It is not that art is stronger than science. It's that science is only as strong as the arts that make it possible.
Saturday, December 07, 2024
Friday, December 06, 2024
"There is the question: what relation must one fact (such as a sentence) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other? This is a logical question, and it is the one with which Mr. Wittgenstein is concerned." (Bertrand Russell)
There is another question: what relation must one fact (such as a body) have to another in order to be receptive to the symbolism of that other? This is a question of pathos, and it is one that Mallarmé, Williams, and Olson were very much conerned about.
Wednesday, December 04, 2024
Saturday, November 30, 2024
You'll Get Over It
Poetry makes you feel better.
It does not make you happy
when you are sad. It makes
your sadness more precise.
Monday, November 25, 2024
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Friday, November 15, 2024
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Monday, November 11, 2024
Thursday, November 07, 2024
Incipit Vita Nova
She was "the blessed one," though few understood the meaning of her name. Blessed, too, was he to experience this woman, if only twice, some nine years apart, in his "old life," but perfectly.
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
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?
Sunday, July 14, 2024
Tractatus Pathetico-Poeticus 1-1.21
1 History is all that befalls us. (History is everyone who is on my case.)
1.1 The elements of history are acts, not people.
1.11 History appropriates what happens, thereby making them our acts.
1.12 For the elemental act appropriates both what went down and who did it.
1.13 Acts in a time of pathos are history.
1.2 History gathers the acts.
1.21 Shit happens. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Thursday, July 11, 2024
Wednesday, July 10, 2024
Monday, July 08, 2024
Pleasure, I have said, is to power,
as certainty to knowledge. But
perhaps it is not mere pleasure
that we seek; perhaps it is felicity.
To see the truth and be sure.
To do good and be happy.
Certainty is the end of epistemology, its goal. (If we were always and easily sure there would be no need for epistemology.)
Felicity is the end of ethics, its goal. (Happiness is the highest good and if it were easy there would be no need for ethics.)
Friday, July 05, 2024
It Is Neither
It displays no intellect,
just makes predictions.
Its output is, not artifice,
but fabrication.
Wednesday, July 03, 2024
Tuesday, July 02, 2024
Monday, June 24, 2024
Monday, June 03, 2024
Friday, May 17, 2024
Sunday, April 28, 2024
Monday, April 22, 2024
Sunday, April 21, 2024
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
It isn't a balance. There is no scale.
You want clarity in thought
and intensity in feeling;
your emotions should be strong
but your concepts, sharp.
You cannot simply weigh
your passions against your reasons.
You can only move into the light.
Friday, April 12, 2024
Sunday, April 07, 2024
Sunday, March 31, 2024
Monday, March 25, 2024
Sunday, March 24, 2024
Monday, March 18, 2024
Tuesday, March 05, 2024
Saturday, March 02, 2024
Sunday, February 11, 2024
Tuesday, February 06, 2024
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Language, Justice, and Music
"Must [the metaphysician] not begin," asks Ayer, "as other men do, with the evidence of his senses? And if so, what valid process of reasoning can possibly lead him to the conception of a transcendental reality?"
Must he?
Could one not begin with the facility* of our motions, even the perfection* of our motives? And if so, could we not be driven through brilliant moments of passion to an enthusiasm for an immanent ideality?
To be sure, that may not quite amount to a "metaphysics". But why always begin where philosophers would have us, here. Why always Dasein, not duende. Why not listen to the muses? Surely, they are not all sirens. And surely our senses, too, sometimes deceive.
Whereof we cannot sing, thereof we must dance.
______
*The root of evidence is to "see fully", obvious, the root of perfection, to be completely done, finished. Facility is a "lightness" or "genteleness" in action, "ease", "fluency".
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Thursday, January 18, 2024
Saturday, January 06, 2024
"Philosophy is disclosure of being, and being's essence is truth and philosophy. Being's essence is the temporalization of time, the diastasis of the identical and its recapture or reminiscence, the unity of apperception." (Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, II.2., p. 29)
Poetry wills the unleashing of becoming, and becoming's emergence wills justice and poetry. Becoming's emergence wills the spacialization of space, the confluence of difference and its forgiveness or forgetting, the multiplicity of agitation.