God bless the troubadour, free spirit of romance, who teaches us to appreciate an inaccessible beauty, to value pleasures from which we are barred, by circumstance or disposition, and accept a deeper longing for the other, a firmer hold upon our ourselves, not merely as recompense for our suffering, but as the very revelation of our capacity to love.
Tuesday, November 05, 2024
Sunday, November 03, 2024
Friday, October 25, 2024
Socratic Meditations
Rightness in the way of desire:
knowing what is good for you.
Rightness in the way of a belief:
mastering what is truly before you.
Know yourself and do what you will.
"Master thyself then others shall ye bear." (E.P.)
Knowledge is the learning that lasts.
Power is a freedom that grows.
See also: "Discipline and Freedom"
Saturday, October 12, 2024
Friday, October 11, 2024
Monday, October 07, 2024
Tuesday, October 01, 2024
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
Friday, August 30, 2024
The Myth of the Chinese Written Character
We wanted to believe in a silent writing. We wanted to believe in a reading that evoked no sounds, only images, so that the text could never be simply read out loud. To recite any text you would first have to form its ideas in your mind. Only then would you choose the words of the spoken language to represent the thought, just as one might recount a memory, or describe a passing scene. The signs on the page could not determine the sounds in the air. Between the poem and the performance there would always be a picture. There would be no reading without imagination.
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
Saturday, August 17, 2024
Wednesday, August 14, 2024
Thursday, August 08, 2024
Ergriffsschrift
Poetry is a sort inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but equations for the human emotions. (E.P.)
Frege taught us that language has "functions":
Concept(object) = a true or false thought.
Likewise, perhaps
Emotion(subject) = a good or bad feeling?
Note that an object is a possible combination of things and a subject is the necessary isolation of a person. (Cf. Woolf on the loneliness that is the truth of things.)
Saturday, August 03, 2024
Friday, August 02, 2024
Thursday, August 01, 2024
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
Non supra grammaticos
Do not read poetry to learn about poets or even poetry, but to learn the language, to submit to the grammar of feeling, and do not read philosophy to learn about philosophy, nor, most certainly, to learn about philosophers, but, again, to learn the language, to serve the grammar of thought.
Saturday, July 27, 2024
Vice Versa?
Does one keep at it until it becomes a paragraph or
does the sheer
persistence of the prose
produce the poem?