Word: beggar
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...bleatniks are a strange and varied lot. Seen in San Francisco, in the vicinity ot Union Square: a blind beggar with Seeing-Eye dog, with extended hand holding tin cup, and with his transistor radio "bleating" away. Could he have been begging for new batteries...
...palace, a half-hundred soft civilians squatted on the absent lord's domain, eating and drinking their heads off, seducing the maidservants, insulting the stripling heir, and competing for the honor of consoling the presumed widow. The whole bloody and wonderful business ends when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, first humiliates the suitors in a contest at archery, then slaughters the whole "wolf pack" of them, hangs the faithless female help, washes off the blood, makes love to Penelope, restores his son to honor and sets his little kingdom to rights...
Probity with Ardor. As the years went by, Ingres became a querulous, touchy man. so sensitive that his wife would shield his eyes with a shawl to keep him from seeing a deformed beggar in the street. For all his crotchets, Ingres remained true to himself. "Drawing is the probity of art." he said, and he would make as many as 100 sketches before deciding how to place a single arm in a painting. Though he turned out his share of pretentious failures, he was always the master of composition. And despite his apparent indifference to color, such canvases...
Masked Folly. Neither king nor beggar was safe from his brush. "My favorite occupation," he said, "is to make others famous, to uglify them, to enrich their ugliness." He painted a world of fiends and skeletons, of ghoulish clowns and grinning, beak-nosed humans at their most frighteningly ridiculous. He became obsessed by carnival masks, used them, not to disguise mankind, but to highlight its folly. His famous The Entry of Christ into Brussels-with himself as Christ-is Ensor at his most devastating. Here, surrounding Christ, is a seething horde of pomposity-soldiers, millionaires, judges, art critics...
...Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God. Its period is that Slough of Despond known as the Late Thirties, and nowhere else has the moral despair of that time been better described. It calls to mind the philosophical conundrum: "If a man tossing a coin to a one-eyed beggar blinds his good eye, is his action praiseworthy...