Status Updates From Art and Lies

“When Picasso looked at a Cézanne apple, she felt all the desire of Eve standing on the brink of the world, paradise falling away.”

‘Di, cor mio, quanto t’amai’ - Say, my heart, how much I loved you

Touch me: Your hand the envoy of your heart.

All art belongs to the same period. Catch it by accent and not by chronology. Ask, ‘where does the emphasis fall?’ not the antiquarianism of where and when. Art is not archaeology. How will I know it? By its rapture. How will I know it? By its fidelity to itself. How will I know it? By its form.

"The best lack all conviction … and the worst?" - W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming":

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Having killed part of me, I fear it less than those who do their murdering with unconscious hands, the daily suicide that precedes all other crimes. Love of money. Fear of death. Twin engines of the human race. Foolish then to search for wings? Inhuman even? But I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallness that I am.

There’s no such thing as autobiography, there’s only art and lies.

Each man and woman goes to their particular scaffold, kneels, and is killed day after day. Each collects their severed head and catches the train home. Some say that they enjoy their work.

tertium non datum - no third option

Casti connubi? - Of chaste marriage?

Consensus facit matrimonium et non concubitus. - Consent makes a marriage, not sexual intercourse.

copula - link, bond, connection

Love me Sophia, in my foolishness, love my words and not my mortal remains. Be tidal to me in the constancy of change. Break over me where I feel most safe, be a shore to me, when I fear I am wave in the water, endlessly slipping away. Lift me up like a shell from the beach, now empty, now full. Lift me up and there are still songs.

I put the words into a flask and flung them out to sea. Flung them far out from me, made through myself, but not myself. Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

‘Know thyself,’ said Sappho, ‘and make sure that the Church never finds out.’

‘It’s so crude’ complained her mother, who believed in Good Taste the way Sunday worshippers believed in the Immaculate Conception. She wasn’t quite sure what it was but she was sure it was Important.

"Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie." - "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me."

It’s comforting, my busy life, left alone with my own thoughts I might find I have none. And left to my own emotions? Is there much beyond a childish rage and the sentimentality that passes for love?

People vanish everyday, but it’s not you and me, is it? We are solid and confident, safe and strong, we can speak our minds.
Can I? Can I speak my mind or am I dumb inside a borrowed language, captive of bastard thoughts? What of me is mine?

What use is it to love God, to dig my hands in the dark red soil of my home, and feel for it a passion which is not possession but recognition?

Books were put to every use to which a book can be put so long as it is never read.

a few lines of physics had been turned into a miracle. Or: A miracle has been turned into a few lines of physics?

THE NATURE OF A WORK OF ART
IS TO BE NOT A PART, NOR YET
A COPY OF THE REAL WORLD
(AS WE COMMONLY UNDERSTAND THAT PHRASE),
BUT A WORLD IN ITSELF,
INDEPENDENT, COMPLETE, AUTONOMOUS;
AND TO POSSESS IT FULLY
YOU MUST ENTER THAT WORLD,
CONFORM TO ITS LAWS,
AND IGNORE FOR THE TIME THE BELIEFS,
AIMS, AND PARTICULAR CONDITIONS
WHICH BELONG TO YOU
IN THE OTHER WORLD OF REALITY.