Abstract Nº1

Sometimes I just don't have time to take some minutes to write the blog text, sometimes just don't have the time to work in one image resemblance through GA, and just keep one old abstract image "just in case to fill space" :-) Tough luck, this is one of those opportunities: "Abstract Nº1".
I prefer working with a symbol, with a meaning in the background, with some structure that can evocate a moment at least, so that the image can become a tiny talisman against everyday's burdens; without any of it, images are less artistic, so less evocative, so less valuable, as I see it... but, well, sometimes life gets in the middle, more knowing that this is made in my spare time. :-)
Pixelization comes from image size reduction.
Cheers.

Bull gore

One bravery symbol, bull-fighting, and giving it sort of cubist style, was too much to let it pass without a try, so I tried "Bull gore". You are in the matador's place, the bull won, the guy is in pain, poor matador. :-)



A reading from my teenage years: Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon, faced bull fighting as an art. From the perspective of esthetic pleasure provided by the crash of the bravery or nobility of the bull, and the killing skill of the matador.

About the matador's and the aficionado's life/death dicotomy, he wrote:

He must have a spiritual enjoyment of the moment of killing. Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you esthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race. [...] One of its greatest pleasures, aside from the purely aesthetic ones, such as wing shooting, and the ones of pride, such as difficult game stalking, [...] is the feeling of rebellion against death which comes from its administering. Once you accept the rule of death, thou shalt not kill is an easily and a naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death, he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes: that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing.

Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, Chap. 19.
The man had its issues...

Dawn on the road

One simple one, no complex textures simulated, "Dawn on the road".

According to that apparent collage style, many things may be found following this road. Lot of hopes seems to be attached to this new dawn.

Cheers.

Earth, Water, Fire and Air

Gnome, Nymph, Salamander and Sylph. This is "Earth, Water, Fire and Air".



While fighting with brushstrokes effects through pure genetic algorithms, I wanted to represent the four elements, how? was the first question, four side wheel? flowing matter?
Well, four elements represent the very basics of our personalities, as I see it, its combinations made us attractive or unappealing, with no rule, no reason interposed, I find the best in women, in many ways, but I've been influenced for long by a feminist mother, so I'd be biased. ;-)
The salamander, strong and surviving the unbearable environments, and the sylph, as lightly substantial and pure as air naturally is, are the ones in my mind since my childhood readings. Air, so good is breathing, I tracked sylphs during the worst years of my lung problems as a child.

In the image I liked the simple mix of brushstrokes and fluent computer-generated colours in four tones. So I let it live instead of erasing it, which was the first idea.

To each of the four roots, or elements, into which the Greeks divided all matter, a particular spirit was later made to correspond.
Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist and physician, gave them their names: the Gnomes of earth, the Nymphs of water, the Salamanders of fire, and the Sylphs, or Sylphides, of air. All of these words come from the Greek. The French philologist Littre traced the etymology of "sylph" to the Celtic languages, but it seems quite unlikely that Paracelsus, who gave us the name, knew anything about those tongues.
No one any longer believes in the Sylphs, but the word is used as a trivial compliment applied to a slender young woman. Sylphs occupy an intermediate place between super natural and natural beings; Romantic poets and the ballet have not neglected them.

J.L.Borges, The Book of the imaginary beings.

Flower on the sky rocks

I've been a little bit off the blog. Well.

What, something for women?
OK, let's start with the manly-boring part :-) in the last two weeks I was working in one genotype to achieve a combination of stone, little paint strokes and soft petals, the pain was, it took three hours to render, and reduced to 1280x1280 weights more than 3.5 Mb compressed in png, so was a hell of a work evolving this image, the recursion pattern is very noticeable, I couldn't work a more complex genetic algorithm without killing the hardware.

The idea was to do some tribute to the influence and power of women, from my perspective.
I thought in a flower, as women seem to be, over cold mountain rocks, as life and problems seems to be, some paint strokes over the rocks in not an easy natural colour (just to let clear men are there to ruin things many times) and some "moonlight" over the mountain, for solitude representation, if possible. Didn't wanted to explain it, just, well, I really forced the hardware this time! That included the brain. :-)

"Flower on the sky rocks", yeah, like women on this life.
Cheers.

Pyrausta

This symbol, image and post is dedicated, if you didn't got an e-mail telling you that you are the one over who's dedicated, then, you are not that person. :-)

I was a happy child (but you know childhood ends, just to give Marillion a good Album), a happy child with access to books, knowledge, encyclopedias (and computers), a lot of symbols to explore, and a way of replacing dreams of traveling with some (non physical) activity :-)
In one encyclopedia of mythology, (and in one beautiful, very recommended book by J.L.Borges -The Book of the Imaginary Beings, again, complete here-, and in the Natural History by Pliny the Elder, here) I've found my favourite when I was a child: the pyrausta (also called pyrallis, pyragones), latin word for πυραύστης in ancient greek, a truly real butterfly which lives in the fire and dies if it leaves it; passionate being, in truth, in beauty, in goodness; sort of the antipodal point of me?, much more decadent... not sure. I believe this one killed Monster Acheron, by the way. :-)
It is something like a fire sparkle, but for the ulterior unbelievers. ;-)

That element, also, which is so destructive to matter, produces certain animals; for in the copper-smelting furnaces of Cyprus, in the very midst of the fire, there is to be seen flying about a four-footed animal with wings, the size of a large fly: this creature is called the "pyrallis", and by some the "pyrausta". So long as it remains in the fire it will live, but if it comes out and flies a little distance from it, it will instantly die.

Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, Book XI, Chap. 42.

Monster aqueron

If you have children, or you like cross-reference readings, The Book of the Imaginary Beings by J. L. Borges is a must-have (that linked electronic version in english has extraordinary illustrations my worn-out original in spanish doesn't have). Was the book that pushed the pleasure of reading into me when was a child, all those references to ten thousand other authors and books is a universe to follow, one star to another; Borges always have that.

Now... is this giant monster dead? Someone knew? Only one person saw it... think I know that person.

Only one person, one time, ever saw the monster Acheron; this took place in the twelfth century in the Irish town of Cork.

The original version of the story, written in Gaelic, is now lost, but a Benedictine monk from Regensburg (Ratisbon) translated it into Latin, and from this translation the tale passed into a number of languages, among them Swedish and Spanish. Of the Latin version there are some fifty-odd manuscripts extant, agreeing in all the essentials.
Visfo Tundali (Tundal's Vision) is the story's name, and it has been considered one of the sources of Dante's poem. Let us begin with the word "Acheron." In the tenth book of the Odyssey it is one of the rivers of hell, flowing somewhere on the western borders of the inhabited world. Its name is reechoed in the Aeneid, in Lucan's Pharsatia, and in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Dante engraves it in a line: Su la trista riviera d'Acheronte ("On the sad shores of the Acheron") .
In one myth, Acheron is a Titan sutfering punishment; in another, dating earlier, he is placed close to the South Pole, below the constellations of the antipodes. The Etruscans had "books of fate" that taught divination and "books of Acheron" that taught the ways of the soul after bodily death. In time, Acheron came to stand for hell. Tundal was an Irish gentleman, well-mannered and brave, but of hardly irreproachable habits. He once fell ill while at the home of a lady friend, and for three days and nights was taken for dead, except for a bit of warmth in his heart. When he recovered his senses, he told that his guardian angel had shown him the lands beyond this world. Of the many wonders he saw, the one which interests us here is the monster Acheron. He is bigger than any mountain. His eyes flame and his mouth is so large that nine thousand persons could fit in it. Two damned men, like pillars or atlantes, prop it open; one stands on his feet, the other on his head. Three throats lead inside and belch undying fire. From deep in the beast's belly comes the continuous wailing of the countless lost souls who are being devoured. Devils tell Tundal that the monster is called Acheron. His guardian angel deserts him, and Tundal is swept inside with the others. There he finds himself in the midst of tears, darkness, gnashing teeth, fire, unbearable burning, icy cold, dogs, bears, lions, and snakes. In this legend, hell is a beast with other beasts inside it. In 1758, Emanuel Swedenborg wrote: "It has not been granted me to perceive Hell's general shape, but I have been told that in the same way that Heaven has a human shape, Hell has the shape of a devil."

J.L.Borges, The Book of the imaginary beings.

Amebas

Just to fill empty space. (?) I call it amebas but may be called abstract Nº 1 too... some little amebas might fill out this whole space...

Trimmed skies

One of my two jobs is as computer-science teacher, I choose that, in a poor zone at one high school here in town, very close to a garbage-dump. They burn the garbage regularly. With the smoke it goes away the health of the whole neighborhood, the elder, the boys, children. Past year healthy students of mine, are dead this year, some other didn't assist any more; we wait the phone to ring at any time... cancer, asthma, leucemia, murder, drugs.
I have to give the boys and girls rest in front of the monitors, their eyes are afflicted with the daily smoke, where pathological waste bags are burned too.
When I leave the high school, the sky looks dangerous, and cut out in pieces of different colours of smoke... dangerous.

The sky, generally is a symbol of future, as a community or group mostly, but personal too; we have those uses very often in tango poetry (the lyrics were written by poets, very commonly).

I prefer this translation to the image name in spanish: "Trimmed skies", by some slight double sense, like in the budget trims.

In the cave of the spider

Yet another debt to fractal artists, although is a GA image, this looks historically old ugly-fractalish in shape to my mind: "In the cave of the spider".

The concept of the sickness unto death must be understood, however, in a peculiar sense. Literally it means a sickness the end and outcome of which is death. Thus one speaks of a mortal sickness as synonymous with a sickness unto death. In this sense despair cannot be called the sickness unto death. But in the Christian understanding of it death itself is a transition unto life In view of this, there is from the Christian standpoint no earthly, bodily sickness unto death. For death is doubtless the last phase of the sickness, but death is not the last thing. If in the strictest sense we are to speak of a sickness unto death, it must be one in which the last thing is death, and death the last thing. And this precisely is despair.

Yet in another and still more definite sense despair is the sickness unto death. It is indeed very far from being true that, literally understood, one dies of this sickness, or that this sickness ends with bodily death. On the contrary, the torment of despair is precisely this, not to be able to die. So it has much in common with the situation of the moribund when he lies and struggles with death, and cannot die. So to be sick unto death is, not to be able to die -- yet not as though there were hope of life; no the hopelessness in this case is that even the last hope, death, is not available. When death is the greatest danger, one hopes for life; but when one becomes acquainted with an even more dreadful danger, one hopes for death. So when the danger is so great that death has become one's hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die.

It is in this last sense that despair is the sickness unto death, this agonizing contradiction, this sickness in the self, everlastingly to die, to die and yet not to die, to die the death. For dying means that it is all over, but dying the death means to live to experience death; and if for a single instant this experience is possible, it is tantamount to experiencing it forever.

Søren Kierkegaard, "The Sickness Unto Death".

_

Firefly

One firefly out there in the closed night.

Extinguished light.
Is it of an empire
or that of a firefly?

Jorge Luis Borges, fourteenth haiku, from "La cifra" (Book translated to english as "The Limit" and/or "The Cypher")


_

One soul in the crowd

I sing what was lost and dread what was won,
I walk in a battle fought over again,
My king a lost king, and lost soldiers my men;
Feet to the Rising and Setting may run,
They always beat on the same small stone.

W. B. Yeats, "What was lost".



Significative eye-looks, or figurative people in ugly colours, or any crap, sometimes I cannot care less. *-* Excuse a passing fase.

Many thanks to the good people, every single person, who have took their time to visit. The only valuable here.

_

Death of the swan

01. The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
02. The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
03. Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
04. And after many a summer dies the swan.
05. Me only cruel immortality
06. Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
07. Here at the quiet limit of the world,
08. A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream
09. The ever-silent spaces of the East,
10. Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
11. Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man -
12. So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
13. Who madest him thy chosen, that he seemed
14. To his great heart none other than a God!
15. I asked thee, "Give me immortality."
16. Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,
17. Like wealthy men who care not how they give.
18. But thy strong Hours indignant worked their wills,
19. And beat me down and marred and wasted me,
20. And though they could not end me, left me maimed
21. To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
22. Immortal age beside immortal youth,
23. And all I was, in ashes. Can thy love,
24. Thy beauty, make amends, though even now,
25. Close over us, the silver star, thy guide,
26. Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears
27. To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift:
28. Why should a man desire in any way
29. To vary from the kindly race of men,
30. Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance
31. Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?
32. A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
33. A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.
34. Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
35. From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
36. And bosom beating with a heart renewed.
37. Thy cheek begins to redden through the gloom,
38. Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
39. Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team
40. Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,
41. And shake the darkness from their loosened manes,
42. And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.
43. Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
44. In silence, then before thine answer given
45. Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.
46. Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
47. And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
48. In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
49. "The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts."
50. Ay me! ay me! with what another heart
51. In days far-off, and with what other eyes
52. I used to watch -if I be he that watched -
53. The lucid outline forming round thee; saw
54. The dim curls kindle into sunny rings;
55. Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood
56. Glow with the glow that slowly crimsoned all
57. Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,
58. Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
59. With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
60. Of April, and could hear the lips that kissed
61. Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
62. Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
63. While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.
64. Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:
65. How can my nature longer mix with thine?
66. Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
67. Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
68. Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
69. Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
70. Of happy men that have the power to die,
71. And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
72. Release me, and restore me to the ground;
73. Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave:
74. Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
75. I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
76. And thee returning on thy silver wheels.

Lord Alfred Tennyson, "Tithonus".

_

Zebra hunters

Figurative image again. Pure life, pure death symbols. This is "Zebra hunters".

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

John donne.

Venetian masks

Adolfo Bioy Casares, in the short story “Venetian Masks” [original book in spanish here], makes the main character of his story, reject the possibility -that offers a friend of him- of recovering his beloved Daniela, since was made a clone of her; the "real" Daniela didn't wanted to restart an old love that didn't have any more sense for her. That replica, the clone, doesn't have interest to the hero, he doesn't love an identical woman, only loves her.

- I'm not interested in an identical woman, I love her.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, "Venetian masks" short story, final dialog.

[Cloning] Will not end being an "unfaithful photocopy" of species?. Although soma could be duplicated, could the soul be duplicated?. This is, simply, one of the so many questions that perhaps never will be answered.

In junguian psychology, the concept of person, is very bounded to the one of mask; very appropriate relation since the person is that system of adaptation, or that way with which we enter in relation to the world. And the mask is what “it hides us”, which covers the true role. The danger of this, as it maintains Jung himself, is to identify itself with the mask that we all carry; risk of stopping being a process, risk of becoming a “mask”. A clone of ourselves is a mask? or perhaps more appropriate it is to allude to a “masque” that hides the other one, that primal, that authentic one.

The masks serves so that the metamorphosis can be hidden, masks are a kind of magical act.

From the “Notebooks of bioethics" by Néstor Eduardo Costa. An old notebook from 1997.

Translucent glass nautilus

The Islam asserts that in the unquestionable day of the Judgment, every perpetrator of the image of a living thing, will resurrect with its works, and it will be ordered to him to animate them, and it will fail, and it will be given, with their works, to the fire of the punishment.

J. L. Borges "The veiled mirrors".

Lucky me, I'm not islamic and this nautilus was dead when I started this work. :-)
"Translucent glass nautilus".

Ghost in the brushstrokes

So in my present times, I'm _trying_ to emulate some effects of reality through pure interactive genetic algorithms, like water, smoke, glass, metal, stone, or simple math figures like flowers and seashells, all of them with more or less accuracy (less accuracy the most).
So I had this fase with the impressionist brushstroke emulation (several images has been done), this is the second I believe. I was mutating brushstrokes from ground zero (I don't use starting textures or images of any kind, only math parameters) and this "ghost" in blue appeared to my eye in the mutation, and I liked it there, over the abstract emulated brushstrokes. So this is it. "Ghost in the brushstrokes". I'm not more than one of those; so let's say it is a dedication to real oil painters, like Olivier Clavel (see left panel for galleries of him), he rocks, one day I'll mail him.

Victim of a one-eyed dream

Busy, busy, busy, "sorry for the hurry", these quarterly reports are killing me. So this is the first thing I saw to upload, the bottom of the directory: "Victim of a one-eyed dream".
There in the center is this person, sleeping the one-eyed dream... I think. :-)

Lamp and wallpaper

This is a sample of how hard is to create a naturalistic image using only interactive GA's.
"Lamp and wallpaper". The lamp, down in the middle, and the wallpaper "behind". Crooked and twisted image. So imagine how a self-portrait might look like; althought it sounds like a joke, I have one... and was made like a joke too.

Superdimensional orchid

I have to admit that I have this "girly" taste (to the caveman I am) for flowers. A simple flower image is not good enough to be done by me (laugh at will)... It is a torture to make an image of a simple flower, I have to complicate the thing, like a stupid. When I was a child many times I was found lying on the ground, watching tiny flowers with a magnifying glass, if a friend walked by and asked me "What are you doing?", I always lied shouting "I'm burning ants!". :-D

Well, this is "superdimensional orchid", a "manly" way to complicate a simple thing, you know; a way to ruin beauty. :-)

Cheers.

Mild sound of the seashell

This was thought to be a gift to a friend poet here in town, years ago. Now he's published. I called it "Mild sound of the seashell" (I put work on this one, I admit it). Completely IGA work, as always.

Into this matters, a selected dedication from an american poet, to my friend and every poet I know:

The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the shipbuilder. In the man, could we lay him open, we should see the sufficient reason for the last flourish and tendril of his work, as every spine and tint in the sea-shell pre-exist in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of heraldry, and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.

Ralph W. Emerson: "Art and history as a private and universal adventure".

And herein is the, legitimation of criticism, in the mind's faith, that the poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature, with which they ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers.

Ralph W. Emerson: "Nature gives second birth to itself in poetry".

The tint of the flower proceeds from its root, and the lustres of the sea-shell begin with its existence. [...] Beauty rides on a lion. Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy. [...] There is not a particle to spare in natural structures.

Ralph W. Emerson: "Beauty".

Degradation to the public violence

Some years after the riots and deaths of december 19th and 20th of 2001 in Argentina, I just tried to erase some of the images off my mind by stressing them out, but was a barren intent.
In the end, this too abstract image was the remaining of the effort: "Degradation to the public violence".
Those days of ineffective work let clear to me that if I will ever want to achieve that kind of complex objective, I should change my kind of work and abandon interactive genetic algorithms... So, from then on, they remain as a relaxing work, not a cathartic work any more. That may be the reason of the lack of depth anyone can find in all these images. But it is very good to me; and to the rest out there, is just a sample of IGA's images, in the end.

Hooligans

There is something in the mind today that push me down to be idle; it was a struggle to leave the couch. :-)
We here in Argentina have violent soccer hooligans still (or soccer fans if you want). In spite of that nasty subject, everyone who sees our soccer matches remain amazed of the visual show, a lot of chants, noise, smoke and flags. Specially chants and flags.

This is Hooligans (Hinchas as called around here).

The moon and the tides

Well, another topic inspired by a subject in a song of Héroes del Silencio (I don't know what I have with them, really).
A very old song about love starting to take over, just put me to think about some simple symbols, the sea (the love in the song), the moon (normally the object of affection, in poetry), and the mutual influence, the tides.
So this is "The moon and the tides", looks fractalish, but no, interactive genetic algorithms instead. It could have better definition, but I just abandon it in the middle of the work, surely bored, before changing those scales for waves instead. I'm too lazy! :-)

Inspired long ago by this old song (do not trust my translation too much):


The Sea doesn't ceases.

It goes out the untenable emptiness
and the lethal laziness that threatens.
By moments I feel the absence of you.
Devoid of everything, dissident of nothing.
I die by impulses of agonizing shackle,
imprisoned by unfair hands.
I see a thousand doors.
They are open to the dark.
They are open to the dark.

Laralalaralalaralalaraira.

Rock me with the impulse of your laughter,
and uproot my mask of tragedy,
and that the hurricane blow away my spiderwebs.

(Héroes del Silencio, "El mar no cesa").

Cobra's egg

In some old fractal style, this may seem a translucent cobra egg, with luck. :-)
But is made with interactive genetic algorithms.

Vegetal water

One day, April the 13th, an admired fractal artist named Oliviah (I don't know her last name, but she seems like a very nice girl) published an artwork called "Magical Garden", you can watch it here; and it was inspirational to something I was looking for: starting to simulate vegetal or mineral textures through pure interactive genetic algorithms (not organic 3D art). She did her job very well, and I tried to keep up the quality, just that. The first result is called "Vegetal water", it has two versions, one daytime illuminated, one night-time illuminated; and I wanted to look like ferns made out of water or green/transparent liquids (hard to achieve).
This is how far I am right now; this inspirational work will surely keep evolving into other different simulations, because I want to go that way (between others) through interactive GA's.

The image is simple, the work was complex; eventually it will lead me to have more resources to express myself (I have almost five years doing this kind of things, but still starting on it).

So this is a brand new work, from days ago, for a change. :-)
Thanks a lot, Oliviah.

So this are the ferns, distorted under daytime light:




And this under night time, the moon should be, tiny, on the left.




For more artists doing works through genetic algorithms, I always have my left panel, "preferred sites".
Surely the night time version should be better. Cheers. :-)

Hearts afire

Have a beautiful worker's day, and please rest as I do. :-) I'll be on a diet of champagne, truffles and romantic music composers; and I'll see if I can convince a hot girl of going to the opera and making-out during it :-) it's worker's day!.

I don't like long posts to not bore, anyhow, if you read it may be you find it interesting, because few of the words are mine.

This is some of the things I cannot forget any time I read Byron or Shelley.
Edward Trelawny, Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, some italian people and some soldiers asisted to Percy Shelley funeral pyre... Many hearts, but one, were on fire there that day, and after.
May be Edward Trelawny, who was there, and was able of managing the whole scene, can explain clearly to the ones who doesn't understand my simple words:

"Mrs. Shelley's large grey eyes were fixed on my face. I turned away. Unable to bear this horrid silence, with a convulsive effort she exclaimed: Is there no hope? I did not answer, but left the room and sent the servant with the children to them"
[...]
"Do not repeat this with me. Said Byron. Let my carcass rot where it falls. The funeral pyre was now ready; I applied the fire, and the materials being dry and resinous the pine wood burnt furiously, and drove us back."

"The Greek oration was omitted, for we had lost our Hellenic bard."

"Let us try to strengthen of these waters that drowned our friends, said Byron, with his usual audacity. How far out do you think they were when their boat sank? -If you do not wish to be put into the furnace, you had better not try; you are not in condition. He stripped, and went into the water, and so did I and my companion. Before we got a mile out, Byron was sick, and persuaded to return to the shore. My companion, too, was seized with cramp, and reached the land by my aid. At four o' clock the funeral pyre burnt low, and when we uncovered the furnace, nothing remained in it but dark coloured ashes, and fragments of the larger bones."

"Byron asked me to preserve the skull for him; but remembering that he had formerly used one as a drinking cup, I was determined Shelley's should be not so profaned."

"Byron could not face the scene, he withdrew to the beach and swam off to the "Bolivar". Leigh Hunt remained on the carriage. The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severly burnt; and had any one seen me doing this act I should have been put into quarantine."

"Yet, see how extremes can appear to meet even on occasion the most overwhelming; nay, even by reason of them; for as cold can perform the effect of fire, and burn us, so can despair put on the monstrous aspect of mirth. On returning from one of our visits to the seashore, we dined and drank; I mean, Lord Byron and myself; dined little, and drank too much. Lord Byron had not shone that day, even in his cups, which usually brought out his best qualities. As to myself, I had bordered upon emotions which I have never suffered myself to indulge, and which, foolishly as well as impatiently, render calamity, as somebody turned it, an affront, and not a misfortune. The barouche drove rapidly through the forest of pisa. We sang, we laughed, we shouted, I even felt a gaiety the more shocking, because it was real and a relief. What the coachman thought of us, God knows; but he helped to make a ghastly trio. He was a good tempered fellow, and an affectionate husband and father; yet he had the reputation of having offered his master to kill a man. I wish to have no such waking dreams again. It was worthy of a German ballad."

This image if mine is called, obviously, "Hearts afire". Cheers.