When I say I have lost my mind, I mean that it has been unmoored from my heart.

When my heart overflows, it is my mind that is flooded.

What does the artist want?

What is a work of art supposed to achieve for the artist?

Robert Graves proposed an answer: the poet is attempting to remove "a concenration which will persist uncomfortfortably" until the poem goes into "circulation".

It is not that art is stronger than science. It's that science is only as strong as the arts that make it possible.

"There is the question: what relation must one fact (such as a sentence) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other? This is a logical question, and it is the one with which Mr. Wittgenstein is concerned." (Bertrand Russell)

There is another question: what relation must one fact (such as a body) have to another in order to be receptive to the symbolism of that other? This is a question of pathos, and it is one that Mallarmé, Williams, and Olson were very much conerned about.

There is a truth in loneliness
if you can endure it.

There are also communal truths;
school sustains them.

Literature: The loneliness that is the truth of things. (Virginia Woolf)

Scholarship: The truth that becomes a community, i.e., that people communicate to each other.

You'll Get Over It

Poetry makes you feel better.
It does not make you happy
when you are sad. It makes
your sadness more precise.

"A pure heart wants one thing." (Søren Kierkegaard)

Philosophy cannot change
how things are done.

No poem can fix
                    how people see.

The peculiar affectation of philosophers
that existence is a mystery.

The strange conceit of poets
that inspiration is an authority.

My perverse obsession
                                      with their likeness.

Do you want their praise?

People are mostly decent.
That's how institutions work.
We're honest about most things—
how we deal with intuitions.

Education is not a preparation for life.
It is a precision in our suffering.

The crime that you confess is not the actual crime.
The sins you are forgiven are not what you have done.

Incipit Vita Nova

She was "the blessed one," though few understood the meaning of her name. Blessed, too, was he to experience this woman, if only twice, some nine years apart, in his "old life," but perfectly.

God bless the troubadour, free spirit of romance, who teaches us to appreciate an inaccessible beauty, to value pleasures from which we are barred, by circumstance or disposition, and accept a deeper longing for the other, a firmer hold upon our ourselves, not merely as recompense for our suffering, but as the very revelation of our capacity to love.

Solace

I've been wrong about everything so far.
I may well be wrong about the rest.

Socratic Meditations

Rightness in the way of desire:
knowing what is good for you.
Rightness in the way of a belief:
mastering what is truly before you.

Know yourself and do what you will.
"Master thyself then others shall ye bear." (E.P.)

Knowledge is the learning that lasts.
Power is a freedom that grows.

See also: "Discipline and Freedom"

Children naturally resent being treated like children.
Why do adults demand it?

We're ever ready to accuse our politicians of corruption,
but reticent to suggest that our scientists are confused.

I once made a map
of all the bridges
I have burned. Then
I burned the map.

---

Alt. take:

Let us make a map
of the all the bridges
we have burned. Then
let us burn the map.

---

Alt. take:

I once made a map
of all the bridges
I have burned. Today
I burned the map.

The way that can be followed isn't actually the way.

The name you can call it by isn't actually its name.

I now know what Mallarmé meant

by, "The world exists to end up in a book,"

and, "Destruction was my Beatrice."

He meant the same damned thing.

The Myth of the Chinese Written Character

We wanted to believe in a silent writing. We wanted to believe in a reading that evoked no sounds, only images, so that the text could never be simply read out loud. To recite any text you would first have to form its ideas in your mind. Only then would you choose the words of the spoken language to represent the thought, just as one might recount a memory, or describe a passing scene. The signs on the page could not determine the sounds in the air. Between the poem and the performance there would always be a picture. There would be no reading without imagination.

The function of art is not to get you thinking but to end your thoughtlessness. It is not to make you feel something but to assuage your callousness.

Institutions are the way we do things, immediately, without thinking.

Intuitions are the way we see things, immediately, without feeling.

Experience is what makes us think and feel, i.e., imagine.

Imagination is the means by which our intuitions and our institutions change.

Literature doesn't change you. It helps you live with who you have become.

Explication de Texte

No philosopher is as wise as their art implies, nor poet, as loving.

Ergriffsschrift

Poetry is a sort inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but equations for the human emotions. (E.P.)

Frege taught us that language has "functions":

Concept(object) = a true or false thought.

Likewise, perhaps

Emotion(subject) = a good or bad feeling?

Note that an object is a possible combination of things and a subject is the necessary isolation of a person. (Cf. Woolf on the loneliness that is the truth of things.)

Do not write a book because you hope it will be read.
Write a book because it must.

What they say about fascism is mostly true.
But what they say about democracy is not.

I am sometimes accused of expecting too much of my students, sometimes of not giving them enough credit, too often, of course, by the same people, in the same breath.

Non supra grammaticos

Do not read poetry to learn about poets or even poetry, but to learn the language, to submit to the grammar of feeling, and do not read philosophy to learn about philosophy, nor, most certainly, to learn about philosophers, but, again, to learn the language, to serve the grammar of thought.

Vice Versa?

Does one keep at it until it becomes a paragraph or

does the sheer
persistence of the prose
produce the poem?

Tractatus Pathetico-Poeticus 1-1.21

1 History is all that befalls us. (History is everyone who is on my case.)

1.1 The elements of history are acts, not people.

1.11 History appropriates what happens, thereby making them our acts.

1.12 For the elemental act appropriates both what went down and who did it.

1.13 Acts in a time of pathos are history.

1.2 History gathers the acts.

1.21 Shit happens. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

How is a fact articulated?
Like a sentence, in imagination.

How is an act articulated?
Like a fact.

Philosophy will always sacrifice truth
for precision, as poetry will justice.

It takes courage to reach for the ideal.
Curiosity drives us towards the real.

Pleasure, I have said, is to power,
as certainty to knowledge. But
perhaps it is not mere pleasure
that we seek; perhaps it is felicity.

To see the truth and be sure.
To do good and be happy.

Certainty is the end of epistemology, its goal. (If we were always and easily sure there would be no need for epistemology.)

Felicity is the end of ethics, its goal. (Happiness is the highest good and if it were easy there would be no need for ethics.)

It Is Neither

It displays no intellect,
just makes predictions.
Its output is, not artifice,
but fabrication.

There is a sense in which the Morning Star is the Evening Star. I'm referring to Venus, of course. But there is also a sense in which it is not. Meaning is use.

Sometimes the error is in the concept.
There is nothing more to see.

Sometimes failure is just an emotion.
There is nothing to be done.

hope mole
home pole
poem hole
elmo hope

He's a phenomenon, a whole
thing. He's been
unpersoned.

Clear concepts, valid reasons, true beliefs.

Tight emotions, great passions, just desires.

Hypocrite, lecturer! My likeness, my peer.

Proust is no way to live.

It's a beautiful day, she says;
go outside. Her perfect grammar:
first, a declarative, then
an imperative. See, then do.

This reminds me of her
body: sometimes just
a statement of the facts;
sometimes, a command.

Great minds are right twice a day.

Let the world change.

Leave by example.

It is strategy, my love,
and tactics; not strategem
                        and tantrum.

As animals go, we are as passionate as we are reasonable, as intentional as we are rational. We count, but we also reach. We calculate and we manipulate. (We are calculating and manipulative.) We believe, but we also desire.

Spirited, we live—measure for measure, from pleasure to pleasure.

Love is an acute awareness of your freedom; wisdom, of your limits.

Passion is not irrationality, just as
our reasons are not antipathies.

Our feelings have nothing against thinking.
Sympathies are not banes of syllogism.

The culture war is about how happy you should be.

If you're not with the warmongers, you're with the terrorists.

Books are not media.
They're right there.

______
I love the asocial immediacy of books.

Is it possible to know someone
without respecting
their resentments?

Philosophy helps you to understand how you imagine facts.

Poetry helps you to obey how you imagine acts.

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.