"Poetry is Like a Garden"
Poetry
is like
a garden,
in that you
grow it slowly,
give it plenty of care,
and it will pay you back.
You can enter your produce
in a contest to show its worth, or
you can sell it to others, who may not
appreciate what you have put into it.
But sometimes, though,
the best thing to do,
is tend it yourself,
for yourself,
and let it
heal you.
"Speaking Freely"
Some people will say, and I will agree, that the best way to go about things,
is not to be seen when you don't want to be seen, and avoid all the trouble that brings.
Drawing attention to yourself, you may know, rarely ends with anything good.
In some extreme cases you'd find yourself under the ground in wood.
But then you may say, "Hey, wait a minute! What am I going to do?
I need to get some ideas across, but how, if I listen to you?"
To you I say only one last thing. I think you'll agree with this thought:
Your new ideas may be good for the world, but good for you, they are not.
1 comment:
I don't know if it's still there or not, but many years ago in Paris there was a garden of "simples". The plants there were called "simples" because they were the basic ingredients in medicines, and the purpose of the garden was to keep these on hand.
Of course the pharmaceutical industry has made such gardens obsolete.
This is one of the reasons why the simile in the poem is so good -- because such gardens, like poetry, are obsolete. In most cases, people's cultural needs are met by the movie industry, which bears about the same relation to poetry as Pfizer does to a garden of simples.
As the poem notes, however, poetry, unlike pharmaceuticals, is not about commerce. Nor can it be mass produced.
About the healing properties:
The symbols in poetry, and in the other arts, do in fact exist for the purpose of healing. Or further developing, which can be the same thing.
The science of the human brain/mind is extremely primitive. In 200 years our culture will look like cavemen compared to what they're going to know about brain activity. In our time, though, we need to deal with things as best we can. What happens in our minds is far too complicated to deal with in a reasonable, controlled, conscious way.
I think that this is why little boys like dinosaurs.
Little boys are engaged in extremely difficult mental work. Freud says that the realization that we are in fact a separate being from our mothers is a trauma from which we never quite recover. The process of becoming individual and independent is ongoing. These things must be dealt with properly and at the correct pace. Humans, unlike snakes, for example, aren't independent from the moment they hatch. Discovery of who one is, and to what extent one is a member of the group while also independent is difficult and complicated.
If there had been only one kind of dinosaur, they would not have been very useful. But there were a lot of types, and in fact new ones keep getting discovered. There were big ones, small ones, strong ones, clever ones, and all variations on the theme. They are attractively powerful and safely absent, therefore purely symbolic. (Like the Greek pantheon.)
There's no doubt in my strictly amateur mind that dinosaurs bear such attraction for kids because they serve as symbols of variety within a group, and offer the example of different personalities, none of which is seen as ideal, but among which we can choose favorites. There is no way that a little kid could deal with individuation on a conscious level. They're too young for psychoanalysis. Learning about and playing with dinosaurs offers an alternative. Dinosaurs serve as companions who are already individuated, yet part of a larger set. As the difficult mental work gets done, dinosaurs act as examples and partners in the process. In this way, they assist with healing or growth in a way that the pharmaceutical industry cannot hope to match.
Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, dinosaurs don't work for your whole life.
As real individuation occurs, the needs of individuals begin to differ. As the whole mind/body complex grows, (slowly, as noted in the poem), different symbols are needed. Here is where society fails most people.
The symbols that most people are offered are mass-produced like the drugs in a factory. Everybody gets offered the same things. Hollywood goes for the lowest-common-denominator, highest-grossing symbolic messages. Everybody gets Batman, whether you need him or not.
A huge academic field has grown up about analyzing the implicit messages in these commercial products. I recently saw a video interview with the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, in which he denounced the movie "Kung Fu Panda". (Although he had seen it 5 times because his little boy likes it.)
In this way, a garden of simples, that you grow yourself, is far superior to mass-produced, commercial products. They fruits of such labors are far more likely to meet one's own needs than the standard items on the shelves. You tend them yourself, for yourself, and then they are exactly the medicine you need.
Not ALL the medicine you need, of course. The growth process never ends (until you die). So the symbols that you have a dialogue with also change. It is give-and-take all your life. Some people have more time, or more energy, or more need, to engage in such work than others.
Here we're getting into the subject of Creative Neurosis: how people whose minds are less settled into the normal environment require a more active engagement with the symbolic environment. Neurosis, unlike psychosis, isn't necessarily harmful to a person. But it does seem to demand further mental work on a more complicated level than the toy dinosaurs.
I wish that everybody had more access to good art, in that the symbols there are more nuanced, and more helpful, than commercial products.
Here's the bad news: unlike a pharmaceutical injection that makes your viruses die, the healing work of poetry is never finished. As I say, we continue to grow. The good news is that as we continue to engage in a dialogue with the symbolic world in painting, poetry, and the other arts, our relationship with those symbols deepens. Again, like a garden, it only gets better with the years. You get rich beauty that you could never bring home in a box, that requires years of tending to blossom.
Trips to Paris can help this process a great deal, I believe.
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