“All Greek gods are violent, in their fashion. Dionysos’ specialty is to connect interior violence - violence of phrenes, distorted perception, individual emotional storm - with performed, exterior violence: violence done and seen, out in the world. His persona is the fostering link between madness and murder. Tragedy, like Athens’ physical theater, belongs in Dionysos’ precinct. It grew up while historians and scientists formulated and worked on the principle that one infers interior movement - and the movement they too were interested in was mostly violent - from external movement, movement you could see. Tragedy is this principle’s dramatic truth. Its performed violence is only nominally onstage. It happens unseen. Spectators infer it and watch others doing so. [quotation of Agamemnon’s death] This is the theater exulting in possibilities of relating inside to outside, unseen to seen, private interior experience to the external watching and guessing of others: a concrete parallel to tragedy’s personal dimension. All over tragedy, men and women suffer within, in their emotions. Other figures, and spectators, infer this unseen pain from words. One cannot see into another person’s feelings. No external mark can tell us what people are inside. We infer what is in them from how they look and what they say. The physique of Dionysos’ theater, its contrasts of unseen and apparent space, embodies the personal dialectics of Dionysos’ tragedy.”

The dark depths of the Word numb me and immunize me. I don’t participate in the enchanting agony. With a stonelike sobriety I remain the mother of distant cradles.

“What I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.”

EL SOL DE LAS TRES DE LA TARDE I

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and strange odours, or or work of any artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of focus on their ways is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

“The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality… to define what is real.”

When I say “I love you,” it means that I want to be near the feeling of ambivalence our relation induces and hope that what’s negative, aggressive, or just hard about it doesn’t defeat what’s great about it really—or in my fantasies of it, anyway.