This is Why:
: To move with poetry.
There is no single truth. Aldous Huxley pointed out, in his article on mescalin, that seeing in color is a human luxury (most animals do not percieve color), an extraneous sensory experience that serves no obvious biological purpose.
"What you think you see is not what you see." He also points out that visionaries and psychics have, for centuries, reported seeing in enhanced, particularly vivid colors.
I used to write odes to spring grass when I was in middle school. I can understand this, color so bright you could drown in it. I have always been obsessed with lights & shadings, the way things are illuminated differently at different times of the day, the transformative power of a streelight or a shaft of sunlight. How light corresponds with human grief or joy, loneliness and regret and longing all expressed in gradations of shadow, back alleyways, distant orbs of luminescence, and in silent darknesses.
Life is a subjective experience. Our minds report as truths things that are not true or could never be proven. The very fabric of matter, in the most basic & essential form we have yet been able to glimpse, functions simultaneously as a wave and a particle. A high school science teacher once described the movement of an electron to us: "It's like being on a swing, and you go from the highest point to the lowest point instantaneously, without feeling the motion between the two points." From point A to point B without the flowing from one to the other, touch here, touch there. I used to love swinging, losing myself in the movement, closing my eyes and imagining myself suspended from clouds, where things like hand-me-down clothes and strange sunlight visions and an oddly slanted intellect did not apply, did not render me less than this - flight. Life as a series of very bright moments, memories, and life as the swinging forward motion of time, simultaneously. Seen in luxurious, inexplicable color.
We know almost nothing, but we create small spaces where boundaries like walls, familiar faces, automatic thoughts, assumptions, accustomed actions can define our lives and the self within the life. How much of who I am is the result of chemical balances in my brain, and how much the result of willful action? Identity is suspended between what is chosen and what is given, and we cannot even know how much we did choose or could have freely chosen. We are both safe within our limits and trapped by them. How shall I define myself? I am (merely) the amalgamation of the forces that pull me out of the norm and those that pull me back in, the internal pressures that pushed me into something unique and deviant, and those forces that told me to adhere to the surrounding standards.
Be a poet because the world is so fucking intense and amazing that you HAVE TO SPEAK OF IT. Be normal & sane & shallow because everyone else expects it, because otherwise you will not survive, you will be cast out and devoid of resources. Two different needs, both dreadfully compelling. The need for an expression of that which I am and the need for control over that which I am. Isn't this the battle that everyone fights, the journey we all take, the creation of the self as a complex series of compromises between the parameters determined by the individual self & its quirks and those determined by the surrouding society, value systems, communities, workplaces, relationships?
My mind is a work of art, a phenomenon, a palace full of extraordinary colors & lights & music, populated by millions of selves like white light scattered by a prism: the pixie girls in their meadow, the white empress, a helpless little girl crying, shadowdemons, the feral child with her claws, the black faerie with her winter eyes, the pilgrim climbing her endless crystalline stairway, persephone in her own garden of pomegranates, the poet, the narrative voice, the voiceless fear, the spark.
And it is also a terror, a nightmare. It knows how vulnerable I am, how helpless I have been in the past, every single mistake I made or weakness I exhibited. It is a perfectionist, holding me to standards I could not possibly obtain and punishing me for not living up to expectations. It blames me for being defective. It allows me to sink into apathy rather than changing my own life. It actively rejects love and help and compliments while desperately desiring those things, while needing them in order to evolve, to move past the past.
We can only hate where we have deeply loved, we can only wound that to which we have been intimately close, and we can only know and be aware of those extremes of emotion and experience to which we have been subjected. Identity is a tenuous thread stretched across uncertain terrain; Self-acceptance a balancing act that requires tremendous skill. Walk this tightrope over the far reaches: vast yawning black caverns, brilliantly blinding sheets of light: the extent of your own knowledge of yourself, your feelings for yourself, the love and the hate, compassion versus blame, forgiveness or shame. Reach a compromise between constantly warring factions. In the middle of chaos, achieve order, or even better - transcend the need for order and dance in the middle of the chaos as a Self. Matter is a wave and a particle at once. Learn to be both at once, constant movement and a definite, finite object. You are the child of the Universe, divine music, the symphonic reconciliation of irreconciliable states of being.
Poetry is one way to speak of these things. How does a life story come together? Chance and fate are perhaps not opponents, but simply two different versions of the truth, like myth and science, parallel ways of ordering & disordering existence. My first grade teacher wrote to my mother in my report card: "I think we have a future author on our hands here." I didn't even know how to read or write in first grade, how could she have known? Buried in a drawer somewhere with all the stellar test scores and academic achievement awards, there is a pink construction paper certificate from the second grade for Creative Writing. An endless stream of accolades, teachers who said, "Someday, you will be an author..."; teachers who envied my writing; friends who liked my poems; old lovers who remembered them; strangers who knew me as a writer; comments from college professors and TAs etc. There are multiple stories here. I wrote because people praised my writing, because I could be proud of it, and later - I wrote because I needed to, because in words I could speak freely. Now I write because poetry is the voice of the mad and the deviant and the beautiful and the struggling. I write because I have faith that language can change the world in any small way, in a way that is meaningful.
But poetry is not only poems, it can be an entire way of experiencing the world - bright colors where others see only in shades of grey, the awareness of life as memory particulates and life as energy flux simultaneously, the million voices that sing to me and then the unbearably awe-inspiring & awful song it produces, poetry as divine symphonics, madness, the edges of perception, order and chaos, grace where there should be none.
This, then, is my secret about my own madness, that most beloved vision and most hated enemy...
It is the ability to live life as a poem, essential and beautiful, terribly painful and stark
and then, every once in a while, balancing above the abyss like a held note or a step in an endless dance,
it is Redemption.
There is no single truth. Aldous Huxley pointed out, in his article on mescalin, that seeing in color is a human luxury (most animals do not percieve color), an extraneous sensory experience that serves no obvious biological purpose.
"What you think you see is not what you see." He also points out that visionaries and psychics have, for centuries, reported seeing in enhanced, particularly vivid colors.
I used to write odes to spring grass when I was in middle school. I can understand this, color so bright you could drown in it. I have always been obsessed with lights & shadings, the way things are illuminated differently at different times of the day, the transformative power of a streelight or a shaft of sunlight. How light corresponds with human grief or joy, loneliness and regret and longing all expressed in gradations of shadow, back alleyways, distant orbs of luminescence, and in silent darknesses.
Life is a subjective experience. Our minds report as truths things that are not true or could never be proven. The very fabric of matter, in the most basic & essential form we have yet been able to glimpse, functions simultaneously as a wave and a particle. A high school science teacher once described the movement of an electron to us: "It's like being on a swing, and you go from the highest point to the lowest point instantaneously, without feeling the motion between the two points." From point A to point B without the flowing from one to the other, touch here, touch there. I used to love swinging, losing myself in the movement, closing my eyes and imagining myself suspended from clouds, where things like hand-me-down clothes and strange sunlight visions and an oddly slanted intellect did not apply, did not render me less than this - flight. Life as a series of very bright moments, memories, and life as the swinging forward motion of time, simultaneously. Seen in luxurious, inexplicable color.
We know almost nothing, but we create small spaces where boundaries like walls, familiar faces, automatic thoughts, assumptions, accustomed actions can define our lives and the self within the life. How much of who I am is the result of chemical balances in my brain, and how much the result of willful action? Identity is suspended between what is chosen and what is given, and we cannot even know how much we did choose or could have freely chosen. We are both safe within our limits and trapped by them. How shall I define myself? I am (merely) the amalgamation of the forces that pull me out of the norm and those that pull me back in, the internal pressures that pushed me into something unique and deviant, and those forces that told me to adhere to the surrounding standards.
Be a poet because the world is so fucking intense and amazing that you HAVE TO SPEAK OF IT. Be normal & sane & shallow because everyone else expects it, because otherwise you will not survive, you will be cast out and devoid of resources. Two different needs, both dreadfully compelling. The need for an expression of that which I am and the need for control over that which I am. Isn't this the battle that everyone fights, the journey we all take, the creation of the self as a complex series of compromises between the parameters determined by the individual self & its quirks and those determined by the surrouding society, value systems, communities, workplaces, relationships?
My mind is a work of art, a phenomenon, a palace full of extraordinary colors & lights & music, populated by millions of selves like white light scattered by a prism: the pixie girls in their meadow, the white empress, a helpless little girl crying, shadowdemons, the feral child with her claws, the black faerie with her winter eyes, the pilgrim climbing her endless crystalline stairway, persephone in her own garden of pomegranates, the poet, the narrative voice, the voiceless fear, the spark.
And it is also a terror, a nightmare. It knows how vulnerable I am, how helpless I have been in the past, every single mistake I made or weakness I exhibited. It is a perfectionist, holding me to standards I could not possibly obtain and punishing me for not living up to expectations. It blames me for being defective. It allows me to sink into apathy rather than changing my own life. It actively rejects love and help and compliments while desperately desiring those things, while needing them in order to evolve, to move past the past.
We can only hate where we have deeply loved, we can only wound that to which we have been intimately close, and we can only know and be aware of those extremes of emotion and experience to which we have been subjected. Identity is a tenuous thread stretched across uncertain terrain; Self-acceptance a balancing act that requires tremendous skill. Walk this tightrope over the far reaches: vast yawning black caverns, brilliantly blinding sheets of light: the extent of your own knowledge of yourself, your feelings for yourself, the love and the hate, compassion versus blame, forgiveness or shame. Reach a compromise between constantly warring factions. In the middle of chaos, achieve order, or even better - transcend the need for order and dance in the middle of the chaos as a Self. Matter is a wave and a particle at once. Learn to be both at once, constant movement and a definite, finite object. You are the child of the Universe, divine music, the symphonic reconciliation of irreconciliable states of being.
Poetry is one way to speak of these things. How does a life story come together? Chance and fate are perhaps not opponents, but simply two different versions of the truth, like myth and science, parallel ways of ordering & disordering existence. My first grade teacher wrote to my mother in my report card: "I think we have a future author on our hands here." I didn't even know how to read or write in first grade, how could she have known? Buried in a drawer somewhere with all the stellar test scores and academic achievement awards, there is a pink construction paper certificate from the second grade for Creative Writing. An endless stream of accolades, teachers who said, "Someday, you will be an author..."; teachers who envied my writing; friends who liked my poems; old lovers who remembered them; strangers who knew me as a writer; comments from college professors and TAs etc. There are multiple stories here. I wrote because people praised my writing, because I could be proud of it, and later - I wrote because I needed to, because in words I could speak freely. Now I write because poetry is the voice of the mad and the deviant and the beautiful and the struggling. I write because I have faith that language can change the world in any small way, in a way that is meaningful.
But poetry is not only poems, it can be an entire way of experiencing the world - bright colors where others see only in shades of grey, the awareness of life as memory particulates and life as energy flux simultaneously, the million voices that sing to me and then the unbearably awe-inspiring & awful song it produces, poetry as divine symphonics, madness, the edges of perception, order and chaos, grace where there should be none.
This, then, is my secret about my own madness, that most beloved vision and most hated enemy...
It is the ability to live life as a poem, essential and beautiful, terribly painful and stark
and then, every once in a while, balancing above the abyss like a held note or a step in an endless dance,
it is Redemption.