It rains. Il pleut. Está lloviendo. Piove.
It rains. It rains. It rains. It rains.
Who rains?
My mind was blown today, of all days, because of ENLT 2523: Lyric Poetry. It's a little bit weird, because we didn't talk about anything that we hadn't talked about before, but all of a sudden today it hit me extra mind-blowingly and then there I was, dumbstruck, gasping for my metaphorical breath, feeling (relatively to other brains,) stupid and a little (relatively to myself of just a few moments before that moment,) smart at the same time. I know. What a paradox. Alas and alack, such is my life as an English major (eep).
Despite the fact that Wednesdays are my infamously worst days (infamously known to...two whole people, me and my last year roommate), also known as "Wilde Wednesdays," combined with 2.4 hours of sleep on Tuesday night, today (Wednesday, 11.09.11, not 11.10.11 as the time stamp will show when I Publish this post) was quite wonderful. I shall summarize it below, but in order to not get completely lost in that, let me finish the whole rainy business first.
So it rains, right? Well sometimes, anyways, and I like when it does, but who the heck is doing all this raining? Who makes it rain? What makes it rain? When makes it rain Where rain How??
Who knows. But the thing is, no one cares. And this is because
the grammar (third person present) gives agency to...an unknown entity. Is this being a benevolent or dastardly being? Will he she or it continue to make it rain or withdraw in cruel drought? Does she he or it care that these watery drops fall on people's heads on their worst days, their best days? Do it he she they have pets or hobbies or achy backs? Will he they it shes ever find love, or write poetry, or survive these next twelve days or Do Great Things? The answer is unknown, because the agent is so utterly unknown. We do not know his (her its their) name or face. We have not met any members of his family, and we do not know his favorite color. A magnificently, mysteriously, movingly monumentalmystery.
It's almost as if we're attributing our own agency to nature. Like oh there simply must be a being out there, brewing and felling this rain, sprinkling it or bucketing it, with concrete hands of five fingers each, connected to wrists, elbows, practical hinges. Something out there, living, probably breathing, separate from the rain, that's making this magical thing happen.
This is called the pathetic fallacy.
Dahh. Even its name is so bleak, you know? It's pathetic (though it probably comes from pathos, feeling). It's a fallacy. But then yeah, even the "pathos" view of it, if anything, makes the "fallacy" even more supremely sad, because you have put your feelings, your heart into this thing, and still, it has failed. Pathetic Fallacy. It is supremely sad that it's defined this way - the idea that to invoke another being out there in nature is a FALLACY. - You are alone. - And what's more, you are self-centered for even thinking these things, that nature is talking to you, patting your wee head, and eye-caressing you and sending you signs via owls and silences. And that is that! Like zip, nada, nope, case closed, blip blop blooop, cause that is the Definition and that is what all the smart people have decided and studied and hmm-ed and hmmmm-ed over and said. wrote.
And who am I to rub my sleepy eyes and write this feeble, run-on sentenceful blogpost about this Huge, Established thing that Huge and Established People have Hm-ed and Haw-ed over? Hmmm??
I am she. I am the same, identical woman. I am a he she it me they we they she, a she with an undeniable agency. I have a cat named Binky though I am infinitely more of a dog person. I am scared of many things, among which are bunny suits. Spores. (s h u d d e r.) I have two eyes and one mouth and I speak and write too many words and a lot of times I am rather, very, quite, seriously self-conscious of them. I spill over like water and feel bad about not having enough rigid structure to help protect you from the barrage of me. I can tell you about my favorite food and color, and I would like to know what-your-top-three-happiest-things-in-life-are-right-now-please-o-prease. And sometimes I deteriorate in grammar. &always I am hurtling toward the end of this, my third semester of College and only really every stopping to breathe about every THursday or so. Ah Thursday.
But here I am - at least here I am, a being enough to, "Ah Thursday." To parallel stories of the rain and living out poetry underneath umbrellas and trying hard to find some sort of a perfect balance. An imperfect agent, who realizes the impossibility of the perfect and embraces the imperfect by virtue of its reality and stark, brave face. An agent who
reigns.
She he it reigns. I reigns rain, mainly in the plain Spain! Haha :)
Perfectly, completely, incompletely happy for this tiny domain in which I reside and the emotions and currents that run through it/stay in it and reveling in eye caresses and brainwave synchronizations and things that come in 38s and being concrete and true.
And here is the poem that inspired all this mindexplosion:
The Most of It — by Robert Frost
He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree–hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder–broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter–love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush—and that was all.
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