[Image: “Patssi Nilsstrom,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) You can read Patssi’s #storypix saga here at SmugMug.]
From whiskey river…
Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive — in the past that was mixed up with other illustrative duties but that was still its central function that has been liberated in the art called modern. Art is not necessarily good for you or about communicating “good things”…
Making beautiful things for everyday use is a wonderful thing to do — making life flow more easily — but art confronts life, allowing it to stop and perhaps change direction — they are completely different.
(Antony Gormley [source])
…and:
My theory is that the purpose of art is to transmit universal truths of a sort, but of a particular sort, that in art, whether it’s poetry, fiction or painting, you are telling the reader or listener or viewer something he already knows but which he doesn’t quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition. And so, what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truths which they already unconsciously know.
(Walker Percy [source])
…and:
I Am Learning to Abandon the World: for M
I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friends.
I have given up melodic lines of hills,
moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.
And every night I give my body up
limb by limb, working upwards
across bone, towards the heart.
But morning comes with small
reprieves of coffee and birdsong.
A tree outside the window
which was simply shadow moments ago
takes back its branches twig
by leafy twig.
And as I take my body back
the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap
as if to make amends.
(Linda Pastan [source])
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