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)

normal

caffeine

LSD

mescaline

1)
"Nourished on the blood of a schizophrenic, a spider weaves crazy webs."

-Guido Ceronetti, The Silence of the Body

2)
During the 1950s, a swiss pharmacologist named Peter Witt conducted a set of experiments in spider doping. He found that the spiders spun uniquely cockeyed webs depending on which substance they had ingested.

-images and Peter Witt information from the great http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog

A Moon Piece, describing that notable Battel between Axalla,
General of Tamerlane, and Camares the Persian, fought by the
light of the Moon.

- Sir Thomas Browne, Musaeum Clausum II

(Thank you James Walsh)

i wish all fields were paper

Miserere my Maker o have mercie on me wretch
strangelye distressed
cast downe with sinne oppressed
mightelye vext to the souls bitter anguishe
even to death I languishe,
yet let it please thee to eare
my ceaseless cryinge
miserere, I am dyinge.

anonymous

- thank you Antonia ( http://oneinten.blogspot.com/)

He had a strange affinity with animals of all sorts, an eerie ability to get along amazingly well with them. At the zoo, lions and tigers would take one look at Buster's unsmiling face and come to him immediately.

- Tom Dardis, Keaton

Beneath his lack of emotion he was also uninsistently sardonic; deep below that...for those who sensed it, there was in his comedy a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia.
- James Agee, 1949

image by

In the end the only thing that never changed, never became deformed,
were animals.

…all these adventurers, fairy tale princes, sea pirates, and magnanimous criminals, I don’t complain that they have passed on but I would wish that they might find with every new orbit that life affords us successors on whom the whole sum of love and belief dedicated to them might be carried on.

- Ernst Junger