What’s the point? More specifically (but not terribly specific), what’s the point of this? All of it.
Last night, my friend and I were talking about whether poetry could/should evoke emotion, like actually make the reader feel an emotion… or does it just approximate those feelings in the reader? I’m sure it happens, but I was struggling to think of poems that made me angry or sad or joyful the way the author might have been feeling those things. And is that their intent? Or is their job to build recognition and maybe a type of camaraderie through emotion? To stretch the personal towards the outskirts of the universal?
Our conversation took a couple of turns and at one point, I felt almost on the verge of an epiphany. We talked about why publish or share or create, and I began to suggest that this (life, writing, creating, etc.) seems to be about connecting and enlarging. I began to suggest that nearly everything we do as human beings seems to be about connecting and changing or growing (going slightly beyond our current capacity, helping others go slightly beyond theirs). Jobs, relationships, poetry, art, learning… These are all ways in which we can enlarge (or change) the self and also others – ways in which we begin to see and experience things differently (sometimes only incrementally so) than we had seen and experienced them before. I often come back to the saying “no man ever steps in the same river twice” which I’ll now couple with this new-to-me nugget from Mark Twain “a man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”
Because I want to believe in the potential of positive change and connections, I sometimes ascribe a positive purpose to things like writing or sharing. I sometimes believe that the point may be in healing or finding ways to be a little less alone in this world. Personally, I tend to identify with poems and poets when I see a glimpse of myself or my past or my desires and longings in what I’m reading. I’m a believer in what Harold Bloom once wrote, “we read to discover minds more original than our own.” As my friend and I talked, I shared with him the gist of a poem called “Why Bother?” by a Pennsylvania poet I’ve gotten to know through Twitter, Sean Thomas Dougherty. He writes, “Because right now there is someone / Out there with / a wound in the exact shape / of your words.” I then shared with my friend, a similar sentiment from Emily Dickinson (but because my recall is crap, I couldn’t remember if it was Dickinson or what her exact words were…) “If I can stop one heart from breaking / I shall not live in vain;”
I recognize that this banter and pontification is me putting a positive spin on things – perhaps out of a desire or need for purpose. Of course, not everything in life is about connecting or growth. Buddhists might argue that everything is exactly how it is – no striving, just being. They might remind us that there is no purpose beyond the present moment. We have no more purpose than the rock or the tree (though the rocks and trees seem to have the good sense to not question it). Vonnegut addresses these concepts frequently. In one interview he said, “we are here on Earth to fart around.” On a slightly deeper level he wrote in one of his “calypsos” from his made-up religion of Bokonism in Cat’s Cradle, “Tiger got to hunt, / Bird got to fly; / Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’/ Tiger got to sleep, / Bird got to land; / Man got to tell himself to understand.”
Expanding our capacities and the capacities of others. Connecting through art, literature, experience, and feeling. Uncovering different layers of “truth.” These are the things that are possible. If not explicitly our purpose, this is what we are capable of. Perhaps the opening question is a misinformed or misleading frame for the conversation. Perhaps instead of a “point” to all of this, we might do well to think: all of this exists and our only job, if we can be said to have a job, is to take notice and be present… to show up and be curious. To fart around and pretend we understand.