07 February 2014

Room

Life Edited
I've been thinking of space.

Rooms within rooms.

The idea of a room. What it is.

Beyond four walls.

I've been writing on it. Thinking through how I deal with space.

From the base idea of a room not existing before it is seen. A sort of classic koan-like thought experiment. From that idea up to the idea of entering a painting and leaving behind the 'real' world.

The mutability of space.

Floor plans.

Think about entering a room. A car. A forest. For the first time. And the wonder of that moment.

It's like looking at a word for the first time.

lighght

That is a poem by Aram Saroyan. The question is inevitable. Why?

Because when you look at it you begin to question the nature of light. The nature of language. The nature of everything.

How many gh's could you stuff in there? Infinite? Because the 'gh' is silent you can slide over them. They approach the infinity of light. The speed of it. The beauty.

Ian Daly talks it out at the Poetry Foundation:

"(The poem) is something you see rather than read. Look at “lighght” as a poem and you might not get it. Look at it as a kind of photograph, and you’ll be closer."

Saroyan himself says: “The difference between “lighght” and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn’t have a reading process...Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once. It’s instant.”

I think of a poem as a room. A space you must enter. Thinking about spaces we see and deal with on a daily basis allows us to reconnect to the magic of life. Beyond the space we have created for ourselves.