What is art but the human translation and expression of an idea? Poems, paintings, essays—they all strive to encapsulate a single thought, to be translated into an idea, into a concept, into an artistic piece. For the most part, humans produce their own thoughts. These thoughts bloom and take root within the mind of a person, to be carried with them all day and written down with relative ease. Mind-manufactured, docile, greenhouse thoughts are propped up by our language systems, making them translatable. These, for the most part, are under our command.
Yet I find that there are others—which we shall call Thoughts with a capital T. They are not original to the human mind, but rather tied to a location. These are the Thoughts of the world. They are the wild Thoughts that float freely on the wind, coming and going from the minds of men.
They are cooked in no language soup, and are therefore untranslatable. They bubble up from ocean vents, and grow in the buds of trees. They rise from the grass like pollen, and fall from the sky like rain. They blow warm concrete air in your face, and tickle your legs with weeds. They have no beginning or end, front or back, no grammar or sentence structure. They simply are, and most likely will be until the end of time.
I feel the wild Thoughts around me: when I lie on my back in the middle of a pond in August; when I watch the fireflies blinking in and out in June; when my sisters and I try to fly a kite in April, and our shoes become wet with mud. They taunt and tease me, allowing me to sense their presence when I visit. But even in their domain I cannot quite express what they are saying to me. The translation is just beyond my capabilities, leaving me only with the a feeling of tension that swells up and up like a balloon, but never quite bursts. A dam of knowledge, held back from breaking by a single twig.
And even that drains and drips out my ears as I leave the Thoughts behind. I cannot rip them from their homes just as they cannot rip me from mine. They feel safest in the wind and the sky and the sea, just as I feel safest surrounded by my own people. I think maybe I could understand the Wild Ones if I cut my ties to humanity, and gave up my connection to language. Then, I feel, I would be exposed to some fundamental truth about the world. I would understand, but I myself would disappear.
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Counting Down the Days
PoetryIt is the summer before I leave for college, and I am staring into the empty abyss before me, wondering what to do with my life. In this collection, I am challenging myself to write something every day (now adjusted to every 2-3 days). I may write p...
