A place of horror (Murdoch)

That this world is a place of horror must affect every serious artist and thinker, darkening his reflection, ruining his system, sometimes actually driving him mad.

Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

New poems

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Lies (Murdoch)

Bad poetry is lies.

Iris Murdoch, The Red and The Green

On doubt

Only the particular flavor of stupidity
we call evil never doubts.

Conception

To be conceived is to be convicted.

More important

It is often more important to identify and eliminate the false in the world than to conclusively establish the true.

Civil War

Will it actually get this bad? I think it may.

https://medium.com/@mikeselinker/a-wargame-designer-describes-our-four-possible-civil-wars-cf5b2e980099

On authority

All authority without opposition is immoral.

Power

Adjectives can be more powerful than verbs.

On art (Maclear)

Art is an entry point for the difficult. The beautiful is a gateway to the urgent.

Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life

A fungus among us

Roanoke Review

Found out that my poem "Made and Unmade" was published in Roanoke Review back in January. No more accepted poems in the pipleline now.

New poems

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Human

Human hardware is made mostly of truth;
the human operating system, mostly of lies.

Constriction (Maclear)

Worry is a constriction. A mind narrows when it has too much to bear. Art is not born of unwanted constriction. Art wants formless and spacious quiet, antisocial daydreaming, time away from the consumptive volume of everyday life.

Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life

Broken, disenchanted (Goncharov)

'Tis an honourable, trustworthy heart. That heart is the nugget given him of Nature, and he has carried it unsullied through all his life. Under life's stress he fell, lost his enthusiasm, and ended by going to sleep—a broken, disenchanted man who had lost his power to live, but not his purity and his intrinsic worth. Never a false note has that heart sounded; never a particle of mire has there clung to his soul....

Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov

New poems

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An abstraction

The fear of abstraction is an abstraction.

What is impossible

If what is impossible is best, how shall we ever be contented with only what can be?

Finger to a button (Lang)

The man stands opposite a nation
Thoughts of going nuclear
Bring his finger to a button on his jacket

Meng Lang, from "Facing a Nation"

The damage (Graeber)

Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

David Graeber

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