"Ren continued, 'There may not be any reason for them to ever meet.' And with such an able conduit of information between the two artists, he may be right. Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and True to Life not only describe the process of art making, but the process of communicating about and experiencing the world. They read as roadmaps of the evolution of the act of being, and it seems that when the travelers live as willfully and truthfully as Robert Irwin, David Hockney, and Lawrence Weschler, life and art cease to imitate each other. They simply converge."

"Now light and time, stripped of purely metaphysical functions, are agents of a new opening to language, reconfigured on patterns of incongruities and asymmetrical viewing that mark the true experiences from which the poem arises. Looking at "Le Repos Du Vieillard" is not to see rest but a portrait of imminent death, skillfully delineated in shade and tones as though we were looking a surrealist painting; a transformation of stillness and finality of life into ghastly insect body and of the place of death (“a house of cards”) itself into Tartarean hell."

All I’m doing is gazing into a gaze. His gaze, the gaze of a dead man. I want my vertigo to be symbiotic, but I never met—and never will meet—Larry Levis.