YuHeng's blog

Even the most insensitive, numb human being knows that the repetitive sound of a word leads to a resounding sense that numbs the receptors and stagnates the nerves and their ability to absorb information. For instance, Poe’s “The Raven” with it’s “evermore” and “nevermore” is obviously used to emphasize the persistent haunting of the narrator’s fears, vision, and dreams. One need not reduce these terms to “repetition” or look through the “glossary of terms” for definitions, but this is exactly what schools teach you. They tell you to use the term “repetition” in an essay that hundreds of other students have also to write on when there could be hundreds of students studying different poems. One is institutionalized into the uniformity of roles, of obedience, and lack of identity. One is a school. So, they begin to lose their sense for information, their basic sense for things that come as naturally as one begins to recognize that the sun is the sun, a bright red thing that is hot because it shines, that the clouds are things that float in the sky, or that the innnocence of the moon is as haunting as the eventual notion that it comprises of such and such a surface, of such and such of a rotation etc. But one doesn’t need to flip through a glossary to find the meaning of terms. Rather, let them come as they are, without intervention upon the self, the filter and distortion towards the self, whatever “that” is. Seldom now are the meanings which soak through the beings and the beings who preserve the fruits of their realizations. I simply don’t need to refer to the “murmurous haunts of flies” to know that Keats wanted to say that the flies murmur monotonously in your ear.