Hot reefs. From eucalypti flow
tropical palm emanations;
all that still holds and stands
also longs for destruction,
down to the limbless,
down to the void,
deep into the lap of creation,
into dawning seas.
(Gottfried Benn, 1922)

“Colour is the key, the eye is the hammer, and the soul the piano with many strings.”
(Wassily Kandinsky, 1911)

“They are savages at the same rate that we say fruit are wild, which nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary progress; whereas in truth, we ought rather to call those wild, whose natures we have changed by our artifice, and diverted from the common order.”
(Michel de Montaigne, Of Cannibals, 1580)

“In the animistic stage, man ascribes omnipotence to himself; in the religious stage, he cedes it to the gods.”
(Sigmund Freud,
Totem and Taboo, 1912/13)

“To the left there suddenly made itself known a previously unnoticed array of flowers like, as it were, a mood of mysterious and mingled tones of green; these passed first into the dazzling, then the muted, then into violet and finally blackish red, and in the end one saw only the irregular tracing of a stick of charcoal as if drawn over grainy paper.”
(Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 1955) )

“Where was our place in the world? To whom did we owe loyalty: to our European fathers or to our Indian mothers? To whom should we now address our prayers? To the new or to the old gods? Which language would we speak? The language of the conquistadores or the language of the conquered? The Baroque of the New World asked all these questions.”
Carlos Fuentes, The buried mirror, 1992