On Szymborska

"In addition, this month I read Wislawa Szymborska’s “view with a grain of sand”. I did not plan it, but she paired very well with Kundera. Her poetry revolves around existential themes, and touches on both laughter and forgetfulness (though especially and more frequently forgetfulness). “Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words, then labor heavily so that they may seem light,” is one of Szymborska’s quotes that embodies the debate between heaviness and lightness that both writers participate in.

One of my favorite poems was “Notes from a Non-existent Himalayan Expedition”. I copied it onto my dry erase board, and now have it mostly memorized. I hope to have the rest memorized soon. I especially liked how she captured some of the simple things that make humanity what it is: Wednesday, bread, alphabets, two times two is four, roses are red…, Shakespeare, Solitaire, and violin. She nailed it, in my opinion: time, food/cooking, words/letters, math, poetry, drama, games, and music. Not to mention she also zeroes in on “crime is not all we’re up to down there”. And most importantly, “we’ve inherited hope- the gift of forgetting. You’ll see how we give birth among the ruins.”

My other favorite poem in this book is, “No Title Required”. I love how she takes a simple scene with nothing dramatic about it, and shows how fantastic it is by showing all the coincidences that it took for her to end up on that hill that day. She sums it up beautifully in her last line “when I see such things, I’m no longer sure that what’s important is more important than what’s not.”

Abandoned Air Series Reunited With Lover

So. A lot of the energy that would have gone into my blog this past year went into letters to my adviser instead. In fact, when I would post here I often quoted huge chunks of my posts in my letters. I just didn't have the energy or the patience to say many of the same things twice, and to different audiences. However, now I've been thinking that mayhap some of you may enjoy reading some excerpts from letters. And I think I would definitely benefit by revisiting them. This might take several posts. Read them at your own pace, of course, and you may want to skip them entirely. So here goes...

"Wow! I can’t believe it is May already. I am getting married on the 31st of the month, so of course I have been doing much planning very excitedly. I’ve been engaged for over a year, so I kind of settled down into that status. This is big. As Father Cathy told us, “forever is a long time”. Then she burst out laughing.

This month, as predicted, I read “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”. In this book Kundera, yet again, touched on a Nietzchean theme that I am quite fascinated with. The idea of how human it is to forget, and how necessary. Nietzsche claims that this is what separates us from the animals, that they forget things instantly having no memory ability. He connects this with the fact that animals have no organized language. Kundera does not seem to imply that forgetfulness makes humans happier, but that it is a two edge sword that can either give us some relief or make us more miserable dependent on the circumstances. Kundera is, at least in these two books, extremely good at showing the sweet-bitterness of life. This is something I look for in art.

Another point that was well made was the utter ridiculousness of some of humanity’s highest held acts. Poetry and sex are such that we must approach them both with pride and treat them as sacred or they become laughable. This is mixed in with debates about whether or not wearing clothes makes us more natural, or takes away some of our uniqueness and sexiness.

I felt that Kundera did an adequate job of exposing all the different types of situations laughter might be had in, and how in some cases it might be absurd or even eerie though it is so much a part of our every day lives. In addition one of my favorite points that he made was the difference between “angelic laughter” and “demonic laughter”. “Angelic Laughter” as I understand it is laughter that is inspired by how complete and orderly everything is… how much it all makes sense. “Demonic Laughter” on the other hand is laughter inspired by something that doesn’t go as planned, or is inspired by chaos or misery. This way of looking at laughter was not only a new perspective for me, but it also made significant sense.

Once a fellow student in my “Critical Theory” course at Cornell College, did his lecture on laughter. One of the primary theories he focused on was the idea that laughter happens when the brain trips on a piece of information that it wasn’t expecting. That is the theory I have adopted ever since, and I think this new theory integrates with it perfectly."