When reality hits the wrong conditions of our expectations and the unacceptable happens – death, abandonment, broken promises, unrequited kindness – we cope in two ways: We question our thinking, thinking that the outside world is coherent. and our response like madness; or we pretend to be sane and dismiss the outside world – another person, a situation, the world – as insanity. All of these are stories that we tell ourselves about the truth, the way things are, and the way things should be. Like all stories, these are all works of imagination.
It is always necessary to think in order to understand what is real, because in human experience reality is a collective nature. It takes a lot of thinking to understand what it’s like to be someone else, how that other person might be in the same situations that we find ourselves in, and it takes a lot of thinking to think about what’s in our hearts.
GK Chesterton (May 29, 1874–June 14, 1936), who thought deeply and originally about the meaning of life, organizes the two answers to be real and the problem of cleanliness as a myth and a book. In a fragment of his writings Very Amazing (public library | | free ebook), he wrote:
Folklore implies that the spirit is intelligent, but that nature is mysterious and full of wonder. Truth means that the world is empty and full of habit, but that life is sick and screaming. The problem with the myth is – what will a healthy person do with a happy world? The problem with the modern book is – what will a madman do with a world without reason? In mythology, madness; but heroes don’t go crazy. In the modern novels the hero is insane before the novel begins, and suffers from intense anger and atmospheric violence.
But while it always takes imagination to understand what is real, it also takes imagination to see beyond the models of reality that the world presents to us as we know it. (“Everything is in the state of mind,” Chesterton agreed.) Perhaps there is a third way beyond this duality, which recognizes awareness as something free from madness and madness, in which being a hero of one’s own life is not a battle. between reality and rationality, between yourself and others, but the matter of peace is the cosmos, a cosmos that can perceive.
Maybe this is how the poem works. Perhaps the best way to deal with reality – especially when it doesn’t have our hopes and expectations – is to be a living poet. “Reexamine everything you have been told in school or church or in any book, reject everything that insults your life,” Whitman wrote in his timeless words of living a happy and productive life, “and your body will be a great poem. .” Poetry is not a slave to the story, it does not need to be solved, it is not a message but an opening. Poetry creates its meaning.
Join Nobel-winning poet Wisława Szymborska on storytelling and the importance of fear, then return to Lucille Clifton on how to become a living poet.