Tag: #thefallenpeople
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The Fallen People: Paracelsus
Paracelsus wrote in 1538, “Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist,” or all things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison. Born Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim in Einsiedeln, Switzerland,…
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The Fallen People: Interregnum
“And I have no fear of failure. Let failure annihilate me, I want the glory of falling. My crippled angel who contorts all elusive, my angel who fell from the heavens to the hell where he lives savoring evil.” — Clarice Lispector Sometimes I dream about a crippled Lucifer eating a ripe Normandy apple. When…
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The Fallen People: Galileo Galilei
“Eppur si muove.” (And yet it moves.) (Apocryphal: What Galileo apparently said after torturers forced him to recant his theory that the earth orbits the sun) It is perhaps not a coincidence that Galileo was named such, as the name derives from the late Latin Galilaeus (“of Galilee”), ultimately referring to the biblical region of…
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The Fallen People: Paul Verlaine
“A vast black sleep, falls over my life, sleep, all hope, sleep, all desire.” Born in Metz, to a petit-bourgeois family, Paul Verlaine first published his collection of poems in French titled Poèmes saturniens (saturnian poems) at the age of twenty-two that established his reputation as a formally experimental poet. This was followed by Fêtes…
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The Fallen People: Caravaggio
There’s a painting I often think about. It depicts young Bacchus (also known as Dionysus), the Greek god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, spectacle, and madness, in a reclining position wearing red green vine leaves and onyx grapes like a crown made of an ancient forest. His right hand is holding on…
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The Fallen People
I often think of Paul Celan while walking alongside the Seine that, in the summer, smells like fish, sweat, and rotting apples. One can look at the green of the river and imagine the countless bodies that have fallen in it or will fall in it in the future, or one can also try to…
