It’s been a good almost three years–making visual art, but the poetry vein has been clogged–almost a year now. I came close to trashing most of what I’d written for the past year or two.
Something came loose reading Rimbaud on the front porch this morning. Open my fat, 2013 to _______ notebook. Read what I’d last been working on. Don’t know why I felt so down about them. I’ve had circulating, but more than that: a kind of self-contempt that chokes me at times. Not unlike what stopped me from painting 40 years ago. I’ve been discouraged by the difficulty of find a publisher for the three MSS Then I’ll look at what I had done, and see it as though made by another hand or eye, and think… this is good! May need some work, but I see the connections, what can be trimmed. Maybe it’s going to start flowing again.
He dreamed… or drempt… that he was
had been
painting
A very large–very long painting.
Dream-voice said: good that you used your whole vocabulary of brush strokes.
Like traditional Chinese paintings–different classes of strokes for
mountain
bamboo leaves
tigers
Thought-Voice said
dream-voices and thought-voices are not the same
A dream voice is external to the dreaming subject, sometimes em-bodied, sometimes not. A thought voice is internal, but as though heard, like an external voice… thought-voice said: don’t think about the banquet (though he wasn’t painting a banquet… though it was a very long painting) … said: don’t think about the
banquet — paint without thinking
paint without touching
the painting
