Delicately, with two fingers of his left hand, Horner pressed two buttons, a black one and a white one. Two buzzers, high-pitched and low, vibrated in a horrible discord.
The monitor beeps stopped.
Joe looked up at the oscilloscope. The worm had changed into a wiggling, scraggly child’s scrawl, which, when Zeitgeist’s long-drawn syllable was finished, changed into a green worm again. Zeitgeist touched a control knob on one of the benches and the worm became a straight line. “Go ahead.”
Skinnarland’s indecipherable whispered something to me in its coding sleep.
She said she will do Cleopatra for a million dollars and a few changes in the script, and as long as the picture is not to be made in Hollywood.
After Venasque introduced me to the journals of Cocteau, I came across a passage which touched me deeply: “Then I realized that my dream life was as full of memories as my real life, that it was a real life, richer in episodes and in details of all kinds, more precise, in fact, and that it was difficult for me to locate my memories in one world or the other, that they were superimposed, combined, and creating a double life for me, twice as huge and twice as long as my own.”
Cocteau does not solve problems or tell anyone what attitude they should take – except to be aware of poetry and live with its creative spirit. This is the only way in which we break through the barrier between life and death, the only which we lose concern as to whether time moves forward or backwards, as to whether the real and the unreal are in any way different from each other. Our one concern is with the perpetually creative intermingling of the two; if we maintain this concern we can dispel the invasion of materialism, the truly destructive force at work today.
Seven passages from seven page seventeens from seven books found either in the Shadowplayhouse or in the street (passage two: the book looked intriguing but was covered with foreign matter so I discarded it after extracting a useful sentence or two).
The Dead Look On by Gerald Kersh; The Fourth Procedure by Stanley Pottinger; Won’t You Walk by Theodore Sturgeon, from Dimension 4 edited by Groff Conklin; Between Silk and Cyanide: A Code Maker’s War 1941-45 by Leo Marks; My Life with Cleopatra by Walter Wanger and Joe Hyams; Outside the Dog Museum by Jonathan Carroll; Cocteau’s World by Jean Cocteau, from the introduction by Margaret Crosland;
shadowplay 