The world is made of verbs

This from James Hillman in The Soul’s Code. An apt a description for what the process of practicing presence feels like.

The world is made less of nouns than of verbs. It doesn’t consist merely in objects and things; it is filled with useful, playful, and intriguing opportunities. The oriole doesn’t see a branch, but an occasion for perching; the cat doesn’t see a thing we call an empty box, it sees safe hiding for peering. The bear doesn’t smell honeycomb, but the opportunity for delicious feeding. The world is buzzing and blooming with information, which is always available and never absent.

Imagination and ‘Reality’

“Right now, human beings as a mass, have a gruesome appetite for what they call ‘real’, whether it’s Reality TV or the kind of plodding fiction that only works as low-grade documentary, or at the better end, the factual programmes and biographies and ‘true life’ accounts that occupy the space where imagination used to sit.

Such a phenomenon points to a terror of the inner life, of the sublime, of the poetic, of the non-material, of the contemplative.

Against all this, a writer … , who believes in the power of story telling for its mythic and not its explanatory qualities, and who believes that language is much more than information, must row against the tide rather like Siegfried rowing against the current of the Rhine.”

Jeanette Winterson, from the Introduction to Weight: the myth of Atlas and Heracles, 2005.

The theatre inside

Eugenio Barba:

“The actor’s concern is simply not to bore his audience”
– to this end the actor’s technique, the theatre inside, is transmitted:

ACTORS > ACTORS
BODIES > BODIES

The actor embodies theatre, so theatre is whatever is in the actor.

Notes from Theater East and West: Revisited, 2002, a conference in honour of Leonard Pronko’s work and the 35th anniversary of his book, Theater East and West.

Performance

“… there is always one person in the audience to whom you speak. One. All I ask is that you feel for or against.”

Martha Graham, Blood Memory: an autobiography, 1991.

Yes

“
-    Everything written symbols can say has already passed by. They are like tracks left by animals. That is why the masters of meditation refuse to accept that writings are final. The aim is to reach true being by means of those tracks, those letters, those signs – but reality itself is not a sign, and it leaves no tracks. It doesn’t come to us by way of letters or words. We can go toward it, by following those words and letters back to what they came from. But so long as we are preoccupied with symbols, theories and opinions, we will fail to reach the principle.

-    But when we give up symbols and opinions, aren’t we left in the utter nothingness of being?

-    Yes.

”

Kimura Kyuho, Kenjutsu Fushigi Hen (On the Mysteries of Swordsmanship), 1768.