I'm reading the Wasteland, and watching mysterious oil patches from the dining hall coffee machines float around the top of my cup. I smell like him, warm and distinct from the typical decaying-coffee scent that usually sits in my clothing. My nerves are bad tonight. I love Eliot. I love the Wasteland. In the moment, nothing seems more powerful than my love of his words and I am completely caught up in the meter. So elegant. So intelligent.
I can't imagine a world without poetry - and it doesn't have to be as impressive as the Wasteland for it to grab my attention. I am the bibliophile stereotype: I live for coffee in one hand, pen stuck behind my ear cradling beautiful, worn-through spines in my hands, clinging desperately to each page like a childhood dream. I move with journal in tow, ready to write down lines, words, names or emotions that catch my attention. Anything is beautiful, it doesn't have to be big, just possess something that reels me in and makes my mind cease its monotony.
There is an inexplicable link between humans and poetry that has more to do with the way words sound than the sense they make. I'll prove it to you. Pick up a book of Plath's poems (or Google one, I'm not picky) and choose a long one. Don't listen to a single word, just listen to the sounds. You can hear her loneliness and desolation before you even begin to examine her word choice, often filled with jarring metaphor and incredibly dark imagery. Some may claim that Plath is not accessible, and apply this claim to other poets. A response to that argument, from an intellectual snob, would be "Poetry isn't meant to be accessible".
That's incorrect (as well as offensive and elitist). The beautiful thing is that poetry is accessible on multiple levels, something that popular culture needs to be reminded of. Is someone who understands every classical allusion in the Wasteland any better than someone who likes the way the words sound? Absolutely not. There are layers of understanding available in a well-crafted poem and it isn't necessary to have a half-million dollar education to access that.
Perhaps a method of reducing my generation's apathy, so widely griped about by our parents and grandparents, would be educating them about the range of human emotions that exist now and always have existed. We want to know that we are not alone, we don't want little pills or terrified parents who one day we will finally succeed in some form of suicide or another. Art, poetry and beauty are lost, not because our generation is inadequate, but because the one before us was. They poison us with media, forcing us into categories: nerd, jock, popular, anti-social and in choosing one form of expression, we are forced to suppress all of the others. We are not taught that we are not alone and never have been. Sure, we're told this time and time again, word-for-word. "Don't worry. You are not alone." Can you be any less creative than that? Is there any less potent way to convey those emotions? Poetry and writing and language all evolved out of nothing.
Humans had nothing, yet created language as a form of expression that is rapidly being dulled by older generations, while being blamed on those of us attached to our cellphones or glued to a computer screen, as if the world's problems all started with us hitting thirteen. Bluntly, most of our parents just fucked up, and maybe that was a result of their parents fucking up. We are not taught how to love. We are not taught how to feel through words. As a generation, our connections to each other are being lost. My generation is trying desperately to regain what humanity has lost and it's reflected in our psychological problems and our desperation to make sense of everything.
I wonder what the world would be like if I could love people as well as literature. If people made half as much sense as books or poems, I would be twice as happy. However all the people I know are liars and childish and possessed by hedonism.
Most of us cannot really feel anyways, and we cannot really love anyone but ourselves because we have been conditioned to believe we are alone and always will be. Who needs the trouble of loving someone else when we hear about statistics, and divorce rates and unhappiness. Rather than thinking about love as a way to transcend these things, we see love as the cause, and close ourselves off to emotions that are inherently human and remain taut and bubbling beneath the surface of hot skin, frustrating us, causing anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, desperation for sex in hopes that it forces us to feel.
It is easy to blame this resultant apathy, depression or bad timing as excuses for why we must cling to self-love over anything else, but the problem stems so much deeper. Losing our ability to connect with others and understand that generations before us have felt pain and happiness and lust and warmth leaves us craving loneliness because we do not understand that there are other options. People who are most aware of the love that exists in poetry and literature are harder on ourselves because we believe in love, and we know it can exist, yet we feel pressure to deny its existence because of how unattainable it seems in our society.
I wonder if what I speak about is something that only I perceive. I have not had the most fulfilling interactions with men over my eighteen years. Some summarizing phrases might be "disappointing" or "absolutely off-putting to men as a gender". This gives me a negative bias: I tend to regard most men as cruel, emotionally frigid and untrustworthy. In my defense, no one has proved me wrong. At the same time, I wonder if my view of the world is so negative because of my specific interactions or because of something deeper, like having high, unrealistic expectations due to my exposure to literature and poetry. I expect romance and feelings to be something beautiful and transcendental and have found that reality works nothing like I imagined as a child. I understand the difference between fiction and non-fiction, but I find it difficult to believe that every love story is not based in something very real and something very attainable. I am conflicted.
My depression does not help this continuous internal conflict. I want to be happy and believe that people can be close in a way deeper than friendship. I have a lot to fight with before I can regain even a part of my childish optimism about love. I want to believe in something that may or may not exist anymore, but I am wary of being vulnerable and open because I know how easy it is for me to get ripped apart by turning people into concepts and loving my caricatures of them more than the actual person. I know that I can be dangerous and destructive. I know how hard I am to love. If I regain any childishness again, it will be tainted by these ideas, no matter what I do. I cannot deny my past entirely; ignoring problems only makes them surface again in am much more hurtful way. All of us, especially the women who possess a secret desire for romance need to find a way to reclaim our belief in fairy tales. People get by believing in a lot more harmful myths, if modern love is indeed a myth.
We may be young, externally apathetic and internally damaged by our society, but we can find it within ourselves to repossess one of the few things that defines us as human and separates us from other forms of life. I'll say it now: I believe in love. I believe in happiness. Nothing can take this away from you, unless you let it.
I can't imagine a world without poetry - and it doesn't have to be as impressive as the Wasteland for it to grab my attention. I am the bibliophile stereotype: I live for coffee in one hand, pen stuck behind my ear cradling beautiful, worn-through spines in my hands, clinging desperately to each page like a childhood dream. I move with journal in tow, ready to write down lines, words, names or emotions that catch my attention. Anything is beautiful, it doesn't have to be big, just possess something that reels me in and makes my mind cease its monotony.
There is an inexplicable link between humans and poetry that has more to do with the way words sound than the sense they make. I'll prove it to you. Pick up a book of Plath's poems (or Google one, I'm not picky) and choose a long one. Don't listen to a single word, just listen to the sounds. You can hear her loneliness and desolation before you even begin to examine her word choice, often filled with jarring metaphor and incredibly dark imagery. Some may claim that Plath is not accessible, and apply this claim to other poets. A response to that argument, from an intellectual snob, would be "Poetry isn't meant to be accessible".
That's incorrect (as well as offensive and elitist). The beautiful thing is that poetry is accessible on multiple levels, something that popular culture needs to be reminded of. Is someone who understands every classical allusion in the Wasteland any better than someone who likes the way the words sound? Absolutely not. There are layers of understanding available in a well-crafted poem and it isn't necessary to have a half-million dollar education to access that.
Perhaps a method of reducing my generation's apathy, so widely griped about by our parents and grandparents, would be educating them about the range of human emotions that exist now and always have existed. We want to know that we are not alone, we don't want little pills or terrified parents who one day we will finally succeed in some form of suicide or another. Art, poetry and beauty are lost, not because our generation is inadequate, but because the one before us was. They poison us with media, forcing us into categories: nerd, jock, popular, anti-social and in choosing one form of expression, we are forced to suppress all of the others. We are not taught that we are not alone and never have been. Sure, we're told this time and time again, word-for-word. "Don't worry. You are not alone." Can you be any less creative than that? Is there any less potent way to convey those emotions? Poetry and writing and language all evolved out of nothing.
Humans had nothing, yet created language as a form of expression that is rapidly being dulled by older generations, while being blamed on those of us attached to our cellphones or glued to a computer screen, as if the world's problems all started with us hitting thirteen. Bluntly, most of our parents just fucked up, and maybe that was a result of their parents fucking up. We are not taught how to love. We are not taught how to feel through words. As a generation, our connections to each other are being lost. My generation is trying desperately to regain what humanity has lost and it's reflected in our psychological problems and our desperation to make sense of everything.
I wonder what the world would be like if I could love people as well as literature. If people made half as much sense as books or poems, I would be twice as happy. However all the people I know are liars and childish and possessed by hedonism.
Most of us cannot really feel anyways, and we cannot really love anyone but ourselves because we have been conditioned to believe we are alone and always will be. Who needs the trouble of loving someone else when we hear about statistics, and divorce rates and unhappiness. Rather than thinking about love as a way to transcend these things, we see love as the cause, and close ourselves off to emotions that are inherently human and remain taut and bubbling beneath the surface of hot skin, frustrating us, causing anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, desperation for sex in hopes that it forces us to feel.
It is easy to blame this resultant apathy, depression or bad timing as excuses for why we must cling to self-love over anything else, but the problem stems so much deeper. Losing our ability to connect with others and understand that generations before us have felt pain and happiness and lust and warmth leaves us craving loneliness because we do not understand that there are other options. People who are most aware of the love that exists in poetry and literature are harder on ourselves because we believe in love, and we know it can exist, yet we feel pressure to deny its existence because of how unattainable it seems in our society.
I wonder if what I speak about is something that only I perceive. I have not had the most fulfilling interactions with men over my eighteen years. Some summarizing phrases might be "disappointing" or "absolutely off-putting to men as a gender". This gives me a negative bias: I tend to regard most men as cruel, emotionally frigid and untrustworthy. In my defense, no one has proved me wrong. At the same time, I wonder if my view of the world is so negative because of my specific interactions or because of something deeper, like having high, unrealistic expectations due to my exposure to literature and poetry. I expect romance and feelings to be something beautiful and transcendental and have found that reality works nothing like I imagined as a child. I understand the difference between fiction and non-fiction, but I find it difficult to believe that every love story is not based in something very real and something very attainable. I am conflicted.
My depression does not help this continuous internal conflict. I want to be happy and believe that people can be close in a way deeper than friendship. I have a lot to fight with before I can regain even a part of my childish optimism about love. I want to believe in something that may or may not exist anymore, but I am wary of being vulnerable and open because I know how easy it is for me to get ripped apart by turning people into concepts and loving my caricatures of them more than the actual person. I know that I can be dangerous and destructive. I know how hard I am to love. If I regain any childishness again, it will be tainted by these ideas, no matter what I do. I cannot deny my past entirely; ignoring problems only makes them surface again in am much more hurtful way. All of us, especially the women who possess a secret desire for romance need to find a way to reclaim our belief in fairy tales. People get by believing in a lot more harmful myths, if modern love is indeed a myth.
We may be young, externally apathetic and internally damaged by our society, but we can find it within ourselves to repossess one of the few things that defines us as human and separates us from other forms of life. I'll say it now: I believe in love. I believe in happiness. Nothing can take this away from you, unless you let it.
No comments:
Post a Comment