The pageant, growing ever more curious, reaches
An ultimate turning point. Now everything is going to be
Not dark, but on the contrary, charged with so much light
It looks dark, because things are now packed so closely
together.
We see it with our teeth. And once this

And so, into our darkness life seeps,
Keeping its part of the bargain. But what of
Houses, standing ruined, desolate just now:
Is this not also beautiful and wonderful?
For where a mirage has once been, life must be.

As on a festal day in early spring
The tidelands maneuver and the air is quick with intimations:
Ships, hats appear. And those,
The mind-readers, who are never far off. But
To get to know them we must avoid them.

New Poem : Voyage in the Blue

if you want i can do a point by point breakdown of your post and my response

Could be. But I sincerely think my YA example encompasses everything you were talking about in the quote I responded to. I think it was a legitimate response that legitimately tests the explanatory power of the theory you're discussing. I'm being contentious, for sure, but I don't think I'm being unfair.

The subtext here is : what is going on that isn't just telling ourselves what we already know & believe in brittler language?

But what Barrett brings to the table is thinking of emotions as inferential results, an effort to cope with the environment in terms of 'predicting' an appropriate response (I haven't brought much if any of this side of things into the conversation yet). — StreetlightX

To continue the conceit: What does this say beyond the idea that when most people feel an affect intensely, they express it in a way that fits the situation? '

To really draw this out - here's a fake passage from a fake YA fiction book:

'She felt a flutter of butterflies, a roller-coaster-feeling, but she knew there was no way her parents would understand. So she said she felt 'scared', that they'd understand.'

What does that leave out?

Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. the pleasantness of the sun on your skin, the deliciousness of your favourite food, and the discomfort of a stomachache or a pinch are all examples of affective valence. The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. The energised feeling of anticipating good news, the jittery feeling after drinking too much coffee, the fatigue after a long run, and the weariness from lack of sleep are examples of high and low arousal. Anytime you have an intuition that an investment is risky or profitable, or a gut feeling that someone is trustworthy or an asshole, that’s also affect. Even a completely neutral feeling is affect...
Affect...depends on interoception. That means affect is a constant current throughout your life, even when you are completely still or asleep. It does not turn on and off in response to events you experience as emotional. In this sense, affect is a fundamental aspect of consciousness, the brightness and loudness. When your brain represents wavelengths of light reflected from objects, you experience brightness and darkness. When your brain represents air pressure changes, you experience loudness and softness. And when your brain represents interoceptive changes, you experience pleasantness and unpleasantness, and agitation a — FB - ‘How Emotions Are Made’

I hadn't realized this when I first posted on this thread, but I do know Feldman, sort of. I listened to her interview with Ezra Klein on the Ezra Klein Show. Ezra, courteously, explained he read the book and that it made him think of how sometimes he doesn't know what he's feeling until he thinks about it after. She says 'yes, exactly' (or something similar) and, in that moment of connection, you can't help but come away with the feeling he read her book.

Being predisposed to her view makes it easier to follow - it’s a paradigm shift, in many ways. We’ve always ‘known’ that emotions are ‘inherently’ understood by those around us, but there is a fuzziness to the concepts that we also can’t deny. So much of the suffering we experience and cause in the world can be traced to affective realism and prediction errors in how we conceptualise emotions. — Possibility

How would you characterize the paradigm shift? What was the old paradigm and what is the new?

yeah, that's right about misprision. I don't know him as well as I feign. What I understand him to mean is that every mature poet offers a Big Poem (or a body of work that can be considered as a Big Poem) and that later poets have to carve out their own space, for their own passions. They misread the old poem, but neccessarily, and in doing so, actually come up with something new. A lot of it is repetition, but the confusion secretes something actually new.


I also think learning something banal would be its own reward. But there's maybe a double thing of learning how to deal with the part of yourself that wants to make the thing you're learning link up to something else? There's the learning something banal and then a side thing of learning how to learn something banal, if that makes sense?

Going afield tho

Good news for all of us - according to Bloom, misprision's the sign of a strong spirit. But then you have to create.

Echoing others, but Sartre's still a cultural signifier of sorts. You'll find references to 'hell is other people' etc in 'smart' cartoons or podcasts. He'll come up in pop philosophy (2016) and pop history books a lot. He's seeped into the culture, just like Freud did, as others have noted. His own work was too insular and autodidactic (I don't know exactly what I mean by that, only it feels autodidactic, which I think he himself would have partially acknowledged, since The Autodidact is a figure in Nausea (I'm told.) But it's hard to build a school around something so insular like that. Were there academic Sartreans ever? (not rhetorical, I sincerely don't know.)

This is my suspicion. I think Bloom's misprision is a good guiding light. I think we forget what others knew, which you can get a dim sense of by looking at the infinite complexity with which people spoke of 'emotions.' Then you say emotions only meant this. And then, having limted what 'emotion' means, you introduce a new language which just says all of what youve missed but as a new discovery. I am open to correction though.

I didn't mean violence against others, but violent in the sense of, well, intense - as one talks about a 'violent wind' etc.

The classical view of emotion holds that emotions are natural states which we simply 'feel' and then subsequently 'express — StreetlightX

At the 'base', biological level, what is 'immediately' felt is a kind of generic, non-specific 'affect', which simply indicates both intensity (heightened or dull feeling - 'urgency' of affect) and valence ('good' or 'bad' feeling, something threatening or rewarding). The second step in the 'production' of emotion however, is an evaluative one - a matter of categorising this initial affect (as sadness, as anger, as joy...), a categorisation which takes place on the basis of a range of bio-cultural considerations. — StreetlightX

A one-easy-trick-emotional-theorists-hate-him perspective, not to negate what you're saying, but to try to better draw out what you take the significance of all this to be.

It goes like this:

The classical view of emotion mixed up 'emotion' with 'affect.' It's not emotions which are simply felt, but affects. Affects are subsequently expressed, not emotions. Emotions are expressions, affects are simply felt.

So: the mistake of people talking about emotions is they mislabeled them. What they were really talking about was affects. Just as we once thought different emotions can lead to the same action, we now say various affects can lead to the same actions. so forth. Just as we once knew from literature, conversation, life that the sturm of drang of violent emotion would take a more understandable form as we grew and learned to understand ourselves, now we know its the sturm and drang of violent affects.

What does this miss?

(end of poem)

Ivy is blanketing one whole wall.
The time is darker
For fast reasons into everything, about what concerns it now.
We could sleep together again but that wouldn't
Bring back the profit of these dangerous dreams of the sea,
All that crashing, that blindness, that blood
One associates with other days near the sea
Although it persists, like the blindness of noon.

3. I Love the Sea
There is no promise but lots
Of intimacy the way yellowed land narrows together.
This part isn't very popular
For some reason: the houses need repairs,
The cars in the yard are too new.
The enclosing slopes dream and are forgetful.
There are joyous, warm patches
Amid nondescript trees.
My dream gets obtuse:
When I woke up this morning I noticed first
That you weren't there, then prodded
Slowly back into the dream:
These trains, people, beaches, rides
in happiness because their variety
Is outlived but still there, outside somewhere,
In the side yard, maybe.

2. Courage
In a diamond-paned checked shirt
To be setting out this way:
A blah morning
Not too far from home (home
Is a modest one-bedroom apartment,
City-owned and operated),
The average debris of the journey
Less than at first thought,
Smell of open water,
Troughs, special pits.
It all winds back again
In time for evening's torque:
So much we could have done,
So much we did do.
Weeds like skyscrapers against the blue vault of heaven:
Where is it to end? What is this? Who are these people?
Am I myself, or a talking tree?

The conscience is to you as what is known,
The unknowable gets to be known.
Familiar things seem a long way off.

[edit]

i need to get me one of those west anglia tranquil-spots.

That's gorgeous! What country/region are you in?

To assuage any fears about my well-being, I do get out most days. Lucky enough to live near a tranquil park w/ altitude which overlooks Southern Maine as it stretches north til the foothills, and past that to the mountains. And a slow 2.5 hour walk will let me circle the city and stop at the park on the other end, which looks out onto the ocean. However, it's not isolated; at either park, there are usually a fair number of others around. An old cemetery nearby works for outdoors isolation, but, of course, its a cemetery. Which I'm ok with, but you can't really ignore the fact there's a bunch of civil war vets a few feet down.

My company just laid off a bunch of people. Luckily, I still have my job. The CEO took a 20% paycut. However, after reading a few articles, found this passage. It went uncommented on, in the comment sections, so maybe I just don't have the finance/business background to adequately contextualize it, but it seems shady af to me. Anyone have any insight to this, and whether it's as bad a thing as it looks?

On Feb. 18, when Wex stock was trading above $220 per share, company President and CEO Melissa Smith exercised an option to buy 8,056 shares of Wex stock at a discounted price of $77.20, then immediately sold 15,556 shares at $223.19 per share for a total cash-out of just under $3.5 million, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. — Portland Press Herald

Nameless shrubs running across a field
That didn't drain last year and
Isn't draining this year to fall short
Like waves at the end of a lake,
Each with a little sigh,
Are you sure this is what the pure day
With its standing light intends?
There are so many different jobs:
It's sufficient to choose one, or a fraction of one.
Days will be blue elsewhere with their own purpose.
One must bear in mind one thing.
It isn't necessary to know what that thing is.
All things are palpable, none are known.
The day fries, with a fine conscience,
Shadows, ripples, underbrush, old cars.

Doesn't "evil" denote failure to obey, serve or worship some g/G? And, therefore, is a religious, not ethical, value? (Nietzsche) So that "natural evil" is actually an apologetic oxymoron? — 180 Proof

'Evil' is too absolute a term, but 'sin' can be re-immanentized, if you like. Call it a bone in the throat of flourishing. If I self-phenomenologize, certain things I do give me endless grief. Others make me feel better. It's not a matter of pleasure vs pain, but of a background ok-ness that allows me to focus on immediate pleasure and pains without tending to old memories and obsessively rub old sins, like dirty coins.

But is that just the programming I inherited, and if I could be free from that programming....?

I don't think so, though of course I could be fooling myself. I think you know what is right action & what isn't through a concatenation of sub-religious things (for example: memories of how the mood of a gathering changed when someone did this or that; knowing a person well and seeing how pain accumulates as they do one thing, seeing when they emerge brightly from it when they do another, and how that happened; so forth)

It seems like something we know instinctively. We learn, through slow-dripped hints, what is good and what isn't, as we grow. But - I don't think there's any choice but to flow from that emotional medium forward. You're 'thrown' into it, to use another language. And you work out from there.

At the same time others have advanced similar ideas, while also doing ethically unconscionable things. They know the inner textures of their ethical system, while not being able to see its contours from without. That's for sure a constant in human history. How to bridge that gap, I'm not sure, but it seems like there's no way but to bring in both poles.

got my stimulus check & bought a cot. Now I'm primarily living in the walk-in closet off my main bedroom (does have a window, at least, I'm not crazy enough to forego that yet.) I don't know why, but it feels more synced up with my mood and the general mood. Provisional and simple?

1. Love

"Once I let a guy blow me.
I kind of backed away from the experience.
Now years later, I think of it
Without emotion. There has been no desire to repeat,
No hangups either. Probably if the circumstances were right
It could happen again, but I don't know,
I just have other things to think about,
More important things. Who goes to bed with what
is unimportant. Feelings are important.
Mostly I think of feelings, they fill up my life
Like the wind, like tumbling clouds
In a sky full of clouds, clouds upon clouds."

New Poem : Poem in Three Parts

[end of Grand Galop ]

Ask a hog what is happening. Go on. Ask him.
The road just seems to vanish
And not that far in the distance, either. The horizon must have been
moved up.
So that by limping carefully
From one day to the next, one approaches a worn, round
tower
Crouching low in the hollow of a gully
With no door or window but a lot of old license plates
Tacked up over a slit too narrow for a wrist to pass through
And a sign: "Van Camp's Pork and Beans."
From then on : angst-colored skies, emotional withdrawals
As the whole business starts to frighten even you,
Its originator and promoter. The horizon returns
As a smile of recognition this time, polite, unquestioning.
How long ago high school graduation seems
Yet it cannot have been so very long:
One has traveled such a short distance.
The styles haven't changed much,
And I still have a sweater and one or two other things I had then.
It seems only yesterday that we saw
The movie with cows in it
And turned to one at your side, who burped
As morning saw a new garnet-and-pea-green order propose
Itself out of the endless bathos, like science-fiction lumps.
Impossible not to be moved by the tiny number
Those people wore, indicating they should be raised to this or that
power.
But now we are at Cape Fear and the overland trail
Is impassable, and a dense curtain of mist hangs over the sea.

Oregon was kinder to us. The streets
Offered a variety of directions to the foot
And bookstores where pornography is sold. But then
One whiffs just a slight odor of madness in the air.
They all got into their cars and drove away
As in the end of a movie. So that it finally made no difference
Whether this were the end or it was somewhere else:
If it had to be somewhere it might as well be
Here, on top of one. Here, as elsewhere,
April advances new suggestions, and one may as well
Move along with them, especially in view of
The midnight-bllue light that in turning itself inside out
Offers something strange to the attention, a thing
That is not itself, gnat whirling before my eyes
At an incredible, tame velocity. Too pronounced after all
To be that meaningless. And so on to afternoon
On the desert, with oneself cleaned up, and the location
Almost brand-new what with the removal of gum wrappers, etc.
But I was trying to tell you about a strange thing
That happened to me, but this is no way to tell about it,
By making it truly happen. It drifts away in fragments.
And one is left sitting in the yard
To try to write poetry
Using what Wyatt and Surrey left around,
Took up and put down again
Like so much gorgeous raw material,
As though it would always happen in some way
And meanwhile since we are all advancing
Itis sure to come about in spite of everything
On a Sunday, where you are left sitting
In the shade that, as always, is just a little too cool.
So there is whirling out at you from the not deep
Emptiness the word "cock" or some other, brother and sister words
With not much to be expected from them, though these
Are the ones that waited so long for you and finally left, having
given up hope.
There is a note of desperation in one's voice, pleading for them,
And meanwhile the intensity thins and sharpens
Its point, that is the thing it was going to ask.
One has been waiting around all evening for it
Before sleep had stopped definitively the eyes and ears
Of all those who came as an audience.
Stilll, that poetry does sometimes occur
If only in creases in forgotten letters
Packed away in trunks in the attic - things you forgot you had
And what would it matter anyway,
That recompense so precisely dosed
As to seem the falling true of a perverse judgment.
You forget how there could be a gasp of a new air
Hidden in that jumble. And of course your forgetting
Is a sign of just how much it matters to you:
"It must have been important."
The lies fall like flaxen thread from the skies
All over America, and the fact that some of them are true of course
Doesn't so much not matter as serve to justify
The whole mad organizing force under the billows of correct
delight.
Surrey, your lute is getting at attack of nervous paralysis
But there are, again, things to be sung of
And this is one of them, only I would not dream of intruding on
The frantic completeness, the all-purpose benevolence
Of that still-moist garden where the tooting originates:
Between intervals of clenched teeth, your venomous rondelay.

Now it is the impulse of morning that makes
My watch tick. As one who pokes his head
Out from under a pile of blankets, the good and bad together,
So this tangle of impossible resolutions and irresolutions :
The desire to have fun, to make noise, and so to
Add to the already all-but-illegible scrub forest of graffiti on the
shithouse wall.
Someone is coming to get you:
The mailman, or a butler enters with a letter on a tray
Whose message is to change everything, but in the meantime
One is to worry about one's smell or dandruff or lost glasses -
If only the curtain-raiser would end, but it is interminable.
But there is this consolation :
If it turns out to be not worth doing, I haven't done it;
If the sight appalls me, I have seen nothing;
If the victory is pyrrhic, I haven't won it.
And so from a day replete with rumors
Of things being done on the other side of the mountains
A nucleus remains, a still-perfect possibility
That can be kept indefinitely. And yet
The groans of labor pains are deafening; one must
Get up, get out and be on with it. Morning is for sissies like you
But the real trials, the ones that separate the men from the boys,
come later.

Yes, but he's leaning into it. That picture is as orchestrated a self-projection as anything from Taylor Swift to Mooji. That you think he has the face he deserves, based on that picture, is ultimately good brand management on his part. That's the reaction he'd want you to have!

It is just the movement of the caravan away
Into an abstract night, with no
Precise goal in view, and indeed not caring,
That distributes this pause. Why be in a hurry
To speed away in the opposite direction, toward the other end of
infinity?
For things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision.
I cannot decide in which direction to walk
But this doesn't matter to me, and I might as well
Decide to climb a mountain (it looks almost flat)
As decide to go home
Or to a bar or restaurant or to the home
Of some friend as charming and ineffectual as I am
Because these pauses are supposed to be life
And they sink steel needles deep into the pores, as though to say
There is no use trying to escape
And it is all here anyway. And their steep, slippery sides defy
Any notion of continuity. It is this
That takes us back into what really is, it seems, history -
The lackluster, disorganized kind without dates
That speaks out of the hollow trunk of a tree
To warn away the merely polite, or those whose destiny
Leaves them no time to quibble about the means,
Which are not ends, and yet...What precisely is it
About the time of day it is, the weather, that causes people to note it
painstakingly in their diaries
For them to read who shall come after?
Surely it is because the ray of light
Or gloom striking you this moment is hope
In all its mature, matronly form, taking all things into account
And reapportioning them according to size
So that if one can't say that this is the natural way
It should have happened, at least one can have no cause for
complaint
Which is the same as having reached the end, wise
In that expectation and enhanced by its fulfillment, or the absence
of it.
But we say, it cannot come to any such end
As long as we are left around with no place to go.
And yet it has ended, and the thing we have fulfilled we have become.

I've only read Submission (looks like maybe the only one you haven't read) but I liked it a great deal. It was a very well-written book, not a word wasted. Like you, I also find him refreshingly realistic, direct and very funny. He has a neat trick of being able to hit genuine literary highs while also hitting the no-bullshit conversational directness you'd have smoking outside with your neighbor. And he fits those two together seamlessly. I'd like to read more of him.

At the same time, the part of Submisison I found least compelling - or appealing - were the scenes detailing the narrator's relationship with women. I wouldn't say they're not realistic - they are. But I got the sense these very heartless and despondent interactions were meant to be representative of relationships in general. That's what didn't quite work for me. I've been in empty relationships & bad almost-relationships, and I've been boorish and pretentious and shitty (as, sometimes, the other person was.) but I've also been, at least for a while, in full ones. It's simply not true (at least, as a rule) that men don't make love because they're in love. I don't mean that in a 'but there are good men out there!' way -falling in love, and making love as someone in love, is something that can happen to a whole spectrum of people that doesn't necessarily correlate with empathy/compassion etc. I mean, empty/full doesn't correlate to bad/good (though I do think there are 'good' relationships, if not ideal ones.)

That said, I think the quote about Annabelle is wonderful. I think there any many women who feel that way, I mean I know there are, I've met them, and I think the frank description of how things played out is, again, refreshingly direct. But I suspect it may be less a sketch of a person or type than a sketch of middle-aged women in general - that, I'm not sure about.

I agree. I could be lying to myself, but I feel something like an internal equilibrium. I'm more or less at peace with myself despite certain eccentricities and excesses and concerned instead about the world, making a living, affording a certain privacy and security, and (maybe the biggest ) the biological reality of aging. I'm healthy now, but I know what's coming. My old man is in a wheelchair from a stroke. I think I'd prefer a clean and certain death at a certain fixed time sufficiently far away to the smoky maze in which the Minotaur lurks somewhere or another. Married aging couple and all that that implies. — jjAmEs

I suspect your new avatar means you're no longer with us, forum-wise, but I relate to your thoughts about death (though I think I'm a bit younger.) I'd like clean and certain too. My biggest fear is dying confused and unprepared, with too much unresolved. If clean and certain isn't available, I'd settle for at least the animal instinct of at least a short period of 'knowing' its happening and finding a place for it to happen.

@StreetlightX You mentioned on another thread that I'm often trying to solve personal problems through transpersonal thought (paraphrasing.) I think that's right. The last gasp of that is probably trying to explain why explanation is a problem, loudly and aggressively. I think basically what I want - need - is something closer to prayer, a different kind of vibration of thought altogether but only accessible once the drive thing bites its own tail and falls away.

But this does not have to be a one way street (gustatory). The integration here can and should modify the space of reasons into which it is brought as well. There's a great paper by Reza Negarestani which I constantly come back to, and which I think is pertinent here, where he notes that there is a way of understanding in which:

"Looking at the space of the universal, through particular instances or local contexts is in this sense no longer a purely analytical procedure. It is like looking into an expansive space through a lens that does not produce zooming-in and zooming-out effects by simply scaling up and down the same image but instead it produces synthetic and wholly different images across different scales of magnification. It then becomes almost impossible to intuitively guess what kind of conceptual and topological transformations the local context—a window into the universal— undergoes as it expands its scope and becomes more true to the universal.

...The transition from the local to the global requires something more than the juxtaposition or addition of local contexts. It requires a form of interknitting multiplication between localities that while it acknowledges their particular specifications (parameters and orientations), takes localities beyond their immediate and restricted ambits. It is in this sense that the passage from the local to the global is not simply a form of transit through which the local element preserves its constancy. It is instead a mode of production of new orientations, structures, dimensions and new intuitions of locality and globality. In this respect, universality becomes the operation of productive locality which is globally oriented". (cite).

I grant that the above is not easy to do, nor does it comes naturally. It takes a huge amount of effort to keep the whole structure supple, mobile, responsive. It can, on the contrary, rigidify, such that one is always looking to 'bring things back' into the prefab fold (apokrisis was this kind of 'explainer', par excellence, almost to the point of parody). This is explanation as lego-set. But explanation can also be kaleidoscopic in nature: you add a piece, give it a shake, and the whole thing changes (a Deleuzian vocabulary might talk about intensive and extensive approaches to explanation).

I see the Ultimate Because as the rigidifying of this structure, an attempt to 'fix' it and find its Final Form. This danger is real, but it can be mitigated. — StreetlightX

This,I agree with as well. It's closer to the 'social' half of the entwined gustatory/social image I was thinking of - a shared space of reasons, modified by what it integrates. Drawing from my (half-baked) lit background, the text that comes to mind is T.S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent. If you haven't read it, here's a (very) short synopsis from poetry.com.

. Eliot’s idea of tradition is complex and unusual, involving something he describes as “the historical sense” which is a perception of “the pastness of the past” but also of its “presence.” For Eliot, past works of art form an order or “tradition”; however, that order is always being altered by a new work which modifies the “tradition” to make room for itself.

individual poem <-> tradition maps roughly onto local<->global. In composing a poem* or in reading a poem or in doing litcrit on a poem, there is a similar shuttling back and forth which doesn't simply make the poem/local an example of tradition/global, but produces something new at both levels (as well as in-between) in a complex movement from one to the other. (I'd actually argue it's the same for the legoworld, though it's been a long time since I inhabited one.)

So, this is good. I think by seeing the places where we agree, the place where I'm trying to locate the thing I'm talking about has slightly shifted. Or I'm beginning to realize that what I'm getting at isn't exactly where I was trying to locate it. In the right zone, but slightly off.

Rigidification as a kind of cancerous subspecies of explanatory integration goes a long way. So does drive. If rigidification is a Scylla, then there's also a Charbydis of feverishly dismantling and remantling The later is a drive to keep the whole thing constantly shaking and shuddering, maintaining a trembling pitch (Brassier's physical presence, again.)

Rigidification makes me think of a wolf spider in a hole (If I recall, Apo's avatar was a spider?). For the other thing, I'm having more difficulty finding an image. It seems related to cruel experimentation. Maybe the AI in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Anything can - and ought to be - transformed (fascination with topology, ruptures - how much can I stretch this until it breaks?) with utter indifference to the emotional ramifications. Well. Maybe. Because, I also suspect there is a certain vengeful delight to these destructive effects, and power-by-association with the thing indifferent to humanity. And that any protestations against this power are futile. I think it's very hard to ingenuously read Brassier and not pick up immediately that this is a big motivation for what's going on (the biggest give away, close-reading-wise, is the tic/obsession with the word 'irrecusable'.) At the end of the day, maybe it just comes down to : I'm not really into what's going on there.

I don't know that it needs to be broken, maybe just chanelled differently, put to use in a different manner somehow. The Deleuzian in me says: put it in connection with things, other things, other people, other practices (hard to do right now, I understand). — StreetlightX

That sounds right. I think both of those two extremes come from being so wrapped up in your own thought that you eventually have nothing to think about but thought. I think where I'm landing is a Kantian or Wittgensteinian or etc idea of philosophy as learning your way around and through certain thought-glitches (I think I still want to say glitches around explanation) so you can get on with the rest. Something you're more or less compelled to do if your mind's going to harass you in that way.
(plus philosophy as an aesthetic or leisurely occupation.) I guess it would be more accurate to say that's where I'm landing in terms of how I'm relating to the drive I've been talking about as philosophy (which is definitely very bound up with philosophy, but not exactly the same thing.)
----
* or novel, or short story or essay etc. I just prefer using 'poem' rather than 'literary text' since the latter sounds so clinical.

cool, I'd like to learn more about the history of business, its a blind spot for me.