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Poets are subjects of the ineffable
Poetry exists to express what conventional language cannot convey, offering transformed perception rather than definitions.
- The poet’s innate orientation
- Poets engage primarily with the ineffable that wells up through experience
- What can easily be said becomes a secondary performance or game to them
- The pre-verbal stage of experience holds unusual predominance in their inner lives
- Authentic poetic expression
- Poets craft combinations of words, structure, and rhythm faithful to pure experience
- The combination works through unique imagery and transformed perception, not complementary definitions
- Poetry reveals and points attention rather than telling what something is
- The poet’s trade-off
- Advantage: the pre-verbal richness remains palpitatingly strong, sharpening their expressive instinct
- Disadvantage: the ineffable claims impractical mind space at the expense of expediency
- Result: less efficient engagement with language-centric social reality
- The compulsion to express
- The ineffable radiates within, compelling them to give it expression
- Poets sense the importance of the culturally unacknowledged
- Suppressing this inclination creates draining waste and constant resistance
- Poetry’s purpose and limits
- Poets do not codify the world like other disciplines
- They decode nature to codify the human soul, which resists conclusive codification
- Poetry offers invitations to transformed states, not definitions
In the end, poetry provides handholds for the ever-untamed, ineffable parts of the soul, guiding perception towards what words alone cannot capture.
- The poet’s innate orientation
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The corpus of human knowledge: the human drive to understand good things and reproduce them
Humanity's intellectual history represents a sustained effort to understand and reproduce the good things we encounter in the world.
- The threshold of sustained thinking
- Early humans often quit thinking when confronted with impassable hurdles
- Lacking accumulated knowledge, ancestors had fewer incentives to think systematically
- Science emerged as one episode in this broader adventure of the mind
- The drive to reproduce goodness
- When something good happens, we want to make it occur more often
- We seek to understand essence: causes, mechanisms, constituent parts
- This produces technologies for shelter, cultivation, medicine, joy, and communication
- Philosophy and art as reproduction
- Philosophy asks how to reproduce meaning, peace, happiness, wisdom, and virtue
- Art attempts to reproduce beauty and aesthetic experiences
- Music theory codifies what makes sounds move us spiritually
- Jung's pursuit of synchronicity
- He observed meaningful coincidences that defied causality throughout his life
- He explored esotericism, alchemy, Eastern philosophy, and quantum physics
- Though he never succeeded in reproducing synchronicity, his work left fascinating byproducts in its wake.
- The imbalance of tools and temples
- Modern rationality favours reproducing our capacity to reproduce over choosing what to reproduce
- We need temples to materialise devotion and sacrifice. We do not just need better tools
- Everything has opportunity cost; more freedom means greater sacrifice with each choice
- Calvino's invisible cities
- Each city embodies a population devoted to perpetuating certain goods above others
- We must seek what is not hell, then make it endure and give it space
In the end, transcendent desires beyond utility create infinite ramifications. We must listen to our desires to discover what good things deserve reproduction.
- The threshold of sustained thinking
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The nausea of existing and the yin-yang
Humanity's existential fickleness drives cyclical swings between order and chaos, yet this very instability contains both creative potential and the seeds of renewal.
The pendulum of human temperament
- Humans eventually grow sick of everything: order and chaos, truth and lies, unity and division
- This collective nausea drives societies through recurring cycles of creation and destruction
- Individual wisdom may temper fickleness, but at scale, disorder inevitably erupts
The yin-yang structure of cycles
- Each opposite contains the seed of its counterpart, forming interlocking wholes
- These cycles repeat fractally: each whole exists as one pole of a larger cycle
- The pattern creates an infinite series of nested transformations
Responding to inevitable collapse
- Wisdom and institutions can mitigate destructive swings, but cannot prevent them
- We must adapt nimbly to both chaos and order rather than resist them
- Excessive force against collapse only intensifies the eventual backlash
Hope within destruction
- Each cycle carries seeds of new order waiting to emerge
- The dynamism itself makes existence vibrant and stories compelling
- Hope appears both in the novel and in recovering forgotten wisdom
Love as the disrupting element
- Love can endure even when we grow sick of it, returning when we remain open
- It stands external to the order-chaos cycle, offering elemental goodness
- Love persists as the ideal that must not be fully abandoned
In the end, humanity's inability to remain content with any fixed state guarantees continuous transformation, making fickleness itself an expression of freedom rather than a flaw to overcome.
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What loving the path means
- Understanding the pursuit of knowledge or practice as a personal, living path that grows and flourishes like a tree shaped by our curiosity, effort, and experience.
- Engaging deeply with a field or craft involves raw effort, trial, and error
- We encounter dead ends and moments of spontaneous insight
- These experiences build familiarity and create the foundations of our understanding
- The “tree of knowledge” emerges from this process
- Roots: our initial curiosity and early approaches
- Trunk: core principles and recurrent insights that guide development
- Branches: ideas and details that expand our understanding
- Leaves, flowers, fruits: discoveries, creations, and contributions we can offer to others
- Growth is continual
- The tree develops uniquely with each detour, difficulty, and moment of revelation
- The path is slow and arduous, but the struggle and personal shaping make it meaningful
- Loving the path itself is essential
- The process transforms the seeker, embedding knowledge into identity
- Ripening fruits of the tree become gifts for others
- We love the tree because it is the tree that we have grown together with
- In the end, the beauty of learning and creation lies not in reaching the end, but in cultivating a unique, living path that reflects our effort, curiosity, and devotion.
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Creating cultural resources against reality’s impermanence
- I propose understanding words, concepts, and symbols as our way of stabilising fragments of an ever-shifting reality so that we can think, imagine, and communicate at all.
- Reality is never static
- Everything moves, transforms, combines, dissolves
- Impermanence and time reinforce one another
- Human perception is limited
- We retain only an infinitesimal part of our experience
- To manage this, we create concepts, words, symbols, imagery
- These freeze selected aspects of reality for later reflection and recombination
- Symbols require shared conventions
- Communication works when others reconstruct a similar “frozen model” in their minds
- Cultures offer vast symbolic repertoires, but only a small fraction becomes acceptable in daily life
- Cultural filtering restricts expression
- Many words and ideas are dismissed as pretentious, eccentric, archaic, or overly “artistic”
- Most symbolic resources remain dormant despite being intelligible within the culture
- What we preserve shapes how we think
- A selective sieve captures certain elements by default
- The rest lingers, waiting in books, artworks, niche circles
- Dormant resources may return
- Conventions shift through chance or deliberate effort
- When they do, they broaden what a culture can express and perceive
- In the end, culture evolves when forgotten symbolic resources re-enter circulation and expand the scope of what we can collectively imagine.