resolutions.

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keep looking, little heart, for the warmth you know exists. pursue other angles, forget the angels, who most certainly will bore you, after a bit.

keep your heart alone. open your legs, feel yourself with yourself. foreign hands neglect glands, forget what you tell them you like.

ignore vacant promises. watch as the world outside doubles and halves, respectively. the action is no surrender, for remember, you are alone.

fill your heart with more words. not other women's words, only those whose point of origin is identical to your mouth, and keep your mouth clean.

do not forget that you are a creature, and your blood signifies hope beyond doubt. your formulas will fail, but your blood always repeats.

maybe he ain't lyin. maybe you will keep striving to repair damaged ideals, or maybe you won't. touch your own self with the love you think you have for him. you will find it greater.

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Working Thesis.

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for those of you who were asking about my thesis: this is the bare-bones precis.

"My final project pivots on the words “original” and “translation:” I am interested in translations of portraits that break stylistically and theologically from their archetype. The two archetypes and their translations I will be analyzing in this project are:

1.      Albrecht Durer’s 1500 Munich Self-Portrait, for which I have selected my object analysis 1. (translation of Christ Pantocrator)

2.      Francis Bacon’s 1953 portrait of Pope Innocent X, for which I have selected my object analysis 2. (translation of Diego Velazquez’s 1650 portrait of Innocent X)

I am interested in telling the story of these translations of religious art. I do not wish to merely compare the original to the translation, but I want to show how the original informs its translation and how the translation completes the original. My theoretical platform, therefore, approaches the correspondence as one that could operate within a number of historical trajectories. Specifically, I am interested in the overlap of two histories: a stylistic/artistic one and a theological one. I hope that in telling the story of these pieces of art, the reader also hears a religious story. I wish to communicate that visual literacy informs, supplements, and, at its greatest heights, is theological literacy.

I will mainly be using Benjamin to organize my paper. The two essays I have in mind are “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “The Task of the Translator.” I also anticipate drawing upon other aesthetic texts that envision art (or everything) historically – so Germanic aesthetics mostly. Lessing, Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno, etc. are possibilities.

Also, I am in the habit of titling my papers after I have finished them, so unfortunately I do not have a title yet." 

Velazquez/Bacon

Christ Pantocrator/Durer