[2001]

Do the children of god smoke dope?

Picked up in a junk shop in town. Who made this? And more importantly - where is your dope taking you?

Garden design for the psychopath

The paved over front garden/driveway combo is the psychopath of garden design. It eats your soil, it eats your empathy, it eats your...

patch of grass, your mono hedge, it eats your Kenneth Roland-esque geometric brick design. Nice and tidy. Clinical. A bit too human to be honest.

Planetary Gardens / Echoey Grass / Whales in your garden pond

Could be some sort of garden plan...


Robert Ryman [?], drawing

"“For me, trying to think about a whale, that endlessness down in that infinity of depth, in darkness, moving around—with a mind inside it…

LISH: Doing things.

GILBERT: Yes, and silent. I can’t make any adjustment to it. Like Lawrence said: “I said to my heart, who are these? / And my heart couldn’t own them.” He was talking about fish. And he says someplace else in the poem: “There are limits / To you my heart; / And to the one God / Fish are beyond me.” Whales in this sense, the sudden sense of the alien nature of the universe not translatable into human terms. But what particularly interests me is the sense of magnitude. It’s out of scale, and not just physically. It threatens my life, the formulations on which I operate. I have to redo my mind. There’s a poem by Rilke where he goes along describing a statue. All of a sudden, for no reason, he breaks off and says: You must change your life. When I think about whales, it’s the same in a way. Or elephants or love.”

from  Jack Gilbert, interviewed by Gordon Lish, 1962 (from Issue One of Genesis West)