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Met an old man on the road,
he looked wise, I said Tell me what you know.
He said My day is done, I’m almost gone,
come closer, I’ll teach you to carry on.
He said
One, be lively;
two, be true;
three, find beauty whatever you do;
four, each day be still an hour;
five, rise up with quiet power;
six, give away your […]

Art, as an experience, is the transformation of matter into energy. Art as object — visual object, sonic object, whatever — is material at the far edge of materiality.

…and unfinished things are my monument for a while.
What I made was always provisional, that’s my justification for this light-weight architecture.
Now I become my world.
Fire and wind lap my ribs, a flood polishes the inside of my skull.
I lack foundation and pretense, and when I go
I will be gone completely.

The twentieth century began with the widening of public discourse. The twenty-first begins with the narrowing.

I’ve always loved the ping and hiss of radiators, which announce themselves so much more lustily with sound than with heat. Sound is their plumage, as it’s mine.
Each day I start to become a musician again.
In improvising you find no great Truth. But there is the possibility, if you dare, of saying something simply and […]

Night has always meant for me an escape from the civilized, a temporary return to that which is not a movie set, not a construction of the human economy and mind, not nature tentatively held captive but totally beyond capture. Night is the crackling of electricity, the pounding of waves, the emptiness of sky. If […]

The mind is a mansion of dark rooms, but there is a courtyard. We’ll find it again.

When I took walks it was always to the most remote solitary places I could get to — I was comforted by how immense architecture and nature seem when unencumbered by population.
But now, a few minutes into my aimless wandering, I find myself turning away from Casco Bay and toward the ordinary downtown streets, […]