postcard 1919

Carissima –

I re-visited Étaples OPP yesterday & posted a ppc to you from the old camp – probably in a letter box from which collections are no longer made! For the Peace has quite spoiled Étaples. There are still a good number of men about but desolation already sits on the place – or, rather, it is arriving in instalments. The first letters of Ichabod are written there and sooner or later the writing will be complete.

cellophane world

In our garden there was an abandoned, ramshackle summerhouse. I loved it for its stained glass windows. Whenever I wandered about inside it, passing from one coloured pane to the next, I was transformed: I took on the colours of the landscape that - now flaming and now dusty, now smouldering and now sumptuous - lay before me in the window. It was like what happened with my watercolours, when things would take me to their bosom as soon as I overcame them with a moist cloud. Something similar occured with soap bubbles… In those days one could buy chocolate in pretty little crisscrossed packets, in which every square was wrapped separately in colourful tinfoil… green and gold, blue and orange, red and silver… from out of this sparkling entanglement the colours one day broke upon me, and I am still sensible of the sweetness with which my eye imbibed them. It was the sweetness of chocolate.

Benjamin / Berlin Childhood/ Colours
























































…electricity through an over abundance of light produces multiple blindings

Grindelwald

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Grindelwald. We have had a gorgeous day been over this glaciers. My boots are a sight the heels are coming off. We were 10 all roped together. We had a tremendous climb for 2 ½ hrs before we reached the ice. Yrs

flowering / deflowering

beatitudes of the frozen city, rituals of re-animation

habeas corpus / techniques of the observer

The 2nd of May 1808 in Madrid: the charge of the Mamelukes

History / kill zones


ABC

gathering nuts or shaking your darling buds

MAY DAY
M'AIDER

attr. jacques le moyne / a daughter of the picts / c1585

Beyonce



Olive Oatman, 1858. She was the first tattooed white woman in the U.S. After her family was killed by Yavapais Indians, on a trip West in the eighteen-fifties, she was adopted and raised by Mohave Indians, who gave her a traditional tribal tattoo. When she was ransomed back, at age nineteen, she became a celebrity. Photograph courtesy of the Arizona Historical Society, Tucson, 1927.
















The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman


"the tattooed captive." It evidently became a popular myth told in circuses towards the end of the 18th century. Victims of kidnapping by the "redskins" offered "the notion that people of color could transform whites into people of color --- ethnically and decoratively, as a means of exploitation and degradation."





Nora Hildebrandt, the first American tattooed circus attraction, in the late eighteen-eighties. Like many early attractions, Hildebrandt claimed to have been forcibly tattooed by western Indians, following Olive Oatman’s example. She was tattooed in New York, by her common-law husband, Martin Hildebrandt, one of the first shop tattooists in the U.S.