People Say Great Art Is Immortal. I

What Did It Mean, The First Time, A Thinking Creature Looked Deeply Into Another's Eyes? Did It Take A Hundred Thousand Years Before This Happened Or It Was The First Thing They Did, Transcendingly, The Thing That Made Them Higher, Made Them Modern, The Gaze That Demonstrates We Are Lonely In Our Souls?

First You Look For Discipline And Control. You Want To Exercise Your Will, Bend The Language Your Way, Bend The World Your Way. You Want To Control The Flow Of Impulses, Images, Words, Faces, Ideas. But There's A Higher Place, A Secret Aspiration. You Want To Let Go. You Want To Lose Yourself In Language, Become A Carrier Or Messenger.

In This Century The Writer Has Carried On A Conversation With Madness. We Might Almost Say Of The Twentieth-century Writer That He Aspires To Madness. Some Have Made It, Of Course, And They Hold Special Places In Our Regard. To A Writer, Madness Is A Final Distillation Of Self, A Final Editing Down. It's The Drowning Out Of False Voices.

It Is Interesting ... How Weapons Reflect The Soul Of The Maker.

That's What In Theory Differentiates A Writer From Everyone Else. You See And Hear More Clearly.