Meets Land

the lacking middle term

Nevertheless his injunction 'that a lady ought to keep the knowledge she might have most secret than the Calvinist his creed in Catholic countries' will dominate the battle to come between her piety and her activity, linking as it does the secret suppression of a woman's access to knowledge, which is otherwise public and shared, part of the social world, with her access to God, to the invisible and supernatural, which is at first erotic and friendly but subsequently converted to a deeper pathos of sin, suffering and salvation. The 'confession' concerns the lacking middle term - the various actual existences' tempted, tried and turned away; so that the confessor matures - she is a 'beautiful soul' - but her body falls away 'as an outward object' Such resolution is not aesthetic or ethical but, as it were, religiousness 'A', resignation with a border on despair, which would 'pine away in consumption' were it not granted the future in the form of four children, left by a dead sister, but shortly removed from the 'dangerous' education of their aunt.

Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle

'We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn’t the best of it after all. She knows how the salad tastes without the dressing, and she knows how life’s lived before it gets to the parlor door.'  Djuna Barnes

An artist who is anti-art, an activist who is also an aesthete.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.

Manifesto

Creator: Yvonne Rainer (1965)
Purpose: To revolutionise dance and reduce it to its essential elements.

No to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement of performer or spectator.
No to style.
No to camp.
No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.
No to eccentricity.
No to moving or being moved.

The whole act of suffering lies in this impossibility of retreat. It is the fact of being backed up against life & being. In this sense suffering is the impossibility of nothingness.    

*The very femininity of woman is in this initial 'after the event'.

some Simone Weil

There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.


We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.


Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.

Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.

An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.

The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.

Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.

Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.

We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits - and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening.

I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.


Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. 

one day I will give my heart to philosophy.
for now I will keep my heart in my mouth.

We are all very anxious

arte povera

Advancing in incomprehension

Long Distance, Laila Halaby

I folded myself and sent me to you

in place of the usual crinkled letters, 

or so I imagined. What would you do

if it was me in your postbox, not pictures?

Would you read me over one hundred times

the way I do with each smile you send

long distance? Would you break the pantomimes

the oceans made me think would never end?

I know what you'd do: iron the folds out,

pin me to the wall in your living room

where I could hear your voice of exile shout

in person, and let me study your gloom,

from which you seek refuge in caress 

of a young girl who can't pronounce your name.

You sing ghazals to her with bold finesse

but she dances on your grave just the same.

Some would say your exile is not so bad

and that you are living well in freedom, 

but all I see inside your eyes is sad

stories of a king without his kingdom

repeat

'I had warned him, that I'm no longer subject to his will, that I've changed, from now on I'll treat everyone the way I'm treating him, with immediate retaliation for every breach of contract'

the madness of sincerity

everything I am suffers because you are not you
everyone suffers because we are not where we should be
The world suffers because we cannot answer to eachother
we cannot answer to eachother yet

"I proposed to you an enigma / I came not to you". 

“Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.” 

― Simone Weil

the wounded healer

The Pit & the Pyramid.

‘Pervaded by a sense of intolerable oppression, lit by sudden shafts of delight in the natural world, their concise artistry proclaims how consumately she knew and rode her devils.’