Words fail us all the time.
We can’t find the right ones to express how we feel in a dramatic situation.
We struggle to make a comparison that could clarify a really confusing topic because we don’t have a way to parallel difficult to understand subjects.
We speak and speak but no one is there to listen.
We learn magnificent things about our universe, about what lies beyond our universe, but we have no way to express it, no way to convince people that their world is much bigger and much more beautiful than their tiny minds and beliefs currently allow.
Einstein said that if you can’t explain a thing to a child, then you don’t really understand it yourself.
I feel like I’m in that boat most of the time as, I’m sure, most poets do.
Words can’t approach the real thing, the ultimate meaning-experience, the total version of all that is. We can’t ever get there, even with the things, words and sentences, that we love most in the world.
The Tao of Chin begins by saying that the true and eternal Tao cannot be named or quantified or put in any sort of box. I’ve always liked that. Saw truth in it.
What we look for most, what every single thing we do works toward, what that final sense of actual being is and always shall remain to be, is utterly indescribable.
To describe it would be pointless, contrary even, to what it is.
I’m still not sure what it means to ‘wander lonely as a cloud.’ I mean, a lonely, wandering cloud is probably just the first of many to come.
A wandering cloud can sprout a storm or it follows behind one as a reminder, a final tally.
Just because we see the thing and point to it with words, doesn’t mean we know the damage or the blooms to come.
It’s like Morpheus and Neo in the Matrix: You can be shown the door, you can witness the actuality of reality, but to get into it, to actually take part in it, you, the reader, have to take the leap off the page and into the world.
Dan Dorman 