Parabola's Spring 1988 issue: The Creative Response Parabola: We were originally going to call this issue "The Creative Process," but we ultimately felt "The Creative Response" was closer to what was really interesting. A work of art is not something created out of oneself in isolation so much as a response to something much larger. Do you agree? Paul Reynard: It depends on what you mean by "response." It seems to me there is a deep necessity in man to express himself. But exactly what does it mean to express myself? To express what of myself? It seems to me that all arts respond to the same need, the need to express something which I could never discover in any ordinary way, something that needs to be sought for, that doesn't come by itself. In painting, in writing, the work very seldom just comes out. It has to be reworked, approached again and again, even if one starts with a very precise idea. Each time it is a repetition of the same attempt to find this possibility which is usually a hidden possibility. So it is something very personal which at the same time has a larger dimension, too. When a work succeeds in speaking to many others, obviously both are there. --from "The Transmission of Content" Cover: "I.N.R.I." by Paul Reynard Oil on canvas, 1986. Private collection. Photograph by David Heald In this issue:

• "The Central Man of All The World" by William Anderson
  - Works of art as storehouses of psychic energy
• "Combing Coyote's Hair" by Anne Twitty
  - How the gods we create, create us
• "Echoes of Infinity"
  - An interview with Seyyed Hossein Nasr
• "Proportion and tile Living World" by Rachel Fletcher
  - Nature and universal structural principles
• "Mark Rothko: They Are Not Pictures" by Roger Lipsey
  - Images lying between the earthly and the transcendent
• "The Transmission of Content"
  - An interview with Paul Reynard
• "The Artist As Yogi, The Yogi as Artist" by William K. Mahony
  - Contemplation and the creative process
• "The Interviewer" by P. L. Travers
  - "Where did you get that idea?"
• "A Slow Air" by Janet Heyneman
  - Making a vow to grow

Tangents - Reviews

• "The Vision Beyond" by Douglas Thorpe
  - A review of "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985"

Epicycles - Traditional stories from around the world

• "The Rose" / Jewish
• "Every Dot Will Be Alive" / Japanese
• "Tansen's Teacher" / Sufi
• "Caedmon's Songs" / Christian
• "The Seventh Ancestor" / Dogon (African)
• "Shiva Nataraja" / Hindu