Joyce Carol Oates

“Inspiration” is an elusive term. We all want to be “inspired” if the consequence is something original and worthwhile; we would even consent to be “haunted” — “obsessed” — if the consequence were significant. For all writers dread what Emily Dickinson calls “Zero at the Bone” — the dead zone from which inspiration has fled.

-- Joyce Carol Oates

Ms. Oates has a nice, longish paean to literary art and the passion with which we seek it, mixed with some concern that maybe fewer and fewer people are seeking it.

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Without the stillness, thoughtfulness, and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture — no collective memory. As if memory were destroyed in the human brain, our identities corrode, and we “were” no one — we become merely a shifting succession of impressions attached to no fixed source. As it is, in contemporary societies, where so much concentration is focused upon social media, insatiable in its fleeting interests, the “stillness and thoughtfulness” of a more permanent art feels threatened. As human beings we crave “meaning” — which only art can provide; but the social media provide no meaning, only this succession of fleeting impressions whose underlying principle may simply be to urge us to consume products.

-- Joyce Carol Oates, "Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature" in The New York Review of Books

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Donald Rumsfeld in Verse

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As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know we don’t know.

-- "The Unknown" by Hart Seely off Donald Rumsfeld

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