In His Own Words

Words

“One of the first things that I realized was that words are lies. They are partial statements that if you mistake them for realities, they are lies. ‘Cause they’re not whole things. They have to be completed.

“Now, our language doesn’t give us the ability to talk about things at that level of experience. You see, the artist is basically non-verbal, because the verbal contains only a shallow, social pattern somewhere. It doesn’t have the whole thing, because the whole thing must include the ability of imagination to conceive the whole thing. And you can’t define it. You spend your whole lifetime trying to be able to define things clearly enough so that people know what you’re talking about.

“In other words, it’s the ordinary thing—it is not the realization—it is the ordinary pattern that comes in there. ‘Go get some wood!’ You see that is an example of the word being used as a transitional notion of discussing the ordinary, meaningless thing that has to happen.

“It’s possible for you to use your imagination to conceive reality, or certain forms of approaching reality. In order to do that, you have to see that the whole thing is in art.”

— Edgar Miller, c. 1991