Thanks to Alison for picking up an essential thread. The following,
especially, makes perfect sense to me: "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."
For several years now I've been occasionally working on a seemingly endless
sequence of poems, in part about this particular loss of Eden, about the
acquisition of language and subsequent loss of innocence. Here are some
snippets from said sequence, for what they're worth:
... he understands no words
yet, knows a few nouns; a premonition
perhaps of two verbs: to give,
to take. Later a
hunch about the verb
to break. The nouns are milk,
mum, they work; perhaps
daddy. He senses manner, touch,
can read these darkly,
while long sentences sail inscrutable
through the air like smoke from a pipe,
like a long twilight day. His environment
cannot read him ...
... nothing
moves. Except
time —
And one's
awareness. Of
course ...
... sometimes words come to his mouth
that to others seem void of meaning.
They alight there all of a sudden,
falling from above like stray birds
that no one recognizes. Yet
they correspond
to various things that catch
his eyes, or to hitherto unknown feelings,
the strange condition of light, for instance,
in late afternoon; in late summer like as not ...
on 5.10.2000 2:29, [log in to unmask] at [log in to unmask] wrote:
>> Well thought of!
>> Pleae, do add, do expand.
>>
>> Erminia
>
>>>
>>> Me, I think poetry happens in the fracture.
>
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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