> Sara Trevisan wrote:
>
>
> Poetry is essentially the rationalization of irrational feelings,
> which always try and succeed in carrying some irrational traces with
> them -- no matter how rational the poet thinks he is.
>
Why do you believe "feelings" are irrational? They seem perfectly
rational to me. And incidentally, no thought, no perception, is possible
except as filtered through feeling. I highly recommend Antonio Damasio,
_Descrates' Error: Emotion, Reason & the Human Brain_ (New York, 1994),
and by the same author, _The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion
in the Making of Consciousness_ (New York, 1999). The latter has as one
of its epigraphs:
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
_Dry Salvages_
The separability of "thought" or "reason" and "feeling" (or of brain and
body) is, precisely, Descartes's error. Incidentally, re apostrophes, I
typed the title of Damasio's book accurately above. And one of the
reviewers of _Descartes' Error_ on the web site of either Amazon or
Barnes&Noble chose to huff and puff angrily about the error in the title
of _Descartes' Error_.
Carrol
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