Talking about meaning at a time when even the mention of meaning has something archaic about it is challenging in many ways. At the same time, what we have said does not diminish the urgency, nor, I am convinced, the importance, of considering meaning, or at least of attempting to do so.
The very idea of meaning has always had something almost illusionistic about it. Whenever you formulate meaning, you are in the position of a magician who entertains himself with illusions, but tells his audience something else. That, sometimes, namely, among these illusions, a real, true, authentic image of the world or man happens to be found. And hundreds of illusions are not a high price for one true formulation, for one moment of feeling that existence is not meaningless after all.
Ultimately, perhaps that's why we want (and must) believe that there is meaning - because meaninglessness is unbearable and so terrible.
If there is a time that made nonsense seem natural and necessary, domesticated - then it is our time. That is why the question of meaning is one of the key questions of modernity.
Authentic questioning of meaning is necessary, because, ultimately, every naming is the final act of questioning.
Poetry heals the language
The search for meaning is originally a philosophical intention and ambition. Explaining the world and man is not easy, on the contrary, it is hellishly difficult. If you do not believe that there is a Reason, then it is even more difficult. Probably and impossible.
Why then should poetry be particularly privileged in this noble endeavor? Why should we trust poetry more than anything else in this quest?
Here again we are looking at things from the threshold of modernity. Namely, in our time Language is sick. Truth has become a ridiculous ornament, without meaning and without need. The wisest minds of our civilization have been using all their intellectual skill for several hundred years to deny the truth, to show that it is a mere construction and illusion. Nothing.
As much as it was, on the one hand, a magnificent intellectual feat, it led to the fact that today every scoundrel repeats it endlessly. When such a "toy" was taken into the hands of the unworthy - we got alternative facts and post-truths.
In this general delegitimization of the idea of truth, has the idea of meaning also suffered? Has it become a collateral victim of the showdown with Truth? Are we inclined to think that meaning is just a mere construct, just another deception.
And when you get to that point, poetry is a savior. Poetry is a look in the mirror that makes things clear. A mirror that doesn't reflect your face, but your insides. A mirror that you have to learn to look into.
Modern man is both a crucified Hamlet and a crucified Oedipus. How Happy Maric notes, Oedipus is because he killed the Father/God and made love to the Mother/Nature.
Poetry is a way of healing language. A dream of a language that does not shy away from the truth. And real words, even if we might call them “big.” Why be afraid of big words, if they are necessary?
Poetry is a lesson about innocence, when all innocence has long been lost. When no one has a right to it, to innocence, the poet - he discovers it, he linguistically constitutes it anew.
And what lasts - poets establish, as the Prince of Poets put it.
If part of the quest for meaning is to reach the totality of the world, or if it is a way to indicate/recognize meaning, then poetry is at work here too. Isn't the act of naming a crucial way of knowing the world?
By pronouncing and naming, we not only give form to things, but also meaning.
The known world is only a told world.
Both from itself and in itself, poetry is a marginal, border activity. Nothing is clearly separated from anything else - this is the principle of all worlds. All borders record the phenomenon edge boiling. This means that all boundaries, that marginally the space of a key (crucial) event in the known.
All this also applies to marginally Languages.
That is why poetry, necessarily, is - ecstasy, and so poetry must be spoken of - exlogosically.
Why poetry?
Indeed, one would say, from, it seems, so visible reasons - there is hardly a more meaningless activity than Poetry: our social nerve, our civilizational vision, our technological fascination, today seem to necessarily push us towards such a judgment.
And it has always been that way - and poetry is always there. So there is some really strong reason for its existence. Yes.
In a way, it is older than language; in fact, it gives birth to it.
“The only mother who gave birth will be without any help from another, any Father,” I wrote in an essay from 2001.
That feeling before the language that he formulated Wittgenstein - the limits of language are the limits of my world - can only "challenge" the act of poetry.
The fluid boundary between the expressible and the inexpressible, the most important of all boundaries, is only then brought into question, only poetry can expand the boundaries of my language, the boundaries of my world.
Where, then, are the Beginning and the End of Poetry?
It is difficult to imagine the moment of her birth. That other one Big Bang after which nothing was the same, because it brought depth into things and being. How does it bring depth? It gives everything a dramatic reason from within itself: to be said is the greatest Reason known to us.
When was it born, then? That moment is certainly older than language itself. That zero point of poetry it must be placed in that space where pure music preceded meaning.
Poetry was the gateway that showed that language was possible. The first pieces of music were connected to meaning by the principle that is poetry. A new world was emerging. Different from everything that had existed before.
To the first, the world looked like Polovtsov images: The Great Indeterminate, real impulses spilled out in the chaos of indiscernment, without any order that would offer meaning.
The world was waiting to be seen. When the first man, the owner of the power of expression, said tree - trees from the Great Indeterminate moved towards him. Form became possible. Form is the way we see the world. Reality, the image began to gain depth. To offer order, to offer meanings. And each new word brings new depth to the infinity of the image.
That's why poetry could have been the first vertical communication of a community. It was the first way to overcome time and formulate eternity with anything. To show meaning.
Language as a beginning
Helderlin, the Prince of Poets, wrote that we have been human “since we have been talking and since we can hear each other”.
If the phenomenon of the human had to be grounded in one element, there is no doubt that it would be language. Not only does the human concept of self-consciousness not function outside of language, it simply does not exist. supralingual or alingual space (these are, it is believed, the privileges of Death) nowhere as far as the geography of the Spirit reaches.
Such familiarity with language makes people dialogical beings. "My word seeks community", I wrote a verse in a book almost a quarter of a century ago, intending to note another of poetry's sacred paradoxes. Poetry is torn between its exclusivity (origin, ecstasy, foolishness) and its need for the other, for the ear of the other, in fact. For understanding. The foundation of the social urge, I am convinced, stems from the nature and working modes of language.
The history of the world is a kind of history of dead languages. Dead talk, better to say.
Palimpsests and labyrinths of language are the only indicator - of any eventfulness. Outside of language as a (relatively) solid order of signs, there are no ways of observation - and what is observed is unthinkable outside of linguistic codes.
"Language is the cause of everything, not the action" is a line that the greatest of tragedians, Sophocles wrote in "Philoctetes", that most atypical tragedy of the Hellenic world.
The poet is a neurotic psychopomp, but also a legislator of the clouds, a ruler of nowhere, a Cassandra whom even those closest to her do not trust... No matter how truthfully she sees and speaks.
This is precisely what makes him the most suitable being to understand meaning. Because poetry is also the translation of the Ineffable into the Expressible. From Play into Sign.
If everything is in language, then poetry transcends everything. Including all our searches, even the search for meaning.
(Scientific conference “Modern Man and Meaning”, CANU, October 6th and 7th, 2025)
Bonus video:
