text:
Some Remarks on the Legacy of Madame Francine Descartes – First Lady and Historian of the Robocene – on the Occasion of 500 Years Since her Unlawful Watery Execution.

By Dominic Pettman
January 4, 2017

It seems likely that the (highly suspect) story of Rene Descartes’s robot daughter has its origins in the middle third of the 18th century — post-dating the philosopher’s death by a considerable margin, and evidently part of more general Enlightenment polemics over materialism, libertinage, and the embattled pieties of conventional religion. The tale itself? Multiple versions are known, but the core of the scandal goes like this: sailors aboard a vessel bearing Descartes to Sweden in 1649 are said to have discovered, in his luggage, a disorienting lifelike girl-doll; when she sat up and moved about they fell upon her and — decrying witchcraft — hurled her into the sea. The backstory to the legend is sad: Descartes’ actual (illegitimate) daughter, Francine, succumbed to a sudden illness at the tender age of five, and the loss deeply affected her father. The displacement of this real tragedy by an off-color farce of autonomic substitution speaks volumes on the stakes of mechanico-mathematical thought across the watershed of modernity. In the Conjectures piece that follows, Dominic Pettman (who is actually, it turns out, the gifted lovechild of Stanslav Lem and Michel de Montaigne) departs from the figure of Francine, using the recovery of her “memory” to spin a clockwork theory of history, the historiographical revenge of our enslaved devices, a Bladerunning satire upon the solipsisms of historismus. What new kind of history can be written by “the sex organs of the machine world”? Read on!
— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

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

date: January 4, 2017

author: Dominic Pettman


text:
Remembering Roy Gold, Who was Not Excessively Interested in Books

By Nicholas Jeeves
May 1, 2018

In this gentle memorial, Nicholas Jeeves takes us on a turn through a Borgesian library of defacements. Jeeves’ quarry, the (inventive and invented) Professor Roy Gold, would seem to have been an outsider artist of his books, and his dust-jacket daubings leave an ambiguous legacy. Should such biblio-graffiti be accounted irreverent mischief? Does it betray anti-bookishness in the secret heart of a bookish man? Or is something else afoot? Perhaps, under the right conditions, doodling can become something like a theory of reading. After all, what is to be done with all our paper books in an age of textual dematerialization? Roy Gold stands over our shoulders, brush in hand…
— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

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

author: Nicholas Jeeves

source: public-domain-review

type: conjecture

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


text:
Concrete Poetry
Thomas Edison and the Almost-Built World
By Anthony Acciavatti
December 1, 2022

Historians often speak of “contingency”, by which they mean something like “things could have been otherwise”. But is this even true? It can be hard to show. After all, there is no (obvious) way to go back, make a few changes, and run history a second time. Much science fiction explores exactly such scenarios, of course, and the popularity of this conceit can be understood as a symptom of a collective anxiety: what if our future is as determinate as our past? Addressing exactly that specter, the French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote, memorably: “There are times in life when the question of whether one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one perceives, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.” Perhaps this is why historians love the idea of contingency. In the playful piece that follows, the architect and historian Anthony Acciavatti uses a real (but mostly forgotten) patent to conjure a world that could have been. If we look around us, and squint, can we see it?— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

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

date: December 1, 2022

author: Anthony Acciavatti


text:
The Elizabeths
Elemental Historians
By Carla Nappi
April 27, 2017

For the most part, working professional historians bring to their sources a fundamentally forensic sensibility: they tend to treat their archival scraps like so many clues, which, rightly read, permit the reconstruction of events and persons. There is much to be said for this program, which works pretty well. But it does have its limits. For instance, certain old tidbits afford a queer intimacy with the past that seems to exceed their evidentiary utility. A death mask may display, trapped in white plaster, a single hair once belonging to the human whose visage we contemplate. The hair is of severely limited utility to a practicing historian, yet it rather seethes with an urgent presencing of the past — and that clearly has something to do with the work of history. So what’s to be done? In this excerpt from a larger project, the imaginative historian of Chinese science Carla Nappi permits a dreamscape to rise from four archival fragments — four oblique references to women named “Elizabeth” who lived on the watershed of the sixteenth-to-seventeenth century, and whose entire existence survives only in four fleeting references within a vast archive of “consultation notes” kept by a pair of London-based astrologer-healers of the Elizabethan period (see more here). There is very little to go on, but the women’s names, and the passing evocations of their bodily ailments, has piqued in Nappi an archival reverie. They went to a conjurer to be healed, and that fact is all that is left of them, really. But Nappi conjures them back, as homeopathic wise-women, empowered to enact their own resurrections.
— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

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

author: Carla Nappi


text:
It is Disturbing to Find

By Elaine Ayers
October 23, 2018

What is an elegy? The term invokes one of the oldest literary forms. The elegos of ancient Greece was a mournful poem, a song that gave dignity to loss through the dutiful beauty of form and attention. In a basic way, history is forever haunted by an “elegiac” mood. The historian writes of people and things that have passed, so the sweet sorrow of loss (death, decay, dissolution) wafts through all historical work — even as any given historical achievement can be understood to wrest some small thing from oblivion. These affective registers must be closely monitored: historical nostalgia is often implicated in the ideologies of political reaction. But sanitizing the soul-sorrow of archives is hardly the answer. In the piece that follows, Elaine Ayers achieves an uncanny elegy: like a magician, she eyes her audience; “look, no hands!” she says; and, then, simply by letting her sources speak, she coaxes a tragic little poem out of the black hat she has set before us.
— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

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

I am indeed a solitary animal, & seem to live here without being perceived by any one.
Sources

Joseph Arnold’s journals dating from 1810 – 1815, bound in four volumes, have been transcribed and made available as downloadable PDFs by the Mitchell Library Special Collections, State Library of New South Wales. C720, items 01 – 04.
Papers Relating to Joseph Arnold, 1810 – 1931. Mitchell Library Special Collections, State Library of New South Wales, Aa72.
Joseph Arnold, Letters to his Brother, 1810. Mitchell Library Special Collections, State Library of New South Wales, A1849.
Joseph Arnold, The Visit to the Moon: A Philosophical Romance. Mitchell Library Special Collections, State Library of New South Wales, A1848.
Dawson Turner, Memoir of Joseph Arnold, M.D., in Samuel Wilton Rix, Thye Fauconberge Memorial (Ipswich, 1849), 68-79.
For the best record of Arnold in Southeast Asia, see: Sophia Raffles, Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (London: John Murray, 1830).
For extracts of Arnold’s final letters and the first published report of his corpse flower, Rafflesia arnoldii, see: Robert Brown, “XV. An Account of a New Genus of Plants, Named Rafflesia”, Transactions of the Linnean Society, vol. 13 (1821), 201-234.

The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 23, 2018

author: Elaine Ayers