Upon a great tide, one fine day, I was given a piece of advice that I liked. “You will always need to make new friends once every five years. Not only because some of the old ones will move away, but also because there are some really wonderful people in the world.”
And ta-da, I introduce to my blog, a girl I am really thick with; keeping in tandem with tradition, we’ll call her P.
This morning P and I were talking, and I asked her if she believed in karma. She said she found it hard to believe that a certain God would take so much interest in the day to day trivialities that abound her life and mine. “You think a God will want to concern himself with what’s traumatising you and me?” she asked. I don’t know really.
We didn’t get the chance to discuss the inner workings of the universe, which, also, P doesn’t ascribe to. But here’s the rest of the story.
I wrote a post on this blog when I finished reading John Green’s novel Paper Towns. In this book, I found the poem Song of Myself by Walt Whitman. This poem was what I was studying back then in my Poetry course. I was struck by Song of Myself and it’s sheer length, and also the fact that I had never read it before. To find this poem’s reference in a novel that I was reading was interesting to me.
This time around when I was reading The Class by Erich Segal, in it I found a mention of the poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg. Not only was the poem mentioned, but Allen Ginsberg did a cameo appearance in the book, if you will. Incidentally, Howl is another poem I, very recently, studied as a part of the Poetry course. Also, the length and breadth of Howl is massive. That poem is quite something. To come to realize that Ginsberg is a Whitmanian, is a thing quite another.
Like P, if I didn’t believe in the universe, I’d have passed this off as inconsequential. Not that I’m too much of a believer given my fragile state of faith. But here’s what I am contemplating – on my white board, I’m going to create a word map of things I find that are connected to each other. For now I have the following words – plenitude, clues, howl, myself, song – or something to that effect if I derive them from the poems and books involved in this cute coincidence.
If it leads to a concocted meaning that I am able to derive for myself, I will blog about it. If it doesn’t, I’ll make up some fabulous story, or my own version of a Dadist poem along the way. Either way, it has potential to turn out into something that could be fun.
Potential.
That’s where it all starts, doesn’t it?
P.S.: I intend to blog about the poems that influenced me during my Poetry course. For now, you’re encouraged to check out the aforementioned poems. Just so that expectations are set, they’re not easy reading.