A friend complained,”My girlfriend said I don’t listen when she talks, but in fact I do.”
“Reality is subjective.” I replied.
So does everything else. Someone had said life is fiction. I didn’t understand what he meant at the time. But in reality everything depends on the point of view. If reality is abstract then everything is fiction.
It’s too scary to think culture, tradition and moral values are fictions that we love to drown ourselves in. And to think that there are other “books” out there with different plots, that some of us will read them and come up with different sets of reality—no wonder the world is in constant conflicts.
It was a freeing moment for my friend. He started to name: time, space, measurements…things that we invent that seem so one dimensional and yet they are not. How many facets are there in the looking glass?
Our words make us human for we make observations, pass on histories, create systems of belief, judge, create systems of law and with every word we learn we expand yet limit. Our words become a kind of violence. An illusion which traps us in our daily fiction. Poets fight back with the words which have put us in this human prison with the very elements of our imprisonment. Perhaps that is the tension of poetry, the agony, and the liberation of our words – the expansion and confinement of language. We poets fight words with words – splintering them, reinventing them, tossing them about on the page, searching our poems and others in order to be set free – which we know is illusory. I have moved back out to the country to live days without words – to allow the full sweep – to undo this limitation. A baby looks out to the world. A mother says, “I love you.” The baby reduces that open joy to words – and we begin our assault.