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.