esse Sharp, when he spoke, spoke suddenly out of his dark fuming silences like a mad oracle, ideas coming in spurts followed by parenthetic remarks. Unlike Kerouac's parentheses, which make archway upon archway into unmeasured spaces of other times and places, Jesse would make a title of a line he'd just spoken by sub-titling it with an aside to himself, a generous offering to his hearer of another way to think the thought, but this time, with a new stress! This unique diction was recorded by John Wieners in "A Poem for Early Risers", in lines perpendicular to the main body of the text. Oh, how I wish I could hear, again, Wiener's unique Boston voice doing Jesse's (nearly) inimitable rhythm.

Jesse, once a coal-miner, then painter, adventurer, was half-Apache, an impassioned double of the part Peruvian Gaugin, would come mornings to my attic studio in the flat I shared with him, his wife and child, sit on my bed beside me and reveal his views on Art, who he was.

"Why do I paint?"

"I paint so I don't die like a cockroach."

"If the public doesn't hate my work, I look to see what's the matter with it".

"Painting has given me back my life; I can see better what happened in the quarrel with my wife that day on Disappoint ment Rock". "Disappointment Rock" was the name of a painting that hung in my studio.

In those long, slow steps across the wide threshold of waking from my sleep, to be told, as I was one morning,

"As I see it, the Universe is one huge painting. The job of the Painter is, in each painting, to sweep aside invisibility".

I was instantly awake, with a new, huge vision of the dimensions of art in space and time and how knowledge in the Cosmos was taking its course in and out of works of art.

"An Artist most nevair be in love; t'eez too hard on the nairves. You know, zee arteestic imagination "
-Georges de Batz

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