Word: primal
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...shared impulse. You can see those asserting themselves in mainstream life through such means as the outdoor murals -- acts of public declamation in the tradition of the great Mexican muralists -- that are an essential part of the Los Angeles cityscape. Add to that sentiment the claims of family, the primal unit of Hispanic life. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz recently described it. "In the North American ethic" he wrote, "the center is the individual; in Hispanic morals the true protagonist is the family." It shows in the work of a photographer like Tony Mendoza. He sees in his extended Cuban...
...They even luxuriated in the outrage of it. The saga was extravagantly awful. Brawley is black and at the time of her disappearance was 15 years old. The old story: strange fruit hanging from a poplar tree, the night riders in sheets come North now. Was hers not the primal American tale of violated black innocence, of white bigotry that wears a badge and goes unpunished? Did it not reverberate with all the horrors of America's original sin? Did it not recapitulate, precisely, the original drama of abduction and violation that brought black Africans to America in the first...
...primal horror of a mother killing her newborn baby may be rooted in severe mental disorders some women suffer after giving birth...
...bizarre and frightening deed, one that elicits an almost primal horror: an apparently normal mother suddenly snaps and kills her newborn child. Sadly, it is not all that rare. In April, according to police, Lucrezia Gentile, a Brooklyn housewife, reported that her two-month-old son had been abducted, then confessed that she had drowned him in his bath. Reason: she could not stand his incessant crying. A year earlier, Michele Remington, a factory worker in Bennington, Vt., fatally shot her infant son with a .22-cal. handgun before unsuccessfully trying to kill herself. Kathleen Householder, of Rippon...
Works like Ouranos are infused with a sense of primal material under the stress of becoming, a mass raising itself up into consciousness even as gravity drags it down. You think of Genesis and the lump of clay just on the point of turning into Adam (the first sculpture of all). A little less thought, less work, and they would only be lumps. Tucker had taken a long look at Rodin, and it shows everywhere on his bronzes. The heavings and incrustations of their skins are, in fact, exquisitely organized to carry the eye around the form and leave...