According to his friend John Varley, Blake saw the ghost in a vision. Hunched and scaly, tongue whisking between his lips, he carries his knife and cup of gore with horrible purposefulness, a far more substantial creature than his insect counterpart.
The flea is reincarnated as an irreducibly eerie hominid, haunting the night corridors with the bowl in which he collects human blood. The Ghost of a Flea: William Blake, c1819-20
"Everything I do is connected with death," remarked Warhol, and it seems particularly true of his silkscreen images – widowed Jackie, the skulls, the car crash sequences and, above all, the electric chairs.Ĥ. The silkscreen print takes the original photograph to the verge of dissolution with its blurry overlays, so that one can hardly grasp what is going on in this desolate scene. The restraints lie slack on the ground after the corpse has been removed and the darkness speaks of some shadowy no-man's-land. The dreadful injunction "silence" glows in the gloom of Andy Warhol's Electric Chair, as if describing the future for whoever has been slaughtered in that seat.
The Nightmare was meant to cause nightmares. Even those blind to the intimations of rape, bestiality, voyeurism and murder can feel the power of Fuseli's metaphor: the nightmare as nocturnal violation. His pricked ears cast horn-like shadows on the curtains behind her, which are, in turn, thrust apart by the head of a wild-eyed stallion. On her stomach squats an excremental troll. The sleeper in her virginal nightgown lies readied on the bed like a sacrificial victim, throat stretched bare as if for the blade. It is the worst dream in art and by far the most famous, an archetype to outclass Sigmund Freud. Photograph: Musee des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg
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