What poetry keeps implict
philosophy makes explicit.

What to unfold?
Wisdom warns us.

Who to enfold?
Love urges us.

Not, "what it is like to be,"
but how     it     becomes
                                       you.

              We begin
                      in imagination
                            to understand
                             and believe
              and know things
      and err
   and doubt
      and wonder
              and begin again
                      in imagination

There is no perspicuity
to be found in our emotions.
They live in darkness.

But we can make them precise.
We can give them their due
                                                   intensity.

Do not try to make your feelings clear.
Keep them tight.

You say:
It hurts. And also,
It is raining.

"It"?
What?

The world.

They say:
You're hurting me. Also,
Your time will come.

"They"?
Who?

History.

What Makes Cowards of Us All

Consciousness is not a fact, e.g., the fact that "there is something that it is like to be." Consciousness is how it feels to think.* There can be no thought without feeling, no belief without desire, no understanding without obedience.

______
*Note that pregnant phrase: "how it feels." How what feels? It. The body. I think but it feels. Consciousness is how it does its thinking: by feeling. The body feels to think

and, thus, I am.

Style is the meeting of
knowledge and mastery.

Your lifestyle is where
your view of life meets
your hold on it.

Thinking is the ability to make up your mind.

Feeling is the ability to take it to heart.

Philosophy and poetry arise from our dissatisfaction with usage. Prose must make use of the language as it is.

(Philosophy, qua literature, is less like prose and more like verse. It accomplishes itself, not in its apodictic assertions, but in its obiter dicta. The "strophes" of poetry become the "remarks" of philosophy, which writhe against the immedicacy of, respectively, our institutions and our intuitions. What matters is not what is stated, but what is turned. Mallarmé's "divagations" and Williams's "improvisations" may be mistaken for prose, as may Frege's elucidations and Wittgenstein's investigations. Mistaken, I say; mistaken. Poetry and philosophy betray their essence when they aspire to science or politics, to say what is and what should be, i.e., to prose. The reader betrays them by taking them straight.)

What I am trying to say is that, beyond our own determination and capriciousness, there is the determinism and caprice of nature (what happens between facts and acts) and culture (what happens between beliefs and desires).

Acts are known only through their effects on the facts. But these effects are not governed by our intentions. We simply do, and see what happens.

Facts are mastered only as we affect them by our acts. But our affects do not question* our expectations. We look around, and see, there, what we have done.

That is, we control neither what facts result from our acts, not what desires emerge from our beliefs.

But, of course, our acts do affect the facts; and our beliefs affect our desires.

It's just that experience intervenes only empirically, between the facts and our beliefs about them, and normatively, between our acts and the desires that drive us to them.

Never between the fact and the act, nor the belief and the desire.

The intellect intervenes between the fact and the belief. (Facts don't make themselves known.) Volition intervenes between the desire and the act. (Acts do not master themselves.) To desire is not to intend and to believe is not to expect. We have some influence on these moments, some responsibility for them.

________
*Update: this originally read "are not curious about," which I changed, first, to "are not wise to" and then to "are not aware of". But I was trying to develop the (pangrammatical) analogy to "governed by," and governance is to our institutions (and our intentions) as inquiry is to our intuitions (and expectations). After some struggle, I realized that the relevant mechanism (or the lack of machination, perhaps?) is precisely one of unquestioning affect.

An image is a concept backed by emotion or an emotion backed by a concept. It either provides a surface that grips and moves you, i.e., an emotional experience, or an appearance that you grasp to steady yourself, i.e., a conceptual experience.

Philosophy is conceptual notation; poetry is emotional notation. They are the means by which we bring our concepts and emotions to presence so that we may make them more precise, affording clear thinking and intense feeling.

They improve our contact with experience: from the facts to our beliefs about them, from our desires to the acts that live them out.

Philosophy converts necessity to possibility;
poetry, vice versa.

"Given this," the philosopher asks,
"what can I think?

"Thus taken," asks the poet,
"what must she feel?"

belief concept expectation reason

desire emotion intention passion

Correctness

realistic expectations
idealistic intentions

accurate predictions
proper indictments

Give me

Olson's special view of history
AND
Quine's general take on the world.

We must assume that Olson was Olson;
and Quine was Quine. Now, some Olsons
no doubt, pretend to be Quines,
occassionally moved and rarely reading,
but a Quine, out at the elbows, his
fly gaping, pretending to be an Olson?

Concepts are more or less intuitive.

Emotions are more
                                or less
                                         institutional.

Alt take

Poets struggle to be clear.

Philosophers eschew intensity.

Poets struggle to be clear.

Philosophers beseech intensity.

If you were emotionally precise about this
you would not be moved.
If you were conceptually precise about it
you could not be stilled.

Belief constrains desire;
desire disturbs belief.

Every full moon is enough.
Given the dead certainty
of its recurrence, there is
no cause for despair. Just
suffer through and circle
back to the wolf you are.

Of things, precision of reference—a perspicuity.

Of people, precision of deference—an intensity.

One wants to be precise:

            clear in the stillness
      of the scene with the thought,
      of the thought with the image,

            sharp in the movement
      from the image to the feeling,
      from the feeling to the deed.

We see what's to be done.

I live in the moment. Unfortunately, on most days, memory and imagination stretches it thirty years into the past and thirty years into the future.

The War Effort

From 1942 to 1945, Charles Olson and W.V.O. Quine were both living and working in Washington, D.C.
Olson was writing propaganda; Quine was breaking codes.

Justice

This is just a sentence.

This is just
                     a poem.

A scientific discovery is always also the discovery of a new source of power.

The function of science is to discover truths, but the function of academia is to maintain ideology. Fortunately, an ideological system that does not allow the discovery of new truths is untenable.

The world remains,
unchanged.
History proceeds
accordingly.

Life is not finished.
It's repeating.

When all the knowledge and all the power has been automated, we will find our work in the grammar.

Theory is to philosophy as practice is to poetry. This is reflected and beheld in the grammar.

That is, I don't have a theory of philosophy and poetry, nor a philosophical or poetic practice. My work is purely grammatical.

* * *

"There is nothing more human (that is, less mineral, vegetal, animal, and even angelical) than grammar." (Jorge Luis Borges)

"I am a grammarian. We will or we will not cry together." (Getrude Stein)

Writing carries its own weight.

We cannot build a creature that knows its place.

You can't fight evil with laws.
Evil wants to be illegal.

It may be the purpose of any species to produce individuals that can experience great love or great wisdom. This would explain our suffering and could even justify it.

You don't build a civilization by killing barbarians.

A poem should remind you that you have a body;
your philosophy should help you to forget.

Writers are those for whom composure is a problem.
It is unclear to them how to coordinate their concepts
with their emotions, their eyes and hands. It's not
easy for them. (They are uneasy.) The page helps them.

"I do feel poems to involve an occasion to which a man pays obedience, and which intentions alone never yield." (Robert Creeley, QG, p. 54)

The idea here is that the poet has an experience that seems meaningful but this is merely the occasion (an inspiration?) that the poet must now obey in order to make the poem. "That which exists through itself," Creeley quotes Olson, "is what is called meaning."

The philosopher works differently, also confronted by some thing, apparently meaningful, but taking it as an existence, not an inspiration, pursues the occasion to understand it.

* * *

I think I will begin using the blog for notes of my readings now. Something is coming together for SaETItC. It will be nice to have a searchable trail. (Creeley, of course, is to Olson as Davidson is to Quine.)

I think like Frege. I feel like Mallarmé.

I imagine facts like Wittgenstein;
                  the field of action,
                                    like Williams.

Quine's objective pull, from the many to the one;
Olson's subjective push, from the one to the many.

Though we do not experience pure forms,
we can know them.

Though we do not experience raw content,
we can master it.

Nothing ever appears in experience in its pure form.

Nor is there any raw content on the surface experience.

It is only in imagination, where form and content combine,
that we experience things. We imagine their innocence.

Somehow the body,
in its entirety
and its privacy,
is our answer.

I comes at you like rain;
you weather it.

Turn a paragraph; write beside a strophe.

The wonder is not what human bodies can do but that human bodies can do it.

Youth is the (blessed) inability to distinguish between the discovery and invention of who you are.

Poems are composed. Philosophies are compromised.

Was der Fall ist

The world is everything that is the case; history befalls us.

Why do I write? When people tell me I have hurt them, I have a large space inside me to process their complaint. That's it.

Every poem is composed in composure;
every philosophy, compromised by compromise.

Nothing cannot be
described
out of existence;

It can't be understood
away.

Any sufficiently advanced 24-year-old is indistinguishable from magic.

You are imagining
some big mind
that will vouch for you
and you look up
and it's just us trying
to make sense of it.

"I have the idea of an objective reality which is independent of my belief." (Donald Davidson, "Rational Animals," p. 326)

The reality is that subjective ideality is dependent upon my desire.

The moment touches the skin;
eternity touches the soul.

The soul is as familiar to us as the skin.

In 1839, Theodor Schwann published his Microscopical researches into the accordance in the structure and growth of animals and plants, the basis of cell theory.

In 1844, Søren Kierkegaard published the Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin.

_______
"To be hearing the inspirations of the angel when one is kissing the flames is a condition so implicit with agony that it took eighteen centuries of Christendom before Kierkegaard could come back alive with the knowledge that such moments not only existed but were the characteristic way modern man found knowledge of his soul — which is to say that he found it by the act of perceiving that he was most certainly losing it." -Norman Mailer, preface to Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters), 1962

Thankfully, the soul knows
almost nothing of
what the flesh in known for.
Nor can everything
it learns be put into words.

Credo, Desiderata

for danielle

I aim to be credible in the moment, sufferable for a time,
desirable at a distance, and tolerable in bed.

Don't bother making things
famous. They don't need it.

And don't bother people with
fame. It destroys them.

The substrate of consciousness is life.
Your soul depends on it.

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).