Throughout a career spanning half a century, Stan Brakhage wrote controversial esays on the art of film and its intersections with poetry, music, dance, and painting. During the last decade of his life, these appeared in the Toronto quarterly, "Musicworks." Now collected, they explore primary concerns beyond film, including his aesthetic theories based on the phenomenology of human cognition. He is as brilliant discussing Gertrude Stein or romantic love as he is on child psychology, astronomy, and physiology, all the while teasing out correspondences between the arts, and upending conventional ideas of how we perceive. His investigations of other artists are models of sympathetic intuition and generosity. His prose is filled with flashes of insight, elaborated metaphors, playful elisions, shorthand puns and neologisms, personal digressions, surprising epiphanies, leaps of faith, and affronts to authority.