Thursday, September 18, 2008

The Evening's Research Reading Yield: Bloody Hell












vampire

1. The reanimated body of a dead person believed to come from the grave at night and suck the blood of persons asleep.


2. One who lives by preying on others.


Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary

"One sign of the vampire is the power of the hand. The slender hand of Mircalla closed like a vise of steel on the General's wrist when he raised the hatchet to strike. But its power is not confined to its grasp; it leaves a numbness in the limb it seizes, which is slowly, if ever, recovered from.
"I may mention, in passing, that the deadly pallor attributed to that sort of revenant is a mere melodramatic fiction. They present, in the grave, and when they show themselves in human society, the appearance of healthy life.
"Its horrible lust for living blood supplies the vigour of its waking existence. The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love by particular persons. In pursuit of these it will excercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. It will never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted victim. But it will in these cases husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. In ordinary cases it goes direct to its object, overpowers with violence, and strangles and exhausts often at a single feast."
-from Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1871)
I think it best to treat the subject of this research as if it were not one with which I am already very familiar, so in support of that interest I do consult the dictionary for a sort of no-nonsense literality, and aim to fill in the holes in my reading on the topic with an anthology of Vampire-fiction (The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories) including, and beginning with Carmilla.
I really enjoyed Carmilla. The writing was dripping with Gothic atmosphere (The Introduction to the collection noted that Le Fanu and Bram Stoker were both Dubliners who infused the landscapes of their novels with the brooding gloomy beauty of Ireland), and the Vampire-attacks were put forth with eerie surreality. I was also struck by the way that Carmilla/Millarca/Mircalla was literally charming all who she preyed upon, with very few instances of anger or ferocity displayed. I remember in the folk-stories I read as a child, of the Ban-sidhe, of the Wurdulak, the Vrykolakas, all of them have the Vampires charming their way into their goals, very rarely reacting with ire or fear except when caught in the act and crossed from feeding or returning to its place of rest.
In most current and recent portrayals of Vampires, The Charm aspect is all too often set aside in favour of the "MTV-hiss Factor", which needless to say, dilutes the Magick and gives Vampires a cheezy name...
There is also this from The Giaour (1813), by George Gordon, Lord Byron:

But first, on earth as vampire sent,
Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life;
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid living corse:
Thy victims ere they yet expire
Shall know the demon for their sire,
As cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy flowers are withered on the stem.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Twos-dy

I have had a four-day weekend of social and cultural activity. Friday night I attended a Baby Shower for April Vidal that went late into the evening (those Mothers-to-be sure do like to party!), Saturday I saw Oh What War at HERE (Which was EXCELLENT), and attended a fine after-theatre snack and schmack-fest with tasty treats and an open bar, Sunday we attended a lovely garden party with grilling and Margaritas among cast members of Everything Must Go at Dina Rivera and Matt Gray's place, and Monday (Last Night) was well-spent at The Brick, attending the Penny Dreadful Season Two Fundraiser. Entertainment featured Burlesque by Rita Menweep, Opera by Matt Curran, and Magic by Nelson Lugo, with Fred Backus as The Amazing Viernik, and culminating with the one-night only presentation of Penny Dreadful Episode 6.5: The Future Ain't What It Used To Be with Eric Bland, Gavin Starr Kendall, Katie Brack, Samantha Mason, V. Orion Delwaterman, and Jessica Savage as "Penny". The "mini-episode" was set entirely in 2012 and took place both in the Maximum Security Prison that Penny materialized into from the year 1907 as a result of "The Great Switcheroo", and in an "underground labyrinth" beneath the Prison, the final moments being Penny recoiling in horror from a fresh corpse as a disembodied voice whispered, "Run, Penny, run.", and she did, slipping into darkness... It set the tone of the Serial's Second Season, continued deeply in the vein of its "horror suspense adventure mystery", and definitely created anticipation for the next full installment, Episode 7, due out in October 18th & 19th. I, for one, will Mark my Calendar...

http://www.thirdlows.com/pennydreadful/main.htm

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Saturn-day

Home today much of the day until the evening when I will go see Juggernaut Theatre's presentation of Oh What War (conceived and directed by Mallory Catlett, script by Jason Craig of Banana Bag and Bodice, and featuring Craig and fellow BBB'er Jessica Jelliffe performing) @ HERE Arts Centre. It is a riff off of Joan Littlewood's Oh What A Lovely War, and has been in development for some time now. I had occasion to see the earlier version of it a couple years ago (also @ HERE).
Writing today.

Monday, September 8, 2008

Morning Meditation


I sit up here drinking coffee at this early hour, watching the sun come up, listening to We're Only In It For The Money by Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention, while Jasmine lay by my feet grooming herself on the carpet, and I consider current irons in the fire:
  • The ongoing writing process for Blue-beard - Part Two is almost at its primary seal, and Part One grows steadily...and I find myself beginning to think of actors for both parts now. I have been seeing a lot of shows lately, and have had the pleasure of discovering some performers whose work was heretofore unknown to me.

  • I may direct a workshop of one of Kirk Wood Bromley's new plays, When I met Juliet, beginning sometime sometime soon (as soon as I get the play from him), but he is busy with the rehearsals for another new play, "Untitled', that he is directing, himself.

  • Researching a film role as a supernatural predator (!) - this prospect excites me more than anything I've done in a long while...

  • The development of Fork YES! as an artistic entity, including the development of Work, and the deepening of relationships with Peers in the community of Work.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Ate too, tooth ows and ate.

The Rain brings rumination, seemingly, without fail. Writing and cleaning today, a welcome day "off" from the day-job (but never a day off from the A-job. The trick: make sure every day-job is an A-job). Working with good people in the open air under the sun by the water to erect a Forum for the burlesque circus that is Spiegelworld. I have been informed by Kevin Bartlett that the Fringe is using the Second Tent space during the Festival for the Burlesque-y acts presented by them this year, while Spiegelworld gets its Big Top together in the Big Tent...The job has been a gift, certainly, and not only for me - I have been able to get work for three others besides myself (Artists and loved ones, all three) - and work in the Summer for such freelancers as we is a blessed precious thing, indeed.

As far as Writing is concerned, the story goes on, deepens, and progresses. The Shape of Part Two from beginning to end (and linking both) came in inspiration and proceeds to inform in intuition as I go on. It will be read-ready very soon. Part One, too, becomes more distinct as I deepen Part Two. They are designed to work independently as individual plays that are also two halves of a greater whole. That design is beginning to be palpable in its manifestation. The Air is thick with It, and I just may have both ready for workshop rehearsal by Winter. Hot.

Monday, June 30, 2008

Up with the Sun


...or at 730am, which is when I noticed its rays enough to distract me from my slumber. Brewing the bean and facing the day ahead with easy expectation. Writing continues (and will continue to continue), with definite forward progress palpable. After much has been researched and osmosed and after much has been written, and after much time off from writing - during whichtime of non-writing, much rumination on the writing has occurred - I am now simply Getting On With It, finishing scenes dangling in composition, and crafting new ones, trimming and cutting, and moving it forward, and "hooray" say I that I am. Most of the day will be writing, then off to see Coyote Love at Under St. Marks tonight.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

The MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Orson Welles: A Reconstruction For The Stage

The Magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles: A Reconstruction for the Stage closed Thursday, June 12th to a lovely audience overfilling the Brick, with some at the apron of the stage sitting on mats from Babylon, Babylon!, and others sitting on the edges of risers; all were ready to listen and watch and laugh and take in the tale as Orson intended it to be told.
There is talk and interest among the creatives involved about a possible re-mount in 2009...

Thursday, June 5, 2008

HAMLET at the Delacorte.



Last evening I saw the new Hamlet at the Delacorte in the Park. Much of it was good. The cutting of the text was good. The duel at the end of Act Five was good. The actors were all good, some were excellent (Lauren Ambrose as Ophelia, David Harbour as Laertes, Sam Waterston as Polonius, and Jay O. Sanders as The Ghost, The Player King, and The Gravedigger most especially), but I felt that Director Oskar Eustis did not Illuminate the text - what I mean by that is nearly everything was well-spoken, but there was little in the language that was SPECIFICALLY Clear, and there was little in the action as directed that made clear WHY things were happening as they were: So much was done, seemingly, "because that's the way it's always been done". Hamlet treats Polonius badly from the first moments of the "fish-monger scene" but we don't know WHY, Hamlet treats Ophelia awfully in the "nunnery" scene, but we don't know WHY, the Play-within-a-play affects Claudius so powerfully, but we don't really know WHY. The "Advice to the players" was done as it usually is, with Hamlet telling the Players how to do their job, and the Players lovingly listening to him do it (I don't know ANY actors who would react that way - perhaps they were different in Shakespeare's day- but I doubt it, and the text of Hamlet indicates otherwise).

Andre Braugher is one of my favourite actors - I loved him in "Homicide:Life on the Street", so I was really looking forward to his Claudius, and I liked him very much in his scene-work (and particularly in Act IV), but felt that his soliloquies were a bit rushed- I didn't see a man wrestling with "Heaven and Earth" after the Play Scene. Michael Stuhlbarg is a very good actor, but I felt that much of what he was doing as Hamlet was VERY technical, and almost mannered. He seemed to be looking at himself in the role, and almost commenting on it. His best work was in the Gravedigger scene: very simple, very clear, very grounded, and very real.

I saw in the Program Notes that Oskar Eustis saw Hamlet as a man who is "clinically depressed", and that makes some sense of what I saw last night, I suppose, because to reduce the role and the story to such a 21st century diagnosis does both a simplistic disservice.

Friday, May 9, 2008

"...and the rain came hammering down"


Rain, indeed, today. A slick and soggy dreamscape. Non-stop since early on and continuing now into the afternoon. I must enter into its stream soon enough, soon enough as well, while on my way into the day itself, as I errand and meet and move through space and time.


Work progresses. Monday, I filmed Camille Morin's piece, Over Again, based on cuttings from Beckett. Rehearsals continue for The Magnificent Ambersons, and a reading on the 21st of Edward Einhorn's Rudolf II. Today we meet about The Beelzebub Sonata at 3pm with Barbara Vann, in the interests of quiring out a space.


Friday I saw Babylon Babylon at the Brick. I was sucked into the World and the action from the first, as (Author, Director, Actor) Jeff Lewonczyk, as "Logios, a storyteller", brought the audience into the world of Babylon, 539 B.C.E. specifically the Temple of Ishtar, on the eve of the Persian attack led by Cyrus, while the 30-person cast entered in opposite parallel directions to so embody the living rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates. I loved the show. It took me somewhere very specific and very alien and also very familiar, dreamlike almost. The cast was excellent, investing the reality with a wonderful and hermetically-sealed verisimilitude of action form and gesture. Hope Cartelli, Michael Criscuolo and Iracel Rivero, Fred Backus and Gyda Arber, Aaron Baker and Adam Swiderski, Ali Skye Bennet, Danny Bowes and Siobhan Doherty, Robert Pinnock and Roger Nasser, Marguerite French, and the afore-mentioned Jeff Lewonczyk particularly impressed. Lights wonderful and appropriate, Set great - simple and grand (The Lion of Babylon painting is a personal favourite...), and the music and dancing were hypnotic and lovely, Grand and Terrible. Jeff's script is a delight, really. The scope, the simplicity, the parallels to people and places and things that we all know in our lives and world are there, as well as having the permission for "Babylonian-licence", as it were, to justify things that we do not have in the everyday all make for an accessible, challengung (in a good way), and fun piece of writing. A treat of an evening.


Saw Kirk Wood Bromley's latest, Me, on Saturday at the Ohio Theatre. The production was excellent, beautifully costumed and lit, with an environment that is beautiful aesthetically, entirely appropriate and right for the material at hand, and ideal for playing in the Ohio's many-pillared space, seating audience within the pillars creating a thrust stage that is at once both vast and intimate. The actors were excellent, with Sarah Malinda Engelke being the obvious stand-out, making the absolute most out of the opportunity of playing a character that is both natural and supernatural, a trickster-spirit with an edge. She leads the way in for the cast, in terms of energy, focus, facility with language and ideas, emotional truth, and playfulness, setting a nice high bar for all. Bob Laine, Josh Hartung, Annie Scott, Drew Cortese, Brenda Withers, Lora Chio, Marshall York, Dan Renkin, Arthur Aulisi, Paula Wilson, and Erwin Thomas all do outstanding work bringing the work to life with ease and authority and pleasure.


And I'm off...

Sunday, March 30, 2008

INFINITY'S SUMMONS: An Exploration into the Theatre of Pure Form of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz


"Deception of Woman (Maryla Grossmanowa and Self-portrait)"
by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1927,
pastel, 115.5 x 184 cm, National Museum, Warsaw

TADZIO: People are like insects, and Infinity surrounds them and Summons them in a mysterious voice.
-The Water Hen, Act I

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, perhaps better known as Witkacy (the name he created to differentiate himself from his identically-named father, a well-known landscape painter), was born in Warsaw on February 24th, 1885, and committed suicide outside Zakopane on September 18th 1939, after Soviet forces invaded Poland and crushed his country’s hopes for independence.
Witkacy was a painter, a philosopher, a highly prolific and original playwright, a dramatic theorist, a photographer, a professional portraitist, and an experimenter of (and consequent expert on) a wide variety of drugs such as stimulants (cocaine, caffeine, and nicotine), psychotropics (absinthe, hashish, cannabis and peyote), and depressives (alcohol).
He developed the Theory of Pure Form in Art, which he manifested in his disturbingly beautiful paintings and beautifully disturbing plays, in which can be found elements of Expressionism, Romanticism, Surrealism, Absurdism, and Existentialism; the common denominator of these aspects being the individual’s lonely struggle for meaning, and a sporadic and fleeting mysticsm.
Witkacy, however, was a self-styled enemy of “isms”:

We live in an age of manifestoes: even before an artistic movement spontaneously comes into being, its theory is often already in a state of near perfection. Theories are starting to create movements, and not vice versa. Besides, in former times there weren’t “movements”, in our sense of the word, or different “isms”, there were only powerful personalities and the schools formed by their followers. A greater and greater intellectualization of the creative process, and subjugation of the creative process and subjugation of the outbursts of genius to principles conceived a priori is the characteristic trait of our times.
[1]

Witkacy asserted that Art was sourced in religious mysteries, or, more specifically, “metaphysical feeling”:

The experience of the mystery of existence as unity in plurality, due to that impression of unity which, as in painting and music, is created by combinations of simple elements…
[2]

He reasoned that as religious mysteries lost their significance to humanity, the importance of metaphysical feelings waned, and theatre gradually fell into a “pure reproduction of life”
[3], (i.e., realism) intensified though it may be. This downward progression from a connection with the mysteries of existence to merely a somewhat more interesting representation of daily life is analogous to the “decay of metaphysical feelings themselves”[4]. In his “Theoretical Introduction to Tumor Brainowicz[5], Witkacy also defines metaphysical feelings as a “unity of personality”, this then implies that the realistic form of theatre also waters down what was an individual’s mystical connection with God, and renders it into something pre-packaged for the masses, dissolving the unity of the personality, and fomenting and perpetuating a spiritual down-spiral into a loss of individuality, as well as the individual’s personal search for meaning, which is then rendered into so much uniform grey sludge hopelessly mired among the quagmire of the status quo.
Witkacy posits this question:

Is it possible, even only for a short period, for a form of the theatre to arise in which contemporary man, independent of dead myths and beliefs, could experience the metaphysical feelings which ancient man experienced through those myths and beliefs?
[6]

His answer is that only “True Pure Art”,

…art whose substance is not the reproduction of the visible world or real feelings, but a purely formal unity which ties the given elements into a dissoluble whole….
[7]

can possibly accomplish this task, only through Pure Form –that is, form revealing essence in its purest sense, utilizing all the elements of theatre, which contains its own logic intrinsic to the formal unity of the performance.
The characters should not be bound to a “real-life” through-line of psychology and action, but should express “fantastic psychology and action”, which acts as a pretext for a pure progression of events…characters who are completely implausible in “real-life” producing “events which by their bizarre interrelationships create a performance in time not limited by any logic except of the form itself of that performance”. The point is that everything must be perceived as necessary and inevitable within the structure of the form itself.
[8]
The actors should not try to feel the emotions and experiences of the characters on stage, to imitate them, but

…should create the role…which entails the following…the actor must understand the whole of the play…the formal conception of the work…and its character, apart from all real-life probabilities…Next, he should build his role that…he can execute with mathematical precision whatever is required by the purely formal conception of the particular work in question…his work will be genuinely creative only when he considers himself an element in the given whole.
[9]

To the director:

Setting the formal tone depends, of course, on the director…forget completely about life and pay no attention to any real-life consequences of what is happening onstage at any given moment as it relates to what is about to happen at the next moment…
[10]

The spectator’s feeling after the performance should be that of having literally been transported into a world that has no direct bearing on “real-life”:

On leaving the theatre, the spectator ought to have the feeling that he has just awakened from some strange dream in which even the most ordinary things had a strange unfathomable charm, characteristic of dream reveries, and unlike anything else in the world.
[11]

The Dream Reverie -or more precisely, the Dream- is that contact with the mystery of existence –the metaphysical feelings which are the mystical experience of communion with God. The characters in Witkacy’s plays who are privy to this experience –and there are several such- know it to be a terrifying, if revelatory experience. Alexander Walpurg, the titular madman of The Madman and the Nun, is a poet, locked up for having a “weak nervous system”, and for “Cocaine. The clock in my head. And that eternal question of whether I killed her or she killed me. Even in the fraction of a second I think two thoughts as different as God and Satan.” Walpurg is privy to the esoteric torments and ecstasies of metaphysical feelings:

WALPURG: There’s only one thing certain: today the greatest Art is found only in perversion and madness –I’m talking, of course, about Form. But for the True Creative Artists, not the jackals, the forms they create are intimately connected to their own lives.
[12]

The protagonist of The Water Hen, Edgar Valpor, wants to be “Great” to satisfy his father, The Captain, who wants him to be an artist; and Edgar half-heartedly humours him, but lacks Greatness for it; the Water Hen wants Edgar to kill her –and he does, but immediately regrets it; and later, when the Hen returns from death, seemingly better than ever, again urging Edgar to kill her, and when he finally, definitively does kill her, and consequently decides to kill himself as well in despair, his father encourages him in his prospective suicide:

EDGAR: So, Father, you’re against me, too?
FATHER: Not against you, but with you against life. I’m waiting for you to become an artist.
[13]

Plasmonick Blodestaug, the hero of The Anonymous Work (which is subtitled, Four Acts of a Rather Nasty Nightmare), is also an artist, also privy to the Theory of Pure Form; after the woman he loved and who had spurned him tells him:

ROSA: Plazy, I’m yours –only yours. I’ve woken up from a terrible nightmare. I don’t love him anymore.
PLASMONICK: It’s too late, Miss Rosa, it’s too late. I love Miss Claudestina de Montreuil. I’ve finally woken up from a nightmare, too –the nightmare of loving you. I’m starting to paint in a completely different way.

Later, when Plasmonick seems on the verge of suicide, and his father says:


BLODESTAUG: Plazy! Don’t kill yourself! Art!
PLASMONICK: Wouldn’t think of it, Father. Miss Rosa –your turn now. (Rushes at her and slits her throat with lightning speed. Rosa falls dead. Calmly.) My secret inner voice told me to. She already composed herself out, anyway…so it’s no loss to Art. In our times there are only two places for metaphysical individuals: prison or the insane asylum.
[14]

The world is a nightmare and a dream. Both and neither. The Water Hen is shot and killed twice during the action of The Water Hen, the first time she urges Edgar Valpor to murder her– when he does, she doesn’t stay dead, and she returns, sexier and more beautiful than before. Her second death is fought against furiously, but is final.

The madman Walpurg hangs himself, only to walk in moments later to smilingly view his own corpse hanging from the window; Edgar Valpor shoots himself to become “Great”; The Engineer and the Fireman in The Crazy Locomotive urge their runaway train on, faster and faster –their philosophical discussion seemingly setting the pace of the engine, as they reveal themselves to be, respectively, Prince Trefaldi, King of murderers, and Travaillac, “sought in vain by the police, all over the world”. As the locomotive goes on, there is an increasing sense of imminent revelation reinforced by the feeling of imminent death.
[15]
Death is around every corner, and in Witkacy’s plays, just as in life, when confronted with it we begin to reveal to ourselves and to others who we truly are. It is a mystery of existence that cannot be met en masse, but individually, and what awaits us within death, within our discovery of ourselves may well be, on the other hand, what the dead Pope Julius of The Cuttlefish, or the Hyrcanian Worldview seems to indicate:

ELLA: Oh my GOD, my GOD- I’ll die of fright. I’m afraid of you, Holy Father –save me. You’ve come from Heaven.
JULIUS II: (Speaking with cruelty) How do you know that Heaven isn’t a symbol for the most awful renunciation? Renouncing one’s personality. I’m a shadow just as she is. (He points to the statue.)
[16]

At bottom, or above it all, or in the thick of it, we are alone, surrounded by strangers, stranger even to themselves, than we are to ourselves.

ROCKOFFER: I’m unknowable even to myself. Look at the paintings I’ve already done and you’ll see who I used to be. But if you look at what I’m going to do now, you’ll see what I want to be; the rest is a delusion.
-
The Cuttlefish, or the Hyrcanian Worldview

PLASMONICK: Let’s talk some more. Then I’ll forget the frightful situation I’m in, if just for a minute. Physical pain and theoretical discussions are my only pleasures –then I don’t think about the realities of my life.
-The Anonymous Work

Witkacy wanted there to be a formal unity of an idea behind the theatre of Pure Form, a new dead myth or belief to send the spectator into a world which exists always at the edge of our senses, something definite and yet unknowable, and into which we tap, if only briefly, to keep us going through the everyday terrors of “real-life”, something like catharsis to let us know that there is something else beyond being alone.

TADZIO: Don’t cry, Papa, these are only little pictures God paints with his magic pastels.
-The Water Hen


[1] “The Analogy with Painting”, (1920).
[2] as above.
[3] as above.
[4] as above.
[5] “Theoretical introduction to Tumor Brainowicz”, (1920)
[6] See 1-4, above.
[7] As above.
[8] “On a New Kind of Play.”(1920).
[9] “A Few Words About the Role of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form” (1920)
[10] As above.
[11] See 8, above.
[12] The Madman and the Nun, (1923).
[13] As above.
[14] The Anonymous Work, Four Acts of a Rather Nasty Nightmare, (1921)
[15] The Crazy Locomotive, (1923)
[16] The Cuttlefish, or the Hyrcanian Worldview, (1921)

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Saturday Update


A return to work upon the pair of plays I have been writing, Blue-beard, Parts I & II. I am further along with the second part than I am with the first. I am viewing them as very different plays in that their respective worlds are mixed somewhat differently in terms of what forces are dominantly portrayed as having sway. The first shows earthly forces excercising a kind of victory over spiritual, then the second shows the emptiness of such a world driving spirit to the test. Seeming and Being. I would like them to be complete by the End of the Summer. We'll see. Already thinking about casting as I write, which is a good thing, I think. When I wrote my last full-length, I wrote three parts with specific actors in mind, and those actors excelled in their eventual manifestations of the roles thus written, so...

At any rate, it helps me to visualize as I write, which makes the writing come faster.

At the very beginning stages of rehearsals for Ian W. Hill's adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons, which will go up for four days in June for "The Film Festival: A Theatre Festival" at the Brick. We will screen the version that the Studio released this coming Monday at the Brick.

In the past month I saw The Optimist, Hooray For What?, Di Ksube (The Marriage Contract), Tristan und Isolde, Hiroshima: Crucible of Light, The Taste of Blue, and The Boy That Wanted to Be a Robot.

The Alchemy of Being


Change is constant, nothing settles, truly; and at the same time, that state of constant change is the "settled state" of Change.

There is the kind of change that one initiates one's self, and there is the kind of change that is initiated outside of one's self, but ultimately, the individual is an active participant in any changes that occur in their own life, as they make choices about what, where, when, why, and how to act on what is before them. It is to be noted that inaction, too, is still a conscious choice.

Ultimately, the how is what distinguishes one in one's life. The quality and means of going about what it is one goes about doing is as important as what, where, when, and why one is doing it. People are remembered throughout history for the poise, foresight, intelligence, compassion, innovation, grace, humility, and class with which they have conducted themselves in times of great change; others are remembered for the greed, cowardice, small-mindedness, selfishness, and disrespect that infused their deeds. Witness the varieties of reaction to the events of 9-11, some supported the community in chaos, others exploited the situation for their own benefit. But this is seen and manifested on the tiniest of levels between people, as well as the large; these smaller instances of conduct and interaction start with the self, and expand outward to one-on-one interaction, to group interaction, to interaction with one's society, one's species, other species, et cetera, and are the foundation for human existence as a conscious evolving species.
Evolution starts inside one's own self, one's heart, head, and core, in what religions refer to as the soul. If there is clarity in one's conduct with one's self, then there is a corresponding clarity in one's conduct with others: this is called acting from love. If there is poison in one's conduct with one's self, it cannot help but infect one's dealings with others; this is acting from fear. Both qualities act in domino-effect fashion, infusing all involved with the energy at the source; oftentimes increasing it exponentially to the joy or suffering, respectively, of everyone. The unfortunate tendency is to meet negative with negative, to give an eye for an eye. It is possible and necessary to transmute, if you will, any negative energies into positive, and vice versa. Why anyone would want to transmute Gold into Lead is a mystery to me. It is no accident that "treating others as you would have them treat yourself" is called The Golden Rule.