A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter O

Ontological Difference

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The distinction between being as such and the particular beings that exist.

Detailed Definition
Poetry can stage ontological difference by separating the question of what it means to exist from the descriptions of individual things. A stone, body, room, or voice is never only an object in the poem; each may open onto the more difficult question of presence itself. The concept discourages treating existence as another identifiable property. Through pauses, negations, and shifts between naming and silence, a poem can make the gap between beings and being perceptible.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about ontological difference distinguishes individual things, such as a stone or a person, from the question of what it means for anything to be; A Heideggerian poem may describe beings in vivid detail while also asking about Being itself; A lyric can show ontological difference by moving from a named tree to the mysterious fact that the tree exists; The contrast between “this dying body” and “existence” demonstrates how poetry can separate a particular entity from the ground of being
Additional Notes
Ontological difference distinguishes being itself from particular beings, such as people, objects, or events. Martin Heidegger made this distinction central to his analysis of existence: beings are what appear or exist, while being concerns the condition that lets them be understood as beings. In poetry, the term can support reflection on the difference between an object and its presence, meaning, or mode of existence. Do not confuse it with ordinary differences between two things.
Also Known As
Ontic-Ontological Difference Heideggerian Difference
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