Hypnotic Dreams
Between brief interludes and hypnotic sensations,
Your name orbits around all temptations...
Lost between the verbs and all translations,
Your fingertips orchestrate my own salvations...
Like a karmic explosion imbued with incantations,
You came to show me the quantum fascinations...
...
Human personalities were thought to consist of 4 humors (black and yellow bile, phlegm, and blood), and each person was dominated by 1 of them (black bile caused melancholy, which was associated with creative genius and insanity). According to the "De Occulta Philosophia" of Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, imagination was the 1st (lowest) level of artistic creativity, below reason, and spirit, the highest. "1" was also a reference to nigredo (blackness, putrefaction, decomposition), the 1st stage of the alchemical process that led to the philosopher's stone. The winged figure of Melancholy holds a caliper and is surrounded by an hourglass, scales, nails, a sundial, pincers, a straightedge, a molder's form, a plane, a hammer, and a saw, tools associated with carpentry and with geometry, the "liberal art" that underlies artistry, which had been revolutionized by new understandings of perspective. (There 7 liberal arts: Grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music theory and astronomy.)
ReplyDeleteShe sits in front of a magic square, a grid filled with positive integers; their sums are the same in each row, column, and diagonal. Melancholy was under the influence of the planet Saturn, seen in the background. Traditional symbols of melancholy included bats, emaciated dogs, purses, and keys.