Motif Of Blood Quotes

Other books depended less on personal contacts than on certain abiding concerns. Early in his career, Dreiser had become interested in a crime that he saw as a dark version of the American success motif: the murder of a woman who stood in the way of her lover’s dreams of social and material advancement through a more advantageous marriage. For An American Tragedy (1925) he investigated numerous case histories, many of them sensational murders involving well-known figures such as Roland Molineux and Harry Thaw. He finally settled on the 1906 Chester Gillette trial for the murder of Grace Brown that occurred in the lake district of upstate New York. The novel benefited from the popular interest in criminal biography, a form to which Dreiser’s masterpiece gave new life as the progenitor of documentary novels of crime such as Richard Wright’s Native Son, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser

Sometimes the Church patently tried to profit from such incidents: the Benedictine monks of Norwich Cathedral in England, encouraged by their bishop, were pioneers in the blood-libel business when in the 1140s they tried to foster in their own church a cult of an alleged young victim of the Jews called William. Unfortunately for the monks, the good folk of Norwich loathed their cathedral more than they did the Jews, and the pilgrimage to little St William never amounted to much. Other cults were more successful (see chapter 2, p. 59), and the blood-libel has remained a recurring motif in the worst atrocities against the Jews.

Persecution and martyrdom were taken for granted by the Christians as normal conditions of the Church's life. They had been foretold in the gospels and had found their supreme archetype in the example of Christ himself. The martyr was following in his master's steps, and his death expressed that identity between the Head and the Members which was the key principle of the Pauline theory of the Church. Consequently it is not surprising that the idea of martyrdom is the dominant motif of early Christian literature and thought throughout the whole of this period from the New Testament to Eusebius. In the first age of the Church the ideal of sanctity was embodied in the figure of the martyr - the man who 'bears witness' with his blood to the Christian faith.

Lorel once told me that fate is a poet, organizing beauty out of chaos. I believed that for a long time—that life happens to a person, buoying them along on its tide whichever way it pleases, instead of bending and shaping itself around my will. And even now I’m not sure that I can entirely discard the idea, because God knows my life has spiraled into gothic prose, and even in the depths of my insanity I could not have thought up the repeating rhythms of horrible motif. Blood as oil, oil as sacred chrism, the suffocating paradox of its sacred and sensual nature, and can oil really run in a person’s blood? Because when I think of one, I think of the other—they are inseparable in my mind. When I think of the times I dipped my fingers in green-gold oil, memory calls forth the image of blood on a warehouse floor, and blood mixed with oil in the creases of my hands.

Zoom into a tree branch, and you’ll find the same fork-shaped pattern that you see in its trunk, repeated in ever-smaller increments. Mandelbrot dubbed these patterns “fractals,” and they can be found in many natural objects and phenomena including coastlines, river networks, snowflakes, blood vessels, skylines, and even our heart rates. This type of pattern is also known as expanding symmetry, because the central motif grows as it is repeated. Research suggests that we have a strong preference for fractals with a medium degree of complexity—the kind that happens to be most common in nature. Looking at these fractals stimulates alpha waves in the frontal cortex, a state known to correlate with wakeful relaxation, which may be another reason that we find spending time outdoors so joyful and restorative.