Was Leonardo da Vinci a cannibal?–I do think he had a bit of Jeffery Dahmer in him.  He writes in his aphorisms:  “We preserve our life with the death of others.  In a dead thing insensate life remains which, when it is reunited with the stomachs of the living, regains sensitive and intellectual life.”  And in his notebook on anatomy he speaks of an old man on his death bed, how kind and nice and gregarious he was, and how he had such a fine liver, all with the unbroken calmness of mind of a latent sociopath.  He was as casual over a corpse as over a breathing man.  Some of his riddles (prophecies) speak of horrible things, such as children torn to pieces after being abducted from their mother’s arms, of broken skulls and gauged out eyes, of wholesale slaughter and quartering–clearly the thoughts of a deranged and unbalanced man.  Is it possible there is a good reason why Mona Lisa  went missing shortly after the painting first began?  Could the uneven pools of water in the painting ’Mona Lisa’ symbolize the descent of the soul and its inevitable resurrection, the path from life to death to life again?  Could her sinister smirk be hiding some deeper plot?   The recent uncovering of actual human DNA within the paint of this most famous portrait speaks volumes.  I venture to suggest that this was not the DNA of the curator of the Musee du Louvre that wandered into the painting sometime during the restoration of 1766, but that Leonardo himself was a culprit of a most heinous crime.  Late into the evening on their third meeting, on a cold, windless Italian night, the Da Vinci murdered and then dissected the Mona Lisa, ingesting some parts of her while mixing some with wet blue paint so as to create the harsh blue hues in the uneven pools of water in the background, all this so she could aid his painting from within, since would now live through him, but also live forever through the unfeeling portrait in her own likeness.  Leonardo in his genius foresaw that one day technology would allow us to have ourselves as children, and so he would literally paint the “Mona Lisa” with Mona Lisa, so that she will stare us down until the day we finally bring her back.  Maybe you will see a Mona Lisa walking down the street.  You’ll look twice.  No, can’t be.  A clone. They’ll be everywhere, like knock-off prints.  You’ll think, she’s not that special but neither am I.  I’ll love her anyway.  You lure her into your apartment for after-hours tea.  You two will talk and get along but something is wrong, she has to leave.  You sense that something is slipping away but also that you never really had it to begin with.  She’ll leave and there’s nothing you can do to stop her.  You want to paint her into eternity too, but you remember there is an eternity is forgetfulness, and also that you can’t paint either.  You ask her if she wants some meatloaf, what a loaf I am.  I will love you like the places I’ve never been, the empty corners of my soul, and like the art I never saw.  Of course she leaves and you never see her again, but you will see ‘Mona Lisa’ many times.  You sit back on a couch with a half cocked smile, no longer afraid of not being the genius.

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