Two new poems on dis­play from Alessio Zanelli. They pro­voke much thought (as does all good poetry), with sound and sense align­ing like the stars. The music of the spheres, etc.. Pythagoras, Kepler, Spinoza, Bach, Gorecki, Arvo Pärt … Are words on the page sim­i­lar to those stars? In that, they mean noth­ing as indi­vid­ual let­ters, but only mean some­thing when linked to other let­ters, other forms of lan­guage, other mod­els, things, images we attach to those words. The stars in the sky, of course, do not form “con­stel­la­tions” in reality. We form them. We asso­ciate them with gods and god­desses, heroes and hero­ines, sto­ries, myths and leg­ends. We do that. And notes and num­bers? We cre­ate geome­tries and sys­tems, har­monies and ratios. Our imag­i­na­tions do that. It would seem we are com­pelled to make this hap­pen, with let­ters, words, num­bers, notes, sen­tences, books and so on. The very struc­ture of our brain seems to com­pel us to group, link, asso­ciate, order, and struc­ture the dis­parate mul­ti­plic­ity sur­round­ing us. What would the world look like to us if we had a dif­fer­ent kind of brain struc­ture? What would it look like if we never felt com­pelled to group, tag this to that, order so many sep­a­rate and unique ele­ments together to form new hier­ar­chies, new asso­ci­a­tions, sur­pris­ing blends, unions, comi­ties? Could we ever make music or poetry? As both depend so much on link­ing, arrang­ing, forg­ing har­monies, find­ing com­mon­al­i­ties and con­nec­tions. And then there is this: It would seem that our nat­ural brain struc­ture does not quite go far enough, when it comes to find­ing con­nec­tions and links, asso­ci­a­tions and sim­i­lar­i­ties. There is always some­thing there that seeks divi­sion as well, that fears dif­fer­ences, that is sus­pi­cious of The Other. What would hap­pen to our world if we saw, nat­u­rally, as an every­day norm, the sim­i­lar­i­ties that exist between the most appar­ently diver­gent real­i­ties? What would hap­pen if we evolved as a species enough to see poetry and music in the every­day inter­ac­tion on dis­play all around us? The next step, the next bit of climb­ing up the lad­der, might make “think­ing poet­i­cally”, think­ing in musi­cal forms, the default for all of us. A new poetry and a new musi­cal form would then emerge to push and pull us yet another step. Closer to … ?
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