Love and Tensor Algebra

Love and Tensor Algebra

 Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product of four scalars it defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!

-- Stanislaw Lem

Poem was published in the "cyberiad", i.e. robot's fairy tales. Pretty amusing :)

Tortured Souls

Tortured Souls is a short novel written by Clive Barker. It's full of violence, macabre, disgust and insanity.
On the basis of the book, six action figures of the main characters has been created. Here - three of them : Lucidique, Scythe-Meister and Venal Anatomica.

Venal
Scythe-Meister
Lucidique

And now, the intro to the story:

He is a transformer of human flesh; a creator of monsters. if a Supplicant comes to him with sufficient need, sufficient hunger for change - knowing how painful that will be--he will accomodate them. They become objects of perverse beauty beneath his hand; their bodies remade in fashions that they have no power to dictate.
Over the years, over the centuries, indeed, this extraordinary creature has gone by many names . But we will call him by the first name he was ever given: Agonistes.

Where would a Supplicant find him?
Usually in what he calls 'the burning places': deserts, for instance. But sometimes he can be found in 'the burning places' in our own inflamed cities: places where despair has seared away away all belief in hope and love.

There he moves, silently, irreproachably, his presence barely more than a rumour. And there he waits for those who need him to come to find him.

When a Supplicant presents him or herself there is never coercion. There is never violence, at least until the Supplicant has signed over his or her flesh. Then yes, there may be some second thoughts, once the work begins. The truth is that on many occasions a Supplicant has begged to die rather than continue to be 'empowered' by Agonistes. It hurts too much, they tell him, as his scalpels and his torches work their terrible surgery upon him. But in all the time he has been wandering the world Agonistes has only ever granted the comfort of death to one Supplicant who changed his mind. That man was Judas Iscariot, who whined so much Agonistes hanged him from a tree. The rest he works on despite their complaints, sometimes for days and nights, coming back to his labours when a piece of flesh has healed and he can begin on the next part of the surgery.

There are some minor compensations for all this pain, which Agonistes will sometimes offer his supplicants as he works. He will sing to them, for instance, and it is said that he knows every lullaby written, in every language of the world; songs of the cradle and the breast, to soothe the men and women he is remaking in the image of their terror.

And, if for some reason he feels particularly sympathetic to the Supplicant, Agonistes may even give his victim a piece of his own flesh to eat: just a sliver, cut with one of his finest scalpels, from the tender flesh of his upper thigh, or inner lip. According to legend, there is no food more comforting, more exquisite, tan the flesh of Agonistes. The merest sliver of it upon the tongue of the supplicant will make him or her forget all the horrors they are enduring, and deliver them to a place of paradisical calm.
Then - once his client is soothed- Agonistes continues his work, cutting, infibulating, searing, cauterizing, stretching, twisting, reconfiguring.
Sometimes he will bring a mirror to show his Supplicants what he has so far created. Sometimes he will announce that he wants the results to be a surprise, and so the Supplicant is left to imagine, through the haze of pain, what Agonistes is turning them into.

And Agonisties himself:

Neil Gaiman - Coraline

Coraline is a novel for children (???????) and adults, by Neil Gailman.
Reminds of Alice in Wonderland.
Coraline, after moving with her parents to the new apartament discovers small hidden door, leading to another world.
Which is completely distorted, with wicked version of her parents, and her own twisted and caricatural version living there.

Neil Gaiman - Sandman

The Sandman is a series of comic books wrtitten by Neil Gailman. The main character is a Lord of Dreams - Morpheus, antropomorphic personification of dreams. At the beginning of the story, Morpheus is caught by some occult rituals and imprisoned for 70 years. When he eventually escapes, he founds his dream kingdom fell into riuns and abonimation.

Myth

Book covers about mythologies from all around the world. Legible type, same black background for every of them, but different picture from traditional art, and different pattern.

Alphonse Mucha

Woman modeling for Mucha

Do I really have to introduce him?
I don't remember when spotted him first, but from then on, I'm buying books and going to every exhibition I can find.

Cyberpunk

It started with Johnny Mnemonic, Monalisa Overdrive, Graf Zero, Neuromancer and other books by William Gibson.
Cyberpunk plots often center on a conflict amonghackers, artificial intelligence, and megacorporations. They tend to be set in a near-future Earth, rather than the far-future settings or galactic vistas found in novels such as Frank Herbert's Dune. The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to be marked by extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its creators . Much of the genre's atmosphere echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques fromdetective stories.

Magical realism -Jacek Yerka

Ecumenic Cat (my fav)


Between the hell and heaven


Midsummer night's dream


Tsunami


Sonet


Artist's kitchen



Book illustrated by Yerka to the short stories of Harlan Ellison


Finnish girls keep posting Finnish artist, now's my turn to show sth from my homeland.
Yerka's inspirations are Jan van Eyck, Bosh,Campin, and surrealist like Magritte.
The pastoral atmosphere of the Polish countryside provides a solid, mimetic foundation for much of Yerka's art.
However, it is his own uniquely evocative dreams that limn the complex, often arcane imagery of his work.
Yerka inspired the fantasy writer Harlon Ellison to write 30 short stories which along with his pictures constituted the publication entitled "Mind Fields".
The same American publisher "Morpheus International" released the album "The Fantastic Art of Jacek Yerka".
In 1995 the artist was awarded the prestigious World Fantasy Award for the best artist. He exhibits in Poland and abroad (in Germany, France and USA among others), being an esteemed representative of the science fiction stream of art.