2008 :: Issue 3/Fall :: Philosophical Notebooks

Polyphony

Is and is not neither is nor is not.

To listen outside words.

Polylicious.

—Phil Yin, meet Sophie Yang.
—Pleasure to sweet you.

Because words lean toward being, I lean away from words toward the becoming world.

The sea of paradox, Odysseus’ true home.

One only has nostalgia for what one is not.

This one thinks with words, this one with pictures, but this one thinks outside words or pictures. (But is this still thinking?)

The celestial reversatility of black-in-white thinking.

Is truth the shadow of doubt or doubt of truth?

Just as certain kinds of thinking are only made possible by transgression, other kinds are made impossible by it. Mere transgression, however, is not yet thinking.

The hungry ones doubted God into existence.

The lines of thought can—at best—only approximate the body’s curves.

Islands of nouns scattered in a swirling sea of verbs. Above—a twinkling sky of prepositions blesses wordless seafarers.

When Lao Tzu kissed Aristotle, paradox woke up from the nightmare of noncontradiction. Somewhere a volcano erupted.

The opposite of nostalgia.

In the pure land where thinking is neither for nor against, the non-thinking in thinking rises, flowers.

And if we assembled the unwilling subjects of the empire of language?

A tongue of water speaks a fluid world.

Gestures from the unutterable.

Some things can only be seen in silence.