Fire & Ice

"Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know."

― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

"the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him"

“I have a tiny little secret hope that, after a decent period of silence and prose, I will find myself in some almost impossible life situation and will respond to this with outcries of rage, rage and love, such as the world has never heard before. Like Yeats's great outburst at the end of his life. This comes out of a feeling that endowment is a very small part of achievement. I would rate it about fifteen or twenty percent, Then you have historical luck, personal luck, health, things like that, then you have hard work, sweat. And you have ambition. The incredible difference between the achievement of A and the achievement of B is that B wanted it, so he made all kinds of sacrifices. A could have had it, but he didn’t give a damn.[...]

But what I was going on to say is that I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business. Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing. And I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will probably largely depend not on my sitting calmly on my ass as I think, 'Hmm, hmm, a long poem again? Hmm,' but on being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia. At that point, I'm out, but short of that, I don't know. I hope to be nearly crucified,”
― John Berryman

Heating and Cooling--A Work in Progress

"Sure, come over so we can emotionally destroy one another. It's for my art." I'd said this as a joke. But I'm no longer laughing.

  

"Maybe I no longer find you smart, charming, or funny." I never said that. Not out loud. Never out loud.

"A tulip in the desert won't last long." You knew this to be true, you who claim to love nothing but your children and "hedonistic adventures." At least you love something. A man who loves something can never be truly evil.

I believe you loved me, but at the same time, somehow, deep down in my darkest heart, I also knew you played with my feelings. As if other people's feelings somehow weren't altogether real to you. As if you never trusted me to love you if I knew the truth. The truth of your fragility and terror. Life has been so cruel to you. I know. I smile and say nothing. We risk being subjected to worse cruelties.

But you have many cruelties.

I still can't escape the feeling that we've done this, all of this, before. There were portents; signs to be read and interpreted. We are familiar and yet do not know each other. Why did I even write this for you? In part, because you're so breathtakingly perfect that it makes my soul ache. I still have this fantasy of you. The perfect you. The dream I had of you and I in perfect union.