[Image: “Stringed Relief” (1937), by Henry Moore. Nothing in particular suggested a connection between this image and the theme(s) of today’s post. Yet I would say everything in general suggests such a connection.]
From whiskey river:
It does always seem as though making things — including books — ends up a grand compromise, or at least negotiation, between one’s ambition, visions, or inspiration for them, and the actual manifested result. This can seem disheartening or deflating until one has written enough to know that this isn’t an impediment to the process of creating — it is the process. Then one can begin to marvel at the sometimes perverse, often surprising, relation between the imagined and the manifest: it can be engaged, expected, enjoyed.
(Maggie Nelson [source: none canonical, but I trust whiskey river])
…and:
Wise men have regarded the earth as a tragedy, a farce, even an illusionist’s trick; but all, if they are truly wise, and not merely intellectual rapists, recognize that it is certainly some kind of stage in which we all play roles, most of us being very poorly coached and totally unrehearsed before the curtain rises. Is it too much if I ask, tentatively, that we agree to look upon it as a circus, a touring carnival wandering about the sun for a record season of four billion years and producing new monsters and miracles, hoaxes and bloody mishaps, wonders and blunders, but never quite entertaining the customers well enough to prevent them from leaving, one by one, and returning to their homes for a long and bored winter’s sleep under the dust?
(Robert Anton Wilson [source])
…and (from the commonplace book):
NOTE: An evening at the theatre. It occurred to me that there is something weird about someone wanting to be someone else. And even more so about someone sitting down for a couple of hours to look at someone they don’t know, pretending to be someone else, talking to someone who is also pretending to be someone else. A dialogue, furthermore, invented by somebody who imagined they were pretending to be each of these in turn.
(Alan Fletcher [source: none canonical, but a few references including this one])
…and:
Within This Tree
Within this tree
another tree
inhabits the same body;
within this stone
another stone rests,
its many shades of gray
the same, its identical
surface and weight.
And within my body,
another body,
whose history, waiting,
sings: there is no other body,
it sings,
there is no other world.
(Jane Hirshfield [source])
