This canvas has been around for a couple decades. There are at least two paintings done by my eldest daughter below the surface, and several of mine. It's oils on stretched canvas, 50.5 x 76 cm.
Zugszwang? Ever get the feeling that you just can't do anything, that you can't make a move without falling into disaster, that everything you do is wrong? Ever get the feeling you don't want to move, that you just want to stay put (not that staying put is necessarily a great thing either)?
Well, don't despair! If the Germans have a word for it, it's gotta be manageable. Don't it?
(PS: Alternative title: Fried Liver Attack!)
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The purpose of this update is to change the name of this painting from "No mate, it's just zugszwang" to "apotheosis".
The German word refers to a chess-game position where every move a player can make leads to disaster.The painting's old name translates into: "I'm not dead yet -- haven't been checkmated -- but every move I can make in the game of life I foresee leading to disaster." The name came to me at a time when I felt trapped, contracted, paralysed, beset on all sides by forces and energies that would harm me.
The new name is "Apotheosis". It depicts a recent time in my life briefly and obliquely referred to in "Yes, I'm talking to you!" and described more fully in "no white sheets a-floating".
During that time I was having regular conversations with what I believed to be a non-human being. By now, that belief has retreated to a grudging and resentful "I don't know what happened. The true nature of it. But something happened. Over a period of some weeks. Something hyper-extraordinary."
So why change the name now, today? Well, last night I was parked in front of the idiot-box, and I happened to glance over at the painting...
NIGHTMERRIES: THE LIGHTER SIDE OF DARKNESS This so-called "book" will chew you up, spit you out, and leave you twitching and frothing on the carpet. More than 60 dark and feculent fictions (read ‘em and weep) copiously illustrated by over 20 grotesque images you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.
AWAREWOLF & OTHER CRHYMES AGAINST HUMANITY (Vot could be Verse?) We all hate poetry, right? But we might make an exception for this sick and twisted stuff. This devil's banquet of adults-only offal features more than 50 satanic sonnets, vitriolic verses and odious odes.
MANIC MEMES & OTHER MINDSPACE INVADERS A disturbing repository of quotably quirky quotes, sayings, proverbs, maxims, ponderances, adages and aphorisms. This menagerie holds no fewer than 184 memes from eight meme-species perfectly adapted to their respective environments.
MASTRESS & OTHER TWISTED TAILS, ILLUSTRATED: an unholy corpus of oddities, strangelings, bizarritudes and peculiaritisms
FIENDS & FREAKS Adults-only Tales of Serpents, Dragons, Devils, Lobsters, Anguished Spirits, Gods, Anti-gods and Other Horse-thieves You Wouldn't Want to Meet in a Dark Kosmos: 4th Edition
HAGS TO HAGGIS Whiskey-soaked Tails of War-nags, Witches, Manticores and Escapegoats, Debottlenecking and Desilofication, Illustrated
Fabulous piece of work. Great title, zugzwang!
Thanks Antares. I have a bit of a love/hate issue with the
German language: On the one hand, to me it sounds clumsy, guttural and coarse. On the other hand, it's got some really great words, like "zugszwang" and "weltanschauung" and "schadenfreude"! Regards, MM
I get Zuswanged far too often when trying to accomplish anything of worth.
Hi Lily, yes I know what you mean -- often feel the same way. But then I remind myself that a lot depends on ones definition of "worth" and "accomplish" (not to mention "often" and "trying") ((Hell, even "anything" and "I" are open to interpretation!))
Thanks for stopping by, Cheers, MM
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