[namedvesta]

Burial chamber within the pyramid of Pharaoh Teti, the first ruler of Egypt’s 𝟨th Dynasty, Saqqara necropolis, c. 𝟤𝟥𝟦𝟢 BCE

[via-appia]

Spring Fresco, Akrotiri, Thera (Santorini)

Minoan, Bronze Age

[zemestoun]

francisco josé de goya y lucientes, el toro mariposa. fiesta en el ayre. buelan buelan. 1825-1828

[hyperions-fate]

The dark depths of the Word numb me and immunize me. I don’t participate in the enchanting agony. With a stonelike sobriety I remain the mother of distant cradles.

René Char, Leaves of Hypnos (1946) (Trans. Corman)

[xgeronimowrks]

ashes of a burnt painting on paper inside a clay vessel

[miamaimania]

“Balancing on the Edge: Pedra Balão’s Silent Witness”

[thirdity]

“What I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.”

— Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

[aschenblumen]

Germán Carrasco, La insidia del sol sobre las cosas (1997).

A propósito de su muerte hoy, 9 de febrero de 2026, en Santiago de Chile.

[vfollia]

EL SOL DE LAS TRES DE LA TARDE I

Para las urracas o el abatido nido de sus ojos brillan los tesoros: sillas de ruedas, baratijas en manos virginales, en regazos. Capta su plasticidad: el sol puede afiebrarte como a un recién nacido o a un raquítico y afectado manos finas al concentrarse en los trozos brillantes de una botella rota en plena acera, al asolar y desolar las fachadas continuas de esta parte; al enmarcar defectos físicos, bellezas excesivas; al cruzar parabrisas y ojos claros. No es justo decir que afea el día cuando pone un velo de bruma sobre el género insidioso, acentuado de las cosas ni culpar a la noche de la traición, el crimen o de los últimos sucesos, cualesquiera que estos sean. Un buen día (se podría decir) a pesar de la engañosa apariencia del sol sobre las cosas. Además, recuerda lo terrible que fue ver (aunque por algunos segundos) al sol como una moneda vieja o una ampolleta de bajo voltaje hace algunos años, en el eclipse, en Putre.

[chthonic-cassandra]

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and strange odours, or or work of any artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of focus on their ways is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

Walter Pater, Conclusion to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

[milksockets]

'brooch of fabricated silver + gold' by albert paley in body jewelry: international perspectives - donald j. willcox (1973)

[philosophybits]

“The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality… to define what is real.”

— Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension

[proustiansleep]

When I say “I love you,” it means that I want to be near the feeling of ambivalence our relation induces and hope that what’s negative, aggressive, or just hard about it doesn’t defeat what’s great about it really—or in my fantasies of it, anyway.

Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People

[389]

Aerial view of a volcanic crater. Danakil Depression, Ethiopia Photo credit: Chris John

[along-the-silkroad]

A page from Anthology of Persian Poetry, Timurid, c. 1450, made of ink, gold leaf, opaque watercolor, silver leaf, book bound by leather. MET

[thinkingimages]

[vfollia]

Concerning the mémoire involontaire: not only do its images not come when we try to call them up; rather, they are images which we have never seen before we remember them. This is most clearly the case in those images in which —like in some dreams— we see ourselves. We stand in front of ourselves, the way we might have stood somewhere in a prehistoric past, but never before our waking gaze. Yet these images, developed in the darkroom of the lived moment, are the most important we will ever see. One might say that our most profound moments have been equipped —like those cigarette packs —with a little image, a photograph of ourselves. And that "whole life" which, as they say, passes through people's minds when they are dying or in mortal danger is composed of such little images. They flash by in as rapid a sequence as the booklets of our childhood, precursors of the cinema, in which we admired a boxer, a swimmer or a tennis player. ["A Short Speech on Proust," delivered by Benjamin on his fortieth birthday, 1932]

[fatehbaz]

And the penal colony was to remain a viable alternative to the penitentiary, not only in nineteenth-century Britain, but also in twentieth-century France […]. But what might it mean to have a rigorous and distant form of imprisonment, located in a colony and continuing until the mid–twentieth century? […]

—

French Guiana emerged as an early favorite for the placement of a French penal colony. […] Daniel Lescallier […] authored a work entitled […] (Exposition of the means by which to develop French Guiana). In it he points to the example the British have set in exporting offenders to the colonies […]. Louis-Napoleon, still serving in the capacity of president of the republic, threw his weight behind […] the exile of criminals as well as political dissidents. “It seems possible to me,” he declared near the end of 1850, “to render the punishment of hard labor more efficient, more moralizing, less expensive […], by using it to advance French colonization.” […] The era of the French penal colony was now open; the new French Empire had begun its Botany Bay, even as the British original [penal colony in Australia] wound to a close. […] The double logic of the British system also drives the French imagination; proposals alternatively concentrate on a desire to punish criminals and rid the Metropole of their presence, on the one hand, and a hope of furthering the work of colonial expansion and economic progress, on the other. Within this logic the focus shifts between the need to colonize, the need to punish […].

In the case of France, it shimmers with colonial fantasy, allowing future Australias to emerge on tropical horizons. […] [T]he penal colony requires location. The specificity of the site matters; it is the very place that is to enact punishment […]. The penal colony is in essence a geographic technique […]. But despite frequent outcries and sensational reports, the French Guiana penal establishment continued to exist through the end of World War II. […] As geography itself becomes a technique of isolation, the French penal experiment in Guiana threatens further ordeals implicit in separation from all that is civilized. […] In sensational accounts these tropics incessantly punish […]: “Fever and dysentery get every man! Clouds of buzzing mosquitoes and fire ants sting your aching body while you labor […].” As the commandant of the bagne would inform convicts on their arrival, “The real guards here are the jungle and the sea.” […] Many of the prisoners, after all, were from urban environments […]. The terror of Devil’s Island takes shape amid metaphoric invocations of the jungle and of the savage […].

—

For those in Metropolitan France the penal colony served as a hidden punishment, a distant if graphic terror, retaining elements of torture out of public view. Yet it retained a veneer of reformation, for the convicts were still told to “make a new life for themselves.” In addition, shipping convicts away from France in the name of colonization cloaked their punishment in the robes of the “civilizing” mission: they would be part of an effort to build a greater France, to develop Guiana, and to integrate it into a Franco-world system. At the same time the bagne underscored that resistance to the humane norms of France could lead to decivilization and exile in the wilderness. […]

—

For those sent to French Guiana, however, the penal colony served directly as a public display, a constant reminder of the operations of justice. The convicts were not merely confined but forced to labor on public works. Official executions were performed by that once-humane instrument, the guillotine, but before an audience of convicts and by a fellow convict, far beyond the gates of Paris. A slower execution, that of the “dry guillotine,” the effects of the tropical climate, surrounded the entire process of deportation, reminding the convicts that this punishment could only happen here and not within Metropolitan boundaries. Theirs was a raw and primitive environment, one of torture and deprivation away from the public eye. Against the truth invoked in their conviction - justice - lay a suggested truth invoked in their punishment: no longer civilized, they were no longer human.

—

And for those already living in French Guiana, the penal colony also served as a public spectacle, if one not aimed directly at them or of their making. Not only did the proximity of prison life to their own lives parade the power of justice before them in an immediate fashion, but the constant importation of prisoners for this apparatus of punishment emphasized the particularly colonial nature of this power. Uncivilized elements were sent to them; their relation to France was that of a repository for human waste, and acts and punishments deemed unseemly for the homeland could still occur within their boundaries.

In addition, the appropriation of the names “Guyane” and “Cayenne” in myths of the bagne and “Devil’s Island” precluded other identities, while burdening the area with a symbolic brand and a historical chain to France. “The bagne,” writes Ian Hammel, “left only a disastrous brand on Guiana.”

Brand here means “trademark” as well as “scar,” indicating purpose, function, and maker.

To be remembered as a penal colony is to be remembered not only as a prison, an exotic place of horror, but also as a colony, the object and product of another. […] Modernizing France, a convulsive patchwork of provinces, cities, farms, and factories, casts its shadow overseas. […] The penal colony takes shape at a crucial moment in European colonial understandings of place and labor. Slavery had just been abolished in the French Empire […]. If slavery were at an end, then the crucial question facing the colony was that of finding an alternative source of labor […], not only in French Guiana, but also throughout colonies built on the plantation model.

—

All text above by: Peter Redfield. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. 2000. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. The text shown here comes from several different chapters in Redfield’s book, shown in the order that they originally appear. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[ritualcircle]

William Blake - The Agony in the Garden (1800)