holy intensity?

We are our choices, Sartre says; “an individual chooses and makes himself.” Our choices determine our identity.

Changing evidence is more effective than changing our long-standing ideas about others and ourselves, if the objective is to maintain the status quo.

When an infant modifies its behavior to please—a survival mechanism at base, given the infant’s dependency on the mother for its basic needs—the socialized self begins to develop.

It can be destabilizing to change long-standing ideas about ourselves, others, and the world, which is why, even as evidence contradicting a belief should lead us to adjust the belief to accommodate reality, many people will bend the evidence before them to keep their thinking intact—the fundamental maneuver marking perverse thinking.

Yet in lining up the external poetic chips into publishable “articulateness” rather than “indwelling,” you face the danger of writing what poet Derek Walcott terms “a fake poem.” Still, many yearn for the status that public recognition brings, even as they recognize the possible falsity involved.

To live by formula, according to Emily Dickinson, leads to feeling closeted: They shut me up in Prose— As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet— Because they liked me “still”—

intercorporeally—

like the map that comes to stand in for the territory, as philosopher Jean Baudrillard describes it: a simulation that takes the place of the real.