Can we hurt better?
Can we feel pain
           more precisely?
Can we cause pain
           more deliberately?
If so, and if I may say so,
we have a lot to learn.

Plato stands
between Pythagoras and
Archimedes,

as an idea,
after proportion, before
exhaustion.

Why do you want
to believe
when you already have
your desires?

"Those who work at their studies increase day after day. Those who have heard the Tao decrease day after day." (Lao Tzu)

We study in order to learn,
hoping to gain wisdom.
We strive in order to be free,
hoping to find love.

We hope to find and gain,
but only when we lose
do we listen. And only when
we are alone do we hear.

Study & Strive

Cf. Paul Ricoeur

Science applies a hermeneutics of suspicion to our senses. Philosophy recovers them.

This is our method of study.

Politics applies a hermeneutics of suspicion to our motives. Poetry recovers them.

This is our mandate to strive.

See also: "Doctrine of Method."

See also: "Discipline and Freedom." The purpose of our studies is learning, wisdom; the purpose of our striving is freedom, love.

We know a house confusedly
before we know its parts,
said Aquinas. So, likewise,
we know Man confusedly
before we know the part that
is his nature. Let me add:

We know ourselves confusedly
before we know our hearts.
So we grope, clumsy and unwise,
at the parts of others,
distracted by their flesh,
searching for their nature.

Life is the coordination
and deterioration
                of the hands
                and eyes,
with blood and bones,
                soul and flesh,
between them to take
the pleasure and the pain.

It took him years to feel the loss
precisely enough to put behind him.
By then, he was involved with the next
woman he would lose to his rivalry
with his past, forever presenting
itself as though it had no future.

He walked for miles, only to find it
exactly where he threw it down.
And there he broke it to appease
the ghosts of two much younger lovers—
one dead inside him, and one interred
inside a happy woman far away.

People exist.
Things are merely
                       extant.

What are things like?
Other things.

What are people like?
Other people.

The body coordinates
the hand and eye,
                 imagination,
the heart and mind.

_______
See also "The image interpolates..."

"Literature is equipment for living."
Kenneth Burke

An education consists in the arrangement of lenses and levers around an individual. It establishes the perspective from which we view the world and the apparatus through which we make our history. It lays out the manifold paths through which all light comes to us, and all weight bears upon us. It focuses our thinking and locates our feeling. It establishes the place we inhabit. It engenders the way we proceed.

The eye is a lens,
the arm, a lever.

To the focus of vision,
the body joins
a locus of motion,

a perspective, to
an apparatus.

A poem has a subject,
      some private sorrow or
      distant woman,
but it is not about her
and is not involved
in anybody's grief.
Not even yours, dear reader,
who are so smugly certain
      that she won't come back.
The poem doesn't touch you.
It just lays out
      the private distance
      between men and women
and their broken hearts.

Likewise, though philosophy sometimes has an object, it is neither here nor there. You don't care about a solitary thing. It's the thinghood of the thing, its likeness to every other blasted thing, that draws your metaphysic in. But not hers. "If you've seen one thing, you've seen them all," she said. I have been of two minds about her ever since.

A poem extricates itself
from history, frees its subject
from the policies
that govern her face.

A philosophy implicates itself
in the world, binds its object
to the sciences
that study her smile.

Those who demand a culture to
nurture their natural
creativity and curiosity
must grant a place for those who
cultivate their innate
ambition and avarice.

Between existence and institution,
the body stands.

Between inspiration and intuition,
the body breathes.

Between the nuance and the act,
the body stares.

Between the impulse and the fact,
the body falls.

We are distracted.
We are pulled apart
by our reasons and passions,
our concepts and emotions straining
at the joints
of imagination.

We gather these images
in the arts. Marshaling
our thoughts and feelings,
our beliefs and our desires,
we get it together.
We find our composure.

"Ideology is the 'faith' of progressives. Conservative 'ideology' is always religion." Discuss.

Belief is
to knowledge
as desire
to power.

Hunches are
to wisdom
as crushes
to love.

All knowledge is objective:
it refers to something.

All power is subjective:
it defers to someone.

Objects are things
construed as possibitities,
as facts that may be,
ways they might be seen.

Subjects are people
delegated as necessities,
as acts that must happen,
deeds that must be done.

Concepts determine the ways
things can be seen
(even if they go unnoticed.)

Emotions determine the deeds
people must do
(even if they lack the courage.)

Objects are what you must think
of things, like it
or not. Thus, they are understood
or misunderstood.

Subjects are what people feel
they may become, whatever
they believe. They obey
or disobey accordingly.

We see the world—
the things in it.

But history is done.
All those people!

The universe is a distribution
of light
        and weight,
of shimmering pleasures
and awkward burdens.

We carry them, and ourselves,
graciously, sometimes
        clumsily.
Enthralled, forgiving,
we carry each other.

"It" is
to philosophy

as

"you" are
to poetry.

But note:

Philosophy clarifies
how you think.

And poetry intensifies
how it feels.

Prose is language taken for granted.
Verse is language turned for pleasure.

Sometimes, we can't repress what reason affords us. Sometimes, we must.

Sometimes, we can't afford
to repress a passion. Sometimes,
we can't afford not to.

The hero is no hypocrite.
He courts the danger openly.
When he falls, the coward
must not say,"I told you so."

The aphorism plumbs a depth it cannot fathom. It hangs its light in darkness.