Tuesday, November 05, 2024

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.

Sunday, November 03, 2024

Solace

I've been wrong about everything so far.
I may well be wrong about the rest.

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

Children naturally resent being treated like children.
Why do adults demand it?

Friday, October 11, 2024

We're ever ready to accuse our politicians of corruption,
but reticent to suggest that our scientists are confused.

Monday, October 07, 2024

I once made a map
of all the bridges
I have burned. Then
I burned the map.

---

Alt. take:

Let us make a map
of the all the bridges
we have burned. Then
let us burn the map.

---

Alt. take:

I once made a map
of all the bridges
I have burned. Today
I burned the map.

Tuesday, October 01, 2024

The way that can be followed isn't actually the way.

The name you can call it by isn't actually its name.

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

I now know what Mallarmé meant

by, "The world exists to end up in a book,"

and, "Destruction was my Beatrice."

He meant the same damned thing.

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

The function of art is not to get you thinking but to end your thoughtlessness. It is not to make you feel something but to assuage your callousness.

Institutions are the way we do things, immediately, without thinking.

Intuitions are the way we see things, immediately, without feeling.

Experience is what makes us think and feel, i.e., imagine.

Imagination is the means by which our intuitions and our institutions change.

Saturday, August 17, 2024

Literature doesn't change you. It helps you live with who you have become.

Wednesday, August 14, 2024

Explication de Texte

No philosopher is as wise as their art implies, nor poet, as loving.

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

Do not write a book because you hope it will be read.
Write a book because it must.

Friday, August 02, 2024

What they say about fascism is mostly true.
But what they say about democracy is not.

Thursday, August 01, 2024

I am sometimes accused of expecting too much of my students, sometimes of not giving them enough credit, too often, of course, by the same people, in the same breath.

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?