Excessive Empathy?

"Warriors and weirdos! I have just released a little video to Murder Song (5, 4, 3, 2, 1). It was filmed in the countryside, and we had real butterflies! They were so beautiful and they loved eating rotten fruit. I really wish I was a butterfly. Not because of the rotten fruit but because of the butter. And the fly.

Rockin Jay

Blinded by Pride

Too proud to die; broken and blind he died
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride

On that darkest day, Oh, forever may
He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow

Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost
Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
Above all he longed for his mother's breast

Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,
In the muted house, one minute before
Noon, and night, and light. the rivers of the dead

Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
(An old tormented man three-quarters blind,

I am not too proud to cry that He and he
Will never never go out of my mind.
All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
Even as a baby he had never cried;
Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
Here among the liught of the lording sky
An old man is with me where I go

Walking in the meadows of his son's eye
On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'

Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

O deepest wound of all that he should die
On that darkest day. oh, he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

Until I die he will not leave my side.

- Dylan Thomas, "Elegy"

Salvador Dali, "Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion" (1930)

This analytical work is one of the first painted in the new house in Port Lligat during the summer of 1930. In his numerous written works Dali has given us much information about this picture. "A month after my return from Paris," he writes, "I signed a contract with George Keller and Pierre Colle. Shortly after in the tatter's gallery I exhibited my Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion, fruit of my contemplation at Cape Creus." The Viscount of Noailles bought this oil. Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion must be considered the most important painting after The Invisible Man among Dali's early experiments with double images. The permanent theme which predominates over all the others is that of the persistence of desires.

Speaking of this picture, Dali has given a definition: "The double image (the example of which may be that of the image of the horse alone which is at the same time the image of a woman) can be prolonged, continuing the paranoiac process, the existence of another obsessive idea being then sufficient to make a third image appear (the image of a lion, for example) and so forth, until the concurrence of a number of images, limited only by the degree of the capacity for paranoiac thought." The violently erotic character of the group of fellateurs metamorphosed into the forelegs and the head of the horse is veiled by the immutable aspect of the ensemble, obtained with the help of an absence of dense shadows and violent colors, as well as by the geological character of the forms. Dali said of these models: "They are always boats which seem to be drawn by exhausted fishermen, by fossil fishermen."

Dali painted three pictures of the same subject with different titles. One of the three was destroyed during the demonstrations which broke out when the film L'Age d'or was being shown at Studio 28 in Paris on December 3,1930.

Something Good?

Here, where my fresh-turned furrows run,
And the deep soil glistens red,
I will repair the wrong that was done
To the living and the dead.

Here, where the senseless bullet fell,
And the barren shrapnel burst,
I will plant a tree, I will dig a well,
Against the heat and the thirst.



Here, in a large and a sunlit land,
Where no wrong bites to the bone,
I will lay my hand in my neighbour's hand,
And together we will atone
For the set folly and the red breach
And the black waste of it all;
Giving and taking counsel each
Over the cattle-kraal.



Here will we join against our foes--
The hailstroke and the storm,
And the red and rustling cloud that blows
The locust's mile-deep swarm.

Frost and murrain and floods let loose
Shall launch us side by side
In the holy wars that have no truce
'Twixt seed and harvest-tide.



Earth, where we rode to slay or be slain,
Our love shall redeem unto life.

We will gather and lead to her lips again
The waters of ancient strife,
From the far and fiercely guarded streams
And the pools where we lay in wait,
Till the corn cover our evil dreams
And the young corn our hate.



And when we bring old fights to mind,
We will not remember the sin--
If there be blood on his head of my kind,
Or blood on my head of his kin--
For the ungrazed upland, the untilled lea
Cry, and the fields forlorn:
" The dead must bury their dead, but ye-
Ye serve an host unborn."


Bless then, Our God, the new-yoked plough
And the good beasts that draw,
And the bread we eat in the sweat of our brow
According to Thy Law.

After us cometh a multitude--
Prosper the work of our hands,
That we may feed with our land's food
The folk of all our lands!


Here, in the waves and the troughs of the plains,
Where the healing stillness lies,
And the vast, benignant sky restrains
And the long days make wise--
Bless to our use the rain and the sun
And the blind seed in its bed,
That we may repair the wrong that was done
To the living and the dead!

- Rudyard Kipling, "The Settler" (1903 - South African War ended, May, 1902)

Dali and Picasso Paint an Egg

Sea Changes

Whoaa, What came of the things we once believed?
Whoaa, All lost to the depths of a hungry sea
Whoaa, What came of the things we once believe?
Whoa, All lost to the depths of a hungry sea

And now our parents are long departed
Who could finish the songs they started
Bodies are broken, but it's just a token
Of what is surely to come

Unstitch the suture
Please pause the future
So I collect my things
The fire is coming, but we'll outrun it
We'll never be undone.

Whooa, What came of the things we once believed?
Whoaa, All lost to the depths of a hungry sea
Whoaa, What came of the things we once believed?
Whoa, All lost to the depths of a hungry sea

When I go to walk the line
The fire it comes but we'll be just fine

(Instrumental)

Whooa, What came of the things we once believed?
Whoaa, All lost to the depths of a hungry sea
All lost, All lost to the depths of a hungry sea
Whoa, All lost to the depths of a hungry sea

All that's left, oh, All that's left is the echo of a roaring sea
Long gone, Long gone to the trace of a memory
Whoaa, What came of the things I once believed?
All that's left, All that's left is the trace of a memory

Brave New Worlds

“Isn't there something in living dangerously?'

There's a great deal in it,' the Controller replied. 'Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.'

What?' questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.

It's one of the conditions of perfect health. That's why we've made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.'

V.P.S.?'

Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconvenience.'

But I like the inconveniences.'

We don't,' said the Controller. 'We prefer to do things comfortably.'

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'

In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer, the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence.

I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome,' he said.”

― Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World"

Heart of Oak

Blue and Blues

Prodigal

Imprinting Fixations