Someone since I've been here, told me
about a poem of mine which has been
woven into the culture in a way that sounded great to me.
It was some kind of multimedia show or something.
It was just this little thing which I want to read.
It's called "Room Zero Zero Zero."
"After the last class in the empty room, chairs relax.
Each in a shadow, and they all stand still
and hear anti-lectures all night long.
Staccato silences measure out the hours,
where does the wind end?
What can the rain give?
Standing around the absent students,
those little whispers come near, nearer, why is a hall?
Is a hall?
Is a hall?"
Well, now I want to sacrifice this in a hurry
and dance away from it, because of a special little feeling
of emergency about it.
Maybe well, first, if a writer is
a person who gets some worthy ideas
and then uses those skills he's learned in school
or anywhere, in order to present those ideas to other people,
then it's quite possible that someone
could say about anything that he's written or said that,
what does this mean?
And since it's a worthy idea, it's related to other ideas
and it's possible to give an equivalent.
But what if that person has done an activity that
isn't the way I phrased it?
What if he has just gone forward by a process that has taken him
way out somewhere, and dumped him off
like at the end of room zero, zero, zero
or something like that?
And someone says, what does this mean?
Well, since you didn't start with an idea,
and no other ideas have caught up with it yet,
you don't know how to say what it means.
I mean, what I'm trying to grope for is
that old topic, of the equivalence of something
you say.
If it's something that's well standardized,
then it's easy to give a substitute.
But if it's something that isn't standardized,
I don't know what you have to do.
You just have to wait till other things are like it.
And then say, well, it's like that.
And they say, oh, yeah.
OK.