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It was Reinhardt’s complete dedication to his art that impressed Lax, his understanding that artist was not a profession or a lifestyle but a definition of one’s self that encompassed everything.
I want to be is a good man, and if you ask me what I mean by a good man I would say that the goodness I want to partake of is infinite and that that infiniteness cannot by definition be defined, and that what an individual life has of that goodness is defined only by the whole of that life considered from all possible aspects and that it cannot be defined by the mind of the person living it at any point or points during the course of it, that all attempted word definitions are only the tiniest parts of definitions, but that maybe none of them are on the other hand completely false.
My charity consists in attempting to write the truth as clearly as I can at a time when many others write intentional distortions.
“I really believe that the spark in art is a part of an eternal and infinite mystery, like and part of the mystery of creation and of love.”
“After a number of years of asking What is life?,” he wrote, “the answer come back, It is what it is.”
“the answer is always: to exist is to exist. What are you going to do? He who asks with the most love (true) gets the best answer. He who courts the land, gets (if there be no tornado) the best vegetables, who courts the violin or typewriter gets the best music or writing, who courts the All and in courting the All courts whatever part he is in it, gets the good thing about life (which this time I will not call this life, just life).”
anyway i don’t for the moment think it’s new ideas we need but a neat neat clarification of our own old ones.
‘Where There’s an Oy, There’s a Vey.’)”
You can take a word like “night” that’s been used so often and in so many combinations that you think it’s no longer usable and try to find a way of using it, in spite of that, so that its meaning becomes “night” again. One of the things you hope happens when you repeat a word rhythmically—and in a pattern that can be listened to pleasantly—is that all of its meanings will begin to reappear or re-present themselves in the mind—all the dimensions of its meanings. (This is essentially an auditory thing; the disposition of words on a page has the same relation to the sound of a poem as notes on a
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“perhaps they see my being here as though this is the moon & i am an astronaut,” Lax wrote afterward, “and now that i’ve come here & written a little & photographed a little, they wonder why i don’t go back to my planet, the earth.”
Central to this was the idea that both life and writing—or art in general—must be dynamic, rising from one’s true self and never rigidly restricted by laws or rules or even an overly earnest striving for perfection. “the perfectly right becomes the perfectly wrong; the imperfectly right leaves a door for the winds of change,” he wrote.
there was a tone, a way, a kind of action. there were ways of doing things which people (having certain gifts) could compass. there was the wise man’s way and the fool’s way, the fiery man’s way and the slow man’s way. naturally, the ways were not alike, but each man doing his action in his own way, was doing an action and was doing it in “the way”. “the way” was to do it with confidence and love and truth. (and to do the thing, once decided, without hesitation).
what a writer writes should have some relation (though not necessarily a discoverable relation) to the meaning of his life. and the meaning of our lives should have some relation (to the meaning of the life of the world) but the meaning of our lives, and what we write, and what we do, is somehow in us from the beginning: in this sense, the child’s only duty is to live and grow
