Wednesday, November 12, 2008

That Girl Just Doesn't Care

I'm taking a course on rhetoric and discourse, and it's the single most absurd thing I've ever studied. I think it's utterly pointless, and a completely unnecessary model being imposed on language that just overcomplicate things.

I feel like a lot of things are like that-- we can't just let things be, we have to analyze and pick apart and try to explain them. By doing so, we're really just making relatively simple ideas incredibly complicated, when really you just need to live it and let it wash over you.

There's this wonderful Billy Collins poem that pretty much exemplifies how I feel about the universe at large:

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.


I feel like a fucking hippie, but... can't we just exist and shit? To quote the movie Independence Day, "All you need is love. John Lennon. Smart man. Shot in the back, very sad."

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