"That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful." ～Edgar Allan Poe / "Understood in its metaphysical sense, Beauty is one of the manifestations of the Absolute Being. Emanating from the harmonious rays of the Divine plan, it crosses the intellectual plane to shine once again across the natural plane, where it darkens into matter." ～Jean Delville
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
～G. Bachelard
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
～Umberto Eco
Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.
～Thomas Mann
Stay, little ounce, here in/ Fleece and leaf with me, in the evermore/ Where swans trembled in the lake around our bed of hay and morning/ Came each morning like a felt cloak billowing/ Across the most pale day. It was the color of a steeple disappearing/ In an old Venetian sky. (...)
Would they take/ You now from me, like Leonardo's sleeve disappearing in/ The air. And when I woke I could not wake/ You, little sphinx, I could not keep you here with me./ Anywhere, I could not bear to let you go. Stay here/ In our clouded bed of wind and timothy with me./ Lie here with me in snow.
~For a Snow Leopard in October, Lucie Brock-Broido
Water Stains on the Wall is Mr. Lin Hwai-Min's fourth piece inspired by the aesthetics, spirit, beauty and philosophy behind the art of Chinese calligraphy and writing (after the breathtaking Cursive Trilogy: Cursive, Cursive II and Mad Cursive). Inhabiting a rather different sphere—"air" (clouds were his original source of inspiration in the creative process of Water Stains on the Wall, and images of clouds are used lavishly and beautifully in the stage design of this piece), for me, Water Stains on the Wall is perfection, transcendence, magnificence, the purest form of poetry and consciousness. I think I might be even more in love with it than with Moon Water, which, up until now, is my favourite piece in Mr. Lin Hwai-Min's oeuvre and what started my profound love affair with Cloud Gate Dance Theatre...
It was a magical evening, when I saw ethereal yet exquisitely powerful swans gliding in space with perfectly controlled 氣 ("chi" or "prana"). The dancers' breathing was as beautiful as a calligraphic work, as the movements and music themselves...
