These are two lines from Billy Collins' poem entitled "Forgetfulness".
After reading this poem it first seemed to me that this poem was about just thought and random little things that we learn throughout our lives, but after thinking about it for a few minutes I realized how much more there actually is to this. The entire poem is not simply talking about facts, but about our thoughts and language in general. The poem is talking about the constant fluidity and changing of thought and our language. Langauge is constantly in motion it is ever changing and evolving, new authors appear everyday and they all contain new works waiting to be read by others, but what happens to our previous thoughts, everything that we thought we once knew? Just as in one of his lines Collins writes that "even now as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away", he is referring to the quite recent change of pluto no longer being considered a planet. The idea of pluto being the last planet in our solar system has been around for quite sometime, ever since I was a little child and way before that Pluto was always considered to be a planet. Now there has been a sudden change, not that pluto is no longer there, but the fact that we do not consider it a planet anymore. This is what Billy Collins is referring to, the idea of all of our previous knowledge being obsolete to what is happening at this very moment. All of our thoughts are in constant jeopardy and what do we do when they are no longer serve their purpose? We throw them away and they float right on down that "mythological river, whose name begins with an L as far as you can remember." This is what those two lines from his poem are referring to, not that we have actually lost our thoughts, but we have disregarded them as being useful and worthwhile so we no longer need to remember them. They are still there, they are merely in "a little fishing village where there are no phones", out there somewhere, unable to contact us, therefore being out of commission in our minds. This shows the constant changing our language as a whole and more specifically our very society. It shows how we are forever changing and are always in motion, trying to keep up with ourselves and to be ready for the next thought to come along and destroy everything which once stood in it's way.
This is all able to connect back to the play "Idiot Savant". In this play we heard many times throughout the show a narrator's voice over the sound system that would tell us to "rejoice" when something was supposedly made obvious to us and also that we had been fooled by the characters. This shows the constant changing of ideas throughout the play. The voice is telling us what is made clear and how we have been tricked all of the time. I personally did not see what exactly this voice was making clear to us, but I did have some ideas about it and every time it would tell us that we had been tricked, I would lose those ideas and think that they were useless. It shows to us how ideas are never solid. There is always room to grow with ideas and even pieces of art. Think of the text that we read about Lehtem in the beginning of the semester and how his whole argument was based around the idea that ideas are continually thought upon and redeveloped into an often completely new form. Because of all of this we are forced to lose our old ideas in order to stay current and to not lose track of what is indeed happening in society. All of these changing ideas only contribute to and exemplify the fast paced and every changing world which we now live in.
Also, one last note, the link that we used in class and also the one that I referred to tonight to consult the Billy Collins poem again was a hypertext. It had links on it to connect you to other websites containing information which had to do with what was mentioned in the poem. Now think about that and isn't that a new thought than the one that you had before. Are you going to go back and look at Collin's poem differently now because of what I have just mentioned? There's your example for a new thought. Thanks Billy Collins.
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