Thoughts on Poetry

This post was originally titled "The Meaning of Poetry"; I just stumbled upon a blog that was filled with some pretty inspiring material. I knew it was inspiring because it forced me to think about what was being said outside of the context of myself. What I'm trying to say is, I stopped thinking about myself for a few minutes to read this blog. Afterwards, I started thinking about myself again, but for a few brief minutes I didn't. I don't like to think that my narcissism is at the pathological level -- I mean, I don't think it actually is, but I don't like to think about it either. The budding anthropologist, the evolutionary biologist within me says the following: Narcissism is vital to survival. Narcissism is simply the term humans invented when, upon looking backwards from their long journey of altruistic progress, were shocked to see that no matter how far they traveled from their primitive pasts, still had their roots firmly grounded in a reality sharply defined by the laws of nature. Eat or be eaten. We hate that, don't we? We have to. We don't like to think of ourselves as animals? This is where my thinking used to stop. I loved to think of us as animals. It would explain so much of the way my parents used to act when the doors were close and they didn't think we could hear them yelling at each other. It would explain the basic pleasure I used to derive from stealing food from my brother. Maybe the only reason I stopped was subconsciously I realized he had grown big enough to break my bones, to punish me for interfering with his own survival processes. This is where my thinking used to stop.

But now I can't help but reflect that we ARE different. We care about each other and we building gigantic monuments to commemorate the heroic actions of members of our community who travel thousands of miles away to get blown up by a mine -- defending too many people for us to explain. Definitely us, thought, right? At the end of the day, we can't think about the fact that our society has grown too fast for our sense of community to keep up.

On this train of thought, contemplating the defining characteristics of mankind, I started thinking about poetry. Our brains our firing constantly. Even comatose, disabled, vegetated people lying in beds in forgotten hospital rooms have brains that are constantly active. Synapse to synapse; microscopic lightning strikes. These storms brew and subside and boil and roar softly and loudly. Occasionally they force open the floodgates of our mind and we speak what we think and suddenly we have performed magic. Our bodies have transmitted electrical currents in one organ into sound waves in another and through this action we have increased the size of our population to 7 billion people. Our population is approaching the magnitude and complexity of our own brains.

What is poetry but the venting of excess thoughts. Some people say poetry tells a story. I say, the only story that is told through poetry is the singly story of human existence: we communicate our inner-most thoughts, opaque and diffuse reflections of the mechanized action of our brains, in the hopes that one word in a thousand words will be heard by someone else and change the way that person thinks. Poetry is not beautiful or simple or elegant. Not in its true form. It's merely a precision, targeted attack of thoughts. It the breath-taking cloud that occurs when a sonic-boom surrounds an ICBM.

I had originally titled this post "The Meaning of Poetry", but I decided to rename it "Thoughts on Poetry" for two primary reasons: 1) To fit the internal organizational vernacular that is consistent throughout this Titanic blog. 2) To show that, at the end of the day, I don't really know the meaning of anything.