Samples of René Char

I saw you, the first and the only one, divine female in the greatly disturbed spheres. I tore your dress of infinity, brought you back naked onto my soil. The mobile humus of the earth was everywhere. We are flying, say your servants, in cruel space, to the song of my red trumpet.

-----

The poet gives life, then hastens to the outcome. In the evening, in spite of several apprentice dimples on his cheek, he is a courteous passerby cutting short the farewells to be there when the bread comes out of the oven.

-----

No more second self, or changing face, no more

A season for flame and a season for shadow!

With the slow snow descend the lepers.

Suddenly love, terror's equal,

With hand never seen checks the fire, restores

The sun, reconstructs the Beloved.

Nothing gave notice of a life so strong.

-----

...your face, as it is, may it always be, so free that at its touch air's infinite ring crumpled, half-opening as I met it, clothing me with the fine streets of your imagination. I remained there, entirely unknown to myself, in your sun mill...

-----

The First Moments

We were watching the water as it flowed, increasing before us. It effaced the mountain suddenly, expelling itself from her maternal side. Not a torrent submitting to its fate but an ineffable beast whose word and substance we became. It held us amorous on the all-powerful arch of its imagination. What intervention could have constrained us? Daily tameness had fled, blood cast aside was rendered to its heat. Adopted by the open, abraded to invisibility, we were a victory which would never end.

The Sistine Chapel

Vasari said of it, "The whole world came running when the vault was revealed, and the sight of it was enough to reduce them to stunned silence." Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, The Last Judgment on the sanctuary wall also by Michelangelo, wall paintings by a team of painters of the late 15th century including Botticelli and Perugino, a set of large tapestries by Raphael... Check out this stunning online tool for viewing every detail, without the crowds.

When artists didn't wink at us - Max Beckmann

The need for solitude

Most books are old. This is not a disadvantage: this is precisely what makes them valuable. They stand against the conventional wisdom of today simply because they’re not from today. Even if they merely reflect the conventional wisdom of their own day, they say something different from what you hear all the time. But the great books, the ones you find on a syllabus, the ones people have continued to read, don’t reflect the conventional wisdom of their day. They say things that have the permanent power to disrupt our habits of thought. They were revolutionary in their own time, and they are still revolutionary today. And when I say “revolutionary,” I am deliberately evoking the American Revolution, because it was a result of precisely this kind of independent thinking. Without solitude—the solitude of Adams and Jefferson and Hamilton and Madison and Thomas Paine—there would be no America.

So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person. Not Skyping with three people and texting with two others at the same time while you hang out in a friend’s room listening to music and studying. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.” - William Deresiewicz

Chekhov on writing

The artist should not be a judge of his [or her] characters or of what they say, but only an objective observer. I heard a confused, indecisive talk by two Russians on pessimism and so must convey this conversation in the same form in which I heard it, but it is up to the jury, i.e., the readers, to give it an evaluation. My job is only to be talented, i.e., to be able to throw light upon some figures and speak their language.

Camus on artistic creation

Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world. But it rejects the world on account of what it lacks and in the name of what it sometimes is.

Akiva Tatz on the creative and life cycle

During the process or journey the pleasure is anticipating the destination / end result that the work will create. At the destination, the pleasure is the journey it took / how hard you worked to build the thing / the knowledge that you did this. The more difficult it was, the more intense the pleasure. This is a remarkable cycle. It teaches you about life, which is the same cycle. The Kabbalists says that in the next world the tree and the fruit taste the same.

The poem occupies an invisible zone

between the subjective emotional utterance and the objective reporting of fact. It is relative and universal, false and true. Negotiating this contradiction with finesse is crucial to the poem's success. – Jennifer Moxley

The Rebbe on the artist

The primary talent of an artist is his or her ability to step away from the externalities of the thing and, disregarding its outer form, gaze into its innerness and perceive its essence, and to be able to convey this. Thus the object is revealed as it has never before been seen, since its inner content was obscured by secondary things. The artist exposes the essence of the thing he [or she] portrays, causing the one who looks at the painting to perceive it in another, truer light, and to realize that his [or her] prior perception was deficient.

And this is one of the foundations of man’s service of his [or her] Creator.

It is only that the divine power of tzimtzum (constriction) holds the divine life-force in a state of concealment and obscurity, and we perceive only its outer form (i.e., the physical reality).
Our mission in life is that we should approach everything in life from this perspective. That we should each strive to reveal, as much as possible, the divine essence in every thing, and minimize, to the extent that we are able, its concealment...

So one must take great care that secondary and external matters should not obscure the essentials of life and its ultimate purpose.

A person might experience difficulties, trials and challenges in separating the good from the bad. But these are but the means by which to achieve the purpose of life—that his [or her] soul should elevate itself through its positive deeds in this world... So one must never allow the difficulties in overcoming one’s trials, or even the fact that one might occasionally fail and stumble, to overwhelm the joy that one must feel.

Yeats on insight and rebirth

It is only when the intellect has wrought the whole of life to drama, to crisis, that we may live for contemplation and yet keep our intensity.

Michael Eigen on Boundaries

For certain individuals (and perhaps, to a degree, everyone), one's double sense of boundlessness-limits is too much to handle and is a source of unbearable pain. One may try to find a way out, through more loss of I-feeling. This may vary from mild self-anesthesia to a complete loss of self-feeling. In the case of hospitalized patients, we find individuals who could not successfully squeeze into an effective practical self. In the "hospital" of the world, we find others who have done so only too well.

Fast vs Slow Burning

From time to time we need a jolting new experience to ignite our spirits; but the key to success is always what happens the day after the inspiration: Can you maintain it? Hay may light quickly, but it also burns out quickly. Logs, good dry logs, take a while to ignite, but once they do, they can be depended upon to warm you for an extended time. - Simon Jacobson

Vincent’s Family (part I)

Vincent reaching out to his mother who’s looking down, continually looking down, mourning her son that died, Vincent I. She’s looking in little Vincent I's direction where the exalted, perfected Vincent I has a halo around his (or in this case, her) head. On the other side is Vincent’s stern, aloof father looking off in another direction as Vincent’s sister Wil, or perhaps one of Vincent’s girlfriends looks up towards him / feels rejected by him. These potato eaters don’t physically resemble Vincent and his family, but their core gestures do.

George Steiner on lessons of the masters

To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one's own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make of one's inward present their future: this is a threefold adventure like no other.

Beckett jolted out of his paralytic torpor

For things to change, perhaps a crisis had to occur, as it did on the night of January 6, 1938, when Beckett, having finally returned to Paris after a terrible scene with his mother, was the victim of an acte gratuit: On a dark Paris street, a drunken stranger accosted him with a knife, stabbing him close to the heart. “How lovely it is being here,” Beckett writes McGreevy from his convalescent bed, “even with a hole in the side. A sunlit surface yesterday brighter than the whole of Ireland’s summer.” The proximity to death, soon to be heightened by the war, jolted Beckett out of his paralytic torpor: He sent McGreevy a new poem, beginning “they come / different and the same”—a poem notably unclotted and intriguingly spare. A new chapter was about to begin.

- Marjorie Perloff

William Logan on Wallace Stevens and Walt Whitman

In the restlessness of an American identity more familiar as lighting out for the territories, both men stayed put in a country founded on the idea of moving on...[both of their books] are of the most violently original, uncategorizable books ever published by an American poet.

Adam Phillips on good writing

Good writing, like good conversation or interpretation in analysis, seems to free something in us. It is as though mobility has sprung from paralysis; but only once we start moving do we realise quite how stuck in we had been...the aim is to recreate fluency.

Wallace Shawn on writing plays

I’m guided by a muse. I don’t choose a subject. I don’t have outlines or notecards. It’s more like a sentence comes to me and maybe a few months later I figure out who said it and why. I don’t pick the subjects. I don’t even know who’s talking. Eventually it’s something. After if it becomes something, I can sort of help it become the essence of what it is.

Sir Ken Robinson on creativity‏

Intelligence is wonderfully interactive. Our brain isn't just different compartments. In fact, creativity - which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value - more often than not comes about through the different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

Oscar Wilde‏ on the monstrous worship of facts

Our problem, then, is too strict an insistence on the truth. Relentlessly champion accuracy and you kill the imagination. Insist on proof at every turn and conversation becomes verification. The monstrous worship of facts sucks the beauty out of art, and would abort all pregnant possibilities. Without lying, there is no human interaction at all, just an exchange of data as if we were machines.