"From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy-five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At one hundred, I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign myself The Old Man Mad About Drawing."
*
This is the poem I read in 1967 or 1968:
doubt a little more than it spent
Of heat and energy until the increasing tension came to the
trigger-point
Of a new chemistry; then what was already flaming found a new
manner of flaming ten-thousandfold
More brightly for a brief time; what was a pin-point fleck on a
sensitive plate at the great telescope's
Eye-piece now shouts down the steep night to the naked eye,
a nine-day super-star.
It is likely our moderate
Father the sun will some time put off his nature for a similar
glory. The earth would share it; these tall
Green trees would become a moment's torches and vanish, the
oceans would explode into invisible steam,
The ships and the great whales fall through them like flaming
meteors into the emptied abysm, the six mile
Hollows of the Pacific sea-bed might smoke for a moment. Then
the earth would be like the pale proud moon,
Nothing but vitrified sand and rock would be left on earth. This
is a probable death-passion
For the sun's planets; we have no knowledge to assure us it may
not happen at any moment of time.
Meanwhile the sun shines wisely and warm, trees flutter green
in the wind, girls take their clothes off
To bathe in the cold ocean or to hunt love; they stand laughing
in the white foam, they have beautiful
Shoulders and thighs, they are beautiful animals, all life is beautiful.
We cannot be sure of life for one moment;
We can, by force and self-discipline, by many refusals and a few
assertions, in the teeth of fortune assure ourselves
Freedom and integrity in life or integrity in death. And we know
that the enormous invulnerable beauty of things
Is the face of God, to live gladly in its presence, and die without
grief or fear knowing it survives us.
No one can paint this desire.
No one can paint this forgiveness.
Her hand drawing his.
His hand drawing hers.
They carry silence between them
as if it were a newborn child.
In my dream we were an old man and an old woman walking by the ocean.
Who painted this desire?
Who painted this forgiveness?
