Vegetarians

"The dancing of Isadora Duncan is great symbolic art; now, when perhaps we have seen it for the last time, we must unhesitatingly re-affirm our conviction that it is one of the superlative artistic expressions of eternal spiritual glories. Her endowment is no mere talent for the consummation of exterior beauties; it is genius. She is a seer and a prophet, fulfilled of understanding and wisdom. The deep disease of the soul, its wasting, anemic illness since it ate of the weeds of prudery and went wandering on the hard roads of materialism, is known to her, and she has a great pity; and with devoted effort, through consecrating trials of toil and rejection, she has fitted herself to be a physician of the spirit. She brings us pure wine from an ancient vineyard, and she will not mingle with it any sharp strange bitters to sting our jaded taste. In her manner is nothing either of decadence nor of gigantic, splendid but agonising dramaturgy. She is of the company of those who have held to the slender infragible thread of the eternal tradition of beauty. And coming so, she startles our spiritual memories from a sleep of centuries. What glorious things she makes the soul remember! Once we were young, and the leaping blades of our desire striking the granite facts of life lit lively fires of wonder. We were simple, so that when the moving beauty of nature and the joy of each other's company stirred us to ecstasies, we sought free and natural expression; we danced — we danced as the movements of waves and branches, and as the exquisite beauties of our own bodies suggested. Such memories she evokes by her subtle gestures and movements, which are as the dancing of a leaf over the ground, as the drifting of mist over the still surface of a lake at dawn. The morning of time dawns upon our spirits again, and once more we have a sense that hears the gods. Watching her we see the soul of man moving in the dance of destiny; dreaming, hoping, aspiring, questioning; thrilling with desire and joy and melancholy, crushed, purged and raised again; the spirit of man enduring its trials and triumphing in the great adventure. This is the interpretation of life by the intuitive wisdom of genius, which is feeling confirmed by thought, and which understands that the ultimate of human apprehension is a mysticism impossible of interpretation save in symbolic art."

"She was a flame sheath of flesh made for dancing. She believed she ran into storm, rain, sun and became part of them and they were afterward woven in her dances."

"The revival of the dance is significant of the abiding, though much forgotten, need of the world for its arts, and a proof of the strange immortality of the arts themselves. A few years ago several great dancers came to summon the world, who must have prepared through long periods separately and without a common plan; yet with the effectiveness of premeditated simultaneity they appeared, as it were in a company. And the response of a world still hungering, somewhat dimly, for the arts, was the welcome we give to an advent long desired. Fortunate were those whose introduction to this momentous movement came by way of the greatest of its exponents, Isadora Duncan. It was one of the great hours, of which we have but three or four in a lifetime, when we first saw her. In that hour we sensed the manifold meanings and implications of the dance; its ecstasies, inspirations, and healing beneficences, and its possibly unimaginable importance to the modern world."

"This great artist is no longer in our world. The sun has set: the cycle is finished. In her art and in her life Isadora Duncan seemed to be an incarnation of all the energies of Nature."

""Come away! Her dancing says. Come out into the splendid perilous world! Come up on the mountain-top where the great wind blows! Learn to be young always! Learn to be incessantly renewed! Learn to live in the intemperate careless land of song and rhythm and rapture! Say farewell to the world you know and join the passionate spirits of the world’s history! Storm through into your dreams! Give yourself up to the frenzy that is in the heart of life, and never look back, and never regret! You shall become sweet and mad as a lover …"

"In those moments where beauty and emotion fuse and climax, something of the immortal floats about the dancer; she wanders in a divine ray, in a mist where all works of art circle in unison with her."

"The most interesting women in modern European history appear in the ranks of radical political movements. It is difficult to find conservative or traditional counterparts equal to Louise Michel, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg. Even Isadora Duncan, creator of modern dance, flirted with communism. More thoughtful and articulate and certainly as politically active as any of these women is the lesser known Spanish anarchist, Federica Montseny. On asking what attracted these women to radical politics, one discovers in each a commitment to feminism. No person, not even Emma Goldman, explored this necessary relationship between feminist and socialist principles more provocatively than did Federica Montseny."

"I shall never forget the first time I saw her come on to an empty platform to dance. … She came through some little curtains which were not much taller than herself — she came through and walked down to where a musician, his back to us, was seated at a large piano — he had just finished playing a short prelude by Chopin when in she came, and in some five or six steps was standing at the piano, quite still — you might have counted five or eight, and then there sounded the voice of Chopin in a second prelude or etude — it was played through gently and came to an end — she had not moved at all. Then one step back or sideways, and the music began again as she went moving on before, or after it. Only just moving — not pirouetting or doing any of the things which a Taglioni or a Fanny Elssler would have certainly done. She was speaking her own language, not echoing any ballet master, and so she came to move as no one had ever seen anyone move before. The dance ended, she again stood quite still. No bowing, no smiling — nothing at all. Then again the music is off, and she runs from it — it runs after her — for she has gone ahead of it. How is it that we know she is speaking her own language? We know it, for we see her head, her hands, gently active, as are her feet, her whole person. And if she is speaking, what is it she is saying? No one would ever be able to report truly, yet no one present had a moment's doubt. Only this can we say — that she was telling to the air the very things we long to hear; and now we heard them, and this sent us all into an unusual state of joy, and I sat still and speechless."

"I have the right to choose the father of my own children," she declared, and then wrote to George Bernard Shaw: "Will you be the father of my next child? A combination of my beauty and your brains would startle the world," but he replied: "I must decline your offer with thanks, for the child might have my beauty and your brains."

"Perhaps the greatest personality who has ever devoted herself to developing the art of the dance … Her interests ranged over a wide field of activities. There was a time when she wished to initiate a reform of human life in its least details of costume, of hygiene, of morals. But gradually she came to concentrate her interest upon the dance. For her the dance is not merely the art which permits the spirit to express itself in movement; it is the base of a whole conception of life, a life flexible, harmonious, natural. In the development of the dance she found herself confronted by the dilemma which has just been alluded to. On the one hand was the limited technique of the ballet, on the other the unnatural contortions of the eccentric school. To return to the unconscious gesture of the people — that is to say, the crude, stereotyped gestures of the street — offered no way of escape. She found the solution in a return to the natural gesture of human life as represented in Greek art."

"It was never easy to coax Isadora Duncan into a photographer's studio. Like a wild and wise animal, she fled from those who sought to capture the essence of her — which was motion — by making her stand still."

"But the dance of the future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art, is mere merchandise."

"The harmony of music exists equally with the harmony of movement in nature. Man has not invented the harmony of music. It is one of the underlying principles of life. Neither could the harmony of movement be invented: it is essential to draw one’s conception of it from Nature herself, and to see the rhythm of human movement from the rhythm of water in motion, from the blowing of the winds on the world, in all the earth’s movements, in the motions of animals, fish, birds, reptiles, and even in primitive man, whose body still moved in harmony with nature…..All the movements of the earth follow the lines of wave motion. Both sound and light travel in waves. The motion of water, winds, trees and plants progresses in waves. The flight of a bird and the movements of all animals follow lines like undulating waves. If then one seeks a point of physical beginning for the movement of the human body, there is a clue in the undulating motion of the wave."

"Isadora Duncan's arms were not clichéd ketchup buddhas like those we're used to seein' in Hollywood & Co., but real floral contaminations, devils in the raw whose blood had sublimely turned to nitroglycerin, or some other "secret" substance even more deadly & dangerous than fire & poison, at the exact moment she discovered the dance."

"And here I want to avoid a misunderstanding that might easily arise. From what I have said you might conclude that my intention is to return to the dances of the old Greeks, or that I think that the dance of the future will be a revival of the antique dances or even of those of the primitive tribes. No, the dance of the future will be a new movement, a consequence of the entire evolution which mankind has passed through. To return to the dances of the Greeks would be as impossible as it is unnecessary. We are not Greeks and therefore cannot dance Greek dances."

"Isadora Duncan has not dealt with the dance intellectually, nor spiritually — but personally. The Age saw to that!"

"I could not adopt him so I married him. You know how wonderful he is, like all Russians. He starts reciting verse at two o'clock in the morning."

"The movement of the waves, of winds, of the earth is ever in the same lasting harmony. We do not stand on the beach and inquire of the ocean what was its movement of the past and what will be its movement of the future. We realize that the movement peculiar to its nature is eternal to its nature. The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body."

"All my muses in the theatre are movements seized during Isadora's flight; she was my principal source."

"To seek in nature the fairest forms and to find the movement which expresses the soul of these forms — this is the art of the dancer. It is from nature alone that the dancer must draw his inspirations, in the same manner as the sculptor, with whom he has so many affinities. Rodin has said: "To produce good sculpture it is not necessary to copy the works of antiquity; it is necessary first of all to regard the works of nature, and to see in those of the classics only the method by which they have interpreted nature." Rodin is right; and in my art I have by no means copied, as has been supposed, the figures of Greek vases, friezes and paintings. From them I have learned to regard nature, and when certain of my movements recall the gestures that are seen in works of art, it is only because, like them, they are drawn from the grand natural source. My inspiration has been drawn from trees, from waves, from clouds, from the sympathies that exist between passion and the storm, between gentleness and the soft breeze, and the like, and I always endeavour to put into my movements a little of that divine continuity which gives to the whole of nature its beauty and its life."

"I have closely studied the figured documents of all ages and of all the great masters, but I have never seen in them any representations of human beings walking on the extremity of the toes or raising the leg higher than the head. These ugly and false positions in no way express that state of unconscious Dionysiac delirium which is necessary to the dancer. Moreover movèments, just like harmonies in music, are not invented; they are discovered."

"Bernard Shaw says that as long as men torture and slay animals and eat their flesh we shall have war. I think all sane, thinking people must be of his opinion. The children of my school were all vegetarians, and grew strong and beautiful on a vegetable and fruit diet. Sometimes during the war when I heard the cries of the wounded I thought of the cries of the animals in the slaughterhouse, and I felt that, as we torture these poor defenceless creatures, so the gods torture us. Who loves this horrible thing called war? Probably the meat-eaters, having killed, feel the need to kill—kill birds, animals—the tender stricken deer—hunt foxes. The butcher with his bloody apron incites bloodshed, murder. Why not? From cutting the throat of a young calf to cutting the throat of our brothers and sisters is but a step. While we are ourselves the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal conditions on the earth?"

"I could have played the part of Saint Joan. I ought to have played it. I have the ample figure, the hardy physique of a farm-servant. Joan was a buxom creature. Yet she is always played by thin little actresses."

"Love is not the sacred thing that poets talk about … Love is an illusion; it is the world's greatest mistake. I ought to know for I've been loved as no other woman of my time has been loved. Men have threatened suicide, they have taken poison, they have fought duels for me. All kinds have come to me — geniuses, poets, millionaires, artists, musicians — but now there is not one to whom I have appealed for the loan of £25 who have responded. There is love for you!"

"Her dances were hymns to freedom — of sensibility, of passion, of the transcendentally convinced and convincing Emersonian soul … Today it is hard to picture convincing interpretations of Joy, Hope, Immortality, the Soul. But at the turn of the century an American girl, incarnating these and more, coincided with historical promise."

"Of all his merit-making, Jigme Lingpa was most proud of his feelings of compassion for animals; he says that this is the best part of his entire life story. He writes of his sorrow when he heard the screams of baby birds being killed by an animal who had climbed into their nest and when he witnessed the butchering of animals by humans. He often bought and set free animals about to be slaughtered (a common Buddhist act). He "changed the perception" of others, such as his Pala sponsors, whom he once caused to save a female yak from being butchered, and he continually urged his disciples to forswear the killing of animals."

"Ho! Mesmerized by the sheer variety of perceptions, beings wander endlessly astray in samsara's vicious cycle."

"A wise man changes his mind sometimes, but a fool never. To change your mind is the best evidence you have one. The last redoubt holding out for me was the year-day principle (on which I had written a defense in 1972 for the Southern Publishing Association Daniel volume which was published in 1978). This collapsed when I handled hundreds of books of commentary on Revelation in the Library of Congress stacks and found that the respective authors had in many cases suggested dates that seemed appropriate for their own time but ridiculous later. It became clear that we, as Adventists, had done the same as our predecessors."

"Everyone who eats meat must kill the animal himself. Because carnivorous animals do not take a assistant, or at least presence walk and spend an hour of their lives watching this beautiful meal and see how these delicious foods are prepared for them."

"As long as we do not suffocate the natural emotions of our hearts by force, it is clear that there is a feeling of hatred in humans for killing and pain of other animals, and it is also clear that when all people are forced to kill the animals they eat with their own hands, most of them turn to vegetarianism."

"Compare that to a fruit shop adorned with pleasant, lush colors that smell like pomegranate. Compare apples, oranges, cherries, peaches, grapes and melons, and the vivid colors of various vegetables to the butcher shop, the hanging heart and intestines, the severed corpses, the split bellies, the broken legs that hang, and drop blood dripping from it."

"It is said that their souls (animals) are inferior. Yes, but in the end, like us, they feel pain and joy. Their inferiority determines for us the duty of the elder brother, not the right of tyranny and oppression."

"Finally I realized that I was a demi-god and that I was beyond all the low, petty desires of mankind. I felt the eternal flux within me. What is eternity? Eternity for me was playing hide-and-seek with that whore on the banks of the Suren river; it was a momentary closing of my eyes when I hid my head in her lap."

"If the human race is to reach its peak of development one day, it will be in a natural environment with plant food. As cannibalism and artificial civilization corrupt him and drag him to the abyss of nothingness. Unless a humane race and a non-native whose life is governed by the laws of nature succeed him, otherwise his race will be shamefully extinguished."

"It should be noted that vegetarianism is still a source of ridicule for those who do not know the truth; How easily we laughed at our ancestors, the day will come when future generations will laugh at our superstitions."

"I was growing inward incessantly; like an animal that hibernates during the wintertime, I could hear other peoples' voices with my ears; my own voice, however, I could hear only in my throat. The loneliness and the solitude that lurked behind me were like a condensed, thick, eternal night, like one of those nights with a dense, persistent, sticky darkness which waits to pounce on unpopulated cities filled with lustful and vengeful dreams."

"What relationship could exist between the lives of the fools and healthy rabble who were well, who slept well, who performed the sexual act well, who had never felt the wings of death on their face every moment—what relationship could exist between them and one like me who has arrived at the end of his rope and who knows that he will pass away gradually and tragically?"

"What is love? For the rabble love is a kind of variety, a transient vulgarity; the rabble's conception of love is best found in their obscene ditties, in prostitution and in the foul idioms they use when they are halfway sober, such as "shoving the donkey's foreleg in mud," or "putting dust on the head." My love for her, however, was of a totally different kind. I knew her from ancient times—strange slanted eyes, a narrow, half-open mouth, a subdued quiet voice. She was the embodiment of all my distant, painful memories among which I sought what I was deprived of, what belonged to me but somehow I was denied. Was I deprived forever?"

"I was not in full control of myself, and it seemed that I knew her name from before. The evil in her eyes, her color, her scent and her movements were all familiar to me. It was as though my souls, in the life before this, in the world of imagination, had bordered on her soul and that both souls, of the same essence and substance, were destined for union. I must have lived this life very close to her. I had no desire to touch her; the invisible beams that emanated from our bodies and mingled were sufficient for me. Isn't this terrifying experience which seemed so familiar to met quite the same as the feelings of two lovers who feel that they have known each other before and that a mysterious relationship has previously existed between them? Was it possible that someone else could affect me? The dry, repulsive and ominous laughter of the old man, however, tore our bonds asunder."

"In this base world, full of poverty and misery, for the first time I thought a ray of sunshine had shone on my life. But alas, it was not a sunbeam, rather it was only a transient beam, a shooting star, which appeared to me in the likeness of a woman or an angel."

"My life appeared to me as unnatural, uncertain and incredible as the design on the pencase I am using at this moment. It seems that a painter who has been possessed, perhaps a perfectionist, has painted the cover of this pencase. Often, when I look at this design, it seems familiar; perhaps it is because of this design that I write or perhaps this design makes me write."

"Their Jewish God is heavy, Cruel and implacable. He always orders to kill and plunder people, and before the day of Resurrection, He sends Mr. Messiah so he can get his people's income and slaughter them so much that his horse's knees surge in blood."

"It is true that the Arabs were too lowly to do such insolence, this sedition was started by Jewish spies and they created (Islam) with their own hands to overthrow the civilization of Iran and Rome and they achieved their goal, but like the staff of Moses that He turned into a dragon and Moses himself was afraid of him, this seventy-headed dragon is devouring the world"

"The Irish were actually Iranians who migrated to Western Europe, tried to change the word "Iran", removed "an" and replaced it with "eland" and became "Ireland". Germanics were Iranians who migrated from Kerman province to the center of Europe."

"In life there are certain sores that, like a canker, gnaw at the soul in solitude and diminish it. (opening line)"

"I write only for my shadow which is cast on the wall in front of the light. I must introduce myself to it."

"Everyone knows that the Chinese regime is coming to an end. I just say to the people in China who are guilty of crimes of genocide, such as harvesting organs from Falun Gong prisoners—we know your names. We know what you're doing… and you will be punished. This is the world of 2006 and beyond. It is a world of human rights and democracy, and a world in which the CCP has no place."

"When you listen as fiercely as you want to be heard, when you respect the idea that you are sharing the Earth with other humans, and when you lead with your nice foot forward, you will win, every time. It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but it comes back to you when you need it. We live in an age of instant gratification, of immediate likes, and it is uncomfortable to have to wait to see the dividends of your kindness, but I promise you it will appear exactly when you need it."

"I, like every other stupid American, assumed the kangaroos would meet us at the airport and they would want to hug us as much as we wanted to hug them. … [In Sydney's zoo] I did find out about the koalas and how eucalyptus makes them high and why they sleep all day. They're little druggies."

"I have always been an animal lover. I had a hard time disassociating the animals I cuddled with—dogs and cats, for example—from the animals on my plate, and I never really cared for the taste of meat. I always loved my Brussels sprouts!"