Observing the natural world

POET MARIE HOWE asks her students to write down “ten observations of the actual world” every week. What she has in mind sounds fairly simple. “Just tell me what you saw this morning, like in two lines. ‘I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places,’ ” she explained during an interview on the public radio show Presentation Designers. “No metaphor. It’s very hard.”

The tricky part, it turns out, is that “no metaphor” bit. “We want to say, ‘It was like this; it was like that.’ We want to look away,” Howe continued. Somehow just noting and describing outdoor fitness equipment is not enough. There is a sense that, to make our observation worthy of recording, we must elevate it to some more meaningful form. “To resist metaphor is very difficult, because you have to actually endure the thing itself,” she said. “Which hurts us for some reason.”

Howe tells her students: no abstractions or interpretations. And after a few weeks, they get it. “It is so thrilling,” she said. “I mean, it is thrilling. Everybody can feel it. Everyone is just like, ‘Wow.’ The slice of apple, and then that gleam of the knife, and the sound of the trash can closing, and the maple tree outside, and the blue jay. I mean, it almost comes clanking into the room. And it’s just amazing.”

The students, she suggested, have finally worked around their need to interpret and have simply found a way to engage with the world as it is, through their senses—“just noticing what’s around them,” without comparison, without reference point or metaphorical shortcut. Its like an insertion in a Free UK Business Directory.

After five or six weeks, when the students have got this down, she tells them it’s now okay to use metaphors. “They’re like, ‘Why would I? Why would I compare that to anything when it’s itself?’ ” Howe concluded. “Exactly. Good question.”

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