Citas

“Lirismo, el desarrollo de una interjección”.
–Giorgos Seferis, Seis Noches en la Acrópolis.

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“The emotional struggles of mankind were never resolved. The same things were done over and over, with passion, with passionate stupidity, insectlike, the same emotional struggles repeated in daily reality —urge, drive, desire, self-preservation, aggrandizement, the search for happiness, the search for justification, the experience of coming to be and of passing away, from nothingness to nothingness. Very boring. Frightening. Doom. Now, mathematical logic could extricate you from all this nonsensical existence.”
–Saul Bellow, “Zetland: By a Character Witness”.

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“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness–that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what–at last–I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”
–Bertrand Russell, prólogo a su Autobiography.

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E. M. Cioran, “Ser lírico” (en En las Cimas de la Desesperación):

El lirismo representa una fuerza de dispersión de la subjetividad, pues indica en el individuo una efervescencia incoercible que aspira sin cesar a la expresión. Esa necesidad de exteriorización es tanto más urgente cuanto más interior, profundo y concentrado es el lirismo. ¿Por qué el hombre se vuelve lírico durante el sufrimiento y el amor? Porque esos dos estados, a pesar de que son diferentes por su naturaleza y su orientación, surgen de las profundidades del ser, del centro sustancial de la subjetividad, en cierto sentido. Nos volvemos líricos cuando la vida en nuestro interior palpita con un ritmo esencial. Lo que de único y específico poseemos se realiza de una manera tan expresiva que lo individual se eleva a nivel de lo universal. Las experiencias subjetivas más profundas son así mismo las más universales, por la simple razón de que alcanzan el fondo original de la vida. La verdadera interiorización conduce a una universalidad inaccesible para aquellos seres que no sobrepasan lo inesencial y que consideran el lirismo como un fenómeno interior, como el producto de una inconsistencia espiritual, cuando, en realidad, los recursos líricos de la subjetividad son la prueba de una gran profundidad interior.

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El hecho de que casi todo el mundo escriba poesía cuando está enamorado prueba bien que el pensamiento conceptual no basta para expresar la infinitud interior; sólo una materia fluida e irracional es capaz de ofrecer al lirismo una objetivación apropiada. Ignorando tanto lo que ocultamos en nosotros mismos como lo que oculta el mundo, somos súbitamente víctimas de la experiencia del sufrimiento y transportados a una región extraordinariamente compleja, de una vertiginosa subjetividad.

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Sin una pizca de locura el lirismo es imposible. … ¿Sería la locura un paroxismo del lirismo?

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El estado lírico trasciende las formas y los sistemas: una fluidez, un flujo internos mezclan, en un mismo movimiento, como en una convergencia ideal, todos los elementos de la vida del espíritu para crear un ritmo intenso y perfecto. Comparado con el refinamiento de una cultura anquilosada que, prisionera de los límites y de las formas, disfraza todas las cosas, el lirismo es una expresión bárbara: su verdadero valor consiste, precisamente, en no ser más que sangre, sinceridad y llamas.

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“Logic resembles good poetry: a precise and radical imagination, an elegant and powerful form, exactly the right expressions in exactly the right order, subtle variations on a theme, the unfamiliar articulation of the familiar, reflection in language on language and its relation to the world, depth achieved through scrupulous accuracy.”
–Timothy Williamson.

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“Achtung: Kunst korrumpiert!”
–Jochen Gerz

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“This body holding me reminds me of my own mortality. Embrace this moment. Remember: We are eternal. All this pain is an illusion.”
–Tool, Parabola.

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“A pesar de todo, seguimos amando. Y ese ‘a pesar de todo’ cubre un infinito”
–E.M. Cioran.

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“…Then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit. And that, after all, is what it is really all about”
–T. McKenna, on the use of psychedelics.

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“There is no mathematical substitute for philosophy”
–Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity.

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“Esto es tan vago que pasa por develador”
–mi amigo Álvaro

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“… science is possible because there is order in Reality. The laws that structure the representation we form of Reality are an image of its own order. The whole of science suggests such an answer, but science alone cannot establish or even formulate it, for this assertion is beyond science’s own representation. Science is restricted to the region of Reality already explored; it cannot get out of it or assess it. To go beyond what is known amounts to proposing a hypothesis about the unknown, to leaving science and entering metaphysics.”
–Roland Omnés, Quantum Philosophy.

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“…unless you are fairly aware of the relation of the symbol to what it symbolizes, you will find yourself attributing to the thing properties which only belong to the symbol. That, of course, is especially likely in very abstract studies such as philosophical logic, because the subject matter that you are supposed to be thinking of is so exceedingly difficult and elusive that any person who has ever tried to think about it knows you do not think about it except perhaps once in six months for half a minute. The rest of the time you think about the symbols, because they are tangible, but the thing you are supposed to be thinking about is fearfully difficult and one does not often manage to think about it. The really good philosopher is the one who thinks about it for a minute. Bad philosophers never do.”
–-Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism