Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.”
“A community`s art is its spiritual vision.”
Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 206
Faith for Living (1940)
“Art is the queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.”
“The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.”
"The Little Man at Chehaw Station" (1978), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 503.
Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 150
Context: The continuity of film, in which the writer deals with a track of images moving at a given rate of speed, and a separate sound-track which is joined arbitrarily to the image-track, is closer to the continuity of poetry than anything else in art. But the heaviness of the collective work on a commercial film, the repressive codes and sanctions, unspoken and spoken, the company-town feeling raised to its highest, richest, most obsessive-compulsive level in Hollywood, puts the process at the end of any creative spectrum farthest from the making of a poem.
At the same time, almost anything that can be said to make the difficulties of poetry dissolve for the reader, or even to make the reader want to deal with those "difficulties," can be said in terms of film. These images are like the action sequences of a well-made movie — a good thriller will use the excitement of timing, of action let in from several approaches, of crisis prepared for emotionally and intellectually, so that you can look back and recognize the way of its arrival; or, better, feel it coming until the moment of proof arrives, meeting your memory and your recognition.
The cutting of films is a parable in the motion of any art that lives in time, as well as a parable in the ethics of communication.
