Lately, I’ve only been interested in getting meals with friends—disdaining parties; I’ve skipped readings and plays and afters; I’ve not wanted any part of it, by instinct. I feel like I’m burrowing into winter, even though it’s not been very cold lately. I feel that I’ve under gone a phase shift: everything I want is internal, comes from within. My project has gone from castle-building to mining.
As I get older, and my generation of writers, or those slightly younger, grow up, I see someone become very proper and professional, and start to write the things that are expected of them—pantomimes of personality—and I think: there goes another one! They’ve learned the trick of discarding everything about themselves that isn’t right and proper and pleasing; they are now dancing ponies.
I love when my mind returns to itself, like messenger pigeons returning to the coop.
I’m too much in the habit of waiting; I can always invent something new to wait for— to live for instead of living.
Pleasure is in the finite duration of the present; beauty is the context in which form becomes manifest from disorder, which means it requires specificity. Nothing is desire-able unless it is limited, unless it is rooted in something particular. We don’t desire ideas; we desire particular bodies. We don’t cry at the idea of a string quartet, we cry at Beethoven’s string quartets. I think being an artist means taking deep pleasure in the particular and the finite and the present-at-hand.