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-title: Words and meaning
-genre: prose
-
-project:
-    title: Elegies for alternate selves
-    css: elegies
-    order: 4
-    prev:
-        title: And
-        link: and
-    next:
-        title: On seeing the panorama of the Apollo 11 landing site
-        link: apollo11
-...
-
-"How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / and frightening
-that it does not quite," Jack Gilbert opens his poem "The Forgotten
-Dialect of the Heart."  In a similar vein, Hass's "Meditation at
-Legunitas" states, "A word is elegy to what it signifies."  These poems
-get to the heart of language, and express the old duality of thought: by
-giving a word to an entity, it is both tethered and made meaningful.
-
-Words are the inevitable byproduct of an analytic mind.  Humans are
-constantly classifying and reclassifying ideas, objects, animals,
-people, into ten thousand arbitrary categories.  A favorite saying of
-mine is that "Everything is everything," a tautology that I like,
-because it gets to the core of the human linguistic machine, and because
-every time I say it people think I'm being [disingenuous][].  But what I mean
-by "everything is everything" is that there is a continuity to existence
-that works beyond, or rather underneath, our capacity to understand it
-through language.  Language by definition compartmentalizes reality, sets
-this bit apart from that bit, sets up boundaries as to what is and is
-not a stone, a leaf, a door.  Most of the time I think of language as
-limiting, as defining a thing as the [inverse of everything][] is not.
-
-In this way, "everything is everything" becomes "everything is nothing,"
-which is another thing I like to say and something that pisses people
-off.  To me, infinity and zero are the same, two ways of looking at the
-same point on the circle–of numbers, of the universe, whatever.  Maybe
-it's because I wear an analogue watch, and so my view of time is
-cyclical, or maybe it's some brain trauma I had in vitro, but whatever it
-is that's how I see the world, because I'm working against the
-limitations that language sets upon us.  I think that's the role of the
-poet, or of any artist: to take the over-expansive experience of
-existing and to boil it down, boil and boil away until there is the
-ultimate concentrate at the center that is what the poem talks around,
-at, etc., but never of, because it is ultimately made of language and
-cannot get to it.  A poem is getting as close as possible to the speed of
-light, to absolute zero, to God, while knowing that it can't get all the
-way there, and never will.  A poem is doing this and coming back and
-showing what happened as it happened.  Exegesis is hard because a really
-good poem will be just that, it will be the most basic and best way to
-say what it's saying, so attempts to say the same thing differently will
-fail.  A poem is a kernel of existence.  It is a description of the
-kernel.  [It is][].
-
-[disingenuous]: likingthings.html
-[inverse of everything]: i-am.html
-[It is]: arspoetica.html