My intellect seems very private,This has got to stop. This is the most time I've ever wasted in my life. Waiting. Yuck! Can't I get in a fight or something? Then at least I'd be doing something. --Sometimes I feel like the dog who might catch the car.
It shyly hides from me.
It hides so well
It seems it's gone...
I wonder.
..........
Does she love me does she not,
I've been there.
Will she write or will she not,
I'm there.
It seems there is no brain.
Not true. It's there,
But hanging in the waft
Of only yes or no--
The single thought it knows--
Twisting.
I could look left,
I could look right,
I could turn upside down.
If then I choose I'd get it right,
It would be one,
Or maybe not.
Twisting, twisting, twisting.
This poetry impulse is interesting. It does seem that poetry is a way of perceiving, it accords with something structured in the brain, it's not mere artifice and convention. The first proof is satisfaction: exactly the same idea expressed in prose does not satisfy in the way as does that same idea expressed in a poem. The second is that often poems simply "come", they're simply there as suddenly expressive of the presently dominating emotion. Virtually all my poems of the last few months (my "poetic episode") have been of that nature. All of a sudden there's the first line, and everything else follows. With the appearance of that first line there's always the sense that "the whole poem is there", although there's never a certain sense of just what it is. Sometimes it can be written straight out, in the matter of a minute; sometimes it may take ten, each next line coming slowly but with a sense the line was always there,found finally; always merely a line uncovered, not one created; something finally apparent not through effort, but patience (and some focus). If this is so, then it's the structure of the brain doing the work, and not an achieved artifice. --And anyway, in my case, it can't possibly be artifice. I don't write poetry, and have no developed skills. Yet what finally comes is a poem. It's can't be training, there is none. It has to be the structure of the brain satisfied.
But there was the above poem. I was just sitting waiting for the mail. My general concentration was horse-crap. I started to write the poem as a way to pass time. It didn't come like the others. It came slowly, with many drafts, fairly topsy-turvy, but finally it was a poem, and it did express the unease and anticipation I felt --far better, by a long ways, than similar words I'd already put down as prose in my notebook. --I conclude that in this case that the brain merely hadn't yet done its work. This isn't a sharp emotion, it's only a disturbing one. Perhaps it's just that the brain hadn't yet been compelled to face an emotion that for the most part I try simply to not note at all. Yet finally something satisfying was completed. It had structure --though it accorded to no known structure; what it did accord to though, was to that peculiar perceptive capacity which is the poetic, and which is determined by the structure of the brain itself. So finally it was a poem, and gave the satisfaction of a poem (the temporary release from the unpleasant tensions of this particular emotion). It was, finally, what prose is not.
I think I'm stating the obvious, that poetic form is innate, not cultural; it's perception, not artifice. Still, though obvious as it is, it's a new perception for me.
So? So what? It does seem that each brain has its own talents. My only talent seems to be the expression of an immediate emotion (perhaps it would be categorized as "the lyrical"). Whatever, although it's never been a part of my ambition I may have discovered something of value,and so may do many more. Anything that gives such satisfaction has to be worth doing. --But I have absolutely no conscious concept of what constitutes a poem; I have no aesthetic. I should work on that.
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If there's a hunger for communion,========
Does that hunger mean it's true?
Though hunger can't create it can perceive,
Thus hunger can establish God exists;
So hunger can establish that on earth
(If good for heaven why not earth?)
That there exists that one communicant.
(Actually, "Proof by Desire" is not a proof, but instead, given
the loving and seeking nature of God, a plausibility. Confused
thinking aside, I am unable not to hope on earth the plausibility.)
May be starting on my first poem that's not just an encapsulation of the moment's feeling but instead is the expression of a concept I don't yet understand. The idea would be that the understanding would come through the work on the poem, something I've never done (though I did to a degree in the sonnets I wrote when I was nineteen; I remember the last one as being of exceptional value.) I think there is something in me now that's felt. The meaning of such a feeling is normally discovered through analysis, the restatement and restatement and restatement of the feeling/concept until by slow accretion of small insights something solid is finally achieved. Such a developing concept can be revisited for weeks, or days or months, abandoned, resurrected years later and worked on again. The only difference this time is that I might try to make the process a poem instead of analytic prose. Maybe. This is an idea of the last hour, so I don't know if it will last. --I haven't gotten very far so far, despite a lot of scratching:
I'm not sure what's real on earthI'm not prepared to defend this concept, I don't even very well know what it is, but it's certainly connected to the idea that the transcendent as it exists in men's minds is real, and so through application must have some real expression. In the deepest things, while certainly there can be death and tragedy, there simply can not be bitter disappointment; something, somehow, still has to exist.
If Heaven's but a fraud;
But if it's true that Heaven's real
And everywhere is all that's real
How could it be that earth
Would not have Heaven too?
great stuff, but there is something else. Even as the mirror of her neglect to reply are the many others who would reply if they knew you.
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