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Remedios Varios, "Naturaleza Muerta Resucitando," 1963.
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David Nash, Branch Chair, 1976. Via jitjindar.
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Dagobert Peche, coffee and tea service, 1922-23, silver, ivory, and turquoise. Execution: Wiener Werkstätte. Neue Galerie New York.
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Wolfgang Paalen, Smoke Painting (Fumage), ca. 1938. Oil, candle burns, and soot on canvas. The Menil Collection.
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Soichi Sunami: Martha Graham in "Lamentation," 1930:
The dance is performed almost entirely from a seated position, with the dancer encased in a tube of purple jersey. The diagonals and tensions formed by the dancer’s body struggling within the material create a moving sculpture, a portrait which presents the very essence of grief. The figure in this dance is neither human nor animal, neither male nor female: it is grief itself.
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Wojciech Weiss, Scarecrows, 1905.
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Detail from a hand-decorated calendar, via Paper of the Past.
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William Blake: The Gates of Paradise, Plate 12, "Help! Help!," 1793. Yale Center for British Art.
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Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels and by the voices of birds of ill-omen. Loneliness, dreariness, aptness for arousing a sense of fear, a kind of ungodly hallowedness—these were the things that called her thoughts away from the comfortable fireside.
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes.
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You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn’t. When the midwife says, ‘It’s a boy,’ where does the girl go? When you think you’re pregnant, and you’re not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines.
Hilary Mantel, "Giving Up the Ghost." London Review of Books, 1/2/2003.
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Barring any significant changes, we predict the energy your jealousy generates will enable you to keep going strong until you are at least a hundred, but given that we are somewhat short of hands, we would prefer if you were to make your way here before then. The sooner the better, as far as we are concerned. The numbers of people with the levels of passion it takes to become a ghost are decreasing every year, Contrary to common presumption, it's not just anyone who can assume spectral form. Without the requisite degree of jealousy or obsession, people just float straight to heaven. Between you and us, everyone is so blessedly sensible that we sometimes find ourselves wanting to give them a good talking-to. Are you really going to settle for that?
Aoka Matsuda, "The Jealous Type."
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With a heart of furious fancies,—ANON. (Tom o' Bedlam). Epigraph to Walter de la Mare's Henry Brocken.
Whereof I am commander:
With a burning spear,
And a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander;
With a Knight of ghosts and shadows,
I summoned am to Tourney:
Ten leagues beyond
The wide world's end;
Methinks it is no journey.
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Post title from "Foxglove Country," by Zaffir Kunial.
