Thanks to everyone who joined the discussion in the comment thread to Via negativa and the road to hell. I was reminded once again why it’s a good idea to keep writing even when one isn’t feeling especially inspired, as was the case last Wednesday (and almost every other day last week – summertime humidity is setting in). Sometimes the best ideas do emerge from dialogue. And judging from people’s reactions, it’s gratifying to think that some of my wilder and woollier notions may not be entirely half-baked. There’s still a part of me that believes that an idea has to be obscure to be of any real value. But another, louder voice says, on the contrary, that ideas only gain value as they approach the vatic or poetic; anything else amounts simply to rearrangement of semantic furniture. Which, to the extent that it allows us to reconceptualize the symbolic spaces where we live and work, is no empty exercise either. And which does not begin to account for the power of mathematical ideas… (Aaagh, here I go again! Somebody hose me down!)
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.