"Acceptance that there is no wholly satisfactory answer is part of moving forward."  - NY Times, editorial about Senator Bob Kerry's Vietnam civilian massacre.

Do you get to - do you have the right to - move forward after you've done something so heinous?

I guess [so]. Gotta go on with daily life. Forgiveness is better.

My stretch class trainer plays a Deepak Chopra recording.  In his smarmy cheesy voice, he is profound.  "...let go of all recriminations, revenge, and regret..." Something like that.  Otherwise you're always a victim.

Speak memory, seek memory

camera the shield against forgetting

seek existential time, not clock time

stay in silence to look to see

See, inquire, learn, know, look again

Engage memory - make it your partner

by writing, noting details, names

accept that contradictions live in art and

don't have to be resolved

...reveals the fault lines of our ludicrous attempts

to make sense of experience, our faulty knowledge of ourselves and the world 

Paraphrase of Phillip Kennicot, Wash Post Culture Critic

“A talent is a kind of imprisonment. You’re stuck in it, you have to keep using it, or else you get ruined by it. It’s like a beaver’s teeth. He has to chew or else his jaws lock shut.” --Wallace Stegner

The result is an empirical behemoth built on the foundation of a few simple propositions. One, that our awareness of death creates tremendous potential for anxiety or terror. Two, that we learn to manage that terror by embedding ourselves in a cultural worldview that imbues reality with order, meaning, and stability. Three, that we gain and maintain psychological security by sustaining faith in that worldview and living up to the values it convey

While teaching at Pomona College in the early 1970s Williams revisited his typewriter drawings, including some of them in a new booklet called "Random Notes On Painting." Not yet into his 40s, Williams' prose in "Random Notes On Painting" is wearily eloquent:

I find in my life fragments of happiness and delight, more doubts than I can account for, empty and restless afternoons spent bumping off the walls, a vainglorious awareness of my own ambition, a fondness for books, maps, seashells, Black Blues Artists, the habitual use of noisy prose, the pretense that making art is a way to interfere, if only for a moment with death, shame at the forbidden memories that reveal themselves in the dark belly of aberrant dreams, outrage at hunger and sickness and the loneliness of men, anger at my own uneasiness in the world, my fear of being wrong, and my daily confessions of incomprehension.

One tries to work with care, with sagacity, to make things with calm. I would wish my paintings to be abundant, generous-nothing dim, no shadows; to stand in the full light of summer. I would wish my paintings to illuminate. -Guy Williams

As is clear from the lives of Saint Francis of Assisi and so many other saints, the gift of knowledge gives rise to grateful contemplation of the world of nature and joyful praise of the Creator...Pope Francis in a Vatican Radio broadcast yesterday