Will Christian
Will Christian
art children fun
In every man there is a hidden child which is called the urge to create and he prefers as play things and serious things not the miniature ships, recreated in the minutest detail, but the walnutshell with a bird feather as mast and sail and a pebble as the captain. He also wants to be able to participate and to co-create in art, rather than being simply an admiring viewer. For this "child in man" is the immortal creator within him.
religious sea giving
Aviation will give new nourishment to the religious sprit of mankind. It will add airspace to those other great heighteners of the cosmic mood: the wood, the sea, the desert.
art children want
The hidden child wants to be able to participate and to co-create in art, rather than being simply an admiring viewer.
travel home where-you-live
Home is not where you live but where they understand you.
perception different demand
It's just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities.
thinking smell tests
I think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure of what the words are in the original.
country thinking missing
I can't think offhand of any American poets who have Mandelstam's urgency, but it's a different country and a different time, and I don't think it would make much sense to say that this is something that's "missing" from contemporary American poetry.
two poet anna
Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva - though their work is more "urgent" than most American poetry, seem to me to operate at a lesser charge than Mandelstam.
spiritual pain loss
Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.
wonder
Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom.
genius artistic produce
Mandelstam was an artistic genius, the sort that any century produces only a handful of.
suffering god-is-with-us
God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.
writing way feels
One of the ways in which I feel close to God is writing poetry.
pain believe fall
I can see now how deeply God's absence affected my unconscious life, how under me always there was this long fall that pride and fear and self-love at once protected me from and subjected me to.... For if grace woke me to God's presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe.