*_The Book of a Thousand Eyes is a night work, in that my interest is in the processes of assimilation and assessment that take place in the dark and silence of night, where opposites as such can't exist because they always coexist.  I have wanted, so to speak, to write in the dark, when the mind must accept the world it witnesses by day and out of all data reassemble meaning.  The writing would do so - assemble (a Faustian project)and, in it's way, make knowledge (the work of LaFaustienne). - Lyn Hejinian, "La Faustienne" in _Poetics Journal, Number 10, 1998, p. 20. **

"A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns - nicht wahr ?.....No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up....In the destructive element immerse." - Joseph Conrad, quoted by Margaret Milner (Joanna Field)in _A Life of One's Own.

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In confronting the issue of established structure versus creativity, he looked at anger that is overtly directed at the "system," but at a system that is really us, or, in this case, him. The shadow is our door to individuality insofar as the shadow renders us our first view of the unconscious [Jungian in this case]. It is not until we have been truly shocked into seeing ourselves as we really are, instead of how we wish or hopefully assume we are, that we can take the first step toward individual reality, individuality. The dark side refers to those aspects of the self that lead us to feel inferior, which, in turn, are those things we try to deny. The shadow begins to develop in childhood as the result of stuffing-away negative feelings in order to build a proper person.

****"The elusiveness of the collage, its deliberate cultivation of relativity of appearance to undermine the absoluteness of reality - to get behind that facade of absoluteness in order to recover the reality of its becoming, its dialectical metamorphosis in its concretizing of itsworld- is at once an attempt 'to sound the "depths" of the soul' and 'an ideologicaldressing up ofthinfgs as they are.' [quotes from Kurt Wolf, From Karl Mannheim, NY, Oxford University Press. 1971], Donald Kuspit, "Collage: the organizing principle of art," in Katherine Hoffman, Collage: critical views, Ann Arbor, UMI Research, 1989.

*****"In thought-provoking ways assemblage is poetic rather than realistic, for each constituent element can be transformed. Physical materials and their auras are transmuted into a new amalgam that both transcends and includes its parts. When, as in a primitive cult object, a shell becomes a human eye because of its context, the accepted hierarchy of categories is disrupted. When the meanings of highly charged units impinge on a poetic as well as on a physical or visual level, significant expression becomes possible. The assembler, therefore, can be both a metaphysician and (because his units are loosely related rather than expository) a poet who mingles attraction and repulsion, natural and human identification, ironic or naive responses." William Seitz, "The realism and poetry of assemblage," in Katherine Hoffman, Collage: Critical views, Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1989.