Anathematization Of The World Is Not An

What An Artist Does, Is Fail. Any Reading Of The Literature, (i Mean The Literature Of Artistic Creation), However Summary, Will Persuade You Instantly That The Paradigmatic Artistic Experience Is That Of Failure. The Actualization Fails To Meet, Equal, The Intuition. There Is Something "out There" Which Cannot Be Brought "here". This Is Standard. I Don't Mean Bad Artists, I Mean Good Artists. There Is No Such Thing As A "successful Artist" (except, Of Course, In Worldly Terms).

Endings Are Elusive, Middles Are Nowhere To Be Found, But Worst Of All Is To Begin, To Begin, To Begin.

Painters, Especially American Painters Since The Second World War, Have Been Much More Troubled, Beset By Formal Perplexity, Than American Writers. Theyve Been A Laboratory For Everybody.

We Like Books That Have A Lot Of Dreck In Them, Matter Which Presents Itself As Not Wholly Relevant (or Indeed, At All Relevant) But Which, Carefully Attended To, Can Supply A Kind Of "sense" Of What Is Going On. This "sense" Is Not To Be Obtained By Reading Between The Lines (for There Is Nothing There, In Those White Spaces) But By Reading The Lines Themselves Looking At Them And So Arriving At A Feeling Not Of Satisfaction Exactly, That Is Too Much To Expect, But Of Having Read Them, Of Having "completed" Them.

I Don't Believe That We Are What We Do Although Many Thinkers Argue Otherwise. I Believe That What We Do Is, Very Often, A Poor Approximation Of What We Are -- An Imperfect Manifestation Of A Much Better Totality. Even The Best Of Us Sometimes Bite Off, As It Were, Less Than We Can Chew.