<>

<>

The only imaginative training consists, during the ordinary hours of attending Dance without any particular aim, in patiently and passively asking oneself about each step, each strange attitude, these points and taquetés, these allongés or ballons, “What could this mean?” or, even better, from inspiration, to read it. For sure, one would operate fully in the midst of reverie, but appropriate; vaporous, clear, and ample, or restricted, so long as it is similar to the one enclosed in her spins or transported in a fugue by the unlettered ballerina lending herself to the play of her profession. Yes, that one (if you’re lost in a hall, very foreign spectator, Friend), so long as you submissively place at the feet of this unconscious revealer, like the roses taken and thrown into the visibility of the upper regions by the dizzying play of her pale satin slippers, first the Flower of your poetic instinct, expecting nothing but the display, in its proper light, of the thousands of latent imaginations; then, through an exchange of which her smile seems to hold the secret, she hastily delivers up, through the ultimate veil that always remains, the nudity of your concepts, and writes your vision silently like a Sign, which she is.

(Mallarmé, “Ballets”)

In the terrible cascade of cloth, the figure swoons, radiant, cold; illustrating many a spinning image tending toward a distant unfolding: a giant petal or butterfly, uncrumpling, all according to order, clear and elementary. Or she fuses with the rapid nuances transmuting their crepuscular or grotesque phantasmagoria of air and water into a rapidity of passions—delight, mourning, anger. One needs, to set them off, prismatic, violent, or diluted, the vertigo of a soul that is as if cast into the air by an artifice.

[…]

Thus this peeling away of multiple layers around a nudity, enlarged by ordered or tempestuous contradictory flights, circling, magnifies it until dissolution: a central nothingness, all volition, for everything obeys a fleeting impulse to disappear in whirls; it sums up, in the will and dizziness of each wing tip, and hurls her strict, upright statue—dead with the effort of summing up—beyond the liberation almost from herself, the last decorative leaps evoking oceans, evenings, perfume, and sea foam.

So much is understood—but not spoken!—that to proffer a word about her, while she is performing, very softly and for the edification of the immediate vicinity, seems impossible, because, firstly, this sows confusion. But the memory, perhaps, won’t be drowned out by a bit of prose here. In my opinion, wherever fashion wishes to range this miraculous contemporary phenomenon, it was important to extract the summary meaning and the explanation that emanates from it and acts on a whole art.

(Mallarmé, “The Fundamentals of Ballet”)

The floor avoided by her leaps or hard on her points acquires a spatial virginity undreamed of, isolating a site that the figure will, all by herself, build and make flower.

“L’air me brise.” “I am broken by air.”

What I do is reorder free association until it is truly free.

How do I grasp my left breast? How do I grasp the sign?

I’m a vain hind. Is summer a good time for drama?

You can’t see me until I’m done with my transformation.

The problem is that the events were never written.

It takes a lot of study to become a dilator of time.

“Truth is the little sister of jouissance, we will

have to come back to this.” (Lacan 116, Seminar 17)

I’m not skimming the surface enough, haven’t given the surface enough time.

Tingling skin after an afternoon in the sun makes me hate him, makes me want to hurt him.

I’m supposed to tell him that I’m female in a way that precipitates from a need within a narrative framework.

It’s inelegant to divulge something that hangs from nowhere; it disfigures the natural evolution of things.

Why is it so easy to remove oneself from the world? How dare he lack in his lazy elongated easeful tiredness?

Comfort around someone is unusual and even if I don’t try to preserve it it persists.

I hate to be made to like, to be made to know that we have something in common.

I understand you as transient, I understand that you cannot be a point of fixation.

What I cannot say to you directly is what I own, what I come to know as valuable.

This doesn’t work in reverse. I don’t know what you dream of, though I might be there.

If you wish for something from me, do know it so it might come out.

I can’t continue to use a person as a particular kind of mirror.

I can’t say I’m grateful without sounding epitaphic;

I am glad you have enjoyed me so much.

Please enjoy me further.

If in ‘The American’ I invoked the romantic association without malice prepense, yet with a production of the romantic effect that is for myself unmistakable, the occasion is of the best perhaps for penetrating a little the obscurity of that principle. By what art or mystery, what craft of selection, omission or commission, does a given picture of life appear to us to surround its theme, its figures and images, with the air of romance while another picture close beside it may affect us as steeping the whole matter in the element of reality? It is a question, no doubt, on the painter’s part, very much more of perceived effect, effect after the fact, than of conscious design—though indeed I have ever failed to see how a coherent picture of anything is producible save by a complex of fine measurements. The cause of the deflexion, in one pronounced sense or the other, must lie deep, however; so that for the most part we recognise the character of our interest only after the particular magic, as I say, has thoroughly operated—and then in truth but if we be a bit critically minded, if we find our pleasure, that is, in these intimate appreciations (for which, as I am well aware, ninety-nine readers in a hundred have no use whatever). The determining condition would at any rate seem so latent that one may well doubt if the full artistic consciousness ever reaches it; leaving the matter thus a case, ever, not of an author’s plotting and planning and calculating, but just of his feeling and seeing, of his conceiving, in a word, and of his thereby inevitably expressing himself, under the influence of one value or the other. These values represent different sorts and degrees of the communicable thrill, and I doubt if any novelist, for instance, ever proposed to commit himself to one kind or the other with as little mitigation as we are sometimes able to find for him. The interest is greatest—the interest of his genius, I mean, and of his general wealth—when he commits himself in both directions; not quite at the same time or to the same effect, of course, but by some need of performing his whole possible revolution, by the law of some rich passion in him for extremes.

[…]

(In making which opposition I suggest not that the strange and the far are at all necessarily romantic: they happen to be simply the unknown, which is quite a different matter. The real represents to my perception the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another; it being but one of the accidents of our hampered state, and one of the incidents of their quantity and number, that particular instances have not yet come our way. The romantic stands, on the other hand, for the things that, with all the facilities in the world, all the wealth and all the courage and all the wit and all the adventure, we never can directly know; the things that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and our desire.)