FAILURE, MY BEGINNING

                  The music that we sense can never sound,
                 The images we'd shape can never be;
                 Knowing beforehand this futility,
                 We yet persist in littering the world with poems -
                 So many crumbling castles scattering dust
                That dances in the sun and, settling, forms
                Haphazard patterns, lovely, unforeseen,
               So that, abandoning what we intend
               Makes failure a beginning, not an end.



Perhaps, in the end,  we don't get the Blue Flower; it gets us.  Perhaps, if the self can't grasp the Ideal, we need to grow beyond selfhood, surrendering old scruples, embracing technology, and evolve toward infinity.  This meta-human hope, vague but powerful, I would reflect in the radical disfigurement of things I've made (such that what remains is both unrecognizable and wholly contingent) - a disfigurement that obliterates the formal outlines  through which traditional art is known - endless color, music unabating.  So that...

                                      In ceasing to be merely me I'm free
                                      As art transcends its old futility.

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