Ideal Talk

     So it always is as we approach the source of our desires. As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks; I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour. And as we blend sight, the sovereign sense and concept's chief content, blurs. 'The lover,' Rilke wrote, 'is in such splendid danger just because he must depend upon the co-ordination of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky centre, in which, renouncing all extention, they come together and have no permanence.'
— William Gass, On Being Blue - A Philosophical Inquiry, pp. 18-19.

     "And if your knowledge has further increased, that too is a thing I mean to discover. And as the man who finds in his path beehives in a tree has a right to the honey, so I shall gather the fruit of your wisdom; and I shall avail myself of your counsel. Evenings of great drought on the earth, we shall discourse of the things of the spirit. Probative things and uncertain. And we shall delight in the lusts of the spirit ... But from one race to another the road is long; and I too have business elsewhere. Make haste! I await you!
— St.-John Perse, from "The Glory of Kings," 3, Louise Varèse (tr.),
in St.-John Perse: Collected Poems, Auden/Varèse/etc. (trs.), p. 85.

     Ah! very great tree of language, peopled with oracles and maxims, and murmuring the murmur of one born blind among the quincunxes of knowledge....
— St.-John Perse, from "Winds," I,1. Hugh Chisholm (tr.), in Ibid., p. 229.

 ... think not it is with God as with a human carpenter, who works or works not as he chooses, who can do or leave undone at his good pleasure. It is not thus with God; but finding thee, ready, he is obliged to act, to overflow into thee; just as the sun must needs burst forth when the air is bright, and is unable to contain itself .... If the painter had to plan out every brush mark before he made his first he would not paint at all.
— Meister Eckhart, quoted by Amanda Coomaraswamy in Transformation of Nature in Art, in The World of Zen, Nancy Wilson Ross (ed.), p. 284.

     The artist must atune himself to that which wants to reveal itself and permit the process to happen through him.
— Martin Heidegger, in The World of Zen, Nancy Wilson Ross (ed.), p. 284.

     In reality, the individual never creates anything; if man creates it is as universal man, anonymous, and as manifestations of the Principle. In ages of truer wisdom artists, scholars and thinkers did not dream of attaching their names to the works which took form through them.
— Hubert Benoit, The Supreme Wisdom, in The World of Zen, Nancy Wilson Ross (ed.), p. 284.

Existence is beyond the power of words
To define:
Terms may be used
But are none of them absolute.
In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words,
Words came out of the womb of matter;
And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately
Sees the surface,
The core and the surface
Are essentially the same,
Words making them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
From wonder into wonder
Existence opens.
— Witter Bynner, first poem in The Way of Life, his poetic version of the Tao Te Ching of Lao-tzu, in The World of Zen, Nancy Wilson Ross (ed.), p. 318.