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Here she was again, she thought… drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people into the presence of this formidable ancient enemy of hers—this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her….

It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.

....no woman he had ever met compared in any way with Gloria. She was deeply herself; she was immeasurably sincere...

Opening wide to the fullness of life, Cézanne felt himself to be the conduit where nature and humanity met—“The landscape thinks itself in me…I am its consciousness.”

Lou (1921): ...the core compulsions of the creative artist clearly reappear in the schizophrenic--that in both of them, active and passive, seeing and shaping are incomprehensibly the same, creation is as little to be halted or held in abeyance as in revelation itself: for both still proceed as one, undivided, behind all that which, in the name of rationality, separates subject and reality into two different things.

Rilke, 1903: “Oh what a solitary (Rodin) is: sunk in himself, he stands full of sap like an ancient tree in autumn. He has grown deep… he bares his heart to what is important, and is all openness when he is among things… What he gazes at and surrounds with gazing is always for him the only thing, the present thing, the one world in which everything happens.”

Lou, 1903: “You already have it inside you, that one real thing, planted there like a hidden seed and this not yet present to you. You possess it now in this sense: you have become like a little plot of earth into which all that falls—and be it even things mangled and broken, things thrown away in disgust—must enter an alchemy and become food to nourish the buried seed…It all turns to loam, becomes you.”

Merging is dangerous, at least to the boundaries and definition of the self. Darkness is generative, and generation requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next. Creation is always in the dark…

Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion…. You see the not-knowing in wars in which the reality of death…. is abstracted into collateral damage or statistics or overlooked altogether, or in which the enemy is recognized as nonhuman.

Breathtaking…. “The Grandmother from the North Pole knows that the blue whales killed by whalers can never be weighed whole. The heart alone is over a thousand pounds. Extracted, it sings above the human threshold.”