the lawless heart

The most important, most extreme, and most incurable dispute is that waged in us by two of our most basic strivings: the one that desires form, shape, definition, and the other, which protests against shape, and does not want form. Humanity is constructed in such a way that it must define itself and then escape its own definition. Reality is not something that allows itself to be completely contained in form.

Form is not in harmony with the essence of life, but all thought which tries to describe the imperfection also becomes form and thereby confirms only our striving for it.That entire philosophical and dialectic of ours takes place against the background of an immaturity which is called shapelessness, which is neither darkness nor light, but exactly a mixture of everything: ferment, disorder, impurity, and accident.

Gombrowicz

I shall not refrain [he says] from including among these precepts a new and speculative idea, which although it may seem trivial and almost laughable, is none the less of great value in quickening the spirit of invention. It is this: that you should look at certain walls stained with damp or at stones of uneven colour. If you have to invent some setting you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills, and valleys in great variety; and then again you will see there battles and strange figures in violent action, expression of faces, and clothes, and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose strokes you may find every named word which you can imagine.
---Leonardo