.
![[tunnel.JPG]](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_qMGAmfRtEt4/R7mYC0NYN8I/AAAAAAAAAOg/XYB5Ns1M9wE/s1600/tunnel.JPG)
Does any of the meaning you think at times you see
Disappearing ahead of you just out of your reach at the tunnel's end
Actually materialize once you’re gone (no longer looking)
And was it ever here...? After the end of all the stories you're left with
What?
When I was a kid I thought I was the only one on the great set of Life who hadn't read the Script. What reassurance was it to grow up & realize there was no Script?
ReplyDeleteYeah. The womb--the source of human life--is at the end of the vagina. Water--a symbol of life--is at the end of the tunnel in the photo. And meaning--the enlightenment at the end of the tunnel--is a source of life too, for to live without a sense of meaning is to be undead. But is your life really meaningful, or does your imagination suffuse it with meaning? Does the world really need you? Does your work really help anyone? And if the meaning of your life dissipates under scrutiny, should you turn away from it? Stop looking at it so that it can rematerialize?
ReplyDeleteA very good friend of mine once told me: the mountains are beautiful and breathtaking if there is someone there to see them. But they continue to be beautiful even when there is no one around. It is their essence. I think our own essence and what we make with it is for our own fulfillment and no one else's. If we can leave our track, great!
ReplyDeleteNobody knows what comes afterwards but nobody has come back to complain either...
I remember what was on my mind when I took the picture. I guess the image of the tunnel inevitably makes us think of the passage.
Thank you, Tom, for letting me take part in this very deep post.
By the way, this tunnel is in fact a double-deck pier in Villa La Angostura, Neuquén, 110km from home, and that is famous Lake Nahuel Huapi.
Tom, the final line, "What" sent me (online of course) to the etymologies and, back in the Anglo-Saxon daze, as you I'm sure know, "what" associates with "who." And so I hear that echoing through the poem, the meaning "ahead" already/always? generated from the end of the tunnel--in the who. And "what" makes one "who" who is. (Owl sounds now.) Thanks for this...
ReplyDeleteIt is a lovely poem that talk a little bit about meaning, and also a spectacular picture, amazing perspective you managed to give to it. I am not going to comment about the poem again here, cause is long and it is enriched with other thoghts from other bloggers in my post.
ReplyDeletehttp://singyourownlullaby.blogspot.com/2009/07/meaning-theories.html
Bye Tom and Lucy
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeletei walk
ReplyDeleteand feel
what matters
is
walking
on a path
along a road
through a text
in
a
poem
.
.
.
is there really an end
when i carry my path
with
me?
when a story
gives birth to me
and me
to another story?
that light is not at the end
of
a
tunnle...
it is
at
the
beginning
of
my life
when
it starts
in each moment
anew...
after the end of all the stories
i'm left with
me
encompassing another part of the
cosmos...
ooops!
ReplyDeletetunnel... sorry!
and thanks a lot for putting my link on your blog... it is an honor for the crow... honestly!
love and peace to you
But George,
ReplyDeleteWhat if beyond the reassurance phase there lies the phase of being reduced to speechless terrified trembling gelatin in a box? (It's the box part I most dread.)
David,
"Does the world really need you? Does your work really help anyone? And if the meaning of your life dissipates under scrutiny, should you turn away from it? Stop looking at it so that it can rematerialize?" It feels very much as though these are some of the questions that are being shadowboxed with here.
Owl, I mean Dale,
May we sum this is up by saying it's a hoot?
Mariana, you're right, in a way this post and your current one are curiously intertwined.
Here's an express link to
Mariana's post on Meaning Theories
human being,
"what matters
is
walking
on a path
along a road
through a text
in
a
poem..."
This is very lovely, as a statement of value or values, and also as a map of how to read.
Lucy,
"Nobody knows what comes afterwards but nobody has come back to complain either.." (It would be just like me to be the first.)
"I remember what was on my mind when I took the picture. I guess the image of the tunnel inevitably makes us think of the passage."
I suppose everyone has their own reasons for being drawn to (or for that matter put off by) a particular image.
The convergence of space in a dark narrowing passage the other end of which opens out into light... for some the instinctive reaction to such an image may be to think of the process of coming into life, for others, the process of leaving it. The reaction may depend on age, state of mind, or the accidents of private perception.
I found this image very powerful. It took me some time to understand that it represented for me an alternative and perhaps more "truthful" (because less conventionally "pretty") way of imaging that movement toward departure or vanishment which had prompted me to put up an earlier post:
Heaven Up Here
It also made me think of ways of trying to find that target and "home" on it with such perfect accuracy that whether a departure or an arrival, one's action would be true, clean, and exactly on the mark. Almost never possible for a human action to be that immaculate. But it's better never to say never.
Finding the Light at the End of the Tunnel (The Immaculate Strike)
I guess you have to tell yourself MORE stories, as Douglas Woolf sd in conversation with Sandra Braman:
ReplyDelete"When it finally all comes apart, I'll have to start over."
"How will you do that?"
"I'll have to start telling myself stories... And because I'll be telling them to myself, they'll have to be at least partly true."
Ryan,
ReplyDeleteGreat to hear from you, my friend.
Doug could spin a yarn. But it's hard to tell who's telling the stories to whom anymore. The vagabond who's standing at the door is standing in the clothing I once wore. My specs are fogged. Is this the Good Will guy, or
a divine messenger?
I've been learning that the deep cold waters of the lake in Lucy's photo are said in aboriginal legend to be the home of a gigantic creature called Nahuelito, also a leathery-skinned beast called El Cuero. This makes me wonder whether the Tunnel might not be the gate to another world at the bottom of the world?
ReplyDeleteAny world is possible in the imagination of men.
ReplyDeleteLucy,
ReplyDeleteEn que mundo se ha visto eso? Solamente aquí...