G. Steve Journal

New Ideas

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas.  I'm frightened of the old ones"

–– JOHN CAGE

Beauty

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves,” writes David Hume. “It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them, and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity where another is sensible of beauty, and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment without pretending to regulate those of others.”

 

Reverence and Conviction

Just read a review of a new biography about the author David Foster Wallace in which the biographer, D.T. Max, chronicles Wallace's evolution as a writer.  I found this observation of special interest, and suggest that it's sentiment goes to the heart of any creative endeavor:

Wallace’s interest in... wordplay, mimicry and metaphysics yielded to a more earnest desire to communicate and connect, how a delight in cleverness and irony gave way to a call for writers who might treat “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.”

Wholly Poised

I can't recall where I read this description of the photographs of Parisian photographer Eugene Atget, but I found it compelling and, like all photographers, hope the images I create might embody some of this poetic notion:

pictures that he made ... are seductively and deceptively simple, wholly poised, reticent, dense with experience, mysterious, and true.

Caretaker

Some time ago I watched Bill Moyers interview the writer Barry Lopez and found his replies to Moyers' questions so intriguing that I downloaded a transcript.

When Moyers asks him what it means to be a storyteller, Lopez recalls a conversation he had with a fellow novelist, a man named Kazumasa Hirai who told him:

"Your work is to take care of the spiritual interior of the language." And he said in Japanese this word we use, kotodama, means that each word has within it a spiritual interior. The word is like a vessel that carries something ineffable. And you must be the caretaker for that.

That metaphor - the word as a vessel - is true as well for the image.

Residue

“creativity is the residue of time wasted.”

                                Albert Einstein