Oh, the humanity! @ccatholichoe - Tumblr Blog

divinity will stain your fingers and mouth like a pomegranate. it will swallow you whole and spit you out, wine-dark and wanting. you will reach for it again and again, greedy human fingers clutching at everything you can reach. the divine will curl its way through your veins and take you over, and it will not leave you quietly. i feel divinity in my bones like aching; like fire.

ppixieew

derangedrhythms

Here I am back and smouldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger.

Henry Miller, from ‘A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller 1932-1953′

derangedrhythms

And nothing feels more like life than desire. Everyone knows it; the surge in the blood, cocaine-highs without the white powder. Desire is shamanistic, trance-like, ecstatic.

Jeanette Winterson, from ‘Desire’

themuseumwithoutwalls

MWW Artwork of the Day (10/12/17) Sébastien Bourdon (French, 1616-1671) Queen Christina of Sweden (c. 1652-53) Oil on canvas, 72 x 58 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

OK, she was no Garbo, but few would dispute the claim that she was the most intriguing woman of her century and the most interesting of all female monarchs. At her birth she screamed with such “a strong, hoarse voice” that the midwife announced her as a boy. Her mother was greatly disappointed to discover her real sex; but her father, Gustavus II Adolphus, was thrilled and exclaimed “She’ll be clever, she has made fools of us all!”. Gustavus went off to fight for Protestantism in the Thirty Year’s Wars of Religion, and got himself killed. So, on March 15, 1633 the six-year-old lass became Sweden’s Queen, their “Girl King.” While her regent, Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, ruled the land, the young monarch received an education equal to or superior to any male of her generation. An apt pupil of high intelligence, by her teens she had mastered six modern languages, as well as Latin and Greek. Her intellectual interests were not only unique for the women of her era, but also for the monarchs. She studied Neostoicism, the Church Fathers, even Islam, and had a firm grasp of classical history and philosophy. She collected art, had theaters built for drama and ballet, subsidized the first Swedish-language plays, and even acted in them to good reviews. She invited the great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius to be her librarian. She corresponded with Descartes on the subject of hate and love, then invited him to Sweden to tutor her on philosophy and religion. (The lessons didn’t turn out so well for Descartes, who arrived in the winter 1649, went to the unheated castle library every morning at five to instruct his royal pupil, and came down quickly with a fatal case of pneumonia.) Distraught with guilt over the great philosopher’s death, Christina embraced skepticism and become temporarily disillusioned with religion.

As a ruler, she was headstrong and not afraid of bucking the powers-that-be. Bucking her Chancellor Oxenstierna, she pushed for a peace that would end the Thirty Year’s War, even if it would favor the Catholic rather the Protestant cause. A moderate when it came to religion, she blocked radical reforms to Lutheranism that would have rendered it more extreme and intolerant. She “spread the wealth” by ennobling 500 commoners and paying for it with a tax on the nobility. Her personal life was no less radical for her times. A workaholic chiefly occupied with her studies, she showed up for ministerial meetings in men’s shoes and unkempt hair. She was rumored to be having an affair with her lady-in-waiting and intimate companion, the Countess Ebba Sparre. Confessing to “an insurmountable distaste for marriage” in her diary, she resisted all pleas that she provide Sweden with a heir to the throne, opting instead to appoint her cousin Charles Gustavus as her successor.

Bourdon is one of the many artists included in the MWW exhibit/gallery: * Ancien Régime I - The Age of Louis XIV

carl-larsson

Before the mirror, 1900, Carl Larsson

drnikolatesla

Nikola Tesla father of radio and of modern power transmission and generation, celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday yesterday.

In honor of the occasion Dr. Tesla revealed in an interview that he had developed after many years of concentrated effort a means that will make it possible for man to transmit energy in large amounts, thousands of horse power, from one planet to another, which, he believes, some day will open the way for interplanetary communication.

During the day a volume was presented to him containing letters of congratulation from about 100 inventors and scientists. These included Sir Oliver Lodge, E. F. W. Alexanderson, Lee De Forest, John Hays Hammond Jr., Dr. Robert A. Millikan, Secretary of Commerce Lamont, H. H. Westinghouse, B. A. Behrend and Count von Arco.

Nearing Period of New Wonders.

“I feel,” he said, “that we are nearing a period when the human mind will perform greater wonders than ever before. This is due to the continuous refinement of means and methods of observation and the ever-increasing delicacy of our perception.

“Will man conquer nature some day?” he was asked.

“As I examine the possibilities of achievement,” he replied, “and the benefits which the human race may derive from them I think that nothing can be more important than interplanetary communication. It will certainly come some day, and the certitude that there are other human beings in the universe, working, suffering, struggling, like ourselves, will produce a magic effect on mankind and will form the foundation of a universal brotherhood that will last as long as humanity itself.”

“Then you believe that life exists on other planets?”

“It is a mathematical certitude!”

“I wouldn’t have told you that under ordinary conditions,” he added with a smile, “but the seventy-fifth birthday is a rare occasion.”

Doubts Physical Strength.

“How soon will you make your discovery public?”

There was a trace of regret in his voice as he answered, and the look of a man who has work enough for centuries and only a few years to do it in.

“I have been leading a secluded life,” he said, “one of continuous, concentrated thought and deep meditation. Naturally enough, I have accumulated a great number of ideas. The question is whether my physical powers will be adequate to working them out and giving them to the world. It is as Goethe said:

Der Gott der mir im Busen wohnt Kann tief mein Innerstes bewegen; Der ueber allen meinen Kraeften tront, Er kann nach aussen nichts bewegen.

The God who lives in my bosom can deeply move me inside; The Tront about all my strength, He can not move outwards

He had not read Goethe for forty years, be said, and he quoted it from memory. The conversation turned to the subject of the human brain.

“We are all automatons,” he reflected, “obeying external influences. We are entirely under the control of agents that beat on our senses from all directions of the outside world. Being merely receivers from the outside, it is a very important question how good the receivers are - some are sensitive and receive accurately. Others are sluggish and their reception is blurred. The individual who is a better machine has so much greater chance of achieving success and happiness. An individual who is an offender of law is a machine in which one or another organ has been deranged, so that the responses are no longer accurate.

“There is no chance in nature, although the modern theory of indeterminacy attempts to show scientifically that events are governed by chance. I positively deny that. The causes and effects, however complex, are intimately linked, and the result of all inferences must be inevitably fixed as by a mathematical formula.

“I also absolutely deny the existence of individuality. It took me not less than twenty years to develop a faculty to trace every thought or act of mine to an external influence. We are just waves in time and space, changing continuously, and the illusion of individuality is produced through the concatenation of the rapidly succeeding phases of existence. What we define as likeness is merely the result of the symmetrical arrangement of molecules which compose our body.”

Says There Is No Soul.

“How about the soul - the spirit?” he was asked.

“Ah,” he exclaimed, “but there is no soul or spirit. These are merely expressions of the functions of the body. These life functions cease with death and so do soul and spirit.

“What humanity needs is ideals. Idealism is the force that will free us from material fetters.”

The inventor spent the day as usual. He went to bed at 5:30 A.M. and rose again at 10:30, after five hours’ rest. However, he did not spend the entire five hours in sleep.

“I rolled around in bed,” he confessed, “and worked on my problems.”

New York Times, July 11th, 1931.