Cy Twombly: The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning.
Mike Davis: Ships disappear there often.
Twombly: It’s totally blank.
Davis: Sure. It’s terrible out there.
Twombly: It goes beyond. I don’t know how to handle it.
Davis: You have to struggle for its context, its interpretation—against the forces who’d like to pin it to the wall and call it a pretty picture. It changes lives.
Twombly: Have you ever seen it? I never have.
***
Davis: There was a period—and I told this story to my friends, who thought I was taking drugs or something—but there was a period when, every day during my run, a coyote would come and lope alongside of me.
Twombly: Well, you know, trance and ecstasy are slightly different.
Davis: Right. They can be gentrified.
***
Twombly: Before, I used to smoke and look, because smoking is very conducive to stimulating the mind.
Davis: There was a ruthless honesty then.
***
Twombly: The expanse is so beautiful, and then the river goes off in the distance like the music; there's a vast bucolic space to it, on and on.
Davis: All the captive intellectuals and artists say they want to destroy the museums.
Twombly: Do you think so?
Davis: Yeah.