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."