"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.

The tradition you pass down is not the tradition that endures.

The tradition you name is already broken.

Thus,
reason : passion :: rationality : satisfaction

Measure is the rationality of reason.

Pleasure is the satisfaction of passion.

Ratio/Satis

Reason, ratio, measure.
Passion, satis, pleasure.

A feeling is the fact of being moved;
a thought, the act of becoming still.

The vanity of artists confounds my aesthetics.

Follow your heart, sure.

But keep this in mind.

Are All Propositional Attitudes Mental States?

Beliefs are surely mental states, i.e., the result of making up our minds about how things are. But what about desires? Should we not rather call them "cordial," i.e., of the heart, not the mind, and do they not feel rather more like "drives" than states?

Mallarmé tried do his thinking with his heart. Frege no doubt thought his feelings were mental. Poets and philosophers, both, want it all, but reduced to a single organ of their professional preference. Is it not rather this: that we think with our minds and feel with our hearts?

We are as passionate as we are rational. Our beliefs and desires do not meet in our minds. Rather, our desires drive us into cordial relations with one another, while our beliefs fix our mental position among things.

Benjamin Britten's kitten
and Benjamin Britten's cat
hid Benjamin Britten's mittens
and Benjamin Britten's hat.

We found the hat and the mittens both
on Benjamin Britten's mat,
but none but the cat and the kitten know
where Benjamin Britten's at.

When I say I have lost my mind, I mean that it has been unmoored from my heart.

When my heart overflows, it is my mind that is flooded.

What does the artist want?

What is a work of art supposed to achieve for the artist?

Robert Graves proposed an answer: the poet is attempting to remove "a concenration which will persist uncomfortfortably" until the poem goes into "circulation".

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

"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.

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.

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.

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