A very dear friend of mine and I have been having a virtual discussion about poetry. To be honest, I know very little about the subject, but have learned a lot, just through our ongoing dialogue and am looking forward, as always, to reading and learning more in the future.
There's something about a particular passage that she sent me to read that has really got me thinking, not just about poetry, but about how the broader scope of an idea:
"Here’s a tricky issue: the task is to grasp, to connect, to understand. But such a task is to some degree impossible, and most people want clarity. At the end of class, at the end of the day, we want revelation, a glimpse of the skyline through the lifting fog. Aesthetically, this is understandable. Some magic, some satisfaction, some "Ahhh!" is one of the rewards of any reading, and particularly the reading of poetry. But a poem that reveals itself completely in one or two readings will, over time, seem less of a poem than one that constantly reveals subtle recesses and previously unrecognized meanings...The most magical and wonderful poems are ever renewing themselves, which is to say they remain ever mysterious."
(Borrowed from "How to Read a Poem: Embrace Ambiguity")
Travel, to me, is always surrounded with an air of poetry. Everything is new and never before seen, I see all the details of every street that I walk down, because I am constantly trying to better understand the place. Eating a new food or meeting new people inspires the kind of instantaneous, ecstatic reaction that it's impossible to immediately capture in even the loveliest prose. It's more like an impressionist painting or a poem-- a sensation that can not be fully understood in just one moment or one glance, just one reading. I find myself re-living these moments over and over again in my mind.
And it takes me to a passage from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, which I'll translate (quite roughly, as there is really no such thing as a clean translation) into English here:
"The more he loses himself in the unknown quarters of faraway cities, the more he understands the other cities that he crossed up until that point and he re-traces the steps of his travels and learns to know the port from which he set sail and the familiar places of his childhood and the surroundings of his home and a little place in Venice where he ran as a child."*
It is only by immersing ourselves into the unknown, that is, into the poetry of life, that we can begin to understand where we came from and how we ended up there. The obvious and the straight-forward do not require that leap-of-faith, that uncertainty, that ambiguity where we find the room to grow.
It's easier to go through life with a closed heart and a closed mind, If we are going to truly lean into our lives, truly "embrace the ambiguity," it takes a lot of courage. After all, ambiguity, by its very nature, makes us uncomfortable. It's much easier and more comfortable to live in an instruction manual than a poem. The next step is always obvious and there is minimal risk involved.
But there is where is the joy? Where is the growth? Where is the beauty in a life like that? Life, like good poetry, should be a challenge.
That's why I'm most grateful for all the places I've never visited and all the people I've never met.
That's what fulfilling friendships and relationships are built on, discovering something new in a person that you knew through and through.
That's how a world I thought I understood manages to confound me anew every day in the most beautiful way.
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*I'm including those sentences from Le citta' invisibili by Calvino here in the original Italian, so that those of you who can read Italian will be confirmed in your suspicion that Italo Calvino was actually a significantly better writer than I am:
"Marco Polo immaginava di rispondere (o Kublai immaginava sua risposta) che piu' si perdeva in quartieri sconosciuti di citta' lontana, piu' capiva le altre citta' che aveva attraversato fin la', e ripercorreva le tappe dei suoi viaggi e imparava a conoscere il porto da cui era salpato, e i luoghi familiari della sua giovinezza, e i dintorni di casa, e un campiello di Venezia dove si correva da bambino"
