Contentions

#1. What I want to say about philosophy in general is, The Age of Reason did not pan out, Plato was kind of a fascist, thank GOD for metaphor, Buddha rocks, and only the poet's truth lives.

#2. None of us is ultimately responsible for anything, and none of us is ever without some responsibility for everything. (We do what we can, and we'd best be humble about it, failed saints that we all are.)

There's a gestalt thing I need to do with these two bits. I can talk myself into understanding that others are more like me than not, but I need art, poetry, an experiential something-or-other to really get it.

I'm thinking about how some well-off folk I've known must deny others' misery. They've chosen and rationalized and I pity them  -- Yes, really; what I mostly feel for "conservatives" is pity -- for having amputated parts of themselves. But how ironic it is that I also envy them for that ability. Had I some of that, I'm tempted to believe, then I too could be snide but self-satisfied.

A thing about my thing, my episode, my crash that I don't talk about is a thing that I don't expect enough others to recognize in themselves: that when others hurt, we will not be content.

When others hurt, I will not be content. And just that, I'm pretty sure, is the crux of the matter, of my need -- for a long time -- to retreat.

And it goes on and on.

Whichever way someone else goes, I'm bound to go sideways from there. No wonder I had to do time in philosophy camp.

::

Ambivalence: Emily Dickenson got there her way. Et moi? At age sixteen or so, I discovered this word, and the top of my head blew off. Oh wow; you can think every which way about everything. It was like getting a direct brain infusion of the many-worlds hypothesis of physics, without math and without drugs.

And so it goes.

Long live the phoenix.
First you crash and then you burn
given fuel -- and wings.