Member-only story
- Philosophy is the good faith message that the soul delivers to itself: that we die.
- You can write about despair, but you cannot write in the midst of despair: this is something I’ve been learning recently. The project of poetry is actually the project of lifting us to a point adjacent to darkness, so that we can look into it, rather than out from it.
- Materialism is a form of melancholia. Our hunger for a good, an object, reflects a deeper hunger — a deeper unmet need, or sense of ontological insecurity. Perhaps this is too obvious to even warrant writing down.
- Philosophy is an interpretation of the world, not a definition of it. The limits of language are the limits of what the world can become to us.
- Tech seems to have one longterm goal: to deprive us of our bodies, our embodiment. Tech ideology is inherently transhumanist. Silicon Valley begins with the assumption that nature and the natural are not enough. That experience must be engineered and improved. If you work in tech, you work for a utopian fantasy (which means, of course, a dystopian reality).
- I write this in a room filled with sunlight, on a typewriter, listening to the Three Penny Opera (so full of vitality) — and all I long for is to get on my computer and type it up. Is this not an illness?
- We must reject techno-Cartesian project of severing the mind from the body. The body has great reserves of strengths with which to fight, if we let. The mind, on its own, will seek a screen; anchored to a body, it finds earth.