A quote by Edvard Munch

"We should no longer paint interiors with people reading, and women knitting. We should paint real people, who breathe, feel, suffer and love."

Edvard Munch on painting and the nature of Expressionism, and why despite training with a Naturalist painter he rejected the academic tradition and instead decided to express the internal emotion subjective view of the painter in his work.

On the difference between eternal sleep and death

"... by a sleep to say we end

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished - to die: to sleep - " 

From Hamlet's soliloquy, "To be or not to be", Act 3, Scene 1, Hamlet(Second Quarto)

I watched "Star Trek; Into Darkness" the other day, and one of the concepts intrigued me. Bear with me if you haven't seen it; this post may make a little more sense if you have, but not much.
Khan and his crewmates are sent to sleep in their little incubators at the end of the movie; near the end, when someone asks Spock if he killed Khan's crew (assuming he'd sent the missiles to Khan's ship with the crew in them) he tells them something like "I would never do something so heartless" and this is folowed by a shot of the crewmates, still in cryo-sleep.

I just thought it was interesting that the idea of keeping someone in an eternal sleep/coma is more humane, more comforting than the idea of putting someone to death. Spock didn't blow up the crew but would it really have made a difference if he had? I suppose the difference is that there is a potential for the crew to wake up; they are not dead, they are still alive. 

But the end of the movie makes it pretty clear that noone has any intention of ever waking any of Khan's crew up. They are stored away.

So why is there such a big moral difference between killing them and keeping them in an eternal coma? There is some degree of debate about what being in a catatonic state means in terms of whether the person is still 'awake' in their own heads, able to think and imagine and remember but not perceive the outside world. If this is the assumption, then I suppose there is a kindness in keeping the crew members in their 'eternal sleep'. 

But being in a coma isn't the same as being asleep, and therefore isn't there the implication that they are not 'awake' at all but fully dead to the world/vegetative? And if this is the case, would keeping someone eternally in this state still be morally superior to killing them?

This is obviously a big argument re; euthanasia and comas and switching off machines. But there is a difference in that the crew in Star Trek are intentionally kept in this 'state' but can be awoken from it at any time. Despite the fact that this will probably never happen, does that mean it's still better than being dead? It's all about contingency; if you could choose to be kept eternally 'asleep' or just killed, you might choose to sleep as there would still be the slim possibility that you might one day be awoken and organisms cling to life with every chance they get.
(there's a parallel with cryonics here, in which people are frozen at vast costs in the hope that future technology will be able to 'resurrect' them, although the variables in that situation are different, relying on future advancements rather than random chance/human curiosity or need)

Is eternal sleep morally superior to death? If you could choose between them, between eternal sleep and death, which would you choose? It shouldn't really matter as they are essentially the same thing, although there is a certain promise to the idea of 'sleep', the lack of finality and the potential(however improbable) for a return to awakeness that might lead people to choose eternal sleep. 

Still though, if beings are kept in comas rather than being killed, this isn't morally superior in any real way unless there is the intention of waking them up in the future. Otherwise they are dead to the world either way.

A quote by Saint Bernardino of Siena, 15th cent.

"Eternity appears in time, immensity in measurement, the Creator in the creature...the unfigurable in the figure, the unnarratable in discourse, the inexplicable in speech, the uncircumscribable in the place, the invisible in vision."

Saint Bernardino of Siena, quoted in Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration by Georges Didi-Huberman.

This discusses the nature of the paradox of the Incarnation, and the visibility of the 'Divine'. It also shows the thought process painters have/had to go through in considering how to represent holy figures in paintings, conveying the divine and unknowable whilst making it tangible and accessible to worshippers and church-goers.
Renaissance artists (and all artists conveying holy stories from the Bible, Apocrypha or otherwise) conveyed the divine message in different ways; Fra Angelico steps on the thin line between Renaissance and International Gothic, using mathematical perspective, a single light source, cast shadows and pairing this with refinement, detail, decoration. However all of this is only ever used to further the narrative, to form a "spiritual exercise", an "aid to meditation". It's fascinating how his faith is clearly shown through the painting, his desire to convey spiritual calmness and holiness.

Revising Art History can be interesting, or rather can lead to interesting distractions.

A quote from "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats

"With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim"

Keats wishing to transcend the physical, mortal world and "fade away". 
I love the repetition of the plosive 'b' sounds in "beaded bubbles"; it reminds me vaguely of Seamus Heaney's poetry (particularly 'Death of a Naturalist' and 'Blackberry Picking',) although of course creating a rather different effect here of prettiness and playfulness. 
The word "winking" too is playful, suggesting the wine is tempting and inviting the drinker. 
However it's the last two lines which are the most powerful, with the view of death as a calm, peaceful escape from the mortal world. The word "fade" especially expresses this view of death as painless and almost desirable. 

A quote from "The Bloody Chamber" by Angela Carter

"His wedding gift, clasped around my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat."

From 'The Bloody Chamber' by Angela Carter.

Carter's description of the necklace is very powerful, conveying many of the central themes of 'The Bloody Chamber'.

She describes the necklace later as "bright as arterial blood", and a "bloody bandage of rubies". 

I suggest you read the short story to get a sense of the necklace in context, as the husband's gift to the girl as well as a representation of the husband's lavish (but dangerous and visceral) world. It works so powerfully to convey a sense of horror mingled with luxury and excess. I think the last four words in particular with the huge contrast between the words "extraordinarily precious" and the very visceral image of the "slit throat" emphasise this.

Carter also uses the necklace to convey the girl's potentiality for corruption. Initially, it seems to throw into sharper relief her innocence and youth but later it symbolises both the husband's world and her potential for becoming part of that world. 

Anyways, I am studying Bloody Chamber for my English Literature coursework at the moment and I think this just shows Carter's incredible ability to create symbols with about a thousand meanings. 

On the 'sublime', or 19th century concepts of pain and pleasure

(Since I no longer have much time to collect and collate stuff into blog posts, this is a sort of fragmentary post.)

"Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer, are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures...which the liveliest imagination...could enjoy."

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757

Let's talk about this idea briefly. This is the idea that the concept of pain is stronger than the concept of pleasure and has a stronger effect on our emotions and imagination. Here we assume the author discusses emotional pain and not physical pain, although he talks about 'danger' quite freely in the same context. Pain may be much more familiar to us because we get hurt all the time; it is a physical response linked very closely to an emotional feeling of 'torment'. So when we describe strong emotions of pain or heartbreak, we say 'it hurts' as in, the emotional pain is so strong it feels physical. Happiness is, like pain, intangible. We experience physical pleasure but happiness is very much an emotional response rather than a physical one.
I need to do more research into this 19th century viewpoint about emotion and torment. Reacting instinctively to it, though, I'd say as a person brought up in the 21st century I'm inclined to disagree with it. We can feel happiness just as acutely as pain, and sometimes it feels like happiness is the more strong because a rush of true happiness is rarer than a stab of pain.

The article(note the date; this is an 18th century perception of the Romantic idea of the 'sublime)  also mentions that fear is most acute when the thing is obscure:

To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary.

 This is perhaps true when we think about how we are more frightened in the dark; night seems to be a darker and more mysterious, perhaps even more frightening time. If you're thinking this is ridiculous in our modern age, consider how much scarier it is travelling home alone in the dark than in the daytime. This certainly also applies when we consider famous and very effective 20th century black-and-white horror movies where the villian appears only as a shadow over the wall or going up the stairs. We never see the monster and therefore are more afraid for it, perhaps because our own imagination creates something much more frightening than anything that could be onscreen(it is true that we know best what we're scared of, so maybe this is why the fear of the unseen works so well; we fill in the space with our worst fears, and when the thing becomes known or visible or tangible we are no longer so afraid).

The article is very interesting; there's also views on the concept of death which I want to discuss at a later date.

On the meaning of control in Stalinist Russia

Here is an essay I wrote a year ago on the nature of control and power in Stalinist Russia. I booked at George Orwell's famous novel 1984 as a basis for establishing the meaning of control in the political climate.

The essay is a few thousand words long, so I will probably shorten it in the near future to provide a more concise, blog-friendly version of my argument. I also haven't looked at it in a year, so please be forgiving; as a 16 year old this was my first lengthy essay and the first essay whereby I conducted independent research and wrote the whole thing on my own. Since I wrote it in the space of a week and a half my research wasn't extensive, so some of the opinions are simplified.

The meaning and level of control in Stalinist Russia

To look into control in Stalinist Russia, the meaning of total and complete control must first be established. The political novel 1984 by George Orwell depicts a society in which controlling the ideas and thoughts of the people is more important than a physical repression of the opposition. Following this theory, if the thoughts of an entire population are controlled completely, then absolute control exists. If we take this as the definition of ultimate authority then it cannot exist, even in a repressive regime such as that of Stalin. However 1984 very effectively portrays a realistic society in which the people accept everything without doubt or question. 1984 suggests that it is more important for the ideas of a regime to be maintained than a single individual’s power. Therefore the question the political novel raises is about the possibility of complete control over a population, not in the hands of an individual but an ideology, as Party member O’Brien reveals whilst torturing Winston: