ABSTRACT
To begin this trialogue, a poet, Irene Bleier Lewenhoff, explores her quest and love for you-ness as a writer and the meaning of her attempt to touch the reader. She contemplates the dialectic between a seeking of truth and the fear of a defensive falseness.
Michal Barnea-Astrog suggests that the familiar is an unknown disguised as known. She describes how words are tied to vast meanings that can travel across space and time, and how unseen mental passages may be regularly cleared so as to allow such messages to move through from mind to mind.
Mitchel Becker differentiates moments of true dialogue, when truth touches two at the same shared moment, from interactions based on a deep suspicion of the other, in which the experience is one of misrepresentation, coercion and being taken hostage.
Irene closes the trialogue with further reflections on how the language of poetry, in which literary defamiliarization acts to crush the obvious, serves as a way for allowing oneself to be cast into the unknown, to contact fear and to engage in a true dialogue. She suggests that true dialogue, unobstructed by fear, can be found where “the intellect dwells in the heart.”
