To soci­ety at large—Capitalist Amer­ica as well as her antagonists—to the Block Party that has irrepara­bly con­fused itself with Cul­ture, whose tour de force aspires to be deemed The First Glob­al­ized Brain, i.e. ner­vous activ­ity [Note: deter­min­ists and advo­cates of False Cause alone, would assume this leap—from avail­abil­ity to demand, from pres­ence to repli­ca­tion, to manic proliferation—is inevitable. I say: Not so.] —to whom it should con­cern: the Each is now con­sid­ered but a pho­ton of the vis­i­ble All: a quan­tum of mea­sure­ment for the momen­tous wave of light that para­dox­i­cally blinds one from the world that one has helped to illu­mi­nate. And the price we are too busy buy­ing, to name: is our voice. Voices to be pre­cise. The “sub­jec­tive I” retreats into its ane­choic prison, afraid to speak out and break the maxim “one is seen—not heard.”

Does, then, Philosophy—the sci­ence consciousness—“fit in” among the oth­ers whose devoir it is to save us from this bur­den? Thus shrugs mod­ern thought: “Isn’t its sur­vival evi­dence enough? Philoso­phers are still writ­ing, after all.” Ah, the inex­haustible appeal to brute force. Yes, they are still writing—and pro­claim­ing the need for self con­scious­ness—to them­selves. The Exis­ten­tial­ists were aware of this fact fifty years ago, and screamed blood cur­dling threats, and wrote “cor­rec­tives” until their hands bled, in the event that they could sal­vage the sci­ence, and in turn, the Mod­ern World. Iron­i­cally enough (as it is so often stated: with an air of sati­a­tion) the world saved the shards of phi­los­o­phy that enticed it—hence the Friedrich Niet­zsche band­wagon that rides on into the 21st cen­tury, mak­ing a pit stop of every high school and house party along the way. The world has saved phi­los­o­phy indeed: as his­tor­i­cal muse­ums will save an obscene lit­tle fetish from a long-collapsed civ­i­liza­tion: for the schmooz­ers clink­ing glasses at the exhibit open­ing. “Of course I’ve read Niet­zsche. Did you know he spent a night in a brothel?”

If phi­los­o­phy is to main­tain rel­e­vance today, it must be taken under the wing of its longest ally. It must be merged, applied, confounded—and this shall be our mantra—with poetic form. “But poetry is just as endan­gered,” you counter: and in that, my most bril­liant con­fi­dante, you are cor­rect. As soon as the Reader is to the Audi­ence as the Pho­ton is to the unfath­omably bril­liant Sun—the poet, prop­erly known as, has ceased to exist. That philoso­phers have been reduced to writ­ing for them­selves is but a symp­tom: of decline in the individual’s capac­ity to think—and to think! All this derives from the “age of infor­ma­tion.” [Note to self: that extin­guished novas “glow” with lost poten­tial: is a symp­tom of irony.] Poet­ics and Phi­los­o­phy are Siamese vis-à-vis a spec­ta­cle of voices whose har­mony is noth­ing less than inborn, and whose vio­lent sep­a­ra­tion our own Plato ordered. And still, heard singing together in the dark…

We speak of “ethics” in rela­tion to art, or more accu­rately, we super­im­pose on art cer­tain social guide­lines of a gre­gar­i­ous order… Call this “bub­ble gum ethics.” Maxim One: “Every fin­ished poem will func­tion like a pop song.” Do not laugh, for this is the foun­da­tion upon which our culture—it’s per­cep­tions, sen­ti­ments, and imaginings—has evolved. A poem which begins: “What if you—abandoned your­self?” is thus charged with pre­ten­tion because its sub­ject is “explic­itly philo­soph­i­cal.” One would think that when the songbird’s left wing was torn off, his left brain died dur­ing surgery! Charged for being, per­haps, polit­i­cally insen­si­tive.

Accord­ing to exist­ing accounts of “art ethics” (for which we do not reserve a place within the cat­e­gory of sci­ence, pseudo-science even) —accord­ing to them: an eth­i­cally per­mis­si­ble poem must do two things: 1. spring from an hon­est emo­tion or con­cern whose locus is the psy­che of the Poet, and 2. Strike a chord for “aver­age” reader. We know this term is dan­ger­ous, not because it casts judg­ment— but because it refuses to say what it means—it is armed with ambi­gu­ity. To describe some­thing as “aver­age” with­out stat­ing the terms and con­di­tions of aver­a­ge­ness as such, offers no point of reference—for below or above. I pro­pose the intended usage of the term is as fol­lows: the prop­er­ties com­mon to most intel­lects and psy­ches, once those that are unique to any one, are shaved off from the median. There no more exists an “aver­age mind” than their does an “aver­age individual”—only minds that can be likened, i.e., cor­rupted, when their own­ers opt to fear instead of acti­vate their pow­ers of thought.

While the intel­lect can be mea­sured (to a minis­cule degree) in terms of quantity—there is no such gauge for the pas­sions, nor the sen­ti­ments, nor the moods. For instance, it is pre­pos­ter­ous to assume that “he who weeps at nei­ther wed­ding nor funeral is an android: and thus does not weep, think, feel, at all.” Or she who’s tonic of pas­sions explodes non-conventionally—into heart­break when a child bounds glee­fully past, into joy when a dead vine unclasps from the side of a building—possesses a neu­rotic, if surface-level view of her world. The poet has the abil­ity to locate and repli­cate enu­mer­able sen­sa­tions of the sub­tlest hue, which he por­trays, unlike the philoso­pher, with­out shov­ing them a pri­ori into Uni­ver­sal straight­jack­ets. The poetic is a style which refuses to be cramped, and thus dia­logue with the Uni­ver­sal becomes its alter­na­tive. Its genius: leaps of rea­son, beauty in order via resem­blance (or metaphor), an intu­itive mas­tery of emo­tion, mean­ing and form.

A poem achieves uni­ver­sal­ity in so far as it makes exiles out of every­thing: the word “money,” the con­struct we call “time,” the val­ues a life is spent heap­ing thereon. It throws society’s lex­i­cons to the wind and says “wait—like this.” It takes the wind out of the Lover, and makes the river her ven­tril­o­quist. It reveals the pyrotech­nics lurk­ing sin­is­ter behind our every Arche­type. If the poet lies, it is to cause us to ques­tion the world that we our­selves have cre­ated, the val­ues we so read­ily accept, and in short: because she can. As for whether a work can be judged as “eth­i­cally permissible”—well. There exists mod­est rea­son to engage in such cri­tiques, to rep­re­sent an ethics which poet­ics can appro­pri­ate: a theme which, like cer­tain explo­sives, is best unpacked in iso­la­tion. Tune in next time to hear the bang.