For me, the poetic is what stands opposed to
industry, to the circularity of routine, the predictability enforced by
purpose, circumstance impoverished by utility. There is a sense in poetry that
poetry has its own physics, its own laws. It doesn’t. But the illusion of
illimitable experience is exciting and sweet.
One can, however, defamiliarize the world using the
right set of images and syntax. And here what is strange is that language, a
preeminently social medium, is ruptured and broken in such a manner that it
loses its social function of communicability and becomes something else.
Becomes wild and precipitous.
The more I’m forced to do something I don’t feel
like doing the more deadened I feel inside. Being contracts. Mind contracts.
Poetry is an antidote. Poetry is to the venom of servitude what antivenom is
for snake bite.
There are numerous occasions in which it is to our
benefit to do something against our will. I have no solution for that. I just
know that a shot of whiskey or a glass of wine helps when the task has
finished. I would compare poetry to whiskey or wine. But the comparison holds
more liquid than is apparent. Poetry does more than rejuvenate the spirit. It
opens vistas.
Why are some people more receptive to its influence
than others? I can’t say. I don’t have a clue.
It happens that, by a physiological curiosity, that
phonation is linked to a current of air emanating from our lungs. The mouth
shapes the air into sounds that become signs, symbols, images. Signs for
desires, signs for needs, signs for objects, and all of it linked to breath. To
pneuma. The spirit as air.
The most intense, most intimate, most private
emotions are struggled into the air. Struggled into sound. Struggled into
sense. Into sense and sentence and sentience.
Steam, silk, abstraction. Mathematics and law.
Rovers on Mars. Lovers in morgues.
I find it curious that we are never the same around
the same people. Some people are easy to be around and some people make us feel
awkward and fearful. Some people bring out our best, as the saying goes, and
some people make communication so difficult that expressions come out of us
wrongly or stupidly distorted, awkward and inappropriate.
Continual practice with language makes it easier to
disguise one’s feelings. It also makes it possible to discover feelings, to
embellish them. To give them fur and fangs and tails and scales.
Declaration, fantasy, convulsion.
Sensations before they become automatic.
Whatever it is that constrains being, causes us to
modify our reactions, the speed by which our minds respond to a given
situation, to conserve certain ideas, to restrain ourselves from saying certain
things or using certain words, are deformations. Sometimes these modifications
are performed in order to acquire a better understanding. This becomes
increasingly difficult according to systems of belief, different gods,
different mythologies, different values.
I’ve noticed over the years the powerful seductions
of deception. I can see how incredibly easy it would be to lose sense of one’s
authentic being and react with such conformity to the social environment that
even in private the truer feelings would go numb and obscure.
Nothing destroys a poem faster than the desire to
make oneself understood.
Infinity, remarks Poe in Eureka, is by no means the
expression of an idea, but of an effort at one.
A word is a proposition. It produces an image linked
to a system of reference, actual sensation, or act. Configuration, fragment, or
hook.
Language is a comparable to a hand with the
independence of its fingers, only this hand has thousands of fingers. The ears
are astonished to find what a pair of such hands can do on a piano.
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