When we are no longer children, we are already dead.
-Brancusi

substitutes

At first sight I really believed that the only reminders in the Piana graveyard of the nature which, we have always hoped, will endure long after our own end, were the artificial purple, mauve, and pink flowers, obviously pressed upon their customers by French undertakers, made of silk or nylon chiffon, of brightly painted porcelain, wire, and metal appearing not so much a sign of enduring affection as the final emergence of a kind of proof that, despite all assurances to the contrary, we offer our dead only the cheapest substitute for the diverse beauty of life.

-Sebald, Campo Santo

2)
The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

- Adorno, Quasi una Fantasia

today is my birthday!
hp

masks

"We have art that we may not perish of the truth."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The cuckoo

The cuckoo is a merry bird, she sings as she flies,
She brings us good tidings and tells us no lies;
She sucks the sweet flowers to make her sing clear,
And she never sings "cuckoo" till summer is near.

O meeting is a pleasure, but parting a grief,
An inconstant lover is worse than a thief;
For a thief will but rob you and swear to be true,
And the very next moment they'll bring you to the grave.

The grave it will rot you and bring you to dust,
There is not one in twenty young men girls can trust;
They will kiss you, and court you and swear to be true,
And the very next moment they'll bid you adieu.

Come all you young women wherever you be,
Build your nest in the top of a tree;
For the leaves they will wither, the branches decay,
And the beauty of fair maids will soon fade away.

- Folk song from Sussex

toys

"All children talk to their toys. The toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced in size by the camera obscura of their little brains. The child twists and turns his toy, scratches it, shakes it, bumps it against the walls, throws it on the ground. From time to time he makes it restart its mechanical motions, sometimes in the opposite direction. Its marvelous life comes to a stop. The child, like the people besieging the Tuileries, makes s supreme effort; at last he opens it up, he is the stronger. But where is the soul? This is the beginning of melancholy and gloom."

- Charles Baudelaire

2)

"Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage, the capacity to convert energies once intensified beyond measure to destroy recalcitrant objects, into the concentration of patient observation, so keeping as tight a hold on the secret of things, as one had earlier when finding no peace until the quavering voice had been wrenched from the mutilated toy."

- Adorno, Minima Moralia

Actaeon out hunting chances upon the goddess Diana
and her nymphs bathing; furious, she changes him into
a stag; his own dogs no longer know him and tear him
apart.

debris

"All could be well, but in fact all is lost."

- L'ARGENT
- Adorno, 'Mahler'

the good wound

Among the great tragedies of childhood, De Quincey included that of the little boy's lips forever separated from his sister's kisses. Men with no sisters also share in this tragedy. Gloomy, incessant death of the sister in Munch's paintings. (Without a dead sister, abandoned lifeless at the foot of a distant staircase, a man cannot rediscover in the dark his sister's lips, the good wound happy to start bleeding again.) At its most ethereal and imaginative, a sister's wedding reaches the deepest endogamic intensity; it makes us feel as if our ties with Chaos and the contracted universe cannot be undone.

- Guido Ceronetti

image from the very fine batsandswallows.blogspot.com

"We were happy, all of us, but that was all."


Image via Anne of White Mule Picture Frames (wmpf.blogspot.com)

Thanks.

asleep in scotland

The Cotard delusion, also known as nihilistic or negation delusion, is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that he or she is dead, does not exist, is putrefying or has lost his/her blood or internal organs.

Rarely, it can include delusions of immortality.
It is named after Jules Cotard (1840–1889), a French neurologist who first described the condition, which he called le délire de négation ("negation delirium"), in a lecture in Paris in 1880.
Young and Leafhead (1996, p155) describe a modern-day case of Cotard delusion in a patient who suffered brain injury after a motorcycle accident:
“ [The patient's] symptoms occurred in the context of more general feelings of unreality and being dead. In January, 1990, after his discharge from a hospital in Edinburgh, his mother took him to South Africa. He was convinced that he had been taken to hell (which was confirmed by the heat), and that he had died of septicaemia (which had been a risk early in his recovery), or perhaps from AIDS (he had read a story in The Scotsman about someone with AIDS who died from septicaemia), or from an overdose of a yellow fever injection.
He thought he had "borrowed my mother's spirit to show me round hell", and that he was asleep in Scotland. ”

- from wikipedia

Why were you born when the snow was falling?
You should have come to the cuckoo's calling
Or when grapes are green in the cluster,
Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster
For their far off flying
From summer dying.
Why did you die when the lambs were cropping?
You should have died at the apples' dropping,
When the grasshopper comes to trouble,
And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble,
And all winds go sighing
For sweet things dying.

- Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) , "A dirge"

The dead make things never be the same.


- text fragment: flowerville (http://oneinten.blogspot.com/)
'to those our dead whom we mourn secretly and to those who mourn them secretly'

- images: http://anonymousworks.blogspot.com/

closing sequence from
georg wilhelm pabst's the three penny opera, 1931

Guest entry by THE ART OF MEMORY
(http://theartofmemory.blogspot.com/)

We do not think enough of the Dead as exhilirants - they are not dissuaders but Lures-Keepers of the great Romance still to us foreclosed - while coveting (we envy) their wisdom we lament their silence.

Grace is still a secret.

Emily Dickinson (Prose fragment 50)

At the last

She cometh no more:
Time too is dead.
The last tide is led
To the last shore.

Eternity!
What is Eternity,
But the sea coming,
The sea going
Forevermore?

a deep grave surely

"The stillness was that of a deep grave, save for the raindrops, falling light as thistledown, with a faint, monotonous sound like a whisper that dies and begins again and dies there behind the wet, glistening trunks."

~J. P. Jacobsen, Marie Grubbe, 1876

shadows and smells

the army is imaginary...

Lazarus - he already stinks.

-Kierkegaard - Journals and Papers v.3

Darwin, who was born into a large family that for two generations had been scientists, engineers, industrialists, and well-to-do landowners, and yet who, despite his genius, was a sufferer of neuroses, constant illnesses (he vomited every afternoon at four), a kind of hysteria that took the form of gasping and palpitation, and seizures of depression in which he wept uncontrollably.
- Guy Davenport

(the image is by Etienne Leopold Trouvelot of an "ideal section of the atmosphere of the sun."
From the fine woolgathersome.blogspot.com)