Tabula Rasa

"—very elliptical."

[redlipstickresurrected]

Grant Wood aka Grant DeVolson Wood (American, 1891-1942, b. Anamosa, IA, USA, d. Iowa City, Iowa, USA) - February, 1940, Lithograph

[pam3pr]

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Paradiso Amsterdam, July 19th 1988.

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

There are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a remote echo - or to which silence is by far the best response. Nature does not name itself. Granite does not self-identify as igneous. Light has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject.

-Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks

[t8i72]

tg: t8i72

[kalliope-amorphous]

“In art, everything happens by submitting docilely to the coming of the unconscious.”

— Odilon Redon, quoted in Occult Paris: The Lost Magic of the Belle Époque by Tobias Churton (Inner Traditions, 2016)

[pwlanier]

LIQUEUR CELLAR FROM THE NAPOLEON III ERA

In blackened wood, brass inlays, the lid decorated with a leafy cartridge, the flap uncovering an interior with two crystal carafes enhanced with gold and two others in engraved crystal on two removable shelves, resting on flattened ball feet.

Artcurial

[illustration-alcove]

Angela Barrett’s illustrations for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

[aavalon2]

Maria Callas

[pmamtraveller]

Photography by Zahra Ghasedi

[solcoil]

Carved antler discovered at the Grotte de Lortet rock shelter in the French Pyrenees

Magdalenian period (roughly 15,000–12,000 years ago)

[lagaleriapopurri]

Angela Barrett

[weltenwellen]

Chen Chen, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

[worldsandemanations]

Bruges-La-Morte (1978) by Ronald Chase

[speciesbarocus]

Lucas Cranach - The Penance of St. John Chrysostom. Detail.

[kitchen-light]

“Not all writing is cursed, but surely all of it is haunted. Literature is a catacomb of past readers, past writers, past books. Traces of those who are responsible for creation linger among the words on a page; Shakespeare can’t hear us, but we can still hear him (and don’t ghosts wander through those estate houses upon the moors unaware that they’ve died?). […] Of all of the forms of expression that humanity has worked with—painting, music, sculpture—literature is the eeriest. Poetry and fiction are both incantation and conjuration, the spinning of specters and the invoking of ghosts; it is very literally listening to somebody who isn’t there, and might not have been for a long while. All writing is occult, because it’s the creation of something from ether, and magic is simply a way of acknowledging that—a linguistic practice, an attitude, a critical method more than a body of spells. We should be disquieted by literature; we should be unnerved.”

— Ed Simon, from his essay “Who’s There?: Every Story Is a Ghost Story”, published in The Millions, August 18, 2021

[thinkingimages]

Detail view of an eclipse expedition plate ☾ ﾟ。⋆ 𓂝  (@fabiola.alondra) 

[nervoservo]

Caroline Vaughan (b. 1949) - Bristol, Vermont, 1971