Sunday, February 25, 2018

The soul is an article of faith.
It is neither an object of belief
nor the subject of desire.
It joins the two immediately.

Saturday, February 17, 2018

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say: "May new sufferings torment your soul." (Søren Kierkegaard)

Suffering separates our reasons from our passions in imagination.
Reason makes a picture of this suffering. Passion makes a melody.

To imagine the difference between reason and passion is to suffer.
Composure draws them together, sings their harmony.

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

From the Tracatus Pathetico-Poeticus

"Melody is the most artificial thing in music." (Boris de Schloezer, via Ezra Pound)

2.1 We hum melodies of our acts to ourselves.

2.11 The melody presents the acts in pathetic time (le temps pathétique), the inspiration and desolation of holistic acts.
2.12 The melody is a siren of ideality.
2.13 The totality of the melody corresponds to the subject of the melody.
2.14 The melody comprises the totality that is actually imposed on us in various ways.
2.15 That the totality of the melody is imposed on us in various ways, represents that people impose on us in various ways. This multiplicity in the totality of the melody is called its texture, and the necessity of this texture provides the function of the representation of the melody.
2.16 In order to be a melody an act must differ in a significant way from what it sings.
2.17 How the melody must depart from ideality in order to be able to represent it after its manner -- justly or unjustly -- is its representative function.
2.18 How every melody, of whatever function, must depart from ideality in order to be able to represent it at all -- justly or unjustly -- is the functional pathos of the Ideal, that is, the function of ideality.
2.19 Melodic pathos is the song of history.

3 The melodic pathos of the act is the feeling.

7 Whereof we cannot sing, thereof we must dance.



Wednesday, February 07, 2018

I am not an ideologue. It is not that I don't have ideas or hold ideals. Ask me what truths I believe and what justice I desire and I will happily answer. But don't ask me what orthodoxy or heresy of the moment I subscribe to. I don't.

Friday, February 02, 2018

For Ezra

Did you lose your center fighting the world,
or did you, perhaps, lose the world
finding your center?

Sexism

There are sides of a woman
that only men find funny.
There is beauty in women
that only men can appreciate.

There is a species of pain
that only a woman can inflict
and only a man can feel. Let us
keep these things between us.