Today I have to return Anne Truitt’s journal, Daybook, to the library. I didn’t quite finish (maybe I’ll buy it?), but I was able to read most of it. So great. I love her writing.
Here are a few passages that I’d like to remember:
on balancing intuition and instinct
I began to see my life as somewhere between these two orders of the natural and the abstract, belonging entirely neither to one or the other.
In my work as an artist I am accustomed to sustaining such tensions: a familiar position between my senses, which are natural, and my intuition of an order they both mask and illuminate.
page 5
…the forces of instinct and intuition fought for control of my work. Yesterday intuition fell back briefly before instinct. My hand wanted to draw, to run free. Colors overran, lines tilted, and with about the same degree of effectiveness as Don Quixote going at the windmills. For one whole day I entertained the notion, which had been creeping up on me, of turning my back on the live nerve of myself and having fun.
This morning I am sober. I would be a fool to sacrifice joy to fun.
page 24
on indifference to others and Paying careful attention
Unless we are very, very careful, we doom each other by holding onto images of one another based on preconceptions that are in turn based on indifference to what is other than ourselves. This indifference can be, in its extreme, a form of murder and seems to be a rather common phenomenon. We claim autonomy for ourselves and forget that in so doing we can fall into the tyranny of defining other people as we would like them to be. By focusing on what we choose to acknowledge in them, we impose an insidious control on them. I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitutally flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.
page 41