Banksy

Prometheus Unbound, Percy Shelley, 1820

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

In each human heart terror survives
The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.

The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats, 1920

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a amaze, so that you shall not lose your way. Fore existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

The arc of circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether…Moons, Coins, Men.

Prometheus

Prometheus felt sorry for his creations (humans), and watched as they shivered in the cold and winter's nights. He decided to give his most loved creation a great gift that was a "good servant and bad master". He took fire from the hearth of the gods by stealth and brought it to men.

Hephaestus took gold and dross, wax and flint, pure snow and mud of the highways, honey and gall; he took the bloom of the rose and the toad's venom, the voice of laughing water and the peacocks squall; he took the sea's beauty and its treachery, the dog's fidelity and the wind's inconstancy, and the mother bird's heart of love and the cruelty of the tiger. All these, and other contraries past number, he blended cunningly into one substance and this he molded into the shape that Zeus had described to him. She was as beautiful as a goddess and Zeus named her Pandora which meant "all gifted".

Zeus sent her to wed Prometheus' brother, Epimetheus, and although Prometheus had warned his brother never to accept gifts from the Olympians, Epimetheus was love-stricken, and he and Pandora wed. The Gods adorned the couple with many wedding gifts, and Zeus presented them with a beautifully wrought box. When Pandora opened the box, all suffering and despair was unleashed upon mankind. Zeus had had his revenge.

As the introducer of fire and inventor of crafts, Prometheus was seen as the patron of human civilization.

Astronomy

Venus - Second brightest in evening sky, often called the Morningstar.

Irony

Yesterday, Jay Fullmer, 38, became the first American to get to grips with the concept of irony.

"It was weird," Fullmer says. "I was in London and, like, talking to this guy and it was raining and he pulled a face and said "Great weather, eh?" and I thought "Wait a minute, no way is it great weather!"

Fullmer then realised that the other man's mistake was, in fact, deliberate. Fullmer, who is married with two children, aged eight and three, plans to use irony himself in the future.

"I'm using it all the time," he says. "Last weekend I was grilling steaks. I burned them to a crisp and said "Hey, great weather!"

Karl Marx

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

Inuit Poem

"I think over again my small adventures.
My fears.
Those small ones that seemed so big.
For all the vital things I had to get and to reach.
And yet there is only one great thing, the only thing.
To live to see the great day that dawns
And the light that fills the world."

Behavior

The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior.

Edward Steichen, The Flatiron Building 1905