This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders
This is one of those quantum mechanical poems that would never stand a chance in the collection of a ‘real’ poetry enthusiast. No, that poetry lover is someone who seeks that one fulfilling moment every time, the moment when everything clicks, the ‘aha’ feeling that assures him he understands—and probably no one else does. He doesn’t want OR/AND, no wavering between possibilities, no flowers that won’t be caught. What he wants is that one line that flatters him like a dog chewing contentedly on an old bone. That I was initiated into quantum mechanics early on thanks to DOE MAAR is completely irrelevant to this poetry enthusiast. For him, true poetry is a form of validation, a principle he can grasp, not the endless game of maybe and maybe not, of OR/AND.
Ah, the poetry connoisseurs. A bunch of guys with concrete heads, stuck in their ideas, immovable like a statue in the rain, stiff and cold, as if the beauty of words can only be shaped by them. Why? Because the poetry lover no longer seeks the new, the unexpected, the twist that shatters reality and forces you to see anew. No, he wants his safe little world, his fulfilling moment, that one line he can cling to as if it’s his last lifeline, a castaway clinging to a piece of wreckage, floating in an ocean of uncertainties.
But is that not already the opening line? There stood a little man under the tree on a searingly pink day.
Exactly! That little man standing under the tree on a searingly pink day—that’s the image where it all begins. That’s the poetry enthusiast, isn’t it? There he stands, in his fixed stance, under the tree of old canonical texts, in the soft, safe light of his fulfilled expectations. The light is pink because that’s the color of nostalgia, of that one line he relives over and over again. But what he doesn’t see is that tree has long taken root in concrete. That little man—he doesn’t stand, he stood. He has become past tense, his creativity ossified, his openness to the new bricked up.
But poetry is not a puzzle you solve. It is not clay you must shape according to your own logic. It is not concrete, like their heads; no, it is something fluid, something that slips through your fingers, and that is precisely what frightens them. Because poetry, real poetry, always escapes. They can’t catch it, can’t pin it down, and that makes them uneasy. So, they immerse themselves in the classics, in the safe, familiar rhythms, where everything is presented in a neat little bow.
And that bow—oh yes, that bow! Because that’s what it all comes down to in the end, isn’t it? The perfect bow, neatly tied around the package of their favorite poem. Everything in its place, no loose ends, no OR/ANDs to disturb the picture. The words shine like new, arranged by centuries of carefully measured rules, like pistachio nuts in a tidy row. Because that’s what they want, those poetry lovers with their concrete heads: everything organized, everything perfectly wrapped.
But what they fail to understand—what they will never understand—is that poetry doesn’t fit in such a ridiculously tight bow. Poetry wriggles free, like a pistachio nut that unexpectedly doesn’t break where you expect it to. A nut that, when you finally crack it open, sometimes surprises you with bitterness, or with an unexpectedly soft sweetness.
And so, I come to FUCKSIA. Why FUCKSIA? Because that’s the color of the untamed, the shrill, the anything-but-neatly-tied bow. Pink, but not the soft nostalgic pink in which the poetry lover wraps himself; no, bright, wild, fuchsia. A color that flies off the handle, that doesn’t fit neatly in a row.
The moment of the little man is imminent. No, not just any moment, not a small, unnoticed instant that passes without meaning. This is a moment like no other in the history of moments. The sky tears open, not by a lightning bolt, but by a rip of pure FUCKSIA, like a celestial firework short-circuiting the world. The little man, that very little man under the tree, suddenly moves, his concrete head begins to crack—the fissures are visible, like a spider web illuminated by the first morning dew. But here, now, the concrete is no longer a silent witness. It breaks. It collapses.
The moment of the little man is not present, it is a paradoxical non-moment. It has both happened and not happened. And yet he still stands there, or maybe he never stood there. Because now, now he is everywhere. He has become the poetry he so feared, the fluid, elusive stream slipping through his fingers. And there, in the midst of the OR/AND, in the spiral of pistachio nuts and fuchsia light, he suddenly realizes that he not only understands the line. He is the line. He is the moment. And the rest? The rest understands nothing at all.
Absolutely nothing!!!!
Martinus 08-10-2024
(1) That dopamine click-moment is the fuel of the psyborg. It’s that sudden flash of clarity, that quick shot of satisfaction, they live for. Always hunting for that one fleeting feeling of understanding, a semblance of control in a chaos of words. That’s why you so often see outdated models wandering in poetry, search engines in human form, their algorithms set on finding that one piece of recognition, that aha-erlebnis that assures them they have ‘grasped’ something. But they are not explorers of the mind, not scouts of the depths of language. No, they are miners. They dig, but not to find new treasures—they are looking for the same old lump of validation, which they always hope to unearth from the rock of the uncomprehended word.