If a poet wants to say anything meaningful about the world, he must not push the world away from himself or seek in any way to avoid it. Despite the best of plans and intentions, the world is more chaotic than ever, and this chaos is pushing it with increasing speed toward self-destruction. The poet must carry this chaos as such—not smoothed and polished ad usum Delphini—but in such a manner that he does not fall under its spell. Through his experiences, he must oppose it from within and set the force of his hope against it.

There’s that word again, eh?

Quoted here for that reason, but also because I wanted to quote something from this elegant (if unfashionably prolix) piece of writing by someone I’d never heard of heretofore.

Struggling to get a regular rhythm going here at the moment, but everything’s a bit transitional and that does tend to play havoc with scheduling and bandwidth… and I guess I’m also still trying decide what blogging is even for, for me, in this particular stage of my life and state-of-the-world.

As I remarked to someone the other day, I think academia has thoroughly trained me out of the throw-out-a-half-thought-thought approach to writing in public; one finds oneself always thinking of the potential ‘gotcha’ retorts of critical readers to threads left dangling (which is ironic, given how few people read this damned website these days).

And while I would perhaps like to turn down the volume of the voice in my head that is always playing the role of Reviewer #2, I’m not sure I want to switch it off entirely; being a bit reflective about your own bullshit seems to me much to be recommended, even if it also seems to be woefully out of fashion (even, if not particularly, within academia).

Eh, I dunno. Maybe I’ll just stick to the standard form that has emerged here, where I set out a bunch of axiomatic statements and then conclude that I have no conclusion to draw.

(That’s irony, see. Or is it sarcasm? I’m sure I wouldn’t know.)