Sleep Has No Direction

Laibach

In England coroners’ rolls showed manslaughter far ahead of accident as cause of death, and more often than not the offender escaped punishment by obtaining benefit of clergy through bribes or the right connections. If life was filled with bodily harm, literature reflected it. One of La Tour Landry’s cautionary tales for his daughters tells of a lady who ran off with a monk and, upon being found in bed with him by her brothers, they “took a knife and cut away the monk’s stones and threw them in the lady’s face and made her eat them and afterwards tied both monk and lady in a sack with heavy rocks and cast them into a river and drowned them.” Another tale is of a husband who fetched his wife back from her parents’ house, where she had fled after a marital quarrel. While lodged overnight in a town on the way home, the lady was attacked by a “great number of young people wild and infect with lechery” who “ravished her villainously,” causing her to die of shame and sorrow. The husband cut her body into twelve pieces, each of which he sent with a letter to certain of her friends that they might be made ashamed of her running away from her husband and also be moved to take vengeance on her ravishers. The friends at once assembled with all their retainers and descended upon the town where the rape had occurred and slew all its inhabitants.

Violence was official as well as individual. Torture was authorized by the Church and regularly used to uncover heresy by the Inquisition. The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people’s bodies. In everyday life passersby saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls. In every church they saw pictures of saints undergoing varieties of atrocious martyrdom—by arrows, spears, fire, cut-off breasts—usually dripping blood. The Crucifixion with its nails, spears, thorns, whips, and more dripping blood was inescapable. Blood and cruelty were ubiquitous in Christian art, indeed essential to it, for Christ became Redeemer, and the saints sanctified, only through suffering violence at the hands of their fellow man.

In village games, players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal’s claws. Trumpets enhanced the excitement. Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs to the laughter of spectators as he ran squealing from the blows until beaten lifeless. Accustomed in their own lives to physical hardship and injury, medieval men and women were not necessarily repelled by the spectacle of pain, but rather enjoyed it. The citizens of Mons bought a condemned criminal from a neighboring town so that they should have the pleasure of seeing him quartered. It may be that the untender medieval infancy produced adults who valued others no more than they had been valued in their own formative years.

philipvthomsen

Rick Owens Spring / Summer 2027 “Stone”

Pestilence

scan from Metal Forces Magazine #35 - January 1989

I’m not acquainted with time. Will I see anyone wear it? I can’t touch it or anything. It’s fiction, it’s an ideal. Was there day? There was day. Was there night? There was night. I forgot nothing. Were those four corners there? They were. Are they there now? Tell me they aren’t, weird sister. Day is night sweat-soaped, that time of yours is just a rope. It spans and spans, but snip it and it remains on your hands. Sorry munchkin, I didn’t mean to call you names.

God may be around from An invitation for me to think

Richard Serra

Running Arcs (For John Cage), 1992

Weatherproof steel

Lee Bontecou

Untitled

1957