Chronic Meanings
Read Bob Perelman's "Chronic Meanings"
Language draws us into the world, heavy at the mouth, grappling for meaning. Yet over time we start to cultivate fogs, with only brief explosions of passion and sense to light up the abyss. And language, once thought to be a door into the world, comes to be seen as a wall, obstructing reality from view, encasing the world in meanings the world never asked for. Humans are the sense-making animals, the fundamental storytellers - so what to do when the world delivers up nothing but senselessness? Cosmically, we are one planet among billions, our geocentrism stolen by Copernicus - our position in the universe amounts to nothing particularly meaningful. The human race is one mass swarm of life between two reverberating darknesses. We kill, we steal, we love, we rave with our passions only to all die out with shouts or whimpers, mostly all forgotten. And even when we sink into ourselves, what do we find there that is really ours? Our drives and impulses seem to come from somewhere else beneath us and what we are is something so thin and fluctuating like the surface of a pond, attune to everything that lies above and below it but the lake beneath is dark and the winds that cause the slightest ripples invisible. Are we but islands of systematization surrounded on all sides by meaninglessness? Systematized so intensely from birth into language and social codes and "civilized society" that we don't know how to go back anymore it's so inextricably apart of us. Yet, yet, we persist to mean. We must. But how? Why? Meaning is chronic - it cannot be overcome because it's not "out there" somehow, it's within us. From the little stories we tell about our day, a way of ordering seemingly arbitrary events, to the grand "metanarratives" of religion, Marxism, etc. that try to pinpoint the human condition and tell us our history and future so as to be themselves the end of all other stories - it's all a vast tangle of interconnected stories reaching toward a meaning that will keep us from killing ourselves. We attempt to sound out the depths of our unwieldy minds, flood the world with meaning and ordering systems, but the veil we throw out is so thin that once you see through it, it's as if there's no turning back anymore, and you're stuck there on the other side of all these safety nets, your coil of comfortable stories shuffled off, struggling to write the new one because you have to now you have no choice, and not just one that will get you through just today, but the rest of your life as well. And the truth is so many try to start theirs and give up halfway through, they can't weave it all together into something with persistence and power, and others, they can't even figure out the first words, just letting the course of time push them through until their deaths.
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"Being" - Eireann Lorsung
A letter is holy. A story
is holy hands reaching out into the world.
Birds come home
across distance I can't conceive
and live in their bodies.
Ash in the air. Every place I've been
is on fire with words.
One day
I throw away all my love letters
without noticing. Mountains
in the heart.
What belongs
to me? I leave the world
all the time. These arms, these
fingers, this tongue, these feet,
and their bent wings. I know
it will be dirt, the prayers
now in marrow will retake
earth. I will live inside whatever flies.
Burning, the brink of all things.