―The trick is, not to think what might happen.‖ Well, I‘ll tell you, that‘s a loaded gun. I can‘t go back into anything – a poem, a relationship, a mood, a stage. What might happen as a result of living in the present is a perpetual future. In fact, the future seems to have been inserted between the past and the present, and the superego between the id and the ego. I'll never go back.
Annie‘s gallery didn‘t accept my prints, and Zack says it's because, even though Annie carries 1930s realism, ―all her current stuff is very optimistic – beaches and things – very pretty." "Oh," I said, "well, I lacerate myself all the time to make my pictures less pretty.
I mean, I thought they were pretty. I thought you had to be exploding with angst to get into a gallery." But what Annie‘s saying is, reality is only in the past; the present is a dream of the future, unless you stick the future between the past and the present, and then you‘re nowhere. Well, I'll go along with that, except that, damn it, when I paint I try to 8
get back to the reality of the past, the reality that's covered up by the fluffy, dimwitted present. Poetry used to be a way of making things come together. And it's not just a question of making things come together or apart: it's a question of getting everything in.
And if you make things come together, do you have to leave something out? Does it have to be positive?
Mandelstam has an evocative, elusive style that alludes to things that aren‘t there; what‘s important in poetry is what‘s left out.
Silence of the brute-dark soul:
Sad and good silence
Like young dolphins
Sounding the grey gulfs, the world
That's how I feel. Everything suggests what's left out. If it weren't for Mandelstam, there would be nothing there. I think that in order to sort of make up a sense of time, you have to assign certain feelings to certain portions of your life, and then say, "the past is red, the future is green, the present is yellow," but you're always arbitrarily inventing time, apportioning events and feelings to areas which you then arbitrarily cut off from one another. Because it's not time – that's like an archeological dig, and comes in layers, strata – it's what's known as ―the psyche,‖ which is in its turn another invention to distinguish something in this great unknown future we're living in, to say, ―well, that's that,‖ when of course it isn‘t at all. I told Barnaby that to me painting is about what's simple and writing is about what's complex, and in particular that writing concerns itself with issues of time, past, present, future, and the coalescence of all three, while painting simply says, ―This is.‖ You can then assign temporal values to painting if you choose or have to-- but I like that simple, ―This is.‖ When Hopkins says, ―This is me, for this I came‖, – well, I used to think that I knew what that meant, but now I think it can be two things – and maybe all the best of everything can be these two things – I think it can be joy, exaltation, total rightness -- but I think it can also be a simple "this is," just being, or, if you will, hanging on. There's a lot to just hanging on that people haven't explored –
hanging on without making something of anything – so that, as it happens, it makes itself
– you can feel your flesh making itself, in the same way that I think a good picture makes itself. Painting is very much about flesh – flesh and clay and paint are one, if you ask me.
And what's writing? The other side of things – the lightning in the flesh, godhead, if you will. But painting's very human, the image has a human soul, as imagistic poetry proves, too. And sometimes the question seems to be, ―Do we want a human soul, or do we want to make something of ourselves?‖ What about people saying, ―You'll never amount to anything?‖ Well, there's a whole school of writing and painting that‘s about what that amounts to. What does being human amount to? The littlest thing, a stone, amounts to more than we‘re capable of laying our hands on.