Quote: Foucault

Question: When did you stop believing in 'meaning?'
Foucault: The break came the day that Levi-Strauss demonstrated - about societies - and Lacan demonstrated - about the unconscious - that 'meaning' was probably only a sort of surface effect, a shimmer, a foam, and that what ran through us, underlay us, and was before us, what sustained us in time or space, was the system ...
Question: But, then, who secretes this system?
Foucault: What is this anonymous system without a subject, what thinks? The 'I' has exploded - we see this in modern literature - this is the discovery of 'there is.' There is a one. In some ways, one comes back to the seventeenth-century point of view, with this difference: not setting man, but anonymous thought, knowledge without subject, theory with no identity, in God's place.

Interview with Michel Foucault in La Quinzaine litteraire, 1966; in 'Claude Levi-Strauss, The Father of Modern Anthropology,' Patrick Wilcken, 2010

‘My Great, Great Etc. Uncle Patrick Henry’; poem by James Tate

There's a fortune to be made in just about everything 
in this country, somebody's father had to invent 
everything—baby food, tractors, rat poisoning. 
My family's obviously done nothing since the beginning 
of time. They invented poverty and bad taste
and getting by and taking it from the boss. 
O my mother goes around chewing her nails and 
spitting them in a jar: You shouldn't be ashamed 
of yourself she says, think of your family. 
My family I say what have they ever done but 
paint by numbers the most absurd and disgusting scenes 
of plastic squalor and human degradation.
Well then think of your great great etc. Uncle 
Patrick Henry.

In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

This essay by Japanese novelist Tanizaki is a rich and subtle meditation on beauty and aesthetics. His descriptions of light are sublime, or perhaps a more humble relative of sublime, since light for him is best contemplated in its least spectacular effects.  Light is variously described as frail, desolate, dilute, clinging, pensive, limpid, or delicate;  gold leaf in shadow has a dull, sleepy luster, white paper panels have a dreamlike luminescence, the candy yokan is possessed of a cloudy translucence … as if it had drunk into its depths the light of the sun. 

But for Tanizaki it is the magic of shadows that makes light effects visible at all, and he reserves his greatest powers of concentration for them.  Shadows are infinitely graded, always mysterious, uncanny, quiet, cloudy, inky, dull, soft, etc. They fill collars and hollows and folds, they gather, soak, fall, press in …

I loved his descriptions of food, of miso soup in a black lacquer bowl, its muddy, claylike color; the viscous sheen of black soy sauce, the soft glow of white fish, of heaped white rice in clouds of steam against black pots ….  Our cooking depends upon shadows and is inseparable from darkness.  Darkness hangs heavy above the No stage like the interior of a huge temple bell; gold leaf and gold dust draw light from the air, glow brighter as you back away.  Women blacken their teeth, wear iridescent green-black lipstick, shave their eyebrows; their black hair is the thread of the great earth spider. 

And Ghosts have no feet …

Quote: Agnes Martin

’There are no valid thoughts about art. If your sensibilities are awake you will respond. It will be a pleasant experience recalling happy times.. You must see that no talking will help and that no defence is necessary ...’

From ‘Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art,’ by Nancy Princenthal

Quote: Stephen Nachmanovitch

‘... intuition computes concentrically.’

From ‘Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art’

Ocean Beach

Now It Is Clear - a poem by WS Merwin

Now it is clear to me that no leaves are mine
no roots are mine
that wherever I go I will be a spine of smoke in the forest
and the forest will know it
we will both know it

and that the birds vanish because of something
that I remember
flying from me as though I were a great wind
as the stones settle into the ground
the trees into themselves
staring as though I were a great wind
which is what I pray for

it is clear to me that I cannot return
but that some of us will meet once more
even here
like our own statues
and some of us still later without names
and some of us will burn with the speed
of endless departures

and be found and lost no more

Quote: Martha Graham

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.  And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost."

Excerpt in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, by Stephen Nachmanovitch

Ocean Beach

Quote: William James

‘The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It ‘becomes’ true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process, the process namely of its verifying itself, its ‘verification.’ Its validity is the process of its ‘validation.’ ‘

From the Preface to ‘The Meaning of Truth,’ 1909.

parking lot devil

mushrooms

Quote: Gregory Bateson

"... mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life; ... its virulence springs specifically from the circumstance that life depends upon interlocking circuits of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits as human purpose may direct."

from Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972

paco de lucia, john mclaughlin, al di meola

Quote: Gaston Bachelard

"The reality of love is mutilated when it is detached from all its unrealness"

Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Reverie

Quote: Hans Loewald

" ... analysts all too frequently fall into the error of regarding fantasy as being opposed to reality, as something to be eventually discarded or relegated to a psychic enclave.  But fantasy is unreal only insofar as its communication with present actuality is inhibited or severed.  To that extent, however, present actuality is unreal too.  Perhaps a better word than 'unreal' is 'meaningless'"

from 'Psychoanalysis as an Art' in Papers on Psychoanalysis (1980)

Quote: Eileen Myles

"Rumi had someone following him around all day long, while he spoke the poem.  He was simply in it.  I was in it too. The room was the poem, the day I was in.  Oh Christ.  What writes my poem is a second ring, inner or outer.  Poetry is just the performance of it.  These little things, whether I write them or not.  That's the score.  The thing of great value is you.  Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live."

from Inferno: (A Poet's Novel) 2010

'Ars Poetica' by Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute   

As a globed fruit,

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless   

As the flight of birds.

                         *               

A poem should be motionless in time   

As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,   

Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time   

As the moon climbs.

                         *               

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean   

But be.

Quote: Tennessee Williams

'Nothing human disgusts me unless it's unkind.'

from 'The Night of the Iguana'

Quote: Zora Neale Hurston

"If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it."