art & life

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.

And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.  The world will not have it.  It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions.  It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

You do not even have to believe in yourself, or your work.  You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you!

Keep the channel open... No artist is pleased...

There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.  There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others."

Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille

Given to me by my ballet teacher Helga deKansky 

Literary references to the Moon

"The peace without seemed all one with the peace in his own soul. The snow had stopped, the gauzy clouds that had ribbed the arch over the Sangre de Cristo mountains. The full moon shone high in the blue vault, majestic, lonely, benign."

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

"As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cartwheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world."

My Antonia by Willa Cather

"They did not noon nor did they siesta and the cotton eye of the moon squatted at broad day in the throat of the mountains to the east and they were still riding when it overtook them at its midnight meridian, sketching on the plain below a blue cameo of such dread pilgrims clanking north."

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy