“Poiesis is often translated as a kind of nurturing or crafting. It's what you make of something given to you.
The opposite of poiesis is physis, which is the basic material you start from. If you throw a lump of clay on the table, that is physis. Poiesis is the act of turning that lump of clay into a statue, or a pot, or a cup, or a comical ornament. Whatever.
Dreyfus asks us to imagine ourselves and the world as a lump of clay, and the job of a life is to craft our natural skills, our abilities, and our values into something beautiful. It's to take the seed we are born with and nurture it into something tall and brilliant.
So how does this add meaning to life? Well, for Dreyfus, poiesis is the act of making the world more after you've left. Your life, your choices, have turned the world into something better. Our purpose is to leave the world more beautiful, loving, or improved in some way.
To live is to make something more of what you're given.”
*Because of social, economic and educational factors, this can be easier said than done.
They lay side by side in the cool sand, not speaking, simply watching the moon rise over the dunes. It was a vast, silent night, and for a moment they felt a curious sense of peace, as if their insignificance in the face of this immensity were a kind of liberation. The weight of their individual concerns seemed to lessen, dissolved in the vastness of the desert. - "The Sheltering Sky", Paul Bowles (1949).
Help me carry this weight That's dragging me down Pull me out of the drink Before I start to drown Let the wreckage all sink To where the fishes are frightening I wanna hear mvself think again I wanna hear myself think again
~ “Frightening Fishes”— co-written by Tom Howe and Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard.
Vampire II (Schiefler 34; Woll 41) c.1895-1902. Edvard Munch,1863 - 1944. Lithograph and woodcut printed in colors on wove paper, c.1913.
“Munch did not title this painting "Vampire." He called it "Love and Pain" and it was only later that it picked up the name and interpretation of a man locked in a vampire's embrace. Munch maintained it was nothing more than a woman kissing a man on the neck. The Nazis declared it morally 'degenerate.' In the painting, we see a man in anguish, arms around his love, while she tries to comfort him.”