i have two minor obsessions that relate to one another in opposite ways. one of them is bravo's hit tv show, top chef. it's amazing to see these very human chefs, full of neuroses and quirks, create beautiful food. their creations probably taste very good too, but i won't know until sometime in the future, when we can hook ourselves up to the tv and eat the food they make. anyway, i haven't seen last week's episode, so i've been watching a lot of tv to hopefully catch a rerun. i've seen just about every other top chef episode like 10 times each, so hopefully this newer episode will be in heavy rotation as well.
i realize now that mentioning top chef as one of my obsessions is pretty boring and meaningless, except in how it relates (or does not relate) to my other obsession: bread and butter. i think i've always been into not-impressive food like wendy's spicy chicken sandwich and Stouffer's french bread pizza, but i think my tastes have greatly downgraded. so while i'm watching marathons of top chef, what with their capriccios and tuna tartars, i'm munching on a loaf of bread and butter. so now, if i'm asked what my favorite food is, i don't have to think of the coolest thing i've eaten recently. because nothing's better than bread and butter! woooo slant rime.
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i had this weird thought the other day. how we use words to encapsulate a thing or idea for our own convenience/sanity/control, but really those words don't cut it. the universe is not the universe. when we use that word, universe, many things come to mind, like an image of a bunch of galaxies or something, or just empty space, but even the images that word evokes doesn't come close to what the real universe is. so, the universe is not the universe. even our own world is a mystery to the brightest scientists, and the average person doesn't really know much about it. so the world is not the world. and if you think about it, it goes on and on. like, people you know, you don't really know exactly what they're thinking or what they're feeling. you don't know what it tastes like for them when they eat cheese, so what you think you are is not you, and i am not me, because i don't even know me very well sometimes.
and is it a western thing to demand a meaning for everything, to be able to sum it all up in one sentence, or one phrase or just one word? or is it a human thing. on a side note. i wonder what it will be like once i am fully human. i'm not talking about a guy that has a job and pays bills and has a family. i guess i'm talking about heaven. but back to the original train of thought. maybe thats why novels are as long as they are. just one word isn't enough to say what you really want to. or, in poetry, when we all know that the words represent the bigger, truer ideas, and so we know that when they say the world they mean The World and so we don't fully understand.
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2 comments:
whoawhoaa so serious! jk
it's funny how when we think about things like the universe (or even just ourselves) it's overwhelming, but then we think about something as simple as the words themselves, we realize that even one of the most basic level of our understanding things is just as big a mystery and a pretty imperfect/complex construct in itself.
actually thinking about it now, yea my words and their evoked images seem so inadequate, knowing that the actual things they are associated with are truer and bigger than i could imagine. it's annoying when ppl try to write poetry and go straight to trying to describe the abstract. i think the best poets acknowledge their incapacity and can get readers to acknowledge that too. and that's why i love short stories where it describes one moment or one small experience or even one small phrase that describes a tiny action/movement where readers get a deeper sense of something indescribable versus having a feeling described with words.
and i think you and i both know what it feels like to eat cheese. no need for words there.
i think crowder's version is better, but then again, i did hear it first and am a bigger fan of his than delirious? stuff.
true with the words/meaning thing... words don't mean anything unless they are contextualized, which is why it's so important that we don't get hung up on the beauty of words or well-constructed sentences... you see, i'm already assuming i understood everything you said.
the most beautiful thing i heard recently is that the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ is really Truth contextualized in us. without Jesus, God would forever be a bunch of very different ideas and stuff to us, without anything other than fire and prophecies and stuff telling us who He is. but with Jesus, we get a touch, we get tears, we get the contextualization we so need, the life that we, somewhere deep down, believe is what being fully human looks like.
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