Words Destroy Their Own Meaning?
I have never written a blog post before and am not quite sure where to begin, so please bear with me. We will see where we end up when we get there.
How does one express or understand the enormity of the world? How do we know what the intangible feels like? Or what non-sentient constructions think about life? Or ask whether there is life outside of our planet?
Well Wislawa Szymborska writes about all these unusual subjects In Monologue of a Dog as well as describing war from an aerial view, giving the alphabet its own thoughts, and making statistics interesting.
Szymborska addresses many difficult themes in more manageable terms, like assigning each variable in a quadratic equation the appropriate quantity. She breaks down walls that seem unbreakable. She makes us think in new ways by giving us unique vantage points of scenes that would normally go unnoticed.
By the time I reached the end of her final poem, I found myself having reached a catharsis. One poem in particular resonated with me:
“The Three Oddest Words
When I pronounce the word Future,
The first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.”
The meaning of the word contradicts the saying of the word itself. Such a simple subject seen from a new perspective must be meant to cause us to ask new questions. What if every time we speak we are contradicting our meaning? What if the very act of naming something negates it?
Szymborska seems to express so much within what is never said, within in the “Zeros”, the silence of the unanswered question. The space left for you to fill in yourself. She gives us just enough to get us thinking, but not enough to simply have the answers.
I believe she writes to inspire thought, and in my case has achieved her goal quite well. So if you have thoughts or ideas as a result reading her poems, then please comment and we can start an interesting discussion.
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