In Poetic Country

The problematically abstract and the problematically concrete are the two starting places. . . By the side of the problematically abstract, language sometimes seems full of the weight of the world. By the side of the problematically concrete, language can seem inappropriately quick and cavalier. In both instances, what is overtly at issue is the knowability of the world, and that knowability depends on its susceptibility to representation.

Elaine Scarry
Resisting Representation

You see, all art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself; and you may say it has always been like that, but now it’s entirely a game. And I think that that is the way things have changed, and what is fascinating now is that it’s going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to be any good at all.

Francis Bacon
Brutality of Fact

Sir,
You speak a language that I understand not:
My life stands in the level of your dreams,
Which I’ll lay down.

William Shakespeare
The Winter’s Tale

I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.

Carl Jung
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

It’s interesting how you can be lost in an area like memory – memory is very easy to get lost in. Some things can’t get lost, though, because there they’re based on emotional memory, which is a different thing from just trying to remember the name of a person or some fact. But to remember where you were touched has more of a reverberation. It remembers itself to you.

Sam Shepard

I’m just trying to make images as accurately off my nervous system as I can. I don’t even know what half of them mean.

Francis Bacon
Brutality of Fact

I’m haunted by ghosts. When I heard Regina and Osvald out there, it was just as if there were ghosts before my very eyes. But I’m inclined to think that we’re all ghosts. . . ; it’s not only the things that we’ve inherited from our fathers and mothers that live on in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and old dead beliefs, and things of that sort. They’re not actually alive in us, but they’re rooted there all the same, and we can’t rid ourselves of them. . . . I should think there must be ghosts all over the country – as countless as grains of sand. And we are, all of us, so pitifully afraid of the light.

Henrik Ibsen
Ghosts

As the Grail itself varies, so do also the results arising from a successful fulfillment of the Quest. At first the object is the cure of the Guardian of the Talisman, an enigmatic personage, generally known as the Fisher, or Maimed, King, who is helpless from the effects either of a wound, of extreme old age, or illness caused by the failure of the Quester, and with the cure of the ruler the restoration of fertility to his land, which lies waste while the Quest is unfulfilled. In the final form the result of the Quest is rather the attainment of spiritual enlightenment by the Quester, who, beholding the deep things of God, passes at the moment of vision from the world – “and thenne sodenly his soule departed to Jhesu Christ, and a grete multitude of Angels bare his soule up to heven.”

Jessie L. Weston
The Quest of the Holy Grail

I think you have to start in colloquial territory, and from there move on and arrive in poetic country … but not the other way around. I’ve noticed that even with the Greek guys, especially with Sophocles, there’s a very simple, rawboned language. The choruses are ‘poetic,’ but the speech of the characters themselves is terse, cut to the bone, and pointed to the heart of the problem.”

Sam Shepard

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tukahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Walt Whitman
Song of Myself

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

T.S. Eliot
Four Quartets

When I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse. And He who sat on him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and makes war. His eyes were like a flame of fire, and on His head were many crowns. He had a name written that no one knew except Himself. He was clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The Word of God. And the armies in heaven, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, followed Him on white horses. . . . And He has on His robe and on His thigh a name written: King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Revelation 19

I’ve increasingly wanted to make the images simpler and more complicated. And for this to work, it can work more starkly if the background is very united and clear. I think that probably is why I have used a very clear background against which the image can articulate itself.

Francis Bacon
Brutality of Fact

What’s the meaning of this corn, Tilden!

Sam Shepard
Buried Child