"Because he has returned to the source of silent and solitary
existence on which culture and the exchange of ideas
have been built in order to take cognizance of it, the
artist launches his work just as a man once launched
the first word, not knowing whether it will be
anything more than a shout, whether it can detach
itself from the flow of individual life in which it
was born and give the independent existence of an
identifiable meaning to the future of that same
individual life, or to the monads coexisting with it,
or the open community of future monads. The meaning of
what the artist is going to say does not exist
anywhere- not in things, which as yet have no meaning,
nor in the artist himself, in his unformulated life.
It summons one away from the already constituted
reason in which "cultured men" are content to shut
themselves, toward a reason which would embrace its
own origins." -from "Cezanne's Doubt" by Maurice
Merleau-Ponty
[courtesy of the lovely Theda]
