A work of literature is not "about" the experience of its characters. It is the experience of the reader while reading.

How much of our culture is merely a distraction from the hogging of the harvest?

The Image Is Easy

It can be seen
without strain
and done
without effort.

You peel it
off the appearance
And stick it
onto the surface.

The image is light:
luminous,
weightless.
It is not hard.

Sometimes it is our honesty that leads us away from the truth.
Sometimes our decency holds us back in the pursuit of justice.

Our wisdom sits uncomfortably with us.
now that the ground has shifted.

Our love looms ominously before us
as the horizon closes in.

Sadness is to feeling as
______ is to thought.

Folly, let us say, is "the wisdom of the heart", the error in thinking that is caused by feeling, the unreasonableness of passion. But it is not simply a defect. Its ground is in something positive: our emotions. And this is why Erasmus was able to sing its praises.

Spinoza talked about "the intellectual love of a thing". What is to passion as folly is to reason? What do we call the loss of feeling that is caused by thinking, the dispassionateness of reason? Melancholy. Dowland would find his composure there.

To champion reason I don't need to degrade passion. My passions are as valid as my reasons.

If we want to know anything at all, said Kant, we must know some things immediately. Similarly, if we are to have any power whatsoever, some people must wield it immediately. We might also say that our knowledge requires that some things sometimes go unquestioned. Our power, likewise, requires that some people are sometimes not questioned.

Nuance is to sense
as impulse to motive.

Tell me how you feel.
Not what, but how.
What techniques, what devices
do you use? By what means do you
hold back your impulses?

Is the desire for truth grounded in the belief that we might say something undeniable?

Is the belief in justice driven by the desire to say something that cannot be denounced?

Nuance is to fact
as impulse to act.

Facts don't make themselves known.

Acts are not committed on their own power.

Facts are discoverable. Acts are decidable.

In the long run, it is better to be rational but mistaken than irrational and correct.
But is it also better, in the moment, to be passionately wrong than dispassionately right?

To take literature seriously is to believe it reveals how language and experience are related. Writing, we imagine, is a sort of controlled experiment in living with meaning, affording precise observations of the connection between words and deeds. Perhaps it is the radical difference between the black marks on the page and the bruised skin of the body that suggests this precision.

Life is a series of simple pleasures foregone in pursuit of superior amusements.

A thing (among other things) is experienced,
immediately and specifically, in intuition.
The object is thought in general
and mediated by the concept.

The self (and the other) is experienced,
immediately and specifically, in institution.
The subject is felt in general
and mediated by the emotion.

In imagination, they are brought together.

It is not easy
to tell a woman
how you feel.

"It took eighteen centuries of Christendom before Kierkegaard could come back alive with the knowledge that ... the characteristic way modern man found knowledge of his soul [was] ... by the act of perceiving that he was most certainly losing it." —Norman Mailer, preface to Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)

Pater Humilias

But you must know your father lost his name,
That father named, lost his, and the children bound
In filial abasement for some term
To feel their father's shame. But to persevere
In base humiliation is a course
Of impious stubbornness. 'Tis inhuman guilt.
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschooled.
For what we know must be and is as common
As any vulgar outrage is to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie! 'Tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the family, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd, whose common theme
Is humiliation of fathers, and who still hath cried,
From the first course till he that was shamed today,
“This must be so.”

Homo Ignavus

Will the Age of Social Media be remembered as the evolutionary niche that selected for cowardice?

Memo to John Keats from Ezra Pound

Truth is truth, justice justice.
Beauty is difficult.

Techniques

"The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language. Let us ask ourselves: why do we feel a grammatical joke to be deep? (And that is what the depth of philosophy is.)" (Wittgenstein, PI§111)

"At least my theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. "Would you hit a woman with a child?—No, I'd hit her with a brick." Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of the precision which creates movement." (E. E. Cummings, preface to is 5)

Decadence

When the scientist no longer believes in truth,
When the politician no more desires justice,
When the priest no longer keeps the faith,
When the artist dwells no more with beauty...

Is it possible that our understanding of the soul has advanced as much as our understanding of the world over the past 5000 years? Or is it rather that we learned of the soul first and have pushed the boundary of our ignorance steadily outwards?

Is it sometimes necessary to be inauthentic in order to be virtuous?

It would seem that it is sometimes necessary to be inauthentic in order be virtuous because the good man seeks perfection and no man is perfect. An ethical life is grounded in habits and some habits are good while others are bad. Thus, at times, the good man must thwart his own desires in the pursuit of justice, and authenticity is to live in accordance with one's own desires. Therefore it is sometimes necessary to be inauthentic in order to be virtuous.

On the contrary, a tedious old fool says, "This above all: to thine ownself be true."

I answer that, It is never necessary to be inauthentic in order to be virtuous, for the desire for perfection is the mark of the good man, and he who breaks with the bad habits that he has in order to acquire better habits that are not yet his is living in accordance with a desire that is higher, and thus more virtuous, than the man who is content to be himself as he is. Virtue is not a state but a power; one is never in a good place but, when virtuous, on a good way. A man is only truly himself insofar as he betters himself.

We are given
to know the fact,
to believe the claim,
to understand the statement,

to imagine the picture
and the procedure,

to obey the command,
to desire the outcome,
to master the act,
which takes us.

________

Note:

This should perhaps be ramified as follows (though it loses some pith here as its aim improves):

We are given
(in these empty spaces)
to know the fact,
(on pain of ignorance)
to believe the claim,
(on pain of doubt)
to understand the statement,
(on pain of confusion)

to imagine the picture
and the procedure,
(on pain of dullness,
on pain of darkness)

to obey the command,
(on pain of disloyalty)
to desire the outcome,
(on pain of misery)
to master the act,
(on pain of impotence)
which takes us
(in the fullness of time).

What is Art?

Perhaps it's not what it is
but what it should be,
perhaps it's not what it should be
but what it pretends
to be. Perhaps it is
what it should pretend to be.

Passion is as distinctly human as reason.

We are as connected by our reasons as our passions.

(It should perhaps be said that philosophers and poets are often most instructive in their failures. We admire philosophers for their misunderstandings, and our poets, for their disobedience.)

The philosopher tries to understand how imagination makes knowledge possible.

Imagination also makes power actual. The poet tries to obey.

You do not know what you do not believe,
nor believe what you cannot understand,
nor can you understand what you will not imagine.

Who you do not imagine, you cannot obey,
Who you cannot obey, you will not desire,
Who you do not desire, cannot master you.

Belief is to desire as knowledge to power,
as understanding to obedience.
In imagination, they find composure.

Those who will not face their ignorance cannot grow in knowledge.

Those who cannot manage their impotence will not grow in power.

Photons are the lightest things in the universe.
And when heavy metals are created in the collision of dark stars,
gravity waves ripple through space-time.

πάθει μάθος

The passion of math is to suffer and learn.

Your subjective passions shape your desires. They are not objective reasons to hold your beliefs. There is a passion to seek a reason. But the passion is not itself a reason. Nor does the passion invalidate the reason once it's found.

The right to enjoy bourgeois pleasures is predicated on the obligation to maintain our institutions. This, perhaps more than anything else, explains the crippling, joyless guilt of the middle class.

There is something unsettling about hearing the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy announce that the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature will be given to Kazuo Ishiguro for "uncover[ing] the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".

After all, the Nobel Prize in Physics this year was given to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves." Gravity waves presumably exist.

Has the Swedish Academy declared my sense of connection with the world illusory? Has Kazuo Ishiguro proved the existence of an abyss beneath my being? Has he discovered my nothingness?

The image is
thought by the mind,
felt in the heart.

The water is still and dark.

The hand passes
through the surface
as the eye dwells
on the appearance.

The water is shimmering and wet.

Foundations

Beneath an ethical life,
the daily grind.

Beneath the grind,
political struggle.

Beneath the struggle,
              a killing field.

As you are distressed
by my reasons,
I am confused
by your passions.

_____
Notes:

Distress is a decomposition of passion. Confusion is a decomposition of reason.

Reason finds its composure by distinguishing things clearly from each other. Passion finds its composure in our intense identification with each other as people.

To distress is to "draw apart" to the point of suffering. To confuse is to "pour together" insufferably.

Composure, then, is a very precise kind of suffering. It is where things are kept apart despite our passions, and where people are kept together despite our reasons. It finds a balance of clarity and intensity.

Disobeying Hitler is not a way of obeying your muse.

Misunderstanding Heidegger is not a way of understanding your existence.

Use philosophy
to locate your concepts
and hone your intuitions.

Use poetry
to temper your emotions
and gauge your institutions.

Use language
to civilize
your intuitions,
to humanize
your institutions.

Theme and Craft

from Greek thema "a proposition,
subject, deposit," literally "something set down,"

German Kraft "strength, skill" ...
Sense expanded in Old English to include "skill, dexterity; art, science, talent"
... also "something built or made."

The proximity of a thought.
The duration of a feeling.

Conceptual space,
emotional
time.

Does the cosmos tend towards the soul?
Does the planet tend towards the body?

Or did our bodies just do the best they could here?
Did our souls make do with what they found?

I was wrong about Composure.
This is not my body.

I become the passion I am.
It is the reason to change.

"For a long time I used to get up early." (John Ashbery)

The Lightest Thing

I find it remarkable
that,

centuries before science
discovered

the photon, the language
already

knew that light is
not heavy.

Wisdom is to know you are no one. Love is to acknowledge there are others.

Philosophy is the pursuit of conceptual accuracy.
Poetry is the pursuit of emotional accuracy.

The body is articulated by light and weight.
The world is articulated by lenses and levers.

Our language is articulated by our passions as much as our reasons.

Two Democracies

A democratic government asserts sovereignty over the land on behalf of its people. It obligates landowners to serve the needs of the population. A simple mechanism for ensuring democracy in this sense is for the state to collect rent in the form of a land value tax (apportioned according to rental value) and distribute it to the people as a universal basic income (a citizen stipend delivered to all regardless of wealth or income). The challenge for the individual remains to live creatively.

Most modern "democracies" assert sovereignty over the people on behalf the banks. It obligates the citizens to serve the interests of finance. To this end, they deploy a complex apparatus of differentiated income and sales taxes, ramified by exemptions and deductions, with minimal taxes on land, leaving ample opportunities to profit from speculation and to store wealth in "havens" of various kinds, while granting "welfare" only to those who can demonstrate need. The individual's predicament here is to earn a living.

"When quoting an aphorism, name recognition is everything." (Anonymous)

A philosophy is something much more general than the philosopher but

a poem
is something much more specific
than the poet.

Some of our problems are philosophical, but we don't often talk about poetic problems. Sometimes, however, a solution will seem poetic.

It is sometimes said that philosophical problems are precisely those that can't be solved. The point is to recognise that there is no solution.

I think poetic solutions are those that have no problems. We say an event or deed is "poetic" when it extricates itself entirely from the problematic.

The heart
beats
in the body,
as the soul
bears
the mind.

The hand
comes to rest
on the surface
of the table,
which appears
darkly glazed
to the eye.

Thought is to feeling
as the eye to the hand,
the mind to the heart.

Emotions are to concepts as
muscle to bone.

In order to make a machine that thinks, we would have to make a being that suffers. We'd have to put it through that suffering.

A machine that thinks but does not feel is not just undesirable, it is unbelievable. It would be unimaginative—thus, unimaginable.

From the Devil's Dictionary of Social Theory

social science, n., The study of society without an understanding of money. Traditionally, it is the business of accounting for social ills without causing embarrassment to land holders. From the early twenty-first century, it has existed mainly as a consulting product, offering putative solutions to social problems that imply no real cost to the unearned wealth of billionaires. In general, a description of society will be deemed "scientific" if it cannot be used to support arguments for a universal basic income funded by a single tax on land value.

—Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
—Then let us forget and be doomed to win the War again.
—No, you fool. You are doomed to fight it.

No nation ever won a civil war.

Wars, unfortunately, are not always won by the just. Mostly, they are won by the strong.

Technology offers power in exchange for pleasure, said Norman Mailer. He surely had a point. Witness how the martial arts have been replaced with machines of war.

If you want to understand the fervor of our protests you must understand the depth of our obedience. It is because we are so hopelessly obedient that our protests are so fervent, so desperate. In our hearts, at the end of the day, we know that we will do you as you say. That is why we demand that our orders be just. That is why we are burning our own cities in effigy of you.

The world is everything that is the case.
History happens to everyone.
God sees all and
is doing all He can.

Train your seeing as you train your doing.
Be as articulate in your commands
as you are in your statements.
Try to understand. Also, to obey.

"Our job as scientists is to discover truths about the world."
(Science determines "the truth of things".)

A politician's job is to make just decisions for history.
(Politics determine "the rights of man".)

Wisdom is to knowledge
as love to power.

This is not a blog post.

Mathematics, Suffering

Δίκα δὲ τοῖς μὲν παθοῦσ-
ιν μαθεῖν ἐπιρρέπει

Put two apples in an empty cube box. Add another two. How many apples are there in the box? That was easy. Now, empty the box.

Fill it half full of water. Put an apple on a stick. Poke the apple end of the stick into the water, so the apple is completely submerged. Measure the height of the water line. (Use the side of the cube as your unit. The increase is a fraction.) Calculate the volume of the apple.

Calculate the radius of the apple. Calculate the maximum number of apples that can be fit into the box. Calculate the volume left over. Redo your calculation with apples cut in half. Quartered. In eighths.

What is the volume of the largest cube you can cut out of the apple? How many of these cubes can you fit in the box? How much space will be left over?

Poetry is the art of writing down how you feel.
How. Not what you feel.
Emotions are the means by which we feel.
They are the apparatus of feeling,
as a concept is an instrument of thought.
An emotion is my readiness to feel something.
It may be more or less precise, affording feelings
that are more or less intense.

Poetry is the art of writing emotions down.
The poet shows us our emotions so we can
tinker with them. A poem makes us feel
better. It does not give us better feelings,
but makes us better able to feel,
more precise in our way of feeling.
How do you feel? (How, again, not what.)
In your suffering, be yourself, that's how.

The philosopher's stance to
the poet's breath—
as existence to inspiration.

______
Note: ex-sistare, "to stand forth"; in-spirare, "to breathe upon".

Are your media ways of making connections or maintaining divisions?

Thoughts exist in souls.
Souls abide in gods.
Gods animate souls, and
souls feel inspiration.

A: My prose is strong.
B: You are too humble. It is impenetrable.

The world cannot be mastered, but it can be known in part. History cannot be known, but it can in part be mastered.

The world is everything that is the case.
History is everything that happens.
God is doing all He can.

________
Note: Pith has taken precedence over precision. Things are to the world as people are to history, and being is to things as becoming is to people, so history isn't everything that happens so much as it becomes everyone who happens or, better, everyone who happens becomes history. Or, we might say, history happens to everyone. Also, seeing is to doing as the world is to history. The last line could read, "All-seeing God is doing all He can."

The lyric is to the aphorism as the lyre is to the lamp.

An image is what a thought feels like, who the feeling thinks of.

The Question

Is it nobler to suffer in the mind or to trouble the arms?

PS: The mind's eye. The heart's hand.

The image is a concept backed like an emotion.

The Human Factor

The facts don't make themselves known,
nor do our acts master themselves.

Between the rational,
and the hysterical,
our reasons and passions
find their composure.

Poets do not tell you what they feel. They show you how they feel. Philosophers don't tell you what they think, but show you how they do it.

No one can tell you what to think or feel. But some can help you do it better. Our poets make us feel better. Philsophers make us think better.

It's not that they give us better thoughts or better feelings. They hone our concepts and emotions, to make our minds and hearts precise.

"Haven't you tried long enough to understand? Isn't it time, perhaps, to obey?"

The poet arranges strophes to present an emotion. The philosopher arranges remarks to present a concept.

The philosopher makes you think, not so that you'll believe anything in particular, but in order to clarify the concept. The poet makes you feel, not so that you'll desire anyone in particular, but in order to intensify the emotion.

Both articulate our experience. They join us more precisely to it.

Poetry is to politics as philosophy is to science. It is not political philosophy that we need, but a poetics of policy.

We cannot understand the ontology of social science, but we must obey the ethnopathy of social policy.

Money is the fact of value. A price is the value of a fact.

Because ideologues don't really understand the things they believe, they expect others to do the same.

If everyone were decent, tyranny would be impossible. If everyone were honest, genius would be unnecessary.

Genius is the tyranny of the mind. Tyranny is the genius of the heart.

Genius always doubts itself. That is its suffering and its passion.

A Transcendental Aesthetic

The point of a work of art must never be that the beholder become an artist.

"Science is the theory of the real." (Martin Heidegger)
Politics is the practice of the ideal.

The purpose of an idea is to make our work easier.

An ideologue will distort a fact in the service of an idea.

Left of Bizarro

Where punching people in the face is okay and pleading for head is rape.

ἀρετή

You are your virtues, your potential for goodness, excellence. The mistake is to identify yourself with your vices. You are not your vices. Your vices merely prevent you from becoming yourself, from doing what you are capable of, at any given time.

(Christianity is the application of this view of oneself to others through love.)

No age is insane. Your sanity is judged against it.

The House of Language

Is a philosopher better able to tell you what a thought is? Is a poet better able to tell you what a feeling is? Is an architect better able to tell you what a house is?

If you want knowledge, you must learn how to change your mind. If you want power, you must be open to a change of heart.

Do not write mediocre poetry about problems that could be solved with good policy.

After you have gone too far the truth always lies in the other direction.

Your prose determines what you can do with a poem. We might say that our prose "affords" us our poetry.

(Cf. Jonathan Mayhew)

The good and the true make you better. True perceptions make you see better. Just actions make you do better.

Institutions protect us from the caprice and malice of people who don't like us, and people we don't like, likewise, from us. With strong institutions you cannot punish someone you don't like on a whim. They have to have done something wrong.

To Those in Search of Social Justice

If you want to experience joy, kindness, and understanding, you must not close yourself off to pain, selfishness, and bigotry. If you want the love and wisdom of others, you must be able to suffer their foolishness, too, their hatred.

πρόσωπον

Nobody becomes true or false in the eyes of another. People see themselves, or not.

πράγματα

Nothing (no thing) is either good or bad in itself. Some things, however, ought to be done, some not.

The Media of Immediacy

Intuition, said Kant, is that through which things are known immediately. Institution, I submit, is that through which people are immediately empowered.

If I am to show you how to do something, I must, unfortunately, also tell you what the difficulty is.

This is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is their own damned fault.

All Rights Reserved

No part of this work may be reproduced, published, distributed, displayed, performed, copied, stored or memorized for public or private use in any information retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any mechanical, photographic, biological or electronic process, including electronically or digitally on the Internet or World Wide Web, or over any network, or local area network, or nervous system, without written permission of the author.

Basic income will not work as a fiscal policy, a welfare program. It will work as a monetary policy: a way of creating money, not as private and public debt, but as purchasing power for everyone, rendering the welfare state obsolete.

The Killers

The same people who want our leader to call another country's leader a "killer" are outraged when he admits that he, too, has killed—that we, too, have killed.

There's no particular providence in the fall of an apple.

_______
Pace Isaac Newton. See Ken Robinson's "The Book of Nature" in Into Another Mould. Routledge, 1992, p. 87.)

What you would know, you must first understand. Who you would master, you must first obey.

Do not think you can understand if you feel you cannot obey.

To know a thing, we must understand its nature. To master people, we must obey their culture.

(And what of our own selves, you ask? And what of our bodies? "In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.")

All science is natural science. All politics is cultural politics.

__________
Cf. Jonathan Mayhew.

The facts determine the results of our acts. Acts, we might say, resolve themselves into facts.

"Poetry," said Auden, "might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings." Philosophy is the tenuous* expression of distinct thoughts.

________
*I tried a "intense", "terse" and "coherent", before hitting on this. The pangrammatical supplement of "clarity" is "intensity". The words tenet, tense, and tenuous share the same root, namely, "to stretch". So we can here capture the pangrammatical point, and also reproduce the "tension" (!) between "clear" and "mixed". Very satisfying exercise.

Learn to understand your reasons. This is wisdom. Be free to obey your passions. That is love.

Marcelaise

When life is, literally, the search for lost time.

Dedalous

When life is a man's self-imposed exile from a country that never let him in.

Hamletesque

When life is a play something like the murder of a king put on by a prince as part of an elaborate attempt to avenge the death of his father.

Quixotic

When life is the story of a man who thinks he is a knight written by a man who thinks he is a novelist.

The hand is to the eye as the heart to the mind.

William Carlos Wittgenstein

We make ourselves a picture
of

the red wheel
barrow.

If you can
actually

imagine the white
chickens,

we'll grant you
all the rest.

Art improves imagination.

Between the act and fact,
the seen and done, the concept
and emotion, between the feeling
and the thought, slips the image.

Wisdom is the stillness of the mind in which things are what they are.

Love is the movement of the heart through which we become ourselves.

The purpose of poetry is to make us feel better. A poem doesn't always make us feel good, but a good poem makes us better able to feel.

The facts don't make themselves known.

The need for a genius in any age is as regrettable as the need for a tyrant.

Genius is the tyranny of knowledge. A tyrant is a genius of power.

Loyalty is the bigotry of the heart.