Some highlights from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet"Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life."
"Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now."
"If only they could be more reverent toward their own fruitfulness, which is essentially one,
whether it is manifested as mental or physical; for mental creation too arises from the physical, is of one nature with it and only like a softer, more enraptured and more eternal repetition of bodily delight. "The thought of being a creator, of engendering, of shaping" is nothing without the continuous great confirmation and embodiment in the world, nothing without the thousandfold assent from Things and animals" 
This last quote ties in directly with Abram's thesis. Thouhgt is nothing apart from the Other. The depth of Rilke's letters' expressions of duty, of anguish, of Eros, of philosophy speak directly to my core. There is a sort of empiricism that good poetry effects that Science can never reach. The exact truth of the liminality of experience, the expression of the in-between--this is reality!
This reading contrasts heavily with the article "How Much Art Can the Brain Take?" by Stephen pinker, who reduces art to the need to be entertained; to satisfy our receptors in our brains that
satiate us. But what of the anguish? The duty? The calling? Pinker shouldn't write about art, apart from his own. Becasue there is enough poetry going on in biology and neuroscience and evolutionary science that he doesn't need to stretch his worldview to encompass things he obviously has little skill at measuring. This is just why there are multiple intelligences in the world. You cannot measure the whole world with any of them. We need poets and scientists, dancers and linguists, philosophers and counselors to realize in concert the wonderous multiplicity and unity that a multidisciplinary approach to reality fosters. Last night I dreamed that a bunch of scientists were studying a live heart, beating, with wires comming off it.
Here are some pictures.
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