(no subject)
"family life just goes on. toughest thing in the world. but of course it is also the microcosm of a world. you get everything there -- birth, life, death, love and jealousy, conflict of wills, of authority and freedom, the new and the old.
...roughly for me the principal fact of life is the free mind. for good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. this produces the very queer world that we live in, a world of continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. a perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. a world in everlasting confilct between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment."
~ joyce cary, 1954.
i've not read joyce cary. i can't name one of his novels. but i love both of these quotes because they play into two of my fascinations: the various levels of experience, and expressing them, and the opposition of form and tradition vs. The New Thing. i am sifting thru old interviews with a treasure trove of writers conducted by the paris review over a number of decades. writers of fiction and nonfiction, old and new. i've got that bug again. i oscillate between my fascinations with painting and the visual artist's world and that of the writer, the absolute magic of words. in my reading of interviews with writers, most of whom i have sadly never read, i keep finding them expounding on very convoluted and highly academic elements of thier craft. i can't relate to that, because when i read a book i am hardly concious of these concepts at all, and i get nowhere near them when i write. i wonder can i cut it as a writer if i seem to write from a different place than all of the writers i look up to? am i of a totally different breed in intention and attitude? will i change over time to be more like them, or should i even? maybe i am coming from a purer place than they are. maybe i am just undeveloped. who knows. i am happy to keep the company of literary minds, even if only accross the divide of the page, and i am stimulated hearing them, even if i am completely befuddled. i keep wondering where my future with words will take me, where the pen will finally come to fall on the paper, which key will be struck, and how it will sound when it pounds home.
...roughly for me the principal fact of life is the free mind. for good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. this produces the very queer world that we live in, a world of continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. a perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. a world in everlasting confilct between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment."
~ joyce cary, 1954.
i've not read joyce cary. i can't name one of his novels. but i love both of these quotes because they play into two of my fascinations: the various levels of experience, and expressing them, and the opposition of form and tradition vs. The New Thing. i am sifting thru old interviews with a treasure trove of writers conducted by the paris review over a number of decades. writers of fiction and nonfiction, old and new. i've got that bug again. i oscillate between my fascinations with painting and the visual artist's world and that of the writer, the absolute magic of words. in my reading of interviews with writers, most of whom i have sadly never read, i keep finding them expounding on very convoluted and highly academic elements of thier craft. i can't relate to that, because when i read a book i am hardly concious of these concepts at all, and i get nowhere near them when i write. i wonder can i cut it as a writer if i seem to write from a different place than all of the writers i look up to? am i of a totally different breed in intention and attitude? will i change over time to be more like them, or should i even? maybe i am coming from a purer place than they are. maybe i am just undeveloped. who knows. i am happy to keep the company of literary minds, even if only accross the divide of the page, and i am stimulated hearing them, even if i am completely befuddled. i keep wondering where my future with words will take me, where the pen will finally come to fall on the paper, which key will be struck, and how it will sound when it pounds home.