Four Times
I folded, measured, pinned, cut,
unpinned, folded, pinned, & sewed
cloth into sacks, stuffed them with foam
to make four steel-blue-gray chenille cushions:
36" x 13" x 2.5", two per bench, mouths
open. By end of day, a thousand
or more invisible stitches,
I closed them.
more from Louis Menand's Discovering Modernism:
when it is the
writer’s unique set of fingerprints we are interested in, it will
not matter what he picks up
from Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Critic as Artist” (1891):
By revealing to us
the absolute mechanism of all action, and so freeing us from the
self-imposed and trammelling burden of moral responsibility, the
scientific principle of Heredity has become, as it were, the warrant
for the contemplative life. It has shown us that we are never less
free than when we try to act. . . . It is the only one of the Gods
whose real name we know. . . . And so, it is not our own life that we
live, but the lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells within us
is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and individual
created for our service, and entering into us for our joy. It is
something that has dwelt in fearful places, and in ancient sepulchres
has made its abode. It is sick with many maladies, and has memories
of curious sins. It is wiser than we are, and its wisdom is bitter.
It fills us with impossible desires, and makes us follow what we know
we cannot gain. . . . [T]he imagination is the result of heredity. It
is simply concentrated race-experience.
To give an
accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the
proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of
any man of parts and culture.
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