SOCHEWS

I’ve always felt that the world into which we were born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of our talent. And it’s precisely because the world looks onto our talent with such a frighteningly repulsive indifference that, as artists, we are compelled to make our talent important. We are forced to assess; the things that hurt us and the things which helped us cannot be divorced from each other, we could be helped in a certain way only because we were hurt in a certain way; and our help is simply to be enabled to progress from one conundrum to the next. So we write out of one thing — our experience.

Everything really depends on how relentlessly we force from the experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly offer. That is the only real concern of an artist — to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. Therefore, all art; writings, paintings etc are a kind of confession, more or less oblique. It’s the main way we give order to this flux which is life and the only way we know to create true art; to be forced to tell the whole damn story, to vomit the anguish, the sorrow and fury up. And that alone has the power to break open the the vaults of the dead and skies behind which prophesying angels hide.