March exercise—day twenty-seven— It’s been a supportive day for my aspirations as a wood engraver. I sold two prints to Dave the collector, and then Gray phoned to let me know that he’s finished the limited edition press run of Manning poems with my block illustration, Boss’s Bucket. I felt a surge of profound satisfaction. Earlier today I asked myself why I tend to study writers for insight into the heart of creative motivation, and the answer came to mind quickly enough to make me feel a bit silly—writers are obviously better than visual artists at verbalizing. Faulkner told an interviewer that “really the writer doesn’t want success, that he knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall—Kilroy was here—that somebody a hundred, a thousand years later will see.” Nabokov wrote that a work of art existed for him “only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”
Today’s sight bite— A worker high up on the new dome of the expanded library —c-l-i-c-k— nailing a layer of roofing with the evident skill of a specialist.
Tomorrow— A working weekend…