The death of God left the angels in a strange position.
Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. They've been a laboratory for everybody.
- Love, which is a kind of permission to come closer than ordinary norms of good behavior might usually sanction. - Back rubs. - Which enables us to see each other without clothes on, for example, in lust and shame. - Examining perfections, imperfections. - Which allows us to say wounding things to each other which would not be kosher under the ordinary rules of civilized discourse.
See the moon? It hates us.
