If you’ve been meditating on the “daily wearing away of life, with its ever-shrinking remainder”, to quote the thoughtful Marcus Aurelius, and yet just can’t overcome that urge to procrastinate, here’s a way to pass the time until we dissolve:
Monte Python classics from the Lunch Hour Veg at YesbutNobutYes
Time’s fingers bend us slowly
With dubious craftsmanship,
That at last spoils all it forms.
(Krates)
Medusa grows wings and flies …
The Monstrous Feminine in Literature and Art – syllabus from K. Nichols at Pitt State University.
Collage art by Lou Beach
Modern memento mori featuring frogs, updating the historical theme enjoining us to remember we are mortal.
Painting by Jim Woodring
Fantastical man riding fantasical horse – print work by Ukrainian artist Oleg Denisenko
Fantastic etchings of fantastic sea creatures.
In 1657, physician and naturalist Joannes Jonstonus (John Johnston) published his Latin treatise Historiæ Naturalis de Quadrupedibus (later translated and released as ‘A description of the nature of four-footed beasts : with their figures engraven in brass’). It includes 80 engraved plates of both real and fanciful beasts.
To see more, click here.
Bradypus
German naturalist Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber (1739-1810) trained as a physician and went and studied botany in Sweden under the great Carolus Linneaus. He would eventually edit one of Linneaus’s publications and he also included the Linnean binomial species naming system for the first time animals such as the one depicted above.
To see more, click here.
Emotions are responses to areas of vulnerability … To see this, let us imagine beings who are really invulnerable to suffering, totally self-sufficient. (The Olympian gods aren’t quite like this, insofar as they love their mortal children and have quarrels and jealousies among themselves that give rise to many types of mental and physical suffering.) Such beings would have no reason to fear, because nothing that could happen to them would be really bad. They would have no reasons for anger, because none of the damages other people could do to them would be a truly significant damage, touching on matters of profound importance. They would have no reasons for grief, because, being self-sufficient, they would not love anything outside themselves, at least not with the needy human type of love that gives rise to profound loss and depression. Envy and jealousy would similarly be absent from their lives.
The Greek and Roman Stoic philosophers draw on this idea when they ask us all to become such self-sufficient people, insofar as we can, extirpating the emotions from our lives. They argue plausibly that human beings can achieve something like the imagined invulnerable condition if they simply refuse to value anything outside of that which they control–their own will, their capacity for moral choice. By shifting our attachments and what we consider valuable, we also shift the emotions we are liable to experience. Although few of us would fully share the Stoic project of withdrawing our attachments from the world, considering that project is a good way of measuring the large role that attachments to insecure aspects of our world–other people, the material goods we need, social and political conditions–play in our emotional life. It also helps us, correspondingly, to measure the large role that emotions such as fear, grief, and anger play in mapping the trajectory of human lives, the lives of vulnerable animals in a world of significant events that we do not fully control. If we leave out all the emotional responses that connect us to this world of what the Stoics called “external goods,” we leave out a great part of our humanity …
[Our] insecurity is inseparable from our sociability, and both from our propensity to emotional attachment; if we think of ourselves as like the self-sufficient gods, we fail to understand the ties that join us to our fellow humans. Nor is that lack of understanding innocent. It engenders a harmful perversion of the social, as people who believe themselves above the vicissitudes of life treat other people in ways that inflict, through hierarchy, miseries that they culpably fail to comprehend. Rousseau asks, “Why are kings without pity for their subjects? It is because they count on never being human beings.” Emotions of compassion, grief, fear, and anger are in that sense essential and valuable reminders of our common humanity.
[H]umanity [is] a condition of shared incompleteness …
What I am calling for, in effect, is something that I do not expect we shall ever fully achieve: a society that acknowledges its own humanity, and neither hides us from it nor it from us; a society of citizens who admit that they are needy and vulnerable, and who discard the grandiose demands for omnipotence and completeness that have been at the heart of so much human misery, both public and private.
[Let us construct] a public myth of equal humanity, to substitute for other pernicious myths that have long guided us. Such a society remains elusive because incompleteness is frightening and grandiose fictions are comforting. As a patient [once] said …, “The alarming thing about equality is that we are then both children, and the question is, where is father? We know where we are if one of us is the father.” It may even be that such a society is unachievable, because human beings cannot bear to live with the constant awareness of mortality and of their frail animal bodies. Some self-deception may be essential in getting us through a life in which we are soon bound for death, and in which the most essential matters are in fact beyond our control. What I am calling for is a society where such self-deceptive fictions do not rule in law and in which–at least in crafting the institutions that shape our common life together–we admit that we are all children and that in many ways we don’t control the world.
This, it seems to me, is a good way to proceed in a liberal society, by which I mean one based on a recognition of the equal dignity of each individual, and the vulnerabilities inherent in a common humanity. If we cannot fully achieve such a society, we can at least look to it as a paradigm, and make sure that our laws are the laws of that society and no other.
(http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i7697.html)
A Horse Is a Horse of Course of Course
(In response to an antique advertisement of a cowboy and his horse.)
“He is a handsome man.
The man and the handsome horse are making love.
A horse! My my my.
No…they aren’t making love, they are too much in the open.
He is serenading the horse, singing a cowboy song.
(Sing) “Get along, get along, get along…”
They live in the west country.
They keep moving.   The cowboy is a married man, but he’s very available.
He is attracted to beautiful women like us.
He is whatever age we want him to be.
He’s probably around 28.
The horse thinks he’s a good guitar player.
He’s not riding the horse right now, but he does sometimes.
The horse’s name is Godfrey, woops, Godfreya.
The man’s name is Thomas Rex.
They go by Tom and God.
Tom and God are inseparable. They are buddies. They even sleep together,
in the barn  of course–it’s much roomier.
The cowboy is also singing “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do…”
God is a talking horse.
He’s been trained.”
(http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_drama_review/v045/45.3basting.html)
