Provoking a response May 2013
My West Coast cyber nanny got back to me after reading my
posts and her posts, and concluded her poems are not a response to mine.
For the most part I believe my cyber nanny is right. Most of
the details of most of the poems she’s posted since late last year do not fit
me at all.
But there are rare exceptions which I have detailed in this
journal, and raised questions about differing interpretations from those I
wrote first, such as some of the poems that came after her affair with the
married man ended.
I’m still reexamining some of her poems with the eye of
finding perhaps a broader interpretation of their meaning.
I, of course, still live with the somewhat naïve fantasy
that she is posting poems she knows I will read, as if conveying a vision of
her inner life so I might come to understand her better.
Down deep, I know better. While she may be aware of my
interest in her poetry, her motivation has nothing to do with me or my
understanding, but the desperate need – as she put in it in her scribe poem –
to try and document the absurdity that is her life.
I am even less inclined to believe that she posts things
(some of which seem to point at me) as a means to provoke me into some foolish
response (as what happened with her birthday last summer) in order to prove
some point about me to the people around her.
Yet sometimes I feel she intentionally creates this duality,
the possibility of multiple interpretations, not merely for artistic merit, but
for deniability.
Consciously or not, her poems evoke images and feelings that
may go beyond the circumstances she is describing, and may well be misread or
perhaps even intentionally misdirected for reasons of her own.
So, what may seem like a response, may be merely something
drawn out of our collective unconscious from which we all draw.
As much as she claims to not need love (she has her cats),
she tends to create heroes out of those she is attracted to, building them up
in her mind, and then growing disappointed when they fail to live up to her myth
making – and for a brief moment in time, when we are all on the upswing, there
is a commonality among us that could easily be mistaken, and an equal
commonality in how we fail to achieve the heroic status she envisioned for us.
So, a poem about any part of this up or down swing might seem relevant to us
all, when she meant is in a most particular way about a most particular person.
We simply read into the poems what we most want to see.
I fervently want there to remain open a channel of
communication, good or bad, angry or not, I therefore see her poems in that
light – if not a response to what I post, then a kind of secret society of
scribes who share their inner most feelings with each other through poetry.
In fact, most likely, she would be posting these poems in
precisely the same way, if I did not exist.
I’m not the only one who appears to think this way. I recall
a year ago when she talked about how her Brooklyn stalker had misinterpreted one
of her poems, making it clear she is perfectly aware of her audience, even if
they are no longer on speaking terms.
She knows we read her poems, and therefore like the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle, her knowing we are reading the poems subtly changes
them, and perhaps consciously or unconsciously alters the content, responding
without meaning to, which I believe she has done a number of times, despite
what my cyber nanny says.
It is quite possible that some poems are aimed at me such as
the scribe poem, while most or not, and some are response to something I’ve
posted, even if unconsciously so.
This is also true about the poems I post, those in particular
that I have snuck passed my cyber nanny with the deliberate intention of provoking
a response. But she is so clever that when and if she responds, I can’t always
be sure she is.
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