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L'agonie (de Sainte Thérèse), 1890s. Félicien Rops

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Fiona Finnegan

Crystal gazing, the burning house, 2023

Oil on linen on wood.

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the idea that dressed boring/plain means a person is boring is well... uh. ok. i'm going to be nice. some of us don't live in outfit world.

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Sacred odors then were notably complex. As in the graves of would-be saints, the smell of sanctity often mingled with the stench of decay and death. Ancient cities, Thurkill wrote, were characterized by “the stench of human excrement, refuse and disease, accompanied with soothing floral scents and perfumes.” Sacred smells like frankincense and myrrh were used over the centuries to demarcate sacred space—but also to disinfect and disguise putrid areas. […]

This gave holy smells a fundamentally paradoxical nature. In a world where breathing foul-smelling air was seen as the cause of many diseases, incense was seen as a barrier against illness, and, with its holy associations, against demonic possession. But equally, powerful scents could be used to disguise a deeper decay, or to tempt the pious with worldly delights and bodies. Even bad smells had an ambiguous quality. After all, the rotting stench of a starved ascetic’s mouth was simply more proof of his profound holiness.

It’s this ambiguity about smell, […] that gives scent its power as a theological tool. In addition to its flexible moral significance, the experience of an odor often reflects our understanding of divinity. Like God, smell can surround you from an indeterminate source, filling spaces with its invisible presence. But unlike sound, which might do the same, to experience a smell it must first be taken within, in an act–breathing–that is both life-giving and volitional.

—John Last, The Centuries-Long Quest for the Scent of God, Noema Magazine

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Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert in: Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (Dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1938). Source

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Crucifix-dagger, cca 1650, Spain

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commenting “trite” under someone’s photo of a flower

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Deianeira and the Dying Centaur Nessus, from James Baldwin's A Story of the Golden Age by Howard Pyle (1888)

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les fils de la femme - marcel mariën, 1984

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Talking Heads | ‘Girlfriend is Better’

Stop Making Sense (1984)

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Eleanor of Aquitaine and King Henry II tomb effigies, Fontevraud Abbey, Loire Valley, France

Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Peter O'Toole as Henry II on the set of The Lion in Winter

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series appreciation • 20 series: [4] orphan black

We do what we can, each of us, in our own way. And we do it for each other. Chipping at the devil till he’s done.

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By Roberto Ferri

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Anjanette Comer in The Loved One (1965) dir. Tony Richardson