I have an idea. Why don't we each pick two or three books for each of the others to read over the break, and then we can come back and have a delicious creative orgy of cross-pollination?
So, when you want to add something to the reading list, post it here, and then we can finalize it when we get closer to break.
AND ASA USE THE TAGS FEATURE FOR CHRISSAKES.
Love,
Mark
Friday, November 30, 2007
This is interesting...
Email from my stepdad douglas, if anyone wonders why i'm "strange", it may come from things like this:
"Asa,
We approach the annual occasion to bribe to Helios to get him to return. Since, however, he has not failed
to reangle his gyre northward at this time of year over millions of eons, we have become complacent and
turned the religious plea into a Dionysian, Lord of Misrule, Saturnalia. However, I intend to perform at least
a token gesture to Helios, fearing that we may yet suffer for forgetting Hume's observation that, regardless
of how many coincidental joinings of events, we cannot ever be assured of causal connection. Perhaps
standing one morning in the cold and wet with a lit candle awaiting his arrival. Or some such.
Which is by way of bringing up that annual ritual of each person inflicting on loved ones stuff they think the
other should have, misunderstanding character and taste, being dully inobservant, or just just eager to get
the prickly duty out of the way in some way not too offensive."
But this got me thinking about poetry, and how great it is.
Yes, mark, the atomic bomb, particularly apocalypse narratives of any kind are very interesting.
If we arrange something like
Initial situation - call to journey - descent into the unknown - meeting the "low point" (this is where apocalypse comes in) - confronting the self/sacrifice - reconciliation - apotheosis - return...
So many things/styles fit into this because it really reflects the full human spectrum. Not that we don't need to be specific.
Eliot:
Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
Whem the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?
(okay, so gey pin used it, but it's one of the classics of western literature, from Kafka's the Trial).
I will look up and post Rilke and the Gnostic gospels, as well as a whole fuck ton of other stuff when I get time.
love love
Asa
"Asa,
We approach the annual occasion to bribe to Helios to get him to return. Since, however, he has not failed
to reangle his gyre northward at this time of year over millions of eons, we have become complacent and
turned the religious plea into a Dionysian, Lord of Misrule, Saturnalia. However, I intend to perform at least
a token gesture to Helios, fearing that we may yet suffer for forgetting Hume's observation that, regardless
of how many coincidental joinings of events, we cannot ever be assured of causal connection. Perhaps
standing one morning in the cold and wet with a lit candle awaiting his arrival. Or some such.
Which is by way of bringing up that annual ritual of each person inflicting on loved ones stuff they think the
other should have, misunderstanding character and taste, being dully inobservant, or just just eager to get
the prickly duty out of the way in some way not too offensive."
But this got me thinking about poetry, and how great it is.
Yes, mark, the atomic bomb, particularly apocalypse narratives of any kind are very interesting.
If we arrange something like
Initial situation - call to journey - descent into the unknown - meeting the "low point" (this is where apocalypse comes in) - confronting the self/sacrifice - reconciliation - apotheosis - return...
So many things/styles fit into this because it really reflects the full human spectrum. Not that we don't need to be specific.
Eliot:
Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
Whem the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always�
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. "It is possible," says the doorkeeper, "but not at the moment." Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior. Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says: "If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him." These are difficulties the man from the country has not expected; the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted, and wearies the doorkeeper by his importunity. The doorkeeper frequently has little intervies with him, asking him questions about his home and many other things, but the questions are put indifferently, as great lords put them, and always finish with the statement that he cannot be let in yet. The man, who has furnished himself with many things for his journey, sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts everything, but always with the remark: "I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything." During these many years the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper. He forgets the other doorkeepers, and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing access to the Law. He curses his bad luck, in his early years boldly and loudly; later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in his yearlong contemplation of the doorkeeper he has come to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the fleas as well to help him and to change the doorkeeper's mind. At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law. Now he has not very long to live. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low toward him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the man's disadvantage. "What do you want to know now?" asks the doorkeeper; "you are insatiable." "Everyone strives to reach the Law," says the man, "so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?" The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and, to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear: "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."
(okay, so gey pin used it, but it's one of the classics of western literature, from Kafka's the Trial).
I will look up and post Rilke and the Gnostic gospels, as well as a whole fuck ton of other stuff when I get time.
love love
Asa
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Theatre is...
First up is a song I really love, thought I'd share it with you guys:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/e7knsa
****
Some Excerpts from Boal's "Rainbow of Desire":
"Theatre is the first human invention and also the invention which paves the way for all other inventions and discoveries. Theatre is born when the human being discovers that it can observe itself; when it discovers that, in this act of seeing, it can see itself, see itself in situ: see itself seeing."
"Theatre is the passionate combat of two human beings on a platform."
"The great general themes are inscribed in the small personal themes and incidents. When we talk about a strictly individual case, we are also talking about the generality of similar cases and we are talking about the society in which this particular case can occur."
****
An excerpt from "The Empty Can", a short story by Hayashi Kyoko. I am really interested in Atomic Bomb literature, and texts, and I have a ton more from Delicious Movements last year. (Something about the transformative effects of that experience interest me greatly, but also I'm interested in the things that were lost in that moment: lives, bodies, words, ideas, emotions, etc.)
After paying our respects at the grave, we sat down by the roots of the oak tree on the grounds of K temple, overlooking the city, and talked about our memories of Miss T. Kinuko had been there when Miss T died. She hadn't actuall identified the body, but she had witnessed the moment when Miss T, struck in the forehead by the blinding flash, had melted into the light and disappeared. Just at that instant, Miss T had opened her mouth wide, and yelled something to Kinuko. Of course she hadn't been able to hear the words. It might simply have been a scream, but Kinuko had never stopped thinking that somehow she wanted to understand Miss T's last words.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/e7knsa
****
Some Excerpts from Boal's "Rainbow of Desire":
"Theatre is the first human invention and also the invention which paves the way for all other inventions and discoveries. Theatre is born when the human being discovers that it can observe itself; when it discovers that, in this act of seeing, it can see itself, see itself in situ: see itself seeing."
"Theatre is the passionate combat of two human beings on a platform."
"The great general themes are inscribed in the small personal themes and incidents. When we talk about a strictly individual case, we are also talking about the generality of similar cases and we are talking about the society in which this particular case can occur."
****
An excerpt from "The Empty Can", a short story by Hayashi Kyoko. I am really interested in Atomic Bomb literature, and texts, and I have a ton more from Delicious Movements last year. (Something about the transformative effects of that experience interest me greatly, but also I'm interested in the things that were lost in that moment: lives, bodies, words, ideas, emotions, etc.)
After paying our respects at the grave, we sat down by the roots of the oak tree on the grounds of K temple, overlooking the city, and talked about our memories of Miss T. Kinuko had been there when Miss T died. She hadn't actuall identified the body, but she had witnessed the moment when Miss T, struck in the forehead by the blinding flash, had melted into the light and disappeared. Just at that instant, Miss T had opened her mouth wide, and yelled something to Kinuko. Of course she hadn't been able to hear the words. It might simply have been a scream, but Kinuko had never stopped thinking that somehow she wanted to understand Miss T's last words.
TECH STUFF
Ok. Gedney, in response to your post about putting articles on the blog, I think it's best to just leave the a link in an entry and we can all have easy access that way.
****
Second, I found a relatively easy way to share songs. The steps:
1. Go to www.sendspace.com
2. Follow the instructions. They are relatively simple, and I hope that as a group we are at least tech savvy enough to figure this one out. (I considered using an emoticon here but didn't. I am pleased with myself)
3. Once the file has finished uploading, you'll get a dowload link on the page as well as one at whatever email you entered on the first screen. You can share that link with us in a blog entry and that way it will remain archived as well.
4. This website can be used for single songs, but it can also accommodate much larger files (up to 100 MB, I think). If you have a lot of music to share, you can create a zip file and upload the zip to share.
****
Lastly, let's start making judicious use of blog tags, shall we? When you go to the new post window, in the lower right-hand corner of the place where you type there is a small area to enter tags for the post.
For example, I tagged this post "tech", which will make it easier for us to find any tech related posts more quickly in the future.
We can start doing this with all our posts. For example, if you're posting text, tag the entry "text" and then also maybe with specific authors, like "Beckett" or "Rumi". That way, we can easily access all of the posts relating to certain authors or containing certain pieces of text.
Also let's tag any entries about events or concerts "events", and so forth.
Hopefully all this shiz will help us start building an easily navigable (is that a word?) library of texts and sources from which to draw on.
****
Second, I found a relatively easy way to share songs. The steps:
1. Go to www.sendspace.com
2. Follow the instructions. They are relatively simple, and I hope that as a group we are at least tech savvy enough to figure this one out. (I considered using an emoticon here but didn't. I am pleased with myself)
3. Once the file has finished uploading, you'll get a dowload link on the page as well as one at whatever email you entered on the first screen. You can share that link with us in a blog entry and that way it will remain archived as well.
4. This website can be used for single songs, but it can also accommodate much larger files (up to 100 MB, I think). If you have a lot of music to share, you can create a zip file and upload the zip to share.
****
Lastly, let's start making judicious use of blog tags, shall we? When you go to the new post window, in the lower right-hand corner of the place where you type there is a small area to enter tags for the post.
For example, I tagged this post "tech", which will make it easier for us to find any tech related posts more quickly in the future.
We can start doing this with all our posts. For example, if you're posting text, tag the entry "text" and then also maybe with specific authors, like "Beckett" or "Rumi". That way, we can easily access all of the posts relating to certain authors or containing certain pieces of text.
Also let's tag any entries about events or concerts "events", and so forth.
Hopefully all this shiz will help us start building an easily navigable (is that a word?) library of texts and sources from which to draw on.
Rumi Poem
I used to be shy.
You made me sing.
I used to refuse things at table.
Now I shout for more wine.
In somber dignity, I used to sit
on my mat and pray.
Now children run through
and make faces at me.
Also, Marcela said something interesting yesterday in Script Analysis about collecting images/text from research. When you collect a bunch of texts, usually, when you look back, from a large distance, you see very clearly the world that's assembled. So that's just something to consider as we go through this.
Gedney, those are pretty fucking great. Thanks. Love the Murakami.
You made me sing.
I used to refuse things at table.
Now I shout for more wine.
In somber dignity, I used to sit
on my mat and pray.
Now children run through
and make faces at me.
Also, Marcela said something interesting yesterday in Script Analysis about collecting images/text from research. When you collect a bunch of texts, usually, when you look back, from a large distance, you see very clearly the world that's assembled. So that's just something to consider as we go through this.
Gedney, those are pretty fucking great. Thanks. Love the Murakami.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
I think i am too scattered to make a huge comprehensive post.
But I will say that in buddhism we have the idea that when you say a word with a certain unity of being, put the word at the top of your head, only the word, yes, something happens. We say "gate gate parasangate parasangate bodhi svaha!" which means, roughly, "gone, gone, into the gone beyond, completely into the gone beyond."
And really I think something I took away from this summer was that presence is linked to perception in the doer. That the way I see the world is how my presence changes.
Hmm, some texts I will post are Rilke poems, from 4 quartets by Eliot, Kafka, Jesus' words in the Gospel of Thomas (does anyone else get turned on by the gnostic gospels?), Dostoevsky, and hopefully more modern poets. Hikmet is a good one.
So yeah, will get those up. Yes, here, I will cut and paste. Err or not but I will find a way.
Okay and I love you guys, really, the prospect of working and singing and training and making theater with people, really being here, is a wonderful thing.
But I will say that in buddhism we have the idea that when you say a word with a certain unity of being, put the word at the top of your head, only the word, yes, something happens. We say "gate gate parasangate parasangate bodhi svaha!" which means, roughly, "gone, gone, into the gone beyond, completely into the gone beyond."
And really I think something I took away from this summer was that presence is linked to perception in the doer. That the way I see the world is how my presence changes.
Hmm, some texts I will post are Rilke poems, from 4 quartets by Eliot, Kafka, Jesus' words in the Gospel of Thomas (does anyone else get turned on by the gnostic gospels?), Dostoevsky, and hopefully more modern poets. Hikmet is a good one.
So yeah, will get those up. Yes, here, I will cut and paste. Err or not but I will find a way.
Okay and I love you guys, really, the prospect of working and singing and training and making theater with people, really being here, is a wonderful thing.
Stuff!
The outer world--forms, temperatures, the moon--is a language we humans have forgotten or which we can scarcely distinguish. (Machen)
Even the articulate or brutal sounds must be all so many languages and ciphers that all have their corresponding keys--have their own grammar and syntax; and thus the least things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest. (Quincy)
The terrifying immensity of the firmament's abyss is an illusion, an external reflection of our abysses, perceived in a mirror. We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our hearts, for which God was willing to die...If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls. (Leon Bloy)
Every man is on earth to symbolizse something he is ignorant of and to realize a particle of a mountain of the invisible materials that serve to build the City of God.
There is no human being on earth capable of declaring the certitude of who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do, what his acts correspond to, his sentiments, his ideas, or what his real name is, his ending Name in the register of Light...History is an immense liturgical text where the iotas and the dots are worth no less than the entire verses or chapters, but the importance of one or the other is indeterminable and profoundly hidden.
Like the alchemist who sought the philosopher's stone with quicksilver,
I shall make every day words...
Give off the magic that was theirs
When Thor was both the God and the din,
The thunderclap and the prayer.
I shall say, in my fashion,
eternal things.
This dust that I am will be invulnerable.
I shall live by forgetting myself.
I shall be the face I glimpse and forget.
Masks! Agonies! Ressurections!
Will weave and unweave my life. (JL Borges)
What Are Years by Marianne Moore:
What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt,--
dubly calling, deafly listening--that
in misfortune, even in death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs
the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
find its continuing.
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is morality,
this is eternity.
In the Days of Prismatic Color by Marianne Moore:
not in the days of Adam and Eve, but when Adam
was alone; when there was no smoke and color was
fine, not with the refinement
of early civilization art, but because
of its originality; with nothing to modify it but the
mist that went up, obliqueness was a variation
of the perpendicular, plain to see and
to account for: it is no
longer that; nor did the blue-red-yellow band
of incandescence that was color keep its stripe: it also is one of
those things into which much that is peculiar can be
read; complexity is not a crime, but carry
it to the point of murkiness
and nothing is plain. Complexity,
moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead of
granting itself to be the pestilence that is, moves all a-
bout as if to bewilder us with the dismal
fallacy that insistence
is the measure of achievement and that all
truth must be dark. Principally throat, sophistication is as it al-
ways has been--at the antipodes from the init-
ial great truths. "Part of it was crawling, part of it
was about to crawl, the rest
was ropid in its lair." In the short-legged, fit-
ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiae--we have the classic
multitude of feet. To what purpose! Truth is no Apollo
Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over if it likes.
Know that it will be there when it says,
"I shall be there when the wave has gone by."
Time wasy down on you like an old ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there--to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you go there. (Murakami)
I turned faceup on the slab of stone, gazed at the sky, and thought about all the man-made satellites spinning around the earth. The horizon was still etched in a faint glow, and stars began to blink on in the deep, wine-colored sky. I gazed among them for the light of a satellite, but it was still too bright out to spot on with the naked eye. The sprinkling of stars looked nailed to the spot, unmoving. I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants of Sputnik, even now circling the earth, gravity their only tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep. (Murakami)
Also, I love all of Lolita, but I can't find any pieces from it that I especially love.
Also, Dubliners, by Joyce. Here's a part of Portrait of the Artist that I love too. It's right after he sees the bird-girl:
He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer, or a flower? Glimmering, trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than other.
As far as composition stuff, I looked at Anne Bogart's book, and her three basic components for grounding work are:
the question
the anchor
the structure
her examples are:
Culture of Desire
question: Who are we becoming in light of the pervasive and rapent consumerism that permeates our every move through life?
anchor: Andy Warhol
structure: Dante's Inferno
American Vaudeville
question: What are the roots of American popular entertainment?
anchor: the actual testimonies and experiences of people who created and performed in vaudeville
structure: a vaudeville show
I in no way am trying to push us towards doing work like the SITI company, but I think looking at those three components eventually could be interesting...
Also, I'm really interested in Beckett. I don't know about Asa, but I loved the text in Rockaby. He's also written novels.
Also E.E. Cummings and Dylan Thomas.
The past exerience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only. (T.S. Eliot)
I'm interested in the idea that text=world and world=text. This is from an article I can give you guys:
In the late twentieth century West, with the influence of a postmodernism that often insists on the textuality of the world, the letter-mysticism of teh Gnostics, the Shi'ite Muslims, and the Kabbalists often raises metaphysical issues that sound remarkably contemporary. These thinkers saw the world as constituted by divine letters, a profound reversal of teh tendency in mainstream Western philosophy to prvilege the spoken over the written word, which one postmodern philosopher has castigated as 'logocentrism'. In this alternative tradition, as we shall see, the cosmos itself is nothing more or less than a text, spelled out y letters that are also understood as the basic phonetic units of language. Even the oral command of God, "Be!" is interpreted as the enunciation of letter-phonemes that in turn generate further metaphysical marks. The written word is therefor not seen as posterior to spoken language, nor parisitic upon it, but rather coeval with and inseparable from speech and from contingent being...All great masters are bequeathed spiritual images and repetoires by their forebears. their importance for us lies in teh way they activate and realize these images, just as the accomplishment of great musicians lies in teh subtelty, intellectual clarity, and emotional intensity of their performances. The mystic is composer and performer at once, and Shaykh Ahmad's rendition of the repetoire is among the finest in all Islamic thought. (you guys should probably just read the article. It's on JSTOR, and it's called "The World as Text: Cosmologies of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa'i" by Juan R. I. Cole)
Also go to blackboard and go to Ritual and Theater and read Kirsten hastrup: "The Challenge of the Unreal"
Asa, will you post the Rilke poem and "Tu es le fils de quelqu'un"? Can we post things articles? Mark, blog help?
That's the end of my manically effusive post.
Even the articulate or brutal sounds must be all so many languages and ciphers that all have their corresponding keys--have their own grammar and syntax; and thus the least things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest. (Quincy)
The terrifying immensity of the firmament's abyss is an illusion, an external reflection of our abysses, perceived in a mirror. We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our hearts, for which God was willing to die...If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls. (Leon Bloy)
Every man is on earth to symbolizse something he is ignorant of and to realize a particle of a mountain of the invisible materials that serve to build the City of God.
There is no human being on earth capable of declaring the certitude of who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do, what his acts correspond to, his sentiments, his ideas, or what his real name is, his ending Name in the register of Light...History is an immense liturgical text where the iotas and the dots are worth no less than the entire verses or chapters, but the importance of one or the other is indeterminable and profoundly hidden.
Like the alchemist who sought the philosopher's stone with quicksilver,
I shall make every day words...
Give off the magic that was theirs
When Thor was both the God and the din,
The thunderclap and the prayer.
I shall say, in my fashion,
eternal things.
This dust that I am will be invulnerable.
I shall live by forgetting myself.
I shall be the face I glimpse and forget.
Masks! Agonies! Ressurections!
Will weave and unweave my life. (JL Borges)
What Are Years by Marianne Moore:
What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt,--
dubly calling, deafly listening--that
in misfortune, even in death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs
the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
find its continuing.
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is morality,
this is eternity.
In the Days of Prismatic Color by Marianne Moore:
not in the days of Adam and Eve, but when Adam
was alone; when there was no smoke and color was
fine, not with the refinement
of early civilization art, but because
of its originality; with nothing to modify it but the
mist that went up, obliqueness was a variation
of the perpendicular, plain to see and
to account for: it is no
longer that; nor did the blue-red-yellow band
of incandescence that was color keep its stripe: it also is one of
those things into which much that is peculiar can be
read; complexity is not a crime, but carry
it to the point of murkiness
and nothing is plain. Complexity,
moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead of
granting itself to be the pestilence that is, moves all a-
bout as if to bewilder us with the dismal
fallacy that insistence
is the measure of achievement and that all
truth must be dark. Principally throat, sophistication is as it al-
ways has been--at the antipodes from the init-
ial great truths. "Part of it was crawling, part of it
was about to crawl, the rest
was ropid in its lair." In the short-legged, fit-
ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiae--we have the classic
multitude of feet. To what purpose! Truth is no Apollo
Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over if it likes.
Know that it will be there when it says,
"I shall be there when the wave has gone by."
Time wasy down on you like an old ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there--to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you go there. (Murakami)
I turned faceup on the slab of stone, gazed at the sky, and thought about all the man-made satellites spinning around the earth. The horizon was still etched in a faint glow, and stars began to blink on in the deep, wine-colored sky. I gazed among them for the light of a satellite, but it was still too bright out to spot on with the naked eye. The sprinkling of stars looked nailed to the spot, unmoving. I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants of Sputnik, even now circling the earth, gravity their only tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep. (Murakami)
Also, I love all of Lolita, but I can't find any pieces from it that I especially love.
Also, Dubliners, by Joyce. Here's a part of Portrait of the Artist that I love too. It's right after he sees the bird-girl:
He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer, or a flower? Glimmering, trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than other.
As far as composition stuff, I looked at Anne Bogart's book, and her three basic components for grounding work are:
the question
the anchor
the structure
her examples are:
Culture of Desire
question: Who are we becoming in light of the pervasive and rapent consumerism that permeates our every move through life?
anchor: Andy Warhol
structure: Dante's Inferno
American Vaudeville
question: What are the roots of American popular entertainment?
anchor: the actual testimonies and experiences of people who created and performed in vaudeville
structure: a vaudeville show
I in no way am trying to push us towards doing work like the SITI company, but I think looking at those three components eventually could be interesting...
Also, I'm really interested in Beckett. I don't know about Asa, but I loved the text in Rockaby. He's also written novels.
Also E.E. Cummings and Dylan Thomas.
The past exerience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only. (T.S. Eliot)
I'm interested in the idea that text=world and world=text. This is from an article I can give you guys:
In the late twentieth century West, with the influence of a postmodernism that often insists on the textuality of the world, the letter-mysticism of teh Gnostics, the Shi'ite Muslims, and the Kabbalists often raises metaphysical issues that sound remarkably contemporary. These thinkers saw the world as constituted by divine letters, a profound reversal of teh tendency in mainstream Western philosophy to prvilege the spoken over the written word, which one postmodern philosopher has castigated as 'logocentrism'. In this alternative tradition, as we shall see, the cosmos itself is nothing more or less than a text, spelled out y letters that are also understood as the basic phonetic units of language. Even the oral command of God, "Be!" is interpreted as the enunciation of letter-phonemes that in turn generate further metaphysical marks. The written word is therefor not seen as posterior to spoken language, nor parisitic upon it, but rather coeval with and inseparable from speech and from contingent being...All great masters are bequeathed spiritual images and repetoires by their forebears. their importance for us lies in teh way they activate and realize these images, just as the accomplishment of great musicians lies in teh subtelty, intellectual clarity, and emotional intensity of their performances. The mystic is composer and performer at once, and Shaykh Ahmad's rendition of the repetoire is among the finest in all Islamic thought. (you guys should probably just read the article. It's on JSTOR, and it's called "The World as Text: Cosmologies of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa'i" by Juan R. I. Cole)
Also go to blackboard and go to Ritual and Theater and read Kirsten hastrup: "The Challenge of the Unreal"
Asa, will you post the Rilke poem and "Tu es le fils de quelqu'un"? Can we post things articles? Mark, blog help?
That's the end of my manically effusive post.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Parthenia and Julianne Baird
CFA on Friday.
Yes.
We should go.
I will get tickets if you guys want.
Early music quartet and vocalist. Should be interesting.
Also my phone is fucked, so email me if you want to communicate.
Asa
Yes.
We should go.
I will get tickets if you guys want.
Early music quartet and vocalist. Should be interesting.
Also my phone is fucked, so email me if you want to communicate.
Asa
Monday, November 26, 2007
Lucky's Monologue - Waiting for Godot
Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labors left unfinished crowned by the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry of Essy-in-Possy of Testew and Cunard it is established beyond all doubt all other doubt than that which clings to the labors of men that as a result of the labors unfinished of Testew and Cunnard it is established as hereinafter but not so fast for reasons unknown that as a result of the public works of Puncher and Wattmann it is established beyond all doubt that in view of the labors of Fartov and Belcher left unfinished for reasons unknown of Testew and Cunard left unfinished it is established what many deny that man in Possy of Testew and Cunard that man in Essy that man in short that man in brief in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation wastes and pines wastes and pines and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the strides of physical culture the practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating riding gliding conating camogie skating tennis of all kinds dying flying sports of all sorts autumn summer winter winter tennis of all kinds hockey of all sorts penicillin and succedanea in a word I resume flying gliding golf over nine and eighteen holes tennis of all sorts in a word for reasons unknown in Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham namely concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown but time will tell fades away I resume Fulham Clapham in a word the dead loss per head since the death of Bishop Berkeley being to the tune of one inch four ounce per head approximately by and large more or less to the nearest decimal good measure round figures stark naked in the stockinged feet in Connemara in a word for reasons unknown no matter what matter the facts are there and considering what is more much more grave that in the light of the labors lost of Steinweg and Peterman it appears what is more much more grave that in the light the light the light of the labors lost of Steinweg and Peterman that in the plains in the mountains by the seas by the rivers running water running fire the air is the same and then the earth namely the air and then the earth in the great cold the great dark the air and the earth abode of stones in the great cold alas alas in the year of their Lord six hundred and something the air the earth the sea the earth abode of stones in the great deeps the great cold on sea on land and in the air I resume for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis the facts are there but time will tell I resume alas alas on on in short in fine on on abode of stones who can doubt it I resume but not so fast I resume the skull fading fading fading and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis on on the beard the flames the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the skull alas the stones Cunard . . . tennis . . . the stones . . . so calm . . . Cunard . . . unfinished . . .
******
This piece has always spoken to me. It seems to be simultaneously nonsense and the most sense.
******
This piece has always spoken to me. It seems to be simultaneously nonsense and the most sense.
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