Back Story. Behind the Scenes, 'Blood Related' out-takes.

More sneak peaks at the origins of 'Blood Related'

Throughout the book you will find these adages referenced to some degree. Inescapable truths about the evil of humanity. The degree to which some of us can go, parasitic hominid but essentially as those who have come before, right back to the ocean, the shallow end of the gene-pool. After all, in some ways we are all Blood Related.

Food for thought.

'Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.'

- Jean Rostand

For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. 

- William Shakespeare
Source: Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Hamlet at II, ii)

The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.
- Sigmund Freud

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) British author.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

- Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) British author and intellectual.

When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder. 

- Simone Weil (1910-1943) French Philosopher

Cruel with guilt, and daring with despair, the midnight murderer bursts the faithless bar; invades the sacred hour of silent rest and leaves, unseen, a dagger in your breast. 

- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) British author.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest. 

- W. H. Auden (1907-1973) English-born poet and man of letters.

 

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) U.S. poet, essayist and lecturer.

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

- Graham Greene (1904-1991) English writer.

People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed – a knife – a purse - and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.

 - On Murder, Considered As One Of The Fine Arts. Thomas de Quincey (1827)

Once that you’ve decided on a killing

First you make a stone of your heart

And if you can find that your hands are still willing

Then you can turn a murder into art.

The Police, ‘Murder by Numbers’

Acts must be carried through to their completion. Whatever their point of departure, the end will be beautiful. It is because an action has not been completed that it is vile.

 - Genet, Journal du Voleur

A work of art is a dream of murder, which is realized by an act.

 - Sartre, Saint Genet

In that every action today leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether or why we have the right to kill.

 - Camus, L’Homme revolte

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create . . .

- T.S. Eliot, ‘the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’

We have to become murderers in order to experience ourselves as real . . . isn’t that horrible?

 - Gregor von Rezzori, The Death of my Brother Abel

The murderer is the last man who still seeks human contact; the remaining members of the species merely continue to ride past each other on escalators. In such a world, murder and conflict govern humanity.

 - Heiner Muller

The Second Coming

W.B Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

……….

And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,

      Which from the links of the great chain of things               20

      To every thought within the mind of man

      Sway and drag heavily, and each one reels

      Under the load towards the pit of death;

      Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate;

      And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood;

      Pain, whose unheeded and familiar speech

      Is howling, and keen shrieks, day after day;

      And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?

From Prometheus Unbound by Percy Bryce Shelley