when earle brown wrote "is and as it is it is"...

"i have always found that the most enlivening thing about art, or anything else, was its mystery and its being beyond my particular experiential conditioning, and therefore, understanding. there is of course, no such thing as complete understanding but there comes to be a familiarity and acceptance of something which one spends time with which might as well be called understanding. when this occurs, the mystery and the real poetic life go out of it... not out of the work, but out of my response to it... and what is left is the form, the technique and poetry which is not longer vital. there is a great deal of admirable form, technique and non-vital poetry which i can admire as such intellectually but find completely unrewarding poetically."

"i have always been drawn primarily to magic and mathematics... in that order. to magic in the sense that everything is and as it is it is magical----i don't understand it... the impenetrable infinite complexities and connections of all things."

earle brown from his notebooks, 1952-1955