The Line
From a March 10, 2004, entry:
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“Language was no more than a collection of meaningless conventional signs, and life could absurdly end at any moment. [Mallarmé] became aware, in Millan’s* words, ‘of the extremely fine line
separating absence and presence, being and nothingness, life and death, which — John Simon, Squaring the Circle * A Throw of the Dice: The Life of Stéphane Mallarmé, by Gordon Millan The illustration of the “fine line” is not by Mallarmé but by myself. (See Songs for Shakespeare, March 5, where the line separates being from nothingness, and Ridgepole, March 7, where the line represents the “great primal beginning” of Chinese philosophy (or, equivalently, Stevens’s “first idea” or Mallarmé’s line “separating absence and presence, being and nothingness, life and death.”) |
By the Associated Press,
Saturday, March 13, 2004:
“Dave Schulthise, known as Dave Blood during his career as a bassist with the 1980’s Philadelphia punk-rock band the Dead Milkmen, died on Wednesday [March 10, 2004] at the home of friends in North Salem, N.Y. He was 47.
‘David chose to end his life,’ Mr. Schulthise’s sister, Kathy, wrote on the band’s Web site.”
I walk the thinnest line
I walk the thinnest line
I walk the thinnest line
Between the light and dark sides of my mind
— The Dead Milkmen, Beelzebubba album
Related material: The Word in the Desert.