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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