It isn't a balance. There is no scale.

You want clarity in thought
and intensity in feeling;
your emotions should be strong
but your concepts, sharp.

You cannot simply weigh
your passions against your reasons.
You can only move into the light.

Pray or get off your knees.

He said the quiet part out loud. Then, when we got to the hard part, he took it easy.

The person is to politics as the thing to science. The rights of the people. The truth of things.

We reject the false choice between being alone and being available.

There is no expertise about how the individual should relate to society.

There is only advocacy for one or the other.

The scientific realist thinks of the truth of our theories like the political idealist feels about the justice of our practices.

Love is hard. When one despairs,
the other must hope;
when one is fearless,
the other must imagine the danger.

Some women are given a choice
between one man and another.
I asked her to choose between me
and not me. Unmoved by logic,
unfazed by paradox, she thought
that she could have us both.

The academic takes a pecuniary interest in peculiar ideas, makes a university of the universal, a corporation of the corpus.

You must believe in the colour of spring. I.e., "happiness is easy" and "suicide is painless".

Don't let your balls write checks your brain can't cash.

It is the task of political journalists to help politicians pretend that they have power. Likewise, it is the taks science journalists to help scientists...

Those who have a purpose in life
may fail to see it in anyone else.

Those who have lost their purpose
can find one in everything they do.

If it is love we lack
we can make it.

If it is wisdom,
we're fucked.

Language, Justice, and Music

"Must [the metaphysician] not begin," asks Ayer, "as other men do, with the evidence of his senses? And if so, what valid process of reasoning can possibly lead him to the conception of a transcendental reality?"

Must he?

Could one not begin with the facility* of our motions, even the perfection* of our motives? And if so, could we not be driven through brilliant moments of passion to an enthusiasm for an immanent ideality?

To be sure, that may not quite amount to a "metaphysics". But why always begin where philosophers would have us, here. Why always Dasein, not duende. Why not listen to the muses? Surely, they are not all sirens. And surely our senses, too, sometimes deceive.

Whereof we cannot sing, thereof we must dance.

______

*The root of evidence is to "see fully", obvious, the root of perfection, to be completely done, finished. Facility is a "lightness" or "genteleness" in action, "ease", "fluency".

What is truly known can be stated clearly.

Who is justly mastered can be commanded intensely.

What cannot be known of others must be mastered in yourself.

By what you cannot master in yourself,

you will be known to others.

In the world, many distasteful things are known to occur.

Throughout history, many delicate souls have been mastered.

"Philosophy is disclosure of being, and being's essence is truth and philosophy. Being's essence is the temporalization of time, the diastasis of the identical and its recapture or reminiscence, the unity of apperception." (Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, II.2., p. 29)

Poetry wills the unleashing of becoming, and becoming's emergence wills justice and poetry. Becoming's emergence wills the spacialization of space, the confluence of difference and its forgiveness or forgetting, the multiplicity of agitation.

Everything in the world resists ending up in a book.
Writing is the texture of their resistance.