on meaning making a life
on Milton’s poetry, Popova writes: “… the mind makes meaning, and meaning - which is different from information, different even from knowledge - is uncomputable.” or, if you don’t trust the poetry that proceeds science; in the research paper Kate sends me, Chiriatti et al. (2024) propose that “[AI’s] ability to generate meaningful outputs relies entirely on human… meaning-making processes.”
this caption is an impossible capture of the curriculum I want to create, to earnestly propose that the purpose of education should be nurturing these meaning-making processes, to put the philosophy from psychology and poetry into practice.
I can’t take a step into our mind garden without being utterly captured by their branches, entangled, enraptured. each sentence begins in the middle of a poem, every prescient poet lives on in an epigraph to a book I’m reading with Indranil, the quote you flip open to in the gallery becomes the preface to my paper and this post. I leap from line to line like a constellator charting new patterns in the inky blue sky, stealing stars from lessons on loss for love letters and learning outcomes alike, the beauty not in the birth of new stars but in the tracing of their patterns. the reflection of their light, Hafiz, the poet.
“Penny For A Poem,” reads the cardboard sign between Léa and I as we sit on a bench in Tompkins Square Park for Enzo’s scavenger dare hunt. we’re surrounded by fireflies like embers dancing on the wind. for his birthday, I paint Enzo as a marble bust of a Greek god to hang in his future commune, though we all always said Icarus would be more accurate, and not only because he loves an open flame.
apparently the firefly bloom in New York this year has something to do with the humidity. the air is almost suffocating with memory when I take off for Mumbai, though on the road to the Maasai Mara, Britt messages me about how nostalgia has more to do with imagination than memory. she says recognising the interwoven references in my writing makes her nostalgic for experiences she’s never had.
amidst the metaphors and motifs by which I map my path, Popova, a fellow cartographer, writes: “we create — poems and paintings, stories and songs — to find a language for the bewilderment of being alive...” where have I heard that before? all art is meaning-making, I think. where have I heard that before? “all living is storm chasing,” Andrea, poet. “I don’t want to get out / without a broken heart,” she says in the poem you put on the end of the playlist you made for me.
for a laundromat dime I write a stranger, a wrestler and a florist, a poem about a break up. I was like the fireflies, he gestured sadly around us. like a moth to a flame. but I don’t regret loving her.
“if all the love I gave you was yours to keep and no love however brief was wasted then the love I thought unrequited needs not be regretted for I still enjoyed loving you.”
“if I’m Icarus and you’re Icarus, then who’s flying this plane?” in two weeks we’ll be reunited again, our oK joke formats stringing dotted lines between corner stores, stars across the seven cities.
the story goes that when Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, he also warned him not to fly too low, a the sea spray would ruin his wings. both extremes - too high & too low - hold danger. we survive in the balance between the two. there it is again, Goots’ tension & balance, A Fine Balance; the novel we read with Ms Woods, my mum’s favourite of the ones I brought home from the bookshop, the annotated copy I gave to NeNa in farewell, the companion to Connie’s Shantaram, set in Mumbai. now I’m here again, in the middle of a book that carries my old teacher, old manager, and my mum, always, in its prescient pages. sitting beside you at Marine Drive, the humidity again, now tempered by sea spray, we’re looking at the skyline from South Bombay and I’ve never seen it from this side.
“the surest way of seeing the wondrous in something ordinary… is coming to love someone who loves it,” writes Popova.
I think this is what I was trying to say in my post post graduation and the email could that have been a love letter. what I learnt about love from b2b sales.
all loving is meaning making.
all meaning making is living.