For a long time, I thought
that literature was a cop out:
one should live,
not write.

I occurs to me now
that literature is a kindness:
one should let live
and write.

Mandates are to justice
as methods, to truth.

Institutions are our immediate point of contact with culture, the meaning of our acts on their face.

Likewise, intuitions are our immediate point of contact with nature, the meaning of the facts as they appear.

Archaic Torso

Change my life? How easy for a headless
piece of marble to be cut and chiseled!
Why don't you come over here and say it
to my face, Apollo? Ready? Find your feet.

Philosophers who try to change our minds by telling us how they think are like poets who try to break our hearts by telling us how they feel.

Note: how not what they think and feel. They present themselves as paragons of thought and feeling, showing us how it's done. But why would we think and feel like them? For the sake of some philosophical truth? For the poetic justice of it? Is life not hard enough? Can they not just let us get on with it?

Perhaps they are not trying to change our minds, after all, nor to break our hearts. Perhaps they are only trying to help: to suffer more precisely, to get through it cleanly.

Some would reduce the whole of epistemology and ontology to science. What is, they say, is what can be known scientifically. I will grant their point, but only if they will grant mine — that ethics and ethnopathy remain, unreduced. Let philosophy provide the logos of what is; we will still need a poetry to absorb the pathos of who is to come.

The variety of faces heartens me.
The variety of faces frightens me.

Behind each pair of eyes, the image
of a world in which mine look
like marbles and have no say
about what there is and isn't.

The likeness of our faces heartens.
The likeness of our faces frightens.

I want to tell you something happened
to me, so sweet and sorrowful
that not even rain on flowers lain
at the grave of a child evoke its likeness.

But no such thing has happened.
There is no sweetness in my pain.
The rain is cold and the sky is grey.
The children are in the ground.

Do we want this precision?

I don't mean just: do we want to make the effort?

To actually know the edge where our beliefs give way
to our desires, to master ourselves at the center.

What is the use of this clarity, this intensity?

What of the grammar of our suffering—

do we understand its reasons?
Will we obey its passions?

Having renounced both the technical jargon of philosophy and the vulgar eloquence of poetry...

There is a sense in which the body is a machine. And a nonsense.

It's hard to believe that a hundred years have passed.

They say say history goes back several thousand more.

Then, for an instant, she was as one
fully capable of her own distress.
It made me want to revive the long-
abandoned tradition of the male gaze.

How to Face an Other

"from Latin continentia 'restraint, abstemiousness, moderation,' literally 'way one contains oneself'." (EtymOnline)

We countenance each other's suffering by containing our own.

_______
"Master thyself then others shall ye bear." (E.P.)

My idea is quite simple and correct. It is quite simply correct.

The Reichenbach Fall

Objection. "Philosophy is not poetry. It is the clarification of meanings through logical analysis; and picture language has no place in it." (Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, p. 145)

On the contrary, Wittgenstein says: "We make ourselves pictures of the facts." (T2.1)

I answer that poetry is the intensification of meaning through pathematic synthesis; and the image is its very locus.

Reply to the objection. Even on the same page, Hans Reichenbach, you tell us that "the motion of the stars is the mirror image of the rotation of the earth." This is not a picture? There is no metaphor in this language? I humbly submit that you, too, are but an "angelheaded hipster burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night."

The Might to Exist

No one has the right to exist.
It is a question of strength.

This goes for peoples as well as persons,
nations as well as individuals.
It is realism all the way down.

You do, however, have the right to inspire.
Take a breath.
It's idealism all the way up.

Any fact can be stated. Any act can be commanded. That is, they are tractable.

It is nonsense to speak of a fact but refuse to say what is thus to be seen. Likewise, it is nonsense to speak of an act but refuse to say who is to do it.

Of course, our statement may be misunderstood; our command may be disobeyed. But what has been misundertood, and who has disobeyed? It must be possible to say.

(It should perhaps be clarified that acts are never in past. Acts, once done, are now facts, to be seen. Likewise, there are no future facts, they are always behind us, in the past, where they may abide up to the present. "Who did that?" always refers to the fact that remains of some past deed.)

Experience is the coordination of your ethics with your physics.

The danger of scientific knowledge and political power is that they lead us believe things and desire people without first imagining them. It may sound strange to think of politics as the business of getting us to "desire people". It is less strange, I suppose, to think of science as getting us to believe things. But even the latter must be qualified by method; and to "desire people" is merely to give them a mandate. That is, science and politics are just systems of representation, objective and subjective, respectively. The danger, like I say, is that we represent (and allow others to represent) things and people without the intercession of imagination. There are things that are easier to believe if you don't try to imagine them, as there people who can likewise be easier to desire. The imagination intervenes (when it does) on behalf our own flesh and bones. It always represents the body.

The practical function of language is to let us describe facts and prescribe acts, to make statements and issue commands. The use of language for these purposes, inevitably affects our empirical and normative experience, our sense of what is real and ideal, what is and what should be. Language shapes our imaginations.

The "language arts," philosophy and poetry perhaps most clearly, work upon our imaginations deliberately. Their aim is to improve the accuracy of imagination, our sense of what is possible. They also try to move us to recognize certain necessities.

I say "the arts" here, and I impute a will to them, an intention, because I do not think the immediate aim of artists is always this. It's just that when they succeed, when they produce "a work of art," it is because what they have done, for whatever petty goals they may themselves have pursued, is to help us better imagine the facts and acts before us.

We become better able to see what must be, and do what we can.

The weight that can be weighed is not the full weight.

The burden you can carry does not break you.

Publicly, we are the self-indulgence others will abide.

Poetry aspires to the honesty of music.

The imagination belongs as much to philosophers as to poets. "We make ourselves pictures of the facts," said Wittgenstein; it is an act upon which "so much depends," Williams might add. "The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things," Stevens proposed, speaking, I suppose, as a poet. Would he grant, I wonder, that it operates, as it were, between the mind and the heart, and would therefore appear, to the philosopher, as the knowledge we carry in our hearts of the needs of others?

Wittgenstein imagined a philosopher who speaks only of things that can be thought, but in such an order that thinking itself, which is to say, the possibility of things, comes to the fore, thus presenting our concepts perspicuously.

We can now imagine a poet who speaks only of people who feel, always in a meter such that we feel them ourselves, which is to say, our need for people, our longing for others, is presented intensely as an emotion.

The purpose of a work of art is to reveal a truth that even the enemy should know.

Some things are made; some things are written.

As to the names of things,
let us be clear about
their sense and reference.

As to the names of people,
let us be open about
our motives and deference.

When we look at the stars, we expect the firmament to persist.
When we see a glass fall, we expect it to shatter.
To perceive is to expect.

Even here, lovers will waste each other's time,
explaining how things work, how the world works.

Everything works, and the world will be fine,
but they will walk earnestly ("as in the day")
dressed like adults, without needs or desires,
and hold forth, like teachers, about machines
and policies and practices and "what they want"
in the upper echelons and why "all we can do"
is one thing (that won't work) or another (that will)
and someone will "just have to understand".

Lovers, I remind you, this is Scandinavia. Relax.
The war is far from here and a hundred years away.

Science shapes our expectations of the world.

Politics fits our entitlement to our history.

You will never be free of this love,
she said. It will never leave you.
It will give you, always, more than you
deserve, take more than you can afford.
It will forever mock your suffering
and censure your simplest pleasure.

You did not find this love, she said,
and it was never yours to lose.
Though you have done much for this world,
our love is not among your accomplishments.
It came before us and abides beside us.
It made us and waits here only to unmake us.

The use of philosophy lies in the precision it brings to the sciences.

It also just makes us think better.

The use of poetry lies in the precision it brings to our politics.

For what it's worth, it also makes us feel better.

It is the function of science to extricate the world from our history.

It is the function of politics to implicate us in it.

Philosophy extricates the concept from our emotions.

Poetry implicates us all.

How can you know things you feel so strongly about?

How can you master people who think so well of you?

This isn't the one sentence everyone should read.

Power depends on deference to authority.*

Knowledge depends on a fixed** point of reference.

_____
*Authority, from author, from L. auctor, "one who causes to grow."
**from L. fixus, "fixed, fast, immovable; established, settled."

From the courthouse roof,
a crow drops a stone of flint.
The churchbell rings.

Let him work.

I spent all this time thinking about it.

I will at some point learn to take everything seriously

at the same time
for a few hours at least.

Imagine the metaphysicians reaching a consensus.

(There must be thousands of them!)

"The mind is the place of vague things." (Valéry)

In the world, they are absolutely precise.

Writers know exactly what they're doing.

People are entitled to live in the world they understand. They do well, however, to obey their history.

What is there?

The ocean exists.

It also inspires.

The ocean asserts itself and admonishes us.

We stand on the shore and look to the horizon.
It is what it is. We must become ourselves.

The ocean has its reasons, and its passions.