Jean-François Millet is noted for his scenes of peasant farmers; he is one of the Realism art movement founders. Millet was an important source of inspiration for Vincent van Gogh, particularly during his early period. Millet's late landscapes would serve as influential points of reference to Claude Monet's paintings of the coast of Normandy.

Millet's Angelus was reproduced frequently in the 19th and 20th centuries. Van Gogh drew his own version of The Angelus (after Millet). Salvador Dali was also fascinated by this work, and wrote an analysis of it, The Tragic Myth of The Angelus of Millet. But rather than seeing it as a work of spiritual peace as Impressionists do, Dali believed it held messages of repressed sexual aggression. Dali was also of the opinion that the two figures were praying over their buried child, rather than to the Angelus. Dali was so insistent on this fact that eventually an X-ray was done of the canvas, confirming his suspicions: the painting contains a painted-over geometric shape strikingly similar to a coffin.

In typical fashion, Dali personalized this theme, using it to try to pin down the hidden reasons for his long fascination with the painting The Angelus by Jean-Francois Millet. He idiosyncratically interprets Millet's figures as being posed in the attitudes of praying mantises; for Dali, the Millet painting became an unconscious parable of female sexual power. The female figure, to the right, poses expectantly, ready to pounce, while the male, head bowed in defeat, vainly tries to protect hi; genitals with his hat. Dali's own long-established fears of female sexuality, of impotence and castration, now found a portentous pictorial source, a new "paranoiac-critical" focus. As a consequence, Dali often turned to this theme as though to expunge his fears.

Dalí launched into an absurd psychoanalytic theory of the image:

Let us look at it. The mother, who could well be a variation of the phallic mother with a vulture’s head of the ancient Egyptians, uses her husband, whimsically “depersonalized” into a wheelbarrow, to bury her son while at the same time causing her own impregnation, being herself the foster–mother–earth par excellence.
The double–image” of the phallus–cactus seems to us an unequivocal allusion to the desire to castrate the spouse, who, thus deprived of his virility and reduced to the state of a simple vehicle of social productivity, can no longer form a screen, or a hindrance in the direct relations of mother–son, or the rising sun of an absolute matriarchy. In the matriarchy, the mother wishes to substitute herself for the husband by replacing him in all “situations”; in the present case, that of a wheelbarrow. Thus she would like to play, be coaxed, a wheelbarrow rhythmically balanced by her son, himself at the zenith of his “heroic” athletic university student strength during which, in a matriarchy, he goes through a very short period of maternal idolatry just before undergoing in turn the fate of his father the moment he becomes a husband.

The passage contains most of Dalí’s theory of Millet’s painting: he wants it to depict a mother who has just killed her son and is anticipating being sodomized by her husband before she cannibalizes him.

FOR GUS, THIS PAINTING HAS THE THEME OF A MOMENT IN HUMAN HISTORY THAT HAS VANISHED. IT HAS BEEN REPLACED WITH FAST FOOD, DESTRUCTION OF LANDSCAPES AND MECHANISATION OF INTENT WHICH LEAD TO UNDERSTANDING HOW HUMANS (THE WESTERN megalomaniacs MOSTLY) HAVE SICKENED THE PLANET...

ARE WE PAYING ATTENTION?

NUPE...

Planet Earth is sick — and getting sicker, according to a new Planetary Health Check.

The report, by Germany’s Potsdam Institute, finds that humans – like a drunken driver heedlessly running a red traffic light – have smashed through the safe boundaries of the planet and its ability to sustain life in seven out of nine vital areas.

Put simply, we humans, through our daily actions, are now ensuring that the planet becomes unfit to support us or our children far into the future – and trouble much larger than anything we have seen yet is brewing.

The Potsdam Health Check, based on the pioneering work of its director Dr Johan Rockstrom when he was at the Stockholm Resilience Institute, identifies nine major processes that are essential to life on Earth. In seven of these humans have now exceeded the safe boundary (green area) which keeps us alive in the longer term. In six of them we are clearly in the orange danger zone, so far as our long-term survival is concerned. And in four we are well into the high-risk red zone, where we now stand a good chance of destabilising the entire planet, making it unable to sustain human life.

In the case of the best-known process, climate, the report warns that both the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and the total amount of radiative forcing (leading to heating of the planet) caused by human activity are well above their safe levels.

In a second, the mass extinction of plants and animals globally is causing a catastrophic loss of genetic diversity and undermining the ability of the biosphere to support life, far beyond safe levels.

In the third, changes in land use (mainly for farming and urban development) has reduced the planet’s total remaining area of forests, woodlands and grasslands to dangerous levels.

Fourth, man-made changes to the Earth’s natural freshwater cycle poses real risks for humans and wildlife as well as for the environment and planet’s ability to absorb carbon.

Fifth, in a devastating process that receives little or no coverage in the daily media or recognition by governments, humans are polluting the entire planet with nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), mainly by growing food and discharging organic waste. This is causing severe disruption of the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles on land and in the ocean, imperilling the future security of our food and drink.

Sixth is the avalanche of 350,000 man-made chemicals and toxins released by industrial activity like farming, transport, construction, manufacturing, mining and development. The Institute judges that the amount of human-made substances being released into the environment without testing is well over ‘safe level’. The World Health Organisation adds that these environmental poisons are linked to 14 million deaths a year – killing one person in every four and poisoning the rest.

To these danger signals the current Health Check adds a new one: the world’s oceans are in danger of acidifying to a state that prevents corals, shellfish, fish and other sea-life from forming their shells or skeletons, eliminating sea life and reducing the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – and thus accelerating global warming.

In only two of the nine key life-sustaining processes is the human impact in the ‘safe’ zone atmospheric aerosol loading, which is the amount of polluting particles (smog) in the atmosphere, and ozone depletion, which is safe but still worse than it was last century.

The global boundaries are a scientific way of viewing the Earth system and its ability to sustain life. Beyond a certain point they start to break down and go haywire, potentially culminating in a planetary state resembling that of Venus (+462o C) or Mars (-200 to -70o C) as the planet sheds its biology, oceans and atmosphere. This may seem extreme, but all collapse processes begin with a few small cracks and groans, before the system finally implodes.

The Planetary Health Check is an excellent scientific way of viewing the practicalities of staying alive on a ball of rock spinning through space and the delicate balance of physics and chemistry that enables it. However, the key ingredient is an understanding of how every person, in their own quiet way, is now working – on a daily basis – to bring about disaster.

In the first place, human numbers have exploded – from around one billion in the C19th, to a projected 10 or 11 billion by 2100. That alone would account for the multiple perils in which we now find ourselves.

However human demand for material goods and the industrial system that supplies them has also exploded, growing on average, three times faster than the human population. As a result, we now consume over 100 billion tonnes of materials every year, of 12 tonnes/yr for every man, woman or child. Over a lifetime, each of us now:

• Uses 35,000 tonnes of fresh water (mostly embodied in the food it grew)
• Causes the loss of 650 tonnes of topsoil (mainly through farming practices and development)
• Uses 120 tonnes of pure energy (oil equivalent)
• Wastes 13.5 tonnes of food
• Causes the emission of 119 tonnes of often-toxic chemicals
• Emits 350 tonnes of climate-wrecking CO2.

This ungovernable consumption is what is undermining the ability of the Earth to maintain life.

Every bite of food you take, every trip or home you make, all the materials and energy consumed by your work, your leisure, your shopping and your family life. All multiplied by over 8.2 billion people, every single year.

Since 1972, our total human consumption has tripled from 29 billion tonnes a year to 105 billion tonnes in 2024 – and is on track to reach 170 billion tonnes a year by 2050. All the water used, the fossil fuels burned, the land cleared, the minerals mined, the forests felled, the oceans emptied, the air polluted, the animals exterminated is down to our unique vice: uncontrolled consumption.

At present of the 105GT of materials used each year, only 7.2% is recycled – and 92.8% goes to waste or pollutes the planet. And that tiny amount of recycling is actually declining, according to the Circle Economy Foundation. Thus, the human rape of Planet Earth is increasing, not diminishing. And this is what is causing the sickness in its life support systems.

While climate attracts the lion’s share of media and government attention (though very little positive action), it can be seen from these numbers that it is only a fraction of the very much larger problem of human overpopulation, overconsumption and over pollution – known euphemistically as the ‘Great Acceleration’. That is a problem for which, self-evidently, we presently have no answers – and which is studiously overlooked in the current UN Summit of the Future and its otherwise heart-warming Pact for the Future.

Nothing in the Summit suggests the destruction of the Earth’s ability to sustain life is about to abate. And, in reality, unless we all change our behaviour and agree to have far fewer children, nothing ever will.

https://johnmenadue.com/the-earth-is-sick-and-getting-sicker/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

SOURCES RE MILLET'S PAINTING INCLUDE (APART FROM GUS'S OWN REMINISCENCES):

https://www.dalipaintings.com/archeological-reminiscence-millets-angelus.jsp

AND 

What is Interesting Writing in Art History?: Chapter 16

James Elkins