In Vietnamese, we don’t have past participles, so everything is spoken in the present, and whether it’s past or present depends on the last word. The funny thing is, the biggest trouble I have with my writing is tense. Is writing a way to orient events among one another on that spiral? You present, in some of your poems, that the future has already happened, and the past is happening still. Everyone’s a poet, as long as they remember. I thought, “Well if the Greek root for ‘poet’ is ‘creator,’ then to remember is to create, and, therefore, to remember is to be a poet.” I thought it was so neat. Every time we remember, we create new neurons, which is why memory is so unreliable. I’ve been thinking about trauma-how it’s repetitive, and how we recreate it, and how memory is fashioned by creation. He believes that’s why we repeat ourselves, including our tragedies, and that if we are more faithful to this movement, we can move away from the epicenter through distance and time, but we have to confront it every time. The Italian philosopher Vico had this theory that time moves more in a spiral than it does in a line. It becomes fuel, and it brings me out of myself and into the world, even if I’ve just been sitting at my desk and thinking about spirals, which is what I’ve been thinking about this morning. I don’t know if curiosity is a balm, because it often gets me in trouble, but it gives me control.
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