sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty, how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring)
“Quartz: So, is it OK to punch a Nazi?
Žižek: No! If there is violence needed, I’m more for Gandhian, passive violence……………
—while Gandhi really wanted to bring down the British state. But his violence was symbolic: peaceful demonstrations, general strikes and so on.
If a guy talks like that jerk [Richard Spencer], you should just ignore him. If he hits you, turn around. Don’t even acknowledge him as a person. That’s the type of violence I would call for. Not physical violence. Because, you know, people say symbolic violence can be even worse, but don’t underestimate physical violence. Something happens when you move to physical violence. I’m not saying we should greet everyone, embrace them. Be brutal at a different level. When you encounter a guy like the one who was punched, act in such a way that even hitting him, even slapping him is too much of a recognition. You should treat him or her or whoever as a nonperson, literally.
In other words, leftists should “go high?””
“It’s much more complex than that. I think that’s their biggest mistake. Isn’t is sad that the best left-liberal critique of Trump is political comedy? People like Jon Stewart, John Oliver and so on. It’s nice to make fun of him, but you laugh at him and he wins. My God! There is something terribly wrong with playing this game of ironically making fun of Trump. You know, in medicine they call it symptomatic healing when you take some things, they just neutralize the effects, like you have this pain, but they don’t heal the disease itself. Criticizing Trump is just symptomatic healing. Trump is an effect of the failure of the liberal-left. Everybody knows this knows this now. The only way to really beat Trump is to radically rethink what does the left mean today. Otherwise, he will be getting ordinary people’s votes.”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69384/selections-from-keatss-letters
“Tell George and Tom to write.—I’ll tell you what—On the 23rd was Shakespeare born—now If I should receive a Letter from you and another from my Brothers on that day ’twould be a parlous good thing—Whenever you write say a Word or two on some Passage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you; which must be continually happening, notwithstand that we read the same Play forty times—for instance, the following, from the Tempest, never struck me so forcibly as at present,
‘Urchins
Shall, for that vast of Night that they may work,
All exercise on thee—’
How can I help bringing to your mind the Line—
In the dark backward and abysm of time—
I find that I cannot exist without poetry—without eternal poetry—half the day will not do—the whole of it—I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan—I had become all in a Tremble from not having written any thing of late—the Sonnet over leaf did me some good. I slept the better last night for it—this Morning, however, I am nearly as bad again—Just now I opened Spencer, and the first Lines I saw were these.—”
‘The noble Heart that harbors virtuous thought,
And is with Child of glorious great intent,
Can never rest, until it forth have brought
Th’ eternal Brood of Glory excellent—’”
“White supremacists are really, really hoping that you don’t keep reading this article. They don’t want you to learn about the Paradox of Tolerance, because then they’d lose a powerful weapon in their fight to make society more racist. Ready to make a white supremacist mad?
Fortunately for us, the Paradox of Tolerance, a concept coined by philosopher Karl Popper, is easy to understand and remember. The “paradox” part makes it sounds complicated and hard, but it’s really just a rule with one exception. It goes like this:
To give a specific example, a tolerant society should tolerate protest marches in general, but it shouldn’t tolerate a white supremacist march advocating for the oppression and killing of people of color – like the march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 that ended with white supremacists beating and killing people who were opposed to their message of intolerance.”
Do we need the Evil Others, then
The” backward” countries we exploit for oil
To take our badness, bear what is our sin?
For we are perfect, civilised, thinking
And they are children letting anger boil
Do we need the Evil Others, then?
We ravaged the whole world, just to begin;
Created empires, stole the haul.
Where is not our badness, where not sin?
We demeaned their culture and religion
Said that we were best and took their all.
Do we need an Evil Other, then?
We did all this with noble conviction
Forgot the lessons and the truth of Fall
Where is then our badness, where our sin?
Are we so sure that we do sense the whole
And never hear the voice of God bewail?
We need the Evil Others, our own twin
To bear our badness, our historic sin.
“But while establishing a brand is good for business, it may be antithetical to the essence of real creative work. According to the Romantic English poet John Keats (1795-1821), artists of fixed opinions suffered from “egotistical sublime,” obsessing over singular truths to the point that they were unable to produce characters and storylines that convincingly diverged from their personal world views. He argued that the secret to being an artist was to cultivate a mindset he called “negative capability.”
Writing to his brothers in 1817, Keats introduced the concept of negative capability as he discussed Shakespeare’s creativity. “At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously,” he wrote. “I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Creative genius, according to Keats, requires people to experience the world as an uncertain place that naturally gives rise to a wide array of perspectives. This imaginative experience is what energizes and vitalizes literature, says Susan Wolfson, a Princeton English professor and author of Reading John Keats. Only when artists are able to stay open-minded can they write a wide range of characters and human experiences, from antagonists like Milton’s Satan and Shakespeare’s Iago to romantics like Keats’ Isabella. Holding too closely to one’s own view of the world is creatively counterproductive.
True poetical character, Keats believed, “has no self—it is everything and nothing—it has no character and enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion Poet.” The ideal artist, it seems, is equally enthralled to inhabit the mind of a character who aligns with their personal beliefs and one who is antagonistic to them. For this reason, he made fun of poets who used poetry as a means of constant lecturing and haranguing, including William Woodsworth (Keats’ friend), who told readers how to read his poetry, and John Milton (author of Paradise Lost), who sermonized on the balance of good and evil. Such instructive writing, Keats believed, inhibited the writer’s capacity for nuance.
Keats’ dwelling on the “chameleon poet”—one who “has no identity, [who] is continually filling some other body”—could be easily misinterpreted as a glorification of the weak-minded. But the imperative of negative capability isn’t about being indecisive or making blurry arguments. It’s about cultivating empathy. Artists do their best work when they learn to step outside themselves.
To artists with strong political dispositions, and in times of fierce political conflict, the concept of negative capability may seem threatening. After all, so much of art is driven by political beliefs. However, as Wolfson explains, Keats would not advocate applying negative capability to politics. “Keats was a staunch liberalist, against the monarchy, and a regular reader of The Examiner, a progressive and anti-monarchal newspaper,” says Wolfson. “He had no affection for political thinking on the right wing and viewed it as tyranny.”
Negative capability, then, is an artistic exercise: learning to entertain all sides of a question as a dramatist, poet, or creative thinker. Thus, perhaps the measure of a true artist and intellectual is the ability to embrace both negative capability and personal convictions at once—without letting one inhibit the depth of the other.”
The thoughts about the nature of human existence that we find
scattered and evolving in his letters, much of this theory and
speculation possesses a remarkable harmony or unity that
derives directly from certain basic qualities of his character.
Perhaps chief among these personal qualities is one easier to
name in negative than in positive terms: the usual and genuine
absence in him of self-assertiveness. The dogmatic tone or spirit
was not his, and he disliked dogmatic men and arguments,
believing that it was more blessed to listen, learn, and explore
than to preach in support of a pre-selected text. Thus we find an
unusual gentleness about Keats’s strength of mind. Because of
the basically explorative thrust of his thinking, he was reluctant
to reach closed-end conclusions.
131
J. Clubbe et al., English Romanticism
© John Clubbe and the Estate of Ernest J. Lovell, Jr
I can hardly believe this.A Swiss Hotel put a sign up saying Jews must shower before using the pool.And there was me, an English woman thinking I could pee in a swimming pool, take some soap and have a good wash
Apparently, that is ok for me.But Jews have to shower first.Would Jesus like this? You Christian hypocrites start thinking before acting
They could have put up a sign asking everyone to shower first.They must be dumb
I can’t imagine how horrible it still is for Jews in Europe.If it was me it would affect my self esteem a lot.
How my heart sings 