Lawyering as Balancing Visible and Invisible Bullets

It's not easy to see how this could be much better. It's an anthem, in form: a celebratory song of self, and like Lawyerland guided by the spirit of Walt Whitman. But you have also drawn up the metaphor of the invisible bullets into a new, more capacious meaning in a larger interpretation. I think that saying "they are hard to name" is a little bit of a cop-out. The things poets are needed to talk about are hard to name, dammit, or we wouldn't need poets to name them. You can do a little thinking and put a couple of sentences there that are as good as all the others.

It's a risk ending an essay with "I'm starting to think ... ." But on this occasion I think you have pulled it off. For all its bravado, which is quite some, this is indeed an essay about starting to think. You've shown just what happens when a strong mind and a clear sensibility light up the burner and start cooking with gas, as the 20th century said.

The trick you're looking to learn is how to whistle this on the inside while saying what gets the job done at the moment and watching everything that isn't nailed down. This is possible, but as my late friend and colleague Kellis Parker would have said, it needs jazz. There's only an endless dynamic balance between presence and absence, grit and abstraction, knowledge and practice, words and music, the truth and what can be proved. Nice start.