the pleasure of fiends (some girls are so vain)

a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.
I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The fair girl went on her knees, and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I would hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one's flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer - nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited - waited with beating heart.

Bram Stoker - Dracula

mooooooommmm ur face smells like tylenol!

Wilkie Collins was addicted to laudanum, a 10% solution of opiate in alcohol. He got it for a case of gout, and never stopped downing the stuff. One day, his servant, curious about his happy juice, poured for himself a big-ass glass, riiiight to the top same as Wilkie downed on the daily.
Killed the poor motherfucker. Like ahhhhhhhhhh mmmmm booom dead.
Wilkie went on to invent detective fiction. Go figure.

the moon rose from behind a cloud. Everything around that had been nebulous took seperate shape.

Thus: the soul, having cast out its body as an unnecessary ballast, is at times caught up by the hurricanes of its own movements. They sweep through the spaces of the soul. Yes the body is a fragile vessel, sailing off on the ocean of the soul toward a spiritual mainland.
Thus-
Imagine: a rope is would around your body at the waist, the rope is pulled and you begin spinning with indescribable speed. In ever widening circles you fly head down, back forward. You will fly off into measureless immensities of the universe, overcoming spaces while becoming spaces.
You are caught up by such a hurricane when the body is cast out as unnessary ballast.
Just imagine: a point of the body experiences the urge to expand without measure, to expand to a horrible extent (and to occupy a space equal in diameter to the orbit of Saturn). Imagine that you consciously sense not only one point, but all the points. They have all swollen up and have rarefied into a gaseous state. The planets have begun to circulate freely in the voids of your body's molecules. The centripetal sensation has been lost; we are blown to bits; and only the consciousness of shattered sensation remains whole.
What would we then sense?
We would sense that the detached organs are separated from one another by horrible billions of miles. But consciousness knits together a blatant and hideous monstrosity which at the same time lacks wholeness. We feel the seething of Saturn's masses in the spine. The stars of constellations eat their way into the brain. In the center of the seething heart we feel the diseased joltings of the entire heart. The solar streams of fire, thrown off from the sun had moved into this fiery, senselessly beating center.
Were we able to imagine this, before us would rise up the first stages of the life of the soul, which as cast off the body from itself.

Andrei Bely - Petersburg

petersburg

But if Petersburg is not the capital, then there is no Petersburg. It only appears to exist.
However that may be, Petersburg not only appears to us, but actually does appear - on maps: in the form of two small circles, one set inside the other, with a black dot in the center; and from precisely this mathematical point, which has no dimension, it proclaims forcefully that it exists: from here, from this very point surges and swarms the printed book; from this invisible point speeds the official circular.

Andrei Bely - Petersburg

fucking

a verb
in cars
like the old days
pushing further
into new subdivisions
that grow
as we grow
dense
and lived in
newly ready
again
like we move
new pavement
pushing further
into our bodies
at the edge
of new streetlight
when we come
back
again
we will have
to drive further
to find
the yet
uninhabited
houses
to fuck against
when the neighborhood
grows
like we grow
newly dense
into our bodies
yet again
at the edge
of new streetlight
to inhabit
a lit city
laid out
underneath us
a verb
we grow
fucking
in cars

It must be abstract It must change It must give pleasure

the real unreal: the unnameable: the howl: the ineffable: the iridescent: the void: the origin of change: the muddy centre before we breathed: the myth before the myth: the first idea in violet space: a passion felt, not understood: the anonymous colour of the universe: the savage plainness: the silence: the vulgate: the gibberish: the hermit in poet’s metaphors: the to and fro both at once: the alpha omega: the round and round like wine at a table: dark things without a double: the exactest point at which the thing is itself: the movable, the moment: the permanent impermanent: the indifferent eye: the big X: the dominant blank, the unapproachable: the cold and earliness and bright origin: the bodiless half: the clearing for outpouring: the single sleep: the intricate evasions: the senseless element: the coming on and coming forth: the final form: the clearness: the traversing shade: the rugged and luminous, chants in the dark: the and yet, and yet, and yet: the possible, possible, possible…



Yves Klein, Wallace Stevens

"Il est dangereux d’avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes accrédités ont tort." Voltaire, 1752

"What philosophy of art needs is an approach that begins by treating art as a field of activities, objects, and experience that appears naturally in human life. We must first try to demarcate an uncontroversial center that gives more curious cases whatever interest they have. I regard this approach as "naturalistic," not in the sense that it is biologically driven (though biology is relevant to it), but because it depends on persistent cross-culturally identified patterns of behavior and discourse: the making, experiencing, and assessing of works of art. Many of the ways art is discussed and experienced can easily move across culture boundaries, and manage a global acceptance without help from academics or theorists. From Lascaux to Bollywood, artists, writers and musicians often have little trouble in achieving cross-cultural aesthetic understanding. The natural center on which such understanding exists is where theory must begin."

Dennis Dutton - The Art Instinct: Beauty Pleasure and Human Evolution

evolve

As many more individuals of each species (read: art form) are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being (read: concept, aesthetic), if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected (read: adaptation, complexity = win). From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form (read: artistic innovation prevails perpetually).

Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species, as applied to artistic momentum

in all forms

art is fundamentally pleasure-chasing. this is how it moves forward and evolves - our tastes change, often randomly, as we desire and pursue the most beautiful.

archeology

"Doesn't an old thing always know when a new thing comes?"
"I suppose so. You sound as if you believe in spirits."
"I believe in the things that were done, and there are evidences of many things done on Mars. There are streets and houses, and there are books, I imagine, and big canals and clocks and places for stabling, if not horses, well, then some domestic animal, perhaps with twelve legs, who knows? Everywhere I look I see things that were used. They were touched and handled for centuries.
"Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used and I'll say yes, they're all here. All the things which had names. All the mountains had names. And we'll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we'll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we'll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we'll never touch it. And then we'll get mad at it, and you know what we'll do? We'll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves."
"We won't ruin Mars," said the captain. "It's too big and too good."
"You think not? We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things... it won't ever be right when there are the proper names for these places."
"That'll be your job, as archeologists, to find out the old names, and we'll use them.

(Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles: June 2001: And The Moon Be Still As Bright)