Stories:
People expressing why
people imagining
a person shaping meaning in the flow of narrative
a person speaking, giving voice to the individual, giving value to the vessel of human knowledge, being an interpreter of the stories that have come before
giving birth to an idea

Expressing:
shape, form, texture, tone
starting with materials and forming them on the mold of a thought, an emotion

Cherished:
Things of value. Love. Obligation. Duty. Ties to other people. Ties to ideas, ideals. Affirming those things outside the self. Relationships.

Is profound emotion the collision of extremely compelling voices, texts? I am constantly evaluating? What is hope? Despair?

Emotion as an ethno-culturally determined set of evaluative procedures and models, filtered through the individual experience. The expression of those evaluations. The Art of loving. The emotional evaluation of the self in relation to a multivocal cacophony of interpersonal negotiations.

Love – the flurry of voices, of texts, of evaluations
Death – silence, the loss of a voice, the abscence of response
Longing – a voice in dialogue with the past, an evaluation about a hoped-for future, a speaking entity. Lacking a repsonse, but believing in its existance. Creative.

And I am thinking about this some more: Love is the death of the intellect. I will continue to refute this, because it seems incorrect.

Desire is generated by love. Desire, I would say, is the genesis of the intellect. The intellect maps desire, finding pathways of logic through it, beyond it, out of it, perhaps. Love generates desire, which stimulates the intellect.

Consider the theory of language, the theory of text, of our comprehension of communication, as a model of how the intellect is operates in terms of desire:

“The seam of the two edges, the interstice of bliss, occurs in the volume of the languages, in the uttering, not in the sequence of utterances: not to devour, to gobble, but to graze, to browse scrupulously, to rediscover” (Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text).

More to come.

I approach these questions under the rain, in the memory of a sunny day on a patio, where they were introduced by friends.

Is religion possible where the mind is free to question, but where it may also submit to the aesthetic? Is a submission to beauty a kind of love? Is love a form of questioning, of continually deferred answer only desirable in its own pursuit?

Desire:
I strip down the the senses and stand in the blue wind of an oncoming rain
peeling off layers of language
down to just below the skin
where wind is no longer a word,
but an electric flash
straight to the brain

I strip down the senses and stand in the blue wind of an oncoming,
rain peeling off, layers of,
language down to just below,
the skin where wind is no longer.
A word – but electric,
A flash, straight to.

I strip senses and stand, blue,
oncoming, peeling language skin,
longer electric words flash to:

senses, skin, words:

electric, flashing in the wind.