1.) Shall we say that the dog who is toilet trained has good morals? Yes, I believe we shall.

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2.) "A simple thing has to be understood: love -- the love that you are talking about -- is not in your hands. You have fallen into it. It was not in your power not to fall, so when it comes, it takes you with it. But it is like a breeze, it comes and goes. And it is good that it comes and goes, because if it stays it becomes stale."

"Love is such a beautiful word. When you say, "Falling in love," you are using the word in an ugly way. Say "falling in sex"; be true. In love one always rises, never falls. But first you have to come out of the ditch. Help each other."

"You fell without a second thought; you can understand that very easily love has disappeared. Accept the truth of it, and don't blame each other, because nobody is responsible.

Help each other gracefully; in deep friendship, part. Lovers when they separate become enemies. That is a strange kind of gratitude. They should become really friends. And if love can become friendship, there is no guilt, no grudge, no feeling that you have been cheated, exploited. Nobody has exploited anybody..."

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3.) "the so-called religious people have never been gentle with themselves. In fact, we call a person a saint only when he tortures himself, when he is masochistic. The more masochistic, the greater a saint he is. The more he tortures himself, the more followers worship him.

That's how we have been deciding who is a real saint. The saint tortures himself and teaches others to be like him, and he creates guilt in you if you cannot torture yourself -- and no intelligent person can torture himself. Hence all intelligent people have been feeling guilty. Only stupid people can torture themselves. That's why in the faces, in the eyes of your saints you will see nothing but sheer stupidity."

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4.) And to speak of solitude again, it becomes always clearer that this at bottom not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. We shall indeed turn dizzy then; for all points upon which our eye has been accustomed to rest are taken from us, there is nothing near any more and everything far is infinitely far. A person removed from his own room, almost without preparation and transition, and set upon the height of a great mountain range, would feel something of the sort: an unparalleled insecurity, an abandonment to something inexpressible would almost annihilate him. He would think himself falling or hurled into space, or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a monstrous lie his brain would have to invent to catch up with and explain the state of his senses!

So for him who becomes solitary all distances, all measures change; of these changes many take place suddenly, and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, extraordinary imaginings and singular sensations arise that seem to grow out beyond all bearing. But is necessary for us to experience that too. We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it.

That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the who so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied.

whew! from http://indiefaith.blogspot.com/2007/09/letter-8-rilke-on-solitude-and.html

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5.) Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake. It is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), might young people use the love that is given them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for along, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives as yet scarcely suffice.

Whoever looks seriously at it finds that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any explanation, any solution, any hint of way yet been discerned; and for these two problems that we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, it will not be possible to discover any general rule resting in agreement. But in the same measure in which we begin as individuals to put life to the test, we shall, being individuals, meet these great things at closer range. The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them. But if we nevertheless hold out and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play, behind which people have hidden from the most earnest earnestness of their existence - then a little progress and alleviation will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us; that would be much.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

from http://www.verticalpool.com/rilke.html

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6.) Dylan: Yes, I had a group at the very start. You must realize I come from the United States, you know. I don't know if you know the United States. It's not like England at all. The people at my age now you know, 25, 26, at this age, everybody's grown up, you know, playing rock'n'roll music.

Klas Burling: You did it?

Dylan: Yes, I mean, cause it's the only kind of music you heard. I mean everybody has done it, cause all you heard was rock'n'roll and country and western and rhythm and blues music. Now at a certain time the whole field got taken over into, into some milk, you know - into Frankie Avalon, Fabian and this kind of thing. That's not bad or anything, but it was just ... there was nobody really, that you could look at, and to really want anything that they had or wanna be like them, you know? So everybody got out of it. And I remember when everybody got out of it. But nobody really lost that whole thing. And then folk music came in as some kind of substitute for a while, but it was only a substitute don't you understand? And that's all it was. Now it's different again, because of the English thing. The English thing ... what the English thing did was, they proved that you could make money, you know, at playing the same old kind of music that you used to play, and that's the truth. You know, that's not a lie. It's not a come on or anything. But, uh, you know the English people can't play rock'n'roll music.

-- Bob Dylan interview with Karl Burling in '66, found on a website, misquoted a little (to my memory): I have the whole interview on CD

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7.)take a look at me baby
I am a teenage prayer
when it's cloudy all the time
all you gotta do is...

take a look at me babe
(good go 'head)
I'm your teenage prayer
take a look at me baby
just take a look at me baby
I am your teenage prayer
yes I'm your teenage prayer

from I'm Your Teenage Prayer, sung by Dylan and The Band in '67 on the basement tapes

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8.) Samuel Beckett.

The perceived pessimism in Beckett's work is mitigated both by a great and often wicked sense of humour, and by the sense, for some readers, that Beckett's portrayal of life's obstacles serves to demonstrate that the journey, while difficult, is ultimately worth the effort. Similarly, many posit that Beckett's expressed "pessimism" is not so much for the human condition but for that of an established cultural and societal structure which imposes a stultifying will upon otherwise hopeful individuals; it is the inherent optimism of the human condition, therefore, that is at tension with the oppressive world. Peter Brook says in The Empty Space that if you believe that Beckett is pessimistic, then you are a Beckett character trapped in a Beckett play; Beckett was not saying "No" because he wanted to but because he was searching for the "Yes".

In 1945, Beckett returned to Dublin for a brief visit. During his stay, he had a revelation in his mother’s room in which his entire future literary direction appeared to him.

"...clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most..."

Since Beckett's death, all rights for performance of his plays are handled by the Beckett estate, currently managed by Edward Beckett, the author's nephew. The estate has a reputation for maintaining firm control over how Beckett's plays are performed and does not grant licences to productions that do not strictly adhere to the stage directions. Historians interested in tracing Beckett's blood line were, in 2004, granted access to confirmed trace samples of his DNA to conduct molecular genealogical studies to facilitate precise lineage determination.

Beckett was once criticized for a 'decadent' lack of realism. (!)

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett

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9.) Beckett was not open to every new approach to his work and he famously objected when, in the 1980s several women’s acting companies began staging the play [Waiting for Godot]. "Women don’t have prostates," said Beckett, an allusion to the fact that Vladimir ... frequently has to leave the stage to urinate, on account of his enlarged prostate. In 1988 he took a Dutch theatre company, De Haarlemse Toneelschuur to court over this issue. "Beckett ... lost his case. But the issue of gender seemed to him to be so vital a distinction for a playwright to make that he reacted angrily, instituting a ban on all productions of his plays in The Netherlands."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot#Interpretations

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10.) The history of Protestantism has been one of chronic iconoclasm. One wall after another fell. And the work of destruction was not too difficult once the authority of the Church had been shattered. We all know how, in large things as in small, in general as well as in particular, piece after piece collapsed, and how the alarming poverty of symbols that is now the condition of our life came about. With that the power of the Church has vanished too - a fortress robbed of its bastions and casemates, a house whose walls have been plucked away, exposed to all the winds of the world and to all dangers.

Although this is, properly speaking, a lamentable collapse that offends our sense of history, the disintegration of Protestantism into nearly four hundred denominations is yet a sure sign that the restlessness continues. The Protestant is cast out into a state of defencelessness that might well make the natural man shudder. His enlightened consciousness, of course, refuses to take cognizance of this fact, and is quietly looking elsewhere for what has been lost to Europe. We seek the effective images, the thought-forms that satisfy the restlessness of heart and mind, and we find the treasures of the East.

... Shall we be able to put on, like a new suit of clothes, ready-made symbols grown on foreign soil, saturated with foreign blood, spoken in a foreign tongue, nourished by a foreign culture, interwoven with foreign history, and so resemble a beggar who wraps himself in kingly raiment, a king who disguises himself as a beggar? No doubt this is possible. Or is there something in ourselves that commands us to go in for no mummeries, but perhaps even to sew our garment ourselves?

I am convinced that the growing impoverishment of symbols has a meaning. It is a development that has an inner consistency. Everything that we have not thought about, and that has therefore been deprived of a meaningful connection with our developing consciousness, has got lost. If we now try to cover our nakedness with the gorgeous trappings of the East, as the theosophists do, we would be playing our own history false. A man does not sink down to beggary only to pose afterwards as an Indian potentate. It seems to me that it would be far better stoutly to avow our spiritual poverty, our symbollessness, instead of feigning a legacy to which we are not the legitimate heirs at all. We are, surely, the rightful heirs of Christian symbolism, but somehow we have squandered this heritage. We have let the house our fathers built fall into decay, and now we try to break into Oriental palaces that our fathers never knew. Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror. What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness. But if he cannot get along with these pedantic dogmatisms, he sees himself forced to be serious for once with his alleged trust in God, though it usually turns out that his fear of things going wrong if he did so is even more persuasive. This fear is far from unjustified, for where God is closest the danger seems greatest. It is dangerous to avow spiritual poverty, for the poor man has desires, and whoever has desires calls down some fatality on himself. A Swiss proverb puts it drastically: "Behind every rich man stands a devil, and behind every poor man two."

Just as in Christianity the vow of worldly poverty turned the mind away from the riches of this earth, so spiritual poverty seeks to renounce the false riches of the spirit in order to withdraw not only from the sorry remnants - which today call themselves the Protestant church - of a great past, but also from all the allurements of the odorous East; in order, finally, to dwell with itself alone, where, in the cold light of consciousness, the blank barrenness of the world reaches to the very stars.

from Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious by Carl Jung, (quoted in Campbell's Creative Mythology), found here: http://www.jungland.ru/Library/EngArchColUn.htm

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11.) Throughout his life, [Saint] Dominic is said to have zealously practiced rigorous self-denial. He wore a hairshirt, and an iron chain around his loins, which he never laid aside, even in sleep. He abstained from meat and observed stated fasts and periods of silence. He selected the worst accommodations and the meanest clothes, and never allowed himself the luxury of a bed. When traveling, he beguiled the journey with spiritual instruction and prayers. As soon as he passed the limits of towns and villages, he took off his shoes, and, however sharp the stones or thorns, he trudged on his way barefooted. Rain and other discomforts elicited from his lips nothing but praises to God.

Death came at the age of fifty-one and found him exhausted with the austerities and labors of his eventful career. He had reached the convent of St Nicholas at Bologna, Italy, weary and sick with a fever. He refused the repose of a bed and made the monks lay him on some sacking stretched upon the ground. The brief time that remained to him was spent in exhorting his followers to have charity, to guard their humility, and to make their treasure out of poverty. He died at noon on 6 August 1221.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Dominic

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