There is very little that a person who is seriously and industriously disposed to improve may not obtain from books with more advantage than from a living instructor. Masters and mistresses are very necessary to compensate for want of inclination and exertion; but whoever would arrive at excellence must be self-taught.

Thomas Young, optiks genius and polymath, in a letter to his brother 1798

Who Loves Not Knowledge?

Blaise Pascal, mathematician and philosopher, said The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. He was not talking of love, but of first principles; perception of space, time, motion and number. It is the heart that teaches us the foundations of geometry.

It is just as pointless and absurd for reason to demand proof of first principles from the heart before agreeing to accept them as it would be absurd for the heart to demand an intuition of all the propositions demonstrated by reason before agreeing to accept them.

Baruch Spinoza believed that life was of two kinds; human bondage, or, slavery to our passions, and, human freedom, or, liberation by our intellect. Human beings wrongly believe themselves to be making free, undetermined choices; because we do not know the causes of our choices, we assume they have none. The only true liberation possible for us is to make ourselves conscious of the hidden causes.

For Spinoza, passive emotions, like fear and anger, are generated by external forces; active emotions arise from the mind's understanding of the human condition. Replacement of passive emotions by active ones is the path to liberation. In particular, the passion of fear, including the fear of death. The key to progress is the appreciation of the necessity of all things. Spinoza believed that when we realise the acts of others are determined by nature, we cease to feel hatred. Returning hatred only increases it, but reciprocating it with love vanquishes it. What we need to do is take a 'God's-eye-view' of the whole necessary natural scheme of things, seeing it in the light of eternity.

This and his equation of God as Nature (Deus sive Natura), are close to Eastern philosophical thought. Although ambiguous (and often debated), this 'God' is taken to mean, not some 'incorporeal substance' who directs things from on high, but the whole natural, self-ordering system, whose code we can never fully know. I prefer this idea; is this not relevant now, when we are treating technology as a kind of God who we think we can know and control? Must not this idea of life remain ambiguous and unknowable? I remember something from Dostoïevski, will we not devise eventually a system of perfect order, of perfect paths, that can be consulted at any time, to direct us to right and wrong? And then, will we not still break things, because sometimes, in the light of the consequences, knowing what is best for us and for others, and perhaps for the very fact of this knowledge, we desire to destroy, often the very thing that we love? Perhaps it is this ordering that is our downfall, our hubris to control and 'know' the system. We never can. And is this not more beautiful? Is it perhaps the very essence of this beauty that the experience of the sublime (of knowledge, of understanding) is but a part of the whole, and whole will always remain mysterious?

sang, and blood, she did.

I have just finished a crocheted kardia , based upon these very diagrams. Lymph and blood vessels not yet included, but aorta and arteries, oui. It will lie in wait, corpse in copse, bosomed in barbarous boscage, to wit a forest whose very fibres call chaos.

vongole vouvray aquarelle asleep with Cece and Raphael

7th étage, rue d'alesia, 14éme, Paris, chez Hamméren et Rikkala

Sans Soleil

Chris Marker's Sans Soleil - the film that brought me into the world of beautiful knowledge, perhaps art, but knowledge made beautiful is how I would describe this film.

When I was younger, at boarding school, in banality made costly, I went to Sydney for new years. I stayed for one night at my cousins house, where he lived with his brother. I remember being younger and with our family at Christmas and seeing a lot of hand/ready made sculptures in his room, and other odd but study-able matchings and findings.
When I came back as a sixteen year old, my friend and I limewired a fairly substantial amount of terrible electro music onto his computer to listen to, and did. Afterwards, when she had left, I found a Chris Marker dvd and settled down to watch. It almost completely changed my world. I remember a few years later, after leaving school, living in Italy for a year, and being back in Sydney to study, and being reminded by my still bemused and slightly smug cousin of those banal pulsing electronic beats that I had once found stimulating. Understood.

A study was done on kids who were learning or were in their teenage years of reading, still working out syntax and semantics. Listening to young kids read, you can hear this, pauses at the end of lines even though there are no commas, runnings on when there is a clear break in textual thought. Their brains are full of activity, but the kind where it is desperately trying to keep up. Suddenly it finds that it has said something aloud, or silently trudged through a paragraph, and it does not remember a thing, except the act of reading itself, like driving a road and realising that you cannot remember what was on either side of that road, or whether there were traffic lights that stopped your journey, or what was playing through the speakers or sliding through the window from the outside world, hitting your ears in an unnatural tempo. School children, just for a second, a siren that rushes up, hits an invisible wall and then drops deep out of your time and space.

Childhood is mostly like that, I have found, a confounded space-time, of unrecognisable peaks and troughs, that only later become solid in memory, and perhaps important. I do not remember my own self as a person of sixteen, but other people do. To them, you are a formed picture, that perhaps they modify, but mostly only slightly (that is a nice triplet treble troika). But what I remember is a part of this film; the lost vagrants of Tokyo, longing for a beer, whose incredible luxury would be the bottle of sake that is poured over shrines as an offering to the dead. This reminds me of Barthes Camera Lucida and an idea of the subjective feeling held in a photograph, that can only belong to the person affected by the events/people the photograph is an imprint of. Of course, it is not that simple. But we will return another time, to this.

P.S. those masks are sick

Scale, Speed, Time and Space

I have been reading Virilio on technological speed and the way that it obliterates space and time, and just quickly, Adorno on reflecting on self-reflection and non-identity. I will write more soon on these. In other pensées, BM sent me a link to Dabrowski, a polish intellectual whose idea of Positive Disintegration interests me greatly. I like this idea that one should make use of experiences, and rather than avoiding pain, fear or unhappiness, appreciate that these essential crisis periods are what enable us to reflect and change. On a side note, this is why I like cloudy days and cool days and winter days and why I do not like summer days, hot days, sunny days. There is something endlessly pensive about a grey sky, whether it is that the sun is not garishly bending around you, imposing time, to go, to go, or passed and no longer. One wanders into a greyday fugue, and loses oneself, often, to thoughts of things outside oneself. I do not care for the sunny summer days, that say "frolic, child, frolic, you need not own past and future here". Plus I get sunburnt.

To wit, I think we have a problem of scale. I was talking to AE recently and he tries to look at everything from all its scales; from the atomic, where everything is mostly empty space, perhaps then taking on the perspective of an ant, knowing with supreme sensitivity surface textures and the simplest curves and angles, to us, which one needs not explain, then perhaps a bird, or from space, then the universe, infinite possible worlds, the big bang and the start of time (which AG pointedly noted the other day, is linguistically insubstantial). He thinks that understanding this, at all moments, lets him keep what is instinctively important in all those scales. Geometry, maths, science. Not a mechanistic view, but that strange sublime, that secret feeling of wondrous cognisance, that perhaps for an instant your mind can broach the void, look over into it and see something other than our human scale.
I was listening to David Christian, author of Big History, talk about origin myths, our new scientific one, our old ones, and their places in the world now. One interesting point he makes is that all origin myths are comprised of similar ideas; simplicity, growing complexity, basic physical and moral laws. Ours differs from the others in two respects; that our time scale is almost incomprehensible in a human sense, and, that not everyone in our society knows our origin myth. The point of origin myths was to teach something of scale to children, and to remind adults. It was an integral part of culture, of understanding your place in your world.

What happens when we don't understand scale or are never taught to think about it? I wonder what our world would be like if we all had an understanding of our place in history, that the whole of human existence is but a blip? Would we treat it more carefully, would it be more sacred? There is something that I just heard about, Saturday the 18th of December (and I'm finished for the semester! jee!) that is, the Overview Effect, the experience of astronauts when they look back down upon the Earth from space, seeing the fertile areas, the changing weather, and all this out of the context of ordinary human experience, the quotidian, where one often forgets that there are things more momentous. In a letter to U:

... it is nice to sit back and see everything from outside of the human scale (as in, what is around us, told to us by our eyes, ears, nostrils), and realise that when you breathe or move your hand you are pushing particles of oxygen and carbon dioxide around, that you are changing the electromagnetic field, that you are hearing sine, saw, triangle or square waves (the last ones shouldn't really be called waves, I think there is something singularly curvy about waves), and that outside of that, from a sky or space perspective, to think of the world revolving, the stars that we see being light sent from millions of years ago, that time and space are in fact one thing, that if you happen to see a supernova, the neurons in your eyes are literally being fired by the exposure to real light waves from a time so long ago that we can hardly comprehend it. I sometimes like to think that perhaps there is a supernova dying in a grand explosion right now and that in 300 million years someone will finally see it from Earth and they will be connected to us on the same bizarre time space dimension. Ooh, this just breaks my mind. In a nice way. Have you seen the Eames' Power of Ten? It is pretty rad.

Und so:

E8, spooky action at a distance.

Some forms are chiral, meaning asymmetrical, others preserve mirror symmetry, some rotational symmetry and some preserve both. The number of rotations or faithful mirrorings gives the number of symmetrical elements. So a dodecahedron, 12 pentagon (5) faces, has a rotational symmetry of 60 elements (12x5).
Like regular taxonomy, most forms can be put into categories, though there are a few outliers. E8 is one of them. Also called Baby Monster, it is preserved by over 13 billion mirror symmetries, and is incredibly beautiful. This was all generously told to me through the medium of Cabinet Magazine, by Margaret Wertheim, who is a personal hero of mine. (Also my crocheting inspiration, which we will come to another time)

And here is the hook, or as Margaret prefers, the spooky thing:

"the Monster may encode the structure of our universe. There is tantalising evidence that this extraordinary symmetry group may lie at the heart of physical reality as explained by string theory. In some versions of string theory, our universe is described as having twenty-six dimensions and there are mystically eerie resonances between this version of the theory and the formal characteristics of the Monster. There are whole columns of numbers in the Monster’s character table that mirror properties of the mathematics that can also be used to describe the stringy structure of spacetime."

Super delicious.

In Praise of Shadows

The magical must liberate reason
from its anxieties of universalism;
the part can only be the whole,
if the whole is mysterious.

"...we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway... Have you never felt a sort of fear in the face of the ageless, a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find you had grown old and gray?"

Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows.

Shiv Visvanathan, A Letter to the 21st Century - This is mostly interesting because it is pre-911, and one decade later, perhaps slightly banal, even though the plea goes unanswered and the problems remain.

Lore Segal's The Reverse Bug

This story is is an exploration of the incomprehensible and the irreducible; subjects that are discussed at length, that tie philosophers in knots, that must be abstracted to be understood; genocide and pain. No answer lies within, but expertly, and astonishingly, Segal uses sound assault to crack the frail gloss of academic reasoning. We hear no screams, but there they are, and they assault us too. Bury it deep, so that we can talk about it.

This is read by Jennifer Egan and can be found in the New Yorker fiction audio.
Listen here - it's srsly good

Second Law of Thermodynamics, or, Einstein is a babe.

Heat cannot be transferred from a colder to a hotter body. As a result, natural processes that involve energy transfer have one direction, thus all natural processes are irreversible. This law predicts that the entropy of an isolated system always increases with time. Entropy is the measure of the disorder (or, randomness) of energy and matter in a system. This may mean that both energy and matter are becoming less useful as time goes on.
And here is the reason we are so obsessed with working out what the universe looked like in the microseconds after the big bang; energy and matter were unified and perfect order occurred. The rapid expansion of the universe and its continued expansion today, the cooling from its dense hot state to our more temperate climate, dark matter and dark energy are all linked back to this second law, forever taking a backseat to e=mc2.

The Host and the Cloud

Pierre Huyghe's The Host and The Cloud, one of the best films I have seen this year. A two hour gallery piece in Marion Goodman, Rue du Temple, Paris. Masked individuals in and around chaotic abstracted rituals, perfectly disfigured, solemnly absurd. Taken, taken, taken.
As Baudelaire wrote in l'Etranger, the liminal poem from the Spleen de Paris, to the wanderer who had no mother, father, siblings, friends, land or wealth.

Eh! qu'aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire etranger?

J'aime les nuages ... les nuages qui passent ... la-bas ... la- bas ... les merveilleux nuages!

So! Then what do you love, you extraordinary stranger?

I love clouds... drifting clouds ... there ... over there ... marvellous clouds!

The advanced technological society is self-perpetuating, it pays us no heed. We create our own rituals, our own systems of law, religion, our own rites, avatars, our own bodies, drugs, personas. Can we wander into the void, experience Zhuangzi's distant lands of marvellous creatures beyond ordinary comprehension, the harmony between life and death?
These are the rabbits in The Host and the Cloud. The spirits of the rituals that we have left behind, unshocked ideas of love, play, salvation, the now useless passions of a categorising nexus. "Save them" the final plea into the darkness.

1942 Hurt

The 1942 American-Japanese internment, post Pearl Harbour. The beautiful boy in the above photo, looking confused and curious at having to pledge allegiance to his home America, makes me want to cry.

Babar and Colonial Euphemising

"The hunter has killed Babar’s mother. 

The monkey hides, the birds fly away, Babar cries.

The hunter runs up to catch poor Babar."

"Here is Celesteville! The elephants have just finished building it and are resting or bathing. Babar goes for a sail with Arthur and Zephir. He is well satisfied, and admires his new capital. Each elephant has his own house. The Old Lady’s is at the upper left, the one for the King and Queen is at the upper right. The big lake is visible from all their windows. The Bureau of Industry is next door to the Amusement Hall which will be very practical and convenient."

The original Babar story jumps seamlessly from Babar's mother being killed to him discovering a wonderful new city (Paris, without the name). A kind old lady dresses Babar in a beautiful green suit and before too long he is building a modern capitalist city in his home country (somewhere in North Africa, also unnamed). The Bureau of Industry and the Amusement Hall, the new churches of the new age are not far from the Haussmann-Napoleon III vision for a stimulated Paris, one in which the entertained will not dwell on their political situation.

Instrumentalism is the dominant mode of education under advanced technological societies, and has, according to Heidegger, destroyed our capacity for meditative thinking in its demand for calculative thinking.

In the Bitter Harvest Tesconi & Morris write: "And finally we know: as both consumers and producers, we are replaceable. The system qua system needs people but it does not absolutely need me. Not only are we alienated and isolated from each other but from ourselves as well. Our self-esteem is wounded, our quest for personal identity lashes out incoherently for symbolic supports in stainless steel things and 'pay later' experiences."

In July 2010, the Sarkozy French government dispersed hundreds of Romani camps, declaring them illegal. The Roma, not welcome in France, have no warm welcome in their largest populated countries, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia. What are the ethics of nomadism and borders?

If we expect cheap goods from China (and we all know why they are cheap), do we have a right to deny the movement of people? If we tick yes (just do it™) on cheap labour, must we not also tick yes on the freedom of movement and habitation? With clean packaging, has it become easier to obscure the map of production and destruction?

Companies dump unwanted computers and electronics in Africa and Asia, where they leak toxic mercury, cadmium and beryllium into the ground and air. Through this pernicious playground children sift for precious copper and aluminums to be re-sold into electronics re-manufacture. Trend has no end, now means don't either. The self-perpetuating technological system has abstracted and magnified the possible ends, which are now unattainable, leaving the significance of means significantly increased. Ritual routine and avoidance is the escape from the void of endless possibility.

Bluewater, described by Ian Sinclair, "a zone where only the fake is truly authentic, the retail swamp on the borders of everything, grandiloquent and meaningless as one of Saddam Hussein’s arches". From elsewhere: "a city with no gods other than Prada, Gucci and Starbucks, with no cathedral and temple beyond the naves and domes of the mall itself, and with no ultimate purpose beyond stupefying consumption".

Trends die to be resurrected and goods end up no good as waste. Death becomes the middle man of life qua fashion; consumption, waste, re consumption.

Hairy Palms, Or, Onania, and All its Frightful Consequences

In 53 BC, Marcus Licinius Crassus was the oldest member of the first triumvirate (his allies being Gaius Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus) and the wealthiest. Thus, his attack on Parthia, with whom he had no quarrel, bespoke his impenitent greed. Asked by the Parthian ambassador the reasons for the unprovoked assault, Crassus boasted that his answer would be spoken in Seleucia, the western capital of the empire. Taking his hand and turning up its palm, the envoy, laughing, said; "O Crassus, hair will grow there before thou shalt see Seleucia"[1]
Crassus did not see Seleucia and his palm remained bare, but the idea did not. A hirsute palm is the very definition of unnatural hair and dangerous sexuality. Now a schoolyard joke, whose butt is the youth who looks to his hands, the words had a complex historical marriage. [2] Let us divert a moment to consider the implications of this match. Hair has always occupied an extraordinary place between the natural and the cultural, being both of and outside the body, able to be shaped but never completely controlled; a sexual, national and racial mark. Increasingly in the 18th and 19th centuries, sexuality became a signifier of personal identity, as well as a key area of social relations, playing a role not dissimilar to that of the hair, a biological actuality to be moulded, cultured and controlled.
The widespread masturbation panic had its beginnings in 1715[3] with the distribution of an anonymous[4] pamphlet entitled Onania, or The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, And All It's Frightful Consequences, In Both Sexes, Considered: With Spiritual and Physical Advice To Those Who Have Already Injured Themselves By This Abominable Practice[5]. As straightforward as this may sound, its contents were not. Amongst the various ailments in store for the indulger were stranguaries (restricted urine flow), priapisms (persistent and painful erections), consumption[6], epilepsy, hysteric fits, whole body degradation and finally, death. Heavy with Hippocratic humoralism, the pamphlet described how Onanism robbed the body "of its balmy and vital Moisture" and sent its victims to their graves.
In 1758, the Swiss physician Samuel Tissot published L'Onanisme, ou Dissertation physique sur les maladies produites par la masturbation in which he called semen "the Essential Oil of the animal liquors… the rectified spirit". Indeed, as the onset of puberty in males produced semen, accompanied by new facial and corporeal hair, a deepening voice and strengthened physique, it is not hard to see why masculine virility was attributed to its excess. It is not a far stretch then, to imagine the hair-growing powers of semen affecting the primary instrument of the masturbating adolescent male. Although in no way helpful in dissecting the myth, it does give an insight into the mysticism surrounding both hair and semen in pre-modern society. Hair is corpo-real, emerging naturally from the flesh but worn as though cloth. It was read as both a biological ‘symptom’ and a humoral diagnosis of cultural character. Compared to the bearded Europeans, the 'eunuch-like' Native Americans and East Asians represented the full effects of semen loss. In his Systema Naturae, Carolus Linneas describes the 'sanguine' European with his long, flaxen mane as 'active' and deems the 'phlegmatic' African 'indolent' by his 'frizzled' black shock. Licentious behaviour and excess were also symptoms of the ferocious, uncombed and wild hair of the Afer[7]. Increasingly, the self-proclaimed civilised West saw the African beard as the involuntary costume of a people who had “no opportunity to shave." [8] It seems that cultivated men must cultivate their hair.

As medicine became more advanced, humoralism gave way to physiological psychology, sociology and sexology. Tissot's publication set medical circles and the wider community to panic. The Onanist was reduced to "a being that less resembled a living creature than a corpse… it was difficult to discover that he had formerly been part of the human race." Stupidity, lassitude, apoplexy, gangrene and finally death were in store for the lowly creatures of sin. Jean-Jaques Rousseau's Emile[9] required, until his twentieth year, all his energy to become physically and mentally matured. Admired by Tissot, Rousseau advocated the channelling of energy into education and productive work, warning against the supplement dangereux[10]. Such ideas of self-mastery had been around since Plato, but a receptive and burgeoning middle class had not. The effects of enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation and post-Tridentine Catholic discourse could be seen in this new social structure, which placed greater emphasis on self-determination and individual responsibility. And in a class whose concern with progress and work ethic was great, the economic values of thrift were easily applied to semen.
Childhood was a constant reminder of waste and excess, the narcissistic time of no tomorrow. If the child learnt no self-control, there could be no mental or physical advance; he would become an idler, an outsider who could neither earn a wage nor take care of a family. Here we see the appearance of the French phrase, avoir du poil dans la main[11] (to have hair on the palms) in the beginning of the 19th century. L'homme fainéant, the bone idle, was said to have be born with hairy palms, his laziness almost a congenital malformation[12]. Although the 'wasting' of vital fluid is no longer associated with the modern usage of the phrase, in the 18th and 19th centuries the vice showed it's first symptom in lassitude.
The idea of hereditary sin was the calling card of one well-respected Doctor Henry Maudsley, a 19th century physician whose three great passions in work were criminality, insanity and self-abuse. Maudsley and his peers furthered the idea of individual responsibility, insofar as the transgressions of one generation would resurface as physical and moral degradation in their progeny. The onus was soon on parents and carers[13], whose sins would likely cause madness and criminality in their children. There are given many reasons for the masturbatory madness scapegoat, but undoubtedly the growth of psychology and the development of the modern asylum were key, as patients, in varying states of mental deterioration, were observed masturbating. Not knowing, as we do, that masturbation is often a somatic product of mental illness and not its cause, 18th and 19th century doctors 'found' empirical evidence of the consequences of vice.
In actuality, it is likely that there was an increase in masturbation during this period, with the average age of puberty declining and later marriages leaving a substantial gap during which there was no socially acceptable sexual outlet. The changing social and physical structure of the family home also allowed greater solitude, helpful given that the fear of venereal disease during the 15th – 18th centuries had made partnered sex less desirable. It is here that the true sins of masturbation and its hairy consequences become clear. The insane see from "the standpoint of the narrowest selfishness" and are in the social "what a diseased organ is in the physiological organism, something separate, out of harmony and unity with it, alienated from it, in fact too individual." The unnatural was a danger to society; both madness and masturbation were anti-social. We see something of this disharmony in the erstwhile popular urban gothic tale[14], wherein an element enters, violates reality (and therefore defines it) and is eventually expelled, re-establishing order. Of course, the wolfman and Dracula, key monstrosities in urban gothic literature, both had hairy palms.[15]

The werewolf, since its beginning in Eastern European folklore, could be identified by hirsute palms, and Dracula, who is himself part wolf, inherited the same trait.[16] These two unnatural creatures are redolent of pubescent boys, who also enter into a world of the unknown, of mysterious urges that can be neither satisfied nor admitted and whose own bodies betray their changes. It is easy to see excess hair as primitive, and hair on the palms as unnatural hair, a symbol of the unkinding [17] of mind, a stripping away of the higher evolutionary functions, leaving only the base and animalistic creature of pre-moral times. Dracula had a child-like mind, imperfectly formed and thus degenerate; he is naturally selfish, solitary and evil. So too was seen the youth, whose love of solitude was evidence of the secret habit, so vile that in the words of Dr John Harvey Kellogg (of the famed flake) "the most loathsome reptile, rolling in the slush and slime of its stagnant pool, would not bemean itself" by masturbating. Autofellatio stirred something so deep in the public's anxiety about antisocial behaviour that the well-known Doctor James Jackson even considered group masturbation “a favourable symptom”[18] by comparison.

Of gravest danger to the adolescent was sleep. One could be vigilant during the day, but as the mind went quiet, latent sexuality would rise and take hold. The individual required an inner panopticon, constant observation and control. Failing strength of mind, various semen-preventing (and blood-curdling) apparatuses were employed to hinder unconscious arousal. Although some forgave nocturnal emissions and insisted upon the innocence of the unclear mind (others did not), willing desire and fantasy were sins more grave than the act itself. Here we shall make a distinction; desire is that which one wishes to fulfil, whereas fantasy has, for all intents and purposes, no goal. Whilst desiring another's wife was still adultery, and another man, still homosexuality, fantasy was grave beyond forgiveness. It signalled a submission to evil, a petulant flouting of social and moral convention, and the making of an outsider. In Stoker's Dracula, Lucy Westenra is a sleepwalker, a habit traditionally associated with sexual looseness. Etymologically, in most European languages, the word nightmare arose from folklore of a mare (a spirit or goblin) sitting on the chest of the sleeper, well illustrated in Henry Fuselli's painting of the same name. The erotic nightmare, along with incubi and succubi, were strange phenomenon of sexual horror much like the creatures of the urban gothic and the fantastic. The sexual symbolism of both the wolfman and Dracula is hard to miss; monthly attacks that can be measured by the cycle of the moon, sexual and (when appropriate[19]) homoerotic connotations of blood sucking - the red substance often compared to that invaluable life source, semen. In an attempt to hide their true nature, werewolves often shaved their palms, but hair, insubordinate foe, grows back; watch for stubbled hands, we are warned.
Bodily hair and fluids are not rational, they cannot be controlled, are not enlightened. Our constant ridding of unwanted hair and its shameful re-eruption from our skin is key in the relationship between our supposed logical minds and our natural bodies. As sexuality figured more in personal identity, its importance to society increased, as did its responsibility. Sexuality had to be escorted and educated, and if threatening, suppressed and deformed. Masturbation was an act seen as both sexual and solitary[20] and, like hair, was both of the body and outside it. The Onanist and his hirsute-palm were the epitome of the unnatural and improper. His secret vice (or a run-in with werewolves and vampires) guaranteed not just la petite mort of orgasm but eventually la grande mort, true death. Or so the story goes.

[1] Plutarch, Life of Crassus, XVIII.2; Dio, XL.1
[2] For the purpose of this essay and unless stated otherwise, the average youth will be assumed male
[3] Believed to be published in its first edition in 1715, only copies of the second edition, announced February 1716 remain.
[4] The author is still a somewhat disputed fact, and although the name Dr Balthazar Bekker pops up, the Dutch theologian died in 1698.
[5] In the Bible, Onan was directed to impregnate his deceased brother’s wife but unable to do so, spilled his seed on the ground. Although this is technically coitus interruptus, it became a suitably powerful term for the non-procreative act of masturbation.
[6] Consumption is now most commonly applied to pulmonary tuberculosis, though masturbation was thought to cause any respiratory malfunction.
[7] Rosenthal, Angela. Raising Hair. Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1, Hair (Fall, 2004) pp. 2 of 16
[8] ibid., p. 3
[9] Emile, from the eponymous book was published by Rousseau in 1762
[10] dangerous habit
[11] Later the phrase became avoir un poil dans la main (to have a hair on the palm) though it is unclear when exactly this occurred.
[12] Another explanation, though more in the realms of folkish speculation, is that the post-orgasm masturbator, languorous and absent-minded, overlooked a trace of his deed, a pubic hair or two stuck to his palm.
[13] It is often noted that nannies would fondle the genitals of babies to soothe their crying
[14] Kathleen Spencer uses this term in Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis published in ELH, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 197-225
[15] Cases of nevoid hypertrichosis (localized hair, including the palms and soles) and hirsuitism have been cited as possible originators of the werewolf myth, but given the widespread nature of sightings, it is at best a shaky explanation.
[16] In Bram Stoker’s original 1897 novel, Dracula had hairy palms. In later versions, including stage and film, he was cleaned up and the trait disappeared.
[17] “Unkinding”; a Maudsley term for the undoing of oneself.
[18] Jackson, James. The Sexual Organism and its Healthful Management. (1862) Boston, pp. 60
[19] In Stoker’s novel, Jonathan faces near death at the fangs of female vampires, until Dracula halts the proceedings, demanding Jonathan for himself: “Yes, I too can love”
[20] this is not counting mutual masturbation as a sexual act to an audience of one or more.