The puppet's puppet

More important

There are things more important than your product or your profit.

Circling

Addictive

The additive is addictive.

Banshee reading

To assign meaning

It is easier to assign meaning to the word than to the world.

Floating eyes

Stupid and evil

I fear stupid more than evil, due to its being a lot more common in the population. But stupid often supports evil, so evil encourages stupid. If either gains enough position in society, it is very difficult to reclaim or restore it.

Cactus witch

The poet

The poet is one who invokes what has been omitted.

Old guy

All words

All words are word.

Cafe woman

The good in people

I'm not one to look for the good in people. If one is good, why keep it a secret? Why make others search for it? I prefer to approach everyone as though they were neutral and to let them tell me who they are. Most waste little time in doing so.

Instant pot flan

Tried a different recipe than my go-to, which resulted in a denser flan.

Question sufficiently

Do we question sufficiently the ramifications of our constant use of fictions (be they narratives or words)?

AI art

I've been messing around with Midjourney to see what it/I can do. I'll be posting some of my more interesting creations, starting with this one:

Determinative

Which is more determinative of language: the naïve use of language or the sophisticated?

Attraction

Physical attraction pulls hard, but semantic attraction pulls deeper.

What portion

What portion of our cognition is grounded in perception, and what portion in imagination?

A loss

Every gain is also a loss.
Every loss is also a gain, but less so.

I hunger

I hunger for that which I can't yet accommodate.

Bad labeling

We are susceptible to bad labeling because we are structured to assimilate labels.

Holiness

"Holiness" reeks of separation, of superiority. I distrust the holy and seek instead humble beauty, which may also be unattainable and aloof but at least is not patronizing.

To do it

The world may not need what I do, but it needs me to do it.

Most people

Most people care more about what is relevant than what is true.

Our normal

Our normal is the aftermath of cataclysm.

There is more

There is more poetry in life than life in poetry.

All

All who believe are deceived.

The distance

How we exaggerate the distance between the best person and the worst.

On betrayal

Betrayal is always of a commitment, a covenant.

New poems

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Life

Life is a satire of our early impressions of it.

Still

To retreat is still to advance.

Constant changes

Constant changes in circumstance demand constant adjustment to one's enterprise.

Something interesting

The points where consensus weakens, there is where something interesting is going on.

To examine the question

To examine the question of what something means is to direct the attention back upon the self.

More attention

Maybe we should pay more attention to what a thing does than to what we decide it means?

Pollinators

Pollinators, not politicians.

Existing

Does existing perfectly require one to exist permanently?

The authority

Humans don't have the authority to transfer authority to the divine.

Unpardonable sin

The one unpardonable sin is to interpret mythology literally.

The self

The self is an ever-changing approximation, intuited from apparent regularities and maintained by recursive partial recollections.

The greatest blessing

The greatest blessing is to feel alive in life.

Everything

Everything is partial next to the completeness of death.

Wisdom

Wisdom seems to transfer between generations more poorly than knowledge.

Essential

The excessive may be essential.

Exclusivity

Exclusivity is a trend, not an end.

We should end

We should end before love does.

Choose

Choose knowledge, or even ignorance, over belief.

Dying

Dying is the last new thing you will ever do.

New poems

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Enlightenment #2

If enlightenment is so difficult to attain, then enlightenment is unethical. No escape should be more theoretical than practical when escape is required or desired. No reward should be hidden behind a challenge beyond the ability of most to surmount.

Truly enlightened

It does not seem credible that a truly enlightened person would invest a lot into trying to evolve an unenlightened person into an enlightened one. That would be like trying to evolve a cat into a dog.

Humans

The defining characteristic of humans may be how much they do with little or no understanding of why they do it.

Nothing

There is nothing emptier than a grave, not even the void where something isn't before it is.

On Buddhism

Buddhism is often brilliant in its hypotheses of how the individual mind works, and frequently preposterous in its hypotheses of how anything outside the human mind works.

Of any and all

Be suspicious of all who demand respect;
be disdainful of any who demand reverence.

Representation

Need representation be replica?

New poems

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Poetry & language

Poetry is language distilled;
language is poetry decanted.

The best poems

The best poems may be the most urgent ones.

Humanity

Much humanity has been quashed because it was deemed detrimental to the profit of others.

The cult

Few things threaten humanity like the cult of careerism.

Stupid questions

It is not that there are no stupid questions; it is that they, too, deserve good answers.

Someone else's answer

Someone else's answer is an answer that satisfied them. How likely is it that it will also satisfy you? Are they trying to answer your question, or are they answering a question of their own that they are trying to get you to take possession of? Their answers may (or may not) suffice for their questions, but your questions may insist that you answer them yourself.

Pollution

Pollution is not the opposite of purity,
but of accountability.

Habit/tradition

Personality is a habit; self is a tradition.

Only the self

The self is only the self in motion.

We're all wrong (Thomas)

Some of the most friendly ghosts I live with are those of my favourite nineteenth-century science writers. Most of them were wrong, of course, but who cares? It's not like this is the end of history. We're all wrong.

Scarlett Thomas, The End Of Mr. Y

New poems

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Embroidery

We embroider the subject into the self.

Dalliance

Though we may wish to marry pure reason, it is certain that we shall dally with the attitude of the age.

Underrated

Earnest passion is vastly underrated.

Participation

Life requires our participation, not our willingness to participate.

Edit

Rage (not outrage) and loneliness (not solitude) are the two emotions I would edit out of the human genome.

The frustration

The stronger the will, the greater the frustration at the confrontation with the world.

With the right people

Conversation, with the right people, is the most addictive thing I have encountered.

New poems

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