"The simplest questions are the most profound.

Where were you born?
Where is your home?
Where are you going?
What are you doing?

Think about these once in awhile, and watch your answers change."
- Richard Bach, from
"Illusions, The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah"

It could have started in the medeival Holland, with a book. Not any book, but the Dialogus Creaturarum Moralizatus written by the Milanese physician Mayno de Mayneri. Taken to Sweden by Johan Snell, who printed it in Stockholm 1483, it came to me 500 years later. Glancing through the beautiful illustrations and strange tales, words and images arose within. It was as if I found a strange kinship with the authors of the book, forgotten in history but imortalized in these pieces of paper and spots of ink. So I started writing.

For me it became a dialouge with the authors - the words I wrote was an answer, a comment, to the moralizing tales in the "Dialogus". The reading of the book spawned works of poetry and dreams of music.

These dreams where answered, discovering what my friend Arcane had been working on. Strangely, the words fitted his musical lines and rythmic patterns in a perfect sense. And with Johan Lindgren as a third piece added of the puzzle, Mors Osculi was born.

Mors Osculi is what the cabbalist refered to as "death in a kiss". Clinically, it has been used as a medical term for death during intercourse. Sometimes, it has symbolized the ending of life through pleasure - "the soul unites so strongly with an image that it leaves the body" ("Rinascita, Rinascimento", Daniel Kolos).

Philosofically, it raises questions about why we live, our purposes and dreams. It refers to images of perfection and fulfillment, devinity and humanity - the mind and the flesh.

/Daniel Fredriksson