Dance Hits from 1982 - Monday Morning Memo

“We are suspended in that eternal moment between the past and the future.”
– RHW, July 5, 2022

“It seems to me that most animals have this superb economy of motion. The instinctual notion of how much energy to expend, the ability to do a thing thoughtlessly and do it right, is a quality that I esteem enormously. I want to get a feeling of this instinctualness into poetry. How to do this linguistically is a difficult thing. That it can or should be done might be an illusion. But it fascinates me to try.”
– James Dickey, Self Interviews, p. 60

“Without words, hearts and minds are isolated. Without words, it would be impossible to transfer ideas, express thoughts and communicate wills between two unconnected hearts. It is no wonder then that God chose a word to open his heart to us and our hearts to him… and the Word became flesh.”
– Chris Rush

“The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the Laws of Nature.”
– T.H. Huxley

“We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion. A lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism, or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the marketplace, while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply.

Around us all – now high like a distant thunderhead, now close upon us with the wet choking intimacy of a London fog – there is an enveloping cloud of fear. There is a physical fear, the kind that drives some of us to flee our homes and burrow into the ground in the bottoms of a Montana valley like prairie dogs to try to escape, if only for a little while, the sound and fury of the A-bombs or the hell bombs or whatever may be coming. There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor’s yard and stampedes us to burn down his house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt – doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we have long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging.

It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong. What truths can a human being afford to furnish the cluttered nervous room of his mind with when he no real idea how long a lease he has on his future.”

- Edward R Murrow, 1951