text:
The Encyclopedia of Light

By Peter Schmidt
April 13, 2022

All writing elides, to a greater or lesser degree, the way it came to be what you read. How many times did I start that last sentence? Five times. But four of them are no more. Had I penned those words in ink, however, scribbling away on a sheet of paper, traces of each false start would remain, and you would see my thinking in a way that, reading me now, you do not. Composition in digital media has, in this way, made for a special kind of frictionless world of sublated erasures, deleted deletions, and endless, invisible recompositions.  In the affecting work of sensory history that follows, Peter Schmidt uses the “strikethrough” as a kind of shadow-writing: his “Encyclopedia of Light” reveals little dark threads of undoing — marks of the second thought that endlessly cancels the first. We write, now, of course, with light, looking at glowing screens. But it is a strangeness of our monitors that we erase what we have written with still more light: a blinking cursor, backing over the words. What is Goethe supposed to have said upon his deathbed? Mehr Licht!  More light! And he was erased. What follows, too, reaches for light — but the light will not be grasped.— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

Morning. After rain, the park glows green beneath a dark sky.
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light consists of
Minutes before sunset. The hot orange glow before the light slips off the top of buildings and over the horizon. If there is a name for this phenomenon, it eludes me.
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is a response to a timeless question
Socrates — Surely sight may be present in the eyes and its possessor may try to use it, and colors may be present in things; but unless a third kind of thing is present, which is naturally adapted for this specific purpose, you know that sight will see nothing and the colors will remain unseen.
Glaucon — What kind of thing do you mean?
Socrates — The kind you call light…
Early morning. Soft yellow on the Armory facade.
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is an exhaustive a partial fuck it an exhaustive inventory catalog of the diverse moments phenomena manifestations forms encounters characteristics qualities properties qualities qualities…
Mid-afternoon. Cranes turning above the Parkway. Cool, milky, color of pearl. Observed from roof. (Should I record temperature?) Sixty degrees in late November. Riddle me that.
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light hopes
Read the headlines again today and wondered: does all this exposure make us more sensitive to the beauty that’s fleeing the world, or less?
An anonymous observer in the Vaisheshika, India’s ancient school of Vedic philosophy, asserted in the sixth century BC that light and heat are “one substance” of two types: latent (seen) and manifest (felt). “Fire is both seen and felt. The heat of hot water is felt but not seen; moon shine is seen but not felt. The visual ray is neither seen nor felt.”
Mid-morning. North-bound bus stop. Warmth on the back of my neck, an uneasy twitch beneath the ribs.
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is a curious mode of escape
The centuries-long debate over light’s source—eye or object?—was settled by Moorish mathematician Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040). al-Haytham reasoned that, if it pains one’s eyes to behold the sun, then sunlight cannot possibly originate in the eyes, and must therefore be imparted by the object of vision itself. He conducted his research in the near-darkness of a mausoleum near Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque…
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is lonely work
Early evening. Between the suspension cables flickering past the train window, a satin-soft purple glow. I make a point to look out of the window when crossing the bridge. To see so many lives through one pane reminds me that my reality is just one of an uncountable many. Often this thought saddens me, but today it comes as a relief.
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light finds solace in the pursuit of objectivity
Hazy evening. HTML color code #CEFFF9: R206, G255, B249.
Dusk. Atlantic Seafoam™ (Oil Base, All Surface, Corrosion Resistant).
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is a partial catalog of the diverse qualities of light which how exactly do I intend to pull that off is an excellent question
The cyanometer (/saɪ əˈnɒm ɪ tər/) is an instrument for measuring “blueness” attributed to naturalists and explorers Alexander Humboldt and Horace-Bénédict de Saussure. The device comprises squares of paper dyed in graduated shades of blue which can be held up and compared to the color of the sky. De Saussure's cyanometer had 53 sections…
Eleven-thirty. From the train window, a green-blue sky. Number twenty-two, a la De Sausurre Sausure Saussure.
(…on second thought, it is closer to a number seventeen.)
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is looking for a more reliable method
In one work, Isaac Newton (1643-1727) schematized the constituent wavelengths of white light by matching each spectral color to a range of frequencies on the musical scale: purple (G-a), indigo (a-b flat), blue (b flat-c), green (c-d), yellow (d-e), orange (e-f) and red (f-g). According to Newton’s device, any visible wavelength has its corresponding musical tone…
Mid-afternoon by the river. The twinkle of the ferry’s wake. Fm7 arpeggios.
Morning. Overcast. E-flat minor funeral dirge.
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light seeks to create meaning in the unbridgeable gap between an external phenomenon and the attempt to record, catalog and and reproduce that phenomenon
In his Theory of Colors, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) asserted that each of light’s spectral colors were naturally generative of a particular mood. Yellow produces “a serene, gay, softly exciting character”; blue, “a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose…” In Goethe’s view, to every quality of light there corresponds a distinct emotional temperament…
Midnight, looking from the bridge toward the city. Awestruck elation.
Morning, from the terrace. Creeping, bashful despair.
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is getting a little melodramatic don’t you think
When Louis Daguérre (1787-1851) produced the first image on a plate of silver iodide treated with carbonic acid and chlorate of potassium, he burst into a fellow light-lover’s shop and cried: “I have seized the fleeting light and imprisoned it! I have forced the sun to paint pictures for me!”
Morning. Light through the window is grey.
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light sure has lost its joie de vivre
(…steamed milk, river slate, pigeon’s wings.)
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is an my attempt to capture isolate preserve, in a historical moment characterized by inescapable loss,
I imagine sometimes, that when the ocean has swallowed the coasts and the forests have burned, I will look up to find a lavender glow hanging above me, and recall having seen this very same light before, and when it was, and where, and permit myself the comforting, if fleeting notion, that maybe not so much has changed.
Radiative forcing is the variation in the energy flux of the atmosphere resulting from the interaction of sunlight, the earth’s surface and natural and anthropogenic particulates… Estimates suggest that the total amount of solar energy trapped by greenhouse gases since 1998 is equivalent to more than 3.1 billion of the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima…
Midday. Fresh light, like the down on baby chicks. Midwinter thaw. My body betrays its dread—I breathe in and flush with the premature thrill of spring.
From the Abrahamic invocation of “Let there be light” to the luminous formation of heaven in the Japanese Tenchi-Kaibyakuhe to the Congolese Bushongo myth of the god Bumba retching up the sun, the emergence of light from darkness figures prominently in creation myths around the world…
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light supposes that if you can’t control reality, the next best thing is to represent it
Inspired by the deep blue glaciers of the western Alps, John Tyndall set out to understand the relationship between aerosols and the mystifying blueness of the sky. His experiments filling a glass cylinder with mixtures of various gases, including carbon dioxide, benzene and butyl nitrite, and illuminating them with a beam of light, produced a variety of celestial blue clouds. The result of his experiment, he wrote, “rivals, if it does not transcend, that of the deepest and purest Italian sky.”
Tyndall’s colleague, philosopher John Ruskin, praised Tyndall’s creating “within an experimental tube, a bit of more perfect sky than the sky itself.” Yet on the same day Ruskin wrote in a letter to a friend: “I’ll thank them—the men of science—and so will a wiser future world—if they’ll return to old magic—and let the sky out of the bottle again, and cork the devil in…”
Afternoon. Above the Navy Yard, a light like dirty bath water. The city air bears the hint of woodsmoke—a taste that, in my body, recalls only laughter, rocking chairs, melted marshmallows.
Warnings were issued throughout the Pacific Northwest, where more than 72 major wildfires are currently raging. “These smoke particles scatter blue light and only allow yellow-orange-red light to reach the surface, causing skies to look orange,” the Bay Area Air District reported on Twitter…
Past midnight. Rather than going back to sleep, I open the sliding door, step onto the terrace and gasp. The cold is unexpected, almost inconceivable. The city is a dull sodium-orange smolder against the low dark clouds. I can look for only so long. Back in bed, I warm my stiff fingers between my thighs and feel my heart hammering against my ribs. Eventually, I cannot help but laugh at my body’s alarm. As if this were the first time I had felt the cold.
The proposed operation would spray calcium carbonate (CaCO3) aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet. Models suggest that these particulates would change the color of blue skies to a cloudy white. Beyond that, however, the project’s directors concede that they cannot predict what effects this solar geo-engineering would have on the earth’s climate…
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is well aware that it is a hopeless endeavor
Time
slows
at the speed of light…
New Year’s. Sunrise from the roof. Clouds flash and the sky shimmers with the red of a firing forge. So this is how the future looks, I think. I had forgotten that burning has its own beauty. Some time passes before I understand that I am crying.
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light seeks comfort in this notion: you will never lose that which cannot be captured
Light may be colored because certain wavelengths are lost.
¶ The Encyclopedia of Light is an exercise in
Morning. After rain,
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Peter Schmidt

source: public-domain-review

type: conjecture

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


text:
An Archaeology of Surf

By Melissa McCarthy
May 19, 2021

“All plots tend to move deathward.” Thus speaks Jack Gladney, the addled protagonist Don DeLillo’s immortal novel of paranoia, language, and knowledge, White Noise (1985). Gladney says the words, but only becomes aware he has done so after they have come out of his mouth in the course of a rambling undergraduate lecture. Why has he said this, he finds himself wondering? Is it even true? In what follows, the shark-thinking artist-author Melissa McCarthy stages a plot that walks its own way across paranoia, language, and the pursuit of knowledge. And it goes where plots so often do. In this case, however, the whole story comes in a little suitcase: a kind of portmanteau of fiction and archaeology; of historical sources and conjured conjunctions. Surf through the footnotes, and ask: is it all plots that lead deathward, or, rather, all interpretations? — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

To the Editors:
I am here reporting on the contents of a briefcase belonging to “T. S.” (the celebrated California surfer), and recovered by the Avon and Somerset Constabulary in September of 2001. It has since been returned to his next of kin, although its exact legal status is disputed. As you will see, I have tried to give a general sense of the contents of the case, and have paid particular attention to the notebook found therein, together with the various bits of paper and ephemera slipped between its pages.
You are aware of how the stand-off in Wells Cathedral terminated, on the third day of T. S.’s presence in Somerset. But the question remains of how this potentially disastrous situation arose in the first place. Certainly there was a misunderstanding and a failure to transmit information in a timely and accurate manner. Actually, quite a few misunderstandings, all layered one on the other, rather like sediments of different density and colour. Or like layers of resin over paint over the core of a surfboard. In making my way towards the report you have requested, I have found it necessary to sift through these layers, in the hopes of arriving at a better sense of exactly where things went so wrong.
You are aware, too, of the reputation that T. S. enjoyed both during his life, and (perhaps increasingly) since his death, as a quasi-cult figure, appreciated well beyond the milieu of professional surfers to which he in many ways belonged.
One would not guess, from the notebook, that such a denouement was at hand. T. S. was visiting the cathedral, as you know, to deliver an academic manuscript to a clerical colleague of his sister’s. When he left Paris in early September, he, along with everyone else, did not anticipate the events of international import and the ensuing chaos and high security alerts. And T. S., while a basically innocuous person, was certainly somewhat erratic, even reckless — the more so after his diagnosis. At any rate, the briefcase contents do, I believe, offer insights into T. S.’s physical health, state of mind, and his lines of thought (obsession?) as this wave of calamity was about to break. As you’ll see, stone features heavily.
What follows is to be treated as an analytic inventory of the materials I have examined from the case. Where relevant I have appended explanatory and contextual notes.
Please consider all this a preliminary sketch; full analysis of signification, and a proposed plan of action will follow. Dr Belmont is, understandably, still reluctant to entertain any notion of receiving visitors to discuss the events; we might need to reconsider, here.
Melissa McCarthyLead forensic investigator (Europe),International Law of Sharks.
THE BRIEFCASE (General Description)
Black leather, well-used, reinforced corners.
Outside: several airline labels (and, very faded, small stickers of cartoon humanoid elephants), non-functioning combination locks.
Inside:– three cheque-books, all partially used, none, notably, in the name of T. S.– one airline ticket, carbon paper with red lettering, valid Paris – London Heathrow – San Francisco, issued by Air France, open dates.– Sept. 2001 issue of Surfer magazine, cover text “California Pro Surfing – can it be saved?” (defaced with elaborate graffito reading “eat my shorts”).– one paperback book, old, poor condition: Digging up the Past, Leonard Woolley.1– one brand-new hardback book: Echo Burning, Lee Child.2– Three tubes (two empty, one with crushed remains) of “Smarties”. Five more Smarties lids (letters T, S, U, R, F) rattling round the briefcase.3– sand, very little, in corners.– one notebook (of which more, below).
THE NOTEBOOK (Description & Contents)
Large, blue, hard-cover notebook, 118 pages, ruled. Writing and doodling, in the hand of T. S.,  in blue ballpoint pen — mostly undated, mainly brief notes, reminders, some copying out from other sources. Slipped between pages are several loose-leaf items, including postcards, newspaper clippings, other paper records.
The eighteen items of potential relevance to the current investigations are described below.
Item 1.Brochure, photocopied page, gatefold, on pink paper, placed in notebook.
Title: “Your Guide to Wells Cathedral”4
Item 2.Note handwritten in the notebook by T. S. Reproduced below verbatim.
Someone said Severn Bore (seven boar?) nearby for surfing. In a river? — Don’t think so.5
Item 3.Handwritten note on lined paper torn from notebook, replaced to original position. Reproduced below verbatim.
Dear Dr. Belmont,
I’m here with the Nicolas book that Pauline asked me to bring over to you, but I don’t see you in your office. I’m going to look round the cathedral and try you again later. She said, remind you to check the printer’s mark against your copy.
T. S.6
Item 4.One A4 printed page, placed in notebook. T. S. has written at the top, “Belmont’s evening class”, and has underlined the words “Guyenne”, “long-distance courtship”, and “entourage”. Reproduced below verbatim.
Proposal for seminar series: six weeks, Thursday 7–9 p.m., “Painting the Princesses: the progress, production, and reception of Archbishop Bekynton’s 1442 Journal”; convenor, J. Belmont.
Outline of primary material: Nicholas Harris Nicolas’ 1828 publication A Journal by One of the Suite of Thomas Beckington provides the full text, in English, and profuse though sometimes disputed background on the characters, motive, and events of an ill-fated mission to Guyenne, south-western France, in 1442.
The Journal has three strands: the first is a set of letters between Henry VI and his three ambassadors, in which he instructs them to enthuse his subjects overseas, and they report that without tangible and rapid support, it will be impossible to stop the French king, Charles, from gaining control of the region.
The second strand, also epistolary, consists chiefly of communications between the ambassadors and the Duke of Armagnac (and his councilor), as they try to advance the courtship between Henry and one of Armagnac’s three daughters. The problems of long-distance courtship are compounded by Armagnac’s obligations towards his ostensible ally, King Charles.
The third strand of the Journal, relayed by “one of the suite” (an unknown member of Bekynton’s entourage), describes the daily activities of Bekynton and his colleagues, as they travel to Guyenne pursuing their tasks.7
Item 5Notes handwritten in the notebook by T. S. Reproduced below verbatim.
The Spiryt of the Lord was borun on the watris
And God made of nouyt grete whallis, and ech lyvynge soule and mouable, whiche the watris han brouyt forth in to her kyndis
– have they got this right? Sounds weird. Also, can’t find stuff about pouring oil on the troubled waters.
Calm water = no surf.8
Item 6.Notes handwritten in the notebook by T. S. The third note, repeated from the first section, is written double-size and surrounded by a doodled wave motif. Reproduced below verbatim.
In Mesopotamia vessels of food and drink provide sustenance for the long journey which the dead must undertake, and during one period these vessels are stacked on a boat made of bitumen, implying that the journey must be made by water. But the journey is not everything, there is the whole life of the next world, and because it is difficult to imagine life otherwise than in terms of that which we know, it is assumed that man’s occupations and needs hereafter will be very similar to what they have been in the past – the next world is a continuation of this. – p68.
I must emphasize strongly one thing. All excavation is destruction. – p35.
The journey must be made by water. – p99.9
Item 7.Postcard placed in notebook, unwritten.
Image on front:
B&W photo of a bifurcating stone staircase.
Caption on back:
V&A Museum, LondonF. H. Evans, 1853–1943, BritishA Sea of Steps, Wells Cathedral, Steps to Chapter House, 1903.10
Written in T. S.’s hand on the page under where the postcard is placed:
This Evans — would make a good surf photographer. Check the early curve building on the right-hand stairs + swell profile on the wobbly ones. Also: that central stone square has nearly a barrel going on?
Item 8.Three pages of the notebook are filled with sketches attempting to copy aspects of the above postcard image. Some concentrate on reproducing the horizontal lines of the treads of each step, and the verticals of the stone columns. Some trace the curve that the right-hand staircase forms as it veers off. Some expand into drawings of waves within vaulted spaces, small figures surfing on them. The curve of these final waves develops into elaborate versions of the letter “C”, which in one place is elaborated into a note, reproduced below verbatim.
Call Crotty.11
Item 9.Print-out from a medical record, on sprocket-feed paper, green lines. Name and department of doctor given (but I am redacting this for now). Folded, placed in notebook. Reproduced below verbatim.
Previous damage:
Scarring on left sternum – deep incision, narrowly missing organs. Patient explains it’s from a fin (?).Foot bumps – cartilage deposits along ridge of foot, mainly historic, not painful.Left foot, calf – three projectile-type depressions – too antique to require police notification; no noticeable muscle damage.Surfer’s ear – bone growths on ear canal, causing occasional mild tinnitus.Nose – broken multiple times.Right forearm – broken bones, badly reset. Scarring.
No previous cancers.
Item 10.Notes handwritten in the notebook by T. S. Reproduced below verbatim.
Benches / pews? here are great. Find out wood: cedar, mahogany? Wonder who did the shaping.
Wax: beeswax — good for boards? How do they get that church smell in the candles?12
Item 11a.Postcard, placed in notebook.
Image on front:
Sandy beach, with the word “Guéthary”.
Back:
French stamp, postmarked but date illegible; hand-written address of a post restante in Paris. No signature, handwritten message, reading:
I miss you so much. Frank at the hotel says, if you ever come back near the Basque country again, he will kill you, for sure. Bisous.
Item 11b.Around this postcard, where it is placed on the page of the notebook, T. S. has added hand-drawing, converting the postcard into one section of a rough map, indicating distance and direction between labeled places: Guéthary, Guyenne, Atlantic, Pyrenees, Spain, rest of France. Also marked on diagram: an arrow showing “nice offshore wind”; a stick-man to left of Guéthary labeled “me, cruising in on a neat left curl”.13
Item 12.Notes handwritten in the notebook by T. S. Reproduced below verbatim.
CATHEDRAL — stone: inferior oolite: (inferior to what?) sedimentary rock, rich in organic material.14Sedimentary is made up of crushed shells and fish. Fossils. Living things turned to stone.
Bath and Wells? Because of natural springs. Archbishop paid for plumbing out to the poor in the city. Conduit, troughs, fountain, reservoir, courses. Pipes of lead twelve inches in circumference. Other necessary engines.15
Nice idea, to build something kickass, just where the water is coming up right.
Here’s Bekynton! TOMB: it’s got him twice! Marble body on top, rotting bones underneath.
Top tier: like he’s resting on a short board?16
Item 13.First page only of letter in T. S.’s hand, on plain paper. Reproduced below verbatim.
Dear Pauline,
Thanks for putting me up, great to see you. Hope they fix that roof soon.
I’ve been thinking — do you remember something Dad used to say, at the beach? The one about “a man in water is unable to move at ease”, something like that? From one of his war books. I think it’s from the same place as his other phrase, that war is full of rocks that the General never suspects.
I was thinking of night surfing, and it reminded me. You’ve been to Hawaii; did you ever see phosphorescence? It’s lovely surfing through that, carving a trail that glows blue behind you, history of your ride all lit up. Or just in the city lights.17
Item 14.Book review torn from a newspaper (edge of the paper causes mid-sentence cut-off), placed in notebook. Reproduced below verbatim.
THE LONG, EVENTFUL LIFE OF ALISTAIR COOKE
The good news is that broadcaster Alistair Cooke has been alive – informing, enlightening and entertaining us – for approaching one hundred years. The bad news: that this plodding new biography seems to take roughly that amount of time to wade through. From his early days as…18
Item 15.Notes handwritten in the notebook by T. S. Reproduced below verbatim.
Alistair Cooke still alive!He’s the one I met that was there at the Ambassador: Like the stone face of a child, he said.Everybody’s at the Ambassador — Cooke, Bekynton, me!AC forever! AC rules the waves!19
Items 16a, 16b, 16c.These are 3 photocopied pages, each with one paragraph circled as noted here, stickytaped one per page to the left-hand spread of the notebook. Reproduced verbatim in each case.
16a.
July 13thFriday, at sea, in a calm, about seven in the evening, as we thought, a fish, called a shark, pursued the ship, and was driven back, after being twice struck with a harping-iron : but in spite of his wounds he again followed the ship; upon which the master, with the harping-iron, pierced his sides.
16b.
Jan 1st.To day the lord regent gave my lord . . . for his new-year’s-gift. And Hull gave him ij small pots of green ZZ. My lord gave them each a scarlet hat. Bernard de Garos gave my lord pimento and waffers.
16c.
We are in daily expectation here of the return of the artist whom we sent, and desire most earnestly to receive the likenesses which he will bring, that we may carry them with us, and so all things be speedily concluded. Farewell: commend us to your lord.20
Items 17a, 17b, 17c.From each item 16a, 16b, and 16c above, T. S. has drawn a line to the facing page, linking the circled photocopied paragraph to his own, handwritten comments on it. As above, verbatim.
17a.
Harping-iron — it’s “a barbed spear or javelin used for spearing whales and large fish”, says this Belmont.
Like the pain in my side. Arrange appointment at the clinic. Get meds.
Belmont says this is the first time shark appears in English. The word. Not the fish. Who am I to argue?
17b.
Belmont says they’re giving new year’s gifts.First gift is illegible in the handwriting of the journal.ZZ = ginger.Scarlet hat = a hat.Waffers = little cakes.
Waffers? I want waffles. Proper waffles. And strawberry pancakes. And American coke. And some west coast waves.21
17c.There’s a line drawn over to this right-hand page, but no further words.
Item 18.Notes handwritten in the notebook by T. S. Reproduced below verbatim.
Stone faces. Stone staircases. Stone slopes and surfaces.Wish I could cruise down them, carve out a new path. But it goes too quick.All this history, piled up, things about to break, crashing forward.Find Pauline’s postal address.Call doctor.Commend me to your Lord.
***
Notes
1 See note 9 below.
2 Lee Child, Echo Burning, 2001. This classic thriller appears to be unread, but the back cover blurb is circled in pen round the phrase “he needs to keep moving through the wide Texan vastness, like a shark in the water”.
3 Smarties are a British sweet, clearly to T. S.’s taste, consisting of lenticular chocolate encased in coloured sugar coating. At the time under investigation, they were sold in cardboard tubes with a plastic lid, each embossed with a letter of the alphabet.
4 Wells Cathedral is a Church of England cathedral in Somerset. Gothic in style, the present structure was begun in the twelfth century, though a Christian church was on the site from A.D. 705.
5 The River Severn, fifty miles north of Wells, has a tidal bore that pushes a wave upstream. T. S. appears unimpressed.
6 T. S. was at Wells Cathedral at the request of his sister Pauline, a medieval historian resident in Paris. She had asked him to deliver a copy of Nicholas Harris Nicolas’ remarkable edited volume A Journal by One of the Suite of Thomas Beckington (1828) to a colleague.
7 Nineteenth-century historian Nicholas Harris Nicolas self-funded a magnificently thorough edition of a set of documents related to a significant fifteenth-century Crown diplomatic mission. As Nicolas explained in his introduction, “During a search in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, the volume from which the Journal in the following pages has been printed, accidentally fell under the Editor’s notice” (Nicolas, vii). Nicolas is referring here to MS. Ashmole 789 ff. 147-359. A later edition of this document is included in the Rolls Series: Memorials of the reign of King Henry VI. Official correspondence of Thomas Bekynton, secretary to Henry VI, ed. G Williams, 2 vols, (London: Longman & Co., 1872). In his edition of 1828 Nicolas gives biographies of the major characters, plus copious historical and political context, and subsequent events. He is particularly strong on details of the Duke of Armagnac’s eldest son, Viscount Lomaigne, and his Grand Guignol-style forays into treason, incest, and mischief.
8 The first two sentences are copied from Genesis 1:2 and 1:21. From T. S.’s comments, it appears that the Bible on hand in Wells Cathedral presented an older — Wycliffe — version of the text than he was familiar with.
9 These extracts are copied from the book in the briefcase, Digging up the Past, (1930) by Sir Leonard Woolley (1880–1960), a British archaeologist famous for his excavations of Sumerian civilization at Ur, in what is now Iraq. In the preface Woolley explains, ‘This little book is based on a series of six talks broadcast by the B.B.C., to whom I am indebted for permission to re-publish the substance in permanent form.”
No prompt for the interest is known, but T. S. was evidently taken by Woolley’s popular account of historical disinterment.
10 Photographer Frederick Evans (1853–1943) made images of landscapes and church structures of England and France, including several of Wells Cathedral. This famous image (copies held here and here) shows the staircase leading from the ground floor to, on the right, the chapter house, and, on the left, a passageway to other quarters.
11 Russell Crotty is a Californian artist noted for pictures of waves and surfing. He is not known to have any relationship with T. S., but it is possible that his work, for instance Surf Drawing Blue, 1990, inspired T. S.’s sketched elaborations of the Evans photograph.
12 T. S. appears to refer here to the construction and maintenance of surfboards: boards, originally of wood, now commonly of polyurethane foam cores and fibreglass surrounds, are shaped into desired form, allowing for variety of length, volume, hydrodynamics, vibe. Before entering the water, a surfer waxes the surface (actually using a paraffin compound), to increase traction of the feet on the board.
13 T. S. spent two years living in the French coastal town of Guéthary, known for its excellent waves. Sender of the postcard unidentified; given T. S.’s habits, the field of potential correspondents is wide.
14 From the language of these notes it would seem that T. S. is copying information from the Guide to Wells Cathedral, item 1 above.
15 For more on mediaeval watercourses, see the Eadwine Psalter.
16 Archbishop Thomas Bekynton was a munificent donor, who “bequeathed courses, fountains and waterways, in the name of him who for the gift of cold water hath promised eternal life” – J. Britton, The History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Wells (1824), 45. Nicolas explains that he “granted permission to the inhabitants [of Wells] to have a reservoir or conduit near the cross in that city”; in return, they committed to praying each year for his soul (Nicolas, lviii).
Bekynton is also, of course, the eponymous, central figure in the Journal. After his return from Guyenne in 1443, he continued serving Henry VI in public roles, and held the position of archbishop from that year until his death in 1465.
T. S. is describing here Bekynton’s tomb, located in the cathedral’s south choir aisle. Over the actual buried bones, it’s a monument in two parts, one showing the finely-painted, richly-robed archbishop, the other, his rotting body. Britton describes it thus:
“The tomb of Bishop Beckington, which, like the chapel, is partly of wood, is extremely curious. It is raised on a basement step, and consists of two divisions; viz. 1st, a table slab, whereon is a recumbent figure of the Bishop, in alabaster, habited in the  same way as he had appointed to be buried; and 2d, a low pedestal beneath the former, on which is another effigy of the deceased, in freestone, represented as an emaciated corpse extended on a winding-sheet.” (111)
T. S. reveals his pleasure at finding the tomb of the figure who has prompted both his sister’s scholarship and his own journey to Wells. His final comment refers to a perceived resemblance between the carving of the archbishop, and a surfer reclining on a surfboard, though not in a posture ready for catching a wave.
17 T. S. appears to be referring to Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Penguin, 1968), originally 1832. Book 1, chapter 7, “Friction in War”:“Activity in War is movement in a resistant medium. Just as a man immersed in water is unable to perform with ease and regularity the most natural and simplest movement, that of walking, so in War, with ordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity.” (165)“Further, every War is rich in particular facts, while at the same time each is an unexplored sea, full of rocks which the General may have a suspicion of, but which he has never seen with his eye, and round which, moreover, he must steer in the night.” (166)It seems likely that he is using the J. J. Graham 1908 translation, edited by Anatol Rapoport, 1968. For a later translation, see the Howard and Paret 1976 edition from Princeton University Press.
In his second query to Pauline, T. S. refers here to a glowing over the surface on the water at night, caused by phytoplankton.
18 So far unable to identify paper that ran this review. N. Clark’s book, Alistair Cooke: A Biography, was published in September 2001.Alistair Cooke (1908–2004), British-born, American-naturalised broadcaster, whose weekly fifteen-minute radio pieces in the series Letter from America were transmitted over the BBC’s World Service from 1946 to 2004.
19 T. S. shows surprising enthusiasm to learn that Cooke is still, as of 2001, going strong. His comment refers to Cooke’s broadcast made in the week following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, on June 5, 1968.
Cooke (like T. S., it appears) had been present at the party celebrating Kennedy’s advancement towards the presidency, and came on the scene very shortly after the shooting. As he described it in his Letter: “There were flashlights by now and the button-eyes image of Ethel Kennedy turned to cinders. She was slapping a young man and he was saying, ‘Listen lady, I am hurt too’ and down on the greasy floor was a huddle of clothes and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy. Like the stone face of a child, lying on a cathedral tomb.”
T. S., increasingly live to every linkage or apparent pattern, seems here to have been struck by a coincidence: the similarity of names, between Cooke's presence at the “Ambassador” Hotel, while Bekyton was among the group of ambassadors sent to France. One might, indeed, trace a (tenuous?) parallel between Cooke's predicament in 1968, stuck there by the dying figure of Robert Kennedy (who could not be saved); and the position of Bekynton and the other ambassadors on their hopeless mission to Guyenne, messaging back to England for saving help (that will not come).
20 These photocopied pages are from the Nicolas edition of Bekynton’s Journal. The first two extracts, dated, are from the narrator’s description of daily activity. The third is a transcript of a letter sent on December 30, 1442 from the ambassadors to Armagnac’s councilor, explaining that they have to leave, even though they have not fulfilled their mission to obtain oil paintings of the three daughters of the Count, so that Henry can choose his favourite. Armagnac later explains that the cold weather had prevented the artist from rolling out his paints, but it seems more likely that political considerations — siege, war zone, threat — contributed to the lack of progress in the courtship.
21 On January 1, 1443, during a general swapping of New Year gifts among the English delegation, Bekynton was the recipient of wafers, or little cakes, the mention of which reminds T. S. of his own home and destination. Days later, Bekynton embarked on his own return journey, which must be made by water, to England.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Melissa McCarth


text:
Food Pasts, Food Futures
The Culinary History of COVID-19
By The Global Experimental Historiography Collective
September 9, 2020

It is possible, as Walter Benjamin suggested, that “boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”  But we might sharpen the proposition: “pandemic lockdowns are the hothouse-incubator that force-hatch the egg of foreboding.” Something like this is closer to the recent lifeways of many.  Including the authors of this criti-fictional course-syllabus from the year 2070 — a bibliographical meteor from the other side of a “Remote Revolution” that, we are told, transformed social and economic life across waves of COVID-19. Focusing on food culture and agriculture (and zeroing in on the nexus of capital, consumption, labor, and taste), this essay-in-the-form-of-a-reading-list uses ludic futurism to slash-critique the world of now. One thinks of the work of Karel Čapek and Stanisław Lem — both of whom pioneered literary experiments in science fiction as a form of cultural criticism (for more on this conjunction, check out this Histories of the Future project). Read on, imagine the course, and dream the reading!  — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

SYLLABUSHIS595 / FUT595Food Pasts, Food Futures: The Culinary History of COVID-19Co-taught through the Global Experimental Historiography Collective 1Fall 2070
The COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s was a period of immense change—on par with the Second World War or the Industrial Revolution in the scale (global) and the extent (fundamental) of its impact. Any student who wants to understand the century we live in (one distinguished by the seemingly inescapable forces of anthropogenic climate change and the incursion of digital technologies upon private life) or simply to grasp the shifts their grandparents experienced in their lifetimes must first understand the historical period that has been termed the “Remote Revolution.”
The first portion of our course will be about understanding what actually happened in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic: How did the practices of cooking and eating change in the Remote Revolution? What does the emergence of the category of “essential workers” in the early stages of the pandemic tell us about the labor relations of that time (and how they’ve changed)? How do we understand the role of technology in facilitating the “remoteness” of this revolution? Can the rise of the agricultural “intentional community” movement be understood as genuinely resisting this trend? How did efforts to both curb the pandemic and to imagine a future beyond it draw on intellectual and practical tools generated by an ever evolving environmental movement—particularly in its responses to climate change?
In the second portion of our course, we’ll step back and address important historiographical questions: Was the Remote Revolution truly “remote”? Was it even revolutionary? To what extent did early historical accounts of the pandemic and its effects lapse into catastrophism or technological determinism?
In our final portion, we'll consider the merits of Future Studies as a discipline and its growing power as a set of methods for imagining life in the wakes of formerly unimaginable crises. We’ll encounter several authors who wrote of futures shaped by climate change and disease over a period of more than 150 years. By the end of the course, we will ask: How can an understanding of the future inform our interpretation of the past? How can past futures deepen our engagement with present futures (and future ones too)? With all these pasts and futures spinning about us, how can we better understand where we are now?
Reading Assignments
PART I: FOOD IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUSWhat are we talking about when we say “Remote Revoution”? These first five weeks will trace the impact of the distancing / individualizing / isolating events traditionally attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Week 1: Introduction to the Remote RevolutionTo begin the course, we’ll situate ourselves among those who experienced the pandemic firsthand: What did contemporary observers perceive to be the predominant social shifts taking place? Which changes did they expect would last the longest? How did they imagine the future, near and far? We’ll consider Bergman (writing at the height of the pandemic) on the influence of personality on contentment in isolation, Kruse on gubernatorial power, and Butler on medicalized analogies and the nature/culture dichotomy in environmental discourse.
Secondary Sources:Bergman, Allison. “Quarantine Blues: Extraversion and Contentment in Isolation During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Information & Human Behavior 14 (2021): 14–35.Kruse, Kristoff.  “States’ Wrongs: COVID-19’s Legacy of Gubernatorial Scapegoating.” The American Historical Review 128, no. 2 (2023): 47–72.Butler, Kiara. “Humans as Virus, Lockdown as Healing: The Nature/Culture Dichotomy and Environmental Narratives During COVID-19.” In Climate Change and the Coronavirus, 87–119.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024.Primary Source:Roy, Arundhati. “The Pandemic is a Portal,” Financial Times, 3 April 2020.
Week 2: Cooking and EatingThe practices of cooking and eating were fundamentally changed—unequally, and in a variety of ways—by COVID-19. In our primary readings this week, Tang introduces the ways home cooking came to be facilitated by internet recipe communities. LaDérive instead argues that home cooking came to be utilized as an opportunity for displaying and enacting cultural capital through social media-mediated conspicuous consumption. Weisberg documents how pandemic-induced food insecurity exacerbated preexisting climate-driven concerns about the food supply and reinvigorated debates about food safety. Our secondary readings explore the consequences of a heightened (or eliminated) awareness of the sociocultural significance of smell and taste.
Secondary Sources:LaDérive, Dawn. “Conspicuous Consumption, Homemade!: Food Imagery on Social Media, Before and After COVID-19.” In Debord in the Age of Zoom: Our Remote ‘Society of the Spectacle,’ 220–242. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023.Weisberg, Anya. “In Food We Trust—But Should We?: A study of the post-COVID-19 food trade deals.” Policy and Science 4, no. 1 (2026): 27–54.Tang, Claudia. “Recipes for Communities and Communities of Recipes.” Cultural History 20, no. 1 (2031): 33–51.Primary Source:Seal, Rebecca. “Reality Bites: How the Pandemic Changed the Way We Eat.” The Guardian, 4 July 2020.
Week 3: Shocks to the Supply ChainThe long-term economic impact of the pandemic revealed great "contradictions" in the early twenty-first century world order. Scholars of the category of labor deemed “essential”, including Nuñez, have spent their careers teasing out the often hidden ways in which members of a labor force known primarily for its precarity and exposure to illness were nonetheless “agentive creators” of community. This week, we also interrogate Clancy’s classic Marxist critique of the Remote Revolution.
Secondary Sources:Nuñez, Catalina. Precarious Ethnography and the Social Economies of Collapse. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2028.Clancy, W. D. From Sous Chef to Meillassoux: Shifts in Gastronomic Labor During the Remote Revolution. New York: DeVry University Press, 2034.Primary Source:Editorial Board. “The Guardian view on empty supermarket shelves: panic is not the problem.” The Guardian, 27 March 2020.
Week 4: Food, Isolation and TechnologyThe role of technology in the pandemic-borne cultural upheaval remains a subject of intense debate among scholars (we'll explore this in greater detail later in the semester). This week, Sage will introduce us to the idea that digital technologies served as both facilitators of "social distancing" and crucial sources of connection. Stefan’s work reveals the role of taste-tracking technology in cultivating heightened flavor awareness, and eventually changing the taste preferences of the tracker’s users.
Secondary Sources:Sage, Loren. “The Rise of The Virtual Farm to Table Movement: Reflections on Cow Connect,” Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture 3, no. 3 (2028) 32–56.Stefan, Niko. “Recovering our Tastes: New-found sensory understandings through COVID-19’s symptoms of smell and taste loss,” Journal of Sensory Studies 22, no. 2 (2048): 77–84.Primary Source:Barrie, Josh. “Coronavirus: Lost your smell and taste? Here's how you can still enjoy cooking and eating during lockdown,” I, 5 May 2020.
Week 5: The Contradiction of the CommuneBetween the pandemic’s first and second waves, the practice of intentional community formation confronted the problem of social isolation. Meanwhile, public health scholars and journalists debated the effectiveness of quarantine “bubbles” or “pods” as intermediate social networks. This week, we read two scholars as they trace the origins of communal living to the 1960s counterculture and the environmental movement (Punarjanma), and far beyond to earlier traditions of monastic asceticism (Vulpes).
Secondary Sources:Punarjanma, Harry. The Rise of the Intentional Community. Mountain View: Google Books Press, 2038.Vulpes, Julia. “Meal-Taking on the Camelback Commune.” In Cult of Connection: Intentional Living Communities in a Post-Pandemic World, 241–317. Providence: Brown University Press, 2045.
PART II: REMOTE REVOLUTION and the HISTORIOGRAPHY OF  EATINGBeginning in the mid-2040s, critical readers from a variety of fields began to find fault with the central tenets of Remote Revolution scholarship. In each of the next four weeks, we will examine arguments that both question and defend 1) the existence of the “Remote Revolution” as a historical phenomenon, and 2) the value of its nomenclature. In weeks 6 and 7, we will weigh the accuracy and appropriateness of the labels “Remote” and “Revolution,” respectively, while weeks 8 and 9 will address the broader trends of technological determinism and catastrophism.
Week 6: Rethinking “Remote”We’ll continue to read Vulpes this week, focusing now on the introduction, where she situates her work in contrast to prevailing narratives of pandemic-induced remoteness; she is among the first to challenge the terminology of “Remote Revolution.” Potosi, writing much later, argues that the term “Remote” is a euphemism for the digitally-mediated infiltration (corporate and state) of ever more realms of lived experience and thus counters Vulpes’s notion of a countercultural movement that has eluded these forces.
Secondary Sources:Vulpes, Julia. “Introduction.” In Cult of Connection: Intentional Living Communities in a Post-Pandemic World, 3–45. Providence: Brown University Press, 2045.Potosi, Pat. Infiltration of the Spectacle: Corporate and State Tech Creep in a Post-Remote Revolution World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2067.
Week 7: Rethinking “Revolution”To what extent were the post-pandemic changes really a revolution? Lopez identifies technological shifts that cast the pandemic as a major cultural and culinary diversion. Rayner uses a case study of the Japanese restaurant Ichiran and its solo dining experience of “taste concentration counters” to suggest that individualization had a longer history than many had assumed.
Secondary Sources:Lopez, A. G. “Generation Zapped: How College Students Paid for the Microwave Renaissance.” The Journal of American Food History, vol. 6 (2049): 61–84.Rayner, Jenna. “Solo Dining: The Decline and Revival of Good Eating? A Case Study of Ichiran.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 2 (2062): 21–47.
Week 8: Technological DeterminismWhat drives revolution? Technology is a frequently posited culprit. This week examines two scholars who credit technology to different degrees: according to Brenner, tech is a primary driver of societal change, while Marcel asserts that technologies such as "Taste Trackers" changed the individual experience of taste and smell. If you have time, look back through your readings from weeks 6 and 7—how would those authors react to Brenner and Marcel?
Secondary Sources:Marcel, Madeleine. “Tracking Taste, Tracking Tech: Perceptions of Flavor Before and after the Pandemic,” Sensory History, vol. 8 (2049), 113–142.Brenner, Charles. “Everything but the Kitchen Sink: Big Culinary Tech’s Takeover of American Food Culture,” The Journal of American Food History, vol. 18 (2061): 45–75.
Week 9: Criticisms of CatastrophismFurther historiographical critiques frame many early histories of the Remote Revolution as “catastrophist.” Patel and Celig each tackle the catastrophist narratives that emerged around the decline of the restaurant industry and communal dining. Patel attacks this same catastrophist narrative by exposing evidence of social and economic shifts away from 20th-century group dining practices that appeared as early as the 1990s. Celig argues against broad-strokes histories in general, pointing to the fallacies of technological determinism and their failure to acknowledge processes of remoteness that predate the pandemic. Patel can get jargony; take your time with this one!
Secondary Sources:Patel, Erik. “Toward a Uniformitarian History of the Remote Revolution.” Social Studies of Science 84, no. 6 (2054): 802–834.Celig, Erin A. “Revising the Revolution: On Radical Togetherness as a Critique of Catastrophism,” Cultural History 51, no. 1 (2062): 36–54.
PART III: FUTURES OF REMOTE REVOLUTION SCHOLARSHIPThe Remote Revolution—if, by now, we are inclined to call it that—has brought about many changes in social organization, technological systems, and practices as fundamental as eating. Few forces barring climate change have had such a profound impact. As students of history, it is our job to make sense of this. However, to understand such rapid and sustained transformations, it may serve us to think not only backwards in time but forwards. After all, our history has been shaped by how its participants envisioned their imminent future, often in the context of environmental catastrophe and transformation. The role of these visions, and their relationship to the past, is the purview of a much younger discipline that can both deepen our understanding of the past and enable us to prepare for our own future. An introduction to Future Studies.
Week 10: The History of the FutureThis week we will examine three examples of a Future Studies perspective. Wells envisions (and accurately predicts) the coming transformations of the twentieth century, Gates eerily predicts the coming COVID-19 pandemic and Callisto examines the political power of predictive models.
Secondary Source:Callisto, E. T. Contested Politics of Unknown Worlds. New York: McKibben Press, 2068.Primary Sources:Wells, H. G. “The Discovery of the Future.” Nature 65 (1902): 326–331.Gates, Bill. “How to Respond to COVID-19.” gatesnotes.com, 28 February 2020.
Week 11: Students of the Future, Outside the AcademyFuture Studies holds promise for examinations of the Remote Revolution and our changing relationship to food, but the treatment of these themes is notably absent from academic literature. This week, we look at Koffi's acclaimed speculative epic, which explores the world-building potential of hunger and food scarcity in West Africa made unrecognizable by climate change, and Recipes of Anticipation, which presents a collaborative effort of cooks and food writers in 2021 to make sense of how COVID-19 had already and might, in the future, impact food. These are exemplary works of Future Studies outside the academy; they have much to teach us academics about the power of the subjunctive tense in examining impending changes to the way we eat and live.
Secondary Sources:Recipes of Anticipation, edited by Cariotta Loftus Yong. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021.Koffi, Binta. The Lotus and the Spit. London: Octavian Press, 2054.
Week 12: Remote Revolution, in RetrospectThis week we will closely examine a seminal document produced on the 50th anniversary of the Remote Revolution: a roundtable discussion between six of its most prominent historians. We have encountered many of them at some point this semester—Celig, Vulpes, Brenner, Potosi, and Marcel—and now get to see them in direct conversation (and confrontation). How have five decades shifted the historical discourse around the Remote Revolution? What new avenues remain unexplored in our understanding of this critical period? What insights will the next 50 years bring?
Secondary Sources:Brenner, Charles, Delphi Castro, Erin A. Celig, Madeleine Marcel, Pat Potosi, and Julia Vulpes. “Roundtable on the Remote Revolution: Discussing 50 Years of Historiography.” Public Domain Review, 20 July 2070.
CULMINATING ASSIGNMENT:Over the past semester we have immersed ourselves in accounts of the Remote Revolution, described the  challenges and limitations of the discipline of history, and begun to contemplate the potential of Future Studies. In our final assignment, I want you to throw this all together: imagine that you are a class of history students in the year 2020, looking forward to today. How might you, at the very beginning of the "Remote Revolution," envision the changes that will transpire over the coming 50 years? How would you use historical methods to examine the possibilities of the near future? How would you situate yourself in the emerging field of Future Studies? This may take the form of an imaginary discussion between academics, a short documentary, a sci-fi story—even an annotated syllabus. Have fun with it.

Due at 11:59PM on May 15th via AmazOnTime. No late submissions.
1. The Global Experimental Historiography Collective is a multidisciplinary initiative (housed at Harvard but engaged in teaching and research worldwide) that seeks to explore the bounds of humanistic methods, and is chaired by Madeleine Marcel, Harvard’s Firmenich Professor of Sensory Sciences. The Collective is grateful for the generous support of Harvard College by Microsoft and individual donors.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 9, 2020


text:
Last Pole

By Julian Chehirian
May 27, 2020

“Every new medium is a machine for the production of ghosts.” So writes John Durham Peters in his brilliant and strange 1999 history of communication (and its failures), Speaking to the Air. At the heart of that study is a dialectical, prophetic effort to show that our purported yearning for error-free intersubjective encounters has always veiled a kind of obverse mystery: a “felicitous impossibility of contact” wherein we long for each other, ourselves, and a different world. Whenever technology is drafted into the service of “communication”, the resulting devices inevitably service that antinomic condition of spectral solitude, silence, and interception. In this affecting essay/experiment, Julian Chehirian goes looking for the history of telecommunication, and is left sitting in the slim shadow of a lightning rod, listening to a voice from beyond the grave.  — D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

After acquiring an advanced degree in history I spent several years adrift, often on cheap inter-state buses. I continued to present bits of my dissertation on the history of telecommunications technologies (specifically, on dropped calls) to a series of miscalculated audiences including marxist archaeologists, military and maritime historians, and shortwave-radio repairmen at small colleges and public venues.
Finally, after a time, I found stable work in Central New Jersey.
There I had been offered a job as a Records Retention Specialist for the State.
Eager to leave the antechamber of unsure employment, I accepted.
Apart from a terse letter informing me of the site that I am to report to and an overview of my responsibilities, I had little with which to move into my new residence in Lambertville — a little room set above an antiques store peddling mid-century modernity.
The position was “Statewide, as required”, but placed me in-town, in a foreclosed office building that had once housed the claims center of a flood insurance firm. From the vantage point of my desk I could see, alternately, deeds of sale that I was to examine and file, and a river too vacant for its breadth: lacking docks, void of boats, and broached only by the foundations of an absent bridge.
*
At nighttime I enjoy listening to cassette tapes I’ve collected from a church thrift shop. I have spent many nights in this way, after an early dinner, fixing my attention on a new cassette while allowing my gaze to flatten against the pale of plastered walls. One cassette offers astute marital advice, one projects a brassy Montreal marching band, and a third is “psychoacoustic”, containing, I have come to believe, the sounds of sailing. Cables tensing, water wiping forward on the hull, and the sound of fabric slapping back and forth. I listen in stillness.
*
In late January my supervisor called me, uncharacteristically, with an assignment. It concerned a piece of land in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Now it was owned by the County — a park — but once it had been a telecommunications facility. There was, he said, a request from AT&T, the previous landowner, who wished to reclaim some unspecified thing from the land, which the County had since made into an ecological preserve — a rarified meadows habitat.
Between 1929 and the late 60s, he told me, transatlantic telephone calls made from the United States were usually destined to pass by short wave radio signal through this 800 acre farm once known as the “American Telegraph and Telephone International Radio Telephone Transmission Station”. The farm was punctured by hundreds of 85+ ft tall pole-antennas arranged in rhombic formations — with each projecting sounds made in Chicago, Albany, or Washington, towards London, Tangier, Damascus, or Buenos Aires. ※※Indexed under…PoleLast transatlantic telephone
In the 1960s some 16,000 conversations per day moved through here. By 1975 the facility had become obsolete, superseded by undersea cable and satellite communications. At the time when AT&T decommissioned the facility only one antenna remained in use, connecting the mainland to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Today one last pole remains . Although poles were usually recycled by AT&T, Charles Bryan, a farmer who purchased the land, asked to keep one. That pole, once a trans-spatial and temporal bridge to Tel Aviv, served instead as a lightning rod between 1975 and 1998.
There was, my supervisor said, little chance for an easy resolution, but it would be best “if you produced a report for the State”.
*
I drove towards the site the following morning. The roads are small. Though there are many of them, few lead to others which lead to the site. Many pass into yet smaller roads, gravel roads and then truncate.
I see, after some time, a sign announcing “Mercer Meadows County Park”.
I circumscribe the park with my car, referencing aerial images of the land — tracing the outer bounds whose interior I am to survey.
The terrain of the park is varied. Some entry points allow passage on narrow pathways between thorny woods. Another spills out into a wide, grassy, rolling expanse. On the perimeter are failing rural houses. A view of one is blocked by a raised pool covered with tarp which rises and sighs very much like a chest. Another house rests uninhabited, a wound in its roof yawning and pulling the structure inward.
I notice a smaller sign that directs me towards the Bryan Farm and find my place in a small gravel lot. Now on foot, my line of sight is reduced to the path ahead and the trees about. Walking past the occasional power walker and baby stroller, I notice a number of guiding displays spread throughout the pole farm-turned-nature preserve, providing descriptions of the antenna technology once used by AT&T as well as a historical chronology of the facility.
But my eyes catch on something else:
A photograph from 1950 whose subject and object I cannot confidently distinguish.
The gazes of two of the people pictured seem to repeat the gaze of the camera towards something other than themselves. My own moves beyond the group, and thereafter I cannot help but unsee them, my attention taken over by the poles — those dark incisions receding into the pale. I know that there were in that very instant a thousand or more voices in exchange — like a vectoring cloud of gnats, an exchange of energy not visible, without trace, but there nonetheless.
*
My historical training reminds me that what could be known of a place like this (or anyplace) either exists in the form of written records or else cannot enter into serious discussion.
I remember a professor who liked to repeat to us: … “no traces, no history” … his lower lip pulsing with a kind of affectionate resentment towards the very idea.
But even historians can have their moments of lowered inhibition. Moments where such uncertain thoughts can be thought, if only for a time. I reach back for questions, questions that once seemed permissible in the stifled ecstasy of my graduate studies. I reach back for the memory of a night immersed in a paper on telecommunications. In this story there were patent applications, bureaucracies, federal regulators and the US military. Wartime protocols, engineers and scientists. Local landowners. Emerging technology and emerging forms of experience. For there were, after all, people making telephone calls.
In my own work I had been wanting to write about telephones as a “social history of intimacy” while also doing a history of the technology itself.  But I was, in the end, forced by professional considerations to choose only one. The latter, predictably, since the former was deemed hardly to make sense, and anyway to be quite likely impossible to achieve.  (I vaguely recall a text message from my supervisor, nervously double checking that I had understood his concerns.)
Sunset approaches, and I drive home without anything to report, advancing westward on a string of narrow roads pressed on both sides by corn fields and weathered houses.
*
In the morning another message arrived from my supervisor. “On my docket” today was to call an Elizabeth Dawn to inquire about records on the land.
After several encounters on the phone tree I was dialed in to Dawn.
"Hello Ms. Dawn", I began. “I am calling from Parks and Forests. I am trying to get some information about a former facility of yours at 111-167 Cold Soil Road in Lawrenceville, New Jersey”.
“Yes?”
All emphasis now on my next move, which must escape disinterest and disbelief.
“Well, I’m looking to find out if you have records on anything that the company left behind when it sold the property”, I said suggestively, making my mark and moving quickly out of the way in deference.
“Oh, sure, okay.”
Dawn felt alright. But on the edge of her voice I could hear some sedimented, fierce, and forthcoming impatience if I made the wrong move. I could hear the sound of a coiled stationary telephone cable slinking against the edge of a desk in bunches, like tranches of something she has on her mind but awaits the right amount of pressure to put through to me.
“Do you have”, she began, “an information authorization?”
*
So I found myself at the county archive instead to check for anything on record with the State. The archive was occupied by other rank and file sent there, like myself, by higher ups to track down paperwork. I was pointed to a filing cabinet where I found only a permit for oversized-load deliveries to the site in 1967.
*
Afterwards I returned to the pole farm to search for anything left over from AT&T.
I took inventory of what little remained amid the brush, on stumps, and in trees. Twelve pole tensioners that appear to be porcelain but feel like bakelite, like in the picture above on the lower right. Some thirty-five feet of braided metal cable attached to the tensioners. Elsewhere I noticed porcelain knobs, like the one pictured on the top left, some less intact. I ran my finger on the groove and found three downed telephone poles nearby with hand- and foot-holds. But I felt I had exhausted the space, and that what more there was could only lie at some remote threshold of access. Below, or above, or maybe both.
I began to develop a taste for the land itself as an “archive” — but what, if anything, can it recall? Does it remember the first of the telephonic voices that trickled through its body?
*
In a public library in Trenton, I wait for the rain to pass and rifle through A History of the Telephone, reaching a passage on the first transatlantic telephone call. On January 7, 1927, the president of AT&T, stationed on the East River in New York, announced to the secretary of the General Post Office of Great Britain: “Across three thousand miles of ocean, individuals in the two cities may by telephone exchange views and transact business instantly, as if they were face to face.”
Power spoke first, but a closer examination by Cary O’Dell reveals that Power merely pasted over a prior day’s test call — which was more accurately the inaugural transmission.
Beyond the terminal point of our recording, O’Dell notes that
a prophetic, if slightly rueful, chord is struck when the American speaker states, "Distance doesn’t mean anything anymore. We are on the verge of a very high speed world….people will use up their lives in a much shorter time, they won’t have to live so long."
What happened after the presidential ribbon cutting the following day has hardly been preserved, not even in the cracks of an archive. But if these first trickles created the conditions of transmission, what followed was an estuary of voices. Communions from afar, unpleasant news, stretched out friendships, loves, business affairs, and transactions.
I think about this land as it is now, silent except for the crow and the rustling shrub. I think about this straddling of presence and absence, desire, and communicative possibility and improbability. How strange it is that even when the facility was operational, little — nothing — could be heard of the many conversations moving through here to elsewhere.
*
On the pole farm I lose some confidence in my disciplinary training.
I remember a book, Wisdom Sits in Places. There, an anthropologist (Keith Basso) had studied the meaning of places and memory for peoples of the Western Apache. He points out that memory and its possibility for survival and transmission is closely related to place. So the displacement of natives from ancestral lands has had the effect of stripping the past from its places of residence.
This park has a longer story than I know, taken as it has been from the Leni Lenape by the Dutch, and then sold to the British Empire to the Quakers to English farmers and then to the American Telegraph and Telephone Company before returning to the public domain.
*
At the end of what can be said there remains, I think, space for a more concerted listening. Dislocated from history, I begin to listen to what is around. I had not listened enough.
I follow a bend in the boardwalk and come upon a bench well occupied by a group.
I stop. I accept a cigarette. I ask them how they were doing  —  about their day. They tell me that Chris Baranowski, whose name is printed on the bench, had passed away. Of an overdose. Due to Fentanyl. While attempting rehab. His friends did not realize the extent of the situation. His parents had placed this bench here for those who knew him to come to, and they had done so.
“He was a great musician. Music meant everything to him”, the guy sitting on the left told me. “The service for him was at the Presbyterian church in Lawrenceville nearby. We came from different places. These guys from DC. This one from New York. I came from Philly. The church was really full. His family and some of his friends spoke and it was so much being there without him, while surrounded by everyone who loved him. After everybody had said everything that could be said, his family brought a stereo up to the altar. They put on a cassette of a one track recording Chris made. He was by himself in a room inside the world”, he said and looked elsewhere. “You know we could play it for you”, the one on the right offered.
In the recording Chris gives his interpretation of this song by Robbie Basho.
"Visions of the Country" by Robbie Basho

I felt something quite strange sitting on the bench with them, listening to a diminutive speaker that had been placed in the grass — a little telephonic grille spilling him into the surround. I could feel him present though I could not see him. The brittle barrier between his room somewhere in the world and this place at present had cracked and softened.
Chris’ bench looked out onto a valley and in the distance there was the last remaining pole  —  the one that farmer Charles had used as a lightning rod. The pole had pointed to Tel Aviv, but now it could point elsewhere, too.
For some time later I thought about poles and what they could index and what they could not. About being there in between the grasses and the streams and the fallen poles.
I thought about the friends who came to listen and about a family’s grief too. Chris’ voice carries around these poles, delicately, appearing to those who can hear around for it.
I did not locate other utterances that converged in those antennas. But I do not doubt that they are there.  In the air.  In that place.  As I listen and wait.
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The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Julian Chehirian


text:
Chaos Bewitched
Moby-Dick and AI
By Eigil zu Tage-Ravn
March 21, 2023

In his Truth and Method (1960), the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer insisted affectingly that human understanding is an essentially historical process. The “meaning” of texts (novels, poems), the significance of past eras or events (WWII, the Renaissance) — none of this can ever be, somehow, “settled” or “put to rest”. On the contrary, because we are historical beings, because our consciousness is formed in and of time, understanding will always itself be a function of intersecting temporalities, what he called a “fusion of horizons”: the perspective from one moment must meet the perspective of another; the widening of view, the shift in what can be seen, this is the experience of coming to understand. There are no cheat codes. And it cannot be mechanized. It is the forever dialog of now with then, through which we become what we are (and the past does too). In the piece that follows, Eigil zu Tage-Ravn experiments with some digital-analog horizon-fusing, asking a GTP-3-driven AI system for help in the interpretation of a key scene in Moby-Dick (1851). Do androids dream of electric whales?— D. Graham Burnett, Series Editor

It is among the most memorable moments in American literature. At the start of Chapter Three of his masterwork, Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville has his protagonist, the existential castaway Ishmael, newly embarked on his fateful commitment to go a-whaling (is it a kind of suicide? a mere lark? both?), push open the door of a port-side rough-house for boozing mariners: the so-called “Spouter-Inn”. It is dark. It is dank. Savage weaponry from cannibal isles spikes the walls. And those who hunker at the bar are renegades and isolatoes, gruff men of the sea. In the half-light, Ishmael immediately discerns, in the entryway itself, like a warning over the threshold, “a very large oil-painting”.
Ishmael pauses. He puzzles. He peers. He even goes so far as to pry open a little window in the vestibule, to shed some light on a most inscrutable, a most intractable, a most maddening canvas: “Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched.”
I take as my text, in this essay, the paragraph that follows, and reproduce it here in full:
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?
Few images of pure formlessness have attained to the canonicity of this darkly imagined canvas, which has been a touchstone for generations of Melville critics. The grizzled Robert H. Zoellner, for instance, writing in the early 1970s, discerned in Ishmael’s panic before the painting nothing less than “a glimpse of th[e] anteperceptual world” — itself a function of “philosophical or religious doubt, impinging corrosively upon man’s Adamic acceptance of the phenomenal datum.” Hence, Ishmael, standing before the beckoning disorder of a smoky vortex, feels “the consequence of faith’s receding wave” in “the dissolution of those hard, sharp lines, those incisive shapes, which characterize a thoughtless acceptance of appearances.”1 By these lights, the murky canvas of Chapter Three sets up “the ontological vacancy beneath appearances” that, for Zoellner, lies at the heart of the novel as a whole — and which, of course, the ghost-leviathan himself makes furiously and fatally real.
Zoellner wrote that of all the works of literature he had encountered, only Moby-Dick actually frightened him. So much so, in fact, that he called his critical efforts “sheer self-defense”. But if this context of existential combat perhaps purpled his prose, it did not push his interpretation of Chapter Three into outlier territory. On the contrary, his Melville-scholar contemporary, James W. Nechass, writing a few years later, offered a very similar interpretation of the “boggy, soggy, squitchy picture”. Focusing on a close reading of “negative affix” in the (non-) description of the (unseeable) painting, Nechass argued that a swarm of privative and negatory terms (“nameless”, “indefinite”, “unimaginable”, “involuntary”, “unnatural”, etc.) all bespoke the apophatic central theme of the book as a whole: “the ungraspable mystery of life” and “the unknowable truth of the universe”. If, ultimately, it seems that a whale might be at the center of the elusive canvas, that merely confirms the conflation of malevolent cetacean and satanic vacancy from which Moby-Dick moves.2
And a series of more recent readings have continued to shed lurid blacklight on Ishmael’s dark canvas. For Manfred Pütz, the scene is carefully constructed to conflate the position of Ishmael with that of the person holding Moby-Dick in hand, since Melville’s own novelistic achievement is itself a dark storm of murk and metaphysics, before which we as readers stand as befuddled as Ishmael confronting the “black mass” of “nameless yeast”.3 Ought we read that key phrase “black mass” in its fully diabolical, rites-of-Beelzebub sense? Jonathan Cook, writing in Inscrutable Malice: Theodicy, Eschatology, and the Biblical Sources of Moby-Dick (2012), suggests yes. Since he sees the scene in the Spouter-Inn as a Bunyan-esque set-piece, where the pilgrim walks directly into the mouth of hell, there to encounter a menace of Burkean sublimity. The painting is then not only a foretaste of the destruction to come, but also a visual warning over the gate: abandon all hope, ye who enter here. What about the possibility that Melville was playing, in his depiction of painterly formlessness, with a reference to the contemporaneous work of J. M. W. Turner, whose abstracted seascapes were themselves mocked as “pictures of nothing, and very like”? Several scholars have made the case.4
But is the painting actually a painting of nothing? Not really. Or, anyway, not exactly. There is that “one portentous something in the picture’s midst”. And in a final paragraph on the encounter, Melville depicts Ishmael as persisting in the work of discernment — even going so far as to consult with the old-timers at the bar, soliciting their views, and creating thereby a kind of extemporized hermeneutic community. With their help, he eventually makes out a tale of woe in the whirl of darkness, a tale that is itself a premonitory figure for the novel as a whole: a demasted ship in the gale, and perhaps a breaching whale, in its death-throes hurling itself upon the ruin.
For the art historian Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby this scene of specifically collaborative interpretation/recovery is revelatory: begrimed by time, smoke, and grease, the original painting has in fact become illegible. It is history that has rendered it opaque. Its layers of patina disclose its venerable antiquity even as they disguise its image and smear the picture to a mummy-brown stew. In the end, Ishmael is only able to make out its form with the help of those who remember — who are, of course, also those directly implicated in its acquired opacity. “Ishmael’s dark painting is almost lost, but it remains just barely legible on the walls of the Spouter-Inn, surrounded by aged whalers who spit and smoke and drink and talk and see themselves in it.”5 They have, across time, puffing on their pipes, made it nearly impossible to see. And they are the ones on whom its interpretation must now rely.
Grigsby thus succeeds in bringing the question of history itself to the fore — history as interpretation, and interpretation as historical. She sees the fateful painting of Chapter Three as not merely a nebulous icon for the blind force of the unknown, but as cameo for the historicity of consciousness itself, a parable for the dynamic processes by which surface becomes depth — and the equally dynamic processes by which that sedimentation is reversed. Meaning happens in both directions.
Those are the processes by which time becomes visible. This is what meaning is. Actually bringing time to consciousness, then, is the essential work of hermeneutic understanding.
In this sense, as he shuttled back and forth (opening the window, asking around at the bar, returning to the painting to look and look) Ishmael was not merely trying to understand a dark canvas. He was looking for the horizon of his moment.
* * *
Let us do the same.
Open AI released the initial “DALL- E” image-generating software in January of 2021, updating to “DALL-E 2” the following year. Both platforms make use of the GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) model, a staggeringly powerful artificial intelligence tool that has “digested” a vast amount of human-generated online content, and developed the capacity to make original and context-responsive outputs that are often difficult to distinguish from new human-generated material. By kitting out DALL-E with GPT-3 models tuned to image analysis (and trained up on billions of image-caption conjunctions) the programmers of Open AI created an essentially unprecedented graphical tool: a system that creates novel visual images from text “prompts” provided by the user. It brings strange new eddies of coherence out of the unformed darkmatter of our interwebbed existence. Compelling eddies. Chaos bewitched.
Offered free to the public, DALL-E and DALL-E 2 precipitated an explosion of online play and artistic experimentation — along with a great deal of head-slapping delight, some ethical handwringing, a bit of (well deserved) Silicon Valley braggadocio, and a smattering of gob-smacked Op-Eds. Through the portal of the software, it is possible to feel one is looking into the nascent dream-world of the androids, presently perched on the very cusp of the singularity. At the same time, however, they are very definitely dreaming in our language, since (for now) all the machines know is stuff they get from us. This means each new series of pictures that sift up out of the mind of the GPT-3 engine can also be understood as “ours” in a real way: DALL-E 2 knows the visual unconscious of humanity much better than we do; it shows us new things, which are, simultaneously, algorithmic recombinations of our collective imaginary.
What better way to bring the iconically inscrutable canvas of Chapter Three to visibility?
So I set myself to this task, and offer what follows by way of a preliminary research report.
I began, somewhat arbitrarily, with the following sentence: “a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast.”
DALL-E 2 thought for a moment, and offered me these four images:
These were OK. But they did not speak to me. So I gave it another go.
The two on the left had a ghostly air. But the Melvillian mood did not feel honored by the graphical idiom on which the system had fixed. I thought it over, and realized the machine had no way of knowing that we were talking, here, about a painting. It seemed quite fair to tip it off about that. I modified the prompt with a prefatory “an oil painting of . . .” and ran it again.
Better, to be sure. But the period was off. These were effective contemporary paintings. Or anyway they could not have been generated in the era of Moby-Dick. I added a date: “A nineteenth-century oil painting . . .”
Interesting. More de Chirico than Turner. More surreal than marine. Might as well get clear on what we are talking about here. So I added “nautical” to my prompt.
That rightmost one had a certain lowering force. I decided to run this prompt again, and see what it would generate.
Nothing not to like. Although I found myself at this point wanting to go back to the start, and take a different tack. After all, I was here working with simply one random sentence in Melville’s total evocation of the mystery canvas. Why that sentence over the others? Why not simply drop the whole paragraph in as the prompt, and see what happens? I left the “nineteenth-century nautical oil painting” preamble, and cut and pasted the whole ’graph right out of Project Gutenberg. I am not sure how much of the text the machine actually processed, but its results were quite new:
For whatever reason, the leftmost of these images hit me immediately, and seemed the first of the whole sequence that had about it an air of actual plausibility. I decided to choose it, and let DALL-E 2 iterate further down that path.
Each of these seemed to me “a boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly”. And indeed of any of them I might be tempted to cry out something along the lines of, “It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale!” or, “It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements!” Or perhaps even, “It’s a Hyperborean winter scene! It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time!”
Further iteration was called for. The middle version possessed, to my eye, a dark central form of peculiarly leviathanic nebulosity. Onward!
Now the rightmost seemed most like a nameless yeast, wherein a central looming might be hesitantly discerned. Further, further . . .
Aye! Second from the left! A little lower, Starbuck!
Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! In the center, man! The billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!
There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! Look down here! In the center, the center!
Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man, steady! There go flukes! Rightmost! No, no; only black water!
Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew overhead, at the center. The two hulls wildly rolled.
Why, he’s getting it by heart—hist! Second from the left, again.
Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Off the portside, look down here!
God! God! God!—crack my heart!—stave my brain!—mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs.
The fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled along . . .
Feel thy heart,—beats it yet?
Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!

* * *
EPILOGUE
“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee”Job
The drama’s done. All true, too. Every word of it. I pushed away from the screen with a woozy air of one who could not quite believe what he had seen. Could flukes — very proper flukes! — have lifted their dark sinews to the moonlight out of that black roiling water? And then did I see the cloud-tending bird, white of wing, bend its lofting arc toward that heaven from which Ahab hid his eyes? What force, then, did twist with redeeming will those scimitar blades into a true and glowing heart, that figure of tenderness and love? Had I not just seen it rise, with the quiet grace of a cold dawn out of the inky depths of that primeval maelstrom?
“Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows”, wrote Melville of the formless canvas of the Spouter-Inn. To help us see into this obscurity, the androids of DALL-E brooded on the broad expanse of our oceanic data. And they delivered themselves of a bewitching chaos.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Eigil zu Tage-Ravn