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“I Am My Own Heroine” How Marie Bashkirtseff Rewrote the Route to Fame By Sonia Wilson September 2, 2020 The diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, published after her death from tuberculosis aged just 25, won the aspiring painter the fame she so longed for but failed to achieve while alive. Sonia Wilson explores the importance of the journal — one of the earliest bids by a woman to secure celebrity through curation of “personal brand” — and the shape it gave to female ambition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In May 1884, long before the likes of Kim Kardashian achieved celebrity through the careful curation and promotion of self, a young unknown named Marie Bashkirtseff staked her desire for fame on the publication of her personal diary. She knew she was consumptive and that she had little time left. Her right lung was irrevocably damaged. The left had steadily deteriorated. Bones were now visible where they had not been before. Taking up her pen and a fresh notebook, she composed what would become the definitive version of the preface to her diary. Adopting the manner of one who is neither inclined toward, nor has the time to strike what Leo Braudy in his study of the history of fame calls “posture[s] of reticence”,1 she cut straight to the chase: she desired immortality, by any means possible. Should sufficient time remain before her death, she hoped to secure posthumous renown through her painting. In the event of an early death, her diary was to be published. This was some wager. By May 1884, she had secured only one medal at the Salon and this — to her disappointment — for a pastel. Nor were the odds to improve. When she died five months later, she left behind a large number of paintings and a small sculpture (all of which had failed to garner any resounding interest), a handful of articles published anonymously in the feminist press, and her diary. Despite her best efforts, she was not part of the literary or artistic coteries of the day; nor did she issue from an illustrious line of poets or painters. Of minor Russian aristocracy, her maternal family had left what is now called Ukraine in 1858, trailing through Europe with the family doctor and a retinue of servants, and settling first in Nice. Here at the age of fourteen Bashkirtseff began her diary, filling early entries with details of the dresses she wore, the number of admiring glances she received on the Promenade, the ins and outs of family squabbles, the progress of her lessons, and the books she read. She also strenuously and repeatedly articulated her desire for glory, elaborating at length on the means by which she intended to procure it. She first entertained hopes of achieving celebrity through her voice, consulting singing masters in Nice, Paris, and Rome and imagining herself fêted on the stages of Europe. Ever alert to what one might call the apparatus of fame, she had herself photographed often and in a number of guises, although she was later to repudiate these early images as pretentious and contrived. In her diary, she engaged in lengthy and glowing descriptions of her face and naked figure, passing off such undue attention to self as a magnanimous gesture in the direction of posterity, who would thus, she archly observed, be spared the trouble of speculating on her physical appearance. From October 1875 on, she placed every notebook of her diary under the sign of the motto that she had adopted as her own: Gloriae cupiditate.2 Her present was less glorious. Early undiagnosed symptoms of her illness reduced the range and power of her singing voice. Scandal dogged her family. Bashkirtseff’s mother and aunt had been implicated in a trial in Russia in which they stood accused of colluding in the death of a certain M. Romanoff who had been married to Marie’s aunt. Their names were cleared, but the process was prolonged and the damage was done: in Nice, the family was the subject of much conjecture. A scurrilous uncle with a penchant for drunken brawls had added further grist to the rumour mill; the fact that Madame Bashkirtseff was separated from her husband, who had remained in Russia, did not help matters. Excluded from the social arenas in which she had hoped to make her mark and aware that the stories in circulation about her family had compromised her chances of making a suitable match, Bashkirtseff vented her fury in her diary entries, chafing irritably at her mother’s and aunt’s conduct. However this was not the only purpose to which she turned her diary. Professing a fondness for writing before the mirror, she would describe herself in the act of admiring her “incomparable arms”, the whiteness and fineness of her hand, or the form of her bosom, thereby effectively turning the diary’s pages into sites of display for those aspects of her physical self that propriety forbade her from exhibiting in public.3 Elsewhere, she drew upon it to project forward and outward, beyond the confines of its pages and the restrictions of her present, to imagine — and leave detailed instructions concerning — the arenas of display to be constructed in her posthumous future. On September 6, 1875, she entered into a good deal of detail concerning a marble statue of her person that, she stipulated, was to be sculpted at thirty times natural size and erected atop a six-metre elevation at the bottom of the family garden in Nice after her death. Throughout however, Bashkirtseff not only worked exceedingly hard at cultivating herself — her wit, her singing, her artistic skills, her knowledge of history and of literary and artistic debates — but also consistently positioned herself within her diary as her own playfully mocking second. Hardly unaware of gender protocols when it came to singing one’s own praises and her own most vigilant reader and surveyor of self, Bashkirtseff did not engage in such self-promotion without keeping up a running commentary on it, shifting from plaintive lamentation or enraptured enumeration of her multiple talents to self-ridicule in less than a line. By the age of nineteen, her ambitions had become more focussed. In 1877, she entered the Académie Julian in Paris, the atelier of choice for young European women with serious artistic ambitions whose gender precluded them from entry into the École des beaux arts. She worked doggedly, spending long hours at the atelier by day, and by night calculating in her diary how many months it would take for her to reach and best the most accomplished students in the atelier. She discovered belatedly a passion for sculpture and briefly entertained the notion that this might be the medium of her success. She did her utmost to develop the artistic and literary relations that her family lacked: she ensured her art instructors, painters Rodolphe Julien and Tony Robert-Fleury, were invited for dinner; she developed a friendship with the painter Jules Bastien-Lepage and his architect brother Émile. She wrote anonymously first to Dumas fils, and — in the year leading up to her death — to Zola, Goncourt, and Maupassant. Dumas fils responded to the rendezvous she gave him at the bal de l’opéra scathingly, prosaically advising early nights as a cure to what he clearly saw as overwrought and misplaced female enthusiasm. Bashkirtseff took a different tack with Goncourt in 1884. Chérie had just been published. This was the novel Goncourt had first announced in his preface to La Faustin in 1882. Describing it as “a psychological and physiological study” of a little girl’s first steps toward womanhood, he had requested what he termed “female collaboration”, directing his female readers to jot down their memories of their earliest adolescence and send them anonymously to his editor.4 With characteristic directness, Bashkirtseff informed him in the opening line of her letter that Chérie was riddled with inadequacies. She spoke, she continued, as one who knew; she herself had been writing her own impressions from an early age and now proposed to send them to him. Whether Goncourt ever received this letter is uncertain; if he did, he did not reply. With Maupassant, Bashkirtseff fared slightly better. Clearly intrigued by her first letter, signed “Miss Hastings”, Maupassant bit. A short epistolary exchange ensued, in which Bashkirtseff responded to Maupassant’s desire to know if she was “a charming young woman”, “an old concierge with a predilection for Eugène Sue novels”, or a “mature and thin well-read lady’s companion” by floating the idea that she might be a man.5 Maupassant promptly declared her a crusty old Latin master and asked if she had a daughter. Now signing Joseph Savantin, Bashkirtseff imparted pithy advice in the tone of older man to younger: loftily quoting from Sallust in order to deflate Maupassant’s boast of superlative performance in sports. Faced with Maupassant’s clearly expressed irritation, Bashkirtseff revealed her gender but became vexed in turn when Maupassant persisted in his attempts to engineer a rendezvous.6 Both clearly managed to rub the other up the wrong way and the correspondence ended badly with the two never meeting. Undeterred by her lack of success in writing herself into the lives of the literary greats, Bashkirtseff promptly wrote their names into her preface instead. The diary’s value as reading matter lay, she asserted, in its status as document humain: the public had only to consult Messieurs Zola, Goncourt, and Maupassant. It was a stretch, as she well knew. When she died on October 31, 1884, just a few weeks before her twenty-sixth birthday and three months after her last letter to Maupassant, she was under little illusion concerning the likelihood of publication. She had written in her diary almost every day from the age of fourteen until six days before her death. It numbered no less than 106 notebooks, many of which consisted of over two hundred pages. As she herself put it in 1882, wading through thousands of pages of an unknown was hardly an enticing prospect for any editor. Three years after her death, a two-volume, highly truncated edition appeared. It became almost overnight one of the greatest publishing sensations of the day. It was Madame Bashkirtseff who first took charge of the publication of the diary. Grief-stricken, intent on honouring her daughter’s wishes, she enlisted the services of André Theuriet, a popular poet and novelist. He deleted, condensed, and sequenced entries to produce an overarching narrative arc, in which a young and ambitious girl morphed into a serious artist only to die on the cusp of success and love. All references to the trial in Russia and Uncle George’s behaviour were removed, as were Bashkirtseff’s descriptions of her body; two years were shorn off her age, placing her on the “right” side of twenty-five. The reaction was immediate. No one, it was generally agreed, had seen anything quite like it. In France, apart from the pious fragments of spiritual diaries cobbled together by curés, only one young woman’s diary had previously been published. The gentle modesty exuded by the well-written pages of Eugénie de Guérin’s diary had made it quasi-obligatory reading for young girls, promoted assiduously by mothers as a model of style and conduct. Moreover, it had come with bona fide literary connections. The older sister of the romantic poet Maurice de Guérin, Eugénie had addressed her entries to her beloved brother, only able to write on after his death when Barbey d’Aurevilly proposed that she write for him instead. When her journal was published in 1862, a respectable fourteen years after her own death, the terrain had already been prepared by the publication of fragments of her brother’s journal. In short, her journal did not simply enter neatly into the existing apparatus of authorship, but reinforced both the protocols of gender and the hierarchy of genres that underpinned it. Marie Bashkirtseff’s journal did not. Ferdinand de Brunetière thundered: what right, he demanded to know, did this “petite peintresse de Marie Baskircheff” have to impose herself upon the public?7 Anatole France devoted a chapter to the Journal in La Vie littéraire, thereby acknowledging the extent to which the journal had already become a discussion piece in literary circles and further consecrating it as such, even as his measured tones gave his own readers the impression that he himself had emerged from the journal somewhat exhausted by what he termed the constant agitation of “a troubled soul”.8 Maurice Barrès immediately threw his not inconsiderable literary and critical weight behind it, sanctifying Bashkirtseff as Notre Dame du Sleeping Car, extolling the tirelessness with which she constantly pushed herself on to new challenges and urging France’s youth to rouse itself from its torpor and do the same.9 In England, W. E. Gladstone himself took up the journal’s cause in a six-page review in the Nineteenth Century (1889). Pronouncing the journal “a book without parallel” on the basis of the insights it provided into “human nature”, he located its value as reading matter in the sustained and in-depth nature of Bashkirtseff’s “self-record”.10 Within a year of Gladstone’s review, the first English translation had appeared in the US; the second, by Mathilde Blind, followed a year later. Blind had in fact been the first to introduce the English reading public to the journal in a two-part article in the Woman’s World (1888), then under Oscar Wilde’s editorship. In it, she recounted her visit to a sorrow-stricken Madame Bashkirtseff in the villa at Nice, who, with “furrowed face” and shabby gown, spoke gladly of her deceased daughter.11 Such visits rapidly became an integral part of what came to be known as “the Bashkirtseff cult”, as did pilgrimages to the imposing neo-Byzantine tomb sculpted by the architect Émile Bastien-Lepage in the Passy cemetery in Paris. Madame Bashkirtseff corresponded happily with readers of the diary and equally willingly conducted tours of Marie’s studio and rooms. Maurice Barrès was not a little irked to discover that the volumes of Fichte and Kant that he had boasted of having seen lying open on Marie’s desk, as if death had surprised her in the midst of deep philosophical speculation, owed more to the rather curious shape Madame Bashkirtseff’s grief was taking than it did to any activity of Marie’s in the days leading up to her death. By 1890, Bashkirtseff’s name was, as one English reviewer put it, “a household word”.12 Public opinion was polarised from the start. Reviewers attempted to outdo themselves in superlatives: Bashkirtseff herself was deemed “overstrung and overbalanced”.13 Stereotypes of the Slav character were peddled furiously on both sides of the Channel, dosed liberally in England with references to Parisian coquetries and refinement.14 Others seized on Bashkirtseff’s “absence of reserve” as “an abdication of womanhood”.15 The already controversial William T. Stead weighed in, allowing Bashkirtseff genius, but not womanliness.16 In turn, George Bernard Shaw took Stead roundly to task in 1913, ridiculing the persistence with which he clung to his ideal of womanhood even when faced with firm evidence to the contrary in the shape of Bashkirtseff’s diary.17 But what saved the journal from becoming just another passing literary sensation and ensured instead that it morphed into a full-blown cultural phenomenon was the very particular way in which young women — and some young men — took it up. They saw it not as a document humain to be analysed, but as an example of a writing practice in which they were either already engaged, or into which they immediately plunged. Anaïs Nin and Katherine Mansfield wrote, entranced, in their own diaries of their reading of Bashkirtseff’s; Nin was eighteen years old; Mansfield had just turned nineteen.18 The young German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, who studied briefly at the Académie Julian herself, sighed in her entries at the tenacity with which Bashkirtseff stuck to her own work schedule.19 In 1887, sixteen-year-old Pierre Louÿs conceded in his own fledgling diary that the idea of writing it had come to him upon reading Bashkirtseff’s.20 In 1895, on English stages, Oscar Wilde’s Gwendolyn assured Cecily with Bashkirtseff-like aplomb that she never travelled without her diary given that “one should always have something sensational to read in the train.”21 Not to be outdone, Cecily copies Algernon’s remarks into her own diary in front of him and when he begs to see, refuses, covering the entry and archly asserting that her diary is merely “a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication”.22 Outside fiction too, a detailed and daily record of self began to be perceived as an accomplishment in its own right, one that — if written with even a modicum of flair — was as sure a route to fame as any other. Imitating Bashkirtseff but going one better, diarists bundled up their notebooks and sent them off to publishers. Two were particularly successful. Bruce Frederick Cummings, a naturalist employed by the British museum, was already a practised diary keeper when he stumbled across Bashkirtseff’s journal in 1914; astounded, he declared Bashkirtseff “the very spit of [him]” and within months began considering the publication of his own journal.23 Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of twenty-six, he, like Bashkirtseff, knew he had not long to live. Unlike Bashkirtseff, he revised his journal for publication himself and lived for a further two years after it appeared in 1919. Entitled The Journal of a Disappointed Man, it too was read as an exercise in candid and precise self-observation and as a narrative of foiled ambition. On the other side of the Atlantic, a certain Marie MacLane had already taken matters one step further. Aged nineteen, she embarked in 1901 on three months’ worth of dated writing with the specific intention of having it published. Naming Lord Byron and Marie Bashkirtseff as the two minds in the world of letters most resembling her own, she opened her first entry with a point-by-point comparison of her own qualities and those of Bashkirtseff, in which predictably she emerged the superior, thus soundly substantiating her claim that in conceit too she bettered Bashkirtseff. Conceived from the outset less as diary and more as “portrayal”, largely unleavened by the kind of mundane detail which is part and parcel of diarising and of which Bashkirtseff at times despaired, MacLane focussed predominantly on her loneliness, the cultural and intellectual barrenness of the mining town in which she lived, her personal philosophies, and her genius.24 The book was a huge commercial success, launching Mary MacLane as “the American Bashkirtseff” and enabling her to embark upon a somewhat sensational, if short-lived, career as writer and autobiographical filmmaker. Clearly, Bashkirtseff’s diary did not only change the ways in which young women and men perceived their own diaries — and indeed themselves — but also shifted something in the mechanics of literary celebrity itself. Her keen awareness of what Leo Braudy calls styles of self-serving25 and how these had shifted between the previous century and her own, her deftness at manipulating the conventions of the diary to produce herself as “[her] own heroine”,26 her astuteness in capitalising on the burgeoning interest in “human documents” — all successfully ensured that posterity did indeed sit up and take notice. Blind’s English translation of the journal was carried forward into the twentieth century by a Virago reprint in 1985. The early decades of the twenty-first have seen Bashkirtseff’s journal finally emerging in full from the archives both in the original French and in English translation: Le Cercle des amis de Marie Bashkirtseff published the last of its sixteen-volume transcription of the manuscripts in 2005. The second and final volume of the first complete English edition of the manuscripts, translated by Katherine Kernberger, was published in 2013. Its title propels Bashkirtseff into the twenty-first century as an icon of female ambition: Lust for Glory: The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff Volume II. As for the would-be Bashkirtseffs that sprang up in the wake of the diary’s publication, Bashkirtseff had not lacked foresight. In her entry for July 22, 1883, in which she outlined yet another painting project and dreams of “un succès brutal”, she noted the following: If I succeed my biography will be the undoing of masses of people. Every proud and vain incompetent will become aware of his genius. But if I fail what a lesson!!27 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 2, 2020

Sonia Wilson

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:32.471832

the-uncertain-heavens

The Uncertain Heavens Christiaan Huygens’ Ideas of Extraterrestrial Life By Hugh Aldersey-Williams October 21, 2020 During the 17th century, as knowledge of the Universe and its contents increased, so did speculation about life on other planets. One such source, as Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores, was Dutch astronomer, mathematician, and inventor Christiaan Huygens, whose earlier work on probability paved the way for his very modern evaluation of what alien life might look like. When things look bleak in this world, it is perhaps natural to turn one’s mind to conditions on other worlds. This is what the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens did in the late 1680s. He had been ejected from his influential post as a government scientist of Louis XIV in Paris and found himself isolated back home in the provincial town of The Hague, frequently ill with depression and fevers, and missing the companionship of his brother Constantijn, who was away serving as secretary to the Dutch King William III in England. It was then that Huygens began to write Cosmotheoros, a book-length speculation on the possibility of life on other planets, and the first such work to be based on recent scientific knowledge rather than philosophical conjecture or religious argument. Fearful of censure by “those whose Ignorance or Zeal is too great”,1 Huygens instructed his brother to publish the work only after his death, which he did in 1698. Originally written in Latin, Cosmotheoros was quickly translated into Dutch and other languages. A lively English translation appeared that same year under the audacious title, The Celestial Worlds Discover’d. Philosophers had of course always thought about the existence of life beyond the Earth. Aristotle ruled it out, believing that the Earth was unique and that other celestial bodies were pure geometrical entities. But the atomists, among them Democritus and Epicurus, accepted the notion of a plurality of worlds, somewhat on the analogy of particulate matter of various kinds existing with space in between. Medieval thinkers picked up on this debate, but could only add to it their own concerns about the implications of one view or another for church doctrine, which did nothing to advance it. The revelation that there were yet more bodies in the solar system than the ones that had been known since antiquity, which came with Galileo’s discovery of four moons of Jupiter in 1610, added an unexpected new dimension to the discussion. And when Huygens discovered the first satellite of another planet, Saturn, in 1655, the balance of the argument seemed to change again. Huygens achieved fame in the 1650s for that discovery of Saturn’s first satellite (later named Titan) and the planet’s ring (later seen to be rings) and as the creator of the first accurate pendulum clock. He also invented numerous other devices, including a “magic lantern”, a kind of primitive slide projector, and made important contributions to mathematics, especially the fields of geometry and probability, and introduced mathematical formulas as a means of expressing the relationship between quantities such as speed and mass in physics problems. All of these achievements make him the greatest scientist in the period between Galileo and Newton. Christiaan Huygens was precocious in his fascination with the physical world. As a child, he made little machines and delighted in solving mathematical puzzles, such that people began to refer to him as the “Dutch Archimedes”.2 He rejected the life of a courtier and diplomat pursued by his father and brothers, and soon distinguished himself in physics, mathematics, and astronomy. After his breakthroughs with Saturn and clocks, his experiments with moving objects led him to the conclusion that all motion is only relative (which later earned the admiration of Einstein). In the 1670s, he devised a wave-based theory of light, which was substantially correct but was neglected for nearly 150 years until it could be confirmed by experiment. Unlike some illustrious contemporaries, he maintained a systematic focus on his chosen problems and recognised the joint importance of their practical and theoretical aspects, rejoicing when these were shown to reinforce one another, as they did in his improvements to the pendulum. Although, like any natural philosopher of the seventeenth century, he worked on a range of problems that would seem hopelessly broad to a modern specialist, he did not — as Newton did — become sidetracked into alchemy, occultism, or religion. Huygens was a true internationalist. He sought to adapt his improved pendulum clocks with the aim of being able to calculate longitude at sea in collaboration with Scottish inventors. He swapped ideas about the air pump used to investigate the properties of the vacuum with the Irish Robert Boyle. He found himself caught in an ugly dispute with the English Robert Hooke over the invention of the balance spring to regulate the timekeeping of portable watches. He compared telescope designs and planetary observations with the Polish Johannes Hevelius and the Italian Giovanni Domenico Cassini, among others. He tutored the young German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in mathematics (before the student surpassed the master and invented calculus). In 1663, Huygens became the first foreigner to be elected to the Royal Society. More significantly, he was instrumental in establishing the French Academy of Sciences around the same time, making him “the recognised leader of European science”,3 according to a biographer. Huygens’ discovery of Saturn’s ring in 1656 demanded years of patient observation of the planet using a telescope of his own design (for which Christiaan and his brother Constantijn even ground the lenses themselves). During this time, the apparent shape of the planet changed, leading to many interpretations of its form. It was Huygens’ powerful optics together with his mathematically informed sense of what was physically most likely that led him to the correct interpretation. His first speculations about life on the planets date from this time. Writing about the ring in his treatise on Saturn, he nonchalantly added a line of wonder about “the effects that the ring that surrounds them must have on those who inhabit it”.4 From later letters of reminiscence to his brother, it appears that Christiaan freely discussed such matters with Constantijn while they were at the telescope together, even though it took another forty years for his thoughts to appear in print. By that time, Cassini had discovered four moons of Saturn in addition to Huygens’s Titan and the four “Medicean stars” that Galileo had detected in orbit around Jupiter in 1610. The solar system was beginning to look very different from that understood by the ancient Greeks, or even by astronomers of a generation or two before, such as Galileo or Johannes Kepler. Although the atomists anticipated that there was a plurality of worlds both within the solar system and perhaps also beyond it, they were divided on the question of what these worlds were like. They accepted that some might be inhabited by living creatures of various kinds, while others might be devoid of any life and water. Pythagoras, for instance, believed that the moon was inhabited by animals larger and plants more beautiful than those on Earth, while others insisted it was barren. Medieval scholars felt duty-bound to consider these matters in the context of God’s creation. In 1318–9, William of Ockham gave lectures at Oxford stating his belief that “God could make another world better than this one and distinct in species from it”.5 But his ideas aroused such opposition that he was not granted his degree. A century later, Nicholas of Cusa went further in supposing that at least some species elsewhere would be superior to humans, but that nevertheless all owed their origin to “God, who is the centre and circumference of all stellar regions”.6 Two great revelations, both so vast in their implications that it took them more than a century to sink in, gave a new stimulus to these speculations in the sixteenth century. The first was Copernicus’ heliocentric theory of the solar system, which demoted the Earth to a status equal with that of the other planets. The second was the European discovery of the Americas, which broadened ideas of the diversity of species that might be expected to be found on new worlds. These conceptual upheavals unleashed a popular new wave of imaginative literature about life on other worlds that depended neither on scholastic orthodoxies nor on up-to-the-minute astronomical observations. The advent of the telescope brought a sharper focus to these conjectures. The discovery that the Moon was not a pure sphere, but marked by mountain ranges like the Earth, encouraged the cleric John Wilkins, for example, to infer that there would also be inhabitants there in The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638). Kepler, too, believed that all manner of celestial bodies — planets, moons, and even suns — might have inhabitants, based on similar astronomical observations. He went further than previous authors by using his knowledge of physical laws (presumed to operate universally) to consider the form that these beings might take. On the Moon, they would have “by far a larger body and hardness of temperament than ours”,7 he wrote, because of the length of days and extremes of temperature. In Somnium, a prototype science fiction novella (the title means “The Dream”) in which the protagonist is kidnapped by daemons and taken to the Moon, Kepler enlarged on the nature of the Moon’s inhabitants, dividing them into two groups according to whether they lived on the dark side or the illuminated side. The latter naturally regard the Earth as their Moon, and Kepler gave a scientifically informed impression of how the Earth would look from its satellite. However, Somnium is not great reading, concerned as it is mainly with the comparison of orbital periods and other astronomical variables on the two celestial bodies. Huygens’ main stimulus to action was probably another work, by the writer Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, published in 1686. His wildly successful Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes took the form of a dialogue between a naive marquise and a wise philosopher. Written in plain French so that it might appeal to those without any scientific knowledge, and specifically to women readers, it offered a primer to current astronomical theories, as well as an entertaining vision of life on the moon, planets, and stars beyond our solar system. While not so artfully conceived as Fontenelle’s work, Cosmotheoros is its match in literary terms, while also being, according to the science writer Philip Ball, the “first attempt to mount a rigorous scientific case for life on other worlds, without doing harm to Scripture”.8 Huygens’ seriousness of intent is evident from the fact that he considered the work as just one volume in a never realised “book of the planets”. He wrote in Latin in order to appeal to an educated readership. (The fact that it was quickly translated into spoken languages shows that it reached well beyond this target audience.) Part of Huygens’ purpose was to refute the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, who had published his own mystical dialogue of space travel, Itinerarium exstaticum, in 1656, which Huygens had read and found to omit all that he considered probable about other planets, while including “a company of idle unreasonable stuff”.9 Huygens had more time for other writers. He cited Nicholas of Cusa, Tycho Brahe, Giordano Bruno, and Johannes Kepler, although they, he felt, had ventured too little detail as to the forms that extraterrestrial life might take. Huygens made his argument by reasoning from probability. He began: “A Man that is of Copernicus’s Opinion, that this Earth of ours is a Planet, carry’d round and enlighten’d by the Sun, like the rest of the Planets, cannot but sometimes think, that it’s not improbable that the rest of the Planets have their Dress and Furniture, and perhaps their Inhabitants too.”10 The key phrase here is “not improbable”, harking back to Huygens’ youthful investigations of statistical likelihoods. For, as he warned his readers: “I can”t pretend to assert any thing as positively true (for how is it possible) but only to advance a probable Guess, the truth of which every one is at his own liberty to examine.”11 He thought it most unlikely there was an atmosphere on the Moon, for instance, and so he ruled out the kind of life there imagined by Kepler and Wilkins. But he happily endorsed the idea of life on planets within our solar system and in the solar systems surrounding other stars. The discovery during his lifetime that the speed of light is finite encouraged him to go further and suggest that there may be stars so distant that their light has not yet reached us. His thoughts about the likely nature of each planet were informed by what could be learned about them through a telescope. He argued that if one planet could be shown to be Earth-like, then it greatly increased the chances that others would be too — a logic that still guides the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). By using what evidence he had of one planet’s distinctiveness from another — in size, distance from the sun, length of days, and appearance — he was able to enrich the vision of extraterrestrial life he laid before his readers. Huygens’ ideas about plants and animals were based on reasonable projections of what was then known to exist on the Earth, recently expanded by news of exotic species brought back to Europe by explorers’ ships. Marvelling at the richness and fitness of species “so exactly adapted”12 to life on Earth, he argued that if we were to deny this abundance to other planets, then “we should sink them below the Earth in Beauty and Dignity; a Thing very unreasonable.”13 What form might this life take? Based on new information that American species are different, but enough like those of the Old World, Huygens presumed a general similarity with terrestrial species. But he did give some consideration to the different physical conditions that may prevail on other planets. The atmosphere might be thicker, for example, which would suit a greater variety of flying creatures. Gravity might be different, too, although he did not provide estimates of the comparative gravitational force on each of the planets, and in any case he rejected the notion of a simple correlation between the size of a planet and the scale of its flora and fauna. “We may have a Race of Pygmies about the bigness of Frogs and Mice, possess’d of the Planets,”14 he wrote, although he thought it unlikely. For Huygens, though, “the main and most diverting Point of the Enquiry is . . . placing some Spectators in these new discoveries, to enjoy these Creatures we have planted them with, and to admire their Beauty and Variety”. Remarkably, he suggested that these intelligent observers might not be men, but other kinds of “Creatures endued with Reason”.15 Some planets, indeed, might be capable of accommodating several species of “rational Creatures possess’d of different degrees of Reason and Sense”.16 The nature of reason and morality would be the same as on Earth. These creatures would be social, and they would have houses to shelter them from the weather. Huygens struggled with their appearance, though. He wanted to indicate that they might not be humanoid, and yet, he said, surely they must have hands, and feet, and stand upright. But perhaps they would have exoskeletons, like lobsters, for example. After all, “”tis a very ridiculous opinion, that the common people have got among them, that it is impossible a rational Soul should dwell in any other shape than ours”.17 Such conjectures echoed those of Kepler in his Somnium, but were more soundly guided by Huygens’ expert knowledge of the likely physical constraints. Huygens then turned his attention to intelligence and technology. His planetary beings would surely have science, and especially astronomy, as this study was said to have arisen as a consequence of the fear of eclipses, which would also occur on other planets. They would doubtless have some of our inventions, “yet that they should have all of them is not credible”.18 In particular, Huygens could not credit that they would possess telescopes, since he considered those which he had used himself as being so fine that other intelligences would not be able to equal them. Instead, he invested the denizens of the planets with far superior natural eyesight. In 1600, Giordano Bruno had been burnt at the stake in the Campo de” Fiori in Rome by the Inquisition for many heresies, including his insistence on the plurality of potentially inhabited worlds. A century later, Huygens was safe from such a fate. Nevertheless, he attempted to forestall any criticism from the church by making the semantic point that the heaven and earth referred to in scripture must apply to the totality of the universe and not to the planet Earth exclusively. He refused to grant man a special place in Creation. Unlike some rival works, especially those with a utopian or a satirical agenda, Cosmotheoros did not propose a hierarchy among the creatures in which humans would be either superior or inferior. Cosmotheoros enjoyed a long period of popularity through the eighteenth century, and Huygens’ ideas about life on the planets and in other solar systems became important for Immanuel Kant in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens of 1755. The discovery of Uranus by William Herschel in 1781 saw a further surge of interest, but thereafter astronomers began to shun the topic, and subsequent opinion has been less kind to this most speculative of Huygens’ works. Recently, though, Cosmotheoros has been reappraised by historians of science, who acknowledge that it was Huygens’ embrace of uncertainty that gave him the licence to explore the topic in the first place. This was by no means a tendency shared by all in Huygens’ time. Many thinkers, such as the English clergyman Joseph Glanvill, saw the acceptance of things not known for sure as the thin end of a wedge that would prise open a world of atheism. The Scottish poet William Drummond (in A Cypress Grove) explicitly singled out both Copernicanism and the idea of extraterrestrial life in this regard, as cases where “Sciences have become opinions, nay errors, and leave the imagination in a thousand labyrinths”.19 Nevertheless, it can now be seen that Huygens’ greatest gift to later generations of scientists may have been his willingness to work with uncertainty. Having set out the mathematical foundations of probability, nobody was in a better position to extend its precepts into thinking about questions of science. Doing so was not a surrender to unreason, but a way of opening new doors to creative thought. As Huygens wrote in Cosmotheoros: “tis a Glory to arrive at Probability, and the search itself rewards the pains. But there are many degrees of Probable, some nearer Truth than others, in the determining of which lies the chief exercise of our Judgment.” The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 21, 2020

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:32.820396

more-lively-counterfaits

“More Lively Counterfaits” Experimental Imaging at the Birth of Modern Science By Gregorio Astengo September 17, 2020 From infographics to digital renders, today’s scientists have ready access to a wide array of techniques to help visually communicate their research. It wasn’t always so. Gregorio Astengo explores the innovations employed in early issues of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, the world’s first scientific journal — new forms of image making which pushed the boundaries of 17th-century book printing. One of the most demanding challenges for early modern scientists was devising how best to visually portray their discoveries to the public. In the absence of any sort of technology for automatic visualisation, like cameras or scanners, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosopher had to rely on drawings and subsequently woodcuts, etchings, or engravings to turn an experimental finding into a reproducible and publicly accessible demonstration. This was a laborious, expensive, time-consuming, and often problematic operation. Negotiated between several parties involved in the world of image-making, such as draughtsmen, engravers, and printers, the results were inevitably compromises between the intentions of the researcher and the possibilities of the printing press.1 For example, what a drawing could express with shading, washing, and chromatic nuances, printed illustrations could only approximate through a binary system of black and white, resulting from the pressure of an inked copper plate against a page. The problem of efficient imaging was particularly felt during the early years of the Royal Society, a scientific institution founded in London in the early 1660s and today still regarded as one of the most prestigious institutions of scientific research in the world. In its early decades of activity, the Royal Society established itself as one of the central forces of the Scientific Revolution, with renowned members such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. Members of the Society used to meet on a weekly basis to discuss ongoing research on a variety of subjects, such as physics, mathematics, biology, astronomy, mechanics, geography, and antiquarianism. Soon after its foundation, the Royal Society sought new ways to increase visibility and maximise its public reach. From this emerged the Philosophical Transactions, a monthly peer-reviewed journal, the first of its kind, featuring extracts from the Royal Society’s weekly research meetings. Founded in 1665 by the Society’s Secretary Henry Oldenburg and still published to this day, the Transactions are regarded as the first and longest-running scientific journal in history, as contributions were the result of original explorative studies into natural and mechanical matters informed by the Society’s culture of experiment — part of what today we generally call science.2 The Transactions were printed in small quarto format (about 17x22cm) with up to about a dozen articles per issue and could be purchased for the price of one shilling, about £5 today. The journal was a pioneering learned publication, with exceptional frequency and aimed at a diverse public of curious researchers. As such, especially in the early years, its contributors were often preoccupied with how best to communicate their ideas and discoveries through the immediacy of mass-producible visual media.3 A closer look into a selection of these articles demonstrates the extent to which natural philosophers were prepared to re-invent the production and consumption of images with new and often odd strategies for representing the world. This was a process of endless hands-on experimentation, often pushing beyond the traditional confines of the printing house. The issue of accurate replication was effectively problematised in 1665 by art critic, writer, and Royal Society founding fellow John Evelyn. Evelyn was particularly sensible to the potentials and limits of engraving. He was an avid collector of prints and in 1662 published his own De Sculptura (here in a later edition), an adaptation of Abraham Bosse’s classic Traicté des manieres de graver (Treatise on Line Engraving). Shortly after the Transactions’ launch, Oldenburg published an account forwarded to Evelyn from an anonymous correspondent in Paris. The article described “a Way of Making More Lively Counterfaits of Nature in Wax, Then are Extant in Painting”.4 The article briefly introduced the technique of wax-modelling and colouring to faithfully sculpt natural specimens and produce maps in relief. The resulting models, Evelyn argued, were much more convincing than figurative drawing and so lifelike “that they kill all things of this Art”. In his praise of the illustrative potentials of a plan-relief, Evelyn was pointing at the necessity of sophisticated research into scientific reproducibility, preserving important information, and at the same time inviting a more substantial engagement on the part of the viewer. Evelyn was not alone in his concern for new and effective forms of imaging. In the early months of 1686, a large table of colour pigments appeared in the 179th issue of the Transactions. The foldable sheet, accompanying an article entitled “A Catalogue of Simple and Mixt Colours”, featured a total of 128 colour samples, each arranged in a large chart and categorised with its type and name in several languages. The accompanying article offered a detailed description of each colour in the chart. “Smalt”, for instance, “is made of Zaffer and Pot-ashes, calcined together in a Glass-furnace” and “Ceruse is the Rust of Lead made by a vaporous Calcination”. The author of the article was Richard Waller, one of most active illustrators in the circle of the early Royal Society and himself editor of the Transactions from 1691 to 1693. Waller’s objective with his table of colours was to establish a standardised system for the visual mapping of colours, bypassing the monochromatic limitations of engraving. Thus to describe a Plant [Waller proposed] it may be seen which of the simple or mixt Colours come nearest to it, and then the Word affixt to that Colour may be made us of, which the reader, if desirous, may look in his Table and find together the Pattern thereof.5 In other words, with this table of colours, Waller was offering a portable chromatic lexicon for natural philosophers, a universally generalisable reference system for reproducing the nuances of coloration without ever actually having to use colours. Waller was arguably the first in England to propose a descriptive account of natural colours, and his was the first and only article in the Transactions which made use of colour at all.6 Producing Waller’s chart must have been especially complicated, as each of the swatches had to be added manually to the several hundred copies of the journal’s issue.7 The last page of the issue also included explicit instructions for the printer: The Table of Colours is to be inserted after this leaf, which ought to be done with Guard and a White-leaf between after the book is bound, lest otherwise the Colours by beating stick together. The format of the learned periodical was substantially new to the printing world of seventeenth-century London, presenting image makers with novel problems and opportunities. Waller’s instructions then also evidence how the intellectual mission of the journal’s visual apparatus could only exist in a relationship with the printers, binders, and booksellers involved in its manufacturing. Another example of this cooperation is an illustration of the micrometer, an astronomical instrument invented by William Gascoigne to optimise focal magnification and measurability, presented in 1667 by mathematician Richard Townley for issue 29 of the Transactions. The article, entitled “An Instrument for dividing a foot into many thousand parts”, was accompanied by an engraved plate, originally drawn by mechanical practitioner Robert Hooke . Hooke was another extraordinary seventeenth-century enquirer: curator of experiments at the Royal Society from 1661, he soon became widely renowned for his best-selling book Micrographia (1665), which gave us the first close look into the anatomy of the flea and other minute animals. In his drawing of the micrometer, Hooke included an additional leaf printed at the bottom of the page, representing a flat wooden cover bolted with two long screws. This “moveable Cover” was to be by the Bookseller cut off by the pricked Line (xxx) from the Paper, and to be fitly placed on Figure I. according to the pricked Line (yyyy) answering thereto; that by the taking off, as it were, or folding up of this Cover, the inward contrivance of the Screws and Sight may appear.8 The “cover” was to be fixed in position as a moveable flap by cutting it out and gluing it along one edge of the instrument. Hooke devised this cut-paste system which, once assembled by the bookseller, would allow the reader to “open” the micrometer. The drawing, then, operated very much as its own “paper instrument”, reproducing with increased realism the physical properties of the original.9 The micrometer was one of the many pieces of technology occupying the Royal Society’s research agenda, alongside more notable examples like the telescope or the microscope. Similarly, instruments for automating the accurate visual recording of nature were also key in solidifying the Society’s empirical mission. In a preface to the Transactions from 1670, Oldenburg paraphrased philosopher Francis Bacon by using the metaphor of instrument making to express the progress towards universal knowledge: any vulgar hand may draw a Circle more perfectly by a compass, than the most perfect Penman can do by hand alone. [. . .] we may find how to draw in Perspective any Object both accurately and dispatchingly, by an instrument.10 At the time Oldenburg was probably referring to the perspectograph, a drawing machine invented by Christopher Wren in the 1650s and recently presented in the Transactions.11 Wren was himself a virtuoso draughtsman: he was one of the first in England to experiment with the technique of mezzotint and soon turned out to be an exceptionally skilled architect, authoring an extraordinary amount of projects, St. Paul’s cathedral among them. His device, a vertical board with a pen attached to a tracer, allowed anyone to draw in perspective by following the contours of an object through a pinhole. Wren’s intent with this device was to optimise visual representation, perhaps even for use in printmaking. In his outstanding drawings of the human brain for Thomas Willis’ Cerebri Anatome (1664), Wren is thought to have used his own perspectograph to draw directly on a copper plate.12 Similar to this device was the “Prosopographical Parallelogram”, an instrument for reproducing objects using parallel lines and published in the Transactions in 1673.13 The machine consisted of a vertical board, mounted on a tripod, with a pantograph (a hinged parallelogram) attached to it. A pointer was attached to one end of the pantograph, while on the opposite end a pencil would draw on the board. By moving the pointer around the contours of the model, an inverted image would be automatically outlined on the board as its 1:1-scaled “elevation”. 14 While Wren’s perspectograph assisted the automatic rendering of perspectival views, as in modern photography, the Parallelogram operated like an early modern scanner and produced measurable drawings. As such, the intention of these instruments was not at all dissimilar from Waller’s table of colours. At the heart of these projects was the search for convenient yet precise methods of reproduction — to make, in short, “more lively counterfaits”. In fact, even the distinct and longstanding traditions of perspective and parallel drawing, which these instruments were supposed to mechanise, could become intertwined for the sake of graphic exegesis. A case in point is an illustration of Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway, the first one ever published, which appeared in 1694 for the 212th issue of the Transactions.15 The image was produced by engraver Edwin Sandys and based on an on-site drawing made by Dubliner Christopher Cole. It depicted a bird’s eye view of the famous promontory in Northern Ireland, detailed with its characteristic forest of natural rocky formations in the foreground. What immediately appears odd is the off-centred, strangely tilted viewpoint of the picture, some way between a mid-view landscape and a large vista. Cole’s drawing, in fact, was a collection of separate views put together into one single drawing. Clergyman Samuel Foley, who wrote a short account accompanying the illustration, commented that Cole has not drawn the Causway as a Prospect, nor as a Survey or Platform, which he thought would not answer his Design, and that he has no other name for it but a Draught, which he took after this sort: He supposed the Hills and Causway, & c. Epitomized to the same height and bigness the Draught shews them, and this he fancied the most Intelligible way to express it.16 In order to obtain this flattened image, it has been suggested that Cole produced two, perhaps three separate panoramas of the landscape, subsequently merging them into his final composition.17 This was neither a “Prospect”, nor a “Survey” nor a “Platform”, it was neither diagrammatic nor pictorial, neither a map nor a perspective view, but rather something in between, an odd collection of selected viewpoints rearranged to express the topographical qualities of the landscape as synthetically as possible, even to the detriment of realism. In fact, as a consequence of its limited verisimilitude, the result in the end was not convincing. For Irish physician Thomas Molyneux, who would soon be elected Fellow of the Royal Society for his precise drawings of the elk-horns published in the Transactions, Cole was “no extraordinary Artist”, and the distinctive rocky formation still remained to be properly represented.18 In order to set the record straight, in 1694 Edwin Sandys was commissioned with a new, much larger “True Prospect” of the Causeway.19 In Sandys’ illustration the natural environment appeared more conventional, with rocky cliffs, buildings, and inhabitants in a more traditional landscape view. However, it was precisely through its unconventional technique that Cole’s first drawing was able to successfully introduce the physical distinctiveness of the Causeway’s basalt columns, something that gets partly lost in Sandys’ version. Cole’s unusual composition attracted the attention of natural philosophers such as Molyneux, who continued his enquiry by sending a further account of his observations on the Causeway to the Transactions a few years later.20 Historian of science Steven Shapin has argued that in the world of late seventeenth-century science “the transformation of mere belief into proper knowledge was considered to consist of the transit from the perceptions and cognitions of the individual to culture of the collective”.21 As a channel explicitly designed to foster a network of learned scholars in the pursuit of cumulative knowledge, the early Philosophical Transactions were an ideal arena to explore this “transit” of information between experimenter and public. Unconventional visual products such as colour tables, foldable flaps, or panoramas with multiple viewpoints offered “more lively counterfaits” than traditional visual aids because they proposed new paradigms to effectively collect, synthesise, and communicate visual data. In doing so, they also challenged and advanced the technologies necessary for their production and dissemination, like engraving and printmaking. They can be seen as early instances of a tradition of innovative scientific imaging which expresses itself nowadays in a wide range of important technologies, such as infrared or ultraviolet photography used to enhance astronomical and microscope imaging; photogrammetry and 3D-scanning used in surveys, topography, and geology; and infographics, like isochrone maps, graphs, and diagrams, to name a few.22 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 17, 2020

Gregorio Astengo

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:33.346016

sicko-doctors

Sicko Doctors Suffering and Sadism in 19th-Century America By Chelsea Davis July 1, 2020 American fiction of the 19th century often featured a ghoulish figure, the cruel doctor, whose unfeeling fascination with bodily suffering readers found both unnerving and entirely plausible. Looking at novels by Louisa May Alcott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville, Chelsea Davis dissects this curious character. On one page [of George Lippard’s novel Ladye Annabel] you read a most graphic and minute description of breaking a criminal on a wheel, told by the executioner, with the same sort of cool gayety with which a parish doctor may be supposed to probe the wounds of charity hospital sufferers. Then, again comes a harrowing recital of the way they tore men to pieces with wild horses, dragging the four quarters of the wretch to as many four points of the compass; . . . [it is] enough to make the fortune of a race of small-fry Monk Lewises . . . [Lippard] pre-suppose[s] a morbid appetite or perverted taste, on the part of the buyer. — Motley Manners, 1848 review of George Lippard’s Ladye Annabel; or, The Doom of the Poisoner.1 Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a doctor, an executioner, and a fan of “perver[sely]” violent fiction walk into a bar, cheerfully chatting about their shared passion for torture. Not ringing any bells? That’s likely because popular views on medicine have changed radically since 1848, when the above passage was penned. These days, it would seem borderline blasphemous to group physicians — now regarded by most as healers and helpers, sworn to do no harm — with two avowed sadists who watch suffering for sport. (Such an analogy would perhaps seem especially inapt in 2020, as countless medical professionals continue to put their own lives on the line to care for highly infectious COVID-19 patients.) But as it turns out, this excerpt’s framing of physicians as barbaric — as the kind of men who finger painful injuries with the “cool gayety” of an expert torturer — would not have surprised many Americans in the nineteenth century. Far from it: the sicko doctor, whose fascination with the human body’s gory workings makes him creepily indifferent to his patient’s discomfort, routinely cropped up as a bogeyman in the fiction, political cartoons, and nonfiction of the antebellum United States. To understand why this was the case, we might take a closer look at the above-excerpted review, which uses a metaphorical doctor to evoke a real ethical question that obsessed Americans at the time: the appropriate way to relate to other people’s suffering. In attacking Philadelphian provocateur George Lippard’s novel Ladye Annabel (1844), pseudonymous reviewer Motley Manners suggests that the book’s explicit portrayals of medieval torture bespeak a “morbidity” and “pervers[ity]” on the parts of its characters, writer, and reader alike. (Manners is no innovator here: the gruesome content of Gothic literature, which supposedly both appeals to and breeds creeps, has produced moral panics ever since its inception in the late eighteenth century — panics which live on in pearl-clutching condemnations of horror movies and fans today.) But what Manners seems to find even more unsettling than the Ladye Annabel executioner’s actual participation in wheel-breakings and drawings and quarterings is the character’s breezy attitude toward his bloody deeds — the “cool gayety” with which he recounts them. The seeming paradox of this particular phrase, which mixes apathy with joy, would have seemed no paradox at all to a nineteenth-century reader. Americans of this epoch were preoccupied with the idea that there was a causal relationship between the two emotions — that feeling indifference toward the pain of others threatened to eventually become active pleasure in the pain of others. All it took to desensitize a given observer, the thinking went, was overexposure to suffering — the kind of daily saturation with groans and gore that are the everyday experience of a professional flesh-cutter like a torturer. Or a doctor. In other texts of the period, the analogy between unfeeling doctor and unfeeling author becomes even more literal. The critic George Gifflan, for instance, speculated that the English writer George Crabbe, notorious for his unflinching portrayals of poverty and crime, had acquired the “perfect coolness” characteristic of his writings during his prior career as a surgeon. “As a medical man, [Crabbe] had come in contact with little else than man’s human miseries and diseases”, observes Gifflan, and the experience “materially discolored [Crabbe’s] view of life”. It is for this reason that Crabbe’s fiction was able to “feel . . . with firm finger the palpitating pulse of the infanticide or murderer—and snuff . . . a certain sweet odor in the evil savors of putrefying misery and crime”. Again, the sick doctor disturbs because of his “cool gayety”, his admixture of clinically appropriate objectivity with straight-up schadenfreude. A “firm[ness]” in the face of suffering could easily mutate into a predilection for the “sweet odor” therein.2 To make matters worse, it was not only his own character that the gore-benumbed writer/doctor ran the risk of damaging. Nineteenth-century thinkers worried he might also wound his reader/patient. Thus another critic used the same harmful healer metaphor to skewer George Lippard (the guy couldn’t catch a break), this time with regard to a different Gothic novel. Reflecting a broader Victorian conviction that art’s main imperative is to improve its audience’s moral character, this second naysayer complained that Lippard’s blood-spattered The Quaker City: Or, the Monks of Monk Hall (1849) made its readers less moral by repeatedly bludgeoning them with descriptions of bombastic violence. “In what estimation would we hold a physician who would order his patient, exhibiting slight symptoms of a contagious disease, to a place where the malady rages in its most malignant forms?” the review asks accusatorily.3 Nor was the twisted physician confined to the realm of critical metaphor: he also took the shape of a full-blown character in several novels of the period. Among the earliest is James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821), which recounts the late stages of the American Revolutionary War through the travails of the Wharton family, inhabitants of a region of New York state hotly contested by the American and British forces. The Whartons are alternately aided and terrorized by one Dr Archibald Sitgreaves, a surgeon serving the Continental Army. Dr Sitgreaves’ surname — conjuring the image of one who sits on graves — perfectly suits a physician whose fascination with grievous injuries renders him insensible to the physical and emotional feelings of his wounded patients. When Henry Wharton, a captain in the British army, sustains a minor arm wound, the physician informs him with perverse regret that the limb will not need to be amputated: “. . . the hurt is not bad, but you have such a pretty arm for an operation; the pleasure of the thing might have tempted a novice.”“The devil!” cried the captain [Wharton]. “Can there be any pleasure in mutilating a fellow creature?”“Sir”, said the surgeon, with gravity, “a scientific amputation is a very pretty operation, and doubtless might tempt a younger man, in the hurry of business, to overlook all the particulars of the case.”4 Here, as elsewhere, Dr Sitgreaves’ oblivious bedside manner is as funny as it is revolting. But this does not mean that he lacks the capacity for seriously sadistic acts. At one point, having caught wind that the novel’s hero, Harvey Birch, is slated to be executed for espionage, Dr Sitgreaves rhapsodizes about his plans to turn Birch’s corpse into a sculpture as a gift for an aunt (“his bones are well knit. I will make a perfect beauty of him”). Later, he boasts that he once broke his own finger simply to watch it heal. “[T]he thrilling sensation excited by the knitting of the bone . . . exceeded any other enjoyment that I have ever experienced”, he tells a horrified listener. “Now, had it been one of the more important members, such as the leg, or arm, how much greater must the pleasure have been!” Although Dr Sitgreaves has, for the time being, targeted only his own body for injury practice, his wistful reverie about the superior thrills of a broken “leg, or arm” gestures toward a ghastly escalation of medical violence. What atrocity might Sitgreaves not commit in pursuit of scientifically interesting spectacles? What stands in the way of his progressing from breaking fingers, to breaking arms, to breaking legs, to killing a man — especially if that man’s skeleton would make a “perfect” sculpture? The latter was no hypothetical nightmare for Cooper’s readers. Throughout the nineteenth century, the corpses of freshly dead Americans — often those of the poor, people of color, and criminals — were snatched up by medical schools for use as dissecting cadavers. This practice produced tremendous public ire toward surgeons, culminating in over a dozen “anatomy riots” from 1785 to 1855.5 The threat of the slippery slope of brutality — a slope down which Dr Sitgreaves has clearly already begun to slide — was central to nineteenth-century Americans’ anxieties over violent voyeurism. “The ‘taste’ for cruelty in . . . spectators was considered to be a ‘progressive vice’”, writes historian Karen Halttunen, “a ‘craving’ or ‘hunger’ that, like substance addiction . . . only grew more powerful as it was fed”.6 Thus in 1831 legal reformer Edward Livingston criticized the death penalty on the grounds that, although “human sufferings are never beheld, for the first time, but with aversion, terror, and disgust”, a person who frequently witnessed public executions eventually came to regard them as “a spectacle, which must frequently be repeated to satisfy the ferocious taste it has formed”.7 The Moral Advocate newspaper worried in 1821 that battle increasingly “dulled” a soldier’s instinctive horror of war, gradually poisoning his empathic capacities until he eventually took active “enjoyment [in] the most horrid scenes of carnage”.8 The presumed link between watching or reading about violence and enacting violence even seemed to come full circle in some instances, such as an 1833 murder committed by one Abraham Prescott, whose attorneys asserted that their client had been “agitat[ed]” into killing an acquaintance by reading the lurid trial transcript from a different murder case.9 The mounting fear of learned callousness was part of a broader preoccupation with suffering in the nineteenth-century US and England, a widespread “obsession with pain” that has led historians to dub the period the “Age of Pain”.10 Prior to the major innovations in anesthesia that marked the late eighteenth century, serious physical discomfort was a common and inalterable part of life. But as surgery and anesthesia grew more sophisticated, and doctors gained the ability to reduce more and more varieties of pain, it was no longer psychologically necessary for people to collectively embrace agony. Between 1772 and 1846 — the years marking the discovery of nitrous oxide and the first use of ether as a surgical anesthetic, respectively — Anglo-American culture developed a “new distaste for pain” that gradually “achieved the level of full revulsion and horror”.11 These improvements in pain technology produced two seemingly antithetical cultural responses in the States. On the one hand, the wildly influential philosophical and literary movement known as sentimentalism pursued the recent advances in anesthesia to their logical extreme, advocating for the reduction of pain in all spheres. Sentimental novels like Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1851) framed sympathy toward suffering as the utmost human virtue, and sentimental reform movements campaigned against brutality in the realms of slavery, the military, the schoolroom, and legal punishment. On the other hand, because nothing spells titillation like taboo, many Americans also increasingly sought frissons in the pain of others. This era saw a massive upsurge in the popularity of BDSM pornography, “penny press” newspapers that ran graphic accounts of gory crimes, and sensationalistic fiction in the US.12 Although the vectors of their interest in suffering may have been diametrically opposed, sentimentalists and sadists were equally fascinated by pain.13 And both camps found the cruel doctor to be a useful device for expressing, interrogating, or denouncing that fascination. The two critics who derisively compared Gothic novelist George Lippard to a perverted physician, for example, were using the same metaphor as the subject of their critique: the figure of the barbaric doctor looms large in Lippard’s most famous novel, The Quaker City; Or, the Monks of Monk Hall (1845). The grotesque Dr McTourniquet raves about various “beautiful” operations and the joys of public dissections (“quite a treat to the uninitiated”); a dentist punishes irritating clients by yanking their teeth with unnecessary force; the novel’s villain, Devil-Bug, is a voyeuristic torturer who calls his victims “patients” and sells pilfered cadavers to physicians.14 “Never a doctor of all the schools, with his dissecting knife in hand and the corpse of a subject before him, could have manifested more nerve and coolness” than Devil-Bug preparing to slaughter and maim, the narrator says.15 Yet when it comes to vicious physicians, Louisa May Alcott’s novella Hospital Sketches (1863) — an example of the theoretically gentler genre of sentimental fiction — gives Lippard a run for his money. A lightly fictionalized account of Alcott’s own experience as a nurse during the American Civil War, Hospital Sketches celebrates sympathy as one of the essential virtues of medical caregiving. But our protagonist, a nurse named Tribulation Periwinkle, also encounters the opposite — a chillingly cold-hearted surgeon in the DC military hospital where she is posted. Dr P., she writes, seemed to regard a dilapidated body very much as I should have regarded a damaged garment . . . cutting, sawing, patching and piecing, with the enthusiasm of an accomplished surgical seamstress . . . The more intricate the wound, the better he liked it.16 What has caused Dr P.’s sadism? An overdose of observed brutality is once again to blame. Before taking up the Civil War posting where we meet him, Dr P. had previously served in the Crimean War (1853–56), and our narrator nurse conjectures that it is “through long acquaintance with many of the ills flesh is heir to, [that he] had acquired [his] habit of regarding a man and his wound as separate institutions”. In fact, this numbing process seems to be at work in multiple members of the hospital staff, and even Nurse Periwinkle herself admits that she is becoming a bit too attracted to the sights of surgery: “There was an uncanny sort of fascination in watching [Dr P.], as he peered and probed into the mechanism of those wonderful bodies”.17 War was not the only context in which doctors (and nurses) were bombarded with the sights and sounds of anguish. Even under ordinary circumstances in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century, the suffering of others was the bread and butter of physicians’ day-to-day-life. Before ether entered the operating theater, “the emotional ability to inflict vast suffering was perhaps the most basic of all professional prerequisites” to becoming a doctor, writes historian Martin S. Pernick.18 It was with distinct pride that Rutgers medical student Asa Fitch described his own transformation, over the course of a few weeks, from a naïf who “recoiled” the first time he observed an amputation to someone who could now see a “tedious and painful operation” performed on a child and feel “none of the tenderness which I have always before felt on such occasions”.19 Little wonder that the public frequently complained about doctors’ callousness.20 A particularly scathing version of this complaint came from none other than Herman Melville. His novel White-Jacket; or, the World in a Man-of-War (1850) satirizes high-intellect, low-compassion medicine men in the form of the vile Cadwallader Cuticle, MD. As the head physician of the frigate whose adventures White-Jacket follows, Cuticle enjoys a reputation as “the foremost Surgeon in the Navy” and memberships in the world’s finest medical associations.21 But Dr Cuticle’s top-notch education in human anatomy seems to have also deadened him to human emotion, leaving him with a “heartlessness of a purely scientific origin”. By the time we meet him, Cuticle views his patients’ bodies as exciting opportunities for medical discovery (and career advancement) rather than sources of real suffering: “Surrounded by moans and shrieks, by features distorted with anguish inflicted by himself”, Melville’s narrator recounts, Cuticle “yet maintained a countenance almost supernaturally calm”.22 In keeping with the “mad doctor” stereotype that he embodies,23 Dr Cuticle’s relentless pursuit of medical knowledge ironically becomes its own kind of distracting passion, in some cases clouding his professional judgment more than basic human sympathy might have. Eager to show off for the Navy’s other surgeons, Dr Cuticle opts to amputate an injured seaman’s leg rather than to pursue the less invasive (but less impressive) cure that his colleagues recommend. The sailor suffers greatly during the procedure and dies almost immediately afterwards. To be sure, Dr Cuticle’s brutality approaches the realm of caricature: much like The Spy’s Dr Sitgreaves and The Quaker City’s Dr McTourniquet, the White-Jacket doctor waxes poetic about the “beaut[y]” of the grisly surgeries he performs, and collects figurines of grotesque medical anomalies. Yet the novel does not present Dr Cuticle’s insensitivity as exceptional. Instead, this highly credentialed, highly callous doctor serves as just one of the novel’s several object lessons in the ways that positions of great social power enable abuse. Throughout White-Jacket, various Naval officers delight in controlling and punishing lower-ranking sailors with various humiliations, flesh-rending floggings (over which Cuticle impassively presides), and even death. “The Navy is the asylum for the perverse”, the narrator bluntly summarizes. The novel’s scandalized readers agreed. Corporal punishment reformers handed out copies of White-Jacket to members of Congress, who voted just a few months later to outlaw flogging in the Navy. Although contemporary scholarship has found no evidence that the distribution of Melville’s book materially shaped this legislative decision, popular rumor held for decades afterwards that the novel had indeed been the straw that broke flogging’s back.24 The longstanding myth that Melville’s violent novel abolished flogging suggests there may be an optimistic alternative to fiction’s violence-warped doctor: Americans’ hope that bombarding readers with imaginary cruelty could sometimes make them less cruel instead of crueler. But if the line between edifying and harmful depictions of gore sounds like a difficult one to draw, that’s because it was — and is. We continue to wonder how much exposure to brutality awakens people to the wrongs of the world, and how much deadens us to them.25 For the pain-obsessed sentimental culture that produced him, the ethically precarious doctor — whose position of authority and constant IV drip of human suffering might just as easily make of him a sadistic harmer as a saintly healer — was the consummate symbol of that contradiction. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 1, 2020

Chelsea Davis

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:33.866904

postures-of-transport

Postures of Transport Sex, God, and Rocking Chairs By Hunter Dukes February 3, 2021 What if chairs had the ability to shift our state of consciousness, transporting the imagination into distant landscapes and ecstatic experiences, both religious and erotic? In an essay about the British and American fascination with rocking chairs and upholstery springs in the 19th century, Hunter Dukes discovers how simple furniture technologies allowed armchair travelers to explore worlds beyond their own. The furniture of the nineteenth century is difficult to approach. Not for lack of material, which abounds at every turn. The difficulty lies rather in the psychological domain.—Sigfried Giedion1 . . . and the piece of furniture [meuble]—oh, surprise, surprise—into an automobile.—Michel Serres2 When is an armchair something more? When it becomes a mode of imaginary locomotion. Elbowed seats date back millennia, but the expression “armchair traveler” did not appear until the early 1800s. These bookish men and women (in their proto La-Z-Boys) followed Emerson’s advice: the wise stay at home.3 With enough literacy and time, you could walk the world from an easy chair or roam Constantinople on an ottoman. Discussions of armchair travel tend to focus on the travelogue. But what about the chair itself in the nineteenth century? Its changing styles and technologies — the advent of rockers, say, or upholstery springs? And how do techniques of the reading body, the physical regimens of leisure and reverie, feed what we might call the sedentary imagination? I ask this last question with two tangled senses of imagination in mind: both the horizon of seated cognition (what kind of things it was possible to imagine at rest) and the representation of lounging bodies in literature and popular culture. While armchair traveler refers to gapers of stereographs or travel-lit enthusiasts, consumers of colonial memoirs and explorers’ journals, my sights are on a more obscure tradition: those who use furniture and other props to trick the mind into ambulation. Toward the century’s turn, readers piloted mahogany spaceships, upholstered time machines with tufted buttons: the seat base jounced and rocked its occupant into journeys of the mind: adventurous, erotic, or devout. “If ‘a landscape is a state of mind’”, the artist Bowyer Nichols once declared, “so too is a paneled room, a chair, or a table. These things have an indwelling spirit, to those who care to question them confiding in response”.4 We should ask the question, try to understand the states of mind produced by variations in the spinal column: a presence or lack of lumbar support, the thoracic angle of repose. If chairs answer back, only part of their reply can be heard through history. The rest will come from an awareness of our own engagements, the curve of the cushioned seat that lets me make these words, or whatever takes the weight off as you proceed to read. Virtual Travel, or, How to Kill a Shark from the Chaise “He travels and I too”, wrote William Cowper in his 1785 poem The Task, in reference to the experience of reading nautical travelogues. His speaker treads the decks of colliers and climbs their topmasts, muddying the moat between experience and recollection: “through his peering eyes / Discover countries, with a kindred heart”.5 John Keats uses the same sort of image in his 1816 “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, where opening an Elizabethan translation makes one party to colonial conquest. His speaker feels like “stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He stared at the Pacific”.6 In both poems, books become uplinks to eyes trained on the edges of empire. In correspondence, Cowper kills the swashbuckling vibe, reveals the Kurtz in Keats’s Cortez. After reading John Hawkesworth’s edition of James Cook’s Voyages, gifted to him by John Newton (erstwhile slaver, born-again abolitionist, hymnist of “Amazing Grace”), Cowper wrote a thank-you note: My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my main-sail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from the fire-side. The principal fruits of these circuits that have been made round the globe seem likely to be the amusement of those that stayed at home.7 Beneath these mannered pleasantries, the proclaimed elation with bloodsports, Cowper chides Cook for the imperial casualties of adventure narratives. “Nations that live upon bread-fruit, and have no mines to make them worthy of our acquaintance, will be but little visited for the future. So much the better for them; their poverty is indeed their mercy.”8 (Note the doubled usage of “fruit” in this letter: on the one hand the breadfruit that feeds Cowper’s spared colonies, on the other, the fruits of explorers’ global circuits, the sellable stories of derring-do for those that stayed at home.) While Cowper intimates something morally askew with the economic and cultural systems that allowed Captain Cook to capture the Georgian imagination, he also worries about the physical effects of armchair travel. “Assure yourself that easy chairs are no friends to cheerfulness, and that a long winter spent by the fireside is a prelude to an unhealthy spring.”9 A century or so later, Joris-Karl Huysmans was a novelist for whom Cowper’s sedentary malaise became a springboard toward new forms of imaginary transport. During a biographical work about the medieval Dutch mystic Lydwine of Schiedam, who suffered progressive paralysis, Huysmans describes how the housebound saint travelled “motionless on a bed”.10 Using this technique, and with an angelic guide, Lydwine is able to visit Rome’s seven pilgrimage churches and local convents in the Low Countries, commenting on their architecture in astounding detail. But mental travel had physical consequences: spraining her foot in a distant ravine, Lydwine returns from the ecstatic journey to find it dislocated upon the bed. For those without angels, Huysmans offers a secular version of sedentary travel in À rebours (translated as Against the Grain or Against Nature), when its reclusive protagonist Jean des Esseintes fingers gauge nets and rolls of nautical sail; inhales lime, salt steam, and sulfate of soda; reads guidebooks describing the seashore’s splendor. The result? Something like virtual reality avant la lettre: Thus, without stirring, he enjoyed the rapid motions of a long sea voyage . . . The secret lies in knowing how to proceed, how to concentrate deeply enough to produce the hallucination and succeed in substituting the dream reality for the reality itself . . . What is the use of moving, when one can travel on a chair so magnificently?11 This hallucinating homebody summons the image of a mystic fallen, an anchorite whose devotions have turned from the spirit toward sensation. A less-consecrated recipe for sailors of the settee appeared in Fun magazine a year later, signed by one Diogenes Tubb: an apt pseudonym for fantasies of immobile travel. Get a packet of Tidman’s sea salt and put it in a pail of hot water beside you, then recline on a rocking-chair after having devoured hastily a fat ham-sandwich. Rock yourself violently and inhale the salt steam. It’s every bit as good as a steamboat journey, and a great deal cheaper.12 Invoking the cynic philosopher who lived in a pithos, Tubb apes Huysmans for a different reading class, trades his Michelin for a Baedeker. These adult games are a form of child’s play, as a poem published in The Youth’s Companion (1909) makes clear: When I do not wish to stayAt my home I go away;And my trusty rocking chairKnows the road to everywhere.Up and down the parlor floor.Travelling twenty times or more . . . Then I make believe that weAre two thousand miles at sea;13 Huysmans and Tubb had a precursor in Xavier de Maistre, whose 1794 Voyage autour de ma chambre (A Journey Round My Room) was translated into English for the first time in 1871. A soldier in the Sardinian army, De Maistre was placed under forty-two days of house arrest for illegal dueling. During the isolation, he scabbards his épée and unsheaths a pen. The resulting “voyage” is Lilliputian, but that’s the point. Summaries make the author sound like Lil Jon in a cravat: chair to bed to window, wall, and back again. Yet how does one do it? With a vehicle, of course. “I had so placed myself in my arm-chair . . . I was able, by balancing myself from left to right, to make by degrees, and at last, almost without knowing it, to get close to the wall, for this is how I travel when not pressed for time”.14 Couchsurfing in its truest sense; just imagine if he had had a rocking chair. De Maistre might be the most famous chair traveler, but he did not venture alone. As Bernd Stiegler recounts in his history of the “room-travel” genre, Xavier was joined by Léon Gautier’s Voyage d’un catholique autour sa chambre (1862); Emma Faucon’s Voyage d’une jeune fille autour sa chambre (1864); Edmond de Goncourt’s Voyage dans un grenier (1878); Marie O’Kennedy’s Inventaire de ma chambre (1884); and many more bedsit inventories and parlor peregrinations.15 My favorite chair traveler appears in Murphy (1938), Samuel Beckett’s first published novel. Murphy too finds chairs transporting, but in a different way. He chooses the ascetic over the exotic and tries to romp, not through foreign lands, but in the mind of God: He sat naked in his rocking-chair of undressed teak, guaranteed not to crack, warp, shrink, corrode, or creak at night. It was his own, it never left him . . . Seven scarves held him in position. Two fastened his shins to the rockers, one his thighs to the seat, two his breast and belly to the back, one his wrists to the strut behind . . . He sat in his chair in this way because it gave him pleasure! First it gave his body pleasure, it appeased his body. Then it set him free in his mind.16 There are many good theories for the explosion of armchair travel. Between 1815 and 1914, the British Empire colonized more than ten million square miles of territory, subjugating an additional 400 million people. With the decline of Grand Tour and “voyage” narratives that had fueled the genre, this era saw the demographics of travel writing widen. Tourist gained its contemporary pejorative associations; urban commuters became a thing, as did globe-trotters. By the 1880s, passengers could board a Parisian train and alight in Istanbul. Telegraphy and telephones linked the near with the farther, while panoramas, zoetropes, magic lanterns, and stereoscopy continued to lengthen the colonial gaze. In London, exhibitions like the Egyptian Hall and the British Museum’s acquisition of the Elgin Marbles brought treasures from “antique lands” into the metropole. By 1914, a narrator in James Joyce’s Dubliners could visit something like “Arabia” without leaving Dublin, an example of what Edward Said called Orientalism’s radical realism.17 Armchair travel is a parodic endpoint for the spring-like compression of geographic space. Why travel at all, if the world — that is, a specific representation of the world, which veils accuracy under the cloak of immediacy — comes home to you? But let’s return to Tubb and Murphy, the way that chair travel can resemble Lydwine’s mystical practices, religious techniques for spiritual transit. While there are some tongues in the cheeks of those passages I quoted above, they depict secularized versions of ritual transportation. The salty vapor of a steaming bath might as well stream from thuribles in the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox mass. It’s no surprise that smudged frankincense has psychotropic properties. And rocking? Nineteenth-century klismonauts, if you will, knew something that scientists did not demonstrate until 2011, when a paper for Current Biology claimed that rocking chairs are wavy: they approximate sea travel, but also compound the waves in our brains, boosting slow oscillations and spindle activity. While this research focuses on how rocking “facilitates the transition from waking to sleep”, what about those twilight states of hypnagogic consciousness?18 How much of chair travel’s imaginary motion comes from the somatic rhythms of rockers and upholstery springs? An 1873 essay in the Edinburgh Review asked the same question about hypnosis and mesmerism. “As regards the simple effect in question, we believe we might as well speak of sermon sleep, of rocking-cradle sleep, of the sleep of an easy arm-chair, or of a dull book, as of Mesmeric sleep.”19 The author means to dismiss mesmerism, but there is nothing simple about this effect. If rockers produce profound changes in our brain’s electrical impulses, then cradles, easy chairs (which, by the 1870s, were often outfitted with upholstery springs), and even the cadences of a preacher are advanced neuropsychological technologies. What is the overlap between the halting physicality of certain shamanic practices and the physiological effects of rocking furniture? Take, for instance, Orthodox Jewish shuckling — swaying backward and forward in prayer, believed by some to boost the wireless connection with God. “For the mystics”, writes Ronald L. Eisenberg, “shuckling during prayer represented an erotic union with the Divine.”20 While I would rather feed myself to Cowper’s parlor shark than imply Alan Dershowitz a mystic, he too credits shuckling with . . . well, you can read for yourself: I need to thank my local synagogue for helping me discover sex. I am convinced that some higher authority built the benches at precisely the right height to introduce sexual feelings at precisely the right time. When Orthodox Jews pray, they shake back and forth while standing. When I reached a certain height, the top of the bench in front of me, which had a curve, was exactly parallel to my genitals. It was while shuckling back and forth in the synagogue that I experienced my first arousal.21 What a suggestion: that a temple’s seating redirects the sexual impulses of adolescence back toward the Torah. A joke, I think (and a queasy one at that, in the autobiography of a man accused of raping a minor, who has advocated throughout his career for lowering the age of consent). Yet it serves, unfortunately, to introduce a different dimension of my argument. Like other entheogenic techniques (drugs, song, rhythm, light, sex), the ecstasy induced by rockers can lead upward, in the case of Beckett’s Murphy, or deeper into the sensual world. The Motion of Moveables While moral and spiritual comfort arrived in English through Anglo-Norman, our sense of comfortable as being physically content, relaxed and reclined, appears in the late eighteenth century. Soon after, a type of French easy chair, the confortable, became popular at home and abroad. What made it cozy? The systematic use of springs, hidden beneath inflated upholstery. In 1833, it was still possible for J.C. Loudon to claim that “the effect of spiral springs as stuffing has been long known to men of science; but so little to upholsterers, that a patent for using them in stuffing was taken out, some years ago, as a new invention.”22 Soon after, however, chairs gained ornate shapes, cushioned bases that had been impossible before the employment of springs. “It would appear that as the century drew to its close”, writes Dorothy Holley, “some of the furniture assumed proportions so great as though it would burst.”23 During a wild treatise on posture, Sigfried Giedion describes this period as the reign of the upholster. “Furniture became a means of filling the room; to inflate its bulk was the first step.”24 Whereas chairs were once classified under a set of possessions called moveables (meubles), now that motion had moved into the seat itself.25 The elasticity of springs created new caches in the Victorian imagination. Chairs were no longer skeletons — now their bones were buried inside vaulted seats and cushions, fabrics domed on animate springs in coiled and zig-zag form. With new spaces (however hidden) come new narrative possibilities. To wit: a story called “The Scissors Swallower” from Frederick Barnard and Charles H. Ross’s Behind the Brass Knocker: Some Grim Realities (1883). Mrs. Mite’s boarding house has a particular problem: the scissors always disappear. Not one pair, mind, “I mean everybody’s scissors—the scissors of the united household—and every lady member of it, and, indeed, a few of the gentlemen even, continually invest in pair after pair of scissors with quite reckless prodigality.”26 A rumor starts — hearsay spreads like bedbugs in the boardinghouse — that a certain “aged, shriveled, high-dried” woman is the culprit.27 The narrator first compares her to a voracious shark, then to a “cheerful nautical person” who participated in a fatal, object-eating wager.28 Upon dissection, his stomach is found to contain half-digested knives, “some of them with four blades”, among other kitchen items.29 ※※Indexed under…ContainmentOrgans' capacity for When the old woman dies, another kind of dissection takes place. Mrs. Mite inherits her armchair and reupholsters it, ripping off the worn leather to get at the stuffing below. “The stuffing below! What think you it was composed of? Horsehair, to be sure, and springs more or less damaged, and fifty-three pairs of scissors that had somehow slipped down through the crevices in the woodwork.”30 The Scissors Swallower of the title is not the late woman after all, but her lounger. The story trades on a resemblance between the spring cushion’s rhythmic compressions and a stomach’s accordion rhythms. The seat partakes in a mechanical form of deglutition and digestion. In the spatial imaginary, locked rooms are a default location for hidden psychic content. Yet in the examples to follow, repression is offset by a kind of evidential decompression. Moving furniture resists the compartmentalization of domestic space: worn-out springs hint at last night’s affairs, the rocker’s rasps amplify an activity taking place behind closed doors. If the basement of American homes served as a storehouse for the id in the twentieth century, the upwelling of libidinous energy exploited by Hitchcock and other contributors to horror, new furniture technologies played an analogous role in the nineteenth-century parlor. For the latter case, however, we find moving furniture explicitly coupled to fraught scenes of sexuality. Dershowitz was not the first teen to get off on seatbacks. Consider, for instance, the trope of broken springs or rockers, evidence of hanky-pank conducted in the social, family rooms of Britain and America. Three years after “The Scissors Swallower”, the Birmingham Owl published a humorous “letter” titled “A Sweetheart’s Bill,” supposedly penned by a father named Hezekiah Blodgers, whose daughter, Maria, has given her suitor “the sack”.31 Note, below, the broken rocking chair and the damaged upholstery springs. The letter ends with a threat. If the suitor comes around again, “I’ll whale the life out of you and make you glad to sit down on your stomach for the rest of the week”.32 In the former story, the old woman’s sexual illegibility — “aged, shriveled, high-dried” — precedes the broken springs beneath her seat. In this letter, presumed heavy petting, sexual energy discharged outside of normative social structures, breaks the springs and rocking chair. With strange symmetry, the corrective punishment (whaling) will force the beau to sit on his stomach, the way the accused Scissors Swallower sat on hers (shark). We encounter the same sexual trope, sans springs or sea creatures, in a poem titled “A Parlour Secret” that circulated through various magazines and newspapers between the 1890s and mid 1910s (I found it in the Chicago Evening Post and Australia’s Mercury and Weekly Courier, to take just two examples): Why does the family rocking chair    That’s silent all the weekOn Sunday nights in mad despair    Proceed to mildly squeak? Whenever father rocks it will    In gentle swaying go,It never seems to squeak until    The daughter has a beau. Ah! Who that knows the cause would dare    To spoil the lovers’ fun?“Two souls with but a single chair;Two forms that rock as one.”33 Adopting a cliché from Friedrich Halm’s play Ingomar, The Barbarian, this poem reduces spiritual ecstasy to physical intimacy.34 I do not know enough about sex in the nineteenth century to wager on the act. Furtive lap sitting? A variation of the Kama Sutra’s love swing? Or is the rocking chair a sonic euphemism, providing a more palatable source for the squeaking? We lack a history of the bodily techniques associated with springs and rocking furniture: a creaking mattress in the in-laws’ guestroom; the childhood taboo against jumping on beds; or murderous recliners. But I do know that upholstery springs and rocking chairs furnished Victorian erotic writing. For example, this scene from The Romance of Lust, published in the 1870s: There was a perfectly shaded walk in the east shrubbery leading from the greenhouse down to a most charming summer house overlooking the very finest prospect, and perfectly secure from all observation. It was furnished very appropriately for amorous purposes, the couches being low, broad, and with patent spring-cushions. In the sequel it was the scene of many a bout of lubricity.35 Or, let me proffer this creepy excerpt from the third volume of My Secret Life, an obsessive, million-word, highly pornographic “memoir” that began appearing in the late 1880s: By the sofa was an American rocking-chair, the first I ever recollect having seen. Matilda began rocking herself in it, I rocked the chair violently for her and then as far as it would go, back and held it there, then rapidly I pushed one hand up her petticoats.36 Rocking chairs (and seats that rocked) carried an erotic charge in the nineteenth century, approximating, perhaps, a tumble dryer before its time. For a certain type of Victorian mind, easy chairs made easy women. Polite society sat erect. Some American commentators found these English regimens laughable. “I am told that the English nation sit bolt upright, like mummies”, wrote the humorist Fanny Fern in “A Chapter on Chairs” for The London Reader (1864). “Poor creatures! No wonder they are so red in the face.”37 While rocking chairs had been around America since the early eighteenth century, they did not fully enter the European consciousness until the 1830s, when travelers to the United States began commenting on their ubiquity. “In America”, wrote James Frewin for The Architectural Magazine and Journal in 1838, “it is considered a compliment to give the stranger the rocking-chair as a seat; and when there is more than one kind in the house, the stranger is always presented with the best.” Not everyone appreciated the gesture. That same year, in her Retrospect of Western Travel, the British social theorist Harriet Martineau stops off at a small inn between Stockbridge and Albany, New York. She describes “the disagreeable practice” of rocking in chairs and finds “ladies who are vibrating in different directions, and at various velocities, so as to try the head of a stranger almost as severely as the tobacco chewer his stomach.”38 A similar description later appeared in the Michigan Farmer and other magazines, echoing both the rocker’s nicotinic effects and asynchronicity; the author calls rocking chairs a woman’s “nervine, a narcotic, a stimulant”, and describes “a woman photographer [who] would sit in a rocker with a camera in her lap and placidly photograph a group of rocking women in rockers of various gaits”.39 Once Martineau gets going, she has trouble stopping. “How this lazy and ungraceful indulgence ever became general, I cannot imagine”, she laments, before painting America as the Land of the Rocker: When American ladies come to live in Europe, they sometimes send home for a rocking-chair. A common wedding present is a rocking-chair. A beloved pastor has every room in his house furnished with a rocking-chair by his grateful and devoted people. It is well that the gentlemen can be satisfied to sit still, or the world might be treated with the spectacle of the sublime American Senate in a new position; its fifty-two senators see-sawing in full deliberation, like the wise birds of a rookery in a breeze.40 Charles Dickens made a parallel observation in his American Notes, finding a rocking chair aboard a steamship on the Connecticut river: “But even in this chamber there was a rocking-chair. It would be impossible to get on anywhere, in America, without a rocking-chair.”41 (Note the symmetry here: Dickens in a travelogue finds a rocker on a steamer; Tubb reads in his rocker to approximate the pitch and roll of steamboat journeys.) The novelist seems to appreciate his seesawing surroundings, but it is tough to tell what exactly gets Martineau’s goat. The fact that the parlor women are vibrating? While we often associate springs with energetic release (trampolines and Tigger’s tail, Pogo sticks and prank nut cans stuffed with a tubular snake) they can also dampen motion (shock absorbers) or cancel it altogether. In the mid-nineteenth century, upholstery springs were introduced into train seating to absorb the jolts of rail transit on passengers’ nervous systems: a public health concern, connected to both sexual and physical disturbances. “A compulsive link of this kind between railway-travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement”, wrote Sigmund Freud in his essay on infantile sexuality.42 Adults and adolescents “will react to rocking or swinging with a feeling of nausea, will be terribly exhausted by a railway journey, or will be subject to attacks of anxiety”. And, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch chronicled, The Lancet released a pamphlet on The Influence of Railway Travelling on Public Health in 1862, describing an ergonomic antidote to wobbling train cars . . . namely, more rocking: The springs of railway carriages, the horse-hair seats (and the elastic floor of cork supplied to the new royal carriage), are recognitions of the principle, which the habitual traveler may wisely extend for himself by many expedients, if he keeps in view what he has to attain—elasticity. The disagreement over the costs and benefits of spring seating extended into rocking chairs too. In 1896, the Christian Observer reported that the chair’s oscillations have “a wonderful effect in stimulating the gastro-intestinal peristalsis”.43 But a 1905 article in Health described a condition known as rocking-chair spine: “the rocking-chair is an unmixed evil . . . [which] begins its deadly mission very early in the lives of its victims . . . [it] perpetually changes the equilibrium of the body and agitates the circulation”, argued William S. Birge. “It injures the eyes, as it continually changes the focus of whatever one may be looking at. It so disturbs the brain that physicians have forbidden mothers and nurses to rock delicate babies.”44 An Uneasy Chair (Coda) When did my obsession — with a chair I had never sat in, in a painting only seen online — begin? Sometime during quarantine, when I sought images of closed domestic worlds, lives lived unobserved, like ours had suddenly become. Vilhelm Hammershøi’s interiors fit the criteria. Mute and soft, they are washed in the raw light that I only know from Nordic winters. Like so many of his other works, Hammershøi painted Interior with Young Man Reading (1898) in his apartment: Strandgade 30, Copenhagen, where he lived with his wife, Ida Ilsted, for eleven years, beginning in 1898. But as with any good neurosis, perhaps its roots were always there — those stackable blue chairs of American schools, with their four steel bolts and slotted bodies . . . did that particular constellation of sensation and support, known to administrators as the Virco 9000, prime me to fixate, decades later, on the interface between human back and chair splat? No. At least, as far as I’m aware: we would need the comfort of an analyst’s couch to get at those depths. It’s something in particular about this chair in Hammershøi’s painting, the way it demands attention. And the young man’s refusal to use the writing table, almost as if he is backing away. I see myself in him, typing from an armchair, avoiding the desk where I pay my bills. Sure, the light might be better for him by the window. Or perhaps he needs to lean into his novel with more movement and elasticity than those springless ribs allow. Watch how desk and chair (dark wood, pink cushion, white paint) mirror the gradient of his body (dark suit, pink face, white collar). And how the chair looks upon two anatomical drawings, as if trying to study their human form. When I behold this painting, I do not know whether to focus on the boy’s face or his furniture. This reader is completely absorbed; but the chair, alert. Does it want to reciprocate my gaze? Do you feel that too? I think he made the right choice: not sitting. This same chair shows up in other paintings. And those who succumb seem to suffer. When Ida occupies it, she bends over an unseen task, and the deep focus and vertiginous vanishing point expand the apartment in a terrifying way, the indoor version of Van Gogh’s “Wheatfield with Crows”, as if gravity might pull her through the open door should she try to stand. I’ve gone so far as to try and trace its movements, how a chair like that (of British design) traveled to Denmark at the century’s turn. The form leads to George Hepplewhite’s 1789 The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide, which contained furniture patterns to “unite elegance and utility, and blend the useful with the agreeable”.45 Its clean lines and shield back updated styles associated with Louis XVI and the Adam brothers, Hepplewhite’s precursors. Thomas Sheraton — whose own Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book (1791-93, revised 1802) reads like a geometry textbook, full of words such as cyma and mixtilinear — took a shot at this model: “if we compare some of the designs, particularly the chairs, with the newest taste, we shall find that this work has already caught the decline, and perhaps, in a little time, will suddenly die in the disorder”.46 Nothing like that happened, however, and the shield became a Hepplewhite classic. But Hammershøi’s paintings make me wonder if oblivion could have been a kinder fate. As for Denmark, I cannot say if this style was common or unique (similar chairs show up in the work of Ida’s brother, Peter Ilsted, but there they are the joyous furniture of family life). I wrote a letter to the Danish Design Museum and a kind curator phoned the leading expert on Danish furniture from 1840-1920, Mirjam Gelfer-Jørgensen. She examined the chair and found no markings or signatures of the manufacturer. “Apparently no one knows who produced them”, ends the email. I also learned that English chairs were so desired by eighteenth-century Danes that the state banned importation. Workshops popped up soon after, imitating the designs of Thomas Chippendale. I imagine Hepplewhite proved popular too. I tried to track the chair itself and had better luck. It now lives next to its painted form in Copenhagen’s Hirschsprung Collection. A curator told me that Hammershøi had left the chair to a janitor in Bredgade, from whom Emil Hannover, the Hirschsprung’s first director, purchased it in 1916. My guess is that the small sign on the seat base, seen in this photograph, says “no sitting” in Danish. But should the tourist do so anyway, what could she learn? To where would she be transported? Or is there no motion here? The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 3, 2021

Hunter Dukes

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:40.076196

the-skeptical-pilgrim-melvilles-clarel

The Skeptical Pilgrim Melville’s Clarel By Jeff Wheelwright May 13, 2020 Weighing in at a colossal 18,000 lines, Herman Melville’s Clarel (1876), which centres on the theological musings of a group of pilgrims touring the Holy Land, is not for the faint-hearted. Jeff Wheelwright explores the knot of spiritual dilemmas played out in the poem and its roots in Melville’s trip to the Middle East two decades earlier. In October 1856, Herman Melville left the tinted hills of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for a lengthy excursion to Europe and the Holy Land. Just thirty-seven years old, Melville was a half-broken man. He suffered from headaches, sciatica, eyestrain, crushed hopes — in a word, burnout. His epic Moby-Dick had failed to catch on in 1851, and his next novel, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, was head-scratching at best, a laughing stock at worst. Subsequent short stories were tepidly received. Earlier in 1856 Melville had been able to squeeze out a final novel, The Confidence-Man, which was his tenth work of prose in thirteen years. The novel is a string of disjointed vignettes about hypocrisy and flimflam, a bitter rosary to brood on. The swashbuckler of the South Seas, the prodigy who had produced Typee and Omoo, was in the past. Herman Melville had pretty much decided to give up writing. The trip was proposed and largely underwritten by his father-in-law, who worried, along with everyone in the family, about Herman’s physical and mental health. But if Melville’s spirit was half broken, the other half awakened when he was on his own again at sea, where he’d always been comfortable. The first entry in his maritime journal was: “Conversations with the Colonel on fixed fate &c. during the passage”.1 The conversational matter (with one G. C. Rankin, an anti-Christian polemicist) indicates his mixed state of mind at this period and also the philosophizing that, more than any other factor, had eroded and killed Melville’s popularity with American readers. “Fixed fate” refers to a line in Milton’s Paradise Lost about the paradoxes of “fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute” within the Puritan matrix of faith.2 On the one hand, a person’s moral fate, her ending in heaven or hell, was predetermined, and only God knew the outcome for sure. On the other hand, God, in creating human beings, had granted them the freedom to choose. There was a ray of light for human agency. How, therefore, was one to act in life? Melville, we know, liked nothing better than to wade into these waters, but the stakes were high — not for him the sanctimonious talk or what he called the “parrot-lore” of conventional piety.3 Although the slant and depth of his religious convictions have been long debated, no critic doubts that Melville was obsessed with the implications of religion. Thus Athens, Rome, and the other places on his to-do list were all very fine, but Palestine was where the writer meant to test his understanding of faith in the landscape where Judeo-Christianity had emerged. The impressions he filed away of his brief stay would lead to his most ambitious and difficult work, the narrative poem Clarel, published twenty years after the voyage. At 18,000 lines, Clarel is the longest skein of verse in American literature and as knotty as the pasture pines of Pittsfield. Landing at Glasgow, Melville traveled next to Liverpool, where his friend and mentor Nathaniel Hawthorne was serving as the American consul. Hawthorne’s record of the Liverpool visit is justly famous and proleptically echoes one of the concerns of Clarel. After walking for a while on the beach the two writers sat down and talked. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief . . . . It is strange how he persists — and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before — in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting.4 On the spectrum between atheism and devotion, Hawthorne situated Melville to the left, toward unbelief, but a non-believer would not care what happened to him after he died. “Annihilation” was shorthand for the direst punishment administered in hell. However, if Melville had “pretty much made up his mind” to that eventuality, he was implying that he could choose — that it was up to him whether he would be saved or damned. Melville’s anti-hero Ahab had claimed the same power over his own fate. A true Calvinist would say this was more free will than God would allow. Shipboard into the Mediterranean, Melville seemed to brighten with the warming winter sun. After passing through the Greek islands, he spent some days exploring Constantinople and was greatly stimulated by the mosques, fortifications, esplanades, and barges. Also the seediness and bustle in the streets of the Ottoman capital made him anxious; he clutched his wallet against pickpockets and sought the highest ground and most sweeping views. He surveyed the formerly Christian city from its topmasts, as it were. Thence to Alexandria and his first taste of the sands of the Middle East. The Pyramids bowled Melville over. His journal sputters, stops, and starts again as he strives to make sense of the mysterious structures. He decided they were the preternatural afterbirth of Jehovah, the signs of a God who had issued from the imagination of ancient Egyptian priests, but “for no holy purpose . . . . Terrible mixture of cunning and awful”5. Climbing, as was his wont, to the top of a pyramid, he compared the desert at its base with an immense ocean billow that would not break, and he became dizzy and frightened. From this moment onward the unfeeling vastness of the sea, which Melville knew well, and of the desert were married in his poetic vocabulary. As the critic Helen Vendler observes: “In the desert, as in the sea, human scale is lost, and the mind grapples for a larger scale by which to measure both life and thought.”6 The desert was deeply dismaying to Melville. In his journal and later in Clarel, Melville speculates that God’s embrace had squeezed the life and greenery out of the landscape, leaving stones and desolation as the environmental cost of monotheism — “Is the desolation of the land the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity?”7. It is due to comments like these that some Melvillians find the author irreligious.8 Exhibit A in that school of thought is sacrilegious Captain Ahab raging on the deck, but just as important to the question of Melville’s religiosity are the earnest, prolix pilgrims who debate one another in the wasteland of Clarel. The full title is Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Before taking up its scheme, we should consider that Melville, cantering with a guide into Jerusalem in January 1857, arrived at a time of fervent European and American interest in Palestine. The Ottoman Turks who controlled the region had opened up the holy places to the West, a concession they granted in exchange for military support against anti-Ottoman forces in Egypt. Although Holy Land tourism has been popular ever since, most present-day tourists lack the intellectual zeal and moneyed curiosity of nineteenth-century expeditionaries such as the Americans Mark Twain, Ulysses S. Grant, and the young Teddy Roosevelt, and the Europeans Chateaubriand, Disraeli, Thackeray, Flaubert, and Gogol. This was not leisure travel. Poor, gritty, and, outside the towns, lawless, the Holy Land all but guaranteed an adventure. Yet the travelogues stuck to the beaten paths so predictably that in 1852 a British newspaper groused: “Oh! Another book about the East. If you’ve read one, you’ve read them all. The same Arabs, the same camels . . . . ”9 Melville was unusual for a literary visitor; his journalizing was terse, jagged, and intended only for himself. When he got home, a couple of his relatives were bewildered when he wrote nothing up about Palestine. There is a subset of Holy Land literature that we may call sacred geography. Christians, many of them clerics, and especially Protestants, who tended to treat the Bible as factually accurate text, journeyed there in order to experience the places that had emotional meaning for them. It is a powerful thing to have a religious place put into one’s mind perhaps in childhood, and to hear it addressed over and over in church, this shrine or village anchoring events humdrum or passion-filled, and later for one to resolve to see that site in person, in the hope, finally, of feeling its sacred power. Especially erudite pilgrims — for example the Anglican priest Henry Baker Tristram, who visited Palestine in 1863 — applied their knowledge of the Bible not simply to the shrines but also to the geological and biological features of the Holy Land. The skeptical era of Darwin and Comte having begun, pilgrims like Tristram labored to reconcile the truths of Scripture with contemporary science. Herman Melville would pick up on all these currents later — but for now in his journal he tried to steady himself as Jerusalem’s sights, sounds, and smells buffeted his sensibilities: In pursuance of my object, the saturation of my mind with the atmosphere of Jerusalem, offering myself up a passive subject, and no unwilling one, to its melancholy [sic] weird impressions, I always rose at dawn & walked without the walls. Not so far as escaping the pent-up air within, was concerned was I singular here.10 Thoughts in the Via Dolorosa — women panting under burdens — men with melancholy faces.11 The city besieged by army of the dead — cemeteries all around. — 12 The mind cannot but be sadly & suggestively affected with the indifference of Nature & Man to all that makes the spot sacred to the Christian. Weeds grow upon Mount Zion; side by side in impartiality appear the shadows of church & mosque, and on Olivet [the Mount of Olives] every morning the sun indifferently ascends over the Chapel of the Ascension.13 Wandering among the tombs — till I began to think myself one of the possessed with devils.14 The strange arches, cisterns, &c you come upon about Jerusalem — every day discovered something new in this way.15 I looked along the hill side of Gihon over against me, & watched the precipitation of the solemn shadows of the city towers flung far down to the bottom of the pool of Gihon [Gihon Spring was the main water source of the ancient city], and higher up the haunted darkened valley my eye rested on the cliff-girt basin, haggard with riven old olives, where the angel of the Lord smote the army of Sennacherib.16 Inside the walls are many vacant spaces, overgrown with the horrible cactus.17 The Old Connecticut man wandering about with tracts &c — knew not the language. — hopelessness of it — his lonely batchelor [sic] rooms . . . 18 We don’t know what Melville expected of Jerusalem. He seems claustrophobic and at times even alarmed, yet he also keeps a sharp eye out for idiosyncratic human behavior. He must have befriended the “Old Connecticut man” who was passing out religious tracts, or else he could not have known about the man’s dour living quarters. The fellow blossoms into a memorable character in Clarel, an addled evangelist who rides a donkey to the Dead Sea. In the Old City of Jerusalem today, throngs of natives and foreigners make a hugely distracting river of color, but one readily spots the visitors who are not all in their right minds: For instance, the youngish man with Jesus-length blond hair, in bare feet and white robe, whom I saw carrying a cross in Muristan in the Christian Quarter one day in 2011, and again, in 2019, this time sans cross, when he attended the Catholic Easter mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Israeli psychiatrists have documented many cases of so-called Jerusalem syndrome, whereby tourists — dehydrated, disoriented, and overwhelmed with emotion — claim to be biblical figures. Scores of people have to be treated every year, usually recovering rapidly or at least becoming well enough to be sent home. Less common but more serious are psychotic eruptions entailing violence and self-mutilation. Fundamentalist American Protestants appear to be most at risk for developing Jerusalem syndrome. “It is an odd fact that many Americans who arrive at Jerusalem are either lunatics or lose their mind thereafter”, remarked J. E. Hanauer, a writer and Anglican canon who grew up in the city during the latter half of the nineteenth century.19 During his stay, Melville returned more than once to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was and still is a confusing, cavernous amalgam of theme park and holy of holies. The putative site of Christ’s tomb lies only yards from the putative site of the Crucifixion, just two of the shrines enclosed within the domed space. Christianity’s schismatic denominations have carved out zones in the church where each practices its rites. The leading officiants are the Greek Orthodox, the Roman Catholics, and the Armenian Apostolics, with lesser roles for the Syriacs, Copts, and Ethiopians. The Catholic Church is the sole representative of Western Christianity; the others are Eastern Orthodox. At times it’s hard to know where to turn. As competing liturgies and processions snake through the pilgrims and gawkers, incense wafts, cell phones swivel and flash, and tourist guides strain to be heard in a dozen languages. Melville’s strongest comment about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was: “a sort of plague-stricken splendor reigns in the painted and mildewed walls . . . . All is glitter and nothing is gold. A sickening cheat”.20 He was repulsed by the hucksters and hawkers, the successors to the money changers who had infuriated Jesus. More importantly, he could not accept that Christ’s body was pulled down from a wooden cross that three centuries later the emperor’s mother uncovered just over there, at Golgotha, its grim rock conveniently at hand, and that his body was laid to rest in a cave that once was located just over here. The miraculous reappearances of the cross and burial cave prime the true believer for the even more miraculous disappearance: that of the Resurrection. Permitted in small groups, the worshipers duck inside the Edicule, the marbled tomb. Melville was stung by “the ineloquence of the bedizened slab . . . like entering a lighted coffin”.21 But why then did he keep coming back to the church “almost every day”?22 After a few days in the city he joined a horse party and ventured into the desert. With Arab guides and armed guards, Melville and his companions went down to Jericho and the Dead Sea and returned to Jerusalem by way of the renowned Mar Saba monastery and Bethlehem. It was a standard, three-day, Holy Land loop of some thirty-five miles in all. Melville’s journal actively disparages the landscape: Barrenness of Judea: Whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape — bleached — leprosy — encrustation of curse — old cheese — bones of rocks, — crunched, knawed, & mumbled — mere refuse & rubbish of creation —23 And: Judea is one accumulation of stones — Stony mountains & stony plain; stony torrents & stony roads; stony walls & stony fields, stony houses & stony tombs; stony eyes & stony hearts. Before you, & behind you are stone. Stones to right & stones to left.24 The Dead Sea was no better: — foam on beach & pebbles like slaver of mad dog — smarting bitter of the water, — carried the bitter in my mouth all day — bitterness of life — thought of all bitter things — Bitter is it to be poor & bitter, to be reviled, & Oh bitter are these waters of Death, thought I . . . . Rainbow over Dead Sea — heaven, after all, has no malice against it . . . . 25 Melville’s report of the water is accurate. Though invitingly clear, the Dead Sea scalds the mouth like acrid chili peppers. But its lovely color seems to have escaped him, a magenta-blue offsetting the rusty mountains of Moab on the eastern shore. Having stayed two weeks, Melville was bound next for Italy and the softer landscapes of art museums. His overall judgment in sailing away was: “No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine — particularly Jerusalem.”26 He was very glad to be through with the place, it appears, though the place was not yet through with him. Melville told his family members the trip had revived him. If so, his work remained at an impasse. For a few years he tried the lecture circuit, where he expounded on travel, Italian art, and the South Seas, but his heart wasn’t in it. During the Civil War years, he published his first book of poems, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. Except for Billy Budd, his posthumously discovered short story, Melville’s writing following his pilgrimage eschewed prose for the constrained format of poetry, its compressions mirroring the squeezes upon his life. Giving up on country living, Melville moved with his wife, Lizzie, and four children back to Manhattan in 1863. Money was tight, his drinking was a problem, and Lizzie nearly left him. His eighteen-year-old son Malcolm committed suicide in 1867. The year before, he had taken a job on the docks of New York as a customs inspector, a post that he held for nineteen years. Six days a week he would check the manifests of ships against their cargos and verify the import duties owed. He became an Ishmael-like figure, “grim about the mouth”, in the same haunts where he had introduced Ishmael to readers in 1851. But Melville meanwhile began to buy books about the Levant, and in his free time, unbeknownst to anyone, he started to compose Clarel. The plot of the poem is simple. Clarel (pronounced CLAR-el) is a young seminarian whose faith has faltered. He arrives in Jerusalem. At loose ends, he wanders among the holy sites. He joins a circle of three other Americans and an Englishman, who are all older and more confident in their religious beliefs, or critiques, as the case may be. At the same time, Clarel falls in love with an American girl, Ruth, whose Puritan father has converted to Judaism and moved the family to Palestine. The youths’ happiness is not to be. The story unfolds over four parts: “Jerusalem”, “The Wilderness”, “Mar Saba”, and “Bethlehem”. The first section introduces the core characters, and the other three follow Clarel and a shifting troupe on a ten-day peregrination on horseback. The passive, lovelorn seminarian has much less to say than the other characters do. We meet Rolfe, thought to be Melville’s alter ego, a pilgrim whose strength (and weakness) is to examine issues from many sides; Nehemiah, the aforementioned evangelist; Vine, a magnetic figure who is probably based on Nathaniel Hawthorne; Derwent, a cheery Anglican priest, always considering the Creator in a golden light; Mortmain, a bitter revolutionary; Djalea, a gnomic Muslim; and Margoth, a pick-wielding Jewish geologist who is scornful of the untestable revelations of religion. Ten or so lesser characters are no less distinctive. Not all live to return to the holy city. Dialogue, not action, dominates Clarel. At first we’re reminded of old Western movies where long scenes take place inside a rocking stagecoach. The landscape out the window, with its scrolling mesas and peaks, is not very convincingly attached to the drama inside since obviously the actors are in a studio. Soon enough, however, Melville’s theological ruminations, biblical allusions, and historico-political commentary, dispensed as speaking parts to his cast, do connect us to the landscape, whether it is a crumbling edifice in Jerusalem or the bleak Judean wilderness. The monumental backdrop of Clarel never recedes but crowds right into the stagecoach. This trick cannot succeed unless the poet constructs metaphors tying the interior and exterior scenes together — but if Herman Melville could do one thing really well, it was to construct vigorous, compelling metaphors. Clarel, a baggy monster of a poem, is not for everyone. First, the modern reader must not be discouraged by the staggering length. She must overlook Melville’s occasionally tortured syntax in shaping a rhyme and hold fast for the relentless beat of his iambic tetrameter. Thus, during the pilgrims’ ride along the Dead Sea: Southward they file.’Tis Pluto’s parkBeslimed as after baleful flood:A nitrous, filmed and pallid mud,With shrubs to match. Salt specks they markOr mildewed stunted twigs uncleanBrushed by the stirrup, Stygean green,With shrivelled nut or apple small.27 The reader must also care about religion. As Melville’s characters navigate the fearsome desert, they discuss and question, in no particular order, reason versus faith, the twists and turns in the evolution of monotheism, human suffering and God’s tolerance for it, the commonality of the world’s creeds, the strangeness of monks, the false allure of America’s secular “progress”, and the contradictory demands of existing on earth; and much more. It’s quite a ride, and not every secular modern reader will be able to complete it. Here is a typical musing by Rolfe on the persistence of the religious instinct, which Melville clothes in a characteristically marine metaphor: Though some be hurledFrom anchor, nor a haven find;Not less religion’s ancient port,Till the crack of doom, shall be resortIn stress of weather for mankind.Yea, long as children feel affrightIn darkness, men shall fear a God;And long as daisies yield delightShall see His footprints in the sod.Is’t ignorance? This ignorant stateScience doth but elucidate —Deepen, enlarge. But though ’twere madeDemonstrable that God is not —What then? it would not change this lot:The ghost would haunt, nor could be laid.28 Melville was intent that his poem should appear during the centennial celebration of the United States. Clarel would be his reply to the cap-flinging and self-congratulation of 1876. With funding supplied by an uncle, he commissioned the publication of 350 copies, each issued in two volumes, since a single volume would have been too unwieldy. It landed with a thud, as he strongly sensed it would. “[E]minently adapted for unpopularity”, was his ironic appraisal in a letter eight years later.29 Contemporary reviewers either objected to or ignored the poem, and even after Melville’s literary reputation was revived in the 1920s, critics looked askance at Clarel, almost embarrassed for him in his late-life failure. In American Renaissance (1941), the critical study that set Melville firmly beside his peers Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Whitman, F. O. Matthiessen commented: “It would be impossible to say, from the several thousand lines of discussion between the shadowy characters, precisely what Melville himself thought . . . . Clarel is practically unreadable because of Melville’s inexplicable choice of rhymed tetrameter as the medium for philosophic meditation.”30 Clarel gradually has gained admirers and defenders. New editions of Melville’s poetry have continued to appear, including a recent Library of America volume edited by Hershel Parker, author of the seminal two-volume biography of Melville. As with all great literature, what is old can be made new again. Young researchers interested in multiculturalism have found the poem fertile ground for articles and dissertations.31 The critic Hilton Obenzinger notes that the figure of Nathan, Ruth’s father, a Jewish convert and settler, is a “proto-Zionist” who foreshadows twenty-first-century Christian Zionism.32 Obenzinger’s colleague Carolyn Karcher suggests that Melville’s poem and journal contain a “pre-history” of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.33 William Potter, in Melville’s “Clarel” and the Intersympathy of Creeds (2004), hails the poet for recognizing and respecting the world’s religious diversity.34 For all of its high-flown ideas, the story of Clarel will be, for most, something of a downer. By the end of the poem, young Clarel has lost Ruth forever without having gained a deeper hold on his faith. The other characters quietly take their leave of Jerusalem, feeling bad for him. Clarel is last seen vanishing glumly into the crowded streets. With some effort a positive message may be extracted from the epilogue, which shifts, as if to change the mood, into iambic pentameter: Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned —Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind;That like the crocus budding through the snow —That like a swimmer rising from the deep —That like a burning secret which doth goEven from the bosom that would hoard and keep;Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea,And prove that death but routs life into victory.35 We are not consoled. Though Melville honors Jesus in the poem and the rosy afterlife Jesus promised, his heart was more attuned to the Old Testament stories of sackcloth and ashes. For years Melville brooded over George Pollard, a real-life captain, whose life story informed both Moby-Dick and Clarel. In the 1820s Pollard had commanded two whaling vessels that were wrecked, the first by a sperm whale and the next by a reef. When the two men met, in 1852, a year after the publication of Moby-Dick, Pollard had been shunned and long forgotten. He was “a nobody”,36 Melville recalled, reduced to working as a night watchman on the docks of Nantucket. Impressed by the captain’s humility, Melville could not know then that his own career was headed for a crack-up and obscurity. In Clarel, Rolfe describes an unnamed captain who is full of pride, an exponent of free will. Clearly the captain was based on Pollard — both suffered the sinking of two ships, by whale and by reef, and both ended their days as night watchmen on the docks. But in this unnamed captain, so stricken by double disaster, we can see parallels too with the author’s own life.37 For Melville, however, it was not ships but books — Moby-Dick and Pierre had sunk back-to-back, sending their author, careening and adrift, to the shores of the Holy Land. The job Melville took as a customs inspector was not that different from being a security guard on the docks. And so: . . . Came the dayDire need constrained the man to paceA night patrolman on the quayWatching the bales till morning hourThrough fair and foul. Never he smiled;Call him, and he would come; not sourIn spirit, but meek and reconciled;Patient he was, he none withstood;Oft on some secret thing would brood.He ate what came, though but a crust;In Calvin’s creed he put his trust;Praised heaven, and said that God was good,And his calamity but just.38 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 13, 2020

Jeff Wheelwright

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:40.644911

eastern-sports-and-western-bodies

Eastern Sports and Western Bodies The “Indian Club” in the United States By Daniel Elkind April 1, 2020 Although largely forgotten today, exercise by club swinging was all the rage in the 19th century. Daniel Elkind explores the rise of the phenomenon in the US, and how such efforts to keep trim and build muscle were inextricably entwined with the history of colonialism, immigration, and capitalist culture. The oldest film included on the National Film Registry of the US Library of Congress features a pale boy calmly swinging a pair of wooden clubs, apparently as part of an exercise routine. Approximately twelve seconds long, Newark Athlete was directed by the Scottish inventor and early associate of Thomas Edison, William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, in collaboration with cinematographer William Heise at Edison’s laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, sometime in the late spring of 1891. Though the wooden clubs brandished by the Newark athlete in this jumpy fragment are now a thing of the past, evidence of their influence can still be seen. John Quincy Adams Ward’s celebrated Indian Hunter sculpture, for example — first installed in New York’s Central Park in 1868 — was partly modeled on a bodybuilder and club devotee named Frederick Küner, whose unusually defined physique was meant to imbue the bronze figure with mythic strength.1 The so-called “Indian clubs” credited for this defined physique may now seem like mere novelty items, but in the nineteenth century they were a staple of fitness routines and a familiar sight at athletic clubs across the United States. Unlike dumbbells and medicine balls, they also played a role beyond keeping the body trim. In England, suffragettes such as E. Sylvia Pankhurst carried them, along with long hatpins, in clashes with armed police: they proved particularly effective in getting police horses to abruptly sit down, dismounting the bobbies, and knocking off their helmets. The clubs swung by the Newark athlete, however, are a short and lightweight version developed primarily to supple the limbs, not to build muscle (or knock policemen off horses). Weighing in at around 1.5 lbs., these wieldy clubs were used mainly in early gymnastics competitions and exhibitions staged by various Turning societies — patriotic fitness groups that had their origins in early nineteenth-century Germany. These societies proudly promoted a collective, firmly Protestant spirit of fitness and graceful coordination (rather than sheer individual strength) through group routines often accompanied by music. Turning was the brainchild of an eccentric German schoolteacher named Friedrich Jahn, a nationalist who crusaded against the French and drew attention to himself by living in a cave and occasionally promenading through town in nothing but a bearskin. Also known as the “Turnvater”, Jahn had in turn been influenced by the pioneers of modern gymnastics, Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths — author of the first gymnastics manual, Gymnastik für die Jugend (1793), which was concerned not only with how to exercise but also with why one should — and Johann Basedow, a philosopher and social reformer from Hamburg who advocated a more egalitarian approach to education, consisting of a practical curriculum conducted in the vernacular. As Jahn had envisioned, the Turner movement was highly influential and spread rapidly throughout Europe and across the pond. The first Turners arrived in the United States in 1824. Though gymnastics ambassadors like Charles Follen, Francis Lieber, and Charles Beck — who published his translation of Jahn’s Deutsche Turnkunst in 1828 — were eager to demonstrate the basics to American fitness circles, the movement didn’t take off until the failed German Revolution of 1848 brought a critical mass of “forty-eighters” to New England, the Great Plains, and beyond.2 Cincinnati became the first city to build a Turnverein in 1848; Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland quickly followed suit.3 As their constituencies grew, these turning societies evolved into more than fitness clubs; they were veritable centers of German-American social, cultural, and political life. It comes as no surprise, then, that when club swinging debuted at the 1904 Summer Games in St. Louis, the US men’s team swept the field, winning gold, silver, and bronze in the new artistic gymnastics event. Edward Hennig, winner of the gold medal, belonged to the Turnverein Vorwärts in Cleveland; Emil Voigt, who took silver, was a member of the local Concordia Turnverein in St. Louis. Both performed for five full minutes with a set of 3-lb. clubs. Other German-Americans, like George Brosius of the Milwaukee Turnverein and William Reuter, a “forty-eighter” from the Turngemeinde of Davenport, Iowa, fulfilled Jahn’s vision by convincing school districts across the Midwest and beyond to make exercise a cornerstone of public education.4 In contrast to this so-called light gymnastics, the longer, heavier clubs weighed anywhere from four to twenty pounds each and were used almost exclusively by strongmen and a growing class of male middle managers to build conspicuous brawn. A key figure in the popularisation of this more individualistic and muscle-focused take on club swinging was the British health evangelist Donald Walker — author of the highly popular Victorian health guide British Manly Exercises (1834), its sequel Walker’s Manly Exercises (ca. 1837), and the monumentally titled Exercises for Ladies: Calculated to preserve and improve beauty and to prevent and correct personal defects, inseparable from constrained or careless habits: founded on physiological principles (1835). Like the health exploits of Septimus Crisparkle in Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Walker’s “laborious exertions” in particular were intended to “strengthen the human constitution”, preventing illness and purifying the body without “pouring drugs into the stomach”, allowing one to become, as the title promised, “manly”.5 Another key figure in the popularization of this particular brand of club swinging was a man going by the name of Professor Harrison. At one time considered the strongest man in England, Harrison was a “well-known English Professor of Gymnastics”6 whose enviable physique furnished all the “ocular proof” anyone needed to believe that the clubs were indeed effective. It was the witnessing in 1861 of one of Harrison’s public performances with the “mammoth war-clubs” which inspired an American named Sim Kehoe to go into business and put these muscle-building clubs into the hands of the average American. Though in many ways opposites, Turning and bodybuilding could both be described as manifestations of the Muscular Christianity movement that in part sprung from rapid urbanization. Throughout the nineteenth century, more and more Americans were moving to crowded cities, abandoning the agrarian rhythms and activities that had defined previous generations, and learning to share diminishing space with strangers. The tensions of this physical proximity gave birth to new forms of social interaction, as gyms and Turnvereins doubled as havens for immigrants and churches for new American city-dwellers. Blending religion and fitness, Thomas Hughes, the novelist whose Tom Brown at Oxford (1859) inspired the term Muscular Christianity, wrote that “the least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief that a man’s body is given to him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak [and] the advancement of all righteous causes”.7 This vision of a project of rigorous self-training translated well to American cities in which entrepreneurialism and individualism went hand in hand — and the righteous cause of making money reigned supreme. With the high demand for affordable fitness among America’s new urban populations, the time was ripe for entrepreneurs like Kehoe, the dashing young “King of Clubs”, who featured corseted ladies and muscular athletes alongside a caricature of himself in advertisements for his line of clubs with adjustable weights. Kehoe had some experience in making and selling gymnastics equipment, and threw himself headlong into the role of strength-training evangelist. For his philosophy, he borrowed the name “Muscular Christianity” and claimed bankers and businessmen — even generals and statesmen — among his many clients, rather than the usual denizens of sports clubs. At the conclusion of the Civil War, Kehoe sent a set of rosewood clubs and dumbbells to Ulysses S. Grant, as evidenced by a reply from the general, dated April 9, 1866, reprinted, as a matter of course, in Kehoe’s manual. The 1860s were a time of great enthusiasm for Indian clubs in particular and male strength training in general. “These clubs act like an incantation,” crowed American Educational Monthly in 1864: You can not touch them, you can not lift them for the simplest exercise, without causing strength to flow into every member of your body as naturally and irresistibly as water into the conduit . . . New systems of muscles seem to shoot out from your shoulder-blades, enabling you to do, almost without effort, what you could not dream of doing before.8 The Olympic Club in San Francisco, founded in 1860, was home to athletes and strongmen like Charles Bennett (the “California Hercules”) and Horace Fletcher, an Indian club enthusiast who is today remembered — if at all — as the man who “chewed his way to greatness”, founding a school of mastication that came to be known as Fletcherism: his patented technique of chewing your food exactly thirty-two times. William James immortalized him in The Varieties of Religious Experience as that quintessentially American character, the self-assured prophet of New Thought or “the religion of healthy-mindedness,”9 and even recommended mindful eating to his brother Henry, who suffered from digestive issues. In Henry James: The Mature Master, Sheldon Novick calls Fletcherism “a twentieth-century American mingling of yogic practice and Protestant optimism.”10 Fletcher had emerged from his own health struggles convinced that people often “think themselves into their graves” instead of taming their minds and bodies through the application of strict discipline.11 As he explained to a journalist: I was once a person who thought that health and disease, misery and happiness, were all pretty much matters of chance, haphazard-happenings like dice-throwing in the game of life — with the dice loaded at times. Disease and pains, it seemed to me, were afflictions, perhaps punishments for sins (our own or our progenitors), but they were scattered among the children of men in the most casual way imaginable. Then there came my great awakening — my conversion or illumination, shall I say? [. . .] From that time to this, I have known that everything that happened to me was my own fault, or my own reward.12 It may not be altogether surprising that, across the pond, one of Fletcher’s most dedicated disciples was Franz Kafka, a writer obsessed with the idea that everything was his own fault, and who, when he wasn’t at his desk at the insurance institute in Prague, subscribed to just about every popular wellness fad going — including Jørgen Peter Müller’s fifteen-minute system and Eugene Sandow’s body sculpting — attempting to transform himself into one of Max Nordau’s “Muscular Jews” in the privacy of his own room.13 Indeed, many nineteenth-century health and fitness systems eagerly reproduced testimonials from ordinary merchants and bank clerks (such as Josef K.) who’d achieved stunning results. Unlike the Turner movement, which emphasized the collective, these approaches were both more personal, and more atomized. Sim Kehoe’s illustrated manual The Indian Club Exercises (1866), for instance, was specifically addressed to aspiring managers whose enthusiasm for this form of mortification of the flesh was rooted in the fear of a generalized and creeping “deformity” — in short, that the “civilized” now suffered from all the hard-won benefits of civilization, becoming more sedentary and physically attenuated, and therefore less vital than their ancestors, not to mention the “savages”14 to whom they so often compared themselves. “Bodily strength is a concomitant of good health,” wrote Walker, citing dubious anthropological studies, which is produced and supported by a regular supply of wholesome and nutritious food, and by active occupation. The industrious and well-fed middle classes of a civilized community may, therefore, be reasonably expected to surpass, in this endowment, the miserable savages, who are never well-fed, and too frequently depressed by absolute want and all other privations.15 An impressive masculine physique was seen to demonstrate not only the virtues of a given fitness system but also the moral character of the individual. It’s not clear when exactly the clubs first arrived in the United States. Nor is it clear where and when the Turnvater Jahn first incorporated them into his system. Whether he adopted the clubs from a British army manual or some other source, it seems certain that all Western club swinging derived from colonial encounters with local wrestling traditions in the East. Though Donald Walker was largely responsible for popularizing them in the English-speaking world, perhaps the first to mention them — and to christen them Indian clubs — was the American-born Swissman Peter Heinrich Clias, in the fourth edition of his Elementary Course of Gymnastic Exercises (1825).16 Though “Indian club” isn’t exactly a misnomer, some of the clubs called by this name are now thought to descend from the large meels used in Persian Pahlevani and zourkhaneh culture, a kind of ritual gymnastics that combines pre-Islamic, Sufi, and Shia spiritual exercises. Likely arriving in the Indian subcontinent with the Mughals during the late sixteenth century, these traditions were possibly “crossbred” with local Indian grappling (Malla-yuddha) to create the hybrid we know as Pehlwani today. The British Museum owns an album known as The Manley Ragamala (1610), illustrated in the provincial Mughal style, depicting athletes with various apparatuses, one of which resembles a gada (a large mallet).17 A later version, in the Rajasthani style, clearly shows an athlete with a pair of mudgars (the heavy clubs still used today). The shorter, lighter clubs called jori in India are believed to have developed independently — from the battle mace described in ancient Sanskrit epics. Peacetime versions of jori, used by wrestlers — and eventually soldiers — for training purposes, are mentioned in print for the first time in the twelfth-century text the Manasollasa and the thirteenth-century Malla-Purana, emphasizing the clubs’ long association with masculinity and a kind of ascetic athleticism.18 Soldiers in the employ of the East India Company may have picked up club exercises from local Indian troops as early as the seventeenth century. But it wasn’t until the following centuries that these exercises became common among British colonial troops. As mortality rates for these foreigners in India soared, the overwhelmed medical staff sought to adopt new forms of bodily discipline for the troops. Seeing their patients suffering from numerous illnesses, they were induced to give local traditions a closer look. According to Conor Heffernan, wrestlers and other conspicuously muscled local specimens provided a pointed contrast to the weak and undisciplined foreigners: “Those wielding Indian clubs effectively were depicted as being in complete control of their desires”.19 Soon club swinging became standard in British army drills and the way was paved for its adoption by the public back home. Even Queen Victoria’s exasperated physician, Dr. Clark, prescribed the “frequent use of Indian Clubs” to strengthen the monarch’s arm muscles.20 For most of the nineteenth century, however, Indian club swinging (at least in its non-Turnverein varieties), like most physical training, was male-dominated. With notable exceptions like Madame Beaujeu-Hawley — who owned gyms and advocated gymnastics training for women from the 1820s on21 — and “middle-class women such as Leonora Geary, Mrs. Thomas and Madame Ferzi”, who “opened independently run Indian sceptre [ultra-light club used by women] and dancing classes for Englishwomen”,22 the fairer sex was generally encouraged to train in moderation, if at all, and to avoid becoming too strong or too muscular. Male authors like Walker, who wrote a separate guide “for Ladies”, considered feminine bodies more delicate and unruly than their own — though Walker was at least liberal enough to encourage club training in the first place. Athletes and performers who pursued physical fitness like Charmion and her “Trapeze Disrobing Act” risked being turned into a sideshow attraction.23 A photo of a lone female gymnast wielding clubs, observed by a sea of expectant male onlookers at the Sutro Baths in San Francisco circa 1915, hints at the struggle women athletes of the time faced. As Germanophobia rose and fell and rose again with the world wars, Indian clubs (which were, despite their Indian and British provenance, mainly associated with the Turner movement) largely disappeared from the gyms of the United States. Beginning as early as the 1890s, new team sports like volleyball and basketball siphoned off interest, while contact sports like football and hockey drew larger crowds (as well as radio and television audiences), ultimately eclipsing individual competition in popularity. The quaint world of the Newark athlete and his clubs receded further into the dusty background of the nineteenth century. Yet the ideas of that era would prove far more stubborn and enduring. The relationship between physical cultivation, moral virtue, and social competence — and the breathless entrepreneurialism that packages it all together — is still very much with us. The “muscle display performances” first popularized by Eugen Sandow, and still evident on gym ads the world over, equate muscles and mastery. In this conflation of “power with simple physical strength,” as Michael Anton Budd writes, there has been “a push against the prevailing experience of a machine age in which the body was in some ways less exalted as a productive resource.”24 Thus, exercising and building unreasonable muscle mass (often by the wielding of Indian clubs) might also be seen as a kind of protest among the sedentary classes — clerks and secretaries disenchanted with their abstract, time-consuming work and nostalgic for the ostensibly more meaningful, slower-paced labor of their parents and grandparents. While we haven’t seen a widespread return of Indian clubs specifically, similar resistance training techniques, such as those using Russian kettlebells, are enjoying a popular resurgence. And it seems that among today’s sedentary classes, exercise that can be practiced alone in the privacy of one’s own home, as club swinging was in the nineteenth century, is more popular than ever. These lines from an article in the Atlantic Monthly of May 1859, could have been ripped from a modern-day Peloton ad: “But how shall I find time to follow out even one of these exercises?” objects the victim of American social life. It is true, he cannot. We live so fast that we have no time to live. Nevertheless, gymnastics have one advantage adapted to our hurried habits. They afford the most exercise in the shortest time. In no other way, so easily accessible, can as much powerful motion be used in so brief a space.25 Until this conception of the body is itself superseded by biohacking or cyborgism, resistance training and patented fitness routines will remain “gymnastic pemmican”,26 and no gain will accrue without pain. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 1, 2020

Daniel Elkind

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:41.180385

how-the-english-found-cannabis

“Theire Soe Admirable Herbe” How the English Found Cannabis By Benjamin Breen February 20, 2020 In the 17th century, English travelers, merchants, and physicians were first introduced to cannabis, particularly in the form of bhang, an intoxicating edible which had been getting Indians high for millennia. Benjamin Breen charts the course of the drug from the streets of Machilipatnam to the scientific circles of London. Not long after he arrived in Machilipatnam, Thomas Bowrey began to wonder what it was that the people of Machilipatnam were smoking. The bustling port city on India’s Coromandel Coast felt fantastical to the young East India Company merchant. During the first days of his visit in 1673, Bowrey marveled at wonders like “Venomous Serpents [which] danced” to the tune of “a Musicianer, or rather Magician”, and “all Sortes of fine Callicoes . . . curiously flowred”.1 Above all, Bowrey was most fascinated by the effects of an unfamiliar drug. The Muslim merchant community in the city was, as Bowrey put it, “averse [to] . . . any Stronge [alcoholic] drinke”. Yet, he noted, “they find means to besott themselves Enough with Bangha and Gangah”, i.e. cannabis. Gangah, though “more pleasant”, was imported from Sumatra (and as such was “Sold at five times the price”), whereas Bangha, “theire Soe admirable herbe”, was locally grown. The word Bangha came to be more commonly transliterated as bhang, and nowadays generally refers specifically to an edible preparation (usually a drink). It is not clear whether Bowrey uses the word with such a specific meaning in mind but either way it is this liquid form, “the most pleasant way of takeinge it”, which he opts to experiment with, as opposed to smoking it, which he describes (with perhaps some trepidation) as a “a very speedy way to be besotted”. Bowrey initially compared the effects of the drug to alcohol. Yet it seemed that bhang’s properties were more complex, “Operat[ing] accordinge to the thoughts or fancy” of those who consumed it. On the one hand, those who were “merry at that instant, shall Continue Soe with Exceedinge great laughter”, he wrote, “laughinge heartilie at Every thinge they discerne”. On the other hand, “if it is taken in a fearefull or Melancholy posture”, the consumer could “seem to be in great anguish of Spirit”. The drug seemed to be a kind of psychological mirror that reflected — or amplified — the inner states of consumers. Small wonder, then, that when Bowrey resolved to try it, he did so while hidden in a private home with “all dores and Windows” closed. Bowrey explained that he and his colleagues feared that the people of Machilipatnam would “come in to behold any of our humours thereby to laugh at us”.2 Bowrey’s account of the resulting effects is worth quoting at length: It Soon tooke its Operation Upon most of us, but merrily, Save upon two of our Number, who I suppose feared it might doe them harme not beinge accustomed thereto. One of them Sat himself downe Upon the floore, and wept bitterly all the Afternoone; the Other terrified with feare did runne his head into a great Mortavan Jarre, and continued in that posture 4 hours or more; 4 or 5 of the number lay upon the Carpets (that were Spread in the roome) highly Complementinge each Other in high terms, each man fancyinge himselfe noe lesse then an Emperour. One was quarralsome and fought with one of the wooden Pillars of the Porch, untill he had left himself little Skin upon the knuckles of his fingers.3 Reckless self-experimentation with drugs is sometimes assumed to be a modern practice. Accounts like Bowrey’s disabuse us of this notion. Bowrey and his merchant friends were plainly interested in bhang as a recreational intoxicant, even if three of Bowrey’s group seem to have found the experience to be less than optimal — to put it mildly. Bowrey, who would later author the first English dictionary of the Malay language, was what his contemporaries called a “philosophical traveler”.4 His interest in cannabis lay not only in its recreational value but in its “curiosity” as a wondrous substance with hidden properties. He was also keenly interested in discovering substances with the potential to be commodified. However, converting a drug like cannabis into a global commodity was not easy. The drug was embedded in a local spiritual and cultural framework — Bowrey himself seems to have viewed it as a distinctively Muslim substance. The England of Bowrey’s time was shot through with paranoia and prejudice relating to fears of both Catholic conspirators and Muslim (specifically, Ottoman Turkish) invaders. Nevertheless, forging alliances with both Portuguese Catholics and Muslims was essential for British merchants seeking a foothold in the East Indies. Bowrey’s primary contact in Machilipatnam had been “Petro Loveyro, an antient Portuguees”, who Bowrey said he came to “[know] very well.” Petro, along with Bowrey’s Muslim bodyguard, may have played a role in Bowrey’s introduction to cannabis. Even if these religious biases were overcome, a final challenge was in store for a drug like cannabis. How to prove, conclusively, that it had any value as either a medicine or as a recreational high? Assessing the “occult causes” of a drug’s virtues came to be a signature goal of the Royal Society and of early modern natural philosophy as a whole. It was a goal buoyed by Iberian-mediated links to pharmacological knowledge in the colonies. But it was also one that depended on the erasure of these links. The sorts of witnesses that the Royal Society deemed trustworthy, after all, tended to be elite, Protestant, and British. Too strong a reliance on figures like Petro Loveyro, or Bowrey’s unnamed bodyguard, was epistemologically unacceptable. On both a cultural and a chemical level, British scientists sought to “purify” pharmaceuticals of their Iberian Catholic, indigenous, tropical, or colonial roots. Medieval Christian and Muslim travelers such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta expected to find marvels along the edges of their mental maps, spinning tales of roc’s eggs, “mellified man”, or elixirs of life. Some medieval commentators even speculated that tropical drugs and spices were fragments from the Garden of Eden, making them items of everyday commerce that were somehow also imbued with an aspect of the sacred.5 In the sixteenth century, however, we encounter a new emphasis on the experimental investigation of Indies drugs, one spearheaded in the Portuguese empire by Garcia da Orta and in the Spanish by the physicians Nicolás Monardes and Francisco Hernández. As with the simultaneously occurring transformations in cosmology and physics, these investigative works demonstrated a newfound interest in “explaining the appearances” of wondrous tropical phenomena — not just reporting marvels, but seeking to demystify them. Francisco Hernández, for instance, lavished attention on describing the wonders of the drugs, poisons, and antidotes he encountered in the colony of New Spain. His was a totalizing mission — to document the natural history of Mexico in its entirety and, by seeing the thousands of discrete naturalia involved as part of a larger system, to understand it in a new way.6 Others focused on phenomena that broke down the boundaries of existing European epistemologies. They fixated on fruits that could dissolve the iron in a knife, leaves with “miraculous” powers to poison or heal, and woods and stones that glowed in the dark. Scientists today hunt for particles that disprove their theories of the fundamental laws of nature; early modern natural philosophers searched for drugs that did the same. The key point of contact for introducing the mysteries of cannabis to England appears to have been not Bowrey but another English East India Company merchant, Robert Knox. In the 1670s, Knox fled from years of captivity in the kingdom of Kandy in the interior of Sri Lanka by piloting a stolen sloop along the Dutch-controlled coast. Parched with thirst and floating through hostile territory, Knox and a fellow escapee were forced to drink “[p]onds of rain water . . . so thick and muddy, that the very filth would hang in our Beards . . . by which means . . . we used often to be Sick of violent Fevers and Agues”. Remembering his brush with death, Knox concluded that he would have died were it not for the anti-nausea effects of a certain South Asian antidote —cannabis. “At length we learned an Antidote and Counter-Poyson against the filthy venemous water, which so operated by the blessing of God, that after the use thereof we had no more Sickness”, Knox would recall. “It is only a dry leaf: they call it in Portugueze Banga . . . and this we eat Morning and Evening upon an empty Stomach. It intoxicates the Brain, and makes one giddy”.7 After Knox reached London safely in September 1680, he retained a taste for this intoxicating “Counter-Poyson” and found a source able to procure it back home. We know this because, on November 7, 1689, Robert Hooke met with Knox at a London coffee house to obtain a sample of what Hooke called the “intoxicating leaf and seed, by the Moors called Ganges, in Portug[uese] Banga, in Chingales Consa”. Hooke added in his diary that the drug was reported to him as being “wholesome, though for a time it takes away the memory and understanding”.8 On December 18, 1689, Hooke delivered a lecture to the Royal Society, describing his administration of the drug to an unnamed “patient” (perhaps Knox, or even Hooke himself).9 “The Dose of it is about as much as may fill a common Tobacco-Pipe”, Hooke explained, although the route of administration he tested was to grind the leaves and seeds into a fine powder, then chew and swallow them. Before long, Hooke wrote, the Patient understands not, nor remembereth any Thing that he seeth, heareth or doth, in that Extasie but becomes, as it were, a mere Natural, being unable to speak a Word of Sense; yet is he very merry and laughs and sings and speaks . . . yet he is not giddy or drunk, but walks and dances and sheweth many odd Tricks.10 Despite emphasizing this loss of “Understanding” and “Sense”, Hooke’s assessment was positive. The drug, he explained, “is so well known and experimented by Thousands, and the Person that brought it has so often experimented with it himself”, that “there is no Cause of Fear, ‘tho possibly there may be of Laughter”. Hooke concluded by noting that he was currently attempting to grow the seeds in London, and that “if it can be here produced” the plant could “prove as considerable a Medicine in Drugs, as any that is brought from the Indies”.11 Hooke’s excited remarks about cannabis’ effects reflected the high stakes of uncovering the hidden properties of drugs in the seventeenth century. If powers to heal, cause sleep, alleviate pain, or cure melancholy could be explained, then who was to say that they couldn’t also be amplified? Via the efforts of Hooke and his colleagues, the microscope and telescope had expanded the natural limits of human vision. Might it be possible that the technological modification of psychoactive drugs could allow an expansion of other human senses and faculties? In the short term, Hooke’s attempt to bring cannabis into the mainstream of British scientific culture was a failure. But with hindsight, we can see that he was not entirely wrong in predicting a great future for the drug. In the 1840s and ’50s — via a series of vivid reports from another East India Company employee, W. B. O’Shaughnessy — cannabis tinctures, resins, and extracts began to be marketed to consumers throughout the British empire. The drug was lauded by one British physician in 1842 for its “manifest effects . . . in removing languor and anxiety”.12 As with the chain of transmission that carried cannabis from the people of Machilipatnam to the house of Thomas Bowrey, and from there to the networks of a growing British empire, the role of the drug’s non-European and non-elite users had disappeared from these nineteenth-century accounts. And so too, it would appear, had any memory of the reports of Bowrey, Knox, and Hooke. When the British medical journal The Lancet discussed cannabis in 1844, it credited “the exertions of Dr. O’Shaughnessy” who, it was claimed, had “only very recently introduced” Indian cannabis to Britain.13 The history of drugs is filled with many such forgettings. Decades before O’Shaughnessy’s triumphant re-introduction of cannabis to British consumers, Hooke had written that the drug “takes away the memory”. He turned out to be right in more ways than one. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 20, 2020

enjamin Breen

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:42.233113

emma-willard-maps-of-time

Emma Willard’s Maps of Time By Susan Schulten January 22, 2020 In the 21st-century, infographics are everywhere. In the classroom, in the newspaper, in government reports, these concise visual representations of complicated information have changed the way we imagine our world. Susan Schulten explores the pioneering work of Emma Willard (1787–1870), a leading feminist educator whose innovative maps of time laid the groundwork for the charts and graphics of today. We live in an age of visual information. Infographics flood the web, driven by accessible platforms that instantly translate information into a variety of graphic forms. News outlets routinely harvest large data sets like the census and election returns into maps and graphs that profile everything from consumer preferences to the political landscape. The current proliferation of visual information mirrors a similar moment in the early nineteenth century, when the advent of new printing techniques coincided with the rapid expansion of education. Schoolrooms from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi frontier made room for the children of farmers as well as merchants, girls as well as boys. Together, these shifts created a robust and highly competitive market for school materials, including illustrated textbooks, school atlases, and even the new genre of wall maps. No individual exploited this publishing opportunity more than Emma Willard, one of the century’s most influential educators. From the 1820s through the Civil War, Willard’s history and geography textbooks exposed an entire generation of students to her deeply patriotic narratives, all of which were studded with innovative and creative pictures of information that sought to translate big data into manageable visual forms. When Willard began publishing textbooks in the 1820s, she knew the competition was fierce, full of sharp-elbowed authors who routinely accused one another of plagiarizing ideas and text. To build her brand, she designed cutting-edge graphics that would differentiate her work and catch the attention of the young. Take, for instance, her “Perspective Sketch of the Course of Empire” of 1835. By the nineteenth century, timelines had become relatively common, an innovation of the eighteenth century designed to feed growing public interest in ancient as well as modern history. First developed by Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg in the 1750s, early timelines generally charted the lives of individuals on a chronological grid, reflecting the Enlightenment assumption that history could be measured against an absolute scale of time, moving inexorably onward from zero. In 1765, Joseph Priestley drew from calendars, chronologies, and geographies to plot the lives of two thousand men between 1200 BC and 1750 AD in his popular Chart of Biography. After Priestley, timelines flourished, but they generally lacked any sense of the dimensionality of time, representing the past as a uniform march from left to right. By contrast, Emma Willard sought to invest chronology with a sense of perspective, presenting the biblical Creation as the apex of a triangle that then flowed forward in time and space toward the viewer. Commenting on her visual framework in 1835, Willard noted that individuals experience the past relative to their own lives, for “events apparently diminish when viewed through the vista of departed years.”1 In “Perspective Sketch of the Course of Empire”, she found striking ways to represent this dimensionality of time. The birth of Christ, for example, is marked with a bright light, marking the end of the first third of human history. The discovery of America separated the second (middle) from the third (modern) stage. Each “civilization” is situated not according to its geography, as on a traditional map, but according to its connection and relation to other civilizations. Some of these societies are permeable, flowing into others, while others, such as China, are firmly demarcated to denote their isolation. By studying this map, students were encouraged to see human history as a rise and fall of civilizations — an “ancestry of nations”.2 Moreover, as time flows forward the stream widens, demonstrating that history became more relevant as it unfolds and approaches the student’s own life. Historical time is not uniform but dimensional. On the one hand, this reflected her sense that time itself had accelerated through the advent of steam and rail. Traditional timelines, she found, were only partially capable of representing change in an era of rapid technological progress. Time was not absolute, but relative. On the other hand, Willard’s approach reflected her own deep nationalism, for it asked students to recognize the emergence of the United States as the culmination of human history and progress. Willard aggressively marketed her “Perspective Sketch” to American educators, believing it to be a crucial break with other materials on the market. As she confidently expressed to a friend in 1844, “In history I have invented the map”.3 She also advocated for her “map of time” as a teaching device because she strongly believed the visual preceded the verbal — that information presented to students in graphic terms would facilitate memorization, attaching images to the mind through the eyes. Willard’s devotion to visual mnemonics shaped much of her work. In the 1840s, she published another elaborate visual device, named the “Temple of Time”. Here, she attempted to integrate chronology with geography: the stream of time she had charted in the previous decade now occupied the floor of the temple, whose architecture she used to magnify perspective through a visual convention. Centuries — represented by pillars printed with the names of the era’s most prominent statesmen, poets, and warriors —diminished in size as they receded in time, turning the viewer’s attention toward recent history, as in the “Course of Empire”. But in the Temple of Time, the one-point perspective also invited students in to inhabit the past, laying out information in a kind of memory palace that would help them form a larger, coherent picture of world history. Readers, in other words, were invited into the palace, so they too could stand at moments in world history. The Temple of Time is complicated, and more than a little contrived. Yet Willard reminds readers that traditional cartography relies on the same basic conceit: In a map, great countries made up of plains, mountains, seas, and rivers, are represented by what is altogether unlike them; viz., lines, shades, and letters, on a flat piece of paper; but the divisions of the map enable the mind to comprehend, by proportional space and distance, what is the comparative size of each, and how countries are situated with respect to each other. So this picture made on paper, called a Temple of Time, though unlike duration, represents it by proportional space. It is as scientific and intelligible, to represent time by space, as it is to represent space by space.4 A map, in other words, is an arrangement of symbols into a system of meaning — and we use maps because we understand the language of signs that undergirds them. If the mapping of space was a human invention, she explained, one could also invent a means of mapping time. Willard’s creative efforts to “map time” stemmed from personal experience. Born just after the Revolution, she was part of the first generation of American women to be educated outside the home, and she chafed at the way “female education” kept more than a few areas of knowledge off limits. One of the few subjects considered suitable for both boys and girls in that era was geography, yet Willard remembered with frustration the degree to which her textbooks lacked maps. It makes sense, then, that as a young teacher in the 1810s Willard became passionate about having her pupils draw maps — not copying them (a common practice in schools for young women at the time) but rather reproducing them in rough terms from memory to demonstrate a grasp of geographical relationships. Willard’s own artistic creativity as a mapmaker was evident from the start. Her first textbook — a geography written with William Woodbridge and published in 1824 — includes a metaphorical map of the Amazon River and its tributaries which illustrates the evolution of the Roman Empire. (One can see in this early effort the prototype for her elaborate “Perspective Sketch” of the 1830s.) Willard’s creativity as an educator was equally immense. In 1819 she published a plan to publicly fund the improvement of female education, which met with more than a little resistance. Two years later, she began to implement this vision by founding the Troy Female Seminary in New York—an institution that quickly became a preeminent school for future teachers and one of the most highly regarded schools for women in the country. At Troy, Willard assumed that females were capable of studying the same subjects as their male counterparts and incorporated “masculine studies”, such as science and history, into the curriculum. Her administration of Troy, and her intensive teaching in the decade prior to and after its foundation, convinced her of the multiple failures of contemporary pedagogy and textbooks. In 1828, Willard issued the first edition of her History of the United States, or The Republic of America, a textbook so popular it would remain in print until the 1860s. One key element of the book’s success was the atlas that accompanied the text — a series of maps of the eastern US that Willard designed and executed with a former female student. In this series, each map marked particular moments or eras that either led toward or resulted from nationhood, including the landing on Plymouth Rock, the Treaty of Paris, or the late War of 1812 against Britain. Perhaps the most remarkable of these was the “introductory map”, which identified indigenous tribes through a series of geographic migrations, collapsing centuries of movement into a single image. In naming this the “introductory” map, however, Willard situated Native Americans in a prehistorical era antedating the ostensibly more significant events of European settlement. The single image she created was innovative and powerful, but it also rendered the violence of Native displacement as an inevitable prelude that gave way to the real drama of colonialism and the inevitable realization of national independence. Willard’s commitment to creative cartography, combined with her nationalism, inspired her to create a simplified American Temple of Time in the late 1840s, which revealed a firm belief in Manifest Destiny: the providential progression from the European discovery of North America in the fifteenth century to a continental empire in the present. The concept of the American Temple was interactive, framing the chronological and geographical outlines of American history to aid memorization. Students were to identify the eight geographical entities that made up the continental United States: the original thirteen colonies, New France, the Northwest Territory, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, Oregon, and the area ceded by Mexico in the 1848 treaty that ended the Mexican–American War. Students were then instructed to locate each state and territory in time by shading its existence as it became part of the country (shading the colonies as they were settled, and the states as they joined the union). If the Temple were drawn large enough, there would also be enough space along the “floor” to identify important battles. The design is complex and unwieldy, but the goal is intriguing: an interactive exercise for students to integrate history and geography in order to understand how the past had—quite literally—taken place. Willard’s final contribution to visual knowledge was perhaps the most straightforward, a “Tree of Time” that presented American history as a coherent, organic whole. There is, of course, a long tradition of presenting time as a tree (family trees being the most enduring), but Willard used the image not to represent ancestors as trunks and descendants as branches, but — rather oddly — to represent time arcing from left to right, like a timeline. She was so fond of the Tree of Time she used it to introduce all subsequent editions of her popular textbook History of the United States and even issued it on a much larger scale to be hung in classrooms. Like the Temple, the Tree presented an encompassing history of the nation that reached back past 1789 to 1492. All of North America’s colonial history merely formed the backstory to the preordained rise of the United States. The tree also strengthened a sense of coherence, organizing the chaotic past into a series of branches that spelled out the national meaning of the past. Above all, the Tree of Time conveyed to students a sense that history moved in a meaningful direction. Imperialism, dispossession, and violence was translated, in Willard’s representation, into a peaceful and unified picture of American progress. Ironically, it was the cataclysms of the Civil War that challenged Willard’s harmonious picture of history in the Tree of Time. In the 1844 edition of the Tree, President Harrison’s death marched the last branch of history. Twenty years later, Willard added a new branch marking the end of the US war against Mexico and the subsequent Compromise of 1850, seismic events which both raised and temporarily settled the sectional divisions over slavery. Even though the Civil War was well underway by the time she issued her last edition of tree, she marked the last branch as “1860”, with no mention of the bloody conflict that had engulfed the entire nation. Her accompanying narrative in Republic of America brought American history to the brink of war, but no further. Willard had come up against history itself. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 22, 2020

Susan Schulten

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:42.840433

fungi-folklore-and-fairyland

Fungi, Folklore, and Fairyland By Mike Jay October 7, 2020 From fairy-rings to Lewis Carroll’s Alice, mushrooms have long been entwined with the supernatural in art and literature. What might this say about past knowledge of hallucinogenic fungi? Mike Jay looks at early reports of mushroom-induced trips and how one species in particular became established as a stock motif of Victorian fairyland. The first recorded mushroom trip in Britain took place in London’s Green Park on October 3, 1799. Like many such experiences before and since, it was accidental. A man identified in the subsequent medical report as “J. S.” was in the habit of gathering small mushrooms from the park on autumn mornings and cooking them up into a breakfast broth for his wife and young family. But this particular morning, an hour after they had finished it, everything began to turn very strange. J. S. noticed black spots and odd flashes of colour interrupting his vision; he became disorientated and had difficulty in standing and moving around. His family were complaining of stomach cramps and cold, numb extremities. The notion of poisonous toadstools leapt to his mind, and he staggered out into the streets to seek help, but within a hundred yards he had forgotten where he was going, or why, and was found wandering in a confused state. By chance a physician named Everard Brande was passing through this part of town, and he was summoned to treat J. S. and his family. The scene he witnessed was so unusual that he wrote it up at length and published it in The Medical and Physical Journal a few months later.1 The family’s symptoms were rising and falling in giddy waves, their pupils dilated, their pulses fluttering, and their breathing laboured, periodically returning to normal before accelerating into another crisis. All were fixated on the fear that they were dying except for the youngest, the eight-year-old son named as “Edward S.”, whose symptoms were the strangest of all. He had eaten a large portion of the mushrooms and was “attacked with fits of immoderate laughter” which his parents’ threats could not subdue. He seemed to have been transported into another world, from which he would only return under duress to speak nonsense: “when roused and interrogated as to it, he answered indifferently, yes or no, as he did to every other question, evidently without any relation to what was asked”. Dr Brande diagnosed the family’s condition as the “deleterious effects of a very common species of agaric [mushroom], not hitherto suspected to be poisonous”. Today, we can be more specific: this was intoxication by liberty caps (Psilocybe semilanceata), the “magic mushrooms” that grow plentifully across the hills, moors, commons, golf courses, and playing fields of Britain every autumn. The botanical illustrator James Sowerby, who was working on the third volume of his landmark Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms (1803), interrupted his schedule to visit J. S. and identify the species in question. Sowerby’s illustration includes a cluster of unmistakable liberty caps, together with a similar-looking species (now recognised as a roundhead of the Stropharia genus). In his accompanying note, Sowerby emphasises that it was the pointy-headed variety (“with the pileus acuminated”) that “nearly proved fatal to a poor family in Piccadilly, London, who were so indiscreet as to stew a quantity” for breakfast. Brande’s account of the J. S. family’s episode continued to be cited in Victorian drug literature for decades, yet the nineteenth century would come and go without any clear identification of the liberty cap as hallucinogenic. The psychedelic compound that had caused the mysterious derangement remained unknown until the 1950s when Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD, turned his attention to the hallucinogenic mushrooms of Mexico. Psilocybin, LSD’s chemical cousin, was finally isolated from mushrooms in 1958, synthesised in a Swiss laboratory in 1959, and identified in the liberty cap in 1963.2 During the nineteenth century, the liberty cap took on a different set of associations, derived not from its visionary properties but its distinctive appearance. Samuel Taylor Coleridge seems to have been the first to suggest its common name in a short piece published in 1812 in Omniana, a miscellany co-written with Robert Southey. Coleridge was struck by that “common fungus, which so exactly represents the pole and cap of Liberty that it seems offered by Nature herself as the appropriate emblem of Gallic republicanism”.3 The cap of Liberty, or Phrygian cap, a peaked felt bonnet associated with the similar-looking pileus worn by freed slaves in the Roman empire, had become an icon of political freedom through the revolutionary movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. William of Orange included it as a symbol on a coin struck to celebrate his Glorious Revolution in 1688; the anti-monarchist MP John Wilkes holds it, mounted on its pole, in William Hogarth’s devilish caricature of 1763. It appears on a medal designed by Benjamin Franklin to commemorate July 4, 1776, under the banner LIBERTAS AMERICANA, and it was adopted during the French Revolution by the sans-culottes as their signature bonnet rouge. It was these associations — rather than its psychoactive properties, of which he shows no knowledge — that led Coleridge to celebrate it as the “mushroom Cap of Liberty”, a name that percolated through the many reprints of Omniana into nineteenth-century British culture, folklore, and botany. While the liberty cap’s “magic” properties seemed to go largely unacknowledged, the idea that fungi could provoke hallucinations did begin to percolate more widely in Europe during the nineteenth century — though it became attached to a quite different species of mushroom. In parallel to a growing scientific interest in toxic and hallucinogenic fungi, a vast body of Victorian fairy lore connected mushrooms and toadstools with elves, pixies, hollow hills, and the unwitting transport of subjects to fairyland, a world of shifting perspectives seething with elemental spirits. The similarity of this otherworld to those engendered by plant psychedelics in New World cultures, where psilocybin-containing mushrooms have been used for millennia, is suggestive. Is it possible that the Victorian fairy tradition, beneath its innocent exterior, operated as a conduit for a hidden tradition of psychedelic knowledge? Were the authors of these fantastical narratives — Alice in Wonderland, for example — aware of the powers of certain mushrooms to lead unsuspecting visitors to enchanted lands? Were they, perhaps, even writing from personal experience? The J. S. family’s trip in 1799 is a useful starting point for such enquiries. It shows liberty caps were growing in Britain at the time, and commonplace even in London’s parks. But also, the trip evidences that the mushroom’s hallucinogenic effects were unfamiliar, perhaps even unheard of: certainly unusual enough for a London physician to draw them to the attention of his learned colleagues. At the same time, however, scholars and naturalists were becoming more aware of the widespread use of plant intoxicants in non-western cultures. In 1762 Carl Linnaeus, the great taxonomist and father of modern botany, compiled the first-ever list of intoxicating plants: a monograph entitled Inebriantia, which assembled a global pharmacopoeia that extended from Europe (opium, henbane) to the Middle East (hashish, datura), South America (coca leaf), Asia (betel nut), and the Pacific (kava). The study of such plants was emerging from the margins of classical studies, ethnography, folklore, and medicine to become a subject in its own right. The interest in traditional cultures extended to European folklore. A new generation of folklore collectors, such as the Brothers Grimm, realised that the migration of peasant populations to the city was dismantling centuries of folk stories, songs, and oral histories with alarming rapidity. In Britain, Robert Southey was a prominent collector of vanishing folk traditions, soliciting and publishing examples offered by his readers. The Victorian fairy tradition, as it emerged, was imbued with a Romantic sensibility in which rustic traditions were no longer coarse and backward but picturesque and semi-sacred, an escape from industrial modernity into an ancient, often pagan land of enchantment. The subject lent itself to writers and artists who, under the guise of innocence, were able to explore sensual and erotic themes with a boldness off limits in more realistic genres and to reimagine the muddy and impoverished countryside through the prism of classical and Shakespearian scenes of playful nature spirits. The lore of plants and flowers was carefully curated and woven into supernatural tapestries of flower-fairies and enchanted woods, and mushrooms and toadstools popped up everywhere. Fairy rings and toadstool-dwelling elves were recycled through a pictorial culture of motif and decoration until they became emblematic of fairyland itself. This magical allure marked a shift from previous depictions of Britain’s fungi. In herbals and medical texts from the Renaissance onwards, they had typically been associated with rot, dung-heaps, and poison. The new generation of folklorists, however, followed Coleridge in appreciating them. Thomas Keightley, whose survey The Fairy Mythology (1850) exerted much influence on the fictional fairy tradition, gives Welsh and Gaelic examples of traditional names for fungi which invoke elves and Puck. In Ireland, the Gaelic slang for mushrooms is “pookies”, which Keightley associated with the elemental nature spirit Pooka (hence Puck); it’s a term that persists in Irish drug culture today, although evidence for pre-modern Gaelic magic mushroom use remains elusive. At one point Keightley refers to “those pretty small delicate fungi, with their conical heads, which are named Fairy-mushrooms in Ireland, where they grow so plentifully”.4 This seems to describe the liberty cap, though Keightley, like Coleridge, focuses on the physical appearance of the mushroom and appears unaware of its psychedelic properties. Despite its ubiquity, and occasional and tentative association with nature spirits, the mushroom that became the distinctive motif of fairyland was not the liberty cap but rather the spectacular red-and-white fly agaric (Amanita muscaria). The fly agaric is psychoactive but unlike the liberty cap, which delivers psilocybin in reliable doses, it contains a mix of alkaloids — muscarine, muscimol, ibotenic acid — which generate an unpredictable and toxic cocktail of effects. These can include wooziness and disorientation, drooling, sweats, numbness in the lips and extremities, nausea, muscle twitches, sleep, and a vague, often retrospective sense of liminal consciousness and waking dreams. At lower doses, none of these may manifest; at higher doses they may lead to coma and, on rare occasions, death. Unlike the liberty cap, the fly agaric is hard to ignore or misidentify, and its toxicity has been well established for centuries (its name derives from its ability to kill flies). One could argue then that this aura of livid beauty and danger would alone be enough to explain its association with the otherworldly realm of fairies. Yet at the same time its mind-altering effects were becoming more widely known, not from any rustic tradition in Britain but from the discovery that it was used as an intoxicant among the remote peoples of Siberia. Sporadically through the eighteenth century, Swedish and Russian explorers had returned from Siberia with travellers’ tales of shamans, spirit possession, and self-poisoning with brightly-coloured toadstools; but it was a Polish traveller named Joseph Kopék who was the first to write an account of his own first-hand experience with the fly agaric, which appeared in an 1837 publication of his travel diary. In around 1797, after he had been living in Kamchatka for two years, Kopék was taken ill with a fever and was told by a local of a “miraculous” mushroom that would cure him. He ate half a fly agaric and fell into a vivid fever dream. “As though magnetised”, he was drawn through “the most attractive gardens where only pleasure and beauty seemed to rule”; beautiful women dressed in white fed him with fruits, berries, and flowers. He woke after a long and healing sleep and took a second, stronger dose, which precipitated him back into slumber and the sense of an epic voyage into another world. He relived swathes of his childhood, re-encountered friends from throughout his life, and even predicted the future at length with such confidence that a priest was summoned to witness. He concluded with a challenge to science: “If someone can prove that both the effect and the influence of the mushroom are non-existent, then I shall stop being defender of the miraculous mushroom of Kamchatka”.5 Kopék’s toadstool epiphany was one of several descriptions of fly agaric use by Siberian peoples that were widely reported in various learned journals and popular works throughout Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.6 Such accounts began a fashion for re-examining elements of European folklore and culture and interpolating fly agaric intoxication into odd corners of myth and tradition. This is the source of the notion that the Berserkers, the Viking shock troops of the eighth to tenth centuries, drank a fly agaric potion before going into battle and fighting like men possessed, regularly asserted not only among mushroom and Viking aficionados but also in text-books and encyclopaedias. There is, however, no reference to fly agaric, or indeed to any exotic plant stimulants, in the sagas or Eddas: the theory of mushroom-intoxicated Berserker warriors was first suggested by the Swedish professor Samuel Ödman in his Attempt to Explain the Berserk-Raging of Ancient Nordic Warriors through Natural History (1784), a speculation based on the eighteenth-century reports from Siberia. By the mid-nineteenth century, then, the fly agaric had become synonymous with fairyland. The mushroom had also, in the guise of the Siberian sources, been claimed as a portal to the land of dreams and written into European folklore. Exactly to what extent and in what manner these two cultural journeys of the fly agaric are intertwined is hard to pin down. Long before the Siberian accounts, in both art and literature, mushrooms of all sorts are depicted as part of fairyland. In Margaret Cavendish’s mid-seventeenth-century poem “The Pastime of the Queen of Fairies”, a mushroom acts as Queen Mab’s dining table, and in late eighteenth-century paintings by Henry Fuseli and Joshua Reynolds, the mushroom acts as a surface upon which fairies, sprites, and similar assemble. Such a presence of mushrooms in supernatural worlds might suggest a concealed or half-forgotten knowledge of hallucinogenic mushrooms in British culture. However, these fungi do not resemble fly agaric (or any other hallucinogenic mushroom) and, of course, for small woodland creatures the large splay of a mushroom would seem like natural furniture. It is only in the Victorian era, post-Siberian tales, that an hallucinogenic mushroom establishes itself so firmly in Britain as the stock mushroom of fairyland. Let us turn now to the most famous and frequently-debated conjunction of fungi, psychedelia, and fairy-lore: the array of mushrooms and hallucinatory potions, mind-bending and shapeshifting motifs in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Do Alice’s adventures represent first-hand knowledge of hallucinogenic mushrooms? The scenes in question could hardly be better known. Alice, down the rabbit hole, meets a caterpillar sitting on a mushroom, who tells her in a “languid, sleepy voice” that the mushroom is the key to navigating through her strange journey: “one side will make you grow taller, the other side will make you grow shorter”. Alice takes a chunk from each side of the mushroom and begins a series of vertiginous transformations of size, shooting up into the clouds before learning to maintain her normal size by eating alternate bites. Throughout the rest of the book she continues to take the mushroom: entering the house of the Duchess, approaching the domain of the March Hare, and, climactically, before entering the hidden garden with the golden key. Since the 1960s this has often been read as an initiatic work of drug literature, an esoteric guide to the other worlds opened up by psychedelics — most memorably, perhaps, in Jefferson Airplane’s psychedelic anthem “White Rabbit” (1967), which conjures Alice’s journey as a path of self-discovery where the stale advice of parents is transcended by the guidance received from within by “feeding your head”. This reading is often dismissed by Lewis Carroll scholars,7 but medication and unusual states of consciousness certainly exercised a profound fascination for Carroll, and he read about them voraciously. His interest was spurred by his own delicate health — insomnia and frequent migraines — which he treated with homoeopathic remedies, including many derived from psychoactive plants such as aconite and belladonna. His library included books on homoeopathy as well as texts that discussed mind-altering drugs, including F. E. Anstie’s thorough compendium, Stimulants and Narcotics (1864). He was greatly intrigued by the epileptic seizure of an Oxford student at which he was present, and in 1857 visited St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London in order to witness chloroform anaesthesia, a novel procedure that had come to public attention four years previously when it was administered to Queen Victoria during childbirth. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that Alice’s mind-expanding journeys owed anything to the actual drug experiences of their author. Although Carroll — in daily life the Reverend Charles Dodgson — was a moderate drinker and, to judge by his library, opposed to alcohol prohibition, he had a strong dislike of tobacco smoking and wrote sceptically in his letters about the pervasive presence in syrups and soothing tonics of powerful narcotics like opium — the “medicine so dexterously, but ineffectually, concealed in the jam of our early childhood”.8 Yet Alice’s adventures may have their roots in a psychedelic mushroom experience. The scholar Michael Carmichael has demonstrated that, a few days before he began writing the story, Carroll made his only ever visit to Oxford’s Bodleian library, where a copy of Mordecai Cooke’s recently-published drug survey The Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860) had been deposited.9 The Bodleian copy of this book still has most of its pages uncut, with the exception of the contents page and the chapter on the fly agaric, entitled “The Exile of Siberia”. Carroll was particularly interested in Russia: it was the only country he ever visited outside Britain. And, as Carmichael puts it, Carroll “would have been immediately attracted to Cooke’s Seven Sisters of Sleep for two more obvious reasons: he had seven sisters and he was a lifelong insomniac”. Cooke’s chapter on fly agaric is, like the rest of his book, a valuable source of the drug lore that was familiar to his generation of Victorians. It refers to Everard Brande’s account of the J. S. family and rounds up various Siberian descriptions of fly agaric experiences, including details that appear in Alice’s adventures. “Erroneous impressions of size and distance are common occurrences”, Cooke records of the fly agaric. “A straw lying in the road becomes a formidable object, to overcome which, a leap is taken sufficient to clear a barrel of ale, or the prostrate trunk of a British oak.”10 The hypothesis is suggestive, though at this distance of time, it’s impossible to know for certain whether or not Carroll read this Bodleian copy, or indeed any other copy of Cooke’s book. It may be that Carroll encountered the Siberian fly agaric reportage elsewhere — we know, for example, that he owned a copy of James F. Johnston’s The Chemistry of Common Life (1854) which includes mention of fly agaric and size delusions11 — or it may be that he simply drew on the fertile resources of his imagination. But some contact with the widely reported Siberian cases does seem much more likely than the idea that Carroll drew on any hidden British tradition of magic mushroom use, let alone the author’s own. If so, he was neither a secret drug initiate nor a Victorian gentleman entirely innocent of the arcane knowledge of drugs. In this sense, Alice’s otherworld experiences seem to hover, like much of Victorian fairy literature and fantasy, in a borderland between naïve innocence of such drugs and knowing references to them. We read them today from a very different vantage point, one in which magic mushrooms are consumed far more widely than in the Victorian or indeed any previous era. In our thriving psychedelic culture, fly agaric is only to be encountered at the distant margins; by contrast, psilocybin mushrooms are a global phenomenon, grown and consumed in virtually every country on earth and even making inroads into clinical psychotherapy. Today the liberty cap is an emblem of a new political struggle: the right to “cognitive liberty”, the free and legal alteration of one’s own consciousness. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 7, 2020

Mike Ja

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:43.203107

the-art-of-whaling

The Art of Whaling Illustrations from the Logbooks of Nantucket Whaleships By Jessica Boyall January 13, 2021 The 19th-century whale hunt was a brutal business, awash with blubber, blood, and the cruel destruction of life. But between the frantic calls of “there she blows!”, there was plenty of time for creation too. Jessica Boyall explores the rich vein of illustration running through the logbooks and journals of Nantucket whalers. The first European settlers arrived at Nantucket, an isolated island some thirty miles from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1659. They built homes, Quaker meeting houses, and cattle farms, swiftly and forcibly colonising the island, which was until then inhabited by 2500 Wampanoag Native Americans. The word Nantucket is a Native American one, meaning either “far-away land” or “sandy, sterile soil tempting no one”. And the colonisers soon found it thus — too small and infertile to accommodate the number of agricultural plots necessary to support their growing population. So they looked to the sea, according to legend quite literally, in 1690, when town selectmen climbed a sloping hill overlooking the southern coast. Here, they watched whales breach the Atlantic’s surface and pronounced the ocean “a green pasture where our children’s grandchildren will go for bread”.1 This declaration proved prophetic, as for some two hundred years Nantucket dominated the global whaling market. Such was its success that in 1851 Herman Melville in Moby-Dick marvelled “What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a livelihood! . . . thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders”.2 In its early days Nantucket whaling looked very different from the hub of activity that Melville, writing from his own experience, described. Initially, whaling took place close to Nantucket’s shores, where viewing platforms from which whales could be spotted were erected. Sightings might take place any time from November to April as during these months hordes of right whales — so called because they were the right whale to catch — returned from a summer of feeding in the far reaches of the North Atlantic. Their migratory route took them within a few miles of Nantucket. Once a whale was spotted, a crew of up to six men, including indentured Wampanoag and Nauset Native Americans, would board twenty-feet-long cedar boats in pursuit of their prey.3 If a boat drew even with the whale, then it would be harpooned and, following a chase, lanced and brought down. The dead leviathan was then hauled back to the bay, where blubber and baleen were flensed from its carcass and transported to try-houses. The blubber was boiled for oil, which was cooled, poured into casks, and sold alongside scrubbed whalebone at markets in New York, Boston, and further afield. This method of shore-fishery was gory, lucrative, and unsustainable. By 1730, the waters around Cape Cod and Nantucket had been overfished and the number of whales woefully depleted. But by this point Nantucket’s whaling market was booming. The collapse of the Dutch North Atlantic fisheries, combined with increased demands for oil in Britain and America, had driven oil prices upwards from around eight pounds sterling per barrel in 1725 to ten pounds in 1730.4 And so, incentivised by these convincingly healthy markets, well-off Nantucket merchants outfitted single-masted sailing vessels with dedicated crews and pursued their prey northward into the deeper waters. Deeper-sea voyages made for longer expeditions, meaning that whalers might spend up to four years at sea, and as a consequence, two sorts of written and illustrated records emerged. The first was the logbook, an official, often tedious account kept by captains and first mates, which held administrative and financial information required by a ship’s owners. The second type of record was the unofficial journal, which might be maintained by anyone on board ship. For although maritime life was arduous and sometimes frantic, a sailor or passenger over the course of months at sea could find time for reflexion and creativity and turn their hand to a variety of artistic pursuits. One such pursuit was scrimshandering, the craft of using a jack-knife or needle to engrave designs into bone and ivory obtained from whale teeth and walrus tusks. A work in scrimshaw could be decorated with a variety of subjects including whaling scenes and ships, portraits of lovers, and Masonic emblems. The other strand of artistic practice was on paper, rather than three-dimensional. Although their rationales differed, both logbooks and journals were also frequently illustrated, replete with images of daily ship-board life, of faraway lands, and, most frequently, of whales. Hundreds of these have been preserved and digitized by the Nantucket Historical Association; the selection here, mainly from the 1840s, gives a unique insight into the world of Nantucket whaling. Ship’s officers used logbooks for a variety of practical reasons: charting different species, sightings, and killings. Some logs, like that of the ship Indian Chief, kept by Thomas R. Bloomfield, contain careful, intricately-patterned drawings of the creatures, accompanied by the co-ordinates of where they were spotted. Others include imprints made from stamps that, cut in the likeness of whales, were fashioned from pieces of wood, ivory, or bone. Different stamps were made to represent different species and carried different connotations. An image of a whale’s tail fluke denoted a whale sighting, whilst one of an entire whale, its slaughter. This visual lexicon, a semiotic language that even Roland Barthes might have appreciated, was developed as an efficient means of recording expeditions for vessel owners, who, rather than wading through dense logbooks written in cursive, often messy, script, might prefer to ascertain a voyage’s success by tallying the number of stamps its log contained. Beyond official records, many journals were illustrated in ways that point to the sheer visual pleasure of the adventures, with whale chases a popular subject. The act of killing a whale deep at sea was not substantially different from doing so at shore, though the object of the hunt was no longer the right whale but the sperm whale, prized for its body oil — of higher grade than that of other cetaceans — and its spermaceti, a precious liquid wax found in its head. Once a whale was sighted, which according to logs was a relatively rare event, the crew would lower whaleboats from the main vessel into the water. Vessels could contain up to five whaleboats: a larboard boat, starboard boat, bow boat, waist boat, and sometimes a starboard bow boat. Each was manned by a boat-header and up to five rowers. As with shore whaling, the key was to draw close to the great mammal before striking it with a harpoon attached to a long coil of rope. Once the harpoon’s iron was firmly lodged into the creature’s flesh, then it would either promptly die or, more commonly, flee, in which case a “Nantucket sleigh ride” would ensue. During this chase the frenzied whale would bolt with the boats in tow, until eventually, exhausted, the leviathan would collapse and be pierced to a gruesome death. The cruelty of the hunt is not something that generally comes across in the logbook and journal depictions, where the blood and gore are replaced by anthropomorphised whales complete with unfathomably merry faces. Perhaps the brutality of whaling was difficult to reconcile with the principles of pacifism and non-violence that supposedly underpinned the Nantucketers’ Quaker way of life. The success of the hunt was more or less dependent on the tractability of the whale. For the most part the creatures were fortunately docile, but some proved formidable adversaries. Such a beast was to be the undoing of the whaleship the Essex, which departed from Nantucket on August 12, 1819. Captained by George Pollard, the eighteen-man crew was scheduled to spend two and a half years at sea, but disaster struck on November 20, 1820. On this day the crew spotted a pod of sperm whales. Whaleboats were greedily launched and several calves corralled; one smashed into a whaleboat, forcing its retreat, during which the cabin boy spotted an ominous shape looming beneath the Essex’s bow. The shape, it transpired, was a colossal sperm whale, some eighty-five feet in length, weighing approximately eighty tonnes. The Essex’s first mate, Owen Chase, recounts that “I could distinctly see him smite his jaws together, as if distracted with rage and fury”, and goes on to describe how the monumental creature appeared with ten-fold fury and vengeance in his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him and his course towards us was marked by a white foam of a rod in width, which he made with the continual violent thrashing of his tail. His head was about half out of the water, and in that way he came upon us, and again struck the ship.5 The irate whale rammed into the Essex twice, sinking it some two thousand nautical miles west of South America. The crew had just enough time to evacuate the ship into three small boats. Eight crew members survived by cannibalising seven others, drawing lots to decide who should live and who be eaten. The horrors of the Essex, as described in Owen Chase’s narrative, provided fodder for the climactic scenes of Melville’s great American novel, Moby-Dick, which narrates the story of doomed anti-hero Captains Ahab’s quest for revenge on the great white sperm whale, Moby Dick. The epic culminates in a three-day chase in which the majestic Moby Dick demolishes the fictional Pequod, leaving Ishmael, the ship’s survivor and true protagonist, adrift at sea. Of course, not all expeditions were so utterly dismal. Indeed, some afforded rare opportunities for working men and occasionally even women to travel the world. Susan C. Austin Veeder was one of the first Nantucket women to accompany their husband to sea. Her decision to do so was perhaps motivated by more than a sense of adventure, given that on his next voyage her husband deferred from his post as captain, took up with a Polynesian woman, and never returned home. Susan’s journey aboard the Nauticon, which departed from Nantucket in September 1848 and returned in March 1853, took her across the Atlantic around Cape Horn to ports in Chile, Oahu, Tahiti, and as far north as the Fox Islands in the Arctic. Her journal, though written in terse, bleakly efficient language, brims with panoramic watercolours that judiciously delineate the places she visited and make clear that she was alive to her surroundings. Susan’s voyage, punctuated by acute sea sickness and the fetor of rancid whale flesh, was not an altogether happy one. After a few months aboard the Nauticon she gave birth to a “a fine daughter weighing 9 lbs” who she described as “growing like a pig”.6 Fourteen months later the child was treated for teething issues by a doctor in Tahiti who, according to Susan’s journal, administered a white powder to her gums. The child died, apparently poisoned by the doctor, and though Susan did not immediately return to Nantucket her journey was marred by the loss. Familial plight weighs heavily in the annals of Nantucket’s whalers, though not all as tragically as in Susan’s account. Richard C. Gibbs Junior’s log of the ship Nantucket, captained by his father, attests to the predictably normal anxieties of an adolescent. Richard was thirteen years old when he accompanied his mother, Almira, and father, Richard C. Gibbs Senior, onto the Nantucket, which set sail in June 1855. In his log he expresses fears of not living up to his father’s expectations, reservations about his own inadequacies as log-keeper, and his hopes for self-improvement. Some of these sentiments are, albeit abstractly, captured on the opening endpapers of his log which, alongside sketches of whales, anchors, and a ship, features the words “HOPE” in emphatic black lettering and, lower down the page, “Blood” in scrawled scarlet script. Richard complains of his and his family’s inadequacies: their failure to catch enough whales and consequent inability to make their fortunes at sea. But his condemnations of ineptitude may have been unfounded: by 1840 global whaling grounds had been sorely overfished. This fact, combined with a rising demand for petroleum and its derivative kerosene, produced in the oilfields of Pennsylvania, undermined the North American whaling market. By the 1870s a series of events, including the Great Fire of 1846 and the American Civil War, had brought Nantucket to its knees. No local industry could succeed or replace the whale fishery and so between 1840 and 1870 its population plummeted from almost ten thousand to little more than four thousand. Nantucket’s heyday was over. And so the island’s grizzly whaling trade proved fallible, but not forgettable; it remains vividly in the journals and logs of its practitioners. The illustrations of these accounts constitute a form of folk art which affords remarkable insight into the extraordinary lives and creativity of the Nantucketers, in the era before their “greasy luck” ran out.7 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 13, 2021

Jessica Boyall

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:43.709973

the-dancing-plague-of-1518

The Dancing Plague of 1518 By Ned Pennant-Rea July 10, 2018 Five hundred years ago in July, a strange mania seized the city of Strasbourg. Citizens by the hundred became compelled to dance, seemingly for no reason — jigging trance-like for days, until unconsciousness or, in some cases, death. Ned Pennant-Rea on one of history’s most bizarre events. On a hastily built stage before the busy horse market of Strasbourg, scores of people dance to pipes, drums, and horns. The July sun beats down upon them as they hop from leg to leg, spin in circles and whoop loudly. From a distance they might be carnival revellers. But closer inspection reveals a more disquieting scene. Their arms are flailing and their bodies are convulsing spasmodically. Ragged clothes and pinched faces are saturated in sweat. Their eyes are glassy, distant. Blood seeps from swollen feet into leather boots and wooden clogs. These are not revellers but “choreomaniacs”, entirely possessed by the mania of the dance. In full view of the public, this is the apogee of the choreomania that tormented Strasbourg for a midsummer month in 1518. Also known as the “dancing plague”, it was the most fatal and best documented of the more than ten such contagions which had broken out along the Rhine and Moselle rivers since 1374. Numerous accounts of the bizarre events that unfolded that summer can be found scattered across various contemporary documents and chronicles compiled in the subsequent decades and centuries. One seventeenth-century chronicle by the Strasbourg jurist Johann Schilter quotes a now lost manuscript poem: Many hundreds in Strassburg began To dance and hop, women and men,In the public market, in alleys and streets,Day and night; and many of them ate nothingUntil at last the sickness left them. This affliction was called St Vitus’ dance.1 Another chronicle from 1636 relates a less happy ending: In the year 1518 AD . . . there occurred among men a remarkable and terrible disease called St Vitus’ dance, in which men in their madness began to dance day and night until finally they fell down unconscious and succumbed to death.2 The physician and alchemist Paracelsus visited Strasbourg eight years after the plague and became fascinated by its causes. According to his Opus Paramirum, and various chronicles agree, it all started with one woman. Frau Troffea had started dancing on July 14th on the narrow cobbled street outside her half-timbered home. As far as we can tell she had no musical accompaniment but simply “began to dance”.3 Ignoring her husband’s pleas to cease, she continued for hours, until the sky turned black and she collapsed in a twitching heap of exhaustion. The next morning she was up again on her swollen feet and dancing before thirst and hunger could register. By the third day, people of a great and growing variety — hawkers, porters, beggars, pilgrims, priests, nuns — were drinking in the ungodly spectacle. The mania possessed Frau Troffea for between four and six days, at which point the frightened authorities intervened by sending her in a wagon thirty miles away to Saverne. There she might be cured at the shrine of Vitus, the saint who it was believed had cursed her. But some of those who had witnessed her strange performance had begun to mimic her, and within days more than thirty choreomaniacs were in motion, some so monomaniacally that only death would have the power to intervene. The more citizens this unusual plague afflicted, the more desperate the privy council became to control it. The clergy held it to be the work of a vengeful Saint Vitus, but the councillors listened instead to the guild of physicians, declaring the dance to be “a natural disease, which comes from overheated blood.”4 According to humoral theory, the afflicted must therefore be bled. But the physicians instead recommended the treatment given to past victims of this bizarre disease. They must dance themselves free of it. A sixteenth-century chronicle composed by the architect Daniel Specklin records what the council did next.5 Carpenters and tanners were ordered to transform their guild halls into temporary dance floors, and “set up platforms in the horse market and in the grain market“ in full view of the public. To keep the accursed in motion and so expedite their recovery, dozens of musicians were paid to play drums, fiddles, pipes, and horns, with healthy dancers brought in for further encouragement. The authorities hoped to create the optimal conditions for the dance to exhaust itself. It backfired horribly. Being more inclined to a supernatural than a medical explanation of the dance, most of the onlookers saw in the frenzied movements a demonstration of the magnitude of Saint Vitus’ fury. None being free of sin, many were lured into the mania. The Imlin family chronicle records that within a month the plague had seized four hundred citizens.6 The privy council ordered the stages to be pulled down. If the choreomaniacs must continue their disturbing movements then they now must do so out of sight. The council went further, prohibiting almost all dance and music in the city until September. This was no small thing for a culture in which communal dancing was central — from upright burghers performing their restrained, delicate steps in the so-called bassadanza, to ale-laden peasants leaping with hearty abandon to let off steam.7 Sebastian Brant, a Strasbourg chancellor and author of The Ship of Fools (1494), detailed the exception to the ban: “if honourable persons wish to dance at weddings or celebrations of first Mass in their houses, they may do so using stringed instruments, but they are on their conscience not to use tambourines and drums.”8 Presumably strings were deemed less likely than percussion to bring on the mania. In addition, the council ordered those worst afflicted to be bundled into wagons and taken the three-day ride to the shrine of Saint Vitus, where Frau Troffea had been cured. Priests placed the choreomaniacs, who were, presumably, still thrashing about like landed fish, underneath a wooden carving of Vitus. They put small crosses in their hands and red shoes on their feet. On the soles and tops of these shoes, they sprinkled holy water and painted crosses of consecrated oil.9 This ritual, carried out in an atmosphere thick with incense and Latin incantations, had the desired effect. Word soon reached Strasbourg and more were sent to Saverne to be forgiven by Vitus. Within a week or so the stream of suffering pilgrims had diminished to a trickle. The dancing plague had lasted for over a month, from mid-July to late August or early September. At its height, as many as fifteen people were dying each day. The final toll is unknown but, if such a daily death rate was true, could have been into the hundreds. If not an angry saint or overheated blood then what did cause the dancing plague? In the view of Paracelsus, Fra Troffea’s marathon jig was a ploy to embarrass Herr Troffea: “In order to make the deception as perfect as possible, and really give the impression of illness, she hopped and sang, which was all most distasteful to her husband.”10 Upon seeing the success of the trick, other women began dancing to annoy their husbands too, powered on by “free, lewd and impertinent” thoughts. This type of dancing mania was classified by Paracelsus as Chorea lasciva (caused by voluptuous desires, “without fear or respect”), which sat alongside Chorea imaginativa (caused by the imagination, “from rage and swearing”), and Chrorea naturalis (a much milder form, caused by corporal causes) as the three main forms of the condition.11 While the famously iconoclastic Paracelsus does deserve credit for placing the cause of the disease in the minds of the choreomaniacs rather than in heaven, he was also a misogynist whose diagnosis looks somewhat ridiculous now. Several modern historians have argued that the dancing plagues of mediaeval Europe were caused by ergot, a mind-altering mould found on the stalks of damp rye, which can cause twitching, jerking, and hallucinations — a condition known as St Anthony’s Fire. However, the historian John Waller has debunked the ergot hypothesis in his brilliant book on the dancing plague, A Time to Dance, a Time to Die (2009). Yes, ergot can cause convulsions and hallucinations, but it also restricts blood flow to the extremities. Someone poisoned by it simply could not dance for several days in a row. Waller’s explanation of the dancing plague emerges from his deep knowledge of the material, cultural, and spiritual environment of sixteenth-century Strasbourg. He opens his book with a quote from H. C. Erik Midelfort’s A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (1999): Madnesses of the past are not petrified entities that can be plucked unchanged from their niches and placed under our modern microscopes. They appear, perhaps, more like jellyfish that collapse and dry up when they are removed from the ambient sea water.12 According to Waller, the Strasbourg poor were primed for an epidemic of hysterical dancing. First of all, there was precedent. Every European dancing plague between 1374 and 1518 had occurred near Strasbourg, along the western edge of the Holy Roman Empire. Then there were the prevailing conditions. In 1518, a string of bad harvests, political instability, and the arrival of syphilis had induced anguish extreme even by early modern standards. This suffering manifested as hysterical dancing because the citizens believed it could. People can be extraordinarily suggestible and a firm conviction in the vengefulness of Saint Vitus was enough for it to be visited upon them. “The minds of the choreomaniacs were drawn inwards,” writes Waller, “tossed about on the violent seas of their deepest fears.”13 One way to elucidate the dancing plague is to consider the trance states people reach today. In cultures around the world, including in Brazil, Madagascar, and Kenya, people enter trances deliberately during ceremonies or involuntarily during periods of extreme stress. Once entranced, their perception of pain and exhaustion is marginalised. Waller describes the spread of the dancing plague as an example of psychic contagion, and he draws a parallel with the laughing epidemic that engulfed a region of Tanganyika (modern-day Tanzania) in the fraught postcolonial year of 1963. When a couple of girls at a local mission school got the giggles, their friends followed suit until two-thirds of the pupils were laughing and crying uncontrollably and the whole school had to be shut down. Once home, the pupils “infected” their families and soon whole villages were consumed by hysterics. Doctors recorded several hundred cases, lasting a week on average. Of course, the dancing plagues have another parallel — modern rave culture. Though usually without the bloody feet and pleas for mercy of our sixteenth-century choreomaniacs, and often with a little chemical help, it is not uncommon for partygoers to dance for days with little break, forgoing sleep and food, sometimes shifting their feet with poise and balance, and sometimes leaping with none. Should one such reveller — perhaps fuelled by a particularly potent dancefloor potion — be transplanted onto the horse market stage of early modern Strasbourg half a millennium ago, they might not feel entirely out of place. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 10, 2018

Ned Pennant-Rea

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:44.693186

exquisite-rot-spalted-wood-and-the-lost-art-of-intarsia

Exquisite Rot Spalted Wood and the Lost Art of Intarsia By Daniel Elkind May 16, 2018 The technique of intarsia — the fitting together of pieces of intricately cut wood to make often complex images — has produced some of the most awe-inspiring pieces of Renaissance craftsmanship. Daniel Elkind explores the history of this masterful art, and how an added dash of colour arose from a most unlikely source: lumber ridden with fungus. There is a tale, perhaps apocryphal, in which Fra Damiano da Bergamo looks on as emperor Charles V — motto: Plus Ultra, “further beyond” — sands away at an area of intarsiated wood from a recently completed choir, a section inlaid with a variety of colored woods to appear as one unbroken composition. In Silas Kopf’s version, it is Fra Damiano’s stunning work at the Church of San Domenico in Bologna which has the emperor so mesmerized: Charles thought the work was so beautifully done that it couldn’t possibly be made of pieces of wood, as he had been told, but rather that it had been painted. To assuage his curiosity, he took his sword and chopped out a bit of the panel. Confirming that the picture was in fact composed of wood pieces, Charles asked to meet the man who could do such work and was taken to Damiano’s studio. Apparently still not sure that the intarsia was not treated with paints, Damiano pulled out a hand plane and passed it over the panel he was working on, thereby shaving off the top layer of wood.1 Despite the obvious talent of the intarsiatori, the Florentine polymath Giorgio Vasari — considered by many the first art historian — famously dismissed their meticulous craft as “counterfeit painting”, which has “always been exercised by persons possessing more patience than skill in design.” Though “praiseworthy and masterly”, wooden inlay was nevertheless an extravagant waste of time, wrote Vasari, doomed to a short life “because of worms and fire”, noteworthy only insofar as it demonstrated the Renaissance fascination with perspective.2 In other words, a curiosity like pastiglia boxes or mother of pearl. At best, Vasari and his contemporaries considered the so-called decorative arts derivative of the fine arts, painting and sculpture. But painting in wood is in many ways more complicated than painting on wood. Rather than fabricating objects from a single source, the art of intarsia is the art of mosaic, of picking the right tone, of sourcing only properly seasoned lumber from mature trees and adapting materials intended for one context to another. Painting obscures the origins of a given material, whereas intarsia retains the original character of the wood grain — whose knots and whorls are as individual as the islands and deltas of friction ridges that constitute the topography of a fingerprint — while forming a new image. From a distance, the whole appears greater than the sum of its parts; up close, one can appreciate the heterogeneity of the components. The aforementioned Charles, for example, had his motto inlaid on one of the flaps of an impressive writing cabinet built for him in around 1532 — a reification of his “invincible” reign and Spain’s recent success in the New World.3 More ornamental than practical, the “Plus Oultra” escritorio, now located at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, has been called “an expression of the universal Christian empire of Charles V and the sacred imperialism of the Spanish Austrias.”4 Through this piece, we can trace not only the path intarsia traveled in Europe as it migrated north and west, but also its trajectory from the religious sphere to the secular, from totem of state to luxury item. From the beginning, intarsia has served as a projection of imperial singularity and superiority. According to Maurice Sven Dimand, the first specialized curator of Near Eastern art at the Metropolitan Museum, the technique arrived in the cathedrals of Europe via Andalusia and Sicily from the mosques and minarets of North Africa, where, due to the prohibition on graven images, it was useful in effecting complex calligraphic patterns and tessellations.5 More than mere ornamentation, the intricate tiling served as a unifying design element, as much a part of the architecture as a pillar or qubba (dome). One can still feel transported before lonely door panels and orphaned minbars (pulpits), as one marvels at the way these features summon the ineffable through sacred geometry from the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia (ca. 836) to the Alhambra in Spain. The Gubbio studiolo (ca. 1478–82), considered perhaps the quintessential Italian Renaissance object and best known example of intarsia paneling, consists of a private study built for the contemplative benefit of Federico da Montefeltro. Montefeltro was undoubtedly one of the major condottiere of his day, a well-connected and well-read mercenary-entrepreneur nicknamed “the Light of Italy” who had another study built at his palace in Urbino where he would go to disappear “when he wanted to withdraw alone for serious study or with a privileged guest for profound conversation.”6 The duke possessed two things for which he was renowned: a library said to be second only to the pope’s, and one of the most famous Renaissance profiles — a big, beefy head with a tiny, broken nose — immortalised in a portrait by Piero della Francesca, author of the first major scientific treatise on perspective, De prospectiva pingendi (ca. 1475), one of the treasures of the duke’s library. The panels portray various souvenirs of the duke’s wide reading in the arts and sciences, symbols of his earthly power, and pictorial allegories featuring the Liberal Arts. Pieces of the panels have gone missing, but in the intervening and fragmented lettered frieze, gorgeously rendered in gold Roman capitals on blue ground, some clues to the connection between the panels remain. As reconstructed by the art historian Olga Raggio, the full inscription would have read: You see how the eternal students of the Venerable Mother/Men exalted in learning and in genius/Fall forward, suppliantly with bared head/and bended knee, before [the face of their parent]./With the help of Justice, reverend Piety prevails/and none regrets having submitted to his foster mother.7 Inspired by the New Testament and uninhibited by Mosaic proscription, craftsmen in the city of Siena began to introduce flora and fauna into their compositions in the 14th century. Figures and faces became common by the late fifteenth century and, by the early sixteenth century, intarsiatori in Florence were making use of a wide variety of dyes in addition to natural hardwoods to mimic the full spectrum from the lightest (spindlewood) to medium (walnut) and dark (bog oak) — with the tantalizing exception of an aquamarine color somewhere between green and blue which required treating wood with “copper acetate (verdigris) and copper sulfate (vitriol).”8 As Italian intarsia made its way north from Siena to Nuremberg and, during the early sixteenth century, to Augsburg in southern Germany, where it became known as “gesägte intarsia (sawn intarsia)”, it nevertheless “remained a closely guarded guild technique.”9 It was in Augsburg that naturally spalted wood — that is, wood that has been stained naturally, most often by some species of fungus — first became a regular source for intarsia work and the color palette was at last completed. Furnishings that featured slivers of griinfaule or “green oak” were especially prized by master cabinetmakers like Bartholomew Weisshaupt and coveted by the elite of the Holy Roman Empire.10 Breaking open rotting hardwood logs to reveal delicate veins of turquoise and aquamarine, craftsmen discovered that the green in green oak was the result of colonization by the green elf-cup fungus, Chlorociboria aeruginascens, whose tiny teal fruiting bodies grow on felled, barkless conifers and hardwoods like oak and beech across much of Europe, Asia, and North America. Fungal rot usually devalues wood, but green oak happened to fill a lucrative niche in a burgeoning luxury trade, and that made it, for a time at least, as precious as some rare metals. During the reign of Charles V, when the Hapsburgs ruled both Spain and Germany, a lively trade in these intarsia pieces sprang up between the two countries. C. aeruginascens is an ascomycete, or sac fungi — aeruginascens means “becoming blue-green” — that is ideal for intarsia work because it grows on wood that has already been decomposed by white-rot fungi, the first-responders of the forest. (Timber has to rest before it can be used and was usually left on the forest floor for weeks or months at a time after being cut.) Arriving late to the party, so to speak, the teal fungus begins to spread throughout the wood in search of sugars, colonizing first the ray cells and then the vessels and fibers while releasing a secondary metabolite called xylindein, which is responsible for the brilliant turquoise color. Unlike dyes, which tend to concentrate in the vessels and fibers rather than ray cells, each piece of xylindein-stained wood appears uniquely, idiosyncratically mottled.11 And due to its stubborn refusal to oxidize or fade — a desirable trait known as colorfastness — it is also a mycological rarity: one of the few inedible mushroom-derived products to become a commodity. Of course, blue-green is not the only shade of spalted wood: there’s red stain (Scytalidium cuboideum), yellow stain (Scytalidium ganodermophthorum), and many others. We also know that “legname verde” was first used by Florentine craftsmen to imitate natural elements like leaves, trees, water, green porphyry, and parakeet feathers, and that it appears in details of the Gubbio studiolo. We know that Fra Giovanni’s pupil Raffaele da Brescia used it to invigorate landscapes parched of variety by too much alder and ash, while Antonio Barili and Giuliano da Maiano used it to differentiate important details like book locks, textiles, and the vestments of the Virgin herself. So might there be other examples of intarsia containing C. aeruginascens hiding in plain sight? In 1992, Robert Blanchette and his team received permission to analyze a green-stained panel from the Gubbio studiolo for the presence of fungal hyphae.12 This panel and another, attributed to Fra Giovanni, both turned out to be pieces of poplar that showed telltale signs of spalting along with the absence of any artificial pigments. (Destructive sampling of antiques is rarely allowed, so testing must consist of a visual comparison of key elements.) More recently, two researchers from the Department of Wood Science and Engineering at Oregon State University used the noninvasive method to extend the scope of analysis beyond Italy and Germany. Focusing on Spanish collections, they were able to determine that bureaus manufactured in Augsburg during the sixteenth century contained pieces of spalted wood, while “Spanish and Italian intarsia artifacts from the 1800s were found to only contain dyed wood.”13 With the advent of inorganic dyes the demand for spalted wood declined and the laborious practice of sourcing it largely fell out of favor. Though it would pop up now and again throughout history, particularly in Regency-era England in the form of Tunbridge ware — souvenir boxes with wooden inlay from the spa town of Tunbridge Wells in Kent — its heyday was past.14 One of those preindustrial alchemies like cochineal, a female scale insect from the New World that was at one time a valuable source of carmine — the color in the walls and doors of Van Gogh’s famous bedroom at Arles — now largely banished to the cabinet of curiosities.15 Though it seems like the mystery has evaporated and little is left to the imagination, it nevertheless strains credulity to seriously consider that the eyes of the parakeet which stare back at us from the walls of a Renaissance man cave may be the result — the wake — of a hungry fungus. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 16, 2018

Daniel Elkind

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:45.229577

divining-the-witch-of-york-propaganda-and-prophecy

Divining the Witch of York Propaganda and Prophecy By Ed Simon October 24, 2018 Said to be spawn of the devil himself and possessed with great powers of prophetic insight, Mother Shipton was Yorkshire’s answer to Nostradamus. Ed Simon looks into how, regardless of whether this prophetess witch actually existed or not, the legend of Mother Shipton has wielded great power for centuries — from the turmoil of Tudor courts, through the frictions of civil war, to the spectre of Victorian apocalypse. In 1488 during the reign of Henry VII, one year after the Dominican Heinrich Kramer wrote his notorious witch-finding manual Malleus Maleficarum, an adolescent girl named Agatha Soothtell gave birth in a cave among the dales and moors of Yorkshire to her daughter Ursula, supposedly conceived by the Devil himself. Ironically it was there in “God’s Own Country” that young Agatha would raise her demonic charge, both of them forced to live in the cave where Ursula was born. The site that would be visited by pilgrims for centuries afterwards, making it arguably England’s first tourist attraction, was known as much for the strange calcifying waters of its subterranean whirlpool as for its medieval Satanic nativity. Most sources claimed that Ursula died during the rule of Elizabeth I in 1561, but with eight decades separating her supposed death and the first appearance of her name in print, it’s fair to assume a degree of invention in her biography. Despite her legendary ugliness (Ursula’s seventeenth-century biographer described her as “a thing so strange in an infant, that no age can parallel”1), at the age of twenty-four she married a carpenter named Toby Shipton, and it is to posterity that she would come to be known as “Mother Shipton”. A less appropriate surname, because as “Smith” and “Taylor” indicate profession, so too did “Soothtell”. Mother Shipton would become the most famed of soothe tellers in English history, renowned for her prophecies and used as a symbolic familiar in the art of divination for generations, the very constructed personage of the seer, a work of poetry unto herself. As scholar Darren Oldridge writes, “Unlike other ‘ancient prophets’ who were known by their words alone, Shipton emerged as a personality in her own right”.2 It is likely at least some of Mother Shipton’s predictions were invented long after she lived, her prophetic couplets revised and edited to conform to later events, whether Cardinal Wolsey’s death, the Great Fire of London, or the Crimean War. Details of her biography, her writing, and her very countenance are uncertain. The prophetess herself may have been a later invention. Yet Mother Shipton, England’s Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century Sibyl, the Yorkshire prophetess, the Knaresborough witch whose crooked face has stared out from prints hanging on occultist’s walls and in the names of country pubs since the initial printing of her predictions in 1641, should serve as a potent point of reflection for what exactly we talk about when we talk about prophecies. Most of the major events in British history found expression in some pamphlet or compendium of Mother Shipton’s predictions, albeit backdated retrospectively with great convenience. There is Elizabeth I’s reformation: “A maiden Queen shall reign anon. / The Papal power shall bear no sway, / Rome’s creed shall hence be swept away.” Mother Shipton supposedly saw those broken ships of the Spanish Armada off the English and Irish coast: “The Western monarch’s wooden horses / Shall be destroyed by Drake’s forces” (a rare case of a prediction specifically naming a historical figure, which a skeptic might use to question said prophecy’s authenticity). It was claimed that the witch had a vision of Mary, Queen of Scots’ execution: “a widowed Queen / In England shall be headless seen”, as well as the punishment of Essex for his rebellion: “An Earl without a head be found”, and the ascension of the Scottish King James VI to the throne in Westminster: “Soon after shall the English Rose / Unto a male her place dispose.”3 And then there’s the Great Fire of London in 1666, Mother Shipton having supposedly claimed that “it comes against London . . . what a good city this was, none in the world comparable to it, and now there’s scare a house left,”4 which apparently led the diarist, raconteur, and naval secretary Samuel Pepys to write “Mother Shipton’s word is out”.5 As mentioned, some scholars have argued that she is a complete fiction. There are those, however, that argue she was in some way an actual person, embellished through local tradition into a folk legend. There is at least one clue earlier than the seventeenth century which indicates that the prophetess may be based in more than pure invention. In 1537, as Catholic rebels in Yorkshire rebelled against Henry VIII and his dissolution of the monasteries, the assailed king wrote a letter to the Duke of Norfolk in which he disdainfully refers to a “witch of York”. It is perhaps the earliest reference to what may be the real Mother Shipton. As the anonymous author in an 1868 edition of Notes and Queries concluded, “Although the fact of the existence of Mother Shipton rests wholly upon Yorkshire tradition, she can scarcely be regarded as a myth.”6 The British Library’s earliest listed publication about Mother Shipton is the anonymously penned 1641 The Prophesie of Mother Shipton in the raigne of King Henry the Eighth, fortelling the death of Cardinall Wolsey, etc., with fifteen subsequent texts in the seventeenth century (including a play), and dozens more published in the intervening centuries. One particular title was crucial to the embellishment of her myth, her biography as written by the Irish novelist Richard Head in 1667. Notes and Queries described Head as “the notorious Richard Head, author of several works of loose description.”7 His oeuvre included the erotic poetry of Venus Cabinet Unlock’d, the earliest slang dictionary The Canting Academy, a work of true crime about a notorious highwayman called Jackson’s Recantation, and, most significantly, a picaresque novel titled The English Rogue. That last title would become the first major fiction in English to be translated into a foreign tongue and would influence authors such as Daniel Defoe, who was inspired to write Moll Flanders based on Head’s example. Head’s The Life and Death of Mother Shipton was responsible for the majority of invented biographical details, building upon the bare narrative scaffolding of dozens of popular pamphlets. From Head’s imagination came details such as Agatha’s demonic wedding feast with Satan, accounts of magical feats performed by Ursula in front of worthies such as Cardinal Wolsey, and, most enduringly, the graphic and purple description of Mother Shipton’s physical appearance, which occupies hundreds of words, describing her as “very morose and big-boned”, with “very great goggling, but sharp and firey eyes; her nose of an incredible and unproportionable length”. Head then goes on for several sentences describing said nose in magnificently baroque prose, its “many crooks and turnings,” and its adornment with “many strange pimples of divers colours, as red and blue mixed, which, like vapours of brimstone, gave such a lustre to the affrighted spectators in the dead time of the night, that one of them confessed several times, that her nurse needed no other light” to assist her in the birth of the prophetess. Head offers similarly purple descriptions of Mother Shipton’s cheeks, her teeth, her mouth, her neck, her shoulders, her legs, and her toes, telling us that it was as if “her body had been screwed together piece after piece, and not rightly placed”. In short, Head rather cruelly makes clear what Mother Shipton looked like — a witch.8 Although not the origin of the Shipton myth, Head’s portrait is its most enduring instance, and it has almost single-handedly propelled Mother Shipton’s rise into full-on prophetic stardom. “The prophet is, first and foremost, a media phenomenon”, writes historian Jonathan Green in Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change 1450-1550, and if Mother Shipton was anything, it was a veritable media phenomenon.9 A beneficiary of cheap print, her stock soared with the collapse of the licensing laws of the 1640s, which enabled a deluge of pamphlets ascribing to her any number of potentially contradictory predictions. Pamphleteers during the years of the English Civil War took ample opportunity to enlist Mother Shipton as a convenient authority in propagandistic causes, both Parliamentarian and Royalist. Scholar Harry Rusche, in the English Historical Review, writes that Virtually all prophecies possessed a potential propaganda value that could be exploited by clever interpretation or a slight revision, and no prophetic utterance, ancient or recent, was so innocent that it could not be ingeniously twisted to bear upon contemporary religious and political issues.10 Such invoking of prophecies during times of crisis, writes historian Madeline Dodds, was “usually to demonstrate that some drastic change, either desired or already accomplished, had been foreseen by the sages of the past.”11 And this was often achieved by the retroactive backdating of prophecies, something certainly true for Head writing during the years of Restoration. Consider the explicitly Royalist gloss of the following, in which Mother Shipton “predicts” the regicide of Charles I, all via the pen of Head writing eighteen years after the actual event: “Then shall the Council great assemble, / Who shall make great and small to tremble, / The White King then (O grief to see!) / By wicked hands shall murdered be.” Head informs his readers that Shipton saw the rule of Charles’ son, “predicted” in this pamphlet published seven years into his rule, for “fate to England shall restore / A king to reign as heretofore.” By contrast, the 1641 Mother Shipton pamphlet evidences Parliamentarian sympathies, presenting startlingly accurate predictions about the future rather than only backdating events that had already occurred. It is claimed that “Wars shall begin in the Spring, / Much war to England it shall bring: / Then shall the Ladies cry well-away, / That ever we liv’d to see this day.”12 Though written with a sense of melancholia, there is also a sentiment of inevitability and the accurate foresight of coming civil war (though written after the Bishop’s War had already seen Scotland and England at blows). Moving from verse to prose, Mother Shipton prophecies that despite the coming strife, ultimately “there shall never be warfare again, nor any more Kings or Queens,” a startlingly radical conclusion written some eight years before Charles I would place his neck on the block. Rusch notes, “Whether this was specifically meant as parliamentarian propaganda is difficult to say” and that 1641 “seems too early for this kind of speculation except in the most extreme factions.” Yet whether the pamphlet originated in those extreme factions (or was simply accurate divination!), Rusche does observe that the publication “came to be recognized as good material for the parliamentarians. . . [and] was subsequently published by those opposed to the principles of monarchy.”13 If, during the politically tumultuous 1640s, the use of Mother Shipton’s prophecies centred on justifying or rebelling against rule, then later versions saw a different focus. Her most famous prophetic couplet, which claims that “The world to an end shall come, / In eighteen hundred and eighty one”,14 first appeared in an 1862 edition of her prophecies edited by Charles Hindley, a Victorian writer who was known for his compilations of vulgar speech, such as his omnibus Curiosities of Street Literature. His edition of Mother Shipton’s predictions reinvigorated the legends about the Yorkshire oracle, and if Head’s biography is one node in her myth, then Hindley supplied the other. Clifford Musgrave writes in Life in Brighton, from the Earliest Times to the Present that Hindley’s ominous apocalyptic verse “had an extraordinary effect on the popular imagination, especially among the poor educated and more credulous people all over the countryside.” According to Musgrave, many of these people “deserted their homes and spent nights praying in the fields, churches and chapels.”15 So pervasive was the fear that the world would end in 1881 that the British Library employed William Henry Harrison (not to be confused with the US president) to write an exhaustive debunking of the legend titled Mother Shipton Investigated. Harrison quotes the editor of an 1873 edition of Notes and Queries who explained that “Mr. Charles Hindley, of Brighton, in a letter to us, has made a clean breast of having fabricated the Prophecy quoted”, thus demonstrating once and for all the complete fabrication that was the Sibyl’s most famous and frightening prediction.16 It is not only fear that motivates allegiance to such prophecies; involved here also is a yearning for meaning and significance — the idea perhaps that our own lives could be of such importance that a Tudor oracle may have dreamt of us. As James Sharpe explains in Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England, prophecies “helped many people make sense of the world and cosmos in which they existed, and helped them deal with at least some of the problems they experienced”, even when such predictions were of apocalyptic bent.17 Consider not just the concluding apocalyptic couplet, but the full prophecy presented by Hindley, where he has the Sibyl say that “Through hills man shall ride, / And no horse be at his side. / Under water men shall walk, / Shall ride, shall sleep, shall talk. / In the air men shall be seen, / . . . Iron in the water shall float, / As easily as a wooden boat.”18 It is difficult to read her couplets and not imagine these prophecies rendered in such pleasing anaphora, repetition, and tricolon, to be eerily aligned to our own present, evoking cars or scuba diving, airplanes, or cruise ships. Perhaps Hindley had the telegraph in mind, but it’s hard not to see a reflection of ourselves in the black mirror of our smartphones and laptops as you read that “Around the world thoughts shall fly / In the twinkling of an eye.”19 Looking for such insight in ancient divinations betrays a poignant sentiment: that in past prophecies we hope not just for predictive power, but also for evidence of a connection with times long past — a sense that we are not so alone, cut-off and adrift in our particular age, but rather characters in a narrative penned long ago. More than being simple prediction, prophecy seems a strange literary tense that confuses past, present, and future, and inserts those not yet born into the writings of antiquity. Green explains that “prophecy involves; above all, the claim, made by the prophet and understood by his or her followers, to be the middle participant in a two-part conversation.”20 The scouring of prophecies, pamphlets, letters, marginalia, ephemera, and almanacs of those prophetic mages is driven by the desire for a radical, sweet empathy imparted to us by our long-dead ancestors. Reading Nostradamus, or those weird sisters the Sibylline oracles, or some other mystic, seer, or psychic is to wish that we could speak to the past, that our dialogues with the dead are not one-sided and that perhaps they cared about us. While scholars have written extensively about more respectable (and verifiably real) astrologers and alchemists who mastered the necromantic arts, from John Dee in the sixteenth century to Simon Forman and William Lilly in the seventeenth (the latter an author of a pamphlet about Mother Shipton), the “cunning-woman” of Yorkshire has remained the province of psychics and tarot card readers, hazily remembered as just another antique prophetess. Distinctions between those gentlemen with their grimoires, scrying mirrors, and alchemical tables and the hag of Yorkshire might not be as historically clear as could be assumed. Sharpe explains that a “distinction between witchcraft on the one hand and magic and sorcery on the other proves impossible”, and that “medieval and early modern commentators tended to jumble the terms [of witchcraft and magic] together happily enough.”21 Certainly there has been a rich and full investigation of witchcraft by social historians over the past half-century, yet Mother Shipton herself awaits her full due -- a debt which may continue to be deferred so long as proof of her existence eludes us. Despite much (or even perhaps all) of her biography and her supposed fortunes being the result of hoax, invention, conjecture, and fiction, there is a cracked truth in her example. For even in her most famed, fake, and falsified predictions we are given the opportunity to contemplate this strange thing of prophecy, in both its propaganda and its poetry, while also perhaps encountering the witch of York on her own terms, seeing predictions for what they are: a weird type of participatory literature. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 24, 2018

Ed Simon

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:45.583818

elephants-horses-and-the-proportions-of-paradise

Elephants, Horses, and the Proportions of Paradise By Dániel Margócsy November 5, 2018 Does each species have an optimal form? An ideal beauty that existed prior to the Fall? These were questions that concerned both artists and breeders alike in the 17th century. Dániel Margócsy on the search for a menagerie of perfect prelapsarian geometry. What does a perfect elephant look like? This was a question that occupied the Flemish artist Crispijn van de Passe II in the years around 1620. By then, several elephants had visited the European continent. In the 1510s, an elephant named Hanno was brought to Portugal from India and then presented as a gift from King Manuel I of Portugal to Pope Leo X. In the 1550s, Suleiman traveled through the Iberian peninsula and Italy, died in Vienna, and was stuffed and exhibited in Munich for centuries. A couple of years after Suleiman’s death, Emmanuel traveled through the Low Countries and Austria, and the list goes on, relentlessly, until we reach Hansken, the elephant that Rembrandt famously pictured, and whose skeleton is still exhibited in Florence’s Museum of Natural History. Before de Passe, no one thought to establish an ideal norm for what the average or canonic elephant might look like. Not that Passe’s aim was to synthesize previous sightings of the animal. While an extensive number of elephant prints survive from the sixteenth century, it is unlikely that he was familiar with all of them. Instead, Passe relied on the rules of geometry. With the use of squares and circles, he constructed an animal that conformed to the laws of mathematical proportions and published the results in his book ’t Light der teken en schilderkonst. By the 1620s, artists had long used the laws of proportions to construct human figures. Their aims were often twofold. The use of squares and circles allowed apprentice artists to quickly learn how to sketch convincing figures, and it also helped establish a standard and idealized understanding of what the human body should look like. Most of us are familiar with Leonardo’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man, which illustrates the idea that the relationship between the body parts of the ideal human being could be expressed in simple, mathematical terms. From the early days of the Renaissance, art theorists such as Albrecht Dürer discussed in great detail how the ideal human being’s height was equivalent to seven, eight, or nine times the length of his head, and how the length of the arm, the legs, the chest, and other body parts could also be expressed as integer multiples (or simple fractions) of the head. Painters applied the same insights to the study of animals. Dürer’s Knight, Death, and the Devil famously pictures a geometrically constructed horse, and he even intended to publish a whole treatise on the topic, which was pirated soon after his death in 1528 by Hans Sebald Beham. Beham’s Maß oder proporcion der ross would soon be followed by the model books of the German printmakers Erhard Schön and Hans Lautensack. Each of these artists came up with a subtly different solution to picturing a proportionate horse. For Beham, the abstract horse could be constructed in a few steps, starting with a large square, divided into nine small squares. Into this grid he introduced numerous smaller geometrical forms and then inscribed his ideal horse into the carefully measured plane. While Beham was interested in establishing the mathematical proportions of the lateral horse across a plane, Erhard Schön extended these considerations to three dimensions. Unlike Beham and Schön, Lautensack did not think that the horse needed to be inscribed in a previously established geometrical plane or space. One could simply construct it by drawing two circles of equal size next to each other, one for the frontal part and one for the buttocks, and then by drawing a set of straight lines that determined the length of the legs, the neck, and the head. Passe’s innovation was to extend the repertory of animal figures to elephants as well as to bears, lions, or rabbits. Yet, for Passe, as for his predecessors, the question of the horse was even more pressing than that of the elephant. Building upon his predecessors, he carefully analyzed the proportions of the horse in a series of images, both in two and three dimensions, paying special attention to the shape of the head. The geometry of the horse was crucial for Passe, whose personal life and profession brought him into daily contact with the animals. He was earning his living by offering lessons at the renowned riding academy of Antoine Pluvinel in the old palace of the Louvre. One may venture the thought that his students were probably more interested in riding than in limning elephants. Passe was also the illustrator of Pluvinel’s Maneige Royal, the crowning achievement and theoretical condensation of the riding master’s work; he saw it through the press after the author’s untimely death. Our Flemish artist peppered the Maneige Royal with images of perfectly proportionate horses, on occasion explicitly borrowing from his ’t Light der teken en schilderkonst. Considering Passe in his time, his focus on horses makes a lot of sense. Horses were, after all, the most important animal in the early modern period. They were the primary means of transportation, a significant source of agricultural labour, and, for aristocrats, a prime fashion object. Picturing them, therefore, was an essential part of any artist’s repertoire. Moreover, horses were highly diverse. By the end of the sixteenth century, Europeans were familiar with dozens of different breeds, ranging from Frisian, Burgundy, and Crete horses to Barbs, Turks, and Arabs. When the Flemish artist Jan van der Straet (Stradanus) was commissioned to portray the horses in the stable of Don Juan d’Austria, he was able to picture forty different breeds, including Armenians, Apulians, and Saxons. While in those days, nobody made a distinction between Asian and African elephants (even Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century founder of taxonomy, would remain ignorant of their differences), Passe was surely familiar with the dozens of horse breeds that his customers were riding. Pictures of proportionate horses offered the hope of establishing an ideal type for the species. Early in the sixteenth century, Lautensack had already pondered this possibility. He admitted that his geometric horses could not be representative of all breeds. While Italian horses were “rather handsome, with round, broad bodies and a small head”, the Turkish horses were “scrawny”, and the bodies and haunches of Frisian horses were large and heavy. Lautensack’s beautiful, proportionate horse could stand in for a beautiful race, such as the Italian, or posit an as yet unattainable ideal, but it did not represent the species in all its diversity. Yet if not all horses followed the ideal rules of geometry, could they be remade to conform? This was the key issue for horse breeders in the decades before Passe came onto the scene. Consider, for instance, the polymath Thomas Blundeville from Elizabethan England. Like Lautensack, Blundeville’s aim was to determine how the geometrical abstraction of the ideal horse related to the observed variability amongst actual horses. What made a species a species? Blundeville’s solution appears to have relied on the idea of an ancestral horse from whom all other horses descended and diverged. This idea is rooted in the story of Noah’s flood. In the Ark each species was represented by only one couple, and it was their offspring, dispersing in all directions, that came to populate the Earth once the waters had subsided. As Blundeville wrote, focusing on humans, though God almightie hath created all men of one selfe bloode, and that all doe take their beginning from the Arke of Noah, and that all men be one selfe qualitie and shape of the bodie, yet they differ in greatnesse, in proportion of members, and in colour. As animals multiplied and dispersed after the Flood, their size, proportions, and colour began to diverge. It was thus imperative to figure out which breed had the best, most beautiful proportions. In his Foure Chiefest Offices belonging to Horsemanship, Blundeville investigated the characteristics of horses from Turkey, Barbary, and Europe, and concluded that the courser of Naples was the best, as “his limmes are so well proportioned in euerie point”. Because of this quality, the Neapolitan horse stood out from the rest, and Blundeville proposed to import this breed to England to rejuvenate local stock. But why was the Neapolitan endowed with perfect proportions? The answer built on the commonly accepted Galenic theory of four humours and its relationship to climate. Following tradition, Blundeville believed that the external proportions and the behavior of the horse reflected the internal proportions of the four bodily humours of blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile. Every animal’s body and character was determined by the particular humoural mix of these four fluids. In turn, it was the climate of a land that determined the humoural make-up of a creature. In hot and dry lands, creatures tended to have an overabundance of yellow bile. In wet and cold lands, like England, creatures tended to have too much phlegm and, as a result, had a rather phlegmatic character. Clearly, the land with the best, most moderate climate produced the best horses, and what could beat the balmy weather of the bay of Naples? That was the reason why the Neapolitan courser was perfect, beautiful, healthy, and strong, ready to withstand any adversity. As Blundeville wrote, the Napolitan although he be bred under a hotter climat, yet that region is very temperate of it self, and so fruitful, as it is called the Garden, or Paradise of Itale: and the Horses there bredde, be of so strong and healthful complexion, as they wil not quaile wheresoeuer they go: and that they prosper so wel heere in this land, as in any other foyraine country. Blundeville probably did not call the city of Naples the “Paradise of Itale” without a reason. The Bible had a huge influence on horse breeding in Elizabethan and Stuart England. In the 1610s, for instance, Michael Baret would argue that the ultimate aim of breeders was to restore the horse from the Garden of Eden. In the era before Darwinian evolution, horse breeders desperately needed a religious narrative that contradicted the widespread theory that species were permanent, which would have left little room for breeders’ attempts to improve upon nature. The Biblical story of the Fall of Man provided such an alternative. As Baret claimed, while the ideal, abstract, universal horse once existed in Paradise, the original sin of Adam and Eve brought corruption to this species as well. Horses devolved into various degenerate breeds and could not return to their Edenic condition without the intervention of breeders. Baret wrote that, For although God gaue unto Horses such excellent qualities at their Creation, now are they changed in their use and are become disobedient to man, and therefore must bee subjected by Art. The art of horsemanship could reverse the fall of humankind and create anew the perfect horse that obeyed humans — a horse that was proportionate, of course. Baret therefore set out to determine which horses were the most proportionate and most beautiful. Unlike Blundeville, he argued that the Edenic horse would be recreated by the careful, racial mixing of hot and dry Turkish or Barb stallions with cold and wet English mares. The combination of the humoural mixes of hotter and colder climates would lead to a new balance manifest in a perfectly shaped horse. Baret’s suggestions about racial mixing had a large impact on English horsemanship. His contemporaries warmly embraced the idea that English horses could be improved by the injection of foreign blood. The author Gervase Markham imported one of the first Arabian horses, the Markham Arabian, during these very years, and he sold it to King James I. One hundred years later, renewed imports of Turks, Barbs, and Arabians led to the establishment of the English thoroughbred, which would remain the most valuable British horse into the present day. While early modern Englishmen increasingly protected their national identity by refraining from marriage with foreigners, they had no such compunction about having their mares bear children from stallions of distant lands. Baret’s example has revealed the practical impact of artistic theories of proportion on contemporary breeding practices. Such a story shows that breeders and horse aficionados didn’t merely marvel at the skills of artists in producing naturalistic images. They also seriously engaged with the geometrical underpinnings of contemporary art theory and used these theories as a blueprint for their eugenic design. Moreover, the reception of proportional theory among horse breeders might also find a resonance with the original context in which artists like Dürer, Passe, and Lautensack operated. From the vantage point of Baret, Dürer’s renowned print of Adam and Eve, with its perfectly proportionate humans, is a most appropriate manifestation of the ideal beauty of humankind before the Fall. Just before they have eaten from the apple, Adam and Eve still have a perfect internal balance of the four bodily humours (which, as some claim, are symbolized by the ox, rabbit, elk, and cat in the foreground). That is why their external proportions are so perfect, a characteristic that no other human will ever have, again. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 5, 2018

Dániel Margócs

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:46.153579

darwin-s-polar-bear

Darwin’s Polar Bear By Michael Engelhard February 21, 2018 Musings upon the whys and wherefores of polar bears, particularly in relation to their forest-dwelling cousins, played an important but often overlooked role in the development of evolutionary theory. Michael Engelhard explores. As any good high school student should know, the beaks of Galápagos “finches” (in fact the islands’ mockingbirds) helped Darwin to develop his ideas about evolution. But few people realize that the polar bear, too, informed his grand theory. Letting his fancy run wild in On the Origin of Species, the man accustomed to thinking in eons hypothesized “a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.” Darwin based this speculation on a black bear the fur trader-explorer Samuel Hearne had observed swimming for hours, its mouth wide open, catching insects in the water. If the supply of insects were constant, Darwin thought, and no better-adapted competitors present, such a species could well take shape over time. Systematic approaches to animals and their respective niches had long fertilized the intellectual landscape. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in his Histoire Naturelle (published serially between 1749 and 1788) clearly distinguished a “land-bear” from a “sea-bear”. But his land-bear category was still muddled: it included a “white bear of the forest” as well as a brown bear. The count would have likely heard of polar bears in the boreal zone of southern Hudson Bay and he thought them a separate species: his “white bear of the forest”. In a 1754 publication of coloured plates used in Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, his white land-bear looks different from his sea-bear, clearly showing the shorter neck and snout characteristic of brown bears and black bears. Perhaps the count knew about British Columbia’s white black bears or “spirit bears,” which could have confused him. (Other contributions by Buffon were significant. He discovered the first principle of biogeography, noticing that despite similar environments, different regions have distinct plants and animals.) Buffon’s classifying of animals by region or habitat — as in the case of the two “different” white bears — prompted later naturalists to try to explain their origins and distribution as resulting from the characteristics of a place. Long before the idea of “habitat” began to infiltrate scientific discourse, the polar bear’s range and that of its prey had been linked to environmental conditions. Synthesizing the work of the Comte de Buffon and other naturalists, the Anglo-Irish Romantic writer Oliver Goldsmith thought the “Greenland bear” exceptional, because it is the only animal that, by being placed in the coldest climate, grows larger than those that live in the temperate zones. All other species of animated nature diminish as they approach the poles, and seem contracted in their size by the rigours of the ambient atmosphere . . . . In short, all the variations of its figure and its colour seem to proceed from the coldness of the climate where it resides and the nature of the food it is supplied with. Food availability does play a role in body mass, as does a region’s mean annual temperature, and while polar bears are not the only compact animal thriving in the Arctic, such biogeographic observations anticipated the theory of evolution and principles of ecology. On Svalbard expeditions in the summers of 1858 and 1859, the Scottish nobleman-explorer Sir James Lamont watched polar bears frolic and dive. Intuiting that the animal had become what it is by living on seals, he deduced that the seal and the walrus must have originated first. Lamont assumed that polar bears had evolved from brown bears, who, finding their means of subsistence running short, and pressed by hunger, ventured on the ice and caught some seals . . . so there is no impossibility in supposing that the brown bears, who by my theory were the progenitors of the present white bears, were accidentally driven over to Greenland and Spitzbergen by storms or currents. The palest brown bears with the greatest amount of external fat, Lamont thought, would have had the best chance to survive and, therefore, reproduce. Upon his return, he wrote to Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859. Encouraged by Darwin’s response, Lamont elaborated upon walrus and polar bear evolution in his 1861 travelogue, Seasons with the Sea-horses. Darwin approved of Lamont’s hypothesis, and, because Lamont’s thinking on the subject predated the publication of On the Origin of Species, he later credited Lamont (as he did Alfred Russel Wallace) with independently conceiving the theory of natural selection. The oldest polar bear fossils found are from Svalbard and northern Norway and have been dated at 115,000–130,000 years old, before the beginning of the last Ice Age. But some biologists think that polar bears and brown bears diverged from their common ancestor as early as 600,000 years ago. According to current research, polar bears evolved from brown bears that ventured onto the frozen ocean to stalk marine mammals, possibly after climate separated them from the main population. This was not a single, clean-cut departure, and repeated pairings between both species have turned the family tree into a thicket. Shrinking sea ice could force polar bears to mingle with their southern cousins again, particularly as the latter now travel farther north. In coastal Arctic Alaska, grizzlies have been observed feasting in the company of polar bears on bowhead whale carcasses. and interbreeding has been documented. After he had been ridiculed for his musings on a future insect-eating cetacean bear, Darwin altered that passage in the second edition of Origin and removed it from subsequent ones. In a letter to the Irish algae specialist William Henry Harvey, Darwin complained how “The Bear case has been well laughed at, & disingenuously distorted by some into my saying that a bear could be converted into a whale”. Still, Darwin insisted that “there is no especial difficulty in a Bear’s mouth being enlarged to any degree useful to its changing habits, — no more difficulty than man has found in increasing the crop of the pigeon, by continued selection, until it is literally as big as whole rest of body.” Lamont’s observations and theories as well as later findings about polar bear evolution vindicated the eminent naturalist and his ursine thought experiment. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 21, 2018

Michael Engelhard

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:46.663006

pods-pots-and-potions-putting-cacao-to-paper-in-early-modern-europe

Pods, Pots, and Potions Putting Cacao to Paper in Early Modern Europe By Christine Jones December 7, 2017 Christine Jones explores the different ways the cacao tree has been depicted through history — from 16th-century codices to 18th-century botanicals — and what this changing iconography reveals about cacao’s journey into European culture. Lauded as the “food of the gods” (Theobroma) by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in 1753, the cacao plant (Theobroma cacao) has always elicited a certain amount of scientific curiosity and mystical reverence from Europeans. Tucked away under the canopy within the planet’s narrow equatorial zone, the only environment in which it grows, and first cultivated in the lands that now constitute Guatemala and Belize, cacao had spent centuries well hidden from Continental eyes. However, after Hernán Cortés and his army took Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, for Spain in 1521, cacao was among the first marvels they wrote home about to describe the new world bounty they’d won for the Castilian crown. Conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote down in his record of conquest that frothed chocolate was “the best thing they have to drink”.1 Others hailed it as the key to Moctezuma’s famed virility. Cacao, the base ingredient in chocolate, was also used as currency in Mesoamerica. It was not long before colonists took a keen interest in this fortifying drink and the money that grew on trees. Unlike that of a typical fruit, the sweet white flesh of the lumpy autumnal-colored pods that sprout from the cacao tree, was considered by locals and European settlers alike to be “of little or no use” and as having a “phlegmatic” texture.2 Its seeds were the valuable prize. Local women followed ancient recipes to produce from these hard, dry seeds an unctuous frothy drink that by all accounts could cure almost anything. That cold cacao beans could become a warming energy drink flummoxed early-modern humoral science.3 Overall, the botanical source of chocolate proved biologically curious, even as the drink became irresistibly compelling. As early Spanish colonists learned, it was not for nothing that the cacao tree had an elevated status in the cosmology and agriculture of Mesoamerica. In the century following conquest, cacao, which had been sacred to the Aztec and to the Maya before them, ranked among crops like tobacco and sugar that proved addictive to the European consumer and crucial to the economic exploitation of the New World. Spain imported beans regularly and Madrileño urbanites whipped up a vogue for the chocolate drink, whose popularity then spilled over into France, England, and beyond. Comparatively few Europeans had, however, seen the plant in its native ecosystem. Curious armchair explorers relied for their knowledge of chocolate’s raw ingredient on illustrations done by clerics and scientists who had voyaged across the Atlantic and documented the landscape. The history of such illustrations of cacao dates back to the first generation after conquest and it not only provides us with a bevy of wonderful botanical studies, but also chronicles cacao’s European reception from the mid sixteenth to the mid eighteenth century. Before the arrival of Europeans, the cacao tree made its textual debut in the form of glyphs in pre-Columbian, that is, indigenous codices. On the first page of what is now known as the Fejérváry-Mayer Codex, one of the oldest that survives today, the tree flanks the god Tezcatlipoca as one of the “trees of life” (a role the tree also played for the Maya, from whom the Aztecs learned cacao agriculture). Though highly stylized, in its placement of the fruit, the pre-Columbian Fejérváry-Mayer glyph offers a surprisingly accurate depiction of the plant’s growth habit. Cacao pods can push from anywhere along the tree trunk, as they do in the Codex, giving the tree a singular appearance. Post-conquest ethnographies and botanicals that feature the tree tended to instead Europeanize it by removing this distinguishing feature: they have the pods migrate up the trunk to the higher branches. The first such “migration” of the pods occurred when Franciscan Friar Bernardino de Sahagún lent his name and publishing power to the inaugural ethnographic study of Aztec culture in the sixteenth century. Covering a period beginning in the years shortly after Cortés’s overthrow of Moctezuma II’s empire until its publication in Madrid in the 1570s, the Historia general de las cosas de nueva España (General history of the things of New Spain) documented social habits and rites of the Aztecs. Now known as the Florentine Codex (for the city of its owner library, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana), its composition among Mesoamerican codices is unique. This encyclopedic book in twelve volumes, each with dozens of short chapters, represents an early collaboration between Aztec and Spanish ethnographers. Sahagún harnessed knowledge of a team of indigenous students who had trained bilingually and biculturally at the Franciscan Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, where Sahagún taught. They wrote the book in glyphs and Nahuatl transcription in Latin characters, to which the friar, with the likely aid of the students, added Spanish translations. The glyphs provide insight into post-conquest culture using stylized pictograms, in the fashion of a pre-Columbian Aztec codex like the Fejérváry-Mayer or the Codex Borbonicus (which was written over with Spanish names after conquest). The more elaborate verbal descriptions that became a feature of post-Columbian Aztec and Spanish codices such as the Florentine Codex and the Codex Mendoza, document the Nahuatl language and translate it into Spanish, giving European readers insight into the symbolic and practical rituals of everyday Mesoamerican life. Sahagún’s study was among the first to depict both the tree and the chocolate drink: cacao in nature and cacao in culture. Culture comes first in the order of the volumes. He classified social habits such as food and drink, along with their makers and sellers, among what he called the “virtues and vices” of the Aztec people (Book 10). Chocolate merits distinction among the beverages, being arduous to produce and crafted by women for the nobility, which he captures in the term atlaquetzal, or precious water. In the years after conquest, “cacao made to drink”, as Sahagún calls the chocolate beverage, was a trade performed by the new Criolla class, women of Spanish descent born in the colonies. They are pictured in the glyph performing the first and final steps of the drink preparation: the Criolla “grinds . . . crushes, breaks, pulverizes” the seeds (left foreground) and “pours it back and forth, aerates it; she makes it form a head, makes it foam” (left background).4 Sahagún takes up the cacao tree in the next volume which focuses on the natural world of central Mexico. Despite the pods being large, because of its relatively compact size the cacaoaquavitl (quavitl = tree) falls into the category of trees that produce small fruit, like guava and plumbs. The artist depicts the cacao tree in a shape — long trunk with a few outstretched branches — that echoes the cacao glyph of the Fejérváry-Mayer Codex. But the Florentine Codex does something specific to the tree that helps it conform better to European expectation: it moves the pods off the trunk and high up onto the branches. In fact, as the first page of Fejérváry-Mayer and the more recent figure that appeared in Walter Baker’s landmark history of the tree (pictured below) demonstrate, cacao pods can indeed push from anywhere along the trunk, giving the tree a singular appearance. Sahagún’s intention to translate Aztec culture for Spain caused him to strip the trunk of its pods so that the plant conformed better to the Continental vision of what a tree should look like. When it came time for the Spanish crown to investigate the natural world of the tropical colonies it now governed, Philip II commissioned court physician Francisco Hernández de Toledo to undertake the first scientific expedition to New Spain. The posthumous publication of his descriptions of more than 3000 indigenous plants took the form of a encyclopedia richly illustrated with images by indigenous artists. This inaugural botanical of the new world was published posthumously in Spanish by the Mexican publisher Diego Lopez Davalos in 1615 under the title, Quatro libros de la Naturaleza, y virtudes de las plantas y animales que están reunidos en el uso de Medicina en la Nueva España (Four Books on the Nature and Virtues of Plants and Animals for Medicinal Purposes in New Spain). In 1628, Nardo Antonio Recchi reorganized the original Latin text, eventually published in Rome as the Rerum medicarum novae hispaniae thesaurus (Thesaurus of Medical Things of New Spain). The Rerum medicarum again figures the tree with no pods on its trunk, giving it a Europeanized look, though the largest pods do hang low. Visible too in this full-body portrait are the characteristic surface roots that snake horizontally from the tree along the ground. This text also explores the agriculture of cacao in more verbal detail than earlier texts. The Aztecs had four words for the plant species, depending upon how it was cultivated, which Hernández indicates in Nahuatl transcription and Latin (translated here): tree-cacao (cacahuaquahuitl) grew to full height, rope cacao — known by the same word — (cacahuaquahuitl) was cut periodically to middling height, flower cacao (xuchicacacahuaquahuitl) produced large blooms, and dwarf cacao (tlalcacahuaquahuitl) was stunted. Each type of cacao in the size hierarchy had a distinct application, from the large aromatic seeds used to make chocolate served to Emperor Moctezuma and other elites (the finest) to the small beans delivered as taxes (the least precious). Both Sahagún before him and Hernández depicted the largest and most precious cultivation, which could then be read back as the same strain depicted in Mayan pictogram and Aztec glyph: tree-cacao. As the century elapsed, and botanical novelty turned to social curiosity, the plant’s image began to change accordingly. In the 1671 Usages du caffé, du thé et du chocolate (translated, The Manner of Making Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate, 1685), Philippe Dufour first explained chocolate alongside the two other steeped beverages served hot in Europe and also known for their curative effects: coffee and tea. In the frontispiece to the section on chocolate, a disembodied branch floats above the ground, upon which the seeds contained in the pod (lower left) and a vanilla bean, an indigenous ingredient commonly found in early Mesoamerican recipes for chocolate, lie in wait. Above them stands an “American” in Aztec dress and characteristic bow, with the utensils used for preparing and serving the drink at his feet. A number of cultural allusions appear in this depiction of the plant. First, the pods on a cut branch (detail) look as one would expect to see them in a cabinet of curiosities, isolated as objects at which a European might marvel. Second, surrounding cacao with vanilla and servingware highlights its role as an ingredient in chocolate rather than a crop or a botanical specimen, and also as a consumer luxury rather than an indigenous woman’s trade. In the top image an “American” appears surrounded by the tools of the trade. Yet, the caption explaining the wares fails to make clear that these particular utensils — the chocolatière, or chocolate pot, for serving (right bottom of the top image) and the goblet for drinking (left bottom) — were designed and used, not by indigenous Americans, but by Europeans in the colonies and on the Continent. In its form, the goblet imitated the shape of a jícara, a gourd that was dried and used as a cup in Mesoamerica. The chocolate pot, for its part, was used as a receptacle to whip the chocolate with a molinillo (pictured next to it) that was inserted through a hole in the lid and twisted quickly between the palms of the hands. It represents a modern way of frothing that replaced the risky pouring method Aztec and Criolla tradeswomen traditionally used to create a foamy head on the chocolate. The deeply colonial artifacts surrounding the American denaturalize both the man and the plant, reducing them to European commodities. As the sampling of wood-cuts above suggests, the images of the cacao tree before 1700 spoke to the needs of their audiences as well as the skill sets of their artists. Most of them stylized the tree without emphasizing its natural beauty or tropical environment. It would take a leader in entomology — Maria Sibylla Merian — to give cacao its native coloring and some indication of the sorts of wildlife that would surround it in the Americas. A landmark depiction of the plant’s lifeworld came to Europe when Merian published her Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium in 1705. The book was the result of her 1699 expedition to Surinam, a Dutch plantation colony. Today historians of science consider it the West’s first major study of American entomology and hail its author as the most talented botanical artist of her century. Metamorphosis did something rare for the early environmental sciences: it combined empirical knowledge of local flora with Merian’s extensive knowledge of insect metamorphosis. Merian, who had begun studying butterflies as a young woman in Holland, quickly ranked among Europe’s leading experts in the new science of entomology. Investigating the life cycle of Lepidoptera (the order of butterflies and moths), which involved an extraordinary metamorphosis, gave her expertise in insect transformation, an even rarer sort of knowledge. Fascination with insects that morph from simple into complex physiognomies drove her to undertake a voyage to the tropics, where moths and butterflies abound. The trip would make her the first woman of Western science to undertake a botanical expedition in the New World. She spent her sojourn in Surinam documenting the different stages of Lepidoptera’s existence, upon and around the leaves they eat. A talented artist, she privileged drawings over words in her presentation of these indigenous life forms: each vibrant page of the picture book illustrates the physical contours of the plant; the profile, markings, and habit of the pupa and emergent worms that can be found on it; and their transformation via chrysalis into full-color butterflies and moths. Merian’s images of the plant gave it the graphic power of fine art, as though cacao was a unique subject worthy of attention, and the botanical complexity of an ecosystem that sustains metamorphosis. Merian depicts the cacao pod with variegation very close to the texture she gives the Surinam lemon, to which she compares the fruit in the verbal description of the image. While she telescopes to the branch of the tree, she shows the fruit hanging lower on the stem than the leaves, true to its growth habit. Both weight and size are easier to gauge in this image with a caterpillar feasting on the leaf — it is not so large or heavy enough to pull the leaf down — and small flower buds dangling from the stems. The fruit is much larger than the delicate stem and leaves would suggest was possible. Cacao pods are indeed substantial at about eight inches in full length and weighing in at about a pound, something earlier depictions do not render as plainly. Further, Merian’s interest in the four stages of insect metamorphosis appears to have influenced her depiction of the fruit. Four variations of the pod show new fruit pushing out, growing around its lumpy seeds, at full maturity, and then with its interior layers exposed. The mass of fleshy pulp cradles dozens of seeds — normally around forty. We are reminded that unlike the meat of other fruits, which are their treasure, the flesh of this one merely incubates the plant’s true dietary riches: its beans. If insects made the cacao plant ecologically concrete, the cacao plant also earned its very own signature insect after Merian depicted their relationship. The exquisite image of cacao composed for the 1705 edition (plate 26) features a black and red striped armyworm and its less spectacular moth. Now known as the Southern Armyworm, Spodoptera eridania belongs to the family Noctuidae, night fliers, of the order Lepidoptera. It’s east Asian relative, Tiracola plagiata, goes by the name Cacao Armyworm now that its diet includes that fruit, which traveled around the equator from South America to Asia in the wake of global colonialism. Merian’s seventeenth-century armyworm appears on Surinam cacao in the four states of its existence, reminding the European reader that they are not the only creature who enjoys chocolate as part of a healthy diet. Picturing the vibrant cacao plant as food for a caterpillar and a haven for its metamorphosis folds the plant into Surinam’s natural world. It was the closest a European armchair traveler could come to experiencing chocolate in nature. Merian’s drawings inaugurated a high age of naturalism in botanical sketching at the dawn of the high age of botanical expedition, of which perhaps the most famous of the century was undertaken by Hans Sloane to Jamaica. Sloane succeeded Isaac Newton as President of the Royal Society and bequeathed his substantial collection of artifacts and specimens to the crown, creating the foundation of what became today’s British Museum. The magisterial two-volume account of his 1690s trip to the Caribbean islands, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (Vol. 1 1707, Vol. 2 1725) contains nearly 350 plates published over the first quarter of the eighteenth century. His voyage in and around Jamaica lasted fifteen months and resulted in the “discovery” and collection of many hundreds of plant species, with cacao figured among them in the second volume. According to the title page, illustrations showcase “the figures of the things described, which have not been heretofore engraved.” While there had been images of cacao in circulation before 1725, the tree in Sloane’s study, drawn by Dutch artist Everhardus Kickius, can justifiably claim to render the small physical details of the plant, veins and petioles, more visible than previous illustrations. The image features a branch as we might expect to see it in a botanist’s inventory destined for a laboratory to be tested or in a materia medica display. (London’s Natural History Museum still displays Sloane’s original cacao specimen.) The artist’s eye has dissected the plant like a scientist to cluster three buds and detail a sample of flesh and a seed from the pod’s interior. Although the sketch is black and white, physical markings on the leaves and fruits showcase the plant’s characteristic striations: the ridges on the pods that compartmentalize the seeds and the dense veins of the leaf surface where it takes in light under the canopy. Another feature of the plant’s ability to draw enough nutrients and energy to form one-pound fruits is visible in the hollow of the cut stem. The sketch finally puts the visual depiction into dialogue with an earlier authority, John Ray, whose Historia planetarum Sloane carried to guide his investigation of Jamaica’s landscape. The words “Ray.hist. 1670” printed at the bottom of the image, send the reader to the first page of Ray’s chapter on cacao. While the cacao illustration is one among a great many in his study, Sloane developed a special relationship to it, one that brings him nearly as much notoriety today as does his founding of the British Museum. As the story goes, like most travelers to the colonies, Sloane partook of the chocolate drink in Jamaica, but had an aversion to what he perceived to be its bitter taste. Legend has it that he added dairy to the brew to cut its bite, creating the first chocolate milk. The Sloane anecdote helped inaugurate a tradition of Europeans claiming to improve the bitter Mesoamerican drink by adapting it to their supposedly more refined taste. Scholars now consider these tales part and parcel of the general colonial pretension to civilizing the Tropics (see Delbourgo and Norton in the bibliography). In point of fact, the Aztecs sweetened their chocolate with honey and smoothed it with corn meal, in addition to adding a host of medically beneficial spices, many of which were enjoyed by Spanish and English colonists for generations. Those importing cacao for preparation in Europe logically sought alternatives to ingredients hard to find on the Continent, such as corn, and turned to what they had. As early as the 1660s, a treatise by Henry Stubbe and a witty dialogue by Bollicosgo Armuthaz recommended adding milk or egg, as a binding agent and for taste. While Sloane did not, therefore, invent the idea of adding a dairy product like milk to chocolate, his name did help the recipe garner press. Shrewd confectioners already began using Sloane’s notoriety to brand chocolate milk in the eighteenth century, and circa 1850, Cadbury printed “Sloane’s” recipe on its chocolate milk label, formalizing the connection. Like the historical illustrations of the tree, stories about chocolate tend to say as much about the interests of their teller as they do about the details of their subject. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

December 7, 2017

Christine Jones

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:47.203341

alas-poor-yorick-the-death-and-life-of-laurence-sterne

“Alas, Poor YORICK!” The Death and Life of Laurence Sterne By Ian Campbell Ross March 7, 2018 On the 250th anniversary of Laurence Sterne’s death, Ian Campbell Ross looks at the engagement with mortality so important to the novelist’s groundbreaking work. This year brings two notable anniversaries in the life of the Reverend Laurence Sterne, author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Two hundred fifty years ago, on February 27, 1768, he published A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. By Mr. Yorick. Fewer than three weeks later, on March 18, aged just fifty-four, he died. Few writers have passed their entire literary career so knowingly in the shadow of death as had Sterne. In the work of still fewer, least of all eighteenth-century comic novelists, does death appear so prominently or so pervasively. In the first of Tristram Shandy’s nine volumes, published in five instalments between 1759 and 1767, Parson Yorick, a fictionalised self-portrait of the author, dies. Three words are inscribed upon the plain marble slab that marks his grave, serving — as passers-by observe it — as both epitaph and elegy: “Alas, poor YORICK!” In Sterne’s novel, these all-too-familiar words face a wholly unfamiliar black leaf: a gesture towards the impenetrability of death that anticipates the many ingenuities that mark out Tristram Shandy as one of the most typographically original of all novels. Tristram Shandy is a comic fiction but there was little humorous about Sterne’s own relationship to death. As a boy, he experienced the death of four of his young siblings before he was himself eight. Having left Ireland for school in Yorkshire at the age of nine, he never again saw his much-loved soldier father, who died when Sterne was seventeen. Within a couple of years, when he was a student at Jesus College, Cambridge, Sterne experienced the first symptoms of the consumption — pulmonary tuberculosis — that would haunt him for the remainder of his life. Much later, when travelling abroad for his health, he vividly recalled the very moment: “I had the same accident I had at Cambridge, of breaking a vessel in my lungs. It happen’d in the night, and I bled the bed full”.1 Small wonder, perhaps, that Sterne’s comic masterpiece is punctuated by the deaths of the fiction’s most loved characters. By the end of Volume IX, not only Yorick but Tristram’s brother Bobby, his mother Elizabeth, and even that favourite of Victorian readers, uncle Toby, have all died, along with the courageous soldier, Le Fever, the account of whose death, excerpted from the novel’s sixth volume, was for long regarded as one of Sterne’s most sublimely touching achievements. Despite constant bodily frailty, Sterne fought long and hard against his mortal illness, continuing all the while to develop the fiction that brought him European-wide fame. Volume VII of Tristram Shandy opens with the hero’s memorable flight from death: NO——I think, I said, I would write two volumes every year, provided the vile cough which then tormented me, and which to this hour I dread worse than the devil, would but give me leave . . . NOW as for my spirits, little have I to lay to their charge . . . in no one moment of my existence . . . have ye once deserted me . . . and when DEATH himself knocked at my door——ye bad him come again; and in so gay a tone of careless indifference, did ye do it, that he doubted of his commission—— “——There must certainly be some mistaken in this matter,” quoth he.2 Sterne’s first stay abroad for the sake of his health, made possible by the financial success of Tristram Shandy, took him to France, where he stayed from January 1762 to May 1764. After a lengthy visit to Paris, where he enjoyed once more the social and literary acclaim that he had known in London, he headed south, spending time in Montpellier, and in Toulouse, where he passed the winter of 1763–4. It was this stay that provided Sterne with the material he fictionalised in Tristram’s account of his own flight from death, determined to gallop without looking once behind me to the banks of the Garonne; and if I hear him clattering at my heels——I’ll scamper away to mount Vesuvius——from thence to Joppa, and from Joppa to the world’s end, where, if he follows me, I pray God he may break his neck——.3 The attempt to outrun death led to an improvement in his health that scarcely outlasted his return home. Very soon, he reported that he was “bleeding to death at York, of a small vessel in my lungs——the duce take these bellows of mine”.4 Sterne’s second attempt to prolong his life by avoiding the rigours of an English winter took him to France from the autumn of 1765 to the early summer of the following year. It was this visit that furnished further experience of continental travel that he would make the basis of Yorick’s narrative in A Sentimental Journey. The fact of the author’s death so soon after that work was published gives the very title of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy an added poignancy. As far as the reader is concerned, Yorick — one of the two characters of his own creation, along with Tristram Shandy, that Sterne chose to impersonate in the years of his fame — gets no farther than a “little decent kind of an inn by the road side” on the French side of the Alps, ready to make an ascent he will never commence.5 Sterne himself did better, travelling to Italy in the winter of 1765–6. There he stayed first in Turin, capital of the Duchy of Savoy, and later at Milan, then under the control of Habsburg Austria. It was in the Lombard city that Yorick encountered the Marquesina di F***: a connection which, he noted in one of the sexually ambiguous phrases that characterise A Sentimental Journey, “gave me more pleasure than any one I had the honour to make in Italy”.6 From Milan, Sterne travelled by way of Parma and Piacenza to Florence. It was in the Tuscan capital that the English painter Thomas Patch portrayed the consumptive Sterne as Tristram Shandy bowing to Death, who has just knocked on his door. From Florence, Sterne travelled to Rome and, finally, to Naples, arriving in time for the pre-Lenten festivities: “We have a jolly carnival of it——nothing but operas——punchinellos——festinos and masquerades.”7 Delighted as always to hobnob with the aristocracy after decades of living in rural obscurity in his Yorkshire parishes, Sterne seems to have thought the highlight of his stay in the Bourbon capital a visit to one of the celebrated masquerades given by the Eleonara Borghese, Principessa Francavilla, wife to Ferdinand IV’s Grand Chamberlain, one of the great offices of state in the Kingdom of Naples. “[H]ere I am, happy as a king after all, growing fat, sleek, and well liking——not improving in stature, but in breadth”.8 Even in such surroundings, death was not far away. One of his companions, Sir James Macdonald, also travelling for his health, was so ill that he was forced to stay on in Naples after Sterne left, and would die at Frascati, outside of Rome, in July 1766. Sterne himself spent Easter Week in the papal city, where the Anglican cleric passed “as merry a Spring as our hearts could wish”, adding “haec est Vita dissolutorum”.9 Fewer than twelve months after returning to England, Sterne knew that his flight from death offered only a short reprieve. His letters, especially those, known as the Journal to Eliza, written to Elizabeth Draper, the young married woman with whom he had become infatuated, tell of the remorseless progress of his disease: I have been within the gates of death.——I was ill the last time I wrote to you; and apprehensive of what would be the consequence.——My fears were but too well founded; for in ten minutes after I dispatched my letter, this poor, fine-spun frame of Yorick’s gave way, and I broke a vessel in my breast, and could not stop the loss of blood till four this morning. I have filled all thy India handkerchiefs with it.——It came, I think, from my heart!10 Sterne survived, still busy working on A Sentimental Journey, for ten months longer. When it was published, subscribers received along with their copies a printed apology that the work consisted only of two volumes and not the promised four. Sterne explained that he had been prevented from completing the work by “ill health” and expressed his optimistic though unfulfilled intention to deliver the missing volumes “early the next Winter”. It was in the seventh volume of his Life and Opinions that Tristram Shandy wrote: Were I in a condition to stipulate with death . . . I should certainly declare against submitting to it before my friends; and therefore . . . wish that it happen not to me in my own house——but rather in some decent inn——at home I know it,——the concern of my friends, and the last services of wiping my brows and smoothing my pillow, which the quivering hand of pale affection shall pay me, will not so crucify my soul, that I shall die of a distemper which my physician is not aware of: but in an inn, the few cold offices I wanted, would be purchased with a few guineas, and paid me with an undisturbed, but punctual attention——.11 Laurence Sterne died in just such circumstances: in lodgings in Old Bond Street, with no friends present but properly attended by a nurse. Fortuitously, there was a witness to his death. John Macdonald, footman to one of Sterne’s friends, arrived to ask after the author at the request of his employer and his dinner guests. “I went up into the room”, wrote Macdonald, “and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in five he said: ‘Now it is come.’ He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute.”12 In the unexpectedly short final volume of Tristram Shandy, published little more than a year before he died, Sterne had reflected seriously on death, addressing his “dear, dear Jenny”, a fictional embodiment of the many women with whom he enjoyed sentimental and, perhaps, carnal relationships: Time wastes too fast, and every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more——every thing presses on——whilst thou are twisting that lock,——see! it grows grey; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.—— ——Heaven have mercy on us both!13 True to the facetious tendencies that enliven his writing, the following chapter of Tristram’s life and opinions is a memorably short one: CHAPTER IX NOW, for what the world thinks of that ejaculation——I would not give a groat.14 Shortly before his death, Sterne had written to his cousin, the bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, declaring defiantly, in an allusion to a passage in the fifth volume of Tristram Shandy: “I brave evils.——et quand Je serai mort, on mettra mon nom dans le liste de ces Heros, qui sont Morts en plaisantant [and when I am dead, my name will be placed in the list of those heroes who died in a jest]”.15 In the event, death had the laugh on him. Sterne’s funeral took place on March 22 in the fashionable church of St George’s, Hanover Square. His body was buried in the church’s new graveyard, beyond Tyburn, only to be stolen by body snatchers and taken to Sterne’s old university, Cambridge, where it was dissected by the professor of anatomy, Charles Collignon. One of those attending the dissection recognised Sterne, and his body was subsequently returned to London for clandestine reburial. Yet the author of Tristram Shandy did not lie undisturbed for eternity. When the St George’s burial ground was scheduled for redevelopment in 1969, his great champion, Kenneth Monkman, succeeded in locating Sterne’s bones and had them reinterred next to St Michael’s Church, Coxwold. This was the village that Sterne had made his home after the local magnate, the Earl of Fauconberg, bestowed on him the living, along with those he previously held not far away at Sutton-on-the-Forest and Stillington. After two decades of making the best of things in precarious financial circumstances, Sterne was grateful enough for this handsome testimony to the extraordinary success the first instalment of Tristram Shandy brought him. Nevertheless, throughout the remainder of his life, Sterne left his new dwelling as often as possible, to revel in the celebrity he enjoyed in London for, as he asserted, “I wrote not [to] be fed, but to be famous”.16 Today, his remains lie across the road from his parsonage house in an otherwise obscure Yorkshire village far distant from the English metropolis. Sterne would have recognised and, perhaps, enjoyed the irony. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 7, 2018

Ian Campbell Ross

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:47.796891

flash-mob-revolution-lightning-and-the-people-s-will

Flash Mob Revolution, Lightning, and the People’s Will By Kevin Duong November 9, 2017 Kevin Duong explores how leading French revolutionaries, in need of an image to represent the all important “will of the people”, turned to the thunderbolt — a natural symbol of power and illumination that also signalled the scientific ideals so key to their project. It is often observed that the French Revolution was a revolution of scientists. Nourished by airy abstractions and heartfelt cries to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, its leaders sought a society grounded, not in God or tradition, but in what Edmund Burke decried as “the conquering empire of light and reason”. To be sure, if we tallied the professional affiliations of the members of the first National Assembly, we would find it overwhelmingly populated by lawyers. But the revolution’s symbols and motifs were not derived from legal practices and traditions, and it was not as men of law that Maximilien Robespierre and Jean-Paul Marat called for the death of their king and the creation of a democratic republic. Rather, they did so as scientists—middle class intellectuals who saw in government a field ripe for experimentation, innovation, and improvement. Nowhere was this as clear as in their approach to “the will of the people”. Of the many puzzles to which revolutionaries applied themselves as scientists, few seemed so pressing and so intractable. It is obvious what a king’s will looks like, or so we like to think. Kings are individuals, they have bodies, and they can tell us what to do. However they choose to communicate their will — through voice, a gesture, a written pronouncement — it is relatively clear when such acts belong to them. But “the people” enjoy no such obvious body and no evident means of self-expression. What does the will of the people actually look like? And how do we hear their voice if they don’t have a mouth with which to speak? As French revolutionaries enthroned the will of the people, they stepped into uncharted terrain. Democratic revolution, it turned out, required men capable of visualizing the invisible and making appear what escaped our immediate senses. Indeed, it seemed to require the labor of scientific inquiry applied to the people themselves. Like the invisible composition of air, the secret patterns of a magnetic field, or the stratifications of the earth’s soil, democratic politics was governed by a hidden law that the scientist-statesman had to uncover. Revolutionary scientists designed a variety of strategies to make the will of the people discernable. They ranged from the statistical to the legalistic. However, one particular approach stood out, both for its intrinsic peculiarity and for its frequency: attempts to analogize the will of the people to lightning strikes. The historian Mary Ashburn Miller has documented the long history of symbolizing sovereignty as lightning.1 In the absolutist imagination, lightning symbolized royal power and its Jupiterian pretensions. The frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 Leviathan features a thunderbolt alongside a crown, cannon, and other items in absolutism’s symbolic ensemble. With the Revolution, French intellectuals seized this lightning and redirected it against their king. In 1792, as the Revolution radicalized into a democratic revolution, members of the National Convention found themselves debating what to do with Louis XVI. On December 3, 1792, Robespierre answered that the king should be summarily executed rather than tried for treason, because “a people does not judge as does a court of law. It does not hand down sentences, it hurls down thunderbolts.”2 Louis XVI was struck down by the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution on January 21, 1793. The trope was ubiquitous, not only in texts and speeches, but also in the visual culture of the Revolution. An allegorical print from 1792 features “Liberty”, the figurehead and personification of the people. She is depicted striking down the remnants of monarchy with a fist full of lightning. Behind her, powerful bands of light (and enlightenment) repel the dark clouds that allude to the obscurity of monarchical superstition. A similar visual vocabulary is employed in a painting from the same year allegorizing August 10, 1792, the date of the popular insurrection that brought down the French monarchy. Although the painting’s provenance is unknown, its symbolism is clear enough. Lightning erupts from “the mountain”, the nickname for the Jacobins who were seen as the people’s true faction. The lightning disperses the dark clouds with a flash. In both illustrations, the causal relationship between popular insurrection and enlightenment, democratic revolution and scientific progress, is placed at center stage. The lightning, once unleashed, is conducted towards frogs and snakes. These critters represented “the Swamp”, the derogatory nickname for the Convention’s moderate Girondin faction known to be skeptics of popular direct action. A 1793 illustration repeats the visual pattern: a Jacobin uses his hand as a conductor for lightning from the heavens — the sacred people? — and directs it to the frogs and snakes at the base of the mountain. These illustrations intimate what many revolutionaries might have thought about the will of the people. It was a natural force, erupting spontaneously like lightning. Yet it was capable of being conducted towards the true enemies of the people. It was invisible until unleashed, but once it struck, it was luminescent, dramatic, and absolute. The motif was pervasive enough for the revolution’s critics to invoke it satirically. In an extraordinary broadside from 1797, Jacobins are portrayed as zombies leading the living to their death. The broadside is crowned with an illustration of the All-Seeing Eye casting down destructive thunderbolts onto the Bastille. The headline warns us: “The mirror of the past in order to safeguard the future. BE IN AWE, PEOPLE!” Passed from the hands of kings to the people and their champions, lightning was now used to convey the counterrevolutionary interpretation of democracy: it was, as Joseph de Maistre argued, a satanic orgy of destruction. It was no accident that lightning was chosen as a model for the will of the people. The language of science and the language of politics were melding together in the crucible of democratic revolution, and not only in France. A fascination with electricity connected scientists of all stripes across the Atlantic, and tugging on those threads reveals a web of radicalism in late eighteenth-century scientific culture. Take two of the leading Jacobins: Marat and Robespierre. Marat was one of the heroes (or demons) of the Revolution. But before 1789, he was a scientist: in 1782, he had published a prominent study of electricity entitled Recherches physiques sur l’électricité. The next year in 1783, in the village of St Omer, a Monsieur de Vissery equipped his home with a lightning rod. Villagers believed the rod actively summoned lightning to their homes, and so they petitioned for the rod’s removal. The case eventually reached the Conseil d’Artois, where a young Robespierre took up the case to defend Vissery in the name of scientific progress. Robespierre won the case, and it made his reputation as a progressive lawyer. In his enthusiasm, he wrote to Benjamin Franklin. In the letter dated 1 October 1783, he thanked the American for the “sublime discovery” of lightning conduction.2 Franklin was well known for having tamed lightning by conducting it from the sky in his “kite experiment” of 1752. Revolutionaries like Robespierre were more than a little obsessed with this fact. In his person, Franklin seemed to offer a paragon of scientific statesmanship. After all, besides taming lightning, Franklin served as ambassador to France from 1776-85. Yet he was not the only scientist of electricity to enthrall the French. On August 26, 1792, the National Convention set aside time from their busy schedule of waging revolution to confer honorary citizenship to the English scientist Joseph Priestley. (In June, they had conferred the same honor to Priestley’s son, William, in virtue of being his father’s representative.) Priestley was a friend of Franklin and known for discovering oxygen and founding Unitarianism. But Priestley was also a scientist of lightning. Throughout the 1770s, he authored and edited several editions of the History of Electricity, which was eventually translated into other languages. In 1774, he delivered a paper on lightning storms to the Royal Academy and exchanged letters with Jeremy Bentham concerning atmospheric lightning. In 1775, he wrote to the American scientist Andrew Oliver about the origins of electricity. And in 1778, he sat on an English Board of Ordinance tasked with optimizing the shape of lightning conductors.3 French revolutionaries idolized Priestley and Franklin because they sincerely believed that science was intimately connected with the struggle for freedom. For these men, the cause of science was the cause of democracy. The sentiment traveled both ways. When Priestley was not investigating electricity and air, he preoccupied himself with championing the French Revolution in England. His combination of revolutionary fervor and scientific fame made him a target for Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Evidently, Priestley’s neighbors agreed that he was a threat to social order. In 1791, they burned down his Birmingham home and laboratory, forcing Priestley to flee to America in 1794 where he was welcomed by yet another revolutionary scientist and French Revolution enthusiast: Thomas Jefferson (himself an occasional diplomat to France). These men shared an enthusiasm for democracy and electricity which, oddly enough, informed one another. Yet it shouldn’t be surprising. When faced with new political questions about democracy, these men applied themselves as they were wont to do, namely as scientists. The outcome was a transatlantic circuit of research, discovery, evidence — and radical politics. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 9, 2017

Kevin Duong

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:48.264869

illustrating-carnival-remembering-the-overlooked-artists-behind-early-mardi-gras

Illustrating Carnival Remembering the Overlooked Artists Behind Early Mardi Gras By Allison C. Meier February 7, 2018 For more than 150 years the city of New Orleans has been known for the theatricality and extravagance of its Mardi Gras celebrations. Allison C. Meier looks at the wonderfully ornate float and costume designs from Carnival’s “Golden Age” and the group of New Orleans artists who created them. On March 6, 1889, the New York Times breathlessly reported on the recent Carnival spectacles in New Orleans. The Krewe of Rex’s pageant, themed around “Treasures of the Earth”, included a “Crystal” float “attended by figures in gorgeous costumes and prisms by the thousand”, and a “Diamond” float featuring “a rocky diamond dell” through which flowed “limpid streams where nymphs sported and played with the gems”. The Krewe of Proteus, meanwhile, dazzled with their “Hindoo Heavens” pageant, where in one scene appeared Agni “God of Fire” riding a ram that “strides the flames, attended by the fire sprites.” This opulent, and highly exoticized, interpretation of South Asian religion concluded with a tableau where “Vishnu, under the guise of a horse with silver wings, shatters the earth with his hoof and rises to the celestial abode.” The modern American Mardi Gras owes much of its bombastic revelry to this late nineteenth-century “Golden Age” of Carnival design. From the invitations to the costumes to the hand fans carried by spectators, artists designed entire identities for each Krewe (a group that organizes a Carnival event). Carnival and its culminating day of festivities — Mardi Gras — was brought to the Louisiana area by the French in the late seventeenth century. Mardi Gras as it’s celebrated today is often linked to the Mistick Krewe of Comus, an Anglo-American group which in 1857 organized a debut parade themed “The Demon Actors in Milton’s Paradise Lost”. It was a departure from previous Carnivals that were more informal and tied to the Roman Catholic community. Following the Civil War, new Krewes emerged, each attempting to outdo the others with increasingly elaborate wood and papier-mâché floats pulled by teams of horses. One year it might be Medieval legends coming to life on the streets, the next flying monkeys of Chinese mythology terrorizing the crowds. “The city developed a Carnival aesthetic that blended popular Carnival tradition with the artistic currents of the late nineteenth century”, writes Reid Mitchell in the 1995 book All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival. “The latter contributed largely to Carnival’s Orientalism. Carnival with its costumes, processions, tableaux, and bals masque played to the late nineteenth-century love of fantasy, of exoticism.” Mythology, literature, religion, and history, as well as nineteenth-century book illustration and turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau, were remixed into an eclectic excess. Up to the early 1900s, the main Krewes were Rex, Comus, Proteus, and Momus, each with their favorite artist collaborators. The names of these individuals are now obscure, but artists Jennie Wilde, Bror Anders Wikstrom, Charles Briton, Carlotta Bonnecaze, and others now anonymous all influenced the embrace of the fantastic that endures into the present. The greatest publicly accessible resource of their art is the Carnival Collection, part of the Louisiana Research Collection (LaRC) at Tulane University and supported by a bequest from the late journalist Charles L. “Pie” Dufour. In 2012, Tulane marked the completion of a two-year digitization project that put over 5,500 float and costume designs in the Carnival Collection online. These watercolor-and-ink drawings were intended to be ephemeral — some have visible pin holes from being tacked on the wall by costume makers in Paris — and thus not all were saved. Due to their delicate nature, they’re also rarely on view. Through April 1, the New Orleans Museum of Art is exhibiting selections from the Carnival Collection in Bror Anders Wikstrom: Bringing Fantasy to Carnival. Although his name is carved right on the frieze of the museum’s façade, included in a litany of American art luminaries like Whistler, Audubon, and Copley, it’s likely few visitors are familiar with the Swedish immigrant. Bringing Fantasy to Carnival features a full set of the twenty floats he designed for the Krewe of Proteus’ 1904 “The Alphabet” parade, with “D for Dragon” carrying knights fighting a red, purple, and green beast, and “U for Unicorn” featuring three one-horned white horses riding before a rainbow. Wikstrom came to New Orleans in 1883. A painter of maritime scenes, inspired by his time as a sailor, he was an active member of the local arts community, helping to found the New Orleans Artists Association that was influential in the opening of the New Orleans Art Museum in 1910. His extremely imaginative illustrations are transporting in their detail, whether the battling tiger-lillies with actual tigers leaping from blossoms and anthropomorphized cacti fending them off, from the 1898 “A Trip to Wonderland”, or the full Egyptian-style temple for the crowning of the pharaoh scene in the 1903 “Cleopatra” parade. Of course, artists could sketch any dream they wanted, building it was another thing. Comparing the illustrations to historic photographs online at the Louisiana Digital Library, it’s evident there were some concessions to making a float the horses could actually navigate through the crowds. Yet the early parades transformed into otherworldly reveries at night, when flambeaux carriers, a dangerous role traditionally given to black men, illuminated the darkness with fire. Then the warm, quavering light of the flames gave the fabricated demons, dragons, fairies, and gods a convincing glow. Wikstrom started as an assistant to a fellow Swedish immigrant, Charles Briton. Briton arrived in New Orleans in 1865, and worked for a time with lithographer Emile Boehler, eventually devoting his artistic talents to Carnival. While he designed floats, invitations, and all the other Krewe materials, his costumes are the most ingenious. His 1882 “Ancient Egyptian Theology” illustrations for the Krewe of Proteus morphed participants into a hieroglyphic-adorned Horus and Anubis, and the 1873 “Missing Links” for Comus metamorphosed humans into beetles, coral polyps, ears of corn, grasshoppers, and leeches. The full title of this 1873 parade was “Missing Links to Darwin’s Origin of Species”, and its satire bristled against the post-Civil War changes in the South. Michael Taylor describes its identifiable characters on the Louisiana State University Special Collections site: “Ulysses S. Grant, for example, has been crossed with a caterpillar and lounges on a leaf smoking a cigar. General Benjamin Butler, the despised commander of the Union army in New Orleans during the Civil War, is shown in another cartoon dining with a party of bears and hyenas.” The parade’s political barbs did not go undetected, and it was ultimately blocked by police from crossing Canal Street. Among the costume drawings that survive in the Carnival Collection is Darwin himself as an ass, and one of a gorilla playing a banjo, a racist caricature that ridiculed the humanity of black people at a time when Reconstruction amendments were constitutionally affirming their rights. Within the Carnival whimsy was the use of its sumptuousness to elevate white Southerners as “kings” and “queens”, with finery and balls that excluded non-white participants. Significantly, in an era of male-dominated arts, several women were leaders in Carnival designs. Born in Georgia, the prolific Jennie Wilde brought a lavish Art Nouveau elegancy to her illustrations for Comus and Momus. For the 1902 Lord Byron–themed floats for Momus, she envisioned his metaphysical poem “Manfred” with a mermaid, waifish spirits, and the lurking specter of death in the form of a skull; “The Prisoner of Chillon” has a lonely, bearded man chained in a Gothic dungeon, swarmed with bats, with one giant winged mammal acting as the eerie float’s prow. For Comus’ 1911 “Familiar Quotations” she positioned couples on the “What are the wild waves saying” float gazing at a torrent of water from pearlescent shells; and butterflies, gargantuan poppies, a sea serpent, and botanical forms swept in a current of foliage on “Such stuff as dreams are made of”. In his 2001 book Mardi Gras Treasures: Costume Designs of the Golden Age Notecards, Henri Schindler writes that Wilde was fascinated throughout her career with the painting and literature of the symbolists and the decadents, with the chimeras and operatic grandeur of Gustave Moreau and Gustave Flaubert, the sensually tinted worlds of Pierre Loti, and the Babylonian apocalypses of Jean Rochegrosse. Nurtured in this other-worldly splendor, Wilde in turn called forth visions of exotic temples and molten clouds, bowers of gigantic flora, and enchanted beasts. In 1913, Wilde died at the age of 48 while on a trip to England. Her final designs for “Tales From Chaucer” appeared in 1914, debuting the very night she was interred in New Orleans’ Metairie Cemetery. In addition to Wilde, there were several other women who had a major role in Carnival art. Carlotta Bonnecaze created dazzling scenes with an air of science fiction, such as the 1886 parade “Visions of Other Worlds” for Krewe of Proteus, with lightning-wielding extraterrestrials riding on a comet, six-armed beings wandering a Saturn covered with prickly cacti, and a desolate moon where wizened figures seem frozen in gray craters. Later, Ceneilla Bower Alexander decked out the Krewe of Rex with an Aurora Borealis float in 1912 and ethereal angel costumes in 1920, and in the 1920s and ’30s, Léda Hincks Plauché sketched feathered serpents and Don Quixote scenes for the Krewe of Proteus. The Great Depression effectively ended this period of no-expense-spared Mardi Gras, yet its spirit of visual exuberance thrives into the twenty-first century. The papier-mâché, wood, paint, and maybe a few fake jewels, used to turn an ordinary person into a trickster devil or graceful half-human, half-butterfly, and a horse-drawn cart into a wonderland, endure in the spirit of Carnival creation. As the annual bacchanalia of parades, processions, and parties continues in New Orleans, there are still threads to follow back to these artists who shaped fantasies into reality. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 7, 2018

Allison C. Meier

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:48.812211

early-modern-memes-the-reuse-and-recycling-of-woodcuts-in-17th-century-english-popular-print

Early Modern Memes The Reuse and Recycling of Woodcuts in 17th-Century English Popular Print By Katie Sisneros June 6, 2018 Expensive and laborious to produce, a single woodcut could be recycled to illustrate scores of different ballads, each new home imbuing the same image with often wildly diverse meanings. Katie Sisneros explores this interplay of repetition, context, and meaning, and how in it can be seen a parallel to meme culture of today. In a dramatic 1609 news pamphlet entitled Newes from Sea, of two notorious Pyrates Ward the Englishman and Danseker the Dutchman, one particularly thrilling story about two of the most infamous pirates in Early Modern Europe unfolds from the perspective of the English merchants who witnessed it. John Ward and Simon Danseker were household names in England: the two pirates served as mercenaries on Turkish ships that ransacked trading ships from Christian nations like England, Spain, and France. In this printed account, English traders aboard the ship Charity watched with horror as a Turkish ship, captained by John Ward, overtook a French ship on the high seas. The account states: “our eies were made witnesses that they tooke the Merchant and the Master, and hanged them uppe at their yard armes . . . the pittifulnesse of which spectacle, we being in the view of beholding, would have compelled any but such hated villaines, even with teares for to have lamented.” Featured prominently on the title page of the pamphlet is that very scene: an English ship nose-to-nose with a Turkish ship (evidenced by the crescent moon flags and turban-wearing men) and two unfortunate human figures hanging gruesomely by their necks from the mast of the ship. The image perfectly encapsulates the harrowing moment. In all likelihood, the woodblock that produced the imprint featured on the pamphlet was created specifically for that text. But it was far from a one time use illustration. Between 1609 and 1617 the woodblock either changed hands or was lent, from Edward Allde to George Eld, who employed it in 1617 in another news pamphlet that told a similarly harrowing tale of English merchants battling bravely against a horde of Turkish pirate ships. Although A fight at sea, famously fought by the Dolphin of London against fiue of the Turkes men of warre, and a satty the 12. Of Ianuary last 1616 does not mention a grisly double hanging in its text, the reuse of the woodcut was perfectly logical and thematically appropriate. As the century drew on, however, this woodblock would go through some dramatic changes. Its representational function would morph over time as it changed owners and began to be used primarily to illustrate broadside ballads. These two ships would reemerge time and time again on printed ballads, each time in a different context and performing a different representational function. The reuse of woodcuts in early modern popular print was an industry standard. Quick, timely, and engaging popular literature was in increasingly high demand in seventeenth-century England. Printers and booksellers were competing against each other for readership so they had to be able to produce lots of texts quite quickly and pique a customer’s interest in buying one with an eye-catching image. But the crafting of a woodcut from a woodblock was a major financial investment for a printer, as it required high quality, resilient wood and the artistic labor to carve a detailed image into its surface. Publishers and printers would reuse old images in dozens of different ways rather than go through the costly process of commissioning new illustrations for each text. The obvious practical upshot to reusing the same woodcut over and over has lent some credence to the assumption that printers must have been apathetic about which images they chose — that the significance of a woodcut’s particular image was secondary to its ability to stand in as an eye-catching stock image, irrespective of the text it accompanied. Thankfully, recent scholarship rejects the dismissal of ballad woodcuts as mere decorative extras.1 If there was indeed method and meaning to what might appear to a modern-day viewer to be the almost random assignment of images to only vaguely related text, how did it manifest? In what ways were woodcuts reappropriated for different representational needs, and how were consumers of these texts processing the images that were recurring consistently in their everyday lives? By exploring a few examples (and revisiting our pirate ships later in their publishing life) we can start to understand how contemporary audiences engaged with individual texts as well as with the pantheon of popular literatures that influenced their lives. We can also see how this practice of reuse parallels aspects of our own modern culture, in particular the phenomenon of the internet meme. The re-used woodcut can be seen to function as a sort of proto-meme, the meanings of an image multiplying through continued reuse in varying contexts. This reuse was pervasive across all manner of popular print genres, from news pamphlets to political propaganda. Among these, the broadside ballad distinguishes itself: eminently cheap and printed in mass quantities, the genre was consumed by a broad swath of English subjects — an ideal case study. The reuse of woodcuts was pervasive across all manner of popular print genres, from news pamphlets to political propaganda. Among these, the broadside ballad distinguishes itself: eminently cheap and printed in mass quantities, the genre was consumed by a broad swath of English subjects — an ideal case study. As a starting point for understanding the extent to which printers were reusing images and what that might have meant for a casual consumer of broadsides, let’s more or less choose one at random. Let us stick our first pin in the early 1680s ballad A sweet and Pleasant Sonnet, Entituled, My Mind to me a Kingdom is, which shares a broadsheet with another ballad entitled A proper new Ballad of a Dream of a Sinner, being very fore troubled with the Assaults of Satan. This broadsheet (featured above) features three woodcuts of male figures, each of which in turn can be traced many decades backwards and forwards in time, creating a web of correlation and relation through which each of the three figures’ “meanings” evolves, contracts, or expands depending on which ballad you’re viewing. Let’s call them, from left to right, “the how-de-do man” (so named by the historian Christopher Marsh because of the figure’s hand extended out in a warm greeting), “the sovereign”, and “the walking stick man.” Marsh offers an in-depth exploration of the widely used “how-de-do man” woodcut and notes that he is present in over one hundred extant broadside ballads (and, given the frailty and ephemerality of the broadsheet, likely used on far more). The journeying man in a cape and hat, arm outstretched, was a standard stock image on ballads. He was such a necessary image, in fact, that over twenty-one different publishers had access to at least one version of the image. You can find slight variations in the image across the ballads, meaning multiple woodcuts existed representing the same how-de-do man.2 Marsh argues that roughly seventy-five percent of the how-de-do man’s appearances are positive, eliciting in an audience feelings of admiration and empathy. In A Sweet and Pleasant Sonnet, he plays an everyman philosopher, musing through the words of Edward Dwyer’s famous poem. Whereas in Truth’s Integrity, he presents to viewers a jovial lover with whom any heartsick Englishman could relate: “From Court to the Cottage, / in Bower and Hall, / From the King to the Begger. / Love conquers all.” This singular image brought with it a lifetime of meaning, and images played as much a role in creating cross-references between ballads as words did (and, of course, the melodies associated with the ballads as well). How you engaged with a viewing of the how-de-do man depended on your previous experiences with him in other ballads, and printers could draw on that experience by using familiar images in unfamiliar constructions to create new meaning. In Strange News from WESTMORELAND, the how-de-do man’s recognizable visage, heavily associated with the idea of a doting lover, has been reassigned to a new, darker role. The ballad tells the story of a cruel husband who drunkenly strikes his wife and kills her, after which Satan himself punishes the man with death. Rather than approaching his lover for an impending embrace, therefore, the female figure is turned away from the man, who is himself approaching the devil. This is not to say that E. Andrews, who published Strange News from WESTMORELAND in the 1660s, was unaware of the how-de-do man’s prior usages in ballads, and thus presented to a viewing audience a version of him that would have been seen as unrecognizable, confusing, or incorrect. Rather, those old associations are precisely what makes his dramatic redirection in Strange News from WESTMORELAND all the more poignant: an old protagonist, an everyman hero with whom readers could so easily identify, has turned heel. Our prior encounters with a picture help define future encounters with it, and that very familiarity could sometimes be deftly turned against us. What better way for a cautionary tale about uncivilized behavior to truly drive home its point than by turning the common man into the villain? The sovereign, the next image over on the broadsheet at the center of our web, illustrates the ways in which a single woodcut could expand or contract in meaning depending on its use. Depicted as a header image for the ballad A Dream of a Sinner, the sovereign might represent King Charles II, invoked in the final lines of the ballad: “Our Noble Royal King, / God grant him long to reign, / To live in joy and Peace, the Gospel to maintain.” Alternatively, he might represent one of the main characters of the tale: Christ, who visits a wayward sinner in his sleep. In 1685’s David and Bersheba, the sovereign is the biblical King David. The image clearly makes no advances toward accurately depicting the King of Jerusalem, but there is little question as to his identity given the context of the ballad. It is clear that the female image next to him, in this case standing in as Bathsheba, was produced by a woodcut with an already long history: much of her detail is lost here, but viewers might’ve remembered seeing her pleated dress and face on ballads from the decades prior. Jump ahead just a few years to 1697’s Great Britain’s Triumph; Or, The Nation’s JOY for a General PEACE, between the Potent Princes of Europe, and the sovereign might represent any one of the nations concerned in the September 20, 1697, signing of the Treaty of Ryswick, about which the ballad was printed. The treaty ended the Nine Years War between France and the Grand Alliance between England, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the United Provinces. The seated ruler’s crown and orb don’t suggest any nation in particular: he might be the image of King William of England or Louis XIV of France, both of whom are mentioned in the ballad, or he might simply be the embodiment of sovereignty itself. All of these varieties might seem strange to a modern audience. How could a single image on a single ballad possibly represent more than one thing or person at the same time? According to Marsh, these minor discrepancies in detail, slippages in textual versus image representation, could have been easily filtered out by viewers who were accustomed to finding meanings with which we in the present day struggle. Returning a final time to our example broadsheet, we are left with the walking stick man. He too crosses over a number of other ballads and wears a variety of hats, as it were, in each of them. In the ballad A Dream of a Sinner walking stick man is the very sinner about which the title speaks, who is visited by Jesus Christ and Satan one night while in a deep sleep, and who awoke joyfully to the realization that he was saved from Satan by Christ’s sacrifice. It’s an uplifting moral tale meant to speak to all good Christians, who are in turn also all sinners. Walking stick man makes a similar appearance in a 1670s ballad titled A Discription of Plain-dealing, Time, and Death, Which all Men ought to mind whilst they do live on earth in which he represents the everyman’s good conscience and urges him to live a good life before time and death take him at last: “The chiefest Prince that in the world doth Live, / When I him strike, he up the Ghost must give: / His whole Kingdom can’t him from me retain, / From Dust he came, and shall to Dust again.” If walking stick man, with this tattered robes, hat, and staff can represent the journey from sin to salvation, or the trials of our conscience, he can also represent one of life’s other great odysseys: love. In The BEGGARS Delight, walking stick man plays a poor beggar who is just as capable of loving his lass “as he that has thousands, thousands, thousands, / He that has thousand pounds a year.” Walking stick man’s appearances in broadside ballads seem to have a common thread: his everyman representation is meant as a salve, a comfort to those whose lot in life disadvantages them here on earth. When a viewer sees walking stick man on a broadsheet, he or she might already be able to ascertain the moral of the ballad: you may be poor, but all men are sinners and none are immune to the consequences of death. I want to divert one last time, following a new trail, this time from The BEGGARS Delight to briefly track the other image on that broadsheet, one that illustrates another common way in which woodcut images were intended for reuse: the two lovers tenderly embracing, empty speech bubble above their heads. This woodcut makes a number of other appearances in the 1670s and 1680s featuring an empty speech bubble next to the canoodling couple, cupid poised knowingly in the background. But a few speech bubbles are filled in with salacious lyrics, a detail which would offer specificity to the otherwise generic images. In The Hampshire Miller, short and thick, a naughty miller visited a widow at her home. She quickly locked up the doors, and the ballad minces no words about what happened next: “Up stairs together they did high, / The Miller lov’d her Coney Pye, / To shake her Plum-tree he was not slack / But presently she was on her back.” The speech bubble strikes a similar tone: “Have at thy Plum-tree now by guess,” the Miller whispers, “For Widow I can do no less.” The particulars are somewhat incorrect: in the image, the couple is lying outside, not inside a house. But broadside ballad printing was primarily a commercial pursuit, and printers would have profited greatly off of reusing a thematically related woodcut rather than concerning themselves with the accuracy of details. Two lovers might as easily be embracing on the ground because one has fallen ill: one image with various possible meanings. In this way, viewers were “reading” woodcut images not just as metaphorical representations specific to the ballad, but as a point of reference that calls upon a lifetime of experience consuming printed texts: a broadside ballad was simultaneously an individual text and part of a compendium, an anthology of cultural knowledge that had its parts drawing upon and from within each other to create meaning. What, then, of our warring ships? How was the woodcut of the English and Turkish ships with the grisly hanging scene reappropriated as the seventeenth century drew on? Scouring the available literature, this author could find only one other appearance of the two ships together, in 1621. Sometime before then, the woodblock itself had gone through a subtle but substantial change. Newes from Argeir tells the harrowing story of an English mission to Algiers that had been sent to free captive slaves but were intercepted by a fleet of Turkish ships prepared for a fight. The English won the day, frightening away the Turks and “left unto our Englishmen / The golden prize of honour then, / which was the worthy conquest of the day.” Of course, the narrative of a resounding English victory against an enemy fleet wouldn’t have been particularly well served by a woodcut that showed two men being executed from the mast of a Turkish ship. And so, at some point between 1617 and 1621, after the woodblock changed hands from George Eld to George Purslowe, who printed Newes from Argeir, the unfortunate men were unceremoniously etched out of the block. The only evidence that they had once been the dramatic centerpiece of the image is a single arm, still visible over a portion of the ship. Details from a facsimile of Newes from Argeir, of the proceedings of our Royall Fleete since their departure from England, and what happened betweene them, and the Turkish Callies upon Christmas day last, EBBA 20281. Shortly after, it seems the ships were broken apart entirely, and the Turkish ship sans hanging men would make frequent appearances in naval ballads from the 1650s through the rest of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At times, the ship illustrates the tragic tale of Aeneas and Queen Dido, as in A Proper new Ballad, Intituled, the wandring Prince of Troy (1658–64, EBBA 30394). Or perhaps one of a number of enemy Dutch ships that an English fleet sacked and destroyed, as in The Dutch Damnified (1663–74, EBBA 31734). It might even depict a ship that brought with it a nefarious man who successfully wooed a married woman in a ballad meant to warn housewives against cuckoldry, as in A warning for married Women (1658–64, EBBA 31991). You didn’t have to be a dedicated collector of broadside ballads like Samuel Pepys to notice recurring images in broadside ballad literature, and it is possible a casual reader might have remembered seeing this Turkish ship a few decades prior in a completely different context. Early modern English viewers were accustomed to reorienting or expanding the catalogue of meanings connected to a woodcut image, drawing them into an even deeper engagement with the text at hand, one that recalls a pantheon of previous texts. It is a collective cultural phenomenon that is not unique to the early modern period, nor did it die out after the ubiquitousness of woodcut impressions in popular print waned. The business of stock photography has trained the modern consumer to simultaneously accept the presence of an image that they’ve likely seen before in a completely different context, while at the same time “reading” the image as something fresh and specific. Just as a seventeenth-century printer might dig laboriously through his woodcut collection to find the perfect (or as close to perfect as his collection allows) woodblock, so too might a modern-day author or digital publisher have to choose the right search terms on a stock photo website to convey, with precision, “sad woman eating salad” or “small dog in a tophat”. In recent years meme culture has exploded the potential of stock imagery. The repetition and reuse of images in internet memes, particularly those that deliberately exploit stock photos that are somehow both generic and oddly specific, has striking parallels to woodcut culture in seventeenth-century England. Just ask “distracted boyfriend”, lustfully ogling a passing woman while his indignant girlfriend looks on in disgust. Originally uploaded to the stock photo database iStock under the description “Disloyal man with his girlfriend looking at another girl”, this twenty-first-century “how-de-do man” has become common fodder for internet culture. He reappears again and again, each of the characters in the image relabeled to create a new nexus of interpretation. But this time, printers and booksellers are not the gatekeepers of meaning. Anyone can download the image, add their own text, and share their meme with an audience online. Whereas woodcuts could be shared unencumbered by copyright laws that wouldn’t start appearing until the eighteenth century, stock photo imagery and the memes that use them seem to replicate despite their legal ownership. Although stock photos like the disloyal man’s are not intended to be used for free, the internet has made paywalls easily scalable. Once the image sharing and content aggregating websites get ahold of them, there’s no stopping their potential spread. A quicker, easier, and more anonymous process than a woodcut changing hands from one printer to another, but a not dissimilar one. Just like early modern woodcut images, distracted boyfriend and countless other stock photo meme characters have created an anthology of cultural knowledge. Their cultural currency feeds an expanding and self-replicating web of meaning. The rich early modern woodcut images thankfully still left to posterity offer numerous threads to follow, webs to weave, and connections to draw. In doing so, we can begin to understand early modern consumption of popular literature and recognize the ways in which we reflect some of the very same habits today. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 6, 2018

Katie Sisneros

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:49.540011

the-dreams-of-an-inventor-in-1420

The Dreams of an Inventor in 1420 By Bennett Gilbert January 24, 2018 Bennett Gilbert peruses the sketchbook of 15th-century engineer Johannes de Fontana, a catalogue of designs for a variety of fantastic and often impossible inventions, including fire-breathing automatons, pulley-powered angels, and the earliest surviving drawing of a magic lantern device. Sometimes we try to invent something new by exploring within the bounds of what is known to be possible, and sometimes we invent by expanding those limits. For an imaginative engineer in the early fifteenth century — working more than two hundred years before the discoveries of Newton — the process of invention would be often a curious mix of the two. You would know so little about mechanical force that you could conjure up almost anything and believe it to be practical. Of course, attempts to bring the designs to reality would often fail, but they might, on occasion, also succeed. Suppose for a moment that you were such a person possessing a talent for gadgets in the early fifteenth century, or an engineer hoping to build marvelous machines and clever structures no one else had yet dreamed of — how would you go about showing your talents? And what if you were someone who wanted to own wonderful and mysterious devices, such as a prince — how would you find the person who could make these things? A remarkable testimony to this meeting of engineering skill, technological ignorance, individual initiative, and public demand can be found in the Bavarian State Library, in the sketchbook of an Italian inventor of the early fifteenth century. It is a volume of sixty-eight drawings advertising the inventions that Johannes (or Giovanni) de Fontana (ca. 1395–1455), who was both the engineer and the artist, hoped to sell to patrons. Thought to have been created sometime between 1415 and 1420, the work has no title by Fontana that has survived, but a later owner gave it the title Bellicorum instrumentorum liber — the Book of Warfare Devices — despite the fact that most of it does not concern military matters. Fontana imagined a wide array of projects: mechanical camels for entertaining children, mysterious locks to guard treasure, flame-throwing contraptions to terrorize the defenders of besieged cities, huge fountains, musical instruments, actors’ masks, and many other wonders. One of the most remarkable features of his ideas is that many of them are impossible to execute: they simply do not conform to the principles of mechanics. This gives them great charm and makes them more interesting, perhaps, than his more rational or practical proposals. We see similar impractical designs in the very few other engineers’ books extant from this early period, most notably in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Fontana lived at the time of transition from medieval knowledge of the world to that of the Renaissance, which many now regard as the origin of early modern science. In the same years in which Fontana was working, drawing, and dreaming, other builders and engineers were inventing perspective. Goldsmiths along the Rhine and craftsmen in southwestern Germany and elsewhere were thinking about how to copy letterforms mechanically. Engravers in wood and metal were trying dozens of techniques, some lost to us today, for reproducing images. Engineers and tinkerers were learning how to build grander, lighter buildings and were experimenting with ways to defy gravity, to harness natural materials and forces, and to dominate nature. And they were learning new ways to envision their ideas on paper. The towers and rockets, water and fire, nozzles and pipes, pulleys and ropes, gears and grapples, wheels and beams, and grids and spheres that were an engineer’s occupation at the dawn of the Renaissance fill Fontana’s sketchbook. His way of illustrating his ideas, however, is distinctly medieval, lacking perspective and using a limited array of angles for displaying machine works. He drew according to the methods practiced in the previous century, not those of the Italy of Alberti and Brunelleschi in which he lived. He used liberal splashes of ochre to animate his mechanical monsters and devils with the effects of fire. Fire had a less terrifying function in some of Fontana’s other designs, being used instead for its light-giving properties. In fact, Fontana made the earliest surviving drawing of a magic lantern device, which transformed the light of fire into emotive display. It is likely that he actually built such a thing, as his idea for it is specific and practicable. Perhaps one day some relic of it will turn up. While many of the fire and light devices in Fontana’s designs were for the battlefield, others were envisaged as elaborate displays for use in spectacles such as religious plays. Performed in front of churches and cathedrals, the shows would draw large crowds seated on bleachers, built to look like battlements, all around the stage. Medieval playgoers loved to see hell-mouths, angels flying down on wires, and heavenly clouds lifted and lowered by ropes. Perhaps Fontana’s most elaborate design was an awe-inspiring fire-illuminated spectacle, most likely serving as a propaganda machine, for use in war and in peace. This fascinating idea draws on many of the arts of spectacle practiced in the late Middle Ages. Drawings on thin-beaten vellum turn in endless loops on spindles. A light source shining through the translucent medium projects shadows onto temporary walls overshadowed by a tower bearing mighty emblems. The visitor is led through a series of doors into the labyrinth of a fantastic world. The structure was most likely meant to stand as an enormous edifice that represented the personal abode of a prince or lord. In addition to his fiery constructions, Fontana also designed many fountains and other hydraulic devices. Before modern water infrastructure, water sources were more visible in people’s lives than they are now. The importance of water and the fragility of its supply were not hidden by massive administrative schemes. Water was life, and it was danger, too. Here’s Fontana’s idea for lifting sunken ships — an urgent and vexing problem of the day. Fontana also tried to harness wind power as well as water power for musical instruments. This one would have been as interesting to the eye as it would have been to the ear. In one of the most curious drawings in the book, Fontana imagined a life support system for patients undergoing gruesome surgeries. He also turned his imagination to more frivolous subjects and designed moving toys to entertain children. In general he was interested in developing flexible structures for entertainment and for civil engineering. He was particularly fascinated by locks and interlocking structures. But there are quite a few drawings that are utterly puzzling. They use some of the forces and themes mentioned above — hydraulics, fire, and flexible or interlocking parts. But because cross section and other visual techniques such as perspective were not used by (and likely not known to) Fontana and perhaps also because his imagination exceeded his skills, what he meant to make and how he thought it was to be done remain something of a mystery. His captions, written in code, do not help much because they describe the function he intended them to perform rather than explain how they were actually constructed or operated. This is just a sampling of the bounty of drawings found in Johannes de Fontana’s manuscript. Many of the others illustrate fierce siege engines and trebuchets, as well as handsome fountains and playful ornaments. Leafing through the pages we get a glimpse of what it was like to be an imaginative inventor right on the cusp of the Renaissance. He was resourceful and aspirational in ways people of every era would recognize and that we can see in ourselves. We may have more science than he had, but, like Fontana, we still show off our inventions to the wealthy and the powerful, currying their favor and seeking their financial support. War is as much a part of modern life as it was in Fontana’s day, with its ceaseless need for new inventions for murder and destruction. As unfamiliar as Fontana’s drawn line might be, he used his pen and brush for purposes very similar to ours when we draw and paint, write and speak, or imagine and hope: to find, somehow, the opportunity to build what we dream of creating. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 24, 2018

ennett Gilbert

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:50.072127

grandville-visions-and-dreams

Grandville, Visions, and Dreams By Patricia Mainardi September 26, 2018 With its dreamlike inversions and kaleidoscopic cast of anthropomorphic objects, animals, and plants, the world of French artist J. J. Grandville is at once both delightful and disquieting. Patricia Mainardi explores the unique work of this 19th-century illustrator now recognised as a major precursor and inspiration to the Surrealist movement. The poet Charles Baudelaire greatly admired the graphic arts, writing several essays about the major caricaturists and illustrators of his day. He found something positive to say about each of them with one exception, the artist Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard, known simply as Grandville (1803–1847). And yet, despite Baudelaire’s antipathy, Grandville is arguably the most imaginative graphic artist of the nineteenth century, as well as the most influential on subsequent generations. Baudelaire was well aware of Grandville’s gifts, but his aversion was that of a true classicist: There are superficial people whom Grandville amuses, but as for me, he frightens me. When I enter into Grandville’s work, I feel a certain discomfort, like in an apartment where disorder is systematically organized, where bizarre cornices rest on the floor, where paintings seem distorted by an optic lens, where objects are deformed by being shoved together at odd angles, where furniture has its feet in the air, and where drawers push in instead of pulling out.1 Baudelaire’s comments were perceptive: these are the very characteristics that, while making him uncomfortable, appealed to the next century’s surrealist artists and writers who saw in Grandville a kindred spirit who shared their interest in the uncanny, in the dream state, and in the world of imagination. Grandville died young, at forty-three, but in his short life his work ranged across the entire spectrum of graphic art, from political caricature to book illustration. His early drawing Let’s Put Out the Light and Rekindle the Fire! for the journal La Silhouette displays the eerie quality many found so disturbing: the censors are drawn with bellows for heads and one large eye, looking very like birds of prey as they go about their grim business of book-burning under cover of darkness. Behind them other censors resembling candle-snuffers in clerical garb join in, all working to extinguish the lumière, the Enlightenment. The image proved so biting that it was proscribed, although by then it had already been published. In 1835, however, political caricature ground to a halt when the government instituted a new series of draconian censorship laws calling for prior (not post) publication censorship. Grandville then devoted himself to book illustration and to the world of imagination. Nonetheless, an enigmatic work such as An Animal in the Moon drawn for the 1838 edition of the Fables of La Fontaine is no less strange than his earlier political drawings — perhaps even more so since it lacks clear referents. Why is the disembodied hand holding a rat upside down by the tail? What is the meaning of the discarded scientific instruments, one of which has a human head? Nothing here is rational; it is, as Baudelaire said, disorder systematically organized. Grandville would, no doubt, agree; he described his creative process as such: “I don’t invent, — I just juxtapose dissimilar things and interweave discordant and incongruous forms.”2 During Grandville’s lifetime his best-known works were those in which animals played human roles, delighting audiences both superficial (pace Baudelaire) and sophisticated, who relished the analogies between his personae and the animal avatars assigned to them. Do we really need a lengthy exegesis of the consummate bourgeois holding the rent bill in The Private and Public Lives of Animals? Mister Vulture indeed! Grandville’s least controversial work has always been his most popular; his posthumously published Flowers Personified, a series of lovely female figures metamorphosed into blooms, for example, has remained in print well into its second century. Like Mister Vulture it needs no interpretation. There is a reason for this. The work of a graphic artist was always collaborative, undertaken at the behest of a publisher. Graphic artists worked mostly on commission; paid by the piece, they considered themselves fortunate if contracted to produce all the drawings for one of the richly illustrated editions that were so popular with nineteenth-century audiences. The standard procedure was that the artist provided the drawing, which would then be translated into an incised wood engraving, printed and hand-colored by specialists. Grandville did his share of these commissioned works, producing illustrations for Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, and Robinson Crusoe, among others, but because of this expensive and time-consuming production process, graphic artists were rarely allowed to follow their own inclinations. Nonetheless, Grandville’s most inventive work did just that, departing from the conventional understanding of illustration as subservient to text; Grandville’s drawings stand alone. When the contemporaneous critic Charles-François Farcy tried to explain the different types of graphic design, he set forth a hierarchy of qualities.3 The lowest level — and always the most popular — was amusement directed at someone’s physical appearance; slightly more elevated was the pleasure offered by the visualization of a depicted situation. But the highest of all was work that broached philosophical or moral questions. Grandville, he judged, fell into this highest category, the philosophical. This quality might explain the disjunction between Grandville’s works that were most popular with his contemporaries and his work that appealed to future generations of artists. He forged a lifetime friendship with Edouard Charton, the editor of Le magasin pittoresque, the first French illustrated periodical, who allowed him to draw whatever he wished. In 1840, Grandville produced a series of musical scores for Le magasin where the notes were personified: Waltz, Military Music, Religious Music, etc., and each was “staffed” by appropriately costumed and performing figures. In Waltz, an interracial couple dances through several lines of music before collapsing, exhausted, in the last bar. His 1844 Man Descending towards the Brute was a send-up of the contemporaneous interest in evolution — Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle had been published five years earlier. Here age most definitely does not beget wisdom: a young boy “devolves” from the classical physiognomy of youth into a low-browed, slack-jawed ape. In Portraits Compared a prince turns into a frog, the opposite trajectory of fairy-tales. In both projects, Grandville interrogates conventional thinking in drawings that have no need of explanatory text. In his last letter to Charton, written only weeks before his death, Grandville mused about the drawings he was sending along for publication: “. . . what should be our title? The Metamorphoses of Sleep? Transformations, Deformations, Reformations of Dreams? Sequence of Ideas in Dreams, Nightmares, Reveries, Raptures, etc? or rather Harmonic Transformations of Sleep? But here I think is the true title: Nocturnal Visions and Transformations.”4 And that is what he depicts in A Promenade through the Sky, the languid progression of imagery that passes through our consciousness as it recedes slowly from our quotidian reality into the private world of imagination and fantasy. A mushroom becomes a parasol, which becomes an owl, and gradually the progression of images diminishes into a chariot pulling the horses of night into the stars. . . which taper off in brilliance as consciousness dims into sleep. He returned to this theme often as a kind of visual stream of consciousness where one image dissolves into another. In The Metamorphosis of Sleep, a bird becomes cupid’s arrows, eventually a flower in a vase, then a lovely woman, who gradually fades into a garland of flowers that dissolves into a snake slithering away. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams wasn’t published until 1899, but surely the good doctor would have had much to say about these images. Of all Grandville’s projects, the one most influential in its afterlife was least successful during his own lifetime, his 1844 Another World. Grandville wanted to produce it himself in its entirety, but he did not write easily. “The pen rebels in my hands at forming sentences”, he explained.5 Although he did produce brief illustrated texts for Le Magasin pittoresque, a full-length novel seemed well beyond his abilities, and so Another World was written by Taxile Delord, the editor of the journal Le Charivari to which Grandville had contributed numerous drawings. In Another World’s introductory dialogue between the personifications of the Pen (the Writer) and the Crayon (the Artist), the Crayon demands “You will allow my wings to move freely through space; you will not impede in any way my flight towards the new spheres that I wish to explore.”6 The Pen responds humbly: “So you want me to serve purely and simply as a secretary?” — to which the Crayon answers, “Precisely”.7 The contract for Another World specified that the novel would be written according to Grandville’s notes, and Delord’s position as a mere scribe is indicated by his name appearing only on the book’s last page, while Grandville’s is prominently displayed on its cover. The loosely organized plot offers a series of barely related adventures of its three protagonists, Dr Puff, a down on his luck con man who conceives the idea of founding the new religion of Neo-Paganism along with two cronies: Krackq, a seaman whose business card identifies him as “Professor of Swimming”, and Hahblle, a former choirmaster and unsuccessful composer whose desire to revolutionize the musical scale by recognizing the philosophical importance of the note of sol (G) was no more successful than his major symphonic work, The I and the Non-I. Together they decide to explore the universe in order to sell their stories to a publisher. These anti-heroes discover Another World; in fact, they discover several other worlds, each a thinly-veiled satire on our own. The full title of the work bears witness to its extreme departure from contemporaneous literary norms: Another World: Transformations, Visions, Incarnations, Ascensions, Locomotions, Explorations, Peregrinations, Excursions, Vacations, Caprices, Cosmogonies, Reveries, Whimsies, Phantasmagorias, Apotheoses, Zoomorphoses, Lithomorphoses, Metamorphoses, Metempsychoses, and Other Things. The book’s thirty-four chapters amply deliver on this extravagant promise. The novel’s minimal narrative functions principally as a framework for Grandville’s drawings — thirty-six full-page hand-colored wood engravings and one hundred forty-six wood-engraved vignettes, smaller images inserted into a page of text. This feature distinguishes Another World from earlier visionary and satirical works such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, making Another World more like a graphic novel than an illustrated text. Each chapter can best be described as posing the question “what if. . .?” What if social status was clearly indicated by stature? In the chapter “The Great and the Small” Puff discovers a world where the idle rich are very tall, while the laboring classes are short. What if, instead of the European gaze objectifying “the other,” the tables were turned? In this reversal, Chinese Shadows (the French term for Shadow Play) becomes French Shadows, and the power dynamics of the gaze are reversed, with the Chinese audience enjoying the spectacle of French performers. Role reversals were a standard aspect of traditional world-upside-down imagery dating back centuries, featuring pictures of yoked men pulling carts, schoolboys beating their teacher, men caring for babies, etc. Such images served to reinforce the status quo by demonstrating the sheer absurdity of alternatives, but Grandville’s images do the opposite. They depict alternatives that, instead, demonstrate the absurdity of the status quo and serve to undermine it. While it would be a stretch to consider Grandville a feminist, several of his drawings for Another World explore permutations of gender. In Apocalypse at the Ballet a female dancer becomes disembodied legs, a mechanical spinning top, while the audience is represented by clapping hands that expand, become large and grasping, and then metamorphose into crab claws, then clappers, wine bottles, wine glasses, an hourglass. The shaving brush directly above the clapping hands indicates that the entire progression is a male fantasy. From above, a shower of coins, wreaths, and cupid’s arrows rains down, perhaps the fantasies of the ballerina? The theme of gender is treated more forcefully in It’s Venus in person! which captures incisively the predicament of an unaccompanied woman subject to the male gaze, represented here as large eyeballs on male torsos. This is the same phenomenon of active seeing and passive objectification that is the subject of French Shadows, for who better than an artist to comprehend the power of the gaze? But gender roles don’t affect only women. What if both men and women were free to follow their inclinations? Puff visits a country where this is a reality and sees a man dressed in brightly colored stockings and fur muff, while women carry walking sticks and smoke pipes and cigars. Confused, as transvestism was outlawed in France, he consults a conservative newspaper that violently, although apparently ineffectively, fulminates against this practice by asserting that “They are trying to overturn the stability of dress and proclaim the promiscuity of clothing”, concluding “The sexes will never lose the distinctive appearance that differentiates them.”8 But in Another World, they already have. Grandville’s sympathy is not limited only to humans and animals, however; if sentient beings have rights, why not vegetables too? In the chapter “A Revolution in the World of Plants”, they rise up in revolt: “You, vegetables, hard-working and fertile race, will you allow them to rip away your offspring at the most tender age so they can devour them as early produce? . . . . Hear the cries of victims who demand vengeance from the bottom of the frying pan.”9 Combat of Two Refined Creatures shows the resultant civil war, here featuring the sugar beet in combat with the sugar cane. Sadly, small degrees of distinction affect even the vegetable kingdom. Even lowly playing cards have the same character flaws, prone to settling their disputes with violence. Battle of the Playing Cards inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and probably ranks as Grandville’s most familiar image to twenty-first-century audiences. Grandville not only undermines our preconceptions and expands our perceptions of our own world, but he also underscores the limitations of our banal human consciousness in the face of the miraculous. By representing the phenomenon of an eclipse as the embrace of the sun and the moon he proposes Another World of consciousness. The prosaic and rational audience is represented here by mechanical scientific instruments that are completely oblivious to the poetry of the event they are witnessing, seeking only to measure and quantify it. But what if we could comprehend our place in the universe as merely one world among many? We know other planets exist, so why can’t we build bridges to connect them?. In one of his best-known drawings, he demonstrates our planetary insignificance, at the mercy of a celestial juggler who amuses himself by playing with unknown worlds. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods”, Shakespeare’s King Lear lamented several centuries earlier. In The Juggler, Grandville creates a haunting image of this fate. ※※Indexed under…JugglingCelestial The philosopher Walter Benjamin was fascinated by Grandville’s art, although he asserted, incorrectly, that Grandville had died insane. In his essay “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”, he identified Grandville with the phantasmagoria of the modern world, especially its burgeoning commodity culture.10 Grandville certainly was aware of this phantasmagoria, showing fashionable mannequins literally composed of their apparel — fine boots, cane and top hat for men, parasol and chapeau for women. “Why do we even need the rest of the person?” Puff the huckster asks.11 Some of Grandville’s most insightful work in Another World treats this theme: Competition shows men attempting to climb the ladder of success, brandishing self-promotional flyers while lashing out at those who might overtake them. He represents Fashion as a goddess seated at an eternal spinning wheel of styles, but Grandville isn’t referring here to clothing styles alone. Puff the cynic prophesies that eventually all things will be subsumed to fashion: “Once we define glory as worldly success, then naturally we must assign art to the realm of fashion.”12 In the context of Grandville’s ruthless attacks on commodity culture, Benjamin’s critique of him as its epigone seems to miss his point. ※※Indexed under…Fashionas fortune Grandville was well aware that Another World did not achieve the success he had hoped for. In his last letter to Charton, three years after its publication, he wrote: “Until now, I believe, no work of art has understood and expressed dreams (except Another World, a recent and little-known work by your humble servant).”13 He was correct on both counts: it was unique and it was ignored. When Théophile Gautier wrote his obituary that same year, he lavished praise on The Public and Private Lives of Animals as Grandville’s “true masterpiece” but didn’t even mention Another World.14 It was published in only one edition, never translated into other languages, and never reappeared in his own century. No matter. In 1963 a facsimile edition was published, and the noted surrealist Max Ernst provided a frontispiece for it with the legend, “A new world is born. All praise to Grandville.”15 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 26, 2018

Patricia Mainardi

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:50.607757

mesmerising-science-the-franklin-commission-and-the-modern-clinical-trial

Mesmerising Science The Franklin Commission and the Modern Clinical Trial By Urte Laukaityte November 20, 2018 Benjamin Franklin, magnetic trees, and erotically-charged séances — Urte Laukaityte on how a craze for sessions of “animal magnetism” in late 18th-century Paris led to the randomised placebo-controlled and double-blind clinical trials we know and love today. Patients, mostly women, are sitting around a large wooden tub filled with magnetic water, powdered glass, and iron filings. From its lid emerge a number of bent iron rods against which the patients expectantly press their afflicted areas. A rope attached to the tub is loosely coiled about them, and they are holding hands to create a “circuit”. Through the low-lit room — adorned with mirrors to reflect invisible forces — there wafts incense and strange music, the other-worldly sounds of the glass harmonica (invented by a certain Benjamin Franklin). Meanwhile, a charming man in an elaborate lilac silk coat is circulating, touching various parts of the patients’ bodies where the magnetic fluid may be hindered or somehow stuck. It appears that these blockages, in the ladies in particular, are generally in the lower abdomen, thighs, and sometimes “the ovaria”. The typical session would last for hours and culminate in a curative “crisis” of nervous hiccups, hysterical sobs, cries, coughs, spitting, fainting, and convulsing, thus restoring the normal harmonious flow of the fluid. The man in the lilac coat is Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer and this scene could be describing any number of animal magnetism sessions he held in late eighteenth-century Paris. While Mesmer’s antics are perhaps familiar to many today, lesser known is the key role they played in the development of the modern clinical trial — particularly in connection with the 1784 Franklin commission, “charged by the King of France, with the examination of the animal magnetism, as now practised at Paris”. Animal magnetism was all the rage in eighteenth-century Europe, and its star Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer, a captivating German physician, had celebrity status. His theory claimed that a special kind of imperceptible magnetic fluid pervaded the universe and that most if not all diseases were caused by an abnormal flow of this fluid inside the body. At first, Mesmer’s therapeutic technique consisted of waiving magnets around his patients after making them swallow iron filings. He later would forego the swallowing metal stage and also the magnets: he discovered that simply using his hands or other objects was just as effective. After such so-called “passes” the patient would go into a kind of trance state, then faint, convulse, shake, and so on (what would be aptly named a “crisis”). Ideally, after all this evidently flow-inducing activity, they would be healed. Mesmer, a charismatic and cultivated man, was married to a rich older widow, and his wife’s moral and material support did not hurt when it came to building a successful medical practice in Vienna. Here he gained notoriety treating mostly upper-class women in his elaborate and rather erotically charged therapeutic sessions. One of his patients was the young pianist Maria Theresa von Paradis, known as “The Blind Enchantress”. Though Mesmer at first seemed to cure her apparent blindness, her recovery was temporary, and the young lady was so emotionally affected by the treatment that for a while she lost her ability to play her instrument. To make matters worse, her protectress (and likely godmother) was also not exactly pleased about the fact that the teenager moved in with Mesmer. Unfortunately for the doctor, she happened to be the Austro-Hungarian empress Maria Theresa. By 1778, having fallen into considerable royal disfavour, Mesmer moved to Paris in a shroud of fame and controversy. Despite the opposition of the medical profession, who denied him a medical license, he partnered up with the respectable and licensed Charles Deslon, personal physician to the brother of King Louis XVI. Mesmer again ended up establishing a stupendously popular clinical practice, winning the favour of many highly influential people. In fact, it only took a few years for animal magnetism to grow into something close to an obsession among the French. Soon Mesmer and a few disciples started offering magnetic group séances. By the mid-1780s mesmerism had become such a craze that concerned Parisian physicians persuaded the king to establish a royal commission to investigate its claims. The degree to which said craze was lucrative and the rate at which regular medical clinics were losing traffic may, of course, have played a role here. Admittedly, we can sympathise with the patients who deemed that magnetic séances compared favourably with the more mainstream practices of bloodletting and leeching. Either way, it is plausible that the total set of motivations very much included concern for scientific truth. By a lucky coincidence, Benjamin Franklin was in France as the first US ambassador with a mission to ensure an official alliance against its arch nemesis, the British. On account of his fame as a great man of science in general and his experiments on one such invisible force — electricity — in particular, Franklin was appointed as head of the royal commission. The investigating team also included the chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, and the doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. It is a curious fact of history that both Lavoisier and Bailly were later executed by the guillotine — the device attributed to their fellow commissioner. The revolution also, of course, brought the same fate to King Louis XVI and his Mesmer-supporting wife Marie Antoinette. In a stroke of insight, the commissioners figured that the cures might be affected by one of two possible mechanisms: psychological suggestion (what they refer to as “imagination”) or some actual physical magnetic action. Mesmer and his followers claimed it was the magnetic fluid, so that served as the experimental condition if you like. Continuing with the modern analogies, suggestion would then represent a rudimentary placebo control condition. So to test animal magnetism, they came up with two kinds of trials to try and separate the two possibilities: either the research subject is being magnetised but does not know it (magnetism without imagination) or the subject is not being magnetised but thinks that they are (imagination without magnetism). The fact that the trials were blind, or in other words, the patients did not know when the magnetic operation was being performed, marks the commission’s most innovative contribution to science. The report also shows an acute awareness that illness is very likely to go away by itself over time. In fact, in the era of leeching, bloodletting, induced vomiting, laxatives, and so on, it was common for patients to improve without treatment. So for the purposes of rigour, the commissioners rejected the requests from mesmerists to make the study longitudinal and see if their patients get better over an extended period of time. This led Mesmer to refuse to cooperate with the commission. They instead turned to his prime disciple and staunch supporter Charles Deslon (whom an irked Mesmer would subsequently denounce). A few of the most striking experiments should give you a flavour of the methodology used. The inspiration for the most famous trial likely came from the following incident involving Mesmer, here described in the commission’s report. One evening M. Mesmer walked with six persons in the gardens of the prince de Soubise. He performed the magnetical operation upon a tree, and a little time after three ladies of the company fainted away. The duchess of C—, the only remaining lady, supported herself upon the tree, without being able to quit it. The count de Mons—, unable to stand, was obliged to throw himself upon a bench. The effects upon M. Ang—, a gentleman of a very muscular frame, were more terrible. M. Mesmer’s servant, who was summoned to remove the bodies, and who was inured to these scenes, found himself unable to move. The whole company were obliged to remain in this situation for a considerable time. Due to Franklin’s old age, it was a particular apricot tree in his orchard at Passy that was selected for the purpose. Deslon magnetised the tree while a twelve-year-old boy of his choosing stayed in the house. The boy was then made to hug several trees for two minutes each, none of which were magnetised; he collapsed in a full-fledged crisis at the fourth. Similarly, the commissioners persuaded one of Deslon’s patients, dame P—, who was blindfolded, that Deslon was performing animal magnetism on her, whereas in fact, he was not even around. In a different room, mademoiselle B— was told that Deslon was behind a door. Both women fell into a crisis within the space of three minutes. On the reaction of mademoiselle B— the report said the following: Her respiration was quick, she stretched out both her arms behind her back, twisting them extremely, and bending her body forward; her whole body trembled; the chattering of her teeth became so loud that it might be heard in the open air; she bit her hand, and that with so much force, that the marks of the teeth remained perfectly visible. On another occasion dame P— was given several cups of water to drink which she believed to be magnetised. She had a crisis at the fourth cup and, ingeniously, was given some actually magnetised water to help her recover her senses. This she drank gratefully and felt much better afterwards. Finally, mademoiselle B— was magnetised for a full half hour from behind a paper partition while happily chatting away with one of the commissioners. However, when the magnetiser emerged from behind the partition and repeated the same moves in full view, mademoiselle collapsed in a convulsive crisis within minutes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the commissioners concluded that imagination alone could produce the same striking effects as mesmerism. Furthermore, animal magnetism by itself was completely toothless and impotent. It is admirable that Deslon himself seems to have acknowledged the power of the commissioners’ approach and accepted the main findings to do with the existence of this “magnetic fluid”. However, even if it proved to be nothing more than imagination, he insisted on its clinical utility. We will never know in what ways Deslon would have developed the practice, as he died just two years later, apparently during a magnetic séance. In 1784 the reports were drawn: one public and one secret, only for the eyes of the king on account of its indecent elements. Here we encounter another possible reason for the infamous convulsions, which also made the treatment “dangerous to morality”. It is noted that the magnetiser is, as a rule, a man, and his patients are mostly women. Moreover, the setup is such that “the two faces almost touch, the breath is intermingled, all physical impressions are felt in common, and the reciprocal attraction of the sexes must consequently be excited in all its force.” He often positions himself such that the knees are touching, his hands are wandering closer to the lower parts of the body and “these the most sensitive”. The discerning men of science observed that “[w]hen this kind of crisis is approaching, the countenance becomes gradually inflamed, the eye brightens, and this is the sign of natural desire”, which of course “may be wholly unperceived by the woman who experiences it, but it cannot escape the observant eye of the physician”. This situation is all the more worrying since such treatment could become addictive: “she continues in it, she returns to it, and discovers her peril when it is too late”. It is pointed out that strong women would inevitably flee from such corrupting influences, but “the morals and health of the weak may be impaired”. On these grounds, the report recommended that the king curb the practice of animal magnetism as soon as possible. Presumably, this was in case exposing the false premises of mesmerism alone was not sufficient to stop it being practised. Whatever the moral case may be, the report paved the way for the modern empirical approach in more ways than one. Stephen Jay Gould called the work “a masterpiece of the genre, an enduring testimony to the power and beauty of reason” that “should be rescued from its current obscurity, translated into all languages”. Just to mention a few further insights, the commissioners were patently aware of psychological phenomena like the experimenter effect, concerned as they were that some patients might report certain sensations because they thought that is what the eminent men of science wanted to hear. That seems to be what propelled them to make the study placebo-controlled and single-blind. Other phenomena reminiscent of the modern-day notion of priming, and the role of expectations more generally, are pointed out throughout the document. The report also contains a detailed account of how self-directed attention can generate what are known today as psychosomatic symptoms. Relatedly, there is an incredibly lucid discussion of mass psychogenic illness, and mass hysteria more generally, including in cases of war and political upheaval. Just five years later, France would descend into the chaos of a violent revolution. Although the details of animal magnetism may sound absurd (and even morally dubious) to modern ears, within its context Mesmerism was very much in line with the latest scientific developments. In some ways, exciting experiments with invisible forces — gravity, electricity, magnetism, wondrous gases like hydrogen — defined the era. Unlike the occultists of the previous ages, Mesmer was striving to give his practices a rational scientific as opposed to a religious flavour. Indeed, although the magnetic fluid part did not work out, in an important sense, animal magnetism marked the beginnings of hypnosis and psychological suggestion. These are very real and possibly still clinically useful phenomena, as a recent resurgence in research shows. ※※Indexed under…HypnosisAnimal magnetism and However we judge Mesmer, the ideas and practice of animal magnetism served to precipitate some important developments in how we think about scientific studies today. This episode left a legacy both of humility regarding our collective ability to reason soundly and of new methods for improving that ability. In the words of our learned commissioners: Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 20, 2018

Urte Laukaityte

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:50.962114

fallen-angels-birds-of-paradise-in-early-modern-europe

Fallen Angels Birds of Paradise in Early Modern Europe By Natalie Lawrence April 4, 2018 When birds of paradise first arrived to Europe, as dried specimens with legs and wings removed, they were seen in almost mythical terms — as angelic beings forever airborne, nourished by dew and the “nectar” of sunlight. Natalie Lawrence looks at how European naturalists of the 16th and 17th centuries attempted to make sense of these entirely novel and exotic creatures from the East. In 1522, the dismembered skins of new and fabulous creatures were brought to the court of Emperor Charles V of Spain. These were birds of paradise from the East Indies, carried with a cargo of spices and other valuable marvels on the last remaining ship from a fleet that had left in 1519 to circumnavigate the globe under Ferdinand Magellan. These birds were unknown and entirely unseen in Europe, but they caused an instant stir. The ship’s chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, described how five of these enigmatic objects were presented to the Spanish sailors by a Moluccan Sultan as a royal gift for the Emperor: These birds are as large as thrushes; they have small heads, long beaks, legs slender like a writing pen, and a span in length; they have no wings, but instead of them long feathers of different colours, like plumes . . . they never fly, except when the wind blows. They told us that these birds come from the terrestrial Paradise, and they call them ‘bolon dinata’, that is, “divine birds”.1 These unusual skins were shrunken and wingless, causing their beaks and gorgeous plumes to be disproportionately exaggerated. They were prepared by New Guinean hunters for tribal dances and displays, which still occur in tribal areas of New Guinea. The flesh and limbs were removed, though methods varied by tribe and species of bird, and the whole skin was smoked to heighten the dramatic effect of the elaborate feathers. Yet the living birds were virtually unknown to anyone outside New Guinea, even to the Moluccan traders who dealt in New Guinean products. One Portuguese apothecary who travelled around Southeast Asia wrote in 1513 that birds “which are prized more than any others come from the islands called Aru (Daru), birds which they bring over dead, called birds of paradise (pasaros de Deus)”. Bird of paradise plumes, in particular, were some of the most coveted products in Asia and had been part of Asian trade networks, which circulated spices and other valuable goods such as ivory and textiles, for at least 5000 years before Europeans reached the region in the late fifteenth century. Spices such as cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg grew only in the Moluccas, but reached the Middle East and eventually Europe in the Middle Ages through trade networks that passed through Venice. Before the sixteenth century, however, nothing was known of the birds of paradise in Europe. It was this high demand for spices in early modern Europe that drove the first European explorations of “a strange, and for so many ages, an unknown world, in order to search for the islands where spices grow”, and, more importantly, to profitably undercut the Venetian monopoly. Spanish court secretary Maximilianus Transylvanus wrote an account of Magellan’s travels, De Moluccis Insulis (1523), constructed from interviews with sailors. It included Islamic Asian myths transported to Europe along with the skins: The kings of Marmin began to believe that souls were immortal a few years ago, induced by no other argument than that they saw that a certain most beautiful small bird never rested upon the ground nor upon anything that grew upon it; but they sometimes saw it fall dead upon the ground from the sky. And as the Mahometans, who travelled to those parts for commercial purposes, told them that this bird was born in Paradise, and that Paradise was the abode of the souls of those who had died, these kings embraced the sect of Mahomet, because it promised wonderful things concerning the abode of souls. But they call the bird Mamuco Diata [Bird of God]. . .2 Accompanied by such fabulous accounts, these striking objects could hardly fail to become something special. In the 1540s, more bird of paradise skins began to trickle into Europe from Portuguese and Spanish trading vessels returning from the East Indies. The skins, most of which bore the iridescent green and velvet brown plumage of the greater bird of paradise (Paradisaea apoda), were prepared for trade, limbs removed, and rapidly acquired by aristocratic collectors for their curiosity collections. There were still a relatively small number of specimens scattered in a variety of collections across Europe. Apart from the collections of the Cardinal of Salzburg and Charles V in Spain, the German humanist Conrad Peutinger owned a specimen, as did the Italian scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger. The apothecary-collector Francesco Calzolari in Verona had a specimen of a chamaeleon aereus described in his collection catalogue, and the German physician-botanist Melchior Weiland had acquired a specimen during his travels in the Levant. The skins fetched painfully high prices on the open market: a 1550 pamphlet from Nuremberg advertised a skin of the birds known to the Greeks as “apodes” (“without feet”), on sale for the price of 800 thalers, equivalent to a year’s salary for a university scholar or skilled musician. Very little was published about these rare birds until the middle of the sixteenth century. Even so, it didn’t take long for their depictions in books of emblems, natural philosophies, and in many other genres to transform them into angelic, floating creatures. These images were based in part on the Islamic myths published by Transylvanus and the fact that the “Orient” has been seen as an exotic paradise full of wonders and riches for hundreds of years. It was almost no surprise that the East should turn out to be a Paradisal land full of spices and jewel-like birds. Few authors actually saw the bird of paradise skins, so closely did collectors keep them from public view. And none, of course, saw the living “angels” they described. The ideas that the birds were like angels did not in fact originate with the legless nature of the skins. This leglessness was used, rather to support the fantastical life histories that authors imagined. The birds of paradise were literally mythologised. The first pivotal account of the manucodiata was in the Historiae Animalium (1551-58) of Swiss naturalist and physician Conrad Gessner. The five volumes of this gargantuan work followed the Aristotelian structure of the natural world and is a seminal example of a Renaissance encyclopedia. It combined image with text for the first time, including about 1200 woodcuts. The complete “history” of each alphabetically-ordered creature was arranged in a set of lettered thematic sections such as synonyms, form, and uses. The size of each entry depended on the volume of extant material on it: newer creatures merited smaller entries than well-known ones. In order to form a complete history of the birds, Gessner brought together as many sources as he could. He included one of the first extant scholarly descriptions of a bird of paradise, found in the expansive De Subtilitate (1550), a book by the Italian mathematician and astrologer Jerome Cardan. Cardan reasoned that, because these birds were never seen alive and could not land without feet, they must exist perpetually airborne in the highest reaches of the sky. Cardan argued that nothing solid was ever found in their bodies, so they must be like the mythical rhyntace, “a little Persian Bird which has no excrement, but is all full of fat inside, and the creature is thought to live upon air and dew”. He also suggested that males had a cavity in their backs in which females laid eggs and incubated them, and he coined the Latinate term Manucodiata, drawn from the Malay name Mamuco diuata (birds of God). Gessner also used the description by French naturalist Pierre Belon, who, in his L’Histoire de la nature des oyseaux (1555), described the headdresses of the Janissaries he had seen in the Levant. They contained “plumes of a bird called the Rhintace . . .” from “a small creature of which only the skin is left” that he believed “may be the Phoenix”. On the basis of these and other accounts, Gessner developed some marvelous ideas about the life histories of the birds. He suggested that these “Lufftvogels” (birds of the air) were effortlessly suspended by their haloes of plumes. Gessner imagined several uses for these hair-like projections, or cirri —- the naked shafts projecting beyond the rest of the feathers. He speculated that the birds might use them to hang from tree branches when they were tired. They might also be vital to the birds’ love lives: Gessner envisaged couples entwining their cirri together when mating, and as the female sat atop the male to brood her eggs amongst the clouds. He maintained that the fatigue of unending flight might in fact be taken away by the birds’ constant movement, like the perpetual movement of a clock pendulum. He argued, though, that they could not possibly live only on pure air or ether. It was far too thin to sustain anything. They were birds, after all. Gessner often called upon correspondents to get information or images he needed. Conrad Peutinger in Augsberg sent Gessner a report and drawing of his own personal specimen to be the basis for the woodcut illustration featured in Gessner’s book. The skin in the resulting woodcut is apparently legless but lacks the hair-like projections that figured so in Gessner’s theories and were clear in other contemporary images such as Calzolari’s. Gessner’s work was source material for many later publications, including Bolognese apothecary Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Ornithologiae hoc est de avibus historia (1599). Aldrovandi had several skins in his collection and differentiated four different species of manucodiata on this basis: Manucodiata prima, secunda, cirrata, and hippomanucodiata, each depicted in woodcuts drinking dew and floating amongst clouds. However, in his text, Aldrovandi argued that the birds could not possibly live on dew alone and conjectured that their “sturdy beaks” were very like those of woodpeckers, and “very fit to strike insects”. He also suggested that the cirri might aid “swifter flight” rather than being used in mating. The birds certainly weren’t confined to natural histories. They were used in many books of emblems such as Joachim Camerarius’ Symbolarum et emblematum (1596), encapsulating ideas of spiritual ascension, lofty thinking, and restless, mercurial thought with their unending flight. The birds, with their elaborate plumes and flighty nature, were even used as emblems of the fickle and coquettish nature of vain and richly adorned women. They also made it into the stars: Dutch astronomer Petrus Planchius enshrined the bird of paradise in a new southern constellation, Paradysvogel Apis Indica, in his 1598 celestial globe. In art, the birds’ exotic and ascendant nature was powerfully symbolic. In Jacques Linard’s painting The Five Senses and the Four Elements (1627), for example, a bird of paradise skin is depicted as if it is flying out of the window to escape the chaos of the study. It acts as part of an alchemical allegory, symbolising the pure aerial elements: these birds were too close to the heavens to be contaminated with the exigencies of the everyday world. In Roelandt Savery’s Landscape with Birds (1628), the birds are comet-like streaks in the sky, far above the terrestrial waterfowl and songbirds. From the early seventeenth century some European naturalists got access to new kinds of skins that possessed legs. Several wrote long and disparaging refutations of earlier authors and their belief in legless wonders. The birds of paradise were becoming terrestrialised, just birds, no longer the ethereal angels they had been. Yet the exoticism and moral connotations of the birds-as-angels meant that these images did not die out. Depictions of the birds were everywhere . . . — in paintings, religious texts, allegories, even in some newly-published retrograde natural histories. It was not only that the birds had become a geographical symbol of the wondrous East or a moral symbol of a pure existence, but that the image of monstrous legless birds fascinated people. This has not lessened today; they continue to enthrall, perhaps even more so as fabulous natural wonders than angelic impossibilities. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 4, 2018

Natalie Lawrence

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:51.442110

iconology-of-a-cardinal-was-wolsey-really-so-large

Iconology of a Cardinal Was Wolsey Really so Large? By Katherine Harvey May 3, 2018 Characterised as manipulative, power-hungry, and even an alter rex, Henry VIII’s right-hand man Cardinal Thomas Wolsey has been typically depicted with a body mass to rival his political weight. Katherine Harvey asks if he was really the glutton of popular legend, and what such an image reveals about the link between the body, reputation, and power in Tudor England. Robed in cardinal’s red and of considerable bulk, Thomas Wolsey’s is one of the most enduring images of the Tudor period. Over the past five centuries, he has been consistently represented as a corpulent churchman, in art, on stage and screen, and in popular culture. Yet this familiar version of Wolsey (1470/1–1530) comes not from a contemporary likeness, but from a portrait painted towards the end of the sixteenth century, at least six decades after Wolsey’s death. It may be based on a contemporary portrait of him, but if so the original has not survived. Not only is there a lack of visual evidence for Wolsey’s appearance, we also lack detailed written descriptions. One Venetian ambassador, Sebastian Giustinian, judged him to be “very handsome”, and another described him as “hale and of good presence” — neither description helps to answer the question of the cardinal’s physique. Hostile biographers have typically assumed that Wolsey was indeed a very fat man; more sympathetic historians have been more sceptical, with Peter Gwyn arguing that “there has to be a suspicion that since his death the poor cardinal’s girth has increased, even as his fame has diminished!”1 The truth is, we don’t know (and almost certainly never will know) what Wolsey actually looked like. Whatever the reality, the image of the fat cardinal was a potent one. As Henry VIII’s chief minister and the most powerful churchman in England, Wolsey was always a divisive figure: he had many critics during his lifetime, and the criticism continued for many years after his death. In the decades after the English Reformation, he became a symbol of everything that was wrong with the late medieval church: it was greedy, corrupt, and self-serving, with no interest in caring for the souls it was meant to save. His fat body, which proved to the world that he was gluttonous and self-indulgent, hinted at his deeper and more damaging flaws. Wolsey’s contemporaries had a strong idea of what a priest’s body was supposed to look like and how he should behave around food. The ideal churchman was an ascetic, or at least was austere: he ate little, took scant interest or pleasure in food, and had a correspondingly slender physique. In theory, Wolsey should have modelled himself on his saintly predecessors — men such as Thomas Becket, who apparently fasted so much that he nearly died of starvation and had to be forced by his confessor to relax his diet in order to save his life. Although such extreme behaviour was rare in early Tudor England, fasting remained an important religious practice. Wolsey’s fellow bishops included William Warham, archbishop of Canterbury, and John Fisher, bishop of Rochester — men who were renowned for their piety and strict living, and who were depicted by Holbein as elderly, distinguished, and gaunt. When compared to such men, the corpulent cardinal appeared as a symbol of decadence, and this impression was reinforced by contemporary ideas about overeating. In pre-Reformation Christianity, gluttony was widely viewed as a gateway sin: a man who overindulged in food and drink would be prone to many other vices. In particular, gluttony was thought to breed lechery. In theological terms, the association was rooted in the Garden of Eden — it was only after Adam and Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit that they began to experience sexual desire, and thus fell prey to the sin of lust. This cultural link between gluttony and sexual sin was supported by medical theory. The proximity of the stomach to the genitals meant that the latter would be warmed by the food and drink contained in the former, providing the heat which was the defining characteristic of the male body and necessary for the production of semen. Furthermore, semen was thought to be a product of completely digested food, with particularly nourishing foods such as meat and eggs being especially conducive to its production. As Thomas More declared in Utopia (1516), there were two types of people: those who lived unmarried and chaste and abstained from meat, and those who married, had children, and ate flesh. This association between gluttony and lechery was problematic for fat priests because the pre-Reformation clergy were supposed to be celibate, and obesity implied that a cleric was not keeping his vow. When, in the 1520s, the poet John Skelton wrote a series of satirical verses about Cardinal Wolsey and the Tudor court, he made full use of such associations to make insinuations about his target. Skelton’s verses make only vague allusions to Wolsey’s love life, but he leaves us in no doubt that Wolsey is a glutton, with all that implied. In Collyn Clout, he describes the lavish manner in which certain contemporary prelates dined: Thus they make theyr boostThrough every coost,Howe some of you dothe eateIn lenton season flesshe meat,Fesauntes, patryche and cranes;Men call you therfore prophanes.Ye pyke no shrympes nor pranes,Saltfysshe, stockfyssh nor herynge,It is not for your werynge,Nor in holy lenton seasonYe wyll neyther beanes ne peason.But ye loke to be let loseTo a pygge or to a goose,Your gorge not enduedWithout a capon stuedOr a stewed cockeUnder her surfled smockeAnd her wanton wodicocke.2 And in Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?, a vicious attack on Wolsey’s court, he adopts a similar tone — and here segues straight from gluttony to lechery: Welcome dame Simonia,With dame Castrimergia,To drynke and for to eateSwete ypocrus and swete meate.To kepe his flesshe chastIn lent, for a repast,He eateth capons stewed,Fesaunt and patriche mewed,Hennes, checkynges, and pygges.He foynes and he frygges;Spareth neither mayde ne wyfe.This is a postels lyfe.3 Is it coincidence that Wolsey (and some of his fellow bishops) are accused of existing almost entirely on the meat-based dishes which were believed to increase semen production and to promote lechery? Possibly, but it seems much more likely that Skelton was deliberately using the contemporary connotations of gluttony to imply further sins and to raise questions about the conduct of certain individuals. In Wolsey’s case, such suspicions were justified: he is known to have had at least one liaison, with a certain Mistress Lark, which produced two children. Nor was lechery the only unfortunate side effect of overindulgence at the table. Throughout the later Middle Ages, it was taught that it was the Christian duty of wealthy households to give vast quantities of alms to the poor. These alms often took the form of food left over from the household’s own meals. One of the benefits of fasting, or even moderation, was that there would be more leftovers, and thus more alms for the needy. On the other hand, a man who ate everything put in front of him left nothing for those who needed it most: he was literally condemning the poor to starvation. Wolsey’s fat body thus proved what so many critics had claimed: he was a greedy, grasping man who had enriched himself at the expense of the English people. In the pre-Reformation world in which Wolsey lived, fat bodies were problematic chiefly as emblems of sin — gluttony, lechery, and a want of charity — rather than in their own right. But during the course of the sixteenth century, the fat body began to revolt in a recognisably modern way, and consequently Wolsey’s critics increasingly described his body in ways which were designed to disgust the reader. John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1570) describes the cardinal’s corpse, which was “blacke as pitch, and also was so heavy that vi could scares beare it. Furthermore, it did so stincke above the ground, that they were costreyned to hasten the burial therof.”4 And in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Buckingham wonders That such a keech can with his very bulkTake up the rays o’th’beneficial sun, And keep it from the earth.5 The image of the “keech” (a lump of animal fat), like that of the black, stinking corpse, is a deliberately repulsive one, making use of the disgusting body to shape the reader’s view of the long-dead man. But despite the prevalence of such images with their emphasis on Wolsey’s ever-increasing bulk, the cardinal was not without his defenders. Foremost amongst his champions was George Cavendish (1494–1562), who wrote a biography of Wolsey in the mid-1550s. As his former gentleman-usher, Cavendish offered a first-hand account of life in Wolsey’s household during the 1520s, including intriguing insights into his employer’s relationship with food. Cavendish’s Wolsey stands in stark contrast to the popular image of him: if not a saintly man, he is at least a good one. His hospitality (an important clerical virtue) is much celebrated: he hosts lavish meals for his royal master and various important guests, including “great banquets and solemn feasts” at which Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn were present. Moreover, his generosity is not limited to the great and good: at York, after his fall from grace, “he kept a noble house and plenty of meat and drink for all comers, rich and poor.”6 Yet, strikingly, Wolsey does not join in the overindulgence on such occasions. For example, at one Hampton Court banquet, he toasted the king, but then retired to his private chamber where he took “a very short supper, or rather a small repast” before rejoining his guests.7 Cavendish is also the source of an anecdote which is often used to demonstrate Wolsey’s formidable work ethic, but which also hints at a less-than-expected capacity for food. During the negotiations with France, the biographer reports, Wolsey rose at 4 a.m. and went straight to his desk, where he stayed until 4 p.m., “all which season my lord never rose once to piss, not yet to eat any meat.” Only once his letters were dispatched did he allow himself a drink. He then went to mass, walked in the garden, said evensong, then “went to dinner and supper all at once. Making a small repast, he went to his bed to take his rest for the night.”8 Such restraint — hours without food or drink followed by a single small meal — echoed the self-denial of Wolsey’s saintly predecessors, men who supposedly ate only once a day and restricted their intake of fluids (even water) as well as of foodstuffs. These men were also celebrated for their refusal to relax their strict regimen even as death approached, and Cavendish similarly adopts this motif for his life of Wolsey. On his deathbed, the life claims, Wolsey wanted meat in order to strengthen himself for confession. When the food was brought to him, he took a spoonful or two of chicken broth and then realised that it was a fast day. The doctor said that Wolsey’s illness made him exempt, but he refused to take any more, and made his confession. Cavendish’s account of Wolsey’s final hours presents him not as the glutton of legend, but as a man for whom the needs of the soul took precedence over the desires of the body.9 Although Cavendish, a Catholic sympathiser who retired to live in rural obscurity after Wolsey’s death, did not attempt to present his beloved master as a potential saint, his decision to record something of his food practices suggests that he was well aware of how bodies and bodily behaviours shaped Tudor reputations. Fewer than two decades after Cavendish’s death, his work was copied and illustrated with scenes from the cardinal’s life. This manuscript (now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford), shows Wolsey riding to Westminster and to France on horseback and travelling by barge to Greenwich; he is also depicted delivering the great seal to the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, and lying on his sickbed. In all five of these images, he is unrecognisable to the modern eye. Why? Because, rather than the corpulent cardinal of legend, he is a depicted as a thin, black-robed man with a long, somewhat straggly beard. Like the famous portraits, these sketches probably bear little resemblance to the real Wolsey. They are symbolic images, designed to represent a character rather than to provide an accurate likeness. In the sixteenth century, as today, most people did not know what Wolsey actually looked like, and few cared. Instead, they were concerned with what he stood for, so they reimagined his body in ways which reflected their version of the cardinal’s character. Whatever truth was contained in George Cavendish’s life of Wolsey, his efforts to rehabilitate his former master were probably doomed to failure from the beginning. Amidst the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century, it was inevitable that the grotesquely obese image — complementing as it did the Protestant stereotype of Wolsey as a symbol of everything which was wrong with the pre-Reformation Church — came to dominate the popular imagination. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 3, 2018

Katherine Harve

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:51.946359

yvette-borup-andrews-photographing-central-asia

Yvette Borup Andrews Photographing Central Asia By Lydia Pyne January 10, 2018 Although often overshadowed by the escapades of her more famous husband (said by some to be the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones), the photographs taken by Yvette Borup Andrews on their first expeditions through Central Asia stand today as a compelling contribution to early visual anthropology. Lydia Pyne looks at the story and impact of this unique body of images. When reporters quizzed Yvette Borup Andrews about her honeymoon, which followed her high society marriage of 1914, the account she offered up was unusual to say the least. We traveled 35,000 miles. We did 2000 of those miles on horseback. Mostly we slept in sleeping bags. The wolves howled about us, the wild dogs threatened, sometimes we followed a tiger to its lair and waited until it returned and shot it, so that a dangerous marauder might no longer threaten us at night. We were shot at by bandits, but neither of us were hurt. And we brought back 3000 specimens from the interior of Asia.1 The “honeymoon” was in fact the American Museum of Natural History’s First Asiatic Zoological Expedition — a pioneering exploration of China, Tibet, and Burma led by Yvette, as official photographer, and her naturalist husband Roy Chapman Andrews. Yvette’s photographs from the trip and the Second Asiatic Expedition two years later — published in Camps and Trails in China and Across Mongolian Plains respectively — not only offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives of Central Asians in the early twentieth century, but also give valuable insight into the world of ethnographic photography and how the American Museum of Natural History used the medium to connect its scientific expeditions with its interested public. An American citizen born in Paris — her father was an American military attaché stationed in France and later in Berlin — Yvette grew up among the European intelligentsia and aristocracy before the outbreak of World War I. Years before the fame her Asiatic adventures would garner, Yvette would frequently make headlines back in the US due to her glamorous party lifestyle, socialising with the likes of Princess Victoria Louise, the daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm. In 1914, as Europe fell headlong into bloody war, she met and married Roy Chapman Andrews, a rising star at the American Museum of Natural History. After their wedding, the couple promptly set about the business of embarking on the ambitious eighteen-month First Asiatic Zoological Expedition to China, Tibet, and Burma to collect zoological specimens and photograph the peoples and landscapes of Central Asia. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Central Asia piqued serious scientific curiosity across a plethora of disciplines from biology to paleoanthropology. Indeed, Roy had finagled funding for the First Asiatic Zoological Expedition in no small part because, in addition to collecting the zoological specimens, he promised to look for fossil hominin sites in Central Asia, an activity which aligned nicely with the pet theory of the American Museum of Natural History’s director, Henry Fairfield Osborn, about the origins of Homo sapiens being traceable to China. Yvette and Roy’s 1914 wedding announcement in the New York Times built up the romantic thrill of their upcoming adventures, declaring, “Within a year, Mr. Andrews plans to have his bride accompany him on an exploring expedition.” Yvette, however, did more than merely accompany her husband to Asia — she was the expedition’s photographer and amateur ethnographer. She had learned the basics of photography from her father while living in Europe, and then perfected her art through study in France, Germany, Italy, and New York. She was not only proficient in creating black-and-white prints, she was also adept at the then-relatively new color techniques like using Paget color plates; and she was also able to create motion pictures. Her compelling series of images from the First Asiatic Zoological Expedition was published in 1918 in the extremely popular Camps and Trails in China. In addition to being formally credited as the expedition’s photographer, she was the author of six of the book’s chapters, including “The Women of China”, “Stalking Tibetans With a Camera”, and “Chinese New Year at Yung-Chang”. Roy relied heavily on Yvette’s journals and photographs in publishing his own popular accounts of their travels as well as establishing scientific credibility for ensuing expeditions to Central Asia in the following decade. When Roy published his immensely successful Across Mongolian Plains in 1921, there was little doubt that Yvette’s work was the backbone of the book. “My wife, who is ever my best assistant in the field,” he wrote, “was responsible for all of the photographic work of the expedition and I have drawn much upon her daily ‘Journals’ in the preparation of this book.”2 The photographs and swashbuckling tales of scientific escapades made for popular reading in the press and Yvette and Roy quickly developed a devoted paparazzi that saw them off whenever they left port in San Francisco and waited for them upon their return. On April 6, 1916, the Charlotte Observer ran a blurb about the couple with the subheading, “While Husband Is Shooting Wild Beasts With Rifle, Mrs. Chapman Andrews Will Take Her Chances With a Camera in the Interior of China and Tibet.”3 Newspaper accounts of the expeditions described in breathless detail how the couple survived wild dog attacks in Tibet and were ambushed and shot at by bandits in China. The First Asiatic Zoological Expedition was a huge success. It amassed thousands of specimens for the American Museum of Natural History’s growing collections and the thrilling stories of Yvette and Roy’s adventures published so soon after the expedition guaranteed that donors would continue to sponsor the museum’s future expeditions to the region. And so in 1918 came the Second Asiatic Zoological Expedition, and again Yvette was to be the expedition’s photographer. Focusing its interest and collecting efforts in Mongolia and North China, this second expedition, and its ensuing success, would itself in turn lay the groundwork for the American Museum of Natural History’s famous fossil-hunting expeditions to Mongolia and the Gobi in the 1920s. Central to this success of both the First and Second Asiatic Expedition was the way in which Yvette’s arresting images acted as a conduit between the distant excursions and the public back home — through her photographs the expedition felt that much more real. The subjects of Yvette’s photographs from the trips to Central Asia were varied — landscapes, animals, people, and places — a broad impression that sought to show how the people lived, how they worked, and what their livelihoods depended on. Her written descriptions tended to emphasize the non-Western-ness of the indigenous communities encountered and were peppered with stories about her attempts to successfully photograph reticent subjects. Of all natives whom we tried to photograph the Tibetans were the most difficult. It was almost impossible to bribe them with money or tin cans to stand for a moment and when they saw the motion picture camera set up beside the trail they would make long detours to avoid passing in front of it. . . . What we could not get by bribery we tried to do by stealth and concealed ourselves behind bushes with the camera focused on a certain spot upon the road.4 In addition to depicting the camels, antelope, and vast expanse of the Central Asian steppe, her lens turned to human stories. She showed her readers what she called the cruelty of foot-binding with portraits of women who could barely balance upright on their tightly bound feet. She also captured images of the animals shot by Roy and the expedition in their quest to provide the museum with provenanced zoological specimens. In short, her photographs introduced European and American audiences to Central Asia, offering readers a chance to become acquainted with the lives, cultures, economies, and politics of peoples living very different lives on the other side of the world. Her photographs also show the demands, complexities, and technologies associated with early twentieth-century field and expedition photography. The expeditions’ photographic equipment included a variety of cameras — two 3A Kodaks, a Graphic 4 x 5 tripod camera, as well as a Graflex 4 x 5 for rapid work. These were standard cameras for travel, expeditions, and scientific work; standard enough in their popularity and manufacture that, at a pinch, the expedition would most likely be able to purchase additional film or plates. Yvette opted to use plates almost exclusively for any fine-grained photographic work, although she conceded that these were much heavier and more difficult to handle than films; for the scientific detail the expeditions required, however, she considered the plates vastly superior. Photography plates and negatives were developed in-field, with the use of a collapsible rubber dark room made by Abercrombie & Fitch Company that was about seven feet high and four feet in diameter. The dark room was incredibly versatile and built to deal with tough field conditions as it “could be hung from the limb of a tree or the rafters of a building and be ready for use in five minutes.”5 Yvette set up her “little rubber darkroom”, as the press called it, “in any convenient tree branch, wherever she pleased, and developed [the expedition’s] pictures in temperatures of 105 in the shade, with a humidity of 150.”6 In addition to the still photography, the expedition packed a Universal camera for motion pictures. To develop the motion picture negatives, Yvette utilized a special collapsible darkroom made of red cloth that could be attached to the inside of any tent, designed by the famed conservator Carl Akeley when he worked at the American Museum of Natural History. At the end of the First Zoological Expedition, the team came home with 150 Paget color plates; 500 photographic negatives; and 10,000 feet of motion picture film. (As well as over 3000 zoological specimens acquired for the museum.) The Second Zoological Expedition was Yvette’s final stint as an official expedition photographer. She traveled with her husband on the later Central Asiatic Expeditions of the 1920s, but her photography of indigenous Mongolians is merely a passing comment in Roy’s 700-page-tome, The New Conquest of Central Asia, published in 1932. However, it is worth noting that this “passing comment” refers to the images that she and James Shackelford shot on April 21, 1922, of the Maidari Festival in Urga, Mongolia — images which turned out to be of incredible historical and ethnographic significance as it was the last Maidari Festival ever enacted due to growing political issues between China and Mongolia. It’s perhaps not totally outlandish to see Yvette’s scant mention in Roy’s 1932 book as connected to the fact they’d divorced a year earlier. Today, Yvette’s work with the Asiatic Zoological Expeditions remains largely uncategorized and unrecognized — even systematically written out of some historical accounts of Roy’s life. Although her photography from the first two zoological expeditions may have become overshadowed by Shackelford’s photographs from the much more famous fossil-based Central Asiatic Expeditions of the 1920s, the images she captured offer an important frame for understanding the world of early ethnographic photography. Her unique photographs act as still-life narratives of peoples and places that captivated audiences, and stand as a testament to the oft-overlooked aspects of twentieth-century scientific exploration. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 10, 2018

Lydia Pyne

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:52.903048

brief-encounters-with-jean-frederic-maximilien-de-waldeck

Brief Encounters with Jean-Frédéric Maximilien de Waldeck By Rhys Griffiths November 22, 2017 Not a lot concerning the artist, erotic publisher, explorer, and general enigma Count de Waldeck can be taken at face value, and this certainly includes his fanciful representations of ancient Mesoamerican culture which — despite the exquisite brilliance of their execution — run wild with anatopistic elephants and suspicious architecture. Rhys Griffiths looks at the life and work of one of the 19th century’s most mysterious and eccentric figures. I first encountered the Count de Waldeck at the ancient Mayan ruins of Palenque. There, in a guide book, I read that from 1831 to 1833 an old European aristocrat, “crazy Count de Waldeck”, lived on top of a ruined pyramid, now known as Templo de Conde, or “Temple of the Count”, with two Mayan brides. While there he drew the Mayan ruins for posterity and was among the first Europeans to do so. Later, I read, he published “a book of fanciful neoclassical drawings that made the city resemble a great Mediterranean civilisation”, a crime for which he has since been condemned as a pioneer of the pseudohistory known as Mayanism. Tens of thousands of tourists visit Palenque each year, many from English-speaking countries, and the ubiquity of the guide in which I read the above makes it safe to assume that plenty of others will have made a similar acquaintance with the “crazy Count”. Knowing him as I think I do now, I think this fact would have wounded him immeasurably. In the eighteenth century, Spanish colonists “rediscovered” Palenque. The ancient city – abandoned some time after 800 AD – was subsumed by jungle, which, it was not unreasonably hoped, might hide lost Mayan gold as well as palatial ruins. Around a century later – at the advanced age of fifty-nine – Jean-Frédéric Maximilien de Waldeck travelled to Mexico from London with similar financial motives. Waldeck saw an opportunity to make money through drawings. He lived in what the art historian Esther Pasztory describes as the second great age of exploration, one concerned with “conquest through knowledge of the world”, rather than the old-fashioned military kind. But he was also an artist, a good one, and though he took artistic licence — archaeologists have taken issue with the elephant heads which populate some of his Mexican illustrations — that, surely, is the prerogative of his trade. Waldeck drew for posterity because he cared about his place in it: the afterlife of his work and reputation provides an unambiguous lesson for those who would see their names writ in marble not water. At Palenque, a sign by the Count’s Temple — a pyramid structure supporting a stone building of three rooms — confirmed that the Count de Waldeck was in Palenque, but claimed that he actually lived at the foot of the nearby Temple of the Cross, and for only two months. The count’s Wikipedia page clarifies that he was, in fact, probably no such thing (a count, that is). Waldeck was possibly born on March 16, 1766, was a self-appointed count, duke, or baron depending, presumably, on his audience, and, at various times, he claimed to be French, Austrian, Czech, or British (his name indicates one, or possibly a fusion, of the former options). Where Waldeck is concerned, it is notoriously difficult to tell truth from self-aggrandising myth; little biographical fact about the man exists before 1822 when, aged fifty-seven, he worked producing theatrical lithographs in London. He redrew and published a famous book of Renaissance erotica, I Modi, in 1856 and claimed that he had been a student of the painter Jacques-Louis David in Paris, served with Napoleon in Egypt, travelled the world to an extent that remains impressive today, and lived to the age of 109 years and 45 days. Waldeck’s publication of I Modi definitely exists, but as for his time with Napoleon and the artistic apprenticeship, we only have his word which is not usually held in high regard. There is also an eye-raising, but almost certainly fictional, story regarding the circumstances surrounding his death: he supposedly died of a heart attack while eyeing a beautiful woman near the Champs-Élysées in Paris.1 I thought the count might make a good protagonist in a picaresque novel and took to looking for his name in the index of any books I came across relating to Mexico or pre-Hispanic people. I tracked him down to two locations: Paris, where he is interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and where a large collection of his work resides in the Bibliothèque nationale, and Chicago, whose Newberry Library houses another large collection of his oeuvre. As for details about his life, a great source of information was what is probably his first biography, Recollections of Two Distinguished Persons: La Marquise de Boissy and the Count de Waldeck, written by a wealthy, well-connected American writer from Philadelphia, Mary Rebecca Darby Smith, and published in 1878. Smith’s book spans her introduction to the count, on a trip to Europe in 1867, and their friendship thereafter. It is fair to describe Recollections as a hagiography. Here, for example, she describes Waldeck stoically accepting news that a diorama of world history he had been working on was not of interest to the American circus titan P. T. Barnum: It was not for thee, brave man, to succumb to ill fortune — steady as an oak of the forest thou hast borne the blasts of adversity; and when thy exit comes, from “the alpine heights of affliction,” thou mayest find thyself in green pastures, at rest and satisfied evermore. Arriving in Europe, Smith is advised to visit Waldeck in Paris. Later, after his death, she recalls reading a letter which stated that “among the many interesting objects of Paris, nothing appeared more remarkable than the aged Count de Waldeck, in his hundred and second year”. Waldeck was clearly a well-known fixture in the city, at least among a certain class of traveller. She finds Waldeck, on the Rue des Martyrs, an “amiable and manly character”, and is soon enthralled by his incredible anecdotes. These include (but are not limited to) his having dined with King George III, fished with Lord Byron in Scotland, painted Marie Antoinette shortly before her execution (a commission by the wife of an Irish MP), and lived, by his own calculation, through forty-two revolutions. The best of Waldeck’s stories concerns his time serving Napoleon in Egypt (a claim military archives do not corroborate). Even if fiction, it is brilliant. Smith writes, He related to me that he had the power to copy the handwriting of anyone perfectly; that upon one occasion he wrote the name of Napoleon so like it that it was a facsimile. Unfortunately Bonaparte found out and sent for the Count. “I hear you can imitate the handwriting of anyone, and that you imitated my signature?” “Yes sire,” replied the Count. “Now,” continued Napoleon, “write it here and then look at the top of the paper before you”, which the Count did and, to his dismay, read “Condemned to three months’ imprisonment at Vincennes.” He bowed his head and went to the prison. Two weeks later, Napoleon sent for him, and said: “You will not do it again? It is bad practise and dangerous. I had to make an example of you, though I know that you are a friend to me and of my dynasty.” Thus the count’s first Napoleonic tussle. His second — with the “Napoleon of the West”, Antonio López de Santa Anna, the soldier and politician who dominated Mexican history in the first half of the nineteenth century — is no less serious in consequence. In an obituary published shortly after Waldeck’s death, the London Illustrated News reports how, having spent three years studying the ruins, flora, and fauna of Palenque with the encouragement of the Mexican government, he was eventually — after being suspected of espionage — “deprived by Santa Anna of the greater part of his drawings and MSS”. He returned to Europe with what he had kept shortly afterwards, though it is entirely possible that this was, in fact, everything. Smith’s account of the count’s remarkable life is a biography in which the author, rooting for her subject, hopes desperately to write a happy ending, but is forced to conclude with tragedy. Anxiety spreads from the aged count to the young writer that his work has not reached the audience it deserves. Of his Palenque oeuvre he opines that “it is not worthwhile to think of my great work of Central America unless I can publish it in New York.” Waldeck’s wife — several decades his junior — confides to Smith that she is “greatly in hopes he will live long enough to see crowned with success the drawings he commenced”. The count decides to travel to New York and, on arrival, there present P. T. Barnum with the aforementioned glass diorama which will “make my fortune”. He sets upon this resolution at the age of 104. When the famous Barnum sees my spectacle he will not fail to speculate on its profits . . . for never before has any artist of merit occupied himself in reproducing upon glass the history of all countries, and the science of all people, since the heroic age to this date. My age, my journeys, and my long experience become a guarantee of the archaeological, geological, astronomical, etc. perfection, which will teach the people what they do not know. Smith agrees to plead the count’s case to Barnum but, in doing so, is met with a reasonable rebuff: “I assure you I feel too old, and certainly your friend is, to engage in a new speculation.” “Thus,” she writes, “perished the ardent hope of the Count for the realization of his efforts. He had to mourn talent unappreciated, hope frustrated, and the enterprise of his brain all lost as far as he was concerned.” In their last meeting, the day before his death on April 29, 1875, she visits the count who is a bedridden invalid, effectively rubbishing the story of his lusty demise on the Champs-Élysées. The best assessment of the count I have read is Esther Pasztory’s Jean-Frédéric Waldeck: Artist of Exotic Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010). Her focus on Waldeck’s art differentiates her from most writers for whom “Waldeck as a character has overshadowed Waldeck as a visionary” (it was amusing to learn, for instance, that, following a popular biography by Claude Baudez in 1993, the count became a superhero in a French comic strip). Waldeck’s work drew ire, Pasztory convincingly argues, because he was attempting science by means of art. He was typical of a type of eighteenth-century traveller artist whose work was scientific in that it observed and recorded the natural world but who was also acutely conscious of their audience. As Pasztory writes, circa 1800 such work “needed to be presented in a way that was comprehensible yet emotionally resonant”. Waldeck excelled at this latter requirement; his “Hollywood imagination” is evident in his additions and modifications, which range from altering the location of certain ruins to the inclusion of figures from classical mythology. A good example of the latter is his Ariadne and Theseus Inside the Temple of the Sun at Palenque, a painting displayed at the Salon in 1869, which depicts Ariadne and a Mayan Theseus walking inside the Temple of the Sun, Waldeck and a naked Mayan woman following behind. Waldeck’s artistic flourishes, argues Pasztory, constitute “an entirely intentional redesigning of the monuments for the sake of attracting attention”. And there was certainly motivation for that: Waldeck arrived in Mexico to find rather more competition from other travel writers and artists than he had expected. So he drew Palenque through the prism of who he was: a European, from a continent in thrall to the classical world (like Waldeck, neoclassicism was born in the mid-eighteenth century), the exotic, ancient Egypt, and erotic nudes. This idiosyncratic approach made Waldeck’s vision difficult for his contemporaries to understand, but, despite this, he had absolute conviction in the importance of what he was doing — a quality which prompted Pasztory to compare Waldeck favourably with Andy Warhol. Unfortunately for Waldeck, after the 1850s, photography played a more dominant role in exploration and reportage and, writes Pasztory, “this blending of art and science came to an end, much to the relief of scientists”. Because he grew up in the eighteenth century, such a hybrid approach seemed possible to him. By the middle of the nineteenth century it made little sense. It is certainly difficult to capture the zeitgeist when you belong to a different century: I doubt history offers many clearer examples of this truth than the count. In her Recollections, Smith concludes that “the life of patient and persevering artistic labour led by Count de Waldeck is without parallel and should not be forgotten”. I read similar phrases regularly at the history magazine where I work, as writers pitch to resuscitate historical events and, more frequently, people overlooked, misunderstood, or simply forgotten. Waldeck has a centuries-old temple named after him, which is certainly an enduring “I was here” statement. I wonder, though, whether the curators at Palenque might consider adding Mary Darby Smith’s tragic, if damning, assessment of the count’s life to the explanatory sign by his temple: “Talent unappreciated, hope frustrated.” “Crazy” Count de Waldeck, vandal of Mayan history, might then become the eponymous hero of a monument to noble failure, a laureate of the underappreciated or misunderstood. Surely the majority of those who first encounter the count at Palenque would consider themselves members of that unhappy group, at least occasionally. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 22, 2017

Rhys Griffiths

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:53.295779

defining-the-demonic

Defining the Demonic By Ed Simon October 25, 2017 Although Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal, a monumental compendium of all things diabolical, was first published in 1818 to much success, it is the fabulously illustrated final edition of 1863 which secured the book as a landmark in the study and representation of demons. Ed Simon explores the work and how at its heart lies an unlikely but pertinent synthesis of the Enlightenment and the occult. There, between the entry for a seventeenth-century Anglican theologian named Assheton and one for the Levantine goddess Astarte, is the demon Astaroth. As depicted by the French artist Louis le Breton for his fellow countryman Jacques-Albin-Simon Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal, Astaroth is a skinny man with reptilian claws punctuating long hands and feet, hobbled over on the back of a lupine demon sporting a massive pair of bat wings and a serpentine tail. His face — described by Collin de Plancy as that of a “very ugly angel” — is rendered by le Breton as thin and effete, almost equine, with eyes dismissive and uncaring, a slight sneer of cold command. Ignoring Astaroth’s claws and demon mount, his look of calculated intelligence could easily be that of one of the armchair intellectuals who dined with the philosophes of the Enlightenment Paris of Collin de Plancy’s youth. Not an entirely inappropriate connection, for the Dominican inquisitor Sebastian Michaelis, who classified the demons he encountered as an exorcist at the infamous monastery of Loudun in the seventeenth century, associated Astaroth with the new rationalist philosophies that were just being born in France. Michaelis’ Astaroth was a kind of hellish René Descartes, who drew the nuns and priests of Loudun astray with the pernicious promises of Epicureanism and invitations to “Do what thou wilt”. Perhaps for Collin de Plancy, born almost two centuries later amidst the convulsions of revolution, the thin, reptilian demon with the aristocratic bearing still represented some of the dangers of the new learning, for Astaroth “willingly answers the questions he is asked about the most secret things, and . . . it is easy to have him talk about creation”. Astaroth is a convenient symbol for the oddity of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire, for the demon represents a muddle of cultural forces: rationalism and superstition, systematization and the occult, the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement. When the Dictionnaire was first published in 1818, Collin de Plancy was a dutiful student of the new rationalism who set out to catalogue what he called “aberrations and germs or causes of errors”. As he labored at subsequent editions, however, the secular folklorist found himself more and more pulled in by the lure of demonology, a passion which would eventually lead him, by the 1830s, to enthusiastically embrace Catholicism. By the Dictionnaire’s final edition of 1863, the publishers could assure the reader that the “errors” previously highlighted had now been eliminated, the catalogue now fully congruent with Catholic theology. The preface authoritatively claimed that Collin de Plancy had “reconfigured his labors, recognizing that superstitious, foolish beliefs, occult sects and practices . . . have come only from deserters of the faith.” All together, across nearly six hundred pages, Collin de Plancy provided entries for sixty-five different demons, including favorites from the pages of Dante, Milton, and others, such as Asmodeus, Azazel, Bael, Behemoth, Belphégor, Belzebuth, Mammon, and Moloch. The most interesting edition of the text is the final one of 1863, illustrated with creepy exactitude by le Breton, whose brilliant Doré-esque engravings elevate the work beyond the relative staidness of previous editions. It’s both edifying and frightening to consider the magnificence of some of these illustrations. For example, among the more minor demons there is “Adramelech, great chancellor of the underworld, steward of the wardrobe of the sovereign of the demons, president of the high council of the devils”, who “showed himself in the form of a mule, and sometimes even that of a peacock”. Le Breton’s illustration portrays him in full pompous glory as an ass-headed version of the Yazidi’s “Peacock Angel”. Or there is Amduscias, in “the form of a unicorn”, to whose voice “the trees bow”, and who “commands twenty-nine legions.” A few pages later there is Amon, a horrific hell beast with globular pitch-black eyes, a “great and powerful marquis of the infernal empire” who appears as a “wolf, with a serpent’s tail . . . [whose] head resembles that of an owl, and its beak shows very sharp canine teeth.” As if le Breton’s rendition of the beast wasn’t terrifying enough, Collin de Plancy reminds us that this nightmare creature “knows the past and the future”. And then there is Ephialtes — a pug-faced, bird-winged, wild-eyed little gremlin perched atop the chest of a man, like Fuseli’s Nightmare — who Collin de Plancy describes in just a single sentence, explaining that he derives from the “Greek name for the nightmare . . . a kind of incubus that stifles sleep.” There is Eurynome, who has “long teeth, a frightful body full of wounds, and a fox skin for clothing.” Le Breton depicts Eurynome as a caprine, saw-toothed creature on bended knee, grimacing at some unseen victim, “showing his great teeth like a starving wolf”. And then there is my favorite, Belphégor, who is associated with the deadly sin of sloth and is shown sat hunched with pinched brow, straining atop a toilet, holding his tail from harm’s way, trying to take a shit. Of course, Collin de Plancy’s concern in the Dictionnaire infernal wasn’t just the defecation of minor demons. He also aimed to provide instruction on both the history and the practical utility of the more exalted among Satan’s minions. There is Asmodeus, who the Talmud claimed was born of a succubus who slept with King David, but who Collin de Plancy argued was “the ancient serpent who seduced Eve.” Associated with lust, Asmodeus is presented as a fearsome three-headed monstrosity, though not one above doing the bidding of King Solomon (regarded by the occult tradition as having had a special ability to control demons), who “loaded him with irons and forced him to help build the temple of Jerusalem.” Or reflect upon that “heavy and stupid demon” Behemoth. Calling to mind his appearance in the Book of Job, Collin de Plancy wrote that some “commentators pretend that it is the whale, and others that it is the elephant”. Le Breton chose to depict Behemoth as a bipedal version of the latter, clutching his hairy, engorged belly like some sort of malevolent Ganesh. Then there is Bael, “the first king of hell” who has “three heads, one of which has the shape of a toad, the other that of a man, and the third of a cat”, to which le Breton made the fine addition of a number of fur-covered arachnid legs. The Phoenician god Ba’al, from whom Collin de Plancy’s Bael derives his name, was associated with all manner of idolatries and blasphemies, and is also the inspiration for that other lieutenant of hell, Belzebuth (or Beelzebub), the trusted advisor of Lucifer whose name appears in the records of exorcists from Loudun to Salem. As Belzebuth literally means “Lord of the Flies”, le Breton decided to depict this demon as a startlingly biologically accurate insect, with long pinching mandibles, weirdly human eyes, and a skull and crossbones upon his paper-thin wings. If anything, the strange verisimilitude of the insect-like creature makes le Breton’s image all the more terrifying. His segmented thorax and spindly arms recall the flea magnified by Robert Hooke two centuries earlier, the English polymath’s Enlightenment monstrosity demonstrating that the nightmares of reason and superstition are not always as divergent as we might think. This connection between the ideals of the Enlightenment and the old world of magic and superstition from which these demons sprung was, in many ways, made literal by the figure of Collin de Plancy himself. He was born in 1793, only four years after the crowning (or most condemnatory) event of the Enlightenment: the French Revolution. Perhaps in reaction to that affair, he added the aristocratic “de Plancy” to his otherwise plebeian name. Indeed it was not just a plebeian name, but one with positively republican associations, for Collin de Plancy’s maternal uncle was none other than George Danton, the radical president of the Committee on Public Safety who, like so many of his fellow Jacobins, ultimately found his severed head looking up at the guillotine blade one morning in the month of Germaine. Like his uncle, Collin de Plancy was originally a partisan of liberty, equality, and fraternity, an enthused reader of Voltaire and a zealous rationalist and skeptic; also like his uncle, he would ultimately see himself reconciled to that Church he had rejected, though with a detour through the darker corners of demonology. As with the many demonic chimeras that populate his dictionary, Collin de Plancy was a mélange of disparate parts. He combined the rectilinear logic of men like Voltaire and Diderot with the chthonic visions of the symbolist and decadent poets of a generation later — Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Verlaine, who drunkenly stomped through the rainy streets of Paris clutching their fleurs du mal. Collin de Plancy did not just convince himself that demons were real, but indeed he developed a wish to control them through language, a desire as fervent as that of his Enlightenment forebears to categorize and define words and ideas in dictionaries and encyclopedias. The demonologist was a man stuck between logic and faith, the salon and the Hellfire club, who heard the screams of horrific monsters while writing with the sober pen of a naturalist. Like its creator, the Dictionnaire spanned the interests of two eras. It recalls such grimoires (practical manuals of magic) as Johann Weyer’s sixteenth-century Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, or the seventeenth-century Lesser Key of Solomon, as much as it does the Enlightenment’s systematized compendiums of knowledge, such as Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie. There is ambiguity in the book’s project itself, for what could be more modern than the dictionary, and yet what could be more antique than the knowledge collected in this particular dictionary? Despite ancient and medieval precedents across several different cultures (one can think of Aristophanes of Byzantium, who compiled a type of dictionary called the Lexeis two centuries before Christ), the dictionary and especially the encyclopedia were products of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Dr Johnson and his Dictionary of the English Language, or James Murray, who, in the Bodleian’s scriptorium, assembled the testament to humanity that is the Oxford English Dictionary, positivist knowledge could be found in the process of collection and measurement. The dictionary was sober, rational, and practical. Etymology was like dissection, another Enlightenment innovation, and the dictionary a sort of dissection theater. For Johnson, the dictionary was a reaction to “speech copious without order, and energetick without rules”, it served to tame vocabulary, for its approach to language was one “reduced to method”. But what then of Collin de Plancy’s infernal version? Is it a dictionary by name only, or could the affinities touch a deeper vein? In his Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, the historian Owen Davies writes of how grimoires are marked by a “desire for knowledge and the enduring impulse to restrict and control it”, a description that could certainly be applied to the projects of Johnson and Murray. “Grimoires exist”, he goes on, “because of the desire to create a physical record of magical knowledge, reflecting concerns regarding the uncontrollable and corruptible nature of . . . sacred information.” While it’s true that the grand experiment of the Enlightenment was supposedly to shine the light of rationality upon the shadows of superstition, the desire to assemble all possible information is one which the grimoire and the dictionary share. And this yearning towards completion and the all-encompassing is not just a superficial similarity, for in their obsessions with words and language, the grimoire and the dictionary share a common faith — that mere verbal pronouncements have the ability to rewrite reality itself. Both kinds of book are partisans of a Platonist philosophy that sees a type of word magic as being able to enact transformations in real life. For the rationalist lexicographer this means that mastery of rhetoric and syntax can affect our lives through the ability to explicate and convince; for the wizard this means that the magic of words can conjure alteration. In both cases, words have the power, if they’re properly organized, to change the world for better or for worse. At the heart of this shared mission is the fact that both magic and reason have a motivating belief in the inherent explicability of reality: that there is a given order to the world and that human minds can comprehend and control this order. Whether that order is supernatural or natural is somewhat incidental; that there is structure to the system is what is important. Collin de Plancy’s dictionary may be a grimoire, or his grimoire may be a dictionary, but fundamentally the distinction between them is less stark than might be supposed. Ilan Stavans writes that “dictionaries are like mirrors: they are a reflection of the people who produced and consumed them.” If this is true, then the Dictionnaire infernal is not just a reflection of Collin de Plancy, a man who dwelled among shadows yet desired to illuminate, but also a reflection of our own modern world. With their words listed like demons, their concern with proper order and grammar (lest our spells don’t work), dictionaries can be seen as modern, secular grimoires. The Dictionnaire infernal, far from being an archaic remnant, reminds us that sharp distinctions between antiquity and modernity ultimately mean little. Ours has always been, and always shall be, a demon-haunted world. But, with apologies to C. S. Lewis, what grimoires prove is not that demons exist, but that they can be tamed. If there is any consolation to be found, it’s that controlling our demons is possible if we’re able to name them, whether they are of the supernatural or of the rationalist variety — and in either case, a dictionary is what we shall need. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 25, 2017

Ed Simon

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:53.840427

the-poetry-of-victorian-science

The Poetry of Victorian Science By Gregory Tate July 26, 2018 In 1848, the mineralogist, pioneer of photography, and amateur poet Robert Hunt published The Poetry of Science, a hugely ambitious work that aimed to offer a survey of scientific knowledge while also communicating the metaphysical, moral, and aesthetic aspects of science to the general reader. Gregory Tate explores what the book can teach us about Victorian desires to reconcile the languages of poetry and science. In a review published in The Examiner in December 1848, Charles Dickens heaps praise on the scientific study of natural phenomena. To show that Science, truly expounding nature, can, like nature herself, restore in some new form whatever she destroys; that, instead of binding us, as some would have it, in stern utilitarian chains, when she has freed us from a harmless superstition, she offers to our contemplation something better and more beautiful, something which, rightly considered, is more elevating to the soul, nobler and more stimulating to the soaring fancy; is a sound, wise, wholesome object.1 Despite the lavish terms in which it celebrates science, Dickens’ prose also reveals the tensions that permeated attitudes to scientific knowledge in Victorian Britain. Admiration for its clear-sighted objectivity and analytical precision is mixed with a fear, inherited partly from Romanticism and partly from Christianity, that experimental science is destructive, reductive, and degrading; that it diminishes nature to a quantifiable and soulless mechanism. But this view of science as the “stern utilitarian” oppressor of natural beauty and of the imagination is, Dickens assures his readers, groundless, and the “sound, wise, wholesome object” of disproving it has been successfully attained in the book which he is reviewing: Robert Hunt’s The Poetry of Science.2 Dickens’ endorsement of The Poetry of Science is not unequivocal. In his view, the book is let down by its ornamented and long-winded style: “We might object to an occasional discursiveness, and sometimes we could have desired to be addressed in a plainer forms of words.”3 And it is true that Hunt, in his efforts to show that science is neither mechanistic nor utilitarian, sometimes overcompensates, indulging in flights of expostulation that are even more grandiloquent and sentimental than those of Dickens’ novels. In the introduction to The Poetry of Science, for instance, Hunt announces that: To rest content with the bare enunciation of a truth, is to perform but one half of a task. As each atom of matter is involved in an atmosphere of properties and powers, which unites it to every mass of the universe, so each truth, however common it may be, is surrounded by impulses which, being awakened, pass from soul to soul like musical undulations, and which will be repeated through the echoes of space, and prolonged for all eternity.4 Hunt presents an analogy between nature itself and the study of nature. Natural processes, he argues, are simultaneously material and immaterial, directed both by the motions of atoms and by the operation of powers and forces (light, gravity, magnetism, electricity) that cannot be reduced to matter. Similarly, the interpretation of those processes must find room both for science, the empirical and experimental investigation of factual “truth”, and for poetry, the expression of the aesthetic, moral, and spiritual “impulses” which surround that truth. This analogy may seem loose and not especially convincing, but it proved popular among Victorian readers. When the first edition of The Poetry of Science sold out, Hunt wrote that “a Second Edition of this work being demanded within a twelvemonth of the publication of the first, convinces the author” that “he was not mistaken in believing the generalizations from mechanical experiments to be capable of assuming a poetic aspect.”5 Hunt’s goal in The Poetry of Science is to reconcile the experimental with the poetic, terms which denote not just two different perspectives on natural knowledge but also two competing kinds of cultural authority. Although poetry steadily lost readers over the course of the nineteenth century to the novel and the press, it retained its exalted status, at least in theory, as the highest form of imaginative expression. At the same time, by 1848, the capacity of the sciences to explain natural processes, and to harness those processes through the development of new technologies, was starting to secure them a more prominent place in British culture. It was easy to see poetic imagination and scientific knowledge as mutually antagonistic, but, as Robert Hunt’s career demonstrates, it was also possible bring them together. Hunt started his working life as a surgeon’s apprentice before making a living, at different times, as a chemist and druggist, a statistician with the geological survey, and a professor at the School of Mines in London. He was a pioneering photographer and published research on photography in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. He also regularly wrote and published poetry and tried in the 1830s to pursue a career as a playwright. Hunt’s diverse interests were not exceptional: several more famous nineteenth-century figures — the astronomer John Herschel, the physicist John Tyndall, and the mathematician James Clerk Maxwell — also combined specialist research with the writing of poetry and of popular expositions of their scientific theories. Their polymathic careers were made possible by the open borders between disciplines in Victorian Britain; there were no rigid barriers of education or language, as there would be in the twentieth century, between scientific research and science communication, or between science and literature. The exchanges between these different disciplines are encapsulated in the style and structure of Hunt’s writing in The Poetry of Science. Together with probably the majority of Victorian science writers, he regularly quotes lines and stanzas of verse in the course of his explanations of scientific experiments and theories. The uses of poetic quotation in Victorian science are numerous, varied, and often difficult to pin down: authors deploy the language of poetry sometimes as supporting evidence for particular scientific theories, and sometimes as a kind of eloquent ornamentation to their prose. Some quotations are used to summarize the inductive reasoning characteristic of science, which moves from the observation of a particular natural phenomenon to a broader conclusion about that phenomenon’s significance or meaning; and some are employed to gesture beyond the inductive method, to hint at the emotional or spiritual effects of a scientific fact. Perhaps surprisingly, Victorian science communication shares its interest in poetry with more recent popular science writing. Even such a pugnacious and controversial proponent of scientific rationalism as Richard Dawkins, for example, is happy to use poetic quotations to convey what he terms the “wonder” of scientific knowledge. But while this practice of quotation suggests that science and poetry are in some ways complementary — both are necessary parts of a full and nuanced understanding of the physical universe — it also imposes a distinction between them, separating the factual and objective knowledge of science from the exclusively emotional or subjective remit of poetry. This duality is evident in Hunt’s discussions of Shakespeare, which manage to be both laudatory and dismissive. After quoting the song “Full fathom five” from The Tempest (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”), he suggests that Shakespeare “little thought how correctly he painted the chemical changes, by which decomposing animal matter is replaced by a siliceous or calcareous formation.”6 The lyrical language of Shakespeare’s verse and the technical terminology of Hunt’s prose describe the same phenomenon, but they do so from fundamentally distinct perspectives. Poets, according to Hunt, “have revelations more wonderful than even those of the philosopher, who evokes them by perpetual toil and brain-racking struggle with the ever-changing elements around him.”7 Natural philosophers or scientists acquire their insights through a painstaking and disciplined investigation of the facts of nature. Shakespeare’s poetry, in contrast, expresses a kind of sublime ignorance, an intuitive knowledge of the truth, but not of the causes or details, of a natural process. Dickens disapproved of this backhanded compliment — “Why Mr Hunt should be of opinion that Shakespeare ‘little thought’ how wise he was, we do not altogether understand”8 — and Hunt altered it in later editions, commenting, still with some equivocation, that Shakespeare “painted, with considerable correctness, the chemical changes” involved in the formation of pearls.9 For Dickens, this quotation risks patronising Shakespeare, reducing his poetry to an eloquent decoration of scientific wisdom. Elsewhere, though, Hunt suggests that poetry can actively support and possibly supplement the knowledge gained through experimental science. He sets out this argument by directly juxtaposing two different kinds of language: on the one hand, his own poetry, which he inserts into his prose at several points throughout The Poetry of Science, as if it were the work of a canonical poet; and, on the other hand, the detailed description of experiments which was a prominent feature of nineteenth-century science writing. In a chapter on gravity Hunt recounts an experiment in which drops of olive oil are suspended in a mix of water and alcohol that has the same specific gravity as the oil: instead of being “flattened” by the “earth’s gravitating influence”, as they would be “under any other conditions”, the drops retain their “orbicular form.” “Simple as this illustration is,” Hunt writes, “it tells much of the wondrous secret of those beautifully balanced forces of cohesion and of gravitation; and from the prosaic fact we rise to a great philosophic truth.” He then documents a means of extending the experiment: If we pass a steel wire through one of those floating spheres of oil, and make it revolve rapidly, thus imitating the motion of a planet on its axis, the oil spreads out, and we have the spheroidal form of our earth. Increase the rapidity of this rotation, and when a certain rate is obtained the oil widens itself into a disc, a ring separates itself from a central globe, and at a distance from it still revolves around it. Here we have a minute representation of the ring of Saturn.10 In these experiments, he concludes, “we produce results resembling, in a striking manner, the conditions which prevail in the planetary spaces.”11 For Hunt, the relation between experiment and nature is fractal: experimental processes represent natural processes in miniature. In this case, from the starting point of the “prosaic fact” of the olive oil’s motion, “we rise” in scale to an apprehension of sublime astronomical phenomena, and we also rise, through inductive reasoning, “to a great philosophic truth,” a theoretical understanding of the forces that shape matter across the universe.12 In the next paragraph Hunt refers to the force of gravity as “a ruling spirit” in nature, and its importance is emphasized again, but in markedly different terms, in the lines of verse which immediately follow, and which form the peroration to his chapter on gravity: The smallest dust which floats upon the wind Bears this strong impress of the Eternal Mind. In mystery round it, subtile forces roll; And gravitation binds and guides the whole. In every sand, before the tempest hurl’d, Lie locked the powers which regulate a world, And from each atom human thought may rise With might, to pierce the mystery of the skies,⎯ To try each force which rules the mighty plan, Of moving planets, or of breathing man; And from the secret wonders of each sod, Evoke the truths, and learn the power of God.13 In contrast to recent writers such as Dawkins, and to Victorian agnostics such as Tyndall, who quote poetry to articulate a sense of secular awe at the natural sublimity revealed by science, Hunt employs verse to promote natural theology, the mode of reasoning which uses observations of nature to demonstrate the existence of the Christian God. He announces that the study of matter, and of the forces that act on matter, launches the mind towards truths which are not just theoretical but theological: “each atom”, through the agency of “human thought”, is capable of illuminating “the mystery of the skies.” The rhymes of his verse set out a series of antitheses (the “dust” on the “wind” and “the eternal mind”, “sod” and “God”) which turn out to be continuities, as the apparent gap between them is closed by an inductive ascent which is comparable to that made possible by experiment. This connection between science and poetry established by Hunt must have been reassuring to Victorian readers troubled by the potentially unsettling truths of science: both, his writing suggests, can use seemingly mundane and insignificant phenomena to make sense of the universe. As a whole, though, The Poetry of Science echoes the conflict present in Victorian society regarding poetry’s relevance to the increasingly influential scientific worldview. Hunt’s use of poetic quotation indicates that poetry is best used as an ornamental illustration of scientific knowledge, which is inevitably more accurate and detailed than the kind of knowledge conveyed in poems. But the sentiment of his own poetic writing reverses this hierarchy, suggesting that verse has the power to reconcile the natural with the divine. Poetry communicates a spiritual and transcendent understanding of the universe, which can be supported, but which cannot be overturned or usurped, by the evidence of experimental science. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 26, 2018

Gregory Tate

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:54.504923

bringing-the-ocean-home

Bringing the Ocean Home By Bernd Brunner June 21, 2018 Bernd Brunner on the English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse and how his 1854 book The Aquarium, complete with spectacular illustrations and a dizzy dose of religious zeal, sparked a craze for the “ocean garden” that gripped Victorian Britain. The popularization of observing the interaction between marine animals and aquatic plants in glass tanks can be attributed to the Englishman Philip Henry Gosse, who was the first person to resolutely use the word “aquarium” for such objects. In his 1853 book A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, the term “vivarium” was used interchangeably with “marine aquarium”, but one year later the die was cast for the latter variant in his book The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea. As Gosse stated in its pages, the word should be “neat, easily pronounced and easily remembered”.1 The term “vivarium” was designated for tanks containing mainly snakes and amphibians; “aqua vivarium” was a step in the right direction, but the term was not yet perfect. Gosse understood “aquarium” as the neutral form of “aquarius”. He must also have known that to the ancient Romans an aquarium signified only a reservoir of water and that botanists had already been using this term for plant tanks for quite some time. For him this was not contradictory, but a justifiable linguistic expansion. He affirmed ceremoniously: Let the word AQUARIUM then be the one selected to indicate these interesting collections of aquatic animals and plants, distinguishing it as Freshwater Aquarium, if the contents be fluviatile, or a Marine Aquarium, if [the contents are salt water-based].2 Gosse was born in 1810 in Poole in the south of England, the son of an impoverished travelling miniature painter. As a young man Gosse made his way across the Atlantic to Newfoundland, where he dealt with seal and cod fleets in the Carbonear harbour. In his early twenties he bought a copy of the book Essays on the Microscope at an auction and thenceforth devoted himself wholeheartedly to collecting insects. For two years he documented every insect he could get hold of. Along with some of his friends, he decided to move to mainland Canada in hopes of establishing a rural commune and opening a museum of stuffed birds. After both ventures failed, Gosse returned to England, where he found work as a teacher in Hackney until he received an invitation from the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge to write An Introduction to Zoology. His research for the book inspired him to write another, The Ocean, published in 1844, on the findings of the explorer Sir James Clark Ross, who since 1818 had travelled throughout the Pacific and Arctic discovering a wide variety of marine flora and fauna. The book was an unexpected success and Gosse’s newfound notoriety led to an invitation to Jamaica later that year — a trip financed by an avid seashell collector in return for specimens to add to his collection. Gosse’s time in the Caribbean gave birth to three further books, all successes, and the author established himself as an important voice among the publishing naturalists of the period. Upon his return from Jamaica, Gosse became a devout Christian, a faith that would shape much of his subsequent work. Through his wife, Emily Bowes, he became involved with a sect called the Plymouth Brethren Movement. His life was dictated by the monotony of seemingly endless prayers. Reading novels and poems as well as going to the theatre or singing temporal songs was forbidden — even social contacts outside the brotherhood were not permitted. Gosse strongly believed that Jesus Christ would return to Earth before his own death, and, under this sense of urgency, he set about to work on several book projects, all of which dealt with life on the coast. Gosse could either be found sitting behind his desk or working outside, where, dressed in his black suit, he fervently poked around in the silt of the tidal shallows or — even during heavy surf — meticulously examined the waterholes in rocks for any living creature. He became an authority for everything connected to coastal fauna, and his frequent speeches in London were always met with acclaim and adoration. Of all Gosse’s works, the most successful was The Aquarium, in which he described his observations of coastal life and — a year after establishing the first public aquarium at the London Zoo — gave his readers instructions on how to build a miniature ocean of their very own. A saltwater aquarium, he asserted, was the perfect way to get acquainted with the peculiar creatures of the ocean without having to descend into the depths using complicated diving equipment. He was amused by a French zoologist, Henri Milne-Edwards, who stalked around at the bottom of the Mediterranean wearing a “water-tight dress, suitable spectacles, and a breathing tube” in order to take a closer look at the submarine world. All this was so much easier to achieve, Gosse proclaimed, in the safe environment of one’s own four walls. In his many long-winded reports about his coastal excursions, Gosse told his readers that the aquarium was the objective, but that many obstacles still had to be overcome. One’s relation with nature required a cautious and respectful approach, for its exploration was, in Gosse’s mind, a spiritual exercise. For Gosse, religion and natural science went hand in hand: “it brings us, in some sense, into the presence of God”, he said, “or rather it gives us cognizance of Him, and reveals to us some of his essential attributes.”3 The aquarium was the perfect arena in which to witness the wondrous creations of Thomas Paley’s “Watchmaker God”. In A Naturalist’s Rambles, published the previous year, Gosse described how in the rock pools of the coast can be seen a glimpse of the prelapsarian bliss that reigned before the fall, and so also an insight into the state of nature that shall reign when Christ returns. In The Aquarium he went on to directly compare coral to the city of “heavenly Jerusalem”: Is it fanciful to discern a faint shadow of these glories in a poor Polype? . . . When I look on the multitudes of Polypes inhabiting such a structure as I have alluded to, each bearing his starry crown, and all engaged in harmony, building up, wall by wall and cell by cell, an edifice whose walls are of crystalline clearness, often studded with what look like gems, and whose cells are closed with pearly doors ; if when I watch the building growing up into a City, a commonwealth, of myriad individuals ; when I know that, besides the separate life of each, there is a common life, a bond of identity, that constitutes the vast assemblage but one Being — One though Many — I cannot help thinking of the heavenly City, the Jerusalem which is above.4 As Jonathan Smith remarks in his Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture, it is in light of such a vision that we must see the illustrations which populate Gosse’s books on coastal life. The mesmerising full-colour plates present “a sort of aquatic peaceable kingdom”, the scenes bustling with different species, all coexisting free from competition or want. The rock pools were pictured as having “the same qualities as the unfallen Garden of Eden . . . a visual glimpse of the millennial kingdom that awaits the true believer”.5 Gosse’s pioneer aquarium contained an impressive abundance of marine fauna and flora. Prior to finding the animals, it was important to gather the plants, which were responsible for the oxygen in the tank. For this, Gosse recommended the day after a full moon or new moon, as the tide is then as far out as possible and areas usually covered with water become visible. Armed with a covered collecting basket, stone and glass jars, two or three smaller vials, and some hammers and chisels, he ventured out to the ledges of rock at the edge of the sea. He was especially drawn to rough and sharp crevices — those which any intelligent hiker would try to avoid at all costs — because it was here that the desired plants tried to hide: We lift up the hanging mass of olive weed (Fucus) from the edge, and find the sides of the clefts often fringed with the most delicate and lovely forms of sea-weed; such for example, as the winged Delesseria (D. alata), which grows in thin, much-cut leaves of the richest crimson hue, and the feathery Ptilota (P. plumosa) of a duller red. 6 The plant had to be removed together with a piece of the rock on which it grew; only this way did it have a chance of survival. After skilful chiselling (often under water), each piece of grass found its temporary home in a receptacle that had been brought along. It was even more important to have a suitable transport container handy when collecting animals. According to Gosse, a collector should always be watchful and alert, as strange creatures of various forms and shapes could appear at any moment. Upon returning from his seaside excursion, Gosse would begin the process of transferring his findings from the temporary tanks into his marine aquarium. The exterior of Gosse’s aquarium already resembled the familiar rectangular glass tank with birchwood beading. It was 61 × 30 × 30 cm (2 × 1 × 1 ft); the sides and ends were panes of glass and the bottom was slate. The panes were puttied between the birchwood, which was a tremendous improvement over earlier prototypical aquariums, as the even glass surfaces did not cause the optical distortions that round glass did. Gosse covered the bottom of the aquarium with an insulating layer of clay, pebbles, sand, and, finally, small pieces of rock, which formed mini-bridges and overhangs that gave the swimming creatures shelter. After adding the plants, Gosse poured 76 litres (20 gallons) of salt water over the miniature landscape. During the first night, Gosse would observe the tank by candlelight and see that numerous tiny shells and micro-organisms were already bustling around inside. The animals were added the following day. Among the specimens were one 15-spined stickleback, seven grey mullet, one black goby, three common periwinkles, one anomia, two common cockles, two ascidia, two hermit crabs, four sand shrimp, one prawn, three crown worms, two thick-horned anemones, and many others. All in all, around one hundred animals found a new home in the tank. Although the tank could handle even more, and two or three gallons of saltwater per day were constantly dripping into the aquarium from another vessel suspended over the tank as “artificial aeration”, it dawned on Gosse that the consumption of oxygen would soon exceed its supply. The first week of his experiment proved to be successful (apart from one or two attacks on weaker animals by predatory species). But three days into the second week a number of animals died, and the water developed an unpleasant smell from those that had died in the sanctuary of the stones. After thoroughly cleaning the tank, Gosse carried on his experiment with the remaining fauna and flora. Since there was as yet little possibility for the general populace to experience many of the creatures Gosse and others had collected, it fell to Gosse to bring them to life on the pages of his books. In his descriptions he concentrated on those animals that best embodied the mystery of the submarine world. He repeatedly used analogies to land animals — combining human and animal forms to create clear pictures in the readers’ minds. Gosse referred to one creature, with its long silky hair adorning it like a fur coat, as the “sea mouse”, which he called “the most gorgeously clad of all the creatures that inhabit the deep”.7 Linnaeus, the great taxonomist of biology, who established a new system for naming, ranking, and classifying organisms, had referred to it as “Aphrodite” as early as the eighteenth century. According to Gosse, the “Aphrodite aculata, reflecting the sun-beams from the depths of the sea, exhibits as vivid colours as the peacock itself, spreading its jewelled train”.8 In the aquarium the sea mouse attracts attention due to its restless movements and a jet of water that spurts every twenty-four seconds. The splendour of its changing colours made it an object of admiration: red and orange reflections usually appeared under candlelight, while during the day they changed to green and blue. Gosse also adored prawns, which he considered “particularly pleasing inhabitants of the aquarium”: There is a certain lightness in the slender filiform appendages of the head, which are continually thrown into the most graceful curves, that resembles in character ‘the light tracery of ropes and spars’ so much admired in a trimly rigged ship. Their bodies are so pellucid that a lady who was this moment looking at the tank compared them to ghosts, and their smooth gliding movements aid the similitude.9 The submarine world is a place where definitions are loose — the alter ego of our world on dry land. Coral, starfish, anemone, jellyfish, sea horse: are they mineral or animal, living or dead, fauna or flora, male or female? Gosse was particularly fascinated by those creatures that build some sort of relationship but can hardly be differentiated as individuals. The alliance between whelks, hermit crabs, and sea anemones is, in Gosse’s view, simply brilliant: Many persons who know a Whelk as well as possible, hesitate when they see the familiar shell tenanted, not by the great black-spotted Mollusk, but by a mongrel between Crab and Lobster, with stout, red, pinching claws, and long, jointed, and pointed legs. And still more mysterious does the thing look, when two thirds of the shell itself is enclosed in a thick mass of purple-spotted flesh, through the midst of which the busy Crab his poking his head and limbs. In truth it is a strange affair, this threefold alliance of Whelk, Hermit-crab, and Cloak-anemone.10 In fact it is a relationship between only two living creatures, because just the whelk’s shell remains, no longer inhabited by the original mollusc. Gosse defined crabs as “the scavengers of the sea” which, like wolves and hyenas, devour everything alive or dead.11 The sea anemone — also known as the animal flower, polyp, or by its scientific name, Actinia — with its colour-changing tentacles, can often be found sitting on stones on the ocean bed, expanding to great lengths before shrinking to a tenth of its size. Equally fascinating, pieces of the creature could break away and develop into new animals. Due to its flower-like appearance, the sea anemone was for a long time mistakenly considered to be the “missing link” between plants and animals. The symbiosis of hermit crab and sea anemone is — according to Gosse — open to all possible speculation and interpretation. Who is actually in control? Is it the crab, pulling the anemone along the ocean bed, striking it with scattered stones? Or has the sea anemone devoured the shell together with the crab, and has the crab then managed to find a way out through the stomach and skin of the sea anemone? Has the sea anemone released a special membrane which, while allowing the crab a suitable home, prevents it from ever leaving? With the help of the aquarium, Gosse hoped to discover the principle of their opposite attraction and the secret of the apparent melding of bodies and identities. However, it was not until the 1920s and 30s that biologists were able to offer plausible explanations for this interaction, which is now regarded as a prime example of biological symbiosis. Sea anemones use their nematocysts to keep octopuses away from the crab and in return are able to gain a much bigger habitat due to the host’s movements. Additionally, the sea anemone can ingest some of the crab’s prey as its mouth directly faces the masticatory organs of the crab. This relationship can, however, end in tragedy: if the hermit crab cannot find enough food, it will eat the sea anemone. For Gosse the aquarium was a living museum, a curious inversion of Noah’s Ark — all species of marine fauna and flora, safely held amidst a dry environment. Comparable to the zoological gardens that brought the animal kingdom to cities or the botanical garden hothouses that showcased tropical flora — living compendiums through which nature lovers and flâneurs alike could wander — the aquarium encapsulated the submarine world into a “see-through” form, the paradox of an ocean journey within one’s own home. Gosse had a way of expressing his enthusiasm in his books and articles that positively stirred the bourgeoisie. His numerous lectures on oceanic subjects always caused a sensation. According to the Literary Gazette, a Victorian magazine published in London, Gosse had “dived into all those decorated palaces which had unassertively been kept under lock and key by old Neptune for such a long time”;12 another chronicler wrote that “all the world wanted to possess an aquarium to verify his assertions and repeat his experiments”;13 the magazine Blackwoods even recommended that children should not see the book, otherwise there would be no peace and quiet in the house until the children were finally allowed to have an aquarium. But the burgeoning fad needed more than Gosse’s contagious enthusiasm to be a success: it also had to please the eye. High-quality illustrations, which were quite rare at the time, played an important role in the success of most of Gosse’s books. He had inherited his father’s artistic talents and is credited with providing the drawings for many of the beautiful lithographic plates that accompany his texts. According to the scholar Barbara T. Gates, it was, however, his wife Emily — a talented artist trained by popular landscape painter John Sell Cotman — who made the drawings for the stunning plates found in The Aquarium.14 Although her images proved so integral to the book’s popularity, she is entirely uncredited on its pages, her husband’s name inscribed below the images instead. While it was general convention at the time for picture credits in scientific publications to default to the text’s author, one does wonder why Henry failed to mention his wife’s contribution at all in his preface, despite finding room to acknowledge the lithograph printers. The Aquarium was more than a cultural sensation: it was also a financial success, with earnings of about £805 (roughly £40,000 today). A year later, a smaller Handbook to the Marine Aquarium was published for those who had not been able to afford the first book. From the collecting of ferns, the Victorian bourgeoisie now turned their attention toward the exploitation of the coastal regions. The rapidly expanding middle class found this new fad a topic suitable for conversation as well as education. As Henry D. Butler retrospectively wrote about the British aquarium mania in his book The Family Aquarium — “The aquarium was on everybody’s lip. The aquarium rang in every body’s ear. Morning, noon, and night, it was nothing but the aquarium.”15 A shop on Portland Road in London, owned by William Alford Lloyd, established itself at the beating heart of the fad. Fifty large tanks and countless smaller containers held some 15,000 marine specimens. The emporium sold salt water over the counter by the pint, quart, or gallon. Aquariums were manufactured in a nearby factory, and Lloyd employed more than a dozen people for the purpose of collecting plants and animals from the coasts and purchasing lots from amateur collectors. Before the existence of Lloyd’s shop, people had to make excursions out to the coast, and transportation was often expensive and dangerous, which made the whole undertaking quite unappealing. Once Lloyd went into business, aquarium lovers could obtain everything they needed easily and frequently. The aquarium craze of the 1850s, however, was just that: a craze. According to the British social historian David Elliston Allen in his fascinating study The Naturalist in Britain, the wave of nature enthusiasm in the 1850s was “sloppier, less intelligent, more given to hysteria” than in the preceding decades.16 Only a few years later, “aquarium mania” was already a thing of the past, at least in Britain. Nine out of ten aquariums had been either dumped or simply left to their own devices. The individual experience of the parlour gave way to the collective experience of the large public aquariums found in Brighton and other coastal resorts. Though short, the intensity of this aquarium fad was sadly not without its environmental cost. Along the coastline the hunt for plants and animals caused real devastation, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the coastal landscape had completely changed. James Hamilton-Paterson in Seven-Tenths explicitly holds “zoology allied to a strong religious bent” responsible for this development.17 In 1907, Gosse’s son Edmund — in contrast to his father, a convinced Darwinist — put matters straight in his memoir Father and Son: The ring of living beauty drawn about our shores was a very thin and fragile one. It had existed all those centuries solely in consequence of the indifference, the blissful ignorance of man. These rock-basins, fringed by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellucid as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms of life – they exist no longer, they are all profaned, and emptied, and vulgarised. An army of ‘collectors’ has passed over them, and ravaged every corner of them. The fairy paradise has been violated, the exquisite product of centuries of natural selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning, idle-minded curiosity. That my father, himself so reverent, so conservative, had by the popularity of his books acquired the direct responsibility for a calamity that he had never anticipated, became clear enough to himself before many years had passed, and cost him great chagrin.18 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 21, 2018

ernd Brunner

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:55.063484

pens-and-needles-reviving-book-embroidery-in-victorian-england

Pens and Needles Reviving Book-Embroidery in Victorian England By Jessica Roberson March 21, 2018 Fashionable in the 16th and 17th century, the art of embroidering unique covers for books saw a comeback in late 19th-century England, from the middle-class drawing room to the Arts and Crafts movement. Jessica Roberson explores the bibliomania, patriotism, and issues around gender so central to the revival. There are few more pleasing accupations [sic] for the skillful fingers of a lady,” wrote the Victorian librarian William Salt Brassington in his A History of the Art of Bookbinding (1893), “than that of embroidering a book-cover”.1 Initially a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century practice of decorative embroidery on religious texts or presentation copies for royalty, embroidered books were a lavish alternative to leather bindings that allowed for the individualized ornamentation of bookish exteriors. This practice of ornamented bookbinding enjoyed a surge of popularity as a handicraft in the nineteenth century. In a variety of publications, from magazines to histories of bookbinding and collecting, middle-class Englishwomen were encouraged to ply their needles within an explicitly patriotic historical tradition. The British Museum acquired a number of early modern embroidered books in the initial bequest of the Old Royal Library by George II in 1757, shortly after its founding. At the end of the nineteenth century, innovations in photography and printing allowed that collection, as well as select examples held at other British institutions such as the Bodleian and the South Kensington Museum, to be reproduced in book form and introduced to a broader readership. The first to treat the embroidered book individually was Cyril Davenport’s English Embroidered Book-bindings, published in 1899 as part of a series titled The English Bookman’s Library. Davenport’s volume reproduces images of fifty-two books, some in color but most in half-tint black and white. The plates and their accompanying descriptions are organized first according to fabric type — canvas, velvet, or satin — and then chronologically. Working from original photographs, Davenport tinted some and added embellishments to others for better visual effect. One color print is of a beautiful copy of Christopherson’s Historia Ecclesiastica, owned by Queen Elizabeth I. The three volumes are bound in matching deep green velvet and are delicately embroidered with the royal coat of arms, Tudor and York roses, and a scattered field of small pearls. A colored photograph of one volume serves as the frontispiece to Davenport’s book, and he admits to doctoring the photograph in order to restore some of the missing pearls. As the series title implies, this book — which functions mostly as a portable paper exhibit of early modern embroidered bindings — participates in a century-long enthusiasm for masculine bookishness. A wave of book-madness, referred to by contemporaries with the delightful term “bibliomania”, swept the men of England’s upper classes at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The “bookman” emerged from this frenzy of book buying and selling as a stock character of the later part of the century, a figure invested (perhaps to an extreme) in the bodies of books. As scholar Phillip Connell has suggested, this interest in books also served as a patriotic attempt to establish a national literary heritage in Britain.2 The English Bookman’s Library represents a body of late-Victorian book-historical writing that is invested in reproducing and displaying the holdings of national institutional libraries as both collectibles and as models for the contemporary fine press movement. The short series, which also included H. R. Plomer’s A Short History of English Printing (1900), and W. Y. Fletcher’s English Book Collectors (1902), emphasized a historical trajectory that culminated in the work of presses such as William Morris’ Kelmscott Press, best known for producing elaborate editions inspired by illuminated manuscripts. As series editor Alfred W. Pollard writes in his “General Introduction”, this is a “new series of books about books, exclusively English in its aims”, and seeks to fill in the gaps of book history at a time when, as he “boldly” says, “the book-work turned out . . . by the five or six leading printers of England and Scotland seems to [Pollard], in both technical qualities and the excellence of taste, the finest in the world”.3 In other words, the series is intended to shore up this claim of primacy in modern fine press printing. However, Davenport’s entry on embroidered bindings is unique in its explicit invitation to women to participate in their revitalization. “Many book-covers have been embroidered during the last few years in England by ladies working on their own account,” he writes, suggesting that his book and its instructions offer an opportunity for women who have, he implies, been embroidering books simply for their own amusement, to join the larger national history he evokes.4 This invitation supports a broader cultural investment in revitalizing England’s artistic reputation, shared, for example, by writers like Brassington: “at the present time a taste for the old kinds of embroidery is being fostered by people who desire to see England again famous for her needlework as she was in the thirteenth century”.5 “Fancy-work”, or domestic handicrafts from flower pressing to needlework, flourished during the nineteenth century as a rapidly growing middle class relegated more and more women to exclusively domestic spaces. The products populated the famously cluttered Victorian sitting room: embroidered pillows and footstools, embroidered accessories and furnishings, terrariums, and taxidermy on display. However, for many women, embroidery and other crafts were also a source of supplementary income. Crafts were sold and exchanged at local markets and charity bazaars; other times embroidery work was outsourced to women working from home, creating a silent workforce. Needlework also served as a mode of personal and artistic expression that often inhabited the social spaces of the home, circulating in surprising ways. Calls for women to resume book-embroidery echo this complicated place of handicraft in Victorian culture, both reinforcing the idea of the “domestic sphere” and at times challenging assumptions of female passivity. Brassington, Davenport, and other male contemporaries frequently couched their pitches for such a revival within gendered frameworks of labor. One author, in a short article for The Bookworm, condescendingly suggests that “an outlet for skill at once useful and ornamental might be found in working book-covers instead of slippers and antimacassars”.6 Engaging in needlecraft played into expectations of delicacy and decoration as complementary, rather than dominant, modes of art — and the art of book embroidery could be seen as essentially confining women to the exteriors of books. Yet Davenport’s definition of the embroidered book as needlework designed explicitly “for the purpose of adorning that particular book,” and not haphazardly recycled, also invites his presumably female reader into the interior.7 In this framework book-embroidery requires intellectual engagement with a text, and careful attention to the historical examples which, Davenport claims, can be “advantageously studied” by interested craftswomen.8 The embroidered book thus offered Victorian women a unique surface for bridging handicraft and literary history. Moreover, Davenport consistently couches his descriptions of the bindings in their connection to English institutions and historical figures, revealing a persistent thread of patriotic historicism. In taking up book -embroidery, the average middle-class Englishwoman joined the company of queens. One of Davenport’s chief examples is a manuscript of The Miroir or Glasse of the Synneful Soul, copied out by the hand of then-Princess Elizabeth and potentially covered and decorated by her as well. The manuscript was a gift to her stepmother, Katherine Parr, and features the queen’s initials surrounded by hearts-ease flowers. Davenport writes this book into a patriotic domestic history that blends writing and embroidery, emphasizing the relatively amateur quality of the work — not likely to be the work of a hired professional — which aligns with expectations of amateur expertise applied to Victorian women’s needlework. Another example from the royal collection is a 1578 edition of The Epistles of St. Paul, held by the Bodleian and much described by nineteenth-century authors of books on embroidery and book-binding. It also belonged to Queen Elizabeth and contains a note in her own hand. As Davenport transcribes it, it is a melancholy but beautifully worded sentiment: I walke manie times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holy Scripture, where I plucke up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning, eate them by reading, chawe them by musing, and laie them up at length in the hie seat of memorie by gathering them together, so that having tasted thy swetenes I may the less perceive the bitterness of this miserable life.9 The book’s embroidery is also attributed to the queen. On both covers are legends in Latin, surrounded by gold cord. Davenport acknowledges that, like the previous example, there is no absolute proof of the queen’s hand in making the cover. However, he argues, its simplicity points to it being of amateur, rather than professional, origin. Including Elizabeth’s meditation on reading with her books reinforces a national history bound up in reading, writing, and embroidery. It also illuminates a late nineteenth-century urge to express emotion through that same entanglement of the written word and material culture. The most significant examples of embroidered books emerged from the anti-industrial Arts and Craft Movement, which flourished in Britain between 1888 and 1920. Exemplified by William Morris, whose Kelmscott Press is briefly mentioned in Pollard’s introduction to The English Bookman’s Library as the preeminent contemporary example of fine book making in England, the Arts and Crafts Movement sought to elevate the materials and work of craftsmen — and craftswomen. Morris’ daughter May was an influential and important designer and embroiderer who exhibited, taught, and wrote about embroidery extensively. Though only twenty-three, she took over management of the embroidery division of her father’s company in 1885 and ran it until his death in 1896. One of May Morris’ contributions to the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, held in London in 1888, was an embroidered book cover. In the catalog it is described as a “silk-embroidered cover for ‘Love is Enough’”, a book of her father’s poetry.10 Morris embroidered at least a few other book covers. The University of Manchester has a copy of The Tale of King Florus and Fair Jehane bound by May Morris in orange silk with a design of two birds under a tree. Morris, like her father and Davenport, was particularly interested in looking to earlier periods for inspiration. In Decorative Needlework (1893), she describes the medieval and early modern periods as the height of artistic embroidery. Her work, too, is motivated by a desire to revitalize a patriotic tradition. The embroidered book offers an engagement with aesthetic and literary history: the embroidered cover, worked by hand, becomes a literal interface between craft and the text. The Victorians saw a return to intimate connections between individual hands and books as an antidote to the emerging mass media, in a way that resonates with our own twenty-first century sensibilities. Referring to some of the same early modern examples enshrined in print a few years later by Davenport, the author of an article in Cassell’s Family Magazine for 1894 laments that “Books were treasures in those times; now they are so innumerable that they are tossed about anyhow by half of their owners.”11 Creating beautiful embroidered covers, the article suggests, can reassuringly set apart a favorite volume, and show books the attention they deserve. As collections of innumerable texts can be easily stored and retrieved on digital devices, we too have to reconsider how and why we value books. As the history of book-embroidery makes visible, craft has a great deal of generative potential for reimagining that relationship. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 21, 2018

Jessica Roberson

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:55.586943

mistress-of-a-new-world-early-science-fiction-in-europes-age-of-discovery

Mistress of a New World Early Science Fiction in Europe’s “Age of Discovery” By Emily Lord Fransee October 11, 2018 Considered by many one of the founding texts of the science fiction genre, The Blazing World — via a dizzy mix of animal-human hybrids, Immaterial Spirits, and burning foes — tells of a woman’s absolute rule as Empress over a parallel planet. Emily Lord Fransee reflects on what the book and its author Margaret Cavendish (one of the first women to publish using her own name) can teach us about empire, gender, and imagination in the 17th century. It is the middle of the seventeenth century and a Bear-man is helping an empress attempt to examine a whale through a microscope. After this task is found to be impossible, a group of Worm-men explain how creatures can exist without blood and how cheese turns to maggots. In her turn, the empress scolds an assembly of Ape- and Lice-men for their pursuit of tedious and irrelevant knowledge, such as the true weight of air, and commands they instead get busy with “such Experiments as may be beneficial to the publick”. Armed with such knowledge of the natural world and equipped with the resources of her vast dominions, she then sends flocks of Bird-men and navies of Fish-men to a parallel planet to make war on and conquer her many enemies. Such are the links between life, learning, and power within The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, a piece of prose fiction published in 1666 by the “Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princesse the Duchess of Newcastle”, better known as Margaret Lucas Cavendish. The narrative blends utopian fiction, imperialist travelogue, and natural history to tell the story of a “young Lady” who is kidnapped from her homeland but soon escapes to a new and mysterious land filled with human-animal hybrids. On arrival she is made empress and quickly establishes societies of natural philosophy, funds theater and the arts, and destroys her enemies with fire and fury. The plot is often convoluted, with descriptions of military invasion or discussions with fantastical chimeras interspaced with short lessons on lenses or lectures on the nature of solar eclipses. Yet there is much that can be learned from Cavendish’s Blazing World, including the way it sheds historical and literary light on conceptions of gender, natural philosophy, political theory, theology, and the life of the author herself in seventeenth-century Europe. For example, in the emphasis on the stability of a realm in which everyone —- from the lowest Flea-man to the highest Emperor —- knows and respects their place in the natural hierarchy, we can see echoed Cavendish’s Royalist sympathies. Histories of feminism have also mined Cavendish’s works, as they reveal the ways in which she saw her own position limited within a society shaped by both gender and class. However, less examined is the way that the narrative illuminates the history of seventeenth-century European imperialism, and how ideas about power, race, and conquest related to those of gender and knowledge. In considering the imperialist resonances of The Blazing World, it is helpful to start with Cavendish herself, an aristocratic philosopher poet whose reputation was divisive while she was still alive. A brief look at her published works indicates the range of her intellectual interests: poetry collections, a play entitled A Comedy of the Apocryphal Ladies, and scientific works such as Observations on Experimental Philosophy (1666), the latter of which originally included The Blazing World as an appendix of sorts. She was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society, where the all-male assembly protested her very presence. Of her visit, Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary that she was a “good comely woman; but her dress so antic and her deportment so unordinary, that I do not like her at all, nor did I hear her say anything that was worth hearing.”1 Her unusual wardrobe was a frequent focus of society commentary, cropping up again in English writer John Evelyn’s recollection of a visit to the Duchess that left him “much pleased with [her] extraordinary fanciful habit, garb, and discourse”, as well as her “extravagant humour and dress, which is very singular.”2 Her “singular” clothing choices played with conceptions of gender as well: her penchant for masculine waistcoats contrasting with one notable incident in which she addressed the audience at one of her husband’s plays while wearing a self-designed dress based on ancient Cretan costumes that left her breasts “all laid out to view.”3 While her intellectual achievements were distinctive in and of themselves, Cavendish’s iconoclastic behavior maintained her reputation as an eccentric contrarian, earning her the nickname of “Mad Madge”. After meeting her in London, for example, one contemporary described her conversation as “airy, empty, whimsical, and rambling as her books, aiming at science, difficulties, high notions, terminating commonly in nonsense, oaths, and obscenity.” During their time together, Margaret reportedly claimed a place among the intellectual greats, declaring that “if the schools did not banish Aristotle, and read Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, they did her wrong, and deserved to be utterly abolished.”4 This characterization of Cavendish as an idiosyncratic and unseemly egotist was echoed many years later in A Room of One’s Own, where Virginia Woolf describes her writings as a “vision of loneliness and riot . . . as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.”5 The Blazing World provides a semi-autobiographical counterpoint to this characterization, not only in the insertion of Cavendish herself as a wise and respected character, but also in her depiction of the main protagonist the Empress as an intelligent woman whose ambition enables her to thrive in the isolated world that she rules absolutely. From this perspective, the self-important dilettante who forces her unwanted opinions onto others transforms into a besieged heroine who champions her own independence and intellect in a society that fails to appreciate her achievements. Lengthy passages describing intellectual life within the Blazing World take on greater significance when seen as critiques of the tediousness and limits of Cavendish’s own experiences within the male-dominated “learned society” of her day, as well as reflect her advocacy of self-expression and freedom from revision (she once wrote that she had “neither Room nor Time for such inferior Considerations” as “Mending or Correcting” her writings.)6 The Blazing World also fits into a larger body of speculative and proto-science fiction works of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, imagined terrestrial and cosmic voyages that sketched out new conceptions of the operation of life and the universe. Even in post-Copernican Europe, such speculation could be seen as dangerous and heretical. In 1600, Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for his claim that the universe was infinite and contained innumerable worlds, essentially killed for arguing in favor of free imaginative speculation in the service of knowledge.7 By the mid-seventeenth century, imaginative works about the operation of the universe became more widespread (and less hazardous to publish) as men such as Johannes Kepler, Francis Godwin, and Cyrano de Bergerac used cosmic voyages and utopian narratives to consider humanity’s place and significance in time and space. In a context of ongoing religious reformation, many of these narratives centered on theological questions such as the primacy of Christ’s Earth-bound sacrifice in a potentially infinite universe, as narrators describe meetings with a variety of “exotic” beings from human-animal hybrids to moon people to the political elite of advanced utopias. Such confrontations raised questions about who (or “what”) could or could not be saved within a Christian worldview. This preoccupation with fictionalized “otherness” was of course intimately related to European efforts to map, colonize, and profit from various regions of the globe. Such a context gives significance to plot points that might otherwise seem bizarre or inexplicable. Read in connection with the violent history of European conquest in the Americas, for example, theological discussions about whether or not lunar beings could be saved from damnation become reworkings of contemporaneous debates about the fate of “unsaved heathens” living in the “New World”.8 With a consistent emphasis on exploration and alterity, such speculative fiction can be understood as the literary imaginary of imperialism, often (although not always) appearing as a celebration of scientific advancement in the service of conquest in imagined new locations. In many ways, The Blazing World is similar to other speculative works from the seventeenth century, particularly in this connection between imagined and real “new worlds”. In his loving dedication, Cavendish’s husband William Newcastle makes this connection explicit, describing his wife’s narrative as a fictionalized “Fancy” made of “Nothing, but pure Wit” that mirrored the “discoveries” of Columbus, who “found a new World, America ‘tis nam’d”. However, unlike many of her contemporaries, Cavendish creates a new world in which the “discoveries” are made by a woman. Within her own realms of “Fancy”, the Empress is free from the gendered limits of the author’s own world — she acts as she wishes and her people adore her all the more for it. Indeed, throughout the narrative of The Blazing World, the female characters are celebrated for their political, territorial, and intellectual conquests, even (or especially) when they entail great violence. Shortly after our introduction to the unnamed female protagonist, she “discovers” a new land when she is “forced into another World” that is joined to her own near the North Pole. Alone and fearful for her life in this strange new place, she is rescued by a large assembly of Bear-men who carry her to their city of underground caves. She quickly becomes the subject of reverence, as “both Males and Females, young and old, flockt together to see this Lady, holding up their Paws in admiration” and decide to “make her a Present to the Emperor of their World”. On their journey to the royal city where the “Imperial Race” is said to dwell, she meets up with the other indigenous subjects of the Blazing World, including Fox-, Geese- and Bird-men, Satyrs, and “men of a Grass-Green Complexion”. The newcomer learns the local language and observes remarkable technologies, including a ship powered by the “extraordinary Art” of a “certain Engin” which operated by drawing in and expelling a “great quantity of Air” that could act as a motor and cut a path of tranquility through rough waters. Upon her introduction to the royal court, the outsider’s beauty and radiance convinces the Emperor that she is “some Goddess” to be worshipped, wed, and crowned. The Emperor seemingly brushed aside, the woman now has “absolute power to rule and govern all that World as she pleased”. To exemplify her new station, the now-Empress dons an impressive outfit of bejeweled clothing and accessories that make use of local natural resources to better reflect her political power. Along with a “Rain-bow” colored diamond-encrusted “Buckler, to signifie the Defence of her Dominion”, she also wields a “Spear made of white Diamond, cut like the tail of a Blazing Star, which signified that she was ready to assault those that proved her Enemies.” Making quick use of her new authority, the Empress establishes “learned societies” to ensure that all of her animal-human subjects “followed such a profession as was most proper for the nature of their Species”, be that philosophy, astronomy, chemistry, physics, politics, mathematics, oration, or architecture. Natural hierarchies are thus maintained and every Satyr and Fox-man knows their own place in the cosmic order. Following a lengthy account of reform (and counter-reform) of intellectual life within her vast dominion, the Empress turns to religious and spiritual matters, collaborating with “Immaterial Spirit” beings to create her own “poetical or Romantical Cabbala” and, in the process, summoning the soul of the Duchess of Newcastle Margaret Cavendish to act as her personal scribe. Although the two are from different “Home Worlds”, the two authorial ciphers soon become close friends in the Blazing World, particularly due to their shared ambitions for glory and power. The Duchess (as the character of Margaret Cavendish is referred to in the narrative) soon becomes upset that she has no empire to call her own, leading the two to discuss how she might acquire such a dominion. After deciding that “terrestrial” conquest will not suit her needs, the Duchess is advised by the Immaterial Spirits to simply write her own “Coelestial World . . . for every human Creature can create an Immaterial World fully inhabited by Immaterial Creatures, and populous of Immaterial subjects . . . and all this within the compass of the head or scull”. In creating her own world according to her own rules, she may enjoy her power “without controle or opposition”, making “what World you please” that can be altered and enjoyed without limits. However, their joyful celebration of the possibilities of speculative fiction are cut short when the Empress learns that the place of her birth has come under attack. Mobilizing the vast intellectual and material resources of her new dominion, she vows revenge and promises “all the assistance which the Blazing-World was able to afford”. To most efficiently mobilize troops, the Emperor suggests that the Immaterial Spirits might be able to inhabit the bodies of their dead foes. The Empress, however, argues that such a thing would “never do” as they’d struggle to acquire so many corpses in the first place, and besides, in the rough and tumble of battle, they’d simply “[moulder] into dust and ashes, and so leave the purer Immaterial Spirits naked”. An army of the walking dead ruled out, it is decided, upon the Duchess’ suggestion, that the Bird-men and Fish-men will lead the vanguard, taking to the sky and the sea to initiate the attack. Giants (the architects of the Blazing World) are commissioned to devise new modes of water transport in the form of golden “Ships that could swim under Water” and better bring their troops to battle. Worm-men are sent out to amass huge amounts of “fire-stone”, a “Greek fire” type of material that burned when wet and therefore could not be quenched. The invasion is a violent success. After establishing the king of her former homeland as the “absolute Master of the Seas, and consequently of that World”, the Empress watches for any sign of dissent, punishing those who try to escape payment of tribute by bringing “fire [to] all their Towns and Cities” and warning those who would cross her that “if they continued still in their Obstinate Resolutions, that she would convert their smaller Loss into a Total Ruin.” After pulling the ships back underwater and returning to the Blazing World, the Empress and Duchess content themselves with their works and deeds, secure in their ability to express their intellect and broadcast their political power. Depictions of conquest in spectacular and science fiction remained popular with European audiences from the seventeenth century onward. Haunted by imperialism as they are, these stories can act as a useful tool for understanding how such ideologies have shaped the past and present. At the same time, works like The Blazing World do have their limits in this respect, as most reflect very little on the perspectives of those forced into colonial subjecthood. In more recent years, indigenous futurism and other postcolonial science fiction have changed this situation, as writers, filmmakers, and artists use the genre to critique the history and legacies of imperialism.9 While science fiction and empire are historically linked, the relationship is flexible and ever-changing. The imperialist presence in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World itself is not a simple one. Her drive, through the character of the Empress, to conquer and exert power in her imaginary realm — this “New World” all of her own — seems a response to real-world limitations she encountered as a woman in the seventeenth century, albeit ones specific to the privileged world of a Duchess. If imperialist ideology inhabits the genre of science fiction in the imagining of interstellar frontiers of masculine swagger, we see here it takes a more unexpected form — a speculative domain for a woman to express her otherwise bridled will, where she is not forbidden from the most learned scientific societies but instead creates them. Indeed, she encouraged others, particularly elite European women, to create their own fictional realms to fit their desires, be that the expression of thwarted political power or securing respect for one’s intellectual scientific prowess. In this, the character of the Empress mirrors that of the author, whose preface asserts her to be “as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be”, and whose creation of worlds means that “though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavor to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Cesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own.” The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 11, 2018

Emily Lord Fransee

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:56.555692

the-life-and-work-of-nehemiah-grew

The Life and Work of Nehemiah Grew By Brian Garret March 1, 2011 In the 82 illustrated plates included in his 1680 book The Anatomy of Plants, the English botanist Nehemiah Grew revealed for the first time the inner structure and function of plants in all their splendorous intricacy. Brian Garret explores how Grew's pioneering "mechanist" vision in relation to the floral world paved the way for the science of plant anatomy. Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712) is best remembered for his careful and novel observations on plant anatomy, for his role in the development of comparative anatomy and as one of the first naturalists to utilize the microscope in the study of plant morphology. His most lasting work, containing his observations and impressive illustrations, is most certainly his early work The Anatomy of Plants begun as a philosophical history of plants published in 1682. Although Grew continued to publish throughout his life, especially on the chemical properties of various substances, all but the The Anatomy have fallen into obscurity. Grew was a doctor by profession, receiving his degree from the university of Leiden in 1671. He was the son of a nonconformist and supporter of parliament, who was briefly imprisoned while his son gave lectures to the Royal Society and dedicated his books to the King. Nehemiah had little of his father’s political inclination, although he inherited some of the latter’s nonconformist religious views. He practiced medicine in London where he met John Wilkins (1614-1672), one of the founders of the Royal Society, who was likely attracted by the younger man’s opinions. Wilkins was impressed and he recommended Grew to the Royal Society for membership. Grew later served as secretary to the society, along with Robert Hooke (1635-1703), the infamous virtuoso and inventor. Like Hooke, Grew utilized the microscope for his investigations into plant anatomy. Along with Marcello Malphigi, Grew is remembered for establishing the observational basis for botany for the next 100 years. As Grew acknowledged, Wilkins’ encouragement was crucial to his work, both intellectually and financially. Having been made a member under Wilkins’ influence, he was engaged by the Royal Society at 50 pounds a year to research plant anatomy. But getting actually paid was another matter and Grew had to plead with the society to receive what he was due. In his later life he practiced medicine in London and Coventry. Throughout the 1670’s Grew wrote short pamphlets on botany (often in Latin) and in 1680 translated and compiled them together under the title The Anatomy of Plants. He published a number of minor essays in the Transactions of the Royal Society, for example, “The description of an . . . Hummingbird” and “Some observations touching the Nature of Snow.” In 1681 he published The comparative anatomy of stomachs and guts, packed full of curious observations. 1683 saw the publication of New Experiments and useful observations concerning sea water made Fresh and in 1697 his Treatise of the nature and Use of Purging Salt contained in Epsom and such other waters. In his last work, Cosmologia Sacra (1701), Grew turned to philosophy and theology in order to demonstrate “the Truth and Excellency of the Bible.” In many ways a contemporary review best sums up the significance of Grew’s scientific work, since much of that significance is obscure today: In general, it is noted by our Author, that it will here appear, that there are those things which are little less wonderful within a Plant than within an Animal; that a Plant, like an Animal hath Organical parts, some whereof may be called its Bowels; that every Plant hath Bowels of divers kinds, containing divers liquors; that even a Plant lives partly upon Air, for the reception whereof it hath peculiar Organs. Again, that all the said Organs, Bowels, or other parts are as artificially made, and as punctually for place and number composed together as all the Mathematical Lines of a flower or Face; that the Staple of the Stuff is so exquisitely fine, that no Silkworm is able to draw so small a thred; that by all these means the ascent of the Sap, the Distribution of the Air, the Confection of several sorts of Liquors, as Lymphus, Milks, Oyls, Balsoms, with other acts of Vegetation, are all contrived and brought about in a Mechanical way.*[Philosophical transactions, 1675]*. The significance for this 17th century reviewer is the ‘Mechanical way’ and Grew’s Organ-ism; that plants possess organs and structure. It wasn’t certain before the 17th century that plants had much internal structure in which distinct parts or organs played distinct roles. It was often thought, especially during the Renaissance, that the external shape of a plant was a clue or signature to its use, but whether there was anything resembling organs in plants was contested. A generation earlier, in his Of Bodies (1644), virtuoso (and all-round blow-hard) Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665) downplayed the existence of distinct organs in plants. However, Grew’s detailed observations established without a doubt that plants were analyzable into functional and morphological units, reinvigorating a tradition that went back to Theophrastus. Grew is remembered for his detailed descriptions of plant anatomy and with him we see the beginning of modern comparative anatomy. He was guided by the idea that there may be similarities of function between animals and plants and this led him to look for equivalent organs in each. He thus believed in the circulation of sap, on analogy with William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood in animals, and he believed in a form of respiration in plants. Although the recognition of plant sexuality was old, Grew is remembered for noting the stamen as the male organ of the plant and pollen as seed. He also noted the prevalence of little bladders, or “cells” as Hooke had coined the term, especially in the parenchyma tissue (a term we have retained from Grew). Many of Grew’s observations were diachronic, putting emphasis on the development of the plant and its structures. The growth of a plant he deemed to be a function of sap circulating through the tissue, carrying and adding material to the plant. His observations on the bud of the flower revealed the complicated folding of the unexpanded leaves, something that had not been previously seen with the naked eye. Grew’s mechanism consisted in his adherence to observations and his avoidance of explanations invoking vital forces, signatures, sympathies and antipathies. Also to be avoided was the direct hand, intervention, or guidance by God. Instead the mechanist looks for natural or secondary causes for the phenomena and the laws that govern them. Grew invokes no “occult” or hidden forces, although he offers a great deal of “wild” chemical speculation in his botanical and medical studies. The mechanistic project was a deliberate attempt to offer explanations of phenomena in terms that were “corporeal”, material or physical, however these difficult terms were to be interpreted. The mechanical philosophy allowed the researcher to think much like an engineerhow to make available materials do the task that is desired. The engineering image was also theologically acceptable: God is the engineer who constructed the mechanisms of nature and as such nature can be seen as “artificial”, the product of God’s industry. As natural philosophers (or scientists) we can uncover how these artifacts are constructed and how they function, by analogy with discovering how a machine, such as a clock, is constructed and functions. Grew published his philosophical and theological views late in life in his Cosmologia Sacra: or a Discourse of the Universe as it is the Creature and Kingdom of God. In his last book Grew argues for a number of doctrines. He divides the natural causes within the universe into vital and corporeal components. Living and cognitive creatures have their origins in a Vital Principle, distinct from matter, yet bodies are necessary for the existence of Life. Life, being “more excellent” [p.34] than mere physical motion, requires an “Excellent, and so a distinct Subject, to which it belongs. And therefore something, which is Substantial, yet Incorporeal”. Grew’s vitalism was not uncommon for the time, especially among the doctors, and reflects the neo-Platonist heritage found in many influential naturalists such as John Ray (1627-1705). But Grew revealed his sympathies for nonconformist religious thought in his account of miracles. Grew asserts a form a Deism: that once God has created the world in accordance with His laws, God has no further need to interfere. God acts through the world only through secondary, that is, natural causes (which includes the vital, incorporeal principle of Life). God does not act directly upon natural events but brings them about by other natural events. Miraculous events are merely those events which are rare and for which the cause is unknown; but they are not caused directly by God “. . . every Miracle is effected in the Use of some Second or Natural cause: Yet to make it a miracle, it is requisite, that this cause be unknown to us“ [p. 195]. The denial of miracles supports Grew’s dominant theme: that the universe reveals the existence and wisdom of God in its design and structure. The deist view sits happily with mechanist perspective. Everywhere a doctor looks he can see the remarkable living machinery of the body; how organs grow to their proper and useful places. Grew took it that the teleological features of the universe revealed the wisdom of its construction. The idea was an old one but had recently gained ground in Robert Boyle’s discussion A Disquisition About Final Causes. Grew was not as careful as the skeptical alchemist and saw many of the world’s wonders as designed for the sake of Man, although he took it that the internal structures of plants were for the benefit of plants. The incredible usefulness of the Coco plant, the silkworm and of iron, indicate that the universe is well suited to Mankind. But the argument from design is often ridiculed as an argument from poor design, when one reflects on the hardships of life and the immorality of Men. Grew is not daunted by such reflections: The most Exorbitant Phancies and Lusts of Men, illustrate the Beauty of God’s Creation. One man makes all his thoughts and Pleasures, to centre in Meats and Drinks; Another, in Musick; a third, in Women; or some other Sense or Phancy so as to think of nothing else. Which, as it shows the infirmity of human nature; so the Plenitude and Perfection of the World, in being fitted, so many ways, to Beatifie Men, would they know discreetly how to use it. And the same Lust and Phancies, are many other ways turned to Good. *[p.104]*. Grew made his observations independently but simultaneously with Marcello Malphigi, in what might be considered a case of independent co-discovery, an interesting phenomenon in the history of science. Most famous is the co-discovery of natural selection by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace. But if Grew and Malphigi’s work counts as co-discovery it is in a very different way from that of Darwin and Wallace. Arguably, the co-discovery in plant morphology was a result of technological advances due to the invention of the microscope and was somewhat non-theoretical. Darwin and Wallace, however, discovered a law of nature, making significant theoretical advances in addition to their remarkable observations. But of course, without the meticulous work by the pioneers of botany, fruitful theory would not have arisen. Thus Nehemiah Grew must be remembered for his pioneering role in the establishment of modern botany. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 1, 2011

rian Garret

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:57.773562

christopher-smarts-jubilate-agno

Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno By Frank Key January 31, 2011 The poet Christopher Smart — also known as "Kit Smart", "Kitty Smart", "Jack Smart" and, on occasion, "Mrs Mary Midnight" — was a well known figure in 18th-century London. Nowadays he is perhaps best known for considering his cat Jeoffry. Writer and broadcaster Frank Key looks at Smart's weird and wonderful Jubilate Agno. “My poor friend Smart shewed the disturbance of his mind, by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place...” Concerning this unfortunate poet, Christopher Smart, who was confined in a madhouse, [Dr Johnson] had, at another time, the following conversation with Dr Burney . . . “I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else.”James Boswell, The Life Of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Dr Johnson thought his friend should not be confined, but ‘society’ thought otherwise, and Christopher Smart (1722-1771) was incarcerated in St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics in Bethnal Green, London and then in Mr Potter’s private madhouse between 1757 and 1763. He died, eight years later, in debtor’s prison. These private miseries overshadowed the reputation he had gained as a poet and contributor to periodicals. He was a prolific writer, in both Latin and English, and five times won the Seatonian Prize, awarded to a Cambridge graduate for the best poem on “the perfections or attributes of the supreme being.” A Song To David, the major work published in his lifetime, was not well-received, however, and until Robert Browning championed it a century later, Smart was more or less forgotten. It was not until 1939 that his masterpiece, written during his confinement in St Luke’s, was first published. Jubilate Agno is one of the most extraordinary poems in the English language, and almost certainly the reason we remember Christopher Smart today. It has been described as a vast hymn of praise to God and all His works, and also as the ravings of a madman. Indeed, that first edition was published under the title Rejoice In The Lamb : A Song From Bedlam, clearly marking it as a curio from the history of mental illness. It was W H Bond’s revised edition of 1954 which gave order to Smart’s surviving manuscript, restoring the Latin title Jubilate Agno, bringing us the poem in the form we know it today. Christopher Smart never completed the work, which consists of four fragments making a total of over 1,200 lines, each beginning with the words “Let” or “For”. For example, Fragment A is all “Let”s, whereas in Fragment B the “Let”s and “For”s are paired, which may have been the intention for the entire work, modelled on antiphonal Hebrew poetry. References and allusions abound to Biblical (especially Old Testament) figures, plants and animals, gems, contemporary politics and science, the poet’s family and friends, even obituary lists in current periodicals. The language is full of puns, archaisms, coinages, and unfamiliar usages. Dr Johnson famously said “Nothing odd will do long; Tristram Shandy did not last”. Jubilate Agno is, if anything, “odder” than Sterne’s novel, and perhaps we are readier to appreciate it in the twenty-first century than when it was written. One section, much favoured by anthologists, gives some of the flavour of the work. ※※Indexed under…Catscalled Geoffrey For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.For he rolls upon prank to work it in.For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.For this he performs in ten degrees.For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.For fifthly he washes himself.For sixthly he rolls upon wash.For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.For tenthly he goes in quest of food. Here we have an example of what one could call Smart’s “encyclopaedic” style, his passion for listing and enumerating. And whereas the description of his cat is fairly straightforward, other passages in the poem are deeply obscure, seeming to emerge from some private store of reference. It has been suggested that, in his confinement, Smart had access to just six books: the King James Bible; Ainsworth’s Latin Thesaurus; Salmon’s guide for London pharmacists (in Latin); Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary; and Hill’s Useful Family Herbal and History of Plants. The modern reader cannot hope to grasp every reference and allusion scattered within the poem, but Smart’s language is exact and exquisite, with a musicality that becomes hypnotic. For a DREAM is a good thing from GOD.For there is a dream from the adversary which is terror.For the phenomenon of dreaming is not of one solution, but many.For Eternity is like a grain of mustard as a growing body and improving spirit.For the malignancy of fire is oweing to the Devil’s hiding of light, till it became visible darkness. For the Circle may be SQUARED by swelling and flattening. For the Life of God is in the body of man and his spirit in the Soul. For there was no rain in Paradise because of the delicate construction of the spiritual herbs and flowers. For the Planet Mercury is the WORD DISCERNMENT. For the Scotchman seeks for truth at the bottom of a well, the Englishman in the Heaven of Heavens. As that last line perhaps indicates, one of the great joys of Jubilate Agno is in its sudden dislocations and unexpected diversions. The “my cat Jeoffrey” passage is justly famous, but the poem is cram-packed with similar wonders, and must be read in full to appreciate its inimitable genius. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 31, 2011

Frank Ke

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:58.332226

emma-goldmans-anarchism-without-adjectives

Emma Goldman’s “Anarchism Without Adjectives” By Kathy E. Ferguson January 12, 2011 In 2011, over 100 years after the publication of her seminal Anarchism and Other Essays, the writings of Emma Goldman entered the public domain. Kathy E. Ferguson, Professor of Political Science and Women's Studies at the University of Hawai'i, provides an introduction to Goldman's life and her particular brand of anarchism. Emma Goldman was a well-known radical critic of capitalism, the state, religion, patriarchy and colonialism during the fertile political years at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. For over a half century, she articulated an anarchist vision of a strong, free, self-creating individual within an egalitarian, participatory society. While anarchists are often dismissed as the lunatic fringe of the Left, Goldman presented anarchism as the most practical approach to human liberation. She emphasized concrete and creative anarchist activities, including cooperatives, radical schools, labor actions, and publications, which showed anarchism in action. Goldman was born in Kovno, Lithuania, into an economically insecure Jewish family. Her brief formal education was enhanced by exposure to nihilist revolutionaries and Russian radical literature. Immigrating with her sister to the United States in 1885, she settled originally in Rochester, New York. Like many young people of her generation, she was galvanized politically by the trial and execution of several young anarchists who were framed for the killing of police at the Haymarket riots in Chicago in 1886. She subsequently moved to New York City and joined the anarchist movement, rapidly rising to become one of the best known speakers in the lively radical landscape of the time. She was arrested countless times – legend has it that she took a book with her to her own lectures so she would have something to read in jail – and served three terms in prison: one year for urging unemployed workers to “take bread,” a few weeks for providing information on preventing conception, and two years for opposing conscription during World War I. After her third prison term, she and her comrade Alexander Berkman, along with 247 other radicals, were sent into exile to the newly-formed U.S.S.R. Initially supporting the Bolsheviks, she soon came to view the Communist Party as the murderers of the revolution. She and Berkman left Russia and eventually settled in the south of France. Goldman continued her lecturing and writing in Europe, England, and Canada; she strongly supported the anarchist revolutionaries in Spain in the 1930s, and was still an active speaker, writer and agitator when she died following a stroke in 1940. Strongly influenced by Peter Kropotkin’s communist anarchism, Goldman also integrated strands from Mikail Bakunin’s militant revolutionary practice, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s mutualism, and Max Stirner’s radical individualism, helping to create what many anarchists of Goldman’s generation called “anarchism without adjectives.” For anarchists, capitalism is a system that robs workers, intellectuals, artists, and peasants of their productive, creative labor, transferring both profit and control of labor to owners. Organized religion supports this theft by teaching adherents to defer to authority and hope passively for reward in the next life. The state uses organized violence to protect owners, suppress workers, and mobilize people’s loyalties and sense of home into a vicious, narrow patriotism that justifies and energizes war, which in turn furthers the profits and power of the capitalist class and its allies. Colonialism calls on the religious mandate of “civilizing” and converting the rest of the world to justify seizing the resources of less well-armed societies for global capitalist expansion. Schools undermine children’s natural curiosity and turn students into automatons regurgitating the orthodoxies they are taught. Into this sweeping critique of established authority, Goldman introduced the aesthetic sensibility of the American romantic movement, Nietzsche’s spirit of rebellion, and her own unique feminism. From Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau she absorbed a poetic, sensuous individualism. Like many other anarchists of her day, she emphasized the centrality of radical art, poetry, literature and drama to the emergence of free individuals. She was one of the first anarchists to become enthusiastic about Nietzsche, embracing him as a catalyst for a spiritual transvaluation of values. While she scorned the women’s suffrage movement, seeing any effort to reform rather than transform society as a useless distraction from more radical goals, she developed a revolutionary feminism that anticipated many themes prevalent in the later women’s movements. She focused her feminism on women’s bodies, demanding that women control their own reproduction, find their own sexual autonomy, claim equality in relations with men, and work with men to overthrow the prevailing authorities and create new relations of equality and freedom. Goldman published several of her key essays in her book Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) as well as her journal Mother Earth, published from 1906-1917. Additionally, she gave many thousands of lectures and wrote enormous numbers of letters to other anarchists and to a range of other progressive figures, including Rebecca West, John Dewey, Jack London, and Bertrand Russell. Her ideas on theater were published in The Social Significance of Modern Drama (1914) and her analysis of the rise and fall of revolution in the Soviet Union in My Disillusionment in Russia (1922). Her best known writing is probably her influential autobiography Living My Life (1931), in which she crafts the story of her lifelong political activism. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 12, 2011

Kathy E. Ferguson

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:58.808227

a-few-words-about-f-scott-fitzgerald

A Few Words about F. Scott Fitzgerald By Scott Donaldson September 26, 2011 In most countries around the world, 2011 saw the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald enter the public domain. Scott Donaldson, author of the biography Fool For Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald, explores the obscuring nature of his legend and the role that women played in his life and work. With Fitzgerald as with no one else in American literature save Poe, the biography gets in the way. Never mind that F. Scott Fitzgerald is the author of one exquisite short novel as perfect as anything in our literature and of another longer, more chaotic novel of tremendous emotional power. Never mind that he has written a couple of dozen stories that by any standard deserve the designation of “masterful.” Ignoring those legacies, much of the general public still tends to think of him in connection with the legends of his disordered and difficult life, and to classify him under one convenient stereotype or another. So diminished in stature, Fitzgerald becomes the Chronicler of the Jazz Age, or the Artist in Spite of Himself, or — most prevalent stereotype of all — the Writer as Burnt-Out Case: a man whose tragic course functions as a cautionary tale for more commonsensical aftercomers. His saga offers an almost irresistible temptation to sermonizers, overt or concealed. It is not right to ride on top of taxicabs or disport oneself in the Plaza hotel’s fountain, not right to drink to excess or abuse a “lovely golden wasted talent.” Go thou and do otherwise. This warning usually remains implicit, of course. It is not the homily but the tale of star-crossed lovers that commands attention — handsome brilliant erratic Scott married for good or ill to beautiful willful unstable Zelda. There is an arresting poignancy in the way the two of them — Scott more than Zelda, perhaps — considered the alternatives and chose the sweet poison. Somehow, in the repeated retellings of this tale, the Fitzgeralds have come to stand for a kind of generic nonspecific glamour, now sadly departed. In 1980 the opening party for an exhibit of Fitzgeraldiana at the National Portrait Gallery drew an enormous crowd determined to celebrate a vanished past. The band played Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman numbers from the 1940s, the decade following Fitzgerald’s death. A few women attempted flapper costumes, but for the most part the clothes were as anachronistic as the music. One chap, aiming for colonial elegance, danced in a pith helmet. The details that mattered so much to Fitzgerald, a man precisely in tune with his times, mattered very little to those come to the party to memorialize his legend. Zelda and Scott, Scott and Zelda — they are fixed so securely in the collective mind as lovable reckless youths for whom it all went disastrously wrong that it has been difficult to set that image aside and concentrate on the work that established him as one of the major literary artists of the twentieth century. Henry James, himself a biographer as well as a novelist, understood that the entire truth about anyone could never be told. “We can only take what groups together,” he said. What most grouped together in Fitzgerald’s work and life, I came to realize over several decades in the classroom and five years of intensive research, was an overweening compulsion to please. He wanted to please other men, but did a poor job of it. His Princeton classmates considered him over-inquisitive and frivolous. Zelda’s father thought him unreliable. Ernest Hemingway, the closest of friends in the mid-1920s, eventually came to regard him with something like scorn. Fitzgerald was far more successful in pleasing women. Readers of his fiction might expect as much, for he is one of our more androgynous writers, with a rare capacity to put himself in the place of characters of either sex. “All my characters are Scott Fitzgeralds,” he acknowledged. “Even my female characters are feminine Scott Fitzgeralds.” The set of instructions Fitzgerald drew up, at 18, for his younger sister Annabel provides convincing evidence along these lines. In this remarkable document he coached his sister in the finer points of attracting boys: how to groom herself, how to dance, what to talk about, how to flatter. And the androgyny is everywhere evident in the stories and novels, too, which is probably why most female college students are attracted to his fiction. Equipped with this sensitivity, Fitzgerald played the game of courtship well. As a youth he was a notoriously successful flirt. “I’ve got an adjective that just fits you,” he would tell a dancing partner early in the evening, and then withhold the laudatory word to build up her expectations. He was good-looking, and at ease in the company of girls. He listened to them as few other boys did, and made it clear that he cared tremendously what they thought of him. Later, as a married man, he continued to woo women. He couldn’t help it. He needed their approval, which is to say their love and adoration. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald may have been the most important woman in his life, but she was not and could not be the only one. Fitzgerald suffered a tremendous setback when Ginevra King of Lake Forest, north of Chicago — one of the wealthiest and most beautiful debutantes of her day — spurned him in order to marry a young man of her own class. The rejection devastated Fitzgerald, even as it supplied him with the basic subject matter of much of his fiction. There are probably more characters in his stories and novels modeled on Ginevra than on Zelda Sayre, who caught him on the rebound. By altering the circumstances of the plot, Fitzgerald played variations on the age-old theme of the battle of the sexes. What is unusual about Fitzgerald’s treatment of this theme is its escalation — in the work as in the life -- from the courting game of his adolescence to the fierce battle of his young manhood to the outright war of his maturity. Perhaps, we are inclined to think, Amory Blaine will not suffer unduly from his jilting by Rosalind Connage in This Side of Paradise (1920), Fitzgerald’s first novel. But Gatsby dies for Daisy in his 1925 masterpiece, and Dick Diver is stripped of his vitality and tossed aside by Nicole and her family in 1934’s Tender is the Night. In Fitzgerald’s fictional treatment of the war between the sexes, it is almost always the man who ends up defeated. By repeatedly depicting the downfall of his male figures, Fitzgerald was imagining what might well have happened (had not Zelda been afflicted with schizophrenia) and also — it seems to me — excoriating himself for his weaknesses. Tender, in particular, is a novel about the enervating effects of charm. Compelled to please everyone around him (and particularly women), Diver dissipates away his life’s work and his usefulness as a human being. The real Fitzgerald, like his invented protagonist, came to despise himself for this “fatal pleasingness,” a self-disgust that characteristically emerged under the influence of alcohol. Drinking runs like an inner malaise through Fitzgerald’s life and that of many of his male characters. His triumph came in the last years of his life, when — supposedly down and out in Hollywood — he cast aside this obsession, quit drinking, and went back to being what he called “a writer only.” The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 26, 2011

Scott Donaldson

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:59.273411

lewis-carroll-and-the-hunting-of-the-snark

Lewis Carroll and The Hunting of the Snark By Edward Wakeling February 22, 2011 In 1876 Lewis Carroll published by far his longest poem - a fantastical epic tale recounting the adventures of a bizarre troupe of nine tradesmen and a beaver. Carrollian scholar, Edward Wakeling, introduces The Hunting of the Snark. Although best known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Lewis Carroll — the pen-name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematical lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford — was also an avid reader and writer of poetry. He greatly enjoyed the poems of Victorian writers such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti. His own poems were varied — some just humorous nonsense, some filled with hidden meanings, and some serious poems about love and life. Probably his best known is called “Jabberwocky,” with its opening line of “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves . . .”, and its many invented words, some that have now entered the English language, such as “chortle” and “galumph”. Such nonsense verse is as popular now as it was when first published. His more serious poetry, it must be admitted, is generally inferior to his humorous verse and often over sentimental. Between 1860 and 1863 he contributed a dozen or more poems to College Rhymes, a pamphlet issued each term to members of Oxford and Cambridge universities, and which, for a time, he edited. In 1869, he compiled a book of poems, many of which he had already published elsewhere but now issued in revised form, together with one main new poem, which gives its title to the book, Phantasmagoria. One particular poem stands out from all the others that Carroll wrote. It has inspired parodies, continuations, musical adaptations, and a wide variety of interpretations. It is an epic nonsense poem written at a time when Carroll was struggling with his religious beliefs following the serious illness of his cousin and godson, Charlie Wilcox, who eventually died from tuberculosis. Although the poem concerns death and danger, it is filled with humour and whimsical ideas. Strangely, it was written backwards. After a night nursing his cousin, Carroll went for a long walk over the hills near Guildford, and a solitary line of verse came into his head — “For the Snark was a Boojum, you see!” The rest of the stanza, the last in the poem, came to him a few days later. Over a period of six months, the rest of poem was composed, ending up as 141 stanzas in 8 sections that Carroll called “fits.” The poem concerns a quest by a crew sailing to catch a mysterious creature called a Snark. Each member of the crew has an occupation beginning with the letter “B” — Bellman (the Captain), Baker, Banker, Barrister, Billiard-Marker, Boots, Bonnet-Maker, Broker, and Butcher, accompanied by a Beaver. Their maritime map is an absolute blank. They reach an island, and the hunt for a Snark begins. But the quest is fraught with danger because although Snarks are not in themselves harmful, those that are Boojums are ferocious and will kill. The question that naturally arises is “does the poem have a meaning?” Carroll denied that he meant anything in particular — the poem was all nonsense — but that did not stop people asking him, and it inspired others to give it their own meaning. To some extent, the poem is about the relationships that emerge among the crew, and the interaction between this motley bunch of characters. All behave in odd ways, some have close-shaves, and one completely vanishes — caught by a Boojum. The poem was entitled The Hunting of the Snark with the subtitle, An Agony in Eight Fits. Carroll originally intended it as a set of verses to be included in another of his children’s stories, but it grew too long and became a book in its own right. He published it on 1 April 1876 — the date chosen with care. However, many of his presentation copies to friends are dated 29 March. Although issued in a pictorial buff coloured cloth, he had copies bound in red, blue, green, and white cloth, all with gold decoration, to give away to his friends and family. The book was dedicated to one of his friends, Gertrude Chataway, and a dedicatory acrostic poem that introduces the book embodies her name as the first word of each stanza, Gert, Rude, Chat, Away, and also the first letter of each line. Accompanying the poem were illustrations by Henry Holiday (1839-1927), artist, sculptor, stained-glass designer, and book illustrator. He drew nine illustrations for the book; a tenth illustration depicting a Snark was rejected by Carroll — he wanted the creature to remain unimaginable. The poem owes a debt to “Jabberwocky” — some of the invented words from these verses reappear in The Hunting of the Snark and Carroll explains their derivation in his Preface, such as frumious being a portmanteau word based on “fuming” and “furious.” Some of the creatures also make a second appearance — the vicious Jubjub bird and the terrifying Bandersnatch. The poem was very popular — it was reprinted many times. In Carroll’s lifetime, over 20,000 copies were sold. The poem was incorporated into Carroll’s compendium of humorous poetry entitled Rhyme? and Reason? (1883). Since then it has been illustrated by a variety of artists and translated into many languages, and the book rarely goes out of print. People are known to memorise and recite the poem. Some people form Snark Clubs. There is a timeless nature about the verses that make it as relevant today as it did in 1876. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 22, 2011

Edward Wakeling

essay

2024-05-01T21:48:59.946772

aspiring-to-a-higher-plane

Aspiring to a Higher Plane By Ian Stewart September 19, 2011 In 1884 Edwin Abbott Abbott published Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, perhaps the first ever book that could be described as "mathematical fiction". Ian Stewart, author of Flatterland and The Annotated Flatland, introduces the strange tale of the geometric adventures of A. Square. Edwin Abbott Abbott, who became Headmaster of the City of London School at the early age of 26, was renowned as a teacher, writer, theologian, Shakespearean scholar, and classicist. He was a religious reformer, a tireless educator, and an advocate of social democracy and improved education for women. Yet his main claim to fame today is none of these: a strange little book, the first and almost the only one of its genre: mathematical fantasy. Abbott called it Flatland, and published it in 1884 under the pseudonym A. Square. On the surface — and the setting, the imaginary world of Flatland, is a surface, an infinite Euclidean plane — the book is a straightforward narrative about geometrically shaped beings that live in a two-dimensional world. A. Square, an ordinary sort of chap, undergoes a mystical experience: a visitation by the mysterious Sphere from the Third Dimension, who carries him to new worlds and new geometries. Inspired by evangelical zeal, he strives to convince his fellow citizens that the world is not limited to the two dimensions accessible to their senses, falls foul of the religious authorities, and ends up in jail. The story has a timeless appeal, and has never been out of print since its first publication. It has spawned several sequels and has been the subject of at least one radio programme and two animated films. Not only is the book about hidden dimensions: it has its own hidden dimensions. Its secret mathematical agenda is not the notion of two dimensions, but that of four. Its social agenda pokes fun at the rigid stratification of Victorian society, especially the low status of women, even the wives and daughters of the wealthy. Flatland’s inhabitants are triangles, squares, and other geometric figures. In the planar world’s orderly hierarchy, one’s status depends on one’s degree of regularity and how many sides one has. An isosceles triangle is superior to a scalene triangle (all sides different) but inferior to an equilateral triangle. But all triangles must defer to squares, which in turn defer to pentagons, hexagons, right up to the pinnacle of Flatland society, the Priestshood. Referred to as ‘circles’, the priests are actually polygons with so many sides that no one can distinguish them. The sons of squares are usually pentagons, the grandsons hexagons, so there is a general progression along the greasy pole (there is no ‘up’ in Flatland). But what of the wives and daughters? Flatland’s women are mere line segments, actually very thin triangles, whose social standing is zero. Their intelligence is little greater. They are required by law to wiggle from side to side so that they can be seen, and to emit loud cries so that they can be heard, because a collision with a woman is as fatal as one with a stiletto. Abbott took a bit of stick from some of his female contemporaries, who failed to appreciate his irony. But we know from his own life, including his daughter’s education, that he did a lot to improve the status of women and to ensure they received the same level of education as men. Abbott wasn’t particularly good at, or keen on, mathematics, but his book tackled an issue of great interest in Victorian times, the notion of four (or more) dimensions. This idea was becoming fundamental in science and mathematics, and it was also being invoked in areas like theology and spiritualism, because an invisible extra dimension was just the place to locate God, the spirit world, or ghosts. Charlatans like the American medium Henry Slade were exploiting conjuring tricks to claim access to the Fourth Dimension. Legitimate hyperspace philosophers were speculating about the role that additional dimensions might play in illuminating the human condition. Flatland approaches this topic by way of a dimensional analogy, widely used ever since, and not entirely Abbott’s own invention. The difficulties facing a three-dimensional Victorian attempting to grasp the geometry of four dimensions are similar to those facing A. Square attempting to grasp the geometry of three. Among Abbott’s sources for this analogy were frequent social encounters with eminent scientists such as the physicist John Tyndall, whom he met at George Eliot’s house in 1871. Tyndall may have told Abbott about the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, who gave public lectures on non-Euclidean geometry using the image of an imaginary two-dimensional creature living on a mathematical surface. Another likely source is the outrageous Charles Howard Hinton, who wrote his own book about a two-dimensional world in his 1907 An Episode of Flatland: How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension. Abbott’s mathematico-literary legacy is a series of Flatland spin-offs: Dionys Burger’s Sphereland, Rudy Rucker’s short story ‘Message Found in a Copy of Flatland’ and his novel The Fourth Dimension, Alexander Keewatin Dewdney’s The Planiverse, and my own Flatterland. But what he was really trying to tell his readers was more subtle. Just as a humble square can transcend his plane world and aspire to the Third Dimension, so the women and the lower classes of Victorian England could transcend the confines of their stratified society and aspire to a higher plane of existence. More than 120 years later, it is a message that has lost none of its urgency. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 19, 2011

Ian Stewart

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:00.437564

100-years-of-the-secret-garden

100 Years of The Secret Garden By Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina March 8, 2011 The year 2011 marked the 100th anniversary of the children's classic The Secret Garden. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, author of Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden, takes a look at the life of Burnett and how personal tragedy underpinned the creation of her most famous work. “With regard to The Secret Garden,” Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote to her English publisher in October 1910, “do you realize that it is not a novel, but a childs [sic] story though it is gravely beginning life as an important illustrated serial in a magazine for adults . . . . It is an innocent thriller of a story to which grown ups listen spell bound to my keen delight.” The “thriller of a story” made its first appearance that fall in The American Magazine, but appeared as an actual book a year later. Now, as the novel is celebrated during its centennial year, it’s fascinating to go back and see the modest beginning of a book that is repeatedly cited as one of the most influential and beloved children’s books of all time. Yet Burnett would be astonished today to learn that she is known primarily as a writer for children, when the majority of her fifty-three novels and thirteen produced plays were for adults. When Burnett sat down to write the story of an orphaned girl sent from India to the Yorkshire moors, where she helps herself and others find redemption and health by reviving a forgotten garden, she composed it not in the north of England but in her new home on Long Island. Born in 1849 and raised in Manchester, England into a middle class family, she moved as a teenager to Tennessee when her widowed mother decided they should emigrate at the end of the Civil War. Although they were poor, Burnett was delighted at giving up the grit and smoke of a factory city for the stunning landscapes of eastern Tennessee. In America she soon began to publish her romantic stories in some of the most popular magazines, eventually becoming hugely famous when she published her sixth novel, Little Lord Fauntleroy, in 1886. From the first her work had never been turned down by any publisher, but with Fauntleroy she became, and remained, the highest paid woman writer of her time, churning out books and stories with great regularity. Despite the enormous success of Fauntleroy, and later of A Little Princess, most of her novels and plays were not for a juvenile audience. By this time a married mother of two living in Washington, DC, she capitalized on her English background in most of her work. Over the years, England remained an active and important part of her life. She crossed the Atlantic no fewer than thirty-three times over her lifetime, often living abroad for a year or two at a time. At the same time, she maintained homes in Washington, and later in New York, and doted upon her very American sons, even when her marriage to their father broke down and through some surprisingly long absences from them. Two life-changing events contributed to the genesis of The Secret Garden, which was written late in her life. The first was the death of her sixteen-year-old son Lionel, who became increasingly ill in Washington while she was living away. Her husband, Dr. Swan Burnett, wrote her urgent letters about their son’s failing health, but it was not until the diagnosis turned out to be tuberculosis that she rushed home to take Lionel on a desperate circuit of European spas. When he died in her arms in Paris at the end of 1890, she was completely devastated. For years she threw herself into starting and supporting a clubhouse for boys in London, and in spoiling her remaining son, Vivian. The second loss was that of her beloved home Maytham Hall in Kent, in southern England, which she had leased for ten years. In 1908 the leaseholder decided to sell the grand house, and Burnett was forced to leave the home where she had spent the happiest months of each year, after shedding her abusive second husband. There she cultivated extensive gardens, held parties, and tamed a robin as she wrote outdoors at a table in a sheltered garden. Both the robin and the gardens made their way into The Secret Garden. With the loss of Maytham Hall, Burnett returned to America where she built adjoining houses for herself and her sister Edith, and for Vivian and his family in Plandome, on Long Island. She returned for several long sojourns to England, and spent her winters with Edith in Bermuda. In both Bermuda and Plandome she threw herself into gardening, with the help of gardeners, designing extensive gardens that produced award-winning blooms. Roses were her favorite, and her trademark, just as they were for Lilias Craven in The Secret Garden. Every year Burnett published a book in time for the Christmas market, and in 1910 she found herself intrigued by the thought of a sallow and unlikeable little girl, her disabled cousin, and a strong nature-loving boy and his benevolent mother. Always taken with her own writing — she often declared that they “came” to her rather than being invented, and she could sometimes be found reading her own books on a stairway, with evident pleasure — she wrote to her publisher that “I love it myself. There is a long deserted garden in it whose locked door is hidden by ivy and whose key has been buried for ten years. It contains also a sort of Faun who charms wild creatures and tame ones and there is a moorland cottage woman who is a sort of Madonna with twelve children — a warm bosomed, sane, wise, simple Mother thing.” Burnett loved the combination of the gothic and the natural worlds, and the ability of children to understand and appreciate them in everyday life. In this new story, she was able, whether she recognized it or not, to recover from her two enormous losses. Unlike her son Lionel, Colin Craven is restored to health at the end of the novel. And unlike Maytham Hall, the gardens at Misselthwaite Manor continually bloomed. When Burnett died in 1924, her friends helped erect a memorial to her in Central Park, consisting of a fountain surrounded by gardens and reading benches. Their prescient choice of The Secret Garden for the fountain sculpture surprised the public, for it was, at the time, one of her lesser known and appreciated books, but they knew these were things that were close to the author’s heart. Although it sold well enough at first, The Secret Garden lapsed into a kind of near oblivion for many decades. Critics ignored or disparaged it, even at a time when children’s literature began receiving more and more critical and scholarly attention. It was the children, along with librarians, who saved it, passing on the book to readers and friends, and creating a special place in their hearts for the story. By the 1960s, its fortunes began to revive, and when the book went out of copyright in 1986, dozens of illustrators and publishers rushed to reproduce it. As we celebrate 100 years of The Secret Garden, the book has never been more popular or influential. Whole shelves in bookstores carry its many editions, and it has been translated into nearly every known language. Children around the world continue to love the story of the children who, with the help of nature and positive thinking, bring the world back to life. As Burnett said to a friend, “I know quite well that it is one of my best finds.” Children and adults one hundred years later, still agree. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 8, 2011

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:00.910859

was-charles-darwin-an-atheist

Was Charles Darwin an Atheist? By John van Wyhe June 28, 2011 Leading Darwin expert and founder of Darwin Online, John van Wyhe, challenges the popular assumption that Darwin's theory of evolution corresponded with a loss of religious belief. The religious views of Charles Darwin, the venerable Victorian naturalist and author of the Origin of Species (1859) never cease to interest modern readers. Bookshops and the internet are well-stocked with discussions of Darwin’s views and the implications of his theory of evolution for religion. Many religious writers today accuse Darwin of atheism. Some popular proponents of atheism also enlist Darwin to their cause. Even while Darwin was still alive there were widely varying descriptions of his religious opinions — which he kept mostly private. In 1880 the Austrian writer Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg visited Darwin at his home, Down House, in Kent. The coachman who drove Hesse-Wartegg from the train station at Orpington opined of the famous Mr. Darwin: “Ha es en enfidel, Sar — yes, an enfidel — an unbeliever! and the people say he never went to church!”. The passage quoted here was actually marked in Darwin’s copy of this German newspaper (the Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt) — no doubt it amused Darwin as much as the German attempt to capture the Kentish accent through phonetic spelling. Other commentators were more generous in their interpretations of Darwin’s religiosity. The modern myth of a timeless conflict of science and religion was far from the reality experienced by Victorian readers who first turned the pages of Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man (1871). It is now widely forgotten that the scientific debate over the theory of evolution was over within twenty years of the publication of Origin of Species. Yet how could that be given that the Victorians were, by and large, far more religious than people generally are today and the scientific evidence for evolution was far less complete than it is now? The explanation is that for very many Victorians the choice was not between God and science, religion or evolution, but between different notions of how God designed nature. It was already widely accepted that fixed natural laws (or secondary laws) had been discovered that explained natural phenomena from astronomy and chemistry to physiology and geology. Darwin, it was believed, had simply discovered a new law of nature designed by God. And it seems this was how Darwin himself viewed at least part of the religious implications of his evolutionary theory. This also makes it all the more understandable that Darwin was buried by the nation in Westminster Abbey in 1882. A few of Darwin’s private letters referring to religion were published near the end of his life and more after his death. These have been very widely quoted in the voluminous discussions of Darwin’s religious views. Searching for other material which might have bearing on the question of his religious views, I turned to Darwin Online, an online repository of Darwin‘s corpus where it is possible to search the works by key term. Putting in terms like ‘atheist’ and ‘atheism’ I found what seems to be a previously unknown discussion of this question by Darwin himself. The passage occurs in Darwin’s lengthy 1879 “Preliminary notice” to the English translation of Ernst Krause’s biography of Darwin’s freethinking paternal grandfather, the poet and physician Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). Darwin addressed the question of whether his grandfather was an atheist: Dr. Darwin has been frequently called an atheist, whereas in every one of his works distinct expressions may be found showing that he fully believed in God as the Creator of the universe. For instance, in the ‘Temple of Nature,’ published posthumously, he writes: “Perhaps all the productions of nature are in their progress to greater perfection! an idea countenanced by modern discoveries and deductions concerning the progressive formation of the solid parts of the terraqueous globe, and consonant to the dignity of the creator of all things.” He concludes one chapter in ‘Zoonomia’ with the words of the Psalmist: “The heavens declare the Glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.” He published an ode on the folly of atheism, with the motto “I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” of which the first verse is as follows:— 1.Dull atheist, could a giddy danceOf atoms lawless hurl’dConstruct so wonderful, so wise,So harmonised a world? It is curious that this passage has not been noticed before. If Charles Darwin argued that his grandfather’s frequent published “expressions” about a creator meant he was not an atheist, it is possible to put Darwin’s own writings to the same test. By searching his published writings on Darwin Online for “creator” one can quickly see the life-long use that Darwin made of this language. The first occurrence is in his first book, Journal of Researches (first edition of 1839, based on his Beagle diary) now known universally as The Voyage of the Beagle referring to an excursion in Australia: A little time before this I had been lying on a sunny bank, and was reflecting on the strange character of the animals of this country as compared with the rest of the world. An unbeliever in every thing beyond his own reason might exclaim, “Two distinct Creators must have been at work; their object, however, has been the same, and certainly the end in each case is complete.” The term does not appear in Darwin’s published writings again until the first edition of Origin of Species (1859) and the many different editions and rewordings that followed until 1872. Darwin next used the term in his following book on the pollination adaptations of orchids in 1862: This treatise affords me also an opportunity of attempting to show that the study of organic beings may be as interesting to an observer who is fully convinced that the structure of each is due to secondary laws, as to one who views every trifling detail of structure as the result of the direct interposition of the Creator. This shows Darwin’s position very clearly. Even more informative are the concluding paragraphs of Variation of Animals and Plants (1868), one of his clearest and most powerful expressions of his theory of natural selection: Some authors have declared that natural selection explains nothing, unless the precise cause of each slight individual difference be made clear. Now, if it were explained to a savage utterly ignorant of the art of building, how the edifice had been raised stone upon stone, and why wedge-formed fragments were used for the arches, flat stones for the roof, &c. and if the use of each part and of the whole building were pointed out, it would be unreasonable if he declared that nothing had been made clear to him, because the precise cause of the shape of each fragment could not be given. But this is a nearly parallel case with the objection that selection explains nothing, because we know not the cause of each individual difference in the structure of each being. The shape of the fragments of stone at the base of our precipice may be called accidental, but this is not strictly correct; for the shape of each depends on a long sequence of events, all obeying natural laws; on the nature of the rock, on the lines of deposition or cleavage, on the form of the mountain which depends on its upheaval and subsequent denudation, and lastly on the storm or earthquake which threw down the fragments. But in regard to the use to which the fragments may be put, their shape may be strictly said to be accidental. And here we are led to face a great difficulty, in alluding to which I am aware that I am travelling beyond my proper province. An omniscient Creator must have foreseen every consequence which results from the laws imposed by Him. But can it be reasonably maintained that the Creator intentionally ordered, if we use the words in any ordinary sense, that certain fragments of rock should assume certain shapes so that the builder might erect his edifice? If the various laws which have determined the shape of each fragment were not predetermined for the builder’s sake, can it with any greater probability be maintained that He specially ordained for the sake of the breeder each of the innumerable variations in our domestic animals and plants;— many of these variations being of no service to man, and not beneficial, far more often injurious, to the creatures themselves? Did He ordain that the crop and tail-feathers of the pigeon should vary in order that the fancier might make his grotesque pouter and fantail breeds? Did He cause the frame and mental qualities of the dog to vary in order that a breed might be formed of indomitable ferocity, with jaws fitted to pin down the bull for man’s brutal sport? But if we give up the principle in one case,—if we do not admit that the variations of the primeval dog were intentionally guided in order that the greyhound, for instance, that perfect image of symmetry and vigour, might be formed,—no shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations, alike in nature and the result of the same general laws, which have been the groundwork through natural selection of the formation of the most perfectly adapted animals in the world, man included, were intentionally and specially guided. However much we may wish it, we can hardly follow Professor Asa Gray in his belief “that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines,” like a stream “along definite and useful lines of irrigation.” If we assume that each particular variation was from the beginning of all time preordained, the plasticity of organisation, which leads to many injurious deviations of structure, as well as that redundant power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and, as a consequence, to the natural selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to us superfluous laws of nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free will and predestination. Then in 1871 Darwin addressed the subject of religion in the Descent of Man: Belief in God—Religion.—There is no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God. On the contrary there is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their languages to express such an idea. The question is of course wholly distinct from that higher one, whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the universe; and this has been answered in the affirmative by the highest intellects that have ever lived. And in the conclusion to the second volume Darwin wrote: He who believes in the advancement of man from some lowly-organised form, will naturally ask how does this bear on the belief in the immortality of the soul. The barbarous races of man, as Sir J. Lubbock has shewn, possess no clear belief of this kind; but arguments derived from the primeval beliefs of savages are, as we have just seen, of little or no avail. Few persons feel any anxiety from the impossibility of determining at what precise period in the development of the individual, from the first trace of the minute germinal vesicle to the child either before or after birth, man becomes an immortal being; and there is no greater cause for anxiety because the period in the gradually ascending organic scale cannot possibly be determined. Darwin himself was not entirely consistent in the language he used to describe his beliefs. And of course his views changed over the course of his life. Starting in 1876 he began writing a private autobiography for his children and grandchildren. In it he mentioned the change in his religious views. A gradual scepticism towards Christianity and the authenticity of the Bible gradually crept over him during the late 1830s — leaving him not a Christian, but no atheist either; rather a sort of theist. To be a ‘theist’ in Darwin’s day was to believe that a supernatural deity had created nature or the univerise but did not intervene in the course of history. Darwin used the term in one famous passage in the autobiography: . . . the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist. This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker. At other times he used the term ‘agnostic’ — a word coined and made fashionable by the naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley. In an 1879 letter, written around the same time as the autobiography and first published in Life and Letters, he writes: In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind. Given the paucity of evidence, and the ambiguity of the statements that do remain, we will probably never be able to completely refine our definition or understanding of Darwin’s religious views. But that is not to say that there are some things that cannot be known. One point is abundantly clear, all the surviving evidence contradicts the assertion that Darwin was an atheist. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 28, 2011

John van Wyhe

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:01.485963

the-snowflake-man-of-vermont

The Snowflake Man of Vermont By Keith C. Heidorn February 14, 2011 Keith C. Heidorn takes a look at the life and work of Wilson Bentley, a self-educated farmer from a small American town who, by combining a bellows camera with a microscope, managed to photograph the dizzyingly intricate and diverse structures of the snow crystal. In 1885, at the age of twenty, Wilson Alwyn Bentley, a farmer who would live all his life in the small town of Jericho in Vermont, gave the world its first ever photograph of a snowflake. Throughout the following winters, until his death in 1931, Bentley would go on to capture over 5000 snowflakes, or more correctly, snow crystals, on film. Despite the fact that he rarely left Jericho, thousands of Americans knew him as The Snowflake Man or simply Snowflake Bentley. Our belief that “no two snowflakes are alike” stems from a line in a 1925 report in which he remarked: “Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost.” It started with a microscope his mother gave him at age fifteen which opened the world of the small to young Wilson. A lover of winter, he made plans to use his microscope to view snowflakes. His initial investigations proved both fascinating and frustrating as he tried to observe the short-lived flakes. So that he could share his discoveries, he began by sketching what he saw, accumulating several hundred sketches by his seventeenth birthday. When his father purchased a camera for his son, Wilson combined it with his microscope, and went on to make his first successful photomicrograph of a snow crystal on January 15, 1885. In addition to the development of the hardware, Bentley also had to devise a protocol to capture a snow crystal and transport it with minimal damage to the camera’s field of vision. What he found worked best was to capture the crystals on a cool velvet-covered tray. Taking care not to melt the crystal with his breathe, he identified a suitable subject and lifted it onto a pre-cooled slide with a thin wood splint from his mother’s broom and nudged it into place with a turkey feather. The slide was then carried into his photographic shed and placed under the microscope. The back-lit image was focused using a system of strings and pulleys he devised to accommodate his mittened hands. Once focused, the sensitized glass plate — the “film” — was exposed and stored for further processing, development and printing. Bentley also devised his own processing methods. In addition to developing the original image, he also created a post-development process to enhance it. Since each photograph was taken of a white snow crystal against a white background, Bentley was dissatisfied with the initial photograph. He felt he could improve the contrast and enhance the detail if he presented the crystal against a dark background. To do this, he painstakingly scraped away the dark emulsion surrounding the snow crystal image from a duplicate of the original negative using a sharp penknife and steady hand. The altered image was then carefully placed upon a clear glass plate and then printed, giving it a dark background. Even after years of practice, this post-production process often took as long as four hours for a complex snow crystal. With 70-75 photographs per storm and notes on the conditions under which they were collected, Bentley accrued a considerable understanding of snow. In 1897, he became acquainted with Professor George Perkins, a professor of geology at the University of Vermont, and they prepared the first paper on snow crystals published in the May 1898 issue of Appleton’s Popular Scientific entitled “A Study of Snow Crystals.” While photographing snowflakes was his passion, Bentley also turned his interest to examining and sizing raindrops for seven summers from 1898 to 1904. From that work, he gave us early insights into raindrops and their size distribution in storms. After some experimentation, he developed a simple yet effective apparatus for gathering raindrops: a shallow pan of wheat flour. At first, he simply photographed the imprints made by the falling rain in the flour. Then in 1898, he made a serendipitous finding. In his journal, he wrote: “In the bottom of each raindrop impression in the flour there could always be found a roundish granule of dough nearly exact size of raindrop. After experimenting with artificial raindrops I could measure [its] diameter before falling into the flour, and thus tell if the dough granule corresponded in size with the measured raindrop.” Bentley measured these raindrop “fossils” and divided them into one of five size-range categories. Over the tenure of his raindrop studies, he collected 344 sets of raindrop pellets from over 70 distinct storms, including 25 thunderstorms, to which he added meticulous weather data about the storm: date, time of day, temperature, wind, cloud type and estimated cloud height. He concluded that different storms produce different size raindrops and different size distributions. Few rainfall events had uniform drop sizes, but when they did, he discovered, they were composed of either all small drops or all large drops. Low rain clouds produced mostly small drops. The largest drops, around a quarter inch in diameter, fell from the tall cumulonimbus clouds of thunderstorms. He concluded that the size of drops and snowflakes could tell a lot about the vertical structure of the storm. Unfortunately, Bentley was so far ahead of his time that he wasn’t fully appreciated by contemporary scientists. They didn’t take this self-educated farmer seriously. It was forty years later — the study of cloud physics and precipitation processes would not blossom until the 1940s — before his raindrop work was rediscovered and corroborated. The first recognition of Bentley’s raindrop experiments appears to have been by US Soil Conservation Service scientists J. O. Laws and D. A. Parsons, who published a paper in 1943 reporting measurements of raindrop size under various rainfall intensities using Bentley’s collection method. Although he dropped his study of raindrops after a few years, he continued to photograph snow crystal and speculate on the nature of snow. From his large data archive, Bentley’s analysis convinced him that the form the ice crystal took (hexagonal plate, six-sided star, hexagonal column, needle, etc.) was dependent on the air temperature in which the crystal formed and fell. Nearly three decades would pass before Ukichiro Nakaya in Japan would confirm this hypothesis. He also wanted to promote his work for its beauty, and thus submitted articles and delivered lectures that focused on his snow photography over the years. His lectures were popular, and from them he was dubbed The Snowflake Man and Snowflake Bentley by the newspapers. Over one hundred articles were published in well-known newspapers and magazines such as The Christian Herald, Popular Mechanics, National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, and the American Annual of Photography. His best photographs were in demand from jewellers, engravers and textile makers who saw the beauty in his work. He also submitted technical reports to the US Weather Bureau’s publication Monthly Weather Review. Although he received scant recognition from most scientists, he did receive encouragement from Weather Bureau chief meteorologist Dr William J. Humphreys who helped him publish a collection of his photographs. Humphreys wrote the technical introduction and appeared as co-author. The book Snow Crystals by W. A. Bentley and W. J. Humphrey was published by McGraw-Hill in November 1931. It contained 2500 selected snow crystal photos plus 100 of frost and dew formation. The book has since been republished by Dover Books. As a grown man, Bentley was slight of frame, likely just over five feet tall and weighing around 120 pounds, but could dig a row of potatoes or pitch hay as well as any farmer in the valley. He continued to farm the acreage with his older brother for all his life. Though not an outgoing man, he loved to entertain by playing the piano or violin and singing popular songs. He also played clarinet in a small brass band and could imitate the sounds of many animals. Bentley never married. In early-December 1931, Wilson Bentley walked six miles, ill-dressed, through a slushy snowstorm to reach his home. Not long thereafter, he contracted a cold, which grew into pneumonia. “Snowflake” Bentley died on December 23 at the age of sixty-six. In March of that year, he had taken the last of his photomicrographs of snow, still using the same camera that took the first one. Although his father thought Wilson’s snow photography a lot of nonsense and not the proper thing for a farmer to do, Wilson broke unique ground in the early days of modern meteorology as well as microscopic photography. His biographer, cloud physicist Duncan Blanchard, dubbed him “America’s First Cloud Physicist”. The Burlington Free Press wrote in a Christmas Eve obituary for Bentley: Longfellow said that genius is infinite painstaking. John Ruskin declared that genius is only a superior power of seeing. Wilson Bentley was a living example of this type of genius. He saw something in the snowflakes which other men failed to see, not because they could not see, but because they had not the patience and the understanding to look. On the morning he was laid to rest in the Jericho Center cemetery, it began to snow, leaving a dusting over the burial ground. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 14, 2011

Keith C. Heidorn

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:01.971374

dog-stories-from-the-spectator

Dog Stories from The Spectator By Frank Key September 5, 2011 Dogs who shop, bury frogs, and take 800-mile solo round trips by rail - writer and broadcaster Frank Key gives a brief tour of the strange and delightful Dog Stories from The Spectator. Here is a puzzle: [Feb. 2, 1895.] I venture to send you the following story I have lately heard from an eye-witness, and to ask whether you or any of your readers can throw any light upon the dog’s probable object. The dog in question was a Scotch terrier. He was one day observed to appear from a corner of the garden carrying in his mouth, very gently and tenderly, a live frog. He proceeded to lay the frog down upon a flower-bed, and at once began to dig a hole in the earth, keeping one eye upon the frog to see that it did not escape. If it went more than a few feet from him, he fetched it back, and then continued his work. Having dug the hole a certain depth, he then laid the frog, still alive, at the bottom of it, and promptly scratched the loose earth back into the hole, and friend froggy was buried alive! The dog then went off to the corner of the garden, and returned with another frog, which he treated in the same way. This occurred on more than one occasion; in fact, as often as he could find frogs he occupied himself in burying them alive. Now dogs generally have some reason for what they do. What can have been a dog’s reason for burying frogs alive? It does not appear that he ever dug them up again to provide himself with a meal. If, sir, you or any of your readers can throw any light on this curious, and for the frogs most uncomfortable, behaviour of my friend’s Scotch terrier, I should be very much obliged. — R. Acland-Troyte. It appears in a curious volume entitled Dog Stories From The Spectator : Being Anecdotes Of The Intelligence, Reasoning Power, Affection And Sympathy Of Dogs, Selected From The Correspondence Columns Of The Spectator by J St Loe Strachey (1895). Strachey’s purpose, as given in his introduction, is to provide “no little entertainment for all who love dogs”, and in this he surely succeeds. Indeed, one may have no liking for dogs whatsoever, yet find many of these stories oddly compelling. There are tales of syllogistic dogs, sermonising dogs, hospital dogs, parcel-carrying dogs, and purchasing dogs — that is, dogs which “understand the first principles of the science of exchange”. We learn of dogs with a sense of humour, dogs’ talent for friendship with hens, rabbits, and pigeons, dogs that foretell death, and dogs that recognise themselves in the mirror. By the time we get to the end of the book we may agree with Strachey that “a single story of a clever dog may amuse, but . . . if we have half a dozen illustrating the same form of intelligence, the value of the evidence is enormously increased”. An added pleasure of the book is, of course, its age. This was a time when the correspondence columns of a general interest magazine were filled with letters written in formal, elegant, crafted prose. The sense of a lost world of good manners and civility could not be better expressed than in Strachey’s apology, worth quoting in full: Before I conclude this Introduction, I should like to address a word of apology to the correspondents of the Spectator whose letters form the present volume. Though the copyright of the letters belongs to the editors and proprietors of the Spectator I should have liked to ask the leave of the various writers before republishing their letters. Physical difficulties have, however rendered this impossible. In the case of nearly half the letters the names and addresses have not been preserved. In many instances, again, only the names remain. Lastly, a large number of the letters are ten or twelve, or even twenty years old, and the writers may therefore be dead or out of England. Under these circumstances I have not made any effort to enter into communication with the writers before including their letters in this book. That their permission would have been given, had it been asked, I do not doubt. The original communication of the letters to the Spectator is proof that the writers wished a public use to be made of the anecdotes they relate. As long, then, as the letters are not altered or edited, but produced verbatim, I may, I think, feel assured that I am doing nothing which is even remotely discourteous to the writers. As for that Scotch terrier fond of burying frogs, Frances Power Cobbe suggested an explanation a week later: [Feb. 9, 1895.] I think I can explain the puzzle of the Scotch terrier and his interment of the frogs, for the satisfaction of your correspondent. A friend of mine had once a retriever who was stung by a bee, and ever afterwards, when the dog found a bee near the ground, she stamped on it, and then scraped earth over it and buried it effectually -presumably to put an end to the danger of further stings. In like manner, another dog having bitten a toad, showed every sign of having found the mouthful to the last degree unpleasant. Probably Mr. Acland-Troyte’s dog had, in the same way, bitten a toad, and conceived henceforth that he rendered public service by putting every toad-like creature he saw carefully and gingerly “out of harm’s way,” underground. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 5, 2011

Frank Ke

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:02.541851

beatus-of-liebana

Beatus of Liébana By John Williams April 18, 2011 In a monastery in the mountains of northern Spain, 700 years after the Book of Revelations was written, a monk set down to illustrate a collection of writings he had compiled about this most vivid and apocalyptic of the New Testament books. Throughout the next few centuries his depictions of multi-headed beasts, decapitated sinners, and trumpet blowing angels, would be copied over and over again in various versions of the manuscript. John Williams, author of The Illustrated Beatus, introduces Beatus of Liébana and his Commentary on the Apocalypse. Towards the end of the eighth century Beatus, a monk in the monastery of San Martin de Turieno, near present day Santander, compiled a Commentary on the Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse, from the writings dedicated to the topic by such patristic authors as Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose and Irenaeus. Recognition of Beatus of Liébana has survived to our time thanks to his decision to illustrate the sixty-eight sections into which he divided the text of the Book of Revelation. It was a decision that could not easily have been anticipated, for it is not at all clear that Beatus had ever seen an illustrated book, and it is almost certain these illustrations were invented by him or an assistant. The pictures would remain integral to the many — some twenty-six — copies of the Commentary that have survived. Some have assumed that Beatus’s great work was linked to his campaign against “Adoptionism,” the heretical position on the nature of the Godhead espoused by the bishop of Toledo, but it antedated that campaign. More commonly the book has been linked to the fact that Christian Spain had been conquered and occupied by Muslims. Perhaps some monks, who expected to adopt an allegorical mode for much that they read, identified the assailants of the righteous in the Book of Revelation with their Andalusian neighbors, but the texts harvested by Beatus were all written before Muhammad’s time and can not explicitly target Islam. In fact, the few passages that can be attributed to Beatus himself, make it clear that he chose the Apocalypse, the last book of the Bible and the one that prophesies the future, because of the common belief that the world would end in A.D. 800 and usher in the Last Judgment. The fact that most copies date after the tenth century, when millennial expectations might have been revived, shows that the tradition had a life of its own. The illustrations must have played a major role in survival of the tradition. The Apocalypse dramatically exposes the future as a contest between the people of God and a triumphant Godhead and the Anti-Christ and his minions, often in the guise of fantastic beasts. Lacking any copy from before the tenth century, we cannot be sure of the appearance of Beatus’s original illustrations, but those in copies of the tenth century employ a dramatic and colorful style eminently suited to the visions offered by John in the Apocalypse. From the copies that preserve the version of the text closest to the original, we know the pictorial format chosen by Beatus placed the figures directly on the vellum within one of the two columns of text. This format was radically revised in the middle of the tenth century by the scribe and painter Maius in the monastery of San Salvador de Tábara in the southern part of the kingdom of León, as first witnessed in the Commentary in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Inspired by the manner in which biblical subjects were illustrated at the French monastery of Saint-Martin de Tours, Maius enlarged the pictures, sometimes spreading them in an inventive way across two facing pages. With the addition of frames the backgrounds were painted, often — and again Touronian painting was influential — in horizontal bands of contrasting colors. No one would mistake this polychromatic expressionistic style for the classicizing style of Tours, nor can it be traced, as is sometimes assumed, to the influence of the art of Andalusia. In the succeeding centuries, however, native style would give way to successive phases of pictorial language invented north of the Pyrenees. The last illustrated copy surviving dates to the middle of the thirteenth century, a time that coincides with the decline of monastic culture. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 18, 2011

John Williams

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:02.883918

labillardiere-and-his-relation

Labillardière and his Relation By Edward Duyker August 15, 2011 When the French explorer Lapérouse went missing, a search voyage was put together to retrace his course around the islands of Australasia. On the mission was the naturalist Jacques Labillardière who published a book in 1800 of his experiences. Edward Duyker, author of Citizen Labillardière: A Naturalist’s Life in Revolution and Exploration (1755-1834), explores the impact of his pioneering work. Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière’s Relation du voyage à la recherche de La Pérouse (1800) is a personal account of an attempt to solve a mystery which began in March 1788. After a five week sojourn–following up on James Cook’s discoveries, investigating reports of a new British colony and undertaking scientific work — the French explorer Jean-François Galaup de Lapérouse sailed out of Botany Bay, New South Wales, and was never seen again by Europeans. His disappearance was a matter of great national concern in France. Just before mounting the scaffold of the guillotine, Louis XVI is said to have asked: ‘Is there any news of M. de Lapérouse?’. In 1791, when the French National Assembly decided to send a rescue expedition, probably the first humanitarian mission on a global scale in world history, Admiral Antoine Raymond Joseph Bruny d’Entrecasteaux was chosen as the commander of its two ships: Recherche and Esperance (‘Search’ and ‘Hope’). We know now that Lapérouse’s expedition was wrecked off Vanikoro in the Solomon Islands. Although d’Entrecasteaux sailed very close to Vanikoro, he failed to discover the fate of Lapérouse and ultimately perished during the voyage. Nevertheless, his expedition made a number of significant geographical discoveries. In Tasmania these discoveries included Recherche Bay, the D’Entrecasteaux Channel (between the mainland and Bruny Island) and the estuaries of the Huon and Derwent Rivers. In Western Australia, d’Entrecasteaux discovered Esperance Bay and surveyed the Archipelago of the Recherche. He also discovered islands in the d’Entrecasteaux group off New Guinea and named and surveyed the Huon Peninsula. Furthermore, his expedition was of considerable significance in the history of geophysics, for it returned with the first survey of global magnetic intensity, proving that it strengthens away from the equator to both north and south. D’Entrecasteaux’s voyage also yielded significant natural history collections and ethnographic observationsincluding some of the earliest recorded observations of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania. The most valuable contributions in these areas was made by the naturalist Labillardière. His Relation du voyage à la recherche de La Pérouseone of the classic works of French travel literaturepublished by the printer and bookseller H.-J. Jansen in the rue des Maçons, was accompanied by an atlas of impressive engravings based on sketches of scenes by Jean Piron, but also of plants by the great Pierre-Joseph Redouté and of birds by Jean-Baptiste Audebert. Labillardière’s Relation proved to be an international best seller. There were several French editions and in 1817 the Atlas was reprinted. Four English editions quickly appeared between 1800 and 1802, and German editions were published in Hamburg (1801) and Vienna (1804). Through his authorship of the Relation du voyage à la recherche de La Pérouse, Labillardière helped to usher the southern continent into the European imagination and may even have helped precipitate British pre-emptive settlement of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). Labillardière would also produce what in practical terms was the first published flora of Australia: the magnificent two-volume Novae Hollandiae plantarum specimen (1804–06) containing 265 copperplate engravings. Labillardière has the distinction of having named the floral emblems of Tasmania (Eucalyptus globulus) and Victoria (Epacris impressa), as well as the genus Anigozanthus to which the floral emblem of Western Australia belongs. Later he published the first flora of New Caledonia, Sertum austro-caledonicum (1824—1825), which unlike his earlier works was not organized on Linnean lines. Born in Alençon, Normandy, in 1755, Labillardière was the son of a lace merchant. After studies at Alençon’s Collège Royale, he studied botany and medicine at Montpellier under Antoine Gouan (a correspondent of Linnaeus), Reims and then in Paris where he came under the influence of Louis-Guillaume Le Monnier, Professor of Botany at the Jardin du Roi. He visited England in 1783 and met Sir Joseph Banks. On his return to France, Labilllardière travelled in the Alps with Dominique Villars and later Carlo Antonio Bellardi. In 1787—8, with the assistance of Le Monnier and Foreign Minister Vergennes, he collected in Cyprus, Lebanon and Syria—travels which provided the foundations for his important early work on the botany of the Near East: Icones plantarum Syriae rariorum (1791—1812). He was selected to join d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition in 1791. Labillardière was a supporter of the French Revolution and was known for his difficult temperament. After the disintegration of the d’Entrecasteaux expedition, on royalist and republican lines in the Dutch East Indies, he suffered the indignity of internment and having his natural history specimens confiscated. Fortunately for posterity, these precious collections were returned through the gracious intervention of Sir Joseph Banks. Although the Relation hints at sympathy for the ‘transmutationist’ ideas of Lamarck, Labillardière did not develop any evolutionary notions based on his field research­. Nevertheless, his books and articles had considerable taxonomic, systematic, biogeographic and morphological significance, and it was upon such foundations that later evolutionary ecology was built. In an age when the discovery of new species and genera was often seen as the apogee of botanical pursuit, Labillardière was accorded ample kudos. Even today, some fifty of the plant genera he established survive. However, in his Relation and in a number of scientific papers, Labillardière ventured beyond a mere cataloguing of nature. He had a strong interest in applied botany and his writings contain numerous observations on subjects such as timber, plant fibres, food crops and herbal pharmacology. They also include studies of significant aspects of animal behaviour and physiology. And aside from his commercial-military strategic perceptions — such as the advantages offered by the D’Entrecasteaux Channel for a trading maritime power, or the value of cultivating New Zealand flax for naval cordage — Labillardière’s applied observations often had enduring ethnological significance. Furthermore, as an ethnographer he attempted to apply empirical methods to record the customs and social structures of indigenous communities he encountered in Australia and the Pacific. Arguably his vocabularies of native languages, as keys to cultural understanding, also beg comparison with his systematic botanical descriptions, representing as they do a necessary ordering of the natural world on the threshold of modern ecological and evolutionary understanding. In the wake of Napoleon’s victories in Italy, Labillardière was appointed a special commissioner by the French government and to his discredit was involved in the plunder of Italian museums and libraries for France. In 1799 he married Marthe Goudes Desfriches, the twice-widowed daughter of a military surgeon, but they had no surviving children. He was elected a member of the Institut de France in 1800. Labillardière died in Paris on 9 January 1834 and is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery. The English botanist Sir James Edward Smith named the genus Billardiera in his honour. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 15, 2011

Edward Duyker

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:03.557186

tales-from-tahiti

Tales from Tahiti By Ray Davis February 8, 2011 In 1890, Henry Adams - the historian, academic, journalist, and descendent of two US presidents - set out on a tour of the South Pacific. After befriending the family of "the last Queen of Tahiti," he became inspired to write what is considered to be the first history of the island. Through Adams' letters, Ray Davis explores the story of the book's creation. The book variously titled in its two small self-published editions Tahiti, Memoirs of Marau Taaroa, or Memoirs of Arii Taimai was a collaboration between the American historian Henry Adams and two Queens of Tahiti: Arii Taimai (positioned as the first-person narrator of the work) and her daughter, Marau Taaroa. After his wife’s suicide in December 1885, Adams lost himself in the massive job of finishing his history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations. After it was done, he came close to losing himself in nothing at all. In 1890, he set out with a friend, the fashionable painter John La Farge, for an indefinite voyage into the Pacific. His purported list of goals included tracking down and sampling the legendary durian fruit, following his friend Clarence King’s example and falling madly in lust with exotic native girls, and attaining Enlightenment. Predictably, all these pseudo-hopes were frustrated: the durian was a “shameful disgrace to humanity” (although the mango and mangosteen comforted), and intellectual bemusement ran stronger than either bodily or spiritual lust. But the unspoken purpose -- to somehow re-learn survival -- was gained: Adams started the trip in an almost catatonic depression and ended it sparkling with bitches and moans in high pissant form. During the travellers’ five months in Tahiti, Adams grew bored with passive tourism: Lovely as it is, it gets on my nerves at last -- this eternal charm of middle-aged melancholy. If I could only paint it, or express it in poetry or prose, or do anything with it, or even shake it out of its exasperating repose, the feeling would be a pleasant one, and I should fall in love with the very wrinkles of my venerable and spiritual Taïtian grandmother; but when one has nothing else to look at, one rebels at being forever smiled upon by a grandmother whose complexion is absolutely divine, and whose attitude indicates the highest breeding, while she suggests no end of charm of conversation, yet refuses to do anything but smile in a sort of sad way that may mean much or mean nothing. Either she or I come near to being a fool. After searching the coral reef for confirmation or refutation of Darwin, he became close friends with the family of “the last Queen of Tahiti,” Marau Taaroa: ... she is greatly interested in Taïti history, poetry, legends and traditions, and as for ghost-stories, she tells them by the hour with evident belief.... She always seems to me to be quite capable of doing anything strange, out of abstraction; as she might mistake me for her small child, and sling me on her arm without noticing the difference, such as it is, in size. ... and especially attached to Arii Tamai, described in an early letter as “the hereditary chiefess of the Tevas, the grandest dame in Tahiti, the widow of Salmon, the London Jew.” (The psychologically speculative might wonder whether Adams was attracted by the contrast between her warm-heartedness and the frankly cold aggression of his own family of faded nation-rulers.) On May 10, 1891, he wrote: By way of excitement or something to talk about, I some time ago told old Marau that she ought to write memoirs, and if she would narrate her life to me, I would take notes and write it out, chapter by chapter. To our surprise, she took up the idea seriously, and we are to begin work today, assisted by the old chiefess mother, who will have to start us from Captain Cook’s time. And a week later: Luckily I am rather amused and occupied. My “Memoirs of Marau, Queen of Tahiti” give me a sort of excuse for doing nothing. Whenever Marau comes to town, I get from her a lot of notes, which I understand very little, and she not much; then I write them out; then find they are all wrong; then dispute with her till she becomes energetic and goes as far as the next room to ask her mother. The dear old lady has been quite unwell. The other evening I was taken in to see her, and found her sitting on her mat on an inner verandah. When I sat down beside her, she drew me to her and kissed me so affectionately that the tears stood in my eyes.... La Farge is not in love with her as I am; he takes more to Marau and the girls; but I think the Hinarii is worth them all. At the beginning of June: Marau is to go on with her memoirs, and send them to Washington. So she says, with her ferocious air of determination, half Tahitian and half Hebrew; and if she keeps her word, I shall have a little occupation which will amuse you too, for I have begged her to put in all the scandal she can, and the devil knows that she can put in plenty. And on leaving Tahiti a few days later: ... we had a gay breakfast; but I cared much less for the gaiety than I did for the parting with the dear old lady, who kissed me on both cheeks -- after all, she is barely seventy, va! -- and made us a little speech, with such dignity and feeling, that though it was in native, and I did not understand a word of it, I quite broke down. I shall never see her again, but I have learned from her what the archaic woman was. If Marau only completes the memoirs, you will see; and I left Marau dead bent on doing it. The work did continue after Adams’s return to America — part of a letter from December 1892 survives in which Adams presses Marau at scholarly length on dozens of points of genealogy and geography — finally achieving what would be its final form in a privately printed edition of 1901. It’s a decidedly odd form, certainly not the personal memoirs originally described: Marau shows up not at all, and the supposed narrator has turned into Arii Tamai. The mix of scholarly history, ethnographic reportage, and primary source material hasn’t been worked into a organic voice or structure. Given this, the book perhaps wouldn’t make the best introduction to Henry Adams. But as the first history of Tahiti, written with the full support of the family at the center of the island’s annexation as a French colony, and as an attempt to give full attention to both sides of the confrontation between “civilized” and “primitive” cultures, it deserves wider access than it’s attained to date. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 8, 2011

Ray Davis

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:04.020058

american-kaleidoscope-morton-prince-and-the-boston-revolution-in-psychotherapy

American Kaleidoscope Morton Prince and the Boston Revolution in Psychotherapy By George Prochnik August 5, 2011 In 1906 the American physician and neurologist Morton Henry Prince published his remarkable monograph The Dissociation of a Personality in which he details the condition of 'Sally Beauchamp', America's first famous multiple-personality case. George Prochnik discusses the life and thought of the man Freud called "an unimaginable ass". 1. Morton Prince—physically hale, philosophically heterodox, ethically uncompromising, psychologically splintered—epitomizes a classic New England character at its sunset hour. Indeed, Prince’s fiery conviction that he could make all his contradictory elements hang together makes his own psychology as fascinating as that of the patients and politicians he scrutinizes. And even when he fumbles in making a grand diagnosis of the foibles of others, it sometimes seems that it’s precisely Prince’s lack of a compelling master-theory that makes his work such a rich repository of individual observations. Until Freud and the rearrangement of values occasioned by the Great War soured his spirit, Prince sustained a note of plucky anarchy in his approach to almost all social problems. In a typical instance of this happily contrarian strain to Prince’s thoughts, he once responded to a suggestion by Upton Sinclair that intercollegiate football be abolished as a “killer of thought” by announcing that what should be abolished was rather the professional coach, whose last duty before surrendering his office should be “handing the game back to the boys.” Less felicitous was Prince’s combative sense of near infallibility as a judge of what was wrong with everyone else—the quality his famous patient Miss Beauchamp once described as Prince’s tendency to be “so awfully wrathy and superior.” Prince fought back against the era’s double threat of moony spiritualists and zealous psychoanalysts on the grounds of his adversaries’ refusal to rationally engage with evidence that challenged their axiomatic beliefs. But confronted with the intractability of those who could not see the virtues of his own high-minded middle way, Prince tended to swerve over into untempered opposition that partook of the same absolutism he condemned in others. When Freud’s disciple Ernst Jones objected to his pugnaciousness, Prince dismissed Jones outright—not for his ideology but for the wimpiness of his come-back punch. “Can you imagine John Brown, Luther, Calvin . . . whimpering ‘like a girl’ because their opponents hit them back or because they would not believe?” he railed to a colleague. Even at his more offensive moments, the vigor of his high dudgeon makes for lively reading. 2. Prince’s lifelong focus lay in charting the relationship between body and mind. He never forgot an experience he’d had in church as a child when the preacher abruptly pointed above the congregation’s head to a chandelier swaying in the breeze and remarked that the human body was affected by the spirit exactly as those dangling crystals were by the wind. The puzzle of what, precisely, this correlation meant haunted Prince’s professional life. He strove to show that there was, at the last, no opposition between mental function and bodily mechanics because there was no integral distinction between the two. But the question of what this seamless contiguity implied for ultimate questions of human nature was a matter on which he waffled with uninspired ambivalence. For the first part of his career, Prince sought to minimize the element of spirit altogether by advocating a purely materialist vision of mental dynamics. Thought and emotion did not act to influence the operations of the brain; they were the substance of those operations. In the 1880s and 1890s, Prince contributed to the evolution of a sophisticated behaviorist theory of mental health that anticipated many aspects of cognitive therapy. He argued that neuroses developed through the often random associations between negative experiences and phenomena surrounding such experiences. These associations were then fixed through repetition and habit; but could be unraveled in treatment through aggressive “conditioning,” both physical and ideational, which eventually reconfigured corrosive behavioral patterns. As was often the case with Prince, key theoretical positions were born of personal experience. Prince’s entire family suffered from a thunder phobia that led them to flee inside closets, dive beneath beds and rush into each other’s shivering arms to hide from storms. Prince finally conquered the syndrome by forcing himself to remain outside in the most violent thunder fusillades until his angst about the warring heavens was quashed. Regardless of his motivations, by placing so strong an emphasis on the role of learned habits of association in the development of symptoms, Prince helped undermine the position of social conservatives who condemned whole families, neighborhoods and populations on the basis of hereditary degeneration. Concurrently, he bolstered the case for the work of New England’s large network of progressive civic reformers, in which he himself played a passionate role. Indeed, Prince’s understanding of the complex web of motives that converged in the behavior of individuals and states led to his championing numerous issues of social justice in national and international arenas. Prince attacked the Sacco-Vanzetti verdict as a gross, cynical manipulation of the jury’s ignorance about the working of perception and memory. He fought for the League of Nations as an essential counterbalance to monolithic, megalomaniacal state enterprise of any stamp. By the turn-of-the-century, Prince stood at the forefront of a cadre of Boston psychotherapists whose open minds, erudition and dogged clinical labors had upended previous American understandings of how the mind worked. Building on scaffolding erected by such pivotal French psychologists as Jean Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet, Prince linked neuroses to extreme “dissociations” between mental states that resulted in a kind of psychological deadlock. This deadlock manifested in rigid behaviors that failed to respond to external reality’s flux and flow. To reintegrate the self, Prince collaborated with his fellow New Englanders in developing a surprisingly sophisticated proto-Freudian version of talk therapy. Like others in his circle, he was also a talented hypnotist who translated a subtle understanding of the power of suggestion into effective clinical practice. Together with colleagues like James Jackson Putnam, Prince began to outline a new, holistic approach to the challenge of psychological treatment that took elements of older, so-called “somatic” treatments like hydrotherapy and electric therapy and melded these onto language-based probings of patients’ psychological conditions. There were still some wild and woolly edges of his methodology to be sure. In The Dissociation of Personality, Prince’s best-selling, hugely influential account of America’s first famous multiple-personality case, he describes a (literally) climactic moment of treatment that qualifies as not just surprising, but jaw-dropping. In order to fully exorcise the sassy alternative personality nicknamed “Sally” who had been tormenting his patient, Prince began applying an established technique whereby he put pressure on a “hypno-genetic point” over the patient’s spine. “With a strength that I did not think she possessed,” Prince records, “she fought, wrestled, struggled to throw off my grasp, and to resist the subtle power. The rush of physical sensations through her body, and the mental feeling that her consciousness was being engulfed in oblivion were more than she could bear. In mental anguish she shouted aloud. Thus for two hours we struggled.” Two hours? Try to picture this insane, erotic wrestling match in a prim Boston medical office between a righteous, jaunty medical luminary then in his mid-fifties and a withdrawn college-age young woman of humble origins. Rather than the brush of Prince's actual portraitist John Singer Sargent, one longs for the hand of Francis Bacon to do the duel justice. There’s something symptomatic of Prince's deeper conundrum in this ethically chaotic moment of full-throttle body-mind therapy. For all his intermittent clinical acumen, the unbending value systems Prince and his fellow Boston doctors inherited from their forbearers ultimately hindered them from orienting their practice effectively toward modernity. Prince had seen through the past, but when he looked into the future, he felt so revolted by what he saw that he tended to violently swerve his gaze backward again. Thus, in works like The Psychology of the Kaiser and The Creed of Deutschtum, Prince revealed himself to be enormously prescient about the dangers of German militarism and the militaristic state of mind as such. In the former study he described militarism under the Kaiser as “something much more than a system of defense against encroachments from within and without—it is a mode of, and organization for, attack in the enforcement of progressive policies, of national growth, and of the will of the State, whatever direction these may take.” Yet in trying to fashion an argument for American interventionism against these kinds of threats in the international arenas Prince fell back on a jingoistic sense of his home country’s historic moral clarity. And in attempting to explain why America had so far failed to respond to the German invasion of Belgium in 1915, he could only surmise that as “a polyglot nation speaking many tongues” his country had lost “the homogeneity of a single race” that had hitherto enabled the maintenance of a national conscience. 3. In 1908 Sigmund Freud received an invitation from the president of Clark University to come to the United States and lecture on psychoanalysis at the school’s 20th anniversary celebration, scheduled for July. With his theories failing to gain traction among professional circles at home, and the psychoanalytic movement itself already fissured by nasty spats, one might have expected Freud to seize this opportunity to export analysis to the New World. However, Freud politely declined the offer, citing in his refusal letter the economic hardship of preempting the seasonal loss of income that would descend with Vienna's summer hiatus. In private, however, he gave another explanation. To his disciple, Karl Abrams, who’d recently had a paper concerned with the psychology of sexuality rejected by The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, (the periodical Prince had founded and continued to edit), Freud remarked, “Morton Prince, who has always been a kaleidoscopic character, is this time really lamentable. Where do the Americans expect to get with this fear of public prudery?” Writing to Jung a few days later, he elaborated on his apprehensions, noting his belief that “once they discover the sexual core of our psychological theories they will drop us. Their prudery and their material dependence on the public are too great. That is why I’ve no desire to risk the trip there in July.” Freud almost didn’t come to the United States at all because of his virulent distaste for a host of American bugbears that seemed to dovetail in the person of Morton Prince, whom Freud would soon be calling “the most arrogant ass imaginable.” Indeed Prince— a champion yachtsman, a talented horseman, a member of many jolly social clubs and an all-around emblem of sporty Yankee self-reliance fit the model of the privileged WASP that made Freud most self-conscious about his own ancestral stereotypes. But for all of Freud’s understandable apprehensions about Prince having a constitutional aversion to psychoanalytic theory, (“the gentle zephyrs of prudery blowing across from America” were ones for which Prince had “a quite special organ” Freud told Jung), he failed to take the measure of the man himself. Not only was Prince not a prude, he confessed in later years that with some patients he’d even pushed too hard to find a sexual etiology to their symptoms where none actually existed. Indeed, after exposure to Freud’s work, Prince’s practice continued to reflect many aspects of Freudian theory. Most of all, Freud misjudged in assessing that Prince was a threat to Freud, rather than the other way around. As Prince wrote looking back on the era of Freud’s arrival in America, “Freudian psychology . . . flooded the field like a full-rising tide, and the rest of us were left submerged like clams buried in the sands at low water.” Rather than the importance of sexuality to human’s psychological make-up, what Prince challenged was the dogmatism with which Freud's axioms were propounded—the insistence that all neurotic symptoms were rooted in sex. (To name but one exception important to Prince, he contended that the convolutions of pride and shame could also distort mental health.) Prince summed up his objection to Freud in a response to an attack by Jones recorded in the 1911 Journal of Abnormal Psychology: “it sometimes seem as if the followers of Freud care more for the acceptance of their method—for being baptized in the faith, than for the determination of truth.” For himself, he says, in the spirit of his one-time mentor, William James, “I don’t care a button what method is employed in the investigation of any given problem, provided it does not lead to fallacies in the results.” It was this mobility of ideological allegiance that got the goat of the Freudians and stoked their hostility to him. Yet given its latter-day history, Prince’s balanced agnosticism about analysis appears only too justified. Now that the Freudian tide has receded, it is Prince's early support for cognitive therapy that appears remarkably forward looking, while Freud's opus—rightly or wrongly—has been largely side-channeled into cultural studies programs of the academy. We have much to learn from re-examining figures like Prince who occupy a pivotal position in early 20th Century psychological debates, before the dogmatism of Freud's disciples crowded out elements that might have fostered a more fruitfully heterogeneous approach to psychotherapy. Reading their copious writings, we catch glimpses of multiple intriguing alternative histories—and, perhaps, come to question the orthodoxies of our own time. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 5, 2011

George Prochnik

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:04.502016

geronimo-the-warrior

Geronimo The Warrior By Edward Rielly August 29, 2011 In 1906, Geronimo published his autobiography recounting the fascinating story of his life, from his years as a resistance fighter, to his capture and subsequent period of celebrity in which he appeared at the 1904 St Louis World Fair and met President Roosevelt. Edward Rielly, author of Legends of American Indian Resistance, tells of the tragic massacre which underpinned his life. Geronimo (1829-1909), whose given name was Goyahkla, sometimes spelled Goyathlay, is one of the most famous figures in the history of the American Indian resistance effort. His name is virtually synonymous with that of a warrior, so much so that his name has been appropriated for a wide range of military (or simply adventuresome) endeavors. Geronimo’s reputation is well deserved, for his very name excited fear in settlers both north and south of the U.S-Mexican border. He was hated by Euro-Americans and even by some Apaches, who blamed him for continuing to stoke the fires of warfare after ultimate defeat of the Apaches seemed inevitable. In addition, he lacked the social and political leadership skills of a Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce and the multidimensional qualities (including the spiritual character) of a Sitting Bull, the great Lakota leader who served as the magnet attracting huge numbers of Plains Indians to him, a force that would secure the most famous resistance victory ever against the U.S. military — at Little Bighorn in 1876. Geronimo was primarily a fighter, a lasting reputation that led American paratroopers in World War II to call out the name “Geronimo” before plunging from their planes. Schoolchildren, for decades after Geronimo’s death, would similarly yell his name before undertaking a real or imagined feat of bravery, such as leaping from a swing into a river. A much more recent, and highly controversial, use of Geronimo’s name was its employment by the U.S. military as a code name linked to the 2011 operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. The association of Geronimo’s name with that of the hated terrorist elicited considerable resentment by a wide range of organizations and individuals, including the National Congress of American Indians, the Onondaga National Council of chiefs, Native American publications, Fort Sill Apache Tribal Chairman Jeff Houser, and Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo. Their response was so intense that the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs took up the issue at a hearing previously scheduled to discuss use of Indian names and images as sports mascots and in other areas of popular culture. Defense Department officials argued that they had intended no disrespect to Geronimo and had named the total operation against bin Laden Operation Neptune Spear, further naming each step alphabetically. The “G” step involved the capture or killing of bin Laden and was coded with the Indian leader’s name, an explanation that did not do much to satisfy those who had raised objections to the use of Geronimo’s name. So what led Geronimo onto the path that would lead from the battlefields of Mexico and the Southwest to a raid into Pakistan? Although it would be serious oversimplification to reduce all of Geronimo’s public life to one incident, certainly his life as a warrior was deeply influenced by a very personal event — an attack on an Apache camp by a Mexican general, José María Carrasco. For years, Apaches had been both trading with and fighting Mexicans. As soon as he reached adulthood, at about the age of seventeen, Goyahkla, who was not yet known as Geronimo, was accepted as a warrior and entered into this dual relationship with Mexicans. About two years earlier, around 1844, Goyahkla’s father, Taklishim, had died of an illness, and Goyahkla assumed responsibility for his mother, Juana (Juanita). Geronimo’s autobiography — dictated to Stephen M. Barrett, superintendent of schools in Lawton, Oklahoma, with Asa Adklugie, a former student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, translating, and published in 1906 — shows a son deeply committed to his mother. Shortly after becoming a warrior, Goyahkla married a young Nednai Apache, Alope, giving a herd of ponies — a substantial sum — to her father, Noposo, for the privilege of wedding her, the price, according to his autobiography, set so high because she was a good daughter and her father perhaps wanted to keep her with him. Goyahkla and Alope had been lovers for some time, and he records in the autobiography that his greatest joy upon arriving at adulthood was that he could marry her. Goyahkla took Alope to live near his mother. His bride decorated their tipi with beads and pictures drawn on buckskin. She was a good wife, he notes, and they were happy together with their three children. When Goyahkla crossed into Mexico again around 1850 (Geronimo in his autobiography cites 1858 but is often off in his dating), he had no reason to suspect anything out of the usual. Traveling in a large group under Mangas Coloradas, the Apaches — including members of the Bedonkohe band to which Goyahkla belonged and the Nednai band, both subdivisions of the Chiricahua Apaches — passed through Sonora on their way to Casas Grandes. They camped at what is generally believed to be Janos (but referred to as Kaskiyeh in the autobiography), and many of the men went into town to trade. This went on for several days, each time a guard of men staying behind to protect the women, children, and supplies. One afternoon, however, as the men were returning to camp, they met some women and children fleeing from Mexican troops who had attacked the camp, killing the guards as well as many of the women and children, destroying supplies, and stealing the Apaches’ ponies. When Goyahkla reached the camp, he discovered his wife, mother, and three children all dead. He tells in his autobiography of going off by himself and standing by a river. Geronimo, so many years after the event, does not say what he was feeling at that river, but his understated description clearly speaks powerfully to a great grief and sense of loss. Without supplies and with most of their weapons and ponies lost, the survivors turned back toward Arizona. The elderly Geronimo recalls how he was unable to pray or devise any plan of action at the moment — devoid of purpose, he followed his comrades silently, staying by himself just within hearing of the now much smaller group. Arriving at his home, Goyahkla gazed, certainly with great sorrow, at Alope’s decorations and their children’s toy before burning them, along with his tipi and his mother’s. Never again, Geronimo notes in his autobiography, would he feel content in his own home. Then, turning from his immediate grief, he vowed revenge on the Mexicans. A year later, Goyahkla returned to Mexico within a large war party and began to exact that revenge. It reportedly was during this excursion into Mexico that his enemies began calling him Geronimo, although no definitive explanation for the naming has ever been given. The name stuck, and Geronimo would continue his battles against Mexicans and, before long, settlers and soldiers of the United States who invaded his homeland, earning the warrior’s reputation that would stay with him throughout his life and into the twenty-first century, even into places that Geronimo could never have imagined, such as Pakistan. At first glance, Geronimo seems an unlikely candidate to compose his life story and be willing to share it with those whom he had been fighting for most of his adult life. There is a great desire, however, in many people, perhaps in most, to want to set the record straight and be understood and Geronimo seems to have been no different in this regard. He also expressed his hope that his story might persuade the government to allow him and other Apaches to return to their native Southwest to live. In addition, Geronimo saw his autobiography as a way to make money; during his late years as a prisoner, he had learned the power of money and had taken to selling photographs, buttons, and other souvenirs. Consequently, when Barrett raised the possibility of telling his story, Geronimo insisted that he be paid for doing so. Geronimo’s occasional suspicions that Superintendent Barrett may have wanted his story in order to do him harm were softened by the presence of translator Asa Adklugie, who was a son of Juh (also spelled Whoa), a longtime Geronimo friend, ally, and cousin by marriage. Fully aware that he was hated by many and at the mercy of the government, Geronimo was politically astute as he narrated his exploits, focusing in detail on his battles with Mexicans but remaining generally reticent concerning encounters with the U.S. military. Still, the autobiography probably would never have been published without the support of President Theodore Roosevelt. Barrett’s request to write Geronimo’s life was rejected by the military, but an appeal to the president brought the desired permission. Responding later to the complete manuscript, President Roosevelt again offered his support but with the suggestion that Barrett clarify that opinions expressed in the book were Geronimo’s alone. Roosevelt was not hard to convince. Prior to Barrett¹s request, Roosevelt had himself made a request that Geronimo ride in his inaugural parade in March 1905, which the Apache leader did. Before leaving Washington, Geronimo met with the president and made a plea to be permitted to return to his homeland. Roosevelt listened compassionately but refused, explaining that he feared reprisals against the Apaches by area residents if they returned. When the autobiography was published in 1906, Geronimo, still trying, and apparently believing that the president might relent, dedicated his narrative to President Roosevelt. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 29, 2011

Edward Riell

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:04.816692

stories-of-a-hollow-earth

Stories of a Hollow Earth By Peter Fitting October 10, 2011 In 1741 the Norwegian-Danish author Ludvig Holberg published Klimii Iter Subterraneum, a satirical science-fiction/fantasy novel detailing the adventures of its hero Niels Klim in a utopian society existing beneath the surface of the earth. Peter Fitting, author of Subterranean Worlds: A Critical Anthology, explores Holberg's book in the wider context of the hollow earth theory. In 1818 John Cleves Symmes, Jr, issued his “Circular Number 1,” sending copies to “each notable foreign government, reigning prince, legislature, city, college, and philosophical society, quite around the earth”: I declare that the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking. The fortunes of the idea that the Earth was “hollow and habitable within,” from classical references to the underworld to esoteric and New Age writers today, have been recounted elsewhere, most notably by Walter Kafton-Minkel in his Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 years of dragons, dwarfs, the dead, lost races & UFOs from inside the earth (1989). Symmes’s theories led to a number of fictional visions of the “world within”, most immediately, Adam Seaborn’s 1820 novel Symzonia — a work which has often been attributed to Symmes himself; and the novel with its diagrams and drawings was for some time cited as evidence that the world is hollow. In a somewhat different way, Symmes’s conviction that there were openings at the poles also led to the establishment of perhaps the most famous American naval scientific expedition, the “United States Exploring Expedition” which was commissioned to explore the South Pacific and led to the establishment of a national museum of natural history — the Smithsonian Institute. (The history of the expedition and its origins in Symmes’ ideas is recounted in William Stanton’s 1975 The Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842). Symmes, however, was not the first to argue that the Earth was hollow; nor is Symzonia the first novel set in a hollow earth. There are of course numerous narratives — dating back to Greek and Roman texts — of descents into the underworld, but hypotheses about vast channels or chasms inside the Earth appear to be a much more recent idea advanced by some European thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries as an explanation of volcanoes, whirlpools and the like. This period is filled with a variety of now discarded cosmological hypotheses, many inspired by the attempt to reconcile scriptural accounts of Creation with scientific observation: hypotheses about the movement of the sun, the earth and the stars, about the universality of the great Flood, about creation and the origins of life, and about the earth’s own formation. Among the proponents of now abandoned theories about the composition of our planet was Edmond Halley (better known for the comet which bears his name), who proposed (in a paper explaining the movement of the magnetic poles published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1692) that the earth was hollow: “that the seemingly solid earth is actually a shell about 500 miles thick containing three smaller concentric spheres . . . each sphere separated from the others by about 500 miles of atmosphere.” While it is perhaps relatively easy to follow the theories of inner cavities or of a passage between the poles (in writers like Thomas Burnet and Athanasius Kircher in the late 17th century), and to see their relationship to a text like the anonymous 1721 Relation D’Un Voyage Du Pole Arctique Au Pole Antarctique Par Le Centre Du Monde, (which describes a channel running through the Earth from pole to pole), it is much more difficult to understand how the idea of the hollow Earth emerged as part of Halley’s explanation of the motion of the magnetic poles. Even more inexplicable is the depiction of the hollow earth some fifty years earlier — complete with inner sun and earth — in Ludvig Holberg’s 1741 subterranean utopia, The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground. This is a far greater imaginative leap, for instance, than Jules Verne’s well-known account of a descent into the bowels of the earth through a dormant volcano (Voyage au centre de la terre, 1865). Verne’s narrative of the discovery of a vast underworld cavern formed during an earlier geological period seems much more plausible than Holberg’s invention of two entire inner worlds — one a planet inhabited by intelligent trees, the other the underside of the earth’s crust, as vast as the outer crust on which we live, and populated with a fantastic variety of intelligent life forms. First published in Latin in 1741, The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground, with a new theory of the Earth and the History of the previously unknown Fifth Kingdom (Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum, Novam Telluris theoriem ac Historiam Quintae Monarchiae adhuc nobis incognita exhibens) was quickly translated into a number of European languages. (The first English edition dates from 1742). As with Verne’s Voyage, the adventure begins with the descent into a cave, although here the hero falls through a hole into the subterranean world, discovering: “that the conjectures of those men are right who hold the Earth to be hollow, and that within the shell or outward crust there is another lesser globe, and another firmament adorned with lesser sun, stars, and planets”. On the central planet, Klim discovers a happy and prosperous utopian land of intelligent, mobile trees. In his subsequent travels around the planet Klim encounters many bizarre varieties of intelligent trees, and each species forms a separate social grouping. It is these sections of the novel that have earned Klim a place in the history of utopia. But in the final sections of the work Holberg turns from utopia and social satire to fantasy: Klim is expelled from the utopian land of Potu to the underside of the earth’s crust which is inhabited by many other fantastic creatures, all of which — plant and animal species alike — are intelligent and gifted with speech; and then he discovers a race of human savages, who, of all the creatures of the subterranean world, “alone were barbarous and uncivilized”. Klim takes it upon himself to civilise them, and uses his knowledge to manufacture gunpowder and to conquer all of the countries of the firmament, becoming a tyrant — the “Alexander of the Subterranean world”. When his subjects eventually rebel, he is forced into flight and falls into the same hole through which he had previously fallen, thus returning to Norway. The Journey of Niels Klim was widely known in the 19th century: the narrator of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” includes the “Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm” among his readings, while the poet Thomas de Quincy began a translation of Klim sometime in the mid-1820s. Giacomo Casanova (better known for his Memoirs) wrote a lengthy subterranean utopia — L’Icosameron (1788) — in which he acknowledges the importance of Holberg’s novel; while Mary Shelly mentions in her diary that she read Klim as she was writing Frankenstein. Fictional settings inside the earth can be found throughout the 19th and 20th centuries — from Edgar Allen Poe’s “Ms. found in a Bottle” (1833) and his unfinished “Narrative of A. Gordon Pym” (1837), through to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar novels, beginning with At the Earth’s Core (1922); and more recently there are authors like Raymond Bernard and William Read who continue to argue that the Earth is hollow. Born in Bergen, Norway at the time of the Dano-Norwegian monarchy, Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) is probably the most European of Scandinavian writers before Ibsen and certainly the best known; he is often referred to as the “father” of Danish and Norwegian literature. He was a writer, essayist, philosopher, historian and playwright who travelled extensively throughout Europe and is often credited as bringing the Enlightenment to the Nordic countries. In fact, the author of The Journey of Niels Klim was far better known for his “Introduction to Natural and International Law“ and his theatre (he has been described as the “Moliere of the North”). Like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Klim is a combination of social satire, utopia and the fantastic. But Swift’s shipwrecked narrator is a much more familiar (and plausible) utopian narrative device than is Holberg’s imagination of a hollow earth. Holberg never explains who “those men . . . who hold the Earth to be hollow” are, and none of his critics have been able to identify them. As long as Holberg’s sources continue to be a mystery, The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground must be considered the first presentation of the idea of the hollow earth. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 10, 2011

Peter Fitting

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:05.177130

john-muir-s-literary-science

John Muir’s Literary Science By Terry Gifford June 9, 2011 The writings of the Scottish-born American naturalist John Muir are known for their scientific acumen as well as for their rhapsodic flights. Terry Gifford, author of Reconnecting with John Muir, explores Muir's multifaceted engagement with 'God's big show'. John Muir was not unaware of how his discoveries from his empirical research in Yosemite were being used by the professionals who were impatient for conventional scientific papers from him. Muir suspected that his refusal of scientific discourse initially left him vulnerable. Muir’s early revolutionary newspaper article titled ‘Living Glaciers of California’ began life in a letter of 8 October 1872 to his friend Jeanne Carr in which Muir set out his empirical research results in glaciology, joking, ‘You will have the first chance to steal’. This follows his complaint that a paper for the Boston Society of Natural History from Professor Samuel Kneeland drew from Muir’s work ‘and gave me credit for all of the smaller sayings and doings, and stole the broadest truth to himself’. When Muir’s literary executor William Frederic Badè compiled The Life and Letters (1924; reprinted 1996) he tactfully omitted a paragraph from this letter in which Muir also wondered how much credit he was being given in a lecture by the Berkeley geologist Professor LeConte whom Muir had guided with his students in Yosemite two years before. This lecture was to be published and was advertised as ‘advancing many new and interesting theories’. Muir wrote to Jeanne Carr that he could better express his own thoughts for the public than LeConte’s ‘second-hand rehash’. So Muir’s resolve to publish his own work more effectively, using Jeanne Carr as, in effect, his literary agent, derived, at least in part, from a mistrust of professional scientists. In his determined amateurism and refusal to limit himself to the discourse of the professionals, Muir reached a wider audience with greater effect, gaining for himself a place not only in scientific, but also in literary history. In the richness of Muir’s discourse he reveals himself to be what he admired in Asa Gray, ‘a great, progressive, unlimited man like Darwin and Huxley and Tyndall’. What are the ways in which Muir’s discourse might be described as ‘progressive’ and ‘unlimited’? Two key features are narrative and metaphor. Even as he prepared to give the facts and figures of the movements of his stakes in the Mt McClure glacier which proved that the living glaciers of the high Sierra were moving at one inch each day, Muir launched into a mystery narrative, vivid with detail, lively in analogy, seductive in alliteration and powerfully rhythmic: One of the yellow days of last October, when I was among the mountains of the Merced group, following the footprints of the ancient glaciers that once flowed grandly from their ample fountains, reading what I could of their history as written in moraines and canyons and lakes and carved rocks, I came upon a small stream that was carrying mud I had not before seen. Ending this sentence with a slightly formal inversion enables Muir to produce the rhyme that sets up the mystery: ‘stream’/’seen’. In his personal narratives Muir frequently exclaims aloud: ‘Before I had time to reason I said, “Glacier Mud! — mountain meal!”’ The dramatic effect of this on the page has actually been enhanced by Badè’s addition of the quotation and exclamation marks. It is worth remembering that Muir developed a reputation for oral dramatic story-telling that must have been symbiotic with his written narrative sense. Ronald Limbaugh has brilliantly shown that Muir integrated not only his reading, but his oral story-telling with what we have in print in the case of the story of Stickeen. (See Gifford 1996, page 893ff, for a memoir of Muir’s ‘wonderful story-telling ability’.) So, as the narrative unfolds, mud leads to a terminal moraine, above which is snow, on which are lines of stones clearly moving in curves and ‘I shouted, “A living glacier!”’ The Berkeley scientist LeConte had mistrusted Muir’s sample of glacier ice that he had sent him years before, so Muir ‘determined to collect proofs of the common measured arithmetical kind’ which in this letter/article/paper he goes on provide. Of course, what Muir’s measurements revealed was a narrative much more important than that of personal discovery, solving a mystery, or correcting the sceptical professionals of his day who clung to a belief that Yosemite Valley was formed by a single seismic cataclysm. Muir’s is the fundamental narrative demonstrated from different data by Darwin, that creation is still ongoing. It is the dynamic interplay of elemental forces in the natural world that is Muir’s central narrative and the reason why his writing is so dramatic is because he seeks to place himself in their way for the purpose not only of empirical observation, but also to be at home in them as a species. Muir’s scientific data is always a personal narrative because he wants to demonstrate that it is possible for our species to find a place in that ongoing creation. His personal example leads his readership to be aware of choices crucial to its influence on evolution. If, for example, logging reduced the number of tree species in America, the future evolution of American forests was limited in its development. Conservation became, for Muir, not just nostalgic preservation, but an intervention in potential futures. In specific cases this narrative would determine whether the human species could survive in America. Muir noted that the logging of watersheds, for example, was having a disastrous effect upon water conservation in a California that looked unlikely to be able to sustain its growing human population. Commenting on Darwin’s evolutionary narrative Gillian Beer writes, ‘Evolutionary theory brings together two imaginative elements implicit in much nineteenth-century thinking and creativity. One was the fascination with growth . . . The other was the concept of transformation.’ When Beer writes that the reason why Wordsworth and Coleridge mattered to Darwin was because of their ‘emphasis on growth and process rather than on conclusion and confirmation’, one recognises Muir’s central narrative drive. For Muir that unfinished process of American nature — rather than American ‘landscapes’ — had implications for the human species that called for a conservation debate that went deeper than the usual nineteenth century American concept of ‘wise use of resources’. This required a popular mode of writing that could draw upon all the resources of rhetoric. As a trained scientist who had studied the Bible, Milton and Burns, Muir had the literary skills as well as the discipline-base to combine the discourses of authoritative scientist, popular poetic nature writer and conservationist preacher with, admittedly, varying degrees of success. Unlike Darwin, it is clear that Muir delighted in his rhetorical resources. ‘Despite the metaphoric density of his writing,’ Beer writes, ‘Darwin seems never to have raised into consciousness its imaginative . . . implications . . . He saw some of the dangers of “authorisation”.’ Muir revelled in ‘authorisation’, playfully and brilliantly mixing his metaphors to startling effects. One of the techniques Muir frequently used to generate the awe of looking at something afresh was the analogy of poetic images. Thus we have in the discourse of the Studies in the Sierra (1874; reprinted in Gifford 1996) ‘ice-ploughs’, ‘glacial cultivation’, ‘ice-wombs, now mostly barren’, ‘pages of rocks embellished with gardens’, a ‘canyon-tree’ of ice whose ‘fruit and foliage’ are ‘meadow and lake’, together with a ‘five-petalled glacier’. In her study of Victorian scientific prose, Gillian Beer notes the use of poetic effects: ‘Poetry offered particular formal resources to think with . . . The poet sets up multiple relations between ideas in a style closer to the form of theorems than of prose.’ It is clear that Muir was thinking with his metaphors, as when he wrote that whilst the tree analogy for a river served some aspects well, in other respects they ‘more nearly resemble certain gigantic algae with naked stalks’. The essay on the ‘Formation of Soils’ concludes with Muir’s all-encompassing proto-ecological vision that all his poetic devices try to serve: ‘Nor in all these involved operations may we detect the faintest note of disorder; every soil-atom seems to yield enthusiastic obedience to law — boulders and mud-grains moving to music as harmoniously as the far-whirling planets.’ The scope of this, as well as its biblical construction and rhythms, conveys a subtle spiritual dimension that is inherent rather than explicit. But later in life, faced with the urgent need for conservation campaigning, based upon his then extensive scientific knowledge, Muir was also to be roused to the ranting discourse of the preacher. ‘Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well as dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.’ Muir could work his rhetoric up to end a book with a bang. ‘God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought disease, avalanches and a thousand straining levelling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools — only Uncle Sam can do that.’ The final arguments of The Yosemite and Our National Parks respectively are not Muir’s strongest, despite their strong form of discourse. Both arguments appear to appeal to the religious norms of his readers, but both are flawed by their own internal logic. If man-made temples are not as holy as Hetch Hetchy Valley they might actually provide better water-tanks. And no post-Darwinian proto-ecologist can believe that ‘God’ has ‘saved’ America’s forests. In fact, the rather more measured discourse that has preceded these resounding final rants is more convincing. On the Hetch Hetchy issue, Muir took each of the popular arguments for flooding the valley and corrected false information and impressions. Muir argued that this valley is ‘one of the greatest of all our natural resources for the uplifting joy and peace and health of the people . . . where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.’ The argument for the healing power of direct contact with wild nature for urban humans appealed to both utility and spirituality. In his later writing Muir’s democratic appeal on behalf of ‘the people’ was the basis for his conservation strategy. As himself an immigrant with an immigrant’s faith in American democracy, Muir made a moving argument at the end of Our National Parks about America’s welcoming those to the woods who would live wisely in them, but that regulation for sustainable living must ultimately be made by the federal government to control corporate lumber interests. So ultimately, it is not just that Muir could not confine himself to the discourse of the empirical scientist, could not deny his poetic muse. Muir’s talent as a popular writer reaching a wide audience throughout America was put at the service of the American land through the medium of the voting power of the American people. Of course, some of Muir’s writing can seem excruciatingly New Age to the contemporary reader unsympathetic to this discourse, as in the most sentimental of Muir’s personifications when, returning from days spent on the glaciers, ‘bird and plant friends’ welcomed him back among them. It is worth noting Gillian Beer’s observation that Darwin’s anthropomorphisms were ‘based on the assumed congruity of man with all other forms of life’. It is fair to recognise that Muir’s eccentric whimsical persona produced these effects partly out of the same mode of discourse that allowed for ‘snowflowers’ and ‘petalled glaciers’. Images that reminded readers of the seamless nature of the processes of growth and decay, of the sensitivity of everything to its context, were key features of Muir’s rhetorical strategy. We may now wince ourselves to read in the Studies that ‘the huge granite valley was lithe as a serpent, and winced tenderly to the touch of every tributary’. But here was a work of science that sought to convey a vision of more than just ‘congruity’ that strains at the limits of the resources of human discourses themselves. Muir’s earliest published journal, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, is probably his earliest sustained prose attempt to find a discourse adequate to his sense of the dimensions of the world to which he was so alert. This journal is a young man’s purging of many of the assumptions with which he has grown up. It is both a humbling and an uplifting experience: ‘The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.’ But for Muir the demand for a rich use of multiple discourses that not only integrate our forms of knowledge but our modes of expression, is produced by the attempt to confront the complexity of the world in which we have to be at home or die. Muir’s early frustration at the limits of human discourse arose out of a deep sense of the richness of relations in the natural world he wanted to mediate. In that early journal Muir wrote: ‘There is not a fragment in nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself. All together form the one great palimpsest of the world.’ Only a literature such as Muir developed, that drew from all the multiple modes of discourse available, could hope to see into and serve that palimpsest. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 9, 2011

Terry Gifford

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:05.646383

in-hollywood-with-nathanael-west

In Hollywood with Nathanael West By Marion Meade January 1, 2011 Today the works of Nathanael West enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Marion Meade, author of Lonelyhearts, a new biography about West, takes a look at his life in Hollywood and the story behind his most famous work, The Day of the Locust. Hollywood has served as a novelist’s muse for almost a century. The list of writers who found inspiration there includes the likes of Fitzgerald, Mailer, Schulberg, Bukowski, Chandler, Huxley, Waugh, and O’Hara, among plenty of others. But the gold standard for Hollywood fiction remains The Day of the Locust. Nathanael West—novelist, screenwriter, playwright—was one of the most original writers of his generation, a comic artist whose insight into the brutalities of modern life would prove remarkably prophetic. In addition to The Day of the Locust he is the author of another classic Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) as well as two minor works, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) and A Cool Million (1934). Seventy years after publication, The Day of the Locust is still the most significant novel ever written about Hollywood. Beyond that, West’s story examines America during the Great Depression, revealing a diseased country being stained by corruption, hypocrisy, greed, and rage. Movie stars who get their faces on the screen did not excite West. Neither was he dazzled by Hollywood as the glitz and glamour capital of the world. Instead, his tale goes backstage to focus on the raw inner workings of a byzantine business and the working stiffs who write scripts, design sets, and appear in crowd scenes. In the novel’s opening scene, a mob of fake infantry and cavalry is being herded away to fight the fake Battle of Waterloo. “Stage Nine—you bastards—Stage Nine!” a second unit director shouts hysterically through his megaphone. West’s heroes are the cheated ones dredged up from the sea of extras and bit players, the menial assistant directors and lowly writers. Buzzing in the background, meanwhile, are the locusts, the plagues of angry migrants disconnected from Middle America, seduced by the promise of California sunshine and citrus. (The Grapes of Wrath showcases some of the same displaced folks.) Battered by hard knocks, these ragtag bands hang out at movie premieres to gawk at celebrities and sometimes they freak out and start busting balls for no apparent reason. In The Day of the Locust, they are first responsible for a bloody murder, then they riot and start setting fire to the city. By paying homage to the Hollywood machine and its invisible workers, West was able to illuminate the film business from the bottom up. There is not much beauty to be found in what he called the “Dream Dump,” or in his chronicle of American life in the Thirties. It’s all violence all the time, with sickening scenes that still retain the power to shock. W.H. Auden would call West’s people “cripples.” They weren’t cripples to West, who lovingly described his excitable characters as “screwballs and screwboxes.” His original title for the book, The Cheated, accurately reflected their frustration. A native New Yorker, West spent his early life managing Manhattan hotels and writing in his spare time. His first three novels earned a pathetic total of $780, hardly a living wage even during the Depression. Losing confidence in himself as a novelist, West in 1935 moved to Hollywood where he found a screenwriting job at one of the poorest studios, Republic, whose biggest stars were horses and singing cowboys. At the same time that he was learning the craft of movie writing, he was forming the ideas for his next novel. 1939 was a very good year for fiction. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath immediately went off the grid, creating heat and noise when it shot onto the best seller list and won a Pulitzer. (Soon the book would become a movie classic starring Henry Fonda.) Unfortunately, The Day of the Locust was eclipsed by Steinbeck’s blockbuster when it was published a few weeks later. Like his previous books, it was unbought, unread, and clobbered by most literary critics, including some of West’s own friends like Edmund Wilson who took an unexpected swipe at the novel. (It did not measure up to Miss Lonelyhearts, Wilson thought.) Writing to his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, West sounds like a slugger who’s been knocked out: “So far the box score stands: Good reviews—fifteen percent, bad reviews—twenty five percent, brutal personal attacks, sixty percent.” Even worse, he fretted, “ Sales: practically none.” He went on to tell Edmund Wilson that “the book is what the publisher calls a definite flop.” This was a blow because its brilliance had impressed Random House and the publisher Bennett Cerf. As a result, pre-publication prospects could not have been brighter. Turning on a dime, a vexed Cerf failed to promote the title and went on to grumble that he never wanted to see another novel about Hollywood. This proved a bit of an exaggeration because he would shortly publish Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? Who said the book business was soft-hearted? West, devastated, was trying his damndest to sound cheerful. In truth, he felt awfully confused. “I seem to have no market whatsoever,” he said. The Day of the Locust would be West’s last book. In December 1940 he and his wife Eileen were killed in a car crash in the middle of the lettuce fields near El Centro, California. He was 37, she was 27. That he should perish dramatically on the highway came as no surprise to his friends, because he was known to be one of the world’s worst drivers. Despite West’s claim to be writing another novel his effects included only a few notes for a story that sounds similar to Miss Lonelyhearts. During the last year of his life he finally began achieving success as a screenwriter, a highly paid profession in the Thirties. Had he lived, I believe he would have continued to work in Hollywood as a screenwriter, director, or producer. He enjoyed the nice Southern California weather, not to mention a nice fat bank account. Would he have written more novels? Maybe. Then again, maybe not. In the decade following his premature death, West’s fiction was pretty much ignored until it made a comeback in the 1950s. Now The Day of the Locust is a classic and its author considered one of America’s premier novelists. Ironically, it took thirty-five years for a screen adaptation of West’s masterpiece. In 1975, John Schlesinger directed a big-budget production, whose spectacular finale showed rioters going on a rampage and setting fire to Los Angeles. Probably West would have got a kick out of seeing his screwballs and screwboxes on the screen. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 1, 2011

Marion Meade

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:06.132775

robert-fludd-and-his-images-of-the-divine

Robert Fludd and His Images of The Divine By Urszula Szulakowska September 13, 2011 Between 1617 and 1621 the English physician and polymath Robert Fludd published his masterpiece Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia, a two-volume work packed with over sixty intricate engravings. Urszula Szulakowska looks at the philosophical and theological ideas behind the extraordinary images found in the first volume, an exploration of the macrocosm of the universe and spiritual realm. Robert Fludd was a respected English physician (of Welsh origins) employed at the court of King James I of England. He was a prolific writer of vast, multi-volume encyclopaedias in which he discussed a universal range of topics from magical practices — such as alchemy, astrology, kabbalism, and fortune-telling — to radical theological thinking concerning the interrelation of God with the natural and human worlds. However, he also proudly displayed his grasp of practical knowledge, such as mechanics, architecture, military fortifications, armaments, military manoeuvres, hydrology, musical theory and musical instruments, mathematics, geometry, optics, and the art of drawing, as well as chemistry and medicine. Fludd used the common metaphor for the arts as being the “ape of Nature”, a microcosmic form of how the universe itself functioned. Fludd’s most famous work is the History of the Two Worlds (Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia, 1617-21) published in two volumes by Theodore de Bry in Oppenheim. The two worlds under discussion are those of the Microcosm of human life on earth and the Macrocosm of the universe (which included the spiritual realm of the Divine). Fludd himself was a staunch member of the Anglican Church. He was educated in the medical profession at St. John’s College in Oxford. At the turn of the seventeenth century, he set out for an extended period of travel on the continent. He spent a winter with some Jesuits, a Roman Catholic order deeply opposed to Protestantism who, nevertheless, tutored Fludd on magical practices. Fludd, however, always claimed to have worked out the theological and magical systems in his first volume of the Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia (1617) during his undergraduate days at Oxford. In this work Fludd devised a lavishly illustrated cosmology based on the chemical theory of Paracelsus, in which the materials of the universe were separated out of chaos by God who acted in the manner of a laboratory alchemist. Fludd was a deeply convinced adherent of the medical and magical practice of the German doctor, surgeon, and radical theologian Theophrastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim. This loyalty led Fludd into severe conflicts with the established British medical profession. His later publications described a medical practice almost devoid of chemical remedies but which depended almost solely on prayer and the use of the name of Jesus on the model of the first apostles of Christ. This devotional medicine was supported by a theology derived from the secret mystical teaching of Judaism, the kabbalah, which Fludd employed in a Christianised form derived from the ideas of the German philosopher, Johannes Reuchlin. In his medicinal incantations Fludd used the Hebrew form of the name of Jesus which, he claimed, possessed immense magical potency. He equated Jesus Christ with the kabbalistic angel Metattron, the heavenly form of the Jewish Messiah. He was said to be the soul of the world (“anima mundi”), pervading it throughout, or Anthropos. Fludd states that “Hochmah” (Wisdom in the kabbalistic Tree of Life) is the same as the “Verbum” (the “Word” in the Christian Gospel of John who is identified with Jesus Christ). The Christian “Word” is the same as the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, “Aleph”. This Christian Messiah is the most potent medicine for all human ills. The “Verbum”, or Metattron-Christ-Messiah, is a form of God himself, residing in the the sun. In Fludd’s medical theories the operation of the aerial nitre, or quintessence, in the human body was of critical importance to health. It was said to originate in the tabernacle of the aerial spirit which was the sun. The essence of the aerial nitre was celestial light. It was breathed in by the lungs and carried to the heart, where it was separated from the air and dispersed as the vital spirit throughout the body. In his short text, the “Tractatus de Tritico” (Tractate on Wheat), which reappeared in his Anatomiae Amphiteatrum (1623) and also in the Philosophia Moysaica (1638), Fludd described the distillation of the aerial nitre from the wheat using the heat and light of the sun’s own rays. Fludd claimed that this distilled spirit was the universal panacea, whose generative celestial fire had been drawn out of the sun. All of Fludd’s treatises were lavishly illustrated with extraordinary engravings, unique in their form and subject matter, which have the visionary quality of a genuine spiritual seer and which exerted an influence on his contemporary occultists such as Michael Maier, Jacob Boehme, and Johannes Mylius. Fludd himself designed these images and they were engraved by the artisans employed at his publishers. (Some of his own original drawings still exist for the first volume of the Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia, 1617). Fludd’s concepts of the creative and healing forces of light were illustrated by diagrams, the principles of light and darkness being represented by two intersecting cones, or pyramids. The base of the “pyramidis formalis” was placed in the Empyreum of God, signifying rays of divine light, while the base of the “pyramidis materialis” was located on the earth pointing upward toward God. Fludd described these diagrammatic forms as “pyramides lucis” (cones of light), claiming to have invented them himself, although they seem to be based on antique and medieval optical theory. Within the lozenge shape created by the intersection of the downward and upward pointing cones, Fludd placed the sun, since the nature of this sphere balanced the oppositions of spirit and matter, male and female, sulphur and mercury. From the outset of the “Macrocosm” section, Fludd’s cosmogony was based on the three generative principles which were those conceptualised by Paracelsus in his own alchemy, namely, those of light, darkness, and water, from which emerged the three primary elements that constituted matter, that is, Salt from darkness (as the “prima materia”), Sulphur from light (as the soul), and Mercury from water (as the spirit). These, in turn, produced the four qualities of antique and medieval physics, the qualities of heat, cold, dryness, and moistness. Fludd’s alchemical cosmology was explained by a series of intricate geometrical diagrams of great power and beauty. In the third book of the “Macrocosm” section, Fludd also offered another interpretation of the structure of the universe, complementing his earlier alchemical visualisations, but expressed musically. He analysed what he claimed to be the “Musica Mundana”, the musical forms that pervaded and structure universal creation based on the musicology and mathematics of the ancient Greek, Pythagoras. The fifth chapter of the “Musica Mundana” included an illustration of a cosmic lyre. Fludd achieved a certain notoriety in his own time for his early support of the “Rosicrucian Manifestos” in his treatise the Apologia (1616) (expanded into the Tractatus Apologeticus, 1618). The two texts, which came to be called the Rosicrucian Manifestos, consisted of the Fama which appeared in 1614, followed by the Confessio in 1615. They were published anonymously in Kassel and they have been the subject of extensive debate in regard to their origins and authorship. The authors never revealed themselves but they called for supporters to join the Rosicrucian movement, claimed to have been in existence for centuries. Those who responded by publishing letters to the Rosicrucians were a heterogeneous group of Protestants, mostly of a radical reformist character, as well as adherents to antique philosophy and magic: kabbalists, followers of Hermes Trismegistos — a mythical Egyptian sage — as well as practitioners of magic on the model of Cornelius Agrippa (a sixteenth century German sage) and of Paracelsus. The Manifestos seem to have been written to counteract the re-conversionary activities of the Jesuit order in central Europe. Said to be supporters of a legendary figure of the fourteenth century, Christian Rozenkreutz, there never did exist in reality any such entity as the Rosicrucian Order in the seventeenth century. It could be said, however, that there did exist a popular Rosicrucian movement whose supporters developed the original ideas of the founders and in which Fludd’s influence was a dominating factor. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 13, 2011

Urszula Szulakowska

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:06.648242

accuracy-and-elegance-in-cheselden-s-osteographia-1733

Accuracy and Elegance in Cheselden’s Osteographia (1733) By Monique Kornell August 22, 2011 With its novel vignettes and its use of a camera obscura in the production of the plates, William Cheselden’s Osteographia, is recognized as a landmark in the history of anatomical illustration. Monique Kornell looks at its unique blend of accuracy and elegance. A lavishly illustrated and particularly elegant book of human and comparative osteology in large folio size, Osteographia, or the Anatomy of the Bones, was published in London in 1733 by William Cheselden (1688-1752). However highly it is esteemed today, it was a financial failure for its author, unlike his earlier, less expensive and more general work, The Anatomy of the Human Body (1713), which went through numerous editions. Cheselden, a successful surgeon based in London, first won fame for his perfection of the lateral method of lithotomy, or “cutting for the stone”. At the time of publication of the Osteographia, he was already well established in his career. Surgeon to Queen Caroline, to whom the book is dedicated, he was also a Fellow of the Royal Society, surgeon at St. Thomas’s hospital and the first foreign member of the newly founded Royal Academy of Surgery in Paris. Work was under way for the Osteographia already by 1726 when Cheselden states in the preface to the Anatomy of the Human Body that he would have replaced illustrations from the first edition: if I had not been so much engaged about an Osteology in which every plate is twenty one inches long, and fifteen broad. All the bones will be done so large as the life, and the bones of the limbs and trunk, with sceletons as large as the plates will admit of; And besides these there will be some plates of the cartilages, ligaments and diseased bones; and every chapter will have a distinct head-piece and tail-piece, which will be chiefly made of the sceletons of different animals. The Osteographia eventually appeared in 1733 with a double set of plates, 56 lettered and 56 unlettered, “to shew them in their full beauty” (ch. 8). Part of the delay was that the initial drawings for the plates were abandoned when Cheselden, in his desire for the greatest accuracy in the rendering of the skeleton, had his artists, Gerard Vandergucht and Jacob Schijnvoet, employ a camera obscura, the use of which is illustrated in a vignette on the title page. As described in chapter VIII, the artist drew upon a roughened glass set six inches inside; a sliding lens allowed him to adjust the scale. The resulting image was then traced on to paper. Many of the preparatory drawings survive in the collection of the Royal Academy, London. In the production of the plates, Cheselden took a markedly active role. He chose the poses for the skeletons and oversaw each stage of the production, stepping in when necessary to correct both drawings and plates: “where particular parts needed to be more distinctly expressed on account of the anatomy, there I always directed; sometimes in the drawings with the pencil, and often with the needle upon the copper plate.” Cheselden was also attuned to the different effects that could be brought about in the engraving, and he comments that the use of unhatched, single lines to evoke the smoothness of the ends of the bones “was also my contriving”. Cheselden’s close involvement in making the plates and his desire for accuracy through mechanical means, as well as in the great expense incurred, parallel the contemporaneous efforts of the Dutch anatomist, Bernhard Siegfried Albinus, who had his artist, Jan Wandelaar, view anatomical preparations through a grid system of ropes. An early influence upon Cheselden’s attention to illustration was the surgeon and anatomist William Cowper, with whom Cheselden resided while studying anatomy. Cowper was also a remarkable draftsman and provided illustrations for his own works and those of others. Cheselden then attended the first St Martin’s Lane Academy of Art in 1720 and would himself later contribute accomplished plates for his addendum to the translation of Le Dran’s Operations in Surgery (London 1749). Much of the charm of the Osteographia lies with the vignettes of the animal skeletons, which are frequently depicted in lifelike poses. A cat with an arched back is startled by a dog; a young, antlered deer stops suddenly and turns to the viewer; a crane picks up a fish with its beak, yielding the conceit of a skeleton bird seeking nourishment from the bones of a fish. Cheselden’s comment concerning the skeleton of a bear indicates the care he took in the poses of the animal skeletons: “This skeleton being put together with stiff wires, I could not alter it into a properer posture” (ch. VIII). The pose of the chameleon skeleton, set on a branch with its tail wrapped around a twig, seen at the head of the fifth chapter, was adapted from an illustration first published by Charles Perrault in 1669. The inventiveness seen in the vignettes is likewise found in the decorated initials and the plates of entire human skeletons. Inspired by the meditative skeletons of Vesalius, Cheselden offers a lateral view of a skeleton kneeling in prayer (Tab. XXXVI), the pose chosen in order “to represent the figure in a larger scale.” In the Anatomy of the Human Body of 1740, the figure has been adapted for Tab. X and is shown with his arms tied behind his back. The influence of Vesalius is also evident in the low-set Italianate landscape seen in some of the full-size skeleton plates, such as Tab. XXXII. Here the viewpoint manages to confer a monumental sense of scale to the skeleton of a year-and-a-half-old child, who is shown walking toward the viewer while brandishing an adult humerus. This bone serves as a comparison of scale but fails, nevertheless, to dwarf the skeleton in any way. The print that follows offers a comparison of scale and of species as well, as a skeleton of a boy of nine years is seen leaning against the skull of a horse, almost half his height. The frontal views of a male and a female skeletons are both after classical statues, the Apollo Belvedere and the Medici Venus. Cheselden has altered the pose of the latter, turning her head and placing her left arm out to the side rather than in the original “pudica” position, thus allowing for a better view of the pelvic bones. In addition to developmental plates of the bones, there are several excellent plates with cross-sections of the bones and depicting cartilages and ligaments. The seventh chapter and the last nine plates of the book are devoted to diseased bones, dealing with cases from Cheselden’s own practice and those of his colleagues. The preparation of the bones of the left arm, showing a congenital ankylosis of the elbow joint, which was sent to Cheselden by “Mr Goodwin” and survives today in the Hunterian Museum, London, is depicted in Tab. LXV, fig. 2. The fused “crooked skeleton” of Tab. XLIII is described as having been “dug out of a grave”. In the Osteographia as well as in his other works, Cheselden favored a reliance on the image for elucidation rather than lengthy description: “I thought it useless to make long descriptions, one view of such prints shewing more than the fullest and best description can possibly do” (Address to the Reader). For example, in discussing the intricate bones of the foot he concludes the fifth chapter by saying that “for what remains see the plate, which makes a farther description needless”. The brevity of the text is certainly one valid criticism of the many made by John Douglas, a rival lithotomist, in his querulous pamphlet, Animadversions on a late pompous book, intituled, Osteographia . . . by William Cheselden (London 1735). Curiously, his brother James Douglas, the anatomist and physician, was a valued friend and collaborator of Cheselden’s. The brevity of the text, the decorative vignettes and the luxurious production of the Osteographia was aimed at attracting a wealthy, general audience for the book. It is for this same potential market that Cheselden had earlier designed a course of anatomy, given with Francis Hawksbee, which was advertised in The Daily Courant of 21 March 1721 as, “chiefly intended for Gentlemen, Such Things only will be omitted as are neither Instructive nor Entertaining and Care will be taken to have nothing Offensive.” From an advertisement in Cheselden’s Anatomy of 1740, we learn that only 97 of the 300 copies of the Osteographia printed had been sold. In an attempt to recoup his expenses, 83 of the remaining copies were cut apart so that the prints could be sold separately. In addition, 100 prints had been struck for a projected Latin or French edition. Some of these were used for an undated edition of the unlettered plates, issued without the text. The plates of the Osteographia are magnificent and worthy of their fame. They are of a far finer quality than the crude depictions of skeletons, originally made for James Douglas, that appeared in Cheselden’s first edition of his Anatomy of 1713. Cheselden’s original plan, laid out in To the Reader, was for a three-volume work on human anatomy, all similarly decorated with plates of comparative anatomy. It is regrettable that the Osteographia did not meet with the financial success necessary to allow the completion of the project. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 22, 2011

Monique Kornell

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:07.114254

bugs-and-beasts-before-the-law

Bugs and Beasts Before the Law By Nicholas Humphrey March 27, 2011 Murderous pigs sent to the gallows, sparrows prosecuted for chattering in church, a gang of thieving rats let off on a wholly technical acquittal - theoretical psychologist and author Nicholas Humphrey* explores the strange world of medieval animal trials. On March 5, 1986, some villagers near Malacca in Malaysia beat to death a dog, which they believed was one of a gang of thieves who transform themselves into animals to carry out their crimes. The story was reported on the front page of the London Financial Times. “When a dog bites a man,” it is said, “that’s not news; but when a man bites a dog, that is news”. Such stories, however, are apparently not news for very long. Indeed the most extraordinary examples of people taking retribution against animals seem to have been almost totally forgotten. A few years ago I lighted on a book, first published in 1906, with the surprising title The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals by E.P.Evans, author of Animal Symbolism in Ecclesiastical Architecture, Bugs and Beasts before the Law, etc., etc. The frontispiece showed an engraving of a pig, dressed up in a jacket and breeches, being strung up on a gallows in the market square of a town in Normandy in 1386; the pig had been formally tried and convicted of murder by the local court. When I borrowed the book from the Cambridge University Library, I showed this picture of the pig to the librarian. “Is it a joke?”, she asked. No, it was not a joke. All over Europe, throughout the middle-ages and right on into the 19th century, animals were, as it turns out, tried for human crimes. Dogs, pigs, cows, rats and even flies and caterpillars were arraigned in court on charges ranging from murder to obscenity. The trials were conducted with full ceremony: evidence was heard on both sides, witnesses were called, and in many cases the accused animal was granted a form of legal aid -- a lawyer being appointed at the tax-payer’s expense to conduct the animal’s defence. In 1494, for example, near Clermont in France a young pig was arrested for having “strangled and defaced a child in its cradle”. Several witnesses were examined, who testified that “on the morning of Easter Day, the infant being left alone in its cradle, the said pig entered during the said time the said house and disfigured and ate the face and neck of the said child . . . which in consequence departed this life.” Having weighed up the evidence and found no extenuating circumstances, the judge gave sentence: We, in detestation and horror of the said crime, and to the end that an example may be made and justice maintained, have said, judged, sentenced, pronounced and appointed that the said porker, now detained as a prisoner and confined in the said abbey, shall be by the master of high works hanged and strangled on a gibbet of wood. Evans’ book details more than two hundred such cases: sparrows being prosecuted for chattering in Church, a pig executed for stealing a communion wafer, a cock burnt at the stake for laying an egg. As I read my eyes grew wider and wider. Why did no one tell us this at school? Why were we taught so many dreary facts of history at school, and not taught these? We all know how King Canute attempted to stay the tide at Lambeth; but who has heard, for example, of the solemn threats made against the tides of locusts which threatened to engulf the countryside of France and Italy? The Pied Piper, who charmed the rats from Hamelin is a part of legend; but who has heard of Bartholomew Chassenée, a French jurist of the sixteenth century, who made his reputation at the bar as the defence counsel for some rats? The rats had been put on trial in the ecclesiastical court on the charge of having “feloniously eaten up and wantonly destroyed” the local barley. When the culprits did not in fact turn up in court on the appointed day, Chassenée made use of all his legal cunning to excuse them. They had, he urged in the first place, probably not received the summons since they moved from village to village; but even if they had received it they were probably too frightened to obey, since as everyone knew they were in danger of being set on by their mortal enemies the cats. On this point Chassenée addressed the court at some length, in order to show that if a person be cited to appear at a place to which he cannot come in safety, he may legally refuse. The judge, recognising the justice of this claim, but being unable to persuade the villagers to keep their cats indoors, was obliged to let the matter drop. For an animal found guilty, the penalty was dire. The Normandy pig, depicted in the frontispiece of the Evans book, was charged with having torn the face and arms of a baby in its cradle. The pig was sentenced to be “mangled and maimed in the head forelegs”, and then — dressed up in a jacket and breeches — to be hung from a gallows in the market square. But, as we have seen with Chassenée’s rats, the outcome of these trials was not inevitable. In doubtful cases the courts appear in general to have been lenient, on the principle of “innocent until proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt”. In 1587, a gang of weevils, accused of damaging a vineyard, were deemed to have been exercising their natural rights to eat — and, in compensation, were granted a vineyard of their own. In 1457 a sow was convicted of murder and sentenced to be “hanged by the hind feet from a gallows tree”. Her six piglets, being found stained with blood, were included in the indictment as accomplices. But no evidence was offered against them, and on account of their tender age they were acquitted. In 1750 a man and a she-ass were taken together in an act of buggery. The prosecution asked for the death sentence for both of them. After due process of law the man was sentenced, but the animal was let off on the ground that she was the victim of violence and had not participated in her master’s crime of her own free-will. The local priest gave evidence that he had known the said she-ass for four years, that she had always shown herself to be virtuous and well-behaved, that she had never given occasion of scandal to anyone, and that therefore he was “willing to bear witness that she is in word and deed and in all her habits of life a most honest creature.” What was the purpose of these lengthy and extravagant procedures? A desire for revenge cannot have been the only motive. Evans cites cases of inanimate objects being brought before the law. In Greece, a statue that fell on a man was charged with murder and sentenced to be thrown into the sea; in Russia, a bell that peeled too gleefully on the occasion of the assassination of a prince was charged with treason and exiled to Siberia. The protection of society cannot have been the only motive either. Evans tells of the bodies of criminals, already dead, being brought to trial. Pope Stephen VI, on his accession in 896, accused his predecessor, Formosus, of sacrilegiously bringing the papal office into disrepute. The body of the dead pope was exhumed, dressed in the pontifical robes and set up on a throne in St. Peter’s, where a deacon was appointed to defend him. When the verdict of guilty was pronounced, the executioner thrust Formosus from the throne, stripped him of his robes, cut off the three benedictory fingers of his right hand and threw his body “as a pestilential thing” into the Tiber. Taken together, Evans’ cases suggest that again and again, the true purpose of the trials was psychological. People were living at times of deep uncertainty. Both the Greeks and medieval Europeans had in common a deep fear of lawlessness: not so much fear of laws being contravened, as the much worse fear that the world they lived in might not be a lawful place at all. A statue fell on a man out of the blue, a pig killed a baby while its mother was at mass, swarms of locusts appeared from nowhere and devastated the crops, the Holy See was becoming riddled with corruption. At first sight such misfortunes can have appeared to have no rhyme or reason to them. To an extent that we today cannot find easy to conceive, these people of the pre-scientific era lived every day at the edge of explanatory darkness. No wonder if, like Einstein in the twentieth century, they were terrified of the real possibility that “God was playing dice with the universe”. The same anxiety has indeed continued to pervade more modern minds. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, having declared that “Everything is permitted”, concluded that were his thesis to be generally acknowledged “every living force on which all life depends would dry up at once”. Alexander Pope claimed that “order is heaven’s first law”. And Yeats drew a grim picture of a lawless world: Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Yet the natural universe, lawful as it may in fact have always been, was never in all respects self-evidently lawful. And people’s need to believe that it was so, their faith in determinism, that everything was not permitted, that the centre did hold, had to be continually confirmed by the success of their attempts at explanation. So the law courts, on behalf of society, took matters into their own hands. Just as today, when things are unexplained, we expect the institutions of science to put the facts on trial, one can see the whole purpose of the legal actions as being to establish cognitive control. In other words, the job of the courts was to domesticate chaos, to impose order on a world of accidents -- and specifically to make sense of certain seemingly inexplicable events by redefining them as crimes. I read some years ago another report in a London newspaper: A jilted woman who attempted suicide by leaping from a 12th floor window but landed on and killed a street salesman has been charged with manslaughter. Prosecutors in Taipei, Taiwan said 21-year-old Ho Yu-Mei was responsible for the death of the food salesman because she failed to make sure that there was no one below when she jumped. Ho had argued that she thought the man would have moved away by the time she hit the ground. She also said she had threatened earlier to sue the salesman because “he interfered” with her freedom to take her own life. If convicted, Ho could be imprisoned for two years. Who says that the medieval obsession with responsibility has gone away? But it was with dogs as criminals I began, and with dogs as criminals I’ll end. A story in The Times some years ago told how a dead dog had been thrown by an unknown hand from the roof of a sky-scraper in Johannesburg, had landed on a man and flattened him -- the said man having in consequence departed this life. The headline read -- oh, how un-newsworthy! -- DOG KILLS MAN. I wonder what Chassenée or E.P.Evans would have made of that. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 27, 2011

Nicholas Humphre

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:07.580256

love-and-longing-in-the-seaweed-album

Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album By Sasha Archibald March 9, 2022 Combing across 19th-century shores, seaweed collectors would wander for hours, tucking specimens into pouches and jars, before pasting their finds into artful albums. Sasha Archibald explores the eros contained in the pressed and illustrated pages of notable algologists, including “the most ambitious album of all” by Charles F. Durant. I love the sea as my soul. Often, it even seems to me that the sea really is my soul.1—Heinrich Heine, 1826 The soul of a man is of the same texture as the [seaweed] polypus.2—George Eliot, 1856 Seaweed’s appeal may not be immediately obvious. It comes to beauty by way of strangeness. The texture is uncouth and the shapes irregular; the reference to “weed” does it no favors. Seaweed’s core self proves elusive. Some varieties are delicate, filmy, and slick, and others dense and meaty, prone to intractable knots. I’ve used seaweed as a jumping rope, but I’ve also liquified tendrils with a forefinger’s stroke. Nowadays, the plant begs respect for its utility. Seaweed prevents oceanic erosion, we are told, and nurtures biodiversity. It’s a nutritious edible that can be cultivated with a light ecological footprint. Most impressively, marine forests are far more efficient than land-based forests at absorbing atmospheric CO2. Seaweed has become commonplace: a children’s snack, a type of massage, an ingredient in face lotion, shampoo, and Bloody Marys. Seaweed deserves our attention, the argument goes, because it is so tremendously useful. Naturalists of the nineteenth century took a different angle. Although they understood that seaweed “conferred a positive benefit on the atmosphere”, its appeal was precisely its lack of utility.3 The same word that described seaweed on shore — “rejectamenta” — also described anything more generally considered detritus. Seaweed seemed to be a weird, surplus embellishment that existed for no particular purpose except to express the wonders of the deep ocean. When the preeminent algae scholar William H. Harvey decided at age fifteen to devote his life to algology, it was the same as if he’d pledged allegiance to profitless esotericism. He wrote his former teacher that he intended “to study my favourite and useless class, Cryptogamia. I think I hear thee say, Tut-tut! But no matter. To be useless, various, and abstruse, is a sufficient recommendation of a science to make it pleasing to me.”4 No other field of study was so delightfully feckless. Interest in the plant signaled refinement. Flowers were the Victorian middle-class obsession, but those of greater discernment favored seaweed. The exclusive fabric designer William Kilburn led the way by printing muslin chintz with a seaweed pattern in the 1790s, and his client, Queen Charlotte, showed her exquisite taste in wearing the fabric to a ball.5 Eighteenth and nineteenth-century seaweed enthusiasts were a motley bunch, but their cultural tastes were consistently out of the ordinary. Harvey, for instance, was very fond of his pet ostrich; other seaweed fans obsessed over butterfly genitalia, paper adverts, beetles, and ballooning.6 Such men took pride in nonconformity. The author of the first American book on seaweed, Charles F. Durant, fit this type exactly: brilliant and cavalier, an intellectually-restless iconoclast. Durant and his ilk embraced seaweed as the niche preference, the obscure art film to the cineplex blockbuster. The most avid fans became collectors. A serious seaweed habit required canvassing miles of shoreline, tracking the ground for hours at a time, stooping occasionally to clip a specimen and tuck it inside a leather pouch or glass jar. Collectors tended to work in damp solitude. The best time to go out, advised nineteenth-century how-to guides, was after a storm. Wind and waves churn the compost on the ocean floor, uprooting deep-water plants and spitting them onto sandbanks a dozen miles away.7 A disheveled beach might be laden with treasures, chief among them fibrous bits of jewel-like red seaweed. Seaweed was then organized by color; the three types correlated to hue. There was the “grass green” Chlorospermae, the “olivaceous” Melanospermae, and the “red” Rhodospermae.8 This last class, which included violet, copper, and persimmon-orange varieties, was arguably the most beautiful, and the most elusive. Like any physical exercise, collecting seaweed cleared the head and strengthened the body. “Many a head-ache, and a heart-ache too, would be relieved if its owner could be brought to feel an interest in the shells or seaweeds which are strewed on the beach”, reflected one collector.9 These therapeutic effects seem to have been especially pronounced for women. Margaret Gatty, for instance, a celebrated children’s book author and exhausted mother of seven, was advised to take up seaweed collecting to restore her vim. She dedicated fourteen years to British Sea-Weeds (1863), which remained a standard text of classification into the twentieth century. Her devotion to seaweed is indisputable, but it’s Gatty’s pleasure in shedding the constraints of femininity that shines off the page: “to walk where you are walking, makes you feel free, bold, joyous, monarch of all you survey, untrammeled, at ease, at home!”10 She praises seaweed hunting as the best excuse a woman has for “imitating the costume of a man” — petticoats were impractical for clambering over rocks and kneeling in tide pools — and addresses her readers throughout as her “sisterhood”.11 At least one literary historian speculates that it was the summer collecting seaweed in 1856 that gave George Eliot the courage and presence of mind to try her hand at writing fiction.12 Seaweed collectors worked to many different ends. Specimens were used as the subject of ink drawings, watercolor paintings, and a variety of early photography techniques. Anna Atkins produced cyanotypes in which the seaweed appears as a white silhouette against a page of cornflower blue, and the botanical illustrator Alois Auer pioneered a method of nature prints that worked exceptionally well with seaweed. (The specimen was pressed between soft lead and steel to create an impression carefully filled with colored ink.13) For many collectors, however, representations did not suffice. They sought to preserve the tactility of the original, so that rather than paint or draw or photograph their seaweed, they kept it as it was, pressing it between pages of paper to be later bound into a book: a seaweed album. Seaweed destined for an album was typically washed of sand, floated in water to resurrect its buoyancy, and then captured by a thick piece of paper skimmed underneath. While still moist, the seaweed fronds could be adjusted, gingerly, with a camel hair brush or porcupine quill. An especially fastidious collector might coax various specimens into tableaus — wreaths or bouquets or monograms — that were called “marine paintings”. All wet seaweed has some amount of mucilage, so that many varieties stuck to paper with no aid at all. Others needed a bit of glue, typically made of fish gelatin. A seaweed that refused to lie flat was fastened down with fiddly paper tabs. Making a seaweed album was a fairly common Victorian pastime. The same sort of person who collected shells or ferns, or outfitted a home aquarium, might purchase a kit of preprinted paper that would help her assemble a seaweed book. Queen Victoria is said to have made a seaweed album as a young girl, presenting it as a gift to the Queen of Portugal. Albums were exchanged amongst tweens, gifted to grandchildren, or donated, like a quilt or a pie, to a charity auction. One collector sold albums to buy blankets for the poor in her parish, and another to raise money for wounded soldiers.14 The more intellectually-inclined hobbyists adapted the conventions of the seaweed album to scholarly purposes. They often attempted a comprehensive collection of a distinct geographical area, for instance, and rather than pasting in seaweed willy-nilly, they arranged their specimens systematically. They noted where and when each vegetative scrap was found, provided labels that followed scientific nomenclature, and included ponderous introductions that make reference to seaweed scholarship. These hobbyists were in the habit of sending long, detailed queries to Dr. Harvey at Trinity College Dublin, with samples of their most unusual finds. (The gatekeepers of academic botany were usually apprehensive about feminine incursions, but Harvey was warm and welcoming.) Nineteenth-century seaweed albums have a baked-in melancholy. Despite the best intentions, they do not flatter seaweed. The samples are brittle where the plant was pliant, opaque when once translucent, flaccid where previously ballooned. The displacement from sea to paper steals a measure of the plants’ integrity, and time leaches away the rest. In every respect, the wonders of seaweed have fled the book. And yet, these albums still speak — not of seaweed exactly, but of the collector’s care and devotion. There is a particular kind of eros that thrums between a receptive human and the natural world; the contours and depth of this eros is the true subject of a seaweed album. The best example of seaweed love is the most ambitious album of all: Durant’s opulent Algology: Algae and Corallines of the Bay and Harbor of New York. Published in 1850, it aspires to be much more than a Victorian craft set piece. The covers are bound in Moroccan leather and intricately tooled with gold flourishes. Seaweed albums were typically one-offs, but Durant managed an edition of about fifteen, and grandly announced one hundred. In the most robust version of Algology, 293 specimens follow 46-pages of letterpress-printed text. There is a glossary with definitions of “lanceolate”, “pedicel”, “capitate”, and other fanciful words, and the samples themselves are numbered and artfully arranged. “As an example of bookmaking it is in a class by itself”, noted the Staten Island Association of Arts and Sciences.15 The book sold for $100, about half the cost of a new piano. Unlike the typical seaweed collector, Durant was not a British woman but an American man, an inventor and scientist. Born in 1805, he seemed to assume, like many educated men of his era, that no aspect of the mechanical, physical, or natural world was beyond his ken. His biography is a litany of claims-to-fame.16 With a hot-air balloon ascent from Battery Park, New York in 1830, he made his name as the first American aeronaut, staying aloft for two hours in a balloon he’d sewn himself. His second ascent, in 1833, was attended by President Andrew Jackson and thousands of others, during which Durant dropped leaflets featuring his own ecstatic poetry. These poems, about the virtues of ballooning, seem to have been the world’s first instance of aerial propaganda. He was the first US manufacturer of silkworm gut, a filament used for fishing line, and his raw silk and cocoons took high awards. He turned his attention then to Mesmerism, a faddish belief in clairvoyant hypnosis that was sweeping the nation. After infiltrating Mesmerist circles by pretending to find the practice credible, he wrote one of the first anti-Mesmerism screeds to be published in America, in which he debunked the supposed science with great relish.17 After that book, Durant became interested in hydraulics. He maintained a year of technical correspondence with Ellis S. Chesbrough, chief engineer of Boston’s waterworks, and soon-to-be engineer of Chicago’s sewage system. Their letters were published as Hydraulics: On the Physical Laws that Govern Running Water (1849). Durant’s turn toward seaweed seems at first counterintuitive. What internal logic connects hydraulics, ballooning, silkworms, and poetry with aquatic plants? I can only guess. Perhaps the difficulty of riding wind and channeling water prepared Durant to appreciate the grace of a plant that is rooted and yet in constant motion, a life form intensely subject to the vagaries of its environment, and yet also a freestanding marvel. Undoubtedly, Durant fell in love with seaweed. As evidence, there is the tender labeling, the rhapsodizing about the shoreline, the curlicue flourishes, the sumptuous crimson cover, the dreamy air of contentment that pervades the book’s introduction. The key to Durant’s heart was the vastness of his subject. I imagine he began collecting with the assumption that he would learn and conquer and publish, as he had before. Instead, he was “admonished” by seaweed; his research served only to remind him, again and again, how partial his knowledge. Algology is a concession, and a surrender too. Durant seems to bow his head before the “unfathomable abyss” of his topic, which proves “too wide, too deep, too vast for perfect exploration”.18 Seaweed chastened his ego, and abasement made space for love. Perhaps the most overt signal of Durant’s affection is his heretical suggestion that seaweed is an animal rather than a plant. He implies that the taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, responsible for the categorizing, was wrong, dryly noting that Linnaeus “resided at a very inconvenient distance from salt water”.19 Durant on the other hand, who has now spent “two thousand hours” in the company of seaweed, can attest that seaweed appears to have locomotion, a core characteristic of animals as Linnaeus defined them. Even more damning, however, is Durant’s opinion that seaweed feels pain. Durant describes how this discovery dawned on him: noticing that his fresh specimens tended to flatten and then crumple up and then flatten again in a cyclic pattern that ended with stillness, he recoiled, realizing with horror that these pulsating movements are in fact the “agonies of death”.20 Durant’s distress in this passage is palpable; he has unwittingly killed the object of his affection. The phonetic echo between “algology” and “apology” suddenly seems of great consequence.21 Reviewers claimed Durant’s Algology was the first work on seaweed ever published with actual specimens. This is not true. At least one book preceded Durant’s efforts, Mary Matilda Howard’s Ocean Flowers and their Teachings of 1846, which seems to climax with the frontispiece: a dainty seaweed cornucopia. Algology was, however, the first book on American seaweed. Durant’s collection centered on the shore of New Jersey, from which he lived “within ten minutes’ walk”, but also included specimens from Red Hook, Staten Island, Ellis Island, and the East River.22 The landscape of the New York Harbor was far less populous in 1850, and Algology mentions landmarks that have long since disappeared: a famous bathhouse in Lower Manhattan; a series of treacherous rocks that were soon blasted apart with dynamite; a floating chapel that serviced sailors. Durant’s bits of seaweed are souvenirs of a landscape gone extinct. Although Durant gifted copies of Algology to various charity auctions, and a few ended up in venerable libraries, they seem to have been rarely consulted or referenced. When a Curator of Botany at the Central Museum of the Brooklyn Institute (now the Brooklyn Museum) found the book in the early twentieth century, he described it as “unrecorded and forgotten”.23 Later generations of seaweed scholars failed to note that Durant’s Algology contained several “types”, a designation for the first specimen of a plant found and labeled, and Durant was not given proper credit for his scholarship. It may have just been bad timing. The very same year Durant published Algology, Harvey was invited by Harvard University to tour the United States. He gave many lectures and collected seaweed from Key West to Halifax. Shortly before his return, he was commissioned by the nascent Smithsonian to publish his findings. The resultant three-volume tome, Nereis Boreali-Americana or Contributions to a History of the Marine Algae of North America, became the definitive study of American seaweed.24 Unlike Durant’s valentine, it had no specimens and certainly no indication that a lovesick author had wrestled with moral and ethical questions about collecting the natural world. Algology was consigned to the nethermost regions of seaweed scholarship. In the end, it was nothing more or less than “a quaint old work on seaweeds”.25 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 9, 2022

Sasha Archibald

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:08.467707

laughter-in-the-time-of-cholera

Laughter in the Time of Cholera By Vlad Solomon November 10, 2021 Political instability, popular unrest, and an impending pandemic? Welcome to France in the early 1830s. Vlad Solomon explores what made Parisiens laugh in a moment of crisis through the prism of a vaudeville play. The year 1832 in France still conjures up images of rebellion and barricades thanks to the enduring pathos of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. For the real-life Parisians, however, who inspired the novel’s iconic characters, it was not only a year of lost causes, bloody street battles, and political disillusionment. It was also, in the parlance of our times, a “pandemic year” during which thousands — more than 18,000 in Paris; 100,000 across France1 — succumbed to a wave of cholera that had been causing havoc throughout Asia, Russia, and parts of East Central Europe since the 1820s. Although germ theory was still in its infancy at the time, people were quick to grasp the contagious nature of the disease and sought to speedily bury their dead as authorities scrambled desperately to meet the demands of an unprecedented public health crisis. A recent transplant to Paris, the German poet Heinrich Heine noted in a letter penned in mid-April 1832 — less than a month after the first recorded case of cholera in the French capital — the “disagreeable” sight of “great furniture wagons used for ‘moving’ now moving about as dead men’s omnibuses . . . going from house to house for fares and carrying them by dozens to the field of rest.”2 Parisians had been vaguely aware of the advancing wave of choléra-morbus, as the disease was then known, since at least 1830, when papers began regularly reporting on outbreaks in the Russian Empire’s eastern provinces.3 By early 1831, news of the ravages caused by the pandemic in Poland and East Prussia was already circulating by word of mouth in the capital. Legitimists (ultra-conservative supporters of the exiled Bourbon dynasty) imagined rootless political radicals spreading the disease with the same ease that they proselytised the “dangerous classes”, while the Church foresaw in the potential upheaval an “opportunity to renew its ties with a population that had shown itself unfaithful to the Catholic religion and the Bourbon dynasty”.4 Medical authorities, meanwhile, were certain that “the topographical situation of France is so advantageous that there is little to fear in this country from choléra-morbus or any other pestilential epidemic”.5 It is less certain what ordinary Parisians made of the alarming news, but those with money and time to spend on leisure turned to popular entertainment for comfort and comic relief. The early 1830s saw a spectacular resurgence of satire in France — the sort that could be both brilliant and crass, as the drawings of Honoré Daumier attest — but what is usually forgotten is that not all satire was printed for an exclusively reading public. Much was meant for the stage, particularly in 1831 when the July Monarchy’s promises of free speech did not yet ring entirely hollow.6 Only the previous year, French theatre had experienced one of the most tumultuous episodes in its venerable history with the so-called Battle of Hernani, a skirmish — at times quite physical — between the Romantic rebels congregated around Victor Hugo and the classicist fogeys who saw in Romanticism only the glorification of deformity and vulgarity.7 That was, however, the “serious” theatre of the Comédie Française which, generally speaking, only the educated bourgeoisie and aristocracy had any real interest in, as Hugo himself was forced to concede.8 A petit-bourgeois office clerk or shop assistant with no particular interest in the rarefied culture wars of the day — the sort that Balzac, and later Flaubert, caricatured without mercy — was much more likely to go for a one-act farce at one of Paris’ several vaudeville theatres. Since the days of the French Revolution, vaudeville, a form of light theatre with roots in medieval minstrelsy, had both reflected and challenged the social and political upheavals of the day in ways that government figures usually found objectionable. In 1807, Napoleon reduced the number of Parisian theatres to just eight and while the regimes that followed the fall of the Empire proved slightly less persecutory at first, they too eventually introduced strict censorship laws.9 As a result of this stifling atmosphere, vaudeville writers (known as vaudevillistes) only ever managed to skirt the political arena for most of the nineteenth century and rarely came close to embodying an actual political consciousness. One unintended effect of this self-censorship was that vaudeville gradually increased both the scope and sharpness of its critique by refocusing its sights on society at large. If the folly of kings, emperors, prelates, and ministers could only be hinted at with a mischievous wink, the state of France itself (and Paris in particular) provided virtually unlimited fodder for the theatrical imagination. As theatre historians have recently argued, the secret to vaudeville writers’ enduring success throughout the nineteenth century — a success that extended well beyond France10 — rested not on their literary talents, which were rarely substantial, but on their skill in employing “finely sketched . . . satirical portraits” to depict “the social and political idiosyncrasies” of their times.11 It was this skill in particular that enabled them to play a leading role in the “modern spectacular culture” that began taking shape in the Paris of the 1830s and 40s.12 Vaudevillistes were, mutatis mutandis, the sitcom screenwriters of their age, serving up the sort of light yet topical satire that simultaneously lampooned and affirmed the “performative dimensions” of social interaction, status seeking, and personal identity.13 Think Fawlty Towers punctuated by brief musical interludes. Hundreds of vaudevilles inundated the stages of popular Parisian theatres throughout 1831, but one play stands out with its inventive use of emerging social panics as a springboard for an absurd yet trenchant critique of politics and culture. Entitled Les pilules dramatiques, ou le choléra-morbus (The dramatic pills, or the cholera), the play followed the time-honoured musical revue format in which a few humorous scenes are tied together by short comical songs. Its surreal and cleverly “meta” plot centres on personified versions of Paris’ most emblematic theatres as they check themselves into the sanatorium of a certain Dr Scarlatin, “médecin des théâtres” (theatre doctor), convinced they have contracted the cholera.14 Their condition, it gradually becomes apparent, is not the result of any infection or indeed curable by any doctor’s pilules since it derives solely from ressentiment and insecurity. The vaudeville theatres feel overshadowed by exclusive establishments like the Paris Opera and want to “rise above” their present condition while the more respectable theatres fear the end of censorship and the increased competition it promised to bring about. Adding to the confusion of the plot, some theatres are represented, purely for comedic effect, by abstract concepts like Illusion or by exaggerated versions of controversial historical characters such as Jacques Dupont, a brutal officer of the early Bourbon Restoration who still embodied the worst excesses of monarchical reaction.15 A dubious bourgeois named simply Bourgeois, who is introduced as a capitaliste looking to exchange “the Stock Market backstage for that of the theatre world”, attempts to sell life insurance to Dr Scarlatin, but only ends up giving unsolicited advice to the theatres, urging them to stick to the tried and tested “honest comedy” of former times.16 Spectators would have detected, in this ostensibly innocent piece of advice, an ironic commentary on the process of embourgeoisement that vaudeville had been undergoing for some years thanks to the incredibly prolific and successful dramatist Eugène Scribe (1791–1861). Scribe, whom Hugo despised as the epitome of crass commercialism and whose reputation rapidly waned following his death in 1861, had almost single-handedly managed to revolutionise vaudeville in the 1820s by shearing it of its atavistic carnivalesque excesses and forcing it into a corset of respectability — something which typically amounted to simple plots and minimal minstrelsy. Despite his shady past and insipid comments, Bourgeois is the only character who manages to make any sense, illustrating the ease with which vaudeville writers could simultaneously satirise and flatter their largely middle- and lower-middle-class audiences. Doctor Scarlatin, whose name is tellingly reminiscent of a disease — scarlatine, French for scarlet fever — is naturally more than willing to offer his would-be patients medicine. The 1830s marked the dawn of a great age of réclame (advertisement) in France and spurious ads for all sorts of miracle drugs and vitality-restoring contraptions were becoming increasingly frequent in the popular press. “To cure all of your illusions, take my pills”, Scarlatin announces , but their effect is not the intended one.17 Having taken the miracle cure, the theatres go predictably “mad” and descend into an ever more cacophonous airing of grievances. They are momentarily brought to order by Monsieur Jovial, a well-known vaudeville character of the day,18 who assumes the title of Attorney General and stages a mock trial for “these dangerous theatres”. Declaring himself a “good doctrinaire” — a mocking reference to the Restoration-era moderate royalists who found themselves in power under the July Monarchy — Jovial sentences the offenders to “keep quiet when it comes to kings . . . bourgeois . . . lovers . . . mothers . . . and the deceased” and to “refrain from ridiculing the multitude”.19 While censorship was relatively lax by Restoration-era standards, the genuinely free press enshrined in the Charter of 1830 — the July Monarchy’s founding document — remained stubbornly elusive. Periodicals were still subject to security deposits and stamp duty and publishers (along with authors, editors, and vendors) could still face prosecution for writings or drawings deemed overtly libellous of the king and his government.20 The play’s stand-out scenes are undoubtedly the final two, during which the world itself abruptly comes to an end, pointing to the banalisation of an intense political disillusionment that was no longer the preserve of embittered republicans. Having just announced, “with pleasure”, that the world is about to be turned to ashes thanks to a comet set on a collision course with Earth, Dr Scarlatin joins the other characters in a jaunty danse macabre. More than an amusing plot twist, the comet too reflected the stuff of everyday life. Biela’s Comet, first spotted in the 1770s and named after the German astronomer Wilhelm von Biela, who had demonstrated its periodicity in 1826, was widely rumoured at the time to return within a “worrying” distance of Earth in 1832.21 Some even openly prayed that it would finally make a clean sweep of all “earthly tyrants”.22 “The human race, starting tomorrow, will wake up in bed, quite dead!” the characters all sing, awaiting their own destruction while Monsieur Jovial excitedly proclaims “Oh! The machine is creaking!” In a time of cholera, the only remedy that can cure political anger (colère) and the social malaise of ressentiment — bringing peace to a society saturated with interminable conspiracies, rivalries, betrayals, and vendettas — is, it turns out, complete annihilation. Courtesans, bankers, rentiers, misers, and “old Crassuses” must all contend with the realization that all of their “cash will be turned to trash”.23 The show, however, always means to go on and, in a moment of proto-Dadaist absurdity, the comet itself is transformed into a character. This parodic version of the Final Judgement would likely not have passed muster with the censors earlier in the century (or after 1835, when censorship laws became much more stringent). The personified Comet — a flamboyant stand-in for all feared and imagined apocalypses, including the encroaching cholera — informs the other characters that no reprieve will be possible; everyone and everything must go and, in any case, “the end of the world is a rather curious spectacle that one can hardly be annoyed at having to witness at least once in life”.24 Not wishing to appear callous, however, the Comet demands its victims to elaborate on what anyone “down here” could possibly have to regret and, with this cue, the other characters break into one final song. Its lyrics neatly sum up the sources of national decadence as they would have been recognised by a theatre-going public of the 1830s: The press has everywhere thrown off its quest for truth [a jeté ses lumières]And by its torches the whole world is bedazzledYour fathers were all subject to abject ignoranceBut you are all undone by an excess of knowledgeAll can be understood, all can be said, all is explained:All peoples, proud of having won their laws through struggle,Have used up every option, from monarchy to the republic,And rack their brains defining all their rights . . .You’ve seen your great men of the peopleFight battles in the cause of freedomOnly to then go begging for a sinecure [quêter des ministères]Like vagrants who search endlessly for alms.Your literature amounts to nothing nowHaving picked up all of romanticism’s errors,Its writings all reveal the face of Nature,Poor and decrepit, surrounded by great horrors.And if it’s love and its enchanted powersYou now seek with regret to call to mind,Trembling with fear before your politicians,All love, alas! has flown away into the yonder.Deists have finally found refuge in your midst,And now, as if to prove their power and his own,God, whom the Saint-Simonians25 would see dethroned,Destroys the world and owes you nothing more. The Comet then turns to the audience and defiantly invites spectators to boo should they find the piece deserving of nothing else, “since the world is drawing to an end [anyway].” In fact, audiences loved it — “it is full of wit, honest malice . . . bitter criticism . . . and verve”, the critics announced26 — and it is easy to see why. Shady capitalists (a term which already carried strong connotations of unscrupulous speculation), out-of-touch thespians, self-seeking politicians, shameless quacks, decadent art, godless cabals, and a press consumed with selling copy while pretending to enlighten — all are lampooned with unusual frankness to the toe-tapping music of popular tunes. If vaudeville’s preoccupation with imitation, competition, forgery, hypocrisy, and status consciousness appears slightly more politically charged than the brooding nostalgia of Romanticism, the navel-gazing of realism, or the austere moralizing of naturalism, it is, of course, not because vaudeville writers were any more perceptive or foresighted than their romantic, realist, or naturalist contemporaries. It is because vaudeville remained immanently focused on the “bourgeois” reality that more sophisticated and imaginative authors sought merely to excoriate, escape, or earnestly moralise on. As Alexandre Dumas fils noted in the preface to one of his vaudevillesque comedies, “We [playwrights] have nothing to invent, we have only to see, to feel and to restore, in a special form, that which all spectators must immediately recall having heard or seen without becoming aware of it until [they see it on stage].”27 Vaudeville writers who lacked Eugène Scribe’s commercial genius and influence were typically paid a pittance for their efforts and often worked in teams in order to maximise productivity and secure the patronage of theatre directors by having them appear as co-authors. It is no surprise then that the author of Les pilules dramatiques, identified only as “M. le docteur Mesenthère” (Doctor Mesentery) on the title page, was in fact four authors: Michel Masson, Claude-Louis-Marie de Rochefort, Ferdinand de Villeneuve, and Adolphe de Leuven. They were all veteran vaudevillistes well-versed in the difficult art of pandering to popular taste. While it is tempting to see in their one-act farce merely an amusing distraction for a nerve-racked public, beyond the surreal silliness and slapstick, the play’s vaguely “anti-system” message contained the inchoate essence of a pessimistic outlook that would mature later in the nineteenth century. Although the relatively relaxed cultural atmosphere brought about by the July Monarchy did not survive for long, versions of the politically-charged motifs in Les pilules dramatiques found a home in many nineteenth-century vaudevilles, even in times when censors were able to indulge their zeal (such as during the authoritarian Second Empire). More importantly, these same tried-and-tested motifs provided a key ingredient in a new kind of political journalism that emerged in France in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century; a brash, violently worded, decadence-obsessed opinion journalism epitomised in the 1880s by the writings of populist pamphleteers like Édouard Drumont and Henri Rochefort. The former was a failed vaudevilliste28 who turned to a lifetime of colère against imagined Jewish cabals, while the latter was none other than Claude-Louis-Marie de Rochefort’s son and a successful vaudevilliste in his own right who used his theatrical reputation to launch a successful journalistic career in the mid-1860s.29 Despite reports of “nine hundred dead each day” being common in mid-1832, many Parisian theatres remained open as the cholera pandemic raged and even after the death (also from cholera) of Prime Minister Casimir Perier plunged the capital into political chaos.30 By early June the general disenchantment, which the authors of Les pilules dramatiques had made a literal song and dance about the previous year, exploded into a republican insurrection quickly and brutally suppressed by government troops and later immortalised in Les Misérables. “Few vaudevillistes”, noted Le Figaro a couple of weeks after the abortive revolt, “can escape the contagion of playing the opposition at the moment . . . such is the importance that is placed on a rhyme or a bit of wordplay [in the belief that they] can topple governments”.31 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 10, 2021

Vlad Solomon

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:09.750800

the-kept-and-the-killed

The Kept and the Killed By Erica X Eisen January 26, 2022 Of the 270,000 photographs commissioned by the US Farm Security Administration to document the Great Depression, more than a third were “killed”. Erica X Eisen examines the history behind this hole-punched archive and the unknowable void at its center. The first killed negative I encounter is of a field. It’s a Carl Mydans shot, and a drought has reduced the land to a flat, cracked expanse out of which only a few tenacious scraggles of crabgrass have managed to sprout. Nothing notable here, no action, no grand geometries — except that the center of the negative has been pierced by a perfect circle, as though in counterpoint to the sprocket holes running along the photo’s edge. Briefly I imagine that this circle is what has doomed the land, a well into which all the precious waters must have run. Months after coming across the photograph, it is that void, more than any peripheral scenery, which remains anchored in my memory — that and the caption describing the picture as “killed”. Begun as part of the alphabet soup of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), under the aegis of which Mydans’ ill-fated photo was taken, had been tasked with resettling struggling farmers onto more fertile ground, providing education about agricultural science, and giving loans for the purchase of land, feed, and livestock. Arguably its most enduring legacy today, however, is the hundreds of thousands of photographs the agency1 produced to document the plight of destitute farmers, many of whom were trapped in an inescapable pit of debt made deeper still by the environmental devastation of the Dust Bowl. The project’s head, Roy Emerson Stryker (1893–1975), would shop his favorites around, going from newsroom to newsroom “with pictures under his arm”, as Dorothea Lange would later recall, in an attempt to secure placements in major papers.2 Stryker had encyclopedic ambitions: tasked with the mission of “introducing America to Americans”, the FSA’s photography wing would soon see its remit balloon far past images of rural poverty to encompass everything from aerial shots of utopian building projects to Kodachrome still lifes — all of which could find a home within what Stryker called simply the File.3 Yet despite the File’s colossal scope, there were still images that Stryker deemed unfit for inclusion. These photographs had to be, in his parlance, “killed” — marked for exclusion, usually with a merciless hole-punch through the middle. By the time the project came to a close, the FSA’s photographers had captured some 270,000 images, of which a staggering 100,000 were killed.4 These include work by pioneering Black filmmaker and photographer Gordon Parks; by Russell Lee, who would go on to document the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War; by Marion Post Wolcott, the FSA’s first full-time female photographer. They also include images of which not even a punctured trace survives. Stryker only used the hole-punch method on 35mm negatives; when presented with sheet film he felt was unsuitable, he simply discarded it.5 Stryker’s career had a ping-pong trajectory: he dropped out of the Colorado School of Mines to become a rancher before being shipped off to fight in World War I, then returned to the U.S. and studied economics at Columbia. There, he researched utopian socialism with Rexford Tugwell, a professor whose emphasis on the pedagogical and psychological impact of visual aids left an impression on Stryker. After Tugwell became part of Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust” of key advisers, he called upon his former student to join him in Washington and head up the photography arm of the Resettlement Administration, which, in 1937, was folded into the Farm Security Administration.6 Though not a photographer himself, Stryker nevertheless had a clearly defined sense of the medium as an instrument of social action and knew what he liked and did not like in an image. He would often send his photographers into the field armed with pages-long scripts detailing what exactly he wanted them to capture, itemized lists that sometimes approached aphoristic form: “The baseball diamond as an important part of our general landscape”; “Pressed clothes”; “The wall decorations in homes as an index to the different income groups and their reactions”; “Old tires piles”; “(What will happen to the roadside hamburger stand?)”; “Pictures of men, women, and children who appear as if they really believed in the U.S.”7 Stryker’s editorial philosophy occasionally brought him into conflict with the photographers he employed. His refusal to use the captions Lange painstakingly composed for her own images greatly frustrated her (despite praising Migrant Mother as the pinnacle of the FSA photography program’s output, Stryker would fire Lange on three separate occasions).8 Photographer Edwin Rosskam remarked bitterly that Stryker’s hole-punching habit “was barbaric to me. . . I'm sure that some very significant pictures have in that way been killed off, because there is no way of telling, no way, what photograph would come alive when”.9 Another FSA staffer, Ben Shahn, referred to Stryker’s style as “a little bit dictatorial”: He ruined quite a number of my pictures. . . . Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn't understand at the time. . . . Later on, during the war . . . I went to look for [a] negative and he[‘d] punched a hole through it. Well, I shot my mouth off about that. But, I didn't know what was done with a lot of my negatives, naturally. He learned, then, not to do that, you see, because this was an invaluable document of what life was like in 1935 and when I was looking for it in 1943 or '44 it didn't exist anymore.10 A chastened Stryker eventually granted veto power to photographers over which of their images would be killed. By the time he took a job at the Pittsburgh Photography Library in the 1950s, Stryker had transitioned to indicating killed negatives by having them pasted onto cards marked with an incongruously cutesy blue star. Sometimes, however, the old temptation for more abrasive methods seemed to take hold — other cards were branded by a special KILL stamp. In still other cases the destroying angel seems to have taken Stryker over completely and caused him to slash across the doomed images in marker.11 Even those pictures that he favored were not immune from these kinds of interventions: squiggles, lines, and written notes instructed his employees to crop and straighten, addenda that sometimes smudged and marred the photo Stryker was trying to perfect.12 Most of the negatives Stryker killed, by all accounts, were redundancies nixed in favor of a similar image with stronger composition, clearer focus, and facial expressions better comporting with the themes of suffering and endurance he sought to draw out of the FSA’s subjects. Shot through, these unloved alternates have become almost more interesting than their perfect twins. In contrast to the carefully captioned File images, killed negatives have no names attached, often no notes on provenance: what little we know about them is only by analogy to those photos that were saved, clues about location gleaned from landscapes, clothing, faces. As such, the killed photos demand a more active viewer, one willing to piece together, to parse, to consign some things to the realm of the curious and unknowable. Did Stryker give much thought as to where to put the hole through when he made his killings? These voids obliterate the hand of a little boy in fringed gloves who stares back calmly at his shooter; they slice through the pavement of an unnamed street where a pair of identical twins walks on unawares. They run like a sniper’s bullet through the legs of a man bending over to pick a fruit, whizz past the ear of a cop. A black hole tarnishes the pale lapel of a floppy-bonneted woman as she looks the other way; it hovers over a man’s head like a grim fate narrowly avoided. In one rare example, a vicious flurry of perforations strafes an entire family of Arkansas sharecroppers as the mother tends to her youngest. The void slates houses for destruction, theaters, water pumps, a cotton bale straining at the corset of its ties. It hangs aloft and lightless over a Chocowinity field like a sun negated. The same person is killed and killed again, from one picture to the next. When one views these photos as a series, the holes begin to feel like a vengeful god too terrible to figure. Once capturing social history, these images now seem to conjure that moment just prior to disaster: before the hole shatters the glass, pops the tire, forces the horse to give one final whinny, kick out uselessly, and fall to the earth. Punning on the pinhole history of early photographic technologies like the camera obscura, Roland Barthes used the word punctum (literally, “sting, speck, cut, little hole”) to name the disarming effect of certain images. “A photograph’s punctum”, he wrote, “is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)”.13 In the killed negatives, we find Barthes’ dictum literalized: it is the little hole or holes themselves that arrest our eyes and imagination. The strange contradiction at the heart of the killed negatives — as the very existence of this essay attests — is that in an important sense they weren’t killed: the hole-punched photos remain in the Library of Congress, preserved by Stryker himself, and the Pittsburgh Photography Library images deemed unfit for the archives have instead come to comprise their own separate archive in the same building, a sort of Salon des Refusés. Allen Benson writes that the “entombment” of these images “produces a contradictory effect, a desire to look, to open the killed storage boxes and inspect the remains”.14 When we do look, we find that, whatever the organic center of the original photo’s gravity may be, the void has usurped it and become, suddenly, the focal point. In the subtle but unmistakable way that Stryker’s puncture marks reveal the three-dimensional negative from which each two-dimensional image is printed, they call our attention to the fact that a photograph is a physical object and a fragile one at that. And yet at the same time it’s difficult not to feel a visceral reel as a hole slices through the head of a child, the face of a young mother. Stryker’s rejects present us with a push-pull of mimesis: the scenes become less real even as they become more emotionally immediate. If we wish to examine what images Stryker thought ultimately worthy of keeping, we must also consider the question of what images he thought were worth taking in the first place. Groups like Latinos and Native Americans, for instance, are underrepresented in the File.15 In a 1937 letter to Lange while she was on assignment photographing tenant farmers in Texas, Stryker advised her to “take both black and white, but place the emphasis on the white tenants, since we know that these will receive much wider use”.16 That latter part was indeed borne out by the fact that exhibitions and newspapers more readily selected white images from the File than non-white.17 More broadly, the FSA’s focus on the madonna, the stoic striver, elevated a certain class of “deserving poor” above those who were beyond the bounds both of being photographed and receiving material aid.18 For the government, of course, these two things were tightly interwoven: the purpose of the FSA’s photography program, after all, was to drum up support for the New Deal among an American public that had long viewed poverty as a moral stain. In the course of resettling white tenant farmers in the Mississippi Delta, the FSA forcibly uprooted Black families throughout the region — families whose suffering, it appears, did not rate high enough to make it into the File.19 When I viewed Stryker’s negatives together, they seemed to be posing questions not just about the work of the FSA but about the future of the country they sought to document: both “who should get a farm loan?” and “who cuts a heroic enough figure to advertise them?” Not only “whose grief do we recognize?”, but also “whose grief is deserving of succor?” Who will be kept and who will be killed? Who will survive in America — and what image of this land will these survivors bear into the future? The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 26, 2022

Erica X Eisen

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:10.286165

black-squares-before-malevich

Precedents of the Unprecedented Black Squares Before Malevich By Andrew Spira June 23, 2022 Described by Kasimir Malevich as the “first step of pure creation in art”, his Black Square of 1915 has been cast as a total break from all that came before it. Yet searching across more than five hundred years of images related to mourning, humour, politics, and philosophy, Andrew Spira uncovers a slew of unlikely foreshadows to Malevich's radical abstraction. Kasimir Malevich’s 1915 Black Square is surely one of the most extraordinary paintings ever produced. On the one hand, Malevich considered the picture to be the ultimate work, taking the practice of art as far as it could possibly go. As an unremitting expanse of the darkest colour, it offered the maximum possible visual experience; there was no work of art that was not somehow implicitly present in it. Hence his name for the style: Suprematism. On the other hand, Black Square seemed to bring the history of art to a conclusive end. It consummated a process that was started by the Impressionists in the 1870s — the dismantling of art’s visual language into its component parts. Following centuries of naturalistic representation, during which the visual arts had revolved around their subject matter, artists now became interested in the language of art itself, eventually reducing it to its bare essentials — colours and forms — at the expense of subject matter. The result was abstract art. Malevich took this process a step further by claiming that not only should “pure art” be free of any dependence on subject matter for its expressive effect, but that creativity no longer needed art through which to manifest. Eventually even the convention of art could be dispensed with: creative consciousness would stand free — immediately, or unmediated. Black Square was a sign that this philosophical task had been accomplished. It was the “final” work of art; but it was also an iconic and magical object, intended to propel viewers beyond themselves, and beyond all difference in the world, into a state of undifferentiated non-objectivity. Given its role, as envisaged by the artist, in the spiritual advancement of mankind, it was important to Malevich that Black Square should seem unprecedented. And there is indeed nothing remotely like it in the earlier history of fine art. But strangely, the painting did have precedents in other fields. In fact, although a black square (or rectangle) would seem — at first glance — to be a laconic, and even terse, sign, it has, over the centuries, proven itself to be extraordinarily elastic in its potential as a conveyor of meaning. The contexts in which it appeared are remarkably diverse, ranging from mourning and comedy, to metaphysics and politics. Although Malevich is unlikely to have known many, if any, of these precedents, they throw an uncanny light on his work, reflecting its own polyvalence. Some of these precedents are reasonably well known — for instance, the astrologer-physician Robert Fludd used a black square to represent the universe before the world was created, in his 1617 Utriusque Cosmi (or History of Two Worlds). And in 1759, Laurence Sterne inserted an entirely black page into his rambling novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman as a self-consciously exaggerated acknowledgement of the death of the parson Yorick. In fact, Tristram Shandy represents something of a turning point in the history of Malevich’s precursors. As a memorial, its black page stands at the tail end of a tradition of “mourning pages”, which were occasionally included in books from the fifteenth century onwards as signs of abject grief. For instance, a book of devotions in the British Library from around 1500 includes several hand-painted black pages, suggesting the utterly desolate state of the world following the crucifixion and death of Christ. Each page is overlaid with an evenly spread web of red beads, depicting the drops of blood that fell from his wounds. While concentrating the painter’s infinite anguish at the suffering of Christ into a moment of unyielding blackness, the image also serves as a trigger for the viewer. The image is not simply symbolic; the totality of its bleakness, contained only by the edges of the page, has a positively traumatic effect, albeit a miniaturised one. In the seventeenth century, this mourning tradition was perpetuated in a secular context. Books of elegies, commiserating the deaths of eminent persons, sometimes had several pages — one facing each page of text — on which nothing but a black rectangle was printed. One example — A kingly bed of miserie in which is contained, a dreame with an elegie upon the martyrdome of Charls, late King of England — was produced to lament the execution of Charles I in 1649. Its text is characteristically intense, though not without a certain vain artistry. On one page, the author of the verses, John Quarles, bewails, in a positively Shakespearean manner: “My shivering body, oh what stormy weather / was that, which violently tost me hither; / where am I now? What rubicundious light / is this? that bloodyes my amazed sight?” One must suppose that while poring over the words, a reader would, from time to time, plunge his mind into the dark wordless oblivion that also presented itself to him on the facing page. The funerary implications of a black square were clearly evident to Malevich. Apart from using the image to herald the “death of art”, one of his later Black Square paintings (painted for an exhibition in the 1920s) was hung over his bed when he died in 1935, acting both as an expression of grief and as a portal into the beyond. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the fervent sophistication of black pages had passed out of fashion, in favour of a more genteel and modest style of mourning. In fact, black pages had come to seem mannered and slightly ridiculous. Thus although Sterne was subscribing to the tradition of using them as a sign of respectful grieving, he was also lampooning it as an absurd artifice — there are several other transgressions of literary conventions in Tristram Shandy which contribute to its overall status as a quirky, comedic work. It is not inconceivable that Malevich knew of Tristram Shandy. In the early 1920s, the literary critic Viktor Shklovsky regarded the novel as a precedent for some of the a-logical futurist “zaum” poetry that was being written in Russia when Malevich was working on Black Square. Its innovations were not only amusing; they also interrupted people’s thought patterns — a process which, taken to an extreme, could alter the reader’s state of consciousness. Malevich also related to absurdity in this way. The paintings he produced immediately before developing Suprematism (for instance, An Englishman in Moscow, 1914) incorporate elements of cut-up pictures and words, giving rise to a thoroughly irrational image. Some of them include flat shapes of a single colour that we now know, with the benefit of hindsight, would eventually rise to the surface and completely eclipse the paintings’ incongruous details, in favour of Suprematist abstraction. In fact, X-rays reveal that Black Square was itself painted over an a-logical work, indicating that it is a continuation of the absurdist journey rather than a brusque replacement of it. Thus, not un-like the black page in Tristram Shandy, Malevich’s Black Square is both reverent and subversive. X-rays have also revealed traces of a vanished inscription on the border of Black Square that seems to link the picture with another early black page. The words of the inscription (which is only partly decipherable) are “battle of negroes”. This brief reference relates the work to an absurdist booklet, published in Paris in 1897. The booklet — Alphonse Allais’ Album Primo-Avrilesque (April Fool’s Day Album) — features seven monochromatic pages, in seven different colours. The pages’ captions reveal that, in each case, the objects depicted in the foreground are (supposedly) the same colour as the background and therefore cannot be distinguished from it: for red, “Apoplectic cardinals harvesting tomatoes on the shore of the Red Sea (an effect of Aurora Borealis)”; for yellow, “Jaundiced cuckolds handling ochre”. The caption for the black page reads “Combat de nègres dans une cave, pendant la nuit” (Negroes fighting in a cellar, at night). The humour was not Allais’ alone, but a refashioning of Paul Bilhaud’s all-black 1882 painting for the Salon des Incohérents, which came with a similar title. The treatment of race, here, undermines Bilhaud and Allais’ playful tone: without illumination, Black bodies appear to become seamlessly undifferentiated from darkness and violence. But what was Malevich’s relationship to these absurdist images? The Album Primo-Avrilesque was certainly known in Russia before 1915. In 1911, Malevich’s colleague Mikhail Larionov organised an exhibition in which pride of place went to a black ink poster with white spots called A Battle of Negroes at Night. But how the inscription found its way on to Malevich’s painting, and whether he was even responsible for its writing or erasure, is unclear. The message bears little relationship to Malevich’s other reflections on the work, though its presence is perhaps consistent with the fact that Black Square was not intended to represent a purist architectural ideal; the painting was pervaded by provocation and complexity. There were in fact several occasions in the nineteenth century when black rectangles were used on account of their absurdity. They can be divided into a number of thematic groups. Some were presented as framed pictures, ridiculing paintings in public exhibitions that were deemed incomprehensible, usually because they were more atmospheric than descriptive. Première Impression du Salon de 1843, a satirical supplement produced by Raymond Pelez for the Parisian magazine Le Charivari in 1843 is a case in point. In that work, a painting of a “night effect” is so dark that it has become an expanse of pure blackness. In a German work of 1867, an “effect painting” is rendered in the same way, with scribble marks to reflect the confusion of its viewers. In other works, blackness simply signifies the absence of light. A book of songs and stories by the German theatre director Franz Graf von Pocci, dating to 1845, used the device to illustrate a tale about a theatrical performance that descends into chaos when the lights fail. L’Histoire de Monsieur Lajaunisse, the story of a hapless Mr Bean-like character, published in 1839 by CHAM (“father of the strip cartoon”) includes two adjacent black rectangles to cover episodes in the story which took place in total darkness: having blown out his candle, and ready for sleep, Monsieur Lajaunisse climbs into his bed only to be confused by its hardness. It transpires that he had climbed into a chest of drawers by mistake. The “darkness” joke eventually crossed the Channel. In exactly the year that Malevich was painting Black Square, one G. L. Hanger was producing postcards of British towns “at night” that were entirely black, but for the white border, the words “[name of town] at Night”, and his own name. Confusion and ignorance were frequently represented by fields of blackness. In 1848, the mental state of the muddled Monsieur Reac, a conman whose antics were narrated by the photographer Nadar in comic strip style, was depicted as a chaotic tangle of black lines. But the blackness of ignorance was not always comic. In his historical atlas of 1830, Edward Quin attempted to convey the history of the world through a series of maps — not as it was at any given time, but only as it was known (by European historians). Those parts of the world that were not known were overlaid by the darkness of ignorance. The author explained how the same scale was used throughout the work to give an accurate impression of the relative state of human knowledge of the world at different periods. Given the limits of man’s knowledge at the earliest stages of human history, it is not surprising that most of the earliest maps in the sequence are covered in black. Malevich’s Black Square resonates with each of these precedents. Both empty and full, it preceded and succeeded the certainty of rational knowing. In the twentieth century it was not just mental states and knowledge that were represented by fields of blackness; it was the very experience of life. In 1912, the American architect and writer Claude Bragdon compared human consciousness to the way in which a two-dimensional plane would register a three-dimensional cube passing through it — as a sequence of shapes, rather than as a solid. In their essential natures, Bragdon surmised, human beings were like cubes, but in the plane of life, we only get to experience ourselves as a series of cross-sections. If we pass through the plane of life perpendicular to it, with consistency and rectitude, we will experience ourselves as squares; but if we pass through it semi-randomly and obliquely, we will experience ourselves as an erratic sequence of irregular shapes. Bragdon’s ideas were known in Russia and Malevich may have been influenced by them. Black Square was not simply a two-dimensional surface, parallel to a single wall and projecting outwards from it in one direction. Judging from the way it was displayed when first exhibited in 1915 — across the corner of the room (like a Russian icon) and as high up as possible — it was required to project from two walls and the ceiling, i.e. in three dimensions, embracing the room over which it presided as a cubic space. Although Black Square is above all a metaphysical painting, Malevich did expect it to have political resonance. His association of the sign with anarchism may have been prompted by an anarchist group called “The Black Banner”, which had established itself in Russia in 1903 and which used a black flag as its emblem. Indeed Malevich sometimes used the Black Square as a banner for his own cause, as can be seen in a celebrated photograph of him with students travelling by train from Vitebsk to Moscow in 1920. Blackness was also projected on to Russia from abroad, sometimes with political overtones. In Gustave Doré’s L’Histoire de la Sainte Russie (1854), the origins of Russia are represented as an area of black nothingness. The frame is captioned “The origins of Russia are lost in the darkness of antiquity”. Malevich may have agreed with these words, but he would not have agreed with Doré’s interpretation of them. For Malevich, the dark origins of Russia were natural, pure and energetic, unspoiled by western pretensions to civilisation; for Doré, they signified the country’s barbarism and lack of culture. Given that the book was written by a Frenchman during the Crimean War (1853–56), which pitted Russia against France, Great Britain, and the Ottoman Empire, the patronising and mocking tone of the work is perhaps not surprising. Another work in which Russia is associated, albeit coincidentally, with a framed black square is a supplement from a British journal, The Graphic, published in 1875. The sheet documents the War Strength of the European Powers in 1874 in a series of diagrams. At the top, the areas of the territory of Great Britain, Germany, Italy, France, Austro-Hungary, and Russia are represented as squares, with their colonies and dependencies (where the countries had them) shown as borders. As the caption clarifies: “SOLID BLACK represents Russia”. The extended territory of the Russian Empire, which then included parts of Poland, Ukraine, and Belorussia, is represented by the pale shaded area around it; the relative sizes of Great Britain and Ireland, and their colonies, are shown to the left, in solid red and pink respectively. One can only wonder whether the designer of this page chose black for Russia and red for Great Britain purposefully — as if to signify that Britain’s colonial agendas were more sympathetic and less harsh than those of Russia; it is not inconceivable. Whatever the case, the decision raises questions regarding the physiological effect that a square or rectangle of blackness can have on its viewers. Each of the examples referenced here is deeply situated in a highly specific context that determines its meaning. Indeed, these contexts are so integral to the overall significance of the motif that they can completely alter it, ranging from one extreme (for instance, misery) to its opposite (slapstick humour) with ease. Remarkably, Malevich’s Black Square functions in all of these contexts: mourning, comedy, epistemology, politics, etc. But while these contexts are able to throw light on his great painting, what they are unable to account for is its sheer guttural force. It evades the ultimate rationalisation, which is exactly what it was conceived to do. Maybe there is something fundamental about this. Human beings attempt to understand the world by identifying objects — assessing their degrees of similarity and difference, their consistency, their rates of change and repetition. The patterns that emerge from this reduction of the indeterminate totality of experience to a web of infinite relationships between things enable people to cohere as subjects. For a moment, Black Square frustrates this impulse to understand the world by simplifying it to a system of relationships, for it offers no relationships. Consequently, the coherence of the subject is momentarily undermined; consciousness stands free and unafraid. Black Square is tragic; it’s absurd; it can be bewildering or funny; it’s certainly metaphysical; and now it serves as a precursor for works and projects yet to be imagined. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 23, 2022

Andrew Spira

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:10.811157

still-farther-south

Still Farther South Poe and Pym’s Suggestive Symmetries By John Tresch June 16, 2021 In 1838, as the United States began its Exploring Expedition to the South Seas, Edgar Allan Poe published a novel that masqueraded as a travelogue. John Tresch guides us along this strange trip southward, following the pull of its unfathomable mysteries. In May, 1837, the U.S. economy screeched to a halt; the panic struck. Martin Van Buren had inherited an impending disaster. Interest rates in England had recently risen and cotton prices plunged. The nation plummeted into seven years of stagnation. All the while, Edgar Allan Poe worked with a focus sharpened by hunger. Years earlier, when Poe wrote to editors in hopes of publishing Tales of the Folio Club — each written in a distinct style, exaggerating the conventions and clichés of established genres and authors, often uproariously — he was warned that there was little public appetite for story collections.1 James Kirke Paulding, a reviewer for Harper & Brothers, said Americans preferred works “in which a single and connected story occupies the whole volume”.2 Poe took the advice. In late 1836, still in Richmond, Virginia, he began a seafaring novel inspired by Robinson Crusoe, with a hero whose name echoed his own: Arthur Gordon Pym. Poe’s novel would draw on popular excitement for a national scientific venture: a government-sponsored expedition to the South Seas. The project had been sparked by the lecturer J. N. Reynolds, who had been seized by the “hollow earth” theory of John Cleves Symmes, the “Newton of the West”.3 Symmes, a former army officer who moved between Kentucky, Missouri, and Ohio, believed that the surface of the earth was the outermost of five concentric spheres; its poles were flat and open, and one might travel smoothly from its extreme north or south into the globe’s interior. Lit and heated by reflected light, the inner surface of the outer sphere (and the four smaller spheres it contained) was, Symmes contended, a “warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals”.4 Declaring the chemist Humphry Davy and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt his “protectors”, he called for “one hundred brave companions” to depart with him “with Reindeer and slays” from Siberia across “the ice of the frozen sea” and into the earth.5 Reynolds, a captivating speaker, joined Symmes on a lecture tour and argued that the U.S. government should sponsor an expedition to test the theory. When Reynolds later spoke on the topic to Congress — having abandoned Symmes’ theory, but not his interest in an expedition to the South Seas — Poe took up the cause in the Southern Literary Messenger.6 Nothing less than “national dignity and honor” were at stake, he wrote. The United States was called to the world’s store of knowledge: “As long as there is mind to act upon matter, the realms of science must be enlarged; and nature and her laws be better understood, and more understandingly applied”. An expedition would boost U.S. trade in whale oil, sealskins, sandalwood, and feathers. It should include a “corps of scientific men, imbued with the love of science”, to correct navigational charts and “collect, preserve, and arrange every thing valuable” in natural history and anthropology. They would document “man in his physical and mental powers, in his manners, habits, disposition, and social and political relations”, studying languages to trace human origins “from the early families of the old world”. By early 1837, Poe had moved to New York, where his income appeared to be nearly non-existent; he survived thanks to the care of his aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, who managed a boarding house. That June, before the full consequences of the economic crash were realized, Harper & Brothers registered a copyright for Poe’s novel. This “single and connected story” wove Poe’s excitement about the Exploring Expedition together with his investigations into the decipherment of ancient languages. Packed with shocking passages and ominous imagery, it teased readers with revelations while throwing mystifying obstacles in their way. Strange Trip The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was published in 1838.7 Its title page was taken up by an outrageous 107-word subtitle, promising the “details of mutiny and atrocious butchery on board the american brig grampus, on her way to the south seas, in the month of june, 1827”, followed by a “shipwreck and subsequent horrible sufferings”, “deliverance”, “the massacre of her crew”, a visit to islands in “the eighty-fourth parallel of southern latitude”, and finally, “incredible adventures and discoveries still farther south”. One reviewer asked, “What say you, reader, to that for a title page?”8 The page didn’t mention Poe, or that the book was a work of fiction — suggesting that Poe intended the book to be taken, at least at first glance, as a genuine travel account. Adding to the Narrative’s verisimilitude were its precise details about currents, weather, and creatures of the sea and air. It closely resembled first-person voyage accounts — an extremely popular genre. It drew on Reynolds’ Potomac voyage and its details on the whaling trade (Reynolds’ Mocha Dick would later catch Herman Melville’s attention).9 Pym’s publication was timed to capitalize on excitement about the South Seas Exploring Expedition setting sail in August, which the narrator hoped would “verify some of the most important and most improbable of my statements”.10 The first edition also included notices of other Harper & Brothers books — travel accounts, histories, and biographies — encouraging readers to see the book in their hands as a truthful account of facts and actual experiences. In that case, its author would be “Arthur Gordon Pym”.11 Yet Poe had published the first chapters the previous year in the Messenger as fiction, signed “Edgar A. Poe”. To explain the contradiction, the preface (signed by “A. G. Pym”) claimed that after an “extraordinary series of adventures in the South Sea”, “Pym” met “several gentlemen in Richmond” who urged him to publish. “Pym” refused, thinking that the events of his journey were “so positively marvelous” that readers would take them as “an impudent and ingenious fiction”. But “Mr. Poe, lately editor of the Southern Literary Messenger”, persuaded him that even if the narrative were rough, “its very uncouthness, if there were any, would give it all the better chance of being received as truth”. “Pym” agreed to tell his story, on the condition that “Poe” would transcribe and publish it “under the garb of fiction” hence its appearance in the Messenger. Yet despite the “air of fable” that “Poe” gave the account, many readers believed it. “Pym” grew convinced that the facts of his journey, if plainly reported, “would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity”. He would tell his tale as it happened, in his “own name”. After this mad squabble between “Pym” and “Poe” about the best means of convincing readers of the truth, the story began calmly enough: “My name is Arthur Gordon Pym. My father was a respectable trader in sea-stores at Nantucket, where I was born.”12 Pym, aged seventeen, sets out one night after a party with his close friend Augustus for a “spree” in a tiny sailboat, the Ariel. They are nearly crushed by a large brig, the Penguin, which returns to save them. Pym lets Augustus talk him into another voyage. He stows away below deck on Augustus’ father’s whaler, the Grampus, with a copy of the account of Lewis and Clark’s expedition to keep him occupied. He nearly suffocates in the “dismal and disgusting labyrinths of the hold”, while above board is a mutiny. Helped by the half-Indian, half-European Dirk Peters and another sailor Richard Parker, Arthur and Augustus overtake the mutineers, playing on their superstitions. A storm ravages the ship; starving, they resort to cannibalism, drawing lots in a “fearsome speculation” that leaves Parker as the feast. Augustus dies; only Pym and Peters remain. Rescued by a passing schooner from Liverpool, the Jane Guy, they sail farther south than any previous Europeans. They land on the island of Tsalal, whose natives are entirely black — clothing, skin, hair, and teeth — and are fascinated and horrified by the white skins and sails of the Europeans, at which they cry out, “Tekeli-li!” Seeing an opportunity for “profitable speculation”, Captain Guy sets up a market, trading European trinkets for edible sea creatures which abound on the island. All goes well for the would-be colonizers until the Tsalalians lure the sailors into a trap, burying them in a deadly avalanche. Once again, Pym and Peters are their ship’s only survivors, hiding in the hills. Hunger forces them down through the black granite chasms of the island, which trace a strange path, like letters, which Pym records. On one wall of a cavern they also find engraved “indentures” that resemble a pointing human. They escape the island in a small canoe, taking a Tsalalian with them. As they paddle furiously away, the vessel is pulled “still farther south”. The air grows warm and the sea turns milky; white birds fill the sky, crying, “Tekeli-li!” The current increases and white ash falls on their boat. Before them appears a great white waterfall that they approach with “hideous velocity”. The Tsalalian dies of fear as the darkness of the sky “materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain before us”.13 As they rush toward the waterfall, “a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow”. There — suddenly, bewilderingly — Pym’s narrative ends. A mischievous “Note” closes the book, just as the preface opened it, explaining that Pym returned to the United States, and died, and that “Mr. Poe” “has declined the task” of reconstructing the final chapters of Pym’s voyage.14 The author of this final “Note” — neither “Pym” nor “Poe” — tentatively suggests an interpretation of the carved markings on Tsalal. In Egyptian, Arabic, and Ethiopian letters they appear to spell out “shady”; “white”; and “the region of the South”. The “Note” concludes with a mysterious, quasi-biblical utterance: “I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock.” Pym’s ending — the “hieroglyphs” in the black chasms, the white figure in the “chasm” of spray and mist, the sudden break in the action, and the note announcing Pym’s return and death — provides more questions than answers. It was Pym who urged Captain Guy to push toward the South Pole: “So tempting an opportunity of solving the great problem in regard to an Antarctic continent had never yet been afforded”.15 Though he regretted the “unfortunate and bloody events” that resulted from this advice — the massacre of dozens of natives and the Jane Guy’s entire crew — he was pleased to have aided in “opening to the eye of science one of the most intensely exciting secrets which has ever engrossed its attention”. Riddled with ambiguities, Pym’s tale was about the quest for discovery and its costs. An Inventory of Altered States Even though detective fiction didn’t yet exist — Poe would invent the genre three years later — Pym’s bizarre events gave readers endless puzzles to solve. The book’s last paragraph, on the writing in Tsalal’s chasms, explicitly invited a variety of interpretations. “Conclusions such as these”, it read, “open a wide field for speculation and exciting conjecture”. Its call for a “minute philological scrutiny” of the ancient words “written in the windings” of the chasms suggested that the entire book could be studied just as closely.16 For example, readers might seek a natural cause for the “whiteout” of the ending: perhaps the sailors are funneled into the hole predicted by Symmes’ “hollow earth”. Perhaps the “white figure” is an optical illusion, the distorted image of an approaching ship — perhaps the very same ship, the Penguin, that saves Pym and Augustus at the book’s beginning.17 Or perhaps Poe meant readers to see the white figure as an encounter with divine truth, as in the book of Revelation’s “vision of the seven candlesticks” with its figure with “hair of white wool”.18 The story might have held a political commentary: some critics have seen in the extreme polarization of black and white in “the region of the South” an allegory of a natural basis for slavery or a reference to the biblical curse of Noah against the descendents of Ham; others read the Tsalalians’ deadly rebellion as a warning of slavery’s likely consequence. The book explicitly addressed the slipperiness of interpretation: “In no affairs of mere prejudice, pro or con, do we deduce inferences with entire certainty, even from the most simple data”. For his descriptions of optical illusions, Poe drew on David Brewster’s Letters on Natural Magic. Pym experiences mirages, the visual distortions of twilight, and possibly, with the voyage’s closing image, “the Specter of the Brocken” — the vision of one’s own shadow as a giant when projected against a distant surface.19 Pym also confirms Brewster’s overall message, highlighting the power of optical tricks to manipulate naive believers. Dressing up as a corpse to play on the “superstitious terrors and guilty conscience” of the mutineers, Pym himself is “seized with a violent tremor” when he looks in a mirror; the first mate dies at the sight of what he takes for a ghost.20 The book underlined the unreliability of the senses by taking readers through an inventory of altered states of mind. As Pym suffocates below deck, he dreams of serpents, demons, and deserts; starving on the wrecked ship, he drifts into “a state of partial insensibility” with visions of “green trees, waving meadows of ripe grain, processions of dancing girls, troops of cavalry, and other phantasies.” His first adventure on board the small boat Ariel (the name of the magician Prospero’s familiar in The Tempest) establishes a narcoleptic rhythm in which Pym drops into a trance or visionary state, then staggers back into consciousness. Repeatedly taking readers from false appearances to an underlying reality, Poe showed how material conditions — intoxication, hunger, expectation — affect states of mind. This psychological emphasis added a probing, philosophical dimension to the “explained gothic” novels of Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole. Yet much as in De Quincey’s Confessions, in Pym truth was a moving target.21 “It is utterly useless to form conjectures”, he noted, “where all is involved, and will, no doubt, remain for ever involved, in the most appalling and unfathomable mystery.” Every appearance might hide a contrasting underlying reality, while that reality’s causes remained shrouded in doubt. Illusions and unreliable revelations pull Pym and the reader along, through a fever dream of signs and wonders, collapses, burials, and recoveries. Writing Backward Poe always took great care with his writings’ typography and physical layout — their visible “composition”.22 Just as he wrote his manuscripts in a precise, minute, and regular hand that resembled type, he worked closely with printers and typesetters. The eye-catching typographical layout of Pym’s title page seems to call out for decipherment, suggesting some meaning to its visual appearance. A copy of the French translation of Pym appears reflected in a mirror in a 1937 painting by René Magritte — an artist obsessed with the relations between images, words, and things; the suggestive symmetries of Poe’s original title page invite a closer look. The eight words of the main title float above the denser, smaller type of the subtitle. If you look with eyes slightly unfocused — or askance — you can see the title forming a half circle, mirrored by the tapering, slightly rounded cluster of text below. The title and the first part of the subtitle appear to form the two hemispheres of a globe: the upper mostly white, the lower mostly black. The eye is pulled downward, “STILL FARTHER SOUTH”, funneling with some bumps down to the publisher and date — the record of the book’s birth. This brief visual voyage anticipates the route the story will trace toward the bottom of the earth and, perhaps, to a receding point of origin — right off the page. Now look again. Can you see the four lines of the title forming two rows of sails, with the subtitle clustered below as the hull of a boat? Imagine a straight line drawn parallel to the line formed by the words “EIGHTY-FOURTH PARALLEL OF SOUTHERN LATITUDE”: you can then see the next clusters of words repeat, on a smaller scale, and upside down, the shape of the blocks of text above. Now we see a boat and its reflection, along with its sails, as if from a distance across a shimmering sea: an apt illustration for the maritime adventures about to unfold, as well as their doublings, inversions, and illusions.23 Symmetry and inversion were deeply engraved in Pym.24 As Poe knew from experience, setting pages for print required a typesetter to line up letters and words in a composing stick — in reverse order. This meant writing and reading backward — a mirror effect that could easily go wrong, through misrecognizing or transposing a letter. Poe built this symmetry and reversal into Pym’s structure. Its twenty-five chapters divide neatly in half, folding back upon themselves. Events in the first twelve chapters mirror those at the same distance from the center in the last twelve. In the middle paragraph of chapter 13 — the center of the book’s central chapter — the Grampus crosses the equator, Pym’s best friend, Augustus, dies, and the vessel flips over. The cannibalistic feast of the previous chapter — a horrific parody of the Last Supper — is echoed in the chapter that follows, with the ship’s departure from Christmas Harbor and Pym’s symbolic rebirth. Where before they drifted above the equator, starving, now they drift below the equator among islands with plentiful food. Likewise, the mutiny on the Grampus parallels the revolt on Tsalal, and the doomed voyage in the small Ariel at the beginning is echoed in the canoe voyage at the end. The book as a whole embodies the rhetorical figure of chiasmus, where elements of a phrase are repeated in reverse order — for example, “say what you mean and mean what you say”.25 The editor’s “Note” suggested a meaning for the shapes traced by Tsalal’s chasms — images of a journey that may form words, while the title page contained words that may form images of a journey.26 The first and last pages enwrap the verbal voyage between them. The book’s ominous pairings hint at hidden truths about the malleable nature of reality. At the start, Pym speaks of the perverse wishes that drive him to sea, visions of “shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes”. In its parallel, final chapter, as he hangs from a cliff and imagines himself letting go, he “found these fancies creating their own realities, and all imagined horrors crowding upon me in fact.”27 By that point, his grisly visions have indeed come true; his “fancies” have created “their own realities”. It is as if in the second half of the book Pym were walking through the exaggerated projections of his mind. He meets his own thoughts and fantasies, but magnified, turned upside down, fused with the landscape — as if passed through a warped mirror, a kaleidoscope, a camera obscura, or a magic lantern.28 Like a natural theologian, Pym seeks evidence of a divine design or providential plan behind his experiences. He doubts, for instance, that the “chain of apparent miracles” on Tsalal could be “altogether the work of nature”, hinting that they might be divinely wrought. Yet no unambiguous revelation is at hand. In the central chapter, exhausted and starving but rescued from shipwreck, he reflects on the horrors from which he has “so lately and so providentially been delivered”.29 In comparison, his current pains appear “little more than an ordinary evil—so strictly comparative”, he reflects, “is either good or ill”. In other words, any entity, and our judgment of it, depends on the other entities with which it is compared and with which it stands in relation.30 This theme was echoed in the mirroring between the Jane Guy’s sailors and the Tsalalians. Pym and other “civilized” men have become cannibals, while the natives turn out to be no more credulous or savage than the white speculators. If the book implied a racial allegory, it might have been one of a shared damnation. Pym’s final line, “I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock”, suggests that Pym’s tribulations could be read as evidence that God created not out of generosity and benevolence but from some incomprehensible divine desire for revenge. After all, engraving matter with the originating Word, breathing spirit into dust, has been the cause of boundless human suffering. Perhaps, even more cruelly, the “vengeance” of the creator, whether God or Poe, was that despite the enticing hints of significance at every turn of the journey, there was no ultimate plan or redemptive design to be found. Poe’s seafaring novel used remarkable literary precision to raise a set of questions it refused to answer; its meaning was a definite mystery, no matter how suggestive the symmetries.31 The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 16, 2021

John Tresch

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:11.430121

william-wells-brown-wildcat-banker

William Wells Brown, Wildcat Banker By Ross Bullen November 24, 2021 A cottage industry, yes, but a barbershop bank? Ross Bullen plots how a story told by William Wells Brown — novelist, historian, playwright, physician, and escaped slave — circulated, first through his own works, and then abroad, as a parable of American banking gone bad. On January 1, 1834, a young man named William escaped from slavery near Cincinnati, Ohio. Travelling at night through the frigid winter, without an overcoat to keep him warm, William suffered from cold and hunger, and yet, as he recorded in the first of many autobiographical narratives, his thoughts were constantly drifting toward the future. “My escape to a land of freedom now appeared certain”, he wrote, “and the prospects of the future occupied a great part of my thoughts. What should be my occupation, was a subject of much anxiety to me; and the next thing what should be my name?”1 Although his mother had called him “William”, he had, for most of his life, been known as “Sandford” to the series of men who had legally owned him. But now he would be William. A last name would be trickier to come by. Although William knew the name of the white man who was his biological father, he refused it, claiming “I would rather have adopted the name of ‘Friday’, and been known as the servant of some Robinson Crusoe, than to have taken his name.”2 Eventually, fate intervened in the form of a friendly Quaker who took William in when he fell ill. Grateful for the Quaker’s help, William gave him the privilege of choosing a new name: William Wells Brown.3 The newly named Brown continued his travels north, eventually settling in Cleveland, Ohio, on the southern shore of Lake Erie. Here Brown married a woman named Elizabeth Schooner, and found work on steamships, often ferrying fugitive slaves across Lake Erie to Canada and freedom. In the years that followed, Brown would become a popular and prolific anti-slavery lecturer and a vocal supporter of social reform. While never working exclusively as a writer, he achieved success across multiple literary modes. With the debut of The Escape; or A Leap to Freedom (1858), Brown became the first published African American playwright, while his The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867) is considered the first military history of African Americans. He wrote the earliest African American travelogue and, later in his life, was a practicing physician.4 The story recounted above comes from Brown’s Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1847), and was reworked six years later in the “Narrative of the Life and Escape of William Wells Brown”, an autobiographical sketch in the third person that precedes Brown’s 1853 novel Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: the first published novel by an African American author. Brown’s novel tells the story of two sisters, Clotel and Althesa, who are the children of an enslaved woman named Currer and Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States. Clotel was based on the story — then a rumor, now confirmed by DNA analysis — that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman whom he legally owned (and who was also his wife’s biological half-sister). Brown’s “Narrative”, however, contains another rumor, this one unsubstantiated, which numerous scholars have tried — with varying degrees of success — to square, thematically, with Clotel: the story of William Wells Brown as a Wildcat banker. As Brown tells it, in the fall of 1835, he found himself broke in Monroe, Michigan, having been cheated out of his summer’s earnings by a dishonest steamship captain. Brown sought employment with the local barber and, after being repeatedly turned down, he embraced the spirit of the free market and opened his own shop directly across the street from his competition. According to Brown, one of the barber’s customers offered him “a room in which to commence business. . . on the opposite side of the street” as well as his influence with the townspeople. Brown eagerly accepted and, in order to attract new business, made an impressive sign for the barbershop, advertising himself as the “Fashionable Hair-dresser from New York, Emperor of the West”.5 Although “the Emperor” had never actually been to New York, his marketing strategy was a great success. He reports that “in a few weeks I had the entire business of the town, to the great discomfiture of the other barber”. Flush with profit, Brown took the advice of a friend and printed and distributed “shinplasters”: promissory notes for small amounts of money — spare change, essentially — that he could give to his customers, and which would then circulate alongside other kinds of money in Monroe. Brown offers his readers a detailed explanation of this unusual economic situation: At this time, money matters in the Western States were in a sad condition. Any person who could raise a small amount of money was permitted to establish a bank, and allowed to issue notes for four times the sum raised. This being the case, many persons borrowed money merely long enough to exhibit to the bank inspectors, and the borrowed money was returned, and the bank left without a dollar in its vaults, if indeed it had a vault about its premises. The result was that banks were started all over the Western States, and the country flooded with worthless paper. These were known as the ‘Wild Cat Banks.’ Silver coin being very scarce, and the [state-chartered] banks not being allowed to issue notes for a smaller amount than one dollar, several persons put out notes of from 6 to 75 cents in value; these were called ‘Shinplasters.’ The Shinplaster was in the shape of a promissory note, made payable on demand. I have often seen persons with large rolls of these bills, the whole not amounting to more than five dollars.6 As Brown explains it, the lack of small change in Monroe — a nationwide scarcity in this period — created a demand for shinplasters: small denomination bills issued by private businesses serving as Wildcat banks (like Brown’s barber shop) and backed by nothing more than the confidence of the local community. In Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic, Joshua R. Greenberg recounts how during the 1830s these western banks were often labelled as fraudulent, “wild cat” organizations, the joke being that such banks — in order to discourage anyone from trying to redeem their notes — were “located in areas so remote that only wildcats lived nearby”.7 Value often decreased over distance: dollars from a Monroe, Michigan bank were worth less in New York City because the issuing bank was regarded as unreliable, while the note itself was harder to redeem (the note holder would have to travel almost six hundred miles to cash it, if it could be cashed at all). Americans would need to constantly haggle over the perceived value of hundreds of different bank notes in their day-to-day lives, while papers like Counterfeit Detector and Bank Note List and Thompson’s Bank Note Reporter provided detailed — and constantly shifting — lists of which notes were reliable and which were not. Although people in Monroe may have been skeptical of Brown’s shinplasters, their desperation for small denomination bills ultimately outweighed any suspicions about Brown. “At first my notes did not take well; they were too new, and viewed with a suspicious eye”, he writes, “But through the assistance of my customers, and a good deal of exertion on my own part, my bills were soon in circulation; and nearly all the money received in return for my notes was spent in fitting up and decorating my shop”.8 By giving his customers shinplaster promissory notes as change, Brown was able to keep more of their money, and to use this surplus to fix up his business. What Brown did not anticipate, however, is what would happen if his customers decided to redeem the shinplasters en masse, demanding payment. He was about to find out. The rival barber, unimpressed with Brown’s entrepreneurship, orchestrated a run on Brown’s “bank”. First, a man visited Brown’s shop and demanded to exchange his shinplasters: “Emperor, you will oblige me if you will give me some other money for these notes of yours.”9 Brown complied by giving him the least reputable paper money he had on hand. Two more men followed, and Brown did the same. When he spotted a fourth man approaching with a handful of his shinplasters, he abruptly closed shop for the day, worried that he did not have enough other money to redeem the notes. Aware that the barber’s associates would continue the run, Brown asked his friend how he could avoid what seemed like inevitable financial ruin. He laughed heartily, and then said, “You must act as all bankers do in this part of the country.” I inquired how they did, and he said, “When your notes are brought to you, you must redeem them, and then send them out and get other money for them; and, with the latter, you can keep cashing your own Shinplasters.” This was indeed a new job to me. I immediately commenced putting in circulation the notes which I had just redeemed, and my efforts were crowned with so much success, that before I slept that night my “Shinplasters” were again in circulation, and my bank once more on a sound basis.10 Did this really happen? Did Brown, an African American fugitive from slavery, actually move to a mostly white town, outwit a local business owner by opening up a successful rival shop, and then found his own small-scale bank? In Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions, Geoffrey Sanborn argues that while many African American anti-slavery lecturers (most notably, Frederick Douglass) used the rhetoric of authenticity and honesty to persuade white audiences of the evils of slavery, Brown preferred to use “attractions” — stories, tall tales, sketches, and jokes, including other people’s — to keep his audiences and readers entertained. Much of Brown’s writing, and his career as an anti-slavery lecturer, was seemingly modelled on Douglass, yet the two had a somewhat combative relationship, with Douglass exposing one of Brown’s instances of plagiarism in Frederick Douglass’ Paper in 1853. (As Sanborn has shown, Brown plagiarized significant portions of his written works, copying passages — ranging from a phrase or two to whole pages — from scores of other writers, including well-known authors like Washington Irving.)11 Brown was highly critical of slavery in his speeches and writing, but he also had no problem placing such criticisms alongside fictional comic vignettes that might have no clear moral, or which might rely on crude racial stereotypes about African Americans. “[Frederick] Douglass seems to want, above all else, to be authoritative”, Sanborn writes. “Brown seems to want, above all else, to be interesting.” Brown is, as Sanborn puts it elsewhere in his book, “always playing to the crowd”.12 Given the picaresque style of the shinplaster story, it seems likely that Brown first told it to live audiences, testing out and revising his material before committing it to print. Brown makes no mention of his bank or Monroe, Michigan in Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1847), his first autobiographical work, even though the barber/banker story ostensibly happened twelve years before it was published. The story first appeared in print during one of Brown’s chapters about England in his travelogue Three Years in Europe; or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (1852). Having left the United States in 1849 to attend the Paris Peace Conference and to publish a British edition of his Narrative, Brown was forced to stay on in England after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law made it too dangerous for him to return home (Brown would remain in Europe until 1854, when his freedom was purchased by English friends). Much of his account of England focuses on the relative lack of racial discrimination he encounters there, and his reverence for the hallmarks of British culture. Brown recalls the story of his own bank only after sharing an impression of the Bank of England, a “monster building of gold and silver” that “surpassed [his] highest idea of a bank”. This encounter with the “monster” bank, which seems to be made of the very metallic materials that backed the British financial system, causes Brown to recall “an incident that had occurred to [him] a year after [his] escape from slavery”.13 After telling his barber/banker story, Brown returns to the narrative present and highlights the odd juxtaposition between the Bank of England and his own Wildcat bank: “As I saw the clerks shovelling out the yellow coin upon the counters of the Bank of England, and men coming in and going out with weighty bags of the precious metal in their hands, or on their shoulders, I could not but think of the great contrast between the monster Institution, within whose walls I was then standing, and the Wild Cat Banks of America!”14 When Brown started publishing his barber/banker story in the early 1850s, shinplasters and Wildcat banks were still very much a part of everyday American life. As Greenberg shows, before the Civil War there was a perpetual shortage of reliable paper currency in the U.S. — Americans had to constantly think, talk, worry, and joke about low-quality paper money. Here are two Wildcat bank jokes from the 1850s that perhaps reflect this anxiety: WILD CAT BANK CAPITAL – The St. Louis News says, Mr. Edeu Brown, of Brown’s Ferry Cedar River, Iowa, has caught, during the past Winter, twenty-three coons; ten minks, two otters, and a cart load of pole cats. One night last week he caught eight young wolves alive in a hollow tree. Mr. Brown is thinking of “starting a bank.”15 Why is a good-for-nothing dog thrown overboard in the Atlantic, like the wild-cat money of the West?        Because it’s a worthless cur-in-sea! (currency).16 These jokes may not be particularly funny, at least by contemporary standards, but they contain the kind of humor that played well to American audiences all-too-familiar with suspicious banknotes. A collection of literal wild cats (although the author of the first joke has a charitable sense of what constitutes a “cat”) probably represents as much of a “reserve” as many Wildcat banks actually held in their vaults. Brown knew that his banknote story also resonated with audiences and readers, at first — presumably — from telling the story during his anti-slavery lectures, and then after reading the reviews for Three Years in Europe. These reviews of Brown’s travelogue consistently excerpted the segment at length, with several singling it out as one of the best parts of Brown’s book. By my count, the barber/banker story was reprinted (either as an excerpt or as part of a more detailed review) at least thirteen times in U.S. and U.K. periodicals, including the London Athenaeum, the New York Times, and Frederick Douglass’ Paper, during the year before Brown published Clotel. In other words, it seems likely that the primary reason Brown reprinted this account in the “Narrative of the Life and Escape of William Wells Brown” is because it was a hit, and Brown — ever the showman — knew a good story when he had one. Brown would reuse the Wildcat story several times throughout the 1850s. In addition to Three Years in Europe and Clotel, Brown included the story in: an 1855 American edition of his travelogue called The American Fugitive in Europe; an 1856 biography ostensibly written by his daughter Josephine (but almost certainly written by Brown himself); and 1859’s Memoir of William Wells Brown, an American Bondman, Written by Himself. And then he stopped. Although Brown would go on to publish three revised versions of Clotel, several volumes of African American history, and a new memoir, My Southern Home (1880), the barber/banker story does not appear in any of these books. Why? The easiest answer is that the decline of Wildcat banking during the 1860s meant that, quite simply, Brown’s story was no longer relevant. “When taken together, the National Currency Act of 1863 and the National Bank Act of 1864 established a new financial and monetary structure in the United States”, Greenberg writes. “Rather than 1,500 separate banks’ currencies with dozens of different state regulations, there would be one uniform national bank note individually branded by its issuing branch”.17 Brown knew that tales about Wildcat banknotes and shinplasters would seem dated to readers in the 1860s (and beyond), and so he simply dropped them from his repertoire. Regardless of whether or not the barbershop event actually occurred or was merely a well-crafted set piece, the story of William Wells Brown, the Wildcat banker, had a rich afterlife first in Brown’s own prose and then, internationally, as a parable of American banking gone bad. There is a curious symmetry between Brown’s shinplasters and the story about his shinplasters. Both originate with Brown, and Brown had some say over their printing and distribution, but ultimately both his banknotes and his story would circulate in ways that Brown could not control or anticipate. We have already seen how Brown’s notes came back to potentially ruin him during a bank run. But what about Brown’s story? How did it circulate beyond his own books? Brown’s barber/banker story had a second act as an example of fast-and-loose American finance in at least two essays about British monetary policy. The first, written by William Neilson Hancock, was published in the Journal of the Dublin Statistical Society in 1855. Hancock’s essay defends the Bank Charter Act of 1844, which limited the number of banknotes that could be issued, and centralized economic power with the Bank of England. The Bank Charter Act positioned the Bank of England in stark contrast with American banks during the Free Banking Era. Hancock uses Brown’s story as a cautionary tale about why “free banking” must be avoided. He reprints it untruncated, italicizing passages that reveal the unscrupulous workings of the Wildcat banking system. Although Hancock acknowledges that Brown is “one of that race whom Americans despise and oppress”,18 at least one reader of Hancock’s essay — John Joseph Murphy, writing in the Belfast Mercantile Journal — drops the subject of Brown’s race altogether, referring to him simply as “an American writer” and “the American”.19 For Irish and British writers in the 1850s and 1860s, the salient element of Brown’s story is what it says about American banks and the American financial system on the whole, rather than anything about Brown or his status as a fugitive slave. This reading is completely at odds with modern interpretations of Brown’s anecdote, and almost certainly at odds with Brown’s intentions as well, since he knew his audience and readers would never lose sight of the fact that he was a Black man running a Wildcat bank in a mostly white town. The second essay to revive Brown’s barber/banking story would take it even further afield — in fact, all the way to China. It was written by Colonel William Henry Sykes, a director of the East India Company and Member of Parliament for Aberdeen. Sykes read his essay, “Free Trade in Banking”, at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Nottingham, England, in August 1866 (it would later be published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society in 1867, a society he helped found). Like Hancock, Sykes was no fan of American-style “free banking”. He introduces Brown as an “escaped slave” whose writing “may scarcely, if at all, be known in England”, but nevertheless states that his barber/banker story “may not be without its effect upon our free traders in money and banking in England”.20 After reproducing Brown’s story about Monroe in full, Sykes recognizes an international trend by noting that “the ingenious devices in the Western States of America for raising money have a parallel in Manchooria, in Tartary”, where a ubiquity of paper money had been reported by the British Consul.21 Sykes then goes on to quote a lengthy excerpt from Justus Doolittle’s 1865 book Social Life of the Chinese, recounting how an 1855 bank run was quashed when the local viceroy had two rioters beheaded in the streets. For Sykes, Brown’s Wildcat bank has wandered far away from its origin in Monroe, Michigan, and now rests comfortably alongside unregulated paper bills, Chinese money clubs, and the public execution of customers, as equally valid examples of banking gone bad. In an essay on Clotel in the volume Early African American Print Culture, Lara Langer Cohen argues that Brown’s writing “demands fresh forms of analysis that would recognize citation as an important technique of African American print culture, theorizing modes of textual production that exceed origination to encompass reading, maneuvering, and rearrangement”.22 In other words, the meaning of Brown’s barber/banker story is not limited by whatever Brown’s original intention for it was when he first told it or wrote it down. By reprinting, revising, and recontextualizing his original story, Brown was able to repurpose it to suit whatever writing project he was undertaking. And when it stopped being a good story, he stopped using it. But the story did not stop with Brown. The “reading, maneuvering, and rearrangement” of the shinplaster tale includes its citation by other writers, like Hancock and Sykes (and their readers), who refashioned Brown’s Wildcat days. By my count, at least fourteen periodicals published, or republished, reviews of Sykes’ paper, and most of them included a sentence or two (or more) about Brown. Years after Brown had stopped telling one of his favorite anecdotes, it suddenly had thousands of new readers. This was an unexpected twist that one of American literature’s cleverest and craftiest writers would surely have appreciated. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 24, 2021

Ross Bullen

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:11.966194

luigi-russolos-cacophonous-futures

Luigi Russolo’s Cacophonous Futures By Peter Tracy March 24, 2022 What does the future sound like? In the early 20th century, one answer rang out from Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori — lever-operated machines designed to pop, sough, shriek, and shock. Peter Tracy explores the ambitions behind Italian Futurism’s experiments with noise and the sensory, spiritual, and political affinities of this radical new music. Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) was well into a successful painting career when he turned to music in his 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises (L’arte dei rumori). Announcing an intention to “enlarge and enrich the field of sound”, the Futurist polymath waxed poetic about the modern city’s sonic landscape — “the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons”, and “the shrieks of mechanical saws”.1 For Russolo, the noisy nature of everyday, industrializing Europe offered new ways of perceiving the acoustic world and a means of shaking concert music loose from its stagnant orchestral roots. With significant help from his assistant, Ugo Piatti, Russolo set out to put these ideas into practice, working day and night to “achieve the great ideal of a complete orchestra of noise instruments [intonarumori]”.2 Within three months, they had built their first creation, a “burster” (scoppiatore), and premiered it before an audience of two thousand at Teatro Storchi in Modena, Italy. Meant to mimic a car engine’s sputter, the instrument, by all appearances a simple wooden box with an enormous speaker cone attached, had a playable range between two octaves, modulated by a crank and lever.3 This “burster” was soon followed by a “hummer”, a “rubber”, which evoked spatulas scraping rusty pans, and the “crackler” — a sonic chimera sounding like something between a mandolin and a machine gun.4 Little remains today of Russolo’s instruments beyond scattered diagrams and photographs, which have been used on multiple occasions to create playable replicas. Aside from a fragment of the score for Risveglio di una città, none of Russolo’s compositions for the intonarumori survive. Yet, miraculously, two gramophone recordings were produced by Russolo and his brother Antonio in 1921 and have been successfully preserved.5 In these grainy time-capsules, the intonarumori seem to be in conflict with one another, battling for sonic space alongside traditional instruments at what sounds like the end of a long tunnel. In Corale, an asinine, plodding orchestral score is rendered unsettling by the violent roar of an unidentifiable machine. Serenata features even less of the intonarumori, but their occasional presence turns a sentimental serenade of strings and woodwinds into a carnivalesque nightmare. Tempered by the presence of instruments from the past and by the limits of contemporary technology, the “noise intoners” nevertheless make their intense energy felt through Russolo’s soundscapes. In an interview some forty years after his 1915 encounter with the music of the Italian Futurists, composer Igor Stravinsky recalled the event as, at best, an intriguing oddity: On one of my Milanese visits Marinetti and Russolo, a genial quiet man but with wild hair and beard, and Pratella, another noisemaker, put me through a demonstration of their “futurist music.” Five phonographs standing on five tables in a large and otherwise empty room emitted digestive noises, static, etc. . . . I pretended to be enthusiastic and told them that sets of five phonographs with such music, mass produced, would surely sell like Steinway Grand Pianos.6 Stravinsky’s reaction was mild when compared to that of the international press: one correspondent for a Paris newspaper described a concert of the intonarumori as “an impressive simultaneity of bloody faces and noisy enharmonics in an infernal din”.7 Yet the musical inventions of Russolo did not fail to find admirers. Indeed, the composer Edgard Varèse was highly enthusiastic about Russolo’s musical and theoretical works, as were later composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and John Cage, and visual artists like Piet Mondrian. What was still unknown to Stravinsky in 1915, however, would become common knowledge by the mid-twentieth century: the sonic revolution that Russolo and his fellow Futurists sought was uneasily compatible with the ritualized, martial violence celebrated by Italian Fascism. The Future is Noise In his early career as a painter, Russolo was significantly influenced by Francesco Balilla Pratella (1880–1955), whose own 1910 manifesto, Musica Futurista, urged “the liberation of individual musical sensibility from all imitation or influence of the past”.8 Reflecting on the psychological and metaphysical ramifications of scientific practice and technological discovery, Russolo’s fellow Futurists broke from the past by articulating new ways of perceiving, thinking, and living. In the 1910 Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto, which Russolo co-authored with the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, the 1895 discovery of X-rays is taken as proof that the full extent of reality is not visible to the naked eye: “Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies, since our sharpened and multiplied sensitiveness has already penetrated the obscure manifestations of the medium?”9 ※※Indexed under…X-rayas inspiration for Futurist art This Futurist interest in obscure mediums and novel sensations often manifested itself as a preoccupation with synesthesia. In Russolo’s early paintings, completed between 1901 and 1913, clouds of color and streaked light represent non-visual sensory phenomena. Profumo, for instance, features a figure lost in the satisfaction of scent, rendered as a wash of blissful greens, yellows, and blues. In Chioma, a woman’s hair comes brilliantly to life as a fiery orange swirl, while her penetrating gaze creates searching rays of purple light. La Musica, with its leering, tumbling noteheads and a shadowy, solitary organist, suggests that, for Russolo, sound and color were parts of the same sensory whole. Other Futurists seemed to agree: the painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni (1882–1912), for instance, remarked in his Roman lecture of May 1911 that paintings could be thought of as “whirling musical compositions of enormous colored gases”, while Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), the founder of Futurism, revealed his preoccupation with the idea of “noise as poetry” through a series of onomatopoetic writings that he termed parole in libertà (free words).10 In these cacophonous works, the sounds of war are mimicked by ordering letters according to sound rather than meaning. In turn, Marinetti’s words seem to have provided Russolo with a new program for music and noise, one that was to shape his life for more than fifteen years.11 When Marinetti penned the 1909 Manifesto del Futurismo, he mythologized himself as a composer overcome by a manic state, one in which modes of perception blurred together and where choric voices, modern architecture, and everyday objects could collude to form a new and dazzling orchestra: We shall sing the great masses shaken with work, pleasure, or rebellion: we shall sing the multicolored and polyphonic tidal waves of revolution in the modern metropolis; shall sing the vibrating nocturnal fervor of factories and shipyards burning under violent electrical moons; bloated railroad stations that devour smoking serpents; factories hanging from the sky by the twisting threads of spiraling smoke . . . the oscillating flight of airplanes, whose propeller flaps at the wind like a flag and seems to applaud like a delirious crowd.12 It was a boundless, assumption-shattering, and violence-courting energy that Marinetti projected from this first statement of his Futurist ideals — a compulsive vitality that aimed to shock the modern urbanite out of blasé complacency, reinvigorating their senses to confront the wonders of a new century with open eyes and ears. Marinetti was trying to rally Europe’s aesthetes to a shining new cause: noise, speed, power, Futurism. “By celebrating action and movement”, writes Luciano Chessa, Marinetti’s “aesthetics celebrated the energy manifested in every vibration of the cosmos, that is, energy itself.”13 Four years after this manifesto, Russolo fashioned a tract of his own in The Art of Noises, which recounts a trench letter, sent by Marinetti during the First Balkan War, in which the sounds of combat create “the orchestra of a great battle”. Building on this image, Russolo lays out a map of his mechanical philharmonic, where the intonarumori are classed by families of sound. “Roars”, “thunderings”, “explosions”, “bangs”, and “booms” belong to his first category, while “shouts”, “screams”, “shrieks”, “wails”, “hoots”, “howls”, “death rattles”, and “sobs” compose category six.14 This taxonomy governed both the spatial organization of the intonarumori on stage and the methodology behind their construction, a process that drew on significant technical skill (fine-tuned through numerous failed experiments) in order to intone, in Russolo’s words, “diverse noises, regulating them harmonically and rhythmically”.15 The intonarumori’s roots in the sound of battle were far from incidental — the fetishization of war was central to Futurist ideals.16 Many were willing to accept and encourage a certain amount of destruction to clear the way for, in Boccioni’s words, “smashing the chronometric tyranny of rhythm”, celebrating violence, in the studio and on the streets, as both an intense expulsion of energy and a means of furthering their cause.17 Marinetti announced the Futurist’s intention to “glorify war — the world’s only hygiene — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman”.18 Whereas Pratella advocated a merely theoretical break with the artistic past, Marinetti called for these sentiments to be taken to their ultimately physical conclusions, exhorting his acolytes to destroy museums, libraries, and universities.19 Although his machismo and misogyny could be construed as posturing, Marinetti’s militancy had much in common with, and helped shape, emerging strains of revolutionary and reactionary politics. A volatile blend of modern science, mass media, fine art, poetry, and insurrection, Marinetti’s vision resonated with a generation of artists who — as Russolo and others wrote in “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters” — wished to express “the violent desire that stirs in the veins of every creative artist today”, a desire that led many to sympathize with the devastating forces of Fascism.20 Body Madness: Russolo’s Early Concerts The first Futurist “happenings”, public poetry readings and performances that encouraged participation from the audience via heckling and vegetable throwing, could be construed as a push to craft a certain eccentric image of the movement, one that would capture the public’s attention and imagination. According to Gavin Williams, “Marinetti’s international publicity campaign had as its goal the seduction of audiences — typically figured as a crowd — to the aesthetics of war.”21 As the 1912 and 1913 Balkan Wars raged and World War I loomed, “Marinetti (along with many others) promoted battle as a means of national regeneration”.22 In an explicit attempt to seduce Italians and foreigners through the violent “beauty” of war, Marinetti wanted to throw “images and sounds ‘frantically into the nerves’”, so as to induce “a sensory overload that would ideally give rise to ‘body madness’ in listeners”.23 Given the surviving descriptions of Russolo’s early concerts, “body madness” seems a rather appropriate term for the resulting scenes. On April 21, 1914, the first public concert featuring the full intonarumori orchestra was held, with the whole gamut of instruments arranged in an arc on a massive stage. More striking than the instruments were the events that unfolded in the audience: Russolo himself concedes that “the immense crowd was already in an uproar a half hour before the performance began” with the first projectiles raining “upon a still closed curtain”.24 This, he claims, was the doing of professors from the Royal Conservatory of Milan.25 A contemporaneous account of the event makes the infamous 1913 “riot” at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps sound like afternoon tea: At the beginning of the third piece, an extraordinary thing happens: Marinetti, Boccioni, Armando Mazzi, and Piatti vanish from the stage, emerge from the empty orchestra pit, run across it, and hurl themselves among the seats, assaulting the many pastists, now drunk with the rage of tradition and imbecility, with blows, slaps, and cudgels . . . the battle in the orchestra lasts about half an hour, while the imperturbable Luigi Russolo continues to direct his orchestra of noise instruments.26 Soon afterwards, the orchestral performers themselves get in on the fray: half keep the intonarumori running, pulling their levers and turning their wheels like a frantic submarine crew, while the other half battles the audience. Yet the bloodshed courted by Marinetti and the Futurists was far from random: they aestheticized violence to such a degree that what occurred in the seats was merely an extension of what took place on stage. In the wake of the First World War, this “artistic experiment” began to seep deeper into public life. During June, 1919, Marinetti co-authored yet another manifesto: Il manifesto dei Fasci italiani di combattimento, commonly referred to as the Fascist Manifesto. Marinetti’s involvement with Italian Fascism is unsurprising when we consider his preoccupation with the volatility of crowds, celebration of public violence, and vision of national renewal through bloodshed. The role of art under Mussolini, argues Roger Griffin, was “to act as a source of the regenerative myths needed to forge a vital new communitas, the national community, out of a moribund society, to inform the ‘spirit’ of Fascism’s ‘spiritual government’”.27 Despite numerous critical attempts to exculpate Futurist noise from Fascist politics, sonic discord could easily become the soundtrack of authoritarianism. “Noise served as the perfect emblem of this violence”, Christine Poggi writes, “which Marinetti and the other futurists wished to unleash, if only to rechannel it to nationalist aims”.28 Although Russolo never explicitly identified as a Fascist, he was by no means immune to the darker strains in Marinetti’s vision: during Mussolini’s reign, Russolo’s work was involved in two state-sponsored arts exhibits, one at Turin’s Quadriennale in May 1927 and one at Milan’s Pesaro Gallery in October 1929.29 At the Turin exhibit, works by Balla, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, and Russolo, among others, were billed as arte fascista. These signs of collaboration and complicity with Mussolini’s regime have been covered up in Russolo scholarship to such a degree that earlier critics, such as Giovanni Lista, termed him explicitly anti-fascist. In the introduction to his French translation of Russolo’s The Art of Noises, Lista claims, on the basis of postwar testimonies, that Russolo left Italy for Paris in 1927 explicitly to protest Fascism.30 Yet even if Russolo’s involvement with Fascist exhibitions were to be ignored, his close involvement with Marinetti and his participation in the violence-courting rituals of Futurist aesthetic practice throw Lista’s designation into question. Indeed, attempting to separate Russolo and other politically ambivalent Futurists from the more explicit evils of their Fascist colleagues is a difficult, if not futile, exercise. Occultist and Experimenter By 1930, Mussolini and the Fascists dominated all aspects of Italian life, and the economic upheavals of the Great Depression were starting to make their presence felt. Far from the heart of Italian political and economic activity, Russolo retreated into esoteric pursuits, returning, in a sense, to his first inspirations. Russolo’s paintings are full of skeletons, skulls, will-o’-wisps, hallucinations, and examples of the extra-sensory made visible. Having begun his spiritual education at the Catholic Seminary of Portogruaro, Russolo developed an early interest in the occult, paranormal investigation, and Christian mysticism, influences that informed both his paintings and noise experiments. Based with his wife in Cerro di Laveno, a quiet lakeside town in Northern Italy, Russolo gave palm readings, expressed increasing interest in theosophy, and researched the possibility of — among other things — creating an “energy double” of his body. Although it would be easy to read the abandonment of music as a break with his avant-garde past, this late period of Russolo’s life has its roots in his exploration of noise. Indeed, Russolo’s sonic theories rested on assumptions about the role of the senses in human life, about energy, perception, and heightened emotional states. These ideas found ready expression through both musical and spiritual experimentation, such that hard lines between Russolo’s work as a painter, composer, and occultist are difficult to draw. As Chessa observes, “futurism was a movement animated by contradictory ideas, constantly oscillating between science and art, the rational and the irrational, future and past, mechanical and spiritual.”31 It is worth noting that the same could be said of Italian Fascism, with its embrace of new weapons and communications technology — radio, film, airplanes — and its mythologizing about a glorious, imperial past in which art was pure and noble. The confluence between the two movements’ aesthetics, philosophies, and tactics, brought together in the figure of Marinetti, is not coincidental. Yet this cannot serve as reason alone to purge all Futurist techniques from the sketchbooks of present-day artists. While none of the original intonarumori survive — having been likely destroyed in the bombing of Paris during World War II — and most of his arrangements are lost, Russolo’s influence on twentieth-century music has been outsized. There are signs that we need not be quite so pessimistic about the ramifications of Russolo’s work: his musical vision has lived on, for instance, through the iconic American composer John Cage (1912– 1992), whose aesthetic priorities differ from Marinetti’s and Russolo’s politics in crucial ways. Although Cage’s emphasis on noise and his championing of “sounds in themselves” bears a striking resemblance to Russolo’s own writings, the American musician entirely rejected sorting sound by category or hierarchy. Rather than controlling noise, Cage wanted to guide it, drawing on Zen philosophy to articulate a spiritual practice of music, which was antithetical to the channeling of public violence through cacophony.32 It seems that Russolo found his most important audience where the Futurists had been looking all along: in the future. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 24, 2022

Peter Trac

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:12.344452

marxist-astronomy-the-milky-way-according-to-anton-pannekoek

Marxist Astronomy The Milky Way According to Anton Pannekoek By Lauren Collee October 27, 2021 Can a person’s experiences on earth alter how they perceive the stars? Lauren Collee peers through the telescope of Anton Pannekoek, the Dutch astronomer whose politics informed his human approach to studying the cosmos. You are false images,Faces of radiant flame;Heart’s warmth and tendernessAnd soul you cannot claim.— Karl Marx, “Song to the Stars” (1836)1 In the many drawings that Dutch astronomer, Marxist thinker, and council communist Antonie (“Anton”) Pannekoek (1873–1960) made of the Milky Way over the course of his life, it is not immediately clear what we are looking at. The band of stars appears like a smudged backbone, sometimes in “true” colour (white stars on a black background), and sometimes inverted, with the stars as dark points and the “milk” of the Milky Way made inky. They are simultaneously vague and precise — something between a charcoal rubbing and an X-ray. In fact, the drawings are not technically of the Milky Way at all, because according to Pannekoek, such a thing was not actually accessible as a purely objective entity. While it was widely understood in Pannekoek’s time that even highly-skilled astronomers fall prey to observational bias during stargazing (a phenomenon known as “the personal equation”), Pannekoek went further, theorising that what we perceive as the Milky Way is actually a visual trick that emerges at the intersection of the stars and the people on earth who perceive them. During an article published in an 1897 issue of Popular Astronomy, Pannekoek discussed the well-known problem of the Milky Way’s ocular inconsistency, wondering if “the character of the galactic phenomenon precludes its being fixed by delineation”.2 This was not just a failing of observational science; it reflected what the Milky Way actually was: a kind of optical illusion that changed its shape depending on the lived experiences of the observer, their historical period, and how these experiences informed the patterns that the mind constructed out of the fluid nature of reality. Pannekoek’s drawings, then, are of the act of perception itself — an approach informed by his political beliefs. Like Marx and Engels — who drew on Feuerbach, Hegel, and Heraclitus — Pannekoek understood material reality to be a “continuous and unbounded stream in perpetual motion”.3 He also believed that the human brain had a tendency to generate fixed, abstract patterns from this fluidity, patterns that are always socially and historically contingent. Any view, including that of the stars in the sky, was therefore always making and remaking itself in the mind of the observer according to their individual physiology, psychology, and the distinct material conditions of their place and period. As technologies for image-making — such as radio telescopy and gamma-ray instruments trained on the Milky Way — become more advanced, mechanical objectivity does not necessarily become more trustworthy. “[T]he history of astronomy has been commonly narrated through the technologically determined progression of better and increased vision”, writes Anya Ventura.4 Yet because these technologies rely on a form of data gathering beyond the faculty of the human senses, there are always additional processes needed to transform their findings into something we can experience. These processes, often excluded from the public-facing narrative, are shot through with subjective decisions. The rich milky vistas of turquoise, rust, violet, and crimson that populate NASA’s first Hubble telescope photos, for example, were artificially coloured, much to the disappointment of a public who felt they had been “tricked”. The Hubble website responded that artificial colours allow viewers “to visualize what ordinarily could never be seen by the human eye”. As Lorraine J. Daston and Peter Galison have argued, scientific imaging’s objectivity rests on a construction of the naked eye as deeply unreliable.5 Pannekoek’s drawings, by contrast, produced during a period in which the mechanical eye was overtaking the traditional role of handwork in astronomical observation, represent an alternate current in astronomical image-making — one that does not shy away from the inherently contested and personal nature of viewing space, but builds this contestation into its very method. This way of doing science does not deny its embeddedness in the material and historical conditions of living on earth. Born in the Netherlands in 1873, twenty-five years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto, Pannekoek studied mathematics and physics at Leiden University, publishing his first paper on the Milky Way while still a student. He became interested in socialism upon reading Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Equality (1897), after which he began to study the philosophies of Karl Marx and Joseph Dietzgen. His scientific and political careers proved difficult to reconcile, and he eventually left his job at the observatory after he was reprimanded for supporting a strike. Deciding to devote his life to revolutionary politics, he moved to Berlin and then Bremen, where he published widely, often with a pseudonym, and taught classes on historical materialism at schools founded by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). He had an intercontinental reach: in the years before World War I, Pannekoek’s name was familiar “to many American Socialists when Lenin and Trotsky were virtually unknown”, notes Theodore Draper.6 After World War II, disillusioned with the communist states, he became one of the main proponents of council communism, a current of thought that opposed state socialism, and instead advocated for a revolution led by the workers’ councils. Despite receiving a favourable treatment in Lenin’s The State and Revolution (1917), Pannekoek is perhaps best remembered politically for his 1938 Lenin als Philosoph (Lenin as Philosopher), which critiques the revolutionary’s belief in “the reality of abstractions”.7 Pannekoek returned from Germany at the start of World War I and found himself once again at Leiden University where he gradually resumed teaching duties. After a change in the university’s directorship, Pannekoek’s name was eventually put forward for vice-director of the observatory, but his known communist activities meant that the Dutch government — fearful of the tide of communist revolutions sweeping across Europe — vetoed the appointment, “as though his propaganda activities might be a risk to the stars”.8 In 1921, Pannekoek established the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Amsterdam, which bears his name today. Around the time he was first dismissed, Pannekoek had described the university’s methods as tedious and outdated. Astronomy at the turn of the century was committed to its self-fashioning as a “precision science”, and doubled down on its acknowledgement of the “personal equation” problem by building vigilance, monitoring, and bookkeeping into methods (William Ashworth describes this as “an accountant’s view of the world”).9 Pannekoek, by contrast, argued that the Milky Way was produced at the intersection of physical reality, the observer’s eye, and the way their mind interpreted this interplay. In A History of Astronomy (1951), Pannekoek asks: What really is the Milky Way? Exactly speaking, it is a phantom; but a phantom of so wonderful a wealth of structures and forms, of bright and dark shapes, that, seen on dark summer nights, it belongs to the most beautiful scenes which nature offers to man’s eyes. It is true that its glimmer is so faint that it disappears where the eye tries to fix upon it—it is perceived only by the rods, not by the cones of the retina, hence is seen only by indirect vision; yet, when all other glare is absent, it gives an impression of brilliant beauty.10 Because of the faintness of some stars that made up the sparkling band of the Milky Way, and the unpredictable way in which the human eye received their light, Pannekoek believed that the brain — which tended towards abstraction — found its own patterns in the interplay of light and dark, and that these patterns would be different depending on the distinct life experiences of the observer. Pannekoek devised a method to produce what he termed the “mean subjective image” of the Milky Way, which was comprised of multiple, layered perspectives. To achieve this, he collected accounts of the Milky Way perceived by several other observers, initially as written descriptions (believing that sketches were more likely to lose their accuracy in the act of drawing), and later also as extra-focal photographs, where the plate was intentionally placed outside of the focal plane so that light was distributed more fully, mimicking the way astronomical light is perceived by human eyes. Both the written accounts and extra-focal photographs were translated into “isophotic maps”, which correspond to the intensity of light, similar to how topographical maps capture the height of terrain. A line was drawn around an area of equal luminous intensity. Each line was then ascribed a value. The mean subjective image was produced by finding the numerical average of each shaded line. Once the average had been calculated, the maps were made into drawings by Pannekoek himself. From today’s perspective, there is something deeply alien about Pannekoek’s inverse maps of the Milky Way. The shadow at once carefully contoured and vague, like the marks a crumpled bedsheet might leave on morning skin. They are naturalistic but not photorealistic, because the method of their production involves a distrust of the photographic eye’s supposed objectivity. These images address themselves towards something that is inevitably elusive — an “average” of various human and mechanical visions — and yet they do so with intense care and rigour. Working at a time when all industries were increasingly mechanised, Pannekoek did not necessarily champion the replacement of written accounts with machine-based methods of perception, but instead sought some form of collective subjectivity by bringing together different “organic” and mechanical ways of seeing. If much of the history of post-Enlightenment techno-science can be explained as the quest to mechanise vision in order to increase its precision and accuracy, then Pannekoek was moving in the opposite direction, distorting the camera’s gaze in order to bring it into closer proximity with human sight. While Pannekoek strived to separate his political and scientific careers, those who have studied his work closely — including Omar Nasim and Chaokang Tai — observe the ways in which his political beliefs bled into his scientific convictions and methods. Pannekoek’s notion of the Milky Way was essentially Marxist in nature. In a pamphlet titled “Class Struggle and Nation” (1912), for example, he describes a version of historical materialism influenced by Dietzgen, which endows perception with profound importance. “The external world flows before the mind like an endless river, always changing; the mind registers its influences, it merges them, it adds them to what it had previously possessed and combines these elements.”11 Writing on a similar theme in 1944, Pannekoek described thoughts as “not independent entities” but instead “connections and interrelations” that were defined by a dynamical process of movement, and which were entangled with material conditions.12 For Pannekoek, then, the “mean subjective image” of the Milky Way was less a static average than a process that captured the dynamic nature of thought as it related to observation over time. It was an instant or snapshot of the wider flux that constituted all reality. In Anthropogenesis, Pannekoek refers to the human ability to find patterns in terms of a “smoothed average”, an automatic process of organisation by which sensations would influence conscious thought by “heaping up in the dark depths, gradually smoothing out and amalgamating”.13 This meant that the more one was trained in a specific discipline, the more the patterns they identified would correspond to what they had already learned. What Pannekoek was talking about could now be called “confirmation bias”; although in the context of a wider belief in the material origin of thoughts, Pannekoek was referring less to an unfortunate human fallibility, more to a fundamental aspect of the way we relate to the world. Scientific practice in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was still largely funded by private wealth, and an undercurrent of Social Darwinism drew a link between bourgeois upbringing and innate scientific talent. Pannekoek staunchly opposed this notion in Marxism and Darwinism (1909), where he tries to demonstrate that, although Darwinism “served as a tool to the bourgeoisie in their struggle against the feudal class”, in reality, Marxism and Darwinism “form one unit” (for Marx, Darwin’s work introduced dialectical thinking into the natural sciences, troubling previous conceptions of the “natural order” as a fixed, stable chain).14 As Tai argues, Pannekoek also rejected the commonly held nineteenth-century idea that scientists possessed “excellent vision” (an innate knack for observing things exactly as they existed in the real world).15 Pannekoek’s belief in the material foundations of ideas meant anyone could learn to practice science. If the tools to do so were owned by the proletariat rather than liberal scientific institutions, then science would no longer be dominated by the bourgeoisie. “In a capitalist society”, Pannekoek wrote, “[science] is the privilege and the specialty of a separate class, the intellectual middle class”, whereas “in a communist society all will partake of scientific knowledge”.16 Pannekoek’s disavowal of the idea of special scientific genius did not discount the value of acquired technical skill. Omar Nasim has explored the way Pannekoek’s scientific practice centred on craftsmanship and handwork (what Nasim calls “a strong, operational presence of the hand”), highlighting how different forms of labour are involved in the production of scientific knowledge.17 In this sense, too, Pannekoek brought down to earth the mystified discipline of astronomy (which, as Nasim writes, “does not have the luxury of having its objects near”), highlighting the material conditions that made astronomical ideas possible.18 Though Pannekoek lived and worked two distinct lives that he was never fully able to reconcile, he is increasingly remembered now as a Marxist-astronomer. The resurgence of interest in Pannekoek’s dual pursuit seems tied up with an increasing awareness of how science and systemic violence intersect, prompting the question of how we might do science differently. What might a science informed by socialist politics look like? And where are the Marxist scientists today? Modern astronomy is far from a politically benign pursuit. Its development in Europe is closely bound to the emergence of systems of global data collection, mapping, and standardisation that exploit material resources from across the globe while also positioning Europe as the intellectual centre of the world. As Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues in Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions, astronomical research became a way for European countries to impose Western scientific norms and beliefs as objective truth.19 It was common practice for European universities to build observatories in colonies in the Southern Hemisphere, which offered a different view of the night sky. Pannekoek himself benefitted particularly from colonial infrastructure in Java and Sumatra, at the time part of the Dutch East Indies. Nevertheless, the philosophy underpinning Pannekoek’s work — when examined critically today — might be said to contribute to a current of scientific thinking that subtly undermines the forceful imposition of certain world-views over others that has largely been the legacy of colonial knowledge production. A dialectical view of the night sky opens up a path beyond any absolute binary between truth and falsity, evoking a form of scientific rigour and precision that does not aim to present itself as complete or incontestable. Pannekoek’s drawings therefore hark back to an earlier form of astronomy which, as Charlotte Bigg writes, embraced a “qualitative, literary and aesthetic approach rather than a quantitative, mathematical approach to phenomena”.20 By foregrounding interpretive variety, Pannekoek edges towards a more bottom-up and decentralised way of doing science; one that has the potential to complement anti-colonial and anti-capitalist methodologies. It was their quality as aesthetic objects that first captured my interest in Pannekoek’s sketches, and I’d guess that this is also what has helped these sketches to endure. The aesthetic realm, for Pannekoek, was a manifestation of the way in which the human mind is able to build order out of the disorder of the cosmos. As Johan Hartle writes: “This idea of a profound isomorphism between cosmic order, nature, human society, and even the individual subject. . . held the promise of a society based on a self-regulating system of material forces”.21 The Milky Way images, then, are not images of the sky so much as cosmic mirrors for the human subject, revealing the interplay between the individual and the collective, between thought and matter, and the deep correspondence between art, science, and politics. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 27, 2021

Lauren Collee

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:12.989391

handy-mnemonics

Handy Mnemonics The Five-Fingered Memory Machine By Kensy Cooperrider April 21, 2022 Before humans stored memories as zeroes and ones, we turned to digital devices of another kind — preserving knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms. Kensy Cooperrider leads us through a millennium of “hand mnemonics” and the variety of techniques practised by Buddhist monks, Latin linguists, and Renaissance musicians for remembering what might otherwise elude the mind. No one knows who made the drawing. Likely the work of an eighth-century monk, perhaps a member of an esoteric Buddhist cult traveling the Silk Road, it long sat forgotten in a walled-off library in China’s Mogao Caves. When the library was uncovered in 1900, the drawing — lifted from a trove of religious manuscripts — had aged well. Its subject is timeless: a pair of human hands.1 The hands are disembodied, perched on lotus petals, palms facing the viewer. Their fingers — vigorous and elegant — are annotated with Chinese characters: the lowest tier of characters, on the tips, names each digit; above that, a second row gives the five Buddhist elements: space, wind, fire, water, and earth; and a final tier, floating upwards as if on kite strings, lists the ten virtues — among them meditation, effort, charity, wisdom, and patience. The drawing illustrates a mnemonic system, a way of projecting knowledge onto the hands so it can be studied, memorized, and stashed in a pocket. Around the same time this mnemonic was made, another monk — in a Northumbrian monastery, halfway around the world — was developing a different system of manual knowledge. His name we do know: Bede. In 725, he published a treatise, The Reckoning of Time, in which — alongside discussions of shadows, moonlight, and the solstices — he laid out a method for determining when Easter would fall on any given year.2 This may sound like a trivial exercise, but, for Christians at the time, it could hardly have presented a more important or vexing problem. ※※Indexed under…HandsCalculations involving To find the date of Easter — which falls after the Northern Hemisphere’s spring equinox, on the Sunday immediately following the first full moon — one needs to reckon with planetary rhythms, which Bede mapped across his hands. The five fingers, he observed, contain fourteen joints, plus five nails — nineteen landmarks in all. This number tracks the metonic cycle: how many years it takes for the moon to return to the same phase on the same calendrical day. The joints of both hands taken together, minus the nails, gives you twenty-eight landmarks: the approximate length in years of a full solar cycle. In this way, Bede noted, the hands can “readily hold the cycles of both planets”.3 Beyond this basic set-up, he left the details obscure and didn’t bother to include an illustration. (The technique, Bede wrote, is “better conveyed by the utterance of a living voice than by the labor of an inscribing pen”.4) But his system — known as a computus digitorum, or simply computus — found an appreciative audience. It was widely circulated and adapted, and would remain a cornerstone of Christian learning for centuries. These two systems — perhaps the earliest examples of manual mnemonics — come down to us only in outline. And yet we have little trouble recognizing their appeal. They seem to spring from an impulse that transcends time and place, a deeply human drive to reach for props to help us reason and remember. “When thought overwhelms the mind”, the psychologist Barbara Tversky has written, “the mind puts it into the world”.5 In the case of hand mnemonics, we put those thoughts out into the world, in a sense, but also keep them within easy reach. In the beginning, the hand was just a hand — or so we can imagine. It was a workaday organ, albeit a versatile one: a tool for grasping, holding, throwing, and hefting. Then, at some point, after millions of years, it took on other duties. It became an instrument of mental, not just menial, labor. As a species, our systems of understanding, belief, and myth had grown more elaborate, more cognitively overwhelming. And so we started to put those systems out into the world: to tally, track, and record by carving notches into bone, tying knots in string, spreading pigment on cave walls, and aligning rocks with celestial bodies. Hands abetted these early mental labors, of course, but they would later become more than mere accessories. Beginning roughly twelve hundred years ago, we started using the hand itself as a portable repository of knowledge, a place to store whatever tended to slip our mental grasp. The topography of the palm and fingers became invisibly inscribed with information of all kinds — tenets and dates, names and sounds. The hand proved versatile in a new way, as an all-purpose memory machine. The arts of memory are well known, but the role of the hand in these arts is often overlooked. In the twentieth century, beginning with the pioneering work of Frances Yates, Western scholars started to piece together a rich tradition of mnemonic practices that originated in antiquity and later took hold in Europe.6 The most celebrated of these is the “memory palace”. Using this technique, skilled practitioners can memorize vast collections of facts by nesting them in familiar places (or “loci”): the chambers of a building or along a well-known route. (To make these places more memorable, a bizarre image is often added to each one, the more jarring the better.) It is an odd omission that hand mnemonics are rarely mentioned alongside memory palaces. Both techniques are powerful and broadly attested. Both are adaptable, able to accommodate whatever type of information one wants to remember. And both work by similar principles, pinning to-be-remembered items to familiar locations. The two traditions do have important differences. Memory palaces exist solely in the imagination; hand mnemonics exist half in the mind and half in the flesh. Another difference lies in their intended use. Memory palaces are idiosyncratic in nature, tailored to the quirks of personal experience and association, and used for private purposes; they are very much the province of an individual. Hand mnemonics, by contrast, are the province of a community, a tool for collective understanding. They offer a way of fixing and transmitting a shared system of knowledge. They serve private purposes, certainly — such as contemplation, in the case of the Mogao mnemonic, or calculation, in the case of Bede’s computus. But they also have powerful social functions in teaching, ritual, and communication. The richness of this overlooked tradition is glimpsed through its ubiquity. In medieval Europe, Christian hand mnemonics were commonplace. Several echo the Mogao system in appending key teachings to manual loci. A 1466 woodcut from Germany, titled The Hand as the Mirror of Salvation, assigns a different spiritual stage to each finger: God’s will to the thumb; examination to the index; repentance goes on the middle; confession is pinned to the ring; and the pinkie gets satisfaction.7 A 1491 devotional treatise, also from Germany, offers readers a “digital” table of contents: the book’s one hundred meditations are distributed across the hands.8 Another illustration in the same work populates the hands with miniature portraits of key Christian figures: apostles and saints gaze out from each of the twelve major divisions of the four fingers; Mary and Jesus share the thumb.9 In different times and places, hands also furnished mnemonic maps of sound. The so-called “Guidonian hand” owes its name to the eleventh-century Italian music teacher and scholar, Guido d'Arezzo. Arranging the different pitches in a scale onto the joints, he developed this technique to help students learn “unheard melody most easily and correctly”.10 Oddly, Guido’s own writings never depict the hands explicitly, but history nonetheless credits him, and, for centuries after his death, the Guidonian hand was a mainstay of musical instruction. One scholar has described it as “fundamental conceptual equipment” for all musicians of the time.11 Other thinkers in Europe — perhaps inspired by Guido — developed systems for learning the sounds of language. In the 1400s, the writer John Holt devised a hand-based technique for remembering the declensions of Latin, and, in 1511, the German scholar Thomas Murner proposed a hand mnemonic for parsing German speech.12 These authors were a few centuries behind their counterparts in China, however, where the hand had long figured in phonology. As early as the thirteenth century, Chinese scholars were projecting syllable charts — often called “rime tables” — onto the palms and fingers. A version from the 1600s maps thirty-two key sounds across the fingers, sixteen to each hand.13 In Europe, a number of mnemonics, sprung from the rootstock of Bede’s system, used the hand to reckon time. A remarkable example comes from a 1582 volume of practical astronomy by Jehan Tabourot, a French polymath best known for his work on dance, who published under an anagrammatic pen name, Thoinot Arbeau. The volume is a slim sixty-one pages, but eleven of those pages include images of hands — presented in various configurations and layered over with different kinds of data. Among these is a mnemonic for keeping track of a notorious calendrical quirk: the alternation of long and short months. The image shows a left hand; the thumb, middle, and pinkie fingers are extended, while the index and ring fingers are curled back toward the palm. The system begins with March, pegged to the extended thumb (31 days); then proceeds rightward to April on the curled-in index finger (30 days); then to May on the extended middle finger (31 days); and so on. It continues by traversing the five fingers twice, ending with January (31 days) on the thumb and February (28 days) on the index. One of the most ambitious of all hand mnemonics was not tailored for time or sound or any one type of information. It was presented by Girolamo Marafioti of Calabria in a 1602 treatise on the arts of memory.14 The system consists of a map of ninety-two manual loci — twenty-three on the front and back of each hand — each housing a different geometric symbol: a crescent moon, a chalice, a circle with horns, what looks like a lemon. To use the system, one simply assigns a to-be-remembered tidbit to each locus. One might, as Marafioti suggests, use it to remember a group of people arranged by status, age, or other characteristics. The system compresses the features of a memory palace — the use of familiar terrain and distinctive images, its customizability — into a handy pocket-sized device. A global survey of hand-mnemonics includes Jewish hand-calendars that resemble Bede’s computus15; the hand-based techniques with which mariners tracked moon and tide16; an elaborate manual system for remembering key moments in Dutch history; the mnemonic alphabet from 1579 in which different hand shapes represent different letters17; and a variegated vein of Chinese medical mnemonics.18 A truly comprehensive treatment would also scout the borderlands of this tradition. In some cases, the hand is mentally inscribed with information, but the primary function does not seem to be as a memory aid. Take, for example, alphabets used for communication with the deaf that relied on manual loci19; hand-charts studied by practitioners of chiromancy and the Kabbalah20; systems for converting the hand into a sundial; and bodily maps used for divination and exorcism. In the last case, for instance, a Chinese illustration from 1152 invites readers to press on various parts of the hand (called mu or “eyes”) to dispel different kinds of evil.21 Spending time amid this rich tradition, questions arise. First, what makes the hand so popular as a mnemonic prop? A large part of the answer, surely, involves portability. The hands are always, well, ready to hand. Another part is familiarity. Though popular wisdom stresses how well we know the back of our hand, the palm is hardly terra incognita. A further advantage stems from how hand mnemonics offer both visual and kinesthetic routes to memory: they are both seen and felt.22 A final part of the answer is that the human hand can be parsed and construed variously. Seen one way, we have a perfect housing for ten virtues; seen another, we have a fitting framework for twelve apostles, thirty-two syllables, or a hundred meditations. But why did hand mnemonics emerge when they did? What niche did they fill? The examples considered here suggest the tradition flourished in a period when literate and oral cultures coexisted, a time when some — the scholarly elites — were developing complex systems of knowledge in monasteries and universities, while others — the broader public — were trying to master those systems and use them in everyday life. Hand mnemonics may have been perfectly positioned to shuttle between these two cultures. They bridged the voice and the pen, offering, to the trained imagination, a kind of living inscription. The thorniness here is that it’s difficult to say with confidence when exactly hand mnemonics flourished. We could assume they got their start around 1200 years ago, based on the earliest surviving examples. But it’s quite plausible that similar techniques had been in use for centuries or longer. Perhaps no earlier evidence survives because hand mnemonics were so widely used, so mundane, that no one thought to mention them. Recall that Bede didn’t bother to illustrate his famed system. Neither did Guido. It's also hard to determine when and why hand mnemonics faded out — that is, if they have. Many continue to remember the alternation of long and short months by projecting them onto the knuckles, an update of Tabourot’s system.23 Japanese students, channeling Bede, sometimes employ a hand-calendar for determining the day of the week on which a given date will fall.24 In the US, hand-based maps — that is, configurations of the hand that resemble a particular geography — are used by residents of Michigan, West Virginia, Alaska, and other places.25 Hand mnemonics are still used to teach the “right-hand rule” in physics classrooms26 and remain especially popular in medicine, with more introduced all the time. Teams of doctors recently proposed manual systems for remembering the expected values of certain diagnostic tests, the anatomy of the brachial plexus and the lungs.27 We increasingly stash our thoughts in virtual realms, but we sometimes still reach for that primordial “digital” repository in our pockets. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 21, 2022

Kensy Cooperrider

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:13.351089

the-spiralist

The Spiralist By Dr Kevin Dann August 5, 2021 Why do helical seashells resemble spiralling galaxies and the human heart? Kevin Dann leads us into the gyre of James Bell Pettigrew’s Design in Nature (1908), a provocative and forgotten exploration of the world’s archetypal whorl. One halcyon spring day in 1903, the sixty-nine-year-old anatomist and naturalist Dr. James Bell Pettigrew sat at the top of a sloping street on the outskirts of St. Andrews, Scotland, perched inside a petrol-powered aëroplane of his own design. Over the course of forty years, ever since he began his aeronautical experiments in London in 1864, Pettigrew had constructed dozens of working models of various flying apparatus. From anatomical dissection and observations of animals in the wild and at the London Zoo, Pettigrew had come to conceive of all creatures — whether on land, in water, or in the air — as propelling themselves by throwing their bodies into spiraling curves, such that their movements were akin to waves in fluid, or to waves of sound. Instead of driving the wings vertically as in other flying machines modeled on animal flight, Pettigrew’s “ornithopter” emulated the movement that he had discovered to be universal in flying creatures: rhythmic figure-of-eight curves. To permit this undulatory motion, Pettigrew had furnished the root of the wing with a ball-and-socket joint; to regulate the several movements of the vibratory wing — comprised of bamboo cane from which issued tapering rods of whalebone covered in a thin sheet of India rubber — he employed a cross-system of elastic bands. A two-stroke engine’s piston drove this elaborate apparatus of helical biological mimicry. The ornithopter covered a distance of about twenty meters during its maiden flight before crashing, breaking both the contraption’s spiral whalebone wings and its pilot’s own spiral hip. Convalescence gave Dr. Pettigrew the opportunity to begin work on Design in Nature: Illustrated by Spiral and Other Arrangements in the Inorganic and Organic Kingdoms as Exemplified in Matter, Force, Life, Growth, Rhythms, &c., Especially in Crystals, Plants, and Animals. In January 1908, as he was nearing its completion, Pettigrew looped back at the work’s end to reiterate what he had stated so vociferously at the beginning — the absolute primacy of design by a “Great First Cause” and “Omni–Present Framer and Upholder of the Universe”. After a lengthy essay considering the antiquity of man — and once again stressing that the human physical form had altered not at all for at least some ten thousand years — he concluded: Man is not in any sense the product of evolution. He is not compounded of an endless number of lower animal forms which merge into each other by inseparable gradations and modifications from the monera up to man. . .He is the highest of all living forms. The world was made for him and he for it. . . Everything was made to fit and dovetail into every other thing. . . There was moreover no accident or chance. On the contrary, there was forethought, prescience, and design.1 Across the 3 volumes, 1416 pages, and nearly 2000 illustrations that made up his magnum opus Design in Nature, Dr James Bell Pettigrew barely mentioned Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which he found “lame, halting, and impotent”.2 Though Pettigrew deeply admired the English naturalist — who had on more than one occasion (as had T. H. Huxley, Richard Owen, John Lubbock, St. George Mivart, and dozens of other leading men of science) visited Pettigrew at London’s Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England to view his state-of-the-art anatomical and physiological preparations — Darwin seemed to Pettigrew only tentatively confident of the very theory he had proposed to explain Nature’s “endless forms most beautiful”.3 He expected that, within a generation, few would recall Darwinism as anything other than a passing fancy. What Pettigrew could not excuse were the egregious errors in Darwin’s pronouncement about the spiraling motions of Clematis, Convolvulus, Honeysuckle, Hops, and many other plants. Whatever positive contributions the retiring naturalist had made with his research on twining plants were undermined by his inexact language and thinking. Pettigrew strenuously objected to Darwin’s use of the term “reflex action” for these plants’ behavior, since this was a phrase used for action in nervous systems — of which Clematis, Convolvulus, and their cousins possessed none.4 By way of a few ingenious experiments — conducted back in 1865, after reading Darwin’s “On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants” — Pettigrew had utterly demolished its author’s “irritability theory” for the movement of the green chimeras. Just as with spiral teeth, claws, horns, muscles, and bones, spirally-turning plant tendrils were in no way the result of external contact. These whirling, twirling structures, as free of contact as the ocean-suspended spiraling egg cases of sharks and dogfish, danced to some wholly invisible music. Pettigrew confessed himself totally spellbound by the mystery of Nature’s most ubiquitous, liquid, and quixotic form — the spiral. Though he had scrutinized this universal cipher from the macrocosmic spiral nebulae down to the dextro- and sinistro-helical microcosmic molecules of the periodic table, Pettigrew was left baffled by the question of its origin. The best that he could say was that the answer “by no means lies on the surface”.5 Overwhelmed as he was by the world’s archetypal whorl, he was sure of one thing — these marvelous spiral arrangements could not be of purely physical origin. A reviewer of Pettigrew’s Lancet series on circulation in plants and animals declared that the distinguished anatomist was a “spiralist” who found that organs were not only constituted spirally, but that they functioned spirally too.6 Putting Isaac Roberts’ astonishing 1888 photographs of the Great Nebula in Andromeda and other spiral nebulae to cosmic effect at his argument’s outset, Pettigrew then immersed the reader in a cascade of more humble spiral forms — the mineral prochlorite; ram’s horns; bacteria from the River Thames; fossil algae carpogonia; dozens of figures of spiral fronds, floral bracts, stems, leaves, tendrils, and seeds in plants. Design in Nature’s plates of spirals in the animal world started with spermatozoa (of crayfish, rabbit, field mice, wood shrike, goldfinch, creeper, perch, frog, rat, and human) and ran up the great chain of being through: frog ganglia; dozens of species of Foraminifera; the exquisite Nautilus pompilius; Devonian, Silurian, Jurassic, Cretaceous, and contemporary shells; the horns of goats, gazelles, and antelope; the human cochlea; almost every section of the vertebrate skeleton, from the phalanges of the Indian elephant to the turbinated inner bones of the human skull. The human umbilical cord looked for all the world like a waterspout or the homely and helically aspiring English Hops, those twining stems of Darwin’s go-to research subject. All these were pictured in the first fifty pages of the book; hundreds more images were liberally spread through the complete three volumes. At times, while reading Design in Nature, the spiral risks losing all significance, so promiscuously ubiquitous is its form. At the center of this dizzying array lay the sacred secret that had so profoundly occupied Aristotle and Aquinas, Leonardo and Vesalius — the human heart. The heart’s sevenfold spiral structure was the mystery of mysteries, its form preserving perfectly the sense of both its muscular contractions and the interior circulatory patterns of its blood. Pettigrew had himself discovered this as a young medical student at the University of Edinburgh; so impressed had his professor been by Pettigrew’s dissections that he invited him to deliver the prestigious Croonian lecture at the Royal Society of London for 1860. The University of Edinburgh was, in Pettigrew’s medical student days, at the zenith of its reputation: James Syme was dazzling the world with his bold pioneering surgery; James Young Simpson had — with dinner guests at his own 52 Queen Street table — proved the safety of chloroform as an obstetric anesthetic; with his methodical use of the microscope, John Hughes Bennett inaugurated a new era in the teaching of clinical medicine; Joseph Lister’s careful application of carbolic acid (phenol) to wounds, dressings, and instruments — though mocked initially by his medical colleagues — had revolutionized the practice of surgery. When Pettigrew reminisced that the rivalry among these stellar physicians had been “a case of diamond cut diamond”, he recognized their fame by employing a most apt metaphor.7 Cutting — with a varied repertoire of scalpels, lancets, and scissors — was the surgeon’s special art. Pettigrew’s tutor in the art was Professor of Anatomy John Goodsir, who, with his large, powerful, finely shaped hands never failed to wield the scalpel “with a dexterity and grace truly remarkable”.8 At the end of the 1857–58 winter term, Professor Goodsir gave out as the subject for the senior anatomy gold medal: “The Arrangement of the Muscular Fibres in the Ventricles of the Vertebrate Heart”. This Gordian knot of anatomy had over the previous three centuries foiled the efforts of Vesalius, Albinus, Haller, and others to unravel it.9 Back home, between sessions at his family’s country home in Lanarkshire, the twenty-four-year-old Pettigrew at once proceeded to dissect in large numbers every kind of heart within reach, making careful drawings and notes of each. Beginning with sheep, calf, ox, and horse, he found that he had to devise a new mode of dissection that would allow both sufficient hardness to preserve the anatomical structures, and ample softness so as to tease out their multitudinous tissue layers. Having exhausted a battery of methylated spirits and other chemicals, he hit upon the expedient of stuffing and gently distending the ventricles of the heart with a truly Scottish material — dry oatmeal. Slowly boiling the hearts for four to five hours, he could get quit of all the external fat, blood vessels, nerves, lymphatics, and cellular tissue. A fortnight to three weeks hardening in a bath of methylated spirits followed, after which he was able to separate and peel off the muscular fibers of the ventricles as if they were layers of an onion. The layers were of two kinds: muscular fibers from the outside of the heart wound in a spiral direction from left to right, progressing downwards; the internal fibers ran in an opposite spiral direction from right to left, upwards. In fact, the internal and external layers of the muscular fibers of each and every one of the more than one hundred vertebrate hearts he had dissected formed two sets of opposite spirals which crossed each other, the crossings becoming more oblique towards the center. These inner and outer layers were further divided into a pair of left- and right-handed spiral sets. There was, especially in the left ventricle, a most perfect spiral symmetry, one that rivaled the Great Andromeda Nebula. As gifted a model maker as he was a dissector, Pettigrew found this now-exposed double spiral heart to be an anatomical puzzle of the first order, for the external muscle fibers were seamlessly and spirally continuous with the internal muscle fibers at both the apex and base of the ventricles. One day Pettigrew came down to dinner a little earlier than usual, and, seeing a newspaper lying on the table, felt an impulse to roll it up obliquely from one corner — as grocers do in making conical paper bags. To Pettigrew’s surprise, the lines of print on the layers of newspaper ran in different directions according to a graduated order: the lines on the outer layers ran spirally from left to right downwards, becoming more oblique as the central layer was reached; the lines of print on the inner layer ran spirally from right to left upwards, becoming more vertical as they moved away from the center. The newspaper print on the two layers crossed at widening angles, forming an X, as the center was approached. The print was seamless at both base and apex of the paper cone, resembling the arrangement of muscle fibers in the heart. There were, in effect, a series of complicated figure-of-eight loops, arranged in a marvelously mathematical pattern of great complexity and beauty. “Here”, he wrote, “was the whole thing in a nutshell. It was a case of the reading turning in or involuting at the apex and of the reading turning out or evoluting at the base”.10 Pettigrew’s newspaper model showed that the heart’s double helical structure — now known as the helical ventricular myocardial band (HVMB) — was essentially a triple-twisted Möbius strip. Crying “EUREKA!”, Pettigrew ransacked the Lankarshire fish shops for the hearts of cod, salmon, sunfish, and turbot. He also lucked into securing the heart of a monster shark killed in the Firth of Forth. From the large hotels he collected several fine sea turtle hearts, as well as a land tortoise and an alligator. Raiding the poulterers too, he got the hearts of duck, goose, capercaillie, turkey, and one “splendid” swan’s heart.11 From fish to frog to turtle, the muscular fiber arrangement — though interesting — shed no light on the complicated arrangement in the ventricles of bird and mammal. (The pattern in the bird exactly matched that of the mammal except that, in the right ventricle of the bird, a muscular valve took the place of the fibrous tricuspid valve of mammals.) In the small hours of the morning, in his humble student lodgings, Pettigrew worked away now at dissections of sheep, calf, ox, horse, deer, pig, porpoise, seal, lion, giraffe, camel, and human — 112 dissections and associated drawings in all. When the day for awarding the gold medal arrived, four hundred students crowded the large anatomical theater to hear the altogether unknown Pettigrew’s name pronounced. Professor Goodsir asked Pettigrew to call on him the next day, anxious to win the heart dissection preparations for the University’s Anatomical Museum. The 112 neat glass jars can still be found there today. He also invited young Pettigrew to report on his discoveries to the Royal Society of London; Pettigrew delivered his address, “On the Arrangement of the Muscular Fibres in the Ventricles of the Vertebrate Heart”, to the Royal Society the very same week that Origin of Species was published by John Murray of Albemarle Street, a short walk from the Royal Society lecture hall. That anyone might attribute such an ingeniously crafted organ as the mammalian heart to mere chance, Pettigrew believed, was sheer madness. Nature’s variegated spiral structures, with the mammalian heart always for him the epitome, represented but one panel of the triptych that Pettigrew would go on to assemble over the next half century. Volume Two of Design in Nature is devoted solely to spiral movement in circulation (although the circulation section dealt with both plant and lower animal circulatory systems, three-quarters of this study focused on mammals and man); Volume Three to the spiral as locomotion’s characteristic form. In both arenas of animal physiology, Pettigrew found a spectacular resonance: movement at once precedes and follows structure, the direction of movement in living things being in every instance determined by the composition and configuration of kinetic spiral parts. This resonance seemed to reach right down to the atomic level. Unlike the closed system of the heart, the spiraling lines of atoms and molecules were arranged so that matter could be added in any amount, in unlimited directions. An open flow of energy and form was the basis for growth and progression in all creatures. Reflected in the vertebrate skeleton, this open attitude also made graceful locomotion possible. Pettigrew quoted his mentor John Goodsir: “The peculiar spiral attitudes into which the human body can be thrown are explained by the spiral curve of the vertebral articular surfaces, and the spiral arrangement of the muscles. No mammal can throw its trunk into those spiral curves which subserve the balance of the human frame and confer the peculiar grace and expression of its movements.”12 Only birds — especially his beloved swallows and swifts, which darted round the turrets of Swallowgate, the stone residence that Pettigrew had built at St. Andrews, and across the broad moor leading to the nearby sea cliffs — could rival the poetry of motion executed by the human body, their movements freed in the less resistant medium of air. The earthbound human body’s idiosyncratic spiraling structure liberated the hands to sculpt clay, tie rope, and grasp chalk, paintbrush, and scalpel in order to go inside the organs of Life and then represent them in color and line. Bony spirals hidden beneath spiral muscles flexed and extended to skip, leap, creep, crawl, wriggle, tumble, skate, march, flip, prance, moonwalk. The polka-ing, pirouette-ing, schottish-ing, waltzing, two-stepping human danced upon a near infinity of corporeal eddies. When Pettigrew took up the third strand of his argument from design, he began again with structures — the muscular and osseous systems, which he found intimately complimentary. Skeletal plates suggest that each part of our bony frame was but a partial realization of the sort of spiral geometry Pettigrew had discovered in the heart. The halfway twisting femur, humerus, tibia, fibula, ulna, and radius reached their fully spiral apotheosis in clavicle, pelvis, and scapula — each of which approached once again the geometry of the Möbius strip. Published posthumously, just months before the centennial of Darwin’s birth, and the fiftieth anniversary of On the Origin of Species — celebrations which were fully exploited by Darwinians to advance a false picture of Darwin as a rabid opponent of teleology13 — Design in Nature dropped from sight as rapidly as Pettigrew’s ornithopter dropped from the sky over the St. Andrews moorland. Nature’s full-page review savaged the work’s teleological argument, wanly submitting that had Pettigrew lived to complete the editing of his opus, he would have “expunged or modified” its conclusions.14 Biostatistician Raymond Pearl was less generous, calling “the ponderous work” “probably the most extensive and serious single contribution to humorous literature which has appeared in recent years”, and declaring Pettigrew’s “spiral philosophy” — that “the Creator fashioned men and corkscrews on the same plan” — as “medieval as any cathedral”.15 Not a single work of contemporary biology or natural history — including D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917), which devoted considerable discussion to spiral forms — cited Design in Nature. A century on from its publication, however, Design in Nature holds up not only as an unsurpassed survey of biological form, but as a provocative modern inquiry into the causation of form. Pettigrew’s magnum opus is also a phenomenological masterpiece whose lively prose and gorgeous illustrations might serve to inspire a new generation of “spiralists”. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 5, 2021

Dr Kevin Dann

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:14.360502

mermaids-and-tritons-in-the-age-of-reason

Mermaids and Tritons in the Age of Reason By Vaughn Scribner September 29, 2021 For much of the eighteenth century, Western intellectuals chased after tritons and mermaids. Vaughn Scribner follows the hunt, revealing how humanity’s supposed aquatic ancestors became wondrous screens on which to project theories of geographical, racial, and taxonomical difference. On May 6, 1736, the polymath Benjamin Franklin informed readers of his Pennsylvania Gazette of a “Sea Monster” recently spotted in Bermuda, “the upper part of whose Body was in the Shape and about the Bigness of a Boy of 12 Years old, with long black Hair; the lower Part resembled a Fish”. Apparently, the creature’s “human Likeness” inspired his captors to let it live. A 1769 issue of the Providence Gazette similarly reported that crew members of an English ship off the coast of Brest, France, watched as “a sea monster, like a man” circled their ship, at one point viewing “for some time the figure that was in our prow, which represented a beautiful woman”. The captain, the pilot and “the whole crew, consisting of two and thirty men” verified this tale.1 The above examples are quite representative of what an early modern Briton would have found in the newspapers. That these interactions were even reported tells us much. Intelligent men like Benjamin Franklin considered such encounters legitimate enough to spend the time and money to print in their widely read newspapers. By doing so, printers and authors helped sustain a narrative of curiosity surrounding these wondrous creatures. As a Londoner sat down with his paper (perhaps in the aptly named Mermaid Tavern) and read of yet another instance of a mermaid or triton sighting, his doubt might have transformed into curiosity.2 Philosophers’ debates over mermaids and tritons in this period reveal their willingness to embrace wonder in their larger quest to understand the origins of humankind. Naturalists used a wide range of methodologies to critically study these odd hybrids and, in turn, assert the reality of merpeople as evidence of humanity’s aquatic roots. As with other creatures they encountered in their global travels, European philosophers utilized various theories — including those of racial, biological, taxonomical, and geographic difference — to understand merpeople’s and, by proxy, humans’ place in the natural world.3 Westerners’ combination of curiosity and imperial expansion is well reflected in the cultural relevance of merpeople. Wealthy individuals and philosophical societies funded naturalists’, botanists’, and cartographers’ expeditions to the New World in the hope that they might broaden humanity’s understanding of the world and their place in it. In an expanding number of investigations into mermaids and tritons, naturalists demonstrated a growing penchant for the wondrous. They also, importantly, revealed how the process of scientific research had drastically changed over the last two hundred years. Rather than relying strictly on ancient texts and hearsay, eighteenth-century naturalists mustered various “modern” resources — global correspondence networks, erudite publication opportunities, transatlantic travel, specimen procedures, and learned societies — to rationally examine what many considered fantastical. Thus, a growing body of gentlemen both carried on and eschewed the supposed narrative of enlightened logic by applying well-known, valid research methods to mysterious merpeople. In doing so, eighteenth-century philosophers such as Cotton Mather, Peter Collinson, Samuel Fallours, Carl Linnaeus, and Hans Sloane complicated our — and their contemporaries’ — conceptions of science, nature, and humanity. The smartest men in the Western world, in short, spent much of the eighteenth century chasing merpeople around the globe.4 The Royal Society of London proved key in this endeavour, acting as both a repository and producer of legitimate scientific investigation. Sir Robert Sibbald, a respected Scottish physician and geographer, well understood the Society’s desire for ground-breaking research. On November 29, 1703 he wrote to Sir Hans Sloane, the president of the Society, to inform the London gentleman that Sibbald and his colleagues had been recording an account of Scotland’s amphibious creatures, along with accompanying copper-plate images, which he hoped to dedicate to the Royal Society. Realizing the Society’s interest in the most up-to-date studies, Sibbald told Sloane that he had “added several accounts and the figures of some Amphibious Aquatic Animals, and of some of mixed Kinds, as the Mermaids or Syrens seen sometimes in our Seas”.5 Here were two leading thinkers of the eighteenth century exchanging erudite missives on merpeople. On July 5, 1716, Cotton Mather also penned a letter to the Royal Society of London. This was not odd, as the Boston naturalist often detailed his scientific findings. Yet this letter’s subject was somewhat curious — titled “a Triton”, the missive demonstrated Mather’s sincere belief in the existence of merpeople. The Royal Society of London fellow began by explaining that, until recently, he considered merpeople no more real than “centaurs or sphynxes”. Mather found myriad historical accounts of merpeople, ranging from the ancient Greek Demostratus, who witnessed a “Dried Triton . . . at ye Town of Tanagra”, to Pliny the Elder’s assertions of mermaids and tritons’ existence. Yet because “Plinyisums are of no great Reputation in our Dayes”, Mather noted, he passed off much of these ancient accounts as false. Mather’s “suspicions” of the existence of such creatures “had got more Strength given”, however, when he read sundry ancient accounts via well-respected European thinkers like Boaistuau and Bellonius.6 Still, Mather was not totally convinced, at least until February 22, 1716, when “three honest and credible men, coming in a boat from Milford to Brainford (Connecticut)”, encountered a triton. Having heard this news at first hand, Mather could only exclaim, “now at last my credulity is entirely conquered, and I am compelled now to believe the existence of a triton”. As the creature fled the men, “they had a full view of him and saw his head, and face, and neck, and shoulders, and arms, and elbows, and breast, and back all of a human shape . . . [the] lower parts were those of a fish, and colored like a mackerel”. Though this “triton” escaped, it convinced Mather of merpeople’s existence. Maintaining that his story was not false, Mather promised the Royal Society that he would continue to relay “all New occurrences of Nature”.7 The famous naturalist Carl Linnaeus also threw himself into investigating mermaids and tritons. Having read newspaper articles detailing mermaid sightings in Nyköping, Sweden, Linnaeus sent a letter to the Swedish Academy of Science in 1749 urging a hunt in which to “catch this animal alive or preserved in spirits”. Linnaeus admitted, “science does not have a certain answer of if the existence of mermaids is a fact or is a fable or imagination of some ocean fish”. Yet in his mind, the reward outweighed the risk, as the discovery of such a rare phenomenon “could result in one of the biggest discoveries that the Academy could possibly achieve and for which the whole world should thank the Academy”. Perhaps these creatures could reveal humankind’s origins? For Linnaeus — world-renowned for his contributions to taxonomical classification — this ancient mystery must be solved.8 The Dutch artist Samuel Fallours also claimed to have discovered merpeople in a distant land, and in doing so set off a decades-long debate that spanned continents and media types. Fallours lived in Ambon, Indonesia, from 1706 to 1712 while serving as a clergy’s assistant for the Dutch East India Company. During Fallours’ tenure on a “Spice Island”, he drew various representations of native flora and fauna. One image happened to depict a mermaid, or “sirenne”. Fallours’ “sirenne” closely resembled the classic depiction of a mermaid, with long, sea-green hair, a pleasant face and a bare midsection that turned into a blue/green tail at the waist. This mermaid’ s skin, however, was dark (with a slight greenish tinge), implying a similarity with the local indigenous population.9 In the notes that accompanied Fallours’ original drawing, the Dutch artist contended that he “had this Syrene alive for four days in my house at Ambon in a tub of water”. Fallours’ son had brought it to him from the nearby island of Buru “where he purchased it from the blacks for two ells of cloth”. Eventually, the whimpering creature died of hunger, “not wishing to take any nourishment, neither fishes nor shell fishes, nor mosses or grasses”. After the mermaid’s death, Fallours “had the curiosity to lift its fins in front and in back and [found] it was shaped like a woman”. Fallours claimed that the specimen was subsequently relayed to Holland and lost. The story of this Ambon siren, however, had only just begun.10 Years before Louis Renard, a French-born book dealer living in Amsterdam, even published a version of Fallours’ “sirenne” in his own Poissons, ecrevisses et crabes (1719), Fallours’ images had already enjoyed wide distribution. Yet, because of the unusually bright colours and fantastic creatures represented in Fallours’ drawings, many doubted their accuracy and veracity. Renard was especially worried about the validity of Fallours’ sirenne, exclaiming, “I am even afraid the monster represented under the name of mermaid . . . needs to be rectified.”11 Philosophers found both promise and disgust in Fallours’ painting and the subsequent dialogue that Renard initiated with his letters. In his preface to the 1754 version of Renard’s Poissons, ecrevisses et crabes, the Dutch collector and director of the menageries and “Natuur-en Kunstcabinetten des Stadhouders” Aernout Vosmaer called objections to merpeople’s reality “weak”, and contended that “this monster, if we must call it by this name (although I do not see the reason for it)” was simply able to avoid humans’ traps better than any other creature (because of its hybrid nature) and was thus rarely seen. Because of merpeople’s biological similarity to humans, furthermore, Vosmaer argued that they were “more subject to decay after death than the body of other fishes”. Such a lack of preservation not only diminished sightings, it also went towards explaining the lack of full specimens in cabinets of curiosities.12 By the mid-eighteenth century, a growing number of physicians not only believed in the existence of merpeople, but also began to wonder what sort of ramifications such creatures might have for understanding humanity’s origins and future. As G. Robinson noted in The Beauties of Nature and Art Displayed in a Tour Through the World (1764), “though the generality of natural historians regard mermen and mermaids as fabulous animals . . . as far as the testimony of many writers for the reality of such creatures may be depended upon, so much reason there appears for believing their existence.” The Reverend Thomas Smith took Robinson’s contention to an even more definitive note four years later, asserting that while “there are many persons indeed who doubt the reality of mermen and mermaids . . . yet there seems to be sufficient testimony to establish it beyond dispute”. But the problem remained: men like Robinson and Smith could rely only upon ancient, often ridiculed sightings or tenuous hypotheses for their “proof”. They needed scientific research to back up their claims, and they got it.13 Two especially important articles — each approaching merpeople through unique scientific methodology — appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine between 1759 and 1775. The first piece, published in December 1759, accompanied a plate image of a “Syren, or Mermaid . . . said to have been shewn in the fair of St Germains [Paris]” in 1758. The author noted that this siren was “drawn from life . . . by the celebrated Sieur Gautier”. Jacques-Fabien Gautier, a French printer and member of the Dijon Academy, was widely recognized for his skill in printing accurate images of scientific subjects. Attaching Gautier’s name to the print garnered immediate credibility, even for such a strange image; but even without Gautier’s name attached to it, the print and its accompanying text were distinguished by their modern scientific methodology. Gautier had apparently interacted with the living creature, finding that it was “about two feet long, alive, and very active, sporting about in the vessel of water in which it was kept with great seeming delight and agility”.14 Gautier consequently recorded that “its positions, when it was at rest, was always erect. It was a female, and the features were hideously ugly”. As displayed in detail by the accompanying print, Gautier found its skin “harsh, the ears very large, and the back-parts and tail were covered with scales”. According to the image, this was not the mermaid that had long graced cathedrals throughout Europe. Nor did it match the description relayed by so many other naturalists and discoverers throughout history. Where most had seen a striking female form, distinguished by flowing blue-green hair, Gautier’s mermaid was completely bald with “very large” ears and “hideously ugly” features. Gautier’s siren was also much smaller than traditional mermaids at only sixty centimetres (two feet) tall. More than anything, Gautier’s mermaid reflected the mid-eighteenth-century approach to studying the wondrous aspects of nature: the Frenchman employed well-respected scientific techniques — in this case a close inspection of the creature’s anatomy and an accurate accompanying drawing (much resembling those of other illustrated creatures at the time) — to display as reality what many still considered fantasy.15 Scholars used the Gautier publication to reflect upon the legitimacy of merpeople. An anonymous contributor to the June 1762 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine exclaimed that Gautier’s image “seems to establish the fact incontrovertibly, that such monsters do exist in nature”. But this author had further evidence. An April 1762 edition of the Mercure de France reported that in June the previous year two girls playing on a beach on the island of Noirmoutier (just off the southwest coast of France) “discovered, in a kind of natural grotto, an animal of a human form, leaning on its hands”. In a rather morbid turn of events, one of the girls stabbed the creature with a knife and watched as it “groaned like a human person”. The two girls then proceeded to cut off the poor creature’s hands “which had fingers and nails quite formed, with webs between the fingers”, and sought the aid of the island’s surgeon, who, upon seeing the creature, recorded: it was as big as the largest man . . . its skin was white, resembling that of a drowned person . . . it had the breasts of a full-chested woman; a flat nose; a large mouth; the chin adorned with a kind of beard, formed of fine shells; and over the whole body, tufts of similar white shells. It had the tail of a fish, and at the extremity of it a kind of feet. Such a story — when verified by a trained and trusted surgeon — only further proved Gautier’s research. For a growing number of eighteenth-century Britons, merpeople existed, bore a striking resemblance to humans, and needed to be studied at length.16 In May 1775 the Gentleman’s Magazine published an account of a mermaid “taken in the Gulph of Stanchio, in the Archipelago or Aegean Sea, by a merchantman trading to Natolia” in August 1774. Like Gautier’s 1759 “syren”, this specimen was drawn and described in detail. Yet the author also distanced himself from Gautier, noting that his mermaid “differs materially from that shewn at the fair of St Germaine, some years ago”. In an especially interesting turn of events, the author utilized a comparison of the two mermaid prints to speculate on issues of race and biology, contending that “there is reason to believe, that there are two distinct genera, or, more properly, two species of the same genus, the one resembling the African blacks, the other the European whites”. While Gautier’s siren “had, in every respect, the countenance of a Negro”, the author found that his mermaid displayed “the features and complexion of an European. Its face is like that of a young female; its eyes a fine light blue; its nose small and handsome; its mouth small; its lips thin”.17 Early modern English writers leaned on two stereotypes to commodify and denigrate African female bodies, as the historian Jennifer L. Morgan has shown. First, they “conventionally set the black female figure against one that was white — and thus beautiful”. Here this 1775 author follows perfectly in line, comparing Gautier’s “Negro” and “hideously ugly” mermaid to his own beautiful mermaid with the “features and complexion of an European”. Second, early modern Europeans concentrated on African women’s supposed “sexually and reproductively bound savagery” in order to ultimately turn to “black women as evidence of a cultural inferiority that ultimately became encoded as racial difference”. Not only were naturalists using the science of merpeople to gain a deeper understanding of the natural order of sea creatures, they were also utilizing their interpretations of these mysterious beings to reflect upon humans’ — especially white humans’ — place in an ever-changing racial, biological framework.18 Carl Linnaeus and his student Abraham Osterdam further complicated the narrative of classification and legitimacy. Though the Swedish Academy found nothing in their search for Linnaeus’ mermaid in 1749, Linnaeus and Osterdam took matters into their own hands by publishing a dissertation on the Siren lacertina (The Lizard Siren) in 1766. Having detailed a long list of mermaid sightings throughout history in the initial pages of this dissertation, they next relayed myriad instances of “marvelous animals and amphibians” that closely resembled creatures of lore and, consequently, made classification tricky. Ultimately, they judged this mermaid-like creature “worthy of an animal, which should be shown to those who are curious, because it is a new form”. The “father of classification” had apparently discovered a “worthy” piece of the natural puzzle, and it linked humans (even if distantly) to animals of the sea. The Siren lacertina also, importantly, further blurred the lines of classification that Linnaeus had so proudly developed, suggesting that perhaps human beings might find some distant relation to amphibious creatures.19 Eighteenth-century philosophers’ investigations of merpeople represented both the endurance of wonder and the emergence of rational science during the Enlightenment period. Once resting at the core of myth and on the very fringes of scientific research, now mermaids and tritons were steadily catching philosophers’ attention. Initially such research was relegated to newspaper articles, brief mentions in travellers’ narratives, or hearsay, but by the second half of the eighteenth century, naturalists began to approach merpeople with modern scientific methodology, dissecting, preserving and drawing these mysterious creatures with the utmost rigour. By the close of the eighteenth century, mermaids and tritons emerged as some of the most useful specimens for understanding humanity’s marine origins. The possibility (or, for some, reality) of merpeople’s existence forced many philosophers to reconsider previous classification measures, racial parameters, and even evolutionary models. As more European thinkers believed — or at least entertained the possibility — that “such monsters do exist in nature”, Enlightenment philosophers merged the wondrous and rational to understand the natural world and humanity’s place in it. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 29, 2021

Vaughn Scribner

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:15.026759

out-on-the-town

Out on the Town Magnus Hirschfeld and Berlin’s Third Sex By James J. Conway June 7, 2022 Years before the Weimar Republic’s well-chronicled freedoms, the 1904 non-fiction study Berlin’s Third Sex depicted an astonishingly diverse subculture of sexual outlaws in the German capital. James J. Conway introduces a foundational text of queer identity that finds Magnus Hirschfeld — the “Einstein of Sex” — deploying both sentiment and science to move hearts and minds among a broad readership. By the time Magnus Hirschfeld died in exile on May 14, 1935 — his sixty-seventh birthday — the German sexologist had already witnessed his own annihilation at least twice over. Presumed dead after a brutal attack by far-right thugs in early Weimar-era Munich, he got to read his own obituary in the newspaper while convalescing. And years later, shortly after the Nazi takeover of Germany, an exiled Hirschfeld viewed a newsreel of the first major book burning, which showed the SA not only casting decades of his research onto the pyre, but a bust of Hirschfeld himself. Magnus Hirschfeld was born to a Jewish family in the Prussian spa town of Kolberg in 1868, but the man whose investigation of difference so incensed his countrymen came forth on a later birthday — May 14, 1897 — when Hirschfeld formed the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee at his medical practice in Berlin. Arising out of culturally conservative Wilhelmine Germany, this Committee was the world’s first gay activist group, from which Hirschfeld later emerged as one of history’s most important figures in the study of gender and sexuality. The Committee’s charter called for public enlightenment, and its first major product was the 1899 Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Sexual Intermediaries), which appeared in annual editions for a quarter of a century and totalled more than 11,000 pages. Academic in tone, it forthrightly claimed homosexuality to be in-born, tracked the development of a corresponding homosexual identity through the long stream of history, and mapped its contemporary forms. The first issue opened with an article by Hirschfeld himself, appended with a reader survey (“Were your parents or grandparents blood relations?”, “Can you point to a reason for your abnormal feelings?”, “Are your ears large, protruding, small, delicate?”). It also included a study of blackmailers, an article outing the nineteenth-century poet Platen, and a petition signed by hundreds of distinguished figures calling for the repeal of the German Criminal Code’s notorious Paragraph 175, which banned “unnatural fornication” between men. Hirschfeld fought all his life to have Paragraph 175 struck off. It not only shadowed his own existence as a gay man; through his practice the doctor also saw its devastating impact on men who lived in fear and shame, prey to blackmailers. Who else, after all, would report a consensual sex act to the authorities? But as those names on the petition indicate, there was more support for abolition than one might expect. In 1898, August Bebel, head of Germany’s Social Democrats, became the first politician to speak out in favour of gay law reform; particularly striking was his insistence that gay men were to be found in large numbers at every social level. No one knew this better than Hirschfeld himself, the antithesis of the cloistered academic. He went out into society, actively participated in the lives of the people he was writing about — not just gay men but a full spectrum of lesbians, bisexuals, trans men and women, cross-dressers of all persuasions — then went back, analysed, formulated, and reappeared before the public with his findings. Hirschfeld’s friend, writer Else Lasker-Schüler, referred to him as a “father confessor”, but his transgression in the eyes of credentialed colleagues and the conservative mainstream was to have breached the sanctity of the confessional, or the academy in this instance. Hirschfeld’s laboratory was queer Berlin — its beats, balls, and bars. Unique among German urban centres, the capital entered the twentieth century as a metropolis. It had experienced phenomenal growth, multiplying twentyfold in a century; in global comparison, only London, New York, and Paris were larger. To both settled Berliners and newcomers the city offered not just material opportunity, but the promise of transformation, or revelation — the prospect of sympathetic company in which to bare one’s true self. It had supported a gay underground since at least the time of Frederick the Great, when Austrian author Johann Friedel indignantly reported on the city’s male brothels in his 1782 Briefe über die Galanterien von Berlin (Letters on the Libertinage of Berlin). In Hirschfeld’s day, the chief of Berlin’s police, Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem, eschewed open confrontation with the city’s sizeable sexual minority and instead maintained a policy of containment and observation — a key factor in the development of a confident, diverse subculture. But Berlin’s rapid expansion had rendered the city a stranger to itself. Hans Ostwald, an ambitious writer a few years younger than Hirschfeld, sought to chart the furthest reaches of the modern city, and the result was one of the most expansive accounts of urban experience ever undertaken — the Großstadt-Dokumente (Metropolis Documents). Beginning in 1904 with Ostwald’s own Dunkle Winkel in Berlin (Dark Corners in Berlin), a study of vagrants, and ending four years later with the shiny nouveau riche revels of Edmund Edel’s Neu-Berlin, the fifty-one editions fed the voracious curiosity of the Bildungsbürgertum — the educated middle class. Viewed together, the Metropolis Documents resemble a compendious study of a distant colony, especially in the row of imposing cloth-bound thematic convolutes which collated five volumes each. But it was the alien customs of modern, urban life that the Metropolis Documents mapped, with a particular focus on the disadvantaged and marginalised — prostitutes, bohemians, single mothers, gamblers, spiritualists, alcoholics, and criminals — as well as civil servants, teachers, seamstresses, musicians, actors, athletes, and bankers. Three quarters of the titles were about Berlin (with brief digressions to Hamburg, Vienna, and St Petersburg). And when Ostwald sought to depict the lives of sexual outlaws in the German capital, he turned to Magnus Hirschfeld. The resulting 1904 volume was by some distance the most successful of the Metropolis Documents. Today, few works emerge from the archives with the urgency of Hirschfeld’s Berlins Drittes Geschlecht (Berlin’s Third Sex). To be fair, it didn’t exactly come out of nowhere; it wasn’t even the first Hirschfeld text to address the “third sex” — at the dawn of the new century he had issued a pamphlet for a broad readership entitled “What People Should Know about the Third Sex”. The “third sex” was a label of convenience at a time when Hirschfeld’s studies were still blurring distinctions between gender and sexuality, conflating them with physiological characteristics. In his research into sexual attraction he would soon settle on the notion of a continuum — decades before Alfred Kinsey — noting that to be positioned at either extreme, heterosexual or homosexual, was the exception rather than the rule. Hirschfeld was hardly alone: a large number of German works at the time examined this “third sex”, in fiction and non-fiction, but with little consensus on what the category actually encompassed: lesbians and gay men? Trans men and women? Emancipated women, perhaps? Hirschfeld’s preferred label for gay and trans individuals — a distinction not always clear at the time — was “Urning” (uranian), but he evidently adopted the more modish term “third sex” to lure as broad a readership as possible. Duly lured, readers of Berlin’s Third Sex were confronted with a whole fête galante of misfits, deviants, and sexual mutineers cavorting on the legal edgelands of society. There’s the “gathering of obviously homosexual princes, counts and barons” discussing Wagner, the women-only ball where a “dark-eyed Carmen sets a jockey aflame”, the drag act burlesquing Isadora Duncan, a café in the city’s north where Jewish lesbians play chess, gaggles of gay labourers meeting up to gossip before tending to their needlework, the Russian baron distributing alms to hustlers in the Tiergarten, a canal-side tavern where soldiers from the nearby barracks find gay men only too willing to pick up their tab, and the encrypted classified ads with which the lonesome and horny sought to make the vast metropolis just a little smaller. There is suffering, yes, there is despair and self-harm and ostracism. But Berlin’s Third Sex also offers something you may not expect of Wilhelmine Berlin — fun. To encounter Hirschfeld’s report today is to experience an electric charge of recognition. With its all-night parties, pansexual drag, and campy stage personas, with its elaborate codes of communication, layers of irony, and pop culture references, it reads like a dress rehearsal, in starched collars, for modern Western queer life. And for Herr and Frau Heterosexual Reader of the time, all of these exotic, dissident elements placed the subculture of “inverts” at a comforting distance. I knew a uranian lawyer who, on leaving his office near Potsdamer Platz of an evening, or taking leave of a gathering of his associates, would seek out a tavern at the southern end of Friedrichstadt, a dive bar where he would gamble, drink and carouse the night away with “Revolver Heini”, “Butcher Herrmann”, “Yankee Franzi”, “Mad Dog” and other Berlin apaches. The raw nature of these criminals exert an irresistible attraction. There was a cunning alchemy to Hirschfeld’s slim volume. He took the base alloy of prurience and contempt and transformed it into the noble metal of enlightenment. As Hirschfeld moves from breathless encounters in windowless bars to loving same-sex partnerships in banal domestic settings, he flips the focus from exoticism to familiarity. The couples in Berlin’s Third Sex maintain an understandable discretion, but otherwise the fact of their gender is pressed to the margins until it almost disappears from significance. It was as though Hirschfeld had tempted audiences to a freak show only to reveal the bearded lady brushing her teeth. There is little evidence in the book of Hirschfeld’s extensive research into sexual practices, which appears to be a conscious authorial decision, one that aligned his potentially explosive work more closely with the popular literature of the day. As Hirschfeld draws out the tragedy that shadowed many queer lives at the time, his deployment of pathos can seem overripe to present-day sensibilities. In one section about a gay Christmastime gathering, he relays the lugubrious musings of the attendees: Many think about their shattered hopes, what they could have achieved if old prejudices had not hindered their progress, and others in respectable positions ponder the heavy lie they must live. Many think about their parents who are dead – or for whom they are dead – and all in deepest sorrow think of the woman they loved most of all and who loved them most of all – their mother. But this markedly sentimental, slightly mannered tone made his account far more accessible to the average reader. It also reflected Hirschfeld’s emotional investment in the subject matter. The only other volume that the doctor penned for Ostwald’s series — Die Gurgel Berlins (Berlin’s Gullet, 1907) — offers an instructive contrast. It addressed the city’s alcohol problem, replacing the anecdotal evidence of Berlin’s Third Sex with empirical data and an overall sense of distance from the topic at hand (Hirschfeld himself was largely teetotal). While much of Berlin’s Third Sex is concerned with expressions of same-sex attraction, it also addresses those living contrary to their assigned gender, such as the individual Hirschfeld refers to as “Miss X”: legally female, mannish enough to attract attention in public, and living entirely as a man at home. Hirschfeld saw that denial of their identity was leading (individuals we now call) trans men and women to depression, even suicide. One of Hirschfeld’s most powerful contributions here — even in advance of the clinical assistance he would later offer — was to acknowledge that trans people exist, and always have. ※※Indexed under…X (letter)to signify the unknown The conclusion to Berlin’s Third Sex, the mission statement of his crusade, crowns sentiment and science with simple justice: “I stress, to avoid any confusion, that these demands on behalf of homosexuals relate to nothing more than what adults in free agreement do with each other”; he goes on to explicitly condemn violence and infringements of the rights of third parties, including minors. In Berlin’s Third Sex, Hirschfeld not only offers a vital piece of queer history both panoramic and intimate: he places a pin in the map marking the spot where majority Western consensus would only arrive about a century later. Around the time of Berlin’s Third Sex, a split in the early gay movement pitted Hirschfeld against splenetic activist Adolf Brand, who drew on the “individual anarchy” of Max Stirner (an early run-through of libertarianism) and — even further back — a model of erotic mentorship inspired by ancient Greece. In 1896, Brand had launched the world’s first gay journal, Der Eigene, which wasn’t so much the organ of a liberation movement as an invitation to a secret society comprised of a classically-educated, exclusively male elite. In their feud, Brand set his own “Nordic” purity against Hirschfeld’s “Oriental” decadence, a motif which recurred when Hirschfeld’s profile as an authority on sexual minorities expanded. Hirschfeld’s questioning of long-cherished truths discomfited wider society, and bigots conflated his campaign with the outer and inner revolutions of Marx and Freud as a great Jewish conspiracy to undo all that the upright citizen held dear. The antisemitic abuse reached a provisional peak in 1907 when Hirschfeld was called as a key witness in the trials that constituted the “Harden-Eulenburg Affair”, which centred on homosexuality in the highest imperial circles. A caricature from this time shows Hirschfeld shouting and beating a drum; his offence in the eyes of the Wilhelmine mainstream was drawing attention to homosexuality, labelling it an identity rather than an activity, a destiny rather than a decision, and — like August Bebel — revealing that it was far more common than generally assumed. Society now stood unhappily disabused of the consoling fiction that sexual difference was a freakish anomaly, a vile act begat of weakness of character, carried out in some untroubling elsewhere. Magnus Hirschfeld became the lightning rod for an entire country’s anxieties about sexuality and gender. Undeterred, Hirschfeld took a closer look at gender dysphoria and the phenomenon of erotic cross-dressing in his 1910 book Die Transvestiten, which introduced the term “transvestite” to the world. The following year he joined forces with feminist Helene Stöcker to — successfully — prevent the scope of Paragraph 175 being expanded to include lesbians. While he advocated for the acceptance of difference in the realms of sexuality and race, Hirschfeld had, at least for a time, less open views when it came to individuals thought to have “inferior” genetic stock. In 1913, Hirschfeld helped found the Medical Society for Sexology and Eugenics (Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Sexualwissenschaft und Eugenik), embracing the latter theory as a way to combat hereditary illness and as a tool for supposed social welfare. Hirschfield’s approach wasn’t as extreme as some of his fellow practitioners, who advocated for government-issued health certificates verifying a person’s “suitability” for parenthood — excluding alcoholics, for example, who might pass on their condition to future generations. For Hirschfeld, a better approach was a free exchange of medical history among engaged couples. More unfortunate and misguided was the doctor’s research into “degenerative signs” — bodily features, like facial asymmetry, that he believed could be used to detect hereditary ills, with an aim to discourage passing these onto the next generation. Later, as the Nazis championed eugenics, Hirschfeld finally recognised the potential and actual dangers of the theory, arguing forcibly against it. By contrast, his consultations at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research), which Hirschfeld operated in Berlin throughout the Weimar Republic, advanced well beyond theory. Here he gave sexual minorities a vocabulary, helping to remove stigma and taboo as well as offering entirely practical interventions to patients like Lili Elbe, the “Danish Girl” — pioneering surgery, hormone treatment, even hair removal. Hirschfeld didn’t believe in a gay liberation without recognition of trans men and women (even if he didn’t use those terms), and none of this was to be accomplished at the expense of feminism. Hirschfeld was utterly tireless in this activism, taking any route — petitions, academic papers, books, international lectures, even feature films — that might lead to public enlightenment. As Elena Mancini reveals in Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom (2010), there is a strain of expansive idealism apparent throughout Hirschfeld’s life away from his headline, hot-button concerns; at just sixteen, for instance, he wrote an essay proposing the “Dream of a World Language”. At the dawn of the twentieth century, he was a member of Berlin’s anarcho-utopian Neue Gemeinschaft (New Community), along with Hans Ostwald and Else Lasker-Schüler, as well as Gustav Landauer, Erich Mühsam, and Martin Buber. The group typified a deep yet rarely acknowledged strain of radical thinking in Wilhelmine Germany. These visionaries were exiles from the Zukunftsstaat (Future State), a concept which carried the suggestion that, like Shangri-La, the ideal society was a location you could reach if only you had the right coordinates. Best known for his examination of sexual difference, Hirschfeld ultimately espoused a unity through plurality, an abolition of hierarchies in diametrical opposition to social Darwinism. So by the time fascism had arrived as a political force in Germany it wasn’t just Hirschfeld’s Jewishness or his defence of sexual difference that placed him in danger; he had in fact formulated a conception of human relations antithetical to Nazism in almost every regard. Fortunately Hirschfeld was already abroad when Hitler assumed power in 1933; he never returned but lived long enough to see the Nazis tighten Paragraph 175. It was only definitively struck from the statutes in 1994, after reunification — almost sixty years after Magnus Hirschfeld’s death. As I was preparing my translation of Berlin’s Third Sex for print in 2017, Germany’s parliament voted in favour of marriage equality. This would no doubt have pleased a time-traveling Magnus Hirschfeld. As a world citizen, however, he would also note that to be gay in the present day can mean being prime minister or being stoned to death in the town square, contingent purely on the accident of birthplace. As reactionary forces seek to claw back hard-won civil advances around the globe, Hirschfeld’s achievements only become clearer, his message of radical acceptance more urgent, his embrace of variance more inspiring. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 7, 2022

James J. Conwa

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:16.053126

documenting-drugs

Documenting Drugs The Artful Intoxications of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz By Juliette Bretan April 7, 2022 In pursuit of Pure Form, the Polish artist known as “Witkacy” would consume peyote, cocaine, and other intoxicants before creating pastel portraits. Juliette Bretan takes a trip through Witkiewicz’s chemical forays, including his 1932 Narcotics, a genre-bending treatise that warns of the hazards of drugs while seductively recollecting their delirious effects. 1:52 – The visions seem to be waning.2:05 – Ages pass. Entire mountains, worlds, and gaggles of visions. Too many reptiles. The last one: A cave made of pigs. I’m in a gigantic moving pig, made of piggish tiles. Narcotics spawn styles in art and architecture.4:10 – I see graphic depictions of all my flaws and mistakes.1 Perhaps it is the main subject of the self-portrait that captures your attention. Debonair in a crisp blue shirt and spotty tie, Polish artist, writer, and philosopher Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) strikes a classic pose: head slightly turned away, steely gaze, half-smile. Or maybe your eyes pan beyond Witkacy to the strangely apocalyptic background — ruined buildings, rendered in smudged grey and yellow pastel, leaching smoke into the air. A prophetic vista, given that the portrait was completed in 1938. Either way, it is easy to overlook the inscription, in the black crayon of Witkacy’s spiky hand, jotted across the bottom of the image: [P + 2NP1]. It looks almost like a signature, a cipher, or a record of ownership. This is Witkacy’s formula for keeping note of the substances he had consumed during the artwork’s composition, and of a previous spell of sobriety. In this case, P denotes “palenia”, or smoking tobacco, while 2NP1 signals one month and two days of “non-smoking”. Under the influence of cocaine, mescaline, alcohol, and other narcotic cocktails, Witkacy prepared numerous studies of clients and friends for his portrait painting company, founded in the mid-1920s; the mix of substances inducing different approaches to colour, technique, and composition. The resulting images are surreal — and occasionally horrific. Heads become disembodied busts, suspended in the night sky. Bodies are transformed into worms. Faces seep down the paper. Witkacy’s experimentation with drugs was not limited to the studio. In 1932, he authored Narkotyki (Narcotics), a series of essays describing his intake, alongside analysis of contemporary attitudes towards drug use. During the 1920s and 30s, substance abuse in Poland was increasingly seen as less a medical issue, more of a social and even national concern, perceived as a threat facing the newly-independent Polish state. Particular criticism was levied against alcohol, though other drugs, including tobacco, were also criticised at times for their detrimental health effects.2 At first glance, Narkotyki appears to employ a similar rhetoric of abstinence. The front cover ominously lists a roster of recreational substances, in blazing red and yellow. In the preface, Witkacy claims he is “writing in total seriousness . . . to produce something useful”; describes how his “main aim is to save future generations from the two most monstrous stupéfiants, tobacco and alcohol”; and claims substance use “ultimately lead[s] to a personality becoming entirely altered, spiritually disfigured”.3 His is a “purely psychological” method, he adds.4 It's a very honourable approach — but, typical Witkacy, this was all a bit of ruse. Narkotyki owes much to the experimental works of other European psychonauts throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Witkacy’s idea of drugs as being both sublime artistic fuel and a fast-track to the doldrums evokes Thomas De Quincey’s opium-laced visions in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821); his playfulness with style, reflecting the ephemeral escape offered by drug-taking — and his acknowledgement of its longer-term, more pernicious social consequences — smacks of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry and writing on hashish.5 Like Baudelaire, Witkacy frequently situates his experiments within wider ideas about the role of the artist in an increasingly modernised society, and the possibilities opened by altering the perceptual faculties. “As humanity adapts to society, to the progressive mechanization and quickening pace of life”, he writes, “the artist, a specialist in channeling the immediate expression of metaphysical sensations, has had to distance himself formally from the social foundation, though it is where his life is rooted.”6 Whatever his debts to other explorers of altered states of consciousness, Witkacy was also future looking. At certain points, he adopts a process of time-stamping his experiences as they progress after ingestion: a method that anticipates the internet’s Erowid portal — a sort of intoxicated version of the Mass Observation project, which allows volunteers to submit public accounts of their experiences on various substances. And his intoxication was both physical and formal. As the translator of the 2018 English version of Narkotyki, Soren A. Gauger, notes, Witkacy’s prose is often tricksy and double-crossing: he is “exhilarating and exasperating”, writes Gauger, “no matter what he was writing, it seems he wished he was writing something else”.7 Born in 1885 in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire, Witkacy was raised in the southern mountain resort of Zakopane — the air and spirit of which would later lead him to deem it “the chief production plant of a unique, purely Polish drug, Zakopanine”. His formative years were spent around cultural innovations, including those by his father, painter and critic Stanisław Witkiewicz, who was associated with the innovative Młoda Polska (Young Poland) Arts and Crafts movement.8 Initially home-schooled, Witkacy later studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, debuting his paintings — Romantic depictions of landscapes which bore similarities to his father’s works — in 1901. A trip to Paris in 1908 sparked an interest in avant-gardism, and he began experimenting with photography, extending lenses with the help of drainpipes to make strange portraits. A macro focus and claustrophobic cropping brought his subjects oppressively close to the viewer; their wide-eyed and grimly-serious faces staring out of the bromide murk.9 Witkacy’s early career was marred by tragedy. In 1914, his fiancée Jadwiga Janczewska took her own life, sending him into a tailspin. As a distraction, his childhood friend, anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, invited him to photograph an upcoming research expedition through Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) and Australia to what was then the Territory of Papua. It was a disastrous trip. En route, the pair spent most of the time in their cabin, deep in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim; upon arrival, Witkacy’s letters to his father reveal an ongoing preoccupation with thoughts of his late fiancée, in which descriptions of the environment interweave intense colour and toxicity: The trees are covered with flowers going from scarlet and orange vermilion to violet and lake. . . . All this causes me the most frightful suffering and unbearable pain, since she’s not alive with me. . . . Everything is poison which brings close thoughts of death. When, when will this inhuman suffering end?10 At one point on the trip, Witkacy held a Browning pistol to his temple for an entire night. His relationship with Malinowski prickled — the anthropologist compared it to “Nietzsche breaking with Wagner” — and Witkacy soon returned for Europe to enlist in the Russian Imperial Army, whilst Malinowski continued to the Territory of Papua.11 The friendship between the pair never fully recovered. Drafted into the Pavlovsky Guard in 1915, Witkacy fought on the frontline of World War I in autumn of the following year — though was severely wounded, come summer, in eastern Ukraine.12 Witkacy spent the remainder of the war convalescing, during which time he developed his artistic style on an industrial scale, creating around eight hundred works, both in painting and photography.13 One composition, produced in St Petersburg (then Petrograd) circa 1917, was his “Multiple Self-Portrait in Mirrors”: an unnerving photographic portrait taken in a reflective hall, depicting five Witkacies, dressed in military uniform, staring each other down with The Lady from Shanghai-ish paranoia. In mid-1918, Witkacy was able to leave St Petersburg and return to Zakopane, where he began exhibiting works with the avant-garde Formist group: a Cubist-Expressionist-Futurist-folk mashup movement, where psychedelic scenes, popping with colour, met more graphical, geometric designs. Around the same time, he formulated the principles of his theory of Pure Form, which stressed composition over content, and a break away from realism, naturalism, and linear narrative. For Witkacy, artistic works served as autonomous units rather than reflective enterprises, prompting free association among viewers, untrammelled by logic or consistency.14 In a 1923 lecture, he explained: On the stage, a man or some other creature could commit suicide as a result of a glass of water spilling, the same creature that danced for joy over the death of his beloved mother five minutes ago . . . . Art with a tendency towards Pure Form is something absolute . . . occupying a given period of time.15 Despite his aesthetic innovations, Witkacy’s works weren’t selling as much as he hoped. In 1925, he decided instead to establish a portrait firm and — under the motto “the customer must be satisfied” — proposed seventeen increasingly sardonic rules, including the classification of portraits into a number of separate styles: — Type A: “‘Slick’ execution, with a certain loss of character in the interests of beautification, or accentuation of ‘prettiness.’”— Type B: “More emphasis on character but without any trace of caricature”— Type B + d: “Intensification of character, bordering on the caricatural.”— Type C: “executed with the aid of C2H5OH [ethanol] and narcotics of a superior grade . . . . Approaches abstract composition, otherwise known as ‘Pure Form.’”— Type D: “The same results without recourse to any artificial means.”— Type E: “Spontaneous psychological interpretation at the discretion of the Firm.”16 Later in the rule-book, Witkacy added: “any sort of criticism on the part of the customer is absolutely ruled out . . . if the firm had allowed itself the luxury of listening to customers’ opinions, it would have long ago gone crazy.” Anticipating his writing in Narkotyki, Witkacy’s portrait painting company was less a serious enterprise than an experiment in boundary-breaking, mischief, and devilish contradiction. Thousands of images were subsequently produced, signed under various pseudonyms: Witkac, Witkatze, Vitecasse (French for “breaks quickly”).17 Many of the Type C, mid-inebriation portraits were made at so-called “orgies” in which Witkacy experimented with drug combinations, overseen by a friend in the medical profession, Dr Białynicki-Birula.18 Rumours about these parties — and Witkacy’s habitual drug-taking — abounded among the general public; even a decade later, in the late 1940s, Białynicki-Birula issued a letter to the press confirming their serious nature, and refuting the suggestion that Witkacy was ever addicted to drugs. Throughout the interwar period, Witkacy garnered a reputation among artistic circles as Poland’s resident eccentric. For writer and playwright Witold Gombrowicz, he was: “never at rest, always highly strung, tormenting himself and others with his perpetual playacting, his craving to shock . . . forever cruelly and painfully playing with people”.19 Photographs of Witkacy are peak interwar slapstick: in one, he is irascible and grimacing; another shows him looking pensive in ski goggles; in a third, he has an arm around the usually shy Polish-Jewish short story writer Bruno Schulz, who has his fingers over his eyes. Witkacy also took to novel writing, composing several bizarre and impressionistic works. His debut, Farewell to Autumn (1927), was to a degree inspired by his travels with Malinowski, and features a cocaine party. The next, Insatiability (1930), is a narcotics-fuelled and eerily prescient dystopia, narrated around the year 2000, in which Europe is overrun by war, facilitated by the hallucinogenic “Murti Bing” pills. There’s a psychoactive bite to much of Witkacy’s work — which makes his preface to Narkotyki all the more farcical. If Witkacy was Poland’s answer to De Quincey, then his was a more confounding approach to substance intake: one part didactic, one part satirical. “I will write the chapter on nicotine in a sorry state of withdrawal”, he claims, then adds: “of course, I might very well begin smoking again in the middle of writing . . . so many times this has happened!”20 Just as his innovations in the visual and literary arts embraced the eccentric and contradictory, Witkacy’s nonfiction was also charged with paradox, reflecting his ambivalent relationship with indulgence and withdrawal. Though written with all the fastidious composition of a lab report, Narkotyki blends objective documentary with more personal, somatic, and often hilarious explanations of Witkacy’s experience on drugs, and the complexities of addiction. Drugs are a gateway “to see the world from ‘the other side’” (similar language also appears in Farewell to Autumn, but here they do not offer an escape from reality, instead revealing its contradictory and fickle undercurrents). Narkotyki slips from desire, greed, and vanity to disappointment and blame; from chronicles of social mores to sharpened invective; intimate reminiscences to artistic theorising.21 At one point, Witkacy breaks away from drug-talk to dedicate several pages to refuting supposedly serious allegations against him: I deny having had sexual relations with my Siamese cat, Schyzia (a.k.a. Schizophrenia, Isotta, Sabina, of whom I am so fond, but nothing more), and that the mongrel kittens she bore in any way take after me. . . . I deny being a braggart and a womanizer always on the make, or having seduced the wives of other men. I deny having hiked up to the summit of Giewont in a tuxedo (I have never even owned a tuxedo), written plays as a lark, swindled and mocked, and not knowing how to draw.22 While one of Witkacy’s central ideas about art was a belief in the growing mechanisation of the world, and the separation between artist and society, Narkotyki combines culture, life, and psychology, exposing both individual effects and general attitudes towards drug taking.23 The first chapter, on nicotine, begins with Leo Tolstoy and ends with existentialism — “what are a few meager puffs when nothing has any meaning” — via segues from moralistic suggestions for its “absolute prohibition”, to the acknowledgement of the “unadulterated bovine pleasure” of cigarettes, and of differing global smoking techniques: “we Poles, Russians and Balkaners of all stripes, to say nothing of the real East, suck the foul smoke right down to our navels, poisoning ourselves some 80% more than those in the West”.24 There are diatribes on how smoking cheapens art — Witkacy suggests smokers see value in the most “hideous literature for cretins . . . those ghastly detective novels”; how it “saps your courage”, causing all manner of ghastly mental and physical symptoms.25 But cigarettes are also near-impossible to jettison. Witkacy frequently mentions the regret of the smoker, who has “squandered all his life’s bright opportunities for the dreary inhalation of an inadequately toasted demon weed substance from hell”. It is not difficult to trace this description, and the careful commentary on stages of withdrawal, back to Witkacy’s own perception of himself. Following his fiancée’s suicide, Witkacy spent much of his life treading the edge of a breakdown: some of his more private writings express fears for the demise of individuality, or describe impending catastrophe, even suicidal ideation. But Narkotyki never reaches complete apocalyptic gloom. Witkacy’s style shifts throughout: rambling, excruciating descriptions of the after-effects of abstinence are defused with impeccable comic timing: First thing in the morning your toxin-paralyzed cells seem to revive, and not just in the brain and the nervous system, but throughout your body. You feel as though they were balls in their sockets, freshly oiled and cleaned. Of course, the first thought, or scraps of thought, you have are: “What a load of crap.” Witkacy’s take on alcohol is similarly brazen. “Alcohol is boring”, he announces — but then offers a thorough and effervescent description of its psychological impact: Reality opens its gelatinous and reeking maw, its derisive eyes goggling with wild abandon . . . by increasing the dosage of the intoxicant you can always occasionally return to the old ecstasy and gain at least a wan simulation of life.26 His account of cocaine, meanwhile, is meticulous narcotics reportage: We spend several hours admiring a stain on a tablecloth as the most beautiful thing in the world, only to subsequently fall prey to the most horrific doubts about the very essence of Being and of life at its most beautiful and sublime. There are also shorter sections on morphine and ether, written by Polish scientists Bohdan Filipowski and Dezydery Prokopowicz (pseudonym for Stefan Glass), who employ a slightly more methodological approach to drug intake. The fourth chapter, on peyote — a small cactus containing mescaline and other psychoactive alkaloids — is Witkacy at his most breathless. Of all the drugs listed in Narkotyki, peyote takes on a particularly mythical status: noting the difficulties in acquiring the substance in Europe, Witkacy explains he will be “grateful until [his] dying days” for the seven pea-sized pills he received from Prosper Szmurło — an “authentic Mexican peyote, from the modest stocks of Dr. Osta, President of the International Society for Metapsychic Research”.27 Witkacy even notes he abstained from drinking and other intoxicants after using peyote; an astonishingly foresighted understanding of the impact of different substances on the human body, which prefigures present-day research into the effectiveness of hallucinogens to treat alcoholism.28 The subsequent thirty pages offer an eleven-hour account of Witkacy’s emotional and physical state while under the influence of peyote: the rate of his pulse; the raging appetites; the drawings he attempts to create; his inability to sleep; and the ceaseless hallucinations (of green embryos as big as a St Bernard, of anteaters spinning backwards, of piscine cross-sections — or, as Witkacy puts it, “giant shark cold cuts”; of imaginary and fantastic meetings with Polish politicians; of rotting body parts; of erotica; of skiing).29 “Peyote reality”, he summarises, “is like our own seen through a microscope . . . the longer the eyes are shut, the more the field broadens and sometimes even ‘envelops’ the peyote user like everyday reality, creeping up on both sides and even producing the strange sensation of having eyes at the back of your head”.30 Drug reality, though, comes in many forms; sometimes physical, sometimes cultural. A compulsive code-switcher, Witkacy’s understanding of experimentation (with art or drugs) as a technique to create formal and social distance also includes a sensitivity to the failings of ordinary language to capture experience. In the preface, he notes: I hope to show you the small mental shifts that ultimately lead to a personality becoming entirely altered, spiritually disfigured, devoid of Geist (the Polish word for “spirit,” duch, does not convey the range of the German Geist and the French esprit – knack, spark, glimmer, drive, etc.), creative power, and a striving toward the Unknown, which requires courage and a carefree attitude that are systematically pulverized by an odious addiction.31 Visual artworks, Witkacy’s or otherwise, and language — of dance, song, incantational poetry, and prose — can cause the beholder and reader to feel spiritually altered; a transposed trip, a kind of second-order intoxication, or a contact high from the artist’s own altered state. I think here of the whirligig beat of a waltz, and of a velvety voice crooning among lamenting violins: Gdy mówisz mi, że kochasz mnie Twe słowa są, jak opjum...(When you tell me you love meYour words are like opium…) This is not Witkacy speaking. These are the lyrics of a mesmeric Polish song written in 1933, “Opium”, which was performed in the leading cabarets of interwar Warsaw. But in many ways, the song proves Witkacy’s point: despite official condemnation, drugs — soft and hard — were substantially intertwined with everyday culture in the early twentieth century, both in Poland and on a wider scale across Europe. Another case study might be found in the 1936 Polish tango “Morfina” (or Morphine), with similar lyrics, about a beguiling drug-turned-lover; or in the plethora of advertising songs for cigarette companies produced in the period — like the 1937 tango “Nikotyna”, the tale of a femme fatale called Nicotine, who turns blood to wine and drives men to despair. Additional examples would include the musical first-aid-kit of interwar Polish advertising songs for painkillers and medications; or the high-quality pictorial advertisements for pharmaceutical firms of the era, including by illustrator duo Jan LeWitt and George Him (who later designed wartime propaganda posters for the British war effort). Narkotyki became an immediate hit, acquiring almost modernist cult status: Gauger notes that one contemporary critic suggested the book “needed no introduction because half of Poland could be seen carrying it around”.32 Was this because Witkacy’s public could relate to the content? Because he dared to toy with societal rules and authority? Or because he left it ambiguous as to whether the book was a serious project at all? Witkacy’s oft-overlooked appendices to Narkotyki have a commonplace focus, emphasising prosaic habits — washing, shaving, and haemorrhoid care — sometimes with recommendations for treatment, and sometimes appealing to readers directly. Perhaps this was why his works gripped audiences. Witkacy always skated the thin line between relatability and absurdity; between the educational and the visceral; between life and art. Witkacy’s fate, though, was decidedly more grim. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he fled east to Jeziory with his lover, Czesława Oknińska. Seventeen days later, Soviet forces also invaded the country — and Witkacy took his own life. After the war, his sealed coffin was moved and reburied in Zakopane; several years later, Polish authorities re-exhumed his remains, and opened the coffin. Then came Witkacy’s final joke, which could have been plucked straight out of his narcotic-induced hallucinations. The body wasn’t his. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 7, 2022

Juliette Bretan

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:16.661839

beastly-clues

Beastly Clues T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword By Roddy Howland Jackson January 12, 2022 Just a few years after The Waste Land appeared — a poem whose difficulty critics compared to some “pompous cross-word puzzle” — Edward Powys Mathers (alias: Torquemada) pioneered the cryptic: a puzzle form that, like modernist poetry, unwove language and rewove it anew. Roddy Howland Jackson reveals the pleasures and imaginative creatures lurking in Torquemada's lively grids. London Zoo was having a bad month. On January 4, 1925, the acquisition of a thirteenth ostrich had led to public pressure “to train one of them for police purposes”, a feat supposedly “accomplished some years ago on an ostrich farm in Florida”, reported the Evening Post.1 A fortnight later, a “fugitive monkey” named George escaped from the zoo, bruising a naturalist’s knee on his way out.2 To add insult to (genicular) injury, the zoo was under siege by “requests for aid in solving ‘cross-word’ puzzles’”: “What is a word in three letters meaning a female swan? What is a female kangaroo, or a fragile creature in six letters ending in TO?” London Zoo, as one reporter suggested, “has enough to do with the care of its own animals, and cannot act as consultant to the world at large”.3 The poor zookeepers were at the thin end of a puzzle wedge; fated, as Ernie Bushmiller joked in his popular comic strip, to serve buckets of alphabet soup to animals prized and poached for their phonemes alone.4 The “crossword craze” of the 1920s had hit Britain like a “meteorological depression”, and, as was traditional, Americans were to blame.5 Following the publication of the first crossword in New York World by Arthur Wynne in 1913, the Tamworth Herald lamented the misfortune of a nation where “10,000,000 people have caught the infection of unprofitable trifling”, estimating the loss of productive American labour to crosswords at roughly five million hours per day.6 In the UK, so much damage had been inflicted by ham-thumbed solvers on the dictionaries of Wimbledon that all such reference works were withdrawn from public access.7 Thesaurus sales skyrocketed while library use crashed.8 By the time Vladimir Nabokov published the first Russian krossword in 1924, the Nottingham Evening Post’s “world at large” estimation was quite right: the grid truly had run a girdle around the earth. Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic were aghast at the forfeiture of intellectual capital to a game that seemingly traded on automatic, transactional thinking. To the New York Times in 1925, crosswords were little more than “a sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex”.9 (During 2018, the New York Times netted roughly $33 million from crossword products alone).10 In 1920s London, The Times, likewise, sneered that “everywhere, at any hour of the day, people can be seen quite shamelessly poring over the checkerboard diagrams, cudgelling their brains for a word meaning idler, or whatnot”.11 Modernist Crosswords As newspapers were lamenting the labour frittered away on crossword puzzles, they also had cross words to say about another form of cryptic writing and time-consuming interpretation: modernist literature. With London Zoo barely recovered from the alphabetic siege, a journalist for the Aberdeen Press and Journal remarked, in a review published on November 8, 1926 about Gertrude Stein’s “The Fifteenth of November”: “Cross-word puzzles are like eating toffee to this stuff”.12 Stein’s story, glossed as “a portrait of T. S. Eliot”, reads, through squinted eyes, like someone shuttling over the rows and columns of a weekly crossword’s clues: “In this case a description. Forward and back weekly. In this case absolutely a question in question. Furnished as meaning supplied.”13 Another humorous critic writing for the Daily Mirror on “Rhymes to Cure the Cold”, that is, on literature as medicine — Longfellow, for instance, gets prescribed to insomniacs — disagrees with the toffee analogy: “Much more modern [medically] and infinitely more powerful in its effects is Gertrude Stein. Up to date disease like cross-word mania can be banished in one dose.”14 Whether an analogue to or cure for the crossword frenzy, Stein’s portrait of Eliot failed to inoculate his work from similar diagnoses. In 1939, a poetry critic at the Birmingham Daily Gazette could not decide if Eliot’s masterpiece was cryptically brilliant or merely an overwrought cryptic: “‘The Wasteland’ may be a great poem; on the other hand it may be just a rather pompous cross-word puzzle”.15 Here again we find a question asked about labour and idleness in this period: are crosswords and difficult poems worth the efforts required to elicit literary pleasure and linguistic revitalisation? Or merely a waste of time? Ironically — or perhaps felicitously — only two decades after The Times had typecast cruciverbalists as “idlers” chasing their own tails, a bestselling Times crossword compendium included a clue for IDLERS, which T. S. Eliot failed to solve, angrily scoring himself an “X” in the margin: ※※Indexed under…X (letter)as a mark of failure 20. Written by Johnson; edited by Jerome. Unlike bees and ants (6) Eliot only got as far as the crossing letters, which he correctly reckoned to be ▢🄳▢🄴▢🅂.16 He had seemingly forgotten Samuel Johnson’s The Idler (despite having written on Johnson throughout his career), as well as Jerome K. Jerome’s The Idler (despite having been his neighbour in Marlow between 1917–1920), which, alongside a nod to nature’s busiest workers — the classical models of allusion itself — yielded the answer. Eliot’s voracious appetite for puzzles certainly seemed idling (or even addling) to many of his colleagues, who often found him smuggling The Times crossword into “tedious” editorial meetings under the table.17 Undeterred by Ezra Pound’s disdain for such games as “an abomination” in his ABC of Reading (1934), Eliot held the cryptic crossword in enough esteem to consider “finding a reference to myself and my works in The Times crossword” a crowning achievement, aspiring to a rank on the same allusive food chain in which he had chewed, without satisfaction, over Johnson and Jerome.18 Flummoxed by bees and ants, T. S. Eliot nevertheless wound up as a fly. In a strange misdirection of his ambition to an afterlife in the crossword, he is often abbreviated and doubled to clue TSETSE, an African insect known for transmitting insomnia. How apt that the author of The Waste Land, skewered as a “maggot breeding in the corruption of poetry” by F. L. Lucas in 1923, should metamorphose posthumously into a tsetse.19 Eliot’s magnum opus may have struck Lucas as a “toad”, but Eliot actively embraced animal personae throughout his career, not only as the Old Possum behind a Book of Practical Cats (1939), but also as a March Hare in his juvenalia, T. S. Apteryx (a kind of flightless kiwi) in his articles for The Egoist, and familiarly as “the elephant” amongst his co-workers.20 He addressed letters to Ezra Pound with “Dear Rabbit”, and while preparing to publish Marianne Moore’s “The Jerboa” for Faber, wondered if Pound was “maybe not a Rabit at all but a Gerboa a Little Animil wich I understan does illustrate the Quantum Theory by being at two Places at once even if he don’t understand it” [sic].21 ※※Indexed under…RabbitEzra Pound as In the cryptic crosswords Eliot enjoyed, creatures could indeed behave multiplicitously; like Schrödinger’s Cat (or, indeed, Eliot’s fondness for playing Possum), animals could quantum leap between being alive or dead, vegetable or mineral, real or fictional, rabbit or jerboa. Take, for example, ten randomly sampled clues for CAT or DOG from cryptics in the broadsheets of the last fifty years: 1. Leo caught both sides of argument (3)2. Best friend rejected god (3)3. Maybe Lion King not shown in Barrow? (3)4. Do good as a follower (3)5. Pet fur has nothing removed (3)6. Hound party girl initially (3)7. A natural killer disturbed in the act (3)8. Shadow boxer, maybe (3)9. Being crafty, occasionally (3)10. Perhaps setter ultimately tried to ring (3) Not one of these clues mentions cats or dogs, yet through the quiet conspiracy of syntactic misbehaviour, all of them yield a precise answer (given in the footnotes).22 They are, and they aren’t, animals. In a 1915 poem, “Portrait of a Lady”, Eliot daydreamed of being footloose from animal taxonomy: And I must borrow every changing shapeTo find expression. . . dance, dance,Like a dancing bear,Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.23 The CAT and DOG clues exemplify the expressive opportunities licensed by letting language dance promiscuously between categories. Each clue is straitjacketed by its obligation to solubility, but the endless possibilities of wordplay supply new opportunities to wriggle free. Letters and lookalikes — collaged from idiomatic, sporting, classical, allusive, and glyphic shorthands — form unlikely alliances, aggregated from vocabularies momentarily in dialogue with one another. In his cutting review of The Waste Land, then, Lucas’ comment that “a poem that has to be explained in notes is not unlike a picture with ‘This is a dog’ inscribed beneath” must have been particularly stinging to Eliot. Not only did it needle his pet preferences (Eliot was firmly team cat), but it also revealed how Lucas misunderstood the pleasure produced by both crosswords and difficult literature, as William Empson implied in a comparison between “obscure puzzles” and “obscure poetry” in The Gathering Storm (1940).24 One poem in Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats seems to claw back at Lucas with its tongue-in-cheek refrain: “Again I must remind you that / A dog’s a dog — A CAT’S A CAT.”25 Unbidden by nominative determinism, the beasts of Eliot’s poetry, personae, and puzzles were under no such obligations, free to hurdle freely across arbitrary Linnean boundaries; free, as it were, to cross-breed. Torquemada’s Crossbred Bestiaries The cryptic crossword was still inchoate during the career of Edward Powys Mathers, the English translator and poet, who popularised the difficult form and wrote under the alias Torquemada, after the Spanish inquisitor. His style of puzzle delighted in exploiting the materiality of language to revive words from the inert familiarity into which they had fallen: taking the modernist injunction to “make it new” and defamiliarise deadened language as a principle of radical reassembly, rather than mere refreshment. Animals real and imaginary, hybrid and crossbred, abound in Torquemada’s puzzles, granted a kind of furtive camouflage amidst the foliage of ambiguity. In a plain crossword, the name of an animal is an endpoint to which the clue must point in a straight line — to extend Lucas’ metaphor, “This is a dog (3)” [DOG] — whereas the cryptic pegs its mischief on wilful misdirection — “This is certainly not a dog (3) [DOG]. The key to a good cryptic, wrote Torquemada, is to make the solver think that they are solving one kind of clue when they are “actually doing nothing of the kind, and you can, for a little, postpone the inevitable end”.26 Delayed gratification, staked on the striptease of ambiguity, staves off instrumentalised meaning, diverting the “inevitable end” both in a temporal and teleological sense. Against the baldness of the American quick style, which Torquemada thought “too easy to hold for long the attention of anyone concerned with and interested in words”, he relished the opportunity to turn words on their heads.27 In doing so, his cryptic grids created all manner of strange beast, becoming little Punnett squares for crossbreeding animals, real and imaginary alike. It is in a Torquemada grid, indeed, that we come across one of Dr. Seuss’s prized specimens, the Lorax, a full forty years before Dr. Seuss believed he had coined it —“I looked at the drawing board, and that’s what he was!”, or so thought the children’s book author.28 24. With enough beer and bromide and borax25 & 30. To fill a crustacean’s thorax27. Any may sheep can be28 & 31. In a threefold degree29. Concealed from the fangs of the Lorax The rules of the puzzle — named “By the Waters of Shannon” (1934) in reference to Edward Lear’s nonsense oeuvre — dictate that “clues consist of one word or consecutive words in each line”.29 Each quintet of five consecutive clues are formatted as a sequence of limericks. The clues are not to be taken at face value. The answers are, in this stanza, ALE, PEREION, EWE, TREBLE, and HID, masked synonymously amid the continuous verse. The solver poses as a literary critic, performing a caricature of close reading to unlock a secret. It cannot be claimed definitively that Seuss magpied Torquemada’s cryptid — though, suggestively, he studied at Oxford during the peak of Torquemada’s popularity — but it is intriguing that two writers in the service of silliness would invest a fictional animal with the same name. Animals have always held a certain reverence in the crossword. In the late composer Stephen Sondheim’s guide to the British cryptic for American readers, he caricatures quick crosswords in The Daily News and the New York Times as requiring knowledge of the “Bantu hartebeest” (the KONGONI, an African antelope).30 Grids are crowded with the ASP, EFT, ELAND, GNU, IBEX, NYALA, OKAPI, and XENURUS: animals that have obtained a peculiar hyperreality in the public consciousness, appearing in crosswords more often than in conversation. A 1934 letter from P. G. Wodehouse even credits a crossword setter with “putting the good old emu back into circulation”, embalmed in the rag-tag bestiary of the newsprint puzzle, where the unique character of an animal is, ultimately, subordinate to its unique, alphabetic characters.31 Torquemada, on the other hand, themed many of his experiments around the shapes of animals, preserving their bodies as well as their names — as Vladimir Nabokov had done in a 1926 letter to Véra, which contained a puzzle that looked like a butterfly. Only two years after the critic Louis Untermeyer slammed writers including T. S. Eliot and James Joyce for being part of the “crossword-puzzle-school”, Torquemada’s Cross-Words in Rhyme for Those of Riper Years (1925) pioneered the verse puzzle, where every single clue is formatted as a metrically regular rhyming couplet.32 Each grid in Cross-Words in Rhyme is designed as a kind of concrete poem, where the lattice of solutions — disparate words drawn into surprising compatibility — forms an (often animal) image. “The Swan” begins self-referentially by telling the solver “I am the cross-word setter’s base device / For making non-existent words suffice” (ANAGRAM).33 Later in the grid Torquemada remixes a nursery rhyme to clue a short word: 29. As hours in days, so many merulaeFound living tombs in me, but did not die.34 Knowing that “merulae” refers to blackbirds is certainly tricky, but the sing-song cadence of the couplet brings to life its solution, PIE, based on “Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds”. The birds are alive, entombed inside a pie; paradoxically, the pie is alive, entombed inside the image of a swan. The crossword apparatus, like George Steiner’s archetypal poet, is constitutionally “a neologist, a recombinant wordsmith. . . a passionate resuscitator of buried or spectral words”.35 Bird inside pie, pie inside bird: both are “encrypted” (etymologically referring to burial) by the setter, and resurrected by the attention of the solver. The entangled difficulties of the cryptic crossword, then, provided a uniquely vital opportunity for defamiliarising language: for reheating, as it were, Bushmiller’s alphabet soup, and letting the animals run rampant. Whether “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land”, as in The Waste Land, or breeding bird-pie fractals, the experimental aspects of literary modernism found extreme expression in cryptics, which took literature and letters alike as their raw materials. In his Puzzle Book (1934), Torquemada gave as his exemplar clue “I made self into poet” (MASEFIELD, a British poet whose surname recombines the letters in “I made self”), achieving anagrammatically the very metamorphosis trumpeted by the clue.36 Combinatorial, cleverly arranged letters could disclose portals into surprising realities. In this regard, Torquemada owed a great deal to the language games waged in the nonsense literature of the nineteenth century, which, in turn, also influenced modernist poetry, namely Eliot’s more-playful verse. Lewis Carroll’s Doublets (ca. 1879) demanded a similarly interactive hand in making evolution come to life, turning APE into MAN, or FISH into BIRD by morphological increments, as if speeding up Darwinian selection to the pace of handwriting.37 If, as Eliot put it, nonsense literature employed “a parody of sense” rather than “a vacuity of sense”, then Torquemada took this sideways slant to its fullest extent.38 In “The Bat”, he apes Carroll: “What he was me, that black thing in the middle, / A hatter once confessed to be a riddle”. The solution, AT, as Torquemada explains, refers to the Mad Hatter asking “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, / How I wonder what you’re at” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), with “that black thing in the middle” singling out the zoomorphic, batty cavity in the heart of the grid itself. Broken Knowledge and Aphoristic Grace In a moving obituary for Torquemada, written by his widow Rosamond Mathers, she recalls his habit for overwriting inert objects with a certain personality: “All the things he ordinarily used were apt to take on the qualities of toys; he had a happy way of naming all the common household objects so that each had its temperament, predominantly mischievous or benevolent”.39 Torquemada, we are told, was not content with things staying in their lanes, and preferred to be “confronted by a haphazard collection of words” than a neat one when he plotted his puzzles. She remembers him “drawing marginal decorations in vari-coloured chalks while he broods on some uninspiring word”, a behaviour that would ultimately be reciprocated by his legion solvers, including J. R. R. Tolkien, whose crossword doodles were recently exhibited by the Bodleian Library. While going through his more than thirty thousand clues for The Observer in preparation for the posthumous publication of Torquemada: 112 Best Crossword Puzzles (1942), Mathers was astonished to find singular words “cropping up fifty times and more” without replicated wordplay: “it was astonishing how he varied the clue”, she notes, remarking on his gift for “using words in a sense remote from the intention from their author”.40 The epigraph to Cross-Words for Riper Years exemplifies the latter trait, cheekily recontextualising a line attributed to “Anne Wordsworth” for comic effect: “Children, remember each Cross Word / Is written in a dread unearthly Book”. The same is true of his prevailing fondness for animals. When Torquemada was not structuring grids around animals, or penning clues which secretly hatched them, he would enlist their help in all manner of games. “Product of a noise many associated with lobster” yields MAYONNAISE (an anagrammatical “product” of “a noise many”), while “Sound of embrace a crocodile in secret” gave HUGGERMUGGER (a homophone for “hug a mugger”, making use of “crocodile” in slang).41 Reducing the appeal of a word game to a few words is almost self-defeating, but Sondheim came close when he said the British cryptic combined “literary cleverness, humour, even a pseudo-aphoristic grace”.42 Sondheim’s compound adjective refractures an aphoristic mode that, to Francis Bacon, was already “a broken knowledge, inviting men to inquire further”.43 Torquemada’s cryptics implored their solvers to participate in unfamiliarity: to join a collaborative meaning-making based not only on close reading, but in turn, close writing and close arithmetic, where even the most unremarkable words can be seen anew. Sondheim’s antelope may have remained a KONGONI in the “bald clues” of the United States, but uncaged by the cryptic style he favoured, it could flee into whimsical free association with its lexical neighbours; it could, as it were, elope with the ants that escaped T. S. Eliot. When it came to the affinity between the modernist puzzle and the modernist poem, Torquemada didn’t mince his words. Or, rather, he minced his words very selectively to make the same point: “In shape nothing more than a poet”. The solution is OVOID, a “shape” generated by adding “nothing” (O) to “a poet” (OVID). Torquemada performs a miniaturised Metamorphoses, reconstituting a literary object, and hatching a new adjective most commonly used to describe eggs, and thereby regeneration itself. The clue is alive with association, and nudges the distractible imagination of the solver one way, while its surface inconspicuously leads elsewhere. The attention nurtured by wordplay, a device for defamiliarity based on the bizarre contingencies embedded in language, leavens the word and world alike with surprising potential. Dispensing penny-drop-moments like arcade coin pushers, the best clues reward a reader not with anything empirically valuable, but instead with the giddy excitement of watching words build up, build up, and topple into surprising new riches. Postscript44 1. Doublespeak in accord protecting large union (9)2. Editing out lines, Lamb guilty over current vagueness (9)3. Imprecision by a doctor, one responsible for cutting trainee (9)4. Uncertainty after my BA and TUI flights essentially exploded (9)5. Occasionally calm, B. B. King quaintly produces doubtful tone (9)6. In the morning, chap who goes both ways welcomes sex with mysterious character (9)7. Postgraduate rebuffed extensive university computer support with variable confusion (9) The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 12, 2022

Roddy Howland Jackson

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:17.464924

circassian-beauties

Circassian Beauty in the American Sideshow By Betsy Golden Kellem September 16, 2021 Among the “human curiosities” in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum was a supposed escapee from an Ottoman harem, a figure marketed as both the pinnacle of white beauty and an exoticised other. Betsy Golden Kellem investigates the complex of racial and cultural stereotypes that made the Circassian beauty such a sideshow spectacle. If you happened to wander the puzzle-box warren of exhibit halls and saloons that made up Phineas Taylor Barnum’s American Museum in the mid-1800s, no one would have blamed you for feeling bombarded. Frankly, that was sort of the point: this five-story destination in lower Manhattan was a living, thrumming organism that strove to do nothing so much as overwhelm the senses. For a quarter’s admission, visitors could take in fine portraiture and exotic taxidermy, live theater and a lemonade stand, antiquities both real and imaginary, wax sculptures, stereographs, a Canadian beluga whale in the basement aquarium, and — capitalizing on an American strand of the Victorian-era “deformito-mania” — a rotating assortment of human, biological rarities, whose unusual bodies demonstrated the breadth and depth of creation.1 Some of these “living wonders” walked the venue’s halls, speaking with guests and offering souvenir carte-de-visite photographs for sale. Other performers were presented to the public in grand staged receptions known as “levees”. Alongside the likes of conjoined twins, a seven-foot “giantess”, the bearded lady, and the celebrated General Tom Thumb in his Napoleon costume was an act that endured through Barnum’s era and into the twentieth-century sideshow: an enigmatic, captivating woman known as the Circassian beauty, whose only “deformity” was her lack of imperfection. A staple of dime museums and traveling shows throughout the nineteenth century, Circassian beauties were alleged to be from the Caucasus Mountain region, and were famous for both their legendary looks and their large, seemingly Afro-textured hairstyles. The Circassian beauty was an attraction that required audiences to hold a number of ultimately unresolvable stereotypes in tension with each other. These women were presented as chaste, but were also billed as former harem slaves. They were supposedly of noble lineage but appeared as sideshow attractions. And they were displayed to predominantly white audiences for an exoticism that traded on hair associated with Black women, which came coupled with the paradoxical assurance that, being Caucasian, Circassian beauties represented the height of white racial “purity”. The pseudoscience of race in the nineteenth century, the development of mass media and entertainment venues at that time, and the employment of women who performed race as though it were a theater role all combined in a jarring and beguiling mix of stereotypes that kept the Circassian beauty attraction going for decades, and has had a lasting impact on how we think about race, class, and gender today. This particular conception of Circassian beauty can be traced to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), a German theorist who used craniometry — the measuring of human skulls — to address the then-pressing scientific question of whether racial variety was evidence of separate species within humanity. Blumenbach firmly dismissed this idea, writing that the color of one’s skin was “an adventitious and easily changeable thing, and can never constitute a diversity of species”.2 This is not to say that everyone was equal in esteem according to the German craniometrist. Blumenbach advocated for a hierarchy that considered people of his own race to be humanity’s poster children. Assessing and comparing the contours of various human skulls, Blumenbach ultimately arrived at a taxonomy of five racial groups, among which he considered persons from the Black Sea region to be the physical ideal.3 He coined the term “Caucasian” to describe this group, writing that I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighbourhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones of mankind.4 Blumenbach considered this Caucasian population, spread across Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa, the “primeval” (or “autochthonous”) human race, which branched into four other categories: Mongolian (Central Asian), American (Native), Malay (Southeast Asian), and Ethiopian (sub-Saharan African).5 It was, he argued, environmental conditions that caused a “degeneration” of the fair Caucasian original into peoples of color. To support his assertion that white skin had to be humanity’s default starting point, Blumenbach needed little more data than the fact that European ladies who spent their winters indoors exhibited “a brilliant whiteness”, while those who “exposed themselves freely to the summer sun and air” quickly ended up with a solid tan. “If then under one and the same climate the mere difference of the annual seasons has such influence in changing the colour of the skin”, he reasoned, ad absurdum, “is there anything surprising in the fact that climates. . . according to their diversity should have the greatest and most permanent influence over national colour”.6 The Ethiopian and Mongolian races Blumenbach considered “extreme varieties”, with Native American and Malay, respectively, as “intermediate” classifications between these extremes and the Caucasian ideal.7 Blumenbach may not have become especially famous, and craniometry (along with phrenology, a sister pseudoscience devoted to divining personality from the bumps on one’s skull) only had a short period of dubious fame, but the stereotype of idealized Caucasian beauty caught on fast. Circassia, a region of the Caucasus Mountains, became ground zero for Western notions of white beauty. Throughout the nineteenth century, books and magazines extolled the virtues of fair, buxom women in draped gowns and peasant jewelry; stout, bearded soldiers with daggers at their belts, and a certain warmly exotic way of mountain life.8 A smattering of nineteenth-century “Circassian” branded products promised women they could achieve Circassian beauty in their own home: hair dye to turn light-colored tresses into a “soft, glossy & natural” brown or black, Circassian fabric to achieve the right gauzy look, and various skin products promising “that whiteness, transparency and color so highly prized by all civilized nations”.9 The endorsement of “the elite of our cities, the Opera, [and] the stage” was supposed to be reassuring, but the promise of removing freckles, acne, sunburn, “Moth”, and roughness suggests such lotions were little more than a chemical belt sander for one’s face.10 Circassia was more than the rugged, simplistic paradise one might have imagined from cosmetics or travelogues. The target of invasion and ethnic cleansing throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as Russia and Ottoman Turkey encroached by land and sea, Circassia was invaded during the Russian conquest of the Caucasus and formally placed under Russian control following the end of the Crimean War in 1856. During this period (just before Barnum’s Caucasian beauty appeared on the scene), the Russian Empire carried out systematic murder and expulsion against the region’s predominantly Muslim communities.11 By the middle 1860s, the remaining population was largely and forcibly evacuated to the Ottoman Empire, where overcrowding, price-gouging, and enslavement were enduring risks for Circassian refugees. There was, concurrently, a mid-century Western fascination with melodramatic narratives of white slavery, popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. Art and drama explored the horror-movie allure of brute men trafficking in the doom of innocent, blushing virgins (suffice it to say that the reality of human trafficking was far broader, harsher, and less discriminating). In the U.S., this manifested in many ways. The sculptor Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave, a statue of a nude woman chained at the wrists by Turkish captors, was adopted as an emblem by abolitionists and seen on tour by more than one hundred thousand Americans in the 1840s.12 Race and slavery were explored in plays like Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, the 1859 story of a young southern white woman whose marriage plans are thwarted when it is revealed that her mother is one of the plantation’s enslaved workers, and who, despite passing for white, is then put up for sale with the assets of her father’s estate. (British audiences got a happy ending, but in American performances the girl commits suicide, avoiding even staged approval of mixed marriage.)13 These audiences liked to raise their collective heart-rate in a safe environment, playing out histrionic fears of subjugation and integration through entertainment. It was against this backdrop that, in 1865, P. T. Barnum introduced American Museum patrons to Zalumma Agra, the “Star of the East”, the first “Circassian beauty”. Her face framed in a halo of frizzy hair, this alluring young lady appeared in levees at the American Museum dressed in a trimmed, three-quarter-length dress with blousy sleeves, a swath of stocking visible above her mid-calf boots. She occasionally completed the outfit with a sash of luxurious fabric or a moon-shaped headdress. A biographical pamphlet sold to patrons laid out the story of Agra’s childhood flight from Russian incursion into her native land, and how that path somehow brought a woman who claimed royal descent to the sort of New York entertainment venue that also offered pet taxidermy. Agra was said to have been orphaned by invaders as a child, and discovered by John Greenwood Jr, Barnum’s right-hand man, on the streets of Constantinople among masses of refugees. “Her marvellous beauty and pleasant, intelligent manners at once arrested his attention”, declared the nameless pamphlet author, “while the extraordinary peculiarity of her hair challenged his interest and his admiration”.14 Greenwood, captivated by the child and hoping to save her from “the beautiful but ignorant habitat of a pagan’s harem”, negotiated with the girl’s friends and Turkish authorities to become her guardian, providing tutoring and accommodations to help her grow into the “thorough and lavishly educated woman” of eighteen then entertaining at the American Museum. No one was especially encouraged to inquire in further detail: Agra’s promoters insisted that, since she had left Circassia as a child, her homeland existed in her mind as “an imperfect and confused dream”, and she remembered little of her native language.15 As one might expect, the true story was a bit different, and Agra’s promoters took full advantage of the interpretive space afforded by imperfect details and confused dreams. John Greenwood had indeed gone east on a scouting trip in 1864, looking to engage an allegedly horned woman. Greenwood found no one worth exhibiting, and Barnum instructed him via letter to instead look for “a beautiful Circassian girl if you can get one”.16 Barnum, in his autobiography, says little about what followed, except that Greenwood disguised himself as a slave-buyer and saw “a large number of Circassian girls and women” in Constantinople.17 In private correspondence Barnum was more frank about his willingness to conveniently ignore the evils of the Ottoman slave economy if it got him a guaranteed hit: “If you can also buy a beautiful Circassian woman”, he wrote Greenwood, “do so if you think best; or if you can hire one or two at reasonable prices, do so if you think they are pretty and will pass for Circassian slaves . . . if she is beautiful, then she may take in Paris or in London or probably both. But look out that in Paris they don’t try the law and set her free. It must be understood she is free”.18 The Circassian beauty made her debut not long afterward, presented as the result of Greenwood’s expedition. An alternative origin story, uncovered by the disability scholar Robert Bogdan in his 1988 book Freak Show, offers an explanation that seems far more likely for the sort of Circassian lady who spoke in a perfect American accent, and the sort of showman who was not exactly known for his infinite patience: Greenwood came back empty-handed, and the American Museum (not wanting to waste a good story) decided to cast a “Circassian” beauty from the local talent roster.19 That the woman in question had distinctively abundant hair was, as best the historical record can tell us, initially incidental.20 As the act grew in popularity, though, her style created a stereotype for all subsequent women performing as Circassian beauties (completely divorced from the style of actual Circassians): frizzy hairdos, the larger the better. Whether or not “Circassian” performers were originally from the Black Sea region was generally irrelevant, and in truth the role was a character fiction, played by women — often lower class and recently arrived to the U.S. from Europe — who washed their hair in beer to achieve the desired look. Soon enough, a succession of women appeared in public performance as Circassian beauties, with a carefully crafted foreign allure and a particular visual script: voluminous Afro-like hair, exoticized peasant costumes, a bit of skin (more as time went on: dresses eventually gave way to ruffly shorts and tights), and a name that usually began with the letter “Z” — Zula Zeleah, Zoe Zobedia, Zuruby Hannum, and Zobeide Luti, to name a few. The Circassian character — and she was a character, to be sure, as much as any dramatic role — was presented as the pinnacle of beauty and evolution. But this ideal white woman was also an unfamiliar curiosity from a foreign culture with hair that connoted exoticism and minstrelsy. We have no idea if Barnum retained the hairstyle part of the act on purpose, in a direct effort to imitate Black hair or parody Black identity; nevertheless, the retention irretrievably linked the Circassian Beauty with the racist associations and biases circulating in American society. This entertainment effectively took the prior vogue of Circassian beauty, which had far more conventional aspirations (selling glossy brunette hair dye and flowery journalism), and added a thick layer of Circassian whiteness. In using large textured hairstyles and suggestive poses, Circassian beauties called forth cultural myths about promiscuity, tribalism, and social worthiness, borrowing qualities from other racist stereotypes, like the “Jezebel”, a lascivious seductress. “The ethnic kink”, wrote author Charles D. Martin in The White African American Body, referencing the Circassian beauty’s hair, “supplied a visible bridge between the normalized, exalted whiteness that conferred citizenship and the distinguishing marks of racial difference that facilitated slavery. The emancipated white body still bore the evidence of its dark-bodied captivity.”21 The idea of white beauty relying on non-white stereotypes — that whiteness, taken to its archetypal extreme, blends Black and Caucasian features — is perhaps the strangest, most puzzling, and cunning facet of the Circassian beauty act.22 Within the sideshow ecosystem, the Circassian beauty was more complex than her colleagues. She was not celebrated in her individual identity like Anna Swan the giantess,23 nor was she exaggerated into racialized or ableist inhumanity like many “ethnic curiosities” of the day. Audiences could view her as morally upright, having escaped the harem for a Western lifestyle, but still gasp at her past proximity to prostitution and “pagan” sensuality. Rescued from a life of indentured, sexual slavery (so the story went), the woman began anew in the United States at the very moment that this nation, built on chattel slavery, passed the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. At the time Barnum debuted his Circassian beauty, it was an entertainment consistent with a general culture of racial anxiety. In show business, as in science and in the explosive political sphere, matters of race held a particular charge. In the middle 1860s, the increasingly violent politics of abolition and its detractors added a menacing edge to life in New York, which, despite its northern location, was conspicuously unfriendly toward President Lincoln and his refusal to make peace with the South. New York mayor Fernando Wood had suggested in 1861 that the city secede from both New York state and the Union — a “venal and corrupt master” — entirely.24 That did not happen, but New Yorkers rioted in reaction to the federal draft for four days in July 1863, and Confederate press threatening to burn the city in response to Union offensives in the South assured readers that “The men to execute the work [raze New York] are already there”.25 The city remained so staunchly hostile to Lincoln administration policy and abolitionism that Union general Benjamin Butler, nicknamed “The Beast”, was posted to the city along with thousands of soldiers to ensure peace during the 1864 Presidential election. And all manner of then-current arts and “sciences”, from phrenology to miscegenation theory, attempted to explain and reinforce a scheme of racial hierarchy that overlaid itself onto warring political agendas.26 The public’s guilty fascination with white slavery narratives only boosted the Circassian beauty’s popularity, and further crowded the inseparable braid of historical concerns and contemporary biases involved in her exhibition. No one interpretation seems sufficient, yet all, taken together, do not arrive at clarity. In addition to the politics of American slavery and the pervasive social fear of miscegenation, there was the romanticized supposition that enslaved harem women were engaged in a “luxurious and mindless” state of posh lounges, scanty clothing, and day after day of idle indulgence, while Circassian men had to be rough primitives who “value their women less than their stirrups” despite the women’s legendary beauty.27 These stories invoke questions about Orientalism, making enemies of foreign sultans, and showing Circassian ladies as subjects in need of colonizing influence; and they glorify non-intellectual domesticity in a thumbs-up to conventional Victorian-era womanhood. This entertainment was a mixtape that suited the current mood: enough truth about Circassian slavery to ground the story in feasibility; enough of a racialized visual language to invoke race and slavery in American politics; Orientalist harem stories to justify white colonialist hierarchy; and re-education narratives to reinforce female subordination and norms of conduct. Barnum’s American Museum was an arena in which such questions regarding performance, social structure, and racial status could be considered. This sort of museum model, which purported to show the wonders of the wider world to a mass of people who did not have the ability to travel, was helpful insofar as it democratized access to knowledge (the American Museum drew crowds on par with modern Disneyland); but it was a highly curated presentation, in which people and groups could all too easily be fetishized or tokenized.28 And while Barnum’s reputation as an exploitative sideshow huckster is not entirely deserved — he was a reputable employer, paid well, and insisted his employees were “living wonders” rather than freaks — race undeniably mattered in how performers of color were presented to the paying public. The same P. T. Barnum who in 1865 would speak before the Connecticut legislature to lobby for Black voting rights nonetheless continued to rely on the profitable prevalence of lazy stereotype and exoticism in paid entertainment.29 (For Barnum, as with many prominent men of his era, anti-slavery did not necessarily mean pro-equality, and his unwillingness to alienate any paying customer meant that he avoided taking moral stances on the stage that were justly called for.) Zalumma Agra and other Circassian beauties would have been exhibited under the same roof as the likes of the Lucasie family who had albinism, the “Living Chinese Family”, or “What Is It?”, a piece of racist, pseudoscientific theater in which a Black man played the role of a supposed “missing link” between apes and humans. All of this assumed and proclaimed a certain white social standard, and allowed viewers to feel comfortably superior to the humans who were, in their eyes, reduced to “curiosities” on display. The stereotype of the Circassian beauty continued in sideshows for quite some time. Dime museums and circuses claimed to have the original Zalumma Agra on display for decades, well past the point of feasibility (not that anyone seemed to mind). In the 1880s, when Barnum was enjoying later-life fame as a circus entrepreneur, his “Greatest Show on Earth” typically included a Circassian woman in its sideshow, and one of the most famous — Zoe Meleke — offered a pamphlet that told the same life story that had accompanied Zalumma Agra decades earlier.30 Into the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as the Circassian story had less resonance for audiences, performers often doubled as similarly exoticized snake-charmer acts, or displayed their hair as a curiosity without the romance of a Black Sea origin story: this was the case with the likes of Mademoiselle Ivy, the “Moss-Haired Girl”, and Zumigo, played by a Black performer. While the latter character’s name and hairstyle conjured her “Caucasian” predecessors, Zumigo was billed as an Egyptian, swapping peasant costumes for fancy dresses and fringed leotards.31 The legacy of the Circassian beauty endures, beginning with the fact that the word “Caucasian” is now so common in use as to be completely divorced from its origins. Today, the question of race as performance has further crossed the permeable barrier between the stage and the outside world — the Circassian woman, after all, relied not only on prevalent bias but on the suspension of disbelief that was P. T. Barnum’s stock-in-trade. More recent controversies over assumed racial identity, from Rachel Dolezal to Jessica Krug, Hache Carrillo, and Andrea Smith, have been carried out in the public sphere, where there is no ticket booth or stage curtain to signal a space of malleable truth, and where repercussions touch more than an audience or performer.32 Circassian beauties may seem like a distant relic of the Barnum era, their popularity only hinted at from the quiet of a cabinet card or carte-de-visite photograph today, but, in demonstrating the pitfalls of reducing any experience to a performed stereotype, they still contribute to our ongoing dialogue around race, community, and identity. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 16, 2021

etsy Golden Kellem

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:18.025205

little-switzerlands-alpine-kitsch-in-england

Little Switzerlands Alpine Kitsch in England By Seán Williams December 8, 2021 Far from the treacherous peaks and ravines of Switzerland, Alpine cottages arose, unexpectedly, amid the hillocks and modest streams of 19th-century England. Seán Williams recovers the peculiar fad for “Little Switzerlands”, where the Romantic sublime meets countryside kitsch. “Nothing can be uglier, per se, than a Swiss cottage, or anything more beautiful under its precise circumstances”—James Fenimore Cooper, Home as Found: Sequel to Homeward Bound (1838)1 One sunny weekend earlier this year, I visited Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, with my young godson. He stood and stared in awe at the historic aeroplanes, hangared at Shuttleworth, whereas I was transported by the country estate’s Swiss Garden: into charming, if uncanny territory. The museum’s planes looked just as they do in children’s books — much to the toddler’s satisfaction. But the ornate ironmongery and the diminutive duckponds of Shuttleworth’s other main, landscaped attraction surprised me. The neatly-turfed hillocks were cute and hardly confounding by themselves, but unexpected for someone who has had the chance to experience the rugged, startling, and at times terrifying Helvetian mountains. The garden’s centrepiece was a thatched and oddly contrived “Swiss” cottage that bore little resemblance to alpine huts. A white peacock came into view as I tried to make sense of this strange scene. The bird symbolised it for me: visually compelling, yet curiously contrary to what I thought I would see. Thinking more about Shuttleworth’s Swiss Garden after I got home led me into the eighteenth century. And not only to Switzerland, but across the borders of Europe and over to North America, before returning to England. Around 1800, a version of the aesthetic sublime turned sweet, while the pastoral, with its lakes and cottages, morphed into the picturesque: an agreeable aesthetics of landscape, framed or staged for tourists’ pleasure. James Fenimore Cooper’s characters in the novel Home as Found from 1838 complain of the architectural blight of “Swiss Cottages” afflicting the banks of the Hudson, amid a building boom in New York.2 Cooper had hiked in the Swiss Alps himself, and bemoaned an inauthentic imaginary that was now imitated across the world: for easy, uncritical, and comfortable amusement. The image of Swissness became, to use a German word, kitsch — especially in England during Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian times, when a fashion for “Little Switzerlands” peaked. We no longer had to go abroad for alpine scenery; Swiss landscapes were brought home, like souvenirs, and domesticated as ornaments for our own countryside. Now that popular culture has climbed down from the height of that craze, we might not know what to make of Swiss Gardens in the English Shires today. Perhaps the absence of context and cultural history in our present age is a reason why we can cast an eye, at once appreciative and naïve, onto these eclectic, eccentric mountains in miniature. They’re not stunningly beautiful; they’re no longer fashionably delightful. A weird hodgepodge of styles presented as Helveticism, we can but enjoy these Little Switzerlands for whatever, wherever they are now. But what were these fairy-tale-like, small alpine attractions once upon a time? Romantic Mountains in Miniature The story of Swiss Gardens like the one at Shuttleworth begins in 1790, when William Wordsworth stopped, awestruck, while on a walking tour in Switzerland. He was astounded not just by the landscape, but also by an intricate model of Lake Lucerne, of the surrounding Alps, and of characterful cottages — all to scale. Wordsworth did not observe the constructed scene alone: the finely measured mountain-scape, created by the surveyor Franz Ludwig Pfyffer von Wyher, was on display to groups of tourists.3 Nor was Wordsworth the only Englishman or foreigner to traverse Swiss nature. No lonely wanderer, he was joined by a friend, Robert Jones, and accompanied by a whole generation of the European social and intellectual elite. They travelled to Switzerland in search of wonder, sublime scenery, and high ideals. Switzerland was romanticised as the home of freedom and of intense sentimental attachment. And like most idealised concepts that people coalesce around, Swiss freedom was vague: anything to everyone, the freer space was understood in individual, political, and spiritual terms. If a nation is an “imagined community”, to speak with the theorist Benedict Anderson, then eighteenth-century Switzerland primarily emerged in the minds of Enlightenment thinkers as a mythical, arcadian place.4 A fictional idyll rather than a realistic image, this “Switzerland” could easily be packaged and moved elsewhere. Swiss authors such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau in French and Salomon Gessner in German shaped the country’s image in print; particularly Rousseau’s novel Julie from 1761 became a pan-European success story. Rousseau’s popularity was due, in no small part, to his depiction of an exoticised Swiss landscape that homes in on the senses. What’s more, in Julie, Switzerland stands in as a superior example of aesthetic sensuality and homeliness compared to the rest of the world: The nearer I got to Switzerland, the more emotion I felt. The instant when from the heights of the Jura I sighted Lake Geneva was an instant of ecstasy and ravishment. The sight of my country, of that country so cherished where torrents of pleasures had flooded my heart; the air of the Alps so wholesome and pure; the sweet air of the fatherland, more fragrant than the perfumes of the Orient; that rich and fertile land, that unique countryside, the most beautiful that ever met human eye; that charming abode like nothing I had found in circling the earth; the sight of a happy and free people; the mildness of the season, the calmness of the Clime; a thousand delightful memories that reawakened all the sentiments I had tasted; all these things threw me into transports I cannot describe, and seemed to restore to me all at once the enjoyment of my entire life.5 If the strange, stylised image of Switzerland abroad began as a literary narrative, it was also shaped by linguistic, artistic, and cultural exchange. Switzerland’s German dialects may have been substituted by the Saxon (or “Meißen”) standard as a supposedly Enlightened literary language, but the landscape of the German Meißen hills was soon framed as Swiss: it was named “die Sächsische Schweiz”, or Saxon Switzerland, following comparisons by resident Swiss artists. Over in England, painters from Berne, Switzerland’s capital, toured Derbyshire to capture natural scenery, which they believed to be somehow similar to their homeland. The Swiss exported the picturesque familiarity of their native country, drawing connections with foreign cultures from that perspective. Wordsworth, too, engaged in the pursuit of analogy. His own emotions overflowed as he composed a sonnet at the top of the Gotthard Pass about a rural legend: the apocryphal story that a cowherd’s melody, traditionally played on an alphorn, once caused a Swiss man in foreign lands to die of homesickness. Wordsworth writes that we should not interpret the folktale as “fabulous”.6 Indeed, he invokes what is often called the “Swiss illness” to explain his own longing for home: the Lake District. And so Swiss myth influenced the yearning tone of Wordsworth’s English Romanticism. Literal comparisons between the landscapes of Switzerland and England took a little longer to gain ground, however. If, in a letter from 1790 sent from Lake Constance to his sister, Dorothy, William claimed that “the scenes of Switzerland have no resemblance to any I have found in England”, this would soon change.7 Once home, Wordsworth moulded the English scenery in response to what he had seen abroad. As much inspired by Wyler’s relief of the alpine landscape as by Helvetic myth, Wordsworth began to make realistic analogies between the Swiss and the English countryside in his poetry and criticism. Although the Lake District is geologically mountainous, its landscape is more undulating and less extreme than the four cantons that surround the Vierwaldstättersee, or Lake Lucerne. Smaller in magnitude, yet all the greater in variety, the Lake District is gentler — strong winds don’t blow you about in Cumbria as much as they can in Switzerland. “A happy proportion of component parts is indeed noticeable among the landscapes of the North of England”, writes Wordsworth in an anonymous essay that accompanied a luxury edition of prints in 1810, and which was expanded and published in his name as a Guide to the Lakes in later editions. Further, the English proportionality of mountains is “essential to a perfect picture”, and surpasses “the scenes of Scotland, and, in a still greater degree, those of Switzerland.”8 Swissness was shrunk, and overlaid onto the English countryside. Not only by Wordsworth — his analogies were already platitudinous. (In composing his Guide, Wordsworth had read Thomas West’s 1778 Guide to the Lakes, which addresses those “who have traversed the Alps” and promises that “the travelled visitor [exploring] the Cumbrian lakes and mountains, will not be disappointed”.)9 But our Lake District poet conceived a popular comparison more theoretically, staking out a claim about sublimity and smallness for those who might not have been to, and could no longer reach, Switzerland. Wordsworth prefaced his reflections in 1810 by recollecting the model he had seen in Lucerne twenty years beforehand, which he now considered from an aesthetic point of view: The Spectator ascends a little platform, and sees mountains, lakes, glaciers, rivers, woods, waterfalls, and valleys, with their cottages, and every other object contained in them, lying at his feet; all things being represented in their appropriate colours. It may be easily conceived that this exhibition affords an exquisite delight to the imagination, tempting it to wander at will from valley to valley, mountain to mountain, through the deepest recesses of the Alps. But it supplies also a more substantial pleasure: for the sublime and beautiful region, with all its hidden treasures, and their bearings and relations to each other, is thereby comprehended and understood at once.10 As Wordsworth remembers the miniature scene, it was not only delightful, but also pleasurable in a “solid” and “substantial” way. The Alps at scale allowed him to survey the scenery in one go, like a diorama, and to understand, supposedly, its total, overall effect. Wordsworth goes on to admire a “tranquil sublimity”, which was apparently true of the English Lake District too. For any earlier, eighteenth-century readers, seeing the sublime as sedate would have been a contradiction in terms. Sublimity, and above all the Alpine mountain-scape, was supposed to be awesome, scary. The sense of terror that lay in wait for the observer of the Alps was thanks, in part, to the enduring influence of Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise on the sublime. (His section titles say it all: Terror, Obscurity, Privation, Vastness, Infinity).11 Immanuel Kant’s equally tremendous discussion of “mathematical” and “dynamical” sublimity also transformed both aesthetic theories and intellectual alpine travellers’ experiences of his day.12 A new tranquil, more domesticated, and overly diminutive sublime, shrunk to scale, now came to define England’s rolling hills and mountains for Wordsworth — a sublimity that “depends more upon form and relation of objects to each other than upon their actual magnitude”.13 His conception of the English small sublime did not fit the existing, European grand theories — but it was an image that stuck. Wordsworth’s analogies represented his own nation as all the better. Yet his motives did not stem merely from national competition. For most Britons during the first decade or so of the early nineteenth century, Switzerland could be accessed only in the mind. The Napoleonic wars of 1803 to 1815 meant that the tourist population in general had to retreat and stay at home. More significantly, the age of conflict was an obvious cause for patriotism. As Patrick Vincent has pointed out, in this warring period, Switzerland was now staged as a setting for anti-Jacobin morality plays in Britain.14 Although not all poets, staycationers, and armchair travellers used Switzerland as an excuse for comparative national pride, the Alps could no longer be idealised entirely. That wartime tendency held true across Europe. The German Friedrich Schiller had also expounded on and nuanced the sublime (or das Erhabene), and he dramatized the Wilhelm Tell legend in 1804 as well, with a good degree of ambivalence. On the killing of the tyrannical overlord Geßler, Tell declares that the mountain huts (or “cottages” in the words of the mid-nineteenth century translator into English) are free of Habsburg control by proxy — and innocence is thereby safeguarded.15 Schiller’s play re-works a medieval alpine narrative of self-sufficiency and greater democratic governance, for a political present in which Switzerland had once again become a confederation (following the collapse of Napoleon’s centralised Helvetic Republic the year before, and having been a sister state of France since 1798). Significantly for a German, Schiller romanticises Swiss folklore and society as a Germanic story of liberation. Yet Wilhelm Tell is also ambiguous in its assessment of how revolutionary politics really works. The Enlightenment idyll was marred by historical reality, around the same time as the sublime was split into new sub-categories. When peace was restored, international travel resumed. And, even as more people experienced Switzerland first-hand, the old fictions of Swiss authenticity were re-issued in the minds of many. The simple beauty and arcadian happiness of the country seemed straightforward once again. Wordsworth returned to Switzerland, accompanied by Dorothy, and his wife, Mary. Other English Romantics holidayed there as well: Percy and Mary Shelley famously stayed with Lord Byron near Lake Geneva, where they told stories to each other through the night — giving rise to Frankenstein in 1818. Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel compares Derbyshire’s Matlock to “the scenery of Switzerland; but everything is on a lower scale, and the green hills want the crown of distant white Alps”.16 In Cumberland and Westmorland, too, the titular character fancies himself “among the Swiss mountains”.17 And during correspondence written from Jura, while observing the mountains, Mary Shelley casts Switzerland’s famed alpenglow as quintessentially English: “that glowing rose-like hue which is observed in England to attend on the clouds of an autumnal sky when daylight is almost gone”.18 Literary analogies between England and Switzerland were either explicitly positive, or passing observations that went unquestioned. Matlock in Derbyshire and the Lake District were both in demand with day-trippers and domestic holiday-makers by this time, just as the Alps were. (Jane Austen bemoaned the absence of a friend in 1817, who was “frisked off like half England, into Switzerland”.)19 In fact, Percy Shelley complained of tourists as he tried to picnic on the mountainside near Chamonix in 1816 — irritated that they made the place “another Keswick”20 — while Byron, in his journal from the same trip, recalls overhearing an English woman exclaim “‘Did you ever see anything more rural?’ — as if it was Highgate, or Hampstead, or Brompton, or Hayes”.21 Ironically, though, the Romantic writers themselves contributed to this very tourism — as travellers, and as authors whose words were taken out of their mouths and printed in pocket guides. In 1817, Byron wrote from Venice to ask Thomas Moore if he’d ever been to Dovedale in the southern Peak District, assuring him that “there are things in Derbyshire as noble as Greece or Switzerland”.22 Guidebooks soon plucked that quotation, and some changed it: in one case, in 1879, from “things” to “prospects”, implicitly relocating the view to Matlock Bath — fifteen miles or so further north.23 The Victorian travel journalist with a liberal attitude to literary lines proceeds to defend the comparison between Matlock and Switzerland in Wordsworth-like logic: “The Peak is Alpine on a reduced scale; it is Switzerland seen through a lessening lens; its hills are mountains in miniature”.24 A German guidebook to Luxembourg from 1934 that I picked up in Hay-on-Wye over the summer, a bookish Welsh border town in the small shadows of the Brecon Beacons, justifies the Petite Suisse Luxembourgeoise in the same way: smallness relative to Switzerland, and magnitude (at a mere 400m) when compared to the surrounding Luxembourg flatlands. The idea of pocket-sized Swiss mountains was pan-European, then, but in England it had an especially poetic inflection from the nation’s literary canon. The above line from the English journalist is similar wording to that which Percy Shelley had used when writing to Thomas Peacock from the Alps in 1816: “The scene, at the distance of half-a-mile from Cluses, differs from that of Matlock in little else than in the immensity of its proportions”.25 The legacy of Romantic musing has not only been canonical literature about Switzerland, it seems, but signposts, postcards, and tourist brochures as well. The slogans of the tourist trade were thus also the commonplaces of English Romanticism. Old postcards in Buxton Museum caption Matlock as “Little Switzerland”, or as a location with a “Switzerland view”.26 Copy-writers in Southern England seized on the words of Romantic poet Robert Southey, for the so-called Little or English Switzerland in Devon’s Lynton and Lynmouth. Of the latter, he wrote: “the beautiful little village — which I am assured by one who is familiar with Switzerland, resembles a Swiss village”.27 Southey saw an Alpine likeness without ever having seen the real thing himself. These analogies became practically contagious, passed by word of mouth, and are still employed by the tourist industry to this day. Why else does a cable car dangle above the A6 in Matlock Bath, Derbyshire? Installed in the 1980s, the visitor attraction seeks to capitalise on the area’s Swissophilia that stretches back in time over two centuries. Swiss Kitsch Everywhere It was in this context that Swiss Gardens were dug and designed throughout England, both on private estates for the aristocracy and on land for attractions marketed at the general public. These ornate gardens centred on a stylised “Swiss Cottage”. Inspired by Rousseau’s novel Julie, Marie Antoinette had a little Swiss cottage built at Versailles in the eighteenth century already, complete with cows and even a real-life dairy maid. The word chalet was borrowed into English from Swiss French, and by the mid-nineteenth century follies and cottages ornés were erected almost everywhere in a picturesque, and only nominally Helvetian style — from the cosmopolitan centres and out into the provinces. London’s “Swiss Cottage” goes back to a pub that was built in the Swiss chalet style in 1804. Extraordinary examples of Swiss Cottages can be found in Tipperary, Ireland, or at Endsleigh in Devon, England — which was designed around 1815, and is rented out as holiday accommodation today. In the Peak District, there is a village of Swiss chalets and a cottage-style school-house in Illam, Staffordshire (near Dovedale), and a Swiss Cottage by a lake on the Chatsworth Estate as well, built in 1842. The latter is also let for holiday amusement. At first, all of these odd cottages looked similar. Hardly quintessentially Swiss, but quaint for some visitors. John Ruskin was scathing in The Poetry of Architecture around 1837, however, about “what modern architects erect, when they attempt to produce what is, by courtesy, called a Swiss cottage.” He wryly opposes, on aesthetic grounds, “the modern building known in Britain by that name”.28 Ruskin is right insofar as the Swiss Chalet was appropriated by national architectures. It differed throughout Europe, but was generally regionally consistent: in Norway, for example, Swiss cottages were wooden structures — most magnificently seen in the Hotel Union Øye, constructed in 1891, and the Kviknes Hotel from 1913. In England and among the Irish aristocracy, the fashion often signified a thatched building with an acutely gabled roof, and usually bow windows — until even English Victorian terraced houses had “Swiss Cottage” etched into their brickwork. In Britain, architectural Swissness soon became but a name. Leaving aside architectural adaptations, Ruskin’s main objection was that the Swiss Cottage abroad had always been inauthentic and contrived. He repeatedly describes its ornamental features, derisively, as “neat”. The structure aspires to the picturesque, but fails. The idea doesn’t work, he writes, “the whole being surrounded by a garden full of flints, burnt bricks and cinders, with some water in the middle, and a fountain in the middle of it, which won’t play; accompanied by some goldfish, which won’t swim; and by two or three ducks, which will splash.”29 Although Ruskin had an airbrushed view of real life in the Alps, it is true that the Swiss cottages of England and elsewhere were fakes. But the foundation of Switzerland they built upon in the popular consciousness was itself a fiction of authenticity: the literary and artistic image of a nation from the late eighteenth century, now evoked for the nineteenth century in new Swiss stories of homesickness and an Alpine state that in the end apparently offers the best of both educated and civilised, as well as sublimely natural worlds. (Joanna Spyri’s Heidi was translated into English in 1882.) Such a stylised Swissness became more and more fashionable over the late nineteenth century, and moved ever-further away from any plausible comparison to Switzerland — or its fictions that continued to influence public perception of the country. Around 1900, Swissophilia in England was at its height: as ornaments at home and as local holiday amusements. On the Norfolk Broads, for instance — an implausibly flat place for the Alps — there were at least two “Little Switzerlands”. The names of these attractions seem to have signalled little other than neatly landscaped waterside parklands for public pleasure. Ruskin would lay the blame for the kitschy craze of Swiss cottages and Little Switzerlands at the foothills of modernity. Europe around 1800 set mass consumer culture and increasing commercial tourism in motion. And once the train tracks were laid, more and more working- and middle-class day-trippers flocked to places such as Matlock from industrial cities like Manchester. Switzerland became more accessible, too, because of the tours of Thomas Cook, the new railways, and cable cars. But Ruskin erred in seeing the antidote as authenticity and the genuine arts. We should remember that it was Wordsworth and his Romantic circle who first made the Alps less terrifying or remote for the British, and the foreign more familiar. And yet these authors were both participants in, and critics of, a nascent capitalist society and an emergent culture of European travel which was briefly paused by the Napoleonic wars — with tropes packaged up and brought home. Causal connections here are complex, so it suffices to say that the amusingly acerbic but simplistically anti-modern, pro-arts criticism of Ruskin doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny. Perhaps an easier question for our purposes is: what was wrong, aesthetically speaking, with the conventional, if unauthentic, experience of Swissness in nineteenth-century England? Why criticise Swiss kitsch? The German philosopher Ludwig Giesz conceives of kitsch as not only, always, or even necessarily about a lack of authenticity. His list of kitschy characteristics from 1960 maps onto Little Switzerlands well: for him, kitsch is a sentimental idyll with pseudo- or vague ideals that feel real. It’s about making the sublime insignificant and unthreatening. It renders the exotic everyday; the uncertain quotidian. There is no transcendence of the trivial.30 Such qualities may have been true for the experiences of Little Switzerlands in earlier centuries, but not nowadays. Swiss kitsch is problematic when we compare it to the original Switzerland — but not if we don’t perceive a relationship between Little Switzerlands and the actual Alps any longer. Reclaiming Curiosity The Swiss Garden at Shuttleworth that I visited earlier this year is one of the leading examples of the ornamental Swiss style, completed in the 1820s and 30s and extending to the architecture of Old Warden, a village on the estate. The brainchild of Lord Robert Henley Ongley, the garden’s plans were explicitly influenced by handbooks such as the J. B. Papworth’s Hints on Ornamental Gardening from 1823. But this text did not yet illustrate a Swiss Cottage — rather a “Polish Hut”, which was said to be “not unlike those of Switzerland”.31 It remains my speculation that Lord Ongley read the Romantics, as well as obviously following a mainstream fashion for Switzerland in Regency England. Ongley spent thousands of pounds on his picturesque project. Yet contemporary visitor Emily Shore was unimpressed. In her journal entry for July 23, 1835, she wrote that the feature was “a very curious place” — a damning verdict that would surely have made Ruskin smile.32 For “the whole of this garden is in very bad taste, and much too artificial. The mounds and risings are not natural. . . . Even the Swiss cottage is ill imagined”.33 We can only guess how she would have perceived the Victorian additions of the industrialist John Shuttleworth, who, in the late nineteenth century, threw parties in this kitsch alpine playground. (The era, incidentally, when the word kitsch was coined.) But as the years have passed, we have forgotten the original aesthetic aims of imagining English pastures or lawns as Little Switzerlands, or that such aspirations were turned into common attractions across the country — and, indeed, the continent and America (and in time, Australia too). I think that loss of context allows for a lighter, and certainly less loaded appreciation of their strangeness in our contemporary landscape. We can look on, amused or bemused, at their foreignness amid the familiar. They appear to be not so much out of place, but instead representative of no immediately comprehensible setting at all. Nowadays, the charm of a Little Switzerland is neither a lofty, aesthetic ideal of Romanticism, nor a conventional offer from the leisure industry. Wrenched from any referent that makes intuitive sense to us, today’s Little Switzerlands have become wonderfully weird. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

December 8, 2021

Seán Williams

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:18.422485

the-dust-that-measures-all-our-time

The Dust That Measures All Our Time By Steven Connor October 13, 2021 From the mythical Sandman, who participates in dream and vision, to an irritating grain lodged in the beachgoer’s eye, sand harbours unappreciated power, however mundane. Steven Connor celebrates this “most untrustworthy” type of matter. αρχας ειναι των ολων ατόμους και κενόν, τα δ’αλλα πάντα νενομίσθαιThere are atoms, and the spaces between them; surmise makes up the rest.—Democritus in Diogenes Laertius1 Sand belongs to the great, diffuse class, undeclared, rarely described, but insistent and insinuating, of what may be called quasi-choate matters — among them mist, smoke, dust, snow, sugar, cinders, sleet, soap, syrup, mud, toffee, grit. Such pseudo-substances hover, drift, and ooze between consistency and dissolution, holding together even as they come apart from themselves. And, of all of these dishesive matters, sand is surely the most untrustworthy, the most shifting and shifty. Nobody would seriously consider taking a stand on a cloud, but sand has betrayed many an architect and edifice. Sand is at once architectural and archiclastic. An eighteenth-century continuation of Baron Munchausen’s adventures describes how the Baron and his party survive a whirlwind of sand by scooping an igloo-style sand-chamber in which to shelter from the storm, and then digging a tunnel from their bunker back out into the light.2 Sand has the capacity to engulf and inundate, blearing contours, eroding and erasing every edge and eminence. As such it is the ultimate mockery of the permanence of stone, for it is no more than one of stone’s own moods, the manner in which stone, atomised, consumes itself. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” imagines the monumental statue of Rameses the Great dismembered on the Egyptian sands. The shattered chunks of head, legs, and pedestal portend a further, finer comminution, after the membra disjecta themselves will have been milled away into flatness: “Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,/The lone and level sands stretch far away”.3 Surely the most treacherous of all kinds of sand is quicksand, whose prefix indicates that it is alive enough to hunger for the lives of the unwary. Quicksand doubles the dubiousness of what is already an uncertain substance; where sand is hard and soft at once, quicksand, a fine sand that has become saturated with liquid, is also amphibiously wet and dry, bonelessly loose, yet syrup-gluey. Walter Charleton, in his tormentedly Latinised Englishing of Pierre Gassendi’s neoatomism, uses quicksand to image the paradox of all matter, the “perpetual inquietude of Atoms, even in compact Concretions. . . because the Revibrations, or Resilitions of Atoms regarding several points of the immense space, like Bees variously interweaving in a swarm, must be perpetual: therefore also must they never quiesce, but be as variously and constantly exagitated even in the most solid or adamantine of Concretions. . . To apparence nothing more quiet and calm: yet really no quicksand more internally tumultuated”.4 Sand has also been a source of quickening. Drops of sweat or spittle on sand or dust were thought to breed mites and fleas by spontaneous generation. Mythical beings have frequently been shaped from sand, like the djinns who take flight in the form of the Zôba’ah, a whirlwind that raises the sand in the form of a pillar of great height.5 In Cornish tradition the troublesome spirit Tregeagle was condemned to toil endlessly at the task of making a truss of sand, bound with ropes similarly of sand, and carrying it out of the water to a rock: the howls of the storm are said to be his cries of rage as the waves repeatedly scatter his work.6 A more contemporary emanation of sand is the irascible Psammead, or sand-fairy, of E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It (1902), found by a group of children in a sand-pit, which has the power of granting wishes by blowing itself up to enormous size and then suddenly letting itself down again. Sand fairies are rare now, it explains, because they used to live in the sandcastles made by children on the shore, but nearly all died out after catching cold from the seawater flowing into the moats around the castles.7 Sand is reversible. Only utter desiccation can attain to this pouring, milk-smooth liquefaction. Sand-baths were used in the ancient world both to draw out the damp ague of rheumatism and as a kind of sauna, to promote perspiration. Sand is the product of abrasion, but is also itself abrasive, used in sand-blasting to etch and burnish. Pliny tells us of the use of sand under a saw edge to make a clean cut in marble, and to polish it after it has been carved.8 Sand signifies neutrality, indifference, and uniformity; yet it also has hairtrigger sensitivity and responsiveness. A grain of sand (in actual fact often a tiny parasite) is the irritant that provokes in the oyster the nacreous secretions that build into a pearl. Sand has a favoured relation to sound, putting a hoarse rattle in the throat of the wind, and is itself all ears. In 1787, the German physicist Ernst Chladni showed how drawing a violin bow over a metal plate could induce in the fine sand sprinkled on it hierophantic figurings of the sound, in quivering mandalas and ripple-fingered arpeggios. Though sand can disfigure and obliterate, it can also disclose the ghost wrist of wind and the perturbations of the earth. It is a detection and reception mechanism, forming ridged isobars, shivering musculature, oscilloscape of the air’s sculpting shoves and gusts. Sand participates in dream and vision. The Sandman brings sleep by throwing or blowing sand into the eyes of children. But the sand does more than merely seal the eyes, for in many versions of this nursery tale, it is the very stuff that dreams are made on, the numb matter of sleep, swirling, particulate, that the sandman carries in his sack. The somnolence of sand is redoubled when in Top Hat (1935) Fred Astaire soothes Ginger Rogers to sleep in the hotel room below him by spreading sand on the floor and hush-dancing a susurrous soft-shoe shuffle. The origins of moon-walking are to be found in the novelty slides and scrapes across a sanded stage by music-hall acts like Wilson, Keppel and Betty. Specious it may be, but sand is also the secret stuff of omen and auspice, in the practice of divination through tossing and scrying handfuls of sand, known in Arabic as ilm al-raml, the science of the sand, or what might have been its Greek equivalent, psammomancy. Sand is not only temporary, it is also the most temporised form of matter. It is the image or allegory of time, shifting, yet unshiftable. It seems a compiling of the minced, mounded years that go into its making, and grains of sand imitate the elementary atoms of time, moment upon pattering moment. Sand is featureless, without joints or divisions, even though it is nothing but division all the way down. Yet it is this very feature that makes it useful in the measurement of time, for, unlike other materials, sand will flow easily and regularly, even as its volume diminishes. Sand-glasses came into use in part because of the need to measure time at sea, far from any landmark; speed would be measured by counting the number of knots in a rope paid out from the back of the ship in the time it took for the sand to run through a half-minute glass. A half-hour period of watch, known as a “glass”, was also measured in this way. Grains of sand, in the form of quartz crystals, with their precise oscillations, still micro-regulate our time. In fact, the sand of hourglasses was often not quartz sand at all, but powdered marble, or eggshell. But we find it hard to give up the idea of the affinity of sand and the glass through which it runs, since silicates of sand are still the most important source of glass. George Herbert imagines this interfusion when he writes that “flesh is but the glasse, which holds the dust/That measures all our time; which also shall/Be crumbled into dust”, while for Gerard Manley Hopkins the soul itself is “soft sift/In an hourglass — at the wall/Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,/And it crowds and it combs to the fall”.9 ※※Indexed under…TimeSand as allegory of Sand enters into composition with cinema, and cinema is repeatedly drawn to the shimmer and mirage of sand. The graininess that is the signature of film, tiny particles of metallic silver formed from photosensitive silver halides on its surface, is the tactile nap that seems to distinguish analogue from digital images. Yet this granularity is also a reminder of what film shares with sand in its composition, namely the capacity to create the illusion of a continuously variable wave from very large numbers of discrete, indiscernible particulars. Strictly speaking, all apparently analogue forms are smoothed accumulations of digital, that is, discontinuous forms, like the illusion of movement formed from the multiple images on the filmstrip. The glissandi of sand, producing molar solidity and motion from the molecular massings of disparate bits of matter, are therefore essentially cinematic. Filming sand, through the glass lens that is itself another of sand’s semblances, cinema seems to come upon the elementary syntax of its own process. Sometimes seemingly razor-hewn, the crescent declivities, scoops of duneshadow and chiaroscuro escarpments of sand can make it seem a physiology of light itself. Wind-pestered, sea-sieved, pestled by the sun’s long pulse, sand piles and plies itself, then crumples in sighs. It is an arena of hallucinations, a terrestrial aurora. The eye surmises ledges and laminar curtains peeling away, furling fringes of aching incandescence, frizzling surf-edges of riptide, lifting aprons, sheets of paint that sag and rill, pools of liquid that sizzle dry in an instant, cliffs that collapse in gentle, pensive catastrophes, whole panes suddenly shivering, slowly closing eyelids, a letting down of blinds. Never less, never more, never now again what it once, only just now, was, mulling itself over, taking its own measure, counting up and losing count, showing its workings in its long humped volumes, page turned on crumbling page in the calendar of its becomings, combing and grooming, sieving and riddling, going with the grain, never ceasing going over it all again, keeping on going, going on coming, the desert does itself like an incalculable sum. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 13, 2021

Steven Connor

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:18.952275

reading-like-a-roman

Reading Like a Roman Vergilius Vaticanus and the Puzzle of Ancient Book Culture By Alex Tadel June 30, 2021 How did Virgil’s words survive into the present? And how were they once read, during his own life and the succeeding centuries? Alex Tadel explores Graeco-Roman reading culture through one of its best-preserved and most lavishly-illustrated artefacts. Texts of Greek and Roman literature do not usually come down to us in lavishly illustrated editions dating back to what we term classical antiquity. The vast majority have been preserved either in relatively contemporaneous papyrus fragments, which are of major historical value but aesthetically rather underwhelming, or much later copies. The manuscript known as Vergilius Vaticanus is one of only three manuscripts from Graeco-Roman antiquity which preserve illustrations in more than a few scraps. An invaluable rarity dating back to around 400 CE, the Vaticanus is the oldest of the three.1 The name “Vaticanus” denotes the location where the manuscript has been kept since 1600 (the Vatican Library) and not the site of its production, though it was most likely made in Rome. “Vergilius” points to the texts copied in the document, which preserves portions of Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid. At a glance, the former is a didactic poem about agriculture; after a focused read, it becomes a complex web of mythological, political, and philosophical material. The latter, Virgil’s seminal creation and Rome’s national epic, relates Aeneas’ escape from Troy and his quest to find a new home for his people. The texts are accompanied by beautiful illustrations depicting carefully choreographed scenes framed by a border of intense red. The canonical classical texts — Oedipus Rex, Medea, the Aeneid and the like — enjoy continuing universal recognisability. But the materiality of texts in ancient Greece and Rome, and the reading culture in which they were created, remain relatively obscure. How, why, when, where, and who read what are questions the answers to which can usually only be reconstructed from tiny scraps of papyrus or offhand remarks by classical authors. The exceptional state of preservation in which the Vaticanus has come down to us — full folios rather than loose strips of papyrus — makes it perhaps the oldest remnant of Graeco-Roman reading culture a modern observer can think of as a “book”. Although it dates from the very end of classical antiquity, its familiar appearance makes the Vaticanus a convenient starting point from which to explore the fascinating, and, to a modern eye, quite alien world of classical books. The Preservation of Papyri While the Vaticanus is the oldest source for the texts it contains, we would still have the Georgics and the Aeneid if we didn’t have the Vaticanus. Like the vast majority of extant classical texts, the works of Virgil are known to us through significantly later copies. There was a continuous Byzantine tradition of copying Greek as well as Latin texts; Arab scientists adopted and significantly enriched Greek medical writings; Christian monks in the territories of the former Western Roman Empire habitually copied authors whom they perceived as the principals of Latin literature.2 As Virgil was the undisputed centre of this clique, we have innumerable manuscripts preserving his works. But there is another source for classical texts, studied by the relatively new and dynamic field of papyrology. In the late nineteenth century, a boom of archaeological excavations brought to light hundreds of thousands of papyri, flooding the previously negligible field with so many fragments to repair, decipher, and interpret that the work is still in progress. One of the most substantial papyrological sites was discovered in 1896 in Egypt near the remains of a Greek town called Oxyrhynchus. The curious name means “sharp-snouted”: Greek for the Nile fish that was worshipped there by Egyptians. Oxyrhynchus was a flourishing town, though little of its architectural remains have been excavated. What has been of tremendous interest since 1896 is the ancient city’s rubbish dump, where the dry Egyptian climate has preserved innumerable papyri (mostly in Greek), thrown there by people who no longer had any use for them. In more humid climates, papyri have long since disintegrated, and most of the finds we have from elsewhere were likewise stored in comparably dry areas. Others were preserved by exceptionally hot conditions. In Herculaneum, for example, the eruption of Vesuvius carbonised an entire library, turning the scrolls into compact and extremely fragile blocks, essentially frozen in time by fire. Early attempts to unroll and read them often resulted in the scrolls disintegrating; recently, scholars have been trying to read them using X-ray technology. The library seems to have contained mainly Greek philosophical texts. Papyri excavations in Oxyrhynchus and elsewhere have unearthed innumerable literary works previously unknown from manuscript traditions. To list just a few: an entire comedy by Menander, a playwright previously known only from brief citations in texts by other authors; substantial portions of a satyr play by Sophocles, one of only two satyr plays of which we know more than a few lines; and multiple fragments of Sappho, the lyric poet from Lesbos. It’s not just scraps of discarded papyrus salvaged from a rubbish dump that have proven to be invaluable. Greeks and Romans used a variety of writing materials, and such precious pieces of literature as a previously unknown poem by Sappho have come down to us scribbled on ostraca — pieces of broken pottery. Papyri (and potsherds) are most often found in quite a sorry condition. They are torn, discoloured or in pieces, and even when reassembled usually still have large lacunae. In comparison with these, the Vaticanus is in an excellent state of preservation. Another difference between most classical textual finds and the Vaticanus is the format — the late Vaticanus is a codex rather than a roll. The codex is basically the type of book we still use today: folded sheets (of paper, parchment, or papyrus) held together at the spine. This results in a two-leaf display which is simple to navigate — flicking forwards and backwards to find a particular passage is relatively easy. In comparison, the roll was awkward and inconvenient — only a narrow portion of the text could be seen at a given time, and a search for a passage consisted of time-consuming rolling and unrolling of the scroll. Around 400 CE the codex became the norm for classical texts, and the Vaticanus may have been one of the first copies of Virgil to take advantage of the convenient format. Pagan Parchment The Vaticanus was made from parchment of the highest quality. The expensive material and the fine execution of the miniatures make it clear that this was a luxury edition for a member of the Roman elite. A very simplistic (though still persistent) conception of the fall of ancient Rome may lead one to see the Vaticanus as one of the last relics of classical culture and refinement soon to be replaced by the darkness and ignorance of medieval Christianity. It is true that the time of its making — around 400 CE — coincided with the ever more adamant efforts by the Church to suppress pagan religion. In the late fourth century, the emperor Theodosius banned all forms of pagan worship, including private rituals. It is possible that the Vaticanus was commissioned by a pagan noble determined to preserve one of the most important texts of their ancestral culture, full of descriptions of strange rituals and blood sacrifices. But it is equally possible that it was made for a convert to Christianity. Just as their pagan predecessors, most late antique Christians, and especially the learned clergy, admired the staples of Greek and Roman literature, among which Virgil held absolute primacy. Nevertheless, to make the explicitly pagan Virgil more palatable and to enhance the glory of the new religion, the quintessential pagan poet was transformed into a kind of Messianic prophet. His Fourth Eclogue, written around 40 BCE, described the birth of a saviour child who would mark the start of the golden age — it is easy to see how this could be reinterpreted to fit Christian mythology. Besides, Christians often found the evidently pagan elements in Virgil such as sacrifice intriguing rather than in need of censorship. Explanations of pagan rituals formed lengthy passages in medieval commentaries, suggesting that paganism was perceived with the curiosity which attracts us to bygone, distant phenomena. The Vaticanus may well have been owned by a Christian who appreciated the texts for their artistic value.3 Reading (in) Antiquity The Vaticanus was undoubtedly a prestigious edition made for a wealthy client, whether pagan or Christian. But we know that the Aeneid was known far beyond such elite circles, as graffiti from Pompeii quoting (and mocking) it testify.4 How widespread was reading for leisure then? Where did people get books? What did they look like? There is little doubt that there was a thriving book culture in ancient Greece and Rome, but as the evidence is often anecdotal, biased, or highly specific, it is difficult to get the full picture. Even while the puzzle of antiquarian book culture remains unsolved, the following few pieces are absorbing enough on their own. Plato testifies that already by the turn of the fifth century BCE, one could buy popular works of philosophy at the Athenian agora for a relatively low price of less than a drachma — one drachma was the average daily wage at the time.5 Greek papyri from Egypt, which start to appear about a century later, show us that the demand and desire for non-luxury copies in the Greek-speaking world was continuously high. Literary texts were found on the backs of papyri formerly used as official documents, which suggests that they were copies made for people who could not afford fancy papyrus. Works by Athenian authors were found in faraway, difficult to access desert towns. Even if most of these copies were made in an educational setting, we cannot completely dismiss the possibility that at least some people found deciphering a scroll — with no spaces left between words — an agreeable enough pastime. When it comes to Latin texts, we have less contemporary evidence in the form of papyri, but much more information about their readership from the authors themselves. Latin authors, to a greater extent than the Greeks, liked to write about their books and their literary success. These discussions paint a picture of conflicting impulses towards elitism and popularisation.6 To begin with the former, Horace is representative in advising aspiring authors to be happy with just a few select readers. In a dedicatory address to his own new collection of poems, he personifies the work and compares its desire to be read by as many as possible to prostitution.7 The content itself of a great portion of Latin texts was somewhat inaccessible. This was highly allusive, learned literature, the enjoyment of which was greatly enriched by one’s ability to recognise and appreciate its sophisticated intertextuality. On the other hand, the wish to be popular, which Horace projects onto his personified poems, might be the author’s own desire to see them widely read; the poems’ longing to be displayed at the booksellers’ stalls in the Forum is their author’s excitement in anticipating the publication of his work. This kind of pride in popular success contrasted with snobby pretensions, and seems often to have prevailed in the most diverse authors. Cicero, the self-important politician, wrote that the number of people reading his philosophical works was far greater than he had expected. Martial, a more lighthearted poet, nonchalantly presented himself as a universally recognised and admired celebrity, and stated that everyone in Rome read him.8 Scattered Fragments and Future Glory It is hard to determine to what extent either the elitism or the popularity were mere wishful thinking. What is certain is that the works of Horace, Cicero, Martial, and many others were continuously considered worthy of copying by a sufficient number of people that they survived until the present day. The power of texts to give eternal life to their author was a perennial theme of classical literature, but the longevity they actually enjoy may well have exceeded these authors’ wildest expectations. The potential of poetry not only for self-immortalisation, but also for promoting politically advantageous visions of past, present, and future was not overlooked by the brilliant propagandist Augustus. Poets under his patronage presented a vision of history as a fateful trajectory culminating in his rule, a narrative which legitimised and exalted his subversion of the republic and assumption of imperial power. The Aeneid was one such work, narrating as it does the Augustan version of the grand destiny of Rome. Aeneas, a Trojan prince, flees his burning city and after a lengthy wandering brings his people to Italy, where their descendants will found a new Troy — Rome. Rome’s future dominion, sanctioned by gods, will have no spatial or temporal limit. The nation will reach its peak in Augustus, whose reign will usher in the golden age promised to Aeneas. This teleology is made explicit in Aeneas’ descent to the Underworld in the company of the Sibyl.9 There Aeneas is shown a procession of future kings and notables of Rome, and told of their achievements — Aeneas needs this display of his people’s future glory to boost his ever-faltering motivation to continue his journey. The absolute apex of the procession is Augustus, who will conquer distant lands, bring peace at home, and lead the way to the golden age. The Aeneid, however, is not a simplistic piece of propaganda. The heroic epic is continuously complicated, most evidently in the flawed character of its superficially exemplary protagonist. The very act of imagining a glorious history and a timeless empire is questioned, modified by an awareness of the fragility of memory, transience, and unpredictability of the future. Even a well-functioning memory can be dangerous, represented by the unforgiving Juno, or paralysing, exemplified by the nostalgic Aeneas, while distorted, fragmentary, interrupted and elusive moments of remembering feature prominently in the Aeneid.10 Attempts to control or interpret the future are just as fragile, as embodied in the Sibyl’s scattered prophecies. She writes prophetic verses on leaves and carefully arranges them in her cave. When the wind blows in, it scatters them through the cavern, and the Sibyl makes no attempt to put them back in order.11 Every text is liable to fragmentation, corruption, or misinterpretation. The Sibyl’s fragmentary prophecies offer partial glimpses into the future, while we in the present day are left to reconstruct the past from pieces of papyri. Even the Aeneid, the grand Augustan epic, is to an extent the result of reconstruction. We do not have the original manuscript Virgil wrote, and the later ones we do possess present us with different versions of the text. Textual critics carefully select the most likely variants for present-day editions of the Aeneid, but the original text will never be recovered with absolute certainty. As far as the Vaticanus is concerned, the care and reverence that went into its making were mostly invested in the lavish illustrations rather than the text, as was often the case with luxury editions. Relatively little attention was paid to the correctness of the copy, and later versions are usually considered more faithful to the original Virgilian manuscripts. Even though the Vaticanus is our oldest source for the Georgics and the Aeneid, its chief interest undoubtedly lies in the illustrations. In Miniature: From Scroll to Codex While the images preserved in the Vaticanus date from antiquity, they are still four centuries after Virgil’s day, and so provide a somewhat belated, anachronistic vision of what a classical Roman illustration tradition might have looked like. But with the help of the Vaticanus we can surmise how other, earlier editions appeared. There was a fixed iconography in Roman book illustration — just as scribes copied the text, so illustrators copied models provided by earlier manuscripts. Based on the style of military dress in the Vaticanus, it is possible that the model for its miniatures dates back to the first half of second century CE.12 Sometimes illustrators conflated earlier models and combined several illustrations within a single frame, which could result in awkward overcrowding. A single illustration in the Vaticanus represents three episodes: a wounded deer flees to its mistress, who in distress cries for help; Allecto, an Erinys, sounds the war call to turn the ensuing quarrel into a fight; a fierce battle follows. As the artist tried to fit the three scenes into the available space, the menacing Allecto was reduced to a tiny, barely noticeable figure. In the Vaticanus illustrations, the entire surface circumscribed by the red frame is filled in. The minimalistic backgrounds, which represent little more than the basic outlines of the landscape and the sky, are nevertheless carefully painted, soft pink shading into pastel blue. The heavy frames and coloured backgrounds could only be executed in the codex format. In a roll, such large surfaces of paint would lead to the pigments flaking off. If the Vaticanus is the first codex in the tradition of illustrations it belongs to, it is likely that the frames and the backgrounds were added by the Vaticanus painters, with only the figures inherited from earlier models. In these earlier rolls, small illustrations would be inserted at the appropriate point in the columns of text.13 Unfortunately, few examples of this system of illustration survive in Graeco-Roman literary papyri. The ones we have suggest that illustrations in scrolls could be much more casual than in late antique codices like the Vaticanus. Illustrations in what is known as the Heracles papyrus — preserving portions of an unknown poem about the hero — appear to have been drawn with quick, informal brush strokes. The result strikingly resembles a hastily sketched modern comic. The Charioteer papyrus probably comes from a codex but preserves the scroll style of illustration without backgrounds or borders.14 Its charioteers are much more finely executed than Heracles. They form a dynamic, expressive group dressed in the colours of the factions of the hippodrome. There were blues, greens, reds, and whites, each of these attracting a loyal following not unlike sports teams do today. Just as the Vaticanus was based on earlier models, so the medieval manuscript style that followed in its wake built on, transformed, and adapted models it found in late antique documents according to its needs. While no medieval manuscript appears to preserve the Vaticanus tradition of Virgilian illustration, late antique codices in general shaped illumination practices in the Middle Ages. This influence was so ubiquitous that it often went undetected. A peculiar example of this process is the false etymology of the word “miniature”. Far from implying the smallness of an illustration, the expression derives from the Latin word for red lead (minium), which was used to paint the signature red borders in codex illustrations. The word remained in use even as frames gradually started to be done in other colours, and became erroneously associated with the minute character of medieval illuminations. If the line separating the classical from the medieval is already hard to draw in Western European manuscripts, the distinction becomes even hazier if we move eastward. The still persistent westernising distinction between the classical and the medieval — which sets the boundary in 476 CE, when Odoacer deposed the final Roman emperor — glosses over the continuous Byzantine political and cultural tradition. Byzantine scholars copied works lost in Western Europe, only to be rediscovered there when these scholars brought their collections to Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These scholars’ contribution was not just in mechanical copying, but also in the critical compilation and interpretation of classical texts. As a product of very late antiquity, the Vaticanus lets us think beyond the habitual contrast between the classical and the medieval. Tales of total overhaul in 476 CE, of the unbridgeable gulf between classical antiquity and the Middle Ages seem naïve and simplifying. The lines of descent linking the late Vaticanus to earlier manuscripts — and its influence, in turn, on (lost) medieval copies — invite us to see patterns of continuity, transferral, adaptation, and development, alongside instances of fragmentation, loss, and oblivion. While the Vaticanus is the oldest surviving illustrated Roman manuscript we have, it is hardly the last relic of a dead tradition. It is part of a continuous culture of reading stretching far beyond the geographic and temporal boundaries of what we term classical antiquity. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 30, 2021

Alex Tadel

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:19.513474

picturing-scent

Picturing Scent The Tale of a Beached Whale By Lizzie Marx July 21, 2021 What can visual art teach us about scent, stench, and the mysterious substance known as ambergris? Lizzie Marx follows a “whale-trail” across history to discover the olfactory paradoxes of the Dutch Golden Age. Foul Omen During the seventeenth century, whales, of various species and sizes, were washed up on the shores of the Netherlands. Sometimes the creatures were already seized by decay; other times, they were beached alive, bellowing deafening groans while being crushed by the sheer weight of their own bodies. While they decomposed, gases would build up, sometimes culminating in a fetid explosion. If the tide did not sweep away the whale, a long and arduous process followed, in order to break down the mass and clear away the site. The colossal creatures attracted onlookers who were fascinated by the spectacle, and among the throng were artists, who, armed with drawing requisites, recorded what they saw, and what they smelled.1 Jan Saenredam depicted a sperm whale that beached on December 19, 1601. The whale is stranded on its side, showing its underbelly to the coast. Hordes of visitors congregate around the swollen cadaver and clamber over its body to inspect it. The descriptive border further details the state of the whale, picturing its gaping mouth on the left, and its back on the right, which has been split open, pouring out tresses of entrails. Positioned near the whale’s mouth, Saenredam pictures himself recording the cadaver on a sheet of paper flapping in the coastal winds. At the scene’s centre is Count Ernest Casimir of Nassau-Dietz, military leader and nephew of the stadholder Prince Maurice of Nassau. In his left hand is a lavish tasselled handkerchief, elevated to his nose to block out the stench. The Latin verses that foot the print, written by the Dutch writer and poet Theodorus Schrevelius, evoke the fetor, reading: Its formlessness, its opening running deep into its innards,And its mouth, from which fluid and great quantities of blood flow.2 In addition to the entrails that are pictured tumbling out of the whale’s mouth and back, the print exudes a foul atmosphere. Faced with the whale’s pervading stench, the Count’s handkerchief appears futile. The whale was, according to Schrevelius, a monster; not only for its terrifying stature, but because it was believed to be an omen. Monsters were by definition the messengers of future catastrophes, as monstrum, monster in Latin, meant both a monster, in the modern sense, and a portent.3 The whale’s warnings manifested within days of its arrival, when there was a solar eclipse on December 24, 1601. It was followed by an earthquake nine days later, and by a lunar eclipse on June 4, 1602. The ominous events play out in the print’s heavy border. In 1618, the engraving was reworked, to illustrate another calamity that struck the Dutch Republic after the whale’s arrival. Beneath the top border, emerging from the clouds, is Death, a skeletal figure whose arrows shoot down a winged woman. The shield of three crosses identifies her as the Maid of Amsterdam. Death presided over the city in 1601–02 during an outbreak of plague, and the print suggests that the sperm whale’s arrival was its prophet. Early Modern medical theory asserted that disease spread through the odours emitted from stagnating and foul matter. In the wake of another outbreak in the Dutch Republic between 1667–1669, the German polymath Athanasius Kircher’s volume about the plague, Scrutinium Physico-Medicum Contagiosae Luis, Quae Pestis Dicitur, was translated into Dutch from Latin. He reported that the causes of the plague included cadavers, foul air, and rotting whales washed up on the shores.4 Perhaps the invisible pestilential emissions from the whale could stretch further than the coast, and insidiously seep into the cities. The Count’s handkerchief takes on a new, ominous layer of significance in the second version of the print. Indeed, he holds his handkerchief against the awful smells of decay, but also as protection from the pestilential fumes. An Olfactory Paradox While the plague descended on Amsterdam, there lay an olfactory paradox deep within the whale’s bowels stranded at Beverwijk. When undigested squid beaks irritate the intestines of a sperm whale, it can produce an exceptionally fragrant substance, known as ambergris. The mass can grow over years until the sperm whale either expels it, or it ruptures the intestine, eventually breaking free from the body. The substance gradually rises to the ocean’s surface, and with exposure to salt water and sunlight, its olfactory composition changes from an abhorrent faecal stink, to the beautifully formed, alluring fragrance of ambergris.5 The grey mass of ambergris may spend years at sea before it is washed up on land, where it becomes perfectly camouflaged on a stone beach. In Early Modern Europe, the source of ambergris remained an enigma. Ambergris might have been food for whales, or it was considered to have come from an underwater island, or from the mud of mountains; or it was honeycomb that had fallen from rocks by the sea, or the aromatic excrement of East Indian birds, whose diet of fragrant fruit and insects was believed to give the ambergris dung its delightful smell.6 The Wittenberg scientist Justus Fidus Klobius was partial to the avian theory, and his volume dedicated to ambergris illustrates four of the sea birds occupying a rocky landscape among the buzz of insects. A kneeling man harvests the excrement, and near the sea, another ambergris gatherer searches for further deposits. No less than eighteen hypotheses for the origins of ambergris are listed in Klobius’ volume, all of which remained inconclusive for more than a century.7 Great fortune came to those who discovered ambergris. Georg Eberhard Rumphius, a botanist working for the Dutch East India Company (VOC), describes encountering an unimaginably large piece in his book on natural history. Towering at nearly six feet, the lump was acquired by the Amsterdam chamber of the VOC in 1693 from the King of Tidore (the Moluccas), fetching an estimated 116,400 gilders, roughly €1.13 million today.8 The accompanying illustrations make no allusions to its potent fragrance, but they keenly observe the ambergris’ craggy, marbled, sinuous topography. Ambergris was often acquired out of a desire to fragrance and flavour. It graced the breakfast table of Charles II, King of England, where it was scattered on scrambled eggs up until his death in 1685, when the potency of the seasoning masked the suspect poison that allegedly killed him. Half an ounce of finely grated ambergris constitutes the Dutch recipe for Amber-Podding, a hedonistic potpourri of lard, almonds, sugar, white bread, musk (a fragrant secretion from the musk deer), and orange blossom water, cooked with the ambergris in pig’s intestine.9 In addition to flavouring food, the substance impregnated leather goods, to sweeten the foul residues from the tanning process. In Saenredam’s scene, the visitors who spectated the beached sperm whale at Beverwijk are warmed by leather gloves and fur muffs, which probably lingered with the scent of ambergris. Standing before the beached whale, the visitors come face-to-face with their decomposing perfumer. The potency of ambergris was thought to make it resistant to maladies. Early Modern medical theory asserted that while malodorous matter could harbour disease, fragrant substances could protect the body. Ambergris is included in incense recipes to fumigate the home, and added to decoctions of sweet waters, to rid the body of pestilence. One of the most beguiling pieces of plague protection is the pomander, a pendant that held fragrance. The name comes from the Latin pomum ambrae, apple of ambergris, as a primary component in the pomander’s composition was the sperm whale’s perfume. Various scented balms were once stored in the six compartments of this luxurious silver segmented pomander. Ambergris probably mingled with cinnamon, rosemary, cloves, and other aromatics. Some pomander recipes called for amber, the fossilised tree resin that was distinct from ambergris, but whose fragrance was also associated with warding off disease.10 To the Early Modern nose, ambergris was one of the defining scents of plague protection. The rotting cadaver in Saenredam’s print illustrated the source of Amsterdam’s troubles, and, paradoxically, deep within its bowels, where fragrant ambergris dwelled, was its solution. Smeared Oils on a Flat Surface Some decades after the beached whale foretold the fate of Amsterdam, visitors in the city came to admire the latest works by Rembrandt van Rijn in his studio. As Rembrandt’s biographer Arnold Houbraken recounts, when visitors edged closer to the paintings, the artist pulled them away, saying, “The smell of the paint would irritate you”.11 Oil paint combines pulverised pigments with linseed oil, a sharp-smelling binding medium which is extracted from pressed flax seeds. The compound produces a wonderfully supple and jewel-like paint that can achieve fine details and varying textures. In Rembrandt’s self-portrait, he does not use oil paint sparingly, but practically sculpts with it. He smears out flesh-coloured oils to construct his nose, and in order to evoke the folds of his headpiece, he scrapes out lines of blue and yellow paint revealing the dark ground beneath. In the studio, the odour of linseed oil must have been a disruptive force, and Rembrandt used it to persuade his visitors to distance themselves from the painting, to best behold the rough, impasto slicks of paint. The painting has retained most of its lustre, but the odour, in time, has faded. To truly triumph over the odour of paint, it was believed that an artist needed to create works that captivated the viewer, so much so that the studio’s astringent atmosphere was rendered imperceptible. Almost twenty years before Houbraken wrote about Rembrandt’s studio, the artist and critic Roger de Piles remarked that a poor work would, “smell always of the Pallet”.12 If a work of art did not do enough to stimulate the viewer’s imagination, the scents of reality would creep in, and the painting was reduced to some smeared oils on a flat surface. But perhaps De Piles’ aphorism came with exceptions. An encounter with a still life of rotting fruit may not have drawn the viewer’s attention back to the studio. Rather, through the odour of glistening oil, their imagination could be roused, and the sharp scent of rot brought to life. An abundance of scents could be discerned in paintings. With microscopic precision, artists depicted the materiality of the Dutch Republic’s exhaustive inventory. Allusions to odours can be seen through landscapes, grand history paintings, scenes capturing daily life, and portraits. They are diffused from little coal fires and bubbling pots, humorously excreted, and exuded from stagnating matter. Scattered among artworks is the paraphernalia devoted to fragrance: clay pipes, snuff boxes, pomanders, chatelaines, sweet bags, nutmeg graters, incense burners, teapots, apothecary jars, fans, gloves, and illustrious fragranced centrepieces. In Saenredam’s print, it was the whale’s spilling guts and the Count’s handkerchief that inferred an odorous atmosphere. Through recording the visual in works of art, the olfactory was made known, and the viewer’s imagination was stirred. A Bone on a Building The whale trail concludes at the Town Hall of Amsterdam, rendered precisely by Pieter Saenredam, whose father Jan had witnessed the monstrous whale at Beverwijk more than half a century earlier. Although the Town Hall had burned down years ago (Rembrandt drew its smouldering ruins), Saenredam painted the scene from memory, using some of his earlier sketches to detail the pastel structures with tufts of weeds, crumbling stonework, and idly swaying shutters, as well as little figures wandering down the street and resting beneath the arcade. It is on the arcade of the vierschaar, the High Court of Justice, that a thick bowed whale rib can be seen shackled above the left arch. The source of the rib is unknown, however it was already fastened to the façade when Jan Saenredam beheld the stranded sperm whale in 1601.13 Even before the whale landed at Beverwijck, the monsters had made an impression on Amsterdam. Whale bones could often be found prominently displayed on public buildings. In 1577 the tail and lower jawbone from a stranding of sperm whales were hung in the hall of the High Court of Holland in The Hague, as an eternal memorial.14 And when the merchant Jan Huyghen van Linschoten returned from his voyage to Nova Zembla in 1596, he presented a whale’s jawbone to the City Hall of Haarlem, to display and commemorate the curiosity.15 While the whales had gone through a lengthy process to be stripped of their former selves, their bodily presence could remain through residual visceral odours. The skeleton of a whale that landed in Livorno in 1549 was displayed in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. However it was not long before the display had to be dismantled. Within the bones, the marrow had advanced its decay, and it exuded an intolerable stench.16 Whalers in the seventeenth century attempted to moderate the smell by drilling holes in the bones to drain it of fluids, but with little success. How the whale rib must have roused the imagination, to dwell on the beast that swallowed Jonah, to marvel over the vastness of God’s creation, or to conceive of the thrashing creatures that the whalers harpooned in the Northern settlement of Spitsbergen. So too might it have conjured up stories of the strandings on Dutch shores. Were the bone at the Town Hall to emit the scent of decomposition — for sources withhold the details — the mind’s eye of the beholder could restore flesh to the whale, and drift in thought to the beach where its counterparts decomposed. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 21, 2021

Lizzie Marx

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:19.864014

petrified-waters

Petrified Waters The Artificial Grottoes of the Renaissance and Beyond By Laura Tradii May 5, 2022 Idling alongside the waters of artificial grottoes, visitors found themselves in lush, otherworldly settings, where art and nature, pleasure and peril, and humans and nymphs could, for a time, coexist. Laura Tradii spelunks through the handmade caves of the Italian Renaissance and their reception abroad, illuminating how these curious spaces transformed across the centuries. For centuries after their appearance in Renaissance Italy, artificial caves were staples of garden architecture across Europe, and the subject of much fascination. Far from being mere kitsch divertissements, or uninventive copies of natural caves, grottoes existed at the crossroads of multiple traditions. Classical mythology, Arcadian idylls, occult speculation, and an interest in cultural curiosities coexisted in the grotto, allowing for the playful exploration of a new tension emerging between Nature and Artifice. Understanding the grotto’s popularity in Italy and beyond requires unpicking the wondrous universe that was conjured by these complex garden features. Their symbolic vocabulary evolved over the centuries, from a Renaissance model of the cosmos, where the mutable shapes of grottoes offered a chaotic counterpoint to the formal grace of gardens, toward a Romantic staging of the Sublime, accessed through increasingly naturalistic replicas of caves. Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that, in ancient Greece, caves dedicated to deities and divinities were decorated with inscriptions and statues.1 Greek mythology frequently figures natural grottoes as the abodes of nymphs and other (sometimes dangerous) beings. In the Odyssey, for example, both the cyclops Polyphemus and the nymph Calypso inhabit caves that imprison Odysseus — the former by force, the latter with enchantment — while Homer’s description of the naiads’ lair on Ithaca led Porphyry, the third-century Tyrian philosopher, to declare with awe how “in the most remote periods of antiquity, [caves] were consecrated to the Gods”.2 Replicas of such places, later referred to as nymphaea (singular: nymphaeum), became part of the urban infrastructure in ancient Rome, where they served as monumental exedras housing public fountains.3 Through both their sacred and mundane forms, artificial grottoes provided “a means to create and manipulate the most precious element — water — to regulate and recycle it, to worship and display it”, writes Naomi Miller.4 The symbolic association between divine nymphs, caves, and aqueous bodies was reprised in the Renaissance, when garden grottoes, usually supplied with running water, were coveted among the wealthy families of Europe. The frenzy began in Italy, where aristocrats, merchants, popes, and cardinals started to incorporate grottoes into their gardens and palaces. In his monumental 1615 treatise L'Idea della Architettura Universale (The Idea of a Universal Architecture), architect Vincenzo Scamozzi described fountains in what he called “grotto porticos” (Grotti Portici), which could be found “below and above the ground”, and were decorated with “pebbles [and] tuff and other materials petrified in various shapes of nature. . . and then decorated here and there with niches, with statues of stone and sometime of metal”.5 Elsewhere he points to a “cryptoporticus underground” at Tivoli’s Villa D’Este, with “various fountains which murmur loudly”. He instructs that “grotto-porticos, so called because of their resemblance with caves [grotte], shall be in fresh and shaded places”.6 They should not receive much light, and their “ornaments shall be fountains, niches, and tableaus with statues, inscriptions, and such things”. “The Ancients would [decorate them with] extravagant and ridiculous paintings . . . . And because such paintings were found in some places [resembling] caves, for this they call them grottesche.”7 Here, Scamozzi is referring to the grotesques or grottesche, fanciful and often humorous decorative motifs that became ubiquitous in the Renaissance, both in the creation of grottoes and as a wider visual style, after similar motifs had been discovered in the cave-like, underground ruins of Nero’s Domus Aurea. The frescoes of Domus Aurea depicted ornate extravaganzas of harpies, festoons, plants, and masks, inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses — a poetic collection of classical myths and legends narrating the transfiguration of humans and gods into plants, animals, and more. A major influence on Renaissance literary and visual arts, Ovidian metamorphosis manifested in this period’s garden grottoes too, where visitors encountered a mysterious universe of mutable forms and half-petrified, often amphibious creatures. While varying in shape and form, grottoes tended to share a few common features. First, niches or vaults, evoking the curved ceilings of natural caverns. Second, the movement of water, ranging from simple mechanisms (trickling down rocky walls) to the elaborate and ornate (musical automata).8 Third, and most importantly, rugged, “rusticated” surfaces, imitating the uneven texture of stone, and sometimes featuring icicles or stalactites. In The Lives of the Artists (1550), Renaissance artist and historian Giorgio Vasari dedicates a brief chapter to the practice of beautifying fountains with “various rustic things” as well as incrustations of “petrified waters” from which condensation would drip.9 He also describes rustic grottoes in which vegetation sprouts on “spongy rocks”, where what “appears disorder[ly] and wild” is made to appear “more natural and real”. Stalactites were only one of the many decorative possibilities, and grottoes were often adorned with artfully arranged shells, corals, pebbles, mosaics, or paint. Statues of nymphs, tritons, dolphins, and other amphibious creatures emerging from rocks were common, and the algae and moss growing on these surfaces would enhance the fusion of natural and artificial elements. Rather than aiming to accurately represent caves in naturalistic detail, many grottoes reinterpreted the Roman nymphaeum, with or without a distinctly cave-like space. Take for example a creation at Villa di Mondragone in Frascati. While conceived as a “grotto”, it is far from resembling a cave. In the sixteenth century, artificial caves became a status symbol in the gardens and palaces of Italy’s wealthier classes, who invested significant resources to provide their abodes with grottoes and nymphaea.10 This was the case, for example, with Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este who hired architect Pirro Ligorio to design the gardens of his Villa D’Este, earning Scamozzi’s praise. The gardens boasted numerous grottoes and water games, and soon became a major attraction: images were circulated in countless drawings, prints, and etchings, doing much to popularise the Italian garden across Europe. In Villa d’Este and beyond, grottoes were more than mere water features providing freshness and shelter from the heat of Mediterranean summers. They were also embedded in complex symbolism and meaning-making. Renaissance gardens were conceived as models of the cosmos, places where the tension between Artifice and Nature — and the triumph of the former over the latter — could be explored and staged.11 With its multimedial dimensions, the grotto enabled and embodied the encounter between the natural and human-made worlds. If gardens represented an ordered cosmos, in which Man played the role of Creator, grottoes animated a primigenial, subterranean world where “elements . . . coagulate into changing forms”, enabling contemplation regarding the mysteries and origins of life.12 With this emphasis on primordial, fluid forms, it is not surprising that amphibious creatures like the nymphs featured so prominently in grotto decoration. Their liminal status between the divine and human realms, liquidity and solidity, and their potentially dangerous sexual lure made them particularly suited for the mysterious and mutable aquatic universe conjured by grottoes.13 The contemplation of nature’s variety was also reflected in the grotto’s decoration with rare and precious materials. Burnished with lavish arrangements of mother-of-pearl and corals, some grottoes were similar to Wunderkammer, the cabinets of curiosities that were becoming popular in the homes of wealthy European families.14 And like in these cabinets, the encounter between nature and art was explored and celebrated with automata, playful masterpieces of ingenuity.15 In Villa D’Este, water-powered birds sang in the grotto-like Fontana della Civetta (Fountain of the Owl). Inside a nymphaeum in Frascati’s Villa Aldobrandini, a fountain represented Mount Parnassus, with figures forming a musical symphony. A number of grotto designs for hydro-powered musical automata are also illustrated in Salomon de Caus’ Les Raisons des Forces Mouvantes (1626), where Orpheus-like figures tame wild animals with wind and string instruments. Depictions like these were a favourite motif because their arcadian themes suited idyllic gardens, recasting what Miller describes as “the mysterious, numinous, and erotic” associations of the classical grotto.16 Musical machines were also popular in “water theatres” (teatri d’acque). Villa Aldobrandini, for example, had a number of rusticated niches with statues, each of which produced different sounds, timbres, and water displays. One fountain of Atlas produced “whirlwinds of waters, with thunder”,17 while, in others, Polyphemus and centaurs play wind instruments, as a deluge drenched “those who climb the stairs”.18 The performance-like aspects of nymphaea betray the importance of the theatre, a major influence on Mannerist garden architecture, in the design and mechanics of grottoes.19 Intermezzi — extravagant theatre and dance performances between the acts of plays — relied on elaborate machinery, stage sets, and props. As in artificial caves, writes Gordon Campbell, they privileged “pastoral, mythological, and allegorical scenes”.20 And indeed, grottoes and their associated aesthetics and paraphernalia figured prominently in such intermezzi. Consider for example this intermezzo, one of the many staged to celebrate the wedding of Ferdinando de' Medici and Christine of Lorraine in 1589. In the words of contemporary Bastiano de’ Rossi: the scene was all covered in sea cliffs, and the stage became a rolling sea, surrounded by those rocks, which looked like mountains [in ruins], among which . . . crystalline fountains gushed. . . . [A] niche in the colour of mother-of-pearl began emerging from the sea, five arms long, and pulled by two dolphins which, moving in leaps (as dolphins do in the sea) spouted scented water. . . . Once all the niche had emerged from the water, one could see [sea goddess] Amphitrite sitting in it, dressed of a garment so [tight], and so similar to the colour of skin, [that she looked naked].21 Sequined with corals, nacre, and various “maritime jewels”, Amphitrite was followed by a cortege of nymphs and tritons. The latter creatures’ heads were covered in bushy “light blue hair, and garlands of marsh reeds” from which, “as they began to emerge”, “abundant water” “rained down their face”.22 With its elaborate mechanisms, rustic mountainous surfaces, corals and pearls, gods and sprites covered in vegetation, this intermezzo deploys the symbolic and iconographic repertoire of the grotto. And the intersections between garden architecture and the theatre were seemingly limitless. Renaissance stage designer Bernardo Buontalenti planned the grottoes of the Boboli Gardens, which can still be visited today in Florence, as well as the park of Villa di Pratolino, home to some of the most famous caves and automata of the time. The French philosopher Montaigne, who toured the garden during its construction, found himself ambushed by the mischievous waterworks: ※※Indexed under…FountainsMischievous At one single movement the whole grotto is full of water, and all the seats squirt water on your buttocks; and if you flee from the grotto and climb the castle stairs and anyone takes pleasure in this sport, there come out of every other step of the stairs, right up to the top of the house, a thousand jets of water that give you a bath. Although little of the original garden survives, the park of Pratolino is known to this day for the grotesque Colossus of Appennino, a gigantic figure that symbolises the surrounding mountainous region.23 A masterpiece of Renaissance sculptor Giambologna, the Colossus, covered in artificial encrustations, was hollowed out on the inside to contain fountains and a network of grottoes painted with scenes of “shepherds, mining, and metallurgy”.24 The presence of this gigantic, grotesque figure amid a formally poised Italian garden highlights how Renaissance gardens were at once, writes Luke Morgan, “places of pleasure and peril, order and confusion”.25 From the gardens of Italy, the grottoes travelled far. Wealthy tourists, inspired by their visits to Italian villas, copied these designs in their gardens back home, often adapting and reinventing them to suit local tastes. In France, for example, one of the first grottoes was built in the palace of Fontainebleau as early as the 1540s. The Grotto of the Pines resembles a portico, its façade supported by rusticated telamons imprisoned in stone pillars.26 The grotto fashion spread in Germany too, resulting in a multitude of diverse designs. The Castle of Heidelberg’s garden, Hortus Palatinus, boasted several grottoes (designed, like the aforementioned automata, by Salomon de Caus).27 In Potsdam, the New Palace (built between 1763 and 1769) had a Grottensaal (Grotto Hall), an imposing, vast room decorated with multicoloured marble and thousands of shells. The majestic Hall could not be more different from the luminous Neptune Grotto — a rococo gem, located in the gardens of the palatial complex.28 While grottoes and nymphaea remained popular through the Baroque period, evolving sensitivities in garden design, and sea-changes in the philosophical conception of nature, altered the appearance of artificial caves. The eighteenth century saw the emergence of the English landscape garden, which preferred a naturalistic emulation of the countryside’s variety over formalised designs.29 As a character laments in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a play centred on the transformation of an Italian-style garden into the English vogue: “By 1760 everything had gone — the topiary, pools and terraces, fountains, an avenue of limes” — the whole geometry of the garden “ploughed under by Capability Brown.”30 Indeed, the primacy of the “picturesque” in these English gardens meant that grottoes receded from the fore to join a wealth of other features (temples, hermitages, bridges, follies, statues), artfully disposed across the landscape to construct pleasing views. The inner marvels of the grotto were no longer the main event. In this new context, as Naomi Miller writes in her seminal Heavenly Caves, the grotto “became a symbol of the forces of nature, or a retreat to spur lofty poetic sentiments”.31 This new treatment of the grotto is evident in William Wrighte’s delightfully titled Grotesque Architecture : Or, Rural Amusement, Consisting of Plans, Elevations, and Sections, for Huts, Retreats, Summer and Winter Hermitages, Terminaries, Chinese, Gothic and Natural Grottos, Cascades, Baths, Mosques, Moresque Pavilions, Grotesque and Rustique Seats, Green Houses, &c . . . (1767).32 While little is known about its author, this successful pattern book provides insights into how grottoes were refashioned to suit the English landscape.33 Consider the design for a “Rural Grotto”, which Wrighte’s caption suggests should be: built of large rough stones rudely put together, so that the building may as near as possible imitate the beautiful appearance of nature. If the dome was to be richly ornamented with pendentive shell and frosted work, it would look very elegant. In the middle niche is Neptune on a rock, pouring out water, which descends under the pavement through an arch, and forms a running stream. The side niches are ornamented with satyrs and other grotesque figures. The situation should be in a morass, near some water.34 While this grotto still presents itself as a rusticated portico, its inclusion in a catalogue alongside hermitages and shepherd’s huts reframes it as a rural retreat. Here the emphasis is not so much on the decoration of grottoes with natural ornament, but on their harmony with the surrounding landscape. This is underscored by the building materials suggested by Wrighte for the various designs, which now include “large rough stones”, “rude and irregular flints”, as well as “irregular rude branches and roots of trees”, like in the “Rustic Seat”. Wrighte’s enclosures have much more in common with garden follies: those eye-catchers that dotted English landscape gardens, often “in the form of a sham ruin, a Classical temple, oriental tent, Chinoiserie pagoda”.35 Around the same time William Wrighte published his Grotesque Architecture, one of the most famous grottoes in the world, or rather its valuable content, underwent a transformation emblematic of the aesthetic shift away from the Renaissance grotto. The Grotto of Thetis in the Versailles gardens, completed in the 1670s, boasted a majestic centrepiece: a statue of Apollo bathed by the Nymphs. Decorated with precious stones, enamels, and mirrors, it punctuates a narrative arch that traced the daily journey of the sun, rising from the Basin of Apollo in the Versailles gardens and setting in the Grotto of Thetis. The marvels of the Grotto of Thetis were short-lived, however, and the building was demolished just a decade later to make place for the extension of the château’s north wing. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the preserved Apollo centrepiece found a new home as part of an English-style garden at Versailles designed by painter Hubert Robert — in a grotto framed by artificial cliffs, cascades, and greenery. Now housed within bare and rugged walls, and to be experienced at a distance, the scene’s aesthetic value lay not in precious and elaborate interiors, but rather in the interaction between the statues, cave, and their surrounding landscape. This shift towards more naturalistic-looking caves reflected the influence of Romantic aesthetic sensitivities. These were characterised by a preoccupation with mankind’s insignificance before grandiose natural phenomena, eliciting a “sublime” sense of awe and terror that sparked artistic inspiration and creation. If Renaissance grottoes had toed the line between playfulness and mystery, it is the latter that took hold in this period, as gardens at large became enveloped in an aesthetics of ruination, melancholy, and sublimity. Artifice — in particular as mechanisation and automation — acquired increasingly negative connotations for distancing mankind from the idyllic state of nature. Automata, which had been so prominent in Renaissance grottoes, fell from favour, and were thought of as disquieting, uncanny, and even demonic.36 With their dark, mysterious interiors and craggy walls, caves figured prominently in Romantic art and literature, and naturalistic grottoes were therefore particularly suited to elicit “sublime” feelings. As Edmund Burke wrote in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), “all edifices calculated to produce an idea of the sublime, ought rather to be dark and gloomy . . . darkness is more productive of sublime ideas than light”.37 The affecting potential of subterranean environments was exploited in the garden of Villa Pallavicini, located in Pegli (Genoa, Italy). Inaugurated in 1846, this English-style Romantic garden was the brainchild of Ignazio Alessandro Pallavicini (1800–1871), an aristocrat, politician, and mason well-versed in esoterism. Here a Romantic sensitivity fuses with the theatricality and occult symbolism that once populated many Renaissance gardens. The architect Michele Canzio, stage designer of the Carlo Felice theatre, arranged the landscape as a circuit of spiritual transformation. At the end of the itinerary, dedicated to Catharsis, the visitor must navigate through pitch-black caves before emerging in a paradisiac grove with a temple rising from tranquil waters. Amerigo Gassarini, Canzio’s contemporary, described the experience of entering the caves: Let us bravely enter in . . . this cave, where thick darkness surrounds us, scarcely transfixed by the weak rays which penetrate through the rare openings in the ceiling. . . . Which mortal could have arranged with such artfulness the natural stalactites which decorate in enormous masses [en masses énormes] the grand vaults of this cave? – Bizarre . . . calcarean formations are piled up above our heads; and because it must be acknowledged that Man . . . arranged them this way, we must not forget that we have, under our eyes, the slow and progressive work of past centuries.38 Gassarini narrates hearing “the sinister lapping of water” and feeling “the almost complete obscurity which reigns in this place.”39 While boating in the caverns, visitors could contemplate the interiors as well as “the infinite price that this grotto must have cost to Monsieur Marquis Pallavicini”.40 At this point in the narrative, it becomes hard to hear Gassarini’s irony — or its lack. Emerging into the light, the visitor is struck “by all the magnificence of the tableau which, all of a sudden, unfolds under our eyes”, prompting the writer to wish he could sing “an hymn in honour of Nature and Art, which held hands to make us experience the most delightful emotions”.41 Villa Pallavicini, and Gassarini’s description and illustration, vividly conjure the continuities and disparities between Renaissance and Romantic interpretations of the cave. Despite changes in their designs and symbolic underpinnings, grottoes remained for centuries places where the tensions between Artifice and Nature could be experienced, whether through the surprising symbiosis of playful automata, lavish shellwork, and morphing forms in Renaissance gardens, or through the awful, sublime powers of nature, as staged in the otherworldly darkness of Villa Pallavicini’s caves. While grottoes eventually fell from favour in garden architecture, this complex history — and the layered symbolism adorning the walls of artificial caves — remind us that a rich cultural universe lies beyond the grotto’s contemporary status as a “kitsch” or “bizarre” curiosity. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 5, 2022

Laura Tradii

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:20.659374

re-examining-the-elephant-man

Re-examining “the Elephant Man” By Nadja Durbach July 24, 2013 Nadja Durbach questions the extent to which Joseph Merrick, known as the Elephant Man, was exploited during his time in a Victorian “freakshow”, and asks if it wasn't perhaps the medical establishment, often seen as his saviour, who really took advantage of Merrick and his condition. The scenes are among the most heartless in cinema history: a drunken, abusive showman exhibiting the severely deformed Joseph Merrick to horrified punters. David Lynch’s The Elephant Man begins with its lead character being treated little better than an animal in a cage. But it soon finds a clean-cut hero in the ambitious young surgeon Frederick Treves, who rescues the hapless Merrick from his keeper and gives him permanent shelter at the London Hospital. Supported by charitable donations, the victim recovers his humanity: he learns to speak again (in a decidedly middle-class accent), to entertain society guests and to dress and behave like a well-heeled young dandy. Merrick, no more the degraded show freak, reveals his inner goodness and spirituality and dies happy. Lynch’s movie is based largely on Treves’ sentimental chronicle. But that narrative is merely one version of events — and one that in the end tells us more about middle-class morality than it does about Merrick. There is another story that casts a different light on what happened. The memoirs of Tom Norman, Merrick’s London manager, are surely as biased as Treves’. But as one of the most respected showmen of his day, Norman’s account challenges head on Treves’ claim that Merrick was ultimately better off in the hospital than at the freakshow. In August 1884, after checking himself out of the Leicester workhouse, Merrick began his career as “the Elephant Man”. The exhibition of human oddities had been part of English entertainment since at least the Elizabethan period. In the 1880s, alongside the Elephant Man, the British public could see Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, American Jack the Frog Man, Krao the Missing Link, Herr Unthan the Armless Wonder and any number of giants, dwarfs, bearded women and other “freaks of nature”. Despite the freakshow’s popularity, by the end of the 19th century, middle-class morality was condemning it as immoral, indecent and exploitive. Most Victorian freaks, however, actually earned a comfortable living. Many were free agents who negotiated the terms of their exhibition and could ask for a salary or a share of the profits. They sold souvenirs to the crowds to make extra money. The freakshow was thus an important economic resource for working people whose deformities prevented them undertaking other forms of labour. Indeed, freak performers did not consider their exhibitions to be obscene or degrading. Rather, they saw themselves as little different from other entertainers. Merrick suffered grievously from a rare disfiguring disease. His limbs were severely enlarged, and his massive head sprouted a large bony lump. His skin was loose and hung in sack-like masses from his back. A small “trunk” that had been cut away from his upper lip was beginning to grow back. He was, recalled Treves, “the most disgusting specimen of humanity that I have ever seen”. But at the age of 22, Merrick’s decision to exhibit himself as the Elephant Man was a rational financial choice. During the two years he was on display in Europe, he was able to save more than £50 — a sizeable sum for a working-class man. In fact, Merrick earned more from his exhibition than his manager. They shared the take evenly, but Norman paid for the rent of the venue, food and lodging. According to his manager, Merrick was happy with his life as a show freak, and of the workhouse he had quit, he declared: “I don’t ever want to go back to that place.” This was no surprise. The Victorian workhouse was the place of last resort. Poor food, squalid living conditions and the penal atmosphere were all intended to discourage the poor from being a burden on the state. Indeed, most working-class people sought desperately to avoid the physical hardships and social stigma of the workhouse. Norman recalled that Merrick “was a man of very strong character and beliefs — anxious to earn his own living and be independent of charity”. He refused to pass a hat around at the end of the show to collect extra, insisting that “we are not beggars are we, Thomas?” The freakshow provided Merrick with a way to earn a decent living in a manner he found less degrading than relying on poor relief. When the Elephant Man’s show was shut by the police in December 1884, Merrick left for a continental tour. But two years later, he returned to the East End of London destitute, having been robbed of his savings by an unscrupulous showman. Treves had exhibited the Elephant Man to the Pathological Society in 1884 as a puzzling medical specimen and had given him his business card. When Merrick produced the card on arrival at Liverpool Street station, the police summoned the surgeon to intervene on his behalf. Motivated by scientific curiosity and compassion, Treves admitted Merrick to the London Hospital. He raised funds for his upkeep through a campaign in The Times to prevent what he considered the immorality of the Elephant Man’s public exhibition. In the hospital, Merrick was kept largely confined to his rooms. When he ventured too far outside them, he was quickly shepherded back, lest he frighten other patients. Treves said his intention in providing for Merrick was to save him from the humiliation of public exhibition. However, his charge was constantly visited by curious members of high society. Like the masses who attended freakshows, they came out of a prurient fascination with Merrick’s grotesque body rather than merely to “cheer his confined existence”. Indeed, as a patient with a rare disorder, he piqued the curiosity of a variety of medical practitioners and was frequently on display. According to Norman, Merrick was “constantly seen and examined” by a “never-ending stream of surgeons, doctors and Dr Treeve’s (sic) friends”. The Elephant Man’s hospitalisation sprang from a benevolent desire to help this “poor fellow”. But, for Merrick, it may have been little different from entering the workhouse. As a permanent resident, supported entirely by charitable donations, he was rendered a dependent member of “the deserving poor”. Norman argued that Merrick’s “only wish was to be free and independent”. This could not happen while he remained an inmate of the hospital where, his former manager argued, he must have felt as if “he were a prisoner and living on charity”. Treves maintained that Merrick was “happy every hour of the day”. But Norman’s son unearthed the testimony of a hospital porter who claimed that Merrick asked more than once: “Why can’t I go back to Mr Norman?” Merrick never returned to the show world. Instead, he lived out his days in renovated basement rooms at the London Hospital, where he was found dead, lying across his bed, at 3:30pm on April 11 1890. Although no foul play was suspected, the coroner felt it prudent to hold an inquest. He concluded that Merrick had died of natural causes — that the weight of his head overcame him during sleep and caused suffocation. Treves supported this interpretation. He argued that Merrick’s death resulted from his “pathetic but hopeless desire” to sleep “like other people”. Norman, however, had a different interpretation of Merrick’s death. He believed the Elephant Man had taken his own life. Suicide does seem a much more plausible explanation. Merrick was found dead in the middle of the afternoon, and thus not during a natural sleep. He was lying in a position that he knew would cause asphyxiation. The Elephant Man’s skeleton remains on display in the London Medical College’s pathological museum, a fate he clearly expected. According to one of Treves’ medical students, he “used to talk freely of how he would look in a huge bottle of alcohol”. Norman also continued to exhibit Merrick’s “body” after his death, displaying a bust of the Elephant Man in his waxworks. But when he sold the exhibit after the first world war, he kept hold of the bust and stored it away in a packing case. Merrick continued to be exhibited, therefore, in both of the venues that had made him famous. Ironically, it was the sideshow, rather than the scientific institution, that finally laid the Elephant Man’s body and memory to rest. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 24, 2013

Nadja Durbach

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:21.732937

still-booking-on-de-quinceys-mail-coach

Still Booking on De Quincey’s Mail-Coach By Robin Jarvis February 20, 2013 Robin Jarvis looks at Thomas de Quincey's essay "The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion" and how its meditation on technology and society is just as relevant today as when first published in 1849. In the last quarter of 1849 Thomas De Quincey published two separate essays in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a leading Tory periodical. These two essays, entitled “The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion” and “The Vision of Sudden Death,” were revised and amalgamated five years later to produce one of the author’s most memorable and idiosyncratic pieces. “The English Mail-Coach” is at once a celebration of that form of transport and an elegy for its demise, since by the time De Quincey published his essay the railways had already spread across the country and shunted the mail-coach into the sidings of history. As an exercise in technology nostalgia, therefore, the essay might be compared to someone recalling fondly the brick-like mobile phones of the 1980s while necessarily using a modern, lightweight smartphone and perhaps grumbling at the way it increasingly dominates their waking life. “The English Mail-Coach” is in four parts. In the first, De Quincey explains his fascination with mail-coaches and recalls his delight in using them — insisting always, against the grain of class preference, on an outside seat — to go to and from Oxford in his student days. He relates his obsession to the pleasures of unprecedented speed, with the thrill of “possible though indefinite danger”; the visual stimulation of “grand effects,” as deserted roads at night are momentarily lit up by coach-lamps; the sheer spectacle of “animal beauty and power”; the sense of participating in a great national system, akin to a living organism; and the additional excitement of bringing news, good or bad, from the battlefront (during the Napoleonic Wars) to local communities far and wide. In the second section of the essay, “Going Down with Victory,” De Quincey elaborates on the adrenalin-fuelled experience of bearing tidings of war, kindling joy all along the route “like fire racing along a train of gunpowder,” and describes the more ambivalent experience of giving one woman a partial account of the “imperfect victory” at Talavera, a costly battle in which her son’s regiment has, he believes, been virtually wiped out. In the third section, “The Vision of Sudden Death,” he narrates an incident at night on the Manchester-to-Kendal mail in which the coachman nods off and, with De Quincey seemingly unable to seize the reins and take evasive action, the vehicle narrowly avoids collision with two lovers in an oncoming gig. It is only the young man in the gig who can avert disaster, and he responds with only seconds to spare. In the final section, the celebrated “Dream-Fugue,” De Quincey tells the reader how the figure of that same terrified young woman, glimpsed for just a few moments, subsequently entered into the “gorgeous mosaics” of his dreams, featuring in a variety of perilous or fatal situations. In the final, apocalyptic, dream-sequence De Quincey’s mail-coach becomes a “triumphal car” proceeding at supernatural pace down a cathedral aisle of infinite length; a female infant who temporarily obstructs its path somehow becomes synonymous with all the victims of war, past and present, while her apparent survival or exaltation stands not only for the material gains of “Waterloo and Recovered Christendom” but also for the spiritual end of resurrection and eternal life. Even this brief summary should make clear that De Quincey’s mail-coach is more than just a horse-drawn carriage. It is, in fact, a powerful mobile metaphor, freighted with all manner of symbolic meanings that modern literary critics have delighted in picking over. Sometimes these meanings seem startling or contradictory. It is, for instance, remarkable that the mail-coach, which at the beginning of the essay epitomises pre-industrial travel and communications and is an object of sentimental regard, nevertheless somehow comes to represent the unstoppable flight of Britain into an industrialised modernity. The unnerving speed of the mail-coach expresses, for some readers, the velocity of social change or the urgency of historical process. For others, the vehicle embodies the hopes and fears of the nation at a critical stage in the European theatre of war, or reflects the author’s belief in Britain’s pre-eminence as an imperial power. For critics of a certain theoretical persuasion, the mail-coach has even been read as a metaphor for the power and unpredictability of language itself. The logic and relative strength of these various interpretations can, of course, only be assessed via a careful reading of the whole essay, and in that undertaking every reader’s journey is his or her own. In a similar manner, only by immersing oneself in De Quincey’s beautiful yet often convoluted prose can one properly appreciate the ingenuity with which a meditation on road travel, brought to life initially as an intense physical and sensory experience (“we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling”), turns subtly yet completely into an account of movements of the mind and of humanity’s ultimate spiritual journey. What is also fascinating for the modern reader of “The English Mail-Coach,” however, is the way in which, despite its almost antiquarian subject-matter, it continues to stimulate thought about aspects of modern society and culture. To take one example, speed is at the heart of De Quincey’s love affair with the mail-coach: he recalls fondly the “continually augmenting velocity of the mail” that sometimes seemed to “trample on humanity.” In fact, mail-coaches travelled, on average, at what must now seem an extremely sedate ten miles an hour, but in psychological terms there seems little to separate De Quincey’s experience from that of the first generation of railway travellers, who (as Wolfgang Schivelbusch pointed out in his classic study, The Railway Journey) celebrated the “annihilation of time and space” on the basis of locomotive speeds of 20-30 miles per hour. Then we think of the transport and communications technologies of our own time — of the serene efficiency with which planes can take us in a matter of hours to places our ancestors could only read or dream about, or of the almost indecent speed with which electronic messages can travel from one side of the world to the other. It seems that every generation is fated to rediscover the extinction of time and space in its own manner. ※※Indexed under…Vehiclesand extinction of time and space One of the striking features of De Quincey’s retrospective account is the degree to which he relishes being the physical embodiment of good news, so that the typical response of citizens elated by confirmation of military success seems to have been to throw their arms around the mail-coach aficionado. This fits with his preference for the mail-coach over the railway as the central instrument of an organic, rather than mechanical, system. His choice of words in calling the mail-coach a “national organ” for broadcasting momentous news is no accident: he writes elsewhere of an ideal state of communication “between the centre and the extremities of a great people” as resembling “the systole and diastole of the human heart,” and for him it was the mail-coach, rather than the railways, that came closest to realising this biological model. This was because it relied more visibly on human energies and effort, transmitted by some mysterious contagion to the “electric sensibility of the horse,” rather than on the mechanical “interagencies” of “iron tubes and boilers” that had no sympathy with the affairs of men. What the close cooperation of man and beast seemed to guarantee was that there was no dilution of passion as news and opinion travelled around the network; ultimately, what De Quincey desired was that all communication should have the spontaneity and directness of a face-to-face encounter. Curiously enough, the rapid development of digital technologies and new media has done nothing to disqualify De Quincey’s seemingly impossible dream. Despite the obvious financial benefits for companies and other organisations of cultivating virtual relationships, business travel has not diminished but in fact continues to grow year on year, with time-poor men and women criss-crossing the globe in order to look each other in the eye and seal agreement with a handshake. Neither have the new technologies turned their back on the ethos of personal encounter, as the one billion worldwide users of Facebook, with its instant messaging, voice calling, and video calling facilities can testify. It seems that every step forward in the digital era also takes us back, perversely, to De Quincey’s nostalgic pre-industrial world of human connections, of the constant befriending of total strangers, and the stubborn reliance on spontaneous word and gesture. De Quincey’s musings on sudden death, prompted by recollections of his near-catastrophic collision with the young couple in a gig, also have a strange contemporary resonance. He begins by contrasting pagan and Christian attitudes to sudden death, which, he suggests, may depend on different meanings of the phrase: an “unlingering death” versus “a death without warning.” Then he focuses on one particular variety of sudden death, that in which the victim has “some hurried and inappreciable chance of evading it,” and must act speedily and decisively in what will, in all likelihood, be a forlorn attempt at survival. Even more desperate, De Quincey says, is a situation in which another life or lives depend on one’s acting with such rapid resolve. Here arises the spectre of moral cowardice, of a man in desperate straits lying down before the lion (in De Quincey’s idiosyncratic phrase): “The effort might have been without hope; but to have risen to the level of that effort—would have rescued him, though not from dying, yet from dying as a traitor to his duties.” “It is not,” De Quincey remarks, “that men generally are summoned to face such awful trials.” And yet, sometimes they are. On 11 September 2001, some passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 fought to regain control of the hijacked plane, one of four commercial airliners deployed in the coordinated al-Qaeda assault on the United States. Staring death in the face, and having already heard via in-flight calls of the attack on the World Trade Centre, they somehow forced the hijackers to abandon their target (most probably the US Capitol) and crash the plane in an empty field in rural Pennsylvania. All forty passengers and crew were killed, but the passenger revolt almost certainly prevented much greater loss of life on the ground. As with De Quincey’s young man, who has mere seconds to manoeuvre his carriage into a safer position and save the life of his female companion, “sudden had been the call upon [them], and sudden was [their] answer to the call.” The circumstances could hardly be more different, yet much of what De Quincey says about the courage required to face “some fearful crisis on the great deeps of life” seems to apply just as well, if not better, to Flight 93 as to his scary incident on the road to Preston. As we now know, the story of Flight 93 also demonstrates the frightening power of modern communication technologies — which is, of course, the central theme of De Quincey’s essay. Using Airfones or their own mobile phones, many passengers were able to call their husbands, wives, or other family members, to inform them that they were almost certainly about to die, and to tell them one last time that they loved them. (By contrast, the hysterical young woman in the gig was able only to throw “up her arms wildly to heaven.”) How De Quincey might have contemplated the unspeakable anguish of such a call is difficult to imagine. This is surely one form of instantaneous — if not face to face — communication that he would have balked at. It is the ability of De Quincey’s essay to trigger such unexpected yet thought-provoking connections that gives it its enduring appeal. Despite its historical subject-matter and its general orientation towards the past, the “English Mail-Coach” is still picking up new meanings and relevancies, is still an intense, sometimes uncomfortable, yet exhilarating ride. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 20, 2013

Robin Jarvis

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:22.197470

the-redemption-of-saint-anthony

The Redemption of Saint Anthony By Colin Dickey March 7, 2013 Gustave Flaubert, best known for his masterpiece Madame Bovary, spent nearly thirty years working on a surreal and largely 'unreadable' retelling of the temptation of Saint Anthony. Colin Dickey explores how it was only in the dark and compelling illustrations of Odilon Redon, made years later, that Flaubert's strangest work finally came to life. In the fall of 1849, Gustave Flaubert invited his two closest friends—Louis Bouilhet and Maxime du Camp—to hear a reading of what he believed was to be his masterpiece: a retelling of the temptation of St. Anthony. The 30 year-old writer had been working on it for four years, and he was excited to finally share it with the two men whose opinion he trusted more than anyone else. Bouilhet and du Camp were likewise excited; they both knew of his extraordinary potential, and were anxious to hear this masterwork that had so fully consumed him. He read the entire five hundred and forty-one pages straight through: eight hours a day in uninterrupted four-hour blocks of time, for four solid days. Bouilhet and du Camp would later remember it as the most painful days in their lives, as they listened to an endless morass of words that was alternately incomprehensible, banal, repetitive and childish. After it was over, they did their best to put a good face on it, and to let him down easy; Bouilhet, with as much tact as he could muster, told Flaubert simply, “We think you should throw it into the fire and never speak of it again.” Instead of continuing to work on the Temptation, they challenged him instead to write something completely devoid of romanticism and symbolism—something instead minutely detailed, objectively reported, as in the vein of Balzac. And so Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary, the book that changed not only his life but changed forever contemporary literature—and which, one could say, was the result of something crossed between a dare and a punishment. And still, Flaubert never gave up on the Temptation. He rewrote it three times over the course of his life, spending close to three decades trying to get it right, finally publishing it in 1874. Even as he was writing Sentimental Education, Salammbô, and Bouvard and Pécuchet, he never forgot it, and yet it cannot begin to compare to those other works. The Temptation was the ghost lingering behind all of Flaubert’s better works; in the words of Michel Foucault, “The Temptation seems to represent Flaubert’s unattainable dream: what he wanted his works to be — supple, silky, delicate, spontaneous, harmoniously revealed through rapturous phrases — but also what they must never be if they were to see the light of day.” It became the thing he returned to time and time again, always the antithesis of his great writing, and it stood in stark opposition to the works by which he is now mostly known. “Suspended over his entire work,” Foucault writes, “it is unlike all his other books by virtue of its prolixity, its wasted abundance, and its overcrowded bestiary; and set back from his other books, it offers, a photographic negative of their writing, the somber and murmuring prose which they were compelled to repress, to silence gradually, in order to achieve their own clarity. The entire work of Flaubert is dedicated to the conflagration of this primary discourse: its precious ashes, its black, unmalleable coal.” The first English translation was by Lafcadio Hearn, begun in 1875, and it remains perhaps the best translation available. As Marshall C. Olds notes in the recent Modern Library edition, Hearn’s rendering—somewhat archaic, anachronistic, and baroque—best matches the strange, baroque quality of the original. The Temptation is one of those few works that does not benefit from a modern translation; the further it recedes into the past, the more compelling the book feels. That said, even in this form the work is difficult to read. It remains, stubbornly, as du Camp and Bouilhet largely first heard it: repetitive, without much direction, and strangely empty of feeling despite its wild imaginings and endless litany of strange figures. Written not as a novel, but as an impossible play, the creatures summoned to taunt Anthony are described in bare-bones stage direction, and so even as Anthony himself cowers or stands in awe, we have little of the same feeling towards these strange monstrosities: Then idols of all nations and of all epochs—of wood, of metal, of granite, of feathers, of skins sewn together—pass before them. . . . The more that the idols commence to resemble the human forms, the more they irritate Anthony. He strikes them with his fists, kicks them, attacks them with fury. They become frightful—with loft plumes, eyes like balls, fingers terminated by claws, the jaws of sharks. If the speeches rehearsed by these monsters are meant to inspire wonder or horror, they often fail by virtue of their bloodless depiction: “Respect me! I am the contemporary of beginnings,” cries Oannes, a creature whose body is half fish, half man. “I dwelt in that formless world where hermaphroditic creatures slumbered, under the weight of an opaque atmosphere, in the deeps of dark waters—when fingers, fins, and wings were blended, and eyes without heads were floating like mollusks, among human-faced bulls, and dog-footed serpents.” But perhaps the real draw of the Temptation is not its readability; its strengths lie elsewhere. Oannes is just one of many creatures in Flaubert’s book that may at first glance to seem to be a product of his imagination, but which was not. An ancient Mesopotamian god who supposedly taught early man writing, art and science, Flaubert learned of him through the writings of the third century BCE Babylonian writer Berossus. As it happens, nearly all of the creatures in the Temptation are figures that Flaubert found in archaic chronicles and encyclopedias: the book is less one of imaginative fancy than it is meticulous research and compilation. What’s remarkable about the Temptation is how it records, with minute accuracy, Flaubert’s research; while it may seem the result of a fevered hallucination, something akin to “Kublai Khan” or the paintings of Bosch, it’s instead a record of copious bibliographic study—and it is this which is perhaps most noteworthy about its composition. “The fantastic is no longer a property of the heart,” Foucault writes, “nor is it found among the incongruities of nature; it evolves from the accuracy of the knowledge, and its treasures lie dormant in documents. Dreams are no longer summoned with closed eyes, but in reading; and a true image is now a product of learning.” The result of prodigious reading, and yet nearly unreadable itself, it would be almost a decade before the Temptation came alive. “Here is the nightmare transported into art,” J. K. Huysmans wrote of Odilon Redon’s work in 1881. “Plunged into a macabre milieu, imagine somnambulistic figures, twisted with fear, having a vague kinship with those of Gustave Moreau, and perhaps you will have an idea of the bizarre talent of this singular artist.” Redon (1840-1916) had been working in lithography since around 1870, developing a singular style that anticipated both the decadent symbolism of the late nineteenth century and the modernism of the early twentieth. Redon’s milieu borrowed largely from the gothic folktales of his childhood, to which he borrowed a pictorial vocabulary from an unlikely place: the grotesque cartoons of political satire, with its half-politician half-animal hybrids, its exaggerated facial features and deformities, and the tone of decadent depravity. This Redon adapted to his darker subject matters, creating, in his Origins series and his noirs, which depict a nightmare landscape where spiders have human eyes and flowers have faces. (J. K. Huysmans, meanwhile, would later pay another form of homage to Redon; in his classic À Rebours, his protagonist des Esseintes collects prints by Redon—a move that helped catapult Redon’s work into the mainstream.) Redon had been working for over a decade when the third and final version of Flaubert’s Temptation was finally published; “It is a literary marvel and a mine for me,” he wrote of the book, in which he saw an endless litany of bizarre figures and distorted creatures that he could adapt as inspiration. Their work formed a natural kinship; as Stephen F. Eisenman comments, “Like Flaubert, Redon saw himself as unique, an accident, a monster, and all the more remarkable an artist for these very reasons.” Redon began producing a series of plates based on the Temptation, work which finally unlocked the strangeness and decadent symbolism that Flaubert had dreamt of but which he could never quite evoke on the page. In perhaps the most striking and well-known example, Redon took Flaubert’s image of death, rendered by the author in a bare bones description (“It is a death’s head with a crown of roses. It rises above a woman’s torso, pearly white. Beneath this, a shroud with dots of gold acts as a sort of tail—the whole body undulates, as might a gigantic worm lifting upright.”), and renders a figure of terrible beauty. All of Flaubert’s components are there, from the roses above to the “sort of tail” below, but Redon’s composition has turned them into something else entirely: the skull is half-obscured in darkness, turned away in either longing or disgust, while her body emerges out of pure blackness. The sense of both endlessness and motion conveyed by the tail spiraling out below her, and the garland of roses streaming out from her head, goes well beyond Flaubert’s original writing—Stephen Mallarmé would later write to Redon, “I am stupefied by your Death. . . I do not believe any artist has ever made, or poet dreamed, an image so absolute!” Other images are far stranger, following Flaubert down the rabbit hole of a world where bodies and shapes are free of any seemingly natural order. Redon’s mastery at using light and shadow, particularly in his use of the pure black that lithography offered, properly evoked the sense of mystery and despair that Flaubert had intended but could never quite create. Redon’s bestiary offers a richer manifestation than Flaubert’s blueprint, particularly his sphinx and chimera, or the half-ostrich, half-ape figure that accompanies Flaubert’s line “There must be, somewhere, primordial figures whose bodies are nothing but their images.” And then there is Oannes, rendered by Redon as a pensive face mounted on a body that swirls up from the darkness. But while these figures may have seemed strange, beyond the ken of nature, Redon was as inspired by the recent work of Darwin and Cuvier as he was of by medieval bestiaries. Increasingly vigorous taxonomists and scientific explorers were reporting back an increasingly bizarre litany of animals far stranger than those dreamed up by the human imagination. “Science recognizes no monsters,” says Jules in Sentimental Education; which is to say, that in science an artist could find ample inspiration for the monstrous. Just as Flaubert’s work represents a mind rigorously compiling monstrosities of the library, Redon’s work reflects a mind gleefully intermixing images from religion and science, allowing monsters whose bodies are nothing but their images. As Eisenman writes, his images for the Temptation read like “anagrams,” inviting “the viewer to create order out of the apparent chaos.” Redon’s work, which caused a sensation in its day but has too often been neglected (particularly outside France), represents perhaps the true potential, and use, of Flaubert’s Temptation. An alchemy of Flaubert’s research, his excessive documentation of strange beasts and foreign gods, brought to life by a pictorial imagination that could make use of everything from political satire to naturalists’ field reports, is what finally brings Anthony’s struggle to life, and finally makes clear the horror and awe in his eyes as Redon’s bestiary parades before our eyes. Flaubert’s Temptation is less a book to be read then it is an archive that can be endlessly plundered. As Redon’s work amply demonstrates, there is material left there to mine. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 7, 2013

Colin Dicke

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:22.551812

the-lancashire-witches-1612-2012

The Lancashire Witches 1612-2012 By Robert Poole August 22, 2012 Not long after ten Lancashire residents were found guilty of witchcraft and hanged in August 1612, the official proceedings of the trial were published by the clerk of the court Thomas Potts in his The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. Four hundred years on, Robert Poole reflects on England's biggest witch trial and how it still has relevance today. Four hundred years ago, in 1612, the north-west of England was the scene of England’s biggest peacetime witch trial: the trial of the Lancashire witches. Twenty people, mostly from the Pendle area of Lancashire, were imprisoned in the castle as witches. Ten were hanged, one died in gaol, one was sentenced to stand in the pillory, and eight were acquitted. The 2012 anniversary sees a small flood of commemorative events, including works of fiction by Blake Morrison, Carol Ann Duffy and Jeanette Winterson. How did this witch trial come about, and what accounts for its enduring fame? We know so much about the Lancashire Witches because the trial was recorded in unique detail by the clerk of the court, Thomas Potts, who published his account soon afterwards as The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster. I have recently published a modern-English edition of this book, together with an essay piecing together what we know of the events of 1612. It has been a fascinating exercise, revealing how Potts carefully edited the evidence, and also how the case against the ‘witches’ was constructed and manipulated to bring about a spectacular show trial. It all began in mid-March when a pedlar from Halifax named John Law had a frightening encounter with a poor young woman, Alizon Device, in a field near Colne. He refused her request for pins and there was a brief argument during which he was seized by a fit that left him with ‘his head . . . drawn awry, his eyes and face deformed, his speech not well to be understood; his thighs and legs stark lame.’ We can now recognize this as a stroke, perhaps triggered by the stressful encounter. Alizon Device was sent for and surprised all by confessing to the bewitching of John Law and then begged for forgiveness. When Alizon Device was unable to cure the pedlar the local magistrate, Roger Nowell was called in. Characterised by Thomas Potts as ‘God’s justice’ he was alert to instances of witchcraft, which were regarded by the Lancashire’s puritan-inclined authorities as part of the cultural rubble of ‘popery’ — Roman Catholicism — long overdue to be swept away at the end of the county’s very slow protestant reformation. ‘With weeping tears’ Alizon explained that she had been led astray by her grandmother, ‘old Demdike’, well-known in the district for her knowledge of old Catholic prayers, charms, cures, magic, and curses. Nowell quickly interviewed Alizon’s grandmother and mother, as well as Demdike’s supposed rival, ‘old Chattox’ and her daughter Anne. Their panicky attempts to explain themselves and shift the blame to others eventually only ended up incriminating them, and the four were sent to Lancaster gaol in early April to await trial at the summer assizes. The initial picture revealed was of a couple of poor, marginal local families in the forest of Pendle with a longstanding reputation for magical powers, which they had occasionally used at the request of their wealthier neighbours. There had been disputes but none of these were part of ordinary village life. Not until 1612 did any of this come to the attention of the authorities. The net was widened still further at the end of April when Alizon’s younger brother James and younger sister Jennet, only nine years old, came up between them with a story about a ‘great meeting of witches’ at their grandmother’s house, known as Malkin Tower. This meeting was presumably to discuss the plight of those arrested and the threat of further arrests, but according to the evidence extracted form the children by the magistrates, a plot was hatched to blow up Lancaster castle with gunpowder, kill the gaoler and rescue the imprisoned witches. It was, in short, a conspiracy against royal authority to rival the gunpowder plot of 1605 — something to be expected in a county known for its particularly strong underground Roman Catholic presence. Those present at the meeting were mostly family members and neighbours, but they also included Alice Nutter, described by Potts as ‘a rich woman [who] had a great estate, and children of good hope: in the common opinion of the world, of good temper, free from envy or malice.’ Her part in the affair remains mysterious, but she seems to have had Catholic family connections, and may have been one herself, providing an added motive for her to be prosecuted. She was, along with a number of others named by the children, rounded up, and by the time of the trial in August the Pendle accused had been joined in the dungeons of Lancaster Castle by other alleged witches from elsewhere in the county. All nineteen were tried in the space of two days, amid dramatic courtroom scenes. Ten of them were hanged the next day on Lancaster Moor, high above the town and overlooking Morecambe Bay. It was probably the first time any of them had seen the sea. Alice Nutter and several other defendants defied convention by refusing to offer any confession on the gallows. To many of those present at the hanging this would have seemed like proof of innocence, and it may have been such rumblings about the trial that prompted the trial judges to ask the clerk of the court, Thomas Potts, to take the unusual step of publishing an account of it. In truth Potts had already had a large hand in organising the trial itself and may well have suggested the publication in the first place. He certainly used it to curry favour with King James I, whose book Demonology he cited several times, proclaiming how the authorities had followed the King’s advice on uncovering cases of witchcraft in the Lancashire trial. The Lancashire trial was then cited from the 1620s onwards as the legal precedent for using child and ‘supergrass’ evidence in witchcraft cases. Indirectly, the trial of the Lancashire witches may have influenced the notorious ‘witchfinder-general’ trials of the 1640s and even the Salem witch trials of the 1690s in New England. The modern fame of the Lancashire witches is down to the publication in 1849 of an imaginative novel by Harrison Ainsworth, a friend of Charles Dickens with local connections and one of the bestselling Victorian novelists. His novel The Lancashire Witches has never been out of print, and it was successful in part because to drew on an edition of Potts’ original book published in 1848 by Ainsworth’s friend James Crossley, the Manchester antiquarian. Ainsworth has in turn inspired many other publications and theories. The trial began to receive serious academic attention in the 1990s, pulled together in a book of essays which I edited for Manchester University Press, The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories. In 2012 an international conference at Lancaster University, Capturing Witches, will bring together the latest work, both factual and fictional. No fewer than five new novels have appeared, most notably Jeanette Winterson’s At Daylight Gate, as well as a book of verses by Blake Morrison, A Discovery of Witches, and a BBC documentary, The Pendle Witch Child. The remarkable range of new work testifies to the richness of historical themes thrown up by the trial, but I would like to single out one in particular: children and witchcraft. Much of the key evidence in the trial of 1612 was given by two children, James and Jennet Device, aged about nine and twelve. Caught up in a terrifying web of charges and arrests they panicked, and their stories, designed to clear themselves, ended up in the deaths of most of their own family members, and indeed of James himself. In some parts of the world, children continue to be accused of witchcraft and to suffer horrific maltreatment as a result. A case of a Nigerian child in London, tortured and murdered by their own family for being a witch, recently hit the national headlines. Lancaster, home of the 1612 trials, is also home of Stepping Stones Nigeria, a campaigning charity dedicated to protecting children from accusations of witchcraft and other abuse. It has been adopted as the charity of the Lancashire Witches 400 programme. There could be no better way of marking the anniversary of the Lancashire witches trials than to visit their website and learn more about how witchcraft remains a live issue, four hundred years on. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

August 22, 2012

Robert Poole

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:23.021374

the-forgotten-tales-of-the-brothers-grimm

The Forgotten Tales of the Brothers Grimm By Jack Zipes December 20, 2012 To mark the 200th year since the Brothers Grimm first published their Kinder-und Hausmärchen, Jack Zipes explores the importance of this neglected first edition and what it tells us about the motives and passions of the two folklorist brothers. The greatest irony of the numerous world-wide celebrations held in 2012 to honor the 200th anniversary of the first edition of the Grimms’ Kinder-und Hausmärchen, published in two volumes in 1812 and 1815, involves the discovery that most people really don’t know the original Grimms’ tales or much about their lives. That is, most people have no clue that the Grimms’ first edition of 1812/15 is totally unlike the final or so-called definitive edition of 1857, that they published seven different editions from 1812 to 1857, and that they made vast changes in the contents and style of their collections and also altered their concept of folk and fairy tales in the process. Even so-called scholars of German literature and experts of the Grimms’ tales are not aware of how little most people, including themselves, know about the first edition, and ironically it is their and our “ignorance” that makes the rediscovery of the tales in the first edition so exciting and exhilarating. Indeed, there is still much to learn about the unique contribution that the Grimms made to folklore not only in Germany but also in Europe if we return to take a closer look at the first edition, for it was this edition that sparked the pioneer efforts of folklorists throughout Europe and Great Britain to gather tales from the oral tradition and preserve them for future generations. To explain why I believe that a rediscovery of the Grimms’ first edition can be not only exciting but also illuminating I would like to share some important background information that will place the Grimms’ collection in a socio-historical context and shed light on their remarkable accomplishment. Here we must bear in mind that their collecting was only a minor part of their research and scholarship and that they would be surprised to know that they are more famous today for their tales than for their superb philological work. When Jacob (b. 1785) and Wilhelm (b.1786) began collecting all kinds of folk tales and songs at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were very young precocious students at the University of Marburg, still in their teens. By 1805 their entire family had moved from their small village of Hanau to the nearby provincial city of Kassel, and the Brothers were constantly plagued by money problems and concerns about their siblings. Their father had been dead for some years, and they were about to lose their mother. Their situation was further aggravated by the rampant Napoleonic Wars. Jacob interrupted his studies to serve the Hessian War Commission in 1806. Meanwhile, Wilhelm passed his law exams enabling him to become a civil servant and to find work as a librarian in the royal library with a meager salary. In 1807 Jacob lost his position with the War Commission, when the French occupied Kassel, but he was then hired as a librarian for the new King Jérome, Napoleon’s brother, who now ruled Westphalia. Amidst all the upheavals, their mother died in 1808, and Jacob and Wilhelm became fully responsible for their three younger brothers and sister. Despite the loss of their mother and difficult personal and financial circumstances from 1805 to 1812, the Brothers managed to prove themselves to be innovative scholars in the new field of German philology by publishing articles and books on medieval literature. Still in their twenties, they were about to launch the collection of tales that was to become second in popularity to the Bible throughout Germany and later throughout the western world by the twentieth century. What fascinated or compelled the Grimms to concentrate on old German literature was a belief that the most natural and pure forms of culture — those which held the community together — were linguistic and were to be located in the past. Moreover, according to them, modern literature, even though it might be remarkably rich, was artificial and thus could not express the genuine essence of Volk culture that emanated naturally from people’s experiences and bound the people together. Therefore, all their energies were spent on uncovering stories from the past. This is why their friend, the romantic poet Clemens Brentano, asked them in 1808 to collect all types of folk tales that he wanted to revise in a book of literary fairy tales. In 1810 they sent him 54 texts that they fortunately copied. Fortunately, I say, because Brentano proceeded to lose the manuscript in the Ölenberg monastery in Alsace and did not use the Grimms’ texts. Meanwhile the Grimms kept collecting tales from friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, and when they realized that Brentano was not going to use the tales from their manuscript, they decided, upon the advice of a mutual friend and another romantic author, Achim von Arnim, to publish their collection that had grown to approximately 86 tales, which they published in 1812 and then another 70, which they published in 1815. Both collections formed the first edition and included footnotes to the tales as well as scholarly prefaces. Before I discuss the unusual quality of the tales in these two volumes, I want to comment briefly on the idealistic intentions of the young Grimms. That is, I want to summarize the ideological stance they took by publishing the tales they had collected. Although the young Grimms had not entirely formalized their concept of folklore while they worked on the publication of the first edition, and even though there were some differences between Jacob and Wilhelm, who later was to favor more drastic poetical editing of the collected tales, they basically held to their original principle: to salvage relics from the past from the beginning to the end of their work on the Kinder-und Hausmärchen. Broadly speaking, the Grimms sought to collect and preserve all kinds of ancient relics as if they were sacred and precious gems that consisted of tales, myths, songs, fables, legends, epics, documents, and other artifacts — not just fairy tales. They intended to trace and grasp the essence of cultural evolution and to demonstrate how natural language, stemming from the needs, customs, and rituals of the common people, created authentic bonds and helped forge civilized communities. This is one of the reasons why they called their collection of tales an educational manual (Erziehungsbuch), for the tales recalled the basic values of the Germanic peoples and also other European groups and enlightened people about their experiences through storytelling. Remarkably, the Grimms at a young age wanted to bequeath the profound oral tales of the people to the German people not realizing that they were about to bequeath unusually striking tales to people of many different nations, and that these tales assumed relevance in all cultures. To understand the role that the tales played in their bequest to western civilization if not the world, we must bear in mind what they stated in the preface of the first edition: It is probably just the right time to gather these tales, since those who have been making an effort to preserve them are becoming even harder to find (to be sure, those who know them still know a great deal, because people may die, but the stories live on) . . . . . Where the tales still exist, they live on and no one worries whether they are good or bad, poetic or vulgar. We know them and we love them just because we happen to have heard them in a certain way, and we like them without reflecting on why. Telling these tales is an extraordinary custom — and this too the tales share with everything immortal — that one must like it no matter what others say. The Grimms sought to celebrate and argue for the necessity of storytelling to create bonds among people that share their experiences through stories. They believed that the tales and all their variants were distinctive and kept cultural tradition alive. They respected difference and diversity, and at the same time they argued that “The aim of our collection was not just to serve the cause of the history of poetry. It was our intention that the poetry living in it be effective, bringing pleasure wherever it could, and that it therefore become an educational manual.” Although there were some other German collections of folk and fairy tales, that preceded the Grimms’ Kinder-und Hausmärchen, none were as diverse or driven by a the Brothers’ cooperative and collective spirit that spurred them to embrace all kinds of tales from German-speaking principalities. As early as 1811, Jacob even composed an appeal, “Aufforderung an die gesammten Freunde altdeutscher Poesie und Geschichte erlassen” (“Appeal to All Friends of Old German Poetry and History”), which was never sent but laid the groundwork for his later more fully developed “Circular wegen der Aufsammlung der Volkspoesie” (Circular-Letter Concerned with Collecting of Folk Poetry) printed and distributed to scholars and friends in 1815. It is worth citing the initial part of this letter because it outlines the basic principles and intentions of the Grimms: Most Honored Sir! A society has been founded that is intended to spread throughout all of Germany and has as its goal to save and collect all the existing songs and tales that can be found among the common German peasantry (Landvolk). Our fatherland is still filled with this wealth of material all over the country that our honest ancestors planted for us, and that, despite the mockery and derision heaped upon it, continues to live, unaware of its own hidden beauty and carries within it its own unquenchable source. Our literature, history, and language cannot seriously be understood in their old and true origins without doing more exact research on this material. Consequently, it is our intention to track down as diligently as possible all the following items and to write them down as faithfully as possible: . . . .           1) Folk songs and rhymes,           2) Tales in prose that are told and known, in particular the numerous nursery and children’s fairy tales about giants, dwarfs, monsters, enchanted and rescued royal children, devils, treasures, and magic instruments as well as local legends that help explain certain places.          3) Funny tales about tricks played by rogues and anecdotes; puppet plays from old times with Hanswurst and the devil.          4) Folk festivals, mores, customs, and games.          5) Superstitions.          6) Proverbs, unusual dialects, parables, word composition.It is extremely important that these items are to be recorded faithfully and truly, without embellishment and additions, whenever possible from the mouth of the tellers in and with their very own words in the most exact and detailed way. It would be of double value if everything could be obtained in the local live dialect. On the other hand, even fragments with gaps are not to be rejected. Indeed, all the derivations, repetitions, and copies of the same tale can be individually important . . . . Here we advise that you not be misled by the deceptive opinion that something has already been collected and recorded, and therefore that you discard a story. Many things that appear to be modern have often only been modernized and has their undamaged source beneath it. As soon as one has a great familiarity with the contents of this folk literature (Volkspoesie), one will gradually be able to evaluate the alleged simplistic, crude and even repulsive aspects more discreetly. This circular letter along with the first edition of Kinder-und Hausmärchen went on to inspire numerous German, Austrian, and Swiss folklorists to begin collecting tales, and gradually the Grimms’ example and their other editions animated folklorists throughout Europe and Great Britain to collect and preserve oral folk tales. If any of the editions that the Grimms published best represented their intentions and ideals that they kept reiterating until 1857, it was their first edition because they did not hone the stories the way they honed and refined the tales in later editions. In fact, you can hear the distinctive voices of the storytellers from whom they received the tales, and to this extent, the tales in the first edition, some in German dialect, are more authentic folk tales and have more integrity to them despite the fact that they are not as aesthetically pleasing as those in later revised versions. In other words, the Grimms let the tales speak for themselves in a very blunt if not awkward manner that lends them a sense of unvarnished truth or the educational value that the Grimms sought. Turning to the tales of the first edition the first thing a reader might notice is that many of the stories such as “The Hand with the Knife” (“Die Hand mit dem Messer”), “Herr Fix-It-Up” (“Herr Fix und Fertig”) “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” (“Wie Kinder Schlachtens mit einander gespielt haben”), “Puss in Boots” (“Der gestiefelte Kater”), “Bluebeard” (“Blaubart”), and “Simple Hans” (“Hans Dumm”) were deleted in the following editions for various reasons, not because they were poorly told but because they did not meet some of the requirements of the Grimms, who at first sought primarily to publish tales that were Germanic in origin. For instance "Puss in Boots," “Bluebeard,” “Princess Mouseskin” (“Prinzessin Mäusehaut”), and “Okerlo” (“Der Okkerlo”) were considered too French to be included. They later learned that this was a mistaken notion because it was and is impossible to know the exact origins of folk tales. Though it is impossible to know fully why certain tales were omitted or placed in footnotes we do know that “Death and the Goose Boy” (“Der Tod und der Gänshirt”) was omitted because of its literary baroque features; “The Strange Feast” (“Die wunderliche Gasterei”), because of its close resemblance to “Godfather Death”; “The Stepmother” (“Die Stiefmutter”), because of its fragmentary nature and cruelty; “The Faithful Animals” (“Die truen Tiere”), because it came from the Siddhi-Kür, a collection of Mongolian tales. As the Grimms continued to collect variants sent to them by friends and colleagues gathered from oral and book sources, they either improved the tales of the first edition by combining versions, omitted tales in favor of new versions, or moved tales to their footnotes. The second thing a reader might notice about the tales in the first edition is that most of them are shorter and strikingly different than the same tales edited in the later collections. They smack of orality and raw contents. For instance, Rapunzel reveals that she has become impregnated by the prince; Snow White’s mother, not her stepmother, wants to kill the beautiful girl out of envy; the wild man is not Iron John and plays a different role in helping the boy who liberates him, just as the devil plays a more unusual role in “Der Teufel Grünrock,” later replaced by “Bärenhäuter.” Thirdly, a reader will recognize immediately that all these tales are blunt and have little or no description. The emphasis is on action and the resolution of conflict. The storytellers do not beat about the bush. They are prone to tell the truths they know, and even though magic, superstition, miraculous transformation, and brutality are involved, the storytellers believe in their stories. Metaphor maps out the reality of listeners and engages people to learn from symbols how to engage their realities. Lastly, it is important to note that the tales in the first edition were collected mainly from literate people whom the Grimms came to know quite well. For instance they were well acquainted with the members of the Wild and Hassenpflug families in Kassel and the von Haxthausen family in Münster; Wilhelm knew the minister’s daughter Friederike Mannel in a nearby town. Dorothea Viehmann, a tailor’s wife, provided many tales, and in some instances, the Grimms took tales from books or received tales in letters. The literacy of the informants, however, did not diminish the folk essence of the tales that, as the Grimms and other folklorists were to discover, were widespread throughout Europe and told more often than not in dialect. The tales came to the tellers from other tellers, or they read tales, digested them, and made them their own. Indeed, we always make tales our own and then send them off to other tellers with the hope that they will continue to disseminate their stories. The Grimms have often been criticized, especially by critics in the last 50 years, for having changed and edited the tales from the first to the seventh edition. That is, they never lived up to their own words that the task of the collector is to record the tales exactly as they heard them. In other words, various critics have complained that the Grimms’ tales are inauthentic folk tales. But this is a ridiculous if not stupid argument, for nobody can ever record and maintain the authenticity of a tale. It is impossible. And yet, the Grimms, as collectors, cultivators, editors, translators, and mediators, are to be thanked for endeavoring to do the impossible and to work collectively with numerous people and their sources to keep traditional stories and storytelling alive. In this respect their little known first edition deserves to be rediscovered, for it is a testimony to forgotten voices that are actually deep within us. Hence, the irresistibility of the Grimms’ tales that are really not theirs, but ours. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

December 20, 2012

Jack Zipes

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:23.537059

athanasius-kircher-and-the-hieroglyphic-sphinx

Athanasius Kircher and the Hieroglyphic Sphinx By Daniel Stolzenberg May 16, 2013 More than 170 years before Jean-François Champollion had the first real success in translating Egyptian hieroglyphs, the 17th century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher was convinced he had cracked it. He was very wrong. Daniel Stolzenberg looks at Kircher's Egyptian Oedipus, a book that has been called “one of the most learned monstrosities of all times.” In 1655, after more than two decades of toil, Athanasius Kircher published Egyptian Oedipus. With his title, the Jesuit scholar characteristically paid honor to himself. Like Oedipus answering the riddle of the Sphinx, Kircher believed he had solved the enigma of the hieroglyphs. Together with its companion volume, Pamphilian Obelisk, Kircher’s magnum opus presented Latin translations of hieroglyphic inscriptions — utterly mistaken, as post–Rosetta-Stone Egyptology would reveal — preceded by treatises on ancient Egyptian history, the origins of idolatry, allegorical and symbolic wisdom, and numerous non-Egyptian textual traditions that supposedly preserved elements of the “hieroglyphic doctrine.” In addition to ancient Greek and Latin authors, Kircher’s vast array of sources included texts in Oriental languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Coptic, Samaritan, and Ethiopian, as well as archeological evidence. The resulting amalgam is, without doubt, impressive. But it can also bewilder. Egyptian Oedipus promised a complete “restoration of the hieroglyphic doctrine,” all the lost secrets of religion and science that ancient Egyptians supposedly encoded on their monuments. The massive final volume gathered almost every hieroglyphic inscription known to Europeans at that time, as well as other ancient artifacts, including mummies, sarcophagi, Canopic jars, sphinxes, idols, lamps, and amulets, found in Rome, other Christian cities, Istanbul, and Egypt. Kircher glossed each object with a learned explanation of its ancient significance. Without a Rosetta Stone, he translated the hieroglyphic inscriptions, character by character, into Latin prose. But Egyptian Oedipus hardly confined itself to matters Egyptian. Kircher interpreted the hieroglyphs by comparing Egyptian inscriptions with evidence from other traditions that supposedly preserved elements of the “hieroglyphic doctrine.” The book contained extensive discussions of topics such as pagan religion from Mexico to Japan, ancient Greek esoteric texts like the Orphic hymns and Pythagorean verses, Jewish Kabbalah, Arabic magic, ancient alchemy, astrology, and astral medicine. To harmonize the “sacred history” of the Bible with the “profane history” of pagan civilizations, Kircher had recourse to symbolism and allegory. Properly interpreted, the seemingly “absurd” myths of the Greeks, Egyptians, and other heathens express a monotheistic theology that prefigures many of the tenets of Christianity. Among the many levels of meaning contained in the story of Isis and Osiris, for example, Kircher detected the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. At the dawn of time, Kircher, explained, Adam, instructed by God and the angels, and guided by experience acquired during his centuries-spanning life, possessed perfect wisdom, which he passed on to his children. Noah and his sons preserved antediluvian knowledge from destruction by the Flood, which Kircher placed 1,656 years after the creation of the world and 2,394 years before the birth of Christ. But Noah’s son Ham polluted the Adamic wisdom with magic and superstition. Eventually the great Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus recovered the pure antediluvian wisdom and invented hieroglyphic writing to preserve it for posterity. But later Egyptian priests mixed the Hermetic wisdom with magic and superstition, creating, yet again, an ambiguous legacy, which was passed on to other nations. Kircher undertook his investigation almost two centuries before Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) famously solved the enigma of hieroglyphic writing, using the bilingual Rosetta Stone as his key. Modern Egyptology reveals that ancient obelisks were memorials whose inscriptions record the identity of the kings who built them and the gods to whom they were dedicated. For example, the obelisk that now stands in the private garden of the Villa Celimontana in Rome was originally erected in Heliopolis in the thirteenth century BC by Ramesses II and dedicated to the god Horus. We know this because its inscription reads, “Horus, strong bull, beloved of Maat, Usr-Maat-Ra Setep-en-Ra (Ra-strong-in-truth-chosen-of-Ra), king of Upper and Lower Egypt, son of the Sun, Ramesses II.” Kircher, who scoffed at the idea that obelisks recorded such mundane details, interpreted the same hieroglyphs as symbols of esoteric wisdom. He arrived at a somewhat longer translation: Supramundane Osiris, concealed in the center of eternity, flows down into the world of the Genies, which is the most near, similar, and immediately subject to him. He flows down into the divinity Osiris of the sensible World, and its soul, which is the Sun. He flows down into the Osiris of the elemental World, Apis, beneficent Agathodemon, who distributes the power imparted by Osiris to all the members of the lower world. His minister and faithful attendant, the polymorphous Spirit, shows the abundance and wealth of all necessary things by the variety that he brings about and oversees. But since the beneficent power of the polymorphous Spirit may be impeded in various ways by adverse powers, the sacred Mophto-Mendesian table, which acquires the moist strength and fertility of the Nile, in order for the flow of good things to be performed without impediment, must be worn for protection. But since the polymorphous Spirit is not capable of thoroughly completing this task, the cooperation of Isis, whose dryness tempers the moisture of Mendes, is needed. To obtain it, the following sacred table of Osiris is composed, on which are taught the things to be done in sacrifices and the way to perform the Komasian rites. Through this table and the sight of it supramundane Osiris shows the desired abundance of necessary things. Faced with Kircher’s relentless mobilization of erudition in the name of such nugatory results, one may be tempted to dismiss him as a learned charlatan or a crank. More than a few readers have done so, from the seventeenth century to the present, usually referring to his unwavering faith in dubious sources of Egyptian wisdom like the Corpus Hermeticum. In 1614 the Protestant scholar Isaac Casaubon convincingly demonstrated that these texts, long esteemed as the authentic teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, had in fact been composed in the early Christian era. Kircher notoriously gave them credence a generation after Casaubon. As a result most modern scholars have viewed him as an eccentric throwback to a Renaissance Hermetic tradition that had supposedly lost credibility by the mid-seventeenth century. But this view misjudges both Kircher and his age. Kircher’s monomaniacal and uncommonly ambitious determination to wring a solution from the hieroglyphic monuments led him to play loose with the evidence. But he was not unique in thinking that esoteric traditions offered valuable aid to the investigator of ancient paganism and the earliest ages of history. Behind Kircher’s great failures—his incredible translations and his reliance on spurious documents—lay principles about symbolic communication and the transmission of ancient knowledge that were widely accepted. Most of Kircher’s seventeenth-century critics agreed with him about many things that, from a post-Enlightenment perspective, seem equally ridiculous. Literal biblical history, which set the ultimate parameters of Kircher’s research, went virtually unchallenged before the second half of the seventeenth century and retained favor with most scholars long afterward. That an inquiry into ancient Egyptian wisdom should focus on the transmission of antediluvian knowledge and genealogies linking all nations to Noah and his sons was fully in accord with principles shared by most of Kircher’s contemporaries, his critics included. The idea that the first human beings, such as Adam, Seth, and Enoch, had been scientists, philosophers and theologians, was the prevalent understanding of the history of knowledge throughout the Renaissance and remained popular in the seventeenth century. Proving that Hermes Trismegistus had not written the Corpus Hermeticum was not the same as proving that the Egyptian sage and his esoteric wisdom had not existed. The idea that hieroglyphs were symbols encoding sacred mysteries remained the dominant theory at least until the early eighteenth century, even if most scholars doubted that Kircher had found their key. Understandably, posterity has not esteemed Kircher as one of the seminal figures in the genealogy of modernity—a Galileo or a Descartes. But in his day he was, without question, one of Europe’s most successful scholars. He embodied the contradictions of a moment when recognizably modern ways of thinking about the past had become available, yet older and conflicting models remained appealing and, to many, persuasive. As such, he allows us to explore a side of history too often lost to view. Without this view we cannot fully grasp the work of thinkers like Galileo or Descartes, much less understand the age on its own terms. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 16, 2013

Daniel Stolzenberg

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:24.019487

the-strangely-troubled-life-of-digby-mackworth-dolben

The Strangely Troubled Life of Digby Mackworth Dolben By Carl Miller November 14, 2012 In 1911 the soon-to-be poet laureate Robert Bridges published the poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben, a school friend who had drowned to death at the age of 19 almost half a century earlier. Carl Miller looks at Bridges' lengthy introduction in which he tells of the short and tragic life of the boy with whom fellow poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was reportedly besotted. Popular success came late in life to Robert Bridges — not that he much cared. When the journalists finally descended on his house in the summer of 1913 he responded first with indifference; and then not at all, leaving their importuning knocks unanswered. One might suspect that he had learned to hate the press from Tennyson, whose grand performance as Poet and Sage had burdened the Victorians of Bridges's generation with an interpretation of the role whose hoary magic they could never quite forget, however much they'd come to hate the trick; but Bridges's own reserve was deeply felt and honestly acquired. He was born in 1844 into a wealthy family of the Kentish gentry, and as such he had no need of ever living by his pen. He loved poetry but studied medicine, believing that a physician's practice would ground his literary efforts in what a platitudinous friend would later call “a knowledge of men.” He intended to retire at the age of forty to a life of writing; but he found after all that a little knowledge of men goes a long way; and following a serious illness he decided to pack in his doctor's kit ahead of schedule. Raised as he had been among a tribe of rentiers whose arbitrary privilege was dignified by time and the speciousness of heraldry, he had a certain grandeur of manner, which his success as a college oarsman had only reinforced. Physically imposing, he was in his later years likened to Olympian Zeus, with white luxuriance of beard, and fingernails that had been hardened into talons by his unwillingness to bathe in water that was anything but cold. If he seemed imperious from a distance, he was among his friends good-natured, frank, and easy: his lordliness remained confined to the domain of literature, where it was ironized by the almost total apathy with which his work was publicly received. His poems he had privately printed in small editions, austerely designed but sumptuously made; and costly. His eccentric publishing program was part of a more general revival of interest in the craft traditions of bookmaking that was then in the air. Connoisseurs, aesthetes and antiquarians hunted stalls and attics for forgotten treasures and rejected masterpieces; and small presses sprung up to produce new volumes that could be shelved with justice among those vellum bindings in the private dusk of any velvet-curtained study. Bridges's own books were of this species, printed on handmade paper and set in the obsolescent type that a friend had found at the Clarendon Press in Oxford under a century of dust. Their very limited impressions tended to sell out; they were even profitable; but the demand for them was not so great that any avaricious publishers came calling. And he grew old in this career: esteemed by some, but never in fashion, even as the fashion swung from the overripeness of the 1890s to the jaded sobriety that marked the century's end. But soon Bridges found himself in a new position. An editor at the Oxford University Press plumped for his inclusion in the “Oxford Poets” series: the result, published in 1912, gathered together for the first time into an inexpensive volume the fruit of Bridges's lonely and uncompromising art; and in its first year sold an astonishing 27,000 copies. On this swelling wave of approbation he would be appointed Poet Laureate. At the age of 69 Robert Bridges was famous. If he had thought that his eighth decade on earth would afford him dignified repose, he had been mistaken. It brought only a war; and as the Imperial Poet it fell to him to invoke the muses as young men went to slaughter by the millions. When the war was over he turned from civic work to The Testament of Beauty, a book-length poem in which he laid out his philosophy of life. It was not a Christian philosophy. Though he never joined the small number of embattled public atheists, he had by the end completely discarded the religious enthusiasm of his youth and discovered in its place a mild sort of pagan spirituality shaped by the writings of Plato and Lucretius. But he had once been Christian; and he had once been ardent; and even if the experience had failed to furnish him with any lasting faith it had at least given him lifelong friends. As a boy Bridges experienced the power of a strain of romantic Christianity peculiar to his time. The direction of the Church of England was then heavily disputed; from below by evangelicals who pushed for protestant austerity, and from above by a movement that sought to emphasize the Anglican Communion's share in the medieval traditions of the Catholic Church. In Oxford in the 1830s these high church Anglicans had hammered their theology into a fine gold leaf: they were dazzled by the beauty of their work but failed to see that it was far too fragile to survive the ecclesiastic contest it invited. Where delicate theology failed, bold aesthetics would have a trial. As doctrinal points receded into the background the high church Anglicans began to indulge a taste for pageantry and ritual shared by their Pre-Raphaelite contemporaries. They dreamed of jeweled chalices and samite robes; the aromatic haze of incense; and at times the livid traces of the scourge. Bridges fell in with the high church set at school. As boys they had no opportunity to test their radical spirit, no chance to strike it against the hard surfaces of life, to watch the sparks and see whether its cutting edge grew sharp or dull: but they were earnest in their fantasy. In later years their paths diverged. Some, like Bridges, lost their zeal and woke up from the dream, while others submerged themselves more deeply in it, drifting steadily towards the Catholic church. But before this happened Bridges met two important friends. They shared his love for poetry, a passion which would abide even after religious enthusiasm ceased to offer any common ground. For just as Bridges was abandoning his high church scruples these two friends were planning, quite independently of one another, to join the Church of Rome. They both died young, though decades apart; and in old age Bridges looked back on them, flush with his own unexpected success, remembering the literary sustenance that these friendships had given him in his youthful ambitions and in his middle-aged obscurity. As Europe sleepwalked towards the Great War this elderly Victorian neo-pagan gathered the old manuscripts of his two intensely Christian friends for publication. It was not only an exercise in nostalgia. One of these friends was Gerard Hopkins, who had died as a failed Jesuit priest in 1889. Bridges's 1918 edition of the Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins revealed in time that Hopkins's stunted life had been a chrysalid state from whose cramped walls a broad-winged poet would emerge into the open air. Bridges's tribute to the other writerly friend of his youth, published seven years earlier, could hardly be anything but negligible in comparison. But The Poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben does have a curious interest of its own. The poems themselves are indifferent; at best the juvenilia of an artist whose promise had been thwarted by an early death; but Bridges introduced them with a lengthy memoir that depicts Dolben's strangely troubled life with understated skill. Henry James was intrigued by the story and wrote that it was “very beautifully and tenderly, in fact just perfectly, done.” Robert Bridges and Digby Dolben met in the early 1860s at Eton, then as now the most celebrated of England's public schools. Bridges was older and heartier than Dolben and as a distant cousin felt a duty to look after him. The two were drawn together by similar inclinations and a shared outlook on life, being determined, artistic, and “terribly serious.” Bridges introduced Dolben to his circle of high church friends; Dolben took to them; and before long he outdid them all in his enthusiasm for the cause. He crossed himself at meals, read improper religious tracts, and eventually made forbidden pilgrimages to consult with certain priests on the prospect of his immortal soul. To his friends he seemed dreamy, abstracted, other-worldly, even saintly: to the head master he was an agitator, dangerously misguided. After Bridges went up to Oxford Dolben's eccentricities increased. He became a novice in the English Order of St. Benedict, signed his letters Dominic, and was furnished with a monk's habit which he wore in public, delighting in the provocation, wearing it on one occasion through the streets of Birmingham, walking barefoot, surrounded by a mob. More and more he seemed to live in dreams, hoping to ignite his friends with embers of his fervency and planning the creation of a mystic Anglo-Catholic Brotherhood at a monastery of their own establishment. Meanwhile his health deteriorated; he left Eton for good; and lived between illnesses with a series of private tutors whom his parents hoped would raise his Greek and Latin to Oxford standards. While sitting his entrance exam at Balliol he fainted midway through and was disqualified. While preparing for a second try at Christ Church, he died: drowned in the River Welland where he had been swimming with the young son of his tutor. He was 19 years old. These are the circumstances of the last years of his life as Bridges gives them: but his technique as a biographer is subtle. His brief life of Dolben is composite and many sided, gaining a range of textures from the incorporation of other voices, including that of Dolben himself, whose letters are excerpted and whose poems are called on to illuminate the recesses of his inner life. And it is here in the biographical application of Dolben's poetry that Bridges is at his most suggestive. He identifies two strands that run through Dolben's poems. The first is his mystic and medievalizing Christianity, which came to dominate his writing in the last two years of his life. The second is his ardent affection for another of his Eton classmates, a particularly attractive (if in Bridges's estimation somewhat vacuous) member of their high church circle. Bridges calls this an “idolization” but infatuation is a better term; the poems are plainly homoerotic. While editing the book Bridges refused the suggestion put forth by mutual friends that he rewrite Dolben's poems to read as though they had been written for a girl: but he did agree to suppress the identity of Marchie Gosselin, the seemingly oblivious young man who had so enamored Dolben and who had himself died a few years before Bridges began his memoir, as the British Minister to Lisbon and a knight. (His widow requested the suppression after denying access to his diary.) Bridges does not ignore this part of Dolben's life — in a way he seems to ruminate it deeply — but his expression is hesitant, extremely guarded, couched in an almost Jamesian aversion to any direct, conclusive statement. Was he grasping for an acceptably oblique means of treating what was still an impossible subject? Or did he only dimly see the subtext that is so evident today? His account of Dolben's death presents similar ambiguities; and one wonders in the end whether Bridges intended to raise the possibility that Dolben committed suicide. To the extent the book is ever read today, it is by Hopkins scholars looking to shed some light on that poet's own frustratingly elusive inner life. For Hopkins and Dolben knew each other, wrote letters to each other, and read each other's poetry: though they met on only one occasion, in Oxford, at Bridges's instigation. The suggestion made by many biographers that Hopkins was in love or at least infatuated with Dolben is eminently credible, though not undisputed. After he heard the news of Dolben's death Hopkins wrote to Bridges that “there can very seldom have happened the loss of so much beauty (in body and mind and life) and of the promise of still more as there has been in his case” — and wondered whether Dolben's family had thought of publishing his poems. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 14, 2012

Carl Miller

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:24.564840

mary-toft-and-her-extraordinary-delivery-of-rabbits

Mary Toft and Her Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits By Niki Russell March 20, 2013 In late 1726 much of Britain was caught up in the curious case of Mary Toft, a woman from Surrey who claimed that she had given birth to a litter of rabbits. Niki Russell tells of the events of an elaborate 18th century hoax which had King George I's own court physicians fooled. In September 1726, news reached the court of King George I of the alleged birth of several rabbits to Mary Toft (1703-1763) of Godalming, near Guildford, in Surrey. Mary was a twenty-five year old illiterate servant, married to Joshua Toft, a journeyman clothier. According to reports, despite having had a miscarriage just a month earlier in August 1726, Mary had still appeared to be pregnant. On September 27th, she went into labour and was attended initially by her neighbour Mary Gill, and then her mother in law Ann Toft. She gave birth to something resembling a liverless cat. The family decided to call on the help of Guildford obstetrician John Howard. He visited Mary the next day where he was presented with more animal parts which Ann Toft said she had taken from Mary during the night. The following day, Howard returned and helped deliver yet more animal parts. Over the next month Howard recorded that she began producing a rabbit’s head, the legs of a cat and in a single day, nine dead baby rabbits. Howard sent letters to some of England’s greatest doctors and scientists and the King’s secretary, informing them of the miraculous births. The curious King dispatched two men to investigate to see what they could ascertain about this case: Nathaniel St. André, Swiss surgeon-anatomist to the King, and Samuel Molyneux, secretary to the Prince of Wales. By now, news had spread and Mary was a local celebrity which necessitated moving her from Godalming to nearby Guildford so that she could be monitored more closely by John Howard. On November 15th St. André and Molyneux arrived at Howard’s home in Guildford and were immediately greeted with the news that Mary was in labour with her fifteenth rabbit. Toft gave birth to several more dead rabbits in their presence. The doctors conducted examinations on the lungs and other internal organs of these rabbits, the results of which showed that they probably did not develop inside Mary’s womb. St. André, however, still seemed convinced that her case was genuine. He believed that these were indeed supernatural births, and took some of the rabbit specimens back to London to show the King and the Prince of Wales. As the story of Mary Toft quickly spread through London, the King decided to send a German surgeon, Cyriacus Ahlers, and his friend Mr. Brand to Guildford to investigate the matter further. Ahlers examined Mary and witnessed several of her rabbit births; however, he was not convinced. On examination of the rabbit parts he had taken back to London, Ahlers found that the dung pellets in the rectum of one of the rabbits contained corn, hay and straw, which proved that it could not have developed inside Mary. Ahlers reported back to the King on November 21st that he suspected a hoax with Mary Toft and John Howard in collusion and showed these rabbit specimens as evidence. Meanwhile, Sir Richard Manningham (1690-1759) — an eminent doctor and midwife among upper class society in London — was contacted by St André to attend upon Mary Toft. After observing her and seeing her give birth to what he believed was a hog’s bladder, he also seemed unconvinced. But he was persuaded to keep his doubts to himself by Howard and St. André until there was proof of any fraud. It seems Howard and St. André were trying to save their reputations in the light of what Ahlers had concluded. On November 29th, Mary Toft was brought to Lacy’s Bagnio (bath house) in London’s Leicester Fields, where she could be observed more closely. St André contacted Dr. James Douglas, the respected anatomist and man-midwife, and asked him to come to the bagnio to observe Mary’s rabbit births. By the time Douglas arrived, he found himself in the company of a large crowd of doctors and medical men who had been summoned by St. André. Unfortunately for St. André, who was desperate to have Douglas validate the rabbit births, Douglas believed the whole affair to be a fraud. Between 30th November and 3rd December, opinion was divided among the medical men gathered there. Mary produced no more new rabbits, but continued to appear to go into labour. She was also badly infected and had fits which made her lose consciousness. Shortly thereafter, a porter at Mr. Lacy’s bagnio was caught trying to sneak a rabbit into Mary Toft’s room. He confessed to Douglas and Manningham that Margaret Toft (Mary’s sister-in-law) had asked him to procure the smallest rabbit he could find. Manningham and Douglas were determined to obtain a confession of guilt from Mary but decided to see if she would incriminate herself. They didn’t have long to wait as she went into labour on 4th December but produced nothing. On that evening they called Sir Thomas Clarges, Justice of the Peace, to the bagnio. The porter, Thomas Howard, swore a deposition before him and Clarges immediately took Mary into custody for questioning but she would admit nothing. Over the next two days, much pressure was put upon her to confess but Mary held out until Sir Richard Manningham threatened to perform painful experimental surgery on her to see if she was formed differently from other women. Toft was forced to admit on 7th December 1726 that she had manually inserted dead rabbits into her vagina and then allowed them to be removed as if she were giving birth. In several different confessions, she implicated a mysterious stranger, the wife of the organ grinder, her mother in law, and John Howard. On the 9th December, Mary Toft was charged with being a “Notorious and Vile Cheat” and sent to Bridewell prison where, allegedly, she was exhibited to large, curious crowds by her warders. The timing of Toft’s confession proved extremely awkward for St. André, who only 4 days earlier, on the 3rd December, had published his forty-page pamphlet A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets, in which he gives a detailed, non-sceptical, account of events. In the pamphlet he describes Mary’s explanation of events: how, in April 1726, she had been working in a field and was startled by a rabbit. She, and another woman, ran after it, and but could not catch it. They also failed to catch another rabbit that they had chased. “That same Night she dreamt she was in a Field with those two Rabbets in her Lap, and awakened with a sick Fit, which lasted till Morning; from that time, for above three months, she had a constant and strong desire to eat Rabbets, but being very poor and indigent cou’d not procure any.” If one assumes St Andre was not complicit in the hoax (though Ahler believed him to be) it was most likely this explanation of Toft’s which had him so convinced, tying in as it did so neatly with the theory of ‘maternal impression’, an idea popular at the time, which explained the existence of birth defects and congenital disorders. The theory proposed that an emotional stimulus experienced by a pregnant woman (such as Mary’s rabbit dreams and her desire for rabbit meat) could influence the development of the foetus. Mental problems, such as depression or schizophrenia were believed to be a manifestation of similar feelings in the mother. For instance, a woman who experienced great sadness whilst pregnant might imprint depressive tendencies onto the foetus she was carrying. The case of Joseph Merrick (1862-1890), the so-called Elephant Man, is perhaps one of the most famous instances of the theory of “maternal impression” being applied. Merrick wrote in his autobiographical pamphlet “The deformity which I am now exhibiting was caused by my mother being frightened by an Elephant; my mother was going along the street when a procession of Animals was passing by, there was a terrible crush of people to see them, and unfortunately she was pushed under the Elephant’s feet, which frightened her very much; this occurring during a time of pregnancy was the cause of my deformity”. Five months after the Mary Toft affair was exposed as a hoax, James Blondel published his The Strength of Imagination in Pregnant Women Examin’d in which he challenged the belief in the prenatal influence of the imagination. The debate he started continued well into the next century. Indeed, in the aftermath of the hoax, the medical profession suffered a great deal of mockery for what the public viewed as its gullibility. On December 9th, St. André had an advertisement (shown below) published in the Daily Journal to try and vindicate his own behaviour. Doctors responded to the Toft affair in print as many were concerned that the episode had damaged the reputation, not only of the doctors involved, but of the profession as a whole. One of the many tracts and pamphlets that appeared during the saga was The Anatomist Dissected by a certain Lemuel Gulliver, “Surgeon and Anatomist to the Kings of Lilliput and Blefescu, and Fellow of the Academy of Sciences in Balnibarbi” — a pseudonym of Jonathan Swift’s and allusion to his satire Gulliver’s Travels published in 1726. Part of the reason the Mary Toft case generated so much interest and discussion was the fact that, although babies had been traditionally delivered by female midwives, the rapidly growing field of medical science had recently begun to dominate the area of obstetrics among the upper classes. Men were being promoted as experts on the theory of reproduction, although they were often viewed with mistrust due to the access they had to women’s bodies. Female midwives were now being thought of by some as part of a superstitious past that had no place in the new scientific age. The fact that an illiterate woman like Mary Toft had fooled many eminent doctors, some with royal connections and patients, put the debate between science and the old traditions sharply in focus. Mary herself didn’t seem particularly impressed by at least one of the doctors who attended her — she called Dr Ahlers a ‘fumblefisted fellow as was never cut out to handle gentlewomen’. The case also proved to be irresistible to contemporary artists. In the satirical print shown below, William Hogarth pokes fun at the incompetence of the early 1700s medical profession. All the main characters in the Toft saga are featured, the doctors being shown as ignorant and credulous fools. Many Britons were angry about the Hanoverian King’s preference for German speaking courtiers and physicians. This is amply demonstrated by the plethora of pamphlets and drawings that appeared in the wake of the Toft scandal, ridiculing St. André and the German court physicians and depicting them as gullible or, even worse, as charlatans. The Prince of Wales was singled out for a great deal of mockery too. Public interest in the case died out by around January of the following year, but the repercussions continued for those involved. For Sir Richard Manningham and James Douglas there had been temporary embarrassment regarding their close connection with the affair but their careers and reputations were secure. St André, however, lost favour with the court and, as his reputation plummeted, his patients deserted him. He retired from London and eventually died in poverty in an almshouse in Southampton. John Howard had to answer charges of being concerned in the ‘Cheat and Conspiracy of Mary Toft’ but the case against him was dropped and he remained a respected figure in Guildford. As for Mary Toft, the case against her was dismissed, not for lack of proof of guilt, but probably because of the further embarrassment to the establishment that would ensue if the case were pursued any further. She spent a few months in jail then returned to relative obscurity. The question as to why she and her family went to such extraordinary lengths to convince the nation that Mary had the ability to give birth to rabbits is perhaps not too hard to answer. Monstrous or deformed people had been exhibited, at a price, all over Europe for hundreds of years, with poor and wealthy alike equally fascinated. Ironically for Mary, although the hoax was not successful, she did succeed for a while in becoming an object of curiosity. In the years that followed the scandal, the Duke of Richmond (who had a residence near Godalming) sometimes showed her at dinner parties for the curiosity of his guests. In April 1740 Mary was charged with receiving stolen goods and committed to the House of Correction in Guildford but was later acquitted by the jury. She died on 13th January 1763. The London papers’ obituary columns announced her death alongside those of peers and statesmen. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

March 20, 2013

Niki Russell

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:25.064550

sir-arthur-and-the-fairies

Sir Arthur and the Fairies By Mary Losure June 12, 2013 In the spring of 1920, at the beginning of a growing fascination with spiritualism brought on by the death of his son and brother in WWI, Arthur Conan Doyle took up the case of the Cottingley Fairies. Mary Losure explores how the creator of Sherlock Holmes became convinced that the 'fairy photographs' taken by two girls from Yorkshire were real. In the winter of 1920, readers of the popular British magazine the Strand found a curious headline on the cover of their Christmas issues. “FAIRIES PHOTOGRAPHED,” it said. “AN EPOCH-MAKING EVENT DESCRIBED BY A. CONAN DOYLE.” The Strand’s readership was well acquainted with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; most of his wildly popular Sherlock Holmes stories had appeared for the first time in its pages. The great man’s claim that fairies –real fairies — had been photographed in the north of England by two young girls was greeted with wonder, but unfortunately for Conan Doyle, most of it was of the “what can he be thinking?” variety. How could the creator of the world’s most famous, least-fool-able detective have convinced himself that “fairy” photographs were real? Let us proceed, Holmes-like, to examine the question. Mistake Number One: Misinterpreting the Evidence To his credit, Conan Doyle made what was (to him) a thorough, scientific, step- by- step investigation of the “fairy” photographs. For his first step, he consulted experts at the London offices of the George Eastman Kodak Company. They examined prints of the first two “fairy” photos and told Conan Doyle they could find no evidence of photo-doctoring; still, they insisted someone who knew enough about photography could have faked them. In Conan Doyle’s mind, that ruled out the two Yorkshire village girls who had taken the photographs, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. “I argued that we had certainly traced the pictures to two children of the artisan [working] class, and that such tricks would be entirely beyond them,” he wrote. Working class girls, surely, would not be able pull off such a hoax . . . . Mistake Number Two: Our Man Not on the Spot Conan Doyle’s next step was an on-the-scene investigation — but Conan Doyle himself did not go. Instead, he enlisted a far-from-impartial surrogate -- an ardent believer in fairies named Edward Gardner -- to carry out the mission. Gardner had already talked to several people who had assured him the girls had played with fairies and elves since babyhood. He had already written to Elsie Wright’s mother begging her to get her “little girl” to take more photos. “I know quite well that fairies exist,” Gardner wrote in one of several letters to Elsie’s mother, “and that they are very shy of showing themselves or approaching adults, and it is only when one can obtain the help of their ‘friends’ that one can hope to obtain photographs and hence lead to a better understanding of Nature’s ways than is possible otherwise.” Gardner explained to Elsie’s mother that he had long been anxious to obtain photos of “fairies, pixies, and elves, and if possible of brownies and goblins.” So it is perhaps not surprising that when he actually visited the Wright family in the Yorkshire village of Cottingley, Gardner found no reason to suspect there was anything amiss in the photographs. He talked to Elsie’s parents, who (not knowing themselves whether or how the photos had been faked) gave him sincere and honest answers. They told Gardner all they knew: that the two girls had borrowed Elsie’s father’s camera and gone down to a little hidden valley behind the house where the younger girl, Elsie’s cousin Frances, believed she saw fairies. The girls had returned a just short time later with the negative that Elsie’s father developed in his home darkroom: the first fairy photo. As part of his investigation, Gardner walked with Elsie to the exact spot, in front of a waterfall, where the photo had been taken. He was glad to have a chance to question the girl alone, he later reported back to Conan Doyle. He asked Elsie what colors the fairies were and she told him they were “the palest of green, pink, mauve,” Gardner wrote to Conan Doyle. Elsie also told Gardner the gnome in the second photo had been wearing black tights, a reddish brown jersey, and a red pointed cap. In answer to Gardner’s questions about the markings on the gnome’s wings — both Conan Doyle and Gardner thought they looked like a moth’s wings — Elsie explained that they weren’t wing markings at all, but musical pipes. She added that on still days, you could hear the faint, high sound of gnome music. After that, Gardner reported back to Conan Doyle that the family’s “transparent honesty and simplicity” had convinced him, Gardner, that the photographs were entirely genuine. Mistake Number Three: Conan Doyle’s and Gardner’s misperception of Elsie Wright To Gardner, Elsie seemed a “shy pretty girl of about sixteen.” But at the time they met, she was really eighteen, going on nineteen, and for years had cherished the dream of becoming an artist. It was Elsie who had painted watercolor fairies, stuck them to hatpins, and arranged them in the foliage in front of Frances. It was Elsie who, using a complicated, old-fashioned camera to take her first-ever photo, managed to capture the strange, haunting image that would go down in history as the first Cottingley Fairy Photograph. Gardner had seen a number of Elsie’s watercolors displayed on the walls of her parents’ house. Still, he insisted that she was not a good enough artist to have drawn the fairies in the photos, and Conan Doyle believed him. Mistake Number Four: Creating the Evidence During his visit to Cottingley, Gardner implored Elsie’s parents to get her to take more fairy photos. Elsie insisted that wasn’t possible because Frances had to be there, too, for the fairies to appear. (By that time, Frances had moved away from Cottingley to the seaside town of Scarborough). Undeterred, Gardner arranged with Frances’ parents for Frances to spend part of her summer holidays in Cottingley. There was nothing either girl could do — the pressure was on. So when Frances arrived in Cottingley and the two were alone, Elsie told her she’d prepared two more cutout fairies, one for each girl. In the hidden valley, the two girls took two more photos. Then they both agreed, in secret, they would never take another fairy photo. Gardner was delighted to get the two new photos, but even more thrilled with a third photo, one which Elsie had not faked. Both girls thought at the time it was just a bird’s nest, some rainwater, some shapes and shadows--but Gardner insisted it showed fairies. Conan Doyle thought so, too. A second Strand article, published in March of 1921, announced “The Evidence for Fairies by A. Conan Doyle, With New Fairy Photographs.” In the article, Conan Doyle quoted Gardner’s assertion that the third and most amazing photo was a “fairy bower.” Conan Doyle also included Gardner’s remark that “We have now succeeded in bringing this print out splendidly.” The article did not say what Gardner meant by “bringing out” the print. The man who had created the world’s greatest detective never knew how badly astray his own investigation had gone. In part to avoid embarrassing him, Elsie and Frances did not reveal the secret of the paper cutouts until long after his death. Elsie had once seen what she remembered as “cruel” cartoon of Conan Doyle in a magazine, and perhaps by then she realized, too, how desperately he wanted the fairy photographs to be real. If the photos were real, Conan Doyle wrote in The Coming of the Fairies, a book that included both Strand articles, they would provide the first solid evidence that whole new orders of invisible beings existed in our world. “There is nothing scientifically impossible, so far as I can see, in some people seeing things that are invisible to others,” Conan Doyle wrote. He did concede that it would take some time before “the ordinary busy man” realized that “this new order of life is really established and has to be taken into serious account, just as the pigmies of Central Africa.” “Victorian science would have left the world hard and clean and bare, like a landscape in the moon,” Conan Doyle wrote, but now -- with the coming of the fairies -- everything had changed. “One or two consequences are obvious,” he wrote. “The experiences of children will be taken more seriously. Cameras will be forthcoming. Other well- authenticated cases will come along. These little folk who appear to be our neighbors, with only some small difference of vibration to separate us, will become familiar.” Conan Doyle’s belief in spiritualism, séances, and “the spirit world” is well known, yet his steadfast belief in the Cottingley Fairies is sometimes glossed over or even ignored by biographers. It shouldn’t be; it’s a telling glimpse into the character of a man too often confused with his cold, rational hero. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 12, 2013

Mary Losure

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:25.559259

simple-songs-virginia-woolf-and-music

Simple Songs Virginia Woolf and Music By Emma Sutton January 9, 2013 Last year saw the works of Virginia Woolf enter the public domain in many countries around the world. To celebrate Emma Sutton looks at Woolf's short story "A Simple Melody" and the influence which music had upon the writer who once wrote that music was "nearest to truth". As Virginia Woolf’s letters and diaries amply record, music was a central part of her social life as it was for many of her contemporaries and she was at her best as a humorist writing about these occasions. She records with glee the various mishaps that befall musicians and audiences — a prima donna throwing down her music in a rage; a button popping off the plump Clive Bell’s waistcoat during the slow movement of a piano sonata; an elderly man crashing loudly but astonishingly unhurt down the stairs at Covent Garden. The social conventions, artifice and pretensions governing these performances intrigue her and allow her to sharpen her wit, but music wasn’t only an occasion for slapstick humour or social satire. It played a central part in the political vision of Woolf’s writing, shaping her understanding and representations of feminism and sexuality, pacifism and cosmopolitanism, social class and anti-Semitism. And it informed, too, the formal experiments of her prose. Woolf learned many of her astonishing literary innovations from music — adopting from Wagner’s operas, for example, the technique of shifting from one narrative perspective to another in order to represent the unspoken thoughts and feelings of her characters. The short story ‘A Simple Melody’ (c.1925) encapsulates her acute interest in music and its resonant but discreet place in her work. In it, the principal character masks his discomfort at a formal party by studying a landscape painting hanging on the wall: Mr Carslake, at least, thought it very beautiful because, as he stood in the corner where he could see it, it had the power to compose and tranquillize his mind. It seemed to him to bring the rest of his emotions — and how scattered and jumbled they were at a party like this! — into proportion. It was as if a fiddler were playing a perfectly quiet old English song while people gambled and tumbled and swore, picked pockets, rescued the drowning, and did astonishing — but quite unnecessary — feats of skill. He was unable to perform himself. The difficulties of communication and the importance of the unspoken are central themes of Woolf’s brief sketch. This is a story about language, about communication. The inhibitions restricting the conversation among the party’s guests, and the difficulty of finding ‘pure new words’ in which to express his feelings, frustrate Mr Carslake. As he looks at the painting of a heath Mr Carslake imagines walking on it with a variety of companions, longing for the intimacy and social equality that he sees as characteristic of al fresco conversation in contrast to polite small talk: Why, very likely they would talk about their own habits for a whole hour; and all in the freest, easiest way, so that suppose he, or Mabel Waring, or Stuart [. . .] wanted to explain Einstein, or make a statement — something quite private perhaps — (he had known it happen) — it would come quite natural. His association of the landscape with song suggests that music, like these imagined outdoor exchanges, represents a more direct or ideal form of communication than language, an idea that Woolf’s writing repeatedly explores. She was fascinated by, but wary of, the idea that music was a form of total expression, a model that writing could aspire to or imitate. Here, Mr Carslake’s comparison of the painting to an ‘old English song’ celebrates music’s expressivity and capacity to confer order on its listeners, but also evokes the extensive contemporary nationalist writing about English folk song, landscape and early music by the composers and teachers of the English Musical Renaissance. Mr Carslake remarks that he has recently attended the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, at which English folk songs and military marches were performed: he found it ‘very tiring’ and ‘believed it was not being a success’. These bathetic details undercut nationalist and military music, suggesting that he, like Woolf herself, was repelled by it. Yet Mr Carslake’s belief that music confers ‘proportion’ on the listener echoes the catchphrase used by the unfeeling doctors treating shell-shocked war veterans in her contemporary novel Mrs Dalloway, using music to suggest a more troubling aspect to his fantasies about communication: his ‘desire [. . .] to be sure that all people were the same’ and ‘very simple underneath’ is both crudely reductive, as he partly recognises, and indicative of empathy and a wish for real connection with others. The allusion to music also allows Woolf to flesh out aspects of her character’s inner life that could not be addressed directly: the story draws on music’s contemporary association with homosexuality, which is further implied through the description of Mr Carslake as a ‘queer fish’ whose ‘affections’ for his butler are the subject of speculation by his friends. These details hint at a more unconventional and warmer private life than is apparent through his conversation at the party — or through his slightly sinister wish for human homogeneity and simplicity. Similar uses of music pepper Woolf’s fiction: in her first novel, The Voyage Out, her heroine plays a Beethoven piano sonata usually perceived as ‘unattainable’ for women, augmenting the references to her growing feminism. In Night and Day, references to Mozart’s operas criticise the power of patriarchal society and in Jacob’s Room a performance of Tristan contributes to the numerous allusions attacking the war mongering of Edwardian society and its imperial activities. In The Years, Woolf’s account of a performance of Wagner’s Siegfried resists the composer’s notorious anti-Semitism, using the opera to embed more sympathetic attitudes towards Jews in the novel. In a famous letter of 1940, Woolf wrote that ‘I always think of my books as music before I write them’; recent criticism has started to explore the implications of the relationship between music and writing in her work. And although music has often been seen as the art in which Bloomsbury was least interested, Vanessa Bell’s work as a set designer for ballets, Bell’s painting (with Duncan Grant) of a music room for the Lefevre Gallery in London, and the central place of musical terms in Roger Fry’s art criticism all illustrate music’s importance to Woolf’s family and friends. Woolf shared a passionate interest in ‘intermediality’ with the Modernists, including T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Katherine Mansfield, too. She spoke, then, for many of her contemporaries when she wrote in a letter of 1899 that music, rather than literature, seemed to her the ‘nearest to truth’. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 9, 2013

Emma Sutton

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:26.053407

the-curious-world-of-isaac-disraeli

The Curious World of Isaac D’Israeli By Martin Spevack February 6, 2013 Marvin Spevack introduces the Curiosities of Literature, the epic cornucopia of essays on all things literary by Isaac D'Israeli: a scholar, man of letters and father of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. What may be most curious about Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature is the title itself. For D’Israeli curiosity was a blend of the original denotation, “investigation . . . characterized by special care,” and that of his own day, “inquisitive, desirous of information,” as in his reference to the grammar in Johnson’s Dictionary as being “curiously illustrated by the notes and researches of modern editors” and his regarding his friend Francis Douce’s library as being “curious”. Suitably for D’Israeli, the man of letters, literature meant even more than just “literature generally, the humanities”; it meant knowledge in the widest sense, without formality and restriction. A collection of essays, Curiosities of Literature — as the full title of the first edition of 1791 makes explicit, Consisting of Anecdotes, Characters, Sketches, and Observations, Literary, Critical, and Historical — has been rightly called “that library in miniature”. It is a library which evolved through a vigorously evolutionary process — a veritable sea change of selection, addition, omission, and revision — its fourteenth and last edition in 1849, a year after D’Israeli’s death, consisting of 276 essays (the version in the first three volumes of the six-volume standard edition of his works edited by his son Benjamin in 1881). That number may appear stable when measured against the 279 of the first edition, but it is by no means indicative of the flexibility of the process or the nature of the topics. Both are strikingly evident in the titles of some of the fifty essays from the “Literature and Criticism” section of the first edition which were excluded from later editions: “Tartarian Libraries,” “The Turks,” “The Law and the Prophets,” “Republic of Letters,” “Esdras,” “Aristotle,” “Gregory the Seventh,” “Fair-Sex having no Souls,” “Physicians write little on Professional Subjects,” “Guy Patin,” “Adam not the first Man,” “Saints carrying their Heads in their Hands,” “On the Adjective Pretty.” Among the twenty-seven “Historical Anecdotes” which dropped by the wayside are “Marriage Dispensations,” “English Ladies,” “Spanish Monks,” “The Virgin Mary,” “Protestants,” “Coffee,” Transubstantiation,” “America,” “Enchanted Tapestry,” “Great and Little Turk,” “The Body of Caesar.” In a preface dated March 1839 D’Israeli described his ever-evolving work as a “voluminous miscellany, composed at various periods . . . a circuit of multifarious knowledge [which] could not be traced were we to measure and count each step by some clinical pedometer.” It would, however, be a misjudgment to regard the miscellany as a jungle of whimsical impressions or fanciful thoughts. Rather, it is a man-made woodland landscaped, cultivated, and manicured by an urban if not urbane gentleman. D’Israeli derived most of his knowledge from books — the first essay is on “Libraries” — for he himself was unabashedly bookish and bibliophilic. But in the range and variety of its topics D’Israeli’s curious world was not hermetically sealed off from the world outside the library, else it would never have had so widespread a popularity over so long a period. If Curiosities of Literature did not directly reflect contemporary social, political, and literary matters, or rely on current gossip or scandal, it did in any case deal with them as recognizable features and phenomena of human existence in recurring clusters unrestricted by time or place. As might be expected, the most prominent is that of literary personalities, productions, and attendant concerns. Of the numerous authors who are subjects of individual essays, although they are drawn from Roman times to the eighteenth century, none are contemporaries of D’Israeli and no particular genre is dominant. English authors receive their due share: Milton, Pope, Dr. Johnson, Ben Jonson, Shenstone, Prior, Spenser, Shakespeare, Butler, Richardson. But continental authors may receive even more individual attention. The French are well represented by Saint-Evremond, La Rochefoucault, Bayle, Scarron, Madeleine and Georges Scudéry, Corneille, among others; the Italians by Vida, Ariosto, Tasso, Dante, Politian. In addition, there are essays dealing with Martial, Cervantes, Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero. As may be inferred from these names and others, D’Israeli gives relatively much attention to what might be called marginal literary figures, many of whom are lesser known humanists, scholars, bibliophiles, bibliographers, antiquaries, men of letters, editors, or philosophers, such as Grotius, Magliabechi, Anthony à Wood, Marolles, Annius of Viterbo, Bodley, Camden, Costar, Fabroni, Hearne, Leland, Naudé, Bentley, Lenglet du Fresnoy, George Steevens, and Oldys. Along similar lines of extension is D’Israeli’s consideration of institutions and families deriving from or in the service of literature, such as “A Glance into the French Academy,” “An English Academy of Literature,” “The Port-Royal Society,” “The History of the Caracci,” as well as his inclination to give more detailed attention to clusters and genres than to single works, such as the essays “Spanish Poetry,” “Romances,” “The Early Drama,” “Poetical Imitations and Similarities,” “Extemporal Comedies,” “Diaries,” “Songs of the Trades,” “Parodies,” “Masques,” among others. While although countless works are cited, only relatively few are found in titles as subjects in themselves: among them “The Turkish Spy,” “Love and Folly,” “The Lover’s Heart,” “The Talmud,” and “Robinson Crusoe.” D’Israeli did not even neglect the fundamentals of such products of literature, as evident in such essays as “Origin of the Materials of Writing,” “Autographs,” “Minute Writing,” “Numerical Figures,” and “Literary Composition”; nor the features and mechanics of their production and dissemination, as in his essays “Early Printing” and “A Secret History of Authors Who Have Ruined Their Booksellers”. He was also interested in the elements of books, as in “Titles of Books,” “Dedications,” “Prefaces,” “Quotations,” “Indexes,” and “Errata,” as well as some of their concomitant practitioners and practices, as in “Patrons,” “Bibliomania,” “Abridgers,” “Imitators,” “Professors of Plagiarism and Obscurity,” “Of Literary Filchers,” “Literary Forgeries,” “Literary Impostures,” “Critics,” “Destruction of Books,” and “Licensers of the Press”. To the implicit historical dimension of the “literary” essays D’Israeli provided an explicit one as well, and, as was his wont, one not restricted to a particular time or country. English royalty was the primary subject. There are essays on “Charles the First,” “Duke of Buckingham,” “Edward the Fourth,” “The Death of Charles IX,” “Elizabeth and Her Parliament,” The Secret History of Charles the First, and His Queen Henrietta,” “The “Secret History of the Death of Queen Elizabeth,” “Buckingham’s Political Coquetry with the Puritans,” and “Secret History of Charles the First and His First Parliaments,” not to mention such accompanying concepts and practices as “Nobility,” “Monarchs,” “Royal Divinities,” “On Royal Promotion,” “Royal Proclamations,” “Political Religionism,” “Toleration,” and “Of Palaces Built by Ministers.” Beyond England, there are essays on “Popes,” “The Minister–The Cardinal Duke of Richelieu,” “Usurers in the Seventeenth Century,” “The Italian Historians,” “Apology for the Parisian Massacre,” “Secret History of an Elective Monarchy,” “The Sources of Secret History,” and even “Of a History of Events Which Have Not Happened”. A further dimension takes the form of a kind of wide-ranging cultural sociology which concentrates on manners and materials. “Feudal Customs,” “Spanish Etiquette,” “Female Beauty and Ornaments,” “The History of Gloves,” “Medical Music,” “Virginity,”“Modes of Salutation and Amicable Ceremonies in Various Nations,” “Fire and the Origin of Fireworks,” “Anecdotes of European Manners,” “On the Custom of Kissing Hands,” “Ancient Cookery and Cooks,” “Ancient and Modern Saturnalia,” “Drinking Customs in England,” “Introduction of Tea, Coffee, and Chocolate,” and “Psalm-Singing”. Socio-psychological touches are to be found in “Solitude,” “Anecdotes of Abstraction of Mind,” and “Cause and Pretext”. The sheer sweep of subjects may be bewildering, their arrangement somewhat scattered. Still, there can be little doubt that there is something for every one in this tastefully conceived and cultivated library in miniature. And beyond the pleasure and information of this essay or the other is the panoramic view of a charmingly curious cultural landscape. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 6, 2013

Martin Spevack

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:26.524501

as-a-lute-out-of-tune-robert-burtons-melancholy

As a Lute out of Tune Robert Burton’s Melancholy By Noga Arikha May 1, 2013 In 1621 Robert Burton first published his masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy, a vast feat of scholarship examining in encyclopaedic detail that most enigmatic of maladies. Noga Arikha explores the book, said to be the favorite of both Samuel Johnson and Keats, and places it within the context of the humoural theory so popular at the time. Robert Burton might well have loved the Internet. His Anatomy of Melancholy, whose first of six editions published during the Oxford clergyman’s lifetime appeared in 1621, is the apogee of Renaissance scholarship — at once the summa of classical learning spliced and rendered in the vernacular for the delight of its early modern audience, and a dense network of embedded quotations, a seemingly infinite set of hyperlinks. This never-ending gathering of scholarship could seem a testimony to the ultimate vanity of human knowledge, as melancholy as the endless sea of information that our screens indifferently project to our digital onlookers’ tired eyes. One would be hard-put to read the entirety of this enormous tome online, but online and public it needs to be, because it is one of the greatest works in the English language, because it is a good book to browse via a search word, and because it addresses a theme that is still dear to our late modern civilization. Melancholy is an old concept; in ancient Greek, melan means black, and hole is the word for bile. Melancholy literally means black bile: however ancient, we still know what that means. One can imagine black bile running through unpleasant states and negative emotions, from existential malaise and bitterness to common depression and despondency. Earlier, melancholy also covered madness and mania. Anyone could be afflicted — lovers, scholars, rulers. Monomaniacs were melancholics. And poets of course: melancholy at its best was a fount of inspiration and creativity. There are many famous melancholics — the author of Ecclesiastes was one, so was Hamlet (Shakespeare probably had read an earlier treatise on the subject, published in 1586 by the physician and clergyman Timothie Bright). Burton was a deeply literary man who wanted to show how the words of others had described the melancholy aspects of the human predicament. As he warns in his book-length preamble, Democritus Junior to the Reader: So that take melancholy in what sense you will, properly or improperly, in disposition or habit, for pleasure or for pain, dotage, discontent, fear, sorrow, madness, for part, or all, truly, or metaphorically, ‘tis all one. Laughter itself is madness according to Solomon, and as St. Paul hath it, Worldly sorrow brings death. The hearts of the sons of men are evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, Eccl. ix. 3. Wise men themselves are no better. Eccl. i. 18. In the multitude of wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth wisdom, increaseth sorrow, chap. ii. 17. The book is a catalogue of passions as well as a compendium of quotes and stories — not so much a medical treatise, even though there are, and must be pages on anatomy and physiology. For black bile was a medical concept, one of the four bodily humours or fluids that coursed through the organism and determined its constitution, and along with it, our appearance and character, our strengths and weaknesses, our tastes, propensities and illnesses. To talk about melancholy was to engage in and endorse humoural theory. In its terms, black bile was a “cooked” version of yellow bile, or choler. The other two humours were phlegm, and blood. Mooted by the Hippocratics in 5th-century BC Greece on the basis of the view of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles that all matter was composed of the four elements, the humoural system that developed in the West (China and India each have their own humoural systems as well) had been systematized in the 2nd century by the Roman physician Galen, who associated humours with temperaments. Black bile might be noble, in some of its manifestations. But it was at first a crass outcome of digestive processes. Burton explained: “The gall, placed in the concave of the liver, extracts choler to it: the spleen, melancholy; which is situate on the left side, over against the liver, a spongy matter, that draws this black choler to it by a secret virtue, and feeds upon it, conveying the rest to the bottom of the stomach, to stir up appetite, or else to the guts as excrement.” (I, 12,4) All humours arose in the liver out of the stomach-based concoction of so-called chyle from food, before being further refined with their spirits in the heart, then the brain. The melancholic would have a preponderance of black bile, the choleric, of yellow bile, the phlegmatic, of phlegm, the sanguine, of blood. To each of these humours was associated a corresponding element, along with its qualities: earth, cold and dry; fire, hot and dry; water, cold and humid; blood, warm and humid. In turn, these were in correspondence with the stars — one could be born under a constellation that conditioned one’s bodily constitution, astral and terrestrial bodies in close, one-way causal correspondence. And how we lived, what we ate, how much we drank, moved, studied, slept, loved; where we lived, in hot or cold or dry or humid climates; what gender one was, what age — all this influenced the humoural balance. One was born with all the humours in a certain proportion, whose constancy guaranteed psychical and physical health; any change in that proportion could signify the fall into a state of holistically conceived ill-health. Balance was all. In itself, black bile did not warrant any more attention than the other humours. But its excess bred the states catalogued in Burton’s book. As he put it, “[T]he tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues, as the chaos of melancholy doth variety of symptoms” (I-3 1-II). Melancholy brought forth a plethora of words in the Anatomy just as it had triggered authors before him to try and account for this powerful state — from the “pseudo-Aristotle” who first honoured its particular, potentially noble nature in the so-called “Problem XXX”, to Rufus of Ephesus and the 11th-century Constantinus Africanus, who translated at the Montecassino monastery near Naples the text, itself a translation of Rufus, written at the Tunisia court by the 9th-century Jewish Baghdadi physician, scholar and translator Ishâq ibn ‘Imran. Many others participated in enriching this tradition that Burton so ravenously plundered. Geographically and chronologically extended, the long lineage of humoural knowledge guaranteed its authority: humours were imagined entities that were general enough to explain everything about the interlocked body and psyche, but too general to correspond to any real bodily substances. We emitted tears, blood, mucus, saliva, sweat, urine, sperm or milk, but those were not humours per se. No one had ever seen humours on either side of skin; only their purported effects on complexion, and on bowel movement, urine colour, temperature, pulse, mood. That partly explains their hold on popular and learned imaginations alike. By the time Burton was writing, though, humoural theory, such as it had developed in the West, was in jeopardy: his book pre-dates by just seven years the publication in 1628 of William Harvey’s An Anatomical Essay Concerning the Movement of the Heart and the Blood in Animals, the Royalist physician’s revolutionary account of blood circulation, based on lectures he gave in 1616 to the College of Physicians. The humoural system was grounded in anatomical assumptions derived from Galen, who had never dissected a human being — such as that of a vascular connection between heart and liver. These assumptions had begun to be overturned in the 16th century thanks to advances in anatomy by the likes of Andreas Vesalius ; and they simply did not cohere with the notion of blood circulation via the lungs. Yet it still made perfect sense to Harvey to write that people afflicted with melancholy or mania manifested symptoms “according to their temperament or krasis, which they had from the stars and those celestial influences, variety of wits and dispositions”, and these symptoms proceeded “from the temperature itself and the organical parts, as head, liver, spleen, meseraic veins, heart, womb, stomach, etc., and especially from distemperature of spirits (which, as Hercules de Saxonia contends, are wholly immaterial), or from the four humours in those seats, whether they be hot or cold, natural, unnatural, innate or adventitious, intended or remitted, simple or mixed, their diverse mixtures and several adustions, combinations. . .”. One could not forget such a sophisticated corpus of established knowledge from one day to the next. The process that led to the demise of humours was halting. It took time, and in some ways humoural culture is still with us. We are not foreign to the notion that melancholy can be a positive as well as a nefarious force. Some years before Burton, Reverend Thomas Walkington had distinguished the two in a treatise entitled Optick Glasse of Humors, or the Touchstone of a Golden Temperature, or the Philosophers Stone to make a Golden Temper. Wherein the four Complections, Sanguine, Choleriche, Phligmaticke, Melancholicke are succinctly painted forth (1607): so melancholy could be a “precious balme of witte and policy: the enthusiasticall breath of poetry, the foyson of our phantasies, the sweete sleepe of the senses, the fountaine of sage advise and good purveiance”; but it also “causeth men to bee aliened from the nature of man, and wholly to discarde themselves from all societie, but rather heremits and olde anchorets to live in grots, caves, and other hidden celles of the earth”. Today just as in Burton’s, or indeed Galen’s day, we seek remedies for our most troubled states. We might forget how embodied are our “mental” disturbances and think it best to dope our brains with targeted pills, but in most cases and in our ordinary daily lives we know that our states of mind are deeply affected by the condition of our whole bodies, by what we eat, by how much we exercise or sleep — and by how well we are loved. Love-melancholy was an important category of melancholy, and Burton devoted a long chapter to it. It had an ambivalent reputation — bad if one leaned toward stoicism or aspired to chastity, but good if one believed that a capacity for strong passions was the mark of a fine soul that recognized beauty and goodness. It was the foundation of chivalry, the source of sonnets, the harbinger of creativity and the promise of fertility. In its long-studied negative form, it could be an illness at worst whose consequences could be devastating and called for medical treatment. That sort of love-melancholy was condemnable as blind lust, the product of painfully unrequited love, of desire unfulfilled. It was a state in which humoural flows ruled the brain, and whose “symptoms are either of body or mind; of body, paleness, leanness, dryness, etc” — the cause of extreme joys and fears, of “fire” and “ice”, in Burton’s words. It had been the reason for Dido’s suicide, and, as Burton reports, the fount of rash, mad behaviour, such as Medea’s, in whom “Reason pulls one way, burning lust another, / She sees and knows what’s good, but she doth neither”. (III-2 3) Pure reason is as unlikely to exist as a brain in a vat. We are embodied through and through, and our thought processes are not immune from our physiology. “For as the distraction of the mind, amongst other outward causes and perturbations, alters the temperature of the body, so the distraction and distemper of the body will cause a distemperature of the soul, and ‘tis hard to decide which of these two do more harm to the other”, writes Burton. “Now the chiefest causes proceed from the heart, humours, spirits: as they are purer, or impurer, so is the mind, and equally suffers, as a lute out of tune; if one string or one organ be distempered, all the rest miscarry, Corpus onustum Hesternis vitiis, animum quoque praegravat una [By yesterday’s excesses still oppressed, The body suffers not the mind to rest]”. [I-2V-I] Humoural theory did not accommodate dualism. And nor does modern psychology. Except for those who still believe in rational choice theory, we know how deeply emotional we are. Hormones and neurotransmitters are the new humours, mysteriously conditioning our emotional responses and, to an extent, our decision-making. No one understands yet how substances and actions are connected, how our newly identified, chemically mapped humours help make up our consciousness, how the mind is an instance of the body-brain. Those questions remain at the heart of Burton’s infinite book and its countless stories of human endeavours, battles, miseries, and hopes. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 1, 2013

Noga Arikha

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:27.020227

henry-morton-stanley-and-the-pygmies-of-darkest-africa

Henry Morton Stanley and the Pygmies of “Darkest Africa” By Brian Murray November 29, 2012 After returning from his disastrous mission to central Africa to rescue a German colonial governor, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley was eager to distract from accusations of brutality with his 'discovery' of African pygmies. Brian Murray explores how after Stanley's trip the African pygmy, in the form of stereotype and allegory, made its way into late Victorian society. On 28 October 1888 the Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley was entrenched deep in the unexplored Ituri rainforest of the Congo. He had been hacking his way back and forth through the jungle for months in his attempt to relieve the colonial governor Emin Pasha, whose province in the southern Sudan was under siege by a coalition of Sudanese and Arab insurgents under the command of the messianic cleric Muhammad Ahmad. Famished and exhausted, Stanley sent his East-African porters out to pillage what they could from native farms. On this occasion they brought back an unusual prize: a “couple of pygmies”. These “pygmies” were most likely one of several diminutive ethnic groups (including the Aka, Twa, Mbuti and Efé) that still inhabit the forests in the upper Congo Basin. But for Stanley these Africans did not merely represent intriguing ethnographic specimens; they were also tokens of a rich historical and mythological heritage, a literary tradition stretching back to Homer and the Old Testament.</span? Not one London editor could guess the feelings with which I regarded this manikin from the solitudes of the vast central African forest . . . That little body of his represented the oldest types of primeval man, descended from the outcasts of the earliest ages, the Ishmaels of the primitive race . . . Even as long ago as forty centuries ago they were known as pigmies, and the famous battle between them and the storks was rendered into song . . . they reigned over Darkest Africa undisputed lords; they are there yet, while countless dynasties of Egypt and Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome, have flourished for comparatively brief periods, and expired. Even though Stanley’s soliloquy is couched in racist European assumptions about the “primitive” nature of Africa and Africans, he nonetheless credits these “manikins” of the forest with an auspicious imperial history of their own. (His reference to the “Father of Poets” alludes to a mythical battle between pygmies and storks mentioned in Homer’s Iliad.) Stanley’s pygmies are venerable ancients who predate and have outlasted all the great empires of antiquity. Although Stanley and the British press would later claim that he was the first explorer to come face to face with African pygmies, this was untrue. A French Admiral, Fleuriot de Langle, photographed members of a pygmy tribe he labelled the Akoa in Gabon in 1868, and the Latvian-German traveller and botanist George Schweinfurth recorded and measured seven pygmies just north of the Ituri forest in 1870. Schweinfurth also saw these ‘Akka’ as the ancestors of the pygmies of Greek mythology and the “living embodiment of the myths of some thousand years!” Stanley’s own melodramatic account of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, In Darkest Africa, sold 150,000 copies in 1890 alone and was translated into ten European languages. There were numerous spin-offs and pirate editions in circulation on both sides of the Atlantic before Stanley had even completed the manuscript. The expedition itself, a quasi-military enterprise co-funded by the Egyptian Government and several wealthy individuals, was initially pitched as a sequel to Stanley’s famous mission to find the Scottish missionary David Livingstone in 1870. However, the “search and rescue” narrative did not go to plan on this occasion. Emin Pasha was the adopted name of Eduard Schnitzer, a German-Jewish doctor born in Silesia who had entered Ottoman service in 1865 and subsequently converted to Islam. Neither Stanley nor Emin were particularly fond of each other and the “rescue” ultimately descended into farce when Emin fell over a balcony and fractured his skull at a celebratory dinner in Zanzibar in December 1889 and Stanley was forced to return to Britain without his prize. Much to Stanley’s dismay, on his recovery Emin took up a post with the German colonial service and soon after the “rescued” governor was making his way back to his province with the intention of annexing it for Germany. Accusations that Stanley and his officers had resorted to brutality, violence and plunder were widespread in the British and American press. By Stanley’s own admission the expedition was directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of approximately one thousand individuals, mostly African soldiers, porters and sundry “belligerent natives”. Many also questioned Stanley’s wisdom in leaving the ill-tempered and mentally unstable Edward Barttelot in command of a “rear column” at Yambuya on the Aruwimi river. Stanley had commanded Major Barttelot to await the arrival of supplies and men from the Arab merchant and slave-trader Tippu-Tip (Hamid bin Muhammad el Murjebi) while his own advance column powered on to Emin’s camp on Lake Albert. However, when Stanley finally returned to Yambuya, he found that the strength of the rear column had dwindled from 271 to 132 individuals through death and desertion. The dead included two officers, Barttelot and James Sligo Jameson. Barttelot had been shot by one of his own subordinates after badly beating the African soldier’s wife in one of his frequent fits of violent rage. Jameson, an heir to the Anglo-Irish Jameson Whiskey fortune, who had paid £1000 for the privilege of joining the expedition, died of an uncontroversial fever. However, other members of the expedition suggested that the young officer had developed an unhealthy obsession with cannibalism; this pathological curiosity led him to purchase a ten-year slave girl whom he reportedly handed over to a group of local cannibals to be stabbed, dismembered, and eaten. A budding ethnographer, Jameson was said to have recorded the grizzly proceedings in a series of calmly-executed watercolours. The controversy reached its peak in December 1890 when a group of London philanthropists and humanitarians — the Aborigines Protection Society — voted to condemn the atrocities perpetrated by Stanley’s “filibustering and quixotic” expedition. The shambolic and shameful history of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition did much to discredit the notion that European explorers were engaged in a noble quest to shed the light of Christianity and civilisation upon the benighted ‘Dark Continent’. Yet during the summer of 1890 Stanley himself still received largely positive coverage in popular newspapers and magazines. His image also featured in advertisements for tents, tea, Congo Brand soap and Bovril. George Bernard Shaw would later complain that the nation had succumbed to “Stanley worship”. The explorer was even given the royal stamp of approval at the Stanley and African Exhibition — patronized by Queen Victoria and King Leopold II of Belgium — which opened on Regent’s Street in March 1890 in advance of Stanley’s return in Britain. In May, Stanley’s scheduled debriefing to the Royal Geographical Society was moved to the Royal Albert Hall to accommodate an audience of 8,000 spectators. When compared with Stanley’s previous journeys, the expedition had contributed little in the way of new geographical data. Yet mindful of controversy, Stanley was now eager to emphasise the passage through the previously unexplored Ituri rainforest and his encounter with the pygmies as the expedition’s primary contribution to geographical and ethnographic knowledge. In his book, Stanley identifies two distinct “racial types” of pygmy in the Ituri: the first is pretty, proportioned and intelligent, while the second is “fitly characteristic of the link long sought between the average modern humanity and its Darwinian progenitors, and certainly deserving of being classed as an extremely low, degraded, almost a bestial type of a human being”. In this period many races were classed as “missing links” and human sub-species by European scientists and anthropologists, and such classifications often anticipated the inevitable extinction (or extermination) of these races. Thus for Stanley and his contemporaries, colonial expansion and imperial aggression were to some extent justified and naturalised through the rhetoric of this pseudo-Darwinian racism. But although the pygmies had, for Europeans, just recently emerged from the realm of fable, in the midst of Stanley-mania they were soon re-mythologised and repackaged in all manner of ways. There were pygmy-related music hall and variety shows such as “Stanley and His African Dwarfs: A New and Unique Entertainment” in which Stanley was portrayed as side show exhibitor, leading his troop of blackface dwarf minstrels through a routine of comic sketches and musical numbers. In 1904 the traveller and big-game hunter James Harrison brought a group of six Mbuti pygmies to Britain, exhibiting these “volunteers” nightly on an eighteen-month tour of British music halls. The African pygmy also entered popular culture in a figurative guise. One radical pamphlet of 1890 alleged that the ruling Tory party were “like the black dwarfs Stanley found in the great forest of Central Africa”. All the people around them are tall and robust, but they have been made what they are by unfavourable conditions . . . Cut down the forest, let in the light, cultivate the soil, and a better race of men will take their place . . . In this opportune illustration read the history, and the end of Toryism. The pygmies proved a convenient political allegory and their anticipated extinction via natural selection became a favourite metaphor for all manner of commentators. The most famous allegorical appropriation of Stanley’s “dwarfs” appeared in the reformist manifesto In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), written by the Salvation Army-founder William Booth and the sensational journalist W.T. Stead. Booth takes Stanley’s two races of pygmy — which he labels the “human baboon” and the “handsome dwarf” — as an allegory for two distinct types of urban poor: “the vicious, lazy lout, and the toiling slave”. Booth reads the degradations of darkest England, where the honest and desperate poor were being exploited and enslaved by the “barbarians” of industrial capitalism, as equivalent to the horrors “which Stanley had found existing in the great Equatorial forest”. If there is a darkest Africa, asks the reformer, “is there not also a darkest England? Civilisation . . . can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies?” Indeed, Stanley too saw the Darwinian “struggle for existence” replicated in the heart of the imperial metropolis, where “pale, overworked, dwarfed, stoop-shouldered” individuals struggled amidst “the human tide flowing into the city over London Bridge”. In an atmosphere of such anxiety it took no great leap for H. G. Wells to imagine a future society in which humanity had evolved into two distinct species. In The Time Machine (1895) the Time Traveller explores a forest world inhabited by two dwarfish races (the effete Eloi and the bestial Morlocks), perhaps an echo of Stanley and Booth’s distinction between the “handsome dwarf” and the “human baboon”. However, these pygmies are not the degenerate progeny of some obscure African race; they are the direct descendants of nineteenth-century Londoners, and the cause of their degeneration is the modern industrial civilisation which was meant to ensure British imperial dominance. Stanley’s story of the decline and fall of the once “undisputed lords” of Africa would have set alarm bells ringing in the imperial metropolis and raised the prospect that the British empire might join “Egypt and Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome” in the litany of dynasties which “have flourished for comparatively brief periods, and expired”. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 29, 2012

rian Murra

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:27.522763

joseph-banks-portraits-of-a-placid-elephant

Joseph Banks Portraits of a Placid Elephant By Patricia Fara April 4, 2013 Patricia Fara traces the changing iconography of Joseph Banks, the English botanist who travelled on Captain Cook's first great voyage and went on to become President of the Royal Society and important patron for a whole host of significant developments in the natural sciences. Benjamin Robert Haydon, the artist who helped bring the Elgin marbles to the British Museum, was scathing about portraiture. It is, he declared in 1817, ‘one of the staple manufactures of the empire. Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonise, they carry and will ever carry trial by jury, horse-racing, and portrait-painting.’ His list of imperial products might also have included Joseph Banks (1743-1820), who is celebrated as one of Australia’s founding fathers. Although this eminent botanical collector sailed with James Cook to the South Seas and was President of London’s Royal Society for forty-two years, he was pushed into obscurity by his Victorian successors. Towards the end of the twentieth century, Antipodean historians restored Banks’s reputation by showing his crucial role in persuading the British government to invest in scientific exploration. Banks is important not for his research legacy, but because he was a canny operator who knew how to promote himself as well as making sure that money flowed into science. Despite living before the era of cheap publishing, he excelled at controlling his public image. At six feet and thirteen stone, Banks was an imposing man. James Boswell described him as ‘an elephant, quite placid and gentle, allowing you to get upon his back or play with his proboscis’, although some of his intimate friends regretted that ‘his manners are rather coarse and heavy.’ Whatever the reality, Banks made sure that influential colleagues saw him how he wanted them to. Disingenuously insisting that ‘I do not feel as if Vanity was a Prominent trèe [sic] in my character’, he adopted different guises for his portraits, negotiating with the artists about which engravers should be hired and ensuring that copies were widely distributed. Banks cannot have been happy with the earliest pictures of him that appeared shortly after his return from Australia. Part of a series parodying foppish young gentlemen, they mocked him as a Botanic Macaroni. A Macaroni, explained a gossipy journal, is ‘a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender . . . It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.’ In Figure 1, Banks sports a redundant sword and an old-fashioned wig, while the accompanying couplet demeans the value of his extensive travels. His inelegant stance, uneasily straddling the hemispheres, parallels verbal satires denigrating the naivety of his sexual activities in the South Pacific. Gossip about Banks’s encounters with Tahitian women raced round London society. However, an entry in his journal suggests that, whatever their boasts, European men did not always find conquest easy; after being offered the bed of a local queen he awoke in the morning to discover that she had stolen his trousers, leaving him to retreat shame-faced back to his fort half-naked. During the following decades, Banks manoeuvred himself into a powerful position. First he converted himself into the prominent adventurer esteemed by Samuel Johnson as ‘Banks the traveller’, and later in life became an eminent government advisor as Britain’s overseas empire expanded. Banks’s own visual propaganda helped to establish two new male role models: the scientific explorer, and the scientific administrator. Within a few months of the Macaroni caricatures, Banks had arranged for two of his flattering portraits (Figures 2 and 3) to be engraved and circulated as black-and-white versions. The American artist Benjamin West portrayed him as a romantic young explorer, recently returned from his voyage on Cook’s Endeavour, wrapped in a Pacific cloak and surrounded by exotic objects. In some ways, this is a conventional portrait, painted in a studio with a rich curtain of bark material looped back from an artificial exterior. Although intended for Banks’s family home, it contrasts strongly with the traditional Grand Tour portraits being brought back from Italy as souvenirs. West has created an international scientific traveller rather than a European tourist, replacing classical ruins with rare Pacific artefacts. Pointing to his New Zealand cloak, fringed with the finest dog-hair and made of flax — highly sought after for making canvas sails — Banks presents himself as a young imperial adventurer with a keen eye for trading opportunities. Near his left foot, an unusual Tahitian adze and the expedition’s book of botanical drawings, open to show flax, proclaim him to be a collector of human as well as natural curiosities. The other portrait from this time is by Joshua Reynolds, who depicted him as a man of action also engaged in intellectual studies: the terrestrial globe emphasizes the extent of his travels, while the pen and books signify a scholar. Half rising in welcome from his chair, Banks displays the restrained manners of a convivial, well-bred Englishman. Borrowing his technique from Rembrandt, Reynolds has sympathetically painted the shiny fur of his collar, the rich red of the sumptuous velvet jacket in the style worn by Italian travellers, and the brocaded waistcoat which stretches over a belly whose rotundity mirrors the globe’s. Banks was literally a man of the world, neither abstemiously dedicated to solitary pursuits, nor prey to the effeminate continental vogue for Macaroni thinness. Conforming to the sporting ideal being constructed, this hearty Englishman evidently enjoyed his food and wine, yet spent his days in virtuous contact with nature. The image’s visual messages are reinforced by the Latin text under Banks’s determinedly clenched left hand, a well-known polemical motto from a Horatian ode: ‘tomorrow we will again cross the immense ocean.’ During his long reign as President of the Royal Society, Banks made himself indispensable to the state and to science. Banksian iconography altered significantly in 1795, when the King awarded him the Red Ribbon of the Order of the Bath. Only a few days later, James Gillray published a cartoon lampooning Banks, the South Sea caterpillar, for his transformation into a Bath butterfly (Figure 4). Recalling the earlier pornographic satires of Banks, Gillray emphasized the corrupt sexuality and phallic qualities of this Banksian caterpillar rising from the Tahitian soil, although his prime target was the scientific community which Banks had come to represent. Formulated in the wake of the French Revolution, this caricature articulated conservative fears of the dangerous political implications of philosophical experimentation. The shell by Banks’s left shoulder is a bonnet rouge of the French revolutionaries. Parodying the language of the Society’s journal, Gillray described how this ‘New Bath Butterfly . . . first crawl’d into notice from among the Weeds & Mud on the Banks of the South Sea . . . it is notic’d and Valued Solely on account of the beautiful Red which encircles its Body, & the Shining Spot on its Breast; a Distinction which never fails to render Caterpillars valuable.’ Membership of the Order of the Bath, an honour normally reserved for diplomats and soldiers, signified immense prestige, and the red sash and star feature prominently in Thomas Phillips’s portrait of Banks (Figure 5). Here he is a solid statesman of British science, wearing decorations bestowed by the king and sitting amidst the ceremonial trappings of the Royal Society. Although it had been commissioned by a Spanish astronomer, Banks ensured that this portrait’s details conformed to his own specifications. To celebrate the picture’s purchaser, the pamphlet in the bottom centre describes an astronomical instrument. However, Banks insisted that the far more prominent paper in his hand should be the recent Bakerian Lecture by Humphry Davy, the electrical and chemical experimenter who strongly opposed Banks’s hegemonic rule at the Royal Society and who succeeded him as President. At this time of dissent amongst disparate factions, this portrait reinforced Banks’s authoritarian control over what historians now call the Banksian empire. Appropriately for a botanist, Banks is wearing a waistcoat embroidered with flowers, but he is presenting himself as Davy’s patron, the learned sponsor of research into the physical sciences. By visually uniting electrical chemistry, astronomy and botany in a single image, he symbolically asserted his all-embracing domination of the Royal Society in the face of bids to create smaller, specialized groups. Through his portraits, Banks helped transformed the stereotype of the English male traveller from the foppish aristocrat degenerating on his Grand Tour to the masculine hero risking his life for the sake of England and of science. In the 1770s, he fashioned himself as an energetic yet learned voyager, the gentlemanly participant in a characteristically English male metropolitan culture. By the time he died, he had manoeuvred the Royal Society into an influential position, and had restyled his own image as the authoritative organizer of British scientific expeditions. By persuading the government to fund international voyages, he ensured the perpetuation of this new male heroic role of scientific explorer, one articulated two years before his death by Mary Shelley. At the beginning of Frankenstein, Captain Walton reminds his sister of their childhood library, packed with exciting tales of earlier voyages, almost certainly including the exploits of Cook and Banks. Walton epitomizes the romantic heroic explorer, the Banks portrayed by Reynolds who combines physical stoicism with intellectual fortitude: ‘I voluntarily endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep; I . . . devoted my nights to the study of mathematics, the theory of medicine, and those branches of physical science from which a naval adventure might derive the greatest practical advantage’. By representing himself first as a scientific traveller and then as a statesman organizing scientific exploration, Banks promoted English imperial possession of the world in the name of the new disciplinary sciences. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 4, 2013

Patricia Fara

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:28.043840

robert-baden-powells-entomological-intrigues

Robert Baden-Powell’s Entomological Intrigues By Mark David Kaufman July 10, 2013 In 1915 Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the worldwide Scouts movement, published his DIY guide to espionage, My Adventures as a Spy. Mark Kaufman explores how the book's ideas to utilise such natural objects as butterflies, moths and leaves, worked to mythologize British resourcefulness and promote a certain 'weaponization of the pastoral'. Upon the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the fifty-seven-year-old Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Baden-Powell, K.C.B., contacted Lord Kitchener and offered to come out of retirement to serve Britain in its hour of need. The War Secretary, however, believed that the veteran officer had a far more crucial part to play on the home front, training and mobilizing the organization he had founded six years earlier and that now constituted an army in itself: the Scouting Movement. Under the auspices of their beloved Chief Scout, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides were soon working in a variety of capacities and taking up key positions left vacant by soldiers and nurses who had gone to the front lines. In the wake of air-raids, while the Zeppelins still hummed in the distance, Scouts dug survivors out of the London rubble, tended to the wounded, and pedaled through the streets blowing the “All Clear” on their bugles. Compulsorily cheerful, 20,000 Sea Scouts patrolled the east and south shorelines in the absence of the Coastguards, watching for mines and practicing signals to be used at the first sign of the invading Hun—pausing only to observe the mating rituals of seahorses, help an elderly matron hang her washing, or sing a rousing rendition of Play up! Play up! And Play the Game! More furtively, Scouts kept vigil over railways, bridges, and telegraph lines; others kept tabs on local German immigrants, who (their leader was convinced) were inevitably plotting sabotage. All the while, Baden-Powell, with his signature cane and campaign hat, visited parade grounds throughout the Allied bloc, reviewing formations of eager young Wolf Cubs like Wellington on the eve of Waterloo. In addition to marshaling this children’s crusade, Baden-Powell’s other wartime duty was to maintain his self-created legend through publications and appearances. Having commanded and held the British garrison during the seven-month Siege of Mafeking from October 1899 to May 1900, Baden-Powell had returned from the Boer War a national hero, a symbol of ingenuity-in-crisis and a living embodiment of that most mystical of English qualities: pluck. But even before his apotheosis, the young officer had spent the last quarter of the nineteenth century pursuing a romantic persona, taking part in a bewildering array of military engagements and intelligence operations throughout India, Africa, and the Mediterranean. A prolific writer, talented artist, and sport-enthusiast, Baden-Powell recorded and illustrated his experiences in eminently readable books with eclectic titles like Reconnaissance and Scouting (1884), Pigsticking or Hoghunting (1889), The Downfall of Prempeh (1896), and Sport in War (1900). After his return to England, the officer discovered that lads of all ages were enthusiastically devouring his army scouting manuals, and he surmised that the time was ripe for a youth movement designed to revitalize the ailing empire. In 1908, Baden-Powell published the first edition of Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship, a volume whose overall sales would soon rival both Shakespeare and the King James Bible. As its title suggests, Scouting for Boys was not only a practical guide to tracking deer and dressing wounds, but a compendium of “civilised” ideals drawn from a variety of historical and literary sources. Reinscribing his own initials as a code of conduct, the hero of Mafeking enjoined his Scouts to “Be Prepared” for any contingency and to uphold the law of chivalry passed down (quite literally) from the Knights of the Roundtable. In an era of modernization and increasing political turmoil, this message had tremendous appeal; by 1910, the movement boasted 100,000 adherents in Britain, as well as offshoots in North America, Europe, and elsewhere. Baden-Powell was an international celebrity. The ideological and propagandic valence of Baden-Powell’s project reached its zenith during the Great War, and his writings at the time worked to mythologize British resourcefulness. In 1915, he published My Adventures as a Spy, an account of his varied experiences in the field of military intelligence, primarily in the Mediterranean region between 1890 and 1895 (he gives few dates and is often vague about locations). Half memoir, half manual, this slim, loosely-organized volume reinforces the crucial correspondence between “scouting” and “spying” that Baden-Powell established in his earlier handbook, thereby underscoring for a wartime audience that scouting was not only defensive but potentially offensive, a means of gathering intelligence and sabotaging the enemy’s operations. Essentially writing as an apologist for the spy, whom he believed was unjustly maligned in the popular culture of the time, the Chief Scout interlaces personal anecdotes with advice and illustrations concerning proper methods of disguise, surveillance, and encryption. Highlighting the training-potential of play-acting and games like “Hide-and-Seek,” the author yarns about how he successfully put these skills to the test, duping foreign officials from North Africa to the Balkan Peninsula. My Adventures as a Spy is possibly Baden-Powell’s most quixotic work — which is saying quite a lot. Most curiously, the former military intelligence officer includes a section titled “The Value of Being Stupid,” in which he contends that the best way to navigate enemy territory unnoticed (in peace time, presumably) would be to play the daffy Briton — specifically, to pose as an eccentric artist or naturalist out for a jaunt with brushes and easel, seemingly oblivious to the strategic military base that just happens to be blocking his view of the coastline. For Baden-Powell, the entomologist is a particularly useful cover, for who would suspect a scholarly gentleman sketching the antennae of turf ants to be secretly observing the construction of a hydroelectric dam? While Scouting for Boys limits its discussion of insects to their being tasty treats and examples of good citizenship — bees, the Chief Scout remarks, “are quite a model community, for they respect their Queen and kill their unemployed” — My Adventures as a Spy takes the bug to a whole new level, graphically illustrating that entomological drawings themselves may be used to conceal maps and diagrams of enemy fortifications. “Once I went ‘butterfly hunting’ in Dalmatia,” Baden-Powell recalls; tasked with investigating a series of mountain-top batteries, the spy pretended to be one of those “harmless lunatics” out for a bit of amateur lepidoptery: ※※Indexed under…Concealmentof messages I went armed with most effective weapons for the purpose, which have served me well in many a similar campaign. I took a sketch-book, in which were numerous pictures—some finished, others only partly done—of butterflies of every degree and rank, from a ‘Red Admiral’ to a ‘Painted Lady.’ Carrying this book and a colour-box and a butterfly net in my hand, I was above all suspicion to anyone who met me on the lonely mountain side, even in the neighbourhood of the forts. Upon inspecting the sketch-book, foreign officials failed “to notice that the delicately drawn veins of the wings were exact representations, in plan, of their own fort, and that the spots on the wings denoted the number and position of guns and their different calibres.” Butterflies were only one of Baden-Powell’s wingèd agents; even the most mundane of moths could veil the blueprint of an enemy compound. In addition to the insects themselves, the author advocates using sketches of leaves to mask the profiles of hilltop fortresses. Reading My Adventures as a Spy, one wonders how hard Baden-Powell really needed to work at playing the dotty Englishman on these Balkan excursions. His outlandish feats of intelligence gathering — if they happened at all — most likely succeeded through a felicitous combination of blind luck and the incompetence of local officials. Indeed, Baden-Powell’s commentators have consistently questioned the authenticity of his entomological intrigues, usually ascribing them to the great man’s need to cultivate his own greatness, particularly at a time of national crisis. As his biographer, Tim Jeal, has pointed out, Baden-Powell’s prolific diaries from his military years bear very little evidence in support of his claims, and what evidence there is may have been added at a later date — the Chief Scout was known to “amend” his diaries in anticipation of biographical enquiries. If spying, as Baden-Powell admits, “teaches one to trust no one,” that same aura of suspicion inevitably redounds to the hero himself. However, we need not concern ourselves with the truth of these spy yarns to see their cultural significance in an era of social and political change. Within that heady alchemy of imperialism, individualism, social Darwinism, and romantic fantasy that also characterizes Scouting for Boys, we find what is arguably the constitutive thesis of the early Scouting Movement and one of Baden-Powell’s chief preoccupations: the paradoxical notion that democratic equality must be achieved through the dissemination and cultivation of upper-class values. It is no mistake that the writer refers to spies as a “much abused gentry”; for Baden-Powell, the honorable secret agent correlates with the gentleman of leisure, who — like John Buchan’s contemporaneous “clubland” heroes — utilizes his superior breeding and public-school education in the service of King and Country. At one point, Baden-Powell observes that the German espionage network, though extensive, is lacking in “men of a higher education and social position,” and so doomed to misadventure and treachery. While he grants that there are such things as “traitor spies,” the officer assures his readers that “we are not much troubled with them in England.” “Fortunately,” he explains, “the Briton is not as a rule of a corruptible character.” Such a statement may strike us as laughably naïve in our more cynical, post-Cambridge-Spy-Ring era— Malcolm Muggeridge once referred to Kim Philby as a “boy-scout who lost his way” — but this unwavering faith in the integrity of the elite persisted throughout the first decades of the twentieth century and clearly informs the writer’s valorization of the spy. From this class-oriented perspective, Baden-Powell’s privileging of genteel pursuits as covers for espionage— butterfly-collecting, landscape-painting, play-acting, fly-fishing, partridge-shooting, and so on — comes to serve a function that is not only political, but strangely elegiac. Invariably referring to spying as a “sport,” “art,” or “game,” the Chief Scout reveals that these aristocratic activities “spent largely in enjoyment” are, in fact, the keys to a desperate strategy: the weaponization of the pastoral. In contrast to the horrors of modern warfare, the barbed wire and poison gas that so appalled him on his visits to the front, Baden-Powell offers what seems to us now an idyllic Nabokovian childhood as a training regime for a more “civilised” conflict that never truly existed, save in his own recollections and in the daydreams of his faithful Scouts. In a sense, My Adventures as a Spy is a last-ditch effort to resuscitate — or perhaps to preserve, like a butterfly pinned under glass — a mortally wounded world. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 10, 2013

Mark David Kaufman

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:28.433557

the-last-great-explorer-william-f-warren-and-the-search-for-eden

The Last Great Explorer William F. Warren and the Search for Eden By Brook Wilensky-Lanford September 6, 2012 Of all the attempts throughout history to geographically locate the Garden of Eden one of the most compelling was that set out by minister and president of Boston University, William F. Warren. Brook Wilensky-Lanford looks at the ideas of the man who, in his book Paradise Found, proposed the home of all humanity to be at the North Pole. The quest to find the Garden of Eden sounds like an occupation that should have fallen by the wayside well before the nineteenth century. No longer did the fanciful medieval geographies of Prester John, or Columbus, allow for the existence of an exotic, unspoiled earthly paradise. This was a newer, wiser age. We had conquered the wild regions of the world. And Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859, was slowly proving that man and, say, the birds of the air, were not created all at once in a single spot on the globe. Darwin himself dismissed the search for a geographical point of origins in his 1871 Descent of Man. He allowed that: “It is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.” But, he declared, there was also a large ape that roamed Europe not so long ago, and anyway the earth is old enough for primate species to have migrated all the way around it by now. So, “It is useless to speculate on this subject.” Victoria Woodhull, feminist radical and free-love advocate, was less diplomatic in her epic speech “The Garden of Eden,” which she delivered frequently in the 1870s. Eden on Earth was nonsense: “Any school boy of twelve years of age who should read the description of this garden and not discover that it has no geographical significance whatever, ought to be reprimanded for his stupidity.” (Perhaps she was referring to the missionary-explorer David Livingstone, who had declared, while mad with malaria in 1871, that paradise existed at the source of the Nile, which he judged to be in the Lake Bangweulu region of Zambia.) Livingstone was not the only one still looking for Eden. This brave new world was turning time-honored beliefs upside down. Evolution was suggesting that man had ascended over time from our less-intelligent, animalistic primate origins. But Christianity had been insisting for centuries that man had descended, through original sin, from near-divine heights in the Garden of Eden to the miserable, depraved society of the late nineteenth century. What was a modern, faithful person to believe? Enter William Fairfield Warren, distinguished Methodist minister and educator. As the president of Boston University, he knew science was going to define the future. But he was unwilling to give up his theology to the new discipline. How to knit the two perspectives together? Counter-intuitively, Warren looked to Eden. He set about translating the Bible into science: Eden was “the one spot on earth where the biological conditions are the most favorable.” Genesis says Eden contains “every tree that is pleasant to the eye or good for food”; Warren posited “flora and fauna of almost unimagined vigor and luxuriousness.” He took note of a newly discovered fact: millions of years ago, the earth had been much warmer. He followed the uncovering of fantastic creatures at once familiar and mythical, like the woolly mammoth, the dinosaur, and the giant sequoia. He knew there was still one blank spot on the world map, a place where nobody had been. And he arrived at the inevitable conclusion: The Garden of Eden is at the North Pole. It made sense, in a way. Both Eden and the Pole had frustratingly resisted attempts to discover and claim them, despite centuries of dangerous, expensive expeditions. Warren published this theory in 1881 as Paradise Found, The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole. The tome positively reeked with academic authority. There were long passages in French, German, and ancient Greek in the footnotes. He drew on his specialty, comparative mythology, which he described as “the science of the oldest traditional beliefs and memories of mankind.” He knew the great epic folklore of the Hindus, the Celts, the Chinese, the Persians. In the nineteenth century, this was a rare, esoteric body of knowledge, full of metaphorical echoes of Bible stories, objective “evidence” of Christian facts. The index of “authors referred to or quoted” in Paradise Found lists 580 sources — for 495 pages of text. Right next to Darwin there’s Ignatius Donnelly, who claimed that the lost continent of Atlantis was real; it was destroyed by the near-collision of the earth with a comet. His 1882 book Atlantis was wildly popular. (Donnelly had another theory — that Shakespeare’s plays might actually be written by Francis Bacon — but at the time that was considered too ridiculous to be taken seriously.) Some reviewers felt that Warren’s wanton citation did his argument no favors, but apparently many readers weren’t bothered. The second printing of Paradise Found, released only months after the first, was peppered with testimonials. Warren wrote proudly of a “plain unschooled Bible student”, Mr Alexander Skelton, a machinist and blacksmith of Paterson, New Jersey, who had independently arrived at his own “remarkably comprehensive and cogent” argument for a North Pole Eden. Warren bragged that one Professor Heer, a haughty Swiss paleontologist, claimed that Warren was plagiarizing him. He also published a testimonial from the British archaeologist, and faithful Anglican, Archibald Henry Sayce: “Provisionally, I may say that your view seems to me eminently reasonable . . .” (No matter that Sayce was actually referring to an earlier work of Warren’s, about the cosmology of Homer’s Iliad.) Warren’s theory was “rapidly superseding every earlier hypothesis” on both sides of the Atlantic— even if Warren did say so himself. So it was a matter of confounding frustration for him that other Eden theories continued to appear. A German archaeologist, Moritz Engel of Leipzig, had the gall to publish The Solution To the Paradise Question simultaneously with Paradise Found. Engel’s Eden was an oasis in the desert outside of Damascus. His four rivers were flood torrents that disappear in the dry season, come May or June. Warren fought back: Engel’s Eden was ugly. It was as if Mr. Engel had never even read Genesis, with its picture of abundance and plenty! It was also narrow-minded, as if he never even noticed that there were “myths of the Happy Garden” found in dozens of other ancient traditions! Worst of all, Engel’s Eden was unscientific, making no effort to incorporate “the facts and theories of ethnologists and zoologists as to the beginnings of human life . . . . The time for studies of such narrowness as this is past.” Warren’s insistence that the North Pole Eden was the overriding, authoritative account was sincere. But it may have been a little naïve, given the secret that Warren himself revealed on the very last page of his book: he didn’t actually think his paradise could be found. He writes, mournfully: “Long-lost Eden is found, but its gates are barred against us. Now, as at the beginning of our exile, a sword turns every way to keep the Way of the Tree of Life . . .” Arriving at Polar Eden, we could do nothing “but hurriedly kneel amid a frozen desolation and, dumb with a nameless awe, let fall a few hot tears above the buried and desolated hearthstone of Humanity’s earliest and loveliest home.” The only way to get back to Eden was in death, if we accept the sacrifice of Christ. Follow Jesus in life, and in death you can walk right past the cherubim with their flaming swords. And just like that, despite his best efforts to be the last word on Eden, Warren had inadvertently opened the door for a whole new generation of Eden-seekers. They began to pop up almost immediately, and many even cited Warren as authoritative evidence for their own claims, just as Warren had done with his 580 sources. It started with Warren’s own colleagues in the Methodist church. Reverend E. D. Ledyard announced to an audience of 5,000 at a retreat in upstate New York that Eden was rather closer to home. “In Chautauqua we see one place where Edenic privileges have been restored. Christ is the central figure here. Through the second Adam paradise is being regained.” In 1890, a three-part editorial in the San Jose, California evening paper entitled “Garden of Eden: Its Position on the Globe Has Been Definitely Located” explained that California’s Santa Clara Valley had all the characteristics of an Eden—pristine state, perfect climate, and the giant sequoia. If Warren was so enthused about the sequoia, the writer notes, why didn’t he choose California? “In coming so near the truth it seems strange that the able scientific writer did not receive the true light as to the location of the original home of man.” Warren can’t have been happy to find his work praised by Wyoming novelist Willis George Emerson, in the preface to his 1908 science fiction novel The Smoky God. The book claimed to be the true account of a Norwegian fisherman who in 1829 had fallen through a hole at the North Pole into the interior of the Hollow Earth — where the Garden of Eden is reachable by monorail. “In his carefully prepared volume, Mr. Warren almost stubbed his toe against the real truth, but missed it seemingly by only a hair’s breadth.” Dr. George C. Allen, a Boston University philologist, took his colleague Warren’s word for it that Eden was at the North Pole. But he made one important modification. In 1921, he claimed that the North Pole moves entirely around the world every 25,000 years, so “careful mathematical computations bring the original paradise where Ohio now is.” Warren himself, who died in 1929 at the age of 96, remained utterly, evangelically convinced of his original theory’s veracity. The North Pole Eden “has shown itself the supreme and inevitable generalization from all the facts of modern knowledge respecting man and the world. It has harmonized the oldest traditions of religion and the latest achievements of science . . .” But a dead Eden and the promise of a more perfect afterlife did not satisfy the same kind of itch for a living paradise — an itch that had turned out to be peculiarly modern after all. Invisible paradise after death was too remote to be believed. And so a surprising number of twentieth-century thinkers continued to try to bring Eden down to earth. Reverend Landon West, an Anabaptist minister in Ohio, insisted in 1901 that the giant earthwork known as the Serpent Mound, outside Chillicothe, marked the site of man’s first transgression. Hong Kong Christian revolutionary Tse Tsan Tai believed that placing Eden in Outer Mongolia could help bring about an end to World War I. Libertarian lawyer Elvy Edison Callaway used numerology to prove that God had made man in the Florida Panhandle; in 1956 he opened a park for all to visit. And like William Warren, each of these seekers were working to synthesize their time-honored religious beliefs with the requirements of modern science. That’s a quest that continues to this day. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 6, 2012

rook Wilensky-Lanford

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:29.085318

truth-beauty-and-volapuk

Trüth, Beaüty, and Volapük By Arika Okrent October 17, 2012 Arika Okrent explores the rise and fall of Volapük - a universal language created in the late 19th century by a German priest called Johann Schleyer. Johann Schleyer was a German priest whose irrational passion for umlauts may have been his undoing. During one sleepless night in 1879, he felt a Divine presence telling him to create a universal language. The result was Volapük. It was designed to be easy to learn, with a system of simple roots derived from European languages, and regular affixes which attached to the roots to make new words. Volapük was the first invented language to gain widespread success. By the end of the 1880s there were more than 200 Volapük societies and clubs around the world and 25 Volapük journals. Over 1500 diplomas in Volapük had been awarded. In 1889, when the third international Volapük congress was held in Paris, the proceedings were entirely in Volapük. Everyone had at least heard of it. President Grover Cleveland’s wife even named her dog Volapük. Though Schleyer was German, a large part of the Volapük vocabulary was based on English. “Volapük” was a compound formed from two roots, vol (from “world”) and pük (from “speak”). However, it was often hard to spot the source of a Volapük word because of the way Schleyer had set up the sound system of the language. “Paper” was pöp, “beer” bil, “proof” blöf and “love” löf. He had rational reasons for most of the phonological choices he made. For simplicity, he tried to limit all word roots to one syllable. He avoided the ‘r’ sound, “for the sake of children and old people, also for some Asiatic nations.” The umlauts, however, were there for löf. “A language without umlauts,” he wrote, “sounds monotonous, harsh, and boring.” He decried the “endlessly gloomy u and o,” the “broad a” and the “sharp i” of umlautless languages. Though many members of the growing Volapük community may have agreed with his aesthetic judgment, many others thought that for Volapük to have a serious chance at being a world language, the umlauts had to go. Indeed, in the United States especially, those umlauts added a threatening and/or ridiculous air of foreignness to the language. Much fun was had at the expense of Volapük on account of those umlauts in local papers such as the Milkaukee Sentinel: A charming young student of GrükOnce tried to acquire Volapük But it sounded so bad That her friends called her mad,And she quit it in less than a wük. By 1890 the Volapük movement was falling apart due to arguments about umlauts and other reforms. Schleyer left the Volapük Academy and formed his own academy of loyalists. Other Volapükists created their own versions of the language — Nal Bino, Balta, Bopal, Spelin, Dil, Orba — all of which immediately fell into the obscurity that soon swallowed Volapük itself. Meanwhile Esperanto, another language that had been rapidly growing since its introduction in 1887, was scooping up all the new recruits to the universal language idea. Esperanto had no umlauts, nor problems with embracing ‘r’. Its roots, though less based in English, were instantly recognizable. “World” was mondo and “to speak” paroli. “Paper” was papero, “beer” biero, “proof” pruvo, and “love” amo. Schleyer decried Esperanto as “an ugly-sounding hodgepodge.” He criticized its use of “unnecessary” and “difficult to pronounce” sounds like “sh“ and “ch.” He scoffed at it for allowing dipthongs (“Ugly!”), “harsh sound combinations,” and the “rattling, hard, bony ‘r’”. Also, it had no umlauts. According to Schleyer, if you compared Esperanto to Volapük it was clear that one “was created by a Pole” (the Bialystok-born Ludovic Zamenhof), and the other by “a music connoisseur, composer, and poet.” Esperanto went on to become the most successful invented language of all time, but it too suffered from criticism, infighting, and its own schism. In 1907 a group of Esperantists backed a reform project called Ido, which did away with some of the awkward elements of Esperanto. They changed affixation rules that resulted in phrases like belajn semajnojn (beautiful weeks) so that they would instead produce bela semani. They got rid of the accented characters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, and ŝ, and replaced some of the challenging root words: pilko (ball) became balon and ŝtrumpo (stocking, pronounced shtrumpo) became kalzo. But Ido died out and Esperanto marched on through to the current day without making the suggested changes. Today, Esperantists (some tens of thousands of them) are still happily enjoying belajn semajnojn at the parko, kicking around a pilko in their sandaloj and ŝtrumpoj. The little infelicities turned out not to matter all that much to the survival of the language. Every language has its lumpy bits, and beauty is in the ear of the beholder. You like potato; I like potahto, and Schleyer preferred pötet. It wasn’t really the umlauts that killed Volapük, but a combination of factors, the most important probably being that the chances of any artificial language gaining a following are slim to none. There were hundreds of invented languages that came before Volapük and hundreds that came after, and almost no one has heard of any of them. Esperanto is the rare exception, but its success (relative as it is) has less to do with its linguistic features than with the luck of timing and circumstances. Volapük didn’t die out completely. It has a bit of life today; there are a few online lessons and discussion boards. There is even a Volapük Wikipedia with over 100,000 articles. And its name lives on in the Danish expression det er det rene volapyk — “It’s pure Volapük,” or, in other words “It’s Greek to me.” The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 17, 2012

Arika Okrent

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:29.619570

athanasius-underground

Athanasius, Underground By John Glassie November 1, 2012 With his enormous range of scholarly pursuits the 17th-century polymath Athanasius Kircher has been hailed as the last Renaissance man and "the master of hundred arts". John Glassie looks at one of Kircher's great masterworks Mundus Subterraneus and how it was inspired by a subterranean adventure Kircher himself made into the bowl of Vesuvius. Just before Robert Hooke’s rightly famous microscopic observations of everything from the “Edges of Rasors” to “Vine mites” appeared in Micrographia in 1665, the insatiably curious and incredibly prolific Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher published what is in many ways a more spectacular work. Mundus Subterraneus (Underground World), a two-volume tome of atlas-like dimensions, was intended to lay out “before the eyes of the curious reader all that is rare, exotic, and portentous contained in the fecund womb of Nature.” There is an “idea of the earthly sphere that exists in the divine mind,” Kircher proclaimed, and in this book, one of more than thirty on almost as many subjects that he published during his lifetime, he tried to prove that he had grasped it. As a French writer put it some years later, “it would take a whole journal to indicate everything remarkable in this work.” There were extended treatments on the spontaneous generation of living animals from non-living matter, the unethical means by which alchemists pretended to change base metals into gold, and the apparent tricks of nature we now recognize as fossils. The book included detailed charts of “secret” oceanic motions, or currents, among the first ever published. The author’s more or less correct explanation of how igneous rock is formed was also arguably the first in print. According to one modern scholar, Kircher “understood erosion,” and his entries “on the quality and use of sand” and his “investigations into the tending of fields” had their practical use. Mundus Subterraneus identified the location of the legendary lost island of Atlantis (something that modern science hasn’t been able to accomplish) as well as the source of the Nile: it started in the “Mountains of the Moon,” then ran northward through “Guix,” “Sorgola,” and “Alata” and on into “Bagamidi” before reaching Ethiopia and Egypt. Kircher offered a lengthy discussion of people who lived in caves (their societies and their economy). He reported on the remains of giants (also mainly cave dwellers) found in the ground. And he went into detail on the kinds of lower animals who belong to the lower world (including dragons). In short, Mundus Subterraneus covered almost every subject that might relate to the realm of earth, as well as many that wouldn’t seem to, such as the sun and “its special properties, by which it flows into the earthly world” and the “nature of the lunar body and its effects.” These correspondences and influences were nothing new, though perhaps only the always-inclusive Athanasius Kircher would choose to publish a series of moon maps in a book about the world below. All these other subjects notwithstanding, it was Kircher’s theory about the interior of the earth that captured, or at least deserved, the most attention. As he explained, “the whole Earth is not solid but everywhere gaping, and hollowed with empty rooms and spaces, and hidden burrows.” Deep down, it holds many great oceans and fires, interconnected by a system of passageways that reached all the way to its core. In his view, volcanoes, however awful and awe-inspiring, “are nothing but the vent-holes, or breath-pipes of Nature,” and earthquakes are merely the “proper effects of subterrestrial cumbustions” that are sure to go on constantly. The “prodigious volcanoes and fire-vomiting mountains visible in the external surface of the earth do sufficiently demonstrate it to be full of invisible and underground fires,” he wrote. “For wherever there is a volcano, there also is a conservatory or storehouse of fire under it . . . . And these fires argue for deeper treasuries and storehouses of fire, in the very heart and inward bowels of the Earth.” According to Kircher, “the fire and water sweetly conspire together in mutual service.” The tides, caused by the nitrous effluvia of the moon, push “an immense bulk of water” through “hidden and occult passages at the bottom of the Ocean” and thrust it “forcibly into the intimate bowels of the Earth.” The resulting winds “excite and stir up” and otherwise feed the subterraneous fire like a huge bellows. The seas, which would stagnate and freeze without the fires, keep the fires from getting out of hand, preventing “unlimited eruptions,” which would “soon turn all to ruins.” The “secret make-up of the mountains” is that they are hollow and serve as reservoirs. Hot baths, hot springs, and fountains are produced where underground water passageways come near or interconnect with the fire channels. More than once, Kircher compares the movement of the earth’s water to the circulation of the blood in the body as described by William Harvey. The water of the oceans follows its “secret motions” up and around the globe toward the North Pole. Somewhere off the coast of Norway (the actual site of a major whirlpool system called the Moskenstraumen), he declared, is a giant maelstrom through which the water enters the earth — as if passing through a great drain — and runs through it, cooling it down, providing it with nutriments in particulate form before being eliminated through a nether opening at the South Pole. Sometimes the analogies referred more to the continuing process of the digestive system than the cycling of blood, but no matter: “You see therefore the manner and way of the Circulation of Nature.” Kircher didn’t just (or didn’t entirely) make up his ideas about the interior of the earth. He’d first “learned the great secrets of Nature,” as he put it, almost thirty before, under circumstances of “great danger.” Kircher was about thirty five years old, and had been based at the flagship Jesuit college in Rome for about three of four years — attempting to decipher the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians — when in 1637 he was assigned to accompany a young German prince on an extended visit to Malta. If he was initially upset about being dragged away with an immature prince to some rocks in the middle of the Mediterranean, his curiosity quickly kicked in. He made magnetic and astronomical readings, and studied geological formations. There were four-hundred-foot cliffs, natural arches, and a place where the tides had carved human-looking shapes into the earth. He explored Malta’s megalithic temples, catacombs, and grottoes, and was especially fascinated by its inland seas and underground passageways: how far down did they go? After about a year, Kircher was finally allowed to return to Rome, but he took his time getting there and lingered in Sicily for a long while. “I found such a Theater of Nature, displaying herself in such a wonderful variety of things, as I had with so many desires wished for,” he wrote later. “Whatever thing occurs in the whole body of the Earth that is wonderful, rare, unusual, and worthy of admiration, I found contracted here.” He was especially intent on exploring Sicily’s outcroppings, cliffs, and volcanoes. And he wanted to look into stories about a type of fish that lived in the Straits of Messina, the body of water that flows between Sicily and Calabria on the Italian mainland. The fish was supposed to be susceptible to a certain kind of song “by which,” Kircher wrote, “mariners are wont to allure it to follow their vessels.” But those plans had to be put aside because of the earthquakes that devastated much of Calabria in the spring of 1638. Kircher recalled that the earthquake began as he and some others crossed the straits in a boat. The sea was “raging beyond what is usual” and began “stirring up huge whirlpools.” The island volcano of Stromboli was “throwing up huge billows of smoke,” and there was “a certain subterranean lowing, if you will, which we were reckoning to be the cracking of the earth and which seemed to conspire with the odor of sulfur to insinuate the complete, fatal and funereal destruction of Calabria and Sicily.” Despite a “cracking racket” and a “noisome odor,” and the fact that the “sea itself was boiling,” Kircher and his party made it across to the mainland side. But soon enough came “a subterranean racket and din, similar to chariots driven at top speed.” The earth “leapt up from below with so forceful a motion that I, no longer able to stand on my feet, was laid low, suddenly dashed down with face flat on the ground.” Kircher experienced “the intolerable frenzy of the earth,” and at one point even the feeling of his soul being “loosened from its corporeal fetters,” but survived to witness the resulting devastation. Through subsequent days of walking, his group “came upon nothing but cadavers of cities and the horrific ruins of castles,” he remembered. “Considering the men straggling through open fields as if extinguished for their fear, you would have said that at that very moment the day of final judgment was looming.” Kircher’s firsthand experience of this earthquake, which killed something like ten thousand people, might have put him off his investigations into the “miracles of subterraneous nature.” But these horrible occurrences had also presented him with an opportunity for study. “After having diligently searched out the incredible power of Nature working in subterraneous burrows and passages,” he wrote, “I had a great desire to know whether Vesuvius also had not some secret commerce and correspondence with Stromboli and Aetna.” There was only one way, in his view, to find out. Vesuvius at that time was merely smoking. But its first major eruption in centuries had occurred seven years earlier, in 1631. Kircher hired “an honest country-man, for a true and skillful companion,” and the two began hiking their way up to the forty-two-hundred-foot summit at midnight. (Perhaps the reason for leaving at that hour was to be able to see in the dark anything that might be molten. Or maybe the idea was to allow for a full day of exploration once they got there.) The way was “difficult, rough, uneven, and steep.” When they finally reached the top, Kircher looked down into the crater. “I thought I beheld the habitation of Hell,” he wrote, “wherein nothing seemed to be much wanting besides the horrid fantasms and apparitions of Devils.” He heard “horrible bellowings and roarings” and there was “an unexpressible stink.” The smoke and fire and stench “continually belch’d forth out of eleven several places, and made me in like manner belch, and as it were, vomit back again, at it.” When the morning light came, Kircher recalled, “I chose a safe and secure place to set my feet sure upon, which was a huge Rock, of a plain surface, to which there lay open an avenue, by a descent of the mountain very far . . . . And so I went down unto it.” The inside of the volcano was, “all up and down everywhere, cragged and broken.” But there was no gradual decline; the volcano’s chamber was “made hollow directly and straight.” The bottom was “boiling with an everlasting gushing forth, and streamings of smoke and flames, and employed in decocting Sulphur, Bitumen and the melting and burning of other kinds of Minerals.” Because the vapors and gases “know not how to be contained” within the molten matter, they did so “scatter the burden that lay upon them, with such great force and violence, accompanied with horrible cracklings and noises, that the mountain seemed to be tossed with an earthquake or trembling.” Those spewings caused “the softer parts of the Mountain,” made of, Kircher suggests, ashes, cinders, rains, and “the refuse of minerals,” to be shaken to pieces and loosened; they fell “like Hills, into the bottom of the Hellish gulph.” And that made the kind of sound that even “the stoutest and most undaunted heart would scarce venture to suffer.” It was within this hollow mountain that Kircher really began to develop the theories he set down so many years later in Mundus Subterraneus, to envision what it might be like even deeper within the earth, and how the mountains and fires and rivers and oceans might somehow all be connected. Calculating the significance of that moment in the history of science is a lot harder than mentioning what appear to be two direct influences on culture: The creation of Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome was certainly informed by Kircher’s ideas about the interior structure of the earth as well as his ideas about the mystical nature of the universe (that’s another story). And the spirited, bumbling polymath-dreamer of Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth, who leads a subterranean descent through an old volcanic crater, certainly seems to be based on Kircher himself. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

November 1, 2012

John Glassie

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:29.976393

the-erotic-dreams-of-emanuel-swedenborg

The Erotic Dreams of Emanuel Swedenborg By Richard Lines January 24, 2013 During the time of his "spiritual awakening" in 1744 the scientist and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg kept a dream diary. Richard Lines looks at how, among the heavenly visions, there were also erotic dreams, the significance of which has been long overlooked. Among the many works of the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist, philosopher, religious teacher and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) his private Drömbok (variously translated into English as Journal of Dreams or Dream Diary) has attracted and continues to attract special attention. Unlike the works he published in his lifetime, or intended to publish, which were all written in Latin, the Journal of Dreams was, in the words of a present-day Swedish Swedenborg scholar, written in ‘rather crude but expressive Swedish’ (Jonsson, 16). It has been described as a ‘difficult and obscure notebook’ (Jonsson, 130) which ‘reflects a profound psychical crisis’ (Jonsson, 150). The Journal covers a period from July 1743 until October 1744, a time when Swedenborg was going through a transition from life as a scientist and mining engineer to one as a ‘revelator’ and seer. As he was to put it himself: I for my part. . . had never expected to come into that state in which I am now; but the Lord selected me for this, and for revealing the spiritual meaning of Scripture, which he had promised in the Prophets and in the Book of Revelation. My purpose previously had been to explore nature, chemistry, the science of mining, and anatomy, etc’ (Robsahm, 6). It begins as a factual travel diary, describing how he leaves Sweden by the port of Ystad (famous today as the home base of the fictional detective Kurt Wallander), crossing the Baltic to Stralsund and then journeying through Hamburg and Bremen to the northern provinces of the Netherlands (then known as the United Provinces), Groningen and Friesland, where the diary breaks off abruptly on his arrival at the town of Harlingen in the latter province. After some undated fragments it resumes at the end of March 1744. A week or so later during Easter weekend, in what is probably the most significant part of the Journal, Swedenborg describes in detail a vision of Christ he had while staying in Delft (just three miles from The Hague). In late May Swedenborg travelled on to London where he became involved for a while with the congregation of the Moravian Church in Fetter Lane. In total, one hundred and fifty dreams are described, of which about one third involve science, not surprising in view of Swedenborg’s professional interests at the time. Indeed, his purpose in travelling to the Netherlands was to complete and deliver to his printer in Amsterdam the manuscript of his work Regnum Animale (‘The Animal Kingdom’ or ‘The Soul’s Domain’, the latter a much better English rendering of the Latin) — a book which aimed to explain the soul from an anatomical point of view. As well as the scientific, the Journal contains mostly dreams of a religious nature. Among the heavenly visions come other scenes both mundane and fantastical: a cast of various dogs, Kings, an executioner with his heads, dragons, a talking ox, and an abstract apparition of an oblong globe. There are also many women and, as we shall see, some dreams that are erotic in content. After his death in 1772, the manuscript of the Dream Journal was preserved by Swedenborg’s family, but in 1858 it was bought by the Royal Library in Stockholm. The following year the Royal Librarian GE Klemming published it in a limited edition of ninety-nine copies as Swedenborg’s drömmar (‘Swedenborg’s Dreams’). Klemming had been shocked by the highly erotic descriptions in some of the dreams and to avoid prosecution had kept within the legal limit of one hundred copies, sending it only to ‘enlightened thinkers and those interested in the subject’. One of the recipients was the Englishman James John Garth Wilkinson, a doctor who had already translated and published Swedenborg’s manuscript De Generatione (‘The Generative Organs’). Wilkinson was to translate the Dream Journal into English in 1860. This translation was not immediately available and it was a slightly later one by RL Tafel which gained currency when it was published in the second volume of his book Documents Concerning Swedenborg in 1877. However, Tafel omitted the erotic material and it wasn’t until C.Th. Odhner’s translation published in 1918 that the offending passages were reinstated, albeit in the guise of Latin. Despite its age, this translation has been described as the ‘linguistically most faithful of the English editions’ (Bergquist, 7). Odhner, a minister of a Swedenborgian ‘New Church’ congregation in the USA, explained that he had translated the passages omitted by Tafel into Latin ‘as the students of the Church certainly should have an opportunity to judge of their character and contents’. ※※Indexed under…Concealmentof erotic words (by Latin) Although only a portion of the Dream Journal is erotic in content, to a modern eye in a post-Freudian age it is perhaps one of the most striking aspects. Further interest is added by the fact that Swedenborg was later to write an important book, Conjugial Love (1768), sometimes translated as ‘True Marriage Love’, in which physical sexual love between man and woman at its best is raised to spiritual heights and represents the union of wisdom and love, the two essential attributes of the divine. Quite early in the Journal Swedenborg noted that after arriving at The Hague ‘. . . the inclination for women, which had been my chief passion, so suddenly ceased’. Swedenborg never married, nor is it recorded that he ever had a long-term mistress, but later entries reveal a man with strong heterosexual feelings who, in modern parlance, had been ‘sexually active’. While the Journal shows him to be a man who felt guilty and full of sin, this sense does not seem to have extended to sexual matters and in this regard he was very much an eighteenth-century ‘man of the world’. In one vivid dream, no. 171, Swedenborg finds himself in bed with a woman. She touches his penis with her hand and he has an erection, bigger than he has ever had. He penetrates her, reflecting that a child must come of this, and writes that he got off en merveille. (He uses the French expression in the original.) In the next paragraph, no. 172, Swedenborg explains that this dream signifies the ultimate love of the holy and that the ejaculation of semen represents the love of wisdom. Worldly reason considers this to be impure, but in reality it is pure. This is something that Swedenborg would develop in his later books, above all in Conjugial Love, where he insists that erotic love is of divine origin, although human beings may pervert it to selfish, and therefore evil, ends. In another dream he is unable to control his desire for a woman and finds himself in the company of his friend Professor Niklas Oelreich (among other things the censor of the Swedish press from 1746) in visiting brothels, although without, apparently, the intention of having sexual intercourse. In a remarkable dream (no. 120) he is lying with a woman who was not beautiful but who pleased him. He touched her vagina and discovered that it had a set of teeth. Suddenly this woman assumes the form of a man, the politician Johan Archenholtz, a friend and ally of Swedenborg’s. The image of the vagina dentata (vagina with teeth) appears again in no. 261 where he sees in a vision a fiercely burning coal fire that represents the ‘fire of love’. Then he is with a woman whom he wants to penetrate, but the teeth prevent him entering her. We know now that the image of the vagina with teeth is found in folklore, notably in Japanese folktales and also in the mythology of the Chaco and Guiana tribes in South America. They may be cautionary tales warning men of the dangers of sex with strange women. Erich Neumann, the pupil of Carl Gustav Jung, relates the myth of the ‘Terrible Mother’ in his book The Great Mother (1955). The hero is the man who breaks the teeth and restores the woman’s femininity. In her book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) Camille Paglia explains that the toothed vagina is ‘no sexist hallucination’ — every penis is diminished by every vagina, ‘just as mankind, male and female, is devoured by mother nature’. ※※Indexed under…TeethSwedenborg’s dream of vaginal It is remarkable that Swedenborg, presumably ignorant of the presence of the myth in folklore and unacquainted with modern psychology, should dream quite spontaneously of the toothed vagina. Yet Lars Bergquist, the contemporary editor of the Journal of Dreams (called Swedenborg’s Dream Diary in this edition), makes no reference to the presence of the phenomenon of the vagina dentata in folktales or its significance in modern psychology. The Victorian translators of the Journal of Dreams — with the exception of Garth Wilkinson who regarded his translation of The Generative Organs as ‘one small step on the way to a greater liberty of thought and knowledge on sexual subjects’ (in a letter to his friend Henry James senior) — were shocked by the erotic content of the Journal and either omitted it (Tafel) or hid it from the eyes of the uneducated and presumably prurient reader (Odhner). Even today, commentators on Swedenborg tend to play down those passages in the Journal and in other works. But for the modern reader these passages show Swedenborg as a heterosexual man subject to ordinary sexual urges and desires. They ‘humanize’ a man who might otherwise be considered an austere scientist and seer. Given the later emphasis that Swedenborg gave to sexual love between men and women, an analysis of the eroticism of his dreams at a crucial turning point in his life would seem to be an important and worthwhile subject of further study. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

January 24, 2013

Richard Lines

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:30.481519

mother-gooses-french-birth-1697-and-british-afterlife-1729

Mother Goose’s French Birth (1697) and British Afterlife (1729) By Christine Jones May 29, 2013 Christine Jones explores the early English translations of Charles Perrault's 1697 collection of fairy tales and how a change in running order was key to them becoming the stories for children which we know today. Unlike the Brothers Grimm, who recently metamorphosed from children’s story collectors to godfathers of gore for the fairy-tale series, Grimm, Charles Perrault’s name remains generally unrecognizable. Yet, his stories, first published in 1697 as the Histoires ou Contes du temps passé (Stories or Tales of The Past) are anything but. Characters he immortalized, such as Cinderella with the glass slippers, the beauty who sleeps one hundred years, and the puss in boots, were destined for centuries of translation and revival. If he did not invent all of them — some appear in different guises in older folklore traditions — he did invent many of the particularities of their stories as we know them today. That said, most readers no doubt know these titles in English, not French and, in that sense, are familiar not with Perrault’s stories per se, but with the healthy tradition of English translation, inaugurated in 1729. Precious little has been said about those published words — the language of the eighteenth century that turned Cendrillon into Cinderella.1 One basic reason for this oversight in scholarship no doubt comes down to a long-standing premise about the 1697 fairy tales: that they fell out of favor in the early eighteenth century and disappeared for a spell.2 According to this argument, they reemerged in the nineteenth century with the recovery tactics of publishers interested in hooking a younger audience for these tales and with the Grimms, who credited Perrault with inspiring their work.3 Yet, when one looks into the early reception of the tales in Britain, extant editions tell a different story about Perrault’s fate during the Enlightenment. Libraries such as the Toronto Library, Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Princeton University’s Cotsen Chidren’s Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, and the British Library are home to myriad eighteenth-century editions of the tales: large, small, fancy, cheap, and all of them delighted by their subject matter. Pirated French editions in Amsterdam and rapid-fire translations from London rolled off the presses every few years. Copies of copies slid down the social ladder and made their way into chapbooks. Woodcutters busily carved variations of earlier images for their publishers, leaving posterity with dozens of illustrations of stories credited to M. Perrault. If France abandoned her native son in the early years of the century, French-speaking publishers in Amsterdam and their eager British counterparts gave him a glorious afterlife. Furthermore, these early editions of Perrault’s stories are as illuminating as they are voluminous. Two inaugurations in that century of Enlightenment and francophilia are worthy of note. First, Amsterdam publishers flooding the market with French editions exerted surprising influence over England’s, and even France’s, eighteenth-century reception of the fairy tales. Second, the Histoires’ very first British translator, Robert Samber of London, found catchy language for these exciting young heroes and heroines in 1729 that immediately turned into classics for the English-speaking world. Before I detail these changes, a word about the stories as they appeared in print from 1697 until about 1720. The first hands that held and read the Histoires ou contes du temps passé belonged to adults, not children. Written in a poetic style with myriad cultural references, the stories embody the style of their age: a blend of the intellectualism found at the Académie Française and the fashionable splendor of Louis XIV’s Versailles. Knowing Perrault had an adult readership may explain why the volume begins and ends with long, complex tales in a narrative style that we no longer associate with fairy tales today. Readers of the earliest editions had to slog first through “La Belle au bois dormant”/”Sleeping Beauty” the longest tale in the collection, rich in detail and also violent in its themes. To take one example, the prince’s Ogress mother orders that her grandchildren and the princess be cooked for her in a Sauce Robert (a staple of classic French cuisine). Owing to the tale’s length, however, the plot has time to resolve the problems it sets up, notably by feeding the Ogress — a cruel irony for a gourmand — to a vat of vipers and snakes. Similarly, the volume ends with the second longest story, “Le Petit Poucet”/“Hop o’ my Thumb”, which sees a diminutive young man through a family drama that repeatedly thwarts his success and sends him on many adventures. Sandwiched in between is the kind of short story Walt Disney Studios prefers: “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” and “Puss in Boots.” If we no longer relish lengthy, tediously detailed fairy tales, it is in part because eighteenth-century editors made a series of decisions that privileged the shortest ones and, as the century reached its end, increasingly aimed the collection at children. Even the earliest choices made seem to have had lasting impact. In 1721, a major publisher in Amsterdam, the family Desbordes, changed the order of the texts in a French-language edition whose impact was subtle and enduring: “Petit Chaperon rouge” (Little Red Riding Hood) was placed first, followed by “Les Fées” (The Fairies).4 Desbordes kept “Barbe bleue” (Blue Beard), of middling length, in its traditional third spot and followed it with “Belle au bois dormant” (Sleeping Beauty) in fourth place. In the wake of this idiosyncratic change, something extraordinary happened: from the first translation by Robert Samber in 1729 onward, British editions copied the Desbordes order of tales.5 Along with the pithy names Samber chose for their protagonists—Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderilla (with an “i”), Puss in Boots—this order of stories stuck. Because editors tended to reprint and tweak earlier translations—the one by Samber and another very similar one credited to Guy Miège6—rather than start from scratch, it was already difficult by 1750 to flout these convention. Of 30 extant editions from Paris, Amsterdam, and London between 1721 and 1800, all but one followed the Desbordes 1721 order and Samber’s names; and all claim to translate from the 1697 Paris edition and credit the book to M. Perrault. Thus, the order of stories with “Little Red Riding Hood” first and “Sleeping Beauty” in the middle quickly and seamlessly became the original edition to which subsequent editors referred. That small change created the conditions for a seismic shift in the volume’s identity. Through the course of the century, it was increasingly associated with simplicity of style and a young readership. Now, Little Red Riding Hood’s fate, to be eaten alive by a wolf, is not on the surface a more youthful theme than the long rest of Sleeping Beauty. Yet, in terms of length and complexity of plot, they represent opposite examples of the genre. In “Sleeping Beauty,” the tale Perrault put first in 1697, the young girl grows up to a teen, pricks her finger, falls asleep for a generation until her prince can be born and find her, elopes, has lots of sex with him, bears two children, and then lives out her life at his mother’s castle. For Little Red Riding Hood, by contrast, death cuts her down in the bloom of youth. Her narrative hardly affords her time to think, much less grow up. Desbordes privileges “Little Red Riding Hood” and pairs it with “The Fairies,” another mini-story about talking to people whose motives and rank the heroine does not fully understand. In first and second place in the volume, they form a neat package of apparently simple caution about behavior, balancing each other out with dystopian and utopian endings: Young girl talks nicely to wolf and dies vs. young girl talks nicely to fairy and wins (her reward is to spit gemstones whenever she opens her mouth to speak). What happens when the text leads off with the shortest stories in the corpus? Readers are set up to read fairy tales a certain way. The short plots encourage us to look for a simple point—the nugget of action or “moral of the story” that teaches a lesson. Readers who approach the collection this way will logically seek out a similarly small nugget buried in the much longer stories to follow instead of relishing their narrative complexity. We can see in that perception of the genre something very close to popular ideas today about what a fairy tale should look like and do for children. Imagine if “Sleeping Beauty” with all its adult drama had stayed in first place. Then Little Red Riding Hood would have come through history as she was born: swallowed up between a story of sex and an Ogress mother-in-law, and Blue Beard’s bloody conjugal nightmare. If this had been the case, the collection probably would not have appeared to target children. Second, we might well have a different vision of the genre today as a form that works out social, rather than moral, complexities. Instead, when Walt Disney animators created the filmic Sleeping Beauty, they made it look like a chaste short story, ending the movie plot where Perrault’s story really begins: the marriage between the prince and the princess. (Spoiler alert: there is also no kiss in Perrault’s version. The princess wakes up and the trembling prince falls to his knees in amazement. Disney added the heroism for dramatic 1950s effect.) Eighteenth-century editors began a slow transformation of this small French book into a pithy classic for children two centuries before Disney got a hold of it. British editions, in particular, helped to canonize a specific vision of the stories. Simply put, eighteenth-century translations are many and relevant to our modern perception of Perrault’s 1697 French fairy tales. Editors reiterated their titles and line-up so often that they ceased to need the French antecedent to be veritable icons and legends of the literary past. No longer translations, they became English-language originals. With her position in first place, Little Red Riding Hood emerged from the century a ubiquitous heroine and the very definition of what a fairy tale should be. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

May 29, 2013

Christine Jones

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:31.063680

lucians-trips-to-the-moon

Lucian’s Trips to the Moon By Aaron Parrett June 26, 2013 With his Vera Historia, the 2nd century satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote the first detailed account of a trip to the moon in the Western tradition and, some argue, also one of the earliest science fiction narratives. Aaron Parrett explores how Lucian used this lunar vantage point to take a satirical look back at the philosophers of Earth and their ideas of "truth". The Greek-speaking rhetorician and writer Lucian of Samosata, born around 125 CE in what is now known as Syria, has had a somewhat mixed reception through the ages. Scholars agree that his contemporaries and successors viewed him with a great deal of respect. Early Christians were less admiring of Lucian and his pagan and vitriolic pen, though by the time of the renaissance, he had regained favor among learned people. Italian humanists translated him from Greek, and thus Lucian went on to influence the post-renaissance modern world. While scholars divide themselves over whether Lucian’s greatest contribution lies in his preservation of classical rhetoric or his innovative force as a satirist, in either case what continues to interest casual readers and scholars alike is his profound sense of humor in investigating what are serious philosophical subjects: the moral life, epistemology, and politics. It is perhaps epistemology which can be seen as Lucian’s main focus of satire in what has become his best known work, Vera Historia (in English, True Story), a detailed and elaborate fantasy about travelling to the moon. The Vera Historia is not only the first detailed narrative about traveling through space to the moon in the Western tradition, it is also, arguably, the strangest. On Lucian’s lunar surface we encounter a dizzying litany of bizarre beasts: three headed vultures, grass-bodied birds with wings of giant leaves, elephant-sized fleas, half women half grapevine beings from whom a kiss would send one “reeling drunk”, and men who sweat milk of such quality “that cheese can actually be made from it by dripping in a little of the honey” which runs from their noses. He also gives particular attention to innovative new methods of reproduction, a necessity in a land devoid of women. On one part of the moon babies are born from men’s swollen calves, delivered dead but brought to life “by putting it in the wind with its mouth open”. A people known as the Arboreals have a different method: a man’s right genital gland is cut off, planted, and from it “grows a very large tree of flesh, resembling the emblem of Priapus”, and from its fruit of huge acorns men are ‘shelled’. ※※Indexed under…Kissfrom half-grapevine being causing drunkenness For readers in the 2nd century a trip to the moon would have been fantastical enough, but with these strange array of creatures and outlandish adventures thrown in, the story is clearly anything but “true”. Lucian’s naming of his tale is immediately provoking. He was familiar with the paradox of Epimenides, the man from Crete who announced as gospel truth that “All Cretans are liars” — if he is telling the truth he is lying, but if he is lying then he is telling the truth. Similarly, when Lucian calls his fantastic tale (which makes fun of liars) a “true story,” he references one of the key paradoxes of philosophy and its inability to be completely self-grounding. In the prologue, he explores the problem of narratorial authority — a key problem for literary criticism in the twentieth century. With an obvious reference to Epimenides, Lucian proclaims: “But my lying is far more honest than [the philosophers’], for though I tell the truth in nothing else, I shall at least be truthful in saying that I am a liar.” Critics have observed that within the first few lines, the persona of the “author” himself is immediately called into question: from the perspective of the author Lucian, what follows is fiction; for the narrator, however, everything is “true.” Since the play of his text unfolds against the backdrop of a paradox, Lucian prevents the reader from gaining even a foothold of privileged perspective from which to objectively judge the truth value of the narrative. More subtly, his statement evokes Homer’s epics and Herodotus’s histories, as well as the dialogues of Plato. He also anticipates the folly of Rousseau’s impossible oath to honesty at the outset of his Confessions centuries later; indeed the Epimenidean paradox applies to almost any work of fiction that purports to tell ‘truth.’ The Vera Historia satirizes the philosophical schools deluded by their own uncritical arrogance when it comes to making and evaluating truth claims. In the way that Lucian exposes the manner literary critical terms dissolve into one another, his satire has much in common with a postmodern outlook because fiction tells a ‘truth,’ but it announces itself as ‘made up’; conversely, ‘history’ announces itself as ‘truth,’ but also tends to be ‘made up.’ Likewise, the authority of the author is challenged, as is the reliability of any narrator — both of which are issues dear to Nietzsche and his French progeny in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lucian makes the problem even more urgent by inserting into his fictive narrative assertions that do not conflict with known reality. Including known facts and plausible interpretations of physical phenomena go a long way toward establishing the sort of verisimilitude that gives any fiction its compelling power, but it also forces the reader to recognize that the line between truth and fiction is a blurry one at best. Lucian’s referral to Venus, or “the morning star,” for example, as the site of a battle between the moon and the sun acknowledges contemporary Greek scientific knowledge regarding the occultation of Venus by the moon, and the transits of Venus across the sun. But at the same time, the battle is fictive insofar as it is merely an allegory of human affairs. Critics have noted that Lucian’s use of verisimilitude bolsters the satire precisely because of the way in which credibility adds force to any argument. The most probable source of some of the more verisimilar aspects of Lucian’s work is Plutarch’s On the Face Appearing in the Orb of the Moon. In this work, Plutarch includes a tale much like the myth of Er from Plato’s Republic, although the work itself is really a compendium of all the speculative knowledge about the moon current in Plutarch’s (and Lucian’s) time. Plutarch’s book is important to a reading of Lucian for two reasons: on the one hand, it offers a view of the moon as “earth-like” in many respects, thus lending credibility to Lucian’s descriptions in the Vera Historia of the moon as an inhabited world, and, on the other hand, it couples “science” with “fiction,” when Lucian repeats the mythical lunar story. Lucian also uses his satire to ridicule pseudo-science and superstition, especially when he writes, “Everything in my story is a more or less comical parody of one or another of the poets, historians and philosophers of old, who have written much that smacks of miracles and fables.” (250-251)1 It’s worth reiterating that even though poets like Homer and historians like Herodotus suffer under Lucian’s satirical lash, the real culprits are the philosophers, and he intends to give them a proper whipping. He takes great offense at the epistemological hypocrisy of those who would elevate themselves as arbiters of truth and falsity, while at the same time resorting to ‘lies’ and ‘fictions’ (for example, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave), to make their case. As Lucian puts it: “On reading all these authors I did not find fault with them for their lying, as I saw that this was already a common practice even among men who profess philosophy.” (251)2 Finally, the exasperating manner in which Lucian finishes his ‘true story’ also satirizes the lofty claims of philosophers insofar as they are what Nietzsche called “systematizers,” since Lucian promises something he cannot, nor has any intention of, delivering — completeness or closure. Lucian teases the reader with the final line of the second book: “What happened in that other world I shall tell you in the succeeding books” (357). The translator’s footnote to this line more or less summarizes its importance relative to the title of the work: “The biggest lie of all, as a disgruntled Greek scribe remarks in the margin!” (357). Assuming that the conventional wisdom of Lucian scholars is correct and that he never intended to “finish” the Vera Historia, one is struck by the fact that once again the issues of truth and untruth (and by extension, authorial intent and authority) are at stake. A later work of Lucian’s entitled Icaromenippus also involves a trip to the moon, although in contrast to the Vera Historia, the tale is a more straightforward satire. In fact, this work sets the bar for a whole species of satire that bears the eponymous descriptor “Menippean Satire.” As in the Vera Historia, philosophers bear the brunt of Lucian’s satirical wit, and the dialogue actually reaches its zenith when Zeus vows to Menippus that he will do the lot of philosophers in with thunderbolts. The central issue once again concerns epistemology — what is the value of “knowledge” that is for sale as it is by the sophists? In this sense, Lucian is perhaps closer to Plato than he would like to admit. Lucian’s challenge to Plato and other Hellenic philosophers is the logician’s tu quoque — what you criticize in the sophists you do yourselves. Nevertheless, the trip to the moon again affords Lucian’s hero to gain a supramundane perspective on an earthly, human problem. The dialogue begins with a presentation of Menippus as world-weary and yearning for another world. He invokes the example of philosophy, as he remarks, “Being in that state of mind, I thought it best to learn about these points from the philosophers, for I supposed they surely would be able to tell the whole truth.” (274-275) But in keeping with the satirical mode, the ‘philosophers’ he ‘employs’ are simply sophists — rhetoricians willing to speak on any subject whatever so long as payment for services is involved. The ‘knowledge’ they pass off is nothing more than fiction: “they presume to say just how many cubits it is in distance from the sun to the moon . . . without knowing how many furlongs it is from Megara to Athens” (279). Like Plato, Lucian calls into question the validity of “selling” knowledge, but he also wants to include Plato (and philosophy in general) within the scope of his larger critique, which is that philosophy does no better than sophistry — it just doesn’t get paid! In other words, a theory paid for is no worse than one got for free. The lack of consensus among philosophers reveals the paucity of its claims about knowledge and its presumptions toward truth. As an example, Menippus points out a logical absurdity in their reasoning that Bertrand Russell will level against Christianity nearly 1800 years later: “[the philosophers] made some god or other the creator of the universe, but did not tell us where he came from or where he stood when he created it all” (281). In the Icaromenippus, what captures the attention of Menippus are the petty foibles of humanity: the hidden motives and the secret hypocrisies indiscernible on earth that the lunar vantage point is able to reveal. Moreover, kings are as bad as common men — no class of person is particularly ethical. Through the history of western literature, many writers will use the device of traveling to the moon or another planet in order to gain a perspective from which to look back at earth and satirize its proudest inhabitants: humanity. Lucian is merely the first to do it. In his Menippus dialogue, Lucian seems sure that knowledge itself is a function of perspective, and that the base fact of being earthbound ensures that we cannot have an unbiased and objective view of any ‘truth.’ From the moon, he sees the world as a small and fragile object, upon whose surface wars and empires appear absurd: “And when I looked to the Peloponnese and caught sight of Cynuria, I noted what a tiny region, no bigger any way than an Egyptian bean, had caused so many Argives and Spartans to fall in a single day.” (298-299) 1800 years before humans even ventured into space, Lucian articulated a sentiment that almost every astronaut fortunate enough actually to have traveled into space and looked back at the earth has also voiced: a profound and nearly religious sense of the fragility of our planet, our “pale blue dot,” as Carl Sagan called it, and the stupidity of conflicts between countries separated by arbitrary lines drawn on maps. As Menippus puts it, “I was especially inclined to laugh at the people who quarreled about boundary-lines, and at those who plumed themselves on working the plain of Sicyon or possessing the district of Oenoe in Marathon or owning a thousand acres in Archarnae.” (298-299). In order to succeed, satire must offer some moral lesson, some didactic purpose. The revelation of Lucian’s trips to the moon seems rather simple: we ought not take ourselves too seriously, especially when it comes to philosophy. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

June 26, 2013

Aaron Parrett

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:31.568528

mrs-giacometti-prodgers-the-cabman-s-nemesis

Mrs Giacometti Prodgers, the Cabman’s Nemesis By Heather Tweed September 19, 2012 Heather Tweed explores the story of the woman whose obsessive penchant for the lawsuit struck fear into the magistrates and cabmen of Victorian London alike. Imagine, if you will, strolling towards a Hackney cabstand in late 19th century London. Suddenly the cry ‘Mother Prodgers!’ echoes around the streets. The cab drivers scarper, leaving the stand empty but for a seemingly innocuous, overdressed woman: Mrs Caroline Giacometti Prodgers, nemesis of cabmen, zealous litigant and infamous music hall conversation topic. Over the course of two decades she was to lead a one woman campaign against the notorioulsy truculent cabmen of London. She took to court the publisher of a major newspaper and even her own cook. Her stubbornness was caricatured in print and sung about in music halls. One desperate cab driver went so far as to burn her effigy on bonfire night. Her first taste of life in the courts came in 1871, when she began proceedings to divorce her husband of ten years, an Austrian naval captain called Giovanni Battista Giacometti. The case set a precedent for divorces in which the wife was wealthier than the husband (the Prodgers family found itself with a considerable fortune through her mother, a wealthy heiress whom her father, the Reverand Prodgers, had married after rescuing her from drowning). The details of Giacometti v Prodgers would regularly make the papers, including such oddities as Mrs Prodgers questioning the legitimacy of her own children, presumably in an attempt to try and disinherit Giovanni from her family fortune. Following the actual divorce there were other legal wranglings. It was reported that her husband Giovanni had given up his whole career at Mrs Prodgers’ request and that, after the divorce, he had taken her to court over non payment of a yearly settlement. The Prodgers family, taking his side, agreed on an additional several hundred pounds per year. Mrs Prodgers found herself again in court after failing to pay a shorthand writer she had, debatably, hired during the divorce proceedings. It was soon after the divorce and its various spin off cases that Mrs Prodgers began her infamous crusade against London cab drivers. Her modus operandi was to catch a cab to a specific destination to which she knew the exact distance (she had familiarised herself with the cost charts), then ask the cabman to stop just at the point where the fare would change. Invariably the cabman would attempt to charge her for the next part of the fare, which she would dispute. One or other party would then threaten a lawsuit and she would continue to goad the often irate cabman into verbal abuse and swearing whereupon she’d immediately threaten another writ. She was remarkably successful and ended up bringing over 50 cases to court — many of which descended into farce. Reports on the various cases are packed with amusing incidents. There is extended banter over the use of her full name (which she always insisted upon). One judge suggests that it might be cheaper for her to purchase a carriage than keep returning to court. In addition to cab related litigations she was involved in a string of court cases regarding other matters. She sued her dismissed cook for refusing to leave her house (and continuing ‘to sing about the place’). She sued a newspaper publisher for accidentally tearing her dress during an altercation after she refused to pay the full penny for a paper (which she thought she might be mentioned in). She sued a watchmaker for returning the wrong watch to her house. Her obsessive and sometimes bizarre activity in the courts did not go unnoticed. In 1875 she had the dubious honour of having an effigy of her burnt on bonfire night, a ‘gigantic figure’ paraded around on a cab. The police intervened and arrested the cab driver — rather bizarrely on the charge of ‘begging’ (the accounts don’t report if Mrs Prodgers had any influence over the arrest). The judge dismissed the case saying that the cabbie was ‘acting as a showman for the amusement of the public’ and that it was merely meant as a joke. Mrs Giacometti Prodgers appeared several times in Punch magazine. A satirical piece in 1890, the year of her death, coincided with controversial plans to fit each Hackney cab with a mechanical device to measure distances and calculate the cost of each journey: A Autumn-attic happaratusFor measuring off our blooming fares!Oh, hang it all! They slang and slate us;They say we crawls, and cheats, and swears.And we surwives the sneering slaters,Wot tries our games to circumvent,But treating us like Try-yer-weighters,Or chockerlate, or stamps, or scent!Upon my soul the stingy dodgersDid ought to be shut up. They’re wussThan Mrs. JACKERMETTY PRODGERS,Who earned the ‘onest Cabman’s cuss.It’s sickening! Ah, I tell yer wot, Sir,Next they’ll stick hup―oh, you may smile―This:―“Drop a shilling in the slot. Sir,And the Cab goes for just two mile!”Beastly! I ain’t no blessed babby,Thus to be measured off like tape.Yah! Make a autumn-attic Cabby,With clock-work whip and a tin cape.May as well, while you’re on the job, Sir.And then―may rust upset yer works!The poor man of his beer they’d rob, Sir,Who’d rob poor Cabby of his perks! Such was her notoriety that the reverse of her name, Sregdorpittemmocaig, was used for a character in The Sunless City, a novel by J.E. Preston and Punch punnily suggested that she had penned her own book after the Hansom cab: ‘Hansom Is As Hansom Does’. She also made it onto the pantomime circuit when comedian Herbert Campbell performed a verse about her: ‘All great men have their statues and it’s but their due,But I wonder why the ladies don’t have them too;If they did, to the Academy I’d like to send,A bust of Mrs Prodgers the Cabman’s friend.Of all the strong-minded females she’s the worst I ever saw,Oh, wouldn’t she be lovely as a mother-in-law?At the corner of every cab-rank her flag should be unfurledAs a horrible example to this wicked world.’ The press painted a picture of a formidable if eccentric woman who should be avoided at all costs if one did not wish to encounter her wrath. One might speculate that a certain amount of misogyny and sexism fuelled by the women’s suffrage movement may have played its part in the press coverage and urban mythology. Had she been a man might she have been hailed as a champion of consumer rights, rather than dismissed as a caricature? One person who seemed to take her seriously was the explorer and Victorian polymath Sir Richard Burton, who entertained her in his house, and reportedly supported her campaign. According to Burton’s biographer Thomas Wright two of Burton’s cousins had a running family joke about the relationship between Mrs Giacometti Prodgers and Sir Richard: At the (Athenæum) club he was never at home to anybody except a certain Mrs. Giacometti Prodgers . . . according to rumour, there was a flavour of romance about her marriage. It was said that while the laws of certain countries regarded her as married, those of other countries insisted that she was still single. However, married or not, she concentrated all her spleen on cab-drivers, . . . and having a profound respect for Burton’s judgment, she often went to him about these cab disputes, and, oddly enough, though nobody else could get at him, he was always at the service of Mrs. Prodgers, and good-naturedly gave her the benefit of his wisdom. To the London magistrates the good lady was a perpetual terror, and Frederick Burton, a diligent newspaper reader, took a pleasure in following her experiences. “St. George,” he would call across the breakfast table, “Mrs. Giacometti Prodgers again: She’s had another cab-man up”. Sadly first hand anecdotal evidence does nothing to alleviate the true awfulness of her character. She appears to have been as rude to fellow members of the public as she was to porters and cab drivers. Upon being offered a cup of tea by another passenger on a ship she was travelling on, she allegedly replied “I have only had afternoon tea once in my life, and that was with the Duke of Sutherland”. Her arrival in various ports around the world was often reported upon in the local press — followed by a sigh of relief when she departed. Unfortunately one has the impression the same might be said about her departure from life in 1890. Her obituary as reported in foreign papers was blunt and concise: Mrs. Giacometti Prodgers, the terror of London cabmen, is dead. Her habit was to drive the fullest possible distance for the money, pay the exact legal fare, and then cause the arrest of the cabman for expressing his feelings. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

September 19, 2012

Heather Tweed

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:32.103006

the-implacability-of-things

The Implacability of Things By Jonathan Lamb October 3, 2012 Jonathan Lamb explores the genre of 'it-narratives' - stories told from the point of view of an object, often as it travels in circulation through human hands. Some of the best recent books about things, such as John Plotz’s Portable Property (2008) and Elaine Freedgood’s Ideas in Things (2006), deal with artefacts, commodities and curiosities that find their value and significance by means of circulation, moving from place to place and hand to hand. These journeys of things were the theme of the essays edited by Arjun Appadurai in his landmark collection, The Social Lives of Things (1986). The title glanced at Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, sharing the assumption made in Capital I that things get a life by moving about and meeting other things; and that if these things have an ambition, it is to act like human beings: that is socially. The sociability of things seems to be co-extensive with the market that generated the system of exchange value; for just as the merchant’s interest is focused on the most desirable commodities — those that move the fastest and never lie upon his hands — so the commodities themselves desire nothing better than to be in perpetual motion, meeting their own kind and mutually proclaiming their importance. Even among thing-theorists operating with a very different model, the principle of sociability looms large. Bruno Latour believes that things “circulate in our hands and define our social bond by their very circulation.” The rapid transit of things in trade and commerce provided the impulse behind a genre of fiction that became popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with titles such as The Adventures of a Watch and The History of a Lady’s Slipper. They were called ‘it-narratives’ or ‘novels of circulation’ and they recorded (usually in the first person singular) the experience of things as they pass through the hands of a series of owners. The things that lent themselves most readily to this new format were those that were most mobile — money and vehicles. Two of the most popular it-narratives in the latter half of the eighteenth-century were Chrysal; or Adventures of a Guinea (1760) and the anonymously authored Adventures of a Hackney Coach (1783). It struck me after reading some of these stories that if one were to look for the ancestors and descendants of this new genre, they would not yield such a congenial meeting of the interests of humans and things. In the animal fables and oriental tales to which it-narratives are clearly indebted, pain, degradation and extinction await those in thrall to despotic power; and despotic power, as Sir William Blackstone pointed out, was what all property-owners long to exert over their possessions. To this contradiction is owing the many scenes of cruelty depicted in it-narratives, inflicted on animate and inanimate things alike. In the slave narratives that followed it-narratives, many of the humiliations befalling things in the hands of humans (see, for example, The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1784)) are endured again by humans who have been transformed into property. These are not worlds where goods and owners see their sociability reflected in each other’s freedom of movement. They are more like the scenes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the power of the gods painfully transforms humans into what is not human. Apuleius’s The Golden Ass is an extraordinary display of the politics of divine oppression in which Venus enslaves Psyche, her clandestine daughter-in-law, and Psyche resists with the help of things — insects, water, reeds and stone. Where among the books I had been reading might one find examples of this resistance? Well, in Charles Gildon’s inaugural it-narrative, The Golden Spy (1709), a story owing its title to Apuleius and its narrative to a collection of vocal coins, the narrator confesses he has edited his material for fear that money’s scandalous revelations should “destroy all Confidence betwixt Man and Man, and so put an End to human Society” (Gildon 1709: 116). The impetus is not towards sociability but its very opposite: humans are exposed as hypocrites by things whose motive is not a principle of moral honesty and social unity but feelings of contempt and revenge. There is no invisible hand in this story capable of restoring the passions and the interests to a social equilibrium. Nor is there in one of its most important successors, Gulliver’s Travels. Here is an it-narrative told by a horse — not a horse that has found a human voice like Black Beauty, but one that was formerly a human until the bond of species was broken by disgust, and whose isolation from the reader is dramatically and obviously total. Theodor Adorno called the thing at the other side of this stand-off implacable (he was talking about the door-handles of American cars), a word suggestive of a non-negotiable hostility that flourishes in the literature of things, jeopardising the mental health of the humans who encounter it. An implacable whale drives Captain Ahab mad in Moby-Dick; implacable collectibles drive Owen Gereth to arson in The Spoils of Poynton; and Fagin is driven to despair in Oliver Twist by the things he stares at so attentively while under sentence of death — a broken pencil, an iron spike with the end knocked off — because they are so devoid of pity. John Banville catches the echo of such implacability in his detective story The Silver Swan: Over every scene of violent death . . . there hung a particular kind of silence, the kind that follows after the last echoes of a great outcry have faded. There was shock in it, of course, and awe and outrage, the sense of many hands lifted quickly to many mouths, but something else as well, a kind of gleefulness, a kind of startled, happy, unable-to-believe-its-luckiness. Things . . . even inanimate things, it seemed, loved a killing. You can see Dickens learning about the implacability of things. In Sketches by Boz he includes ‘Meditations in Monmouth Street,’ a market for second-hand clothes. Boz looks at the garments hanging up and imagines the lives of their owners: “We have gone on speculating in this way, until whole rows of coats have started from their pegs, and buttoned up, of their own accord, round the waists of imaginary wearers.” It is an exercise in anthropomorphism: property makes sense again when it is bulked out by the form of an owner. How different to the mementoes arranged on the mantelpiece of Jaggers’s office, or on Wemmick’s watch-chain, in Great Expectations. These are travesties of curiosities and sentimental keepsakes, mementoes alien to human interests, coming fully into their own when owners are removed, usually suddenly and violently. This is exactly how Wemmick is driven to define his ideal of portable property after Magwitch’s capture and imminent death: “I do not think he could have been saved. Whereas, the portable property certainly could have been saved. That’s the difference between the property and the owner, don’t you see?” Edmund de Waal’s memoir published last year, The Hare with the Amber Eyes, was a story of the loss and recovery of a family heirloom, a collection of Japanese netsuke. These tiny figures of creatures and humans made of ivory or boxwood were owned by the rich banking family of Ephrussi in Vienna, until they were sequestered by the Nazis along with the rest of their treasures as ‘ownerless Jewish property’ — a category close to Wemmick’s idea of portable property. The story offered to be a heartwarming account of sentimental value, and generally this is how it has been read. Anna, the faithful servant who has been allowed to remain in the Ephrussi palace, saves the netsuke in twos and threes, hiding them first in her pocket then in her mattress until a member of the family arrives after the end of the war to whom she can say, “I have something to return to you.” De Waal grants that for Anna each one of the netsuke may be “a resistance to the sapping of memory . . . a story recalled, a future held on to.” But that is emphatically not how they strike him: “The survival of the netsuke in Anna’s pocket, in her mattress, is an affront . . . . Why should they have got through this war in a hiding-place, when so many hidden people did not? I can’t make people, places, and things fit together any more.” This is a shocking moment but it has been carefully advertised by the narrator when he talks of the heaviness acquired by things during an Umsturz in civil society, and when he quotes Maupassant to the effect that “The bibelot is not only a passion, it is a mania.” Maupassant wrote a story about a man who came back from the opera to find all his possessions leaving the house. After a series of fruitless attempts to repurchase them he lodges himself in an insane asylum, whereupon his missing things reoccupy the house, presumably on their own implacable and defiant terms. There are genres of fiction where we allow things to be sinister or significant in an unsettling way — Gothic romance and the detective story, for example — but the it-narrative is generally expected to be comic and anthropocentric. Yet for a number of reasons this is seldom how it deserves to be read. Whether it is owing to its origin and terminus in the narratives of slaves, or to its coincidence with the financial revolution and the growing unaccountability of mass human behaviour, or to the growing appetite for print ephemera, or to the end of feudal tenures and the resulting anomalies of personal portable property, or to the irreversible metamorphoses precipitated by the holocaust, ordinary things situated in banal circumstances develop a salience that has nothing to do with symbolism or hidden meaning. They are just there, eying their human adversaries, implacable and meditating affronts. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

October 3, 2012

Jonathan Lamb

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:32.656558

vesalius-and-the-body-metaphor

Vesalius and the Body Metaphor By Marri Lynn April 18, 2013 City streets, a winepress, pulleys, spinning tops, a ray fish, curdled milk: just a few of the many images used by 16th century anatomist Andreas Vesalius to explain the workings of the human body in his seminal work De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Marri Lynn explores. Andreas Vesalius threw down a glove in front of established medicine and its scholars when, in 1543, he produced a massive anatomy text titled De Humani Corporis Fabrica — on the fabric of the human body. Vesalius believed that the field of medicine was being ill served by sending its students to books to learn their anatomy. The flesh itself had to teach, not merely the page. This idea of hands-on learning trumping an ancient textual legacy was an affront to many of Vesalius’ medical peers. Medicine was not a handicraft, but a noble scholastic art. Far from trying to disparage his discipline, Vesalius intended to elevate the most denigrated field of medicine — surgery — to that same level of esteem. He was taking a professional risk. But the Fabrica, the result of untold hours of dissection and writing, largely spoke persuasively for itself. Vesalius exposed hundreds of mistakes made by Galen, whose writings were still considered the chief source on anatomy over a thousand years after they had been written. Naturally, there were some who still believed that Vesalius had misunderstood what he had seen in his dissections, or Galen’s explanation itself. But the stance the Fabrica and its author took gained attention, and the idea of an apprenticeship in anatomy at the slab, rather than the desk, began to gain ground. Still, opportunities for students to actually observe dissections were rarer than Vesalius would like, and could never fill the need of a student or professional to occasionally fact-check their memory, or consult a confusing realm of the body in more depth at their leisure. The Fabrica’s illustrations were a small effort to reproduce, for the study, the complexity that would confront the anatomy student in the anatomy theatre. The resulting woodcut illustrations, beautiful works prepared at Vesalius’ own expense in Titian’s Venetian workshop, have become the centerpiece of the Fabrica’s lasting impression. But it is telling that Vesalius had his Latin text published in German only days afterward. The Fabrica was meant to be read, and read again — not merely looked at. This was all the more true for the students of anatomy Vesalius wanted to reach out to, who would be buying abbreviated versions of the massive text, without nearly as many (if any) expensive illustrations reproduced inside. And furthermore, two-dimensional images could never properly convey the constant movement and form of a three-dimensional body. Vesalius had to, as best as he was able, paint a moving mental picture with words that would be good enough for surgeons to use as guidance when they lowered their blade into the flesh of their patients. To draw the reader’s mind toward a mental model of the body’s inner workings, Vesalius used his full toolkit of pedagogic devices. Metaphor and analogy, especially, could be used to help the student make the cognitive leap to understanding the alien. Now, these metaphors show us the ways in which anatomists might visualize and understand the structures, dynamic processes, and physical motions of the body. While he broke with tradition in many ways, Vesalius’ use of metaphor was in fact a continuation of a stylistic and polemic tradition. Metaphor had been used by earlier writers, and in some cases, Vesalius drew from their dictionary of established comparisons directly. But always, observation served imagination, and never the opposite. The best example of Vesalius’ insistence on deriving metaphor from observable truth is his abandonment of the Galenic conception of the liver as having four main lobes, an idea which Galen acquired from his dissections of dogs. These lobes were colorfully called the hearth, the table, the knife, and the charioteer, in relation to their functions. After describing this tradition, Vesalius addresses this metaphor directly and in his usual straightforward way: “This arrant nonsense exemplifies the fancies of those who study the human fabric by imagination rather than dissection or try to learn from procedures on animals rather than humans.” Since many of the structures Vesalius encountered did not yet have proper names, using creative analogues as visual signposts and descriptions of function was still a natural solution. With the intention that both elites and humble students would read his work, he carefully chose accessible symbols as his objects of comparison. His metaphors reveal not only the state of anatomical knowledge of the time, but realms of shared experience. Many of the metaphors used in the Fabrica could have been written today. Vesalius sees the veins and arteries like a pipe, synovial fluid like oil, and the skeleton like the walls and supportive beams of a house. His mechanical metaphors strike one as especially current to our post-industrial way of thinking, but Vesalius’ conception of the body as a whole formed by moving parts placed man’s engines and inventions in imitation of Nature, and not the other way around. We find city streets in the digestive system, a winepress in the sinuses, a storeroom in the stomach, and reins and pulleys in the ligaments. The Vesalian body was not gears and oil, but rather wood, stone, and all things organic and ingeniously designed by Nature. (Ingeniously, but pragmatically. Of the physical separation of the mouth and the remainder of the digestive system, he writes, “. . . the Creator of the world set the stomach below the thorax and the viscera contained therein, so that the outflow of the excrement would be lower down and well away from the senses that reside in the head; similarly in buildings the architects keep the inescapably unpleasant outflows well away from the eyes and nostrils of the owners.”) To describe muscles, he draws upon the images of a spinning top, a ray fish, a pyramid, the letter C, a butcher’s cleaver, and Benedictine cowls. Horns, nets, rivers, pumpkin vines, pigeon coops, wickerwork baskets full of curdled milk, grape root, and tree trunks shelter elsewhere in the anatomy, somehow envisioned amidst what must have appeared, to the untrained eye, as a bloody mess beneath the scalpel. Amidst lengthy, precise descriptions, these metaphors are bursts of color and clarity, never mixed or muddled even when presented in close proximity. As a Latin stylist, Vesalius was far from florid, making his choices of imagery interesting in their individual precision, contrasted with their overall diversity across the pages. A modern translation of the Fabrica from Latin to English, in its entirety, has revealed the full breadth of the author’s attention to detail, as well as his clarity in describing anatomical structures which still puzzle and entrance new students of anatomy to this day. Jacob Soll has suggested that Vesalius’ manner of making the body more complex while at once demystifying it “changed the nature of corporeal metaphor.” The recent discovery of his own annotated copy of the Fabrica suggests that Vesalius continued to think about his choice of words well after publication. Whatever his qualms with the minutiae of his legacy, the Fabrica remains a work that struck the imaginative faculties and changed the practice of anatomy generations before technology would penetrate the flesh and render it truly visible in three dimensions. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

April 18, 2013

Marri Lynn

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:32.906255

john-martin-and-the-theatre-of-subversion

John Martin and the Theatre of Subversion By Max Adams July 12, 2012 Max Adams, author of The Prometheans, looks at the art of John Martin and how in his epic landscapes of apocalyptic scale one can see reflected his revolutionary leanings. John Martin, born in the week that the Bastille was stormed in July 1789, was an instinctive revolutionary. His generation may have suffered from a misty-eyed envy of new-found liberties in America and France, but they understood what practical revolution might mean at home and they strove to achieve liberation from repression and tyranny without bloodshed; very largely they succeeded. Martin has often, and wrongly, been seen as a religious fanatic by a comprehensive misunderstanding of his paintings and by false association with his schizophrenic arsonist brother. He has also been portrayed as a Luddite (by critics who should have known better) and by Ruskin, a late contemporary, as a mere artisan in lamp-black. Poor Martin. Despite his very evident technical deficiencies as a painter – he inevitably suffers by comparison with his friends and contemporaries Turner and Constable – he was equally adept at creating a theatrical sense of a world undergoing irreversible change, and more fervent than either in his desire to be an engine of that change. If there were dramatists better placed to portray the dilemmas of the human condition, and one immediately thinks of Shelley and Byron, of Delacroix and Dickens, no-one came closer than Martin to designing the perfect sets on which to act out the drama: he was the supreme architect and engineer of the sublime. To start at the curtain’s uncertain opening, we see Martin, a Geordie ingénue with a chip on his shoulder, arrive in London to find that its streets are not paved with gold but with beggars. He makes his debut in the greatest city on earth in 1806, the year in which Pitt the Younger and Charles James Fox die and in which Nelson’s pickled body is carried up the Thames in mawkish pomp. Martin struggles against more proficient competition: has insufficient imagination in his mental palette other than to paint the misty blue hills of his native Northumbria and dream of maidens in skimpy veils straight out of Ovid. By 1812 his mood has darkened: his radical friends the Hunts have been jailed for seditious libel (the Prince Regent was a fat, useless libertine, a drain on the treasury and a traitor to his Whig friends but saying so in the pages of the Examiner in such terms was asking for trouble); the first global war showed no sign of ending, nor did the horrors of wage-labour poverty. Caricaturists had a field day: they could not be imprisoned. Martin’s response was weightier, loftier. His Sadak of 1812 is a dark, portrait-format theatre flat of abysmal fire in which the struggling righteous loner (his friends the Hunts, the beggar, or Martin himself: take your pick) faces alpine odds in seeking the Waters of Oblivion. From here on in Martin was on a mission to bring down the unjust from their lofty perches to the level of the populace. For him scale was everything: his deployment of trompe l’oeil devices, three-dimensional column-and-tunnel special effects and epic scales has often, and rightly, been seen as a forerunner of the Hollywood movie set of the 1920s and beyond. By 1821, when he produced his Old Testament masterpiece Belshazzar’s Feast (a thinly disguised libel on the self-same Prince Regent made more potent by his coronation as George IV and the grotesque accompanying feast) Martin was exploiting his audience’s familiarity with the Bible to recreate for them the immensity of its drama, its injustices and the majesty of the retribution which God (not Martin’s God – he was a sceptic) could and would visit on those who committed the sin of hubris. The Tate Gallery, which recently hosted the largest Martin exhibition for over a hundred years, hung his paintings wrong: that is to say, too low, with the viewer’s eye line directed into the centre of the picture when Martin’s intention, I am certain, was to force the viewer to look up, up at the crenellated towers of the tyrant, to be left in no doubt of the task required in bringing its monuments down. Martin liked to open his play right in the middle of the drama, just like a modern movie director: he drops us into the action so that we are part of it, believe we can be part of it. Martin is inciting us to tear down the house; but we are certain, as participants, that we start at the bottom, as Martin had. Shelley, whose sympathies were in tune with Martin and with Prometheus, the liberator of humanity, chose to set Ozymandias (1818), his own cameo drama of fallen tyranny, after the action had long finished, in the shapeless desert where two vast and trunkless legs of stone stood as a quiet, if profoundly eloquent, epilogue to Martin’s revolutions. Shelley was interested in what the world would be like after the revolution and, in describing his idealistic new world in Prometheus Unbound (also 1821) he offered a later Romantic poet and activist, Karl Marx, the blueprint for the real thing: a revolution every bit as fantastic as Martin’s. The mid-1820s witnessed a reformist lull in Britain and abroad: opposition emasculated by internal rivalry and suicide, the lassitude of once-fervent ideologues like Wordsworth and William Godwin (a friend of Martin’s); the announcement by critics like William Hazlitt of the passing of an age of action. Martin set himself to make money to support the realities of a large family and generous domestic establishment, and he was not the only one (he lost his first fortune to a dodgy banker). But the appearance of somnolence is an illusion, just like Martin’s various engravings of Paradise Lost during that decade. Britain’s creative revolutionaries were not done. The French have a phrase for it: reculer pour mieux sauter – draw back to take a running jump. In France itself dissatisfaction with the post-Napoleonic world would lead to revolution in 1830 and its diarist-in-oils, Eugène Delacroix, heavily influenced by Martin but more interested in the actors than the stage sets, has left us the supreme finale of the drama in Liberty Leading the People (1830), with its bare-breasted Amazonian heroine and her pistol-toting lieutenants climbing on piles of bodies to wave the Tricolore. It is virtually a curtain call. Not to be outdone, John Martin’s own brother Jonathan had been tried for his life after setting fire to York Minster in a suitably Promethean gesture and by 1830 was confined for life in Bedlam. Martin himself began to plan for a new world before the old had been brought down: he designed a new sewage system for London and evolved a curious idea for a circular underground railway to run beneath the streets of the capital: Babylon-on-Thames, as it was known in a public nod to his prescience. More subtle revolutionaries – Michael Faraday and Charles Wheatsone making sparks in the laboratory, the Brunels with their tunnels, the Stephensons with their belching locomotives and railways – were busy forging a completely new symbolic lexicon of steam, electricity and subterranean sublimity for artists to work up on their canvases. Turner, as so often, was first on the scene. He was there, when the old Houses of Parliament burned down in 1834, to record the irony of a Reform Bill, passed the year before, which left Parliament more or less unreformed. He was there when the old warship Temeraire, a symbol of the patriotic Heart of Oak Royal Navy, was towed up the Thames by a steam tug to be scrapped. He was there, in spirit at least, to record the impression which the onrushing steam railway age left on a generation which had previously only known the pedestrian power of the horse and millwheel (Rain, Steam and Speed, 1844). In doing so he leaves us still physically reeling, as if the action is now so hot that we cannot, literally, focus on it. The stage has become a roundabout and we are dizzy, clinging on for dear life. A look at Martin’s later works, from 1838 (when he and his son Leopold visited Turner in Chelsea to watch progress on the Fighting Temeraire) and his overtly populist and tediously static Coronation of Queen Victoria, to the ethereal beauties of Solitude (1843) and Arthur and Aigle in the Happy Valley (1849) might give the impression that Martin, like Wordsworth, had become an old fogey, too comfortable or cynical or tired to light the touch paper for any further apocalypse. The impression is understandable; but it is quite wrong. One of the things I most admire about Martin is that, almost with his last breath, he had the guts to once more put on the costume of the grand ringmaster, crack his whip and serve up the greatest show on earth. Until The Great Day of His Wrath (1853) the victims of Martin’s retributive fury had always been tyrants or hubristic fools: Pharaoh; Lot; Belshazzar; Edward I, even. Now, as if to say ‘That’s all, folks!’ (and meaning just that) Martin took the set, the whole set, and burned it down, stage, proscenium arch, auditorium, theatre and all: the entire world is folded in upon itself in an unimaginable (by anyone but Martin) volcanic conflagration. Everything, everyone is terminally punished for every sin ever conceived. This is the Day of Judgement. The world ends. The End (and no curtain call). The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

July 12, 2012

Max Adams

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:33.857176

phillis-wheatley-an-eighteenth-century-genius-in-bondage

An 18th-Century Genius in Bondage The Poems and Politics of Phillis Wheatley By Vincent Carretta February 6, 2012 Transported as a slave from West Africa to America when just a child, Phillis Wheatley published in 1773, at the age of twenty, her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Vincent Carretta takes a look at the remarkable life of the first ever African-American woman to be published. The African-American poet Phillis Wheatley has achieved iconic status in American culture. A 174-word letter from her to a fellow servant of African descent in 1776 sold at auction in 2005 for $253,000, well over double what it had been expected to fetch, and the highest price ever paid for a letter by a woman of African descent. Elementary, middle, and high schools throughout the United States bear her name. A prominent statue in Boston memorializes her. Wheatley is the subject of numerous recent stories written for children and adolescents. Googling “Phillis Wheatley” turns up about 665,000 items. The author we now know as Phillis Wheatley was born around 1753 somewhere in West Africa, probably between present-day Gambia and Ghana. She was forced to endure the Middle Passage from Africa to America when she was about seven or eight years old, and brought to Boston, where she was sold as a domestic servant to John and Susanna Wheatley. They called her Phillis, after the name of the slave ship that brought her from Africa. Encouraged by her owners, Phillis Wheatley quickly became literate and began writing poetry that soon found its way into local newspapers. Notwithstanding the prejudices against her race, social status, gender, and age, Wheatley became the first published woman of African descent in 1767. She gained international recognition with her funeral elegy on the death of the evangelist George Whitefield, addressed to his English patron, the Countess of Huntingdon, and published in Boston and London in 1770. By 1772, Wheatley had written enough poems to enable her to try to capitalize on her growing transatlantic reputation by producing a book of previously published and new works. Unable to find a publisher in Boston, in part because of racial prejudice, Wheatley and her owners successfully sought a London publisher and Huntingdon’s patronage in 1773 for her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Phillis Wheatley’s trip to London with her master’s son to arrange for the publication of her book was a turning point in her personal and professional lives. Her six-week stay in London enabled her to establish a network of associations that included many of the militarily, politically, religiously, and socially most important people in North America and Britain. She arrived in England a year after a court decision declared that slave owners could not legally compel their slaves to return to the colonies. Phillis returned to Boston shortly before her book was published. Within a month of her return she wrote a friend that she had been freed “at the desire of my friends in England.” She had apparently agreed to return only after her owner was compelled to promise to free her if she did. The assertiveness that Phillis probably displayed in her dealings with Nathaniel Wheatley was anticipated more subtly in her Poems. Wheatley does not hesitate in Poems to proclaim her African heritage. Her opening poem, “To Maecenas”, thanks her unnamed patron, loosely imitating Classical models such as Virgil and Horace’s poems dedicated to Maecenas, the Roman politician and patron of the arts. Emphasizing in a footnote that the Classical Roman poet Terence “was an African by birth”, Wheatley implies that her “Maecenas” has enabled her to claim a place in the Western literary tradition, which has included Africans since its beginning. Elsewhere in her poems, Wheatley appropriates the persona of authority or power normally associated with men and her social superiors. For example, in “To the University of Cambridge, in New-England”, first composed when she was about fifteen years old, Wheatley speaks as a teacher to students, or a minister to his flock, in addressing the young men of what was to become Harvard University, many of whom were being trained there to become ministers themselves. Several of Wheatley’s poems demonstrate a nuanced treatment of slavery unrecognized by some of her critics. For example, written in October 1772 to celebrate Dartmouth’s appointment the previous August, “To the Right Honourable WILLIAM, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for North America, &c.” is one of the most carefully crafted poems in the 1773 volume. In it Wheatley re-appropriates the concept of slavery from its common metaphorical use in the colonial rhetoric of discontent, which described any perceived limitation on colonial rights and liberty as an attempt by England to “enslave” (white) Americans. Wheatley appears to use slavery in this conventional sense in the poem: No more, America, in mournful strain Of wrongs, and grievance unredress’d complain, No longer shall thou dread the iron chain, Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand Had made, and with it meant t’enslave the land. But Wheatley’s reference to her authority to speak against this conventionally metaphorical slavery reminds her readers of the reality of chattel slavery trivialized by the political metaphor: Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,Whence flow these wishes for the common good,By feeling hearts alone best understood,I, young in life, by seeming cruel fateWas snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat. . . .Such, such my case. And can I then but prayOthers may never feel tyrannic sway? Having gone to England as an enslaved African Briton, Wheatley returned to the colonies prepared to embrace the free African-American identity that the American Revolution soon made available to her. Her anti-slavery stance became more overt once she was free, compared to her poems published while she had been enslaved. She denounces slave owners as “Modern Egyptians” in a letter to the Indian Presbyterian minister Samson Occom that was widely reprinted in newspapers in March 1774 throughout New England, as well as in Canada. Wheatley increasingly came to believe that the colonial struggle for freedom from Britain would lead to the end of slavery in the former colonies. In her poem “To His Excellency General Washington” Wheatley pledged her allegiance in 1776 to the revolutionary cause, hoping that even the most eminent slave owner in North America would ultimately apply the revolutionary ideology of equality and liberty to people of African as well as European descent. In the poem “On the Death of General Wooster”, included in a letter to Wooster’s widow, Mary, on July 15, 1778, Wheatley exclaims, “But how, presumptuous shall we hope to find/Divine acceptance with th’Almighty mind—/While yet (O deed ungenerous!) they disgrace/And hold in bondage Afric’s blameless race?” The hopes that Wheatley brought home with her from England were soon frustrated. She did not live to see the enfranchisement of her fellow people of African descent. Nor was she able to publish a second volume. Susanna Wheatley died within months of Phillis’s return from London, and John Wheatley died in 1778. Eight months later, Phillis married John Peters, a free black, on Thanksgiving Day. Although the marriage of Phillis and John Peters was initially prosperous, they soon fell victim to the general economic depression that followed the war. Peters, who at various times in his life advertised himself as a lawyer, physician, and gentleman was repeatedly jailed for debt. He was probably in prison when Phillis died on December 5, 1784, when she was about thirty-one years old. The cause of her death is unknown, but it may have been related to the “Asthmatic complaint” she suffered from in previous winters. The first American edition of her Poems was not published until 1786, in Philadelphia. Wheatley was not only the first person of African descent to publish a book, but consequently the first international celebrity of African descent. She also founded the literary tradition of English-speaking authors of African descent. Although Wheatley never met her contemporaries Jupiter Hammon, an enslaved African-American poet, Philip Quaque, an African-born Christian missionary to Africa, or Ignatius Sancho, a renowned contemporaneous African-British author, they all knew of her and her writings. Sancho called her a “Genius in Bondage”. Eighteenth-century opponents of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as nineteenth-century ante-bellum American abolitionists, cited Wheatley’s poetry as proof of the humanity, equality, and literary talents of people of African descent. But she and her work have not always been so highly valued. Arguments about the significance of Wheatley and her writings, from her own lifetime on, reflect the evolving re-assessment of African-American and African-British culture. Some commentators, Black as well as white, questioned the literary quality of her writings, or the political and social significance of her life, in support of their own ideological positions on whether and how people of African descent should produce literature. The most notorious critic was Thomas Jefferson, who denied that she was a poet. During the period from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s, a number of critics expressed neo-Jeffersonian denunciations of Wheatley’s literary abilities, as well as of her racial loyalty. Phillis Wheatley’s place in the developing tradition of early transatlantic literature by people of African descent, and her role as the mother of African-American literature are now finally secure. The many ways in which she subtly and indirectly confronted the issues of racism, sexism, and slavery have been increasingly appreciated. The prophecy offered by the pseudonymous “Matilda” in “On Reading the Poems of Phillis Wheatley, the African Poetess” (New York Magazine, October 1796) has been realized: A PHILLIS rises, and the world no more Denies the sacred right to mental pow’r; While, Heav’n-inspir’d, she proves her Country’s claim To Freedom, and her own to deathless Fame. The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

public-domain-review

February 6, 2012

Vincent Carretta

essay

2024-05-01T21:49:34.352611