Philosophy - hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they're both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that's almost happening, never quite totally happening.

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.

A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.

Caught between the tongue and the taste.

Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches. Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt. He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds. I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.