On Avoidance: To Move Towards Novelty An Anthology of Poems

*This brief collection of Poems was written in an effort toward completion of the Certificate in Process thought and philosophy through the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, CA.

On Avoidance: To Move Towards Novelty - An Anthology of Poems

Throughout this course, a lot of new ideas came to the forefront of my thought. Some were impactful from the start, others have begun to show their importance for application in my life. One set of ideas that was resonant in the immediate was the conversation around the “fallacies to avoid” from a process lens. Those three are the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, the fallacy of perfect dictionary, and the fallacy of simple location. Of all three, misplaced concretness took the longest to grasp, but the value of the other two allowed me to orient myself in such a way to reflect on all three together, within my daily experience. To reflect on these fallacies, and to creatively offer my expression of them, I’ve opted to do something I never have done before. A research paper made the most sense to me. I’ve always been oriented in that direction of processing information. Yet, as Whitehead says in Science and the Modern World, poetry and poets provide “more concrete intuitions of the universe” (SMW 126). So in that vein of thought, I challenged myself to step into a new experience in my process of becoming. Below is a collection of three poems, one for each fallacy. My reflections on their style and the reasoning for their structure can be found just below this introductory paragraph. I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in this grand adventure of ideas. 

Misplaced Concreteness

In the poem of reflection on misplaced concreteness, the shape and style of the poem lends to the fallacy itself. The modern reader expects to read top to bottom. Read in the “normal” direction, the poem attempts to project a picture of understanding from limited experience with another. Assumptions are made about an individual because of simple conversations. This is often the way many relate to others. It takes one comment, one interaction, one experience that we allow to tint the entirety of continued existence. We allow the individual to become a stagnant being, rather than an actual entity in a process of becoming. Decisions are made based of single experiences. 

Then, when read from bottom to top, a new idea, a new experience begins to take shape. When we allow ourselves to be surprised by the very structure of things, we create room for freedom of expression, novelty, harmony, and beauty - even in places where we would have, with prior certainty, said there is no way. The reverse of this poem offers an idea of growing experience and shrinking expectations.  

This writing was extremely difficult. Much like breaking loose of this fallacy, the expectations we place on experience can become the only thing we see/feel. That experience is valid, yes - but we must work to not make it our whole understanding. While parts of it feel clunky to me, the expression I was aiming to convey feels relevant and novel. 

Perfect Dictionary:

Styled like a dictionary entry, this poem seeks to use our limited words available to express the incapturable fullness of an experience. Like a dictionary entry, the poems are concise and clean, however, even a dictionary does not allow one to experience the fullness of something. You can read and know the definition of anything. The definition of an apple, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is “the round fruit of a tree of the rose family, which typically has thin red or green skin and crisp flesh. Many varieties have been developed as dessert or cooking fruit or for making cider.” And while this can give you an idea, you can not capture the experience of eating an apple in words. Not to mention every apple-eating experience will be different. Are you starving? Are you in the mood for an apple? Did you bite into one expecting it to be crisp and crunchy and it was spoiled and mushy? This is true of everything we seek to describe. Even those of us who have been gifted in storytelling and communication can not fully bring people into the space where they have experienced something for themselves.  The reliance on a dictionary or definition alone can limit that which is truly sacred, the lived participated experience. 

Simple Location: 

A lived experience of many I know is one that limits the experience to places spectacular and far away. Oftentimes, I see this play out in the formation of my Youth Group students in their “belief” that the closest they ever feel to the divine is when they take a week each summer to go to a camp. The camp high experience is limited to the confines of the camp borders, it quickly dissipates when they have left the mountain. Their experience is limited by location, or at least they believe it to be true.

It is not true. In this poem concerning the fallacy of simple location, the structure is constructed of GPS locations of important and significant places from my own experience. Each GPS coordinate is shaped to look like continents with a footnote number. The actual poetic stanza is found in the footnotes, a nod to trusting that truth and beauty from an experience can be found beyond the expected location. The poems root their physical location in the following places: Yosemite National Park, Dayton, Ohio; Santa Monica, California; Ishinomaki, Japan; and  Heidelberg, Germany. These are places that are physical locations I have spent significant time in, but the lessons through experience that I have taken away have carried beyond their physical location. These places remind me to avoid the fallacy of simple location - I see within these places an experience that transcends the local. These different places have instilled in me a sense of awe, a sense of belonging, lessons on community and solitude, friendship, and more. In the footnotes of the page, the experience is expressed. In the footnotes of life, I have found that we sometimes have the most profound spaces of becoming. 

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Misplaced Concreteness: A poem of expectations

We’ve met

Once. 

All I think I know

Forget

That, you are

Individually

Is too much

To understand. 

Passions

Politics

Personality

Is more than 

Enough

To know you.

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Perfect Dictionary: A poem of experience

experience

1 of 2

noun

Ex·​pe·​ri·​ence |  ik-ˈspir-ē-ən(t)s 

Synonyms of experience: camping, coffee, meals, travel, sleeping-in, love, life, etc. 

1

a: disclaimer: the experience of experience cannot be put fully into words - that is what brings awe, magic, wonder, and a desire to continue on the journey of becoming. Find words and be willing to let them go. 

b: Love - shared between another is not something I need you to understand from my experience, rather, I invite you to find the place, the person, the experience that can usher you in - welcome to that party. 

2

a: to learn more about yourself and others, about the world and the cosmos. Your experience opens you up to a new realm of participation and cooperation with all things. 

B: the experience of time and its lengthening draws us into a new reality. 

3: the sunlight hits different. No not just when we make the transition from winter to spring. I mean every time. The beach I sit on is not the same as last time, I am not the same as last time. The tree that filters the light through is not the same as last time, I am not the same as last time. I am not the same as last time. Nor you. Nor any of this. Not even the sunlight. 

4

a: there are events that swirl around our lives, conscious and not. 

b: there are events that swirl around our communities, conscious or not. They all shape. They all change. They all can be expressed, yet not fully known. 

2 of 2

verb

experienced; experiencing

transitive verb

1: we moved every two or three years. Community was hard. Friendship was hard. But I learned. I became the one to go out of the way, to meet new people who were not sure who i was or where I came from.

2: life lived lets us learn to live life. When we only wait, for what’s next, for what’s better, for what is bigger - we miss out and we miss us. Life lived lets us learn to live life.

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Simple Location: A Poem of Geography

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1. Granite slabs that have been here long before I have and will be here long after I am. What would it be like to be the first to see these? What would it feel like to see a first glimpse at “my” world, unmarred by violence, hate, colonialism, prejudice. What if these granite slabs could tell us who had been here, who had seen them? Do I know these that come before? Of course. I am but a small moment of experience in the abundance of life that has existed before. I know those who have seen these slabs. The capitan and the three sisters, half dome, I know them because they are me, and I them. I know because of the warm feeling of awe that sinks deep into my bones. I know because of the emotion. I know because I can close my eyes, and I am still there.

2.  To be born to a place you do not want to claim. Oh No, Ohio…born to the military, born to the cold, born to the midwest cultural norm. You can not separate that which has been a part of your story. You can not rewrite that which has played out. You can move within the present, new and oriented different. You are who you are, in part, because you come from a place that is your own. You are becoming who you are because of where you are (be)coming from.

3.  Red brick walls stack higher than the rent goes up…but even in Santa Monica, this small oasis of nature and neighbor is ours. No we don’t own, but that’s true of everything, isn’t it? We are renters of this space we call earth. We are neighbors of these people who we share walls with, yet whose stories we still do not know. We eat, sleep, live, move in this place - for now. But now is enough to see those around us as new. Now is enough for the present moment to be the thing that will define our future. To know now would allow us to know them, the neighbor with the clarinet.The neighbor with two cats. The neighbor who smiles and the neighbor who frowns. Is that us? Help us to know in the now. Oh Santa Monica, pray for us.

4.  おはよう! Good morning…to the land where the sun rises earlier than I can ever expect to be up. おはよう! Good morning…the only phrase I definitely had memorized after a year. おはよう! Good morning….the beginning of a new adventure. The adventure of a new country. The adventure of a new culture. The adventure of a new language. The adventure of a new stage in our relationship, no longer just dating. Engaged. Engaged in each other’s lives. Engaged in a world we do not know. Engaged in our experience of a culture not our own. Engaged to the moment we are becoming new.

5. They tell you that going to study abroad is an extroverts dream…55 people, one house, what could go wrong in the lives of those 55 19 year olds…come to find out it was everything. We were selfish we were shallow, one friend called me an asshole. Me? We drank bier together, we explored the schlöss together, we traveled through the hauptbahnhof. Me? An asshole? I learned that my friendships are as healthy as I am. I learned that woods behind our house, filled with 55 of us, would feel fuller than I could imagine. I learned the difference between being lonely and solitude. I learned that I can in fact be an asshole. And I can in fact be a better friend. And that I am becoming…