Wednesday, December 24, 2008

who now understands
the quiet of cluttered rooms—
how the heart listens
.
.
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7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Me. And there's nothing like Christmas just to remind you of this. Sat in a room with people, happy and talking, and I sat there thinking, I belonged to this family once, when did that stop?

A room full of people but I was alone.

7:55 am
Steve said...

I was actually thinking 'cluttered', as with objects, rather than crowded with people. I was sitting in a cluttered room filled with stacked furniture ready for moving out, and it felt like being inside a dead person's silent head.

8:18 am
Anonymous said...

ah well, readers take their own meanings and endings. Neither place sounds good.

9:07 am
Anonymous said...

Oh wow, I love the idea of a room stacked with furniture being synonymous with being inside a dead persons head. Quite brilliant. You should expand those three lines to make that point, its too brilliant to not be framed.

9:55 am
Steve said...

I guess you could build it up into more of a point. But I quite like things being obscure and just out of reach too, so that readers can do their stuff rather than have the experience entirely prescribed for them. I think there has to be some point at which you relinquish control, and I think the disagreements between schools of poetry are largely to do with where that point comes. In real life I tend to hammer things out too much, and generally want to follow lines of 'reasoning' to my versions of their ends. In poetry I kind of realise this is ridiculous, so I'm quite happy to abandon most control at the outset and just throw out images and impressions that others can form into whatever. The whole communication deal is pretty much a cargo cult anyway, so we might as well be straight about it and accept the limitations rather than follow the wreckage into the village and insist that parachutes never be cut down into wedding dresses.

That image of the room full of stacked furniture kind of haunts me a bit, though. It reminds me of Giorgio de Chirico and his melancholy paintings. Inanimate things speaking silently to each other. His paintings are like the insides of dead people's heads. You almost can't breathe in his paintings. Everything is hushed and stifled. Abandoned furniture glances secretly at other furniture. But when you look, nothing moves. There's a hum in the background that no one can hear. And no one even hears it.

11:33 am
Anonymous said...

I've been doing a fair bit of reading about metaphor / surrealism / abstract. While travelling from site to site I found a painting by Georgio, check it, I think it's awesome.

The enigma of the Oracle

zoe

2:08 pm
Deb said...

Someone always hears it. Trust me.

6:22 pm

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