The Pointed Nib

Carrion Crow (1860, John James Audubon) 

Brevity is the soul of wit.

     ~ Shakespeare

                    Here I write to respond to image, song or story; to clarify (foremost to myself) aesthetic experience; to arrange ideas in some form of coherent opinion, or even fiction, that they may persist in memory, and might even be worthy of a reader. 

                    The pen’s tip took its name from the bird’s beak, honed by Nature to a sharp point. It is my aim to be precise and concise as that avian implement that tackles large things in small nibbles.

                    Though I often write within the space of the margin, like medieval monks that ever patiently glossed sacred texts, I desire, like the mystics, for that rare transport beyond the aesthetic—to the ecstatic.

(Santa Barbara, 2017)