Neil Young

Terri Gross interviewing Neil Young on NPR's Fresh Air February 9, 2006:

"Right now, do you feel , that there's something very cathartic about the performance film ("Heart of Gold"), do you feel like you've come through the other end of something---
after having lived through the whole aneurysm thing, written the songs you wanted to write, recorded the CD,
done the performance film, they're both very emotional experiences, do you feel like you're out of the end of something....

Neil Young:
"I feel like I'm at the beginning of something else now.

Terri Gross:
"Of what, do you know?"

Neil Young:
No.But I know I am at the beginning of something. Nothing really ever ends with music it just keeps going on.
It's like a an eternal exhaust out of some inter-planetary spaceship. It just keeps happening. It's just out there.
All you put out just keeps happening.
People could be listening to this music in 200, 300 years from now as far as I know.
So what we do now lasts forever and what we're going to do next is what matters."

The Heart of All Creativity

TO DISCOVER THE DIVINE BLUEPRINT IN YOUR SOUL

Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact
instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that
pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose
unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to
shine through life's foolscap.

Vladimir Nabokov


THE HEART OF ALL CREATIVITY IS THE AWAKENING AND flowering of individuality. The mystery and magic of being an individual is to live life in response to the deep call within, the call to become who we were dreamed to be. In primal terms, it is the call to discover and realize the divine blueprint in the soul.  This is where true freedom awaits us. Freedom is not simply the absence of necessity; it is the poise of soul at one with a life which honours and engages its creative possibility.  There is no other presence in creation that has such potential for freedom as the human self.

The awakening of individuality is a continual unfolding of our presence.
Individuality is not a thing or a position, nor the act of fixed or stolid identity. Individuality is the creative voyage of aloneness in which the gifts and limitations of real presence emerge.
The nature of the beginning inevitably holds the rhythm of the future. The secret of individuality is powerfully suggested by the act of birth. We come to the earth in an intensely vulnerable way, for birth is an act of separation. We are cast out into the emptiness as the cord is cut, yet the wound of connection remains open for the visitation of beauty.

--John O'Donohue
in Beauty the Invisible Embrace

Albert Einstein on Beauty

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the Mysterious --
the knowledge of the existence of something unfathomable to us,
the manifestation of the most profound reason coupled with the most brilliant beauty.

                            Translation by David Domine.
                                                 Essay courtesy of the Albert Einstein Archives
                                        at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Beauty

The Ancient Greeks called the world, κόσμος, beauty.
Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal,
give us a delight in and for themselves;
a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping.
This seems partly owing the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists.
By the mutual action of its structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mss of objects, of what character soever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose, is round and symmetrical. And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters.

                         "Nature and other Writings"
                         by Ralph Waldo Emerson
                         Shambhala, Boston & London, 1994
From James Hillman on the need for recognition of beauty
" That longing in the human heart for beauty must be recognized by the field (psychology) that claims the human heart to be its province.
Psychology must find it's way back to beauty, if only to keep itself alive.
Amazingly, even studies of creative personalities in the arts seem to regard the desire for beauty ---if they mention it all---as only a variable factor.
How can the modes of biographical writing that leave out the propelling force of beauty(doesn't the acorn want to be the beautiful oak?) ever meet the hunger of the readers who search biographies for clues to the living.
Only if the story itself transmits this sense of beauty can it satisfy the life it is written about.
Like cures like: A theory of life must have a base in beauty if it would explain the beauty that life seeks.
The Romantics grasped this essential truth.
Their exaggerated overreach toward cloudy glories meant to bring into this world forms of the invisible they knew were necessary for imagining what a life is.

A last member of these Romantics, the Connecticut poet
Wallace Stevens, makes clear these cloudy thoughts:

. . . The clouds preceded us

There was a muddy center before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.


The tale we take from Plato about the soul choosing its particular destiny and being guarded by a daimon ever since birth is such a myth --- venerable, articulate, complete; and it is there before you began the other myth you call your biography."

Excerpt from "The Soul's Code-In Search of Character and Calling"

James Hillman
Random House, 1996

These lines below of T.S.Eliot seem to be a wonderful description of the ever deepening creative process.

"Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at."

Excerpt from
T.S. ELIOT'S
BURNT NORTON
I believe that in the creative process there is a delicate balance between 'reason' and 'madness' which to my mind is essential. Recently I read the following which I feel states it quite well.

From an interview with Sue Monk Kidd about the making of her novel, "The Secret Life of Bees":
"It took me a little over three years to complete the novel. The process of writing it was a constant balancing act between what writing teacher Leon Surmelian referred to as "measure and madness." He suggested that writing fiction should be a blend of these two things. That struck me as exactly true. On one hand, I relied on some very meticulous "measures", such as character studies, scene diagrams, layouts of the pink house and the honey house.I had a big notebook where I worked out the underlying structure of the book. I relied more heavily, however, on trying to conjure "madness", which I think of as an inexplicable and infectious magic that somehow flows into the work."
In the same spirit, here are two of extracts from Wallace Stevens' The Man With the Blue Guitar":

XIX
"That I may reduce the monster to
Myself, and then may be myself

In face of the monster, be more than part
Of it, more than the monstrous player of

One of its monstrous lutes, not be
Alone, but reduce the monster and be,

Two things, the two together as one,
And play of the monster and of myself,

Or better not of myself at all,
But of that as its intelligence,

Being the lion in the lute
Before the lion locked in stone"
XXXII
"Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you."
Here is another example of  how Art transforms our 'seeing'
from the foreward by Heinrich Wiegand Petzet
in
Rilke's Letters on Cezanne
by
Rainer Maria Rilke

"The poets have learned how to see." This statement by the poetologist Richard Exner is borne out by Hofmannsthal's letters on color as well as by Rilke's Letters on Cézanne. However, when Rilke makes the astonished remark that "suddenly one has eyes" (Oct 10) this does not exclusively refer to works of art. The change he feels, the newness and difference in his manner of seeing, does not only apply to the perception of paintings (let alone an external optical event). The peculiar transformation of the sense of sight is at the same time a transformation of the person standing in front of the pictures and writing about them. Or is a change in the man that brings about this new way of seeing? The altered horizon of insight involves, in this seemingly minor context, a reclamation of language, an extension of its boundaries which is never lost again."
Joseph's introduction to the November 2003 exhibition catalogue:

My longtime friend Reuben Weinzveg sent this to me the other day. I feel it expresses exactly where I am at this time. - JR

Moving Forward

"The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings,
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
into the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes."

- Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Robert Bly

Catalogue written by John Fitz Gibbon, published by
Nancy Hoffman Gallery. Now Available !