the incumbent
New York, New York I won't go back Indelible reminder of the steel I lack I gave you seven years What did you give me back? A jaw-grind, disposition to a panic attack –Mike Doughty, of Soul Coughing
no prisoners
"We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have, through thousands of years of accommodation, become so much like this life that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, those abysses belong to us; if dangers are at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us to hold to the difficult, then that which now seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How can we forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths and dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us, once, beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is, in it's deepest being, something helpless which wants help from us." -Rainer Maria Rilke; Briefe an einen jungen Dichter
artists of the living
"Only a few achieve the colossal task of holding together, without being split asunder, the clarity of their vision alongside an ability to take their place in a materialistic world. They are the modern heroes... Artists at least have a form within which they can hold their own conflicting opposites together. But there are some who have no recognized artistic form to serve this purpose, they are artists of the living. To my mind these last are the supreme heroes in our soulless society." –Irene Claremont de Castillejo
