not poetic intention, but poetic justification of the everyday.
validation of the norm, and validation of the not so norm. mourn. but what about the morning? this is what i am asking. this is what i am intending. this is meant to be an exercise in recording. the every day. this blog will suit the intention to record the everyday.
milan kundera writes in the unbearable lightness of being : “the brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful. from the time he met tereza, no woman had the right to leave the slightest impression on that part of his brain.” poetic memory unfolds in this way. for tomaz, the problem with poetic memory was that he could want that which he did not currently see, touch, taste, smell, hear. sense is funny this way. senses are tangible in ways that one only feels within that moment. poetic moment then, is greedy, for once we have one great poetic moment, it becomes an addiction, and we go on searching for another and another. this can be both beautiful and troublesome all at once. for tomaz, “tereza occupied his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all trace of other women.” & tomaz was then stuck in a variety of moments that he was tried with great difficulty throughout his whole life to make comparable to his first few moments with tereza. tereza occupied him because he knew she always had him. yet he continually seeks the company of others; making love to women, scarring her in the process. always. why?
as milan himself states, “of each erotic experience his memory recorded only the steep and narrow path of sexual conquest: the first piece of verbal aggression, the first touch, the first obscenity he said to her and she to him, the minor perversions he could make her acquiesce in and the ones she held out against.”
this is not meant to become a blog about the large banners of love hung from the great relationship graffiti walls between a man and a woman. this is not a blog meant to segregate any notion of race, ethnicity, or gender. this is not a blog meaning to explicate on the particulars of any specific two people in the universe, but is meant to cover the world simultaneously, as in, everyone, all at once.
kundera’s point is valid, simple. we love the first moments of every great encounter. each person, scene, language, scent, sight is recorded in the six million simultaneous brains all working, decoding, perceiving, believing…
and this is it. this is what becomes us in passing. every second develops another intricate moment of the web we’re constantly building, & as we move through each indiscriminate sticky mess, we encounter thousands of potential poetic moments that pass through the eye and out again so lightheartedly, it is all we can hope is that it move then in and again through a tree, or a bird, or continuously, another person. kundera is right in suggesting our unbearable lightness of being. it is sometimes so difficult to just be. & so, in searching and in also the mundane aspects of the every day living, there cultivates an overwhelming & beautiful unbearability. it is so much to just see, to open the self to everything that simply is, without trying, without thinking too much about it, but always noticing.
it is understandable this is a conflict. how much do you measure something before you ever understand its meaning? we are all always searching for a particular moment, that sometimes, when those moments happens, we are too busy searching for something else to see what is happening directly within the moment. we are too busy waiting for the next one to come.
time reflecting off your retina, time sitting on a bench by the museum, time on the street with a thousand pigeons. tomaz loved tereza so dearly that he could not stop himself to just sit and be. he could not bear her magnitude, if not so much more for those small moments. it was merely too much to bear. & so he continually wandered, looking again for someone, something to supply those same first moments.
this first moment is alluded to in the following passage:
“she did not want him to study her. she wanted to draw him into the magic stream that may be entered only with closed eyes. the reason she refused to get down on all fours was that in that position their bodies did not touch at all and he could observe her from a distance of several feet. she hated that distance. she wanted to merge with him. that is why, looking him straight in the eye, she insisted she had not had an orgasm even though the rug was fairly dripping with it. ‘its not sensual pleasure i’m after, she would say, ‘it’s happiness. and pleasure without happiness is not pleasure.’ “
tomaz with yet another woman. yet another woman. this woman wants the lightness of the moment. immediately however, tomaz thinks back to tereza, he is trying so hard to make the moment seem familiar, to make it real; he is putting an incredible weight on the moment, to such a degree that the unbearable lightness of being conflicts intentionally with the direct weight of a past moment, a moment with tereza. & tomaz once again, thinking too much about his many moments, creates a tension that, to me, has become the most difficult procurement in living.
what i am suggesting by these quotes is not only to read kundera’s book, but to really think about the conflict about the unbearability of both the lightness and weight in being. so much happening all the time, all at once, we forget to look, to see, sometimes the beauty in everything, in every exchange, in every friendship, every mother, every father, every crime, every sin, every infidelity, every moment of every waking day. there is something to see every moment of every waking day.
& in essence, i do believe, if there is any one particle of universal perception and experience that exists within every human being simultaneously is our ability to conceive of poetic memory always, as it is occurring within each living thing at every precious moment. there is so much that is unbearable on every scale of every emotional perception, but we bare this, yes we continually and constantly bear all of these things because we are alive, and because these moments are constantly there. always.
& so with this blog i am conveying a new exercise in my own personal poetic memory, as the blog will be an expressionable, self seeking motive for me each day to find the strands of poetic moments which lasso themselves throughout my walks, and with each person i meet and each image i have, each one i will try to witness with a great emphasis placed on the lightness and deep heaviness of the moments, as they ascend and transpire and become a figment of poetic memory.
i will record these moments in passing when needed. i know you can not know my moments. but you will feel your own.
it is through the everyday sequence we see the world beautifully. i feel often people shut this mode off during many critical periods of their lives. that may be a presumptuous statement, and that is just as so, for i have no idea what perception is in accordance to anyone else. the sad thing is we can only know ourselves. yet we are surrounded by so many images, ideas, people that i am beginning to see that the world as a great species of moments constantly occurring and recreating themselves in various forms. i truly don’t think we see these moments unless we are always trying. this can be an ultimately unbearable thing to do.
HOWEVER, I AM ASKING HERE FOR YOU TO OBSERVE YOUR OWN POETIC MOMENTS AS GATHERED IN MEMORY, AND PERHAPS WE WILL ALL SOMEDAY BE ABLE TO GLUE A PAPER CHAIN OF POETIC MOMENTS ALL TOGETHER TO LOB ACROSS THE POWERLINES AND TELEPHONE POLES OF EVERY MAJOR CITY.