'Art Is Distinction: Process Is Not Being'

“The words you see are all there is worth seeing.” Adagia are maxims, proverbs, the root of our current word, adage. It entered English from the Latin in the sixteenth century. In one of his pamphlets, Milton refers to “quips and snapping adagies.” Erasmus published the first edition of his Adagia in 1500. It contained some eight-hundred sayings. Later editions totaled more than 4,100 entries. Charles Gullans (1929-93) titled one of his poems, collected in Letter from Los Angeles (John Daniel and Co., 1990), “Adagia”: "Stolid and literal, I take my stand. Art is decision, not the chance, unplanned Performance of a trivial vulgar act. It is selection of the crucial fact. Though brute particulars still litter sense, Art’s the suppression of irrelevance. Life is the constant pressure of the new, But art, the final judgment of the true, Measures resistance to inane distraction. Art is the model of coherent action. It is not my confusion or confession, It’s not a gossip’s tale concerning…