Aphorisms & Reflections

1. Art & Artists

1.1  The artist leaves a trace, a hand print on the wall of time.

1.2  Vernet (about a sold canvas): Il m'a demandé une heure de travail, et toute la vie.

1.3  A master chef produced wonderful creations for consumption and delectation. No two dishes were quite the same; there was always some difference and some new excellence to be savoured. When the chef died, there was great consternation because all of his recipes and notes were incomplete and even fragmentary, and the photographs of his superlative achievements yielded nothing of value, beyond a tantalizing image leaving the viewer to imagine how a dish might have tasted. No-one was able to reproduce a single plate giving the splendid sensations for which the chef was justly famous.

1.4  There is terror in art that goes to the heart of something and comes back empty-handed.

1.5  A poet's journey from isle to isle must be across water, and water is what we know of the abyss that surrounds us.

1.6  My art does not belong to me; it comes through me from a place I do not understand. According to Prévost (who took the idea from Stendhal and Montaigne), the writer creates himself. However, I think that is giving the writer too much credit. Perhaps it is true that a writer can learn from his work, but that must depend on the writer and on the quality of his art.

1.7  Artists can certainly be insufferable and even despicable people. See 1.6 above.

1.8  A poem speaks with authority from another world. What can she reveal?

1.9 For the artist whose unfinished works are his best...

1.10 Nature is illiterate, but she does not lack meaning.

1.11 The erotic in art as contemplation of the shadowy garden from which we all emerge into the chiaroscuro of reality.

1.12 If you can for a moment allow music to replace words in your head, the experience of thought can change into that.

1.13 A writer must choose the language he or she will write in. It might seem like a given, but it isn't. Perhaps you will even write with an accent.

1.14 Does art produce any sort of knowledge?

1.15 A literary contract with the Muse - write clandestinely as the wager for recognition of your art. L'anonyme shall have what he craves at the price of denying it to himself.

1.16  A literary contract with the Devil - become famous.

1.17 Orphic moment:  the things of this world must all recede beyond the painted curtain of memory. Art cannot stop at remembrance.

1.18 Sacred and poetic landscapes are charged with meanings that are in no sense local. That is the essential progression from animism where meaning resides in a place or feature.

1.19 The effects of the poetic use of language are not exhausted by its apparent semantic possibilities. 

1.20 Music not only expresses emotions; it causes them.

1.21  If the divine is revealed only in the margins, it is all the more important to have the text.

1.22 Some writing is good enough to wait for its meaning.

1.23 At some point in time all of the works of Shakespeare and the memories of his works will be obliterated. In that same moment, all of Proust's profound recollections and every memory of them will cease to exist. Man is not permanent, and therefore art is not permanent. But it is, for a time, our finest achievement. Life, too, in broadest sense we can know, is short.

1.24 The blue rose of the imagination is neither blue, nor a rose.

1.25 An artist is most alive when he or she occupies that space that others do not see. The artist at work is properly invisible.

1.26 Make no mistake: the sky above and earth below are already there before the poem (to paraphrase Chantre). The poet is but a little god, who is given the divine spark.