“Although the wheel has thirty spokes its utility lies in the emptiness of the hub. The jar is made by kneading clay, but its usefulness consists in its capacity. A room is made by cutting out windows and doors through the walls, but the space the walls contain measures the room's value.

In the same way matter is necessary to form, but the value of reality lies in its immateriality.

(Or thus: a material body is necessary to existence, but the value of a life is measured by its immaterial soul.)”

“Be still and know that I am God”

You are delivered of something in having forgotten it. Deliverance is forgetfulness and love delivers greatest and longest. The power of a smile, laughter-- teeth as amnesiac marble goads--, forgetting, emptiness and the peace of vessels emptied of anything except deliverance. Spokes and vases of Lao Tzu.

The purpose of art is to glorify God, to make one stop and think of the beautiful difficultly of it all. To know themselves Cain, to know themselves Abel, to fall in love with disgust and forget Love and its obfuscations. To see the lame and ugly and know “Neither they sinned, nor their parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest within them” (John 9:3). The purpose of art is to kill someone--with a poem-- but sometimes you walk with God and forget about it all.

The Chinese bone-script ideogram for art is an old woman tending to a plant. The ideograms came from virgins locked deep in the caverns of the earth planted to bear nothing but sigils and their intonations. Untouched pale bones of the earth, untouched porcelain thighs, untouched mouthed whispers turned bone-script brushstrokes, and that is our language and that is our art before the western warlocks Dee and Bacon separated form from content and the envelope from the message the woman from the wife and the law left us with consuming bloodstained glasses of the covetous.