It’s not as didactic as it seems; in this life my biggest fear is that I’ll end without knowing everything. This translates to a fuming anxiety for ignorance: I remember the first summer of my childhood I spent with a computer. My curiosity about South American native tribes, present and throughout history, was relentless. I read what little there was online about the Muisca’s and their empire of gold, the Tayrona’s aggressions, the Quimbaya’s tombs. In every family library available to me I looked for anything about them, but it was in the house on the corner that I found a book of Amazonian myths. It was there that I became obsessed with the dragon living below the Orinoco River, sometimes seven headed, other times spinning the wind into the jungle. Hole after deluging hole I ended the summer reading Plato’s Timaeus conversations, to know Atlantis. Then the fifth grade began,
In my history class we learned about MesoAmerican native empires. Every lesson upset me because I didn’t know! And I could’ve! I went east when I should’ve gone north. It was the K’iche who baffled me the most, and while the lessons moved south toward the Incas, I read the only translation I could find of the Popol Vuh, in Spanish, which I had only learned to read a year before.
Most times I like to assume that everybody feels this way, but the same person who knows ten pre-colonial native tribes knows little about Oscar Wilde-- which is fair. Specialization wouldn’t let a podiatrist replace a pacemaker; but my instinct sees a foot like it sees a heart. This puts me at odds with others sometimes; it bores me to not speak. I’ve learned not to, and it’s lucid to learn something that isn’t for them.
This may be the paramount therefore of me: therefore, I can’t end without being a creator of knowledge. How could that be possible if my brain just wants to research? I’ve always thought of a sponge here; it absorbs, yes, but it also exudes. Everything can be soaked in then let go, brand new! Oh man. This is why I study poetry, unlike anything else. How else do you aestheticize intelligence, the search for everything?
A painter at my gallery is also a mathematician which is cool, but he can only paint equations. Another is an architect and he only knows destruction, or perfect uniformity. Picasso himself was bound by style, even if that changed a few times. Journalists don’t aestheticize, photographers don’t speak. But then you have Allen Ginsberg:
“who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,”
Only a poet could know everything! And we don’t have to speak— mouths can be so vile and in front of you, so needy for excitement when they can barely elicit a response. In a line, I won’t care if you understand the irony of Blake-light tragedy. I won’t know where your eyes are when you read it, if you’ve heard of El, if you can’t help looking it up.
I am led to believe that language to me is the way it looks like on a sheet. I can draw, and print, and speak for hours if you let me, my voice is sweet. But I think about the great aesthetes of knowledge: Shakespeare, Breton, and Ashbery; worms doing backflips on their throats, and the grand possibility of them just being scholars, or painters— how many things today we would not know.
Thus, we know because it reads well. The poet is the highlighter of culture, the master collagist, capable of singing every song. “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's,” William Blake writes in his epic poem Jerusalem, “I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” The poem is an amalgamation of biblical references, British mythology, and complex cultural and political themes of the early 19th century. It is in fact a story of the whole world, through which Blake’s endless knowledge creates more. This must be the highest purpose of art! Of poets, of myself: to know so much that the only way to know more is to make.
11/27/19 12:57PM