'What a fine comedy this world would
be if one did not play a part in it."
Diderot, Letters to Sophie Vollard

"The bounded is loathed by its
possessor. The same dull round, even
of a universe, would soon become a
mill with complicated wheels."

Blake- 'There is no natural religion', 1788

"Everything which I have created as a poet
has had its origin in a frame of mnd and
a situation in life; I never wrote because I
had, as they say, found a good subject."
Henrik Ibsen

6/18/94

Robert Motherwell:

"The problem of the artist is to wait
until reality speaks to him. [...] To
do nothing until a work, an image,
a clear structure begins to unfold
its meaning."

Odilon Redon, 1898
his works "*inspire* and are not
meant to be defined. They determine
nothing. They place us, as does music,
in the ambiguous realm of the
undetermined. They are a kind of
metaphor."

Still the idea intrigues me of writing
a work in which I can discuss ideas
and still obtain the forward momentum
and charm of immediacy in a
piece of poetry or fiction- this
"H.C." and "T.C," idea is not yet
it- but when I wrote it I had an
image of a "work inside a work"
which would capture the feeling of
what I am imagining about this-
like *Explications.*

"Part of the surprise of modern art is
to strip away from painting the
costumes, the masquerades, the status
symbols of church and state and
poltics-hence, its so-called
abstraction, which is actually a
humanly felt universalism.

Motherwell

"To be a master of a language is
to be a master of emphasis. What is
emhasized is at once the form and
the content."

7/2/94

Poetry-99% silence and 1% whispering.

I imagine a poetry tha would make
most of what has been written unitl now
sound like screaming, or at least shouting