Infinity and Paradox

CHAPTER XIX: ART — ENTRY XIX.7

“The poem writes the poet.”

In the study of ontology, we assume a linear hierarchy of creation: the subject acts upon the object, the craftsman shapes the clay, and the poet composes the line. We view the self as a stable, preexisting entity that exports its internal contents into the world. However, I collapse this hierarchy. The act of expression is not a one-way transmission but a recursive loop where the creator is birthed by the creation. To understand this, we must look toward the Buddhist concept of emptiness, or void — not as a terrifying vacuum, but as the essential, fertile clearing where being interconnects.

When I stand before the void of an unwritten page, I am not yet a “poet.” I am simply a site of potentiality. The void represents the absence of defined form, a silent space that precedes identity. Writing is as if an act of ontological discovery. As I reach into that silence to pull forth a word, that word reacts upon me. It constrains my future choices, narrows my focus, and demands a specific resonance from my psyche. The poem, as it unfolds, establishes its own internal logic and gravity. I find that I am no longer directing the pen; rather, I am being pulled into a specific configuration of selfhood that only this specific text could demand.

This process transforms the nature of the “I”. If I am changed by the language I produce, then the poem is the active agent in my development. Each metaphor I construct serves as a scaffolding for my own consciousness. I come to know my own grief, my own joy, and my own hidden depths only because the poem required them to exist in a tangible form. I act as a mirror that does not just reflect what is already there, but actually assembles the fragments of my experience into a coherent soul. This is the reality of the void: it is the space where we are permitted to be authored by something larger than our conscious individuality and intentions.

There is a communal and historical nature to language. The words I use carry the weight of centuries; they are artifacts of the human struggle to name the infinite. When I allow the poem to write me, I am submitting to a lineage of meaning that transcends my individual ego. I cease to be a solitary ego attempting to colonize the silence and instead become a vessel through which the void speaks. This surrender is not a loss of agency, but an expansion of it. I am elevated from a technician of grammar to a participant in the ongoing creation of the human being.

There is some kind of inherent hope in the fact that we are never finished. If the poem writes the poet, then as long as there is art to be made, the self remains an open project to be discovered.

Although we are trapped in static identity rails defined by our past, we are constantly being internally rewritten by the beauty we encounter and the truths we attempt to articulate. In the encounter between the human spirit and the vast, silent void, the poem emerges as the bridge that creates both the path and the traveler. I find myself defined not by what I have to say, but by what the language insists I become. In this ontological cycle, the creator and the created are unified, proving that in the heart of this void, we are always in the process of being composed.

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