not everything has to be a lesson. as freud said, 'sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.' but some of us can't help being fascinated with gurus. take shakespeare, for example. at 20 i read all his plays, a play a day. images, phrases, repeated scenes updated, all these gave me a sense of his hand-writing.
or kafka and dostoyevsky. later 20's i read practically everything each had written. pilgrimages included a visit to the apartment in st. petersburg where the brothers karamazov written, and walking with a kafka reference book in hand around prague. (in 1992 these places remarkably unchanged from their authors' days.)
then there were other fascinations. with federico garcia lorca, his plays and poems. in 1966 the village where he was born near granada full of images from his works. einstein's apartment in bern where he changed history. strindberg's apartment in stockholm, as gloomy as their former resident.
zurick had no memorial for c.g. jung, but at least i spent a night in town.
we all have role models. robert graves, the novelist of the I Cladius series, wrote much about the importance of poetry and jazzed me up. who were some others? i tend to forget.
at the moment i'm a fan of bjork and francis bacon. i've eight dvd's of bjork, concerts, her biography, music videos, the making of. she's a fascinating character. (i'll be interested to see what she does in the second half of her life.) as for francis bacon, i never thought i'd enjoy his work, but i've read three books, including his really interesting conversations with david sylvester.
what all these have in common is a kind of animal energy (yes, even kafka). a force of nature that can't stop creating. contact with them, even at a distance, gives me a jolt and a will to continue. of course, this goes for picasso too, and you can read an account of my adventures with him.
other recent additions, including more pictures http://www.pbase.com/wwp/root&view=recent
