Skip to main content

The World



                        * Sally Mann, Jessie (1951)

The beasts from the Apocalypse looked on, with eyes of ravenous red- a girl danced within a garland of fire. She was naked, and held in her hands the staffs that could ward off any danger inflamed inexorably by her untarnished beauty. Lust and wonder abounded. The beasts looked on, salivating. For them the girl was like a candle in motion, her skin flimsy like dripping wax. Their imagination played a fatal trick: the desire came in the form of an infernal fire, threatening to lick away her flesh to the bone, and gnaw it, caressingly and persistently like a jilted lover, still hankering after the love he was denied of.

I asked the girl of her stance on innocence as virtue. She told me that it was engrained in her nature to follow a set pattern of life ordained by the divine One. Innocence was only one of the many virtues that she knew from a very young age to hold dearly of. Never excelled in the art of discussing at length a subject in admirable eloquence, she resorted to metaphor, and envisioned innocence as ghosts with pure, diaphanous bodies, who were never to be violated by either the lived or the departed. The innocent rarely laughed or cried, was not easily given to extreme emotions. No pain so piercing that ever penetrated her glacial heart; all earthly sentiments washed over her like ghosts flitting across a thorny field. Innocence was her shield against the horrors and tragedies that accompanied mortality. “It is rather a fear of vice than a love of virtue that I worship devoutly the innocent,” she confided to me.

The beasts were drunk with ecstasy. Their gaping jaws reminded me of the bottomless pit of Hell. They responded to the girl’s dance with bated breath, like that of an ailing man gasping for life lest it would be his last. Morbid lust and horrible desire stir awake the monsters in them. They were subjected to eternal vigil on account of their inner tumult that was incited by torture, and an impatient anticipation of finally attaining what they had been coveting. “Sooner,” one of the beasts told me, “the fire would extinguish. And it would be our time to feast.”


The premonition of doom never hovered long on the edge of her thoughts. She feared not and she feared none. I warned her of the inevitable danger once the fire extinguished. She smiled, and told me that innocence rendered her a child with white blood: green and unborn and undead. “Someone is destined to kill the history of me. Let them in,” she whispered.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke...
2 comments
Read more

Franz von Stuck, Two Dancers

Dancers can be like jousters. Fear and excitement wring their hearts so into tangled skein. Fluttered air brushes against their skins like chill. In anticipation of a good, likely interminable, fight both cannot be more well-prepared, grimacing to each other some distances afar as menacing demonstration of their unconquerable audacities. Everything is all so punctiliously rehearsed and choreographed. Even when darkness descends and everything is shrouded in utter invisibility, each dancer will know by heart when to put which foot forward, to which direction she will sway elegantly her supple bodice to duck narrowly from her opponent, and when the time is ripe, she will let her skirt billow like an arch of rainbow, the more fiery and colourful the rainbow the likelier the chance the dancer is going to claim the final victory. It is always something with Art Nouveau that, when beholding a piece that epitomises most substantially the essence of the said art mov...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gustav Klimt, Judith I

    The story of Judith beheading Holofernes reveals more violence than female heroism. Paintings or sculptures often depict Judith carrying triumphantly the head of her victim, in a fashion of the notorious Salome. Or she can also be seen stepping suavely on Holofernes’ head, like that in Giorgione’s, in which the heroine leaves her majestic beauty and elegance untarnished even when carrying out the bloodiest business. The pervasive serenity of Giorgione’s painting only augments the lurking horror.   Gustav Klimt whips up a different degree of horror in his depiction of the tale- the kind of horror that, at the sight of the painting the viewers blush. Or they might constantly dither between evading their furtive glance and transfixing boldly their eyes on every telling detail. In Judith I (1901), Klimt introduces a rare sentiment- that of an unreserved sexuality, which contradicts brazenly how Judith was originally portrayed- a widow with unquestionab...
Post a Comment
Read more