A moving prism

The dragon devouring the companions of Cadmus by Hendrick Goltzius » These dead are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses—and in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? "We"—this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through—don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and  how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right. — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Memory - Rene Magritte (1948) » The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence. A coquettish, even cheerful nihilism. One recognizes the imperative of silence, but goes on speaking anyway. Discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that. Beckett has announced the wish that art would renounce all further projects for disturbing matters on "the plane of the feasible," that art would retire, "weary of  puny exploits. weary of pretending to be able,of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going further along a dreary road." The alternative is an art consisting of "the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with theobligation to express." From where does this obligation derive? The very aesthetics of the death wish seems to make of that wish something incorrigibly lively. - The Aesthetics of Si...