Understanding

So here’s this, then. Is the desire to write a curse? Also, tangential notes from my Lit Travels class:

Do we ever really enjoy the external world? Or is what we love the self, the results it produces? How much of an affect may the external world have on the memory-limited self, especially given our penchant for living the present within the frame, through the lenses of the past, experience, memory, names, places? How much of a product of circumstance of memory / past influenced by mindset as ordained by natural, scientific occurrences, synapsing nerves? Even given the memory, past guided present, we still experience, and in an infinitely intimate way.

There is so little choice involved for me in writing. Only now aware of it do I try to escape it but somehow that only pulls it closer, creates a more complicated dependent relationship. What is the point? Is it the need to be remembered, to leave something behind? To mark our temporal places? Make maps of our minds, what is it? How does it function for others? I suppose when I read truly beautiful pieces, they are awakening; the world becomes grand, possible, whole. I am reminded that I do not know, how little any of us truly know. That creates a dependence, too, on that writer, a thankfulness. Poetry is awakening in its way; it is an attempt to communicate the self, the world in such a way that it is understandable, the greatness or tragedy, any characteristic of it is wholly understandable. Because that is what we are scrambling for in the first place, isn’t it? To be understood? To know enough to understand?