Kindle Notes & Highlights
Before we sit down with our paper in order to (maybe, maybe not) write a poem, as well as during the many hours we sit there, that’s the way it is: as if we’ve become lost. The world, which a moment ago, when we were drinking our morning coffee, was perfectly manageable and normal, has once more suddenly become far too big, and even if our consciousness wanders in all directions, bringing its small bits of language along, it can’t locate exactly the stone, the plant, the situation, perhaps the incomprehensibility, from which it can find its way back to the world with the aid of a word.
This is why I’m appealing to our sense of being borne up by an inconceivably huge, already existing foundation of comparisons. Specifically to our awareness that we as poets must learn to love prepositions — words that express relationships among phenomena — because prepositions, almost unreasonably invisible though they are, keep our consciousness in the same kind of motion as the world.
Seen in that way it becomes a matter of humans’ faith in the word as such, in its innate magic, its self-generating ability to create an imaginary world. John the poet knew all this when he wrote his introductory verse, and he especially knew that it’s all words. But where do the words come from?
As it is now, when the world has existed for so long, words come from everywhere, and they’re never there for the first time. Not only that. Although there may not be an infinite number of them, nor an infinite number of combinations, nevertheless there is an inexhaustible landscape of words, there are more than any one individual could manage to travel through. This is where it ends and where it begins, if a person is going to write poems: in the imagined concept of this mysterious landscape. For poems are created exclusively from words.
Why write, when the blank page behind the words just gets blanker and blanker? Why write, when the Cold War was at its very coldest and human beings were thinking up more and more irrevocable ways to wipe themselves out?
If I limit my view to the time that has passed in my life up to now, and, with my pulse rate as a fear meter, see death coming nearer, then I have to conceive of my life as an isolated travesty. But if I experience, feel, my life as an example of something that stays alive no matter what, something that occasionally attains expression in me as in others, then I experience life as an anonymous drawing in which only the human characteristics shift.
