#6a-k, April 2007
#6a-k, April 2007
All paintings are acrylic on paper, 12 x 9
inches.
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February 21, 2006. Oakland.
Early morning.
What is to do in old age when all the years (the numbers) and times (the periods and their tasks) are passed away? As Paul Mills said to me a few months before he died, it was “finish it up,” the things left undone in all the times before.Somerset Maugham said almost the same in the title of his memoir, The Summing Up. But fumbling and confused in his dotage, he later wrote another and called it Strictly Personal. Maugham’s prose in The Summing Up was the example to me of a clarity of language for which to strive, while Strictly Personal was an example of the confusions of old age when it would be best to stop working—except that you are the last to know.
And as for De Kooning’s old age, the others never told him it was time to stop because whatever else he might have been before, anything he did anytime was always money in their bank—and he was already too far gone ever to know of himself it might be best to stop.
Thus, since I will be the last to know, I can keep on working until I know too—which, by evidence of Maugham and De Kooning, is never.
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