are you dreaming, Frederick?

"No artist has ethical sympathies."
--Oscar Wilde


"As in all of the best books, there was the important page with the list of illustrations, a line of text for each of them. She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awakening from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams."
--Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient


"We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

"All art is quite useless."
--Oscar Wilde


"Making Movies"
"Take me, subtract movies, and you are left with nothing."
--Kurosawa Akira

We linger on them,
these our fine masterpieces,
caressing our creations
erecting and tearing down and building afresh our characters,
perfectionism to a point. But parts of us
do not want
to let these other parts of us
depart, terrified
of our skeletons, the basic
blood beneath.

What a man creates before his own eyes
and before the eyes of an audience
the red sky stains of a sunset
he does not eagerly approach again
the world which is real
the world in which his hand does not control
the seasons, and the men, and the passage of time.

For the king I have composed,
I have built the solid stone of a monolith castle.
For the battle I have prepared,
I have supplied the rain, and the gray clouds, and the mud.
For the deaths I have executed,
I have set the blood to look just so, I have painted
the white fragile faces,
and the reaching of the hand,
and the way the sunlight at last filters
through the latticework of the shivering trees.

When a man has sought out the truth,
and discovered that the truth is what he makes it,
and he may burn all the castles he has built
along the skyline that rolls onward,
vast but captured
in the very center of his eye,
he will not relinquish this power: the world on a grand scale
made to fit his own minutia.

In the terror, which is never to produce again,
never to bring to full term that which swells,
and roils, and coils, and aches, and breaks
within our wombs--man or woman may
bear these children--
we do not wish to end that in which we
are so wrapped up, as if
it is the burial shroud we sew
for ourselves, but cannot suffer to think of using.

When this, the beginning, may so easily be the end,
or this, the end, may so easily be the beginning,
it is knowing that you are at least in the middle
that carries with it contentment and safety,
a spot to sit, and drink your tea,
and carry the great, great weight
of playing God
on two proud shoulders, knowing that this,
this hubris, will defeat you in the end,
and will not be strong enough to carry you
through the world where you do not direct,
and you do not star,
and you barely know the lines.
--Jaida Jones