AMOUR/MORT I - "Eros, the powerful creator in Hesiod's time ... has now deteriorated into a child, a rosy, chubby, playful creature, sometimes a mere infant playing with his bow and arrows."
Rollo May, 'Love and Will'-Eros Sickening
AMOUR/MORT II :-.''Woman must forget her own personalitywhen she is in love. It is a law of nature. A woman is nonexistent without a master. Without a master she is a scattered bouquet."
AMOUR/MORT Ill - "Nothing lives in the shadow of love"
AMOUR/MORT IV - "There is always a kingdom. That is the beginning of everything."
AMOUR/MORT V - "The tower is masculine, a construct, a convention, a set of rules, a tradition, a system."
AMOUR/MORT VI - "Romantic love has become inextricably tied to spiritual aspiration. In human relationships we seek something inward, eternal, transcendent. We are ennobled, refined, spiritualised, uplifted, transformed."
AMOUR/MORT VII - "There are floods of tears... Wedding finery and funeral darkness are bound together."
AMOUR/MORT VIII - "To love is to draw close to another person, to have ties, to merge... to be in love with another person is to look right through them and thus lose that person irrevocably."
"Nowadays it's a cliche that the multi national governments through their media are determining the political and other perceptions of their citizens. Worse: 'Just as the overwhelming power of high capitalism forms myths that tower above the collective consciousness, in the same way the mythic region in which the modern consciousness seeks refuge bears the marks of that capitalism: what subjectively was the dream of dreams is objectively a nightmare. To that extent it can be asserted that the inauthentic aspect of that iconic world, namely the distortion of the myths at the hands of later generations who discover themselves and mirror themselves in them, is also its truth. Confronted with an exorbitant unapproachable world of things that casts its alien shadow over him, the individual feels an affinity with the world of myth. What he shares with it is the gesture of falling silent' (1). Not only the inability but also the refusal to believe in or speak the truth - the recourse to myth which turns a theatrical or communicatory gesture into opera - is a phenomenon of the world in which there is cause to fear everything. In this world called 'fear' the middle-class who are now the poverty stricken, dream of their own destruction and at the same time of something else, something or somewhere called 'primitive', a world which is above all non-existent, the world of myths. In this world, only a night of love, of that physical passion which is beyond the emotions manipulated and created by capitalistic society, is the knight, the night to the lives of fear we know, the bearer oblivion to all we hate."
Kathy Acker, 'Opera: The Actual Working of Terror and Ecstacy'
(1) Theodore Adorno 'In Search of Wagner'
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