BIG QUESTION 2: CAN WE UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER?*

This is Poem-a-day #2 in my foray into using poetry to answer some of the Big Questions.* 

YOU AND I

Words in their primary or immediate signification stand for nothing, but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them. ---John Locke

 

Are you talking to me? Are you writing to me?

Answers to questions you pitch into the dark
are meanings I assign to the questions you ask.

Always, you and I, will be at opposite ends

of a half-lit hallway where echoes are as urgent
as the tremulous confessions we burden ourselves

with each time we look into our reflections

on the one-way mirrors we look into when hiding
hurts hurled like hunting knives at target trees.

When I call you, I mean to quickly hold you down,

to find your voice, to shape your feelings, to own
your thoughts, to mould you as I want to have you.

I interpret you through my own lenses and mirror

you as you would me and have our confluence
in this reflection, a dragging into a cold dungeon

of thought constructing meaning instead of finding

it, and the “You” becomes the “I” held in bondage.
Except that in this conquest, I lose everything.

Questions and answers become elusive phantoms
of meaning, configurations of troth to the other
turn into fantasy, dreams and desire but delusions.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

*This poem was prompted by Simon Blackburn's "Can We Understand Each Other? Treating Words Carefully," The Big Questions: Philosophy, Quercus Publishing, London, UK, 2009