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Standard Theory of Pure Love 2: About the Intellectual/Emotional Irreducible

Standard Theory of Pure Love 2: About the Intellectual/Emotional Irreducible

To feel or think a faith or doubt,
we rest upon the sense
that our feels and thoughts
can somewhere go,
can something mean–
are solid, worthy routes.

But what’s that undergirding sense,
us without we cannot trust
any sense that follows hence?

If knowing what is better
and following where it lead
are not within the scope,
or lie beyond the need
of my own heartfelt thought–
then the how and why
‘neath mental spires–
‘neath all my thought begot–
sink fast from flashing fires
that burn their ground floors out.

So faith in lawlessness
and doubting there’s a way
both break down at the gate.

So sole a course straight through
the sense we sketch but rough
(for sitting prior to all talk)
with “true” and “good”
is option to us human folk,
who can’t be but what we are.

Thus any answer we may post
for what we think to know
must ratify and follow close
our deep-in sense about
how Good nor True can go–
are ours before all doubts.

—–

Or wind round another way,
and hold our drive to learn
what’s best to be our own,
not mindless churns
untied to human yearns:

Our meaning speaks to us–
if not, we nothing more
but pretend to trust,
believe, and follow
what we never saw nor were.

And if our deep still sense
that kindness wide
and goodness far
and truth with love’s long reach
is start and path and goal in one,
and right to call us forth–
if that blaring inner light
does point away from right,
what meaning have we left
that matters very much
to us, to us right here right now,
with “it matters” at the heart
of all our thoughts and feels?

So there is after all,
a common faith–
regardless how we nod and shake,
we’ve a boundary shared,
beyond which any step we take
betrays all for which we care:

Faith and doubt are tools
to help us find our better ways;
if we so contrive them
to seal our minds
or shut our hearts
or keep love locked away,
they’re tools misused
that shot the hunter
and gave the game away.

BW/AMW

What is this?
It has to do with Love at a Reasonable Price.
The first section of that evolving ebook starts with two stories from the town of Pine, Michigan–where Ichabod the Love Peddler appeared over a century ago, and where there now stands a Pure Love Research Center (at the University of Pine). At the end of the second story, a Pure Love researcher says, “To understand Charles’ and I’s research, you have to be at least somewhat acquainted with the standard model of Pure Love.”
So that seems to call for a standard model or standard theory of Pure Love–similar to how there is one a standard model for physics: a set of principles and findings that just about all practicing physicists agree on. But we’ve been having our troubles writing a standard theory of Pure Love. So now we’re just writing poems around the topic, hoping to perhaps eventually sink in at an appropriate place. So far these “standard model” poems are all free (so far all poems are free: see “Poems” category on the right hand side to see them all). These poems and all other writings in Love at a Reasonable Price are listed and linked-to here:
Intro to Love at a Reasonable Price

Access to the whole evolving ebook, along with Diary of an Adamant Seducer for sale here:
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Statement of Faith (Essayish 4; also included in the beginning of LAARP)

Statement of Faith (Essayish 4; also included in the beginning of LAARP)

Here for the umpteenth gazillion time, BW tries to summarize Something Deeperism and its philosophical appeal.

Statement of Faith

Bartleby Willard is a simple man of faith. He is a simple Something Deeperist. He maintains that though the True Good is prior to our ideas and feelings, our ideas and feelings can still interact meaningfully with the True Good.

Something Deeperism attempts to hold the middle ground between radical skepticism and fundamentalist religiosity. Radical skepticism refutes itself because only a fealty to one’s underlying sense toward “truer” and “better” can justify or motivate intellectual rigor. Fundamentalist religion refutes itself when it allows religious sentiments to turn one’s focus away from centering oneself upon the True Good/God/Truth/Dharmakya Buddha/the Way (for a direction towards ideas and feelings, only poetic formulations can be used; so we’ve chosen several common names for the “wheel within the clay”) that justifies and motivates true religion.

Something Deeperism does not claim that either skepticism or religion is an error, but merely points out that the basis of both is deeper than either one: the point of bothering with both skeptical and the religious analyses is to better understand and follow the True Good.

Trying to figure out how to think and act or best follow God’s will only makes sense if it actually matters what you do: if you actually matter: our inner sense that it matters what we do is logically and experientially prior to specific notions about how to do things right (note that an inner sense that I matter is not the same as feeling like I matter or having the idea that I matter: we’re talking about a sense deeper than ideas and feelings here!). The various tools of human thought and human culture should therefore serve this inner sense of We All Matter! For Real!, and not get off into tangents, making gods of themselves and otherwise pushing us away from the very wisdom/joy/decency they should be pushing us towards.

A Something Deeperist can be a Christian or a Buddhist or a secular humanist or etc; all that is barred from Something Deeperists is to deny the sacred Love at the core of reality, or to claim either that one’s intellectual and/or emotional thought perfectly understands that holiness, or that those aspects of one’s thought have no understanding of that holiness, or that one’s intellect cannot better its understanding of that holiness. A Something Deeperist must keep pedaling.

“The logos (account) is only one. It is willing and unwilling to be called by the name of Zeus.” [Heraclitus]

Or again: “Let’s not sing of Titans and Giants–those fictions of the men of old–nor of turbulent civil broils in which is no good thing at all; but to give heedful reverence to the gods is ever good.” [Xenophanes]”

The author’s hope for himself and his various groups (be they friend-, family-, practitioner-, nationstate-, worldwide- or ecetera-units) is only this:

Let us all be Something Deeperists at least to the extent that we keep our ideas and feelings about What Matters (including of course so the God help us Amen our ideas and feelings about Something Deeperism) from betraying that ineffable light that they are to some degree imperfectly but still to some degree adequately pointing towards! Help us, Oh inconceivably vastly vast That Which Helps! Please!!!!

“Those who speak with understanding must hold fast to what is common to all as a city holds to its law, and even more strongly. For all human laws are fed by the one divine law. It prevails as much as it will, and suffices for all things with something to spare.” [Heraclitus]

Bartleby Willard, WAP staff writer; in a resort on the water, vacationing ten days after Independence Day, 2015. Slashed and revised August 1, 2015. Another attempt made August 2, 2015, then again Aug 3, and again November 12.

{Some frenzied, overwashing, desperate, footnotes:

About poetic formulations and irreducibles:
All concepts are prior to the way things really are. A literal formulation (ex: “The capital of Arkansas is Little Rock”) can therefore only label something within a system that is already assumed (like a mathematical or physical set of rules); the metaphysical existence of the foundations of such a system are not provable or even fathomable, and so literal statements can help us to work within working-hypotheses but they cannot speak meaningfully about what is actually the case (or even if such a thing as “actually the case” exists). Poetic formulations (ex: “human life truly matters” or “The capital of Arkansas actually is in Little Rock”), on the other hand, knowingly point with imperfect clarity, precision, and verifiability; they can therefore be employed to discuss irreducibles (senses-of-things that cannot be reduced to any further argumentation: anything having to do with “no, but this is actually the case”, for example “some philosophies are better than others”).

“Imperfect” is not necessarily the same as “inadequate”, so it is conceivable both that an individual could grow in knowledge about the Something Deeper and that humans could meaningfully share their senses of the Something Deeper with one another:
Poetic formulations cannot perfectly relate our inner-senses-of-things to ideas and feelings; but that doesn’t mean they cannot adequately do so–it was an unfounded philosophical prejudice to suppose that our ideas were somehow hermetically sealed off from our feelings or our deeper-senses-of-things (how to think about the relationship between the Something Deeper and ideas and feelings? A good analogy is our ability to use ideas to talk about feelings, even though feelings are wider/deeper/less-conceptually-solid).
Similarly, poetic formulations cannot perfectly relate one human’s experience to another’s; but that doesn’t mean they cannot adequately do so–we are all essentially the same and we learn language from other humans: from this we know that our poetries can meaningfully relate to other people’s poetries.}

Author: BW
Copyright: Andy Watson

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About this project:

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting this one into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
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That page also includes a current list of chapters for each book.

Actually, the posts of Diary of an Adamant Lover probably won’t ever require a subscription. Still, with a subscription, you get a nicely ebound eevolving ebook compilation of the writings, and you get a quick buy eye-connecting “Thank you” from AW and BW as they bow their way out of the subway car with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the songs in their lungs.

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)