Distorted Perceptions Run Through Greek Tragic Madness. When Heracles Kills His Own Children, He Sees

“Distorted perceptions run through Greek tragic madness. When Heracles kills his own children, he sees them as his enemy’s children. In the Bacchae, Agave sees her son as a lion and tears off his head. The motif was repeated in lost tragedies (we know their storylines from other sources). Killing your own children - while seeing them as something else - is one of the manifestations of tragic madness. In a society which believes only flickeringly, like fifth-century Athens, in any OK afterlife, your children are your future. Your hope. Your way of continuing. Killing them brings on you unbearable and terrifying pollution; it is also an image of total cancellation of self. Apart from Medea (a special case, and not said to be mad) heroes kill their children when they are mad, seeing them as something else - an animal, a vine-stock, an enemy’s child. The motif is an image of how madness itself cancels self. Distorted perception leads to the blotting out of self.”

— Padel, R. (1996) “Tragic Greek Madness: inner shadow versus seeing in the dark”, Free Associations 6 pp.403-427

THE FACE OF ANOTHER

Traditional October Still Life #3

original artworks by Lev Tchistovsky, Johann Amandus Winck

we ran through the bright tokyo lights, nothing to lose. summer of 2012, burnt in my mind

october moodboard V: présager (to predict, to foresee)

Lesbian moodboard

“Were my hands to seek you out?” “I’d be disrupted, like a surface of water.”

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