Busy afternoon. The cable company was here to troubleshoot internet problems we've been having for the last few weeks.

And, at the same time, the tree service was here to remove a huge storm damaged tree and assorted debris from the backyard. I wish my grandsons had been here to see the crane lifting huge sections of trunk away. It was kind of awesome.

*

Fragment




It came to me.

I appeared in it.

It’s not unusual.

One imagines it,

Hopes to encounter it.

Some consider it

To be a mistake.

It is often mistaken

For (fill in the blank).

It should never

Be forgotten.

It is shrouded

In language.

It is of a piece.

It is at hand.

It is nowhere

To be found.

Its nature

Is debated.

Some say it

Has been debased.

*

Am enjoying the new Zizek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, but it's a slow read (not a bad thing) and I'll be reading it for a very long time. One of the affinities between poetry and philosophy is that both disciplines require patience and slowness. Much like love. Eros runs all the way through the greatest poetry and philosophy. You heard it here first, peeps.

Anyway, this passage from the Zizek is one I keep returning to:

"A 'raw' Platonism would claim here that only the beautiful body fully materializes the Idea, and that a body in material decay simply falls away from its Idea, is no longer its faithful copy. From a Deleuzian (and, here, Lacanian) perspective, on the contrary, the specter that attracts us is the Idea of the body as Real. This body is not the body in reality, but the virtual body in Deleuze's sense of the term: the incorporeal/immaterial body of pure intensities. (One should thus invert the usual opposition within which true art is 'deep' and and commerical kitsch surperficial: the problem with kitsch is that it is all too 'profound,' manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while genuine art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract its subject from the 'deeper' context of historical reality.)"
(32)

*