“Go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
It’s easy to feel like you’ve got nothing to wear, but it’s also a signal of identity problems. If you’ve got a well-developed sense of identity, you tend to know what’s you no matter what the trends. Nothing I buy ever looks new, because I have my look down, and it’s classic.
His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.
“as William Blake once noted, the choice was simple: Create another system or be enslaved by someone’s else’s. The Wu-Tang Clan didn’t create another system-they conceived an entire cosmology.”
In carefully scrutinizing the affairs of the past, we find that there are many different opinions about them, and that there are some things that are quite unclear. It is better to regard such things as unknowable. Lord Sanenori once said,
“As for the things that we don’t understand, there are ways of understanding them. Furthermore, there are some things we understand just naturally, and again some that we can’t understand no matter how hard we try. This is interesting.”
This is very profound. It is natural that one cannot understand deep and hidden things. Those things that are easily understood are rather shallow.
Black is modest and arrogant at the same time. Black is lazy and easy - but mysterious. But above all black says this: “I don’t bother you - don’t bother me”.
