Poet, Novelist, Dramatist, Designer, Boxing Manager, Playwright, Artist, and Filmmaker 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963
"An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture."
Jean Cocteau's 1913 cartoon of Stravinsky playing The Rite with Nijinsky's dancers multiplying movement in geometrical progression.
"A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system."
"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."
"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses."
"After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter."
"All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it."
"An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original."
"Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious."
"Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time."
"Being tactful in audacity is knowing how far one can go to far."
"Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie."
"Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort."
"One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends."
"Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for."
"You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive."
Preamble (A Rough Draft For An Ars Poetica) by Jean Cocteau
...Preamble
A rough draft for an ars poetica
. . . . . . .
Let's get our dreams unstuck
The grain of rye free from the prattle of grass et loin de arbres orateurs
I
plant
it
It will sprout
But forget about the rustic festivities
For the explosive word falls harmlessly eternal through the compact generations
and except for you
nothing denotates
its sweet-scented dynamite
Greetings I discard eloquence the empty sail and the swollen sail which cause the ship to lose her course
My ink nicks and there
and there
and there
and there
sleeps deep poetry
The mirror-paneled wardrobe washing down ice-floes the little eskimo girl
dreaming in a heap of moist negroes her nose was flattened against the window-pane of dreary Christmases
A white bear adorned with chromatic moire
dries himself in the midnight sun
Liners
The huge luxury item
Slowly founders all its lights aglow
and so sinks the evening-dress ball into the thousand mirrors of the palace hotel
And now it is I
the thin Columbus of phenomena alone in the front of a mirror-paneled wardrobe full of linen and locking with a key
The obstinate miner of the void exploits his fertile mine
the potential in the rough glitters there mingling with its white rock
Oh princess of the mad sleep listen to my horn and my pack of hounds
I deliver you from the forest where we came upon the spell
Here we are by the pen one with the other wedded on the page
Isles sobs of Ariadne
Ariadnes dragging along Aridnes seals
for I betray you my fair stanzas to run and awaken elsewhere
I plan no architecture
Simply deaf like you Beethoven
blind like you Homer numberless old man
born everywhere
I elaborate in the prairies of inner silence
and the work of the mission and the poem of the work and the stanza of the poem and the group of the stanza and the words of the group and the letters of the word and the least loop of the letters
it's your foot of attentive satin that I place in position pink tightrope walker sucked up by the void
to the left to the right the god gives a shake and I walk towards the other side with infinite precaution