Metonymy

From the sounds that filter through our tiny bathroom window, too high on the wall to see much more than the sky, we intuit storms, ocean waves, thrashing palm fronds, so at least some of our island life is cobbled together from bits and pieces, sounds of unseen squalls, that paint larger patterns in our mind, and our small porthole becomes a portal to a parallel universe.

So we lead a quantum life, at least when we’re in the bathroom.

We invent the world we assume we’re in, even when we don’t see it. We fabricate entire structures out of random sounds and glimmers of light or dark. We live by metonymy and synecdoche, by extrapolating the whole from the part. Thus we gradually realize that the rhetorical devices we learned in high school gradually grow into vaster scientific algorithms which contour our adult lives, here and there.

Cathy says this poem makes you fly out of the body into a different world, and in fact we were flying to a different world, so I wanted to take a bit of our former Hawaiian world with us. There’s a sense of the reality of the sounds and what they represent, but also a sense of physics as magic, to make a cold scientific theory into a physical experience. So the listener gets to progress through the poem into magic, which makes the poem very real. It’s accessible; it’s all right there, but, like a Möbius strip, you don’t see it when the rabbit comes out of the hat. A deep scientific truth becomes an ordinary event.

When leaving a place, even for a short time, I always feel an immense wrenching, an impossibly emotional loss. I suppose I have withdrawal anxiety. I always want to do everything I’ve planned for the next few years in the few hours and minutes before I leave, so I get both panicked and focused. And undoubtedly annoying. (Cathy says it isn’t, but I certainly annoy myself now and then. She is much more tolerant of me than I am.)