Emily Carr: Before Attending to My Muse

Before I attend to a few images suggesting a poem, I'll jot down a few impressive (to me) bullets from Emily's Hundreds:

  • Ghost flowers grow in the woods -- beauties. I shall take a big clump home. They are mystery flowers
  • Yet, as I was mounting sketches today I felt so many shortcomings and I believe more and more that one's only real critic, the one that counts, is one's own soul
  • The educated look for technique and pattern, colour quality, composition. Spirit touches them little and it's the only thing that counts
  • It's my own awful longing to possess a dog and of course it's very real to me [Emily is most certainly talking about artistic "possession"--nothing dark or perverted here]
  • She was really interested in my work. She said that it appealed to her like religion. Art and religion you can't separate, for real art is religion, a search for the beauty of God deep in all things
  • living above paint, above colour, above design, even above form, searching the spirit
  • Poor soul, wrestling, striving to learn its lessons out of the old book of flesh, tossing the book impatiently aside -- stupid dull print -- and picking it up again to reread the words and get the sense clearer
  • There's a row of pine trees that won't leave me alone

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