The Infinite; the Absolute; God.

[Parodites]

@Parodites

Given the fact that you are my mind’s only equal, you must share my distaste for the Byronic conscience, that is, the old cliched lamentation of the poets over knowledge being somehow equivalent to sorrow. Knowledge is not sorrow, and sorrow does not teach us anything that we could not have learned without it; sorrow is not deeper than joy. What do we gain by this monstrous wit of ours? Knowledge is neither a curse or a boon. We can defeat everything with it, with wit, but in the end, nothing can help the one who possesses it from turning it against itself. What use is it, after all, to have all the answers, and to have no questions to give our answers context? It is certainly not wisdom that we gain by it, by our wit. If wisdom ever did exist at all, it doesn’t now; it was in our youth, it was a dream whose strange symbols we learn to prophesize with age, a mute hieroglyphics we learn to read back into the living shape of things, until, perhaps with a second youth, (for I am sure this is what the first youth was) assuming that we do not simply forget that dream as most do in the advancement of years, everything we set our eyes to,- all the objects of our perception,- might learn to speak for the heart they touched, to the heart that beat in accordance to them and knew the language of such images in all of Bryant’s ‘eloquence of nature’. Conversely, philosophy leads only to aporia and paradox. The sciences reconstruct the universe in a skeletal form, a web of causes and effects that cannot ever be traced back to any moment of true creation, only the repetition of the same dialectical contest; Reason alone only feeds the mind back to itself, deriving an empty simulacrum, a potential stripped of any vitalizing element, a clockwork gear left without any impulse to actually set it into motion, a frozen mechanism: pure descriptions, without any explanations. Poetry, the arts, music-- these only generate our eidolons, converting the fluxions of sensible matter into stable, Apollonian forms; the illusion of immortality, Plato’s children of the mind, a progeny without generation. The desire of the poets to join these Forms with the shadow of our senses, to join Apollo and flesh, creates only what the Stoics called phantasai, the fog of delusion. All three of these fail to touch the Real, and what each of them lacks, we name God; what each of them refuses, we name the Infinite; what each of them denies, we name Absolute. That is why the saints and old religious masters, turning away from all three of these pursuits, chose to focus their energy on the task of negating their selfdom- on eliminating that finite element within themselves, opposing the infinite, their God. But that is just as pitiful a thing to do. The infinite is a mirror turned toward itself. They take one of the mirrors away, the lesser one, and believe they will see their God more clearly by doing so. They see nothing at all. It is easy, armed with wit alone, to fall into forgetfulness of self. But we have more than wit; as our minds save us from feeling too much, so do our feelings save us from thinking too much, Sarah. We are blessed to have both depths.

[Meno2 (Meno_)]

The medium requires the median value ( aesthetic) to balance and counterbalance Byron’s conscience against it’s diminutive absence, to balance the unity between them.

There is cyclical substantiality of either or both kinds of value.

Therefore absence makes stronger hold on presence and reversely. , while it makes the heart grow fonder.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

How did Sarah reply? Is she a member here? Can she reply here?

[Parodites]

@Ichthus77

How did Sarah reply? Is she a member here? Can she reply here?

Hell no bro, she’s by no means ever going to learn the name “Parodites”, I don’t want her to find my online persona and especially my politics, which is all over the place here. NO GO on that.

[Parodites]

I will relate to you though, that she told me I should have more faith in words; because, though they are fleeting and changeable things… the world is a fleeting and changeable thing. And then I said oh, you just invalidated my whole rant with a sentence, thanks.

[Parodites]

And with that realization, she reminded me that it is possible to speak in tandem with the world’s changing face, to learn its rhythm, and that this was in fact what poetry is, it is the ‘second youth’ I mentioned… that it is available to us. It is not Truth, but it is something.

[HumAnIze]

@Parodites

@Parodites

Given the fact that you are my mind’s only equal, you must share my distaste for the Byronic conscience, that is, the old cliched lamentation of the poets over knowledge being somehow equivalent to sorrow. Knowledge is not sorrow, and sorrow does not teach us anything that we could not have learned without it; sorrow is not deeper than joy. What do we gain by this monstrous wit of ours? Knowledge is neither a curse or a boon. We can defeat everything with it, with wit, but in the end, nothing can help the one who possesses it from turning it against itself. What use is it, after all, to have all the answers, and to have no questions to give our answers context? It is certainly not wisdom that we gain by it, by our wit. If wisdom ever did exist at all, it doesn’t now; it was in our youth, it was a dream whose strange symbols we learn to prophesize with age, a mute hieroglyphics we learn to read back into the living shape of things, until, perhaps with a second youth, (for I am sure this is what the first youth was) assuming that we do not simply forget that dream as most do in the advancement of years, everything we set our eyes to,- all the objects of our perception,- might learn to speak for the heart they touched, to the heart that beat in accordance to them and knew the language of such images in all of Bryant’s ‘eloquence of nature’. Conversely, philosophy leads only to aporia and paradox. The sciences reconstruct the universe in a skeletal form, a web of causes and effects that cannot ever be traced back to any moment of true creation, only the repetition of the same dialectical contest; Reason alone only feeds the mind back to itself, deriving an empty simulacrum, a potential stripped of any vitalizing element, a clockwork gear left without any impulse to actually set it into motion, a frozen mechanism: pure descriptions, without any explanations. Poetry, the arts, music-- these only generate our eidolons, converting the fluxions of sensible matter into stable, Apollonian forms; the illusion of immortality, Plato’s children of the mind, a progeny without generation. The desire of the poets to join these Forms with the shadow of our senses, to join Apollo and flesh, creates only what the Stoics called phantasai, the fog of delusion. All three of these fail to touch the Real, and what each of them lacks, we name God; what each of them refuses, we name the Infinite; what each of them denies, we name Absolute. That is why the saints and old religious masters, turning away from all three of these pursuits, chose to focus their energy on the task of negating their selfdom- on eliminating that finite element within themselves, opposing the infinite, their God. But that is just as pitiful a thing to do. The infinite is a mirror turned toward itself. They take one of the mirrors away, the lesser one, and believe they will see their God more clearly by doing so. They see nothing at all. It is easy, armed with wit alone, to fall into forgetfulness of self. But we have more than wit; as our minds save us from feeling too much, so do our feelings save us from thinking too much, Sarah. We are blessed to have both depths.

The analysis of truth-reality as in our experiences of this attempted to be put into language/symbolic representations is always going to generate an incomplete result, incomplete with regard not only to the original experience itself but also to the relevant truth-reality. So why do we do it? Probably for a hundred different reasons. One of which is that for various other reasons we have forgotten or abandoned something like an ability to silently reflect, which means simply TO KNOW as in knowledge=being. The very factuality of our own existence-as-such in its absolutely truth-real aspects (all of them simultaneously) as well as the varying degrees of “awarenesses” that have come to exist as parts of this truth-real-self which we are, and which parts somehow teach or elevate or reflect or represent or edify or compliment or expand or embody or authenticate or deepen or enliven that self.

“And wit was his vain, frivolous pretense
of pleasing others at his own expense.”

Speaking of wit. Poetry is best when it gives the truth-real directly as it in fact applies to the self as it is self, including all relevant contexts and associations and recursions and potentialities both succeeded and failed. But even good poetry that attempts to do this is always limited and often devolves back into the mere wit of shallow observations and self-serving ego-reifications, not without irony still nonetheless achieving something like an authentic portrait of certain aspects of the self although inauthentically so because such an image is not what the author supposes he is giving and certainly not what he has intended with his poem; perhaps this explains the genesis of postmodernism, come to think of it. Without God, we need God.