text:
Porch Memories

By Federica Soletta
August 4, 2021

In the final stanza of his remarkable poem “Sunday Morning” (1923), Wallace Stevens refers to Jerusalem (and more specifically the tomb of Christ) as, possibly, “the porch of spirits lingering”. It is such a strange formula that it has endured: the “porch of spirits”, the place where they “linger” — this is any portal or threshold linking (and also separating) human beings from whatever gods or angels there might be. A lovely notion. But why did Stevens choose that homely word, and that most quotidian of sites: the porch? A “portico” (whence the word derives) is something grand. But a “porch”? It is the postage-stamp façade of a temple (or is it a tomb?) pasted in miniature upon our domestic architecture. In a secular age, as Stevens understood so well, this is where our spirits, whatever they may be, are left to linger. Federica Soletta sits with them awhile in the affecting photo-essay that follows. — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

One day, in a thrift store in Brooklyn, I found a box full of old family photographs. I felt immediately the reality of the people depicted, and with that sense came many questions, along with a churning curiosity about their lives and deaths. Old photographs often work that way. But here there was something else, too. Something that caught my attention —  something perhaps unremarkable to an American eye but certainly unusual to a foreigner like me. My punctum, in these images, had the shape of a rigid frame, a structural element present in many of the photographs, although never as the main actor: the American porch.
Typically made of wood and partially surrounding the house, the porch is a boundary between the outside world and the intimacy of a home’s interior, seen and lived as both a private and an open space. In the U.S., the porch is an adaptation, a point of convergence of different architectural traditions: an adjustment to the many European revivals of the nineteenth century and an assimilation of Haitian house styles, imported by free Black people in the South, probably coming from West Africa. Perhaps, even a liminal zone between civilization (the house itself) and the wild (the outer world). In these terms, the porch is a kind of frontier. In America, it becomes a transverse element — seen across Victorian mansions, landowner houses, and low-income habitations — and spans geographies as well: while always more predominant in the South, porches, in many forms, achieved wide popularity in the whole of the United States.
Even more ubiquitous than the porch in America are American porch photographs. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the American porch became a privileged background for family portraits. Is it possible to speak of a “photographic tradition”? And if so, how did this “photographic tradition” evolve? What kind of history, and how many stories, do these photographs narrate? What kind of archive have they produced? What do they suggest to us about photography, about family photographs, and, most explicitly, about American history and families?
*
The people in most family photographs pose, play, or smile, and are usually aware of the photograph being taken. While the families are different, the formal similarities are many: the group arrangements, the closeness of the subjects, likenesses across the components of the group, or their generational gaps. In the photographs that follow, the construction of the visual space, too, becomes a common element. It is a backdrop or setting for the protagonists, who stand in front of (or just outside) the entrance door of their house. Although they are not inside, they still feel “at home” in a space of transition and safety: on the porch or just close by it.
Photo-historian Geoffrey Batchen reminds us that snapshots are an art historian’s worst nightmare, for they resist “value judgments”, which is, of course, “a key element of traditional art historical practice”.1 Agreeing with him, my intention is not to invent an art history of “the porch photograph”, for these photographs do not belong to the world of art history. Nor do I aim to search for the people portrayed in the photographs, or to elucidate what specific action is depicted in each image. Instead, here I will treat these photographs as objects of and for history, a history in the lower case. “All photographs”, John Berger once wrote, “are contributions to history, and any photograph, under certain circumstances, can be used in order to break the monopoly which history today has over time”.2 In weaving fictitious and real memories, personal and quoted reflections, these notes attempt to “ventriloquize” the images and to listen to them, without a storyline or individual captions. Banal, yet tender, this set of photographs does not only portray the daily gestures of life on the porch and the functionality of this distinctive space. These images can also be used as a lens by which to reveal other scenes and stories. Or possibly for looking differently — with a different gaze — at our own history: either the old history of a nation or a new history of photography. My thoughts will serve as suggestive threads, but to you, reader, is left the final interpretation.
The Historian Dreams…
We always belonged to this porch. The trip was long, the heat sometimes unbearable, the train very slow, very crowded, very noisy. But certainly there was the sky. Nowhere in Wales did we have this kind of sky: grand, vast, at times even frightening in its curve and reach. In Wales, we may have beautiful grey clouds and green valleys as you cannot even imagine, and the magic torpidity of foggy mornings. But a sky like this won’t fit in Wales. It was, we thought, enough to look at the sky to hope for the future. The future was everything we had. You don’t take a trip like this if you don’t have some future to bring with you, tightly packed in your luggage. We had just a few things with us, mostly distant memories and dirty clothes. My wife with a child inside her, a baby that would be an American, the first of us. We didn’t need much more. We were an ordinary story at that time. Pennsylvania seemed like a very exotic name for us, a name that meant a house, some land, and silent nights on an American porch to remember the solitude of Wales. My brother was already there, in Pennsylvania. He wrote us letters full of passion for its polite cows, simple food, and women’s hearts. We met him in front of his house. None of us had the strength or the ability to say much. We just looked at the house, the empty garden, the curtains on the windows, and the airy porch. We arrived thinking of Wales. Now we will be Americans. Do you know what it means to be, or even to become, American? Being American, for me, a shepherd coming from Wales, means to have a porch between my existence and the world. A porch from which to look at the countryside, the dusty road, the infinite sky, the carts with horses passing by.
American Iconography
In response to the publication of Walker Evans’ American Photographs, William Carlos Williams beautifully noted, in an article written for the New Republic in 1938:
So here’s a book of photographs about America. It’s not the first, perhaps not even the best book of pictures of us, but it’s an eloquent one, one of the most fluent I have come across and enjoyed. The pictures are for the most part mild, but in spite of this, though always exquisitely clear in reasoning and in visual quality, they pack a wicked punch. There’s nothing oppressively “photographic” here, it isn’t a long nose poking into dirty corners for propaganda and for scandal, there are no trick shots, the composition isn’t a particular feature — but the pictures talk to us. And they say plenty.3
Williams points to photography’s relation with the visible and the invisible. In order to speak to us, photographs may conceal their “photographability”, perhaps even their purpose or beauty. In this way, he also seems to suggest that a photograph, or a series of photographs, has the ability to reveal America’s deep essence. As if within the photographs, one could possibly find a visual common denominator for America, an American iconography.
A Family Album
But the pictures whisper to us. And they say plenty. When “listening” to these photographs and reading them in relation to each other (despite the differences of era, geography, and economic status of the families), one may uncover a double identity. The first represents the intimacy of a house: the secret relations within a family and its singularity. The other illustrates a much larger story: the common history of a country. As a family album, one by one, they uncover and delineate the American life and its identity.
In this way, the familial gaze becomes itself a kind of lens, an involuntary panoramic zoom turned to a national self and a national gaze. If there is something familiar in every family photograph, something that reminds each of us of our own family, it is perhaps because each photograph appears to follow a similar visual script that makes itself visible through the image’s composition and intention — unique yet universal. But in the case of the “porch photographs”, there is something more: the elements of remembrance, mourning, life and death that are typical of every photograph, especially of family portraits, intertwine with the representation of an architectural object. And it is through these images that the porch became a symbol, an integral part of “Americanness”, even a metaphor of America, with its community and its contradictions.
Connections
In Porch Portraits, photographer Susan Meiselas offers a fragmentary documentation of domestic life in the countryside of South Carolina and Mississippi. The series is not just a collection of photographs on or of porches, despite the title of the project. Sometimes the porch is visible, although not as the main subject; sometimes it is not even present. Sometimes it is the place of exchange between the gaze of the photographer and that of the people portrayed; other times it is just another type of frame, a visual reference. Yet, Meiselas’ title, “Porch Portraits”, immediately reminds us of the setting that we will see in the photographs. The porch does not simply divide the interior life from the outdoor one. Nor does it merely separate the private, individual space from the wild American landscape, another leitmotif of the American identity. As in Meiselas’ photographs, the porch also belongs to the life of the American house, to its memory.
It is in these terms that one may think (as I do) of the porch as the epitome of a certain American life, not simply as an architectural landmark but as a domestic — and photographic — lieu par excellence, as described in books and shown in movies. Perhaps, we can even think of the porch as a space of empathy: it is on the liminal porch that, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout realizes what it means to be in someone else’s skin, to see from another perspective:
Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.
Symbol
The immobile porch and the moving flags. From the outside, the porch can be thought of as a three-dimensional billboard, since it is where the American flag can be displayed — an advertisement, a testimony of belonging. But what if you don’t belong to the porch or to the flag? Here is the vulnerability of the space, that strangeness that the photograph cannot stop echoing. The porch becomes an eye-level flagpole, whether the flag flies or not. This is an ensign by which to veil or reveal America.
A promise of Safety
The porch is an all-encompassing cinematic screen: projected on it are the smiles of immigrants, the suburban growth of the 1950s, social and racial inequalities, economic booms and crashes. In the photograph, the porch is a space of encounter and possession, it belongs to the viewer as much as to the users. Rooted in its location, the porch echoes a sense of belonging, while also being in constant transformation (and, in a way, remaining the most vulnerable part of the house). If the American porch mirrored the evolution of an entire country and of its landscape, fashions, and migrations, it is also a sign of the violence and appropriation of its territory. The porch photographs — spontaneous and involuntary historical witnesses — bring fragments of America’s past into its present and future: they bear the traces of multiple stories that will become the official American history.
Yet the porch photographs distance themselves from the historical documentation of, for instance, Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange in their work with the Farm Security Administration during the late 1920s and 1930s. The familiar atmosphere that is visible in the porch photographs reveals an innocence of intention. The porch was indeed a successful place where everyday life was experienced, photographed, and passed by. Evans’ and Lange’s documents are meant to keep the eye of the camera focused on a specific object of study with an underlying tension. They remind us of an ethnographic gaze, with the exactitude of the photographer’s external eyes. The family photograph, instead, has the family itself as both subject and object. Every kind of happening is recorded there: the evidence of laughter, a memorable Christmas day wearing a nice dress, the old lady knitting, the happiness of a child with a toy, or a couple or friends posing in front of the camera.
There is a clear consciousness of the camera in these images, an exceptional performance that is able to register, once and for all, the repetition of everyday gestures. And in this arises a legible conflict: the planned pose against the pure spontaneity of the moment. The porch is more than the stage of this conflict. It is, in a sense, an involuntary testimony to the antinomy: it is itself, in its physicality, a frame for presentation; it is also the promise of everyday safety and intimacy.
“Even in the war years”
My main porch memory is a memory of a back porch photograph from circa 1940. It is a picture of my grandmother, my grandfather, and my grandfather’s siblings on the back porch of the servants’ house in what had been a large estate with a palace. That estate went nearly bankrupt in 1929, so the family moved into this house, the Barghans, where, on the porch, the photo shows they were at times incredibly happy even in the war years.
Several years ago, I showed a series from my porch photograph collection in a small exhibition, and I asked the public to interact with the collection by writing, in an adjacent notebook, a personal memory or experience related to the porch. My intention was to gain insight into the relationship that the public (mostly American) had with the life on the porch and its “photographability”. Whether one of the photographs triggered the memory above, or the writer had already a memory of this particular porch in her mind, I cannot know. Yet, it struck me to read that her memory was not about a specific moment, action, person on a porch, or even of the space itself, but rather about another photograph. It was a moment she has not lived, except, of course, through the image. Her words suggest a tenderness about the house, and most specifically about the porch, that is revealed and internalized through the medium of the photograph — so much as to become a memory of “it”.
Her description belongs to all photographs, as it manifests the power of each and every photograph to bear the traces of memory. There is a uniqueness, however, in her note and in the image she recalls — the uniqueness of the specific moment in which her grandparents were happy on “the back porch”. Even with her brief description, we can almost imagine and visualize “her photograph” and feel it as our own. In the same way, every porch photograph becomes her porch memory.
Mise en Scène
The porch and the photograph (I’ll treat them as near-synonyms at this point) do not permit us to see the inside of the house or the privacy of its interiors. We can only imagine the grandiosity or humility of the interior spaces and the richness or frugality of the back yard. If the porch becomes a screen, the photograph acts as a further medium. With its frame and porosity, it sets a different network of spatial and physical relations. The cropped photographic image transforms the rhythm of the space and the visual understanding of the porch. Through this rhythm and the dialog between the frame of the camera and that of the porch, one may write a further history of photography.
Carefully conceived is the composition: the family is staged on the porch. The porch is a special place, and the photograph is a special moment, a planned action, a mise en scène for the memory of the family. “Being portrayed” was not an everyday thing at the end of the eighteenth or start of the nineteenth century. Following the rule of the studio, we can imagine the photographer en plein air setting and composing the scene, while the family is tidying up the porch. The distance of the mechanical eye is understandable, as early technology needed more light and a wider field. Perhaps, however, the singular faces of the family were not the main focus of the photograph: being photographed on the porch, as a family, also meant to show one’s own fortune and physical possessions.
In the small frame of the photograph, the spatial distance between the viewer and the subject has a visible consequence, since including the house meant blurring the facial features of those who patiently stood and posed on the porch. The porch, the family, and the house harmoniously became one entity. The possession of one’s own house (the American dream) intertwines with the sociological implication of photography and the act of being photographed. If the house with the porch is a status symbol, being photographed on the porch is not merely a memory but also a most powerful act of ownership and belonging.
Close-up
Moving forward in time, the composition becomes less formal and more familiar. The use of the camera is cheaper, more popular, and easier to manage. The porch changes status, turning into a mere platform (rather than a proper back-ground) on which life is performed and recorded. As a result, the camera steps onto the porch and deconstructs it. Only fractions are visible: a column, the steps, a portion of the roof. The porch is almost transparent; we perceive its presence without seeing it. Later, in the second half of the twentieth century, the privileged space of the home’s photographer changes to the new gathering point of the family: the television room. Another medium, another gaze on the world.4
Messages
“This is a picture of me”, writes Nelly Ramsey on the back of her portrait (perhaps destined for another hand, or for that of her future self), “and my beautiful poinsettia, with five lively blooms at last Christmas time. I have some beautiful plants, guess I am like my mother”
This is not a caption, as one could expect in an artistic photograph, nor is it the voice of the photographer; rather, it is the voice of the subject, the sitter.
The unknown photographers give us points of view upon people whose voices are inscribed on the back of the photographs themselves.
Transformed into a message, into a postcard, the porch multiplies presence and presences.
“Young warriors”
Just a little behind us on our left and close on the road was a house, the first we had passed in several miles, and we decided to ask directions of the people on the porch, whom, in the car mirror, I could see still watching us. . . . There were three on the porch, watching me, and they must not have spoken twice in an hour while they watched beyond the rarely traveled road the changes of daylight along the recessions of the woods, and while, in the short field that sank behind their house, their two crops died silently in the sun: a young man, a young woman, and an older man; and the two younger, their chins drawn inward and their heads tall against the grained wall of the house, watched me steadily and sternly as if from beneath the brows of helmets, in the candor of young warriors or of children.— James Agee and Walker Evans5
Stage - Reflections
Evans is looking at the people on the porch; their eyes are responding silently. The photograph transforms the individual act of looking into an infinite, circular correspondence of gazes. As a theatrical stage, the porch is a place from which you look at the world, while the world looks back at you. Porch photographs make such reflections of regard endless, as the viewer not only steps into the shadow of the photographer, but also becomes the new audience. One may imagine that there’s no better podium on which to be seen and remembered than the American porch.
On a personal note…
Running and hiding in the shadow of the columns — this is my porch memory. I cannot recollect a specific day, season, or place for any of them, because my porches belong to another geography, where most of the “portici” surround a piazza and are, therefore, a properly public space. There was nothing I could “possess”. I have as many porch memories as there were piazzas through which I ran, or over which my eye passed.
My grandfather was born in Duluth in 1904, the second son of an Italian immigrant couple. While working in New York, in his 20s, he went back to Italy to visit some relatives. There he met my grandmother and never went back to New York or Duluth. He built a new house for his new family, a house for his Italian daughters — daughters who would not be Americans, my mother and her two sisters. The house was a medium-sized one, almost anonymous in a small village in the very north of the country, close to the Alps, close to Switzerland. It is a normal, medium-sized house of a Lombardy province, in a row of normal, similar houses, facing what was a quiet village road. Shades of ochre and rose, with ordered trees planted on the edge of the curbside. It was a tranquil house, two stories, with a steep roof, a garden all around, and a balcony.
My grandfather, born in Minnesota, who lived most of his life in Italy, built, in the village of Brebbia, somewhere in the Prealpine region of Lombardy, an ordinary countryside Italian house.
With a porch.
“Like the houses of America!”
I can see them on that porch, in an old photograph: he is there, with my grandmother and my newborn aunt (1934?), as in the American houses of which that porch carries the memory.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: August 4, 2021

author: Federica Soletta


text:
Reborn Into a New Form (1849)

By Alex Christofi
November 10, 2021

A second life? To live again? Fyodor Dostoevsky, famously, survived the uncanny pantomime of his own execution, and found himself, on the other side, “reborn into a new form”. These were Dostoevsky’s words, written to his brother in the wake of the ordeal. Here below, those very words are themselves given a kind of second life: in this excerpt from Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life (published earlier this year), Alex Christofi stitches primary source excerpts into a “reconstructed memoir” — the memoir that Dostoevsky himself never wrote. The dream of literature made entirely of quotations reaches back across more than a century of cut-ups, remixes, centos, and collages: from Octavian Esanu’s brilliant JFL, What Does "Why" Mean? (2002), through Guy Debord’s Mémoires (1958), and over the mountain of Walter Benjamin’s landmark “Arcades” project (1927–1940). In 1990, Richard Price’s pioneering history of slave rebellion in Suriname, Alabi’s World (1990), used four different typefaces, one for each of the “voices” being woven into a single work. Here, in this re-collected episode, Christofi, too, is weaving: weaving Dostoevsky’s autobiographical fiction together with his fantastic life. — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

Today, 22nd of December, after eight months of solitary confinement, I was taken with five others to the Semyonovsky Parade Ground.1
Fyodor’s friend, Sergei Durov, was standing next to him. There were three posts stuck in the ground.
“Surely we cannot be executed”, Fyodor whispered. Durov indicated a cart nearby, on which there appeared to be several coffins covered with cloth.2
Fyodor turned to his other companion, Nikolai Speshnev. “We shall be with Christ”, he muttered in French. But Speshnev only smiled and pointed at the ground.
“A handful of dust”, he replied.3
The sentence of death was read to all of us, we were told to kiss the cross, our swords were broken over our heads, and we were put into white shirts.4 Then the first three — Petrashevsky, Mombelli, and Grigoriev — were led up, tied to the pillar for execution, and caps were pulled over their eyes.5 A company of several soldiers was drawn up against each post. I was in the second batch and there was no more than a minute left for me to live.6 I wanted to understand as quickly and clearly as possible how it was that I was living and in moments I would simply be a thing. Not far off, there was a church, and the gilt roof was glittering in the bright sunshine. I stared persistently at the roof and the sunshine. I could not tear myself away from it.7
I had not expected that the execution would take place for at least a week yet — I had counted on all the formalities taking some time — but they got my papers ready quickly. At five in the morning I was asleep, and it was cold and dark. The governor came in and touched my shoulder gently, and I started.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The execution is fixed for ten o’clock”, he said.
I was only just awake, and couldn’t believe it at first — I began to ask about my papers. But by the time I was really awake and saw the truth of the matter, I fell silent and stopped arguing, as I could see there was no point. The governor watched me. All I could say was, “It’s very hard to bear — it’s so sudden”.
Those last three or four hours pass by in the preparations. You see the priest, have your breakfast — coffee, meat, even a little wine. The priest was there the whole time, talking.8 You get in the cart and the houses recede — but that’s nothing. There is still the second turning. There is still a whole street, and however many houses have been passed, there are still many left.9 And so to the very end, to the very scaffold. At the most terrible moments of a man’s life, he will forget anything but some roof that has flashed past him on the road, or a jackdaw on a cross.10
The most terrible part of the punishment is not the bodily pain, but the certain knowledge that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, your soul must quit your body and you will no longer be a man, and that this is certain — certain! That’s the real point: the certainty of it. A murder by sentence is far more dreadful than a murder committed by a criminal. If you are attacked at night, in a dark wood, you hope that you may escape until the very moment of your death. But in an execution, that last hope is taken away, and in its place there is only the terrible certainty that you cannot possibly escape death. It is the most dreadful anguish there is. Our Lord Christ spoke of this anguish. No one should be treated this way — no one.
The priest, who seemed a wise man, stopped talking when we reached the drill grounds, and only held the little silver cross for me to kiss. My legs felt feeble and helpless, and I felt a choking in my throat. I had that terrible feeling of being absolutely powerless to move, though I hadn’t lost my wits. The priest pressed the cross to my lips, and I kissed it greedily, as if it might be useful to me afterwards.11 In that last minute, I remembered my brother; only then I realised how I love him!
Finally the retreat was sounded, and those tied to the pillar were led back, and it was announced to us that His Imperial Majesty had granted us our lives.
***
My life begins again today. I will receive four years’ hard labour, and after that will serve as a private. I see that life is everywhere, life in ourselves. There will be people near me, and to be among people — that is the purpose of life, I have realised. The idea has entered my flesh and blood. Yes, it’s true! I have beheaded my lofty, creative, spiritual self. There are many ideas I haven’t yet written down. They will lacerate me, it is true! But I have my heart and flesh and blood which can also love, and suffer, and desire, and remember, and this, after all, is life.
When I look back and think how much time has been wasted in vain, how much time lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in ignorance of how to live, how I did not value time, how often I sinned against myself — my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute might have been an age of it. Youth is wasted on the young! Now, I am being reborn into a new form.12
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 10, 2021

author: Alex Christofi

source: public-domain-review

type: conjecture

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


text:
Every Society Invents the Failed Utopia it Deserves

By John Tresch
October 19, 2016

“Now: the integration of the actual and the possible.” So speaks the radiant Marie Violette Tranchot (AKA “Octave Obdurant”) at a crucial moment in the piece that follows. Where are we? Well, we are ensconced with a cross-dressing cosmologist of all possible worlds, a scarred veteran of the age of revolution, as s/he bends, wild-haired, in unhinged service to a sociopolitical astrolabe of her own confection — call it a utopian calculator of every utopia, a clockwork orrery modeling nothing less than transcendence. John Tresch is a historian who combines tremendous learning with a luminous imagination, and he here graces us with a gift in both keys. Yes, he tips open the visionary, mechano-morphic romanticism of the mid-nineteenth-century radicals of Paris, and does so using an archival pry bar of real precision. But at the same time, he manages to vignette our vista by means of a tale so lurid and glimmering one can readily imagine it accidentally anthologized in a volume of Edgar Allan Poe. What kind of history is this? Historical fiction? Not really. Fictionalized history? That won’t do either. One is tempted to say that Tresch has here given us history as the integration of the actual and the possible. History contaminated by its subject? Yes. And to quote Violette/Octave once again: “It shows how far dreams may reach.”
— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

Let me offer a few words to introduce this translation. I stumbled upon the original, a forgotten memoir by a now legendary author, in a bound, yellowed volume of radical newspapers in Paris’ Bibliothèque Nationale. It dates from 1895, when both the past and future of the workers’ movement were rethought under the force of unrest and uncertainty. I was researching Elisée Reclus, the French anarchist geographer. “Man is nature taking consciousness of itself”, Reclus believed; the liberation of humanity and the earth went hand in hand. What Lenin called Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, was at that time being consolidated on a global scale. Yet many fought it with new forms of thought and action; they wanted to redirect the power of new technologies, and their world-spanning reach, away from the usual endpoints of nationalist aggression and imperial subjugation. Elisée Reclus was one of those who could see a different future: “Our destiny is to reach that state of ideal perfection in which nations no longer need to be under the tutelage of a government or another nation; it is the absence of government, it is anarchy which is the highest expression of order.”1
I was looking for roots and resonances of Reclus’ science, the tools with which he saw humans helping this more-than-human destiny along. It seemed this moment from the past was ripe with anticipations and provocations for today, offering examples and other resources for those who struggle to draw new maps of politics, knowledge, nature — to remake this crowded globe.
I found I had become obsessed with one of Reclus’ associates: Louise Michel. Paul Verlaine called her “The Red Virgin of Montmartre”. She was a school teacher born in 1830, a pen pal of Victor Hugo and drove an ambulance carriage for the Paris Commune in 1871.
Louise Michel was not among the 20,000 who were executed in that uprising; she served twenty months in prison, exiled to New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Amnesty was declared in 1880; she returned to France, increasingly committed to anarchism: “Power is cursed; that is why I am an anarchist”, was one of her slogans. She was arrested again and again. In prison she wrote books about “the social question”, including the astounding science fiction novels The Human Microbes and The New Era. Michel lived her last seventeen years with a bullet lodged in her skull from an assassination attempt. She also inaugurated the use of the black flag for anarchy.2
I wish I had invented Louise Michel, but she’s too extraordinary to be fictional.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, state repression and censorship made widescale political organizing difficult. New means were proposed. Some argued for “The Propaganda of the Deed”. In 1891, the anarchist Ravachol set bombs against Ministers of Public Defense, was arrested and executed. In 1893, Auguste Vaillant exploded a bomb in the Chamber of Deputies causing minor injuries. President Sadi Carnot was stabbed to death in 1894.
A result of these shocking attacks on the ruling elite was “Les Lois Scélérats”, starting in 1893. These “Scoundrel Laws” allowed draconian suppression of civil liberties: the mere mention of violent uprising landed radicals in jail.
1893 was also the year of the death of historian Hippolyte Taine, who had just finished a three volume history of France. Two years later, in 1895, the anarchist journal Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Sociale was relaunched, with the assistance of La Bonne Louise.
The article I’ve translated for this essay is from the third issue of Le Libertaire. It’s signed by “Une lutteuse”, and would almost certainly have been recognized by contemporaries as the work of Louise Michel. It’s entitled: Pour en finir avec l’histoire scélérate- Le mot d’Octave Obdurant. Which I’ve translated as: Scoundrel History and Utopian Method.
Scoundrel History and Utopian Method
Le Libertaire, iii, 1895, presumed Louise Michel
Who among us does not feel the shadow of fear cast by the cowardly laws of these past years? The Scoundrel Laws terrorize not only those who might commit violence, but anyone who associates with them. They reward those who denounce their brothers and sisters, sowing distrust and ill-will. They freeze our hearts and our tongues, by punishing with prison anyone who provokes, praises, or merely seeks to understand those mad acts to which an insane society has driven a few poor souls.
Perhaps even these words, here, are enough to summon our new inquisitors.
If so, I say, let them come. I know their jail cells; their guards are my comrades and friends. Scoundrel laws, like the scoundrels who created them, must one day lose their power. It is a law of justice and nature.
We who know the future, who see with certainty like a memory ahead of us the society of freedom, equality, brotherhood and sisterhood, we learn such laws from the past, even, at times, from the bourgeois chroniclers behind the walls of the Sorbonne. At the very least, from them we may learn what new tricks they employ.
Thus I recently read the three volumes of the historian whom they call “great”, Hippolyte Taine, to learn what lies were being passed off as the official past. Taine sat in a special Chair, for the History of the Revolution — a monument propped on the grave of the past like a tombstone, to guarantee that such an event will never happen again.
This historian is now himself buried, covered in praise. I come not to desecrate his memory, but merely, after so many éloges by those mindless thinkers-by-the-hour, to restore it to its true and laughable scale.
Taine tells us that history is an obscure knowledge of a distant past, and that we have nothing to expect from the future. The Revolution, this decisive overflowing of the desire for justice and a better life, is denounced as a deception, a struggle for power among upstarts, a monstrosity never to be repeated.
Among all Taine’s half-truths, fantasies, and idiocies, none is so great as his pretension to science — in which history is always a balance between race, milieu, and moment. He transforms inspired and courageous men and women into dupes of nature and of their fellows; by this he hopes to complete whatever bestialization the rulers of this society have not yet wrought.
He has created the equivalent in letters of those villainous acts of legislation. He has written l’Histoire scélérate, Scoundrel History. It shuts people’s mouths and severs their connection to the dreams, sweat, and aspirations of those who struggled before us. Scoundrel History insists on the difference between now and then, the arbitrariness of the new, the fatalism of birth, of rocks, vegetation, and rivers. In the name of science he lashes those who embraced a world more vast than his vanity.
Were these his only crimes, I would happily cast his miserable books aside — or in a more generous spirit, wrap fish in them, so that in some small way they might serve life. But I am moved to take up my pen, finally, by his third volume, which blesses the current power as good, just, and in any case inevitable. What spurs me to write is a single citation, a unique if profound mistake.
His book discusses the Commune, a glorious moment we remember by its hopes and noble example, laid low but not destroyed. In one brief passage, Taine betrays all his worship of the predictable and his denial of the unforeseen. Here we see Scoundrelism elevated to a theory.
After describing the aftermath of the Commune, the butchery of the state against the living proof that a truly egalitarian and democratic society functions well, joyously, when left to itself, he writes:
A few years later, most of this rabble had lost whatever convictions drove their violence. Even deluded demagogues renounced their youthful dreams. We need no further evidence than a pamphlet from the printing offices of confusion: Every Society Invents the Failed Utopia It Deserves, the work of a certain Octave Obdurant — a survivor of 1848, second-rate engineer and first rate rabble-rouser. This is not a wise, but a chastened work — the lament of a man awakened to the bitter truth, that only compromise and concession allow one to live with a semblance of repose. In this pamphlet, we see the renunciation of a whole generation, the inevitable calming of a degenerate revolutionary impulse. Obdurant, hard-headed though he was, at last yielded to reality; his fellow-travelers must soon enough do the same. (Histoire de la France, vol IV, Le régime contemporaine, p. 221)
Our historian has not only misread the pamphlet he cites, Every Society Creates the Failed Utopia It Deserves, by Octave Obdurant; I believe he has not even opened it.
For you see, I knew Octave Obdurant. Once, we met.
I sought the author out, in those dark years when it seemed the flame of liberty might be extinguished forever. I was moved by the memory of another pamphlet I had read in the spring of 1848. Meeting me in my youthful optimism and driving it to higher, dizzying heights, was the essay, Organize Labor, Free the Earth, signed Octave Obdurant.
It was one of the many utopias springing up like mushrooms in those days. I was under the sway of Blanqui, captivated by the burning purity of his rage. But in Obdurant there was a different persuasion: the passion of poetry, the serenity of mathematics, the earth’s conception from the first divine breath, its long slumber in chaos until at last the sons of Noah raised their heads, took up the tools of industry, and demanded a just apportionment of labor and its fruits. I was moved that Obdurant spoke also of Noah’s daughters and their high position in the earthly paradise.
This vision resembled the fantastic plenum of the Fourierists, the religious cry of the Saint-Simonians, the frenzy for order of Cabet’s Icarians. Yet in Obdurant’s words one sensed at once eagerness and reserve, a mind which had surveyed a vast territory with all the rigor of science, yet now allowed the quiet light of truth, arriving as if from the origin of time, to illuminate a holy marriage of earth and humanity, thought and deed.
There was madness to it, yes — a madness which spoke to my own. I cherished the pamphlet, even after all those utopias burst one by one like fragile bubbles blown by a child. In 1855, unwilling to abandon these honorable dreams of youth, I wrote two letters. One to Victor Hugo, the great man who repaid me with a gift I value above any other: his friendship. I wrote also to Octave Obdurant.
*
I had learned that Obdurant still lived — in exile, in silence. In Belgium. I wrote a letter, thus: Though a child in ’48, I had sworn my life to the people, and Organize Labor, Free the Earth was a clarion leading a young revolutionary through a hopeless time. I asked if we might meet.
Three months later, a reply came, written on green graph paper in a careful hand. One word: Yes, followed by a date — a fortnight hence: 15h précis.
I was filled with anticipation on the long train journey from Paris to Brussels. With only moderate difficulty I found the address: a quiet cul-de-sac in a warren of streets not yet ravaged by the projects of destruction in the city’s center. I turned the knob which rang a bell, answered by slow, heavy paces. It opened a crack, to a craggy face, peering up at me with suspicion and mockery.
I said I had come for Monsieur Obdurant. The old man took in my eager face, poor dress, cracked shoes, frayed shawl and bonnet, and spoke. “Monsieur Obdurant does not exist.” He glowered with relish.
Baffled by this sphinx’s statement, I brought out my green invitation, unfolded it, showed him the address and signature. With a slight smile he nodded, as if wondering how much of a fool I truly was. He gestured me in, pointing across the courtyard. “Third floor on the left, Mademoiselle”, he said, reminding me of my youth, my sex, my vulnerability.
With growing unease, I mounted the narrow staircase, the ceilings lower with each floor. Before a door on the third, I knocked.
A husky voice barked: “Entrez!”
Through a long, dim hallway, I followed the voice, until I reached a spare, curtained room. One empty chair stood near the entrance. Another, across the darkened space, was occupied by a slender, shadowed figure with erect posture, white hair long and flowing as in the fashion of the 1840s, in an elegant black suit, immaculate linens, a neckcloth of Persian design. A bright gaze set into a finely featured face pierced the gloom.
“Sit”, the figure commanded. As if under the influence of a powerful magnetizer, I sat without pause.
My host spoke sharply, gruffly. “Welcome, Mademoiselle. You have come to meet me, no? You wish to learn of my ideas, my thoughts. But should you not first know to whom you speak?”
I nodded.
The figure straightened. “You wrote to Octave Obdurant. This is the name with which the person before you entered the Ecole Polytechnique. It is the name on my entrance papers to the Ecole de Ponts et Chaussées. It is the name with which I signed my first articles in geometry, my first statistical tables, as well as Free the Earth, which you were kind enough to notice.”
The voice was clear and occasionally guttural; there was a warmth beneath its unyielding syllables.
“But as you have certainly realized, this is not my true name.”
I felt my mind begin to spin. I was unsure of where I was, what I was doing here, in these isolated rooms. I stammered out:
“Excuse me, Monsieur. What, then, is your name?”
“I was baptized Tranchot.” Despite the pause which followed, the name meant nothing to me until it was repeated, with its prenames before it.
“Marie Violette Tranchot.”
I was moved by an emotion of shock and recognition at once. Some part of me had already realized that I was not in the presence of a great man, but rather a great woman — no wizened brother of the struggle, but a sister. Instantly, I felt myself uncannily at home, safe at last in a place I’d never been — truly at home, perhaps, for the first time in my life. This hero, epitome of the courage and intelligence the world saw as masculine, was a woman like myself.
She must have guessed the sensation her revelation would cause. I sat in silence, collecting my thoughts, calming myself. At last I spoke; I asked to know her life and history. In an arch and formal manner, not without humor and charm, she told me her tale.
*
She was a child of the century, born in 1807 near Reims, illegitimate and unrecognized, her father a minor noble and Orleanist, a free thinker and a Field Marshall in the revolutionary Army.
He had limped home from Austerlitz, took up in secret with the daughter of a mason of the Cathedral. Marie Violette’s father, in secret, took her schooling in charge. She learned the multiplication tables by age four. She mastered Laplace and Lagrange, Greek and Latin, Descartes, Pascal, the large-hearted Jean-Jacques. When the pupil surpassed the teacher, he found a discreet polytechnician to prepare her for its examinations.
The only way forward for her was to pretend to be a boy.
Thus Marie Violette Tranchot gave way to Octave Obdurant. Even her tutor did not realize that the child with cropped hair and unbroken voice, defining quadratic functions, was a girl.
At sixteen, with Poinsot himself administering the examinations, Octave-Marie excelled her peers. She entered the Polytechnique in seventh place. She dressed and bathed in secrecy, modeling her gestures on those of older soldiers, training her voice to a manly depth. She was noticed only for the quickness of her mind and memory; at Ponts et Chaussées she became the protégeé of the great diagrammer and cartographer, Charles Minard; she was sent on mission from Metz to Lyon and Saint-Germain, designing railroads, perfecting bridges and new factories.
In Paris, through her astronomy tutor — Auguste Comte himself — she had become aware of Saint-Simon and with her classmates she attended meetings of the religion they were then pouring forth to remake the world.
A great battle was raging in her heart between her regimented life as a soldier-savant and her passions as both a woman and a republican. Suzanne Volquin and Flora Tristan proclaimed the inseparability of workers’ emancipation from that of women. Attending the Vaudeville one night she observed George Sand, dressed as a man but hiding none of her femininity; Octave-Violette was thrilled by her courage and her words.
At last, to Claire Bazard, the Saint-Simonian priestess, Octave-Violette revealed her torments. Bazard knew and understood all; even the Père Enfantin acknowledged her and praised her “sublime versatility, symbol of the androgynous divine.” She became one of the sect’s most persuasive preachers; she shared their collective house, took on lovers, and terrified her former classmates by appearing alternately as Octave and as Violette.
After the Saint-Simonians were scattered, the Père and his loyal Chevalier imprisoned, it was with a troop of Fourierist colonists that Violette found herself in Algeria in 1836, attempting to set up a phalanstery in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. Writing as Obdurant she examined and documented the Agricultural Science of the Berbers; she scoured the Qur’an, undertook study with a marabout Sheikh.
“He sent me dreams”, she said sternly. “Maps of paradise.”
I dared not to ask what bejeweled landscapes and labyrinths she explored with her Sheikh; it was evident that this was some holy secret she would either take to the grave, or announce at a moment reckoned by an unknown astronomy, and with it set the world aflame.
She was back in Paris by the 40s, her engineering expertise always much in demand. She wept at the tomb of mathematician Sophie Germain, protegée of Lagrange and Joseph Fourier. She taught geometry to weavers and broke bread with republican journalists and polemicists. Half a lifetime of secrecy had taught her to keep quiet, but when the hour grew late, she joined their disquisitions and disputations over the form of artificial paradises to come.
“I ran circles around them”, she said, proud and contemptuous. “They spun only clouds and moon beams. Whereas I had learned to dream in stone and steel.”
During a season she spent in Leroux and Sand’s experimental commune, she arrived at the formulas of Organize Labor, Free the Earth, which had so stirred my imagination. Though she did not realize it, she was preparing for 1848. When it exploded, she was the first to the barricades.
“Four months of intoxication”, she described it, “followed by a hangover without end.” In the June Days, she spent weeks in prison. She later signed articles denouncing both the untethered utopianism of her fellows and the opportunism of her enemies. With Bonaparte’s coup of 1851 she fled, exhausted by hope.
In Brussels she said she had been laboring, for years now, on a new project, a “return to first principles”. Apparently this required utter solitude; I saw nothing in her rooms to indicate any friend, lover, family, or any other visitor but myself.
*
Octave-Violette then expounded her philosophy — like a canal whose gates were suddenly opened, releasing a cascade driven by impatient gravity. I did not understand all she said, though I later recognized it as the method in her pamphlet on utopias.
“To understand the future, we study the past”, she said. “We know the past best by the future it dreams.”
In long historical investigations she saw wave after wave of starry-eyed youngsters, each of them certain that they at last had found the true solution to the problem of human existence. At first she saw only monotony in these relentlessly repeated and doomed burlesques of abundance or simplicity. She began to wonder about hidden variables, about the law connecting real conditions and the wild scenarios to which they gave birth.
She found a guiding thread which became her title: Every Society Invents the Failed Utopia it Deserves. Whether this was a discovery, or an a priori determination, remains to me obscure. Revising Leibniz, she saw an undeniable metaphysical necessity regulating what is, what might be, and the gap between them. She set herself the task of defining and reckoning that gap.
“The reach of a society’s dreams”, she said, “always exceeds its grasp. The measure of this excess — the degree by which a utopia fails, the area between the curves of reality and aspiration — is a periodic function, a law of history. Once known, this formula is the philosopher’s stone of the politician and the revolutionary.
“To discover it requires us to establish the relationship between what is given, what is dreamed, and what is needed. The given is easily observed. To learn what was dreamed it suffices to read the forward-looking testaments of speculators. It is the real historical need which is most difficult to ascertain. Our political economists believe the contrary: either that human needs are set and knowable, or that they are endless.
“Neither is true”, she said. “Need is a historical variable. It changes as a function of the relationship between the givens of natural and social reality, and available visions of a better world. The method of utopia consists of establishing this relationship, making predictions, and acting upon them.”
She peered inquisitively into my face. “You think I speak in riddles.”
Frightened, I said nothing.
“These are no mere words, but the results of a rigorous science”, she stated imperiously. I blinked at her, not knowing what she wanted.
She sprung up suddenly, with youthful speed: “Come, I will show you.” She strode past me, her boot-heels clicking down the hall. I followed a few cautious paces behind. Before a closed door, she took a key from her trousers and unlocked it, looked back at me, opened the door and walked through.
I followed her into a workshop whose floor was covered in scraps of wood and metal. A small furnace stood in the corner, near tongs, hammers, an anvil. Wan rays of late afternoon sunlight streamed through the gap of heavy curtains. One wall was covered in slate, scrawled with a hieroglyphic blizzard of diagrams and numbers. On an overcharged bookshelf I recognized Proudhon, texts in Arabic and Chinese, Schiller’s Letters, a volume of Dante.
In the center was a large round drum, with scraps of cloth, metal, and wood nailed into its sides. Viollette-Octave leaned over this object like a vintner proud of her harvest, an architect above the blueprint of a new world.
“Behold. My Conducteur à Comparaisons Cosmographiques.”3
It was a sublime contraption: a wooden cylinder, over one meter across. At its center stood a slim but sturdy pole; in its interior was a smaller ring. Between the two rings was rumpled green velvet, calling to mind a roulette wheel as much as a model solar system.
The bottom of this well was painted in gold, crossed by elastic ribbons in red, attached to tiny hooks on the inner wooden ring. These divided the space into segments like irregular slices of a tart or the spokes of a warped carriage wheel. The outer circle was covered in brass, hatched out in degrees; at one side a metal arm like a slide rule reached into the center, immediately displaying the radius. On the front was a glass-covered dial whose needle pointed to two.
I had no words. She said, “This is merely a model. But the principle should already be clear.”
It was not. She began to show and to tell.
Turning a crank on the right of the device, the inner ring drew toward the center. “The golden disk at the bottom is the germinal base of beatitude. Its size varies with each era.” She turned the crank in the opposite direction, and the ring expanded outward, exposing more of the gold, pressing the green velvet together and stretching the red bands.
“Look closely. These ribbons cut out nine segments — the nearly perfect number: a square, a triangle of triangles, not yet the stability of ten. These are the nine springs of our nature.” She listed: “Material comfort, equality, justice, desire for command, desire for submission, comfort of stasis, power of flight, butterfly of change, and finally,” she raised her eyebrows, “beauty.”
She owed a debt to Fourier’s keyboard of the passions, she admitted. Yet rather than human motors, her nine sections were “actual quantities of valued entities, goods in the most general sense.”
To establish this “base of beatitude”, is the first, easiest task of the utopian method, she said. Estimates could be derived from evidence in taxation records, agricultural and geological surveys, weather reports, marriage laws, artistic outputs, the state of the sciences and arts, words used in obituaries and their frequency. She was impatient with this inventory, as though one might become embroiled in its imperfections, rather than grasp what she called “the parallax between the pardonable generalization and the exceptional particular which yields the conditions of existence”. It was a simple matter of applying the principles of descriptive geometry and natural history to the human species. “All this detritus of the past — Collect it, count it. Then move on!"
“Our modern Political Economy is concerned almost exclusively with whether the base of beatitude is increasing, declining, or simply waxing and waning according to a cycle as regular as that of our moon. Of course, applying the Cosmographic Comparator to the successive eras of humanity would provide an indisputable answer to this question.
“Yet this is laughably small fruit in light of the device’s true potential.” She pointed to the red elastic bands across the center. “Here we see traced the distribution of the given. The proportions and relations claimed by each of the goods shifts with each era. Regardez.”
She unhooked the bands around the ring, stretching and bending them, rehooking them to divide the tart into different shapes. “The comfort of stability gives way to a rising love of flight; once bread and shelter attain a certain dimension, the share of beauty, by a natural compensation, immediately begins to grow.” With each phrase and new adjustment, the pie pieces shifted. “The desire for command expands, drowning out justice, and occluding the sliver of equality. Desire for flight shrinks near to zero, and comfort in stasis threatens to overtake the whole left half.”
“Do you recognize it?” She gestured with her chin at the new configuration, waiting for me to answer. I did not. “The Empire of China, at the time of Marco Polo!”
She spoke in professorial tones. “Now we can at last truly see, with an exactitude unimagined by the statisticians, the provisions of earth, social order, and human happiness across history.” I saw she expected me to nod. I did, though without comprehension.
“But the Cosmographic Comparator comes into its own when we add the final piece. I cannot tell you the sweat and pain this cost me.”
She turned to open a curtain behind her, letting in rays of thick golden sunlight and revealing a wide cabinet out of which she lifted a bulky, lustrous metal object, and heaved it forward for my inspection. It was a round metal grill, a disk raised at its center like a cymbal, woven of multiple strips of brass in various widths and lengths.
“This is the speculative crown, the utopian umbrella.” With a grunt, brushing aside my gesture of assistance, she balanced it on top of the spike at the center, and spun it around several times; it slowly lowered itself until it stopped, lodged snugly in place.
It covered the cylinder below it, like an awning with gaps, showing the pattern of gold and red beneath.
Reaching to grasp a knob, one at the crown’s center and one at its edge, Octave-Violette said, “The umbrella can be adjusted to render any possible inventory of society’s goods. This concrete utopia reflects, with modification, the germinal base, the pattern of goods below.
“It’s first decisive variable is the distribution of the possible.” She loosened the screw at the top, letting the metal bands slide together and apart, closing and opening gaps which wove into stars, spirals, compass roses, fleurs de lis, in undulating, mesmerizing forms.
She snapped her fingers, waking me from my reverie.
“The second variable is the diameter. It shows how far dreams may reach.” With a twist of the knob on the edge, the disk flared out from the center; twisting in the other direction, it drew inward. “By comparing this distance to that of the germinal base below, we get the age’s disgruntlement index.”4
She gave a quick inspection, murmuring, “And now to calibrate.” Below the dial, she pressed a button; the needle dropped to zero.
“Now: the integration of the actual and the possible.” Opening a divided drawer, she selected out a number of purple elastic bands, with hooks on either end. She laid them out on the palm of her hand, like fishing lures. “The compensation vectors.”
Kneeling, reaching under the crown like a piano tuner, she latched the purple bands onto hooks hidden beneath the umbrella, then looped them, one by one, at precise locations on the red elastic bands.
“Watch the dial!” Its needle rose minutely with each strand she added. “It measures the tension between the germinal base and the distribution of the possible — the total force on the system.”
She hooked the last into place, plucked out a high, clear note. “This gives us the plausibility factor, from one to ten — Ten is ‘Inevitable’; seven means ‘nothing to lose’, five is ‘possibly maybe’, four ‘probably not’, three ‘snowball’s chance’, two ‘bazonkers’, down to one ‘absofuckinglutely never on your life’. The number is the integration of actual conditions with people’s hungry imaginings, and the tension between them. It tells us how fast, and with what violence, a given utopian design is destined to fail.
“A rigorously demonstrated function relates the plausibility coefficient, the germinal base, and the disgruntlement index; from it, we obtain the historical need for any moment.” Her voice was rising in volume, her gestures growing more agitated.
“Performing this same operation for successive eras and the incomplete utopias they generate, in a principle of sufficient unreason, we line up a series of values, ascending and descending. We can then trace the vector of historical need and the vector of realizability from one era to the next. The relation between these functions, ascending and descending, allows us to analyze, at any moment in the past, present, or future, which utopia has the greatest likelihood of failure at any given moment. The point at which these curves cross is the moment in which to act. This is the goal toward which all the philosophers have striven. These curves are nothing less than the signature of God and Nature, written across the ages, from the first imprinted fiat to the final apocalyptic flourish. You see?”
She spoke impatiently, breathing fast, her face beginning to glow with both her own agitation and the late sunlight of the setting sun streaming through the curtains cracked open behind her. Ashamed in the face of this profound learning to feel myself such a poor pupil, I ventured a simple request. “Perhaps if you gave an example...”
“An example?” She stared as if possessed. “You want an example?” Arms outstretched, as if to dive into her machine, she cried: “I will give you the past two thousand years — for example!”
She turned the crank; with a shriek that made me shudder, the inner ring contracted, leaving only a small golden disk. She restrung the red bands and adjusted the spokes. Her hands were a blur as she pointed out proportions.
“This, you recognize, is Ancient Greece. A rough land with simple satisfactions. A relatively equal distribution, haunted by material scarcity, political instability, the deadly constriction of slavery."
She twisted the umbrella into a small, tight form. “Now here is the first dream of golden ages, in Pindar and Virgil, looking backwards in escapism to livestock born tame, to crops that needed no coaxing.” She strummed the bands, pointed to the dial, now at three. “Childish compensation for the pains of agriculture.”
She adjusted again, expanded the golden disk, reshaped the umbrella until a triangle appeared. Pointing out new figures she rattled off: “Iron, colonial expansion, democratic experiments, the knots of the helots. The speculative crown, of course, is Plato’s Republic: his caste system, sprung up from the Peloponnesian Wars. As an ineluctable necessity this vision of Spartan austerity emerged, justifying in an ideal order behind the world. The birth of mathematics and political fantasy, in a single gesture.”
She adjusted the radius below and the metal shade above. With a practiced hand, she again reworked the pattern of bindings. “Rome. Harmony of law. Roads. Grain. Straining under excessive expansion.” She flicked the umbrella, which whirled until it stopped in the form of a rose. “Now, the Kingdom of God, Jesus of Nazareth. You see the coefficient, nearing one? Almost as if that was the whole point: to thrust the promised land of the Hebrews into the eternal beyond. Look at this disgruntlement index! Off the chart! No going back after this. The gap between hic et nunc and the unattainable. Setting humans running — and with what unholy tension! — toward the horizon of an unreachable plane.”
Eyes flashing, she cranked the walls in closer, thinned out the profile of the crown. “And now, Augustine’s City of God, hovering above the slack uncertainties of the late empire, the spent energy of past glories, a decadent nobility and an implausible polytheism, now restrung with the longing for a simple solution. An endless mortal pilgrimage rewarded with the only true Eternal City — one outside the world.”
Again she twisted screws, hooked and unhooked. “A shrinking, now, of the givens — the long dark ages — and here, in the overextended fantasies of the Land of Cockaigne — mais quelle grogne! — the projection of vast hunger and want: fill my belly and I want for nothing.” To harmonic twangs, she returned. “Now note, one by one, the utopias drawn up under the strain of the monastic orders. Here Benedict; now loosened into the tender joys of Francis.
“Something is stirring in these monasteries, where utopia and reality live in such proximity. The base of beatitude becomes itself a utopia. The plausibility coefficient runs high here, nearly eight; indeed, even in their obvious imperfections, the orders lasted centuries!”
She plunged, again, beneath the umbrella; broken red bands sprung out of the tub as she grasped across the table next to her for replacements. Her voice was muffled but relentless. “Vatican opulence blocks the higher view. Regal powers of Europe inflate in petulance.” She appeared again, pointing at the dial. “Watch the plausibility!” The needle, drifting back to three, jumped to seven.
“The continents of the New World appear in the spyglass. The science of cosmographic comparison enters its adolescence.” The umbrella assumed a beautiful form, an iris blooming against a chaos of red below. “Surely you recognize this? The land of Utopia, properly named by Thomas More. In its frank earthly paradise, the template for all future dreams. See how closely the diameters align! Little would be needed to bring it about materially — Yet see how violent its strain here — what enormous intellectual, spiritual, political upheaval it would require!
“Note also the similarity, here, here, and here, with the diagram of Benedict: More, aligned with Luther and Calvin, lets the monastery loose upon the world. Indeed, this next crown, from the Dominican Campanella with his City of the Sun” — the umbrella took the form of seven concentric circles — “the world itself becomes a well-furnished monastery. Readjust slightly, remove the wallpaper, and strengthen the part of equality — Here it’s Winstanley and the Levellers. An elegant pattern, no? But I get ahead of myself. As for Lord Bacon,” crouching energetically, she knotted and reknotted strands of red and violet, “here I add the will to technological power, here, the love of royal pomp, and there a maritime fantasy of becoming Beefsteak Conquistadors — and voilà! New Atlantis in the Age of Elizabeth! The Don Quixote of imperial ambition, agricultural improvement, and small machines!”
She took a breath, her white hair wildly uncoiffed, her neckerchief hanging loosely. “I could spend hours with you here on the upside-down worlds of the seventeenth century and those of the eighteenth — Mercier and Condorcet, the great Babeuf.” She gestured around the machine. “Here is where the Encyclopédie would stretch the restless share of learning, here the philosophes deny the heart, the Jacobins lay down a formal but not yet a felt equality.
“Yet even so, the way is being prepared, for our noisy, staggering age.” She crouched again, gave the crank a mighty twist. Like a steam train approaching from the distance, a high-pitched metal whine began from within the machine.
She gasped with exertion as she restrung the vertical strings. They pulled the umbrella downward.
“See here the panorama: the growth of productive powers, the economic and martial entwinement of the world into a single system, the conscious rise of labor and the workers, both below and above.
“Look, here, one republic of workers across the globe! And here! An end to tyranny! There, perfected agriculture! The realization of universal association!”
A great groan arose from the wooden walls of the cylinder. She looked at me, eyes lit with frenzy.
“How far we have traveled, no? One more push and we stretch the crown to where its edge at last matches that of the germinal base: a dissatisfaction index of zero. And here” — she twisted, then pointed to the dial, trembling just above nine— “we would at last reach ten — perfect plausibility — here, at last, action will be the sister of the dream!” She was gripped with a steely intensity.
“One last step remains. Now, we must read the instrument backward — we decode, from this perfected configuration, the precise utopian utterance and image which is required, to bring its own world into existence.”
In the setting sun the machine’s tangle of spikes and strings cast otherworldy shadows across the room.
Looking proudly into my eyes, she said: “It was all so simple, once I saw.”
My admiration had turned first to awe, and now to terror. The sage before me, digging in the mines of the past, climbing the fairytale turrets of the future, had lost her foothold in the present.
The metal shriek grew louder with a sound like a bursting spring. I muttered a hasty excuse, backing toward the door, the machine’s ominous patterns spinning around the room in dizzying reflections. Octave-Violette, lost a thousand years ahead and behind the moment we shared, started at me with a ragged, eternal desperation. With a growl like a pained animal, reaching a long thin hand toward me she cried: “My dear, you’ve seen nothing yet! You must stay here, return to Paris tomorrow!”
Part of me longed to take her hand, to allow myself to be consumed right along with her in the fire of her obsession. But some other impulse made me shake my head, backing out of the workshop, away from the grip of her eyes, the now-piercing shriek, the creaks and knocks of wood and metal the machine was letting out. As I hastened down the hallway, she called out:
“Remember, child! Everything dies — that is a fact. But all that dies — one day comes back!”5
I hurried through the door, singed by the fire of certainty which possessed her, like that mad alchemist who returned from his glimpse of the absolute unable to report what he’d seen. I stepped quickly down the staircase, past the room of the porter in which a single candle flickered. I hurried out into the street, into the familiar darkness of the nineteenth century. Pulling on my bonnet, drawing the shawl around my shoulders, I swiftly retraced my steps back to the railroad station, without a glance behind.
*
To tell the truth I still cannot say if there was more of genius or lunacy to the being I came to think of as the Violet Sister.
I later heard rumors about the androgynous geometer. From Belgium she went to London and Manchester, giving lectures before setting sail to America. She visited Oneida, New Harmony, fixed barrels at the ruins of Brook Farm, sailed to Nouvelle Orleans where, in the Western valley of the Mississippi, she disembarked for several years at a former plantation run by former slaves on principles laid down by Fourier, Cabet, and Mohammed.
From there, the record grows sparse. She was spotted in Nicaragua, organizing the Mayan opposition to the Yankee, Walker; later it appears she took up residence in Panama, with a plan she described as “snipping the umbilical of the globe”.
In 1871, still on that fateful isthmus, she received news of the Commune. I can only assume her calculations had convinced her that the hour had arrived. She was on a ship to France within days. Was it foolish for a woman nearing seventy, halfway across the world, to do anything but wait patiently to hear how things turned out? But Violette measured wisdom and foolishness by a different compass than others.
Yet she made it only as far as the Spanish border. She was stopped at Pau, her papers questioned, told she would have to wait a week. Anxious to witness the new society being born in Paris, she sought some other route; she died in the hands of the border police.
These last rumors were told to me by a wild-eyed poet and drinker of absinthe who claimed to be her abandoned son, whom I met a few years ago at a café in Ménilmontant. Believing that she was carrying his inheritance, as well as plans for the perfected Cosmographic Comparator, he said he had retraced her steps from Pau to Bogota and back. He found nothing concrete. Now he himself has disappeared, leaving only a poem, “Barjot de Belleville”, in a nihilist journal, Le point final.
Octave’s second pamphlet appeared in the 1860s; I stumbled upon a copy in a reading room not long after it was published, on a block now razed to the ground to make way for one of Haussmann’s boulevards. I read it in one sitting with equal parts fascination and confusion. I was pleased to recognize and remember expressions she had used in our one meeting, and felt both admiration and sadness for the author, who had lived such disappointment and denial her whole life, upright in the truth she believed she had found, yet whose hopes for a future society had closed her off from the world.
I return to Taine, that Scoundrel of Historical Studies, recently buried, who so abused the testament of the Violet Sister, trying to make it one more coffin plank for the eternal revolution.
Whatever this document was, Every Society Invents the Failed Utopia It Deserves, it was not a cry of despair. Or not only a cry of despair. It was charged with hope and learning. And while Marx, Engels, and their followers expelled Bakunin and denied their own ingenious precursors, by opposing their supposed scientific socialism to a utopian one, Octave-Violette knew the two were inseparable: that a history without utopia is dead in spirit and fact, but that the future cannot live on dreams alone; that any science worthy of the name has no other purpose than the visionary improvement of life on earth.
Even in her greatest obscurity, the Violet Sister drew toward revelations which cannot be separated from lucid exactitude. Her essay ended thus:

When the vectors balance in stasis, when the distances cancel out, when the needle returns to the originary perfection of zero — then, with recollection and anticipation yielding to what surrounds us, we will have found a center of our universe at last beyond compare. The unveiling of heaven while in hell. The dream inseparable from the suffering which gave it life. Know this once, and there is nothing left to know.

I do not claim to understand all that the Violet Sister wrote, all the prophecies she declaimed. I seek only to redeem her memory from the backward-looking certainty of scoundrels. I wish for the world to see her as I knew her once, and I dare to hope, even as my own star dims, that her history may be one more beacon leading us forward, to the bright future we must see ahead.
Une lutteuse, 1895.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 19, 2016

author: John Tresch


text:
In Search of the Third Bird
Kenneth Morris and the Three Unusual Arts
By Easter McCraney
September 7, 2016

In his ecstatic poem of rebirth, “Starting from Paumanok,” the great bearded bard of mad beauty and love-bombast, Walt Whitman, suddenly calls out to the past: “And you precedents!” he cries, calling for their attention. What does he want from them? He wants those “precedents” to “connect lovingly” with his own work, his own creations, his poems. In one sense, this is odd. The stuff of the past cannot embrace us, or the things we make. It is dead. But in another sense, the longing that the embrace with history should be mutual is by no means insane. In the essay that follows, Easter McCraney (who is not insane) arranges for just such a mutual embrace. The result is disorienting. But, in its way, full of truth. It is the truth of a poem, which is always the product of the labor of a reader who works with a rich and redolent (if also, generally, ambiguous) text. In this sense, Easter has written a kind of history-poem.
— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

The Theosophical Path (1911-1935), formerly called Century Path, was one of a number of periodicals edited by Katherine Tingley (1847-1929) during her tenure as head of the Theosophical Society in the United States. Its readership comprised, but was not necessarily limited to, those in residence at Lomaland, the Theosophical community at Point Loma, California, founded by Tingley in 1900, and first conceived as a School for the Revival of the Lost Mysteries of Antiquity.
The SRLMA included a “Raja-Yoga” school, where young boarders of diverse backgrounds were grouped into “Lotus Houses” and given comprehensive training in the arts of the human mind, body, and spirit, in keeping with the final perfectibility of humankind and the ambition of universal excellence. A latter day chronicler provides a suggestive and compact explanation of the mission of the Lomaland school:
To grasp the guiding principles that determined the policies and programs of the Point Loma schools, it is necessary to understand the term raja yoga, the “royal or kingly” method used in the eternal battle of the human soul to control its weaknesses and earn its way to union with its inner god. Students on this path must become aware of the inner god that is their teacher, and of the body as the temple of the spirit, to be kept strong and fit. They must learn that the gentle promptings of the divinity within are best recognized in moments of silence and attentiveness.1
On the verdant Lomaland grounds and in its atria and auditoria, students performed the works of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, learned musical instruments, raised crops, baked bread, studied the minute wonders of nature, and practiced self-sufficiency. The Lomaland press, as well, with the help of its photo and engraving department, produced many periodicals for both adults and children over the lifetime of the community, full of instruction and optimism for the future, often in the pedagogically earnest tone of one’s maiden piano teacher assigning finger exercises.
In the October 1916 issue of The Theosophical Path appears an essay titled “The Birds of Lomaland”. The piece is oddly placed — amid articles on the tripartite structure of the human soul and the freedom of the will — enough that it seems, for all its good cheer, to demand a suspicious reading.
Its author describes the beauties and behaviors of birds commonly found on the Lomaland grounds, from the California towhee to the housefinch to the Brewer’s blackbird. However, certain twists of expression lead the reader to suspect that in fact specific people in the Lomaland community, not their feathered friends, are being allusively described. The very scrupulosity of the descriptions shadows them with double entendres. One bird — a colleague whose eccentricities are fondly known to the magazine’s readers? — is a “pitiless tyrant to one who has once come under his sway”; he is prone to display a “simulated anger” with his “wife”, but to either her sorrow or glee, he is “never happier than when rustling about under the protective branches of some low-growing shrub”. Startling set pieces abound as well, particularly those describing the behavior of the Lomaland birds in groups. An array of goldfinches descends upon a “dead weed”, for example, in a strangely “undulating flight and a chorus of low twittering” that recalls a ritual dance of temporary resurrection.
Were it not for a further network of clues and allusions scattered throughout the remainder of this particular October 1916 issue of this humble publication, one would have to leave things here — since there is only so far that one can spin stories and speculations about birds. But traces of a deeper, or at least an other, meaning are clearly discernible to the interested eye, particularly in their relation to a writer, amateur historian, and Theosophist by the name of Kenneth Morris (1879-1937), who lived and taught at Point Loma for two decades, from 1908 to 1929. Though Morris’ work is still anthologized and reprinted from time to time, quite nearly his entire oeuvre played itself out on the pages of the various Point Loma periodicals edited by Katherine Tingley, to be read by members of the Lomaland community or by committed Theosophists, and survives largely, if at all, in the archives of the American branch of the Theosophical Society now located in Pasadena.
In this issue of The Theosophical Path, however, Morris is ubiquitous. He is the author not only of one short, impassioned poem titled “Mater Implacabilis” and an article on Islamic history titled “Golden Threads in the Tapestry of History”, but also a Taoist parable, “Red-Peach-Blossom Inlet”, under the pseudonym Hankin Maggs. Morris, who was fond of pseudonyms, may easily have been responsible for other pieces in the issue as well. And even if the “Percy Leonard” who composed the “Birds of Lomaland” feature, for example, is most likely identical to the better-known Theosophical writer H. Percy Leonard, might Morris have had a hand in its composition or editing? It may be significant in this regard that a 1912 issue of the Tingley-edited Lomaland youth publication Raja Yoga Messenger, which also heavily features Morris’ work, also contains an article titled “The Birds of Lomaland” (this time by a “Cousin Edytha”), which cryptically notes that “Lomaland is getting to be a real bird land”, and that birds “have not hesitated to build [nests] right under our very noses, so to speak”.
More tellingly, and more than once in the Messenger, a piece by Morris is preceded or followed by one with birds somewhere in the title — in one case (March 1914), “The Bird as Omen”. The Raja Yoga Messenger also printed Morris’ story “Sion ap Siencyn”, which bears a strong resemblance in structure and theme to “Red-Peach-Blossom Inlet”.
The latter concerns a young man who abandons the world of ambitious “cheaters and thumpers” to seek tranquility and inner peace. But even his favorite meditative activity, fishing, is too much a cause of distraction, and he can only continue it after carefully straightening his fish hook. (One cannot but see Morris himself, patiently straightening his own literary hook, renouncing fame, pursuing his own spiritual ends.) One day, adrift, and quite by accident, the fisherman discovers the realm of the immortals. But he is cast out of paradise — or casts himself out — at the moment he wishes to see his enlightenment and his perfected state reflected and registered in the world of ambition that he has abandoned. “Sion ap Siencyn” is the story of a man who wanders into the realm of Rhianon (or Rhiannon, more commonly), a figure of Welsh myth, and encounters the so-called three “Birds of Rhianon” which, though mentioned in the Welsh source material with which Morris was deeply familiar, are in their greater detail entirely his invention. One encounters them in “Sion ap Siencyn” — but also elsewhere, as we see below — as the white bird of pleasure and cease of sorrow; the blue bird of transfiguration; and the rainbow bird of wisdom and wonder.
Morris’ third text in this issue of The Theosophical Path (or fourth, if the “Birds of Lomaland” are as much his own confection as the revised Birds of Rhianon), “Golden Threads in the Tapestry of History”, is an account of the alleged betrayal of the true and “inner Islam” by those who elected the Prophet’s father-in-law Abu Bakr leader of the faith instead of his cousin and son-in-law Ali the “Lion of God”. (This approach, to say the least, begs a number of rather fraught questions, as current events will attest.) The article locates a “true” Islamic strain oddly congruent with the salient doctrines of Theosophy — these being “reincarnation, the divinity in man, the existence of a secret school of Initiates, and their appearance as Teachers from age to age among men”.
One of the doctrines of Theosophy is that the human heart is “godlike in its higher aspects” — and only in its godlike aspects is it able truly to hear the subterranean roar, like a “heartbeat”, of the river of Sacred Truth as it “plunges into its caverns measureless”, beneath the well-mapped hills of history. This special sense of hearing is something, perhaps, like the averted, peripheral vision that allows one to glimpse the fainter, more distant stars, for esoteric truths can only be glimpsed, never directly verified. The Prophet, writes Morris, “never preached Theosophical doctrines at large [...]. No; or they would have ceased to be esoteric.”
As far as history itself is concerned, Morris begins his essay by assuring the reader that “we are not concerned here with history ‘as she is wrote’ by omniscient western pundits; omniscience is always a bore, especially when it deals in negations”. The historian’s task is to:
be prepared to venture boldly: using intuition and imagination; directed by a splendid faith at all times; tied down by no limitations of the brain-mind, nor hoppled with quidnuncs and quiddities [...] boldly reject whole volumes of apparent evidence; which is the most tricky thing in the world, and can be forged liberally or buried wholesale.
History, Morris concludes, is simply a kind of “jugglery”. What he demonstrates is that Theosophy, in order to follow its own golden thread through history, must first loosen it up, like an icebreaker pushing through sea ice. Historical matter is neither created nor destroyed, only displaced, jostled, buckled, set adrift.
What we have here, in summary, is a morsel of historical matter which, in its esoteric obscurity, might as well be invented — in the form of an issue of a Theosophical magazine intended for the brothers and sisters of a long-dissolved utopian commune, dominated by a single author using one or more pseudonyms, and concerned not only with the means of discerning an other world within our world, and an other history within our history, but featuring birds (rather, “birds”) performing strange rituals, rapt before the Fields of Being. But what of it, really?
Suffice it to say that it is my belief, as part of the research consortium known as ESTAR(SER), that Kenneth Morris was either a member of, or otherwise affiliated with, the highly secretive, fugitive, acephalous body of practitioners known as the Order of the Third Bird, the submontane passages of whose history ESTAR(SER) exists to map and indeed to forge; and that Morris, with or without Tingley’s knowledge and involvement, was using this issue of The Theosophical Path — and possibly other issues, and other Lomaland publications — to address members of the Order who were constellated throughout the Point Loma community, like a hidden nerve system. It is likely, consulting the existing (though sparse) literature, that there was already a high concentration of “Birds”, as members of the Order call themselves, in the United States Theosophical community — especially given the strong arguments for this being the case regarding the Theosophical Society headed by Henry Steel Olcott and Annie Besant based in Adyar, India.
The facts remain, as they perhaps must, slippery and treacherous, as ice floes that dip and plunge. But incrementally and over decades of steady endeavor by the researchers of ESTAR(SER) and occasionally by others, it has become clear that the Order of the Third Bird has existed for some period of time, and that it has a propensity to multiply itself, constantly sending out new shoots and branches, as well as a tendency to appear where it is least expected — and always, for that matter, where it is most expected. Its influence, silent where it runs deepest, is most often discernible only in those hints and traces which it has been the habit of ESTAR(SER) to decipher, eyes slyly averted to catch their dim signal. But while ESTAR(SER)’s historical speculations and archival reconstructions often remain, for lack of sufficient documentation, just that, practitioners of the Order can also be seen today, in any museum or street, standing completely still in groups of four or five, swatches of telltale saffron peeking from pockets and belt loops, their gazes formidably, unwaveringly fixed on a single object, most often a work of art.
Although here is not the place to fully lay out what is known of the Order and its practices in all contextual fullness — since more always remains to be said — a few basics can be established. The Order derives its name from one of the fragmentary epyllia ascribed to the fourth-century Latin rhetorician Ausonius, an embellished retelling of Pliny’s well-known story of Zeuxis and the painting of the child carrying grapes. Pliny recounts the great painter’s frustration that birds pecked at the fruit in the picture, since he took this as proof that the boy was less well executed than his harvest: “if I had done a better job on the figure”, he declares, “the birds would have been too frightened to approach”. The pseudo-Ausonian prose translation continues as follows:
It is said that Zeuxis went back to work on the painting, in the hopes of improving the child, and that when he put this new work outside to dry, he hid himself in the bushes to watch. And we are told that he saw three birds approach. One, making for the grapes, seemed suddenly to notice the boy and flew off with a squawk. The second, similarly drawn to the fruit, disregarded their guardian entirely, and pecked furiously at the illusory meal. But the third stopped before the tablet and stood in the sandy courtyard, looking fixedly at the image, and seemingly lost in thought. “What a curious bird!” mumbled Zeuxis, but the bird did not move.
This story famously reflects the central preoccupation of the Order, which is to collectively engage in practices or “protocols” of sustained attention and “practical aesthesis” upon works of art and/or other material phenomena made to be seen (though this last phrase is often open to interpretation). The very simplicity of its aim is what gives rise to the great cornucopia of experiential, social, and metempsychotic exercises and traditions that compose the Order’s history.
Little in Morris’ life story directly points to his affiliation with the Order. Kenneth Morris came to Point Loma originally from Wales, but a detailed biography on the website Daily Theosophy indicates that Morris first encountered Theosophy as an adolescent abroad in Ireland, where he “joined a group of the most prominent Irish thinkers and authors of these days, among which were Standish O’Grady, Æ, [and] William Butler Yeats”. Around this time he also began to write poetry and short stories, all of which were published in Theosophical periodicals. His prior interests in Celtic myth and tradition secured his growing devotion to the cause, and only a year after he met Katherine Tingley, he settled at Lomaland for what was nearly the rest of his life (he returned to Wales only when she died) giving lectures on Celtic literature at the Raja Yoga School. He also began work, soon after he arrived, on a retelling of part of the thirteenth and fourteenth-century Welsh myth cycle known as the Mabinogion. Titled The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed — and inspired by his Theosophical faith as well as by the sui generis, druidic “scriptures” of the great Welsh antiquarian and forger Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826) — it was first published in 1914 by the Theosophical Press at Point Loma, and reissued in 1978 as part of the Newcastle Publishing Co.’s Forgotten Fantasy series, alongside works by Lord Dunsany, H. Rider Haggard, and William Morris.
It is not the details of his life, as it turns out, but a further reading of his oeuvre — a reading, specifically, of The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed — that threatens to transform the teasing out of esoteric meanings into the laying forth of exoteric fact. For it is here that Morris tells his tale of three birds, in the section titled “The Story of Rhianon and Pryderi, or The Book of the Three Unusual Arts of Pryderi fab Pwyll”. The second, five-part “branch” of this section is devoted specifically to the freeing of the imprisoned Birds of Rhianon by a young man named Gwri Gwallt Euryn, who does not yet know that he is Prince Pryderi, the son — abducted at birth — of Rhianon herself. What he does know, however, are the three “Unusual Arts” taught him by his mentor and guardian Teyrnion (or Teyrnon): the art of war in the midst of peace; the art of peace in the midst of war; and the spell of the wood, the field, and the mountain. He will use these arts to locate and liberate the three birds, who are named Aden Lanach, Aden Lonach, and Aden Fwynach.
The interlocking and — to borrow a term from Celtic art — triskelionic structure of Morris’ narrative is as complex as that of his source material, and its recursive patterns are densely colored with Theosophical allegory. The nature of the three birds and the circumstances of their liberation, however, can be described in basic outline as follows. The First Bird of Rhianon, Aden Lanach (also simply Glanach) is white as “the color of the sunlight on the snowflake”, and her singing is “awakenment, and the passing of sloth into valor”. She is imprisoned in a fortress guarded by deeply slumbering giants, whose time has come to be rudely roused by the first Unusual Art, the art of war in the midst of peace. The hero, Gwri, quite literally teaches them warfare — and as their “valor” increases, the First Bird awakens and recovers her song.
The Second Bird of Rhianon, Aden Lonach (also Llonach) is “the color of the blue forget-me-not in the marshland”, and her singing is “a coolness upon all aching, and the passing of desire into peace”. She is held hostage amid a great host making uproarious warfare; unlike her sister, she begins to wake and sing as the sound of the sharpening of weapons, drawn out and nuanced in Gwri’s adroit hands, becomes music. This is the second Unusual Art, the art of peace in the midst of war.
As for the Third Bird of Rhianon, Aden Fwynach (or Mwynach) “there are better colors on her wings than in the rainbow”, and her singing is “the passing of the heart from its bondage, the fulfillment of the ultimate concerns of the soul”. She languishes in the Castle of Caer Hedd, a place of great feasting, heavy enchantment, and the spinning of gorgeous falsehood. Lost amid twittering throngs of beautiful birds, Mwynach has forgotten who she is, and the castle inhabitants claim never to have heard of her. The king of the Castle attempts to regale and distract Gwri with food, drink and story; to these three temptations in turn, Gwri responds with the three parts of the last Unusual Art: the Spell of the Wood, the Field, and the Mountain. The names of these “three places in Wales” have power to dissipate the mists of pleasant falsehood and specious pleasure. When the king, as a last measure, hands Gwri a harp, hoping the latter might ensorcel and beguile himself with the sound of his own singing voice and the charm of his own fictions, Gwri sings instead of the Third Bird, and of her troubling absence and silence. It is this song, finally, with each successive verse, that brings her fully to life and remembrance.
The basic ritual, or “protocol”, of sustained attention in universal use among practitioners of the Order of the Third Bird consists of three primary phases, which are called (with small variations) Attending, Negating, and Realizing.2 Rather than the three birds of Morris’ allegory corresponding, as one might expect, to the first, second, and third bird of the aforementioned pseudo-Ausonian parable, it seems they correspond to these three phases, in which practitioners ask in turn, of the Work before them, What Is, What Is Not, and What Shall Be. Attending — like the song of the First Bird of Rhianon and like the first Unusual Art — is a phase of awakening, to all that is before one and all that is — in which, also, what is immediately before one becomes all that is. Negating — like the song of the Second Bird of Rhianon and like the second Unusual Art, and like sleep — undoes all that is, and undoes those aspects of the self that greet and desire what is. Realizing — like the song of the Third Bird of Rhianon and like the third Unusual Art — is a phase of fulfillment, in which the inherent potential of what is breaks free in an act of paraphysical bardsmanship (or birdsmanship) that resembles storytelling, but is also the process by which storytelling becomes reality.
It is possible, in the end, that these mere comparisons and congruencies fail to convince. One wonders, for example, whether threes and birds — not to mention awakenings and realizations — are not simply native to Theosophy and to the spiritual traditions from which it draws. (Take, for example, the term Kalahansa — one name of Brahma and Sanskrit for the “swan of time”. As the First Cause of the universe, from this “Great Bird” emanate Three Logoi, moving from formless void to dawn to the light of consciousness.3) In this case it is not beyond possibility that practitioners of the Order, always syncretist opportunists, drew inspiration from Theosophy — but also that the twentieth-century practice of Theosophy, especially in the United States, drew inspiration from the Protocols of the Order. More research is needed.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 7, 2016

author: Easter McCrane