Thursday, February 16, 2006

Dance of the Dual

This is about a third in to The Move.
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Entering an enclosure of great transparency and light where things name themselves.*

Fulfillment of our desires is not fullness in itself, but a counterpoint between lack and abundance. To know one is to know the other. They are twin forces, balancing each other through all the cycles.

The creative force is the force of entrophy. An oscillating dance, each necessary to life and death.

Life cannot exist without death; so death cannot exist without life.

In counterpoint we know each other.

Dualism enables us to straddle the middle, the golden means, the pivot of the centre. Even in uncertainty.

On the threshold of being, non being.

The dialectic of our soul.

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*This line, I'm sure, is from Michael Hamburger's introduction to Poems of Paul Celan, which I would've written onto one of the copies of this mms. but which didn't get onto the computer, and which means a trip to the library...

4 comments:

  1. Yes.
    Nothing ever stays the same. Balance is not stasis but balancing, at least a subtle shifting involved. And often, balance involves more, a continuous return to balance. And in this way we are centered, knowing both ends of the spectrum, and thereby the complete spectrum... By these oscillations we know ourselves and each other and life... and death. And so we are.

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  2. I love the way you put this, MB, "not stasis but balancing." Yet we need to know "both ends of the spectrum" to find balance too. Oscillations- oh, this is great stuff! When you sing, that balance? A way to encompass all the variations, splits, motions? How you have expanded my little metaphor!

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  3. What I mean to say is that I think of balance as an active doing, an act of oscillation between the ends, the sense of stasis being an illusion or a moment in passing. In essence, a juggling act, and when it's going smoothly it seems effortless, it seems balanced, because one is experiencing the whole.

    And oh yes, when I sing, balancing. So many kinds. There are the constant micro-adjustments on the physical level in the act of singing, there are the ways I must balance inward focus and outward connection (what I'm doing, what my fellow performers are doing, what the audience is doing... singing vs. playing instrument...), there is the balance between my spiritual/ emotional inward involvement and technique & execution... there is the balance between vulnerability and polish... the balance between remembering words and making them new all over again... I find that performing is very much a relationship issue, with myself, with those I'm with, with those I sing for, with the spiritual. And to weave that all into a whole. Not to mention the ways in which singing restores my personal balance, helps me keep balanced in life...

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  4. MB, wow, that beautiful writing on balancing and singing... you should post that paragraph at your site, share it beyond this admiring reader. xo

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A Pulsing Imagination - Ray Clews' Paintings

A video of some of my late brother Ray's paintings and poems I wrote for them. Direct link: https://youtu.be/V8iZyORoU9E ___