#butcherye

[lardr]

"one failure / on top of another"

Well, one of the pictures I did in 1946, the one like a butcher's shop, came to me as an accident. I was attempting to make a bird alighting on a field. And it may have been bound up in some way with the three forms that had gone before, but suddenly the lines that I'd drawn suggested something totally different, and out of this suggestion arose this picture. I had no intention to do this picture; I never thought of it in that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another.

[...]

One very personal recurrent configuration in your work is the interlocking of crucifixion imagery with that of the butcher's shop. The connection with meat must mean a great deal to you. Well, it does. If you go to some of those great stores, where you just go through those great halls of death, you can see meat and fish and birds and everything else all lying dead there. And, of course, one has got to remember as a painter that there is this great beauty of the colour of meat.

-- David Sylvester interviews [the wrong] Francis Bacon [found elsewhere, while digging up this quote, "the seething indigo of rot" -- also, a proto-Baconian valentine; and more about religion and butchery.]

[lardr]

gobbets foule garbaged, collops bludred yfrancked

in Stanyhurst's translation of the Aeneid: Thus did he speake manly, with great cares heauely loaden, His grief deepe squatting hoap he yeelds with phisnomye cheereful. They doe plye theire commons, lyke quick and greedye repastours Thee stags vpbreaking they slit to the dulcet or inchepyn. Soom doe slise owt collops on spits yeet quirilye trembling, Soom doe set on caldrons, oothers dooe kendel a bauen. With food they summond theyre force: and coucht in a meddow Theyre panch with venison they franck and quaffye carousing, When famin had parted, the tabils eeke wholye remooued, They theire lost feloes with long talck greedye requyred.

. . .

Jn this grislye palaice, in forme and quantitye mightye, Palpable and groaping darcknesse with murther aboundeth. Hee doth in al mischiefe surpasse, hee mounts to the sky top. (Al the heunly feloship from the earth such a monster abandon) Hard he is too be viewed, too se hym no person abydeth. Thee blud with the entrayls of men, by hym slaughtred, he gnaweth. And of my feloes I saw that a couple he grapled On ground sow grooueling, and theym with villenye crusshed, At flint hard dasshing, thee goare blood spowteth of eeche syde, And swyms in the thrashold, I saw flesh bluddye toe slauer, When the cob had maunged the gobets foule garbaged haulfe quick. Yeet got he not shotfree, this butcherye quighted Ulisses: In which doughtye peril the Ithacan moste wiselye bethoght hym. For the vnsauerye rakhel with collops bludred yfrancked, With chuffe chaffe wynesops lyke a gourd bourrachoe replennisht, His nodil in crosse wise wresting downe droups to the growndward, In belche galp vometing with dead sleape snortye the collops , Raw with wyne soused, we doe pray toe supernal asemblye, Round with al embaying thee muffe maffe loller; eke hastlye With toole sharp poincted wee boarde and perced his oane light, That stood in his lowring front gloommish malleted onlye.