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.