First published in The ACT -- Performance Art Journal

Sets for THE BODY

 
a surreal-style photograph of a naked body in the pose of the Vitruvian man
 The Knees 
and higher up 
the shoulders 

The neck 
and higher up the 
eyes 

The Book of Questions, Edmond Jabes 
 
 
    two: But this is a brick. 
      Your heart is a brick. 

    one: But it beats only for you. 

    HEARTPIECE, Heiner Muller 
 
"What is eaten is the sunlight. What is excreted is the dark night. The breath of life is the clouds, and the blood is the rain that falls on the world." 

"The joints are the most important part of man" 

Conversations with Ogotemmeli, An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas, by Marcel Griaule. 
 
 THE NOBLE CASTLE 
15. Why men are not born with horns or other weapons. 
19. Why the nose is located above the mouth. 
23 What opinions should be held concerning visions. 
30. Why, as one can see from the darkness into the light, one cannot similarly see from the light into the darkness. 
32. Why hay is the cause of weeping. 
36. Why the fingers were made unequal. 
38. Why men cannot walk when they are born, as animals do. 
46. Why the living are afraid of dead bodies. 
 		 Scream with your toes! 
Your eyes! 
Your back! 
Your stomach! 
Your legs! 
Your whole body! 
Scream loud!! 
Theater Games for Rehearsal, Viola Spolin 
 
The most striking natural instrument of power in man and in many animals is the teeth. The way they are arranged in rows and their shining smoothness are quite different from anything else belonging to the body...Smoothness and order, the manifest attributes of the teeth, have entered into the very nature of power.
-- Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti 
 
 
With beauty may I walk 
With beauty before me, may I walk. 
With beauty behind me, may I walk. 
With beauty above me, may I walk. 
With beauty below me, may I walk. 
With beauty all around me, may I walk. 
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, 
lively, may I walk. 
In my old age wandering on a trail of beauty, 
living again, may I walk. 
It is finished in beauty. 
It is finished in beauty. 
Navajo Night Chant. Healing Ceremony in Ritual of the Wind, Jamake Highwater 
 

In the beginning there was nothing but mere 
appearance, nothing really existed. It was a phantasm, an illusion that our father touched; something mysterious it was that he grasped. Nothing existed. Through the agency of a dream our father, He-who-is-appearance-only, Nainema, pressed the phantasm to his breast and then was sunk in thought. 

A belief of the Uitoto of Colombia, in Primitives to Zen, by Mircea Eliade taken from K.T.Preuss, Religion and Mythlogie der Uitoto