The stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak. I say that this concrete language, intended for the senses and independent of speech, has first to satisfy the senses, that there is a poetry of the senses as there is a poetry of language, and that this concrete physical language to which I refer is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language. These thoughts are what words cannot express and which, far more than words, would find their ideal expression in the concrete physical language of the stage. It consists of everything that occupies the stage, everything that can be manifested and expressed materially on a stage and that is addressed first of all to the senses instead of being addressed primarily to the mind as is the language of words...creating beneath language a subterranean current of impressions, correspondences, and analogies. This poetry of language, poetry in space will be resolved precisely in the domain which does not belong strictly to words...Means of expression utilizable on the stage, such as music, dance, plastic art, pantomime, mimicry, gesticulation, intonation, architecture, lighting, and scenery...The physical possibilities of the stage offers, in order to substitute, for fixed forms of art, living and intimidating forms by which the sense of old ceremonial magic can find a new reality in the theater; to the degree that they yield to what might be called the physical temptation of the stage. Each of these means has its own intrinsic poetry.
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The mystic prophets of the absolute cannot save us. Sustained by our history and traditions, we must save ourselves, at whatever risk of heresy or blasphemy. We can find solace in the memorable representation of the human struggle against the absolute in the finest scene in the greatest of American novels. I refer of course to the scene when Huckleberry Finn decides that the '' plain hand of Providence '' requires him to tell Miss Watson where her runaway slave Jim is to be found. Huck writes his letter of betrayal to Miss Watson and feels '' all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. '' He sits there for a while thinking '' how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell .'' Then Huck begins to think about Jim and the rush of the great river and the talking and the singing and the laughing and friendship. '' Then I happened to look around and see that paper. . . . I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: 'All right, then, I'll go to hell' - and tore it up .''
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So if I asked you about art you could give me the skinny on every art book ever written...Michelangelo? You know a lot about him I bet. Life's work, criticisms, political aspirations. But you couldn't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. And if I asked you about women I'm sure you could give me a syllabus of your personal favorites, and maybe you've been laid a few times too. But you couldn't tell me how it feels to wake up next to a woman and be truly happy. If I asked you about war you could refer me to a bevy of fictional and non-fictional material, but you've never been in one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap and watched him draw his last breath, looking to you for help. And if I asked you about love I'd get a sonnet, but you've never looked at a woman and been truly vulnerable. Known that someone could kill you with a look. That someone could rescue you from grief. That God had put an angel on Earth just for you. And you wouldn't know how it felt to be her angel. To have the love be there for her forever. Through anything, through cancer. You wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand and not leaving because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term 'visiting hours' didn't apply to you. And you wouldn't know about real loss, because that only occurs when you lose something you love more than yourself, and you've never dared to love anything that much. I look at you and I don't see an intelligent confident man, I don't see a peer, and I don't see my equal. I see a boy. Nobody could possibly understand you, right Will? Yet you presume to know so much about me because of a painting you saw. You must know everything about me. You're an orphan, right? Do you think I would presume to know the first thing about who you are because I read 'Oliver Twist?' And I don't buy the argument that you don't want to be here, because I think you like all the attention you're getting. Personally, I don't care. There's nothing you can tell me that I can't read somewhere else. Unless we talk about your life. But you won't do that. Maybe you're afraid of what you might say.
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We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies -- all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.
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The poor and the affluent are not communicating because they do not have the same words. When we talk of the millions who are culturally deprived, we refer not to those who do not have access to good libraries and bookstores, or to museums and centers for the performing arts, but those deprived of the words with which everything else is built, the words that opens doors. Children without words are licked before they start. The legion of the young wordless in urban and rural slums, eight to ten years old, do not know the meaning of hundreds of words which most middle-class people assume to be familiar to much younger children. Most of them have never seen their parents read a book or a magazine, or heard words used in other than rudimentary ways related to physical needs and functions. Thus is cultural fallout caused, the vicious circle of ignorance and poverty reinforced and perpetuated. Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.
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SIR,--Your letter of February the 18th came to hand on the 1st instant; and the request of the history of my physical habits would have puzzled me not a little, had it not been for the model with which you accompanied it, of Doctor Rush's answer to a similar inquiry. I live so much like other people, that I might refer to ordinary life as a history of my own. Like my friend the Doctor, I have lived temperately, eating very little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principle diet.
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Is it better to be the lover or the loved one? Neither, if your cholesterol is over six hundred. By love, of course, I refer to romantic love -- the love between man and woman, rather than between mother and child, or a boy and his dog, or two headwaiters.
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There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.
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There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics I refer to the infinite.
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If there is a symbol of our age, perhaps it is something that every factory worker does each day of their working lives -- I refer to clocking in. (Very soon probably they won't even have to do that; the clock will itself observe them by radar.) In the ancient world when a person entered a temple, each made a votive offering to a god or a goddess at the door. As twentieth century people file into their shrines, they obediently pay their due to the god that regulates their lives -- the clock. It is the clock that measures us, that silent witness that keeps our going in and our coming out and relentlessly records our every movement. That is where all our organization and machinery to free us from time, to save us time, has brought us. Never before have we had such control over things, and never before have we been so enslaved by them. And of nothing is this more true than of time.
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And then, what is the spiritual being that does not know its Sacred Self? But knowing it means to refer to non-Knowledge and be an Image from the non-Knowledge as well. Then I ask again: what is the spiritual being that does not refer its Sacred Self to non-Knowledge? Is it the Spiritual Being that no longer is an image of its own destiny in non-Knowledge? Is this being truly spiritual when the Absolute Truth of Knowledge consists precisely of non-Knowledge? Or in not knowing it?
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'I refer to those who describe murders/riots/panics and other catastrophes perpetrated by humans, and who say to be 'acting like animals.' I refer specifically to comments regarding a recent ship hijacking where it was said that the terrorists acted like 'cowardly animals.' These terrorists and guerrilla acts are NOT animal in nature - they are HUMAN in nature. As one who sees the balance, beauty and meaning of the world in which nonhuman animals must face life-or-death situations everyday just to survive and perpetuate their species, I grossly resent and take offense at these statements! When was the last time we saw a gorilla hijack a plane? A pod of whales hijack an ocean liner? A group of nonhuman animals walk down the street and terrorize the neighborhood??? Human animals are the terrorists and guerrillas when they go into the nonhuman animals' homes to slaughter them for fur coats, hunting trophies, plumage and all the other atrocious reasons society gives for the gross lack of respect for life, and murder of our fellow creatures inhabiting this world. If and when man comes off his ego trip, maybe he'll see just how insignificant he is to the total scheme of beings on this planet in which ALL creatures share. Then, the saying will be turned around to 'They behaved like people.'' (Letter to Abigail Van Buren in the York Daily Record)
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The spirit of Eucharistic love will make you refer everything to the Holy Eucharist, for the Eucharist is the summary of all marvels. It is the permanent mystery in which we find all others. If you have this Eucharistic spirit, if your thoughts are tuned continually toward the Eucharist, the presence of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament will never leave you. God is immense, the universe is filled with God's presence, but the Eucharistic soul prefers to search and find God where he is sacramentally. Just as the eagles assemble where the body is, so also Eucharistic souls are attracted instinctively, easily, and habitually to the Holy Eucharist. Therein is their happiness, their peace; there they find a supernatural knowledge of all things. That is why after holy Communion we often understand some things which before were incomprehensible to us. That is why some saints who were very ignorant spoke admirably of God. Put yourselves, then, dear sisters, in the holy Eucharist, and you will be in a center of light.
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It's funny, to me, the way people refer to childbirth as a miraculous event. A miracle is something that defies nature. Only, childbirth has got to be the most natural thing in the world. Top three anyway. But, on the other hand, when you think about it, there's really no other word that fits. Sperm. Egg. A coincidental meshing of genetic information that will grow something that could write an opera or cook up some Napalm. It blows my mind.
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To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime. That alone is the justification of all that humans may suffer. It cries vengeance upon all the human race. If God exists and tolerates it, it cries vengeance upon God.
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Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.
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Negative thinking is always expensive--dragging us down mentally, emotionally, and physically--hence I refer to any indulgence in it as a luxury.
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I refer to the restaurant
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I can't talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it's a horror to look back on. I can't imagine how I did it. When I got away from it I couldn't even refer to the place by name. Out there, I called it.
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An academic dialect is perfected when its terms are hard to understand and refer only to one another.
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There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts
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By the power elite, we refer to those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisio...
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I refer to the tyranny of science. The old horrors are being brought back. Though we no longer torture in the name of God or in the name of the State, we torture in the name of science!
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As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality
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As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
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As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
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As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
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There are only two industries that refer to their customers as users.
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It's rural America. It's where I came from. We always refer to ourselves as real America. Rural America, real America, real, real, America.
Politics
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First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.
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