The Mind as Haiku

For November, Spinozablue welcomes the poetry of Virginie Colline, Joshua Bocher, Greg Mackie and Kyle Hemmings.

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Making poetry, making art, comes naturally to humans. For all we know, we’ve been doing this since the dawn of time. It probably brought immense pleasure to the first Neanderthal and his or her tribe when they made speech rhythmic, flow, condense the life around them into a proto-song. I can imagine them delighting in the sounds of brand new lyrics, forcing them to dance, and then delighting in these new movements they had never encountered in themselves or others before.

Laughing. Grunting with joy. Perhaps mocking the less adept. Though, perhaps mockery came later and had not yet been discovered. Perhaps it took the first satirical poet to bring us that Dance, as the physical manifestation of their extraordinary surprise.

Dance, as the first physical manifestation of ordering the body to be at one with the heavens.

It is likely that we are pre-wired to want to do this, to want to construct images in words, stone, paint, sound and motion. It is likely that our hard-wiring provokes us into this maddening quest to make sense and order out of the chaos of our surroundings — and our inner lives.

It is very difficult to escape from this. It takes incredible practice to stop ordering and reordering our surroundings and internal flow. And even then, the practice itself is a form of ordering and reordering, a negative image imposed on the sunlit one we can’t avoid.

The mind itself is a Haiku, or so the mind believes, if we could but see from outside its structure. If we could but gaze upon it from the safety of the structures surrounding it — the order and context it must create.

 

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