But happy the writer who begins simply with the activity itself--the defacement of blank pieces of paper--without having first encountered the socially acknowledged role. (4)
As a grave-digger, you are not just a person who excavates. You carry upon your shoulders the weight of other people's projections, of their fears and fantasies and anxieties and superstitions. You represent mortality, whether you like it or not. (23)
"A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures," says Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, puncturing the early-Romantic great-poet idea by taking it to its logical conclusion--the logical conclusion that if poetry is the self-expression and a great poet puts the good stuff in himself into his works, there's not much left over for his life...The others [great poets] write the poetry that they dare not realize." (47)
Nothing is truly beautiful unless it cannot be used for anything; everything that is useful is ugly because it is the expression of some need, and those of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and infirm nature. (quoted Theophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin)
Pages 53-54 discuss that Yeats wanted the artist to become the priest--to start his own religion and "serve this mystical entity" and he was "not alone," "The artist was to be its priest"
She discusses Lewis Hyde and the relationship between art and money on pages 60-61.
In her reading of Orpheus, she says, "The God of High Art...requires human sacrifices. If Art is a religion
and artists are its priests, it follows that the artists too must sacrifice. What they must sacrifice is the more human parts of themselves--the heart first [as Orpheus had to lose his wife]. They must sacrifice the possibility of human love, like priests, in order to more perfectly serve their god. ...The God of Art picks you, not the other way around. Therefore the artistic vocation has an aura of tragedy and doom about it. [Her example is Kafka's "Hunger Artist" <--the first piece of literature I actually liked!]
Any art of any kind is a discipline; not only a craft--that too--but a discipline in the religious sense, in which the vigil of waiting, the creation of a receptive spiritual emptiness, and the denial of self all play a part. (p. 86)
"Come," said the Lord. "I will make a covenant between Me and you. I, I will not measure you out anymore distress than you need to write your books...But you are to write the books. For it is I who want them written. Not the public, not by any means the critics, but Me, Me!" (quoted Isak Densen's "The Young Man With the Carnation" p. 136)
Finish with the last chapter.
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