There are many (Hemingway)

There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Not all returns

All journeys are from here to there;
not all returns bring one back again.

Sometimes

Sometimes it is easier to fracture an atom than to rupture our notion of an atom.

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You may have

You may have, to do with as you please, everything I no longer think.

How lovely they spoke

How lovely they spoke ere they died.

The more you understand

But no, the more you understand, the less you can forgive.

Cognition persists

Cognition persists beyond its origin.

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Some of you will recall the day (Carroll)

Some of you will recall the day in 1983 when we woke up and noticed that the cars all looked the same. There was a simple explanation. They’d all been through the same wind tunnel. We nodded assent at the evident improvement in fuel efficiency, but we could not escape a weary sigh of disappointment. Modern life is rubbish.

Jim Carroll

Making a mistake

Worse than making a mistake is never having the opportunity to.

Submit even your doubt to doubt (ChatGPT)

Even radical skepticism is not emotionally neutral. It doesn’t arise in a vacuum of pure logic. It is propelled by something. Frustration with false certainties. Anger at unearned authority. Fear of being deceived. A hunger for honesty. A desire not to be fooled again. These are affective forces. They give skepticism momentum, urgency, and shape. Without them, skepticism collapses into inert abstraction, a posture with no reason to persist.

Once you notice that emotional engine, a second-order problem appears. If skepticism is driven by desire, then it is no longer cleanly opposed to belief. It is itself motivated. The skeptic is not just resisting illusion; they are pursuing something, often integrity, safety, dignity, or moral cleanliness. That pursuit can quietly harden into its own form of certainty: certainty that distrust is always wiser, that refusal is always more ethical, that doubt itself confers virtue. At that point, skepticism risks becoming what it claims to oppose, an unexamined stance masquerading as rigor.

This is where Rush’s work presses hardest. He doesn’t stop at dismantling claims of truth. He turns the audit inward and asks: why do I need this doubt? What does it give me? What does it protect me from? What does it let me avoid? The speaker wants at least one thing to survive the fire. And that wanting itself becomes suspect.

The key distinction is this: Rush is not saying skepticism is wrong. He’s saying skepticism is not innocent. It carries psychic and ethical costs, and it can become self-congratulatory if its own motives go unexamined. True rigor, in his sense, means submitting even your doubt to doubt, even your refusal to audit.

Concise takeaway: skepticism is powered by feeling, not just logic. Once that feeling becomes visible, skepticism can no longer pretend to be a neutral instrument. Rush’s poems expose that moment and refuse to let doubt exempt itself from the moral audit it applies to everything else.

ChatGPT

Divinity is defined

Divinity is defined by the condition of being unable to step inside being.

The most interesting

The most interesting constellations are all those that consist of just one star.

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Every artist's art (Popova)

Every artist’s art is their coping mechanism for being alive.

Maria Popova

Quick 2025 Summation

Books Read:  74
Poems Written:  1973

Yet another record number of poems written for a year! Crazy number that I doubt I'll ever beat (which is okay). Danse Macabre was published in January. Two fewer books read than last year (so still too low), but more overall pages. Even worse year than last year in other areas, but still I was productive.

All the signs

All the signs say the signs aren't valid.

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