January 9, 2022:
Le Douanier, the customs collector.
He reached me then through the mystery of his images. He reaches me now through the tenacity of his struggle.
Ridiculed by critics, his hallucinatory canvases speak of perseverance as much as dream.
Rousseau, Jarry, Apollinaire, Satie. They all resonate for me today as they did on first introduction, in Shattuck's The Banquet Years, recommended by an aleatorily encountered art teacher at UCSD, in an otherwise miserable and unproductive quarter, fall 1976.