Stretching My Brain Like Taffy

I hadn't realized, when choosing my schedule in September, that two of my classes would split my brain in two different directions: Philosophy and Poetry. In my poetry class your encouraged to never state anything outright, which does make some sense. We turn to art forms for when our regular language fails us. If you can state something outright, you'd put it in a newspaper article or an encyclopedia. But when you've got a mood, an emotion, an impression, an inkling, a question, or a curiosity, and it's difficult to "get there" and describe it, then you've got to use some kind of artistic language. Poetry still uses words of course, but it uses them in unexpected and inexplicable ways, as the only way to communicate what you're trying to communicate. Which means your language has to be fracture and fragmented, or as Emily Dickinson would say, you have to "tell it slant." You need to be roundabout, weird, metaphorical, unpredictable. It's probably been a good exercise for me to learn to write this way.

But then I had a philosophy paper to write, which is the exact opposite. Nothing should be muddled, nothing should be poetic. Not only should you not use metaphors, my professor said philosophers even avoid synonyms because it can confuse meanings and argumentation.

And with these two classes running concurrently, it was very, very hard on my little brain. It was like when I flew from Tanzania, where I had been immersed in Swahili for a year, and landed in Spain. I walked up to the information table at the airport, meaning to speak Spanish (which I could at one time), though still stuck in Swahili land in my head. I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came it. It was a language bottleneck, a glut that rendered me mute. I hadn't learned two languages, I learned two languages which canceled each other out.

And now I can't quite write a good poem OR a good philosophy paper.

Maybe I'll just go watch T.V. Those reality shows include lots of dialogue that is neither poetic nor philosophical. Which might be what T.V. is for.