urne buriall

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/hydrionoframes/hydrioepi.html

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/woolf.html   "Afflictions induce callosities"

collotype / 1932

'In a Field in old Walsingham, not many moneths past, were digged up between fourty and fifty Urnes, deposited in a dry and sandy soile, not a yard deep, not farre from one another: Not all strictly of one figure, but most answering these described: Some containing two pounds of bones, distinguisable in skulls, ribs, jaws, thigh-bones, and teeth, with fresh impressions of their combustion. Besides the extraneous substances, like peeces of small boxes, or combes handsomely wrought, handles of small brasse instruments, brazen nippers, and in one some kinde of Opale.'

In the first chapter of The Rings of Saturn W.G. Sebald meditates, in turn, upon Thomas Browne and Hydriotaphia:

  'The inquiry of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten. These are the circles Browne's thoughts describe, most unremittingly perhaps in Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial of 1658, a discourse on sepulchral urns found in a field near Walsingham in Norfolk. Drawing upon the most varied of historical and natural historical sources, he expatiates upon the rites we enact when one from our midst sets out on his last journey.'

Laws Against Images

It was a severe disappointment, Beyle writes, when some years ago, looking through old papers, he came across an engraving entitled Prospetto d'Ivrea and was obliged to concede that his recollected picture of the town in the evening sun was nothing but a copy of that very engraving. This being so, Beyle's advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one's travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them. For instance he could no longer recall the wonderful Sistine Madonna he had seen in Dresden, try as he might, because Muller's engraving of it had become superimposed in his mind; the wretched pastels by Mengs in the same gallery, on the other hand, of which he had never seen a copy, remained before him as clear as when he first saw them.

Sebald, Vertigo























The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

Benjamin

ernst herbeck

Golden ABCs