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I think about art and religion. What does an artist want to give? Different artists offer us different things. But what is the best kind of art?

Generally I think that religious art is best, but this should not be understood in a strictly traditional sense. Even Yves Klein, when he paints a monochrome, can be understood as someone who wants us to SEE.

See what? It's a monochrome! Exactly. To see one color. To see that color is.

But that's obvious!

Should it be so obvious? Should we find the raw existence of color so very boring?

I think of those big beautiful sculptures of the Buddha, which are how many years old? What were the sculptors trying to say? Did they care about their artistic reputations?

I bet that many did not. Not in the least. I suspect that they felt something there, that they understood something that was finally worth chiseling into stone.

I myself have been in artist in just about every medium. I have wrestled wrestled wrestled with the problem of what to say with my art.

Some of my best lines were tossed off from a state of joy, of excitement. I was playing with words. I wrote down what delighted me. I forgot about the audience. I wanted to save these amusements for later. And that is why I wrote them, and didn't just think them and pass on.

I used to want to write fiction, as I have always enjoyed fiction. But the fiction I enjoyed was never the shallow stuff. I wanted fiction to say something about reality. I also loved Bukowski, Miller, Kerouac, Fante, and the autobiographical writers in general. Of course Dostoevsky is deep. Nabokov is a master of sensation and desire, of the slick phrase. All of this enhanced my perception of reality. In this sense, fiction served as a narrative form of philosophy, or human science rather than natural science.

In the last few years I've wrote less and less fiction, excepting some self-referential "meta-fiction," and concentrated on philosophy.

I'm not connected to any acknowledged philosophical community, excepting of course all the other living breathing thinking human beings in my life. We are all philosophers in the broad sense, as we all think sometimes on the grand issues. Yes?

For awhile, I wrote philosophy from the angle of what I playfully call "Satanism." Now this is just a philosophy that stresses the freedom of an individual to create him or herself. And of course it was largely inspired by Nietzsche, etc., and rock-n-roll, and Shakespeare, and all the great books I've been lucky enough to be exposed to.