“I want to let the light in, it cries / I want this want / to be the arrow and I want it to be mine.”
—Reve Rubio, "An Infinite Path Towards the Sun"
Reve Rubio is our featured Poetry contributor for Issue 5: Mirage! Their magnificent poem "An Infinite Path Towards the Sun" grapples with desire as an abstract, arrowlike concept, which you can find here. In this interview, you'll dive into Reve's exploratory and experimental philosophy of writing, poetry's intersections with physics, how "desire as a medium can lay out both the question and the answer," and much more. Please enjoy Reve's incredible and thoughtful insights into their craft!
How would you describe your writing style and process?
I like to think of writing as a way of exploring the “singularities” of language. In math and physics, singularities are the points where known description or theory ceases to be well-behaved. The laws start to break down, to put it another way. Encountering singularities usually means that there’s something wrong with the description or theory. It’s a sign that the means we use to interface with reality has failed to account for certain complexities; as a result, we’re pushed to find new means of describing and understanding.
I think something analogous happens when language confronts the complexities of life and the human condition. As a bilingual speaker (I grew up speaking both English and Filipino), I’ve always been fascinated in the ways in which different languages fail to accurately capture different parts of our reality. What emotions, life-states, and nuances are impossible to express using our words? Why is it impossible? How do we try to express them anyway? For me, writing is mainly a way of grappling with the ‘failures’ of language not by seeing them as hard boundaries or limitations, but as possibilities for further creative expression.
What inspired you to write “An Infinite Path toward the Sun”?
“An Infinite Path” was born out of a feeling of ennui and general directionlessness in my life. The first version of it dates back to early 2021, which means yes, it is a product of the quarantine times. I learned a lot of things about myself then, especially with regards to how I wanted to be understood and seen by others (I realized I was genderqueer around mid-2020), but felt like I was unable to shape my life around those things in any meaningful way.
I guess I would call that part of my life a transition period, although that implies (1) a sense of moving towards something; and (2) an end point (or at least a clear image of one), neither of which I seemed to have at the time. I wanted some sort of direction, in both senses of the word. I missed looking forward to things. I missed doing things in pursuit of an end goal or commitment, not just out of routine. I just wanted to want something, and I wanted that want to shape my life, to give direction of it, regardless of what exactly that would look like for me.
My poem-writing process usually starts with identifying a language-play that (at least to me) gets at a deeper aspect of the human condition; for “An Infinite Path,” that was the phrase “to want to want [something],” the recursive nature of it. I played around with that phrase in my head for a while, then I sat down to write, and the rest of the poem kind of grew from there.
What is your favorite image or moment in the poem and why?
There are two sets of lines that have stayed exactly the same throughout every version of “An Infinite Path,” and that’s because they capture the main image of the poem for me. First there’s “These are the cravings of my heart / which are also the chambers of my heart,” and then there’s the final lines, “I want to let the light in, it cries / I want this want / to be the arrow and I want it to be mine.”
Both of these moments deal directly with the heart, because I think that’s where desire lies. In fact, whenever I visualize this poem I have this horrifyingly literal image of a person with a massive arrow poking out of their chest. Or, for those who have taken a mechanics / elementary physics class recently: my main image for this poem kind of looks like a free-body diagram. There’s the person on one end, their object(s) of desire on the other; now find the forces acting on the person’s heart. This poem is basically a mechanics problem.
Why did you decide to center-align this poem? It’s such a unique and effective formal choice!
Thanks! I do enjoy playing around with form and shape in my poems; to me, that can be another ‘language’ that only poetry can access in full. More specifically, I wanted “An Infinite Path” to be an exercise in visualizing and spatializing want — this thing that often seems so abstract to us — and to some extent, setting up a cosmology for it. The center alignment of the poem is part of that exercise. I think of desire — once it’s strong enough — as ‘bending the space’ around it, centering all of one’s life and efforts around itself so that everything else is simply an accident, a note in the margins of need. Centering the poem itself was a way of achieving that.
At the same time I also wanted to highlight a form of uncertainty within the poem, a sort of structural flux. Most of the time I prefer having lines with roughly equal lengths on the page (I even play around with the spacing between words just to achieve that), but for this one, I thought it would be more appropriate for the shape of the poem to reflect the emotional uncertainties involved in following any want. Do we really want the things we want? Is it worth all the work we put into it? I wanted the poem to be roughly shaped like an arrow, but a very unsure one, even failing to commit to a point at the very end. Centering the poem also helped that visual stand out more clearly.
Desire is a central theme of your poem; for instance, you write of the heart’s desire to run “right into the stars, / and be burned by it.” In your opinion, what effect does desire have on the lover, beneficial and/or harmful? What do you think the value of desire in human life is?
I really wanted to play around with the desire-as-arrow motif throughout the poem. I think desire has this way of pulling us towards our object(s) of want, and in doing so forming a connection between the object(s) and ourselves as subjects of/to it. There are plenty of ‘pointy’ objects in the poem (the knife, the tooth, the vector, as examples); consequently, there is mention of these objects lodging themselves deep in the heart. We often see desire as an intrusion; this painful, unwanted, pointy thing that burrows into us whether we want them to or not. And yet it is there, always sharp, always undeniable.
Another aspect of desire I wanted to touch on was its ‘endlessness,’ so to speak — hence the title “An Infinite Path toward the Sun.” I wanted two truths about infinity to coexist in the poem: first, that chasing after something that is infinitely far away is ultimately a futile effort; but also, that it can also be a constant and inexhaustible guiding force, an opening to paths of greater possibility.
I fully believe that wanting things — wanting to want things, even — is an inherent part of the human condition. Not only does desire help us get to where we have to go, but it sets out the very definition of where we must go. To what ends do we bend ourselves? What want makes a wish out of us? Desire as a medium can lay out both the question and the answer. Whether such desire helps us or harms us will depend not only on the very object(s) of desire itself, but on ourselves as subject of/to it.
What overarching emotions and thoughts do you wish to evoke in reader’s minds?
I wrote “An Infinite Path” to be nonspecific, basically to the point of abstraction, because I wanted to focus more on desire itself as a medium rather than any particular object or subject of it. My hope is that readers can place themselves and their specific object(s) of desire on both ends of the arrow. I’ve had to ask myself many questions while writing and revisiting “An Infinite Path” — What do my wants look like? Toward what end(s), finite or infinite, am I being pulled? How do I act given such pulls? Do I bend myself toward them? Do I resist them? Hopefully these questions can be a guide to others as well.
What plans do you have for the future regarding writing?
I’m not sure, frankly. I’ve always viewed writing as a ‘side quest,’ something to pursue whenever the rest of my life becomes too hectic and overwhelming to handle. Besides, I worry that having too structured a plan for my writing will make me look at it as a ‘job’ I have to fulfill rather than something to pursue for its own sake.
For that reason I’m a bit cautious with making too many concrete plans for my writing; right now, I mostly just want to get my work out there. A lot of my poems, “An Infinite Path” included, have been sitting around in my drafts for years, but revisiting them made me realize — there’s quite a lot of interesting material in there! I’m glad that poems like “An Infinite Path” have found their homes in spaces like these. What lies beyond that remains to be seen.
Anything else you would like to add about your poetry?
I believe that, at its core, poetry is a form of play. I believe in the power of exploring language, challenging language, testing its limits until it breaks.
I also believe that this does not only apply to poetry, or to math and physics, for that matter. From Leonard Cohen’s Anthem: “There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in.”
Comments