[end of poem]

It thinks itself too good for
These generalizations and is
Moved on by them. The opposite side
Is plunged in shade, this one
In self-esteem. But the center
Keeps collapsing and re-forming.
The couple at a picnic table (but
It's too early in the season for picnics)
Are traipsed across by the river's
Unknowing knowledge of its workings
To avoid possible boredom and the stain
Of too much intuition the whole scene
Is walled behind glass. "Too early,"
She says, "in the season." A hawk drifts by.
"Send everybody back to the city."

New Poem:River

[end of poem]

Easing the thing
Into spurts of activity
Before the emptiness of late afternoon
Is a kind of will power
Blaring back its received vision
From a thousand tenement windows
Just before night
Its signal fading

New poem: Tarpaulin

[end of poem]

"Father!" "Son!" "Father I thought we'd lost you
In the blue and buff planes of the Aegean:
Now it seems you're really back."
"Only for a while, son, only for a while."
We can go inside now.

Because it only builds up out of fragments.
Each evening we walk out to see
How they are coming along with the temple.
There is an interest in watching how
One piece is added to another.
At least it isn't horrible like
Being inside a hospital and really finding out
What it's like in there.
So one is tempted not to include this page
In the fragment of our lives
Just as its meaning is about to coagulate
In the air around us:

Let's get on with it
But what about the past

Like I said, maybe I'm crazy, but I really do think that we are profoundly mythological animals and that our interactions occur within a shared gallery of types. We all play off on each other against an inherited background of types. TV imitates life imitates TV. It doesn't mean we don't love one another, but it does raise the question of what exactly it is we love. A beloved person is another vortex in the shared cultural stream, another critic of the movie of the world, perhaps a co-hero, and philosophy is perhaps the critic as hero. — path

:vomit:

Let's cut to it in plain language - You're full of shit. Everything hasn't been great, people temporarily provide you access to that pure whatever, and then cease being able to, so you have to look elsewhere, and they get dimmed and something else gets bright and pure creation etc. This justifies treating them like shit and then retroactively recasting it in literary terms. You have a core self, and its registering all of this, but you keep slicing off parts, to leave yourself pure for the next stage. You're pathologically tied to a process of killing off old identities and creating new ones, and this is tied directly to the idea of the impossibility of confronting reality, and the inescapability of living in myth. This persona will be dead in a month, and you'll start back over, ingratiating yourself through 'i love this idea' responses until building to some kind of climax and feeling guilty and destroying all evidence. No?

That the place beyond myth is itself a seductive myth — path

Yeah that's the move. And it ballasts itself with the idea of pure states of play and so forth. The problem is its wrong, and I may be wrong, but I have a hunch, based on your shuttling between personas, that you're probably in a vicious repeating circle. Well, one part of the circle at least seems bristling with the idea of a pure state of play, which is a temporary salve - but then, and so on and so on

look back on all the things you've gilded ('it was like dostoevsky' etc) and ungild them without going full-celine, which is a reverse-gilding. If you can honestly remember accurately a past relationship without mythologizing it, you're way better off than if you can expound heidegger or hegel. But the shitty thing about that is there's no way to demonstrate that quickly for the next post (in order to then move on to the orgiastic big idea (or big idea about the impossibility of the big idea etc)) you have to do it.

another aphorism @path

You can't kill or triumph over a discarded self by proximity to a marquee truth. I mean, heck guy, what do you think the import of 'path' is?

I like that. — path

My plus-stroke taken, I offer a plus-stroke to you in return, a perenially recognized personality, with an invariable, quite-worldly, courtly signature. The offerings burnt, the room confirmed cool ( whose quotes don't you like path?) I can only respond by saying

I don’t understand this seemingly pejorative use of the term “totalizing”. In all fields, finding common principles that underlie many diverse phenomena is an admirable goal. Are QM or GR too “totalizing” of physics because they explain too many diverse phenomena previously accounted for by separate, unrelated theories? How is not relating things to each other good? — Pfhorrest

let's flip that. Why is totalizing good even if you have no audience? (also, importantly, synthesizing isn't the same as totalizing.)

I.e. 'progress' by pragmatic negations - making room for agency (pace Kant) - rather than by incrementally more general, or abstract, totalizing systems (or "theories of everything"). — 180 Proof

Yes! Philosophy, at its best, rids you of the traps thought can keep you in, so you can move on safely to what matters. Its a painstaking self-inoculation. Totalizing systems are like guys who steroid themselves against past humiliations into near-immobility.

Tonight is going to be a turning point, I think. At the very least, this week. We're living through something very big. This is well beyond right and wrong conduct ('is looting a legitimate protest'?) or anything like that.

"the canons are falling
one by one"

The canons are falling
One by one
Including "le célèbre" of Pachelbal
The final movement of Franck's sonata for piano and violin.
How about a new kind of hermetic conservativism
And suffering withdrawal symptoms of the same?

"I really would like to know what it is you do to 'magnetize' your poetry, where the curious reader, always a bit puzzled, comes back for a clearer insight."

True, but he did not know where to land. My position, which seems to be the correct one.

Regards
DL — Gnostic Christian Bishop

He flubbed that one, the old goon

[this is the last time I'll add commentary here. I don't know how I feel about the above move - the last stanza - on Ashbery's part. This whole poem is particularly strange to me, and this part especially There's definitely something offputtingly narcissistic about the quote, but the way it's inserted - as quoted prose - suggests its meant to be intentionally jarring. Maybe there is something to be said for nakedly including this sort of thing. Not sure. In any case, that's my commentary, back to quoting the rest [this is about the midpoint of the book ] ]

"I have become attracted to your style. You seem to possess within your work an air of total freedom of expression and imagery, somewhat interesting and puzzling. After I read one of your poems, I'm always tempted to read and reread it. It seems that my inexperience holds me back from understanding your meanings.

They are bringing the plants back
One by one
In the interstices of heaven, earth and today.

Otherwise in Paris why
You never approved much of my pet remedies.
I spoke once of a palliative for piles
You wouldn't try or admit to trying any other.
Now we live without or rather we get along without
Each other. Each of us does
Live within that conundrum
We don't call living
Both shut up and open.
Can knowledge ever be harmful?
How about a mandate? I think
Of throwing myself on the mercy of the court.

Then up and spake the Major:
The new conservatism is
Sitting down beside you.
Once when the bus slid out past Place Pereire
I caught the lens-cover reflection: lilacs
Won't make much difference it said.

I think where the specter of a possible/actual metaphysics lurks is something like: a set of rules for generating one state [particles in positions at t2] from another state [particles in positions at t1] can, in principle do all the work of incorporating Darwin & rejecting Plato. Another way to phrase this: Darwin would agree that there's no platonic forms, but would he need Deleuze's metaphysics?

I'm being intentionally dense - Deleuze's analysis, to me, makes a lot of sense at a conceptual-poetic level --- and seems a much more fruitful way of thinking about things. And contemporary physics seems to agree reality is non-deterministic at core. But isn't the dice-throw something that is neither a realization of one state from another, folllowing strict rules of generation or just the pure possibility of a new arrangement, randomly recreating the rules of the game? (I think there is a teleological/vitalistic thing that can't be left out, and suspect that may be the old maid in the attic the glosses gloss over). I am happy with a teleological or vitalistic approach, but I think it either has to be recognized, or there has to be an explanation of what's going on with the metaphysics, such that a new metaphysics is necessary, without making use of teleology/vitalism.

You might find this old thread interesting : https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1308/aphantasia-and-p-zombies/p1

The petits fours have left.

Martha Hoople wanted a big "gnossienne" hydrangea
Smelling all over of Jicky for her
Card party: the basement couldn't
Hold up all that wildness.

It is the first soir of March
They have taken the plants away.

New poem : The Tomb of Stuart Merrill

I read that Klossowski book a really long time ago. I remember finding it a bit hard to digest, and it's one I've been meaning to come back to. I think what I got out of it was an appreciation for just how heavily Nietzsche's psychological state left it's mark on his philosophy. What is it that keeps drawing you back? — StreetlightX

It's hard to say. Above all, I recognize the voice, something resonates. "This guy gets it" sort of thing

After that:

all the tangles and contradictions that he - Klossowski - highlights have been the same ones I got (get) hung up on. He seems to get at the core of Nietzsche, directly. Clinically, to be sure, but not without a lot of sympathy. There's no 'lifting' of decontextualized nietzschean thoughts in order to apply them to this, that, or whatever- there's a honing in on the central thing that produced them. That's cool. Nietzsche is too often seen as a pure iconoclast. That's not the case - or at least not the case in the way its usually taken. He's very much 'working-through' the culture he lives in, in that problem/solution sense. Klossowski, I think (I'm not sure) shows how the deep irritation at the center of Nietzche is: 'it's fucked up people have to deeply suffer so others can thrive, and part of 'thriving' is everything I find valuable in philosophy and philology.' That plus 'but is all my thought against thriving, just resentment at not being selected for the nicer role?' [this sounds simple obv but it gets tangled when you pull on any thread, as he did]

Everything is a matter of working out that undigestible thought, and it has its own logic. Of course it ended, as we all know, with a collapse at the feet of the turin horse.

I know this is all a tangent, but on the way to the Deleuze stuff

That is likely true of people who like to signal to others, for whatever reason. But absent the motive to show off, there are many other valid reasons to refrain from adopting habits and norms others have adopted without question — NOS4A2

if wearing a mask becomes an issue of conformity and virtue signalling, I will not be wearing one. — NOS4A2

The latter quote seems unequivocally to be about counter-signals, but I'm not aiming for conversion or self-recognition. At this point, I'm just fascinated by rationalizations in the wild, formed in real-time - how do you go about making consistent those two quotes?

[end of poem]

A breeze off the lake - petal-shaped
Luna-park effects avoid the teasing outline
Of where would be if we were here.
Bombed out of our minds, I think
The way here is too close, too packed
With surges of feeling. It can't be.
The wipeout occurs first at the center,
Now around the edges. A big ugly one
With braces kicking the shit out of a smaller one
Who reaches for a platinum axe stamped excalibur:
Just jungles really. The daytime bars are
Packed but night has more meaning
In the pockets and side vents. I feel as though
Somebody had just brought me an equation.
I say, "I can't answer this - I know
That it's true, please believe me,
I can see the proof, lofty, invisible
In the sky far above the striped awnings. I just see
That I want it to go on, without
Anybody's getting hurt, and for the shuffling
To resume between me and my side of the night."

New Poem : Foreboding

That being said, if wearing a mask becomes an issue of conformity and virtue signaling, I will not be wearing one. — NOS4A2

That's a good counter-signal, right there. See if people are signalling something, so you can react by counter-signalling. Nothing like defining yourself by countersignalling signals. Some would think that this way-of-living suggests a resentment that has metastasized - why would anyone base their choices around reactions to others' choices otherwise? defining themselves in terms of the people they hate, even as a negative outline?

But who knows, really?

Maybe you just know that when you walk into a convenience store without a mask, people will know you're the real deal, no limp-noodle liberal. 'That's a cool guy,' people with sunglasses on motorcycles will say, 'That's not someone who has tragically come to define himself entirely in reaction to the people he professes to hate, so that nothing of himself is left. He's just a very cool, not-sad-at-all guy.'

I wear one (usually only inside) for a few reasons
(1) as @Pfhorrest says, it avoids hassle.
(2) it's an easy nod, or recognition that we're all in this together. I do feel that way and this is a convenient symbol.
(3) maybe it works? Doesn't hurt anyway.
(4) I bought a cool mask from a Thai Place (had them in a box when i picked up takeout) and I like the way it looks.