text:
Lover of the Strange, Sympathizer of the Rude, Barbarianologist of the Farthest Peripheries

By Winnie Wong
July 5, 2017

Why do we see what we see? What is the role of culture, history, metaphysics in the way our eyes and minds make sense of images? How do conventions of visual representation — line, color, perspective — emerge and change? In one sense, these are art-history questions. But thorny issues of civilization, race, and power have long been tangled up with the answers: Whose sculptures are “primitive”? Whose drawings are “childlike”? For much of the sordid ordeal of European global imperialism, the conquerors collected the made things of the conquered and arranged these artifacts in museums intended to teach lessons about the stages of savagery and rise of the West. That legacy has come under plenty of critical scrutiny, but it is hardly dead. Call it a zombie. In the bright and Borgesian piece that follows, the imaginative art historian Winnie Wong skewers that zombie with a rapier wit. To bring us this short biography of the Chinese curioso Pan Youxun (1745-1780) Wong has donned a translator’s mask, the better to smuggle a gem of storytelling up out of the well-policed precincts of archival scholarship. At issue? Hubris, hegemony, global art history, and what Gillian Beer once called, in a superb essay on travel and transculturation, “Travelling the Other Way” — which is to say, “coming back home”, but transformed by the view from elsewhere.
— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

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

author: Winnie Wong


text:
In Praise of Halvings
Hidden Histories of Japan Excavated by Dr D. Fenberger
By Roger McDonald
March 28, 2019

In his combative and much-meditated-upon essay, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life”, Friedrich Nietzsche identified a number of ways that the dead legacy of the past could grip the living in its stifling grasp: “Monumental” history fashioned heroes who loomed over life; “Antiquarian” history reverentially aggregated the detritus of bygone ages, and thereby forced the vital present to play custodian to a bunch of old junk; “Critical” history sorted the “lessons” of the past (the right from the wrong, the effective from the less so) with an eye on tutoring everyone with somniferous yakka-yakka about the days of yore. How to escape from history — and especially from the mindset of historical deference called “historicism”? These were Nietzsche’s questions. He hazarded answers, too, proposing that it might be time to learn to be unhistorical (by learning to forget), or possibly suprahistorical (by learning to live in/with/through “eternity” — whatever that might mean). I rehearse Nietzsche’s important argument because it offers, I think, a suggestive frame through which to encounter Roger McDonald’s “In Praise of Halvings”, presented here below. Burying history? Or inventing it? Both? And here is a problem: If others have erased your history, are you unhistorical? Suprahistorical? Or perhaps just invisible?
— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

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

author: Roger McDonald

source: public-domain-review

type: conjecture

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


text:
Portrait of a Scaphander

By Brad Fox
February 2, 2022

Etymologically, Orthobiosis means something like “right living”, and the term has cropped up now and again in the history of science, always to invoke a promise of bringing our actual (messy, painful, diseased, confusing) lives into line with…well, something better. The “ortho-” in there comes from the Greek term for “straight” — straight like a line. The “-biosis” part means nothing less than “life” — life itself. But what in “life” is “straight”? Not much. Maybe nothing. Except, of course, time. Sure, you can sort of loop it (with memory), or kind of meander in it (with daydreams), but it is a damnable feature of time that, whatever our tricks or hopes, it runs on a line. The events line up.  Historians, as a rule, love this. The “time-line” is the magic wand of historicism: no matter how complex things get, there is always chronology, and it orders things with a ruthless logic.  So history loves its timelines. But story-tellers tend to squirm and jump. They tell yarns, after all — and yarns will tangle. In “Portrait of a Scaphander” Brad Fox tells a history-story that pulls on a life-thread in the tangle of things. But that only makes it all a little knottier, no?
— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

Orthobiotic Origins
In the winter of 1660, Voivode Constantin Basarab sat in his chamber inspecting a colorless, serpentine creature with malformed legs, a head backed with frilly pink gills, and soft skin like a child. It had been found in the Dinaric Alps after a cave flooded — a larval fish-human incubating in the Balkan earth. Laying it aside, the voivode picked up a walking stick sent to him by a Moldovan courtier only to have a rolled-up piece of paper slide out. He inspected the note and found it contained detailed instructions on how to overcome the palace guard and assassinate the Moldovan prince. Glancing back at the strange animal, Basarab shut his mind against this subterfuge. He alerted his ostensible victim, and the authorities went in search of the plotter.

A talented linguist named Nikolai Milescu Spătarul was arrested, but the seditious courtier bolted and managed to slip past the border. He headed first to Germany, then appeared in Moscow, where he finagled an audience with the sovereign himself. Tsar Alexei was so impressed by the visitor’s linguistic skill that he hired the Moldovan to tutor his son, the future Peter the Great. Further on, the tsar entrusted Spătarul with a mission to China, and he returned three years later speaking Mandarin, offering notes on the geography around Lake Baikal, and bearing gifts from the Chinese emperor.
When Alexei died, rivals had the star courtier sent to Siberia, but Peter restored his old tutor’s honors, made him court interpreter, and deeded him an estate in Ukraine. Spătarul married a woman from Moscow and lived to be 72. The Romanian family name, meaning sword-bearer, was Russianized as “Mechnikov”. He spent his last years immersed in a work called Arithmologion, in which he discussed questions of theology, philosophy, and ethics in the language of numbers.

The next century found Spătarul’s descendant Ilya Ivanovich Mechnikov in Petersburg, proposing to a Jewish woman with splendid dark eyes, whose nickname, Milotchka, meant charming.
None other than Pushkin, she liked to point out, said the name suited her perfectly.
Milotchka brought a small fortune to the marriage, but Ilya Ivanovich had soon drunk and gambled it away, and the couple were forced to retreat to the old Mechnikov estate in Ukraine. Ilya Ivanovich occupied himself with planning meals and playing cards, and Milotchka raised the children.
Her youngest son — Ilya like his father — was highly sensitive, with his mother’s large dark eyes. As a boy, he saw a fight between some villagers and soldiers over the mistreatment of a local woman (a soldier had pushed her down and stuffed her mouth with dirt) — and from that he developed a distrust of crowds and a horror of violence.
He and his older brother wrote a drama called “Burning Tea”, in which the hero offered a friend a cup that was too hot. The friend burnt his tongue. A duel ensued. After that, Mechnikov abandoned literature.
Instead, like his illustrious forebear, Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov devoted himself to matters of theology, philosophy, and ethics. He studied Buddhism and Taoism, disharmonies in the human organism, the immortality of cells, the immune system, aging, and the impact of cultured milk on digestion. His central obsession was a philosophy of life he called Orthobiosis.
He opposed taking the body as a source of evil. His mind was tormented by images of dervishes beating their heads in with clubs, Hindu fakirs hanging themselves by hooks, and Russian mystics castrating themselves. Ironically, he pointed out, despising the body turned humans into beasts:
“Hermits resorted to the lairs of animals, abandoned their clothing and went about naked with shaggy and disordered hair.”
Mechnikov held that the fear of death, though nearly universal, was nothing but superstition. He cited a Swiss alpinist who pointed out that tourists who’d had serious falls or nearly frozen to death reported feeling, above all, “a sensation of ecstasy”.
But when Mechnikov’s first wife died of tuberculosis, he took a large dose of opium, trying to do himself in. When that proved unsuccessful, he stripped, doused himself with icy water, and walked out into the cold, only to find his mind captured by an image of dayflies swarming a lantern. The thought of their short lifespan awakened his sense of wonder, and he turned home to save himself.
His book, Studies of Human Nature, was a pursuit of scientific grounds for optimism.

Mechnikov traveled to Geneva in 1865, where he met Herzen, and to Italy, where he got to know Bakunin. Noticing Mechnikov’s sweet and nurturing disposition, the great anarchist named him Mamma.
Mechnikov finally settled near the Pasteurs on Rue d’Ulm in Paris and opened his home to cultivated visitors. He’d spent time with the Tolstoys while researching Studies of Human Nature, and Lev’s sons often visited him when in Paris. Among the young scientists who sought his support was an aspiring zoologist named Emil Racoviță, a luxuriously mustachioed Moldovan with a taste for acid humor.
Mechnikov recommended Racoviță to the Atlantic research center in Roscoff, introducing him to a French researcher there named Louis Boutan. Racoviță spent several months in Roscoff studying marine and coastal organisms. In the evenings he convened with Boutan, who was assembling notes from a recent trip to Asia where he’d been studying pearls.
There were female pearl divers in Japan, he told Racoviță, who enter the water in nothing but a loincloth and stay down for several minutes at a time.
Future of the Family
Exploratory expeditions might be funded by private patrons or subscription services, but there was still no substitute for a royal endorsement. When a Belgian named Gerlache received King Leopold’s support for a mission to Antarctica in a barque-rigged steamer, he renamed the vessel Belgica.
Now Gerlache just had to get a crew together — a navigator, a captain, some adventurous sailors. He needed a zoologist with the right combination of competence and madness, and that was proving difficult. He asked all over Belgium and France. Finally the Pasteurs sent him to Mechnikov, and Mechnikov sent him to Racoviță. But when they sent for the Moldovan in Roscoff, they heard he’d been called home for military service.
Gerlache pulled some diplomatic strings and had the zoologist released from his martial obligations. He’d have to sail from Constantinople, and it was too late to circle all the way up to Antwerp, so Gerlache told him to head straight to South America.
Everything seemed to be ready — until the surgeon unexpectedly quit. They couldn’t very well travel without a doctor. Just then a cable arrived from Brooklyn, from a surgeon named Frederick Cook who said Antarctica was his lifelong dream. Gerlache wrote back to say they’d pick him up in Rio in September.

When Cook watched the Belgica steam past all the large modern ships in the Rio harbor, the iron vessel looked to him “like a bulldog surrounded by greyhounds — small, awkward, ungraceful.”
Racoviță had arrived early and gone ahead to Punta Arenas. They’d have to find him there, in the world’s southernmost town.
They stopped in Montevideo along the way, where dense smoke rose from chimneyed houses set along bustling granite promenades. They could find no butter, though, so bought tubs of condensed milk and cane sugar mixed with the marrow of cow bones, which turned out to be delicious.
Punta Arenas was a former prison colony, now a town of exiles and adventurers. Cook saw it as “a terminal moraine to a restless stream of human life, a true Magellanic metropolis.”
He befriended a German who, he said, ordered drinks in English, conducted business in Spanish, and prayed in Italian.
But crossing the city they stepped along dirt roads full of stagnant pools, heaps of ash, tree stumps, broken carts, and dead dogs. Cowboys were well-dressed, but miners, rich or poor, were “rigged in rags”.
Cook talked to a miner who’d tried to win the heart of an Ona girl — tall, black-eyed, wrapped in fur. She’d “agreed to be stolen”, he said, but then kept telling him she was going mushroom hunting only to disappear for days on end. He followed her and found her in the forest with a lover.
A fine-looking man, the miner had to admit.
He made them an offer: How about the lover join their household?
And now they live together, the miner said, and “there has been peace, and restfulness, and divided love in our wild home.”
Lemon and Fog
The Belgica finally set out toward the uncharted south.
They passed Point Virgins, then Port Famine. Skeletons of wrecked ships rocked in the shallows.
At Cape Anna, birdcalls echoed off the cliffs so loudly they couldn’t hear each other. The rocks below were covered with snoring sea-leopards. Whales spouted and breached. Ice fractured, sounding like cannon fire. At night, the sea glittered and the ice sparkled and it was impossible to sleep.
“A stillness in the atmosphere”, Cook wrote, “fascinates the soul but overpowers the mind”.
Racoviță and a geologist disembarked, and Cook followed them with his looking glass from aboard ship until they disappeared in the darkness. Then he could only hear the echo of the geologist’s hammer and the chorus of penguins that greeted Racoviță as he moved from rock to rock.
They passed a “zone of lemon” where the sun hovered above the water to one side but seemed to project its light from across the sky. Refraction through frozen mist made the sun seem to double and triple. The ice blink — white glare against low clouds — meant there was still ice beyond the horizon.

On February 17, sailing slowly near a group of rocks called the Alexander Islands, it began to rain. They woke up the next morning to find the deck and ropes covered with ice. The sails were frozen so solid it was impossible to lower them. There was no land in any direction. A fog descended, and they drifted “further into silence”.
The fog lifted and revealed a white world. The men stood on deck urging the ship on through the ice. A few sailors sat on the anchor chains discussing their prospects. It didn’t look good.
At noon they made a deep-sea sounding. They lowered five hundred and sixty meters of wire and brought up a cup of blue clay.
For two days ice rammed the side of the boat. Water froze and the ice expanded until it pressed in from all sides, eventually lifting the boat right out of the water. On March 4th they came to terms with their situation: trapped in ice that was only going to solidify for the next several months.
The atmosphere grew heavy. The sky was low and gray and the bands of ice ranged from white to smoky. The water was the color of lead. Everything was shifting, pressing, and cracking around them. The ice-pack that held them floated free, yet they were unable to move.
Eventually Racoviță and Cook disembarked onto the packed ice that clutched the Belgica. They were greeted by friendly penguins, approached by seals. Petrels dove into the icy waters. The world of ice appeared restful and content. It glowed ultramarine, reflecting a purple sky above.
The wind blew snow and cracking ice into hummocks, so it looked like they were emerging from a landscape with its own topography. Ice crystals grew into forms like jewels or blooming plants.
In order to conserve their food supply, Racoviță shot seals, and Cook, regretfully, beat a penguin to death with a ski. As they headed back to the vessel in the growing gloom, Captain Lecointe mistook Cook for some other animal and was about to try his luck with the rifle.
The aurora australis appeared above them — “trembling lace-work, draped like a curtain, on the southern sky.”
They continued to drift unobstructed. There was no sign of land anywhere around them, as if Antarctica were nothing but a “hypothetical continent”.
As night settled in, the sailors began to sing and whistle and play songs on an accordion. On deck they kicked up their heels and danced and told stories. In the cabin they cranked music boxes that plinked out cheerful tones.
“We are making the dead world of ice about us ring with a boisterous noise”, Cook reported.
At 4 pm on May 16, the last drop of sunlight disappeared below the horizon. Lecointe poured over his almanac and made some calculations. There would be no more sun, he announced, for seventy days.
Adrift on a Hypothesis
The cold wasn’t the problem at first, Cook wrote: “I have shivered more in New York”. But then it got so cold the captain lost his eyelashes. One sailor, nailing up specimen cases between decks, put two nails in his mouth, and when he snatched them out, ripped off a piece of his tongue and lip and looked like he’d been burned with a hot iron.
Their eyes grew puffy, then their ankles. Their muscles lost all tone until they were soft as mush. Piles, hemorrhoids, headaches, neuralgia, rheumatism. It was impossible to concentrate.
Cook registered their slowing heartbeats becoming weak and irregular. A short walk heightened the pulse and after ten minutes it was hard to breathe. Their footing was so uncertain they had trouble walking straight.
Their cheeks grew pale and green. Their hair grayed but grew rapidly. Skin crept over fingernails. One of the crew members kept fainting, and his mind seemed permanently deranged.
“We have aged ten years in thirty days.”

A sailor named Danco had a leaky valve in his heart. He’d been in good health, but with the darkness his pulse varied and weakened and he started to fail. It was clear he wouldn’t see the sun again.
Then for a couple of days he revived. He grew cheerful, talked about how much easier it was to breathe. He said he was sure that after a bit of rest he’d regain his strength, then went to bed and promptly died.
To bury him, they hacked a hole in the ice with axes about a hundred yards from the ship. Cook made a speech about a man who said he “valued life because of the prospect of death”.

Watching Danco’s body sink into an Antarctic hole, Racoviță wondered how he’d ended up in this place of frigid darkness. His thoughts turned to Mamma Mechnikov back in Paris, the benefactor who’d recommended him for the expedition — how after Mechnikov’s suicide attempts, he’d taken on oblivion as a philosophical concept. Racoviță had absorbed his discourses many times on Rue d’Ulm.
As much as we might want to end our existence, Mechnikov felt there was something embedded in the universal will that urged us on toward propagation and multiplicity.
He liked to quote von Hartmann’s Die Philosophie des Unbewussten, arguing that we should aim for “the complete abandonment of the individual to the cosmic process, in order that the latter may accomplish its end and bring about the universal deliverance of the world.”
What role did the long Antarctic night play in the universal deliverance of the world? Would they be granted some secret, written across the sky by the aurora? Or would they all end up like Danco, dropped into the frozen sea, bobbing near a hypothetical continent, above a scoopful of blue clay.

Through the hole where Danco disappeared, Racoviță sent down a dredge and brought up a few isopods and a tangle of annelid worms. Watching them writhe on his worktable, he contemplated their sensitivities:
A plant turns to the sun. What do these worms want?
He pictured a blind body, squirming and twisting in the freezing muck. Could the hunger for nutrients give rise to a sense of smell? Did the need for sunlight lead to vision?
If it’s through need that our sensitivities become senses, what might we need next? Maybe to know where Danco is now that he’s dead. We are as blind to that as the worm is to the gloomy sky, so much so that we can’t imagine knowing anything about it at all. It’s a hole in the ice you slip through, never to return. But in fact the afterlife is as natural as the moon reflecting off the hummocks and the scent of seal steaks on the grill. It’s as close to us as the air is to the sea.

He could hear Mechnikov cite his beloved Mainländar:
“The world is but the means for bringing about a condition of nonexistence.”
As such, our own annihilation should be anticipated with joyful expectancy.

It had been a long time since Racoviță had felt any joyful expectancy, and the death of Danco threw the entire crew deeper into a listless torpor.
Captain Lecointe, looking at his miserable aggregation, declared they’d been overtaken by a case of “shivers”. He had them pull out their full-dress suits and come to dinner as smart as they could manage. He opened a crate of champagne from the hold and filled everyone’s glasses. They cooked a sweet concoction of chocolate, milk, and sugar mixed with reindeer fur, penguin grease, blood, and pieces of fishy meat.
A few nights later, observing an eclipse of one of the moons of Jupiter, the captain was able to set his chronometer. Hunching over his calculations, he announced that they had passed Antarctic midnight.
Soon a glow began to increase at noon.
Cutting Through
Just past 11 am on July 23, Cook saw a wave of light spread across the vast cold sky, and then “a gleam of fire” burst through a purple cloud to the north. The featureless ice lit up rose, and the northern sky was streaked with bands of carmine. Though the sun barely showed above the snow at noon, and its form refracted and twisted so as to be unrecognizable, the whole crew of the Belgica celebrated. They ate penguin and watched the aurora. They played accordion all night and dealt cards out on deck.
A week later, they could feel the sun’s heat for the first time, indescribably intoxicating. They wandered around the ice sunning themselves “like snakes in spring”.
Racoviță, pencil in his bare hand, in torn trousers and without a coat or a hat, strolled with a notebook making satirical sketches of the crew.
Summer passed quickly, and they still couldn’t extricate themselves from the ice. Hoping for signs of open water, they studied the reflection on the underside of clouds, looking for dark veins. The sun appeared rarely. They saw only a cold blue light filtered through crystally haze.
The ice held together with surprising tenacity. Faced with the prospect of another winter, they tried to blow up the ice with explosives, but that just caused smoke and didn’t even make a hole. The only option was to saw through with saws and hack it with axes.
Working eight hours a day for eight weeks, fueled by piles of penguin and seal steaks, they cut through the ice on March 13.

The very next day, the wind changed. The ice expanded and drifted in every direction. They pushed north, and as they moved the ice broke up. Soon they were in open water, surrounded by easy swells. The ice blink vanished, and they headed for Cape Horn.
Before they reached harbor, Cook wrote, they felt half sorry to leave “this weird other-world life”. In a year, he thought, they’d long to return again to the death-like sleep of the south.

When they reached shore, they wandered like drunks, having completely forgotten how to walk on land. Their faces were the color of copper kettles, and their unkempt hair was streaked with gray, though none was over thirty-five.
When they looked through the open door of a house where two pretty girls were standing, it sent a charge through them, “like a Faradic battery”.
Racoviță predicted they’d all be married in six months.
Portrait d’un Scaphandrier
Returning to France, Racoviță was made director of a lab along the Catalan coast in Banyuls-sur-Mer. When he arrived, he found his old friend Boutan, last seen describing pearl divers in Roscoff, now experimenting with underwater photography.
The Englishman William Thompson had taken underwater photos decades earlier, but it was really no more than a technological stunt. Boutan wanted everyone to see the beauty of the subaquatic landscape.
As Racoviță unpacked hundreds of bottles of specimens he’d brought back from the southern ice, Boutan was encasing a small apparatus known as a detective camera into a hermetically sealed box and lowering it into the water.
Racoviță watched Boutan enter a diving suit and descend to work with his photographic installation, appearing hours later exhausted and drenched in sweat.
The problem was that with depth the increasing pressure would crush the box, so Boutan had filled it with a membrane of Sumatran gutta-percha he could pump with air, equalizing the pressure from outside. But now in order to get the box to sink, it had to be weighted down with cast iron. But then it was so heavy that when he tried to move it, sweat poured down his forehead, fogging up the pane in his helmet. Blinded by condensation, he tried futilely to rub the pane with his nose or lick it with his tongue.
The photographs required half-hour exposures and showed nothing but blurs and smudges.

On certain afternoons, Racoviță put on the diving suit himself and drifted below the sea, its otherworldliness reminiscent of the hypothetical continent he’d just returned from. He luxuriated in the slow, encumbered movements and enjoyed the soughing of air through the hose. He watched Boutan, having roped the photographic instrument to a barrel full of air in order to lighten its weight, now push his copper, glass, and rubber box into position. This time, they’d used iron weights to submerge another barrel — full of oxygen and topped with an alcohol lamp under a glass bell.
Racoviță drifted over toward the Frenchman and helped him arrange his equipment. Boutan then climbed onto a boat, and from there he pulled a cord that exposed the photographic plate and injected magnesium powder into the alcohol lamp. When the powder hit the flame — pow! — a brief but bright explosion. In that flash of light, Racoviță saw, momentarily, a clear image of the engineer in a scaphander suit holding a sign — photographie sous-marine. Only later did they realize the engineer had been holding the sign upside down.

Racoviță emerged from the sea and went back to work on his Antarctic notes. Gerlache in Brussels and Cook in Brooklyn were still waiting for him to write up his findings. Now with the illuminated undersea engineer etched in his mind, he remembered the southern sun doubling and tripling through frozen mist months before:
“Splendid parhelia, paraselenae, and mirage phenomena were remarkable and varied.”
In the Mediterranean afternoon, he described the effects of lack of sunlight through the Antarctic night: “discoloration of the mucous membranes, dyspnoea, acceleration of the pulse, dizziness, insomnia, a complete incapacity for prolonged intellectual work, and a swelling of the legs.”
He catalogued species, mostly small crustaceans and blind worms, that he had been first to identify.
The Antarctic, he wrote, is “the last unexplored expanse on the globe of sufficient area to offer room for fictitious creations of new worlds.”

But that turned out to be wrong. After wandering the sea floor with Boutan in Banyuls a while longer, Racoviță joined an oceanographic expedition through the Balaeric islands. A naturalist in Mallorca led the team into the magnificent Cuevas del Drach, extravagant caverns full of underground lakes where Racoviță identified several species of crustaceans. Having contemplated icy silence while adrift beneath the warm Mediterranean, the endless interiors of the cave offered him another, equally fictitious dimension of the planet.
Soon he returned to his home country and began exploring the recesses of the Carpathian Mountains. The endless tunnels near where he was born were as inaccessible as anywhere he’d been. He was crawling through a narrow passage in the Apuseni range where air throbbed back and forth as if the cave were breathing. He scooped water into his hand and once again found isopods — similar but not the same as the small, jointed creatures he’d pulled from the Antarctic hole where Danco had disappeared.
There had never been any light here. Even microorganisms were scarce. To find these flea-sized troglobites thriving in this inert earth challenged the fundamentals of how life was expected to work. Segmented bodies pressing into the creases of his palm — like Mamma Mechnikov, naked and inconsolable, dazzled by dayflies. In the iciest ocean, and here in the subterranean darkness, these modest creatures, largely unseen, met the world with their chitinous shells, blind and colorless, with miniscule growths full of nerve endings, sensitive as lips. Touching, tasting, the troglobites formed a squirming, writhing sentience that, wherever he went, emerged from the deep to meet him.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 2, 2022

author: rad Fox


text:
Titiba and the Invention of the Unknown

By Kathryn Nuernberger
February 26, 2020

In a remarkable collection of essays entitled Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, the great cultural historian Carlo Ginzburg returns again and again to a central problem of knowledge (in general) and historical knowledge (specifically): How far away should we be from the things we want to understand? In the optical sense, this is “perspective”. We use the same term when we speak of conceptual distance — but is it the same thing? Traditional historical practice, and possibly even the very idea of “historicism”, uses something like “distance” to create its objects. But does this mean that historians cut themselves off, and cut their readers off, from a certain kind of intimacy between then and now? Between the people of the past and us?  In this lyrical essay on a very, very difficult and painful topic, the poet Kathryn Nuernberger works to defy history’s commitment to distance, to unsettling effect.

— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

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

date: February 26, 2020

author: Kathryn Nuernberger