>Well thought of!
>Pleae, do add, do expand.
>
>Erminia
>>
>> Me, I think poetry happens in the fracture.
Erminia
It's a little hard to, in less than 10,000 words. But if you will excuse
some simplistic theorising...
A baby is born without language, and simply is. In the womb it has no
knowledge of any differentiation between the world and it; it is the
world, the world is it. Then there is the violence of birth, the first
shock. Still, if it is a lucky baby, its world will be close, warm,
physical, amorphous, only a step from the womb.
But inevitably it will also be alone, and frightened. My first memory,
in a cot, is of being alone and frightened.
It learns speech, to bridge the gap. Speech is the symptom of the gap,
the fracture between the world and the child, the way to bring the world
back to the child. Language grows with the child, and for a while it
thinks that language is the same as reality, that the two fit. The world
is still anarchic and without explanation; language is part of that
anarchy, but things begin to have names, and the names are magical. To
say bang is to bang, to say I hate you is to fill the world with hatred,
to say I love you mends everything.
Then, at some point, it realises that the two do not meet at all.
Perhaps at about the age of seven, which in almost all human cultures is
considered the first sign of adulthood; it marks the loss of baby teeth
and ushers in a huge developmental leap. The child's consciousness
expands to embrace abstractions and the beginnings of critical awareness,
and a fracture between language and reality becomes apparent. Adults
lie. What is said does not necessarily square with what is. And so on.
And maybe, in some people, that awareness occurs as a shock, which
becomes a desire to bring the two back together, an impossible dream,
because the two were never the same, that Eden never existed. And maybe
those who never get over that shock end up writing poetry; because
poetry, maybe, might bring language and reality closer together, might
make them fit again. But the anguish is that it never does, and the
poet, knowing that, still goes on writing poetry. Consciousness is
tragic.
Perhaps.
Alison
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|