But each day, it is too hard to go, too many things to do.

That was Monday.  I wanted to be ready to get on the road, back to Washington, but when I woke I had no will.  It would be too hard to part, to leave my old mom.  It was a nice day.  Blue sky, clear air, even with the humidity.  Around noon I went for a walk up the road.  The night’s thunderstorm rain had helped with the swamp by the power grid station.  I called the car rental company.  They were raising the weekly rate on me.  Then I called my aunt.  The guilt of leaving mom, versus the guilt of not being there on my own home turf to face looking for what to do, a forced career change.

We went for a quick drive, to find a newspaper, groceries.  The usual.  Keep mom happy, comfortable, while I run in..  Then we went for ice cream, a drive by the  big endless lake, the shore, stones, the bank below the picnic tables, then on past the snapping turtle swamp, where we were there just as a huge blue heron lifted slowly.

I had mom back, I was  getting ready to squeeze some lemon on top of chicken breasts.  Mom commented about how I shouldn’t fill the cat’s water bowl so high.  Okay, I said, in a sort of drone, and then mom was sudden angry at me again.  I’m never right.  I’m always wrong.  She flung herself out the back door, sitting down facing away, her small frame in an outdoor chair on the grass. I looked down at her through the storm door window.

Well, it’s almost four, she was up early, so I pour herself a tumbler of Chardonnay, drop a cube in it.  And then I reach back into the fridge for the bottle of $9.99 Beaujolais.  Suddenly the neck has snapped off as I yank with the shaky corkscrew.  And something has happened.  I wrap it in white kitchen towel, raising it.  Shit.  The gash on my left index finger is long and deep.

I drive myself to the local hospital.  I wait on a bed in the ER.

One nice woman, an angel in my eyes comes in, checking in with the paperwork things to render.  Then a slender strawberry blond young woman.  She’s the first person to want to look at it.



Hemingway, always getting into something.  The skylight falling.  Car accidents.  Concussions.  Stitches.  The later plane crashes.  Scars. Organ damage.


Melville.  The idea a part of you will meet an end in the writing of a book.  Even when you’re not a great writer, there’s still the Ahab in you.  The whale adventure co-opted, for psychological revenge.  The physics of it, part of you will die, and leave you with what’s left.

Dostoevsky says as much, standing at the precipice of the first words of Karamazov.  It was on my parent’s shelves from JK Lumber.  A Bible quote, after books full of nightmare and feverish visions of the world turning into hallucinations and madness, things we all get, hey, it’s all entertainment, all cut form the things we would all understand, intuitively, given what we will have to go through.

Something from John.  But if a kernel of wheat shall fall to the ground and die, then it bringeth forth much fruit.

And Dostoevsky, he would have known that.  He would have earned a glimpse of that.  Given what he’d been through.  Add on the great vulnerability of having epileptic seizures.  Or of being thrown away to Siberia, human trash.  Creditors, income problems.  The final unending long adult pains of the never ending shit stream.

He hated electric lights.  He’d be up late, hand rolling cigarettes, not allowed to smoke them.  Like Vonnegut, he was a great doodler.  Here’s Father Zosima, off on a margin space.


The blood starts again, after I’ve peeled back the white kitchen towel, which I have to pull off, tearing it away.  Faint stomach.  Oh, you did a nice job on that, I think she says.

Then, finally, an older woman with a blue smock.  She’s the one to take care of it.  Wheeling in a stand with a tray.  She assembles her gear.  Packaged Bandages.  Needles, three thin ones, for numbing.  This will be the painful part.  Okay.  I look off, away.  I don’t want to be here, but I am.

She doesn’t say much. I’ve asked her if she’s a native of Oswego.  New Hartford.  Oh, I grew up in Clinton...  She’s busy.  That’s okay,

I hum a song without any tune, just notes.   Taking breath, air up the chest, alternative to breathing, like I’ve been, through the nose.  Are you doing okay, she asks me, as I felt the tug of thread, bringing a peel of tough sagacious finger skin back in line.  “I’m fine.  I’m thinking of the story my mom tells about my C-section...  ‘I can feel you cutting...’. So they gave her more juice.”  The doctor almost chuckles. She studies her work so far, sewing up the old catchers mitt baseball glove while I float in time, as it flows on, beyond my control.  55 years.

My mom is calling.  Hi.  Yes.  I’m being taken care of very well, by a nice woman doctor.  I’ll be home soon, mom.  Are you doing okay?  Well,, I’m good now, but before, I was scared shitless, to tell you the truth.

At  some point into the procedure, I forget, I say, I’m sorry for being stupid, I tell the doctor quietly.  No.  That’s what we are here for, she says.

Earlier:  Looking up at the flourescent lights, or away, you feel the loneliness.  Poor suffering humanity, all the sickness, the waiting for medical help, the cancers, the pain, the shocks.


Then later, wrapped in gauze, my finger protected, numb,, I’m on my way out, back through the ashen lobby,  after the nice nurses.  When you’re suffering, in need of medical attention, you become reminded of something.  People care, even for you.  And in your own shocked pathos, you find that people care for you, even, and that you yourself are polite.

I’m walking across the warm paced parking lot, towering cumulus clouds like mountain distance.  I start the car,


I settle down, we order delivery.  After half a glass of white, I pour some red from the broken bottle.  Later, thinking, I strain the wine through a tea strainer for safety. Ibuprofen, baby aspirin.



Next morning, Tuesday, The rough part, taking the bandage off, peeling off the gauze pad after the gauze wrap.  Oh boy.  The shower blasts too much, the water cutting the stressed, so I hand cup water over the finger.

Useless sketch April 2020:

Well, how do you start the day?

I get up out of bed, find a cold cup of tea stored in the fridge, put it down on the coffee table and I recline on the couch.  Snoozing.  Hoping for energy and a vision to make some effort to come.  Mom calls.  Okay, all good.  I now have the impetus to go back to the little kitchen and get the water kettle going.  A fresh pot of green tea.  Maybe I put some eggs on, heat on low, three, sunny side up, with a plexiglass plate over the pan.  I stir a healthy teaspoon of ground flax seed into my tea cup.

Back at the coffee table, Ikea, I look through the apps on my iPhone, The Weather Channel app for the pollen report, the other Weather Channel app to check on the basic weather details for my mom, Oswego, then back to Washington, DC.  I've checked Facebook already.  I'll check it again.  I stir in a little Ashwaganda powder into my tea.  After calling my mom I have my breakfast, the eggs runny over the sliced deli chicken breast, a sprinkle of cayenne and turmeric, olive oil.

Let's see, I took my mountain bike back from the bike mechanic.  I rode it around last evening, clicking through the gears.

Just stay busy, I tell my mom.  Have your little projects.  Make your tea and breakfast to start the day.

I only had one bottle of wine, with dinner.  And it didn't seem to be enough.  I went off to bed depressed.  Mom had called me as I was preparing to do my evening yoga on the bluff, and she sounded frightened, anxious, and I calm her down.  "I don't want to bring you down with me," she says.  "Everybody has died," she tells me, my father, her uncle, her aunts, her parents...  "You still have me, you have my brother, you have your sister, you have your friends..."

The sunlight of the later part of the day is coming through the trees now, and I position myself on the hill so that I remain in the light.

We drive out to Sterling Nature Center.  Clear, blue sky.  Distant clouds.  I walk mom down the mowed path to the observation deck.  The lake is blue, appearing higher above the land than usual.

Two men have Family Life Network radio on under the pavilion.  I’ve made us a turkey sandwich wrap.  We look out over dragonfly pond.  Hard to ignore the two men, father and son, son with shirt off, a bit of late smoke rising from the standing grill, a bag of Kingsford charcoal.  Hungry? The father asked as we made our way up from the shade of the tree between the parking lot and the open barn-like structure of the picnic pavilion.

The Lord gives each of us particular gifts;  we are good at certain things, perhaps not others, the woman’s voice says over the two men’s boom box.  One, shirt off, as he sits in his folding beach chair,,corn on the cob.  Radio blaring,  the radio voice tells a story of making a sign, to be printed, shared.  “All about you.”  She tells a story of waiting for a flight in Indianapolis.  The CEO barges to the front of the line when boarding is called.

God helps us discern our work if we leave it up to Him.


But why?  Why the struggle of the city...  obscure, shunned almost, though that choice is probably of your own making.,  Even as you’ve welcomed so many strangers and friends to the wine bar with graciousness even if hurried, a magician.   The great Abe Lincoln decency you’ve shown to the multitudes, to the deluge.  Not put to more profitable use.

To the city person, what are you, in the estimations of guarded professional life secrets and income...

Some of us, God’s fools, double down on decent, servitude, humble kindness, and some of us double down on being greedy touch-holes.


John Wilkes Booth:  worthless urbanite.

Wayne Kilgore, descended from Irish bards, at last was free.  Even as he was almost about to shout at his aged mother, as she sat there in her Eames Chair (throne), glowering at him, in a way that Kerouac too might have shouted at his mother, according to a Ginsberg interview,  (dialect French Canadian, Joal?, "you smelly old fishcunt.")

They were, earlier, or just before, in the kitchen.  He was sorting out the groceries.   And again she had confused him with his honorable father.  "Has the semester started yet," she asks him as he brushes past her, trying to keep her refrigerator organized.  “So where are you going after this?”  And he had to explain all over again, that he worked in a restaurant, and things there were quite uncertain, why, because of the pandemic...  he really didn’t have a job anymore, not that it was much of one to begin with.  He hadn't a chance not to sit down with any space for his thoughts yet.  And his explanation gets heavy handed.

She was up in a huff.  About his tone.  It makes me want to kill myself..  She got up and sat down in the living room, in her chair.  Then she went on, went on, I’m no good, I’m no good, I wish I were dead, and he shouted at her, finally, but quickly, to shut up and went into the kitchen away from her to make chicken salad from the breasts he’d baked two nights ago.

She would soon forget anyway.  She picked up Dylan Thomas Collected Poems with entitled airs.  Has other things to do than deal with her servant.

He went back to the kitchen and sliced into the cold chicken breast, peeling off the skin, on the one ready useful cutting board.


Wayne Kilgore felt an inner need to write.  He had things to chew on.  And he wasn’t getting  much space from his elderly mother.  Studying him from her chair as he sat on the couch sorting out his uncomfortable morning thoughts.  Did you sleep well?  What are we doing for fun today... Do you have any reunions coming up...


Just as everything was happening, humanity had divided, naturally, itself on all its archetypal lines and distinctions, and in certain cases, depending, even though all and each by now were an inextricable mix, the bardic mentality versus the cop mentality...  all of which we stumble upon, as sea mammals to an Irish rocky cove with stones upon which we would warm ourselves, in other words, by surprise, and quite incidentally.


Wayne Kilgore, even as all things of his struggled workman life were falling apart, had been, in a way , set free.  Now it was 1:39 AM, and he wanted some space.  He heard her get up.  To the bathroom from her bed in the cluttered bedroom.  Stiffly coming downstairs from the bathroom quietly saying, help...  help...  help... In a pitiable childish voice.


He was thinking.  Two nights ago.  The Princess had messaged him, after the book he wrote...  But now, again, just like before, she was declaring herself uncomfortable, insinuating that he was stalking her again, as he as he checked in afterward, and it had gone downhill from there, each time he wrote, politely, in friendship, literary respect.

So, he was thinking.  The attachments we create in our mind in order to make narrative arts really have nothing, or very little, to do with the original people we associate these attachments with.  Let them go.  Free of the projected light of the theater created by your own neuroses, your own desire to shout back at the family members who have shouted their own way through life’s attendant miseries.

He groaned inwardly as he heard her wake after midnight and come downstairs.  He spent a little time with her in the kitchen as she poured herself some Pepsi and ate a saltine with a swipe of almond butter.  There was mushroom pizza in the fridge.  The beer wasn’t settling with him well,  he’d just been reading about Kurt Vonnegut’s mother’s death, barbiturates.

He went back to the couch, hiding his attention in the new book, a compilation of Vonnegut thoughts on writings.  He monitored her, by the sounds in the kitchen.  Okay.  No one is here.  No one wants to talk to me, okay....  He heard her belch, with childish amused entitlement.  Talking to herself.  Singing quietly to herself.  She sat down and tinkled in the hall bathroom without sliding the door shut.

The people we attach the mind’s own fictions, Jesus is more real.  Free from selfish neuroses.


In the morning he lounged before getting up, giving himself time to think.  Which is not the same as writing.  He didn’t want to get up and come down.  She wouldn’t let him sit down to write, without the huff, the heavy sigh.   He felt slightly better.  Soon he would have to go back.  It would take a long time for the wine bar to get back to normal.

The next step of life seemed like a simple meaning of life sort of thing, a spiritual revelation, an invitation to a deeper truth.  And he should also be looking for a job.

He thought about the people in the town up here, by the big lake.  Somehow people up here weren’t angry, less of the guarded professional of the urban.  Friendly, not about to accuse the innocent of unclean motives.  Not about to put a person down, for nothing.  Judgmental.

It was already turning into a gift, a freeing insight, his old friend’s great duscomfort at even being in a friendly text about literary matters.  City people for you.  Good luck with that.

Now, despite it all, he was writing again..

In life, I mean, for a living, I’ve been, I was, a bartender.  I may have helped contribute to the happiness of many people, not that happiness is a lasting thing necessarily.  Perhaps I should have been a policeman, but maybe that wasn’t really me.

In observing the elderly, I trust a good mood less and less.

Mom wants to for a drive.  I go out to the parking lot, opening up the windows, bringing a paper bag with bottled water and a sandwich wrap from the earlier trip to the Stewart Shop for a NY Times.  I got up early, going for a walk in morning wind around seven.   After the convenience store I went out back and did my yoga as the sun was just coming up over the poplars.  Then I took a shower, dressed, got ready for taking mom out in the rental car.  I come back in.  She has intestinal issues, she tells me, so we hold off for a bit.  We go check the mailbox, but the mail hasn’t come.   Then, she is ready, so I bring the paper bag back to the car.

We are driving slowly toward the lake, through the 20 mph street that takes you around the university campus to the drive to Rudy’s with the lake view, and the motor homes and the cabins.  There are three crows just by the side of the street, picking at something interesting and agreeable to them.  So I slow down more and give them a wide berth.  They take off, calling as they do, and then from around the curve comes a university police car.

He turns around, and we’re going along slow and I’m talking to mom about what we might see today, but I know he has pulled in behind me and the lights go on.  Sure.  No problem.  I pull over, gently, stop.

License and registration.  Sure.   It’s a rental car.  Just the license then.   Sure. Sir, do you know why I pulled you over?  You were in the left lane.  Yes, I’m sorry, there were three crows by the side of the road.  Mom’s a birder, she’s retired from the SUNY...

The policeman is kind, and almost chuckles. Oh, I didn’t see any birds.  Yeah...  Any problems with your license?  No, sir.

And five minutes later we are on our slow way again.  Chastened.  Slightly nervous.  I go along with our little ride.  Past Rudy’s fried fish stand like a diner, picnic tables by the lake, then out past where the wind picks up the water in spray as the waves crash the sea wall, then out past the pond, eventually turning around and coming back.

I am a believer in the written word.

I had sent off a copy of a book I’d written, via Amazon.  A gesture of literary respect, right...

I'd gotten one of those emails, the book had been delivered.  It's Saturday, I go about the usual keeping mom entertained and fed.

I'm sitting on the couch, reading, or staring into my iPhone when a text message from the old acquaintance, whom I take as a person of literary talent, a positive note, comes over.  Coming out of the blue.  “Enjoyed your book, lol.”

So, I text back, three in the morning, enjoying some wine and some quiet time,

Still waters run deep, who knew, emoji...
We were rather immature back then, yes.
We both owe each other an apology.

I owe you a million of them, I respond.

And then I hear my old mom coming down the stairs, distracting me, peering at me surprised out of her lostness from the landing, holding onto the banister.

“Do you have wife, kids?”  And just telling mom, an old friend, etc., I want to, since she has sort of praised me, I wish to tell her that I enjoy her writing too... "What writing?   Where?"

Uh-oh, here we go again.

Thank you for not stalking me.  Oh, okay.

Still, when I go to bed, it feels positive more than negative.


Being a dumbass, and not feeling all that sexy anyway in trying times, my impressions were of a largely literary conversation.  Which don’t come about very often, if at all, as if people would rather hold a dirty diaper than go down “that path.”  My literary efforts, not of much importance anyway.

Woe unto the world, because of offences.

I’m up at my mom’s, difficult person to deal with, of general old age.

The restaurant where I have worked a good long time has had a case of the Covid-19 come through, at a cleaning session before the intended opening, and the scheduled opening I was about to be called back for was postponed once, then again, and then, a partial reopening, with my remaining laid off.  Unemployment protection lasting through the end of the coming month.

A bygone era depicted somewhat in my old book, in that I was able to pick it up, and read parts of it, and say, hmmm, not so bad.  I read my mom a passage of taking the bus back from college, her picking me up at the station.

Here I am, as my mom’s hold loosens.  But we are here, all her books.  A bookish life,  it has its organic pull.  You could not lived your way through it and not have been a writer.  Nope.

Things are broken, cannot be fixed.


And then...  first, it’s Sunday.  Somewhere through the day, around noon, I shoot of a text.  "I hope I didn’t keep you up late."  Fair enough, I thought.

"Well. it was an interesting way to spend a Saturday night in Covid-times."

Monday.  Hot.  Lots going on in my mind, but I shoot off a quick, hi, I hope you have recovered from your literary shock, returned to the land of the productive.

The old man, writing.  Faced with an adept to the modern way, disdainful.

Distance of social media, moving behind a screen.  A human robot.

Looking for a N.Y. Times, grocery shopping, I take my mother to the bookstore here.  Hot out, humid.  I ease her from the rented car and in through the glass doors, to stop at the sanitizing station they’ve set up.  We have our masks on.  She looks through the shelves, after we say hello to the staff, and I look through other ones.  I come upon two books, on writing, and I see they will be life affirming in some ways.  One, Slow Writing, and by a student of Kurt Vonnegut, accompiling his thoughts on writing itself.  And so am I protected against the coming final snub.

I’m an empath.  But I shouldn’t have written you.  Are you really seeing a therapist?  You should take to her.  You’re over focusing on me.

Jesus Christ.  I want to laugh, light a cigarette with Vonnegut.

To no avail.  Don’t even bother.  “You’re not listening.  I’m not comfortable...”

Jesus Christ.  “Go on without me”

Fine.  “I’m ok with that.”  That’s all I have to say.  Adios.

I don't need any more shame added to my plate.


Just as my therapist had predicted, things had returned to the same old.  The inappropriateness, the rising discomfort on the part of my old friend...  Fine.  If that’s how you want to be.  My blood pressure goes up, I felt a small wave of an awkward sadness come over me, but then it began to fade.



I write for life.  I write for self protecting. I write for all the human beings who do not have such a spokesperson.



Who has protection from such, the Karens of the world, what or where a leg to stand upon against their distorted privileged worldview...  Some Buddhism, or even yoga itself, comes to mind.  Nothing is good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.  All things being observed through perceptions, so that things can only be an inextricable mix of good and bad, or being neither, just being things as they are, with no need for a reaction beyond the meditations that allow perspective.

Today I awake, I get up, I go downstairs, there is tea from last night, and dirty dishes from last night’s supper, the iron pan of bone-in chicken breast and onion gravy, plates, knives, cutting board, silverware, empty wine glasses with film.  I make coffee in the Bialetti, find a deviled egg and a slice of Big M low-sodium sliced turkey breast.

Mom sighs, from her chair.  Reaches up to pick at her scalp.  She huffs at me as I write, pecking at the screen of my iPhone, not having brought along the power cord for my laptop, thinking Apple products interchangeable.  She has grown distracted from the book we purchased together yesterday about Lincoln and his Second Inaugural .  Well, I come all this way and you ignore me.

Later I ask permission for a walk.


And the next day starts, hot and aimless.  Here I am.  Feeling weakened, rather than supported.  Some creatures develop a natural protection layer or device, but for me, gullible, such growths have come slowly.

Were I to find myself caring, it all would strike me as more than a passing awkwardness.  And what returned to me, strongly enough, was the writing, through all things.

Buddhist thought and your own proofs of psychological insight come slowly, over the years, over time.

Out on my walk, up the road, away from the townhouses, there is a breeze.  I walk slowly, almost numbly, but the body strides and my shoulders feel strong, my gate upright.  Beyond the power station gates and the marshy places red winged blackbirds call their warnings overhead, having risen from the low trees, fagus japonica, one perched on the wooden power line poke before swooping to draw me away from nests..  A night heron rises and perches.  Calling.  The grasses sway, carrying the fruit of their grain now at tips.  I find my friend Hall Kirkham performing a morning prayer session, the Rector of St Michael’s Episcopal church in Malden, reading from Psalm 69.


Later, at The Press Box, around 4:30, I sit with mom, reluctantly having a glass of Chianti, pouring it over ice in a highball glass, a mushroom burger.  I tell her not to get the battered shrimp, but she won’t listen.  At least she is entertained.  But we have some wine and things go better, and we end up having a nice conversation about how literature and poetic lines are invented by finding through the ear.  All those great lines laid down, each of them having sounds and rhythms, and all such things and they sometimes when we write we are taking dictation from our ears, having to back later, finding some words spelled phonetically.   I tell her the old story of Kerouac and The Scroll, and when Bob Giroux questions, Jack, I’m not sure we can handle this, Kerouac picks his scroll up, tucks it under his arm.  “You have offended The Holy Spirit,” and walks out.  That’s what it’s all about.


I took another walk after our late lunch, and mom, after her wine, had begun to quietly murmur to herself, help...   help.  The red-winged blackbirds turned from their usual vibrant sort of two note call to their on-guard calls and behaviors of vigilant distraction.  Again I walked slowly and the marshy parts were dry and I heard the little green heron shriek somewhere up the overgrown train tracks toward the high power lines.  There were the fagus japonica along the bank, grown so as to obscure it with their shrubby height, and also sweet pea with its purple flowers, small black walnut trees like limbs coming out of the cattails, vetch, and other weedy proliferating things besides the tall grasses.  A big rain, a line of thunderstorms was in the way I hoped, as the plant life had begun to sag, and I walked along and then back to mom’s apartment, feeling like I was entering back into some sort of Bergman film scene, the coming disasters growing, breathing down my neck.


It might well be said that the only people who really get writers and writing are writers themselves.  Those who wrote the Psalms stride with maturity, they were real writers, and they knew the writer’s lot.  They wrote because they needed to, they had to.  They were not false in it, not using their talents for commerce.  So it is that writers seek out their own, for some form of company, sometimes, if they are lucky, even in person.   Their work is akin to that of the bees of this world, essential for pollination, that there be fruit and flowers and all sorts of vegetation productive.  That work is work, and it is not easy, even perhaps the cause of difficulties and honest anguish that bears upon the human condition.   They must often be thrown away, castaways, slipping into oblivion while leaving their psalms behind.  You can’t ask other people to pick up that burden.  It is not comfortable and it is not easy, and it’s mainly right of people to wish to avoid any part of it and to go on enjoying the fruits of life, of the cultural labors that writers will, by laws of nature, go about doing.

I’m sitting miserable on her couch, and mom, reclined upon the old Eames Chair with cat scratched leather, found for sale cheap at Hinman’s Farm on Route 5 near Oneida, observes, and reads something from early pages of Ellmann’s Joyce, droning on, reading aloud, almost as if drunkenly, a passage on Joyce’s father’s meaning, and after she tells me, “you know, when you’re down, it helps, just to read a book.  It will help.”

Yeah, mom.  She goes back to half talking self talk, and I’ve had each day a predictable day of repetitive phrases, beginning with, did you sleep well, do you have any reunions coming up, who was your favorite professor...  I for my part go back to my worries, considerable, financial, professional.  “Everybody is going through the same thing you’re going through,” she tells me, but I feel sick, haunted, and by now hunted almost.

By dinner hour, another repetitive round of talk.  I was a very fussy eater, my poor mother...

But later, a few evenings, I see the thick paperback book near her chair and the ottoman. I open  it up.  The cover, blue, needs some tape, to hold it to the binding.  I find the clear tape in the kitchen.  James Joyce is a thick book.  The binding is not as steadfast.  I tape  the blue cover back on carefully.  I took a class with Ellmann’s daughter, Maud, once upon a time, in the old Octagon.

Why has it taken me so long, to see, to get Joyce.  Here I am, my life falling apart, nowhere to find anywhere to save Mom and her books and all her stuff.  Here I am, a car rented, for a week, but now I’ve been here for a month, and each day rises and tells me that leaving today is impossible, and all the world’s traffic of problems is still rising higher around and before me.

Read a book, she says.  That’s what I tell my students.  Read a book and it will help.

So I pick up the story.  James Joyce and Nora Barnacle have eloped, at the promise of a job at Berlitz,  Paris, then Geneva...


“At the age of twenty-one Joyce had found he could become an artist by writing about the process of becoming an artist, his life legitimizing his portrait by supplying the sitter, while the portrait vindicated the sitter by its evident admiration for him.”

Ellmann, p. 149. Oxford University Press paperback, 1965. New York (USA)


“As his faith in Catholicism tottered, a counter-process began:  his faith in art, which is written by people with faults, grew great.”

Ibid. p.50