“The Rejection of Closure”

Sometimes I purposefully miss things. Scroll past. Walk a block around. Let the timer go until I can’t stand to hear it anymore. I am not a timely person. I am often late with the odd occasions I decide to be early, though I constantly gnaw at my nails, the inside of my mouth, lip.

In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one per­ceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. We delight in our sensuous involvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the world—to close the gap between ourselves and things—and we suffer from doubt and anxiety because of our in­ability to do so.

It is all too much. I get nervous waiting in line. Did you read this? Did you eat that? Have seen him? Have you met her?

Yet the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other. The undifferentiated is one mass, the dif­ferentiated is multiple. The (unimaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would in fact be a closed text. It would be insufferable.

Why bother saying it, I ask a lot.

(Source: poetryfoundation.org)