it was the Cubist who created the space and color that
everywhere today assails our eyes
in    uniform architecture and monotonous
design; the various branches of modern art
through tedious & exhaustive experiment
       & research creating a massive cultural sinkhole
whose banal discoveries unveil for all the sameness
of form, line and color;
Quote from Gorky's 'Camouflage', 1942: I like the heat;
the tenderness; the edible; the lusciousness;
the song of a single person
in a bathtub full of water.                
           I like Ucello, Grunewald, Ingres,
the drawings and sketches for paintings
   of Seurat and that man Pablo Picasso;
               I measure all things by weight.
               In text for MoMA, describing the 'Garden in Sochi' - series,
               26 June 1942
I love Mougouch, Gorky's wife.                What about papa Cézanne;
I like the wheat fields, the plow, the apricots,
those flirts of the sun.    And bread above all.
My lever is the purple; About 194 feet away
from our house in Armenia on the road to the
spring my father had a little garden with
a few apple trees which had retired
                             from giving fruit;
this garden was identified as the 'Garden of Wish Fulfillment'
often I had seen my mother and the other village women
exposing their naked bosoms, taking the soft,
dependable ******* in their hands &
rubbing them on the rocks; above all this
standing an enormous tree all bleached
under the sun, rain & cold,  deprived of leaves.
This was the Holy Tree [quoted in 1942]
In text for MoMA, describing the 'Garden in Sochi' - series,
26 June 1942
I don't like that word 'finished'.
    When something is finished,
that means it's dead, doesn't it?
I believe in everlastingness;
I never finish a painting –   I just stop
working on it for a while.
I like painting because it's something
I can never come to the end of;
sometimes I paint a picture,
then I paint it all out.    Sometimes
I'm working on fifteen or twenty
pictures at the same time; I do that
      b/c I want to – b/c I change my
   mind so often; The thing to do is
     always to keep starting to paint;
     never finishing the painting [quoted in 1948]

Happy those early days, when I
Shin’d in my Angel-infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white celestial thought:
When yet I had not walk’d above
A mile or two from my first Love,
And looking back—at that short space—
Could see a glimpse of His bright face:
When on some gilded cloud, or flow’r,
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity:
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My Conscience with a sinful sound,
Or had the black art to dispense
A several sin to ev’ry sense,
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.

  O how I long to travel back,
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain
Where first I left my glorious train;
From whence th’ enlightned spirit sees
That shady City of Palm-trees.
But ah! my soul with too much stay
Is drunk, and staggers in the way!
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move;
And when this dust falls to the urn,
In that state I came, return.

I walk among the
too-tall pines,
lonely sentinels who
alone still bare their green.
They are
unashamed
in the colors they show,
natural exhibitionists
in a world of barren arms
and almost-snow.
I squeeze around their
stuck-out branches,
sometimes stabbed
and sometimes poked.
That’s the thing with trees—
there is no tenderness,
there is no intimacy because
it's all a joke.
Their pines and their needles
stick to your warmth,
cling to the heat that
rolls off your body in
thick
moist
heavy puffs.
How I hate them
and their everlastingness,
how I despise their
infinity.
One by one
I have cut down their branches,
have snipped off the green
in thick, poky batches.
Carefully and
quietly I
arrange them
in the slush,
build them into
a body that I can
slip into when
there is green abound
and the Earth
is lush.

I am the seemingly blind
That leads a sightless mind
Into everlastingness.

Kissing my eyes with deceit,
She bows at my feet
And regards me as –

A muse most Sublime.