Exchange
Rolling around in my head the idea of unit of exchange or marker or sign or currency. Not quite in a commodifying way, just: I need there to be something I can hand to you and you can hand to me and the passing back and forth of it will be a kind of understanding.
Coin, bone, button, twig. It's a present!
And then from the small literal thing comes a bigger kind of exchange. We're not swapping our own things, we're agreeing that this thing is shared. What meaning? value? word assigns.
How this works in the poem. (Trying to explain makes my hands come off the keyboard and make pincer-motions in the air at nothing: take, give, take! mean, mean, mean! grasp!) It's not toward a broader understanding, no new set of signs to work from... not an overhaul like that. Rather a brief accord? For now I hand you this little stone and tell you stone and you hand it back and we know something, for a moment, with both of our hands on it?
What's funny is that it sounds like I want to talk about signs and referents here, but no, not really... not that we could make the word work that way. When we say stone what we are referring to is not the hard, round, mineral thing we passed back and forth, it is the period of time when we both touched the thing. Looked each other in the eye, acknowledged. This is not a stone, but we are making a stone now: two hands, object, and agreement.
So when I say the thin roan horse grazing it's not the horse that I saw or the horse that you've seen, it's the horse we're both standing next to in the field. Both touching and both saying horse.
This is not quite it. But it is kind of why I get cranky with memoir-ish writing and poetry and the assumed value & validity of true stories. They aren't true. Once you tell them, they're stories. So use them in the third space, use them in the in-between place to make something with someone else. Or use things that come from who-knows-where. But make them meet-able, hand-able over.
Coin, bone, button, twig. It's a present!
And then from the small literal thing comes a bigger kind of exchange. We're not swapping our own things, we're agreeing that this thing is shared. What meaning? value? word assigns.
How this works in the poem. (Trying to explain makes my hands come off the keyboard and make pincer-motions in the air at nothing: take, give, take! mean, mean, mean! grasp!) It's not toward a broader understanding, no new set of signs to work from... not an overhaul like that. Rather a brief accord? For now I hand you this little stone and tell you stone and you hand it back and we know something, for a moment, with both of our hands on it?
What's funny is that it sounds like I want to talk about signs and referents here, but no, not really... not that we could make the word work that way. When we say stone what we are referring to is not the hard, round, mineral thing we passed back and forth, it is the period of time when we both touched the thing. Looked each other in the eye, acknowledged. This is not a stone, but we are making a stone now: two hands, object, and agreement.
So when I say the thin roan horse grazing it's not the horse that I saw or the horse that you've seen, it's the horse we're both standing next to in the field. Both touching and both saying horse.
This is not quite it. But it is kind of why I get cranky with memoir-ish writing and poetry and the assumed value & validity of true stories. They aren't true. Once you tell them, they're stories. So use them in the third space, use them in the in-between place to make something with someone else. Or use things that come from who-knows-where. But make them meet-able, hand-able over.
posted by stower at 3:09 PM
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