I performed an interview today, I had a class on poetry, and I've done many other things and thought many thoughts today besides, but they all somehow keep pointing a single question, "How do we come to know a person?"
Asking a person questions about themselves is one way, in this way we come to understand what a person thinks of him/her-self; in this way we come to know who a person believes him/her-self to be. I'm reminded of the adage, "Beware the actions and not only the words of a man, for deeds will betray a lie." I don't think we all lie about ourselves, but I think self-description is inaccurate, false. We learn best from self-description what a person wishes to be, to think, to do; but this doesn’t tell us how true these things are.
There was a noblewoman during the Renaissance, whose name escapes me now, who liked to throw gold coins to the starving peasants in the city. She would watch them scamper and fight for the gold; the strongest eventually got the gold by injuring the weaker. When asked why she threw the gold, she answered that she liked to be charitable and give help to the less fortunate.
This shows how self-image can be wrong, though I think this is an extreme example of how wrong self-image can be.
On the other hand, ready poetry, or any writing from a person, tells us much about the person. The more read, the more the reader knows about the writer, but caution is needed, because to only read part of what the writer has written gives a false impression. The meaning from half a sentence is incomplete, the other half of the sentence can change the meaning entirely. The same is true of half a paragraph, a chapter, a book. The book of a person’s life finishes only at death, but themes and ideas are learned and reoccur.
I’m always suspicious of self-exposition too. I wrote recently about my feelings, but instead of simply writing about them and expressing them, I analyzed them, writing about why I did things, why I felt a certain way. Surely a little is ok to clarify and express exactly what was happening, but writing too much about why something happened, or why a person feels a certain way about a certain thing always makes me ask the question, “Who are you (the writer) trying to convince? Me (the reader), or yourself?” Perhaps when we explain too much we lose track of what is really happening; looking too closely at the beauty of the cup makes one forget the purpose of the cup is to hold a drink, looking too closely at the ornate handle may makes one argue the handle is there to make the cup complete, to look better, instead of realizing the handle is there to help lift the cup. Analyzing emotions has the same pitfalls; we convince ourselves the emotion is there for one reason, when it is actually there for another. Maybe this doesn’t make sense, though, and my rambling and incoherence are showing.
The important thing is the image I have of learning about someone. I imagine a person walking; this is the person that other people see. A person carries a haversack; the haversack holds our world, our universe. It contains everything the person knows, it shows the universe and the reality this person has constructed since birth, this person’s life is held in this haversack, shaped by the individual’s perspective, carried with forever. We spend time with a person, we ask them questions, and when they truly answer, they take the haversack off of the shoulder, open it, rummage around in it a bit until they find the answer, and then show the answer to us. What is most intriguing about a person are the glimpses we get inside this sack as the person opens it. All of the other things inside, bundled together like an art expose’, but hidden. If we like what we see we ask more questions, always trying to get a better look in the bag; if we’re lucky we will eventually be allowed to see most of the bag, we will be allowed to look inside, but if we’re very, very lucky, when we look in the bag the things we see will be more wonderful than what we imagined.
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