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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
|
