QUOTES: (These quotes are assorted thought-provoking statements that I happened on in the course of my research for The Faun. Some I agree with, some not - some are still being thought about.) "Pan is the perfectly initiated dancer." Pindar "Love isn't an emotion or an instinct - it's an art." "Any time you got nothing to do - and plenty of time to do it - come up and see me." Mae West "There is no well-being without reverie. No reverie without well-being." Gaston Bachelard "The reverie which works poetically maintains us in an intimate space which does not stop at any frontier - a space uniting the intimacy of our being which dreams with the intimacy of the beings which we dream. It is within these composite intimacies that a poetics of reverie is coordinated. The whole being of the world is amassed poetically around the cogito of the dreamer." Gaston Bachelard "Yet now as Fate approaches, and the Hours are breathing low, the sands of Time are changed to golden grains." A. E. Poe "We only find that time has length when we find it too long." Gaston Bachelard "Far from innermost duration being a property we own, it is a work we create and is always preceded by an action centered on an instant. It is this initial action that has first to adapt more or less precisely to spacial conditions. We must attach our time to things for it to be effective and real. Gaston Bachelard "The positive experience of nothingness in ourselves can only help to clarify our experience of succession." Gaston Bachelard "Pan is evidently symbolic of the repressed. But everything man flees and rejects in order to distinguish himself from the animals makes him like to the gods. The myth seems to say: if we refuse the beast, we shall never know how to resemble a god. A double and limnal figure already, Pan meets man only to leave him at the precise spot where animality corresponds to the divine." (Pan is)..." an agent of transfer from one world to another." "The bucolic landscape of...Arcadia, is a kind of stage set." "Pan undeniably identifies a landscape, but one that is more than a spatial location. He is, after all, a god, and a sign not of the picturesque but of the supernatural. The panic landscape is a space where strange phenomena take place, irrespective of human will and power." "...the phallic power of the god and his music can be properly communicated...only through the mediation of ritual." "In the myth, the syrinx comes into existence as the object of desire escapes. Music, so closely associated with Pan's dance, seems thus to originate in a deficit. But it would be wrong to take it as a mere substitutave compensation. It is infused with supernatural power and is that which it replaces; it has the overpowering force of passion - and its reality: it is the divine word that in a pastoral world fertilizes the flocks, and in a wider symbolic universe leads mankind in a dance where, as Sophocles has it, we take wing under the sign of Eros and Charis." "...what has no cause is ascribed to Pan." "Pan sprinkles his own sort of honey." Phillipe Borgeaud: "The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece." (Locus amoenus = "pleasant spot") "...both the landscape and the time of day are significant. The sycamores and their cool shade, the riverbank, the grassy slope, the sound of the cicadas; all combine to create an inviting place to rest. The hour of midday, when one is inclined to seek shade beneath a tree, is also the hour when divine epiphanies are most likely." Lanon "...the charm is sometimes inherent in the object..." An ancient commentator on Sappho's poetry "There was a cave of the nymphs, a great rock hollow within and rounded on the outside. The images of the nymphs had been made in stone; their feet were unshod, their arms bare to the shoulder, their hair loose to their necks. Their garments were tucked up at the waist, and there was a smile about their eyes. The whole scene was like a chorus of dancers. The mouth of the cave was in the middle of a great rock, and gushing water spouted from it, so that a hollowed meadow was created before the cave, and plentiful soft grass was nourished by the moisture." Longus "Thus souls coming into genesis are naiad nymphs and so it is the custom to call brides "nymphs" as well, since they are being married for childbearing (genesis), and to pour over them water drawn from springs or streams or overflowing fountains. For souls that have been initiated into the material world and for the deities that preside over genesis [ie., the nymphs] the cosmos is both holy and pleasing, though by nature it is shadowy and "murky": that is why these beings are considered to have the substance of mist or air. For the same reason an appropriate temple for them would be a "pleasant grotto," a "murky" one, in the image of the cosmos in which souls dwell as in the greatest of temples." Porphyry "A mutual sex relationship between two adult men of approximately the same age and social standing negates the use of sex as the underpinning of a power structure, be it that of man over wife, man over prostitute, or adult male over young boy. It is probably for that reason, and not because it is "unnatural," or breaks the link between sex and procreation, that true male homosexuality is almost universally censured, as in the case of Classical Athens." Keuls: The Reign of the Phallus "Her power is that of performing the spectacle of difference which cannot be mastered." Linda Singer "(The) ungrounded choice at the limit of rationality (is) precisely the affirmation of life." Judith Butler, paraphrasing Camus "Becoming a faun was the best thing that ever happened to me." Mr. Murphy "When will you realize, superficial, light man, that I am desire and that desire desires everything?" Maurizio (Concerning sports...) "...despite the strong social discouragement to male looking at the male, the setting of sport uniquely legitimizes that gaze." ""...the most intense and intimate spectatorship, however, is justified in non-sexual terms by the overall alibi for spectator sports, that of scientific inquiry." "...disavowed, but phantasmatic, images of men at the peak of physical perfection in the moment of power and ecstasy when victory is won are offered for the satisfaction of the male viewer. These images are then the means by which the television sponsor is able to make contact with the gratified viewer, since in the commercials the same sorts of images are employed to sell products, and the acquisition of masculinity through the purchase of certain sporting (and related) items seems guaranteed by the sponsors." "...spectacle must be maximized at the same time as disavowal is reinforced. The oneiric world of powerful males in beauteous motion created by slow motion and long lens is read as a mode of documentary realism." "...In this way, the alibi of the sporting context is invaluable, since it allows the offering of erotic images of the male to the self-identifying heterosexual male along with the disavowal of eroticism." Kenneth Mackinnon Is Gay the new Blackface? (granting...) "straight consumers a longed-for place outside of the humdrum mainstream." Bronski "I'm actually a pretty man." Muhammed Ali "...the Cartesian distinction between body and freedom." (the)...distinction between soul (consciousness, mind) and body invariably supports relations of political and psychic subordination and hierarchy. The mind not only subjugates the body, but occasionally entertains the fantasy of fleeing its embodiment altogether." "...the bride functions as a relational term between groups of men; she does not have an identity, and neither does she exchange one identity for another - she reflects masculine identity precisely by being the site of its absence." (concerning Foucault's theory...) "...the univocal construct of "sex" (one is one's sex and, therefore, not the other) is (a) produced in the service of the social regulation and control of sexuality and (b) conceals and artificially unifies a variety of disparate and unrelated sexual functions and then (c) postures within discourse as a cause, an interior essence which both produces and renders intelligible all manner of sensation, pleasure, and desire as sex-specific." Judith Butler "Gender Trouble"
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