Those dragonflies
Your blue eyes
Lawns with daisies
Poetic phrases
Sparrows cheeps
No mobile bleeps .
Foxes’ eyes
Scrutinize.
Let me be.
Don’t squash me
BBC
Poetry
Earl grey tea.
Rabbits run.
Let’s have fun,
Knitted hats.
Tabby cats
Hot red fires.
Dark quagmires
Lambs and sheep,
Lover’s leap.
Windermere
Glass of beer.
Sun on hills
Watermills
Rabid leavers
Damned deceivers
Facial cancer
Ballet dancer
Skate on ice
Do think twice
Acrobats
Habitats
The place where you learn to practise having fractures
The hip replacement clinic
You go here when you’ve lost your hip.
Please know which one it is left or right before you arrive at the clinic
A hat trick
You can wear a hat so that you can keep something under it
If you are on the verge of a nervous breakdown go to the psychiatric clinic where you can have a complete one under the psychiatrist
If you don’t know how to use a commode go to the geriatric ward. They’ll teach you how to be incontinent by refusing to take you to the toilet in a wheelchair when you have broken your leg
Happenstance
When something perfect happens seemingly by charice
A consultant
The head doctor in a unit not just not to be confused with s psychiatrist.
Psychiatrist
Used to be someone who dealt with the psyche but now we don’t believe in the psyche anymore but we still go crazy anyway
In fact it’s normal to go crazy from time to time. It’s just a total relaxation and refusal to bear any tension
Now just pay attention. It’s easy once you know what currency is used in Attention.
“I will say this quite plainly, what truly human is -and don’t be afraid of this word- love. And I mean it even with everything that burdens love or, i could say it better, responsibility is actually love, as Pascal said: ‘without concupiscence’ [without lust]… love exists without worrying about being loved.”
― Emmanuel Lévinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind
In her Philosophy in a New Key (1942) her intent was to authenticate a new notion of the “rational,” but how she does it is of fundamental importance. The classical tradition, Langer claimed, generally identified the rational with the “logical,” with discursive thought and objectivity. It then had the difficult task of explaining, or explaining away, such important human concerns as art, ritual, myth, and religion. Langer showed that these forms of meaning-making were embodied in vast sets of symbols and symbolic practices with their own distinctive “logic,” a non-discursive logic, quite different from the discursive logic of language and mathematics. They belonged to the domain of “presentational forms,” not “discursive forms,” a key distinction of her work. Presentational forms, Langer showed by an examination of their logic, are not mere effusions of an irrational subjectivity but articulations of the felt sense of things to which they give us unique access. They orient us in the world in the deepest existential manner, effecting participation in vital values and giving us visions, embodied in symbolic images, of our place in the cosmos. Langer, prior to extensive developments in semiotics, showed that they are worthy of philosophical study in their own right. Her work compares favourably in heuristic power with, and complements, C S Peirce’s great attempt to avoid logocentrism. We are a symbolic species at every level and not just language-endowed animals, although Langer held discursive symbols in the highest regard, as did her intellectual companion, Ernst Cassirer.
Langer was a devoted lover and practitioner of the arts, especially music, which she had studied in detail in Philosophy in a New Key. In 1953 she published Feeling and Form, a masterful generalisation and application to all the arts of the theory of music elaborated in that book. Its key idea was that feeling had a distinctive “morphology” that is exemplified in different ways in the different genres of art. Art works, she claimed, give us knowledge of or insight into ways of feeling the world in every shade of its expressiveness. They articulate feeling and are not mere expressions of personal feeling. They are presentational symbols and their meaning-contents are the “primary illusions” peculiar to each art form: virtual space in the pictorial and visual arts, virtual powers in dance, virtual experience and virtual memory in literature, virtual time in music, the ethnic domain in architecture, and so on. Langer showed art to be an authentic symbolic form and her notion of a “morphology of feeling” exhibited in the artwork is a permanent contribution to aesthetics.
In the last twenty-five years of her working life Langer attempted to develop the notion of feeling as a term to cover all the manifestations of minding. The result was Mind (1967-1982), published in three volumes over a fifteen year period, and which remained incomplete, due to her advancing age. It anticipated many of the current concerns in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. Its central idea is that feeling is an emergent property of natural processes but that its paradigmatic manifestation is the rise of symbolisation and the proliferation of cultural forms and their attendant conflicts and permutations. Central chapters in this book carry out and reformulate Langer’s central insight and claim: symbolisation and the power of abstraction are the keys to what it means to be human. In a return to and deepening of her initial proposals in her first philosophical work, Langer distinguished between generalising abstraction and presentational abstraction, the two fountainheads of all those frames of meaning in which we live out our lives. It was the working out of the implications of this distinction, present at the beginning of her intellectual journey, that forms the connecting link of her whole remarkable philosophical career.
Robert E Innis is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and author of Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind (Indiana University Press).
I’m really sorry to hear that your sister has died again. Will it ever stop,? Someone needs to get to the bottom of this before it becomes an infinitely repairing decibel. I know I’ve always preferred fractions myself but not everybody is as rational as I am.
Please accept our deepest infinity for your cross
Please be aware of our deepest symphony when we hear sure sad news.
I am sorry your sister is enjoying eternal pests. I pray it will be soon be over. Who else is there in purgatory?
I couldn’t wait to write to you when I heard your sister lied. I hope she makes a good recovery when she gets to heaven if you guess what I scream. I only wish I was illiterate I know you both went to Oxford. What for? I never like the railway station there myself and the Marks and Spencer store is far too small there I suppose Oxford Cons do not shop there.
I hope your mourning goes well. Sending our bugging timpani
When you said your sister spied I wondered if you were on the spectrum. But we don’t have a chemistry lab over here. Should you ask professor Fearrack
What did you say was the spectrum of the Duraglit operator. Did this affect your sister’s health and ultimately her life? I know you were worried about nuclear plumbers at Oxford. We lost contact so I never got to have that explosion that we were all waiting for in 1969
More likely it was a rest in eternity.
I really don’t know what I’m talking about but I am very sad on your behalf because you’ve had too many deaths in your life so far so I hope that you will have no more for the rest of eternity or should that be we will have arrested eternity? In any case eternity is inconceivable
William Blake could see eternity in a grain of sand
How did it feel on the beach when you were with him?
overlook, for instance, that Keats spent six years studying medicine, successfully earning a license to practice in London from the Society of Apothecaries—hence Lockhart’s insult about the “plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.” To think that he was “snuffed out by an article” trivializes the intense pain he experienced as his lungs were slowly consumed by tuberculosis, robbing him of his work, his love, and his life at the age of twenty-five.
The myth of the frail genius is attractive, even to contemporary readers, because of its quintessential Romanticism. But the truth is that Keats’s writings—especially when they seem fanciful or escapist—are grounded in real-world concerns. And nowhere is this more evident than in the letters and poems of his that deal with feverish suffering.
During the early nineteenth century, London had fallen into the grip of fever mania. The city was working to combat a host of diseases associated with the colonies: yellow fever, typhus, influenza, smallpox, child-bed fevers, agues, and St. Anthony’s fire, among many others. With almost a million people living in the city in the early 1800s, including more than ten thousand prostitutes, disease spread quickly, inducing public panic. Between 1816 and 1817, the number of admissions to the Fever Hospital spiked from 124 to 781, and the fever epidemic remained a major news story for the duration of Keats’s life. Whereas some historians have viewed the fever as a foreign invader, striking from the colonies upon the homeland, Keats would have recognized it as a recurrent, intimate presence that followed him throughout his life.
The patients whom he attended at Guy’s Hospital haunted him, as did the memory of his mother’s fatal consumptive fever, which he would relive as he nursed his brother, Tom, throughout 1818. Because of his family’s history of illness, his own medical training, and the epidemic of fever that spread throughout London, Keats was intimately familiar with feverish suffering; he used his writing to make sense of a pain for which there was no reasonable explanation. Two letters—one written before Tom’s death and one after—outline Keats’s philosophy of suffering as a creative force.
* * *
On May 3, 1818, Keats wrote a letter to his friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, comparing a human lifespan to “a large Mansion of Many Apartments.” He imagined two rooms in a mansion through which one must pass before confronting a vast number of potential third rooms. For an unspecified length of time, one remains unthinkingly in the first apartment, in spite of the fact that the doors leading to the second are wide open. Eventually, the impetus to think moves one from the first chamber into this second, called the “Chamber of Maiden-Thought,” which is full of intoxicating delights and thus initially very pleasing. But time spent within it leads to a “sharpening [of] one’s vision into the heart and nature of Man … convincing ones nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression.”
One becomes aware of one’s own fever and the suffering that afflicts humanity—which were present all the while, even amid the delights. Keats thought he’d only made it to the end of this second room. He saw nothing but darkness and mist in the hallway beyond it. He told Reynolds that he wished to explore the dark passages to seek out some form of salvation by way of his poetry, though he offered no compelling evidence that any of the unexplored rooms might contain something redemptive, or even pleasant.
Surrounding this philosophical discussion are the details of Tom’s illness. The letter begins with what appears to be good news: “After a Night without a Wink of sleep, and overburdened with fever, [Tom] has got up after a refreshing day sleep and is better than he has been for a long time,” and ends with restrained melancholy: “Tom has spit a leetle [for little] blood this afternoon, and that is rather a damper.” But insofar as Keats was hoping to justify the purpose of suffering to himself, both of these statements are heartbreaking. Because of his extensive experience with ill patients, Keats surely knew that his brother’s condition was grim, even in May 1818. His reactions hint at a kind of denial—an insistence that there be an identifiable purpose to justify the trauma he continued to witness and endure. And once he has convinced himself that there is a purpose to suffering, it is only another small leap to start thinking of the fever as something constructive. Indeed, as odd as it may seem, it was his brother’s grim condition that prompted, even forced, Keats to expand his philosophy of suffering to embrace fever as beneficial. The search for the third room, undertaken in the midst of suffering, had to lead to the creation of something meaningful and redemptive, as Keats would try to convince himself after Tom’s death in December 1818.
Joseph Severn’s drawing of Keats on his deathbed.
* * *
In the spring of 1819, Keats was at the height of his genius; within the next few months he would write his finest poems. In a letter from April 21, 1819 to his other brother, George, who had emigrated to America, Keats revisited his philosophy, unveiling the “system of Spirit-creation” that he’d been designing and testing for more than a year: the world as the “vale of Soul-making.”
Keats argued that any attempts to improve one’s life still end in death—a fate that he acknowledged as unbearable without some notion of redemption. And yet he rejected the idea of the afterlife or religious salvation—those, in his view, devalue the act of suffering, because they serve no creative purpose and teach nothing to the human individual.
Instead, he referred to the raw material of a soul as an “intelligence.” All humans have (or are) an intelligence, but they’re not considered souls until they develop an individual identity. Soul creation takes place over the span of many years and requires two components—the human heart and the world of feverish suffering—comprising a process that Keats likens to an education:
I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read—I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School—and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!
The “vale of Soul-making” celebrated the fever that had followed him through his life. And yet what Keats could not, or refused to, see is that the irrationality he perceived in religious salvation is present in his own system, too. There’s no ultimate purpose to the suffering that he, his family, and his patients have had to endure; it’s not as if the fever of tuberculosis consciously, benevolently struck Keats’s mother and brother to help them shape their souls. But Keats went to great lengths to convince himself of just that.
While the fever had surrounded him for most of his life, it consumed Keats during the months following Tom’s death, insisting that he find some way to rationalize its irrational effects. In fact, compared with other medical terms, Keats uses the word fever sparingly in his poems: blood is explicitly referenced forty-seven times (and implicitly in at least a dozen other instances), and there are 157 variations of heart, but only twenty-three instances of fever appear across the body of Keats’s poetry.
This shouldn’t mislead us into thinking that it’s a less potent image for him. His prudent use of the term demonstrates its importance—it’s loaded with personal significance. All but five of these uses of “fever” occur after Tom became ill, the most poignant of which comes in “Ode to a Nightingale,” written only a few days after the “vale of Soul-making” letter.
The feverish heart overwhelms the speaker of the “Ode to a Nightingale,” who suffers a heartache as he listens to the nightingale’s song, hoping to mirror the bird’s ability to transcend real-world circumstances. The speaker describes the world as
The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs.
Keats must have had Tom’s death in mind when he composed these lines; every phrase is loaded with the common suffering of humanity from which the nightingale’s song seems to escape.
Less than two years later, Keats died of tuberculosis in Italy, where he’d traveled in the hope of recovering, accompanied by the artist Joseph Severn. Even as he grew shorter and shorter of breath in early 1821, Keats repeatedly rejected his dear friend Severn’s belief in the afterlife, suggesting that he was committed to his philosophy of Soul-making until the end. Severn wrote in mid-January: “this noble fellow lying on the bed—is dying in horror—no kind hope smoothing down his suffering—no philosophy—no religion to support him.”
When the end came, it was the fever, and not an article with obvious political motivations, that killed Keats. The pleasures of his life—beauty, love, poetry—had always been bundled up with suffering and death, and we may empathize with him in his desire to articulate a purpose to it all. He was not too frail for the world: his devotion to making the most of his mortality drove his creative process. He was a man who had a deep need to create meaning where there was none.
Jeffrey C. Johnson is a writer living in California. His writing can be found on his website, and he is on Twitter.
How my heart sings 