The deeply mysterious: (Abram,1996)

being polymorphous: (De Luca Comandini,1988)

Even the birds: "The essence of birds and, by the same token of any other 'thing' ('dead' or 'alive'), shows itself when the thing is approached, not as an object of scientific curiosity or in terms of its practical usefulness, but as an image that exists in its own right and for its own delight. In contrast to symbols which always point beyond themselves, images mean what they are and are what they mean." (Avens,1982)

harmonizing: "Of course, in the order of creatures, humanity is a special case. Humans, unlike mud daubers (who, "as they trowel mud into their nest walls, hum to it, or at it, thus mastering their material by a kind of song, e.g., harmony with the earth"), are not naturally involved in harmony. For humans, harmony is always a human product, an artifact, and if they do not know how to make it and choose to make it, then they do not have it. And so I suggest that, for humans, the harmony I am taking about may bear as inescapable likeness to what we know as moral law--or that, for humans, moral law is a significant part of the notation of ecological and agricultural harmony." (Berry,1983)

No passion: "On my way back to my hotel, I walked along the Seine, and, passing Shakespeare and Company, saw its window lit up, and went in. It was shoddy. I knew it was not the original. I could not imagine this place generating anything. I listened to two Americans in the bookshop talking; one worked there and the other was a friend, and the one who worked there was sitting at a big table covered with used books, a gas fire hissing under the table, and he was saying, 'I'm a poet. It doesn't matter what job I have to make money, because that's secondary to my job as a poet.' His friend said, 'But you can't excuse your problems, your really serious problems, by calling yourself a poet.' I transposed myself and the young poet, and I imagined I said exactly what he'd said when I was his age living in Paris. I was once in a bookshop with a friend, both of us Americans in Paris, and I said to him, as an admission I had never made to anyone else, 'I'm going to write books.' He said, 'Bull shit.'" (Plante,1984)

Filling the loft's: (Cleever,1993)

can be thought of: (Hayles,1990)

the source of architecture's: (Diani,1988)

metaphoric power: "I had a romantic drawing prepared. It showed what the reviewing stand on the Zeppelin Field would look like after a generation of neglect, overgrown with ivy, its columns fallen, the walls crumbling here and there, but the outlines still clearly recognizable. In Hitler's entourage this drawing was regarded as blasphemous. That I could even conceive of a period of decline for the new-founded Reich destined to last a thousand years seemed outrageous to many of Hitler's closest followers. But he himself accepted my ideas as illuminating. He gave orders that in the future the important buildings of his Reich were to be in keeping with the principles of this 'law of ruins.'" (Speer,1970)

where you live: "If someone had prophesied some fifty-five years ago that I, a young 'pure' mathematician from Poland, would spend a good part of my adult life in New Mexico--a state whose name and existence I was not even aware of when I lived in Europe--I would have dismissed the idea as inconceivable." (Ulam,1976)

essay: (Kipnis,1988)

Daniel Libeskind: "I believe that practicing architecture today, teaching architecture today, being a student of architecture today, entails very different consequences than it did even a hundred years ago. I think all of us are in a different stage of possibility, of development of the modern world. I believe architecture has entered its end. That is not to say that architecture is finished, but I would say that architecture has entered an end condition. I think that all those who practice architecture, whether knowingly of unknowingly, feel in some way that something has come to an end, but what it is, is very difficult to say since it is not in the realm of objects." (Libeskind,1988)

Botticelli's Venus: "for Botticelli (Birth of Venus) was an intellectual virtue that triumphed over sensuality, and his lovely naked woman rising from the waves, her physical charms sublimated in the diaphaneity of her forms and the purity of her lines, is a challenge--an intellectual challenge--to sensuality. As for the landscape...it is only a backdrop, devoid of depth. The whitecaps are merely circumflex accents against the pale blue of the water; rather than waves these are the abstract symbols of waves, serving to show that the blasts of the zephyrs have stirred up a choppy sea. But this is not a deliberately chosen symbol; it is born, almost spontaneously, of the systematic reduction of natural appearances to their most immaterial and intellectual element: line." (Argan,1957)

boiling inside: this movement is quiet particularly in mania: it is continuous, violent, always capable of piercing new pores in the cerebral matter, and it creates, as the material basis of incoherent thoughts, explosive gestures, continuous words which betray mania. Is not such pernicious mobility that of infernal water, sulfurous liquid, those aquae stygiae, ex nitro, vitriolo, antimonio, arsenico et similibus exstillatae: its particles are in perpetual movement; they are capable of provoking new pores and new channels in any substance; and they have strength enough to spread themselves far, exactly as the maniacal spirits are capable of spreading agitation through all parts of the body." (Foucault,1965)

Wild West ethic: "Because of the gun's centrality to the Western, the heroes were usually those who displayed an expertise at shooting quickly and accurately as well as the wisdom to shoot discrimminately and justly. Behind whatever conflict evoked the hero's deeds of valor were the western badman and Indian--forces that could destroy civilization while challenging it to still greater victories and accomplishments. Surrounding the hero and giving purpose to his deadly encounters with evil elements were the ordinary people who, though the heart and purpose of American civilization, were yet vulnerable in this extraordinary environment. The western heroine, usually a refined Easterner or spirited rancher's daughter, exemplified both the virtuous moral fiber of the good community and its susceptibility to physical danger. The final union of hero and heroine in many Westerns insured the spiritual strength and physical durability of American society." (Lenihan,1980)

working around: (Friedman,1972)

as extraordinary: In the old days everyone shared the shaman's vocation. With the rise of agriculture chores took more time, and the shaman became a professional, whom the public paid to make the soul's journey for them. Thus priests, gurus, physicians, scientists...the extraordinary shattered into an array of specializations, with the soul hidden behind the focus of its shards. Meditation, psychotropic drugs, trance, and the deliberate refocusing of of perception are a few of the ways we can approach the extraordinary again. The breach, after all, is only in the mind!

Cleared, so: J. Weishaus, "Autumn." Rikyu (1521-1591) was a Japanese tea master. Sho-an was his son-in-law. Rikyu wrote: (The art of) Tea is nothing but this: Boil the water,

Infuse the tea
Drink it in the proper manner--
That's all there is to it.

West Side Story: "New York, Jan 6, 1949. Jerry R. called today with a noble idea: a modern version of Romeo and Juilet set in slums at the coincidence of Easter-Passover celebrations. Feelings run high between Jews and Catholics. Former: Capulets; latter: Montagues. Juliet is Jewish, Friar Lawrence is a neighborhood druggist. Street brawls, double death--it all fits. But it's all much less important than the bigger idea of making a musical that tells a tragic story in musical-comedy terms, using only musical-comedy techniques, never falling into the 'operatic' trap. Can it succeed? It hasn't yet in our country...

    "Beverly Hills, Aug 25, 1955 Had a fine long session with Arthur (Laurents) today, by the pool. (He's here for a movie, I'm conducting at the Hollywood Bowl). We're fired again by the Romeo notion; only now we have abandoned the whole Jewish-Catholic premise as not very fresh, and have come up with what I think is going to be it: two teen-age gangs, one the warring Puerto Ricans, the other self-styled 'Americans.' Suddenly it all springs to life. I hear rhythms and pulses, and--most of all--I can sort of feel the form.

    "Washington, D.C., Aug 20, 1957. The opening last night was just as we dreamed it. All the agony and postponements and re-re-rewriting turn out to have been worth it. There's a work there; and whether it finally succeeds or not in Broadway terms, I am now convinced that what we dreamed all these years is possible..." (Bernstein,1982)

emulsion and all: "The Savior said, 'Yes, it is useful. And it is good for you since things visible among men will dissolve--for the vessel of their flesh will dissolve, and when it is brought to naught it will come to be among visible things, among things that are seen. And then the fire which they see gives them pain on account of of faith they formerly possessed. They will be gathered back to that which is visible. Moreover, those who see among things that are not visible, without the first love they will perish in the concern for this life and the scorching in the fire. Only a little time until that which is visible dissolves; then shapeless shapes will emerge and in the midst of tombs they will forever dwell upon the corpses in pain and corruption of soul.'" Mathaias, From, The Book of Thomas the Contender. (Robinson,1981).
    Mathaias is probably the apostle Matthew, who allegedly recorded this "Gnostic revelation dialogue" between the resurrected Christ and Jesus' brother, Judas Thomas. The book "was probably composed in Syria during the first half of the third century." (J.D. Turner, translator.)

Petroglyph National Monument: Most of the petroglyphs were created between A.D. 1300 and 1650; though some could be as much as 2,000 to 3,000 years old while others are historic, dating from the Spanish colonial period. In addition to the petroglyphs, more than 100 archaeological sites help tell a 12,000-year-long story of human use along (Albuquerque's) West Mesa." (National Park Service brochure.)

at the center: (Falk,1977)

Michael Palmer:: "a good part of my feeling for time, for particular lengths of time, is tied up with night, specifically sleepless, so-called 'white nights'. I have been experiencing these again recently, as I have periodically throughout my life, and so each seems to connect with every other and the quality of time and duration in them seems fairly constant - they throw me out of daily time even as they force me to reflect on it. That is, they acquire a particular identity by relation to all the others. The chain of them forms a sequence explicitly felt in the nervous system, so that lying awake at one point in time physically reminds me of other like occasions and their causes and the immediate concrete surroundings. So there is both the singularity of the thing and the loss of that as it rhymes with other such nights" M. Palmer, "Period (senses of duration)." (Palmer,1983)

sweeping 5 A.M.: J. Weishaus. From, "Eight New York Poems." This poem was made on a bleak winter morning, waiting for a train on an outdoor platform  in Coney Island, having come from a party, were I had fallen in-love with a young woman in the dark and crowded room. Knowing the chances were that I would never see her again, as I would soon be returning to San Francisco, I suddenly felt so alone in the world.

My maternal Grandfather: "That night, Erik dreamed that he had a hairy bear-face with long narrow jaws full of teeth, and he sniffed the air with his wet black nostrils and scented Breidalbolstead and came at a lumbering run and smashed the house in with a single blow of his claw--but when he awoke he was not a bear anymore; the age of the Bear-Kings was long past, and no man would ever become a bear again." (Vollmann,1990)

She whose aura: "(Walter) Benjamin raises his conceptual image of the aura to its greatest power, partly by deliberately confusing 'aura' with 'aureole,' a wholly unrelated word (except by punning). The aureole is the bright ring seen around a misty sun or moon, or else the halo of god, angel, or saint. The word is a form of the Latin for 'gold,' aurum, and ought to be very different from Benjamin's aura, which, as I once wrote, 'is properly an invisible breath, or emanation; an air, as of nobility, characterizing person or thing; a breeze that precedes the start of a nervous breakdown or disorder.'
    "That primary sense of 'aura,' I suspect, Benjamin took from Freud's account of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which he compounded with Paul Valéy's idea that in the crisis of European culture the norm for lyric poetry had become the shock experience. Brilliantly carrying Freud and Valéry back to Baudelaire, Benjamin found the trope of shock and catastrophe in the aura: 'To perceive the aura as an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.'" (Bloom,1994).

lying latent: (Cox,1981)

here in these hollow: (J.W. Von Goethe.)

John Berger's essay: (Berger,1991)

"In one dream I particularly remember, I went to a dinner party given by the Metropolitan Museum. There were two dinners: one was upstairs, one was downstairs, and I went to the one in the basement with Jackson Pollock and his brother Sandy. I brought the centerpiece for the table, which was a bouquet of roses without the flowers--just the thorns--because the Met had forbidden anyone to bring in live things. I noticed that Jackson was very reticent and wasn't drinking at all. I asked him why he was so quiet and he said he had stopped drinking. I asked him about his painting, and he said he wasn't painting anymore because it was too painful. The dinner ended, and when we left he wanted to drive, but I wouldn't let him, and I drove home." L. Chase. (Mifflin,1993).

drips: Jackson Pollock's drip paintings have had no viable descendants. They leave no further step to take as paintings. Yet the spirit was picked up, by John Cage, with his chance operations. Not strange, as Pollock's paintings are music (frozen, like architecture), or dance; movement, that is. In the end he was more musician, or choreographer, than painter. While he had painted himself into a corner, if he had lived longer, would he have created music, or dance?

circumstantial fingerprints: "The red zones suggest magnified fingerprints of which one, marked with a black cross, points to the futile identification of another absent event. The fingerprints, perhaps bloodstained, can be linked to a barely recognizable index finger drawn in the same red ink. The finger could belong to the artist, the actor, and/or a possible criminal who may have left the prints, one of them marked with a black cross suggestive of murder, but nevertheless far too ambiguous to provide a meaningful clue." (Hubert,1994)

hollow, then: "In this silence I hear nothing except the beating of my heart....

"But the rays of the moon play through the bamboo reeds, standing equidistant from each other before my hut, and reach even to my bed. And these regular intervals of light suggest a musical instrument to me--the reed-pipe of the ancients, which is familiar to the Maori, and is called vivo by them. The moon and the bamboo reeds made it assume an exaggerated form--an instrument that remained silent throughout the day, but that at night by grace of the moon calls forth in the memory of the dreamer well-loved melodies. Under this music I fell asleep.

"Between me and the sky there was nothing except the high frail roof of pandanus leaves, where the lizards have their nests.

"I am far, far away from the prisons that European houses are." (Gauguin,1994)

Wang Ching-po: (Van Gulik,1940)

arche-writing: "The arche-trace is 'the irreducible absence' (that is, an absence that is not the absence of a presence) or 'the completely other" that announces itself as such within all structures of reference as the present (mark or trace) of an absent (presence). This manifestation of the absolute Other as such (that is to say, its appearing within what is not it, its becoming present, tangible, visible), consequently, coincides with its occultation." (Gasché,1994)

a future artist: " A rebellious young bourgeois will create a reign of terror in language; he will shake words up in a hat and throw them into the air; he will realize disorder. As for Genet, he makes of poetic disorder an invisible rot. He is against terror and for rhetoric because it is beautiful to sacrifice the most beautiful prose to poetry. By means of language the Just man has made Genet a thief: with the naming, this sudden debasement of his being had appeared in the daily web of his acts. Genet thereby experienced the hemorrhage of words: none of them quite belonged to him; each of them had its true meaning out there, in the minds of the Just." (Sartre,1963)

Often I revisit: "I think that suicide can be the highest way a man can tell to the Almighty I don't agree with the way you are managing the world and because I don't agree, take back your great gift. It's all yours, I don't want it anymore." I.B. Singer. (Burgin 1978-79). And: "death is the only redemption. Because all other redemption disappoints us, they are promises that are never kept. But the promise which death gives to people is always kept." (Ibid.)

Death wanted: J. Weishaus, "Lost." It was in Taos, during a stay at the Wurlitzer Foundation. One night I found centipede crawling across the floor. My plan was to trap it on a piece of paper and take it back outside. During the process, somehow it got crushed.

elegant silence: Intermittent rain in my hermitage
A solitary light flickers as dreams return.

Outside, the sound of falling raindrops.
A crow sits in darkness on the wall.
The fireplace is cold, no charcoal awaits my
imagined visitors.

I reach for a volume of poems.
Tonight, in solitude, deep emotion.
How can I explain it the following day?
(Ryukan. From, "Dawn." J. Stevens, translator)

Ryukan (1758-1831) was a notable Zen monk and poet. This is but one example of the innumerable poems and prose pieces written in this spirit by Japanese over several centuries. This aesthetic extends even into the toilet.

"One could with some justice claim that of all the elements of Japanese architecture, the toilet is the most aesthetic. Our forebears, making poetry of everything in their lives, transformed what by rights should be the most unsanitary room in the house into a place of unsurpassed elegance, replete with fond associations with the beauties of nature." (Tanizaki,1994)

bosque: (Spanish for woods, usually by water.)

A woman strolled: "A man was jogging down a trail at the Rio Grande Nature Center at sunset Sunday when he passed a woman walking the other way alone. He paused, turned and called to her, 'Hey, be careful out there. Did you know there was a woman attacked up there yesterday?' The woman walked back and asked if he would walk with her, but then decided to end her walk there and go home. 'I hate for everyone (sic., anyone) to respond with fear,' said the man, who identified himself only as Joe." (Shoup,1994)

what have we come to: "A female jogger was raped and beaten Saturday morning after a man accosted her on a popular running trail about a mile north of the Rio Grande Nature Center and forced her into the nearby bosque, police said." (Crowder,1994)

hands twick: J. Weishaus, "Squaw Woman."

an emaciated: "The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses. 'I look pale,' said Byron, looking into the mirror. 'I should like to die of a consumption.' Why? asked his tubercular friend Tom Moore, who was visiting Byron in Patras in February 1828. 'Because the ladies would all say, "Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying."' Perhaps the main gift to sensibility made by the Romantics is not the aesthetics of cruelty and the beauty of the morbid (as Mario Praz suggested in his famous book), or even the demand for unlimited personal freedom, but the nihilistic and sentimental idea of 'the interesting.'" (Sontag,1978)

in circumstances: (Stevens,1993)

Christ into: J. Weishaus, "Theirs Is The Knowledge."

the story is familiar: (Clifford,1984)

a mask from Ivory Coast: "To reinforce their supernatural powers, the big Senufo masks generally have several holes in the forehead into which bush-buck horns can be fitted, each horn carrying a bundle of feathers from a particular kind of bird, and porcupine quills, which are believed to be effective against enemies at a distance." (Holas,1968)

Bob pedaled away:

Seeing dear flesh float by--
days emptied of sun and wind,
hold on to trees and dirt.

Want it under me, body,
wants legs to keep working...
(R. Creeley. From, "Flesh")

If you looked: From, "Eyebrows Made of Crows." (Norman,1982)

CROWS were there:

"He looks astoundingly like a crow--it is unbelievable--even his hair is somehow 'crow hair.' Shining black, falling over his head that is full of determination to pester owls if he sees any. The beak is a crow beak, and the sideways look he gives, the head shoved slightly to the side by the bad eye, finishes it. And I suppose his language is crow language--no long open vowels, like the owl, no howls like the wolf, but instead short, faintly hollow, harsh sounds, that all together make something absolutely genuine, crow speech coming up from every feather, every source of that crow body and crow life." (R. Bly. From, "Seeing Creeley for the First Time.")

Your father's: "You can let go, he said, I've got you. You won't fall. When he said that, I became aware of the strong grip of his hands around my ankles. Then I let go. I turned loose and held my arms out on either side of me. I kept them out there like that for balance. My dad went on walking while I rode on his shoulders." (Carver,1988)

thirty years from now: "Blowing in the wind thirty-four years ago, on September 29, 1959, Bob Dylan (a.k.a. Bobby Zimmerman) became a pledge of Sigma Alpha Mu Fraternity along with seventeen other University of Minnesota freshmen...Neither his parents nor his seventeen fellow pledges had any idea who Bobby Zimmerman would become. If they had, perhaps they wouldn't have thrown eggs." (Axelrod,1994)

can be entered: (Goldberger,1983)

unrolls: "Last night it began, the scroll-dream of the shaperider returned to the surface of things, the scroll-text beginning white letters on black background, the color of the monitor-torah spilling inchoate scriptures, one after the other. I lost myself in my desire for them, nothing but the letters backgrounded by letters, each a shadow of itself and other, each simultaneous, but always in movement, whether or not read, whether or not absorbed and comprehended." (Sondheim,1995)

spinning beard: J. Weishaus, "Me." From, "Five Spring Poems From Po Chu-i."

Lou Andreas-Salome: Lou and Nietzsche together climbed the Monte Sacro, near the northern Italian village of Orto, an episode that lived in Nietzsche's memory as the high point in the intellectual relationship. It was while visiting Lucerne that they had the famous photograph taken showing Lou kneeling in a cart and pretending to goad with a small crop the two suitors, (Paul) Rée and Nietzsche, harnessed like draft horses in front of the cart--a grotesque prefigurative inversion of Zarathustra's dictum that when going to call on women one must not forget to take along the whip." (Leppmann,1984)

Gala: Elena Dimitrovna Diakonova had been Paul Éluard's wife since 1917 and was known as the "surrealist muse"; a reserved and masterful woman she was exercised an occult, yet considerable influence over the entire group and had contributed largely to the success of Max Ernst. Éluard and Gala had gone to Switzerland first, to see René Crevel, who was ill at the time, but when they arrived in Cadaqués lightning struck. As Dali said later, 'We fell in love with each other instantly.' The superior intelligence, the mysterious Slavic charm, the slender, boyish body won an immediate victory....It was the beginning of a fierce attachment, an idolatry without parallel. Dali had found 'the Beatrice of his life." And as for Gala--mistress, teacher, guide, source of inspiration and manager, all at the same time--she took the phenomenon that was Dali firmly in hand; his dazzling success is in large part her work." (Brassaï,1966)

Nush: "Nush's sudden, completely unexpected death plunged Éluard into a profound melancholy. In losing her, he also lost his confidence in life, his hope in the world, and even in poetry. The great singer of love, of happiness, of joy in living, fell silent. His friends--Picasso and Dora Maar among them--did everything possible to ease his pain, but they could only stand by, helpless witness to his despair. Not until later did the event which had overwhelmed his life burst forth in his poetry, like a sob, a cry of revolt:

We shall now grow old together.
The day is too bright: time overflows.
The love I wore so lightly
has become the weight of anguish..
(Brassaï,1966)

Georgia O'Keeffe: "Then a girl appeared--thin, in a simple black dress with a little white collar. She had a sort of Mona Lisa smile. 'Who gave you permission to hang these drawings?' she inquired.

'No one,' I replied. Still with a smile, she started very positively, 'You will have to take them down.' 'I think you are mistaken,' I answered. 'Well, I made the drawings, I am Georgia O'Keeffe.' 'You have no right to withhold these pictures,' I said, 'than to withdraw a child from the world, had you given birth to one.' She seemed rather surprised.
"I took her into the little gallery and asked where a particular charcoal--all of the drawings were abstract--had come from. She told me, 'I often get headaches and this is the picture I see.' That corroborated something I knew. I pointed to another, 'And what is the origin of this?' She began to talk, but after a few words she drew herself up straight and challengingly said, 'Do you think I am an idiot? I refuse to say anything more." A. Stieglitz. (Norman,1973)

straddling the creek: J. Weishaus, "Brushing Them Off."

to Paris: One night I dreamed—

I've been accused of several petty crimes, which the state feels are serious enough to put me on trial. The trial is held in a theater, as a courtroom, a friend tells me, would be too small. The theater is packed with spectators. It seems I'm a celebrity, but I don't know why, and no one seems to recognize me. On stage, the judge is having his makeup put on, and the audience, including me. As the prosecution presents its case, it becomes obvious that the charges are a sham, and the audience beings to thin out.

I leave, and take a walk. Passing a large ball field on my left, I suddenly see in front of me the Eiffel Tower looming. I decide not to go that way, but make two lefts to a street with casement windows on either side. Several lovely women pass me and smile.
I am in Paris, and am moved to tears. I remember having this emotion in my last dream of being here, as if that dream had been real, as in our waking state we remember the past as if it were real. Crossing a wide street, which I know is the border of France, I look back at an overhanging sign several times, each time it reads differently, as if I were rewriting a script.

that the most sensitive: (Ward 1967)

The silent buzzards: J. Weishaus, "Even Here."

Kipnis identifies: (Kipnis,1992)

Apparently the significance: (Marshack,1975)

a book by Patrick de Sercey: Being Space. Santa Fe, NM., 1991.

Zen monastery: "These mountains are young, in a geologic sense, and even now rising. Streams notch them deeply and have not had time to broaden the steep-walled canyons to gentler slopes and shapes. The sun's heat and long rainless seasons make water scarce, a condition shaping the pattern of plant distribution. The north-facing hillsides are not so dry and are covered with forests of oak, madrone, California laurel, and other broad-leafed trees. But the south-facing slopes feel the sun longer and more intensely and they support grasses, shrubs, and patches of chaparral, dominated by chamisa and manzanita, all plants adapted to drought and fire." (Bunnell,1968). What the author leaves out in this idyllic essay on the ecology of the Zen Mountain Center is the poison oak, notorious in coastal northern California. But what is Zen without an incessant itch?

It was October.
The Monarchs were dying,
falling through the air
like oak leaves
and landing on the rocks and stones
where they would rest,
slowly moving their faded
orange and black wings
as if they were trying to fan themselves
back into flame.

(W. Witherup. From, "Marian at Tassajara Springs")

cooking a sauce: Béarnaise sauce is made primarily with a "generous" amount of butter, along with egg yokes, wine vinegar, and various spices. An earthenware bowl is recommended. "Sauce béarnaise made in this fashion is less apt to turn, and the earthen bowl, which never becomes as hot as a metal bowl, makes it possible to let the sauce stand until ready to use." (Chamberlain,1952).

the search: (de Luca Commandini,1988).  

Humans see differently: Dialogue between two angels. In, Far Away, So Close. Win Winters, director. 1993

Stuart Arends: "unlike many early Minimalist works which seem to lose a high degree of their power when removed from their intended context, Arends' boxes reserve a level of inherent potency that remains intact in the intimacy of their small size and tactility...their informal, unsophisticated quality, and how that determines their significance." (Shields,1990)

Not to believe: "Further, that should belief in their holiness no longer be sustained by at least one patron, the relics would miraculously vanish without depositing so much as a faint layer of grey dust. The true efficacy of these objects would indeed be potent if this were so--some fraction of the universal mass not being simply displaced, but actually ceasing to exist, would be a cataclysmic violation of physical laws." (Fox,1987)

I am imbued: (Chayefsky,1976)

plugged into: I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard." (Cage,1961)

electro-magnetic field: "Sometimes this imagination is understood, as by (C.G.) Jung, as a Somatic unconscious; or, as by (Arnold) Mindell, as a Dream Body; or traditionally as a synaesthetic Magic Body or Subtle Body. Some of the magical methods and exercises are designed to increase the sensitivity of the space surrounding the skin, by imagining it filled, as it is, with electromagnetism in various invisible colours, and subject to the four elements, which means in effect fluctuating environmental influences like those described by (S.W.) Tromp." (Redgrove,1987)

Zeus gave them: Translation of a fragment by Archilochos. (Davenport,1980). "Archilochos was both poet and mercenary. As a poet he was both satirist and lyricist. Iambic verse is his invention. He wrote the first beast fable known to us. He wrote marching songs, love lyrics of frail tenderness, elegies. But most of all he was what Meleager calls him, 'a thistle with graceful leaves.' There is a tradition that wasps hover around his grave. (His tomb was inscribed: 'Hasten on, Wayfarer, lest you stir up the hornets.') To the ancients, both Greek and Roman, he was The Satirist. And we have no a single whole poem of Archilochos." (Ibid.)

Andy Warhol: "AW:...I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me. I haven't been able to make every image clear and simple and the same as the first one. I think it would be so great if more people took up silkscreens so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else's.
     GS: It would turn art history upside down?
     AW: Yes.
     GS: Is that your aim?
     AW: No. The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that  whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do." (Swenson,1963)

David Ross: Former director of the Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, California, which, under his administration, became noted for its collection and support of Video Art. He then became director of the Center for Contemporary Arts, Boston, MA. Ross was Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Venice Biennale: Although this huge exhibition of art dates back to 1895, it was fixed by law in 1928, by King Vittorio Emanuele III and the fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. "The 1966 Biennale showed 2,785 works by artists from thirty-seven countries; attendance was 181,383, with eight hundred art critics, journalists, and free-wheelers in addition. Sales amounted to around 141,684,690 lire." (Alloway,1968).

Jenny Holzer's light show: "I'm prone to be on the couch and in this stupor sometimes I get half-formed things. It's this semiconscious state that serves me well. Once when I was in that state, I got the second half of a statement that came out of a dream: 'You saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.' Full of Joy was the name of a horse that my grandfather gave me once. And I was grateful that it was delivered to me. If I'm completely awake, I'm much too stiff to be an artist, so I'm better served when I'm half asleep. But I can't plan it. In other words, I have to trick myself into being an artist." J. Holzer. (Mifflin, 1993).

Noam Chomsky: "Chomsky's name is associated with specific flavors of transformational grammar. The model elaborated over the last few years is called GB (government and binding) theory...Although Chomsky contributed some valuable techniques, grammarians have always believed that grammar was a precise mechanical thing. They are highly divided, however, on the nature and function of those mechanisms!" (Covington,1995)

You must be nothing: Maggid of Mezritch, "How To Say Torah." (Buber,1961).

cultural artifacts: "George Tinker, an Osage who is a professor at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, expressed concern that whites would transform Indian culture into their own images. 'When you uproot something from one culture and plant it in another culture, it is not the same thing,' he said. 'The danger is that these mutations of spirituality will make their way back into the Indian world.'" (Johnson,1993)

I don't know why: (I. Taboboku) "A statement of identity, such as 'I am not that', indicates an edge. Thus, going over an edge is always an immense experience; you feel that your identity is changing, confused, lost or challenged." (Mindell,1990)

impossible imagery: "The fact is that the dematerialization of products as a consequence of electronic digital technologies and the immateriality of chemical and biological processes all support the idea that our external reality is no longer entirely legible." (Balfour,1993)

one description: Presently cosmologists are discovering stars that are older than the universe of their calculations. They are--to their lenticular minds--baffled. But what is a universe? What are its boundaries but an area defined within the imagination of current equations. Has, for example, the so-called "Big Bang" occurred myriad times, creating countless universes? And does it continue to occur, in universes that are beyond our vision? (J. Weishaus. From, "Notebook.")

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY