Is Death That Which Gives Meaning To

The Privileged Classes Can Afford Psychoanalysis And Whiskey. Whereas All We Get Is Sermons And Sour Wine. This Is Manifestly Unfair. I Protest, Silently.

We Like Books That Have A Lot Of Dreck In Them, Matter Which Presents Itself As Not Wholly Relevant (or Indeed, At All Relevant) But Which, Carefully Attended To, Can Supply A Kind Of "sense" Of What Is Going On. This "sense" Is Not To Be Obtained By Reading Between The Lines (for There Is Nothing There, In Those White Spaces) But By Reading The Lines Themselves Looking At Them And So Arriving At A Feeling Not Of Satisfaction Exactly, That Is Too Much To Expect, But Of Having Read Them, Of Having "completed" Them.

The Question So Often Asked Of Modern Painting, "what Is It?", Contains More Than The Dull Skepticism Of The Man Who Is Not Going To Have The Wool Pulled Over His Eyes. It Speaks Of A Fundamental Placement In Relation To The Work, That Of A Voyager In The World Coming Upon A Strange Object. The Reader Reconstitutes The Work By His Active Participation, By Approaching The Object, Tapping It, Shaking It, Holding It To His Ear To Hear The Roaring Within. It Is Characteristic Of The Object That It Does Not Declare Itself All At Once, In A Rush Of Pleasant Naïveté.

What An Artist Does, Is Fail. Any Reading Of The Literature, (i Mean The Literature Of Artistic Creation), However Summary, Will Persuade You Instantly That The Paradigmatic Artistic Experience Is That Of Failure. The Actualization Fails To Meet, Equal, The Intuition. There Is Something "out There" Which Cannot Be Brought "here". This Is Standard. I Don't Mean Bad Artists, I Mean Good Artists. There Is No Such Thing As A "successful Artist" (except, Of Course, In Worldly Terms).

The Writer Is One Who, Emnbarking Upon A Task, Does Not Know What To Do.