Why do we always keep the windows closed?
Isn’t it amazing, at home there’s still snow and ice and here …
Look at the birds.
I always felt a little hurt that our swallows deserted us in the winter for capitalistic countries. Now I know why. We have the high ideals, but they have the climate.
(Excerpted from Ninotschka)
I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who’s now in her 90s, but she’s been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, “run like hell.” And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it “for another poet.” And then there were these times — this is the piece I never forgot — she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she’s running to the house and she’s looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it’s going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first.Elizabeth Gilbert, A New Way To Think About Creativity
过去那十天真的像是一场梦一样，
那个不曾真正体验所以对未來还有期盼的能量一直还在湧出。
每回味一次就觉得原來我还活着。
Richard Brautigan, from Revenge of the Lawn
天亮了, 没有做梦, 也没有死掉.
90’04”
突然发现自己看电影会哭得连呼吸都变得非常困难, 看书时却只有感動，很少流泪. 也许看书的想像力没了那伤感的配乐就会漸漸枯竭, 因為它們是集体出現,也集体消失的东西. 又或许自己制造出來的想象能力够实在但不够细腻, 所以脑海里的特写镜头总是非常美但非常不真实, 很多时候感觉什么都抓不住.
这才明白为何比较喜欢于那间大小刚好,只有声音偶而经过的臥室看电影, 却喜欢在有人流动的地方看书 --- 在人群中可以一个新的身分翻过一个新的章节来掌握作者在字行间里插入的多层想像, 什么事情都可以发生.
后记 / 突然用中文写了一些莫名其妙的东西, 都是因为读了L的造园理论书所害的.
Sometimes
We squeezed into narrow spaces like crumbs of lights because the heart is too big for the body. We move around the white noises long enough and suddenly something appears. Circus in the town. Rabbits pop out of the hat.
I am always hoping for rabbits.
(Matters, 2010)
If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I’m driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I feel the limits of what humans are capable of — that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that encouraging.Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Milton Glaser Once Wrote
1. As dark and as difficult this moment is, it will change and everyone in this room today has a significant role in that transformation because like all people who make things, you are inevitably on the side of light.
2. Early in my career I wanted to be professional, that was my complete aspiration in my early life because professionals seemed to know everything - not to mention they got paid for it. Later I discovered after working for a while that professionalism itself was a limitation. After all, what professionalism means in most cases is diminishing risks. So if you want to get your car fixed you go to a mechanic who knows how to deal with transmission problems in the same way each time. I suppose if you needed brain surgery you wouldn’t want the doctor to fool around and invent a new way of connecting your nerve endings. Please do it in the way that has worked in the past. Unfortunately in our field, in the so-called creative – I hate that word because it is misused so often. I also hate the fact that it is used as a noun. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.
3. There is a reason for all of you here to continue making things even though, vocationally speaking, this is the most difficult of times. The deepest role of art is creating an alternative reality, something the world needs desperately at this time. Everyone here today chose to be on the side of Eros, that is you’ve devoted your life of making things, rather than controlling things. I used to feel that it was strange that artists are self-anointed. Now I realize it could not be any other way because above all, art is a view of life itself. It cannot be given by others or taken away by dealers or marketing men. Real artists are always working for nothing because they don’t see their essential role in society as being simply to exchange goods. They turn up first in the anti-war demonstrations, not because they lack patriotism, but because they revere life.
4. It’s absurd to be loyal to a style. It does not deserve your loyalty.
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.Ira Glass
