Seen and unseen. Thought and not-thought. Henry sits down and looks out the window and tries to think, for just a moment, about what he doesn’t want to think about. About the thing he knows is there, but can’t quite work out. “Down the drain. Down the stairs. Out the door. Hit the floor!” It’s
I keep thinking about something Ezra Pound said. He was talking about his time in Paris and the ‘new art’. About Picasso and the ice-block quality. About planes and patterns and vortexes. And about how some people ridicule what they don’t understand because they don’t know what thought is like. They’re only familiar with argument
“Tamara was lonely and she saw the devil.” Before daylight this morning I read Chekhov’s short story A Doctor’s Visit. My favourite line referenced Lermontov. I have no particular interest in Lermontov’s devil or Tamara’s seeing of it…it’s the way the sentence is structured by Chekhov that makes it so wonderful and interesting. I can’t
“To a chemist nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist, he must lay aside his personal subjective standpoint and must understand that muck heaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that the evil passions are as inherent in life as the good ones.” – Chekhov
I’m exhausted. And my brain’s just not working right for me today. It wont sit still. I also keep tasting salt. I worry it’s some kind of aura, because that’s what it usually is. Every neurological episode I’ve ever had (my brain’s way faulty) has been proceeded by the inexplicable and lingering taste of salt
“It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees — this in itself
