I be getting more stupider by the moment.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
It's true. I, the girl who missed only two questions on the English section of the SATs just a few years ago, have daily conversations that go something like this:Me: What's that thing, you know, that you cut the other thing with...god...you know what I'm trying to say. It has points and it goes like this (makes emphatic hand motions). You know!
Them: No, I really don't. Please leave me alone.
Anyway, in my post college haze of reality TV and poorly typed IM conversations, roughly half of my brain cells have been lost and/or are asleep at the wheel. To slow my steady intellectual decline, I have decided to begin reading and paying attention to one of my first loves, poetry.
Poetry is a funny thing. It takes the kind of attention and concentration that isn't possible in a 25 minute public transportation commute, or even a fourty minute "I'm-exhausted-from-not-working-all-day-and-am-cuddled-in-bed-reading-some-crap-that-my-nearly-slumbering-mind-can-comprehend" session. These scenarios are where roughly fifty percent of my reading is done lately, sadly enough.
Poetry requires reading the same passage three, four, twenty times, reading aloud to yourself, pausing and reflecting, and all sorts of other things that can't be done while simutaniously watching "The People's Court." So this will be my new project, reading and admiring the wordsmiths who can express more in three lines than I could say if I babbled all day. I'm hoping, in my dime store psychology mind, that this might lead to the pursuit of other things I love but am generally too lazy to actually do.
In honor of this first post, here is the poem that inspired the project:
Poetry
And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating planations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesmal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
-Neruda
Holy crap, I wish I could read him in his original language.
