#in-teresting...

[besmirchthis]

Maybe I am always meditating, if by that you mean searching for a perfect stranger.

Rae Armantrout, ‘Control’*

[besmirchthis]

No one likes us when we've slept badly. The sleep we missed carried off with it whatever it was that made us human. There is, it seems, a latent irritation in us, in the empty air that surrounds us. Ultimately it is we who are in dispute with ourselves, it is within ourselves that diplomacy in the secret war breaks down.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet [transl. Margaret Jull Costa, ed. Maria José de Lancastre]

[besmirchthis]

The play is a lecture in which you don't say 'This is so . . .' but rather . . . 'This occurs to me and it occurs to me that the reason it occurs to me is this act, which occurs to me,' and so on and so on, deeper and deeper.

Richard Foreman, ‘How to Write a Play (in which i am really telling myself how, but if you are the right one i am telling you how, too)’ [published in Theatre of the Avante-Garde: 1950-2000, ed. Robert Knopf and Julia Listengarten]