What raw experience do poetry and philosophy refine today?
To what rough approximation do they bring their precision?

Literature maintains the connection between language and experience.

When a poem moves you, you feel the words as words.

When a philosophy calms you, you think them as such.

We try them out and learn their use. We dwell upon them now.

Proximally, and for the most part, your existence (being) belies your existentialism (angst).

That is, your body has solved the problem of existence before your mind raises it.

I'm pretty sure that this is the basic lesson of meditation.

"Language is conceived in sin," says Quine, "and science is its redemption." Yes, and language is then born in innocence, and politics is its perdition.

For philosophy, the body is a problem:
How does it exist?

For poetry, it is the solution:
How it does inspire!

Poets try to extricate our history from our politics.

Philosophers help the world recover from science.

Folk Psychology

We think that some things are true,
and some people just feel right.

Doubt is to belief as fear, to desire.

Without the other, each is nothing.

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.