“Works of art are indeed always products of being in danger, of having gone to the very end in an experience, to where man can go no further.”

*

The resolutely independent run the risk of complete solitude.

In solitude, a person shares so little reality with others that the background of reality stays visible. To put it another way: chaos blindness is lost.

The unavoidable remnant of shared reality doesn’t matter. A solitary person is often contemptuous of “mere” facts. What matters is the sense we add to our senses: that by which a fact is significant; a sign of what can only be known obliquely by sign.

*

Intellectual solitude is solitary confinement in plain sight. Only the terribleness of the condition can be observed. The condition itself is invisible because the condition is invisibility.

*

One perspective cannot be observed from another.

*

Some independent minds give up on mutual understanding. They learn to content themselves with leaving deep impressions on the senseless senses of others: memory depth-bombs that go off in the event that understanding ever becomes possible. This is why poets fuck with people.

*

Some minds have triggered chain reactions lasting millennia.

An explosion in the chain can ignite more fire or snuff a spark.

*

One technique for extinguishing a forest fire is to drop dynamite on it. The explosion consumes all available oxygen and the fire instantly starves. (Most rebirths are stillbirths.)

*

Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself, all is
mere skill and little gain;
but when you’re suddenly the catcher of a ball
thrown by an eternal partner
with an accurate and measured swing
towards you, to your centre, in an arch
from the great bridge building of God:
why catching then becomes a power —
not yours, a world’s.