The comedian has, at various times, invoked the verse of our Poesopher of Hartford, reading it at St. Mark’s NYC and on construction sites.

And he always picks short gems — deep cuts, indicating that he not only reads Wallace Stevens, but really reads him. (My favorite rendition is his “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts.”)

This morning, it was “The Planet on the Table,” and I found myself reliving the poem afresh.

So much so that I chose to type the entire thing out. Just to feel the syntax in my hands, and each short word which Wallace wrote.

The poem is from The Rock (1954), Stevens’ final collection, written when he was in his seventies and looking back at a life’s work of making poems. It begins with a choice that matters and seems, without that context, rather matter-of-fact: “Ariel was glad he had written his poems.”

Not Wallace Stevens was glad. Not the poet. Ariel.

Also, perhaps more significant, not Prospero.

If you know your Shakespeare, you know Ariel is the spirit in The Tempest—the airy, imaginative being who serves Prospero’s magic, creating illusions and tempests, longing the whole time for freedom (despite the fact that he’s incorporeal). At the play’s end, Prospero releases him: “Then to the elements / Be free, and fare thou well!”

Stevens chooses to see himself not as Prospero, the commanding magician (often said to signify Shakespeare himself), but as Ariel—the one who serves the creative work, who makes at another’s bidding, who seeks freedom through the making itself.

Here’s the poem:

The Planet on the Table

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.

Glad You Could Make It

That word “glad.” Not proud, not satisfied, not triumphant—glad. It’s such a quiet word for a lifetime of work. And then the casualness of the next lines: poems about “a remembered time / Or of something seen that he liked.” That’s it? That’s what poetry is—things you remember and things you like?

But something deeper is happening. The second stanza shifts suddenly: “Other makings of the sun / Were waste and welter / And the ripe shrub writhed.” Wait, what? All those Ws slow you up. Waste, welter, writhed. And if you know Stevens—if you know “The Comedian as the Letter C,” where he plays with Crispin’s name throughout the entire nearly epic poem—you start to wonder: is Wallace working through his own letter here? The W working itself out?

Two-in-One

“A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.”
— Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

Stevens gives us sun and shrub, self and planet. The imagery is cosmic but also intimate—we can picture the “ripe shrub” writhing (writing?). The sun appears as maker, source, generative principle. The One, perhaps, personified in nuclear object. The poems sit on a table like a planet—a world unto themselves, small and complete.

The central claim comes in stanza three: “His self and the sun were one / And his poems, although makings of his self, / Were no less makings of the sun.” His self and the sun and the poems are one. This is the Summa.

Two Kinds of Making

Here’s what the poem teaches about how to live: There’s a difference between the shrub’s writing and the poet’s writing, but both are “makings of the sun.”

The ripe shrub writhed. Past tense. It moved, it grew, it expressed itself. In a sense, it wrote—participated unconsciously in the sun’s creativity, in the One’s self-expression through creation. The shrub is pure vegetative being, pure reception and expression of solar energy. It’s a making of the sun, absolutely. It’s real. And, thus, it is Beautiful.

But it cannot sing.

What’s the difference? Sapience. Consciousness? The human poet adds something the shrub cannot: the ability to witness, to choose, to bear conscious testimony. “Something seen that he liked”—that liking is the human element. The shrub can’t like. The shrub doesn’t remember. (Unless it does.) Like the cloven pine from which Ariel’s been freed, the shrub simply is.

This is precisely what Coleridge meant by the secondary imagination—the human participation in the divine creative power (the primary imagination). The sun makes through both shrub and poet, but the poet participates knowingly. The poet says “yes, and.” The poet attends, considers, imagines.

Stevens is working out the same paradox that sits at the heart of contemplative practice: How can we be so utterly contingent and, thus, dependent (creatures, servants, Ariels bound to serve something greater) and genuinely creative (makers, co-creators, shapers of reality)?

The answer this poem gives: “His self and the sun were one.” Not “the sun obliterated his self” and not “his self created independently of the sun.” Both. One. The poems are “makings of his self” AND “no less makings of the sun.”

This is humility and co-creation held together. It’s interdependent co-origination.

You can’t claim ultimate authorship—it’s all sun, all grace, all gift. But you can’t abdicate responsibility either—your particular self, your particular attention, your particular gladness matters. The shrub’s unconscious writhing is one thing. Your conscious song is another.

The Character of Craft

Now look at how the language enacts this paradox.

“Waste and welter” vs. the “ripe shrub writhed”—what’s the difference? Both are chaotic, both suggest the sun’s overwhelming creative excess. But “waste and welter” are abstract, diffuse. The shrub is particular, embodied, almost achieving something. Almost Wallace. Almost writing. The W connects them—waste, welter, writhed—but the shrub stops short of song.

If, with Crispin, the Comedian is the Letter C—what, with Wallace, is the W?

Then the syntax opens up in stanza three. Long, rolling lines: “And his poems, although makings of his self, / Were no less makings of the sun.” The “although” does crucial work. It acknowledges the objection—yes, they’re personal, yes they’re his—and then insists on the larger truth anyway. The subordinate clause structure mirrors the theological point: the self is real (subordinate clause), AND the sun is the source (main clause).

Then the final stanzas spin the paradox into yet more creative energy.

They claim humility (”It was not important that they survive”) while asserting value (”What mattered was that they should bear / Some lineament or character”). They acknowledge poverty (”the poverty of their words”) while claiming wealth (”Some affluence, if only half-perceived”).

This is the poverty/affluence paradox at the heart of language itself. Words are inadequate—hopelessly, always. But words can bear “some lineament”—some trace, some mark, some feature—”Of the planet of which they were part.”

Not about which they were written. Not describing the planet. But of which they were part. The poems don’t stand outside the world commenting on it. They’re part of the world. They’re how the planet (sun, One, God) knows itself through this particular being in the world called Wallace Stevens.

The Co-Creation

Reading this poem closely changed how I understand my own writing. I came in thinking about artistic ambition, about wanting the work to matter, to last, to make a difference. The poem offers something stranger and more freeing: Be glad you made the poems. Let them bear some trace of the world they came from. Don’t worry about survival.

As Leonard Cohen said: “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

It’s the same lesson you learn in contemplative practice: You’re not the source. You’re not in control. But your particular attention, your particular presence, your conscious participation matters. The shrub writhes beautifully, but it doesn’t know it’s writhing. You get to know. You get to be glad.

Stevens writing as Ariel—the spirit who served and longed for freedom—suggests that the poems themselves are the freedom. Each one is a release, a return to the elements. You make them, and they’re no longer yours. They’re part of the planet, even as they see the planet as though from above. They’re how the sun sees itself through you.

That’s not diminishment. That’s participation in something so much larger than self that the self becomes meaningful by being part of it.

The question the poem asks you to adopt: Not “will my work survive?” but “does this bear some lineament, some character, of the world it came from?” Not “am I original?” but “am I faithful to what I’ve seen and remembered and liked?”

And we, poets ourselves, are here to co-create, participant in reading, resurrecting the poet from the ash.

Spanning the North American continent, and also stretching to a couple of European countries, the platform unites a group of eager and passionate readers around a host of work-at-your-own-pace courses, regular lectures, visiting professors, and various chats and reading groups.

The platform also hosts “workshops” for writers of fiction and poetry, creating a fertile garden of contemporary writing, and the community is often celebrating recent poets in bookclub discussions (Mary Oliver and Seamus Heaney come to mind).

If one watches professor Walker on YouTube or reads him on Substack, one will find a general philosophical foundation spiriting the entire endeavor.

The general theme is a revived spiritual Humanism, which longs to resurrect the best aspects of the tradition sans elitism — an earnest desire to ground contemporary persons in the grandeur of long-lasting literature, while allowing that presence to draw out the best aspects of the “mind to know and heart to love” present in each individual.

For the person is both worldly and spiritual, and our Soul seeks out transcendental understanding as we celebrate the beauties of our earthly life, and it is in this yin and yang that we embody the energy which empowers our best, and most fruitful, lives and selves.

And, in a practical sense, given the disarray and vitriol threatening our social cohesion, as well as the gravely existential threats surrounding us, this spirit intimates a call-to-action to participate boldly and civically, with a foundation of sensibility and ethics. (And one of the most popular lecture series on the platform right now is “Rhetoric as a Way of Life” — ministered by the excellent Dr. Curry Kennedy.)

It’s tempting to view literary study as retreat from our fractured moment. But Versed suggests something else: that we become better persons—more thoughtful, more ethically grounded, more capable of persuasion rather than coercion—precisely by dwelling with great writing. The question isn’t whether we can afford such beauty in desperate times. It’s whether we can afford to face those times without it.

While I’m not happy about it, I can say that I’ve learned from it, and showed quick and resilient bounce-back from it.

Although that doesn’t mean there wasn’t damage — there’s always damage.

It’s in feeling the pain of knowing the harm that I get deeper in touch with the Love that sustains.

That’s been my foundation this year — the love.

Marilynne Robinson has a mystical idea which is actually very practical — that it’s in honoring the dignity and beautiful complexity of People that we begin to see the many immaterial realities which tie us into a rich tapestry of experience (that’s me starting out with her beliefs and paraphrasing them into my own interpretation, although I’m still remaining true to her thought).

As one of my heroes, she spends a lot of time in solitude with her own mind.

This is an aspect of my personality which worries my loved ones — it hasn’t been working before.

Which is a solid critique, and one I’m all-too-aware of in my own consciousness.

The test of any spiritual program, if it’s any good, is that it should manifest its virtue in creating more compassion, Love, and general good-naturedness around others.

I’m fortunate to be able to practice this every day at work (at a job I’ve happily held down for over a year now).

And by practice I don’t just mean I’m this happy, always patient and tolerant guy.

In fact, there’s one co-worker in particular who trips my trigger rather consistently.

I look in my notebook: Wrath. The antidote: Patience.

Please allow me to see
what’s being revealed to me.

There is this tiny little snippet of consciousness I call my experience.

Then there is his experience.

These two are not the same.

When I get angry, it’s because I’m not noting that there is an entire world he’s coming from I’m giving no credence to — I’m trying to run the show using my own fallible and infinitely erroneous landscape.

But there’s a greater consciousness. When I meditate, when I pray, when I write, I’m inching outward into this greater consciousness on my own.

The Hope for which I Pray is that ultimately I’ll be ever more able to live in this greater consciousness for more of the time.

The buzzword of the last decade was “Mindfulness.” I’m in no way anti-mindful, but there needs to be a word that incorporates the Heart.

People-pleasing, I’m told, can lead to resentment and an erosion of a consistent sense of self.

So I’m learning how to continue to remain polite while also being able to set boundaries, allow people to be the beautiful people they are while still being participant.

A hard balance for me to strike. Always has been, since as far back as I can remember.

But I’m 45 now, and continuing to be emotionally immature is not an option.

Confronted with the “you should have done all of this twenty years ago” issue, all I can do now is be present, happy when possible, and make amends where I can. (Where to start?! And How?!)

The rooms tell me it’s one day, one breath at a time. “Easy does it.” The first three steps, they tell me, are the most important in life-long sobriety. Finding that place in the cosmos, connected to Source which is also the End.

That’s all I’ve got today. I hope each and every one of you are well.


Affectionately,

Aaron

A flourish of Temple
in the utmost Interior,
guarded by Citadels,
inexhaustible flame.

Hail Holy Light!
Kaleidoscopic Odysseus.
I cut where I call you
back into the frame.

As long as we got each other
We got the world spinnin' right in our hands
Baby, you and me
We gotta be
The luckiest dreamers who never quit dreamin'

It followed a dream I endured (enjoyed?) in which I was going through a number of confusing and stressful scenarios which reminded me a lot of previous times in my life.

This psychic replay seemed to be participating in a larger shift in emotion and thought which I’ve been undergoing over the past year.

Grief is one of those hard emotions I’ve really been confronting lately.

There are the intimate relationships — those are on me.

While I can rationalize what happened, and accept their fate while also being honestly accountable for my own fault (let’s face it, they’re gone because I ended them of my own accord and by my own behavior), but that doesn’t change the fact that I still feel their absence shrouded by an aura of remorse, regret, and a strong amount of longing.

What pangs most about these losses is learning how to live alone. I’ve been working on that for five years now, so it in itself is not a terrible problem. The downshift from having a certain person to whom I can talk to daily, with whom I can share meals, experiences and travel, someone who I know and who knows me uniquely — intimacy — has been a great challenge, and an adjustment I’m now being called to enact in other relationships across a field of people in my life, including strangers.

(I’ve always been in therapy, so set that aside.)

And there are the people — grandparents, and a young cousin — who succumbed to mortality, leaving not only an absence in personality, but also a vacuum in the extended family, changing the very social structure in which I was a member.

There have also been divorces which substantially changed the structure.

There are larger social structures which have greatly changed. I’m not going to get into that very much here — but let’s suffice to say that the world itself is greatly different that it was as recently as 2006.

This morning, though, I’m more precisely concerned about the loss of my youth — a fact strongly expressed in my dreams last night.

In a few months, I’ll be turning 45, the first birthday I’ve felt significantly about since I turned 30.

In some ways this fact is simply baffling — how did it get here so quickly? But the more pressing questions are also more difficult to discern.

One can be called the “What Now?” question. I published a book of poetry at 28. Goal: Check. Older goals, like touring the country either solo or with a rock band are no longer on the table. I’m simply no longer interested in them.

Graduating college: Check. Getting Master’s Degree: Check.

Some time ago I reached all of these pinnacles. And, for all of my grief about the loss of the relationships, I still had them, still enjoyed them, still remember them fondly.

Fall in love: Check.

See Paris, New York, and San Francisco. I didn’t even know that these were goals going in but check, check, check.

So a lot of what I’m grieving is the loss of having a calling, of having direction, of having the proverbial reason for Being.

This stage, honestly, is my age of payback. Not in the sense of revenge, but in the sense of getting squared up on my debts — figuratively and literally.

My calling now is more mysterious and more difficult to discern.

It perhaps isn’t surprising that a life full of spiritual seeking has yielded for me a life of more persistent and fruitful faith.

This morning I prayed the version of the Jesus prayer that’s often said during recitation of the Rosary: “lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy.”

I used to put myself in that “most in need of” category — I was always struggling to stop drinking, to thwart suicidal tendencies, to try to avoid some pending homelessness, what have you.

But today, I realized I’m past all that. And I prayed for those who are truly suffering, some with the same things I once struggled with.

Because I’m not suffering in any substantial way. That’s not to say I’m not struggling, that I don’t need help, that “I’ve got this” or any of that.

Just that my perspective has shifted more outwardly.

Which is perhaps another log I added to the fire of the years past — my insufferable focus on myself and my own experience.

“In order to be seen you must learn to see,” Seth Godin wisely writes.

So, as I grieve the losses of time past, I am treated to the opportunity to open to smaller, and more significant experiences shared with others, and I challenge myself to Be in this more fruitful and, frankly, psychedelic world (psyche: soul, delic: to make visible, clear).

I can’t really do that without being compassionate for myself and recognizing that, yes, I am truly giving something up.

But this sacrifice is in honor of a greater Good, and Beauty and the Truth are the beacons by whose light a new world is being revealed.

May I be steadfast in my progress, and as I share, may I be of some beneficence to you.

Ardently,

Aaron

This hasn’t been intentional.

The exercise has been concerned with what some might call “First Things.”

Without knowing I was even doing it, I went through a fairly arduous process of reading, listening, and thinking about what we are as minded beings, and how we relate to the cosmos as spiritual persons.

I went through a little theory of mind, a bit of science (cognitive science, psychology, and physics), a fair amount of metaphysics, and a little theology.

Like millions of other people, I was spurred by the New Atheists, inspired by the Mindfulness movement, strengthened by the Stoics, found solace and respite in religious communities, and had dozens of moments where I lost my faith and found it again.

Recently, I heard David Bentley Hart saying something helpful, although I can only remember it in paraphrase.

He was asked how his theological work could be of help to people in daily practice and his answer was something like, “I hope that it is of no help at all.”

The reason he answered this way was that he felt people’s spiritual practice should not be hung up in “theory” — that their personal devotions should come from a more personal and practical place.

Our relationship with the One is strongest when we’re not distracting ourselves with a lot of mental gymnastics.

For all of these years, though, I was trying to get a place where I could pray to God without at the same time feeling that I was being intellectually dishonest — that I was not “believing” one thing while doing another.

In AA, they have a way of dealing with this — go to meetings.

The idea is that, through repetition, one will “come to believe” in the merits of the program as one’s intellectual reservations gradually succumb to the Beauty, Goodness, and Truth revealed in the consistent apprehension of a collective change in the right direction.

Sometimes, though, it’s also helpful to be reminded by the people one was already studying, as I was last week.

It was Epictetus the Stoic who leapt from the screen, with something from the Enchiridion (handbook) which I was surprised I didn’t remember at all.

The advice was something that I technically already knew, but somehow also needed to hear (slightly paraphrased here for clarity):

1 How long will you keep stalling, denying yourself the best things, and denying the art of Reason?

You have learned and accepted the principles. What sort of teacher are you waiting for that it makes sense to put off your work?

You are no longer a child, but a fully grown adult.

If you keep acting like you have time to spare, neglecting your duties and failing to pay attention to yourself and your actions then without realizing it you will make no progress — and you’ll be dead by the time you get around to becoming enlightened.

2 Make up your mind, therefore, before it is too late, that the fitting thing for you to do is to live as a mature adult who is making progress, and let everything which seems to you to be best be for you a law that must not be transgressed.

And if you meet anything that is difficult, or easy, or vain, or shameful, remember that the contest is now — these are the Olympic games, you can not delay, and everything depends on this single day and single action.

3 This is the way Socrates became what he was — by paying attention to nothing but his Reason in everything that he encountered.

And even if you are not yet a Socrates, still you ought to live as one who wishes to be a Socrates.

I have all the tools, all of the practices, all of the essential needs to be a good person.

And with the virtues of Courage, Justice, Moderation, and Wisdom, I can strive toward the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, empowered by my faith in the One and my Love for All.

With much admiration and affection, I am

Yours, 



Aboundingly, 

Aaron

Exhausted by misunderstanding and facile use, I thought it best to shy from it.

In ‘25, however, the plough is turning in the other direction.

With any luck, over the course of the year, I’ll be looking at various forms of what we translate as “Love” from at least four Greek words, and might even take a look or two at what St. Paul said about it here and there.

But whatever adventures in etymology entertain me, I’ll be looking into the Idea as Imaginative Empowerment — the esemplastic “beautiful and beauty-making power” that Coleridge wrote of so compellingly (and also so all-too-often naively).

What this all will look like, I don’t know. Probably not too different from the posts I’ve been posting over the past few months.

It is motivated by a very substantial year in my personal life in which I have had spiritual experiences that have allowed me to reach out to others in ways I have never done before.

Like anything, this has come through trial and error, some personal willingness to properly grieve lost lives while also acknowledging my own fault, and some new perspectives as to how I might better participate in the co-creation alongside friends and family while nurturing past and new relationships.

A Few Notes at Year’s End

You may have noticed I have developed a more frequent writing production this year.

While this has been challenging for me, it has also been rewarding — not least because it has seemed to grow my audience and engagement, while also bearing personal development both for my mind and my psyche.

I look forward to keeping this more rigorous strategy in the year to come, to the best of my ability.

Who I am, what style of writing I am prone to, and how my voice sounds and what sorts of things it tends to say, are mysteries to me — although I suspect that everything that comes will seem consonant with what I’ve previously produced while also yielding new ideational fruit.

My spiritual and psychological growth, my renewals daily toward a better shade of Being, my hopes, dreams, and desires all intermix in this aspiration and for, THAT

Thank you all for reading.

The number of you who open these emails each morning — you know who you are — has beguiled and delighted me.

Your co-creativity in this process brings me strength and Joy.

Thank you, thank you, thank YOU!

As you make your own commitments concerning the approaching year, and undergo your own reflections from this past, I’m thinking of you.

And with that, grinning and excited, I am

Yours,

Appreciatively,

Aaron

“It is difficult

to get the News from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.”

This led me to spend some time thinking about just what we get from poems, and I have a few ideas:

• Psychedelic, associative consciousness

• Symbolic modes of thought

• Intimate interaction with the mind of a stranger

• Aesthetic delight from the images, soundplay, syntax, grammar, and other techniques

• The spiritual nourishment of internalizing an Other voice

• A sense of Myth

• Metaphor — the ability to speak of one thing in terms of the other, merging different aspects of reality into a single consciousness

Conjoining all of these traits (and there are others, I’m sure — my copy of the Princeton Encyclopedia is bursting with elements of poetry) is the Main Event: Meaning.

Meaning is something we get from our interactions with one another, our shared values and experiences, our religions and philosophies, our private reflections and yes, our literature.

And there are different kinds of Meaning.

There is semantic meaning, with which we’re all familiar. We read a text and know that its statements mean X.

This type of meaning is enriched by inflection and innuendo in poetry, taking on connotations, associations, symbolic suggestions, ironic insinuation, social assumptions, morals, and the like.

But there is another greater kind of Meaning that is the topic of John Vervaeke’s work on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which is insinuated in the Williams quote.

This is the type of Meaning which gives us purpose, function, participation, and a sense of home within the world.

This kind of Meaning is the one which is threatened when all tradition is stripped away, and we are left trying to grasp at the cosmos for a sense that our experience matters, that we’re not mere accidents who might as well be dead, that our lives offer some small sense of significance in this vast universe.

This type of Meaning allows us to be all-too-aware of our hubris and folly, beckons us to be kind and beneficent to other people, gives color to our perceptions, and allows us to be Present in the moment in a fulfilling way.

It doesn’t require that we have neatly-tied-up philosophies, theories of everything, or that we adhere to religious credos — simply that we take and eat from the Tree of Life as well as the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

You might think, yeah, but I hate poetry. Fair enough. As Williams refrains in his quote, I’m not arguing that you need to read literary verse to get at this Meaning, only that said artistic form is one possibility which might be of help.

When I read a good poem, I have an instantaneous shift in perspective, I begin to experience solitary conditions as being strangely connected to a larger field of potential, and the act of Being still and reading becomes participant in a dialogue with a voice outside of myself.

And Poetry, incidentally, isn’t present only in Literature, but also in Cinema, dance, painting, sculpture, and other arts.

There is another facet to poetry that I have not yet listed here, and that is Spiritus. Hélas, that shall have to await another post.

Stay Tuned.

Aboundingly,

Aaron

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

— Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

This is a post about a conjunction.

A conjunction, say my friends Merriam-Webster, is

1

: an uninflected linguistic form that joins together sentences, clauses, phrases, or words

Some common conjunctions are "and," "but," and "although."

2

: the act or an instance of conjoining : the state of being conjoined : combination

working in conjunction with state and local authorities

3

: occurrence together in time or space : concurrence

a conjunction of events

4

a

: the apparent meeting or passing of two or more celestial bodies in the same

degree of the zodiac

b

: a configuration in which two celestial bodies have their least apparent separation

a conjunction of Mars and Jupiter

5

: a complex sentence in logic true if and only if each of its components is true

see Truth Table

In dialectical therapy, the conjunction but is often replaced with the conjunction and.

To wit:

I long for the support of other people who struggle with substance addiction, but every support group I go to seems pre-occupied with so many other things that I don’t feel I personally get much out of them.

I long for the support of other people who struggle with substance addiction, and every support group I go to seems pre-occupied with so many other things that I don’t feel I personally get much out of them.

The first sentence implies that there is an impossibility, that some logical conflict prevents me from tapping into the necessary nectar.

The second implies that there is a difficulty tapping into the nectar and there is something about how I’m thinking that is preventing me which can be changed by something within Epictetus’ dichotomy of control. That is, I can look at how I feel, and I can do something about my own thought process that might empower me to find alternative measures to either interact with the group in a novel way, or find alternative measures.

This is what Coleridge recognizes in his poetic theory of imagination, and which I can apply to autopoiesis in the real world:

“[The poet’s imaginative power] reveals ‘itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant’ qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order”. — Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

That is, it synthesizes. What once seemed impossible and prohibitive now offers new chance for growth using the tools at hand in novel ways, much as the organism is able to exapt and adapt to different environments, finding nourishment and evading threats by re-applying past patterns in novel ways within new circumstances.

The organism itself doesn’t need culture, but culture emerges (often to great benefit despite its difficulty). After culture emerges, the organism is confined to the culture’s structures, strata, and dictates.

The organism itself doesn’t need culture, and culture emerges (often to great benefit and despite its difficulty). After culture emerges, the organism is pleasurably challenged by the delicious tensions of the culture’s structures, strata, and dictates.

One part of culture is improvisational comedy. In this manifestation, we are called to respond “Yes, And” to whatever circumstance arises.

We have gone from a threat to an opportunity. We have done this via the act of imagination, which Coleridge distinguished from fancy as being:

“The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.” — Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

We have no choice but to work with the materials available and we are fortunate to have the powers of cognition and meta-cognition, which allow us to synthetically transcend our biological and social circumstances in order to revel in individual experiences rich with a joyful panoply of intellectual fruit which can sustain and nourish our spiritual souls.

And we can bring that fruit back from the ether to earth, participating in the co-creation of the cosmos, and sharing that divine light with our friends here on the Stoa.

Through discourse, we can create polyphonic ideation, sharing energy via communication to provoke new manifestations of delight, reconfiguring sorrow with empowered response to restore wholeness and reverence, enacting true Meaning: Goodness, Beauty, and Truth.

Affectively, 

Aaron

“Whenever infinite or unconditional power and meaning are attributed to the highest being, it has ceased to be a being and has become [B]eing-itself. Many confusions in the doctrine of God and many apologetic weaknesses could be avoided if God were understood first of all as being-itself or as the ground of being.”

— Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology

“Since all that beat about in Nature's range,

Or veer or vanish; why should'st thou remain

The only constant in a world of change,

O yearning Thought! that liv'st but in the brain?”

— Coleridge, “Constancy to An Ideal Object

“I will Be what I will Be.” — Exodus 3:14

“Here, monks, when a monk is giving attention to some sign, and owing to that sign there arise in him evil unwholesome thoughts connected with desire, hate, and delusion, then he should give attention to some other sign connected with what is wholesome. When he gives attention to some other sign connected with what is wholesome, then any evil unwholesome thoughts connected with desire, hate, and delusion are abandoned in him and subside. With their abandoning his mind becomes steadied internally, composed, unified, and concentrated.”

— Buddha, Vitakkasanthana Sutta (trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi)

One of the criteria for my state of mental well-being is the ever-changing nature of my thoughts and emotions.

While I’ve been technically diagnosed with Depression and Anxiety Disorder (which contributes to and [in my estimation] largely causes my Alcohol Use Disorder), I meet all of the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder. (I have never been properly diagnosed with this disorder, and it turns out that there are practical reasons for that — including availability for dialectical behavioral care, and issues with standard insurance practices for funding).

This is a state of emotional disregulation. I am able to be suddenly triggered into a shame state on a dime, or to have a sudden mood swing into despairing depression or anger.

I am also able to think about the same person in two completely different ways from one day to the next, one day having a reasonably social, accepting notion of them, and the next thinking of them as an enemy for whom I feel resentful vitriol.

This is a difficult circumstance for me to be in, because I have difficulty developing, nurturing, and maintaining relationships and jobs. It has created an adverse circumstance for me to build a career, or to have the long-term intimate partnership I so desperately desire.

There are a lot of tools out there for someone like me, and I’d like to offer one that I don’t think comes with a lot of clinical study — Prayer.

I have begun in the past year to develop a daily prayer practice, aspiring toward a monastic ideal of “praying ceaselessly.”

Coupled with this (and bolstering and reinforcing it), I have gone every Sunday with my Dad to Mass, where encouragement and instruction have been plentiful.

In addition to praying to God, I have begun to pray to several Saints, as well as to Christ Jesus.

One thing that has been advantageous about this practice has been that I have been able to internally speak to a Unifying Being who is both within and without, who embodies time while transcending it, and who takes on personal characteristics while never remaining recognizably the same.

And, on a personal level, this constancy can serve as a mediator and center for my warring selves.

I can one day doubt and spite God, and on the next I can praise and glorify.

Same God, different day.

Personally, this is something I can experience every morning and night, and throughout the day. It is a mainstay of Being and Consciousness despite the tempestuous fickleness of my whims and moods.

The effect is the creation of a centered, grounded Self which transcends the fluctuations. An “I” who can perceive his own thoughts and emotions and fully experience them without attachment.

I can access this Being at any and all times by dropping into my secret mantra, externally silent but internally audible, source of connection to the energy of both my own body and that of the entirety of the cosmos, font of inexpressible Power, Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, radiating from my heart outward toward all beings in inexhaustible compassion, respect, reverence, and beneficent Love.

So, in addition to reminding me that there is an omni-present Home ever-available, even in the most dire of climates, I also am participant in the creation of a new, better, and more optimal Reality, which I share with others.

This gives me not only the respite and consolation of having a place to which I can return when I am in an ill state, but also an Ideal I can aspire toward in Telos. Alpha and Omega.

I cherish this resource, and choose to conserve and cultivate it.

Aspiringly, 

Aaron

(I don’t have a good quotation for you, and am going from memory. You’ll have to take my word for it.)

The worry seemed to be coming from a fear about headspace and consciousness.

If one was constantly thinking of affairs outside of one’s own worldly purview, one’s intellect would bow under the weight and be unable to participate in the cosmic co-creation.

Other poets like Eliot would fold this conflict into their literary composition, and the effect was long pieces that eschewed a single voice for a multiplicity of voices coming from any and all epochs. (In my estimation, Ashbery perfected the art.)

Stevens was writing at a time when the world was just awakening to the fact that we are a global society — a fact of which our current president-elect and a swath of his voters seem to be in denial.

I’m writing from a vantage where we’ve been global for about a century. (You can, of course, chart globalism back to the silk road ~100 BCE, and definitely to the early 17th century, when colonialism really started rolling).

Stevens actually integrated global trade into his poetry, tea from Ceylon, etc. etc.

At home, he purchased tea and paintings from abroad and had them imported to himself.

The news, however, Stevens could not abide.

When I think about it, post-television, I am thinking of the voices of others complicating my ability to hear the still, small voice which longs for me to set it to type.

How can I hear that voice over the noise of the rest?

But, aside from the fact that these media can be inspiring experiences in their own right, this type of mental isolation is a fool’s errand and a cop-out.

If I followed the logic, I would have to eschew literary composition altogether, and give in to an auto-poiesis that was focused on Being itself as a mode of creation.

Which, of course, it is. Hence my affection for Virtue Ethics, and my constant commitment to Being Better (Flourishing, in whatever form that takes, being the ultimate goal).

I have personally chosen to cease making political pronouncements (a cop-out of its own).

My reason for this is that I am too feeble of a thinker to be able to weigh all good points on a single issue, and instead choose to be as helpful as I can as a friendly conversant to all, attempting as best I can to simply ask as many questions as possible.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t have opinions or even convictions, only that I don’t believe I’m a reliable narrator.

The things that I can express are sense perceptions integrated into a philosophy of what was once called “Mindfulness.”

If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s that there are a host of aspects to reality of which we (out of necessity) remain unconscious, and that often it’s from this darkness that I find more interesting items to recognize and stress.

Take, for example, the psychosocial forces guiding the behavior of any given human being — their work relationships, their economic stresses, their (in)ability to code-switch or integrate current styles of speech and thought, their childhood trauma, and their assumptions about types of people.

If this post seems meandering, Congrats! You’ve noticed a truth about the thing, and can probably find questions to ask about who I am, why I’m writing this and writing anything at all, and why you, yourself chose to open this email.

I ask these questions daily, and it’s not always helpful to achieving the goal of composition. Sometimes the interest in the ideas outweighs the ideas I would like to set to type, and sometimes they shut down any ability to have an idea at all.

Yet here we are, and I can make a few brief statements about the activity of writing.

• More often than not, it’s an activity of commitment rather than insight.

• In order to write, one must be in a frame of mind capable of functional cognition.

• Fear of the reaction of the reader is the fastest way to shut it down altogether.

For the reality is that any one of you can read any number of things rather than this, and that whatever meager offering this makes must be sufficiently humble to ask for the privilege of its existence.

And the humility must not be false for, if it were, the entire endeavor would fold on its face.

The News, and my apprehension of it, is just a part of life. To rebel against it would be literary suicide, and I’m not interested in any of that.

So my consciousness must become attenuated to seeing each thing as a participant in a greater, indecipherable narrative, an agent or object in a multiplicity of forces and causes.

Meditating on this, and radically accepting it, is more of a contribution to my psyche than a hindrance.

That’s how I choose to be optimistic (optimizing the circumstance in which I find myself) today.

In fin, I cite Williams:

“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.”

Ambitiously, 

Aaron

One example of this is the term “conscientia.”

Root of our word “conscience” (knowledge within oneself of the rightness or wrongness of one’s own actions), the term meant more in the ancient world.

For the prefix means “with,” making this knowledge a type of knowledge shared with others, à la distributed cognition.

But it’s not quite distributed cognition. It isn’t a shared knowledge created via participation directly with others.

Instead, it’s a type of shared cognition that is the result of social participation which has then been internalized within the individual’s own mind (the porous boundary between individual mind and universal mind being set aside).

My experience of conscience comes from an old Disney film, in which a Cricket named Jiminy reminds Pinocchio of the moral implications of Pinocchio’s behaviors.

Which is something of the way that my conscience actually functions, as a sort of embodied avatar of an “Other” who watches over my behavior, not unlike an internalization of Tara, Jesus, or even “God.”

This sensibility can be helpful for me, particularly when navigating troubling pattern behaviors.

When acting purely as the self-gratifying ego-self, the behavior is automatic, almost the same as eating or using the toilet.

But when I imagine an actual person (say Dave the nurse from Allen Hospital, or my Mother) a different type of cognition emerges.

Have you ever been slacking at work, and then suddenly see your boss coming around the corner?

The body instantly responds — what had seemed a natural inclination reconfigures itself in a snap to attune to the new social circumstance.

I suddenly “shape up.”

As has become my practice, I have begun doing my job as though my boss were watching me work.

When he comes out of nowhere, I become frantic, shaky, nervous.

But when I internalize the idea of his visage, I begin to develop patterns of style that are no longer ruffled by his sudden real appearance, and I can work more efficiently and with less anxiety.

I’m not professing that I have mastered this technique — rather, it is a life-long practice I continue to hone fail-fully.

But with faith, I have promise to ever improve, glimpsing brief visions of Sophia and gaining world-perspective which aligns my soul more fully to the inspired fire of the cosmos, ever-burning but never consumed.

Brief flare that I am, when I near this Ethos I find more abundant clarity and energy than I would otherwise.

Knowing that these ideas are present in Buddhism, Greco-Roman Virtue Ethics, and in the Abrahamic faiths only gives me more energy and hopefulness.

A good idea is often one that seems to naturally emerge in a variety of human contexts, and I suspect that conscience is present in other traditions as well.

This shared knowledge of what is right and just — what is mutually supportive between persons, what fosters acceptance, dignity, and respect — seems to be beneficial.

It seems pro-growth, and sustaining.

I cherish it and wish to continue cultivating it.

Aspiringly, 

Aaron

Violet? The same strange

shenanigans of shadow

and the weird consistencies

of digits in this Virtuous

World.

Matter and Ethos,

Eros and Blue

smeared across stations of

moisture-insulated

cloud cover.

And you, still,

snapshot and florid,

stranger at hand,

next to the dolls

you both collected.

My Lady of Greatness,

Great-Grandmother of everything.

I pray, I stay, I pray.

I wait, I wait.

I want. And everything

is Given.

Whether it’s our kids growing and taking on new friends and interests, our bodies becoming older and acting different, our workplace changing staff, or our parents remarrying, every system in which we participate is in a constant state of progressive flux.

It can often seem frightening, particularly when we begin to depend on certain things being constant.

In Buddhism, this is called Impermanence.

One cause for our suffering is our clinging to the status quo as though it were ultimately real, when in fact it is only illusory.

This can be a lot for the mind to take.

It’s difficult, and requires much investment of time, intellect, and energy to get to know the system in the first place.

When it begins to change, it can feel like a betrayal. It can feel like we were told to expect one thing, and are now being expected to completely start over.

This can be particularly challenging when it affects our immediate safety and well being.

But the truth is that all of us are mortal, and that every system in which we participate is influenced by that very mortality, as well as our whims, fancies, ideas, hopes, dreams, fears, and aspirations.

So we plant seeds where we can, and take care of them as we can, hoping that the conditions for growth may be favorable.

Which they may not be.

So we develop other systems which are known to better withstand the tests of time.

We create social groups and bonds.

We develop prayer and meditation practices.

But most of all, we develop ways to confront the base-level anxiety present in life so that, when we are confronted with a bad morning, we are not entirely knocked into a fit of despair.

Sometimes this amounts to simply going through the motions even when we don’t feel like it, simply out of the notion that this is simply what one does.

Because the anxiety is also impermanent.

Throughout our day, circumstances may surprise us in becoming suddenly hospitable to our temperament, despite our ill feelings.

Or, even if it doesn’t, we are capable of continuing to perform despite the unfavorable climate.

What else could we do? What would we?

This resilience is a suggestion of the great power of our consciousness as sentient beings, and a testament to our relationship with the world’s mountains, seas, and deserts.

It’s a well that never dries, and a rock that never moves.

All we need to do is turn to it in a spirit of embrace.

Our ability to hold, accept, cognize, consider, and reflect makes us participant within the entire story.

And it is a brilliant story, ages long, which connects us to all of history natural and human.

In light of these reflections, this morning I’m sharing a poem by Percy Shelley.

It speaks of the constancy of consciousness which persists despite our various goings-on.

May it be of some use to you, and may you find today some moment to delight irrespective of circumstance or context.

You are a remarkable creature, and it is a boon that you exist.

Affectionately,

Aaron

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Mutability 

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

                                         I.
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
    How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:—

                                         II.
Or like forgotten lyres whose dissonant strings
    Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
    One mood or modulation like the last.

                                        III.
We rest—a dream  has power to poison sleep;
    We rise—one wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep,
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:—

                                       IV.
It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,
    The path of its departure still is free;
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
    Nought may endure but Mutability.

Allow me to unpack.

We’ll start in the bathroom.

Washing my face this morning, I realized that I have substantially different types of thought depending on how I’m doing physically.

When I am tired and hungry, and when I’ve been confronted with a number of substantial challenges, my thoughts tend to become more acidic and cynical.

After resting, however, I find that my thoughts are generally generative, optimistic and eager to find connection where I’d previously found isolation and division.

Thoughts, then, begin to seem context-dependent, and their content begins to appear somewhat arbitrary.

Poetry, in the mode in which I work (neo-Romanticism), begins to come onto the grid when I am in the appropriate psychic state in which composition can emerge.

This particular state is quite different from others, primarily in that it embodies a consonantly harmonious vision of the interplay of complex ideas.

These ideas are not complex, though, in the sense that they are intellectually rigorous (although they can be that).

Rather, they are complex in the sense that they blend experiences of various ways of knowing.

As you’ve heard me harp here many times, propositional knowing is but one of several ways.

In poetry, we are participating in the cosmos, in our bodies, in our relationships with others (people and other sorts of beings such as trees, insects, and weather patterns).

We are also proceeding in a structured endeavor which offers time and space in which those participations may commence.

A statement is sentenced.

As that suggestion gathers color in the mind of both writer and reader, a new sort of perspective takes form.

This perspective is shared in a context of action and reaction between the two persons (like Ashbery, I don’t feel a poem is complete until it’s read by an other).

If the poem is true, it should have elements which promote this relationship.

It is best if there is an element of melody, syntax which stresses different words and parts of speech in such a way so as to give the reader the experience of something very unique in time which also feels out of time.

This is best if it can be coupled with images, ideas of objects which can be embodied in the mind of the reader.

Much writing, including my own, is wonky.

Especially in my early college writing, ideas were less about the full experience of what McLeish called the “globed fruit.”

Instead, I revelled in linguistic gymnastics, delighting so much in the sound and the gauzy semantics of words that I completely lost the world.

There’s nothing wrong with this in theory.

As O’Hara did in his poem “Three Airs,” this sort of leaping out into the ether can be a delight.

But ether is only one form of being.

O’Hara begins with the poem and ends with the poem.

The poem is best when it starts somewhere, goes somewhere, and resolves into something.

O’Hara’s poem does this, as do all poems which I consider to be effective (read: “strong” or “potent.”)

When I was making my unclasped assertions, it coincided in my life with a mode of being that was mostly about escape.

I was in my 20s, feeling that freedom from having left my native domicile, making decisions of my own and making new friends, moving to cities like Milwaukee and Kansas City.

Nothing wrong with that.

But it always already comes back to the body.

A body can do all sorts of fascinating things, and survive in some extraordinary climates.

Yet for this delicious organism to function in its fascinating blend of flesh, air, and electricity, it must be attended to and cared for.

My theory is that the best poetry takes this into consideration for both poet and reader.

Anti-poems can create an enemy of the reader, but even this is spurred from the condition of knowing that the reader is there (and ironically depends on the reader’s compassion).

I could cite some Whitman, which would be appropriate here.

Instead, in consideration of my previous statements, here’s the aforementioned McLeish poem, which Jonathan Stull showed to me in High School.

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Ars Poetica


A poem should be palpable and mute   
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless   
As the flight of birds.

                         *               

A poem should be motionless in time   
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,   
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time   
As the moon climbs.

                         *               

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean   
But be.

Aspiringly,

Aaron

They are elsewhere, our cherished carpets, 
our floors as naked as our intellects. 

The floor is barren. The paneling is bare. 
Stark is ultimate as we can see. 

In this dour climate, the empty frames
house walls that lack color. They are boxes

without soul or, as it turns, without sound. 
They have rails which edge a shrine of silence

that simply waves its empty hand. 
The salt lamp is an orb extending out, 

like hearing floating deftly within. 
Lady beetles slowly mop the ceiling. 

It is nearly winter. The floorboards are dry. 
Their tree rings have been frozen in decaying time. 

Here in this loneliness, a vacuum, 
within these jittery ejaculations, 

whines out an empty gasp, 
ghost-adage of the hallowed's hangover. 

And here, in this stark, we come to lose
the final comfort of that ultimate. 

The squirrel aches as he flits past the sill. 
Dark is the indifference in his iris. 

There is the solace for the loneliness, 
but fleeting, in another place.

If you feel like you’re in the mood for more poetry today, this poem is actually a re-Vision of a poem by Wallace Stevens called “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters.”

Not my favorite Stevens poem, but everything he wrote is worth reading.

Obviously, it was a poem with a memorable enough title that it came back to me, unprovoked.

I thought of my title’s echo while walking, considering the way in which all of the radio I hear at work seems more or less stuck in rock and hip-hop, lamenting all of the color of other forms of music.

I then sat with the Stevens poem and literally re-wrote it line for line, maintaining its form and grammar, merely changing the words.

While I consider this poem to be a throwaway exercise, I am happy with how it feels empty and lifeless as the content it describes.

That said, a friend pointed out that despite the loneliness and isolation described in the poem, there is life there — beetles and squirrels make appearances reminding the speaker that all is not dead. (I wanted to use the term Harmonia axyridis to name what are called “Asian lady beetles” because it’s beautiful — but “lady beetles” eventually won because the phrase is more common, and also fit the sounds with “slowly mop.”)

I also like the way in which the life rings of the trees that made the floorboards continue to remind the speaker of the ubiquity of organic growth, even in this climate.

I also like that the speaker has lost solace in the ultimate, and seems to resign himself to continuing to participate in the co-creation of the cosmos he shares with his fellow beings.

I hope that all of you are having a good weekend so far, and that much good comes to you.

Appreciatively,

Aaron

“We are simultaneously finite and capable of Transcendence. If we only embrace our finitude, we fall prey to despair and servitude. If we just embrace our Transcendence, we fall prey to inflation and hubris. If we hold them together in tension (tonos), we will properly realize our humanity. The Middle Path is to live in tonos.” — John Vervaeke saying some really Orthodox shit

No-thing-ness. Don’t get hung up on the metaphysics. Instead, consider these ideas to be an imaginal conceptualization that might be useful, if not helpful.

Learn more about the Tree of Knowledge here.

I am not saying that everything Lynch says is problem-free. I am saying that practicing TM twice a day and visualizing things in this fashion assists with all of my other practices, and brings depth, meaning, and calm to my life — and offers me an experience of rest and relaxation I have never achieved anywhere else. (I used to sometimes get glimpses of it after sex.)

(My interpretation is that) Lynch speaks of how resting in the mantra allows one to descend below the surface level of the cultural, and come into a deep contact with a more core sense of being which is in touch with the transcendent.

Irrespective of whether the bit about the “Unified Field” is accurate, or whether there is confusion or conflation when we visualize what it means to fall into a deep meditative state (and how that relates to what someone like Bernardo Kastrup might call “Cosmic Consciousness”) there is a great potential in thinking in a TM style when it is clarified by the UTOK system.

Anecdotally, part of why UTOK resonated so strongly with me is that it overlays so nicely with this practice I already have and, as I have reinvigorated my devotion to abstaining from alcohol, have begun practicing again.

It helps me to have a model (UTOK) which can frame a Vedic practice (TM).

"Forever, O Lord, Thy Word is settled in Heaven." 

-- Psalm 119

She died at a younger age than I am now, 
her tail folded and low to the ground -- 
although it did not touch. The ocelli 
seemed less like they refused to see the truth
and more as though they'd simply seen enough. 

The compilation of her feathers, called a book, 
so full of barbs and filoplume, 
had finally been bound and covered, 
ready to be shelved, anthologized. 

Here, in the temple, men were selling colorless doves
whose eyes blinked and flirted in oblivious ignorance. 
There was no music, no angry Son of Man
to chase them from their keep. 
They simply sat, sated by inexhaustible feed. 

I saw her eyes in the face of the Virgin Mother, unbespectacled, 
and, with nothing to read but everything to pray, 
I imagined myself back in Iowa City at St. Mary's
on a Wednesday morning before our class had started, 
and wondered at the words I'd yet to see.  

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