making meaning

Twelvenight: New Year’s Eve

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
Stepping off the Edge: The Fool Sallies Forth
“Walk on air against your better judgment.”
–Seamus Heaney “The Gravel Walks”

Yesterday, as I was scrolling through Facebook in a lazy moment, I came upon another of those word search puzzles. This one was different. It was a different color, different font. The same friend had posted both this one and the one from the day before. The blurb at the top of the second, like the first, was something like: “The first three words you see are your words for the coming year!” I have my own processes for choosing my words for the year, but still, I couldn’t resist.

I’m a sucker for this stuff, and social media has been happy to oblige. I used to take those Facebook quizzes before I began to get wary about viruses and data collection. Like the puzzles, the quizzes offer you some random answer to an inner question. “What is my personality?” “What will 2020 be like?” “Who among my friends is most like me?”

I think that probably most of us who take these quizzes and do these inconsequential games are participating playfully, but also holding some tiny deep-self spark of hope that this little bit of utter randomness will offer us a truth we can hold onto. Like the mining of dreams or daily experience for images and ideas that will guide the inner work of the coming year, these games engage the younger, more playful deep-self part of our psyches, offering us a chance to seek meaning in organic and flowing associative connection as opposed to marked and organized logical connection.

Both processes are valid for inner work, but we have a tendency to downplay the imaginative and associative parts of our inner selves and try to make meaning and sense of the world through the logical processes. This is where I think we get ourselves into trouble. Even Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” and claimed to use associative processes like sleeping on an idea, and following intuitional trails, to find his way to some of his greatest thoughts about how the world works.

Searching for meaning in this way, by following the rabbit trails of the intuition, and associating seemingly random images and stories to create a narrative guide, is a form of divination. Humans have practiced divination since our early days as humans, and through all our cultures. We divined, through our senses and awareness of the natural signals around us, whether the day would be a good one for gathering mushrooms or for hunting. We let our intuition tell us whether those new mushrooms might be like the ones that feed us or the ones that kill us. It’s only natural, perhaps, that three crows in a dead tree or the sudden appearance of a coyote at the woodsedge might begin to take on greater significance, too.

Divine: an adjective, and sometimes a noun. Holy. Godlike. Heavenly. Having the properties and attributes of a deity.
Divine: a verb. To seek to know. To observe patterns and (perhaps random) elements in a landscape or a mind in order to create meaning, to develop a guiding narrative for the future.

Do my friends and I (and you, perhaps) believe that the faery folk, or God, or some spirit presence, guides our eyes down those word search charts to find us the exact words that are meant for us for the coming year? Probably not, or not exactly. Do those words take on meaning, at least for some of us? Yes. Out of the random soup of the thousands of words that we read and experience daily, here are three to focus on, three to consider special. Yes, the prophecy is definitely self-fulfilling. If Health appears in my three and I have been feeling an internal sense of having neglected my health, perhaps taking this as my word will mean that I begin, in intentional and unintentional ways, to look to my health, and so 2020 becomes a year of robust health for me. When I look back at the end of the year and remind myself of my 2020 words: “Amazing! Look! Health was one of my words, and look how that has come true!”

Magic happens in many ways, and sometimes we make the magic happen.

In the tarot system of divination, one of the major cards is the Fool, who dances on the edge of a cliff, seemingly unaware of the danger, but perhaps aware and dancing anyway, because one must live joyfully no matter the circumstances. Perhaps because of the dire nature of circumstances, the Fool must dance. Since I began to play with the idea of the Fool as one of my guiding concepts for 2020, the Fool has begun to appear everywhere, in books and images and references. Two days ago, I made that little corn dolly Fool and took some photos of her in various places. Yesterday, I did a little digital twisting of some of those photos, and came up with the one attached to this post. See how she dances at the edge of that cliff, even setting her foot into air as though she is about to trust the wind to hold her?

And here’s the strange thing about following the intuitional, poetic, pathways. Sometimes (and maybe often) delightful coincidences/synchronicities (call them what you will) occur. In the first Word Search I did, the words I saw first were: Health, Gratitude, Wade. Wade? Not particularly inspirational. Not like the others at all, haha. The maker of the puzzle clearly didn’t intend it. Of all the possibilities, wouldn’t you know it, I would find the odd one out. The second puzzle, remember, was a different puzzle. I looked closely at it afterward, and the words were definitely different, in different places. My words in the second? Dance, Friendship, and. . .Wade. Yes.

My logic-brain is rolling its eyes and chuckling. But that laughter is a doorway to the deep-self fool, who loves sense that doesn’t make sense, who molds coincidence into meaning. As quick as my logic-brain was working to shrug it off, that deep-self elf had already begun to weave the patterns of a new idea. So I’m wading in the coming year. Does that mean that things will be a slog? Or maybe I have finished swimming in waters above my head and I might now be free to wade instead. I’m heading toward the second. And, because my being human means that I am a meaning-maker, I will build the meaning into my narrative for the coming year.

Dreamwork:
Last night wasn’t particularly dreamy, but I did wake up with a sense of a dream in my head. I don’t remember all of the context or even the images. But I do remember the terrible sense of urgency to get a book ready to send to a publisher. Oooof. I don’t really want urgency in my collecting basket at the moment, and I’ve been wanting to put some poems or reflections or stories together into a book, but I’m not sure I want to marry that to greater urgency. There is a deadline coming up at the end of the month for a chapbook contest for Paraclete Press. Perhaps I’ll begin with that.

Gratitude List:
1. These long slow mornings I have had for writing and contemplating and meditating. I’m beginning to feel an edge of panic that I’ll be losing the gift of morning in just a few days, but I want to focus on being grateful for the days I have had to re-develop the habit of long morning writing sessions. My blog posts will soon be getting much shorter and quicker.
2. Still two days of break. Time to get more work done, and time to spend with my family and the cats.
3. Playing games. The boys got some new games for Christmas. Can’t Catch Harry is sort of like spoons, and Ravine and Spaceteam are collaborative problem-solving games.
4. Deep, sound sleep.
5. How the logic-brain and the deep-self work together to create meaning.

May we walk in Beauty!

Making Sense

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

leaves1

“A good poet tries to lead you into universal experience by leading you into the shocked concrete experience of one flower, one frog, one dog, one tree, one rooster. . . .” —Father Richard Rohr

A few weeks ago, when former US Poet Laureate Mark Strand died, I read a quotation by him about the twin streams of narrative and surrealism that are hallmarks of contemporary poetry.  For some reason, googlability and all, the exact quote eludes me, so you’ll have to trust me on the paraphrase.  My inner ears really perked up at the marriage of those two streams into one sentence, because, without trying to place myself directly into any particular style of poetry, I find myself drawn to both the narrative and the surreal in my own reading and writing.  Even the act of placing those two words into the same context–narrative AND surreal–is something of a surreal exercise itself.  The nature of narrative, of telling a story, is to make sense of a series of events.  Surrealism is a breaking up of sense, a marring of the waters of sense and meaning.

This week, I ran across Matthew Buckley Smith’s Prose Feature in 32 Poems magazine, titled “Why Poems Don’t Make Sense,” and it sent me deeper into this exploration of the meaning of meaning in poetry.  He suggests that sometimes poets engage in a cliquish game of “Keep-away,” writing with such obscure allusions (or with no definite referents at all) that only the in-crowd of poets and erudite thinkers could “get” the deeper meaning, which leaves the majority of people scratching their heads and saying they hate poetry because it doesn’t make sense, or else pretending that they really do find meaning where there is none or little to be had.  He also writes that some poets may deliberately avoid cliched and conventional patterns of meaning-making in their poetry as a way to fight the oppression of conventional thinking.

When I write poems, why do I intentionally obscure the meaning, slanting the sense into images that–depending on your personal reference points–could take on many different meanings? Why, as a reader, am I so often moved by poems that are a series of seemingly unrelated images that seem to suggest a story or an idea, but only in the spaces between the images?  I hope I am not being clubby, trying to make references that only the knowing and thoughtful in-group will understand.  I don’t think so.

His other point does resonate for me, however.  You’ll have to read his article to explore his ideas in detail, but here is my take on it.  We use language to build the structures upon which we hang our ideas.  Language is the scaffold upon which we develop whole structures of thought.  Language anchors and shapes and breathes life into thought and idea.  Conventional thinking, and conventional language, can end up being a pretty tight little box of a windowless building that doesn’t let in the light.  The air in there gets pretty stale.  When language–and its attendant ideas–become calcified and crippled into arthritic patterns, poetic image and word-use can find new ways to say things, can break windows into the walls of those airless rooms and build ornate new additions onto the old structures.  Poetry jars the cart of language out of its constricting wheel ruts.  This is why poets and writers can make good revolutionaries–if they know their work and do their jobs well.

Good poetry, I think, is more about finding your way by signposts than about following a map.  It gives readers a few cues and clues, sets us loose, and then waits for us to say, “Oh!  I recognize this territory!  I know this landscape.” A series of seemingly unrelated but compelling images can spring to life when sprinkled with the fairy dust of beautiful language or the hint of a story.  While I want to be able to understand enough of the controlling idea of a poem for it help me create some sort of sense, the most satisfying meaning that I derive from reading a good poem comes not through the intellectual front door, but through the back door of the emotions.  Meaning made through emotional connection rather than mental processing often appears in the form of wonder and holy surprise, even when it comes in a painful or angry guise.  Poetic understanding is gut-level understanding.  I have long been a fan of singer-songwriter Paul Simon.  I don’t think I know what he means about anything, but he always makes me feel something.

The sense-making in poetry is about getting behind the brain.  A poem is a door.  Sometimes poets make sturdy, locked, exclusive club doors that you can only enter if you are one of “us,” or if your can speak (or pretend to know) the password.  A really good and satisfying poem is an open and inviting doorway that frames the view in a particularly compelling way.  “Look!” it says.  “Stand and stare.  Take a deep breath.  Then tell me what you see.”

Good poetry, I think, holds a paradoxical perspective on language itself: it acknowledges the inadequacy of words to completely map an inner geography, and it also steps with reverence and awe into the sacred space that language creates between writer and reader.  Words are both inadequate and holy.