G. Steve Journal

Timeless Delight

 

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.

                                                                                                                            –– Seamus Heaney

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Get Out of the Way

If you get out of the way of your work, your work will tell you exactly what it needs. Usually your work is much more forward-thinking than you are. Half of what we do, we're doing almost intuitively. It's later that we really understand what we've actually done or why we've done something a certain way.

                                                                                       -- Carrie Mae Weems

Unknowable Aspects

Echoing David Lynch's observations from an earlier post, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick on language as an anemic and unsatisfying medium of creative expression:

There are certain areas of feeling and reality...or unreality or innermost yearning, whatever you want to call it...which are notably inaccessible to words. Music can get into these areas. Painting can get into them. Non-verbal forms of expression can. But words are a terrible straitjacket.... There's a side to the human personality that somehow senses that wherever the cosmic truth may lie, it doesn't lie in A, B, C, D. It lies somewhere in the mysterious, unknowable aspects of thought and life and experience.

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Heartbeat of Life

Jack Kerouac's writing, and often Tom Wolfe's as well, is routinely criticized for it's stream-of-consciousness format; as Truman Capote once described it: "That's not writing, that's typing."

Yet it is this very quality – an immediate and non-cognitive response to the world – that has made Walt Whitman a beloved, and much imitated, American poet:

The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment...to put things down without deliberation...without worrying about their style...without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote, wrote, wrote… By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.

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