(gentle music) (car horns honking) - [Louise] If we recognize what we are made of and how we are made, put together, the rest is an extension.

And I can still go back to say that it's your consciousness and your awareness of all this.

So all that I have said is all along the line that I don't want to make anything.

What I am doing is living the livingness of life and using all these things to extend this awareness.

- She really overturned any stereotypes about the nature of the work of women artists.

- It's very difficult to forget of Louise Nevelson.

I mean, her images is so firm and so solid.

- Her energy was so crystallized, particularly by the '70s that I guess it would scare most people.

- She was a hard drinking, hard living woman who didn't wanna be dragged down by all these supposed perceived old-fashioned stereotypes of the weak, submissive, obedient, disciplined woman.

- I knew her for 40 years, but the last 14 years when I was on the Bowery, my address was Spring Street and she was on Spring Street.

And it was just work, work, work.

- Be embarrassed to talk about being happy.

She said, "That's ridiculous.

The only thing that matters is work."

- As far as Louise was concerned, her work was Louise.

- She was determined to let the world know who she was at all costs.

And no one was going to stop her because she knew her worth, don't you see?

- And then it was her own dedication.

She obviously, she was her own goddess.

And it isn't every artist who is their own goddess.

- She did want very much to take her cubist being and put it in a form that had not been seen before.

And she did just that.

And that is her greatness.

(gentle music) - [Louise] My whole life has been centered.

You can use the word self-center if you wish.

I think it's a great word.

Who am I going to center myself on if not on my inner self?

(soft jazz music) - If you're interested in art and the uniqueness of the important artists, all you need to do, it's not complicated.

Look at the work.

(soft jazz music continues) - The very few artists who are comfortable with no color.

They need the blue, greens, yellows, and reds to be able to carry forth whatever their vision or their impression is of what they're looking at.

Louise was looking inside her and she wasn't seeing color.

She was seeing ideas and concepts, philosophical ideas, emotional reactions to something in her life or to something that had happened on the street.

So that the color was not necessary for her to bring forth an emotion.

The emotion was more in the structure that she was creating.

- You know, it might be discarded toilet seats and wooden boxes from the street, but she managed to transform all of that into something very moving and very beautiful.

- [Speaker] She made sense and order and solidity out of chaos.

Those strewn objects along the street became these beautiful moving objects once they went through the transformative hands and eyes and heart of Louise Nevelson.

(soft jazz music continues) - There's somebody who is aware.

That was an important lesson that my grandmother kept saying to me.

And I didn't understand it till now that I'm older because I was living in a conventional world in Connecticut and she was in New York in a very urban cosmopolitan environment.

And everybody seemed to be very aware.

And I didn't really know what awareness was.

So I was all intimidated about that.

But I think now, I do understand what the awareness is.

And I think that goes into what she looked at as the fourth dimension.

And I think it's an area outside of time where you feel very contained and very connected to yourself, and you're certainly very aware of the medium that's bringing you to that spot.

I personally do it through my own sculpture.

I think that's what my grandmother meant.

I think that's what she meant by awareness and by the fourth dimension.

But that's a very complex concept to understand, particularly if you haven't had the experience or have a vehicle to get there.

I think people get it through religion.

That's another vehicle or harmonious spot.

It could be anything.

Maybe it's, you know, picking up garbage off the street and putting it on a truck.

It could be through any vehicle, so we need to be open.

Which I think my grandma would say that's awareness also to understand that it doesn't have to be through the arts.

It could be through anything.

Tilling the ground and planting seeds.

But I think once you understand it, it's liberating.

- [Louise] I suppose that with all the great minds through the ages, they still have not got too close to what life is all about or what life is.

I mean, men like Einstein, as an example, have given us great things and others nevertheless think that in all the history of humanity, we still find daily that life in its essence is a mystery.

And psychiatry and psychology and all the other fancy things are not getting closer.

They are giving us another facet.

Like in a mirror, there's a reflection, but they're not getting closer to the essence of what life is.

I bring that out because within my being, I have not been influenced so much by all these outside things.

First, I don't suppose I would even understand them.

And second, they don't interest me.

But I am interested in my life and my awareness and my consciousness.

And for that, I have worked so desperately is to get a little more aware, a little more consciousness of what my life is about.

Because what my life's about is what everybody's life's about.

Only the other people get or have been cowed down to make a living, they'll say, or to eat, which embarrasses the hell out of me.

Or they have a concept of truths, which boxes them in like a prison.

Or they have a concept of lies which boxes them in like a prison.

But if you wanna go deeper, how many people on earth face themselves anyway?

How many dare to look in the mirror and say they have lived according to their own being?

- I mean, I believe most people are living on a sort of two-dimensional plane, three-dimensional because we're physical, but we're not very deep.

And we know this through the media that we exist that way.

But if you come in with that perspective, you're not gonna understand the artwork or you're going to have difficulty.

If you've developed to the next step of awareness, then you will be able to appreciate the artwork more than just pieces of wood stuck together in a kind of interesting way, painted black.

(soft jazz music continues) (soft jazz music) - She was an immigrant from Russia.

She was Jewish, quite tall for her age, and had dark hair, a fairly dark complexion.

She didn't look like the typical New Englander from Rockland, Maine.

So where did this come from?

You know, where did this sort of artistic drive come from?

I find just fascinating.

But Louise says that from her early childhood believed that she was going to be a great artist.

I mean, I think that she had this drive within her, a real sense, a passion about herself, that she was destined for greatness.

And she followed that path determinedly against really great odds.

- [Louise] So I recall from the very first, my earliest recollections were that almost everybody said I was an artist.

And then when I got to Rockland and went to school, the minute I was in school, all the teachers knew I was creative.

And that's a long time ago when teachers overlooked these things.

But it was never overlooked in my life.

Evidently, it was so evident that it was just never overlooked.

And I was fortunate in my schooling and in my environment because I never had anything but a acknowledgement that I was creative.

- She gravitated to art at a young age because of course when she came to this country, she didn't speak English.

And she had to understand things through the eye.

- I think she was always very conscious that she was not an English-speaking native.

And so she was more visually oriented rather than literally.

- The eye was really her most important sense.

And it also goes back to an early childhood experience in Russia when her father left Russia to come to this country.

She was very traumatized and too young to understand what had happened.

And she stopped speaking for six months.

She became mute.

(soft jazz music continues) - [Louise] My father came to this country almost two years before we came.

Now it may be a little different, but at that time, no matter who you were, if you didn't speak the English language, you were green on.

Here in New York, they call it a kite.

Down there, they called it a green.

It was a handicap.

- [Laurie] She was part of a very small immigrant community and she felt very much like an outsider.

- I think that her thoughts about Maine were not not too happy.

- Remember they were Jews in a wasp town.

- I think Louise felt very less than, you know, comfortable, comfortable in Maine.

- [Speaker] She adored her mother and always talked about how beautiful she was.

I don't recall her ever talking about her father.

- Well, the fact that her father was a junk dealer is extremely important to her development as an artist.

She never admitted he was a junk dealer during her lifetime.

It was a fact I discovered in the 1910 census when she was 11 years old.

When she had her breakthrough as an artist in the '50s, it was because she was taking old junk she found in the gutters of New York, old pieces of wood.

And she was making art with them.

She painted them black.

She gave them a certain elegance and unity and made these quite fascinating assemblages.

And I felt very strongly that this was a way to redeem her father, to take junk, to take debris from the streets, turn it into art.

This was very important to her psychologically.

- The fact that her father was a junk man or a dealer in wood, however you wanna phrase it, politely or impolitely.

I think that, yes, maybe she had an affinity for wood.

But was that because she was Russian?

Was it a cultural thing?

Or was it something that developed in Maine as a young girl?

- Yeah, I didn't know her father was a junk dealer.

She never spoke of him as being a junk dealer.

Maybe she did to someone.

But I thought he was in the lumber business and thereafter, Louise for years, devoted herself to nothing but wood was certainly significant.

(jazz music) - Many people have said some of these dark wooden forms and even the later steel forms are very much influenced by New York, by the subway columns, by the buildings at night, by the patterns of light in the windows.

But I see Maine in them as well.

I mean, I see tar blackened piers when the tide goes out.

I see lobster pots.

So I think you'll find that Maine is there, is apparent in her work.

(soft jazz music) (soft jazz music continues) - Of course, Louise's having been brought up in Rockland has everything to do with her life.

I think that too much has been said of the literalness of it.

- I don't find it in my song.

(laughs) - Was it dark and black piers along the East River in New York after her marriage?

Who knows?

- I never really saw a connection, except that she grew up in Maine and there was wood around and the other lobster traps, the driftwood.

And I mean, obviously, that's all gonna make part of who she is.

But I always thought the city of New York and the high buildings and, you know, the cityscape was what excited her.

And block after block of buildings and that energy that that was all about.

- [Suzette] So many people even now are surprised to hear that she grew up in Maine because she seems to be the embodiment of New York City.

- So I would say that's where she was drawing her visuals from and things.

So I don't know about her childhood.

I don't see a direct connection, but with wisdom, you'd expect there is some connections.

- And there's a sort of waste-not, want-not mentality here of people who, you know, don't want to throw anything out if it still has a useful life.

And I think there's certainly some of that in Nevelson's work, you know, that this idea of taking common everyday materials, things that are really considered trash by many people.

And she, through the power of art, through the power of her vision, transforms them into these magnificent works of art.

- You can't separate these things.

You tie them all.

It's all a piece of cloth.

It's all part of the same piece of quilt, piece quilt.

Oh, absolutely.

- [Louise] Now, in Maine, as a little girl, there's so much nature, it overpowered me.

And I got very tired of nature and green trees because I couldn't handle it.

And it was only after I studied that, that I could go back and see light and shade and cube.

And so it became a very exciting thing to me.

- One of the most telling things about Louise in relation to Maine is that at one point, you know, New York can get very uncomfortable in the summer and artists do break away and go out to places like the Hamptons and so forth.

Louise did take a summer house one time and did not enjoy it.

She said there were too many leaves.

(chuckles) (soft jazz music continues) (soft jazz music) (soft jazz music continues) - It begins with drawing.

And she later said that all of her work really comes out of drawing, that she sees even the wood pieces as drawing in space.

And some of the earliest works that we have are these wonderful sinuous line drawings that she did studying with Kimon Nicolaides at the Art Students League.

She had just this gift of a very fluid, fast line.

And you can see even at that point in her career, really at the very beginning, that she had this eye and she had a unique individual way of conceiving three-dimensional forms within the two-dimensional confines of the paper.

How she filled the rectangle of the paper with these forms, to me, relates directly with how she later fills boxes with pieces of wood.

(soft jazz music continues) The paintings where she really started to explore principles of cubism and this interpreting of three-dimensional space into two-dimensional picture plane, sort of the flattening, compressing of space, a view of York Avenue where she took an apartment after she came back from studying with Hans Hofmann in Germany.

It's a very sort of simplified cubist approach, but she clearly is understanding the principles of cubism.

Rockland Meadows, Old County Road, which actually predates her studying with Hoffman.

She did this piece on a trip back to Rockland on the eve of her departure for Germany.

And there's this sense of joyousness about this piece, I think that just is sort of irrepressible that she had this, I guess, sense of real optimism at that time.

She was about to go to Germany and study with the person she most wanted to study with in the world.

So there's this sort of lighthearted joy about the piece.

When she comes back from studying with Hoffman, she starts a series of really intense portraiture.

The ones that I find the most fascinating are the ones that have sort of the seeds of what's going to come next.

And that's these box constructions.

A piece like Woman, Child, and Cats, where there's this fascinating sort of grid of rectangles in the background with the figures placed in front of them.

There's this placement of these figurative forms within the rectangular grid of the background, really a half step away from what she's gonna do next in wood.

In addition to that, these things are incredibly sculptural in their application of paint.

They're really thickly textured.

And so the surface texture, that patterning of the surface, the surface texture itself, and creating depth is starting to become very important to her.

And again, it's just a launching off point for what's going to come next.

A piece like Boy in Blue Shirt where the top knot of hair projects, you know, over an inch off the surface of the canvas.

It's just this piling up of paint.

It's a very sculptural application of paint.

(soft jazz music continues) You know, there's these wonderful self-portraits that are really a very revealing.

I think the most potent is the woman with the red tie around her hands.

She had suffered a series of setbacks at this point.

Her father had just passed away.

She had a falling out with her son, Mike.

Her dealer of several years, Karl Nierendorf, who was a great supporter and close friend, passed away suddenly of a heart attack.

I think she felt incredibly frustrated.

And here, she portrays herself with this sort of symbolic red line outlining her and actually binding her hands.

(soft jazz music continues) Throughout the '40s and into the early '50s, at the same time that she's doing paintings, she was also creating a three-dimensional figurative sculpture that were very influenced by the cubist works.

I see a bit of Picasso in here, some Lipchitz.

There's definitely a relationship to sort of Mayan sculpture, the sort of blocky forms of geometric forms of Mayan sculpture.

She did literally hundreds of these pieces that were primarily made out of either cast plaster that she would then carve and then paint black.

Or she used cast stone, a particular kind that was called Tattistone, that was developed by a man that she was studying with named Tatti.

(soft jazz music) Some of these were later cast in bronze.

They're largely figurative.

Some are based on animals, but more are based on the figure.

This is a transitional period for her while she's starting to develop her own mature vision.

(soft jazz music continues) - She always felt stronger and more beautiful than anyone around her.

And so she must have been a princess.

She must have been a queen.

(chuckles) I think that was the logical leap.

- She saw herself as this you know, I think princess or a star.

So that sense of royalty, of transformation, of alchemy, of mystery, it's a great part of the sort of theatrical presentation.

- She acted sort of like a queen or into royalty as we saw in some of her sculptures.

But I always felt it was just all about herself.

She didn't think you were a subject of hers.

She just felt like if you felt like a queen, you'd dress like a queen too.

You would doll yourself up and carry on.

So everybody had this opportunity.

She just took it.

- [Louise] In America years ago, artists wore berets.

They wore old clothes.

That was their symbol.

Just like a soldier wears his uniform.

That was their uniform.

And I always had a flare for clothes and liked them because I have a whole feeling about appearance.

And because I think you can very, very carefully identify a person by their appearance.

It's important.

It's not skin deep.

It's much deeper.

And consequently, I, in youth, had this kind of flamboyance and wore good clothes and wore attractive things.

And so I think that it was taken for granted that a woman of that sort couldn't be totally dedicated.

So I think because of their, not mine, because of their preconceived ideas that an artist had to look.

The older and the uglier they looked, the more they were convinced that there was a dedication.

Well, that again is preconceived cliches.

That's what I've been trying to break down all my life and still am.

(soft jazz music continues) - She planned it all.

She was very smart.

She made her persona.

She stayed with us overnight one time and I had a dinner party for her.

And she was in the upstairs guest room.

And the guests arrived and she was very late.

Louise would not come to a party in which someone else might come after her.

She wanted to make sure that she made her grand entrance.

She was very much aware of her appearance and herself as a work of art, I think.

- Well, she cut quite a figure.

She wore those eyelashes and she wore those marvelous coats and she was definitely a figure that was easily recognized.

- There's absolutely no question of it, but other people misunderstand it as being important.

It's not important to the art.

See, this is why I get a little impatient with people who want to just talk about all that, because that they then have missed what is important.

There's nothing wrong with Louis Nevelson's ambiance.

Many artists have it.

- Her dress was an extension of her artwork and her creative self.

And so she acknowledged it as that.

- [Louise] And I don't care if you make a hat or a dress or look at your linen or study your silver.

It's all creation.

I think 24 hours a day is creative.

It's not only the time that you are performing.

- [Speaker] I think everybody associates Louise with those eyelashes.

She didn't look like Louise without the eyelashes.

- She wore a double pair of mink eyelashes.

She said, "Just because I'm old, I don't think I have to stop being pretty.

And the eyelashes make me feel pretty."

And I thought that was wonderful reason for wearing them.

- Then of course the other thing was her Scaasi coat, which she wore.

Something like chinchilla and lined with paisley.

And it was Louise's practice to reverse the coat and wear the chinchilla inside and the paisley on the outside.

She was always shall we say, "Center stage.

Center stage."

And she was quite a ham.

Quite a ham.

- You know, we're all like three-year-olds.

They want to be on center stage at all.

Everybody likes that.

I don't know anybody.

You know, this business of shy people, I sometimes wonder about how much of it is real.

Of course she wanted attention.

Everybody wants to be loved.

- Yes, it was part of her persona, but on the other hand, I don't think that she ever wanted it to be drawing attention away from her sculpture.

If it brought you to the gallery, fine.

If it got her press coverage, fine.

She had been starved for recognition in the media for so long.

(soft jazz music) - We went to visit her and we were a little concerned because we felt uneasy that this was not a great part of New York City.

And we asked her, "Louise, why do you live here?"

And she says, "Because I'm so safe here."

And we said, "Well, how come?"

And she says, "Because this is the mafia area."

And she says, "The mafia would get such a bad reputation if anything happened to me right in their area."

So she said, "I feel quite safe here.

They look out for me."

- She loved Little Italy.

She became sort of the unofficial acknowledged queen of Little Italy.

And I think she really was rather attracted by those mafia types.

Our restaurateur where we shared a wall on Spring Street always carried a what is it called?

A piece underneath his clothing.

- It was in the walking distance of her Spring Street house, and we walked to this restaurant.

And of course, she's in her finery and always with a head scarf.

And we walked in and the maitre d' or the owner of the place was very much impressed by the fact that this is Louise Nevelson now coming into his restaurant.

And they took us down.

It was the table boy at the very back.

And we sat there and it was just, you felt as though you were the Queen of England who just arrived or something.

- I think she kind of liked that role.

The queen of Little England.

(soft jazz music continues) (soft jazz music continues) - [Speaker] The thing was, we had thought of sculpture as something that stood and you walked around it.

See, she changed all of that.

- [Speaker] She's really interpreting a three-dimensional thing into a two-dimensional sort of picture plane.

Your eye visually moves both across and into the piece.

The viewer sees them more in a frontal way than in a three-dimensional way of moving around the object in space.

- [Speaker] Another one of her great innovations was turning shadow to form.

- [Louise] I didn't want to make sculpture, and I didn't want to make form as such.

And I got through that very fast.

And I wanted really to get beyond that.

I want something else entirely.

I want that extra dimension like you are an architect that's building through shadow and light and dark.

See, so it isn't through the intellect.

It's through vision that you give form and structure to that place.

And so naturally, you are an architect.

- So a need to put these pieces of wood together and build, as she said, her world, her environment.

She was the architect of shadow, the architect of environment, or the grandmother of environment or whatever.

But she needed to build things.

That was her industrious desire.

So it's more architecture, her sculpture.

- [Louise] I think that the shadow, let's say for a better word, is the fourth dimension.

And that shadow, I think forms out of.

It's just not a fleeting shadow.

That means something.

I call it, for clarification, the fourth dimension.

I don't need so much material and matter to tune in and identify and recognize that fourth dimension.

And to me, that's remarkable and very wonderful.

Very wonderful.

(soft jazz music continues) - [Speaker] But what it's all about is form.

We forget that.

- For many years, of course, she used exclusively black.

And it was really those black painted wood pieces that catapulted her to the forefront of American sculpture.

Therefore, it was all the more eye-opening when she did a fully white piece, you know, Dawn's Wedding Feast for her first really big exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, following her years of using exclusively black.

And, you know, she said this was really her celebration, her marriage with the world.

You know, she wanted to do something that was completely unexpected.

And so, you know, this use of this virginal white after all these years of using the black, it was really a great surprise to many, but it was a brilliant move on her part, I think, too.

Because it showed that she wasn't locked into this one kind of working.

So she went on to do a number of other white pieces as well.

But it was this yin yang, you know.

What I see throughout Nevelson's work is this yin yang, this sense of the public persona and the very private one, the surface patterning of her work as opposed to pushing against the depths of it, the white against black.

There's just this beautiful sort of tension.

(soft jazz music continues) (soft jazz music continues) (soft jazz music) - [Louise] Yeah, I studied voice and piano.

And I studied modern dance for over 25 years just to free my body so I would free myself and have no handicaps.

I knew all this.

Not that one is a scholar, but you know your tools and what you need to say what you have to say.

- [Speaker] Modern dance really taught her about movement through space.

And I think if you think of her mature work and this idea of movement through space in terms of how our eye moves through the space of the constructions, I think that there is this sort of rhythmic building up of forms within her work that is related not only to dance, but to music.

It's been, you know, some of her pieces have been likened to a fugue of forms built up in sort of stanzas the way a piece of music might be built up.

- And she really created a symphony from the beginning of her work to the end.

- [Speaker] There's this beautiful rhythmic balance of the negative spaces and the positive spaces, the surface and the depth, one against the other to sort of compose the entire piece, the way a piece of music might be composed out of separate elements, but put together to make a whole.

- [Rufus] What we're getting at here is harmony and what unity means.

No matter whether you use notes to put it together or paint to put it together or wood to put it together.

(soft jazz music continues) - Endless Column, I remember first seeing it in Nate Berliawsky's dining room at the Thorndike Hotel.

But in 1984 or '83 when I said to Louise, "Let's do another show.

Do you want to do a retrospective and of another part of your career?

We haven't done all the terracottas.

We haven't really done too much with the prints or we haven't done a large wall of your drawings."

And she said, "No, let's do something totally new.

Let's use Endless Column in the alcove there as you come up the stairs."

"But that's an old piece.

I'll do you two new columns for the sides.

So you have the big old central piece."

And then she did two columns for the side.

So she wasn't living in the past in a retrospective way.

Yes, she was sad that Dawn's Wedding Feast got broken up.

Yes, she was sad that this had never been shown or that this had never been sold.

But she was always, even in 1985, just three years before she died, "I want it all new.

I did this fabric for the opera in St.

Louis.

I'll send you a great big piece of fabric.

You can use that in back of Endless Column."

And I did three thrones for the opera.

They only used one.

"I'll send you all three so you can see how I was thinking."

So that was her always going forward.

She never really regretted much in the past.

She never regretted men who would come in and out of her life or women who had come in or out of her life or shows missed or opportunities lapsed or something like that.

She was, "Let's go forward."

(soft jazz music continues) - And I had picked up this little black box and said," Oh, what's this?

"And she says," That's yours."

And so when she had turned her back, Mary said," Why don't you ask her to sign it?

And so I said," Louise, would you sign this piece?"

And she said, "Yes," and she went out in the kitchen and she got a regular kitchen carving knife and came in and signed her name on it.

(soft jazz music continues) And she would occasionally call me on Sunday mornings.

And I can remember she called me one time and she said the usual, I said, "How are you, Louise?"

And she says, "Not good."

And I said, "Well, what's wrong?"

And she says, "Oh, it's bad.

It's very bad".

And I said," Well, tell me what it is."

And she said, "I don't wanna talk about it."

And that's the last time I ever talked with her.

- She probably did have in her mind that they would get it eventually because Louise was uncanny about this.

She knew they were going to get it.

It was a question of when.

By this stage in her life, she knew who she was.

She knew that she was great.

She knew that she was original.

She just had to wait until they were ready.

- Art's about working it out on your own.

And that's in line with what you're saying is, yes, you have to work it out on your own.

So here's the final products.

Take a look at it.

Either you get it or you don't.

Keep coming back until you get it.

- We need to use our eyes and to see.

And then we don't need really to talk about it, but we need to feel it.

And if we do use our eyes and see it, we will feel it.

- It's very hard to put words to describe what you're experiencing because it's such a feeling process.

It's so intuitive.

To talk about it and describe it doesn't really ever, ever explain the feelings that you have and the experience.

(jazz music) (jazz music continues) - [Louise] The only reality that I recognize is my reality.

You see, it's other work.

(jazz music) (jazz music continues) (jazz music continues) It wasn't that I planned it as a blueprint, but the energy forced it, you know, to build itself like growing.

(jazz music continues) And I think all of this was a kind of psychic labor pains.

Like you have labor pains if you're gonna give birth to a child.

These are psychic labor pains.

And I don't think that it can be avoided.

(jazz music continues) (jazz music continues) Oh, I think I saw the object first.

Really?

No, I'm not in love with wood as such.

The forms, the forms were important.

If I love wood so much, I wouldn't paint it black.

I'd leave it.

(jazz music continues) Most of the pieces of wood came from the street.

They left marvelous things.

And of course, I'd take them home.

(jazz music continues) Sure, I'm ambitious, but that isn't the way I put it.

I feel that if you have energy, if you have great desires, you create energy yourself.

You see, because if you don't have those, well, you can't have a nice life.

(jazz music continues) (jazz music continues) You know, it's funny that no matter what one does in life, it hasn't got the vitality or the excitement of really living than when you are really working.

It's very interesting.

No matter what you're doing, when you're creating, there's an added energy that surpasses anything else.

May I say that I think that a person like myself, I will concede that I was dedicated.

And that art and creation was not art and creation, but it was a place to live in and breathe in.

And I can't quite put it in words, but there was no question about it.

So I had no choice.

Either you would stay there or cut your throat.

So anyone that has dedicated it, we use that word dedication as I was and am, have a blind spot.

You see, nature's very strange.

It blinds you to a great many other things.

That's what I'm talking about, the blind spot.

And so I saw no other world, but it gave me also very acute insights.

And I realized to fulfill my life as I saw it meant that I couldn't have departments in my head.

I had to have totality.

So I recognized that without any hesitation, there wasn't a moment in my life that I hesitated.

I had my convictions.

I wouldn't have done anything less than I did.

And I think that is it.

(soft jazz music) My concept of this great activity is the great thing in life.

It is life.

And I think it's been misunderstood.

People think that they're running, that they're running.

But for me, that is life.

My feeling about life was, and I had written some poems at the time, say in the 1930s, early '30s, that I was at sea.

And at sea, what can it be?

I remained so long at sea.

So that was a very critical, dangerous part in my life.

So I began not as a student, not as curious about anything, just that I wanted the straw to hang onto.

So I began in New York to go to everything, every ism and whatever it was.

And finally, I did begin to study metaphysics.

And in metaphysics, I found a few keys that were necessary and that I feel close to to this very day.

Now, I don't ask that to be the truth.

I'm not looking for the truth.

The truth is really deceptive.

It's constantly changing.

Also, I feel that anyone that dares to assume that they're going to find the truth, well, they're way off deep.

(soft jazz music continues)