Joseph Cornell. I met him when I was in, I screened his films for the first time in New York the day JFK was shot and there is a long story there, but he came to the... he gave all his films to Anthology and, of course, you know, if you went to his house, I mean there were... he had... there was some similarities with George Maciunas of Fluxus movement where George was working on many, many, many pieces at the same time, many little boxes. They were, like, growing naturally, like... every day he added something to that or that. Joseph Cornell was the same. He had various boxes in the basement in every corner there that were in different stages of growth, of changing. In any case, he came to... and he played games with us very... we went... Luckily, whenever I went to him to visit him, P Adams Sitney went with me who has a very good memory, I don't have such memory as P Adams Sitney and Cornell would say, 'Okay, the line in my film The Legend Fountains, that line there... and I forget the line, where is it from?' Luckily P Adams knew it, the Garcia Lorca. That, of course, made his day and our day and we were okay because we... we were knowledgeable enough.
So he came to Anthology's opening and there he sits on the steps there and Parker Tyler, a poet... Actually a better poet than anybody knows right now because I think he's one of the underestimated poets, but he also wrote a great, I think, novel, the only one together with Henry Ford, Wilder, Young and Wilder or whatever the title is, but I think it's great, very ungrammatical great, and has written several books on various artists. An art historian and was very knowledgeable in the avant-garde film, wrote several very good essays on... on early work of Brakhage, Markopoluos. So he sits next to Cornell, there they are, they talk and then Joseph Cornell turns to Parker Tyler and said, 'Parker, I would like... maybe you could return to me that box I gave you, remember, ten years ago I gave you that box?' And Parker Tyler is shocked. 'Joseph, I mean... you...you gave it, didn't you give this to me?' And Joseph Cornell says, 'Yes, but you didn't see the invisible strings attached to it'. That is Joseph Cornell, because Parker Tyler wrote something somewhere about something that Joseph Cornell did not like so then he... he wanted, you know, it back.