literal first, then
apologetic — and last
of all, far too late,
I can hear myself being
just plain rude: Do I know you?
The more I think about it now, the more it seems to me that I spend a remarkable amount of time and energy in the literal and apologetic realms. My social self is more or less defined by these two habitual modes. Or at least that’s how it seems to me. In my dream there was a girl who, it turned out, was a prospective volunteer for one of the charities I work for. But my first words to her were Do I know you? and I’ve succeeded quite well in this poem, in getting across the succession of cognitive stages I went through in the dream. The net result was a not-all-that-mild sense of social anxiety which is perfectly true to life. But since this is a dream, I’m allowed leeway to add another layer too: the symbolic. The girl in my dream is a part of myself. I’m asking myself do I know myself. It’s also legitimate to query how well any of us actually know the people we say we ‘know’. The symbolic layer is the most interesting to me. I wish I were more interested in people themselves instead. Layering is a curious title, with its connotations of dressing and fashion. But I guess both poem and dream are concerned with the self we present to the world. The tension and stages between inside and outside.
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