On artists speaking about their work

It is a mistake for a sculptor or painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases the tension needed for his work. By trying to express his aims with rounded-off logical exactness, he can easily become a theorist whose actual work is only a caged-in exposition of concepts evolved in terms of logic and words…the artist works with a concentration of his whole personality, and the conscious part of it resolves conflicts, organises memories, and prevents him from trying to walk in two directions at the same time. - Henry Moore

It is easy to mistake our life for the world

If in our moments of happiness, mastery, ecstasy, we say Yes to heaven and to earth, and all we need is misfortune, sickness, the decline of physical powers to start screaming No, this means that all our judgments can be refuted tomorrow and that it is easy to mistake our life for the world. It is not obvious, however, why weakness-whether of a particular person or of an entire historical era-should be privileged and why the old nihilist from Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape should be closer to the truth than he himself was when he was twenty years old.

- Czesław Miłosz

[the minotaur at supper: spare the noritake and the spode] - D. A. Powell

the minotaur at supper: spare the noritake and the spode

from these ungular hands. goblet stems scattered at my hoofs

a spattering of color on my hide. remnants of one youth

another impaled on my horns: I must say grace over his thighs

for there may be no path back to him. the way is dim and twists

myself am halfboy. am beauty and the end of same: a hungry thing

hunts me also: through which passageway do my nostrils sense blood

what aperture brings me air salted with cries of the ancient corrida

The tone of Bergman's "The Silence"

I reflect on what it was that set Bergman's The Silence apart from other films of its time, thirty years ago, and why so many people in so many countries wanted to see it. It was its tone. That is something that is very hard to put into words but can be clearly felt and is patent during the screening and long afterwards. It was the first Bergman film to be so uncompromisingly personal and uniform in its style, its mode of narration. It had taken seventeen years of work (he began in 1945 with Crisis, and The Silence comes from 1962) for him to grasp that a film's power comes from the unrelenting honesty of its maker, his courage in refusing to retreat by as much as one step. Not from its philosophical construction (The Seventh Seal, which I do not like), its original and beautiful record of dreams and overpowering nightmares (as in Wild Strawberries), its social elucidation of dramatic events (as in Summer with Monika, which I like a lot)–but from its delineation of feelings we all experience and understand, as we tremble incessantly between love and hate, between fear of death and a longing for rest, between envy and generosity, between a keen sense of humiliation and the joy of revenge…I know where the bright trace comes from in this dark film. From Bergman's profound belief in humanity… - Krzysztof Kieślowski

Shakespeare's paradoxical voice in the later sonnets

Blame of the woman has faded in view of the greater blame with which the speaker castigates himself. The self-lacerating intelligence in the later sonnets produces a voice so undeceived about reality (the truth) and himself (his perjured eye) that the reader admires the clarity of mind that can so anatomize sexual obsession while still in its grip, that can so acquiesce in humiliation while inspecting its own arousal, that can lie freely while acknowledging the truth. To represent such a voice in all its paradoxical incapacity and capacity is the victory of Shakespeare's technique. - Helen Vendler

A new music is a new mind

If you change the way in which you're proceeding musically, you will move out of the experiences that you already know you know, and begin to have emotions, and therefore perhaps thoughts, and certainly intimations, or even visions of things that you had no access to, except via that music. - Jorie Graham

The liminal aim of art

Why should there be art, why poetic creation? . . . The teeming prodigality of the phenomenal world, its inexhaustible deployment ("thereness") of sensory, communicative energies and forms is such as to saturate even the hungriest appetite for perception, even the most ample capacities for reception. The colours, metamorphic shapes and sonorities of the actual exceed immeasurably human capacities for registration and response. The animate logic of congruent symmetries, of organic motifs in the human body, is of a designate wonder - a wonder of design as we see it in [Leonardo do Vinci's] famous icon of frontal and cosmic man - such as to overwhelm understanding. And it is in this tensed caesura between analytic intelligibility and perception, when cognition holds its breath, that our sense of being is host to beauty. Why, then, art, why the created realm of fiction? . . . [T]here is aesthetic creation because there is creation. - George Seiner

Books that change with us

A real book reads us. I have been read by Eliot's poems and by Ulysses and by Remembrance of Things Past and by The Castle for a good many years now, since early youth. Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy with me and to understand my hidden meanings. - Lionel Trilling

Lacan and Lynch

For Lacan, a link exists between impossibility and what he calls the real. Within every symbolic order, the real occupies the place of what cannot be thought or imagined - the position of the impossible. The real is not reality but the failure of the symbolic order to explain everything. When seen in this light, the impossible is not materially impossible but rather logically impossible as long as we remain within the current social structure. In Seminar XVII, Lacan claims that "the real is the impossible. Not on account of a simple stumbling block against which we bang our heads, but because of the logical stumbling block of what announces itself as impossible in the symbolic. It is from there that the real arises." What is impossible in the symbolic order is, in the real, perfectly achievable. It is in this sense of the term impossible that Lynch's films allow us to experience it actually taking place. They thus provide a fundamental challenge to the ruling symbolic structure, forcing us to see possibilities where we are used to seeing impossibilitities. - Todd McGowan

Shakespeare's aesthetic manifesto?

Hippolyta:

'Tis strange my Theseus, that these

lovers speak of.

Theseus:

More strange than true: I never may believe 

These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. 

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, 

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends. 

The lunatic, the lover and the poet 

Are of imagination all compact: 

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, 

That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: 

The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, 

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; 

And as imagination bodies forth 

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing 

A local habitation and a name. 

Such tricks hath strong imagination, 

That if it would but apprehend some joy, 

It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

Or in the night, imagining some fear, 

How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

Hippolyta:

But all the story of the night told over, 

And all their minds transfigured so together, 

More witnesseth than fancy's images

And grows to something of great constancy; 

But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

- A Midsummer Night's Dream, V, i

"The Woods by the Epte" by René Char

That day, I was only two legs walking.

Eyes blank, at the empty center of my face,

I set out to follow the stream through the vale.

Flowing slowly, that dull hermit failed to intrude

On the formlessness through which I journeyed.

From the angle of a ruined wall scorched by fire

Two wild briars full of gentle inflexible will

Plunged suddenly into the grey water.

They seemed like a communion of vanished beings

At the moment of proclaiming themselves again.

The hoarse blush of a rose striking the water

Reawakened the first face of the sky

With an ecstatic questioning,

Woke the earth in the midst of loving words,

Thrust me into the future like a famished and feverish tool.

Further on the Epte woods followed a further bend.

But I did not have to traverse them, the dear seed-store of increase!

I breathed, on the heel of a half-turn, the musk of meadows

Into which some creature merges.

I heard the gliding of a timid snake;

I felt – don’t think harshly of me – I was fulfilling all your wishes.

From "The Book of Questions" by Edmond Jabès

     "He who lives within himself, beside his God, beside the life and death of God, lives in two adjoining rooms with a door between. He goes from one to the other in order to celebrate Him. He goes from presence in consciousness to presence in absence. He must fully be, before he can aspire to not being any more, that is to say: to being more, to being all. For absence is All."
     He died for each second. He gathered a strength from beyond the grave. He was a fraction of the desert and an inflection of the wind. He stripped the untouched page of its leaves.
     But the word is a triumphant sower. Dawn and dusk are written, as is race. When he got back to his neighborhood, to his house (a nomad had taken him on his camel to the nearest control post where he caught a military truck to town), so many words urged him. He was, however, bent on avoiding them. They were still too much in love with space for him to think of fixing them.

"I heard, as if I had no Ear" by Emily Dickinson

I heard, as if I had no Ear
Until a Vital Word
Came all the way from Life to me
And then I knew I heard.

I saw, as if my Eye were on
Another, till a Thing
And now I know 'twas Light, because
It fitted them, came in.

I dwelt, as if Myself, were out,
My Body but within
Until a Might detected me
And set my kernel in.

And Spirit turned unto the Dust
"Old Friend, thou knowest me,"
And Time went out to tell the News
And met Eternity.

Abstract art - a fertile faith

     Abstract art is a symbolic game, and it is akin to all human games: you have to get into it, risk and all, and this takes a certain act of faith. But what kind of faith? Not faith in absolutes, not a religious kind of faith. A faith in possibility, a faith not that we will know something finally, but a faith in not knowing, a faith in our ignorance, a faith in our being confounded and dumbfounded, a faith fertile with possible meaning and growth.
     From this field of not knowing, from our ignorance, from our dumbfoundedness and disorientation, artists get us into the history of our culture, make our culture go. They produce from the form of things defamiliarized, from our refocus on the things we thought we knew, from the banal, from the points between A and B, from all those momentary interstices where we have no category and no form of understanding. They produce our fresh understanding of the world of culture as separate from nature, as separate from the clock of events in the rest of history: separate by moving faster and stimulating us to change when we least expect it, and slower by linking us to traditions in the past, different from the clocks that tick away in our own lives. - Kirk Varnedoe

"Distraction" by Henry Vaughan

O knit me, that am crumbled dust! The heap
             Is all dispersed and cheap;
        Give for a handful, but a thought
                   And it is bought;
                    Hadst thou
Made me a star, a pearl, or a rainbow,
             The beams I then had shot
             My light had lessened not,
                    The world
Is full of voices; Man is called and hurled
             By each, he answers all,
             Knows ev'ry note and call,
                    Hence, still
Fresh dotage tempts, or old usurps his will.
Yet, hadst thou clipped my wings, when coffined in
             This quickened mass of sin,
         And saved that light, which freely thou
                    Didst then bestow,
                     I fear
I should have spurned, and said thou didst forbear;
             Or that thy store was less,
             But now since thou didst bless
                     So much,
I grieve, my God! that thou hast made me such.
                     I grieve?
O, yes! thou know'st I do; come, and relieve
         And tame, and keep down with thy light
         Dust that would rise, and dim my sight,
             Lest left alone too long
             Amidst the noise and throng,
                    Oppressed I
Striving to save the whole, by parcels die.