And what was the ultimate goal? To have one’s work caged in art’s great zoos – the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?
I was both scattered and stymied, surrounded by unfinished songs and abandoned poems. I would go as far as I could and hit a wall, my own imagined limitations. And then I met a fellow who gave me his secret, and it was pretty simple. When you hit a wall, just kick it in. Todd.
He picks the lock of her dreams with her own hairpin.
The genesis of my coat, made from fine wool, spinning backwards through the looms, onto the body of a lamb, a black sheep a bit apart from the flock, grazing on the side of a hill. A lamb opening its eyes to the clouds that resemble for a moment the woolly backs of his own kind.
Images have their way of dissolving and then abruptly returning, pulling along the joy and pain attached to them like tin cans rattling from the back of an old-fashioned wedding vehicle.
I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.
Our quiet rage gives us wings, the possibility to negotiate the gears winding backwards uniting all time.
Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.
Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.
Looking back, long after his death, our way of living seems a miracle, one that could only be achieved by the silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.
Some dreams aren’t dreams at all, just another angle of physical reality.
Not all dreams need to be realized. That was what Fred used to say. We accomplished things that no one would ever know.
It is said that children do not distinguish between living and inanimate objects; I believe they do. A child imparts a doll or tin soldier with magical life-breath. The artist animates his work as the child his toys.
We would all like to believe that we came from nowhere but ourselves, every gesture is our own. But then we find we belong to the history and fate of a long line of beings that also may have wished to be free.
Nothing was spoken, it was just mutually understood.
He flashed a huge smile, one of absolute joy, from a place of no beginning or end.
Thank you, I said. I have lived in my own book. One I never planned to write, recording time backwards and forwards.
There is only one directive: that the lost are found; that the thick leaves encasing the dead are parted and they are lifted into the arms of light.
I hate being confined, especially when it’s for my own good.
And when we went home he was unnaturally quiet and looked at me as if he wanted to convey all he was feeling without words.