All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.
I once told Tommy Smothers, 'If I could just get the money and the women straightened out, the rest of my life would be easy.'
Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.
I created a lot of drama and mess in my life.
Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own chaos.
Ultimately, I'm a mess. I don't mean I'm a mess, like, emotionally - I mean, I think probably everybody's a mess. David's a mess. But. I'm talking about... I'm messy.
Can we really conquer chaos so easily? If that were so, I should be able to prune the pandemonium of my own soul into something neat and tidy rather than this maze of wants and needs and misgivings that has me forever feeling as if I cannot fit into the landscape of things.
One of my many horrors is to become the man with the frayed jacket and unfastened flies standing at the Co-op counter with egg on his shirt and more too because the mirror in the hall has given up the ghost. A shipwrecked man without an anchor in the world except in his own liquid thoughts where time has lost its sequence.
Maybe it's only those who've made such chaos of their lives who can understand the heights and depths of God's mercy.
