Old Photos

There’s my daughter among the flowers.
She’s in the arms of her fiancé,
the first one, whom she changed her mind about
and never married, looking happy.
I think it was her graduation day.
We liked him. We like her new love too.
And here’s my son in his room with his guitar,
which was stolen on the night before a show.
He’s studying the frets, ear turned to a sound
outside the frame, working out the chords.
It was a cheap guitar, but he was fond of it.
He thought he might become an entertainer.
He never did replace it.
He found his calling writing code,
and we are happy for him.

So what is this flood of feeling that washes over me
As I turn past these images that seemed for a time to define a life
But now tell only the story of the moment just before the shutter closed,
The one about the tale that wasn’t told
In the echo of this pleasant house or garden
Where Kate and I have lived these twenty years?

Neither Objective nor Subjective

How can you compare one __________ to another? It’s all subjective, he said. But he was wrong. Put whatever you want in the blank. To say that for us, being subjects, there is nothing objective, is to say the obvious. “Objective” is a useful concept. We can imagine it with no possible measure to guarantee accuracy but with the ability to propose possible measures we can agree on which will structure our imaginative thinking, like clock time. I was looking forward to sleep, a time when the pain would cease for a little. Eight hours in elyisium as the clock ticked on and it came. And it went. But for me, the pain did not cease. The pain ceased in a real I could not inhabit. For me the pain was continuous. No time passed between falling asleep and waking.

Subjectivity is no more real. We cannot experience it. Or if we can, it’s only as insanity. Something we cannot put into language because as soon as you put into language it becomes something someone else can share. It becomes intersubjective. Language is always someone else’s language. As soon as you put experience into language you move experience in the direction of object. Subjective experience is impossible in language and impossible also outside of language. Like the neglected deaf man who learned language as an adult and who after the slow process could be asked, “what was it like before you learned to speak?” He had no answer. It was not “like” anything. He could remember nothing from that time. In order to use language we have to become two people.

All language and all experience, so called, is intersubjective. More or less. Always more or less. This means that you don’t get to interpret a poem or a work of art for yourself any more than you can interpret a baseball game or the career of two athletes in the same sport—or different sports or from different eras, or politicians or political systems or anything at all in the whole physical or intellectual universe that you can talk about and judge. We exist intersubjectively. We cannot exist otherwise. We are absolutely dependent on otherness, its maintenance and its assimilation. An endless, creative process.