the sunlight to greet me
“Don’t pull down the blinds! I feel fine. I want the sunlight to greet me.”
—Rudolph Valentino, his last words.
you dirty yellow dog
“You dog, you dirty yellow dog, you! You ain’t no son of mine!”
—actress Marjorie Man, in the movie Dead End, 1937.
Security
“Security is having your socks match.”
—Charles M. Schultz, from Security is a Thumb and a Warm Blanket, 1963. It is Linus whose socks are matching.
translucent to the light of Wisdom
“Fire, light and the dazzling luminosity of the starry dimension are all images that were associated through the ages with the radiance of Wisdom, which, as a fusion of love and insight, or gnosis, expresses the union of queen and king, the highest feminine and masculine qualities of the soul. In the fairy-tale these are personified by Cinderella and the Prince. . . .
Cinderella’s dresses, her “robe of glory”, are described as “blue like the sky”, woven of the stars of heaven, of moonbeams, sunbeams, or made of all the flowers in the world. Sometimes the metaphor of the sea appears and her dress is “sea-coloured” or “like the waves of the sea” or “as the sea with fishes swimming it” and as the “colour of the sea covered with golden fishes”. . . . Sometimes her dresses shine like the sun or gold, covered in diamonds and pearls, “of spendour passing description”. . . .
Cinderella’s shoes or slippers are described as made of crystal, or gold or blue glass, or embroidered with pearls. Without her glass slipper, Cinderella would not have been recognized, and it could fit only her whose standpoint had become translucent to the light of Wisdom.”
—Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, from The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, 2005.
White on white translucent black capes
“White on white translucent black capes
Back on the rack
Bela Lugosi’s dead . . .
Undead undead undead”
—from Bela Lugosi’s Dead, by Bauhaus, 1979. Thank you Pat Vining for mentioning, at the opening last night, this great song.
Her many-coloured robe
“the apparition of a woman began to rise from the middle of the sea with so lovely a face that the gods themselves would have fallen down in adoration of it. First the head, then the whole shining body gradually emerged and stood before me poised on the surface of the waves. . . .
Her long thick hair fell in tapering ringlets on her lovely neck, and was crowned with an intricate chaplet in which was woven every kind of flower. Just above her brow shone a round disc, like a mirror, or like the bright face of the moon, which told me who she was. Vipers rising from the left-hand and right-hand partings of her hair supported this disc, with ears of corn bristling beside them. Her many-coloured robe was of finest linen; part was glistening white, part crocus-yellow, part glowing red and along the entire hem a woven bordure of flowers and fruit clung swaying in the breeze. But what caught and held my eye more than anything else was the deep black lustre of her mantle. She wore it slung across her body from the right hip to the left shoulder, where it was caught in a knot resembling the boss of a shield; but part of it hung in innumerable folds, the tasselled fringe quivering. It was embroidered with glittering stars on the hem and everywhere else, and in the middle beamed a full and fiery moon.”
—Apuleius (mid-2nd century), from The Golden Ass. Translated from the Latin by Robert Graves, 1950. The vision is of Isis.
The Soul
“An eye is meant to see things.
The Soul is here for its own joy.”
—Rumi, as quoted in The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, 2005.
different colors
“Variation in the stimulus offered to students . . . can gain attention. When teachers (like actors) vary their volume, pitch or rate of speech, they are varying the stimulus in ways likely to arouse the orienting response. When teachers write on the board in
different colors
or place
words in
unusual
patterns
they are more likely to elicit attention; that is, more of the information they want to be attended to ends up in working memory. Emotional stimuli also can capture attention. For example, words like “blood” or “gold” or our own name are likely to elicit an orienting response. Vivid similes and metaphors have the same attention-grabbing properties. Who would not attend further after hearing, “My love is like a red, red rose” or ‘He was known in the field as Doctor Death.’”
—N.L. Gage and David C. Berliner, from Educational Psychology, fifth edition, 1992.
7,000 jars of beer
“The Egyptian goddess Sekhmet was imagined as a lioness, whose ‘mane smoked with fire, her back had the colour of blood, her countenance glowed like the sun, her eyes shone with a fire.’ A document from c. 2000 BC tells the tale of how the goddess could not be halted in her slaughter of the human race. The gods, to save humanity, ordered the brewing of 7,000 jars of beer, to which was added a red powder so that it resembled human blood, and then this liquid was poured out over the fields. With the coming of morning the goddess gazed at her reflection in it, drank it all and returned to her palace intoxicated. So it was that humanity was saved.”
—Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, from The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, 2005.
the White Album
“[Yoko Ono] is a great artist, but people don’t talk enough about her work in terms of this crossover between art and music. She’s really an under-recognized precurser, an early Conceptual artist. I’m sure she had a great influence on John Lennon and The Beatles in the way they presented themselves. Their visual style was certainly influenced by her ideas. I don’t think the White Album, for example, could have existed without her art interest. . . .
In fact, when you think of it, the White Album is a perfect crossover object, a mix of pop music, Pop Art and Fluxus: a cross between a Richard Hamilton and a Fluxus edition.”
—Christian Marclay, talking with Kim Gordon in 2003. From Press Play: Contemporary Artists in Conversation, 2005.