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November 30, 2005
pictures must be miraculous!
The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.
Mark Rothko
Posted by amin at 10:45 PM | TrackBack
November 25, 2005
michelangelo on painting and drawing
What one has most to work and struggle for in the painting is to do the work with a great amount of labor and sweat in such a way that it may afterwards appear, however much it was labored, to have been done quickly and almost without any labor, and very easily, although it was not.
Let whoever may have attained so much as to have the power of drawing know that he holds a great treasure; he will be able to make figures higher than any tower, both painted and as statues, and he will find no wall or side of a building that will not prove narrow and small for his great imaginings.
Michelangelo
Posted by amin at 9:37 PM | TrackBack
November 21, 2005
the thief of fire
I’ll go on:
So the poet is truly the thief of fire, then.
He is responsible for humanity, even for the animals: he must make his inventions smelt, felt, heard: if what he brings back from down there has form, he grants form: if it’s formless he grants formlessness. To find a language – for that matter, all words being ideas, the age of a universal language will come! It is necessary to be an academic – deader than a fossil – to perfect a dictionary of any language at all. The weak-minded thinking about the first letter of the alphabet would soon rush into madness!
This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, scents, sounds, colours, thought attaching to thought and pulling. The poet would define the quantity of the unknown, awakening in the universal soul in his time: he would give more than the formulation of his thought, the measurement of his march towards progress! An enormity become the norm, absorbed by all, he would truly be an enhancer of progress!
This future will be materialistic, you see. – Always filled with Number and Harmony, these poems will be made to last. – At heart, it will be a little like Greek poetry again.
Eternal art will have its function, since poets are citizens. Poetry will no longer take its rhythm from action: it will be ahead of it!
These poets will exist! When woman’s endless servitude is broken, when she lives for and through herself, when man - previously abominable - has granted her freedom, she too will be a poet! Women will discover the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours? –She will discover strange things, unfathomable, repulsive, delicious: we will take them to us, we will understand them.
Meanwhile, let us demand new things from the poets - ideas and forms. All the clever ones will think they can easily satisfy this demand: that’s not so!
Rimbaud
Posted by amin at 9:15 PM | TrackBack
November 14, 2005
the memory of all
Draw the map the voyage made. Yes & No, looking with care in the beginning, using what I had been taught at school. Sitting down at my age now-to write. I trust my intuition. Who am I writing to? To explain my detours. Yes, to keep them alive. Look the other way-not afraid to make my mistake and show it. I want to show ambition. I want to show what it is to be in America. Positive & Negative, I scratch it through the surface. Children grow up. Mary is gone. Love turns to indifference. Always returning to New York-except for Andrea, Andrea dying in the Air in Guatemala. LIFE DANCES ON...HOME IMPROVEMENTS...LAST SUPPER...the map makes itself, I follow, no choice, like exorcising the Darkness come too early. Please line up the chapters now one two three-too late to teach about photography. just accept lost feelings-Shadows in empty room-Silence on T.V. Silence in Canada. Bad Dreams-Black White & Things, enjoy each minute to the fullest...KEEP BUSY...The Memory of all. So much of it gone. I wish that the feeling of that Memory will make a sound of music."
Robert Frank
Posted by amin at 11:30 PM | TrackBack
November 12, 2005
poison
Wine can clothe the most sordid den in miraculous luxury,
and makes more than one fairy-tale portico rise up in the gold of its red vapours,
like a setting sun in a misty sky.
Opium enlarges that which is boundless,
extends the unlimited, deepens time, digs further into pleasure,
and fills the soul with black gloomy pleasures to its capacity and more.
All that is nothing,
compare to the poison which flows from your eyes,
from your green eyes, lacks where my soul trembles
and sees itself upside down...
My dreams crowd to slake their thirst in those bitter gulfs.
All that is nothing,
compare to the terrible prodigy of your biting saliva,
which plunges my soul into oblivion without remorse
and bearing vertigo on its waves,
casts it up fainting on the shores of death.
Baudelaire
Posted by amin at 4:37 PM | TrackBack
November 10, 2005
nietzsche on music
God has given us music so that we should first of all be led upwards through it... its main designation is that it leads our thoughts to higher things, that it elevates us, even shakes us.
...Who does not feel a quiet, clear peace steal over him when he hears the simple melodies of Hayden? Music often speaks to us more penetratingly with notes than poetry in words... But if music is used solely for enjoyment or to make a public exhibition of itself, it is sinful and harmful. Yet one now finds this frequently, indeed, almost all of modern music bears traces of it...
Nietzsche
Posted by amin at 2:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 9, 2005
free government
To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power; teach obedience: and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.
Edmund Burke
Posted by amin at 9:23 PM | TrackBack
November 5, 2005
deathly quiet and tireless wanderers
It is enough to love, to hate, to desire, in fact to feel-and immediately the spirit and power of the dream descend upon us, and with wide-open eyes and insensitive to all dangers on the most perilous paths, we clamber on to the rooftops and towers of the fantasmagorical, and with no trace of vertigo, as though born to climb-we sleepwalkers of the day! We artists! We concealers of naturalness! We moon-and-god-struck addicts! We deathly quiet and tireless wanderers, up on the heights, which we do not perceive as heights but as our level plain, as our security!
Richard Wagner
Posted by amin at 6:14 PM | TrackBack
November 1, 2005
the light wraps you
The light wraps you in its mortal flame.
Abstracted pale mourner, standing that way
against the old propellers of the twilight
that revolves around you.
Speechless, my friend,
alone in the loneliness of this hour of the dead
and filled with the lives of fire,
pure heir of the ruined day.
A bough of fruit falls from the sun on your dark garment.
The great roots of night
grow suddenly from your soul,
and the things that hide in you come out again
so that a blue and pallid people
your newly born, takes nourishment.
Oh magnificent and fecund and magnetic slave
of the circle that moves in turn through black and gold:
rise, lead and possess a creation
so rich in life that its flowers perish
and it is full of sadness.
Pablo Neruda