One of the reasons I love poetry is it’s ability to address and communicate in-betweens – the moments of change, the processes, the insecurity I always find trying to explain human experience and its correlations to reality with mere speech. We were chatting about this the other day, and one of the most obvious examples is Columbus and how he “found” America, thinking it was India. Within his little bubble of experience, it was a new world – but it is sad when one human experience begins to define the world for others, as well.
Of course it happens in smaller scale more often than on the scale of finding “new worlds”. It’s the moments when you sit talking shite about someone, and through your bad experience of this person you make others more likely to accept that that experience would be who they are. Or the moments when you are enthusiastic about something you just realized and explain it to everyone as if it was the first time this has ever occured. Or when theatre-makers, myself included, describe their projects as “something no one has ever done before” when it should be “something I have never done before”.
And it’s fine. Most things in life are totally fine. It’s very human to live through one’s own experience, and you should never try and get rid of that. But I think that the more we remember that is ours, that our firsts are our firsts and our quarrels with others are our quarrels with others and not how they are, the more we find self-harmony – and become able to accept the insecurity and quirkiness of the world, and see other people as unfinished processes we all are, as well as our selves. For me, accepting that rawness is accepting growth, and embracing life – as my therapist once said to me “if you would be ready, would you be alive anymore?”
Queen of Wandering 