I've always envied people who compose music or paint, because they don't have to be bothered with the sort of crude mess that language normally is, in everyday life and in the way we use it.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a longing for the clarity and beauty of music and art compared to the often messy and imperfect nature of language.
Franz Wright reflects on his envy towards musicians and painters, suggesting that they possess the ability to convey emotions and ideas in a purer form than language allows. He implies that language is frequently inadequate and messy in everyday communication, whereas music and visual art can transcend these limitations and communicate in a more direct and profound way.
In practice
In a speech about creativity at an art festival.
We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life.
EPITAPH Now I'm not the brightest knife in the drawer, but I know a couple things about this life: poverty silence, impermanence discipline and mystery The world is not illusory, we are From crimson thread to toe tag If you are not disturbed there is something seriously wrong with you, I'm sorry And I know who I am I'll be a voice coming from nowhere, inside-- be glad for me.
I am in no way different from anyone else, that my predicament, my sense of aloneness or isolation may be precisely what unites me with everyone.
When I'm in certain moods, a conversation will start up in my head, and suddenly I'll realize that the language has reached a very high and interesting level, and then lines and stanzas will just kind of appear, full-blown.
The humiliation I go through/when I think of my past/can only be described as grace./We are created by being destroyed.
I began by listening to my mother's collection of Amelita Galli-Curci and Lily Pons records, and then was taken (at age eight) to hear Pons at a Met performance of Lakme. It was at that moment that I decided to become an opera star. Not just an opera singer, but an opera star!
I often conduct an orchestra in my sleep; my orchestras are so huge that the back desks of the violas vanish into the horizon. And everything is so wonderful.
The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.
When I see an artist whose work I like at a party - I'm old now, so I can do this - I go right over and tell them how much I like their work. Instantly, I'm on their side. The act of saying it takes away the competition. The act of saying it makes me not hate them anymore, because they're good.
I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work, and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them.
They're the best critics. Workshops are good, and drama teachers are fine, but the best is the audience. And even better if they're paying!
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.