—Gregory Orr, from Poetry as Survival (The University of Georgia Press, 2002)
“If you were to pause right now, close your eyes, and listen to your mind for sixty successive seconds, you would undoubtedly encounter a ceaseless jumble of emotions and ideas and thoughts and body sensations and memory images and a voice jabbering away like a twenty-four-hour-a-day radio station. I call this interior chaos the Buried Self because so little of it gets out. When we say, ‘I spoke my mind about that,’ we don’t mean that we expressed in words the actual and complete contents of our consciousness, but only a narrow thread of focused thought or emotion. The contents of our minds are like an iceberg that is 90 percent below the waterline of silence—even we don’t know and can’t keep track of what’s going on inside us.”
