My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.
As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.
Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work.
We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.
Practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
