An extremely powerful monologue from Peter Brooks’ Marat/Sade. In it, the Marquis de Sade talks about how the clinical, sterile means of death and violence, the guillotine, divorces humanity from nature. Extremely powerful, somewhat disturbing, and very thought-provoking.
Crashingly Beautiful: Leonard Cohen on Meditation
…You run through your top ten erotic fantasies, ambition fantasies, revenge fantasies, global ratification fantasies. You run through them all until you bore yourself to death, basically, and the faculty that produces opinions and snap judgments and unrealistic scenarios for your own prominence, after you run through them for a number of years, they cease to have charge. They bore themselves into non-existence. You see them as diversions from another kind of intimacy that you become more interested in–and that is what Socrates said: Know Thyself.
—from Sarah Hampson’s interview with Leonard Cohen in Shambhala Sun.
Source: crashinglybeautiful
Parabola Magazine: She Responded
The birds’ favorite songs
You do not hear,
For their most flamboyant music takes place
When their wings are stretched
Above the trees
And they are smoking the opium
Of pure freedom.
It is healthy for the prisoner
To have faith
That one day he will again move about
Wherever he wants,
Feel the…
(via auroraday)
Source: parabola-magazine
I first tried to read both of these not long after my mother died ten years ago. I couldn’t read either of them: I was too raw and these hit those raw nerves.
I think it’s time to revisit them.
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing……Only I will remain.
Love and Death: The Great Gifts
“Love and Death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened.” - Rainer Maria Rilke as quoted by Roshi Joan Halifax in Being with Dying.
