Category Archives: Image and idea

Drawn 17 Oct. 2019

So, I felt too tired to want to work last hour and that’s OK, you know? I tried to annotate journals but I’m not sure I quite felt up to that, either. I had some cool ideas from this (and yester?) morn and they seemed underexplained but also subtly wonderful, and I don’t know that I could maintain that nuance, that I could keep my thrill at the subtlety alive as I tried to define the ideas. Now I know that things do have to be defined (in some sense) or the idea might not be any more than an image, which would be OK, but there was more than image— maybe there was idea or at least feeling to the original idea. I shouldn’t feel a need to determine things, but if I don’t try to define it, I won’t be able to learn/communicate from it in the future. I don’t always want to sit and annotate my pocket page ideas but if I don’t, the ideas will be just topics—not ideas at all. I’ll look at the words later and not sense anything new there, nothing crafted, no sculpture, just clay (a good metaphor?) [from Journal 312, page 15]

“He’s a dog of many enthusiasms,” said woodcut artist Audrey Christie of dog Sosa at her house near Dodgeville, Wisc. 20 Oct. 2019.

φ   I don’t need to explain everything in what I publish to blog! And I don’t need to pick a mood/tone before I start writing. It’s OK to be a little messy and inexplicable—like life is, maybe—and like poetry can be. I don’t need to seem calm and collected in my postings from my journal! Why should I try to write like some Op-Ed columnist, valued for one’s opinions or having some theoretical program to promote and sell. … I’m not sure where ideas come from—I’m not a point source/P.O.V. of consistent ideas. I’m a conduit for ideas starting from/originating I know not where. No need to be self-righteous when I do have a new insight, thinking this new ideas is the best ever—even if it feels that way! Being intimate in my blog-posts, not necessarily maintaining a cool, normal exterior (mood).  [20 Oct. 2019 journal, J310]