The Saunterer

Charles Burchfield on basing one’s votes on just principles

    Artist Charles Burchfield first voted in 1914, and he wrote in his journal what he voted for and why. He based his whys on just principles, not on popular particulars. Something to think about for voters today:

    My first vote today. I voted no on Prohibition because it is a blow at personal liberty.
    I voted yes on Woman Suffrage because I know so little about politics myself and I am in no position to say they should not have the vote.
    I voted straight Socialist ticket because their principles mean the freedom of humanity from graft and greed.

    (Quoted from page 1 of Heat Waves in a Swamp: The paintings of Charles Burchfield, edited by Cynthia Burlingham and Robert Gober. DelMonico Books, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Charles Burchfield, click here. For images of Charles Burchfield’s paintings, click here.
    For a brief biography of Cynthia Burlingham, click here. For an article featuring Robert Gober discussing Charles Burchfield’s art, click here.

Ansel Adams’ approach to photography

    Ansel Adams’ beliefs about the world of nature set his approach to photography:

My approach to photography is based on my belief in the vigor and values of the world of nature, in aspects of grandeur and minutiae all about us. I believe in people, in the simpler aspects of human life, in the relation of man to nature. I believe man must be free, both in spirit and society, that he must build strength into himself, affirming the enormous beauty of the world and acquiring the confidence to see and to express his vision. And I believe in photography as one means of expressing this affirmation and of achieving an ultimate happiness and faith.

    (Quoted from pages 338-39 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
    For a brief biography of Ansel Adams, click here. For images of or relating to Ansel Adams, click here.

Lillian Hellman on “if I had my life to live over”

    People of Lillian Hellman’s sort aren’t born every day. Such honesty about herself.

It is true that I miss Hammett, and that is as it should be. He was the most interesting man I ever met. I laugh at what he did say, amuse myself with what he might say, and even this many years later speak to him, often angry that he still interferes with me, still dictates the rules.
    But I am not yet old enough to like the past better than the present, although there are nights when I have a passing sadness for the unnecessary pains, the self-made foolishness that was, is, and will be. I do regret that I have spent too much of my life trying to find what I called “truth,” trying to find what I called “sense.” I never knew what I meant by truth, never made the sense I hoped for. All I mean is that I left too much of me unfinished because I wasted too much time. However.

    (Quoted from pages 279-280 of An Unfinished Woman -- a memoir, by Lillian Hellman. Little, Brown and Co., 1969.)
    For a brief biography of Lillian Hellman, click here. For images of or relating to Lillian Hellman, click here.
    For a brief biography of Dashiell Hammett, click here. For images of or relating to Dashiell Hammett, click here.

Lyndon Johnson on the cause of global warming

    Global warming has a double cause. First is the one who started it, and second the one who is too lax to stop it. The two are one in the same -- in Pogo-ese, “We have met the irresponsible and it is us.”
    In his special message to Congress in 1965, Lyndon Johnson pointed out who caused global warming:

This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through . . . a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

    That was a warning to Americans to stop it. But Americans are a group of fiddling Neros, which Adlai Stevenson once put this way:

The trouble with Americans is that they haven’t read the minutes of the previous meeting.

    (Johnson and Stevenson are quoted from page i of Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Bloombury Press, 2010)
    For a brief biography of Naomi Oreskes, click here. For a brief biography of Erik M. Conway, click here.
    For a brief biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, click here. For a brief biography of Adlai Stevenson, click here.

Edgar Allan Poe on landscape gardeners as poets

    If the ties between art and wild nature interest you, so may Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Domain of Arnheim.” Its main character, Mr. Ellison, with his enormous wealth and aesthetic sensibilities, chooses landscape gardening as his medium of poetic expression. We enter on this excerpt:

In the widest and noblest sense he was a poet. He comprehended, moreover, the true character, the august aims, the supreme majesty and dignity of the poetic sentiment. The fullest, if not the sole proper satisfaction of this sentiment he instinctively felt to lie in the creation of novel forms of beauty. Some peculiarities, either in his early education, or in the nature of his intellect, had tinged with what is termed materialism all his ethical speculations; and it was with this bias, perhaps, which led him to believe that the most advantageous at least, if not the sole legitimate field for the poetic exercise, lies in the creation of novel moods of purely physical loveliness. . . .
    No definition had spoken of the landscape-gardener as of the poet; yet it seemed to my friend [Mr. Ellison] that the creation of the landscape-garden offered to the proper Muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Here, indeed, was the fairest field for the display of imagination in the endless combining of forms of novel beauty; the elements to enter into combination being, by a vast superiority, the most glorious which the earth could afford. In the multiform and multicolor of the flowers and the trees, he recognised the most direct and energetic efforts of Nature at physical loveliness. And in the direction or concentration of this effort -- or, more properly, in its adaptation to the eyes which were to behold it on earth -- he perceived that he should be employing the best means -- laboring to the greatest advantage -- in the fulfillment, not only of his own destiny as poet, but of the august purposes for which the Deity had implanted the poetic sentiment in man.
 
    For a brief biography of Edgar Allan Poe, click here. For images of or relating to Edgar Allan Poe, click here.
    For the complete text of Poe’s “The Domain of Arnheim,” click here.

Pablo Picasso on painting

    What Pablo Picasso tells about painting here is true of all arts:

When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise, you become your own connoisseur. I sell myself nothing.

    (Quoted from page 265 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
    For a brief biography of Pablo Picasso, click here. For images of or relating to Pablo Picasso, click here.

Gilbert Murray on the need for everyday art and beauty

    Gilbert Murray tells how it was in the Greek world:

To take a contrast with Rome: if you dig about the Roman Wall in Cumberland you will find quantities of objects, altars, inscriptions, figurines, weapons, boots and shoes, which are full of historic interest but are not much more beautiful than the contents of a modern rubbish heap. And the same is true of most excavations all over the world. But if you dig at any classical or sub-classical site in the Greek world, however unimportant historically, practically every object you find will be beautiful; the inscriptions will be beautifully cut; the figurines, however cheap and simple, may have some intentional grotesques among them, but the rest will have a special truthfulness and grace; and vases will be of good shapes and the patterns will be beautiful patterns.

    (Quoted from “The Value of Greece to the Future of the World,” by Gilbert Murray -- page 8 in The Legacy of Greece, edited by R. W. Livingstone. Oxford University Press, 1921 and 1969.)
    For a brief autobiography of Gilbert Murray, click here. For a brief biography of Richard Livingstone, click here.

Virginia Woolf on gratitude

    Just before her suicide, in her last letter to her husband Leonard, Virginia Woolf defined gratitude in the best way, by saying her gratitude:

What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that –- everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I cant go on spoiling your life any longer. I dont think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.

    (Quoted from page 226 of Virginia Woolf: a biography, by Quentin Bell. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 1972.)
    For a brief biography of Virginia Woolf, click here. For images of or relating to Virginia Woolf, click here.
    For a brief biography of Leonard Woolf, click here. For images of or relating to Leonard Woolf, click here.
    For a brief biography of Quentin Bell, click here. For images of or relating to Quentin Bell, click here.

Willie Nelson on kindness to animals

    Willie Nelson, a man who says a dog was his first pal, said this:

I hope that more of our elected officials will join in and help pass federal legislation to ban horse slaughter. Until then, tens of thousands of American horses will continue to be transported across U.S. borders to their deaths. This transport itself is as cruel and tragic as what they face in the slaughterhouse. There are more wild horses in captivity than in the wild. Americans must hold the Bureau of Land management accountable to do the right thing. These are wild animals on public land and, as Americans, we have a say in what happens to them.
    Animals, humans and all forms of life – we are all the same.

    (Quoted from Amy Nelson’s interview with her father Willie, Best Friends Magazine, July/August 2011.)
    For a brief biography of Willie Nelson, click here. For images of or relating to Willie Nelson, click here. For a video of Willie Nelson and The Nelson Family singing “Wild Horses,” click here.

Paul Muldoon on poetry as a way of knowing

    Here is where Paul Muldoon stands on poetry:

The word “poetry,” as you know, means “making,” so these are constructs in the world. . . . One is trying to construct something that will help us to make sense of things, and a construct, or building even, let’s say, a space, a clearing, a momentary stay against confusion (from Robert Frost’s phrase), which, when we enter, we have some clarification, however slight, and when we leave it, something, however slight, has been clarified. We have been helped in some way to make sense of the world.
    So that is what poetry means to me. I need to be provoked by it. I can’t quite accept what seems to be a fairly conventional notion of poetry as that which bolsters us up in what we already know. I am less interested in that than in poetry that puts us in a difficult position and makes us think again about how things are, and that is almost an article of faith.
    Another article of faith (which I touched on briefly) has to do with unknowing, and that, I think, connects it to many experiences that could be described as “spiritual” experiences, and I know you are all familiar with those, where one has a sense of giving oneself over to something beyond oneself, something one doesn’t quite understand; and only when one does that, and only in a spirit of humility, is there half a chance that one will come out the other side knowing anything at all in some minor way.

    (Excerpted from "The Triumph of Paul Muldoon," by Nick Laird. The New York Review of Books, June 23, 2011.)

    For a short video of Paul Muldoon explaining the role of poetry to Stephen Colbert, and the two reading a poem together, click here.
    For a brief biography of Paul Muldoon, click here. For images of or relating to Paul Muldoon, click here.  For a brief biography of Nick Laird, click here.