Richard Q

The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited

The turn to poetry need not be a turn to the less disciplined as opposed to the rigorous, to the figurative as opposed to the technical, precise or literal, to one truth as opposed to another. This opposition, while a powerful tool for both spheres–but even keeping them separate, contained away from one another is…More

Michael Marder Presents on Dust (Link)

Michael Marder gives talk, in geometric order, on dust.More

A philosophy of dust

A Philosophy of Dust From https://interecophil.wordpress.com/ “Dust is a ledger of past existence: dead skin cells and plant pollen, hair and paper fibers. Dust is also an ephemeral gathering place for dust mites and fungi. It is at once a random community of what has been and what is yet to be, and a figure…More

Senselessational Beings

“In the beginning was the nonsense….“ Nietzsche, HAH You see those beings there, Up on the peak which still seems profound, Acting all kinds of foolishly? You hear them pounding the ground With gourds and skins, Singing only insensible things? You feel their touch Caressing the space between spaces, Barely never touching? You taste their…More

How, and from where, we look

How, and from where, we look. From above, at three thousand feet above the town, soaring through the clouds and piercing them with the nose of the great machine we are riding, the world looks wondrous, all the way up to ten thousand feet. But it’s the clouds that look most wondrous, in their expanse…More

On words

On words. What’s the word for that time in your life, when you’re trying to get back to where you were, but it takes forever, he asked. Despair, I said, and he sort of chuckled under his breath. I guess that’s a good word for it, he said with a lighter tone than was fitting…More

When it comes down to it

When it comes down to it: you have to keep doing what you’re doing, even in the face of the obstacles set up by your importunity and stupidity. We might ourselves be our greatest enemies and our most insurmountable difficulties, but even this, however true it turns out to be, gives us no excuse. It…More

Deathinitions

Alive, that means to stretch and have something to stretch. Alive, that means to give the potluck your secret recipe. Alive, that means a combination of steam and fantasy, like clouds. Alive, that means to etch out space out of nothing but space. Alive, that means a dream of the dead, a vast moving showing…More

New Year’s Blessing, or, To Be Reborn

Our transformations can happen any year, on any day, at any moment. But a new year is when we are all forced, somehow, to reckon with the possibility of transformation, of being transformed ourselves and of the world being transformed, if not forced to actually transform ourselves. What is a year for us? Even before…More

Scribblings on Eternal Recurrence

Eternal recurrence and our sense(s) of time: It possibilizes a prophetic sense of the future; but isn’t the past also granted a sense of uncertainty, of yet-to-be? * * * Once on a walk I asked each and everything: Do you want this once more and innumerable times more? and I was overwhelmed by the…More

via humiliatio

The more I love Christ, the harder I find it to laugh at him. The last two thousand years could be seen as a series of humiliations of Christ, who was already scheduled for humiliation while on the earth. As though one round of humiliation were not enough, Christ seems to have been doomed to…More

…this small sticky thing…

There is no solutionTo a thing like being covered in tarry despairSearching for respite in sticky flowersMelting further into your hand than into the soil.The planet feels it, and surely other planetsFeel it too, the wobbled curveOf adventuring into nowhere with no ideaWhere the other side begins, what it meansTo glimpse at a total life…More

There is no bandage for the wound of nihilism.

It is to our detriment when we think there is. My roommate recently said to me in the kitchen, “I struggled with nihilism for a long time, and I finally got over it.” The philosopher within my psyche laughs, the philosopher within me whose greatest philosopher-friend is Nietzsche who, in turn, made “the overcoming of…More

Nihilism, Grace, & the (In)difference

Nihilism stands at the door. Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests? Nietzsche, F. W., Kaufmann, W., & Hollingdale, R. J. (1968). The will to power. Vintage Books ed. New York, Vintage Books. p. 7 There are many ways to fall. Falling gracefully is one of them.Nihilism stands at the door, Nietzsche said, and he was right.…More

The be(a)st ideas

We might have passed the time when a man or a woman or another gives rise to an idea worth emulating or cultivating, and in that way gives that idea continued life. Now…now every idea is a caged idea. The idea is let out a little while to perform and wave its hands, then it…More