On Writing
We give children the spark of life, but at long last they lead their own life - and it's no different to art that involves words. In other instances, we try to keep up with a boss who's pacing back and forth - fast and unpredictable - and suffer the more for it as we risk to trip over our own feet and fall or worse: we retrieve the gist, bereft however of essence and sink to our knees in a daunting and angst-ridden state, brewing with frustration and doubt.
Maybe this in part explains the sensitivity of the artist to critics and the argumentative reaction that ensues: a legacy shared to the world is shot down, and a piece of your soul dies with it - no one wants to die, after long suffering and a lifetime in hardship, in dishonour, let alone see their children pass away before your own departure from life on this earth.
Traditional poetry was very much the product of a craft, hence the coinage 'wordsmith', that involved a set of rules and techniques, to hone skills and talent for sure, but subordinates the flight of your fancies to an authoritative dictum.
But how do we capture reveries, dreamscapes, impressions, non-causal events, emotive responses and stirrings as well the floating, murmuring and often for ourselves too opaque sounding 'monologue intérieurs', all with their share of disjointed imagery and hidden messages, in rigid structures, mathematical computations, logic even, when these qualities and faculties that are within the domain of the mind and foremost the soul, the latter described by the animal psychologist Fischel as the experiencing and purposeful universe of all the assonant, regulating and creative non-corporeal impulses in a human being (technically speaking, those would include our 'sixth sense', be it intuition or instinct)?
Our language might be simply inadequate to formulate the elusive cluster of particles that whirl and writhe in the aether of that stately manor of our consciousness, without real shape nor weight, their presence to us but shades and shaduws flitting beyond the corner of our physical and mental eyes, whose true existence may or may not dwell in some Platonic realm, conditionally accessible to a handful of people whose antennae attempt to penetrate and register the great beyond - a transgression that comes with great cost, bargaining for little more than brief and vague outlines, ripe for interpretation and inconsistencies, like a wind-burned and frayed flag, wavering in any which way a gale wind directs it to flutter.
Sure, we adopt foreign phrases and terms into our language, molding them into our fold, and more likely, as we engage in pedantic boasting about how well-versed we are in high culture, and fawn leecherously over our own majestic ego in declaring ourselves citizens of the world, exhibiting all the trademarks of vacuous pundits and their class-conscious, provincial charade, these interlopers stick out as a sore thumb... but again, they sound snazzy, trendy, hip and are considered a notch up our intellectual, moral and cultural evolutionary scale.
They're still of limited use if we want to describe the beyond, what goes at the other side of the borders of logical empiricism of the pedestrian kind. They're fine as reference, a momentary definition; henotheistic verbiage to gear up to a multi-layered refinement of an account. It draws attention, but it also begs for more.
The closest we come to unravel this whirlpool of figments of the mind and fragments of concepts and impressions is by way of painting. I could go in great length to applaud the efforts brought by impressionism, symbolism, magic-realism, surrealism etc to summon up experience, perception and the uncanny, that-which-defies-words-and-definition in brush strokes towards a composition that functions as a portal to what lies beyond and strikes us down with our preconceptions, and arrogance to relate everything into terms of chemical biology and materialism. But I am not yet about to write an essay on this issue...
So, the modern, transgressive poet must pander to the art of painting, become a word painter, to fulfill his single most important destiny and give birth to a new language, grafted onto an old, weathered but familiar and somewhat reliable root, but which gives the native patois an edge, a new intonation and flexibility which shuns old patronizing tenets, and thus, to quote from one of my poems, 'wending your way across the sprawling cluster of galactic aeons, on the wings of intuition, guided by the many lores of wisdom, musing eyes tear down the gathering night with a yearning fluttering to summits where the blues of asphyxiation powersup to a fuga of excruciating inebriety...'.
Though always aware that this poem touches upon an aspect of various myriads of incalculable perspectives, which in their turn, are merely fleeting oily reflections filmed on pulling and pushing waves which as easy as they're born, will be smoothed out of existence in a wink of an eye...
Maybe this in part explains the sensitivity of the artist to critics and the argumentative reaction that ensues: a legacy shared to the world is shot down, and a piece of your soul dies with it - no one wants to die, after long suffering and a lifetime in hardship, in dishonour, let alone see their children pass away before your own departure from life on this earth.
Traditional poetry was very much the product of a craft, hence the coinage 'wordsmith', that involved a set of rules and techniques, to hone skills and talent for sure, but subordinates the flight of your fancies to an authoritative dictum.
But how do we capture reveries, dreamscapes, impressions, non-causal events, emotive responses and stirrings as well the floating, murmuring and often for ourselves too opaque sounding 'monologue intérieurs', all with their share of disjointed imagery and hidden messages, in rigid structures, mathematical computations, logic even, when these qualities and faculties that are within the domain of the mind and foremost the soul, the latter described by the animal psychologist Fischel as the experiencing and purposeful universe of all the assonant, regulating and creative non-corporeal impulses in a human being (technically speaking, those would include our 'sixth sense', be it intuition or instinct)?
Our language might be simply inadequate to formulate the elusive cluster of particles that whirl and writhe in the aether of that stately manor of our consciousness, without real shape nor weight, their presence to us but shades and shaduws flitting beyond the corner of our physical and mental eyes, whose true existence may or may not dwell in some Platonic realm, conditionally accessible to a handful of people whose antennae attempt to penetrate and register the great beyond - a transgression that comes with great cost, bargaining for little more than brief and vague outlines, ripe for interpretation and inconsistencies, like a wind-burned and frayed flag, wavering in any which way a gale wind directs it to flutter.
Sure, we adopt foreign phrases and terms into our language, molding them into our fold, and more likely, as we engage in pedantic boasting about how well-versed we are in high culture, and fawn leecherously over our own majestic ego in declaring ourselves citizens of the world, exhibiting all the trademarks of vacuous pundits and their class-conscious, provincial charade, these interlopers stick out as a sore thumb... but again, they sound snazzy, trendy, hip and are considered a notch up our intellectual, moral and cultural evolutionary scale.
They're still of limited use if we want to describe the beyond, what goes at the other side of the borders of logical empiricism of the pedestrian kind. They're fine as reference, a momentary definition; henotheistic verbiage to gear up to a multi-layered refinement of an account. It draws attention, but it also begs for more.
The closest we come to unravel this whirlpool of figments of the mind and fragments of concepts and impressions is by way of painting. I could go in great length to applaud the efforts brought by impressionism, symbolism, magic-realism, surrealism etc to summon up experience, perception and the uncanny, that-which-defies-words-and-definition in brush strokes towards a composition that functions as a portal to what lies beyond and strikes us down with our preconceptions, and arrogance to relate everything into terms of chemical biology and materialism. But I am not yet about to write an essay on this issue...
So, the modern, transgressive poet must pander to the art of painting, become a word painter, to fulfill his single most important destiny and give birth to a new language, grafted onto an old, weathered but familiar and somewhat reliable root, but which gives the native patois an edge, a new intonation and flexibility which shuns old patronizing tenets, and thus, to quote from one of my poems, 'wending your way across the sprawling cluster of galactic aeons, on the wings of intuition, guided by the many lores of wisdom, musing eyes tear down the gathering night with a yearning fluttering to summits where the blues of asphyxiation powersup to a fuga of excruciating inebriety...'.
Though always aware that this poem touches upon an aspect of various myriads of incalculable perspectives, which in their turn, are merely fleeting oily reflections filmed on pulling and pushing waves which as easy as they're born, will be smoothed out of existence in a wink of an eye...
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