running the asylum

Snow
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands –
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
- Louis MacNeice



"Perhaps the Christian idea of Grace, of "an unmerited gift from God", better conveys the aspect of enlightenment which is part of our original nature, and which can miraculously appear any time, anywhere, as the result of a seemingly insignificant sight, sound, or word. What is freely given cannot be taken by force and is as often obscured as discovered by our self-centered efforts."
- Barry Magid



"Might it not in fact already have been determined that I go through this argument with myself today, that I struggle in just this way toward a decision that, unknown to me, is foregone? What is the issue? To try to create something of value . . . or to hell with it! But is this a decision I'm going to make - or one already made for me by complex and immeasurable causes, fixed within me as an unveering potentiality, to be revealed in time in the illusion of will?

I don't know. Can one know such a thing? Would it make a difference?

Perhaps a great difference; for if the issue is already settled I shall lose interest - do now lose interest even at the thought - even without knowing which way it has been settled. This kind of thinking is work - or the illusion of work, which is just as hard, and, being useless, is worse - and I'll not do it for nothing.

If, however, I should take the view that what I shall decide is still open - not just unknown but really open, not fixed by antecedents, unpredictable at this point by any intelligence however superior, even by Laplace's omniscient demon - I would incline to continue the struggle, to anguish over it, try to think it out, find my way. Because the decision would be mine, something made, a creation.

So it does make a difference and I must take a stand."
- Allen Wheelis
The Illusionless Man



"Yeats wrote somewhere that one had to choose between the work (the art) or the life. I have spent my life defying that, trying to make the work of art and the work of life both true without excluding one or the other and without differentiation. I don't know if you feel the price you paid to accomplish this too was worth it, but I would pay the price of exhaustion, illness, and addiction over and over if I could have my beautiful, sane, happy children, the sustaining love of my wife, and one poem that opened the heart of another being."
- Terrance Keenan
in a letter to Hayden Carruth



"The world displays perfect neutrality on whether we achieve any outward manifestation of our inner desires. But not art. Art is exquisitely responsive. Nowhere is feedback so absolute as in the making of art. The work we make, even if unnoticed and undesired by the world, vibrates in perfect harmony to everything we put into it or withhold from it. In the outside world there may be no reaction to what we do. In our artwork, there's nothing but reaction. The breathtakingly wonderful thing about this reaction is its truthfulness.
Look at your work and it tells you how it is when you hold back or when you embrace. When you're lazy, your art is lazy. When you hold back it holds back. When you hesitate, it stands there staring, hands in its pockets."
- David Bales and Ted Orland
Art and Fear



The Room
It is an old story, the way it happens
sometimes in winter, sometimes not.
The listener falls to sleep,
the doors to the closets of his unhappiness open

and into his room the misfortunes come -
death by daybreak, death by nightfall,
their wooden wings bruising the air,
their shadows the spilled milk the world cries over.

There is a need for surprise endings;
the green field where cows burn like newsprint,
where the farmer sits and stares,
where nothing, when it happens, is never terrible enough.
- Mark Strand



"In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot - and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice."
- David Bales and Ted Orland
Art and Fear



What is it inside the imagination that keeps surprising us
At odd moments
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . when something is given back
We didn't know we had had
In solitude, spontaneously, and with great joy?
- Charles Wright
The World of the Ten Thousand Things



In Praise of Dreams
In my dreams
I paint like Vermeer van Delft.

I speak fluent Greek
and not with just the living.

I drive a car
that does what I want it to.

I am gifted
and write mighty epics.

I hear voices
as clearly as any venerable saint.

My brilliance as a pianist
would stun you.

I fly the way we ought to,
i.e., on my own.

Falling from the roof,
I tumble gently to the grass.

I've got no problem
breathing under water.

I can't complain:
I've been able to locate Atlantis.

It's gratifying that I can always
Wake up before dying.

As soon as war breaks out,
I roll over on my other side.

I'm a child of my age,
but I don't have to be.

A few years ago
I saw two suns.

And the night before last a penguin,
clear as day.
- Wislawa Szymborska



"Recently a painter of some accomplishment (but as insecure as the rest of us) was discussing his previous night's dream with a friend over coffee. It was one of those vivid technicolor dreams, the kind that linger on in exact detail even after waking. In his dream he found himself at an art gallery, and when he walked inside and looked around he found the walls hung with paintings - amazing paintings, paintings of passionate intensity and haunting beauty. Recounting his dream, the artist ended fervently with, "I'd give anything to be able to make paintings like that!"

"Wait a minute!" his friend exclaimed. "Don't you see? Those were your paintings! They came from your own mind. Who else could have painted them?"
- David Bayles & Ted Orland
Art & Fear

<°))))><


"When you're truly absorbed, everything else is forgotten - you aren't asking "How well am I behaving?" or whatever. What is important for the doer is the quality of attention, the "habits of meditation" Wordsworth spoke about . . . Wordsworth says, "I believe that my habits of meditation have so formed my feelings, as that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose." That would be my feeling: agonizing over those things - how to live properly, I mean - is worthwhile because it forms your "habits of meditation," your frame of mind, your disposition, your temperament. When it comes to the actual doing, all you really have is your temperament, your disposition, your impulse. But you can affect your temperament by thinking in certain ways."
- Seamus Heaney



"Even when the poet seems most himself, he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete."
- William Butler Yeats



"I keep coming back to the statement because it gets at the truth. It's another way of accounting for the fact that, if a poem is any good, you can repeat it to yourself as if it were written by somebody else. The completedness frees you from it and it from you. You can read and reread it without feeling self-indulgent: whatever it was in you that started the writing has got beyond you. The unwritten poem is always going to be entangled with your own business, part of your accident and incoherence - which is what drives you to write. But once the poem gets written, it is, in a manner of speaking, none of your business."
- Seamus Heaney



Making Poetry
'You have to inhabit poetry
if you want to make it.'
And what's 'to inhabit?'
To be in the habit of, to wear
words, sitting in the plainest light,
in the silk of morning, in the shoe of night;
a feeling bare and frondish in surprising air;
familiar . . . rare.
And what's 'to make?'
To be and to become words' passing
weather; to serve a girl on terrible terms,
embark on voyages over voices,
evade the ego-hill, the misery-well,
the siren hiss of publish, success, publish,
success, success, success.
And why inhabit, make, inherit poetry?
Oh, it's the shared comedy of the worst
blessed; the sound leading the hand;
a wordlife running from mind to mind
through the washed rooms of the simple senses;
one of those haunted, undefendable, unpoetic
crosses we have to find.
- Anne Stevenson
Collected Poems 101



Dear Artist,
Recent activities have helped with an understanding of what goes on in the art-making brain. The encouragement of Zen-like lapses can be useful both in the studio and the great outdoors. We start with the understanding that a relaxed brain more easily accesses natural creative tendencies.

In the preparation phase, minimal anxieties, few regrets and a state of well-being preheat the oven. Shuffling of the recipe cards is also valuable. Here are a few ideas:

Have an attitude of low expectations and nothing to lose.
Try to make deliberate, thoughtful, rhythmic movements.
While not necessarily alone, be solitary.
Allow yourself to dream, flow and indulge your fancies.
Be philosophic about your weaknesses and creative faults.
Let your tools and your media do the talking.
Let your work tell you what it needs.
Let yourself yin and yang between thought and no thought.
Accept imperfection. Try for the spirit of attaining.
Teach yourself to teach yourself as you go.
Be in the now, but look gently ahead.
Be not lazy in your relaxation.

In the mystery we call life, certain work can be certain joy, and it has something to do with surrender to the more primitive, playful and automatic parts of our brain.

It's like the convention of retirement, only in shorter and more frequent increments. The idea is to calculate and bend a sense of leisure into specific creative times. Like retirement activities such as golf, boating or woodworking, work is required. In the Zen-like mode, work is not so onerous, but it is still work. Persons of any age with a desire for independence, who are disposed to squeeze and produce, can access this mode.

I'm not trying to be funny here, but artists need to develop a feeling of privilege and a sense of good fortune, even if the feeling has to be artificially induced. This self-foolery, a sort of mental levitation, brings on a state of mind that facilitates easy-going exploration. The active seduction of one's own mind is a significant key to creative progress.
Best regards,
Robert Genn



"Nothing is more profound than direct personal experience of a thing, which is the point of both Zen and art."
- Eden Maxwell



The Wind in the Bend
The willows' golden budded branches brim in the winter air.
There is fire - even in winter, even when my heart here
cannot remember the way of Love. - The road curves round
taking me to where I have been, and in the bend,
the willows' golden budded branches brim.
- Elaine Maria Upton



"A non-Buddhist said to the Buddha, "I don't ask about words, I don't ask about no words." The Buddha just remained silent. The student bowed and said, "Thank you for dispelling the clouds of my ignorance," and walked away. Ananda, who was standing nearby, asked the Buddha, "What happened? What did he see?" The Buddha said, "He's like a fine horse that moves at the shadow of a whip."

Of course, everyone wants to be the horse that moves at the shadow of the whip. But what is most important is moving. Whether you move at the shadow of the whip, or whether you have to feel the whip itself is just a matter of your present awareness."
- Geoffrey Shugen Arnold
Dharma Talk
The Eternal Sky



"Only horizon and sky are given up easily. Take the numbing distance in small doses and gorge on the little details that beckon."
- William Least Heat-Moon



"Before my eyes, high in the sky appear two moving white lines. The aircraft are invisible, the vapor trails appearing as the writing of white chalk on blue slate. I think of it as a message from a distant communicant and try to read, but the graceful curves fade too quickly. I imagine myself then at the site of these aircraft, giddy in the thin air, see the gleaming metal, am deafened by the roar of wind and motor; enter the cockpit, see the oxygen mask over the young face, the full lips, the steady eyes - and remember, suddenly, an experience swimming at La Jolla. I had gone down twelve feet in clear water and there, by the rocks, had rolled over and looked up. At the surface, glittering in the sun, two silver fish had flashed by.
I sit here now and look up from the floor of an ocean of air. In a billion years life has lifted itself from the bottom of the sea to the surface and then onto land; moves upward now in this more rare ocean; and up there at this moment, beyond my vision, are two frolicking fish who have reached the very surface, chasing each other and splashing about, and one day may leap out entirely, into an even freer realm."
- Allen Wheelis


><((((º>


"Unless we are very, very careful, we doom each other by holding onto images of one another based on preconceptions that are in turn based on indifference to what is other than ourselves. This indifference can be, in its extreme, a form of murder and seems to me a rather common phenomenon. We claim autonomy for ourselves and forget that in so doing we can fall into the tyranny of defining other people as we would like them to be. By focusing on what we choose to acknowledge in them, we impose an insidious control on them. I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery."
- Anne Truitt



"Ichu was a famous painter and Zen teacher. One day Nambutzu, a great warrior, came to see him and asked whether he could paint the fragrance described in a famous line of poetry: "After walking through the flowers, the horse's hoof is fragrant." Ichu drew a horse's hoof with a butterfly fluttering around it. Then Nambutzu quoted the line, "Spring breeze over the river bank," and asked for a picture of the breeze. Ichu drew a branch of waving willow. Nambutzu cited the famous Zen phrase, "A finger directly pointing to the human mind; see the nature to be Buddha," and asked for a picture of the mind. Ichu picked up the brush and flicked a spot of ink onto Nambutzu's face. Nambutzu was surprised and annoyed; Ichu rapidly sketched his angry face. Nambutzu then asked for a picture of the nature. Ichu broke the brush. Nambutzu didn't understand, and Ichu remarked, "If you haven't got the seeing eye, you can't see it." Nambutzu asked him to take another brush and paint a picture of the nature. Ichu replied, "Show me your nature and I'll paint it." Nambutzu had no words."
- John Daido Loori
The Eight Gates of Zen



It is not skill, knowledge, intellect,
good luck or bad, but choosing
to feel the strange notes
of our wildness,
for there is not nothingness
despite the easy magic
of despair.
- Terrance Keenan
St. Nadie in Winter



"Balancing intuition against sensory information, and sensitivity to one's self against pragmatic knowledge of the world, is not a stance unique to artists. The specialness of artists is the degree to which these precarious balances are crucial backups for their real endeavor. Their essential effort is to catapult themselves wholly, without holding back one bit, into a course of action without having any idea where they will end up. They are like riders who gallop into the night, eagerly leaning on their horse's neck, peering into a blinding rain. And they have to do it over and over again. When they find that they have ridden and ridden - maybe for years, full tilt - in what is for them a mistaken direction, they must unearth within themselves some readiness to turn direction and gallop off again. They may spend a little time scraping off the mud, resting the horse, having a hot bath, laughing and sitting in candlelight with friends. But in the back of their minds they never forget that the dark, driving run is theirs to make again. They need their balances in order to support their risks. The more they develop an understanding of all their experiences - the more it is at their command - the more they carry with them into the whistling wind."
- Anne Truitt
Daybook



I remember the word and forget the word
. . . . . . . . . . . . . although the word
Hovers in flame around me.
Summer hovers in flame around me.
The overcast breaks like a bone above the Blue Ridge.
A loneliness west of solitude
Splinters into the landscape
. . . . . . . . . . . . . uncomforting as Braille.

We are our final vocabulary,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . and how we use it.
There is no secret contingency.
There's only the rearrangement, the redescription
Of little and mortal things.
There's only this single body, this tiny garment
Gathering the past against itself,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . making it otherwise.
- Charles Wright
Negative Blue



"Those who would make art might well begin by reflecting on the fate of those who preceded them: most who began, quit. It's a genuine tragedy. Worse yet, it's an unnecessary tragedy. After all, artists who continue and artists who quit share an immense field of common emotional ground. (Viewed from the outside, in fact, they're indistinguishable.) We're all subject to a familiar and universal progression of human troubles - troubles we routinely survive, but which are (oddly enough) routinely fatal to the artmaking process. To survive as an artist requires confronting these troubles. Basically, those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue - or more precisely, have learned how to not quit.

Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail.

Virtually all artists encounter such moments. Fear that your next work will fail is a normal, recurring and generally healthy part of the artmaking cycle. It happens all the time: you focus on some new idea in your work, you try it out, run with it for awhile, reach a point of diminishing returns, and eventually decide its not worth pursuing further.

In the normal artistic cycle this just tells you that you've come full circle, back to that point where you need to begin cultivating the next new idea. But in artistic death it marks the last thing that happens: you play out an idea, it stops working, you put the brush down . . . And thirty years later you confide to someone over coffee that, well, yes, you had wanted to paint when you were much younger. Quitting is fundamentally different from stopping. The latter happens all the time. Quitting happens once. Quitting means not starting again - and art is all about starting again."
- David Bayles and Ted Orland
Art and Fear
An Artist's Survival Guide



"It was Gurdjieff who dissected this process for me to examine, and I like to watch it happening. An undertaking, he says, begins with a surge of energy that carries it a certain distance toward completion. Then there occurs a drop in energy, which must be lifted back to an effective level by conscious effort, in my experience by bringing to bear hard purpose. It is, however, in the final stage, just before completion, that Gurdjieff says pressure mounts almost unendurably to a point at which it is necessary to bring to bear an even more special kind of effort. It is at this point, when idea is on the verge of bursting into physicality, that I find myself meeting maximum difficulty. I sometimes have the curious impression that the physical system seems in its very nature to resist its invasion by idea. Matter itself seems to have some mysterious intransigency."
- Anne Truitt
Daybook



"In making a piece of art, both the artist and the artist's world are changed, and re-asking the question - facing the next blank canvas - will always yield a different answer. This creates a certain paradox, for while good art carries a ring of truth to it - a sense that something permanently important about the world has been made clear - the act of giving form to that truth is arguably unique to one person, and one time. There is a moment for each artist in which a particular truth can be found, and if it is not found then, it will not ever be. This is pretty good evidence that the meaning of the world is made, not found.
The world thus altered becomes a different world, with our alterations being part of it. The world we see today is the legacy of people noticing the world and commenting on it in forms that have been preserved."
- David Bayles and Ted Orland
Art and Fear



"Artists have a modicum of control. Their development is open-ended. As the pressure of their work demands more and more of them, they can stretch to meet it. They can be open to themselves, and as brave as they can be to see who they are, what their work is teaching them. This is never easy. Every step forward is a new clearing through a thicket of reluctance and habit and natural indolence. And all the while they are at the mercy of events. Even the most fortunate have to adjust the demands of a personal obsession to the demands of daily life."
- Anne Truitt



"Tonight, the uneven darkness is equal parts bold and apologetic. It's the shabby moonlight epiphanies are made for, but I'm not due for an epiphany. I'm due for something lower in my body, something akin to the warming of hands by a mug of something hot."
- Philip Pardi


<°))))><


"If art is about self, the widely accepted corollary is that making art is about self-expression. And it is - but that is not necessarily all it is. What gets lost in that interpretation is an older sense that art is something you do out in the world, or something you do about the world, or even something you do for the world. The need to make art may not stem solely from the need to express who you are, but from a need to complete a relationship with something outside yourself. As a maker of art you are custodian of issues larger than self."
- David Bayles and Ted Orland
Art and Fear



"The open being: I am an artist. Even to write it makes me feel deeply uneasy. I am, I feel, not good enough to be an artist. And this leads me to wonder whether my distaste for the inflated social definition of the artist is not an inverse reflection of secret pride. Have I haughtily rejected the inflation on the outside while entertaining it on the inside? In my passion for learning how to make true for others what I felt to be true for myself (and I cannot remember, except very, very early on, ever not having had this passion), I think I may have fallen into idolatry of those who were able to communicate this way. Artists. So to think myself an artist was self-idolatry."
- Anne Truitt



"Nothing is ever lost. If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life. From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theatre, from nursery rhyme to symphony, from jungle compound to Kafka's Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored, and used on some later day. To be a child of one's time is to do all these things."
- Ray Bradbury
Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Inside You



Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life
I

Is there something down by the water keeping itself from us,
Some shy event, some secret of the light that falls upon the deep,
Some source of sorrow that does not wish to be discovered yet?

Why should we care? Doesn't desire cast its
. . . rainbows over the coarse porcelain
Of the world's skin and with its measures fill the
. . . air? Why look for more?

II

And now, while the advocates of awfulness and sorrow
Push their dripping barge up and down the beach, let's eat
Our brill, and sip this beautiful white Beaune.

True, the light is artificial, and we are not well-dressed.
So what. We like it here. We like the bullocks in the field next door,
We like the sound of wind passing over grass. The way you speak,

In that low voice, our late night disclosures . . . why live
For anything else? Our masterpiece is the private life.

III

Standing on the quay between the Roving Swan and the Star Immaculate,
Breathing the night air as the moment of pleasure taken
In pleasure vanishing seems to grow, its self-soiling

Beauty, which can only be what it was, sustaining itself
A little longer in its going, I think of our own smooth passage
Through the graded partitions, the crises that bleed

Into the ordinary, leaving us a little more tired each time,
A little more distant from the experiences, which, in the old days,
Held us captive for hours. The drive along the winding road

Back to the house, the sea pounding against the cliffs,
The glass of whiskey on the table, the open book, the questions,
All the day's rewards waiting at the doors of sleep . . .
- Mark Strand
Blizzard of One



"People talk about the discontent in the world and about existential anxiety as if it were something new! Everyone at every period in history felt it. You have only to read the Greek and Latin authors!
It is not true that the individual with his emotional life no longer feels himself the center of the world! What do you think really interests people from morning to night if it isn't their feelings, their work and love - especially love."
- Alberto Giacometti



"Do you want a sign that you're asleep? Here it is: you're suffering. Suffering is a sign that you're out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there's falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering."
- Anthony De Mello



"It is often thought that the Buddha's doctrine teaches us that suffering will disappear if one has meditated long enough, or if one sees everything differently. It is not that at all. Suffering isn't going to go away; the one who suffers is going to go away."
- Ayya Khema



"Gautauma said that one is fooling oneself if one says that the I exists, but in saying it does not exist one is fooling oneself no less."
- Samuel Beckett



"Buddha-nature lies in the fact of being, not outside it. As Blyth says "the -ite is bliss. There is no bliss in anything infinite or finite. Iteness only is bliss." The universe is an indeterminate, constantly changing state of iteness. Being and non-being merge. Opposites share Buddha-nature, differ in their individual essences or spirits."
- Fredric Lieberman



"I have been nothing but a series or rather a succession of local phenomena all my life."
- Samuel Beckett
Malone in Malone Dies


><((((º>


Valentine
Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.

Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.
- Carol Ann Duffy