“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion" - Albert Camus
(Art by Dane Starbrook)

"I came upon a forest of decapitated trees, women carved out of bamboo, flesh slatted like that of slaves in joyless slavery, faces cut in two by the sculptor’s knife, showing two sides forever separate, eternally two-faced, and it was I who had to shift about to behold the entire woman. Truncated unsymmetrical figures, eleven sides, eleven angles, in veined and vulnerable woods, fragments of bodies, bodies armless and headless. The torso of a tube-rose, the knee of Achilles, tubercles and excrescences, the foot of mummy in rotted wood, the veined docile wood carved into human contortions. The forest must weep and bend like the shoulders of men, dead figures inside of live trees. A forest animated now with intellectual faces, intellectual contortions. Treesbecome man and woman, two-faced, nostalgic for the shivering of leaves. Trees reclining, woods shining, and the forest trembling with rebellion so bitter I heard its wailing within its deep forest consciousness. Wailing the loss of its leaves and the failure of transmutation."

-Anais Nin/House of Incest
Photo by Sally Mann

Europe Tour begins April 1st in Berlin, We're excited!!! Hope you can join us...

''No great thing is created suddenly'' -Epictetus

'' We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty , driven from end to end''.
-Blaise Pascal  ( photo by Zaida Ben-Yusuf )

''My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
'Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul''
-William Butler Yeats

''As i was walking among the fires of Hell,
delighted with the enjoyments of genius;
which to Angels look like torment and insanity,
I collected some of their Proverbs''.
-William Blake ( painting by Nicholas Kalmakoff, ''Astarte'' )

  ''In solitude, where we are least alone'' -Lord Byron 
  ( painting by Edward Steichen )

''There is not
A single soul among the trees
And I
Don't know where I've gone''. 
-Octavio Paz  ( illustration by Gustave Dore )

L.A. Show!!! Saturday April 23rd
at ''Three Clubs'' 1123 N.Vine St. L.A. CA 90038
BLACK MATH HORSEMAN / LANTVRN / NERO ORDER / TAIGA 
21+ Free

''Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
they sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhaustible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes''.
-Jorge Luis Borges, ''The History of the Night''
( painting by Peter Nicholai Arbo, ''Nott riding Hrimfaxi''

''Wolves have howled at the Moon for centuries, yet it is still there''. -Italian proverb
( painting by Caspar David Friedrich, ''Two men contemplating the Moon'')

 ''All is mystery; but he is a slave who will not struggle to penetrate the Dark veil.''
  -Benjamin Disreali  ( painting by John William Waterhouse )

''...we shall not ask for reason's payment, The why of heartbreaking strangeness in dreeping hedges.''
-Patrick Kavanagh  ( illustration by Harry Clarke )

 “The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our nothingness” 
-Andrea Malraux 
 ( illustration by Michael Maiers Atalanta Fugiens )

 ''March days return with their covert light,
and huge fish swim through the sky,
vague earthly vapours progress in secret,
things slip to silence one by one.
Through fortuity, at this crisis of errant skies,
you reunite the lives of the sea to that of fire,
grey lurchings of the ship of winter
to the form that love carved in the guitar.
O love, O rose soaked by mermaids and spume,
dancing flame that climbs the invisible stairway,
to waken the blood in insomnia’s labyrinth,
so that the waves can complete themselves in the sky,
the sea forget its cargoes and rages,
and the world fall into darkness’s nets.''
-Pablo Neruda, ''March days return with their covert light''
 ( painting by Jennifer Day )

 ''Whoever starts out toward the unknown must consent to venture alone''. -Andre Gide

 ''Above the cloud with its shadow is the star with its light. Above all things reverence thyself.”   -Pythagoras (Photo By Edward Steichen)

''In all things it is better to hope than to despair''
-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
    ( painting by William Blake )

 Recording with our good friend Scott Reeder this Weekend at The Sanctuary. We're VERY happy about it!

''Tonight the moon, by languorous memories obsessed,
Lies pensive and awake: a sleepless beauty amid
The tossed and multitudinous cushions of her bed,
Caressing with an abstracted hand the curve of her breast.


Surrendered to her deep sadness as to a lover, for hours
She lolls in the bright luxurious disarray of the sky —
Haggard, entranced — and watches the small clouds float by
Uncurling indolently in the blue air like flowers.


When now and then upon this planet she lets fall,
Out of her idleness and sorrow, a secret tear,
Some poet — an enemy of slumber, musing apart —


Catches in his cupped hands the unearthly tribute, all
Fiery and iridescent like an opal's sphere,
And hides it from the sun for ever in his heart.''
-Charles Baudelaire, ''The sadness of the Moon''
( illustration by Gustave Dore )

''Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world'' -Mary Shelley
  ( illustration by Gustave Dore ) 

''At the twilight, a moon appeared in the sky;
Then it landed on earth to look at me.
Like a hawk stealing a bird at the time of prey;
That moon stole me and rushed back into the sky.
I looked at myself, I did not see me anymore;
For in that moon, my body turned as fine as soul.
The nine spheres disappeared in that moon;
The ship of my existence drowned in that sea.''-Jalal Al-Din Rumi

( painting by Jan Toorop  -''O grave, where is thy victory?'' )

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
-Vladimir Nabokov

( illustration by Harry Clarke )