Awed by her splendor

(Red Plum and Moonlight, woodblock print by Utagawa 
Hiroshige, 1797-1858, Japanese artist)

Awed by her splendor 

Awed by her splendor 
stars near the lovely 
moon cover their own
bright faces
when she
is roundest and lights 
earth with her silver

 - Sappho

The Great Mortality in Europe

      "In this great affliction that befell our wretched city all respect for lawful authority, human or divine, had been destroyed: those who should have seen that it was upheld were, like all the others, either dead or sick or with scarcely any subordinates left to perform their duties. So everyone did as they liked." - Boccaccio

      At the end of the 13th Century, Europe had undergone a long period of population growth, technological advancement and general prosperity (or at least security). Around 1300, the populations across Europe had reached a local maximum, and such a density would not be seen again for at least 4 centuries. The European achievement was about to be irrevocably undone. The High Middle Ages were over and what was to come would change the structure of the Occidental world forever.

      The Black Death or Great Morality that afflicted Europe in the middle of the 14th Century was not an isolated disaster, but was, rather, a climax of destruction that was bookended on either end by half a century of economic crisis, famine, disease, war and revolt. The great plague was preceded by famines, shortages and epidemics that had been brought on by poor weather, crop failures, and speculation in commodities. These disasters had already affected major spikes in mortality rates in certain places such as rural Essex, which lost as much as 15% of its population, or Ypres which suffered a 10% decline in its population as it gave in to starvation, disease, and want.[1]
      The recession in population that began with famine and peaked with the Plague years  of 1347-1349 might not have been enough to permanently retard the growth or at least stasis of Europe in itself, but repeated epidemic breakouts of plague and other diseases, such as typhus and smallpox, would  derail any nascent recoveries and ensure that the population of Europe would suffer a precipitous decline over the next 7 decades. Demographic reconstructions of the period have estimated that Europe as a whole lost somewhere between 30 and 50% of its population to the various crises.[2]
      Perhaps the most quantifiable consequences of the disasters besetting Europe in the 14th Century were those involving the economic sphere. Henry Knighton, a contemporary of the Great Mortality, writes that during the plague year in England ".... the price of everything was cheap, because of the fear of death; there were very few who took any care for their wealth, or for anything else. For a man could buy a horse for half a mark, which before was worth forty shillings, a large fat ox for four shillings, a cow for twelve pence...." He then continues that in the following year, due to manpower shortages, the wages of labor had begun to rise. "... one could not hire a reaper at a lower wage than eight pence with food, or a mower at less than twelve pence with food. Because of this, much grain rotted in the fields for lack of harvesting..." [3]
      The famines and plagues had dramatically reduced the available labor pool, increased the wages of both the common and skilled laborer, and led the serf, tied to his land and unable to access the upward mobility present around him. into a state of dissatisfaction. In England laws were enacted to keep the price of wages at a status quo, but these rules were summarily ignored by the general populace and "The great landlords had to use ingenuity, and sometimes force, to maintain their customary levels of income from their estates." [4]
      In towns, abbeys, monasteries, and cities all over Europe, officials, clergy, and skilled labor sought to replenish its depleted resources by encouraging immigration from the rural areas, further exacerbating the displeasure of the serfdom, reducing the manpower available to the landed gentry, and leading to an inexorable upward spiral in labor and commodity prices.[5] In the ecclesiastical sphere, the high mortality rate led to the recruitment of younger and less experienced personnel in the years after the Black Death, and may have inadvertently given rise to popular heretical sects, like the Lollards, when the established church balked a paying higher wages for well educated university graduates. [6]
      Try as they might, however, the powers of officialdom were unable to put the genie of upward mobility and yeomanship back in the bottle. In May of 1358, disaffected peasants and artisans in the Beauvais region in France, rose up against the nobility whom they also blamed for recent military defeats at the hands of the English. The rebellion quickly turned bloody and rebels sacked manors, castles and estates, killing any noblemen unfortunate enough to come under their power. [7] In 1381, a more organized and sustained revolt was let by Wat Tyler in Southeastern England. [8] Despite being ruthlessly put down by a disingenuous English crown, it was clear that from that point forward the lowest classes could no longer be taken for granted by the landed, aristocratic elite.
      The Black Plague, and the subsequent population implosion, had left the nobility and the upper echelons of secular political power intact, but had forced these higher powers to address the strength and disquiet among the lower classes. In the religious sphere, the former hegemony of the monolithic Catholic church was weakened both from within and without. General dissatisfaction with luxury-loving clergy and inexperienced undereducated priests, as well as the splintering of churches into private members only chapels and parishes, would lead eventually to the Protestant Reformation in the coming centuries. But in the mean time, the church was determined to hold on to its privilege and power and so persecuted anyone who it saw as a threat, selling indulgences to the upper classes to fund its activities and Inquisitions. Finally, in the sphere of trade and production, the overall productivity of Europe was weakened while overseas trade had shrunk and now persisted primarily in the South of Europe, the very areas that would set out to conquer the New World in the coming century.

1. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, "Notes on Plague and Family Life", The New Cambridge Medieval History. Vol VI
2. ibid & Josian C. Russell, "Population in Europe", The Fontana Economic History of Europe
3. Henry Knighton, "The Impact of the Black Death", The Portable Medieval Reader
4. Caroline M. Barron, "The Reign of Richard II", The New Cambridge Medieval History. Vol VI
5. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, "Notes on Plague and Family Life", The New Cambridge Medieval History. Vol VI
6. Norman Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague
7. Michael Jones, "The Last Capetians and Early Valois Kings", The New Cambridge Medieval History. Vol VI
8. Caroline M. Barron, "The Reign of Richard II", The New Cambridge Medieval History. Vol VI

Oedipus Rex - 1957

The land ruled by King Oedipus is plagued by ill-fortune and the people are promised relief by the gods if the slayer of the former king is apprehended and punished. This does not bode well for King Oedipus and his Queen. (Performed in masks by the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespearean Festival Players.)

Written by Les Adams via IMDb

Halcyone

Halcyon Days
by Walt Whitman
(1819-1892) 

Not from successful love alone,
Nor wealth, nor honor'd middle age, nor victories of politics or war;
But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
As softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like freshier, balmier air,
As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs
really finish'd and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!

We are, most of us familiar with the phrase "Halcyon Days," a term that was seemingly coined to take us back to half remembered Summer days of our youths and to recall gauze covered memories of games played noisily upon the green. Like many things we accept without examination, however; once we begin to peek beneath the surface we start to see a much different and more complex picture.

The first thing to note is that in the traditions of the Mediterranean, from whence we derive the term, we learn that it refers not to summer, but rather to a fortnight which is said to lie just before the winter's solstice, the longest night of the year. In the maritime traditions of Greece and the Near East, it was believed that the nesting season of the Kingfisher, or Halcyon bird, brought a time of peace to the sea.

Gregory Nagy, professor of classics at Harvard, says of the name Halcyon or Alkyone (Ἁλκυόνη, Halkyónē) that it is

"a name derived from the word for a bird, the halcyon bird, which in ancient Mediterranean traditions was understood to be a bird that sings laments, sings songs of laments." 

He goes on to elaborate that

"in other traditions, we know that halcyons are imagined as eyewitnesses to terrible scenes of mass slaughter. There's a famous example of folk tradition concerning the destruction of the city of Corinth by Roman armies in the second century BCE. And in this folk tradition, there's a visualization of halcyon birds flying overhead and seeing the mass destruction of the Greek population by the Roman army. And so they're the only survivors who then tell the sorrowful song, or shall I say sing the sorrowful song. And so any lament that happens is triggered by what the birds saw and then the birds sing."

Halcyone, by Herbert James Draper (1863-1920). Oil on canvas, private collection. 61 × 85 inches. Halcyone is seeking her husband Ceyx; kingfishers - the Halcyone birds -
are painted over her head.

Requiescat

Camille Monet On Her Deathbed - Claude Monet

Requiescat

by Oscar Wilde

Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.

All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.

Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.

Phaedra

Georges Barbier, 1882-1932, Hippolyte et Phèdre.

Nurse (to Phaedra):

So, you will die for love! And all the others
who love, and who will love, must they die, too?
How will that profit them? The tide of love,
at its full surge, is not withstandable.
Upon the yielding spirit she comes gently,
but to the proud and the fanatic heart
she is a torturer with the brand of shame.
She wings her way through the air; she is in the sea,
in its foaming billows; from her everything,
that is, is born. For she engenders us
and sows the seed of desire whereof we're born,
all we her children, living on the earth.

Hippolytus 442-451 (Euripides, trans. by David Green)

Lovesick Phaedra

Museum Collection: British Museum, London, United Kingdom
Ware: Apulian Red Figure
Shape: Calyx krater
Painter: Attributed to the Laodamia Painter
Date: ca 350 BC
Period: Late Classical

SUMMARY
The lovesick Phaidra is plagued by a winged Eros. Beside her stands her elderly nurse.

via Theoi.com

I am not much of a gardener.

I don't have the patience.

But I remember starting seeds in my garage

under the fluorescent lamps.

Rows upon rows of corn shoots

glowing, growing green.

Mesmerizing.

I couldn't turn wrench my gaze away.

Otto Dix - War Images

Otto Dix (1891-1969) via Encyclopedia of Irish &World Art

The German painter and printmaker Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was one of the greatest and most powerful representatives of the post-war satirical style of German Expressionism, which flourished during the 1920s in Berlin, Dresden, Mannheim and other major cities. The target for Dix's satirical, often brutal style of expressionism was the horror of war, of which he had first-hand experience, and the decadent depravities of the post-war Weimar Republic. A member of Die Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) school, Dix was banned by the Nazis who classified his art as degenerate. Acknowledged as one of the greatest post-war expressionist painters, his 1920s paintings are regarded as some of the finest anti-war pictures of modern art.

Read more here.

The Trench

Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas - 1924

Machine Gunner Advancing

Meal Time in the Trenches - 1923/24

Trenches - 1917

Flandern - 1934

Some good things from the IMA

The Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Take a look at pages from The Red Book by Carl Jung | Books | guardian.co.uk

Take a look at pages from The Red Book by Carl Jung | Books | guardian.co.uk

The Red Book by Carl Jung

During the first world war, Carl Jung embarked on an extended self-exploration he called his 'confrontation with the unconscious'. At the heart of this exploration was The Red Book, a grand, illuminated volume which he created between 1914 and 1930, in which he developed the nucleus of his later theories.

The book is a remarkable blend of calligraphy and art; an illuminated manuscript that bears comparison with The Book of Kells and William Blake. But while Jung considered The Red Book his most important work, only a handful of people have ever seen it. Finally, nearly 80 years after it was completed, it is available in a facsimile edited by Jung historian Sonu Shamdasani and published by WW Norton. View a handful of the pages here.

A Journey Round My Skull: Warsaw Warble

One of my favorite design blogs. Check it out!

A Journey Round My Skull: Warsaw Warble

A Journey Round My Skull: Happy Walpurgisnacht

via A Journey Round My Skull: Happy Walpurgisnacht: "Stefan Eggeler"

Jacob Wrestles with an Angel

 Jacob wrestling with the Angel - Paul Gauguin

24 And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.

25 And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.

26 And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

27 And he said unto him, What [is] thy name? And he said, Jacob.

28 And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.

29 And Jacob asked [him], and said, Tell [me], I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore [is] it [that] thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there.

30 And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.

Genesis 32:24-30 KJV

Kingdom of the Dead (Excerpt from Virgil)

Excerpts from the Aeneid of Virgil
translated by Robert Fagles

Virgil

Now carved out of the rocky flanks of Cumae
lies an enormous cavern pierced by a hundred tunnels,
a hundred mouths with as many voices rushing out,
the Sibyl's rapt replies. They had just gained
the sacred sill when the virgin cries aloud:
"Now is the the time to ask your fate to speak!
The god, look, the god!"
               So she cries before
the enterance - suddenly all her features, all
her color changes, her braided hair flies loose
and her breast heaves, her heart bursts with frenzy,
she seems to rise in height, the ring of her voice no longer
human - the breath, the power of god comes closer, closer.
"Why so slow, Trojan Aeneas?" she shouts, "so slow
to pray, to swear your vows? Not until you do
will the great jaws of our spellbound house gape wide."
And with that command the prophetess fell silent....

               "....But grant one prayer.
Since here, they say, are the gates of Death's king
and the dark marsh where the Acheron comes flooding up,
please, allow me to go and see my beloved father,
meet him face-to-face.
Teach me the way, throw wide the sacred doors!...."

The Sybil of Cumae

              ..So he prayed,
grasping the alter while the Sibyl gave her answer:
"Born of the blood of gods, Anchises' son,
man of Troy, the descent to the Underworld is easy.
Night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide,
but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air-
there the struggle, there the labor lies. Only a few,
loved by impartial Jove or born aloft to the sky
by their own fiery virtue - some sons of the gods
have made their way. The entire heartland here
is thick with woods, Cocytus glides around it,
coiling dense and dark.
But if such a wild desire seizes on you - twice
to sail the Stygian marsh, to see black Tartarus twice -
if you're so eager to give yourself to this, this mad ordeal,
then hear what you must accomplish first.
              Hidden
deep in a shady tree there grows a golden bough,
its leaves and its hardy, sinewy stem all gold,
held sacred to Juno of the Dead, Porserpina.
The whole grove covers it over, dusky valleys
enfold it too, closing around it. No one
may pass below the secret places of the earth before
he plucks the fruit, the golden foliage of that tree.
As her beauty's due, Proserpina decreed this bough
shall be offered up to her as her own hallowed gift.
When the first spray's torn away, another takes its place,
gold too, the metal breaks into leaf again, all gold.
Lift up your eyes and search, and once you find it,
duly pluck it off with your hand. Freely, easily,
all by itself it comes away, if Fate calls you on.
If not, no strenght within you can overpower it,
no iron blade, however hard, can tear it off...."

The Cattle of the Sun from The Odyssey by Homer

Bull for the Cave Paintings at Lascaux

A truly horrifying scene, where, after killing and dismembering the sun god Helios' cattle, and roasting them as a sacrifice, they return to life, but still in pieces.

'As soon as I reached our ship at the water's edge
I took the men to task, upbraiding each in turn,
but how to set things right? We couldn't find a way.
The cattle were dead already...
and the gods soon showed us all some fateful signs-
the hides began to crawl, the meat both raw and roasted,
bellowed out on the spits, and we heard a noise
like the moan of lowing oxen'

translated by Robert Fagles

The Land of the Dead

Death on a Pale Horse - J.M.W. Turner

   Sooner or later the hero travels to the Land of the Dead, the shadow realm... seeking secret knowledge. What world is this of half light, and half truths, and half remembered things, where those who used to walk with us are now but phantoms of their former selves? Memories, I say. Not of the deceased alone, but of the departed, the unreachable ones, those who have passed away either in mind or in body or in spirit. And the only form they have now is that which the hero imparts to them by his rememberance.
   There can be no satisfaction gained here; the elixir will not be obtained. For when we question those who reside here, we merely question ourselves, our memory, the simulacrum of those who have passed far and strange away from us, and who are out of ear shot. And what can we tell ourselves about what those who are not here might think? Nothing... and what is more, when we speak with them (in our thoughts), we become as them... faded and wan and little more than a ghost of what we once were when life was all about. This is the meaning of the hero passing yonder. And what is the secret knowledge that he seeks? What balm? Just this, that he too is a ghost haunting someone else's dark dream. It is the death wish, the desire to be remembered; but with that also, to be as faded as these pale reflections and less than alive.

Eidolons from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Hermes as Psychopomp

I met a seer,

Passing the hues and objects of the world,

The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense,

To glean eidolons.

Put in thy chants said he,

No more the puzzling hour nor day, nor segments, parts, put in,

Put first before the rest as light for all and entrance-song of all,

That of eidolons.

Ever the dim beginning,

Ever the growth, the rounding of the circle,

Ever the summit and the merge at last, (to surely start again,)

Eidolons! eidolons!

Ever the mutable,

Ever materials, changing, crumbling, re-cohering,

Ever the ateliers, the factories divine,

Issuing eidolons.

Lo, I or you,

Or woman, man, or state, known or unknown,

We seeming solid wealth, strength, beauty build,

But really build eidolons.

The ostent evanescent,

Myrrha,  Gustave Doré

The substance of an artist's mood or savan's studies long,

Or warrior's, martyr's, hero's toils,
To fashion his eidolon.

Of every human life,

(The units gather'd, posted, not a thought, emotion, deed, left out,)

The whole or large or small summ'd, added up,

In its eidolon.

The old, old urge,

Based on the ancient pinnacles, lo, newer, higher pinnacles,

From science and the modern still impell'd,

The old, old urge, eidolons.

The present now and here,

America's busy, teeming, intricate whirl,

Of aggregate and segregate for only thence releasing,

To-day's eidolons.

These with the past,

Of vanish'd lands, of all the reigns of kings across the sea,

Old conquerors, old campaigns, old sailors' voyages,

Joining eidolons.

Densities, growth, facades,

Strata of mountains, soils, rocks, giant trees,

Far-born, far-dying, living long, to leave,

Eidolons everlasting.

Exalte, rapt, ecstatic,

The visible but their womb of birth,

Of orbic tendencies to shape and shape and shape,

The mighty earth-eidolon.

All space, all time,

(The stars, the terrible perturbations of the suns,

Swelling, collapsing, ending, serving their longer, shorter use,)

Fill'd with eidolons only.

The noiseless myriads,

The infinite oceans where the rivers empty,

The separate countless free identities, like eyesight,

The true realities, eidolons.

Not this the world,

Nor these the universes, they the universes,

Purport and end, ever the permanent life of life,

Eidolons, eidolons.

Beyond thy lectures learn'd professor,

Beyond thy telescope or spectroscope observer keen, beyond all mathematics,

Beyond the doctor's surgery, anatomy, beyond the chemist with his chemistry,

The entities of entities, eidolons.

Unfix'd yet fix'd,

Ever shall be, ever have been and are,

Sweeping the present to the infinite future,

Eidolons, eidolons, eidolons.

The prophet and the bard,

Shall yet maintain themselves, in higher stages yet,

Shall mediate to the Modern, to Democracy, interpret yet to them,

God and eidolons.

And thee my soul,

Joys, ceaseless exercises, exaltations,

Thy yearning amply fed at last, prepared to meet,

Thy mates, eidolons.

Thy body permanent,

The body lurking there within thy body,

The only purport of the form thou art, the real I myself,

An image, an eidolon.

Thy very songs not in thy songs,

No special strains to sing, none for itself,

But from the whole resulting, rising at last and floating,

A round full-orb'd eidolon.

From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
by William Blake

The voice of the Devil

   All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:
   1. That Man has two real existing principles: Viz: a Body & a Soul.
   2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body; & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.
   3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
   But the following Contraries to these are True:
   1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
   2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
   3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

Axis Mundi

   The cry of the Kwakiutl neophyte, "I am at the Center of the World!" at once reveals one of the deepest meanings of sacred space. Where the break-through from plane to plane has been effected by a hierophany, there too an opening has been made, either upward (the divine world) or downward (the underworld, the world of the dead). The three cosmic levels - earth, heaven, underworld - have been put in communication. As we just saw, this communication is sometimes expressed through the image of a universal pillar, axis mundi, which at once connects and supports heaven and earth and whose base is fixed in the world below (the infernal regions). Such a pillar can be only at the very center of the universe, for the whole of the habitable world extends around it....
....
   To us, it seems an inescapable conclusion that the religious man sought to live as near as possible to the Center of the World. He knew that his country lay at the midpoint of the earth; he knew too that his city constituted the navel of the universe, and, above all, that the temple or the palace were veritably Centers of the World. But he also wanted his own house to be at the Center and to be an imago mundi. And, in fact, as we shall see, houses are held to be at the Center of the World, and on the microcosmic scale, to reproduce the universe. In other words, the man of traditional societies could only live in a space opening upward, where the break in the plane was symbolically assured and hence communication with the other world, the transcendental world, was ritually possible. Of course the sanctuary - the Center par excelence - was there, close to him, in the city, and he could be sure of communicating with the world of the gods simply by entering the temple. But he felt the need to live at the center always - like the Achipla, who, as we saw, always carried the sacred pole, the axis mundi, with them, so they should never be far from the Center and should remain in communication with the supernatural world. In short, whatever the dimensions of the space with which he is familiar and in which he regards himself as situated - his country, his city, his village, his house - religious man feels the need always to exist in a total and organized world, in a cosmos.


excerpt from The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade

Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich

While keeping my physical frame I lost sight of my real self. Gazing at muddy water, I lost sight of the clear abyss. - Chuang-tse