Ever disciplined,
my body stands
before you,
breathing calmly.

Often punished,
my soul flutters
within me
and sighs.

Philosophers will not believe what they cannot understand. Poets, though they are often less conscious of it, follow a similar principle. They cannot desire what they will not obey.

In the everyday, the artist is merely a being who feels a range of life's difficulties more acutely than the rest of us. There is no particular nobility in the difficulty; which is to say, the artist is not ennobled simply by doing the requisite suffering. Nor does the artist win our admiration by solving the problem. After all, we solve it matter-of-factly in our own lives every day. Rather, the artist contributes by articulating the suffering we all do, less intensely, less perspicuously, in our comings and goings, our doings and occasional undoings. The artist makes this suffering available to us in the work and we can then face our difficulties more precisely. Whether the artist is finally destroyed by the effort is of little importance to us on a purely technical or, let us say, aesthetic level. Morally, we may care or not care as our empathy permits, or as it demands. What matters is that the work be articulate.

Beyond the social media
there are material facts.

Between the body and the tribe,
in essence and in accident,
life emerges and then thrives,

and dies, and rots, and grows
and thrives again, immediately.

It is said that marriage is an unreliable method for the production of human happiness. But it must also be said that it is hard to imagine a truly unhappy human being in a truly happy marriage. Now, half of all marriages are said to end in divorce. Let us grant the cynics that only half of all the marriages that last are truly happy ones. That still leaves us with hundreds of millions of individuals who we cannot really imagine are truly unhappy. Does that not, I ask you, in itself justify the entire institution?

These are sketches,
of thoughts,
of feelings,
of the images
they occasion.

If the sociologists
would stop leaning on
our hearts,

if the psychologists
would stop prying up
our souls,

our poets
could work again and lift
our spirits.

Outrage does to the heart what
insight does to the mind.

The mob overwhelms the institution—
an intuition, undermined in a flash.

But emotions keep our feelings tight.
Concepts keep our thinking clear.

May we extricate ourselves
from this history,
and implicate these things
in the world.

In ordinary life,
when expressing your thoughts,
be honest;
when expressing your feelings,
be decent.

In your science,
strive for truth, and
in your politics,
strive for justice.

Your poetry, however,
can take some license.
And your philosophy?
Let them howl.

Structure is to existence
as texture to inspiration.

Standing is to space
as breathing to time.

The profundity of philosophy
is covered by its judicious obscurity.

The pretensions of poetry
are supported by its sublime violence.

"One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it." (Wittgenstein, PI§114)

The material fact
of social acts,
the structure under
the texture.

A concept,
an emotion.
A thought
a feeling.

The calm mind,
and a heartbeat:
skull and bones,
flesh and blood.

Philosophy barely
makes sense.
A poem only just
moves you.

Therein lies
their precision:
their clarity,
their intensity.

____________


When you have come to understand a philosophical proposition immediately, it has ceased to be philosophical for you. It has become a statement of science, a piece of knowledge. Likewise when a poem seizes you completely and forces your obedience, it is no longer a poem. It has become a policy, a locus of power. Philosophers and poets do, in fact, sometimes succumb to the temptation to seek the authority of scientists and politicians. Alternatively, they may hone a contradiction or venture a seduction, they may traffic in paradoxes or cavort with paramours. They become sages and lovers. None of this is art.

The imprecision of our
emotional lives
is not made necessary
by emotions themselves
but is made possible
by life as it is,
imprecise, all around us.

The essential thing in the poet,
said Ezra Pound,
is that he build us his world.

The correct method in philosophy,
said Ludwig Wittgenstein,
is to say only what can be said.

To write a poem about a song,
to philosophize about a painting—
is it our envy of the noisier, showier
artist, one with an actual public,
that moves us to annotate their work?

Once the culture has already committed
itself to a melody or an image,
we seize upon its intensity, its clarity
and offer our "refinement", as if
the artist's aim was just to entertain.

Let us not repeal
the rain just yet.
It has fallen for days
and I suspect
it has some purpose.

The scientist relates to nature through his method,
with which he holds his desire at a distance.

The politician relates to culture through his mandate,
with which he suspends our disbelief.

The artist relates to his nature and his culture
through suffering—through the distance between
his beliefs and his desires.

Lacking a method, the philosopher (an artist)
must suffer his detachment from desire.
Lacking a mandate, the poet
must suffer his detachment from belief.

The scientist need not suffer his detachment.
He has his apparatus. The politician need not suffer
his detachment. He has his machine.

Philosophers and poets are artists.
Unprepared. Without machination.
Only their suffering to represent them.

There may be some philosophy,
some poetry, in these lines.

But wisdom isn't like this.
Love is not like them.

There is no bone to break,
no flesh here to cut.

These frictionless planes
are only models of pain.

I am pulled towards the "nothing",
but always find someone there.
I throw myself at "no one",
and something blocks my way.
I can escape existence
but only by way of inspiration;
I can cease to be only in becoming.