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.

The imagination belongs as much to philosophers as to poets. "We make ourselves pictures of the facts," said Wittgenstein; it is an act upon which "so much depends," Williams might add. "The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things," Stevens proposed, speaking, I suppose, as a poet. Would he grant, I wonder, that it operates, as it were, between the mind and the heart, and would therefore appear, to the philosopher, as the knowledge we carry in our hearts of the needs of others?

Wittgenstein imagined a philosopher who speaks only of things that can be thought, but in such an order that thinking itself, which is to say, the possibility of things, comes to the fore, thus presenting our concepts perspicuously.

We can now imagine a poet who speaks only of people who feel, always in a meter such that we feel them ourselves, which is to say, our need for people, our longing for others, is presented intensely as an emotion.

The purpose of a work of art is to reveal a truth that even the enemy should know.

Some things are made; some things are written.

As to the names of things,
let us be clear about
their sense and reference.

As to the names of people,
let us be open about
our motives and deference.

When we look at the stars, we expect the firmament to persist.
When we see a glass fall, we expect it to shatter.
To perceive is to expect.

Even here, lovers will waste each other's time,
explaining how things work, how the world works.

Everything works, and the world will be fine,
but they will walk earnestly ("as in the day")
dressed like adults, without needs or desires,
and hold forth, like teachers, about machines
and policies and practices and "what they want"
in the upper echelons and why "all we can do"
is one thing (that won't work) or another (that will)
and someone will "just have to understand".

Lovers, I remind you, this is Scandinavia. Relax.
The war is far from here and a hundred years away.

Science shapes our expectations of the world.

Politics fits our entitlement to our history.

You will never be free of this love,
she said. It will never leave you.
It will give you, always, more than you
deserve, take more than you can afford.
It will forever mock your suffering
and censure your simplest pleasure.

You did not find this love, she said,
and it was never yours to lose.
Though you have done much for this world,
our love is not among your accomplishments.
It came before us and abides beside us.
It made us and waits here only to unmake us.

The use of philosophy lies in the precision it brings to the sciences.

It also just makes us think better.

The use of poetry lies in the precision it brings to our politics.

For what it's worth, it also makes us feel better.

It is the function of science to extricate the world from our history.

It is the function of politics to implicate us in it.

Philosophy extricates the concept from our emotions.

Poetry implicates us all.

How can you know things you feel so strongly about?

How can you master people who think so well of you?