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| Susan Sontag Photo Credit: Annie Liebovitz |
“All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.”
“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.”
"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art." (Against Interpretation, 1966)
"To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’" (Against Interpretation, 1966)
"Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable." (Against Interpretation, 1966)
"In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art." (Against Interpretation, 1966)
"If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature—the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society—it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what’s there." (Styles of Radical Will, 1968)
"The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game." (Styles of Radical Will, 1968)
"Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another". (Styles of Radical Will, 1968)
"To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom ... Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom." (Styles of Radical Will, 1968)
“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
"I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up."
If you resonate with the content of this site, and would like to support my work, all four volumes of my Primal Reality quadrilogy (listed here in reverse chronological order) are available from Amazon.com in both soft cover and Kindle editions:
- Planetary Emergency/Personal Emergence: Path of An Evolutionary (2014)
- User's Guide to Human Incarnation: Yoga of Primal Reality (2013)
- Humanifesto: A Guide to Primal Reality In An Age of Global Peril (2012)
- Between Shadow and Night: The Singularity In Anticipation of Itself (2010)
https://soundcloud.com/wordsofpower/
See Also
Richard Power's Primal Reality Quadrilogy Available Now from Amazon.com
Great Song: Life and Teachings of Joe Miller - Available Now Via Kindle (Amazon) and Nook (Barnes and Noble)
