life is poetry. we are the poets

[I]t’s already striking that the most basic or generic term for the mental or deliberate dimension of a crime is precisely this old phrase mens rea i.e. guilty mind, rather than a more neutral term like “state of mind”; when the mind per se enters an English court, so to speak, in a sense it does so in a way that’s presumed to be guilty in advance.

Maybe the mistake is thinking that atheism is the opposite of faith. And maybe the two are never more intimately connected than in bed. This might be the only time we modern atheists still cry out to a higher power. Oh my God: it’s a prayer without an addressee, without a request. Perhaps this is nothing more than our clumsy way of naming pleasure—perhaps our erotic vocabulary is just impoverished. Or maybe an orgasm is still a religious experience even if we don’t believe in God; we recognize something transcendent in sexual pleasure even if we can’t name it very well, even if we have lost the language and narratives and imagery of theology that once shaped the experience and lent it meaning. There was unbelief at the heart of belief in early modernity—and there may yet be belief at the heart of our own unbelief.

The paradox that language can evoke experience that transcends words is perhaps the highest tribute to the power of language. But those are words in poetic use.

Language forces a space between interpersonal experience as lived and as represented. And it is exactly across this space that the connections and associations that constitute neurotic behavior may form. But also with language, infants for the first time can share their personal experience of the world with others, including “being with” others in intimacy, isolation, loneliness, fear, awe, and love.

totality as a flood of convergences