The contortions of belief
that protect our desires,

the contortions of desire,
that protect our beliefs,

are rectified in

the clarity of philosophy,
the intensity of poetry.

There are small shifts within the body,
the first emotions, to which our lives
adjust, in obedience and resistance.

They have been there from the start.
They do not master us, but are a limit
on our sovereignty, our reach.

The first concepts are beyond us.
From things within its grasp, the body
learns. In understanding and confusion,

our knowledge grows, without end,
without purpose or finality.
We are curious, friend. Curious indeed.

Perhaps we are suspended over it
and the depth, not ours to choose.

Perhaps, poised or clamoring,
we are free only to leap or slip.

Or, perhaps, perhaps, the depth
itself is ours to set, but the fall,

out of our hands. Thus we forget
how it is we lay us down to sleep.

A body is always able to be itself.

(Every body promises to be itself.)

It is always possible to be yourself.

It's not easy. It is the difficulty.

No depth is reached
by poetry.
No, you are released
by poetry

           into it.

The scientific method does not produce truths you must believe but claims you can test.

A political mandate does not represent a right to be desired but a promise to be kept.

The way to truth
traverses error,
straying, wandering,
and forgetting.

The site of justice
comprises malice,
betrayal, slander,
and forgiveness.

Every body
is a world,
a history.

Everybody's
world is a
whole story.

---

Reason constrains belief.
Passion liberates desire.

Song

All these years,
you've been telling me to choose.
And all this time,
I've been learning how to lose.

If you ask me why I did it
I'll give you reasons and passions.

If you ask me why it happened
I'll resort to causes and morals.

Maybe it's not so much
that the mind seeks truth
and the heart, justice, but
that the mind seeks truth
and the heart just seeks.

Wittgenstein was right. Philosophy must be composed like poetry. But, instead of extracting what Pound called "the data of ethics," emotions at their first intensity, from the vortex of history, it must arrange the propositions of science perspicuously to reveal our concepts.

Those days are over.
Others are in store.

Wisdom of Thomas More

Keep your affairs regular,
your moods, seasonal.

Concepts are to knowledge

(the hold we have on it)

what emotions are to power

(the hold they have on us).