[Image: “Plaza Convocation,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
In my experience, you always think you know what you’re doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn’t and you couldn’t. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That’s my idea. Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It’s a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it’s a normal human activity and that “everybody’s creative.” They’re not. Honestly, I never sit down to write anything without thinking, This is a weird thing to be doing! Why am I sitting here writing? Why am I looking at the Ellsworth Kelly on my wall? I don’t know. It feels funny to do these things, but it feels funnier not to, so I write and look.
(David Hickey [source])
…and:
Too Easy: to Write of Miracles
Too easy: to write of miracles, dreams where the famous give
mysterious utterance to silent truth;
to confuse snow with the stars,
simulate a star’s fantastic wisdom.Easy like the willow to lament,
rant in tramples roads where pools
are red with sorrowful fires, and sullen rain
drips from the willows; ornamental leaves;
or die in words and angrily turn
to pace like ghosts about the walls of war.But difficult when, innocent and cold,
day, a bird over a hill, flies in
—resolving anguish to a strange perspective,
a scene within a marble; returning
the brilliant shower of coloured dreams to dust,
a smell of fireworks lingering by canals
on autumn evenings—difficult to write
of the real image, real hand, the heart
of day or autumn beating steadily:
to speak of human gestures, clarify
all the context of a simple phrase
—the hour, the shadow, the fire,
the loaf of a bare table.Hard, under the honest sun, to weight
a word until it balances with love—
burden of happiness on fearful shoulders;
in the ease of daylight to discover
what measure has its music, and achieve
the unhaunted country of the final poem.Sicily, 1948
(Denise Levertov [source])
…and:
What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.
(Elizabeth Bishop [source])
From elsewhere:
The Good God and the Evil God
The Good God and the Evil God met on the mountain top.
The Good God said, “Good day to you, brother.”
The Evil God did not answer.
And the Good God said, “You are in a bad humour today.”
“Yes,” said the Evil God, “for of late I have been often mistaken for you, called by your name, and treated as if I were you, and it ill-pleases me.”
And the Good God said, “But I too have been mistaken for you and called by your name.”
The Evil God walked away cursing the stupidity of man.
(Kahlil Gibran [source])
…and:
We are warmed by fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So, too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts. We must find our real selves not in the froth stirred up by the impact of our being upon the beings around us, but in our own soul, which is the principle of all our acts…
The soul does not find itself unless it acts. Therefore it must act. Stagnation and inactivity bring spiritual death. But my soul must not project itself entirely into the outward effects of its activity. I do not need to see myself, I merely need to be myself. I must think and act like a living being, but I must not plunge my whole self into what I think and do or seek always to find myself in the work I have done. The soul that projects itself entirely into activity, and seeks itself outside itself in the work of its own will is like a madman who sleeps on the sidewalk in front of his house instead of living inside where it is quiet and warm. The soul that throws itself outdoors in order to find itself in the effects of its own work is like a fire that has no desire to burn but seeks only to go up in smoke.
(Thomas Merton [source])
#51: The two men met at an intersection known to both, but recognized by neither.
“I haven’t seen you in forever!” exclaimed the younger man to the older.
“And I,” replied the older, laughing, “could say the same thing for you!”
“Want to walk together for a while?”
“Thought you’d never ask. Where you want to go?”
“I think,” said the young man, and paused. “…I think it doesn’t much matter. How about that horizon over there?”
The older man laughed. “That’s funny. That’s exactly where I myself was headed!”
And so they set out, not quite arm in arm — but all but.
(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)
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