Everything in the world resists ending up in a book.
Writing is the texture of their resistance.

Whenever I have an idea
reality puts me in my place.

Wherever it gets real,
ideally, I'll have a moment.

She believed in balance.

Whenever I found a way to make her life better,
she started looking for ways to destroy mine.

Where are beings?
In becoming.
When do they come?
Eventually.

What is being?
It is what it is.
Who is coming?
You know who.

I think fiction may be a scam.

Philosophy is about what must be true if anything is.

There's nothing like that to poetic justice.

Act, Fact, Artifact

People act; they do things. Facts are things done.

People get together to act. Things brought together are facts.

Things are just lying around. Facts accomplish them.

People make artifacts out of the things they find.

I am sane and,
also, I am not.

All facts are themselves. “Each item can be the case or not the case, while everything else remains the same.”

All acts are collective. A deed may be done by one of us, but is condoned or denounced by everyone else.

"The pain is part of it," she said
and I laughed, because it is
a funny thing to say.
But now I know what she meant.
The sadness in her voice
is a memory, and my tears—
I tell you, the pain is part of it.

Two Things Can Be True

Everyone deserves the love they get.
No one deserves the love they get.

You can't solve the problem
of being
         by becoming
                  a man
            or a woman.

Just be yourself.
That's hard enough.

Wisdom is non-attachment; i.e.,
love is folly.

War Economy

Just before the first Gulf War in 1990, $5 was worth $11 in today's money. Compounded at 5%, you'd have about $22 today. But if you had invested it in Raytheon stock and sold on the day Putin invaded Ukraine you'd have $100 dollars.

Decency is the immediate rightness of conduct given one's desires, as honesty is the immediate rightness of conduct given one's beliefs.

Decency does not guarantee justice, nor does honesty guarantee truth. Indeed, the pursuit of truth sometimes requires dishonesty, and the pursuit of justice sometimes requires indecency.

Science is the pursuit of truth, constrained by honesty, not decency.

Politics is the pursuit of justice, constrained by decency, not honesty.

Art is a scandal.

A conspiracy theorist is not someone who believes that a conspiracy took place. It is someone who thinks it is an empirical question whether it did.

"May God forgive what you have done to me. I cannot."

This sentiment can be perfectly sincere. Indeed, two people who have hurt each other can each pray for the other's forgiveness without themselves being able to forgive.

Two paintings, two harbors,
four years and five hundred
nautical miles apart. Blues
that only eyes have seen.

Philosophy elucidates the logic of assertion.
Poetry aggravates the pathos of injunction.

Two Errors

To seek truth when justice must be done.

To demand justice where the truth is hidden.

We believe in facts.
We desire to act.

This is important. While our fantasies often present themselves to us as utopias of imaginary fact, our desires are imagined acts. We do not, properly speaking, desire the ends, we might say, but the means. We do not want to possess our love; we want to pursue her. We do not want to see our enemy dead; we want to kill him.

Dasein is kitsch
for existence, as

duende is kitsch
for inspiration.

Cf. Jonathan Mayhew.

He would not inflict his apprenticeship upon the world.
As if to return the favor, the world refused his mastery.

Good News, and Bad

The genius of Christ's message was not to try to tell you that it's not your fault. He knew you wouldn't believe that. (You were there.) It was to tell you that you are forgiven for the sins you can never redeem yourself. He suggested you rejoice at the news. Repent, sure. But then rejoice.

This is far superior to the current secular religion, according to which you are to blame for things you didn't do and can't prevent, are guilty of things you would never do and will never see undone, and are at the mercy of people without grace. They would have you do the work and despair.

Truth must be thought;
it must be held in the mind.
Justice must be felt;
it must move our hearts.

Use philosophy (conceptual notation)
to clarify your thoughts.
Use emotional notation (poetry)
to intensify your feelings.

It is what it is.
"You must change your life."

Love is the master emotion. Wisdom is the master concept.

Love governs all feeling. Wisdom queries all thought.

To "feel better" is to become more capable of love.
Better thinking is greater receptivity to wisdom.

Bad feelings make us less loving.
Bad thoughts make us less wise.

Every feeling strives for love. Every thought is a study in wisdom.

One way — perhaps the most common way — to think about philosophical domains — "the philosophy of science", "the philosophy of mind", "the philosophy of language" — is as a particular kind of "theory" of a particular kind of object. One could, on this view, also have an "economics" or a "psychology" or an "anthropology" of the same objects (science, mind, language).

Or one could have a "poetics" of them. Or a "history".

But with "history" we must stop for a moment and remember that it denotes both a theory and an object — indeed, it denotes a theory and a practice. "The history of mind" can refer to an academic disicipline or the actual past.

It is that second sense that I wish to approach in my use of the word "philosophy". Consider an alternative to "poetics": poetry. Not "the poetics of science" but "the poetry of science" (or mind or language).

Just as philosophy is a natural part of the practice of science, mind, and language, just as we might, indeed, argue that you cannot do science, be mindful, or use language, without having a philosophy, or, better, doing philosophy, practicing it, we might also say that "the poetry of politics", "the poetry of the heart", are inseperable from their "objects", perhaps most obviously in "the poetry of language".

Long Games

Honesty tends toward the truth.
Decency bends towards justice.

Be honest about what you think
but not what you feel. Be decent
about your feelings. Be precise.

The Actual Program Is Different

There is the program they sell you,
the program you buy.
It is a perfectly good program.
It will not harm you.
It will do you a lot of good.
But it is not the actual program.
The actual program is different.
It runs in the background.
Do your thing. Let it run.
Humor it, if you will.

The actual program will hurt.
But it will not cause permanent damage.
The actual program will not improve your life.
It will hurt and it will do you no good.
But the actual program never harms you.
There's no reason to fight the actual program.
The actual program doesn't care about you.
It does not hate you.
It is the actual program, that is all.
Actually, no. That's not all. Far from it.

Modernity Is Insufferable

Wisdom yields to knowledge,
knowledge to information.

Love yields to power,
power to indignation.

Character becomes personality.
Soul becomes identity.

And now, when given benediction,
we demand validation.

We seek affirmation
when we need forgiveness.

Our acts can be articulated as precisely as our facts.

Strive for clarity in your descriptions, intensity in your prescriptions.

It is only as a prescription that an act can be articulated precisely. The precision of the prescription is its intensity.

"A great clearness is the enemy of all enthusiasm whatsoever." (Edmund Burke)

A clear description of an act is no such thing. It is, perhaps, a description of a fait accompli. It merely states the fact that resulted from the deed.

When the fact is articulated with clarity its truth can be thought.

It is only in a command that the act is articulated. Only when actually ordered, can its justice be felt.

The world is
to our history
as a picture
to a melody,

as a map
to a story,
a place
to an event.

What is it?
Who are we?
Let it be.
Let them come.

Philosophy is conceptual notation, the art of writing down how we think; poetry is emotional notation, the art of writing down how we feel. How, not what. The point is to note the concept, not the thought; the emotion, not the feeling.

The concept makes thought possible in the void. It presents us with the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, the experience of things as objects. We think we can know (or ignore) something here.

The emotion makes feeling necessary in the moment. It gives presence to the occasion of the necessity of power, the experience of people as subjects. We feel we must master (or serve) somebody now.

Writing maintains the language, the grammar of knowledge and power, the words for things and people, the joint between objects and subjects. Philosophy makes it clear; poetry keeps it tight.

State/change of mind/heart

We speak of a "state of mind" as naturally as we speak of a "change of heart". A thought is essentially a state of mind, just as feelings emerge from our changes of heart.

We may say that thinking (an act) changes our state of mind. Conversely (pangrammatically), we can say that a feeling (a fact) "states" a change of heart, i.e., it registers it. We notice our changes of heart by feeling. We trouble our state of mind by thinking.

Philosophy is conceptual notation; it takes note of our states of mind in order to bring our concepts to presence. This helps us think better.

Poetry is emotional notation; it notes our changes of heart and brings our emotions to presence. This helps us feel better.

It's natural to ask successful poets what "poetry" is. But would it not be more interesting to ask failed poets?

Now do "business" and "politics".

Fait Accompli

To read a poem, you must feel
the image, the act
implicit in it.

Prose saves you the trouble, making the fact explicit.

I hate these things as much as you do.

I mean poems.
I mean reading them.
Out loud.
I don't mind writing them.
It's what I do.
I do it without complaining.
I put the words down.
It's lifting them off the page I could do without.
I wouldn't ask my worst enemy to do it.
I wouldn't put my words in their mouth.
Gross.
It occurs to me that this is a perfect poem
to start a poetry reading with.

My cowardice explains many things.
My courage remains a mystery.

Truth is a relation between a thought and an arrangement of things.

Justice is the position of a feeling within a community of people.

"...the limitation of logic to things within the world..." (Russell on Wittgenstein's Tractatus)

Cf. the fixation of the epic on people through history.

Philosophy extricates a thought from its scientific intricacy.

Poetry extricates a feeling from its political intrigue.

If I am lucky, I will die from lack of discipline.

Epic

I wrote two paragraphs recently that mark an important shift in my thinking. What I have been calling the Tractatus Pathetico-Poeticus would better be called the Tractatus Epico-Poeticus.

This has two important advantages. First, I've never liked the way it sounds when "logical" is replaced with "pathetic", as in "a pathetic picture of the acts". "Epic" has a nicer ring to it. Also, "epic" and "logical" can both be traced back to a root in speech. Their indication of "reason" and "passion" comes later in world-history.

* * *

“The world is everything that is the case,” Wittgenstein famously began his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “the totality of facts, not things.” I have often imagined a, let us say, Tractatus Epico-Poeticus that begins, “History is everything that happens, the totality of acts, not people.” It is not merely the story of us all, but of all that we have done. Like the world, it is comprehensive; it doesn’t leave anyone out. Even the most marginalized people are marginalized by history; even the most forgotten are forgotten, precisely, by history. The most ordinary lives are part of history because it reaches right up to the present, the present moment of our entirely practical lives. It presents itself to us through the needs and demands of the people around us. “What is the case is that there are states of affairs,” said Wittgenstein. “A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things).” Without facts, if things were not the case, they would just be lying around every which way, adding up to nothing. Likewise, if everyone just minded their own business there would be no history. History is everyone who is on my case.

“Writing as Freedom is therefore a mere moment,” said Barthes. “But this moment is one of the most explicit in History, since History is always and above all a choice and the limits of that choice.” Every time a writer sits down to compose a deliberate paragraph, history is articulating itself. A mind asserts its freedom to think and appreciates its finitude. For a moment, all the pressures of life (the totality of which just is History) are suspended — the desk is cleared — simply because the writer has chosen to arrange some words on a page for a few minutes. The words will be the writer’s free choice and they will be put in the order the writer chooses; anything can happen. But not everything; the writer has also, no less freely, chosen a theme and a genre, something to write about and someone to read it. This is a choice of limits, as was the practical matter of writing the paragraph between 7:30 and 8:00 in the morning. All over the world, writing like this is happening as we speak. These moments are perhaps the most explicit in history.

Let's be honest. We're all pretty comfortable with the people running things behind the scenes.

Trigger Warning

This is a work of art. Anything can happen.

Between the fact and the image
may you find your philosophy.
Between the image and the act,
                                  your poetry.

In accordance with the strange customs of her people, she had been raised to believe in herself. Of course, in accordance with those same customs, her parents had long ago lost all faith. All of the histories of her people, and, before that, all the stories of the tribe, were histories of failure, stories of defeat, through which the only moral to be drawn could be that you will survive, despite everything. It is no wonder, then, that the word for belief in her native tongue was the same as the word for spite. In most contexts, it made no difference what she meant.

Some people like me. Some people don't. They are both right, and both wrong, about different things.

The universe uses our concepts to think.
Emotions are how it feels.

He would now set about to do deliberately
what he had once done only desperately.

Things make facts possible.
People make acts necessary.

We know things only through the facts they make possible.
We master people only through the acts they make necessary.

In some facts, some possibilities are immediately apparent. Intuitively, we call these things objects.
In some acts, some necessities come immediately to the surface. Institutionally, we call these people subjects.

Science is to our intuitions as politics to our institutions. But

there are scientific institutions and political intuitions.

Inuitions, we might say, are essentially scientific but emergently political, while institutions are essentially political and science merely emerges from them.

The institutionalization of science threatens to politicize it. There's a danger there.

But the presence of intuition in politics opens it to science. That's the saving power.

Intuition and institution are the media of immediacy—that "through which" objects are known and subjects mastered "immediately", to use the Kantian idiom. Technology and propaganda are, of course, the corresponding "media".

(This, of course, refers to Heidegger's reading of Hölderlin.)

You're affronted because machines now speak for you?
After everything they've already done for you?

The people we master as subjects eventually become the emotions through which we feel them.

The things we can know about an object are contingent on the concepts we have to think them.

Some books should be given tenure.
Then let them say what they want.

"Meanwhile, SPRING, which has been approaching for several pages, is at last here." (William Carlos Williams, 1923).

We are forever chasing the origin through the tradition.

Twenty years ago, I wanted to be a public intellectual because I thought some people would think I'm right and others that I'm wrong but everyone would learn something from the debate. Today, I'm glad I failed because being a public intellectual means letting some people think you're good and others that you're bad and accepting that no one has to learn anything at all from that.

"What is behind
your facade?"

"Just me,
holding it up."

In English, the root of boredom
is drudgery.

In Danish, it is sadness.

Intuition is that through which
objects are known immediately.

Institution is that through which
subjects are mastered immediately.

Intuition and institution are
the media of immediacy.

Imagination is the immediacy
of their mediation.

If you want your privacy, you have to keep it
like a secret.

Authenticity is not a moral center. You cannot be your own authority.

Creativity is not a causal process. The work does not become its own creation.

* * *

This one was fun to make. The first strophe about authenticity is somewhat classical, even conservative, and the rather Bergsonian romanticism of the second emerged gradually with some very deliberate pangrammatical craftiness, to yield a subtly radical result.

First, the "moral center" was transposed into a "causal process"; then "your" "being" became a "becoming" (of some as yet unspecified "it" in my notes). After a while "creativity" presented itself as the pangrammatical supplement of "authenticity" (an impersonal becoming to balance that personal sort of being).

It took a walk to identify "the work" as "your" dangerous supplement. (I considered "an art does not become its own work" but I wanted creativity/creation to match authenticity/authority.) At this point I realized that things had gotten outright anti-Oedipal. "It is at work everywhere," as I recall. "Eating, shitting, fucking. What a mistake to ever call it the Id." Not Ego-Id, then, but your-work. Your. Fucking. Work.

Do it.

Courage shines.
It brightens the room.

Cowardice hangs in the air.
It stinks.

Wisdom is the stillness
of the mind
in which things
are what they are.

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

After Ezra Pound

I don’t know how humanity stands it
breaking up without knowing the reason
breaking up knowing the reason
the dwarf morning-glory twines round the grass blade.

Honesty in expression,
decency in comportment.

Brutal honesty with oneself,
common decency towards others.

Brutal honesty. Common decency.

Causes are reasons
things happen.

Morals are passions
people serve.

Without us,
the causal universe
could not imagine
the moral universe
within us.

War is a market.

Truth is the sense
that our words can sustain
in the face of experience.

Justice is the sustainability
of our motives.

The philosopher exists
to take perception
back to being
in language,
becoming the pith
of action, giving
inspiration to the poet.

Everyone's romance just got a little harder.

On the Bad Quarto

Our passions would be general.

May our reasons be specific.

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.