There are some moments when I feel as if I am on the verge of Figuring It All Out, then the moment slips away, slides off the face of things like a Dali clock face and I am left with what feels like reality but I seem to know deep inside is a mere simulacrum of the real thing. Does that sound a bit insane? The problem is, it seems to me, that the construct we call reality is so convincing that we have to look a bit sideways to get a good look at what is truly real. When that is too frightening we withdraw from the vision back into the comforting real-seeming world we have created. It's like the movies in which what seems real to the protagonist turns out to be anything but true when he or she gets a chance to look behind the scrim and see the workings of things, as if all of what we believe to be real is the Wizard and what is Real is the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy discovered, though, the man behind the curtain can be enormously disappointing when we have acclimated ourselves to something flashy, loud, busy, diverting, distracting, grand and pinned all our hopes of salvation to it.
Poetry tries to look at things sideways to get at a bit of the Real reality without describing its features too starkly not because it will disappear or we will recoil, but because part of the problem we have with comprehending the depth of what is Real is that it cannot be described in words and when we try to do so we reduce it to what is comprehensible to our everyday mind, which has circuit breakers designed to protect us that serve instead to shut out too much of what is Real. Why? Not only for our protection (as our minds perceive danger) but, it seems to me, because our minds, our egos, want to be in charge of things. Since no one and nothing is in charge of the larger Reality (it is wild, it is vast, it is uncontrolled and uncontrollable), that is impossible and that impossibility offends our small minds, our egos.
But, oh, it is comfortable to rest in the limited view. Things are comprehensible there, within my control. If only I do everything on my list, all will be well. If I convince you that I am OK, then I will be. If you tell me I am good, I am good. If you tell me I am bad, that must be true, too. One and one always equals two. There is a great deal of "purposeful forgetting" that goes into such a view of reality, though, for I must conveniently forget that I have never gotten to the end of the list, not in all my 55 years (though as a child my list was mercifully short and I completed it every day: play, eat, sleep, repeat. It was workable). One and one are sometimes three and sometimes 145,863. The judgment implicit in "good" and "bad" is really pretty irrelevant. That's just the way Reality works.
This real Reality, though, is like the gears and levers and pipes and switches that live behind the scenes and make things work. Have you noticed that there are spaces in buildings that seem to have nothing in them? If you pay attention, you will see that you can know where one room ends and another begins and there are some places where one room does not meet another and there is a space. In that space, in most modern buildings anyway, are wires and pipes and tubes and cables and motors, at least I assume so, though there is often no access door. In the clinic where I work, between the pharmacy and the elevators is an expanse of blank wall that seems to have nothing behind it. What's in there? That is how Reality works in our lives and if we crawl behind the facade we see the intricacies and connections that are vaster than our imaginings. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy", says Hamlet. Are dreams a map of that space? Sometimes it seems so, because when I wake up I am not at all sure which is more confused, the spaces I dreamed or the spaces in which I "live".
Fiction, too, can paint a portrait that causes us to question this narrow world in which we spend our daily lives. I just finished a book titled Room that asks this question. Jack knows only Room for his first six years and assumes that it is all there is. When he finds out this isn't so, he still questions the boundary. I think he may be more wise than most of us; oh, I'm sure he will eventually acclimate himself to the narrow reality that makes us all feel safe, but he will lose a wisdom he will have to regain if he wishes to be truly free.
I know, I know, this doesn't sound like any kind of sense, but that's the point, really. Look around at the world in which we live. Where is the sense there? People kill each other for the pettiest reasons imaginable. The wars in which this country has been engaged for the past decade are being fought for reasons that would not pass muster in the most unruly kindergarten, yet go unquestioned in the "grown-up" world.(Don't you sometimes want to send them to bed without supper? Spank their hands and take their toys away?) People starve for no good reason. Millions are dying of preventable diseases while I sit in Starbucks sipping my five dollar coffee. This is not to induce guilt in me or in you but to ask that basic question again, what sense does all this make? Where do we find sense in the programmatic world in which we reside unless we dig deeper and find what lies beneath? And how do we go about that?
The first step, I think, is to questions all of our assumptions. The safety they lend us is illusory, anyway, so there is no threat, not really. How secure have they made us feel? It's no wonder we feel a sense of unease, of incompleteness in our everyday lives; the artificial, created world in which we spend that everyday is incapable of answering the most basic questions about cause and purpose and truth. Yet because it is where we have been taught to be comfortable we make the odd choice of no longer asking the questions rather than questioning the assumptions underlying the narrow world. Make no mistake about it, these are the most important questions we can ask and most of us give up on them at some point, then forget to pick them back up. Isn't that odd? I don't pretend to understand this. How do we get so caught up in the minutiae of life that it takes a trauma or other earth-shattering event to wake us up? When we are awakened we scramble to get back to the comfort of not thinking as quickly as we can, if we can.Our poets are all insane if sanity if this narrow world. Unfortunately for us, to glimpse Reality from time to time and then retreat behind the protection of societally sanctioned reality cannot bring us freedom.Only a determined, persistent dedication to taking off the armor and exposing ourselves naked to the world can do that. But it's worth every effort we make.
Poetry tries to look at things sideways to get at a bit of the Real reality without describing its features too starkly not because it will disappear or we will recoil, but because part of the problem we have with comprehending the depth of what is Real is that it cannot be described in words and when we try to do so we reduce it to what is comprehensible to our everyday mind, which has circuit breakers designed to protect us that serve instead to shut out too much of what is Real. Why? Not only for our protection (as our minds perceive danger) but, it seems to me, because our minds, our egos, want to be in charge of things. Since no one and nothing is in charge of the larger Reality (it is wild, it is vast, it is uncontrolled and uncontrollable), that is impossible and that impossibility offends our small minds, our egos.
But, oh, it is comfortable to rest in the limited view. Things are comprehensible there, within my control. If only I do everything on my list, all will be well. If I convince you that I am OK, then I will be. If you tell me I am good, I am good. If you tell me I am bad, that must be true, too. One and one always equals two. There is a great deal of "purposeful forgetting" that goes into such a view of reality, though, for I must conveniently forget that I have never gotten to the end of the list, not in all my 55 years (though as a child my list was mercifully short and I completed it every day: play, eat, sleep, repeat. It was workable). One and one are sometimes three and sometimes 145,863. The judgment implicit in "good" and "bad" is really pretty irrelevant. That's just the way Reality works.
This real Reality, though, is like the gears and levers and pipes and switches that live behind the scenes and make things work. Have you noticed that there are spaces in buildings that seem to have nothing in them? If you pay attention, you will see that you can know where one room ends and another begins and there are some places where one room does not meet another and there is a space. In that space, in most modern buildings anyway, are wires and pipes and tubes and cables and motors, at least I assume so, though there is often no access door. In the clinic where I work, between the pharmacy and the elevators is an expanse of blank wall that seems to have nothing behind it. What's in there? That is how Reality works in our lives and if we crawl behind the facade we see the intricacies and connections that are vaster than our imaginings. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy", says Hamlet. Are dreams a map of that space? Sometimes it seems so, because when I wake up I am not at all sure which is more confused, the spaces I dreamed or the spaces in which I "live".
Fiction, too, can paint a portrait that causes us to question this narrow world in which we spend our daily lives. I just finished a book titled Room that asks this question. Jack knows only Room for his first six years and assumes that it is all there is. When he finds out this isn't so, he still questions the boundary. I think he may be more wise than most of us; oh, I'm sure he will eventually acclimate himself to the narrow reality that makes us all feel safe, but he will lose a wisdom he will have to regain if he wishes to be truly free.
I know, I know, this doesn't sound like any kind of sense, but that's the point, really. Look around at the world in which we live. Where is the sense there? People kill each other for the pettiest reasons imaginable. The wars in which this country has been engaged for the past decade are being fought for reasons that would not pass muster in the most unruly kindergarten, yet go unquestioned in the "grown-up" world.(Don't you sometimes want to send them to bed without supper? Spank their hands and take their toys away?) People starve for no good reason. Millions are dying of preventable diseases while I sit in Starbucks sipping my five dollar coffee. This is not to induce guilt in me or in you but to ask that basic question again, what sense does all this make? Where do we find sense in the programmatic world in which we reside unless we dig deeper and find what lies beneath? And how do we go about that?
The first step, I think, is to questions all of our assumptions. The safety they lend us is illusory, anyway, so there is no threat, not really. How secure have they made us feel? It's no wonder we feel a sense of unease, of incompleteness in our everyday lives; the artificial, created world in which we spend that everyday is incapable of answering the most basic questions about cause and purpose and truth. Yet because it is where we have been taught to be comfortable we make the odd choice of no longer asking the questions rather than questioning the assumptions underlying the narrow world. Make no mistake about it, these are the most important questions we can ask and most of us give up on them at some point, then forget to pick them back up. Isn't that odd? I don't pretend to understand this. How do we get so caught up in the minutiae of life that it takes a trauma or other earth-shattering event to wake us up? When we are awakened we scramble to get back to the comfort of not thinking as quickly as we can, if we can.Our poets are all insane if sanity if this narrow world. Unfortunately for us, to glimpse Reality from time to time and then retreat behind the protection of societally sanctioned reality cannot bring us freedom.Only a determined, persistent dedication to taking off the armor and exposing ourselves naked to the world can do that. But it's worth every effort we make.
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