text:
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.

author: John Tresch


text:
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.

date: November 24, 2021

author: Ross Bullen

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
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.

author: Peter Trac


text:
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.

date: October 27, 2021

author: Lauren Collee


text:
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.

author: Kensy Cooperrider