We have three more of these to do, three more Elisa New questions from her Emily Dickinson MOOC many years ago. This time we have two related questions she asked: Is a poem a container that holds a set of meanings or is it an expansion or dissemination that defies all containment?

I feel like this must be the easiest question she’s ever asked us. Because nothing is a container. Not even a Tupperware container. And yet…poems can be usefully seen as tight little containers (compared to novels, for example).

Maybe formalists build poems to be containers. But nothing we really do or say can be hermetically sealed. Even, I would argue, if we never ever share that poem with a single other person. It disseminates and expands into us as creators.

Like man, no poem is an island. And yet it is truly maddening for some people to think about how porous the borders of all things are, even their own skin.

Often people rely on black and white thinking, probably the most popular coping mechanism devised by the human mind for all of time. But like trying to seal the unsealable, black and white thinking is very unreliable, if not just plain self-sabatoging.

Things are not either yes or no. They are always yes and no.

I learned this at a very young age. It’s a story that has to do with a family member with depression and it’s not a story I can tell in a forum like this but suffice it to say the experience taught me a foundational lesson in what we call a paradox: two seemingly contradictory facts often can be, nonetheless, true at the same time.

And not only did I learn this lesson at a very young age, I also found out that once you see a paradox in one place, you can’t help but see them everywhere. It’s all or nothing. Which is why my thinking often hops from a definitive statement to “well, but except for this….”

This is the kind of thing that sends men out babbling into the street. It’s mentally hard to reconcile with. It’s emotionally hard to reconcile with. Enter black and white thinking. As I see it, people have three choices in this world when dealing with life’s plethora of paradoxes: (1) go nuts, (2) retreat into black and white thinking or (3) do what Georgia O’Keeffe calls “walking on the edge of a knife.” It’s the hardest of the three things for sure.

Speaking for myself I can’t use black and white thinking. It would be a constant argument with reality for me and I don’t have that kind of energy. I also prefer not to go crazy, so that leaves the knife.

And speaking of Georgia O’Keeffe, Gene Hackman who recently passed in Santa Fe, was one of O’Keeffe’s Santa Fe museum’s celebrity supporters, serving on the museum board from 1997 to 2004 and narrating the museum’s video that was played multiple times a day for many, many, many years there. I’ve taken quite a few people to that museum and watched that welcome video so many times.  It explains northern New Mexico, my family’s terra sancta, like no  other I’ve ever seen. It’s in this video that O’Keeffe talks about walking that knife. And that’s why I’ve always remembered it.

It applies to more than painting and writing. Nothing is simple. Nothing is simply its own self. Nothing is only one way or another. And that is both immensely frustrating and incredible beautiful, as any paradox is.

R.I.P. the great Gene Hackman (and also the great Georgia O’Keeffe).