Do not seek wisdom. Just reflect on the wisdom you have. Everything is an epiphany. There is no fact to uncover, no scam to get wise to. Everybody knows what you're looking for.

Do not seek love...

Speech is one of the least dangerous things you can do with your ideas. Writing is utterly harmless.

The goal of thinking is to stop thinking.
And begin to see.

The goal of feeling is to stop feeling.
And do something.

Philosophy seeks
precision in stillness:
clarity. Wisdom.

Poetry seeks
precision in movement:
intensity. Love.

Love your enemies.
Fuck them.

Persist. The future
will present itself
              as the past
of least resistance.

Philosophy makes you think better.
It makes your doubts stronger,
your convictions weaker,
your ecstacy precise.

I wanted to be an artist.
But we seemed to have enough of them.

Poetry makes you feel better.
It makes your pain sharper,
your joy brighter,
your suffering precise.

Modern Living

Must we suffer?
No. But we should.

Love is the movement
of the heart
through which we
become ourselves.

Wisdom is the stillness
of the mind,
where everything
is what it is.

Our poems bring precision
to the motion
of the heart — intensity.

Philosophy brings precision
to the calm
of the mind — a clarity.

When the tension of the string
in the lyre,

when the sharpness of the light
              in the lamp,

is tuned
              and focused,

I am alone.

Always remember that melancholy is caused by a humor.
E.g.:

"True happiness is an illusion. Fortunately, most happiness is fake."

The poet receives inspiration.

The philosopher endures existence.

The philosopher's obsession
with existence resembles
the poet's possession
by inspiration. For both

it is a matter of sitting:
the philosopher must sit and face
what is, while the poet has to
sit and hold what is to come.

Thus their labors are divided
between one's earnest being
and another's sly becoming,
between the essence of the thing

and the emergence of the people,
brought together in imagination.

A story, said Hemingway, is a sequence of fact and motion.
Perhaps an argument is a consort of act and grasping.

To know how to act is to have power.
Knowledge is a mastery of facts.

The philosopher is inspired by the brute fact of existence.

The poet exists for the pure act of inspiration.

I may have to correct my thinking on discipline. Perhaps discipline is to power as intelligence is to knowledge. Cf. "Study & Strive", "Discipline and Freedom", and "Pangrammatical Laces"

I am literally looking for the spot where existence touches inspiration. I must find its figure in time.

It was his tenuous hold on his existence that made him a philosopher, always tentatively groping in the dark for concepts with which to grasp the reality.

Ever attentive to her inspiration, by contrast, she was a poet, tensely straining at her bonds with an emotion that seized her ideally.