Mind 2

"My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it. (The famous example of Kekule working out the structure of benzene in his sleep is well-known.) Creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.”  ~Isaac Asimov

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"Inspiration is there all the time. For everyone whose mind is not clouded over with thoughts whether they realize it or not." ~Agnes Martin

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"When you look in your mind you find it covered with a lot of rubbishy thoughts. You have to penetrate these and hear what your mind is telling you to do. Such work is original work."  ~Agnes Martin

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Pantoum Quilted from Agnes Martin's Writings by Carol Moldaw

Composition is an absolute mystery.
To penetrate the night is one thing
(you get light enough and you levitate),
to be penetrated by the night, another.
To penetrate the night is one thing, 

the mind knows what the eye has not seen;
to be penetrated by the night, another.
Overtaken, we feel a certain devotion.
The mind knows what the eye has not seen.
Perfection, of course, cannot be represented.
Overtaken, we feel a certain devotion.
Think of a shibori-dyed silk organza quilt.
Perfection, of course, cannot be represented
pieced and layered, a little bit off the square.
Think of a shibori-dyed silk organza quilt
but without batting, transparent, floating,
pieced and layered, a little bit off the square,
the layers hand-tied together with horsehair
(but without batting, transparent, floating).
Try to understand, court misunderstanding.
The layers hand-tied together with horsehair,
the grids of the layers overlap like voices.
Try to understand, court misunderstanding.
The seams, like leading, show through.
The grids of the layers overlap like voices.
One thing I've got a good grip on is remorse.
The seams, like leading, show through.
Before it's put on paper, it exists in the mind.
One thing I've got a good grip on is remorse.
Technique a hazard, interruptions a disaster,
before it's put on paper, it exists in the mind.
Rectangles lighten the square's weight.
Technique a hazard, interruptions a disaster,
composition is an absolute mystery.
Rectangles lighten the square's weight.
You get light enough and you levitate.

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"To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind." -~Agnes Martin

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"There are two parts of the mind. The outer mind that records facts and the inner mind that says "yes" and "no." When you think of something that you should do, the inner mind says "yes" and you feel elated. We call this inspiration."  ~Agnes Martin

Give (#1)

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.  ~Carl Sandburg

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Amendment                                                            Christina Davis

The love of each of us
for some of us,

                        of some of us

for all of us—

                        and what would come if it were
                        welcome, if learning were
                        to prepare “a self with which to

welcome”

           the in-

admissible,        stranger

whose very being gives
evidence of
a discrepancy. School of our just

beginning to think
about this,       I believe

the seats will be peopled.

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"To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind." ~Agnes Martin

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"A man will give up almost anything except his suffering." ~John Cleese

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"Just do your work. And if the world needs your work it will come and get you. And if it doesn't, do your work anyway. You can have fantasies about ...having control over the world, but I know I can barely control my kitchen sink. That is the grace I'm given. Because when one can control things, one is limited to one's own vision." ~Kiki Smith

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I ONLY DANCE FOR MY MOTHER                      Mathias Nelson

She gives me the wine
and I take the wine.

I mop her floors
and she walks on them
while they’re still wet
so I begin to dance
to warn her of how
easy one can slide.

She watches
grinning in her old green jacket
before going outside
to see the moon on the snow.

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“The city gives us a feeling of being at home. We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place.” ~Simone Weil

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The word guru means ‘one who dispels the darkness,’ which is different from giving light. Giving light means giving someone something that they don’t already have. Gurus remove the layers of darkness and show you what’s already there. They peel away the self-hatred,the guild, the shame, the fear.  ~Krishna Das

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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 -- 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 Bayles & Ted Orland In Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

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I am so rich that I must give myself away.   Egon Schiele

Cloud I

Letter to My Imagined Daughter                   Kyle Vaughn

If I could fold this lonely year in half and then in half again, until finally it became next year, I would keep folding until I came to where you are. I would keep folding until this year made a little paper car. This white care would be soft, like a cloud in the air. And even more than a soft cloud, this would be a bright car, more like the sun in the middle of the day. And as it does through certain glass, its light would keep folding , folding in—making the world spin like a red barber’s chair, once around for every fast ray.

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You Begin                                                                              Margaret Atwood 1978

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
this is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.
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Inspiration is there all the time. For everyone whose mind is not clouded over with thoughts whether they realize it or not. ~Agnes Martin

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Ring               by Melissa Stein

Control was all
I wanted: a handle
on the day, the night
when it curved,
when it swayed,
when I could sense
the teeming stars
in light, in dark
the sun's bare wire.
Some switch
to turn it off:
each shadow
pinned to each tree
like a radius
of some infant's
milk it spilled.
And the leaves,
their gossip
of claw and beak
and wind and heat
and wing. Tether
lake to bank and
cloud to peak.
And weather it.
Weather it. All this
to say I've
taken off my ring. 

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Something goes through the world

Without speaking to anyone.

When it falls in water

It doesn't splash, when it enters a tree

It doesn't rustle.

The less you hear it the fiercer its presence is.

Time stops.  There's a mist in the north

And a branch, only one branch pointing to it.

No creature may now share its stillness.

Cloud, drifting in the direction of my birth,

If there's a Hell,

It must have only one inhabitant.

  

~Charles Simic

Accept

"To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind." - Agnes Martin

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She Considers the Dimensions of Her Soul            Young Smith

(Mrs. Morninghouse, after a Sermon Entitled,
"What the Spirit Teaches Us through Grief")

The shape of her soul is a square.
She knows this to be the case
because she sometimes feels its corners
pressing sharp against the bone
just under her shoulder blades
and across the wings of her hips.
At one time, when she was younger,
she had hoped that it might be a cube,
but the years have worked to dispel
this illusion of space. So that now
she understands: it is a simple plane:
a shape with surface, but no volume—
a window without a building, an eye
without a mind.
                         Of course, this square
does not appear on x-rays, and often,
weeks may pass when she forgets
that it exists. When she does think
to consider its purpose in her life,
she can say only that it aches with
a single mystery for whose answer
she has long ago given up the search—
since that question is a name which can
never quite be asked. This yearning,
she has concluded, is the only function
of the square, repeated again and again
in each of its four matching angles,
until, with time, she is persuaded anew
to accept that what it frames has no

interest in ever making her happy.

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“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

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To Be Continued: A Parable                Samuel Hazo

It's like a play.
                     Or rather
   the revival of a play in which
   you're still the main character.
The set, the lighting and the stage
   are what they were, but not
   the cast.
                Different actors
   have the roles that other actors
   acted when the play first
   ran.
         You make comparisons
   but then accept the differences
   as given.
                 Somehow you only feel
   secure in character but alien
   to all the others on the stage.
Their names will keep on changing
   as the run resumes with younger
   people in older roles.
                                 The script
   will stay the same.
                              You know
   your lines by heart but try
   to say them in a different voice
   each night.
                  The other actors
   say your character and you
   are one.
               Sometimes this seems
   a sentence, sometimes a challenge.
Either way you keep on playing
   your part.

                 You have no choice.

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Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.  W. H. Auden

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Legato                                                                       Mary Cornish

(Italian: bound)

As when a crow flies up from a field, the sky
accepts the weight of birds.
The crow's shadow falls to earth, and earth
accepts the shadow as if it were a house or tree.
Roots go down, blind as moles
and as eager. And in the house, each day
light moves across the bed.

Even with you gone, light moves on the bed
and I wake up. There's an arc
between the living and the dead, as when
a crow rises from a field, sun on its back.

Below, the shadow moving.

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Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.  Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters: 1910 – 1926

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We deduce that accepting an initiatory task is more important than succeeding or failing at it. Robert Bly, in Iron John: A Book About Men, p. 54

Happy Birthday, Agnes Martin!

This week was artist Agnes Martin's Birthday. She would have been 101 years old. Celebrate over at Maria Popova's Brain Pickings with quotes and an interview with Martin.

On a side note, I've been trying to get a copy of Martin's Writings, but it's priced at $75 used and $150 and up new....I found it on Scribd, but am not sure how I feel about the ethics of downloading form Scribd. If anybody has an opinion on that they want to share, please do....