Poetry

Poetry is a special kind of language. It is closer in lineage to mantras and chants than prose. This is because of some specific things but first some clarifications.

What we understand to be verse is not always poetry. Verse is a format of diction. It is a way to get across. A poem on the other hand is way of getting across that establishes its own way. It establishes its own rhythm, its own context and has room for interpretation. People only use prose for communication because prose uses language in a reduced and functional way. What is said is followed! And that is a big loss... For a moment, assume that the potential of communication (for us to realise a kind of meaning that helps us rise above the profound numbness that we are seeped in) was cross-connection. Mis-heard production. People receiving something other than what was literally transmitted... Receiving as the transmitting persons makes the act of receiving into a dumb, machined act. One that denies that there is any creative potential in the act of receiving at all. A potential that can be exercised through interpretation. Through our attempt to separate the intents of different endeavours to communicate and trusting our exercising the ability to interpret when "we perceive" it to be advantageous to do so, we have effectively made social interaction dull and deprived it of any potential of gradually sharpening our capacity to solve the problems that surround us.

When we trust our perception, we are basically saying we are ok with our general pre-occupation with our livelihood, with upholding social conventions and with being more bothered with the stock-market index than the survival of our planet.

Poetry can free us up from being pre-occupied with mundanity to doing things of consequence. Interpretation is the most unique thing which we can do. If artificial-intelligence does anything, it teaches us how to distinguish between the ordinary kinds of interpretation that a machine can perform and the kinds it cannot. We can still do something that no machine can do and that is to misinterpret.

Misinterpret not an intent to harm us but to but an intent to bore us and drown us in mundanity, lest we do something creative!

Civilisation's design only works as intended if we do as told (do not interpret).

I have no reason to help civilisation thrive. As far as I have understood the intent of civilisation's design, it has no bright spots. If any bright spots emerge, they do because somebody chooses to interpret (all interpretations are misinterpretations for the system).

The only reason I am here today is because I chose to interpret constantly.

And so do so many others. But at the societal scale all these individual events of "attempts to interpret" are filtered out as noise. As anomalous activity. Undesired.

Poetry pursued to the full extent it allows - demands interpretation at full capacity. Else it fails spectacularly.

A good gauge of the value of the society we live in today is the scale of poetry's failure.

And we have to live with this failure. It is all that we can do.