AI funeral

 

Birds have comparable postures, in the following groups:

• displayed, volant, and volant contourny


• close, naiant and the contourny versions of these


• rising, striking, roussant, and the contourny versions of these

photo: Erika

arbor tree

wind witch

According to legends witches were believed to be able to control the wind. One method was with the use of three knots tied into a rope, or sometimes into a handkerchief. When the three knots were tied in the proper magical way, the wind was bound up in them. Witches gave, or sometimes sold, these magic knots to sailors to help them experience safe voyages (see *Ligature). The release of one knot brought a gentle, southwesterly wind; two knots, a strong north wind; and three knots, a tempest. In the folklore of the Shetland Islands and Scandinavia, some fishermen were said to have commanded the wind this way. The belief in controlling the wind by tying it goes back to the legends of ancient Greece; Odysseus received a bag of wind from Aeolus to help him on his journey.

Hajime Kinoko bondage tights

laces

*Ligature is a magical working by tying in a string, thread, or cord one to three knots, usually. Traditionally, for obvious reasons, it is used in binding spells. In ancient Greek times as well as in more recent English times knots were used by sorcerers and sea witches to harness winds and give sailors fair weather for sailing. In many Wiccan traditions knots are tied in the ritual cord belt of the initiation candidate. The number of knots, one, two or three, in the belt signifies the degree of initiation, first, second or third, which the person is receiving. The knots also magically bind the initiate in place and prevent his/her energies from being dispersed

http://ubu.com/film/steyerl_andrea.html

life sucks // nothing matters // lulz

halloween massacre

napoli

quirinus of neuss

During the siege of the city of Neuss by Burgundian troops in 1474, the citizens had worn a metal emblem of their patron saint, Quirin, on their clothing. Under the saint's protection, they all had remained uninjured, and if one of them was hit by an enemy missile, it quite simply bounced off the emblem, which quite literally shielded them from harm.

Defaced / Groebner/ 54

entoptic

http://entheology.com/research/entoptic-imagery-and-altered-states-of-consciousness/

Rubem Valentim

gibbons /// cosimo panel

James Shirley. 1596–1666

288. Death the Leveller

THE glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against Fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings:
Sceptre and Crown	5
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crookèd scythe and spade.
Some men with swords may reap the field,
And plant fresh laurels where they kill:	10
But their strong nerves at last must yield;
They tame but one another still:
Early or late
They stoop to fate,
And must give up their murmuring breath	15
When they, pale captives, creep to death.
The garlands wither on your brow,
Then boast no more your mighty deeds!
Upon Death's purple altar now
See where the victor-victim bleeds.	20
Your heads must come
To the cold tomb:
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

 

burke // the radical's arms

henry's little bronze horse

pacing horse /// pietro tacca ///

Kings in old legends seem
Like mountains rising in the evening light.
They blind all with their gleam,
Their loins encircled are by girdles bright,
Their robes are edged with bands
Of precious stones—the rarest earth affords—
With richly jeweled hands
They hold their slender, shining, naked swords

rilke / book of pictures 

leaky abstraction

Portrait of a German Officer, 1914
Marsden Hartley

double cross / adenoid hynkel

patty hearst / patti smith / The [abstract] sign under which a group coheres

Honey, the way you play guitar makes me feel so, makes me feel so masochistic. The way you go down low deep into the neck and I would do anything, and I would do anything and Patty Hearst, you're standing there in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army flag with your legs spread, I was wondering will you get it every night from a black revolutionary man and his women or whether you really did and now that you're on the run what goes on in your mind, your sisters they sit by the window, you know your mama doesn't sit and cry and your daddy, well you know what your daddy said, Patty, you know what your daddy said, Patty, he said, he said, he said, "Well, sixty days ago she was such a lovely child, now here she is with a gun in her hand."

image stands in for face, sign stands in for image

The descendants of every man who had borne a curule office were entitled to an image of that person, and at the funeral of every member of a family thus ennobled, all the images to which the ius imaginum entitled him, were produced and formed the most important part of the procession. As many as three hundred are said to have been displayed at the funeral of one person. The mind is immediately struck with the resemblance which this custom bears to that, which arose after the introduction or armorial bearings, of exhibiting at the funerals of the noble the banners and pennons to which the laws of arms entitled them, and the testimonies of their high descent and honourable connections.

Encyclopaedia heraldica

The ius imaginis is a Roman custom that (1) allowed a member of the nobility to have a wax mask (imago) of himself that would be handed down to descendants and (2) granted the privilege of a public funeral at state expense. At the funeral, the imago would be worn by an actor in the procession. The actor would also wear the clothing and insignia of the highest office and play the part (persona) of the deceased. [Incidentally, persona is the term for theatrical mask. The personae covered more than the face; the imagines, only the face.] Other actors would play the role (also, personae) of ancestors and wear their masks.

To obtain the ius imaginis right required obtaining one of the curule magistracies:

• curule aedile,
• praetor,
• censor, or
• consul.
• 
  
• 
  
• Although often called death masks, since they were used in funerals, the imagines are now thought to have been life masks, made during the lifetime of the office holder, if possible.

  Ancestral maps were displayed in the cupboards (armaria) of the family atrium, and were considered symbols of high status. They were displayed during special festivals and public sacrifices, as well as in funerals and in the atrium.

  Pollini says there is substantial evidence that the wax ancestral mask began in the second half of the 4th century B.C., after the passage of the Lex Licinia Sextia [367 B.C.] requiring that at least 1 consul be plebeian and later laws that led to the creation of a new, plebeian nobility. By obtaining a curule office, such a plebeian became a noble, a novus homo, and entitled to the ius imaginis. This was also the time the Senate first sanctioned theatrical performances (ludi Scaenici), which is worth noting, given the theatricality involved in the funeral parade.

  Source:
  Performing Death: Social Analyses of Funerary Traditions in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean #13 "Ritualizing Death in Republican Rome: Memory, Religion, Class Struggle, and the Wax Ancestral Mask Tradition's Origin and Influence on Veristic Portraiture." John Pollini, University of Southern California.

a horse led, called le cheval de deuil, covered in black velvet

CHAPERON, CHAPOURN or CHAPERONNE from the old French word for hood, which by metonymy hath given name to the little shields containing deaths-heads, crests or other devices, placed on the foreheads of the horses drawing hearses at pompous funerals. They are called chaperons or shafferoons because these devices were fastened to the chaperones or hoods, formerly worn over the heads of those horses with their other coverings of estate.

CHAPEROON or CHAPERON, by corruption termed shafferoon, [French, chaufries de cheval de deuil.]

Encyclopaedia heraldica or complete dictionary of heraldry, Volume 1

By William Berry

portolano

Fredric Jameson (1991)

Postmodernism
or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

There is, for one thing, a most interesting convergence between the empirical problems studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.” Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do in the narrower framework of daily life in the physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.
Yet Lynch’s work also suggests a further line of development insofar as cartography itself constitutes its key mediatory instance. A return to the history of this science (which is also an art) shows us that Lynch’s model does not yet, in fact, really correspond to what will become map-making. Lynch’s subjects are rather clearly involved in pre-cartographic operations whose results traditionally are described as itineraries rather than as maps: diagrams organised around the still subject-centred or existential journey of the traveller, along which various significant key features are marked oases, mountain ranges, rivers, monuments, and the like. The most highly developed form of such diagrams is the nautical itinerary, the sea chart, or portulans, where coastal features are noted for the use of Mediterranean navigators who rarely venture out into the open sea.
Yet the compass at once introduces a new dimension into sea charts, a dimension that will utterly transform the problematic of the itinerary and allow us to pose the problem of a genuine cognitive mapping in a far more complex way. For the new instruments - compass, sextant, and theodolite – correspond not merely to new geographic and navigational problems (the difficult matter of determining longitude, particularly on the curving surface of the planet, as opposed to the simpler matter of latitude, which European navigators can still empirically determine by ocular inspection of the African coast); they also introduce a whole new coordinate: the relationship to the totality, particularly as it is mediated by the stars and by new operations like that of triangulation. At this point, cognitive mapping in the broader sense comes to require the coordination of existential data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality.

vulned

tr.v. vulned, vuln·ing, vulns

To wound (oneself) by biting at the breast. Used of the pelican, which was once believed to feed its young with its blood, as a heraldic motif.

---

[From Latin vulnerre, to wound; see vulnerable.]