Sunday, January 22, 2006

Did I write it?

I don't usually write poems--at least since high school when I used to write them during math class, I haven't. The style I choose to go with when I write is normally more prose-like. However, every once in a while I jot down some thoughts in a way that resembles, in my mind, more of a verse in nature. I don't know what it is, maybe a matching of the moment, a correspondence with some happening that is too subtle for me to express in another way. A cosmic concatenation. A heartfelt wimpering. A series of direct and indirect causes, some remote and some near at hand. A response to something read or heard or felt or smelt. Something inner needing to transmit to the outside or something outside targeting my inner core? A resonance if you will. Or maybe it is just a passing of time, in the way that I now write, in the way I would seek to solve a crossword puzzle, or read a book, or watch a sitcom or reality show. Just a passing of time.

Well, today I was looking through a box of my books and I found a notebook that I used while I was writing my dissertation; it must be from 2003. About a third of the way into the notebook, I found a page with the following:

Bourdieu intro 1-25, 32-34
37-42
43-65

P106.B6813 1991

Then, below that are written these words:

Reflected in your heart
Is a pure treasure,
a shiny oasis, glittering alive.
From your inner recesses
Glows a transformation, into art.

The bumpy experience that you face--
Undaunted by the hazy dreams of anguish;
wild themes, concentration petrified--
Vanishing, melting away,
Lost without a trace.
Wow, perhaps I should read more Bourdieu. Now, I make no claims or admissions about the quality of these words, but I don't even have any recollection of having written them. Did I write them? Being the good academic that I am, I would by convention cite the source if it indeed was a quote. It certainly isn't Bourdieu. P106.B6813 1991, by the way, is the UPenn call number for Bourdieu's, Language and Symbolic Power, but the words of my verse, at least the ones written on the page in my notebook, do not seem to reflect any notions in that book, as I understand it, consciously. What else was I then reading? What was happening to me and in the world? What was I thinking?

So, where did those words come from? A mystery.

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