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.