Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Onfim the Artist

For the latest issue of Cabinet I wrote about 13th-century birch-bark gramoty, Slavonic letters and manuscripts that together attest to the remarkable literacy of medieval Novgorod. Of particular interest to me are the gramoty attributed to a certain Onfim, a schoolboy who had the singular habit of illustrating his grammar exercises with drawings of horses, dragons, men with pitchfork hands, and indeed of himself. To read the entire essay, go here.

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The Novgorod birch-bark manuscript No. 203 depicts a remarkable fantasy scene, and represents a perfect fusion of image and text, the twin elements of Onfim's art:

With the words properly spaced, we obtain:

Which is to say: “Lord, help your servant Onfim!”

What exactly is happening in this scene? According to the Soviet philologist Artemii Vladimirovich Artsikhovskii, the words at the top of the gramota are a conventional and very common phrase in the period.[i] He describes the figure at the left as a boy, and implicitly as Onfim himself, while characterizing the figure on the right as indeterminate, as perhaps a man with his hands raised, or even a tree. Most importantly, he determines that the figure on the right is incomplete, evidently abandoned as the artist lost interest.

But it may be that Artsikhovskii’s presumption of the “schematic” character of the figures, and the conventional character of the text, prevented him from giving the dramatis personae more than a casual glance. If we study them attentively, we will notice what appears to be a third person lying on the ground, with his legs sticking up in the air and three toes sticking out from the one visible foot. There is a man or a creature on top of the man on the ground, with wild hair waving on his head. He may be clutching a snake or venomous asp, or he may have the serpent wrapped in his hair, and he may have just killed the man on the ground by means of it. Though it may not be clear what Onfim intended, it is at least clear he has not abandoned this drawing for lack of interest, and, in this light, however conventional the phrase at the top of the gramota may be, when he adds his name to it, as the servant of the Lord to be helped, and places it together with the violent scene born not of convention but of his imagination, the phrase becomes anything but rote. The artist is imploring the Lord to help him, in particular, Onfim, the subject and hero of this oeuvre...

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[i] See Artemii Vladimirovich Artsikhovskii, “Berestianye gramoty mal’chika Onfima,” Sovetskaia Arkheologiia, no. 3 (1957).

The History of Plants

I will hold the Émile Francqui Chair at the Université Libre de Bruxelles next year. When I learned this my first thought was: Who's Émile Francqui? and my second thought was: I'm guessing I don't want to know. I'm guessing it has something to do with the history of the Belgian Congo.

 

And I was exactly right: in 1885 Francqui was appointed by King Leopold II to go to the Katanga Province as an army captain and a cartographer. Some sources, not least the Fondation Francqui, report that their namesake was active in combatting slavery, but what this seems to mean is that he was engaged in the Congo Arab war of 1892 against Zanzibari 'Arab' slave traders fighting for control of the Congo Free State.

Francqui's principal adversary was the Zanzibari ivory merchant, slavetrader, and memoirist known as Tippu Tip, a nom de guerre derived onomatopoeically from the sound of his gun. It is unlikely that Tippu Tip saw Francqui as any more enlightened than he was, but instead took the war as having to do only with control of territory. For his service there, Leopold would send him onward to China, to represent Belgian interests in the burgeoning mining industry.

As I was reading this part of Francqui's biography, I realised the name was vaguely familiar. A few months ago I was engaged in some minor research on the natural-philosophical and, shall we say, eudaimonistic writings of the 31st president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, beginning with his translation in 1910 of Georg Agricola's 1556 work De re metallica, and right up through his 1963 swan song, Fishing for Fun-- And to Wash Your Soul.

I had checked out through interlibrary loan from Bavaria the only physical copy of this latter book known to exist on the European continent, and had to give the ILL librarian a special pleading look as if to say, "What? This is research too."

The fruits of the Hoover research will be made public, in Cabinet Magazine, soon enough, but here what is noteworthy is the small detail of his own passage through China, in the first years of the 20th century, having even fought in the Boxer Rebellion in Tianjin in 1900, alongside his wife, Lou Henry. And who would become his great rival in the struggle for control of the Chinese mines? The Belgian industrialist and envoyé of the king, Émile Francqui.

Some years later still, after the outbreak of World War I, Francqui and Hoover would collaborate to direct and manage the Commission for Relief in Belgium, offering food supplies to refugees of the German occupation. One of the principal thoroughfares in Brussels today is the Boulevard Herbert Hoover, which I remember from the mid-1990s, when I briefly had a Belgian girlfriend and flew to Brussels from New York on a Pakistan International Airlines flight that made a brief stopover for refuelling in Europe before continuing on to Karachi. She, a Francophone, had disappointed me for her total lack of interest in the language of the Flems, and would not indulge for a second my attempts to translate the Dutch part of the bilingual cereal box.

I disappointed her for other perhaps more profound reasons, but anyhow I have been surprised, recently, to find these two men, Francqui and Hoover, meeting again, not just in Brussels during the Great War, after their period of enmity in China, but also, a century later, in my own curiosity, my own wandering from this topic to that.

Belgium has its Francqui Foundation, and the United States has, at Stanford, its Hoover Institute. If you accept an affiliation with the Hoover Institute you can expect to be unfriended by your cool friends, the ones who post links to new books from Verso and who rigorously practice the hermeneutics of suspicion, about pretty much everything: the New York Times, Disney cartoon princesses, Miley Cyrus twerking. Accepting to be associated with the name of Émile Francqui seems somewhat less charged, though in truth the men seem to have been very much alike.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I err through life, taking opportunities as they come, accepting invitations, without much suspicion, but also without the hopefulness young Herbert Hoover surely felt as he set out to impose order and progress in the world. As a topic for the lecture series I’ll give in connection with the year-long chair, I have proposed: "What Is a Plant? Philosophical Reflections from Aristotle to Goethe." The world is going up in flames, there is a coming global order of idiocy and barbarism, and, like Herbert Hoover with his history of metals, though without the optimism, I have chosen to focus on the history of plants. I want to wash my soul of the history of men.

The Internet of Snails

Paris, October, 1850. A young man, a former law student and radical candidate for the Constitutional Assembly by the name of Jules Allix, publishes in the feuilleton of La Presse a short article describing a new invention. He is not himself the inventor, but is only speaking, he claims, on behalf of his associates, Monsieur Jacques Toussaint Benoît from Hérault near Montpellier, and a man identified only as 'Monsieur Biat-Chrétien, the American'. The discovery is of a 'pasilalinic sympathetic compass' that will facilitate "universal and instantaneous communication of thought, at any distance whatever." Unlike the electrical telegraph, we are told, the compass has no conductive wires, but only two unconnected and portable apparatuses, containing a Voltaic pile, a wooden or metal wheel ringed with copper-sulphate-lined metal troughs. And, in each of these troughs, a snail...

I have an essay on Allix and his compass in the most recent issue of Cabinet Magazine. You may subscribe here. The essay is one of my many perischolarly exercises devoted to explaining why something that seems frivolous is in fact very important, for example for our understanding of what it is we are doing when we communicate across distances, or when we attempt to harness the powers thought to inhere in living beings for our machines. Allix was a charlatan and a huckster (after the compass scam collapsed, he would later appear on the isle of Jersey hosting spiritist séances for Victor Hugo and his entourage), but what he tried to do, or pretended to try to do, tells us something vitally important about what I have been calling the 'deep history of the Internet', in which our predecessors tended to look to the living world, for example to the 'escargot commotion' generated when snails copulate, rather than to 'mere' physical forces, for the powers and principles that might be harnessed in order to achieve instantaneous connections between remote places.

Here I offer some translations of key passages from Allix's text, published in La Presse on October 25 and 26, 1850. A scan of the original text is available in the digital archive of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France here, and here. Cabinet has made my full English translation available here. 

 

 

The Pasilalinic Sympathetic Compass

Universal and instantaneous communication of thought, at any distance whatever, with the aid of a portable apparatus known as the Pasilalinic Sympathetic Compass

The fact at issue, as I’ve had the honor to tell you, is the discovery of a new system for the communication of thought, as a result of which all men will be able to correspond instantaneously with one another, at whatsoever distance they are placed, man to man, or several men simultaneously, at every corner of the world, and this without recourse to the conductive wires of electronic communication, but with the sole aid of what is basically a portable machine, which the inventors call the ‘Pasilalinic Sympathetic Compass’, and which moreover may be built to any size and may be made to take on any shape.

...Originally one needed two conductive wires for a single telegraph: the one to go out, and the other to come back. But after an experiment carried out in 1845 (on various telegraph lines that had been built in Paris), having perfectly proven that the conductivity of the earth could play the part of one of the wires, it has since been possible to do without half of the circuit. One conductive wire now suffices for each telegraph.

Now what person, in seeing, first of all, the surprising effects of a system of transmission that makes it possible to communicate thought at a distance almost as fast as by means of speech, and, second of all, the great inconveniences, independent of cost, that arise from the necessity of a conductive metal wire that can be altered or broken, and that it is not possible to protect entirely from atmospheric variations: what person, I say, in these circumstances, has not wished for the discovery of some medium that, simplifying the system still further, would permit him to get by altogether without the conductive wire?

... if no one is ignorant of the attraction or the natural sympathy of the magnetized needle for the North Pole, towards which it ever turns, it will be understood, I hope, that if a certain sympathy naturally exists between inorganic bodies, there is all the more reason for the same thing to occur between organic bodies.

... if we have any faith in divine goodness, it is necessary to admit that, whenever man has been able to conceive some idea that is truly good for humanity, as it is not possible that the human imagination be more powerful than the divine omnipotence, it is necessary, I say, to admit that God as well could have foreseen this good idea, and that, in his wisdom and goodness, he must wish that it be realized one day, for otherwise man, who is nothing but God’s creature, would be better and wiser than God, his creator, to whom man necessarily owes all of his own wisdom and goodness.

... the most useful discoveries have been due only to chance events and circumstances, and we would have to wait until the beginning of the 19^th century in order to find the first traces of science being applied to electrical telegraphy. But what distance in turn separates this application of science from the new system of Messieurs Benoît and Biat! The magnificent discoveries of the Galvanis, the Voltas, the Mesmers, were only the prelude to the discovery of these two great genius inventors, and like signposts, so to speak, placed along the route that led to them.

What is remarkable in these two men is that, being strangers to one another, and each one born at opposite ends of the globe, the one in France and the other in America, they each had, separately and at the same time, the first idea of their discovery, and chance, or rather Providence, then brought it about that they meet and that they agree to pursue together the experiments and investigations that have decidedly had such fortuitous results.

...As I have already intimated, the discovery of Messieurs Benoît and Biat rests at once on galvanism, on mineral and animal magnetism, and on natural sympathy, that is to say that the basis of the new communication is a particular sort of sympathetic fluid arising from the combination of galvanic, magnetic, and sympathetic fluids, all three married together by the operations and procedures that will be described further on.

And as the different fluids involved vary according to the organic or inorganic being in question, it must still be said that the different fluids that are married together are the mineral-galvanic fluid on the one hand, the animal-sympathetic fluid of snails on the other, and, thirdly and finally, the magnetic-mineral fluid of the magnet and the magnetic-animal fluid of man, which means that, to characterize succinctly the basis of the new communication system, one should say that it happens by means of a galvano-magnetico-mineral-animalo-adamical sympathy.

Messieurs Benoît and Biat have in fact discovered that certain snails possess a remarkable property: that of remaining continually under the sympathetic influence of one another, when, after they have been coupled together and subsequently brought into relation through a particular operation involving the magnetic, mineral, and adamic fluid, they are placed in the necessary conditions for maintaining this sympathy; and in order to obtain all these results Messieurs Benoît and Biat require only the perfectly portable apparatus that they have invented, which they call the Pasilalinic Sympathetic Compass, by means of which they subsequently obtain, instantaneously and at whatever distance the sympathetic snails are placed the one from the other, a very sensitive commotion that they have called the ‘escargotic commotion’, which is manifested and communicated whenever the sympathy of two snails is stimulated by the approach of two other snails, similarly sympathetic between themselves, and with all the others, exactly like when electrical commotion is manifested for the physician each time he brings his finger close to any sort of electrified body.

...This apparatus consists in a square wooden box, in which a voltaic pile moves about, the metallic pairs of which, rather than being placed on top of one another as in Volta's pile, are arranged in order and are attached for this purpose to holes made in a wheel or in a circular wooden disc that moves around an iron axis.

For the metallic discs that make up the pairs of Volta's pile, Messieurs Benoît and Biat have substituted other pairs, in the form of circular depressions or troughs, and composed of a depression or trough made out of zinc, furnished on the inside with a previously dampened sheet of copper sulphate and maintained by means of a copper blade riveted to the depression.

At the bottom of each of these troughs they have fastened, with the aid of a mixture the composition of which will be given later, a live snail, prepared and chosen in advance, so that in the trough it will be able to imbue itself with the galvanic influence that should thus combine with the electrical influence, which will be developed when the wheel that forms the pile is placed into motion, and consequently along with it the snails that are attached to it.

The box in which this wheel or mobile pile is closed up can be of any form and material, but the box itself is necessary in order to remove the snails from the influence of the atmosphere. In any case, it is essentially mobile and portable. Moreover, each trough or galvanic depression is placed on a spring so as thus to form a sort of elastic key the movement of which is utilized to register the escargotic commotion.

We see now that the entirety of an apparatus of communication necessarily presupposes two particular apparatuses or instruments that are arranged like the one I have just described, and with the special attention of placing, in the troughs of the one, the snails that are sympathetic with those in the troughs of the other, in such a way that the escargotic commotion can depart from a precise point on one of the piles in order to go from there to an equally precise point on the other, and reciprocally.

And with these dispositions spelled out, the rest comes of itself: Messieurs Benoît and Biat have places on the wheels of the two instruments, and on each of the keys with a sympathy between them, corresponding letters, in such a way that from these they have mad a sort of alphabetical and sympathetic dial, by means of which the communication of thought is thus carried out naturally and instantaneously at any distance, by means of the writing of the thought itself, of which the escargotic commotion indicates the letters.

...The apparatus that I have just described, having the form of a marine compass, has been given the same name, 'compass', adding, so as to characterize its usage, the further qualification 'pasilalinic', which signifies universal speech or language, as well as the qualification 'sympathetic', which indicates the means by which one makes use of it.

The pasilalinic sympathetic compasses that Monsieur Benoît has created are more the two meters high. They have such a large size because he wanted to include in them the alphabetic letters or signs of all languages in use, as well as those of the universal pasilalinic language that he created, and which will be discussed further on, and, further, the punctuation marks as well as the numbers. But he realized that the number of couples or of escargotic keys necessary could be rigorously reduced to the twenty-five letters of the French language, and as one can, moreover, make use of snails of any size, and as there are some that are very small, even as small as the head of a pin, it follows that we should understand that the instrument, which can take any form, can also take on any size, from the very biggest down to the smallest, and that there could be some that are big like the dial of a horologium, others like that of a clock, and others still that are smaller, like that of a pocket-watch.

Here I will not speak of the matter or of the manner in which the apparatus's box can be made, but one must understand that all matters, metallic or otherwise, being suitable for use, the pasilalinic sympathetic compass is destined to become an indispensable piece of furniture, or even an intriguing piece of jewelry, which, designed according to all the artistic fancies to which it will not fail to give birth, will necessarily be found everywhere, from the dresser, to the boudoir, and even, if you like, to the waist-chains of ladies.

... I was placed behind one of the compasses, Monsieur Triat behind the other; Monsieur Benoît, between the two, was consequently faced by both of them. There between us he maintained a religious silence.

I touch a snail from behind, as he said; Monsieur Benoît, seeing it move, draws it close to another one, and goes from there, with a third, to the second compass. He draws it close to several snails, until one of them becomes active, and Monsieur Triat says: "I see it," and notes down the letter that corresponds to it.

... . I had in fact transmitted these three letters: 'G', 'Y', 'M', and, in hearing him say that he understood the whole word, it was very clear for me that he had understood that I was going to add the letters 'N', 'A', 'S', 'E', since we had said that the word would not be too long. But he wished for the word to be completed. I in fact touched these four letters, which made the entire word GYMNASE; he in fact received the first three letters, but there were two errors for the others. In place of 'N' and of 'S', he received 'O' and 'T', which precisely follow the letters 'N' and 'S' in the alphabet, and the whole word turned out for him as GYMOATE rather than the GYMNASE I had sent.

Then Monsieur Triat was to speak in his turn, so that there should be question and answer, and so that the role of the compasses was inverted relative to the point of departure and of arrival. This time, I called out the letters in the order they were indicated to me, in order to determine the material errors, should there be any, at the moment the arose.

He transmitted to me the three letters 'L', 'U', 'M', which I called out in succession, then he transmitted an 'I' and I received an 'H'. Next he transmitted the three letters 'E', 'R', 'E', which I received and which formed the word LUMIERE, which I received as LUMHERE. Then, finally, he sent me the word DIVINE, which I received in its entirety and which I called out, letter by letter, in the order in which I received them.

...If now we consider the applications and the consequences of the discovery of Messieurs Benoît and Biat, we see they are very abundant, whether one considers the matter from the point of view of general relations, of governments and peoples, or from the point of view of particular relations and of the family. And one may also advantageously recall here, extending the applications even further, all the proposals that have already been made, all the projects already conceived for electrical telegraphy, such as electronic newspapers, electronic mail, the usage of electrical telegraphy for the internal administration of a country, and for relations between one people and another: things one could only hope for in electronic telegraphy from a more or less distant future, and things one might not even dare to wish for at all. As for particular relations, one may wish for it and expect it from the system of new communication, which can be organized and set up as if by magic across the surface of the entire globe, all at once and without great expense in comparison with what had been necessary for electrical telegraphy.

Yes, from now on by the system of communication of Messieurs Benoît and Biat, which is as simple as it is infallible, it will be possible to correspond as quickly as by speech, from man to man, or between several men at once, at any distance, without having to worry about atmospheric variations, in any season and at any moment of the day or night!

Among all the necessities of our epoch, the most pressing one is not only that of knowing and of communicating, but of knowing and communicating quickly. The railways, from a material point of view, and the activity of human nature, from a moral point of view, have created this pressing necessity. Now, imagine a discovery thatm by connecting itself to the material locomotion of the railways and to the aerial navigation that is beginning to dawn, would achieve in one day and surpass what electronic telegraphy has already begun and what it can cause us to hope for in the transmission of thought. Without a doubt this discovery would be received with acclamation and enthusiasm by all the nations of the globe, which it would thus bring together into one sole people of the earth: rejoice, for this discovery is precisely the one made by Messieurs Benoît and Biat!

...electrical telegraphy has made us understand and hope that we might have one day a national press that is published at the same hour, both in Paris and in all the departmental capitals.... But we had to wait a pretty long time still for this, while by means of the pasilalinic sympathetic compass, we could have, if we wished, not only the French press, the English press, the German press, and that of all the countries of the globe, but also the humanitarian press of the world, which would be specially intended to connect all peoples and to bring their accomplishments into harmony, so that they might thus walk together in realization of that great saying of Christ: "All men are brothers."

And morevoer, if a pasilalinic sympathetic compass were placed in the tribunal of the Chamber of Representatives, and it were made to communicate with the ones placed in each of the city halls of France, it would be possible, so to speak, to hear the voice of the orator, at the same instant, in all places at once, and thus to estaoblish between all minds a truly miraculous communication. By means of the pasilalinic sympathetic compass, the walls of the parliament buildings would be, so to speak, turned inside out, and the orator could speak to all the earth. From one end of the world to the other his voice would be heard, and the assembly that would hear him would be nowhere, but everywhere. This invisible orator, traversing immense distances, would be infinitely multiplied before an innumerably large audience, and his words would circulate in this way as rapidly as thought to all points in the world, thanks to the mysterious agent of the invisible sympathetic fluid, bringing with them not only the passion that drives the orator, but also the beating of his heart and even the least vibrations of his soul!

...But I must remember that I am not to give in to enthusiasm.

Why Is Iceland a Portal to the Moon?

There is a trite and obvious thing to say about Iceland, and that is that it looks like the moon. Descending into the Keflavik lava fields the other day, on an Icelandair flight from Paris, I was permitted to feel annoyed and a bit superior when I overheard the virgin French tourists behind me exclaiming as they gawked at the land below: Mais il n'y a rien là! By 'nothing' I thought perhaps they had meant 'no Michelin stars', but then one of them added, as if on cue: C'est comme la lune! Yet if there is an association between the earth's only satellite and this basalt outcropping of the mid-Atlantic range that is too obvious to mention, there is another that remains to this day far too occult, and that is as deserving of notice as the other is of suppression. 

The great German astronomer and natural philosopher Johannes Kepler, most famous for defending the Copernican system and for establishing the elliptical orbit of planets, began his 1634 Somnium (sometimes subtitled A Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy) as follows:

My name is Duracotus. My country is Iceland, which the ancients called Thule. My mother was Fiolxhilde. Her recent death freed me to write, as I had long wished to do. While she lived, she carefully kept me from writing. For, she said, the arts are loathed by many vicious people who malign what their dull minds fail to understand, and make laws harmful to mankind. Condemned by these laws, not a few persons have perished in the chasms of Hekla. 

 The narrator goes on to describe his mother's commercial undertakings in what might be euphemistically called 'folk medicine', or, slightly more bluntly, 'natural magic':

In the earliest years of my boyhood my mother, leading me by the hand and sometimes hoisting me up on her shoulders, often used to take me up to the lower slopes of Mt. Hekla. These excursions were made especially around St. John's Day, when the sun is visible all twenty-four hours, and there is no night. Gathering some herbs with many rites, she cooked them at home. She made little bags out of goatskin, which she filled and carried to a nearby port to sell to the ship captains. This is how she earned her living.

That Kepler decides to preface what turns out to be a fairly serious work of lunar astronomy --to wit, a theoretical reflection upon the conditions on the still-mythical dark side of the moon-- with this narrative set-up is peculiar, not least because we know, and his contemporaries knew, that it reflects Kepler's own life in significant ways. Kepler's own mother, Katharina Kepler, née Guldenmann (1546-1622), was in the years leading up to the Somnium's composition being held in prison in Stuttgart on suspicion of witchcraft, under threat of imminent torture and execution. The son fought for years for his mother's release, and eventually won it, but much of their life was spent in the frenetic uncertainty of the Hexenjagd. Kepler was concerned with witchcraft not only as a source of fanciful characters for his thin fictions.

And yet, this bit of biography in no way helps us to answer the question: Why Iceland?

Duracotus cuts open one of his mother's little bags, and the herbs and runes come falling out. In a rage, she sells the little boy to a ship captain, and he sails off to the Danish island of Hven, where he eventually falls into an apprenticeship under the great Tycho Brahe, who instructs Duracotus first in Danish, then in astronomy. From the beginning, the displaced Icelander notices the similarity between his new learning and the traditions embodied by his own mother:

I was delighted beyond measure by the astronomical activities, for Brahe and his students watched the moon and the stars all night with marvelous instruments. This practice reminded me of my mother, because she, too, used to commune with the moon constantly. 

Duracotus eventually returns to Iceland and is reunited with Fiolxhilde. Upon reuniting, they engage in an exhaustive exchange of information about their respective traditions. The Icelandic witch is happy to learn the latest science from the continent, and her son, in turn, is just as pleased to finally be indoctrinated into native secrets, "those arts among a people so remote from all the others." Fiolxhilde relates her wisdom as follows:

Advantages have been conferred, Duracotus my son, not only on all those other regions to which you went but also on our country, too. To be sure, we are burdened with cold and darkness and other discomforts, which I feel only now, after I have learned from you about the salubriousness of other lands. But we have plenty of clever persons. At our service are very wise spirits, who detest the bright light of the other lands and their noisy people. They long for our shadows, and they talk to us intimately. Among them there are nine chief spirits. Of these, one is especially known to me. The very gentlest and most innocuous of all, he is evoked by one and twenty characters. By his help I am not infrequently whisked in an instant to other shores, whichever I mention to him... Most of the things which you saw with your own eyes or learned by hearsay or absorbed from books, he related to me just as you did. 

This spirit, it turns out, specializes in organizing trips to 'the island of Levania', which lies 'fifty thousand German miles up in the ether', and which is, evidently, nothing other than the moon. Fiolxhilde goes on, channeling the spirit, to explain how the lunar voyage unfolds:

The road to it from here or from it to this earth is seldom open. When it is open, it is easy for our kind, but for transporting men it is assuredly most difficult and fraught with the greatest danger to life... Great as the distance is, the entire trip is consummated in four hours at the most... Because the opportunity is so fleeting, we take few human beings along, and only those who are most devoted to us. Some man of this kind, then, we seize as a group and all of us, pushing from underneath, lift him up into the heavens. In every instance the take-off hits him as a severe shock, for he is hurled just as though he had been shot aloft by gunpowder to sail over mountains and seas. For this reason at the outset he must be lulled to sleep immediately with narcotics and opiates. His limbs must be arranged in such a way that his torso will not be torn away from his buttocks nor his head from his body, but the shock will be distributed among his individual limbs. Then a new difficulty follows: extreme cold and impeded breathing. The cold is relieved by a power which we are born with; the breathing, by applying damp sponges to the nostrils. After the first stage of the trip is finished, the passage becomes easier. At that time we expose their bodies to the open air and remove our hands. Their bodies roll themselves up, like spiders, into balls which we carry along most entirely by our will alone, so that finally the bodily mass proceeds toward its destination of its own accord. But this onward drive is of very little use to us, because it is too late. Hence it is by our will, as I said, that we move the body swiftly along, and we forge ahead of it from now on lest it suffer any harm by colliding very hard with the moon When the humans wake up, they usually complain about an indescribable weariness of all their limbs, from which they later recover well enough to walk. 

Fortunately, like some Laurence Sterne or DFW who can never be happy or finished with his work, Kepler provides us with his own explanatory notes on the Somnium, which are significantly more lengthy than the work itself. And he does not shy away from the question we've been circling around, Why Iceland? He begins by noting that "in our German language," 'Island' means 'Ice Land'." But, he continues, the real reason for choosing it is the power it seems to hold of inducing a state of rêverie:

In this remote island I perceived a place where I might fall asleep and dream, in imitation of the philosophers in this branch of literature. For Cicero crossed over into Africa when he was getting ready to dream. Moreover, in the same western ocean Plato fashioned Atlantis, whence he summoned imaginary aids to military valor. 

But still, why Iceland in particular, rather than the distant lands selected by his classical predecessors? Kepler supposes Plutarch had already discussed Iceland in his On the Face of the Moon from the 1st century CE, though he insists that this had nothing to do with his own choice. This choice, if we are to take Kepler at his word, turns out to be fairly uninteresting, a contingent result of a contingent choice of an obscure publisher to collate the plots of unrelated stories into a single volume. He writes of his sojourn in Bohemia:

At that time there was for sale in Prague Lucian's book about the trip to the moon, as translated into the German language by Rollenhagen's son; bound with it were the stories of St. Brendan and St. Patrick's Purgatory in the earth beneath Mt. Hekla, the Icelandic volcano. Moreover, since Plutarch, in accordance with the belief of pagan theology, located the purgatory of souls on the moon, I decided that when I set out for the moon I would most prefer to take off from Iceland.

My thesis here, if I must have one, is that there is more to the story than this. The association between Iceland and lunar voyages runs deeper than some editorial caprice of Georg Rollenhagen fils. For one thing, we know that Kepler was reading other books, which can be shown to have had a significant influence on the content of the Somnium. In particular, the 16th-century Swedish minister and polymath Olaus Magnus's Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555) seems to have been particularly important. Magnus refers to the "artem magicam apud septentrionales populos" (Bk. 3, Ch. 15, 117), a phrase which Kepler subsequently picks up virtually unaltered. According to Edward Rosen, "Kepler's use of the words montis... ignivomi to describe Mt. Hekla as the site of Purgatory strikingly echo" the terminology of the 1599 abridgement of Magnus's Historia. 

In fact, when we look at the entire passage on Iceland to which Rosen refers, we can plainly see that Kepler is relying on Magnus not just for his picture of Mt. Hekla, but also for much of Fiolxhilde's later account of the Icelandic spirits that, as she puts it, 'love the shadows'. Allow me to cite the passage at some length: 

Islandia terra est subiecta polo Arctico, vento praesertim Circio opposita, ac mari Glaciali propinqua: atque ob id dici meretur terra glacialis, seu ultimum Tyle, nulli veterum non celebrata... Pro maiori parte montosa, & inculta, praesertim versus plagam Septentrionalem, ob austera spiracula praedicti venti Circii, qui nec frutices elevare permittit. Insula est insolitis miraculis praedicanda. Rupes etenim, sive promontorium in ea est... quod instar Aetnae perpetuis ignibus aestuat. Ibique locus esse creditur poenae, expiationisque sordidarum animarum. Illic nempe spiritus, seu umbrae, comperiuntur se exhibentes manifestos humanis ministeriis submersorum, sive alio violento casu enectorum. Spectra sese offerunt congressibus notorum hominum tam manifesta, ut tanquam viventes accipiantur ab ignaris mortis illorum, data dextra. Nec deprehenditur error prisquam disparuerint umbrae. Incolae plurimum praesagiunt fata principum, quiduc remotius in orbe peragitur, revelationibus apparentium spectrorum non ignorant, prout inserius cap. de magicis praestigiis lucidius aperietur. 

The land of Iceland is situated beneath the Arctic pole, oriented principally toward the northwest, and close to the glacial sea: and this is why it merits the name of 'Ice Land', or 'Ultima Thule', celebrated among the ancients... For the greater part it is mountainous and wild, above all towards the northern coast, for nor does the austere vent of the aforementioned northwesterly wind permit anythng to grow. The island is known for its unheard-of wonders. And indeed the rocks, or the promontory in them, ... are seething with a perpetual fire like Mt. Etna. And it is in that place that the punishment and expiation of besmirched souls is believed to occur. One finds there spirits, or shadows, that are manifested through the conjurations of men. The specters of drowned men or of men who died a violent death appear so real that, like living men, they shake hands with men who don't know they are dead, and the error does not reveal itself until the moment when the specters have disappeared ('De apparentibus umbris submersorum', Bk. II, ch. 3, 62).

It is, in short, even more clear than it had been for Rosen, when we look at this entire passage, that Kepler is greatly indebted to Magnus, and not just for his appreciation of Hekla as a point of entry to a nether-realm, but also as an inspiration for the idea that Iceland is a place of commerce with spirits. 

But we are still missing something very important: the sort of transit Kepler describes as happening from Iceland is not a descent into a dark nether world. Iceland as a point of entry to the center of the world is of course a familiar trope, as for instance in Jules Verne, whose 1864 Voyage au centre de la Terre begins with the deciphering of a supposed runic manuscript that describes where the volcanic points of entry lie. The idea that Iceland possesses such points of entry appears to be rooted both in the geology of the mid-Atlantic range, as well as in Norse mythology itself. Thus in the Gylfaginning, which makes up the first part of Snorri Sturluson's 13th-century Prose Edda, there is mention of the Gjallarbrú, a bridge across the River Gjöll into Hel (a place that is what it sounds like). But the Gjallarbrú has its symbolic inversion in the Asbrú, or Æsir Bridge, which does not descend into the bowels of the earth, but rather extends from this world into Asgard, the realm of the gods. An alternative term for 'Asbrú' is 'Bifröst' (as found in the Prose Edda) or 'Bilröst' (as found in the Poetic Edda). These terms can all serve, even in contemporary Icelandic, as poetic or elevated ways of saying 'rainbow': a bridge that leads to the æsir, the gods. Thus in the Grímnismál, a component of the Poetic Edda, we find a concealed Odin revealing cosmological knowledge to Agnarr, who learns that the Asbrú is the best of all bridges, even if it is constantly burning up those who cross it:

Ka/rmt oc Avrmt 
oc Kerla/gar tver, 
þer scal Þorr vaða 
dag hvern, 
er hann doma ferr 
at asci Yggdrasils; 
þviat asbrv 
brenn a/ll loga, 
heilog votn hlóa.

Or, in Benjamin Thorpe's 19th-century translation: "Körmt and Ormt, and the Kerlaugs twain: / these Thor must wade each day, / when he to council goes / at Yggdrasil's ash / for as the As-bridge is all on fire, / the holy waters boil."  

There is no sign in Magnus, or any of Kepler's known sources, of an understanding of the commerce wth spirits in Iceland as initiating a flight rather than a descent. There is little indication of any interest in the Historia in the arcana of Norse mythology, and if it is to this latter that we ultimately wish to trace Kepler's Somnium, from the lunar voyage back to the burning bridge of the Æsir, scholarly prudence requires us to concede that we have yet to discover the path by which this trope was transmitted from medieval Iceland to early modern Germany. 

What can be established is that in Iceland, as a result of the coincidence of its geological features with its geographical situation, we find the confluence of two widespread and ancient mythological tropes. Its vulcanism marks it out as a site of access to Hades or Hel, while its Arctic location causes it to be associated with another world not beneath but above or beyond this one-- we see the Arctic being used for exactly this purpose in, e.g., Margaret Cavendish's conception of a 'blazing world' that attaches to this one at the North Pole, and in the many subsequent iterations of the idea that 'Nova Zembla', as it was long called in quaint misunderstanding (and where, good maps show, there is a river called 'Nabokov'), is a site where the ordinary laws of nature break down. Remarkably, both of these tropes are found already in the medieval Eddas, narratively represented by the two bridges, Asbrú and Gjallarbrú, burning and scintillating, dissuading the common lot of men from crossing them. 

A Conversation with Danielle S. Allen

For the latest issue of Cabinet Magazine, devoted to the theme of punishment, I talked to Danielle S. Allen about criminal justice in ancient Athens, the civil rights movement, and the Trayvon Martin case, among other things. To read the entire interview, go here, or, better yet, go buy Issue 46 of Cabinet, in stores now.

Your book The World of Prometheus offers a perfect way of giving historical depth to this issue on punishment, but it may also be interesting to reflect on how punishment in ancient Athens is relevant to our understanding of punishment in the contemporary world and, in particular, in the US. I’ve read both Prometheus and Talking to Strangers, your more recent book on Brown v. Board of Education, and one thing that struck me is how many of the same themes run through both books. You observe in Prometheus that the value of approaching punishment through the Greeks is that we’re able to “sharpen our thinking about punishment on the stone of the unfamiliar ancient world.” Does this remain for you the ultimate reason for studying ancient conceptions of punishment: that it gives us a point of access for understanding the problem of punishment itself by looking at an unfamiliar conception of it?

I can tell you the origin story of the book, which is simply that, as an undergraduate, I took a class on Athenian politics in which we read a lot of the speeches that were given in Athenian law courts. I was really taken aback by the fact that there was very little mention of imprisonment in those speeches, and I suddenly realized that I couldn’t imagine a world where prisons weren’t a major part of how we think about punishment. That captivated me, and I wanted to understand a world where imprisonment was not the dominant mode of understanding punishment. In that regard, the origin of the book was absolutely the shock of discovering, by looking at the ancient world, that our world is contingent, and that one particular contingency is the degree to which we use incarceration. It bears some thinking as to how we got there and what a world without extensive incarceration looks like.

Well, that might be right about our contemporary context; the ancient story is somewhat different. Generally—there are minor exceptions to this—Athenian methods of punishment strove to protect the body of the citizen, and this established a distinction between citizen and slave, between citizen and foreigner, resident alien, and so forth. The citizen stood out as having that bodily protection. In the early phase of the democracy, the main modes of punishing were monetary fines and exile. What happened, though, was that poorer citizens would find themselves imprisoned indefinitely: there were monetary penalties, and you would be thrown into prison until you’d paid them. So imprisonment wasn’t itself a penalty, except that poorer citizens began to have these indefinite periods in prison because they couldn’t actually pay the fine. Imprisonment as a penalty seems to have been developed in order to equalize the penal system, so that poorer citizens could pay with their bodies. In that regard, it was a different approach to the body than the physical punishment used for slaves and foreigners. It wasn’t really so much a matter of chastising or wounding the body, but rather of accepting the idea that the body could stand in for property. That’s what happened at that historical moment: the body became a form of property, and the person could use that property to pay their debts. Only the citizen had such rights and control over his own body [...]

The Politics of Curiosity

[Excerpt of an essay forthcoming in Cabinet Magazine's 10th-anniversary book. To read the full essay, buy the book!]

...A curious thing happens as curiosity is legitimated, over the course of the modern period, through its transformation into what would be called 'science': it is coopted by the state. And so begins the next chapter, the late modern chapter, of curiosity’s history. Murals go up on the sides of public buildings depicting atoms, bridge-builders, men in lab coats. Science becomes conflated with national glory.

This chapter of curiosity’s history dominated most of the 20th twentieth century, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and began its decline only in the past generation. Now the state grows jealous of the curiosity of individuals, seeking not so much to squelch it as simply to channel it for the state's own interests. Every competence must have a license, and every interest an official association. State support easily crosses over into state control, and this is a circumstance in which the true curiosus is unable to thrive.

A telling illustration of the conflict between state science and individual curiosity is given by the life-work of Vladimir Nabokov, who appears to have seen his love of lepidoptery --which yielded up a new bit of Linnean nomenclature: the Nabokovia genus of the order Lepidoptera— precisely as a defiance of the form of life from which he escaped when he fled to Berlin in 1922. Nabokov’s butterflies stand for a celebration of the possibility of a life that includes the non-political. In the circumstances of the early Soviet Union, in which he did not ask to live, attachment to such a possibility itself becomes deeply political.

But what happens when the individual who embodies the state is himself a curiosus? Consider the late Emperor Hirohito’s marine-biological endeavors, which yielded up serious scientific publications. The curiosity of the emperor, demoted from his pre-war status as an incarnate divinity, was coupled with a lifelong indifference to what one might imagine would be the heavily freighted matter of Japan’s role in World War II and the build-up to it.

In 1975, when asked, “Does your majesty feel responsibility for the war itself, including the opening of hostilities?,” the emperor replied: “I can't answer that kind of question because I haven’t thoroughly studied the literature in this field” (1). The Japanese emperor is not an expert on the Japanese empire; he's more interested in marine worms and hydroids. One can’t help but detect in the emperor a fairly selective variety of curiosity, one that is evasively non-political, and very much unlike Nabokov’s defiantly apolitical lepidoptery...

(1) Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), p. 676.

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Curiosity and Method, Princeton, April 9, 2011

The Polish Plait, or, An Illness of the Hair

I've already mentioned that this coming Superbowl Sunday is going to be one of the best I've ever spent: I'll be busy talking about hair with a bunch of effete Brooklynites.

Quite independently of my preparation for this debut as a hair counsellor, I have just happened upon a number of references to an important chapter in our capillary history that has previously quite escapted my attention. I am speaking here of the plica polonica, which was long thought to be an illness, most commonly diagnosed in Poland, whose primary symptom was matted, clumpy, dreadlock-like hair.

I first came across a reference to the Polish plait in François Bernier's 1669 letter to Jean Chapelain, written from Shiraz in Persia, describing the appearance and practices of the yogis he had seen during his sojourn in India: "There are some [yogis] who have hair that falls to half-way down their thigh, and that is matted into branches like the massive hairs of our water-dogs, or rather like the hair of those who suffer from the illness from Poland that we call the 'Polish plait'. I saw in many places ones who held an arm, and sometimes both arms, elevated and stretched continually above their heads."

I was quickly able to turn up a number of medical treatises, mostly from the 19th century, that identify the Polish plait variously as 'a sort of trichoma', a 'strange illness' or a 'hair disorder'. The 1834 Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine informs us that its frequencey in Poland results from a long tradition, going back to the 11th century, of wearing the hair "after the manner of the Tartar and some Indian tribes," namely, in "a single tuft of hair being left to grow from the top of the scalp." The poorer inhabitants of Poland, "being wretchedly lodged and clothed, and exposed to the combined injurious influence of a marshy soil and a damp variable climate, the general cutaneous exhalation is at all times below the healthy standard, and ... hence arises the greatly increased gowrth of this portion of the hair, and the unnatural quantity of viscid secretion which is at the same time thrown out."

Now by now you are surely thinking: how could there be an illness of the hair? If it clumps, or split ends emerge, or any other such salonfähig problem arises, it can simply be cut off. This is a concern for beauticians, not physicians. Or is it? The author of the Cyclopaedia entry tells of a patient, a boy of about fifteen years of age, who "lay in a most filthy state, and his black hair, knotted long and matted together, gave out an intolerable stench." It is related that the Polish phyisician in attendance strongly opposed the possibility of "cutting off the hair, on the ground that the humour exuded on the hair might turn in on the brain and cause apoplexy."

Lest we presume that this is just a problem of the benighted past, it should be noted that there is an article in a medical journal from March, 2000, bearing the title "Plica polonica in the 21st Century." The abstract, translated haltingly from the German, reads as follows:

We describe a young man presenting with dreadlocks. There are remarkable similarities with the so called plica polonica, that historically had been treated with long courses of mercury. Apparently very important in the 18th century, the interest for this hair-disorder appears to be lost in specialized medical literature. In contrast dreadlocks, a recent hairstyle are frequently encountered. Lack of other sources various websites provide dermatologists with answers to questions regarding complications. Fortunately a simply haircut is today treatment enough.

Now I had put this curiosity behind me until by chance this evening I stumbled across the intriguely titled 1653 book of Thomas Hall, the Comarum akosmiai: The Loathsomnesse of Long Haire: or, A Treatise Wherein you have the Question stated, many Arguments against it produc'd, and the most materiall Arguments for it refell'd and answer'd, with the concurrent judgement of Divines both old and new against it. With an Appendix against Painting, Spots, Naked Breasts, &c.

I hope to be able to get back to that last part of the title soon, but what jumped out at me given my recent encounters with this strange diagnosis was the dedicatory poem, "To the Long-hair'd Gallants of these Times." It begins with some delightful couplets:

Go Gallants to the Barbers, go 

Bid them your hairy Bushes mow.

God in a Bush did once appeare,

But there is nothing of him here.

And so on. But then already by the fifteenth line or so we are told of the horrible wrath a vengeful God has let loose on Poland:

Have you not been inform' o'th' hand

Of God on Poland lately laid;

Enough to make all Lands afraid,

And your long dangles stand an end?

Feare him that did that Plica send,

And those sad Crawlers: and hath more

Unheard of Judgements still in store.

It's interesting in this connection, and I won't dwell at length here, to reflect on the semiotics of dreadlocks in the Euro-American sphere. They are supposed to come from Jamaica, and to be a transposition of a hairstyle 'naturally' suited to African heads onto heads that can only cultivate them with great effort. But we see here that the dreadlock in the European imagination originally came from Poland, or, rather, from a country on the Eastern frontier of Europe that had allowed itself to be influenced by the barbarian practices of the Tartars of deepest Eurasia: the nomads who ate raw meat and drank blood. I suspect that the association of matted hair with the Afro-Caribbean and African-American cultural sphere is itself the transposition of prejudices that are much more deeply rooted than most will ever know.