Even more

Submission is even more unethical than domination.

Society

Society is just the infrastructure of culture.

To boldly know

To boldly know what no one has known before.

Those things which are

Those things which are separate long to be joined; those that are joined, to be separated.

New poems

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The only reason (Barney)

The only reason generative AI technologies like ChatGPT have a snowball’s chance of replacing mainstream professional writing is because mainstream professional writing has been devolving toward the vapid, voiceless, informative “style” of algorithmic writing for three decades.

Vicenzo Barney

What starts as

What starts as soil ends as sand.

On consequence

Consequence is intolerable.

On the Republican Party

The Republican Party, in turning on democracy, has ceded the right to continue to exist. Period. You can't be permitted to work within a democracy if you have worked to end that democracy.

Market logic

Market logic is compromised logic.

Our reasons

We have our reasons for obsessing over reason.

Or

Vigor or rigor, rarely both.

Less and more

There is less old and more new every day.

All the hells

All the hells I can imagine are peopled mostly with reactionaries.

New poems

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If we were everything

If we were everything, there’d be no perspective, no contrast, no threshold across which awareness could move. Experience requires boundary, just as thought requires difference. To become is only possible when there is a not-yet—when we are not total, but partial, poised in relation to something else. One can only conclude that if there were a god, he would long to become human, craving the fragmentary, the contingent, the limited.

Self-examination

Self-examination is not merely navel-gazing, narcissism, or psychology—though it may certainly be those—it is, at its most serious and disciplined, cosmological inquiry carried out by the only instrument available:  the cosmos itself, rendered conscious in us.

On cliche

Cliché, deeply felt and clearly expressed, is not unworthy of attention.

Sometimes the best way

Sometimes the best way to honor tradition is by defying tradition—or ignoring it.

New poems

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