You Won’t Find Yourself

"I hated what was easy, I looked for myself in the light, the sea, the wind. I lie down late, I wait for a kind of silence that never arrives early. More than anything, I hate so many blooming nights in the spring, overflowing with appeals and waiting, but where nothing has ever come… Learn not to wait for you, for you won’t find yourself. Poetry is offered to each person only once and the effect of denial is irreversible."

― Sophia de Mello Breyner, Portuguese poet

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Dear Kate,

Kids don't go out anymore.

My kids anyway.  And the kids my kids know.

Out to smell the flowers.  Out to check out things for what they are--not to "find" themselves, but to have poetry offered to them once and the Self irreversibly denied.

We were kids once too.  What's that? we asked.  Our interest has once been genuine and selfless.

Now we know what everything is, contained--made containable, on the internet, and we love what is easy, to have everything captured for our use.  Mostly we find things useless, but are sure we can use everything if we want to.  We travel not because we really want to know: we go places to enjoy our Selves, make things useful for our pleasure.  If we are there to know, we might find our Selves staying to rejoice and suffer with the Others, die a little or maybe die there for good.

It is perfectly conceivable for an environmentalist to never slow down to smell the flowers.  If he did he would have been less angry.  If she did she would have discerned her own conceit in contrast.  We have a strong propensity towards action and a thirst for facts, a rather deadly combo to go for the easy kill.  Social justice, go for it, swipe whatever you have in your hand and see what you can chop off.  Don't think twice; it's alright.  At the end it is about you swiping and that it makes you feel justified socially.

I don't blame my kids, any kid, I really don't.  I have done my part to take their hands to touch the flowers and pull their face close.  Every thumbnail folder of pictures I have taken of them is green, a sea of green on my screen once when I was backing up memory of their childhood.  Yes, memory, there but gone, a green dream, a world strange to them now.  Estranged.  The question is Why?  And it is theirs to answer.

Poetry "demands unflagging, concentrated, intransigent obstinacy," Portuguese poet Sophia de Mello Breyner said also, and that it "speaks not of ideal life but of actual life."  It is the actual life that we are estranged from in our pursuit of what we think ideal, eschewing the uneasiness and paradoxes on earth as it probably is in heaven.  Poetry is difficult not because our English teachers have fucked it up for us, but because we want life to be easy, slick and superficial.

Let's talk, that's what people offer when they say they want to know/use you more, to settle understanding, not to be further unsettled by admitting to the elusiveness of it.  Thus as life goes, it is often prosaic, which is a poetic way to say we are estranged from each other and what is really going on around us.  There's grocery and here's the laundry, another same-old story to catch up on TV, and here we beckon our old life back waving our vaccinated arm.  I say Let's not talk.  I hate to talk about whatever people think we need to talk about.

I'd rather wait for a kind of silence that never arrives early.

Yours, Alex