morethanenoughtruth

The Monday Morning Writers Group might appreciate knowing what is going on in my strange essay, “Gnarly Knowing”.  (Please see January 15, 2012 posting.)  That’s reasonable and understandable.  When I first presented this piece to the group, my last resounding words were met with a silence so dense I could have sliced it and served it on a plate.  I hadn’t intended for us to actually enter the Cave of Silence.  The group sat in shocked stillness, surreptitiously glancing around the table to share the question on their faces: Is this woman nuts?  Fair question.

Writers are familiar with the concept of “point of view”.  The writing flows from a defined vantage point: If “I” am telling the story it becomes much more intimate than if “He” is telling it.  An “Omniscient” viewpoint knows all and can tell all.  “Gnarly Knowing” postulates and demonstrates a new viewpoint wherein metaphor tells the story.

Inside the Cave of Silence, the metaphors assemble.  They wait for inevitable visits from the writer who in unguarded moments of dream or meditation or bouts of solitude come to visit and explore.  They exist for a single noble purpose: they express raw truth.

I can only describe my cave since it is impossible for me to enter any other, but it is reasonable to assume that what I experience is available to others.  My many years of asking “why” and “why not” have taught me that no feeling or idea is self proprietary.  Any insights I ever achieved had already been expressed by others quicker and smarter.  But what I am speaking of here is a personal cave, personal to me and what the flow of my conscious thought has carved out of the rock of my own reality.  See?  We have already entered the cave.  Every concept is quickened by metaphors that hang around waiting for some nascent thought to pass by and press them into service.

My cave itself is a homey place.  How could it be other, carved as it was in my own dark subterranean mystery, growing from ooze, to seep, to stream, to mighty river of expression.  As roiling torrent breaks out into light and air, both reader and writer take a shared breath.  We have come through this adventure together, buoyed by a joined trust, moved by a poet’s vision, affirmed by the resonance of reader and writer, embodied by the many metaphors lurking like bats hanging from the dripping arches of my cave.  Such a moist place breeds life.  Where there is life there is the capacity for thought, however rudimentary.  Even the lowly snail carries in its unique nerve cell array a microcosm of the mechanism that produced the Harvard Classics.

In my cave, I am caught between microcosm and macrocosm, in my own personal chasm.  I can vision infinity in either direction, but I rail at being stuck in my spot in this hierarchy of fractal branching.  The universe isn’t fair; why must I be so imprisoned?  Why me?  I am put in my place by the limitations of my being.  Who am I?  A being called human crouched before a computer screen, on a planet circling a minor star, in a galaxy that spirals about a black hole somewhere in a roiling universe of suns; conversely and reflectively, I am a conglomeration of systems and organs and cells and molecules and the atoms, electrons, neutrons, quarks and bosons they comprise, in an ever-diminishing expression of the incipient reality we call energy.  I will be imprisoned here until some form of life discovers the answer to the ultimate questions: who, what, when, where, why are we?  Are there other dimensions, out of time, out of mind, or in a Twilight Zone inhabited only by metaphor?  Until that is clarified, perhaps poetry dreamed in the Silent Cave is the only consolation.

“Gnarly Knowing” was conceived in my cave out of raw passion impregnated by seeds of raw truth.  My description of what happens in that cave carries the use of metaphor to absurdity.  I’m hoping that exercise will clarify what I was trying to do.  If it still doesn’t make sense, it might be useful to switch viewpoints, to wit:

Dorothy J. Martin, aspiring writer, had a dream.  When her alarm went off, she pressed snooze, lay abed and thought it through.  It was fascinating and deserved to be recorded.  She rose, washed teeth, and showered.  Then she sat at the computer and realized she had forgotten the dream entire.  It was gone.

Then she decided that the wisdom carried by the symbolism of the dream must have already become part of her integrated matrix of understanding during REM processing.  This self-serving rationalization made her feel better, so she decided to write a poem about it, to have faith in her basic thought process, and to spend the rest of her life enjoying the craft of writing.

But hedging her bets, she resolved on future awakenings to write first and wash later.