With four girls in our heavily biased household, I am from time to time exposed to the zodiac lines shedding light on the theatre of my horoscopic life. The hard copy of Sunday papers (Terror?) wants to know answers from Taurus born bohemians: Are you surrounded by enemies? Are those friends really enemies in disguise? Or do those apparent enemies actually have your best interests at heart? We are all supposed to intuitively know the difference. Yet sometimes even the sharpest among us cannot be sure ...
I follow three basic philosophies on life and I am informed that the Liberal Party Tzar Graham Morris is also keen on two including one heralded by Elbert Hubbard. Elbert instructs us Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.
Abraham Lincoln, whose ghost invaded the Press Party at the Strangers Dining Room at the NSW Parliament House last week, used to ask his directors of communication: Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
Seung Sahn, Zen Master, sums it all up for me: The one who praises you is a thief. The one who criticizes you is your true friend. In this context, I am grateful for every communist apparatchick ever born and some of the dopy bullies at Parliament House and offices in different part of our taxing lives.
The theatre is an attack on mankind carried out by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal. Art's relation with its client is here at its closest and most immediate. In other arts, we can blame the client: he is stupid, unsophisticated, inattentive, dull. But the theatre must, if need be, stoop—and stoop—until it attains the direct, the universal communication which other artists can afford to seek more deviously and at their ease.
-Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
Sea of Leaves
Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Faust: experiments in living
Rarely in the field of poetry have so many stories been published about a 31 year old Australian woman:
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God. . . .
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of stars.
. . .
And the message of the yew trees is blackness -- blackness and silence.
• Half in love with easeful death [HENRY VIII was forever scribbling in the margins of his books. This most literate king collected an extensive library, and regarded the margins of his books as useful places to demonstrate his learning, pass billets-doux to his lovers, or simply to vent the royal ire Edges and Marginality ]
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