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Stewart Stafford

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“I’m remembering there’s a word in Russian, izgoy, that describes someone with a flaw that makes that person singularly unfit to perform his or her professional role. A blocked writer, I lascivious priest, a drunken chauffeur. As a screwed-up therapist,someone like me should not be working at all. Not yet. It is far too soon. And you can tell that. Bethany, with her Competence Scale, already has. But here I am. An izgoy.”

DenialMental BlocksIzgoy
Book:The Rapture
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“Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope—and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing—that I shall draw a letter that begins, 'Dear Mr. Hitchens, it seems that you are unaware that…' It is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with 'the reader.' And there's no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already. It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so.”

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Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“He sat in the chapel for hours picking his way through fugues. A dozen notes, hardly music. But then those few notes spoke to each other, subject and answer, by repetition, by diminution, by augmentation, even looping backwards on themselves in a course like the retrograde motion of Mars. He listened as if he had as many ears as fingertips, and, like a blind man, could feel textures that were barely there. At the end of two or three pages of music he would hear all the voices twining together in a construction of such dizzying power that the walls of the chapel could barely contain it.”

MusicFugueOrgan
Book:The Lieutenant
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“La fugue – paraît-il – est un appel au secours et quelquefois une forme de suicide. Vous éprouvez quand même un bref sentiment d’éternité. Vous n’avez pas seulement tranché les liens avec le monde, mais aussi avec le temps. Et il arrive qu’à la fin d’une matinée, le ciel soit d’un bleu léger et que rien ne pèse plus sur vous. Les aiguilles de l’horloge du jardin des Tuileries sont immobiles pour toujours. Une fourmi n’en finit pas de traverser la tache de soleil.”

Fugue
Author:Patrick Modiano
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“Ce que cherchait Glenn Gould dans la musique de BACH, par son jeu staccatissimo - et les innombrables commentateurs ne l'ont pas vu - ce n'est rien d'autre que la lisibilité des voix contrapuntiques de ladite musique. En d'autres termes, Gould voulait rendre le plus nettement possible la spécificité de chacune des voix qui composent, par exemple, une fugue. La forme-fugue incarnant la quintessence de la musique du Kantor. Hélas, cela était impossible, comme c'est impossible pour tout instrument à clavier dont la nature sonore, l'identité sonore, est trop uniforme, le piano en tête ! L'orgue a bien quelques sonorités (jeux) à sa disposition, mais ce la ne suffit pas. La seule solution pour rendre aussi fidèlement que possible l'esprit contrapuntique de la musique de BACH, c'est de transcrire sa musique pour divers instruments ayant chacun une voix - une sonorité - très identifiable. C'est ce que j'ai modestement tenté par le moyen de diverses formations musicales (trios, quartets, quintets...) inventées spécialement à cette fin, savoir, redonner vie aux différentes voix du contrepoint. Un unique instrument ne pourra jamais même s'approcher de l'essence du contrepoint : il erre dans les limbes de l'harmonie et ne peut atteindre à aucune horizontalité - linéarité - des voix. Glenn Gould, cet anachorète des studios, n'a de cesse de chercher par quel biais technologique on pourrait rendre lisible ce fameux agencement des voix. Il se heurte à un problème de départ, insoluble : le son uniforme du piano. Ergo, cet instrument est sans aucun doute le dernier, avec le clavecin, qui convienne à la musique de BACH. Il existe, Dieu merci, d'autres compositeurs dont la musique ne pose pas le problème de la superposition de voix contrapuntiques purement linaires. L'ironie du sort voulut que Gould jouât du piano et ne goûtât pas Chopin, lequel était pourtant le seul qui a écrit - à ce jour - un musique qui épouse totalement la sonorité même du piano.”

FugueBachGlenn GouldContrepoint
Author:Leontsky
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“Simple linear logic, in which principles come first and deductions follow, is not very useful when it comes to comprehending a vidya, because the sages who developed these vidyas employed an entirely different mode of thinking. 'They thought rather in terms of what we might call a fugue, in which all the notes cannot be constrained into a single melodic scale, in which one is plunged directly into the midst of things and must follow the temporal order created by their thoughts' (de Santillana, p. xi). Probably the most essential condition for becoming a capable jyotishi, which happens to be the most difficult one for the average Westerner to fulfill, is to learn how to think in this holistic, non-linear way. Because it is also very difficult to write or teach non-linearly - it is simply impossible to 'square the circle' - imperfections in books on Jyotish that are written in modern languages are inevitable. One reason why Jyotish's texts are written in Sanskrit is that Sanskrit helps facilitate holistic thought. The Seers taught that Sanskrit's very sounds are sacred, and they held that Sanskrit (when properly intoned) speaks directly to the soul of living creatures, transmitting, as does music, a universal meaning which does not depend on its composition or lyrics. Because the essence of the Vedas is believed to be transferred to the listener when Vedic hymns are recited correctly, the Vedas must be studied vocally in their original Sanskrit if they are to be truly understood. This also applies to the Vedas' satellite vidyas such as Jyotish and Ayweda (India's traditional medical system). Other languages may convey the vidyas' theoretical meaning, but only Sanskrit captures and conveys their quintessence. Anyone who wishes to become a master jyotishi must eventually possess and be posscsscd by Sanskrit, and although theoretical or book learning can be helpful, Sanskrit, like Jyotish, can only be truly learned orally from a competent teacher.”

SanskritFugueAstrology Signs
Book:Light on Life
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“Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own.”

DepressionMental HealthMental IllnessInsanityBipolarBipolar DisorderMood DisorderBipolar Mother
Book:Letters from a Bipolar Mother
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