Poetic Search

....Everything is unexpected in Cocteau, but everything is a coherent part of his character and the result of his particular genius. He has never claimed to be  more than he is. This is one of his most sympathetic traits. He has constantly pointed out his own limitations. Man, especially the poet, is infirm, a prisoner of his own dimensions. The poet, in contrast with the ordinary man, writes on the fourth wall of his prison. This act gives him the illusion of escape.
— Wallace Fowlie (tr. & ed.), from the Introduction, The Journals of Jean Cocteau, p. 4.

     After the scandal of Parade in the Chatêlet, in 1917, two remarks flattered me. First, a theater director crying, "We're too old for Punch and Judy"; and then, a gentleman whom Picasso and I heard say to his wife, "If I had known it was so crazy, I would have brought the children."
— Jean Cocteau, in The Journals of Jean Cocteau, Wallace Fowlie (tr. & ed.), p. 90.

     In Blood of the Poet, the blood flowing through that film upset my judges. They wondered why they should be disgusted and shocked so deliberately. The blood which sickened them forced them to turn aside and prevented their enjoying the "windfalls" (by this word, they meant: the entrance through the mirror, the moving statue, the beating heart), but I should like to ask what bond exists between these various startling episodes, save the blood which flows and which gives the film its title. What can those who want only to enjoy the ports of call, know of the river? And what would the "windfalls," as they call them, be worth, if they were not the consequence of a plan, even subconscious, and tributary moreover, by means of this bond of blood? They sleep and believe that I sleep and that my waking up awakens them. In a meal their heaviness condemns them to distinguish only peppers. They are sensitive only to witticisms. That is what inflames them, makes them restless, and forces them to run from place to place.
— Jean Cocteau, in Ibid., pp. 128-129.

     I hate nullity, the half-way.
     In the arms of the beloved who says to me, "Ah, my handsome Rolla, you are killing me!" I do not want to be obliged to say, "No, I'm not in form this evening."
     I must have everything, I cannot conquer everything but I will to do so.
     Let me get my breath and cry once more:
     "Spend yourself, spend yourself again! Run till you are out of breath and die madly! Prudence ... how you bore me with your endless yawning!"
     Philosophy is dull if it does not touch my instinct. Sweet to dream of, with the vision that adorns it, it is not science ... or at most science in the germ. Multiple, like everything in nature, ceaselessly evolving, it is not a deduction from things, as certain solemn personages would have us believe, but rather a weapon, which we alone, even as savages, fabricate ourselves. It dares not manifest itself as a reality but as an image, even as a picture is, — admirable if the picture is a masterpiece.
     Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?
     The Colossus remounts to the pole, the world's pivot; his great mantle shelters and warms the two germs, Seraphitus, Seraphita, fertile souls, ceaselessly uniting who issue from their boreal mists to traverse the whole universe, teaching, loving, creating.
     You wish to teach me what is within myself? Learn first what is within you. You have solved the problem, I could not solve it for you. It is the task of all of us to solve it.
     Toil endlessly. Otherwise, what would life be worth?
     We are what we have been from the beginning; and we are what we shall be always ships tossed about by every wind.
     Shrewd, far-sighted sailors avoid dangers to which others succumb, partly, however, thanks to an indefinable something that permits one to live under the same circumstances in which another, acting in the same manner, would die.
     The few use their wills, the rest resign themselves without a struggle.
— Paul Gauguin, in Paul Gauguin's Intimate Journals, Van Wyck Brooks (tr.), pp. 239-240.