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one of my favorite things is this manuscript I saw in special collections this past spring of a fifteenth century english text called the prick of conscience whose final pages are covered with these sixteenth century child’s drawings, I especially love the well-dressed lady and what looks like the tudor rose on the last page

english-history-trip

But where’s that weird pointy S thing

harvardfineartslib

We love these doodles!

phaxes

via weheartit

snpsnpsnp

xatching

A black crow attacks one of the Pope’s white doves.

intense

forni-kate

Rise lucifer

olanthanide

This is the sort of thing that if I read it in fiction I would’ve condemned it as being too heavy handed with the symbolism.

semioticapocalypse

Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen. 1890s

[::SemAp Twitter || SemAp::]

Whistle

The shadows chased each other over the gravel path. Some of them may not have been shadows. The lamps along here were broken somehow, darker shadows against the deep blue of the night sky. Sometimes something in the undergrowth scurried.

She was cold. Her jumper and her coat were keeping the worst of it out, but her hands felt red and sore under the weight of her shopping bag. The wine in her head kept her a couple of inches above the ground, gliding like a metal hovercar, 3D removed from flesh and blood, near the temperature and looking at it. Only her hand tingled with pins and needles. She heard the stream and thought of the death boat man. Imagined herself sliding down the bank, Opheliaing into the water, liquifying at the grate where the water dipped onwards in its course to who knew where through the big grate with the rubbish sticking to it near where a fox stood in front of her once, stared at her, and walked off. In the summer sun it was a very different place, still some of the Pan panic, but now the reeds rustled with an almost whisper. She imagined men in there, one man, multiple men, shadow men, flesh and bone men, and quickened her pace. What would it be like to die now, or now? It would depend on how, depend on pain, depend on panic. Sudden darkness? Sudden nothing? A struggle, a fight, a breaking, breaking, body? It streamed out in front of her in invisible phantasmagoria. No, the night, the night, the night is beautiful.

She strained her senses to take in the blue of the sky. One shade. Monochromatic. That and no other. But the lights from the windows over the fence along the road yellowed them with a ghastly light like they had been burned like paper, burned like entropy, heavenblue turned to kibble. And what about the SciFi writer’s gas mask man? Staring down through his metal helmet. What if god were immutable eyes? All very grand but unpitying to the extent of sadism. She felt very small. She strode for the benefit of no-one. I am strong, I am strong, I am strong. If anyone came out of the bushes they’d wish they hadn’t! I’d rend them and rend them and rend them. With my bare teeth, with my bare hands. Only she wouldn’t. She felt very small. She quickened her pace.

The autumn air chilled her lungs, in in in, quicker and quicker. Her legs jellied, she fell to her knees on the gravel. It scratched through her tights and the pain pushed her, liminal before, out of her body. It slumped in a heap on the path. Had she been within it she would have wanted it to feel ethereal, fragile - but she wasn’t.

She was a quantity of low-flying sky. The shadows darted about her. Little scurrying things without proper edges, like ink in water in air. She didn’t need to breathe anymore. The stream kept on up from the sea, counterintuitively flooding the land upwards like litmus paper in a line indicating something wordless and uncategorised. Bits of sky jostled around her, seemed to push upon her edges. She tried to breathe. There was nothing.

Slosh, slosh, slosh, tempo like a stalking panther, the sound of a boat on a stream too little for boats. The cold is colder, around her near-nothingness. The boatman is whistling a long tuneless whistle like the sound of a storm in the reeds. It cuts through her incorporeality.

Nearer and nearer and nearer and nearer and - there. Drawn up beside her like a taxi, waiting. A pause. Then the whistle moves on, slosh, slosh, slosh, the boat moves down the stream.

The gravel on her hands presses into them. The contents of the shopping bag surround her like surrealist blood. She is colder than she has ever been in her life. She hauls herself to her hands and knees, to her feet. She leaves the shopping where it is and runs, tears running down her cheeks, gasping the night sky, as straight a line as possible to the door she has a key to. Jabs at lock with her key until she can open it. Throws her arms around her other coats, hanging from the coathook in the hall, and sobs into their softness.

gnossienne

eventheghostsaregivingup

shihlun

Raúl Ruiz

- Genealogies of a Crime / Généalogies d'un crime

(1997)

yarbus

Though writing has become the most commonplace of information technologies, it remains in many ways the most magical. Brought into focus by properly educated eyes, artificial glyphs scrawled onto the surface of objects leap unbidden into the mind, bringing with them sounds, meanings, data. In fact, it is very difficult to gaze intentionally upon a page of script written in a known language and not automatically begin reading it. The ecophilosopher David Abram notes that, just as a Zuni elder, so do we hear voices pouring out of our printed alphabets. “This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless—as mysterious as a talking stone.” We forget this mystery for the same reason we forget that writing is a technology: We have so thoroughly absorbed this machine into the gray sponge of our brains that it is extremely tough to figure out where writing stops and the mind itself starts.

Erik Davies, Techgnosis (1998)