For the Love of Life, Wisdom, and Language

Robert was ever in my consciousness; the blue star in the constellation of my personal cosmology.

When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.

His mission was not to reveal, but to document an aspect of sexuality, as it had never been done before.

...often contradiction is the clearest way to truth.

I wasn't gonna drag him around like some male trophy.

Robert was always my first listener and I developed a lot of confidence simply by reading to him.

My armor still had its vulnerable points, and Robert, my knight, had pierced a few.

Perhaps it was the closeness before the end, like a gentleman buying his mistress jewels before telling her it's over.

We had a beautiful day that blossomed into an usually passionate night. I happily wrote of this night in my diary, adding a small heart like a teenage girl.

'Oh, take their picture,' said the woman to her bemused husband, 'I think they're artists.' 'Oh, go on,' he shrugged. 'They're just kids.'

Patti Smith ("Just Kids," 2010)

...vagabonds will sometimes find one another.

But nature with all her force would have the final word.

...I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve years-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not. I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.

The merry-go-round was slowing down. As I packed even the most insignificant of things accumulated in the past few years, they were accompanied by a slide show of faces, some of which I would never see again.

...there is no pure evil, no pure good, only purity.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre? I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself. Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination.