Images du monde visionnaire was comissioned in 1963 by the film department of Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz (best known for synthesizing LSD in 1938) in order to demonstrate the hallucinogenic effects of mescaline and hashish.

Belgian poet Henri Michaux (well known mescaline user) and Eric Duvivier are aiming here to seize the way a sequence of images appears and disappears in front of a subject under the influence of psychotropic drugs.

via ombresblanches.wordpress.com

Erotica Romana, is a compilation of elegies by Johann W Van Goethe, which were composed in the 18th century. Most of the poems are written from the perspective of ruminative and passion male characters; often using references to nature, fictional and historical Roman mythological narratives. The elegies serve as insights into the overactive and cynical mindset of the narrator(s), with some of the best and most quotable lines being not solely erotic; but sometimes humorous or overtly romanticised. ER exists as an interesting series of journeys and takes on the psyche concerning romance and embrace; relationships and sex.

Elegy VII:

Happily now on classical soil I feel inspiration

Voices from present and past speak here evocatively.

Heeding ancient advice, I leaf through the works of the ancients

With an assidious hand. Daily the pleasure is renewed

Throughout the night in a different way, Im kept busy by Cupid

If erudition is halved, rapture is doubled that way

Do then I not become wise when I trace with my eye, her sweet bosoms form and the line of her hips stroke with my hand?

I acquire as I reflect and compare my first understanding of marble

See with an eye that feels, feel with a hand that sees

While my beloved, I grant it, deprives me of daylight 

She in the nighttime hours gives me compensation in full

And we do more than just kiss, we prosecute reasoned discussions (Should she succumb to sleep, that gives me time for my thoughts)

In her embrace– it’s by no means unusual– Ive composed poems

And the Hexameters beat gently tapped out on her back

Fingertips counting in time with the sweet rhythmic breath of her slumber

Air from deep in her breast Penetrates mine, and there burns.

Cupid, while stirring the flame in our lamp No doubt thinks of those days when

 For the triumvirs he similar service performed.

 

Painting: Henri Gervex- ‘Rolla’

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly–. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

 

“Yet did I love thee to the last

As fervently as thou,

Who didst not change through all the past,

And canst not alter now.

The love where Death has set his seal,

Nor age can chill,

nor rival steal,

Nor falsehood disavow:

And, what were worse, thou canst not see

Or wrong, or change, or fault in me.”

 

Excerpt from “And thou art dead, as young and fair”- Byron

The Pheonix and the Turtle
by Shakespeare

So they loved as love in twain,
Had the essence but in one
Two distincts, but division none:
Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote yet not asunder
Distance and no space was seen
Twixt this turtle and his queen
But in them it were a wonder

So between them love did shine
That the turtle saw his sight
Flowing in the phoenix
Either was the other’s mine

Property was thus appalled
That the self was not the same
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was called

Reason in itself confounded
Saw division grow together
To themselves yet either neither
Simple were so well confounded

That it cried, How true a twain
Seemeth make this concordance one!
Love hath reason, reason none
If what parts can so remain.