I wrote a poem for the first time in a long time. I am unsure of what I wish it to express. A poem like that is for me unprecedented--everything I have ever written has had a very directed meaning, sometimes several meanings, one or several explicit, and one severely implicit. How pretentious it is to admit that aloud. How pretentious it is to point out pretension.
So this poem. I do not know if it is a thought coming from me, a real thought, or if it is me imagining myself as having this thought, but not actually having it. It is somewhat like the way I might travel through a past conversation in my head, but reorder my words and expressions and invent reactions to those parts of the exchanges that never actually happened.
When a person writes, saying "this is coming from me," they might be saying me or they might be expressing an idea through their me, but an idea that exists separate from themselves. And when does anyone ever know? For it is a difficult thing to divide oneself like that, to strip off a piece of being that exists through meaning. It is no comfort to spread out a map of one's self after it has been folded and tucked in their back pocket for ages, to discover that their whole landscape has been creased and separated by the straightest fold lines.
2 comments:
if it's pretentious to point out pretension, doesn't that make you ever moreeee pretentious? OH NO, now I'm pointing out that you pointed out that you're pointing out pretension! I'm getting sucked into a time warp of logic, guaaaaaaaaghhhhh
Gyahhh.
That's something I think about a lot, actually. How is a person able to objectively criticize another person's criticism? Can you be objective about subjectivity? I'm not someone to say that subjectivity is improper in every case, and wouldn't either consider it to be inescapable. But how it can be escaped, I don't know.
I just don't know. Tsk. What a day.
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