A moving prism

» All of us are infected today with an extraordinary egoism. And that is not freedom; freedom means learning to demand only of oneself, not of life and others, and knowing how to give: sacrifice in the name of love. I don’t want the reader to misunderstand me: what I am talking about is freedom in an ultimate, moral sense. — Sculpting in Time , Tarkovsky; p 180

Image: It is rude to stare , Antoine Monmarché Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each oth er and without realising that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny the existence of each other. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal. — Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, 1960

» We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence. […] Our relationship to the social is, like our relationship to the world, deeper than any express perception or any judgement. It is as false to place ourselves in society as an object among other objects, as it is to place society within ourselves as an object of thought, in both cases the mistake lies in treating the social as an object. — Other Selves and the Human World, Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception ; p 421

  Image: Marc Chagall, La vita (1964) » As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires […] And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.” ― The Neutral : Lecture Course at the College de France, Roland Barthes; p 13 

Old Man with his Head in his Hands (At Eternity's Gate), Vincent van Gogh » Zola says, ‘Moi artiste, je veux vivre tout haut – veux vivre’ [I, as an artist, want to live as vigorously as possible -- (I) want to live], without mental reservation – naive as a child, no, not as a child, as an artist – with good will, however life presents itself, I shall find something in it, I will try my best on it. Now look at all those studied little mannerisms, all that convention, ho w exceedingly conceited it really is, how absurd, a man thinking he knows everything and that things go according to his idea, as if there were not in all things of life a ‘je ne sais quoi’ of great goodness, and also an element of evil, which we feel to be infinitely above us, infinitely greater, infinitely mightier than we are. How fundamentally wrong is the man who doesn’t feel himself small, who doesn’t realize he is but an atom. Is it a loss to drop some notions, impressed on us in childhood, that maintain...

Painting:  Beksinski » Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity  […] Therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it. — : that it is his epitome; the knot in the rosary at which his life recites a prayer, the ever-returning proof to himself of his unity and genuineness, which presents itself only to him while appearing anonymous to the outside, nameless, existing merely as necessity, as reality, as being — . — From a letter on Cezanne by Rainer Maria Rilke to his wife (a painter), June 24, 1907 

Duane Michals, Untitled 1968 » Finally, I am getting older, any change becomes more and more difficult. But in all this I foresee a great misfortune for myself, one without end and without hope; I should be dragging through the years up the ladder of my job, growing ever sadder and more alone as long as I could endure it at all. But you wanted that sort of life for yourself, didn’t you? — Franz Kafka, from Diaries 1914-1923. Translated by: Martin Greenberg