Marsh:
So then to keep writing you would require another theme or to go to another pool within yourself….Lee:
Right, and of course those pools would suggest themselves. My life would suggest which way to go, because my life is full of fixations and obsessions that I need to untie and uncover, and I think in this way writing is revelatory—it reveals. There is something strange about consciousness once something is revealed: it goes away, but then we recycle it, of course—we put it back in. But if we keep revealing it, somehow just being conscious of it dissolves the clots…. I don’t know if this is making any sense.Marsh:
It does make a lot of sense to me, but I’m probably coming at it from too psychological an angle. But so you think it’s good to sort of get rid of these things.Lee:
Yes, and I would say that the practice of art—aesthetic practice—is by definition “Yoke-ic” [“Yogic”], that is, it yokes us. It links us to a bigger consciousness, to another center other than “the Me.” Of course, that other center is me; it’s the Real Me in a way. But by emptying all that stuff, that moat, then we can get to the other shore or something. Gee…all these metaphors…all of them fail….Marsh:
I’m just thinking as probably you are right now of Emerson’s [essay] “Circles” where he talks about the “circle only teaches me my own limitations,” and we have to overleap the circle and we find ourselves in yet a bigger circle and so on. You mentioned emptiness before. Emptiness in Taoist thinking—it’s not nothingness, quite, is it?Lee:
Right, it’s an ultimate fullness.….