88

Nothing needs more justification than pleasure.

Bertolt Brecht

"Never forget that all these people are primarily visual people. They are designers, window dressers, models, photographers, graphic artists. ...They value the eye, and their sins, as Saint Augustine said, are the sins of the eye. And being people who live on the surface of the eye they cannot be expected to have minds and hearts."

quote from review of Dances from the Dance by Andrew Hollerman NYT Jan14.79

The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.

T.S. Eliot

Do you know what the greatest affliction is? It's finding out happiness amounts to nothing!

Stringberg - the Perican p257 Walter Johnson trans.

2.5.79

89

Obviously life has rules about which we have no understanding and form which the artist's gaze, always directed to the beyond, sometimes manages to snatch something or other... Still, there is no tearing oneself away. You can stand before the keyhole, pressed to the door; you see very little, but no one can drag you away.

p27 Stravinsky letter "Pictures and Documents - 1978

(age 30 - 1912)

1.16.79

The grossly naturalistic details of a life, contained in the enormously wide context of a life, are softened and qualified by it, but when you attempt to set those details down in a tale, some measure of obscurity or indirection is called for to provide the same, or even approximate, softening effect that existence in time gives to those gross elements in the life itself.

Hard Candy p106 Tennessee Williams