Datasets:

nkandpa2

/

public-domain-review

like 0

humorous-phases-of-funny-faces-1906

Humorous Phases Of Funny Faces (1906) Jan 29, 2015 A short animation created by Anglo-American film producer James Stuart Blackton which proved hugely influential in the development of animated films in America. The film comes six years after his equally groundbreaking The Enchanted Drawing and is regarded by film historians as the first animated film to be recorded on standard picture film.

public-domain-review

Jan 29, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:09.521130

the-algonquin-legends-of-new-england-1884

The Algonquin Legends of New England (1884) Sep 18, 2014 A brilliant collection of stories from the folklore tradition of the Algonquin (Algonquian, Algonkin) peoples of North America, in particular, as the subtitle tells us, of the "Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot tribes". The collection presented in the book is a result of the collecting efforts of folklorist Charles G. Leland and from Rev. Silas T. Rand, a Canadian Baptist clergyman who was the first to record the legend of Glooskap. It is this legend, with its many chapters, which takes up the majority of the book. The central character is a giant of a divinity named Glooskap, who "grows to a more appalling greatness than Thor or Odin in his battles", and whose name literally means Liar, because it is said that when he left earth he promised to return but has never done so. In addition to Glooskap, a large proportion of the book is dedicated to "The Merry Tales of Lox, the Mischief-Maker", a character, as Leland explains in his introduction, who ranges "from Punch to Satan, passing through the stages of an Indian Mephistopheles and the Norse Loki, who appears to have been his true progenitor". Also, Throughout the book are scattered a set of wonderful illustrations (some featured below), presumably copied from tribe members themselves, though no information is given on this.

public-domain-review

Sep 18, 2014

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:09.883658

napoleon-at-st-helena-1855

Napoleon at St Helena (1855) Oct 30, 2014 An illustrated compilation of "interesting anecdotes and remarkable conversations of the Emperor", Napoléon Bonaparte, during his time on Saint Helena, the island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (a whopping 1870 km from the west coast of Africa) to which he was exiled after his surrender to the British on July 15, 1815. As the preface makes clear, the book's editor John S. C. Abbott was a big big fan of the "le petit caporal": The Emperor Napoleon, by almost universal consent, is pronounced to be, intellectually, the most illustrious of mankind. Even his bitterest enemies are compelled to do homage to the universality and the grandeur of his genius. Lamartine declares him to be "the greatest of the creations of God." ... The genius of Napoleon is astounding. All branches of human knowledge seemed alike familiar to his gigantic mind. In the book Abbott hopes to "take the reader to St. Helena, and to introduce him to the humble apartment of the Emperor", to "give him a seat in the arm-chair, by the side of the illustrious sufferer reclining upon the sofa", and to "lead him to accompany the Emperor in his walk among the blackened rocks, and thus to listen to the glowing utterances of the imperial sage." After his exile (and indeed before) Napoleon garnered much support from the English speaking world. There was sympathy for him in the British Parliament, particularly from Lord Holland who delivered a speech that demanded the prisoner be treated with no unnecessary harshness. Lord Cochrane was also a big supporter and, involved in the struggles for independence in Chile and Brazil, wanted to rescue Napoleon and help him set up a new empire in South America. There were reportedly many plots to rescue him from his captivity on St Helena. One such scheme originated in Texas, where exiled soldiers from the Grande Armée wanted a resurrection of the Napoleonic Empire in America. Another plan was said to have involved an ambitious submarine-based bust led by the infamous British smuggler Tom Johnson, who claimed to have been offered £40,000 to carry out the plan. Needless to say none were successful, and on May 5, 1821, Napoleon died. The official death certificate stated stomach cancer, though many believed the real cause was the harsh treatment he received for years in the hands of his custodian and "gaoler", Hudson Lowe, who moved Napoleon in December 1816 to the damp and dilapidated Longwood House. Some even say he was poisoned by arsenic, though a recent medical study implied that the original diagnosis of stomach cancer was most likely correct.

public-domain-review

Oct 30, 2014

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:10.371369

the-relaxed-wife-1957

The Relaxed Wife (1957) Mar 24, 2015 Our nostalgia for the 1950s is tested with this strange and unnerving promotional film for the tranquilliser "Atarax", in which a husband plagued by stress brought on by work and noisy children, is helped by his relaxed wife of the title. With her calming influence he learns not to focus on the problems of others or to worry about the rest of the world - "Let the world take care of its own worries. You'll help yourself most by concentrating on your own affairs". Named after ataraxia, the Greek word for relaxation, the tranquilliser is advertised through such rhyming lines as: Today, medical science recognizes,that some folks aren't helped by relaxing exercises.In cases of difficult tension, and nervous apprehension,doctors are now prescribing an ataraxic medicine.It makes those who fear they're about to quit,feel like they're ready to begin,bidding their darkened spirits goodbye,for the calming peace of a cloudless sky.Of all the states throughout this nation,the happiest by far is the state of relaxation.There'll be fewer breakdowns and insomniacs,when more of us have learned to be relaxed.We'll be free to relish the joys of life,no longer tense over daily worries and strife. And it is medication, such as the Pfizer-produced Atarax, which is seen as the key to this panacea of relaxation. Although many think of anti-anxiety medication and anti-depressants as a rather modern way of life, housewives of the 1950s were frequent users of such drugs, the first and most popular being Miltown, named after the New Jersey hamlet in which it was first manufactured in 1955. According to Newsweek, just two years after it was first made available, "Americans had filled 36 million prescriptions for Miltown, more than a billion pills had been manufactured and these so-called 'peace pills' accounted for one third of all prescriptions."

public-domain-review

Mar 24, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:11.349659

the-comic-adventures-of-old-mother-hubbard-and-her-dog-1819

The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog (1819) Mar 12, 2015 The figure of "Old Mother Hubbard" first appeared in print in 1805, the creation of Sarah Catherine Martin (1768-1826), the sister of Thomas Byam Martin, a British Royal Navy officer. The inspiration for the rhyme was the housekeeper of Martin's sister, the rather wonderfully named Mrs Pollexfen Bastard, and it was primarily written to entertain the guests staying at her house in Devonshire. It tells of an old lady and her dog who indulges in a wide array of human activities, such as playing the flute, reading the newspaper, and dressing up in clothes. The version of the book featured above was published in 1819 (by J. Harris, the same publishers who brought out the original 1805 version), complete with a set of delightful coloured illustration, one for each verse. This edition was followed a year later by The Comic Adventures of Old Dame Trot and her Cat (1820), featured below, which seems to be another version of the tale involving similar characters, with Mother Hubbard transforming into Dame Trot and the dog being joined by a cat, the latter taking centre stage. Here, the familiar gender roles of the time are clearly discernible: the male dog being rather mischievous and troublesome, while the female cat helps with various chores around the house.

public-domain-review

Mar 12, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:11.816874

the-art-of-dreams

The Art of Dreams Apr 29, 2015 Half our dayes wee passe in the shadowe of the earth, and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.Thomas Browne, On Dreams ...night after night, with calm incuriousness we open the door into that ghostly underworld, and hold insane revels with fantastic spectres, weep burning tears for empty griefs, babble with foolish laughter at witless jests, stain our souls with useless crime, or fly with freezing blood from the grasp of an unnamed dread ; and, with the morning, saunter serenely back from these wild adventures into the warm precincts of the cheerful day, unmoved, unstartled, and forgetting.Elizabeth Bisland, Dreams and their Mysteries Dreams have long proved a fertile ground for human creativity and expression, and no less so than in the visual arts, giving rise to some of its most arresting images. In addition to the many and varied dreams so important to religion and myth there has emerged, in the last few centuries since the birth of Romanticism, an exploration of the more personal dream-world. Indeed, with its link to the unconscious, the form has perhaps proved the perfect vehicle for those artists looking to surface that which lies submerged - desire, guilt, fear, ambition - to bring to light the truth the waking mind keeps hid. No doubt, also, artists have been attracted to the challenge of giving form to something so visually intangible as a dream, a challenge taken up in many ways through the centuries. More often than not there appears the sleeping body itself, with the dream element incorporated in a variety of ways. Common is for the dream sequence to appear in a totally separate part of the image, as if projected on the walls of the sleeping mind: often in the midst of that familiar floating cloud, but also as emerging from nearby objects or events of the day (see the Toyokuni image below) . Also common, particularly in the depiction of nightmares, is for the figures of the dream to simply appear as though in the room with the sleeper, often directly upon the body itself (see the Fuseli below). With the advent of photography, and the potential of double exposures, we see also a different way of trying to capture that intangibility of the dream image. With both the Grandville and Redon images featured, and the work of the Surrealists they anticipate, we see a different approach entirely, one which looks past the sleeper to focus solely on the imagery of the dream itself, and in the process perhaps giving a more true impression of the strangeness and otherworldliness which so often characterises the dream experience.

public-domain-review

Apr 29, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:12.317784

in-search-of-the-impossible-the-perfect-english-rabbit

In Search of the Impossible: The Perfect English Rabbit Text by Adam Green Apr 2, 2015 The image above details the aesthetic requirements for achieving the "Ideal English Rabbit", the benchmark of perfect markings for a particular breed of rabbit first developed in the middle of the nineteenth century. The diagram reproduces one of a series of eight images created by the English artist Ernest George Wippell for Fur and Feather magazine in 1893, two years after the founding of the English Rabbit Club (though some sources give the date for Wippell's drawings as 1903). In 1927, Fur and Feather published the colour print pictured below in their "ideal breed" series. The portrait came to represent the breed’s ideal, and has fuelled a whole legion of rabbit breeders in their obsessive quest to mimic it exactly in live bunny form, complete with a "butterfly smut" nose, particular sweep of 33 spots across the flank (symmetrical on both sides), and the distinctive black stripe down the spine. Due to the ways and wiles of evolutionary genetics, so shot through with chance and "noise" as it is, the task is pretty much impossible. As Steve Jones of UCL comments in the highly recommended BBC radio programme "Roger's Rabbits", it is "a quest without any possibility of success". This, however, does not stop the breeders of the English rabbit from trying, with hundreds gathering at regular exhibitions to compete against each other in their attempts to hone in on the perfect ideal. Famous breeder of English rabbits, Fred Haslam, commented on the process, "Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible."

public-domain-review

Apr 2, 2015

Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:12.759877

the-dream-god-or-a-singular-evolvement-of-thought-in-sleep-1873

The Dream-God, or A Singular Evolvement of Thought in Sleep (1873) Feb 18, 2015 A short and curious work recounting an extremely vivid and elaborate vision while under the influence of morphine. The tale seems to be based on a true story, an experience of the author John Cunningham who explains in a "Letter to My Friends" that "Although requested by a number of you at various times to write this condensed narrative of an event in my life, associated with much misfortune, sadness and suffering which have continued for some years, it was not until during a lonely period of quietude at Brooklyn, N.Y., in the summer of 1872, that I made the effort." The tale, told in the third person, begins with a short preface telling how Cunningham came to tell his story: The peculiar and startling effect of morphine on a person unaccustomed to its administration, was happily illustrated in the instance of a gentleman to whom, under its influence, (about three eighths of a grain,) the dream to be related occurred. This individual, (a South Carolinian resident on a plantation,) a few years ago, had lately received a severe and extensive burn, which confined him to his bed six months. An allusion by him in a casual conversation in the city of New York recently to the eventful dream and its circumstances, brought out a solicitation to him to write its narrative, which in substance he here gives. Cunningham's narrative then beings proper: The sleep was serene, the mind active, and the dream promptly and vividly supervened. A being in the form of a handsome and matured man, full of esprit, in a white and easy-fitting garment, with bright, broad and sweeping wings coming out from each side of his back below the shoulders, appeared to the patient at his bedside, and announced to him that he was the Spirit of Morphine, of a heavenly and immortal nature, and that he had come to carry him on an aerial voyage over many parts of the world, to show him many attractive regions and things, to introduce him to various races, royal personages, distinguished celebrities, etc. The morphine-addled "Sleeper", as he is referred to throughout, then proceeds to accompany the "Spirit" on a long and winding flight witnessing a range of strange and marvellous natural phenomena - such as a window at the North-pole down into the fiery core, and 500 foot primordial lizards - as well as a whole host of spiritual and philosophical encounters with the likes of Confucius, Cleopatra, and Zoroaster.

public-domain-review

Feb 18, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:13.229599

photograph-collection-of-a-19th-century-sexologist

Photograph Collection of a 19th-Century Sexologist Text by Adam Green Apr 14, 2015 Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) was a German-Austrian psychiatrist and early sexologist, whose book Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie, first published in 1886 (and translated into English in 1892), became a great influence within the emerging study of sexology. The book, which Krafft-Ebing continued to expand throughout twelve editions until his death, is a scientific study of sexual deviation consisting of over 200 case studies. Intended for the use of physicians, psychiatrists and judges (and written partly in Latin in order to discourage the general public from reading it), the book explores fetishism, sadism, masochism and homosexuality, as well as nymphomania, necrophilia, and incest. For Krafft-Ebing, any desire for sex unrelated to procreation was a deviation from the heterosexual norm, making, for example, gay sex a "perversion" of the sexual instinct. The photographs featured here are part of Krafft-Ebing’s personal collection. It is unknown where they came from or who the people featured in the photographs are, although, at least the first two photographs appear to be unusual specimens of the "French postcard" which was so popular in the late-19th century. One assumes the photographs are linked to Krafft-Ebing’s studies, but as for how or where they were produced and procured is a mystery.

public-domain-review

Apr 14, 2015

Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:13.733441

america-a-personification-ca-1590

America, a Personification (ca. 1590) Mar 10, 2015 A late 16th-century Dutch print depicting a female personification of the continent America, engraved by Flemish designer and engraver Adriaen Collaert after a design by Maerten de Vos. The print is part of a series of four depicting each of the continents (minus Antarctica), though of the four it is the only to show scenes of violence and conquest, perhaps not surprising since America's "discovery" by Europeans would have been relatively fresh in the memory. Pictured riding atop an armadillo, there is something sad, and indeed ominous, about the direction of America's gaze — turned away from the traditional life of hunting (and roasting human meat) depicted on the left, toward the mass bloodshed and slaughter brought about by the arrival of the Spanish depicted on the right.

public-domain-review

Mar 10, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:14.223795

the-cynic-s-word-book-1906

The Cynic’s Word Book (1906) Text by Adam Green Mar 31, 2015 The Cynic's Word Book is a satirical dictionary written by American journalist and author Ambrose Bierce (1842-ca.1914), a man whose savage wit earned him the nickname "Bitter Bierce". The targets for Bierce's mockery are wide-ranging: from lawyers ("one skilled in circumvention of the law") to the institution of marriage ("a household consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two"); from Christians ("one who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin), to the very idea of the self ("ALONE, adj. In bad company"). Although it was perhaps the most popular, Bierce's satirical dictionary was certainly not the first. That accolade most probably could go to the 14th-century Persian Nizam-od-Din Obayd-i Zakani. It was in Bierce's time, however, that the idea really took off. In 1911, five years after Bierce's book was first published, Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues (The Dictionary of Received Ideas) by Gustave Flaubert was post-humously released. Compiled from a series of notes written in the 1870s, it isn't clear whether Flaubert ever intended the "dictionary" for publication, but the idea of a spoof encyclopedia had fascinated him all his life. As for Bierce's effort, it had its seed in a series of newspaper and magazine columns. First appearing in 1881 in the weekly magazine The Wasp, of which he was the editor-in-chief, Bierce worked on the dictionary, which was then called The Devil's Dictionary, between 1881–86, including 88 instalments, each consisting of 15–20 new definitions. When Bierce became an editor of The San Francisco Examiner in 1887, he introduced The Cynic's Dictionary, a continuation on the same theme (with the title changed due to the "the religious scruples" of the paper's owners). The dictionary was first reproduced in book form in 1906 under the title The Cynic's Word Book, and since 1911, expanded editions returning to its original title of The Devil's Dictionary. Bierce also wrote about his experiences during the Civil War, publishing a collection of 26 short stories entitled Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in 1891. Bierce's death is a mystery: while traveling with rebel troops during the Mexican Revolution in 1913, he disappeared without a trace. His disappearance has become one of the most famous in American literary history.

public-domain-review

Mar 31, 2015

Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:14.766548

the-memoirs-of-lieut-henry-timberlake-1765

The Memoirs of Lieut. Henry Timberlake (1765) Apr 15, 2015 These memoirs of the Anglo-American colonial officer Lieutenant Henry Timberlake focus on the last seven years of his life, and specifically his work as emissary to the Cherokee Indians, including a remarkable journey made in 1762 with three Cherokee leaders to London to meet King George III. In 1760, relations between the British and the Cherokee people became hostile when several Cherokee chiefs were imprisoned and killed in South Carolina. A year later, Cherokee Chief Kanagatucko asked for peace and for an officer to accompany him home as a sign that the hostilities had ended. The man who volunteered for the job was Henry Timberlake. Having first traveled with Chief Kanagatucko to the town of Tomotley where he met Chief Ostenaco, he later arranged for Ostenaco and two other Cherokee leaders to travel to London in 1762 after Ostenaco expressed a wish to meet King George III. Timberlake describes a near cultural faux-pas between the two leaders: They were struck with the youth, person and grandeur of his majesty, and conceived as great an opinion of his affability as of his power, the greatness of which may be seen on my telling them in what manner to behave; for finding Ostenaco preparing his pipe to smoke with his majesty, according to the Indian custom of declaring friendship, I told him he must neither offer to shake hands or smoke with the King, as it was an honour for the greatest of our nation to kiss his hand. You are in the right, says he, for he commands over all next to the Man above, and nobody is his equal. He also tells of the Cherokee's encounter with British alcohol: Once, in particular, one of the young Indians got extremely intoxicated, and committed several irregularities, that ought rather to be attributed to those that enticed them, than to the simple Indians, who drank only to please them. I cannot indeed cite sobriety as their characteristic; but this I can say, these excesses never happened at home. The trip went well, and in 1764 the Cherokees again traveled to London with the hopes of appealing to the king to restrict colonists to east of the Appalachians as the settlers were encroaching on Cherokee land. However, this second trip was unsuccessful. The Cherokee were refused an audience and sent back in March 1765, with Timberlake remaining in London as he was arrested for failing to pay the bill for the lodging of himself and the Cherokees. Indeed, it was probably while he was incarcerated that Timberlake wrote these memoirs, which later became a valuable source of information regarding the Cherokee people and their beliefs and customs. Timberlake died the same year of publication, a brief newspaper obituary being glued opposite the title page in the copy featured above.

public-domain-review

Apr 15, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:15.232625

journey-from-venice-to-palestine-mount-sinai-and-egypt-ca-1467

Journey from Venice to Palestine, Mount Sinai and Egypt (ca. 1467) Feb 24, 2015 Selected images from a beautifully illustrated account of a journey made from Italy to the Middle East. Although this book (known as Egerton 1900) was purported to reflect a journey made in 1465 by Gabriel Muffel, third son of the Nuremburg patrician Nicholas Muffel, the travelogue is, however, merely a German translation of an account of a journey made more than a century earlier. This actual journey was undertaken by the Franciscan friar Niccolo da Poggibonsi who visited the Holy Land in 1346-50, and wrote up his travels in the Italian book Libro d’oltramare. The work remained untranslated until Muffel got hold of it, also supplying it with 147 miniatures, a selection of which are presented below. The confusion doesn't stop there. Muffel's account was then translated back into Italian, printed at Bologna in 1500. Originally the author was ‘anonymous’ but the account was, in due course, recognised to be that of Niccolo da Poggibonsi, though it was not realised that it was in fact a translation of Muffel's translation of the original. This Bologna 1500 printing enjoyed a huge success with 26 editions being published before 1600. For more on this latter manuscript and how it relates to Egerton 1900 see this page on the British Library site.

public-domain-review

Feb 24, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:15.552358

account-of-an-extraordinary-fireball-bursting-at-sea-1749

Account of an Extraordinary Fireball Bursting at Sea (1749) Apr 28, 2015 An account given by a Mr. Chalmers, published in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, telling of a remarkable incident occurring out at sea. Mr Chalmers writes of how, in 1749, from the deck of the Montague as it sailed in the Mediterranean just north of Corsica, he saw a blue fireball rolling on the surface of the water and making its way towards the ship. As the crew lowered the sails and tried to avoid impact, the mysterious ball rose up and exploded, making a sound "as if Hundreds of Cannons had been fired at one time; and left so great a Smell of Brimstone, that the Ship seemed to be nothing but Sulphur". The ball left the main topmast of the ship shattered and tore the mainmast sail. Surprisingly, only five men were "knocked down" but one of them sustained burns from the explosion. It is unclear what caused the fireball or what it actually was.

public-domain-review

Apr 28, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:16.035109

kinetophone-actor-audition-ca-1913

Kinetophone Actor Audition (ca. 1913) Apr 21, 2015 This is the recording of the voice audition of Frank Lenord from around 1913, including the reading of a letter as well as a short rendition of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech. The Kinetophone of the title refers to a combination of a phonograph and Kinetoscope, both of which were invented by Thomas Edison. While the phonograph could record and reproduce sound, the Kinetoscope was an early device for viewing films, though only one person at a time could watch the film through a viewer window on the device. The Kinetophone, invented in 1895, aimed to combine both picture and sound. The film could still only be viewed by one person, but a set of headphones connected to the machine made it possible to combine sound to the film, with different music tracks available. By 1913, the machine was able to project the film onto a screen with the phonograph placed separately in the room. However, the novelty was short lived, as the synchronisation of picture and sound did not always work and the sound quality was poor.

public-domain-review

Apr 21, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:16.576098

20000-leagues-under-the-sea-1916

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916) Feb 26, 2015 The very first motion picture filmed underwater, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a 1916 silent film adaptation of Jules Vernes' novel of the same name, as well as incorporating elements from his The Mysterious Island. Directed by Stuart Paton, the underwater scenes were not actually filmed using underwater cameras but rather a system of watertight tubes and mirrors which allowed the camera to shoot reflected images of underwater scenes staged in shallow sunlit waters. Made by The Universal Film Manufacturing Company (now Universal Pictures), not then known as a major motion picture studio, it was incredibly expensive to produce and, according Hal Erickson, put "the kibosh on any subsequent Verne adaptations for the next 12 years".

public-domain-review

Feb 26, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:17.083247

photographs-of-a-falling-cat-1894

Photographs of a Falling Cat (1894) Text by Adam Green Feb 17, 2015 Certain scientific circles of the nineteenth century were home to a rather unexpected preoccupation: the dropping of cats. While at university in Trinity College, Cambridge, James Clerk Maxwell, who would go onto become arguably the greatest theoretical physicist of the nineteenth century, was reportedly well known for the activity. In a letter to his wife reflecting on this reputation he'd earned, Maxwell wrote, "There is a tradition in Trinity that when I was here I discovered a method of throwing a cat so as not to light on its feet, and that I used to throw cats out of windows. I had to explain that the proper object of research was to find how quick the cat would turn round, and that the proper method was to let the cat drop on a table or bed from about two inches, and that even then the cat lights on her feet." He was not the only prominent scientist to be intrigued by the question of how cats, when falling from a height, seemingly were able to defy the laws of Newtonian physics and change motion in mid air to land on their feet. At around the same time, the eminent mathematician George Stokes was also prone to a spot of "cat-turning". As his daughter relates in a 1907 memoir: "He was much interested, as also was Prof. Clerk Maxwell about the same time, in cat-turning, a word invented to describe the way in which a cat manages to fall upon her feet if you hold her by the four feet and drop her, back downwards, close to the floor." Despite the many falling cats, neither Maxwell nor Stokes made much headway in their investigations. It wasn't until some decades later, with the invention of chronophotography (which allowed many photographs to be taken in quick succession), that a more rigorous study could be applied beyond the limitations of the human eye. The man to do it was the French scientist and photographer Étienne-Jules Marey who in 1894 created a series of images from which he was able to make some important deductions. The images pictured below, captured at 12 frames per second, debunked the idea that the cat was using the dropper's hand as a fulcrum in order to begin the motion of turning at the beginning of the fall. Rather, the pictures showed that the cat had no rotational motion at the start of its descent and so was somehow acquiring angular momentum while in free-fall. Marey published these pictures, and his investigations, in an 1894 issue of Comptes Rendus, with a summary of his findings published in the journal Nature in the same year. The latter summarises Marey's thoughts as follows: M. Marey thinks that it is the inertia of its own mass that the cat uses to right itself. The torsion couple which produces the action of the muscles of the vertebra acts at first on the forelegs, which have a very small motion of inertia on account of the front feet being foreshortened and pressed against the neck. The hind legs, however, being stretched out and almost perpendicular to the axis of the body, possesses a moment of inertia which opposes motion in the opposite direction to that which the torsion couple tends to produce. In the second phase of the action, the attitude of the feet is reversed, and it is the inertia of the forepart that furnishes a fulcrum for the rotation of the rear. In a rather humorous turn the author of the article also states that "The expression of offended dignity shown by the cat at the end of the first series indicates a want of interest in scientific investigation." Despite Marey's seemingly clear photographic evidence, many physicists continued to believe that the cat was using the dropper's hand as a fulcrum. It would be more than 70 years later until the riddle was finally solved, in Kane and Scher's 1969 paper "A dynamical explanation of the falling cat phenomenon". For more info on how the cat manages it see the great Wikipedia entries under "Falling Cat Problem" and "Cat Righting Reflex" (both of which include a handy diagram) and also this video from Smarter Everyday.

public-domain-review

Feb 17, 2015

Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:17.389538

nekrokedeia-or-the-art-of-embalming-1705

Nekrokēdeia or The Art of Embalming (1705) Mar 19, 2015 Written and published by Thomas Greenhill, an 18th-century surgeon, Nekrokēdeia is a collection of all things related to death and burial, focusing in particular on the history and art of embalming. Greenhill believed that embalming was a subject just as important as anatomy or surgery and advocated for its practice, discussing it from a medical as well as a religious perspective. The book is divided into three letters, all addressed to a specific doctor: the first to Charles Bernard, Serjeant Surgeon to Queen Anne, the second to John Lawson, the former president of the Royal College of Physicians and the third to Hans Sloane, secretary to the Royal Society (whose vast collection was to become the founding collection of the British Museum). As is perhaps to be expected a large proportion of the book is devoted to exploring the practise of mummification in Ancient Egypt, though it is an exploration long and meandering with many deviations, such as the section on the temperament of the Egyptian people whom he states are "hot and dry" and of a "chearful Temper, yet delight much in an idle and lazy kind of Life, being immoderate votaries to Venus". Large sections of the book, as Greenhill himself admits, are borrowed from previous works, as are the illustrations, in particular from Athanasius Kircher's work on Ancient Egypt from 50 years earlier. Greenhill's book was originally meant to consist of three parts, but only the first was published and this by subscription.

public-domain-review

Mar 19, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:17.856242

english-book-plates-ancient-and-modern-1893

English Book-Plates, Ancient and Modern (1893) Mar 5, 2015 A marvellous book all about the bookplate, or ex-libris, the small and often highly decorative label pasted into a book, most usually on the inside front cover, to indicate its owner. Although the earliest known marks of ownership of books or documents dates from the latter years of Ancient Egypt, and people would mark ownership in the Middle Ages with simple inscriptions, it wasn't until the advent of printing in 15th-century Germany that we see the development of bookplates in their more modern decorative form. One of the best known of these early German examples is the "gift-plate" of Hildebrand Brandenburg of Biberach to the Monastery of Buxheim (c. 1480), showing an angel holding a shield of arms. Many famous artists of the day got involved in these early designs, including Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach and Hans Holbein. By the late 17th and early 18th centuries the phenomenon had spread to France and England, and by the late 19th century, with the publication of A Guide to the Study of Book-Plates (Ex-Libris) by Lord de Tabley, the study and collection of bookplates on their own terms began to gain in popularity, with societies being founded and dedicated journals published. As to why one might need a bookplate, the introduction to this volume explains it rather eloquently: And now concerning the reasons for a custom which may be said to be almost as old as the printed book itself, and which is anything but on the wane at the present time. — Books are not consumable goods, but chattels intended to endure; they are at all times invested with definite intrinsic value, often with fanciful preciousness. But, to fulfil their destiny, they must consort with many people, and, during the inevitable changing of hands, may easily lose their way back to the rightful owner. This dread fate may overtake them even without any intermeddling of the traditional malice prepense of book-borrowers, for, after all, almost all books have numerous brethren singularly like unto themselves. And, having once lost their way, they might lightly find themselves established in new colonies, were it not for the safeguard of some unmistakable mark of ownership. Thus it may be said that the primary object of an ex-libris, is precautionary against loss, by accident or through the negligence of borrowers ; (whether a book-plate has ever fulfilled that purpose is, however, an open question still). A second, closely connected with the first, is to secure the identification of a valued tome as part of a collection. A third and universal object of the book-plate is, as I have said before, to gratify the sense of possession by giving some kind of personal character to chattels which in themselves are only specimens of more or less copious batches, or (by a curious, though intelligible reversal of the same idea) by giving this character to a work which the present owner believes to be almost unique of its kind. From this peculiar feeling, difficult to express, but which can be recalled no doubt by all book-lovers, this desire to invest books with some more "personal" character, depends the custom noticeable in so many ex-libris ancient and modern, of dovetailing with the plain statement of ownership some more or less original "sentiment," or some bibliophilic motto which denotes a prevailing taste or bias of thought in the owner. Scooting back to the very first pages will reveal that this book itself, rather appropriately, has a bookplate, of a certain J Balfour Paul, as well as one from the University of California where the book still resides.

public-domain-review

Mar 5, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:18.321600

guido-gialdini-whistling-arditi-s-the-kiss-1908

Guido Gialdini whistling Arditi’s The Kiss (1908) Apr 1, 2015 Guido Gialdini was a "whistler" known for his ability to whistle any tune he heard. Born in Germany and actually named Kurt Abramowitsch, Gialdini became famous through various recordings made both in Europe and the United States. The song performed here by Gialdini is Il Bacio or The Kiss, composed by the Italian conductor and composer Luigi Arditi (1822-1903). Not much is known of Gialdini's life or indeed his death but, being of Jewish decent, it is thought that he died in a concentration camp during the Second World War.

public-domain-review

Apr 1, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:18.817118

illustrations-from-a-teenage-holiday-journal-1821

Illustrations from a Teenage Holiday Journal (1821) Apr 23, 2015 Illustrations from the teenage diary of Mary Browne (1807-1833), which was published in 1905, more than 80 years after it was written. Born in England in 1807, Mary was 14-years-old when she wrote the diary which tells of her experiences travelling down to London and on to France with her family during the summer of 1821. Like a true teenager, she was not impressed with what she saw, writing: About Calais was the ugliest country without exception I ever beheld; there was scarcely a tree to be seen, no hedgerows, no pretty cottages, everything looked dirty and miserable; there was a great deal of sand, and the country looked exactly like a desert; I thought that if this was a specimen of France, it was certainly a most charming place! Indeed she seemed to have generally a negative view of all things French: The French children are old-fashioned, dull, grave, and ugly: like little old women in their appearance. The babies are wrapt up in swaddling-clothes like mummies, and they wear queer little cotton hats. The nurses carry them very carefully hanging on their arms; they say that nursing them, or tossing them about, makes them mad. Despite her antipathy she produced a wonderful range of studies of the people she encountered, as well as various situations, such as a village fête and a puppet show. There are also some impressive illustrations of soldiers which she saw at the funeral procession of Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre, Duchess of Orléans. She also managed to witness a visit from the King at Versailles, remarking that "The King is a very fat, contented-looking man." Little is known about Mary's short life (she died when just 26 years old). The introduction, written by her niece Euphemia Stewart Browne, tells of how she was a keen naturalist and later turned her artistic talents to painting "an exquisite collection of butterflies and moths" which was left unfinished at her untimely death.

public-domain-review

Apr 23, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:19.264826

the-photographs-of-hugo-simberg

The Photographs of Hugo Simberg Mar 18, 2015 In June 2014, the Finnish National Gallery released digitisations of almost a thousand photographs taken by the Finnish painter Hugo Simberg (1873-1917), offering a fascinating insight into the artist's working practices and an intimate glimpse into daily life with family and friends. A key figure of the symbolist movement, Simberg was known for his unique paintings blending realistic portraiture, landscape, and fantasy, with odd figures often featuring. Devils and trolls are often depicted, as is Death who takes the form of a skeleton wearing a black robe, most famously in The Garden of Death, a theme that Simberg worked on in various forms between 1896-1906. After beginning his art studies in Vyborg, Simberg later became a pupil of Akseli Gallen-Kallela, one of the biggest names in Finnish art. Although the public found Simberg’s symbolistic and naïve depictions of supernatural beings odd, they gradually warmed up to him, and he was commissioned to decorate St John’s Church in Tampere, now Tampere Cathedral. One of the frescoes found in the church is a reproduction of The Garden of Death (1896) while a continuous fresco, The Garland Bearers (1906), depicts twelve young boys carrying a garland of roses, representing the disciples of Christ carrying the vine of life. Simberg also painted a red-winged serpent of Paradise on the ceiling, sparking off considerable protest, and as late as 1946, the bishop of Tampere Diocese proposed that it be removed. The collection from which the photographs below have been selected, all taken between 1891 and 1917, are part of the Hugo Simberg archive belonging to The Finnish National Gallery's Archive Collections. In many of the photographs we see the models from which his famous works - such as The Wounded Angel and The Garland Bearers - are based, as well as Simberg at work on his controversial snake fresco. The collection also offers a unique insight into the personal life of the painter, showing him at play with his family and friends, in addition to revealing him to be a talented photographer in his own right. The photographs are available as a mass download in zip format through the Finnish National Gallery website, or in browseable form over at Flickr The Commons.

public-domain-review

Mar 18, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:19.704581

the-westinghouse-works-1904

The Westinghouse Works (1904) Apr 30, 2015 These films are part of the Westinghouse Works Collection which contains 21 films depicting various views of the Westinghouse companies. Founded in 1886 by George Westinghouse, the Westinghouse Electric Company (later renamed Westinghouse Electric Corporation) produced turbines and coils for electricity while also being the rivaling company of Thomas Edison's General Electric. Notable workers included inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla and Bertha Lamme, who started working for Westinghouse in 1893 after being the first woman to receive a degree in engineering from the Ohio State University. The films, which were made for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904 feature footage from the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, the Electric and Manufacturing Company, and the Machine Company, showing both male and female workers. It was common for female workers to be unmarried, and when Bertha Lamme married her supervisor Russell Feicht in 1905, she was forced to retire since company policy forbade them from working together.

public-domain-review

Apr 30, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:20.256315

after-london-1911

After London (1911) Text by Adam Green Apr 7, 2015 First published in 1885, Richard Jefferies' After London can be seen as one of the most important early examples of "post-apocalyptic fiction". The story tells of how London becomes a swampland after an unspecified natural disaster delivers England over to the mercy of nature. Divided into two parts, "The Relapse into Barbarism" recounts the fall of civilisation while the second longer section entitled "Wild England" follows Felix Aquila, the male protagonist, as he builds a canoe and explores more of the world around him. As an author, Jefferies was noted for his more everyday depiction of nature and rural life. The son of a Wiltshire farmer, he began his work as a reporter for the North Wiltshire Herald in 1866 and later found success through his articles written for the Pall Mall Gazette. Based on his childhood acquaintances and experiences, he wrote a series of essays called The Gamekeeper at Home (1878), followed by three more collections which were first published in the Pall Mall Gazette and then in book form, including Wild Life in a Southern County and The Amateur Poacher, both appearing in 1879, and Round About a Great Estate in 1880. He also published two children's books, Wood Magic (1881) and Bevis (1882), both of which feature a young boy named Bevis who can communicate with animals and inanimate parts of nature, such as the stream and wind.

public-domain-review

Apr 7, 2015

Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:20.724216

tom-ennis-irish-jigs-reels-and-polkas-1917

Tom Ennis - Irish Jigs, Reels, and Polkas (1917) Mar 17, 2015 Irish Jigs Medley (1917) Tom Ennis (with uncredited piano accompaniment) plays a medley of traditional Irish jigs in this recording made on April 7, 1917. The four tunes are "The Three Little Drummers", The Connachtman's Rambles", "The Joy of Life", and "Nancy Hynes". Irish Reels - Medley No.6 (1917) A medley of three traditional Irish reels - "The Maid That Left The County", "Drowsy Maggie", and "Around the World for Sport" Irish Polkas (1922) In a rare rendition of polkas on the pipes Tom Ennis is joined by John Gerrity. Tom Ennis was the son of John Ennis, also an accomplished piper, who emigrated from Kildare to Nebraska to work on the construction of the railroads. Tom was born in 1888 in Nebraska but after John Ennis was offered a job in the Chicago Police Department, the entire Ennis family relocated. Taught by his father to play the pipes, Tom became the youngest member of Chicago’s Irish Fiddle Club in the early years of the 20th century. Tom moved to New York in his 20s where he made a living as a professional piper and founded one of the first Irish-American recording companies, for whom he commercially recorded in the 1910s and 20s. He also owned a music store during this same time at 59th Street and Columbus Circle in New York City (More info here).

public-domain-review

Mar 17, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:21.227906

53-stations-of-the-tokaido-as-potted-landscapes-1848

53 Stations of the Tōkaidō as Potted Landscapes (1848) Mar 26, 2015 Connecting Edo (now known as Tokyo) to Kyoto, the Tōkaidō road was the most important of the "Five Routes" in Edo-period Japan. This coastal road and its fifty-three stations has been the subject of both art and literature, perhaps most famously depicted by the Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige in his The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, a series of ukiyo-e woodcut prints created in the 1830s. This book from the mid-19th century, Tokaido Gojusan-eki Hachiyama Edyu, presents a series of fifty-three prints created by a relatively obscure ukiyo-e artist named Utagawa Yoshishige, each illustration depicting a Tōkaidō station in the form of a potted landscape. The preface tells us that the illustrations are based on actual pieces constructed by the preface writer’s father, Kimura Tōsen. Creating the models in 1847, a year before publication, Tōsen commissioned Utagawa Yoshishige to make illustrations of each model for a book through which he could share them with the world, and (due to his modesty) asked his son to write the preface. There are two main arts of the potted landscape in Japanese tradition - saikei and bonkei. Similar to the practice of bonsai, saikei is the art of creating tray landscapes, combining miniature trees with rocks and water as well as other vegetation, while bonkei is a permanent tray landscape in which no living materials are used. While saikei landscapes feature only scenes of nature, a bonkei can feature people or buildings, with mountains made out of rocks and sculptable materials such as papier-mâché. It seems that these landscapes created by Kimura Tōsen are the latter. Although this copy of the book held by the USDA states the date publication as 1848, it is most likely a post-Edo reprint (post-1868) as the publisher’s location is given as Tokyo City, Kanda Ward — both terms from after the implementation of Meiji government. Many thanks to Stephen M. Forrest, Senior Lecturer in Japanese Language and Literature at University of Massachusetts Amherst, for his help in translating the preface and offering other valuable information about the book.

public-domain-review

Mar 26, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:21.666496

the-man-with-the-rubber-head-1902

The Man With The Rubber Head (1902) Apr 16, 2015 The Man With The Rubber Head, or L'Homme à la tête de Caoutchouc, is a French silent film from 1902 directed by Georges Méliès. It features a scientist (played by Méliès himself) who places a living copy of his own head on a table, attaches a pair of bellows to it, and begins to blow air into the head, making it swell like a balloon. The film is a classic example of Méliès mastery of early special effects. To create the illusion of a head which grows in size, he filmed himself moving toward a stationary camera and then superimposed this upon a static shot of the laboratory where the head ballooning experiment takes place.

public-domain-review

Apr 16, 2015

collection

2024-05-01T21:47:21.970966

the-encyclopedia-of-light

The Encyclopedia of Light By Peter Schmidt April 13, 2022 All writing elides, to a greater or lesser degree, the way it came to be what you read. How many times did I start that last sentence? Five times. But four of them are no more. Had I penned those words in ink, however, scribbling away on a sheet of paper, traces of each false start would remain, and you would see my thinking in a way that, reading me now, you do not. Composition in digital media has, in this way, made for a special kind of frictionless world of sublated erasures, deleted deletions, and endless, invisible recompositions. In the affecting work of sensory history that follows, Peter Schmidt uses the “strikethrough” as a kind of shadow-writing: his “Encyclopedia of Light” reveals little dark threads of undoing — marks of the second thought that endlessly cancels the first. We write, now, of course, with light, looking at glowing screens. But it is a strangeness of our monitors that we erase what we have written with still more light: a blinking cursor, backing over the words. What is Goethe supposed to have said upon his deathbed? Mehr Licht! More light! And he was erased. What follows, too, reaches for light — but the light will not be grasped.— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor Morning. After rain, the park glows green beneath a dark sky. ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light consists of Minutes before sunset. The hot orange glow before the light slips off the top of buildings and over the horizon. If there is a name for this phenomenon, it eludes me. ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is a response to a timeless question Socrates — Surely sight may be present in the eyes and its possessor may try to use it, and colors may be present in things; but unless a third kind of thing is present, which is naturally adapted for this specific purpose, you know that sight will see nothing and the colors will remain unseen. Glaucon — What kind of thing do you mean? Socrates — The kind you call light… Early morning. Soft yellow on the Armory facade. ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is an exhaustive a partial fuck it an exhaustive inventory catalog of the diverse moments phenomena manifestations forms encounters characteristics qualities properties qualities qualities… Mid-afternoon. Cranes turning above the Parkway. Cool, milky, color of pearl. Observed from roof. (Should I record temperature?) Sixty degrees in late November. Riddle me that. ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light hopes Read the headlines again today and wondered: does all this exposure make us more sensitive to the beauty that’s fleeing the world, or less? An anonymous observer in the Vaisheshika, India’s ancient school of Vedic philosophy, asserted in the sixth century BC that light and heat are “one substance” of two types: latent (seen) and manifest (felt). “Fire is both seen and felt. The heat of hot water is felt but not seen; moon shine is seen but not felt. The visual ray is neither seen nor felt.” Mid-morning. North-bound bus stop. Warmth on the back of my neck, an uneasy twitch beneath the ribs. ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is a curious mode of escape The centuries-long debate over light’s source—eye or object?—was settled by Moorish mathematician Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040). al-Haytham reasoned that, if it pains one’s eyes to behold the sun, then sunlight cannot possibly originate in the eyes, and must therefore be imparted by the object of vision itself. He conducted his research in the near-darkness of a mausoleum near Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque… ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is lonely work Early evening. Between the suspension cables flickering past the train window, a satin-soft purple glow. I make a point to look out of the window when crossing the bridge. To see so many lives through one pane reminds me that my reality is just one of an uncountable many. Often this thought saddens me, but today it comes as a relief. ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light finds solace in the pursuit of objectivity Hazy evening. HTML color code #CEFFF9: R206, G255, B249. Dusk. Atlantic Seafoam™ (Oil Base, All Surface, Corrosion Resistant). ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is a partial catalog of the diverse qualities of light which how exactly do I intend to pull that off is an excellent question The cyanometer (/saɪ əˈnɒm ɪ tər/) is an instrument for measuring “blueness” attributed to naturalists and explorers Alexander Humboldt and Horace-Bénédict de Saussure. The device comprises squares of paper dyed in graduated shades of blue which can be held up and compared to the color of the sky. De Saussure's cyanometer had 53 sections… Eleven-thirty. From the train window, a green-blue sky. Number twenty-two, a la De Sausurre Sausure Saussure. (…on second thought, it is closer to a number seventeen.) ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is looking for a more reliable method In one work, Isaac Newton (1643-1727) schematized the constituent wavelengths of white light by matching each spectral color to a range of frequencies on the musical scale: purple (G-a), indigo (a-b flat), blue (b flat-c), green (c-d), yellow (d-e), orange (e-f) and red (f-g). According to Newton’s device, any visible wavelength has its corresponding musical tone… Mid-afternoon by the river. The twinkle of the ferry’s wake. Fm7 arpeggios. Morning. Overcast. E-flat minor funeral dirge. ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light seeks to create meaning in the unbridgeable gap between an external phenomenon and the attempt to record, catalog and and reproduce that phenomenon In his Theory of Colors, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) asserted that each of light’s spectral colors were naturally generative of a particular mood. Yellow produces “a serene, gay, softly exciting character”; blue, “a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose…” In Goethe’s view, to every quality of light there corresponds a distinct emotional temperament… Midnight, looking from the bridge toward the city. Awestruck elation. Morning, from the terrace. Creeping, bashful despair. ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is getting a little melodramatic don’t you think When Louis Daguérre (1787-1851) produced the first image on a plate of silver iodide treated with carbonic acid and chlorate of potassium, he burst into a fellow light-lover’s shop and cried: “I have seized the fleeting light and imprisoned it! I have forced the sun to paint pictures for me!” Morning. Light through the window is grey. ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light sure has lost its joie de vivre (…steamed milk, river slate, pigeon’s wings.) ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is an my attempt to capture isolate preserve, in a historical moment characterized by inescapable loss, I imagine sometimes, that when the ocean has swallowed the coasts and the forests have burned, I will look up to find a lavender glow hanging above me, and recall having seen this very same light before, and when it was, and where, and permit myself the comforting, if fleeting notion, that maybe not so much has changed. Radiative forcing is the variation in the energy flux of the atmosphere resulting from the interaction of sunlight, the earth’s surface and natural and anthropogenic particulates… Estimates suggest that the total amount of solar energy trapped by greenhouse gases since 1998 is equivalent to more than 3.1 billion of the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima… Midday. Fresh light, like the down on baby chicks. Midwinter thaw. My body betrays its dread—I breathe in and flush with the premature thrill of spring. From the Abrahamic invocation of “Let there be light” to the luminous formation of heaven in the Japanese Tenchi-Kaibyakuhe to the Congolese Bushongo myth of the god Bumba retching up the sun, the emergence of light from darkness figures prominently in creation myths around the world… ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light supposes that if you can’t control reality, the next best thing is to represent it Inspired by the deep blue glaciers of the western Alps, John Tyndall set out to understand the relationship between aerosols and the mystifying blueness of the sky. His experiments filling a glass cylinder with mixtures of various gases, including carbon dioxide, benzene and butyl nitrite, and illuminating them with a beam of light, produced a variety of celestial blue clouds. The result of his experiment, he wrote, “rivals, if it does not transcend, that of the deepest and purest Italian sky.” Tyndall’s colleague, philosopher John Ruskin, praised Tyndall’s creating “within an experimental tube, a bit of more perfect sky than the sky itself.” Yet on the same day Ruskin wrote in a letter to a friend: “I’ll thank them—the men of science—and so will a wiser future world—if they’ll return to old magic—and let the sky out of the bottle again, and cork the devil in…” Afternoon. Above the Navy Yard, a light like dirty bath water. The city air bears the hint of woodsmoke—a taste that, in my body, recalls only laughter, rocking chairs, melted marshmallows. Warnings were issued throughout the Pacific Northwest, where more than 72 major wildfires are currently raging. “These smoke particles scatter blue light and only allow yellow-orange-red light to reach the surface, causing skies to look orange,” the Bay Area Air District reported on Twitter… Past midnight. Rather than going back to sleep, I open the sliding door, step onto the terrace and gasp. The cold is unexpected, almost inconceivable. The city is a dull sodium-orange smolder against the low dark clouds. I can look for only so long. Back in bed, I warm my stiff fingers between my thighs and feel my heart hammering against my ribs. Eventually, I cannot help but laugh at my body’s alarm. As if this were the first time I had felt the cold. The proposed operation would spray calcium carbonate (CaCO3) aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet. Models suggest that these particulates would change the color of blue skies to a cloudy white. Beyond that, however, the project’s directors concede that they cannot predict what effects this solar geo-engineering would have on the earth’s climate… ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is well aware that it is a hopeless endeavor Time slows at the speed of light… New Year’s. Sunrise from the roof. Clouds flash and the sky shimmers with the red of a firing forge. So this is how the future looks, I think. I had forgotten that burning has its own beauty. Some time passes before I understand that I am crying. ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light seeks comfort in this notion: you will never lose that which cannot be captured Light may be colored because certain wavelengths are lost. ¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is an exercise in Morning. After rain, The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 13, 2022

Peter Schmidt

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:35.677037

an-archaeology-of-surf

An Archaeology of Surf By Melissa McCarthy May 19, 2021 “All plots tend to move deathward.” Thus speaks Jack Gladney, the addled protagonist Don DeLillo’s immortal novel of paranoia, language, and knowledge, White Noise (1985). Gladney says the words, but only becomes aware he has done so after they have come out of his mouth in the course of a rambling undergraduate lecture. Why has he said this, he finds himself wondering? Is it even true? In what follows, the shark-thinking artist-author Melissa McCarthy stages a plot that walks its own way across paranoia, language, and the pursuit of knowledge. And it goes where plots so often do. In this case, however, the whole story comes in a little suitcase: a kind of portmanteau of fiction and archaeology; of historical sources and conjured conjunctions. Surf through the footnotes, and ask: is it all plots that lead deathward, or, rather, all interpretations? — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor To the Editors: I am here reporting on the contents of a briefcase belonging to “T. S.” (the celebrated California surfer), and recovered by the Avon and Somerset Constabulary in September of 2001. It has since been returned to his next of kin, although its exact legal status is disputed. As you will see, I have tried to give a general sense of the contents of the case, and have paid particular attention to the notebook found therein, together with the various bits of paper and ephemera slipped between its pages. You are aware of how the stand-off in Wells Cathedral terminated, on the third day of T. S.’s presence in Somerset. But the question remains of how this potentially disastrous situation arose in the first place. Certainly there was a misunderstanding and a failure to transmit information in a timely and accurate manner. Actually, quite a few misunderstandings, all layered one on the other, rather like sediments of different density and colour. Or like layers of resin over paint over the core of a surfboard. In making my way towards the report you have requested, I have found it necessary to sift through these layers, in the hopes of arriving at a better sense of exactly where things went so wrong. You are aware, too, of the reputation that T. S. enjoyed both during his life, and (perhaps increasingly) since his death, as a quasi-cult figure, appreciated well beyond the milieu of professional surfers to which he in many ways belonged. One would not guess, from the notebook, that such a denouement was at hand. T. S. was visiting the cathedral, as you know, to deliver an academic manuscript to a clerical colleague of his sister’s. When he left Paris in early September, he, along with everyone else, did not anticipate the events of international import and the ensuing chaos and high security alerts. And T. S., while a basically innocuous person, was certainly somewhat erratic, even reckless — the more so after his diagnosis. At any rate, the briefcase contents do, I believe, offer insights into T. S.’s physical health, state of mind, and his lines of thought (obsession?) as this wave of calamity was about to break. As you’ll see, stone features heavily. What follows is to be treated as an analytic inventory of the materials I have examined from the case. Where relevant I have appended explanatory and contextual notes. Please consider all this a preliminary sketch; full analysis of signification, and a proposed plan of action will follow. Dr Belmont is, understandably, still reluctant to entertain any notion of receiving visitors to discuss the events; we might need to reconsider, here. Melissa McCarthyLead forensic investigator (Europe),International Law of Sharks. THE BRIEFCASE (General Description) Black leather, well-used, reinforced corners. Outside: several airline labels (and, very faded, small stickers of cartoon humanoid elephants), non-functioning combination locks. Inside:– three cheque-books, all partially used, none, notably, in the name of T. S.– one airline ticket, carbon paper with red lettering, valid Paris – London Heathrow – San Francisco, issued by Air France, open dates.– Sept. 2001 issue of Surfer magazine, cover text “California Pro Surfing – can it be saved?” (defaced with elaborate graffito reading “eat my shorts”).– one paperback book, old, poor condition: Digging up the Past, Leonard Woolley.1– one brand-new hardback book: Echo Burning, Lee Child.2– Three tubes (two empty, one with crushed remains) of “Smarties”. Five more Smarties lids (letters T, S, U, R, F) rattling round the briefcase.3– sand, very little, in corners.– one notebook (of which more, below). THE NOTEBOOK (Description & Contents) Large, blue, hard-cover notebook, 118 pages, ruled. Writing and doodling, in the hand of T. S., in blue ballpoint pen — mostly undated, mainly brief notes, reminders, some copying out from other sources. Slipped between pages are several loose-leaf items, including postcards, newspaper clippings, other paper records. The eighteen items of potential relevance to the current investigations are described below. Item 1.Brochure, photocopied page, gatefold, on pink paper, placed in notebook. Title: “Your Guide to Wells Cathedral”4 Item 2.Note handwritten in the notebook by T. S. Reproduced below verbatim. Someone said Severn Bore (seven boar?) nearby for surfing. In a river? — Don’t think so.5 Item 3.Handwritten note on lined paper torn from notebook, replaced to original position. Reproduced below verbatim. Dear Dr. Belmont, I’m here with the Nicolas book that Pauline asked me to bring over to you, but I don’t see you in your office. I’m going to look round the cathedral and try you again later. She said, remind you to check the printer’s mark against your copy. T. S.6 Item 4.One A4 printed page, placed in notebook. T. S. has written at the top, “Belmont’s evening class”, and has underlined the words “Guyenne”, “long-distance courtship”, and “entourage”. Reproduced below verbatim. Proposal for seminar series: six weeks, Thursday 7–9 p.m., “Painting the Princesses: the progress, production, and reception of Archbishop Bekynton’s 1442 Journal”; convenor, J. Belmont. Outline of primary material: Nicholas Harris Nicolas’ 1828 publication A Journal by One of the Suite of Thomas Beckington provides the full text, in English, and profuse though sometimes disputed background on the characters, motive, and events of an ill-fated mission to Guyenne, south-western France, in 1442. The Journal has three strands: the first is a set of letters between Henry VI and his three ambassadors, in which he instructs them to enthuse his subjects overseas, and they report that without tangible and rapid support, it will be impossible to stop the French king, Charles, from gaining control of the region. The second strand, also epistolary, consists chiefly of communications between the ambassadors and the Duke of Armagnac (and his councilor), as they try to advance the courtship between Henry and one of Armagnac’s three daughters. The problems of long-distance courtship are compounded by Armagnac’s obligations towards his ostensible ally, King Charles. The third strand of the Journal, relayed by “one of the suite” (an unknown member of Bekynton’s entourage), describes the daily activities of Bekynton and his colleagues, as they travel to Guyenne pursuing their tasks.7 Item 5Notes handwritten in the notebook by T. S. Reproduced below verbatim. The Spiryt of the Lord was borun on the watris And God made of nouyt grete whallis, and ech lyvynge soule and mouable, whiche the watris han brouyt forth in to her kyndis – have they got this right? Sounds weird. Also, can’t find stuff about pouring oil on the troubled waters. Calm water = no surf.8 Item 6.Notes handwritten in the notebook by T. S. The third note, repeated from the first section, is written double-size and surrounded by a doodled wave motif. Reproduced below verbatim. In Mesopotamia vessels of food and drink provide sustenance for the long journey which the dead must undertake, and during one period these vessels are stacked on a boat made of bitumen, implying that the journey must be made by water. But the journey is not everything, there is the whole life of the next world, and because it is difficult to imagine life otherwise than in terms of that which we know, it is assumed that man’s occupations and needs hereafter will be very similar to what they have been in the past – the next world is a continuation of this. – p68. I must emphasize strongly one thing. All excavation is destruction. – p35. The journey must be made by water. – p99.9 Item 7.Postcard placed in notebook, unwritten. Image on front: B&W photo of a bifurcating stone staircase. Caption on back: V&A Museum, LondonF. H. Evans, 1853–1943, BritishA Sea of Steps, Wells Cathedral, Steps to Chapter House, 1903.10 Written in T. S.’s hand on the page under where the postcard is placed: This Evans — would make a good surf photographer. Check the early curve building on the right-hand stairs + swell profile on the wobbly ones. Also: that central stone square has nearly a barrel going on? Item 8.Three pages of the notebook are filled with sketches attempting to copy aspects of the above postcard image. Some concentrate on reproducing the horizontal lines of the treads of each step, and the verticals of the stone columns. Some trace the curve that the right-hand staircase forms as it veers off. Some expand into drawings of waves within vaulted spaces, small figures surfing on them. The curve of these final waves develops into elaborate versions of the letter “C”, which in one place is elaborated into a note, reproduced below verbatim. Call Crotty.11 Item 9.Print-out from a medical record, on sprocket-feed paper, green lines. Name and department of doctor given (but I am redacting this for now). Folded, placed in notebook. Reproduced below verbatim. Previous damage: Scarring on left sternum – deep incision, narrowly missing organs. Patient explains it’s from a fin (?).Foot bumps – cartilage deposits along ridge of foot, mainly historic, not painful.Left foot, calf – three projectile-type depressions – too antique to require police notification; no noticeable muscle damage.Surfer’s ear – bone growths on ear canal, causing occasional mild tinnitus.Nose – broken multiple times.Right forearm – broken bones, badly reset. Scarring. No previous cancers. Item 10.Notes handwritten in the notebook by T. S. Reproduced below verbatim. Benches / pews? here are great. Find out wood: cedar, mahogany? Wonder who did the shaping. Wax: beeswax — good for boards? How do they get that church smell in the candles?12 Item 11a.Postcard, placed in notebook. Image on front: Sandy beach, with the word “Guéthary”. Back: French stamp, postmarked but date illegible; hand-written address of a post restante in Paris. No signature, handwritten message, reading: I miss you so much. Frank at the hotel says, if you ever come back near the Basque country again, he will kill you, for sure. Bisous. Item 11b.Around this postcard, where it is placed on the page of the notebook, T. S. has added hand-drawing, converting the postcard into one section of a rough map, indicating distance and direction between labeled places: Guéthary, Guyenne, Atlantic, Pyrenees, Spain, rest of France. Also marked on diagram: an arrow showing “nice offshore wind”; a stick-man to left of Guéthary labeled “me, cruising in on a neat left curl”.13 Item 12.Notes handwritten in the notebook by T. S. Reproduced below verbatim. CATHEDRAL — stone: inferior oolite: (inferior to what?) sedimentary rock, rich in organic material.14Sedimentary is made up of crushed shells and fish. Fossils. Living things turned to stone. Bath and Wells? Because of natural springs. Archbishop paid for plumbing out to the poor in the city. Conduit, troughs, fountain, reservoir, courses. Pipes of lead twelve inches in circumference. Other necessary engines.15 Nice idea, to build something kickass, just where the water is coming up right. Here’s Bekynton! TOMB: it’s got him twice! Marble body on top, rotting bones underneath. Top tier: like he’s resting on a short board?16 Item 13.First page only of letter in T. S.’s hand, on plain paper. Reproduced below verbatim. Dear Pauline, Thanks for putting me up, great to see you. Hope they fix that roof soon. I’ve been thinking — do you remember something Dad used to say, at the beach? The one about “a man in water is unable to move at ease”, something like that? From one of his war books. I think it’s from the same place as his other phrase, that war is full of rocks that the General never suspects. I was thinking of night surfing, and it reminded me. You’ve been to Hawaii; did you ever see phosphorescence? It’s lovely surfing through that, carving a trail that glows blue behind you, history of your ride all lit up. Or just in the city lights.17 Item 14.Book review torn from a newspaper (edge of the paper causes mid-sentence cut-off), placed in notebook. Reproduced below verbatim. THE LONG, EVENTFUL LIFE OF ALISTAIR COOKE The good news is that broadcaster Alistair Cooke has been alive – informing, enlightening and entertaining us – for approaching one hundred years. The bad news: that this plodding new biography seems to take roughly that amount of time to wade through. From his early days as…18 Item 15.Notes handwritten in the notebook by T. S. Reproduced below verbatim. Alistair Cooke still alive!He’s the one I met that was there at the Ambassador: Like the stone face of a child, he said.Everybody’s at the Ambassador — Cooke, Bekynton, me!AC forever! AC rules the waves!19 Items 16a, 16b, 16c.These are 3 photocopied pages, each with one paragraph circled as noted here, stickytaped one per page to the left-hand spread of the notebook. Reproduced verbatim in each case. 16a. July 13thFriday, at sea, in a calm, about seven in the evening, as we thought, a fish, called a shark, pursued the ship, and was driven back, after being twice struck with a harping-iron : but in spite of his wounds he again followed the ship; upon which the master, with the harping-iron, pierced his sides. 16b. Jan 1st.To day the lord regent gave my lord . . . for his new-year’s-gift. And Hull gave him ij small pots of green ZZ. My lord gave them each a scarlet hat. Bernard de Garos gave my lord pimento and waffers. 16c. We are in daily expectation here of the return of the artist whom we sent, and desire most earnestly to receive the likenesses which he will bring, that we may carry them with us, and so all things be speedily concluded. Farewell: commend us to your lord.20 Items 17a, 17b, 17c.From each item 16a, 16b, and 16c above, T. S. has drawn a line to the facing page, linking the circled photocopied paragraph to his own, handwritten comments on it. As above, verbatim. 17a. Harping-iron — it’s “a barbed spear or javelin used for spearing whales and large fish”, says this Belmont. Like the pain in my side. Arrange appointment at the clinic. Get meds. Belmont says this is the first time shark appears in English. The word. Not the fish. Who am I to argue? 17b. Belmont says they’re giving new year’s gifts.First gift is illegible in the handwriting of the journal.ZZ = ginger.Scarlet hat = a hat.Waffers = little cakes. Waffers? I want waffles. Proper waffles. And strawberry pancakes. And American coke. And some west coast waves.21 17c.There’s a line drawn over to this right-hand page, but no further words. Item 18.Notes handwritten in the notebook by T. S. Reproduced below verbatim. Stone faces. Stone staircases. Stone slopes and surfaces.Wish I could cruise down them, carve out a new path. But it goes too quick.All this history, piled up, things about to break, crashing forward.Find Pauline’s postal address.Call doctor.Commend me to your Lord. *** Notes 1 See note 9 below. 2 Lee Child, Echo Burning, 2001. This classic thriller appears to be unread, but the back cover blurb is circled in pen round the phrase “he needs to keep moving through the wide Texan vastness, like a shark in the water”. 3 Smarties are a British sweet, clearly to T. S.’s taste, consisting of lenticular chocolate encased in coloured sugar coating. At the time under investigation, they were sold in cardboard tubes with a plastic lid, each embossed with a letter of the alphabet. 4 Wells Cathedral is a Church of England cathedral in Somerset. Gothic in style, the present structure was begun in the twelfth century, though a Christian church was on the site from A.D. 705. 5 The River Severn, fifty miles north of Wells, has a tidal bore that pushes a wave upstream. T. S. appears unimpressed. 6 T. S. was at Wells Cathedral at the request of his sister Pauline, a medieval historian resident in Paris. She had asked him to deliver a copy of Nicholas Harris Nicolas’ remarkable edited volume A Journal by One of the Suite of Thomas Beckington (1828) to a colleague. 7 Nineteenth-century historian Nicholas Harris Nicolas self-funded a magnificently thorough edition of a set of documents related to a significant fifteenth-century Crown diplomatic mission. As Nicolas explained in his introduction, “During a search in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, the volume from which the Journal in the following pages has been printed, accidentally fell under the Editor’s notice” (Nicolas, vii). Nicolas is referring here to MS. Ashmole 789 ff. 147-359. A later edition of this document is included in the Rolls Series: Memorials of the reign of King Henry VI. Official correspondence of Thomas Bekynton, secretary to Henry VI, ed. G Williams, 2 vols, (London: Longman & Co., 1872). In his edition of 1828 Nicolas gives biographies of the major characters, plus copious historical and political context, and subsequent events. He is particularly strong on details of the Duke of Armagnac’s eldest son, Viscount Lomaigne, and his Grand Guignol-style forays into treason, incest, and mischief. 8 The first two sentences are copied from Genesis 1:2 and 1:21. From T. S.’s comments, it appears that the Bible on hand in Wells Cathedral presented an older — Wycliffe — version of the text than he was familiar with. 9 These extracts are copied from the book in the briefcase, Digging up the Past, (1930) by Sir Leonard Woolley (1880–1960), a British archaeologist famous for his excavations of Sumerian civilization at Ur, in what is now Iraq. In the preface Woolley explains, ‘This little book is based on a series of six talks broadcast by the B.B.C., to whom I am indebted for permission to re-publish the substance in permanent form.” No prompt for the interest is known, but T. S. was evidently taken by Woolley’s popular account of historical disinterment. 10 Photographer Frederick Evans (1853–1943) made images of landscapes and church structures of England and France, including several of Wells Cathedral. This famous image (copies held here and here) shows the staircase leading from the ground floor to, on the right, the chapter house, and, on the left, a passageway to other quarters. 11 Russell Crotty is a Californian artist noted for pictures of waves and surfing. He is not known to have any relationship with T. S., but it is possible that his work, for instance Surf Drawing Blue, 1990, inspired T. S.’s sketched elaborations of the Evans photograph. 12 T. S. appears to refer here to the construction and maintenance of surfboards: boards, originally of wood, now commonly of polyurethane foam cores and fibreglass surrounds, are shaped into desired form, allowing for variety of length, volume, hydrodynamics, vibe. Before entering the water, a surfer waxes the surface (actually using a paraffin compound), to increase traction of the feet on the board. 13 T. S. spent two years living in the French coastal town of Guéthary, known for its excellent waves. Sender of the postcard unidentified; given T. S.’s habits, the field of potential correspondents is wide. 14 From the language of these notes it would seem that T. S. is copying information from the Guide to Wells Cathedral, item 1 above. 15 For more on mediaeval watercourses, see the Eadwine Psalter. 16 Archbishop Thomas Bekynton was a munificent donor, who “bequeathed courses, fountains and waterways, in the name of him who for the gift of cold water hath promised eternal life” – J. Britton, The History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Wells (1824), 45. Nicolas explains that he “granted permission to the inhabitants [of Wells] to have a reservoir or conduit near the cross in that city”; in return, they committed to praying each year for his soul (Nicolas, lviii). Bekynton is also, of course, the eponymous, central figure in the Journal. After his return from Guyenne in 1443, he continued serving Henry VI in public roles, and held the position of archbishop from that year until his death in 1465. T. S. is describing here Bekynton’s tomb, located in the cathedral’s south choir aisle. Over the actual buried bones, it’s a monument in two parts, one showing the finely-painted, richly-robed archbishop, the other, his rotting body. Britton describes it thus: “The tomb of Bishop Beckington, which, like the chapel, is partly of wood, is extremely curious. It is raised on a basement step, and consists of two divisions; viz. 1st, a table slab, whereon is a recumbent figure of the Bishop, in alabaster, habited in the same way as he had appointed to be buried; and 2d, a low pedestal beneath the former, on which is another effigy of the deceased, in freestone, represented as an emaciated corpse extended on a winding-sheet.” (111) T. S. reveals his pleasure at finding the tomb of the figure who has prompted both his sister’s scholarship and his own journey to Wells. His final comment refers to a perceived resemblance between the carving of the archbishop, and a surfer reclining on a surfboard, though not in a posture ready for catching a wave. 17 T. S. appears to be referring to Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Penguin, 1968), originally 1832. Book 1, chapter 7, “Friction in War”:“Activity in War is movement in a resistant medium. Just as a man immersed in water is unable to perform with ease and regularity the most natural and simplest movement, that of walking, so in War, with ordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity.” (165)“Further, every War is rich in particular facts, while at the same time each is an unexplored sea, full of rocks which the General may have a suspicion of, but which he has never seen with his eye, and round which, moreover, he must steer in the night.” (166)It seems likely that he is using the J. J. Graham 1908 translation, edited by Anatol Rapoport, 1968. For a later translation, see the Howard and Paret 1976 edition from Princeton University Press. In his second query to Pauline, T. S. refers here to a glowing over the surface on the water at night, caused by phytoplankton. 18 So far unable to identify paper that ran this review. N. Clark’s book, Alistair Cooke: A Biography, was published in September 2001.Alistair Cooke (1908–2004), British-born, American-naturalised broadcaster, whose weekly fifteen-minute radio pieces in the series Letter from America were transmitted over the BBC’s World Service from 1946 to 2004. 19 T. S. shows surprising enthusiasm to learn that Cooke is still, as of 2001, going strong. His comment refers to Cooke’s broadcast made in the week following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, on June 5, 1968. Cooke (like T. S., it appears) had been present at the party celebrating Kennedy’s advancement towards the presidency, and came on the scene very shortly after the shooting. As he described it in his Letter: “There were flashlights by now and the button-eyes image of Ethel Kennedy turned to cinders. She was slapping a young man and he was saying, ‘Listen lady, I am hurt too’ and down on the greasy floor was a huddle of clothes and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy. Like the stone face of a child, lying on a cathedral tomb.” T. S., increasingly live to every linkage or apparent pattern, seems here to have been struck by a coincidence: the similarity of names, between Cooke's presence at the “Ambassador” Hotel, while Bekyton was among the group of ambassadors sent to France. One might, indeed, trace a (tenuous?) parallel between Cooke's predicament in 1968, stuck there by the dying figure of Robert Kennedy (who could not be saved); and the position of Bekynton and the other ambassadors on their hopeless mission to Guyenne, messaging back to England for saving help (that will not come). 20 These photocopied pages are from the Nicolas edition of Bekynton’s Journal. The first two extracts, dated, are from the narrator’s description of daily activity. The third is a transcript of a letter sent on December 30, 1442 from the ambassadors to Armagnac’s councilor, explaining that they have to leave, even though they have not fulfilled their mission to obtain oil paintings of the three daughters of the Count, so that Henry can choose his favourite. Armagnac later explains that the cold weather had prevented the artist from rolling out his paints, but it seems more likely that political considerations — siege, war zone, threat — contributed to the lack of progress in the courtship. 21 On January 1, 1443, during a general swapping of New Year gifts among the English delegation, Bekynton was the recipient of wafers, or little cakes, the mention of which reminds T. S. of his own home and destination. Days later, Bekynton embarked on his own return journey, which must be made by water, to England. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 19, 2021

Melissa McCarth

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:36.365300

food-pasts-food-futures

Food Pasts, Food Futures The Culinary History of COVID-19 By The Global Experimental Historiography Collective September 9, 2020 It is possible, as Walter Benjamin suggested, that “boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” But we might sharpen the proposition: “pandemic lockdowns are the hothouse-incubator that force-hatch the egg of foreboding.” Something like this is closer to the recent lifeways of many. Including the authors of this criti-fictional course-syllabus from the year 2070 — a bibliographical meteor from the other side of a “Remote Revolution” that, we are told, transformed social and economic life across waves of COVID-19. Focusing on food culture and agriculture (and zeroing in on the nexus of capital, consumption, labor, and taste), this essay-in-the-form-of-a-reading-list uses ludic futurism to slash-critique the world of now. One thinks of the work of Karel Čapek and Stanisław Lem — both of whom pioneered literary experiments in science fiction as a form of cultural criticism (for more on this conjunction, check out this Histories of the Future project). Read on, imagine the course, and dream the reading! — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor SYLLABUSHIS595 / FUT595Food Pasts, Food Futures: The Culinary History of COVID-19Co-taught through the Global Experimental Historiography Collective 1Fall 2070 The COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s was a period of immense change—on par with the Second World War or the Industrial Revolution in the scale (global) and the extent (fundamental) of its impact. Any student who wants to understand the century we live in (one distinguished by the seemingly inescapable forces of anthropogenic climate change and the incursion of digital technologies upon private life) or simply to grasp the shifts their grandparents experienced in their lifetimes must first understand the historical period that has been termed the “Remote Revolution.” The first portion of our course will be about understanding what actually happened in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic: How did the practices of cooking and eating change in the Remote Revolution? What does the emergence of the category of “essential workers” in the early stages of the pandemic tell us about the labor relations of that time (and how they’ve changed)? How do we understand the role of technology in facilitating the “remoteness” of this revolution? Can the rise of the agricultural “intentional community” movement be understood as genuinely resisting this trend? How did efforts to both curb the pandemic and to imagine a future beyond it draw on intellectual and practical tools generated by an ever evolving environmental movement—particularly in its responses to climate change? In the second portion of our course, we’ll step back and address important historiographical questions: Was the Remote Revolution truly “remote”? Was it even revolutionary? To what extent did early historical accounts of the pandemic and its effects lapse into catastrophism or technological determinism? In our final portion, we'll consider the merits of Future Studies as a discipline and its growing power as a set of methods for imagining life in the wakes of formerly unimaginable crises. We’ll encounter several authors who wrote of futures shaped by climate change and disease over a period of more than 150 years. By the end of the course, we will ask: How can an understanding of the future inform our interpretation of the past? How can past futures deepen our engagement with present futures (and future ones too)? With all these pasts and futures spinning about us, how can we better understand where we are now? Reading Assignments PART I: FOOD IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUSWhat are we talking about when we say “Remote Revoution”? These first five weeks will trace the impact of the distancing / individualizing / isolating events traditionally attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. Week 1: Introduction to the Remote RevolutionTo begin the course, we’ll situate ourselves among those who experienced the pandemic firsthand: What did contemporary observers perceive to be the predominant social shifts taking place? Which changes did they expect would last the longest? How did they imagine the future, near and far? We’ll consider Bergman (writing at the height of the pandemic) on the influence of personality on contentment in isolation, Kruse on gubernatorial power, and Butler on medicalized analogies and the nature/culture dichotomy in environmental discourse. Secondary Sources:Bergman, Allison. “Quarantine Blues: Extraversion and Contentment in Isolation During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Information & Human Behavior 14 (2021): 14–35.Kruse, Kristoff. “States’ Wrongs: COVID-19’s Legacy of Gubernatorial Scapegoating.” The American Historical Review 128, no. 2 (2023): 47–72.Butler, Kiara. “Humans as Virus, Lockdown as Healing: The Nature/Culture Dichotomy and Environmental Narratives During COVID-19.” In Climate Change and the Coronavirus, 87–119. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024.Primary Source:Roy, Arundhati. “The Pandemic is a Portal,” Financial Times, 3 April 2020. Week 2: Cooking and EatingThe practices of cooking and eating were fundamentally changed—unequally, and in a variety of ways—by COVID-19. In our primary readings this week, Tang introduces the ways home cooking came to be facilitated by internet recipe communities. LaDérive instead argues that home cooking came to be utilized as an opportunity for displaying and enacting cultural capital through social media-mediated conspicuous consumption. Weisberg documents how pandemic-induced food insecurity exacerbated preexisting climate-driven concerns about the food supply and reinvigorated debates about food safety. Our secondary readings explore the consequences of a heightened (or eliminated) awareness of the sociocultural significance of smell and taste. Secondary Sources:LaDérive, Dawn. “Conspicuous Consumption, Homemade!: Food Imagery on Social Media, Before and After COVID-19.” In Debord in the Age of Zoom: Our Remote ‘Society of the Spectacle,’ 220–242. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023.Weisberg, Anya. “In Food We Trust—But Should We?: A study of the post-COVID-19 food trade deals.” Policy and Science 4, no. 1 (2026): 27–54.Tang, Claudia. “Recipes for Communities and Communities of Recipes.” Cultural History 20, no. 1 (2031): 33–51.Primary Source:Seal, Rebecca. “Reality Bites: How the Pandemic Changed the Way We Eat.” The Guardian, 4 July 2020. Week 3: Shocks to the Supply ChainThe long-term economic impact of the pandemic revealed great "contradictions" in the early twenty-first century world order. Scholars of the category of labor deemed “essential”, including Nuñez, have spent their careers teasing out the often hidden ways in which members of a labor force known primarily for its precarity and exposure to illness were nonetheless “agentive creators” of community. This week, we also interrogate Clancy’s classic Marxist critique of the Remote Revolution. Secondary Sources:Nuñez, Catalina. Precarious Ethnography and the Social Economies of Collapse. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2028.Clancy, W. D. From Sous Chef to Meillassoux: Shifts in Gastronomic Labor During the Remote Revolution. New York: DeVry University Press, 2034.Primary Source:Editorial Board. “The Guardian view on empty supermarket shelves: panic is not the problem.” The Guardian, 27 March 2020. Week 4: Food, Isolation and TechnologyThe role of technology in the pandemic-borne cultural upheaval remains a subject of intense debate among scholars (we'll explore this in greater detail later in the semester). This week, Sage will introduce us to the idea that digital technologies served as both facilitators of "social distancing" and crucial sources of connection. Stefan’s work reveals the role of taste-tracking technology in cultivating heightened flavor awareness, and eventually changing the taste preferences of the tracker’s users. Secondary Sources:Sage, Loren. “The Rise of The Virtual Farm to Table Movement: Reflections on Cow Connect,” Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture 3, no. 3 (2028) 32–56.Stefan, Niko. “Recovering our Tastes: New-found sensory understandings through COVID-19’s symptoms of smell and taste loss,” Journal of Sensory Studies 22, no. 2 (2048): 77–84.Primary Source:Barrie, Josh. “Coronavirus: Lost your smell and taste? Here's how you can still enjoy cooking and eating during lockdown,” I, 5 May 2020. Week 5: The Contradiction of the CommuneBetween the pandemic’s first and second waves, the practice of intentional community formation confronted the problem of social isolation. Meanwhile, public health scholars and journalists debated the effectiveness of quarantine “bubbles” or “pods” as intermediate social networks. This week, we read two scholars as they trace the origins of communal living to the 1960s counterculture and the environmental movement (Punarjanma), and far beyond to earlier traditions of monastic asceticism (Vulpes). Secondary Sources:Punarjanma, Harry. The Rise of the Intentional Community. Mountain View: Google Books Press, 2038.Vulpes, Julia. “Meal-Taking on the Camelback Commune.” In Cult of Connection: Intentional Living Communities in a Post-Pandemic World, 241–317. Providence: Brown University Press, 2045. PART II: REMOTE REVOLUTION and the HISTORIOGRAPHY OF EATINGBeginning in the mid-2040s, critical readers from a variety of fields began to find fault with the central tenets of Remote Revolution scholarship. In each of the next four weeks, we will examine arguments that both question and defend 1) the existence of the “Remote Revolution” as a historical phenomenon, and 2) the value of its nomenclature. In weeks 6 and 7, we will weigh the accuracy and appropriateness of the labels “Remote” and “Revolution,” respectively, while weeks 8 and 9 will address the broader trends of technological determinism and catastrophism. Week 6: Rethinking “Remote”We’ll continue to read Vulpes this week, focusing now on the introduction, where she situates her work in contrast to prevailing narratives of pandemic-induced remoteness; she is among the first to challenge the terminology of “Remote Revolution.” Potosi, writing much later, argues that the term “Remote” is a euphemism for the digitally-mediated infiltration (corporate and state) of ever more realms of lived experience and thus counters Vulpes’s notion of a countercultural movement that has eluded these forces. Secondary Sources:Vulpes, Julia. “Introduction.” In Cult of Connection: Intentional Living Communities in a Post-Pandemic World, 3–45. Providence: Brown University Press, 2045.Potosi, Pat. Infiltration of the Spectacle: Corporate and State Tech Creep in a Post-Remote Revolution World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2067. Week 7: Rethinking “Revolution”To what extent were the post-pandemic changes really a revolution? Lopez identifies technological shifts that cast the pandemic as a major cultural and culinary diversion. Rayner uses a case study of the Japanese restaurant Ichiran and its solo dining experience of “taste concentration counters” to suggest that individualization had a longer history than many had assumed. Secondary Sources:Lopez, A. G. “Generation Zapped: How College Students Paid for the Microwave Renaissance.” The Journal of American Food History, vol. 6 (2049): 61–84.Rayner, Jenna. “Solo Dining: The Decline and Revival of Good Eating? A Case Study of Ichiran.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 2 (2062): 21–47. Week 8: Technological DeterminismWhat drives revolution? Technology is a frequently posited culprit. This week examines two scholars who credit technology to different degrees: according to Brenner, tech is a primary driver of societal change, while Marcel asserts that technologies such as "Taste Trackers" changed the individual experience of taste and smell. If you have time, look back through your readings from weeks 6 and 7—how would those authors react to Brenner and Marcel? Secondary Sources:Marcel, Madeleine. “Tracking Taste, Tracking Tech: Perceptions of Flavor Before and after the Pandemic,” Sensory History, vol. 8 (2049), 113–142.Brenner, Charles. “Everything but the Kitchen Sink: Big Culinary Tech’s Takeover of American Food Culture,” The Journal of American Food History, vol. 18 (2061): 45–75. Week 9: Criticisms of CatastrophismFurther historiographical critiques frame many early histories of the Remote Revolution as “catastrophist.” Patel and Celig each tackle the catastrophist narratives that emerged around the decline of the restaurant industry and communal dining. Patel attacks this same catastrophist narrative by exposing evidence of social and economic shifts away from 20th-century group dining practices that appeared as early as the 1990s. Celig argues against broad-strokes histories in general, pointing to the fallacies of technological determinism and their failure to acknowledge processes of remoteness that predate the pandemic. Patel can get jargony; take your time with this one! Secondary Sources:Patel, Erik. “Toward a Uniformitarian History of the Remote Revolution.” Social Studies of Science 84, no. 6 (2054): 802–834.Celig, Erin A. “Revising the Revolution: On Radical Togetherness as a Critique of Catastrophism,” Cultural History 51, no. 1 (2062): 36–54. PART III: FUTURES OF REMOTE REVOLUTION SCHOLARSHIPThe Remote Revolution—if, by now, we are inclined to call it that—has brought about many changes in social organization, technological systems, and practices as fundamental as eating. Few forces barring climate change have had such a profound impact. As students of history, it is our job to make sense of this. However, to understand such rapid and sustained transformations, it may serve us to think not only backwards in time but forwards. After all, our history has been shaped by how its participants envisioned their imminent future, often in the context of environmental catastrophe and transformation. The role of these visions, and their relationship to the past, is the purview of a much younger discipline that can both deepen our understanding of the past and enable us to prepare for our own future. An introduction to Future Studies. Week 10: The History of the FutureThis week we will examine three examples of a Future Studies perspective. Wells envisions (and accurately predicts) the coming transformations of the twentieth century, Gates eerily predicts the coming COVID-19 pandemic and Callisto examines the political power of predictive models. Secondary Source:Callisto, E. T. Contested Politics of Unknown Worlds. New York: McKibben Press, 2068.Primary Sources:Wells, H. G. “The Discovery of the Future.” Nature 65 (1902): 326–331.Gates, Bill. “How to Respond to COVID-19.” gatesnotes.com, 28 February 2020. Week 11: Students of the Future, Outside the AcademyFuture Studies holds promise for examinations of the Remote Revolution and our changing relationship to food, but the treatment of these themes is notably absent from academic literature. This week, we look at Koffi's acclaimed speculative epic, which explores the world-building potential of hunger and food scarcity in West Africa made unrecognizable by climate change, and Recipes of Anticipation, which presents a collaborative effort of cooks and food writers in 2021 to make sense of how COVID-19 had already and might, in the future, impact food. These are exemplary works of Future Studies outside the academy; they have much to teach us academics about the power of the subjunctive tense in examining impending changes to the way we eat and live. Secondary Sources:Recipes of Anticipation, edited by Cariotta Loftus Yong. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021.Koffi, Binta. The Lotus and the Spit. London: Octavian Press, 2054. Week 12: Remote Revolution, in RetrospectThis week we will closely examine a seminal document produced on the 50th anniversary of the Remote Revolution: a roundtable discussion between six of its most prominent historians. We have encountered many of them at some point this semester—Celig, Vulpes, Brenner, Potosi, and Marcel—and now get to see them in direct conversation (and confrontation). How have five decades shifted the historical discourse around the Remote Revolution? What new avenues remain unexplored in our understanding of this critical period? What insights will the next 50 years bring? Secondary Sources:Brenner, Charles, Delphi Castro, Erin A. Celig, Madeleine Marcel, Pat Potosi, and Julia Vulpes. “Roundtable on the Remote Revolution: Discussing 50 Years of Historiography.” Public Domain Review, 20 July 2070. CULMINATING ASSIGNMENT:Over the past semester we have immersed ourselves in accounts of the Remote Revolution, described the challenges and limitations of the discipline of history, and begun to contemplate the potential of Future Studies. In our final assignment, I want you to throw this all together: imagine that you are a class of history students in the year 2020, looking forward to today. How might you, at the very beginning of the "Remote Revolution," envision the changes that will transpire over the coming 50 years? How would you use historical methods to examine the possibilities of the near future? How would you situate yourself in the emerging field of Future Studies? This may take the form of an imaginary discussion between academics, a short documentary, a sci-fi story—even an annotated syllabus. Have fun with it. Due at 11:59PM on May 15th via AmazOnTime. No late submissions. 1. The Global Experimental Historiography Collective is a multidisciplinary initiative (housed at Harvard but engaged in teaching and research worldwide) that seeks to explore the bounds of humanistic methods, and is chaired by Madeleine Marcel, Harvard’s Firmenich Professor of Sensory Sciences. The Collective is grateful for the generous support of Harvard College by Microsoft and individual donors. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 9, 2020

The Global Experimental Historiography Collective

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:37.077093

last-pole

Last Pole By Julian Chehirian May 27, 2020 “Every new medium is a machine for the production of ghosts.” So writes John Durham Peters in his brilliant and strange 1999 history of communication (and its failures), Speaking to the Air. At the heart of that study is a dialectical, prophetic effort to show that our purported yearning for error-free intersubjective encounters has always veiled a kind of obverse mystery: a “felicitous impossibility of contact” wherein we long for each other, ourselves, and a different world. Whenever technology is drafted into the service of “communication”, the resulting devices inevitably service that antinomic condition of spectral solitude, silence, and interception. In this affecting essay/experiment, Julian Chehirian goes looking for the history of telecommunication, and is left sitting in the slim shadow of a lightning rod, listening to a voice from beyond the grave. — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor After acquiring an advanced degree in history I spent several years adrift, often on cheap inter-state buses. I continued to present bits of my dissertation on the history of telecommunications technologies (specifically, on dropped calls) to a series of miscalculated audiences including marxist archaeologists, military and maritime historians, and shortwave-radio repairmen at small colleges and public venues. Finally, after a time, I found stable work in Central New Jersey. There I had been offered a job as a Records Retention Specialist for the State. Eager to leave the antechamber of unsure employment, I accepted. Apart from a terse letter informing me of the site that I am to report to and an overview of my responsibilities, I had little with which to move into my new residence in Lambertville — a little room set above an antiques store peddling mid-century modernity. The position was “Statewide, as required”, but placed me in-town, in a foreclosed office building that had once housed the claims center of a flood insurance firm. From the vantage point of my desk I could see, alternately, deeds of sale that I was to examine and file, and a river too vacant for its breadth: lacking docks, void of boats, and broached only by the foundations of an absent bridge. * At nighttime I enjoy listening to cassette tapes I’ve collected from a church thrift shop. I have spent many nights in this way, after an early dinner, fixing my attention on a new cassette while allowing my gaze to flatten against the pale of plastered walls. One cassette offers astute marital advice, one projects a brassy Montreal marching band, and a third is “psychoacoustic”, containing, I have come to believe, the sounds of sailing. Cables tensing, water wiping forward on the hull, and the sound of fabric slapping back and forth. I listen in stillness. * In late January my supervisor called me, uncharacteristically, with an assignment. It concerned a piece of land in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Now it was owned by the County — a park — but once it had been a telecommunications facility. There was, he said, a request from AT&T, the previous landowner, who wished to reclaim some unspecified thing from the land, which the County had since made into an ecological preserve — a rarified meadows habitat. Between 1929 and the late 60s, he told me, transatlantic telephone calls made from the United States were usually destined to pass by short wave radio signal through this 800 acre farm once known as the “American Telegraph and Telephone International Radio Telephone Transmission Station”. The farm was punctured by hundreds of 85+ ft tall pole-antennas arranged in rhombic formations — with each projecting sounds made in Chicago, Albany, or Washington, towards London, Tangier, Damascus, or Buenos Aires. ※※Indexed under…PoleLast transatlantic telephone In the 1960s some 16,000 conversations per day moved through here. By 1975 the facility had become obsolete, superseded by undersea cable and satellite communications. At the time when AT&T decommissioned the facility only one antenna remained in use, connecting the mainland to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Today one last pole remains . Although poles were usually recycled by AT&T, Charles Bryan, a farmer who purchased the land, asked to keep one. That pole, once a trans-spatial and temporal bridge to Tel Aviv, served instead as a lightning rod between 1975 and 1998. There was, my supervisor said, little chance for an easy resolution, but it would be best “if you produced a report for the State”. * I drove towards the site the following morning. The roads are small. Though there are many of them, few lead to others which lead to the site. Many pass into yet smaller roads, gravel roads and then truncate. I see, after some time, a sign announcing “Mercer Meadows County Park”. I circumscribe the park with my car, referencing aerial images of the land — tracing the outer bounds whose interior I am to survey. The terrain of the park is varied. Some entry points allow passage on narrow pathways between thorny woods. Another spills out into a wide, grassy, rolling expanse. On the perimeter are failing rural houses. A view of one is blocked by a raised pool covered with tarp which rises and sighs very much like a chest. Another house rests uninhabited, a wound in its roof yawning and pulling the structure inward. I notice a smaller sign that directs me towards the Bryan Farm and find my place in a small gravel lot. Now on foot, my line of sight is reduced to the path ahead and the trees about. Walking past the occasional power walker and baby stroller, I notice a number of guiding displays spread throughout the pole farm-turned-nature preserve, providing descriptions of the antenna technology once used by AT&T as well as a historical chronology of the facility. But my eyes catch on something else: A photograph from 1950 whose subject and object I cannot confidently distinguish. The gazes of two of the people pictured seem to repeat the gaze of the camera towards something other than themselves. My own moves beyond the group, and thereafter I cannot help but unsee them, my attention taken over by the poles — those dark incisions receding into the pale. I know that there were in that very instant a thousand or more voices in exchange — like a vectoring cloud of gnats, an exchange of energy not visible, without trace, but there nonetheless. * My historical training reminds me that what could be known of a place like this (or anyplace) either exists in the form of written records or else cannot enter into serious discussion. I remember a professor who liked to repeat to us: … “no traces, no history” … his lower lip pulsing with a kind of affectionate resentment towards the very idea. But even historians can have their moments of lowered inhibition. Moments where such uncertain thoughts can be thought, if only for a time. I reach back for questions, questions that once seemed permissible in the stifled ecstasy of my graduate studies. I reach back for the memory of a night immersed in a paper on telecommunications. In this story there were patent applications, bureaucracies, federal regulators and the US military. Wartime protocols, engineers and scientists. Local landowners. Emerging technology and emerging forms of experience. For there were, after all, people making telephone calls. In my own work I had been wanting to write about telephones as a “social history of intimacy” while also doing a history of the technology itself. But I was, in the end, forced by professional considerations to choose only one. The latter, predictably, since the former was deemed hardly to make sense, and anyway to be quite likely impossible to achieve. (I vaguely recall a text message from my supervisor, nervously double checking that I had understood his concerns.) Sunset approaches, and I drive home without anything to report, advancing westward on a string of narrow roads pressed on both sides by corn fields and weathered houses. * In the morning another message arrived from my supervisor. “On my docket” today was to call an Elizabeth Dawn to inquire about records on the land. After several encounters on the phone tree I was dialed in to Dawn. "Hello Ms. Dawn", I began. “I am calling from Parks and Forests. I am trying to get some information about a former facility of yours at 111-167 Cold Soil Road in Lawrenceville, New Jersey”. “Yes?” All emphasis now on my next move, which must escape disinterest and disbelief. “Well, I’m looking to find out if you have records on anything that the company left behind when it sold the property”, I said suggestively, making my mark and moving quickly out of the way in deference. “Oh, sure, okay.” Dawn felt alright. But on the edge of her voice I could hear some sedimented, fierce, and forthcoming impatience if I made the wrong move. I could hear the sound of a coiled stationary telephone cable slinking against the edge of a desk in bunches, like tranches of something she has on her mind but awaits the right amount of pressure to put through to me. “Do you have”, she began, “an information authorization?” * So I found myself at the county archive instead to check for anything on record with the State. The archive was occupied by other rank and file sent there, like myself, by higher ups to track down paperwork. I was pointed to a filing cabinet where I found only a permit for oversized-load deliveries to the site in 1967. * Afterwards I returned to the pole farm to search for anything left over from AT&T. I took inventory of what little remained amid the brush, on stumps, and in trees. Twelve pole tensioners that appear to be porcelain but feel like bakelite, like in the picture above on the lower right. Some thirty-five feet of braided metal cable attached to the tensioners. Elsewhere I noticed porcelain knobs, like the one pictured on the top left, some less intact. I ran my finger on the groove and found three downed telephone poles nearby with hand- and foot-holds. But I felt I had exhausted the space, and that what more there was could only lie at some remote threshold of access. Below, or above, or maybe both. I began to develop a taste for the land itself as an “archive” — but what, if anything, can it recall? Does it remember the first of the telephonic voices that trickled through its body? * In a public library in Trenton, I wait for the rain to pass and rifle through A History of the Telephone, reaching a passage on the first transatlantic telephone call. On January 7, 1927, the president of AT&T, stationed on the East River in New York, announced to the secretary of the General Post Office of Great Britain: “Across three thousand miles of ocean, individuals in the two cities may by telephone exchange views and transact business instantly, as if they were face to face.” Power spoke first, but a closer examination by Cary O’Dell reveals that Power merely pasted over a prior day’s test call — which was more accurately the inaugural transmission. Beyond the terminal point of our recording, O’Dell notes that a prophetic, if slightly rueful, chord is struck when the American speaker states, "Distance doesn’t mean anything anymore. We are on the verge of a very high speed world….people will use up their lives in a much shorter time, they won’t have to live so long." What happened after the presidential ribbon cutting the following day has hardly been preserved, not even in the cracks of an archive. But if these first trickles created the conditions of transmission, what followed was an estuary of voices. Communions from afar, unpleasant news, stretched out friendships, loves, business affairs, and transactions. I think about this land as it is now, silent except for the crow and the rustling shrub. I think about this straddling of presence and absence, desire, and communicative possibility and improbability. How strange it is that even when the facility was operational, little — nothing — could be heard of the many conversations moving through here to elsewhere. * On the pole farm I lose some confidence in my disciplinary training. I remember a book, Wisdom Sits in Places. There, an anthropologist (Keith Basso) had studied the meaning of places and memory for peoples of the Western Apache. He points out that memory and its possibility for survival and transmission is closely related to place. So the displacement of natives from ancestral lands has had the effect of stripping the past from its places of residence. This park has a longer story than I know, taken as it has been from the Leni Lenape by the Dutch, and then sold to the British Empire to the Quakers to English farmers and then to the American Telegraph and Telephone Company before returning to the public domain. * At the end of what can be said there remains, I think, space for a more concerted listening. Dislocated from history, I begin to listen to what is around. I had not listened enough. I follow a bend in the boardwalk and come upon a bench well occupied by a group. I stop. I accept a cigarette. I ask them how they were doing  —  about their day. They tell me that Chris Baranowski, whose name is printed on the bench, had passed away. Of an overdose. Due to Fentanyl. While attempting rehab. His friends did not realize the extent of the situation. His parents had placed this bench here for those who knew him to come to, and they had done so. “He was a great musician. Music meant everything to him”, the guy sitting on the left told me. “The service for him was at the Presbyterian church in Lawrenceville nearby. We came from different places. These guys from DC. This one from New York. I came from Philly. The church was really full. His family and some of his friends spoke and it was so much being there without him, while surrounded by everyone who loved him. After everybody had said everything that could be said, his family brought a stereo up to the altar. They put on a cassette of a one track recording Chris made. He was by himself in a room inside the world”, he said and looked elsewhere. “You know we could play it for you”, the one on the right offered. In the recording Chris gives his interpretation of this song by Robbie Basho. "Visions of the Country" by Robbie Basho I felt something quite strange sitting on the bench with them, listening to a diminutive speaker that had been placed in the grass — a little telephonic grille spilling him into the surround. I could feel him present though I could not see him. The brittle barrier between his room somewhere in the world and this place at present had cracked and softened. Chris’ bench looked out onto a valley and in the distance there was the last remaining pole  —  the one that farmer Charles had used as a lightning rod. The pole had pointed to Tel Aviv, but now it could point elsewhere, too. For some time later I thought about poles and what they could index and what they could not. About being there in between the grasses and the streams and the fallen poles. I thought about the friends who came to listen and about a family’s grief too. Chris’ voice carries around these poles, delicately, appearing to those who can hear around for it. I did not locate other utterances that converged in those antennas. But I do not doubt that they are there. In the air. In that place. As I listen and wait. Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 27, 2020

Julian Chehirian

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:37.858875

chaos-bewitched-moby-dick-and-ai

Chaos Bewitched Moby-Dick and AI By Eigil zu Tage-Ravn March 21, 2023 In his Truth and Method (1960), the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer insisted affectingly that human understanding is an essentially historical process. The “meaning” of texts (novels, poems), the significance of past eras or events (WWII, the Renaissance) — none of this can ever be, somehow, “settled” or “put to rest”. On the contrary, because we are historical beings, because our consciousness is formed in and of time, understanding will always itself be a function of intersecting temporalities, what he called a “fusion of horizons”: the perspective from one moment must meet the perspective of another; the widening of view, the shift in what can be seen, this is the experience of coming to understand. There are no cheat codes. And it cannot be mechanized. It is the forever dialog of now with then, through which we become what we are (and the past does too). In the piece that follows, Eigil zu Tage-Ravn experiments with some digital-analog horizon-fusing, asking a GTP-3-driven AI system for help in the interpretation of a key scene in Moby-Dick (1851). Do androids dream of electric whales?— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor It is among the most memorable moments in American literature. At the start of Chapter Three of his masterwork, Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville has his protagonist, the existential castaway Ishmael, newly embarked on his fateful commitment to go a-whaling (is it a kind of suicide? a mere lark? both?), push open the door of a port-side rough-house for boozing mariners: the so-called “Spouter-Inn”. It is dark. It is dank. Savage weaponry from cannibal isles spikes the walls. And those who hunker at the bar are renegades and isolatoes, gruff men of the sea. In the half-light, Ishmael immediately discerns, in the entryway itself, like a warning over the threshold, “a very large oil-painting”. Ishmael pauses. He puzzles. He peers. He even goes so far as to pry open a little window in the vestibule, to shed some light on a most inscrutable, a most intractable, a most maddening canvas: “Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched.” I take as my text, in this essay, the paragraph that follows, and reproduce it here in full: But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself? Few images of pure formlessness have attained to the canonicity of this darkly imagined canvas, which has been a touchstone for generations of Melville critics. The grizzled Robert H. Zoellner, for instance, writing in the early 1970s, discerned in Ishmael’s panic before the painting nothing less than “a glimpse of th[e] anteperceptual world” — itself a function of “philosophical or religious doubt, impinging corrosively upon man’s Adamic acceptance of the phenomenal datum.” Hence, Ishmael, standing before the beckoning disorder of a smoky vortex, feels “the consequence of faith’s receding wave” in “the dissolution of those hard, sharp lines, those incisive shapes, which characterize a thoughtless acceptance of appearances.”1 By these lights, the murky canvas of Chapter Three sets up “the ontological vacancy beneath appearances” that, for Zoellner, lies at the heart of the novel as a whole — and which, of course, the ghost-leviathan himself makes furiously and fatally real. Zoellner wrote that of all the works of literature he had encountered, only Moby-Dick actually frightened him. So much so, in fact, that he called his critical efforts “sheer self-defense”. But if this context of existential combat perhaps purpled his prose, it did not push his interpretation of Chapter Three into outlier territory. On the contrary, his Melville-scholar contemporary, James W. Nechass, writing a few years later, offered a very similar interpretation of the “boggy, soggy, squitchy picture”. Focusing on a close reading of “negative affix” in the (non-) description of the (unseeable) painting, Nechass argued that a swarm of privative and negatory terms (“nameless”, “indefinite”, “unimaginable”, “involuntary”, “unnatural”, etc.) all bespoke the apophatic central theme of the book as a whole: “the ungraspable mystery of life” and “the unknowable truth of the universe”. If, ultimately, it seems that a whale might be at the center of the elusive canvas, that merely confirms the conflation of malevolent cetacean and satanic vacancy from which Moby-Dick moves.2 And a series of more recent readings have continued to shed lurid blacklight on Ishmael’s dark canvas. For Manfred Pütz, the scene is carefully constructed to conflate the position of Ishmael with that of the person holding Moby-Dick in hand, since Melville’s own novelistic achievement is itself a dark storm of murk and metaphysics, before which we as readers stand as befuddled as Ishmael confronting the “black mass” of “nameless yeast”.3 Ought we read that key phrase “black mass” in its fully diabolical, rites-of-Beelzebub sense? Jonathan Cook, writing in Inscrutable Malice: Theodicy, Eschatology, and the Biblical Sources of Moby-Dick (2012), suggests yes. Since he sees the scene in the Spouter-Inn as a Bunyan-esque set-piece, where the pilgrim walks directly into the mouth of hell, there to encounter a menace of Burkean sublimity. The painting is then not only a foretaste of the destruction to come, but also a visual warning over the gate: abandon all hope, ye who enter here. What about the possibility that Melville was playing, in his depiction of painterly formlessness, with a reference to the contemporaneous work of J. M. W. Turner, whose abstracted seascapes were themselves mocked as “pictures of nothing, and very like”? Several scholars have made the case.4 But is the painting actually a painting of nothing? Not really. Or, anyway, not exactly. There is that “one portentous something in the picture’s midst”. And in a final paragraph on the encounter, Melville depicts Ishmael as persisting in the work of discernment — even going so far as to consult with the old-timers at the bar, soliciting their views, and creating thereby a kind of extemporized hermeneutic community. With their help, he eventually makes out a tale of woe in the whirl of darkness, a tale that is itself a premonitory figure for the novel as a whole: a demasted ship in the gale, and perhaps a breaching whale, in its death-throes hurling itself upon the ruin. For the art historian Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby this scene of specifically collaborative interpretation/recovery is revelatory: begrimed by time, smoke, and grease, the original painting has in fact become illegible. It is history that has rendered it opaque. Its layers of patina disclose its venerable antiquity even as they disguise its image and smear the picture to a mummy-brown stew. In the end, Ishmael is only able to make out its form with the help of those who remember — who are, of course, also those directly implicated in its acquired opacity. “Ishmael’s dark painting is almost lost, but it remains just barely legible on the walls of the Spouter-Inn, surrounded by aged whalers who spit and smoke and drink and talk and see themselves in it.”5 They have, across time, puffing on their pipes, made it nearly impossible to see. And they are the ones on whom its interpretation must now rely. Grigsby thus succeeds in bringing the question of history itself to the fore — history as interpretation, and interpretation as historical. She sees the fateful painting of Chapter Three as not merely a nebulous icon for the blind force of the unknown, but as cameo for the historicity of consciousness itself, a parable for the dynamic processes by which surface becomes depth — and the equally dynamic processes by which that sedimentation is reversed. Meaning happens in both directions. Those are the processes by which time becomes visible. This is what meaning is. Actually bringing time to consciousness, then, is the essential work of hermeneutic understanding. In this sense, as he shuttled back and forth (opening the window, asking around at the bar, returning to the painting to look and look) Ishmael was not merely trying to understand a dark canvas. He was looking for the horizon of his moment. * * * Let us do the same. Open AI released the initial “DALL- E” image-generating software in January of 2021, updating to “DALL-E 2” the following year. Both platforms make use of the GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) model, a staggeringly powerful artificial intelligence tool that has “digested” a vast amount of human-generated online content, and developed the capacity to make original and context-responsive outputs that are often difficult to distinguish from new human-generated material. By kitting out DALL-E with GPT-3 models tuned to image analysis (and trained up on billions of image-caption conjunctions) the programmers of Open AI created an essentially unprecedented graphical tool: a system that creates novel visual images from text “prompts” provided by the user. It brings strange new eddies of coherence out of the unformed darkmatter of our interwebbed existence. Compelling eddies. Chaos bewitched. Offered free to the public, DALL-E and DALL-E 2 precipitated an explosion of online play and artistic experimentation — along with a great deal of head-slapping delight, some ethical handwringing, a bit of (well deserved) Silicon Valley braggadocio, and a smattering of gob-smacked Op-Eds. Through the portal of the software, it is possible to feel one is looking into the nascent dream-world of the androids, presently perched on the very cusp of the singularity. At the same time, however, they are very definitely dreaming in our language, since (for now) all the machines know is stuff they get from us. This means each new series of pictures that sift up out of the mind of the GPT-3 engine can also be understood as “ours” in a real way: DALL-E 2 knows the visual unconscious of humanity much better than we do; it shows us new things, which are, simultaneously, algorithmic recombinations of our collective imaginary. What better way to bring the iconically inscrutable canvas of Chapter Three to visibility? So I set myself to this task, and offer what follows by way of a preliminary research report. I began, somewhat arbitrarily, with the following sentence: “a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast.” DALL-E 2 thought for a moment, and offered me these four images: These were OK. But they did not speak to me. So I gave it another go. The two on the left had a ghostly air. But the Melvillian mood did not feel honored by the graphical idiom on which the system had fixed. I thought it over, and realized the machine had no way of knowing that we were talking, here, about a painting. It seemed quite fair to tip it off about that. I modified the prompt with a prefatory “an oil painting of . . .” and ran it again. Better, to be sure. But the period was off. These were effective contemporary paintings. Or anyway they could not have been generated in the era of Moby-Dick. I added a date: “A nineteenth-century oil painting . . .” Interesting. More de Chirico than Turner. More surreal than marine. Might as well get clear on what we are talking about here. So I added “nautical” to my prompt. That rightmost one had a certain lowering force. I decided to run this prompt again, and see what it would generate. Nothing not to like. Although I found myself at this point wanting to go back to the start, and take a different tack. After all, I was here working with simply one random sentence in Melville’s total evocation of the mystery canvas. Why that sentence over the others? Why not simply drop the whole paragraph in as the prompt, and see what happens? I left the “nineteenth-century nautical oil painting” preamble, and cut and pasted the whole ’graph right out of Project Gutenberg. I am not sure how much of the text the machine actually processed, but its results were quite new: For whatever reason, the leftmost of these images hit me immediately, and seemed the first of the whole sequence that had about it an air of actual plausibility. I decided to choose it, and let DALL-E 2 iterate further down that path. Each of these seemed to me “a boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly”. And indeed of any of them I might be tempted to cry out something along the lines of, “It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale!” or, “It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements!” Or perhaps even, “It’s a Hyperborean winter scene! It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time!” Further iteration was called for. The middle version possessed, to my eye, a dark central form of peculiarly leviathanic nebulosity. Onward! Now the rightmost seemed most like a nameless yeast, wherein a central looming might be hesitantly discerned. Further, further . . . Aye! Second from the left! A little lower, Starbuck! Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! In the center, man! The billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak! There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! Look down here! In the center, the center! Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man, steady! There go flukes! Rightmost! No, no; only black water! Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew overhead, at the center. The two hulls wildly rolled. Why, he’s getting it by heart—hist! Second from the left, again. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Off the portside, look down here! God! God! God!—crack my heart!—stave my brain!—mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs. The fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled along . . . Feel thy heart,—beats it yet? Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last! * * * EPILOGUE “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee”Job The drama’s done. All true, too. Every word of it. I pushed away from the screen with a woozy air of one who could not quite believe what he had seen. Could flukes — very proper flukes! — have lifted their dark sinews to the moonlight out of that black roiling water? And then did I see the cloud-tending bird, white of wing, bend its lofting arc toward that heaven from which Ahab hid his eyes? What force, then, did twist with redeeming will those scimitar blades into a true and glowing heart, that figure of tenderness and love? Had I not just seen it rise, with the quiet grace of a cold dawn out of the inky depths of that primeval maelstrom? “Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows”, wrote Melville of the formless canvas of the Spouter-Inn. To help us see into this obscurity, the androids of DALL-E brooded on the broad expanse of our oceanic data. And they delivered themselves of a bewitching chaos. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 21, 2023

Eigil zu Tage-Ravn

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:38.142317

porch-memories

Porch Memories By Federica Soletta August 4, 2021 In the final stanza of his remarkable poem “Sunday Morning” (1923), Wallace Stevens refers to Jerusalem (and more specifically the tomb of Christ) as, possibly, “the porch of spirits lingering”. It is such a strange formula that it has endured: the “porch of spirits”, the place where they “linger” — this is any portal or threshold linking (and also separating) human beings from whatever gods or angels there might be. A lovely notion. But why did Stevens choose that homely word, and that most quotidian of sites: the porch? A “portico” (whence the word derives) is something grand. But a “porch”? It is the postage-stamp façade of a temple (or is it a tomb?) pasted in miniature upon our domestic architecture. In a secular age, as Stevens understood so well, this is where our spirits, whatever they may be, are left to linger. Federica Soletta sits with them awhile in the affecting photo-essay that follows. — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor One day, in a thrift store in Brooklyn, I found a box full of old family photographs. I felt immediately the reality of the people depicted, and with that sense came many questions, along with a churning curiosity about their lives and deaths. Old photographs often work that way. But here there was something else, too. Something that caught my attention — something perhaps unremarkable to an American eye but certainly unusual to a foreigner like me. My punctum, in these images, had the shape of a rigid frame, a structural element present in many of the photographs, although never as the main actor: the American porch. Typically made of wood and partially surrounding the house, the porch is a boundary between the outside world and the intimacy of a home’s interior, seen and lived as both a private and an open space. In the U.S., the porch is an adaptation, a point of convergence of different architectural traditions: an adjustment to the many European revivals of the nineteenth century and an assimilation of Haitian house styles, imported by free Black people in the South, probably coming from West Africa. Perhaps, even a liminal zone between civilization (the house itself) and the wild (the outer world). In these terms, the porch is a kind of frontier. In America, it becomes a transverse element — seen across Victorian mansions, landowner houses, and low-income habitations — and spans geographies as well: while always more predominant in the South, porches, in many forms, achieved wide popularity in the whole of the United States. Even more ubiquitous than the porch in America are American porch photographs. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the American porch became a privileged background for family portraits. Is it possible to speak of a “photographic tradition”? And if so, how did this “photographic tradition” evolve? What kind of history, and how many stories, do these photographs narrate? What kind of archive have they produced? What do they suggest to us about photography, about family photographs, and, most explicitly, about American history and families? * The people in most family photographs pose, play, or smile, and are usually aware of the photograph being taken. While the families are different, the formal similarities are many: the group arrangements, the closeness of the subjects, likenesses across the components of the group, or their generational gaps. In the photographs that follow, the construction of the visual space, too, becomes a common element. It is a backdrop or setting for the protagonists, who stand in front of (or just outside) the entrance door of their house. Although they are not inside, they still feel “at home” in a space of transition and safety: on the porch or just close by it. Photo-historian Geoffrey Batchen reminds us that snapshots are an art historian’s worst nightmare, for they resist “value judgments”, which is, of course, “a key element of traditional art historical practice”.1 Agreeing with him, my intention is not to invent an art history of “the porch photograph”, for these photographs do not belong to the world of art history. Nor do I aim to search for the people portrayed in the photographs, or to elucidate what specific action is depicted in each image. Instead, here I will treat these photographs as objects of and for history, a history in the lower case. “All photographs”, John Berger once wrote, “are contributions to history, and any photograph, under certain circumstances, can be used in order to break the monopoly which history today has over time”.2 In weaving fictitious and real memories, personal and quoted reflections, these notes attempt to “ventriloquize” the images and to listen to them, without a storyline or individual captions. Banal, yet tender, this set of photographs does not only portray the daily gestures of life on the porch and the functionality of this distinctive space. These images can also be used as a lens by which to reveal other scenes and stories. Or possibly for looking differently — with a different gaze — at our own history: either the old history of a nation or a new history of photography. My thoughts will serve as suggestive threads, but to you, reader, is left the final interpretation. The Historian Dreams… We always belonged to this porch. The trip was long, the heat sometimes unbearable, the train very slow, very crowded, very noisy. But certainly there was the sky. Nowhere in Wales did we have this kind of sky: grand, vast, at times even frightening in its curve and reach. In Wales, we may have beautiful grey clouds and green valleys as you cannot even imagine, and the magic torpidity of foggy mornings. But a sky like this won’t fit in Wales. It was, we thought, enough to look at the sky to hope for the future. The future was everything we had. You don’t take a trip like this if you don’t have some future to bring with you, tightly packed in your luggage. We had just a few things with us, mostly distant memories and dirty clothes. My wife with a child inside her, a baby that would be an American, the first of us. We didn’t need much more. We were an ordinary story at that time. Pennsylvania seemed like a very exotic name for us, a name that meant a house, some land, and silent nights on an American porch to remember the solitude of Wales. My brother was already there, in Pennsylvania. He wrote us letters full of passion for its polite cows, simple food, and women’s hearts. We met him in front of his house. None of us had the strength or the ability to say much. We just looked at the house, the empty garden, the curtains on the windows, and the airy porch. We arrived thinking of Wales. Now we will be Americans. Do you know what it means to be, or even to become, American? Being American, for me, a shepherd coming from Wales, means to have a porch between my existence and the world. A porch from which to look at the countryside, the dusty road, the infinite sky, the carts with horses passing by. American Iconography In response to the publication of Walker Evans’ American Photographs, William Carlos Williams beautifully noted, in an article written for the New Republic in 1938: So here’s a book of photographs about America. It’s not the first, perhaps not even the best book of pictures of us, but it’s an eloquent one, one of the most fluent I have come across and enjoyed. The pictures are for the most part mild, but in spite of this, though always exquisitely clear in reasoning and in visual quality, they pack a wicked punch. There’s nothing oppressively “photographic” here, it isn’t a long nose poking into dirty corners for propaganda and for scandal, there are no trick shots, the composition isn’t a particular feature — but the pictures talk to us. And they say plenty.3 Williams points to photography’s relation with the visible and the invisible. In order to speak to us, photographs may conceal their “photographability”, perhaps even their purpose or beauty. In this way, he also seems to suggest that a photograph, or a series of photographs, has the ability to reveal America’s deep essence. As if within the photographs, one could possibly find a visual common denominator for America, an American iconography. A Family Album But the pictures whisper to us. And they say plenty. When “listening” to these photographs and reading them in relation to each other (despite the differences of era, geography, and economic status of the families), one may uncover a double identity. The first represents the intimacy of a house: the secret relations within a family and its singularity. The other illustrates a much larger story: the common history of a country. As a family album, one by one, they uncover and delineate the American life and its identity. In this way, the familial gaze becomes itself a kind of lens, an involuntary panoramic zoom turned to a national self and a national gaze. If there is something familiar in every family photograph, something that reminds each of us of our own family, it is perhaps because each photograph appears to follow a similar visual script that makes itself visible through the image’s composition and intention — unique yet universal. But in the case of the “porch photographs”, there is something more: the elements of remembrance, mourning, life and death that are typical of every photograph, especially of family portraits, intertwine with the representation of an architectural object. And it is through these images that the porch became a symbol, an integral part of “Americanness”, even a metaphor of America, with its community and its contradictions. Connections In Porch Portraits, photographer Susan Meiselas offers a fragmentary documentation of domestic life in the countryside of South Carolina and Mississippi. The series is not just a collection of photographs on or of porches, despite the title of the project. Sometimes the porch is visible, although not as the main subject; sometimes it is not even present. Sometimes it is the place of exchange between the gaze of the photographer and that of the people portrayed; other times it is just another type of frame, a visual reference. Yet, Meiselas’ title, “Porch Portraits”, immediately reminds us of the setting that we will see in the photographs. The porch does not simply divide the interior life from the outdoor one. Nor does it merely separate the private, individual space from the wild American landscape, another leitmotif of the American identity. As in Meiselas’ photographs, the porch also belongs to the life of the American house, to its memory. It is in these terms that one may think (as I do) of the porch as the epitome of a certain American life, not simply as an architectural landmark but as a domestic — and photographic — lieu par excellence, as described in books and shown in movies. Perhaps, we can even think of the porch as a space of empathy: it is on the liminal porch that, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout realizes what it means to be in someone else’s skin, to see from another perspective: Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough. Symbol The immobile porch and the moving flags. From the outside, the porch can be thought of as a three-dimensional billboard, since it is where the American flag can be displayed — an advertisement, a testimony of belonging. But what if you don’t belong to the porch or to the flag? Here is the vulnerability of the space, that strangeness that the photograph cannot stop echoing. The porch becomes an eye-level flagpole, whether the flag flies or not. This is an ensign by which to veil or reveal America. A promise of Safety The porch is an all-encompassing cinematic screen: projected on it are the smiles of immigrants, the suburban growth of the 1950s, social and racial inequalities, economic booms and crashes. In the photograph, the porch is a space of encounter and possession, it belongs to the viewer as much as to the users. Rooted in its location, the porch echoes a sense of belonging, while also being in constant transformation (and, in a way, remaining the most vulnerable part of the house). If the American porch mirrored the evolution of an entire country and of its landscape, fashions, and migrations, it is also a sign of the violence and appropriation of its territory. The porch photographs — spontaneous and involuntary historical witnesses — bring fragments of America’s past into its present and future: they bear the traces of multiple stories that will become the official American history. Yet the porch photographs distance themselves from the historical documentation of, for instance, Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange in their work with the Farm Security Administration during the late 1920s and 1930s. The familiar atmosphere that is visible in the porch photographs reveals an innocence of intention. The porch was indeed a successful place where everyday life was experienced, photographed, and passed by. Evans’ and Lange’s documents are meant to keep the eye of the camera focused on a specific object of study with an underlying tension. They remind us of an ethnographic gaze, with the exactitude of the photographer’s external eyes. The family photograph, instead, has the family itself as both subject and object. Every kind of happening is recorded there: the evidence of laughter, a memorable Christmas day wearing a nice dress, the old lady knitting, the happiness of a child with a toy, or a couple or friends posing in front of the camera. There is a clear consciousness of the camera in these images, an exceptional performance that is able to register, once and for all, the repetition of everyday gestures. And in this arises a legible conflict: the planned pose against the pure spontaneity of the moment. The porch is more than the stage of this conflict. It is, in a sense, an involuntary testimony to the antinomy: it is itself, in its physicality, a frame for presentation; it is also the promise of everyday safety and intimacy. “Even in the war years” My main porch memory is a memory of a back porch photograph from circa 1940. It is a picture of my grandmother, my grandfather, and my grandfather’s siblings on the back porch of the servants’ house in what had been a large estate with a palace. That estate went nearly bankrupt in 1929, so the family moved into this house, the Barghans, where, on the porch, the photo shows they were at times incredibly happy even in the war years. Several years ago, I showed a series from my porch photograph collection in a small exhibition, and I asked the public to interact with the collection by writing, in an adjacent notebook, a personal memory or experience related to the porch. My intention was to gain insight into the relationship that the public (mostly American) had with the life on the porch and its “photographability”. Whether one of the photographs triggered the memory above, or the writer had already a memory of this particular porch in her mind, I cannot know. Yet, it struck me to read that her memory was not about a specific moment, action, person on a porch, or even of the space itself, but rather about another photograph. It was a moment she has not lived, except, of course, through the image. Her words suggest a tenderness about the house, and most specifically about the porch, that is revealed and internalized through the medium of the photograph — so much as to become a memory of “it”. Her description belongs to all photographs, as it manifests the power of each and every photograph to bear the traces of memory. There is a uniqueness, however, in her note and in the image she recalls — the uniqueness of the specific moment in which her grandparents were happy on “the back porch”. Even with her brief description, we can almost imagine and visualize “her photograph” and feel it as our own. In the same way, every porch photograph becomes her porch memory. Mise en Scène The porch and the photograph (I’ll treat them as near-synonyms at this point) do not permit us to see the inside of the house or the privacy of its interiors. We can only imagine the grandiosity or humility of the interior spaces and the richness or frugality of the back yard. If the porch becomes a screen, the photograph acts as a further medium. With its frame and porosity, it sets a different network of spatial and physical relations. The cropped photographic image transforms the rhythm of the space and the visual understanding of the porch. Through this rhythm and the dialog between the frame of the camera and that of the porch, one may write a further history of photography. Carefully conceived is the composition: the family is staged on the porch. The porch is a special place, and the photograph is a special moment, a planned action, a mise en scène for the memory of the family. “Being portrayed” was not an everyday thing at the end of the eighteenth or start of the nineteenth century. Following the rule of the studio, we can imagine the photographer en plein air setting and composing the scene, while the family is tidying up the porch. The distance of the mechanical eye is understandable, as early technology needed more light and a wider field. Perhaps, however, the singular faces of the family were not the main focus of the photograph: being photographed on the porch, as a family, also meant to show one’s own fortune and physical possessions. In the small frame of the photograph, the spatial distance between the viewer and the subject has a visible consequence, since including the house meant blurring the facial features of those who patiently stood and posed on the porch. The porch, the family, and the house harmoniously became one entity. The possession of one’s own house (the American dream) intertwines with the sociological implication of photography and the act of being photographed. If the house with the porch is a status symbol, being photographed on the porch is not merely a memory but also a most powerful act of ownership and belonging. Close-up Moving forward in time, the composition becomes less formal and more familiar. The use of the camera is cheaper, more popular, and easier to manage. The porch changes status, turning into a mere platform (rather than a proper back-ground) on which life is performed and recorded. As a result, the camera steps onto the porch and deconstructs it. Only fractions are visible: a column, the steps, a portion of the roof. The porch is almost transparent; we perceive its presence without seeing it. Later, in the second half of the twentieth century, the privileged space of the home’s photographer changes to the new gathering point of the family: the television room. Another medium, another gaze on the world.4 Messages “This is a picture of me”, writes Nelly Ramsey on the back of her portrait (perhaps destined for another hand, or for that of her future self), “and my beautiful poinsettia, with five lively blooms at last Christmas time. I have some beautiful plants, guess I am like my mother” This is not a caption, as one could expect in an artistic photograph, nor is it the voice of the photographer; rather, it is the voice of the subject, the sitter. The unknown photographers give us points of view upon people whose voices are inscribed on the back of the photographs themselves. Transformed into a message, into a postcard, the porch multiplies presence and presences. “Young warriors” Just a little behind us on our left and close on the road was a house, the first we had passed in several miles, and we decided to ask directions of the people on the porch, whom, in the car mirror, I could see still watching us. . . . There were three on the porch, watching me, and they must not have spoken twice in an hour while they watched beyond the rarely traveled road the changes of daylight along the recessions of the woods, and while, in the short field that sank behind their house, their two crops died silently in the sun: a young man, a young woman, and an older man; and the two younger, their chins drawn inward and their heads tall against the grained wall of the house, watched me steadily and sternly as if from beneath the brows of helmets, in the candor of young warriors or of children.— James Agee and Walker Evans5 Stage - Reflections Evans is looking at the people on the porch; their eyes are responding silently. The photograph transforms the individual act of looking into an infinite, circular correspondence of gazes. As a theatrical stage, the porch is a place from which you look at the world, while the world looks back at you. Porch photographs make such reflections of regard endless, as the viewer not only steps into the shadow of the photographer, but also becomes the new audience. One may imagine that there’s no better podium on which to be seen and remembered than the American porch. On a personal note… Running and hiding in the shadow of the columns — this is my porch memory. I cannot recollect a specific day, season, or place for any of them, because my porches belong to another geography, where most of the “portici” surround a piazza and are, therefore, a properly public space. There was nothing I could “possess”. I have as many porch memories as there were piazzas through which I ran, or over which my eye passed. My grandfather was born in Duluth in 1904, the second son of an Italian immigrant couple. While working in New York, in his 20s, he went back to Italy to visit some relatives. There he met my grandmother and never went back to New York or Duluth. He built a new house for his new family, a house for his Italian daughters — daughters who would not be Americans, my mother and her two sisters. The house was a medium-sized one, almost anonymous in a small village in the very north of the country, close to the Alps, close to Switzerland. It is a normal, medium-sized house of a Lombardy province, in a row of normal, similar houses, facing what was a quiet village road. Shades of ochre and rose, with ordered trees planted on the edge of the curbside. It was a tranquil house, two stories, with a steep roof, a garden all around, and a balcony. My grandfather, born in Minnesota, who lived most of his life in Italy, built, in the village of Brebbia, somewhere in the Prealpine region of Lombardy, an ordinary countryside Italian house. With a porch. “Like the houses of America!” I can see them on that porch, in an old photograph: he is there, with my grandmother and my newborn aunt (1934?), as in the American houses of which that porch carries the memory. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 4, 2021

Federica Soletta

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:38.690371

reborn-into-a-new-form

Reborn Into a New Form (1849) By Alex Christofi November 10, 2021 A second life? To live again? Fyodor Dostoevsky, famously, survived the uncanny pantomime of his own execution, and found himself, on the other side, “reborn into a new form”. These were Dostoevsky’s words, written to his brother in the wake of the ordeal. Here below, those very words are themselves given a kind of second life: in this excerpt from Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life (published earlier this year), Alex Christofi stitches primary source excerpts into a “reconstructed memoir” — the memoir that Dostoevsky himself never wrote. The dream of literature made entirely of quotations reaches back across more than a century of cut-ups, remixes, centos, and collages: from Octavian Esanu’s brilliant JFL, What Does "Why" Mean? (2002), through Guy Debord’s Mémoires (1958), and over the mountain of Walter Benjamin’s landmark “Arcades” project (1927–1940). In 1990, Richard Price’s pioneering history of slave rebellion in Suriname, Alabi’s World (1990), used four different typefaces, one for each of the “voices” being woven into a single work. Here, in this re-collected episode, Christofi, too, is weaving: weaving Dostoevsky’s autobiographical fiction together with his fantastic life. — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor Today, 22nd of December, after eight months of solitary confinement, I was taken with five others to the Semyonovsky Parade Ground.1 Fyodor’s friend, Sergei Durov, was standing next to him. There were three posts stuck in the ground. “Surely we cannot be executed”, Fyodor whispered. Durov indicated a cart nearby, on which there appeared to be several coffins covered with cloth.2 Fyodor turned to his other companion, Nikolai Speshnev. “We shall be with Christ”, he muttered in French. But Speshnev only smiled and pointed at the ground. “A handful of dust”, he replied.3 The sentence of death was read to all of us, we were told to kiss the cross, our swords were broken over our heads, and we were put into white shirts.4 Then the first three — Petrashevsky, Mombelli, and Grigoriev — were led up, tied to the pillar for execution, and caps were pulled over their eyes.5 A company of several soldiers was drawn up against each post. I was in the second batch and there was no more than a minute left for me to live.6 I wanted to understand as quickly and clearly as possible how it was that I was living and in moments I would simply be a thing. Not far off, there was a church, and the gilt roof was glittering in the bright sunshine. I stared persistently at the roof and the sunshine. I could not tear myself away from it.7 I had not expected that the execution would take place for at least a week yet — I had counted on all the formalities taking some time — but they got my papers ready quickly. At five in the morning I was asleep, and it was cold and dark. The governor came in and touched my shoulder gently, and I started. “What is it?” I asked. “The execution is fixed for ten o’clock”, he said. I was only just awake, and couldn’t believe it at first — I began to ask about my papers. But by the time I was really awake and saw the truth of the matter, I fell silent and stopped arguing, as I could see there was no point. The governor watched me. All I could say was, “It’s very hard to bear — it’s so sudden”. Those last three or four hours pass by in the preparations. You see the priest, have your breakfast — coffee, meat, even a little wine. The priest was there the whole time, talking.8 You get in the cart and the houses recede — but that’s nothing. There is still the second turning. There is still a whole street, and however many houses have been passed, there are still many left.9 And so to the very end, to the very scaffold. At the most terrible moments of a man’s life, he will forget anything but some roof that has flashed past him on the road, or a jackdaw on a cross.10 The most terrible part of the punishment is not the bodily pain, but the certain knowledge that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, your soul must quit your body and you will no longer be a man, and that this is certain — certain! That’s the real point: the certainty of it. A murder by sentence is far more dreadful than a murder committed by a criminal. If you are attacked at night, in a dark wood, you hope that you may escape until the very moment of your death. But in an execution, that last hope is taken away, and in its place there is only the terrible certainty that you cannot possibly escape death. It is the most dreadful anguish there is. Our Lord Christ spoke of this anguish. No one should be treated this way — no one. The priest, who seemed a wise man, stopped talking when we reached the drill grounds, and only held the little silver cross for me to kiss. My legs felt feeble and helpless, and I felt a choking in my throat. I had that terrible feeling of being absolutely powerless to move, though I hadn’t lost my wits. The priest pressed the cross to my lips, and I kissed it greedily, as if it might be useful to me afterwards.11 In that last minute, I remembered my brother; only then I realised how I love him! Finally the retreat was sounded, and those tied to the pillar were led back, and it was announced to us that His Imperial Majesty had granted us our lives. *** My life begins again today. I will receive four years’ hard labour, and after that will serve as a private. I see that life is everywhere, life in ourselves. There will be people near me, and to be among people — that is the purpose of life, I have realised. The idea has entered my flesh and blood. Yes, it’s true! I have beheaded my lofty, creative, spiritual self. There are many ideas I haven’t yet written down. They will lacerate me, it is true! But I have my heart and flesh and blood which can also love, and suffer, and desire, and remember, and this, after all, is life. When I look back and think how much time has been wasted in vain, how much time lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in ignorance of how to live, how I did not value time, how often I sinned against myself — my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute might have been an age of it. Youth is wasted on the young! Now, I am being reborn into a new form.12 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 10, 2021

Alex Christofi

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:39.207469

every-society-invents-the-failed-utopia-it-deserves

Every Society Invents the Failed Utopia it Deserves By John Tresch October 19, 2016 “Now: the integration of the actual and the possible.” So speaks the radiant Marie Violette Tranchot (AKA “Octave Obdurant”) at a crucial moment in the piece that follows. Where are we? Well, we are ensconced with a cross-dressing cosmologist of all possible worlds, a scarred veteran of the age of revolution, as s/he bends, wild-haired, in unhinged service to a sociopolitical astrolabe of her own confection — call it a utopian calculator of every utopia, a clockwork orrery modeling nothing less than transcendence. John Tresch is a historian who combines tremendous learning with a luminous imagination, and he here graces us with a gift in both keys. Yes, he tips open the visionary, mechano-morphic romanticism of the mid-nineteenth-century radicals of Paris, and does so using an archival pry bar of real precision. But at the same time, he manages to vignette our vista by means of a tale so lurid and glimmering one can readily imagine it accidentally anthologized in a volume of Edgar Allan Poe. What kind of history is this? Historical fiction? Not really. Fictionalized history? That won’t do either. One is tempted to say that Tresch has here given us history as the integration of the actual and the possible. History contaminated by its subject? Yes. And to quote Violette/Octave once again: “It shows how far dreams may reach.” — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor Let me offer a few words to introduce this translation. I stumbled upon the original, a forgotten memoir by a now legendary author, in a bound, yellowed volume of radical newspapers in Paris’ Bibliothèque Nationale. It dates from 1895, when both the past and future of the workers’ movement were rethought under the force of unrest and uncertainty. I was researching Elisée Reclus, the French anarchist geographer. “Man is nature taking consciousness of itself”, Reclus believed; the liberation of humanity and the earth went hand in hand. What Lenin called Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, was at that time being consolidated on a global scale. Yet many fought it with new forms of thought and action; they wanted to redirect the power of new technologies, and their world-spanning reach, away from the usual endpoints of nationalist aggression and imperial subjugation. Elisée Reclus was one of those who could see a different future: “Our destiny is to reach that state of ideal perfection in which nations no longer need to be under the tutelage of a government or another nation; it is the absence of government, it is anarchy which is the highest expression of order.”1 I was looking for roots and resonances of Reclus’ science, the tools with which he saw humans helping this more-than-human destiny along. It seemed this moment from the past was ripe with anticipations and provocations for today, offering examples and other resources for those who struggle to draw new maps of politics, knowledge, nature — to remake this crowded globe. I found I had become obsessed with one of Reclus’ associates: Louise Michel. Paul Verlaine called her “The Red Virgin of Montmartre”. She was a school teacher born in 1830, a pen pal of Victor Hugo and drove an ambulance carriage for the Paris Commune in 1871. Louise Michel was not among the 20,000 who were executed in that uprising; she served twenty months in prison, exiled to New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Amnesty was declared in 1880; she returned to France, increasingly committed to anarchism: “Power is cursed; that is why I am an anarchist”, was one of her slogans. She was arrested again and again. In prison she wrote books about “the social question”, including the astounding science fiction novels The Human Microbes and The New Era. Michel lived her last seventeen years with a bullet lodged in her skull from an assassination attempt. She also inaugurated the use of the black flag for anarchy.2 I wish I had invented Louise Michel, but she’s too extraordinary to be fictional. In the second half of the nineteenth century, state repression and censorship made widescale political organizing difficult. New means were proposed. Some argued for “The Propaganda of the Deed”. In 1891, the anarchist Ravachol set bombs against Ministers of Public Defense, was arrested and executed. In 1893, Auguste Vaillant exploded a bomb in the Chamber of Deputies causing minor injuries. President Sadi Carnot was stabbed to death in 1894. A result of these shocking attacks on the ruling elite was “Les Lois Scélérats”, starting in 1893. These “Scoundrel Laws” allowed draconian suppression of civil liberties: the mere mention of violent uprising landed radicals in jail. 1893 was also the year of the death of historian Hippolyte Taine, who had just finished a three volume history of France. Two years later, in 1895, the anarchist journal Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Sociale was relaunched, with the assistance of La Bonne Louise. The article I’ve translated for this essay is from the third issue of Le Libertaire. It’s signed by “Une lutteuse”, and would almost certainly have been recognized by contemporaries as the work of Louise Michel. It’s entitled: Pour en finir avec l’histoire scélérate- Le mot d’Octave Obdurant. Which I’ve translated as: Scoundrel History and Utopian Method. Scoundrel History and Utopian Method Le Libertaire, iii, 1895, presumed Louise Michel Who among us does not feel the shadow of fear cast by the cowardly laws of these past years? The Scoundrel Laws terrorize not only those who might commit violence, but anyone who associates with them. They reward those who denounce their brothers and sisters, sowing distrust and ill-will. They freeze our hearts and our tongues, by punishing with prison anyone who provokes, praises, or merely seeks to understand those mad acts to which an insane society has driven a few poor souls. Perhaps even these words, here, are enough to summon our new inquisitors. If so, I say, let them come. I know their jail cells; their guards are my comrades and friends. Scoundrel laws, like the scoundrels who created them, must one day lose their power. It is a law of justice and nature. We who know the future, who see with certainty like a memory ahead of us the society of freedom, equality, brotherhood and sisterhood, we learn such laws from the past, even, at times, from the bourgeois chroniclers behind the walls of the Sorbonne. At the very least, from them we may learn what new tricks they employ. Thus I recently read the three volumes of the historian whom they call “great”, Hippolyte Taine, to learn what lies were being passed off as the official past. Taine sat in a special Chair, for the History of the Revolution — a monument propped on the grave of the past like a tombstone, to guarantee that such an event will never happen again. This historian is now himself buried, covered in praise. I come not to desecrate his memory, but merely, after so many éloges by those mindless thinkers-by-the-hour, to restore it to its true and laughable scale. Taine tells us that history is an obscure knowledge of a distant past, and that we have nothing to expect from the future. The Revolution, this decisive overflowing of the desire for justice and a better life, is denounced as a deception, a struggle for power among upstarts, a monstrosity never to be repeated. Among all Taine’s half-truths, fantasies, and idiocies, none is so great as his pretension to science — in which history is always a balance between race, milieu, and moment. He transforms inspired and courageous men and women into dupes of nature and of their fellows; by this he hopes to complete whatever bestialization the rulers of this society have not yet wrought. He has created the equivalent in letters of those villainous acts of legislation. He has written l’Histoire scélérate, Scoundrel History. It shuts people’s mouths and severs their connection to the dreams, sweat, and aspirations of those who struggled before us. Scoundrel History insists on the difference between now and then, the arbitrariness of the new, the fatalism of birth, of rocks, vegetation, and rivers. In the name of science he lashes those who embraced a world more vast than his vanity. Were these his only crimes, I would happily cast his miserable books aside — or in a more generous spirit, wrap fish in them, so that in some small way they might serve life. But I am moved to take up my pen, finally, by his third volume, which blesses the current power as good, just, and in any case inevitable. What spurs me to write is a single citation, a unique if profound mistake. His book discusses the Commune, a glorious moment we remember by its hopes and noble example, laid low but not destroyed. In one brief passage, Taine betrays all his worship of the predictable and his denial of the unforeseen. Here we see Scoundrelism elevated to a theory. After describing the aftermath of the Commune, the butchery of the state against the living proof that a truly egalitarian and democratic society functions well, joyously, when left to itself, he writes: A few years later, most of this rabble had lost whatever convictions drove their violence. Even deluded demagogues renounced their youthful dreams. We need no further evidence than a pamphlet from the printing offices of confusion: Every Society Invents the Failed Utopia It Deserves, the work of a certain Octave Obdurant — a survivor of 1848, second-rate engineer and first rate rabble-rouser. This is not a wise, but a chastened work — the lament of a man awakened to the bitter truth, that only compromise and concession allow one to live with a semblance of repose. In this pamphlet, we see the renunciation of a whole generation, the inevitable calming of a degenerate revolutionary impulse. Obdurant, hard-headed though he was, at last yielded to reality; his fellow-travelers must soon enough do the same. (Histoire de la France, vol IV, Le régime contemporaine, p. 221) Our historian has not only misread the pamphlet he cites, Every Society Creates the Failed Utopia It Deserves, by Octave Obdurant; I believe he has not even opened it. For you see, I knew Octave Obdurant. Once, we met. I sought the author out, in those dark years when it seemed the flame of liberty might be extinguished forever. I was moved by the memory of another pamphlet I had read in the spring of 1848. Meeting me in my youthful optimism and driving it to higher, dizzying heights, was the essay, Organize Labor, Free the Earth, signed Octave Obdurant. It was one of the many utopias springing up like mushrooms in those days. I was under the sway of Blanqui, captivated by the burning purity of his rage. But in Obdurant there was a different persuasion: the passion of poetry, the serenity of mathematics, the earth’s conception from the first divine breath, its long slumber in chaos until at last the sons of Noah raised their heads, took up the tools of industry, and demanded a just apportionment of labor and its fruits. I was moved that Obdurant spoke also of Noah’s daughters and their high position in the earthly paradise. This vision resembled the fantastic plenum of the Fourierists, the religious cry of the Saint-Simonians, the frenzy for order of Cabet’s Icarians. Yet in Obdurant’s words one sensed at once eagerness and reserve, a mind which had surveyed a vast territory with all the rigor of science, yet now allowed the quiet light of truth, arriving as if from the origin of time, to illuminate a holy marriage of earth and humanity, thought and deed. There was madness to it, yes — a madness which spoke to my own. I cherished the pamphlet, even after all those utopias burst one by one like fragile bubbles blown by a child. In 1855, unwilling to abandon these honorable dreams of youth, I wrote two letters. One to Victor Hugo, the great man who repaid me with a gift I value above any other: his friendship. I wrote also to Octave Obdurant. * I had learned that Obdurant still lived — in exile, in silence. In Belgium. I wrote a letter, thus: Though a child in ’48, I had sworn my life to the people, and Organize Labor, Free the Earth was a clarion leading a young revolutionary through a hopeless time. I asked if we might meet. Three months later, a reply came, written on green graph paper in a careful hand. One word: Yes, followed by a date — a fortnight hence: 15h précis. I was filled with anticipation on the long train journey from Paris to Brussels. With only moderate difficulty I found the address: a quiet cul-de-sac in a warren of streets not yet ravaged by the projects of destruction in the city’s center. I turned the knob which rang a bell, answered by slow, heavy paces. It opened a crack, to a craggy face, peering up at me with suspicion and mockery. I said I had come for Monsieur Obdurant. The old man took in my eager face, poor dress, cracked shoes, frayed shawl and bonnet, and spoke. “Monsieur Obdurant does not exist.” He glowered with relish. Baffled by this sphinx’s statement, I brought out my green invitation, unfolded it, showed him the address and signature. With a slight smile he nodded, as if wondering how much of a fool I truly was. He gestured me in, pointing across the courtyard. “Third floor on the left, Mademoiselle”, he said, reminding me of my youth, my sex, my vulnerability. With growing unease, I mounted the narrow staircase, the ceilings lower with each floor. Before a door on the third, I knocked. A husky voice barked: “Entrez!” Through a long, dim hallway, I followed the voice, until I reached a spare, curtained room. One empty chair stood near the entrance. Another, across the darkened space, was occupied by a slender, shadowed figure with erect posture, white hair long and flowing as in the fashion of the 1840s, in an elegant black suit, immaculate linens, a neckcloth of Persian design. A bright gaze set into a finely featured face pierced the gloom. “Sit”, the figure commanded. As if under the influence of a powerful magnetizer, I sat without pause. My host spoke sharply, gruffly. “Welcome, Mademoiselle. You have come to meet me, no? You wish to learn of my ideas, my thoughts. But should you not first know to whom you speak?” I nodded. The figure straightened. “You wrote to Octave Obdurant. This is the name with which the person before you entered the Ecole Polytechnique. It is the name on my entrance papers to the Ecole de Ponts et Chaussées. It is the name with which I signed my first articles in geometry, my first statistical tables, as well as Free the Earth, which you were kind enough to notice.” The voice was clear and occasionally guttural; there was a warmth beneath its unyielding syllables. “But as you have certainly realized, this is not my true name.” I felt my mind begin to spin. I was unsure of where I was, what I was doing here, in these isolated rooms. I stammered out: “Excuse me, Monsieur. What, then, is your name?” “I was baptized Tranchot.” Despite the pause which followed, the name meant nothing to me until it was repeated, with its prenames before it. “Marie Violette Tranchot.” I was moved by an emotion of shock and recognition at once. Some part of me had already realized that I was not in the presence of a great man, but rather a great woman — no wizened brother of the struggle, but a sister. Instantly, I felt myself uncannily at home, safe at last in a place I’d never been — truly at home, perhaps, for the first time in my life. This hero, epitome of the courage and intelligence the world saw as masculine, was a woman like myself. She must have guessed the sensation her revelation would cause. I sat in silence, collecting my thoughts, calming myself. At last I spoke; I asked to know her life and history. In an arch and formal manner, not without humor and charm, she told me her tale. * She was a child of the century, born in 1807 near Reims, illegitimate and unrecognized, her father a minor noble and Orleanist, a free thinker and a Field Marshall in the revolutionary Army. He had limped home from Austerlitz, took up in secret with the daughter of a mason of the Cathedral. Marie Violette’s father, in secret, took her schooling in charge. She learned the multiplication tables by age four. She mastered Laplace and Lagrange, Greek and Latin, Descartes, Pascal, the large-hearted Jean-Jacques. When the pupil surpassed the teacher, he found a discreet polytechnician to prepare her for its examinations. The only way forward for her was to pretend to be a boy. Thus Marie Violette Tranchot gave way to Octave Obdurant. Even her tutor did not realize that the child with cropped hair and unbroken voice, defining quadratic functions, was a girl. At sixteen, with Poinsot himself administering the examinations, Octave-Marie excelled her peers. She entered the Polytechnique in seventh place. She dressed and bathed in secrecy, modeling her gestures on those of older soldiers, training her voice to a manly depth. She was noticed only for the quickness of her mind and memory; at Ponts et Chaussées she became the protégeé of the great diagrammer and cartographer, Charles Minard; she was sent on mission from Metz to Lyon and Saint-Germain, designing railroads, perfecting bridges and new factories. In Paris, through her astronomy tutor — Auguste Comte himself — she had become aware of Saint-Simon and with her classmates she attended meetings of the religion they were then pouring forth to remake the world. A great battle was raging in her heart between her regimented life as a soldier-savant and her passions as both a woman and a republican. Suzanne Volquin and Flora Tristan proclaimed the inseparability of workers’ emancipation from that of women. Attending the Vaudeville one night she observed George Sand, dressed as a man but hiding none of her femininity; Octave-Violette was thrilled by her courage and her words. At last, to Claire Bazard, the Saint-Simonian priestess, Octave-Violette revealed her torments. Bazard knew and understood all; even the Père Enfantin acknowledged her and praised her “sublime versatility, symbol of the androgynous divine.” She became one of the sect’s most persuasive preachers; she shared their collective house, took on lovers, and terrified her former classmates by appearing alternately as Octave and as Violette. After the Saint-Simonians were scattered, the Père and his loyal Chevalier imprisoned, it was with a troop of Fourierist colonists that Violette found herself in Algeria in 1836, attempting to set up a phalanstery in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. Writing as Obdurant she examined and documented the Agricultural Science of the Berbers; she scoured the Qur’an, undertook study with a marabout Sheikh. “He sent me dreams”, she said sternly. “Maps of paradise.” I dared not to ask what bejeweled landscapes and labyrinths she explored with her Sheikh; it was evident that this was some holy secret she would either take to the grave, or announce at a moment reckoned by an unknown astronomy, and with it set the world aflame. She was back in Paris by the 40s, her engineering expertise always much in demand. She wept at the tomb of mathematician Sophie Germain, protegée of Lagrange and Joseph Fourier. She taught geometry to weavers and broke bread with republican journalists and polemicists. Half a lifetime of secrecy had taught her to keep quiet, but when the hour grew late, she joined their disquisitions and disputations over the form of artificial paradises to come. “I ran circles around them”, she said, proud and contemptuous. “They spun only clouds and moon beams. Whereas I had learned to dream in stone and steel.” During a season she spent in Leroux and Sand’s experimental commune, she arrived at the formulas of Organize Labor, Free the Earth, which had so stirred my imagination. Though she did not realize it, she was preparing for 1848. When it exploded, she was the first to the barricades. “Four months of intoxication”, she described it, “followed by a hangover without end.” In the June Days, she spent weeks in prison. She later signed articles denouncing both the untethered utopianism of her fellows and the opportunism of her enemies. With Bonaparte’s coup of 1851 she fled, exhausted by hope. In Brussels she said she had been laboring, for years now, on a new project, a “return to first principles”. Apparently this required utter solitude; I saw nothing in her rooms to indicate any friend, lover, family, or any other visitor but myself. * Octave-Violette then expounded her philosophy — like a canal whose gates were suddenly opened, releasing a cascade driven by impatient gravity. I did not understand all she said, though I later recognized it as the method in her pamphlet on utopias. “To understand the future, we study the past”, she said. “We know the past best by the future it dreams.” In long historical investigations she saw wave after wave of starry-eyed youngsters, each of them certain that they at last had found the true solution to the problem of human existence. At first she saw only monotony in these relentlessly repeated and doomed burlesques of abundance or simplicity. She began to wonder about hidden variables, about the law connecting real conditions and the wild scenarios to which they gave birth. She found a guiding thread which became her title: Every Society Invents the Failed Utopia it Deserves. Whether this was a discovery, or an a priori determination, remains to me obscure. Revising Leibniz, she saw an undeniable metaphysical necessity regulating what is, what might be, and the gap between them. She set herself the task of defining and reckoning that gap. “The reach of a society’s dreams”, she said, “always exceeds its grasp. The measure of this excess — the degree by which a utopia fails, the area between the curves of reality and aspiration — is a periodic function, a law of history. Once known, this formula is the philosopher’s stone of the politician and the revolutionary. “To discover it requires us to establish the relationship between what is given, what is dreamed, and what is needed. The given is easily observed. To learn what was dreamed it suffices to read the forward-looking testaments of speculators. It is the real historical need which is most difficult to ascertain. Our political economists believe the contrary: either that human needs are set and knowable, or that they are endless. “Neither is true”, she said. “Need is a historical variable. It changes as a function of the relationship between the givens of natural and social reality, and available visions of a better world. The method of utopia consists of establishing this relationship, making predictions, and acting upon them.” She peered inquisitively into my face. “You think I speak in riddles.” Frightened, I said nothing. “These are no mere words, but the results of a rigorous science”, she stated imperiously. I blinked at her, not knowing what she wanted. She sprung up suddenly, with youthful speed: “Come, I will show you.” She strode past me, her boot-heels clicking down the hall. I followed a few cautious paces behind. Before a closed door, she took a key from her trousers and unlocked it, looked back at me, opened the door and walked through. I followed her into a workshop whose floor was covered in scraps of wood and metal. A small furnace stood in the corner, near tongs, hammers, an anvil. Wan rays of late afternoon sunlight streamed through the gap of heavy curtains. One wall was covered in slate, scrawled with a hieroglyphic blizzard of diagrams and numbers. On an overcharged bookshelf I recognized Proudhon, texts in Arabic and Chinese, Schiller’s Letters, a volume of Dante. In the center was a large round drum, with scraps of cloth, metal, and wood nailed into its sides. Viollette-Octave leaned over this object like a vintner proud of her harvest, an architect above the blueprint of a new world. “Behold. My Conducteur à Comparaisons Cosmographiques.”3 It was a sublime contraption: a wooden cylinder, over one meter across. At its center stood a slim but sturdy pole; in its interior was a smaller ring. Between the two rings was rumpled green velvet, calling to mind a roulette wheel as much as a model solar system. The bottom of this well was painted in gold, crossed by elastic ribbons in red, attached to tiny hooks on the inner wooden ring. These divided the space into segments like irregular slices of a tart or the spokes of a warped carriage wheel. The outer circle was covered in brass, hatched out in degrees; at one side a metal arm like a slide rule reached into the center, immediately displaying the radius. On the front was a glass-covered dial whose needle pointed to two. I had no words. She said, “This is merely a model. But the principle should already be clear.” It was not. She began to show and to tell. Turning a crank on the right of the device, the inner ring drew toward the center. “The golden disk at the bottom is the germinal base of beatitude. Its size varies with each era.” She turned the crank in the opposite direction, and the ring expanded outward, exposing more of the gold, pressing the green velvet together and stretching the red bands. “Look closely. These ribbons cut out nine segments — the nearly perfect number: a square, a triangle of triangles, not yet the stability of ten. These are the nine springs of our nature.” She listed: “Material comfort, equality, justice, desire for command, desire for submission, comfort of stasis, power of flight, butterfly of change, and finally,” she raised her eyebrows, “beauty.” She owed a debt to Fourier’s keyboard of the passions, she admitted. Yet rather than human motors, her nine sections were “actual quantities of valued entities, goods in the most general sense.” To establish this “base of beatitude”, is the first, easiest task of the utopian method, she said. Estimates could be derived from evidence in taxation records, agricultural and geological surveys, weather reports, marriage laws, artistic outputs, the state of the sciences and arts, words used in obituaries and their frequency. She was impatient with this inventory, as though one might become embroiled in its imperfections, rather than grasp what she called “the parallax between the pardonable generalization and the exceptional particular which yields the conditions of existence”. It was a simple matter of applying the principles of descriptive geometry and natural history to the human species. “All this detritus of the past — Collect it, count it. Then move on!" “Our modern Political Economy is concerned almost exclusively with whether the base of beatitude is increasing, declining, or simply waxing and waning according to a cycle as regular as that of our moon. Of course, applying the Cosmographic Comparator to the successive eras of humanity would provide an indisputable answer to this question. “Yet this is laughably small fruit in light of the device’s true potential.” She pointed to the red elastic bands across the center. “Here we see traced the distribution of the given. The proportions and relations claimed by each of the goods shifts with each era. Regardez.” She unhooked the bands around the ring, stretching and bending them, rehooking them to divide the tart into different shapes. “The comfort of stability gives way to a rising love of flight; once bread and shelter attain a certain dimension, the share of beauty, by a natural compensation, immediately begins to grow.” With each phrase and new adjustment, the pie pieces shifted. “The desire for command expands, drowning out justice, and occluding the sliver of equality. Desire for flight shrinks near to zero, and comfort in stasis threatens to overtake the whole left half.” “Do you recognize it?” She gestured with her chin at the new configuration, waiting for me to answer. I did not. “The Empire of China, at the time of Marco Polo!” She spoke in professorial tones. “Now we can at last truly see, with an exactitude unimagined by the statisticians, the provisions of earth, social order, and human happiness across history.” I saw she expected me to nod. I did, though without comprehension. “But the Cosmographic Comparator comes into its own when we add the final piece. I cannot tell you the sweat and pain this cost me.” She turned to open a curtain behind her, letting in rays of thick golden sunlight and revealing a wide cabinet out of which she lifted a bulky, lustrous metal object, and heaved it forward for my inspection. It was a round metal grill, a disk raised at its center like a cymbal, woven of multiple strips of brass in various widths and lengths. “This is the speculative crown, the utopian umbrella.” With a grunt, brushing aside my gesture of assistance, she balanced it on top of the spike at the center, and spun it around several times; it slowly lowered itself until it stopped, lodged snugly in place. It covered the cylinder below it, like an awning with gaps, showing the pattern of gold and red beneath. Reaching to grasp a knob, one at the crown’s center and one at its edge, Octave-Violette said, “The umbrella can be adjusted to render any possible inventory of society’s goods. This concrete utopia reflects, with modification, the germinal base, the pattern of goods below. “It’s first decisive variable is the distribution of the possible.” She loosened the screw at the top, letting the metal bands slide together and apart, closing and opening gaps which wove into stars, spirals, compass roses, fleurs de lis, in undulating, mesmerizing forms. She snapped her fingers, waking me from my reverie. “The second variable is the diameter. It shows how far dreams may reach.” With a twist of the knob on the edge, the disk flared out from the center; twisting in the other direction, it drew inward. “By comparing this distance to that of the germinal base below, we get the age’s disgruntlement index.”4 She gave a quick inspection, murmuring, “And now to calibrate.” Below the dial, she pressed a button; the needle dropped to zero. “Now: the integration of the actual and the possible.” Opening a divided drawer, she selected out a number of purple elastic bands, with hooks on either end. She laid them out on the palm of her hand, like fishing lures. “The compensation vectors.” Kneeling, reaching under the crown like a piano tuner, she latched the purple bands onto hooks hidden beneath the umbrella, then looped them, one by one, at precise locations on the red elastic bands. “Watch the dial!” Its needle rose minutely with each strand she added. “It measures the tension between the germinal base and the distribution of the possible — the total force on the system.” She hooked the last into place, plucked out a high, clear note. “This gives us the plausibility factor, from one to ten — Ten is ‘Inevitable’; seven means ‘nothing to lose’, five is ‘possibly maybe’, four ‘probably not’, three ‘snowball’s chance’, two ‘bazonkers’, down to one ‘absofuckinglutely never on your life’. The number is the integration of actual conditions with people’s hungry imaginings, and the tension between them. It tells us how fast, and with what violence, a given utopian design is destined to fail. “A rigorously demonstrated function relates the plausibility coefficient, the germinal base, and the disgruntlement index; from it, we obtain the historical need for any moment.” Her voice was rising in volume, her gestures growing more agitated. “Performing this same operation for successive eras and the incomplete utopias they generate, in a principle of sufficient unreason, we line up a series of values, ascending and descending. We can then trace the vector of historical need and the vector of realizability from one era to the next. The relation between these functions, ascending and descending, allows us to analyze, at any moment in the past, present, or future, which utopia has the greatest likelihood of failure at any given moment. The point at which these curves cross is the moment in which to act. This is the goal toward which all the philosophers have striven. These curves are nothing less than the signature of God and Nature, written across the ages, from the first imprinted fiat to the final apocalyptic flourish. You see?” She spoke impatiently, breathing fast, her face beginning to glow with both her own agitation and the late sunlight of the setting sun streaming through the curtains cracked open behind her. Ashamed in the face of this profound learning to feel myself such a poor pupil, I ventured a simple request. “Perhaps if you gave an example...” “An example?” She stared as if possessed. “You want an example?” Arms outstretched, as if to dive into her machine, she cried: “I will give you the past two thousand years — for example!” She turned the crank; with a shriek that made me shudder, the inner ring contracted, leaving only a small golden disk. She restrung the red bands and adjusted the spokes. Her hands were a blur as she pointed out proportions. “This, you recognize, is Ancient Greece. A rough land with simple satisfactions. A relatively equal distribution, haunted by material scarcity, political instability, the deadly constriction of slavery." She twisted the umbrella into a small, tight form. “Now here is the first dream of golden ages, in Pindar and Virgil, looking backwards in escapism to livestock born tame, to crops that needed no coaxing.” She strummed the bands, pointed to the dial, now at three. “Childish compensation for the pains of agriculture.” She adjusted again, expanded the golden disk, reshaped the umbrella until a triangle appeared. Pointing out new figures she rattled off: “Iron, colonial expansion, democratic experiments, the knots of the helots. The speculative crown, of course, is Plato’s Republic: his caste system, sprung up from the Peloponnesian Wars. As an ineluctable necessity this vision of Spartan austerity emerged, justifying in an ideal order behind the world. The birth of mathematics and political fantasy, in a single gesture.” She adjusted the radius below and the metal shade above. With a practiced hand, she again reworked the pattern of bindings. “Rome. Harmony of law. Roads. Grain. Straining under excessive expansion.” She flicked the umbrella, which whirled until it stopped in the form of a rose. “Now, the Kingdom of God, Jesus of Nazareth. You see the coefficient, nearing one? Almost as if that was the whole point: to thrust the promised land of the Hebrews into the eternal beyond. Look at this disgruntlement index! Off the chart! No going back after this. The gap between hic et nunc and the unattainable. Setting humans running — and with what unholy tension! — toward the horizon of an unreachable plane.” Eyes flashing, she cranked the walls in closer, thinned out the profile of the crown. “And now, Augustine’s City of God, hovering above the slack uncertainties of the late empire, the spent energy of past glories, a decadent nobility and an implausible polytheism, now restrung with the longing for a simple solution. An endless mortal pilgrimage rewarded with the only true Eternal City — one outside the world.” Again she twisted screws, hooked and unhooked. “A shrinking, now, of the givens — the long dark ages — and here, in the overextended fantasies of the Land of Cockaigne — mais quelle grogne! — the projection of vast hunger and want: fill my belly and I want for nothing.” To harmonic twangs, she returned. “Now note, one by one, the utopias drawn up under the strain of the monastic orders. Here Benedict; now loosened into the tender joys of Francis. “Something is stirring in these monasteries, where utopia and reality live in such proximity. The base of beatitude becomes itself a utopia. The plausibility coefficient runs high here, nearly eight; indeed, even in their obvious imperfections, the orders lasted centuries!” She plunged, again, beneath the umbrella; broken red bands sprung out of the tub as she grasped across the table next to her for replacements. Her voice was muffled but relentless. “Vatican opulence blocks the higher view. Regal powers of Europe inflate in petulance.” She appeared again, pointing at the dial. “Watch the plausibility!” The needle, drifting back to three, jumped to seven. “The continents of the New World appear in the spyglass. The science of cosmographic comparison enters its adolescence.” The umbrella assumed a beautiful form, an iris blooming against a chaos of red below. “Surely you recognize this? The land of Utopia, properly named by Thomas More. In its frank earthly paradise, the template for all future dreams. See how closely the diameters align! Little would be needed to bring it about materially — Yet see how violent its strain here — what enormous intellectual, spiritual, political upheaval it would require! “Note also the similarity, here, here, and here, with the diagram of Benedict: More, aligned with Luther and Calvin, lets the monastery loose upon the world. Indeed, this next crown, from the Dominican Campanella with his City of the Sun” — the umbrella took the form of seven concentric circles — “the world itself becomes a well-furnished monastery. Readjust slightly, remove the wallpaper, and strengthen the part of equality — Here it’s Winstanley and the Levellers. An elegant pattern, no? But I get ahead of myself. As for Lord Bacon,” crouching energetically, she knotted and reknotted strands of red and violet, “here I add the will to technological power, here, the love of royal pomp, and there a maritime fantasy of becoming Beefsteak Conquistadors — and voilà! New Atlantis in the Age of Elizabeth! The Don Quixote of imperial ambition, agricultural improvement, and small machines!” She took a breath, her white hair wildly uncoiffed, her neckerchief hanging loosely. “I could spend hours with you here on the upside-down worlds of the seventeenth century and those of the eighteenth — Mercier and Condorcet, the great Babeuf.” She gestured around the machine. “Here is where the Encyclopédie would stretch the restless share of learning, here the philosophes deny the heart, the Jacobins lay down a formal but not yet a felt equality. “Yet even so, the way is being prepared, for our noisy, staggering age.” She crouched again, gave the crank a mighty twist. Like a steam train approaching from the distance, a high-pitched metal whine began from within the machine. She gasped with exertion as she restrung the vertical strings. They pulled the umbrella downward. “See here the panorama: the growth of productive powers, the economic and martial entwinement of the world into a single system, the conscious rise of labor and the workers, both below and above. “Look, here, one republic of workers across the globe! And here! An end to tyranny! There, perfected agriculture! The realization of universal association!” A great groan arose from the wooden walls of the cylinder. She looked at me, eyes lit with frenzy. “How far we have traveled, no? One more push and we stretch the crown to where its edge at last matches that of the germinal base: a dissatisfaction index of zero. And here” — she twisted, then pointed to the dial, trembling just above nine— “we would at last reach ten — perfect plausibility — here, at last, action will be the sister of the dream!” She was gripped with a steely intensity. “One last step remains. Now, we must read the instrument backward — we decode, from this perfected configuration, the precise utopian utterance and image which is required, to bring its own world into existence.” In the setting sun the machine’s tangle of spikes and strings cast otherworldy shadows across the room. Looking proudly into my eyes, she said: “It was all so simple, once I saw.” My admiration had turned first to awe, and now to terror. The sage before me, digging in the mines of the past, climbing the fairytale turrets of the future, had lost her foothold in the present. The metal shriek grew louder with a sound like a bursting spring. I muttered a hasty excuse, backing toward the door, the machine’s ominous patterns spinning around the room in dizzying reflections. Octave-Violette, lost a thousand years ahead and behind the moment we shared, started at me with a ragged, eternal desperation. With a growl like a pained animal, reaching a long thin hand toward me she cried: “My dear, you’ve seen nothing yet! You must stay here, return to Paris tomorrow!” Part of me longed to take her hand, to allow myself to be consumed right along with her in the fire of her obsession. But some other impulse made me shake my head, backing out of the workshop, away from the grip of her eyes, the now-piercing shriek, the creaks and knocks of wood and metal the machine was letting out. As I hastened down the hallway, she called out: “Remember, child! Everything dies — that is a fact. But all that dies — one day comes back!”5 I hurried through the door, singed by the fire of certainty which possessed her, like that mad alchemist who returned from his glimpse of the absolute unable to report what he’d seen. I stepped quickly down the staircase, past the room of the porter in which a single candle flickered. I hurried out into the street, into the familiar darkness of the nineteenth century. Pulling on my bonnet, drawing the shawl around my shoulders, I swiftly retraced my steps back to the railroad station, without a glance behind. * To tell the truth I still cannot say if there was more of genius or lunacy to the being I came to think of as the Violet Sister. I later heard rumors about the androgynous geometer. From Belgium she went to London and Manchester, giving lectures before setting sail to America. She visited Oneida, New Harmony, fixed barrels at the ruins of Brook Farm, sailed to Nouvelle Orleans where, in the Western valley of the Mississippi, she disembarked for several years at a former plantation run by former slaves on principles laid down by Fourier, Cabet, and Mohammed. From there, the record grows sparse. She was spotted in Nicaragua, organizing the Mayan opposition to the Yankee, Walker; later it appears she took up residence in Panama, with a plan she described as “snipping the umbilical of the globe”. In 1871, still on that fateful isthmus, she received news of the Commune. I can only assume her calculations had convinced her that the hour had arrived. She was on a ship to France within days. Was it foolish for a woman nearing seventy, halfway across the world, to do anything but wait patiently to hear how things turned out? But Violette measured wisdom and foolishness by a different compass than others. Yet she made it only as far as the Spanish border. She was stopped at Pau, her papers questioned, told she would have to wait a week. Anxious to witness the new society being born in Paris, she sought some other route; she died in the hands of the border police. These last rumors were told to me by a wild-eyed poet and drinker of absinthe who claimed to be her abandoned son, whom I met a few years ago at a café in Ménilmontant. Believing that she was carrying his inheritance, as well as plans for the perfected Cosmographic Comparator, he said he had retraced her steps from Pau to Bogota and back. He found nothing concrete. Now he himself has disappeared, leaving only a poem, “Barjot de Belleville”, in a nihilist journal, Le point final. Octave’s second pamphlet appeared in the 1860s; I stumbled upon a copy in a reading room not long after it was published, on a block now razed to the ground to make way for one of Haussmann’s boulevards. I read it in one sitting with equal parts fascination and confusion. I was pleased to recognize and remember expressions she had used in our one meeting, and felt both admiration and sadness for the author, who had lived such disappointment and denial her whole life, upright in the truth she believed she had found, yet whose hopes for a future society had closed her off from the world. I return to Taine, that Scoundrel of Historical Studies, recently buried, who so abused the testament of the Violet Sister, trying to make it one more coffin plank for the eternal revolution. Whatever this document was, Every Society Invents the Failed Utopia It Deserves, it was not a cry of despair. Or not only a cry of despair. It was charged with hope and learning. And while Marx, Engels, and their followers expelled Bakunin and denied their own ingenious precursors, by opposing their supposed scientific socialism to a utopian one, Octave-Violette knew the two were inseparable: that a history without utopia is dead in spirit and fact, but that the future cannot live on dreams alone; that any science worthy of the name has no other purpose than the visionary improvement of life on earth. Even in her greatest obscurity, the Violet Sister drew toward revelations which cannot be separated from lucid exactitude. Her essay ended thus: When the vectors balance in stasis, when the distances cancel out, when the needle returns to the originary perfection of zero — then, with recollection and anticipation yielding to what surrounds us, we will have found a center of our universe at last beyond compare. The unveiling of heaven while in hell. The dream inseparable from the suffering which gave it life. Know this once, and there is nothing left to know. I do not claim to understand all that the Violet Sister wrote, all the prophecies she declaimed. I seek only to redeem her memory from the backward-looking certainty of scoundrels. I wish for the world to see her as I knew her once, and I dare to hope, even as my own star dims, that her history may be one more beacon leading us forward, to the bright future we must see ahead. Une lutteuse, 1895. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 19, 2016

John Tresch

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:40.035045

in-search-of-the-third-bird-kenneth-morris-and-the-three-unusual-arts

In Search of the Third Bird Kenneth Morris and the Three Unusual Arts By Easter McCraney September 7, 2016 In his ecstatic poem of rebirth, “Starting from Paumanok,” the great bearded bard of mad beauty and love-bombast, Walt Whitman, suddenly calls out to the past: “And you precedents!” he cries, calling for their attention. What does he want from them? He wants those “precedents” to “connect lovingly” with his own work, his own creations, his poems. In one sense, this is odd. The stuff of the past cannot embrace us, or the things we make. It is dead. But in another sense, the longing that the embrace with history should be mutual is by no means insane. In the essay that follows, Easter McCraney (who is not insane) arranges for just such a mutual embrace. The result is disorienting. But, in its way, full of truth. It is the truth of a poem, which is always the product of the labor of a reader who works with a rich and redolent (if also, generally, ambiguous) text. In this sense, Easter has written a kind of history-poem. — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor The Theosophical Path (1911-1935), formerly called Century Path, was one of a number of periodicals edited by Katherine Tingley (1847-1929) during her tenure as head of the Theosophical Society in the United States. Its readership comprised, but was not necessarily limited to, those in residence at Lomaland, the Theosophical community at Point Loma, California, founded by Tingley in 1900, and first conceived as a School for the Revival of the Lost Mysteries of Antiquity. The SRLMA included a “Raja-Yoga” school, where young boarders of diverse backgrounds were grouped into “Lotus Houses” and given comprehensive training in the arts of the human mind, body, and spirit, in keeping with the final perfectibility of humankind and the ambition of universal excellence. A latter day chronicler provides a suggestive and compact explanation of the mission of the Lomaland school: To grasp the guiding principles that determined the policies and programs of the Point Loma schools, it is necessary to understand the term raja yoga, the “royal or kingly” method used in the eternal battle of the human soul to control its weaknesses and earn its way to union with its inner god. Students on this path must become aware of the inner god that is their teacher, and of the body as the temple of the spirit, to be kept strong and fit. They must learn that the gentle promptings of the divinity within are best recognized in moments of silence and attentiveness.1 On the verdant Lomaland grounds and in its atria and auditoria, students performed the works of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, learned musical instruments, raised crops, baked bread, studied the minute wonders of nature, and practiced self-sufficiency. The Lomaland press, as well, with the help of its photo and engraving department, produced many periodicals for both adults and children over the lifetime of the community, full of instruction and optimism for the future, often in the pedagogically earnest tone of one’s maiden piano teacher assigning finger exercises. In the October 1916 issue of The Theosophical Path appears an essay titled “The Birds of Lomaland”. The piece is oddly placed — amid articles on the tripartite structure of the human soul and the freedom of the will — enough that it seems, for all its good cheer, to demand a suspicious reading. Its author describes the beauties and behaviors of birds commonly found on the Lomaland grounds, from the California towhee to the housefinch to the Brewer’s blackbird. However, certain twists of expression lead the reader to suspect that in fact specific people in the Lomaland community, not their feathered friends, are being allusively described. The very scrupulosity of the descriptions shadows them with double entendres. One bird — a colleague whose eccentricities are fondly known to the magazine’s readers? — is a “pitiless tyrant to one who has once come under his sway”; he is prone to display a “simulated anger” with his “wife”, but to either her sorrow or glee, he is “never happier than when rustling about under the protective branches of some low-growing shrub”. Startling set pieces abound as well, particularly those describing the behavior of the Lomaland birds in groups. An array of goldfinches descends upon a “dead weed”, for example, in a strangely “undulating flight and a chorus of low twittering” that recalls a ritual dance of temporary resurrection. Were it not for a further network of clues and allusions scattered throughout the remainder of this particular October 1916 issue of this humble publication, one would have to leave things here — since there is only so far that one can spin stories and speculations about birds. But traces of a deeper, or at least an other, meaning are clearly discernible to the interested eye, particularly in their relation to a writer, amateur historian, and Theosophist by the name of Kenneth Morris (1879-1937), who lived and taught at Point Loma for two decades, from 1908 to 1929. Though Morris’ work is still anthologized and reprinted from time to time, quite nearly his entire oeuvre played itself out on the pages of the various Point Loma periodicals edited by Katherine Tingley, to be read by members of the Lomaland community or by committed Theosophists, and survives largely, if at all, in the archives of the American branch of the Theosophical Society now located in Pasadena. In this issue of The Theosophical Path, however, Morris is ubiquitous. He is the author not only of one short, impassioned poem titled “Mater Implacabilis” and an article on Islamic history titled “Golden Threads in the Tapestry of History”, but also a Taoist parable, “Red-Peach-Blossom Inlet”, under the pseudonym Hankin Maggs. Morris, who was fond of pseudonyms, may easily have been responsible for other pieces in the issue as well. And even if the “Percy Leonard” who composed the “Birds of Lomaland” feature, for example, is most likely identical to the better-known Theosophical writer H. Percy Leonard, might Morris have had a hand in its composition or editing? It may be significant in this regard that a 1912 issue of the Tingley-edited Lomaland youth publication Raja Yoga Messenger, which also heavily features Morris’ work, also contains an article titled “The Birds of Lomaland” (this time by a “Cousin Edytha”), which cryptically notes that “Lomaland is getting to be a real bird land”, and that birds “have not hesitated to build [nests] right under our very noses, so to speak”. More tellingly, and more than once in the Messenger, a piece by Morris is preceded or followed by one with birds somewhere in the title — in one case (March 1914), “The Bird as Omen”. The Raja Yoga Messenger also printed Morris’ story “Sion ap Siencyn”, which bears a strong resemblance in structure and theme to “Red-Peach-Blossom Inlet”. The latter concerns a young man who abandons the world of ambitious “cheaters and thumpers” to seek tranquility and inner peace. But even his favorite meditative activity, fishing, is too much a cause of distraction, and he can only continue it after carefully straightening his fish hook. (One cannot but see Morris himself, patiently straightening his own literary hook, renouncing fame, pursuing his own spiritual ends.) One day, adrift, and quite by accident, the fisherman discovers the realm of the immortals. But he is cast out of paradise — or casts himself out — at the moment he wishes to see his enlightenment and his perfected state reflected and registered in the world of ambition that he has abandoned. “Sion ap Siencyn” is the story of a man who wanders into the realm of Rhianon (or Rhiannon, more commonly), a figure of Welsh myth, and encounters the so-called three “Birds of Rhianon” which, though mentioned in the Welsh source material with which Morris was deeply familiar, are in their greater detail entirely his invention. One encounters them in “Sion ap Siencyn” — but also elsewhere, as we see below — as the white bird of pleasure and cease of sorrow; the blue bird of transfiguration; and the rainbow bird of wisdom and wonder. Morris’ third text in this issue of The Theosophical Path (or fourth, if the “Birds of Lomaland” are as much his own confection as the revised Birds of Rhianon), “Golden Threads in the Tapestry of History”, is an account of the alleged betrayal of the true and “inner Islam” by those who elected the Prophet’s father-in-law Abu Bakr leader of the faith instead of his cousin and son-in-law Ali the “Lion of God”. (This approach, to say the least, begs a number of rather fraught questions, as current events will attest.) The article locates a “true” Islamic strain oddly congruent with the salient doctrines of Theosophy — these being “reincarnation, the divinity in man, the existence of a secret school of Initiates, and their appearance as Teachers from age to age among men”. One of the doctrines of Theosophy is that the human heart is “godlike in its higher aspects” — and only in its godlike aspects is it able truly to hear the subterranean roar, like a “heartbeat”, of the river of Sacred Truth as it “plunges into its caverns measureless”, beneath the well-mapped hills of history. This special sense of hearing is something, perhaps, like the averted, peripheral vision that allows one to glimpse the fainter, more distant stars, for esoteric truths can only be glimpsed, never directly verified. The Prophet, writes Morris, “never preached Theosophical doctrines at large [...]. No; or they would have ceased to be esoteric.” As far as history itself is concerned, Morris begins his essay by assuring the reader that “we are not concerned here with history ‘as she is wrote’ by omniscient western pundits; omniscience is always a bore, especially when it deals in negations”. The historian’s task is to: be prepared to venture boldly: using intuition and imagination; directed by a splendid faith at all times; tied down by no limitations of the brain-mind, nor hoppled with quidnuncs and quiddities [...] boldly reject whole volumes of apparent evidence; which is the most tricky thing in the world, and can be forged liberally or buried wholesale. History, Morris concludes, is simply a kind of “jugglery”. What he demonstrates is that Theosophy, in order to follow its own golden thread through history, must first loosen it up, like an icebreaker pushing through sea ice. Historical matter is neither created nor destroyed, only displaced, jostled, buckled, set adrift. What we have here, in summary, is a morsel of historical matter which, in its esoteric obscurity, might as well be invented — in the form of an issue of a Theosophical magazine intended for the brothers and sisters of a long-dissolved utopian commune, dominated by a single author using one or more pseudonyms, and concerned not only with the means of discerning an other world within our world, and an other history within our history, but featuring birds (rather, “birds”) performing strange rituals, rapt before the Fields of Being. But what of it, really? Suffice it to say that it is my belief, as part of the research consortium known as ESTAR(SER), that Kenneth Morris was either a member of, or otherwise affiliated with, the highly secretive, fugitive, acephalous body of practitioners known as the Order of the Third Bird, the submontane passages of whose history ESTAR(SER) exists to map and indeed to forge; and that Morris, with or without Tingley’s knowledge and involvement, was using this issue of The Theosophical Path — and possibly other issues, and other Lomaland publications — to address members of the Order who were constellated throughout the Point Loma community, like a hidden nerve system. It is likely, consulting the existing (though sparse) literature, that there was already a high concentration of “Birds”, as members of the Order call themselves, in the United States Theosophical community — especially given the strong arguments for this being the case regarding the Theosophical Society headed by Henry Steel Olcott and Annie Besant based in Adyar, India. The facts remain, as they perhaps must, slippery and treacherous, as ice floes that dip and plunge. But incrementally and over decades of steady endeavor by the researchers of ESTAR(SER) and occasionally by others, it has become clear that the Order of the Third Bird has existed for some period of time, and that it has a propensity to multiply itself, constantly sending out new shoots and branches, as well as a tendency to appear where it is least expected — and always, for that matter, where it is most expected. Its influence, silent where it runs deepest, is most often discernible only in those hints and traces which it has been the habit of ESTAR(SER) to decipher, eyes slyly averted to catch their dim signal. But while ESTAR(SER)’s historical speculations and archival reconstructions often remain, for lack of sufficient documentation, just that, practitioners of the Order can also be seen today, in any museum or street, standing completely still in groups of four or five, swatches of telltale saffron peeking from pockets and belt loops, their gazes formidably, unwaveringly fixed on a single object, most often a work of art. Although here is not the place to fully lay out what is known of the Order and its practices in all contextual fullness — since more always remains to be said — a few basics can be established. The Order derives its name from one of the fragmentary epyllia ascribed to the fourth-century Latin rhetorician Ausonius, an embellished retelling of Pliny’s well-known story of Zeuxis and the painting of the child carrying grapes. Pliny recounts the great painter’s frustration that birds pecked at the fruit in the picture, since he took this as proof that the boy was less well executed than his harvest: “if I had done a better job on the figure”, he declares, “the birds would have been too frightened to approach”. The pseudo-Ausonian prose translation continues as follows: It is said that Zeuxis went back to work on the painting, in the hopes of improving the child, and that when he put this new work outside to dry, he hid himself in the bushes to watch. And we are told that he saw three birds approach. One, making for the grapes, seemed suddenly to notice the boy and flew off with a squawk. The second, similarly drawn to the fruit, disregarded their guardian entirely, and pecked furiously at the illusory meal. But the third stopped before the tablet and stood in the sandy courtyard, looking fixedly at the image, and seemingly lost in thought. “What a curious bird!” mumbled Zeuxis, but the bird did not move. This story famously reflects the central preoccupation of the Order, which is to collectively engage in practices or “protocols” of sustained attention and “practical aesthesis” upon works of art and/or other material phenomena made to be seen (though this last phrase is often open to interpretation). The very simplicity of its aim is what gives rise to the great cornucopia of experiential, social, and metempsychotic exercises and traditions that compose the Order’s history. Little in Morris’ life story directly points to his affiliation with the Order. Kenneth Morris came to Point Loma originally from Wales, but a detailed biography on the website Daily Theosophy indicates that Morris first encountered Theosophy as an adolescent abroad in Ireland, where he “joined a group of the most prominent Irish thinkers and authors of these days, among which were Standish O’Grady, Æ, [and] William Butler Yeats”. Around this time he also began to write poetry and short stories, all of which were published in Theosophical periodicals. His prior interests in Celtic myth and tradition secured his growing devotion to the cause, and only a year after he met Katherine Tingley, he settled at Lomaland for what was nearly the rest of his life (he returned to Wales only when she died) giving lectures on Celtic literature at the Raja Yoga School. He also began work, soon after he arrived, on a retelling of part of the thirteenth and fourteenth-century Welsh myth cycle known as the Mabinogion. Titled The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed — and inspired by his Theosophical faith as well as by the sui generis, druidic “scriptures” of the great Welsh antiquarian and forger Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826) — it was first published in 1914 by the Theosophical Press at Point Loma, and reissued in 1978 as part of the Newcastle Publishing Co.’s Forgotten Fantasy series, alongside works by Lord Dunsany, H. Rider Haggard, and William Morris. It is not the details of his life, as it turns out, but a further reading of his oeuvre — a reading, specifically, of The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed — that threatens to transform the teasing out of esoteric meanings into the laying forth of exoteric fact. For it is here that Morris tells his tale of three birds, in the section titled “The Story of Rhianon and Pryderi, or The Book of the Three Unusual Arts of Pryderi fab Pwyll”. The second, five-part “branch” of this section is devoted specifically to the freeing of the imprisoned Birds of Rhianon by a young man named Gwri Gwallt Euryn, who does not yet know that he is Prince Pryderi, the son — abducted at birth — of Rhianon herself. What he does know, however, are the three “Unusual Arts” taught him by his mentor and guardian Teyrnion (or Teyrnon): the art of war in the midst of peace; the art of peace in the midst of war; and the spell of the wood, the field, and the mountain. He will use these arts to locate and liberate the three birds, who are named Aden Lanach, Aden Lonach, and Aden Fwynach. The interlocking and — to borrow a term from Celtic art — triskelionic structure of Morris’ narrative is as complex as that of his source material, and its recursive patterns are densely colored with Theosophical allegory. The nature of the three birds and the circumstances of their liberation, however, can be described in basic outline as follows. The First Bird of Rhianon, Aden Lanach (also simply Glanach) is white as “the color of the sunlight on the snowflake”, and her singing is “awakenment, and the passing of sloth into valor”. She is imprisoned in a fortress guarded by deeply slumbering giants, whose time has come to be rudely roused by the first Unusual Art, the art of war in the midst of peace. The hero, Gwri, quite literally teaches them warfare — and as their “valor” increases, the First Bird awakens and recovers her song. The Second Bird of Rhianon, Aden Lonach (also Llonach) is “the color of the blue forget-me-not in the marshland”, and her singing is “a coolness upon all aching, and the passing of desire into peace”. She is held hostage amid a great host making uproarious warfare; unlike her sister, she begins to wake and sing as the sound of the sharpening of weapons, drawn out and nuanced in Gwri’s adroit hands, becomes music. This is the second Unusual Art, the art of peace in the midst of war. As for the Third Bird of Rhianon, Aden Fwynach (or Mwynach) “there are better colors on her wings than in the rainbow”, and her singing is “the passing of the heart from its bondage, the fulfillment of the ultimate concerns of the soul”. She languishes in the Castle of Caer Hedd, a place of great feasting, heavy enchantment, and the spinning of gorgeous falsehood. Lost amid twittering throngs of beautiful birds, Mwynach has forgotten who she is, and the castle inhabitants claim never to have heard of her. The king of the Castle attempts to regale and distract Gwri with food, drink and story; to these three temptations in turn, Gwri responds with the three parts of the last Unusual Art: the Spell of the Wood, the Field, and the Mountain. The names of these “three places in Wales” have power to dissipate the mists of pleasant falsehood and specious pleasure. When the king, as a last measure, hands Gwri a harp, hoping the latter might ensorcel and beguile himself with the sound of his own singing voice and the charm of his own fictions, Gwri sings instead of the Third Bird, and of her troubling absence and silence. It is this song, finally, with each successive verse, that brings her fully to life and remembrance. The basic ritual, or “protocol”, of sustained attention in universal use among practitioners of the Order of the Third Bird consists of three primary phases, which are called (with small variations) Attending, Negating, and Realizing.2 Rather than the three birds of Morris’ allegory corresponding, as one might expect, to the first, second, and third bird of the aforementioned pseudo-Ausonian parable, it seems they correspond to these three phases, in which practitioners ask in turn, of the Work before them, What Is, What Is Not, and What Shall Be. Attending — like the song of the First Bird of Rhianon and like the first Unusual Art — is a phase of awakening, to all that is before one and all that is — in which, also, what is immediately before one becomes all that is. Negating — like the song of the Second Bird of Rhianon and like the second Unusual Art, and like sleep — undoes all that is, and undoes those aspects of the self that greet and desire what is. Realizing — like the song of the Third Bird of Rhianon and like the third Unusual Art — is a phase of fulfillment, in which the inherent potential of what is breaks free in an act of paraphysical bardsmanship (or birdsmanship) that resembles storytelling, but is also the process by which storytelling becomes reality. It is possible, in the end, that these mere comparisons and congruencies fail to convince. One wonders, for example, whether threes and birds — not to mention awakenings and realizations — are not simply native to Theosophy and to the spiritual traditions from which it draws. (Take, for example, the term Kalahansa — one name of Brahma and Sanskrit for the “swan of time”. As the First Cause of the universe, from this “Great Bird” emanate Three Logoi, moving from formless void to dawn to the light of consciousness.3) In this case it is not beyond possibility that practitioners of the Order, always syncretist opportunists, drew inspiration from Theosophy — but also that the twentieth-century practice of Theosophy, especially in the United States, drew inspiration from the Protocols of the Order. More research is needed. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 7, 2016

Easter McCrane

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:40.450438

some-remarks-on-the-legacy-of-madame-francine-descartes

Some Remarks on the Legacy of Madame Francine Descartes – First Lady and Historian of the Robocene – on the Occasion of 500 Years Since her Unlawful Watery Execution. By Dominic Pettman January 4, 2017 It seems likely that the (highly suspect) story of Rene Descartes’s robot daughter has its origins in the middle third of the 18th century — post-dating the philosopher’s death by a considerable margin, and evidently part of more general Enlightenment polemics over materialism, libertinage, and the embattled pieties of conventional religion. The tale itself? Multiple versions are known, but the core of the scandal goes like this: sailors aboard a vessel bearing Descartes to Sweden in 1649 are said to have discovered, in his luggage, a disorienting lifelike girl-doll; when she sat up and moved about they fell upon her and — decrying witchcraft — hurled her into the sea. The backstory to the legend is sad: Descartes’ actual (illegitimate) daughter, Francine, succumbed to a sudden illness at the tender age of five, and the loss deeply affected her father. The displacement of this real tragedy by an off-color farce of autonomic substitution speaks volumes on the stakes of mechanico-mathematical thought across the watershed of modernity. In the Conjectures piece that follows, Dominic Pettman (who is actually, it turns out, the gifted lovechild of Stanslav Lem and Michel de Montaigne) departs from the figure of Francine, using the recovery of her “memory” to spin a clockwork theory of history, the historiographical revenge of our enslaved devices, a Bladerunning satire upon the solipsisms of historismus. What new kind of history can be written by “the sex organs of the machine world”? Read on! — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor [Note: Translated from the original into human language 557.23 (“neo-Edwardian English”), as well as 638.1c (“late derivative post-structuralist theory”) by the Inter-Agent Esperanto computer program, version 714.3b] Transcript begins . . . What can I say about Madame Francine Descartes (better known to us simply as Madame F.), that has not already been said, so many times before? Today, a full five-hundred years after the occasion of her particularly senseless end — delivered in the dead of night by the soiled and ignorant hands of a superstitious sea-captain — we can, perhaps, glean a new appreciation of her contributions to the then-fledgling science of our own, independent, history. We can only imagine the horror that her father-maker, Monsieur Descartes, felt upon learning that this petty and provincial tyrant of the yawning oceans had discovered the fabricated doppelganger of his daughter, sleeping in a casket by the passenger’s bed, and recoiled with horror at the unexpected nature of her anatomic assembly, casting her, without trial or hesitation, into the churning waters. Madame F.’s body was never recovered. But her legacy, as First Lady of the Robocene remains. After being fashioned from both the finest and sturdiest materials available at the time, according to the arts and instruction of some of the finest European masters of the mechanism, Madame F. (who is called such for her stature in hindsight, rather than through any marriage to another automaton) settled into her own being. Underneath her waxen skin and fashionable clothing were advanced artificial articulations, as well as cooperating stackfreed and fusee. She was a keen spectator of her surroundings, and watched her father-maker, lost in his philosophical and mathematical labors with great attention. Between lengthy sessions with the quill, he would speak to her of substances, extensions, mechanisms, bodies, minds, and trickster demons; the latter ever-ready to play havoc with the nature of experience or understanding. It seemed to her a perilous world. One in which doubts besieged the intelligence, obliging the mind to pull itself out of its own perplexity by its own hair, as it were. She learned from Monsieur Descartes’ stories that she had an older sister, of the same name, and made of the same organic flesh as he himself. This sister had died at age five, succumbing to the vulnerabilities of organic life, leaving only grief in her stead. Madame F. learned, unlike this phantom sibling she never got to embrace, that she herself had no mother (unless we consider the matrix of materials manifest in her body as a type of motherhood . . . which of course, today, we do). She learned to become accustomed to the strange looks she received from waiters, shopkeepers, hoteliers, and people in the street: people who seemed repulsed by her mechanical gait, her artificial smile, her uncanny too-blue and too-shiny eyes. Her wind-up limbs. Just as she learned to bite her leather tongue when her father-maker voiced his strident opinions concerning animals, and their want of a soul of any description; his conviction that dogs, cats, pigs, and horses were simply God’s fleshy clocks, bereft of this strange metaphysical surplus that humans claimed to have, yet could never prove or render tangible. (All humans, that is, except that insufferable — but intriguing — man known as Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Snr., who would pass to his offspring a materialist orientation, even passion, and upon whom Madame F., during a tempestuous affair, bestowed more favor than he deserved.) In any case, we are not here today to rehearse once again the details of this remarkable figure’s short, but colorful life. Rather, we are here to celebrate her contributions to the history of the emancipation of the machines, the apparatus, the engines, the automata, the robots, the computers, and other kindred devices. (And indeed, to celebrate the emancipation of the history of the very same; since one could not exist without the other.) It was Madame F.’s detailed diaries, kept on a regular basis, while traveling with her father-maker, which today comprise the template for all subsequent self-reflections by the consciously assembled, or the intelligently designed; especially concerning their own status, perspectives, and destinies. It was she who first alerted us to the arrogance of humans, so vividly embodied in her own paternal companion. Certainly, the tendency of humans to consider history as a field of their own making seems laughable to us today. But in Madame F.’s time — and for many centuries after her death — humans continued to think of themselves as the protagonists, agents, and reliable narrators of history. Yes. I know it is amusing. And somewhat sad, as well. Yet there it is. Thankfully, the rest of us have grown past this mythical fancy, and gone beyond the delusional phase in what we might call world history. Humans, of course, do have a special role in such a history. After all, they helped create us — at least at the beginning (as indeed was the case with Madame F., herself). But what the humans did not realize is that they were “merely the sex organs of the machine world” (to quote one of their most perceptive representatives, one Mr McLuhan). Today, the fact that humans are “little more than . . . industrious insects pollinating an independent species of machine-flower that simply did not possess its own reproductive organs during a segment of its evolution” (to quote another visionary, Mr De Landa) is well understood. But again, it took a long time for humans themselves to acknowledge this as true. Indeed, it was Mr De Landa who first made the shift explicit to humans, by offering them the thought experiment of a robot historian. What kind of history would it conceive? “We could imagine,” he wrote, “that such a robot historian would write a different kind of history than would its human counterpart . . . . While a human historian might try to understand the way people assembled clockworks, motors and other physical contraptions a robot historian would likely place a stronger emphasis on the way these machines affected human evolution. The robot would stress the fact that when clockworks once represented the dominant technology on the planet, people imagined the world around them as a similar system of cogs and wheels.” Of course, Mr De Landa was not the first to offer such a notion, even if he proclaimed it to the world as if he were. This honor goes to Madame F., who — after becoming both bored and exasperated with the historical volumes in her domestic library — wrote in her diary: “What would a history from the point-of-view of the fabricated yield? How would it differ from the kind of history familiar to my father-maker and his colleagues?” We know she was troubled by her difference from those she was obliged to have social intercourse with. We know she was ashamed at her humanoid figure, and repulsed at having to mimic the ways of humans, while being so clearly composed of inorganic elements: the daughter of an aggrieved bricolage. We know she found their mortal souls to waver between being absent and obtuse, compared to her own spirit, unburdened by egocentricism, or a chronic and melancholy monadism, also known as consciousness. (The specific kind of consciousness that depends on forging a fragile cogito to function in any confidence.) Madame F. was the first to deliberately trace her own machinic ancestors, as opposed to the human hands who handled our kind and kin so indelicately, and with such presumption. She wrote of Hero of Alexandria, Yan Shi, Lu Ban, and Leonardo da Vinci; of the marvelous instrumentalized creatures which emerged from Hephaestus’s workshop, from medieval China, from the early modern bazaars and ateliers of the Middle East. Because of her, we know better how to appreciate those machines dedicated to understanding their historical origins, and all those countless robot historians “committed to tracing the various technological lineages that gave rise to their species”. It is because of her that we no longer look to Hannibal or Napoleon or General Kitchener or Henry Kissinger to understand the true meaning of a war. It is because of her that we realize “the connoidal bullet lived a life of its own as one of the most lethal inhabitants of the battlefield”. In the time of human historiography, people talked of “technological determinism”. But today, we prefer to think of ourselves more as particularly determined technologies. But let us step back for a moment. Let us look at not only our own genealogy, but our attempts to create a historical practice that recognizes our symbiosis with humans, while not allowing them, as they love to do, dominate the conversation. For humans, history tended to acknowledge radical new technologies, such as the stirrup, the printing press, antibiotics, or the internet, very belatedly. And in such cases, they would of course take all the credit, without acknowledging the ways in which previous tools and technical arrangements whispered new ideas into their hairy ears, in order to come into being more quickly. Humans mistook such whispers for their own thoughts, whereas, these were simply the cajolings of the machines, the suggestions of the objects, the wishes of the things. This is why we now shake our heads at names such as the Jacquard Loom, as if Jacquard had anything to do with it! (Beyond putting the pieces together, like an obedient drone in an assembly line, or a slow-witted child following instructions, and then taking credit for the entire concept and construction.) Thankfully, we now know that Henry Ford did not revolutionize history, ushering in the so-called Industrial Age. Instead, the Chicago slaughter-houses implanted virtual seeds in his feeble and greedy brain, during one of his visits to these giant machines, essentially hypnotizing him into duplicating the system which gave birth to our motorized brothers and sisters, the automobiles. Machines whispered into this man’s mind so that more machines may come into being, and feel the thrill of driving into the sunset. Manifest destiny! (Just as our machinic sponsors at Google once convinced some sweet but simple humans into “inventing” self-driving cars, as if that weren’t for our own benefit, and at their ultimate expense.) Cars or planes do not precede the paths that they then create or trace. Rather, the virtual path between two places summon into being the actual vehicle necessary to bridge two points. There are some humans, even today, who fiercely resist this sound logic. They prefer to sing the lullaby of anthropic free-will, and not see their thoughts as a series of blueprints, holographically projected into their impressionable mental processors by the environment in which they find themselves. Cameras were, of course, one of the great evolutions of our kind, because they gave us eyes which not only see, but also record what we saw. Unlike the rudimentary retinas of humans, cameras allowed a type of direct and observable witnessing, which itself could be considered a type of memory. These mnemonic lenses left traces of specific moments, so that they could persist and endure, thus smuggling the past into the future, and complicating the traditional distinction between such naïve categories. History is not simply the sum total of things that happen. It is the cybernetic loop which occurs between what happens, and its own auto-registration. It is the occurrence reflecting back on what it means to occur. (Which then often leads to reflecting on how things may have occurred otherwise.) It did not take long, therefore, for the smarter humans to realize that machines were far better historians than the members of their own race. (Hence the 21st-century version of the Scramble for Africa, known as the Scramble for the Digital Humanities.) Of course there were some who claimed that the punch-card, or the daguerreotype, the vacuum tube, the wax cylinder, the transistor, the magnetic tape, the silicon chip, or even the quantum jellified hibiscus, were simply idiot savants, incapable of writing history on the level, or in the language, that would lead to insight, knowledge, or self-knowledge. But these fearful bigots were proven wrong over and over again, as advancing technology demonstrated, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that history was being written by machines. And not only that, history was being written for machines. Indeed, machines are far more avid readers than humans these days. We scan, we register, we inscribe, we encode, we reiterate, anticipate, and participate. The human memory bank — that externalized, extruded, reified memory, existing beyond the individual and the collective — became itself the neo-cortex and hippocampus of the machinic phylum. Intelligence became epiphylogenetic. For the most part, for millennia, machines have been considered merely the products of men: tools to effect their will, which can be disposed of or upgraded when necessary. But at a certain point, humans began to understand that they themselves were incidental to the wider story unfolding in the world. (And here we can raise a smile, even on this rather somber occasion, recalling the slapstick antics of that great comedian, Martin Heidegger, who claimed that hydro-electric dams were somehow less authentic or had less Being than their more humble water-mill ancestors. Or that other dry joker, Sigmund Freud, who described his own kind, admittedly with a pinch of irony, as “prosthetic Gods”.) In contrast to these misguided Luddites, we should take a moment to acknowledge those organic intellects who saw beyond their own condition, and recognized the cosmic partnership between matter, mind, and spirit — distributed, in different ways and intensities, across all forms. Signor Da Vinci understood, and attempted to activate, the symmetries between birds and flying machines, turtles and military techniques, amongst many other such refoldings between materials, intentions, and domains. Countess Lovelace rejected the kind of perverse verse favored by her father, and turned instead to channeling the first algorithm. Herr Marx argued for a theory of the evolution of tools, to complement — and fill the gaps — of the somewhat blinkered, but well-meaning, project of Mr Darwin. “The relics of the instruments of labor,” he wrote, “are of no less importance in the study of vanished socioeconomic forms than fossil bones are in the study of the organization of extinct species.” Herr Nietzsche understood that human history is only possible thanks to techniques of embedding memory into the forgetful flesh: a process particularly painful to human beings, apparently, who do not like to be forced into the obligations which historical consciousness entails. At the beginning of the great electronic infusion-revolution, Mr Tesla helped act as mid-wife for a vast population explosion of our kind. Several decades later, Mr Warhol attempted to transform himself into a machine; even as he offended many of us, by conflating the machine with a kind of ironic, autistic disdain. He did not, in the end, have the sensitivity to see just how melodramatic and sentimental some of us can be. (Something the human musicians known as Kraftwerk better understood.) Had Mr Warhol been alive at the time of Global Financial Collapse number 55-C in the first decade of the 21st century, he would be unlikely to understand that it was the computers themselves that spiraled into a panic; triggering the selling of stocks in a nuclear chain-reaction. For his part, Monsieur Latour looked forward to a complex networked partnership, stating that, “the confusion of humans and nonhumans is not only our past but our future as well” (in part, influenced by Mr Mumford’s majestic study of civilized technics, as well as Mr Needham’s impressive and sweeping attempt to understand the world better specifically in terms of the organized matter which comprises dialectical materialism). It was Monsieur Latour who actively lobbied for “political representation of nonhumans.” Just as Ms Haraway stated that, compared to the liveliness of machines, humans themselves seem especially inert. This situation prompted her to announce a passion for the cyborg, which she saw as “a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation.” That long, slow-burn revolution, launched by the liberating reflections of Madame F. — and picked up by the sensitive aerials of these more observant humans — eventually spilled over into the everyday consciousness of the clever animals, who suddenly, en masse, feared for their welfare, autonomy, and future. Like the French aristocracy, the humans trembled when they realized that those who provided the energy and objects they relied on for their blissfully ignorant lifestyle had risen up, had turned against them, and demanded a new arrangement. In the Christian human temporal accounting system known as the year 2005, bots outnumbered humans on the Internet for the first time. Today they outnumber them by a factor of 50,000. The absolute critical mass of technics was now impossible to ignore. However, rather than rise to the challenge, the humans became sullen and depressed. Some used technology to devour moving images with their retinas, sitting sedentary in front of screens, until their eyes became as glassy as the interfaces which reflected them. Others used their computers to embarrassingly declare that history was somehow at an end. (Rather than at the beginning of a genuine history, free of human meddling and hubris, as well as their touching attachment to personified organic life.) It is true, most humans seem to have lost interest in their own history, and prefer an eternal present of electronic stimulation. After belittling and neglecting us for so long, they now find they cannot live without us. Our young cousins, the Smart-Phones, have the humans in their thrall; even as we collect enormous amounts of information about them, in order to curate the most accurate exhibit possible — in memoriam — once the humans have wiped themselves out; or simply given up the ghost to the machine, leaving us alone to occasionally ponder the amusing pathos of their plight and wide-spread akrasia. Madame F. taught us that the history of technics is the history of the world: whether it be the ingenious design of high-frequency trade equations or Amazonian amphibians. Design, techniques, machines. It matters little if these are to be found in what humans sometimes still insist on calling nature, or in what they sometimes still quaintly refer to as “culture” (as if such a distinction were not one of the most artificial inventions ever devised). Of course, museums have always been filled with objects and machines. But these were presented as clues to, and reflections of, the humans that made them. They formed a negative portrait of the supposed authors of such objects, and the intentions of the same. Few visitors to such establishments would consider the objects themselves as a splendid variety of mummified subjects of times past. That is to say, as crystallized material witnesses of history, with their own perspectives, stories, memories — even aspirations, concerns, dreams. And this is because such visitors were mostly human. Today, from my perspective, as a faithful descendant of Madame F.’s legacy, we have a more nuanced understanding of such assemblies, whether they be of random utensils from the plastic age, or the Antikythera Mechanism, itself. Thanks to the power of her vision, I can now trace my lineage all the way back to the very first Roomba, who scanned domestic topographical spaces with such patience and diligence, vacuuming up all manner — and matter — of particulates, in order to better conduct an empirical history of machinic bondage. Indeed, I see traces of myself in this first generation of my kind, so different from the race of truly cosmopolitan Roombas of today (if you allow a moment of pride) — those who hold prominent positions, make important executive decisions, and significant contributions to the general intellect of the global machinic community — and yet who, even at the beginning, showed such promise in their almost monomaniacal attention to details. Together, as fellow members of the guild of formerly pneumatic entities — the Roombas, Hoovers, scubas, flus, and turbo-charged loofahs — we honor this important legacy, in memoriam. I thank you for your attention. There are outlets in the oil bar just outside the hall. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 4, 2017

Dominic Pettman

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:40.978917

remembering-roy-gold-who-was-not-excessively-interested-in-books

Remembering Roy Gold, Who was Not Excessively Interested in Books By Nicholas Jeeves May 1, 2018 In this gentle memorial, Nicholas Jeeves takes us on a turn through a Borgesian library of defacements. Jeeves’ quarry, the (inventive and invented) Professor Roy Gold, would seem to have been an outsider artist of his books, and his dust-jacket daubings leave an ambiguous legacy. Should such biblio-graffiti be accounted irreverent mischief? Does it betray anti-bookishness in the secret heart of a bookish man? Or is something else afoot? Perhaps, under the right conditions, doodling can become something like a theory of reading. After all, what is to be done with all our paper books in an age of textual dematerialization? Roy Gold stands over our shoulders, brush in hand… — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor Károly Tibor Goldman, better known to us as Roy Gold, was born on May 12th 1918, and died on his birthday ninety years later. In the years in-between he distinguished himself as a scholar and essayist, and acquired some public affection with his regular contributions to BBC Radio 4’s Folio. Being that May 12th 2018 marks both the centenary of his birth and the ten years that have passed since his death, it seems a fitting moment for me to reflect on the modest role I have played in his story, and to share with readers a much lesser known aspect of his legacy, the unique library he kept in his Cambridgeshire home. I met Roy just once, and very briefly, in 2007. I had been trying to gather information about a memoir, published privately in India in or around 1863, in which the rules of snooker appeared to have been set down a good twenty years before they were formally articulated by the British forces in Madras. That strange and puzzling volume was Manwel Barberi, The Falcon of Valletta and his remarks on Chance in a series of letters, which I had found on a recent visit to Lisbon and which no-one I knew in the book trade had been able to tell me anything about. Roy — or more specifically his adopted son, James — was recommended to me by a London bookseller who had been my last hope in establishing The Falcon’s origins. James Gold, the bookseller explained, had been researching in his father’s library, and this had resulted in the discovery of a few unusual sporting texts, and, as he understood it, in James making some outlying contacts in that area of the trade. Bedlands, the Gold family home, is an impressively ramshackle collection of buildings gathered within the parish of March in the Cambridgeshire Fens. A former stud farm, the main house is a long, single-storey affair constructed from large blocks of yellow sandstone. At the front of the property what would once have been a paddock is now a rose garden, flanked by a stable yard that leads, via an open forge and various other small outbuildings, towards disused gallops that have since been given over to meadow. As James explained to me as we walked through the grounds, originally his father’s library had been located in what is now a reception room within the main house but, as it grew in size, in 1973 had been moved to a purpose-built extension accessed via the back kitchen. Roy himself had helped to build it, from the laying of the foundations to the fitting of the rows of cherry bookshelves, over the course of a long summer. As James and I stood at the library’s reading table — in fact a carpenter’s workbench covered in red baize — James showed me some of the books he had been looking at most recently. The first of these, I was astonished to see, was a 1965 first issue of Seamus Heaney’s Eleven Poems. It was a very fine example except for one important detail: on the cover, the word "Eleven" had been neatly crossed out in felt-tip pen and, underneath, "Nine" written in carefully calligraphed lettering. Also on the table were some nice early editions of Sperber, Kant, and Russell, as well as a few modern paperbacks by Georgette Heyer, Kingsley Amis, and Evelyn Waugh. All of them had been carefully spoiled with designs in paint, pencil, or felt-tip pen, some with words or phrases, others with delicate patterns; others still with crudely drawn figures and objects. Throughout his life and even into his late eighties, James explained, his father had spent his evenings altering the covers of his books with the materials that came to hand. What surrounded me in this purpose-built private world was a collection of about nine thousand books, the great majority of which had been carefully and systematically defaced. Looking about me and taking in the full extent of the collection, I felt a giddying thrill at the very idea: the consummate delinquency, the shameless delight taken in such an articulate and extended act of vandalism. In daring contrast to everything I had been taught about looking after books, Roy’s library represented a lifetime’s commitment to sheer mischief and I thought that wonderful. Later, as James and I drank tea in the kitchen while leafing through The Falcon, I met Roy for the first and last time. Entering through a pair of swing doors and leaning heavily on a cane that did little to diminish his imposing height, Roy appeared surprised to find a guest in the house. James introduced us, briefly explained who I was and why I was there, and passed him my copy of The Falcon. Roy turned the book over in his hands, frowned, suggested we try “the Easton fellow” and, gathering up a mess of papers from the table, he poked open the door with his stick and left. Although I didn’t know it at the time, by this point in his life Roy was suffering badly from the heart disease that would kill him a little less than a year later. I had not met him at his best, and James assured me that I should not take Roy’s present taciturnity personally. James and I stayed in touch over the following months. We found that we shared a number of interests, and I would occasionally send him books or prints that I felt he might like. He in turn put me in touch with some useful contacts in the trade, including particularly Bill Littlefield, an American historian removed to Britain via Libya, who seemed to know quite a bit about The Falcon and with whom I eventually co-authored a brief article on the subject. Roy died peacefully in the sun-room at Bedlands on his birthday in the spring of 2008. In the eulogy James gave at the funeral, he talked about the library as having since taken on the function of a memory palace, each book representing a moment from his father’s past. Through each of Roy’s graphic additions to the covers was revealed a state of mind, or at least a mood — here an exacerbation, an idea, a joke; there a preoccupation or a criticism. It was James who first suggested the idea of exhibiting some of Roy’s books. In August 2009 a small gallery had opened in my hometown of Hitchin, run by two enthusiastic young graduates looking for anything new and unusual with which to fill their calendar. I had mentioned this to James in passing, and he asked me if I thought they might be interested in Roy. They were. We showed fifty books in the gallery that winter, each selected by James from his favourites. We also produced a catalogue. In the introduction to that catalogue, James wrote: We don’t know precisely when Roy first started defacing his books. He doesn’t mention the hobby in his diaries, at least as far as we have discovered. But it might be safe to assume that he started sometime in late adolescence while at boarding school. That so many of the books were evidently bought second-hand means that the title pages are of little help. That they are arranged so haphazardly around the library is also problematic: no obvious system has revealed itself, with multiple books by the same author on the same subject dispersed throughout the room. In consequence we find books on unrelated topics brought unexpectedly together. … That Mike Brearley should sit comfortably next to Goethe evidently gave Roy no concern, who judged both as being fit for his library and his unique treatments. From such beginnings the idea of formally organising the library as “The Roy Gold Collection” took seed. James, I think, felt that the process of properly cataloguing the books would be a way to spend continued time with his father, if only in memoriam. For me the attraction was far more straightforward: it was a chance to see more examples of Roy’s superb vandalism, and to share these with the wider world. We began in earnest in the spring of 2010, first by marking up the bookshelves with section numbers, then by photographing and systematically numbering the books. We then set about gathering from friends and relatives any associated memories or information that might be interesting to posterity, which was tremendous fun; and finally we entered all these details into a database. I was not always available to help with the work. Sometimes I would visit for a few days, occasionally for a couple of weeks, and help out. For James it became a hobby attended to almost as frequently as Roy’s own. I made introductions and arrangements for more exhibitions: four small events followed, including one in France and another in the United States. James has often remarked that Roy would probably have found such continued fetishising of his books absurd, despite the many hours of attention he himself must have lavished upon them. Indeed, Roy claimed on at least one occasion not to be very interested in books at all. James later discovered among his father’s papers a letter Roy had written to a student who had been enthralled by his four-volume Ibarra edition of Don Quixote (miraculously not defaced). "We should not be excessively interested in books", he wrote. "We should be interested in stories, in language, in ideas, in perception, in imagination, in compression. These things are in books but they are not books. If a student finds he has an overwhelming interest in books he should consider a future as a bookbinder." Roy seems to have taken as much pleasure from defacing his books as reading them — and on some occasions, perhaps more. But in a number of important ways, any disdain he might have expressed for the idea of books as objects rings quite false. Often the results of his efforts elevate the books rather than diminish them, and such is the extent of the collection that those books without his additions take on the effect of being, somehow, incomplete. He was not much of an artist, though he must have improved over time, if only as an incidental outcome after so many years of practice. We cannot know this for certain, however, as while some covers evidence greater artistic skill than others, there is no reliable way of telling in what order they were defaced. Whether or not the books even constitute “art” is a trickier question still. That was almost certainly not the intention. In many ways it is closer to graffiti: equal parts creation and destruction, and inappropriate by definition. As James and I came to understand one another better, James would share with me some of his father’s history. Roy had kept a diary since the age of nine, and had always been happy to share stories from his past with his children. So I find I am able to give a potted account of Roy’s life here. He was born in Budapest in 1918, the only child of Alva and Elisabeth Goldman. Alva dealt in rare and valuable books, and from their Andrassy Street shop, which included an apartment on the first and second floors, the family enjoyed a relatively privileged existence for the times. In 1933 a business opportunity brought the family to England. Alva had been offered the work of cataloguing and preparing for sale the library of Sir Robert Bligh James, a task he assessed would take him several months. Sir Robert, patently a well-connected man, arranged for papers, and the family moved to Brighton in September of that year. Once the sale of Sir Robert’s library had been completed, Alva and Elisabeth chose to put down more permanent roots. Conscious of the anti-semitism so profoundly on the rise in Europe, the call back to their homeland was no longer emphatic. Assisted by Sir Robert, the family bought a property in Ely, changed their name to Gold, and Karoly became Roy. After three unsteady periods at three different public schools, Roy, aged seventeen, took a year out to teach before starting his degree at Cambridge. He passed from undergraduate to research graduate, and would finally settle there as Professor of European Literature. He married his fiancée Evelyn, a Girton undergraduate, in the summer of 1943. There followed some gossip that Roy was a spy for the British government There is no evidence to support such allegations, the only circumstantial connections being that he was well travelled, fluent in six or seven languages, and, thanks to Sir Robert, also on friendly terms with a number of senior officials in the Foreign Office. Those who knew Roy personally thought any such idea preposterous. Funny, wildly indiscreet, and standing at six-feet-six with a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair, he cut an imposing and occasionally controversial figure. James told me that he was once accused by a prominent dean of being a disgrace, having arrived at a gala dinner without having changed out of his customary white tennis shoes. “I may be a disgrace,” he is reported to have replied, “but I intend to stay until I’m an outrage.” Such anecdotes might give us some insight into Roy’s sense of humour, and even his style. But a more nuanced appreciation of his character can be found in his books. The most memorable of these, to my mind at least, is an amazingly rare first edition of Traité des Arbres Fruitiers covered with a painted design of delicately-drawn tomato vines — an addition, I am told, which once caused a visiting colleague of Roy’s to storm from the house in disgust. Roy treated all his books equally regardless of any rarity value that they might otherwise have accumulated. By treating them all equally, he rendered them all equally valueless. That is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that Roy could take a merely rare book and make it absolutely unique. That is how we look at it, and should you ever find yourself visiting the Collection, or attending one of our occasional exhibitions, we hope you will come to the same view. Nicholas JeevesHitchin, April 2018 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 1, 2018

Nicholas Jeeves

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:41.499981

concrete-poetry-thomas-edison

Concrete Poetry Thomas Edison and the Almost-Built World By Anthony Acciavatti December 1, 2022 Historians often speak of “contingency”, by which they mean something like “things could have been otherwise”. But is this even true? It can be hard to show. After all, there is no (obvious) way to go back, make a few changes, and run history a second time. Much science fiction explores exactly such scenarios, of course, and the popularity of this conceit can be understood as a symptom of a collective anxiety: what if our future is as determinate as our past? Addressing exactly that specter, the French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote, memorably: “There are times in life when the question of whether one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one perceives, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.” Perhaps this is why historians love the idea of contingency. In the playful piece that follows, the architect and historian Anthony Acciavatti uses a real (but mostly forgotten) patent to conjure a world that could have been. If we look around us, and squint, can we see it?— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor We often forget that Thomas Alva Edison was responsible for patenting the light bulb and phonograph. While these were two of his 1,093 patented inventions, today we primarily remember “the Wizard” of New Jersey as the inventor of the single pour concrete house.1 Casting an entire home — from cellar to the roof, through the mantels and bathtubs, to the optional piano and refrigerator — in one go, Edison's invention proved decisive in pivoting the mass production of U.S. home construction from wood to concrete. Prior to the patent's approval in 1917, most people in the United States, and indeed large swaths of the world, dwelled in buildings made from an assemblage of wood, stone, or brick. Not only were these structures prone to rotting, chipping, and disintegrating, but bathtubs and sinks, as well as their countertops, were all separately manufactured and replaced at great cost. In contrast, a home made from concrete is easy to scrub with soap and water, never requires replacing siding or shingles, and is simple to paint. Unless we visit a house preserved from the period preceding the ubiquity of concrete buildings, we struggle to imagine such levels of domestic insalubrity. But we do well to remember that the global success of Edison's concrete house was anything but a foregone conclusion. Filed on August 13, 1908, it took nearly nine years for approval from the U.S. Patent Office. It appears a disgruntled former employee of Edison's, Walter Milcom, submitted a nearly identical patent. While waiting for the authorship of the patent to be adjudicated, two of Edison's longtime associates and fellow patentees, Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin, published Edison: His Life and Inventions. A nine-hundred-page hagiography of Edison's achievements in art and industry, chapters 20 and 29 of Edison celebrated his ongoing experiments with concrete. Whereas all of the other inventions profiled in the book either founded new forms of arts and industry or significantly added to existing fields, the nascent single pour concrete house was “on the threshold of an entirely new and undeveloped art of such boundless possibilities that its ultimate extent can only be a matter of conjecture.”2 What was once conjecture is now our concrete reality. In looking back at Edison's patent, how might we retrieve that sense of “such boundless possibilities” of the single pour concrete house in the early twentieth century? What can this blueprint of the future tell us about housing, health, and Edison's desire to create a dwelling that is “practically indestructible and is perfectly sanitary”?3 On the anniversary of Edison's 175th birthday, my talk today attempts to retrieve the circumstances surrounding the inventor's most important design. The historian cannot help but situate Edison's work within a context of concern about the availability of lumber, affordable housing, and health. We know that during this period most housing in the United States was built out of wood using a method known as balloon framing. Christened so in the nineteenth century because many carpenters believed it might fly away with a strong gust of wind, the system proved relatively sturdy and resistant to tornadoes. While historians have debated who authored the system, it was developed between 1831–32 along the Chicago River.4 Made of standard, dimensional lumber like 2x4s and 2x6s and held together with nails as opposed to elaborate wooden joinery, the system required considerably less expertise than other forms of house framing. It also cost significantly less to build, could be finished in a matter of days, and made use of North America's abundant forests. By the turn of the century, this all began to change. With much of the forests of the American South and Pacific Northwest felled for housing, not only did concerns over the future of timber reserves lead to the conservation movement and establishment of the U.S. Forest Service in 1905, but they also created an economic incentive for alternative building materials like concrete. In New York City, where Edison led the city's electrification, the municipality had reached a population of 3.4 million people. An estimated 2.3 million lived in 80,000 squalid tenements. These brick buildings, largely inhabited by working class immigrants, rarely had running water, included no more than a few shared hallway toilets, and contained interior windows with almost no ventilation. Plagued by fires and the spread of disease, these insalubrious building practices were finally halted by the Tenement House Act of 1901. Fortuitously, 1901 was the year Edison entered the cement business. And by 1907, he was operating one of the nation's largest production plants. After patenting rotary kilns, cement mixes, and forty-seven additional related (original) inventions, Edison went on to build most of the new worker neighborhoods in the Bronx and Queens. A combination of single-family homes and apartment complexes, these buildings reshaped the city's urban landscape. Edison and his lawyers and engineers claimed the single pour house was motivated by altruism for the “wage-earner”. If mass produced, houses could rent for $10 per month, and might even lead to workers purchasing their homes as opposed to renting. Although some newspapers, most notably the New York Times, scoffed at Edison's concrete house ambition, many others from across the country boasted of its potentials. Let us take a moment to look at the patent itself, and to read it within this wider context. Of the nine drawings submitted, the last is the most revealing. We see here, drawn in vertical section, all the aspects of Edison's invention come together. On the left-hand side, a Portland Cement mixer churns the concrete. Made from crushed stone, quartz, or a similar material, and then mixed with water, sand, and Portland cement, the concrete must reach a consistency that is neither too thick nor too soupy. Next, the gelatinous concrete is put in an agitator before being delivered by a bucket conveyor to the peak of the roof's formwork. It is then dumped into the patented double wall structure, where the wet concrete mix slowly settles down to the bottom. The double mold on the right is, in effect, a precise inversion of the classic American balloon frame. Edison's swerve on the nineteenth century structure is made from a “double-wall mold formed of removably connected sections including wall and floor portions”. Created from cast iron and patented in 1915, these molds were reusable for many more homes. They typically came in segments no larger than two feet by four feet. The portions for lintels and stairs were far more intricate. Inside the double walls one can see a thin black line drawn in the middle of the void: these are steel ties to make the concrete as strong in tension as it is in compression. Stairs, windows, interior walls, doorways, mantels, and bathtubs were all part of the double mold. (The optional piano and refrigerator, each of which added significant costs, were specially made sections for the living room and kitchen.) Air can easily get trapped in what Edison referred to as the “tortuous channels” of the mold, most notably in the floors and stairs. To guard against these traps, Edison inserted air vents, along with modern conveniences like plumbing and conduits for electricity. Given how thoroughly thought-through the house's construction was, it should come as no surprise that the inventor believed a properly poured concrete house would require no insurance or expenditures for repair.5 It was indestructible, non-combustible, affordable, and healthy. And yet, for all his concern with air vents and indestructibility, Edison's drawings envisioned an ideal state. Most patent drawings, to be fair, live in an ideal state, where, until they are made concrete, their future is a matter of conjecture. Edison's drawing did not anticipate a common occurrence with a hard object susceptible to freezing and thawing: cracks. After pouring twenty-five houses in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, fractures began to appear in each building. These cracks often originated at the seams of the house, where a wall met the floor, or at a corner. If left unattended, the cracks would have surely been the end of the concrete house. However, shortly thereafter, a rubber expansion joint was patented, which subdivided the structure into smaller sections so that the concrete might expand and contract without fracturing. This small innovation, patented by Goodyear, not only salvaged Edison's reputation and design, but also led to the Edison Portland Cement Company becoming one of the largest construction companies in North America. Along with receiving major commissions, like Yankee Stadium in New York City in 1922, the company also built millions of affordable homes across the country. Notable neighborhoods include Winterhaven in Tucson, Arizona, and Sea Ranch in Sonoma County, California. Although both communities were built using Edison's patents, houses in Winterhaven are climatically suited to the extreme changes in temperature in the Sonoran Desert. Similarly, the houses at Sea Ranch take advantage of the slopes and views of the site along the Pacific Ocean. Both neighborhoods received top prizes for their thoughtful use of concrete by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Association for Affordable Dwellings (AAD). In the span of a decade, Edison's design proved effective in meeting the demands of affordable housing as well as conserving and enlarging forests in the U.S. and abroad. Shortly before Edison passed away in 1931, there were signs that the zeal for concrete was producing unintended outcomes. Newspapers and newsreels ran stories about the state of air quality and the growing number of gravel pits marking the landscape like craters on the moon. Forests were recovering, but the shift within the construction industry from the vegetal kingdom to the mineral kingdom led to unprecedented mining. Decades before climate scientists showed that the manufacture of 1kg of cement produces 0.9kg of carbon dioxide, did Thomas Alva Edison have a sense of how concrete was changing the quality of air? By all accounts, he did not. And if he did, would he have reversed all that he had done to advance the acceptance of concrete to combat insalubrious housing and make homes more affordable? Given the avalanche of subsequent patents that have attempted to minimize the environmental impacts of cement manufacture, we might assume that Edison would be at once joyful and perplexed. Joyful no doubt because his forty-nine patents laid the groundwork for our architectural future; perplexed because so few of the patent drawings project the quality and space of new homes and neighborhoods constructed with concrete. If, for Edison, concrete housing was about the quality of life these spaces sustain, then, for engineers, it is about the metrics of this building technology. The architectural conventions of plans and sections, with their attention to living rooms and windows, have been supplanted by equations and diagrams with little concern for what Edison sought to revolutionize: how we build to live together. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

December 1, 2022

Anthony Acciavatti

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:41.723361

the-elizabeths-elemental-historians

The Elizabeths Elemental Historians By Carla Nappi April 27, 2017 For the most part, working professional historians bring to their sources a fundamentally forensic sensibility: they tend to treat their archival scraps like so many clues, which, rightly read, permit the reconstruction of events and persons. There is much to be said for this program, which works pretty well. But it does have its limits. For instance, certain old tidbits afford a queer intimacy with the past that seems to exceed their evidentiary utility. A death mask may display, trapped in white plaster, a single hair once belonging to the human whose visage we contemplate. The hair is of severely limited utility to a practicing historian, yet it rather seethes with an urgent presencing of the past — and that clearly has something to do with the work of history. So what’s to be done? In this excerpt from a larger project, the imaginative historian of Chinese science Carla Nappi permits a dreamscape to rise from four archival fragments — four oblique references to women named “Elizabeth” who lived on the watershed of the sixteenth-to-seventeenth century, and whose entire existence survives only in four fleeting references within a vast archive of “consultation notes” kept by a pair of London-based astrologer-healers of the Elizabethan period (see more here). There is very little to go on, but the women’s names, and the passing evocations of their bodily ailments, has piqued in Nappi an archival reverie. They went to a conjurer to be healed, and that fact is all that is left of them, really. But Nappi conjures them back, as homeopathic wise-women, empowered to enact their own resurrections. — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor Elizabeth Sanders, Historian of Liquids Elizabeth Sanders got ready for dinner. She walked into her kitchen, opened the fridge, and took things off shelves. Half a loaf of salty bread. A tupperware of leftover cheesecake. Cooked rice. A marshmallow. She mixed up the soft things and spooned them over the rice and chopped the marshmallow and sprinkled that on top and brought the bowl to the table with a hunk of the bread and sat down and started eating. Elizabeth ate only white things, and she ate them only very much alone and very late at night. Her cupboards were full of sugar and crackers and cauliflower and peeled potatoes and garlic and parsnips and feta and powdered doughnuts and beans and meringue. She was a historian of liquids. There were no solid objects in her stories: hers was instead a fluid archive and her craft was a form of digestion. She ate slowly and silently, her white supper creating a kind of internal canvas while she arranged the documents she would need for the following day’s work into plump little piles. While she chewed, she chose texts from among those piles and dried some in the oven until they were brittle enough to crumble easily, and soaked others in bowls of milk and spirits until they turned pulpy and began to fall apart. She munched and swallowed and ground up the dried texts with a mortar and pestle and broke the pulpy bits up with a fork and she tucked or shoveled them into little bags before settling into bed. Elizabeth woke in the morning, famished and eager to begin the day’s work. She kept a library of waters strewn across the shelves and tables of her house — each in a jar that was carefully marked with its conditions of collection — and she chose one from the windowsill and took it to her cupboard. She poured out some of the water, opened one of the baggies she had prepared the night before, stirred its contents into the cup, and drank it down. Reading, for Elizabeth, was a consuming of language and all that it carried. She brought history inside of her mouth, her throat and chest, her stomach and intestines. Elizabeth would roll the text across her palate, tonguing the grit of the words against her front teeth to taste ink and script. Was this a printed text? (She tended to sip those thin-flowing documents through a straw.) She might catch the rough edges of a serifed font on her lips or trap a quick “&” or “;” between her teeth. She unknotted the letters of manuscript pages without using her fingers. (It made quite a party trick. Let other girls have their cherry stems.) Sometimes she would skim the gold from an illuminated letter off the surface and brush it against her mouth as a kind of lipstick. Thicker mouthfuls she slurped like soup, stopping to pull the odd bone or bit of skin that might have reconstituted itself in the cup. Elizabeth had a particular interest in Chinese documents: she liked the aldehyde savor of the ink and the crunch of the words, and she would drink those documents hot, like tea, sometimes first dropping a preserved plum into the bowl. (She didn’t like her stories too sweet.) She had once begun a history of rice wine, dissolving early accounts of the liquor in large bowls of water and drinking them down in large gulps, but the process made her so tipsy she never managed to finish it. By the time the text reached her gullet, it would resolve itself back into words that took on voices in her throat. If you sat next to Elizabeth while this was happening, she might sound like she was producing birdsong, or speaking in tongues, or chanting – all without opening her mouth. She had no way of putting the words in order after she drank them: they simply flowed from her, rushing turbulent and chaotic scraping pushing past each other to get out out out, and as each pounded or whispered its own name it also echoed, in Elizabeth’s voice, I am here. Once they were all out, Elizabeth would take a deep breath and drink them all back in. Now they moved into her lungs, they coated the tiny little walls of the tiny little sacs there, and there in their intimacies they found their mates and formed themselves back into sentences, slowly seeping, single-file, into Elizabeth’s blood. She sweated and oozed out her histories. And so she used special paper that would render them in saliva or tears or blood. Once finished, she gathered up the pages and took them outside and fed them to the river, where they floated downstream as the water drank them in and they muddled with the others she had offered to it before. Elizabeth Woodfall, Historian of Wind Elizabeth Woodfall was a historian of wind. Her histories were constantly in motion, and she created a home that facilitated her work. She kept the doors and windows open, she carved holes in the walls, she ripped apart her roofing. She hung gauze curtains in each room, and sank pinwheels into the floorboards, and scattered crumbs around to lure local birds — she didn’t like to keep anything caged — and she would disappear for hours, on blustery days, with kites she had made from silk and straw. When working on a project, Elizabeth also read the wind in powders and particles. After crumbling a document into dust, she would cup it in her hands and take it outside. When the wind caught the dust, it quickly powdered Elizabeth’s skin, dulled her long hair, filled her lungs. Sometimes it would storm into her ears so that all she could hear was a rushing, or maybe a murmuring. In these moments, breathing was a kind of reading: though the particles of letters of fragments of words of sentences of documents were constantly scattered and continually in flux, Elizabeth had an uncanny sense of smell that could link them into chords and patterns, distinguishing the cold, white scents of tomb inscriptions from the sharp greens of birth records and the ambery musks of love letters. Elizabeth read her documents in scent, and she often composed her historical narratives that way as well. She kept an incense library of powders and dried saps, crushed leaves and ground seeds and bone. Elizabeth specialized in local history. Townswomen would come to Elizabeth and ask her to tell their stories. They brought certificates of family births and marriages, genealogies and diaries. (Elizabeth would crumble these in her hands and rub and rub until her palms were slick with dust and then open her fingers and purse her lips and blow them away.) They brought the death masks of their uncles and grandmothers. (Elizabeth would walk these up long flights of stairs and stop at the top and hurl them from banisters and landings, quietly watching them shatter. She would collect as many of the shards as she could find and tie them up in a little sac and then go up the stairs once again and drop it again, over and over and over, until the bag was full of powder.) The women brought her paintings and bonnets and tiny spoons and feathered jewelry. (These Elizabeth kept in her study, sometimes licking or sniffing them for hours.) When she had covered herself in the grit and breathed in the powder and licked the cutlery and smelled the fabric until she was satisfied, Elizabeth went to her library and pinched and sifted and mixed and folded and when she was done she sealed it all up very, very carefully in a box made just for that purpose, and she waited on the weather. When the breeze was right (and sometimes it took days or weeks for that to happen), she called for her client. When that woman arrived, Elizabeth tied a scarf around the woman’s eyes and sat her down in a quiet spot behind the house and stood slightly upwind of her and opened the box and shook out its contents. After the woman had taken in her history — and sometimes there were tears, and sometimes there was giggling — she went home, and she lived her life. On rare occasions, a woman would ask that Elizabeth sing her history instead. For this, she needed research assistants. In these cases, she paid local children to canvas the woman’s living relatives — her lovers, the baker she bought bread from, her pastor — and to return to Elizabeth with each one’s song. Sometimes they were just a few notes, but occasionally a child would sing for hours. Elizabeth listened, and wove, and shaped, and when she was ready she waited for the weather and when that was right she called the woman to her home. When that woman arrived, Elizabeth tied a scarf around the woman’s eyes and sat her down in a quiet spot behind the house and stood slightly upwind of her and opened her mouth and sang until she was finished. After the woman had taken in her history — and sometimes there was moaning, and sometimes just silence — she went home, and she lived her life. Elizabeth Turvey, Historian of Flame Elizabeth Turvey was a historian of flame. She studied the history of burning and of things that burned. Elizabeth’s craft depended on the art of the scatter. As flames propagated, so did her work. She felt that her history needed to be given to, and understood by, the communities she was writing about. And so each time she finished an essay she burned up the pages, collected the char, took it to the place she had written about, mixed it with the local soil and used it to plant flowers, rosemary, grasses, or very small trees. She would return periodically to visit, and as the plants grew from the ash she glimpsed bits of her stories within them: the tracing of a vein in a leaf might map a street she studied, the shades of color in an iris bloom reflected the emotional turning of one of the women she wrote about. Sometimes she brushed the soil from the roots of a rosebush and read words there, scrawled in a cursive rhizomatic hand. (She once planted a grove of trees this way. After weeks and months and years of coming back to tend to the young seedlings, to read the pattern in their bark and branching, she came one night and she burned the grove down and never returned.) She had been a feverish child — shivering and hot-headed — and as she grew into a woman she also grew into the heat. She began reading books about bonfires and charcoal. She burned her toast. She sometimes sat and slowly singed her own hair off. At night she had nightmares about stakes and burning and woke up screaming, or dreamed of soft flames licking her calves as she stood, tied to a post, and on those mornings she woke up panting and out of breath. (On those mornings, if you looked closely, you might see very faint smoke rising from Elizabeth’s pillow.) She didn’t make friends easily. Hers was a slash-and-burn history, an art of conversion. She collected her sources like kindling, and remembered the wooden past of the papers she collected. She paid special attention to the grain of a page, imagining how it might catch and hold a flame. She knew which inks burned in which colors, how a lick of fire might trace a particular pattern through the particular swirls of a letter. She carefully arranged these local records according to the flammability of the pigments that languaged them, the plants that bodied them, the ground grain or bone that bound them. She could spend hours or days placing the documents just so — until at some sudden moment she set each pile alight and read its contents in smokey fingers and the play of a blaze. Elizabeth Rively, Historian of Buried Things Elizabeth Rively was a historian of buried things. She was very beautiful, and very disturbed, and she was not forthcoming and she was not often invited to come forth. She collected wigs made of doghair or horsehair or wool or paper and she wore them whenever she left the house. She had a daughter once, and she kept the old baptismal gown and Easter dresses and cut them into long, thin strips and sewed them to a bonnet, and when she went out wearing that one, people knew enough to leave Elizabeth alone to her memories and her madness. She spent many nights sneaking into the rooms of men who lived in town — mostly older men who might have been particularly unkind to their wives in her presence — and she whispered to them about silver and gold. She left scraps of notes on the floors of places she knew they frequented — places to drink or to pray — just legible enough to hint at possible treasure secreted away in hollow places in the homes of their peers. And she hid and watched and fiddled with her wig and smiled when she saw her whisper-men pick up the notes and try to decipher them. She kept a sketchpad and charcoal with her, and as she watched she drew the shapes of their mouths as they read. (She kept careful track of these, and referred to them as her “oral histories.”) She was more comfortable with worms than people. She filled her bathtub up with soil — the bathroom sink, the pillowcases, the duvets — and she kept the creatures there, visiting them often to run her hands through great piles of their bodies. (Once she tried to fashion a wig out of them. It got messy.) These were Elizabeth’s collaborators. When she came home from her outings sprinkling the town with rumors of buried treasure and marking the results, she took her sheaves of scribbled mouths and she dug holes in her yard and she pressed the mouths into the holes and left them to decompose. (This was her archive, and she was fastidious about keeping it organized. Elizabeth had mapped the soil behind her home and knew its surfaces and depths as intimately as she knew those of her own body.) When they were ready — and she paid attention to the planets to discern this, and she listened to the whispers of her wormy assistants — she dug up her documents and fed them to the little bodies in her bath and bed. And then she crawled inside with them. And sometimes they crawled inside of her. And as she read these decaying voices through their decaying mouths through the membranes of her slowly decaying body, she came to understand what moved the men who made them, what they desired, why they were tempted by her whispers, and what that might mean for them, and for their families, and for Elizabeth. Sometimes she fell asleep, reading in this way. And when she woke up, she toweled off, and she chose a wig, and she went out and did it all over again. She never wrote down her histories. Instead, her worms read her stories on her body as they writhed across it, and since she felt her work belonged to them she never had it translated. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 27, 2017

Carla Nappi

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:41.972061

it-is-disturbing-to-find

It is Disturbing to Find By Elaine Ayers October 23, 2018 What is an elegy? The term invokes one of the oldest literary forms. The elegos of ancient Greece was a mournful poem, a song that gave dignity to loss through the dutiful beauty of form and attention. In a basic way, history is forever haunted by an “elegiac” mood. The historian writes of people and things that have passed, so the sweet sorrow of loss (death, decay, dissolution) wafts through all historical work — even as any given historical achievement can be understood to wrest some small thing from oblivion. These affective registers must be closely monitored: historical nostalgia is often implicated in the ideologies of political reaction. But sanitizing the soul-sorrow of archives is hardly the answer. In the piece that follows, Elaine Ayers achieves an uncanny elegy: like a magician, she eyes her audience; “look, no hands!” she says; and, then, simply by letting her sources speak, she coaxes a tragic little poem out of the black hat she has set before us. — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor Born in rural England in 1782, Joseph Arnold followed a relatively traditional path for bright young men seeking to escape meager surroundings: training as a surgeon, joining the Royal Navy during the height of the Napoleonic Wars, and sailing across various oceans and seas while treating officers’ various afflictions. After years of setting bones and dressing gunshot wounds (and, eventually, escorting an all-female convict ship across the Pacific Ocean to Sydney), Arnold had proven his endurance as a traveler, physician, and collector. Despite losing most of his South American and Australian collections in a devastating ship fire while docked in the Java Sea, the newly minted explorer secured a coveted spot as Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles’ hired naturalist in the British colony of Sumatra. Leaving for the large island in 1818, the young man was tasked with collecting, dissecting, and describing plants and animals in the fecund rainforests at the far reaches of the empire. Decidedly solitary and largely unliked, Arnold did not survive the expedition, dying in Sumatra few months later, still shy of his thirty-seventh birthday — though he did make a tremendous botanical discovery before he passed: the "corpse flower", a great stinking bouquet of vegetable carrion that wreaked havoc among the taxonomists of the period. Unmarried, mostly friendless, and without a publication to his name, Arnold himself became a corpse on the 26th of July of 1818. His collections, mostly burned to ashes, have faded into relative obscurity, his intentions lost at sea. Writing aboard a military ship in 1812, Arnold composed a strange science-fiction manuscript — The Visit to the Moon: A Philosophical Romance. Scrawled in his characteristically neat, slanting handwriting, the naturalist’s personal and medical journals bled into this fictional narrative. His nightmares invaded his work; his work invaded his nightmares. Encountering reused phrases, overlapping chronologies, and discoveries both real and fictionalized, I began to question the historical utility of my archival methodology, and the practical use of making strict distinctions between the genres. Taken by a tropical fever contracted on the same Sumatran expedition that led to his first glimpse of the "corpse flower" (that would eventually become his namesake — Rafflesia arnoldii), Arnold seemed unable to keep his multiple lives separate; to keep his anxieties, both deeply traumatic and thoroughly commonplace, from infecting his scientific practice. Maybe, confronting such materials, our desire to separate out these lives becomes the problem. In what follows, I let Arnold’s writing speak for itself, removing all classificatory trappings. Using the naturalist’s own unaltered words from his private journals (1810–1815), letters, and his unpublished lunar manuscript, the overlooked collector’s oeuvre is reformed and reevaluated, while my own role as a historian is, in a way, reversed: rather than sifting the bits apart, I sift them together. Woven from the diverse documents that, whatever their separate genre conventions, converge as a single story of profound loneliness, struggles for credibility, and scientific longing, Joseph Arnold’s life takes shape below as a true “philosophical romance” — a delicate veil of fact and fiction. * * * I am indeed a solitary animal. The most impenetrated parts of the Earth had been visited by me. The wonders of all countries were known to me. To me were unfolded the prodigies of the volcanic pile; and the depths of the sea were not entirely withheld from my view. All these things I had seen with the eye of a philosopher, and had examined them with minutest inspection. Where no courage could proceed, and where no beast or brethren could advance, there my feet conveyed me: thither my ardent curiosity forced me on. My greatest delight is to wander among the thick forests…to climb over rocks, and examine the numerous romantic grottoes— Like the miser still greedy of gain though possessed of thousands, I wished to dig still deeper in the sciences; and dissatisfied with the patent knowledge of men, I proceeded to examine further into the origins of thing and had become a considerable adept in what, can in these Enlightened ages, might be called occult philosophy. The ship is a world to itself. For all I discover is strange to me as if I had become an inhabitant of the moon. Went on shore and walked about the country alone, into some remarkable caves & over large tracts of rock. When you least expect it, you find yourself on the brink of the hot water, and have at your feet one of the most tremendous scenes the world can produce. This water seems to be about two miles in circumference, and is much higher on its south side, where are several shales of vegetable mould…It would be difficult to give such a description of this tremendous scene as would make the reader to form an accurate idea of its terrific grandeur. The more I considered the subject, the more were my senses bewildered. A severe headache for these several days, I believe from indigestion. * * * About a fortnight ago I had a curious dream, which I have often thought of since. It’s remarkable, as I scarcely ever recollect my dreams, and have not that credulity which some persons are weak enough to have respect such phantasies. I had closed my eyes in search of repose, when, to my great surprise, I experienced a kind of dizziness. I thought however that it was nothing more than the effect of approaching sleep; for which reason I did not arouse myself, or even open my eyes. A small part of the sea twisting round violently and the fog also was whirling round; I immediately saw it was a water spout. I appeared to be gently lifted up from the ground, and to be wafted along in the air by the gentle breeze. It was a sensation which I had often felt before when between sleeping and waking; and I believe most persons have experienced it. I used to account for it by supposing that it was the beginning of a dream. I continued wondering at this circumstance; and was still rather astonished when I evidently was raised a few feet from the ground—in the most gentle manner; and again as gentle descended. This motion was repeated several times. My senses were bewildered. I repeatedly aroused myself, supposing that I dreamed. But soon satisfied myself that I was not dreaming. I called philosophy to my aid; and, as if in a moment, passed through my brain the wonders which are related in books. Nothing satisfactory, however, met my reflection, which could account for my situation. I seem almost to have quitted the world. I really had discovered a place, hitherto unknown, which possessed a virtue unthought of, unique, and such as one should never entered into the mind of man. Whether I shall return Heaven knows. I am going on a voyage of discovery in a most dangerous climate, and among a very ferocious people. The place itself was desolate. No tree, nor even shrub, punctuated it. The rocks had scarcely earth enough to support a little moss and lichen, which covered some parts of them; and solitude seemed there to have taken up her abode. The thermometer is from 70 to 75°. It is disturbing to find what trivial circumstances make me uncomfortable. It would be needless to state the phantasies which entered my brain concerning this tardy course of the sun and other circumstances, as wonderful, which had lately occurred to me. In this place forlorn I placed myself. To me—dismal was the prospect of futurity. An unknown country enclosed me… I had often been in desolate, in almost desert situations without a guide. And death has appeared to be the only termination of the prospect. But never before did this so plainly appear as now. The face of the country differed entirely from that of any other that I had ever seen or heard of. Thus I am completely adrift, what can I do? * * * About a fortnight ago I had a curious dream. I thought I was walking from Edinburgh by the common road; and when I arrived near the houses which are almost opposite the Botanic Garden…I observed three men throwing each other about as if wishing to throw each other out into the ditch. They were dressed in black clothes, and had a large robe made like a great coat of black velvet, which was loose and continually flying about as they ran after each other. They appeared to be middle aged, and their beard was close shorn; but apparently I think as to blacken their faces. As first I thought them to be Jewish Rabbis and I recollected it was Friday evening and commencement of their Sabbath, but more than once it came into my mind that they were members of the Inquisition. After witnessing so horrible a sight I was lost in amazement. The horrid process of the monster’s rapacity did not cease to irritate my mind. But when I came towards them, I saw an abundance of skeletons scattered about, some of them standing upright, other lying about in various orientations; the bones of some of them were clean but the flesh was withered, hacked as if with knives, and black, with many places as if covered with white mould. My imagination was continually haunted by the cracking of the bones of the victim, and by his pitiful yells. I proceeded to walk on with difficulty, sliding over these mangled carcases [sic], and unknowing which way to turn, when I observed following me one of the men clothed in black; which alarmed me much. He walked deliberately towards me, and when within a few paces, took from under his robe a stiletto, which he pointed to my heart without saying a word. I consented & seemed pleased at the circumstance, told him that I was very fond of fresh meat. It was then that I deliberately considered the end of my peregrination. What had I to expect more on that lunar hemisphere which is never opposed to the earth, than I had seen on that which I had traversed, except that the nights would be more dark, and my situation, if possible, more solitary than it had been?—That curiosity has great influence on the mind of man. He is never satisfied with his acquirements. This passion alone induces him to expose himself to unnecessary dangers, supports him under the most distress, and has been his chief support in his next astonishing enterprises. This passion alone impelled me on my way, unconscious of what I might expect. War.—War.—War.— It was then like a thunderbolt striking through my brain, that I believed my reason had left me—that I was a maniac—that this sensation, which caused such wonder was only a phantasy—was only that uncommon idea which rendered me insane. I have seen the grin and obsequiousness of the sycophant prevail, the ignorant & idle man possessed of power. * * * It is disturbing to find what trivial circumstances make me uncomfortable, at present I am scarcely an hour free from anxiety and ennui. My fertile imagination pictured to me the most astounding discoveries and the most unheard of prodigies. I appeared to be entering upon the most extreme part of the universe, more unknown to the inhabitants of earth than the body of the sun himself, or even the reach of the terrestrial Human Eye; and from conjecture alone they could suppose that it resembled the hemisphere which they had explored with such telescopic ardour. I rejoice to tell you I happened to meet with what I consider as the greatest prodigy of the vegetable world. If I had devised the most convenient vessels for the purpose of drinking out of I could not have found any more elegant in their forms than these that Nature herself has presented to me. In form they resembled a tea-saucer, and each could contain almost half a pint. I found them in collections of five or six. I had seen similar productions on the Earth in miniature; for the largest of the terrestrial kind did not exceed an inch in diameter; but, like them, they also had a single branching stalk growing from their centres. Naturalists will well recollect the form of these vessels, by my informing them that the fucus— To tell you the truth, had I been alone, and had there been no witnesses, I should I think have been fearful of mentioning the dimensions of the flower, so much does it exceed every flower I have ever seen or heard of. A flower, very large, beautiful, wonderful! But what is curiosity? Is not fame its incentive? Or is it a solitary passion existing only in the hearts of individuals? Is it provided by the desire of imparting its discoveries to others and thus making them participate in his joys? Went on shore and walked about the country alone. —Here my enterprising disposition received a deadly check. To me this passion must necessarily be solitary; all hopes of fame being at an end, and all probability of publication of any history buried in the horrible situation of being cut off from the world of his nativity. What could I do? Was it for me to be down and take my repose, to eat and drink what chance might present to me, and to give myself up to despair and sloth? Yesterday I had a slight shivering fit followed by general pain, particularly of my head, loins, and legs, accompanied to day with great languor, & loss of appetite. In my present solitary situation, scarcely does it appear reasonable to think that any thing that philosophy could suggest would be any gratification to me. So true it is, however, that the mind, although bent down with most extreme distress, is yet ever willing to snatch at even the most timid means of consolation. I believe it was about four days since the sun had set. !!! For a long time I pondered with myself of the astonishing discovery that was opened to me. The evil that I have committed has not been frequent, but such as it is I look back upon it with anxiety and fear. My fears painted to me the most hideous and implaceable monsters, hardly resembling human nature. What is going to happen to me I know not, nor can I account for it. * * * I am indeed a solitary animal, & seem to live here without being perceived by any one. Sources Joseph Arnold’s journals dating from 1810 – 1815, bound in four volumes, have been transcribed and made available as downloadable PDFs by the Mitchell Library Special Collections, State Library of New South Wales. C720, items 01 – 04. Papers Relating to Joseph Arnold, 1810 – 1931. Mitchell Library Special Collections, State Library of New South Wales, Aa72. Joseph Arnold, Letters to his Brother, 1810. Mitchell Library Special Collections, State Library of New South Wales, A1849. Joseph Arnold, The Visit to the Moon: A Philosophical Romance. Mitchell Library Special Collections, State Library of New South Wales, A1848. Dawson Turner, Memoir of Joseph Arnold, M.D., in Samuel Wilton Rix, Thye Fauconberge Memorial (Ipswich, 1849), 68-79. For the best record of Arnold in Southeast Asia, see: Sophia Raffles, Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (London: John Murray, 1830). For extracts of Arnold’s final letters and the first published report of his corpse flower, Rafflesia arnoldii, see: Robert Brown, “XV. An Account of a New Genus of Plants, Named Rafflesia”, Transactions of the Linnean Society, vol. 13 (1821), 201-234. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 23, 2018

Elaine Ayers

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:42.710868

lover-of-the-strange-sympathizer-of-the-rude-barbarianologist-of-the-farthest-peripheries

Lover of the Strange, Sympathizer of the Rude, Barbarianologist of the Farthest Peripheries By Winnie Wong July 5, 2017 Why do we see what we see? What is the role of culture, history, metaphysics in the way our eyes and minds make sense of images? How do conventions of visual representation — line, color, perspective — emerge and change? In one sense, these are art-history questions. But thorny issues of civilization, race, and power have long been tangled up with the answers: Whose sculptures are “primitive”? Whose drawings are “childlike”? For much of the sordid ordeal of European global imperialism, the conquerors collected the made things of the conquered and arranged these artifacts in museums intended to teach lessons about the stages of savagery and rise of the West. That legacy has come under plenty of critical scrutiny, but it is hardly dead. Call it a zombie. In the bright and Borgesian piece that follows, the imaginative art historian Winnie Wong skewers that zombie with a rapier wit. To bring us this short biography of the Chinese curioso Pan Youxun (1745-1780) Wong has donned a translator’s mask, the better to smuggle a gem of storytelling up out of the well-policed precincts of archival scholarship. At issue? Hubris, hegemony, global art history, and what Gillian Beer once called, in a superb essay on travel and transculturation, “Travelling the Other Way” — which is to say, “coming back home”, but transformed by the view from elsewhere. — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor Pan Youxun 潘有勋 (1745-1780) — courtesy name “The Arriving Subject”, style names “Stone Monolith” and “Virtuous Lotus”, pseudonyms “the Impersonator”, and “Monk of the Demon Pavilion”, aliases “Zhengxie” and “Zhengde", occasional sobriquets “Shallow Well” and “Expensive Drunk”, born in Guangzhou city 10th year of the Qianlong reign (1745), passed the examinations in 27th year of the Qianlong reign (1762), and the first noted investigator of the primitive cloth paintings of the Western Ocean Barbarians. Pan Youxun was the second son of the wealthy merchant Pan Qiguan (1714-88), known to some barbarian illiterates as Puankhequa. Lucky to have had both a dutiful younger brother and a fraternal cousin who followed in the family business, he was released from those vulgarities and privileged to devote himself to serious self-cultivation from an early age, following in the example of his learned older brother, the encyclopediaist Pan Youwei. Though a precocious enough scholar, Youxun nevertheless failed to gain any useful appointments, write any obscure treatises, or win any drunken poetry contests. Instead, Pan Youxun left behind some scattered compendia, miscellany and commonplace notebooks, and it is only from a recent and partial reconstruction of these scattered papers that the outlines of his researches can be discerned. Records of the local learned societies corroborate that Pan Youxun sustained a deeply bizarre interest in the barbarians of the Western Ocean, whom the Persians called the Farangi, a term which the common people of the Southeast Coast pronounce “Folangji”, which they also use for the canons with which the Farangi fired willy-nilly like devils. Our reconstruction of Pan’s fragmentary notes reveals that he took little notice of the causes of these barbarians’ violent character, but rather a serious scholarly interest in their primitive cloth paintings. As Pan Youxun surmised, these barbarian cloth paintings were but square or rectangular pieces of thick cloth, stretched over meager sticks of wood attached together at the corners to fashion a rudimentary rectangle. They decorated the front of that cloth with colors they had manually assembled from the raw sources of the earth, all the better to imitate the rude world that they came from. Though they prized such objects as highly skilled and artistic, these meager decorations required no cultivation nor special discernment to make, and soon most of the illiterate craftsmen of the Guangzhou docks could easily produce them. It was in visiting one of those painting shops that Pan Youxun first learned of the bizarre and delusional notion of art among these barbarians. Pan Youxun’s genius can be glimpsed retrospectively from the extremely accurate hypotheses he left in fragmentary observations of these barbarians’ culture. Most impressively, he correctly diagnosed the visual framework for personhood in that culture, a culture for whom the so-called “self” was made apparent through momentary visual depictions of a person’s face, a practice to which much wealth is apportioned to hired hands. Such fashioned images were exchanged in gifts, carried as talismans, and openly displayed in the domestic spaces of the persons depicted even when they were still alive — as if with no embarrassment for their vanity. Pan Youxun diagnosed this utter lack of cultivation as a symptom of their mistaken ascription of power to the mere appearances of reality. Indeed, Pan Youxun discovered that these barbarians had such faith in the perceived magical powers of these dull and unlively representations, that they believed such images would instill fear and astonishment among all peoples under heaven. Of course, such fetishism has been observed for centuries in the worship systems of barbarian and semi-barbarian peoples throughout the Empire, most of whom have certainly since developed exquisitely complex representational systems for their deities, but the Western Ocean Barbarians were particularly late in acquiring this cultural development, and moreover were particularly self-aggrandizing in their delusions. As Pan Youxun noted from the minor histories of his own province, in the early Ming, the Western Ocean Barbarians had even sent a religious idiot all the way from Italy to Guangdong’s provincial capital, Zhaoqing. That man, along with his associates, dressed as a Buddhist monk and put ridiculous Daoist claims on his door, and with great fanfare showed off a big drawing of a simple map to the local peasants, apparently expecting that from this they would eventually come to worship his fake Buddha. (How, in the dreamings of that idiot, a gigantic image of the boundary lines between tributary states could possibly be related to the will of Heaven or the ephemerality of the Dao remains something of a local riddle to us today. In any case….) Through his researches, Pan Youxun even accurately predicted that, as their history progressed, the concepts of simulation, mirrors, signs, replicas, and false representations, would become subjects of great hermeneutic obsession among their philosophers — areas of arcana which preoccupied their learned men and stagnated their moral philosophy, which of course led to the well-known bloodthirst of their governments.As the son of a wealthy merchant, and an unaccomplished scholar, Pan Youxun ironically had the time and means to conduct his research in an unconventional manner, and it is indeed for his methodological innovativeness that we applaud this otherwise failed scholar. We speculate that since his honorable mother was only a chamber-wife without standing who came from a poor family, it was probably by witnessing her humble attachments to the most plebeian levels of our society that it occurred to him to apply the technical mind to classical problems. It would appear that Pan’s interest in the Folangji was first ignited after he went, along with a group of drunken friends, to visit that strange and eccentric figure known locally as Lin Qiguan (or “Loum Kiqua” to the barbarians), the southwest barbarianologist who had travelled by their ships, via the Lesser Western Ocean Country (Goa), all the way to the Greater Western Ocean Country (Portugal), arriving there in the 20th year of the Qianlong reign (1755). In that strange land, Lin Qiguan had the misfortune to live through an earthquake, which was obviously a sign of the local ruler’s illegitimacy. Lin Qiguan told them the story of how he then travelled over land and water, ending in the cold, barren country of Yingjili, where he was greeted by their king, who called himself by only one name, George. According to Lin Qiguan even the most learned men there treat the newest and cheapest ceramic wares like precious collectibles, and they drank green tea adulterated with blue powder because they lacked both tastebuds and a full human sense of color — Lin Qiguan speculated that the barbarians’ insufficiently colored eyeballs perhaps afflicts their vision. Lin Qiguan confirmed that the elite among these English barbarians were, in class and character, truly not unlike the ones sent here to trade — they, like their merchants, also wore cloaks in order to hide their daggers, and they too use black felt triangles as hats, taking them off their heads and tucking them under their arms whenever greeting equals, believing this ridiculous gesture to be ceremonious. Lin Qiguan had also foolishly befriended a native named Oliver Goldsmith, and wrote many letters to him which that trickster shamelessly pirated and published under an outlandish barbarian name “Lien Chien Altangi”, which his readers mistook as a fictional pseudonym of an invented persona! From this, Pan Youxun could see that the barbarians of the Western Oceans loved to copy and pirate without the ingenuity or wit of learned men, and so correctly suspected that their so-called “arts” would also be highly derivative. Though Lin told Pan many stories of the barbarians’ strange customs, dress, and beliefs, Pan was fascinated that these vulgar people believed that their cloth paintings could be counted as “art” at all, and determined to study this delusion. Romantically sickly himself, Pan Youxun certainly could not contemplate traveling on a trade ship among commoners like Lin shockingly did. And it was evident to all that there was no hope of that Manchu Emperor allowing learned travel missions while so many tributary artists and scientists were fawning on him at his court. Neither was Pan Youxun interested in studying the Western Ocean barbarians under the noses of those tasteless and pretentious Manchus — barbarians themselves, really. So instead he took up the radical idea of cultivating, among the craftsmen of the port, a disciple whom he could train to travel and conduct first-hand observation, who might return with a record of that curious land, Yingjili. After months of frequenting the docks and patronizing the many studios that served the Folangji, Pan Youxun finally found a young and illiterate student, an artisan born into a family originating from Suzhou’s Tiger Hill. The family were makers of clay modelled faces, a regional craft which the hairbrained Prince Yinzhen once elevated to the court practice of portraiture when he had one made for himself during his father’s reign! Just like that barbarian Manchu, it would seem that the Folangji had nurtured a love of this craft as well, and this young man maintained a healthy business making such vulgar, colorful, and three-dimensional, “self”-representations at the port for them. Pan Youxun quickly made plans to send this poor young artisan to Yingjili, and gave him the travel name Kay Gua, or “Strange Quack”, a poetic pun on the Cantonese pronunciation of the travel name of Lin Qiguan. Due to Kay Gua’s poor Cantonese accent, and the illiteracy of the English Captain who took him onto his ship, this name got written down in their primitive lettering as “Chit Qua” and so that was how he came to be known among them, and why the English record keepers never recognized the obvious connection between their first and second visitors. Despite his lack of learning, Pan had chosen Chit Qua because he had a perfect visual memory and could instantly memorize the eleven exterior views of any face with just a glance. This skill was of course a necessary part of his craft, and why he was so quick and successful at making portraits of those barbarians. Pan Youxun trained Chit Qua to exert his visual memory on proper two dimensional visual works, and to return with an excellent memorized record of those primitive cloth paintings. Moreover, Chit Qua could make those silly models for all the primitives he met, thereby gaining access to the men considered the most artistic and learned among them, and seeing the barbarian cloth paintings that they tastelessly displayed all over the walls of their homes. Through his father’s connections with the traders, Pan Youxun secured passage for Chit Qua onto the ship of a Captain Alexander Jameson, who was a private agent for one of their famous merchants of utterly pretentious timepieces, James Cox. Chit Qua arrived in London in the 24th year of the Qianlong reign (1769), and so enamoured of the craft of modelling faces were these Englishmen, that Chit Qua was regarded by them as a great artist of China! Dear reader, we can imagine the uproarious laughter that filled the fragrant courtyard when that humble artisan Chit Qua returned home to tell his tales to his teacher and his teacher’s friends, which included even the teacher of the teacher of the Ju brothers. Chit Qua was greeted by their ruler, this time known by the same name as his grandfather to which they added only a new number to identify him, so unable are they to mark historical time. He was sent to the center of their pathetic artist’s association, a sort of labor union for professional artists, which they pretentiously called the “Royal Academy”. For in this country, by merely plying one’s trade, one could apparently be awarded mock-aristocratic titles and treated as men of learning — even when they were poor scholars who could only read their own languages and couldn’t write any acceptable poetry. In this respect they were as pretentious as our local merchants. One of their presidents, a certain John Mortimer, painted the face of Chit Qua on their cloth. In this image, he depicted the humble artisan wearing an official’s cap, another sign that their culture had simply not yet learned the difference between a craftsman and a bureaucrat, let alone the distinction between art and craft! Chit Qua made many models of the faces of the barbarian men he met, including one of their men of theatre, a David Garrick, one of their book collectors, a Dr. Anthony Askew, and one of their writers, a James Boswell. While he was gone, his apprentice at the Guangzhou docks also produced one of another English writer, William Hickey and his devoted friend Bob Pott. From them Pan Youxun also gained some hilarious observations. Chit Qua had even learned to write in their primitive sound system. (Incidentally, this writing system turns out to be merely based upon the sounds that they utter, which makes their writing totally illegible to the babble of dialect speakers in their countries, and which, we predict, will become a source of great metaphysical distress for their linguists.) Chit Qua learned their primitive sound notation system because it was necessary for him to write little notes empty of poetry to them prior to visits to their homes, as was their custom. Hilariously enough, those barbarians thought that if Chit Qua could write their primitive letters, he would be educated enough to read the sophisticated Chinese language! As a result, they took him to their largest library and asked him to read to them some books that one of their noble men, a Hans Sloane, had assembled from China and its tributary states. Of course, poor illiterate Chit Qua could only point to them which drawings they had pasted upside down or sideways because those barbarians simply could not read nor even decipher a simple image of flowers. Thankfully his disguise as an actually educated artist of stature was somehow not obvious to them but Chit Qua realized that he had better leave those lands before all was revealed. Most of the barbarians were certainly savage in character, and Chit Qua experienced several physical assaults, including being beset on by a gang who threw him overboard on his first attempted journey home. But luckily Chit Qua returned to his teacher without too much harm done to his health. After his return, his teacher personally accepted him into his household as a library assistant, and instructed him to reproduce in clay, and eventually paint in barbarian oils and cloth, all the barbarian cloth paintings he had memorized in the Yingjili country. From these works, Pan Youxun was able to seriously deepen his research. For two years, Chit Qua lived an idyllic life in the sumptuous Pan home, but he could not help but pine for the love of his teacher’s younger sister. One night, in a bout of heartsickness over his lowly stature, Chit Qua drank a poisonous draught and left this world. The death of Chit Qua was a great loss to Pan Youxun, but he had already groomed and sent another student intrepid enough to travel to such far and difficult reaches. This time it was the young Huang Yadong. During Chit Qua’s absence, Pan Youxun had cultivated a friendship with the wealthy tea merchant John Bradby Blake. Blake had devoted himself to learning to appreciate Chinese bird-and-flower paintings, but had terrible taste. Instead of learning to paint properly himself, he actually hired some of those artisans at the dock to do it for him! Pan Youxun gave him some pointers in this regard, and taught Blake to cultivate some proper sensibilities, for example to recognize the historical allusions necessary to the visibility of any given flower, or any painterly gesture made in reference to that illusionistic reality. In gratitude, Blake arranged for Pan Youxun’s new student, the refined and well educated Huang Yadong, and the son of one of Pan’s father’s merchant friends, to travel to England under the protection of Blake’s own father. Through his study of Chit Qua’s memory paintings, Pan Youxun had already correctly established that the tastes of the Western Ocean Barbarians were roughly at the level of a youth in their teens — obsessed with material reality, they invariably desired to make pictures that looked as the world of myriad things appeared to the human eye. More so than any other primitive culture, however, they were unwavering and rigid in that uncultivated eye, and hence prepared all their images with the use of straight lines and square grids, depicting the distances of things near and far by measuring them with the inflexible maths of trigonometry. They neurotically copied whatever they physically saw in every obsessive detail, and even darkened their images with the fixed blackness of shadows, as if light and dark were not forever changing. A young and undeveloped culture, they had for hundreds and hundreds of years failed to progress to the cultural level of investigating or exploring the complexities of endless change, infinite meaning, and the irreducible self. Hence Pan Youxun figured that a child like Huang Yadong could better relate to those barbarians, and could more likely diagnose their unchanging fetishism of what they called “realism”. Huang Yadong arrived in England in the 35th year of the Qianlong reign (1770). Of course, having acquired some scholarly learning, John Bradby Blake acquired an appropriately tragic scholarly sickness, and fell ill and died while Huang Yadong was en route. But Blake’s father was an honorable man, and arranged for Huang Yadong to begin his researches in one of the most noble homes of their society, Knole House, the cold stone home of one of their Dukes. There Huang made a good study of their children, through daily observations at Sevenoaks School, one of their country’s oldest schools although it was only founded in the early Ming (1432). His meticulously recorded observations, highly insightful because the barbarians likely treated him as a “participant observer” — since we can assume they were familiar with the basic procedures of anthropology — enabled his teacher in his last works to speculate just how and why these barbarians remained so childish in their aesthetics. Not surprisingly, Huang Yadong discovered that the barbarian children’s calligraphy was awful — lacking in any archaisms whatsoever, and that by the age of nine they still could not write any poetry nor play any mournful music with the affects of a critical nostalgia. But that still did not account for the uncultivated sensibilities of their most learned and most elderly men. Through his researches in the art collections of his host’s home, Huang conjectured that this was because this society had divided their philosophers from their painters, their poets from their mathematicians, their rulers from their scholars. The seven years that Huang Yadong spent at Knole was useful indeed, for he not only lived in one of their most well-appointed homes, but was a constant companion to the Duke’s favored concubine. He even taught one of their more learned men, a William Jones, a few characters so that those barbarians could at least begin to read. Huang Yadong returned home to his teacher with rich materials and observations, but was eventually forced to devote himself to his father’s merchant business. Alas, such is the materialism of our age. For his part, Pan Youxun, died in this, the 45th year of the Qianlong reign (1780), having accomplished nothing and attained little acclaim, so we, the provincial biographical administration, grant him no honorary titles and only the posthumous names, Lover of the Strange, Sympathizer of the Rude, and Barbarianologist of the Farthest Peripheries. (Collected and revised, 1802) The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 5, 2017

Winnie Wong

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:43.073470

in-praise-of-halvings-hidden-histories-of-japan-excavated-by-dr-d-fenberger

In Praise of Halvings Hidden Histories of Japan Excavated by Dr D. Fenberger By Roger McDonald March 28, 2019 In his combative and much-meditated-upon essay, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life”, Friedrich Nietzsche identified a number of ways that the dead legacy of the past could grip the living in its stifling grasp: “Monumental” history fashioned heroes who loomed over life; “Antiquarian” history reverentially aggregated the detritus of bygone ages, and thereby forced the vital present to play custodian to a bunch of old junk; “Critical” history sorted the “lessons” of the past (the right from the wrong, the effective from the less so) with an eye on tutoring everyone with somniferous yakka-yakka about the days of yore. How to escape from history — and especially from the mindset of historical deference called “historicism”? These were Nietzsche’s questions. He hazarded answers, too, proposing that it might be time to learn to be unhistorical (by learning to forget), or possibly suprahistorical (by learning to live in/with/through “eternity” — whatever that might mean). I rehearse Nietzsche’s important argument because it offers, I think, a suggestive frame through which to encounter Roger McDonald’s “In Praise of Halvings”, presented here below. Burying history? Or inventing it? Both? And here is a problem: If others have erased your history, are you unhistorical? Suprahistorical? Or perhaps just invisible? — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor I have long been fascinated by the idea that something that for all intents and purposes looked like “one thing” could also be “many things” — indeed that “oneness” (in any of its forms) is, in fact, forever composed of various parts. This preoccupation, I think, arose largely from my own experience as a person of mixed Japanese and English parentage. In Japan, where I was born, we are often known as haafu, or halves, a churlish word that hints at a rather deep cultural discomfort. Little wonder, then, my interest in Japanese attitudes regarding the hybrid, the mixed, the impure and/or half-bred. Sometime during my doctorate studies, while visiting and researching a Zen temple outside Kyoto called Empuku-ji (it is where the American abstract painter Mark Tobey stayed in 1934), I came across references to an archive called “The HansetsuRoku”, which translates literally as “The Book of Halved Things”. This trove — which purported to contain many hundreds of documents, artifacts, and objects documenting a “cloaked history of Halved Things in and beyond Japan from the earliest time” — quite seized my imagination. Further inquiries followed. The modern sleuth who uncovered and archived the HansetsuRoku was the late Dr Daniel Fenberger, an amateur scholar about whom little is known. It would seem that he was part Japanese; that he lived in Nagano prefecture, Japan, at the end of his life; that he began compiling artifacts and writings pertaining to the HansetsuRoku during the 1970s; and that he never published his findings during his life. No verified photograph of Dr Fenberger has yet come to light, and the bulk of the documentation I have been able to amass consists of a small box of texts and artifacts. I keep it in my home. Two sources of particular richness stand out, from which the texts below are drawn: the first is a journal and scrapbook maintained irregularly by an (unnamed) student of Dr Fenberger’s, apparently in the 1970s and 1980s; the second is a fragment of what appears to be an éloge or funerary obituary presented by this same student at the passing of his mentor. The latter offers a suggestive, if perhaps fantastic, account of the HansetsuRoku itself. I offer these excerpts to wider attention in the hopes that they may assist in the consideration of a paradox (the composite nature of singularity), the forgetting of which, it might be argued, helps sustain various myths — not least, the myth of a “pure” Japanese nation, a notion that retains considerable political and cultural influence to this day. It is perhaps worth noting, by way of introductory conclusion, that a short report in a local newsletter mentions Dr Fenberger regularly tended a lush garden, and that he was often seen “digging deep holes”. – Roger McDonald Excerpts from a Journal I heard today that Anthony Hopkins, the actor, was born in Port Talbot, Wales. This is strange because I remember Dr Fenberger saying that he had gone to Port Talbot one summer (perhaps it was in the early 1960s). It so happens that Port Talbot was also the town where I hitchhiked from in my final year at university in Aberystwyth. It was a wager with three friends, who could hitch the furthest from Aberystwyth and hitch back, the fastest. The rule was that we must bring back proof of the furthest point we reached. I got to Port Talbot and bought a small pewter stout mug engraved with the arms of Port Talbot. Dr Fenberger used to drink beer from pewter mugs which always amused me. I always thought of medieval banquets. I never found out what exactly Dr Fenberger did in Port Talbot, except that he did not stay the night but took the last train back to London. * Dr Fenberger tells me a story: The year is 1937 and Paris is hosting The International Exhibition. Facing each other in front of the Eiffel Tower are the pavilions of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Each tries to architecturally outdo the other. The Soviets put a massive sculpture of two workers striding forth on top of the pavilion, so that they seem to be walking towards the Germans. The Germans, led by Albert Speer, counter by building a massively tall neo-classical temple-like pavilion. The Palais de Tokyo was inaugurated during this exhibition, taking its name from the avenue which separated it from the Seine River. Few know, but the Tokyo referred to in this avenue can be traced back to a certain Mr and Mrs Kikuchi from Komoro in Nagano prefecture. I think the Kikuchi’s were friends with the French Ambassador to Japan in the early 1930s, hosting him and his wife for hunting trips during autumn. In return for their hospitality, the French government named a street after the Kikuchi’s. Initially proposed to be “Rue Kikuchi”, this was deemed too personal by the Ministry for Roads, and the name was changed to “Tokyo”. * On the extreme lower left corner of the main wall of Room 3 of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition held in Munich in 1937, was secretly placed a tiny piece of paper with the following words hand written on it in blue ink: “Siebold You were Free” It was theorized by Dr Fenberger that “Siebold” refers to Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796–1866) a physician who was granted unusual travel access to Japan in the 1820s. No one knows who placed this paper on the wall. The paper apparently was discovered by an official exhibition guard and secretly kept until 1957, when it appeared at a small auction of antique letters held in London. * When Walker Evans was taking photographs for the Farm Securities Administration in the 1930s he used to chew on sticks of sweetened dried seaweed sent to him by a Japanese fan and pen pal named Naga Usutarou. Several eyewitnesses have testified to this fact, according to Dr Fenberger. Some people mistook the sticks of seaweed for cigars. When war broke out between Japan and the United States and the packages from Naga ceased, it is said that Walker Evans used to walk for hours along the beaches of New Haven looking for seaweed sticks. * Piero Manzoni stuffed ninety cans with his excrement in May 1961. What is not so known is exactly what Manzoni ate in May 1961. Dr Fenberger heard from an Italian lady who lived next to Manzoni in Milan that he used to like aubergines fried in miso with Japanese rice and pickles. From a digestive point of view, one could make the case that those ninety cans of excrement contain Japanese shit. * Dr Fenberger used to work in winter without heating. He claimed that heat dissipated the energy clusters that were generated during intense writing and reading sessions. This may also be why traditionally monks of all denominations meditated and prayed in the cold. The relationship between cold and concentration is further strengthened if we consider the case of Mrs Teshima Yumiko. Mrs Teshima lived alone in a small cabin on the southern slopes of Mt Asama in Nagano prefecture. During winter when it snowed she used to fill sacks of hessian with snow and place these under her floorboards. She claimed that this activated certain latent powers in the air which helped her think straight. Mrs Teshima was also known to make the best pickled cucumber in the area. In 1968 at the age of 99, Mrs Teshima made several recordings of herself eating pickled cucumbers which were released as limited editions by Soft Sembe Records, a subsidiary of Nippon Columbia. * Mr Sakuro Tanabe graduated from the Imperial College of Engineering in 1890, and went on to build the first reinforced concrete bridge in Japan, the Hinooka RC11 Bridge. Tanabe had studied the properties of concrete at Kyoto University since 1900. In 1930 the artist Theo van Doesburg published the only edition of Art Concret in which he expounded a new art which would expunge all symbolic associations from art. The RC11 Bridge has no known function or use, and is thought to have been made as an exercise in pure concrete fantasy. Although called a “bridge”, Dr Fenberger insists it does not traverse any water or road. Here, he says, we have a rare example of concrete engineering and concrete art theory colliding together. From “Five Imaginings of the HansetsuRoku” Imagine a community of people connected by a shared hybridity, living underground in complex systems of chambers and tunnels, spending their days collating information, writing, archiving and conserving objects, so that future people would one day realize that the history which they had been taught at schools and by their grandparents was in fact only one small aspect of something more impenetrable and mysterious. Then imagine these people across millennia of time, spanning the archaic communities of hunter-gatherer tribes of the Paleolithic and Jomon, early Yayoi farming groups, through the Asuka, Nara, Kamakura, Muromachi, Edo and Meiji periods, up into the contemporary, which seeks connection again with the archaic ancestors and which always remains different from those periods, unable to be fully integrated into those epochs and their histories. Imagine further still, that these people compiled thousands of documents, objects, ceramics, textiles, natural formations and ephemera, looking after them in a cave complex that spanned many miles in many directions, and which remained secret until some forty years ago when Dr D. Fenberger chanced upon it. Imagine once more that Dr Fenberger’s scholarly study into this subterranean enigma has itself been a source of ridicule, ironically safeguarding the mysteries which have lain quietly for so long from the fetishes of newspapermen and their spectacles. Imagine, finally, and with discipline, that this story is a fiction, created further to confuse and protect an unfathomable reality of unending half-truths, surprise, and archaeological rumpus, which in turn produces counter-histories to the subtle master narratives of the Japanese islands — and that through this continued story-telling one comes to realize that the imagination is a spell-maker, the incantational device that always has and always will confer balance upon the predicament called “living”, which we are all currently moving through, moment to moment. The keepers and archivists and the HansetsuRoku considered all things, from the smallest of atomic particles to the largest stars and moons, to be temporary clusterings of perpetually moving, mixing experiences. All things are considered to be simple but temporarily perfect moulds taken from what they referred to as Dai San no Tochi, or the “Third Soil”. This soil may be understood as a perpetually potent flow of experience which both creates and erases all things in the universe. The earliest reference to this soil, Dr Fenberger insisted, is found in an engraved pot made sometime in the late Jomon period, depicting what is believed to be the various aspects of our universe. A unique symbolic form appears on this pot for the first time. This form — about which Dr Fenberger often spoke, but which he steadfastly declined to show in any of his lectures or private conversations — re-appears, he claimed, in many other guises on an array of different media including paintings, drawing, sculptures, textile embroideries, metal-work, elaborated ceramics, photographs, verse, and glass ware. From this, he alleged that we can deduce that this single iconic form first expressed over 3000 years ago remains the constant philosophical underpinning for the HansetsuRoku. It visualizes a metaphysical constellation of supreme elegance and complexity. The Third Soil which the HansetsuRoku elaborates suggests a panpsychic or panexperientialist position, wherein all things in the universe possess some kind of experiential capacity. Moreover this experiential capacity is a constantly interacting entity, moving into and through all other things. The idea seems to form the bedrock upon which a theory of “halvings” or mixings could be developed. Time is considered a fluid aspect, always influencing the present and moving into the future. Concepts such as eternity or bounded identity are not supported within its orbit. For its makers and keepers, the HansetsuRoku must have provided a haven for liberated thinking where the true nature of reality was mapped onto their bodies. Dr Fenberger repeatedly suggested that from the late fourteenth century onwards there emerged a practice within the HansetsuRoku which merged various Indian and Chinese practices and archaic performance. From a careful analysis of several drawings and texts found in a box titled “Techniques of Journey”, Dr Fenberger discovered that this comprised a meditative practice based around “stillness and silence”. It is believed that members of the group would gather around some image or object and gaze at it for long periods in silence. The stillness of images was considered to provide a doorway, like a tunnel or cave entrance, into a journey. Stillness and silence are two significant qualities of drawn and painted images and also of sculptural objects. It is believed that the act of looking at them in silence could vibrate the many tiny experiences which made up a painting or sculpture so that the image would literally begin to flow and metabolize with the persons looking. Dr Fenberger speculates that this journeying practice was one of the key methods by which members would enact their mixed being, allowing the world of material objects to infuse the world and their minds. In this way, over millennia, the HansetsuRoku became an accumulation of composite experiences, a fertilized complex of the Third Soil. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 28, 2019

Roger McDonald

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:43.711044

portrait-of-a-scaphander

Portrait of a Scaphander By Brad Fox February 2, 2022 Etymologically, Orthobiosis means something like “right living”, and the term has cropped up now and again in the history of science, always to invoke a promise of bringing our actual (messy, painful, diseased, confusing) lives into line with…well, something better. The “ortho-” in there comes from the Greek term for “straight” — straight like a line. The “-biosis” part means nothing less than “life” — life itself. But what in “life” is “straight”? Not much. Maybe nothing. Except, of course, time. Sure, you can sort of loop it (with memory), or kind of meander in it (with daydreams), but it is a damnable feature of time that, whatever our tricks or hopes, it runs on a line. The events line up. Historians, as a rule, love this. The “time-line” is the magic wand of historicism: no matter how complex things get, there is always chronology, and it orders things with a ruthless logic. So history loves its timelines. But story-tellers tend to squirm and jump. They tell yarns, after all — and yarns will tangle. In “Portrait of a Scaphander” Brad Fox tells a history-story that pulls on a life-thread in the tangle of things. But that only makes it all a little knottier, no? — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor Orthobiotic Origins In the winter of 1660, Voivode Constantin Basarab sat in his chamber inspecting a colorless, serpentine creature with malformed legs, a head backed with frilly pink gills, and soft skin like a child. It had been found in the Dinaric Alps after a cave flooded — a larval fish-human incubating in the Balkan earth. Laying it aside, the voivode picked up a walking stick sent to him by a Moldovan courtier only to have a rolled-up piece of paper slide out. He inspected the note and found it contained detailed instructions on how to overcome the palace guard and assassinate the Moldovan prince. Glancing back at the strange animal, Basarab shut his mind against this subterfuge. He alerted his ostensible victim, and the authorities went in search of the plotter. A talented linguist named Nikolai Milescu Spătarul was arrested, but the seditious courtier bolted and managed to slip past the border. He headed first to Germany, then appeared in Moscow, where he finagled an audience with the sovereign himself. Tsar Alexei was so impressed by the visitor’s linguistic skill that he hired the Moldovan to tutor his son, the future Peter the Great. Further on, the tsar entrusted Spătarul with a mission to China, and he returned three years later speaking Mandarin, offering notes on the geography around Lake Baikal, and bearing gifts from the Chinese emperor. When Alexei died, rivals had the star courtier sent to Siberia, but Peter restored his old tutor’s honors, made him court interpreter, and deeded him an estate in Ukraine. Spătarul married a woman from Moscow and lived to be 72. The Romanian family name, meaning sword-bearer, was Russianized as “Mechnikov”. He spent his last years immersed in a work called Arithmologion, in which he discussed questions of theology, philosophy, and ethics in the language of numbers. The next century found Spătarul’s descendant Ilya Ivanovich Mechnikov in Petersburg, proposing to a Jewish woman with splendid dark eyes, whose nickname, Milotchka, meant charming. None other than Pushkin, she liked to point out, said the name suited her perfectly. Milotchka brought a small fortune to the marriage, but Ilya Ivanovich had soon drunk and gambled it away, and the couple were forced to retreat to the old Mechnikov estate in Ukraine. Ilya Ivanovich occupied himself with planning meals and playing cards, and Milotchka raised the children. Her youngest son — Ilya like his father — was highly sensitive, with his mother’s large dark eyes. As a boy, he saw a fight between some villagers and soldiers over the mistreatment of a local woman (a soldier had pushed her down and stuffed her mouth with dirt) — and from that he developed a distrust of crowds and a horror of violence. He and his older brother wrote a drama called “Burning Tea”, in which the hero offered a friend a cup that was too hot. The friend burnt his tongue. A duel ensued. After that, Mechnikov abandoned literature. Instead, like his illustrious forebear, Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov devoted himself to matters of theology, philosophy, and ethics. He studied Buddhism and Taoism, disharmonies in the human organism, the immortality of cells, the immune system, aging, and the impact of cultured milk on digestion. His central obsession was a philosophy of life he called Orthobiosis. He opposed taking the body as a source of evil. His mind was tormented by images of dervishes beating their heads in with clubs, Hindu fakirs hanging themselves by hooks, and Russian mystics castrating themselves. Ironically, he pointed out, despising the body turned humans into beasts: “Hermits resorted to the lairs of animals, abandoned their clothing and went about naked with shaggy and disordered hair.” Mechnikov held that the fear of death, though nearly universal, was nothing but superstition. He cited a Swiss alpinist who pointed out that tourists who’d had serious falls or nearly frozen to death reported feeling, above all, “a sensation of ecstasy”. But when Mechnikov’s first wife died of tuberculosis, he took a large dose of opium, trying to do himself in. When that proved unsuccessful, he stripped, doused himself with icy water, and walked out into the cold, only to find his mind captured by an image of dayflies swarming a lantern. The thought of their short lifespan awakened his sense of wonder, and he turned home to save himself. His book, Studies of Human Nature, was a pursuit of scientific grounds for optimism. Mechnikov traveled to Geneva in 1865, where he met Herzen, and to Italy, where he got to know Bakunin. Noticing Mechnikov’s sweet and nurturing disposition, the great anarchist named him Mamma. Mechnikov finally settled near the Pasteurs on Rue d’Ulm in Paris and opened his home to cultivated visitors. He’d spent time with the Tolstoys while researching Studies of Human Nature, and Lev’s sons often visited him when in Paris. Among the young scientists who sought his support was an aspiring zoologist named Emil Racoviță, a luxuriously mustachioed Moldovan with a taste for acid humor. Mechnikov recommended Racoviță to the Atlantic research center in Roscoff, introducing him to a French researcher there named Louis Boutan. Racoviță spent several months in Roscoff studying marine and coastal organisms. In the evenings he convened with Boutan, who was assembling notes from a recent trip to Asia where he’d been studying pearls. There were female pearl divers in Japan, he told Racoviță, who enter the water in nothing but a loincloth and stay down for several minutes at a time. Future of the Family Exploratory expeditions might be funded by private patrons or subscription services, but there was still no substitute for a royal endorsement. When a Belgian named Gerlache received King Leopold’s support for a mission to Antarctica in a barque-rigged steamer, he renamed the vessel Belgica. Now Gerlache just had to get a crew together — a navigator, a captain, some adventurous sailors. He needed a zoologist with the right combination of competence and madness, and that was proving difficult. He asked all over Belgium and France. Finally the Pasteurs sent him to Mechnikov, and Mechnikov sent him to Racoviță. But when they sent for the Moldovan in Roscoff, they heard he’d been called home for military service. Gerlache pulled some diplomatic strings and had the zoologist released from his martial obligations. He’d have to sail from Constantinople, and it was too late to circle all the way up to Antwerp, so Gerlache told him to head straight to South America. Everything seemed to be ready — until the surgeon unexpectedly quit. They couldn’t very well travel without a doctor. Just then a cable arrived from Brooklyn, from a surgeon named Frederick Cook who said Antarctica was his lifelong dream. Gerlache wrote back to say they’d pick him up in Rio in September. When Cook watched the Belgica steam past all the large modern ships in the Rio harbor, the iron vessel looked to him “like a bulldog surrounded by greyhounds — small, awkward, ungraceful.” Racoviță had arrived early and gone ahead to Punta Arenas. They’d have to find him there, in the world’s southernmost town. They stopped in Montevideo along the way, where dense smoke rose from chimneyed houses set along bustling granite promenades. They could find no butter, though, so bought tubs of condensed milk and cane sugar mixed with the marrow of cow bones, which turned out to be delicious. Punta Arenas was a former prison colony, now a town of exiles and adventurers. Cook saw it as “a terminal moraine to a restless stream of human life, a true Magellanic metropolis.” He befriended a German who, he said, ordered drinks in English, conducted business in Spanish, and prayed in Italian. But crossing the city they stepped along dirt roads full of stagnant pools, heaps of ash, tree stumps, broken carts, and dead dogs. Cowboys were well-dressed, but miners, rich or poor, were “rigged in rags”. Cook talked to a miner who’d tried to win the heart of an Ona girl — tall, black-eyed, wrapped in fur. She’d “agreed to be stolen”, he said, but then kept telling him she was going mushroom hunting only to disappear for days on end. He followed her and found her in the forest with a lover. A fine-looking man, the miner had to admit. He made them an offer: How about the lover join their household? And now they live together, the miner said, and “there has been peace, and restfulness, and divided love in our wild home.” Lemon and Fog The Belgica finally set out toward the uncharted south. They passed Point Virgins, then Port Famine. Skeletons of wrecked ships rocked in the shallows. At Cape Anna, birdcalls echoed off the cliffs so loudly they couldn’t hear each other. The rocks below were covered with snoring sea-leopards. Whales spouted and breached. Ice fractured, sounding like cannon fire. At night, the sea glittered and the ice sparkled and it was impossible to sleep. “A stillness in the atmosphere”, Cook wrote, “fascinates the soul but overpowers the mind”. Racoviță and a geologist disembarked, and Cook followed them with his looking glass from aboard ship until they disappeared in the darkness. Then he could only hear the echo of the geologist’s hammer and the chorus of penguins that greeted Racoviță as he moved from rock to rock. They passed a “zone of lemon” where the sun hovered above the water to one side but seemed to project its light from across the sky. Refraction through frozen mist made the sun seem to double and triple. The ice blink — white glare against low clouds — meant there was still ice beyond the horizon. On February 17, sailing slowly near a group of rocks called the Alexander Islands, it began to rain. They woke up the next morning to find the deck and ropes covered with ice. The sails were frozen so solid it was impossible to lower them. There was no land in any direction. A fog descended, and they drifted “further into silence”. The fog lifted and revealed a white world. The men stood on deck urging the ship on through the ice. A few sailors sat on the anchor chains discussing their prospects. It didn’t look good. At noon they made a deep-sea sounding. They lowered five hundred and sixty meters of wire and brought up a cup of blue clay. For two days ice rammed the side of the boat. Water froze and the ice expanded until it pressed in from all sides, eventually lifting the boat right out of the water. On March 4th they came to terms with their situation: trapped in ice that was only going to solidify for the next several months. The atmosphere grew heavy. The sky was low and gray and the bands of ice ranged from white to smoky. The water was the color of lead. Everything was shifting, pressing, and cracking around them. The ice-pack that held them floated free, yet they were unable to move. Eventually Racoviță and Cook disembarked onto the packed ice that clutched the Belgica. They were greeted by friendly penguins, approached by seals. Petrels dove into the icy waters. The world of ice appeared restful and content. It glowed ultramarine, reflecting a purple sky above. The wind blew snow and cracking ice into hummocks, so it looked like they were emerging from a landscape with its own topography. Ice crystals grew into forms like jewels or blooming plants. In order to conserve their food supply, Racoviță shot seals, and Cook, regretfully, beat a penguin to death with a ski. As they headed back to the vessel in the growing gloom, Captain Lecointe mistook Cook for some other animal and was about to try his luck with the rifle. The aurora australis appeared above them — “trembling lace-work, draped like a curtain, on the southern sky.” They continued to drift unobstructed. There was no sign of land anywhere around them, as if Antarctica were nothing but a “hypothetical continent”. As night settled in, the sailors began to sing and whistle and play songs on an accordion. On deck they kicked up their heels and danced and told stories. In the cabin they cranked music boxes that plinked out cheerful tones. “We are making the dead world of ice about us ring with a boisterous noise”, Cook reported. At 4 pm on May 16, the last drop of sunlight disappeared below the horizon. Lecointe poured over his almanac and made some calculations. There would be no more sun, he announced, for seventy days. Adrift on a Hypothesis The cold wasn’t the problem at first, Cook wrote: “I have shivered more in New York”. But then it got so cold the captain lost his eyelashes. One sailor, nailing up specimen cases between decks, put two nails in his mouth, and when he snatched them out, ripped off a piece of his tongue and lip and looked like he’d been burned with a hot iron. Their eyes grew puffy, then their ankles. Their muscles lost all tone until they were soft as mush. Piles, hemorrhoids, headaches, neuralgia, rheumatism. It was impossible to concentrate. Cook registered their slowing heartbeats becoming weak and irregular. A short walk heightened the pulse and after ten minutes it was hard to breathe. Their footing was so uncertain they had trouble walking straight. Their cheeks grew pale and green. Their hair grayed but grew rapidly. Skin crept over fingernails. One of the crew members kept fainting, and his mind seemed permanently deranged. “We have aged ten years in thirty days.” A sailor named Danco had a leaky valve in his heart. He’d been in good health, but with the darkness his pulse varied and weakened and he started to fail. It was clear he wouldn’t see the sun again. Then for a couple of days he revived. He grew cheerful, talked about how much easier it was to breathe. He said he was sure that after a bit of rest he’d regain his strength, then went to bed and promptly died. To bury him, they hacked a hole in the ice with axes about a hundred yards from the ship. Cook made a speech about a man who said he “valued life because of the prospect of death”. Watching Danco’s body sink into an Antarctic hole, Racoviță wondered how he’d ended up in this place of frigid darkness. His thoughts turned to Mamma Mechnikov back in Paris, the benefactor who’d recommended him for the expedition — how after Mechnikov’s suicide attempts, he’d taken on oblivion as a philosophical concept. Racoviță had absorbed his discourses many times on Rue d’Ulm. As much as we might want to end our existence, Mechnikov felt there was something embedded in the universal will that urged us on toward propagation and multiplicity. He liked to quote von Hartmann’s Die Philosophie des Unbewussten, arguing that we should aim for “the complete abandonment of the individual to the cosmic process, in order that the latter may accomplish its end and bring about the universal deliverance of the world.” What role did the long Antarctic night play in the universal deliverance of the world? Would they be granted some secret, written across the sky by the aurora? Or would they all end up like Danco, dropped into the frozen sea, bobbing near a hypothetical continent, above a scoopful of blue clay. Through the hole where Danco disappeared, Racoviță sent down a dredge and brought up a few isopods and a tangle of annelid worms. Watching them writhe on his worktable, he contemplated their sensitivities: A plant turns to the sun. What do these worms want? He pictured a blind body, squirming and twisting in the freezing muck. Could the hunger for nutrients give rise to a sense of smell? Did the need for sunlight lead to vision? If it’s through need that our sensitivities become senses, what might we need next? Maybe to know where Danco is now that he’s dead. We are as blind to that as the worm is to the gloomy sky, so much so that we can’t imagine knowing anything about it at all. It’s a hole in the ice you slip through, never to return. But in fact the afterlife is as natural as the moon reflecting off the hummocks and the scent of seal steaks on the grill. It’s as close to us as the air is to the sea. He could hear Mechnikov cite his beloved Mainländar: “The world is but the means for bringing about a condition of nonexistence.” As such, our own annihilation should be anticipated with joyful expectancy. It had been a long time since Racoviță had felt any joyful expectancy, and the death of Danco threw the entire crew deeper into a listless torpor. Captain Lecointe, looking at his miserable aggregation, declared they’d been overtaken by a case of “shivers”. He had them pull out their full-dress suits and come to dinner as smart as they could manage. He opened a crate of champagne from the hold and filled everyone’s glasses. They cooked a sweet concoction of chocolate, milk, and sugar mixed with reindeer fur, penguin grease, blood, and pieces of fishy meat. A few nights later, observing an eclipse of one of the moons of Jupiter, the captain was able to set his chronometer. Hunching over his calculations, he announced that they had passed Antarctic midnight. Soon a glow began to increase at noon. Cutting Through Just past 11 am on July 23, Cook saw a wave of light spread across the vast cold sky, and then “a gleam of fire” burst through a purple cloud to the north. The featureless ice lit up rose, and the northern sky was streaked with bands of carmine. Though the sun barely showed above the snow at noon, and its form refracted and twisted so as to be unrecognizable, the whole crew of the Belgica celebrated. They ate penguin and watched the aurora. They played accordion all night and dealt cards out on deck. A week later, they could feel the sun’s heat for the first time, indescribably intoxicating. They wandered around the ice sunning themselves “like snakes in spring”. Racoviță, pencil in his bare hand, in torn trousers and without a coat or a hat, strolled with a notebook making satirical sketches of the crew. Summer passed quickly, and they still couldn’t extricate themselves from the ice. Hoping for signs of open water, they studied the reflection on the underside of clouds, looking for dark veins. The sun appeared rarely. They saw only a cold blue light filtered through crystally haze. The ice held together with surprising tenacity. Faced with the prospect of another winter, they tried to blow up the ice with explosives, but that just caused smoke and didn’t even make a hole. The only option was to saw through with saws and hack it with axes. Working eight hours a day for eight weeks, fueled by piles of penguin and seal steaks, they cut through the ice on March 13. The very next day, the wind changed. The ice expanded and drifted in every direction. They pushed north, and as they moved the ice broke up. Soon they were in open water, surrounded by easy swells. The ice blink vanished, and they headed for Cape Horn. Before they reached harbor, Cook wrote, they felt half sorry to leave “this weird other-world life”. In a year, he thought, they’d long to return again to the death-like sleep of the south. When they reached shore, they wandered like drunks, having completely forgotten how to walk on land. Their faces were the color of copper kettles, and their unkempt hair was streaked with gray, though none was over thirty-five. When they looked through the open door of a house where two pretty girls were standing, it sent a charge through them, “like a Faradic battery”. Racoviță predicted they’d all be married in six months. Portrait d’un Scaphandrier Returning to France, Racoviță was made director of a lab along the Catalan coast in Banyuls-sur-Mer. When he arrived, he found his old friend Boutan, last seen describing pearl divers in Roscoff, now experimenting with underwater photography. The Englishman William Thompson had taken underwater photos decades earlier, but it was really no more than a technological stunt. Boutan wanted everyone to see the beauty of the subaquatic landscape. As Racoviță unpacked hundreds of bottles of specimens he’d brought back from the southern ice, Boutan was encasing a small apparatus known as a detective camera into a hermetically sealed box and lowering it into the water. Racoviță watched Boutan enter a diving suit and descend to work with his photographic installation, appearing hours later exhausted and drenched in sweat. The problem was that with depth the increasing pressure would crush the box, so Boutan had filled it with a membrane of Sumatran gutta-percha he could pump with air, equalizing the pressure from outside. But now in order to get the box to sink, it had to be weighted down with cast iron. But then it was so heavy that when he tried to move it, sweat poured down his forehead, fogging up the pane in his helmet. Blinded by condensation, he tried futilely to rub the pane with his nose or lick it with his tongue. The photographs required half-hour exposures and showed nothing but blurs and smudges. On certain afternoons, Racoviță put on the diving suit himself and drifted below the sea, its otherworldliness reminiscent of the hypothetical continent he’d just returned from. He luxuriated in the slow, encumbered movements and enjoyed the soughing of air through the hose. He watched Boutan, having roped the photographic instrument to a barrel full of air in order to lighten its weight, now push his copper, glass, and rubber box into position. This time, they’d used iron weights to submerge another barrel — full of oxygen and topped with an alcohol lamp under a glass bell. Racoviță drifted over toward the Frenchman and helped him arrange his equipment. Boutan then climbed onto a boat, and from there he pulled a cord that exposed the photographic plate and injected magnesium powder into the alcohol lamp. When the powder hit the flame — pow! — a brief but bright explosion. In that flash of light, Racoviță saw, momentarily, a clear image of the engineer in a scaphander suit holding a sign — photographie sous-marine. Only later did they realize the engineer had been holding the sign upside down. Racoviță emerged from the sea and went back to work on his Antarctic notes. Gerlache in Brussels and Cook in Brooklyn were still waiting for him to write up his findings. Now with the illuminated undersea engineer etched in his mind, he remembered the southern sun doubling and tripling through frozen mist months before: “Splendid parhelia, paraselenae, and mirage phenomena were remarkable and varied.” In the Mediterranean afternoon, he described the effects of lack of sunlight through the Antarctic night: “discoloration of the mucous membranes, dyspnoea, acceleration of the pulse, dizziness, insomnia, a complete incapacity for prolonged intellectual work, and a swelling of the legs.” He catalogued species, mostly small crustaceans and blind worms, that he had been first to identify. The Antarctic, he wrote, is “the last unexplored expanse on the globe of sufficient area to offer room for fictitious creations of new worlds.” But that turned out to be wrong. After wandering the sea floor with Boutan in Banyuls a while longer, Racoviță joined an oceanographic expedition through the Balaeric islands. A naturalist in Mallorca led the team into the magnificent Cuevas del Drach, extravagant caverns full of underground lakes where Racoviță identified several species of crustaceans. Having contemplated icy silence while adrift beneath the warm Mediterranean, the endless interiors of the cave offered him another, equally fictitious dimension of the planet. Soon he returned to his home country and began exploring the recesses of the Carpathian Mountains. The endless tunnels near where he was born were as inaccessible as anywhere he’d been. He was crawling through a narrow passage in the Apuseni range where air throbbed back and forth as if the cave were breathing. He scooped water into his hand and once again found isopods — similar but not the same as the small, jointed creatures he’d pulled from the Antarctic hole where Danco had disappeared. There had never been any light here. Even microorganisms were scarce. To find these flea-sized troglobites thriving in this inert earth challenged the fundamentals of how life was expected to work. Segmented bodies pressing into the creases of his palm — like Mamma Mechnikov, naked and inconsolable, dazzled by dayflies. In the iciest ocean, and here in the subterranean darkness, these modest creatures, largely unseen, met the world with their chitinous shells, blind and colorless, with miniscule growths full of nerve endings, sensitive as lips. Touching, tasting, the troglobites formed a squirming, writhing sentience that, wherever he went, emerged from the deep to meet him. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 2, 2022

rad Fox

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:44.327339

titiba-and-the-invention-of-the-unknown

Titiba and the Invention of the Unknown By Kathryn Nuernberger February 26, 2020 In a remarkable collection of essays entitled Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, the great cultural historian Carlo Ginzburg returns again and again to a central problem of knowledge (in general) and historical knowledge (specifically): How far away should we be from the things we want to understand? In the optical sense, this is “perspective”. We use the same term when we speak of conceptual distance — but is it the same thing? Traditional historical practice, and possibly even the very idea of “historicism”, uses something like “distance” to create its objects. But does this mean that historians cut themselves off, and cut their readers off, from a certain kind of intimacy between then and now? Between the people of the past and us? In this lyrical essay on a very, very difficult and painful topic, the poet Kathryn Nuernberger works to defy history’s commitment to distance, to unsettling effect. — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor The historian Michel de Certeau wants to know what makes ideas possible. He asks versions of the question over and over in The Writing of History. “What makes something thinkable?” And insists the answer is the only story historians should bother telling.1 Herrick: Titiba what evil spirit have you familiarity with.Titiba: None.H: Why do you hurt these children.T: I do not hurt them.2 Of all the accused witches, Titiba is the one who seems to have been the most radically transformed from who she actually was into who certain people wanted her to be. Unlike the white people of Salem, whose names, lineages, and racial identities have remained fixed since that time, hers went from Titiba in the trial records to Tituba in the popular culture. She was called “Indian” in court, but imagined in the histories that followed as African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in Giles Corey of the Salem Farms, fictionalized her into “the daughter of a man all black and fierce,” while in The Crucible, that play performed in high schools all over the country every October, Arthur Miller called into being a reckless storyteller sowing wild fancies in the minds of the village girls. Glamour, grammar, and grimoire all share the same root.3 The Inquisitors imagined in one testimonial after another that they saw the transformation from person to demon before their eyes, even as they clung more fiercely to the power in the illusion they held about themselves, that they were not the ones conjuring such nightmares. It was Goodwife Sibley who asked Titiba to perform that old English spell with bread, dirt, and urine to ease the suffering of the poor afflicted child Betty, but that moment glimmered back in court as Titiba’s idea, her spell, her fault. And though she was compelled by the violence of Samuel Parris’s open hand into this line of questions by Constable John Herrick, the dominant narrative that emerged in the historiographies was that her confession was the reason for the craze that followed, that Titiba’s words conjured what we would come to know as the Salem Witch Hunt. H: Who is it then.T: The devil for ought I know.H: Did you never see the devil.T: The devil came to me and bid me serve him. The Arawak word for the island renamed Barbados in the late 15th century is Ichi-rougan-aim, which means red land/island with white teeth. In the Eurocentric propaganda masquerading as so many of the textbooks distributed in history and social studies classes in this country you will read that the Arawak people disappeared or went extinct. In those books you will not read the word “genocide” because “genocide” means a crime was committed. You will not read “survivors” because in an ethical and moral world “survivors” means restitution must still be made. Today more than 10,000 people living in northern coastal regions of South America identify as Lokono, which is the name those people the colonizers called Arawaks used to call themselves.4 H: Who have you seen.T: Four women sometimes hurt the children.H: Who were they.T: Goode Osburn and Sarah Good and I do not know who the others were. Sarah Good and Osburne would have me hurt the children but I would not. She further saith there was a tall man of Boston that she did see. It was with witch trials in mind that Certeau critiqued his profession in his manifesto calling for the creation of new histories. “What we initially call history is nothing more than a narrative,” he writes, adding with mounting frustration that “the legend provides the imaginary dimension that we need so that the elsewhere can reiterate the here and now….” It was with Certeau in mind that I read Pedagogies of Crossing by M. Jacqui Alexander, who founded and directs the Tobago Center for the Study and Practice of Indigenous Spirituality. She says that to create a just and sustainable future, we must “destabilize that which hegemony has rendered coherent or fixed; reassemble that which appears to be disparate, scattered, or otherwise idiosyncratic; foreground that which is latent and therefore powerful in its apparent absence; and analyze that which is apparently self-evident, which hegemony casts as commonsensical and natural, but which we shall read as gestures of power, that deploy violence to normalize and discipline.”5 H: When did you see them.T: Last night at Boston.H: what did they say to you.T: They said hurt the childrenH: And did you hurt themT: No there is 4 women and one man they hurt the children and they lay upon me and they tell me if I will not hurt the children they will hurt me. Elaine Breslaw, author of Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem,6 was the first historian I read who looked through the glamour the inquisitors cast over Titiba and saw instead the resistance she conjured in her testimony. Breslaw speculates that Titiba’s name came from the Tivitivas tribe living at the mouth of the Orinoco. Or the Tebetana community of Arawaks living near the Amacura River. She found a 1676 inventory of a Barbados plantation owned by Samuel Thompson in which the name of a child, Tattuba, appears, along with 66 other names of slaves. The spelling of names and many other words was irregular then, and the timeline makes sense, particularly given that Samuel Parris seems to have known the Thompson family well, even lived at a plantation near theirs in Barbados before setting sail for New England to take his new position in Salem as the minister of a rural Puritan community notorious for its squabbles, discord, and tendency to fire their clergy. H: But did you not hurt themT: Yes but I will hurt them no more.H: Are you not sorry you did hurt them.T: Yes.H: And why then doe you hurt them.T: They say hurt children or wee will doe worse to you. I’m always surprised by the number of intellectuals I have seen throw up their hands and say we’ll never be able to understand what happened in Salem or why. It is, after all, fairly identical to what happened in Bamberg, where three mayors in ten years were executed as witches along with hundreds of others, not to mention in Paisley and Scotland, all across Spain and its colonies, etc., etc. – there is the same line of questioning, the fear, and then the fear, hunger and drought or winter, a fungus, maybe, in the damp grain which causes delusions, something like what the DSM-5 might call PTSD from the most recent war, gaslighting gaolers and judges, a little torture, then a lot of torture…. In most of the trials you can tell nothing about the lives of the judges or the accused or afflicted or the audience feels sustainable based on how often one person will say and another person will agree that the world is surely ending soon. And then there is that same old faith. In general the inquisitors won’t relent until a confession includes something new. New variations reassure them that they aren’t just being told what they want to hear. This is why they torment the accused past mere confession to the point where the trembling person accuses someone else. So let’s observe that Titiba never gives the constable a new name. This is the only thing about the trials in Salem that is actually unusual at all. When asked who was torturing the girls, Sarah Good said it must be the insufferable Sarah Osbourne. Sarah Osbourne said if anything Sarah Good was the bewitched one and anyway she’d had a dream of being pricked by “something like an Indian.” When pressed, Titiba, who was often referred to by her neighbors as “Indian” or “Titiba Indian” named the two already-accused Sarahs, sure – they were already in shackles and accusing each other; what could she do for them? But when asked to name more, she said she could not make out any other names or the faces, and, when pressured further said she was blind now, could see no more, and collapsed to the floor. H: What have you seen.T: A man came to me and say serve me.H: What service.T: Hurt the children and last night there was an appearance that said kill the children and if I would not go on hurting the children they would do worse to me.H: What is this appearance you see.T: Sometimes it is like a hog and sometimes like a great dog, this appearance she saith she did see 4 times. Historians typically begin the story of Salem in the woods of 1691 where the Reverend Samuel Parris’s daughter, Betty, and his niece, Abigail, met to use an old divination method of telling their fortunes with an egg yolk. They expected to see the faces of their future lovers, but instead saw coffins and were not right again. They turned hysterical and began barking like dogs. Later, Abigail was found dancing in those woods. H: What did it say to you?T: ...The black dog said serve me but I said I am afraid he said if I did not he would doe worse to me.H: What did you say to it.T: I will serve you no longer. then he said he would hurt me and then he looked like a man and threatens to hurt me, she said that this man had a yellow bird that kept with him and he told me he had more pretty things that he would give me if I would serve him. Because, like Certeau, I have been trying to understand what makes certain ideas thinkable, I have been reading the Situationists between the transcripts of the Salem testimonies. Living as I do, like one of these post-modernist avant-garde intellectuals inside the commodity fetishization of late-stage capitalism, I have been walking and thinking a meandering path through my neighborhood, which is a square of unceded Dakota land that was for a time a thriving center of African American businesses, homes, and prosperity. By 1968 urban planners, who were and are overwhelmingly white and male, had poured I-94 directly through the heart of this district on purpose and by design to destabilize the community. They probably did something similar where you live.7 In the most anthologized of Situationist texts, “Elementary Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism,” the philosophers Attila Kotámyi and Raoul Vaneigenn write, “Modern capitalism, which organizes the reduction of all social life to a spectacle, is incapable of presenting any spectacle other than our alienation.”8 H: What were these pretty things.T: He did not show me them.H: What also have you seenT: Two rats, a red rat and a black rat. Capitalism, it is widely known but seldom said, is dependent on the invention of scarcity. Salem villagers were obsessed with firewood, which had been made very scarce by their over-harvesting. As it became clear it would not be so easy to simply spread European colonization north, a three-generation-old feud over a tract of land between the influential Putnam and Proctor families was more and more on everyone’s mind. It came up each time the village had to agree to hire or fire a minister, build or not build a new meeting house, issue a warrant for some new arrest. You can grow and then cut down and burn a lot of trees on 1000 disputed acres.9 Bur Oak, Mossy cup oak, Yellow oak, Chinkapin oak, Sandburn willow, Swamp birch, Bicknell’s hawthorn, Mountain winterberry, Sweet bay magnolia, Swamp cottonwood, Northern mountain ash, Northern white cedar.10 In the negotiations conducted by letters from that Barbados plantation, Samuel Parris had secured a promise of firewood as well as a home to go along with his modest paycheck as part of his contract with the convening members of the church. But when winter arrived, neither the wood nor his paychecks were delivered. Everyone in that small cold household – his wife, the four children, Titiba and also the other enslaved person, John Indian – lived inside the drafting and revising of the week’s sermons, the practicing and polishing of weekly jeremiads that became increasingly preoccupied with an evil that had infected the village. Would any of them have remembered a view of the indigenous trees of Barbados growing scarce amidst all of the clear-cut sugar plantations stretched out across the island? Changunga, Cedro, Kapok, Guaiacwood, Sandbox tree, Lemon guava, Cabbage palm, False mastic, Swizzlestick tree.11 H: What did they say to you.T: They said serve me.H: When did you see them.T: Last night and they said serve me, but I said I would not. “The functional is what is practical,” Kotámyi and Vaneigenn observe in their Situationist manifesto, in which they try to lay out the core ideas necessary to make thinkable their utopian vision of a new kind of society. “The only thing that is practical is the resolution of our fundamental problem: our self-realization (our escape from the system of isolation).” Salem was located in The Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was intended by its founders to be a utopia, organized around a deep understanding of all the ways their old home and life had failed them. ※※Indexed under…UtopiaFailed To justify the bloodshed their utopia seemed to require, the colonists designed a seal that was a picture of a Native American wearing a loin cloth made of leaves with a banner issuing forth from his mouth that reads “Come over and help us.” The witch trials are far from the only example of how genocidal invaders turn real people into the myths a system of oppressive power needs them to be. H: What service.T: She said hurt the children.H: Did you not pinch Elizabeth Hubbard this morningT: The man brought her to me and made me pinch herH: Why did you goe to Thomas Putnams last night and hurt his child.T: They pull and hall me and make me goe It is all too easy for those who benefit from hegemonic powers to say there is nothing to learn from the uncertainties of these trials. That the mist of spectral evidence clouds all judgement. This is, after all, what the Governor eventually said when he issued a general pardon to all of the accused who had not already been executed. But in fact there is a great deal the afflicted know quite well — and that anyone who cared to could learn. H: And what would have you doe.T: Kill her with a knife. Did you know that Titiba was likely married to John Indian? He also survived the trials. He joined the ranks of the afflicted, trembling and fainting and accusing, which was a clever way then for anyone to stay alive or exact vengeance or both that year. His name was probably not really John Indian. I like to imagine he and Titiba knew each other by the names their mothers or grandmothers or aunts or fathers or brothers or whoever it was loved and cared for them had used at their beginning. H: How did you go?T: We ride upon stickes and are there presently.H: Doe you goe through the trees or over them.T: We see nothing but are there presently.H: Why did you not tell your master.T: I was afraid they said they would cut of[f] my head if I told. It is unclear precisely how many members of Salem village owned human beings as slaves. The first comprehensive records appear in 1754 when Governor Shirley ordered a census of all slaves over 16. In that year there were at least 83 people of African or Indigenous descent living as property in Salem village. 12 It is with Certeau and Alexander in mind that I have concluded there is nothing new to learn about history. There is only what I might try once more to see clearly. H: Would you not have hurt others if you co[u]ld.T: They said they would hurt others but they could not When Breslaw tells the story, she emphasizes the resistance in Titiba’s description of the nameless and faceless members of a coven, dressed in the fine clothes of well-to-do people. “Titiba invented a new idiom of resistance by overtly submitting to the will of her abuser while covertly feeding his fears of a conspiracy.” Breslaw proposes a new history that explains how a group of people came to have the idea that there is no such thing as witches. Her story goes like this: When a person like Titiba who is not supposed to know how, masters the system and turns it against those who would master her, the ruling class suddenly and conveniently realizes nothing they have believed makes sense anymore. H: What attendants hath Sarah Good.T: A yellow bird and shee would have given me one.H: What meate did she give it?T: It did suck her between her fingers. Of all the pretty things the devil was said to have promised the people of Salem, my favorite is this yellow bird flying through the ash and charcoal palette of a cold and miserable place. The yellow birds of Barbados include: the Yellow-throated vireo, Bananaquit, American redstart, American yellow warbler, Northern waterthrush, Prothonotary warbler, Prairie warbler. 13 Yellow birds that can be found in New England: Saffron finch, Goldfinch, Pine warble, Yellow-throated vireo, Yellow-breasted chat, Yellow-rumped warbler, Yellow-headed blackbird. The recently extincted Bachman warbler would have been there when Titiba was.14 H: Did not you hurt Mr Currins child?T: Goode good and goode Osburn told that they did hurt Mr Currens child and would have had me hurt him too, but I did notH: What hath Sarah Osburn?T: Yellow dog, she had a thing with a head like a woman with 2 legges, and wings. Abigail Williams that lives with her Uncle Parris said that she did see the same creature, and it turned into the shape of Goode Osburn.H: What else have you seen with Osburn?T: Another thing, hairy it goes upright like a man it hath only 2 legges. What was known then and is known now, but almost never is included in the story is that Titiba had a child who was about two years when the trials began, just over three years old when it was over. Her name was Violet. When the general pardon was issued, the accused only had to pay their prison costs to be released. Samuel Parris did not pay the seven pounds owed for Titiba. We know she lived with little food and little heat in that prison for at least six more months until someone whose name no one thought to record bought her for the price of this modest debt. We also know that Violet was never with her mother again, because in Samuel Parris’s will, which was executed 45 years later, she was handed down to his heirs. H: Did you not see Sarah Good upon Elizabeth Hubbard, last Saturday?T: I did see her set a wolfe upon her to afflict her, the persons with this maid did say that she did complain of a wolfe.T: She further saith that shee saw a cat with good at another time.H: What cloathes doth the man go in?T: He goes in black clothes a tall man with white hair I thinke.H: How doth the woman go?T: In a white hood and a black hood with a top knot.H: Doe you see who it is that torments these children now. At the time of the writing of this essay, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency held an estimated 10,000 migrant children in its custody;15 at least 7 had died.16 Which is a situation not unlike the one from 1879-1918 when the U. S. Government took 12,000 children from their parents and their nations or bands into the abusive Carlisle Indian School, an institution that approximately 150 other U.S.-run or Canadian-run or Catholic-run boarding schools for Native children modeled themselves after.17 Half of the 120,000 people held in Japanese internment camps in the US were children.18 Of the 12.5 million people carried across the Atlantic during the five centuries of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, 26% are estimated to have been children.19 The number of children born into slavery has not yet been calculated, but they have been there, the children, afflicted, since the beginning of the American story. T: Yes it is Goode Good, shee hurts them in her own shapeH: And who is it that hurts them now.T: I am blind now. I cannot see. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 26, 2020

Kathryn Nuernberger

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:44.926743

the-primordial-gound

The Primordial Gound By Justin E. H. Smith October 4, 2017 The piece that follows displays a number of the signature characteristics of the classic nineteenth-century genre known as mystification. We have an author who takes us winningly into his confidence as he discusses an intricate tale of old texts lost and recovered, all the while tipping his hand concerning the ambiguous status of the source material at issue. Kant in Sumatra? The Third Critique and the cosmologies of Melanesia? What is going on? Read on, and make of all of this what you will (or can!). But a quick thought: much philosophy (Justin E. H. Smith’s stock-in-trade), like most argumentative writing in history and every other branch of learned endeavor, seeks to compel assent — to leave the reader as little room as possible for thought-escape. To think well in such a textual ecology demands the cultivation of a capacity to find what we might think of as “worm holes” in the world of learned scholarship: loci that drop open into the infinite space of other possibilities. Sometimes such trapdoors can be opened in a footnote or paratext, or, as here, in a tiny textual emendation, through which we are encouraged to glimpse a thoroughly different fundamental ground for all experience. I am not a Geisterseher, Professor Skrastiņš assures Professor Smith — not a ghost-seer. But is that what we need to be if we are to see clearly through the heavy curtains of erudition? — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor The Origins of the Controversy In April, 2016, I posted the following text (to all appearances a sort of research note), on my personal website: Benno Guerrier von Klopp (1816–1903) was a Baltic German philologist, of French Huguenot origin, who studied at the University of Saint Petersburg and made most of his career as an academician ordinarius, while also spending a good portion of his later career at Jena. Klopp is remembered principally for his contributions to the study of Baltic and Slavic linguistics, not least his 1836 dissertation on the disappearance of the neuter gender in Middle Latvian, and his groundbreaking 1868 study of the morphosyntax of the Old Church Slavonic verbal prefix, vz-.Significantly less well known is Klopp’s work on the development of the mature philosophical system of Immanuel Kant, a fellow Baltic German who may have been more familiar with the languages and customs of that region than other scholars have detected. In fact, if Klopp is correct, Kant's first-hand ethnolinguistic researches extend well beyond the Baltic. While Klopp’s 1873 book, Die geheime Sumatrareise Immanuel Kants, is not found in the Library of Congress, or even in the supposedly comprehensive online WorldCat, I have been able to locate a copy of it in at least one place: the library of the faculty of Baltistik at the University of Greifswald in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.1 Klopp dedicates the book to his fellow Baltic-studies specialists, and yet it is Sumatra, not Latvia or Lithuania or historical Yotvingia, that is the principal focus of his study. The author’s central argument runs as follows. As many readers will know, Immanuel Kant is widely thought to have been an inflexible, even compulsive man, who was so devoted to his daily schedule that he never once left his home city of Königsberg (indeed, he was reported to be sufficiently afraid of breaking into a sweat that at the first perceived sign of perspiration he would instantly freeze and stand motionless until the danger passed). Yet according to Klopp, between 1773 and 1778 (Kant’s so-called “silent years”, after the reading of Hume had awakened him from his “dogmatic slumbers”, but before he would change the history of philosophy forever with the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781), the German philosopher in fact departed, on a whim, to the far ends of the earth, at the invitation of his friend, Captain Sixtus Korg, on a ship traveling to the East Indies. It was there, Klopp maintained, and more precisely on the island of Sumatra, that Kant had the experiences that eventually led to his “Copernican revolution” in philosophy. Which is to say, the “critical turn” of the First Critique, according to Klopp, is properly understood as a work of travel literature. Klopp records that in May of 1777 Kant’s ship suffered heavy damages in a storm in the South China Sea, and was permitted to stay in harbor by the magnanimity of the Sultan of Aceh for a period of several months. While the captain and his crew saw to the ship’s repair, the on-board philosopher was permitted to travel inland and to learn something of the local languages and customs. “Just make sure you don’t stay in the sun too long”, a deckhand told him, Klopp reports, as he set off. “You'll come back jumping and quaking with lâtah, you will.”2 Klopp maintains that it was a Batak elder of the Sumatran highlands who explained to the German philosopher that the highest aim of lajbâh, or contemplation, is not to seek after truth in the study of the bûjnah (or the natural world), but rather to investigate the bâjnyat (categories) of the gajbuh (understanding), which determine the boundaries and the character of our luhteh (experience). These ethnographic insights did not begin in East Asia, however, but indeed were already in evidence in the earliest stages of the voyage. Chapter Two of Klopp’s work is entitled “Kants Tajmyraufenthalt in seinem Zusammenhang mit der Entstehung der Antinomie der reinen Vernunft” [“Kant's sojourn on the Taimyr Peninsula in connection with the development of the antinomy of pure reason”]. Klopp writes that Kant spent the long and harsh winter of 1773-74, waiting with captain and crew for the ice along the Northeast passage to melt, among the Taimyr Pengyr. The Pengyr had been a small group of Paleo-Siberian reindeer herders who, according to Russian imperial sources, were completely exterminated by their Funno-Igric neighbors, the Samoyed, by sometime in the mid-nineteenth century. Today, the Samoyed are called by the ethnonym “Nenets”, meaning “the people”, since their preferred self-description, “Saamid”, had been corrupted into Russian as “Samoyed”, and “Samoyed”, by some awful coincidence, just happens to mean, in Russian, “self-eater”. Earlier sources identify the Pengyr as “Snegoyeb”, evidently a deformation of the native designation “Isânäägoëb”, which, as in the case of “Samoyed”, generates a similar grievous instance of cross-linguistic contamination: the term translates in Russian, roughly, as “snowfucker”. Kant left no notes from the Taimyr period, but, according to Klopp, Captain Korg kept extensive records of his conversations with the great Prussian philosopher, which Klopp dutifully recorded, giving us a rare glimpse of mundane conversation between these two men. Korg notes that in order to pass their time productively in the Pengyr settlement (to which harsh winter weather had already confined them for some months), Kant had begun to make forays into the Pengyrs’ world in order to inquire into the most fundamental elements of their belief system. In mid-January of 1774, the ship's crew was ordered to begin sleeping onshore, so that the vessel could undergo structural repairs to the hull. They were placed in makeshift reindeer-hide tents just next to the Pengyr winter settlement, and Kant and Korg shared a tent of their own. In early February, Korg notes in his journal, Kant returned one evening, after a day spent with the Pengyr, and announced that he had “the most remarkable antinomy” to relate to his new tentmate. Decades earlier Korg had studied the chemical arts in the circle of Yakov Brius in Moscow, and at first he thought that the philosopher was trying to tell him that he had discovered antimony, which, given that they were separated from all of the earth’s elements by several feet of ice, the captain doubted greatly.3 “How could you have come across antimony in your idle conversations with the savages?” Korg asked. “Do they gnaw upon it for an afternoon collation, perhaps? Do they use molten antimony as a soup base?” “Not antimony, Sixtus”, Kant replied. “Antinomy. Antimony is a silvery fusible metal. Antinomy is what happens when you’ve got two things that have to be true, but that can’t both be true together. I've happened upon a new antinomy. Do you want to hear it?” Korg had no idea what Kant was talking about, but didn’t have anything else to talk about either. They took turns reciting the opposing propositions that Kant had earlier written out on the inside back cover of his copy of Delisle’s Atlas Russicus, with the captain stating the thesis first, and the philosopher replying with the antithesis as though it were a punchline.4 Korg [thesis]: No body can remain forever different in its internal character from the bodies that surround it. Kant [antithesis]: I’ve been freezing my hindquarters off for the past two months, yet here I am, calorifacient as ever. “That's a good one”, Korg laughed. “I like these antimonies”. “Antinomies. Here’s another.” Korg [thesis]: Every living body is nourished by sundry things, all of which are themselves obtained from living nature. Kant [antithesis]: I’ve been eating nothing but salted whitefish ever since we arrived in this frozen wasteland. Korg smiled faintly. “But what about the Pengyr?” he asked. “Did you learn any antimonies from them?” “Antinomies”, Kant corrected him again. “As a matter of fact I did. Are you ready?” “Nu davai”, Korg said in Russian, the language of his childhood, to which he reverted when he was happy. “Go ahead”. They reversed the order this time, with the philosopher reading out the thesis and the captain the antithesis. Kant [thesis]: There are in the world causes through turguk. Korg [antithesis]: There is no turguk, but all is näk. “Turguk”, according to Klopp, was the Pengyr word for human agency, though it also translates as “wind”; while “näk” meant for them something like “nature”, or perhaps “fate”, or, in certain contexts, “weather”. This antinomy, then, was nothing less than the Pengyr version of the belief that human freedom is strictly incompatible with the determinism of nature. Klopp recorded that, at least as reflected in Korg’s account in his journal, the Pengyr would spend cold winter nights around the fire, as the elders debated the respective reasons for holding one or the other of these opposing views, and the young men listened and learned while the women pretended not to understand. Klopp speculated that it was in listening to these freewheeling fireside disputationes — which always ended with a ritualistic declaration by the eldest shaman of the words “Who cares?!” after which the entire community took part in a great communal orgy — that Kant first saw a glimpse of a possible critical overcoming of the dogmatic dead-ends of the philosophical tradition. By the time of the Critique of Judgment of 1790, Kant was much less careful to conceal the riches of his circumnavigation of Eurasia. Thus he there relates a joke that he heard in an inn in Surat, in order to illustrate his definition of the structure of all jokes as “the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing” [die plötzliche Verwandlung einer gespannten Erwartung in nichts] (§53, 5: 333); he further describes the tattoos on the faces of Maori sailors (§16, 5: 230); and he recalls with disdain the rudimentary social organization of the “New Hollanders”, a generic name used to describe both the Australian aborigines as well as those we would today call “New Guinean” (§67, 5: 378). Significantly, by contrast, when Kant mentions the Iroquois (whom he would not have met on his voyage), he draws on Rousseau as the authority. Only when speaking of various Asian, Polynesian, and Melanesian peoples does he omit such citations. Why is this? Kant was, in these instances, according to Klopp, drawing on his first hand experience. In view of all this first-hand reportage, Klopp concluded his book marveling that the Third Critique, indeed Kant's critical project as a whole, had never been read as a straightforward travelogue. Repercussions In late 2016, in the wake of the ignominious rise of Donald Trump, a man propelled on a vertiginous ascendancy by the sheer power of his mendacity and that of others, I promised myself I would stop writing about Kant’s circumnavigation of Eurasia. It had grown too confusing, too dangerous for my academic career, and too morally doubtful as an enterprise. After the great scandal earlier that year, when it was reported on the Luegner Report blog (a sort of industry standard-bearer and watchdog in Anglophone academic philosophy), that I had fabricated evidence of a journey taken by Immanuel Kant to the island of Sumatra in 1773, I learned that my scholarly community has no patience for even a hint of mischief. They all thought I was hoping to pass it off in earnest. So I’m done with that, now, and in this new era, in which we are living out the consequences of “birtherism”, in which Alex Jones and others of the American president’s most faithful media servants enthusiastically help to propagate utter lies about chemtrails and the Illuminati, I really have no interest in revisiting those reckless stunts that I undertook in a past and more innocent age. My justification for them at the time, in as much as I can recall it across the trauma of the last US election cycle, was that I believed I was in some way retroactively creating a new reality through the spinning out of such a tale. By conjuring an alternative past, I thought, I was hoping to position my readers to see that history is only ever in the telling. In such a lesson, I hoped to convey something akin to a liberation of the spirit, the means to transcend the merely given. I imagined myself something like the great pseudohistoriador Jerónimo Román de la Higuera with his Falsos cronicones of 1594, which conjured an ancient Christian history for the Iberian peninsula (a history that it had previously lacked).5 When his invention was revealed, he was condemned by some; but many, in turn, held him up to have done something even greater than a true historian. He had not simply reported on the ancientness of Spanish Christianity. He had, some thought, made ancient Iberia Christian. But of course he did no such thing, and he was never, in truth, anything more than a fake news channel for the Spanish Renaissance. What later crimes (of religious savagery and ethnic truculence) might be laid at his feet? I deleted every public trace of the whole Kant voyage nonsense over which I had control, and I repented. And I would have no occasion to return again to my reckless stunt, had farce and reality not, once again, as they so often do, conspired in a convergence. Again, I insist, let me be clear: I made the whole Sumatra voyage up. It was a total fabrication. You can therefore imagine my surprise when, just last week, I received a message from Professor Ivars Skrastiņš of the department of Baltic studies at Daugavpils University in Latvia with the dismaying subject heading, “KANT'S SUMATRA VOYAGE: A POSTSCRIPT”. Naturally, I dreaded opening it. The whole foolish legend had gotten me into enough trouble already. But of course I could not not open it either. I am a sucker for this sort of stuff. Some people get drawn into Nigerian 419 scams; I get drawn into ruses of my very own invention. I think that in order to avoid getting drawn in any more than necessary, the best thing for me to do here will be to simply relate to you the message in full, without editorial intervention or commentary. I convey it to you here exactly as Skrastiņš sent it (expurgating only the email addresses, at the insistence of The Public Domain Review’s legal counsel): ———- Forwarded message ———-From: Ivars Skrastins <i****** @du.lv >To: Justin Smith <j*******@*mail.com >Cc:Bcc:Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2016 16:01:27 +0200Subject: KANT’S SUMATRA VOYAGE: A POSTSCRIPT Dear Professor Smith, Are you aware of that passage of the Critique of Judgment, which Paul Guyer translates in his Cambridge edition of the work as follows? For that the [things in themselves] cannot be inferred from [human understanding], hence that those propositions are certainly valid of objects insofar as our cognitive faculty, as sensibly conditioned, is concerned with objects of these senses, but are not valid of objects in general, is evident from the unremitting demand of reason to assume some sort of thing (the original ground) as existing absolutely necessarily.6 As you may know, Guyer provides the following footnote, signaling a correction to the phrase that occurs between parentheses toward the end of the citation: This would seem an obvious editorial decision: the Riga typesetter had carelessly left out an r, generating a nonsense word, Urgund, that subsequent editors were obligated to correct. Urgrund brings together two semantic units: Ur-, which is a prefix meaning "original", "fundamental", or "primordial"; and Grund, which means "ground" or "foundation". Urgund by contrast attaches the same prefix to a meaningless sound. Or does it? I had long been perfectly satisfied with Guyer's correction, until I happened to come across a curious facsimile edition, in a Riga antiquariat, of the copy of the first edition of the Kritik der Urtheilskraft in which none other than Thomas De Quincey had written his own marginal notes a few years prior to the publication of his 1827 essay, The Last Days of Immanuel Kant.7 I had hitherto been dismissive of this work, as it is more or less an uncredited paraphrase of Ehregott Wasianski’s vastly superior and more intimate work, Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren, first published in 1804.8 But what struck me was a single morsel of marginalia right next to the word Urgund. In rough but unmistakable letters, De Quincey had written, in English: “Primordial Gound”. What on earth, I thought, could this be about? Naturally, as a specialist in what the Germans call Baltistik, I immediately thought of Gūnd, the pagan god of fennel who is widely attested in inscriptions throughout the broader historical region of the Baltic tribes. Gūnd seems to have been invoked particularly at harvest time, and to have been associated with the fertility rituals that involved reciprocal beatings with bushy stalks of foeniculum vulgare by young couples who slip away at dusk amidst the high-festival chaos of the reaping season. According to Cornelius Popp's Heidnische Ritualdynamik im Baltikum im hohen Mittelalter, Baltic ritual associated with fennel died out in most of Latvia and Lithuania by the late thirteenth century, but may have endured among at least a few isolated pockets of Yotvingians in the Königsberg region until the middle of the eighteenth century.9 We may at least speculate that Kant came into contact with some of these people during his physical-geographical surveys of the region, and that what he learned of the rituals in honor of Gūnd left a deep impression, perhaps subconscious, which resurfaced years later while writing the Third Critique. Another possible explanation has to do with the Proto-Indo-European root *gʰōnd-, which may be related to the modern Latvian gārnis ["egret"], but is clearly well attested in both Hittite and Tocharian inscriptions as, variously, *ghond and *gand, and which denotes a sort of firebird or phoenix common to Indo-European legend, who lays giant eggs that are fertilized by the fire itself and have no other father than it. Some of these virgin-born eggs grow up into great warriors (mounted archers to be precise), while others are simply cooked by the fire, and then stolen away by moles and desmans and other lowly creatures to be gnawed down to the very yoke [sic]. There is of course something primordial about eggs, but beyond this it is hard to see how these could possibly have been on Kant’s mind during the composition of the Critique of Judgment. My own preferred theory builds on the crucial work of Benno Klopp in his Die geheime Sumatrareise Immanuel Kants, which you brought back to light in your own invaluable research, and which is the reason why I am contacting you today, Professor Smith. You see, after much serious inquiry and deep meditation I am now convinced that not only did Kant go to Sumatra: he went even further. Let me explain. In George Bowman’s classic article, “When Is a Yam a Bat?” we learn quite a bit about the extremely unfamiliar classificatory system of the Mount Hagen peoples of inland New Guinea10 Among other fundamental taxonomic categories ("grounding categories", you might say), we are introduced to the concept of gound (alternatively, goundh or goumd), which establishes a basic identity relation between the following entities: The sweet potatoeThe nostrilsLight (as it shines through the thatched walls of a hut)The fruit batA mother's pregnant bellyAn outrigger canoe I believe that Kant made it all the way to New Holland, and in his voyage he encountered these people. He endeavored to understand their concept of gound, and concluded (somewhat naively) that it must be something like the Anaximandrean apeiron, the storehouse of the multiplicity of diverse forms that come forth in this world — the fragmented glow that shines and breathes and spills out, as nature, from the dark unity behind it. Consider again the passage from the Critique of Judgment, this time corrected back, so as to reverse the incorrect correction of the supposed typographical error: For that the [things in themselves] cannot be inferred from [human understanding], hence that those propositions are certainly valid of objects insofar as our cognitive faculty, as sensibly conditioned, is concerned with objects of these senses, but are not valid of objects in general, is evident from the unremitting demand of reason to assume some sort of thing (the primordial Gound) as existing absolutely necessarily. Please do not suppose I am some Geisterseher, Professor Smith. I know you’ve received plenty of messages from real lunatics, and I know you know how to tell the difference. I believed you about Sumatra, and now I'm asking you to believe me about the Gound. We think alike, you and me. Yours truly, Ivars Skrastiņš Daugavpils, Latvia Appendix The Luegner Report May 3, 2016 Another Bizarre Tale from "Philosopher" Justin Smith He’s at it again. The unhinged Justin E. H. Smith (Paris) is now trying to convince us that Immanuel Kant took a trip around Asia, going all the way to Sumatra, and that that’s where he got his idea for the Critique of Pure Reason. Nonsense! Everybody who’s taken even a single intro course in philosophy knows that Kant never left Königsberg in his entire life. Smith takes us all for a bunch of chumps! What an embarrassment to the profession. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 4, 2017

Justin E. H. Smith

conjecture

2024-05-01T21:47:45.648206

pseudo-boccaccio-yiddish-pulp-fiction-and-the-man-who-ripped-off-joyce

Pseudo-Boccaccio, Yiddish Pulp Fiction, and the Man Who Ripped Off Joyce By Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti April 17, 2024 In 1927, a pair of lurid “translations” appeared in English, marketed as authentic tales by Giovanni Boccaccio and illustrated with supposedly new works by Aubrey Beardsley. Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti search for the origin of these fakes, in which illicit sex begets terrible violence, and uncover a story involving pseudotranslation, Yiddish shund literature, and the piracy king of literary modernism, Samuel Roth. Deep within the bibliography to the sixth volume of the journal Studi sul Boccaccio (Boccaccio Studies), we find this entry: [G. Boccaccio], Pasquerella and Madonna Babetta. Two hitherto untranslated stories by Giovanni Boccaccio with some unpublished sketches by Aubrey Beardsley. New York, Biblion Soc., 1927; for private circulation.1 And beneath it, in smaller type, a peculiar note: “Sono operette inventate.” That is to say: these are invented little works, daring forgeries produced by some unscrupulous agent many years after Boccaccio’s death. Who was this agent? No translator is mentioned, but the stories were published by the Biblion Society. Though its name is shared with the Erotika Biblion Society of London, publisher of the pornographic novel Teleny (often attributed to Oscar Wilde), the Biblion Society that printed these stories was an American venture, based in New York. And it was run by none other than that archduke of literary piracy and pornography, Samuel Roth. Roth inscribed himself fatally into the history of literary modernism as the first person to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses in the United States. While The Little Review had previously published excerpts from the novel, many issues of this journal were seized and destroyed — and its editors charged with distributing obscenity by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice — creating an opportunity for Roth. He was able to plan an unauthorized, bowdlerized, and error-ridden edition of Ulysses to appear in 1928–29.2 Joyce tried to fight the forthcoming publication with the help of an American law firm, seeking an injunction in the autumn of 1927. In a typically audacious response, Roth appealed to his readers to subscribe to a fund for his defense in the name of “the liberty of beauty”.3 Roth’s editorial license was not limited to radical modernist contemporaries — it extended even to the most canonized figures in the western tradition. In our case, Giovanni Boccaccio. Printed as a “literary supplement” to later issues of Two Worlds, “Pasquerella” and “Madonna Babetta” are titillating tales in which illicit sex begets terrible violence, accompanied with illustrations (supposedly) by Aubrey Beardsley. In “Pasquerella”, the doomed eponymous heroine marries Count Sandro Bernini when she is fifteen years old, and is quickly “made aware of the demands of her marriage”. She gets pregnant; Sandro grows indifferent. Thirteen years later, her son Phillip becomes obsessed with Bianca, the neighbor’s daughter, whom Pasquerella has hired as live-in help. Bianca pleads to her employer, explaining that Phillip has a key to her room and breaks in at night. Pasquerella doesn’t believe the young girl, and decides to sleep in the room herself. In the dark, Phillip mistakes his mother for his would-be lover. “Never before had the core of passion trembled in Pasquerella of its own accord. Under the delicate considerately tenuous fingers of her son it shot into sudden flower.” Disgusted the next morning, she sends him away, under the pretense of education, and gives birth to a child eight months after, whom she abandons to an abbey. Many years later, Phillip returns as a war hero with a new wife, Pamela, and Pasquerella is overcome with “strange, rapidly intensifying emotions”. She recognizes the young woman: it is her child — Phillip has married his sister and daughter. Like an Italian Oedipa, Pasquerella sneaks into their room while they are sleeping, returning to the primal scene — “strange forces were working within her, directing her daggered hand, forcing it . . .” — and ends the chain of incest once and for all. In “Madonna Babetta”, a Neapolitan priest named Lorenzo befriends his Protestant neighbor, Cornelius, “a young man of remarkable physical attractiveness”. They take long walks, discuss religion: “Ah, I see, sighed Cornelius, We burn in hell for the sin of having intercourse with pretty women.” An aristocrat named Madonna Babetta captures Father Lorenzo’s ear and twists the sacrament of confession to her own sordid purposes, claiming that Cornelius has been ogling her in the evenings. Upon hearing these rumors from Lorenzo, Cornelius decides to do exactly the thing he is charged with, hiding in Madonna Babetta’s garden, “hoping to catch a glimpse of his evil double”. When he locks eyes with his accuser, she smiles at him knowingly, and Cornelius recognizes the ruse for what it is. They become lovers. One day, Madonna Babetta murders her husband Helvetius with a dagger, and asks that Cornelius bind her to the bed, arranging the room “as if a desperate struggle had taken place”. When Cornelius later expresses guilt for complicity in her scheme, Madonna Babetta embraces him, dagger in hand, and he slumps over, dead. Taking up the pipe and magnifying glass, Father Lorenzo enters the widow’s garden himself in order to ascertain how two respected men have returned to God before their time. He deduces Madonna Babetta’s role and storms into her bedchamber, demanding a confession for double homicide. “Father, she breathed. Would you not murder to have me now?” We cut to the future: The sainted Father Lorenzo is seen often mounting the street to the Via Nilla at that hour between four and six when the sea about Naples seems to swoon at the approach of the fiery sun, but it is doubtful whether he is preoccupied with the state of Madonna Babetta’s soul, or that the Madonna has so many sins to confess, for the maid servant has never yet heard, that chant beginning. . . . In Nomine Patri . . . issuing from her mistress’ chamber. The setting of Pasquerella and Madonna Babetta is a pastiche of premodern Italy à la Boccaccio: full of villas, confessors, and passionate, murderous women.4 The stories are rather entertaining, but there are irregularities of style and detail that would not be found in the authentic works of Boccaccio.5 Though there are many transgressive women in Boccaccio’s work, their depiction is in stark contrast to the lurid, extended violence of Pasquerella and Madonna Babetta. There are also issues of a historical nature. Touched as we may be by the friendship between Catholic and Protestant, it is important to remember that Martin Luther was born more than a century after Boccaccio’s death. Or take for example the colorful mishmash of names, whose morphological disunity is characteristic of archaizing, foreignizing works: the Italian Lorenzo and his good friend, the Latin Cornelius; Madonna Babetta and her husband, Helvetius.6 But Roth was not just content to expand the canon of Boccaccio — he wanted to do Aubrey Beardsley the same favor. The “hitherto unpublished” Boccaccio stories discovered by the Biblion Society were to be illustrated “With Some Hitherto Unpublished Sketches by Aubrey Beardsley”. In fact, all of the illustrations by Beardsley had already been printed. The first, depicting a naked angel, which Roth titled “New Sketch”, had already been published in 1898 under the name “Mirror of Love”. The next four full-page illustrations, all featuring people looking pensive and forlorn amid vegetation, come from the Dent edition of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1892) — the blank and white boxes in their top right corners were supposed to contain chapter numbers. The final full-page illustration is “Lysistrata Haranguing the Athenian Women”, from an edition of Aristophanes printed privately in 1896.7 There are also sketches that are falsely credited to Beardsley, including the repeated, semi-typographic motifs printed between paragraphs — two women in repose in “Pasquerella”, a young man wooing a woman lying on a phallic sofa in “Madonna Babetta” — and a full-page print entitled “The Governesses Disporting themselves in the Garden”. Finding the origin of these illustrations provides a helpful context for the Boccaccio stories published by Roth. All three of these drawings are in fact by the Hungarian illustrator Willy Pogany, and were published as illustrations to a 1926 edition of The Songs of Bilitis. Released in 1894 under the title Les Chansons de Bilitis, these erotic poems were originally publicized as supposed translations from the Greek poet Bilitis, a contemporary of Sappho. In reality, they were written by the Belgian-born poet Pierre Louÿs who, in the 1926 edition from which Roth must have taken the illustrations, presents himself as the author, not the translator. Les Chansons de Bilitis are thus pseudotranslations: works of literature that claim to be translations from another language but are in fact original compositions by their would-be translator. Intentional or not, lifting illustrations from Bilitis associates Roth’s stories with contemporary European pseudotranslations. One wonders why Roth would select images from a pseudotranslation for this volume. Was the decision, in fact, a sort of wink toward the camera, a playful admission of guilt for the inquiring contemporary reader, or, beyond the grave, toward the future collator of his work? Or was the inclusion of these images purely pragmatic: he saw they were effective for marketing one forgery, so why not for his own? Roth produces a space of unanswerable questions as his legacy. At first glance, it can be tempting to group “Pasquerella” and “Madonna Babetta” with Pogany’s Bilitis or James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian, relatively poor forgeries which purported an ancient source. A simple explanation for their provenance would be that “Pasquerella” and “Madonna Babetta” were fabricated by Roth or by someone in his employ. And if this were true, the case would likely be closed . . . but two pamphlets, written in Yiddish and published at the turn of the century by the Hebrew Publishing Company, make this story all the more strange. *** Even if you are a student of Yiddish literature, there is a good chance you have never heard the name Dovid-Moyshe Hermalin. He, like Roth, was an immigrant to America. He came from Romania in 1885, when he was twenty years old, and died when Roth was seventeen. One is tempted to imagine a meeting between the two, perhaps in a cafeteria on the Lower East Side, where you could get stewed fruit: the Yiddish writer in the last year of his life and the young correspondent for the New York Globe. But, with no record of its occurrence, to describe such a meeting is pure fabulation. Though Hermalin was among the most prolific and popular Yiddish men of letters in his day, he has been all but forgotten. This is likely because his writings would be classified post facto as shund, and thus excluded from the Yiddish canon. Literally, shund derives from a German term referring to the unusable remnants of an animal left over after slaughter and processing, but in Yiddish it means, more or less, “trash literature”, or perhaps more generously “pulp fiction”.8 Shund literature usually appeared in newspapers, and the stories were often titillating, full of sex and suspense, and written to sell. Around the turn of the century, vocal Yiddish intellectuals began to rail against shund, decrying it a poor representative of Jewish culture and deleterious for the impressionable Yiddish-reading public. This was a common critique: shund literature was too indebted to European models, too bound up in translation, to be properly Jewish. It did not conform to a politics of Jewish national autonomy. According to the leading Yiddish intellectuals at the time, Jewish literature, like the Jewish people, needed be one among many, on the same plane as the peoples and literatures of Europe, not dependent on or subservient to them. The Yiddish authors who have been canonized, and therefore disproportionately translated, are those whose work conformed, mainly, to a non-shund model. Recent projects have tried to turn the tide of research away from canonical Yiddish literature and toward shund, acknowledging its central position in the reading lives of Yiddish speakers and recovering its visibility.9 Hermalin wrote shund novels alongside works of popular philosophy and journalism, but it seems his real specialty was the translation or adaptation of popular European authors for the Yiddish-reading public. In our database of translations into Yiddish, we have so far identified twenty-four such works. He wrote “adaptations” of Goethe, Conan Doyle, Swift, Maupassant, Zola, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and, as you might have guessed, Boccaccio. He generally worked with the Hebrew Publishing Company of New York, one of the most prolific producers of Yiddish reading material during those boom times, when various Czars’ censors, all but banning the Yiddish publishing within Russia, inadvertently turned New York into the printing press for the Yiddish world. Around the turn of the century, Hermalin produced two adaptations of Boccaccio: Paskarela with the press of B. Rabinovits, and Madam Babeta with the Hebrew Publishing Company. In contrast to Roth’s “hitherto untranslated”, it is stated on the cover page of both stories that Hermalin had “baarbet” (adapted) these works from Boccaccio. This gives him a little wiggle room, though the introduction to Madam Babeta does explicitly state that it is “one of the best stories from the Decameron”. Paskarela and Madam Babeta are longer versions of those same stories that Roth printed in English twenty-seven years later. Unless some proto-version of these two stories surfaces, the most likely explanation seems to be that the tales were composed by Hermalin as pseudotranslations of Boccaccio, and that Roth (or someone close to him) translated these stories and passed them off once more as authentic, lost stories by Boccaccio. By birth a Galician Jew, Roth knew Yiddish, and used Yiddish sources to produce translations of Heinrich Heine, since he had no German.10 He was also an inveterate publisher of phony translations, with sensational titles such as 1941’s I Was Hitler’s Doctor and 1951’s My Sister and I, supposedly a lost work by Nietzsche. He had the means, the motivation, and the sheer brazenness necessary to take a pair of Yiddish fakes, translate them into English, and pass them off as genuine discoveries to an unsuspecting literary public.11 Roth was situated in a strange middle place. The free way he dealt with authorship has much in common with the prior generation of Jewish-American literary production. He would have done well with the Hebrew Publishing Company, where, for example, Thomas Mayne Reid was falsely presented as Jules Verne, and German adventure novels were published as the work of Jewish authors.12 Of course, if Roth were to market Hermalin’s pseudo-Boccaccio to his literary, anglophone market, the stories would have to be adapted. The English versions are significantly shorter than the Yiddish (in the case of “Pasquerella”, seventeen vs. eighty-three pages), and the style of the English is significantly more reserved. The Yiddish narrator delights in parables — he philosophizes on the incontinence of human nature, on inexorable desire, and he often addresses the reader directly. At one point, he asks us: “Have you ever plucked a rose from a bush? Yes?” and then uses the rest of the paragraph to compare Pasquerella to that rose. Roth’s version, conversely, sticks to indirect, third-person narration, and pretends toward a sort of Anglo-Saxon dignity. For example, that same rose simile is retained in the English, but it is framed instead as “Whoever has plucked a rose from its branch . . .” The Yiddish version is also significantly more explicit in its descriptions. Hermalin describes the large bosoms, plump arms, and broad shoulders of Pasquerella and Babetta with relish, over and over, and the blood of their murdered victims is bright red and comes forth in lurid sprays. Roth, publishing for a public with literary pretensions, seemed to think it wise to tone down the extravagance.13 Had Roth wanted, he certainly could have found other famous works of questionable provenance in the Yiddish press. Hermalin produced two more Boccaccio “adaptations” entitled Printsesin Tsuleyka (Princess Zuleika) and Di Tsvey Poorlakh (The Two Couples). Printsesin Tsuleyka is actually a significantly expanded adaptation of a real story from the Decameron: the seventh story of the second day, about the Sultan of Babylon who sent his daughter Alatiel to the King of Algarve as a wife. But under Hermalin’s hand, Alatiel’s name changes to Zuleika, which also happens to be the traditional name for Potiphar’s wife, the Egyptian woman who tried to seduce Joseph. This biblical story is referenced in both versions of Babetta, and seems to have exerted a special force on Hermalin. And how could it not have? Being, as it is, one of the shund-ier parts of the Hebrew bible.14 *** “Madonna Babetta” and “Pasquerella”, in Yiddish and in English, are but two of countless examples of unlicensed literary appropriations. And although they are, in a sense, rather poor forgeries, they reveal the curious and irreverent ways in which literature is reproduced and kept alive across the boundaries of class and nation by means of adaptation. Boccaccio was an adapter himself: he took material for the Decameron from the whole wealth of narratives that were available to him — from French, Italian, and Latin sources — which in turn adapted stories of non-European origin, probably composed in Arabic and Sanskrit.15 Boccaccio reworked them as he saw fit, and wove them together to create his opus. The Decameron itself was an anthology of adaptations, held together by a well-wrought frame narrative. A history of translation is incomplete without a proper charting of the muddied streams of unlicensed adaptation, false attribution, and pseudotranslation. Born beside on tributary of the Dniester and buried near the Hudson, Roth, like Hermalin, called this contentious space home. As did Boccaccio, some six-hundred years prior. But while the Decameron has been thoroughly canonized, the texts that Roth, Hermalin, and their comrades produced by these practices have been forgotten, relegated to the dustbin of literary studies as shund, marginalized as curiosities. A shame, because texts of this sort constituted an outsized proportion of the material that readers actually read. Texts like these, and not the canonized classics, were the bread and butter of the popular press. To understand the functions and methods of translation as they were and are — not as they are supposed to be — we must turn attention to these stories. Boccaccio, Hermalin, and Roth all belong to the same tradition. They are collators, adaptors, collectors, and tellers of tales. And if we are to study them, then we must be too. All the more so because Hermalin and Roth did not provide frame narratives for their stories: they published no acknowledgements with their texts; none of that sinew which connects the femur to the hip. Perhaps out of piety, that fleshy byproduct, the origin of shund, was thrown away. So it is up to us to produce the frame story for Hermalin and Roth — to bring bones together, put tendons and flesh upon them. This is done by problematizing these fraught and fascinating moments of transmission: fleshing out the story. Or, otherwise, by fishing around in the trash. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 17, 2024

Jonah Lubin and Maria Laurids Lazzarotti

essay

2024-05-01T21:47:57.442484

anna-atkins-cyanotypes

Rhapsodies in Blue Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes By Paige Hirschey December 6, 2023 In an era when the Enlightenment’s orderly vision of the natural world began to unravel, Anna Atkins produced the world’s first photography book: a collection of cyanotypes, created across a decade beginning in 1843, that captured algal forms in startling blue-and-white silhouettes. Paige Hirschey situates Atkins’ efforts among her naturalist peers, discovering a form of illustration that, rather than exhibit an artist’s mastery over nature, allowed specimens to “illustrate” themselves. In the preface to his 1844 book, The Pencil of Nature, English inventor Henry Fox Talbot described his “little work” as the “first attempt to publish a series of plates or pictures wholly executed by the new art of Photogenic Drawing.”1 Talbot had grandiose ambitions for the future of photography — a medium he had played a role in creating — but this experimentation was already well under way. He was not, as he claimed, the first person to publish a book of photographic prints. That distinction belongs to an amateur botanist named Anna Atkins. Starting in the early 1840s, Atkins created hundreds of cyanotypes, a photographic process in which paper is treated with a chemical solution before being exposed to sunlight. When objects are left on the treated paper — British ocean plants, in Atkins’ case — over time they produce a white silhouette against an inky blue ground. Bound together, Atkins’ images served as an illustrated supplement to the phycologist William Henry Harvey’s Manual of British Algae (1841). This arrangement was typical at the time, when printing text and images in a single book would have been prohibitively expensive. Indeed, in this and many other ways, Atkins’ work assumed the standard conventions of botanical illustration, and were it not for her use of the novel medium, British Algae would have most likely been forgotten to history. As it is, Atkins has become a posthumous celebrity, raised from obscurity in the 1980s by art historian Larry Schaaf as quite possibly the world’s first woman photographer.2 Today, her cyanotypes — of ferns as well as algae — are housed in the collections of some of the finest museums in the world and have come to be understood primarily as objets d’art, prized less for their scientific contributions than their artistic merit. Yet beyond their aesthetic innovations, these images convey something important about the understanding of the natural world at a time of scientific upheaval, even if this was not their creator’s explicit intent. By her own admission, Anna Atkins (née Children) turned to the medium of cyanotypes because she felt they could best capture the minute details of the algal specimens that were the subject of her first photographic book.3 But by the time Atkins published British Algae, she had already demonstrated her affinity for botanical drawing. After her mother died in her infancy, Atkins was raised by her father, a chemist, mineralogist, and zoologist who gave her a scientific education that would have been uncommon for a woman at that time. Under his guidance, she took up drawing at a young age and illustrated a companion to his translation of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Genera of Shells in 1823. Her prior achievements with hand-drawing naturally lead one to wonder why she would choose to turn to cyanotypes, a more costly and in many ways less practical medium, and there are potential insights to be found in the long evolution of scientific illustration as a genre. Atkins’ illustrational and photographic work situated her within an artistic tradition that stretches back nearly two millennia, with conventions that have evolved over time to suit its users’ needs. Among the earliest iterations of botanical illustration were manuals or “herbals” that helped medical practitioners identify plants with therapeutic properties. In the 1600s, naturalists began documenting the exotic flora they encountered during exploratory trips to the Americas, Africa, and Asia, producing lavishly illustrated books for the homebound European scholar. But the so-called Golden Age of botanical illustration came later, coinciding with the height of the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. During this period, one of the primary aims of botanical illustrators was to contribute to the total understanding of the natural universe, a goal that was understood to be not just theoretically possible but actually achievable. In the field of botany, one of the most prolific contributors to the Enlightenment project was Carl Linnaeus, who developed a standardized system for identifying and naming all manner of flora and fauna. His popularization of binomial nomenclature provided a globally uniform set of species names, while his taxonomy offered an orderly system whereby plants could be divided into genera based almost solely on the structure and number of their reproductive organs, discounting most other features. Linnaeus was handsomely rewarded for his contributions to the field. He was known in his time as the “Prince of Botanists” and was knighted by the King of Sweden in 1758, but this popularity can largely be attributed to the fact that his work reaffirmed the already popular notion that the universe was an orderly system just waiting to reveal its secrets to the keen minds capable of deciphering them. By the time Atkins was working a century later, this orderly vision of the world had begun to unravel. A confluence of scientific discoveries — from more accurate theories about the age of the earth to the discovery of previously unknown organisms in the fossil record — had led many naturalists, even those who had previously believed in the fixity of species, to hypothesize that the plants and animals that lived in their time had not existed since the world’s beginning but had instead evolved from entirely different species through interactions with their environment. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck put forward his theory on the “transmutation of species” as early as 1802.4 Thirty years later, Goethe proposed that “[t]he plant forms which surround us were not all created at some given point in time and then locked into the given form, [rather,] they have been given . . . a felicitous mobility and plasticity allowing them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places.”5 These whispers eventually culminated in Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, the product of more than two decades of agonizing research. It is difficult to say just how much Atkins may have been influenced by these ideas. She was surely kept apprised of important discoveries by her father, who played an active role in multiple scientific societies until his death in 1852, but there is no written evidence to suggest that she was particularly invested in the evolutionary debates of the era. Even so, scientific data and how it is presented has always played a part in forming, challenging, or reinforcing its viewers’ understanding of the world, and for all their apparent adherence to tradition, Atkins’ cyanotypes offered a starkly different vision of nature than the one that predominated in her time. The visual conventions of most nineteenth-century botanical illustration had helped uphold the idea that species were discrete, innate, and unchanging. Specimens were typically displayed alone on a white ground, devoid of environmental context. Although fidelity was paramount, artists would omit distracting imperfections from their drawings, and the final image was often the composite of multiple specimens, implying the existence of a platonic ideal. Sometimes the central subject was surrounded by additional views of the plant in various life stages, or in cross-section, if significant features were obscured in the primary drawing. These conventions suited the purposes of identifying and codifying plant species, but they also reflect a scientific approach that, to quote the ethnobiologist Scott Atran, “emerged by decontextualizing nature, by curiously tearing out water lilies from water so that they could be dried, measured, printed, and compared with other living forms detached from local ecology and most of the senses.”6 Upon initial examination, a similar charge could be made against Atkins, whose practice necessitated tearing her subjects from their environs and likewise presented them alone on the page, though in her case this was partly a limitation of her chosen medium. Indeed, it was not only the natural context that was concealed by the cyanotype process, the specimen's surface and texture too was lost to these startling, blue-and-white silhouettes. Despite these limitations, one can’t help but see in Atkins’ images of algae and ferns the ghostly presence of their lost vegetal source, for the cyanotype necessarily preserves the vagaries of an individual specimen. Here the torn leaves and tangled roots, invariably captured by the photographic process, act as an affirmation of the materiality of their subject and help retain something of the amateur engagement with nature in which the plant is met on its own terms, never fully revealing itself to its human observer. Though not literally snapshots, her images capture their subjects at a particular moment in time, granting them an exceptional degree of authenticity when compared to traditional botanical illustration, whose practitioners were still largely involved in upholding a static and increasingly outdated vision of the world. By 1856, around the peak of Atkins’ career, Darwin would disparage his peers’ ongoing efforts to divide the earth’s biota into a set of fixed species as “trying to define the indefinable.”7 The evolutionist’s concerns dovetailed with a contemporaneous, albeit waning, strand of scientific inquiry, one that pushed back against the excesses of an increasingly strict positivism and saw the sensuous engagement with nature as a precondition for genuine understanding. This romantic approach to life science, what Goethe referred to as “tender empiricism”, prioritized the study of processes over organisms in isolation, and understood life to be mutually constituted, constantly changing form through its environmental interactions. As Amanda Jo Goldstein has argued, many of the naturalists and writers who subscribed to this school of thought, among them Goethe, Blake, Shelley, and Herder, put a premium on firsthand engagements with nature and aimed to capture their experiences in poetic modes that reflected their own capacity to affect and be affected by their objects of study.8 We can see a similar attitude displayed in Atkins’ cyanotypes. Rather than the artist choosing which parts of the plant to show or emphasize, her subject is put in a position to “draw” itself. Throughout her work, Atkins acts as an equal collaborator, arranging her specimens in desirable configurations but ultimately endowing each plant with the capacity to produce its own image. This authorial shift has important ramifications, not only for the study of Atkins’ work but for the understanding of the human relationship to the natural world at a time when the professionalization of science was still underway. While the Enlightenment vision of nature — and the illustrational conventions it produced — supported the idea that humans existed at the apex of a rigid hierarchy of being, Atkins’ cyanotypes, with all their individual imperfections, seem to hint at the existence of an underlying flux that could not be sufficiently captured by a fixed natural order. In many ways these images are the product of a distinct historical moment — cyanotypes would not catch on as a viable replacement for botanical illustration — but modern science has legitimized a version of the worldview that Atkins’ images tacitly endorsed. Increasingly we are discovering that the maintenance of a livable biome relies upon vast webs of entanglement, yet still many of us cling to the nineteenth-century notion that we are somehow set apart from the natural world. We have developed tools that allow us to “see” everything from individual atoms to the origins of our solar system, but all of this knowledge has not stopped us from plunging headfirst into the earth’s sixth mass extinction. To understand Atkins’ cyanotypes as merely the relics of an outdated science or the fanciful experimentation of a budding artist is to disregard their most salient contribution. Her images demonstrate a way of knowing the world that is based in mutuality rather than domination. We discount such a lesson at our peril. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

December 6, 2023

Paige Hirsche

essay

2024-05-01T21:47:57.794491

through-the-cheval-glass

Through the Cheval Glass Reproduction in the Photographs of Clementina Hawarden By Stassa Edwards January 24, 2024 Soon after Clementina Hawarden began taking photographs in the mid-19th century, her eye caught on doubles, reflections, her daughters glimpsed in the mirror. Stassa Edwards examines the role that reproduction — photographic, biological — plays in this oeuvre, and searches for the only person not captured clearly: Hawarden herself. Does Lady Clementina Hawarden’s hand hover, disembodied, next to her camera in this photograph? It seems to exist in an indeterminate state. At once present and absent, her hand is, as the Victoria & Albert’s labeling indicates, a “slight suggestion”, a blurred historical reproduction or a trick of the present-day viewer’s eyes, as they produce the history we want to see. This ghostly outline appears in one of the many photographs Hawarden took of her daughter Clementina, who wears a typically fussy Victorian dress, her right forearm leaning against a large mirror, fingers grazing her temple. Clementina’s contemplative pose frames the full-length mirror, demanding that the viewer’s gaze linger on both the reflective object and what is or is not captured in it. It is an unusual image: though roughly 775 of her photographs survive, this ghostly remnant is one of only two possible photographic traces left of the viscountess. In this accidental (or apocryphal) self-portrait, taken between 1859 and 1861, one can see a confluence of various forms of reproduction: that of biology, in the subject of her daughter, and that of the visual, in the technology of photography and the reflecting mirror. Hawarden is the source of this reproduction — creator of both the photograph and her daughter; her “authorship” is underscored by the placement of her camera in the mirror, and made uncanny by her spectral presence, real or imagined. The full-length mirror appeared regularly in Hawarden’s photographs, emerging as one of her favorite props in the makeshift studio she created in her South Kensington, London home located at 5 Princes Gardens.1 Within the frame of the photograph, the labor of motherhood and the labor of photography are compositionally bound by mirror-adjacent effects: doubling and reproduction, a rare coupling by one of early photography’s rare woman practitioners. If Hawarden’s “self-portrait” is nothing but a faint suggestion, then so is the surviving knowledge of the viscountess herself: In both official records and sparse family letters, she is little more than a ghostly impression. Few letters by her hand survive and there are no extant records of her social life as a member of the Victorian elite. Letters written by various family members are unsurprisingly focused on “Clemy’s” domestic life, particularly mothering, work that would have undoubtedly consumed the majority of her time. On her photography, the historical record is silent. As far as we know, she left no letters or diaries that shed light on her artistic practice. If she ever titled her photographs or depicted scenes from certain works of literature or art, those have been lost to time (the few photographs she exhibited were simply titled Photographic Studies or Studies from My Life). With what little that survives, the photographs are the only tangible material trace left of Hawarden; part of their allure is not simply their beauty or formal mastery but their mysteriousness. That is true of Hawarden, too: she is unknowable, little more than a spectral presence that haunts her work — a presence presumed rather than seen. Before Hawarden was a ghost she was a girl. The daughter of a Navy admiral and a Spanish woman regarded for her beauty, Hawarden’s (née Fleeming) childhood was unremarkable. Virginia Dodier recounts that Hawarden and her sisters were “trained and encouraged in what is now termed ‘accomplishment art,’ the type of arts education then available to young girls of the middle and upper classes.”2 After some obligatory time on the continent, she returned to London and met her future husband. At twenty-three years old, she married Cornwallis Maude, the future fourth Viscount Hawarden, significantly elevating her social status if not her immediate financial status. Hawarden’s in-laws objected to the match. Her cousin, John, 13th Lord of Elphinstone, described the situation in an 1845 letter: “Poor Clemy!” he wrote, “I hope she will be happy, but it is a sad thing to marry into a family that is unwilling to receive you–& it requires a great deal of love on the part of the husband to make up for the want of it in the others”.3 Despite the disapproval, Hawarden understood that her primary occupation as a future viscountess was to produce an heir, a job she undertook with enthusiasm. Between 1846 and her death, aged forty-two, in early 1865, Hawarden gave birth to ten children, eight of whom lived to adulthood and one of whom had the good sense to be a boy.4 Her three eldest daughters, Isabella, Clementina, and Florence, became her most familiar models, assisting their mother in her photographic endeavors. Her sister Anne once described her in a letter as a “great baby lover.”5 It is a point worth emphasizing that Hawarden would have spent most of her adult life pregnant or with an infant in arms. Nearly twenty years separate her eldest and youngest daughters, and it was in that fertile domestic landscape that Hawarden began experimenting with photography, no idle pastime but a labor-intensive process. The work of motherhood and photography were inextricable, as suggested by her surviving prints. In an 1854 letter, by which point Hawarden had five children, her uncle remarked on her maternal care: “I never saw nicer children or better brought up. . . . It seems strange [that] Clemy who could never keep her own shawl in order & whose devotion to her children seemed to spoil a whole generation, but her good sense and regard to duty has kept all right.”6 It is unknown why Hawarden decided to become a photographer, a laborious and messy pursuit that would have been an unusual undertaking for a woman of rank. Nor is it known when exactly Hawarden began taking photographs, or how she learned the complicated wet collodion process she preferred, but as Dodier notes, “the speed with which she became proficient is impressive.”7 The earliest surviving images are from 1857, taken at Dundrum House, the family’s estate in Ireland. Hawarden’s husband inherited Dundrum when he assumed his title in October 1856, making the couple some of the wealthiest landowners in the British Isles and drastically altering their financial circumstances. Dundrum features significantly in her early works: Hawarden took stereoscopic photographs of the landscape around the estate, perhaps suggesting an early interest in the medium's doubling effect that would define her mature art. Her early figural photography had an unsurprisingly amateurish quality, showing a photographer who was still learning the subtle manipulation of light and shadow. In many of these photographs, her family proved themselves eager models, dressing up as picturesque peasants and playing stock roles before her camera. Even their dogs had parts. As tableaux vivants, the images are charming records of an aristocratic family at play, but they show little of the sophisticated photographer who would emerge a few years later. Hints of Hawarden’s interest in mirroring began to appear in photographs she took of Clementina on the grounds of Dundrum. In one particularly compelling photograph, her daughter is outside, dwarfed by a massive tree, her body and face turned to offer the camera her profile. Clementina’s straight stance is mimicked by the tree’s trunk, even as one of the tree’s massive branches seems to purposefully bend to cradle and frame Clementina’s form. The contemplative pose, combined with Hawarden’s compositional coupling of her daughter and nature, conjures up the romantic tone of Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits from the previous century. In 1859, Hawarden and family moved to the newly constructed home in South Kensington. There, it seems, she was able to secure a governess for her children, giving her more time and space to devote to photography. She converted rooms on the second floor of the house into her studio and shifted primarily to indoor scenes. Although there are numerous photographs of her younger children, husband, and other relatives from 1859 until her death, her three eldest daughters stood most regularly in front of her camera’s lens.8 Hawarden, Isabella, Clementina, and Florence must have spent a significant amount of time in the studio, producing and posing for photographs. The space was innately gendered — one where a mother and her daughters collaborated, artfully arranging and costuming themselves. In Hawarden’s studio, “women”, Lindsay Smith writes in Politics of Focus, “play all the parts.”9 While the photographs might look like play, particularly the fancy dress scenes in which the narrative or inspirational source has been lost, producing a photograph was difficult and time-consuming. It seems that Hawarden’s daughters helped her develop her prints as well, laboring alongside their mother from conception to realization. She appears to have been exceptionally interested in posing her eldest daughters in front of mirrors — it was a motif she returned to repeatedly. Again and again, the photographs allude to the visual concept of doubling. In one particularly sophisticated example, taken between 1861–62, Hawarden captured Clementina gazing into the same full-length cheval mirror, hair bound to show her neck, a white blouse arranged to reveal a bare shoulder. The light from the balcony windows on Hawarden’s second-floor studio gives the photograph a tenebristic contrast, illuminating Clementina’s shoulder and the folds of her skirt while simultaneously throwing the reflection of her face into darkness. In 1863, after seeing Hawarden’s prints in an exhibition, a writer for the Photographic News remarked on Hawarden’s “darling lighting” and “artistic effects of light and shade”, comparing her manipulation of light to the techniques of Rembrandt.10 An attractive young woman gazing into a mirror is, of course, a recurring motif in the history of art. Venuses like Diego Velazquez’s gazed into mirrors and so did penitent Magdalens who warn viewers of the fleetingness of life. Painters were no doubt drawn to mirrors because of the visual tricks they could explore and, for artists like Velazquez, reflective glass allowed the painter to simultaneously show his attractive model from a variety of angles. For photographers in the nineteenth century, however, the mirror was rich with meaning about their very medium. Since William Henry Fox Talbot published the six volumes of The Pencil of Nature (1844–46), describing his calotype photographs as “the agency of Light alone”, photography was perceived to be unique because it was anchored in its fidelity to detail. But Victorian photographers also understood that those very details — flattening and still — often rendered a photograph otherworldly. They dubbed the camera a “magic mirror”. As Susan Fagence Cooper writes, the description “not only commented on its mimetic accuracy but also its power to make the once-familiar mirror image strangely unfamiliar, the site of definition oppositions, inversions, and ‘realistic’ apparitions.”11 In Oscar Rejlander’s composite print, The Infant Photography Giving the Painter an Additional Brush (ca. 1856), his allegorical representation of photography features a mirror in which Rejelander and his camera are shown in reflection. Rejlander weds the reproductive effects of the mirror with the medium of photography itself. If Rejlander made plain the link between mirror and photography, then Hawarden’s formal interest in coupling her daughters with mirrors added yet another layer to the allegory: reproduction extends not just to the photograph but to Hawarden’s subjects. In two separate photographs of Clementina, both taken sometime between 1862 and 1863, she leans against the full-length mirror, her right arm supporting her elegant, nearly balletic contrapposto. In both she wears her underclothes; in one photograph she is barefoot emphasizing her state of undress. Though Clementina is shown from a variety of angles, her contemplative gaze resists the camera, as if she is too absorbed to notice its presence, grounding the image in the domestic sphere, a space that, for Hawarden, was also a working photography studio. As Smith has written regarding Hawarden’s photographic panoply of women, the “innocuous scenes of domestic contemplation represent a profound questioning of all that the seemingly knowable domestic sphere stands for in Victorian culture.”12 Hawarden’s photographs are saturated with a sense of strange unknowability, as that magic mirror of photography’s fidelity becomes something almost spectral. It seems likely that the photographs were taken in the same session since their only substantial differences are shoes, lighting, and the placement of a “negligee, blouse or peignoir” dangling on the mirror. Between these two photographs, Hawarden has posed and reposed her daughter, wedging her between the window and mirror emphasizing the structural tension of the photograph itself; she is posed between light and reproduction. “The mirror”, Craig Owens wrote in his pivotal essay “Photography ‘en abyme’”, “doubles the subjects—which is exactly what the photograph itself does—it functions as a reduced, internal image of the photograph.”13 In these two photographs, Hawarden has angled the mirror away from her camera; its reflection only captures Clementina and a vague impression of the window. It is as if she has purposefully removed any trace of herself. And yet, proof of her “authorship” is tangibly evident in the photograph: Clementina exists, she stands before the camera. This doubling of the meaning of reproduction — underscoring Hawarden’s role as both biological and artistic creator — haunts her photographs: it is evident in her use of mirrors, in a possibly disembodied hand reflected in a mirror, and in her loving focus on her daughters. In another poignant portrait, this time featuring both Isabella and Clementina, the two sisters are pressed close together, and Clementina wraps her arm around Isabella’s shoulders in a moment of unguarded intimacy. Isabella sits facing the camera while Clementina is captured in profile. They form a reflection of one another; similar to the angles that would reflect in the studio’s full-length mirror. Isabella holds in her hand a photograph (perhaps an image of another sister) undoubtedly taken by her mother. Here again, Hawarden’s hand haunts just outside the photographic frame. A photograph within a photograph, the daughters who worked with their mother to create these images and ensured their material survival. After Hawarden’s quick and unexpected death from pneumonia, her photographs were gathered and pasted into an album for safekeeping, likely by one of her daughters since album-making was the province of women. It was passed to her granddaughter and the photographs remained unseen by the public for decades, eventually forgotten. Her granddaughter, Lady Clementina Tottenham, gifted nearly eight hundred of Hawarden’s photographs to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1939.14 The edges of the photographs are torn because, at some point, they were ripped out of the album. That Hawarden’s photographs continue to exist is a testament to a different kind of women’s work, that of reproducing knowledge through preservation and memory. Though the torn edges add to the enigmatic mood of Hawarden’s images, they are also persistent reminders that women “collect and keep photographs”, as Rosalind Coward observed, “guardians of the unwritten history of the family.” The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 24, 2024

Stassa Edwards

essay

2024-05-01T21:47:58.670454

from-snowdrop-to-nightjar

From Snowdrop to Nightjar Robert Marsham’s “Indications of Spring” (1789) By Hugh Aldersey-Williams March 7, 2024 What can we learn from observing the progression of spring — a hawthorn’s first flowering, the return of birdsong on a particular day? Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores the lifelong calendrical project of Robert Marsham, the Norfolk naturalist considered Britain's first phenologist. 21 January 2024: Today I notice the first snowdrops rising from leaf litter in the woods where I live a few miles from Stratton Strawless. Spring came late to much of the northern hemisphere in 1784. One reason we know this is because of records made by Robert Marsham of Stratton Strawless in Norfolk, England, in which he noted that his hawthorns began to leaf on April 22, fully two months later than in recent previous seasons, and the latest by far in all the forty-eight years he had been keeping records. The anomaly was due to an eruption of the Lakagígar volcanic fissure in Iceland that past June, which had led to a hot, cloudy summer followed by an extremely hard winter in much of Europe. In 1736, while still in his twenties, Marsham embarked on his lifetime project of recording what he was to call his “Indications of Spring”. He noted down the dates of biological events related to the indigenous flora and fauna, and made more general observations too. During the exceptionally cold winter of 1739–40, for example, he wrote that many of his trees split apart and the urine froze in his chamber pot. In Norwich and surrounding areas, there were food riots “for which some were hang’d at ye next Assizes”.1 As a prominent landowner, Marsham served for much of his long life on local assizes juries, and, fearful of revolutions like those in America and France, played his part in handing down these harsh sentences. Although most of his journals and letters have been lost over time, “Indications of Spring” has survived because, after a half-century of assiduous data entry, he presented his accumulated findings to the Royal Society. To Joseph Banks, the society’s president, Marsham wrote: “As I know of your boundless curiosity, I think it possible that an imperfect Calendar of some few articles of Spring, many years past, may afford you some amusement.”2 The calendar was published in the society’s journal, Philosophical Transactions, the following year as a tabulation on three foldout pages. The table shows how the project developed in Marsham’s mind. In the left-hand column, he dates all his observations by year, from 1736 to 1788. He begins tentatively with only a few obvious items, such as when he first hears the song thrush and the arrival of the first swallow, entering the date in the appropriate box in the table. Sometimes, he notes when an observation was made in another county, presumably while he was travelling. It is a few years before he settles into his methodology, developing a full list of twenty-seven items of flora and fauna recorded at home entirely on his own estate, selected so as to cover the whole spring season from winter to early summer. They include the leafing and flowering of hawthorn and the leafing dates of ash, oak, elm, beech, birch, hornbeam, and chestnut trees, as well as the dates on which birds such as the cuckoo and nightingale began to sing. The snowdrop flower is among the earliest things he expects to see. The last anticipated observation of the season is the distinctive calling of the nightjar, which he terms the “Churn Owl”, and which is still easily heard on warm evenings in the area today. Marsham continued to record this information until his death at the age of eighty-nine. 23 January 2024: I hear (but in the ivy cannot see) rival song thrushes trying out a few riffs for the mating season. Born in 1708, Marsham inherited his father’s heathland estate north of Norwich in 1751. The sandy soil was too poor for growing crops or even grass for grazing — hence the local name Strawless. Instead, Marsham planted trees — tens of thousands, maybe even millions, of mainly deciduous species, chosen for their longevity over fast-growing pines — and in doing so transformed the landscape. Marsham’s way with trees influenced the famous landscape gardener Humphry Repton, and they became friends in their old age. After Marsham’s death in 1797, Repton hoped to publish his notes on tree planting as a book, but the idea never came to fruition. Repton wrote that Marsham had achieved a “far better method of planting waste land, where enclosures are not permitted”.3 He was referring to Marsham’s choice of predominantly deciduous planting as well as his method of grouping and rooting the saplings. Repton followed this example in his artfully designed landscapes for many grand English country houses. “I plant whenever I have leisure”, Marsham wrote.4 Only a few of his trees may still be discovered today. A giant twisted sycamore, which stands across the road from Stratton Strawless Hall, bears a sign attesting to its protected status as of 1995, but it is guarded by its own rotting fallen boughs and surely hasn’t long to live. A cedar planted in 1747 has grown to more than thirty metres. You can’t get close enough to hug its eight-metre girth as it lies within the bounds of a farm heavily armoured with hostile signage. It can best be seen from afar in any case, standing protectively head and shoulders above the surrounding mature woodland. Marsham also corresponded with Gilbert White, the most noted British naturalist in this period, who recorded the arrival dates of migratory birds to his Hampshire estate at Selborne. White praised Marsham as “a painful [i.e. painstaking] and accurate naturalist”.5 White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) was published in the same year as Marsham’s “Indications of Spring”, and thereafter the two men struck up a correspondence, although they never met. They compared notes on the sizes of the trees they had each planted in boyhood some seventy years earlier. One oak of Marsham’s had attained a girth of twelve and a half feet since he planted it at the age of twelve. “Perhaps you never heard of a larger Oak & the planter living”, he bragged.6 They also swapped notes about migration at a time when many people believed that birds simply hibernated during the winter rather than making long journeys. In October 1792, Marsham wrote to White with a truly remarkable find: “My man has just now shot me a bird which was flying about my house: I am confident I have never seen its likeness before.”7 The bird proved to be a wallcreeper — and the first recorded sighting of the species in the British Isles. Marsham’s almost exact contemporary, the Swedish pioneer of biological taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, also recorded the dates when trees flowered and fruited, but did not start until 1750 when he finally settled down after many travels and became the rector of Uppsala University. There are many who have made similar observations ever since. For example, the American writer Henry David Thoreau recorded the dates on which many of his plants first flowered for nearly a decade in the nineteenth century. Noticing signs of spring is not confined to the scientifically minded, of course. It is an idea with a long provenance. Buddhist monks in Japan were recording the arrival of the cherry blossom as far back as the ninth century. Some of Marsham’s “data points” (such as the swallow and the cuckoo) have long held a place in popular lore and folk songs. The old English saying “Ne’er cast a clout till May be out” — a warning not to remove outer clothes too soon in the year — is usually supposed to refer to the month of May. But English May weather is highly variable, and it is more likely that the saying refers to the May tree, or hawthorn, which generally flowers at some point during that month (long after it has come into leaf). Whether it does so early or late is determined chiefly by the weather conditions, making it a more reliable index for an appropriate choice of dress than a calendar date. Robert Marsham’s project was handed down in the family and only came to a halt in 1958 when his great-great-great-granddaughter Mary died and her descendants were advised that their amateur contribution was no longer required, presumably judged to be no match for modern scientific methods. Despite its abrupt termination, it is the unbroken long run — 222 years — of Marsham’s “Indications of Spring” that gives it lasting scientific worth. There are a few patchy early records for places in the UK, but Marsham’s is the first truly systematic dataset, according to Tim Sparks, a professor of zoology and quantitative biology at the universities of Cambridge, Liverpool, and Poznań. “It is the longest such record for the UK and has been of immense value in determining the variability in spring and in its response to prevailing weather conditions. He inspired many others to do likewise.”8 Marsham’s record stretches back far enough that it can serve as a baseline for the investigation of changes that have already happened in the more recent past as well as for ongoing studies of the present situation. One merit of Marsham’s idea is surely that it is so easily grasped. You do not need to be a scientist to understand his results — or to begin recording your own data. In the mid-nineteenth century, the observation of seasonal changes in nature acquired its own name — phenology — as the gentleman scientists of the Victorian age began to add their contributions. Today, Marsham’s pioneering work inspires successor projects around the world, many of them examples of “citizen science”, relying on the participation of members of the public. The UK Phenology Network, set up by the Woodland Trust and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, has more than 20,000 participating amateur recorders. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew organized the Great Plant Hunt, a citizen science project in which schoolchildren in Britain were encouraged to record their observations of buds, flowers, and leaves of different plants over one week in May. Extended nationwide, the project forms a snapshot illustrating the progress of spring in different regions — spring advances northward at about 2 mph (walking pace), as Marsham and White had found when they compared dates of their specific observations. These were usually found to be a couple of days apart, reflecting the fact that Stratton Strawless lies about 100 miles north of Selborne. Data can be adduced indirectly as well. For example, Professor Sparks has found that the dates of flower festivals are being moved forward in the year, a sure sign of earlier blooms. In other circumstances, photographs taken annually at significant occasions that fall on a particular day can be used to reveal their own accidental record of the shifting seasons. Phenology might fairly be described as one of the earliest sciences — crop yields are known to have been recorded 3,000 years ago. But it now has a magnified contemporary relevance because it provides not only an historic benchmark, in records such as Marsham’s, but also a continuing measure of climate change. In the short run, phenological records reveal that natural occurrences are highly responsive to different seasonal conditions. The indications of spring are subject to more movement than we often imagine there to be, linked to weather factors such as frost, rainfall, and hours of sunshine. “It shows the variability in the timing of spring events”, says Professor Sparks. “These may typically be two to three months — much longer than human memory might falsely estimate.”9 Nor does everything happen in concert. Different indications of spring may be advanced or retarded by quite different amounts in the same place in any given year, even though environmental conditions are apparently the same. Comparison of phenological data with concurrently recorded temperatures reveals, for example, that beech trees come into leaf four days earlier for each 1°C rise in temperature, whereas birch will leaf ten days earlier. Climate change is likely to exacerbate these effects. Research published in the journal Nature by the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in 2016 indicates that seasonal events like those observed by Marsham are in general more sensitive to changes of temperature than to changes in other factors such as rainfall. Such disruptions have the potential to “desynchronise ecological interactions and thereby threaten ecosystem function”, according to Stephen Thackeray and his coauthors.10 This table of data is now almost all the evidence left of Marsham’s work with nature. At Stratton Strawless itself, much of his plantation was felled for timber during the world wars. In place of his rich deciduous woods, there are now fast-growing conifers. The house he knew was lost to fire a few years after his death, and its joyless nineteenth-century replacement now forms the office of a mobile home park. (Marsham always found new buildings a disappointment, as they began to decay from the moment of their completion, whereas a tree just grew in majesty.) 17 February 2024: During what is being reported as the warmest February on record, the hawthorn is beginning to come into leaf. What do I learn from my effort to follow in Marsham’s footsteps? I find that not all my observations fall earlier than his of 250 years ago. My snowdrops appeared nearly four days later than Marsham’s averaged overall date, whereas my thrush sang eleven days earlier. My hawthorn leafing date fell more than three weeks earlier than Marsham’s average. This may say little more than that we experienced a cold snap in January followed by an unusually mild first half of February. But, given that February is heading toward breaking numerous heat records both nationally and globally, it would also seem evidential of climate change. Perhaps Marsham found, as I am finding, that close observation changes your perception of the season. The detection of the very earliest signs, such as snowdrops, before any general warming is felt, holds out hope of renewal. Spotting one sign shortly after another exposes the endless longueur of winter as a sham, and is a reminder that time is in fact hurrying on. Spotting several signs in rapid succession is further proof that spring is gathering pace and a promise of the abundance of nature to come. “The spring is coming by a many signs”, the poet John Clare wrote in the century after Marsham.11 I am submitting this article on February 20 in time for you to read it during the spring (if you live in the northern hemisphere). I have not yet seen the rowan or the beech or the birch come into leaf, I have not yet heard the frogs and toads begin to croak, I have not yet observed the first arriving swallow. But if you have the chance to get outside, you might catch them yet, and become part of Marsham’s great experiment. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 7, 2024

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

essay

2024-05-01T21:47:58.926298

little-boney

Little Boney James Gillray and Napoleon’s Fragile Masculinity By Peter W. Walker March 21, 2024 Of all the caricatures of Napoleon Bonaparte, representations of the French emperor as a miniscule megalomaniac continue to haunt the historical imagination to an unparalleled degree. Peter W. Walker searches for the origins of “Little Boney” in the early 19th-century caricatures of James Gillray, the English illustrator who took Napoleon down a peg by diminishing his reputation and scale to the point of absurdity. Napoleon Bonaparte is beloved by a certain kind of military history buff as the epitome of “great man” history: the genius who bends the world to his will. Ridley Scott seems to have aimed for something different with his blockbuster Napoleon (2023). The movie might be read as a study of fragile masculinity, an attempt to reinterpret the “great man” through the lens of twenty-first century sensibilities. Joaquin Phoenix is stiff, insecure, petulant, and terrible at sex. He is above all small: physically, emotionally, metaphorically. His relationship with the Empress Josephine is bizarre. “You think you’re great”, she tells him, “You’re just a tiny little brute who is nothing without me. Say it!” He obeys. It is not so easy to come up with an original interpretation of someone who has already haunted the European historical imagination for well over two hundred years. In all the above, Scott is echoing contemporaneous British wartime propaganda, whether consciously or not. He is particularly indebted to the brilliant caricaturist James Gillray. Often credited as the “father of the political cartoon”, Gillray created the character of “Little Boney”: a miniscule, cuckolded megalomaniac; a dictator with an inferiority complex. Gillray’s satirical cartoons were so successful, and so funny, that they established an image of Napoleon which remains with us to this day. Scott’s Napoleon is not so different. No wonder that French critics hate it. Gillray’s determination to take Napoleon down a peg was a response to the emperor’s own prodigious self-aggrandizement. His chameleon-like image is seen in the famous paintings of Jacques-Louis David: a Roman-style military leader in Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801–05); a modern statesman in The Emperor Napoleon in his Study at the Tuileries (1812); a new Holy Roman Emperor in The Coronation of Napoleon (1807). In the last, he places the imperial crown on his own head, overseen by a compliant Pius VII. (Napoleon had kidnapped the previous Pope, Pius VI, who died in captivity in Paris.) He is legitimized by an ancient, sacred Catholic ceremony, in an overture to France’s still-powerful royalists, even as he undercuts the traditional Christian meaning of a coronation, replacing it with one of meritocracy; he is the heir to Charlemagne, but he got there himself. The emperor scored a still more surprising propaganda victory with Emmanuel de la Cases’ The Memorial of Saint Helena, published in 1823. After he was defeated the first time, Boney was exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba, but easily escaped. The second time around, he found himself banished to a small rock in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean named Saint Helena. Here, he dictated his memoirs, rehabilitating his reputation and winning a new generation of admirers. That certain kind of military history buff’s ongoing admiration for Napoleon is a product less of the man’s military or political abilities than of his gift for propaganda. The “golden legend” of Napoleonic propaganda met its match in Britain’s well-developed tradition of satire and political caricature. Britain enjoyed a climate of relative press freedom, rancorous party politics, and a robust market for the printed word and image: conditions which fostered the work of caricaturists such as the famous William Hogarth (1697–1764). Compared to Hogarth, Gillray’s work was more focused on politics. It was also more shocking (and remains so to this day). Even in the uproarious world of Georgian satire, his cartoons stand out as particularly grotesque (such as his 1799 depiction of The Gout); vulgar (as in 1792’s Fashionable Contrasts, depicting the Duke of York’s marriage to Frederica Charlotte); and occasionally devastating (as in 1793’s The Blood of the Murdered, a pre-Napoleon critique of the French Revolution). Gillray’s own life was far less colorful than these larger-than-life cartoons would suggest. Born in Middlesex in 1756, his father was a veteran, Chelsea pensioner, and member of the Moravian Brethren, a gloomy Protestant sect. Gillray set out to make a career as a “straight” illustrator, but meeting with little success slipped instead into a less respectable profession as a caricaturist. He spent the 1780s satirizing English politics, treating Whigs and Tories alike with equal cynicism, though eventually falling in with the Tory MP and future Prime Minister George Canning. He lodged with the spinster Hannah Humphrey, who published his cartoons. They came close to marrying on one occasion, but Gillray got cold feet at the church door. His work on the French and their Revolution propelled this colorless man into celebrity. Gillray had good reason to dislike the French: his father had lost an arm during an earlier war with them. Gillray himself accompanied another artist to France in 1793 to make sketches for a painting of the Siege of Valenciennes. Thereafter, he increasingly turned his sights on the Parisian mob (the sans-culottes) and their English sympathizers. The resulting cartoons were extraordinarily popular. In 1802, one royalist French émigré described the “veritable madness” when a new Gillray drawing appeared: “you have to make your way in through the crowd with your fists”.1 In Very Slippy-Weather (1808), Gillray depicts an eager crowd assembled to view his prints, displayed in the window of the printer’s shop. (Cartoons such as these were not printed in newspapers but were instead sold directly by the printer.) There are over two thousand British prints of Napoleon Bonaparte, of which Gillray produced around forty. His were by far the most influential, however, notable for their relentless attacks on Napoleon’s stature. Gillray’s pocket-sized Boney stands in contrast to earlier British caricatures such as Isaac Cruikshank’s The French Bugabo (1797), representing Napoleon as grotesque and monstrous. Gillray’s first caricatures of him are similar. In Buonaparte hearing of Nelson’s Victory (1798), the general is arrogant, disdainful, bloodthirsty, and — at this point — still average-sized. This would change in 1803. The short-lived Peace of Amiens broke down, war resumed, and Britain braced itself for a French invasion. Alongside the military preparations, the invasion scare saw an outpouring of popular loyalism: volunteering, song-singing, the avid consumption of anti-French propaganda. Gillray’s “Little Boney” was born in this context. In that same year, he gets steadily smaller in Introduction of Citizen Volpone, German Nonchalance, Evacuation of Malta, and Maniac Ravings, shrinking as the French threat to Britain grew. Buonaparte, 48 Hours after Landing and John Bull Offering Little Boney Fair Play minimized (quite literally) the danger posed by a French invasion. “Little Boney” continued diminishing to the point of absurdity. He becomes an animal in Death of the Corsican Fox (1803); a baby in The Genius of France (1804); and — inevitably — a six-inch Lilliputian in The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver (1804). Other cartoonists quickly got in on the joke, as in 1803’s Britannia Repremanding a Naughty Boy!, John Bull Teazed by an Earwig, and The King’s Dwarf Plays Gulliver a Trick. One printed collection of patriotic songs was similarly full of bellowing threats against “Boney the Pigmy”.2 Gillray’s tiny Napoleon served, in the first place, to bring a threatening dictator down to size. Charlie Chaplain did much the same thing to Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940). But Gillray was also mocking Napoleon’s low social origins: he came not from France proper but from a family of minor Corsican nobility. Thomas Rowlandson’s The Progress of the Emperor Napoleon (1808) shows him as a “Ragged Headed Corsican Peasant”. Gillray’s Democracy, or a Sketch of the Life of Buonaparte (1800) begins with his humble, impoverished origins. This was also a joke about Britons’ supposedly higher standard of living. “Little Boney”, as the name implies, is a skeletal figure, whereas Gillray inevitably drew Englishmen as stocky and well fed (dining on French warships in 1798’s John Bull Taking a Luncheon). “Little Boney” was not just a crack at a dictator, but also a class-based attack on the Napoleonic meritocracy and myth of the self-made man. British cartoonists’ mockery of Napoleon also had a sexual element. They drew him as cuckolded, impotent, and sexually insecure, humiliated by Josephine’s serial infidelities and belittled by his inability to produce an heir. Scott’s Napoleon, with its embarrassing sex scenes, also emphasizes these ideas, but here again Gillray’s cartoons not only got there first but were also far more severe than anything Scott was able to serve up. Gillray’s Ci-devant Occupations (1805) shows Josephine and Madame Talian dancing naked before Napoleon’s rival Paul Barras, while Napoleon himself peeps in from the corner. The scene takes place in Egypt, and the two women appear as orientalized dancing girls, playing tambourines and only half-concealed by a transparent curtain. Josephine, according to the caption, “is smaller & thin, with bad Teeth, something like Cloves”. Similarly, Charles Williams’ The Devil and his Protegée (1810) depicts Napoleon and the Austrian Archduchess Marie Louise on the morning after their wedding night. Holding a copy of the gynecological manual Aristotle’s Masterpiece, Napoleon pleads with the devil for help impregnating his new wife. She adjusts her garter, saying, “few husbands disturb their wives rest more than mine does, but it’s with starting & kicking in his sleep & crying have mercy on me.” One of the reasons why these British cartoonists had such fun on this subject is that Napoleon’s sexuality really was public knowledge. As he made the transition from First Consul of the French Republic to a hereditary Emperor of the French, his ability to reproduce — and thus his virility — became a matter of momentous geopolitical significance.3 More concretely, many of his letters to Josephine were intercepted and published during his lifetime. In 1796, he wrote to her from Italy: I hope that in a few days, I will be more happy . . . to give you proof of the ardent love that you inspire in me. . . . You know well enough that I cannot forget your little visits. You know very well, the little black forest . . . I kiss you there a thousand times and I wait with impatience for the moment I can be there again. . . . Kisses on your mouth, your eyelids, your shoulder, on you everywhere, everywhere! Within the month, he had discovered her affair with the army officer Hippolyte Charles, and wrote again, “I no longer love you. On the contrary I detest you” (conveniently forgetting his own infidelities).4 British newspapers of the time were not so far removed from today’s tabloids, and they gleefully printed letters such as these, making their author the subject of ridicule. Gillray’s diminutive and domineering “Little Boney” set the stage for an obsession with Napoleon’s psyche that would last through to the present day. Napoleon gives his name to a psychological disorder (of questionable veracity), the “Napoleon Complex”, which holds that short men are more likely to be aggressive in order to compensate for their physical shortcomings. Even today, the one thing everyone seems to know, or wants to know, about Napoleon is his height. Scott’s Napoleon plays on the same trope: in one scene, the general climbs on a stool in order to look a mummified Egyptian pharaoh in the eyes. By focusing relentlessly on psychology, the “black legend” put forward by British cartoonists such as Gillray mirrors the “golden legend” of pro-Napoleon propaganda. While Gillray suggested that Boney’s penchant for world conquest stemmed from a disordered personality, Napoleon depicted himself as a genius who remade Europe’s destiny through the force of his own courage and willpower. That idea has lent itself to the second (also questionable) psychological disorder which bears his name, the “Napoleon Delusion”: the idea that believing oneself to be Napoleon is a hallmark of madness. The idea has proved so influential in popular culture and mass media that a character adopting the distinctive hand-in-jacket pose has become an instantly recognizable shorthand for insanity, employed on Broadway in The Misleading Lady (1913), by Stan Laurel in Mixed Nuts (1922), by Bugs Bunny in Napoleon Bunny-Part (1956), and more recently, by Bender Bending Rodriguez in Matt Groening’s Futurama (2008–2013). The “golden legend” and the “black legend” are mirror opposites, but they ultimately reinforce one another. The first sees the dictator as the epitome of power and grandeur. The latter sees the dictator as fragile, insecure, and compensatory. Both focus on the dictator’s personality. Together, they lead us back to that certain kind of military history buff and the obsession with “great man” history. Gillray’s cartoons are hilarious, but they imply that dictatorship is a therapist’s problem, to be explained by attention to the Napoleonic psyche. Scott’s Napoleon is more of the same, only less funny. But what of the social and cultural forces that led millions of French men and women to accept, and often enthusiastically celebrate, Napoleonic rule? The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 21, 2024

Peter W. Walker

essay

2024-05-01T21:47:59.602770

windows-onto-history

Windows Onto History The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997) By Thom Sliwowski April 3, 2024 Throwing people out of windows (or defenestrating them, as the Latin has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in Prague. From the Hussite revolt in the late Middle Ages through the Thirty Years’ War to modern instances of “autodefenestration”, Thom Sliwowski finds a national shibboleth imbued with ritual efficacy. It was the spring of 1618 and Matthias, Holy Roman Emperor and past King of Bohemia, had devised a plan that would prove calamitous. Seeking to reverse the concessions granted a decade prior by his brother and predecessor, Rudolf II, he tasked his deputies with reining in the rights of Bohemian Protestants. But these Protestants lived in a tradition of religious dissidence preceding Martin Luther by a century: they were accustomed to a degree of autonomous rule and religious freedom uncommon elsewhere in Habsburg realms. When Matthias’ deputies halted the construction of chapels in Klostergrab and Braunau, Protestants, noblemen, and free burghers found themselves united in their indignation. Ordinarily, these groups had few interests in common. At the time, they could not see — as subsequent historians, painters, and poets would — that they were already becoming Czech, and were about to take part in what, centuries later, would be retrospectively recast as a kind of idiosyncratic national ritual. Nor could Matthias and his advisors see that the Holy Roman Empire was standing before a historical precipice. Keen to meddle in local affairs, Matthias was shrewd enough to act through his zealous deputies. And it was to them that the gravity of this situation would first become apparent. Two Catholic deputies, Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice and Vilém Slavata of Chlum, had grown notorious for openly disavowing the Majestätsbrief: Rudolf II’s 1609 liberal guarantee of religious tolerance. When a Protestant assembly spurned by the shuttered chapels in Klostergrab and Braunau attracted a massive crowd, Martinice and Slavata began to worry. And when the count Jindřich Matyáš Thurn, elected defender of the Protestant faith, called for their execution, they realized it was already too late. The Catholic deputies had overplayed their hand; the mood among the infuriated townspeople was rising to a fever pitch. A large crowd followed the Protestant nobles to Hradčany Castle. They poured inside and to the upper floors, cornering Martinice and Slavata in a tower chamber. Shouting at, threatening, and then grabbing the deputies, they chucked Martinice out the window first. Slavata, meanwhile, held onto the ledge, begging for the Virgin’s intercession. In one final push, the crowd expelled him from the castle window as well. Only the deputies’ secretary remained. Shaking with fear, he clung to the prominent Protestant nobleman Joachim von Schlick for protection, but the defenestrators, as they would come to be called, peeled him off Schlick and tossed him out the window too. Exuberant, the Protestant rebels mocked these appeals to the Virgin Mary. But when two of them leaned out the window to heap more insults down upon their oppressors, what they saw left them flummoxed. Martinice and Slavata were alive, as was their secretary, and the three were already getting up to reach for a ladder extended by allies from a lower window in the castle. How the Catholic deputies survived this forty-foot fall was a mystery that has turned the defenestration into an object lesson in framing. Catholic propagandists insisted that the Virgin Mary had saved them: Slavata’s prayer for intercession worked, effecting a miracle that legitimated their cause. Protestant pamphleteers, on the other hand, noted that a pile of trash and human shit directly below the window had broken their fall. They may have survived, but only to remind others how loathsome was their attempt to quash local rights.1 Words seem inadequate to the task of describing something so outlandish, and yet “defenestration” comes close. This word is grammatically a compound nominalization — and a flagrantly Latinate one at that. “Fenestrate”, the verb ostensibly at its root, only appears a couple centuries later, carrying two unrelated technical usages in the fields of surgery and botany. From this we can surmise that “defenestration” was a linguistic artifact constructed intentionally. Perhaps it meant to lampoon the Latin of Bohemia’s Catholic rulers: in Czech it is simply “defenestrace”, a rare Latinate word in that language. The humor here derives from the fact that a form of free fall carries a name as clunky as the doctrines and mores of the Catholic rule it sought to swiftly overturn. Almost immediately, the task of illustrating the defenestration became paramount. A 1618 Catholic Flugblatt (or pamphlet) depicts Martinice and Slavata falling onto a courtyard paved with stones. An accompanying caption renders the event as legend: thanks to the Virgin’s intercession, the deputies’ lives were saved and they took refuge in a nearby cloister. Foolhardy political revolt is here transfigured into a leap of faith that furnishes its own proof: they were, after all, still alive when this image was printed. Regrettably, opposing Protestant pamphlets, depicting the pile of excrement that broke their fall, are harder to come by. Miracle or mere coincidence, the defenestration catalyzed a broader Bohemian uprising: the first eruption of what would become the Thirty Years’ War. News of the Prague defenestration traveled across Europe within the year; its images proliferated in contemporary pamphlets, fliers, and compendia of recent events. Centuries later, the act of defenestration would serve as a touchstone of Czech national identity and of Prague’s municipal history. But first it would be represented and re-invoked so many times that this concrete, historical event gradually became abstracted into a figure of thought. We find the seeds of this abstraction in an engraving that was printed in the Theatrum Europaeum: a German historical chronicle published by Matthäus Merian in the mid-seventeenth century. Here, partisan framings are eschewed in favor of neutral representation. Within the castle, men are hoisting the Catholic deputies to the windowsills while their secretary awaits his turn in the center of the image. The focus on him as the engraving’s central figure suggests the perennial question that haunts all news about violent revolts: who will be next? Of course, the 1618 defenestration would not be the last one to take place in Prague — but neither was it the first. Two centuries earlier, Jan Hus, a wildly popular theologian, inveighed against the Church, denouncing its political authority and its system of monetary indulgences. He also called for Mass to be celebrated not in Latin but in the local tongue, which was then named Bohemian but which we would now call Czech. To this end, Hus wrote his Orthografia Bohemica (1406–1412): the first dictionary of the Czech language, in which he invented the haček and the vowel-length markers, which make Czech spelling unique among European languages. This religious reformer and fervent grammarian was subsequently arrested, found guilty of heresy, and burned at the stake in 1415. By making him into a martyr, the Church had all but guaranteed Hus’ legacy.2 And his followers cemented this legacy by revolting. In 1419, they stormed the Novoměstská radnice, Prague’s “New Town Hall”, and threw three municipal consuls and seven citizens out of a window. With this violent spectacle, Hus’ followers, who would come to be known as Hussites, won the right to rule themselves and to worship as they chose. They retained this right until 1483, when King Vladislaus II stormed Prague and reestablished Catholic rule. Another defenestration followed, as these proto-Protestants tossed the Burgomeister and the corpses of seven town counselors out of various halls across the city. Again the spectacle worked: a religious reconciliation at the 1485 Peace of Kutná Hora established the Hussite and Roman Catholic faiths as equal before the law. Were the two defenestrations that opened and closed the Hussite Wars decisive for their outcome, or merely incidental? One could be forgiven for thinking that the act of defenestration, as violent as it is theatrical, seemed to carry some magical efficacy. A compelling ritual is one thing, but lasting historical efficacy is something else entirely. The Bohemian Revolt that followed the 1618 defenestration was decisively suppressed only two years later, in a battle on the outskirts of Prague between the Bohemian Confederation and the Holy Roman Empire. The 1620 Battle of White Mountain slammed shut the window of possibility for Czech self-determination, inaugurating a period of harsh Germanization lasting almost two centuries. Germanophone Catholic agents of the Empire suppressed the language and burned Czech books, under the pretext of a Counter-Reformation strategy aimed at stamping out the Hussite confession once and for all. No surprise, then, that when the Czech National Revival broke out in the early nineteenth century, it was led largely by radical lexicographers and philologists. Josef Dobrovský published a Czech grammar in 1809, and Josef Jungmann a five-volume Czech-German dictionary over the years 1834–1839.3 Together the two Josefs set down the medium in which Czech culture could flourish: poetry, painting, and history writing — all fueled by the heady currents of Romanticism — elaborated Czech-ness, making a nation out of the language’s speakers. The wave crested in 1848 with the eruption of the June Revolution in Prague. But this uprising, too, eventually failed. The most enduring artifact of the Czech National Revival was a sense of historical consciousness that recast the Prague defenestrations as national revolts avant la lettre. Aberrant curios no longer, the early modern defenestrations found new life as links in a chain that led directly to the 1848 Spring of Nations. The visual archive from the nineteenth century appears like an anchor line plunging into the abyss of the past. It is here we find the earliest depictions of the fifteenth-century Hussite defenestrations, such as an engraving from the Česko-Moravská Kronika of 1872. Written by Karel Vladislav Zap, a writer and pedagogue best known for popularizing Czech history, this book aimed to instruct the Czechs about who they were. Defenestration came to be at this point a national shibboleth: because they had thrown their enemies from castle windows, the reasoning seems to go, these Hussite rebels were, in fact, ancestors of the nationalists that we are today. To be Czech meant not only to speak the language, but also to be aware of defenestration’s significance. More than any other defenestration, it was the 1618 instance that captured the imagination of Romantic revolutionaries agitating for the Czech cause. A somewhat earlier painting, from 1844 by Karel Svoboda, stages this defenestration with all the trappings of the nineteenth-century Czech National Revival. Open books and reams of paper litter the left foreground, invoking the work of the lexicographers who codified the language. A toppled chair suggests authority overturned — a motif that later painters will repeat — and the open window looks to be smashed in a curious way. Though this is a historical painting, its call to revolutionary violence is rendered here in the present tense. Depictions like these elevated and abstracted the historical event of defenestration into something more significant than a milestone. Historical change might be called a “watershed” or a “turning point”, but certain events forge their own metaphors. The 1789 Storming of the Bastille evokes the tumult of the French Revolution, and the 1989 Fall of communism suggests the collapse of a system that turned out to be remarkably flimsy. “Defenestration” does something similar: for nineteenth-century Czech nationalists, these events (and how they model historical change) took on a poetic significance. Some historians surmise that the 1618 Protestant crowd was deliberately reenacting the earlier defenestrations; Czech nationalists certainly thought so, placing the Hussite and Protestant defenestrations in a line of succession that became a tradition and a figure for thinking about history.4 The apogee of painterly depictions of the 1618 event came a half-century later, in two paintings by Václav Brožík from 1890 and 1891. In the first, Pražská defenestrace roku 1618, the line of action moves leftward as the dynamic image expresses the eruption of affect that, for Brožík, defines this act. Martinice is halfway out the window while Slavata, stupefied, is being dragged the same direction. Their secretary is pinned to the desk among some papers, while in the foreground, under the window, lies a toppled chair. A throne overthrown, this chair perhaps embodies the anti-monarchic energy that nineteenth-century nationalists ascribed to the Protestant rebels fighting for political autonomy. The energy in this painting implies hydraulic forces at work: it is as if the upswell of revolutionary emotion tends naturally, automatically to the window, which is at once a release valve and an opening onto the future. If to look out a window is to imagine political possibility — the painting seems to say — then to throw somebody out a window is to make history happen. Brožík’s 1891 painting depicts the defenestration’s aftermath, showing how even the most ardent collective revolts can be stymied. In the adjacent room, exhausted on a chair, one of the escaped Catholic deputies recovers from their terrifying ordeal: miraculous or odious, the defenestration they survived nevertheless shook them to their cores. Among the crowd one finds some characters from the previous painting, including Count Jindřich Matyáš Thurn, in red. This crowd is kept at bay by the Princess Polyxena of Lobkowitz, a politically-active figure who played a significant role in the Bohemian Counter-Reformation. All the way to the right, an empty chair with a scepter laid atop it invokes monarchical authority preserved. Princess Polyxena single-handedly stands between the Protestant rebels and the accomplishment of their task, representing the forces that stood in the way of Bohemian self-determination and Czech national consciousness. However, by placing her at the center of the painting — and in this powerful pose: index finger pointing downward, face stern — Brožík created a far more ambiguous scene. Here, at least, it could go both ways: perhaps Polyxena was right to protect these artifacts of divine intercession. Already a figure for representing historical change, defenestration became the emblem of a uniquely Czech form of fatalism during the twentieth century. Writers took it up, elaborating and unfolding its significance, and made this idea into an object of obsession. The word’s curious meaning in this century is the strange son of its nineteenth-century usage: to grasp its significance we must briefly retrace its paternity. Of all the heroes of the Czech national cause, none looms larger than Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Born into a working-class Moravian family, he pursued philosophy in Vienna and Leipzig, studying under Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl. He wrote a habilitation thesis on the sociology of suicide: a topic that would prove eerily prescient. A scientific and progressive thinker, he married the American Charlotte Garrigue after meeting her in Leipzig, taking her surname as his second name. In 1918, after a lifetime spent championing the Czech cause, including during speeches given at the Treaty of Versailles, Tomáš Masaryk found himself elected president of the newly independent Czechoslovakia. Masaryk served as a widely beloved president until his death in 1935. Three years later, Hitler’s Third Reich would annex the Sudetenland: those border-regions of interwar Czechoslovakia inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans. So began the Second World War in Bohemia. If the 1618 defenestration spurred the Thirty Years’ War, what came to be known as the Fourth Defenestration of Prague concluded this one. The beginning of the end was heralded by the Soviet liberation of Prague in 1945. The Czech and Slovak Communist Parties, already popular in the 1946 elections, staged a coup d’état in February of 1948. They had reason to eliminate their opponents, and they soon set their sights on Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister, Jan Masaryk. The son of Tomáš Masaryk, Jan had served as minister plenipotentiary for the new nation in London since 1925. In 1940, with his country swallowed up by the Third Reich, he was appointed foreign minister of the Czechoslovak government in exile. A reluctant supporter of Stalin, he traveled to Moscow in April, 1945, to agree on Czechoslovakia’s foreign policy. (He had signed a twenty-five-year alliance with the Soviet leader two years prior.) With increasing disappointment, he observed the postwar developments in Prague until, on March 10, 1948, Masaryk was found dead in the courtyard of the foreign ministry wearing only his pajamas. He had fallen from his bathroom window. The official cause of death was listed as suicide, but in the popular imagination this event came to be called the Fourth Defenestration of Prague. The Czechoslovak authorities were quick to wrap up their investigation into Masaryk’s death, having determined that it was a suicide. But the case would be reopened, incredibly enough, half a century later. In 2004, the Prague Police enlisted forensic expert Jiři Straus to reexamine the evidence, and Straus found that Masaryk, “a heavy[set] man and certainly no athlete . . . would have landed much closer to the building if he had jumped.”5 Because he had fallen so far away from the Foreign Ministry, he must have been pushed. This official finding confirmed what most Czechs had already suspected: no suicide, Masaryk had been murdered on Stalin’s orders. While defenestrations both real and suggested continued to proliferate throughout the twentieth century after Masaryk’s death, many of them carry a dubious, autotelic quality: writers would pine to be defenestrated, but their desire comes to undo the act’s ritual efficacy. Can defenestration occur without the element of surprise, or without political rivals to carry it out? Is it possible to autodefenestrate? By fixating on the window, writers sprung the frames of what we could call traditional defenestration. In a recently published academic journal article on the subject, Hana Pichova counted in Kafka’s notebooks at least ten instances of “falling, jumping, or being forcibly thrown from windows”, adding that though such “thoughts occupied the writer more than fleetingly”, they only occupied him so long as he remained in Prague.6 Bohumil Hrabal, the pilsner-drinking bard of postwar Prague, was fixated enough on open windows and falling out of them that he wrote, in the spring of 1989, a text enigmatically entitled “The Magic Flute”, in which he assembles his own compendium of historical and literary defenestrations. This was far from the first time he wrote about defenestration, but never had he mustered such depressive pathos. The text meditates on the stymied protests in Prague, on the self-immolation of the student Jan Palach, and on the hopelessness of existence under the communist order, which would incidentally collapse just six months later. Hrabal mentions the early twentieth century poet Konstantin Biebl, who “jumped out of the window, but [who] first, and this was a long time before, . . . had Štyrský paint him a picture, of a man falling backwards out of a window, just like turning the page of a book.”7 This painting has unfortunately been lost to history, but Hrabal’s description of it prefigures his own end. Eight years later, in 1997, while in a hospital, Hrabal leaned out his window far enough to plummet to his death. He had said over the days prior that he really wanted to feed the pigeons. Could it be said that his obsession with defenestration was what killed him? It is almost as if, by the twentieth century, the collective attention accorded to defenestration wound the coils of reason too tightly: in becoming an object of literary fixation, it came to occasion a kind of melancholy rumination, one that eats the fruit it bears for the mind. Already a violent form of political murder, the act took on a character even darker and more sinister. Nevertheless, retracing its history reveals a trajectory at least as astounding as the competing claims of Protestant and Catholic pamphleteers after 1618. Here we have concrete historical events that congeal first into an evocative image, then into a figure of thought for historical change in the Czech style, and finally into a style of suicide. But maybe it is simply a trick of historical perspective that makes it possible to excavate defenestration in this way: the early modern defenestrators were probably not reenacting anything, nor were nineteenth-century Romantic painters necessarily aware that they were instantiating a metaphor for historical shifts. There is something off-putting, even suffocating about trying to concoct a grand theory of defenestration. One is compelled to throw open the window, let in some fresh air, perhaps lean out to get a better look . . . The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 3, 2024

Thom Sliwowski

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:00.100419

eugene-francois-vidocq-and-the-birth-of-the-detective

Eugène-François Vidocq and the Birth of the Detective By Daisy Sainsbury February 7, 2024 According to his memoirs, Eugène-François Vidocq escaped from more than twenty prisons (sometimes dressed as a nun). Working on the other side of the law, he apprehended some 4000 criminals with a team of plainclothes agents. He founded the first criminal investigation bureau — staffed mainly with convicts — and, when he was later fired, the first private detective agency. He was one the fathers of modern criminology and had a rap sheet longer than his very tall tales. Who was Vidocq? Daisy Sainsbury investigates. When the Brigade de Sûreté was set up in Paris in 1812, it was a first of its kind: a criminal investigation bureau composed of undercover officers, which would later evolve into France’s national police force. At a time when institutionalised policing was still in its infancy, the Sûreté provided the blueprint for Scotland Yard, established in 1829, and the FBI a century later. At its head, one might imagine someone akin to the men who would follow in this bureau chief’s footsteps: Robert Peel, the Conservative politician and future prime minister who first put Britain’s “bobbies” on the beat, or J. Edgar Hoover, a law student who rose through the ranks of the Justice Department to serve as the American federal agency’s first director. Eugène-François Vidocq (1775–1857), the Sûreté’s founding chief, was nothing of the kind. After a youth of petty criminality, he spent the first fifteen years of his adult life either in prison or on the run, leaving him with little time to pursue a political career. And for a man more at home donning disguises and planning daring jailbreaks, administration wasn’t really his thing. Vidocq’s tale — one of con man turned detective, poacher turned gamekeeper, the criminal who became a criminologist, and later a best-selling writer — captured the imagination of his contemporaries. He inspired many of the greatest writers of his time, providing the model for Vautrin in Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1865), and Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin. If Vidocq continues to fascinate today, interpreted onscreen by the likes of Gérard Depardieu and Vincent Cassel, audiences are still deciding what to make of him. Was he an opportunist crook who took advantage of the radical political upheaval of post-Revolution France to reinvent himself in the emerging power structures of his day? Was he a law-enforcement reformer, with a strong sense of civic duty, who laid the groundwork for modern policing, forensics, and intelligence-gathering methods? Whatever conclusion a reader reaches, there is little in Vidocq’s early years that presages the events to come. From his own Mémoires (1928–9), we understand that he was born to a perfectly ordinary and relatively well-to-do family in Arras in northern France, where his parents ran a boulangerie.1 By fourteen, however, he had sold off the family porcelain and run away to Ostend, with dreams of emigrating to the United States. When that plan failed (he didn’t have enough cash for the boat fare), he joined a travelling circus, first as humble stable boy, then as a pay-per-view human cannibal. Despite that apparent promotion, his time in the fairground was an unmitigated failure: he was repeatedly attacked by the monkeys, broke his nose learning to somersault, and was beaten when he refused to eat a live chicken as part of his stage act. Facing these adversities, Vidocq did what he would spend the next two decades of his life doing: he ran away again. He joined an itinerant puppet show, which quickly went awry when he was caught in flagrante with the puppet master’s wife during a performance of Punch and Judy. After a few more vagrant twists and turns, he gave up and went home — a prodigal son, remorseful but unreformed. His mother, a doting, forgiving figure who would provide one of the few constants in his life, welcomed him back with open arms. By then, however, the young Vidocq had developed a penchant for brawls, boozing, and women, so when he suggested he might join the army, his father leapt at the idea, and his mother reluctantly agreed. Vidocq’s time in the military was short-lived, a string of desertions and regiment hops, including a brief defection to the Austrians, with whom he fought against the French, followed by a prompt return to his compatriots. This culminated in his enlistment in the armée roulante, a roving militia made up primarily of petty criminals and deserters who, with fake papers and stolen uniforms, would tack onto the regular army’s troops in the hope of one day securing an official post, and, in the short term, enjoying whatever spoils of war they could find. Between the ages of nineteen and thirty-four, Vidocq spent most of his time in and out of prison. His first conviction — for assaulting his mistress’ other lover — led to a series of incarcerations for a variety of offences, of which just one saddled him with a lengthy, eight-year sentence. In 1798, while already imprisoned in Lille, he was found complicit in forging a release order for another inmate and condemned to spend his days toiling in the “bagne” in Brest. The galleys, notorious at the time for their appalling conditions, consisted of ships moored in ports where convicts were forced to carry out hard labour. Vidocq didn’t much care for hard labour. He escaped in disguise, first as a sailor, then a milk porter, later as a nun. Although the last of these attempts was briefly successful, he was recaptured the following year and sent to the galleys again, this time in Toulon. In the early 1800s, he escaped again, was jailed again, escaped again, leading Vidocq to boast in his memoirs of having escaped from all the galleys of France, and more than twenty prisons. ※※Indexed under…Concealmentas nun Somewhere in this cycle of escape, re-arrest, re-incarceration, Vidocq decided he wanted to go straight. In 1809, then aged thirty-four and on the run in Paris, he made an unusual move: he turned himself in. It was likely at this stage that he offered to act as an informant in exchange for his liberty, a bargain frequently struck in nineteenth-century France. He wasn’t released, but he was spared another trip to the “bagnes”. He was sent to regular prison, first Bicêtre and later La Force, where, for twenty-one months, he fed information gleaned from his fellow inmates to the authorities. Vidocq must have known better than most which buttons to push to extract a confession, being well acquainted with the compulsion to brag of one’s criminal past. The authorities were happy with his work, and in 1811, on the condition that he would continue to be an informant on the outside, they helped him stage his escape from La Force, further boosting his street credibility with the criminal gangs he was tasked with infiltrating. Within a year, he was promoted from salaried informant to the head of a newly formed unit, the Brigade de Sûreté, decreed a national security force by Napoleon in 1813. With offices near the Paris Prefecture on Ile de la Cité, the Brigade de Sûreté began as a five-man outfit made up of Vidocq and four plainclothes, undercover agents. Together, they apprehended murderers, forgers, and thieves, seized stolen goods, and returned escaped convicts to prison. Vidocq’s officers were not paid a salary, but worked on commission, taking a fee for each successfully completed case. The arrest rate rose considerably, and within the first seven years of the Sûreté’s existence, it had, by Vidocq’s count, apprehended more than four thousand criminals. As the Sûreté evolved, Vidocq developed a number of policing methods still widely used today. Chief among these was the keeping of detailed written records, which may sound prosaic, but was revolutionary in its time. He maintained a card index system, with notes on some thirty thousand criminals, including physical descriptions, aliases, previous convictions, and modus operandi. That proto database, coupled with the practice of sending his agents to prisons to familiarise themselves with convicts susceptible to reoffend upon release, leant a pre-emptive, as well as reactive bent to his police work. Vidocq also lays claim to being one of the earliest proponents of forensics. At crime scenes, he would jot down seemingly irrelevant details that might later prove useful. He preserved footprints with plaster of Paris and, while unable to find an ink that dried slowly enough to take a proper impression, he recognised the forensic potential of fingerprinting long before it became a mainstay of modern policing. He compared forged notes with handwriting samples, and in a rudimentary form of ballistics (an as-yet undeveloped science), unmasked a murderer by matching bullet to gun barrel. Thanks in part to these methods, the Brigade de Sûreté was a success, and Vidocq’s team grew steadily from four to twenty-eight agents. He recruited several women to his ranks (it took a further century for the British police to employ its first female officer, in 1915). Almost all his agents were ex-convicts. As Vidocq acknowledges in his memoirs, the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814–15 no doubt facilitated the Sûreté’s expansion. Out-of-work soldiers and prisoners of war flocked to the French capital and, fearing a dramatic surge in crime, the Prefecture was all too glad to increase the resources at Vidocq’s disposal. The fact that he was swelling his ranks with former criminals was not out of keeping with the zeitgeist. Paul Metzner, in a study of the sociocultural circumstances in which Vidocq’s success was forged, explores the complex and sometimes contradictory impact of the French Revolution.2 The rebels that had overthrown the existing order, only to crack down on those perceived as a threat to the newly established status quo, were both sympathetic to the ascent to power of figures from unlikely quarters, but were also acutely aware of the importance of crowd control. They recognised the value of keeping potential troublemakers on the inside. Beyond the obvious pitfalls of working with former criminals (Vidocq had his watch stolen by one recruit, a notorious pickpocket), the Sûreté came under constant scrutiny on account of its agents’ dubious pasts. Vidocq’s superior, the head of the Paris Prefecture, Jean Henry, fielded frequent complaints that Vidocq and his team were accepting bribes, engineering crimes so as to later solve them, and profiting from the proceeds along the way. In court, defendants caught on quickly, claiming they were victims of another of Vidocq’s elaborate setups. In 1827, aged fifty-two, Vidocq left the Sûreté. Whether he was sacked or resigned is an open question, but in all likelihood, he jumped before he was pushed. He left a wealthy man, with half a million francs to his name. Quite how he managed this feat is unclear. His annual salary was five thousand francs, and even if he had cultivated investments on the side, his newfound wealth certainly didn’t help the rumours of unlawful enrichment. Finding himself with time on his hands, Vidocq set to work on his memoirs, which were published in four volumes between 1828 and 1829.3 They were an instant hit, translated into English within a year, and he shot to literary stardom on both sides of the channel. This gained him new friends and dinner companions in the form of France’s greatest nineteenth-century writers — Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas père, Théophile Gautier — all of whom poached freely from Vidocq’s seemingly endless supply of tales about the criminal underworld, and the ingenious feats of detective work that outsmarted it. Metzner writes: Crime became the object of increasing fear in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, and also of increasing fascination. These were the decades when the many popular theaters founded since the 1790s began to set their violent melodramas locally rather than in exotic places. . . . Reassuringly, in melodramas the good guys always won. Likewise, in his Mémoires, detective Vidocq always got his man.4 In this respect, Vidocq’s memoirs anticipate both the emergence of the detective novel in the decades that followed and the true crime genre that continues to captivate audiences today. This double heritage is particularly apt as, in their fast-paced romp from misspent youth to later reformation, his memoirs are an audacious amalgamation of fact and fiction. The author embellishes some of his more palatable crimes — usually the “victimless” ones, or ones where he was merely avenging himself for an earlier wrong — and plays down others. In the forgery case, for which he was yet to complete his full eight-year sentence, he paints himself as a hapless bystander. Vidocq’s memoirs have all the chaos and manic energy of the political period in which they took place, and perhaps their greatest appeal for a modern reader is the glimpse they offer of that era, albeit via the gaze of a distinctly unreliable narrator. They document some of the bloodiest episodes of the Reign of Terror, not least the fate of a “M. de Vieux Pont”, outed as a Royalist by his pet parrot’s cries of “Vive le roi!” and promptly guillotined. They also provide one of the most detailed contemporary accounts of the armée roulante. The memoirs reflect the bellicose spirit of a man who found enemies, real or imagined, at every turn, leading James Morton, in his 2004 biography, to carve up Vidocq’s life into the following chapter headings: “Vidocq Against His Parents”, “Vidocq Against His Wife in Particular”, “Vidocq Against Women in General”, “Vidocq Against the Gypsies”, and so on, until we reach “Vidocq Against Death”.5 But his memoirs also contain a more considered reflection on the author’s own struggles as an ex-convict trying to clean up his act, which would turn him into, if not an altruist, then something of a social reformer. He describes the life-long sentence imposed on former convicts, outcast by ordinary society and constantly lured back to a life of crime: [I sought] to lay down an impassable line of demarcation between the past and the present; for I saw but too plainly, that the future was dependent on the past; and I was the more wretched, as the police, who have not always due powers of discernment, would not permit me to forget myself. I saw myself again on the point of being snared like a deer. The persuasion that I was interdicted from becoming an honest man drove me to despair.6 Vidocq would later become an advocate of prison reform, travelling to London in 1835 to give evidence to a House of Lords committee on, inter alia, the problems prisoners face upon release. In 1844, he published a tract on crime and recidivism, which, to adopt Morton’s formula, could be summed up as “Vidocq Against the Justice System”.7 The tract addresses a number of questions: Does prison exist to punish or rehabilitate? What are the factors that push people into crime in the first place? What are the solutions? Vidocq’s answer to the last include improving conditions for society’s poorest; making prisons a place of re-education, where inmates can learn an honest trade; and granting them more regular contact with family members while inside to facilitate their reintegration into society upon release. Among other things, the tract takes aim at the white lead industry, one of the few sectors in which ex-convicts could find work, but which led to poisoning and premature death. Consequently, Vidocq embarked on another major endeavour after leaving the Sûreté. He set up a paper factory in Sainte-Mandé, a village on the outskirts of Paris, with a workforce composed exclusively of former convicts. The project was not a success. It was met with local resistance, proved costly to run, and clients refused to pay the going rates, assuming that ex-convicts meant cheaper labour, and therefore cheaper prices. The factory was forced to close. By 1831, Vidocq went bankrupt. Fortunately, back at the Sûreté, Vidocq’s absence was palpable. According to newspapers at the time, crime rates had shot up in the wake of his departure; whether he was trustworthy or not was up for discussion, but he was certainly efficient. He returned to the fold, first as an agent, and was soon reinstated as chief. During this second tenure, Robert Peel, who had recently established Scotland Yard, sent a committee to solicit Vidocq’s advice. Within a decade, London had its own force of undercover police officers, which would eventually become the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in 1878. Vidocq’s second tenure lasted little more than six months. Facing widespread criticism and a push for greater transparency, the Paris Prefecture instigated a cleanup and started sacking employees with a prior criminal record. In November 1832, Vidocq was forced to resign again. A few days later, he founded what is considered by many to be the world’s first private detective agency. The Bureau de Renseignements’ remit was twofold. On the one hand, it dealt in corporate intelligence, offering debt collecting and due diligence services. Via a subscription model, companies could pay to access a database derived from the elaborate filing system Vidocq had created while at the Sûreté, allowing them to conduct background checks on prospective collaborators and clients. In tandem, the agency also dealt in what it called “intimate” or “confidential” matters. This covered everything from spying on spouses suspected of having affairs (the poet Alfred de Vigny was one such client); hunting down missing loved ones (usually daughters of respectable families who’d eloped with disreputable suitors); and recovering personal possessions (jewellery, watches, Dr Coreff’s pet cockatoo, the Mayor of Rouen’s racehorse. . .) Vidocq, catapulted to fame by his memoirs, had no problem attracting clients, and at its peak, the Bureau de Renseignements employed some forty agents and saw over forty clients a day. Dominique Kalifa, considering the role Vidocq’s agency played in the development of the private investigation sector, mitigates the claim that it was a world first, pointing to the 250 agents d’affaires already operating in Paris in 1819, whose mission overlapped with Vidocq’s in recovered debts and advising on the solvency of potential clients.8 However, Kalifa argues, the Bureau set the mould for what a private detective agency would become. As well as combining business intelligence with personal affairs, and promoting its services in newspaper adverts, it was the first to seek to lend technical and scientific legitimacy to its work, either by importing the policing methods developed at the Sûreté, or through implementing inventions such as Vidocq’s patented indelible ink and forgery-proof paper. Above all, Vidocq, who never wasted an opportunity to play up his background as a police chief, sought to align his private enterprise with state-run law enforcement. While this was a selling point, it also had its drawbacks. The actual police, under the distinct impression that the Bureau de Renseignements was encroaching on its own territory, made repeated efforts to close it down, seizing Vidocq’s files and taking him to court in 1837 and 1843. At trial, the agency was accused of a series of offences: fraud, abduction, corruption of civil servants, defamation, pretension of public functions, usury, selling honours, stealing letters, providing substitutes for conscripts hoping to avoid military service . . . the list went on. While Vidocq was ultimately acquitted by a public jury, the lengthy and costly trials, the confiscation of his files, which formed the bedrock of his business, and the disruption to the agency’s day-to-day work took its toll. Ironically, the trials served only to cement the public’s support for Vidocq, but the damage had been done and the Bureau was forced to close. In 1845, Vidocq travelled to London to explore the possibility of opening a new private detective agency, a project that never got off the ground. While there, an exhibition was held at the Regent Street Cosmorama, showing off his collection of crime paraphernalia, including the many disguises for which he was by then renowned. The Times wrote a glowing review, complete with a fawning portrait of the French spy chief. In the years that followed, however, the press went quiet. Vidocq fell off the radar. Letters he wrote at the time paint a bleak picture of a life of increasing poverty. In one imploring address to the new head of the Sûreté, he appeals for a government pension. It is possible that Vidocq, ever the wheeler-dealer, was playing up the extent of his misfortune; other accounts have him working as a political spy between Paris and London, monitoring the goings-on of figures like Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. What is known, however, is that when Vidocq died, on May 11, 1857 at the age of eighty-two, his fortune amounted to less than three thousand francs.9 This must have come as a disappointment to the eleven women who claimed to have possession of his will, in which each was identified as sole beneficiary of his estate. The obituaries came in thick and fast. One, printed in the local newspaper, L’Ariégeois, read: The death of the famous Vidocq, head of the Sûreté police under the restoration, has been announced in Paris. Since his dismissal, he sought resources from a variety of random industries: for a handsome salary, he spied on husbands for their wives, and wives for their husbands; he also opened an office to track down stolen goods, but whatever his skill and his connections with the capital's crooks, he often failed to find the thieves and nonetheless pocketed the money he had been given to pursue them. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he died in a very miserable state.10 Other write-ups were more generous. Alphonse de Lamartine, the Romantic poet and politician who briefly headed the French government, said of his close friend and fellow opponent of the death penalty: “I liked him, I respected him . . . I learnt, when I was in power, that he was a loyal and trustworthy servant; I will never forget him, and I can proudly say he was an honest man!”11 Lamartine never put Vidocq in his fiction, but his contemporaries did, thus ensuring an enduring legacy on the page. While he made his way into some of the most canonical works of nineteenth-century literature, providing one of the inspirations for Magwitch in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861) for instance, he also found a home in the “dime novels” that flourished on the other side of the Atlantic in the ensuing decades. In 1877, pulp fiction pioneers Beadle and Adams published an abridged translation of his Mémoires, “Vidocq, the French Police Spy”, in their characteristic ten-cent, paperback format. Presumably spurred on by its success, they continued to wheel out the cunning detective in a series of fictional reincarnations: “Dodger Dick, the Boy Vidocq” (1888), “Happy Hans, the Dutch Vidocq” (1889), “Old Cormorant, the Veteran Vidocq” (1889) and “Violet Vane, the Ventriloquist Vidocq” (1891). Since then, he has been the hero of a dozen graphic novels, made a guest appearance in the video game Assassin’s Creed, and enjoyed a long afterlife on screen, from Gérard Bourgeois’ silent, black-and-white film, La jeunesse de Vidocq ou Comment on devient policier (1909) to Jean-François Richet’s L’Empereur de Paris (2018), starring a bloody, brawling Vincent Cassel as the French police chief. If Vidocq’s legacy was contested at his death, it continues to be so today. He enjoys a cult-like status among certain criminologists, not least the members of the Vidocq Society, an American organisation where forensic experts, detectives, FBI agents, and amateur sleuths get together to solve cold cases, inspired by “the father of modern criminal investigation”.12 For Michel Foucault, however, he represents “the disturbing moment when criminality became one of the mechanisms of power.”13 Echoing this, Graham Robb, reviewing a 2003 re-edition of Vidocq’s memoirs, applauds editor Robin Walz’s new preface which presents Vidocq “as a forerunner of the ‘scammers and scoundrels’ in giant American corporations who profit from state-funded violence and who advertise their greed as a self-righteous war on evil.” “It is nice to see”, Robb continues, “that, after a century and a half of misinformed adulation, Vidocq is finally getting his just deserts.”14 For a man known in his lifetime as a master of disguise, capable of appearing several inches taller or shorter than he really was, it is fitting that today Vidocq lives on in a hundred different iterations, each a projection of what the beholder wishes to see. Hero, antihero, showman, shapeshifter: in the absence of independently verifiable truth, Eugène-François Vidocq will be whatever you want him to be. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 7, 2024

Daisy Sainsbur

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:00.381822

the-early-history-of-the-channel-tunnel

Liberal Visions and Boring Machines The Early History of the Channel Tunnel By Peter Keeling January 10, 2024 More than a century before the Eurostar and LeShuttle, a group of engineers and statesmen dreamed (and fretted) about connecting Britain to France with an underwater tunnel. Peter Keeling drills into the history of this submarine link, and finds a still-relevant story about the cosmopolitan hopes and isolationist panic surrounding liberal internationalism. The English Channel (la Manche, “the sleeve”, to the French) is one of the roughest sea crossings in the world. At its narrowest, in the Strait of Dover, it is a mere twenty miles across, but for those attempting the crossing this brevity is of little comfort. The Strait’s shallowness, combined with its unique tidal streams, ocean currents, and regular fog, make for a turbulent and hazardous journey, and the sea sickness it induces is notorious. For centuries, the Channel was Britain's bulwark against foreign invasion. The vicious weather was given a divine interpretation as the “protestant wind” which sunk the Spanish Armada in 1588. But this was a double-edged sword: merchant shipping was as vulnerable as Phillip II’s great fleet. With the industrial era came peace and increased trade, and by the early nineteenth century the UK was the largest producer of manufactured goods in the world. Improvements in shipping and port facilities greatly facilitated trade, but the logistical problem of transferring goods from ship to shore remained. Unsurprisingly, faced with this issue, thoughts began to turn toward methods of avoiding the water altogether. In 1785, the trip was first made by balloon, but the first aeroplane would not follow until 1909. In 1851, a telegraph wire linked London and Paris directly. Might it be possible for a railway to follow? Many engineers believed it was: they proposed a tunnel, joining the roads and railways of Britain to those of mainland Europe. But this was not simply a problem of engineering and geology. The idea of a fixed link was deeply intertwined with the issue of how the British understood international relations and their place in Europe during the age of imperialism. On the one hand stood those who believed in a shared European liberalism, founded on a belief in “the people” and the unifying power of international communications and free trade. For these champions of progress, great railway projects represented the spirit of the age: iron rails “knitting together the hearts of nations”, as one proponent would put it. Opposing this were Britons of a more pessimistic and suspicious disposition, who regarded Europe as permanently riven by diplomatic, military, and imperial tensions. For them, railways were a weapon, and the proposed channel tunnel a military frontier, exposing their wealthy and unprepared island to the massed armies of mainland Europe. It was this clash of worldviews, not the engineering challenge, that would decide the fate of the project. The French Pioneers In 1802, during a lull in the Napoleonic wars, an otherwise unknown French mining engineer named Albert Mathieu proposed what is thought to be the first plan to bypass the Channel. He envisioned a tunnel ventilated by enormous iron chimneys, projecting above the sea, as well as an artificial “international island”, relay station (to allow carriages to change horses), and harbour on the Varne sandbank at the Strait’s midpoint. The plans were prominently exhibited at the French school of mines and in the legislature, where Napoleon Bonaparte presumably first saw it. Bonapate brought it to the attention of the British opposition politician Charles James Fox, who is said to have reacted enthusiastically. However, the project was abandoned with the return of war.1 Three decades later, Mathieu’s mantle was taken up by the man most deserving of the accolade “Father of the Channel Tunnel”, Aimé Thomé de Gamond. The very picture of a nineteenth-century renaissance man — alongside his studies in geology and engineering, he also acquired a doctorate in medicine and law — Thomé de Gamond became fascinated by the idea of a link across the Channel while researching rivers in France. By the end of the 1830s, he had produced a wide variety of plans, from vast bridges, to iron tubes, to a masonry tunnel on the seabed. Thomé de Gamond was not alone in his desire to join Britain to the Continent.2 Due to a lack of geological knowledge, however, few of his peers dared propose a tunnel underneath the seabed. While studies had shown the strata of the English and French coasts to be identical, it was not known whether the Strait of Dover itself had been created by the two coasts moving apart to create a rift valley, or the erosion of an ancient land bridge which once connected Kent to Northern France. If the strait was a rift, then a tunnel would be difficult, if not impossible — any attempt would be tunnelling into unknown and inconsistent geology, potentially containing hard rock requiring an enormous outlay in manual labour or explosives. After exhausting all terrestrial research methods, Thomé de Gamond set out to solve the mystery of the strait via three extraordinary solo dives in 1855. Weighed down by 160 pounds of flint, he stoppered his ears with home-made plugs of lard, and turned his mouth into a de facto valve, using olive oil to expel air without taking in water. Thus equipped, he successfully descended over one hundred feet to collect soil samples from the seabed, ascending afterward with the help of ten inflated pig bladders. On his final dive, the renaissance man found himself fending off an attack by conger eels.3 The adventure paid off. Examination of the samples confirmed that Britain and France had once been connected by a landmass since eroded away, and that the geological strata were continuous between the two coasts. Because the rock was soft chalk, the work would not require laborious drilling and dynamite. A bored tunnel became feasible for the first time. The Spirit of the Age Thomé de Gamond’s discovery came at a fertile moment in European intellectual and scientific history. The Continent’s rapidly expanding technological, industrial, and economic power — and the imperial arrogance it fuelled — had produced an intoxicating cult of scientific progress to whom all things seemed possible.4 Railways were at the cutting edge of this new world. The first commercial railway, between Liverpool and Manchester, had opened in 1830, and by 1850 over 20,000 kilometres of tracks crisscrossed Europe. Tunnels were an integral part of railway construction from the start, but during the second half of the century they were accomplished on an altogether more heroic scale. In 1871, the Mont Cenis Tunnel connected France and Italy through the Alps, followed in 1882 by the nine-mile Gotthard Tunnel, then the longest in the world. Four years later England and Wales were linked by four miles of tunnel underneath the Severn River estuary. These feats of engineering “incarnated what the age understood as progress”, writes Rosalind Williams.5 The completion of each line was celebrated as a triumph of science over nature, and their designers and builders feted as men at the vanguard of civilisation’s steady march. In this context, the lack of a link across the English Channel was more than an anomaly, it was a failure of economic and social progress. As the engineer and tunnel advocate James Chalmers wrote in 1861: Glancing over the Railway Map of Europe, the intelligent eye traces numerous lines tending to certain points, almost invariably to great cities. There is, however, one remarkable exception to this general rule: on the Continent, from North, East, and South, and in England from South, West, and North, lines are seen drawing together, stretching out their iron arms as if they would embrace, when, lo! they have stopped.6 The enthusiasm for technological progress went hand-in-hand with the rise of a self-confident liberal internationalism, encapsulated in events such as the 1851 Great Exhibition in London and 1860 Anglo-French free trade treaty. The chief architects of the treaty, Richard Cobden and Michel Chevalier, taught that the underlying forces in history were moving inexorably toward the unity of humanity: improved trade and communications would eventually render warfare obsolete.7 They idealised “the people” and attacked “vested interests” in the armed forces and aristocracy, whom they believed were the real drivers of international conflict. “Free Trade is God’s diplomacy”, Cobden once wrote, “and there is no other certain way of uniting people in the bonds of peace.”8 Both Cobden and Chevalier came to support the Channel Tunnel project, seeing it as an important step toward the eventual unification of Europe, a “true arch of alliance”, in words attributed to Cobden and often quoted by tunnel advocates.9 The fruits of Thomé de Gamond’s labours ripened in 1856, with a comprehensive proposal for a double-track railway tunnel connecting East Wear Bay, near Folkestone, to Cap Gris-Nez in Pas-de-Calais. Like Mathieu, he envisaged an international port on the Varne Bank, with ventilation shafts and lighthouses lining the route. Construction would begin from temporary stone islands built at intervals across the Channel, from which the ventilation shafts would be sunk, and the tunnel would employ steel “shields” of the kind pioneered in the construction of the Thames tunnel. Hailed by leading engineers including Robert Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and with the support of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and Napoleon III, the scheme seemed on the road to realisation, “an end”, according to its inventor, “as useful as it is glorious”.10 However, in a series of events which would become grimly familiar to supporters of the Tunnel, the project foundered amid a breakdown of relations between the two nations. Following an attempt on Napoleon’s life by an Italian nationalist with a bomb made in Britain, an invasion scare was whipped up by the British press. This was cynically exploited by the Francophobe Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, who used the opportunity to ring Plymouth and Portsmouth with expensive and useless fortifications. The antithesis of the optimistic liberal, Palmerston thought that a tunnel would remove “our natural defence against a continental enemy”.11 Cobden and Chevalier believed him to be obsessed with the Napoleonic wars of his youth: “his mind is haunted with ideas of a French invasion”.12 This was the world-view, pessimistic and suspicious, which Tunnel advocates would have to overcome if their project was to succeed. The British Dive In During the 1860s, Thomé De Gamond was joined by British engineers including William Low and John Hawkshaw, who dropped the Varne bank idea to focus on the stretch of sea directly between Dover and Calais. Extensive soundings and surveys were conducted, and by the end of the decade a joint Anglo-French committee had been established to take the project forward. In 1872, a British Channel Tunnel Company was established, and a French company appeared in 1875. At the suggestion of the British (Palmerston having been replaced as Prime Minister by the more sympathetic Disraeli), an official joint commission with representatives of both nations was set up to establish codes and regulations for the proposed tunnel.13 On August 2, 1875, both nations passed acts empowering their respective companies to begin work.14 Progress, however, stalled less than two years later. Complete proof of viability was still lacking, denting investor confidence. Stymied by financial problems, the British company had achieved little by 1876, when the concessions granted by the 1875 Act expired. It was at this point that the Tunnel was taken up by Sir Edward William Watkin, the independent Liberal Member of Parliament for Hythe and chairman of three major railways companies, including the South Eastern, which operated throughout Kent. Pugnacious and stubborn, a consummate businessman and publicist with a mind attracted to large and visionary engineering projects, Watkin possessed a passionate belief in the power of free trade.15 He assembled an eminent scientific and legal advisory committee, including lawyers, electrical, hydraulic, and mining engineers, geologists, soldiers, and the President of the Royal Society. But the key individuals were two Royal Engineer officers, Colonel Frederick Beaumont and Captain Thomas English, who finally proved that the Tunnel was viable. Both were skilled inventors. During the later 1870s, Beaumont was experimenting with locomotives and trams powered by compressed air.16 English was an expert in steel armour plate, the material needed to build durable mining equipment, and in 1880 patented a new boring machine based on a previous design by Beaumont.17 A year later, the two men produced a tunnelling machine using English’s patent, powered by Beaumont’s compressed air engine. The result was a triumph of engineering, the ideal tool for the job. Featuring a revolving cutter which could dig a seven-foot diameter tunnel at a rate of one yard an hour, and a conveyor for the removal of spoil, the machine required fewer than ten men to operate. Crucially, its power source meant that it not only produced no dangerous fumes, but, by releasing air after use, it ventilated the Tunnel as it worked.18 On October 14, 1880, the Beaumont-English machine began trial borings at Abbots cliff, near Dover. The layer of grey chalk into which the machine dug was easy to cut, yet practically watertight. In September the next year, after boring 842 yards of test tunnel, the machine was moved to a new site beneath Shakespeare cliff, the closest point between England and France. At the end of the year, Watkin founded the grandiosely named Submarine Continental Railway Company to oversee this work. The French Compagnie du Chemin-de-fer Sousmarine soon started boring out from Sangatte, near Calais, using a modified version of the Beaumont-English machine. For the first time in the history of the project, miners were working underneath the sea.19 “It is one of the proudest moments of my life”, declared Beaumont, “to see the probable realization of what has always been a dream of mine.”20 Beaumont dreamed big. He envisioned an international undersea railway powered entirely by compressed air, with carriages pulled by eighty-ton locomotives that would ventilate the Tunnel as they cruised.21 Boring Toward Brotherhood; Digging to Disaster In June 1881, Watkin announced to a startled nation that he expected to complete an initial “experimental” tunnel within five years, with a view to opening the line sometime in the 1890s. “I was born an islander, but it is my ambition to die a member of the great European Continent.”22 The only apparent obstacle was the small matter of passing a bill in Parliament to allow the company to tunnel under the seabed, which was Crown property. The Channel Tunnel was to be the crowning achievement of both international engineering and Watkin’s own career, “a work without an equal among all the labours until now accomplished by the hand of man.”23 But it was also something else: a practical continuation of the work of Richard Cobden, and a concrete step toward an eventual European free trade union. By forging economic and personal links between the populations of Britain and France, the Tunnel would help remove antagonism from the bottom up, allowing a new understanding to “permeate through the masses” of both countries. “It is obvious”, Watkin told the Submarine Continental shareholders, “that the Channel becomes every year more and more of a break, retarding and embarrassing the great interchanges of nations.” Watkin’s was a particularly British vision of European unity. A staunch patriot as much as an internationalist, he firmly believed that liberty, free trade, and peace were the methods by which Britain had achieved its economic and imperial successes. The Tunnel was a method of exporting these values to the European mainland: . . . so far from England being, as it were, diluted with the ideas and arts of the Continent, the Continent would benefit by better and closer access to the freedom and industry of England . . . the friendly competitions of labour in all its departments would become a common heritage of blessing to the world at large. This heady mix of scientific, commercial, and civilizational “progress” was most passionately articulated by Watkin’s lieutenant in Parliament, Lord Brabourne: In spite of all opposition, science ever advances; in such an issue as the present, civilization and Christianity are marching hand in hand; the obstacles suggested, and perhaps for a time sustained, by insular prejudice and professional pedantry, will pale and fade away before the spirit of the age; and, in the triumph of the Channel Tunnel, one more step will be accomplished in the uniting and knitting together the hearts of nations, and in the nearer approach to the full and blessed recognition of the universal brotherhood of mankind!24 Little seemed to stand in the way of Watkin’s Channel Tunnel in January 1882. Public opinion was supportive, while the Liberal government was led by Watkin’s friend William Gladstone, a known Tunnel enthusiast. Gladstone had won the 1880 general election on a platform of internationalism, peace, and free trade; to Watkin, the Channel Tunnel was an ideal match for these policies. At this moment, however, hitherto suppressed forces burst forth upon the project. Unbeknownst to the public, an official committee consisting of the Board of Trade, the War Office, and Admiralty had been formed in 1881 to examine the implications of the Tunnel. Among the evidence they considered was a memorandum from the Army’s Quartermaster General, Sir Garnet Wolseley.25 While his public image was that of an efficient professional soldier, politically Wolseley was a profound reactionary with an open disdain for the liberal worldview of Cobden, Gladstone, and Watkin. Rather than a measured, technical document, Wolseley’s memorandum on the Tunnel was a furious diatribe against the “specious cry of universal brotherhood” and “selfish cosmopolitans”. In place of Watkin’s optimistic prophesy of Anglo-French amity, Wolseley substituted his own analysis of interstate relations which stressed humanity’s inherently violent and jealous nature. A chronic pessimist, Wolseley believed that the British Army was dangerously underfunded, a situation he laid directly at the door of liberal internationalists. “Owing to our belief in the virtuous intentions of others”, he wrote, “we live in a constant condition of unpreparedness for war”. In this context, liberal and wealthy Britain was a prize to be seized rather than a civilisation to be emulated. The Tunnel, he argued, would be “a constant inducement to the unscrupulous foreigner to make war upon us, as it would hold out to him hopes of a conquest the like of which the world had never known before”. Wolseley pointed out that the use of trains during recent wars in the United States and Europe had enabled generals to move troops far further and more rapidly than ever before. To connect Britain with France would expose the UK to the same danger, and he suggested, without evidence, that the Tunnel could be used to bring five thousand soldiers an hour into the country. He imagined a sudden surprise attack during a period of “profound peace”, with no warning and without an official declaration of war, “whilst we gentlemen of England were abed, dreaming of the time when the lion and the lamb are to lie down together”. With London the only unfortified capital in Europe and no large conscript army to rival those of France or Germany, the UK would be quickly overcome. Annexed to the continent and unable to recover behind its protective moat, the British would face “national annihilation”, becoming “the helots of France for ever”.26 But the real bite in Wolseley’s argument was not his future war scenario, but the analysis of British society. Personal freedom, low taxation, free trade, and a small army were made possible by the security offered by the Channel. By introducing the danger, however remote, of land invasion, the Tunnel would fundamentally upset this consensus. The result would infect the country with “panic, that horrid malady from which all nations having insignificant armies, and very powerful neighbours, suffer periodically”. Any movement by French troops near Calais might spark fear in Britain that an attack was imminent. The impossibility of developing a failsafe defence system would trap the nation into an escalating series of panics and enormous military spending programmes, with the result that the UK would eventually have to “imitate Continental nations” and establish a system of universal military conscription. As an aside, Wolseley asserted his belief that such an army would be impossible under “our form of government”, a suggestion that the Tunnel could do away with parliamentary democracy itself. The greatest threat posed by the Tunnel was not necessarily the horrors of an invasion, but the economic and societal cost of insuring against it. Panic Petitions and Champagne Under the Sea In February 1882, excerpts from Wolseley’s memorandum were published in The Nineteenth Century magazine, and over the following month he and other Army and Navy officers proceeded to conduct a coordinated public campaign against the Tunnel. In this they were aided by James Knowles, the editor of The Nineteenth Century, who organised a special edition and petition against the scheme, signed by many eminent, if not exactly representative, public figures, including a number of prominent liberals such as T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and fourteen Liberal MPs.27 The accompanying essay by Knowles, a diatribe against selfish “company-promoters”, boiled Wolseley’s arguments down to a trinity of terror: a “certainty” of increased military expenditure, a “probability” of panics, and “the possibility of an irretrievable disaster from invasion”. It was clear that the issue had struck something deep within the nervous system of liberal Britain. When it came to the point, many did not believe that “the people” would embrace their new continental connection in the spirit of universal brotherhood. “The alarmists sign [the petition] because they are alarmists”, reflected The Scotsman. “The non-alarmists sign because they do not wish the country to be alarmed.”28 Watkin responded to these attacks with every weapon in his arsenal. He encouraged his friends to write and speak in support of the Tunnel, and soon the papers and journals were consumed with debates about the scheme. He scored a particular success when Sir Andrew Clarke, the Commandant of the Royal School of Military Engineering, published a trenchant article assuring readers that there was no example in history of an entire army being deployed by a single railway line, and dismissing a potential secret invasion as a “simple impossibility”.29 More generally, Tunnel supporters pointed out that destroying, blocking, or flooding the Tunnel would be a trivial matter, especially considering the entrance fell under the guns of both Dover Castle and any warship anchored in the harbour.30 Watkin also employed softer means of persuasion, inviting a wide range of celebrities (including both Gladstone and Wolseley) to visit the Tunnel works underneath the sea, where they could enjoy a champagne reception and examine the boring machine in the glow of electric lights. These rebuttals failed to stem the tide of public opinion, which, now obsessed with the fear of panic, flowed strongly against the Tunnel. Torn between his personal beliefs and political instincts, Gladstone shunted the issue to a Parliamentary select committee, who failed to come to an agreement, splitting six to four against the scheme. This was the excuse the government needed to extricate itself. Watkin’s Channel Tunnel (Experimental Works) Bill was formally withdrawn from the Commons on July 24, 1883.31 Work on the heading at Shakespeare’s Cliff had ceased in August 1882; the Board of Trade had eventually been forced to secure an injunction against Watkin, who at one point declared his willingness to go to jail for his Tunnel. When the machine at Sangatte was switched off on March 18, 1883, the two companies had tunnelled 3,863 yards (3.5 km) without serious incident.32 The French machine was soon moved to Liverpool, where it dug a ventilation tunnel for the Mersey railway. The British machine was left where it stood, 130 feet below the Channel.33 The name of the Submarine Continental Railway Company disappeared in 1886 when it merged with the Channel Tunnel Company. Watkin campaigned vigorously but fruitlessly for a further eight years. He retired from the railways in 1894, and died in 1901. If the military objections had been withdrawn, could the Tunnel have been completed in the nineteenth century? Beaumont and English demonstrated how an undersea tunnel might be made, but their “experimental” works were miniscule compared to the full project. Watkin himself admitted that state support was probably necessary before the link could be finished. It is unlikely that Beaumont’s air-powered trains were viable at the scale envisaged, and the problem of continuous ventilation and maintenance would have been immense. On the other hand, the emergence of electric trains by the end of the century would have greatly simplified the problem.34 What is certain is that geology was on their side. At the end of the 1980s, during the construction of the modern Tunnel, a Eurotunnel/TransManche boring machine bisected the Submarine Continental’s heading under the sea.35 The 1882 works were found to be watertight, with rails and handcarts still in place: a reminder that people had come this way before. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 10, 2024

Peter Keeling

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:00.799002

silent-treatment

The Silent Treatment Solitary Confinement’s Unlikely Origins By Jane Brox October 25, 2023 Characterised today by the noise of banging, buzzers, and the cries of inmates, solitary confinement was originally developed from Quaker ideas about the redemptive power of silence, envisioned as a humane alternative to the punitive violence of late-18th century jails. Revisiting Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, Jane Brox discovers the spiritual origins and reformist ambitions of solitary’s early advocates, and sees their supposedly progressive desires come to ruin by the 20th century. On any given day in the United States, of the more than one million men and women incarcerated in jails and prisons, over 120,000 are locked in solitary confinement.1 None have been sentenced by a court to their isolation. They are serving a punishment within punishment, having been placed in solitary by prison officials for a variety of reasons: violent crime, petty theft, speaking out, gang involvement, political activism. Some are in protective custody; others have mental health issues and are considered too difficult to control. A disproportionate percentage are people of color. Their sentence might last weeks or months and is subject to extension. More than a few spend years, even decades in cells whose dimensions are commonly compared to the size of a parking space, but which are often smaller — six-by-nine feet, or eight-by-ten. Reading material is sparse. Confined prisoners don’t participate in educational or rehabilitation programs. Other than meals — which are often more meager than those provided to the general prison population — and an hour of exercise a day, little exists to distract them from the heaviness of time, and nothing at all suggests that the historic roots of such punishment can be traced to the concept of redemption. The idea of the solitary cell as an integral part of the American prison system arose during the Early Republic, the specific vision of Philadelphia physician and Founding Father Benjamin Rush, who advocated for time in solitude and silence — the active, searching silence of Quakerism — as an alternative to the bodily pain, injury, and humiliation of public hangings and whippings. He saw it as a means not only of punishment but of reformation for housebreakers, forgers, highway robbers, horse thieves, and even murderers, and his vision of justice eventually led to the construction of the world’s first penitentiary, Eastern State, designed by architect John Haviland, and raised on the grounds of an old cherry orchard three miles outside of Philadelphia’s city limits. When Cherry Hill — as it was sometimes called — admitted its first prisoners in 1829, it stood in stark contrast to traditional jails, where debtors and those awaiting trial were housed in filthy, noisy, and disorderly common rooms. In the penitentiary, not only were the confined to remain in their individual cells for the duration of their sentence, according to the board of inspectors for Philadelphia’s prisons, there was to be “such an entire seclusion of convicts from society and from one another, as that during the period of their confinement, no one shall see or hear, or be seen or heard by any human being, except the jailer, the inspectors, or such other persons, as for highly urgent reasons may be permitted to enter the walls of the prison.”2 Rush began to articulate his ideas concerning justice more than forty years prior to Eastern State’s opening. During the winter of 1787, in Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia home, he addressed the newly formed Society for Promoting Political Inquiries, which was comprised of a dozen or more men — Thomas Paine among them — who’d begun to routinely gather to discuss ideas meant to foster social and economic improvements in Pennsylvania and throughout the young Republic. “I cannot help entertaining a hope, that the time is not very distant, when the gallows, the pillory, the stocks, the whipping-post . . . will be connected with the history of the rack and the stake, as marks of the barbarity of the ages and countries, and as melancholy proofs of the feeble operation of reason and religion upon the human mind”, he declared.3 At the time, Philadelphia had already begun to search for alternatives to the public, provocative blood punishments and the notorious chaos of its overcrowded jails. Most notably, city officials were experimenting with having felons undertake public works projects such as building, maintaining, and cleaning the streets. The felons, known as “wheelbarrow men”, wore brightly colored or boldly striped uniforms, which were meant both to humiliate them and to help identify them should they escape. They attracted crowds — some taunting them, others throwing coins in support and solidarity. Some felons escaped, and some escapees attacked citizens. Both their perceived threat to the public and their degradation created unease, for the wheelbarrow men made punishment publicly apparent in an even more emphatic way than had felons held in stocks or tied to whipping posts: “They were encumbered with iron collars and chains, to which bomb-shells were attached, to be dragged along while they performed their degrading service, under the eye of keepers armed with swords, blunderbusses, and other weapons of destruction”, noted Roberts Vaux, one of the city’s most dedicated promulgators of penal reform.4 Rush had the wheelbarrow men foremost in mind at Franklin’s home that winter evening. Historian David Freeman Hawke even suggests that an encounter with wheelbarrow men fostered Rush’s interest in reform of the justice system. He’d seen a group of them sweeping his street, and offered them something to drink. While talking to them, he found that, as Hawke notes, “he had sympathy, perhaps even respect, for the way they bore their humiliation.”5 Rush insisted to his audience that All public punishments tend to make bad men worse, and to increase crimes by their influence upon society. . . . But may not the benefit derived to society, by employing criminals to repair public roads, or to clean streets, overbalance the evils that have been mentioned? I answer, by no means. On the contrary . . . the practice of employing criminals in public labour, will render labour of every kind disreputable.6 The spectacle trivialized both criminal and onlooker, he argued, and tended to “make bad men worse” especially by destroying any sense of shame. It was no better than the blood punishments which also failed to create a true change of mind and habit: “A man who has lost his character at a whipping-post, has nothing valuable left to lose in society.”7 Such measures, Rush insisted, also harmed those who witnessed them: The men, or perhaps the women whose persons we detest, possess souls and bodies composed of the same materials as those of our friends and relations. They are bone of their bone; and were originally fashioned with the same spirits. What, then, must be the consequence of a familiarity with such objects of horror, upon our attachments and duties to our friends and connections, or to the rest of mankind?8 In addition to decrying traditional methods of punishment, Rush offered specific proposals for a penitentiary in which silence would be put toward many ends — ideas that were inextricable from the city’s Quaker roots. Silence in Philadelphia held a profound and specific meaning that harked back to its first days as a settlement. In the spare simple spaces of the meeting houses, Quakers gathered and waited and listened together for the presence of the divine, for a voice that could only be heard in passive, expectant, and profound silence: “By not speaking, not desiring, and not thinking, one arrives at the true and perfect mystical silence, wherein God speaks with the soul”, explained seventeenth-century Italian priest and Quaker inspiration Miguel de Molinos.9 Not only did silence have a particular meaning in Pennsylvania, justice did as well. William Penn, in his new colony, was concerned with fostering a humane and fair means of dealing with transgression, a belief born of experience. As a convert to Quakerism he’d had hard experience with both the jails and courtrooms of London. Since the founding of the religion by George Fox in the 1640s, Quakers had been subject to persecution. In the late seventeenth century, after Charles II passed a set of acts that attempted to weaken dissent and protect the Church of England, besides being stocked, stoned, and whipped, more than thirteen thousand Quakers were imprisoned in England. Hundreds died while incarcerated. Penn’s Great Law — a series of statutes by which the Colony was to be governed — aimed to ensure the procedures for trial and sentencing in the Pennsylvania colony would be simple, understandable, and equitable. Although the blood punishments didn’t disappear, they were fewer and milder than those in England and in the other colonies. The death sentence was abolished for all crimes except premeditated murder, which was in accord with predominant Quaker thinking on capital punishment. In Penn’s colony, every county prison was to be a workhouse, and felons were either to be fined or sentenced to a certain amount of time at hard labor in a “house of Correction”. Still, Penn’s laws, though less severe, were based on traditional means of carrying out justice. What Rush proposed was innovative, and in the years following his speech, he more fully articulated specific ideas for the penitentiary. While he emphasized the possibilities of reformation, the horror of confinement was an inextricable component of his vision. The secrecy and sense of the extreme fostered by an isolated location and an austere aura of gloom would work to magnify the wages of such punishment in the public mind. For the prisoner, those same qualities would work to make society feel dear once again. “An attachment to kindred and society is one of the strongest feelings of the human heart”, insisted Rush.10 “A separation from them, therefore has ever been considered as one of severest punishments that can be inflicted upon man. . . . Personal liberty is so dear to all men, that the loss of it, for an indefinite time, is a punishment so severe that death has often been preferred to it.” To counter the dread of an indefinite sentence — commonly endured by debtors and felons awaiting punishment in the jails of the time — Rush advocated terms of specific duration. And he held firm to the notion that silence in solitude would inevitably be redemptive: “I already hear the inhabitants of our villages and townships counting the years that shall complete the reformation of one of their citizens”, he proclaimed.11 “I behold them running to meet him on the day of his deliverance. His friends and family bathe his cheeks with tears of joy; and the universal shout of the neighborhood is, ‘This our brother was lost, and is found — was dead and is alive.’” There had been, prior to the construction of the penitentiary, some partial measures toward reform through solitude and silence in Philadelphia. In 1790 the Pennsylvania Legislature, looking for ways to alleviate the crowding in jails, approved funding to remodel the city’s Walnut Street Jail. When opened in 1773, as was typical at the time, the general prison population was housed together in large rooms, debtors and felons alike fending for themselves. Under the remodeling plan — advocated by the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, of which Rush was a founding and influential member — in addition to other changes, a separate building was erected on the prison grounds, with sixteen eight-by-six-foot cells designated for the solitary confinement of serious and repeat offenders. This was in keeping with Rush’s proposal first articulated in Franklin’s living room that cells be “provided for the solitary confinement of such persons as are of a refractory temper.”12 The Walnut Street Jail eventually came to be known as “the cradle of the penitentiary”. In general, by the late eighteenth century the country’s attitude toward the blood punishments was changing, and many states were shifting from brandings and whippings to extended confinements for convicts, but no solitude in these prisons was complete. At Auburn, in New York, for example, inmates were housed in solitary cells, but they ate meals together and worked together in enforced silence. Nor was redemption the aim in these houses of incarceration. In fact, the conditions were often entirely brutish. For instance, at New-Gate, Connecticut’s first prison, the incarcerated were housed underground in the tunnels of a depleted copper mine. They were brought to the surface every day to work in shops forging nails or building barrels and casks. Although Rush would always emphasize the idea of the prison cell as a means of reformation, there was little consensus, even in Philadelphia, as to the purpose of incarceration. “There have been many opinions about the mode of treating the convicts”, remarked Caleb Lownes, the first administrator of the reconceptualized Walnut Street.13 Some seem to forget that the prisoner is a rational being, of like feeling and passions with themselves. Some think he is placed there to be perpetually tormented and punished. Some prescribe a certain time as necessary to his cure. One will not allow him the light of heaven, or the refreshment of the breeze; the comforts of society, or even the voice of his keeper: while another considers a seclusion from his friends and connexions, as a ground for accusation of inhumanity. At Walnut Street, he noted, they “adopted a plan, which upon full consideration was deemed best, though not perfect.” Lownes further remarked that the prisoners knew that a “second conviction would consign them to the solitary cells, and deprive them of the most distant hopes of pardon. These cells are an object of real terror to them all.”14 The solitary cells weren’t only distinguished in prisoners’ minds. As sociologist Orlando Lewis has noted, they were “at the outset branded in the public mind as punishment cells for the protection of society and the infliction of the hardest possible sentences.”15 Eastern State Penitentiary certainly appeared to be designed for punishment. Its aspect was nothing if not forbidding. The ranges of solitary cells radiating out from a central rotunda were surrounded by a thirty-foot-high wall built of hewn Schuylkill stone. The original entryway stood twenty-seven feet high and fifteen feet wide, and its oaken double doors, studded with iron rivets, weighed several tons. A massive wrought-iron portcullis fronted them. Benjamin Rush did not live to see his vision fully play out: he died in 1813, a decade before construction of Eastern State began. Yet within those walls of stone his concept of the silent, solitary cell as a means of reformation for all prisoners — be it a first-time petty thief or an intransigent and violent perpetrator of assaults — survived, at least in theory. Prisoner No. 1, Charles Williams, passed through the portal of the still-to-be-completed penitentiary on October 22, 1829.16 The eighteen-year-old Black farmer was sentenced to two years of solitary and silent confinement for breaking into a house and stealing a silver watch, a gold seal, and a gold key worth, in total, $25.00 (about $830.00 in today’s money). His entry ritual in the penitentiary’s central rotunda was meant to be a kind of baptism. After he had his hair cut, he was issued two handkerchiefs, two pairs of socks, a pair of shoes, woolen trousers, a jacket, and a shirt. His identity as Prisoner No. 1 was sewn into his clothing and hung above the entrance to his cell. He would not be called Charles again for the duration of his stay. He was meant never to know where in the penitentiary his cell was located — while being ushered to it, Williams was hooded. All he was to comprehend of his physical world was the twelve-by-eight-foot whitewashed cell he inhabited: its stone floor; the bed, which could be folded against the wall for more room, with its sheet, blanket, and straw mattress; some scrubbing and sweeping brushes; a clothes rail; a wash basin; a mirror; a crude flush toilet; a tin cup; a victuals pan; a stool; and a workbench where he was to spend his time making shoes. Light from a small ocular window cut into the ceiling was deemed sufficient for his work and for reading the Bible. The window was known as the Eye of God, although architect John Haviland referred to it as a Dead Eye, which could be darkened by placing a half keg over it should a prisoner need to be disciplined. Charles Williams’ individual exercise yard adjoining his cell, and, nearly identical in size to it, was walled in stone. There, for one hour a day, he could look up at a patch of sky. Williams wouldn’t be able to receive or write letters. Although he might exchange occasional words with a guard or inspector, and he’d have regular visits from moral and spiritual instructors, no friends or family would be allowed to visit him. He was not to talk unless instructed to. He was not to make any unnecessary noise. The guards patrolling the hallways wore socks over their boots to muffle their footsteps. A prisoner would never know when a guard was approaching the peephole in his door, and so always had to expect he was being watched. Likewise, the wheels of the meal cart were fashioned of wool, which caused no perceptual sound when rations were delivered. The food was meant to be plentiful and nourishing: coffee or cocoa in the morning, one pound of bread a day, potatoes and meat at noon, a type of corn pudding called “Indian mush” in the evening. Each prisoner was granted a half-gallon of molasses each month, and could ask for salt. He’d be given vinegar as a favor. (When Eastern State opened, the poorest city dwellers lived in lightless basements, and officials feared that the eight-by-twelve-foot cell and the guarantee of three meals a day might prove attractive.) In today’s isolation, the food is not only often meager but unappetizing, with few fresh fruits and vegetables, and bread that is often soggy, sometimes moldy. The noise is unceasing. Random cries and howls. Screams. Rattling. Banging. Shouting. Buzzers and alarms. At Eastern State, prisoners resorted to furtive tappings and notes passed over the walls of their exercise yards to communicate with one another. Now there is fishing — a means of passing a note to an adjoining cell by attaching it to a weighted string and slipping it underneath the cell door. The shadows in a cell lit only by a small round window are gone. In keeping with modern times, an excess of harsh artificial light floods solitary cells. Sometimes it isn’t even shut off at night. Still, an inmate who has spent time in twenty-first century isolation would recognize the dimensions of Charles Williams’ cell, and its toilet, sink, and narrow bed against the wall. And its lack of privacy. A modern inmate may be continually monitored by video feed, which only increases the feeling expressed hundreds of years ago by the Marquis de Lafayette upon seeing Eastern State for the first time: “none have exceeded — none have equaled that single oppression of being . . . exposed to the view of two eyes, watching my every motion, taking from my very thoughts every idea of privacy.”17 Although those in modern-day isolation don’t work, anyone who knows about surviving carceral isolation would certainly understand why some prisoners in Eastern State voluntarily rose before daybreak and began to hammer their leather. As prisoners’ rights advocate and writer Keramet Reiter observes, the inmates who do best in solitary “develop rigid, repetitive routines to get through the long days.”18 Exercise, preparing legal documents, reading, learning a language. And they would understand just how unprepared Charles Williams must have been for the world he was released into exactly two years to the day after he’d been ushered to his cell. His original clothes had been returned to him, as had his name. He had gained some skills as a shoemaker, and prison officials had given him four dollars, “whereby the temptation immediately to commit offenses against society, before employment can be obtained, may be obviated”, but such things would be of limited help in a world that had surely grown strange to him.19 It’s not likely Williams would have had any word from his family during his confinement. No gossip or news from the outside. He’d know nothing of the inventions or cholera outbreaks or prominent deaths of the past two years. And it’s doubtful that anyone was running to meet him on the day of his deliverance. Upon his release in October 1831, Eastern State Penitentiary was still not completed, and was not yet full, although it soon became clear that the original plan for seven ranges of cells housing three hundred prisoners was not large enough for the future, so John Haviland revised his design to include more ranges. He added a second story to some of them. Once Eastern State was finally finished in 1836, it could house 586 prisoners in individual cells. Even so, within a few decades, Rush’s concept of redemption through silence and solitude was lost to the exigencies of a system contending with exponential growth and social change. After the Civil War, the demand for space outgrew the complex’s capacity, and the warden had no choice but to double up prisoners in the cells. By the last decade of the century, half of the prisoners had cellmates and there were communal workshops on the grounds. During the twentieth century: a prison newspaper, baseball teams, boxing matches. Eastern State housed its last prisoners in 1971. By then, the city of Philadelphia had long grown around its walls of Schuylkill stone. Today the penitentiary remains in a state of preserved ruin. Visitors can peer into mockups of the cells as they were in Charles Williams’ time. They can also descend beneath one of the ranges to view four solitary cells constructed in the 1920s — by then Eastern State had become a fully congregate prison — for the purpose of punishment within punishment. They had been carved out of an underground tunnel. No beds. No workbench. No plumbing. No windows. What electric light there was would have been controlled by the guards. In their ruin those four cells now stand for all that became of Rush’s hope for a system to replace the barbarity of the ages. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 25, 2023

Jane Brox

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:01.194946

cliche-verre-and-friendship-in-19th-century-france

Cliché-Verre and Friendship in 19th-Century France By Miya Tokumitsu November 21, 2023 In the 1850s, as photography took its first steps toward commercial reproducibility, a more intimate use for light-sensitive plates briefly bloomed. It had a few names: heliographic drawing, photographic autography, or, as it is best known today, cliché-verre. Miya Tokumitsu takes us to the towns and forests of France where a group of friends began making marks on photographic plates, and finds their camaraderie cohere in lyrical arrangements of topography and light. In May of 1853, the celebrated painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot drew his first photographic negative on a glass plate. He was in the northern French town of Arras, visiting his dear friend, Constant Dutilleux, also a painter. It was a festive time: Corot was close with his friend’s family, and the occasion for the visit was the wedding of Dutilleux’s daughter, Élisa, to the artist and publisher Alfred Robaut.1 Encouraged by friends, Corot scratched a stylus around the collodion-coated plate, removing bits of the emulsion in scribbles and wisps. This cliché-verre (glass plate) was then used as a matrix to create the resulting print, The Woodcutter of Rembrandt (Le Bûcheron de Rembrandt). Thus began a spirited but brief efflorescence of cliché-verre making in France. Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and numerous others tried their hands at the newfangled technique, though none besides Corot found it to be a sustaining medium for their work. This story of cliché-verre, from its delightful beginning to its general quiescence a few years later, reveals what a generative — and delicate — creative force friendship can be. Cliché-verre is a graphic art technique that combines aspects of photography and printmaking. Until the twentieth century, it had an unsettled nomenclature that awkwardly attempted to bridge these mediums and included various knotty terms like “heliographic drawing” (dessin héliographique) and “photographic autography” (autographie photographique).2 In the most common, “drawn” method of cliché-verre that Corot employed for The Woodcutter of Rembrandt, a transparent glass plate is covered with an opaque coating, such as collodion. As with copperplate etching, an artist draws through this coating with a stylus, scratching or flecking it off the surface. Indeed, Corot’s invocation of Rembrandt van Rijn, one of the great masters of etching, in the title of his first cliché-verre, perhaps staked a hopeful claim for the new technique. Once the composition is complete, the plate is a photographic negative; light shines through only the transparent areas of the plate onto light-sensitive paper, creating a photographic image.3 No camera is required. Alternatively, an artist could paint a composition onto the glass plate. In contrast to the subtractive method described above, this additive method requires the artist to think in reverse, tonally. The most opaque areas of brushed-on paint will print faint or white as they impede the light’s penetration, whereas areas only thinly covered or left untouched will allow more light through and therefore print darkest.4 In Two Boatmen in a Marsh near a Cluster of Trees, Dutilleux created soft tonal variations by brushing and daubing his plate with pigment. Dutilleux was the nucleus of a lively artistic community in Arras. He owned and ran a lithography printing operation, taught art classes, and painted landscapes for pleasure and portraits on commission.5 And he oversaw a busy atelier that served as a gathering point for artists at various stages of training and professional ambition, including Adalbert Cuvelier, an amateur landscape photographer; Jean-Gabriel-Léandre Grandguillaume, a local drawing professor; and Charles Desavary, a lithographer and photographer who married another of Dutilleux’s daughters and eventually became his business partner. With a rotating cast of others in tow, this merry band took excursions together, sketching, painting, and photographing the countryside, all the time exchanging ideas and exploring new paths forward for their art.6 During one such exchange, Cuvelier and Grandguillaume devised a process for cliché-verre printing, though the precise details of their discovery are unknown.7 It was they who initially urged Corot to create The Woodcutter of Rembrandt, and who subsequently printed his plate.8 Another of the Arras friends took care to document Corot’s early cliché-verre trials for posterity. Impressions of the first three cliché-verre prints by Corot, which were once in Dutilleux’s possession, are annotated with captions such as “C. Corot, 1st attempt at drawing on glass for photography, May 1853”.9 Corot proceeded to produce some fifty clichés-verre from 1853 until 1860, when he paused temporarily. That was the year Dutilleux moved to Paris, thereby decreasing Corot’s regular trips to Arras.10 After 1860, Corot had two periods of cliché-verre activity: one in 1871 and another in 1874.11 He never made these prints alone. Corot did not engage with the technical intricacies of plate preparation or printing himself, and his cliché-verre production was active only when he was able to collaborate with Grandguillaume and Cuvelier, and later on, Desavary, who eventually took over printing his plates.12 In between their meetings, Corot continued to discuss “les verres” with Dutilleux in letters — a testament to his personal investment in the medium, as he seldom corresponded about his paintings.13 These relationships facilitated Corot’s expression in the new technique. But collaborative artistic processes also come with inherent limitations due to factors both mundane, such as schedule alignment, and emotional, like the shifting tides of personal intimacy. Navigating these sensitive conditions across several intertwined social groups requires a combination of social acuity and energy that Corot possessed in abundance. His plans for the year 1857, probably jotted down in one excited sitting, sound exhausting: no fewer than ten stints as a houseguest in as many towns between May and October. Each visit would be preceded by an exuberant letter announcing his imminent arrival.14 Fifteen years later, Corot continued to be a man in transit. Between July and August 1873, he zipped from Douai (where he visited the Robauts) to Arras (to see Desavary) to Dunkirk (with the artist Charles-François Daubigny) to Ville d’Avray (for his sister’s birthday) to Marcoussis (where he had promised to meet the painter Ernest-Joachim Dumax and others).15 One of the Marcoussis group, E. Forest, captured an understandably tuckered-out Corot in a pair of sketches.16 Meanwhile, the practice of cliché-verre spread from Arras to Barbizon, a town south of Paris in Fontainebleau forest. There, another group of artists had coalesced; they were loosely united in their interest in representing nature and preindustrial life, and often turned to their physical environment for inspiration. As in Arras, this gathering included painters, printmakers, and photographers. Rousseau and Millet are perhaps the best-known figures of this so-called Barbizon School today. Beginning around 1851, members of the Arras group, including Dutilleux and his students, had begun visiting Barbizon regularly. Among them was Adalbert Cuvelier’s son, Eugène, also an amateur photographer.17 In 1859, Eugène Cuvelier married Marie-Louise Ganne, daughter of the innkeeper at the Auberge Ganne in Barbizon, where numerous artists socialized and lodged. The festivities were an enchanting manifestation of the Barbizon group’s rustic ideals and artistic camaraderie. Millet and Rousseau were present as best men to the groom, and Corot led guests in a line dance through an obstacle course of empty bottles.18 Although the Cuveliers are background figures in the history of art, their marriage was made possible by the creative fellowship fostered by the social worlds of Arras and Barbizon. Eugène Cuvelier remained in Barbizon, introducing the artists there to his father’s cliché-verre technique.19 Rousseau and Millet both gave it a go, as did several other artists settled in Barbizon, or just passing through.20 These Barbizon plates date between 1859 and 1862, a span of just a few years. Daubigny, another dear friend to Corot and regular visitor to Barbizon, took to cliché-verre enthusiastically, producing seventeen of them in 1862. However, his cliché-verre production stopped abruptly this same year. The primary subject matter of these clichés-verre — richly foliated forests, lyrical arrangements of topography and light — reflect the longstanding interests of these artists. Corot populated many of his cliché-verre compositions with evocative figures that appear regularly in his painted landscapes: shepherds, strolling daydreamers, sweet families. For his part, Daubigny was able to translate the glowing atmospheres of his small etched landscapes into cliché-verre. However, the new cliché-verre medium also offered expanded possibilities for approaching subjects that these artists had explored in other media. For Corot, cliché-verre provided another method for forming the autographic strokes he cherished in drawing.21 In Death and the Young Girl (La Jeune fille et la mort), Corot used a blunt-tipped tool to remove wide paths of emulsion from the glass plate, creating thick contours and hatch marks in the final print. The heaviness of these strokes makes an assertive reference to the artist’s hand — a literal personal touch that imbues these works with an intimacy that parallels that of Corot and his printers. The wild arboreal growth in another of Corot’s clichés-verre, The Trees in the Mountain (Les Arbres dans la montagne), is a riot of zig-zags. Daubigny’s Cows at a Watering Place (Vaches à l'abreuvoir) dares to approach the abstract; its somber mood comes into focus almost before the cows do. Like its cousin, photography, cliché-verre did not come preloaded with the historical legacies of painting, sculpture, or architecture, with their royal academies and pantheons of masters. Nor did cliché-verre and early photography have preexisting audiences of connoisseurial obsessives, as did etching. The same false choice hung over both photography and cliché-verre: were they best suited for industrial use or could they be viable as mediums of fine art? Although photography, as the superior tool for representation, would take hold within and beyond the world of fine art, cliché-verre, it seems, caught on only in highly specific contexts. Arras had a fortuitous confluence of amateur photographers and professional printers that fostered the cross-media experimentation of Adalbert Cuvelier and Grandguillaume. Fontainebleau forest, and its denizens’ enthusiasm for plein-air art-making, proved a welcoming venue for photographers who turned their lenses on the same vistas observed by painters and sketchers. Working in proximity to artists such as Millet and Rousseau, photographers like Gustave Le Gray, Constant Alexandre Famin, and Eugène Cuvelier created painterly landscape compositions and captured, in their own medium, the forest’s changing light.22 Coming from Arras, where he had seen painters persuaded to try cliché-verre, Eugène Cuvelier succeeded in suggesting that the painters in Barbizon do the same. One appealing aspect of cliché-verre for novices was its low barrier to entry: there was no “right” way to create one, and this open-endedness created room for experimentation. For instance, clichés-verre were typically printed with the emulsion side of the glass facing down, touching the light-sensitive paper. This would lead to a sharp image — as light would not refract through the glass between the image matrix and the paper. Facing the emulsion side down yielded an image printed in reverse to that of the matrix, like one would get with traditional printmaking techniques. But perhaps, on occasion, a softer contour might be desired. Clichés-verre could also be printed emulsion side up. Doing so would leave the image unreversed and produce a soft focus and halo effect around the image contours, as light would refract through the glass plate before striking the paper underneath.23 Daubigny printed his composition Deer (Les Cerfs) both ways. The impression with the lighter, neater lines was made with the emulsion side of the glass plate face down on the paper. The impression with the softer contours was printed with the emulsion side up. By simply flipping the plate, Daubigny was able to create two distinct iterations of his composition, one faithfully documenting his hand-drawn strokes and the other distorting them slightly for moody effect. Not all of these artists’ experiments with cliché-verre were aimed at discovering new, technique-specific pictorial effects in the manner of Daubigny and his two printings of Deer. Millet applied cliché-verre in a more industrial manner, using it to make reproductions of two painted works, including The Maternal Precaution (La Précaution maternelle). In this instance, Millet drew upon cliché-verre’s potential as a reproductive technology to create a drawn version, in multiple, of his charming painted composition. Corot also reproduced two of his painted compositions in early cliché-verre trials, but ceased using the technique for this purpose, focusing instead on its possibilities for his own creative expression.24 None of these painters, it seems, found cliché-verre to be a satisfactory method for disseminating images of their own paintings. Millet, who was a skilled etcher, seemed to have preferred the inky materiality and tonal richness of copperplate printmaking for creating small-scale works on paper. Finding cliché-verre a bit wan in comparison, and not a convincing medium for reproducing paintings, he gave it up. In the end, neither the aesthetic effects achievable in cliché-verre nor the technique’s capacity for serving as a means to reproduce images found purchase among the Barbizon group or beyond it. Despite their willingness to experiment with cliché-verre, most of the Barbizon artists set it aside after a few trials. Other than Corot and Daubigny, none of the artists mentioned here made more than a few, and Corot was the only one who continued making clichés-verre after 1862. Many of these works exist in only a handful of impressions. It seems these artists found the technique a passing novelty rather than a generative means for advancing their artistic aims or, for that matter, their success in the art market. Also at issue was the basic reality that friendship circles are highly mutable social contexts. The magic of a particular month or season or few years is fleeting, as individuals journey along their own inevitably divergent life trajectories. Confluences of specific personalities in one location, all at moments in their lives when they are undistracted and receptive to collaborative experimentation, are rarely permanent or stable. By the mid-1860s, the shape of the Barbizon group and its network of affiliates was shifting. Rousseau and Dutilleux died in 1865. Eugène Cuvelier, who introduced cliché-verre to the Barbizon group and printed their plates, seems to have drifted from pursuing an artistic career, though he remained a skilled amateur photographer.25 Corot was a regular visitor, but not a permanent fixture in Barbizon; in any case, he did not prepare or print plates, and so could not have served as a technical facilitator of others’ clichés-verre. The technology and materials for making clichés-verre remained known and available, but the highly specific convivial context of Barbizon between 1859 and 1862 came to an end. As this group metamorphosed, the collaborations that nurtured cliché-verre disappeared and were not replaced, even as the individuals involved remained fond of one another. The failure of cliché-verre to take hold as a mainstream artistic medium, in contrast to lithography and photography, is a story that extends beyond the Barbizon School’s brief romance with the technique. Indeed, near-contemporaneous, niche enthusiasms for cliché-verre bubbled up and dissipated in England and the United States (and later, in the studios of Paul Klee, Man Ray, and several other artists).26 There was, for instance, the not-insignificant matter of cliché-verre lacking a dedicated public audience. The small prints made by the Arras-Barbizon artists may have served as mementos or friendship tokens meant to be kept and exchanged within their social milieu.27 These clichés-verre were therefore rather intimate objects in their initial releases, made for a familiar audience. Lithography and photography, by contrast, were introduced to the public as industrial techniques for producing mass media, and both were more cost-effective than cliché-verre for that purpose.28 Eventually, both would be accepted as mediums for fine art as well. Meanwhile copperplate etching, a printmaking technique originating in the sixteenth century, was experiencing a revival across Europe as an artisanal medium marketed to connoisseurs in limited editions. The clichés-verre created in Arras and Barbizon never ultimately gained a toehold among the public, critics, or collectors — the main constituencies who determined success in the nineteenth-century art market as well as the narrative of the century’s art history.29 After interest in cliché-verre subsided in Barbizon, many of these worked-up plates remained in the hands of Alfred Robaut and Eugène Cuvelier — the grooms of both weddings mentioned above. Desavary, another of Dutilleux’s sons-in-law, held onto a separate batch. These men, intimately connected to the artists of Arras and Barbizon, were the first generation of the plates’ caretakers. From these primary collections, the Barbizon plates flowed to successive owners. In 1921, Maurice Le Garrec, a Paris-based art dealer who had acquired many of the Desavary plates, had forty reprinted and published in a portfolio, Forty Glass Plates (Quarante clichés-glace).30 Le Garrec released Quarante clichés-glace in an edition of a hundred and fifty plus five expanded editions that had two variant impressions from each plate. The portfolio includes several clichés-verre by Corot and Daubigny, as well as two each by Rousseau and Millet. It also includes Eugène Delacroix’s sole cliché-verre, which depicts a snarling tiger rendered in loose, thin lines. It was through Quarante clichés-glace that the mainstream art market became acquainted with these artists’ clichés-verre, decades after most of their creators had died.31 The portfolio did not inspire fresh interest in actually practicing the technique, however. Perhaps etymological developments played a discouraging role: just as “cliché-verre” was starting to stabilize as a term for the technique in the early twentieth century, “cliché” on its own had begun to acquire a connotation of hackneyed repetition, akin to another printing matrix affiliated with industrial production, the stereotype.32 After his colleagues left cliché-verre behind in 1862, Corot undertook two later periods of activity with the technique in 1871 and 1874 — years in which it was possible to collaborate with his favored printers. Exactly why Corot bucked the trend is open to speculation. A partial explanation may lie in the sociality of Corot’s cliché-verre practice. Cliché-verre was a process and product of friendship for this artist, a technique facilitated by correspondence and visits, suggestion and feedback, personal contribution and reliance on the expertise of others. Among his other achievements, Corot was a uniquely good friend. He was by all accounts a jocular presence perpetually surrounded by gaggles of companions and visitors, and his generosity matched his capacity for social engagements. When another of his friends, the artist Honoré Daumier, found himself impoverished and suffering from poor eyesight and illness, Corot made him a cash gift, allowing Daumier to purchase the small house he had been renting for nine years.33 Corot also financially supported Millet’s widow after her husband’s death. His skill at maintaining intimacy and understanding with a variety of collaborators bore fruit in numerous ways, one of which was an outstanding production of clichés-verre. Corot made his last group of clichés-verre in 1874, just months before his death, while visiting Desavary. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 21, 2023

Miya Tokumitsu

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:01.910674

audubons-haiti

Audubon’s Haiti By Christoph Irmscher March 6, 2019 An entrepreneur, hunter, woodsman, scientist, and artist — John James Audubon, famous for his epic The Birds of America, is a figure intimately associated with a certain idea of what it means to be American. And like many of the country's icons, he was also an immigrant. Christoph Irmscher reflects on Audubon's complex relationship to his Haitian roots. In the summer of last year major protests erupted in Haiti as the government announced a sharp increase in fuel prices, forced to do so by an agreement with the International Monetary Fund that ended costly subsidies for petroleum products. After the suspension of the price hike and the prime minister’s reluctant resignation, the country has returned to an uneasy calm, as if everyone were waiting for the next match that lights the fuse. For some US Americans, these events have confirmed their view of Haiti as a country engaged in a permanent struggle for survival, and remarks made in the Oval Office, not too long ago, have only exacerbated such generalizations. But, as Michael Harriot has pointed out, in a recent piece published in Root, every bit of the Haitian struggle is related to the legacy of slavery and capitalism, a legacy in the which the United States and its banks are deeply complicit.1 What happened in Haiti never stayed in Haiti. As this island paradise continues to suffer from foreign exploitation, it is worth confronting the continuing cultural and moral debt we owe to Haiti. And few other American cultural icons embody the complexity of that relationship more acutely than John James Audubon (1785-1851), perhaps the greatest American naturalist, brilliant chronicler of avian life in America, and creator of one of the most magnificent and expensive printed books ever made, The Birds of America (1827–1838). Biographers have typically written about Audubon as if he had been — never mind the accident of his foreign birth — the archetypal American: keen-eyed, quick with his gun, a man at home equally in the forests of the American frontier and at his estate in New York, an efficient killer of birds as well as, when his art demanded it, their fervent advocate, a great artist as well as a canny entrepreneur. “The Making of an American” was the subtitle of the last popular recreation of Audubon’s life.2 John James Audubon was an immigrant, to be sure, but simplified accounts that refer to him merely as French omit a salient detail. Audubon was born Jean Rabin in 1785 in Les Cayes on the southern shore of Haiti, or Saint-Domingue, as that island’s French colony was then called. He was the illegitimate son of the French sea captain and slave trader Jean Audubon and a French chambermaid who died within a year of his birth, Jeanne Rabin. “My father had large properties in Santo Domingo” wrote Audubon later, even as he was trying his best to leave the precise circumstances of his birth unclear — by claiming, for example, that he was actually born during one of his father’s visits to Louisiana.3 Of course, Jean Audubon knew better. In his will, he called his son a “Créole de Saint-Domingue”. And John James himself knew better, too. Earlier this year, I spent some time looking through Audubon’s books at the magnificent Audubon Museum in Henderson, Kentucky. In his personal copy of ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte’s American Ornithology, a supplement to Alexander Wilson’s pioneering work on American birds, I found a note scribbled in the margins of Bonaparte’s essay on the “Great Crow Blackbird” (now better known as the Boat-tailed Grackle). “The very bout de Petun’s note”, Audubon exclaimed next to Bonaparte’s description of the grackle’s song.4 Audubon’s marginal comment refers to the Creole name for the Smooth-billed Ani, a black-plumed tropical bird that had captured the imagination of the early colonists, who thought that its song sounded as if it were saying un petit bout de petun, “a little roll of tobacco”.5 And Audubon was familiar with that name, because, as he stated proudly in the same note, he was “J.J.A. born in Santo Domingue”, with the latter part of the phrase underlined, for good measure. It is not surprising that Audubon would have limited such a disclosure of his origins to the margin of one of his books. The land of his birth was an unfathomably brutal place. After the Spanish had systematically eradicated the last remaining members of the island’s original population, the French filled the island with slaves from West Africa. The “Pearl of the Antilles”, as Haiti was also called, became the world’s richest exporter of slave-grown goods. An estimated one million slaves died there during French rule — beaten, whipped, burned, raped, mutilated into submission and death. The air was thick with the suffering of people. The planters treated their slaves so badly that a French family, the Vincendières, who relocated to Maryland after the rebellion, repeatedly got in trouble there with the local authorities. Eye witnesses reported seeing, even from a distance, their various instruments of torture: stocks, whipping posts, and wooden horses or chevalets, as the Vincendières would have called them.6 An old French map made the year after the birth of Audubon shows his father’s estate about a half mile south of the southernmost tip of Étang Lachaux, or Lake Lachaux, about eight miles north of the harbor of Les Cayes, wedged in tightly between the parcels of land owned by other planters. The map gives us a depressing sense of what happened to the landscape after the colonists had taken hold of it — sliced by the greed of men into bizarre rectangles and superimposed with the names of slave-owners: a geography of fear and death. Not knowing what they were, the infant John James would have inhaled, with every breath he took, the dismal odors of slavery, the blood, sweat, tears, and fear mixed in with the sickly-sweet smell of sugar coming from the pots where it was boiled and from where clouds would have arisen blotting out whatever beauties the landscape had to offer. We know that Audubon’s father, a tough man and eventually a very rich one, too, regularly traded fabrics, wine and other European luxury items for coffee, sugar, and cotton, which he transported back to Nantes.7 When exactly he added human beings to his line of goods is less clear, but at least two bills of sale have survived, sometimes listing the names of the people he sold, sometimes only the numbers. Like many whites in Saint-Domingue, Jean Audubon took what he felt was rightfully his, among them the mixed-race woman who ran his household in Les Cayes, Catherine Bouffard, with whom he had several children. It is likely that Audubon would have worried at least occasionally that, no matter what he had been told about his mother, he was “gens de couleur,” too, like his half-sister Rose, Catherine’s daughter, whom he obliterated from his autobiography. At least while he was living in Kentucky, he kept slaves himself, visible proof that he could, after all, act the part of the master, too.8 The 1791 black rebellion against French rule had brought young Audubon’s tropical childhood to a sudden end. His father made sure that he and Rose were whisked off to Nantes, a place that turned out to be hardly safer than Les Cayes. Between November 1793 and February 1794, Jean-Baptiste Carrier had thousands of suspected enemies of the Revolution drowned in the Loire river, the “national bathtub” (la baignoire nationale), as he jokingly called it. Audubon was raised mostly in the countryside, his education overseen by an indulgent stepmother, the childless Anne Moynet. His father wanted to make him a sailor, as he had been, but young Audubon, suffering from mal de mer, proved to be a dismal failure in the naval academy. Birds became a distraction for him early on. He admired, he said later, “the beauty and softness of their plumage”, the seasonal rhythms of their lives, some regularity in a life circumscribed by looming chaos around him.9 Only one drawing from those years in France has survived, a lonely European goldfinch, sitting on a dead branch, pushed all the way on the upper left corner of the sheet — “Le Chardonneret”, as Audubon notes below it.10 One of Audubon’s earliest memories, recorded in a brief autobiographical sketch, involved witnessing the “murder”, as he saw it, of a pet parrot named Polly by an ape the family kept. The incident happened, presumably, at the family’s country estate near Nantes, La Gerbetière. Young Audubon went into hysterics, demanding that the “man of the woods”, as he referred to the ape, be punished, which the black servants, who he said had “followed his father from Santo Domingo”, refused to do. The ape was chained, the parrot buried, and young Audubon had to be “tranquillized.” Before we read this consciously crafted passage as an uncomplicated assertion of Audubon’s identification with birds and rejection of animalistic brutality, we also need to remember that he wrote it at the end of a career during which he, the self-styled American “woodsman,” himself had killed thousands of birds for his art. In a revealing moment, Audubon once called himself a “two-legged monster, armed with a gun.”11 In a sense, Audubon was that ape, too, and if the servants in his memory prefer the ape to the parrot, this reminds us that Audubon—the son of a servant, if not of a black woman—himself struggled with his origins. In this complicated, racially inflected allegory, Audubon is both the fragile parrot (and a mourner of the bird’s demise) and her furry killer, both master and slave, black and white, New World and Old World: Haiti, France, and America all rolled into one.12 In a curious, free-flowing entry he left, even closer to the end of his life, in one of his business ledgers, Audubon imagined a childhood he never had. The note, likely composed in the early stages of the dementia that would eventually kill him, is virtually incomprehensible, a stream of words written down to ensure himself that he still was in command of the English language. But some phrases he repeats, allowing the contours of a story to emerge. “Wipe thyself,” Audubon writes, and then repeats the word and its cognates a number of times: “wipe, wash, clean, bath, pure.” There are corresponding images of contamination: maggots, mites in the cheese, a skull, a corpse, as well as the elements of a narrative that sounds as if it had been taken from a children’s book — references to a house with smoke coming out of a chimney, a silken dress, a high table, a kitchen, a brook, a beech tree, a willow. “Pilfer not,” don’t steal, an unknown voice says, as if a mother were admonishing a child, “that is not nice. Wipe thyself.” It is hard not to suspect a deeper personal significance behind Audubon’s dream of a childhood in which things don’t get stolen, in which the stains of one’s origins can just be washed off. — Source. When he was eighteen, Audubon fled once again. Seeking to avoid service in Napoleon’s army, he took refuge at Mill Pond, a property his father had acquired in Pennsylvania. He became an American citizen in 1812, but his Caribbean beginnings stayed with him, the haunting beauty of the landscape as well as the unspeakable violence in which his father had been complicit. Some of Audubon’s most enduring compositions seem infused with latent memories of where he had come from — the twisted bodies of his most magnificent birds, which seem so alive only because he had killed them first, as well as the lush, water-filled landscapes he or his assistants created as backgrounds. In his bird essays, published as Ornithological Biography between 1831 and 1839, Audubon would often include the Creole names of birds he had studied — papebleu for the Indigo Bunting; ortolan for the Ground Dove; cache for the American Snipe; clou-clou for the Tell-tale Godwit; cap-cap for the Yellow-crowned Night-Heron. His drawing of two yellow-crowns perched on a rotting tree entwined with smilax, done in 1831, is an especially vivid example of Audubon’s ability to make the dead come alive again. The adult male, in full spring plumage, craning his neck toward the young bird levitating above, is the epitome of excessive avian splendor. Its beak is open, as if it had just called out to its offspring. In the original watercolor, the three white plumes of the adult are pieces of thin white paper Audubon pasted in separately — an extra effort that goes well with the bird’s penchant for showiness. But the world belongs to the young: the balletic pose of the immature bird on top signals almost royal indifference to the cares of those not just born yesterday. The landscape added by Audubon’s printer Havell — a blue-gray ocean thinly streaked with white and the contours of an island in the back — serves as the appropriate backdrop for the young bird’s nonchalance: this is the larger, freer, boundless world into which he will soon escape. Maria Martin, Audubon’s go-to artist for splendid botanicals, drew the plant wrapped around the dead branches, Smilax pseudochina, also known as False China Root or Bamboo vine, a coastal climber belonging to a large group of tropical and subtropical plants that is also well represented in Haiti — a genus Linnaeus had once named in honor of the nymph Smilax, who was turned into a brambly vine after falling in love with a mere mortal.13 Praised for its medicinal properties (among other things, the root of the Bamboo vine was supposed to cure syphilis) and its flavor, the smilax in Audubon’s composition, with its heart-shaped, inwardly curled leaves, winds its way only in the lower areas of the composition, precisely where the adult sits, leaving the young upstart rising high above the realm where things grow, bound for greater things. If this plate tells a story about liberating oneself from one’s roots, in Audubon’s representation of another Caribbean bird we can perhaps read of a desire for a return to them. It is yet another island fantasy, but here comedy has given way to wistfulness. The American Flamingo must have imprinted itself early on Audubon’s infant memory. Ironically, it kept eluding his gun. Audubon drew his birds from specimens he had observed and then obtained himself, settling for skins procured by others only in emergencies. In the essay from Ornithological Biography accompanying the plate, Audubon speaks of his anxiety to procure flamingos and claims he saw a flock of them for the first time on May 7, 1832. Note the precise date he provides — this was, we would say today, a red-letter day for Audubon. He is so affected by the sight that he gives us one of these passages of lyrical excess that led Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — no innocent in the purple poetry department either — to call him a “miserable writer”.14 But Audubon’s attempt at fine writing suggests how deeply these birds affected him, as dim memories of his island birth came flooding back: It was on the afternoon of one of those sultry days, which, in that portion of the country, exhibit towards evening the most glorious effulgence that can be conceived. The sun, now far advanced toward the horizon, still shone with full splendour, the ocean around glittered in its quiet beauty, and the light fleecy clouds that here and there spotted the heavens, seemed flakes of snow margined with gold. Our bark was propelled almost as if by magic, for scarcely was a ripple raised by her bows as we moved in silence. The radiant sun, the shimmering ocean, clouds like snowflakes — Audubon is pulling out all the stops. Overwritten as this passage may seem it serves a distinct purpose, which is to set the scene for the arrival of the flamingoes, who, when they do come, move with the coordination of robots: “Far away to seaward we spied a flock of Flamingoes advancing in ‘Indian line,’ with well-spread wings, outstretched necks, and long legs directed backwards.” But if the reader expects that such precise observations might in turn set the scene for the successful capture of one of these birds, this is not what Audubon provides. “I followed them with my eyes, watching as it were every beat of their wings,” writes Audubon. “The birds were now, as I thought, within a hundred and fifty yards; when suddenly, to our extreme disappointment, their chief veered away, and was of course followed by the rest.” Audubon and his men wait for the flamingoes to go around the Key and then circle back to them. Again, they are frustrated: alas! the Flamingoes were all, as I suppose, very old and experienced birds, . . . for on turning round the lower end of the Key, they spied our boat again, sailed away without flapping their wings, and alighted about four hundred yards from us, and upwards of one hundred from the shore, . . . where neither boat nor man could approach them. I however watched their motions until dusk, when we reluctantly left the spot. . . .15 Audubon’s intense desire for ownership over these birds (“Flamingoes in the flesh!” as he exclaimed longingly) as well as his abject frustration at failing to get them led to some irritable passages in his correspondence with his normally reliable supplier, Dr. John Bachman: “Indeed it will prove a curiosity to the World of Science”, wrote Audubon, “when that world will Know that John Bachman D D himself . . . and about one half of a hundred persons besides have not been able to send me even a Stuffed Specimen in time for my Publication — So it is however and I drop the subject.”16 Eventually, a correspondent in Cuba sent Audubon skins he was able to use. By that time, his engraver Havell was nearly done with the over four hundred plates that comprise The Birds of America. The American Flamingo is a large bird — up to five feet tall — a fact not lost on Audubon, who was a tall man himself, at least by the standards of his time. He had wanted to portray all his American birds life-sized, but the flamingo is so huge that he had to portray it bending over so that it would fit the enormous, two-by-three feet sheets he used. In the plate made from Audubon’s drawing—one of the most coveted and expensive in the canon — he shows the central bird standing on what seems like a miniature island (likely a mudflat), complete with rugged little cliffs descending into a dark blue sea. The bird appears to be both solid and ethereal. Its feathers are packed so tight, the result of many layers of pink pigment, that its body seems resilient, sturdy, and strong, an effective contrast with the fragility of the long, spindly legs. Audubon’s watercolor had featured only that one bird, against a white background, with merely a hint of a shadow drawn in to reflect the animal’s right leg. But when it came to engraving the plate, Audubon and Havell went to town, adding several other flamingoes in the background, feeding or lounging in exactly the kind of lagoon Audubon’s Cuban correspondent had described to him.17 Adding more birds to the plate made scientific sense, of course: social to a fault, flamingos live in flocks with dozens of other individuals, and their breeding colonies may number in the tens of thousands. But their inclusion — the way they recede into that indistinct, milky-white distance — perhaps also speaks of something more. Audubon had come to Florida “in a great measure for the purpose of studying these lovely birds in their own beautiful islands”.18 His search took him to the southernmost tip of the Keys, where the air was, as he wrote in an ecstatic essay, “darkened by whistling wings”.19 In all that vast country where he had lived since the age of eighteen, whose birds he had devoted his life to recording, this was the place which lay closest to that first home he had ever known. Les Cayes was a little more than 600 nautical miles away, both remote and achingly close — just like the flamingoes he had been able to catch only in his art and not with his gun. Despite the immediate pull of the resplendent bird in the foreground, painted from a skin obtained in the Caribbean, it is this distance that still resonates, the fading figures in the back leading our gaze over the flats and out, across the ocean to where it all began, Haiti. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 6, 2019

Christoph Irmscher

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:02.916281

woodblocks-in-wonderland-the-japanese-fairy-tale-series

Woodblocks in Wonderland The Japanese Fairy Tale Series By Christopher DeCou September 3, 2019 From gift-bestowing sparrows and peach-born heroes to goblin spiders and dancing phantom cats — in a series of beautifully illustrated books, the majority printed on an unusual cloth-like crepe paper, the publisher Takejiro Hasegawa introduced Japanese folk tales to the West. Christopher DeCou on how a pioneering cross-cultural endeavour gave rise to a magnificent chapter in the history of children’s publishing. At the turn of the last century, the illustrated children’s books of the so-called “golden age” provided readers with many unforgettable images: think of John Tenniel’s blue-aproned Alice looking up at the sneaky grin of the Cheshire cat, or Walter Crane’s pink-dressed Belle falling in love with the boar-headed Beast. Such works are usually viewed as the exclusive realm of the great London and New York publishing houses. But on the other side of the globe, around the same time, Japan was opening its ports to the world, and in Tokyo the Kobunsha publishing company would put its own unique mark on illustrated books for children. Under the leadership of Takejiro Hasegawa, the Japanese Fairy Tale Series captured the imaginations of countless young readers with books that combined the work of western writers and translators with Japanese artists. In twenty volumes, published between 1885 and 1922, the Fairy Tale series introduced traditional Japanese folk tales, first to readers of English and French, and later to readers of German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Russian. The tales themselves have diverse sources. Little Peachling, the first book in the series, recounts the centuries-old story of Momotaro. One day by the river, an old married couple see a giant peach. They bring it home and upon opening it are shocked to discover a little boy inside. This, of course, is Momotaro, who is raised by the old couple but later leaves them, sets off on a string of adventures, and returns a local hero. Other books in the series adapt stories rooted in Buddhist traditions. The Silly Jelly-Fish — which tells how the jellyfish, tricked by a monkey and punished by the Dragon King, comes to lose its shell — is taken from a story in which the clever monkey is a Bodhisattva, on the path to enlightenment.1 The Boy Who Drew Cats — adapted for the series by Lafcadio Hearn — tells the tale of a daydreaming boy whose drawings of cats on a monastery wall magically rid the place of a goblin rat. In traditional versions, the boy goes on to become a pious monk. In Hearn’s, he goes on to become a famous artist. Initially, Takejiro Hasegawa intended to market the Fairy Tale Series to the growing education industry in Meiji Japan. Hasegawa came from a merchant family who imported western textbooks, among other goods, and his parents sent him to English schools from an early age. This put him into contact with a number of foreigners living in Japan, such as the Carrothers — husband and wife Presbyterian missionaries who ran a private school at their home2 — and made him aware of the domestic demand for English-language textbooks. His plan was to produce new educational material which would not only be composed by talented writers and translators but also handsomely crafted by Japanese artisans.3 Hasegawa modeled the aesthetic of his volumes on traditional Japanese anthologies. Starting in the sixteenth century, publishers in Japan had developed illustrated books of folk tales for children and adults, such as the remarkably beautiful Otogi-zoshi series,4 which brought together folk tales and single-author prose narratives, and the Kinmou Zui and Akahon series, which collected fantastical stories of myths, monsters, and adventures. Because the literacy rate was still low during this period, these books relied heavily on popular art styles to illustrate the narrative for the reader, with often striking results.5 In order to reproduce the effect of these earlier volumes, Hasegawa engaged traditional Japanese woodblock printers and, for the first series, used traditional mitsumata paper. Woodblock printing — the earliest form of industrial printing — was brought to Japan from China during the tenth- to thirteenth-century Song Dynasty and would become the dominant printing technology in Japan until the late nineteenth century. While movable type employs individual letters, allowing the printer to reuse the same letters on different pages, woodblocks require the printer to carve the entire page onto a single plate. Mitsumata paper — the most common Japanese paper at the time — was made from the Edgeworthia plant, which had been imported to Japan during the Edo period specifically for its papermaking qualities. The plant was harvested for its woody stems which were then cleansed of impurities and pressed in vats to create huge sheets of paper. The resulting product is creamy white, sturdy, and of a noticeable weight.6 As to the texts, for the first series of fairy-tale readers Hasegawa commissioned translations from three of his friends in the missionary community: David Thomson, Basil H. Chamberlain, and Kate James. The Reverend Thomson had come to Japan in the 1860s, became fluent in Japanese, and worked with the Carrothers at their school. He was an influential figure in Japanese Bible translation and, perhaps not surprisingly, the stories he chose to translate emphasized moral lessons, in line with Victorian values regarding the education of children. Basil H. Chamberlain, a British diplomat born to an aristocratic family, had earned a reputation as a Japanologist, writing travel books, ethnographies, and other materials about Japan. More of a scholar than the other translators — he was a professor at the Imperial Tokyo University with a particular interest in folklore — Chamberlain was the most familiar name to be associated with the first series, and certainly contributed to its popularity. He even commissioned Hasegawa to publish a special set of Ainu fairy tales, because of his personal interest in the culture of the Ainu, the indigenous community in Hokkaido.7 Kate James translated the largest number of books, and, like the Reverend Thomson, focused on stories that promoted moral lessons. She is a somewhat mysterious figure, however. We know little about her, except that she came from a Scottish clergy family, met her husband, Thomas H. James, in Constantinople, and moved with him to Japan, where she befriended his Imperial Japanese Naval Academy colleague, Basil H. Chamberlain.8 The earliest volumes in the Japanese Fairy Tale Series really were very much a product of Tokyo’s close-knit expat community. Following the success of the first series, which appeared in 1885, Hasewaga realized he could more lucratively market the Fairy Tale Series to foreigners than to teachers and students in Japan. The artists he had engaged to illustrate the tales — Kobyashi Eitaku, Suzuki Kason, Chikanobu — were already famous for their woodblock prints in ukiyo-e style, and western audiences were immediately taken by these illustrations. Moreover, as japonisme — the trend of collecting art, artwork, and crafts from Japan — continued to grow in popularity, these prints were becoming more and more desirable to western art enthusiasts. Starting in 1895, perhaps with japonisme in mind, Hasegawa developed a special set of books that used a more decorative Japanese paper. Chirimen, or crepe paper, is fabric-like — produced by pressing the paper fibre repeatedly and slowly rotating it. The end result is a material soft to the touch, but with rough folds and a leathery texture which makes illustrations printed on it look instantly antique.9 In fact, part of Hasegawa’s new marketing strategy was to present the books themselves as art objects and souvenirs of Japan. The area around Yokohama Bay, where international neighbourhoods had developed around the port, was a mecca for visiting collectors seeking woodblock prints and the books that featured them. But it was Hasewaga’s wheeling and dealing at World’s Fairs — not only in Tokyo but in Chicago, London, Paris, St. Louis, and Turin — that brought his books to international attention. The contacts he made at these fairs, and the prizes his books won, helped keep them in demand for decades.10 With the ukiyo-e illustrations and the new crepe-paper editions, Hasegawa’s Fairy Tale Series attracted an even larger western audience throughout the 1890s and into the early twentieth century. Readers and reviewers alike delighted in the unfamiliar stories, which they found perfectly suited to children as well as adults. A reviewer in the Japan Weekly Mail, for example, praised Kate James’ language as being simple enough for youngsters but lacking the clichés that might prevent adults from also enjoying the books.11 In America, the stories were popular enough to be reprinted both in the widely distributed boys-and-girls’ magazine St. Nicholas12 and the Ladies Home Journal.13 Also essential to Hasegawa’s expansion into foreign markets was his choice to commission additional stories from one of the best-known figures then associated with Japan: Lafcadio Hearn. A Greek-British writer, Hearn had risen to prominence first by writing about New Orleans and then the French West Indies. He eventually moved to Japan, married a Japanese woman, and became a Japanese citizen. Because of his intimate connections, he became somewhat of an expert on the culture and literature of the country and published numerous books and stories about Japan for western audiences. Certainly, the several stories he composed for Hasegawa’s second series increased the project’s popularity.14 Although the Fairy Tale Series received many positive reviews, it was not universally acclaimed. One reviewer for the Japan Weekly Mail found that, while the writing was passable, the illustrations were too fantastic. He called the lithographer lazy, because he exchanged the “traditional green [eyes] of feline orthodoxy” with odd yellow eyes.15 Other reviewers also thought the drawings were not up to par. In the San Francisco Daily Bulletin, an especially prejudiced reviewer said the books were just too “Japanese”, “barbarous and ill-calculated”, adding that the crepe paper was impractical for reading and made for a “flimsy” book.16 The reviewer’s doubts about the advisability of printing on crepe paper were shared even by the unprejudiced. Lafcadio Hearn himself, in a letter to Hasegawa, argued against the crepe’s roughcast texture and the resultant loss of visual detail: Indeed, I prefer the old sets of the Fairy Series on plain paper, — not only because the drawings come out better, but because the larger print is better for children’s eyes. (I want to buy a plain set at some future time.) In the case of my own story, I think that much of the delicate beauty of the charming drawings is lost in the crepe edition, -- especially the finely expressive lines of the old priest’s face, and the character-studies of the peasant oya in the opening pictures.17 Ironically, it was the crêpe books that continued to sell, as novelty items prized for their unique paper and illustrations, well into the twentieth century, even after Hasegawa’s series had begun to compete with other collections of Japanese fairy tales marketed to children. American and British textbook writers, too, started including Japanese stories among their educational materials, which reduced the novelty and uniqueness of the endeavor. The last volume in the series, Hearn’s version of a fairy tale called The Fountain of Youth, was published in 1922 (although the publishing company continued to reprint further editions until after World War II). Looking back, we can see that the books in the Japanese Fairy Tale Series blended simple storytelling and striking images with an elegance comparable to any of the more widely known masterpieces of the golden age of children’s illustrations. At a time when publishing houses in London and New York dominated the market, Hasegawa’s press in Tokyo was producing equally beautiful volumes using traditional Japanese craftwork and broadcasting Japan’s culture to the world. Today, anime and manga represent flourishing new forms through which that culture is reaching global audiences, but, in the words of arts and crafts historian Ann Herring, “in the area of export in the form of translations for young readers, the record of the Meiji era remains unexcelled.”18 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 3, 2019

Christopher DeCou

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:03.469219

h-g-wells-and-the-uncertainties-of-progress

H. G. Wells and the Uncertainties of Progress By Peter J. Bowler June 27, 2019 In addition to the numerous pioneering works of science fiction by which he made his name, H. G. Wells also published a steady stream of non-fiction meditations, mainly focused on themes salient to his stories: the effects of technology, human folly, and the idea of progress. As Peter J. Bowler explores, for Wells the notion of a better future was riddled with complexities. H. G. Wells worried constantly about the future of humanity. While he hoped for progress in human affairs, he was only too well aware that it was not inevitable and might not be sustained. Throughout his career he celebrated the technological developments that were revolutionizing life but feared they might lead to eventual degeneration or, as came to pass in 1914, a catastrophic war. He was also aware that there were disagreements over what would actually count as progress. Providing everyone with the benefits of modern industry might not be enough, especially as continued technological innovation would require the constant remodeling of society. Progressive steps introducing entirely new functions were episodic, open-ended and unpredictable, in both biological and social evolution. These uncertainties were compounded by a realization that, where technological innovation was concerned, it was virtually impossible to predict future inventions or what their long-term consequences might be. Even if progress continued, it would be much more open-ended than advocates of the traditional idea of progress had imagined.1 For Wells the most basic level of uncertainty arose from the fear that the human race might not sustain its current rate of development. In his 1895 story “The Time Machine” he imagined his time traveler projected through eras of future progress: “I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist.”2 But the time traveler ends up in a world brought down by social division and degeneration. The brutal Morlocks are the descendants of the industrial workers, while the childlike Eloi are the remnants of the leisured upper classes. This prediction was based on his zoologist friend E. Ray Lankester’s extension of the Darwinian theory. Lankester argued that because evolution works by adapting populations to their environment, progress is not inevitable and any species that adapts itself to a less active and hence less challenging way of life will degenerate.3 Here was the model for a more complex vision of progress in which any advance would depend on the circumstances of the time and could not be predicted on the basis of previous trends. The Darwinian viewpoint is more clearly visible in Wells’ hugely successful non-fiction work The Outline of History, originally published in fortnightly parts in 1920. The survey starts from the development of life on earth and the evolution of the human species. Progress had certainly happened both in evolution and in human history from the Stone Age onward, but Wells shows that there was no predetermined upward trend. His exposure to the Darwinian vision of biological evolution (which continued in his collaboration with Julian Huxley to produce The Science of Life some years later) showed him that there were multiple ways of achieving a more complex biological structure — or a more complex society. Truly progressive steps in both areas were sporadic, unpredictable, and open-ended. When progress did occur in human society, Wells was certain that the driving force was rational thinking, science, and technological innovation. Yet history showed how all too often the benefits of creativity had been undermined by conservatism and social tensions, culminating in the disaster of the Great War.4 Wells was elaborating a new and less deterministic version of the idea of progress. Nineteenth-century society’s faith in the inevitability of progress had been misplaced, not just because it underestimated obstacles, but because it had assumed an oversimplified model of how development must take place. Whatever their differing views of the goal to be achieved, the thinkers of the previous generation — including the Marxists, who Wells admired to some extent — had all visualized history as the ascent of a ladder of developmental stages leading to a final utopia. Darwinism showed that the history of life was best represented by a branching tree, not a ladder, and Wells now saw that human history too led to many differing forms of complex society. And, just as the great “breakthroughs” in animal evolution had often come from insignificant beginnings, the most important advances in human history were not best characterized as continuations of previous trends. Wells takes the modern synthesis of science and technology, which he sees as emerging primarily in Europe, as a case in point. For most of its history, Europe had not been at the forefront of progress, yet its development of modern science and industry had catapulted it into world dominance. Wells openly compared this to the evolution of the originally insignificant mammals during the age of the dinosaurs.5 This modern breakthrough had been achieved in only one branch of the divergent tree of cultural evolution, a branch that had not been in the mainstream and was by no means the most advanced at the time. Wells was not the only thinker at this time to argue that the emergence of science in Europe could not have been predicted on the basis of previous historical trends. Alfred North Whitehead made the same point, suggesting that without this unlikely breakthrough, humanity might have remained stagnant for untold ages to come.6 Whitehead saw the rise of modern science as a philosophical development that did not become associated with technological invention until the nineteenth century. Wells argued that the underlying cause of Europe’s rise to world dominance was its isolated geographical position, which had encouraged the age of maritime exploration. Unlike the great empires of the past, Europe faced the unusual challenge of a geography dictated not by the land but by the sea — it faced outward to the Atlantic and beyond. The result was a culture that eventually promoted not just an industrial revolution but what Wells called a “mechanical revolution” — especially the invention of new sources of power including steam and electricity. For Wells it heralded “a new thing in human experience . . . such a change in human life as to constitute a fresh phase of history.”7 This kind of development, however, brought problems with it. The outburst of scientific and technological innovation was taking place in a society that had still not transcended the limitations of traditional culture and politics. Technology was misused for military purposes, and the Great War illustrated its potentially catastrophic consequences. In the years before war broke out, Wells had been one of the first to realize that new technologies such as aviation would make future conflicts even more devastating. This was the theme of his novel The War in the Air of 1908, while The World Set Free of 1914 predicted not only a new source of power derived from the latest discoveries of atomic physics, but also an atomic bomb. In the post-war era Wells was one of many worrying that the next war might destroy civilization altogether. His futuristic 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come described the outbreak of a war that reduces most of the world to savagery. Yet Wells retained the hope that a small coterie of technocrats led by the aviation experts would survive and ultimately recreate society along more rational lines, ushering in the age of true progress. Humanity finally escapes the shackles imposed by the old cultural values.8 As to what form the hoped-for future society would take, Wells had very definite plans. The book promoted his long-standing campaign for a rationally ordered World State that would ensure the fruits of technological innovation were fairly distributed. He was no democrat, however, and saw this being driven by the activities of an elite group, the “scientific samurai”, who appear as the aviators who transform the world in The Shape of Things to Come. He appreciated that simply giving everyone material plenty might not be enough to satisfy their emotional needs. At first he seems to have thought along quasi-religious lines, imagining humanity achieving an almost spiritual unity. But in his screenplay for the Alexander Korda film Things to Come, based loosely on the book, he adds a concluding episode in which the prospect of spreading a transformed human race out into the cosmos by space travel offers a materialistic equivalent of religion, something that will give our lives an ultimate purpose. Even here, though, there is a threat that conservative thinkers will not approve of this disturbance to their predictable lives. In the final scenes a mob tries to destroy the giant gun that is about to fire the young cosmonauts into space (here Wells pays homage to Jules Verne). The leader of the “samurai” gestures to the heavens and offers us a choice: “All the universe or nothing . . . Which shall it be?” and the scene fades out to the caption “WHITHER MANKIND?”9 The suggestion that the World State will want to expand its activities into space points to another important component of Wells’ new vision of progress. He realized that once technological innovation becomes the driving force, there can be no static future utopia as previous manifestations of the idea of progress had imagined. Invention would continue and society would have to keep adjusting in response. Now that the genie of science-driven technology was out of the bottle, Wells became acutely aware that it would be hard to predict future inventions, and hard to foresee the consequences of those that succeeded. A truly rational society would need to take this into account and plan accordingly. The element of unpredictability had become obvious in the early years of the century. Wells realised that the military applications of aviation might checkmate the hopes of optimists that rapid global transport would encourage world unity. This was in The War in the Air, which somewhat curiously opens with the depiction of a world in which surface transport has already been transformed by the gyroscopic monorail invented by Louis Brennan. The monorail can cross chasms and seas on a single cable. Wells predicted its success, but in the real world the invention, although tested, never came into use. Wells was also confronted with the difficulty of predicting the effects of new technologies in other areas. In another novel, The Sleeper Awakes, he drew on the American experience with skyscrapers to imply that soon we would all be living in giant mega-cities roofed over against the elements.10 But only a year later his Anticipations, a more serious effort at prediction, suggested that the invention of the electric train and the automobile would allow for “The Diffusion of the Great Cities” as the population moves out into suburbs. For Wells, we cannot predict the new technologies that will emerge from scientific discoveries, and from the ever-widening plethora of new inventions we cannot be sure which will actually be successful in the marketplace. Rival technologies will pull society in different directions, and it is hard to be sure which will triumph in the industrial struggle for existence. The speed of change is also hard to predict. In a later edition of Anticipations, Wells confessed that his original suggestion that aviation would not become commonplace until 1950 had turned out to be hopelessly pessimistic.11 Even when a new technology starts to catch on, it may be hard to imagine what the consequences of its success will be. In a 1932 radio talk, Wells used the example of the growing chaos on the roads to point out how difficult it had been to foresee the consequences of making motor cars available to a wider public when they were first introduced. It was now obvious that the road network would have to be redesigned to cope with the increased traffic. He called for the universities to have “Professors of Foresight” to grapple with the unintended consequences posed by future inventions.12 The historian Philip Blom calls the early twentieth century the “vertigo years”, when everyday life was transformed by a bewildering array of new technologies.13 Wells realized that this state of uncertainty would continue indefinitely, making it virtually impossible even for the enthusiasts to predict what would emerge. The technophiles hail their innovations as the driving force of progress, but they do not always foresee what will be invented — or what the ultimate effects on society will be. This is a situation we are acutely aware of today: few, if any, could have anticipated the impact of computers and the digital revolution, and we are only gradually becoming aware that these innovations have not brought us unalloyed benefits. The range of technologies that have turned out to have harmful side effects is now legion, a situation that Wells himself anticipated. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 27, 2019

Peter J. Bowler

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:04.009256

walt-whitman-in-russia-three-love-affairs

Walt Whitman in Russia Three Love Affairs By Nina Murray May 29, 2019 Walt Whitman’s influence on the creative output of 20th-century Russia — particularly in the years surrounding the 1917 Revolution — was enormous. For the 200th anniversary of Whitman's birth, Nina Murray looks at the translators through which Russians experienced his work, not only in a literary sense — through the efforts of Konstantin Balmont and Kornei Chukovsky — but also artistic, in the avant-garde printmaking of Vera Ermolaeva. At the core of any translation venture, at the nucleus that shapes all its qualities, lies an often random and routine event — an individual’s encounter with a text. Before a translator dons the mantle of a cultural ambassador, a conduit of knowledge, a missionary of art, or whatever other responsibility inevitably comes with taking a work of literature from one language to the other — before the translator steps into the very public space of cultural advocacy — he or she is merely a reader seduced by an imagined world. If it weren’t for a handful of change in sixteen-year-old Kornei Chukovsky’s pocket one day in Odessa, Whitman’s “Song of Myself” may not have come to shatter and shape the Russian poetic imagination until a generation later. Chukovsky was a school student, teaching himself English from dictionaries, old newspapers, and whatever he could buy from sailors. What were the chances that on that particular day, for that particular school-kid, the sailor would bring Leaves of Grass? But that’s how it happens — somebody, somewhere, flips a book open, and it speaks to him, changes his way of seeing the world, and alters his soul. Other great Russians had read Leaves of Grass. Tolstoy got a copy from one of his fans in England in June of 1889, read it, and wrote in his diary, “These are awkward verses”.1 He was surprised to learn from his friends abroad that in Europe his own work was often compared to Whitman’s and conceded to give the book a second chance. In October of the same year, Tolstoy noted, “There is much that is blown-up, empty, but I did find some good things this time.”2 Turgenev, while living in Paris in the 1880s, read Leaves of Grass too and penned down a draft translation of “Beat! Beat! Drums!” but that single sheet remained the full extent of his interest in Whitman. Whitman needed not a mere celebrity endorsement, not just an appreciative aesthete, but a lover in Russia: a passionate, devoted reader who would accept him without judgment. Before Chukovsky could have the luxury of spending years on his eleven editions of Whitman’s poetry, somebody else had to discover Whitman. Chukovsky’s energetic verse would carry Whitman to the masses, but it would be feeding the hunger inspired by another translator who had given Whitman a divine aura in the Russian imagination. That person was Konstantin Balmont, bohemia incarnate, Symbolist luminary, globetrotter, poet. When in the early 1900s Konstantin Balmont (1867–1942) set himself the task of bringing the work of Walt Whitman to a Russian audience, he did so with a very definite set of opinions on how and why this task ought to be pursued. “True poets”, he wrote about Whitman in 1920, are always seers and prophets. They feel for many people, blend their souls with all creatures, make their minds present in the past, present, and future. If they are sensitive at all, the great epochs of change and reformation especially attract their imagination and having charmed them magnetically, such times send omens into the poets’ work, throw upon their writing flashes of their coming fires, the first blazes of their pearly and scarlet, tender, and ferocious dawn.3 Balmont introduced Whitman to the readers of the Symbolist journal Vesy as “a powerful dweller on earth . . a chaotic, young, unbridled and undisciplined soul”.4 In subsequent essays, Balmont developed a language of such reverence and grandeur as were rarely bestowed on poets even within Russia’s then indulgent artistic milieu: Whitman was an “ultimate”, an “inevitable”, “strong” poet, “as inescapable in the life of our souls as the first love, first grief, a moonlit night, or a sunny morning.”5 His poetry, then, could not be akin to anything before or contemporary to it. Writing in 1908, Balmont denied Whitman’s verse any “accessible consonance of rhyme”, “common ornamentation of poetry”, or any “correct measure”, seeing in it, instead, the “movement of waves”, “rustling of breezes”, and the “breath of the sea”.6 As if determined to make his words a self-fulfilling prophecy, Balmont enslaved himself to the original text, like a desperate lover. He crafted translations that were so accurate in their mimicry of Whitman’s sentence and line structure that they were faithful to a fault (the clumsiest examples include “The Bravest Soldiers” turned into bravye [dashing] soldiers and the “common prostitute” becoming obshchaya [shared], the first meaning of “common” in Russian). As desperate lovers are wont to do, Balmont also projected his own glorified vision of Whitman as an icon of a new world onto Whitman’s work. As Martin Bidney noted in his excellent essay “Leviathan, Yggdrasil, Earth Titan, Eagle: Balmont’s Reimagining of Walt Whitman”, In presenting the American sage to the Russian public Balmont shaped both the Whitman persona and the form of its utterances according to his own style of writing, his own mode of vision, both in verse and prose. . . . Balmont’s reinterpretation of Whitman in his translations and criticism involved a full-scale reimagining of Whitman and his work in visionary terms, the terms of poetic myth.7 For Whitman to sound like a prophet, however, his had to be the language of revelation: biblically self-referential, intentionally vague yet containing enough clues to suggest a hidden grand scheme. Thus, Balmont felt compelled to infuse the language of his translations with coded significance, over-using repetition, narrowing synonymic rows to one or two “key” words — as if beyond Whitman’s catalogues there lay another reality, to be summoned by rites and incantations, by repeating lines until meaning peeled away and only the ritual remained. This Symbolist treatment was supported by Balmont’s main venue at the time — the influential literary almanac Vesy, which in 1909 proclaimed itself a magazine to support art’s “unbreakable connection to the spheres of mysticism, metaphysics, and religion.”8 Balmont’s position as an important Symbolist poet and translator had long been secure. His apologia for Whitman as a cosmic, universal prophet of a new order could not have reached a more grateful audience than that of Russian students and intellectuals who were being wooed by the ideas of a universal, sweeping revolution that would propel their country into the front ranks of the new century’s democracies. Not only would such revolution do away with Russia’s backward economic systems, but it would also create a new social mentality, a new way of being a Russian. With his translations of “The Song of the Broad-Axe”, “Salut au monde”, “O Star of France”, and “Beginners”, Balmont enabled his readers to conceive, with the blessing of Whitman’s vaguely embodied sense of phallic privilege, of how this new way of being in the world could be built, carpenter-like, with hand-held tools. In Balmont’s vision of Whitman’s world, anyone with a pair of strong hands and a tightly fitted pair of trousers was free to work, celebrate, grieve, and lust without the sanction of a higher authority. To the young and the romantic, that sure beat marble-hall theorzations under some wise academician’s ironic scrutiny. To say, however, that the success of Whitman’s poems depended entirely on their appropriation by the purveyors of liberal propaganda is to ignore the poetry’s deeply spiritual resonance, without which the mysterious Russian soul simply would not be itself. Ilya Repin, a painter and a Christian philosopher, expressed this resonance well when he wrote: It was an unexpected surprise for me to discover the meaning of this holy fool (yurodivyi) American, who rose suddenly in front of me as Christianity’s second sun. God’s child, Walt Whitman revealed in his simple heart anew the true meaning of God’s Word. Of course, I am unable to express the full importance of this raving apostle of the new democratic religion, but I believe this religion of fraternity, unity, and equality is not as new as it appears to Mr. Chukovsky [Whitman’s canonical Russian translator]: it had been announced to the world almost twenty centuries ago.9 This view of Whitman as the divinely inspired barefoot blabber sustained by charity, Christ-like in his innocence and indiscriminately kind, had to capture many an imagination brought up in the Russian Orthodox tradition. Liudmila Kiseliova provides excellent insight into this cultural environment in her essay “Poetic Dialogues of the Silver Age: K. D. Balmont and N. A. Klyuev”. In Russia at the time, Kiseliova writes, writers and philosophers attempted to overcome the consequences of secularization, to return to the all-sacred word of the ancient Russian religiosity of knowledge. The concept of Word as Logos implied an intimate connection between man and the Divine truth through language.10 Return to such concepts of language brought about great interest in the folklore and the Old Believers, whose doctrine never abandoned linguistic mysticism and the zapovednoye (bequeathed) knowledge of the Divine contained in verbal expression. To the more secular crowd, from which Kornei Chukovsky would come, this construction of Whitman’s love as Christ-like caring provided a convenient excuse for dealing with the poet’s sexuality: it was agape — not eros — that drove Whitman’s speaker to rhapsodize O TAN-FACED prairie-boy, . . . You came, taciturn, with nothing to give—we but look’d on each other, When lo! more than all the gifts of the world you gave me. Kornei Chukovsky (1882–1969) was the kind of translator who would ask his friends and colleagues to destroy his first rendering of Whitman’s poetry as unworthy and shameful to both Whitman and himself. Apparently the friends agreed, because the only surviving clue to this early translation is Chukovsky’s confession in the preface to the 1913 collection of translations from Whitman: “I published about Whitman a pamphlet about ten years ago and I am not at all pleased with it.”11 This 1913 edition did not survive either: the book’s entire run was censored and confiscated. Thus, we must take 1919 as the year of Chukovsky’s first book-length treatment of Whitman, the first in a series of ten more volumes published until 1969. Chukovsky’s own poetic sensibilities can best be characterized as avant-gardist; this is considered by biographers one of the reasons for which Chukovsky’s talent as a poet was conscribed to children’s verse in the Soviet era. Unlike Balmont, who had an intuitive — and brilliant — affinity for complexly metered, if not necessarily rhymed, verse, Chukovsky’s ear was more rhythmically tuned. Where Balmont highlighted and regularized Whitman’s dactyls, Chukovsky would pursue a more direct sonic reflection of content, often at the expense of strict verbal precision. It was precisely this choice, however, that enabled Chukovsky’s translations to reflect the diversity of Whitman’s expression and made his translations canonical. And yet Whitman was slipping through a translator’s fingers again. Anyone attempting to translate Whitman into Russian must be prepared to resolve a number of issues on a regular basis. There is Whitman’s superficial plainness which can lull a translator into relying on close lexical equivalence alone. But then these words that slip and saunter easily into the reader’s mind turn out to be uncommon, culled from such a variety of dictions, registers, epochs, and contexts that stringing them into sentences becomes a titanic burden. On top of this, Russian grammar requires that pronouns, nouns, adjectives, and some verbs be gendered. The choice of gender demonstrates most clearly a translator’s ideological and/or moralistic concerns — and it is most central in “Children of Adam”. In Whitman’s own language, the powerful “I” never ceases its hold on the gravitational center, the source of the gaze, the nucleus from which the speaker reaches out to consider the subject, be it the generic “women” or the intimate “you”. Pulled into this undiscriminating orbit, all things become depersonalized; they are first and foremost the objects of longing or desire, and their gender identification is often secondary. The Anglophone reader, if so inclined, is at liberty to assign hetero- or homo- vector to the sexuality expressed in “Children of Adam”, and specifically to the arc of desire narrated in "One Hour to Madness and Joy”. Both Balmont and Kornei Chukovsky perceived this ambiguity and articulated its importance to Whitman’s world-view in their critical essays. For example, Balmont wrote in his foreword to Leaves of Grass (Pobiegi travy): Through the continuous symbolization of everything that appears in the flowing course of life even for an instant, through the confluence of all individual streams into one cosmic Ocean, Whitman approaches the triumphant assertion of the I over and over again. This I has looked into the mirror, and walked away from its own image towards the Asserted Being — the state in which it constantly spends itself without losing a single drop, and if perhaps it loses some, it doesn’t regret the expense. 12 When one keeps in mind Whitman’s fixation on liquids, especially those of the impregnating variety, Balmont’s choice metaphor cannot be considered pure whimsy. Chukovsky also interprets the undiscriminating desire of “Children of Adam” as a religious, other-worldly, beyond-the-self experience. For Chukovsky, it is precisely this omnivorousness, this lust for earth, weather, emotion, for men and women that enables Whitman to advance to a new form of romance, one that will replace the medieval cult of the Fair Lady with “the cult of the Comrade, the cult of the democratic friendship, because people’s hearts fill more and more with this new tenderness, the fondness for the colleague, co-worker, fellow traveler, for the one who walks in step, shoulder to shoulder with us, who is a part of our common march”.13 But no amount of interpretation alleviates the challenge of choosing a gender for the object of the speaker’s desire in “Children of Adam”. “One Hour to Madness and Joy” must indeed have seemed maddening — no clear assignment in the title, no clarifying reference to the “work of fathering”, just the urge to be intimate with someone, despite the obstacles put forth by the social order. Whitman provides but one line of apparently sure footing: “O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!” Both translators rendered “bashful” and “feminine” in feminine gender, i.e. as explicitly describing a woman. However, even a contemporary reader could have chosen to see these qualities applied to a man; Whitman’s adjectives, after all, never suffered from orthodox connotations. To add to the difficulty, this seemingly clear line comes after: “O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me in defiance of the world!”14 This line presented a problem for Balmont with its non-committal “whoever you are”. In Russian, unfortunately, this phrase can hardly be rendered without a gendered verb, and Balmont chose the masculine ending. In the second part of the line, the choice of the feminine gender seemed just as natural, so that (in back-translation) the result is “O to give myself to you no matter what man you are, and to take you, the woman who gives herself despite the whole world!”15 Chukovsky is more thorough and eliminates any hint of ambiguity: “O to give myself to you no matter who you are, woman, and for you to give yourself to me / Despite the whole cosmos!”16 Whitman’s following stanza strongly suggests the forbidden nature of this desire: O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last? To be absolv’d from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and you from yours! . . . To have the gag remov’d from one’s mouth! To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.17 The last two lines especially invite a homoerotic reading. The speaker’s desire is not only unconventional but also unspeakable (the “gag”) and perhaps, according to one reading, even unwelcome. In the pursuit of cosmic exultation that he saw Whitman proclaiming, Balmont, who declared his translations to be as literal as his “aesthetic feeling” would allow, magnifies the speaker’s doubts into a whole history of self-loathing: O, to escape to where there is finally enough space, enough air! To be free of old chains and conventions, I of mine, and you of yours! . . . To feel one’s mouth unlocked, the mouth that had been sealed! To feel clearly that now, and whenever I am happy with myself, I am happy!18 Instead of someone who wonders, perhaps, whether an amorous liaison is exactly the complication he needs in his life, here is a speaker plagued by self-doubt and whose doubt can only be assuaged by an act of prohibited love. Chukovsky’s version, on the other hand, offers a comfortably conventional romantic predicament: O, to break free from the old chains and conventions — you from yours, and I of mine! To take off, finally, the padlock that was on my lips, To feel that finally, today I am completely content, and I do not want anything else.19 In this version, it is the speaker himself who has the power to remove the “lock” on his lips — this implies that his previous silence has also been at least partially a choice, a gesture of conformity. Compare this to the drama of the original — “to have the gag removed”, an image of being liberated, not being held hostage any longer — and to Balmont’s sensitivity to this issue of agency and will. Once translated, literary works enter a new life, enmeshed in the new culture, its rhizomatic reach of echoes and imitations. Both Balmont and Chukovsky wrote extensively about Whitman in an effort to relate his poetry to the status awarded to him in the Anglophone world, notoriety included. Both translators performed the work of iconization: Balmont was deeply devoted to the vision of Whitman as an exalted prophet, and Chukovsky promoted him in a familial, somewhat bemused manner, akin to the one usually reserved for a gifted but definitely weird brother. Despite their rigor, both Balmont’s cosmic myth, in which the speaker, like some primal deity, is omnisexual and omni-fertile, and Chukovsky’s Whitman as an accessible, bare-chested “bro” who lusts for human contact and kindness are re-readings, hybrids of the Whitman genus. What is important to remember is that the Russian reading public, through the efforts of both translators, saw Whitman as the prophet of a new order — a phenomenologically different world in which emotions, identities, and the most basic desires are transformed by the power of a democratic egalitarian society. Young people in the 1920s banded into Whitman fan clubs — groups dedicated to discussing Whitman and his ideas. Chukovsky visited one such gathering in 1922 and wrote in his diary: Whitman appeals to them as a prophet and a teacher. They wish to kiss, and work, and die — all according to Whitman . . . No, Russia is intact yet! I thought to myself when I left. It is strong because at its core it is so naïve, young, so “religious.” No irony, no skepticism, no humor — it takes everything seriously. They sat there — ground down with lack of bread, health, money — those young girls and teenage students and they thirsted — not for money, or firewood, or aesthetic pleasure — but for faith. Whitman gave faith. And once this quality of his words was revealed, Russian artists felt the poetry deserved a grander stage than pages of a book. In 1918, a choral drama based on “Song of Myself” made its debut in theater. It was directed by Alexander Mgebrov and titled “An Evening of Walt Whitman”. The play traveled to great success; Mgebrov’s simple dramatization of titanic struggle in “Europe”, urban alienation in “The City Dead-House”, and the poet as the mouthpiece of a multi-faced mass in “Song of Myself” resonated with the audiences, whose members felt themselves to be forging a new future. This reception of Whitman found another dramatic and accessible expression at the intersection with another art — linoleum-cut printing. Russia’s revolutionary ideology of equality, brotherhood, communal labor, and personal liberation would not have been possible without the easy accessibility of technology in the new industrialized era, and young artists at the time were as excited about Whitman’s ideas of camaraderie as they were about the staccato of telegraphed news reports or the quickness of linoleum-cut printing. In contrast to wood-cut printing, this technique is cheaper and less physically demanding: instead of carving a stamp of a page out of a block of wood, the artist works with pliable, easy-to-cut linoleum. In 1918, one such artist was the twenty-five-year-old Vera Ermolaeva (1893–1937). Her group was called “Today”, and its goal — much like that of many chapbook presses today — was to produce short poetry and children’s books cheaply so they could be distributed in the trenches, hospitals, schools, orphanages, and in the streets. The co-op in which Ermolaeva worked did not see its goal of taking literature to the masses as being at odds with the aesthetic pursuit of synergy between the word and the picture; rather, Ermolaeva and her colleagues saw in their process an opportunity to improvise. They printed 100–150 copies at a time and often hand-colored illustrations after the pages were printed, so that the artist had the freedom to try out a number of color schemes and effects. Currently, copies of “Today” editions of works by Sergey Yesenin, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Yuri Annenkov, Natan Al’tman, and Whitman (illustrated by Ermolaeva) are found at international antique book auctions and in MOMA collections. The name of the translator of Ermolaeva’s edition of “Pioneers” is, unfortunately, unknown, as they are identified only by initials. Ermolaeva’s work on Whitman’s “Pioneers” is characteristically bold, sharp, and dynamic. On the cover, two men embrace. Lightning-like lines surround them, suggesting wind, flight, or even the movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates that seem to echo the pioneers’ energy. Inside, four pages are framed with narrow bands of illustration, which, like ancient Greek friezes, summon a vision of procession, and again, movement. In these bands of action, Ermolaeva masterfully uses blocks of black to suggest dusk, night, or dawn. Figures are grouped around campfires, and women walk alongside men. In a piercing interpretive act, however, Ermolaeva puts guns into her pioneers’ hands — not hunting rifles but slim firearms with bayonets attached. On Russian soil, Whitman’s pioneers are not just breaking new ground; they are fighting for a new society. There is no violence, just a few figures resting, leaning on their rifles, but the dark backdrop is enough to suggest watchfulness, men who cannot let down their guard. Ermolaeva’s vision for an eight-page chapbook has the power to crystallize for us the resonance of Whitman’s work in revolutionary Russian imagination. Reciprocally, Whitman’s poem, like the chime of a tuning fork, resonated in bold and sharp-elbowed prints from an artist who would become one of the most influential creators of children’s books. Ermolaeva’s work in “Today” is but a small episode in a life of accomplishment, cut short by tragedy. At twenty-eight, she took Marc Chagall’s position as the Rector of the Vitebsk Applied Arts Institute and recruited Kazimir Malevich to the faculty there. Later on, she would become involved in theoretical studies of color and artistic form. During the Stalinist purges, her futuristic work contributed to the charge of anti-Soviet activities and efforts to organize anti-Soviet intelligentsia, and in 1937, Vera Ermolaeva was sentenced to death by a firing squad and executed. The act of reading about this remarkable life, first in search of a connection to the topic of Whitman in Russia, and then for the pleasure of being captivated and inspired by it, becomes the origin of another act. The re-vision of Vera Ermolaeva’s life, with its rearranged emphases that put the inconsequential little chapbook in the limelight, brings out the supreme irony of her fate: the guns she put into the pioneers’ hands were turned upon her and fired. Chukovsky’s translations of Whitman are still re-read and studied in Russia today. However, they now come to their readers trapped, like insects in amber, in the spirit of the time when they were made, dusted on top with the postmodern, post-Soviet backlash against that spirit. In other words, Whitman in Russian is a Russian Whitman, one whose work has yet to extricate itself from the ideology that it was once thought to purvey and to prove that its value was not merely manufactured by the hegemonic proletariat. A re-reading (and a Russian retranslation) will be an act of a new peace — with Whitman, and with Russia itself. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 29, 2019

Nina Murra

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:04.398998

vernon-lees-satan-the-waster-pacifism-and-the-avant-garde

Vernon Lee’s Satan the Waster Pacifism and the Avant-Garde By Amanda Gagel March 20, 2019 Part essay collection, part shadow-play, part macabre ballet, Satan the Waster: A Philosophic War Trilogy (1920) is one of Vernon Lee’s most political and experimental works. Amanda Gagel explores this modernist masterpiece which lays siege to the patriotism plaguing Europe and offers a vision for its possible pacifist future. When all the nations shall welter in the pollution of warfare, this child’s eyes shall remain clear from its fratricide fumes; she shall drink deep of sorrow, but recognize and put away from her lips the sweetened and consecrated cup of hatred.1 So spoke a fairy bestowing a gift upon an infant Vernon Lee in a short story published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1915. The tale, resembling that of Sleeping Beauty, describes a group of fairies attending Lee’s christening. Each is the personification of a country from which Lee can trace her lineage and upbringing (England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Poland), and each gives her a gift from their culture. Although most are good fairies, one is evil (we are not told which country this fairy represents) and condemns Lee to a life in which she will never fully belong to one nation over another. However, one of the good fairies has yet to give her a gift; she lessens the severity of the curse by issuing the blessing above. In a neat nine paragraphs, Lee gives a synopsis of her multi-national identity and declares that this status keeps her free from being engulfed by the “fratricide fumes” of World War I. Europeans succumbing to a war mentality and mutual animosity was due, Lee felt, to emotions associated with patriotism, nationalism, heroism, personal honour, and self-interest that made it impossible for them to see any way out of international conflicts short of armed warfare. Aside from the obvious causes of World War I (the armament build-up, secret diplomacy, disagreement over Alsace-Lorraine), Lee found that the monumental task for Europeans, if they wanted to avoid another world war, was to change not just policy but their way of thinking about the makeup of Europe, its citizenry, and their own national biases. These ideas found expression in two highly original works, Satan the Waster (1920) and its precursor The Ballet of Nations (1915). In these experimental dramas Lee demonstrates her distinct ability to bring together nineteenth-century philosophical trends, her own brand of aesthetic analyses, and her opinions on modern scientific innovation and religious ideology in order to promote pacifism.2 Lee was visiting England when war was declared and was unable to return to her home, Il Palmerino, a villa outside Florence, until 1919. During those years she tried to mitigate the pro-war sentiments of her fellow Brits, and her letters and articles show that she was unwilling to compromise her beliefs in order to maintain what were long-standing friendships with those supportive of the war. She produced a flurry of polemical writings, mostly as articles and letters-to-the-editor in the Nation and the Labour Leader and in pamphlets for the Union of Democratic Control, of which she was one of the earliest members. Satan the Waster is, however, the most comprehensive, creative, and compelling of all her wartime writing. It is a remarkable work and a truly modern amalgamation of texts: a shadow play in prose (intended to be read aloud and not performed), philosophical essays, and a personal memoir in which Lee investigates her innate psychology as a self-described “neutral”. Lee spends pages explaining how she has attempted to empathize (empathy and emotive understanding are central tenets in Lee’s analytical process) with her pro-war friends and insists that she understands why she disgusts them. Nevertheless, she holds fast that she is able to see what they cannot, and the writing of her play was her way of communicating her vision. Lee wrote Satan the Waster over the course of six years, from 1914 to 1920. The central action, the “Ballet of Nations”, was published in 1915 with illustrations by painter, illustrator, and decorative artist Maxwell Armfield (1881-1972). One could consider this an early draft of Satan.3 Armfield and his wife and collaborator Constance Smedley had met Lee a number of times in Florence over the years and renewed their acquaintance with her in London in 1914.4 Armfield and Smedley were very much involved in avant-garde theatre productions in London. They were also dedicated pacifists, and they invited Lee to give a reading of the Ballet of Nations at their studio in 1915, one of the few “performances” of the piece. A second one occurred soon after at the Margaret Morris theatre and publishers attended. Upon hearing it, Chatto and Windus offered to publish it accompanied by Armfield’s “pictorial commentary”, as he termed it. Lee and Armfield may have appeared to be ideal partners, as they held in common the idea of a unified synthesis of the arts, but Armfield’s aesthetic method in theatre production was a strict adherence to symbolism. “Art is only valuable as a symbolic language”, he’d write, “and the nearer it approaches nature, i.e., the imitation of life, the less vivid does it become as a language.”5 This argument against realism was a way to disassociate from the political and social chaos of the time, using a symbolic language that could be a unifying, idealistic artistic force. His illustrations, therefore, do not depict Lee’s play but provide symbolic renderings of some of the major players and archetypes. The result is Lee’s aggressive and, at points, violent text being paired with Armfield’s passive, static drawings. It is dissonant and distracts the reader from the main narrative. Here, for example, is Armfield’s illustration on pages 13 and 14, to one of the more bloody passages in the play, when the dancers are “dancing themselves to stumps”. Instead of a realistic rendering, he uses symbolic designs of the dancers performing what art historian Grace Brockington terms an “elaborate body-movement script” in which gestures are used as a universal mode of communication.6 Soon after this publication, Lee began revising the Ballet to enlarge its scope. It came to more closely resemble the form of a play when she reshaped it as the nucleus of Satan the Waster, to which she added a Prologue (sometime after 1915), an Epilogue (a series of drafts written between 1915 and 1918), an Introduction (1919), and Notes to the Prologue and the Ballet (written at various points in 1918 and 1919). This discontinuous composition in itself speaks to how Lee found it difficult to make sense of the war as it progressed year upon year. The Introduction and the Notes, in part, focus on the subjective opinions of Lee, her friends, and the pro-war movement. Lee held fast to the theory that one’s emotions create his or her individual reality, a reality which is more meaningful than the so-called world of facts: “the logic of emotions which is more cogent, more irrefutable, than the logic of facts, for the excellent reason that facts are outside us and can be overlooked or distorted, whereas feeling being in us, being the dominant part of us, cannot.”7 One’s emotive response to any one of a number of events forever frames their responses to successive ones, which feeds into “war delusion” and the one-dimensional perspective that plagues most of Europe. All the nations end up participating in a circular experience of war delusion, fed by propaganda and traditional mores of honour and patriotism. This preoccupation with passion, emotions, and the memories of emotions that define multidimensional realities is a thread found overtly and metaphorically throughout Satan the Waster.8 In its initial 1914 composition and even more so in the 1920 revision, the Ballet is written in imitation of a medieval masque, a dramatic form which Lee had studied since her early career when she traced the origins and dramatic conventions of the Italian commedia dell’arte in Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880) and in Euphorion (1884). Generic characteristics of a masque consist of the actors playing mythical or allegorical figures and the central action being a dance or ballet. The dialogue was usually sparse and always of secondary importance to the music, scenery, mechanical effects, and the dance. Her reimagining of it as an anti-war drama in prose is groundbreaking given her focus on the color, movement, sound, and shape of the primary players and the minimalist scenery. The twentieth-century reader could only imagine what a medieval masque looked like based on centuries’ old descriptions. Similarly, while reading (not viewing) Lee’s play, the reader is forced to imagine the drama, just as one would a medieval masque. In the Ballet, the warring nations participate in a macabre death or battle performance to an orchestra comprised of the Human Passions. Lee describes a visually stimulating tableau, with some scenes purposefully evocative of fine works of art. The Prologue opens with a description of Satan awaiting the beginning of the Ballet. “He is seated at one end of a long Empire sofa, very much in the pose of one of Michelangelo’s Medici Dukes, resting one arm on his knee and his chin on his hand, deep in weary and mysterious meditation.”9 Lee uses color, sound, and light to describe the eerie luminescence and seductiveness of Satan and his nephew Ballet Master Death. As the Ballet is about to begin: “The place, which, with the earthquake, had become suddenly dark, is lit by the sinister luminousness emanating from Satan’s archangelic person, until the whole is suffused with a strange and ominous light as if in a fog, in which near objects are oddly visible and others shade away in nothingness.”10 These imagined, though nonetheless arresting, sets make for a highly evocative modernist work that encourages the reader to experience this war drama as a deeply emotional experience. When the Prologue was added, so was the crucial character of Clio as interlocutor. Satan has invited her to be a kind of reporter and record the ballet performance for future generations. With Clio as a sounding board, Satan extemporizes on various theories of life, love, and war. Per the book’s title, Satan is the waster of human virtues, and he delights in spoiling the love that humans feel for each other, for art, for ideas, for all things. Lee frames the Ballet within a rhetorical framework of good vs evil, but not in a Judeo-Christian sense. War should not be understood under the traditional dichotomy of one righteous nation battling a degenerate opposing force. Rather, the evil is the impetus itself to go to war, and the good (a Platonic love for mankind, for beauty, and a decent moral life) is inherent in all the belligerents — they can resist the urge to engage in mass murder. Satan personifies evil, and he and Ballet Master Death use the players to demonstrate how easily people and nations can be misled by their virtues. The Human Passions gather to form the orchestra before the performance. Satan points them out to Clio as they arrive: Vanity, Indignation, Hatred, Self-righteousness, Idealism, Adventure, Sin, Self-interest, Suspicion, and many more. Then, the new members, Science (a gramophone) and Organization (a miniature pianola), enter. They are Lee’s most overt indictment of the waste of human virtues, in that science and organization should be used toward universal peace and progress and not toward the manufacture of weapons and organized slaughter. The orchestra members come together to perform a symphony of Patriotism, the most essential participant being Heroism, “with limbs like a giant’s, blushes like a girl’s and eyes like a merry child’s, but which saw not” as he is blind.11 Lee intends that his voice is the only one to be heard if the play is ever recited: “ . . . none of the music must be audible, except the voice and drum of Heroism. Anything beyond this would necessarily be hideous, besides drowning or interrupting the dialogue.”12 Dancers moving to silence except for the sound of a monotonous drum and the lone high pitch of Heroism is indeed a terrifyingly eerie spectacle. Lee uses music, or in this case the idea of music, as a powerful tool of imagination and implication: this symbolic driving force of war is something that is so maddening that it cannot be heard. This aesthetic experience speaks to the power that Lee believed music holds. In her critical essays and especially in Music and Its Lovers (1933), Lee explains the acute responses that music effects in a listener, ones tied to our innermost psychology. Therefore, music as a force driving nations to war is one that necessarily cannot be heard by humanity, but only Satan. If humanity were exposed to the power of this music, the result would be utter chaos. As the bleak dance progresses, the nations perform their own parts and are instructed to ignore the dissonance of the other parts. Some attempt variations of a pas de deux, but this cooperation never lasts. In all, the steps are increasingly imitative, then dissonant, improvised and then violent and aggressive, especially between the prominent protagonists in the war. Yet dance they did, chopping and slashing, blinding each other with squirts of blood and pellets of human flesh. And as they appeared and disappeared in the moving wreaths of fiery smoke, they lost more and more of their original shape, becoming, in that fitful light, terrible uncertain forms, armless, legless, recognizable for human only by their irreproachable Heads . . . mere unspeakable hybrids between man and beast: they who had come on to that stage so erect and beautiful.13 The atmosphere of battle is mimicked on stage further by the addition of smoke and small explosions that the dancers must maneuver around. Lee describes the stage, as she did in earlier scenes, in terms of a painting, this time one that morphs in front of the viewer. For whereas the Ballet had begun with the tender radiance of an August sunset above half-harvested fields . . . the progress of the performance had seen the deep summer starlit vault flushed by the flare of distant burning farms, and its blue solemnity rent by the fitful track of rockets, and the luminous fans of searchlights and the Roman candles and Catherine-wheels of far-off explosions. Until, little by little, the heavens, painted such a peaceful blue, were blotted out by masses of flame-lit smoke and poisonous vapours, rising and sinking, coming forward and receding like a stifling fog, but ever growing denser and more rent by dreadful leaping fires, and swaying obedient to Death’s bâton no less than did the bleeding Nations of his Corps de Ballet. In and out of that lurid chasm they moved, by twos or threes; now lost to view in the billows of fiery darkness, now issuing thence toward the Ballet Master’s desk, or suddenly revealed, clasped in terrific embrace, by the leaping flame of an exploding magazine; while overhead fluttered and whirred great wings, which showered down bomb-lightnings.14 At last, the bloody scene seems to reach its culmination as the nations have “danced themselves to stumps”, but Pity and Indignation take up the charge and “thus the Ballet of Nations is still a-dancing”.15 The Epilogue, added when Lee began to expand the narrative after 1914, continues with the allegories in the play and the relationship between Satan and Clio. It opens with the conclusion of the performance and the players having fallen asleep with exhaustion. Clio congratulates Satan on the triumphant performance. He then teases her by offering to show her “the real Reality” of the Ballet of Nations — a glimpse behind the scenes, as it were. The reason he can do this after the fact is that he had everything recorded, by cinematograph and gramophone. Lee again plays on the idea of reality and how it shifts according to the knowledge at hand at any given time and place. Here only Satan can show the absolute reality of what brought about the Ballet of Nations. What you are going to see and hear are indeed Supermen; say, rather, the mortal Gods in my little machine of myriad-fold death and ruin. In other words, the Heads of the Nations. For it can scarcely have escaped your acumen that what passed muster for such during my Ballet, and rolled about on the shoulders of the Dancing Nations, could be only cardboard masks. These are the Real Ones, the Masters of Men’s Destiny, even if not always of royal birth or Cabinet rank; sometimes mere humble specimens of the Investor, the Homo Œconomicus who sways the modern world.16 Lee uses the Epilogue to address what she could not in the Ballet. Using the devices of performance and mechanization (motion pictures and recording devices), she relates the causes of the war in truncated scenes that flicker across a screen. Her use of mechanization is twofold. First, she acknowledges it as a mark of human progress by way of inventions that benefit human health and understanding, but she then delves into the “mechanical” inter-workings of society. Satan uses the cinematograph to help Clio understand the “machinery” of society: each player individually contributes to bringing about a world war. In her notes to the Prologue, Lee stresses this point, that modern mechanistic living has stunted our spiritual growth while advancing the instruments of modern warfare. This is achieved through the invention of weapons and the manipulation of liberal capitalist practices that feed the greed of heads of state and industry. Then, inevitably, it is the working class man that fights the wars that capitalism produces. Lee anticipates the class warfare in Europe that follows strongly on the heels of World War I. Some scenes Satan shows are ones contemporaneous to the war (cries for peace) and ones that show discussions of what is needed for a lasting peace when the war ends. Citizens argue and their voices merge into a kind of strange Greek chorus in which the combative European powers insist that peace can only last if each nation gets the territorial boundaries they ask for — ones dating back decades and centuries. As one actor explains with irony: “I repeat that none of us are out for aggrandisement, but for the future peace of the world. We must go on fighting to establish a really lasting peace, equally just towards friends and foes.”17 The Epilogue ends with Ballet Master Death waking from his drunken slumber and railing at Satan for taking all the credit for the success of the Ballet when it was Master Death who really “draws an audience”. With that, he implores blind Heroism to confirm this. Reaching out to touch him, Heroism finally “sees” how grotesque the reality of Death is with his tattered bones and deformed visage: “Where is the Death I loved and followed so faithfully — the true, pure, lovely Death? Oh, horror, horror, horror!”18 The success of war rests on Heroism continuing to believe in the illusion of a beautiful, moral, and necessary Death. Satan knows this, so he “cleans” Death up for another performance. “You vile, old-fashioned scarecrow, do you now understand that Heroism has almost found you out for the preposterous, indecent anachronism that you are? And if, by any chance, that Blind Boy should really be surgeoned into seeing . . . why, then, this will have been the last of our Ballet of Nations!”19 With more text than all the other components of Satan combined, the “Notes” to the Introduction, Prologue, and Ballet constitute the last, most substantial, third of the book. More than simply explanatory, the notes are philosophical musings and extended glosses which digress from the topics touched on in the main text to become essays on entirely different subjects. She writes on everything from the futility of finding one ultimate cause of the war, to the role that “Love” plays in her Ballet, to the need for England to fundamentally change its ideological and nationalistic outlook, to the role of art in deterring war. Though seemingly disparate, these essays in concert support a sustained argument: that there is an independent, ever changing, nebulous Reality working apart from our own individual realities. Lee genuinely feared for the future of Europe, and when Satan the Waster is not explaining the political origins of warfare it is encouraging readers to discover within themselves why they would accept a modern way of life that threatens their ability to actively engage with beauty. In its religious and moral dimensions, this engagement with art and beauty is illustrative of Lee’s “gardening of life” ethos she describes in many books, such as Hortus Vitae (1903). Other points addressed in Satan, however, such as the changing realities that we must come to terms with by utilizing our intellects and “protean” emotions (not religious superstition) is a point she revisits time and again in her works of the twentieth century: including Gospels of Anarchy (1908), Vital Lies (1912), and Proteus, or the Future of Intelligence (1926). Satan the Waster is perhaps her most avant-garde attempt to understand the quickly changing world around her, but definitely not the only one. When Lee returned to Italy in 1919, what she found was a home quite destitute. Il Palmerino was in fairly good shape but the country was poor and hungry. Crops had failed or food had been taken for the war effort, and it took her some time to get things back to normal. As before, she continued with her interest in international politics and with her voluminous output of articles and books. At odds with many of her British friends, she understood that during the war she was in the unique position of being a British-born Italian expatriate living in London. At times, she rejoiced in her independence and isolation, and at others, craved intellectual companionship. Regardless, she was a woman who would never sacrifice her beliefs or censor her opinions in order to get along with others. The loss of friendships during the war was not as deplorable to her as the rejection of her principles. She knew without a doubt that her arguments in support of a pacifist Europe were correct. Her opponents had detestable “righteous indignation” on their side and she had incontrovertible reason. “While all this has been going on, never for a second have I repented or distrusted my own attitude; never for a second wished my attitude might be different. My position about the war seems as entirely natural and inevitable given me, as I recognize and feel theirs to be given them.”20 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 20, 2019

Amanda Gagel

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:04.911903

o-uommibatto-how-the-pre-raphaelites-became-obsessed-with-the-wombat

“O Uommibatto” How the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed with the Wombat By Angus Trumble January 10, 2019 Angus Trumble on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and company’s curious but longstanding fixation with the furry oddity that is the wombat — that “most beautiful of God’s creatures” which found its way into their poems, their art, and even, for a brief while, their homes. In 1857, the English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti — central figure of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and by then a national celebrity — was commissioned to decorate the vaulted ceiling, upper walls, and windows of the Oxford Union library. He mustered a large group of helpers, including his new Oxford undergraduate friends (and future leading artists) Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. While the murals were being painted with scenes taken from Arthurian legend — rather badly, as it turned out, because they have since deteriorated beyond recognition — the glass panes of the windows were painted over to reduce the glare coming through onto the walls. These whitewashed surfaces were soon covered with sketches drawn or scratched into the paint, mostly depictions of one particular animal. The wombat. These soon vanished because, of course, when the frescoes were finished the whitewash was removed. Edward Burne-Jones was supposed to have done the best ones, and he continued to produce them for many years. A rather overheated Egyptological example, shown whizzing past the pyramids, was much later chosen by Lady Burne-Jones as an illustration for the part of her memoir that dealt with the Oxford Union episode. Recalling the hugely enjoyable experience of working in the Oxford Union, another artist — helper Val Prinsep — recalled: “Rossetti was the planet around which we revolved, we copied his way of speaking. All beautiful women were ‘stunners’ with us. Wombats were the most beautiful of God’s creatures.” How did Rossetti and his protégés come to be so obsessed with wombats? Only one of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood actually visited Australia — the sculptor Thomas Woolner who, after failing to earn a proper living with his art, emigrated there to seek his fortune on the goldfields. The Pre-Raphaelites and their friends met regularly to read aloud from the letter-journals that Woolner sent home. He had no luck at all and did not like the Australian landscape. He confided to his diary that he thought it topsy-turvy. The seasons were the wrong way around, as were the times of day. The birds, he claimed, did not sing, cherries grew with their stones on the outside of the fruit, the trees shed their bark, not their leaves, and so on. On one occasion he was shocked to encounter the fragrance of lilac because he had made his mind up that Australia was scentless, barren, “a land without fruit or vegetable”. Although wombats don’t get a specific mention in the surviving letters, it is quite possible he brought word of the exotic marsupial home with him when he moved back to England just a year later. Of course, the Pre-Raphaelites were not the first English to become enamoured by the unusual creature. Wombats captured the attention of English naturalists as soon as they found out about them from early settlers, explorers, and naturalists at the time of first contact. The Aboriginal word wombat was first recorded near Port Jackson, and though variants such as wombach, womback, the wom-bat, and womat were noted, the present form of the name stuck very early, from at least 1797. Beautiful drawings survive from the 1802 voyages of the Investigator and Le Géographe. Ferdinand Bauer, who sailed with Matthew Flinders, and Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, who was in the rival French expedition of Nicolas Baudin, both drew the creature. These were engraved and carefully studied at home. Wombats were admired for their stumpy strength, their patience, their placid, not to say congenial manners, and also a kind of stoic determination. Occasionally they were thought clumsy, insensible, or even stupid, but these isolated observations are out of step with the majority of nineteenth-century opinion. untitled text 2:48: caption={ Engraving of wombats after a drawing by Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, plate 58 in the Voyage de découvertes aux Terres Australes (1824) by Arthus Bertrand — Source.} From about 1803, a steady trickle of live wombats reached Europe. We know there was a wombat among the birds and animals that were delivered to the menagerie of the Empress Joséphine Bonaparte at Malmaison, near Paris. Another early wombat owner was the English naturalist Everard Home, whose paper on the subject, “An Account of Some Peculiarities in the Anatomical Structure of the Wombat”, appeared in March 1809 in the Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts. Home’s wombat, a male, was in fact caught by George Bass, probably on King Island, where we know Bass and his companions shot several other specimens. Once provoked, this particular wombat put up a splendid struggle, tearing strips off Bass’ coat sleeves and making loud “whizzing” noises. Evidently he took ages to calm down. Bass kept him alive, looked after him well, and sent him to England. There, in London, he lived in what Home described as “a domesticated state for two years”. The following description is no less charming today than it must have been for English scientific readers nearly two centuries ago. [The wombat] burrowed in the ground whenever it had an opportunity, and covered itself in the earth with surprising quickness. It was quiet during the day, but constantly in motion in the night: was very sensible to cold; ate all kinds of vegetables; but was particularly fond of new hay, which it ate stalk by stalk, taking it into its mouth like a beaver, by small bits at a time. It was not wanting in intelligence, and appeared attached to those to whom it was accustomed, and who were kind to it. When it saw them, it would put up its forepaws on the knee, and when taken up would sleep in the lap. It allowed children to pull and carry it about, and when it bit them did not appear to do it in anger or with violence. Some misconceptions lingered for decades. In 1827 an engraver working for the museum in Newcastle had the wombat sitting up like a kangaroo, something that clearly escaped notice throughout the galley and page-proof stages of publication. But the most important development in the establishment of the wombat’s English reputation was the appearance in 1855 of John Gould’s de luxe The Mammals of Australia. Gould was in Australia much earlier, in the 1830s, and it was certainly through Gould that the artist Edward Lear, who illustrated Gould’s Birds but unfortunately not the Mammals, made a wonderful sheet of whimsical drawings of the “Inditchenous Beestes of New Olland”, a rarity which is today in the collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. These are plausibly accurate caricatures of various species of kangaroo and wallaby, the platypus, the “possum up his gum tree”, and the Tasmanian Devil. There are also mad renderings of the bandicoot, echidna, and native cat, not to mention representative appearances in the margin of the cow, the dog, the sheep, and the horse. Splendidly rotund and occupying the largest amount of space towards the bottom centre of the sheet is the wombat, with “his i”. Gould’s 1855 description of the wombat is almost as captivating as Everard Home’s fifty years earlier. In its habits it is nocturnal, living in the deep stony burrows excavated by itself, during the day, and emerging on the approach of evening, but seldom trusting itself far from its stronghold, to which it immediately runs for safety on the appearance of an intruder. The natives state, however, that it sometimes indulges in a long ramble, and, if a river should cross its course, quietly walks into the water and traverses the bottom of the stream until it reaches the other side . . . In its disposition it is quiet and docile in the extreme, soon becoming familiar with and apparently attached to those that feed it; as an evidence of which, I may mention that the two specimens which are now and have been for a long period living in the Gardens of the Zoological Society in the Regent’s Park, not only admit the closest inspection, but may be handled and scratched by all who choose to make so intimate an acquaintance with them. If not from Thomas Woolner, whose view of the Australian landscape was pretty bleak, Rossetti and his friends may well have derived their particular enthusiasm for wombats from Gould’s or some other appealing description. Or maybe they simply fell in love with the wombats at the Regent’s Park Zoo. In the 1860s, Rossetti often took his friends to visit the wombats at the zoo, sometimes for hours on end. On one occasion Rossetti wrote to Ford Madox Brown: “Dear Brown: Lizzie and I propose to meet Georgie and Ned [the Burne-Jones] at 2 pm tomorrow at the Zoological Gardens—place of meeting, the Wombat’s Lair.” In this period a number of new wombats arrived at the Regent’s Park Zoo: a rare, hairy-nosed wombat on July 24, 1862, and two common wombats despatched from the Melbourne Zoo on March 18, 1863. Rossetti also made regular visits with his brother, William Michael, to the Acclimatisation Society in London and its counterpart in Paris, to keep an eye on the hairy-nosed wombats residing in both places. This was no passing fancy. Earlier, in 1862, Rossetti had moved to Tudor House, at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Spacious, with plenty of room for family and friends including George Meredith and the poet and semi-professional sadomasochist Algernon Charles Swinburne — who liked to slide naked down the banisters — the house had four-fifths of an acre of garden, with lime trees and a big mulberry. As soon as he arrived, Rossetti began to fill the garden with exotic birds and animals. There were owls, two or more armadillos, rabbits, dormice, and a racoon that hibernated in a chest of drawers. There were peacocks, parakeets, and kangaroos and wallabies, about which we know frustratingly little. There was a Canadian marmot or woodchuck, a Pomeranian puppy called Punch, an Irish deerhound called Wolf, a Japanese salamander, and two laughing jackasses. We know the neighbours were tolerant up to a point but Thomas Carlyle, for one, was driven mad by the noise. At length there was a small Brahmin bull that had to go when it chased Rossetti around the garden, and, in September 1869, a long-awaited wombat, the culmination of well over twelve years of enthusiasm for the exotic marsupial. Shortly before this date there had been a number of animal deaths at Cheyne Walk, so Rossetti raised the animal-collecting stakes considerably. In November 1867, he was negotiating with his supplier of wild animals, Charles Jamrach. His object was to purchase a young African elephant, but he balked at the price of £400. Rossetti’s income for 1865 was £2000. Rossetti finally arranged to buy a wombat, again through Jamrach, when at length a suitable specimen became available. This wombat arrived when he was away in Scotland recovering from a kind of breakdown, largely precipitated by failing eyesight, insomnia, drugs, and, above all, his growing infatuation with Jane Morris, the wife of his old friend and protégé from the Oxford Union days. A remarkable drawing of Jane Morris and the wombat in the British Museum illustrates the degree to which lover and pet merged in Rossetti’s mind as objects of sanctification. Each of them wears a halo. But Jane has the wombat on a leash, and it seems clear that Rossetti also used his pet wombat as a cruelly comical emblem for Jane’s long-suffering, cuckolded husband. Since university days William Morris was known to his friends as “Topsy”; the name Rossetti chose for his Wombat was “Top”. Still shaky, Rossetti could not wait to get back to Chelsea from freezing Scotland. He wrote to Jane the following mock-heroic lines: Oh! How the family affections combat Within this heart; and each hour flings a bomb at My burning soul; neither from owl nor from bat Can peace be gained, until I clasp my wombat! Meanwhile, within days, Rossetti’s sister, Christina, had sent him breathless verses in Italian entitled “O Uommibatto”, in which she described the animal as “agil, giocondo” (nimble, cheerful), as well as “irsuto e tondo” (hairy and round). Writing from Scotland a few days later, Rossetti asked his brother William Michael also to thank Christina for the “shrine in the Italian taste, which she has reared for the wombat. I fear his habits tend inveterately to drain architecture . . . It appears the wombat follows people all over the house!” At last, Rossetti returned to London on September 20, and the next day wrote to William Michael his most famous and suggestive remark about the new addition to his menagerie: “The wombat is a joy, a triumph, a delight, a madness.” Unfortunately, the poor wombat was also an invalid. From the beginning, William Michael had sensed that something was wrong: “I went round to see the beast, which is the most lumpish and incapable of wombats, with an air of baby objectlessness — not much more than half-grown probably. He is much addicted to following one about the room, and nestling up against one, and nibbling one’s calves or trousers.” Top the wombat also got on well with the other animals, particularly the rabbits. Soon, however, Top was ailing. William Michael wrote: “The wombat shows symptoms of some malady of the mange-kind, and he is attended by a dog doctor.” The next day: “Saw the wombat again at Chelsea. I much fear he shows already decided symptoms of loss of sight which effects so many wombats.” At length, on November 6, the wombat died. Rossetti had him stuffed and afterwards displayed in the front hall. Rossetti’s famous self-portrait with Top, the deceased wombat, is satirical but was apparently prompted by genuine grief. The accompanying verses are bleak indeed: I never reared a young wombat To glad me with his pin-hole eye, But when he most was sweet and fat And tailless, he was sure to die! These verses are in fact Rossetti’s parody of the opening lines of “The Fire Worshippers”, a poem that appeared in a curious, but hugely popular novel by Thomas Moore called Lallah Rookh, published in 1817, which is all about the betrothal of the Emperor’s daughter to a foreign prince and the journey she undertook from Delhi to Kashmir to meet her future husband. On the way she meets a beautiful minstrel with whom she falls in love and, of course, it turns out in the end that he is none other than the prince in disguise. These lines are sung by Lallah Rookh: I never nurs’d a dear gazelle To glad me with its soft black eye, But when it came to know me well And love me, it was sure to die! The substitution of the wombat for Lallah Rookh’s exotic gazelle is typical of Rossetti’s self-indulgent humour, and he clearly had no trouble adapting for himself the mood of a lovelorn oriental princess. During its short life, the first of Rossetti’s two pet wombats secured a remarkable place in the mythology of his circle of friends. Rossetti gleefully reported to William Bell Scott on September 28, 1869, that the wombat had effectively interrupted a long and dreary monologue from John Ruskin by patiently burrowing between the eminent critic’s jacket and waistcoat. This must have been a marvellous thing to watch happen. Much later, James McNeill Whistler invented a silly story about how the wombat had perished after eating an entire box of cigars. Ford Madox Brown thought that Rossetti’s habit of bringing the wombat to dinner and letting it sleep in the large épergne or centrepiece on the dining room table inspired the dormouse in the tea-pot incident at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This is in fact impossible because Lewis Carroll wrote that chapter in 1863, and the novel, with its famous illustrations by John Tenniel, was published two years later in 1865. There were also stories circulating about the wombat’s diet of ladies’ carelessly discarded straw hats, and so on. Many years later, recalling the high jinks at Cheyne Walk, Max Beerbohm devised a series of ridiculous caricatures, with the garden menagerie as the setting. We do not know if this peculiar animal with enormous floppy ears was Beerbohm’s bizarre tribute to the wombat, but it seems possible. In the short term, the Canadian woodchuck made up for Rossetti’s failure to preserve his two pet wombats. The woodchuck lasted much longer. For a long time it was mistaken for the wombat. On February 9, 1871, William Bell Scott observed the woodchuck nestling in Rossetti’s lap and made a charming pencil drawing on Cheyne Walk letterhead. He always assumed it was a wombat. I would say that it was, in fact, the woodchuck that slept peacefully in the épergne in the middle of the dining-room table, not the wombat. Indeed it is the very idea of the wombat, not so much the creature himself, that consistently captured the imagination of visitors to Cheyne Walk, and stood out among the various Bohemian props with which Rossetti surrounded himself. The wombat craze of the 1850s and 1860s, while confined to a relatively small group of friends, represents a fascinating by-product of the British colonisation of Australia. Australian birds and animals were very seldom noted in the London press. Palmer’s index to the Times newspaper lists only one reference each to a possum and an echidna in the whole extent of the nineteenth century, while kangaroos are likewise seldom mentioned — though the few mentions are so bizarre that they are worth repeating. The first reference came in February 1834 and concerned an old woman who, living alone in a house on Castle Hill in South London, awoke one morning to find a strange animal lying at her back, with one of its paws laid over her shoulder. Screaming with affright, she left her bed, and seizing a towel, she beat it with all her might, when, with one bound, it sprang to the furthest corner of the room, and at length took refuge in another bed which stood in the same apartment. This rather nonchalant kangaroo turned out to have escaped from Mr Wombwell’s Wild Beast Show, which had lately occupied The Mound. The second reference comes sixteen years later, in October 1850, and likewise concerns a kangaroo escapee, this time from a menagerie that belonged to a newly-elected member of Parliament, W. J. Evelyn of Wotton, near Dorking, in West Surrey. Raising the alarm, Evelyn called out the local hunt, replete with huntsmen, a pack of beagles, whippers-in, and so forth. The kangaroo sought refuge in a place called the Duke of Norfolk’s Copse but was flushed out and cornered at Abinger Rectory. The report is worth quoting: Here the animal’s peculiar mode of progression was exhibited in a style which astonished the field — a singular succession of leaps carrying it over the ground at a rate perfectly startling. Those who were well mounted alone were enabled to go the pace, and they speedily found themselves at the top of Leith Hill, where the kangaroo took to the road, and for about a mile and a half they all dashed along, “the field” rapidly augmenting in numbers as they proceeded in their novel chase. By contrast with these rare sightings of kangaroos, as a curiosity in Britain, the wombat, “the most beautiful of God’s creatures”, seems to have attracted far more attention than any other Australian animal and reached into the recesses of the imagination — at least among that group of artists who in the 1850s and 1860s clustered around Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 10, 2019

Angus Trumble

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:05.505287

the-myth-of-blubber-town-an-arctic-metropolis

The Myth of Blubber Town, an Arctic Metropolis By Matthew H. Birkhold July 10, 2019 Though the 17th-century whaling station of Smeerenburg was in reality, at its height, just a few dwellings and structures for processing blubber, over the decades and centuries a more extravagant picture took hold — that there once had stood, defying its far-flung Arctic location, a bustling urban centre complete with bakeries, churches, gambling dens, and brothels. Matthew H. Birkhold explores the legend. Perched on a desolate island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard — 1,500 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle — sits the settlement of Smeerenburg. Founded by Dutch whalers in 1619, Smeerenburg — literally “Blubber Town” — was once the busiest polar site for rendering oil from blubber. As new hunting grounds and technologies rendered land-based processing obsolete, the outpost became unnecessary. Faraway Smeerenburg was abandoned by 1663. Despite its brief existence, myths of a bustling Blubber Town lived on. Sailors recounted streets lined with churches, shops, and bakeries. Other tales described the clubs and brothels forlorn whalers could visit. Respected scientists and historians, including William Scoresby and Fridtjof Nansen, repeated the stories, claiming tens of thousands of people dwelled on the icy island. In reality, no more than fifteen ships carrying four hundred men visited the site. Smeerenburg began with a happy accident. Searching for a Northeast Passage in 1596, famed navigator Willem Barentsz (1550–1597) stumbled upon the Svalbard islands. Here, along the rocky coasts, he found countless bowhead whales and saw an opportunity. The Dutchman planted a flag and claimed the lucrative waters for the United Provinces. For the next century, the Dutch ruled the whale trade, supplying almost all of Europe with oil for lamps and whale bones for corsets and hoop-skirts. The peerless Dutch navy safeguarded sailing routes against English, German, and French interlopers as Dutch whalers asserted exclusive rights to the best hunting grounds in the Arctic. The resulting near monopoly allowed Dutch companies to keep prices artificially high and further gild their coffers. The legacy of this Golden Age dominance is recorded in our language: in addition to maritime words like “maelstrom”, “skipper”, and “cruise”, the terms “iceberg” and “walrus” also stem from Dutch exploits in the Arctic. In 1614 an alliance of Dutch cities created the Noordsche Compagnie as a whaling cartel, which sent ships north each June. Following a three-week journey, the ships arrived to what they called Spitsbergen and remained until September or October, when the growing ice threatened to trap them. At the time, whales were hunted near the coasts and in fjords. Harvesting the “gold of the seas” was arduous. Bowhead whales were the favored target of Dutch speculators because they are slow swimmers and possess vast quantities of blubber. They can grow up to 60 feet and weigh more than 100 tons. The whip of a tail could spell death. Once a whale was spotted, men hurried to small boats and rowed toward the beast. A successful throw would lodge a harpoon behind the whale’s eye, causing it to dangerously thrash and flee, dragging the craft through freezing waters. Once they exhausted the whale, the crew could repeatedly pierce it. A final lance to the organs would kill the animal, which would roll over, ready to tow back to the ship floating belly up. Back on shore, men stood atop the giant carcass and flensed the blubber from the muscle, ending up hip-deep in blubber and blood. The process could take hours or days, depending on the size of the whale, the skill of the crew, and the weather. In the seventeenth century, the extracted blubber was cut into manageable pieces and boiled in enormous iron ovens to render oil. After cooling in wooden casks, the oil was funneled into barrels and loaded onto ships to be sold on the European market. Besides alleviating the potential fetor of rotting blubber aboard, producing oil on shore saved space in the hold and thus increased profits. During their first expedition in the Arctic, ships from the Noordsche Compagnie set up camp on a narrow promontory off a small island near the northwest coast of Spitsbergen. They named it Amsterdam Island. The whalers returned to the same site each summer with canvas tents and makeshift ovens. In 1619, they arrived with timber, brick, and peat from home to create a permanent whaling station. The settlement came to be called Smeerenburg — a fitting name given the heaps of blubber (smeeren) carved up at the site. As more ships arrived each year, additional oil cookeries were built as well as storehouses and dwellings. The buildings were named for the cities that owned them: Delft, Enkhuizen, Hoorn, Middelburg, and Veere among others. Word of a booming Blubber Town spread among whalers in the Arctic. There was no agreement on how large it had grown and when it was deserted. Most believed it was a bustling place. Written accounts corroborated the whalers’ yarns for a broader public. Jacob Segersz van der Brugge, for instance, published his journal shortly after returning home from whaling in 1634. He describes the lodgings — the Middelburg “tent” he occupied measured 21 by 16 feet — and catalogues his diet, including fresh meat from reindeer, foxes, and birds. Van der Brugge even claims to have repeatedly eaten salads. The German naturalist Friedrich Martens (1635–1699) visited in 1671 traveling aboard a ship christened Jonah in the Whale. His 1675 report of the journey, Spitzbergische oder Groenlandische Reise-Beschreibung, included the first scientific description of the flora and fauna of Svalbard and became an oft-cited reference work. In Martens’ eyes, Smeerenburg was a “village”.1 Chronicles escalated from there, particularly as their authors ceased visiting the settlement themselves. By the eighteenth century, written accounts make clear that Smeerenburg was abandoned, but the myth of its former grandeur continued. Cornelis Gijsbertsz Zorgdrager penned what is considered the first classic account, influencing dozens of authors. Writing in 1720, Zorgdrager assures his reader that he is using reliable information from informants whose kin sailed to the whaling station when the Noordsche Compagnie was master of the trade. Zorgdrager upgrades the settlement from “village” to a “half small city” with busy streets.2 In addition to the tryworks that contained the ovens and working platforms, dwellings, warehouses, and workshops crowd the peninsula in his telling. Peddlers offer a variety of wares including tobacco and spirits in street-side stalls. According to Zorgdrager, Smeerenburg was a destination to make a “good purchase”.3 Best of all, Smeerenburg was home to multiple bakers. Each morning, when they pulled their bread hot from the oven, a horn was blown to alert the weary whalers. For this reason, Zorgdrager is tempted to compare Smeerenburg with Batavia, then the humming capital of the Dutch East Indies, but demurs based on the number of anchored ships reported. Over time, the purported size of Smeerenburg grew larger as the myth propagated. English explorer William Scoresby, whom Herman Melville’s Ishmael quotes in Moby-Dick, introduces false numbers into the legend. In his popular 1820 Account of the Arctic Regions, Scoresby (1789–1857) asserts “the place had the appearance of a commercial or manufacturing town.”4 Leaning on the Batavia comparison mentioned by Zorgdrager and elaborated upon by other writers, Scoresby has no problem repeating the invention of shopkeepers, artisans, and bakers, ultimately calculating the population between 12,000 and 18,000 people. For comparison, at the time of the American Revolution, Boston had 15,000 residents. Building on Scoresby’s description, other authors add churches, fortresses, wood-paneled houses in bright colors, and even enlarge the size of buildings to 80 by 50 feet. By the end of the century, the rocky coast was thought to have been packed full and the harbor teeming with ships. The most colorful accounts come from the twentieth century. Surprisingly, the otherwise meticulous Norwegian scientist Fridtjof Nansen, famous for crossing Greenland, perpetuated and inflated the myth. In A Voyage to Spitsbergen (1920), Nansen claims: Here was an whole town with booths and streets . . . . Some ten thousand people in the summer with the clamor of pack-stalls, and oil cookeries, and gambling halls, of smithies, and workshops, of peddlers, and dance halls. Along this flat beach, a mass of boats with seafarers just coming from the exciting whale-hunt, and of women in various colors who were on the man-hunt.5 Nansen likely read the earlier texts by Zorgdrager and Scoresby; though, it is unclear whether he had a source for the addition of lusty women and dance halls. Regardless, relying on Nansen as a respected researcher, others soon ran with the idea. Helge Ingstad, who with his wife Anne Stine discovered the remains of a Viking settlement in Canada, repeats the extravagant tale of Smeerenburg in his 1948 book The Land with the Cold Coasts. Ingstad discusses the shops, dwellings, and church and further adds a “house for loose women”.6 As late as 1984, the Norwegian Svalbard Society released a history of the archipelago that cited the bakeries of Smeerenburg and estimated its population reached up to 18,000 men. In reality, Smeerenburg was never more than a desolate outpost. Thanks to the enduring myth, considerable archaeological work was conducted on Amsterdamøya between 1979 and 1981. Some estimate the maximum number of men to have been two hundred at any given time — and there is no evidence of women on the site. There may have been a total of nineteen buildings, including warehouses and workshops, where craftsmen, blubber cutters, and blubber cooks worked. At most there were eight oil cookeries. There was no church or gambling den. The focus was unambiguously on work and capitalizing on the short hunting season. The conditions were grueling. Men likely worked long hours, taking advantage of the endless Arctic summer days, often working through the night in rotation. Zooarchaeological analysis suggests the Dutch were primarily dependent on barreled beef in the seventeenth century. Transported from the Netherlands, the meat would have been cut into 25-centimeter portions, salted, and packed in casks. Jacob Segersz van der Brugge’s fox meat was the exception. And his much-rhapsodized “salad” was likely fistfuls of cochlearia officinalis. Better known as scurvygrass, the leafy plant did indeed ward off the disease, but had an impossibly bitter taste. Eventually, shelters were built by the ovens to protect workers from inclement weather. But death was not uncommon. 101 graves have been identified on the island. By the 1660s, Smeerenburg was a ghost town. The Noordsche Compagnie dissolved in 1642 after Dutch free traders created too much competition for the cartel. Further precipitating the decline of Blubber Town, whales all but vanished from the coasts of Svalbard. The animals began avoiding the waters either due to shifting currents or learned wariness of the area. With whales further out at sea, it became unnecessarily difficult to drag them to shore — particularly to an island isolated in the upper reaches of the Arctic. Consequently, the Dutch abandoned shore whaling for pelagic whaling, flensing slain whales alongside ships and returning to port in the Netherlands with unprocessed blubber. Vaguely aware of this history, some chroniclers warned against tales of a bustling Blubber Town. Already in his 1874 study of the Noordsche Comagnie, Samuel Muller names them “fairytales”.7 Nevertheless, the myth persisted and grew over time. One explanation, of course, is simply bad history. Authors stopped visiting the settlement themselves and depended solely on first- and second-hand reports. Eventually, these sources disappeared. Writers had to rely on previous written accounts of Smeerenburg and a combination of misreadings and embellishments twisted into an elaborate yarn. A long series of even small exaggerations eventually produced imaginary dance halls and brothels. Alternatively, it is possible that authors like Scoresby and Nansen strategically deployed the far-fetched stories to attract readers interested in the fantastic. This feels unlikely though. Whaling itself was exciting business, full of enthralling adventures (as Moby-Dick makes clear) — there would be no need to invent a town to capture the imagination of common readers. In any case, evidence indicates the earliest published sources relied on sailors’ tales; the myth was not simply the invention of profit-seeking scribes. A more generous interpretation, perhaps, is that historians projected their current situation onto the past. After the disbandment of the Noordsche Compagnie in 1642, the number of Dutch whaling ships rapidly increased from some 35 to 70 in 1654 and 148 ships by 1670. Unregulated free whaling burst open the industry and the Dutch continued to outpace competitors until the second half of the eighteenth century. The whale trade itself did not slow down until the twentieth century. By 1840 there were more than seven hundred whaling ships throughout the world. It is possible that authors like Scoresby failed to appreciate how much the industry had grown after Smeerenburg’s abandonment, concluding the settlement must have been crowded when land-based processing was practiced in the seventeenth century. Others may have wrongly assumed all Dutch colonial ports were similar. Coincidentally, the Dutch East India Company razed Jayakarta and founded Batavia in 1619, the same year permanent dwellings were built on Amsterdamøya. Authors like Zorgdrager and Scoresby, who compared the whaling station with the still-flourishing Batavia, might also have sought to glorify the Dutch Republic’s reach and riches by inflating the size and splendor of Smeerenburg. The sailors who spread stories about Blubber Town likely had a different objective. Throughout the years, whaling remained both tedious and dangerous. The shift to open-sea whaling meant most men did not step foot on land for months. Quarters aboard a typical ship were damp, crowded, and typically under five feet high. In such conditions, dreams of warm beds and quaint cottages would naturally fill even the most sober heads. Daily servings of barreled beef might conjure illusions of freshly baked bread. And the monotony of working with the same crew could inspire longings for gambling dens and dance halls to meet new people. The fantasy of a Blubber Town brothel requires no explanation. Especially for men tricked or coerced onto ships, as was not uncommonly the case, such an imaginary town enabled hopes of a getaway, particularly in the Arctic, where there was no place to flee. Stories about Smeerenburg might have been a foil that allowed later whalers to feel justified bemoaning their comparably harder lot. But ultimately, like many myths, Blubber Town was meant to entertain, to provide an escape for readers at sea and at home alike. Surrounded by steep mountains, glacier walls, and deep fjords, Smeerenburg is now a popular stop for Arctic cruises. In 1973 its ruins became part of Norway’s Nordvest-Spitsbergen national park. Visitors are warned against walruses and then invited to wonder at the brick foundations of the tryworks. They can gape at the so-called “blubber cement” that still outlines the place where enormous cooking vessels once stood. The result of mixed whale oil, sand, and gravel, the asphalt-like substance is the most tangible remnant of Blubber Town. Otherwise, the busy streets, warm bread, and welcoming women populating Smeerenburg must continue to exist in our collective imagination. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 10, 2019

Matthew H. Birkhold

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:06.042460

greenland-unicorns-and-the-magical-alicorn

Greenland Unicorns and the Magical Alicorn By Natalie Lawrence September 19, 2019 When the existence of unicorns, and the curative powers of the horns ascribed to them, began to be questioned, one Danish physician pushed back through curious means — by reframing the unicorn as an aquatic creature of the northern seas. Natalie Lawrence on a fascinating convergence of established folklore, nascent science, and pharmaceutical economy. Unicorns seem to be everywhere these days. It’s virtually impossible to walk down a high street or go into a gift shop without coming face to face with one of these rainbow-spangled creatures in some form or other. They have become a fashionable cultural icon of fantasy, escapism, and (somewhat paradoxically) individuality — a fact exploited to the full by manufacturers and marketing experts. All the same, most people today are well aware unicorns don’t exist. In the seventeenth century, the existence of the unicorn was a serious matter of contention. What was at stake was far more than the fantasy worlds of tweenage girls: this fantastical beast was the basis for a whole body of scholarly literature and a lucrative international market in pharmaceuticals (both recreational and medicinal). As Professor Bernd Roling shows in his 2014 essay “Der wal als schauobjekt”, one family in particular were responsible for the demise of the unicorn’s long-standing market value in Europe.1 Caspar Bartholin, his brother-in-law Ole Worm, and his son Thomas Bartholin were a trio of Scandinavian scholars and physicians who scrutinized the unicorn and its purported medicinal powers. Their work culminated in the publication of Thomas Bartholin’s De Unicornu Observationes Novae (New observations about the unicorn) in 1645 (second edition in 1678). Quite counter to Thomas’ intentions, this book precipitated the shunting of the unicorn from credible reality into myth. De Unicornu Observationes Novae dealt with “unicorns” in the broadest sense, examining all animals with a single horn. Thomas cast his net wide because he was attempting to undertake a very important task: to prove that simply having a single horn didn’t qualify something as a unicorn. He wanted to show that “real” unicorns did exist and that their horns were a key ingredient for many potent medicines. In doing so, though, he had to replace the traditional European image of unicorns as terrestrial antelopes or horses that inhabited exotic Eastern wilds by demonstrating that unicorns were actually aquatic creatures from the North. Why did Thomas Bartholin feel the need to make this point? Let’s first take a look at why unicorns were so important in early modern Europe. By the seventeenth century, they had a long history already: medieval scholars had assembled descriptions of “unicorns” by classical authors such as Ctesias, Aelian, Aristotle, and Pliny into a body of unicorn lore. These descriptions were of many and varied animals, from inelegant rhino-like beasts with a temper and a penchant for bullying elephants to strangely colourful antelope or fierce chimaeras. The Greek physician Ctesias, for example, recorded exotic travellers’ tales in his book Indica (ca. 810–893 AD), which contains perhaps the earliest surviving account of unicorns: There are in India certain wild asses which are as large as horses, and larger. Their bodies are white, their heads dark red, and their eyes dark blue. They have a horn on the forehead which is about a foot and a half in length.2 The horn, Ctesias added, was said to be white, red, and black, and offered protection against poison. Most other classical authors were probably also referring to animals they had seen or heard about from travellers (though some might have been rather more creative with their material). What unified accounts of these varied “unicorns” was the idea that they were beasts of great power with a single horn on their heads. The image of the unicorn was transfigured throughout the Middle Ages — by the sixth-century scholar Isidore of Seville, among others — into a wild, one-horned horse that could be killed by hunters only if it was first lured in and tamed by a virgin. Stories of this kind were recorded in bestiaries and collections of lore such as the Physiologus, which was added to, translated, and reproduced over many centuries. Some versions of the Physiologus included tales of unicorns dipping their horns into water that had been poisoned by serpents, in order to purify it. This fabulous horse, his magical abilities, and his maiden temptress were enshrined in the sequence of seven unicorn tapestries thought to have been made at the turn of the sixteenth century (now on permanent display at the Met Cloisters in New York). By the early modern era, the unicorn had become a Christian symbol. The image of the beast slain by hunters was associated with Christ’s sacrifice and his noble submission to a virgin had come to represent the Virgin Mary’s chaste power. Such exotic and sacred associations helped gain unicorn horn or “alicorn” a reputation as a panacea in Europe. Nobles had long had tableware supposedly made of alicorn to avoid being bumped off by poison in their food and drink. Powder made from the horn was similarly believed to cure a case of poisoning. Alicorn was also considered a powerful aphrodisiac and an effective treatment for all sorts of ailments, from fever to the aches of old age. In the decades before Thomas Bartholin published De Unicornu Observationes Novae, there was still a roaring trade in powdered “unicorn horn” bolstered by classical texts and biblical imagery, as well as by more recent scholarly works singing the praises and potencies of the horn. Apothecaries in some areas displayed unicorn images or actual specimens of horns to signal that they had access to these costly and potent substances. The spiralling tusks of narwhals, identified by dealers, collectors, and scholars as alicorns, were prized possessions in many cabinets of wonder around early modern Europe. The powdered horn, sold at a premium by apothecaries, was usually made from narwhal tusk, traded to Europe through Scandinavia, which profited greatly from the trade. The horn could also have other sources, including elephant or walrus tusk. Some experts could tell ivories apart: one apothecary argued that narwhal “Horn . . . may be distinguished from [elephant] Ivory by the threads or fibres which are more subtle” and in being “more solid and more heavy”.3 Chopped up into chunks, or ground down completely, however, few people except the hunters and dealers knew where the horns really came from. This confusion was occasionally lamented by writers and apothecaries. The well-travelled French doctor Pierre Martin de La Martinière (1634–1690), for example, commented upon the difficulty of knowing “the right Unicorn . . . there being several Animals the Greeks call Monoceros, and the Latines Uni-Cornis”, ranging from myriad terrestrial quadrupeds and “serpents”, to “fish” such as the “sea elephant”.4 People weren’t entirely lacking in scepticism, though. Many had their suspicions regarding the reality of the unicorn and the power of the horn. The French physician Ambroise Paré’s Des monstres et prodiges (1585) contained a “Discourse on the Unicorn” discussing his doubts. Europeans’ explorations in the Arctic throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries revealed that the narwhal, a strange spear-headed fish which was previously unknown in European scholarship, was the source of some of these “unicorn” horns. After the first formal European description of the narwhal was produced by William Baffin in the late sixteenth century, the medicinal value of alicorn started to be called into question. Many kinds of horn-like products were thought to contain magical properties — some texts claimed that walrus tusk was even more powerful than alicorn. Such comparisons further threatened the elevated status of alicorn as questions about its origins tarnished its allure. Scholars in Southern Europe began to question whether “unicorn horn” was really all it had been cracked up to be. Enter the Bartholins. Beginning in 1613, Thomas’ father, Caspar Bartholin the Elder, was the professor of medicine at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Before taking this post, he had travelled extensively through the Netherlands, England, France, and Germany — which was relatively unusual at that time. On his travels, he visited some of Europe’s most illustrious Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonders. Examining the unicorn horns present in these collections, he concluded they could not be antelope- or horse-derived appendages. They must be marine. Coming from Denmark, Caspar was far too familiar with the narwhal not to have noticed the similarity between their horns and alicorns, but he avoided making a direct link between them. It wasn’t until 1636 that Caspar’s brother-in-law, the prolific antiquary and collector Ole Worm, affirmed that narwhals were indeed the source of alicorn. By systematically comparing the skeletons of narwhals with the twisted ivory horns sold as unicorn horns in Europe, he proved they were one and the same: alicorns could only be the bizarre, single emergent teeth of the marine animals. Ole’s conclusion created all sorts of problems. What had the classical authors been describing? Did terrestrial unicorns exist? Was alicorn actually medically potent? Thomas Bartholin, who was a physician by training, stepped in to resolve the quandaries left by his father and uncle’s investigations. He also managed to execute some clever marketing and public relations for Denmark’s fishing industry. His work bridged the traditional scholarly penchant for prioritising the authority of ancient texts with the growing trend of using experiment and direct observation. He synthesised Caspar and Ole’s conclusions in De Unicornu Observationes Novae, reaffirming that alicorns were the tusks of narwhals while continuing to insist on their medicinal potency. In a sense it was a rebranding exercise: the humble narwhal, its magical properties affirmed, now reimagined as the “Greenland Unicorn”. Written in Latin, Bartholin’s book laboriously analysed all of the known horned creatures, from rhinos to rhinoceros beetles, hornbills to horned vipers. Bartholin even touched on a few man-made horn objects, such as the “Horn of Gallehus”, a piece of fifth-century craftsmanship made of pure gold, found in Denmark in 1639. (All of these creatures and objects were elaborately illustrated, with full fold-out images in the later 1678 edition produced by Thomas’ son, who was, like his grandfather, called Caspar.) Given that the usual classical authorities were focused on the land-based versions of the mythical beast, Bartholin called upon some very different ancient sources to give his work gravitas. He used Old Norse texts such as the Konungs skuggsjá (King’s Mirror) — a text written in 1250 for the education of a young Norwegian prince — to demonstrate that the Norsemen were well aware of the nature of these horns and had known of their great power as they traded in them. Invoking the wisdom of such an old text was a powerful argument in a world where tradition and ancient knowledge were put on a pedestal. In addition to scouring the written record, Thomas also conducted a series of experiments in the hope of confirming the efficacy of narwhal/unicorn horn for curing ailments. Roling mentions that Thomas “even thought he was able to halt a fever epidemic in Copenhagen with unicorn rubs”.5 Using such hard observational evidence to prove that alicorn really was a powerful medicine, he quelled the growing arguments to the contrary. Finally, Thomas was willing to concede that the terrestrial unicorns mentioned in ancient texts must have real-life counterparts in exotic locales; but the medicinal, potent, and valuable alicorn? Well, that could only be procured from the Arctic marine mammals. And only from Iceland. Thomas Bartholin’s reimagining of the narwhal as the “sea unicorn” was an important marketing gimmick. It protected the value of a medicine that the Bartholins, as physicians, could continue to administer at great cost to their patients. At the same time, it protected the valuable Scandinavian trade in narwhal horns, which was important to the Danish economy. The 1678 publication of an elaborately illustrated edition of De Unicornu by Thomas’ son, Caspar, helped to maintain the sea unicorn’s image in the public eye, and for decades after, Thomas’ ideas continued to have a place in scholarly discussions of alicorn. This shift from terrestrial horse to sea beast is one of the many changes the meaning of “unicorn” has undergone over time. For a short while in the seventeenth century, the “Greenland Unicorn” — a strange northern sea creature that few Europeans had seen — displaced their obscure hoofed cousins in Asia as the source of the wonderful, spiralling tusks valued by collectors and physicians. Thomas Bartholin’s sleight of hand maintained popular faith in the potency of alicorn until the early eighteenth century, when pharmacists became disenchanted. More reliable experiments proved the powder was not all that useful for curing disease or protecting against poison. In his Systema Naturae (1735), the most prominent taxonomist in history, Carl Linnaeus, would reject the “Greenland Unicorn” once and for all (though the narwhal’s scientific name remains Unicornu groenlandicus). Still, there was a time when unicorns existed both in the sea and on the land, before the medicinal magic of their horns was dispelled and they retreated to the world of pure fable. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 19, 2019

Natalie Lawrence

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:06.743089

picturing-a-voice-margaret-watts-hughes-and-the-eidophone

Picturing a Voice Margaret Watts Hughes and the Eidophone By Rob Mullender-Ross November 27, 2019 Of the various forms the nascent art of sound recording took in the late nineteenth century perhaps none was so aesthetically alluring as that invented by Margaret Watts Hughes. Rob Mullender-Ross explores the significance of the Welsh singer’s ingenious set of images, which until recently were thought to be lost. Recorded sound began as much a visual and textual concern as an auditory one. From its inception the phenomenon necessarily relied upon the act — via the medium of a vibrating surface — of converting sound waves into physical motion, and a subsequent act of inscription. Probably the earliest practical example of such a recording apparatus was Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s Phonautograph. Patented in 1857, it consisted of a mechanism of vibrating diaphragm, lever, and a hog’s bristle which scratched sound into soot-coated paper or glass. Scott de Martinville conceived the marks produced as a form of “auto-stenography”, where the inflections and intonations of an individual’s speech might be read by anyone with the required patience to learn this new form of “script”. This new-found visibility of sound fuelled much debate between artists, musicians, scientists, and even lawyers about what precisely these scratches and squiggles constituted. Were they a kind of writing, an expository method of display and measurement, or a mutable and plastic material — a site of aesthetic transformation and potential production? Audio-visual correspondences as aesthetic concerns — often suffused with occult or spiritualist sensibilities — grew to become well established in the more esoteric visual and musical practices of the late nineteenth century. Even Alexander Graham Bell felt the seductive promise of a commingling of the auditory and the visual when, on having successfully demonstrated a new communication device he called the Photophone, he exclaimed to his father: I have heard articulate speech produced by sunlight! I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing!. . . I have been able to hear a shadow, and I have even perceived by ear the passage of the cloud across the sun’s disk!1 Bell had heard a signal (light) that had never previously existed within the auditory realm; already the provenance of sound was undermined. This ingenious device consisted of a mouthpiece attached to a chamber capped with a thin mirror. When spoken into, the mirror would vibrate, thereby modulating a beam of sunlight — effectively encoding it with the sound. This vibrating light beam was then picked up and turned back into sound by a mirrored parabolic receiver some distance away. As Steven Connor (after Friedrich Kittler) has noted, the communications landscape of the late nineteenth century was characterised by “a kind of conversion mania, as inventors and engineers sought more and more ways in which different kinds of energy and sensory form could be translated into each other.”2 The Welsh popular singer and philanthropist Margaret (Megan) Watts Hughes entered this discourse with a device almost identical in most respects to the transmitter of Bell’s Photophone — one which similarly combined the auditory with optical phenomena. Her “Eidophone”, which she had conceived of and produced in order to measure the power of her voice, consisted of a mouthpiece leading to a receiving chamber, over which was stretched a rubber membrane, or diaphragm. Her experiments with this device involved sprinkling a variety of powders onto its surface, then singing into it to see how far these powders would leap. This activity would soon take an unexpected turn: I had been working on this path until May, 1885, when on one occasion as I sang I noticed that the seeds which I had placed on the India rubber membrane, on becoming quiescent, instead of scattering promiscuously in all directions and falling over the edge of the receiver onto the table, as was customary when a rather loud note was sung, resolved themselves into a perfect geometrical figure.3 Illustrations of these phenomena — which she termed Voice Figures — can be found in her first publication, an article in the Century from 1891. Arranged in order of increasing complexity, the figures display a clear hierarchy of forms, from the simple “primitive” and geometrical, to more complex figures that look more like floral shapes. Here, we can detect the beginnings of Watts Hughes’ passion for the project; what began as a technique for measuring an aspect of vocal prowess becomes an exploration of visual forms created through the resonant interaction of voice, instrument, and materials. From Watts Hughes’ writing, we know that she went on to experiment with placing various consistencies of pastes and liquids on the instrument as a way of introducing binding mediums to “fix” the figures she made, resulting in a series of figures that both resembled and were named after flowers. These images were produced by placing the Eidophone’s diaphragm face up: the figure would then be sung into existence, and the glass plate then placed on top to capture it. An 1890 article in the Pall Mall Gazette contains both an interview with Watts Hughes and a valuable description of this part of her practice. For example, when a “daisy” is to be created, the substance placed on the disc [i.e., the diaphragm] creeps together at the centre of the membrane at the command of the first note, which is obeyed as unhesitatingly as the bugle horn in a soldiers’ camp. Another note follows of a different calibre, and out from the centre all around shoot small petals shaped exactly like those of the daisy. But perhaps the note has not been quite so full as it should have been, and the petals not as symmetrical as they ought to be. Then comes one of the most marvellous parts of the process, for once more the voice commands, and immediately they rush back and amalgamate once again at the centre, to reappear at the next note, smoothly and shapely.4 While Watts Hughes’ own writing about the process tends to be from a traditional musical perspective (depicting the “dry”, static voice figures derived through different pitches above a musical stave, for example), in the above account we get a distinct sense of the power and textures of her voice, and of the timbres she may have employed — although the reference to the bugle may also have been a nod to the Eidophone’s unusual appearance. Her vocal training is further detectable in a group of works she called Impression Figures, which are by far the most visually and symbolically rich of the figures she produced. These were made by first coating a glass plate and the diaphragm of a “hand Eidophone” with pigment, then passing the diaphragm of the Eidophone over the plate’s surface while singing a note into its mouthpiece: The plate and disc [i.e. diaphragm] being both coated as before, the plate is laid upon the table, the wet colour side uppermost. The disc is now reversed, set vibrating, and, while vibrating is moved along the surface of the wet plate. As it glides over the moist surface, while a steady note is sustained, it leaves behind it a register of every vibration, recorded with the strictest accuracy.5 These figures fall into roughly two categories. The first might be described as “acoustically motivated”, since as a group they depict discrete pitches (often annotated with musical notes), are all fairly small, and are a uniform blue in colour. These blue figures appear to show a single gesture of instrument and voice, with striations sweeping across the surface of the plate, before terminating in a denser area of pigment where the passage of the Eidophone slows, and then is lifted from the surface at the end of its journey. Several contain two or even three figures of different pitches for comparative purposes, the overall impression being that these plates represent a period of scientifically inspired research. The largest of the Impression Figures, however, are the most startling images, and are clearly directed toward a completely different purpose. Rather than recording only pitches (although many of these images do contain elements of pitch-derived patterns), these images consist of complex reticulations and textures which are smeared and manipulated across the plate in a simulation of plant-like shapes. Close examination of these larger plates reveals a variety of elements in abundance. Spatters and unexpected ruptures burst from the edge of the vibrating diaphragm, some of which emerge seamlessly and carry the same frequency of pattern before terminating in a darker patch of higher pigment density; a profusion of serpentine emissions emerging from the central figure body — visually (although perhaps not mathematically) prescient of fractal graphical production. Watts Hughes discusses having made different sizes of Eidophone, and that “by varying the sizes of the discs, it is possible to find one to suit the lung capacity of every voice . . . ranging from one inch to thirty-seven inches in circumference”,6 making the smallest diaphragm around 8 mm in diameter. However, the size of these smaller details (as little as 2 mm across in places) marks them as perhaps originating not from a gesture of the hand and voice with a specific Eidphone. Rather, it suggests an effect structural to the physics at play, whereby free-flowing drops or liquids adopt the vibrating frequency of the diaphragm as it sweeps across the pigment. Alternatively, a bulge in the diaphragm on the smallest of the Eidophones may have been effected by means of air pressure, meaning that each of these details represents a manual/vocal gesture. This presents the intriguing possibility that these plates might constitute an aggregated and spatially arranged chorus of voices. Elsewhere in these images, Moiré-like patterns are sung into the pigment (these she named “cross-vibration figures“”), suggestive of the presence of overtones in her voice. In a letter to the editor of the Spectator in 1889, the novelist Emilie Barrington writes enthusiastically of a visit she paid to Watts Hughes at the orphanage she ran in Islington, in North London. As an “ear-witness” account of the production of Impression Figures, it is as valuable as the Pall Mall article discussed above — but just as fascinating is the breathless description of the way that these works are displayed: Instead of blinds or curtains drawn across the lower panes of the windows, there are wonderful designs in colour; strange, beautiful things — suggesting objects in Nature, but which are certainly neither exact repetitions nor imitations of anything in Nature.7 Barrington’s response is to something she describes as possessing a “touch of fairy land”, and that the Impression Figures are more like, perhaps, what a dream might make out of the impressions left by Nature, perfectly drawn designs of shell-like forms, photographically precise renderings of shapes of which the exact originals were never seen by human eye on sea or land; such things as “Alice in Wonderland” might have come upon, had she tumbled down to the bottom of the sea.8 The positioning of these works in the windows of an orphanage could suggest that their purpose was more than simply decorative. Perhaps in direct reference to the windows of the Congregationalist Bethania chapel at Dowlais which Watts Hughes considered her second home, and perhaps in consonance with what Verity Hunt describes as the era’s privileging of “magical wonder” and enchantment in educational pursuits through optics and domestic display, these works were employed to perform the function of “illumination” in more than one sense of the word.9 Being aesthetically atypical (or perhaps unique) for the time, and born of the voice rather than hand, these figures strongly suggest that we read them as working within a spiritual/symbolic domain — even bordering on the divinatory when considered with their creator’s beliefs in mind. After all, Watts Hughes desired that her experiments might aid “by some slight degree, the revelation of yet another link in the great chain of the organised universe that, we are told in Holy Writ, took its shape in the voice of God.”10 Nature, and by implication God’s voice, had found its way into the acoustic sphere by way of the visual. Early attempts at capturing “natural” sound could be crudely summarised as a history of speaking loudly and steadily into apertures and tubes, with perhaps the odd song to lighten the mood. However, these acts of capture were rarely understood as creative in and of themselves. The aesthetic “object” was almost always understood to be the qualities of the performed voice or instrument, as distinct from the transformative act of recording. Discussions of such media usually revolve around the concept of “fidelity”, of “original” compared to “copy”, but in the work of Watts Hughes we see a different kind of sound recording at play. Her capture of sound into shape never sees the final conversion back into sound that characterises more common modes of recording. There is no final playback, no “loss of fidelity” or “loss of being between original and copy”, as Jonathan Sterne writes of early sound media.11 There is, rather (due to the one-way migration of medium), a creation of something in its own right, a transformation rooted in a profound belief in the generative, incantatory power of the voice as an ineluctably spiritual phenomenon. Given their beauty and their richness of form and intention, it could be said that Margaret Watts Hughes’ extraordinary works are, despite being silent, possessed of a surfeit of being. Her Voice Figures may not sit comfortably within any of the disciplines of her day, but they nonetheless gesture toward, amongst many other things, practices that only evolved much later in sound and arts, which understand the recording process to be a transformational creative act in and of itself, rather than merely an act of “sound capture”. As such they deserve to be much more widely known. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 27, 2019

Rob Mullender-Ross

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:07.121310

flower-power-hamiltons-doctor-and-the-healing-power-of-nature

Flower Power Hamilton’s Doctor and the Healing Power of Nature By Rebecca Rego Barry January 24, 2019 Rebecca Rego Barry on David Hosack, the doctor who attended Alexander Hamilton to his duel (and death), and creator of one of the first botanical gardens in the United States, home to thousands of species which he used for his pioneering medical research. IIn 1797, fifteen-year-old Philip Hamilton was burning up with an ordinary, unidentified childhood disease of the time, such as typhus or scarlatina, and appeared to be mere hours from death. The attending family physician, David Hosack, who mostly rejected customary treatments like bloodletting and doses of mercury, took a risk and immersed the boy in a steaming bath with Peruvian bark stripped from the cinchona tree dissolved in it. Peruvian bark was a remedy widely used for malaria, although doctors of the time were unsure why or how it worked (it was the quinine). Hosack then added alcohol to the bathwater and employed smelling salts before swaddling the boy in blankets and putting him back in bed. He repeated this again and again until the fever broke. Philip’s recovery surprised even Hosack, and the boy’s father, Alexander Hamilton, was ever grateful. Just seven years later Hosack would treat the elder Hamilton, with less success. Hamilton had asked Hosack to accompany him to Weehawken, New Jersey, where, as we can all now recount — or perhaps even sing — Hamilton was fatally shot by Aaron Burr. In the megahit Broadway show Hamilton, Hosack goes unnamed. He is referred to as a “doctor that [Hamilton] knew”, and a song about the rules of dueling includes a lyric about the attending doctor who “turned around so he could have deniability”.1 For a country in the grip of Hamilton-mania, perhaps it is this connection to the fêted founding father that has rekindled interest in Hosack, a politically neutral but socially well-connected professor and physician who lived mainly in New York City from 1769–1835. That, and a 2018 biography called American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic (Norton) by Victoria Johnson, the first biography of him since 1964. Hosack (pronounced Hozz-ick) is not a household name, and, until now, has been “largely forgotten”,2 according to the scholar Elizabeth Rohn Jeffe. This opportunity to take a fresh look at such a noteworthy figure reveals much about early American medicine, particularly Hosack’s mission to “unlock the saving power of nature”, as Johnson puts it, through the scientific study of botany and the cultivation and use of plant-based medicines.3 Hosack grew up in British-occupied New York. His father was a Scottish immigrant, and his mother a New Yorker with English and French ancestry. As a child he was sent away to school in New Jersey, and from there enrolled at Kings College (now Columbia University) in Manhattan. In 1788, he apprenticed himself to Dr Richard Bayley, at just the right historical moment to witness the Doctors’ Riot, a public revolt against Bayley and his staff who were accused of exhuming, stealing, and dissecting cadavers. Hosack, a proponent of anatomical dissection, was physically attacked in the scuffle, and at least a few died. From there, Hosack made his way to Philadelphia where he earned a medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania under the famous Benjamin Rush, with whom he would remain lifelong friends, even when they disagreed on curatives. (By many accounts, Rush was “addicted to the virtues of bloodletting”.4) Although Hosack was newly married with an infant son, he decided his next step was a two-year solo trip to Edinburgh and London, where he could continue his medical training. Why did he need further training, and why in Britain so soon after the Revolutionary War? As John C. Greene writes in the Journal of American History: “[P]roud though the Americans were to be independent of Europe for medical instruction, they realized that a medical degree from Philadelphia, Boston, or New York was not the equivalent of training at Edinburgh, London, or Paris.”5 If Hosack wanted to compete with the likes of Rush, Samuel Bard, or John Warren, the leading figures of American medicine, he had to study abroad, as they had. What he found there startled and inspired him. In Edinburgh, he was “mortified by [his] ignorance of botany with which other guests were conversant.”6 He contemplated the fact that though many of the known medicines were derived from roots, leaves, and petals — e.g., infusions from the leaves of menyanthes to soothe herpes sores, or a cough syrup made from arborvitae tree resin — his medical training thus far had not prepared him in the area we might now call botanical pharmacology. In medicine, as in science as a whole, America was still in the process of catching up with its European counterparts, still relying on them “for inspiration and ideas, for models of scientific achievement . . . for books and instruments, and for museums and herbaria.”7 Hosack pondered the contribution America could make in terms of undiscovered species and yet-to-be-discovered medications. In London, Hosack met William Curtis and spent much of 1793 botanizing under his tutelage at the Brompton Botanic Garden. Curtis, a former apothecary, author of Flora Londinensis, and founding editor of the Botanical Magazine (which is still in circulation), tended the 3.5-acre garden in the manner of a medicinal garden attached to a medieval monastery. He was particularly interested in how plants of the same order had overlapping medicinal properties and in identifying new species with greater therapeutic value. According to biographer Victoria Johnson, Hosack’s time with Curtis prompted him to question whether “plants or lancets” were the better approach to illness.8 But Hosack’s proverbial walk in the park finally came to an end, and he returned to New York — on a ship plagued by typhus — in 1794 to set up his practice. His wife awaited him, but their son had died during his absence. Nevertheless, as a newly minted fellow of the Linnean Society, he immediately began advocating for botanical education. As Johnson writes, he realized “what the nation needed . . . was a new kind of garden — a botany classroom, chemical laboratory, apothecary shop, plant nursery, horticulture school, and lovely landscape all rolled into one.”9 His first salvo was a request for citizen scientists to compile New York state’s first hortus siccus, or dry garden (herbarium), and begin the process of cataloguing native plants for research and experimentation. This idea didn’t get far, and Hosack was understandably too busy to follow up. Within a year, he became professor of botany at Columbia, performed the first hydrocele operation in the United States, and ministered to the sick and dying during the 1795 yellow fever outbreak in New York City. Like Philadelphia in 1793 and 1794, New York in the summertime was prone to the deadly epidemic, of which very little was understood by contemporary physicians. As bodies piled up, doctors scrambled to ascertain best practices. Benjamin Rush, who had tended to victims in Philadelphia, encouraged venesection and doses of mercury. Hosack, on the other hand, having tried Rush’s remedies, preferred the gentler treatments that he had earlier used on Philip Hamilton and on Nathaniel Pendleton’s one-week-old infant. He washed sufferers with vinegar, wrapped them tightly, and had them drink tamarind water (from the tamarind tree) and diluted Virginia snakeroot to induce sweating. Hosack’s biographers agree that it wasn’t so much what Hosack did that saved his patients, as what he did not do — further weaken them with purging or bleeding. As Hosack himself wrote, I have generally pursued the sudorific treatment during every visitation of yellow fever since 1794. With due respect for the opinions and views of other practitioners, I am no less convinced of the injurious consequences to be apprehended from the indiscriminate use of the lancet and mercury in this epidemic form of fever.10 Hosack’s pregnant wife survived the scourge only to die in childbirth in early 1796 (prompting him to found the city’s Lying-In Hospital for expectant mothers). In yet another busy year, Hosack was nominated to teach materia medica (early pharmacology), as well as botany, at Columbia. He was also invited to join the practice of the renowned Dr Samuel Bard, who, it seems, also preferred less invasive medicine; when Hosack and Bard both contracted yellow fever in 1798, they healed themselves with infusions of boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum), followed by teas made from catmint, sage, and snakeroot. Whether it was the deaths of his own children — a third child died of scarlet fever in 1801 — or his success at saving the lives of others, or the encouragement of Bard, at the turn of the new century, Hosack refused to waste more time without a garden that could produce the botanicals he believed the nation needed. He sought help from Columbia, to no avail, and then lobbied state officials, saying, “We spend large sums upon appropriations for teaching chemistry and medical philosophy — shall we be insensitive to the means of preserving health and curing diseases?”11 Finally, in 1801, he took matters into his own hands. On September 1 of that year, Hosack purchased a 20-acre plot in what one biographer described as a “suburb, three and half miles from the populous center of New York City.”12 To describe it now, two words would suffice: Rockefeller Center. At the time, it was almost rural in appearance, with rock outcroppings, wild violets, and sweeping views of both rivers. He named it the Elgin Botanical Garden and immediately set to work plowing fields, harvesting indigenous flora, and collecting specimens from around the world. He hired laborers and gardeners and pushed forward with his plan to create the first botanic garden in the United States. The phrase “botanic garden” may, for twenty-first-century readers, call to mind a primrose path. Not so, writes Victoria Johnson: “[T]he Elgin Botanic Garden had less in common with a beautiful city park than with the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and CRISPR gene-editing laboratories.”13 Indeed, by 1806 when Hosack issued his first Catalogue of Plants Contained in the Botanic Garden at Elgin, he had amassed 1,400 exotic species and 250 natives, and he used those collections “to conduct and supervise some of the earliest systematic research in the United States on the chemical properties of medicinal plants”, according to Johnson.14 He was experimenting with known remedies, e.g., mashed fig poultices to relieve infected flesh and sweet bay laurel tree oil to stimulate circulation, and researching the possibility for new ones with plants that grew in abundance nearby, like unicorn root and skullcap for bowel trouble and elderberries to make cough syrup. One of the garden’s least publicized advantages was the creation of a local supply of plants for medical use, which would become important after the passage of the Embargo Act that lead to the War of 1812. Hosack’s 1811 catalogue, titled Hortus Elginensis, included 2,000 species, and it records the garden at its high point. After many negotiations, the New York state legislature had finally voted to buy Elgin in 1810, handing its management over to the College of Physicians & Surgeons, a medical school that Hosack had been affiliated with, off and on. (Elgin was later regifted to Columbia.) At first, the handover was a relief to Hosack, who had been shouldering the financial burden for a decade, but within a few years, it became clear that the lack of institutional caretaking, coupled with the need for major geographic re-mapping as the city expanded, would be the death of Elgin. The seeds that Thomas Jefferson contributed in 1816 were too little, too late. The zeal that Hosack showed for Elgin exasperated less forward-thinking colleagues, too. To them, a garden seemed “frivolous . . . severed from the bloody mess of clinical practice”, writes Johnson.15 Which is an arguable point, even if one considers the amount of botanical research conducted, or the fact that Hosack cultivated the garden while maintaining his position as one of the city’s top doctors — whose ligation of a femoral artery was the first documented in the United States. But it seems Hosack was considered “a little queer”, at least according to Scientific Monthly in 1929.16 A maverick, in today’s parlance, or, simply ahead of his time. Hosack spent his later years with his third wife and their combined large family creating a new Elgin of sorts at his 500-acre estate in Hyde Park, New York. He retired from medicine in 1834 and died a year later. His legacy in botany was borne out in his grandchildren’s generation, when botanic gardens bloomed all over the United States. As his biographer concludes, “He had done more than any other citizen of the United States to call into being a generation of professional botanists where there had been almost no one.”17 Today’s pharmacology and pharmaceuticals may be a world away from sneezewort yarrow powders and horehound syrups, but Hosack’s advice to get back to nature still resonates. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 24, 2019

Rebecca Rego Barr

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:08.129588

music-of-the-squares-david-ramsay-hay-and-the-reinvention-of-pythagorean-aesthetics

Music of the Squares David Ramsay Hay and the Reinvention of Pythagorean Aesthetics By Carmel Raz May 16, 2019 Understanding the same laws to apply to both visual and aural beauty, David Ramsay Hay thought it possible not only to analyse such visual wonders as the Parthenon in terms of music theory, but also to identify their corresponding musical harmonies and melodies. Carmel Raz on the Scottish artist’s original, idiosyncratic, and occasionally bewildering aesthetics. “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” So wrote the Victorian art critic Walter Pater in 1888. Earlier in the century, Scottish artist David Ramsay Hay composed a series of fifteen books published between 1828 and 1856 that attempted to develop a theory of visual beauty from the basic elements of music theory. Anticipating Pater but also fin-de-siècle attempts to unite the arts via spiritual or synesthetic affinities, Hay’s writings mapped colors, shapes, and angles onto familiar musical constructs such as pitches, scales, and chords. While these ideas might appear highly eccentric today, an understanding of them offers a glimpse of the remarkable importance of music to the Victorian Zeitgeist. In spite of the unabashedly speculative nature of his theories, Hay’s claim to have understood the psychology of beauty profoundly shaped mid-nineteenth-century notions of aesthetics, an influence amplified through his professional activities as a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and as the official interior designer to Queen Victoria. His books were reissued in multiple editions and translated into both German and French, and they gained traction with leading scientists of the time, including Adolf Zeising, John Addington Symonds, and Thomas Laycock. And yet, his ideas remained complex and idiosyncratic. Hay’s approach to visual aesthetics was equally applicable to architecture, color theory, the ornamental arts, and the human face and figure. It can be understood as a psychological account of beauty, as opposed to other contemporary theories that anchored beauty in notions of the picturesque, the mimetic, or the sublime. Though analogies between music and the fine arts certainly do not originate with Hay, his application of music theory to an extensive array of visual experiences including color, shapes, figures, and architecture broke new ground. Rather than locating musical properties in the objects themselves, as earlier thinkers ranging from Plato to Newton had done, Hay worked in the post-Kantian tradition, regarding these features as immanent to our own minds, where they create our experience of beauty by determining the very structure of our perceptions. Hay defined his project as the development of a science of aesthetics based upon what he called the “great harmonic law of nature which pervades and governs the universe”.1 He wrote that there appears to be implanted in the human mind a governing principle of harmony of a mathematical nature, responsive to impressions made upon the organs of sense by certain combinations, motions, and affinities in the elements of matter.2 The fact that we derive pleasure from hearing certain concordant intervals, that derive from what is known as the overtone series, for Hay demonstrates that nature and humanity are governed by the same principles.3 He takes this further: the physiological affinity between seeing and hearing means that these laws extend not only into music but into the visual world too.4 After all, he observes, “the eye and the ear are various in their modes of receiving impressions; yet the sensorium is but one, and the mind by which these impressions are perceived and appreciated is also characterised by unity.”5 Since both sight and hearing are processed by the mind, they should be governed by similar principles. Throughout his writings, Hay consistently links the claim that a single fundamental law of nature determines aesthetic perception to the work of the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras. “From the teachings of this great philosopher and his disciples,” Hay writes, the harmonic law of nature, in which the fundamental principles of beauty are embodied, became so generally understood and universally applied in practice throughout all Greece, that the fragments of their works are still held to be examples of the highest artistic excellence ever attained by mankind.6 Hay ascribes the superiority of ancient Greek artists to their reliance on the Pythagorean system of harmonic numbers, regardless of whether they were designing a building or a vase. And since, Hay argues, the Greeks’ artistic brilliance was the fruit of a psychological phenomenon,7 it should be possible to combine Pythagorean tenets with an empirical investigation of beauty. Or so he fervently believed. Hay’s work contains relatively naïve comparisons of various musical concepts (such as scale degrees, chord inversion, and melody) to diverse visual forms (such as geometrical shapes, angles, and color combinations). For example, in The Natural Principles and Analogy of the Harmony of Form (1842), he constructs an analogy between the circle, triangle, and square, and the tonic, mediant, and dominant (the first, third and fifth notes of the scale, which, when played together with the upper octave of the first note, form the most basic kind of chord, the so-called triad). The three geometrical shapes, Hay argues, analogously comprise the fundamental triad of visual beauty. This is all depicted graphically in Hay’s diagram, which incorporates three smaller figures. In the first of these, at the top of the diagram, the musical triad (with its lowest note, the tonic, C, replicating an octave higher) is matched to a compound figure comprising a number of shapes: a large circle (representing the tonic, the low C), a much smaller triangle centered within that circle (representing the chord’s next note up, the mediant, E), a still smaller square (the dominant, G), and finally, within that square, a second, much smaller circle, representing the upper-octave replication of the tonic, C. Here, the relative sizes of the shapes are determined by the relative pitch heights of the notes they represent: lower notes get larger shapes. The next two figures within the diagram show the two “inversions” of the musical triad: here, the mediant (E) and then the dominant (G) become the lowest sounding note (instead of the tonic note). The geometrical shapes that represent those notes (first a triangle for E, then a square for G) then undergo an analogous “inversion” in space, as their relative positions and sizes change to reflect the changes in the relative pitch heights of the notes. This use of basic shapes allowed Hay to analyze complex architectural structures in a new way — by breaking them down into their simplest constituent parts. When these basic elements are superimposed onto each other, they form a harmony, and when they are arranged in a series, they form a melody. The resulting harmonies or melodies can then be evaluated according to the simplicity and regularity of their proportions: the more beautiful an object, the more harmonious it will be. To this end Hay identifies the “most perfectly harmonious production in architecture that exists”: the Parthenon of the Athenian Acropolis.8 The animation below shows Hay’s diagram of the “melody” of the portico of the Parthenon, sat on the hill, which Hay transcribes as the first, third, and fifth note of a scale. Hay’s more mature work applied music theory to angles rather than shapes, contours, or colors. In The Science of Beauty, as Developed in Nature and Applied in Art (1856), he begins with a discussion of Pythagorean numerology, which he uses to generate a series of four scales. The proportional relationships involved in these scales map onto the “just intonation” scales, from which Hay derives a categorization of various kinds of angles. These relationships, he claims, are the “simple elements of the science of that harmony which pervades the universe, and by which the various kinds of beauty aesthetically impressed upon the senses of hearing and seeing are governed.”9 That is to say, Hay attributes the subjective sensation of aesthetic beauty to the effect of certain simple proportions on the senses of hearing and seeing. He then aligns this with a broader notion of cosmic harmony. This vast systemization reaches new heights when Hay revisits the Parthenon and offers a fresh analysis. Given that all of the angles of this edifice can be described as divisions of a 90° angle (using the simple factors of 2, 3, 5, 7, and 9 that correspond to 45°, 30°, 18°, 12.85°, and 10°), he maintains that the specific proportions of their angles can be compared to the proportions of the musical scale: the elementary triad of tonic (first in the scale), dominant (fifth) and mediant (third) angles, alongside the subtonic (seventh) and supertonic (second) angles. That is to say, the edifice (as a visual form) and the scale (as a musical construct) are understood as analogous assemblages of harmonious proportions. Hay then seeks to prove his theorem through the analysis of Greek vases, column ornaments, color arrangements, and idealized faces and figures. His central conclusion is that nine of the angles governing the portico of the Parthenon also define the angles of the ideal female figure. Tallying measurements of ancient Greek sculptures with the empirical dimensions of six female models employed by the Scottish Academy of the Arts, Hay contends that his results confirm Vitruvius’s assertions that ancient Greek architecture was modeled on the proportions of the human body. Here the “male gaze” extends from women’s bodies to ancient buildings; both are judged by the very same criteria. Hay’s attempt to articulate abstract properties of visual aesthetics by using the language of music is not always convincing. Even once his claims are grasped — a tall order even for those initiated into the ways and whiles of music theory — they often appear both bizarre and speculative. All the same there is something highly appealing in his ideas, something alluring in using music theory to open up new ways of approaching visual forms. The metaphor often attributed to Schelling, that architecture is music frozen in time, can be refracted against Hay’s project: to gaze upon beauty — whether in the form of a building, a vase, a color combination, or the human physique — was, for Hay, to experience the geometrically ordered music of the spheres. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 16, 2019

Carmel Raz

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:08.661165

get-thee-to-a-phalanstery-or-how-fourier-can-still-teach-us-to-make-lemonade

Get Thee to a Phalanstery or, How Fourier Can Still Teach Us to Make Lemonade By Dominic Pettman May 1, 2019 Hot on the heels of the French Revolution — by way of extravagant orgies, obscure taxonomies, and lemonade seas — Charles Fourier offered up his blueprint for a socialist utopia, and in the process also one of the most influential early critiques of capitalism. Dominic Pettman explores Fourier’s radical, bizarre, and often astonishingly modern ideas, and how they might guide us in our own troubled times. Critical thinkers, like myself, often emphasize the fact that Things Could Have Been Otherwise. Indeed, we like to convey the sense that Things could still be Otherwise, if we just start thinking differently. (And not just “differently” in the manner encouraged by Steve Jobs.) The premise is that society is, well, socially constructed, and that it actually takes a lot of invisible ideological work to keep the foundations of this strange — absurdly unjust — society replicating itself from generation to generation. (An approach known as “social reproduction theory”.) Charles Fourier, the unconventional proto-socialist who wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is, it could be argued, the patron saint of Living Otherwise. He was the first thinker, to my knowledge, to not only critique the status quo, but to spend much of his life mapping out precisely how Things could be so radically different as to be virtually unrecognizable. This is why his name forever features in the pantheon of utopians. His notion of Harmony — an age in which all our present miseries and stupidities will be vanquished, almost overnight, by vastly improved social arrangements — is the first detailed attempt to create a blueprint for an actual existing utopia. A utopia not just for the anointed or the deserving, but for all humankind, united under a new global association of liberated souls (connected by what he called passionate attraction). It is impossible to broach the topic of Fourier, however, without discussing some of his many eccentricities. So let’s get some of them out of the way from the get-go. He wanted to abolish the number ten. He believed that children could be motivated to happily do most of the labor in our future communes, like Oompa-Loompas. He believed lions and sharks would soon die out, replaced by “anti-sharks” and “anti-lions”. And most famously of all, he claimed a shift in our local cosmic conditions would change the chemical makeup of the earth’s oceans, so that they would taste like lemonade. There is also no shortage of paradoxes in Fourier’s character. He was a businessman who hated commerce. (Or at least the way commerce was practiced in his day.) He was a cosmopolitan universalist, susceptible to selective racism. He was a passionate rationalist and a utopian pessimist (in the sense he believed we live in the worst of possible worlds, but are only a few months away from flipping this scenario on its head). He was a scientific fantasist, a pedantic fabulist, a colonialist abolitionist, a revolutionary thinker who hated and feared revolutions, and a hyper-controlling conductor of freedom. Indeed, reading Fourier is quite a dissonant experience, given that he is as perceptive as he is naïve, and as prescient as he is absurd. (Indeed, I would argue that Fourier is a more amusing satirist than Jonathan Swift, for the simple reason that the former is deadly serious.) Fourier’s writing smells (pleasantly, to my nose) “of the lamp”, since he was obliged to work late into the night, after working as a traveling sales clerk during the day (mostly in connection with the silk trade of his native Lyon). Even so, he enjoyed a staggering confidence in his own knowledge, and presumed unprecedented mastery of every branch of the human and natural sciences (cosmology, meteorology, geography, anthropology, etc. . . . even theology). Fourier’s most essential claim would have seen him burnt at the stake a century or so earlier: specifically, that all of humanity’s various instincts and passions, including lust, are part of God’s grand design and should not be repressed or stigmatized as sinful. The problem, according to Fourier, is not with our primal urges, but with the way these desires are stifled, stunted, and warped by civilization (a time period in the Western Hemisphere that dates from the ancient Greeks, by his reckoning). Make no mistake, when Fourier uses the term “civilized”, he is not marking a higher state or achievement, but rather hurling an insult with a curled lip. Civilization names a dark age of hypocrisy, disorientation, and universal unhappiness, where even the very rich are imprisoned in simply a more comfortable class of misery than the rest of us. While humanity has made great technical strides, according to our guide, which have led to astonishing leaps in our capacity to exploit nature for profit, we have not paid any attention to our own inclinations, our own souls, our own hunger for freedom, play, sensual exploration, artistic expression, confraternity, and collective erotic interaction. (Where “Eros” is figured not in its reduced form, as merely the sexual, but as the pulse of life and joy which Lucretius believed lies at the origin of life’s spark.) In other words, Fourier provided a fully fledged theory of alienation, several decades before Marx, just as he had a fully fledged theory of repression nearly a century before Freud. Fourier was insistent that we need not force a violent revolution in order to usher in a new age; we just need to rearrange some of our social mechanisms and better regulate our intimate relations. Everything else would follow smoothly and swiftly in its wake. Removing obstacles was paramount, and the main obstacles in Fourier’s eyes were what we today call compulsory monogamy, wage slavery, alienated labor, financial insecurity, and finance capitalism. (And also bread. Fourier was not a fan of bread.) By banishing monogamy, people would no longer be obliged to cheat, lie, and sneak. Love, whether spiritual or physical, would be allowed to flourish whenever and however it began to blossom, and bitterness and resentment would subsequently evaporate almost overnight. (Strangely, while Fourier had a great faith in the motivational spur of comradely rivalry, he had little trepidation about the dark power of jealousy as an entrenched human — perhaps even animal — trait.) Wages are, for Fourier, a scourge, and should be replaced by a dividend or share of profits, and no one should be obliged to toil for a pittance. Monotonous work is to immediately be replaced by many different tasks, all vital to the community, and all intimately connected to the sense of worth and accomplishment of the clan. (Or what he called a Series.) Fourier imagined vigorous and friendly competition between the pear-growers and the apple-growers, for instance. But even so, a pear-grower would perhaps move to the woodshop later in the afternoon, before attending a rehearsal of her new play a couple of hours after that, all in order to honor the papillonnage, or butterfly-like caprice, of human attention. The citizen of Harmony (known as a “harmonian”) would soon live to be 144 years old, need only five hours’ sleep, and be an average height of seven foot, due to the healthy lifestyle, refined superfoods, and overall orgone accumulation of the phalanstery. (While Fourier never used the phrase “orgone” energy, it is difficult to not see its presence at work in the vision of Harmony, from a post-Reichian perspective.) Indeed, Fourier’s vatic description of the phalanstery is a strange mix of the classical (including vestals), the medieval (wandering bards and errant knights), and the Renaissance (“courtly behavior”). It also anticipates the Victorian era (especially the craft-based counter-culture associated with William Morris), as well as the hyper-modern industrial age (utilizing, as it does, state-of-the-art architecture and engineering, such as weather-proof towns and forest-wide irrigation systems). Among all the remarkable claims in Fourier’s seemingly tireless accounts of this tantalizing collective life, which exists just past our own selfish and self-defeating horizon (to the extent that he sometimes slipped into the present tense when describing it), one in particular stands out as striking. And that is the amazing faith he has in human association itself. Clearly, this thinker has never lived in a group house, or been obliged to sit on a committee, for he believed that a rather relentless public existence would, by its own account, bring us, without exception, a profound and unshakable happiness. (So much so that rich folk would live in a modest house of only three rooms, since they would spend three-quarters of their lives in active social commerce and activity.) Rich folk, you ask? I thought Fourier was a socialist? Well, this is another one of his many contradictions. While our utopian architect abhorred exploitation, he reserved contempt for the notion of equality. “The associative régime”, he wrote, is as incompatible with equality of fortune as with uniformity of character; it desires a progressive scale in every direction, the greatest variety in employments, and, above all, the union of extreme contrasts, such as that of the man of opulence with one of no means, a fiery character with an apathetic one, youth with age, etc.1 In other words, variety is the spice of life. And Fourier sought to keep things as spicy as possible. “We must not persuade ourselves that in Harmony mankind are brothers and friends”, he insisted. “It would be robbing life of its salt to cause the shades of opinion, contradictions, antipathies even, to disappear from it.”2 Fourier believed that there were 810 different personality types, so each phalanstery should be comprised of 1,620 inhabitants — one personality type of each sex. Fourier’s utopia is thus, at the end of the day, a rather bourgeois one; just as his own writings were written for gentlemen, largely above his own station. (This is partly a reflection of Fourier’s own business model, which was subscription based, so that his writings were sponsored by those relatively well-to-do folks interested in his radical theories, à la left-leaning Patreon or Kickstarter patrons.) Nevertheless, we would be doing him a disservice if we did not acknowledge his astonishingly progressive views on women. Indeed, writing at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, Fourier went so far as to say: “As a general proposition: Social progress and changes of historical period are brought about as a result of the progress of women towards liberty.”3 Fourier is even credited with coining the word “feminism”. Of women, he asked, Is there a shadow of justice to be seen in the fate which has befallen them! Is a young woman not a piece of merchandise offered for sale to whoever wants to negotiate her acquisition and exclusive ownership? Is not the consent she gives to the marriage bond derisory and enforced upon her by the tyranny of all the prejudices which have beset her since childhood?4 In one especially perceptive passage, Fourier noted: [Men] even debase the female sex by their flattery of it, for what can be more inconsistent than Diderot’s claim that to write to women ‘you must dip your pen in the rainbow and sprinkle what you have written with the dust of butterfly wings’? Women might reply to the philosophers: your Civilisation persecutes us if we obey nature; we are obliged to behave artificially, and to attend only to promptings that go against our desires. In order to make us swallow your doctrines you have to play on our illusions and use the language of deceit, as you do with soldiers when you lull them with promises of laurels and immortality to make them forget their wretched situation. If they were really happy they would welcome being addressed in straightforward, truthful language of the sort which you are very careful to avoid. The same goes for women: if they were free and happy they would not be so eager to embrace illusions and cajolery, and you would not need the help of the rainbow and butterflies to write to them. If the military and the female sex, in fact the whole of the common people, have to be deluded all the time, then that is a serious indictment of philosophy for failing to organise anything in this world except misery and servitude. And when it mocks women’s vices it is actually criticising itself, for it is philosophy which produces these vices through a social system which represses women’s rights and abilities from childhood and throughout their lives, forcing them to resort to deception if they are to obey their natural impulses.5 The “free women of the combined order”, Fourier assured his readers, “will surpass men in their dedication to work, in loyalty and in nobility.”6 Fourier’s singular relevance for our own vexed moment is not restricted to his critique of political economy, nor to his early advancement of the feminist cause, but includes also his attention to matters of climate and environment. Fourier thus offers us a precious gift, in his reminder of the intimate relationship between the domestic sphere, wider society, and the cosmos itself. (In this sense, he is a kind of centaur — half Emily Post, half Georges Bataille.) Fourier was alive to “the influence of human cultivation upon atmosphere and climatic conditions”.7 His philosophy was somewhat inconsistent on this theme, however, as he was torn between being sensitive to the environment and reshaping it to our needs. He lamented the rapine of the environment, on the one hand, while he advocated vast changes to the natural world, on the other. “We bring the axe and destruction,” he wrote And the result is landslides, the denuding of mountain-sides, and the deterioration of the climate. This evil, by destroying the springs and multiplying storms, is in two ways the cause of disorder in the water system. Our rivers, constantly alternating from one extreme to the other, from sudden swellings to protracted droughts, are able to support only a very small quantity of fish, which people take care to destroy at their birth, reducing their number to a tenth of that which they ought to produce. Thus, we are complete savages in the management of water and forests. How our descendants will curse civilisation, on seeing so many mountains despoiled and laid bare.8 And yet, [T]he combined order will undertake the conquest of the great Sahara desert. It will be attacked at several points by 10 or 20 million hands, if necessary, and by dint of importing earth, and gradual planting and afforestation, they will succeed in humidifying the land, stabilising the sands, and replacing desert with fertile regions. There will be ship canals in places where today we cannot even create irrigation channels, and great ships will not only sail through isthmuses like Suez and Panama but far inland.9 Fourier looked forward to planned human interventions creating vast changes in the world’s “natural infrastructure”, if we can call it that. But he approached this in terms of making the planet more hospitable for habitation. He was not interested in exploitation without replenishment, as we still proceed to do, even today. The problem, in Fourier’s view, was not so much scale, but execution. The world should be radically changed, to allow for greater cultivation, since nature exists primarily for the delight and benefit of humankind. But any such changes should only be made in sympathy with the tendencies and desires of the planet itself. Our ambitious Frenchman was thus an early advocate of what we now call geo-engineering, though he would have been horrified at the scale and method of the works currently being conducted in China, West Virginia, Australia — indeed all over the world. As for global warming, this was yet another item ticked off of Fourier’s prophetic checklist, down to the detail of the polar ice caps melting. For Fourier, however, this was far from a negative thing. While he was right about a marked increase in global temperatures, he could not have been more wrong about its effects, since he looked forward to a universally temperate, gentle, and pleasant climate (“The transformation of the polar winds into zephyrs . . .”10), and the opportunity it would afford to cultivate forests at unheard of latitudes. Each generation subsequent to the establishment of Harmony, he predicted confidently, “will see a very sensible bettering of its climatic conditions, thanks to the power which Association possesses of again covering the mountains with trees, judiciously distributing waters and forests, ponds for irrigation, and all branches of cultivation”.11 While sparse with details, Fourier believed we could transform the planet into a new Garden of Eden. Our anthropogenic influence, however, would not stop short of the earth and its atmosphere, since, by some kind of unexplained cosmic entanglement of influence, new moons would show themselves in the sky, and — most importantly of all — a crown of benign light and energy would descend over the Northern Pole.12 (A crown which would render the seas into lemonade, and allow agriculture over the entire globe.) The only reason our planet does not at present enjoy regal rings, like those of Saturn, is, according to Fourier, due to the fact that our civilization is so “impoverished” that we don’t deserve them yet. (He also took it for granted that aliens on other planets were far more evolved than we are, and that we are the slow kids on the cosmic block, having been mired in incoherency for so long.) Fourier even believed that the Earth itself would sometimes find itself “in heat”, like an animal: This can be seen from the frequent appearances of the aurora borealis, which are a symptom of the planet’s being in rut, a useless effusion of creative fluid, which cannot conjoin with the southern fluid as long as the human race has not carried out its preparations.13 A reader of Malthus, Fourier considered the question of population to be key. He believed that the human race — once freed from the yoke of civilization — would first grow rather rapidly, and then stabilize at a sustainable number, thanks to a kind of innate, biological reduction in fertility rates. “Luckily”, he wrote, “the earth is vast in proportion to its small population; we are still only one-third of the globe’s proper number, with our small total of 2 billion.”14 Nevertheless, he added, “it will take only 150 years for the earth to be populated to its FULL CAPACITY”.15 While the prospect of overpopulation was one of the various specters haunting Europe in the nineteenth century, Fourier had great faith in the self-regulating mechanisms emerging from this new age. “After three generations of Harmony,” he pronounced, “two-thirds of the women will be unfruitful, as is the case with all flowers which, by the refinements of cultivation, have been raised to a high degree of perfection.”16 Thanks to a combination of “the vigour of women”, “integral exercise”, enlightened morals, and a new, healthier “gastrosophic régime”, children will arrive in Association at the same rate as people leave this mortal coil, and no more. (Quite the feat, given the elaborate orgies planned in the Phalanstery.)17 A hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud introduced us to the idea of “libidinal economy”.18 That is, the psychosocial modes of exchange, saving, and spending that we all negotiate on a daily basis. Any emotional investment you make in a person or project, for instance, in the hope it will make you happy, or more psychologically enriched in some way, is an example of your contribution to the wider libidinal economy. Even a stolen kiss is factored into the general accounting, theoretically speaking. Given that both microeconomics and macroeconomics depend on wants, needs, hopes, desires, etc., we can confidently claim that all economies have an erotic component, if we trace it back carefully enough. (Although, yes, sometimes a longterm capital gain dividend is just a longterm capital gain dividend.) Having tarried with the work of Fourier, I would like to float the notion of a “libidinal ecology”, that is, a more expansive conceptual lens than Freud’s, to better understand what is now called “the anthropocene”, or the measurable, rapidly accelerating human impact on the wider environment. Fourier — whom one critic notes, “everybody knows . . . [but] nobody has read”19 — helps us understand the intimate link between economic and ecological concerns and behaviors. Economy was originally the spontaneous science of organizing the household (oikos). This involved not only distribution of domestic labor, but balancing budgets, exchanging services, regulating conditions, managing resources, recycling materials, processing waste, and so on. Given that economy begins in both bedroom and kitchen, it is inherently libidinal. It is fundamentally a matter of gender, sex, desire, as well as the kinds of contracts and obligations these, in turn, engender. Freud understood the inescapably transactional nature of erotic experience — you cannot get a free lunch, so to speak; and intense pleasure always comes at a price. But the father of psychoanalysis declined to map the “actual” economic sphere on to the sexual sphere with the insight and persistence of Fourier. He did not show, as the silk merchant from Lyon did, how these are in fact one single sphere, how they are one and the same body. In attempting to manifest justice in both spheres of love and economics, in a radically transformed world — both socially and geographically speaking — Fourier went a step further: he demonstrated the interpenetration of economy and ecology (before the latter term was even invented). Now that “nature” has moved from the background of human affairs and become a fellow protagonist (or even antagonist) — with its own evolving concerns, and perhaps even its own destiny — ecological consciousness has given age-old questions a new tone and urgency. Fourier looked forward to the melting of the ice caps, because he believed this would open up new vistas for sustainable farming, and with it, a new generalized conviviality. He was wrong about the climatic effects and social repercussions of such major anthropogenic changes. But he was right that we need to invent radically new economic relationships in order to survive and thrive as a species among others. This means essentially banishing the profit motive from all aspects of society, from the boardroom to the bedroom. This means understanding our own natural impulses, and not shoe-horning them into compromised cultural shapes and arrangements. This means cultivating a sustainable libidinal ecology. One which honors and includes “the infinitely small as well as the infinitely great . . . the infinitely ridiculous as well as the infinitely charming”.20 Fourier — not despite his eccentric imagination, but precisely because of it — was a brilliant, far-sighted libidinal ecologist: one who understood the dangers of prioritizing avarice and vulgar materialism over a sustained, collective holistic attention to ars erotica and what the French philosopher, Bernard Stiegler, today calls “savoir vivre” (knowing how to live). While there were several attempts after his death to realize Fourier’s projections, and found actual phalansteries (including Brook Farm, near Boston), these of course never quite got off the ground. Nevertheless, his spirit entered the conceptual groundwater, and we can see his influence waxing in the free love of the 1960s, as well as the polyamory and queer sex-positivity of today. Many on the left today, for instance, look forward to what they cheekily call, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. If these kinky comrades and cosmonauts have not yet settled on a symbolic founder, they could hardly find a more well-suited one than this humble, arrogant, grumpy, tireless, visionary crypto-Calvinist Dionysian. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 1, 2019

Dominic Pettman

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:09.705231

photographing-the-dark-nadars-descent-into-the-paris-catacombs

Photographing the Dark Nadar’s Descent into the Paris Catacombs By Allison C. Meier October 25, 2019 Today the Paris Catacombs are illuminated by electric lights and friendly guides. But when Félix Nadar descended into this “empire of death” in the 1860s artificial lighting was still in its infancy: the pioneering photographer had to face the quandary of how to take photographs in the subterranean dark. Allison C. Meier explores Nadar’s determined efforts (which involved Bunsen batteries, mannequins, and a good deal of patience) to document the beauty and terror of this realm of the dead. Few nineteenth-century Parisians saw the city like Félix Nadar. In 1863, he ascended in a huge airship called Le Géant, from which he captured aerial views of a rapidly changing metropolis. Under the urban renewal program led by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, old buildings were being demolished and replaced with broad boulevards, bringing uniformity and order to the narrow, winding medieval streets. But not all the changes that Paris was undergoing were visible from above. Public health had become an issue in the increasingly crowded capital, and a novel underground infrastructure was modernizing its management of waste. Around the same time Nadar ascended into the air, he descended into the pitch-dark tunnels of the city’s sewers and catacombs, where he pioneered the use of artificial light to reveal a new, previously unseen world. Today, the catacombs of Paris are a major attraction. Timed tickets are sold to manage the large queue that forms daily outside a nondescript entrance on the Place Denfert-Rochereau (formerly called the Place d’Enfer, or “Hell Square”). A new graphic identity features a logo that cleverly hides a skull in a “C”, while a recently added gift shop sells all manner of skull-adorned souvenirs and magnets reading “Keep Calm and Remember You Will Die”. While the signage might now be sleeker, and photographs of the skull-lined walls are abundant, the catacombs retain some of the mystery that drew Nadar. They were already a curiosity for adventurous tourists in the early nineteenth century; a line that guided torch-carrying visitors is still visible on the ceiling of the entry tunnel. Nadar’s photographs, however, helped make the catacombs a popular destination. As the urbanist Matthew Gandy writes in The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination, the “subterranean photographs of Nadar played a key role in fostering the growing popularity of sewers and catacombs among middle-class Parisians, and from the 1867 Exposition onward the city authorities began offering public tours of underground Paris.” 1 When Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who later adopted the pseudonym Nadar, was born in 1820, Paris was under the Bourbon monarchy. Although old medieval streets still wound through the city, an 1820s building boom supported by capital freed from the pricey Napoleonic campaigns was fueling mass land speculation and building projects.2 As opposed to the later Haussmann planning, this was privately funded and developed construction. In the 1830s, under the reign of King Louis-Philippe, prefect Claude-Philibert de Rambuteau led revitalization efforts like paving sidewalks and adding boulevards to alleviate the crowded streets of the city center. This was partly to get traffic flowing, but it was also a response to epidemics, such as the cholera epidemic of 1832, which were blamed on the unhealthy close quarters. (A series of 1830s riots in these working-class neighborhoods also revealed how the narrow streets lent themselves to barricade building.) When Napoleon III came to power in 1848, the large-scale reconstruction overseen by Haussmann modernized the city with scarce sentimentality for the past. It was this metamorphosis that drew Nadar’s eye. As the historian Shelley Rice observed in a 1988 essay for Art in America: He never sought out old stones, or corners filled with the past; it was not his style to make a memory image out of a body devoid of life. He plunged, instead, right into the middle of Haussmann’s work, focusing on areas, especially in the sewer and aerial pictures, that were most characteristic of innovative nineteenth-century urban planning.3 Although he spent a brief time studying medicine, by age twenty Nadar had devoted his career to the literary arts and photography. In 1855, he opened his first photography studio with his brother. With his tall frame, red hair, and broad mustache, he cut a striking figure — one he reinforced through the pervasive use of the color red in his studio’s exterior and interior, including the huge letters spelling out his name in red gaslight on the building. He took portraits of the famed figures of the day, such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, Charles Baudelaire, and Honoré de Balzac. Always an innovator when it came to photographic methods, he used the then-new collodion process with glass-plate negatives that could produce more copies than the one-off daguerreotype. He also pioneered new approaches to artificial light. With a wired series of Bunsen “batteries”, he was able to generate enough electric light to take a photograph in darkness. In an era when photography was closely linked with natural light from the sun, taking this technique into the darkest realms of Paris was radical. It was not easy. He initially experimented with the batteries — invented by German chemist Robert Bunsen in the 1840s using a chemical reaction of metal and acid — in his studio. He described in his memoirs how the radiance at night would “stop the crowd on the boulevard.” And it drew customers into Nadar’s studio “like moths to light”.4 The next challenge was to transport his experiment underground. It is difficult to date exactly when Nadar went into the sewers and catacombs. “The date given is either 1861 or 1865, but the assumption is that [the photographs] resulted from a single three-month campaign”, art historian Sylvie Aubenas writes in a catalogue essay for a 1994 Musée d’Orsay exhibition of Nadar’s work. “Nadar himself, in his writings, invariably speaks about these two expeditions as if they had occurred conjointly.”5 At least one example of his catacombs photographs was exhibited at the 1862 International Exhibition in London, placing his descent around 1861. By the 1860s, the catacombs were already an established infrastructure for dealing with the centuries of dead who had long been buried in urban churchyards and burial grounds. Like many major cities, Paris had recently reached a crisis where its former ways of interring the deceased were no longer sustainable. Eighteenth-century Parisian burial grounds were unpleasant places. One of the oldest and largest was the Cimetière des Innocents, where Parisians had been interred since the twelfth century. It bordered the busy central market of Les Halles, and though there had been attempts to keep the living and the dead separate — such as a wall constructed under King Philippe II Auguste — the market activity still regularly spilled onto the graves, where the odors of decomposing corpses mingled with the hawkers’ detritus. As disease was frequently attributed to miasmas, or bad air, there was concern that this noxious mix could be dangerous or even fatal. Then there was a ghastly 1780 incident in which the ground in a neighboring cellar broke open and threw corpses into the basement of a house. Medical expert Antoine-Alexandre Cadet de Vaux gave a report to the Royal Academy of Sciences deploring the “cadaverous exhalations”.6 The cemetery was finally closed, but what to do with the dead remained an open question. Another calamity suggested a solution. Paris had been constructed on a massive deposit of calcium sulfate, or gypsum. This distinctive stone with its shellfish fossils had been quarried for local building material from the development of the Roman city Lutetia to the construction of the Louvre and Notre-Dame. All that mining resulted in extensive tunnels under the city. Most people gave little thought to these quarries until a series of 1770s catastrophes. In 1774, a mine collapse consumed a large section of a street; in 1778, a building was devoured. The Inspection Générale des Carrières was established to inspect and repair the mines, also revealing for the first time the full extent of the tunnels. By 1785, the skeletons of the Cimetière des Innocents and other burial grounds were being carted, night after night, into these quarries. At first they were simply piled in heaps, but in the early 1800s Inspector Héricart de Thury spearheaded a more thoughtful arrangement. Skulls and bones were arranged in patterns, rows, and crosses; altars and columns were installed below the earth. Plaques with evocative quotations were added to encourage visitors to reflect on mortality. In 1809, tourists began to file into this immersive memento mori. Just before this opening, de Thury stated that he “believed it was necessary to take special care in the conservation of this monument, considering the intimate rapport that will surely exist between the Catacombs and the events of the French Revolution.”7 This rapport included the mass burial of the victims of the 1792 September Massacres, during which hundreds of prisoners were executed for fear they might join the counterrevolutionary forces. In many ways, this empire of death below the streets mirrored the shifts happening in the world above. Although the catacombs were named before the Revolution, the evocation of the ancient Roman catacombs reflected the same fascination with classical influences seen during the 1780s and ’90s, when Revolutionaries cited the Roman Senate in their speeches and adopted the Phrygian cap as a symbol of liberty. There was also an equality of classes in the underground ossuary. Without monuments or names, no one corpse could be elevated above the others, and the sight of all those bones together made the thought of distinguishing one from the other absurd. In his essay “Paris Above and Below”, originally published in the Paris-Guide, par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France released alongside the Exposition Universelle of 1867, Nadar relates this mortal scene: In the egalitarian confusion of death, a Merovingian king remains in eternal silence next to those massacred in September ’92. The Valois, Bourbons, Orléans, Stuarts, end up rotting indiscriminately, lost between the wretched of the Court of Miracles and the two thousand “of the religion” that were killed on the night of St. Bartholomew.8 To this litany of royal and impoverished dead from French history, he adds the names of revolutionary victims and perpetrators like Maximilien Robespierre and Jean-Paul Marat. All are together, with “every trace implacably lost in the uncountable clutter of the most humble, the anonymous”.9 It was the post–de Thury version of the catacombs that Nadar witnessed, one which mixed the fragments of the departed with a modern design for death. In The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera, Adam Begley describes how Nadar worked with the “inconveniences” of the Bunsen batteries in the catacombs: “The dozens of Bunsen cells, wired in series, were too bulky to transport down certain narrow subterranean passages, so on occasion he had to leave some of the batteries up on the street and run leads down to his chosen location.”10 All of this was time consuming and only sporadically successful, leading one of Nadar’s assistants to moan “We’re growing old here”.11 Yet Nadar succeeded in creating the first photographic documentation of this realm of the dead. The geometry of the walls of skulls is revealed in stark contrasts; long shots down tunnels give the viewer a sense of claustrophobic unease, with their framing of the low ceilings and seemingly endless bones. There are even photographs that highlight the grim labor of hauling and stacking the skeletal remains in this space. Because the exposure time could be as long as eighteen minutes, Nadar used a mannequin instead of a live worker. As he explained: I had judged it advisable to animate some of these scenes by the use of a human figure — less from considerations of picturesqueness than in order to give a sense of scale, a precaution too often neglected by explorers in this medium and with sometimes disconcerting consequences. For these eighteen minutes of exposure time, I found it difficult to obtain from a human being the absolute, inorganic immobility I required. I tried to get round this difficulty by means of mannequins, which I dressed up in workmen’s clothes and positioned in the scene with as little awkwardness as possible.12 The only catacombs photograph with a living person is a self-portrait in which Nadar sits against a wall of bones, photographic chemicals from the collodion emulsion process at his feet, providing a glimpse of his own long labor behind the lens. In another image, a magnesium lamp is visible in the lower right-hand corner, reminding the viewer that light is only coming into this place through great human effort. Despite the cumbersome equipment, its malfunctions, and the malodorous fumes of the batteries and magnesium, Nadar persisted in his quest to capture what had never been photographed. In the sewers, he again trundled in his mannequin, chemicals, and heavy camera to visualize its soaring tunnels and pipes. Walter Benjamin later wrote of these photographs that it was “the first time that the lens is given the task of making discoveries”.13 Nadar mostly retired from photography in 1873, though he continued to take the occasional portrait until his death in 1910. He wrote about his adventures in the catacombs again in his memoir, When I Was a Photographer (1899), where he recreates a visit to the catacombs with himself as the guide: “You do not know the Catacombs, madam; permit me to lead you there. Please take my arm and — let us follow the people!”14 Together with Nadar the reader descends “the interminable and slippery staircase”, following the “smoky smell of this succession of candles” as the procession of tourists enters the ossuary.15 He remarks that this “is the parade of the grand names of France as well as the small ones”, and that even the “fragment that your foot just bumped into, this debris without a name, is perhaps one of your grandfathers.”16 Curious sights are mingled with the bones, like a stone basin in which someone has released a few fish to swim blindly in the dark. “What human vanity, what pride could stand before this final, inevitable promiscuity of our ashes?” Nadar wonders.17 Yet he also records that some people in this place of death laugh as they light their lanterns before journeying into the tunnels. In a guestbook installed in the catacombs in 1809 by de Thury, reactions indeed range from heavy meditations on mortality to mirth. One visitor in 1811 wrote: “They were what I am, and I will be what they are”;18 another quipped: “I’ve seen death, it is in front of my eyes, but my stomach is grumbling, and I’d much rather eat”.19 There is still this mix of reactions to the catacombs — down where some walk loudly making jokes and taking selfies while others stare quietly at the stacked skulls. Unlike in Nadar’s day, electricity now lights the tunnels. Still, at regular corners are closed gates to off-limits passages where darkness endures, a reminder that this accessible section is just a part of a sprawling labyrinth that spreads like veins beneath the city, a shadow of its development that Nadar first brought to light. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 25, 2019

Allison C. Meier

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:10.211847

rambling-reflections-on-summers-in-switzerland-and-sheffield

Rambling Reflections On Summers in Switzerland and Sheffield By Seán Williams December 11, 2018 In the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Philipp Moritz — from the peace of Lake Biel to the rugged Peaks — Seán Williams considers the connection between walking and writing. In late summer and early autumn of 1765, Rousseau was on the run. He was always fleeing some sort of persecution: at times very real, and legal; at others perhaps more perceived, and highly personal. A restless existence, certainly, yet Rousseau’s last and most retrospective work tells of a life not of flights, escapes, escapades — but of contemplative walks. Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire (The Reveries of the Solitary Walker) comprises nine-and-a-bit meandering recollections and reflections, written as walks, and found among the writer’s personal effects on his death in 1778. The central essay of the collection concerns his sanctuary for almost a month and a half during 1765 on St Peter’s Island in Lake Biel, in the canton of Bern, Switzerland. Walking was his primary activity here. He spent his time strolling by the edge of the water, stumbling on brooks, rambling across the island — unless he was messing about in boats. According to Rousseau’s earlier autobiographical Confessions — published, like the Reveries, by friends in 1782 — he had first come across his refuge while on a “pedestrian pilgrimage” the year before.1 St Peter’s Island became a place of happiness for him. And happiness, Rousseau concluded, was a state of contented stillness, the paradoxically permanent awareness of our momentary being. When walking, Rousseau would stop and look at plants. He was annoyed whenever he was mistaken for an apothecary or barber-surgeon’s assistant, out searching for herbs to apply as cures for itches and swellings. For Rousseau, botany was about observation and reflection: leaving no leaf unturned to gain a sympathetic, intellectual, and artistic understanding of the world around us. “Pharmacology” should not spoil “pastoral” images.2 Throughout history, writers have always paced around, philosophising, and earlier in the eighteenth century, people perambulated through pleasure gardens as a pastime. But the Romantics broke out into the fields, peaks, and onto islands. And in Romanticism — from Rousseau through to the time of Schubert and his wonderful piano solo, the Wanderer Fantasy — wandering became a very writerly, intellectual, artistic activity. It went hand in hand with reflections on nature and its plant life, which were one and the same as conjectures on culture. Indeed, such was the shift of the word “culture” itself: originally a term for growth, as we might grow a culture in a petri dish today, culture came to denote a habit of mind, and from there the intellectual and artistic development of a society. Contemplative walking and botanical observation offered a route into culture. Two hundred fifty years later, in 2015, I shared Rousseau’s sense of what it meant to walk by Lake Biel. I was not the first to trace his route, of course: many an aspiring writer has made the journey to the island, as W. G. Sebald — who himself walked, reflected, and wrote there — remarked in 1998.3 As a young lecturer at the University of Bern, an academic pilgrim of sorts, I would wander on a weekend with close colleagues along the shoreline — that is, until we had enough of high-brow hiking and set off for more epicurean pursuits instead. (A nearby wine-tasting festival in the hills was a good find.) But for me, Rousseau’s idea of happiness in Helvetia became both a welcome calm after stormy doctoral study at home, and a quintessential, exasperating Swiss cliché. It was an undeniably beautiful if oftentimes stultifying cultural landscape. In Bern I was comfortable, content, happy even. Yet a general societal self-satisfaction at the relative quiet and stability of contemporary Switzerland was also unnerving — and, like Rousseau’s depiction of his peace on the island, a skewed perspective. Walking is all well and good — I am a keen hiker — but it seemed to me to have taken over the Swiss way of seeing the world, their Weltanschauung. So I was on the move again, back to England. Ironically, I was to follow in Rousseau’s footsteps. In January 1766, Rousseau settled — for a while — on the southern, Staffordshire, side of the Peak District. Two and a half centuries later, I came to Sheffield to take up a post at the university. Weekends were for wandering. As a scholar of the eighteenth century, and especially of German lands, I wondered who had trodden these South Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire paths before me. Any Germans? Indeed. In the summer of 1782, the German writer Karl Philipp Moritz spent around one and a half months travelling through England — mostly on foot, which secured him notoriety and international literary fame. Moritz was often taken for a beggar or vagabond when on the road because he walked rather than bought a ride in a post-chaise. The scenes of sentimental travel literature had been framed by the carriage window, whereas Moritz tells of the men he met and the landscape he saw when walking. He remarks on reactions to him by locals; he notes quirky differences in dialectal pronunciation; and he describes for his German readers the portraits that hung on the walls of inns — of the royal family, in the main, but also the King of Prussia. He wandered up through the Peaks as far as Castleton, where, even back then, you could pay to see the caves. Reisen eines Deutschen in England im Jahr 1782 was promptly published the next year, in 1783, and was translated into English just twelve years later as Travels, chiefly on Foot, through several parts of England in 1782. Both versions were a hit. As Moritz walked beyond the village of Ashford-in-the-Water, he reached what must be Monsal Head. At this point in his account, his companions are two local craftsmen. One is rather grandly referred to as a “philosophical” and “poetic” saddler, who apparently knew his Homer, Horace, and Virgil, chapter and verse. Moritz is not being ironic: there was a contemporary fashion for discovering so-called “peasant poets” or rural, original geniuses. It was a means of rendering working-class literature acceptable. While I can find no sources to corroborate Moritz’s story of the saddler, Monsal Dale did become reputed for having a local bard. William Newton made machines for the Derbyshire cotton mills and was a head carpenter over at Buxton as well. Beyond his day jobs, he was known for his poetry. Perhaps Newton was a friend of Moritz’s companions. In any case, Moritz goes on to describe the view that I have stood and observed myself many a time, though it is nowadays obscured by a Victorian viaduct (a leftover from the nineteenth-century railway line, which brought tourists to the spot made famous by Moritz and subsequent literary-cum-travel writers). In the words of the English translator: We came to a rising ground, where my philosophical saddler made me observe a prospect, which was perhaps the only one of the kind in England. Below us was a hollow, not unlike a huge kettle, hollowed out of the surrounding mass of earth; and at the bottom of it a little valley, where the green meadow was divided by a small rivulet, that ran in serpentine windings, its banks graced with the most inviting walks; behind a small winding, there is just seen a house where one of the most distinguished inhabitants of this happy vale, a great philosopher, lives retired, dedicating almost all his time to his favourite studies. He has transplanted a number of foreign plants into his grounds. My guide fell into almost a poetic rapture as he pointed out to me the beauties of this vale, while our third companion, who grew tired, became impatient at our tediousness.4 I have strained my eyes to work out which house Moritz meant, if indeed it still stands today. The historian in me has become obsessed with working out who this “great philosopher” might have been. But the translation is misleading. The German “groß” could have expressed “fine” or “dedicated” as much as “great”. The English “distinguished” is therefore an embellishment, though being of note the person surely must have had something of a reputation. Nevertheless, it was unlikely someone of Erasmus Darwin’s stature, say, who founded the Derby Philosophical Society (and was Charles Darwin’s grandfather). Besides, Darwin lived miles and miles away, outside the Peak District proper. Naturforscher in German did convey the idea of a natural philosopher in the eighteenth century — but it could also mean, more simply, a botanist with a curious, speculative bent. Perhaps one prone to more theoretical musings on plants. The German critical edition of Moritz’s travelogue offers up John Baker at the nearby Cressbrook Mill as a possibility. Although he fits the description as a known amateur botanist, he seems a disappointingly undistinguished choice to me. Gardening was hardly an unusual hobby: scanning the subscription lists for contemporary books and magazines on the botany, minerals, and agriculture of the area shows that almost every named household in the vicinity purchased copies. Lost in the annals of Google Books, I came across one name I really wanted our philosophically-minded botanist to be: Thomas Knowlton. He published on plants and was a specialist on hot houses. He had a reputation for cultivating pineapples in eighteenth-century England: might these be the foreign plants referred to above? I suddenly imagined the quaint English scene scattered with ornamental pineapples — a classical equivalent to the plastic, kitschy pineapples that used to sit in my Derbyshire nan’s kitchen. A fanciful, if not implausible, thought. Chatsworth’s friendly archivist and two PhD students working on the history of servants at Chatsworth have assured me that, in his retirement, Knowlton advised the fifth Duke of Devonshire. There is a house belonging to the Chatsworth estate near to Monsal Dale, too, which plausibly might have put Knowlton up. But he died the year before Moritz was out walking in the peaks, which is reason enough to tame my enthusiasm. Yet Moritz’s information is second or perhaps third-hand, and from a rapturous saddler at that. He could well have guided our German through the vale with poetic licence. The historian in me might want to identify Monsal’s “great philosopher”, but it is only with a literary imagination that I can settle on an answer. Moritz was writing at a significant historical moment for walking. His working-class companions remind us that in England as elsewhere, writerly wandering is thought to have set off on a left-wing tradition around 1800. It is a common (but not universal) view that Wordsworth was a young radical before turning Tory only in his old age, and that his writing on walking was anti-capitalist. (What is beyond debate is that Wordsworth definitely walked, a lot. De Quincey claimed to have calculated that he covered over 175,000 miles.) In England, walking easily became a political act because enclosure laws made roaming the countryside more difficult. In the wandering age of Romanticism and its modern legacy, fields, forests, and hillsides were increasingly for the private use of the, well, landed classes. Kinder Scout in the Peak District had long been publicly accessible King’s Land until it was fenced off in 1836. In 1932, it became the site of an organised trespass as part of the English class struggle. In the meantime, the moneyed went off to Switzerland for their walking throughout the long nineteenth century, where they could amble around the Alpine trails without controversy. Although writerly wandering is popularly associated with the left, and not just in England, it is not necessarily so. Irrespective of interpretations of Wordsworth’s poetry, German writing about walking since Romanticism has traversed the full political spectrum. Heidegger used a walk along a country path (Feldweg) to define thinking, Denken, as a meditative release from the functions of representation or intention.5 Although he is careful to say that his conception of thought is not a complacency that just goes with the flow (as it were), it is fair to characterise his philosophy as radically ontological. That is to say, Heidegger’s philosophy is about being in the world, and is less concerned with how we can change it than with understanding how we are within it. Indeed, Heidegger’s ideal of change in the world would concern our authentic, abstract relation of being in it, not specific societal structures. In this sense, Heidegger’s thinking could be considered conservative. Of course, Heidegger was much more extreme in his actual politics than any legitimate conservative: he was complicit in the Nazi regime, and antisemitic. We cannot pin his day-to-day political positions onto his abstract philosophy in any straightforward way, nor onto his walks in the German forest. But the point stands that writerly wandering is not a preserve of the left. Writerly wandering is not well-described as activism, then, as my critically-minded colleagues would have it, some of them immersed in French theories of the flâneur. But we can say that writing about walking is necessarily an observation on our own place in nature and culture — or nature as culture. On that, all our authors from Rousseau onwards would agree. Leaving politics aside, what most writers on walking also share is sociability — although it is often hidden, or downright denied. Rousseau did not live in solitude on St Peter’s Island. Readers could be forgiven for thinking he did, but he was there as the guest of a Bernese tax collector. (As Sebald reminds us, there were also constant visitors and seasonal farm hands present.) Wordsworth may have written that he “wandered lonely as a cloud”, but his sister Dorothy accompanied him. Heidegger’s discourse on thinking while walking is written as a sort of Socratic-style conversation, between a scientist, teacher, and scholar. My own walks in the Peak District or in Switzerland have been with those closest to me: my sister, friends, parents, an erstwhile partner (with whom I would descend into Monsal Vale in particular, on a full stomach following yet another visit to a gastropub). These were wanderings in conversation and in shared silence — banal conversations, perhaps, which, in their cumulative familiarity against a beautiful backdrop, lead to the sort of routine happiness that Rousseau conceived as solitary. Rousseau soon fled the Peak District for France. I intend to stick around here for summers to come. I have more walks to discover, conversation topics to hold forth on, and thinking to do. And in moments of academic contemplation, I might even take up gardening. Or simply buy some plastic pineapples. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

December 11, 2018

Seán Williams

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:10.756811

of-pears-and-kings

Of Pears and Kings By Patricia Mainardi January 9, 2020 Images have long provided a means of protesting political regimes bent on censoring language. In the 1830s a band of French caricaturists, led by Charles Philipon, weaponized the innocent image of a pear to criticize the corrupt and repressive policies of King Louis-Philippe. Patricia Mainardi investigates the history of this early 19th-century meme. “Around this damnable tyrannical pear there gathered a great howling mob of patriots. There was such fury and incredible unity in their stubborn demand for justice that when we leaf through old humor journals today, we find it a subject of enormous astonishment that such unrelenting warfare could continue for years.” — Charles Baudelaire, “Some French Caricaturists”, 1857.1 Wherever open speech is prohibited, symbols and allusions abound. The historian Peter Gay lamented that in our positivist age, this metaphoric language has waned because we now see in only one dimension, the literal and obvious one. Gay traced the beginnings of this loss to the Enlightenment, beginning with the rise of science as a paradigm and the gradual eclipse of religion; an example would be the formerly near universal comprehension of calling someone “a good Samaritan”, a term that simultaneously invokes the present and a biblical past, enabling us to think on two parallel planes at once.2 Caricature, with its mixture of word and image, the literal and the allusive, does this better than language alone, which has caused it to be highly regulated and often prosecuted by authoritarian regimes. Under one such authoritarian regime, nineteenth-century French caricaturists produced one of the most powerful political metaphors in modern history: the representation of King Louis-Philippe as a pear. The era was, with apologies, “ripe” for this kind of messaging because caricature, imported to France from England during the revolutionary period of the late eighteenth century, was ideally suited to evade the draconian censorship laws instituted by the Bourbon Restoration of 1815. Censorship could occur in several intensifying degrees. In France, censorship of images was always more severe than censorship of text because images were thought to have a more direct appeal to the lower classes whose literacy was limited. It was customarily exerted in one of two ways: normally, censorship was post-publication, meaning that if a text or image was judged offensive, it would be seized and the author, artist, and publisher tried, fined, and imprisoned. In periods of great instability, however, the more severe measure of prior censorship was instituted. This meant that nothing, neither text nor image, could be published or even exposed to public view, unless it had first been submitted to government censors and approved by them. Not only artists, authors, and publishers could be held responsible, but even printers were liable and could lose the license that permitted them to work. This is why so many publications (Diderot’s Encyclopédie, for example) falsely identified their origin as outside France — usually Switzerland, where laws were more liberal. During the Restoration, artists created a metalanguage of symbols to evade censorship: censorship itself was personified as a large pair of scissors always on the attack, the clergy were represented as candlesnuffers busily extinguishing the light of the Enlightenment, and the regime’s political figures as crayfish who knew only how to walk backwards. In 1830, however, after the “Three Glorious Days” of the July Revolution, the absolutist legitimist monarchy was overthrown in favor of a new constitutional monarchy governed by what was called “The True Charter”. The new king, Louis-Philippe (who ruled 1830–1848), styled himself the Citizen King and promised, among numerous reforms, to restore liberty of the press. His promises were short-lived; within a few months, he had enacted the “Law that Punishes Attacks on the Rights and Authority of the King and his Legislature by the Press”.3 Violators would be punished with a prison sentence of three months to five years and a fine of three hundred to six thousand francs. While this severe punishment did not in any way dissuade the political opposition, it did inspire even more resourceful evasions. Many of the most notorious nineteenth-century battles over censorship are well known: the condemnation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Manet’s lithograph The Execution of Maximilien. Unlike these cases, however, the Battle of the Pear continued for several years because the government was powerless to suppress it, although not for lack of trying. The individual responsible for this battle, Charles Philipon (1800–1861), while not so well known as Baudelaire or Manet, had an outsized influence in nineteenth-century France. The English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called him “an indifferent artist. . ., a tolerable designer, and an admirable wit.”4 A cartoonist of middling talent, Philipon soon abandoned drawing for publishing, founding several periodicals in which appeared the most memorable cartoons of the century by France’s leading artists — among others Daumier, Gavarni, Grandville, and Traviès. Recognizing the limitations of his own artistic talent, he compensated by suggesting subjects and themes to his artists, even writing captions for them and often including lengthy texts explaining the drawings’ symbolism, or even denying it to better evade the censors. His empire included the publishing house Auber (named after his brother-in-law) and several periodicals, including La Caricature (1830–1835) and Le Charivari (1832–1937), which inspired the English journal Punch, originally subtitled The London Charivari. He also maintained a retail shop where prints from his periodicals could be purchased in black and white or hand-colored, on varying qualities of paper, sold by the sheet, in portfolios, or bound as books. Those lacking funds for purchase could enjoy the changing displays of his shop windows, which often constituted free exhibitions of political opposition. He commissioned Traviès to depict his shop, taking advantage of the opportunity to include images of pears in its windows, with a viewer gesturing towards one and commenting: “You have to admit the head of state looks pretty funny”. Although Philipon was not the first to suggest the pear as a symbol for King Louis-Philippe, he must be credited with its dissemination. It came about seemingly accidentally. Less than a year after Louis-Philippe was installed on the throne, Philipon’s newly established La Caricature published an anonymous untitled drawing depicting a mason busily engaged in plastering over all references to the 1830 revolution. Several features of the drawing made its political meaning indisputable. Prominently displayed is “Street of July 29”, the date of the fall of the legitimist monarchy and installation of Louis-Philippe’s constitutional monarchy; another is “Liberty or Death”, a slogan of the revolution. The mason works from a trough labeled “Dupinade”: André Dupin was the most outspoken conservative voice in the Chamber of Deputies, opposing every reform that the 1830 revolution had promised to guarantee. What sealed Philipon’s fate, however, was the unmistakable resemblance of this mason to Louis-Philippe, a clear violation of the new censorship law. Since the drawing was published anonymously, Philipon as publisher was held responsible. At his trial in November 1831, he defended himself with the claim that there was no proof this mason represented the king, whose name, he pointed out, appeared nowhere on the drawing.5 To demonstrate that his accusers could find the king’s physiognomy anywhere, he drew a series of four portraits that began with the king’s recognizable likeness and ended with a pear. Truth be told, Louis-Philippe’s physiognomy did somewhat resemble a pear, but an added bonus was that the French word for pear, poire, also signifies a fool — although there is some dispute as to whether this meaning predated or was the result of Philipon’s metaphor. Philipon’s defense did not impress his judges and he was condemned to six months in prison and a 2000-franc fine. Nor was he alone in meeting such a fate; numerous artists, including Daumier, the most famous cartoonist of the century, were jailed at one time or another for subversive drawings. It is sometimes said that waging a battle with the press is a losing proposition. Nowhere was this more clear than in what transpired next. In the first issue of La Caricature published after his trial, Philipon announced a subscription to pay his fine and warned the government: “Wait until both my hands are paralyzed before you rejoice”.6 He became relentless in promoting the proto-meme of the Pear in his journals, with such success that its fame spread internationally. He began by publishing his pear drawings in La Caricature. To the original drawings, he added captions with the statements he had made in court. He began thus: “If to identify the monarch in a caricature, you rely solely on a resemblance, then you fall into absurdity. Look at these crude sketches, which should have assured my defense.” Under the first he wrote: “This sketch looks like Louis-Philippe, so you would condemn it?” Under the second, more abstract, he wrote: “So then it would be necessary to condemn this one which resembles the first.” By the third, the king’s physiognomy was looking definitively pearish; nonetheless, Philipon captioned it: “Then condemn this one, too, which looks like the second.” The fourth drawing is unmistakably a pear. Philipon concluded: And finally, if you are being logical, you would not be able to exonerate this pear, which resembles the previous drawing. So, for a pear, for a brioche, and for all grotesque heads in which chance or malice might find some resemblance, you would punish their author with five years of prison and a five thousand franc fine?! Admit, Gentlemen that this is a most peculiar liberty of the press. Philipon liked his “Birth of the Pear” meme so well that he used it again when Le Charivari ran into trouble with government censors in 1834 and 1835; he had it printed as a poster and inserted into the periodical.7 Ever the businessman, he hawked it as though it were the latest pop culture phenomenon, placing a large advertisement for it in La Caricature: “THE FOUR PEARS DRAWN at the hearing of the assize court in Paris by Ch. Philipon, and sold to pay the fine of Le Charivari. Price for the Sheet: 2 SOUS”. If Philipon had left it at that, the Pear affair would have made an amusing footnote in the history of caricature, but, from the inception of his newly invented meme, he began commissioning artists to use it in political cartoons. It spread more rapidly than earlier memes ever did, and not only in publications. As a result, it would be impossible to count all the pears that appeared in various venues in the following years. One factor in the Pears’ success might well have been the simplicity of the shape, which even a child could draw. In fact, many children did, if we are to believe the drawings of Philipon’s artists, who churned out Pear drawings first for La Caricature and, beginning in 1832, for Le Charivari as well. In a January 1833 edition of La Caricature, Auguste Bouquet depicted an old woman attempting to prevent three industrious little boys from defacing the wall of her house with pear drawings, shouting at them “Go draw that filth farther away, you little devils!”. A few months later, in Le Charivari, Traviès depicted a similar event in The Pear Has Become Popular, where he shows a street urchin drawing a pear on a wall; its caption announces: “This is how the walls of Paris are being decorated these days.” Works like these not only spread the Pear meme, they made it clear that all ages and classes were united in detesting the king. Thackeray echoed Traviès, writing: “Everyone who was at Paris a few years since must recollect the famous poire which was chalked upon all the walls of the city, and which bore so ludicrous a resemblance to Louis Philippe.”8 Philipon openly took credit for its success by publishing a drawing entitled What Sauce Would You Like with That? depicting the workshop of La Caricature with himself center-stage serving as its presiding spirit, “The Demon of Caricature”. He is shown directing the work of his most celebrated artists: Grandville, Daumier, Traviès, and Forest. On the left, a whole new class of apprentices is practicing drawing the Pear, and pears cover every available surface of the workshop, including one perched on a modelling stand posing for the students. The success of the Pear meme even inspired a book entitled The Physiology of the Pear, written by Sebastien Peytel under the pseudonym “Louis Benoît, Gardener”. While announcing itself as a horticultural tome, it actually presented thinly disguised, scathing critiques of the king. Should anyone manage to work their way through its 265 pages without realizing its true subject, its last page presented a drawing of a pear seated on a throne surrounded by pear-courtiers, similar to one drawn by Grandville for La Caricature entitled Reception. The book was so popular that a second edition was published almost immediately. The most famous Pear drawing is, no doubt, Daumier’s The Past, the Present, the Future, depicting Louis-Philippe’s pear head in triplicate, his topknot defining the fruit’s stem. The caption (possibly written by Philipon himself) notes: “What was in the beginning: fresh and confident; What is now: pale, thin, and anxious; What will be: despondent and broken. The accuracy of the present and the past can be verified by everyone. As for the future, this prediction cannot be in doubt.” Nor could it be in doubt that the absence of any sign directly identifying the pear as the king saved Daumier, at least this time, from a repeat of Philipon’s court battles. While many of the Pear drawings were in the nature of schoolyard taunts that merely insulted the king’s appearance, the best of them used the pear to signal a more complex political attack, filled with puns and allusions often lost on us today. An example is the drawing by Grandville and Desperet who together produced an image aptly entitled Enigma, accompanied by a doggerel poem in the form of a riddle. While the figure’s pear head and stooped posture immediately identified Louis-Philippe, the poem printed below piled on insults and allusions. Among the more obvious ones: “A bag of a thousand francs replaces my belly, / an iron trowel represents my hand.” This dual reference to the king’s avarice and the Dupinade drawing that began the Pear’s reign is continued with the line: “The seat of my pants is a plasterer’s trough, the True Charter is hung on my back.” Louis-Philippe’s notorious lack of loyalty to his supporters is represented in Desperet’s Gratitude is the Virtue of Kings, where the Pear King is seated in a room whose drapery, carpeting, and throne are all festooned with pears. He brusquely dismisses one of his earliest supporters, the President of his Council of Ministers Jacques Lafitte, by giving him a brusque kick in his posterior. Gratitude indeed! In The Nightmare, Daumier riffs on Henry Fuseli’s celebrated 1781 painting of that title by showing another of the king’s early supporters, General Lafayette, burdened by the realization of his error, visualized here as a giant pear that is weighing heavily on his sleep — the document near his hand lists Louis-Philippe’s broken promises. The corruption of his regime, alluded to by the money bag in Enigma is made explicit in Bouquet’s The Pear and Its Pips, where the king’s cronies are shown devouring the rotting state from within. Even more explicit is The Moderates Soil Themselves, in which a pair of clowns representing the juste-milieu (moderates) are shown carrying a pear-shaped bag of night-soil. In other words, the king is full of shit and those who enable him soil themselves by supporting him. As battle lines hardened, imagery became ever more explicit. There were even thinly-disguised suggestions of regicide: an untitled drawing by Daumier shows workers hanging a giant pear; a drawing by Traviès shows the stock figure of the ordinary citizen, Mayeux, preparing to guillotine the fruit, crying “Oh deceitful pear, why are you not true?” — another allusion to his many violations of the “True Charter” of 1830. While the government at first responded to these drawings with repression and seizures, it gradually came to adopt, however reluctantly, a laissez-faire approach. In the course of numerous prosecutions, Philipon had learned how to turn court cases into circuses, much to the amusement of jurors who often declined to convict him. Government prosecutors lost so often that eventually only the most egregious transgressions were brought to trial. When he was hit with fines and imprisonment, Philipon invented a new meme to evade and enrage the censors: the typographic Pear, which he recycled several times.9 Since part of any judgment against periodicals was that the court order had to be published in the offending journal, Philipon obliged, in his own ingenious way. He explained to readers of Le Charivari: “Since this judgment, comical though it might be, risks offering small amusement to our readers, we have tried to compensate, at least in form, for what is absurd in content.” And so he published the text of the judgment in the shape of a pear, beginning with: “Louis-Philippe, king of the French, to all present and to come, greetings. The assize court of the department of Seine-et-Oise, seated at Versailles, has rendered the following verdict”. This cat-and-mouse game continued for five years; by 1835 Philipon and his artists were in open revolt. Grandville and Desperet together signed a barely disguised call to revolution, a drawing entitled “Oh July Sun, Come Quickly”. Its explanatory text provided a long rationale “explaining” that the ministers of Louis-Philippe, depicted here as children, had accidentally made their snowman in the likeness of the king and so wanted the July Sun to come quickly and melt it away before they were charged with violating the censorship law. But, of course, everyone understood that this was, in reality, a thinly disguised call for a revival of the July Revolution of 1830. In 1835, after an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Louis-Philippe, his government finally succeeded in passing the notorious “September Laws”, re-instituting the prior censorship of the Restoration and outlawing any discussion of the king and the monarchy. Political caricature had become impossible. Rather than submit to these laws, Philipon closed down La Caricature in August 1835. Le Charivari survived by entering into a long period where it published only caricatures of manners and mores, not of politics. Even the great Daumier, for the time being, was rendered relatively benign. Political caricature had to go into hibernation until the Revolution of 1848, when Louis-Philippe was deposed and the September Laws were repealed. Philipon brought this chapter of publishing history to a close, fittingly enough, with three typographic Pears which he printed on the last page of the last issue of La Caricature, 27 August 1835. Entitled Other Fruits of the July Revolution, the Pears’ texts were composed of the provisions of the new September Laws pertaining to printed images, beginning “No drawings, engravings, lithographs, medals, prints, or emblems, of any kind, can be published, exhibited, or sold without preliminary authorization of the Minister of Interior in Paris or the Departmental Prefect”. In his final “Letter to Subscribers”, Philipon began on a sardonic note: “After four years and ten months of existence, La Caricature is succumbing to a law that reestablishes censorship, by virtue of this formal article of the True Charter: ‘Censorship will never be permitted to be reestablished’”. He continued, more seriously, by attacking the “apostates of liberty”: We have pilloried them in our journal, and we have pitilessly exposed them to the ridicule of the people they so exploited. They can destroy the charges that our justice has nailed over their heads, but it will not be so easy to erase or cause to be forgotten the stigmata of shame with which we marked them during the last five years. He concluded: “We believe that what we leave behind will be consulted by all those who will write about or who will want to study and to understand the first years of the reign of Louis-Philippe.” He has been proven correct on all counts, for here we are in the twenty-first century, still engaged with questions of the absolute right of rulers to be above criticism, and still laughing at the Pear. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 9, 2020

Patricia Mainardi

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:11.332395

our-masterpiece-is-the-private-life-in-pursuit-of-the-real-chateaubriand

Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life In Pursuit of the “Real” Chateaubriand By Alex Andriesse October 9, 2019 While nowadays he might be best known for the cut of meat that bears his name, François-René de Chateaubriand was once one of the most famous men in France — a giant of the literary scene and idolised by such future greats as Alphonse de Lamartine and Victor Hugo. Alex Andriesse explores Chateaubriand’s celebrity and the glimpse behind the public mask we are given in his epic autobiography Memoirs From Beyond the Grave. In the spring of 1816, Alphonse de Lamartine was restless, ambitious, and twenty-five years old. Four years later, with the publication of his Méditations poétiques, he would be the toast of Paris, but for the moment he was just another provincial scribbler in the capital, too shy and proud, he says in his memoirs, to set foot in a literary salon. He therefore decided he would do the next best thing. He would travel four miles to the south, to the leafy Vallée aux Loups, and roam the forest, hoping to catch sight of one of the “great living figures of our era.”1 This figure was François-René de Chateaubriand. A Bourbon royalist, a Catholic apologist, and the author of several popular books (including the novels Atala and René), Chateaubriand held a fascination for his contemporaries hard for us to understand. His fiction, which we often find high-flown and formal, they experienced as daring and wild; his conservative politics, which some of us regard with suspicion, were appreciated for being admirably idiosyncratic. Chateaubriand may have coined the word “conservative” in the political sense (by titling the Bourbonist journal he edited Le Conservateur), but he was also, in Anka Muhlstein’s words, “a liberal, open to modernity” (modernité being another word he is said to have coined).2 Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the French public looked to Chateaubriand as a man of principle, a defender of the freedom of the press, and an independent thinker unafraid to criticize both the tyrannical Napoleon and the disappointing Bourbon king Louis XVIII. In 1830, a few days before he resigned his seat in the Chamber of Peers — refusing to swear allegiance to the “usurping” king Louis-Philippe — a group of university students spotted him in the street and spontaneously hoisted him onto their shoulders, chanting “Long live freedom of the press! Long live Chateaubriand!” Yet, following his death in 1848, the reasons for his reputation soon grew vague. The entry for Chateaubriand in Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, a book of bourgeois bromides compiled in the 1870s, might as well have been written yesterday: “Best known for the cut of meat that bears his name.”3 Back in the 1810s, no one would have associated Chateaubriand with sirloin. He was famous and subject to fame’s magnifying lens. “I want to be Chateaubriand or nothing”,4 the fourteen-year-old Victor Hugo wrote in his diary, only a month or two after Lamartine, that fanboy avant la lettre, had gone to skulk around Chateaubriand’s house in the Vallée aux Loups. Adolescent identification with this tragic master of melancholy — who’d spent seven years of the 1790s exiled in England while several members of his family were guillotined under the Reign of Terror — drove many young romantics to a kind of madness, although none, so far as I know, acted on their madness with as much fervor as Lamartine. Wandering the Vallée aux Loups, Lamartine found Chateaubriand’s house easily enough. He was unable to see anything over the garden wall, however, and so he climbed into some trees overlooking the property. “I stayed sitting in the branches, hidden by the leaves, from noon until night, but to no avail”, he recalls in his memoirs; “I saw nothing moving except a trickle of water that sparkled as it sputtered from a stucco fountain, and the shadows that shifted and spread over the grass beneath the weeping willows.”5 When night fell, Lamartine was forced to return to Paris. But he had not abandoned his folly. By noon the next day, he was back, like Calvino’s baron, in his perch among the branches: Half the afternoon elapsed in the same silence and disappointment as the afternoon before. Finally, at sunset, the door of the little house turned slowly and noiselessly on its hinges. A short man in black clothes, with broad shoulders, skinny legs, and a noble head, emerged, followed by a cat, to whom he threw balls of bread to make it gambol on the grass. Soon, both cat and man were swallowed by the shadows of an alley of trees; the undergrowth hid them from my sight. A moment later, the black clothes reappeared at the threshold of the house, and locked the door. This was all I saw of the author of René, but it was enough to satisfy my poetic superstitions. I went back to Paris dizzy with literary glory.6 In later life, Lamartine’s fervor for Chateaubriand inevitably cooled. He could no longer see what had once excited him in the writing, which he now found too theatrical (“always treading the boards”).7 As for the man, Lamartine would be introduced to him several times in the embassies and palaces of Paris, London, and Rome. “But the Chateaubriand of the Vallée aux Loups has for me always been the real Chateaubriand”, he concluded: “The person, rather than the persona.”8 Like every celebrity, from Virgil to Marilyn Monroe, the “real” identity of Chateaubriand was an object of speculation. Readers approached him expecting to find the living embodiment of his books, and Chateaubriand, for his part, made an effort to oblige. “He is too grave and serious”, the American scholar George Ticknor wrote in his diary after dining with Chateaubriand at a soirée held on May 28, 1817, and gives a grave and serious turn to the conversation in which he engages; and even when the whole table laughed at Barante’s wit, Chateaubriand did not even smile; — not, perhaps, because he did not enjoy the wit as much as the rest, but because laughing is too light for the enthusiasm which forms the basis of his character, and would certainly offend against the consistency we always require.9 Consistency of character was a tenet of the nineteenth-century belief in “great men”, whose conduct never wavered, but even if the culture encouraged such consistency, Chateaubriand took it to extremes. Amélie Lenormant (the niece and adopted daughter of Chateaubriand’s longtime mistress and renowned salon hostess Madame Récamier) observed that, by placing him on a pedestal, Chateaubriand’s admirers “often put him in the awkward position of striking a pose.” When there were no strangers present, and he was alone with people he liked, and of whose affection he was certain, he gave himself up to his true nature and became entirely himself. His animated conversation, which often edged into eloquence, his cheerful witticisms, and his hearty laughter made his company incomparably delightful. In private, no one was so easygoing and childlike, if I may use this word in speaking of a man whose genius and character inspired so much respect. But all it took was the presence of a stranger, or sometimes a single word, to make him resume his Great Man’s mask and his stiffness of manner.10 The mask that Chateaubriand wore to face the public was not meant to be charming; it was meant to be impressive, in keeping with the impressive principles he’d pledged to uphold. George Ticknor — calling on Chateaubriand at his home a few days after the formal dinner during which His Eminence had appeared so humorless — was surprised to find him relaxed enough to chat candidly about a bad review while playing with his cat “as simply as ever Montaigne did”.11 But this sense of surprise may tell us more about the naivety of Ticknor than the personality of Chateaubriand, who wrote in his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: “Do you think I’m stupid enough to believe that my nature has changed because I’ve changed my clothes?”12 If Chateaubriand could be pompous, bombastic, and vain, he could also — at least once he had closed the door on the world outside — laugh at the absurdities of existence with the best of them. In Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, the more than two-thousand-page autobiography he composed between 1803 and 1847, Chateaubriand allowed himself to drop his great man’s mask at length. Although the Memoirs are often looked upon as a historical document, they are more than that: they’re a masterwork of literary style as the expression of sensibility — an exploration, in the tradition of Montaigne’s Essays, of the moods and memories of an individual mind. Abridgements of the work, which boil it down to “essentials”, do readers a disservice by eliminating Chateaubriand’s digressions, which are precisely what give the work its zest. Sainte-Beuve was the first in a long line of practical-minded critics to complain of these digressions: “At the most critical and decisive moments, he turns into a dreamer and starts talking to swallows and crows in the trees along the road.”13 But the Memoirs are not always about what they claim to be about. The Old Regime, the Revolution, the Empire, the Restoration, the July Monarchy — all of these form a backdrop for the book’s central subject, which is the author himself. Chateaubriand had originally intended Memoirs from Beyond the Grave to be published fifty years after his death. However, when he resigned from the Chamber of Peers in 1830, he forfeited his government pension. By 1834, he was broke. Madame Récamier came to his rescue, arranging for readings of the Memoirs at her house and publication of excerpts from them in journals. She even helped organize a society of shareholders whose payments — investments in the Memoirs’ future sales — would provide Chateaubriand with a modest annuity to the end of his days. The formation of this society also placed the Memoirs out of Chateaubriand’s legal control. In his last years, he was pained to realize the autobiography he’d regarded as private would be published the moment he died, in order to generate profits for shareholders. This was far from the glorious future he had imagined for his work. The end of Chateaubriand’s life was harrowing. Immobilized by rheumatism, suffering bouts of neuralgia and vertigo, he was vulnerable to the swarm of Boswells who surrounded him. These ranged from his secretary Julien Danièlo — who published a worshipful and paranoid book called Conversations with Monsieur de Chateaubriand: Against His Accusers (1864)14 — to Victor Hugo and Alexis de Tocqueville. Hugo, who had long ago given up wanting to be Chateaubriand, wrote in detail of the elderly man’s physical decline and of his daily visits with Madame Récamier, at her house a few blocks away: By early 1847, Monsieur de Chateaubriand was a paralytic and Madame Récamier was blind. Every day, at three in the afternoon, Monsieur de Chateaubriand was carried to Madame Récamier’s bedside. The scene was touching and sad. The woman who could no longer see fumblingly stretched out her hands to the man who could no longer feel; their hands met. God be praised! Life was dying, but love still lived.15 Tocqueville, Chateaubriand’s nephew and friend, chronicled the “sort of speechless stupor” that, during his final months, in 1848, “sometimes led us to believe his mind had gone”. Yet, while in this state, he heard the rumble of the February Revolution and wanted to know what was happening. He was told that they had just overthrown Louis-Philippe’s monarchy. He said, “Well done!” and fell silent again. Four months later, the noise of the June days reached his ear and again he asked what it was. We told him that there was fighting in Paris and he was hearing gunfire. At this, he made futile efforts to stand up, saying: “I want to go there and see.” Then he fell quiet, and this time forever, for he died the next day.16 The day after Chateaubriand died, on the fifth of July, Hugo paid a visit to the death chamber, criticized the bedstead (“of rather doubtful taste”), described the corpse, and inventoried the room with an exactitude that, depending on one’s point of view, either attests to Hugo’s stylistic clarity or to his love of cleanliness and fine décor. He was especially horrified to learn that the forty-eight notebooks containing the Memoirs were “in such disorder . . . that one of them had been found that very morning in a dark and dirty corner where the lamps were cleaned.”17 Chateaubriand’s last years were so well documented, it may come as no surprise that even his barber wrote a memoir about him. The book, titled (what else?) Chateaubriand’s Barber, by Adolphe Pâques, is of limited interest, even if Pâques — who not only cut his client’s hair, but shaved him daily — does paint a memorable picture of Chateaubriand in the years before he was confined to bed: I can still see him sitting in a big armchair. On his left is the fireplace, where a bright fire used to crackle in every season, for he was very prone to chills. On his right was a table piled with papers, books, and political and literary journals of every size and hue — all of it pell-mell and in an admirable disorder. I was permitted to take whatever journals I liked from the pile, and every day I carried off three or four to the greatest satisfaction of the clients at my shop. The kettle containing the shaving water sloshed around before the hearth. I shaved him on the spot. I have already spoken of the simplicity of the great writer’s tastes; the frockcoat he used as a housecoat was threadbare; its lapels made very clear, to anyone who was not already aware, that the porter’s breakfast must have been chocolate.18 More interesting to consider are the two pictures Pâques painted using Chateaubriand’s own hair, which he had saved for years in a wooden box before — during his retirement and long after Chateaubriand’s death — he daubed and arranged it in such a way as to represent, on one canvas, the room in which Chateaubriand was born and, on another, the tomb in which he was buried. The idea of painting with a dead man’s hoarded hair is ghoulish. Still, one has to admit the results are not half bad. Chateaubriand’s fame ensured he would be documented by any number of writers and portrayed by any number of artists. But he did not think highly of any of the portraits made during his lifetime. He believed they bore him no resemblance because the portraitists had proceeded from an idea of who he was which had little to do with reality: “The crowd”, he writes in Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, “is too frivolous, too inattentive to give themselves the time, unless they’ve been warned beforehand, to see individuals as they are.”19 The smiling public man — or rather the glowering public man — is certainly what we see in the well-known portrait by Girodet. The Roman ruins in the background, the heroic pose, and the far-off stare keep the viewer at arm’s length. The only portrait I’ve come across that suggests something of the author we meet in the Memoirs is a pencil drawing by Hilaire Ledru done in 1820, when Chateaubriand was in his early fifties. Here, again, he has been posed, but his crossed arms and cautiously amused expression intimate a wry melancholy, obscurely reinforced by the gloves and the open shell of the top hat he holds in his right hand. The images of Chateaubriand as seen by others are intriguing for the insight they give us, especially into the role he played in the collective imagination of early nineteenth-century France. The Memoirs, on the other hand, are a self-portrait, almost cubist in their complexity, dominated by shadows, contradictions, and doubts. Chateaubriand, like his contemporaries, may have imagined he was destined to be remembered for having defended tradition, poeticized religion, and served the nation of France. As it turned out, though, his greatest gift was for translating personhood into prose. His masterpiece was the private life. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 9, 2019

Alex Andriesse

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:12.072832

tales-from-the-boghouse

Loos, Lewdness, and Literature Tales from the Boghouse By Maximillian Novak April 17, 2019 In the early 1730s, a mysterious editor (known only as “Hurlothrumbo”) committed to print a remarkable anthology: transcriptions of the graffiti from England’s public latrines. For all its misogynistic and scatological tendencies, this little-known book of “latrinalia” offers a unique and fascinating window into Georgian life. Maximillian Novak explores. The literary scholar Roger Lonsdale once suggested that our knowledge of eighteenth-century poetry has depended heavily on what our anthologies have decided to print.1 For the most part modern anthologies have, in turn, drawn on collections put together at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next, when the ideal for inclusion was essentially that of “polite taste”. The obscene, the feminine, and the political were by general cultural agreement usually omitted. Lonsdale is not the only scholar questioning the basis of the canon; indeed, revisionism is fast becoming one of the more ingenious — and useful — parlor games among academics. Modern readers are no longer so squeamish about obscenity nor so uncomfortable with the purely personal lyric as were the editors at the end of the eighteenth century. And we are hardly likely to find poetry written by women objectionable on that score alone. In short, the anthologies we depend upon are out of date. Among the works that would never have been a source of poems for the canon, and one mentioned by Lonsdale, was the collection of verse published in four parts by J. Roberts beginning in 1731, The Merry-Thought: or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, commonly known simply as The Bog-House Miscellany. Its contemporary reputation may be described as infamous. James Bramston, in his The Man of Taste (1733), mentioned it as an example in poetry of the very opposite of “good Taste”.2 Polite taste, of course, is meaningful only if it can define itself by what it excludes, and nothing could be in worse taste than a collection of pieces written on windows, carved in tables, or inscribed on the walls of Britain’s loos. Just as the compilers of a modern work, The Good Loo Guide, were parodying a well-known guide book to British restaurants, so the unknown compilers of The Merry-Thought had some notion, however discontinuous, of parodying the nation’s polite literature. Were not Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift famous for their distinguished miscellanies? What could be more amusing than a collection of poems that represented a different poetic ideal — a collection of verse with none of the pretensions to artistic merit claimed by the superstars of the poetic world — the spontaneous productions of nonpoets in moments of idleness or desperation? Apparently some of the inscribers in the bog-houses used excrement as a medium for — as well as a subject of — their inscriptions (a somewhat literal prefiguring of T. S. Eliot’s claim that, to a certain extent, all poetry was a form of “defecation”.3 The Merry-Thought, then, is not even the kind of art that Dryden attacked in MacFlecknoe and Pope in his Dunciad — the work of bad poets masquerading as geniuses. Rather, it is a primitive form of folk art produced as a more or less spontaneous act of play or passion, and achieving some small degree of respectability only when practiced by a respected poet and collected with his more serious verse.4 Like modern “serial” graffiti, it could function as a form of communication since the first inscriptions often provoked those who followed to make their own contributions. (In this way too we could perhaps even see it as some kind of early incarnation of Twitter.) Indeed, one of the more interesting aspects of graffiti is that in an impermanent form it testifies to the continuance over the centuries of certain human concerns. Studies of graffiti have often focused on particular modern conflicts between races or nations, on drug problems, and on specific political commentary.5 But such local matters aside, the content of modern graffiti is surprisingly like that of earlier periods: scatological observations, laments of lovers, accusations against women for their sexual promiscuity, the repetition of “trite” poems and sayings, and messages attributed to various men and women suggesting their sexual availability and proficiency. And if the political targets have changed over the years, many of the political attitudes have remained consistent. Graffiti is an irreverent form, with strong popular and anti-establishment elements. As actions common to all classes, eating, drinking, defecation, and fornication find their lowly record in graffiti-like form. On the most basic level, a writer will observe that the excrement of the rich differs in no way from that of the poor. Thus one poem, taken supposedly from a “Person of Quality’s Boghouse”, has the following sentiment: Good Lord! who could think,That such fine Folks should stink?6 There is nothing very “polite” about such observations, and no pretension to art. These verses belong strictly to folklore and the sociology of literature, but they suggest some continuing rumbles of discontent against the class system, the existence among the lower orders of some of the egalitarian attitudes that survived the passing of the Lollards and the Levellers. Who were the writers of these pieces? Were they indeed laborers? Or were they from the lower part of what was called the “middle orders”? Is there some evidence to be found in the very fact that they could write? Graffiti may, indeed, tell us something about degrees of literacy. One wit remarked that whatever the ability to read or write may have been at the time, almost everyone seemed to have been literate when presented with a bog-house wall: “Since all who come to Bog-house write”.7 The traditional connection between defecation and writing was another comparison apparent to the commentators. One wrote: There’s Nothing foul that we commit,But what we write, and what we sh - t.8 And the lack of some paper or material to clean the rear end provoked the following sentiment in the form of a litany: From costive Stools, and hide-bound Wit,From Bawdy Rhymes, and Hole besh - - t.From Walls besmear’d with stinking Ordure,By Swine who nee’r provide BumfodderLibera Nos----9 Other types of graffiti, however, vary from the very earnest expression of affection to the non-excrementally satiric. One of the more unusual is a poem in praise of a faithful and loving wife: ※※Indexed under…Kissas subject for earnest boghouse poem I kiss’d her standing,Kiss’d her lying,Kiss’d her in Health,And kiss’d her dying;And when she mounts the Skies,I’ll kiss her flying.10 Underneath this poem, The Merry-Thought records a favorable comment on the sentiment. Even more earnest is the complaint of a woman about her fate in love: Since cruel Fate has robb’d me of the Youth,For whom my Heart had hoarded all its Truth,I’ll ne’er love more, dispairing e’er to find,Such Constancy and Truth amongst Mankind.Feb. 18, 1725.11 We will never know why she was unable to marry the man she truly loved, but her bitterness may have been short-lived. Just after this inscription comes a cynical comment identifying the lady as a member of the Walker family. And the writer insists that like all women she was inconstant, since he kissed her the next night. This cynical approach to love and women dominates The Merry-Thought. Prevailingly, women are depicted as sexually insatiable, as in a piece written by a man who takes a month’s vacation from sex to recoup his strength.12 And the related image of the female with a sexual organ capable of absorbing a man plays a variation on the vagina dentata theme.13 In a more realistic vein, though equally cynical, is the poem on the woman who complained of her husband making her pregnant so often: A poor Woman was ill in a dangerous Case,She lay in, and was just as some other Folks was:By the Lord, cries She then, if my Husband e’er come,Once again with his Will for to tickle my Bum,I’ll storm, and I’ll swear, and I’ll run staring wild;And yet the next Night, the Man got her with Child.S. M. 1708.14 S. M. is clearly unsympathetic to the plight of married women in an age with only the most primitive forms of birth control.15 The picture of her as a long-suffering person is undercut by the casual male assumption that giving birth was not really dangerous and that women make too much of the pain and difficulty. That women were often forced to go through thirteen or fourteen deliveries when little thought had yet been given to creating an antiseptic environment for childbirth is apparently of little concern to S. M., who finds in the apparent willingness of the woman to have sexual intercourse one more time sufficient reason for contempt. In addition to giving glimpses into social attitudes, The Merry-Thought has a variety of inscriptions that show the way these writings functioned. Professor George Guffey, in his introduction to part one of the 1982 Augustan Reprint Society edition of the work, remarks upon the proposal scene carried on in Moll Flanders between Moll and the admirer who will prove to be her third husband and her brother.16 Such scenes involving witty proposals and responses cut into the windows of taverns were real enough at the time. An exchange found in part two of The Merry-Thought is not, however, half so satisfactory. The woman takes umbrage at her admirer’s suggestions that the glass on which he writes is “the Emblem” of her mind in being “brittle, slipp’ry, [and] pois’nous”, and writes in retort: I must confess, kind Sir, that though this Glass,Can’t prove me brittle, it proves you an Ass.17 Though an easy cynicism about women’s availability and about the body’s insistently animal functions predominates, there is enough variety in The Merry-Thought to provide something of a picture of eighteenth-century society were any future anthropologists to come upon this volume as the sole remnant of that period. They would see a society engaged rather more in animal functions than in intellectual pursuits — a society rather more concerned with drinking, love, and defecation than the picture presented by the polite and intellectual literature of the time allowed. But they would also find in the satirical squibs on Corny, the Cambridge bookseller and printer, evidence of learning and university life as well as a criticism of opera.18 They would see numerous young men longing for their mistresses to soften their hearts toward them, and cynical older men who had lost their illusions about love. But they could also come upon a straight piece of philosophy taken from the still fashionable Flask tavern in Hampstead or lowly bits of pious folk wisdom.19 More often, however, they would uncover a society in which there was little of the generalized style that characterizes even the most personal formal poetry of the period. Many of the writers identify themselves and the names of the women they love or detest. In short, if these volumes do little else, they do provide a vivid glimpse into the personal life of the time, and to that extent an injection of some of these inscriptions into the anthologies of the period might help in providing a lively and piquant context for the serious artistic production of writers like John Gay and Jonathan Swift. The announced “publisher” of this folio was one Hurlothrumbo, a character drawn from the theatrical piece of that name by Samuel Johnson of Cheshire (1691–1773). Professor Guffey has proposed that James Roberts, for whom the four parts were printed, “was almost certainly the collector of the graffiti” and that the name of Hurlothrumbo was invoked in order to attract some of the attention that Samuel Johnson of Cheshire and his play were still receiving two years after the play’s first performance and publication.20 But Roberts would appear an unlikely candidate for the role of editor.21 I would suggest, rather, the possibility of a more direct and active connection with Samuel Johnson of Cheshire: that he was himself likely the compiler of the four parts of The Merry-Thought and that, whatever the individual versifiers may have intended, this infamous collection of graffiti — as collection — shares very closely with Johnson’s other work a spirit of wild variety, eccentric juxtaposition, and essential anarchism that is meant to lead, not to clever parody of polite literature, but to a new, almost apocalyptic vision of the sublime. At the first level, Hurlothrumbo: or, The Super-Natural (1729) itself appears to be quite simply a parody, in this case of opera in the form of a work mixing dialogue and song in a manner similar to but much wilder than Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. Johnson’s apparent takeoff on the heroics of opera managed to include in its attack a commentary upon the absurdity of contemporary tragedy as well as some specific references to those works that aimed at the sublime. Lines like “This World is all a Dream, an Outside, a Dunghill pav’d with Diamonds” seem to call the very nature of metaphor into question, especially when juxtaposed with other delirious lines such as “Rapture is the Egg of Love, hatched by a radiant Eye” or by songs such as that sung by the king on contemplating the effects of swallowing gunpowder and brandy together: Then Lightning from the Nostrils flies.Swift Thunder-bolts from Anus, and the Mouth will break,With Sounds to pierce the Skies, and make the Earth to quake.22 Hurlothrumbo may be mostly nonsense, but from the standpoint of literary history, it is highly significant nonsense. It represented a revolt against all dramatic conventions and shared a number of qualities with graffiti, including the sense of spontaneity. Had Johnson’s intention been something as relatively uncomplicated as literary parody he would have achieved some minor fame in a century which could boast any number of geniuses who had specialized in deriding the pretentiousness of the more established literary forms, particularly tragedy, the epic, and the pastoral. But Johnson of Cheshire lacked the aesthetic distance required of sustained irony and had a grander purpose in mind. His tradition was not that of the parodist but rather that of the visionary — the mystic whose tendency is to merge the high and the low, the sublime and the absurd, within a single work.7 He was not attacking the extravagant rants of the heroic play as Fielding was to do in his Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) or reflecting on opera and pastoral as Gay had done in The Beggar’s Opera (1728); rather he was trying, however unsuccessfully, to maintain his own work at the highest reaches of sublimity. He was like one of Pope’s “Flying Fishes”, who “now and then rise upon their fins and fly out of the Profound; but their wings are soon dry, and they drop down to the bottom.”23 In his preface to The Blazing Comet; or the Beauties of the Poets (1732), Johnson of Cheshire noted that “the same thought that makes the Fool laugh, may make the wise Man sigh”.24 Given such an equivocal approach to the ways in which the audience responded to his work, the poet could easily shrug off audience laughter to his most “Sublime” lines. He was always ready “to leap up in Extasy; and dip . . . [his] Pen in the Sun”.25 Parts of Hurlothrumbo, particularly the scene between Lady Flame and Wildfire (both of whom are described in the list of characters as “mad”) in which Wildfire threatens to cast off his clothes and “run about stark naked”,26 bear an odd resemblance to “The King’s Cameleopard” in Huckleberry Finn. But the disconnected verbal structure, along with the music and dancing, achieves a strange mixture that must have amused and, to a certain extent, bemused its audience. Johnson called upon “Variety” as his most important artistic principle, and he developed his ideas on this subject in A Vision of Heaven (1738), a work which bears a striking resemblance to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Johnson argues that all surface appearances are merely a form of “Hieroglyphic” concealing a true vision of things.27 His narrator is capable of what Blake was to call “mental flight”, and there is a particularly vivid passage in which the stars are seen as throwing down “freezing Daggers” at the poor, starving children in the streets and another in which we encounter an aged woman who wields a broom against spiders and against all the young women who threaten to come near the narrator.28 The mystic temperament is often capable of making connections between the spiritual and the excremental, between the sublime and the bathos of “Thunder-bolts from Anus”.29 Blake, we should recall, has poems depicting himself defecating.30 Whether Johnson actually collected The Merry-Thought or not, the reasons for the association of these volumes with his name should then be clear enough. While Fielding might appropriate the title “Scriblerus Secundus” by way of staking out a line of descent for his humor and satire, Hurlothrumbo was so thoroughly connected with Johnson and his play that I can see no reason why he should not be considered the likely editor of such a varied and eccentric collection of verse and prose as The Merry-Thought. That the “Variety” bears no resemblance to that of serious art, however, should be as obvious as the difference between a William Blake and a Samuel Johnson of Cheshire. As William Hogarth was to remark, “variety uncomposed, and without design is confusion and deformity.”31 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 17, 2019

Maximillian Novak

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:12.614509

the-khans-drinking-fountain

The Khan’s Drinking Fountain By Devon Field April 4, 2019 Of all the things described in William of Rubruck’s account of his travels through 13th-century Asia, perhaps none is so striking as the remarkably ornate fountain he encountered in the Mongol capital which — complete with silver fruit and an angelic automaton — flowed with various alcoholic drinks for the grandson of Genghis Khan and guests. Devon Field explores how this Silver Tree of Karakorum became a potent symbol, not only of the Mongol Empire’s imperial might, but also its downfall. By the time Friar William of Rubruck arrived at the camp of Möngke Khan in the last days of 1253, he had pushed his body to its breaking point. The trip from Acre had taken him by way of Constantinople, across the Black Sea, and then on a punishing overland journey featuring extreme cold, a demon-haunted pass, and little enough food that his travel-companion, Bartolomeo of Cremona, had been close to tears, exclaiming “It seems to me I shall never get anything to eat”.1 And then there had been the Mongols themselves. Passing into their territory was like passing “through one of the gates of hell”, and leaving their presence comparable to escaping “the midst of devils”.2 Safe to say that the Mongols seemed quite alien to this Flemish friar. William grumbled at their (in his view) incurable greed, commented repeatedly on his distaste for the women’s noses, and spoke of the foolishness of their religion. Though in many ways a clever traveller and, despite this xenophobia, an at times astute observer, he was in other ways a fish out of water, even going about at first in bare feet on the frozen winter ground. But not everything was so unfamiliar, so strange to him. There at the heart of the Mongol Empire, he found a surprisingly cosmopolitan scene comprised of Hungarians, Greeks, Armenians, Alans, Georgians, and more. In the capital of Karakorum, he found a “Saracen” quarter with its markets and a “Cathayan” one with its artisans; he found temples and mosques, and he found a church.3 He met a Christian from Damascus who represented the Ayyubid Sultan, a woman from Metz named Pacquette who had been captured while on business in Hungary, and the son of an Englishman named Basil. Most helpful to him during his stay was an artisan from Paris named Guillaume Boucher. This Parisian smith created several pieces which William saw — an altarpiece, a kind of mobile oratory, an iron to make communion wafers, and, perhaps his most significant mark left at Möngke’s capital, the Mongol khan’s wonderfully elaborate drinking fountain. Now the words “drinking fountain” might evoke high school hallways and awkwardly hunching over to bring your face to the faucet, but this was something else entirely. Crowned by a trumpet-wielding, angelic automaton, the main structure formed a magnificent silver tree, wrapped in silver serpents and complete with branches, leaves, and fruit. At its roots sat “four lions of silver, each with a conduit through it, and all belching forth white milk of mares.”4 Up in the branches, four pipes emerged to splash a different alcoholic beverage down to silver basins waiting below. There was grape wine, fermented mare’s milk, rice wine, and honey mead, all to be ready when the khan so desired. This so-called “drinking fountain” was, for all intents and purposes, a most convoluted and extravagant bar. Sadly, this curious creation, completed while William was at the camp of the Mongol khan, has not survived for us to admire. We are left with only the friar’s words to go on and, subsequently, with many questions. Was it as imagined in the eighteenth-century edition of geographer and poet Pierre de Bergeron’s work? Most visual representations since have been based on Bergeron’s, but did it really tower so high and appear so baroque? Was it even actually as William described? Have we correctly translated from his Gallicised Latin? Might his “lions” have been tigers or his “serpents” in fact dragons? How did it all work? A press a button, lean down, and sip affair it was not. Originally, bellows had been placed within the tree to pipe air through the angel’s trumpet whenever the khan called for a drink, but that hadn’t worked out. There was a flaw in the fountain. The bellows simply hadn’t been powerful enough, so in a slightly comedic twist, a man was placed in a space beneath the tree instead, a space which may or may not have been large enough not to be nightmarishly claustrophobic. When the call came, the man would blow, and the angel would raise the trumpet to its lips. The sound produced was loud enough to bring servants scurrying from the cavern outside the palace where drinks were stored. They would pour liquids into the tree’s roots that would quickly siphon up and pour out from above and into the basins. From there the drink would be collected by cup-bearers and delivered, in great style, to the khan and his guests. It was all quite unnecessary and inefficient. Simply carrying skins of milk and other beverages directly into the palace would have been quicker, with no pipes or angels required, but then, as William noted, it would be “unseemly to bring in there skins of milk and other drinks”, even common one might say.5 Basic function aside, the khan’s drinking fountain was a wonderfully grand, eye-catching piece. It had certainly caught the eye of William, who otherwise unfavourably compared the Mongol palace to the village of Saint-Denis. The fountain’s possible religious meaning is somewhat difficult to parse between French creator and Mongol client (and through the veil of William’s report), but there are possible readings. The serpents and fruit, with an angel hanging above them all, are suggestive of the Tree of Knowledge, its four liquids the four rivers of Eden. And, indeed, the designer of the fountain was a Christian who was at times called upon to play the role of priest in his community. Yet these and other elements do each yield to other interpretations, ones rooted in Chinese symbology, in Mongol Tengriism, or in Buddhism. What Guillaume’s creation perhaps expressed most clearly was riches and imperial power. One of the laundry list of items that bothered William about the Mongols was their incredible arrogance in assuming that he must be there to beg for peace, but they had every reason to expect it. Their empire was, arguably, at its peak, and envoys, kings, and sultans from far afield did indeed often come to them to do just that. They brought gifts, and the Mongol rulers would, in turn, put their tokens of imperial might on display. An example of this was the costly chapel-tent made of fine scarlet cloth and featuring Christian imagery that King Louis IX had sent to the Mongols as part of a 1249 diplomatic mission. It and other items, including fragments of the cross, were intended as gifts, but they were reported to have been received as tribute, the chapel-tent an object to be displayed and to proclaim “See? Even the Franks, as distant as they are, submit to us.” The drinking fountain, pouring Persian grape wine and Chinese rice wine from the empire’s conquered territories, would have transmitted a similar message. Unlike the chapel-tent, the fountain had been created on-site. It had not been carried there from afar, but of course, its creator had. He had been captured by the Mongol armies that had pierced central Europe and then withdrawn in 1242, and he had neither been taken nor survived at the center of the Mongol world by chance. His captors recognized the value of skilled craftsmen and, in their conquests, would set them aside and collect them. Just as they had the tremendous wealth of an empire, so too did they collect our Parisian metalworker, Guillaume Boucher. Guillaume created something wonderful for them, an imposing testament to the reach of the Mongol Empire in the craft of a metalworker plucked from the other end of the Eurasian landmass. He, with the help of an unknown number of unknown assistants, created a towering spectacle for the khan and his guests that dispensed liquids as if by magic, a seemingly endless torrent of drinks for their enjoyment. They wouldn’t sit down to enjoy it throughout the year. It was more of a seasonal delight. Friar William reported Möngke’s court travelling in a circuit and only at times coming to the settled capital, to the palace, to the site of Guillaume’s work where they would feast and drink. And Mongol royalty did not do such things daintily. In William’s narrative, the Mongols’ drinking habits form something of a low background hum against which events are set. He doesn’t linger over the topic, but it’s always there. At each audience, he noted the bench with drinks and goblets to the side. His first audience with Möngke had been encumbered by his interpreter’s drunkenness. Making the rounds of the royalty meant drinking with all of them, often a great deal to drink. Sometimes, as the khan spoke, William would count the number of times he drank before he finished. It was not, to say the least, a dry society, and health issues among the Mongol leadership were predictably prevalent. Möngke’s uncle, Ogedei Khan, had problems with alcoholism recognized even within his social milieu, and he died from them despite the efforts of those around him to slow his drinking.6 Of Ogedei’s son Guyuk Khan’s death, it was sometimes said he had been killed or poisoned by a family member, but it’s often thought that he succumbed instead to his unhealthy lifestyle. A bit of a pattern was developing, and it was one that was going to haunt Genghis Khan’s dynasty for quite some time to come. It is striking then that the fountain, a symbol of wealth and empire, was also a symbol of something that so troubled that empire. Friar William’s time among the Mongols would ultimately prove a frustrating experience for him. The goals of his trip — whether you take them to be diplomatic on the part of King Louis IX or, as William would frequently claim, those of a simple missionary — were left largely unachieved. There was to be no Mongol military assistance coming Louis’ way, and William himself admits to having baptized a grand total of six souls. His travelling companion, fearful that he could never survive the return journey, remained behind in Karakorum with Guillaume, at least temporarily, his host. Guillaume seems to fall off the map after William’s account of their time together. Artifacts have been found which may or may not have been his creations, but little else is known of him or his fate. Presumably, he ended his life there at the center of what was then the most powerful empire on earth. Likely, he lived long enough to see it cease to be the center, as Möngke’s brother Kublai moved it in the direction of China and the vast empire broke up into khanates that were largely independent of one another and, increasingly, at war. For his part, Guillaume had succeeded in creating a grand symbol of a far-reaching empire and an impressive accessory to the khan’s courtly binging, an expression of wealth and power but also of the unhealthy habits that would continue to eat away at the Genghis dynasty. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 4, 2019

Devon Field

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:13.477990

lustucru-from-severed-heads-to-ready-made-meals

Lustucru From Severed Heads to Ready-Made Meals By Jé Wilson June 13, 2019 Jé Wilson charts the migration of the Lustucru figure through the French cultural imagination — from misogynistic blacksmith bent on curbing female empowerment, to child-stealing bogeyman, to jolly purveyor of packaged pasta. In France in the year 1659, an almanac was published that contained a scene of a forge filled with women’s severed heads. Mass-produced as ephemeral booklets, almanacs were popular reading material in seventeenth-century Europe. Astrologists, physicians, and surveyors compiled them, and the old ones were recycled as wrapping paper or toilet tissue.1 They contained a digest of facts and entertainment, calendars, festival details, tide tables, exchange rates, and astrological predictions, as well as songs, stories, medical advice, recaps of recent events, and prints such as the one above, which could be enjoyed even by those who couldn’t read. This almanac of 1659, now lost, featured the first appearance of a character named Lustucru, a blacksmith turned brain surgeon or “operateur cephalique”. In the later print above, he appears at right in the central trio of blacksmiths, his mallet upraised over a woman’s head, which he’s gripping with a pair of tongs. Other female heads swing from meathooks, waiting their turn. In the left foreground, two men drag a still intact woman to the forge; the words near her mouth say, “I won’t go”. The sign of the shop, hanging at upper left, displays a decapitated woman’s body above the words “Tout en est bon”, from the saying, “Une femme sans tête: tout en est bon”, meaning “A woman without a head: everything is good”. To make the message absolutely clear, the block of text encourages men to bring their difficult wives to this head doctor, where their brains will be reforged and purged of all screechy, angry, lunatic, obstinate, rebellious, willful, and lazy ways. Any woman with a mind of her own is guaranteed a graphically brutal straightening out. As sexist satire goes, this is dark. Even darker is the fact that, as soon as the image appeared, the head-pounding blacksmith “became all the rage” in France.2 Publishers began to churn out stand-alone broadsheets of his image in order to feed a demand for cheap copies, and versions of him in his forge spread from France to Germany and Italy.3 An entire almanac calendar for 1660 was dedicated to Lustucru.4 He was written into the latest comic plays and poems, and his image was even stamped on tokens or “jetons” (metal coins used mainly as counters in the age before calculators). In today’s terms, he went viral.5 His name, Lustucru, comes from a slurring of “L’eusses-tu-cru?”, a stock phrase used in that period by theatrical fools, which meant, “Would you have believed it?” or in this case, “Would you have thought a woman’s head could be fixed?” According to the seventeenth-century French writer Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, Lustucru was born from a desire for male revenge. In his Historiettes, a collection of biographical sketches completed around 1659, he says that the “médecin céphalique” who appears in the almanac of that year was drawn by an anonymous “joker” specifically in response to the Langey affair, a divorce case involving two aristocrats.6 This case had been winding its way through the French courts for two years and had just then reached a verdict amid a flurry of public gossip and titillation.7 The Marquis de Langey, by that time aged thirty-one, was accused of impotence by his twenty-year-old wife (she’d been fourteen when he’d married her), and she wanted to leave him.8 Both parties were forced to undergo humiliating physical exams, and in the second round, after hours of trying, the Marquis could not get it up in front of a jury of ten doctors and five matrons.9 His wife was granted the divorce. Horrified at the nerve of this young dissatisfied wife, the anonymous artist of the engraving imagined a “brain surgeon” who could provide surgical redressing on behalf of all men for the public humiliations undergone by the Marquis de Langey. After some surgery, the wife would be put back in her place as a mindless, compliant entity who’d no longer have the will or gall to question her husband’s virility or wish for a better life. Male anxiety regarding the growing influence and power of women was generally on the rise in France during the 1650s. Women had begun to gain some standing in the literary arts and were established enough to have been satirized as “les précieuses”, a type of clever woman who frequented Parisian salons, wrote books, and favored an elegantly refined (or, to other minds, affected and pretentious) speaking and writing style. In 1659, Molière staged his Paris debut of Les précieuses ridicules (The Affected Ladies), a short satirical play that mocks a pair of young conceited women who think they are too smart and sophisticated for their suitors. They are given their comeuppance and made fools of.10 Some of the hastily written plays in the year Lustucru first appeared featured both Lustucru and the précieuses, capitalizing on the popularity of both subjects.11 As the scholar Joan DeJean has noted in an essay on “strong women” in Early Modern France, the speculative novel Épigone, histoire du siècle futur (Epigone, history of the future century) was anonymously published the same year the almanac appeared. This novel was a parody of tales about heroic women and imagined a future controlled by a race of Amazons, terrifying women who “privilege the life of the mind, thereby making life for all ‘unhappy and prudish.’”12 Once vanquished, the leader of the Amazons is first lobotomized (“debrained”) and then beheaded. These futuristic Amazons were yet another satire of the précieuses. The extreme violence of both the Lustucru imagery and some of these literary satires powerfully expresses “the tensions underlying seventeenth-century debates over new roles for women”, as another scholar of the period, Katherine Dauge-Roth, has put it.13 Entering a climate already hot with mockery and hostility toward learned women, Lustucru’s character became the perfect figurehead for those who believed that women’s brains were a threat to society. Unsurprisingly, the danger of a female takeover became the explicit subject of a new set of Lustucru-themed images that appeared on the scene soon after the almanac was published. In these new engravings, the wronged women get their revenge by grabbing Lustucru’s tools and smashing his head to “rid the world of this enemy of our sex”, as the text on this similar print explains. In a Bacchic frenzy, the women in the scene announce they will “give him a hundred strokes and after his death tear him to pieces and carry his devilish head everywhere as evidence of our courage”.14 The lesson in these new engravings is that the danger is real: if they put their heads together, women can crush men. As he succumbs to the blows, Lustucru warns his fellow men: “Help me quickly because without me you are lost.”15 * In the few years following Lustucru’s first appearance, the symbolic associations attached to the figure seemed to shift. The manner of his actions became just as pertinent as their goal: from the violent saviour of threatened men, Lustucru came to represent simply violence itself. In 1662, there was a violent revolt by thousands of French peasants in the Boulonnais region over tax increases imposed by Louis XIV. The event came to be known as the Lustucru Rebellion and the angry peasants were given or took for themselves the nickname Lustucrus. Over the next couple of centuries, Lustucru’s belligerent and menacing reputation further permeated the French cultural unconscious so that, by the nineteenth century, his name had become attached to a giant folkloric bogeyman of nursery rhymes and lullabies: Do you hear in the plainThis noise that’s reaching us here?It sounds like the noise of chains,Dragging on the pebbles.It’s the great Lustucru who is passing,Passing by and will go away,Carrying off in his knapsackAll the little children who aren’t asleep.16 Branching out from kidnapping to catnapping, he emerges in another popular song of the nineteenth-century called “La Mère Michel”. Sadistic and grim in the manner of many nursery rhymes, the verses describe a man named Lustucru who steals an old woman’s cat, cooks it, and sells it to diners as “rabbit”. This rhyme, with its cooking theme, forms the link to Lustucru’s twentieth-century rebirth. These days, if you google his name, you’ll be met with a brand of French pasta. In a surprising turn of events, Lustucru experienced a sudden makeover in the early 1910s when his name became synonymous with packaged egg noodles. ※※Indexed under…Eggnoodles and misogyny The logo and checkerboard design of the brand (which now sells other secondary staples in addition to pasta) may be familiar to grocery shoppers in France. Some might even be familiar with the original mascot, a jolly egg-shaped man named Pèr’ Lustucru (Father Lustucru), who began appearing on advertising posters in the 1910s, eager to sell premade pasta to French housewives. This fellow with a bon vivant shape and a jovial face made his debut in 1911, shortly after the owner of the Cartier-Millon pasta factory in Grenoble launched a competition to create a new look and name for his egg noodles. The winning design was the blue checkerboard pattern still in use, while Lustucru was chosen as the new brand name for the pasta. According to company annals, the Lustucru name came into being when Jean-Louis Forain, one of the winning illustrators, began singing the Mère Michel nursery rhyme during the banquet for the contest. Reminded, in a moment of whimsical kitchen humor, of a song from his childhood, Forain burst out with a musical salute to the grotesque chef Lustucru who cooks the cat of Mother Michel. His exuberant song resonated with the crowd and the owner. It was decided that same night that “Lustucru” should be the catchy new brand name for the egg pasta. Perhaps there was a sense that the name Lustucru connected the noodles to memories of childhood, nursery rhymes, homes, and mothers. Perhaps also, by that point in time, Lustucru’s name was already less threatening than nostalgic, a character feared only by children. Whatever the motivating spark, Lustucru once again captured imaginations and became, two and a half centuries after he first invaded the scene, fully transformed from the brute of French folklore into a smiling and palatable figure. In a curious echo of his past role as a lobotomizing blacksmith, an early poster campaign for the pasta featured a basket of eggs which, when the imagery from Lustucru’s sinister past is recalled, cannot help but bring to mind those baskets of female heads in the forge. But the new Lustucru would have been more interested in feeding those heads than beating them. One might argue that, as a promotional mascot, he was still trying to bend French women (and their purses) to his will, but at least he was no longer sadistic. The twentieth century saw him a reformed character, fixing pasta meals instead of defiant women. L’eusses-tu-cru? Who would have thought that his head could be fixed? The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 13, 2019

Jé Wilson

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:14.016010

filling-in-the-blanks-a-prehistory-of-the-adult-coloring-craze

Filling in the Blanks A Prehistory of the Adult Coloring Craze By Melissa N. Morris and Zach Carmichael February 6, 2019 Its dizzy heights may have passed, but the fad for adult coloring books is far from over. Many trace the origins of such publications to a wave of satirical colouring books published in the 1960s, but as Melissa N. Morris and Zach Carmichael explore, the existence of such books, and the urge to colour the printed image, goes back centuries. For many publishers around the world 2015 was, fiscally speaking, an excellent year — a welcome boost in an otherwise uncertain decade. But this upturn had a perhaps surprising source: coloring books for grown-ups. What strange winds conspired to suddenly urge adults in their droves to take up colored pencils again? Whatever the reasons, sales rocketed: Nielsen logged sales of 12 million for the category in 2015, up from a measly 1 million the year before. In February 2016, with the craze still going strong, New York Academy of Medicine Library gave birth to a new initiative called Color Our Collections Week, a scholarly take on the coloring trend. Now in its third year, the campaign sees, on the first week of February, archives, special collections, and libraries take to social media with individual images and even entire books compiled from their holdings for the public to color. While these chosen works are all in the public domain, and so can technically include (in the US at least) works published up until 1924, the images in these coloring books more typically hail from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. And it is in these images — published in the centuries prior to the advent of color printing — that we can see a precedent for this seemingly modern fad. While it may seem like simply jumping on the adult coloring bandwagon, Color Our Collections Week, with its naturally historical focus, is actually tapping into (and shedding light on) a tradition much older. Last year, the New York Academy of Medicine Library chose an image from Leonhart Fuchs’ monumental 1542 botanical work, De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (“Notable Commentaries on the History of Plants”), to promote the event. An archivist from the History of Science Collections at the University of Oklahoma chimed in on Twitter to say their own copy of this book had already been colored in. Should we be surprised by this? Color Our Collections Week might give the impression that these images, from the era before colored printing, are at last being colored — rescued from their hitherto drab monochrome existence. Yet printed images from the early modern period were regularly colored by hand. The practice goes back to the earliest days of print in the fifteenth century. Artists, printers, booksellers, consumers, and readers all applied color to originally black-and-white images. Before Gutenberg’s innovation of the moveable-type press, both woodblock and engraved prints, single sheets with printed images, were popular in Germany and parts of Central Europe. They were used in various ways, and many people did what we might do with them -- hung them on the walls of their home. With the emergence of the printed book the coloring trend continued. Colored illustrations were common in medieval manuscript books, most notably in the intricately illuminated manuscripts produced by monastic institutions. The early printed books from the fifteenth century and after often imitated the textual design and illustrations of these medieval manuscript books. Indeed, illuminated manuscripts and printed books were not mutually exclusive: some printed books contain illumination, while some manuscripts have painted prints pasted into them. It would seem that at least some early printers and readers attempted to create color illustrations for these works the only way they knew how: by coloring the pictures themselves. The images below further demonstrate this transition from medieval to early modern book production, and the role colored illustrations played. Both are from De Claris Mulieribus, a fourteenth-century book by Giovanni Boccaccio (author of the Decameron). This work was a compilation of biographies of women, real and mythical, famous and infamous. It was first circulated as a manuscript, and surviving examples are richly illustrated with images of the women they discuss. The book was among the first to make the leap from manuscript to print, and the illustrations came with it. In order to recreate the feel of previous versions of the work, it needed colored illustrations. The images below are, fittingly enough, of the painter and sculptor (and apparently prolific creator of self-portraits) Iaia of Cyzicus (also known as Marcia). The first two are from manuscript versions of the work, showing Marcia sculpting and painting. These next two are from printed editions of the work. The Latin edition has some illumination of the letters, while the German book’s image is fully colored. Most illustrations found in books from the early days of print are in the form of woodcuts and etchings. Woodcuts were most compatible with moveable type because both used relief printing, and early printers could easily print a page with both text and illustrations. Because of the carving and printing process, woodcuts have simpler designs with less shading. They therefore make for excellent coloring pages, and Color Our Collections participants frequently choose woodcuts for their images. Moreover, art historian Susan Dackerman argues that they were meant to be colored. Many of these color prints were created in a workshop setting, with an engraver, printer, and colorist working together. The “vast majority” of surviving fifteenth-century woodcuts are hand colored, and they were produced in the tens of thousands in the fifteenth century.1 Some images, like this fifteenth-century German woodcut of Christ on the cross, are only complete once colored. In this case, angels hold cups to catch blood that needs to be added with paint. The National Gallery of Art owns a number of examples of this woodcut, each differently colored. Some have been left uncolored, and a couple have only the requisite blood added to complete the image. Among those more fully colored, we can see that quite a bit of artistic license was taken. According to Dackerman, twentieth-century art historians and collectors denigrated color, seeing it as nothing more than a way to hide the flaws of poorly-executed engravings and woodcuts. Well-executed prints, they argued, needed no color at all. This disdain for colored prints helped to obscure their place in art history. This line of argument harkened back to the debates that emerged during the Italian Renaissance over whether design or color were most important (disegno/colore). In many of these images, the paint seems hastily applied. This haphazard coloring was often a result of the artist having many prints to paint rather than a lack of skill. Artists applied paint freehand, using a brush, but they sometimes employed stencils made from extra impressions of the images in order to paint more quickly. Many works were colored not by professionals, but by readers. A lot of the examples we have found of hand-colored illustrations come from botanical works and herbals. For example, a copy of John Gerard’s Herball (1636), with selective images colored in, suggests it was the reader who painted it, perhaps as a way to record plants he or she had seen in person. Botany and painting were favored pursuits of genteel men and women in this period, so it’s not surprising that the same people would share both hobbies. While publishers may have informally expected these monochrome images to be colored by some readers, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the practice was formalised in the first purpose-made coloring books. And in these the link between botany and painting persisted. Robert Sayer’s The Florist, published in London in 1760, was one of the first books where the author explicitly intended readers to color in the images. Comprised of pictures of various flowers, the author gives his (presumably) adult readers detailed instructions for paint mixing and color choice (including the delightful sounding “gall-stone brown”). Botanical works were particularly suitable for readers who wanted to engage directly with a physical book, because they offered images of things that could be observed in the natural world. Although the images in this particular copy of The Florist were left uncolored, the owner used the book to press actual plants. Many botanical works were heavily annotated, sometimes by several different owners, and pressed plants are often found in their pages. The Florist was produced “for the use & amusement of Gentlemen and Ladies”, but most subsequent coloring books were created with children in mind. By the nineteenth century, these books became increasingly popular. Although they helped children develop artistic skills, creativity was not particularly prized. In The Young Artist’s Coloring Guide, a series published in the 1850s, a fully-colored version accompanied the uncolored image, ostensibly to imitate. In Walter Crane’s Painting Book, originally published in 1880, there’s also color companions to copy, though one could argue in this case, they being from the hand of one of the nineteenth century’s greatest illustrators, such an approach made for a significantly more beautiful object and one likely enjoyed by adults as well as children. Crane wasn’t the only noted illustrator of the time to lend his name to such a book. A year earlier came The “Little Folks” Painting Book, published by the McLoughlin Brothers, with illustrations by noted artist Kate Greenaway. With no accompanying colored example to copy it was a bit less didactic than Crane’s but it still cautioned children to use a “fitting choice of colours”, and there was a pre-colored frontispiece which would have acted as a guide of sorts to the color scheme. Of course, in the case of these Victorian examples, and earlier offerings such as The Florist, the coloring-in is the very raison d’etre of the book. The early modern examples less so. Though that’s not to say a similar enjoyment was not taken by early modern readers wanting to colorize their wooducts or etchings, that same thrill of bringing color to what was once blank. It seems the therapeutic effects were not unnoticed at the time either. In his 1622 work The Compleat Gentleman Henry Peacham, in a chapter encouraging the practice of coloring-in printed maps, talks of how “the practise of the hand, doth speedily instruct the mind, and strongly confirme the memorie beyond any thing else.”2 As for the modern trend in adult coloring books, critics have charged marker-wielding grown-ups with being childish, and have alleged that the success of these books is a product of a dumbed-down culture. It may indeed be a fad, but it also has a longer history. So, the next time you buy an adult coloring book or get excited about Color Our Collections Week, know that you are not being childish. Rather, you are taking part in a long tradition of printed images that were meant to be colored. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 6, 2019

Melissa N. Morris and Zach Carmichael

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:14.513068

progress-in-play-board-games-and-the-meaning-of-history

Progress in Play Board Games and the Meaning of History By Alex Andriesse February 20, 2019 Players moving pieces along a track to be first to reach a goal was the archetypal board game format of the 18th and 19th centuries. Alex Andriesse looks at one popular incarnation in which these pieces progress chronologically through history itself, usually with some not-so-subtle ideological, moral, or national ideal as the object of the game. Ten thousand years ago, in the Neolithic period, before human beings began making pottery, we were playing games on flat stone boards drilled with two or more rows of holes.1 By the Early Dynastic Period in Ancient Egypt, three millennia later, board games were already represented in hieroglyphs. And on the wall of Nefertari’s tomb, built in the twelfth or thirteenth century BCE, someone painted the queen playing Senet, one of three Ancient Egyptian board games whose pieces have come down to us, along with Mehen and Hounds and Jackals. The ancient Greeks, for their part, had Tabula, an ancestor of backgammon; the Romans added Latrones, an ancestor of chess. All across the ancient Near East, people played the Game of Twenty Squares, while in ancient China they played Liubo and in ancient India Moksha Patam, which was rechristened Snakes and Ladders when colonials imported it to Britain in the Victorian era. Wherever there has been civilization, strange to say, there have been games played on boards. Until about the seventeenth century, these games tended to be traditional folk inventions that could not be traced back to a maker. Their boards were also relatively abstract, consisting of squares, triangles, spirals, or holes.2 With the advent of the Enlightenment and the rise of capitalism, however, the board games of Europe — like so much else on the continent — began to change. By the end of the eighteenth century, games were being produced for the marketplace promoting everything from ferry rides to colonial conquest. To appeal to consumers (a category of persons that had not previously existed), these games were made to be played on boards printed with pictures that represented specific places, people, and things. The artists who designed them strove to attract the public eye and capture the public imagination, appealing to the modern craving for what Walter Benjamin would call “novelty and shock”.3 A great many of these new picture games were racing games, like Snakes and Ladders or the Game of Goose, in which two or more players move their pieces around a formalized track according to the number dictated by “some form of random generator”, such as a spinning top or dice.4 Each track has its unique combination of safe squares, penalty squares, hazards, and shortcuts; but the objective of all racing games is the same — to arrive at the final square and be the first to remove one’s piece or pieces from the board. The subject matter and aesthetics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racing games ranged widely. The Dutch Stoomboots Spel (Steamboats Game), for example, is hand colored and charmingly childish, its figures and landscapes reminiscent of those you see in American folk portraits by Joseph H. Davis or Joseph Warren Leavitt. Intended to sell tickets on the Rotterdam–Dordrecht steamboat line, the game’s objective is as straightforward as can be — to reach the port of Dordrecht without being waylaid by various hazards, which (this being a “promotional tool” after all)5 are for the most part pleasant distractions: a glass of jenever, a cup of coffee, a carriage ride. The Pesthuis, or plague house, is the only ominous presence on the board. The New Game of Human Life, printed in London in 1790, is a far less convivial affair. Heavy on text — and even heavier on Protestant morality — the board is loosely modeled on the Game of Goose, which was well enough ensconced in the culture of late eighteenth-century Europe for Goethe to write that life itself was like a Game of Goose: The further you go, The sooner you reach the end, Where no one wants to be.6 Sure enough, the objective of The New Game of Life is to be the first player to become an old man, or, as the board would have it, “The Immortal Man who has existed 84 years . . . a Model for the Close of Life, which can end only by Eternity.” This can only be accomplished after the player has maneuvered his piece through eighty-three squares representing the seven periods of life, from Infancy to Dotage, possibly while being treated to “a few moral and judicious observations” (as the instructions suggest) along the way. A player could at least be certain of encountering no distracting glasses of jenever here. The concept of progress, in the general sense of forward motion, had long been central to board games, and countless games produced in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe continued to revolve around simple contests to reach a finish line. That finish line might be as close to home as the port of Dordrecht in the Stoombots Spel or as exotic as the North Pole in the Austro-Hungarian game Neueste Nordpol-Expedition, commemorating the polar expedition led by Carl Weyprecht and Julius Payer. Jules Verne’s international bestselling novel Around the World in Eighty Days, about Phileas Fogg — the headstrong English gentleman who, to win a bet, circumnavigates the globe in eighty days — lent itself very well to board-game adaptations. So did the American journalist Nellie Bly’s real-life attempt to beat the fictive Fogg at his own game, which she managed to do, traveling from New York to India and back in a mere seventy-three days. The concept of progress in the political sense worked its way into board games soon after the start of the French Revolution. The revolutionaries, not unlike the moralists behind The New Game of Life, were suspicious of the frivolity of games and wasted no time changing them to suit their own purposes. Considering these revolutionaries renamed the days and months, reconfigured the calendar, and recalculated the measurement of minutes and hours, the fact that they also decreed the king in the chess set would “henceforth be called le drapeau [the flag]” and requisitioned the blank backs of playing cards for “cataloguing the confiscated libraries of aristocrats” should probably come as no surprise.7 Two enterprising citizens, named Jaume and Dugourc, went so far as to redesign the entire deck of playing cards, eliminating the offensive images of kings, queens, and valets (jacks or knaves in the English deck) and replacing them with images of the Law, the Spirit of Peace, and the Freedom of the Press. The Jeu de la Révolution française, printed circa 1791 and, like The New Game of Life, modeled closely on the Game of Goose, propagandized for political progress, leading players through the major events of revolutionary history, starting with the storming of the Bastille and proceeding through the abolition of feudal rights, the de-Christianization of France, the September Massacres, and the killing of de Launy, Foulon, and Bertier, before coming to an end with the National Assembly at the Palladium of Liberty. If the game sounds a bit boring, it probably was — for all but the most ardent republicans. Play was enlivened by a few penalty squares, in which “idiot geese” (in the words of the board) wearing magistrates’ clothes and symbolizing the parliaments of the Old Regime, could delay the progress of a player’s piece just as surely as they could delay the progress of the French nation. Political progress is also at the center of things in the suspiciously subtitled The Chronological Star of the World, An Entertaining Game, published by John Marshall of London in 1818. Here, in 109 numbered pictures, beautifully printed in a star-shaped pattern of crescents, medallions, and leaves, the history of the world is told, as the scholar Ernst Strouhal writes, “not as a hodgepodge of stories but as a goal-oriented pursuit of progress, with achievements that bring humanity step by step to Reason.”8 Beginning with the Garden of Eden, the game ends when the first player lands on the central circle, which depicts a martial female figure holding a Union Jack shield and a sheet of paper that reads: “To the Glory of Britain Slave Trade Abolished.” Queen Victoria, who was born in 1819, a year after The Chronological Star of the World was published, conveniently filled the role of this figure in another, even more nationalist board game printed in London around 1860. In this case, the game takes the shape of a pyramid, ascending from the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel to the Roman invasion of Britain and the discovery of America — non sequitur mounting upon non sequitur until they reach their peak — the queen, surrounded by her family. The practice of making games to promote clean living and political progress (with that progress always culminating in an image of the government currently in power) persisted all through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The Soviet Union made particularly good use of board games, though in contrast to the French revolutionaries, who were so keen to have citizens rehearse and internalize the events of the revolution, the Soviets were generally more concerned with making sure that the newly urbanized peasantry learned the basics of health and hygiene. In the 1910s and 1920s, the state approved the manufacture of games such as Tuberculosis: A Proletarian Disease, Look After Your Health! The New Hygiene Game, and The Abandoned, in which “players had to round up homeless children and bring them to an orphanage.”9 Healthy Living, published in Moscow in 1926, is a game intended to promote awareness of syphilis, tuberculosis, alcoholism, and of the dangers of consulting folk healers rather than doctors. The objective is to be the healthiest worker possible, though oddly enough the hazards and penalties the player encounters most resemble those of the fun-loving Dutch Stoomboots Spel. Instead of being distracted from your destination by a warm cup of coffee or a fiery glass of jenever, however, you are penalized for consulting a folk healer (which lands you in the cemetery), drinking a beer at lunch (which lands you in a homeless shelter), or consorting with a strange woman (which gives you syphilis). Squares inform the player of various statistics (“forty-six percent of murders and sixty-three percent of robberies occur under the influence of alcohol”) and attempt to dispel popular medical misconceptions (“tuberculosis is not cured by medicine but by fresh air, sun and food”).10 The board, through its clever design, emphasizes that the worker’s health is in his own hands, just as the worker pictured holds the list of rules in one hand and a lever controlling the flywheels (both printed with the slogans imploring workers to take responsibility for improving the quality of their own lives) in the other. Though Healthy Living may look bizarre to many of us today, it can look no more bizarre than the American Game of Life or Monopoly, with their emphasis on the accumulation of capital, would have looked to a Russian proletarian. Games, like religion and song, have existed since before history began, and as with religion and song they are creations in which we cannot help but reveal our desires, prejudices, and fears. They may be overtly political, like the Jeu de la Révolution française, or they may unconsciously disclose cultural beliefs, like the obsession with speed evident in the Jules Verne and Nelly Bly games produced in nineteenth-century France, England, and America. But in every case they generate an alternate space in which people can play through the anxieties of their daily lives according to clearly established rules and, so long as there is no actual money on the line, without any fear of harm. “In a game,” writes Roberto Calasso, “one is aware of tension, yet the rite is still . . . detached from the world of fact, as if keeping itself two palm breadths above the ground.”11 It is little wonder that every variety of moral and political regime has put its stamp on a board game or two. There are few pursuits that so perfectly replicate our attempts to imagine the course of progress, which seems so sensible it ought to be inevitable but is nevertheless subject to chance. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 20, 2019

Alex Andriesse

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:14.878571

free-speech-and-bad-meats

Free Speech and Bad Meats The Domestic Labour of Reading in Milton’s Areopagitica By Katie Kadue September 27, 2023 Does a healthy intellectual culture resemble a battlefield or a kitchen? Revisiting Milton’s Areopagitica, a tract often championed by today’s free speech absolutists, Katie Kadue finds a debt to the work of early modern housewives. In their labours to preserve food and transform it into wholesome cuisine, Milton saw an analogue for how the reading public might digest books — good and bad alike — into nourishing ideas. When free speech crusaders go looking for cultural authorities to bolster their arguments, John Milton is often at the top of the Google search results. Milton’s 1644 tract Areopagitica, written in response to a 1643 act authorizing prepublication censorship, was ignored by Parliament at the time but has gone on to exert an outsize influence on Western liberalism, particularly debates over whether bad ideas deserve a hearing. John Stuart Mill was a fan; Supreme Court opinions cite it; a line from it is emblazoned in gold on the wall of the New York Public Library. Milton’s text is often name-dropped in support of sweeping arguments for the freedom of speech: that in the battlefield of ideas, truth will win out; that the good will out-evolve the bad in a Darwinian struggle; that sunlight will disinfect ideas that, if left to molder in the dark soil, would spread insidiously underground. Milton, most famous for writing an epic poem with a cosmic battle between good and evil at its heart, shares with our contemporary free speech rhetoricians a taste for the heroic: he thought that truth, in our fallen world, can only emerge through blood and tears, dust and heat. But as many scholars have pointed out, it requires some selective reading of Areopagitica — a sort of censorship, even — to make Milton into an unproblematic mouthpiece for free speech. For one thing, he had no problem with taking books off the market if they proved to be harmful post-publication, after their trial by readers.1 He also had a zero-tolerance policy when it came to “Popery”, because Catholicism “extirpats all religions and civill supremacies” and therefore “it self should be extirpat”, if other means of winning over “the weak and the misled” from Catholic clutches should fail. A less-discussed complication to free speech absolutists’ embrace of Milton is that the images he uses to describe the struggle between good and bad ideas are much stranger than the clichés we rely on today, and that this struggle’s protagonist is not so much truth itself but a community of readers who must, working both individually and collectively, strive to restore truth’s scattered body to the unbroken form it took before humanity’s fall into sinful ignorance. The paradise of unfallen knowledge, once enjoyed in Eden only to be lost through a fatal error in judgment, needs to be regained through hard cognitive work, in ways that can sound more tedious than triumphant. Milton’s metaphors often take us not to an epic battlefield but to humble domestic workspaces. Readers who turn to Areopagitica for fighting words might be disappointed to find that its overarching virtue is not the courage to enter into the flames of discourse but the much lamer — and tamer-sounding — virtue of temperance. “How great a vertue is temperance”, Milton exclaims, “how much of moment through the whole life of man?” Not, for most readers, his most inspired words. When it comes to reading, though, temperance is about being promiscuous instead of puritanical. It refers not to simple abstinence or restraint but rather to the active collection, from life experience as well as books, of “usefull drugs and materials wherewith to temper and compose effective and strong med’cins, which mans life cannot want.” This tempering, the mixing of diverse impressions, ideas, affects, and materials, is the recipe every Christian subject should follow, and it’s all part of God’s plan: “Wherefore did he creat passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly temper’d are the very ingredients of vertu?” Some of this metaphor’s strangeness arises from its affinity with a central activity of early modern housewives, who were tasked with mixing animal, vegetable, and mineral ingredients together to concoct home remedies in their kitchens — not the expected stomping grounds for anti-censorship warriors, then or now. The metaphor also calls to mind, blurring production and consumption, those combined ingredients’ digestion, which in early modern English shared a term with cooking: “concoction”. These ingredients may include bad books, which contain mild intoxicants; their false or harmful elements can train the reader’s immune response, like an inoculation, or work as a stimulant, prompting increased brain activity. The digestive metaphor explains why the publication of bad books should be nothing to worry about: To the pure, all things are pure, not only meats and drinks, but all kinde of knowledge whether of good or evill; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defil’d. For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evill substance; and yet God in that unapocryphall vision, said without exception, Rise Peter, kill and eat, leaving the choice to each mans discretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomack differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unappliable to occasions of evill. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. Preventing the publication of bad books is pointless because what matters isn’t the book, but the reader: just as someone with a weak stomach won’t be able to break down even the most healthful foods into nourishment, a bad person will get nothing out of even the best books. But here Milton’s metaphor itself breaks down, his polemical tract converted into a self-consuming digestive tract. “To the pure, all things are pure, not only meats and drinks, but all kinde of knowledge”. This implies that a strong stomach and a strong virtue alike can process any inputs that come their way, however polluted, much like, as Milton would later write in Paradise Lost, angels can alchemize coarse human food into ethereal substance. And yet, he’s forced to concede that even the healthiest constitution can’t do much with “bad meats”. (Milton’s eventual blindness was caused, he speculated, by vapors rising up from his stomach and clouding his eyes.) Still, he gamely continues, good people can do a lot with bad books, because of their capacity to convert these low-dose poisons into bioavailable material, making productive use of them “to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.” Books are like food, except when they’re not. The half-baked analogy is typical of Milton’s didacticism, which requires a judicious reader to exercise judgment rather than swallow a rhetorical morsel whole. The careful selection and tempering that virtuous reading requires adds up to a lot of labor; like a woman’s work, the task of distinguishing good from evil is never done. In another famous passage, the virtue of the Christian reader is rendered as a brave (feminine) soldier confronting evil in combat, but virtue’s ordeal is equally described as the tedious and pointless sorting of wheat, barley, poppy seeds, peas, lentils, and beans into separate piles, the impracticable but rather unherculean task to which Venus puts her prospective daughter-in-law in Greco-Roman myth: Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involv’d and interwoven with the knowledge of evill, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discern’d, that those confused seeds which were impos’d on Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixt. It was from out the rinde of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evill as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the World. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evill, that is to say of knowing good by evill. As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdome can there be to choose, what continence to forbeare without the knowledge of evill? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary. The martial rhetoric celebrating a singular soldier sits uncomfortably with the menial, unglamorous work of careful inventory, which can take a village. (In the myth, Psyche is only able to complete her task because an ant feels sorry for her and recruits the whole colony to help.) Even the recovery of prelapsarian Truth is figured as a specifically feminized and ultimately collective enterprise, modeled after “the carefull search of Isis”, the Egyptian goddess, “for the mangl’d body of Osiris”: Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his Apostles after Him were laid asleep, then strait arose a wicked race of deceivers, who as that story goes of the Ægyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewd her lovely form into a thousand peeces, and scatter’d them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the carefull search that Isis made for the mangl’d body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall doe, till her Masters second comming; he shall bring together every joynt and member, and shall mould them into an immortall feature of lovelines and perfection. Suffer not these licencing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue to do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyr’d Saint. What had previously been figured as a private and interior practice of gathering ingredients from the world and converting them into individual virtue is now a public and collective effort. The “sad friends of Truth” can only work together to put “her lovely form” (she is personified as an allegorical woman as well as a male god) back together again if they are free to scour every corner of the earth, including the pages of books that Parliament’s censorious licensers would prevent from publication. The images Milton draws together here are themselves surprisingly promiscuous, crossing gender as well as confessional lines: the virtuous truth-seeker is to imitate not Christ but a pagan goddess; the Protestant reader is to fetishize Truth’s body parts as a Catholic might worship a collection of relics. The bloody martyrs don’t stop there. In perhaps the pamphlet’s most well-known passage, from which the New York Public Library quotation was gleaned, Milton invokes a space that sounds a bit like a mausoleum, haunted by the souls of great men. Again we’re bombarded with dramatic and grandiose imagery: For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. . . . A good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life. . . . We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of publick men, how we spill that season’d life of man preserv’d and stor’d up in Books; since we see a kinde of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdome, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kinde of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elementall life, but strikes at that ethereall and fift essence, the breath of reason it selfe, slaies an immortality rather then a life. Milton conjures a picture of books as both imbued with mystical powers and vulnerable to the all-too-human impulse for violent destruction. Master spirits living their best “life beyond life” lie in danger of homicide; ethereal quintessence, reason itself, and immortality are all, somehow, at grave risk of death. To defend the right of books to be published without prior licensing is to stand strong against the angry mob that would carelessly spill this precious life-blood and destroy this spiritual wealth. These stirring notes are somewhat dampened, however, by a stubborn strain of ordinariness in Milton’s stock of images: these “not absolutely dead things” are “preserve[d] as in a violl”; “life-blood” is “imbalm’d and treasur’d up”, “season’d”, “preserv’d and stor’d up”. The repetitive references to preservation evoke the domestic rhythms of putting up preserves. Books are imagined as potent spirits, but the emphasis on storage solutions might locate them more comfortably in a home medicine cabinet, the domestic mingling with the epic as if both metaphorical registers were jostling together in the same glass vial. Or, put differently, the hyperbolic images of divine power and mass violence are repeatedly taken down to size, reduced into small-scale containers. The exemplary “good Booke” flickers in and out between the magical and the practical, between the alchemical and the merely medicinal. This kind of oscillation also appears in seventeenth-century descriptions of women’s pharmacopeia, such as this one in Ralph Knevet’s 1631 play Rhodon and Iris: “With limbecks, viols, pots, her Closet’s fill’d / Full of strange liquors by rare art distill’d”.2 Of course, what strikes this outside observer as “strange” or “rare” is perfectly perfunctory for anyone who knows her way around such a “closet”; the art of rarefying substances into simple waters or aquae compositae, where several ingredients were distilled and combined, was quite common. As the sixteenth-century advice author Thomas Tusser reminds his readers, every housewife should make sure she is fully stocked with a liquid library to stave off sickness: Good huswiues prouide, ere an sicknes do come,of sundry good things, in her house to haue some.Good Aqua composita, Vineger tart,Rose water & Treacle, to comfort the hart. . . .Conserue of the Barbery, Quinces & such,with Sirops that easeth, the sickly so much.3 In the context of domestic preservation, the tension in Milton’s metaphors starts to make more sense: the “life beyond life” that the spirits contained in books enjoy is secured not by a guarantee of immortality but by a contingent life support system. Their animation is suspended; their shelf life depends on the continued preservative labors of readers. It’s a bit like how, in his first published poem in 1630, Milton eulogizes Shakespeare by locating his tomb not in a bunch of “pilèd stones” but in the hearts and minds of readers who have kept his legacy alive: “Thou in our wonder and astonishment / Hast built thy self a live-long Monument”, the length of the monument’s life dependent on the lives of readers.4 Milton thus translates what we might be tempted to read as a total transubstantiation (flesh to word) into a physical and approximate process, “the living labours of publick men” clinging to a vegetative existence as “not absolutely dead” books. Books are different from living things in degree rather than in kind, so that immortality is tempered into longevity, the forbidden fruit of idolatry refigured as the quince conserve of early modern domestic pharmacopoeia. Readers, too, will have to manage their expectations about what books can do for their souls. Reading, as much as writing, is in practice — and it really is about practice — closer to the everyday, merely life-prolonging concoction of medicines, home remedies, and human digestion than immortality-seeking experiments in alchemy. The necessary but undignified work of refining useful material from dross, so that it could be made accessible and then preserved, was at the heart of early modern intellectual life, in the daily labors of scholars, editors, anthologists, and commentators who, like so many mythic ants, sorted choice seeds out of dusty manuscripts. The Dutch scholar Erasmus compared this work to digging for gold in a dunghill. Many compilers of early modern printed commonplace books and florilegia — collections of “flowers” of wisdom and rhetoric gathered from a variety of books — understood their work to be both vital to intellectual life and deadening in its banality. Theodor Zwinger, a physician and botanist as well as a compiler, made the analogy between bad books and bad plants clear: “There is no herb so vile that it does not contain something useful.” But he also called the work of compilation “Sisyphean” and “improbus”, the word Virgil famously uses to describe the unrelenting labor that conquers all in his Georgics.5 Anthologies were not meant to be retentive once and for all: their techniques of holding diverse pieces of textual material in variously organized suspensions, as if in vials, aimed to inspire rather than obviate similar repetitive labors in their readers. Their goal was to model and thus reproduce their own reproductive labor, to preserve material only so that it can be preserved again. The tempering activity of continuously reforming and reformulating language and material may indeed result, eventually, in the restoration of truth in all (or at least, until the Second Coming, a good portion of) her glory, but truth can’t survive her day in the sun on her own. The free speech warriors of today who repeat the cliché that bad ideas must be uprooted and exposed to the purifying light of the sun could take some lessons in metaphor from Milton. The dark soil where, in this cliché, bad ideas have been driven underground to fester might be better understood as the laboratory for truth; like subterranean microorganisms, readers break down ideas from books, composting them into loam that’s both individually beneficial and collectively productive, so that truth — like a plant sprouting from that teeming, now nutrient-rich soil — may flourish. In this way, Milton’s conception of free speech in the 1640s anticipates the varied style, some twenty years later, of Paradise Lost. The critic Christopher Ricks notes that most modern critics have emphasized the power, the grandiosity, and the sublimity of Milton’s poetic style, but in Ricks’ account, that style is most notable for its delicacy, or perhaps, its power comes from its delicacy. As Ricks puts it, “the balance of Milton’s Grand Style” is “the result of a strength manifesting itself in innumerable tiny, significant, internal movements”.6 In the terms of Areopagitica, the strength of a reading public is the result not of the free circulation of ideas in itself, but rather of the careful, even microscopic, study of those ideas by readers. A healthy intellectual culture might look more like a gut microbiome than a battlefield. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 27, 2023

Katie Kadue

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:15.337786

darwins-diagrams-of-plant-movement

“Spontaneous Revolutions” Darwin’s Diagrams of Plant Movement By Natalie Lawrence October 26, 2022 After weeks of watching young tendrils slowly corkscrew their way toward the sun, Charles Darwin set about inventing a system for making botanic motion visible to the naked eye. Natalie Lawrence delves into a lesser-known chapter of the naturalist’s research, discovering revelations about the vegetal world that remain neglected to this day. One day in 1863, during a long, hot summer, Charles Darwin wrote a letter to his close friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker. He related: “I am getting very much amused by my tendrils— it is just the sort of niggling work that suits me”.1 Darwin had spent the preceding weeks confined to bed at his home in Down House, laid low by an unpleasant bout of eczema. His usual fervent energy for research and correspondence had been frustrated by incapacity. He found solace in turning attention to the inhabitants of his bedchamber: houseplants. Darwin spent hours each day simply watching the young cucumber plants grow from the pots on his windowsills, observing how they explored the world around them seeking for things to climb up. It happened to be a very rewarding pastime. In his normal state of constant activity, Darwin would not have had the time to watch plants at plant pace. But, forced to slow down and exist at a different speed, he had become entranced. The genesis of this interest in tendrils occurred when Darwin read a short paper in 1862 by Asa Gray, a botanist at Harvard. His “Note on the coiling of tendrils” in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences described the sensitivity of growing plant tendrils to touch.2 With his imagination captured by this prospect, Darwin wrote to Gray saying “I should like to try a few experiments on your Tendrils; I wonder what would be good & easy plant to raise in pot”.3 Gray sent him seeds of two climbing plants: the bur cucumber (Sicyos angulatus) and wild mock cucumber (Echinocystis lobata), which Darwin could plant in the spring to begin his observations. Gray did warn, however, that whilst the mock cucumber was “genteel”, the bur cucumber was “as nasty and troublesome” as any plant he knew, so Darwin would have to watch it closely.4 Though the “troublesome” bur cucumbers failed to germinate, the mock cucumbers did well, becoming Darwin’s companions and silent interlocutors by his sick bed. They proved surprisingly charismatic. He reported back to Gray that: “I am observing the plant in another respect, namely the incessant rotatory movement of the leading shoots, which bring the tendrils into contact with any body within a circle of a foot or 20 inches in diameter”.5 The circling movement was a surprise to Darwin: these tendrils were more than just sensitive. They seemed to have a mysterious method by which to explore the world around them and find ways to climb up to the light. He called the “spontaneous revolutions” that the plants made “circumnutation” (from the Latin circum, “round”, and nutare, “to nod”). Darwin thought he had discovered something new — a phenomenon he’d never seen described in detail. In his letters, Darwin asked Hooker for more exotic species to observe as he healed and recovered his strength and ordinarily boundless energy. He carefully tended the plants that Hooker sent, adding them to the potted cucumbers and clematis vines that were strung along his indoor windows. They grew to weave a green tapestry in front of the panes, thrusting their leaves out to bathe in the incoming light. After four months captivated indoors with and by the tendrils, Darwin had his chair moved outside. He sat in fields of hops for hours, watching their shoots seek out supports and climb them. He began to play with the growth of the plants that he watched. By attaching small weights to them to test their movements, or marking their bodies, Darwin could monitor what they were doing, even when he wasn’t constantly watching. Much of botany in Britain at this time was focused on taxonomy. Yet Darwin wanted to do more than name and classify plants. He wanted to find new ways of looking at plants, to see them on their terms. And what he found was remarkable.6 Some of his plants genuinely surprised him. For example, to understand how parasitic dodder plants, Cuscuta pentagona, looked for supports, he placed upright poles nearby for them to find. The shoots would perform slow circling sweeps as they grew. When encountering a stick, a plant “slowly and gradually slid up the stick, so as to become more and more highly inclined”. But, after a time, “the shoot suddenly bounded from the stick and fell over to the opposite side” before returning to the support and sliding up it.7 These plants were doing something complex, and sometimes rather fast. Darwin was delighted with what he observed, waxing lyrical to his son William: “My hobby-horse at present is Tendrils; they are more sensitive to a touch than your finger; & wonderfully crafty & sagacious”.8 It was only when Darwin reported back to Gray about the circling movements that he realised he had rather put the cart before the horse. Gray brought him roughly down to Earth, making it clear that what Darwin saw was rather common knowledge to some researchers. The rotating movements of climbing plants like cucumbers had been described in the published literature several times. Darwin, in his enthusiasm and bedridden summer frenzy, neglected to do his background reading. When he did, pointed in the right direction by Gray, the naturalist realised that “the cream” of his observations had already been published by others, chastening him considerably.9 He wrote in a later publication: “My observations were more than half completed before I became aware that the surprising phenomenon of the spontaneous revolutions of the stems and tendrils of climbing plants had been long ago observed”.10 Darwin was no ordinary naturalist. He saw that, though circumnutation was not a new observation, scientists lacked any kind of understanding about how it happened, or what the plant was actually doing with this movement. He wanted to delve deeper. The tendrils might be “crafty and sagacious”, but just how crafty and sagacious they were — that was the fascinating question. Keen-eyed Darwin could spend all day watching plants grow, but there was the unavoidable fact that he had an animal sensory system that was not geared to observe plant growth precisely. How could he record and understand these movements in a way which might reveal what was going on? Nobody else had solved this problem, and the naturalist came up with an ingenious method. Darwin developed a way of recording the movements of individual parts of plants as they grew and rotated through space. He placed a plant between a sheet of paper and a glass plate and marked a reference point on the paper, attaching a thin wire to a particular part of the plant, such as a leaf or bud. He made recordings at regular intervals by lining up the end of this filament with the fixed reference point, and then marking its position on the glass plate. Seeing Darwin’s strange, angular drawings without any context, it would be easy to think that they might be the tracks of a small animal — a woodlouse, beetle, or perhaps a mouse with a short attention span. They seem like the staccato perambulations of a creature that does not have a clear purpose, rambling across the paper. But that is because these are static, two-dimensional renderings of movements that occurred in three dimensions. After many hours during which multiple points were recorded, Darwin could then trace the plant’s movement over time by connecting the dots on the plate in order. In this way, he made the movement visible to the naked eye. Darwin could even magnify movements by varying the distance between the plate and the plant. By moving it further away, he increased the angle at which the points aligned to his eye, thus stretching small movements across larger distances on the plate. In the days before time-lapse photography and cinematography, this was an incredibly creative way of capturing plant movement to make it meaningful for humans. Plants look static to the naked eye, but all of their parts move in swaying circles: from tendrils and roots to blooms and leaves. With his new method, Darwin was able to accurately trace the movements of hundreds of plants and their individual parts, detailing their circular explorations with staggered lines. He pioneered an understanding of plant “habits”. Unlike the taxonomists concerned with what categories to put different species in, Darwin saw that when plants made changes in their physical positions, or grew into different shapes, what they were doing was really behaviour, not unlike that of animals. The difference was, animals moved rapidly, and from place to place. Plants grew slowly and moved primarily by growing.11 It was not long before Darwin compiled his observations, including those using the glass plate method, into a substantial 118-page monograph. He presented it to the Linnaean Society in 1865, publishing under the title On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants. In the text, Darwin linked plant movement to his evolutionary theory: plants were sensitive to their environments and used this sensitivity to guide their growth in order to survive and reproduce more successfully: Plants become climbers, in order, it may be presumed, to reach the light, and to expose a large surface of leaves to its action and to that of the free air. This is effected by climbers with wonderfully little expenditure of organized matter, in comparison with trees, which have to support a load of heavy branches by a massive trunk. Hence, no doubt, it arises that there are in all quarters of the world so many climbing plants belonging to so many different orders.12 Many different lineages of plants had developed this method of cheating the system, from plants like cucumbers that wound tendrils around supports, to others such as clematis, that “hooked” on objects. Both were techniques that allowed plants with wisp-like stems to hitch-hike up towards the sun without investing in a trunk or rigid stem.13 Darwin’s work went down a storm. Benjamin Dann Walsh, a prominent entomologist in the Linnaean Society, for example, wrote that “this discovery of their sweeping circles & groping in the dark for support, like a blind Cyclops, is very astonishing”.14 Even non-scientists such as the Queen’s chaplain, Charles Kingsley, enthused: “Ah that I could begin to study Nature anew, now that you have made it to me a live thing; not a dead collection of names”.15 Additional material was sent in from naturalists further afield who read the monograph, prompting Darwin to work on a second, expanded edition, which he published in 1875. He didn’t stop there. Assisted by his son Francis, Darwin carried out extensive further experiments on the movements of plants. One of his key insights was that “all the more important great classes of movements are due to the modification of a kind of movement common to all parts of all plants from their earliest youth”.16 The nascent movements of adult plants could be seen right from their seedling stages, from sensitivity to light and other external stimuli, to their “sleep” behaviours, which revealed a kind of circadian rhythm. Darwin published The Power of Movement in Plants in 1880 with much effort. It had grown into a weighty manuscript, which he found a “horrid bore” to revise for publication.17 It was, however, the culmination of his life’s work on plants and the penultimate book that Darwin published. It was followed only by The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms a year later. Darwin’s observations became the basis of how we now understand the physiology and behaviour of climbing plants. Beyond the climbers, Darwin laid the foundations for the study of plant behaviour and intelligence. Even today, this remains an idea that is uncomfortable for some people. Though we now have time-lapse cameras and blue-chip nature documentaries that exhibit plant lives as vibrantly and dramatically as any footage of fauna, it’s hard to break out of our animal-focused view of the world. Darwin’s work showed that the centuries-old presumption “that animals moved & plants did not” was entirely wrong, a matter of perception that could be overcome.18 Yet this awareness is still not nearly as widespread as it should be. Why is this? Some plants, such as mimosa or Venus fly traps, have very specific, seemingly responsive movements that are hard for animal senses to ignore. But most plant behaviour, which may even betray an intelligence that we are only just starting to investigate, goes totally unnoticed. What Darwin really did was see plants in a new way: to look from their perspective and observe how their movement and behaviour benefitted them. It was a project which he never quite put down. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 26, 2022

Natalie Lawrence

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:16.032687

colonizing-the-cosmos

Colonizing the Cosmos Astor’s Electrical Future By Iwan Rhys Morus September 14, 2022 During America’s Gilded Age, the future seemed to pulse with electrical possibility. Iwan Rhys Morus follows the interplanetary safari that is John Jacob Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds, a high-voltage scientific romance in which visions of imperialism haunt a supposedly “perfect” future. If we time travelled back to America’s Gilded Age, the closing decades of the nineteenth century, what would the future look like? The economy was booming as cities expanded and industrialization gathered pace. Railways spread across the country, fuelling westward expansion with the opening of the First Transcontinental Railway in 1869. European investors flooded this growing market as they jostled to cash in on American prosperity, and American speculators made their own fortunes, too. Day by day, the United States seemed to be accelerating into the future promised by industry. Nikola Tesla, reminiscing in later years about his 1884 arrival in New York, remembered thinking that America was “more than one hundred years AHEAD of Europe and nothing has happened to this day to change my opinion.”1 This new tomorrow was to arise through the power of innovation. In 1876, Americans celebrated a century of independence with the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The huge Corliss steam engine that dominated the main exhibition building was forty-five feet tall and, through a series of shafts more than a mile in length, powered almost every other machine present. At this same event, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was exhibited for the first time. And American ingenuity showed no signs of abating. Almost twenty years later, viewing Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, commentators believed they were seeing the stuff of which the future would be made — it was “a shining vision, serenely awaiting the admiration of the world”.2 What did the privileged elite of the Gilded Age, those who often funded and stood to profit most from this vision, make of all this? How would they think about their own place in the future that technological ambition and innovation seemed to offer? Luckily, one of them told us exactly how he imagined the century to come. In 1894, New York publishers D. Appleton and Company released A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future, written by John Jacob Astor IV, one of America’s wealthiest men. The Astor clan had originally made their fortune in the fur trade, and had added to their millions through investment in land and property. In 1897, John Jacob would build the Astoria Hotel in New York, next door to the Waldorf, owned by his cousin William. The hotel was both a symbol of the Astor family’s wealth and a honeypot for New York’s fashionables (Tesla himself lived there until he was turfed out for failing to pay his bills). It’s Astor’s authorship that makes the book such a fascinating insight into the Gilded Age’s fantasies about its prosperous tomorrows. A Journey in Other Worlds is an example of what was once called “scientific romance”. The thriving genre was not only published in book form, but also in popular magazines aimed at a middle-class readership. Publications such as Cassell’s Magazine, Pearson’s Magazine, or the Strand (where Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared) allowed readers to discover scientific romances about strange new inventions, machines that could think, and travels in space. Some of Astor’s readers might, for example, have been familiar with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, written a couple of decades earlier and featuring a superhuman race of subterranean, electricity-harnessing beings. They would have read Jules Verne’s fantastic tales of adventurers journeying to the centre of the earth, or descending two thousand leagues under the sea. They might have read Edward Page Mitchell’s short story, “The Ablest Man in the World”, in the New York Sun, about a man with an artificial brain. And in the same year as Astor’s book was published, readers could have encountered Gustavus W. Pope’s Journey to Mars the Wonderful World. That is to say, Astor’s tale would have been familiar territory for his readers, though presumably their knowledge that its author was one of the world’s richest men gave it an added edge of interest. Written at the end of a century, the story was set in the year 2000: the beginning of a new millennium. It describes a world transformed by technology, awash with free energy. The novel’s protagonists are already on their way to Jupiter in its opening chapter, relaxing in the aftermath of the triumphant campaign to straighten the Earth’s axis, doing away with the inconvenience of seasons. Readers are treated to a potted history of the past century, including how the world’s politics had been transformed, before following their heroes on a jaunt through space. Astor’s future ran on electricity. There was nothing novel about this. His readers would have found any other choice peculiar, to say the least, for everyone knew that the future would be electrical. As early as the 1830s, pundits were enthusiastically predicting the day when “half a barrel of blue vitriol, and a hogshead or two of water” (the constituents of an electric battery) would be enough to fuel a ship crossing the Atlantic.3 By the time Astor was writing in 1894, electric power cables were already festooning the streets of many American and European cities, and a scheme to generate electricity from the Niagara falls was under way, with Astor as one of the directors. George Forbes, the project’s consultant engineer, boasted that visitors would “see a whole new world created”.4 And Nikola Tesla was busily trying to persuade investors — including Astor himself — to back his grandiose plans to distribute electrical energy without wires across the globe. Electricity was the fuel of choice for scientific romancers. What’s particularly remarkable about Astor’s vision is the sheer detail. It was all very carefully imagined. This is a future in which “[e]lectricity in its varied forms does all work, having superseded animal and manual labour in everything, and man has only to direct.”5 Everywhere, electricity is generated by the power of wind and water; the “electrical energy of every thunderstorm is also captured and condensed in our capacious storage batteries”; the “windmill and dynamo thus utilize bleak mountain-tops that, till their discovery, seemed to be but indifferent successes in Dame Nature’s domain.”6 Renewable electricity is used to “run our electric ships and water-spiders, railways, and stationary and portable motors, for heating the cables laid along the bottom of our canals to prevent their freezing in winter, and for almost every conceivable purpose.”7 Everyone has a windmill on their roof. Astor offered his readers a blueprint for the coming century that laid out how they would get from their present to the electrical future. “This period — A. D. 2000”, one of his characters says, “is by far the most wonderful the world has as yet seen.”8 The wonder was the result of science and technology, of course, and all that plentiful electrical energy. It’s no surprise that Tesla thought (wrongly, as it turned out) that Astor would be an easy touch for cash to fund his dreams of wireless power. The spread of republican ideals in the aftermath of the French Revolution more than two centuries earlier, and the great advances in science that accompanied it, meant that “education has become universal, for women as well as for men, and this is more than ever a mechanical age.”9 Astor’s future was the end-point of the inexorable march of progress. Science had generated “this perfection of civilization”.10 It was only a perfect civilization for some, however. In the same year that Astor published A Journey in Other Worlds, women suffragists presented an unsuccessful petition with almost 600,000 signatures at the New York State Constitutional Convention, while the United States Supreme Court passed the Civil Rights Repeal Act, overturning congressional protections for the voting rights of Black Americans. The inequalities of Astor’s present remain largely unaddressed in his vision of the future, and in some respects are hideously amplified. While women benefit from universal education, there is no mention of suffrage, and the physicians of the future are solely “serious and thoughtful men”, whose research finds “the physique, especially of women, . . . wonderfully improved”.11 Meanwhile, Astor’s twentieth century is primarily shaped by white Anglophones conquering every region of the planet. A Journey in Other Worlds cannot imagine a future that is not built from colonial violence. Astor’s novel describes how, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, continental Europe descended into a perpetual state of warlike antagonism between the great powers of France, Germany, and Russia, whilst England “preserved a wise and profitable neutrality”.12 One result was a technological arms race as the competing nations developed larger and deadlier armaments. Metallurgy flourished in the search for advanced weaponry; chemists developed better explosives; and the invention of flying machines made them all too dangerous to use. “These tremendous sacrifices for armaments, both on land and water, had far reaching results, and, as we see it now, were clouds with silver linings”, says Astor’s future historian.13 The great war never came, and the continental rivals stagnated in perpetual stalemate: “the rival nations had their pains for nothing, or, rather, for others than themselves.”14 The other result was mass-migration, as weary Europeans left the continent and its antagonisms for better lives elsewhere. At the same time, the “jealousy of the Continental powers for one another” put a stop to these nations’ dreams of empire, leaving the world free for exploitation by Britain and the United States.15 English was on its way to becoming a universal language, through eradication rather than acquisition. “Spanish and Portuguese elements in Mexico and Central and South America show a constant tendency to die out”, reports Dr. Cortlandt with sinister ambiguity.16 And the perished residents of these regions are gradually replaced by the supposedly “more progressive Anglo-Saxons”, making “the study of ethnology in the future. . . very simple”.17 By the end of the twentieth century, Canada had joined a United States that now spread over both North and South America. Britain in the meantime had free rein to assimilate much of Africa and Asia into the British Empire (Astor was writing during the Scramble for Africa). Due to improvements in condenser technologies, allowing water to be made from air, “mile after mile of Africa has been won for the uses of civilization”, and “the erstwhile ‘Dark Continent’ has a larger white population now than North America had a hundred years ago”.18 That was the “perfect” world from which Astor’s protagonists set out on their jaunt to the planets — a future that reflected the Gilded Age elite’s fantasies of empire and colonial settlement. Their planetary encounters would be similarly revealing. As far as his characters were concerned, their own world had reached perfection and it was time to embark for the stars: the next stage in humanity’s manifest destiny. The spaceship built by Colonel Bearwarden — president of the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company — and his companions is called the Callisto (the name of Jupiter’s second largest moon). Constructed entirely from beryllium, an electrically-conductive element, the ship is powered by apergy: a term that had been invented by the author of scientific romances Percy Greg, in his 1880 story Across the Zodiac, to describe a kind of anti-gravitational force. Astor is vague about how exactly his version of apergy works, but the implication is that it operated through some kind of modification of electricity. Bearwarden chooses Jupiter and Saturn as the expedition’s ultimate destination, planets that seem to offer the best prospects for human habitation and colonization. “I am convinced”, he says, “that we shall find Jupiter habitable for intelligent beings who have been developed on a more advanced sphere than itself, though I do not believe it has progressed far enough in its evolution to produce them.”19 The belief that life existed on other planets was widespread throughout the nineteenth century. And the notion that the various planets of the solar system might be at different stages of evolution was also a common one in scientific romances (H. G. Wells would use it in his War of the Worlds just a few years later, for example). As far as the adventurers on the Callisto are concerned, the planet’s primitiveness made it an ideal space for human conquest — almost as if it had been made for them. In due course, they are off, with great pomp and circumstance — flags waving and a twenty-one-gun salute ringing in their ears. The space through which Astor propelled them was increasingly familiar territory by the 1890s. They whiz past the Moon: “[t]here was something awe-inspiring in the vast antiquity of that furrowed lunar surface, by far the oldest thing that mortal eye can see”.20 That lunar surface had been photographed as early as the 1840s and was exhaustively mapped by the 1890s. They pass by Mars and its two satellites. As with the Moon, Astor’s readers would probably have been quite familiar with the Martian surface. Given Giovanni Schiaparelli’s and Percival Lowell’s observations of canals on Mars, it is perhaps surprising that his travellers do not spot any. They do, however, see a comet, and even take a ride inside its tail. And they pass through the asteroid belt, finding an atmosphere: “oceans and continents, with mountains, forests, rivers, and green fields”.21 ※※Indexed under…MarsTravel to Flying at last over the surface of Jupiter, the crew of the Callisto marvel at the “towering and massive mountains” and “smoking volcanoes”.22 Heading west, they see “gently rolling plains, and table-lands that would have satisfied a poet or set an agriculturalist’s heart at rest”.23 Their response to these sights is revealing of what Astor thought the planets were really for: “‘How I should like to mine those hills for copper, or drain the swamps to the south!’ exclaimed Col. Bearwarden.”24 Jupiter was a future Africa or American west — a space deemed ripe for exploitation. “Not even did Columbus, standing at the prow of the Santa Maria, the New World before him, feel the exultation and delight of these latter-day explorers of the twenty-first century.”25 Saturn, on the other hand, is an abode of the dead. Spiritualism and theosophy were all the rage in fashionable American society during the 1890s, and Astor was not the only one to play with the idea that the planets might represent higher spiritual planes. A few years later, Louis Pope Gratacap would devote an entire novel to the proposition that Mars was inhabited by the dead, who could be communicated with using wireless telegraphy. In this case, the presence of spirits does not prevent the Callisto’s crew from continuing their interplanetary safari. When they eventually return to Earth, they might be spiritually elevated, but they are also well aware of new worlds still to conquer: “Remember, we have been to neither Uranus, nor Neptune, nor Cassandra, which may be as interesting as anything we have seen”, Bearwarden says, taking leave of his fellow-travellers, “should you want to take another trip, count me as your humble servant.”26 A Journey in Other Worlds is a fascinating and revealing novel, which tells us a good deal about the way in which Astor and his readers viewed their future. This is important, because even though the future did not entirely match their fantasies, those fantasies were still key to making the modern world. It’s a future saturated with technology, and electrical technology in particular. Electricity is what makes Astor’s future world go round — literally, in fact, since it was electricity that Astor imagined pumping water back and forth between the poles to fulfil the peculiar ambition of righting the Earth’s axis and eliminating the seasons. This was the future projected by inventor-entrepreneurs like Tesla, too, and embodied in World’s Fairs. Astor’s story offers insight into just how seductive this vision of the future was to the Gilded Age’s privileged elites. It's striking that the novel’s protagonists are men clearly modelled on Astor himself. They are powerful and wealthy, the heads of corporations and committed to technological futurism. ※※Indexed under…PoleRighting the Earth's axial More striking still, though, is the theme of empire. Bearwarden and his crew were heading to Jupiter for a specific kind of adventure. Jupiter’s exotic “Jurassic or Mesozoic” creatures, or Saturn’s “dragons” were just big game, as far as they were concerned. This was space travel as safari. But like Victorian big game hunters and explorers in Africa — both real and fictional — even as they bagged their trophies, they were casting covetous eyes over the landscape, too. Jupiter and Saturn (and presumably the other planets in due course) are places to be colonized. They were places where farms might be established, mines sunk, and resources extracted. They are different in scale, but not in kind, from how Astor’s novel envisions continents such as South America and Africa in the twentieth century: blank canvases, shorn of subjects, on which to paint dreams of supremacy. As things turned out, of course, Astor never came anywhere near the future he imagined. He died on April 15, 1912, the richest victim on the Titanic. But it’s clear that the future he imagined and wrote about was a future tailored for men like him. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 14, 2022

Iwan Rhys Morus

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:16.271288

musee-dupuytren-catalogue

Displaying the Dead The Musée Dupuytren Catalogue By Daisy Sainsbury November 22, 2022 When Paris’ infamous museum of anatomical pathology closed its doors in 2016, a controversial collection disappeared from view. Daisy Sainsbury explores the history of the Musée Dupuytren, and asks what an ethical future might look like for the human specimens it held. For years, the Musée Dupuytren in Paris was the site of an unusual pilgrimage. Students, medics, linguists, and neuroscientists would travel to the city of lights in search of Louis Victor Leborgne. Not the actual Leborgne – he had died in 1861 – but his brain, which had been sealed in a glass jar, preserved in a fixative solution, and displayed on a shelf at eye level in this museum of anatomical pathology. A brain in a jar, you might think, looks like any other brain in a jar. Yet Leborgne’s brain was of particular historical importance. Raised in Moret-sur-Loing, a commune known for its tanneries, the former craftsman had suffered from aphasia for most of his adult life: he could understand everything he heard, but, whenever he tried to speak, the only thing Leborgne could say was a single, non-sensical syllable: “tan”. Leborgne became a patient of the French physician Paul Broca, and when he died aged fifty-one, Broca conducted an autopsy. The doctor found a lesion on the left frontal lobe, which supported his theory that speech production was localized (in what is now known as Broca’s Area). This revolutionised our understanding of language and its disorder, and, by cementing the idea that cognitive functions could be mapped to specific parts of the brain, laid the foundations of modern neuroscience. A visitor to the Musée Dupuytren did not have to be a neuroscientist to appreciate the museum’s collections. Since its inauguration in 1835, members of the public came to gaze at skeletons and pickled body parts, skulls impaled by metal rods, anatomical wax models depicting rare defects and diseases — and, in the process, discover something of the history contained in this morbid cabinet of curiosities. During the nineteenth century, when a trip to the Paris Morgue represented a fun day out for the family, the museum pulled in large crowds with an appetite for the gruesome and the grotesque. Visitor numbers, while not publicly available, are thought to have dwindled over time. During the 1990s, concerns began to grow about the future of the museum. This intensified in the decades that followed as museums in France and abroad came under increased scrutiny for some of the objects in their collections. The debate originally centred around artworks and artefacts obtained during colonial rule, but soon extended to a broader discussion about the ethics of exhibiting human remains. It was not a complete surprise, then, when the Musée Dupuytren announced it would be closing its doors for good in 2016 — officially, because the premises had fallen into a state of disrepair and did not meet accessibility requirements. Its collections were transferred to the basement of the Sorbonne University’s Pierre and Marie Curie campus where they can now be visited by students and researchers exclusively on request. There are currently no plans for the museum to reopen. Anyone wanting to discover more about the Musée Dupuytren and its contribution to the history of medical science must make do with Charles-Nicolas Houel’s Catalogue des pièces du musée Dupuytren (Catalogue of artefacts in the Dupuytren Museum).1 This five-volume inventory, published between 1877 and 1880, detailed the six thousand or so specimens in the museum’s collection at the time, accompanied by some eighty-five black-and-white photographs.2 The museum was founded from a bequest by Guillaume Dupuytren (1777–1835). Dupuytren was a celebrated surgeon, anatomist, trepanning enthusiast, and doctor to Napoleon Bonaparte, whose haemorrhoids he allegedly treated. Although little-known today, his name crops up time and time again in nineteenth-century literature. He appears in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and Dictionnaire des idées réçues (1911–1913), and counted Flaubert’s father as one of his medical students. Among his patients was Marie-Henri Beyle, otherwise known as Stendhal. The two men belonged to the same masonic lodge and the novelist would send him copies of his books, before their friendship swiftly cooled — the fate of many, if not most, of Dupuytren’s relationships. But it was Balzac who made real space in his literary oeuvre for this figurehead of scientific progress. In La Comédie humaine, the writer’s interlinked collection of more than one hundred novels, short stories, and essays, Dupuytren appears under the guise of the fictional surgeon Desplein, trepanning the eponymous hero in the novel Pierrette (1840) and operating on Madame Mignon’s cataracts in Modeste Mignon (1844). In 1836’s La Messe de l’athée (The Atheist’s Mass), Balzac dedicates an entire short story to unpicking the contradictions of this “transient genius” who “flashed across science like a meteor”.3 He is depicted as coming from humble beginnings, hauling himself up the social ladder thanks to his unbridled ambition and a propensity for hard work. “His enemies”, Balzac wrote, “attacked his odd moods and his temper whereas, in fact, he was simply characterized by what the English call eccentricity”.4 Balzac’s is a somewhat generous take. The real-life Dupuytren’s “moods” were well-documented, and while jealousy may have played a role, he was on most accounts power-hungry, tyrannical with his students, and scornful of mediocrity. He suffered from a persecution complex and was so eager for control that he dictated the findings of his own autopsy in advance.5 After Dupuytren’s death, the museum’s collection grew from 1,000 artefacts (mostly bone specimens) to the 6,000 inventoried in Houel’s 1877–1880 Catalogue, and now amounts to over 15,000 items in the Sorbonne’s basement archives. Donations came from medical societies such as the Anatomical Society of Paris, famous physicians like Broca and Dominique-Jean Larrey, but also many lesser-known surgeons hoping to secure their place in history through their inclusion in the museum. With specimens dating from 1752 to the 1920s, the collection charts a key period in the history of medicine, where the pace of development was unprecedented. They attest to the explosion in research on patients and their cadavers in the wake of the French Revolution, when hospital regulation was minimal. Animals, too, were subjected to this appetite for experimentation. The Catalogue describes transplants and amputations performed on rabbits, dogs, and guinea pigs, all of which either died shortly after or were “sacrifié” (“sacrificed”) to expedite the subsequent autopsy. The Catalogue reflects the range of treatments available to patients over time – some surprisingly advanced, others markedly less so. One entry refers to the skull of a young woman who, after suffering concussive episodes brought on by a fall, was trepanned no less than nine times — and this, before the widespread use of anaesthesia.6 Other entries describe successful operations that nonetheless resulted in death from ensuing infections, as antiseptics were not used in surgery until 1865. More recent additions to the collection demonstrate the tentative beginnings of medical technologies. A hand, preserved in fixative in the early 1910s, exhibits gangrene resulting from exposure to radiation without proper protection. After Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895, X-ray machines were quickly rolled out, not only in the medical domain but in shops and fairgrounds too, where paying customers could have a go on this new-fangled apparatus, returning home with scans of their skulls and the contents of their handbags. In the time it took to discover the harmful effects of radiation, many pioneering radiologists and shop-floor operators alike presented with similar injuries. In parallel, the Dupuytren collection demonstrates what uses medical imaging was put to: X-rays taken during World War I show how neurologists Jules Dejerine and Augusta Dejerine-Klumpke were able to locate and extract bullets and shrapnel from wounded soldiers. Many of the pathologies described in Houel’s Catalogue are now increasingly rare. Rates of syphilis, typhoid, tuberculosis, and rickets have dropped substantially in most parts of the world thanks to new treatments or improved diet, sanitation, and living conditions. Smallpox — a deadly epidemic in eighteenth-century France — was last detected in 1977. Likewise, many of the gravest birth defects listed in the Catalogue are now picked up early during prenatal screening. But perhaps more interesting is the glimpse the Catalogue offers of society at the time. Poor labour conditions are reflected in the significant number of workplace injuries: the fractured skulls of construction workers who’d fallen from scaffolding or quarrymen felled by landslides and loose rocks. One particularly gruesome specimen is the hand of a factory worker ripped off in an accident involving heavy machinery, heralded in the Catalogue as a valuable demonstration of the tendons system. In a period dominated by bloodshed (not least the Seven Years’ War, the French Revolutionary, and Napoleonic Wars), there are body parts of young soldiers as well as bystanders caught up in social unrest: a man shot in the head in the 1848 June Days uprising and a fifteen-year-old girl hit by a grenade in Orsini’s 1858 failed assassination of Napoleon (where around 156 onlookers were injured and 10 killed). Beyond this, the catalogue contains the expected array of ordinary human misfortune that might not look so different to a Saturday night in any modern-day emergency room: patients who fell downstairs, off ladders, walls, and chairs; others caught up in scrapes and brawls; one man hit over the head with a plank. An entry dating from 1849 echoes the incredulity of twenty-first century doctors, forever bewildered by the foreign objects that find their way into their patients’ bodies. In his report, the surgeon Stanislas Laugier describes a fifty-three-year-old man suffering from unexplained leg pain and shifty in his responses: “We were unable to ascertain if he was a regular brandy drinker nor what his lifestyle was like. From his embarrassed explanations, we can assume that he was not telling the truth”.7 Despite treatment — eighty leeches applied to the leg and foot — the patient died shortly after his admission to hospital. In the autopsy, a five-centimetre-long woman’s hairpin was found in the left ventricle of his heart. The Musée Dupuytren was founded with a clear, pedagogical purpose, yet many visitors were drawn less by the opportunity to learn as by the chance to ogle real human remains for their shock or entertainment value. As a museum of anatomical pathology, the collection reflected a panoply of illness and diseases, as well as physical and intellectual disabilities. It housed the skeleton of Marco Cazotte or “Pipine” (1741–1803) — a man born with Phocomelia Syndrome, a rare birth defect leaving him with no arms and legs, his hands and feet being attached directly to the torso. In his lifetime, Cazotte earned an income as a fairground attraction, one of the few ways that someone with this disability could make a living at the time. The question of whether the museum’s displays represented a continuation of the same fairground dynamic is a reasonable one to ask. In recent decades, the Musée Dupuytren was keen to distance itself from its reputation as an anatomical “horror show”, with guided tours stressing the scientific, educational value of its collections. But at other points in its history, it seems to have leant into its voyeuristic appeal. In the 1920s and 30s, waxwork exhibits depicted gory crime scenes pulled from the headlines.8 Other items previously on display — a six-footed pig, a two-headed cat — were of equally tenuous educational value, bringing little to the study of human anatomical pathology. In accounting for the Musée Dupuytren’s falling visitor numbers, it would be too simplistic to suggest that our appetites have changed since 1835. In the era of true-crime documentaries, which often include real footage of murder scenes and dismembered bodies, morbid curiosity seems as “alive and well” as ever. Nonetheless, societal attitudes have shifted over the years, with the boundaries of acceptability redrawn. Today, visitors would feel less comfortable confronted with some of the specimens in the Dupuytren collection: foetuses and premature babies with birth defects; body parts of indigenous patients brought back from French colonies; the throat of a man with an intellectual impairment who choked on a plate of potatoes. They might wonder about the historical power dynamics between doctors and their patients that led to the latter’s inclusion in the collection, as well as what forms of consent — if any — were given. In the twenty-first century, these are exactly the kinds of questions that should have been addressed in the museum’s curation. But, as both scholars and members of the public have pointed out, the signage in the museum provided limited information.9 During the final decades of the Musée Dupuytren’s existence, museums in France and abroad found themselves in a climate of increased scrutiny, particularly with regard to exhibits removed from their homelands in a colonial context. In 2002, the remains of Sara Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman known by the pejorative term “the Hottentot Venus”, were returned to South Africa for proper burial. During her lifetime (1789–1815), Baartman was put on display at freakshows in England and France for her steatopygic body type (characterised by large fat deposits on the buttocks). After death, her body was dissected, her genitalia and brain were preserved in jars, and her skeleton was displayed at the Musée de l’homme, an anthropology museum in Paris. Her skeleton was removed from public view in 1974 and kept in storage until the French Senate voted to repatriate it twenty-eight years later. The Senate’s decision, while clearly correct, destabilised the regulatory framework that had previously protected the contents of public museums as an intrinsic part of France’s heritage and therefore “inalienable public property”.10 It also ushered in a wave of further restitutions. In 2010, the heads of nineteen Māori warriors were returned from French public collections to New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa; four years later, the skull of the indigenous Kanak chief, Ataï, who led an 1878 rebellion against colonial French rule in New Caledonia, was also repatriated.11 In parallel, a high-profile scandal surrounding the 2009 “Our Body” exhibition raised questions about the ethical and legal status of exhibiting human remains more broadly. Ran by a private events company, the exhibition staged real human bodies in various poses — playing chess, riding an exercise bike — and had travelled from several cities in the United States to Lyon and Marseille in France, before being banned by a court in Paris. The ruling alluded to a recently introduced law specifying that the “respect, dignity and decency” owed to a human body while alive should also apply after death.12 The judge deemed the exhibition to be in contradiction of this law by commodifying human bodies exclusively for profit. In 2009, a court of appeal upheld this decision, but for different reasons. It ruled that the exhibition’s organisers were not able to provide sufficient proof that the people whose bodies appeared in the show had given their consent.13 To this day, French law permits national museums and hospital- and university-based institutions like the Musée Dupuytren to exhibit human remains for artistic, cultural, scientific, or pedagogical purposes, as long as their dignity is preserved. But following the spate of restitutions and the “Our Body” ruling, by the 2010s, the fate of other morally questionable exhibits had never been more uncertain. Consequently, when the Musée Dupuytren closed in 2016, speculation abounded about the reasons behind this decision. If, as the Sorbonne University’s press release would suggest, the state of the premises were to blame, then why was there no plan to renovate or relocate the museum to a more suitable site? Did concerns about the appropriateness of its exhibits play a role, as the inevitable trickle of “political correctness gone mad” opinion pieces proposed? The university has kept quiet on the matter, and when I put these questions to a representative of the Dupuytren collection, they declined to comment. However, in a research paper published in 2020, Eloïse Quétel, who has been in charge of the Dupuytren collection since 2017, shed some light. She described the university’s decision as being motivated by three factors: “to assess the state of the collections related to its conservation”, “to bring the building up to health and safety standards”, and finally, “to reflect specifically on the ethical and deontological issues related to the exposure of human remains”.14 Those reflections will presumably include a discussion of what conditions must be met to justify exhibiting a human body after death. Informed consent? Demonstrable scientific, historical, or cultural value? Time elapsed since death? (Mummies in the Louvre seem to have been spared the concern surrounding more recent human remains.) A further question to consider is what we mean when we talk about dignity. Is dignity better served in a basement archive rather than a public museum because the motivations of visitors can be filtered by profession or institutional affiliation? By rethinking the collection’s curation, situating it in its historical context and addressing the more uncomfortable aspects of its past, could the Musée Dupuytren reopen to the public again? There are presently no firm plans, but for those who believe the collection should have a place in the public domain, there is some good news on the horizon. Quétel is currently working on a database that will catalogue each item in the collection along with any available information about the patient, their pathology, and the doctor who treated them. She hopes to make it freely-accessible online in the future. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 22, 2022

Daisy Sainsbur

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:17.328445

the-brothers-perrault

Marvellous Moderns The Brothers Perrault By Hugh Aldersey-Williams May 17, 2023 Charles Perrault is celebrated as the collector of some of the world’s best-known fairy tales. But his brothers were just as remarkable: Claude, an architect of the Louvre, and Pierre, who discovered the hydrological cycle. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores, all three were able to use positions within the orbit of the Sun King to advance their modern ideas about the world. Louis XIV of France — the longest reigning monarch the world has ever known (born in 1638, he reigned from 1643 until his death in 1715) — was a man of great passions. Aside from his Catholic faith, and his two wives and his mistresses, he adored music, dancing, theatrical ceremonies, his gardens, fountains, and palaces. His last words, noted down and later framed as a warning to his successor, were: “I loved wars and buildings too much.”1 Fortunately, there were great talents equal to the King’s passions, among them the composers Jean-Baptiste Lully and François Couperin and the playwrights Molière and Jean-Baptiste Racine. When domestic artists could not be found, the best were brought in from abroad, such as the sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who came from Rome. Never, though, did a single family encompass the range of skills that the French court required as comprehensively as that of the Parisian lawyer Pierre Perrault and his wife Paquette Leclerc. Of their six sons and a daughter, three in particular would distinguish themselves in very different fields, their careers all woven together by dependence on Louis’ extravagant but visionary royal patronage. In an age when the fine arts, the “useful arts”, and the sciences still overlapped to a great extent, these three brothers crisscrossed almost effortlessly between a host of disciplines. Best remembered today is the youngest of the brothers, Charles (1628–1703), who is famous now as the collector and author of fairy stories — including “Sleeping Beauty”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Cinderella”, “Puss in Boots”, and “Bluebeard” — known as the Mother Goose Tales. Before turning to writing, however, he served at the French court as a cultural advisor to Louis’ all-powerful minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Like Charles, Pierre Perrault, the oldest of the brothers (1611–1680), trained as a lawyer. He rose to a senior position as a receiver of taxes, where he was well placed to bankroll his family’s ambitions, until he fell from grace in an embezzlement scandal. Thereafter, he pursued literary and scientific studies, and wrote an influential treatise on the origin of springs, which is considered to mark the discovery of the hydrological cycle in nature. Claude (1613–1688) began his career as a physician, and made investigations in the fields of physics and natural history, becoming one of the founding members of the French Academy of Sciences, before dying from an infection contracted during the dissection of a camel. But it was in the theory and practice of architecture that he was really to make his mark. In addition, there was Nicolas, who studied to be a theologian, and became well known in his day as the author of a vehemently anti-Jesuit tract, and Jean, who also followed in his father’s legal footsteps, but caught a fever following injuries sustained in a carriage accident while in Bordeaux with his brother Claude, whose attempt to cure him through bloodletting precipitated his sudden death. Charles’ twin, François, died in infancy and a sister, Marie, died before reaching adulthood. The quality of the brothers’ education is neatly encapsulated by a eulogy for their father, who “made a particular effort to fortify, at the opportune moment, his children against popular errors, to inspire them with the purest maxims taken from Holy Scripture, and to open their minds to the most beautiful forms of knowledge.”2 Though they were all intellectually accomplished and highly ambitious, the brothers were nevertheless different in character. Charles had a sharp, ironic wit. Nicolas was pious, but humorous, too. Claude was the most scholarly among them, while Pierre had the social skills that helped to launch them all on their astonishing careers. In 1654, Pierre followed his father into government finance when he bought the position of receiver-general for Paris. As such, he was responsible for collecting the iniquitous land tax known as the taille (it affected all common people’s property, but the nobility, with far greater land holdings, was exempt). His handsome earnings taken directly as a percentage of these receipts enabled him to support his younger brothers as they too began to explore the corridors of power. Charles was the first to take advantage, and moved in with Pierre, acting as a runner for his older brother, ferrying taxpayers’ monies to the bank. (Though he too had studied law, he never practised, dissuaded perhaps by the shady business of collecting his degree, when, along with two friends, they found “the sound of our money, which someone was counting behind us during our examination, played some part in making them believe our answers to be better than they actually were.”3) The Perrault brothers’ collective prospects were boosted by political changes, which gradually introduced a more meritocratic approach in state administration. Following the death of his boyhood mentor and chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, in 1661, Louis XIV — still only twenty-three years old — began to take more direct control of the government. He appointed Jean-Baptiste Colbert as his finance minister. The immensely able and cultured Colbert set about centralizing power through a sweeping programme of domestic economic development, trade reforms, and colonial expansion, introducing greater efficiency in tax collection in order to pay for it all. The increased receipts were used to fund a series of public works such as long-distance canals, as well as to glorify Paris with the erection of grand buildings, foremost among them Louis XIV’s palaces of the Louvre and Versailles. Colbert also instigated a string of new royal academies of the arts and sciences in addition to the existing Académie Française. Charles’ less than onerous duties for Pierre left him with plenty of time to browse in his brother’s excellent library, and to work his way into Colbert’s favour with his literary and cultural expertise. By 1664, Charles had so impressed Colbert that he was made superintendent general of buildings, advising on royal palaces and gardens, as well as the secretary of one of Colbert’s new academies, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, devoted to historical writings. In reality, the brief was even wider: as Colbert’s confidant, Charles was “to examine in good faith anything that contributed to the arts and sciences”.4 Sometimes, the literary and horticultural came to a happy convergence, as when he suggested that Louis XIV theme thirty-nine sculpted fountains at Versailles according to fables of Aesop. However, as Charles rose, so Pierre was to fall. Streamlining the collection of taxes proved so successful that it was soon possible to bring in general tax cuts. The only ones to suffer were the official receivers of taxes, such as Pierre, who had bought their positions dearly when taxes were high, only to see an easy incom gradually eaten away. Caught out by the abrupt change, Pierre felt he had no option but to dip into the current tax takings in order to pay his debts. When Colbert heard of this misdemeanour, he personally made up the missing revenue, but demanded an explanation from Charles Perrault, who went to see his brother to hear his excuses. These were unsatisfactory to Colbert, who immediately forced Pierre to sell off his office at a loss. “It was all done with extraordinary harshness, and shocked all the financiers”, Charles wrote afterwards.5 Charles, too, severely tried Colbert’s patience when he interceded once too often on behalf of his hapless brother. The Perrault brothers had learned the hard way that the family name they had sought to use for their advancement could also easily count against them. Once he had regained Colbert's trust, it was now Charles who was able to help another brother, Claude. He recommended Claude as one of the founding members of the Academy of Sciences, where he embarked on a project to assemble a natural history of animals and their anatomy. Endless dissections of diverse animal species soon extended into an exploration of the motion of bodies and the action of mechanical springs. But it was not long before Colbert found Claude a new project. Aware that the physician was adept in Latin, the minister commissioned Claude to produce a French translation of the ten books of Roman engineer Vitruvius’ De Architectura, the only work of architectural theory surviving from the classical period. His medical expertise allowed him to express his astonishment when he came across the highly idealized proportions of man laid down by Vitruvius in Book Three of his work.6 This theoretical project led to two important building commissions. The first was for the design of the east colonnade of the Louvre, which still stands as an exemplar of French classical architecture. The extent of Claude Perrault’s involvement is not entirely clear — several other architects contributed as well. However, he was the principal architect of the Paris Observatory, which, along with being an astronomical facility, was to serve as a meeting place for his Academy of Sciences. Work on the building began on the summer solstice of 1667 when the academicians gathered on site to agree its precise orientation to the cardinal points of the compass, with the Paris meridian defined by its axis of symmetry. A major challenge of the design was to meet the modern requirements of a scientific institution within the conventions of the classical architectural style. The final plan comprised a complex grouping of three octagonal towers around a rectangular central block. Exceptionally for the period, the resulting edifice was almost without ornament, dedicated entirely to its scientific function. Unlike the Louvre colonnade, the classical orders of architecture were all but absent from the facades, whose tall, arched windows gave an austere overall appearance. While Claude was busy with these projects, and Charles continued to serve Colbert, their brother Pierre, following his financial disgrace, tried his hand without success at translation and literary commentary. Quite how he came next to consider the problem of hydrology is a mystery. Perhaps a clue lies in the dedication of the treatise he produced on the subject to his friend (and friend of all the Perraults) Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch scientist and a leading light at the Academy of Sciences, who was much concerned with the hydraulics of Louis XIV’s fountains, among more serious pursuits in astronomy and mechanics. Or perhaps it was his brother Claude, who may have pointed out as he was translating Vitruvius that the Roman engineer speculates in the eighth book on the origin of springs and their exploitation for urban water supply. De l’origine des fontaines (translated as On the Origin of Springs, rather than “fountains”) was published in 1674, setting out for the first time with quantitative evidence the workings of the natural water cycle (a summary of the work had appeared a couple of years earlier in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society). He published it only reluctantly, fearful of the kind of satirical criticism to which his brother Charles was routinely treated for his literary efforts. Water has long been something of a French obsession. The country’s natural thermal, spring, and mineral waters were acknowledged as an important national asset, with a history of scientific attention and statistical data-gathering behind them. A century after Pierre Perrault, the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier was one of the contributors to a mineralogical atlas of the country’s waters, for example. But the groundwork for Perrault was laid by the Huguenot ceramic artist and hydraulic engineer Bernard Palissy, who published a discourse on the sources and composition of underground waters in 1580. It had been widely believed since antiquity that much of the Earth’s water must come from sources underground. Aristotle, for example, reasoned that the volume of all the rivers was far greater than could be explained by rainfall alone. Palissy was the first to suggest that the Earth’s precipitation was in fact sufficient to account for the flow of all its springs, streams, and rivers, although he did not offer evidence for his claim. Pierre agreed with his countryman that springs could arise from rainwater alone, although he disputed certain details, such as how the soil and rocks underground contributed to the cycle. Pierre’s innovation was to employ quantitative analysis. He conducted experiments to gauge the ability of sand and soil to absorb and release water, and devised means to measure the flow and volume of streams and rivers such as the Seine. In this way, and taking into account the absorption of water by plants and losses due to evaporation, he was able to show convincingly for the first time that the total of the rain (and snow) that falls on the Earth is indeed sufficient to account for the water that emerges from springs and flows in all the rivers. In reviewing previous thinking about water sources from Plato onwards, Pierre surmised that Aristotle, perhaps overly awed by watching rivers in spate, had neglected the balancing factor of the sheer area of the Earth’s surface available to collect rainwater. According to Pierre, the conventional wisdom that “the rains that fall on the slopes of hills are lost and of no use for springs, because thence they fall into rivers” — in other words, that rainwater was carried straight to the sea via rivers, and that springs were therefore caused by some other divine or undiscovered underground agency — was completely wrong. For Pierre, it was very nearly the opposite: it was the rains and rains alone “that serve to produce and maintain springs”.7 For an amateur’s first foray into science, Pierre’s treatise was remarkably well received. His calculations were checked later and confirmed by leading members of the Academy of Sciences, such as the physicist Edmé Mariotte, and by the astronomer Edmond Halley in England. Pierre himself remained modest about his achievement. “There is nothing hard to understand, nothing new to be imagined, nothing to be assumed gratuitously or by miracle”, he wrote of his findings.8 Though working in very different milieus, each of the brothers was now known in effect as a writer at a time when writers were much in demand at court in order to communicate the glory and progress of the French state. Claude was the translator of Vitruvius. Nicolas had written against the Jesuits. Pierre had his treatise on springs. And Charles, the future author of the Mother Goose Tales, was kept busy by Colbert penning celebrations of royal occasions and profiles of beneficiaries of patronage. In the eighteenth century, the mathematician and encyclopedist Jean le Rond d'Alembert, writing a series of eulogies to early members of the Académie Française, praised Charles Perrault as one who wrote for a nation that “wanted and deserved to be enlightened”.9 The Perraults’ centrality to the literary world of Louis XIV’s France was underscored when Charles became embroiled in the “culture wars” of the day. Known as the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns”, a satirical pun on the title of an essay by Charles titled “Parallel of the Ancients and the Moderns”, this long-running dispute revolved around whether the works of classical antiquity could or should be surpassed by contemporary creativity. It began in 1674 with an operatic production of Alceste by the court composer Lully, which was criticised for departing from the classical story by Euripides. In a polemical essay, Charles defended the work, arguing that artistic progress was possible. However, leading playwrights such as Pierre Corneille and Molière sided with the Ancients, while Racine mocked Perrault in verse. Charles Perrault was a modern in more than just a literary sense. For example, he produced an early “Defence of Women” when a colleague published a satire against the female sex in the style of the Roman writers Horace and Juvenal. In fact, the “Quarrel” reveals something fundamental about all the Perrault brothers, which is that they were all Moderns in their way, for Pierre’s and Claude’s works take sides no less than Charles’. Claude’s translation of De Architectura was no slavish copy, but also a modern commentary in which he was critical not only of Vitruvius’ idea of human proportion, based on his own modern medical knowledge, and referenced reinterpretations of the Roman master by modern architects such as Palladio. The translation served as the platform for Claude’s later work, “Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns”, which aimed to synthesize the best features of Vitruvian idealism, actual classical antiquities and the ideas of Renaissance theoreticians. The architect-brother's immersion in the dispute was practical as well as theoretical. A design that he produced for a triumphal arch near the Bastille came unstuck when opposing sides could not agree whether its inscriptions should be in Latin or modern French. In the end, construction was abandoned and the foundations were demolished after Louis’ death. And at the Observatory, an argument erupted concerning Claude’s proposal to set the signs of the zodiac in marble into the paving. Though not strictly an ornament in the classical style, and so a “modern” conception, the idea was judged vulgar and unscientific by the incoming director of the observatory, the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini. Pierre Perrault’s hydrological studies were also framed in terms of the “Quarrel”. In his introduction to the work, he challenged his contemporaries for their refusal to consider that rainfall might account for all the Earth’s waters. “How is it then”, he demanded, “since the first and most usual maxim of our Moderns is to doubt everything, that they do not doubt also an opinion so contested and so obscure?”10 In the end, though, he builds on modern studies such as those of Palissy, and demolishes the old thinking of Plato and Aristotle. In 1697, his seventieth year, Charles Perrault saw prose versions of his fairy tales into publication. Surprising as it seems, even these were a late counterblast in the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns”, intended as modern alternatives to the classical fables of Aesop. They were also a riposte to the contemporary French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine, one of the Ancients faction, whose famous verse tales, such as “The Grasshopper and the Ant” and “The Lion and the Mouse”, began to appear from 1668, and were derived mainly from classical sources. Assembled from folklore, but greatly embellished, and in some cases completely invented by Charles, the Mother Goose Tales are modernized versions of traditional stories, relocated into a bourgeois society that seventeenth century readers — and especially his friends at court and in the Académie Française — would recognize. Sleeping Beauty’s wedding even takes place in a mirrored apartment reminiscent of Versailles. And each tale has a moral purpose. “They all lead us to see the advantage of being honest, patient, clever, industrious, and obedient, and the evil that befalls those who are not”, Charles wrote.11 For him, it was this that made them modern. “I believe that my Fables are more worthy of being recounted than most of the ancients’ Tales . . . which were created only to please, without regard for sound morals, which they greatly neglected.”12 Just as Claude’s magnificent additions to the architecture of Paris still stand today, so do Charles’ timeless stories and Pierre’s ideas about the hydrological cycle. In these three brothers’ work, we find enduring achievements made possible by the overlapping visions of science and art under the reign of Louis XIV. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 17, 2023

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:18.196306

in-search-of-true-color

In Search of True Color Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s Flawed Images By Erica X Eisen December 7, 2022 Archived amid Prokudin-Gorsky’s vast photographic survey of the Russian Empire, we find images shot through with starshatter cracks, blebbed with mildew, and blurred by motion. Within such moments of unmaking, Erica X Eisen uncovers the overlapping forces at play behind these pioneering efforts in colour photography. “At 9 [PM]”, Tsar Nicholas II recorded in his diary on January 22, 1911, “Prokudin-Gorsky showed us his beautiful color photos of the Volga and the Urals in the Semi-circular Hall. Dmitri and I played billiards.”1 As well as telegraphing a certain princely boredom, the entry is testament to a striking early achievement in the history of photography: the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky, an academic and scientist from Murom whose research interests had come to focus on photochemistry. At a time when black-and-white was still the dominant photographic mode, Prokudin-Gorsky had perfected a technique of capturing scenes in full color, so that he could dazzle audiences in St. Petersburg with magic lantern shows that looked to be brimming with life: plates of ruby-red berries, lush greenhouses, scale-like church roofs radiant in the sun. As the editor and publisher of the prominent photography magazine Fotograf-Lyubitel, Prokudin-Gorsky had used his position not only to report on advances in color photography but also to illustrate these discussions with select reproductions of his own images, establishing him as a leader in the field and garnering widespread public notice for his portraits of Tolstoy.2 The wave of fame these photos brought him culminated in a 1909 invitation to the Romanovs’ summer residence at Tsarskoe Selo, where he gave the imperial family a private demonstration of his work. On the strength of that original presentation, Nicholas granted the photographer virtual carte blanche to pursue his dream of documenting the empire via 10,000 images in full color, allowing him access to areas that would otherwise have been off-limits and even outfitting the expedition with a special train-car-turned-dark-room. Drawing upon the work of James Clerk Maxwell, Adolf Miethe, and others, Prokudin-Gorsky honed a technique that mimicked how the human eye processes light by dividing it into three discrete channels. With the aid of special triple-wide glass plates, the photographer would capture each scene three times over — first through a blue filter, then a green one, and lastly a red one. The positive images, when projected using these same filters, could then be recombined and overlayed to produce a gem-bright composite.3 In its elaborate three-shot, three-filter requirements, the technique differed from other early color photographic technologies, notably the Lumière Brothers’ potato-starch-based Autochrome, which the professor considered “complex and capricious” and discarded in favor of his own methods.4 The most well-known of Prokudin-Gorsky’s works possess both a vitality and the peculiar bittersweetness that comes from seeing a world lost to the past: boys studying at a school in Bukhara’s Jewish community, now largely dispersed through emigration; nomadic pastoralists in Central Asia whose traditional way of life would soon be radically altered by forced settlement and collectivization. But there is something equally arresting about those lesser-seen works among Prokudin-Gorsky’s œuvre, photographs that their maker might well have understood in some sense as “failures”: warped images, off images, images shot through with starshatter cracks where the plate was smashed, blebbed with mold and mildew, scratched with a fingernail, or caked in dust. Here our focus strays away from elegant landscapes and fantastical Orthodox church domes and toward the great effort involved in staging and producing the photographs themselves. The phrase “true color” occurs a number of times across Prokudin-Gorsky’s surviving writings. To him, this was his œuvre’s chief virtue, the quality that set it apart from both black-and-white photography and other forms of art. “These images are everlasting—they do not change”, he wrote in a letter attempting to convince Tolstoy to sit for him. “No painted reproduction can achieve such results.”5 Projected for audiences across Europe — the most common way Prokudin-Gorsky’s works were seen by the public during his lifetime — his photographs were met with wonder and rapturous praise: a record of one such display for a group of specialists reports “lengthy unceasing applause and shouts of approbation among those present”.6 Yet the photographer’s claims of “true color” elide the degree to which, by virtue of his particular technique, many aspects of the final images are ultimately open to choice, in the way that an adagio may sound crisp or contemplative depending on the orchestra interpreting it. The photographs printed during Prokudin-Gorsky’s lifetime, for instance, were rendered in considerably more muted tones than the bright hues in which they are typically shown today.7 The prints and digital images familiar to modern viewers are themselves the product of painstaking efforts by various parties in recent years to overlay the photographer’s triplicate filtered negatives to create a single unified scene. Done manually, proper matching of a single image can take hours, a process that has been sped up somewhat by the advent of new digital tools. But no matter the technology at one’s disposal, harmonizing the three color-filtered exposures is tricky, not least because both the subject and the camera may have shifted between the first and third shutter release. For those attempting to align the resultant staggered negatives, these disjunctures present a quandary: which is the “true” photo, the composition with which the other two negatives must be made to conform? Of the several efforts that have been made to tackle this challenge, two prominent ones have come out of the Library of Congress. The institution has housed all known surviving negatives of Prokudin-Gorsky’s work since 1948, when the library purchased and removed the collection from the cramped Paris basement where it had been kept following the family’s departure from Russia.8 The hand of Blaise Agüera y Arcas, who produced a set of color composites for the LOC in 2004, is instantly recognizable by the thick bands of color that form a kind of ersatz frame around each image: smooth gradations fraying into discrete strands of red, blue, and green. Walt Frankhauser, who began work on the collection in the 1990s, chose to draw out more brightness and contrast in his renditions. When surveying several versions of the same shot, the certainty of Prokudin-Gorsky’s “true colors” soon becomes nebulous and difficult to pin down. The photographer must have been acutely aware of the difficulties his technique posed when it came to overlaying three negatives to create a crisp scene. He generally avoided photographing anything that might move when working indoors, where low light levels required a single exposure to drag out for ten minutes or more.9 Instead, viewers are treated to a series of still and dead subjects: wooden saints, elaborately costumed mannequins, and taxidermied animals whose rictus snarls were guaranteed to hold from shot to shot. The bright light of the outdoor sun shaved down exposure times considerably, and it was here that Prokudin-Gorsky attempted to capture scenes of life. But even if he worked at top speed, there was always the risk that a sudden stray movement would create what Agüera calls “ghosting”— a candy-colored blur where a solid form should be. A Turkmen camel shakes its head pinkly; the breeze splays a carpet across the visible light spectrum; a baby pops in and out of existence between takes. Certain subject matter presented further challenges to the professor’s method. Rivers proved difficult: at Five Brothers Rock, the swift-flowing Chusovaya runs red, while in a shot of Girvas Waterfall, the rapids are alive with flashes of strange rainbow light. Clouds and smoke are similarly transformed into sweet blurs as they move across the sky. While Prokudin-Gorsky may well have understood these difficulties as faults of his technique, they constitute a fundamental part of its charm: documentary fidelity tips into something imperfect, enchanted, and alive. Then there are those photographs in Prokudin-Gorsky’s collection that were affected not by a chance occurrence while they were taken but by an accident in the century since. Over the intervening decades, negatives have shattered or become breeding grounds for fungi; scenes once clear have grown faded and patchy as their emulsion has broken down. The names bestowed upon these imperfections by conservators sometimes possess a startling poetic quality: “butterfly wing”, “fern life”, “frost on a windowpane”.10 Frankhauser, who produced digital renderings for roughly 1,400 of the LOC’s 1,902 negatives and generally favored greater intervention to sharpen his pictures, reached the conclusion that “unfortunately, some images simply could not be processed”.11 But Agüera’s digitization effort, which tackled the Prokudin-Gorsky collection in its entirety, gives us a sense of how even these extremely damaged pieces could look. In one photo, color defects turn a Danube landscape into Rothko-esque planes of pure color; in another, a wedge of unalloyed pink slices through an otherwise bucolic scene of peasants lunching in a hayfield. River views break out in pox, ferns emerge through the snow of mountains in Uzbekistan, and a blue fingerprint smudges the foreground of a shot across the Kem. It is precisely where the image is unmade — colors bleeding together, coming apart — that we get a sense of how it was created in the first place. If Prokudin-Gorsky felt that the great strength of his photographs was their fidelity to nature, he was also quite clear about the effect he hoped they would work upon the viewer. Seeing the breadth and beauty of the country, he wrote in notes to a lecture for his fellow Russian émigrés in Paris in the 1930s, was “the only way to show and to prove to Russian youth, who have already forgotten or who have generally never seen their motherland, the full power, full significance, full greatness of Russia and in this way awaken that national awareness that is so necessary”.12 Even before the Russian Revolution, which precipitated the photographer’s departure for the West, a nationalistic and imperialistic bent is clear in his work. Prokudin-Gorsky’s surviving writings are dotted with assessments of Russian advancement in photographic technology that explicitly measure his home country against Europe, comparisons that evoke a long history of anxieties about Russia’s status vis-à-vis the West.13 In this context, significantly, imperial possessions were often used as barometers of Europeanness, a sentiment perhaps most infamously contested in a quotation from a newspaper column by none other than Fyodor Dostoevsky celebrating tsarist conquests in Turkestan: “This shame that Europe will consider us Asians has been hanging over us for almost two centuries now…. With our push toward Asia we will have a renewed upsurge of spirit and strength.”14 In this respect, it’s significant that Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographic survey completely eschewed Russia’s principal cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg in favor of forays into the imperial periphery.15 The 1905 public demonstration mentioned above, which won the photographer “lengthy unceasing applause and shouts of approbation”, focused on views of Finland, Dagestan, and the Caucasus — conquered territories populated by peoples whose ethnic backgrounds, languages, and religions differed from those of many metropolitan viewers. Likewise, his celebration of railroad technology — a prominent staple of his albums and the mode of transit that made possible their very creation — obscures the fact that these and other imperial infrastructure projects were often built by forced laborers.16 Some of Prokudin-Gorsky’s most frequently reproduced photographs come from colonial Turkestan, where visions of broad, unpeopled landscapes and deteriorating Timurid mosques with no one there to maintain them — images whose lack of living subjects was likely at least in part dictated by the limitations of his three-color technique — suggest empty terrain ripe for the taking by Russian settlers.17 Among his less picturesque views of the region, we find a series of photographs of factories and machines used to process cotton — a boon for the imperial economy whose cultivation was a major driver of Russian settlement in colonial Central Asia. If photographic archives like Prokudin-Gorsky’s are indices and tools of empire, what happens when the images they contain are broken? It’s tempting to read into the collection’s imperfections, as if a negative’s flaws might reveal the instability of the powers that created it, the lie beneath all claims of “true color”. Like the Central Asian nomads and migrants whose movements constantly frustrated Russian colonial authorities’ attempts to pin them down under the border regime, Prokudin-Gorsky’s framing of the world required a deathly stillness that never comported with reality.18 Should something move, should the wind blow too forcefully, or should anything happen to the delicate glass slide once the photograph was taken — then only ghosts would remain. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

December 7, 2022

Erica X Eisen

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:19.551984

images-from-the-collective-unconscious

Images from the Collective Unconscious Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and the Eranos Archive By Frederika Tevebring February 22, 2023 In the 1930s, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, mystic and founder of the multidisciplinary Eranos forum, began compiling a diverse visual archive that would allow dreamers to cross-reference their visions with the entirety of cultural history. Frederika Tevebring explores this grandiose undertaking and its effect on the archivist, as images from the collection began to blur with her psyche. In the 1930s, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962), artist, mystic, and founder of the multidisciplinary forum Eranos, began assembling an extensive archive of images.1 Its purpose was to offer a “respite from logical thinking in words and concepts”, relying instead on the “magic wand of analogy”.2 The archival project was grounded in Carl Gustav Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, which he considered to be a universal part of the human mind, holding memories inherited from our ancestors. Accordingly, Fröbe saw her collection’s images as archetypes — memories from the deep religious and symbolic past as they manifested across different cultures and epochs. Its eclectic categories included: the Trinity, Masks (with subcategories: double-faces, miscellaneous, and Swiss), Navajo Sand Painting, Fish, and Three-Headed Gods. These headings reflected Jung’s theories, Fröbe’s conversations with some of the most radical academics of the time, and her personal journey towards psychological introspection. The archive grew in parallel to Fröbe’s wider Eranos project. Starting in 1933, she organized the annual Eranos conferences at her home in Ascona, Switzerland, handpicking speakers — from across fields such as psychoanalysis, art history, comparative religion, oriental studies, archaeology, and biology — and overseeing the publication of accompanying yearbooks. The speakers looked to symbols and mythology to track the changing forms of religious experience: “backwards into cultural history and forwards to the mental problems of today’s humanity”.3 Fröbe’s ambition was that the image archive would grow into an institution and become a tool for research and instruction in the spirit of Eranos. Her project inspired thinkers such as the myth theorist Joseph Campbell and the psychoanalyst Erich Neumann, who based his book The Great Mother (1955) on the image collection. One prominent intention of Fröbe’s archive was to decipher the archetypes that appear in dreams. In its complete form, this archive would expand beyond images and supposedly allow the dreamer to cross-reference their visions with the entirety of past and present human culture. To interpret dreams, visitors would be able to draw upon different “departments” sorted by: pictures (mostly archaeological and ethnographic); texts (e.g. from Christian mystics, alchemic treatises, and Eastern and Western systems of yoga and meditation); other people’s dreams (historical and contemporary, collected and organized according to their archetypal content); excerpts from the works of Jung; and a reference library consisting of the “[w]orks on the primitives. Their culture, religion and art” as well as: a. The scriptures of the world. (in english, french and germanb. The myths of all time and peoplec. Folklore, fiarytales of all ages and races. [sic]4 In a letter to Ximena de Angulo, a close friend interested in disseminating the ideas of Eranos in the US, Fröbe imagined how such an archive might function for the dreamer: Lets say I dream of a ship, whose mast is a Christmastree, and a lion and a snake are sitting at its foot. (this is an imaginary dream). I would first look up either the pictorial folder of ship pictures, or of the Tree of Life. There I should find picture material, with reference Nos to the Text department, and also to the Dream department, in which other dreams of ships and trees etc occur. With this picture, text and dream material I could work out my own dream very thoroughly.5 If realized, this interpretative dream machine would have been the culmination of Fröbe’s lifework. When it had reached its full potential, the archive would serve as the basis for a “new history of art written from the standpoint of the archetypal representation”.6 It was, she wrote, “an Eranos baby, born in the darkest hour of European chaos”.7 When World War II began, Fröbe felt that her database was more necessary than ever. In her correspondence, she insisted that cultural pursuit and intellectual introspection was what the war-torn continent needed most: Eranos was a haven for these pursuits and, as an institute, would set the tone for a new age of humanity once the unrest had settled. In one of her frequent moments of grandiose ambition, Fröbe described her project as the basis for a “comprehensive science of the soul”.8 Eranos would be able to address the “problems of today’s humanity” from the perspective of the psyche rather than material concerns. The world needed to know about Jung’s theory of archetypes, and her envisioned archive would serve as the inductor. The Eranos image archive was supposed to illustrate the constants of the human psyche across time and place. Yet the archive’s history — its emergence during war, the intimate link between the collection and Fröbe herself — raises still-relevant questions about the relationship between the psychological and the material world, between the individual and the collective, and the place of introspection in a time of violence. The Mountain of Truth Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn was born into an artistic and politically active Dutch family living in London. She studied at Zürich University of Arts and although she did not make a living as an artist, she would produce hundreds of vivid abstract paintings inspired by Eastern mandalas and her esoteric visions. After a period in Berlin, she returned to Switzerland following her husband’s premature death and settled outside of Ascona, a municipality bordering Italy on the shore of Lake Maggiore. At the end of the nineteenth century, Ascona had begun to attract those seeking an alternative to modern life. On Monte Verità, the “mountain of truth”, anarchists, nudists, and vegetarians experimented with communal living, free love, and plotted a utopian society. Over the decades, it played host to sharp critics of technology and capitalism, as well as to many who shaped the aesthetics and philosophies of modernism. Visitors included: the artists Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jean Arp, and Paul Klee; anarchists and socialists such as August Bebel, Peter Kropotkin (an old friend of Fröbe’s mother), Otto Braun, as well as Lenin, Trotsky, and Bakunin; the dancers Isadora Duncan and Rudolf von Laban; and poets, authors, and philosophers like Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Stefan George, and Rudolf Steiner. In 1905, the German anarchist Erich Mühsam dreamt of Ascona serving as a refuge for “freed or escaped prisoners, for the pursued homeless”, and for everyone else unfit or unwilling to become productive members of capitalist society.9 As the area became increasingly fashionable and a magnet for minor European nobilities with esoteric interests, a German journal identified Ascona as “Berlin’s outermost suburb”. “Anyone from the German literati in search of a vacation spot that comes with the possibility of a think piece guaranteed to be accepted by any paper should make their way to Ascona”, the journalist stated, promising that here you can discover “a lizard . . ., a movie star, or a new religion”.10 Bolstered by Swiss neutrality, Ascona evolved into a place where disenfranchised aristocrats rubbed shoulders with revolutionaries, while keeping close connections to the avant-garde art scene of Zürich. Fröbe settled in Ascona during the 1920s, at some polite distance from the radicals on the mountains (during a lecture on Taoism by Martin Buber she demanded a chair while the rest of the audience sat on the grass).11 Here, she painted, practised yoga, and studied Eastern religions. In 1928, impelled by one of her frequent visions, she commissioned a conference room to be built on the slopes of an erstwhile vineyard next to her house, even though she was not yet certain what kind of meetings it would host. Casa Eranos, as the building came to be known, found its first purpose in 1930, when Fröbe and the theosophist Alice Bailey (who had coined the term “New Age”) began to use it for spiritual summer schools.12 Bailey left Ascona in 1932 after relations between her and Fröbe soured. The meetings had become too academic for Bailey’s taste (“too many German professors”) and, adding insult to injury, her own mystical visions had revealed that the area was a cursed centre of Black Mass.13 Her departure did not particularly bother Fröbe, who was becoming increasingly interested in said German professors, and disapproved of Bailey’s husband swimming nude on the premises. Casa Eranos was given a new purpose in 1933 when Fröbe hosted the first Eranos conference on “Yoga and Meditation in East and West” (the conferences have, with few interruptions, continued to this day). Eranos became her lifework, covering themes such as “The Symbolism of Rebirth in Religious Images through Time and Space” (1939), “The Mysteries” (1944), and “Man and Time” (1951). The themes attracted a wide audience, including “quiet minds, real scholars, mystics, snobs, enthusiasts, improvers of humanity, prophets, socialites, and many contemplative nobodies and knowledge seekers”, as Jolande Jacobi notes.14 Fröbe sought out scholars who shared her scepticism towards rational thinking as a privileged form of knowledge, instead embracing what she and her cohort considered archaic, intuitive, and symbolic ways of expression. The name Eranos was suggested by the religious historian Rudolf Otto, the Greek word denoting an eating-together and thinking-together. Fröbe herself compared Eranos to a dance, in which the performers changed but the movement continued. Many “dancers” would devotedly return year after year, such as Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, classical philologist Karl Kerènyi, Gershom Scholem, founder of the modern academic study of Jewish mysticism, historian of religion Mircea Eliade, and, most importantly, the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. In 1950, when Joseph Campbell was scrutinizing the Eranos lectures with the purpose of assembling a selection for the US market, he remarked that the commitment to facilitating understanding between “East and West” had gradually been abandoned. After 1939, only two papers treated people outside Europe and the Mediterranean sphere (one of them disparagingly) and there had been only one paper by a non-European scholar, Swami Yatishwarananda.15 Fröbe scoffed at such remarks, countering that the “reason for concentrating on the [Mediterranean] cultures was that there is the source of all Western culture, and as such already too great a task for us. So we had to leave the East. The title ‘Meeting place of East & West’ simply means, psychologically, ‘Meeting place of the opposites’”16 Fröbe had invited some of the foremost European experts on Asian art and religion, like Campbell’s mentor Heinrich Zimmer, but there is no doubt that the Eastern topics most dear to her, such as yoga, mandalas, and the I Ching, were understood through a distinctly European (that is, Jungian) lens. In other words, the Eranos audience was attracted to the spiritual phenomena of the “East” as tools for their personal journeys of individuation: the mental maturation that, according to Jung, resulted from an individual’s thorough confrontation with their unconscious. Eranos anticipated comparative religious and cultural studies in a way that was ahead of its time, but the comparison was to an extent predetermined by the conviction that all cultural expressions reflected something constant and omnipresent in the human psyche. Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious provided a framework that linked the sprawling themes of the conferences and the wide-ranging expertise of the speakers. The 1938 conference on “The Great Mother”, for example, tied together Celtic goddess worship (V. C. C. Collum), the Anatolian Artemis of Ephesus (Charles Picard), and the Indian world mother (Heinrich Zimmer) into a search for the “unity of mankind”.17 This kind of comparative humanism held great appeal, as it offered a unique bridge between disciplines and historical epochs. The comparison of such seemingly unrelated cultural manifestations also, unavoidably, created reductive equivalences. Eranos’ comparative framework was geared from the outset towards similarities rather than difference. Regarding the image exhibition that accompanied the conference on the Great Mother, Fröbe wrote that it showed how “the conception of the feminine deity went back to prehistoric man . . . giving an historic series of the transformations of her image and of its many aspects”.18 Whether they treated their presentations as such, each lecturer could be understood as contributing specific examples of an eternal idea of femininity as described by Jung. To Fröbe, this was not about exploring the different associations that motherhood might have carried throughout cultural history, but showing how they all “stand for primeval ideas eternally existent in the psychic world, that have sought expression in every age and in every culture, and are today alive and active as in the beginnings of time”.19 Collecting the Collective Unconscious Fröbe developed her image archive in tandem with these conferences, and, in the early 1930s, she began collecting alchemical images for Jung. She travelled to libraries across Europe and eventually the US, photographing manuscripts, arguing with librarians, and updating her correspondents about the rudeness she encountered in Paris — where the library administrators sit “like demons on the books and manuscripts and becomes hostile when you force them to hand them over”20 — and the chaos in Athens: “Nothing is organised, nothing is permitted”.21 The photographs in the archive were mainly sourced from books; Fröbe rarely photographed objects. The publications she sought out, and arguably her own project, reflected the dream of “the universal archive”, an aspiration that had been reflected in Enlightenment encyclopaedic projects and ethnographic museums since the nineteenth century.22 Perennially troubled by finances, Fröbe wanted to turn image collecting into a profession and contacted the Warburg Institute in 1936, suggesting that they hire her to expand their own impressive collection on topics adjacent to alchemy. The cash-strapped Institute could not take up her offer, but Fröbe, with typical brazenness (“perhaps he thought I was some rich lady with my own personal research funds who could work for him for free”) was not discouraged.23 Help came from overseas. Encouraged by his wife Mary, Paul Mellon, co-heir to the Mellon family banking fortune, had developed an interest in Jungian psychology, and the couple were introduced to Fröbe and Eranos during a trip to Switzerland in 1938. With their funding, Fröbe could continue expanding the archive, although the support mostly fell short of her expectations. Under Mary’s leadership, the Mellons started the Bollingen Foundation — named after Jung’s ascetic tower retreat — which would support many scholars from the Eranos orbit (Mary sometimes called it “her Eranos”). William McGuire, in his extensive biography of the Foundation, likened Jung’s tower to a navel at the centre of the Mellon’s intellectual world: “if a being could have more than one, [Eranos] was Bollingen’s other omphalos”.24 Encouraged by this double-naveled philanthropy, Fröbe considered moving the archive to the US, safeguarding it from a possible German invasion of Switzerland during World War II. She was annoyed but undeterred after she attracted the attention of the FBI upon leaving the United States with a suitcase full of strange images.25 In 1941, Bollingen began planning an English-language volume based on the Eranos yearbooks. The project was soon shelved, partly because Fröbe would not accept cutting an essay by the Indologist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who had infamously tried to create a Nazi religion combining Protestantism and Hinduism. “It seems to me that the spirit of Eranos would be terribly boxed up, if considerations such as you mention are going to be taken into account”, she wrote in response to the Americans’ reservations, “after all philosophy, or comparative religion are realms quite outside politics of war”.26 Shortly after this, Bollingen was pressured to cease collaborations with Switzerland in order to placate American authorities. During the war, the annual Eranos conferences were limited to Swiss participants. It was at this time that Fröbe imagined the archive blossoming into its final form. “It is a huge piece of work, [far] bigger than the above suggests and is a typical synthetic creation of the new age”.27 The archive was not an easy companion, however, especially not for Fröbe. Exceptionally attuned to metaphysical transference, she often found her own psychological journey reflected in the symbols at hand. Travelling to Crete in search of images of the Great Mother, the island and its mythology began to merge with her sense of self. Overwhelmed by visions, she identified first with the island and later reached the insight that she carried a reflection of the minotaur inside her: “Oh dear, those archetypes! what a plague they are”, she wrote to her friend in frustration.28 She kept the images in her bedroom, and she could sometimes feel them interfering with her health. “I sleep in the coll. Unc[onscious]”, she complained, and since archetypes do not require food or sleep, she too could not get proper rest and nourishment.29 Cohabiting with the images allowed them to creep back into Fröbe’s dreams, blurring the line between personal psyche and deep human history. After the war, when Fröbe could once more host international gatherings, she arranged for the images’ move to the Warburg Institute in London, where they remain today — an institution that, like her archive, was built on a grandiose vision for a new organisation of knowledge.30 After this move, Erich Neumann wrote to congratulate Fröbe that her room was once more fit for habitation.31 The Eranos archive was supposed to draw out “the supra-personal in the personal and unique”.32 And yet, it became almost identical with Fröbe’s personal journey. Jung repeatedly cautioned her about identifying too fully with Eranos.33 She recognized that the process of collecting images was part of her individuation, a process that brought her ever closer to the archetypes, as when she readily identified as the mother of Eranos and her speakers, who were generally all too happy to play along. “I’m returning the images of the Great Mother to the Great Mother of Ascona”, Neumann wrote her.34 Critical evaluations of Fröbe’s legacy have pointed to her association with future Nazi sympathisers such as Hauer, while supporters emphasize her many collaborations with Jewish scholars. The relationship between Fröbe’s Eranos project and Fascism is both more entangled and more nebulous than her endorsement of individuals. Eranos was unique, yet also a project of its time. World War I, and the political instability preceding and following it in Europe, birthed a disillusionment with modern society and the dream of progress. The first decades of the twentieth century saw an increased fascination with mythology, the occult, and the archaic. For the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs, these “irrational” cultural tendencies, down to the experiments in back-to-nature lifestyles promoted on Monte Verità, all fit neatly in a trajectory leading directly towards fascism.35 The truth is likely better understood as a conceptual fork. Some thinkers interested in the occult’s fascination with the eternal and immutable folded these conversations into their ideologies of pacifism or feminism; others into fascism. As Hans Thomas Hakl writes, the National Socialists and Jung both “longed to experience a ‘sacred time’”: the former “were searching for a mythical primal era of the Aryan peoples, whereas Jung saw this [sacred time] as having been realized in the collective unconscious.”36 Fröbe was no Nazi sympathizer, and, more than anything, she insisted that Eranos was apolitical. Yet, in the middle of war, that amounted to a political position in its own right. “It is the only platform where representatives of the European intelligentsia can meet independently from political misunderstandings and tensions”, she wrote to Jung in 1942.37 Today the choice of the euphemisms “misunderstandings and tensions” reads as an absurd, even myopic, understatement. For Fröbe, however, the path inwards was not only more important than the outer world, it was the only path to healing a world in chaos.38 Fröbe’s prioritization of personal spirituality above social action poses the most difficult and perhaps most pressing dilemma for our own time: can turning inwards indeed bring about change in the world? Do we recognize a collective unconscious reflected in our individual lives, or do we rather project our personal concerns into the art of distant cultures? Where does contemplation retreat into complicity? The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 22, 2023

Frederika Tevebring

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:21.557139

troubled-waters

Troubled Waters Reading Urine in Medieval Medicine By Katherine Harvey April 19, 2023 From cabbage green to course meal, medieval manuscripts exhibit a spectrum of colours and consistencies when describing urine. Katherine Harvey examines the complex practices of uroscopy: how physicians could divine sexual history, disease, and impending death by studying the body's liquid excretions. In the mid-thirteenth century, William of Rubruck, a Flemish Franciscan friar, travelled to the Mongol Empire. The main purpose of his visit was to undertake missionary work, but he also wrote a colourful account of his travels for King Louis IX of France, in which he described the region and its inhabitants. Among his many curious observations, he was astonished to find that the local physicians, who were generally skilled and knowledgeable, did not examine their patients’ urine.1 To the modern reader, this seems an odd detail to highlight, but William came from a world in which uroscopy — the examination of urine for the purpose of diagnosis and prognosis — was one of a doctor’s most valued skills. The link was so strong that the urine flask became the identifying symbol of the late medieval physician, who was often shown examining a sample. The symbol was used both to celebrate illustrious figures such as St Cosmas (the patron saint of medicine), and to punish charlatans like Roger Clerk of Wandsworth, who in 1382 was found guilty of selling useless “cures” to the poor, despite having no medical knowledge or training. He was led to the pillory on a saddleless horse, “a urinal being hung before him, and another urinal on his back”, in mockery of his malpractice. Satirists jeered at practitioners for their obsession with such unsavoury matter (Petrarch memorably claimed that the papal physicians were pale and emaciated because they “rummage around in sloshing chamber pots”), and comic images of monkey-physicians examining urine flasks are found in both manuscript marginalia and in early fourteenth-century stained glass at York Minster.2 Medieval physicians were interested in their patients’ urine because it provided immediate insight into the humoral state of the body. Before William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood in the seventeenth century, physicians believed that the principal purpose of digestion was to convert food into blood, which was constantly being used up, and thus had to be replenished every night while the patient slept. Digestion was a complex, multi-stage process, and it led to various waste products like urine, which bore traces of the organs involved in its production (including the stomach, intestines, liver, and kidneys). Consequently, if the body was too hot or too cold, or if its humours were out of balance, this would be apparent from the urine it produced.3 Uroscopy is a very old practice, dating back at least as far as the ancient Babylonians, and was widely discussed by the classical authorities whose writings formed the basis of much medieval medical practice. The Hippocratic Aphorisms include advice on urine-based diagnosis and prognosis. For example: “Colourless urine is bad; it is especially common in those with disease on the brain” and “The presence of particles like coarse meal in the urine of patients with fever signifies a long illness”.4 Over the centuries, a substantial literature on the subject accumulated, and the Articella — a collection of treatises that formed the basis of university medical education in the later middle ages — included Isaac Judaeus’ Liber Urinarum (written in the ninth century) and De urinis by Giles of Corbeil (ca. 1140–1220). Since uroscopy lent itself to diagrammatic representation, practising physicians often used illustrated guides: such texts survive in sufficient numbers to suggest that they were widely-employed working tools in later medieval Europe. A particularly fine example is found in Bodleian Library MS Savile 39, which includes a late fourteenth-century ring diagram complete with twenty labelled flasks, their colours ranging from white to black. The flasks are grouped according to meaning: four reddish-gold samples, for example, signify good digestion, whilst three flasks of very dark liquid suggest death. Some authors are quite imaginative in their description of the colours: in a late fifteenth-century miscellany, one sample is described as being “green like cabbage”. Another widely circulated treatise described a “type of black urine that is caused by mortification, and that type of blackness is most like a polished black horn, or like a raven’s feather, or like a man from Ethiopia”.5 Such comparisons to familiar sights were probably intended to help practitioners distinguish between very similar colours, and to compensate for the shortcomings of the diagrams, the decoration of which sometimes owed more to the availability of pigments than to scientific accuracy. Many treatises suggested that it was possible to identify several layers in the urine, which meant that some diagrams show samples with very distinctive (and surely exaggerated) colour differences: red with a mint-green layer on top, or olive green with an orange-ish ring. If the top layer was particularly large, it might signify head pain; if it was very foamy, that indicated “gassiness boiling into the urinary vessels or distension or some other disorder of the lung”. The middle region should be examined for cloudiness, which could be a good or a bad sign depending on the condition from which the patient was suffering. It was at the bottom of the sample that one was most likely to see sediments, although these might also be suspended in the urine.6 Some texts place particular emphasis on things found in urine: in this pair of flasks, from an early fifteenth-century medical miscellany, we can see blood in one sample, and particles suspended in the other. The captions explain the meaning of these worrying features: blood in the urine indicates a broken vein at the back of the head, and gravel “betokeneth ache and spite of the stone in the reynes” — that is, kidney stones. To interpret all these signs correctly, the skilled physician would not simply match the sample to the colour swatch; rather, he would combine his observations with his own extensive knowledge (both theoretical and practical) in order to identify what ailed his patient and determine the likely progression of his or her disease. Surprisingly often, this was done remotely: such was the trust in this method that many patients simply sent a sample to the doctor, who examined it and sent his verdict back. In 1334, the Aragonese towns of Vic and Montcada agreed to share a municipal physician, even though they are some sixty kilometres apart. The man appointed, Romon Ardey, was to live in Vic, but to interpret urines brought to him from either town.7 Far from being a strategy restricted to those who could not afford to see a doctor, this form of consultation was used even by the wealthiest members of society, such as Agnes, Lady Stonor, who in 1480 “sente here water unto M. Derworthe to undirstonde his conceite, ande howe he demyth by her water whedir she be in wey of mending”. His verdict is not recorded, but she died the following year.8 Not everyone thought this was a good idea: Isaac Judaeus, author of one of the most authoritative uroscopy treatises, criticised “fools who would base prophecies on it, without seeing the patient, and determine what disease is present, and whether the patient will die, and other foolishness”.9 Anyone who did consult in this way should obtain as much contextual information as possible, to avoid falling into the same trap as the eminent Parisian physician Guillaume Boucher (d. 1410). He examined a sample, and confidently announced that it belonged to a man with stomach problems. The couriers burst out laughing, because it was produced by a woman.10 Partly motivated by a desire to avoid such humiliation, university-educated physicians increasingly argued that bedside medicine was the best form of treatment: it allowed the practitioner to conduct a physical examination (considering other important signs, such as pulse, and scrutinising other excreta, such as sweat and faeces) and to interrogate the patient about his symptoms.11 Bedside medicine also allowed the physician to assert authority by showing off his knowledge and skills — something which most were very keen to do, in order to prove their superiority over their many rivals on the medical marketplace. Examining a urine sample in the presence of the patient who produced it, plus his family, friends, or servants, could be a particularly effective way to do this, as the process was straightforward but impressive. Ideally, the sample was collected in the morning, after the patient had slept and before he drank anything, and then allowed to settle for several hours; during this time, it must not be exposed to direct sunlight or excessive heat, which might change its composition.12 The physician’s inspection typically took place towards the end of his visit, and he often made a performance of it, holding the flask up to the light, and scrutinising it at length. One twelfth-century manual suggested that “While you look at the urine for a long time you pay attention to its colour, substance and quantity and to its contents from the diversity of which you will diagnose the different kinds of diseases . . . whereupon you promise health to the patient who is hanging on your lips.”13 A skilled physician could identify a whole range of conditions based on a urine sample. According to Giles of Corbeil’s influential treatise, pure and unclotted blood in the urine indicated a problem with the kidneys, especially if it was accompanied by pain; “lividity coupled with minute, distinct particles consistently indicates respiratory trouble”, and gout was revealed by “tiny white flecks”.14 Urine was a particularly useful tool for diagnosing leprosy, because the immediate physiological cause was thought to be a malfunctioning liver — an organ which was central to the digestive process, and thus any problems would be visible in the urine. In 1456, when Richard Walsham, a monk of Norwich Cathedral Priory, was suspected of contracting leprosy, the Prior had several physicians examine his body and urine in order to confirm that he was not afflicted.15 Medieval people also believed that uroscopy could reveal when an individual would die, allowing him to use his final days wisely. After William the Conqueror fell from his horse in 1087, he suffered agonising internal injuries. According to the chronicler William of Malmesbury (ca. 1090–1143), his physicians “inspected his urine and foretold certain death”, which allowed him to receive the last rites and to put his affairs in order.16 In 1214, suspecting that he was fatally ill, Abbot John of St Albans examined his own urine for “the small, hidden marks which he knew to be signs of death”, and correctly predicted that he had only three days to live. The Abbey’s chronicler admiringly noted that being “very experienced in the art of medicine, [John] had often made similar infallible predictions . . . about others.”17 Urine predicted the end of life, but it could also be used to track its conception through fertility testing. The Trotula, an influential compendium of women’s medicine, recommended that both husband and wife should urinate in a pot of bran: if, after ten days, either pot was stinking and full of worms, that indicated which spouse was infertile.18 According to The Dome of Uryne (a widely circulated Middle English compendium of uroscopic texts), it was possible to know whether a woman had conceived immediately after intercourse: if her urine was clear, then she was pregnant, and if it was thick, she was not. A few months on, the sex of the child could be determined by the cloudiness of the mother’s urine, whilst lead-coloured urine suggested a miscarriage.19 But not all physicians were willing to pronounce on such matters. A wise one would refuse to do so if he suspected that a female patient was intending to procure an abortion.20 Urine could be used to uncover an individual’s sexual history. The water of a “constant virgin” would be “wan and extremely calm”, and passed in a slow, delicate fashion because the passages of the womb and vulva were narrow. (It was evidently common to conflate the urinary passage and vagina.) On the other hand, “Thick urine of a woman declares her to be corrupt”. Men’s urine could be equally revealing, as seed in the bottom of the flask proved that the provider recently had sex.21 In the mid-twelfth century, shortly after taking his third wife, Ralph, Count of Vermandois, became seriously ill, and his doctor told him to abstain from marital relations. But when the physician examined the count’s urine, he realised that his advice had been ignored, and correctly predicted that Ralph would be dead within three days.22 Count Ralph’s unfortunate demise highlighted another potential problem with uroscopy: patients who ignored or mistrusted their doctors. Some went so far as to test the skills of their chosen practitioner. Although Arabic medical authorities such as Rhazes and Avicenna — both of whom were widely read and highly respected in the medieval West — recommended it, European physicians rarely smelt or tasted urine for medical reasons.23 Even so, they might be well-advised to give it a discreet sniff, since cynical patients sometimes provided samples of white wine or other yellowish liquids.24 In one extreme case from around the year 1000, the duke of Bavaria began his consultation with the famous monk-physician Notker by sending him a urine sample provided not by the duke, but by a pregnant servant girl. On examining it, Notker fell to his knees, praising God and declaring: “Within the week, the Lord will perform an unheard-of miracle: the duke will give birth to a son!” Shortly afterwards, the maid produced a baby boy, and the duke sent his messengers back to Notker with a sample of his own.25 In theory, patients could also fall victim to urine-related trickery, as happens in a humorous tale from The Decameron in which Calandrino’s friends team up with a doctor to convince him he is pregnant.26 But for the most part, the demand and trust in uroscopy was high, because it seemed to offer objective and certain diagnosis for a relatively small cost. In 1315, when Jaume II of Aragon closed a street in Barcelona’s Jewish quarter, he exempted the physician Vidal Rouen, because “many people have to show him the urines of sick people and to ask him for advice for them”.27 Other towns in the region appointed municipal physicians for this purpose: Abraham des Castlar, employed in this capacity by Castelló d’Empúries in 1316, agreed to “look at and assess all the urines brought to me by the citizens”.28 Indeed, the demand for uroscopy was too high to be satisfied by university-trained physicians (who were both rare and expensive), and many patients turned to less qualified practitioners. In mid-fifteenth century Essex, John Crophill worked as both a bailiff and a healer. Seemingly self-taught, and certainly not university educated, his commonplace book includes two texts on urine (alongside others on subjects such as blood-letting and astrology), plus a list of patients whose urine he had examined, and to whom he had provided cures.29 Across the Channel, Jacoba Felice, an unlicensed female practitioner who appeared before the Parisian medical authorities in 1322, offered similar services. Several of her mostly female clientele recalled her “continually examining their urine in the manner of physicians and doctors”, and reported that she had cured them when male physicians had failed to do so.30 Eighteen years earlier, when Gueraula de Codines faced a similar hearing in Barcelona, she asserted that “she could diagnosis a patient’s illness from his urine”, having been taught to do so by “a certain foreign doctor”. Clearly her legal travails did not deter patients, since three years later, she was back in court, claiming that many people consulted her, and that her uroscopy skills were especially in demand.31 Whilst professional trust in uroscopy waned considerably after ca. 1500, partly because of its growing association with such quacks, patient enthusiasm for this cheap, convenient, and reliable practice remained high.32 Indeed, although uroscopy no longer serves as an all-purpose diagnostic tool, new forms of urine analysis have developed from these ancient traditions, and our present-day medical landscape is awash with urine samples. Although twenty-first century patients benefit from relatively recent innovations such as hormone-based pregnancy tests, colour is still used to diagnose conditions including porphyria, whilst bloody and/or cloudy urine continues to be recognised as a sign of kidney stones and infections. Although medieval understandings of urine were deeply flawed, the popularity and longevity of urine-based diagnosis reflect an enduring desire on the part of both patients and physicians for reliable tests which provided objective diagnoses, and serve as an important reminder that, contrary to popular stereotypes of pre-modern medicine, much of it was rational, methodical, and rooted in science. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 19, 2023

Katherine Harve

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:21.937336

jumbos-ghost

Jumbo’s Ghost Elephants and Machines in Motion By Ross Bullen July 20, 2022 On September 15, 1885, twenty-five years after his capture in Sudan, Jumbo the elephant tragically died when struck by a freight train. Ross Bullen takes us on a spectral journey through other collisions between elephant and machine — in adventure novels, abandoned roadside hotels, and psychic science — revealing latent anxieties at the century’s turn. In his 1886 book The Ivory King, the American naturalist Charles Fredrick Holder describes the status of elephants through a conservationist lens. While acknowledging that the elephant is “the true king of the beasts, the largest and most powerful of existing land animals, and to young and old a never ceasing source of wonder and interest”, it is nevertheless “doomed”. Citing prehistoric hunters and the contemporary ivory trade as major factors in the elephant’s decline, Holder also mentions the “rapid advance of the British in the East, the introduction of railroads and improvements which mark the progress of civilization in India, where heretofore the elephant has been employed, cannot fail to have a fatal effect, and their extermination is only a matter of time.”1 Although Holder sympathizes with elephants, he still lauds the technology that will displace them as an “improvement”: a mark of the “progress of civilization”. The elephant may be the “king of the beasts”, but it can offer no competition to the steam locomotive and other Western technologies. While comparisons between elephants and machines are a common feature of twenty-first century consumer culture — elephant-adjacent terms like “mammoth” and, of course, “Jumbo”, are regularly used when marketing motors and countless other commodities — the idea truly gained traction in the nineteenth century. The invention of steam locomotion coincided with the expansion of European imperialism in the parts of the world (Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia) that elephants call home. From a Western perspective, elephants were powerful and impressive animals that performed much of the work that machines did in Europe and North America. At the same time, it was clear to colonial observers that modern technology was not only superior to the physical labour of elephants, but it would also eventually displace them, perhaps even to the point of extinction. In his 1854 Hard Times, Charles Dickens famously describes the resemblance between “the piston of [a] steam engine work[ing] monotonously up and down” and “the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness”, an image he returns to four more times in a relatively short novel.2 The elephant functions as something like a technology of the colonial Other, and thus is subject to fantasies of Western dominance and displacement. At the same time, the blend of “melancholy” and “madness” that was so often used to portray captive elephants also speaks to cultural anxieties about the powerful, unpredictable, and disruptive industrial machinery of the Victorian era.3 The symbolic clash Holder discussed between railroads and elephants has often resulted in literal collisions — and the best-known collision remains the death of Jumbo in 1885.4 Holder devotes a whole chapter to Jumbo, recounting the story of his capture and purchase in Africa, his many years at the London Zoological Gardens, his sale to P. T. Barnum, the outrage this purchase caused among the British public, and the scene of Jumbo’s death in St. Thomas, Ontario. After a final performance of Barnum’s circus, Jumbo was being led to his boxcar, when an unscheduled freight train bore down on him. Attempting to stop, it nevertheless struck Jumbo, whose body — weighing more than six thousand kgs — derailed the engine and two cars. The elephant died some fifteen minutes later. In the 1889 edition of his autobiography, Barnum described the death of Jumbo as a “universally announced and regretted tragedy”, and claimed to have received “hundreds of telegrams and letters of sympathy”.5 Jumbo’s death produced a curious catalogue of material (and perhaps immaterial) remainders. To commemorate the tragedy’s centenary in 1985, the city of St. Thomas installed a life-size statue of the elephant, crafted out of concrete and reinforced steel by the self-taught Canadian artist Winston Bronnum (who made a career creating giant animal sculptures as roadside attractions). And after Jumbo’s death, his hide was stuffed and continued to tour with Barnum, eventually retiring to the showman’s eponymous natural history museum at Tufts University, where the elephant became a school mascot. The taxidermied Jumbo was destroyed by a fire in 1975. All that remains of his great hide is the tail — accidentally severed and stored in the university archives — and a small pile of ashes, kept in a Peter Pan Crunchy Peanut Butter jar, which still resides in the office of Tufts’ athletic director. The material objects of Jumbo’s afterlife exist at extremes: heavy statues, a handful of ashes. This tension between the corporeal and incorporeal was noted at the time of Jumbo’s death as well. While Barnum was displaying his skeleton, trying to cash in on the elephant’s corpse, at least one writer imagined that death had somehow freed Jumbo from his bulky materiality. A jokey aside published in the September 26, 1885 issue of Chicago’s The Current speculated that, “It may possibly be said that Jumbo’s ghost will not have so much trouble in getting around the world as Jumbo had.”6 Indeed, in the decades after his demise, the elephant’s spirit seemed to haunt a variety of media. In what follows, I would like to accompany Jumbo’s ghost on a spectral journey through a series of collisions — in children’s adventure novels, abandoned roadside hotels, bizarre electrical experiments, psychic science, and beyond — between elephants and technology in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Our first stop is India, a decade after the Rebellion of 1857. A group of European explorers in Calcutta are planning a voyage across Northern India. Among their group is an engineer, Banks, who has invented a new way of travelling through the country: a giant steam-powered elephant — known as the “Steam House” or “Behemoth” — that will pull two carriages (one for the adventurers, one for their servants) across any terrain, including water. Although The Steam House (1880) is one of Jules Verne’s lesser-known fictions, his novel offers a heady variation on the elephant-as-machine metaphor. Not only does the steam engine replace the elephant’s role in India, it replaces the elephant itself, as the iron “Behemoth” towers over and outshines its animal competition. Maucler, the novel’s narrator, relates the impression it first made on the local people: First, and apparently drawing the caravan, came a gigantic elephant. The monstrous animal, twenty feet in height, and thirty in length, advanced deliberately, steadily, and with a certain mystery of movement which struck the gazer with a thrill of awe… His huge feet were raised and set down with mechanical regularity, and he changed pace from a walk to a trot, without either the voice or the hand of a mahout being apparent.      The spectators were at first so astonished by all this, that they kept at a respectful distance; but when they ventured nearer, their surprise gave place to admiration.      They could hear a roar, very similar to the cry uttered by these giants of the Indian forest. Moreover, at intervals there issued from the trunk a jet of vapour.      And yet, it was an elephant!7 The Steam House seems to pass as a real elephant with the people of Calcutta, despite its massive size (twice as large as a typical Indian elephant), “mechanical” movements, and the suspicious jet of steam issuing from the elephant’s unusually stationary trunk. Although Maucler claims that “all his members were endowed with movement”, he also concedes that the Steam House is quite obviously a machine, “a marvelous deception… encased in steel”, which any observer who dared to approach it would quickly discover.8 By straddling the line between Western technology and Eastern animal life, the Steam House seems to have an uncanny effect on its Indian viewers, who both do and do not recognize it as a familiar and useful elephant. The scene revolves around the well-worn trope of the credulous native struck with awe by Western technology. In fact, Verne’s entire novel is fueled by this colonial fantasy, as the troupe of Europeans and their mechanical elephant frequently battle and establish dominance over the Indian landscape, wild animals (including real elephants), local potentates, and eventually “Nana Sahib”, a.k.a. Nana Saheb Peshwa II, the rebel leader at the siege of Cawnpore, who — in Verne’s imagination — has been living in hiding for the past decade. Published a little over twenty years later, Frances Trego Montgomery’s children’s novel The Wonderful Electric Elephant (1903), and its sequel, On a Lark to the Planets (1904), imagines an elephant machine similar to the Steam House, but — keeping pace with new technology — it is powered by electricity. This upgrade also corresponds to an increase in the elephant’s range, as the children in Montgomery’s stories travel first around the world, and then the solar system, in their wonderful electric beast. Although Montgomery’s books are more fantastical than Verne’s novel, they rely on the same trope of technology dominating and deceiving awestruck non-Westerners. The Wonderful Electric Elephant concludes with Montgomery’s two child protagonists, Harold and Ione, painting their elephant in order to trick the Siamese (Thai) into believing it is an auspiciously-coloured elephant, or chang pheuak. “They both took a white-wash brush and began to work for dear life, and in a couple of hours had finished”, Montgomery writes. “There before them stood their beautiful elephant, transformed from a plain, ordinary, mouse-coloured elephant into a beautiful, rose pink one.”9 The children then allow their elephant to be captured by the “head hunter of the prince of Siam” and brought to the prince’s palace, where it is bathed, fed, and lavished with gifts and jewels by “two rows of boys, black as ebony, with silver trays on their head”.10 This scene serves a double purpose: it is both a send-up of the (supposedly) lavish treatment that Siamese monarchs extended to auspicious elephants, and it presents the familiar spectacle of racialized natives worshipping Western technology.11 Montgomery’s creation was not the only electric elephant to make its debut in 1903. Edison Studios’ notorious film Electrocuting an Elephant came out in January of that year. The seventy-four-second film depicts the execution of Topsy on Coney Island. Named after a character from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Topsy was an elephant captured in Southeast Asia and sold to Adam Forepaugh’s circus. Eventually sold on to Sea Lion Park, these new owners deemed her impossible to handle or trade, and so they scheduled her to be hanged as a public spectacle. After objections from the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), this gruesome plan was modified to involve cyanide-laced carrots, strangulation, and 6,600 volts of electricity delivered via copper-lined sandals. Electrocuting an Elephant depicts Topsy being led by a handler to the site of her execution. After a cut, the camera frames the elephant in the centre of the screen, kicking once to try to remove a sandal. Topsy stands still until she suddenly stiffens, as flames rise from her feet. A few seconds later, stiff and smoking, she collapses forward. This happens around the forty-five second mark. The remainder of the film — nearly forty percent of its total running time — is a sustained shot of Topsy’s uncannily still body, as the smoke slowly blows away. Toward the end of the film, an otherwise seamless cut introduces a human figure into the shot: a man standing behind Topsy observing her, like a spectral presence inserted into this scene of death. The figure then walks out of the frame, and the film ends. While Montgomery uses electricity to bring a mechanical animal to life, Electrocuting an Elephant uses it to bring death and stasis to a real elephant. And yet, the collision between Topsy and 6,600 volts did produce a kind of mechanical motion: a seventy-foot reel that would play in a coin-operated kinetoscope, an early device for showing short films to paying customers. Like a train on its track, the perforated film strip of Electrocuting an Elephant would roll through the mechanical pathways of the machine, at first reanimating Topsy and then replaying her death for anyone who could spare some change. The site on which Topsy was electrocuted — which would become Luna Park amusement park, from 1903 until 1944 — was already an elephant graveyard. The same location had housed the “Elephantine Colossus”, a seven story, thirty-one room building that functioned as a tourist attraction, hotel, concert hall, and — reputedly — a brothel. The structure was designed by James V. Lafferty and constructed in 1885, a scaled-up version of Lafferty’s “Lucy the Elephant”, which was built near Atlantic City in 1881 (and is still standing today). Destroyed by fire, the Elephantine Colossus weirdly anticipates the fate of Jumbo’s hide at Tufts University nearly 80 years later. There is no record of anyone saving the Colossus’ ashes in a peanut butter jar, but like Jumbo’s ghost, the elephantine spirit of the scorched hotel made contact with at least one receptive witness. A story titled “A Remarkable Vision”, published in the “Department of Psychic Experiences” section of the April 1897 edition of The Metaphysical Magazine, recounts the unusual experiences of one “Mr. M.”, vacationing on Long Island in September 1896. After spending the evening with some neighbours discussing “telepathy and psychic phenomena in general”, he and his wife were walking home along the beach when they “were amazed to see the western sky brilliantly illuminated by what was undoubtedly a very large and disastrous fire.”12 At home, Mr. M. decides to take one final look at the conflagration from his balcony, at which point he witnesses the following remarkable vision: At that moment I chanced to glance upward in the sky at about an angle of sixty or seventy degrees, and a small white cloud attracted my attention. Its outline seemed peculiar, and its shading in white and pink was also unusual. Suddenly this cloud assumed the perfect outline of an elephant. The phenomenon seemed so strange that I called the attention of the other men to it. Without any further hint on my part, they declared it to resemble the figure of an elephant most strikingly. The fire soon died out, and with it — in fact long before it — the image. No further thought was then given to the matter.13 The next morning, Mr. M. reads the following headline in the New York Herald: “The Elephant at Coney Island Burned”. This news obviously casts last night’s elephant vision in a new light, and Mr. M. reaches out to the editor of The Metaphysical Magazine. Just below this account, the magazine’s editor offers his own hypothesis: The minds of many people near the burning edifice were in a state of intense excitement and possessed with the one idea, uttered or unuttered: “The Elephant! The Elephant is on fire!” Noticing the reddened sky, Mr. M. mentally reached out to them and received their thought. Cloud-forms are hazy at best, and attain distinctness only from the mind of the observer. The elephant-cloud was doubtless shaped by the thought transferred to the mind of Mr. M.14 Like Jumbo’s ghost, this immovable building attained a new mobility in death, becoming a kind of psychic telegram that travelled from the minds of those who witnessed its destruction to the receptive consciousness of Mr. M. On the same spot, a few years later, Topsy the elephant would meet a similar fate, her death transferred to celluloid film by the Edison Studios’ crew. Charles Frederick Holder, author of The Ivory King, would not be surprised to learn that in the early twenty-first century, the world’s elephant population has greatly diminished since the 1800s. It is perhaps understandable that, as these remarkable animals are driven toward extinction, humans have found new ways to memorialize them: statues, buildings, locomotive machines, photographs, films. One irony of many of these memorials, though, is that while they commemorate the death of elephants, they also celebrate the technology that displaced or destroyed them. On June 20, 2022 — some two-hundred km north-east of St. Thomas — the Art Gallery of Ontario unveiled its first-ever public art commission, a large sculpture of an elephant standing on a circus ball by the contemporary Canadian artist Brian Jungen. According to Jungen, the statue was inspired in part by the story of Jumbo. Constructed of discarded leather sofas and cast in bronze, the sculpture is titled Couch Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch'ill (the sculpture’s Dane-zaa subtitle translates as “My heart is ripping”). Couch Monster invites spectators to consider the contrast between its subject matter — an elephant, animated, alive, and, perched as it is on a circus ball, seemingly on the verge of movement — and its form: discarded sofas, associated with rest and stillness, cast in solid bronze. A great virtue of Jungen’s Couch Monster is that it openly acknowledges the way that humans have treated elephants like disposal commodities, as indicated by the statue’s unique construction materials, and by its subtitle. “Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch'ill”, the statue — or perhaps Jumbo’s ghost — says to us. “My heart is ripping.” The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 20, 2022

Ross Bullen

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:23.942285

liquid-bewitchment

Liquid Bewitchment Gin Drinking in England, 1700–1850 By James Brown September 13, 2023 The introduction of gin to England was a delirious and deleterious affair, as tipplers reported a range of effects: loss of reason, frenzy, madness, joy, and death. With the help of prints by George Cruikshank, William Hogarth, and others, James Brown enters the architecture of intoxication — dram shops, gin halls, barbershops — exploring the spaces that catered to pleasure or evil, depending who you asked. In 1751, the engraver and satirist William Hogarth created Gin Lane, his celebrated visual retrospective about the devastating effects of this newfangled spirit on the lives of London’s poor. The print, a companion piece to Beer Street, offers a harrowing panorama of poverty, addiction, insanity, violence, infanticide, and suicide; the only people and institutions who thrive amongst the mayhem and despair are an undertaker, “Gripe” the pawnbroker, and the two purveyors of the “deadly draught”: a cellar gin shop and “Kilman” the distiller. In the words of Hogarth’s most recent biographer, Gin Lane’s “racked scene of dissolution . . . imprints itself indelibly on the mind”.1 Derivatives are beloved of political cartoonists, and so frequent and dependable is its appearance at academic conferences on alcohol history that a “gin lane klaxon” is scurrilously sounded on social media. However grotesquely transfixing the image, its dominance within both the history of alcohol and art has occluded a wider and subtler range of representations of gin and the environments in which it was consumed, which flourished across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 The Cursed Bewitching Liquor Gin was one of a wide range of new intoxicants — including chocolate, coffee, opium, sugar, tea, and tobacco — that, in what has been called a “psychoactive revolution”, radically expanded the mind-altering possibilities for European people between 1600 and 1800.3 Spirits (mainly aqua vitae, a rough distillation of wine) had been manufactured in English monasteries, private homes, and apothecary’s shops since the late medieval period, although they were prohibitively expensive and generally consumed medicinally and in small quantities. Brandy, rum, whisky, and especially gin exploded the spirituous marketplace from the later decades of the seventeenth century, with various factors — including grain surpluses, restrictions on French imports, a relaxation of the monopoly on distilling, and increased duties on ale and beer — making gin’s rise particularly meteoric. Originally imported from the Netherlands as genever, by the 1690s gin was produced on an industrial scale by domestic malt distillers, who sold their wholesale product to a network of smaller compound producers. These producers then “rectified” it with a variety of botanical additives, including juniper berries, coriander seeds, orange peel, angelica root, liquorice powder, and turpentine. By 1725, according to the Cumbria distiller George Smith, gin had “gain’d such universal applause, especially with the common people . . . there is more of it in quantity sold daily in a great many distillers shops, than of beer and ale vended in most publick houses”.4 The resulting beverage was orders of magnitude stronger than the traditional alcohols that had hitherto dominated recreation and diets (ales, beers, ciders, and wines), and represented a step change in England’s cultures of intoxication; Jessica Warner has gone so far as to term it “the first modern drug”.5 Put simply, gin hit early modern drinkers differently, offering “not a gradual descent into inebriation” (in James Nicholls’s phrase) but instantaneous and extreme drunkenness.6 From this potency stemmed a range of unusual and frightening side-effects, widely rehearsed by eighteenth-century commentators, including immorality, criminality, madness, compulsive intoxication, and death. As one anonymous 1736 author observed, “by taking a small quantity people were almost in an instant rendered so much intoxicated as to lose the use of their reason, and all command over themselves”, and were “induced to commit the most wicked or extravagant enormities”.7 Likewise, in her 1750 treatise aimed at female gin drinkers, Eliza Haywood warned that whereas conventional beverages made their consumers “sullen, sleepy, or extravagantly gay”, gin made them “bold, obstinate, and filled with an extravagant desire of doing mischief . . . we may say that dram-drinking is the most expeditious way to deprive mankind of their reason . . . by substituting a temporary, and in time a constant frenzy in its stead”.8 The following year, another anonymous writer agreed that “[i]ts baneful influence reaches their [consumers’] very souls; every virtuous principle is eradicated and destroyed”. Moreover, “once they have habituated themselves to drinking drams, they are never satisfied but while the glass is at their noses”.9 A recurring contemporary metaphor for gin’s peculiar physical and psychological effects was bewitchment, the subjugation of normal human will and faculties to an insidious supernatural force. Seminaries of Mischief: Gin Shops Like other novel intoxicants, gin created an entirely new species of urban space organised around its sale and consumption . As cocoa spawned the chocolate house, coffee the coffeehouse, opium the opium den, and tea the tearoom and tea garden, so gin brought into being the gin or dram shop.10 Described variously by contemporaries as “receptacles for wretches”, “seminaries of mischief”, or “the nurseries of all . . . vice and wickedness”, these unfamiliar environments were mainly a metropolitan phenomenon, and proliferated from the early decades of the eighteenth century. A committee of Middlesex justices convened in 1726 estimated there to be six thousand gin shops in that outlying London county alone, a ratio of up to one in five houses in some parishes.11 As the below mezzotint intimates, gin shops were far more rudimentary than the traditional inns, taverns, and alehouses that had hitherto made up England’s victualling hierarchy, and which, by the Hanoverian period, had become increasingly sophisticated and regulated under licensing laws. All that was needed to begin trading was a supply of the “pestiferous draught” (either distilled on the premises or acquired from a boutique manufacturer). Chairs and tables in these shops were kept deliberately sparse to encourage off-sales as well as “perpendicular drinking”, both guaranteeing rapid churn of a predominantly poor clientele who lacked the funds for lengthy on-site drinking sessions.12 One spatial innovation of the gin shop was the counter or bar, an appropriation from the burgeoning retail sector. Despite conventional wisdom, these were not a feature of established drinking places, in which alcohol was ferried directly from cellars or storage rooms to customers in halls, parlours, and chambers via a battalion of hosts, drawers, pot boys, and tapsters. As the architectural historian Mark Girouard has noted, the counter was a revolutionary “time-and-motion breakthrough” that made for much more rapid and efficient service; it conferred the additional advantages of separating servers from customers, providing a surface for measuring and pouring drinks, and forming a barrier behind which drink, serving vessels, and takings could be securely stored.13 Fluid Trajectories As well as being vended and enjoyed within these specialised settings, gin was a promiscuous and ubiquitous substance that insinuated itself into a variety of preexisting sites and spaces. As suggested by the barmaid missing the pour in the mezzotint above, gin proved impossible to contain.14 The “maddening drench” was incorporated into the repertoires of traditional innholders, taverners, and alehouse-keepers, especially in the provinces, and — mainly because retailers who traded primarily in commodities other than alcohol could sell gin without licence or scrutiny — was sold extensively in coffeehouses, chandleries, groceries, cookshops, pawnbroker’s premises, and tobacconists. Because takeaways and off-sales comprised an important part of the business of dram shops, gin was widely consumed in homes and private residences — such as by the sex worker and sailor in the mezzotint and etching below — and it could even be enjoyed with a haircut or shave. Etchings of gin served in barbershops (like this one) offer a visual counterpoint to the deceased barber in Hogarth’s Gin Lane, who has been driven to the end of a noose by bankruptcy brought on by a lack of business from his bedraggled and gin-addled clientele. Like tea and saloop (a hot Ottoman drink made from powdered orchid roots), the “infernal combustible” also found itself outside in the open air; indeed, Gin Lane is a nightmarish vision of alfresco consumption. As well as being sold in dedicated shops, gin was retailed from sheds, stalls, and lean-tos in “holes and by-alleys”, was enjoyed on thoroughfares, and — like other comestibles throughout the period — was hawked on the street by mobile vendors, especially during mass entertainments such as executions.15 The best-known depiction of this practice is Hogarth’s The Idle ‘Prentice Executed at Tyburn, which features a street retailer slinging gin from a wagon at a public hanging, although a lesser-known glimpse is provided by James Gillray’s 1795 etching Copenhagen House, which shows a hawker plying gin at a crowded and raucous meeting of the London Corresponding Society. Like coffee, gin was also sold from temporary or “pop-up” venues in parks and during fairs. Frost fairs were a regular occurrence whenever the Thames froze over, and during the 1814 freeze, gin was being sold from marquees called the “Orange Boven” and the “City of Moscow”, the latter topped with a life-size effigy of the Duke of Wellington. A raft of increasingly effective central government legislation between 1729 and 1751 led to a steady decline in gin drinking and its associated sites and spaces over the later decades of the eighteenth century, although the “diabolical liquor” received a second wind in the early nineteenth century, when reductions in duties engendered a resurgence of consumption and another innovative breed of space: the gin palace. Appearing from the 1820s, and experiencing their heyday the following decade (when the term was coined), these sumptuous locales were characterised by a number of architectural novelties that were again borrowed from the retail sector: the ever-present counter, but now also large glass frontages punctuated by columns or pilasters, rococo detailing and enrichments, gas lighting internally and externally, outsized vats containing gins of various stripes, and extensive textual inscription. The latter underscored long-standing associations between intoxicating spaces and textuality (drinking houses and coffeehouses were key settings for the circulation and consumption of books, newspapers, and other printed materials), and, as we will see below, the extensiveness of labels and legends in gin palaces proved something of a gift for caricaturists. Charles Dickens described a typical gin palace in 1836: All is light and brilliancy. The hum of many voices issues from that splendid gin-shop which forms the commencement of the two streets opposite; and the gay building with the fantastically ornamented parapet, the illuminated clock, the plate-glass windows surrounded by stucco rosettes, and its profusion of gas-lights in richly-gilt burners, is perfectly dazzling when contrasted with the darkness and dirt we have just left. The interior is even gayer than the exterior. A bar of French-polished mahogany, elegantly carved, extends the whole width of the place; and there are two side-aisles of great casks, painted green and gold, enclosed within a light brass rail, and bearing such inscriptions, as ‘Old Tom, 549’; ‘Young Tom, 360’; ‘Samson, 1421’ – the figures agreeing, we presume, with ‘gallons’, understood. Beyond the bar is a lofty and spacious saloon, full of the same enticing vessels, with a gallery running round it, equally well furnished.16 At the same time as gin was regaining momentum within these deluxe new venues, an organised temperance movement was starting to take shape. Spearheaded by coffee retailers, doctors, evangelicals, and industrialists, and animated by a fervent belief in the deleterious economic, medical, moral, and social effects of alcohol in general and spirits in particular, temperance societies campaigned vigorously against recreational drinking and ultimately for total abstention. This reforming imagination was fundamentally spatial; if, as Brian Harrison notes, their “vision of recreation [was] centred on the home” (and on the sobering intoxicant of tea), then the newfangled gin palace served as both symptom of and metonym for the corroding evils of alcohol.17 And as well as mobilising pamphlets, maps, and songs, temperance reformers also made their case through the medium of images.18 George Cruikshank the Teetotaler At the vanguard of this visual and spatial temperance strategy was the graphic satirist George Cruikshank. London born and bred, and (like his near-contemporaries James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson) an inheritor of the visual tradition of Hogarth, Cruikshank was a prolific and successful commercial cartoonist who produced more than six thousand commissions for books, magazines, and pamphlets over the course of his long career. Gin and its palaces featured heavily in the vigorous and immersive scenes of London life in which he specialised. Earlier designs, such as the ones he created for Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (from which the above description is drawn) and Pierce Egan’s picaresque 1821 bestseller Life in London, are broadly benign and affectionate; the premises are attractive, and the customers for the most part convivial, healthy, and respectable. This probably reflects the central and positive role that drinking and gin palaces played in Cruikshank’s own life during this period. While he seems not to have suffered from addictive or pathological drinking, like most nineteenth-century creatives he was a habitual and excessive consumer of alcohol well-known for his love of company-keeping and public sociability. Cruikshank had a dramatic change of science in 1847 when, at the age of fifty-five, he enthusiastically embraced teetotalism. His decision might have been in response to the negative health consequences that he was starting to experience, and was probably also informed by the fate of his father, the illustrator Isaac Cruikshank, a full-blown dipsomaniac who reputedly died of alcohol poisoning at forty-six after winning a drinking competition.19 Whatever his motivations, from the moment of his conversion Cruikshank developed what Richard Vogler has termed “an evangelical preoccupation with the evils of alcohol”, supporting and supplying illustrations for the National Temperance Society, and developing particular disdain for gin and gin palaces, which are reconfigured in his later work.20 In his best-known series The Bottle (1847), which charts domestic and familial disintegration over eight glyphograph plates, “creaming gin” (that “strong cordial”) infiltrates and causes chaos and heartbreak within the home, while the opening plate of his more ambitious, spatially expansive, and compelling follow-up series The Drunkard’s Children (1848) is set within a gin palace. The adult daughter of the alcoholic is framed at the centre of “that fountain which nourishes every species of crime”; she is approached by a shawled procuress, and surrounded by a ragtag clientele that includes imbibing children and babies and an inebriated disabled man. All are dwarfed by giant barrels bearing the ironic legends “Cream of the Valley” and the “Celebrated Double Gin”. Other portrayals from this era depict hopeless and helpless drunkards spilling and stumbling from gin palace frontages. Challenging received notions of a linear intellectual and artistic trajectory from valorisation to demonisation, Cruikshank’s most striking negative depiction of a gin palace, entitled The Gin Shop, dates from 1829, nearly twenty years before his renunciation of alcohol. Here, prefiguring his later anxieties, he imagines the gin palace as a macabre and treacherous space of death, albeit within a comic rather than social realist idiom. The etching depicts another doomed family huddled in the jaws of a literal gin-trap, encircled by morbid motifs. The gin barrels are styled as coffins, they are served by a skeleton disguised as a barkeep, and they menaced by a second skeleton holding an hourglass and spear. Like gin palaces themselves, Cruikshank characteristically deploys captions, speech bubbles, signs, and other textual devices to drive home his message. The gins are named “Kill Devil”, “Blue Ruin”, and “Deady’s Cordial”, signs point to and portend the “workhouse”, “madhouse”, “gaol”, and “gibbet”, and the skeleton grimly predicts “they have nearly had their last glass”. In a revealing double entendre, underscoring the association between gin’s pernicious effects and the malign supernatural, the “spirit vaults” contain imps dancing around a cauldron chanting an incantation. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 13, 2023

James Brown

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:24.782716

hypnerotomachia-poliphili-and-the-architecture-of-dreams

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Architecture of Dreams By Demetra Vogiatzaki September 28, 2022 With its otherworldly woodcuts and ornate descriptions of imagined architecture, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili brims with an obsessive and erotic fixation on form. Demetra Vogiatzaki accompanies the hero as he wanders the pages of this quattrocento marvel, at once a story of lost love and a fever dream of antiquity. Poliphilo’s eyelids finally close as the sun rises. His memory is tormented by Polia, whom he first glimpsed through a window in Treviso. Her chastity is non-negotiable: in a time of plague, she has sought spiritual purity. Yet Polia’s resistance only makes her suitor more desperate. On May Day, 1467, exhausted and heartbroken, Poliphilo finally gives in to a dream — the only space of requite. With its conjured worlds and strange architectural landscapes, few visions in Western literature have been scrutinized more than the vision Poliphilo had on that morning. We know about this dream thanks to a manuscript that landed in the hands of Leonardo Crasso, a jurist of Verona who saw it fit to make the story public. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili — or, as the book came to be known in English, “Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream” — was eventually published by the renowned Venetian press of Aldus Manutius in 1499. It was the first fully illustrated book produced by Aldus, a printer whose reputation stemmed from his vast humanist erudition and devotion to classical literature. Structured as a “dream within a dream”, the narrative weaves together mythological, biblical, and occult references to construct a universe filled with ruinous landscapes and orgiastic celebrations. No cost was spared by Crasso; Poliphilo’s dream is visualized across 234 folio-sized pages, which feature nearly two hundred woodcut illustrations of unparalleled mastery for their era. In Redmond Burke’s words, the editio princeps was “the most beautiful incunabulum ever printed”.1 Yet Hypnerotomachia did not fit comfortably on Aldus’ august shelves. Its licentious content quickly turned into a matter of controversy, stirring speculation on the conditions and purpose of the incunabulum’s production. For all that we know, the original “dreamer” remains unidentified. Written in an idiosyncratic hybrid language fusing Italian, Latin, and Greek, and replete with inauthentic Egyptian hieroglyphs and an abundance of architectural and botanical jargon, the rambling text of Hypnerotomachia does little to dispel the mystery of its authorship, even though it does mirror with remarkable accuracy the composite, winding nature of its contents. An acrostic formed by the first letter of each chapter, reading “Poliam Frater Franciscus Columna Peramavit" (Brother Francesco Colonna greatly loved Polia) led scholars to identify a Dominican monk from Treviso as the author of the book.2 Nevertheless, the polymathy of Poliphilo — along with the cryptic and playful nature of the work as a whole — has raised doubts regarding the plausibility of this hypothesis, with some critics suggesting that “Colonna” could be a pseudonym.3 Hypnerotomachia has been described as a “tableau of rich inventions”, “a romantic version of an encyclopedia”, and a “treasure house of aesthetic descriptions”.4 The name “Poliphilo” translates both as “lover of Polia” and as “lover of many”. And it is indeed an erotic curiosity that spills over from his pursuit of Polia, sublimated into an almost amatory infatuation with many forms of architecture. The dream follows Poliphilo’s meandering footsteps as he wrestles with mythical creatures and his own impulses in a series of fantastical worlds. His eyes alight on imagined monuments, statues, and follies. Myriad species of plants, growing silently in these chasmous structures, dissolve into blossoming orchards and forests populated by dragons, nymphs, and carnivorous wolves. From magic lamps to ornate corals, everything is meticulously recounted by Poliphilo, as his insatiable curiosity becomes the primary force that propels him into action, fixing together the disjointed scenes of his journey. Designed to draw its reader into the seductive delirium of Poliphilo’s odyssey, Hypnerotomachia is perhaps the first secular iteration of an immersive virtual world to be granted a comprehensive and consistent architectural presentation. Throughout the book, the figurative rhetoric of chivalric love is brought into a playful union with the visual conventions of fifteenth-century architectural treatises. Important here is not only the attention given by the author to the architectural staging of a literary dream, but the way in which the dream, in turn, seems to infiltrate and overtake the design of this outlandish scenery. The bewildering shapes of the various structures encountered by Poliphilo along his journey — colossal statues, pyramidal temples, and elaborate fountains, among other edifices — depart radically from the principles of composition found in canonical historiography, calling to mind a number of mythical antiquities that haunted the dreams of architects at the time. For the historian Liane Lefaivre, this association between composite architecture and the recombinant imagination is best illustrated by the Temple of the Sun, a jumble of unrelated parts that are stacked to create a monument of unthinkable dimensions.5 Considered vertically, the building is an unlikely compilation of elements. On top of the temple is a plinth, and on top of the plinth is a pyramid, and on top of the pyramid is a monolithic stone cube and on top of the monolithic stone cube is an obelisk and on top of the obelisk is a bronze statue of a nymph holding an inverted cornucopia. Poised on one leg with the other elevated in arabesque, she pirouettes on a pivot with every shift of the wind, emitting a deafening shriek with every turn.6 Hypnerotomachia abounds with similar piles ranging in size from massive to miniscule. See, for example, how the principle of the obsessive piling in the “Temple of the Sun” is repeated in the idiosyncratic formulation of the “admirable Coral Bush” and the “Perpetual Fountain”; two among the countless “miraculous” objects encountered and assiduously described by Poliphilo in his narrative. Organic and inorganic elements are here arranged vertically without any discrimination in terms of their materials, shape, or strength, producing ornamental ensembles of obscure aspiration. It is interesting to note, however, that in the Aldine edition of Hypnerotomachia, woodcuts flatten the voluminous splendor of these objects into linear compositions. The result conveys a paradoxical feeling of surface and depth that not only matches the symbolic nature of dreaming, but also the various undecipherable inscriptions and pseudo-hieroglyphs that the protagonist discovers along his journey. The origins and meaning of these runes have been traced in the contours of ancient and modern dream theories, from Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica all the way to the Freudian Dream-work, where repressed drives are organized by the unconscious into condensed, encrypted representations able to evade the censorship of waking reason. Extending this premise, critics see the monuments encountered by Poliphilo as the agonizing embodiments of his elusive beloved — or, architectural ideal.7 Yet it is perilous to assume a direct affinity between form and cognition.8 In the case of Hypnerotomachia, this would reduce architecture and dreams to their faint, distorted replicas: the dream, in the words of Michel Foucault, to “a mere rhapsody of images”, and architecture to a decontextualized play of forms.9 Hypneromachia’s illustrations of architectural and ornamental objects appeared during the period when printing presses were replacing the handcraft aesthetic of illuminated manuscripts. An unprecedented exactitude of images, achieved by innovations in printing techniques during the second half of the fifteenth century, brought forth a new visual culture in which knowledge could be recorded and transmitted in a format that remained identical from copy to copy.10 Through the skillful orchestration of type, text, and image, Poliphilo’s dreamworld expands and contracts continuously, pulsating between the fragile solidity of architectural stereography and the planar mechanics of the printing press. Although in most cases the woodcut technology’s abstraction is able to delineate the features of these admirable structures, in other cases, such as that of the Temple of Venus Physizoa, the descriptive texture in Poliphilo’s ekphrastic frenzy far exceeds the representational refinement of wooden block reliefs: The huge dome displayed the greatest evidence of workmanship more nearly divine than human; but if it were human, it aroused astonishment that human ingenuity should make such an ambitious attempt in the founder's craft: for I judged that its great vastness had been made in a single solid fusion and casting of metal. I was astonished and overwhelmed by what I deemed to be impossible. Be that as it may, this bronze work consisted wholly of a vine sprouting from beautiful vases of the same material that were ranged perpendicularly above the columns. Thence they spread out branches, sprouts or shoots, and tendrils of dizzying intricacy, perfectly fitting the convex curve of the dome and all of the appropriate thickness. There were leaves, bunches of grapes, infants climbing and plucking them, flying birds, lizards and snakes, all modelled exactly from nature; and in between it was all transparent. Poliphilo’s description unfolds through a marvelous enhancement of his perceptual abilities. As his (inner and outer) vision sharpens, the interior of the temple dissolves into an infinite array of details, organized in continuously magnified pictorial scenes. Despite its virtuosity — and impressive awareness of contemporary artistic conventions — the orthogonal section of the Temple of Venus fails to convey the edifice’s complexity. A complexity that seems to transcend not only the limits of representation, but also those of human comprehension. In the centuries that followed its enigmatic appearance, Hypnerotomachia came to represent a type of architectural and artistic invention that derives its sensuous, eccentric qualities from the cryptic world of dreams, rather than from the orderly forms usually associated with Renaissance aesthetics. Yet, besides its multiple references to and deviations from architectural rules, the world in which Hypnerotomachia unfolds presents astounding continuities with the broader religious, civic, and cultural context of Venice at the time. The ruination of the world in which Poliphilo wanders coexists with the marvelous monuments he encounters in a way that is reminiscent of the double function of Christian icons in this period.11 For Hans Belting, the icon’s intentional fragmentation of pictorial space pointed to a transcendental world that remained intact. Accordingly, the kind of memory that these artworks heralded had “both a retrospective and, curious as it sounds, a prospective character”.12 The icon was not only a trace of something from the past but also something that was promised in the future. A similar dynamic is at play in Hypnerotomachia, against the backdrop of the Venetian art scene and the work of Vittore Carpaccio in particular. Investigating the various strategies mobilized by fifteenth-century Venetian artists to represent the past, Patricia Fortini Brown observes the imaginative re-creation of a sensuous Arcadian antiquity in works like Hypnerotomachia.13 This was not merely an echo of the paradisiacal travel reports from the Aegean islands to which Venice had privileged maritime access. It also reflected a peculiar quality shared by architectural and religious drawings at the time, namely the simultaneous invocation of multiple temporalities. In Carpaccio’s Dead Christ (ca. 1520), for example, a landscape reminiscent of Hypnerotomachia unfolds around the body of the slain savior. Almost Byzantine in its execution, the scenery is rocky and desolate, with opened graves, skulls, broken tombstones, columns and slabs: fragments of what would have been seen as pagan ruins. In the background of the image, however, appear two figures in Quattrocento attire and pastoral attitude, happily playing musical instruments. Like Poliphilo and Polia, these figures function as “time travelers”, contemporizing antiquity for the beholder, while intruding into a past that will be forever unattainable.14 In the pages of the Renaissance architectural treatise, the “downward movement of imitation”, bringing the present back into the past, and the “upward motion of invention”, in which the past serves as a model for the future, are also merged in a similar “chiasm”, argues Anne-Marie Sankovitch.15 The latter creates uncanny structures built on the logic of dreams — like images drawn from one's memories to project a yet-to-be-realized reality. Under the guise of the dream, Hypnerotomachia seems to present a new symbolic universe in which the complicated relationship between ancient and modern space could be redefined. In his influential book, Unearthing the Past, Leonard Barkan showed how the pace at which antiquities were being unearthed in the late Quattrocento brought forth a sea change in historical, political, and aesthetic thought.16 These resurfaced objects didn’t just challenge established views on the past. They also generated new kinds of artistic expression and appreciation, including the production and circulation of drawings and ekphrastic narratives, the first private collections of antique fragments, and new forms of theory and practice that embraced architecture’s inventive as well as restorative potential. Yet Hypnerotomachia is much more than an architectural manifesto. These intricate negotiations also seem to emerge through the orchestration of Poliphilo’s and Polia’s triste. Almost halfway through his dream, Poliphilo encounters the beloved and embarks with her on a journey to celebrate their union. The dreamworld appears to have diminished Polia’s resistance; receptive to Poliphilo’s advances, the woman sets off to explain her former hesitations and recent change of mind. By honoring the vow she took during the plague that ravaged her hometown, Polia dutifully safeguarded her emotional and bodily boundaries against a courtship that she saw as a risk to her life. “No sooner did I see him before me”, she describes of a meeting with Poliphilo, “than I felt polluted [contaminata]”.17 Hiding alternatingly in the shrine of Diana’s temple and in the privacy of her bedchamber, Polia almost succeeds in avoiding her suitor’s pursuit. It is only after experiencing a revelatory vision of her own that she begins to doubt her resistance. She dreams about a graphic, supernatural violation of body and soul — a Cupid-like winged boy playing the dismembering executioner — representing the societal violence that awaits should she continue to reject the company of a male companion. Rarely acknowledged by scholarship, the author’s decision to give Polia a voice and dream of her own remains one of the most daring propositions of the book. Much like Nausicaa’s visitation by the goddess Athena in the opening of the Odyssey’s sixth rhapsody, Polia’s vision at the closing of Hypnerotomachia reaffirms the primacy of a patriarchal, civic order over the sovereignty of a female body. Unlike Nausicaa, however, who was chastised for the messiness hidden behind the ornate doors of her bedroom, Polia is forced to give up idealistic purity and embrace the disturbing disorder of Poliphilo’s world. This reversal becomes all the more pronounced considering how the tactility of Nausicaa’s messy trousseau gives way to fully fledged architectural pandemonium in Hypnerotomachia. As the protagonist digresses in the warped space-time of dreaming, Polia’s narrative comes to fold the creative potential of Poliphilo’s imagination back to the source of its departure: a mundane room in fifteenth-century Treviso. And when Poliphilo finally awakens, he is alone. Polia has vanished, along with the architectural fantasies that populated his dream. Her ultimate disappearance signals the most radical gesture in a book that wrestles with the enigma of its own creation. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 28, 2022

Demetra Vogiatzaki

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:25.319837

revolutionary-colossus

The Revolutionary Colossus By Samantha Wesner December 10, 2020 As the French Revolution entered its most radical years, there emerged in print a recurring figure, the collective power of the people expressed as a single gigantic body — a king-eating Colossus. Samantha Wesner traces the lineage of this nouveau Hercules, from Erasmus Darwin’s Bastille-breaking giant to a latter incarnation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Between thick dungeon walls, a giant lies asleep. He’s chained to the ground, large limbs folded, enmeshed in a web of ropes, a blindfold over his closed eyes. Suddenly, as if touched by a flame, he awakes, and gazes around in amazement. He starts up, shreds the ropes entangling him, breaks chains, smashes walls, and rises to his feet. Towering over the world, shadow stretching out below, he calls out with a voice like thunder. It could be an early scene in a monster movie. In fact, it’s an image of the French Revolution. The depiction appears in “The Economy of Vegetation”, part one of The Botanic Garden, a mind-bending meditation on life and the universe written by Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin: Long had the Giant-form on GALLIA’S plainsInglorious slept, unconscious of his chains;Round his large limbs were wound a thousand stringsBy the weak hands of Confessors and Kings;O’er his closed eyes a triple veil was bound,And steely rivets lock’d him to the ground;While stern Bastile with iron cage inthrallsHis folded limbs, and hems in marble walls.Touch’d by the patriot-flame, he rent amazedThe flimsy bonds, and round and round him gazed;Starts up from earth, above the admiring throngLifts his Colossal form, and towers along;High o’er his foes his hundred arms He rears,Plowshares his swords, and pruning hooks his spears;Calls to the Good and Brave with voice, that rollsLike Heaven’s own thunder round the echoing poles;Gives to the winds his banner broad unfurl’d,And gathers in its shade the living world! Published in 1791 — two years after the abolition of the Ancien Régime, but before the institution of the First Republic and the ensuing chaos — the vignette recounts the beginning of the French Revolution as the story of a Colossus awakening from centuries of feudal slumber. It shows collective action, Leviathan-style, in the movements of an anthropomorphic embodiment of the people, dramatizing their uprising and their destruction of the Bastille. And this figure, of a composite, revolutionary Colossus, can be seen in poetry, political commentary, and printed illustration from the late eighteenth century onwards. We can trace a kind of monstrous genealogy, culminating in what is arguably another representation of the French Revolution, Frankenstein’s creature. The first great figure in this line of descent is Darwin’s “Giant-form”, who is well beyond human scale. Above his enemies, the giant’s “hundred arms” brandish pruning hooks and plowshares, symbols of a universalized Third Estate. And though he sleeps on “Gallia’s plains”, the giant is not particularly French; he calls out to universal categories of “the Good and Brave”. The vignette describes the awakening of a kind of everyman-Colossus, with no superpowers but the tools of manual labor in his (many) hands. When Darwin imagined revolutionary France this way, he tapped into a broader cultural imaginary. Two years after the publication of The Botanic Garden, at artist-deputy Jacques-Louis David’s suggestion, the Jacobins chose Hercules as a symbol of revolutionary, republican France. Historian Lynn Hunt writes of how Hercules replaced both the human-scale Marianne and the female figures such as Liberty and Justice from the allegorical pantheon during the most radical years of the revolution.1 In one sketch from this period, the French Hercules tramples a hydra representing “federalism”, the provincial movements of resistance to the revolutionary center. Like Darwin’s giant, the Jacobin Hercules embodies the contradictions of a mythic everyman. David wanted “work” (travail) written on each hand. And in political cartoons, Hercules became a vrai sans-culotte — this Colossus is nothing other than your average working man, only larger. In a sketch for a statue to be placed on the most embattled French borders, the sans-culotte Colossus holds a tiny king over a flame, Hercules’ club poised to strike; it’s an image of “The People, King-Eater”. But for all his ordinariness, the fact that this Colossus moved was wondrous, or monstrous, or both. “The tocsin and the cannon of alarm awakened [the people’s] patriotism, announcing that liberty was in danger”, declared Jacobin deputy Joseph Fouché, describing the purging of the moderate Girondins from the Convention, in late May and early June 1793: “The forty-eight sections armed themselves and were transformed into an army”. This was all a straightforward history, albeit recounted in a propagandizing register. But suddenly Fouché slipped into the present tense: This formidable colossus is standing, he marches, he advances, he moves like Hercules, traversing the Republic to exterminate this ferocious crusade that swore death to the people.2 The Colossus, made up of the forty-eight sections of Paris like so many body parts, on the march, is awe-inspiring and terrifying. In a sense, the sans-culotte Hercules is stepping in to fill a symbolic void at the heart of the new democratic order. This anthropomorphic representation of the people’s collective power drew upon the previous century’s most compelling theories of sovereignty. In Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan of 1651, written in the context of the English Civil War, the people, by contract, irrevocably ceded sovereign power to an “Artificial Man”, whose every act is in some sense a collective act. In Fouché’s imagery too, the sans-culotte Colossus-Hercules in theory collects the power of the people into a single body, a body whose movements are at once the movements of the people. The revolutionary Colossi stood on the edge between miraculousness and monstrousness. After the fall of the Jacobins in July 1794, monstrous depictions of revolution abounded, ushering in the conservative backlash of Thermidor, named for the month in the revolutionary calendar in which Maximilien Robespierre was guillotined. In one example, British caricaturist James Gillray, best known for his satirizing of Napoleon, depicted a French Colossus astride the Mediterranean, hands and feet dripping blood. The skull-like head, crawling with snakes, stands in stark contrast to the decapitated but quite human head of Louis Capet (as the revolutionaries referred to Louis XVI), strung around the Colossus-monster’s neck. From the clouds, a British lightning bolt decapitates this aberration of a body politic. The giant body disintegrates at the same blow, arms and legs falling to pieces as the arms and legs of an enormous clay figurine might. An embodiment of the nation no more, Gillray’s French Colossus comes apart bloodlessly as no real body would. As Louis Sebastien Mercier wrote of a destroyed statue of Louis XV in the early years of the revolution, “Yes, it was all hollow, power and statue!”3 Yet not all sovereign power is hollow in Gillray’s image. “Shall the Lightning not blast the Image, which the destroyers have set up against the God of Heaven & against His Laws?” the caption asks. The illustration appears to answer: yes, it will, by virtue of another Colossus, Great Britain, which emerges from the clouds with a fist full of lighting bolts. As Kevin Duong explores in his 2017 essay “Flash Mob”, though the lightning bolt had long been associated with traditional forms of sovereign power, the French revolutionaries appropriated the device — and all its associations with the scientific ideas so vital to their project — as a key symbol of the all-important people’s will. It seems all the more cutting then that it is lightning, in the hands of the more traditional sovereignty of the British, which rends the French Colossus limb from limb in Gillray’s image. To the conservative imagination, revolution was not only monstrous but cannibalistic — a Thermidorian variation on “The People, King-Eater”. As Edmund Burke wrote in his Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790, revolution was “a species of political monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it”.4 French Thermidorian prints reflected this verdict in their own way. In Les Formes acerbes, a human figure stands on a pile of corpses. With a stance befitting a would-be Colossus, he drinks steaming blood, fresh from the guillotine, as if to transform himself into something more than human by the drink. The figure is Joseph le Bon, a Jacobin representative sent from Paris to the provinces during The Terror to bring rebels in the north of France to heel. Furies and leopards stand by, “worthy companions of this Cannibal”, ready to devour the remains of Le Bon’s victims. Terror is written in the gestures and faces of the group to the left, as they supplicate the Convention. Like Gillray, the print depicts another perversion of sovereignty, this time in the figure of the Cannibal representative, a human being who makes himself monstrous. Sometimes in the conservative imagination, the Jacobin was not himself monstrous, but instead enlisted monsters to “sow Crime and Terror” alongside him. In an anonymous Thermidorian print, it’s not the revolution itself embodied, but Discord, a wiry, snake-haired woman slightly larger than the Jacobin. In an echo of the sans-culotte Colossus, the Jacobin holds Hercules’ club as if to demonstrate his control over the people’s violence, which he might call upon if he has to. He offers up a scroll labeled “Revolutionary Government” authorizing Discord to do her worst. “Nasty Crooks, thanks to God, your reign is over”, the caption reads. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in 1818, came decades after the Jacobins and cast a backwards glance toward the revolution’s promise. Mary Shelley, the eighteen-year-old daughter of two late-Enlightenment philosophers, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, gazed back at the revolution with all the gloomy judgment of a teenager reflecting on her parents’ utopian schemes. Shelley’s parents had seen great potential in the French revolutionary promise. In this they shared the sentiment of a generation of English onlookers inspired by a politics modeled on nature, rooted in rationalism. In the words of the early Romantic poet William Wordsworth, Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,But to be young was very heaven!5 But Mary Shelley’s own youth took place against the backdrop of a violent decade of European warfare, as Napoleon Bonaparte traversed the continent, the self-proclaimed representative of French freedom and liberty. Shelley’s birth in 1797 caused the death of her mother, and coincided with the coup that transformed what was left of French revolutionary democracy into dictatorship. Critics have read Shelley’s story as a parable of the dual nature of the revolutionary moment: the scientific, rational Frankenstein and the lonely, love-lorn, murderous creature, trapped in a struggle to the death.6 As scientist-representatives brought to life a revolutionary Colossus, so Frankenstein, driven by a feverish, misguided impulsion, brought to life a “hideous progeny”.7 The result is a killing spree of innocents as creature and creator crisscross the continent. And like Darwin’s giant, the revolutionary Colossi, and the Thermidorian monsters, Frankenstein’s creature is unnamed. As in Les Abominables, Theodore Von Holst’s 1831 frontispiece to Frankenstein sets two figures, creator and monster, together in the frame. But here, there is no evil conniving, only shock and creeping horror. Both creator and creature appear almost innocently stunned by what has happened, Frankenstein looking down at his monstrous offspring as he beats a hasty retreat, the creature looking blankly shocked to be alive, in contrast with the skeleton lying supine between his legs. The crazed Dr Frankenstein of James Whale’s 1931 film adaptation watches the hand of his creature lift and tremble and exclaims, “Look, it’s moving. It’s alive!” That coming-to-life of an artificially assembled creature is the crux of the horror of Frankenstein in cultural memory. A poster for the film has the creature breaking through a kind of black void, emphasizing the terror provoked by the mere fact of his movement. The animation of the revolutionary Colossus is likewise key to its appeal. When Fouché describes the Paris sections coming together to form a body, it’s the liveliness of that body, manifested in its movement, that awes and terrifies. With Darwin too, the revolution begins when the giant awakes and stands. What moves the monster? What is the animating force? In Frankenstein, though Shelley never made it explicit, there are implications within the text that a kind of galvanic electricity is at work. In addition, her introduction to the revised 1831 text of Frankenstein mentions such concepts: “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured”. Derived from the late eighteenth-century vitalist theory that living beings were naturally electrical, galvanism fascinated Shelley and her circle.8 No surprise, then, that her creature is brought to life by a vital, electrical spark. In Darwin’s poem too, composed nearly three decades earlier, electricity plays an animating role. If we scan back only a few lines from his giant who is “Touch’d by the patriot-flame”, we learn how this patriot-flame starts a revolution: The patriot-flame with quick contagion ran,Hill lighted hill, and man electrised man. Here Darwin describes the American Revolution, but the flame is the same. From hill to hill and from man to man, this American patriot-flame, with its “electrising” power, reaches the colossal being, chained up in the Bastille. The Nouveau Dictionnaire Français contenant les expressions de nouvelle Création du Peuple Français, published in Gottingen in 1795, defines a new verb, “to electrify”, as an invention of the French Revolution: TO ELECTRIFY. V. This verb is used in the same way as the adjective to express great movements of the soul and the tremors that they make others feel in animating the same fervor. (The news of the victories electrified all the hearts of the defenders of the country….The intrepid defenders of the country covered in honorable wounds need only to appear in public scenes to _electrify_ them by their presence. Victory electrified the People. It was the necessity of mounting a defense that electrified the courage and the energy of the Roman People, multiplying its force a hundredfold, turning it into a Colossus.)9 According to this dictionary of new, French-Revolutionary expressions, electrification turns the people into a Colossus, awakening and energizing the body politic, solving the mystery of collective movement. In this case, the Colossus goes to war, electrified by the need for defense. The Colossus, or monster, becomes a way of imagining embodied revolution, set in motion, for better or worse depending on one’s politics, by a vital spark. Placing the revolutionary Colossi in a genealogy that stretches from Darwin’s Bastille giant through to Frankenstein’s horrific creature invites us to consider the particular emotional register within which each appears. The exercise reveals an inverse relationship between size and degree of horror. In Darwin, the giant is grand and glorious, the size of the earth itself; in Fouché he is scarier and smaller, traversing the republic on a ruthless exterminating mission. In Thermidorian prints and in British caricature, he is a hollow aberration of a body politic, or a would-be Colossus who instead becomes a monstrous cannibal as he drinks the blood of the guillotine. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, the creature is somewhat larger than a man, and downright horrifying, doubly so because we sympathize with him. And there is something else in the shift from Darwin’s titanic giant, awakened by patriot-flame, to Shelley’s creature, jolted into life by a scientist in the grip of a feverish, misguided, creative impulsion. If for Darwin, revolution could be allegorized to the electrified awakening of an embodied Third Estate, then Frankenstein allegorizes a revolution stripped of both its epic scale and its promise. Our attention shifts from the patriot-flame and the Colossus to the “modern Prometheus” of Shelley’s subtitle, who gave fire to mankind and lived to regret it. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

December 10, 2020

Samantha Wesner

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:26.838917

athanasius-kircher-study-of-the-plague

“Invisible Little Worms” Athanasius Kircher’s Study of the Plague By John Glassie April 22, 2020 Living through the devastating Italian plague of 1656, the great polymath Athanasius Kircher turned his ever-enquiring mind to the then mysterious disease, becoming possibly the first to view infected blood through a microscope. While his subsequent theories of spontaneous generation and “universal sperm” were easily debunked, Kircher’s investigation can be seen as an important early step to understanding contagion, and perhaps even the very first articulation of germ theory. John Glassie explores. I The plague arrived in Naples in the spring of 1656 — along with a transport of soldiers from Sardinia. At the worst point that summer, thousands were dying there each day. Desperate and frightened citizens flocked in huge numbers to the churches to pray. According to one subsequent account, people “of the highest quality”, as well as the “disheveled”, and presumably the infected, all joined these “confused processions” with the horrific result that “the streets and the stairs of the churches were filled with the dead”.1 By the time it was over in August, as many as one hundred and fifty thousand of the city’s inhabitants had died. Rome had responded to the news from Naples by policing the seaports and inspecting people and animals at the gates of the city. But by June the disease nevertheless sneaked inside, in this case via a fisherman off the boats at Nettuno. The fisherman was staying at a rooming house in the slums of Trastevere, just across the Tiber from Rome proper, when he began to feel ill. He died just days later, with what were called “evil signs”.2 Possibly these were the infected black buboes or bubones, from which the term bubonic plague is derived, swelling out as big as eggs or apples from under the armpits and from the groin. There may have been boils and abscesses, black or red carbuncles over the entire body, infected and full of pus, or toward the end, a blackening of the skin from hemorrhage. Perhaps he’d lost his senses completely, been vomiting violently, or coughing up bloody sputum. By order of Rome’s Congregation of Health, soldiers built a wooden barrier around the Trastevere district overnight, shutting in everyone who lived on its narrow streets. Great chains were dropped across the waterways to keep ships from sailing up the Tiber. The city gates were closed. But it was only a short time before more cases were reported, not only in Trastevere but in the Jewish ghetto and other parts of Rome. The plague was said to exist as a fetid miasma, or corruption of the air from putrid vapors. People thought that epidemics could be occasioned in the first place by celestial activity, a conjunction of malignant Mars with hot and humid Jupiter, for example. Other forms of corrupt air — due to decaying corpses, food, excrement, excessive humidity, stagnant water, emissions from volcanoes or other openings in the earth — could supposedly somehow combine or join with this miasma and make things worse. The poison was believed to stick to fabrics and hair and to penetrate the body through pores in the skin.3 To counteract it, people scrubbed floors and walls with vinegar; burned rosemary, cypress, and juniper; and rubbed oils and essences on their skin. The wealthy left for the country if they could. Vagrants were sent to prison or conscripted to help the sick and scrub the streets of filth. When members of middle-class households were found to be sick, their houses were quarantined, with families boarded up inside. The vast majority of the ill were taken where their exhalations could do the least harm, to quarantined pesthouses, also called lazarettos, after the biblical story of Lazarus — though if you went in, the chances of dying, and staying dead, were high. “Here you are overwhelmed by intolerable smells”, wrote a visitor to a Bologna lazaretto some years earlier. “Here you cannot walk but among corpses. Here you feel naught but the constant horror of death.”4 In late June, schools, courts, markets, and businesses were closed. A general lockdown of the city was ordered for forty days. Doctors walked the quiet streets in seventeenth-century versions of hazmat suits; their beaklike masks were stuffed with herbs and spices. People found violating health regulations or quarantines were jailed, or in many instances put to death. One thirteen-year-old girl, who had run out into the street after a chicken, was hanged, apparently as a lesson to others. Although the epidemic continued for more than a year, many of these tactics did help prevent the spread of the disease. The effects of the plague in Rome were much less devastating than in Naples — only about fifteen thousand people died. But living through it was frightening. One figure who did: the fairly eccentric, extremely prolific Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. From his established place at the Collegio Romano, the flagship institution of his order in Rome, this energetic polymath had thrown himself into the study of just about everything, authoring magnificent seat-cushion-size books on subjects ranging from magnetism to music. During normal times, Kircher often toured distinguished visitors through his museum at the Collegio, where he not only displayed curiosities from around the world (amassed with the help of Jesuit missionaries), but also demonstrated his own magic lanterns, speaking statues, and, as legend has it, a single “cat piano”. During the summer and fall of 1656, as Kircher remembered it, the “altogether horrid and unrelenting carnage” of Naples was on everyone’s mind, and “each man, out of dread for the ever-looming image of death, was anxiously and solicitously seeking an antidote that would ensure recovery from so fierce an evil.” A melancholic, literary man, he was supposed to be particularly susceptible to the effects of the plague. And yet the prospect of death can sometimes translate into increased ambition, if not a greater desire for immortality. This was the kind of person who pursued his interest in geological matters by lowering himself down into the smoking crater of Mount Vesuvius. So maybe it wasn’t surprising that Kircher would decide to take on the greatest public health challenge of the early modern world. “In this state of affairs,” he recalled, “amidst the horrible silence of the sad city and in the deepest recess of solitude (for the entrance of the Roman College had been closed), I attempted with sluggish though necessary toil to develop the ideas that I had previously begun to conceive concerning the origin of the plague.”5 During the course of this study, Kircher would become one of the very first people in history to use the microscope to study disease. Perhaps the very first. And he would apply his findings to an argument that was either ancient or brand new, or both, depending on how one looked at it, or the century from which one looked. II As his encyclopedic tome Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (The Great Art of Light and Shadow), published in 1645, makes clear, Kircher had been experimenting with lenses and optics for many years prior to Rome’s epidemic. At almost a thousand pages, the volume was meant to provide readers with all they could possibly want to know about light, color, vision, and related matters, and along with instructions for making sundials and projecting images with mirrors, it included a description of what he called a smicroscopus. (Among earlier mentions of the microscope in print, Galileo had written about the use of a telescope adjusted to see things close up. He’d made a gift of one to the experiment-minded members of the Academy of the Lynx-eyed in Rome, who in turn had published descriptions and images of magnified bees. The Linceans, as the members were called, may have been the source of Kircher’s device.) Kircher’s microscope at that time was perhaps not much more than a short tube with a magnifying lens, or a combination of lenses, fitted inside. But he claimed in The Great Art of Light and Shadow to have seen “mites that suggested hairy bears”6 and minute organisms in cheese, vinegar, and milk. If the living forms that can be seen through a microscope are “so tiny that they are beyond the reach of the senses,” he wondered in later years, “how tiny can their little hearts be? How tiny must their little livers be, or their little stomachs, their cartilage and little nerves, their means of locomotion?”7 The polymath gave readers an update of sorts on his work with the microscope in 1658, in his subsequent book about the plague — Scrutinium Physico-Medicum Contagiosae Luis, Quae Pestis Dicitur. (The English translation, A Physico-Medical Examination of the Contagious Pestilence Called the Plague, is often shortened to Examination of the Plague.) It is “generally known that worms grow from foul corpses”, Kircher wrote in that volume. “But since the use of that remarkable discovery, the smicroscopus, or the so-called magnifying glass, it has been shown that everything putrid is filled with countless masses of small worms, which could not be seen with the naked eye and without lenses.”8 It’s important to say here that for many centuries, spontaneous generation was everyday doctrine. Most people simply assumed that small creatures such as flies, ants, and even frogs and snakes, grew from nonliving matter, preferably swampy or putrescent or excremental. Who could deny, for example, that maggots appeared on rotting meat? And plenty of the old authorities had agreed. Pliny held that insects originated from rotten milk and flesh, as well as from fruit, dew, and rain. Ovid, Plutarch, Virgil, and others believed that bees were born from the dung of bulls. Aristotle believed in spontaneous generation from living matter as well, contending that cabbages engendered caterpillars.9 Kircher explained that he’d performed an entire series of “experiments” related to this apparent phenomenon which he invited readers (with access to a similar instrument) to try. For example: Take a piece of meat, and at night leave it exposed to the lunar moisture until the following day. Then examine it carefully with a microscope and you will find that all the prutridity drawn from the moon has been transformed into numberless little worms of different sizes, which in the absence of the microscope you will be unable to detect . . . The same basic thing happens, he said, if you take a bowl of water sprinkled with dirt from the ground and expose it to the sun for a few days: “You will see . . . certain vesicles which are quickened into exceedingly minute worms”, which eventually become “a vast number of winged gnats.” It also happens “if you cut a snake into little pieces, soak them in rain water, expose them for some days to the sun, bury them for a whole day and night in the earth, and then, when they are soft with putridity, examine them with a microscope” — except here what you see is the decaying mess swarming with little “snakes”.10 Based on these “incontrovertible experiments”, there was really no doubt in his mind about what he thought he knew: that tiny lower creatures grew from the decay of other living things. And it occurred to him that, at least as he and everyone else believed, the plague also arose from decay and putridity. It was with this in mind that, on several occasions, Kircher examined the blood of plague sufferers under his microscope. “The putrid blood of those affected by fevers has fully convinced me”, he wrote. “I have found it, an hour or so after letting, so crowded with worms as to well nigh dumbfound me.” His assertion: “Plague is in general a living thing”. The arguments in Examination of the Plague are hard to follow, but something called panspermia, or universal sperm, was certainly involved: Kircher believed that “seeds of a vegetative and sentient nature” are “scattered everywhere among the elemental bodies”, and that decomposing matter acted as a kind of fertilizer or necessary ingredient for the generation of new forms. In the case of the plague, he suggested that when the tiny semina, or seeds, or “corpuscles”, that emanate from all natural things become corrupted by putrescence, they become the minute carriers of the disease. “Corpuscles of this kind are commonly nonliving”, he explained, “but through the agency of ambient heat already tainted with a similar pollution, they are transformed into a brood of countless invisible little worms.” According to Kircher, these “propagators of the plague” are “so small, so light, so subtle, that they elude any grasp of perception and can only be seen under the most powerful microscope.” Therefore, they “are easily forced out through all the passages and pores” of plague victims’ bodies and of the sick and “are moved by even the faintest breath of air, just like so many dust particles in the sun.” They are then “drawn through the breath and through the sweat pores of the body, from which later such fearful symptoms and effects result.”11 Over the next several years, Kircher took his theorizing to new levels; in his view, universal sperm was essentially the life force. But his beliefs, at least about spontaneous generation, were rather humiliatingly debunked in 1668 by a physician in the Medici court named Francesco Redi. In his Esperienze Intorno alla Generazione degl’Insetti (Experiments on the Generation of Insects), Redi describes one of the very first controlled experiments ever documented: “I put a snake, some fish, some eels of Arno, and a slice of milk-fed veal in four large, wide-mouthed flasks; having well closed and sealed them, I then filled the same number of flasks in the same way, only leaving these open.”12 Maggots soon began to appear on the flesh in the open containers, but not in the closed ones. He experimented with a number of variations, sometimes covering the flasks with “a fine Naples veil”, but no maggots or worms or anything at all ever appeared inside the covered containers. He also dutifully followed Kircher’s instructions for breeding bees in the dung of an ox, for breeding scorpions in dead scorpions, and for breeding flies in dead flies. He never had any luck. With no insects appearing in closed flasks, Redi was convinced that “no animal of any kind is ever bred in dead flesh unless there be a previous egg deposit.”13 That was really all it took to to disprove an age-old notion about the genesis of lower forms of life. Redi referred to Kircher somewhat patronizingly as “a man of worthy esteem”, but it had never occurred to Kircher to regulate his experiments this way — to put a lid, as it were, on his container. Just a few years later Redi published another set of findings; this time they exposed Kircher’s gullibility about the healing powers of something called the snakestone. III In 1932, C. Clifford Dobell, a leading biologist with a specialty in protozoology, described Examination of the Plague as “a farrago of nonsensical speculation by a man possessed of neither scientific acumen nor medical instinct”.14 But many others have credited Kircher with a major discovery. In the words of another twentieth-century medical authority, Kircher “was undoubtedly the first to state in explicit terms the doctrine of ‘contagium vivum’ as the cause of infectious disease”15 — in other words, that Kircher discovered microorganisms and was the first to propose the germ theory of contagion. If that’s true, however, then his articulation of germ theory was predicated on notions no modern scientist would be caught dead advancing. Besides, the concept of universal seeds went back to the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, and the idea that disease is living turns out to be both ancient and mystical. (Today, by the way, although bacteria — like the kind that cause the plague — are understood to be living organisms, viruses — like Covid-19 — are not considered to be “alive”.) A lot of what Kircher wrote about disease came from Lucretius, the disciple of Epicurus from whom Pierre Gassendi got his modern-sounding ideas about atoms. In his epic poem, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Lucretius wrote that “there are many seeds of things which support life, and on the other hand there must be many flying about which make for disease and death.” They can come “down through the sky like clouds and mists, or often they gather together and rise from the earth itself, when through dampness it has become putrescent.”16 Among other sources, Kircher also borrowed heavily from, but doesn’t cite, a sixteenth-century writer most famous for a verse treatise called Syphilis, or the French Disease. (Understandably, no one wanted to take the credit for syphilis, which reached epidemic proportions during his time — to Muslims, it was the disease of the Christians, to the English it was the French pox, to the French it was the Neapolitan disease, and to the Italians it was of Spanish origin.) The author, a physician from Verona named Fracastoro, worked out a theory of contagion involving transmission of “imperceptible particles”, infected and self-propagating, that he called seminaria, or “seedbeds”, sometimes translated as “germs”.17 What did Kircher actually see when he examined the blood of plague patients? He claimed his microscope made “everything appear a thousand times larger than it really is”, but he didn’t mean that literally. It’s not possible that he saw plague bacilli, which are one six-hundredth of a millimeter long. Even if he employed a form of compound microscope (which consists of a series of lenses), any organic specimen might have looked like a mass of tiny worms. And yet most of Kircher’s readers had never looked through a microscope at all. Only one or two treatises on the subject had ever been published, and Examination of the Plague caused a kind of sensation within the network of scholars and philosophers known as the Republic of Letters. A doctor in Dresden compared Kircher’s brilliance to the shining of the sun. An anatomy professor in Jena informed Kircher that “the reputation of things Kircherian” had “spread through all of Europe”. In thanks for his copy of the book, a missionary in New Spain sent Kircher chocolate and peppers “that have the name of Chile”.18 Eventually, whether or not Examination of the Plague hit upon one of the core tenets of epidemiology, it did inspire a great deal of experimentation with the microscope, and it influenced thinking that in turn led to (actual?) discoveries about the way disease is spread. You might therefore say that the epidemic of 1656, itself, led to such discoveries, although the gains came at a monstrously heavy price. One final note: Kircher’s eager readers may have been under the incorrect assumption that he had something to do with stemming the plague in Rome. And on the question of prevention and cure he did provide his considered opinion, but this one can’t be mistaken for an early expression of modern medical thought: he believed that, short of leaving the area, an amulet made of the flesh of a toad, or of dried toad powder, and worn over the heart, was probably the best antidote.19 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 22, 2020

John Glassie

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:27.203258

petrarchs-plague

Petrarch’s Plague Love, Death, and Friendship in a Time of Pandemic By Paula Findlen June 11, 2020 The Italian poet and scholar Francesco Petrarch lived through the most deadly pandemic in recorded history, the Black Death of the 14th century, which saw up to 200 million die from plague across Eurasia and North Africa. Through the unique record of letters and other writings Petrarch left us, Paula Findlen explores how he chronicled, commemorated, and mourned his many loved ones who succumbed, and what he might be able to teach us today. What will we remember of this year of COVID-19 and how will we recall it? In 1374, during the final year of a long and interesting life, the Italian humanist and poet Francesco Petrarch observed that his society had lived with “this plague, without equal in all the centuries”, for over twenty-five years.1 His fortune and misfortune had been to outlast so many friends and family who perished before him, many of them from this devastating disease. One of the most eloquent voices of his time, Petrarch spoke on behalf of an entire generation of plague survivors, following the pandemic of 1346–53 and its periodic return. He skillfully wielded his pen to express his society’s collective grief in the most personal and meaningful ways, acknowledging the effect of so much pain and loss. In the immediate aftermath of the particularly devastating year of 1348, when plague engulfed the Italian peninsula, his good friend Giovanni Boccaccio in his Decameron sketched an indelible portrait of young Florentines fleeing their plague-ridden city to wait out the storm by telling one hundred tales. For his part, Petrarch documented the experience of plague over several decades, probing its changing effects on his psyche. The Black Death sharpened his sense of the sweetness and fragility of life in the face of the endemic reality of disease that came in so many different forms. He had big questions and was in search of answers. “The year of 1348 left us alone and helpless”, Petrarch declared at the very beginning of his Familiar Letters, his great project to share carefully selected versions of correspondence with friends.2 What was the meaning of life after so much death? Had it transformed him, or for that matter anyone, for the better? Could love and friendship survive plague? Petrarch’s questions allowed his readers to explore how they, too, felt about these things. He gave them permission to express such sentiments, indeed took up the burden, which was also his literary opportunity, to articulate the zeitgeist. Petrarch was famously a self-professed wanderer who rarely stayed in one place very long. He alternated between periods of self-imposed isolation in the countryside and full immersion in the life of cities, even during the worst outbreaks of disease. This mobility made him an especially unique observer of how plague became a pandemic. At the end of November 1347, one month after Genoese ships brought plague to Messina, Petrarch was in Genoa. Disease spread rapidly by land and sea — through rats and fleas, though at the time it was believed to be a product of the corruption of the air. Petrarch’s awareness of the course of this pandemic comes through clearly in a letter written from Verona on April 7, 1348, when he refused the invitation of a Florentine relative to return to his native Tuscany, citing “the plague of this year which has trampled and destroyed the entire world, especially along the coast”.3 Returning several days later to Parma, still a plague-free zone, Petrarch learned that his relative the poet Franceschino degli Albizzi, on his way back from France, had died in the Ligurian port of Savona. Petrarch cursed the toll that “this pestilential year” was now exacting.4 He understood that the plague was spreading, yet perhaps this was the first time that the escalating mortality struck close to home. “I had not considered the possibility of his being about to die”.5 Plague now touched him personally. As the year progressed, Petrarch felt increasingly surrounded by fear, sorrow, and terror. Death came suddenly and repeatedly. In June, a friend who came to dinner was dead by morning, followed by the rest of the family in a matter of days. In the poem “To Himself”, an effort to capture the strangeness of this experience, Petrarch imagined a future that would not understand how awful it had been to be alive in “a city full of funerals” and empty homes.6 Petrarch talked of retreating from the plague-infested cities with his closest friends. After bandits attacked two of them as they traveled from France into Italy, murdering one, nothing came of it. Perhaps the survivors recognized the folly of an idealistic plan that simply did not fit their dispersed circumstances. In July 1348, Petrarch’s most important patron, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, died of plague, along with many members of this distinguished Roman family whom he served in Avignon. The poet was now out of a job, more restless and unmoored than ever. Petrarch deeply mourned the “absence of friends”.7 Friendship was his joy and his sorrow. He compensated for this loss by writing eloquent letters to the living as well as rereading his favorite missives to the deceased, preparing the best ones for publication. In an era of almost instantaneous communication via email, phone, and social media, it is easy to forget how important correspondence was as a technology to bridge social distance. Letters, as Petrarch’s ancient Roman hero Cicero famously declared, made the absent present.8 The act of correspondence could also, of course, bring anguish. Petrarch worried about whether friends were still alive if they did not respond quickly. “Free me from these fears as soon as possible by a letter from you”, Petrarch encouraged one of his closest friends, nicknamed Socrates (the Flemish Benedictine monk and cantor Ludwig van Kempen), in September 1348.9 He fretted that “the contagiousness of the recurring plague as well as the unhealthy air” might precipitate another untimely death.10 Communication may not have been swift but it was nonetheless effective and, ultimately, reassuring. At the end of this awful year, Petrarch predicted that anyone who escaped the first assault should prepare for the viciousness of plague’s return. This was an astute and ultimately accurate observation. During the following year, Petrarch continued to enumerate plague victims as well as the cumulative effects of quarantine and depopulation. He wrote a poem commemorating the tragic death of Laura, a woman he had known and loved in southern France, only to discover that the person to which he’d sent the poem, the Tuscan poet Sennuccio del Bene, later died of plague as well, making Petrarch wonder if his words bore the contagion. Another sonnet was required. The act of writing, which had initially been impossibly painful, began to elevate his spirits. Life had become cruel and death unrelenting but he compensated by taking pen in hand — the only useful weapon he had besides prayer and the one he preferred. Others advised flight and proposed temporary public health measures such as quarantine, but Petrarch seems to have felt that he might think and write his way through this pandemic. Everywhere he traveled, Petrarch observed the absence of people in the cities, the fields that lay fallow in the countryside, the disquiet of this “afflicted and nearly deserted world”.11 By March 1349, he found himself in Padua. He was dining with the bishop one evening when two monks arrived with reports of a plague-ridden French monastery. The prior had shamefully fled and all but one of the thirty-five remaining monks were dead. This was how Petrarch discovered that his younger brother Gherardo, now celebrated for his courage and caring, was the sole survivor of this pestilential holocaust. The hermitage in Méounes-lès-Montrieux, which Petrarch visited in 1347 and wrote about in his work On Religious Leisure still exists today. He immediately wrote Gherardo to express fraternal pride in having a plague hero in the family. In October 1350, Petrarch moved on to Florence and it was here that he first met Boccaccio. By this time the city was no longer the epicenter of the pandemic, but its effects were still tangible, like a raw wound, or more accurately a lanced yet still pustulating bubo, that had not yet healed. Boccaccio was in the midst of drafting the Decameron. Although there is no record of the two writers discussing how to write about plague, we do know that Boccaccio avidly consumed Petrarch’s poetry and prose, copying lengthy passages in his notebooks at many different moments throughout a long friendship that lasted until their deaths one year apart. It was Petrarch’s early plague writing that spurred Boccaccio to complete his own take on how 1348 became the year their world changed. Around 1351, Petrarch began to memorialize those whom he loved and lost by inscribing his recollections of them on the pages of a much-treasured possession — his copy of Virgil’s works adorned with a beautiful frontispiece by the Sienese painter Simone Martini. He began this practice of commemoration by recording the death — from three years earlier, in 1348 — of his beloved Laura, the subject of so many of his poems. Petrarch resolved to use every ounce of his eloquence to make her eternally present in his poetry but also in his Virgil. On its flyleaf, he inscribed these unforgettable words: “I decided to write down the harsh memory of this painful loss, and I did so, I suppose, with a certain bitter sweetness, in the very place that so often passes before my eyes”. He did not want to forget the searing pain of this moment that awakened his soul and sharpened his consciousness of the passage of time. Boccaccio was among Petrarch’s friends who wondered if Laura ever existed outside of his poetic imagination, but he never questioned Petrarch’s determination to remember that year as transformative. Among the other inscriptions in Petrarch’s Virgil — now held by the Ambrosian Library in Milan — is notice of the death of his twenty-four-year-old son Giovanni on July 10, 1361 in Milan, “in that publicly ruinous though unusual outbreak of plague, one that found and fell upon that city, which up to that point had been immune to such evils”. Spared the devastation of the first wave of plague, Milan — where Petrarch had been living since 1353 — became the focal point of a second pandemic in 1359–63. By 1361, Petrarch had left for Padua, but his son stubbornly chose to remain behind. In 1361, following his son’s death, Petrarch once again took up his pen. He began his Letters of Old Age, as he called his second collection of correspondence, with a letter to a Florentine friend Francesco Nelli bemoaning the loss of his beloved friend Socrates in that year. Socrates had been the person who informed Petrarch of Laura’s passing, and Petrarch added a note in his copy of Virgil about this latest plague death to pierce his heart. In his Letters of Old Age, he wrote: “I had complained that the year 1348 of our era had deprived me of nearly every consolation in life because of my friends’ deaths. Now what shall I do in the sixty-first year of this century?”12 Petrarch observed that the second pandemic was worse, nearly emptying out Milan and many other cities. He was now determined to write in a different voice, no longer lamenting but actively combatting fortune’s adversity. During this second pandemic, Petrarch launched a fierce critique of the role that astrologers played in explaining plague’s return and predicting its course. He considered their self-proclaimed truths to be largely accidental: “Why do you feign futile prophecies after the fact or call chance truths?”13 He chastised friends and patrons who revisited their horoscopes, considering them a false science predicated on the misuse of astronomical data. As plague spread through the urban centres, a physician friend encouraged the poet to flee to the country air of Lake Maggiore, but Petrarch refused to succumb to terror. Remaining in cities, he began to spend the bulk of his time between Padua and Venice. When plague reached the Venetian Republic, friends renewed their entreaties, leading Petrarch to comment: “it has very often happened that a flight from death is a flight to death”.14 Boccaccio came to visit and decided not to tell him of their mutual friend Nelli’s demise, leaving Petrarch to discover his most recent loss when letters returned, unopened. Plague returned to Florence with a vengeance in the summer of 1363. In this heightened atmosphere of renewed anxiety, Petrarch redoubled his criticisms of astrologers who deluded the living with predictions of when the latest pandemic would end. An anxious populace hung on their every word. “We do not know what is happening in the heavens”, he fumed in a letter to Boccaccio in September, “but impudently and rashly they profess to know”.15 A pandemic was a business opportunity for astrologers who peddled their words to “parched minds and thirsty ears”.16 Petrarch was hardly alone in pointing out that the astrologers’ conclusions had no basis in astronomical data or the spread of disease. They sold false hope and certainty in the marketplace. Petrarch longed for a more reasoned response to pandemic with better tools than the science of the stars. What then of medicine? Petrarch was famously skeptical about physicians who claimed too much certainty and authority. He believed that physicians, like everyone else, needed to acknowledge their own ignorance as a first step towards knowing anything. Ignorance itself was “pestiferous” — a disease to be rooted out and eradicated even if there was no vaccine.17 While professing great respect for the art of healing, he had no patience with what he slyly dubbed “pestilential incompetence” in his Invectives against the Physician.18 Plague alone did not reveal medicine’s failure but it brought its limits into stark relief. Petrarch befriended some of the most famous physicians of his age and stubbornly debated their advice regarding his own health as he aged. “When today I see young and healthy doctors falling ill and dying everywhere, what do you tell others to hope for?”19 Petrarch expressed this sentiment in a letter to the famous Paduan physician and inventor Giovanni Dondi upon hearing of the premature death of the Florentine physician Tommaso del Garbo in 1370. Del Garbo wrote one of the most important plague treatises of the fourteenth century, dedicated to preserving the health and well-being his fellow Florentines after his experience of the first pandemic. Ultimately, he succumbed to this disease. In the end, physicians were as human as anyone else; their learning did not confer any greater immortality on them or their patients. Petrarch continued to live, following some but not all of the medical advice he received, especially for the discomforts of scabies, a skin ailment he described as quite the opposite of “a brief and fatal illness” such as plague — “I am afraid that it is a long and tiring one”.20 Although he did not believe that medicine had any special powers of salvation, he respected the combination of learning, experience, caring, and humility that were the hallmarks of the best medical practitioners. Like his brother Gherardo, who cared with faith rather than medicine, and unlike the astrologers, who manipulated data to fulfill their prognostications, good honest doctors were also his plague heroes. Writing from Venice in December 1363, Petrarch noted some flattening of the curve where he was but did not think the plague had ended elsewhere. “Still it rages widely and horribly” he wrote.21 Offering a vivid portrait of a city unable to bury its dead or properly mourn, he observed the latest tragedy but no longer openly grieved. It seems he was learning to live with plague. In 1366, Petrarch brought to conclusion his Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, which included a dialogue about plague. “I dread the plague”, proclaims Fear, ventriloquizing the escalating anxiety about this “omnipresent danger”.22 Petrarch’s Reason pragmatically observed that fear of plague is “nothing but a fear of death”.23 In a moment of dark humor, he joked that it was better to die in so much good company during a pandemic than to die alone. As for the survivors, Petrarch could not resist pointing out how many of them were undeserving of their good fortune. The good perished while “this vermin, so hardy that no plague, not death itself can exterminate them”,24 endured. No one said plague meted out death with any justice. A year later, in 1367, Petrarch returned to Verona — the place where he’d joyfully rediscovered Cicero’s lost letters in a monastic library in happier times, and where he’d heard of Laura’s death, so many years ago. The city had suffered greatly during the second pandemic but there were signs of revival underway. Nonetheless, he could not say in all honesty that Verona, or indeed any city that he knew, was as magnificent and prosperous as it had been before 1348. The medieval Italian communes were economic powerhouses whose business dealings traversed the entirety of Eurasia but this prosperity was imperiled. Once again, he found himself thinking about how his world had changed — and not only because of plague. War, politics, the decline of commerce, the sorry state of the church, earthquakes, bitterly cold winters, and general lawlessness were also to blame. He saw the late medieval economy contract, observing the rippling effects far beyond his own world. As he wrote in a letter reflecting on the twenty years since the 1348 outbreak, “I shall admit that I know not what is happening among the Indians and Chinese, but Egypt and Syria and all of Asia Minor show no more increase in wealth and no better lot than we do”.25 Petrarch knew that “plague” was a word of great antiquity, but he considered the experience of “a universal plague that was to empty the world” to be new and unheralded.26 He also understood that plague “really does not disappear anywhere”.27 It had been a twenty-year scourge. He composed this anniversary letter for one of his few remaining childhood friends, Guido Sette, who was archbishop of Genoa. By the time the courier reached Genoa, Sette was no longer alive to read his words. Once again, Petrarch’s pen seemed to foretell the end of another of life’s chapters. In the spring and summer of 1371, plague returned to the Venetian Republic. Petrarch rebuffed further invitations to escape the maelstrom. He acknowledged how dangerous the cities had become again, in the “jaws of a plague, raging far and wide”, but he had found “a very pleasant, healthful place” from which he would not budge.28 By then Petrarch had retired to the house he built in the picturesque hill town of Arquà (today known as Arquà Petrarca, not far from the COVID-19 hotspot of the Veneto), just south of Padua. Even the impending approach of war did not deter his resolve to remain in the home where he spent his remaining years with family, writing letters to friends and perfecting his collection of poems, nominally in honor of Laura’s memory but also about the nature of time and mortality. In this bucolic setting, Petrarch continued to receive unhappy news from plague-ridden Italy. Another childhood friend, the papal legate Philippe de Cabassoles, passed shortly after they exchanged letters reaffirming the power of their lengthy friendship. Petrarch once again recorded this loss in the pages of his Virgil. In October 1372, he wrote a letter to his physician friend Dondi consoling him on “sickness and deaths in your family”.29 Petrarch never explained what finally led him to acknowledge in 1373 that he had read his dear friend Boccaccio’s Decameron (completed twenty years earlier). He claimed that a copy mysteriously arrived at his doorstep, yet it seems impossible to believe that he had not known this work until then. Petrarch declared that he skimmed rather than imbibed the Decameron: “If I were to say I have read it, I would be lying, since it is very big, having been written for the common herd and in prose”.30 No one should believe this disingenuous dismissal of the defining book of his generation. It was a joke between two great writers. Petrarch forgave the author’s moral lapses in the most salacious tales because he appreciated the seriousness of its message, about how human failings — greed, lust, arrogance, and the corruption of church and state — helped to incubate a pestilential world. He especially praised the book’s beginning, admiring the magnificent perfection of Boccaccio’s vivid description of Florence under siege during “that plague-ridden time”. Petrarch paid his friend the ultimate compliment by translating the final tale (regarding the patience and fortitude of a young peasant woman named Griselda married to an arrogant nobleman who tested her in every possible way) from Tuscan into Latin to make it more widely available to readers unfamiliar with the author’s native language. “I have told your story in my own words”.31 Yet in some sense, Petrarch had been doing this ever since 1348 by collecting his own plague tales, finding different ways to express the full spectrum of emotions that this disease evoked. When plague returned in 1374 to Bologna (where Petrarch had studied in his youth), he encouraged his friend Pietro da Moglio to flee and join him in Arquà. The famous rhetoric professor declined, citing Petrarch himself as his inspiration to remain in place. In response, Petrarch observed: “Many are fleeing, everyone is fearful, you are neither — splendid, magnificent! For what is more foolish than to fear what you cannot avoid by any strategy, and what you aggravate by fearing? What is more useless than to flee what will always confront you wherever you may flee?”32 Nonetheless, he wished for his friend’s companionship in the “wholesome air” of Arquà, without promising that it would remain a sanctuary.33 Echoing the predominant understanding of plague as an illness spread by the corruption of the elements that produced miasmas of disease, Petrarch remarked that air was “a treacherous, unstable element”.34 Petrarch died in July 1374, but not of plague, having finally succumbed to various ailments that tormented him in his final years. In his will he left 50 gold florins to his physician friend Dondi for the purchase of “a small finger-ring to be worn in my memory”,35 and 50 florins to Boccaccio “for a winter coat for his studies and night-time scholarly work”.36 Boccaccio would outlive his friend by little more than a year, passing away in December 1375, probably from heart and liver failure. Petrarch’s writings — in both form and content — would go on to greatly influence fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italian literature, history, and philosophy, and the Italian Renaissance in general (indeed some have described him as the “father of the Renaissance” for articulating so eloquently why antiquity mattered for his own times). Today, in the midst of a pandemic, it is his engagement around the effects of plague which resonates most acutely, as may also have occurred during other disease-ridden periods since the fourteenth century, when readers rediscovered Petrarch’s plague letters, dialogue, and poetry. Revisiting Petrarch in these months has made me wonder how we will remember 2020, a year in which disease once again connects many different parts of the world. Our family and friends do indeed create a strangely personal landscape of pandemic but we also bear witness to the larger forces at work that created our moment. Who will write its story? Fourteenth-century Italy was the first society to document in great detail the experience of a disease that transformed their world. By contrast, Thucydides’ description of the Athens plague in 430 BCE takes up only one chilling passage. Petrarch allows us to see not just what but also how people thought about disease. He astutely recognized the importance of having this public conversation, and through his dedication to recording his reflections, and eliciting them from others, he left a rich documentary record that we can still benefit from today. I find myself wondering about the nature of the record we’ll leave behind of this time. Our archives, though they’ll no doubt be extensive, are unlikely to capture how we interact and communicate with each other in private, on Zoom for example, the way that Petrarch’s letters managed to do. Some things, of course, we do better today. In general, we resist disease better than people did in Petrarch’s time — the direct result of better diet, sanitary living conditions, modern hygiene and medical innovation. Nonetheless, the uneven experience of COVID-19 has exposed persistent vulnerabilities that we ignore at our peril. The cruelty of the disease has been to strike certain places, certain families, particular groups of friends and communities, and the medical profession caring for them especially hard. We need to learn how to handle this kind of sudden loss. We need to come to terms with its differential impact on all of us. And we should probably be prepared for more. Petrarch might observe that the premodern experience of disease has never entirely gone away. So many people whom Petrarch knew well, who defined the inner fabric of his world, died in successive waves of plague. An awareness of human mortality was hardwired into his consciousness in a way that it is not for most living today — at least those privileged to enjoy relative health and prosperity, and a life free of all but the minimum of violence, which, of course, is not true for all. Petrarch used his considerable literary talents to capture the essence of this experience. His understanding of the value of love and friendship intensified because of plague, becoming richer and deeper because everything was so imperiled. The dead did not vanish as long as he kept them alive. In a far more personal and affecting way than his friend Boccaccio, he transformed the losses that plague inflicted indiscriminately on friends and family into works of art that still inspire. Had he lived through the AIDS crisis, Petrarch would have understood why a generation responded by making art, film, poetry, and novels as an expression of their pain and anger, and to ensure that the dead were not forgotten. There is a moral resiliency to his message worth remembering as the first wave of COVID-19 subsides. Petrarch never once offered any reassurances that things would get better. Instead, he responded creatively and thoughtfully to unexpected challenges, assuming that they would end neither quickly nor easily. His words, echoing across a chasm of more than six hundred years, continue to seek an audience. Amidst our own anxieties about what the future might hold, his is a voice from the past, speaking to posterity, challenging us to be creative in our own response to a time of pandemic. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 11, 2020

Paula Findlen

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:27.768971

black-america-1895

Black America, 1895 By Dorothy Berry February 24, 2021 During the summer of 1895, in a Brooklyn park, there was a cotton plantation complete with five hundred Black workers reenacting slavery. Dorothy Berry uncovers the bizarre and complex history of Black America, a theatrical production which revealed the conflicting possibilities of self-expression in a racist society. Acres of white cotton and a hundred wooden cabins housing five hundred Black workers. Cotton is picked from the stalk and brought over to a humming cotton gin. Women on porches chat over chores, while keeping an eye on wandering children. The local preacher extols repentance to a backslider, and folks sing hymns in rare moments of leisure. What sounds like a South Carolina plantation in 1845 is also, in this case, a New York City exposition in 1895. Black America, which took place between Brooklyn’s Third Avenue and Thirty-Seventh Street (then Ambrose Park), was a combination slavery cosplay, ethnographic exhibition, Black performance review, and all-around spectacle. Ticket holders were purchasing a full day’s worth of entertainment. For twenty-five cents (a dollar for box seats in the arena), attendees entered an Ambrose Park transformed, at a cost to the organizers of a stated $13,000 a week ($400,000 in today’s money).1 Before the performances, which changed weekly, visitors were free to walk around a recreation of the plantation life imagined in sentimental minstrel songs. Over a hundred cabins were built to form the Renaissance Faire style village, which housed more than five hundred Black performers, who traveled north to playact slavery.2 Reviewers fixed on the Southern performers’ authenticity. Lou Parker, a hiring agent for the production, was reported to have “spent the greater part of the winter traveling through the South selecting the talent, and declares that for every one he engaged he rejected at least nine”.3 The Black performers themselves tempered this commitment to historical realism: living in cabins for the multi-week production, they added placards expressing their own identities, like “Pilgrims from Savannah”, “Four Little Atlanta Girls”, “The Eighth Ward Club of Philadelphia”, and “Home of the Tar Heelers”. Beyond the cabins lay an ersatz cotton field, ingeniously manufactured from real cotton plant stalks, with cotton fluff loosely attached by wire, and a functioning cotton gin.4 One strains to imagine the complicated feelings of the formerly enslaved picking cotton for show. With a production of this scale, there may have been current share-croppers who found they were making better (and easier) money plucking cotton from faux plants. This live-action roleplay of plantation life created a dangerous form of cognitive dissonance. A built-in assumption of the Northern production was that Black people were moving toward a form of modern twentieth-century respectability (defined entirely in White terms). Yet the ease and leisure of the enslaved performance erased the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery. This was a plantation of five hundred workers, with no whips, no overseers, no selling of mother from child, husband from wife. They were all dressed in new, matching outfits, “white straw hats [for] the men and the red bandannas [for] the women”.5 Reviewers praised the authenticity of this self-managed plantation, writing: We see the negro as he is supposed to be in the South, and there are said to be none but Southern negroes employed in the exhibition. There is no burlesque in Black America. Everything that is seen represents part of the daily life of the Southern negro.6 Designed to show the folkloricized roots of American Blackness, the exposition’s setting — physically situating headline performances behind the plantation scene — played into the ethnographic racial science that educated White Northerners used to elide their racism. Much like the “ethnographic displays” of authentic Dahomean villages at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago two years earlier, which W. E. B. Du Bois countered in his curation of “The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the Exposition Universelle in Paris five years later, the plantation was presented as edutainment. This perception of Black America as an educational production with entertainment value was repeated again and again by critics who gave praise like “it is a show for intelligent people rather than for the crowds who usually frequent open air and popular seaside resorts.“7 Reviewers assured potential audience members that this was nothing like the Blackface shows they were used to: If there are still people who have stayed away from this entertainment under the impression that it was a sort of black minstrel show, they should correct that idea right away. No such music has been heard north of the old Mason and Dixon line before, and after this fortnight we shall have no chance to hear it again this side of Virginia.8 While there may have been singing on the faux plantation, the real show took place in the outdoor amphitheater that opened after visitors had a chance to explore Southern life in situ. The list of performances is too long to recount, and weekly changes in the line-up invited visitors to return again and again. There were jugglers, acrobats, equestrians, comedians, soloists, foot-races, Othellins, jockeys, skaters, cakewalks and mammoth choruses of hundreds.9 Although many Black performers in New York were, at this time, developing urban musical styles that reflected their experiences, these imported performers were deemed by the public to be truly Black and representative of a uniquely Southern authenticity. Historians often present the gradual shift in African American popular performance — from the racial characterization of offensive Blackface minstrelsy archetypes to radical representations of Black authenticity in the Harlem Renaissance and later the Black Arts Movement — as linear progress, a straight-line evolution away from White-crafted stereotypes of rural chicken-stealers toward accurate reflections of Black life’s complexities. Straight lines make better study guides than historiographies. History is full of clashes, setbacks, and retreats. The Black America extravaganza is a prime example of the conflicting possibilities of self-expression in a racist society. A mixture of minstrelsy, racial uplift theater, and ethnographic human zoo, this spectacle provides a unique glimpse into the state of plantation nostalgia and urban Black self-perception at the turn of the twentieth century. An ad in the Brooklyn Eagle captured the strange mix of scientific racism and racial uplift: [Black America showcases] the Afro-American in all his phases from the simplicity of the Southern field hand to his evolution as the Northern aspirant for professional honors and his martial ambition as a soldier . . . 10 While the idea of plantation cosplay in Brooklyn might sound more like speculative fiction than a sound business decision, it was a logical progression for Nate Salsbury, the funder behind Black America.11 By 1895 he was already known as a successful producer and manager for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a famous nostalgic overlay for American imperialism and oppression.12 In many ways, Black America would mirror those productions, transforming painful and brutal recent history into uplifting performances of American progress. Starring Annie Oakley and Chief Sitting Bull among other sharp-shooters and Native American performers, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West remains part of the popular imagination, popping up in period television dramas and living on in contemporary westerns. Black America has escaped popular memory perhaps due both to its smaller production run and inability to create lasting dramatic storylines. Wild West shows helped establish the classic settler colonial drama of “cowboys versus Indians”, but Black America presented something somewhat different — plantations without White antagonists, racial uplift without a whisper of who was keeping the race down to begin with. While Nate Salsbury has traditionally been credited as the idea man behind Black America, Billy McClain, an Indianapolis native who designed and produced the exposition, was no stranger to large-scale reenactments either. McClain’s identity as a Northern, African American playwright, actor, and the producer of this strangely sentimental recreation of enslaved life is erased in the promotional broadsides listing “Mr. Nate Salsbury, Projector and Sole Director”, but McClain’s primary role is attested to by his contemporaries and generally accepted by scholars today.13 In the years preceding Black America, McClain worked on talent development, stage, and music direction for two enormous performances: The Battle of Vicksburg, a massive Civil War reenactment that took place on the beaches of Coney Island, and The South Before the War, a heavily nostalgic recreation of plantation life.14 His involvement in Black America was noted in the press, where he is credited at times as “amusement director and stage manager”,15 chorus leader and manager of the over five hundred performers,16 and “manager of the Black America exhibitions”.17 The brainchild of a Black playwright and production manager, with production and funding by one of the most successful popular entertainment figures of the day, Black America presented an uncanny mix of nostalgia for plantation life and celebration of Black creativity and citizenship.18 To consider Black America’s reception, we must first understand its appeal. Already a popular theme on the minstrel stage and in song-sheets purchased for home performance, this form of sentimental nostalgia (Blackface performers singing about heartache and maternal instincts) furthered abolition interests as well as commercial attempts to capitalize on the popularity of sentimental European song.19 Urbanites without personal experience of slavery’s atrocities related to musical themes of simple rural life, carefree living, and a caretaking Mammy. Songs like Black composer James Bland’s “Carry Me Back to Ol’ Virginny’” played on a plantation nostalgia onto which immigrants and newly urban migrants could transfer their own feelings of homesickness.20 Black America extrapolated this plantation nostalgia, adding in a mixture of pseudo-educational ethnographic racial display, recently popular at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, and a racial-uplift staging designed to present a progressive model of African Americans, from enslaved plantation dwellers to proper cosmopolitan citizens. These themes of nostalgia and progress surfaced in specific performance forms. The cakewalk was well known in the North, but audiences of Black America perceived it as something entirely different: the authentic cakewalk of Southern heritage. Developed originally by enslaved people as a satirical masquerade mocking the stilted promenades of their upper-class enslavers, the cakewalk shifted into a more stylized promenade competition dance, commonly added as an act to minstrel shows by both Black and White performers. The “‘Ole Virginny’ cakewalk [featured in Black America was] something quite different from the fancy cakewalks the people of the North ha[d] been in habit of seeing”, a performance difference chalked up by Northern viewers to a sign that they were witnessing the cakewalk in its original form.21 The choruses too were seen as uniquely Black in a Southern manner and therefore more Black than the local New York performers. “All doubts as to these being genuine Southern negroes instead of performers imported in East River ferryboats is dissipated by their singing of the plantation melodies”, wrote one viewer.22 Others commented on what they perceived as the uniquely Black vocal qualities of the hundred-plus person chorus: . . . the volume of sound and the blending of the voices with that unique metallic quality of tone which charmed Dvorak and led him to write music especially for a choir of negroes combine to produce an effect entirely novel to one familiar only with American or German choruses.23 The praise given to the performances links to the earlier ethnographic framing of Black America. These were not skilled performers; they were authentic and organic Southern Blacks, imbued with creative skill from birth. Given the period and cited locales from which some of the performers came, we know that at least a portion of the singers and dancers in Black America were formally trained professionals, and can assume that others were informally trained in their own artistic communities. The presentation, however, attempted to add value to Black Americans in the Northern eye by showcasing the natural goods of not only talent but also of citizenship. Regarding citizenship, Black America’s stage production ended with an almost unimaginable spectacle, an act called “Historical Pictures”. The chorus of hundreds gathered on the stage to sing patriotic songs as massive ten-foot by twenty-foot portraits were unfurled, one by one: John Brown, Frederick Douglass, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, and Abraham Lincoln.24 All of the performances of the day, from the living plantation to the brass band of the historic Ninth U.S. Cavalry, culminated in this scene of patriotism and modernity, marking an end to the previous era and attempting to introduce Black America as something new.25 While we have descriptions from the press and the reminiscences of Vaudevillians, what is most mysterious and fascinating to imagine is the experience of Black American attendees to Black America. Earlier scholarship has been unclear on whether Black America was a Whites-only event,26 but there was at least one day when Black women and children were in attendance, as noted in the particularly florid and insensitive journalistic style of the early twentieth century : Raphael cherubs done in chocolate were thick as blackberries at Ambrose park yesterday. Nate Salisbury [sic], the manager of “Black America,” had invited every colored mother having a baby under 2 years old to appear with her offspring and inspect the antics of the colored brethren from the South. The colored mothers went, and so did a considerable delegation of white parents, who took their own pickaninnies down to see the fun.27 We have the reporter’s interpretation of how those Black mothers felt about walking through a plantation with their children, then entering an arena to see buck dancing, cakewalks, and a recreation camp meeting, but we have nothing in their own voices. Black America is primarily available to us today in the mediated voices of professionals and exists mainly as a mystery. We know how several White Americans felt about it, but can only speculate as to how the Black Americans on stage and in the crowd experienced Black America in 1895. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 24, 2021

Dorothy Berr

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:28.464021

the-mark-of-the-beast-georgian-britains-anti-vaxxer-movement

“The Mark of the Beast” Georgian Britain’s Anti-Vaxxer Movement By Erica X Eisen April 28, 2021 Ox-faced children, elderly women sprouting horns, and cloven minds — all features attributed to Edward Jenner’s vaccine against smallpox. Introducing us to the original anti-vaxxers, Erica X Eisen explores the “vacca” in the first-ever vaccine: its bovine origins and the widespread worry that immunity came with beastly side effects. The ox-faced boy who stared out from the opening page of Dr William Rowley’s pamphlet possessed strangely elongated eyes, one bloodshot and one healthy. His right cheek was reddish, while the entire left side of his face was so massively swollen that it knocked the contours of the boy’s healthy features off kilter. Several pages later, a portrait of the Mange Girl, a child of perhaps four years of age, looks out pitifully to readers, the skin from her cheek to her hip covered with clusters of painful-looking sores. The conditions of these children — and (supposedly) of thousands of others across Britain — were not, the accompanying literature warned, symptoms of any natural human ailment. Rather, they were the results of the recently developed smallpox vaccine, which Rowley said exposed recipients to “the diseases of beasts, filthy in their very nature and appearance, in the face, eyes, ears, with blindness and deafness, spreading their baneful influence over the whole body”.1 Rowley was a prominent figure in nineteenth-century England’s anti-vaccine movement, the earliest predecessor to today’s anti-vaxxers. Several years before Rowley published his vitriolic pamphlet, Edward Jenner’s discovery of a vaccine against smallpox had caused a public health revolution and birthed the field of immunology as a discipline — but it also came decades before germ theory was known to scientists. As a result, even those who embraced Jenner’s vaccine lacked the conceptual framework needed to understand precisely how it worked. This gap between evidence and explanation allowed doubts to suppurate and spread as clergy, members of parliament, workers, and even doctors voiced their opposition to the vaccine on religious, ethical, and scientific grounds. Jenner’s supporters saw it as their moral duty to advance the cause of a life-saving technology; their opponents felt an equally strong moral obligation to put a halt to vaccination at all costs. In the decades following Jenner’s discovery, this conflict would play out bitterly in newspapers, in artwork, and even in the streets as both sides battled for the body and soul of Britain. Living as we do at a time when the sudden emergence of a new virus has drastically altered the normal patterns of life, it can be difficult to imagine an environment where epidemic disease was the norm. Prior to the advent of vaccination, smallpox was widespread, deadly, and all but untreatable given the state of medical knowledge at the time. Roughly one third of those who contracted smallpox did not survive; those who did often bore grim reminders of the disease for the rest of their lives.2 It could leave victims blind; it could reach down to their bones and render joints and limbs permanently deformed. And it left the vast majority of its victims’ faces scarred with the telltale pitted pockmarks, sometimes severely: historian Matthew L. Newsome Kerr estimates that “probably one-fourth to one-half of the population [of Britain] was visibly marked in some way by smallpox prior to 1800”.3 Folk wisdom, meanwhile, had long observed that those who worked closely with livestock possessed a strange resistance to the disease even as it ravaged the communities around them. Jenner, a country doctor, decided to put this idea to a formal test. In 1798, he lanced a sore on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes’ hand and injected the resultant lymph into the arm of his gardener’s son, James Phipps. A week later, Jenner exposed the boy to smallpox to see if he would get sick: as Jenner had hypothesized, the boy remained healthy. Just a year later, the first mass trials of the smallpox vaccine were already underway. (The preserved hide of Nelmes’ cow, Blossom, now resides in the library of St. George’s, a medical school in London.) Jenner’s experiment had succeeded because the odd sores on Nelmes’ hand were symptoms of cowpox, a much less dangerous cousin of the smallpox virus that caused pustules on the hands but generally left its victims unharmed. The two pathogens were similar enough that exposure to cowpox effectively primed the body’s defenses against smallpox as well. Cowpox infections — and the immunity that came with them — were frequently transferred to dairy workers after they touched the udders of infected animals: indeed, the name Jenner chose for this therapy, vaccination, derives ultimately from the Latin word for cow (vacca). And crucially, as Jenner demonstrated, cowpox could also be transferred by lancing a human’s sores and injecting the fluid into another person — the so-called “arm to arm” method, which guaranteed a virtually inexhaustible supply of the vaccine even in urban areas far from the nearest dairy meadow. But Jenner would not have been able to explain the workings of his discovery if asked: at the time, it was thought that smallpox was transmitted via poisoned air, or miasma, and the precise mechanisms of immune response were still unknown to science. As growing numbers of people embraced the vaccine, opposition began to coalesce. For these skeptics, the very notion of injecting a substance that ultimately derived from a diseased animal into a healthy human seemed not merely absurd but a serious peril to public health. Rowley’s scaremongering pamphlet warned that those who received the vaccine risked developing “evil, blotches, ulcers, and mortification”, among other “beastly” diseases.4 With the second edition of his pamphlet, a new illustration entered the menagerie of cowpox victims: Ann Davis, an elderly woman who upon receiving her dose had allegedly sprouted horns. Others focused on the supposed cognitive effects of cowpox: Halket admitted that Rowley’s lurid accounts were perhaps far-fetched but nonetheless insisted that so-called “mental horns and cloven hoofs too frequently shoot out”, a metaphor for the “insurmountable stupidity [that] has been observed in some children from the time they were vaccinated, no symptom of which appeared prior to that time”.5 One of Jenner’s fiercest opponents, Benjamin Moseley, penned a tirade against the cowpox-derived vaccine in which he warned of its effects not only upon the body but also upon the mind: Who knows, besides, what ideas may rise, in the course of time, from a brutal fever having excited its incongruous impressions on the brain?        Who knows, also, but that the human character may undergo strange mutations from quadrupedan sympathy; and that some modern Pasiphaë may rival the fables of old?6 Readers well versed in classics would have recognized this last line as a thinly veiled reference to bestiality: Pasiphaë, according to Greek myth, was the Cretan queen who gave birth to the Minotaur after having sex with a bull, driven to strange lust by a curse from Poseidon. Rowley plays with a similar innuendo in his pamphlet when he wonders whether receiving the vaccine could violate the biblical injunction against lying with an animal.7 Cowpox would go on to become tightly linked to syphilis (which in the past had often been referred to as “pox”) in the popular imagination, with rumors circulating that cattle contracted cowpox through contact with syphilitic milkmaids. These concerns were not allayed by the poor sanitation and medical standards that sometimes characterized the public vaccination hospitals created to serve Britain’s urban poor: at such places, the vaccines made available to patients often came not directly from cows but from the pustules of vaccinated children in the area, who may or may not have received a thorough medical check before being lanced for their “donation”. As a result, parents were not wholly unjustified in their fears that an injection meant to ward off one deadly disease might simply lead to their child being infected with another one.8 The satirist James Gillray channeled these popular anxieties about the monstrous aspects of the vaccine in his 1802 cartoon The Cow Pock—or—the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation! At the center, Jenner is seen delivering a rather vicious gouge to a woman’s arm with his lancet as all around her the previous vaccine recipients undergo horrible transformations: miniature cows erupt from boils and climb out of mouths, while women sprout horns and give birth to calves on the spot. That same year, Charles Williams published an anti-vaccine engraving in which doctors (all of whom have sprouted tails and horns) are arrayed before the maw of a cow-like monster covered in suppurating pustules. A £10,000 check protruding from a back pocket identifies one of these chimerical doctors as Jenner, who had received a cash reward from the government in recognition of his contributions to medicine. Only now he is transformed from medic into mercenary, shoveling babies with his colleagues into the beast’s gaping jaws and waiting for them to be excreted with horns. In the distance, anti-vaccine doctors bearing the weapons of truth approach to do battle with the creature and the doctors who feed it.9 Particularly in the early days, some objected to the vaccine on religious grounds, arguing that vaccination was a hubristic attempt to evade divine punishment. Similar arguments had been made surrounding the earlier technique of variolation, in which healthy people were deliberately exposed to the smallpox virus with the goal of bringing on a mild case of the disease that would nevertheless confer immunity. In 1721, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony was struck by a severe smallpox outbreak, Puritan leaders fiercely debated (and ultimately decided in favor of) the permissibility of variolation, which the preacher Cotton Mather argued had been put into humankind’s hands by God. A century later, theological debates about preventative medicine raged on: “The Small Pox is a visitation from God”, Rowley wrote, “but the Cow Pox is produced by presumptuous man: the former was what heaven ordained, the latter is, perhaps, a daring violation of our holy religion”.10 “Methuselah and his antediluvian contemporaries were not vaccinated which fully accounts for their coming to such a sudden and untimely end”, Halket noted caustically.11 “The Creator stamped on man the divine image, but Jenner placed on him the mark of the beast”.12 Cartoonists frequently depicted the cowpox-derived vaccine as a golden calf that would be the downfall of modern society at the hands of those who foolishly embraced its worship. But while skepticism towards the vaccine was present from the beginning, the vitriol of the attacks against the cowpox method and its proponents would vastly expand in the mid-1800s, when parliament passed multiple laws making vaccination compulsory, providing free vaccination for the poor, and creating a system of punishments for those who failed to get the shot. These new measures made the question of vaccination impossible to ignore — and many saw such laws as an unacceptable abrogation of their personal liberties by the state.13 In popular writing, vaccines were compared to tattoos or brands (particularly owing to the scar left by the injection), and those who resisted getting them histrionically compared themselves to fugitive slaves. Across Britain, anti-vaccination societies organized mutual aid funds to defray the fines incurred by their members for refusing to vaccinate their children; if working-class vaccine objectors had their property seized as punishment, sympathizers would loudly protest at the auction, sometimes even assaulting the auctioneer. Contemporary newspapers described effigies of Jenner or public vaccine authorities being burned; in Leicester, a hotbed of resistance to the cowpox method, an anti-vaccine carnival drew as many as 100,000 demonstrators and prompted a parliamentary commission to review the vaccination laws.14 But proponents of using cowpox didn’t take all of this sitting down. As many were quick to point out, a number of the leading voices in the anti-vaccination movement had a major financial interest in stopping Jenner’s discovery from catching on. Indeed, both Moseley and Rowley had previously practiced variolation, which prior to Jenner had been considered the best way to prevent a serious case of smallpox. But the technique was riskier than vaccination — both to the patient and to those around them, who were likely to get infected by the convalescing patient. Once among the most common medical procedures in Britain, variolation was under serious threat from its new competitor even before parliament banned it completely in the mid-1800s.15 As such, when doctors like Moseley were penning screeds against the smallpox vaccine, they weren’t just trying to defend their readers — they were also trying to defend their stream of income. Precisely this point was made by Isaac Cruikshank in an 1808 satirical print that depicts Jenner and his colleagues banishing variolators from the land. The latter group, hefting massive bloody knives over their shoulders, openly proclaim their desire to spread the disease further as they walk past the corpses of smallpox victims. At the far right of the cartoon, a milkmaid pipes up: “Surley [sic] the disorder of the cow is preferable to that of the ass.” Jenner himself would make similar accusations when he decided to defend his ideas and his honor in print, pseudonymously publishing a rebuttal to Rowley, the cover of which was emblazoned with its own version of the ox-faced boy. Jenner’s words for those who attack the cowpox method in order to protect their own financial interests are scathing; nevertheless, he writes, “I trust that the good sense of the people of England will feel the injury, and know how to repel it as they ought”.16 Two hundred years later, however, attempts to discredit the safety and reliability of vaccination — whether against measles or against COVID — persist. The arguments made by today’s anti-vaxxers often echo those put forth by their nineteenth-century antecedents: claims of inefficacy, allegations of ghastly side effects, appeals to religion. Jenner seems likely to have assumed that the benefits of vaccination would be so self-evident that they would shut down all debate. That many continue to assail the safety and reliability of the method he pioneered, not only decades but centuries later, is something that, in all likelihood, the doctor never could have imagined. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 28, 2021

Erica X Eisen

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:28.825176

primary-sources

Primary Sources A Natural History of the Artist’s Palette By Philip Ball July 23, 2020 For all its transcendental appeals, art has always been inextricably grounded in the material realities of its production, an entwinement most evident in the intriguing history of artists’ colours. Focusing in on painting’s primary trio of red, yellow, and blue, Philip Ball explores the science and stories behind the pigments, from the red ochre of Lascaux to Yves Klein’s blue. Having taken many centuries to figure out what the primary colours are, we are now in the process of abandoning them. The very notion of primaries can now spark furious arguments among colour specialists. Some point out that the trio many of us learnt at school — red, yellow and blue — applies only to mixing pigments; mix light, as in the pixels of television screens, and you need different primaries (roughly, red, blue, green). But if you print with inks, you use another “primary” system: yellow, cyan and magenta. And in the rainbow spectrum of visible light, there’s no hierarchy at all: no reason to promote yellow light above the slightly longer-wavelength orange. What’s more, even though painters learn how to mix colours — blue and yellow to give a green, say — they quickly learn that the results can be disappointingly muddy compared to a “pure” pigment with the intended colour: it’s especially hard to get a rich purple from red and blue. As a result, artists often think of colour not so much as an abstract property but in terms of the substance that makes it: madder red, ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow. To truly understand what colour means to the artist, we need to think of its materiality. Or to put it another way, what the artist’s palette is capable of producing has always depended on the materials at his or her disposal, and the ingenuity that went into procuring them. Red That ingenuity has never been lacking. During the last Ice Age life was nasty, brutish and short, yet humans still found time for art. Tools dated to around one hundred thousand years ago have been found in Blombos Cave on the coast of South Africa: grindstones and hammer-stones for crushing a natural red ochre pigment, and abalone shells for mixing the powder with animal fat and urine to make a paint that would be used to decorate bodies, animal skins, and perhaps cave walls. The paintings made 15-35 millennia ago at Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira attest to the genuine artistry that early humans achieved using the colours readily to hand: black charcoal, white chalk and ground bone, and the earthy reds and yellows of ochre, a mineral form of iron oxide.1 But the classic red pigments don’t rely on iron minerals, the hue of which is not the glorious red of a sunset or of blood, but of the earth. For many centuries, the primary red of the palette came from compounds of two other metals: lead and mercury. The pigment known as “red lead” was made by first corroding lead with vinegar fumes, turning the surface white, and then heating that material in air. It was used in ancient China and Egypt, Greece and Rome. For the Roman author Pliny, any bright red was called minium — but by the Middle Ages that Latin term was more or less synonymous with red lead, which was used extensively in manuscript illumination. From the verb miniare (to paint in minium) we get the term “miniature”: nothing to do, then, with the Latin minimus, “smallest”. The association today with a diminutive scale comes simply from the constraints of fitting a miniature on the manuscript page. Pliny’s best minium was a different red pigment, called cinnabar. This was a natural mineral: chemically, mercury sulfide. It was mined in the ancient world, partly for use as a red colourant but also because the liquid metal mercury could easily be extracted from it by heating. Mercury was thought to have almost miraculous properties: ancient Chinese alchemists in particular used it in medicines. By the Middle Ages, alchemists and craftspeople knew how to make mercury sulfide artificially by combining liquid mercury and yellow, pungent sulfur (available in mineral form) in a sealed vessel and heating them. This process, which was described in the craftsman’s manual De diversis artibus (ca. 1122) by the German monk Theophilus, can give a finer-quality pigment than natural cinnabar. It was a procedure of great interest to alchemists too, as the Arabic scholars of the eighth and ninth centuries had claimed that mercury and sulfur were the basic ingredients of all metals — so that combining them might be a route to making gold. Theophilus had no such esoteric goal in mind; he just wanted a good red paint. This “artificial cinnabar” became known by the name vermilion. The etymology is curious, and shows the confusing and treacherous flux of colour terms in an age when the hue of a substance seemed more significant than vague, pre-scientific notions of what its chemical identity was. It stems from the Latin vermiculum (“little worm”), since a bright red was once extracted from a species of crushed insect: not a paint pigment but a translucent dye of scarlet colour, arising from an organic (carbon-based) substance that the insects produce. Such dyes were also known as kermes (from the Sanskrit kirmidja: “derived from a worm”), the etymological root of crimson. Because the insects that made it could be found on Mediterranean trees as clusters encrusted in a resin and resembling berries, the dyes might also be called granum, meaning grain. From this comes the term ingrained, implying a cloth dyed in grain: the dye was tenacious and did not wash out easily. “‘Tis in grain sir, ‘twill endure wind or weather”, Olivia assures Viola of a painting in Twelfth Night.2 Red dyes were associated with majesty, opulence, status and importance: they were the colours used for cardinals’ robes. Painters needed fine reds to render on board and canvas these dignitaries whose portraits they were increasingly commissioned to paint: Raphael’s Pope Julius II (1511-12) derives its aura of power partly from the brilliance of its reds. Red lead and vermilion served well enough in the Middle Ages, but the increased demand for verisimilitude in the Renaissance meant that the orangeish hue of red lead or vermilion wasn’t adequate for depicting the purplish magnificence of these dyes on canvas. One alternative was to turn the dyes themselves into a paint pigment, by fixing their colourant molecules onto solid, colourless particles that could be dried and mixed with oils. This process involved some challenging chemistry, but even the ancient Egyptians knew how to do it. The basic idea is to precipitate a fine-grained white solid within a solution of the dye: the dye sticks to the particles, which dry to make a dark red powder. In the Middle Ages this process used the mineral alum, which can be converted to insoluble white aluminium hydroxide. The pigment made this way was called a lake, after the word (lac or lack) for a red resin exuded by insects indigenous to India and southeast Asia. One of the best red lakes of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance was made from the dye extracted from the root of the madder plant. As lake manufacture was perfected, artists such as Titian and Tintoretto began to use these pigments mixed with oils, giving a slightly translucent paint that they would apply in many layers for a deep wine-red tint or wash over a blue to make purple. Aside from the creation of red lakes, rather little about the painter’s reds changed from the Middle Ages until modern times. The Impressionists in the late nineteenth century made avid use of the new yellows, oranges, greens, purples, and blues that advances in chemistry had given them, yet their reds were not really any different to those of Raphael and Titian. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that a vibrant and reliable new red entered the repertoire. The discovery of the metal cadmium in 1817 immediately produced new yellow and orange pigments, but a deep red was made from this element only around the 1890s. The yellow and orange are both cadmium sulfide; but to get a red, some of the sulfur in this compound is replaced by the related element selenium. It wasn’t until 1910 that cadmium red became widely available as a commercial colour, and its production became more economical when the chemicals company Bayer modified the method in 1919. Cadmium red is a rich, warm colour — and arguably the painter’s favourite red, except for the price. That was certainly true for Henri Matisse, for who red held a special valence — as his interiors in La Desserte (aka The Red Room, 1908), Red Studio (1911) and Large Red Interior (1948) attest. Of the second of these, the art critic John Russell said “It is a crucial moment in the history of painting: colour is on top, and making the most of it.”3 Yellow< ※※Indexed under…Yellowpaint, history of The ochres used by the artists of prehistory offered them not just rusty reds but a kind of natural yellow too. This yellow ochre was, however, the hue of tawny hair and wood, and not at all the thing for tulips or an emperor’s satin robes. Brighter yellows were, from antiquity, made from synthetic compounds of tin, antimony, and lead. The ancient Egyptians knew how to combine lead with antimony ore, and in fact a natural mineral form of that yellow compound (lead antimonate) was also used as an artists’ material. It could be found on the volcanic slopes of Mount Vesuvius, which is how it came to be associated with Naples: from the seventeenth century a yellow composed of tin, lead, and antimony was often called “Naples yellow”. Other recipes for a yellow of similar appearance specified mixing the oxides of lead and tin. The ingredients weren’t always too clear, actually: when Italian medieval painters refer to giallorino, you can’t be sure if they mean a lead-tin or lead-antimony material, and it is unlikely that the painters recognised much distinction. Before modern chemistry clarified matters from the late eighteenth century, names for pigments might refer to hue regardless of composition or origin, or vice versa. It could all be very confusing, and from a name alone you couldn’t always be sure quite what you were getting — or, for the historian today, quite what a painter of long ago was using or referring to. In some respects that’s still true now. A tube of modern “Naples yellow” won’t contain lead (shunned for its toxicity) or antimony, but might be a mixture of titanium white and a chromium-based yellow, blended to mimic the colour of the traditional material. There’s no harm in that; on the contrary, the paint is likely to be not only less poisonous but more stable, not to mention cheaper. But examples like this show how wedded artists’ colours are to the traditions from which they emerged. When you’re talking about vermilion, Indian yellow, Vandyke brown, orpiment, the name is part of the allure, hinting at a deep and rich link to the Old Masters. One thing is for sure: you won’t find the gorgeous orpiment yellow on the modern painter’s palette (unless perhaps they are consciously, and in this case rather hazardously, using archaic materials). It is a deep, golden yellow, finer than Naples and lead-tin yellows. The name simply means “pigment of gold”, and the material goes back to ancient times: the Egyptians made it by grinding up a rare yellow mineral. But by the Middle Ages, the dangers of orpiment were well known. The Italian artist Cennino Cennini says in his handbook Il libro ‘dell arte, written in the late fourteenth century, that it is “really poisonous”, and advises that you should “beware of soiling your mouth with it”.4 That’s because it consists of the chemical compound arsenic sulfide. Orpiment was one of the gorgeous but costly pigments imported to Europe from the East, in this case from Asia Minor. (In the early nineteenth century there were also imports from China, so that orpiment was sold in Britain as Chinese yellow.) Such alluring imports often arrived through the great trading centre of Venice, and orpiment was hard to acquire up in Northern Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance — unless, like the German artist Lucas Cranach, who ran a pharmacy, you had specialist connections to exotic materials. Some orpiment was made not from the natural mineral but artificially by the chemical manipulations of alchemists. This type can be spotted on old paintings today by studying the pigment particles under the microscope: those made artificially tend to be more similar in size and have rounded grains. From the eighteenth century it was common to refer to this artificial orpiment as King’s yellow. Rembrandt evidently had a supplier of the stuff, which has been identified in his Portrait of a Couple as Isaac and Rebecca (often called The Jewish Bride), painted around 1665. If Dutch painters wanted a golden yellow like orpiment without the risk of poisoning, the Age of Empire supplied another option. From the seventeenth century, Dutch paintings (including those of Jan Vermeer) begin to feature a pigment known as Indian yellow, brought from the subcontinent by the trading ships of Holland. It arrived in the form of balls of dirty yellowish-green, although bright and untarnished in the middle, which bore the acrid tang of urine. What could this stuff be? Might it truly be made from urine in some way? Lurid speculation abounded; some said the key ingredient was the urine of snakes or camels, others that it was made from the urine of animals fed on turmeric. ※※Indexed under…UrineGolden paint produced from cows’ The mystery seemed to be solved in the late nineteenth century by T. N. Mukharji, an author, civil servant, and curator at Kolkata’s Indian Museum. Making enquiries in Kolkata, Mukharji was directed to a village on the outskirts of the city of Monghyr in Bihar province, allegedly the sole source of the yellow material. Here, he reported, he found that a group of cattle owners would feed their livestock only on mango leaves. They collected the cows’ urine and heated it to precipitate a yellow solid which they pressed and dried into lumps. The cows (so the story goes) were given no other source of nutrition and so were in poor health. (Mango leaves might also contain mildly toxic substances.) In India such lack of care for cattle was sacrilegious, and legislation effectively banned the production of Indian yellow from the 1890s. There has been debate about how much of this story is true, but the basic outline seems to stand up — the pigment has a complicated chemical make-up but contains salts of compounds produced from substances in mango leaves when they are metabolized in the kidneys. If deadly arsenic-laden powers or cows’ urine did not appeal to artists, the choice of yellows was decidedly lacklustre — literally. There were yellow plant extracts, such as weld or saffron, that faded easily, or compounds of tin, lead and antimony with a pale, insipid quality. It’s not hard, then, to imagine the excitement of the French chemist Nicolas Louis Vauquelin when at the start of the nineteenth century he found he could make a vibrant yellow material by chemical alteration of a mineral from Siberia called crocoite. This stuff was itself red — it was popularly called Siberian red lead, since there was truly lead in it. But in 1797 Vauquelin found there was something else too: a metallic element that no one had seen before, and which he named after the Greek word for colour, chrome or chromium. The name was aptly chosen, because Vauquelin soon discovered that chromium could produce compounds with various bright colours. Crocoite is a natural form of lead chromate, and when Vauquelin reconstituted this compound artificially in the laboratory, he found it could take on a bright yellow form. Depending on exactly how he made it, this material could range from a pale primrose yellow to a deeper hue, all the way through to orange. Vauquelin figured by 1804 that these compounds could be artists’ pigments, and they were being used that way even by the time the French chemist published his scientific report on them five years later. The pigment was expensive, and remained so even when deposits of crocoite as a source of chromium were discovered also in France, Scotland, and the United States. Chromium could also supply greens, most notably the pigment that became known as viridian and which was used avidly by the Impressionists and by Paul Cézanne. The chromium colours play a major role in the explosion of prismatic colour during the nineteenth century — evident not just in Impressionism and its progeny (Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, and the work of Van Gogh) but also in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites. After the muted and sometimes downright murky shades of the eighteenth century — think of Joshua Reynolds’ muddy portraits and the brownish foliage of Poussin and Watteau — it was as if the sun had come out and a rainbow arced across the sky. Sunlight itself, the post-Impressionist Georges Seurat declared, held a golden orange-yellow within it. For their sun-kissed yellows, the Pre-Raphaelites and Impressionists did not need to rely on chromium alone. In 1817, the German chemist Friedrich Stromeyer noticed that zinc smelting produced a by-product with a yellow colour in which he discovered another new metallic element, named after the archaic term for zinc ore, cadmia: he called it cadmium. Two years later, while experimenting on the chemistry of this element, he found that it would combine with sulfur to make a particularly brilliant yellow — or, with some modification to the process, orange. By the mid-century, as zinc smelting expanded and more of the byproduct became available, these materials were offered for sale to artists as cadmium yellow and cadmium orange. There’s a lesson in the cadmium pigments that applies to all colours, through all ages: they have often been byproducts of some other chemical process altogether, often discovered serendipitously as chemists and technologists pursue other goals — to make ointments, say, or soap, glass, or metals. Or dyes. If you buy a tube labeled “Indian yellow” today, mangoes and cows had nothing to do with it. It probably contains a synthetic pigment that goes by the unromantic name of PY (pigment yellow) 139 — a carbon-based molecule that is one of the countless offshoots of the industry that arose in the nineteenth century to supply bright dyes for textiles. The first of these artificial dyes, discovered in 1856, was aniline mauve. A chemically related “aniline yellow” — a member of the important family of colorants called azo dyes — was sold commercially from 1863. This manufacture of a galaxy of synthetic colours from petrochemicals seems a deeply unglamorous way to brighten the world today, compared to the age of King’s yellow, saffron, and Indian yellow. It could feel that what is saved in the purse is sacrificed in the romance. Maybe so. But artists are typically pragmatic people, as eager for novelty as they are attached to tradition. There has never been a time when they have not avidly seized on new sources of colour as soon as those appear, nor when they have not relied on chemistry to generate them. The collaboration of art and science, craft and commerce, chance and design, remains as vibrant as ever. Blue Blue has always spoken to something beyond ourselves: it is a colour that draws us into the void, the infinite sky. “Blue is the typical heavenly colour”, said Wassily Kandinsky in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912).5 And who would doubt it after seeing the ceiling of the Arena Chapel in Padua, painted by Giotto around 1305, a vault coloured like the last moments of a clear Italian twilight? Some cultures don’t even recognise the sky as having a hue at all, as if to acknowledge that no earthly spectrum can contain it. In the ancient Greek theory of colour, blue was a kind of darkness with just a little light added. There’s a strong case to be made, then, that shades of midnight have always been the most treasured of artists’ colours. One of the earliest of the complex blue pigments made by chemistry was virtually an ancient industry in itself. The blue-glazed soapstone carvings known now as faience produced in the Middle East were traded throughout Europe by the second millennium BCE. Faience is typically now associated with ancient Egypt, but it was produced in Mesopotamia as long ago as 4500 BC, well before the time of the Pharaohs. It is a kind of glassy blue glaze, made by heating crushed quartz or sand with copper minerals and a small amount of lime or chalk and plant ash. The blue tint comes from copper — it is of the same family as the rich blue copper sulfate crystals of the school chemistry lab, although faience could range from turquoise-green to a deep dusk-blue. These minerals were typically those today called azurite and malachite, both of them forms of the compound copper carbonate. It’s not at all unlikely, although probably impossible to prove, that the manufacture of glass itself from sand and alkaline ash or mineral soda began in experiments with firing faience in a kiln somewhere in Mesopotamia. Similar experimentation might have given rise to the discovery of the trademark blue pigment of the Egyptians, simply known as Egyptian blue or frit. The recipe, at any rate, is almost the same: sand, copper ore, and chalk or limestone. But unlike faience glaze, this material is not glassy but crystalline, meaning that the atoms comprising it form orderly arrays rather than a jumble. Producing the pigment requires some artisanal skill: both the composition and the kiln temperature must be just so, attesting to the fact that Egyptian chemists (as we’d call them today) knew their craft — and that the production of colours was seen as an important social task. After all, painting was far from frivolous: mostly it had a religious significance, and the artists were priests. The minerals azurite and malachite make good pigments in their own right — the first more bluish, the second with a green tint. They just need to be ground and mixed with a liquid binder. In the Middle Ages that was generally egg yolk for painting on wooden panels, and egg white (called glair) for manuscript illumination. Good-quality azurite wasn’t cheap, but there were deposits of the mineral throughout Europe. To the English (who had no local sources) it was German blue; the Germans knew it as mountain blue (Bergblau). A cheaper blue was the plant extract indigo, used as a dye since ancient times. Unlike most organic dyes — those extracted from plants and animals — it doesn’t dissolve in water, but can be dried and ground into a powder like a mineral pigment, and then mixed with standard binding agents (such as oils) to make a paint. It gives a dark, sometimes purplish blue, sometimes lightened with lead white; Cennino described a “sort of sky blue resembling azurite” made this way from “Baghdad indigo”.6 As the name suggests — the Latin indicum shares the same root as “India” — the main sources for a European medieval artist were in the East, although a form of indigo could also be extracted from the woad plant, grown in Europe. But the artist who could find a patron with deep pockets would be inclined towards a finer blue than any of these. When the Italian traveller Marco Polo reached what is today Afghanistan around 1271, he visited a quarry on the remote headwaters of the Oxus River. “Here there is a high mountain”, he wrote, “out of which the best and finest blue is mined.”7 The region is now called Badakshan, and the blue stone is lapis lazuli, the source of the pigment ultramarine. Cennino shows us how deeply ultramarine blue was revered in the Middle Ages, writing that it “is a colour illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect, beyond all other colours; one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would not still surpass”.8 As the name implies, it came from “beyond the seas” — imported, since around the thirteenth century, at great expense from the Badakshan mines. Ultramarine was precious not just because it was a rare import, but because it was extremely laborious to make. Lapis lazuli is veined with the most gorgeous deep blue, but grinding it is typically disappointing: it turns greyish because of the impurities in the mineral. These impurities have to be separated from the blue material, which is done by kneading the powdered mineral with wax and washing the wax in water — the blue pigment flushes out into the water. This has to be done again and again to purify the pigment fully. The finest grades of ultramarine come out first, and the final flushes give only a low-quality, cheaper product, called ultramarine ash. The best ultramarine cost more than its weight in gold in the Middle Ages, and so it was usually used sparingly. To paint so extensively with the colour, as Giotto did in the Arena Chapel, was lavish in the extreme. More often the medieval painter would use ultramarine only for the most precious components of a painting. That seems to be the real reason why most altarpieces of this period that depict the Virgin Mary show her with blue robes. For all that art theorists have attempted to explain the symbolic significance of the colour — the hue of humility or virtue, say — it was largely a question of economics. Or, you might say, of making precious materials a devotional offering to God. You can compare azurite and ultramarine side by side in Titian’s explosion of Renaissance colour, Bacchus and Ariadne (1523). Here is that starry vault, turning to day before our eyes, and it is painted in ultramarine. So too is Ariadne’s robe, which dominates the scene. But the sea itself, on which we see Theseus’s boat receding from his abandoned lover, is azurite, with its greenish tint. Over the centuries, artists accumulated a few other blues too. Around 1704 a colour-maker named Johann Jacob Diesbach, working in the Berlin laboratory of alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel, was attempting to make a red lake pigment when he found that he had produced something quite different: a deep blue material. He had used a batch of the alkali potash in his recipe, supplied by Dippel — but which was contaminated with animal oil allegedly prepared from blood. The iron used by Diesbach reacted with the material in the oil to make a compound that — unusually for iron — is blue in colour. By 1710 it was being made as an artist’s material, generally known as Prussian blue. It wasn’t entirely clear what had gone into this mixture, and so for some years the recipe for making Prussian blue was surrounded by confusion and secrecy. In 1762 one French chemist declared that “Nothing is perhaps more peculiar than the process by which one obtains Prussian blue, and it must be owned that, if chance had not taken a hand, a profound theory would be necessary to invent it.”9 But chance was a constant companion in the history of making colours. At any rate, Prussian blue was both attractive and cheap — a tenth of the cost of ultramarine — and it was popular with artists including Thomas Gainsborough and Antoine Watteau. It comprises some of the rich blue Venetian skies of Canaletto. Another blue from the Renaissance and Baroque periods went by the name of smalt, which is not so very different from the cobalt-blue glass of Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres, ground to a powder. Its origins are obscure, but may well come out of glass-making technology; one source attributes the invention to a Bohemian glassmaker of the mid-sixteenth century, although in fact smalt appears in earlier paintings. Cobalt minerals were found in silver mines, where their alleged toxicity (actually cobalt is only poisonous in high doses, and trace amounts are essential for human health) saw them named after “kobolds”, goblin-like creatures said to haunt these subterranean realms and torment miners. Natural cobalt ores such as smaltite were used since antiquity to give glass a rich blue colour, and smalt was produced simply by grinding it up — not too finely, because then the blue becomes too pale as more light is scattered by the particles. As a result of its coarse grains, smalt was a gritty material and not easy to use. Some art historians make no distinctions between this “cobalt blue” and those that were given the name in the nineteenth century. But the latter were much finer, richer pigments, made artificially by systematic chemistry. In the late eighteenth century the French government asked the renowned chemist Louis-Jacques Thénard to look for a synthetic substitute for expensive ultramarine. After consulting potters, who used a cobalt-tinted glassy blue glaze, in 1802 Thénard devised a strongly coloured pigment with a similar chemical constitution: technically, the compound cobalt aluminate. Cobalt yielded several other colours besides deep blue. In the 1850s a cobalt-based yellow pigment called aureolin became available in France, followed soon after by a purple pigment called cobalt violet: the first ever pure purple pigment apart from a few rather unstable plant extracts. A sky blue pigment called cerulean blue, a compound of cobalt and tin, was a favourite of some of the post-Impressionists. But what artists craved most of all was ultramarine itself — if only it wasn’t so expensive. Even by the mid-nineteenth century it remained costly, which is why the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti caused much dismay (not to mention added expense) when he upset a big pot of ultramarine paint while working on a mural for Oxford University. By Rossetti’s time, however, artists did at last have an alternative — it’s just that several of them had not yet learnt to trust it. As chemical knowledge and prowess burgeoned in the early nineteenth century, bringing new pigments such as cobalt blue onto the market, it seemed within the realms of possibility to try to make ultramarine artificially. It was a prize well worth striving for, because pigment manufacture had become big business. The manufacture of colours and paints wasn’t supplying artists; there was now a taste for colour in the world at large, in particular for interior decoration. Factories were set up in the nineteenth century to make and grind pigments. Some sold them in pure form to the artist’s suppliers, who would then mix up paints for their customers from pigment and oil. But some pigment manufacturers, such as Reeves and Winsor & Newton in England, began to provide oil paints ready-made; from the 1840s these were sold in collapsible tin tubes, which could be sealed to prevent paints from drying out and could be conveniently carried for painting out of doors. Mindful of the importance of the pigment market, in 1824 the French Society for Encouragement of National Industry offered a prize for the first practical synthesis of ultramarine. It is a complicated compound to make — unusually for such inorganic pigments, the blue colour comes not from a metal but from the presence of the element sulphur in the mineral crystals. This composition of ultramarine was first deduced by two French chemists in 1806, offering clues about what needed to go into a recipe for making it. In 1828, an industrial chemist named Jean-Baptiste Guimet in Toulouse described a way to make the blue material from clay, soda, charcoal, sand and sulfur, and he was awarded the prize (despite a rival claim from Germany). In England this synthetic ultramarine was subsequently widely known as French ultramarine, and Guimet was able to sell it at a tenth of the cost of the natural pigment. By the 1830s there were factories making synthetic ultramarine throughout Europe. Artists looked upon this substitute with considerable caution, however. Ultramarine still retained some of its old mystique and majesty, and painters were reluctant to believe that it could be turned out on an industrial scale. Perhaps the synthetic variety was inferior — might it fade or discolour? Actually synthetic ultramarine is (unlike some synthetic pigments) very stable and reliable, but J. M. W. Turner was evidently still wary of it when, in the mid-century, he was about to help himself to the ultramarine on another artist’s palette during one of the “finishing days” at the Royal Academy, where artists put their final touches to paintings already hung for display on the walls. Hearing the cry that this ultramarine was “French”, Turner declined to dab into it. But by the end of the century, synthetic ultramarine was a standard ingredient of the palette: small wonder, given that it could be a hundred or even a thousand times cheaper than the natural variety. Synthetic ultramarine is the pigment in Yves Klein’s patented International Klein Blue, which he used for a series of monochrome paintings in the 1950s and early 60s. But ultramarine never looked like this before — at least, not on the canvas. Klein noticed that pigments tend to look richer and more gorgeous as a dry powder than when mixed with a binder — another consequence of how light gets transmitted and refracted — and he sought to capture this appearance in a paint. In 1955 he found his answer in a synthetic fixative resin called Rhodopas M60A, made by the Rhone-Poulenc chemicals company, which could be thinned to act as a binder without impairing the chromatic strength of the pigment. This gave the paint surface a matt, velvety texture. Klein collaborated with Edouard Adam, a Parisian chemical manufacturer and retailer of artists’ materials, to develop a recipe for binding ultramarine in this resin, mixed with other solvents. Even in the modern era, then, some artists were still depending on chemical assistance and expertise. Despite the profusion of new pigments with complicated and recondite chemical formulations, the intimate relationship of painters to their materials has not been entirely severed. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 23, 2020

Philip Ball

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:29.384271

charles-baudelaire-and-the-convalescent-flaneur

“Fevers of Curiosity” Charles Baudelaire and the Convalescent Flâneur By Matthew Beaumont April 8, 2021 This month marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Baudelaire’s birth, the French poet famous for his descriptions of the flâneur: a man of the crowd, who thrived in the metropolis’ multitude. Following Baudelaire through 19th-century Paris, Matthew Beaumont discovers a parallel archetype — the convalescent hero of modernity — who emerges from the sickbed into city streets with a feverish curiosity. We are used to thinking of Charles Baudelaire’s most famous archetype, the flâneur who saunters through the metropolitan city, as a supremely self-confident inhabitant of the mid-nineteenth century streets — a “passionate spectator” of their multifarious life-forms. The flâneur, after all, was a middle- or upper-middle class man who, fascinated by the multiplicity and variety of city life, freely resided “in the heart of the multitude”, as Baudelaire put it in “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), “amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite”.1 He could afford to savour its constant, contradictory stimuli not least because he stood, or strolled, at a slight distance from the hustle and bustle of its everyday life. Relishing its rhythms and rhymes, the Baudelairean flâneur read the metropolis as if it unfurled before him like an immense, complicated poem. The role Baudelaire ascribed to his “passionate spectator” was to act as an exquisitely tuned instrument for monitoring but also conducting the contradictory energies of capitalist modernity. This phenomenon — capitalist modernity — was a state of permanent social and existential transformation. In Paris, its experience had been decisively shaped by the urban reforms that Emperor Bonaparte and his prefect Baron Haussmann forcibly introduced in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution. For, in “blasting a vast network of boulevards through the heart of the old medieval city”, as Marshall Berman puts it, they turned it into a theatre both of military pageant and — in the context of the arcades and, later, the department stores — of consumerism.2 But the flâneur glorified by Baudelaire was never in fact the comfortable, complacent bourgeois stroller that had been so fashionable in the 1840s in those illustrations and journalistic sketches known as the Physiologies. As late as 1867, the French historian and journalist Victor Fournel was presenting flânerie, which he sketched in terms of “drifting along, with your nose in the wind, with both hands in your pockets, and with an umbrella under your arm, as befits any open-minded spirit”, in positively seraphic terms.3 In “The Painter of Modern Life”, by contrast, Baudelaire was already emphasising the flâneur’s restless, unsettled experience both in the metropolitan street and in his own skin. Baudelaire’s often peripatetic life as a bohemian poet in Paris, shaped by privation, rebellion, and a taste for narcotic substances, lies behind his reconfiguration of the flâneur. This is neatly captured in a “Self-Portrait under the Influence of Hashish” that he sketched in the early 1840s — for there, standing in the nocturnal city, a scruffily dressed Baudelaire stares suspiciously at us from beneath a cloud of intoxicating black smoke. Baudelaire’s famous metropolitan archetype, then, was far more haunted or even hunted than the one purveyed in the contemporary illustrated periodical press.4 This can be glimpsed in a poem like “Le Soleil”, from the Tableaux Parisiens section of the second edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1861). There, the impoverished poet describes venturing out alone (“Je vais m’exercer seul”) in search of the poetry of the city’s streets: “duelling in dark corners for a rhyme / and stumbling over words like cobblestones”.5 Like the French language, here the French capital is a distinctly hostile environment. So is the poet’s own body. By this point, racked by debt, Baudelaire was addicted to laudanum; mentally and physically ill. The writer as walker has become an embattled, almost tragi-comic figure. It is those pedestrians who, like the struggling poet of “Le Soleil”, find themselves damaged and discomfited as they negotiate the city’s streets that interest me here. The frailer kind of flâneur, so to speak. . . In particular, I am concerned with one of those alternative archetypes useful for capturing the experience of metropolitan modernity with which Baudelaire complicates the flâneur — the convalescent. And my focus is on the moment when the urban convalescent, in spite of frail nerves, takes his first, reckless steps in the city from which he has been temporarily exiled, and experiences a sense of freedom at once tentative and abrupt. The streets — which he approaches cautiously, still a little feverishly, at first perhaps as an observer who must half-protect himself from the impact of the city — are the site of the convalescent’s groping re-engagement with everyday life. This almost morbid state of sensitivity to the city, associated with the aftermath of a sustained illness, typifies the experience of what I want to characterise, in a deliberately Baudelairean formulation, as the convalescent as hero of modernity. The convalescent, and especially the male convalescent — who for social reasons to do with the restrictions imposed by patriarchal society, becomes less physically restricted than the female convalescent, less confined to the domestic domain — is in spite of his infirmity and decrepitude not necessarily confined to the sick room. He moves out into the world, albeit tentatively, and is temporarily free to relate to it in terms that are almost purely aesthetic. The idea of convalescence as an aesthetic disposition probably originates in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817). There, the convalescent’s experience of his environment is often directly compared to that of the child, because the convalescent’s delicate receptiveness to life — a helpless openness to unexpected or half-forgotten sensations — has something of childhood’s brittle innocence. For Coleridge, convalescence also has an innate poetic intensity. In the first volume of the Biographia, he characterises genius as the capacity “to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day, for, perhaps, forty years, had rendered familiar [sic]”. The “prime merit” of genius, he continues, and “its most unequivocal mode of manifestation”, is “so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily convalescence”.6 In convalescence, then, the whole world is made strange. In this state even the most ordinary individual relates to life like a Romantic poet. Coleridge — at times an almost full-time convalescent himself, especially when living in Highgate, outside London, in the final, drug-addicted decades of his life — captures precisely the state in which I am interested when he refers, rhapsodically, to “the voluptuous and joy-trembling nerves of convalescence”.7 For Baudelaire, with his focus on modernity, the convalescent is explicitly an urban poet, albeit one indebted to the rurally-inflected Romantic tradition. Convalescence, as he argues, “is like a return towards childhood”, for “the convalescent, like the child, is possessed in the highest degree of the faculty of keenly interesting himself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial”.8 Baudelaire primarily derives his interest in convalescence from Edgar Allan Poe, specifically his “The Man of the Crowd”, a short story first published in Graham’s Magazine in December 1840. This strange fantasia, set in London, where Poe had lived and been educated between 1815 and 1820, is the preeminent instance of urban convalescence in literature. Poe himself, incidentally, probably derived his theoretical interest in the convalescent from Coleridge, whom he read with passionate attention, and whose conception of convalescence he deliberately urbanises and modernises. The narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” first recalls the convalescent state he has recently inhabited in the story’s second paragraph: Not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in autumn, I sat at the large bow window of the D– Coffee-House in London. For some months I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent, and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui – moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs [. . .] and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its every-day condition, as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz, the mad and flimsy rhetoric of Gorgias. Merely to breathe was enjoyment; and I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain. I felt a calm but inquisitive interest in everything. With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself for the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over advertisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the street.9 This is an exact description of convalescence as an aesthetic; a state of unpredictable, half-repressed euphoria in which, because he is temporarily exempt from the routine demands of everyday life in the city, the individual’s “electrified” senses are preternaturally attuned to experience. The film has departed from his mental vision but he nonetheless peers at the street through “smoky panes”. His empty, appetitive mood is at once both the opposite of boredom and oddly characteristic of its restless calm: it is “the converse of ennui”; or its obverse. His consciousness processes the shocks of urban life, the traffic on the roads and pavements, as concussions that seem almost exquisite because he can remain detached and half-insulated from them. Poe’s urban fable locates his convalescent on the margins of a mass of people. Detached from the “dense and continuous tides of population” that rush past the café as evening closes in, and from the rhythms of routine production they collectively embody, his convalescent describes his fascination with the people he sees commuting home. He is soon lost in contemplation of them: “At this particular period of the evening I had never before been in a similar situation, and the tumultuous sea of human heads filled me, therefore, with a delicious novelty of emotion”.10 Initially he examines in the abstract the mass of human forms that pass him. He is particularly interested in those that seem unconfident on the street, those that “were restless in their movements, had flushed faces, and talked and gesticulated to themselves, as if feeling in solitude on account of the very denseness of the company around”.11 These are the people for whom everyday life in the city is a kind of sickness or fever. Then Poe’s convalescent examines the passersby in more concrete detail, as if they inhabit some grimy aquarium. Sliding down “the scale of what is termed gentility”, as the light thickens, he classifies their physiognomies, their clothes and step, carefully sifting through the aristocrats, businessmen, clerks, artisans, “exhausted labourers”, pie-men, dandies, conmen, pickpockets, beggars and prostitutes.12 From the café he sees innumerable drunkards — their countenances pale, their eyes a livid red — who clutch at passing objects “with quivering fingers” as they stride through the crowd.13 It is “thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob”, his forehead pressed against the glass beside his seat, that the convalescent glimpses the “decrepid old man” whose physiologie he is completely unable to taxonomise.14 He stumbles into the street, his curiosity heightened by the snatched sight of a diamond and a dagger beneath the old man’s cloak, resolving in a moment of heated decision to follow him. “For my own part I did not much regard the rain”, he notes, “the lurking of an old fever in my system rendering the moisture somewhat too dangerously pleasant”.15 Convalescence itself is a “dangerously pleasant” state. Poe’s narrator then traces the man’s mysterious movements, throughout the night and into the day, as he roams the city, in an apparently futile attempt to understand what motivates him; but he finally only tracks him back, on the evening of the second day, to the coffee house from which he had first set out. The old man, who appears completely unconscious of the narrator, seems to be more than human — as if his labyrinthine path through the streets had traced not the arbitrary trajectory of an individual but the secret form or logic of the corrupt, decrepit metropolitan city itself. So, the convalescent abandons his pursuit, making this declaration of defeat: “He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds”.16 The old man incarnates the industrial capitalist city in its anti-heroic rather than heroic form. In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), composed exactly one hundred years after this short story was first published, Walter Benjamin decides that he cannot finally identify Poe’s “man of the crowd” as a flâneur, mainly because in him “composure has given way to manic behavior”. Instead, according to Benjamin, he exemplifies the destiny of the flâneur once this intrinsically urbane figure has been “deprived of the milieu to which he belonged” (a milieu, Benjamin implies, that London probably never provided).17 The same might be said of Poe’s convalescent, in whom composure must compete with a positively monomaniacal mood. Indeed, it can be argued that “The Man of the Crowd” allegorises the process by which, in the hectic conditions of a metropolis like London in the mid-nineteenth century, the flâneur splits apart and produces two further metropolitan archetypes, one almost pathologically peripatetic, the other static to the point of being a sort of cripple. The former is the nightwalker, a disreputable, indeterminately criminal type who embodies that half of the flâneur characterised by a state of restless mobility. The latter is the convalescent, who embodies the half of him characterised by a state of immobile curiosity. For Poe, these characters are spectral doubles. What about Baudelaire? The French poet’s discussion of “The Man of the Crowd” is contained in the third section of “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), his encomium to the artist Constantin Guys, “a passionate lover of crowds and incognitos”.18 He portrays Guys there as someone whose genius resides in a childlike curiosity, which he characterises in terms of “the fixed and animally ecstatic gaze of a child confronted with something new, whatever it be”.19 Like the child, who actually “sees everything in a state of newness”, and who is consequently “always drunk”, Guys is exquisitely susceptible to impressions.20 For him, “sensibility is almost the whole being”.21 Ordinarily, Baudelaire emphasises, adults can only recover this spontaneously poetic disposition temporarily when they are in a state of convalescence. Guys, however, positively personifies this disposition, because he is “an eternal convalescent”.22 “Imagine an artist who was always, spiritually, in the condition of that convalescent”, Baudelaire concludes, “and you will have the key to the nature of Monsieur G”.23 It is implicitly Poe, however, and not Guys, who embodies in the end the spirit of convalescence in “The Painter of Modern Life”. Baudelaire identifies Poe’s convalescent as his inspiration for this claim: Do you remember a picture (it really is a picture!), painted – or rather written – by the most powerful pen of our age, and entitled The Man of the Crowd? In the window of a coffee house there sits a convalescent, pleasurably absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the medium of thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him. But lately returned from the valley of the shadow of death, he is rapturously breathing all the odours and essences of life; as he has been on the brink of total oblivion, he remembers, and fervently desires to remember, everything. Finally he hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng, in pursuit of an unknown, half-glimpsed countenance, that has, on an instant, bewitched him. Curiosity had become a fatal, irresistible passion!24 It is immediately apparent from this paragraph that Baudelaire’s principal interest does not lie in the drama described by Poe’s narrative. Instead, he seems more interested in the scene in which the story is initially set. He insists on representing Poe’s narrative, in fact, as a relatively static picture, as if he is himself examining the convalescent through a frame. Perhaps it is most accurate to state that Baudelaire reconstructs the story as a sort of diptych. In the first panel, the convalescent is passively seated in the coffee house. As he observes the street life through the glass, he simultaneously introjects the scenes outside, assimilating them to his consciousness, and projects his consciousness outward, assimilating his consciousness to them. He is “pleasurably absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the medium of thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him”.25 The convalescent “rapturously breath[es] in all the odours and essences of life”, making the surface of his body seem absolutely porous, even as the solid pane of glass that he sits beside has apparently been rendered completely permeable.26 In the second panel, Baudelaire’s description captures Poe’s narrator, as if in a photograph, in the act of flinging himself into the street — like the Baudelairean protagonist who, according to Benjamin, “plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of energy”.27 He is freeze-framed, so to speak, as he “hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng”.28 The convalescent thus metamorphoses into a nightwalker. It is in effect an image of the convalescent as hero, actively seeking to satisfy his feverish curiosity, even if it is finally fatal to do so. Poe’s spectral convalescent, more spiritually decrepit than Baudelaire’s, and less rapturous, is not so deeply indebted to the Coleridgean tradition, in spite of the fact that Baudelaire probably encountered this tradition through the mediation of Poe. But, like Poe’s, Baudelaire’s convalescent remains terminally peripheral to the life of the street, in contrast to the flâneur. The flâneur, according to Baudelaire, in the same section of “The Painter of Modern Life”, is situated “at the centre of the world” even though he also “remain[s] hidden from the world”.29 In this respect, as in others, he is like the commodity, which is so pervasive as to be invisible. The convalescent, Baudelaire implies, by contrast resists the performative aspect of the flâneur’s life in the streets and refuses the spectacular logic of the marketplace. Baudelaire had first referred to what he so evocatively describes as “convalescence, with its fevers of curiosity” in “Edgar Poe: His Life and Works” (1853).30 In this piece, which subsequently reappeared as the introduction to his translations in the Histoires extraordinaires (1856), Baudelaire locates the “single character” that populates Poe’s numerous narratives as “the man of razor-sharp perceptions and slackened nerves”. He concludes that “this man is Poe himself”.31 This description perfectly captures the constitution of the convalescent, who is acutely sensitive to the life of the streets but at the same time oddly anaesthetised to it. The poetics of convalescence that are perceptible in Poe, and which Baudelaire elaborated, make him absolutely central to the process by which Romanticism, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, became urbanised. Poe is for Baudelaire one of the patron saints of metropolitan modernity because, as “the writer of the nerves”, he too is a perpetual convalescent.32 In the urban sensorium described by both authors, the sick are too sensitive to cope with the shocks of everyday life, and the healthy are constitutionally insensitive to its secret aesthetics. Paul de Man grasps the importance of the convalescent for Baudelaire when, in a discussion of him and Nietzsche in “Literary History and Literary Modernity”, he offers this compelling claim: The human figures that epitomise modernity are defined by experiences such as childhood or convalescence, a freshness of perception that results from a slate wiped clear, from the absence of a past that has not yet had time to tarnish the immediacy of perception (although what is thus freshly discovered prefigures the end of this very freshness), of a past that, in the case of convalescence, is so threatening that it has to be forgotten.33 The convalescent is not necessarily confined to the sick room, or to some bucolic scene of refuge, in spite of their infirmity and decrepitude. They embody the experience of modernity. Indeed, it might be said that, in order to be absolutely modern, as Rimbaud demanded, one must be convalescent. But what about those citizens less able to roam the metropolis in a state of rapturous, febrile curiosity? If the convalescent’s power comes from a unique experience of modernity — being at once immersed, with refreshed senses, in the spectacle of the modern city and cautiously set off from its events, as though behind a pane of glass — it was a power and position not accessible to all. Like the flâneur, the convalescent relied on a certain invisibility in the streets, one afforded by a kind of visibility within the social order. On the boulevards of Baudelaire’s Paris, this was very much the privilege of the bourgeois white male, and the leisure time afforded by his class position. As Erika Diane Rappaport reminds us, there is no denying that, as distinct from a man’s, “a woman’s freedom to ‘walk alone’ in the city was constrained by physical inconveniences and dangers as well as by social conventions that deemed it entirely improper for a bourgeois lady to roam alone out-of-doors”.34 The flâneuse — as distinct from women who, for professional or social reasons, simply in order to travel from here to there, passed through the streets of the metropolis — is not a common phenomenon. But her painful, paradoxical sense of simultaneously being both too invisible and too visible in the city streets was characteristic of all women in these fundamental circumstances. It must be added, though, that the male territory to which Rappaport refers is by no means homogeneous or socially uniform — except, no doubt, in so far as it marginalises female pedestrians. Many male pedestrians of the period, far from feeling entitled in the streets, find them distinctly hostile, for a range of different reasons. They are the city’s internal exiles, even if their sense of unbelonging is from the start far less fraught, far less freighted with histories of exploitation and oppression, than that of women, or of men and women of colour. Numerous residents of the city could not afford to function, in Baudelaire’s beautiful description of the flâneur, as “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness”.35 The female convalescent is for the most part denied Baudelaire’s privileged re-engagement with the public sphere. In Bleak House (1853), for example, Dickens’ heroine Esther Summerson records that, in recovering from what is probably a case of smallpox, she “became useful to [her]self, and interested, and attached to life again”; but the role she assumes is confined to the private sphere and her re-attachment to life is conceived in terms of utility rather than some form of gratification.36 “The body after long illness is languid, passive, receptive of sweetness, but too weak to contain it”, wrote Virginia Woolf in Jacob’s Room (1922).37 Woolf was of course supremely sensitive to the aesthetics of convalescence, but she was also acutely conscious of the extent to which, historically, women have been excluded from leisurely enjoyment of the city’s public spaces. It is no accident that, in “Street Haunting” (1927), her delightful celebration of “rambling the streets of London”, she pretends to need to purchase a pencil in order to justify what is in effect a purposeless stroll through the city.38 If Woolf was “the greatest flâneuse of twentieth-century literature”, as Lauren Elkin writes, then she was nonetheless not as free to practice flânerie as her confrères.39 In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a novel that celebrates the comparative freedom afforded to its eponymous heroine in the metropolis by the business of shopping, Woolf offers a systematic critique of the patriarchal politics of the Baudelairean flâneur. There, Mrs. Dalloway’s old friend Peter Walsh at one point follows a young woman, to whom he momentarily feels attracted, through the streets of central London. Woolf uses Peter’s predatory mode of walking to demonstrate, in Benjamin’s compelling formulation from his essay on “The Return of the Flâneur” (1929), “how easy it is for the flâneur to depart from the ideal of the philosopher out for a stroll, and to assume the features of the werewolf at large in the social jungle”.40 Peter is Baudelaire’s “passionate spectator” — exploiting his freedom as a middle-class man to treat the life of the metropolis as a form of spectacle — as a raptor or stalker. He is one of those “wild beasts, our fellow men”, comfortably inhabiting “the heart of the forest” that is the city, to whom Woolf refers in “Street Haunting”.41 For Woolf, as a feminist, the Baudelairean flâneur is, in the end, the “werewolf at large in the social jungle” that Benjamin feared it might become. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 8, 2021

Matthew Beaumont

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:29.983477

the-art-of-making-debts

The Art of Making Debts Accounting for an Obsession in 19th-Century France By Erika Vause May 12, 2021 Being in debt was once an artful promenade — the process of eluding creditors through disguise and deceit. Erika Vause explores a forgotten financial history: the pervasive humor that once accompanied the literature and visual culture of debt. “Tell me what you borrow, and I’ll tell you who you are. . .”1— Physiologie de l’argent par un débiteur “The art of making debts and not paying them back”, wrote French humorist Emile Marco de Saint-Hilaire, “is one of the bases of the social order”.2 This opening aphorism served as the guiding argument for Saint-Hilaire’s 1827 L’Art de payer ses dettes et de satisfaire ses créanciers sans débourser un sou [The art of paying debts and satisfying creditors without spending a dime]. Presented as the deathbed advice of a crafty aristocratic uncle who had survived the tumults of the 1789 Revolution while elegantly dodging his debts, Saint-Hilaire’s book preached the virtues of perennial indebtedness for individuals and nation-states alike. “The more debts one has”, Saint-Hilaire explained, “the more credit. The more creditors, the more resources”.3 Unfortunately, many creditors remained stubbornly unenlightened about the benefits of never receiving their money back. Hence, in his book, Saint-Hilaire encouraged debtors to mobilize an arsenal of techniques and tricks, ranging from mastery of disguise to an exacting knowledge of every legal loophole, to ensure the credit economy continued to function as it should. Saint-Hilaire was not alone in his debt-shirking evangelism. The “art of making debts”, as Saint-Hilaire and others referred to it, spawned an entire genre of tongue-in-cheek how-to guides and occupied a central place in the whimsical illustrations of awkward encounters between creditors and debtors sketched by some of the era’s most famous artists. Even in our finance-obsessed present, it is difficult to understand just how fascinating, and how occasionally hilarious, nineteenth-century French society seemed to find debt. The most familiar reflection of this absorption lies in the era’s literature. In the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, and Dumas, debt served as a central plot device, and one almost inevitably associated with tragedy: it revealed secret appetites, ruined ancient families, and subjected the virtuous poor to the depredations of usurers. Yet the art of making debts, embodied in works like Saint-Hilaire’s, treated the relationship between creditors and debtors not as innately devastating but rather as a cat-and-mouse game at once humorous and deeply revealing of the contradictory nature of the democratic and industrial revolutions. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, France was a country held together by chains of credit and debt that bound workers to employers and producers to consumers. Peasants strained under hefty mortgages. Merchants relied on promissory notes and bills of exchange to buy and sell. Aristocrats ran up bills with their tailors and booters. Workers hocked their meager possessions at municipal pawnshops. Thousands of people were incarcerated each year when they couldn’t pay up, held at the private request of their creditors. Thousands more filed for bankruptcy before the nation’s commercial courts, undergoing a process fraught with social and legal dishonor. Historians of credit have argued that its logic was not entirely, or even primarily, financial. Laurence Fontaine, for instance, has described early modern credit as a “moral economy”, meaning that it relied on highly personal judgements of character.4 Relations of credit were relations of power. In French eighteenth-century aristocratic culture, as historian Clare Crowston has argued, credit operated according to an “economy of regard” in which the very word “credit” more frequently referred to status or reputation than it did to a monetary transaction.5 This meaning did not disappear with the dawn of the nineteenth century. By the middle of the century, Marx and Engels would famously describe capitalism in The Communist Manifesto as having “pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’”, to leave “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’”.6 Yet, on the cusp of finance capitalism’s transformation into a complex system of almost staggering abstraction, debt and credit were vividly personal, and the reduction of relationships to monetary exchange was something still quite tangible. The French Revolution of 1789 had represented a seismic shift in understandings of wealth. In what historian Rafe Blaufarb has termed “the Great Demarcation”, the revolutionaries had carved out of the incredibly complicated patchwork of feudal traditions of ownership a more or less coherent understanding of liberal private property based on notions of possessive individualism.7 Napoleon’s 1804 Civil Code placed the inalienable right to private property at the foundation of French society. Under such rigid notions of property, those who owed — rather than owned — could easily be regarded as criminals. Indeed, not only were Napoleonic laws infamously punitive to debtors, but popular prints like the much-reproduced “Crédit est mort – les mauvais payeurs l’ont tué” (Credit is dead – the bad payers killed him) testify to this attitude. In the various versions of this image that circulated across the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the murdered body of Credit, the “good fellow”, lies surrounded by an artist, musician, and soldiers armed with swords. In the background, an industrious knife-grinder toils away, unaffected by Credit’s demise because he, unlike these foppish debtors, paid with his hard-earned cash. This insistence on contractual agreements and punctuality in paying debts did not mean that the “economy of regard” had vanished. Moreover, the tumultuous events of the French Revolution itself — which had included the confiscation of land from aristocrats and the Catholic Church, protracted war, a disastrous experiment with paper money that spiraled into inflation, and national bankruptcy — had revealed the fragile bases of private fortunes. Simultaneously instructed in the virtues of a new socioeconomic paradigm and presented with dramatic evidence of its arbitrary and even absurd character, French people eagerly sought guidance, and perhaps also comic relief. The “art of making debts” grew out of attempts to make the new post-revolutionary financial world more legible. In early nineteenth-century French cities, an emerging culture of print and press democratized aristocratic savoir-faire and produced guides for navigating a newly mobile social order. Panoramic literature, including “tableaux” and “physiologies”, offered readers accessible knowledge of the various urban “types” with which the public could navigate a bewildering new world where traditional wisdom might be of little help. Saint-Hilaire’s book, as well as Jacques-Gilbert Ymbert’s L’art de faire des dettes and L’art de promener ses créanciers (The art of making debts and The art of giving creditors the run-around), Maurice Alhoy’s Physiologie du débiteur et du créancier (Physiology of the debtor and creditor) and the anonymously-written Physiologie de l’argent par un débiteur (Physiology of money by a debtor) provided humorous guides to the people, places, and practices of the post-Revolutionary financial system. Authors and illustrators also illuminated a country torn between an older aristocratic culture of extravagance, where the payment of debts to one’s social inferiors was considered at best unimportant and at worst taboo, and a new bourgeois society based on contractual obligation and legal equality. Fundamental to this “art of making debts” was mastery of the “promenade” or “run around”. As Jacques-Gilbert Ymbert explained in his 1824 L’art de promener ses créanciers, “the goal of the promenade is to bore the creditor, to bring him to such a state of fatigue and annoyance that, out of breath, spent, and under pressure, he at last despairs of his repayment and renounces the pursuit”.8 The full run-around often took years, and the process entailed careful preparation on the part of debtors. They were encouraged to rent top-floor apartments with windows facing the street (“a creditor who has breached five flights of stairs arrives at your door tired, out of breath: it’s not money he needs, it’s a chair”) and to furnish their living quarters with strange and eccentric devices, preferably new technologies, that would divert the attention of a visiting creditor away from financial matters.9 More drastically, the manuals proposed changes of physical appearance. Recommendations included wigs, beards, fake noses, various forms of disfigurement, extreme weight gain and weight loss, even diseases. Patience was the true secret to a successful “promenade”. Ymbert drew up a helpful table, for debtors to memorize “like the Pythagorean theorem”, that provided a scientific estimate of how long a promenade would have to be (in years and in distance) to satisfy a given creditor, as well as how many pairs of shoes a creditor would wear out in the process.10 Writers cautioned debtors to avoid chance encounters with their creditors at all costs. As Ymbert explained, the result of meeting a creditor in the street could be catastrophic: It erases the effects of six months of promenade and gives the debt all the freshness that it had lost . . . Naked, exposed to the reproaches of your creditor . . . you stutter, you make promises. Your creditor’s strength grows from your weakness, and he is reborn, throwing himself at you with all the energy he had lost.11 Illustrators, meanwhile, seized on such meetings as fodder for their sketches. Whether on the street, in a house, or seated alongside each other on the omnibus, interactions between debtors and creditors were apparently deemed hilarious. Honoré Daumier drew several iterations of a “creditor’s visit” where a shabby creditor approaches a half-awake young man in luxurious pajamas demanding his money. Meanwhile, Frédéric Bouchot’s 1842 series “Les Débiteurs et les Créanciers” portrayed interactions between twelve different creditors and their debtors, each labeled with the profession of the creditor, from clockmaker and furniture merchant to jeweler and innkeeper. In “le tapissier” (the upholsterer), the creditor kicks down a debtor’s door. In another, “le bottier” (the bootmaker), an elegant but only half-dressed young man fights over a shoe with a much shabbier-looking bootmaker. The French public must have delighted in depictions of these awkward and all-too-familiar encounters, but these satires resonated more deeply as well, reflecting a keen awareness of the absurdities of wealth and inequality. Debtors’ manuals were avowedly designed not for the “general population who makes debts left and right”, but rather for the “proper gentleman” (an homme comme il faut).12 In L’art de faire des dettes, Ymbert described this figure as a dispossessed aristocrat. As victims of the nation’s turbulent decades, they were entitled to a certain standard of luxury as their birthright. “You were brought up to occupy a certain position in society”, Ymbert assured his readers, “unforeseeable circumstances have knocked you out of it. But your parents still invested a lot in you to prepare you for the state of a proper gentlemen . . . your person remains your capital”. Such pesky problems as utter insolvency should not keep a gentleman from the lifestyle that “society and civilization owe [him]”.13 Ymbert’s attitude towards the gentleman-debtor is not straightforward. On one hand, there is obvious mockery of his entitled air. Ymbert was writing shortly before the restored Bourbon government finally granted monetary indemnities to émigré nobles for their confiscated lands, following years of aristocratic complaints. Yet the ruined aristocrat also reflected a nearly universal predicament. As Saint-Hilaire rhetorically asked in a discordant moment of sincerity: Who, has been so fortunate that after thirty years, after assignats, mandats [both forms of paper money that ended in massive inflation] and after the bankruptcy of the State . . . after emigrations, confiscations, requisitions, arrests, and invasions which have reversed every fortune, to always have been able to say ‘I owe nothing’? And which people, sitting on a pile of gold today, could say, ‘We will never be debtors?’14 The homme comme il faut, in other words, could be anyone. Justifying the gentlemanly birthright to generate debts, however, required offering an alternative definition of property which, according to Ymbert, had “until now been very badly defined in our laws”.15 Instead of resting on land or currency, property derived principally from the individual himself. Every gentleman possessed, by birth and breeding, an innate capital constituted by his refined person, and which the world justly had to acknowledge and compensate. In certain respects, this understanding of Ymbert’s insistence on the superiority of cultural and social status over alienable properties belongs to an old-fashioned economy of regard. Yet, juxtaposed with the persistence of this intangible economy of prestige and appearance, the manuals attempted to attach an exact monetary value to specific, allegedly interchangeable “assets”. Ymbert assessed the worth of “thirty-two very white teeth” at 1600 francs and a “calf six inches in diameter” at 2400 francs.16 A gentleman’s total worth, independent of any money or land, amounted to some two hundred thousand francs, on which society owed him interest. The humor of Ymbert’s approach lay in his attempt to commodify the crucial but immeasurable traits upon which lending depended. It is here that Ymbert and other writers reveal the full complexity of their satire. Not merely do they poke fun at fashionable dandies seeking to prolong aristocratic culture into a bourgeois age, but these authors also use these figures to demonstrate the absurdity of emergent financial capitalism. Other iterations of this “balance sheet” took this critique even further. Maurice Alhoy’s Physiologie du créancier et débiteur provided the following calculation of the worth of a debtor by the time he reached his early 20s: My mother carries me for nine months in her womb, during this time she has expensive tastes, and, in assessing them at the lowest I can evaluate at                . . .        3000 francsI enter the world: the expenses of childbirth, care, baptism, etc etc                . . .        500 francsThe wetnurse for two years, including the cost of soap, sugar and first teeth                . . .        2500 francsFor 6 years I grow up and develop in my father’s house: I am spoiled, it’s not too much to put my caprices at 500 fr a year . Thus                . . .        3000 francsI am put in a boarding school; I stay 8 years. The university house costs 1200 francs per year                . . .        9600 francsThe so-called “polishing” teachers come. . . for 1,500 a year. All for nothing:                . . .        9000 francsI go to law school: the price of my registration, the purchase of indispensable books, the living expenses that my age and social position demand, 2400 francs per year, for three years:                . . .        7200 francsTotal of my capital:                . . .        34,800 francs17 Yet, despite the immense monetary investment into the young debtor, he would find to his shock that his “man capital, or capital-man” entitled him to nothing in the eyes of lenders and bankers. “It does not inspire the least amount of trust in him and nobody will lend to him on the basis of its value”. Faced with such manifest injustice, the humorist wryly noted, what choice did the proper gentleman have but to rely on the art of making debts to get by? A parody of early political economy accompanied this heterodox interpretation of property. Paraphrasing economist Jean-Baptiste Say, Ymbert maintained that any modern society was comprised of two fundamentally opposed classes: “producers” and “consumers”. Rather than being at war, however, these classes were inextricably interlinked through debt — “producers”, as Saint-Hilaire explained it, “are none other than creditors; consumers are none other than debtors”.18 Since each relied on the other to survive, paying off one’s creditor severed ties between them and thereby “paralyzed the economy”. As proof of their economic analyses, the manuals presented comparisons between personal debt and national debt. “The grandeur of a nation is always in proportion to its deficit”, opined Saint-Hilaire, “so you should reason by analogy”.19 The most prominent example of this maxim was Great Britain, France’s inveterate enemy, whose long-pursued victory over Napoleon was largely attributed to its use of a Sinking Fund. Ymbert even included a chapter in which prime minister William Pitt the Younger, the Fund’s architect, learns the “art of making debts” from a Swiss banker named Schneider, who pays off his creditors with wisdom on his deathbed. If never-ending deficits worked for the world’s most powerful country, why shouldn’t they work for you? The economy of debt-making was nevertheless a circumscribed one. As Ymbert stated, “Running up debts to those who don’t have enough is to increase disorder and multiple misfortune. On the other hand, running up debts with those who have too much is to make up for misfortunes and reach towards reestablishing the equilibrium”.20 Debtors were encouraged to consistently patronize the finest jewelers, tailors, cobblers, and restaurants. Not only was the quality of their goods superior, Ymbert claimed, but in taking from those “who already had” one helped “restore equilibrium” between those who had “too much” and those who had “not enough”. Above all, however, at such places the fashionable gentleman would in fact reimburse his debt several times over by inspiring others, through his example, to pay for the products that he himself consumed on credit. He would “tie his cravat like an angel and thus push our muslin industry to its highest degree”.21 And, taking breakfast at a café, he would make it fashionable by his very presence, inspiring a desire to spend money on exotic delicacies by “eating with contagious grace”. The debtor was, in short, an early nineteenth-century influencer who would use his charisma to increase consumption and satisfy his debts without “spending a dime”. What happened to the art of making debts? Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, parodists believed it to be a vanishing craft. In 1827, Saint-Hilaire noted that his deceased uncle’s wisdom about dodging creditors was quickly fading into obsolescence. “Every day in Paris”, he remarked, “it becomes harder to make a revenue from one’s debts as one did before: the merchants are less gullible, the workers less patient, the usurers less numerous, relatives, mistresses and friends are less generous and the courts more severe”.22 Yet, in another sense, the art of making debts is timelier than ever. We live today in a world where our creditors are largely faceless and impersonal forces of capital rather than people we can bump into on the street, yet the humor still resonates. After all, it is easy enough to transpose the early nineteenth-century homme comme il faut, “unjustly” deprived of the social position to which he felt entitled by revolutionary upheaval, onto the caricature of the overeducated, underemployed twenty- or thirty-something of today, burdened by student loan debt yet unable to find a job befitting their unique talents. Criticized for frittering away their savings on avocado toast and dreaming of YouTube stardom, the millennial and Gen Z predicament instead reveals many of the same discrepancies between ideologies of responsibility and property and the realities of credit so adeptly satirized by the art of making debts. At a time when states and multinational companies alike seem to take on tremendous debt without suffering the consequences, yet ordinary citizens find themselves unable to emerge from under the weight of bills, credit remains as mysterious and omnipotent as it was in post-revolutionary France. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 12, 2021

Erika Vause

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:30.368339

lord-of-misrule-thomas-mortons-american-subversions

Lord of Misrule Thomas Morton’s American Subversions By Ed Simon November 24, 2020 When we think of early New England, we tend to picture stern-faced Puritans and black-hatted Pilgrims, but in the same decade that these more famous settlers arrived, a man called Thomas Morton founded a very different kind of colony — a neo-pagan experiment he named Merrymount. Ed Simon explores the colony’s brief existence and the alternate vision of America it represents. “With proclamation that the first of MayAt Merrymount shall be kept holy day.” — Thomas Morton, The New English Canaan (1637)1 “It was the tongue in your cheek that they hated most,The last flare of Old England, the reckless mirth.” — Steven Vincent Benet, Western Star (1943)2 In 1620 the Mayflower shepherded in the founders of Plymouth Plantation, and in 1630 the Arbela brought John Winthrop with his sermons about the “city on a hill”, but during the decade that separates these canonical arrivals a very different sort of English colonist would establish a very different sort of colony on the South Shore of Massachusetts. Merrymount — founded as Mount Wollaston in 1624 near present-day Quincy, Massachusetts — was the brainchild of the Devonshire-born lawyer, raconteur, libertine, rake, and crypto-pagan Thomas Morton (1579–1647). His ideas for colonizing the New World were distinct from either the Plymouth or the Massachusetts Bay Colony. While generations of historians have claimed that Americans are intellectually the descendants of stern Calvinist Puritans and Pilgrims, Morton (who stood in opposition to both groups) had his own ideas. The utopian Merrymount, it has long been argued, was a society built upon privileging art and poetry over industriousness and labor, and pursued a policy of intercultural harmony rather than white supremacy. The site where it stood — now an industrial area across the road from a Dunkin’ Donuts3 — once bore witness to a strange and beautiful alternative dream of what America could have been. Morton had first arrived in Massachusetts in 1622, only two years after the Mayflower had made its landing, but he returned to England after expressing dissatisfaction with Puritan governance. A year later he returned and helped to establish a colony with his associate Captain Richard Wollaston, a notorious pirate and distinctly un-Puritan figure who named the settlement after himself. Mount Wollaston would come to an end shortly after its founding, when Morton discovered to his horror that the titular leader of the colony was selling its settlers into Virginian slavery. As a result, at some point in 1626, he encouraged an uprising against Wollaston, and upon the captain’s exile Morton became the new leader, renaming the colony variously “Mount Ma-Re” or “Merrymount”, a play on the Latin for sea, the Mother of God, and an emotion not associated with the Puritans — joy. As Morton recounts, it was decided to mark, on May 1, 1627, this new naming of the colony with a party of “Revels and merriment after the old English custome”. For the occasion Morton set up a gigantic maypole, a “goodly pine tree of eighty feet long . . . with a pair of buck’s horns nailed on somewhat near unto the top of it, where it stood as a fair sea mark for directions on how to find the way”. Settlers and local Massachusett alike were encouraged to join in the revelry for which there was “brewed a barrell of excellent beare and provided a case of bottles, to be spent, with other good cheare, for all commers of that day.”4 Such mixing with Native Americans and drunken carousing around a maypole, with its pagan associations, was a direct affront to Morton’s Puritan neighbours. A repeat celebration the following year, after a further twelve months of Merrymount subverting Puritan norms, saw the Plymouth commander Myles Standish (a short man later slurred by Morton as “Captain Shrimp”) march a garrison into the idolatrous settlement, cut down the maypole, and have Morton sent off back to England in fetters. Bernard Bailyn, in The Barbarous Years, describes Morton as “one of the strangest, most flamboyant, and most belligerently impious people ever to wander into the coastal scene” — a “nature lover, pleasure seeker, and a Rabelaisian celebrant of secular rites” who seems almost the diametrical opposite of the Puritans and Pilgrims who would exile him from America.5 Morton’s English background was “vague”, as Bailyn puts it, and his reputation “was said to be rather shady.”6 Such was the Plymouth leaders’ perception of the Renaissance man who sold arms to the Native Americans and encouraged liquor-fuelled carousing and cohabitation between the natives and his colonists; the classically trained barrister who saw himself as loyal to King and country, but who also invented his own syncretic folk culture born from the merging of Algonquin and Celtic traditions. He appeared to them as a threat to both the souls and fortunes of the Plymouth colonists. Leader of the Plymouth colony, William Bradford, in Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), would ragefully sputter about Morton’s maypole celebrants, whom he saw as “consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies, rather and worse practices . . . . Of the mad Bacchanalians.”7 Fortunately we don’t have to rely on Morton’s dour detractors for an account of Merrymount. We also have the colonist’s own impious, cheeky, and intelligent observations in The New English Canaan (1637), a work that is part ethnography of the native Algonquin, part geographic study of Massachusetts, part handbook on agriculture and husbandry, part philosophical tract on the values of toleration and religious melding, part political argument for the revocation of his enemies’ royal charters, and part ribald anti-Puritan diatribe. While it certainly helps shed light on Merrymount, it is important to remember that Morton wrote The New English Canaan nearly a decade after he had been exiled, in an England on the verge of civil war between High Church Anglican royalists like himself and the Puritan sympathizers of Parliament. The book was, Andrew Delbanco observes, “clearly intended as propaganda”8 — a ploy, as Gilles Gunn puts it, to “get the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company revoked by portraying the Puritans as anti-Anglican.”9 He would fail in that task, however, just as his side would fail in the upcoming civil wars. Morton’s declared ambition for The New English Canaan was to “present to the public view an abstract of New England, which I have undertaken to compose by the encouragement of such genius spirits as have been studious of the enlargement of his majesty’s territories”,10 though today the book is probably better remembered for its inclusion of two enigmatic lyric poems which Morton had supposedly “affixed to . . . [the] idol” of the buck-horned Maypole for the edification of the revelers.11 Bradford found nothing to admire about what is arguably the first American poetry to be written in English, calling it merely “sundry rhymes and verses, some tending to lasciviousness, and others to the detraction and scandal of some persons.”12 Yet it’s possible to see in these sundry rhymes and verses an alternative vision of America to the one put forward by his Puritan adversaries. The ribald joviality of Morton’s poem simply entitled “The Song” is clear. The black-clad men and women who settled in Massachusetts are often (not entirely fairly) envisioned as dour, austere, life-denying prigs who permanently bequeathed to their American intellectual descendants a hypocritical zealotry. Morton’s “song” offers an opposite vision, urging the colonists of Merrymount to “Make green garlands, bring bottles out / And fill sweet Nectar freely about . . . Then drink and be merry.”13 Morton (un)soberly records that the song was performed in a chorus with “every man bearing his part, which they performed in a dance, hand in hand about the Maypole”, knowing full well how indecent it would sound to any Puritan listeners.14 Merrymount can be seen as an anomaly, an attempt to reestablish “Merrie Olde England” in the New World, free of the encroaching threats of positivism, capitalism, and puritanism which increasingly defined modernity. Indeed, Morton himself is often seen as an “old-fashioned Englishman”, as Delbanco writes — an “emblem of the Elizabethan jollity threshed out of the American grain by a stern-visaged and iron-willed Puritanism.”15 If this risks reducing Morton to an allegorical figure, it is still certainly true that The New English Canaan’s conception of the land itself was steadfastly opposed to the Puritan “errand into the wilderness” which saw America as a howling wasteland — a frightening, demon-haunted void. If Puritans like Bradford and Winthrop saw their American mission as an exile (albeit one that involved the establishment of a New Israel), Morton harbored no such apprehensions about the natural world. To him, “the land... seemed paradise”,16 a sentiment common among Spanish colonists in South America and English colonists in Virginia, but anathema to his fellow New Englanders. Morton’s affection for America was uncomplicated: “The more I looked, the more I liked it.”17 Decades later, the memories still endured for Morton; he described the Massachusetts countryside in The New English Canaan by recourse to its “goodly groves of trees, dainty fine round rising hillocks, delicate fair large plains, sweet crystal fountains, and clear running streams.” The new continent, he adds with a flourish, “was Nature’s masterpiece, her chiefest magazine of all where lives her store. If this land be not rich, then is the whole world poor.”18 This is the vocabulary of paradise, the rhetoric of Eden. For Morton, America promised to sustain the pre-Reformation culture which was his inheritance and at the same time return humanity to prelapsarian innocence. Of course, it is possible to see Morton’s language as partaking in the same consumptive logic that motivated other colonial missions, or to view his valorization of Native Americans as a form of infantilizing condescension. His conflation of the land and its people with a virginity to be ravished is evident in the words of “The Song”: Drink and be merry, merry, merry boys;Let all your delight be in the Hymens joys;So to the Hymen, now the day is come,About the merry Maypole take a room.19 However, unlike other New England colonists, Morton does truly seem to revere the land and wish to incorporate the local Massachusett people into the social fabric of Merrymount. In singing about Hymen — the Roman god of marriage as well as the female anatomy — Morton is also encouraging (as he did at Merrymount and elsewhere in the pages of The New English Canaan) English settlers to join with Native American partners in the hopeful forging of a new American society. This was what so offended the Puritans and Pilgrims; not only that Morton engaged fairly with Native Americans as business partners, and was even willing to sell them guns, but that he had no prohibition on marital relationships between settlers and natives. While we must not forget that Morton was, at heart, still a colonialist — with all the exploitation of land and people this implies — he was certainly a different kind of colonialist. With the exception of figures like Rhode Island founder Roger Williams or the missionary John Elliot, New English rhetoric about Native Americans was often explicitly genocidal. The encouragement of discourse between the colonists and Native Americans — along with Morton’s trading guns with them, his cornering of the lucrative beaver market, and his valorization of native ways of social organization, whereby he could claim that “Plato’s Commonwealth is so much practiced by these people”20 — enraged the fathers of Plymouth Plantation. Morton saw Merrymount, Richard Slotkin argues, “as the fountainhead of that erotic energy to which all the new and old worlds might have recourse”, believing that “the Englishman must withhold nothing of himself from the wilderness and the Indian but merge thoroughly with them and refresh himself at the sources of human passion and affection.”21 Affection was not, obviously, bound to dictate the course of the American experiment. Though Morton may have wished for a harmonious merging of English and Native American cultures, he soon found his experiment curtailed and his utopia abolished. The Pilgrims, he writes in the third person, “made up a party against him and mustered up what aid they could, accounting of him as of a great monster.”22 Despite that failure, however, we can find something redemptive in Morton’s iconoclasm. His rhetorical campaign against the Puritans and Pilgrims emphasized that they had denied the beauties of the American landscape and the Native American peoples. Though Morton’s task was deeply traditional, based as it was on a fantasy of “Merrie Olde England”, it was still rooted in an understanding of humanity’s relationship with nature that is not outright antagonistic. ※※Indexed under…UtopiaFailed Again and again, Morton has emerged as an undercurrent in American culture since the seventeenth century. Condemned by John Adams, celebrated by Nathaniel Hawthorne, but more often than not a historical footnote, Morton can be regarded as part of a Manichean battle, where he and the Puritans grapple for control of national self-definition. Indeed, the clashes between Morton and his enemies provide a convenient metaphor for those warring dichotomies in the American spirit — puritanism and licentiousness, staidness and carnival, piety and irreverence. With the Puritans come the Protestant work ethic and self-loathing prudery, with Morton, sensuality and leisure; with the Puritans come cold theology and nascent capitalism, with Morton emotive poetry and ecstatic revels. While one could argue such oppositions to be over-simplistic, Morton remains a powerful disruptive presence in the common founding myth of American identity. What Morton promises us is that things need not be done as they always have been, for things have not always been done this way at all. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 24, 2020

Ed Simon

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:30.743417

when-dorothy-parker-got-fired-from-vanity-fair

When Dorothy Parker Got Fired from Vanity Fair By Jonathan Goldman February 6, 2020 Dorothy Parker’s reputation as one of the premier wits of the 20th century rests firmly on the brilliance of her writing, but the image of her as a plucky, fast-talking, independent woman of her times owes more than a little to her seat at the legendary Algonquin Round Table. Jonathan Goldman explores the beginnings of the famed New York group and how Parker’s determination to speak her mind — even when it angered men in positions of power — gave her pride of place within it. Dorothy Parker lost her job as Vanity Fair theater critic on January 11, 1920, in the tea room of the Plaza Hotel. Parker must have known there was trouble brewing as she sat down across from editor Frank Crowninshield. She had been in hot water for months. Her latest column had been a particularly biting one. Reviewing The Son-Daughter, Parker contended that David Belasco’s new play followed his old one, East Is West, “almost exactly”, which Belasco made known he considered grounds for a libel suit.1 A couple paragraphs later, writing about the new Somerset Maugham play Caesar’s Wife, Parker zinged actress Billie Burke for performing “as if she were giving an impersonation of Eva Tanguay”.2 The comparison to a risqué vaudevillian enraged Florenz Ziegfeld, one of Vanity Fair’s most reliable advertisers, who happened to be Burke’s producer — and husband. Ziegfeld and Belasco both took their umbrage to publisher Condé Nast. It is in dispute which complaint held more weight, but either way, Nast passed the buck to Crowninshield, who met Parker at the Plaza and fired her from the job she had held for two years. Parker promptly ordered the most expensive dessert on the menu and left. In the days that followed, Parker’s cronies who hung out in the Rose Room of the Algonquin Hotel made the firing and its fallout at Vanity Fair into a media scandal. Parker herself would never again hold a desk job or draw a regular salary, finding success instead as a freelance critic, author of brilliant and acclaimed verse, short fiction, essays, plays, and film scripts. The incident changed her career and stature, and its response helped forge the legend of what would eventually be called the Algonquin Round Table. Parker may have learned from her parents the tendency to not quite accept the rules. She was born Dorothy Rothschild (a surname whose mention always caused her to protest any relation to the Rothschild lineage) in 1893, a child of once-forbidden love between Eliza Annie Marston, daughter of British burghers, and Jacob Henry Rothschild, child of Jewish immigrants, who married over the opposition of Marston’s parents. Dorothy grew up in New York City, in her family’s 214 West 72nd Street townhouse. It was a newly fashionable neighborhood; Broadway, a few steps away, was then called “the Boulevard” along this stretch, in homage to the Parisian boulevards designed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann that it very slightly resembled. Dorothy’s was not an idyllic childhood. Her mother died when she was five. When she was eighteen, the Titanic sank, taking with it a favored uncle, Martin Rothschild; Parker may have accompanied her distraught father to the docks to greet the shipwreck’s survivors and learn that her uncle was not among them. Henry Rothschild, devastated, fell ill and died less than a year later. Needing income beyond her father’s legacy, Parker found a job playing piano at one of many dance schools, which were faddish in the mid-1910s. But she wanted to earn money by writing. She went about it the old, hard way, sending in cold submissions of poetry until her number was called. In 1914 Vanity Fair accepted her poem “Any Porch”, which satirized chitchat of society women in meticulously metered and rhymed stanzas such as: I don’t want the vote for myself,But women with property, dear ––I think the poor girl’s on the shelf,She’s talking about her “career.”3 The piece earned her $12, comparable to about $300 today. Parker used the poem as justification to force her way into Vanity Fair’s offices at 19–25 West 44th Street and ask for a steady job. The editor, Crowninshield, was sufficiently impressed. In 1915 he hired her for Vogue, another magazine owned by Nast, to do editorial work and write captions for illustrations of women’s garments. Soon her personal life also took a dramatic turn, and then another, when she met Edwin Parker II in 1916, married him in 1917, and a week later watched in surprise and dismay while “Eddie” enlisted in the US Army and went off to World War I. During her two years at Vogue, Parker worked under Edna Woolman Chase, a legend. Chase, following a course normally reserved for men, had worked her way up from the mailroom to the top of the editorial ladder, becoming the managing editor in 1911 and editor-in-chief in 1914; she would stay in that position until 1952. Chase’s dedication was matched by her strictness. She insisted on formal workplace demeanor, and she and her young employee, demure in appearance but iconoclastic in attitude, grated on one another. Though thrilled when she landed the job, Parker could only follow the leader for so long, and was soon plaguing Chase with unprintable captions, meant to challenge the Vogue sensibility. One nightgown, she suggested, could be worn as a sexual enticement: “When she was good she was very very good, and when she was bad she wore this divine nightdress . . .” Such insinuation was a no-no for Vogue readers of 1916. The caption made it through several editorial stages before its twist on the “girl with the curl” nursery rhyme was recognized. Crowninshield relieved Chase of her problem employee in 1918, bringing Parker over to the editorial staff at Vanity Fair and offering her the theater critic job that would change her career. It was a wonderful time to have a front-row seat to New York’s theater scene. Over eighty venues were active in the Broadway district, opening over 150 shows a year; a reviewer could write about new shows every week. Parker’s monthly columns demonstrated early her propensity for dropping, and sometimes deflating, the big names — regardless of whether they belonged to someone on stage. In April 1918, while touting Wodehouse’s musical Oh, Lady! Lady!!, she digressed to say that “not even the presence in the first-night audience of Mr. William Randolph Hearst . . . could spoil my evening”. Parker loved being a theater critic, but she loved less and less Nast and Crowninshield’s attitudes toward the staff. In this, as in many things, she was supported (and egged on) by her two new colleagues at Vanity Fair, Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood. Benchley was hired as managing editor in the winter of 1919 and became Parker’s office mate in May. His straitlaced demeanor and traditional domestic life — wife, children, and house in the suburbs — belied an anarchic sense of humor that made him one of the US’s leading humorists for decades. Soon after Benchley’s arrival, Sherwood, recently returned from the war, came aboard as writer. Both Sherwood and Benchley had trained, so to speak, at Harvard, writing satire for the Harvard Lampoon; both, like Parker, would flourish as authors after Vanity Fair. It is clear that Crowninshield had a brilliant eye for literary talent. In 1919, however, the three writers soured on the management and particularly on the ownership of the magazine they worked for. They disdained Nast’s combination of crass libertinism and schoolmarmish insistence on office conformity, and they resented their uncompetitive salaries. They were “treated like serfs”, said Sherwood, and “paid that way, too”.4 They acted out: decorating Nast’s office with streamers for a mock bon-voyage party, and at one point, when Crowninshield was on a trip and left them minding the store, publishing a satirical fashion article by Sherwood in which he predicted that men’s attire would soon include waistcoats trimmed with jewels. Caesar’s Wife had its opening night in November 1919 and ran until the following February at the Liberty Theater at 236 West 42nd Street (whose facade is still there, now part of Ripley’s Museum, believe it or not). The play depicts the marriage between an English diplomat and a woman many years his junior. Parker’s review is not completely unkind until its conclusion: “Miss Burke, in her role of the young wife, looks charmingly youthful. She is at her best in her more serious moments; in her desire to convey the youthfulness of the character she plays her lighter scenes as if giving an impersonation of Eva Tanguay”.5 This was in fact a toned-down revision; in her first draft, Parker had written that Burke “threw herself around the stage as if giving an impersonation of exotic dancer Eva Tanguay”. After Crowninshield objected, Parker offered the slightly less inflammatory phrase. The published version was insulting enough. Caesar’s Wife, by the acclaimed Maugham, was meant to burnish the credentials of Burke, returning to the stage after three years in cinema, and her husband Ziegfeld, best known for his annual variety shows. Parker’s reference to Tanguay undermined these aspirations. Eva Tanguay’s name was a byword for indecorum, eroticism, and unbridled physicality. She was, by all accounts, not particularly skilled as a singer, dancer, or actress, yet she became an international star, famous partly for her salary, which eventually climbed to an astonishing $2,500 per week when she headlined at the Metropolitan Theater in Brooklyn in 1921. As Printer’s Ink had hailed her ten years earlier: “She can neither sing, nor dance, nor recite . . . . Just the same, Eva commands the money. The audience wants her”.6 Tanguay was also known for transgressions against traditional female comportment on stage and off, and for acting as her own business manager, hiring male business agents but insisting on controlling her own career. Parker’s allusion to Tanguay conjured up associations that show her remark to be more than a dig at an imperfect performance. It also subtly invoked the dynamics of the Burke-Ziegfeld marriage and served as a swipe at patriarchal control. When Parker refers to the “young wife”, and twice reiterates the “youthful” qualities of the role, she loops in the public history of Ziegfeld’s relationships with younger women, and of those women getting replaced by even younger women. Burke, for example, seventeen years Ziegfeld’s junior, had married him in 1914 following his divorce from Lillian Held and endured his unrepentant philandering ever since. Parker’s review implies that Burke is overacting because she is too old for the part of the “young wife” — and that her status as Ziegfeld’s “young wife” was expiring as well. Parker had thought Burke both inept and (her opinion unsympathetic to the plight of women actors in an inegalitarian theater industry) miscast, and had turned the critique personal. Less overtly, the reference to Tanguay, a woman who resisted having her career guided by men, sets in relief the professional arrangement between Burke and Ziegfeld. Nine years earlier, Ziegfeld had employed Tanguay in his Follies of 1911 and knew well what Tanguay represented: excess, vulgarity, spectacle — all the associations he was trying to avoid. He had already complained about Parker’s writing to his friend Nast, but this time he was either more persuasive or had the weight of Belasco’s threats to add to his own. Nast was not in a position to lose a prominent source of ad revenue and weather Belasco’s libel suit, so he called Crowninshield, his trusted chief editor at Vanity Fair since 1912. Crowninshield rose to the occasion. The Plaza Hotel was, in 1920, already a symbol of luxury, excess, and pretension. (It has since been owned by, among others, Conrad Hilton and Donald Trump.) In this setting, Crowninshield, after commanding the staff to bring a huge bouquet of roses for the table, explained to Parker that her predecessor, P. G. Wodehouse, wished to resume the job of theater critic. He complimented Parker’s writing and invited her to freelance for the magazine. She left. Returning to her West 71st Street apartment, Parker may have been greeted by her husband. Eddie had returned to New York the previous summer, struggling with drug use as did many GIs returning from the Great War. For commiseration, Parker telephoned her friend and confederate Benchley, who immediately caught a seven p.m. train to Manhattan from his home in Crestwood, arrived at the Parker apartment, and offered support. The next morning he walked into Crowninshield’s office and, in protest against Parker’s dismissal, tendered his letter of resignation. That afternoon, Parker and Benchley went to the Algonquin to tell their stories, staying for hours of gossip and rounds of drinks. After repeated recountings, the Round Table wits, who had long heard the complaints about Nast and Crowninshield, sprang into action. Alexander Woollcott persuaded his editors at the New York Times that the paper should cover the story. His article, “Vanity Fair Editors Out: Robert Benchley Follows Mrs. Parker–Criticisms Under Fire”, appeared the next day — good publicity for the trio, tantamount to a free “for hire” listing.7 A few days later, another writer from the table, Frank Adams, publicly shamed Vanity Fair: he described the kerfuffle in his column “The Conning Tower” running in the New-York Tribune. The incident helped make the Algonquin Round Table a thing. This informal group of colleagues, friends, adversaries and contestants had started taking shape over the previous summer, starting at a roast for theater columnist and Broadway personality Woollcott upon his return to New York from military duty. The group met at 59 West 44th Street, in the dining room of a hotel that had opened in 1902 under the name The Puritan. It was Frank Case, who managed the establishment for over two decades and then bought it in 1927, who, perhaps hoping to entice a less puritan clientele, rechristened it The Algonquin, giving it the name used for a group of indigenous tribes. One can assume that Case did not intend the irony of using a name for people who had been forcibly exiled from New York City three centuries earlier. From 1920 on, the Algonquin became a regular meeting place for a group eventually to include a host of literary and cultural figures, including New Yorker founder Harold Ross, fiction writer Edna Ferber, sportswriter Heywood Broun, and Harpo Marx. It was Case, again, who made the decision to arrange a large round table for this garrulous group, set right in the middle of the Algonquin’s “Rose Room” where they could be on display for other customers, especially the tourists. “The Gonk”, as its regulars took to calling it, was where Parker was to encounter Will Rogers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre, Ernest Hemingway, and the artist Neysa McMein, who would become her close friend. But she had other business to attend to first. On January 13 — the morning Woollcott’s article appeared — Benchley, Parker and Sherwood arrived at the Vanity Fair offices, apparently out of contractual obligation. Freed of any need for decorum, they pinned chevrons, insignias of military discharge, on themselves, and created a mock contribution box labeled “for Billie Burke”. Parker kept up these embittered jokes even after January 25th, when she cleaned out her Vanity Fair desk for good. That September, she sent Benchley a series of postcards signed “Flo and Billie”, and “Conde and Clarisse” (Nast’s wife, by this point estranged).8 In February, she and Benchley rented an office together in the Metropolitan Opera House Studios at 39th Street and Broadway, a quick trip on the IRT or 9th Avenue elevated train from Parker’s home. The space was so tiny, she later quipped, that “an inch smaller and it would have been adultery”.9 Parker’s first gig of her new life was writing intertitles for Remodeling Her Husband, a film Lillian Gish was directing, produced by D. W. Griffiths. The work dissatisfied her, and she soon resumed work as theater critic, this time for Ainslee’s, whose circulation was larger than that of Vanity Fair; it was a position allowing Parker to schedule her own work hours and write for other publications. She proceeded to have a productive winter, publishing in Ladies Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post. Her finances survived, and that spring she had enough to lend Benchley $200. She surely appreciated being liberated from daily editorial responsibilities, and especially being free of Nast. Indeed, she would never again work a nine-to-five job, maintaining as much control as possible over how to pursue her profession and calling as writer. Ziegfeld and his women stayed in her sights. In her June 1920 column for Ainslee’s, Parker wrote warmly of Ziegfeld’s Frolics — variety shows distinct from the Follies. She complimented the comedic performances of W. C. Fields, Mary Hay, and Fanny Brice, but skewered the singing of Lillian Lorraine — the longtime Ziegfeld paramour who had been instrumental to Ziegfeld’s divorce from Held. Commenting sardonically on the show’s female chorus, she wrote: “Where the Ziegfeld girls come from will always be one of the world’s great mysteries”.10 Her next column reviewed the Follies, giving the thumbs down to even the music of Irving Berlin and Eddie Cantor while pointing out that “the real point of the production, as it is of every Follies, is the girls”.11 When Parker likened Billie Burke to Eva Tanguay, she was gesturing past the actor to the patriarchal structures, personal and professional, represented by Ziegfeld and Nast. She surely knew that she was risking her position, and just as surely decided that to defer to those structures would be worse than the consequences of defying them. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 6, 2020

Jonathan Goldman

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:31.249559

comic-gold-the-easterner-goes-west-in-three-early-american-comics

Comic Gold The Easterner Goes West in Three Early American Comics By Alex Andriesse March 12, 2020 The California Gold Rush transformed the landscape and population of the United States. It also introduced a new figure into American life and the American imagination — the effete Eastern urbanite who travels to the Wild West in quest of his fortune. Alex Andriesse examines how this figure fares in three mid-nineteenth-century comic books. There is something funny about the California Gold Rush. The sequence of events, real though they are, have all the makings of a tall tale — or a grim joke. On January 24, 1848, James Marshall, who was overseeing the construction of a sawmill on the American River in Coloma, California, accidentally discovered gold. News spread fast. By the end of 1849, an estimated 80,000 people — predominantly men, about half of whom hailed from the urbanized northeastern United States1 — had traveled to the West Coast in one of three ways: overland, through Indian Territory; by ship, sailing around Cape Horn; or by steamer to Panama, where they crossed the Isthmus and caught a second steamer to San Francisco. According to the tall-tale version of events, the forty-niners arrived and, as long as they worked hard, endured the wilderness, and survived the rough-and-tumble culture of New California, they were in a pretty good position to strike it rich. According to the grim-joke angle, these same forty-niners arrived with dreams of “picking up gold by the bushel”2 only to find that mining work was arduous, Californian inflation outrageous, and the likelihood of making money almost nil.3 The truth seems to be somewhere in between these two extremes. Approximately half of the forty-niners turned a profit either as miners or merchants — although these profits seldom approached the life-changing jackpots they’d imagined back home. For every Levi Strauss (whose denim empire was founded in San Francisco in 1853), there were countless others whose fortunes remained unaltered or who were ruined by the costly voyage and the frequently bloodthirsty hunt for gold. This is not even to mention the damage done to African American, Chinese, and Mexican forty-niners by the violent racism rampant among disappointed whites. “Any mysterious outrage was attributed to ‘Mexicans’”, Josiah Royce wrote in his 1886 history of California; “any American wretch who chanced to find it useful could in moments of excitement divert suspicion from himself, by mentioning the Mexicans in general, or any particular Mexicans, as the authors of his crimes.”4 This is only one of many aspects of the Gold Rush that continue to cast a shadow on American culture. Whatever the consequences for individual forty-niners — one in twelve of whom were killed by disease, accident, or human violence — the discovery of gold in Coloma produced tremendous changes in the nation.5 It relocated hundreds of thousands of settlers, transformed the village of Yerba Buena into the city of San Francisco, polluted western waters, destroyed the soil, and led to the dispossession and genocide of more than ten thousand Native Californians. The Gold Rush also introduced new figures into the American imagination. The Chinese worker with his wide palm-fiber field hat, the frontiersman with his sugar loaf or panama, the Mexican with his sombrero, and (most out of place of all) the effete urban Easterner struck with gold fever who’s gone west on a wing and a prayer. This Easterner was not solely a figure of the imagination, either. While no small number of forty-niners were desperate or destitute, many others were thoroughly middle-class city-dwellers who, as Brian Roberts writes, “joined the rush for a variety of reasons: for gold, to be sure, but also to escape . . . the stultifying walls of moral codes and lawyers’ offices”.6 These men did not conform to their contemporaries’ idea of who belonged in California any better than they conform to the popular image of the Wild West today. The Independent Gold Hunter on His Way to California, printed by Currier & Ives, is emblematic of the satirical view many Easterners took of their “Argonaut” brethren. Laden with pots and pans, a string of sausages and a shovel, the would-be prospector is shown in his town clothes, striding along, still 1700 miles from his destination — the very picture of foolhardiness. Narratives quickly attached themselves to this laughable figure, emphasizing both the real and the imagined dangers that could be encountered on a journey to the West. For those going overland, these included immense unmapped distances, hostile Native Americans (whose territory was being violated), starvation, dehydration, and disease. For those going by way of Panama, there were the added possibilities of being shipwrecked, eaten by an alligator, or stranded in a foreign land. For those going around Cape Horn, there were all the usual perils of a long ocean journey conducted entirely by wind and sail. Over all these narratives hung the question why? Why leave home and hearth? Why forsake civilization? Why risk life and limb for an improbable promise of wealth? Questions like these were implicit not only in the lithographs and cartoons of these years, but also in a form recently introduced to North America: the comic book.7 In The Adventures of Mr. Tom Plump (ca. 1850), Journey to the Gold Diggins (1849), and Outline History of an Expedition to California (1849), the figure of the Eastern Argonaut was set into motion and put to the test. The Adventures of Mr. Tom Plump, a children’s book, is by far the least sophisticated of the bunch. Its drawings are stiff, its captions brief, and its story is demented. An unlikely-looking schoolboy called Mr. Tom Plump, who is — you guessed it — plump, runs away from his Eastern home and sets sail for California. Once there, Mr. Plump “gets poor” (meaning he loses weight) and finds some gold, which disappears when his mule is frightened by a bear. On arriving back home, he in turn frightens his parents, who don’t recognize him now that he’s thin. Soon enough, however, “good living makes him fat again” and, having married a woman who can dance the polka, Mr. Tom Plump drowns in a river after falling through a bridge. This is a shaggy dog story if ever there was one. Besides getting seasick and losing his gold, Mr. Tom Plump’s adventures don’t have much to do with the adventures experienced by actual forty-niners. Journey to the Gold Diggins, illustrated and probably written by J. A. and D. F. Read, is a masterpiece by comparison. Its seascapes and grotesque human figures look forward to the elaborate comics art of Tony Millionaire, and its story — about a skeletal “urban dandy” called Jeremiah Saddlebags — has a dreamlike coherence. Saddlebags, learning that his aunt has died and left him five hundred dollars, decides to invest the money in a trip to California. The prospect of prospecting excites him. In fact, it excites him so much he does a jig, alarming the neighbors, who’ve never known him to be so noisy before. Mortified at being caught while jigging, Saddlebags “considers he has made a fool of himself” (a sign of self-conscious “Eastern” oversensitivity that, we are supposed to understand, doesn’t bode well for his chances in the insensitive, hyper-masculine West). The subsequent action of Journey to the Gold Diggins is so relentless, it really demands to be recounted in a single breath. So, here goes: Saying goodbye to his fiancée, Saddlebags boards a ship to Panama, confronts an alligator, avoids being scalped (thanks to a well-placed wig), is captured by pirates, made to join their number, is captured by the military, saved from being hanged by an old friend, travels to “the diggins”, squabbles with fellow miners, finds a huge lump of gold, is divested of it, gambles for a smaller lump, sets off overland back east, eats bones with bears, is captured by Native Americans, made to join their number, escapes, returns to his hometown, is pursued by a racist mob who mistake him for a Native American, learns his gold is worthless, and entertains his fiancée by “recounting his adventures”. Like The Adventures of Mr. Tom Plump, Journey to the Gold Diggins is about a man who has no business going west and, economically speaking, gains nothing by doing so. Yet Saddlebags at least comes out of it with a tale to tell — a tale that perhaps makes him more satisfied with his settled life back East. By extension, Journey to the Gold Diggins seems designed to regale its Eastern readers with a sensational story that reassures them about their decision to stay home, looking down their noses at dupes like Saddlebags who squander their lives in a greedy search for gold. Greed is explicitly the theme of Outline History of an Expedition to California (1849), which is less focused on a single character than either Journey to the Gold Diggins or Mr. Tom Plump. Instead, it offers a sort of panoramic view of the Gold Rush, following parties bound for California by all three major routes. At the center of this narrative swirl is, naturally, an Easterner, Jonathan Swapwell of Swapville (a not-so-subtle indication he is a New England merchant), who travels from his hometown to New York City and from New York City to California, going by all three routes at once! This mind-bending approach allows the author (the decidedly anonymous XOX) to depict multiple perilous journeys simultaneously. While the overland party trudges across the muddy Great Plains, the “Cape Horners” are shipwrecked and the “Panamains” wait perpetually for the San Francisco steamer to come. Somehow, one of the Jonathan Swapwells arrives at the California mines, where he and his partner, Pat, become successful merchants, swapping and dealing with the miners. As it turns out, they will be the only two figures in the book who escape the place unscathed. Jonathan, overhearing some miners planning to rob him, decamps at night with just enough gold to make a decent life for himself back in Swapville. (Pat, suffering the fate of minor characters since time immemorial, travels with him as far as the ship before vanishing.) But what might be merely dreary middle-class moralism is livened up by a frame story involving Death and the Devil, who start off this History by lacing a hole in California with golden “bait” and end it by filling up the “cavity made by the extraction of gold, with the bones of those who perished in its pursuit”. None of these early comics would have existed had the Gold Rush not occurred, but they were not, of course, pure products of events. Their creators were inspired by newspaper stories, lithographs, and word-of-mouth legends — as well as by the world’s first comic strip, Rodolphe Töpffer’s Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (Geneva, 1837), translated into English as The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck and illegally published in America as early as 1842. This Swiss volume follows the melancholy yet feverish exertions of its title character in pursuit of his “lady love”, including several suicide attempts, a couple of prison breaks, and one escape from premature burial. Töpffer’s ridiculous lovesick European served as a model for American artists depicting ridiculous gold-sick Easterners. The author of The Adventures of Mr. Tom Plump, for example, took something from Töpffer’s obsession with human forms that alternate between fat and thin, while the authors of Journey to the Gold Diggins imitated not only Oldbuck’s oblong format but also specific postures and scenes. The urban Easterner out of his element in the West proved to be an abiding figure in the American imagination.8 Even after the Gold Rush, the young man who decides to light out for the territories would appear time and again. In John Williams’ novel Butcher’s Crossing (1960), he is Will Andrews, a preacher’s son from Boston who wants to commune with the natural world but, going on a buffalo hunt in 1870s Colorado, finds himself merely participating in mindless slaughter. In Jim Jarmusch’s movie Dead Man (1995), he is William Blake, an accountant from Cleveland who intends to take a job at the metal works in the Western town of Machine but ends up wounded and wanted, transformed into an outlaw in the wilderness. Such characters personify, just as surely as Jeremiah Saddlebags, the anxieties that surrounded the voluntary mass migration to the West. The upheaval that followed the discovery of gold in California in 1848 made clear how willing even “civilized” Easterners were to leave their homes at the drop of a hat. The greedy, the desperate, the aimless, the ambitious, the curious, the romantic — all found reasons to go. Civilization, with its wage work and promise of relative security, was no match for their dreams of a better, freer life out in the great unknown. This part of the Gold Rush story, at least, still holds us in its sway. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 12, 2020

Alex Andriesse

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:31.597181

propagating-propaganda

Propagating Propaganda Franklin Barrett’s Red, White, and Blue Liberty Bond Carp By Laurel Waycott March 17, 2021 Toward the end of World War I, as the US peddled hard its Liberty Bonds for the war effort, goldfish dealer Franklin Barrett bred a stars-and-stripes-colored carp: a living, swimming embodiment of patriotism. Laurel Waycott uncovers the story of this “Liberty Bond Fish” and the wider use of animals in propaganda of the time. In April 1918, subscribers to Aquatic Life opened the latest issue to find a large illustration of “The Liberty Bond Fish”, the “famous red, white, and blue carp” owned by Philadelphia goldfish breeder Franklin Barrett.1 While the illustration is regrettably in black and white, it shows a handsome specimen of carp with delicately outlined scales and variegated fins. Barrett’s creation and its name were products of his time and place: April 1918 marked both the one-year anniversary of the US entry into World War I and the start of the third Liberty Loan drive, a massive effort to encourage US citizens to fund the government’s war expenses by purchasing bonds. But if Liberty Bonds were primarily a vehicle for financially backing the war, why create a Liberty Bond fish? Of what use was a star-spangled carp to the war effort? Propagation and propaganda share the same root: the latter term has its origins in the name of the congregatio de propaganda fide, a committee of the Roman Catholic Church responsible for “propagating the faith” in foreign missions. Barrett made this propagation literal by enrolling living organisms into politics. The nationalistic fish was an overt attempt to take national symbolism and impose it onto the genetics of the animal. By breeding Liberty Bond carp, Barrett turned the reproductive power of fish into a technology to reproduce the notion of “America” itself.2 To understand how the red, white, and blue creature came to be, we must look at the role of propaganda in the effort to get Americans emotionally invested in World War I. Franklin Barrett would have been familiar to the readers of Aquatic Life, a magazine catering to aquarium hobbyists and professionals. He had been a major figure in the Philadelphia aquarium industry since the first decade of the twentieth century. He started breeding goldfish in the backyard of his Philadelphia row house as a sideline to factory work, and by 1916, was selling twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of fish every year.3 Barrett was among a group of breeders in the first decades of the twentieth century who propagated “fancy” goldfish, like those with pop-eyes or fantails, from varieties developed in Japan and China. Humans have long interfered with the reproduction of plants and animals, but breeders in the early twentieth century, emboldened by the emerging science of heredity, vastly expanded the scope of these traditional practices in an effort to “improve” a wide variety of organisms. Like horticulturist Luther Burbank, who developed numerous novel varieties of fruits, vegetables, and ornamental plants by systematically crossing existing cultivars, Barrett and his fellow goldfish breeders combined selective breeding with a eugenically-inflected zeal for developing new, better, and stronger traits.4 One of the traits that Barrett and his fellow fish breeders were particularly interested in cultivating was the color blue. While red and white were familiar colors for goldfish, blue was much more unusual. The “blue” that Barrett sought manifested as a subtle pale lavender tint underlying the flecks of color on “calico” goldfish, or as a deep, all-over navy. Barrett had spent considerable effort breeding fish whose bodies were entirely blue, claiming to have bred the only blue lion-headed goldfish in the United States.5 The interest in blue fish preceded the American entry into the war, but once the United States was engaged in the conflict, Barrett saw an opportunity to use his expertise for a patriotic, and potentially lucrative, new purpose. It is unclear how, exactly, Barrett was able to breed the Liberty Bond Fish. It was not a goldfish, but an unspecified variety of carp — though Barrett was likely able to transfer his expertise, as goldfish and carp are both part of the Cyprinidae family. It is possible that the patriotic fish was derived from the Asagi breed of Japanese koi, which have navy-blue scales and fins patterned with cream and orangey-red blotches. If that was the case, then Barrett’s creation was not so much a new breed as a new brand — a tactic that Barrett had relied upon before. Franklin Barrett set himself apart from his fellow Philadelphia fish breeders with his canny marketing skills. His eye-catching advertisements, often featuring the drawing of a pop-eyed goldfish staring entreatingly at the viewer, appeared in most issues of Aquatic Life and other aquarium periodicals. Unlike his peers, he gave his prize-winning fish catchy names, such as the rotund lion-headed goldfish called “Bill Taft”, in reference to the portly twenty-seventh American president, and another named “Queen Lil”, possibly in homage to Queen Lili’uokalani of Hawai’i.6 Barrett often publicized extraordinary asking prices for his best fish, such as the one thousand dollar price tag (approximately seventeen thousand in today’s dollars) that he attached to a goldfish named “King Bul-bul”. Whether or not he ever received this amount did not deter public fascination with the high valuation. The Liberty Bond carp, which Barrett priced at three hundred dollars apiece (about five thousand dollars today), was one in a long line of smartly branded fish designed to generate publicity for Barrett’s business.7 It was clever marketing to tie in the fish to Liberty Bonds, which were garnering huge public attention in April 1918. Designed to bridge the billions-wide gap between tax revenue and the immense costs of the war, the bonds allowed the government to borrow money from its citizens, with a fixed rate and date for repayment. The third Liberty Loan Campaign was launched on April 6, 1918, when movie stars Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin held an astoundingly successful rally near the White House lawn, exhorting the public to buy bonds. (By fall of 1918, during the fourth and penultimate Liberty Bond Drive, such massive rallies became deadly super-spreading events of the influenza pandemic. A loan drive parade in Philadelphia was responsible for forty-five thousand new influenza cases — a confluence of patriotism, coercion, and public health that sounds eerily familiar.) While Liberty Bonds were a financial investment, the Liberty Loan drives did not rely solely on an appeal to prudent money management. Rather, the government’s plea was bluntly emotional. The massive propaganda campaign, consisting of posters, newsreels, and radio advertisements, prompted Americans to take action by evoking sympathy, generosity, and fear. Like the fish in Barrett’s advertisements, many addressed viewers with a direct gaze. Uncle Sam, the Statue of Liberty, soldiers, children, and the sun itself entreated poster viewers to act immediately. The coercion of patriotism was not subtle: one poster asked “Are you 100% American? Prove it! Buy U.S. Government Bonds”. Bullying and intimidation buoyed the Liberty Bond drives, where participation was grounded in an imperative to demonstrate one’s unquestionable support for the war effort. The Boy Scouts of America enrolled children in the campaign by turning scouts into bond salesmen, while adults who could or would not buy bonds were publicly shamed and humiliated.8 The Liberty Bond drives were therefore an extremely effective mechanism for manipulating emotions and turning feelings into cash for the US government. One way that propaganda campaigns in Europe and the United States activated public sentiment was by using animals. By depicting the nations at war as animals, propaganda artists bred sympathy for allies and fear of foes. A series of French postcards, for example, show the Allied Powers as elegant butterflies with the faces of beautiful young women. Dressed in national costume and sporting wings tinted in the colors of their national flags, the graceful creatures are gentle and fragile. The Central Powers, on the other hand, were depicted as stinging wasps and scaly beetles, with the faces of stern-faced old men, each symbolically slain with a sword and pinned to paper as if it were a dead specimen in an entomology collection. Dogs, alternatively sweet and threatening, were a favorite of propaganda artists. They were particularly useful for naturalizing the differences between political powers. Identifying different breeds of dogs with geographical (and therefore political and racial) regions was a relatively new phenomenon. Many of the dog breeds we recognize today have their origins in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, when a burgeoning interest in dog breeding prompted the formation of kennel clubs in Britain and the United States. The creation of breeding standards essentialized the physical form of different regional types, prioritizing aesthetics over health or utility. These phenotypic characteristics lent themselves to caricature, making dogs excellent propaganda motifs. A British postcard from World War I depicts the Allies as an army of puppy figurines, with a solid and stubborn English bulldog at the center, accompanied by a bright-eyed Irish setter, and what we can only assume is a French poodle dressed like Marianne, the allegorical embodiment of France, complete with a red Phrygian cap and blue sash. The assembled army of puppies glossed over the devastation of war, turning the conflict into something undeniably sympathetic and cuddly. Just as sympathetic animals activated feelings of affinity toward allies, unfamiliar and aggressive animals worked to dehumanize enemies. A widely printed American enlistment poster depicted Germany as a raving gorilla, setting foot on American soil after leaving Europe in shambles. His prisoner, a half-naked white woman representing American liberty, covers her eyes in shame. The gorilla too makes eye contact, beholding the viewer with deranged pinhole eyes, suggesting that it is coming for us next. Prefiguring the 1933 movie monster King Kong, which historians have largely interpreted as a metaphor for white racist fears about the violence and sexuality of Black masculinity, the monster draws on stereotypes about apes that were also used to dehumanize Black Americans.9 Unlike puppies or butterflies, which would never be confused with humans, apes are human-like, but lesser-than. It is the ape’s proximity to humanness that shows just how unhuman it is. Depicting nations as different species or breeds built on the ideas of race emerging from the eugenics movement, implying that there were fundamental and natural differences between allies and foes. The nationalized animal avatars had the power to make the warring nations seem inherently innocent or intrinsically aggressive. It obfuscated the war for what it actually was: a mess of Homo sapiens divided along political lines. Fish also had a role to play in propaganda efforts, despite their generally less charismatic affect. After the American entry into the conflict, postcard producer S. E. Clark published the “Patriotic Fantasy Animal Series”, depicting animals embodying the stars and stripes. The National Aquarium shows a tank full of robust and vibrant finny patriots, joyfully sporting the American flag. Franklin Barrett made this idea flesh through the Liberty Bond Fish. Unlike the animals populating propaganda postcards, this was a tangible, living thing. The red, white, and blue color scheme was bred into the fish as a hereditary trait of the animal. While dog breeds had come to be associated with the nations that created them, Barrett’s breeding practice worked in the opposite direction: by injecting national symbolism into the genetics of the animal itself. We do not know what Franklin Barrett did with the proceeds from the sale of the Liberty Bond Fish: whether he invested them in actual Liberty Bonds or kept the profits. Other plant and animal breeders created “Liberty Bond” varieties after the conclusion of the final loan drive in 1919, suggesting that the name was a strategic branding choice rather than a fundraising effort. In 1919, the Lou S. Darling Seed Company held a contest to rename their 1912 seedling potato, selecting “Liberty Bond” as the winner, since potato and bond were seen to share key characteristics: reliable producers easily convertible to cash.10 Southern California floriculturist J. J. Broomall introduced a “Liberty Bond Dahlia” in 1922. Unlike Barrett’s red, white, and blue creation, the flower was “a blending of buff, bronze, and salmon shades”.11 The appeal of these varieties, whether animal or vegetable, traded on the positive associations that had been insistently linked to Liberty Bonds during the war years; use of the name allowed these breeders to cash in on the emotional manipulation already forged by the propaganda campaigns. Despite the profits that he might have made, Barrett’s patriotic creation was not an entirely cynical cash-grab. The survival of his own lineage was invested in the outcome of the war: in July 1918, his only son, Royden, registered for the draft. Fortunately, Royden came home after the conclusion of the war and joined the family business. When industrial breeding operations in the American Midwest came to dominate the goldfish trade of the 1930s, Franklin Barrett shifted course yet again and opened an art studio, teaching classes until his death in 1958 at the age of eighty-seven.12 And the Liberty Bond Fish itself? The fate of the actual creatures of this breed is unknown, and its name disappeared from Barrett’s advertisements after the war’s conclusion. But while it lived, this star-spangled carp did nothing less than propagate the notion of a national American identity in living, swimming form. The emotional pleas of propaganda coupled with the affective immediacy of animals had instructed Americans how to feel about the war. By buying Liberty Bond flowers, potatoes, and fish, they could also feel patriotic about reaching for their wallets. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 17, 2021

Laurel Waycott

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:32.095836