notes from non-meaning

I am trying to write poetry again now that I have almost totally exhausted any sense that I am capable of loving any other kind of writing at least for now. The thing about poetry is that it is an unforgiving form. Nothing is taken for granted. Everything means something. But that meaning is not the kind of meaning hoped for in the essay. And it seems that is what is being lost right now across all areas of our thinking. Social media discourse has exhausted meaning and people have nowhere to turn for knowing something else, they crowd our digital universe with exasperated cries of nothingness masquerading as insight and none of it means what they think it means but even this is not what I mean.

What I mean is that there’s a non-meaning to meaning. Non-meaning is the kind of meaning that lives in the poetic register. This non-meaning is not sure. It is the hesitance I wrote of in Of Black Study. You could live there, create from there, imagine from there. If you would just let go of your need to capture. I guess unforgiving may not be the word. I am looking for a word that tries to lessen the blow of wanting each letter of every word to explode and re-stage whatever this form we are stuck with is. I want to forgive the words for not knowing that they don’t know. Maybe then I could love them again.

Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Thelonius Searching Those Familiar Keys (from the Whales Fucking series), circa 1980s, mixed media on canvas, 81 inches × 10 feet 18 inches.