The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.
Robert M. PirsigRead
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that achieving perfection in art comes from self-improvement and authenticity.
Robert M. Pirsig emphasizes that the essence of creating perfect art lies not in technical skills alone but in personal growth and authenticity. By striving for personal perfection, an artist can express themselves genuinely, leading to naturally beautiful creations. This perspective places the focus on the artist's inner development as the foundation for their work.
In practice
In a speech about personal growth and creativity.
The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.
The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.
It's better not to see than to see wrongly.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest.
He spares no resource in telling of his dead inventions... Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphis sweat and struggle; the
Camus says in 'The Stranger' that reason is the enemy of imagination. Sometimes you have to put reason aside and make something beautiful.
The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil. And since it is radical evil that is manifest here, evil per se, forming the absolute negative pole of every value-system, kitsch will always be evil, not just kitsch in art, but kitsch in every value-system that is not an imitation system.
Music, I think, is best when it honestly explores personal demons, and it stirs around in the silt of the psyche to find out what's really there.
Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.
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