The recklessness of a life can make interesting discoveries. I had accidently met an adamantly anti-military type. He had a group of anti-military types around him. I wasn't anti-military but I had had doubts and the doubts were enough to plunge me into this group for a time. Was I truly anti-military? I couldn't believe that. It did represent a failure in the ideal world but an utter necessity in the real one. Tribes prey on one another and have ready-made excuses to do so.

There are people who ooze a kind of hatred from their pores even as their faces and speech make an attempt to try and control what is coming out.

I interpret many of my dreams as the everlasting conflict between growing identity and the multiplication of all its decisions through the world.

To take a perfection and then complain about the falling away of the present in comparison is common enough. But to take up the perfection in oneself and live them in the present world is an act of courage.

A good art is hard and insistent because it has taken on responsibilities abdicated by most everyone and "everyone's representative."

Unlike the wrathful woman, the artist has endless dreams he is able to weave and puts them to the test.

Necessity flows effortlessly out of rationalizations like an old wound, received.

In America contradictions are a way of life. A 'type' rises up, is superseded, fused, annihilated, born again, sentimentalized: The 'cowboy', 'Indian', 'businessman' 'frontiersman.' At one end is the reality and on the other end is a sentimental image used to sell products. The writer needs to scrape all of this to the deeps where are found the currents of an inheritance. At the bottom of this inheritance is the seed of imagination. Out of the seed is a dyaspora of traits limited and pushed every which way by social, political, and geographical considerations. A man born of Norwegian blood can't help but feel compelled toward the Ice-lands of Canada and Alaska, say, without knowing a word of Norwegian or having any connection with Norway. No matter how fastidiously he dissociates him or herself from this fact and identifies completely with 'being an American' he can't escape living out a great deal of the inheritance. Much of it has to do with the folklore of the family group, passing down stories of how and when grandpa and great grandpa came to this country; their struggles, difficulties, successes.

In France or Germany or Italy or Japan the artist can exhaust the myth of his national inheritance completely. He can even refute it, knowing what he is refuting. But there is a distinction that doesn't work in America. Contradictions abound and abound. That is, if one believes that a 'nation' is an essential fact. It does seem to make some difference. It means too, that I can enjoy the poems of Basho more than the plays of Ibsen. I want both in my cultural database. I want the Sundiata as well as the Mahabharata for the simple fact that men and women used language to shape a story. That said I can't possibly understand America without Thoreau, Melville, Twain, Hemingway, Baldwin, Douglas and dozens of others. And there is always something missing in them that I am required to find.

I believe that 'nation' is a fact. So the Indian epic is more understandable for a person born in India even though I can understand some of it. It's also a fact that the "nation" is built up by the peoples of the world so I have the opportunity to explore much more culture.

America is a fact which evolved out of an Idea. That fact is made solid by attacks as 9/11 demonstrated.

The sharpness in art is determined by the time one lives in. In a particularly dumbed-down one the artist has to struggle a bit more to gain that sharpness but will find it since anything connected to the time one lives in is, in fact, the time. That includes the hidden sharpeners, the obscure pinpricks and scalpels. The feeble attempts to cut our time from all other times has failed. There is an art and skill to the ability to connect without becoming a puppet to the whims of some distant time. Immerse in the past until it sets you free. Immerse in the present until you are free of it. By the time that process is over you'll be living in the future.

Our mysticism consists in the very fact that what occurred three thousand years ago or three hundred is a living moment for us. Whether it is for others is irrelevant. And we don't try to convince them of anything.

Parenthetically, what will determine one's relation to the time one is issued into is the vain, rather pejorative nature in oneself but no need to punish a poor self about it. You have to ask yourself some rather simple if not embarrassing questions. "Does this art, thought, inspire one?" "Does the art, thought, take away precious moments?" "Will this art, thought make oneself better -ie. will it sharpen the sense- will it sharpen the feeling life- will it sharpen the intellect?"

If the art dulls the attributes then go to the next one.

Ignorant, we construct little schemas of fear so that a memory will remain. We have no faith in the fiber of life that is eternal. That is a judgement based on anecdotal and personal experience.

Being a composite mind the 'modern' mind seeks to place his old memory as artfully as possible in his present mind; rather than the old primitive way of dying an essential death to the old memory and being initiated into a new one.

People will forget and perhaps this is a good thing. Except they forget so much they end up re-living their lost memories.

The writer had a quintessential fight with a woman. "I have come into the world in order to pull the splinters together into fair, fine oak." I tell her this to explain why I don't care about her neurotic problems or, as she says, issues.

"I laid myself open to the knives of others because I knew the knives have been sharpened on the stone of humiliations and limitations. Yet one knife burrows deeper than the rest."

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