poem: view with a grain of sand, by wislawa szymborska

this poem to me is about the nameless and the named, to quote another poet, leonard cohen. 

tom best had participants in a nightwalking workshop do an exercise of walking around and naming what we saw.

then we walked around and looked at patterns and gave them nonsense names. 

take the tree's point of view, or the rock's, or the grain of sand's. become the tree, the rock, the grain of sand. 

this poem reminds me of that. but i'm not so sure these "things" are as oblivious to us as we often are to them. our naming puts us in the map, not the territory.

how do we, how can we know a grain of sand doesn't feel itself seen and touched? it may not have a nervous system, but it may still have some form of consciousness. 

what if everything, all of existence, is conscious? 

View With a Grain of Sand

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine, without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch means nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is not different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
The water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like courier with urgent news.
But that's just our simile.
The character is inverted, his haste is make believe,
his news inhuman.