December 11, 2013
Believe What You Wish
The Buddha’s hard-to-disagree-with central insight—that desire is at the source of human suffering, and human action in general—has ready examples in our loves, lusts, and ambitions; it seems to have […]
November 29, 2013
Child’s Play: The Maturation of the Mind
Freud, in his late life, moved from patient-on-couch analysis to larger theorizations about religion and civilization. In one such tract, The Future of an Illusion, he makes mention of how […]
November 29, 2013
About the “Singularity”
To decide whether Kurzweil’s idea of the Singularity is “true” or an “accurate” depiction of our future is to mistake the nature of prophecy. Imagine someone in 1914 predicting the […]
November 23, 2013
There are no Coincidences: Language and Apophenia
I have a peculiar mystical inkling about language, or rather about languages in the same language group or family, which is that there are no coincidences. Translingual synapses form, […]
November 23, 2013
Turning (Back) to Performed Language
Why sit down and read quietly? Is this really the only way, or even the best way, to experience language? The three central works of Western literature were never, and […]
November 17, 2013
Me and the Monotheists
I have noticed, over the past decade of writing and publishing poems, that Catholic journals, and Christian journals in general, have welcomed my poems warmly. This, in spite of the […]
November 16, 2013
The Scripture Reads You
Scriptures, because they are bound as books, are considered to be books; and the metaphor that extremists of any stripe (religious or antireligious) have in their heads is that of […]
November 9, 2013
With or Without You: Government Censorship and Literary Creativity
Good Queen Bess, absolute monarch during the great flowering of English drama, had a hair-trigger policy on censorship. No writer was allowed to criticize the Queen or her policy on […]
November 4, 2013
Blasphemy’s Implicit Exaltation of Language
A poet’s concern that his poems are failures is nothing new. The difference, beginning in the 20th century, has been where we place the blame. We used to say: […]
November 4, 2013
Rimbaud the Prodigy
We are used to mathematical prodigies—a Ramanujan, a Pascal, an Evariste Gaulois—leaping to some early, complete insight closed off to the merely talented or well-practiced. Musical prodigies, too, are well-documented; […]
October 29, 2013
The Twenty-Year Rule
Just as there is a sharp division between a 19th century Yeats (the “Celtic Twilight” material) and a deliberately developed, 20th century Yeats (the “Byzantine” Yeats of the more […]
October 19, 2013
Why I am Inherently Evil
The idea of karma—the moral effect of your actions, good or bad, following you across births—suggests that even a newborn has some inherent guilt. In this Eastern model of […]