[Image: “Gratte Ciel’s ‘La Place des Anges,’ a French aerial spectacular,” by Peter Tea. (Found it on Flickr; using it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) Says one preview of the show (2018): “This weekend Botanic Park will be transformed nightly into a white wonderland as angels appear above the crowd for WOMADelaide. French company, Gratte Ciel (which means skyscraper in English) will perform its show ‘La Place des Anges’ between the trees of Botanic Park.” The park in question was this one.]

From whiskey river:

(a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end? 
(b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split? 
(c) Is there a chance (and please check the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason?

Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair’s breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a key or a hair clip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hate, why not go mad, go gibbering through the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There’s nothing to stop you—or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That’s the real difference in a life.

(Zadie Smith [source])

…and:

Then as regards the actual connection between spirit and body I consider that the body by reason of being a living body can “attract” and hold on to a “spirit” whilst the body is alive and awake and the two are firmly connected. When the body is asleep I cannot guess what happens but when the body dies the “mechanism” of the body, holding the spirit, is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later perhaps immediately.

As regards the question of why we have bodies at all; why we do not or cannot live free as spirits and communicate as such, we probably could do so but there would be nothing whatever to do. The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.

(Alan Turing [source])

…and:

Humans are indeed frightful beings.
A single moon
Bright and clear
In an unclouded sky:
Yet still we stumble
In the world’s darkness
Have a good look
stop the breath,
peel off the skin,
and everybody ends up looking the same.
No matter how long you live,
the result is not altered.
Who will not end up as a skeleton? Cast off the notion that “I exist.”
Entrust yourself to the windblown clouds,
and do not wish to live forever.

(Ikkyu (translated by John Stevens) [source])

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