El Árbol de la Vida

[Ilus.: Salvador Dali, Las Meninas (detalhe), 1960]

" The painter is standing a little back from his canvas. He is glancing at his model... He is staring at a point to which, even though it is invisible, we, the spectators, can easily assign an object, since it is we, ourselves, who are at that point... The spectacle he is observing is thus doubly invisible: first, because it is not represented within the space of the painting, and, second, because it is situated precisely in that blind point, in that essential hiding-place into which our gaze disappears from ourselves at the moment of our actual looking... In appearance, this locus in a simple one: a matter of pure reciprocity: we are looking at a picture in which the painter is in turn looking out at us... And yet... the painter is turning his eyes towards us only insofar as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself... The great canvas with its back to us on the extreme left of the picture... prevents the relation of these gazes ever being discoverable or definitely established... Because we can see only that reverse side, we do not know who we are, or what we are doing. Seen or seeing?... We are observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and made visible to his eyes by the same light that enables us to see him..."
(in Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 1970)

A Família do Rei

(+ meninas)

happy birth canal

(+ meninas)

Ahura Mazda

Armies of the Fanatici [+]

+,+,+,+ e +

zarf böreği

As for the story itself, it was entitled “The Dancing Fool.” Like so many Trout stories, it was about a tragic failure to communicate.

Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing.

Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.

[Breakfast of Champions - 1973 by Kurt Vonnegut]

Correcção retiniana

"Est enim quædam Geometriæ pars, quæ optikè, id est perspectiua appellatur, ad oculos pertinens: multa enim huiusmodi demiranda facit experimenta, vt imaginem nunc extra porrigat, nunc nihil imaginet, nunc aliorsum transsata imagines faciat."

[Giovanni Battista della Porta, Magiae Naturalis, Libri IV, 1558]

(Ilus.: Jan Dibbets, My Studio I, Square on the wall of my studio, "Perspective correction", 1969)

Straub-

Petit déjeuner

"Elle envoya chercher un de ces gâteaux courts et dodus appelés Petites Madeleines qui semblent avoir été moulés dans la valve rainurée d’une coquille de St Jacques. Et bientôt, machinalement, accablé par la morne journée et la perspective d’un triste lendemain, je portai à mes lèvres une cuillerée du thé où j’avais laissé s’amollir un morceau de madeleine. Mais à l’instant même où la gorgée mêlée de miettes de gâteau toucha mon palais, je tressaillis, attentif à ce qui se passait d’extraordinaire en moi. Un plaisir délicieux m’avait envahi..."

[Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 1913]

gilt goblet

"Marry, if thou wert an honest man, thyself and the money too. Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife."

[W. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, Acto II, Cena 1]

(+)

gilda

gild the lily

gilded creature II

You've seen balloons set, haven't you?
So stately they ascend
It is as swans discarded you
For duties diamond.

Their liquid feet go softly out
Upon a sea of blond;
They spurn the air as 't were too mean
For creatures so renowned.

Their ribbons just beyond the eye,
They struggle some for breath,
And yet the crowd applauds below;
They would not encore death.

The gilded creature strains and spins,
Trips frantic in a tree,
Tears open her imperial veins
And tumbles in the sea.

The crowd retire with an oath
The dust in streets goes down,
And clerks in counting-rooms observe,
''T was only a balloon.'

gilded creature

[944] So too endured Danae in her beauty to change [945] the light of the sky for brass-bound walls, and in that chamber, both burial and bridal, she was held in strict confinement. And yet was she of esteemed lineage, my daughter, [950] and guarded a deposit of the seed of Zeus that had fallen in a golden rain. But dreadful is the mysterious power of fate--there is no deliverance from it by wealth or by war, by towered city, or dark, sea-beaten ships.