Fishbones do not rid the poison.
The sickness begins with ghosts
On the top of the mound.
The IYC students came and participated in during one of the six days of improvisational performance of the Santa Fe Novena Project. They were very active participants verging on violent, but no one was hurt. We all felt great about it.
The stars, like the years,
Repeatedly return to their beginning.
By this time, at the very least, you (the reader) probably have a good picture of who I am. The entire piece could have come under the first heading, "About the Author." This post modern era is much too diverse for me to claim to be a model representative of a post modern artist. The neo-classicists have almost as strong a claim to be representative of post modernism as I do with my own peculiar romantic synthesis of the past. We are all products of our environments and hopefully I have shed some light on some of the influences that are in our present one. I have learned quite a bit about myself during the process of writing this piece. First, there are not the many contradictions in my character and personal belief systems that was often warned about earlier in this piece. Also, the number and quality of the references made the piece much more "scholarly" than I had imagined it would be. I expected the piece to be more obscure by having the looseness of John Cage's Silence or Pauline Oliveros' Software for People. I ended up with a pretty hefty book. I have the T'ai Hsuan Ching to thank for much of that as well as journals filled with a life full of multitudes of performances, dreams and responses to other texts.
The stars, like the years,
Repeatedly return to their end.
This piece marks the culmination of my formal education because it partially fulfills the requirements for a Ph.D. in Art and Performance. It also should mark the beginning of new artistic activity which will utilize this new package for all this information. I hope it will help inspire others to do the same. This piece was intended to be cyclic just as the verses from the T'ai Hsuan Ching are structured in a cyclic way. I will continue rereading this work in order to find more meaning from the juxtapositions of the Tsans with the other text. I don't really expect any other reader to try and do this. Most of the text may be too dense to even glance at the Tsan while reading through it. It is not so much that way for me because I wrote it. I need the juxtapositions to crack open this old stuff so that I can keep discovering new meaning in it. Hopefully this work will acquire new meaning for the reader (including myself) upon each rereading. Thank you for accompanying me on this journey.
Now all is frozen;
Hands reverently lift the crimson disc up to Heaven.
There, in the clear sky,
Is the Mystery's secret fountain.
A great marvel followed immediately on Galahad's death: the two remaining champions saw quite plainly a hand come down from heaven, but not the body that it belonged to, It proceeded straight to the Holy Vessel and took both it and the lance, and carried them up to heaven, to the end that no man since has ever dared to say he saw the Holy Grail.1
1 The Quest of the Holy Grail, translated by P.M. Matarasso, Penguin Books, 1969.