Academia.edu: Wittgenstein's Willing Subject: How the Happy Life Is the Only Right Life [complete] Published on Academia.edu (DOC) Wittgenstein's Willing Subject: How the Happy Life Is the Only Right Life [complete]

All the World Was Broken: An Ecopoem On weightless air, the cocksure ravens flew. Wild sheep chewed grass; deer And bison chewed too. On a slanted hillside white mountain goats Enjoyed a lofty view. In forests, eucalypti, fresh-minted, grew. And fire-green firs with purple cones, Did too. For the silver-studded starfish there were oceans Wet with green and blue – And oceans for the whale and dolphin too. On blackest soil, the man called Adam grew His

Begin, Again, Finally Begin Organic bodies. Competitively divergent, Striving to maintain Separation. First creature, Rat. Disgusted, self-hating, heart-horrored. Ties a string-taut wire around his skinny neck And kicks the stool. Begin again Second, Vulture. Stupidly well-fed on pride, Invests heavy in guns, Gas, nightsticks and, supercritically, All the plutonium he can lay his talons on, Ending in his own atomization: The birth of stars. And again Snake.

By the Sound of a Voice After a long silence that seemed An eternity, There came a turbulent noise, A spirited noise. No, it was a voice, A loud voice Lashing up a storm, Singing intense, singing hot. And in the violence Of that voice, Whirled seeds of sound, Fragments of sense, Half-words, Commas & accents, Rhythm & image, Inclining towards poetry. And the LORD bent His ear To hear spoken The moon & sun & stars – & there was a dark saying too, Sung by

God, DNA, Bone Our DNA a polymer implant from our worldly creator, Backbone sidechain nitrogen phosphate And an oesophagus for food easier to swallow than pride. Offal and organs. God sticks in the gullet. Mitochondria In the nostrils. Bonding one cell To another, neuron to neuron to neuron, bone and bone.

Melville and the White Whale Shut up Here in This Caved Trunk of a Room, On the Massachusetts Side of a Loose-Fish Land We Call America — and Feeling All at Sea In a World That Is Mad and Wet All Over I Write down This, My Heathen Language. Making waves. Much INK OIL WAX SPERM BLOOD Spilled to find the White Whale — Whose mighty tail-flukes billow the sea’s shroud; whose peck-slaps flap and flood six hundred pages of Great American Prosody; whose massive genitalia rem

Made of Light Everything is made of light. Everything is light, of differing gradations and qualities, from the big bang to the atom. Earth and sky are the light of God, and the spirit in man is a self-shining light. The light of lights is the true substance, and that substance is God. Art is the light of the imagination projected outward. Bodies are dark light, lacking luminosity, where “darkness is simply an expression for the lack of light.”

The Quality of a Quantum I am nothing and you are nothing. but the relation between us isn’t nothing. Infinitesimally small differences establish the continuity between our discrete bodies. Intensive or extensive? Unity thought as plurality or plurality as unity? I can’t decide. (Either way we take up space and time.) We are two thought as one and one thought as two. If a complete synthesis is beyond us, remember this: In God’s infinite understanding we know just a little, an

In the Beginning Was Strange to think I am the universe and everything in it too. I call out. No voice returns other than my echo. So evidently, I am my own cause and, worse, horribly alone. Bored, I fall into a deep sleep and dream of many things: wave-like particles in plasma; diverse organisms, vertebrates and invertebrates; metals and gases; all kinds of finite bodies with perishable qualities, competing for succession and place and rank. Time passed and, with time, entro

"The temple curtain made of some heavy purple fabric, with its curious pleats ..."

Krishna Statue at the Sri Mariamman Temple (Singapore) Courtesy of AngMoKio / Wiki Krishna Maya clouds -- sattva, rajas and tamas -- Encircle the throne of Krishna, the bright Abode of the ten thousand faces. Making (placing before and at first), Paramatman forms the ribs of Adam, Sculpts the mountains, fills up the oceans With the flesh and water of his own body. You can find him in grasslands, rivers, cow-herds, Under a stone and inside a piece of wood. He kills demons, swa

Death of a House Sparrow Scraping his toes in the fine dirt, the handsome house sparrow lowered his whitish belly to the ground, deepening the depression of a crater arid from drought. Flapping dust under his wings, beak pressed to chest, he dry cleaned his colours in the earth, expressing in movement the joy and power of God’s nature. Perhaps it was a pain or a sorrow that made him stop still, every nerve in his body petrified to its tip. I stoo

Father O'Sinner Father O’Sinner is not his name (not quite), Though it should be and not O’Connor, Which was the name bestowed by his stepdad, Who drank and killed himself aged forty. Here he lies this foggy midnight on the cradle Of his drears and prayers. Faith does not Fructify; it is dirty. On a mattress Hard his rump Swells, bruises His core parts, the body revolts Amidst all this blasting and mildew. Life gone old and fat around the waist. A

The Blinded Samson (1912) by Lovis Corinth Samson 1 The LORD is a living dread whose absence in Shiloh is more potent than his presence. Notwithstanding the regenerative Spirit whose intimate impulse is felt by the inner man, no angelic return or godly descent precedes the rousing motions of body and temple torn joint by joint. No use for Delphic oracle or word from Jerusalem. 2 Absorbed by the moon, the sun gives up its light, the stars their sweetness, and the sky is d

A Dark Thought in a Green Shade Somewhere in the newly planted earth, a god sits at his bench, creating and curating each little plant and flower. Day upon day he nurses roots, stems and leaves, talks to fragile saplings, puts to work all the surprising symmetries and fractals he dreams of when he sleeps for hours in the afternoon sun. Neither a Moses nor a Prospero, but looking like both, the god puts down his staff and exhales a fragrant cloud that veils the garde

When He Planted in the Earth When He planted in the earth a tree of life, a tree of death (the latter with a curse of woe) did God say that this was good? And when He placed upon the grass the serpent Satan and his crew, did He ever stop to think why the Devil envied God? When Adam spied inside the bower that Eve was naked and alone, Was it Satan, was it God Who put the worm in Adam’s blood? And when God wept and cried some more inside a cloud of smoke and gas, was it then he

Yehudah, I Make You Mine From out of the banks of the muddy Jordan River, I make you Mine. Into shape I press the grit, into shape I knead the clay And your body clings to my fingers. I knead and a verb puts you in motion. I cut and I layer and an adjective fleshes out your shape. I slap and I roll and a rhyme gives you weight. I model and I sculpt and a noun marks you as a thing. With a name, I form you in my image (Your name is on my tongue). With a name, I firm you

God's Entropy (short version)

From Creator to Creature After the birds and mammals lost their speech (the serpent's tongue having already turned to ash) and Heaven swayed and fell to within four miles of the earth, a disappointed God crept low into the sea’s womb, into Mary, our lady of the ocean, and transmuted his glory into the microscopic, a millimetre in size, living between grains of sand on the sea bed, eventually emerging in the form of a fish.

A Song of the Sabbath Sacrifice And so the gods of lead and brass, The idols and their thrones, The teraphim made of fibreglass The mummified skulls and bones, Are tossed inside a whirl of wind And shattered into shells. But deep inside the kellipot The light of Yahweh dwells. And from the pieces Something new arises in the land, A temple of the sabbath king Built by Ezekiel's hand. With cherubim and fan-leaved palms Carved in the walls of paradise, And the air perfumed with