coerce

     I'm rereading a book for the 4th time.  I have dubbed it the second most influential book for my life.  It is East of Eden, by John Steinbeck.  And no, I will not tell you why it is so good. 
     Honestly that's because I simply don't know why it's so dang important to me.  Really, I have no idea, and this drives me absolutely crazy.  Reading and rereading and rereading it again and again have yielded almost no concrete details as to why the book seems to redirect my life on an unmistakable path towards truth with a clarity unrivaled by pretty much anything else.  
     Again and again I read the book and it does this very thing all over again.  Steinbeck seems to capture truth so subtly that I can't identify exactly where it is he's capturing truth.  It's kinda crazy.  

     I've been zoning out lately.  I get so lost in thought that I'm usually pulled out of my head and back into the room by an annoyed "JOSH!" muttered by the person who had been talking at me.  That's part of how I know I'm in a wonderful stage of transition right now, because my thoughts have assumed a potency so powerful that they refuse to let my senses distract from their immediate examination.  New beginnings are so frequent and strong that they overpower my attention and I cease to be in the room.  
     In fact, wandering thoughts isn't even the half of it.  My very understanding of how my mind works mind has actually started to change and mature.
     Let me explain: have you ever taught yourself something in a dream?  When I was a sophomore in high school they tried to teach me trigonometry and I just couldn't get it.  At all.  Then, in a dream that night I successfully taught myself the principles and rules of sin, cos, and tan.  When I woke up the next day I knew it so well that I could help teach it to the girl next to me in class. 
     Brains are funny things. Dreams are funny things.  On May 18 of 2011, I wrote in my journal about dreams and ended the 3 page reflection with the following: "Weird.  I guess I'll have to ponder dreams some more.  Perhaps for several weeks; maybe longer.  I look forward to the conclusion of this pondering, as I can't wait to understand what these are."  Oh Younger Josh, what a delightful fool you were...
     Last week a dream taught me how my mind works.  In the dream I was trying to remember a word for someone, but before long our conversation left the word and shifted to how my brain works.  I was able to communicate a clear conception of my mind as a large rotating sphere with a thick outer shell.  The sphere was a swirling conglomeration of glowing colors that I knew were my thoughts.  The shell is so thick that it muddled the colors of the thoughts and words and feelings inside the sphere with an opaque veil, and the only way to retrieve anything is to squeeze my hand into the sphere and blindly search around until I've found what I'm looking for. 
     EVERYTHING that happens around me goes into the sphere, and I began learning tricks to retrieving those things.  I remembered where certain words were, and where certain emotions would make the sphere light up.  And eventually I rummaged around my mind long enough to retrieve the missing word from earlier in the dream: "coerce".  
     And then I woke up, blessed with new knowledge of myself. 

     East of Eden seems a lot like my mind.  Maybe that's why I like it.  The book seems like this swirling sphere of truths that is covered by a membrane of beautiful prose.  You know the sphere is filled with truths and you have a sort of affinity for it, but you can only reach in and remove those truths one at a time.  You have to pull them one out and play around with it before putting it back and searching for a different one.  
     In my opinion, this is a model for good literature.  It's so good that you can't just tell someone why it's good.  You have to move it around, reaching in and removing one thing at a time.  You can't just say, "This book is great because..." because that would be a crime to the book.  It's so filled with truth that you can't just bring it to someone whole; it has to be read and appreciated bit by bit.  
     It's more like actual life, which can really only be appreciated as a whole with tangential sighs of gratitude and almost never with grandiose remarks that "sum everything up". 
      This is what I understand poetry to be.
     At the end of it, a good book coerces you into a new way of thinking.  It molds your mind and gives you a new clarity with regards to the beauty that is all around you, and it does it so well that you can't even identify how it happened.