'Leonardo, "omo sanza lettere" (an unlettered man), as he described himself, had a difficult relationship with the written word. His knowledge was without equal in all the world, but his ignorance of Latin and grammar prevented him from communicating in writing with the learned men of his time.' --Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium tr Patrick Creagh (1988)

I suppose i can get used to artist as a despised, dispossessed and endangered role. What i can't forgive this society is having believed (Santa Claus) i would be treated differently. The shadow of those expectations still darkens my plain gray daylight. I am painfully conscious of how late i begin to learn survival...

It may be useful to keep the word "evil"--to distinguish active destructiveness from passive neglect. Similarly "folly"/"stupidity". What will astound future historians as much as any of the 20c's evils & follies, is the fact that we have no language left in which to describe the major difficulties we can hardly avoid facing everyday. Do we not perceive the ugliness of the city? we believe "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"...our minds don't register anything beyond the functional implications of the image. Leaving judgment to the Judges. "Politics" even moreso. Everyone has opinions. Nobody ever thinks about the subject.

Poets should be the sworn enemies of priests. Instead, they want to emulate them.

I think "Maya" originally did not mean that the world is an illusion, but instead was used to designate philosophies of pleasure as opposed to philosophies of freedom. Similarly the language of transcendentalism (Higher Worlds) must refer to the latter. Without this long dialogue either set of terms remains puzzlingly irrelevant to real life; e.g. it seems to be quite useless to state that "what you sense is not real" or "the true reality is somewhere else". Those are not even interesting lies...

If we are in a time before dwelling in a place is possible, we must needs be nomads. Which is a hard sentence, because we utterly lack nomadic instincts (austerity, ingenuity, stamina, decisiveness). We would be ready to walk right into Utopia (we think)--if it were merely across the street from us. But we cannot become reconciled to it being 1000 miles (or years) away. So we go on living extravagantly amid illusions of safe, easy, pleasant and rewarding futures, forever just about to rescue us from these "troubles".