Absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world

 Arthur Schopenhauer (1815), portrait by Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl

Arthur Schopenhauer
Quotes

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.  
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.
The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.
The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.
There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.
In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.
Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

To them it is I send my farewell cry...

Anna Akhamatova (1889-1966)
Portrait by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1922)

Anna Akhmatova

Dedication

Before this sorrow mountains bow,
the vast river’s ceased to flow,
the ever-strong prison bolts
hold the ‘convict crews’ now,
abandoned to deathly longing.
For someone the sun glows red,
for someone the wind blows fresh –
but we know none of that, instead
we only hear the soldier’s tread,
keys scraping against our flesh.
Rising as though for early mass,
through the city of beasts we sped,
there met, breathless as the dead,
sun low, a mistier Neva. Far ahead,
hope singing still, as we passed.
Sentence given…tears pour out,
she thought she knew all separation,
in pain, blood driven from the heart,
as if she’s hurled to earth, apart,
yet walks…staggers…is in motion…
Where now my chance-met friends
of those two years satanic flight?
What Siberian storms do they resist,
and in what frosted lunar orb exist?
To them it is I send my farewell cry.

Comments & Greek artists: Woman portaits in poetru & Greek painting...

Woman portraits by poets & Greek artists


Yannis Stavrou, Portrait of a woman, oil on canvas

Percy Bysshe Shelley

And like a dying lady, lean and pale

And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky East,
A white and shapeless mass—

Art thou pale for weariness

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

One word is too often profaned

I.
One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.

II.
I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,--
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?

Comments & contemporary Greek artists: Taking it for my target, I would dart Them deep into your streaming, sobbing heart...

Poets & Greek artists, Greek painters, modern Greek artists


Yannis Stavrou, Portrait of a Young Woman, oil on canvas

Forgotten perfumes, memories desires...

Poetic melancholy and power...

Great art...

Charles Baudelaire

To a Madonna


(Ex Voto in Spanish Style)

I'd build, Madonna, love, for my belief,
An altar in the dim crypt of my grief,
And in the darkest comer of my heart,
From mortal lust and mockery far apart,
Scoop you a niche, with gold and azure glaze,
Where you would stand in wonderment and gaze,
With my pure verses trellised, and all round
In constellated rhymes of crystal bound:
And with a huge tiara richly crowned.
Out of the Jealousy which rules my passion,
Mortal Madonna, I a cloak would fashion,
Barbarous, stiff, and heavy with my doubt,
Whereon as in a fourm you would fill out
And mould your lair. Of tears, not pearls, would be
The sparkle of its rich embroidery:
Your robe would be my lust, with waving flow,
Poising on tips, in valleys lying low,
And clothing, in one kiss, coral and snow.
In my Respect (for satin) you'll be shod
Which your white feet would humble to the clod,
While prisoning their flesh with tender hold
It kept their shape imprinted like a mould.
If for a footstool to support your shoon,
For all my art, I could not get the moon,
I'd throw the serpent, that devours my vitals
Under your trampling heels for his requitals,
Victorious queen, to spurn, bruise, and belittle
That monstrous worm blown-up with hate and spittle.
Round you my thoughts like candles should be seen
Around the flowered shrine of the virgins' Queen,
Reflected on a roof that's painted blue,
And aiming all their golden eyes at you.
Since nought is in me that you do not stir,
All will be incense, benjamin, and myrrh,
And up to you, white peak, in clouds will soar
My stormy soul, in rapture, to adore.

In fine, your role of Mary to perfect
And mingle barbarism with respect —
Of seven deadly sins, O black delight!
Remorseful torturer, to show my sleight,
I'll forge and sharpen seven deadly swords
And like a callous juggler on the boards,
Taking it for my target, I would dart
Them deep into your streaming, sobbing heart.


(Translated by Roy Campbell)

A une Madone

Ex-voto dans le goût espagnol


Je veux bâtir pour toi, Madone, ma maîtresse,
Un autel souterrain au fond de ma détresse,
Et creuser dans le coin le plus noir de mon coeur,
Loin du désir mondain et du regard moqueur,
Une niche, d'azur et d'or tout émaillée,
Où tu te dresseras, Statue émerveillée.
Avec mes Vers polis, treillis d'un pur métal
Savamment constellé de rimes de cristal
Je ferai pour ta tête une énorme Couronne;
Et dans ma Jalousie, ô mortelle Madone
Je saurai te tailler un Manteau, de façon
Barbare, roide et lourd, et doublé de soupçon,
Qui, comme une guérite, enfermera tes charmes,
Non de Perles brodé, mais de toutes mes Larmes!
Ta Robe, ce sera mon Désir, frémissant,
Onduleux, mon Désir qui monte et qui descend,
Aux pointes se balance, aux vallons se repose,
Et revêt d'un baiser tout ton corps blanc et rose.
Je te ferai de mon Respect de beaux Souliers
De satin, par tes pieds divins humiliés,
Qui, les emprisonnant dans une molle étreinte
Comme un moule fidèle en garderont l'empreinte.
Si je ne puis, malgré tout mon art diligent
Pour Marchepied tailler une Lune d'argent
Je mettrai le Serpent qui me mord les entrailles
Sous tes talons, afin que tu foules et railles
Reine victorieuse et féconde en rachats
Ce monstre tout gonflé de haine et de crachats.
Tu verras mes Pensers, rangés comme les Cierges
Devant l'autel fleuri de la Reine des Vierges
Etoilant de reflets le plafond peint en bleu,
Te regarder toujours avec des yeux de feu;
Et comme tout en moi te chérit et t'admire,
Tout se fera Benjoin, Encens, Oliban, Myrrhe,
Et sans cesse vers toi, sommet blanc et neigeux,
En Vapeurs montera mon Esprit orageux.

Enfin, pour compléter ton rôle de Marie,
Et pour mêler l'amour avec la barbarie,
Volupté noire! des sept Péchés capitaux,
Bourreau plein de remords, je ferai sept Couteaux
Bien affilés, et comme un jongleur insensible,
Prenant le plus profond de ton amour pour cible,
Je les planterai tous dans ton Coeur pantelant,
Dans ton Coeur sanglotant, dans ton Coeur ruisselant!

Comments & Greek artists: Yannis Stavrou paints MYRTIS & participates in the exhibition "Myrtis: face to face with the past"

Ancient Greece & Greek artists, modern Greek painters


Look at the video:
Discussing Yannis Stavrou artistic work with Myrtis...

Yannis Stavrou paints the portrait of MYRTIS and participates in the moving exhibition "Myrtis: face to face with the past"...

The exhibition constitutes an interdisciplinary effort to depict aspects of Ancient Greece through the case study of Myrtis' skull, a girl that lived in Kerameikos in the 5th century BC.

A portrait of this girl was created by the painter Yannis Stavrou...


Interview - Discussing Yannis Stavrou artistic work with Myrtis...

My thoughts are just filled with responsibility and sensitivity...

It is very intriguing to paint the portrait of a person that you have never met...

What I'm trying to do is to elect my personal point of view through the existing material, to imagine Myrtis...

I was really moved by Myrtis story. She was a little girl who died at the time of the plague in 430 BC. I thought of her as young girl of the time, a daughter of a potter, maybe, living somewhere near Iera Odos...

I continued using my imagination and that is how this character was born, a character that is certainly a myth, but that myth will become a reality and that little girl will come to life...

------------------------------------

Myrtis letter is posted at the United Nations website:

MYRTIS, AN ATHENIAN GIRL WHO LIVED 2500 YEARS AGO,

IS SENDING A STRONG MESSAGE TO THE WORLD

(With these words, the United Nations Organization has declared Myrtis “a Millennium Friend” and a symbol of its global campaign “We Can End Poverty”)

My name is Myrtis. Actually this is not my true name. I was named “Myrtis” by the archeologists that discovered my bones in 1994-1995, in a mass grave with another 150 skeletons in the Athens area of Kerameikos.

I may look like a girl of the 21st century but I can assure you that I’m an eleven year old Athenian girl who lived and died in Athens during the 5th century BC.

So, how can a young ancient Athenian become a Millennium Friend of the United Nations?

The scientists are certain that I was one of the victims of the plague that struck Athens during the 5th century BC. They also know that the cause of my death was the typhoid fever that also killed the ancient Athenian statesman Pericles and roughly one third of all people living in the city at that time. They also say that it was this plague that contributed to Athens´ defeat by Sparta during the Peloponnesian Wars.

My skull was in an unusually good condition and this inspired Athens University Orthodontics professor Manolis J. Papagrigorakis to begin – with the help of specialist scientists – to effect a facial reconstruction. And, here I am. You can see the result of their efforts in my photo. I look almost exactly the same as the day I died.

Prof. Manolis J. Papagrigorakis thought that my ‘resurrection’ should not only be an opportunity for the world to see the face of a girl who played at the Acropolis while the Athenians were building the Parthenon, but he also wanted my “return” to send a strong message to the world and its leaders.

My death was inevitable. In the 5th century BC we had neither the knowledge nor the means to fight deadly illnesses. However, you, the people of the 21st century, have no excuse. You possess all the necessary means and resources to save the lives of millions of people. To save the lives of millions of children like me who are dying of preventable and curable diseases.

2,500 years after my death, I hope that my message will engage and inspire more people to work and make the Millennium Development Goals a reality.
Listen to me. I know what I’m saying. Never forget that I’m much older and therefore much wiser than you.»

Myrtis is the central person of the exhibition «Myrtis: Face to face with the past» which has begun a planned tour of Greek and foreign cities....

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek artists: Who will tell us to whom in this house We without knowing it have said farewell?

Literature & Greek artists, modern Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Portrait of Young Woman, oil on canvas

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Jorge Luis Borges

Limits

Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table,
There must be one which I will never read.

There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.

There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.

And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.

[Translation by Alastair Reid]


Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

Borges and I

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

Comments & modern Greek artists, Greek painters: Her glossy eyes are made of charming minerals...

Poetry & Greek painting, Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Woman with Hat, oil on canvas

Charles Baudelaire
Avec ses vêtements ondoyants et nacrés

Avec ses vêtements ondoyants et nacrés,
Même quand elle marche on croirait qu'elle danse,
Comme ces longs serpents que les jongleurs sacrés
Au bout de leurs bâtons agitent en cadence.

Comme le sable morne et l'azur des déserts,
Insensibles tous deux à l'humaine souffrance
Comme les longs réseaux de la houle des mers
Elle se développe avec indifférence.

Ses yeux polis sont faits de minéraux charmants,
Et dans cette nature étrange et symbolique
Où l'ange inviolé se mêle au sphinx antique,

Où tout n'est qu'or, acier, lumière et diamants,
Resplendit à jamais, comme un astre inutile,
La froide majesté de la femme stérile.

With Waving Opalescense In Her Gown

With her pearly, undulating dresses,
Even when she's walking, she seems to be dancing
Like those long snakes which the holy fakirs
Set swaying in cadence on the end of their staffs.

Like the dull sand and the blue of deserts,
Both of them unfeeling toward human suffering,
Like the long web of the ocean's billows,
She unfurls herself with unconcern.

Her glossy eyes are made of charming minerals
And in that nature, symbolic and strange,
Where pure angel is united with ancient sphinx,

Where everything is gold, steel, light and diamonds,
There glitters forever, like a useless star,
The frigid majesty of the sterile woman.

Comments & modern Greek artists: about human kind...

Anthropology & Greek painting, Greek artists, modern Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Woman on Blue Background, oil on canvas

A new hominin, which is neither homo sapiens nor neanderthal, was recently discovered - the "X-Woman"...

Like neanderthals, this hominin dissapeared too - due to the dominant role of the human kind...

However, the next victim of the human kind is the human kind itself...

Maybe, this is the best solution for us as well as for the planet...

As the amelioration of the humans is absolutely impossible - according to facts...

Recent scientific news follow:

The X-Woman...

Scientists have identified a previously unknown type of ancient human through analysis of DNA from a finger bone unearthed in a Siberian cave.

BBC NEWS, March 25, 2010

By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News

The extinct "hominin" (human-like creature) lived in Central Asia between 48,000 and 30,000 years ago.

An international team has sequenced genetic material from the fossil showing that it is distinct from that of Neanderthals and modern humans.

Details of the find, dubbed "X-woman", have been published in Nature journal.

Ornaments were found in the same ground layer as the finger bone, including a bracelet.

Professor Chris Stringer, human origins researcher at London's Natural History Museum, called the discovery "a very exciting development".

"This new DNA work provides an entirely new way of looking at the still poorly-understood evolution of humans in central and eastern Asia."

The discovery raises the intriguing possibility that three forms of human - Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and the species represented by X-woman - could have met each other and interacted in southern Siberia.

The tiny fragment of bone from a fifth finger was uncovered by archaeologists working at Denisova Cave in Siberia's Altai Mountains in 2008.

An international team of researchers extracted mitochondrial DNA from the bone and compared the genetic sequence with those from modern humans and Neanderthals.

Origin unknown

Mitochondrial DNA comes from the cell's powerhouses and is passed down the maternal line only.

The analysis carried out by Johannes Krause from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues revealed the human from Denisova last shared a common ancestor with modern humans and Neanderthals about one million years ago.

This is known as the divergence date; essentially, when this human's ancestors split away from the line that eventually led to Neanderthals and ourselves.

The Neanderthal and modern human evolutionary lines diverged much later, around 500,000 years ago. This shows that the individual from Denisova is the representative of a previously unknown human lineage that derives from a hitherto unrecognised migration out of Africa.

"Whoever carried this mitochondrial genome out of Africa about a million years ago is some new creature that has not been on our radar screens so far," said co-author Professor Svante Paabo, also from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The divergence date of one million years is too young for the Denisova hominin to have been a descendent of Homo erectus, which moved out of Africa into Asia some two million years ago.

And it is too old to be a descendent of Homo heidelbergensis, another ancient human thought to have originated around 650,000 years ago. However, for now, the researchers have steered away from describing the specimen as a new species.

Dr Krause said the ground layer in which the Denisova hominin fragment was found contain tools which are similar to those made by modern humans in Europe.

Comments & Greek painting, Greek painters, Greek artists: We urgently need a new tool of sight...

Culture & painting, Greek painters, Greek artists


Yannis Stavrou, Portrait of Young Woman, oil on canvas

Among the side effects of the global cultural decline is the loss of sight…

Ugly nothings are called works of art…

Incredible and ridiculous banalities are described as progressive art events…

Barbaric and fascist constructions are characterized either as modern sculpture or as inspired architecture…

And the worst: all of us have lost the ability of face (physiognomy) reading. We are unable to see at a glance the very basic things. We do not recognize anymore the stupids, the cretins, the fools, the sneaky, the frauds…

We urgently need a new tool of sight - it is heard that it will come from the tongue…

Device Lets the Blind "See" with Their Tongues
Scientific American, August 13, 2009

Neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita hypothesized in the 1960s that "we see with our brains not our eyes." Now, a new device trades on that thinking and aims to partially restore the experience of vision for the blind and visually impaired by relying on the nerves on the tongue's surface to send light signals to the brain.

Legal blindness is defined by U.S. law as vision that is 20/200 or worse, or has a field of view that is less than 20 degrees in diameter. The condition afflicts more than one million Americans over the age of 40, according to the National Institutes of Health. Adult vision loss costs the country about $51.4 billion per year.

About two million optic nerves are required to transmit visual signals from the retina—the portion of the eye where light information is decoded or translated into nerve pulses—to the brain's primary visual cortex. With BrainPort, the device being developed by neuroscientists at Middleton, Wisc.–based Wicab, Inc. (a company co-founded by the late Back-y-Rita), visual data are collected through a small digital video camera about 1.5 centimeters in diameter that sits in the center of a pair of sunglasses worn by the user. Bypassing the eyes, the data are transmitted to a handheld base unit, which is a little larger than a cell phone. This unit houses such features as zoom control, light settings and shock intensity levels as well as a central processing unit (CPU), which converts the digital signal into electrical pulses—replacing the function of the retina.

From the CPU, the signals are sent to the tongue via a "lollipop," an electrode array about nine square centimeters that sits directly on the tongue. Each electrode corresponds to a set of pixels. White pixels yield a strong electrical pulse, whereas black pixels translate into no signal. Densely packed nerves at the tongue surface receive the incoming electrical signals, which feel a little like Pop Rocks or champagne bubbles to the user.

It remains unclear whether the information is then transferred to the brain's visual cortex, where sight information is normally sent, or to its somatosensory cortex, where touch data from the tongue is interpreted, Wicab neuroscientist Aimee Arnoldussen says. "We don't know with certainty," she adds.

Like learning to ride a bike
In any case, within 15 minutes of using the device, blind people can begin interpreting spatial information via the BrainPort, says William Seiple, research director at the nonprofit vision healthcare and research organization Lighthouse International. The electrodes spatially correlate with the pixels so that if the camera detects light fixtures in the middle of a dark hallway, electrical stimulations will occur along the center of the tongue.

"It becomes a task of learning, no different than learning to ride a bike," Arnoldussen says, adding that the "process is similar to how a baby learns to see. Things may be strange at first, but over time they become familiar."

Seiple works with four patients who train with the BrainPort once a week and notes that his patients have learned how to quickly find doorways and elevator buttons, read letters and numbers, and pick out cups and forks at the dinner table without having to fumble around. "At first, I was amazed at what the device could do," he said. "One guy started to cry when he saw his first letter."

Wicab will submit BrainPort to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval at the end of the month, says Robert Beckman, president and chief executive officer of the company. He notes that the device could be approved for market by the end of 2009 at a cost of about $10,000 per machine.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Active Evil is better than Passive Good...

Aphorisms & Greek artists, painters


Yannis Stavrou, Portrait of a Young Woman, oil on canvas

From ancient Greek philosophers to English romantism...
Let us enjoy some quotations by William Blake...

William Blake
Quotations

• A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
• A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
• Active Evil is better than Passive Good.
• Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
• Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.
• Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.
• As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.
• Better murder an infant in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire.
• Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read black where I read white.
• Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief?
• Christ's crucifix shall be made an excuse for executing criminals.
• Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.
• Energy is an eternal delight, and he who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.
• Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
• Every harlot was a virgin once.
• Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.
• Exuberance is beauty.
• For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.
• Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.
• Great things are done when men and mountains meet.

He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven *

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
______________________________________

* William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven
* On the left, Yannis Stavrou, Portrait of a Young Woman, oil on canvas (detail)