For the world-renewing potential of an imagined response. Because the imagination is violent in its impulse to press back against the killing from without. To tilt the scales on the side of the near erased. To disobey the given order. To honor some dimension of collective soul only glimpsed. Because a pressure accumulates. Because of this abiding anxiety. Because the capacity for making transcends those of judgement and knowing. Because joy in language, thrill in meetings. At arrivals that morph into futures. In awe over the burden of experience. To push against a form that seems to demand submission and imagine not a win but an encounter with that which sings behind the fight. Because longing is endless, and music, and unknowing so complete except for a small, insistent certainty that there is a sense around this somehow, to be near it even if I have none.
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Notes while reading Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures.