Name for a band- "Echinacea Complex".

'Goethe was the contemporary of his country's ruin.' --de Gourmont

'What happened to literature was like what happens to a decimated army: you bury the dead and make heroes of the survivors.' --ibid

Am i afraid to paint a "beautiful" painting? tell an "engrossing" story? Or to do so for the wrong reason (and what reason would i claim, that couldn't be bent into a wrong one, later?) and somehow cancel out my high, my only-meaningful ideal? ...An objective observer might well wonder in what possible danger i am, of all impossible artists the most willfully impossible, of being smoothly assi milated into the machinery of any art-process. Worry, rather, lest i succumb to an eccentric's dogged-dogma & bitter intransigence to change.

It must be that all culture is made by exiles, from somewhere else that lacked it, that didn't want it.

Don't you just love walking into a strange town with the thought to stay?

'And if only we arrange our life according to the principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the most difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.' --Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties, ed/tr J J L Mood

   "Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat
On the silent sea we have heard the sound
That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.

Under the mile off moon we trembled listening
To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound
And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing
The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,
Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat
For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,
We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell.
Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,
Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned."

--Dylan Thomas