Another extract from a Diary of Cornell's.

'the past'
a feeling that a particular moment of the past was transmuting a present moment with an unarmed but significant touch ( a lyrical feeling although there was the ever lessing strain of morbid obsession with the past - a thing from childhood never outgrown) here experiences like Long Island - once in Bayside riding in a car feeling an intolerable sadness at passing a blue house + from Westhampton one house in particular evoked a world of emotion as unexpected as significant.

different sights (pre-dawn etc) sometimes of the particular vs abstract
- the past becomes present


GC 44 (around 1945)

the transcendent experiences of threshing in the cellar, stripping the stalks onto newspapers, the sifting of the dried seeds, then the pulverizing by hand and storing in boxes.

These final siftings were used for habitat (imaginative) boxes for birds, principally owls. The boxes were given a coating of glue on the insides then the grass dust thrown in and shaken around until all the sides had an even coating to give them the aspect of a tree-trunk or nest interior

From the biography Utopia Parkway by Deborah Solomon

'To sign and date a work is to acknowledge that it is finished and Cornell was wary of such acknowledgments ; he proffered to think he could return at any point to all that he started, that even the past was never really the past, to paraphrase Proust.


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Utopia-Parkway-Life-Joseph-Cornell/dp/0878466843/ref=sr_
1_29?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209918529&sr=1-29

A very thorough look into Cornell's life, from his birth to his death.

History's 100 Best Composers,
Helen L Kaufmann 8:30
morning after with it's "back to life" freshness although that element of cloudness - that flavor of drugged sleep of infinitely varying degrees - experienced with the good and bad so mixed as to never satisfactory elucidation or recording too cold for hummingbirds - breakfast time

Cornell Notes.

'Riding by car one takes too much for granted, and personal reactions lessened by conversations'

Joseph Cornell