The Art of Listening

My excitement comes in letting my ideas flow freely... My frustration comes in try to force these ideas to fit the frame of this blog--in trying to frame myself. So what follows here is a map (as my Proforker calls it) of how I arrived at the question that follows in bold. Beyond that are the ways in which I have begun to experience its answer.

Here is the original poem where I started this exploration:

STYLE
Flaubert wanted to write a novel
About nothing. It was to have no subject
And be sustained upon the style alone,
Like the Holy Ghost cruising above
The abyss, or like the little animals
In Disney cartoons who stand upon a branch
That breaks, but do not fall
Till they look down. He never wrote that novel,
And neither did he write another one
That would have been called La Spirale,
Wherein the hero's fortunes were to rise
In dreams, while his walking life disintegrated.

Even so, for these two books
We thank the master. They can be read,
With difficulty, in the spirit alone,
Are not so wholly lost as certain works
Burned at Alexandria, flooded at Florence,
And are never taught at universities.
Moreover, they are not deformed by style,
That fire that eats what it illuminates.

HOWARD NEMEROV

Themes about life, even nothingness, are inherently limited if you write them down, they may be better understood if you never try to articulate them.

If you stick only to what you know, if you limit the story to what you know, will you ever really understand anything?

Can life be understood if you never try articulating it, if you write a book about nothing, if you never write a book about nothing?

The imagined works.

Maybe all of the ideas are not meant to fit together, or maybe they each fit together at a different time.

How do we frame the act of asking and answering questions? Do we listen to real things or things that don't exist?

Our frame is a need for answers.


We search for understanding (in reading poems, in listening to people, in telling stories), through the frame of needing answers, but would we understand more if we could create a frame that let us experience understanding without actively searching for it?

"Once for instance, my father asked me a series of questions that suddenly
made me wonder whether I understood even my father whom I felt closer to
than any man I have ever known. 'You like to tell true stories, don't you?'
he asked, and I answered, 'Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.'

Then he asked, 'After you have finished your true stories sometime, why
don't you make up a story and the people to go with it?

'Only then will you understand what happened and why.'"

-Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

The lecture was on the writing of Primo Levi which describes his time in Auschwitz. My professor began discussing a point he called the art of listening. He then went on to explain the two problems we have with listening: 1. There is the danger of premature understanding. In an attempt to reach out, we end up reaching over. 2. We listen only to the point of finding a tag where we can tell our own story.

How do we truly listen, truly understand?

*For some reason I couldn't get the original version of Listening to transfer from Word with the right format. This version has the right format but is hard to read... I'm working on getting both to work together.