Ｇreen by Yamata Katsuaki

Tree roots following the pattern of concrete footpaths

kdynesis. oil painting

kdynesis. oil painting

"A small detail in The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch, 1500-1505."

Annie Oakley’s heart target (One of Oakley’s most popular stunts was shooting through the center of a small, inch-wide heart on a card from around 40 feet away.)

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz, Pilgrimage (Random House, 2011)

Living flesh in Brite's work is constantly being bound, tied, held, or restrained. Dead flesh, on the other hand, is free; it "melts," "gives birth," and "tells stories." Brite moves from the image of the "binding straps" to the image of a "living blanket"--from an image of hardness, confinement, and impenetrability to an image of warmth and nurture. Brite deconstructs the life/death binary by drawing dead flesh as more lively than living flesh. The novel's characters don't begin to really live until after they're dead -- until the text has made worm's meat of them -- until, like Hamlet, their "too too sullied flesh [melts], thaws, and resolve [s] itself into a dew" (I.ii. 129-30). Brite seems to offer a reading of Hamlet's words in the passage from Exquisite Corpse I'm analyzing here-- seems keenly aware of the not just sad but glorious implications of Hamlet's word "melt." To melt is to become heterogeneous, to be part and parcel with, to absorb and be absorbed. Tran's flesh "melts" and pours into Jay's "ribcage." They give birth through assimilation, moving from two to one, from distinct persons confined inside bodies to a queerly ecstatic heap of worm-infestation. The worms pick their bones "clean," suggesting there is mutual redemption for them in this moment. There is no longer a protagonist and antagonist, a sadist and masochist, a killer and victim; there is only flesh, one mound of rotting, satiated flesh.

The Loveliness of Decay: Rotting Flesh, Literary Matter, and Dead Media., Jesse Stommel

Vincent van Gogh - The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Winter (1884)

you ever heard a lightning fucking scream?

youre about to

kea feeding on a live sheep, photo by rob morris. article with more detail about this phenomenon.

Wax anatomical model, La Specola, Florence

Jonathan Torres, Blow Head 2022, Oil on linen, 16 x 20 in