March 25, 2008

• A Midrash for Julie:

  Dancers and
  the Dance

  The previous entry was inspired (see the "In the Details" link) by the philosophical musings of Julie Taymor... specifically, her recollection of Balinese dancers--

  
  

  "... they were performing for God. Now God can mean whatever you
  want it to mean. But for me, I understood it so totally. The detail....
  

  
  

  They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside
  to the in. And that profoundly moved me then. It was... it was the most
  important thing that I ever experienced."

  -- Julie Taymor,
  "Skewed Mirrors" interview

  Here is some further commentary on the words of that entry--

  On the phrase "Within You Without You"-- the title of a song by George Harrison:

  "Bernard’s understanding of reality connects to this
  idea
  of 'flow': he sees reality as a product of consciousness. He rejects
  the
  idea of an 'outer' world of unchanging objects and an 'inner' world of
  the
  mind and ideas. Rather, our minds are part of the world, and vice
  versa."

  -- Adrien Ardoin, SparkNote on
      Virginia Woolf's The Waves

  On "Death and the Apple Tree"-- the title of the previous entry-- in The Waves:

  "The apple tree Neville is looking at as he overhears the servants at
  the school discussing a local murder becomes inextricably linked to his
  knowledge of death. Neville finds himself unable to pass the tree, seeing it
  as glimmering and lovely, yet sinister and 'implacable.' When he learns that
  Percival is dead, he feels he is face to face once again with 'the tree
  which I cannot pass.' Eventually, Neville turns away from the natural world
  to art, which exists outside of time and can therefore transcend death. The
  fruit of the tree appears only in Neville’s room on his embroidered curtain,
  a symbol itself of nature turned into artifice. The apple tree image also
  echoes the apple tree from the Book of Genesis in the Bible, the fruit of
  which led Adam and Eve to knowledge and, therefore, expulsion from Eden."

  -- Adrien Ardoin, op. cit.

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