Back in September, I stumbled (in the back of Half Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016) across this nugget of wisdom from Frank Bidart:

“What’s crucial for any writer is to understand how your mind apprehends meaning. How, in your experience, you apprehend significance. Understand and find a way to embody it, make it have the force for the reader in a work of art that is has for you. Image, what the eye sees, is, of course, part of this for everyone. But I think tone of voice, situation, the look in an eye or on a face, are as much part of what make up for me ‘meaning’ as what traditionally people think of as images.”

I love this verb—apprehend! How well it bridges the divide between mental and physical; to apprehend is to grasp—and by extension to understand, to perceive. One can apprehend an idea, a possibility, or a killer, a thief, maybe a ghost. Apprehend has currents of danger and violence in it; to apprehend a threat is also to fear it, to take hold of something might also be to arrest it. The verb is laced with apprehension, with ambivalence. Indeed, to apprehend a thing does not make us omniscient; we can apprehend even if we can’t fully comprehend.

It’s a stark contrast to ‘get’, which seems to be my students’ current preferred word for approaching new concepts—as in (a) “I don’t get it” or (b) “I just used ChatGPT to get ideas”. ‘Get’ implies that ideas are external objects waiting to be obtained through a brief transaction. We get takeout. We get toothpaste. Meaning and ideas, though, arise from an ongoing encounter (a dance? a relationship? a messy decolonization?) between inner life and outer reality.

We only apprehend meaning where we have the curiosity and energy to pursue it, and when we are willing to risk leaping after it. To apprehend an idea we have to give it our attention (no small effort these days) and we have to allow it to exist in our field of thinking—where it might change us. To apprehend is to become aware.

The other thing I love about this quote is the way Bidart recognizes that apprehension is an embodied process and works differently for different writers. My ways of apprehending meaning are as much vestibular as they are visual. I apprehend meaning in sudden shifts of temperature and pressure: cold snaps, storm fronts. And through changes in momentum (halts, pivots, bursts of speed) and the muscular effort required for these. Travel is clarifying; so is stillness. The sudden absence of a familiar sound, the return of a familiar smell. Changes in elevation (there is nothing like crossing the landing of a staircase to make me realize something in passing) and turns of season. A knife slicing an apple, steam rising from a kettle, a startled animal leaping through the back woods of my brain.

I hope you will greet November with this question: how (and where) do you apprehend meaning?

Wishing you peace, health, and inspiration,

Ceridwen

P.S. I have a new poem, “Unmapped Landscape with Egress and Hemlock”, out at Booth. Lots of apprehension as navigation in this one.