Thursday, May 13, 2010
EMpty Space by Waldman
This poem resembled to me the gods creation of the world. It also felt like she was describing a poet writing a poem, a painter painting a picture. There was a sense of freedom there, individual freedom to do as you wish. She starts the poem with puting makeup on empty space, Beautifying the empty space, putting the meanings on the empty space and filling the empty space with whatever she wants to fill it with. EMpty space could be the world in which we live in, it could also be our lives as humans, we do things that give our life a meaning, and in the poem the author puts meanings on the empty space by adding new things to it. "TUrn yourself inside out and you might disappear" regarding the empty space got me a bit confused... DOes she mean that we are empty inside or perhaps all the same and the way we stand out from one another is by all the things that make us different from the outside, makeup, different hair color...but in the insidie we all have same things in common, same emotions, sad angry happy, frustrated and that if we turn ourselves inside out we will blend right in with the empty space that we will become invisible inside that empty space. Not sure which interpretation would be the most appropriate one yet.
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Hi, I had a totally different interpretation of "empty space" than yours in my blog. I really don't think that we are all the same on the inside and only things on the outside separates us. Wouldn't that make the saying "don't judge a book by it's cover" totally wrong and pointless?
ReplyDeleteFrom my research, "empty space" or "emptiness" from Buddhism means a lack of personal identity but an interconnection with everything in the world. (other people, animals, nature, etc.) I think the meaning of turning "inside out and you might disappear" means that if you focus on "make up", which are meaningless material things such as money, fame, and status, you will lose your true self or the natural connection to the world.
but if you turn from inside out means that your insides is all exposed to the world but not your outside which is the "make up" part (material side).
ReplyDeleteI see how your interpretation is different because these are my first reactions to the poem as I have not put too much thought into it yet. But when i said we are not all the same on the inside i meant like things that we feel as humans, reactions, feelins all that, we all felt angry at one point, we all felt sad at one point. Its how we react and when we react to those things that make us stand out which comes out by our physical features, facial expressions, tears, like some might cry when angry because theyre frustrated for not being able to express the anger, some might laugh because theyre angry, thats also how we could be seperated, but inside our souls we all felt the same things only to be expressed differently. Not sure if I am right here lets see what the professor says
I was afraid you'd ask me... Well, this is a really interesting discussion--great observations--and you may not be that far apart in your interpretations. We can probably relate to/empathize with the urges, desires, and fears of the speaker in ccnfronting this "empty space," and so in that sense she appeals to a common humanity; Henry is also right that the poem is philosophically grounded in Buddhism, and the notion that emptiness is all. In many shools of Buddhism the "self," as personal, individual, identity, as well material phenomena (natural and otherwise), is illusory, and so everything is "makup" on empty space, or void, in this way; of course believing this can be especially frighetning for a Western consciousness based in individualism and materialism. It does, also, allow for a great amount of freedom, in that, if we are able to let "Things" go (this includes ideas, beliefs, "Truths" with a big "T"--ideologial frameworks--as well as material things), then we are not possessed by our possessions, so to speak. So all (everything we may think of as constituting a stable sense of self in an extant world) is nothing, in this sense, and nothing is everything--the greater sense of being; "impermanence" is a key term. the other leg of this concept is that, since there is no self-coherent identity, everything may interconnect, interpenetrate, with everything else, in an imaginative sense (and certainly quantum physics has shown that this is true at a subatomic, physial level, as well). This is very muh the conceptual atmosphere of Snyder"s poetry, as well.
ReplyDeleteNote to how the speaker works through aspects of her personal identity, as a woman, to get through this/re-contextualize/foreground this this within a oonsiousness of void/emptiness. Also note how remaining imaginatively/meditatively within the aura of the void which allows all things to intepenetrate and at the same time dissolves any sense of permanence takes a great deal of effort, concentration and practice--thus the repetitive insistence/persistance of the poem and the key line "Someone was always intruding to make you forget empty space"
I was thinking almost everything everyone had mentioned here, and I am also starting to imagine this is how she views on writing poems, she starts out with "nothing" but technically there is something [an empty piece of paper] then she makes up her own world, she makes up her own stories and just creates with her writing.
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