> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://abagofstories.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Butterfly Is Enough - URL: https://abagofstories.com/the-butterfly-is-enough/ - Published: 2026-09-14T10:51:50.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-15T12:26:57.000Z - Description: Leonard Cohen once wrote a severe little lesson about poetry; nearly fifty years later, some of its simplest instructions describe the kind of storytelling we try to practice at "A Bag of Stories": observe carefully, resist the flourish, respect the material, and leave enough room for the reader. - Author: Claudio Maria Lerario - Tags: Editorial notes, The Ethics of Looking, Field Notes, Performing Arts **There is a butterfly**, and that is where Leonard Cohen begins; not with flight, beauty, transformation, fragility, spring, freedom, flowers, or the soul, but with the word itself, and with a warning against asking it to perform meanings it does not need in order to exist. > “The word butterfly is merely data.” The sentence sounds, at first, almost hostile to poetry, yet Cohen’s argument in [***How to Speak Poetry***](https://www.tetragrammaton.com/article/howtospeakpoetry?ref=abagofstories.com), written in 1978, moves in the opposite direction: language loses force when we insist on decorating it, when we confuse the thing with the language used to describe it, when a butterfly must immediately become a symbol of beauty or freedom, when death requires a lowered voice, or love a face arranged for intensity. > **The thing exists before our description of it**; our first responsibility is to notice it. This is also where many of the stories in *A Bag of Stories* begin: with something small enough to be overlooked, a roof people are allowed to walk across, a piece of fabric repaired instead of discarded, coffee poured from a clay pot, a photograph returned to the person who appears in it, a bag that has crossed a border, a hand repeating a gesture learned from another hand years before. **None of these things needs us to make it poetic**; what they require is attention, and enough patience to understand what is already there. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/poetry002.jpg) ****Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso** — Burkinabé singer Alif Naaba, whose work draws on the tradition of the griots, recites verses from one of his songs. ## The butterfly is enough Travel writing has accumulated a large vocabulary for telling us how to feel: places are “timeless,” villages are “untouched,” markets are “vibrant,” landscapes are “breathtaking,” traditions are “ancient,” and people encountered along the road somehow possess “simple wisdom.” > The words often arrive before the place, and once they do, **seeing becomes more difficult**. A village described as timeless is removed from history; a community called untouched is imagined as existing outside politics, economics, technology, migration, conflict, aspiration, and change; someone praised for living a “simple life” may simply be living a life whose complexity the visitor has failed to understand. The problem is not only literary, because **language organizes attention**: call something exotic and we begin searching for difference; call a person vulnerable and we may stop noticing strength; call a neighborhood poor and poverty can become the only thing we permit ourselves to see there. > **Documentary work should move in the opposite direction**: first comes the encounter, then the uncertainty, then the attempt to understand, and only after that, perhaps, the words. This does not mean stripping language of beauty; precision has its own beauty, as do rhythm, silence, and the movement of thought across a paragraph. Some of the most powerful writing begins when the writer stops trying to sound powerful, when the desire to produce a beautiful sentence gives way to the harder task of observing well. **Ryszard Kapuściński** understood this tension with unusual clarity. His reportage could be literary, reflective, even parabolic, while remaining rooted in people, gestures, rooms, roads, waiting, bureaucracy, rumor, weather, conversation; the larger meaning rarely descended from above, fully formed, but accumulated through details until something opened and the reader was able to see further than the individual fact without losing sight of it. That is the kind of storytelling we are interested in: not reducing reality to information, but allowing information, carefully observed and carefully arranged, to become experience. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/poetry003.jpg) ****San Antonio Palopó, Guatemala** — A man recites his own verses about the genocide of Indigenous Maya people during Guatemala’s civil war. ## Speak the words. Step aside. Cohen returns several times to one instruction: “Speak the words, convey the data, step aside.” It is difficult advice because writers like to remain in the room, and photographers do too; we have chosen the frame, traveled to the place, spent the time, noticed something, and inevitably want the reader to understand why it mattered to us. From there **the temptation begins**: we explain, underline, dramatize, push the reader toward the emotion we consider appropriate. Documentary photography has its own versions of this tendency: the dramatic crop, the isolated expression, the image selected because suffering is immediately legible, the caption that closes interpretation instead of providing context. Sometimes the louder image wins, but volume is not the same as truth. This matters particularly when a story involves hardship, because a person who has experienced displacement, poverty, discrimination, illness, violence, exclusion, or loss does not owe the storyteller a performance of suffering; **nor does the storyteller acquire moral authority by appearing sufficiently moved by it.** Cohen is unusually severe on this point, warning the speaker not to compete with the material, particularly when speaking before people who already know pain. The thought is useful far beyond poetry. There are moments when the ethical task of the storyteller is precisely to become quieter: **to give the reader the facts necessary to understand**, to identify the systems at work, to describe what happened, to listen to how people themselves understand their circumstances, and then to resist occupying all the remaining space. The person in the story does not need us to become tragic on their behalf; the reader does not need instructions for compassion. Good documentary storytelling asks for another kind of confidence, one based on trust: trust the material, trust the people represented, **trust the intelligence of the audience**. If something is terrible, we should describe it accurately; if something is beautiful, we should look carefully at its beauty; if something is contradictory, we should resist cleaning up the contradiction. Then we should know when to step aside. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/poetry005.jpg) ****Hawassa, Ethiopia** — Inside a prison in Hawassa, a man recites motivational verses to his fellow inmates. ## Respect the privacy of the material “This is an interior landscape,” Cohen writes; “it is inside. It is private.” Then comes the instruction: “Respect the privacy of the material.” For photographers, those words carry particular weight, because a camera gives extraordinary access to the visible world but does not give an automatic right to everything that can be seen; the same is true of writing. Someone tells us a story, opens a house, allows us to attend a ceremony, enter a workplace, photograph a child, listen to a memory, sit beside a hospital bed, walk through a neighborhood, or watch a craft being practiced; access, however generous, is not ownership, and **permission is not the end of responsibility**. Publication changes things. An intimate moment becomes searchable; a face can travel far beyond the place in which the photograph was made; a sentence spoken in one context can live for years in another; a location can become identifiable; a private history can turn into public information. This is one reason *A Bag of Stories* returns repeatedly to the ethics of looking, because the decisive question is not always simply, **Can we publish this?** > Sometimes the more important question is, What happens to this person when we do? There are photographs that become stronger precisely because they remain unpublished, and there are details capable of making a passage unforgettable that may still be the details we should remove. Restraint can easily be mistaken for timidity; in reality, it can require considerably more courage than exposure. Cohen speaks about discipline: **the discipline not to embellish what is already powerful**; the discipline not to transform intimacy into spectacle; the discipline to recognize that another person’s life contains rooms into which the storyteller has not been invited. Good storytelling depends on proximity, but ethical storytelling also knows when proximity must stop. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/poetry-006.jpg) ****Fredrikstad, Norway** — A historical reenactor recounts in prose key moments in Norway’s separation from Sweden. ## The poem is information Then Cohen makes his strangest claim: “**The poem is nothing but information.**” At first the sentence sounds absurd, because poetry seems to belong to the opposite world, to ambiguity, rhythm, metaphor, emotion, and silence; yet Cohen continues by imagining someone describing a mountain climb and insists on specificity: tell us the height, tell us the equipment, describe the surfaces, tell us how long the ascent took. > Do not perform the danger. If danger exists, the facts will contain it: it is difficult to think of better advice for reporters. **Specificity is not the enemy of imagination**; it is what gives imagination somewhere to stand. A craftsperson’s hand is interesting because of what that hand is doing; a landscape becomes meaningful through distance, temperature, geology, labor, history, ownership, and movement; an object acquires a story through material, production, use, repair, exchange, and inheritance. Even emotion becomes more intelligible through detail. Someone does not need to be “devastated” if we can describe what they did after receiving the news; a place need not be “magical” if we have looked at the light carefully enough; a tradition does not need to be “timeless” if we can discover when it began, how it changed, who continues it, who abandoned it, and why. **Facts do not flatten stories**; badly observed facts do. The reporter’s task, therefore, is not simply to collect information, but to recognize which information allows a world to become visible. This is where documentary photography and writing meet, because a photograph is also information: a wall, a gesture, the distance between two people, the way someone holds an object, what lies at the edge of the frame, what has been repaired, what has been left empty. **None of these things tells us everything**; together, they allow us to begin asking better questions. The poetry, when it comes, emerges from the relationship among them, rather than from the writer declaring that poetry has arrived. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/poetry004.jpg) ****Rimini, Italy** — A man moments after reciting one of his poems to a woman he had just met on the street. ## Avoid the flourish Near the end of the text, Cohen offers another instruction: “Avoid the flourish.” It may be the hardest one, because the flourish proves that we can write; it signals importance, asks for attention, and sometimes tells the reader that a sentence deserves admiration. There are, of course, moments when a beautiful sentence is exactly what a story needs, but the question remains whether the sentence is serving the story or asking the story to serve the sentence. We think about this often while editing *A Bag of Stories*, because our stories move through places, materials, memory, work, inequality, design, photography, community, travel, and identity; these subjects invite metaphor, and sometimes metaphor illuminates them, but sometimes it simply replaces them. The distinction can be very small. A writer sees a woman weaving and decides that she is “weaving the future of her community”; perhaps she is, but perhaps, at that moment, she is making fabric, and that fact deserves respect too. **Reality does not always need elevation**, because ordinary life is not a preliminary version of literature waiting for a writer to complete it. People work; they get tired; they repair things; they argue; they laugh at the wrong moment; they change their minds; they protect memories and forget others; they want to leave places we find beautiful; they return to places others have abandoned; they care about money, dignity, children, beauty, time, recognition, privacy, work, love, and a thousand other things that cannot be arranged neatly around the theme of an article. **A serious story must leave some of that disorder intact**. Perhaps this is also why we remain attached to documentary photography. The photograph resists us, because however carefully we compose it, something escapes: a face refuses the meaning we had prepared for it; someone looks away; a background complicates the foreground; an accidental gesture becomes more important than the intended subject. Reality enters through the side door, and good writing should leave that door open. This does not mean pretending the storyteller is invisible. **Every photograph has a position**; every text has a voice; every act of editing creates meaning. We choose where to stand, what to include, what comes first, what follows, and what remains outside the frame; the responsibility lies in recognizing those choices rather than disguising them as reality itself. Cohen’s lesson, finally, is not an argument against poetry, but an argument for trust: trust the word, trust the thing, trust the person standing in front of you, trust the reader, and perhaps trust yourself enough not to demonstrate, in every sentence, that you are a writer. **The butterfly is already there**; look at it carefully, learn what you can, say what you know, and then give it back its wings. --- ### Editorial note [*How to Speak Poetry*](https://www.tetragrammaton.com/article/howtospeakpoetry?ref=abagofstories.com) appears in Leonard Cohen’s *Death of a Lady’s Man*, first published in 1978\. Short excerpts are quoted here for the purposes of commentary and critical discussion. Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) was a Canadian poet, novelist, songwriter, and singer. All rights in the original work remain with their respective rights holders.