Dark Eros & Gothic Dreams

Untitled painting, detail, 1960, Leonora Carrington. (Click to enlarge)
The full image can be found below the jump-break....

(From) Spirits of the Dead by Edgar Allen Poe

"Thy soul shall find itself alone

'Mid dark thoughts of the grey tombstone;

Not one, of all the crowd, to pry

Into thine hour of secrecy.

Be silent in that solitude,

Which is not loneliness - for then

The spirits of the dead, who stood

In life before thee, are again..."

(From) Speak, God Of Visions by Emily Brontë

"So, with a ready heart I swore

To seek their altar-stone no more;

And gave my spirit to adore

Thee, ever-present, phantom thing—

My slave, my comrade, and my king.

A slave, because I rule thee still,

Incline thee to my changeful will,

And make thy influence good or ill;

A comrade, for by day and night

Thou art my intimate delight..."

(From) Elm by Sylvia Plath

"I am inhabited by a cry.   

Nightly it flaps out

Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing   

That sleeps in me;

All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.

Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?   

Is it for such I agitate my heart?"

(From) Letter to Sainte-Beuve and a prose poem by Charles Baudelaire

"Poet, is it an insult, or a well-turned compliment?

For regarding you I’m like a lover, to all intent,

faced with a ghost whose gestures are caresses,

with hand, eye of unknown charms, who blesses,

in order to drain one’s strength. – All loved beings

are cups of venom one drinks with eyes unseeing,

and the heart that’s once transfixed, seduced by pain,

finds death, while still blessing the arrow, every day."

"Dreams! Always dreams! And the more aspiring and fastidious the soul, the more its dreams exceed the possible. Every man has within him his dose of natural opium, endlessly secreted and renewed, and how many hours do we count, from birth to death, that are filled with positive pleasure, by successful deliberate action? Shall we ever truly live, ever enter this picture my mind has painted, this picture that resembles you?"

***

No tricks, just treats. Have a great holiday... with hidden pleasures... and mysterious treasures.

(Below:  Apocalypse by Cigarettes After Sex with some clips from Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride.)

(continued below...)

Higher Ground - A Meme

Devi;Vijaya Lakshmi - the Lakshmi of Victory. G - DS - 2024.

In the Hindu understanding of the cosmos, the female counterpart of Vishnu - Lakshmi - is the Devi, or goddess, of prosperity... "who is the guiding light for the world - who has obtained the sustained (continued, everlasting) glance (Grace) from Brahma."

Also: "She is often depicted sitting upon a lotus and adorned with lotus at her hands and feet. Many of her names, Padmā, Kamalā, Ambujā, refer to the lotus. The lotus has powerful symbolism in Hinduism. While its roots are in the mud, its stalk rises clearly through the murky water, with its petals blossoming above, untouched by the mud. It is a symbol of rising above the material world through divinity, of being good in the midst of negative influences."

Lakshmi was first introduced on this blog in this post. (Shyamala Gopalan didn't name her daughter Kamala Devi for nothing. She saw the future.)

***

prosperous (adj.)

synonyms: thriving, doing well, fortunate, successful, lucky, rich, vigorous, roaring, strong, productive, flourishing, booming, opulent, golden...

antonyms: depressed, poor.

- Via Google/Oxford Languages. Prosperous is a word few of us can really wrap our heads around. Why is this?

I see them every day now in southwestern Albuquerque... more of them, and more frequently: the misfortunate nomads - the darker side of the American dream - wheeling their life's belongings in shopping carts down the vacant streets with no destination... no protection, no peace. They appear to be American refugees of every description. While I was never one of them, I, too, was homeless - and, theoretically, still am - but the emergence of the new Traveler or Nomad and the plight of the disenfranchised is not a recent development. I began living in my car the year following Trump's inauguration. And, then, came the Black Hole - the Pandemic. We all know the rest.

It is true: we - none of us - can "go back"; "back" no longer exists as we once knew it.

(Continued below the jump...)