Saturday, December 07, 2024

It is not that art is stronger than science. It's that science is only as strong as the arts that make it possible.

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

There is a truth in loneliness
if you can endure it.

There are also communal truths;
school sustains them.

Literature: The loneliness that is the truth of things. (Virginia Woolf)

Scholarship: The truth that becomes a community, i.e., that people communicate to each other.

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.

Friday, November 29, 2024

"A pure heart wants one thing." (Søren Kierkegaard)

Monday, November 25, 2024

Philosophy cannot change
how things are done.

No poem can fix
                    how people see.

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

The peculiar affectation of philosophers
that existence is a mystery.

The strange conceit of poets
that inspiration is an authority.

My perverse obsession
                                      with their likeness.

Sunday, November 17, 2024

Friday, November 15, 2024

People are mostly decent.
That's how institutions work.
We're honest about most things—
how we deal with intuitions.

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

Education is not a preparation for life.
It is a precision in our suffering.

Monday, November 11, 2024

The crime that you confess is not the actual crime.
The sins you are forgiven are not what you have done.

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

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?

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

How is a fact articulated?
Like a sentence, in imagination.

How is an act articulated?
Like a fact.

Wednesday, July 10, 2024

Philosophy will always sacrifice truth
for precision, as poetry will justice.

It takes courage to reach for the ideal.
Curiosity drives us towards the real.

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

There is a sense in which the Morning Star is the Evening Star. I'm referring to Venus, of course. But there is also a sense in which it is not. Meaning is use.

Tuesday, July 02, 2024

Sometimes the error is in the concept.
There is nothing more to see.

Sometimes failure is just an emotion.
There is nothing to be done.

Monday, July 01, 2024

Wednesday, June 26, 2024

He's a phenomenon, a whole
thing. He's been
unpersoned.

Monday, June 24, 2024

Clear concepts, valid reasons, true beliefs.

Tight emotions, great passions, just desires.

Wednesday, June 19, 2024

Monday, June 03, 2024

It's a beautiful day, she says;
go outside. Her perfect grammar:
first, a declarative, then
an imperative. See, then do.

This reminds me of her
body: sometimes just
a statement of the facts;
sometimes, a command.

Friday, May 31, 2024

Monday, May 27, 2024

It is strategy, my love,
and tactics; not strategem
                        and tantrum.

Friday, May 17, 2024

As animals go, we are as passionate as we are reasonable, as intentional as we are rational. We count, but we also reach. We calculate and we manipulate. (We are calculating and manipulative.) We believe, but we also desire.

Spirited, we live—measure for measure, from pleasure to pleasure.

Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Love is an acute awareness of your freedom; wisdom, of your limits.

Sunday, April 28, 2024

Passion is not irrationality, just as
our reasons are not antipathies.

Our feelings have nothing against thinking.
Sympathies are not banes of syllogism.

Wednesday, April 24, 2024

The culture war is about how happy you should be.

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

If you're not with the warmongers, you're with the terrorists.

Monday, April 22, 2024

Books are not media.
They're right there.

______
I love the asocial immediacy of books.

Is it possible to know someone
without respecting
their resentments?

Sunday, April 21, 2024

Philosophy helps you to understand how you imagine facts.

Poetry helps you to obey how you imagine acts.

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.

Monday, April 15, 2024

Friday, April 12, 2024

He said the quiet part out loud. Then, when we got to the hard part, he took it easy.

Sunday, April 07, 2024

The person is to politics as the thing to science. The rights of the people. The truth of things.

Sunday, March 31, 2024

We reject the false choice between being alone and being available.

There is no expertise about how the individual should relate to society.

There is only advocacy for one or the other.

Monday, March 25, 2024

The scientific realist thinks of the truth of our theories like the political idealist feels about the justice of our practices.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Love is hard. When one despairs,
the other must hope;
when one is fearless,
the other must imagine the danger.

Monday, March 18, 2024

Some women are given a choice
between one man and another.
I asked her to choose between me
and not me. Unmoved by logic,
unfazed by paradox, she thought
that she could have us both.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

The academic takes a pecuniary interest in peculiar ideas, makes a university of the universal, a corporation of the corpus.

Saturday, March 02, 2024

You must believe in the colour of spring. I.e., "happiness is easy" and "suicide is painless".

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Don't let your balls write checks your brain can't cash.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

It is the task of political journalists to help politicians pretend that they have power. Likewise, it is the taks science journalists to help scientists...

Tuesday, February 06, 2024

Those who have a purpose in life
may fail to see it in anyone else.

Those who have lost their purpose
can find one in everything they do.

Monday, January 29, 2024

If it is love we lack
we can make it.

If it is wisdom,
we're fucked.

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

What is truly known can be stated clearly.

Who is justly mastered can be commanded intensely.

What cannot be known of others must be mastered in yourself.

By what you cannot master in yourself,

you will be known to others.

Thursday, January 18, 2024

In the world, many distasteful things are known to occur.

Throughout history, many delicate souls have been mastered.

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.