'603. The unpredictability of human behaviour. But for
this--would one still say that one can never know what
is going on in anyone else?' --Wittgenstein, Zettel
(1945-48)

"Milton appears to suspect that souls partake of the general
degeneracy, and is not without some fear that his book is to
be written in an age too late for heroick poesy."
--Samuel Johnson

Nowadays art tends to be one of two kinds: TOYS or CANDY.
CANDY is pleasing art, pure texture (even violence has
become an element of texture) and made for a definite audience.
TOYS is personal art, which reflects where the artist is at
one point in time, what he saw, or was reading, his training,
and the dead artists he admires. This art is less offensive
to me because it is sometimes obscure enough to seem faintly
mysterious, but it never derives from a true inspiration
(beyond noise-level unconscious); also, very few people
today have enough personality to be interesting for that
alone... --Both are contingent. I can easily imagine them
otherwise, or not at all --and both are devoid of thought,
passion, and above all relevance.

The tragedy of syncretism is that it makes exact statements
impossible: the conflation of so many various symbol systems
dissolves every potential synthetic concept (generalization)
into an infinity of ambiguous associations. (Though this in
itself can make a style: Ashbery.)