Tavik Simon, Vilma reading on a Sofa, 1912
It is really curious how men, whom I otherwise look upon as honest, and who in other respects are not my enemies, lie monstrously, and are hardly conscious of it themselves, when they really get into a passion. Passion has an extraordinary power. How foolish, then, is the modern seeking after system upon system, as though help was to be found there; no, passion must be purified.
Soren Kierkegaard’s Journal, 1846
“It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if se adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it.
D.H. Lawrence – Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“A Sad thought dancing” that migrated from the brothels of Buenos Aires to the European dance halls.
Several great writers have written tango songs, but the greatest and most profound lyricist is Enrique Santos Discepolo.
The man who defined the tango as “a sad thought dancing” , “a mixture of anger, pain, faith, and absence” sings of love, death and paradise lost in radically pessimistic poems that express the despair of the thirties, that “infamous decade” where hopes of democracy gave way to coups l’etat and electoral fraud.
Faced with stattered dreams, “All is a lie, nothing is love/the world buggers you about as it turns.” Love is always at punishment: “Why was I thought to love/If to love is to cast all your dreams into the sea”.
Painting
Kees Van Dongen [1877 – 1968]
Tango or Tango of the Archangel
1922 – 1935
