The Witch by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Whistler's The White Girl 1862

I have walked a great while over the snow,

And I am not tall nor strong.

My clothes are wet, and my teeth are set,

And the way was hard and long.

I have wandered over the fruitful earth,

But I never came here before.

Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!

The cutting wind is a cruel foe.

I dare not stand in the blast.

My hands are stone, and my voice a groan,

And the worst of death is past.

I am but a little maiden still,

My little white feet are sore.

Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!

Her voice was the voice that women have,

Who plead for their heart’s desire.

She came—she came—and the quivering flame

Sunk and died in the fire.

It never was lit again on my hearth

Since I hurried across the floor,

To lift her over the threshold, and let her in at the door.

The Last of Summer

It's very warm today but a cold front is moving toward us. It's due. The first of October has never been this warm since records were taken. I went outside to walk the lawn and look at the flowers, took this photo at the gate. The sun was in my eyes. I love the sun in my eyes. I know it's been very hot this summer, but I shall miss it. Winter is never kind to me.

Rilke on Beauty and Terror

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

On Tribalism and What Art Really Is and Does

On ART: I saw this live in early 1971. It was a huge and shattering experience. I think I lay in my bed for two days afterwards staring at the ceiling. When I got up, I cut my hair like Hanoi Jane, packed up my expensive clothes, studded a pair of used bellbottom jeans, borrowed my Daddy's insulated undershirt, and then went out and joined a bunch of Vietnam War protesters in Memphis. Shaking my head here. But it's true. I got expelled from school twice afterwards. One of my teachers cried when she saw me, every time she saw me from then onward. One teacher became my only support system for two years. But in this moment, I never felt so liberated in my life. And ever since, I've been living in conflict with my environment. The thing I know now, is that I was right all along, even when I thought I was wrong and doubted myself, even when others told me so, even when I went back to things I should not have. I was so literal, this almost destroyed me mentally. And I had no one to talk to about it until twenty something years later when I asked my Daddy for $800 so I could visit one of the smartest therapist in the city of Memphis and talk for forty minutes. Believe me, when I say, I went to this man with a notebook full of scribbles. I am writing this, because the hardest things that any one person will ever do in their life is leave behind the traditions and values of their environment and family and create their own, be it religion, politics, or just local culture. Joyce Carol Oates writes about this all the time. Most people, even brilliant and emotionally sound ones, will never do this. Do we all have to do this? Well, that's debatable. Some people feel that the culture of their environment and family is the best thing ever, that there is no need. I see this in my Facebook feed every single day I look at it. Traditions are valued and nurtured and spread from one generation to another. This is how we ground ourselves and establish identity. But it is tribalism. Too precious, it creates the biases that filter our perceptions and even alters reality. I'd say religion can do this. So can shared beliefs about race, politics, masculinity, the roles of women, sex and sexual identity, the relationship between humankind and nature. The inability to see past our own tribe and traditions is a core problem with our species. But going forward, the future will belong to those people who can. It may not come to them like my beginning, simply reading books all the time and then one day, watching a rock and roll band do something that still is seen as way ahead of its time. The early Grand Funk Railroad was part grunge, part punk, and something very unique. This song went on to be of great value to those soldiers who caught those last flights out of Saigon before the city fell. 

Art is what transcends our tribe. It's what makes a Bob Dylan from a pop star. Art is not something that has rules or that is dictated or organized by an editor or painting teacher, or even a math professor. It is the 'thing' you create out of your own bidding. And while it can make a nod to your influences and tribe, it is never dictated or manipulated by it or other people. Creating good art is the moment of personal responsibility and true autonomy. It will challenge the status quo, often disturb, and perhaps even change people and alter their lives. Art is all about intent and a kind of gutsy form of communication. It's often painful and risky. The people who create art like this have always been the ones to move civilization. It may be a song, or a poem, a painting, a math problem, a performance on a street corner, and yes, even a business of some sort. But it will be art. Art is not about the tools we use. It is about how we use them. Art does NOT look back or hold on to a tribe, it reacts against all that, it violates traditions and creates something new and original. It is just as likely to get negative reviews as it is positive ones. Sometimes it is totally misunderstood for generations. Art is the soul of humankind. That is why I lay on my bed for two days, disturbed, floating, my sense of identity shattered to pieces. And even at my age, I am still trying to gather the pieces up and glue them in a suitable form. Art is ongoing. It's never finished. I am thinking right now, that simply living day to day can be art, too, if attempted. Art is not a job, but it is work.

On Francesca Woodman

She had few boundaries and made art out of nothing: empty rooms with peeling wallpaper and just her figure. No elaborate stage set-up or lights … Her process struck me more the way a painter works, making do with what’s right in front of her, rather than photographers like myself who need time to plan out what they’re going to do.

                                                 Cindy Sherman

Fact

‘It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.’

                                    Sherlock Holmes

On art

“I take seriously Flaubert’s statement that we must love one another in our art as the mystics love one another in God. By honoring one another’s creation we honor something that deeply connects us all, and goes beyond us.” 

—Joyce Carol Oates

Old Fashion Traditional Witchcraft

As someone who has had a wide fascination with folklore and cunning people, I've long wanted to read some books on local conjuring. I once had the pleasure of knowing one of these witches. She was truly one of the most fascinating persons I had ever met. Long dead, she had offered to show me what she called "old fashioned witchcraft" and I'm sorry to say, although she taught me tarot, I passed on the conjuring. If I had been wise enough or brave enough I would have recorded her conversations and preserved her image and voice for future generations. But she made me terribly shy. I think I was half afraid of her and I was younger and less confident.  She was the perfect image of a what we all think is a witch, an older woman, dressed curiously, bent over, with a wicked laugh and sparkle. Her brown eyes are still vivid in my mind, large and always wet-looking, as though she was on the verge of tears and yet, there were no cause. When she looked at you, you felt pierced. I felt pierced. It was like she could see through me and I could hide nothing from her. I felt she knew all my secrets. That is how uncomfortable she made me. I suppose it was part of her power over people. She commanded strength and had a deep conviction about her lifestyle. I envy few anything. But I wanted to know the source of her strength. Of course, at the time, for reasons that are my own, I never spoke of her much. Perhaps it's because I knew others would frown on the associations and that what I treasured about her, most abhorred. In another life, I could have been her and very happy.

Crone work.

Now that I feel like a crone and look like a crone, I've decided to become one.

Why We Write

“We write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely...When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.” 
                                                        ― Anaïs Nin

“One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that - to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others.” 
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

Small Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris

Small Kindnesses
by Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

(found on Jonathan Carroll's Facebook feed)

Why I write.

  It occurred to me today, that writing has really been about self-preservation in a world that is absolutely maddening. It gives me pleasure to write. Happiness. Peace of mind. Joy. That's it. That's the sum of why I write. Nothing more. Nothing less.

THIS

“If you no longer live,
if you my beloved, my love, 
if you have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain in my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death
and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you
are sleeping, but
I shall live”
― Pablo Neruda

Try Sitting in A Room Alone

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

                           Blaise Pascal

Seeking truth

I've had to do grown up things this month. I've had to be an adult which is good, considering I am over sixty years of age. But the grownup things I have been doing are not the usual ones. I suppose, even as a child, I hated hypocrisy and lies, although a good yarn and fairy tale made me feel really damn good. But real lying. I could never like a lie on someone lips and I found it painful to see people live lies, too, and they did, all the time. It took years to understand why living a lie is so much easier than living a truth. But truth is what I crave. Maybe it's easy for some people, maybe truth is their neighborhood. I don't know. Where I come from people didn't look reality in the eye. It was too damn hard.

Truth

 I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe. 

Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Walking

“My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is.” 
― Ellen DeGeneres

I am the mosquito.

“If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.” 
― Anita Roddick

The Weight of My Regard

Francesca Woodman by David D Prince

“Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart, of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.”  
~ Poe, singer

Music

“Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.” 

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Quotes from the Erl-King

“Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning.” 

                                 from The Erl-King by Angela Carter 

50 Days Until All Hallow's Eve

And I am going to be reading....

The Moon (Luna) Alchemical symbol.

The Moon (Luna) Alchemical symbol.

(my personal symbol, representative in alchemy and tarot)

Lola Ridge quote

Better--while life is quick

And every pain immense and joy supreme,

And all I have and am

Flames upward to the dream ...

Than like a taper forgotten in the dawn,

Burning out the quick.

                             Lola Ridge, "Dedication"

                            The Ghetto and Other Poems

Reality, Truth, Living Experience

All imagined futures lacking recognition of anthropogenic climate-change will increasingly seem absurdly shortsighted. Virtually the entire genre will be seen to have utterly missed the single most important thing we were doing with technology. --William Gibson

Shirley Jackson Quotes

“On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.”

                                     

                                          –  Shirley Jackson

“The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.” 


                                       ― Julian Barnes

My favorite Angela Carter quote

“If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciliatory mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.” 

                                                                       ― Angela Carter

Love never dies. People do.

"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night." 

                             — Edna St. Vincent Millay

I feel this very deeply.

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” 


                                              ― Rob Siltanen

Summer Flowers

Rose Mallow, 2019

Choosing

“Left alone, no matter at what age or under what circumstance, you have to remake your life.” 
― Katharine Graham
(Choosing to live. Choosing to work. Choosing to be happy. I want my grandchildren to know I fought.)

Spaces

Human nature seems to abhor a blank space on a map. Where there are no human habitations, no towns, where villages dwindle into farms and farms into woods, mapping stops. Then the imagination rushes to fill the woods with something other than black darkness: nymphs, satyrs, elves, gnomes, pixies, fairies. 

Diane Purkiss, At The Bottom of The Garden

It is what it is

Why do I desire the space?
I was mourning after you
I was lost and lost my shape
There was nothing I could do

I don't want to waste away
It was all I gave to you
Take me back and take my place
I will rise right up for you




from Silence by Manchester Orchestra

Vignette

The term vignette can be defined as a short literary sketch. The word originates from the French word 'vigne', which means 'little vine', as in a short description of an object or scene. An ideal vignette is supposed to be short, to the point, and should bring out the emotions of the writer. It normally appears as a stand-alone piece of literature, or as a part of long stories or stage plays.

            from Penlighten

Poetry by Louise Erdrich

“Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic - decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.”

              

                                      Louise Erdrich, Original Fire

Stepping into the real life mix again....

“Wildflower; pick up your pretty little head, 
It will get easier, your dreams are not dead.” 
― Nikki Rowe

Truth and little lies everywhere....

Amongst the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?” 

― Angela Carter

On Widowhood

The most unsettling moment of that first year without John was when I went to Physical Therapy at Campbell's Clinic for two torn disks in my back and I had to fill out all these forms, and one had these little squares that you checked, it could be one or all. Like housewife, works outside the home, wife, married, divorced, and it kind of went on in a very modern way. There was none for widow. Laughing. And there were several for jobs. JOBS. 

I didn't mark any of them and I wrote really big on the paper. NOTHING. 

I am laughing now, but when the nurse came in she told me I could not put NOTHING on there. This was nearly half a year after John died. And I was still pretty bummed and depressed, and I told her, "You mark it, because I am not going to do it." It was a total act of rebellion that is so typical of me when I am stressed and find life absurd and just refuse to go along. You know that feeling. I said, "Right now, I am NOTHING and it stays."  

Much later into my therapy my PT guy told me he laughed and laughed and said he would never forget me because no one had ever refused to check a square. I know it sounds petty and maybe even childish, but rebellion and anger were all I possessed at that time.

And it was true. I was nothing. I could not clean house, I could not cook. I could not paint. I could not write. I could not read. I could not watch TV. I could barely sit in a chair for 15 minutes. That was my limit at one time. I did nothing. I hardly had a thought in my head until the following October. 

I look back on this as one of the darkest moments in my life. The fact that I survived is a little miracle. But I did. I never knew I was that strong, because I was not only grieving, I also had an ulcer, gastritis, and lower back problems.

And I was alone. Really alone.

Now, everything I do is just pure joy. The fact that I can do anything is a testament to my own willpower. Widowhood sucks. And as Joyce Carol Oates said, "It is our duty to survive."

Just survive.

My Motto for the last two years

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” 

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Keep Your Own Company

“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.” 
― John Steinbeck

A memory today

C-Section 1978

ME: Chattering away to myself

Doctor: What's she saying

Johnny: She's reciting Shelley

laughing.....

6 Years Ago Today with Colin Harrison

So, I am in Paw's recliner, my eyes closed, rocking, listening to Colin playing with Little People. Me, just a smiling. He is telling a story about Mommy, Daddy, PawPaw, MawMaw, and it's Christmas and it's snowing and everyone is happy and all these little details.-----Half an hour later I open my eyes and there is white doughnuts pulverized all over the room!!!!!!! It really did snow. Out comes the vacuum at 11:30 at night!

The Maze by Stars

KONSTANTIN FYODOROVICH BOGAEVSKY 

In the center of the maze
On a summer afternoon
I sat alone and waited
Until I saw the moon

And then the stars errupted
From the blackest sky I've seen
And I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream

I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream
I fell into it

In the center of the maze
You're a distant memory
And in every cul-de-sac
There burns an effigy

And then the stars collapsed
And they hit the distant hills
And the fires are burning still
The fires are burning still

They always will
They always will
They always will
They always will
They always will
They always will
They always will
They always will

I don't wanna find my way
I split the secret room in two
I don't wanna find my way out
I wanna watch the moon with you
I don't wanna find my way
I split the secret room in two
I don't wanna find my way out
I wanna watch the moon with you
I don't wanna find my way
I split the secret room in two
I don't wanna find my way out
I wanna watch the moon with you

Monday Morning Fun

I miss my Daddy.

This is my Daddy and me, in St. Francisville, Louisiana. I loved these trips. Years later I realized that one of the reasons I truly loved St. Francisville was because I always associated it with Daddy. It took me a lifetime to understand that. Smiling here. He was incredibly generous, but somewhat of a mystery to me. To some, he was a stranger. But not to me. I understood him better than anyone in our family. I love him, still. He was the World War II generation, a generation of men who went off to fight a brutal war as boys really. Most of them came back home with a sense of shock and gratitude. They knew hard work. They often drank too much. They did not know how to share their feelings openly.

My Daddy was like that. Smiling. He often said, "We'll see." That was the only way he knew how to say 'no' and even today I can remember him saying these words to me. But he loved me and showed me in little ways. He always bought me pumpkins for Halloween and gave me 'cookie money' at Christmas time so that I could bake all my goodies. He did this because he knew it was the two things I treasured. At times, he bought odd little things for me, such as yard art and even my favorite candy. He came by my house often and never stayed long, thirty minutes at the most and talked about nothing much.  After he died I learned he did this to his favorite sister, Polly. I felt lucky to understand what these little visits really meant, that these were big moments of love, the only way he knew how to express it.

But did he love. He adored my mother and his children.

The last years of his life were difficult and very frustrating for him. He told me how unhappy he was, but I didn't know what to do about it. He was grateful for the help he had, but we all  paid a heavy price for that final comfort. That decline and his death essentially destroyed the illusion of family for me. I cried for a long time, mourning him and a life that would never exist again. Everything died with him in early 2007, every illusion I knew. Every hope. It was the beginning of a decade of a real and deep unhappiness for me. I was shattered.  Reality set in.

But somehow, I don't know how, because I lost so much, when everything else faded away in my life, (including Johnny) I was left standing. My heart intact. Hope once again alive. I was not broken.

I started breathing again in 2018....  This year, I am even working again, on real things, real words, real thoughts.

Daddy, thank you for that time you gave me the words I needed to hear. "I love you."

I. AM.

Sir Frederic Leighton "Flaming June" 1895 |

REAL CHANGE, DAY ONE

Love Among the Ruins by Edward Burns-Jones

(I posted this on the day after you died. Our love was in ruins. The next day I gave instructions on your cremation and not long after that, someone brought you home in a box. Ashes. The first year I was as much a ruin as our love, as you. The second might have been harder emotionally. The third is just sad. But I have to go back to my way of work. I can't sit here and cry anymore. I am cold, too damn cold. If I choose to stay with you, I'll freeze to death, turn to ice, go blue.  Oh, how I miss your kisses. Your breath was just a whisper against the back of my neck, but it always stirred such a storm.)

“So for now,
I will miss you like I’ll never see you again,
And the next time I see you,
I will kiss you like I’ll never kiss you again,
And when I fall asleep beside you 
I will fall asleep as if I’ll never wake up again,
because I don’t know if I will.
I don’t know if I will.

- I Will Love You Like The World Is Ending” 
― Charlotte Eriksson

Learning to Say Goodbye

“We the mortals touch the metals,
the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,
knowing they will go on, inert or burning,
and I was discovering, naming all the these things:
it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.” 
― Pablo Neruda 

I. AM. WRITING.

Disappearing.....

“Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner…?” ― Francesca Woodman

Writing is like this....

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.”

― Flannery O'Connor

Cinderella by Edward Burns-Jones

I wonder if those are Rossetti's blue dishes?

Bluebeard by Edna St. Vincent Millay

THIS door you might not open, and you did;      

    So enter now, and see for what slight thing     

You are betrayed…. Here is no treasure hid,       

    No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring            

The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain   

    For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,

But only what you see…. Look yet again—            

    An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.

Yet this alone out of my life I kept

    Unto myself, lest any know me quite;   

And you did so profane me when you crept        

    Unto the threshold of this room to-night          

That I must never more behold your face.           

    This now is yours. I seek another place.           

Nothing last forever but....

 I love that word. Forever. I love that forever doesn’t exist, but we have a word for it anyway, and use it all the time. It’s beautiful and doomed. 

Viv Albertine

Facing reality quotes

"Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil as you make it.’ And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity."
                                                    - Michel de Montaigne

Ballerina rose, hybrid musk. My garden. Today.

Angela Carter Quotes

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.” 
― Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love

Burning here....

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.” 
― Federico García Lorca

Love and Life and Death

“Blot out the moon, 
Pull down the stars. 
Love in the dark, for we're for the dark
So soon, so soon.” 
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Van Gogh on Art

“Do you know that it is very, very necessary for honest people to remain in art? Hardly anyone knows that the secret of beautiful work lies to a great extent in truth and sincere sentiment.”

— Vincent Van Gogh