Man in the Arena

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

-- Theodore Roosevelt

Shadows Bright as Glass

"Nothing, however, remains fixed. Everything is local and always moving.  The whereabouts of the self shift from lobe to lobe, hemisphere to hemisphere; it 'wanders on,' fragile and fitful, the sum of more possibilities than there are stars in the heavens. We are, all of us, an amalgam of associations--what we see and hear, smell, touch and taste--and the memories and emotions they conjure. Our ability to understand the world is limited by our very humanness. We are fragments, our sensation mere splinters of reality. Like standing outside one's home at night and peering through the window, all that we see of the world is what passes briefly into the light of that small frame. The rest remains in shadow."

Amy Ellis Nutt, from Shadows Bright as Glass: The Remarkable Story of One Mans' Journey from Brain Trauma to Artistic Triumph

Art is Lunging Forward

"Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is."

-- Mark Vonnegut

Three Witches

Plight of an English major: watching birds dine by dipping in and out of a trashcan on a cloudy day makes me think about the Weird Sisters in Shakespeare's MacBeth. 

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair / Hover through the fog and filthy air."

I'll refrain from making the inevitable pun on foul/fowl.

Billy Collins "Introduction to Poetry"

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

-- Billy Collins

Joan Didion quote from The White Album

I rediscovered Joan Didion, The White Album, today.  Great quote for writers:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.  The princess is caged in the consulate.  The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea.  The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be "interesting" to know which.  We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens.  We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.  We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.  We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while.  I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.