MIRROR PIECE

Instead of obtaining a mirror, obtain a person.
Look into him.
Use different people.
Old, young, fat, small, etc.

1964 spring

People want pretty much the same things: They wanted to be happy. Most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future, while most older people believed they lay in the past.

Children always want to look behind mirrors.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete.

When you're younger, a lot of your . . . art or music or whatever is more about just trying to look like you're an artist . . . trying to look like you're a certain thing or trying to . . . just . . . fit in. . . .

Older artists kind of don't care about that as much. . . . That's liberating and feels more like what true art should be about. . . .

When I first started writing songs, all I wanted to do was a write a song that sounded like another song so that it sounded like . . . . a legitimate thing. Not necessarily . . . a song that expresses anything I'm actually thinking . . . or feeling.

Here's what I'm mostly thinking or feeling in my early 20s: 'I-I hope I fit in.' . . . And that's not that interesting. . . . 'I hope people don't think I'm a fraud. . . . I want to be liked.' . . .
That seems kind of anti-art, really. . . .

Life is never beautiful, but only the pictures of life are so in the transfiguring mirror of art or poetry; especially in youth, when we do not yet know it. Many a youth would receive great peace of mind if one could assist him to this knowledge.

I’m just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of me.

I'm old and the mirrors don't lie.

Young lovers seek perfection. Old lovers sew shreds together and see beauty in the multiplicity of patches.

you never will love art well, till you love what she mirrors better

It seems that a lot of people my age try to be interesting by having problems or starting conflicts. I'd rather be interesting because I created something beautiful.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.