Pablo Picasso
La Vita

Blue. The clear, bright, summery, and luminous sky. The warm, frothy, welcoming sea, lavender, and brine of being. Freshness of the soul and lightheartedness of the transcendental infinite. Unbreakable mirror.

Blue. The cold ice of death and existential precariousness. The rigid embrace of Thanatos. Limbs that break apart, deform, a terrible torment, awaiting a final, incorruptible, and unalterable judgment.

Why, Man, do you grant yourself the luxury of a luminous rainbow? Why give your body the pleasure of a changing pinwheel? Why enrich your muscles, your skin, your shaky worldly and material kingdom with the chromatic heterogeneous?

Have you earned it? Perhaps. Or maybe not.

Look at yourself. You are gaunt and pale. Anorexic and deformed. Degraded and corrupt. Horrific and horrifying. In the face of the immense, you represent the most fragile molecule, the most elusive atom. In front of beasts, birds, and insects, you fill with pride and presumption, only for that pseudo-rationality enclosed in soft and slimy brain matter. It's a pity that even you, creator and mentor of great works, demiurge of arts and sciences, aspiring desecrator of space/time, are unable to quell the instinctual side of your subconscious. The King of beasts. The Sovereign of moral and material fluidity.

Turn around. Your wife is naked as a worm, just like you; she is crying, desperate, clinging to your trunk like a leech, seeking consolation: the fruit of her instinctual faults has been taken from her by the Authority you ignored. You have mystified the Law. Wretched progeny. The fault of a fault. The punishment of the punishment. Infinite deadly chain. Indivisible. It will be your travel companion towards the last Tribunal. During the final verdict. Condemnation or absolution. No extenuating circumstances.

Observe. The walls of your cave, your foul den, teem with raw, bland, harsh images. It seems like a joke, but it isn't. Your pain is immediately transferred to the rough wall. Little men weeping, kneeling, embraced, compassion that serves no purpose, except to downsize your arrogance and your laughable obstinacy. You have returned to mental Prehistory: no longer graffiti depicting your hunting trips for bison and mammoth, but yourself. After all, even you are easy prey. You often fall into the simplest trap set before your shadow.

Ice, frost. The fire of eternal security has been extinguished. That violent infernal red that warmed your belly and brain is no more. It is the new Ice Age. It will cover tissues and memories, organs and feelings. It will harm, wound, kill. It will be crafty and violent, grim and damned.

But you, Man, must warm yourself. Yes. Even without the flames of pyres. Even without the fire of oracles. Of embers and the hearth.

You must succeed.

Survive.

Pablo Picasso, La Vie (1903). Oil on canvas. Cleveland Museum of Art, United States.