the animal that slips through your fingers
I call the art of poetry an animal because that’s what it’s like to me. Foreign and different. Something to be studied from a remote distance, never an organic extension of the self. A cousin, a distant relative maybe, but nothing more. I’ve never felt an affinity for poetry - that elusive art of speaking and writing in riddles.
I just came back from a study trip to Japan, five years after I made a vacation trip to the very same place. It’s astonishing how much more, and how much less, I saw this time around. Five years ago I left my hometown, eager to fish for ideas in a land so drastically romanticised in my imagination. I was ready to hunt for cultural contradictions, to pull poetic or artistic observations from every nook I could find with the fresh, hungry eye of a foreigner. I wasn’t looking for understanding. I was looking for a sensational story. And I found it, or I think I did. I emerged with little vignettes and haikus that I thought were smart; and maybe they were, maybe they weren’t.
This time around, I went as an adult. Instead of ghosts of the past, I shook hands and locked eyes with the locals. I was present in reality. Instead of teasing out the ironies in their dense and sophisticated culture, I learnt to love the people I met. I didn’t see them as little digits or blips in a larger tapestry of a moving, living history - I saw them simply as people. With their fears, excitement, ambitions. I listened to their stories, complained and laughed with them. So that unlike before, I emerged from this trip with little to say. No poetry, I had decided, as the plane accelerated, and its wheels - the last linkage connecting us to home - grunted and pulled away from the ground. No romanticisation. No looking out for spectres, for things invisible. My work here isn’t with the paradoxes or secrets hidden below the surface. It’s with infrastructure, systems, people.
My last thought as we lifted off was this: I wonder why poets are so good at what they do? That is, writing things in riddles? Do they see things in riddles and so simply write down what they see? Or does what they see or hear undergo this transformation in their heads, like a kind of conversion machine that turns fact into fiction? All I know is that I’m through with looking out for riddles, or talking in them. Because often the best - and better - way to communicate is talking about things simply as they are.
