"Damn everything but the circus! And here am I, patiently squeezing
fourdimensional ideas into a twodimensional stage, when all of me that's
anyone or anything is in the top of a circustenet ....
"... The average "painter" "sculptor" "composer" "playwright" [college
professor?-AA] is a person who cannot leap through a hoop from the back of
a galloping horse, make people laugh with a clown's mouth, orchestratre
twenty lion....
"... But imagine a human being who balances three chairs, one on top of
another, on a wire, eighty feet in the air with no net underneath, and then
climbs into the top chair, sits down, and begins to swing...
" ... I feel only one thing, I have only one conviction; it sits on three
chair in Heaven. sometimes I look at it, with terror: it is such a perfect
acrobat! The three chairs are three facts--it will quickly kick them out
from under itself and will stand on air; and in that moment (because
everyone will be disappointed) everyone will appalud. Meanwhile, some
thousands of miles over everyone's head, over a billion empty faces, it
rocks carefully and smilingly on three thing, on three fact, on: I am an
Artist, I am a Man, I am a Failure--it rocks and it swings and it smiles
and it does not collapse tumble or die because it pays no attention to
anything except itself. I feel, I am aware--every minute, every instant, I
watch this trick, I am this trick, I sway--selfish and smiling and
careful--above all the people. And always I am repeating a simple and dark
and little formula ... always myself mutters and remutters a trivial
coulourless microscopic idiom--I breathe, and I swing; and I whisper: 'An
artist, a man, a failure, MUST PROCEED.'"
Annie