Theaters of Authenticity

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Ana Roberts, December 3, 2024

David Bowie released his first album in 1967 to little acclaim or success, and there are many who say it rightly deserved neither. A peculiar blend of psychedelic rock, folk and whimsical music hall acts, the album is incompatible with the rest of his career. It is a combination of twee songs of pastoral England, saccharine love songs and quaint lyrics that seem to come from an oral tradition of medieval story telling. It is an album mostly not worth talking about, save for a single track ‘We Are Hungry Men’ undoubtedly amongst the few embarrassing moments in Bowies career. It is a muddled song telling a rather shallow story, feeling halfway between a radio play and a song, with an undeniably catchy chorus, yet in it Bowie plays the part of a Messiah, come to earth to warn of overpopulation. The lyrics read like a pulp science-fiction novel of the 50s, a known influence on Bowie, but it is not ludicrous to suggest that Bowie had seen how Dylan had created himself as a prophet and began flirting with the idea. In fact some four years later, on Hunky Dory, he paid direct homage to his influence on ‘Song for Bob Dylan’, illustrating how deeply he understood the power of Dylan’s creation, ‘You sat behind a million pair of eyes / And told them how they saw’. Bowie understood the power of Dylan’s ability to transplant his truth on others, rather than make any claims for himself but more importantly, he understood that Dylan was playing a character, addressing him by his given name and referring to Dylan as a separate entity entirely; ‘Now, hear this, Robert Zimmerman / Though I don’t suppose we’ll meet / Ask your good friend Dylan / If he’d gaze on down the street’.

Bowie saw that Dylan was a created character, and that his mythology as a prophet was a tool of genius, but even on ‘We Are The Hungry Men’ Bowie took this tool far further than Dylan ever did, on this very first outing he presents himself directly as a prophet, something Dylan never dared to do throughout his career. In a mostly forgettable album, this single moment shows that Bowie, so early in his career, is already comfortable with playing characters, willingly inauthentic at his very origin and entirely aware of how Dylan has created himself, and dealt with his own problem of authenticity. It would be another five years until the Bowie’s journey of the created prophet would reach it’s origin with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars.

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“Bowie created a prophet, and created for him a prophecy he knew would come true. While Dylan ensured that his work could not be falsifiable, Bowie ensured that his was able to be proven true.”

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Fans waiting outside the concert in D.A. Pennebacker’s ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’, 1979.

In the D.A. Pennebacker, who had made the Bob Dylan film ‘Dont Look Back’ some 6 years earlier, concert film of Ziggy’s last performance we open with glimpses of a crowd waiting outside. One by one, boys and girls alike, are seen in makeup, in crimson hair, dressed as mime artists, as aliens, as the lost population of Ziggy’s world. These are not just fans, they are inhabitants, they are part of the performance, they are the disciples of Ziggy who have followed him from outer space to earth to revel in his glory, in his sex, in his pure rock’n’roll. This is the genius of Ziggy and the genius of Bowie; it is in this that he is able to become entirely authentic through playing a created character. Bowie does not have to comment on or confront whether he is authentic because through creating the character of Ziggy Stardust, he has created a theater. His understanding of mime and comedia dell’arte, studied in the interim years between his first album and this, he was able to create a world through himself alone. The reduction of comedia dell’arte into purest forms of emotion to convey character allowed him to forget about the particulars. It is why Ziggy Stardust doesn’t tell a cohesive story and still creates a world. It is a masterpiece of maximalist reductionism. Bowie did not create a glass onion, he created an alien, and presented him openly for the world to see. He created a singular narrative, rejecting the need for a continuous one. Though his albums before all built up to this, they have no relation to it. David Bowie needs to be authentic, needs to create a glass onion, but Ziggy Stardust has no such requirements. Watching the opening minutes of the concert film, with a gaggle of kids dressed up as freaks, it is clear that this is true. The audience believes in the world, and they believe in Ziggy, so they become part of the world. They no longer question whether he is being authentic, because they have authentically inhabited the same created world as him. It is easier to create worlds than to change them.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars ends as promised, with a fall. ‘Ziggy Stardust’ offers the most cohesive chronicling of the events of the album so far, and, sung from the perspective of one of the spiders, it describes his death, ‘Like a leper messiah / When the kids had killed the man / I had to break up the band’. It offers a parable of fame and success, the overcoming of an ego that leads to destruction. Yet, it is not the last song on the album. Instead, it precedes ‘Suffragette City’ and the album finishes with ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’. The live show too, while it differed in track listing from the album, always finished with this track. In Pennebackers documentary of this final performance, at the end of the show, stripped of costumes, wearing just a sheer black top, Bowie delivers a speech before he begins, announcing the end of Ziggy Stardust that this is to be ‘the last show we’ll ever do’. He turns, as the opening piano chords begin and circles the stage, stopping in the middle to sing, delicately, ‘Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth’. The song matches the tone of the opener, ‘Five Years’, both feeling more like ‘avante-garde show song than straight rock songs’, biographer David Buckley suggests. The repeated refrain of the song, sung with unbridled passion and emotion by Bowie at the final show, ‘You’re not alone’ feels like a message to his fans, written in the knowledge he would kill Ziggy. Bowie created Ziggy with the intention of him to die, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ is the final prophecy, fulfilled 18 months after it’s release. It is this track that is perhaps the ultimate stroke of genius in creating Ziggy. Bowie created a prophet, and created for him a prophecy he knew would come true. While Dylan ensured that his work could not be falsifiable, Bowie ensured that his was able to be proven true.

Ziggy Stardust had truth embedded in him at the moment of his creation, to be ultimately revealed at the moment of his death. Bowie knew too, that in order for Ziggy to be authentic he had to die. Not just in the grand tradition of dead rock stars but more potently in the tradition of theater, where no piece of art can last forever, and they are imbued with truth because of it. Bowie employed mime in every aspect of Ziggy’s creation, and it is because of this that he was able to create authenticity. He undermined himself, acknowledged that he could never be authentic and so instead created someone who was. ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ speaks as directly about Bowie as it does to Ziggy. Bowie had to commit suicide of the self, suicide of his rock n roll dreams in order to create Ziggy and reach authenticity and communicate truth. It would not be the first time such a suicide was performed. ‘You’re not alone’ is as much words of comfort for the freaks in Ziggy’s world as it is to Bowie himself, his repeatedly fracturing personalities ensuring that it would be nearly a decade before he performed as himself, alone. Bowie confronted authenticity as directly as The Monkees did, but where Head was a critique of their own inauthenticity, Ziggy Stardust was a celebration of it. Embedded within Ziggy is knowledge that Bowie had in his first record, we are never ourselves, never for ourselves and we are all the more powerful because of it.

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Ana Roberts is a writer, musician, and cultural critic.

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Avis Akvāsas Ka (Artefact VI)

WUNDERKAMMER

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Artefact No: 6 
Description: Schleicher’s Fable  
Location: Origins within Pontic-Caspian Steppe  
Age: 5th and 4th Millenia BC.

Ben Timberlake October 24, 2024

The above artifact never existed. It is a fable written in 1868 by Augustus Schleicher, composed in Proto-Indo-European (PIE), a long dead language that was reconstructed from the multitude of languages descended from it, spoken in a broad arc from modern English in the west to ancient Tocharian in the Tarim Basin in China. PIE is believed to have been first  spoken between the 5th and 4th millennia BC.  

Another term for a descendant language is a ‘daughter language’ because she is a child of  the mother tongue. For example: English is a daughter language of Old English, which is a daughter language of Proto-Germanic, which is a daughter language of Proto-Indo European (PIE). German and Yiddish are our cousins by way of Old High German, also a  daughter of Proto-Germanic. Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Romanian are all  daughter languages of Proto-Italic, who’s mother language is Proto-Indo-European. Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, and a host of other Eastern languages can all be traced back to Proto-Indo-European, too. Our linguistic family tree is surprisingly large, some branches are healthy, others have withered but at the trunk we find, again and again, PIE.  

PIE was reconstructed using the comparative method: linguists studied existing languages  for familial traits. Our most fundamental words—those concerning family, body parts, numbers, and animals—show the strongest connections across daughter languages. Once linguists identified enough examples across languages, they could reconstruct the original  PIE word, marking it with an asterisk. 

Take the word ‘daughter’ in English. This is daúhtar in Gothic, θugátēr in Ancient Greek, dúhitṛ in Sanskrit, dugәdar in Iranian, dŭšter in Slavic, dukter in Baltic, duxtir in Celtic, dustr in Armenian, ckācar in Tocharian, and datro in a form of Hittite. This renders daughter as *dʰugh₂tḗr in PIE. 

Here are two more: Horse is Eoh in Old English, aíƕa in Gothic, Equus in Latin, áśva in Sanskrit, ech in one of the Celtic languages, ēš in Armenian. This renders *éḱwos in PIE, (although earlier scholars spelled it *akvās).  

And sheep or ewe in English is awistr in Gothic, ovis in Latin, avi in Sanskrit, ovèn in one of the Slavic languages, ōi in Celtic, and eye in Tocharian. Which gives us *h₂ówis in PIE  (although earlier scholars spelled it *Avis). 

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“The study of protolanguages parallels fundamental physics research—both reveal hidden  connections that deepen our understanding of the world.”

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I mention the spelling of earlier scholars to get us back to Schleicher, and his fable, which is titled Avis akvāsas ka, or The Sheep and the Horses. Here it is in English:  

The Sheep and the Horses 

A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load,  and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man  driving horses."  

The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the  wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool."  

Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain. 

Pantographia: A Specimen Book of All the Alphabets Known on Earth (1799), Edward Fry.

The study of PIE has attracted remarkable scholars, rivaling nuclear physics and  astrophysics in intellectual rigor. These men and women often mastered numerous  languages and conducted research in remote locations across the globe. 

As early as the 16th century, visitors to India were aware of the similarities between Indo Iranian languages and European ones. In 1653, Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn proposed a proto-language of Scythian as the mother language for Germanic, Italic, Slavic, Baltic,  Celtic and Iranian. In 1767, Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux, a French Jesuit living in India,  wrote a paper proving the similarities between Sanskrit and European languages.  

In 1818, Danish linguist Rasmus Christian Rask showed the links between Old Norse,  Germanic and other Indo-European languages. A few years later Jacob Grimm - one half of  the Brothers Grimm of fairytale fame - laid down Grimm’s law, which brought a rigorous  and widely used methodology to historic linguistic research, layingthe ground for  Schleicher’s great work and his fable. 

Schleicher used the available PIE words that he had reverse-engineered. In those early days there was only a limited vocabulary that he felt confident enough to work with. And yet Schelicher wrought something very layered and profound: he created a nursery rhyme from the cradle of pre-civilisation to teach himself and his colleagues this ancient language. And it contained themes - as many nursery rhymes do - that go back to our earliest days: the beginnings of agriculture, the domestication of horses and sheep - the naming of our world. And yet this simple fable - a prehistoric Baa-Baa Black Sheep - was the linguistic equivalent of Jurassic Park; Schleicher breathed life into this ancient language.   

If we were to trace these diverse and far-flung lineages back to some Oral Eve, we would most likely find her living on the Steppe north of the Black Sea. This is the Kurgan Hypothesis and was formulated by Marija Gimbutas in the 1950s. Gimbutas, a Lithuanian archaeologist, who survived the Nazi occupation of her homeland, was the first scholar to  match PIE theories with archaeological evidence from her excavations into Bronze and Iron Age cultures from across the Steppe. The Kurgan Culture, so named after the  burial mounds that it left, were early domesticators of the horse, and first to use the chariot, spreading their language and ideas with them.  

I saw these Kurgan mounds last year in Ukraine. The battlefields by the Black Sea are in  the deltas of the great rivers and terminally flat. These ancient burial mounds are one of the few pieces of high ground and both sides use them as fighting positions.  

The study of protolanguages parallels fundamental physics research—both reveal hidden  connections that deepen our understanding of the world. PIE studies sometimes feel  otherworldly yet innately familiar, revealing ancient pathways of thought and meaning. 

There are parts of PIE that feel hallucinatory, spiritual and yet innately familiar: linear clusters of nodal points like constellations of forgotten meanings; or ley-lines within the language that suggest a truer course we might take. 

Pantographia: A Specimen Book of All the Alphabets Known on Earth (1799), Edward Fry.

Take the word ‘Day’ which comes from the PIE word *dei ‘to shine, be bright’ and *dyēus  ‘the daylight sky-god’. This PIE term gave Greek the name of Zeus, Latin the word Diem, and Sanskrit word Deva, ‘heavenly, divine, anything of excellence’. So to Carpe Diem is  not merely a matter of seizing the passing moments but of grasping the divine within  them. 

Or take the other PIE word for ‘to shine’ which is *bhā, and also means ‘to speak’. This connection surfaces in Greek "phēmi" (to speak), Latin "fari" (to speak) and "fama" (speaking, reputation), and English "fame." Ancient speakers saw speech as a kind of illumination - words could light up understanding just as fire lit up the darkness. We still preserve this dual meaning when we talk about ideas being "brilliant" or someone giving  an "enlightening" speech. 

Lastly, one that I noticed last week while I was in Brazil: the Portuguese for ‘the way’  “Sentido” shares a cognate with our word ‘sentient’. This ancient connection between movement and perception appears in Latin "sentire" (to feel) and "sequi" (to follow), again in Portuguese as "caminho" (way, path), and English words like "sense," "sentiment," and  "sentient." When the original PIE speakers talked about "finding their way," they were simultaneously describing physical navigation and emotional/intellectual understanding.  A path was both a literal route and a way of feeling through the world. This deep link between movement and consciousness persists today when we speak of "following our feelings" or finding our "life path," echoing an ancient understanding that movement, feeling, and knowing are fundamentally connected. Most days I forget this, but it’s good to be reminded. 

I’m going to leave you with a long list of reworked versions of ‘The Sheep and the Horses’. The Fable has become a palimpsest for PIE scholars down the generations. I don’t pretend to understand the later versions which abound with algebra-like symbols to denote glottal stops and plosives but I do like the idea that this artifact lives on.

HIRT (1939)

Owis ek'wōses-kʷe

Owis, jesmin wᵇlənā ne ēst, dedork'e ek'wons, tom, woghom gʷᵇrum weghontm̥, tom, bhorom megam, tom, gh'ьmonm̥ ōk'u bherontm̥. Owis ek'womos ewьwekʷet: k'ērd aghnutai moi widontei gh'ᵇmonm̥ ek’wons ag'ontm̥. Ek'wōses ewᵇwekʷont: kl'udhi, owei!, k'ērd aghnutai widontmos: gh'ᵇmo, potis, wᵇlənām owjôm kʷr̥neuti sebhoi ghʷermom westrom; owimos-kʷe wᵇlənā ne esti. Tod k'ek'ruwos owis ag'rom ebhuget.

LEHMANN AND ZGUSTA (1979)

Owis eḱwōskʷe

Gʷərēi owis, kʷesjo wl̥hnā ne ēst, ek̂wōns espek̂et, oinom ghe gʷr̥um woĝhom weĝhontm̥, oinomkʷe meǵam bhorom, oinomkʷe ĝhm̥enm̥ ōk̂u bherontm̥.Owis nu ek̂wobh(y)os (ek̂womos) ewewkʷet: "k̂ēr aghnutoi moi ek̂wōns aĝontm̥ nerm̥ widn̥tei".Eḱwōs tu ewewkʷont: "k̂ludhi, owei, k̂ēr ghe aghnutoi n̥smei widn̥tbh(y)os (widn̥tmos): nēr, potis, owiōm r̥ wl̥hnām sebhi gʷhermom westrom kʷrn̥euti. Neǵhi owiōm wl̥hnā esti".Tod k̂ek̂luwōs owis aĝrom ebhuget.

DANKA (1986)

Owis ek'woi kʷe

Owis, jesmin wl̥nā ne ēst, dedork'e ek'wons woghom gʷr̥um weghontn̥s - bhorom meg'əm, monum ōk'u bherontn̥s. Owis ek'wobhos eweukʷet: K'erd aghnutai moi widn̥tei g'hm̥onm̥ ek'wons ag'ontm̥. Ek'woi eweukʷont: K'ludhi, owi, k'erd aghnutai dedr̥k'usbhos: monus potis wl̥nām owiōm temneti: sebhei ghʷermom westrom - owibhos kʷe wl̥nā ne esti. Tod k'ek'luwōs owis ag'rom ebhuget.

ADAMS (1997)

H₂óu̯is h₁ék̂u̯ōs-kʷe

Gʷr̥hₓḗi h₂óu̯is, kʷési̯o u̯lh₂néh₄ ne (h₁é) est, h₁ék̂u̯ons spék̂et, h₁oinom ghe gʷr̥hₓúm u̯óĝhom u̯éĝhontm̥ h₁oinom-kʷe méĝhₐm bhórom, h₁oinom-kʷe ĝhménm̥ hₓṓk̂u bhérontm̥. h₂óu̯is tu h₁ek̂u̯oibh(i̯)os u̯eukʷét: 'k̂ḗr hₐeghnutór moi h₁ék̂u̯ons hₐéĝontm̥ hₐnérm̥ u̯idn̥téi. h₁ék̂u̯ōs tu u̯eukʷónt: 'k̂ludhí, h₂óu̯ei, k̂ḗr ghe hₐeghnutór n̥sméi u̯idn̥tbh(i̯)ós. hₐnḗr, pótis, h₂éu̯i̯om r̥ u̯l̥h₂néhₐm sebhi kʷr̥néuti nu gʷhérmom u̯éstrom néĝhi h₂éu̯i̯om u̯l̥h₂néhₐ h₁ésti.' Tód k̂ek̂luu̯ṓs h₂óu̯is hₐéĝrom bhugét.

LÜHR (2008)

h₂ówis h₁ék’wōskʷe

h₂ówis, (H)jésmin h₂wlh₂néh₂ ne éh₁est, dedork'e (h₁)ék'wons, tóm, wóg'ʰom gʷérh₂um wég'ʰontm, tóm, bʰórom még'oh₂m, tóm, dʰg'ʰémonm h₂oHk'ú bʰérontm. h₂ówis (h₁)ék'wobʰos ewewkʷe(t): k'ḗrd h₂gʰnutoj moj widntéj dʰg'ʰmónm (h₁)ék'wons h₂ég'ontm. (h₁)ék'wōs ewewkʷ: k'ludʰí, h₂ówi! k'ḗrd h₂gʰnutoj widntbʰós: dʰg'ʰémō(n), pótis, h₂wlnéh₂m h₂ówjom kʷnewti sébʰoj gʷʰérmom wéstrom; h₂éwibʰoskʷe h₂wlh₂néh₂ né h₁esti. Tód k'ek'luwṓs h₂ówis h₂ég'rom ebʰuge(t).

VOYLES AND BARRACK (2009)

Owis eḱwōs kʷe

Owis, jāi wl̥nā ne eest, dedorḱe eḱwons, tom woǵʰom gʷr̥um weǵʰontm̥, tom bʰorom meǵm̥, tom ǵʰm̥onm̥ ōku bʰerontm̥. Owis eḱwobʰjos eweket: "Ḱerd angʰetai moi widontei ǵʰm̥onm̥ eḱwons aǵontm̥". Eḱwos wewekur: "Ḱludʰe, owei! Ḱerd angʰetai widontbʰjos: ǵʰm̥on, potis, wl̥nam owijōm kʷr̥neti soi gʷʰermom westrom; owibʰjos kʷe wl̥nā ne esti". Tod ḱeḱlōts owis aǵrom ebʰuget.

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Ben Timberlake is an archaeologist who works in Iraq and Syria. His writing has appeared in Esquire, the Financial Times and the Economist. He is the author of 'High Risk: A True Story of the SAS, Drugs and other Bad Behaviour'.

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Trance (1938)

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Aleister Crowley, October 22nd, 2024

Living in London and surviving largely off donations from Jack Parson’s branch of the esoteric order O.T.O, Aleister Crowley wrote ‘Little Essays Towards Truth’. The founder of contemporary occultism and a controversial figure in his day whose influence and infamy has only grown since his death 9 years after the publication of this essay, ‘Little Essays’ is a pocket companion and far daintier and simpler than some of his significant tomes. It takes 16 subjects and Crowley explores each of them through historical, personal and occultist interpretations, expounding his ideas of Thelema and using a framework of Qaballah. It was the twilight of his life, and his cultural powers were waning, but this collection remains a revelatory, insightful and essential contribution to occultist literature.

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The word Trance implies a passing beyond: scil., the conditions which oppress. The whole and sole object of all true Magical and Mystical training is to become free from every kind of limitation. Thus, body and mind, in the widest sense, and the obstacles in the Path of the Wise: the paradox, tragic enough as it seems, is that they are also the means of progress. How to get rid of them, to pass beyond or to transcend them, is the problem, and this is as strictly practical and scientific as that of eliminating impurities from a gas, or of adroitly using mechanical laws. Here is the inevitable logical flaw in the sorites of the Adept, that he is bound by the very principles which it is his object to overcome: and on him who seeks to discard them arbitrarily they haste to take a terrible revenge!

It is in practice, not in theory, that this difficulty suddenly disappears. For when we take rational steps to suspect the operation of the rational mind, the inhibition does not result in chaos, but in the apprehension of the Universe by means of a faculty to which the laws of the Reason do not apply; and when, returning to the normal state, we seek to analyse our experience, we find that the description abounds in rational absurdities.

The Oracle at Delphi, John Collier, 1891.

On further consideration, however, it becomes gradually clear—gradually, because the habit of Trance must be firmly fixed before its fulminating impressions are truly intelligible—that there are not two kinds of Thought, or of Nature, but one only. The Law of the Mind is the sole substance of the Universe, as well as the sole means by which we apprehend it. There is thus no true antithesis between the conditions of Trance and those of ratiocination and perception; the fact that Trance is not amenable to the rules of argument is impertinent. We say that in Chess a Knight traverses the diagonal of a rectangle measuring three squares by two, neglecting its motion as a material object in space. We have described a definite limited relation in terms of a special sense which works by an arbitrary symbolism: when we analyse any example of our ordinary mental processes, we find the case entirely similar. For what we "see," "hear," etc., depends upon our idiosyncrasies, for one thing, and upon conventional interpretation for another. Thus we agree to call grass green, and to avoid walking over the edge of precipices, without any attempt to make sure that any two minds have exactly identical conceptions of what these things may mean; and just so we agree upon the moves in Chess. By the rules of the game, then, we must think and act, or we risk every kind of error; but we may be perfectly well aware that the rules are arbitrary, and that it is after all only a game. The constant folly of the traditional mystic has been to be so proud of himself for discovering the great secret that the Universe is no more than a toy invented by himself for his amusement that he hastens to display his powers by deliberately misunderstanding and misusing the toy. He has not grasped the fact that just because it is no more than a projection of his own point-of-view, it is integrally Himself that he offends!

Here lies the error of such Pantheism as that of Mansur el-Hallaj, whom Sir Richard Burton so delightfully twits (in the Kasidah) with his impotence—

Mansur was wise, but wiser they who
smote him with the hurled stones;
And though his blood a witness bore, no
Wisdom-Might could mend his bones

God was in the stones no less than within his tarband-wrapping; and when the twain crashed together, one point of perception of the fact was obscured—which was in no wise his design!

To us, however, this matter is not one for regret; it is (like every phenomenon) an Act of Love. And the very definition of such Act is the Passing Beyond of two Events into a Third, and their withdrawal into a Silence or Nothingness by simultaneous reaction. In this sense it may be said that the Universe is a constant issue into Trance; and in fact the proper understanding of any Event by means of the suitable Contemplation should produce the type of Trance appropriate to the complex Event-Individual in the case.

Now all Magick is useful to produce Trance; for (α) it trains the mind in the discipline necessary to Yoga; (β) it exalts the spirit to the impersonal and divine sublimity which is the first condition of success; (γ) it enlarges the scope of the mind, assuring it full mastery of every subtler plane of Nature, thus affording it adequate material for ecstatic consummation of the Eucharist of Existence.  

The essence of the idea of Trance is indeed contained in that of Magick, which is pre-eminently the transcendental Science and Art. Its method is, in one chief sense, Love, the very key of Trance; and in another, the passing beyond normal conditions. The verbs to transcend, to transmit, to transcribe, and their like, are all of cardinal virtue in Magick. Hence "Love is the law, love under will" is the supreme epitome of Magical doctrine, and its universal Formula. For need any man fear to state boldly that every Magical Operation soever is only complete when it is characterised (in one sense or another) by the occurrence of Trance. It was ill done to restrict the use of the word to the supersession of dualistic human consciousness by the impersonal and monistic state of Samadhi. Fast bubbles the fountain of Error when distinction is forcibly drawn "between any one thing and any other thing." Yea, verily and Amen! it is the first necessity as it is the last attainment of Trance to abolish every form and every order of dividuality so fast as it presents itself. By this ray may ye read in the Book of your own Magical Record the authentic stigma of your own success.

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Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) was an American artist and art theorist who was a founding figrue in the ‘Conceptual Art’ and ‘Minimalist’ movements.

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‘Dont Look Back’ and Self Made Myth

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Ana Roberts, October 16th, 2024

In 1967, Bob Dylan was a prophet speaking truth to power with his guitar and voice, and informing the minds of a million young people searching for direction. He was settled in this role and comfortable enough to experiment within it. Yet just 2 years earlier, the foundations of this persona were a little less steady. On the road to immortality, Dylan was learning from his mistakes and shaping the mythology of himself. One of those mistakes, it seemed, was inviting a young documentary filmmaker on tour with him. ‘Don’t Look Back’ captures Dylan in a way he never would be captured again, and for a good reason.

D.A. Pennebaker followed Dylan in 1965, touring England, at the very start of his electric revolution, still playing live shows with his acoustic and harmonica. He is seen hanging with Joan Baez, Donovan, and a group of managers, journalists, and fans, with Allen Ginsberg appearing in the background of the now iconic opening sequence set to “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a proto-music video before the term existed. It is a remarkably candid film and stands as a pinnacle of 1960s-era cinéma vérité. Pennebaker does not interact with him; he serves as a fly on the wall and tries to, through the powers of sheer observation, understand the truth of his subject. The Dylan that the public sees in this film largely aligns with his established persona—a mercurial, elusive genius—yet the consistency of this behavior reveals a soft inauthenticity. The more we watch him interact with journalists and play the role of the aloof prophet, the more his predictability begins to erode the myth. Instead of reinforcing his mystique, it undermines it. We see not a spontaneous artist but an actor fully conscious of his role. At once relentlessly confrontational and perpetually elusive, his time on tour is punctuated by petulant encounters with journalists, lazy days, and frustrated evenings spent in hotel rooms, trading songs with Baez while he sits at his typewriter, and the occasional flash of anger. Where the consistency of Dylan begins to undermine his façade, it is the latter of these, the moments of anger, which one can guess are to blame for Dylan’s refusal to ever be filmed by him. Even in these moments, as he tries to recover from the broken façade he inadvertently revealed, we can see shivers of regret in the young Dylan’s eyes—fear that his image of a “cool cat,” unfazed by the world around him, has slipped in front of an audience and, worse, a camera.

There is a single scene that stands out, and one that resides most strongly in the public consciousness of the film, where Dylan, while his hotel room is filled with various figures from the contemporary British music scene, including Donovan and Alan Price, having recently left the Animals, tries to get to the bottom of who threw a glass out the window. It is the antithesis of the Dylan he presents: he is not the elusive figure, the freewheelin’ Dylan, the mocking Dylan. Instead, he is a petty, angry figure concerned about his own perception. He tells a drunken Englishman who he suspects threw the glass that “I ain’t taking no fucking responsibility for cats I don’t know, man… I know a thousand cats that look just like you.” Later, when the dust has settled, Donovan plays a song and Dylan, immediately after, plays “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” a pointed upstaging of the younger artist, clearly in the presence of his hero. These ten minutes of footage stand alone in Dylan’s career—a glimpse behind the glass onion. It is in these moments that we see such concern about the way he is presented, agonizingly self-aware and furious at the possibility that he might not be in full control of his image. Yet this does not weaken Dylan’s genius; it amplifies it. It is the reason for his success. He is a master at building the mythology around him, knowing, like Freud, that if he gives too much of himself, too inconsistent a version of himself, it won’t be a strong bedrock on which the fans can create the myths. ‘Don’t Look Back’ stands alone in documentaries because it pays attention to the man behind the curtain, and Dylan’s work remains more powerful when the curtain is not pulled back. 

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“‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’ is the Temptation of Christ, the 40 days and nights in the desert—it is the prophet going alone, leaving those who believe they need him, only to force them to dig deeper into his message.”

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Bob Dylan in the hotel room in ‘Dont Look Back’. (1967).

It is not this film alone that reveals the personal construction of Dylan, though it gives a wondrous insight into it. Between 1963 and 1965, Dylan put out five albums, and to listen to each is to hear in stark detail the active construction of an icon. He refines his ability with each album, taking the elements that most readily captured his listeners and expanding them constantly, while refusing to be pigeonholed in style or content. We can see this perhaps most clearly in the three-album run of ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’, ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’, and ‘Bringing It All Back Home’. ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’, his third record and the first to contain all original songs, builds off the previous album, leaning into revolutionary-minded, political anthems and civil-rights era ideas, blended with majesty into his brand of beat-inspired folk music. It is a logical continuation to ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’, cementing his reputation as the voice of his generation, reporting on the issues in ways only the kids understand. Yet ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’, released some eight months later, entirely rejects this image. The name itself is a refusal to be defined as anything, a rejection of the label of prophet, which only makes the role more powerful as listeners try to rectify the two. “My Back Pages” confronts any attempts to pinpoint political views: “Equality, I spoke the word / As if a wedding vow / Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now,” a cry that he is changing, an offer to attempt an understanding of what he believes. ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’ is the Temptation of Christ, the 40 days and nights in the desert—it is the prophet going alone, leaving those who believe they need him, only to force them to dig deeper into his message.

‘Bringing It All Back Home’ is the completion of this journey—it is when Dylan knew he had found greatness. He blends folk with rock music deftly, never allowing any song to fall simply into either category. Gone are the directly political songs; rather, he is able to embed the possibility of revolution into every line, turning songs of the personal into rambling prophecies of the last days of earth, as with “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Each line can be taken as its own maxim, its own prophecy, and Dylan throughout this album confirms his role as the oracle. “He not busy being born / Is busy dying / Temptation’s page flies out the door / You follow, find yourself at war” captures this ability to at once capture specificity and remain entirely open to interpretation. *Bringing It All Back Home* is the realization that the prophet is most powerful when they can never be understood. Each song makes you confident you are in the presence of, and listening to, something important, and if you don’t understand it in time you will—the prophecy will reveal itself. It is in these three albums we see Dylan embrace the inauthentic and use it to further his message; it is here we see him realize that authenticity leads to understanding, and when you are understood your message ends. Dylan embraces the inauthentic, and it lets him live forever.

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Ana Roberts is a writer, musician, and cultural critic.

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Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969)

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Sol LeWitt, 123/Six Three-Part Variations Using Each Kind of Cube Once, 1968-1969.

Sol LeWitt, October 15th, 2024

Two years before this text was written, Sol LeWitt published ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ which can rightly be seen as the first public recognition of a new art form that was sweeping the avant-garde. LeWitt was a pioneering artist in this field, and as he proved in that writing, it’s greatest practicing theorist. This text is a follow up to that work, written when ‘Conceptual Art’ as a genre is widely accepted and recognised. His goal, then, was not to explain but to illuminate, and provide a set of maxims that artists can follow to create art that transcends the boundaries of what was seen as possible. It was first published in 1969 in issue 1 of "‘Art-Language’.

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1. Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

2. Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.

3. Illogical judgements lead to new experience.

4. Formal Art is essentially rational.

5. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.

6. If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.

7. The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His wilfulness may only be ego.

8. When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.

9. The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter are the components. Ideas implement the concept.

10. Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.

11. Ideas do not necessarily proceed in logical order. They may set one off in unexpected directions but an idea must necessarily be completed in the mind before the next one is formed.

12. For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not.

13. A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.

14. The words of one artist to another may induce an ideas chain, if they share the same concept.

15. Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, the artist may use any form, from an expression of words, (written or spoken) to physical reality, equally.

16. If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature, numbers are not mathematics.

17. All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art.

18. One usually understands the art of the past by applying the conventions of the present thus misunderstanding the art of the past.

19. The conventions of art are altered by works of art.

20. Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions.

21. Perception of ideas leads to new ideas.

22. The artist cannot imagine his art, and cannot perceive it until it is complete.

23. One artist may mis-perceive (understand it differently than the artist) a work of art but still be set off in his own chain of thought by that misconstrual.

24. Perception is subjective.

25. The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others.

26. An artist may perceive the art of others better than his own.

27. The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made.

28. Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist's mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side-effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.

29. The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.

30. There are many elements involved in a work of art. The most important are the most obvious.

31. If an. artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist's concept involved the material.

32. Banal ideas cannot be rescued bv beautiful execution

33. It is difficult to bungle a good idea.

34. When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art.

35. These sentences comment on art, but are not art.

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Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) was an American artist and art theorist who was a founding figrue in the ‘Conceptual Art’ and ‘Minimalist’ movements.

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Life Is Right (1904)

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Rainer Maria Rilke, October 3rd, 2024

In 1902, while attending military college an hour outside of Vienna, Austria, the 19 year old Xavier Kappus began a correspondence with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a respected and established writer who had, many years earlier, been tutored by the very same school master as Kappus himself. Seeking advice and criticism on his poetry, over 6 years and 10 letters, Rilke taught him something altogether more important - a way to understand the world and navigate the difficulties of life with wonder, love, creativity, and hopefulness. The letters were collected into a book published as ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, which remains one of the most seminal and essential works of the 20th Century. The letter reproduced here was written in November of 1904, while Rilke was in Sweden.

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My Dear Mr. Kappus,

In this time that has gone by without a letter I have been partly traveling, partly so busy that I could not write. And even today writing comes hard to me because I have already had to write a lot of letters so that my hand is tired. If I could dictate, I would say a great deal to you, but as it is, take only a few words for your long letter.

I think of you, dear Mr. Kappus, often and with such concentrated wishes that that really ought to help you somehow. Whether my letters can really be a help, I often doubt. Do not say: yes, they are. Just accept them and without much thanks, and let us await what comes.

There is perhaps no use my going into your particular points now; for what I could say about your tendency to doubt or about your inability to bring outer and inner life into unison, or about all the other things that worry you—: it is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.

And about emotions: all emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you. Everything that you can think in the face of your childhood, is right. Everything that makes more of you than you have heretofore been in your best hours, is right. Every heightening is good if it is in your whole blood, if it is not intoxication, not turbidity, but joy which one can see clear to the bottom. Do you understand what I mean?

And your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you vail find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers— perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life.

That is all, dear Mr. Kappus, that I am able to tell you today. But I am sending you at the same time the reprint of a little poetical work * that has now appeared in the Prague periodical Deutsche Arbeit. There I speak to you further of life and of death and of how both are great and splendid.

Yours:
Rainer Maria Rilke

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Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was an Austrian poet and novelist whose lyricism and literary intensity expanded the possibilities of the German language.

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Head, The Monkees and the Search of Authenticity

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Micky Dolenz falls from the Gerald Desmond Bridge, Head (1968).

Ana Roberts, September 24th, 2024

In 1968, Micky Dolenz jumped off the Gerald Desmond Bridge. Some eighty minutes later, he did it again, this time joined by the rest of The Monkees—Peter Tork, Davy Jones, and Michael Nesmith. Head, the 1968 film penned by Jack Nicholson and starring The Monkees, was the vehicle for this bridge jump—a filmic suicide that served equally as a career one. Not that there was much life left in The Monkees by 1968; the final episode of their show had aired in March, and their latest album, The Birds, the Bees & the Monkees, had failed to top the charts in America and didn’t even break the top ten in the UK—their first to miss both marks.

The Vietnam War, the assassinations of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, riots in Chicago, and Soviet pressures across Eastern Europe all contributed to a waning optimism, within which there was hardly a place for the naïve antics of the Prefab Four. Yet Head is far from naïve. It is a psychedelic experiment—intentionally mind-numbing and academically stimulating—serving as a fourth-wall-breaking political critique of everything from the American collegiate sports system to dandruff commercials, with war, media, and reality thrown in for good measure. The film flopped spectacularly. It made just $16,000 from its $750,000 budget and was derided by Monkees fans, hippies, academics, and critics alike. It was too conceptual for the core fan base, mostly teen girls, and too Monkees for anyone else the film was aiming for.

Yet Head has prevailed. In the years following its release, it built a cult following and achieved a niche but significant level of critical success, regarded as a cornerstone object of the era that encompasses the themes, politics, and feelings of the late '60s. It was entered into the Criterion Collection in 2010 and hailed by Criterion critic Chuck Stephens as “arguably the most authentically psychedelic film made in 1960s Hollywood.” Stephens is right—Head is a staggeringly authentic film in so many ways. Much of the joy of watching it lies in seeing The Monkees, unable to play anything but their teeny-bopper TV show selves, juxtaposed with legitimate, psychedelic social criticism. It is within this brilliant contradiction that the question arises: How did the era’s least authentic band create its most authentic film? And why was it so readily rejected and ignored as a false work, with no authentic merits, by the contemporary counterculture—among whom authenticity was a primary obsession?

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“They were inside the wrong thing and outside the right one. This strange combination, teamed with the genuine rebelliousness and otherness of Jack Nicholson, uniquely positioned them to make the most astute criticism of their time.”

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There are simple answers to these questions if we want them. Nesmith’s affinity for Nicholson and the hippie scene, paired with a studio believing that combining a cultural zeitgeist with a teen phenomenon would be financially viable, accounts for the creation of the film. Sgt. Pepper’s had been released to critical and commercial success the year before, proving that boy bands could be both psychedelic and successful. This explains much of the film’s genesis. As for the rejection of Head by the counterculture, it feels wholly logical—the only quality the counterculture valued more than authenticity was “cool,” and The Monkees, for all their possible genius, were achingly uncool. Yet these answers do not hit at the crux of the issue: that of authenticity.

Authenticity was not a problem solely for The Monkees; it was a primary concern for almost every post-war artist who tried to shape a public image that wasn’t always in line with their true selves. Regardless of where they started, most were to some extent manufactured by a team around them. The Monkees are discussed in terms of authenticity not because they were the first or only inauthentic band of the era—arguably, they were neither—but because they were among the rare few who acknowledged their own inauthenticity. Later, with Head, they acknowledged their own attempt toward authenticity.

Frank Zappa and Davy Jones in Head (1968).

At its heart, Head is a film about freedom, and the failed attempt to achieve it in a world that wants not just The Monkees, but all public figures, to be a shiny, televised version of themselves, sanitized even in their rebellion. After the opening suicide, each of the four band members kisses the same groupie and is told that they are indistinguishable from one another. They race through various genres and films, moving in unrelated vignettes as if they were aliens dropped randomly across a film studio lot. They fight in the trenches of war, ride horseback across the great American West, and solve a murder mystery in ominous, decadent housing. In each scenario, they try to prove that they are four real, individual people in a real band that makes real music that real people listen to. Yet, at every turn, they find that this pursuit is meaningless—everything they are doing is sanctioned, fated, directed, and written by the producers of the film they are trying to escape. They break the fourth wall repeatedly, intentionally flubbing lines, acknowledging actors, and referencing the flimsy walls of the set they are on—only to find that this, too, is in the script that Jack Nicholson, appearing as himself and playing his actual role as producer, wrote for them. From start to finish, it is a wild ride—a kind of Ouroboros that eats itself in its meta-reflective analysis. It digs through philosophical ideas again and again, only to find that it has dug so deep it returns on the other side, no closer to the surface than when it began—with a synthetic boy band playing their hits to an audience who don’t truly know them, and would rather keep it that way.

The film was released at the tail end of the capital-S "Sixties," before the killing at the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont turned the whole decade into a bad trip. Despite the turmoil in the world, there was still a tie-dyed, tune-in, drop-out, mind-expanding, world-changing hopefulness that believed art, youth, truth, and rebellion could really change the world. The Monkees, for most of their career, had been a distillation of this attitude—neatly packaged by executives to be sold for syndication on TV channels across the world and played relentlessly on every wavelength. They were able to operate as both insiders and outsiders, feeling less shame about their participation in the system that everyone else was pretending not to be part of. They were inside the wrong thing and outside the right one. This strange combination, teamed with the genuine rebelliousness and otherness of Jack Nicholson, uniquely positioned them to make the most astute criticism of their time. That this critique is seen to come from the most unlikely place is, perhaps, incorrect—they were the only ones who could do it so explicitly.

Head is bombastic and exaggerated, but it cuts through to something that everyone else was too scared to be honest about. The Beatles danced around the ideas on Glass Onion, Dylan nodded to them with Ballad of a Thin Man, and even Elvis, in his countless motion pictures, tried to comment on them. But all cared too much about their artistry to acknowledge that they were participating in a system they claimed to be outside of. It took The Monkees, the least cool of all, to truly speak truth to power, and they paid the price for it. In the closing minutes of the film, as the final Monkee falls to his watery death, the director wheels their soaked bodies away in a large aquarium, the band struggling as they awake, and stores it neatly on a studio lot—to be used again whenever deemed fit.

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Ana Roberts is a writer, musician and culture critic.

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The Postmodern Condition

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Roy Litchenstein, Sunrise. 1963.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, September 19th, 2024

Commissioned by the government of Quebec, Lyotard undertook a philosophical study on the affects of modern life and capitalist culture on the metaphysical health of the world. He finds an inivetability to a lack of consensus and sees differences and conflict as inherent in the modern world, yet he remains positive that postmodernism retains the modernists ideals of maintaining the hope for a new kind of social existence.

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Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It then produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, a discourse called philosophy. I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. For example, the rule of consensus between the sender and addressee of a statement with truth-value is deemed acceptable if it is cast in terms of a possible unanimity between rational minds: this is the Enlightenment narrative, in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political end - universal peace. As can be seen from this example, if a metanarrative implying a philosophy of history is used to legitimate knowledge, questions are raised concerning the validity of the institutions governing the social bond: these must be legitimated as well. Thus justice is consigned to the grand narrative in the same way as truth.

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements - narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable.

Thus the society of the future falls less within the province of a Newtonian anthropology (such as stucturalism or systems theory) than a pragmatics of language particles. There are many different language games - a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions in patches - local determinism.

The decision makers, however, attempt to manage these clouds of sociality according to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their elements are commensurable and that the whole is determinable. They allocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters of social justice and of scientific truth alike, the legitimation of that power is based on its optimizing the system's performance - efficiency. The application of this criterion to all of our games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear.  

The logic of maximum performance is no doubt inconsistent in many ways, particularly with respect to contradiction in the socio-economic field: it demands both less work (to lower production costs) and more (to lessen the social burden of the idle population). But our incredulity is now such that we no longer expect salvation to rise from these inconsistencies, as Marx did.

Still, the postmodern condition is as much a stranger to disenchantment as it is to the blind positivity of delegitimation. Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside? The operativity criterion is technological; it has no relevance for judging what is true or just. Is legitimacy to be found in consensus obtained through discussion, as Jurgen Habermas thinks? Such consensus does violence to the heterogeneity of language games. And invention is always born of dissension. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert's homology, but the inventor's paralogy.  

Here is the question: is a legitimation of the social bond, a just society, feasible in terms of a paradox analogous to that of scientific activity? What would such a paradox be?

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Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924 –1998) was a philosopher, sociologists and literary theorist.

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The New Painting

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Jost Amman, Wenzel Jamnitzer. 16th Century.

Guillaume Apollinaire, September 17th, 2024

Guillaume Apollinaire was a poet, playwright, novelist, and art critic who inspired and was admired by the Cubists and Surrealists, movements that he himself coined the terms for. Here, he writes in strong defence of Cubism against the public disdain, and shows how despite the modernity of their style, they are applying ancient laws and ideas that grounds them in tradition. He draws a comparison between Euclidian Geometry and Cubism first in a series of lectures in 1911 and then put them into words here, in 1912.

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The new painters have been sharply criticized for their preoccupation with geometry. And yet, geometric figures are the essence of draftsmanship. Geometry, the science that deals with space, its measurement and relationships, has always been the most basic rule of painting.

Until now, the three dimensions of Euclidean geometry sufficed to still the anxiety provoked in the souls of great artists by a sense of the infinite – anxiety that cannot be called scientific, since art and science are two separate domains.

The new painters do not intend to become geometricians, any more than their predecessors did. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of writing. Now today's scientists have gone beyond the three dimensions of Euclidean geometry. Painters have, therefore, very naturally been led to a preoccupation with those new dimensions of space that are collectively designated, in the language of modern studios, by the term fourth dimension.

Without entering into mathematical explanations pertaining to another field, and confining myself to plastic representation as I see it, I would say that in the plastic arts the fourth dimension is generated by the three known dimensions: it represents the immensity of space eternalized in all directions at a given moment. It is space itself, or the dimension of infinity; it is what gives objects plasticity. It gives them their just proportion in a given work, where as in Greek art, for example, a kind of mechanical rhythm is constantly destroying proportion.

Greek art had a purely human conception of beauty. It took man as the measure of perfection. The art of the new painters takes the infinite universe as its ideal, and it is to the fourth dimension alone that we owe this new measure of perfection that allows the artist to give objects the proportions appropriate to the degree of plasticity he wishes them to attain.

Wishing to attain the proportions of the ideal and not limiting themselves to humanity, the young painters offer us works that are more cerebral than sensual. They are moving further and further away from the old art of optical illusion and literal proportions, in order to express the grandeur of metaphysical forms.

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Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) was a poet, playwright, novelist and art critic.

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Simple Expression of the Complex Thought

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Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis. 1950-51.

Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman September 4th, 2024

In his column in The New York Times, the art critic Edgar Allen Jewell wrote a review of a new show hosted by the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. He expressed his befuddlement at this distinctly modern art, devoid of figuration or tangible form, singling out the work of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. Yet, in an unusual act of humble awareness, he offered up the inches of his column to these same artists if they cared offer a response. It was Barnett Newman, who had shown in the same exhibition but not been spotlighted by Jewell, who Rothko and Gottlieb came to with this offer, and Newman penned the following work that the two others signed their name to in agreement. The following essay served as a sort of defacto manifesto for this new form of American painting they were creating – a neo-expressionist style interested in myths, symbols, and emotions above all else. It first appeared in Jewell’s column in June of 1943.

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To the artist the workings of the critical mind is one of life's mysteries. That is why, we suppose, the artist's complaint that he is misunderstood, especially by the critic, has become a noisy commonplace. It is therefore an event when the worm turns and the critic quietly, yet publicly, confesses his 'befuddlement,' that he is 'nonplused' before our pictures at the federation show. We salute this honest, we might say cordial, reaction toward our 'obscure' paintings, for in other critical quarters we seem to have created a bedlam of hysteria. And we appreciate the gracious opportunity that is being offered us to present our views.

We do not intend to defend our pictures. They make their own defense. We consider them clear statements. Your failure to dismiss or disparage them is prima facie evidence that they carry some communicative power. We refuse to defend them not because we cannot. It is an easy matter to explain to the befuddled that The Rape of Persephone is a poetic expression of the essence of the myth; the presentation of the concept of seed and its earth with all the brutal implications; the impact of elemental truth. Would you have us present this abstract concept, with all its complicated feelings, by means of a boy and girl lightly tripping? 

It is just as easy to explain The Syrian Bull as a new interpretation of an archaic image, involving unprecedented distortions. Since art is timeless, the significant rendition of a symbol, no matter how archaic, has as full validity today as the archaic symbol had then. Or is the one 3000 years old truer? ...easy program notes can help only the simple-minded.

No possible set of notes can explain our paintings. Their explanation must come out of a consummated experience between picture and onlooker. The point at issue, it seems to us, is not an 'explanation' of the paintings, but whether the intrinsic ideas carried within the frames of these pictures have significance. We feel that our pictures demonstrate our aesthetic beliefs, some of which we, therefore, list: 

Adolph Gottlieb, The Rape of Persephone. 1943.

1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.

2. This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.

3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way - not his way.

4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.

5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject-matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art. 

Consequently, if our work embodies these beliefs it must insult any one who is spiritually attuned to interior decoration; pictures for the home; pictures for over the mantel; pictures of the American scene; social pictures; purity in art; prize-winning potboilers; the National Academy, the Whitney Academy, the Corn Belt Academy; buckeyes; trite tripe, etc.

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Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), Mark Rothko (1903-1970), and Barnett Newman (1095-1970) were American Abstract Artists who together created a new visual language built on symbols, mythology, and color.

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The Guldara Stupa (Artefact V)

WUNDERKAMMER

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Artefact No: 5
Description: Guldara Stupa
Location: Logar Province, Afghanistan
Age: 2000 Years Old

Ben Timberlake September 3, 2024

The Guldara Stupa is one of the most beautiful Buddhist ruins in Afghanistan. It sits at the head of a valley on a proud spur of rock. Behind it is the remains of the adjoining monastery. The stupa is comprised of a square base with two concentric drums above it. Atop them, a dome, partially shattered and missing its spire. 

The role of a stupa has been described as ‘an engine for salvation, a spiritual lighthouse, a source of the higher, ineffable illumination that brought enlightenment’¹. The design is thought to have evolved from earlier conical burial mounds on circular bases that were being built in the century before the birth of the Buddha, from the Mediterranean all the way down to the Ganges Valley. According to early Buddhist texts, Buddha himself demonstrated to his followers how to build the first stupa by folding his cloak into a square as a base, then putting his alms bowl upside-down and on top of the cloak, with his staff on top of that to represent the spire. 

Ancient sculpture of the Buddha alongside a corinthian column.

The Guldara Stupa, whose name translates to ‘stupa of the flower valley,’ is the best surviving example of the sophisticated architectural developments during the Kushan period. This Empire, which flourished from the 1st to 3rd centuries CE, epitomized the cultural exchange and fusion between East and West along the Silk Road. Originally nomads from Central Asia, Kushans created a vast kingdom spanning parts of modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northern India. They adeptly blended elements from Greek, Roman, Persian, and Indian traditions to create a unique syncretic culture. This melding and harmonization was evident in their art, and particularly in the Gandharan style, which combined Hellenistic techniques with Buddhist themes. A Greek influence entered  with Alexander the Great’s conquests in the 4th century BC and continued through subsequent Hellenistic kingdoms. Prior to this the Buddha was represented symbolically, but the Greeks introduced more human representations of the Buddha: realistic proportions, naturalistic facial features, and the contrapposto stance. Many Gandharan Buddhas appear in Greek-style clothing with wavy hair and long noses set on oval faces, typical of classical sculpture. In the sculpture here he appears sat at a banquet beside a corinthian column. 

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“In a single structure, philosophies and ideas from thousands of miles over converge in perfect harmony.”

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The Kushans were also instrumental in the spread of Buddhism along the Silk Road, patronizing Buddhist art and architecture while maintaining a religiously tolerant empire. Their capitals, like Bagram, became cosmopolitan centers where goods and ideas from China, India, and the Mediterranean world converged. Their coinage featured Greek inscriptions alongside Indian languages, and depicted both Greek and Indian deities. In governance, they adopted titles from various traditions, such as "King of Kings" (Shah-in Shah), reflecting Persian influence. This Kushan synthesis not only shaped the cultural landscape of Central and South Asia but also facilitated the transmission of ideas and technologies between East and West, leaving a lasting legacy that extended far beyond their political boundaries. 

Corinthian pilasters with their Corinthian capitals.

The Guldara Stupa reflects this assimilation. The core structure is a classic stupa design that served both symbolic and practical functions in Buddhist practice. Its form represents cosmic order and the path to enlightenment, while its circular base allows for circumambulation (pradakshina), a key ritual in Buddhist worship. Yet the harmonious proportions of the square base are similar to the Temple of Hera on Samos and the engaged pilasters,with their corinthian capitals, are almost pure classical world finished in flaked local schist. In a single structure, philosophies and ideas from thousands of miles over converge in perfect harmony.

The decline of Buddhism in Afghanistan was not a sudden event but a gradual process that occurred over several centuries. While Buddhism flourished in the region from the 1st to 7th centuries CE, its influence began to wane with the spread of Islam from the west starting in the 7th century. Archaeological evidence, however, suggests that Buddhist practices persisted in some areas long after the initial Muslim conquests. The transition was not uniformly abrupt or violent, as sometimes portrayed in later folklore. Instead, there was a period of coexistence, with some Buddhist sites remaining active even as Islam gained prominence. The process of conversion was complex, influenced by political, economic, and social factors. By the 11th century, Islam had become the predominant faith in the Kabul region and most of Afghanistan, though pockets of Buddhist practice may have survived in remote areas. 

The abandonment of many Buddhist sites was likely due to a combination of factors, including changing patronage patterns, shifts in trade routes, and the gradual adoption of Islam by the local population. Interestingly, some Buddhist architectural and artistic elements were incorporated into early Islamic structures in the region, reflecting a degree of cultural continuity amid religious change. The last definitive evidence of active Buddhist practice in Afghanistan dates to around the 10th century, marking the end of a remarkable era of religious and cultural flourishing that had lasted for nearly a millennium.

Ben Timberlake at the Guldara Stupa.

It was Guldara’s remote position that probably accounts for its remarkable preservation. In the 19th century it was looted by the British explorer and archaeologist Charles Masson. (It’s a little mean to use the word ‘looted’: he ‘opened’ the stupa looking for relics and artifacts as was the practice at the time). Masson was a fascinating character. His actual name was James Lewis but he deserted from the East India Company’s army in 1827 and adopted the alias Charles Masson. He spent much of the 1830s living in Kabul, travelling the country extensively and documenting the Buddhist archaeological sites there. His work was crucial in bringing these sites the attention of Western scholars. Guldara was his favourite, “perhaps the most complete and beautiful monument of the kind in these countries’. 

I visited Guldara this July. It is an hour’s drive from Kabul to the village at the head of the valley, then another 20 minutes up the dry riverbed that tested our 4x4, and finally a half an hour’s trek up to the site itself. There is something deeply spiritual about the Stupa. It seems to belong profoundly to the place - to the valley - and yet floats above it. Its lines and proportions are as graceful as the surrounding mountains while its myriad of eastern and western architectural forms have integrated to be more than the sum of their parts. It is a site of quiet conjunction, of perfect harmony. Of peace. 

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Ben Timberlake is an archaeologist who works in Iraq and Syria. His writing has appeared in Esquire, the Financial Times and the Economist. He is the author of 'High Risk: A True Story of the SAS, Drugs and other Bad Behaviour'.

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¹ The Buddhas of Bamiya, Llewelyn Morgan.

Towards Alienation

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Interessenspharen, 1979. Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt.

Arcadia Molinas August 29, 2024

Last time, translator Lawrence Venuti and philosopher Friedreich Schleirmacher showed us the radical potential of walking away from fluency when reading books in translation. Engaging in an uncomfortable reading practice, they argued, favouring ‘foreignization’, has the potential to expand our subjectivities and lead us to embrace the cultural other instead of rejecting it. In this walk away from fluency, we find ourselves heading towards alienation. But what does it mean to be alienated as a reader, how does it feel, and perhaps most importantly, how does it happen? 

The concept of culturemes can help us get closer to an understanding of alienation. Culturemes are social phenomena that have meaning to members of one culture but not to another, so that when they are compared to a corresponding phenomenon in another culture, they are revealed to be specific to only the first culture. They can have an ingrained historical, social or geographical relevance that can result in misconceptions or misunderstandings when being translated. This includes jokes, folklore, idioms, religion or expressions. If we pay attention to the translation of culturemes, we can evaluate how alienation is functioning in the translated text and sketch the contours of its effect on the reader.

Panza de Burro by Andrea Abreu made my body come alive from just one sitting. Even in its original Spanish, the book is alienating. Abreu takes us into the mind of her ten-year old narrator, nicknamed “Shit”, as she spends a warm, cloudy summer in a working-class neighbourhood of Tenerife with her best friend Isora. The language is mercilessly juvenile, deliciously phonetic and profoundly Canarian. The Canarian accent, more like the Venezuelan or Cuban accents of Latin America than a mainland Spanish accent, is emulated in a way similar to what Irvine Welsh does for the Scots dialect in Trainspotting. This means, for example, that a lot of the ends of words are cut off, “usted” becomes “usté”, “nada más” becomes “namás”. On top of this are all the Canarian idiosyncrasies that Abreu employs to paint a vivid sense of place: the food, the weather, the games the children play. Abreu demands her reader move towards her characters, their language, their codes and their culture and with it demands a somatic response from her reader. The translation of such a book should be a fertile ground for the experience of alienation, done two-fold.

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“Meeting halfway is a political act that not only allows people to exist at the frontier but brings everyone closer to the frontier too.”

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Widening, 1980. Ruth Wolf-Rehfeltd.

On the first page of Panza de Burro, Shit and Isora are eating snacks and sweets at a birthday party, “munchitos, risketos, gusanitos, conguitos, cubanitos, sangüi, rosquetitos de limón, suspiritos, fanta, clipper, sevená, juguito piña, juguito manzana”. Most of these will be familiar to anyone who has grown up in Spain, including the intentional spelling mistakes (“sevená” for example is meant to emulate the Canarian pronunciation of 7-Up). Julia Sanches, in her translation, Dogs of Summer, writes “There were munchitos potato chips, cheese doodles and Gusanitos cheese puffs. There were Conguitos chocolate sweets, cubanitos wafers and sarnies. There were lemon donuts and tiny meringues, orange Fanta, strawberry pop, 7-Up, apple juice and pineapple juice”. The alienating words are still present in the translation, munchitos, gusanitos, conguitos, their rhythm, their sound, carry an echo of their cultural significance and with them maintain the sticky, childish essence of the Canarian birthday party. They are there to flood your senses, which is what, at its best, alienation can hope to do. Yet the words themselves, the look of them, the sound of them, could have also done their infantilizing, somatic job of taking us into the soda pop-flavoured heart of the birthday party taking place on a muggy Canarian day without their tagging English accompaniment “cheese puffs”. To be able to chew the words around for yourself is essential to experience alienation. To experience the foreign, your mouth must move in ways and shapes hitherto unfamiliar to it. In other instances, however, Sanches keeps Canarian culturemes intact, for example the term of endearment “miniña” is untouched in the translated text, which again with its heavily onomatopoeic sound thrusts the unfamiliar reader into a new context, this time for endearment, and so expands the sounds and shapes of affection and proximity.

Gloria Anzaldúa, feminist and queer scholar, wrote Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a book which takes the alienating project to its logical extreme. The book is not only an exercise in alienation through language but in alienation through form too. Drawing inspiration from her Chicana identity, an identity inherently at a crossroads between Mexicana and tejana cultures, she advocates for a wider “borderlands culture”, a culture that can represent and hold space for the in-between, the interdisciplinary and the intercontinental. In the preface she explains her project, “The switching of "codes" in this book from English to Castilian Spanish to the North Mexican dialect to Tex-Mex to a sprinkling of Nahuatl to a mixture of all of these, reflects my language, a new language-the language of the Borderlands. There, at the juncture of cultures, languages cross-pollinate and are revitalized; they die and are born. Presently this infant language... this bastard language, Chicano Spanish, is not approved by any society. But we Chicanos no longer feel that we need to beg entrance, that we need always to make the first overture –to translate to Anglos, Mexicans and Latinos, apology blurting out of our mouths with every step. Today we ask to be met halfway. This book is our invitation to you-from the new mestizas.” 

Anzaldúa wrote a guide on how to live on the borderlands, how to embrace linguistic and cultural hybridity, supporting Venuti and Schleirmacher’s claim that a wider acceptance of difference, of meeting halfway, is a political act that not only allows people to exist at the frontier, but brings everyone closer to the frontier too. Being on the frontier means going towards alienation, it means offering your body to new expressions and new experiences, it is to remain open, to walk on the border like a tightrope, to feel the tension in your muscles from the balance and to come out taught at the other end.

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Arcadia Molinas is a writer, editor, and translator from Madrid. She currently works as the online editor of Worms Magazine and has published a Spanish translation of Virginia Woolf’s diaries with Funambulista.

Music Lover’s Field Companion

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Artwork by Lois Long, for John Cage’s 'Mushroom Book' 1972.

John Cage August 27 2024

I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom. For this purpose I have recently moved to the country. Much of my time is spent poring over "field companions on fungi. These I obtain at half price in second-hand bookshops, which latter are in some rare cases next door to shops selling dog-eared sheets of music, such an occurrence being greeted by me as irrefutable evidence that I am on the right track.  

The winter for mushrooms, as for music, is a most sorry season. Only in caves and houses where matters of temperature and humidity, and in concert halls where matters of trusteeship and box office are under constant surveillance, do the vulgar and accepted forms thrive. American commercialism has brought about a grand deterioration of the Psalliota campestris, affecting through exports even the European market. As a demanding gourmet sees but does not purchase the marketed mushroom, so a lively musician reads from time to time the announcements of concerts and stays quietly at home. If, energetically, Collybia velutipes should fruit in January, it is a rare event, and happening on it while stalking in a forest is almost beyond one's dearest expectations, just as it is exciting in New York to note that the number of people attending a winter concert requiring the use of one's faculties is on the upswing (1954: 129 out of l2,000,000; 1955: 136 out of 12,000,000).  

In the summer, matters are different. Some three thousand different mushrooms are thriving in abundance, and right and left there are Festivals of Contemporary Music. It is to be regretted, however, that the consolidation of the acquisitions of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, currently in vogue, has not produced a single new mushroom. Mycologists are aware that in the present fungous abundance, such as it is, the dangerous Amanitas play an extraordinarily large part. Should not program chairmen, and music lovers in general, come the warm months, display some prudence?

I was delighted last fall (for the effects of summer linger on, viz. Donaueschingen, C. D. M. I., etc.) not only to revisit in Paris my friend the composer Pierre Boulez, rue Beautreillis, but also to attend the Exposition du Champignon, rue de Buffon. A week later in Cologne, from my vantage point in a glass-encased control booth, I noticed an audience dozing off, throwing, as it were, caution to the winds, though present at a loud-speaker emitted program of Elektronische Musik. I could not help recalling the riveted attention accorded another loud-speaker, rue de Buffon, which delivered on the hour a lecture describing mortally poisonous mushrooms and means for their identification.  

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“The second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium. The expressivity of this movement was not only dramatic but unusually sad from my point of view, for the animals were frightened simply because I was a human being.”

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John Cage and Lois Long.

But enough of the contemporary musical scene; it is well known. More important is to determine what are the problems confronting the contemporary mushroom. To begin with, I propose that it should be determined which sounds further the growth of which mushrooms; whether these latter, indeed, make sounds of their own; whether the gills of certain mushrooms are employed by appropriately small-winged insects for the production of pizzicati and the tubes of the Boleti by minute burrowing ones as wind instruments; whether the spores, which in size and shape are extraordinarily various, and in number countless, do not on dropping to the earth produce gamelan-like sonorities; and finally, whether all this enterprising activity which I suspect delicately exists, could not, through technological means, be brought, amplified and magnified, into our theatres with the net result of making our entertainments more interesting.

What a boon it would be for the recording industry (now part of America'. sixth largest) if it could be shown that the performance, while at table, of an LP of Beethoven's Quartet Opus Such-and-Such so alters the chemical nature of Amanita muscaria as to render it both digestible and delicious!

Lest I be found frivolous and light-headed and, worse, an "impurist" for having brought about the marriage of the agaric with Euterpe, observe that composers are continually mixing up music with something else. Karlheinz Stockhausen is clearly interested in music and juggling, constructing as he does "global structures," which can be of service only when tossed in the air; while my friend Pierre Boulez, as he revealed in a recent article (Nouvelle Revue Française, November 1954), is interested in music and parentheses and italics! This combination of interests seems to me excessive in number. I prefer my own choice of the mushroom. Furthermore it is avant-garde.

I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece~ transcriptions, that is, for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have had published. At one performance, I passed the first movement by attempting the identification of a mushroom which remained successfully unidentified. The second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium. The expressivity of this movement was not only dramatic but unusually sad from my point of view, for the animals were frightened simply because I was a human being. However, they left hesitatingly and fittingly within the structure of the work. The third movement was a return to the theme of the first, but with all those profound, so-well-known alterations of world feeling associated by German tradition with the A-B-A.

In the space that remains, I would like to emphasize that I am not interested in the relationships between sounds and mushrooms any more than I am in those between sounds and other sounds. These would involve an introduction of logic that is not only out of place in the world, but time consuming. We exist in a situation demanding greater earnestness, as I can testify, since recently I was hospitalized after having cooked and eaten experimentally some Spathyema foetida, commonly known as skunk cabbage. My blood pressure went down to fifty, stomach was pumped, etc. It behooves us therefore to see each thing directly as it is, be it the sound of a tin whistle or the elegant Lepiota procera.

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John Cage was an American composer, writer, music theorist and amateur mycologist. He was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde and amongst the most consequential and important composers of the 20th Century.

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I Am For An Art… (1961)

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Oldenburg in The Store, 107 East Second Street, New York, 1961. Robert R. McElroy.

Claes Oldenburg August 22 2024

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.

I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.

I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top.

I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.

I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

I am for an artist who vanishes, turning up in a white cap painting signs or hallways.

I am for art that comes out of a chimney like black hair and scatters in the sky.

I am for art that spills out of an old man's purse when he is bounced off a passing fender.

I am for the art out of a doggy's mouth, falling five stories from the roof.

I am for the art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper. I am for an art that joggles like everyones knees, when the bus traverses an excavation.

I am for art that is smoked, like a cigarette, smells, like a pair of shoes.

I am for art that flaps like a flag, or helps blow noses, like a handkerchief.

Pastry Case, 1961. Claes Oldenburg.

I am for art that is put on and taken off, like pants, which develops holes, like socks, which is eaten, like a piece of pie, or abandoned with great contempt, like a piece of shit.

I am for art covered with bandages, I am for art that limps and rolls and runs and jumps. I am for art that comes in a can or washes up on the shore.

I am for art that coils and grunts like a wrestler. I am for art that sheds hair.

I am for art you can sit on. I am for art you can pick your nose with or stub your toes on.

I am for art from a pocket, from deep channels of the ear, from the edge of a knife, from the corners of the mouth, stuck in the eye or worn on the wrist.

I am for art under the skirts, and the art of pinching cockroaches.

I am for the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind mans metal stick.

I am for the art that grows in a pot, that comes down out of the skies at night, like lightning, that hides in the clouds and growls. I am for art that is flipped on and off with a switch.

I am for art that unfolds like a map, that you can squeeze, like your sweetys arm, or kiss, like a pet dog. Which expands and squeaks, like an accordion, which you can spill your dinner on, like an old tablecloth.

I am for an art that you can hammer with, stitch with, sew with, paste with, file with.

I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is.

I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.

I am for the art of the washing machine. I am for the art of a government check. I am for the art of last wars raincoat.

I am for the art that comes up in fogs from sewer-holes in winter. I am for the art that splits when you step on a frozen puddle. I am for the worms art inside the apple. I am for the art of sweat that develops between crossed legs.

I am for the art of neck-hair and caked tea-cups, for the art between the tines of restaurant forks, for the odor of boiling dishwater.

I am for the art of sailing on Sunday, and the art of red and white gasoline pumps.

I am for the art of bright blue factory columns and blinking biscuit signs.

I am for the art of cheap plaster and enamel. I am for the art of worn marble and smashed slate. I am for the art of rolling cobblestones and sliding sand. I am for the art of slag and black coal. I am for the art of dead birds.

I am for the art of scratchings in the asphalt, daubing at the walls. I am for the art of bending and kicking metal and breaking glass, and pulling at things to make them fall down.

I am for the art of punching and skinned knees and sat-on bananas. I am for the art of kids' smells. I am for the art of mama-babble.

I am for the art of bar-babble, tooth-picking, beerdrinking, egg-salting, in-suiting. I am for the art of falling off a barstool.

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice-cream cones dropped on concrete. I am for the majestic art of dog-turds, rising like cathedrals.

I am for the blinking arts, lighting up the night. I am for art falling, splashing, wiggling, jumping, going on and off.

I am for the art of fat truck-tires and black eyes.

Performances at Oldenburg's The Store, 1962. Robert R. McElroy.

I am for Kool-art, 7-UP art, Pepsi-art, Sunshine art, 39 cents art, 15 cents art, Vatronol art, Dro-bomb art, Vam art, Menthol art, L & M art, Ex-lax art, Venida art, Heaven Hill art, Pamryl art, San-o-med art, Rx art, 9.99 art, Now art, New art, How art, Fire sale art, Last Chance art, Only art, Diamond art, Tomorrow art, Franks art, Ducks art, Meat-o-rama art.

I am for the art of bread wet by rain. I am for the rat's dance between floors.

I am for the art of flies walking on a slick pear in the electric light. I am for the art of soggy onions and firm green shoots. I am for the art of clicking among the nuts when the roaches come and go. I am for the brown sad art of rotting apples.

I am for the art of meowls and clatter of cats and for the art of their dumb electric eyes.

I am for the white art of refrigerators and their muscular openings and closings.

I am for the art of rust and mold. I am for the art of hearts, funeral hearts or sweetheart hearts, full of nougat. I am for the art of worn meathooks and singing barrels of red, white, blue and yellow meat.

I am for the art of things lost or thrown away, coming home from school. I am for the art of cock-and-ball trees and flying cows and the noise of rectangles and squares. I am for the art of crayons and weak grey pencil-lead, and grainy wash and sticky oil paint, and the art of windshield wipers and the art of the finger on a cold window, on dusty steel or in the bubbles on the sides of a bathtub.

I am for the art of teddy-bears and guns and decapitated rabbits, exploded umbrellas, raped beds, chairs with their brown bones broken, burning trees, firecracker ends, chicken bones, pigeon bones and boxes with men sleeping in them.

I am for the art of slightly rotten funeral flowers, hung bloody rabbits and wrinkly yellow chickens, bass drums & tambourines, and plastic phonographs. I am for the art of abandoned boxes, tied like pharaohs. I am for an art of watertanks and speeding clouds and flapping shades.

I am for U.S. Government Inspected Art, Grade A art, Regular Price art, Yellow Ripe art, Extra Fancy art, Ready-to-eat art, Best-for-less art, Ready-tocook art, Fully cleaned art, Spend Less art, Eat Better art, Ham art, pork art, chicken art, tomato art, banana art, apple art, turkey art, cake art, cookie art.

add:

I am for an art that is combed down, that is hung from each ear, that is laid on the lips and under the eyes, that is shaved from the legs, that is brushed on the teeth, that is fixed on the thighs, that is slipped on the foot.

square which becomes blobby

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Claes Oldenburg, 1929 – 2022, was a Swedish-born American sculptor best known for his public art installations, typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. In 1961 he opened The Store in Downtown New York which hosted performances, conceptual art pieces and happenings, as well as selling work he made in the space to punters and passerbys, removing the middle-man from the commercialisation of the art world. He wrote this text for an exhibition catalogue in 1961, reworked it when he opened the store and then republished it again in 1970 for an exhibition in London, from which this version is taken.

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Mystery and Creation (1928)

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Piazza D'Italia, 1964. Giorgio de Chirico.

Giorgio de Chirico August 20 2024

To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream.

Profound statements must be drawn by the artist from the most secret recesses of his being; there no murmuring torrent, no birdsong, no rustle of leaves can distract him.

What I hear is valueless; only what I see is living, and when I close my eyes my vision is even more powerful. It is most important that we should rid art of all that it has contained of recognizable material to date, all familiar subject matter, all traditional ideas, all popular symbols must be banished forthwith. More important still, we must hold enormous faith in ourselves: it is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense in itself, which has no subject, which means absolutely nothing from the logical point of view, I repeat, it is essential that such a revelation or conception should speak so strongly in us, evoke such agony or joy, that we feel compelled to paint, compelled by an impulse even more urgent than the hungry desperation which drives a man to tearing at a piece of bread like a savage beast.

I remember one vivid winter's day at Versailles. Silence and calm reigned supreme. Everything gazed at me with mysterious, questioning eyes. And then I realized that every corner of the palace, every column, every window possessed a spirit, an impenetrable soul. I looked around at the marble heroes, motionless in the lucid air, beneath the frozen rays of that winter sun which pours down on us without love, like perfect song. A bird was warbling in a window cage. At that moment I grew aware of the mystery which urges men to create certain strange forms. And the creation appeared more extraordinary than the creators. Perhaps the most amazing sensation passed on to us by prehistoric man is that of presentiment. It will always continue. We might consider it as an eternal proof of the irrationality of the universe. Original man must have wandered through a world full of uncanny signs. He must have trembled at each step.

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Giorgio de Chirico was an Italian artist and writer born in 1888, who founded the movement of Metaphysical Painting. He was inspired by Neitzsche and Shopenhauer in his philosophy, that informed both his visual and written work, and his own writing was a major source of inspiration to Andre Breton and the Surrealist Movement. This essay was first published in 1928 by Breton in ‘Surrealism and Painting’.

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A Forager’s Take on Fairytales Pt. 1

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Izzy Johns August 15 2024

Long ago in Drumline, County Clare, in the late 19th Century, an old farmer and his wife huddled for warmth in a mud hut. Many a cold winter passed, and finally, the man agreed to build his wife a house  of bricks and mortar.  

He set to work the following Spring. Not a day had passed when the old man received a  visit from a traveler, who spoke these words:  

“I wouldn’t build there if I was you. That’s the wrong place. If you build there you won’t be  short of company, whatever else.” 

The old man paid him no mind, but sure enough, the moment he and his wife lay down to  rest in their new home, they were plagued by noise and disruption. Furniture was  knocked over, cutlery strewn across the floor, crockery smashed. They couldn’t get a wink of sleep. But, as sure as day, whenever they went to investigate, they found nothing and  no one. The old couple sought the help of the local preacher, who recognised this as the work of the Sidhe, the Little Folk of this land. He tried to exorcize the house, but to no avail.  

After five sleepless nights, the man wearily set off to the market to sell their cows. It was  the Gale day, the day that their rent was due, and money was sparse. English colonisers had seized land from the Irish farmers some years  before. Now they were renting it back to them, and the rent was high.  

The old man got a fair price for the cows, and he stopped at a roadside pub on the way  home. It was there that he encountered the traveler once again. In desperation, the man  begged the traveler for advice. He would do anything so that the Little Folk would let him  rest. The traveler walked him home, and took him to stand in the yard, on the far side of  the house.  

He said: 

“Now, look out there and tell me what you see.” 
[…] “The yard?” 
“No,” he says, “look again.” 
“The road?” 
“No. Look carefully.” 
“Oh, that old Whitethorn bush? Sure, that’s there forever. That could be there since the  start o’ the world.” 
“D’you tell me that now?” 
The old man walked out to the gable o’ the house, called [him], then says, “come over  here.” 
He did. 
“Look out there, and tell me what do you see?” 

He looked out from that gable end, and there, no farther away than the end o’ the garden,  was another Whitethorn bush, standing alone. 

“Now,” says the old man, “I told you. I warned you. The fairies’ path is between them  bushes and beyond. And you’re after building your house on it.” 

Upon the instruction of the traveler, the man built two doors in either side of the house, in line with the Whitethorns. From then on, the Little Folk had a clear passage, and  the man and his wife were not bothered again.¹

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“The higher you climb, the further you travel, the greater the view”

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British Goblins, 1880. Wirt Sikes.

I was very struck by this account. It feels different to the rich, meandering folk-tale jewels I love so much, that are wrapped in mythos and allegory. Instead, this tale falls into the  realm of family and community stories, that are still “lived in”,  in this case, by the  old couple’s grandson, who told this story to Eddie Lenihan in the living room of the very  same house. He said that he still leaves the two doors ajar each night so as to let the fairies pass. There’s no use in locking them, he says, for they’ll only be open again by the morning. 

Make no mistake, this story is not hearsay. A book of fairy tales might read like a book of  fiction, but it isn’t. What we see in this tale, and so many others like it, is a relic of a complex faith system from times gone  by, and it’s important that we storytellers hold it in that way. This story comes from  Ireland, where the fairies are called Sídhe, or Sí, though often called by euphemisms to  avoid catching their attention. The Sidhe are the descendants of the people of Danu, the  Tuatha Dé Danann, a race of fallen Gods and Goddesses that dwell in the liminality  between our world and the otherworld, the An Saol Eile. It’s only fair to acknowledge their  providence, not least is it a crucial act of cultural preservation.  

Fairies have a range of habitats depending on where you are live. In Ireland, they are particularly fond of two places: a lone Whitethorn (Hawthorn) tree, and the forts -  those grand, grassy mounds of earth, often covered in a greater diversity of wild plants  than their surroundings. In this tale, the old couple has disturbed not a habitat, but a  passage between habitats. More savvy builders would have driven four hazel rods into the ground, marking out the proposed foundations of the house. If by the next day any rod had moved, the house should be built elsewhere.  

The fairies in this story star in a role that I’ve seen in countless tales; defending their  habitat from ecological destruction. Here, they were able to communicate with the  intruders and resolve the problem quickly. It’s a good thing that the old couple were  forthcoming. Fairies will always give warnings, but it’s perfectly within their power to  cause grave suffering if those warnings aren’t heeded. They can be at best didactic and  at worst violent, but they have no interest in troubling a person who isn’t troubling them. I  can’t condone the violence, but I marvel at how proficient they are at protecting and  stewarding the land. Plus, they greatly enrich the ecosystem. Various tales see fairies  fertilizing soil for generous farmers, and producing abundances of wildflowers and fungi.  It’s said that the rings of mushrooms we see in woodlands and meadows are where  they’ve danced. 

The Intruder, c.1860. John Anster Fitzgerald.

Thinking about this with an Ecologist’s gaze, fairies are a fascinating species. They might well be a larger genus with loads of regionally-specific variants like small  people, spriggans, buccas, elves, bockles and knockers, browneys, goblins, dryads,  gnomes and piskies. There’s a wealth of anecdotal evidence of their existence,   thousands and thousands of stories, stretching back millenia,  yet we’ve never successfully captured and studied  them. Perhaps what makes this species most unique is their ability to outwit ours. Their cunning gently prods at our human arrogance, contesting our claim to be the most  “developed” of species.

Far less frequently in the UK do we hear tales of the Little Folk interfering with larger  property developments. In London, for example, you’ll scarcely come across a piece of land that hasn’t been leveled ten times over, and most Whitethorns are confined to cultivated hedges. I wonder how many forts have been destroyed in my neighborhood. Our lack of understanding of the fairies’ life cycles and physiology makes it pointless to  speculate on why larger builds don’t experience ramifications from the little folk. It’s hard  not to wonder if heavy machinery, giant crews of contractors and big blocks of hundreds  of dwellings haven’t been too much for the fairies to contend with. I hate to think that,  unbeknownst to us, urbanization might have wiped them out. If fairies are still around, it’s  clear that they’re gravely endangered.  

If this is the case, then it makes fairies one of over two million species under threat of  extinction. It’d be such a shame if these creatures, these stories, and the feelings that  they represent, disappeared altogether. I love this tale for giving us such a tangible  example of humans making space for fairies and subsequently managing to co-exist  peacefully. The fairies in this story are model land guardians, and from that we humans  have a lot to learn.  

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Izzy Johns is a forager and storyteller. She teaches foraging under the monicker Rights  For Weeds and manages the Phytology medicine garden in East London. You can find her  work on Substack [rightsforweeds.substack.com] and Instagram [instagram.com/ rightsforweeds] .

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¹As recounted to Eddie Lenihan in 2001 by the couple’s grandson, recorded in ‘Meeting the Other Folk…”

Against Fluency

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Guilliaume Apollinaire, 1918. Calligram.

Arcadia Molinas August 13, 2024

Reading is a vice. It is a pleasurable, emotional and intellectual vice. But what distinguishes it from most vices, and relieves it from any association to immoral behaviour, is that it is somatic too, and has the potential to move you. A book can instantly transport you to cities, countries and worlds you’ve never set foot on. A book can take you to new climates, suggest the taste of new foods, introduce you to cultures and confront you with entirely different ways of being. It is a way to move and to travel without ever leaving the comfort of your chair.

Books in translation offer these readerly delights perhaps more readily than their native counterparts. Despite this, the work of translation is vastly overlooked and broadly underappreciated. In book reviews, the critique of the translation itself rarely takes up more than a throwaway line which comments on either the ‘sharpness’ or ‘clumsiness’ of the work. It is uncommon, too, to see the translator’s name on the cover of a book. A good translation, it seems, is meant to feel invisible. But is travelling meant to feel invisible – identical, seamless, homogenous? Or is travelling meant to provoke, cause discomfort, scream its presence in your face? The latter seems to me to be the more somatic, erotic, up in your body experience and thus, more conducive to the moral component of the vice of reading.

French translator Norman Shapiro describes the work of translation as “the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections— scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should never call attention to itself.” This view is shared by many: a good translation should show no evidence of the translator, and by consequence, no evidence that there was once another language involved in the first place at all. Fluency, naturalness, is what matters – any presence of the other must be smoothed out. For philosopher Friedreich Schlerimacher however, the matter is something else entirely. For him, “there are only two [methods of translation]. Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.” He goes on to argue for the virtues of the former, for a translation that is visible, that moves the reader’s body and is seen and felt. It’s a matter of ethics for the philosopher – why and how do we translate? These are not minor questions when considering the stakes of erasing the presence of the other. The repercussions of such actions could reflect and accentuate larger cultural attitudes to difference and diversity as a whole.

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“The higher you climb, the further you travel, the greater the view”

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Guilliaume Apollinaire, 1918. Calligram.

Lawrence Venuti coins Schlerimacher’s two movements, from reader to author and author to reader, as ‘foreignization’ and ‘domestication’ in his book The Translator’s Invisibility. Foreignization is “leaving the author in peace and moving the reader towards him”, which means reflecting the cultural idiosyncrasies of the original language onto the translated/target one. It means making the translation visible. Domestication is the opposite, it irons out any awkwardness and imperfections caused by linguistic and cultural difference, “leaving the reader in peace and moving the author towards him”. It means making the translation invisible, and is the way translation is so often thought about today. Venuti says the aim of this type of translation is to “bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar; and this aim always risks a wholesale domestication of the foreign text, often in highly self- conscious projects, where translation serves an appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political.”

The direction of movement in these two strategies makes all the difference. Foreignization makes you move and travel towards the author, while domestication leaves you alone and doesn’t disturb you. There is, Venuti says, a cost of being undisturbed. He writes of the “partly inevitable” violence of translation when thinking about the process of ironing out differences. When foreign cultures are understood through the lens of a language inscribed with its own codes, and which consequently carry their own embedded ways of regarding other cultures, there is a risk of homogenisation of diversity. “Foreignizing translation in English”, Venuti argues, “can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism, in the interests of democratic geopolitical relations.” The potential for this type of reading and of translating is by no means insignificant.

To embrace discomfort then, an uncomfortable practice of reading, is a moral endeavour. To read foreignizing works of translation is to expand one’s subjectivity and suspend one’s unified, blinkered understanding of culture and linguistics. Reading itself is a somatic practice, but to read a work in translation that purposefully alienates, is to travel even further, it’s to go abroad and stroll through foreign lands, feel the climate, chew the food. It’s well acknowledged that the higher you climb, the further you travel, the greater the view. And to get the bigger picture is as possible to do as sitting on your favourite chair, opening a book and welcoming alienation.

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Arcadia Molinas is a writer, editor, and translator from Madrid. She currently works as the online editor of Worms Magazine and has published a Spanish translation of Virginia Woolf’s diaries with Funambulista.

Lapis Lazuli (Artefact IV)

WUNDERKAMMER

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Artefact No: 4
Description: Ultramarine from Lapis Lazuli
Location: Sare-e-Sang, Badakhshan, Afghanistan
Age: 6000BC to Present

Ben Timberlake August 6, 2024

Blue is the color of civilization. It is the color of heaven.  

When the first prehistoric artists adorned the cave walls, they used the earth colors: reds,  browns, yellows, blacks. There were no blues, for the earth very rarely produces the color. Early peoples had no word for blue: it doesn’t appear in ancient Chinese stories, Icelandic Sagas, the Koran, or Sumerian myths. In the Odyssey, an epic with no shortage of opportunities to use the word, there are plenty of blacks and whites, a dozen reds, and several greens. As for the sea - Homer describes it as “wine-dark”.  

Philologist Lazarus Geiger analyzed a vast number of ancient texts and found that the words for colors show up in different languages in the same sequence: black and white, next red, then either yellow or green. Blue is always last, arriving with the first cities and the smelting of iron. Homer’s palette, at the end of the Bronze Age, sits neatly within this developmental scheme.  

The Egyptians had a word for blue, for they also had the tools of civilization, long-distance trade, and technology, that allowed them to seek out and harness the color. 6000 years ago, the very first blue they used - the true blue - was ultramarine from Lapis Lazuli (the ‘Stone of Heaven’), found in the Sar-e-Sang mines in northern Afghanistan. It was this blue that adorned the mask of Tutankhamun, and that Cleopatra wore, powdered, as eye-shadow.  

Lapis lazuli was so expensive that the Egyptians were driven to some of the earliest chemistry experiments - heating copper salts, sand and limestone - to create an ersatz  turquoise that was the world’s first synthetic pigment. The technology and recipe spread throughout the ancient world. The Romans had many words for different varieties of blue and combined Egyptian Blue with indigo to use on their frescoes. But none of these chemical creations or combinations could match the Afghan lapis for the brilliance of its blues. 

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“The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him  a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural.”  - Wassily Kandinsky

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The Virgin in Prayer, Giovanni Battista Salvi da Saassoferrato, c.1645.

At the Council of Ephesus in 431AD, ultramarine received official blessing when it was  decided that it was the color of Mary, to venerate her as the Queen of Heaven. Since then it has adorned her robes and that of the angels. Ultramarine was the rarest and most exotic color. Its name - meaning ‘beyond the sea’ - first appeared in the 14th century, given by Italian traders who brought it from across the Mediterranean. Lapis Blue was more expensive than gold and was reserved for only the finest pieces done by the most gifted artists.  

It was the most expensive single cost in the whole of the Sistine Chapel and it is said that  Michelangelo left his painting The Entombment unfinished in protest that his patron wouldn’t pay for ultramarine. Raphael reserved the color for the final coat, preferring to  build the base layers of his blues from Azurite. Vermeer was a master of light but less good  at economics: he spent so much on the ultramarine that he left his wife and 11 children in debt when he died.  

Once again, mankind turned towards chemistry to search for a cheaper blue: in the early  1800s France’s Societé d’Encouragement offered a reward of 6000 Francs to a scientist who  could create a synthetic ultramarine. The result was ‘French Ultramarine’ a hyper-rich color that is still with us to this day. 

But 200 years later there is still a debate as to whether we have lost something. Alexander  Theroux in his essays The Primary Colors wrote “Old-fashioned blue, which had a dash  of yellow in it... now seems often incongruous against newer, staring, overly luminous eye killing shades”.  

Anthropometry: Princess Helena, Yves Klein, 1960.

True ultramarine is perfect because of its flaws. It contains traces of calcite, pyrite, flecks of  mica, that reflect and refract the light in a myriad of ways. Many artists have continued to  prize it for its shifting hues, the heterogeneity of the brushstrokes it creates, the feelings it  stirs in us. As Matisse said, ‘A certain blue penetrates the soul’.  

Yves Klein worshiped the color and used the synthetic version but he owed his inspiration to the real thing. Klein was born in Nice and grew up under the azure blue Provencal skies. At the age of nineteen he lay on the beach with his friends - the artist  Arman, and Claude Pascal, the composer - and they divided up their world: Arman chose  earth, Pascal words, while Klein asked for the sky which he then signed with his fingers. 

It was only when Klein later visited the Scrovegni Chapel and saw the ultramarine skies of  Giotto’s paintings did he understand how to achieve his calling. Klein devoted his brief  life to the color, he even patented International Klein Blue (IKB), a synthesis of his childhood skies and the stone of heaven itself.  

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Ben Timberlake is an archaeologist who works in Iraq and Syria. His writing has appeared in Esquire, the Financial Times and the Economist. He is the author of 'High Risk: A True Story of the SAS, Drugs and other Bad Behaviour'.

Sator Squares (Artefact III)

WUNDERKAMMER

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Artefact No: 3
Location: Across Europe and the Americas. 
Age: 2000 years 

Ben Timberlake May 28, 2024

It might be innocently regarded as perhaps the world’s oldest word puzzles, were it not for its association with assassinations,  conflagrations and rabies.  

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Sator Square in the village of Oppède le Vieux.

The “it” in question is the Sator Square. A Latin, five-line palindrome, it  can be read from left or right, upwards or downwards.  The earliest ones occur at Roman sites throughout the empire and by the Middle Ages, they had spread across northern Europe and were used as  magical symbols to cure, prevent, and sometimes play a role in all sorts of wickedness. The one pictured here is set in the doorway of a  medieval house in the semi-ruined village of Oppède le Vieux, Provence,  France, carved to ward off evil spirits. 

There are several different translations of the Latin, depending on how  the square is read. Here is a simple version to get us started:    

AREPO is taken to be a proper name, so, AREPO, SATOR (the gardener/ sower), TENET (holds), OPERA (works), ROTAS (the wheels/plow), which  could come out something like ‘Arepo the gardener holds and works the  wheels/plow’. Other similar translations include ‘The farmer Arepo works his wheels’ or ‘The sower Arepo guides the plow with care’.   

Some academics insist that the square is read in a boustrophedon style, meaning ‘as the ox plows’, which is to say reading one line  forwards and the next line backwards, as a farmer would work a field.  Such a method would not only emphasize the agricultural nature of the square but also allow a more lyrical reading and could be very loosely translated thus: “as ye sow, so shall ye reap.”   

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“Early fire regulations from the German state of Thuringia stated that a certain number of these magical frisbees must be kept at the ready to stop town blazes.”

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Sator Square with A O in chi format.

There are multiple translations and theories surrounding Sator Squares. They became the focus for intense academic debate about 150 years ago. Most of the early studies assumed that they were Christian in origin. The earliest known examples at that time appeared on 6th and 7th century Christian manuscripts and  focussed on the Paternoster anagram contained within: by rearranging  the letters, the Sator Square spells out Paternoster or ‘our father’, with  the leftover A and O symbolizing the Alpha and the Omega.    

However, in the 1920s and 30s, two Sator Squares were discovered  within the ruins of Pompeii. The fatal eruption of Vesuvius that buried the  city occurred in AD 79, and it is very unlikely that there were any  Christians there so soon after Christ’s death. But the city did have a large  Jewish community, and many contemporary scholars see the Jewish Tau  symbol in the TENET cross of the palindrome, as well as other Talmudic references across the square, as proof of its Jewish origins. Pompeii’s Jews faced pogroms throughout their history, and it makes sense that they might try to hide an expression of their faith within a Roman word puzzle. 

Sator Squares spread throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and  appear in the margins of Christian manuscripts, in important treatises on  magic, and in a medical book as a cure for dog-bites. Over time, they gained popularity amongst the poor as a folk remedy,  even amongst those who had no knowledge of Latin or were even  illiterate. (Being ignorant of meaning might increase the potency of the  magic by concealing the essential gibberish of the script). In 16th century Lyon, France, a person was reportedly cured of insanity after eating three  crusts of bread with the Sator Square written on them.  

As the square traveled across time and country, nowhere was it used more enthusiastically than in Germany and parts of the Low Countries, where the words were etched onto wooden  plates and thrown into fires to extinguish them. There are early fire regulations from the German state of Thuringia stating that a certain number of these magical frisbees must be kept at the ready to stop town blazes.

Oath Skull with Sator Square carved into bone.

From the same period comes a more sinister use of the square: The Oath Skull. Discovered  in Münster in 2015 it is a human skull engraved with the Sator Square and radiocarbon dated between the 15th and 16th Centuries. It is believed to have been used by the Vedic Courts, a shadowy and ruthless court system that operated in Westphalia during that time. All proceedings of the courts were secret, even the names of judges were withheld, and death sentences were carried out by assassination or lynching. One of the few ways the accused could clear their names was by swearing an oath. Vedic courts used Oath Skulls as a means of  underscoring the life-or-death nature of proceedings, and it is thought  that the inclusion of the Sator Square on this skull added another level of mysticism - and the threat of eternal damnation - to the oath ritual.    

When the poor of Europe headed for the New World, they took their  beliefs with them. Sator Squares were used in the Americas until the late 19th century to treat snake bites, fight fires, and prevent miscarriages.  

For 2000 years, interest in the Sator Squares has not waned, and a new generation has been exposed to them through the release of Christopher Nolan’s film TENET, named after the square. The  film, about people who can move forwards and backwards in time, makes other references too: ‘Sator’ is the name of the arch villain played  by Kenneth Branagh; ‘Arepo’ is the name of another character, a Spanish art forger whose paintings are kept in a vault protected by ‘Rotas Security’. In the film, ‘Tenet’ is the name of the intelligence agency that is fighting to keep the world from a temporal Armageddon.   

Sator Squares have been described as history’s first meme. They have outlasted empires and nations, spreading across the western world and taking on newfound significance to each civilization that adopts them. Arepo should be proud  of his work.   

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Ben Timberlake is an archaeologist who works in Iraq and Syria. His writing has appeared in Esquire, the Financial Times and the Economist. He is the author of 'High Risk: A True Story of the SAS, Drugs and other Bad Behaviour'.

Maeshowe, Sound, and Viking Runes (Artefact II)

WUNDERKAMMER #2

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Artefact No: 2
Location: Maeshow, Orkney Islands, Scotland
Age: 5,000 years 

Ben Timberlake March 27, 2024

Maeshowe is a Neolithic chambered burial complex on the Orkney Islands, an archipelago to the north of Scotland that is a floating world of midnight suns and brutal, dark winters. The tomb overlooks the Lochs of Harry and Stenness. On the narrow spit of land that separates the two lochs is The Ring of Brodgar, an ancient stone circle. It is nothing to look at from the outside - bored sheep munching salty grass on a small mound — but inside is one of the finest prehistoric monuments in the world. 

The tomb’s structure is cruciform: a long passageway some 15m long, a central chamber, with  three side-chambers. The main passageway is orientated to the southwest. Building began on the  site around 2800BC. It is a work of monumental perfection: each wall of the long passageway is  formed of single slabs up to three tons in weight; each corner of the main chamber has four vast  standing stones; and the floors, walls and ceilings of the side-chambers are made from single  stones. Smaller, long, thin slabs make up the rest of the masonry. They are fitted with unfussy but  masterful precision in the local sandstone. It is even more impressive when you realize that these  stones were cut and shaped thousands of years before the invention of metal tools. It is estimated  to have taken 100,000 hours of labor to construct.  

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The interior chamber of Maeshowe, illuminated by the sun of the Winter Solstice.

Maeshowe sits within one of the richest prehistoric landscapes in Europe. The four principal sites  are two stone circles - the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness - Maeshowe and the  perfectly preserved Neolithic village of Skara Brae. These sites are within a further constellation of  a dozen Neolithic and Bronze Age mounds, and other solitary standing stones.  

Aligned within this landscape like a vast sundial, Maeshowe is sighted so as to tell the time just once a year, at midwinter. For a couple of weeks at either side of the winter solstice the sun sets to the southwest and the rays of the run enter down the long passage and illuminate the wall at  the back of the end chamber. And this midwinter sun, at the zenith of its year, sets perfectly above the Barnhouse Stone some 700m away. The spectacle can be viewed live online every year.

Maeshowe and its sister sites are open to the public and well worth a visit. Because of their  remote location they get a fraction of the visitor numbers similar sites receive. There is something  deeply penitential about a visit there. The long passage is only a meter and a half tall and  archaeologists believe it was designed this way to force people to bow and submit as they walked  towards the center of the complex. 

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The Barnhouse Stone, on the left, aligns perfectly with the entrance to Maeshow, the mound on the right, so that on the day of midwinter, the sun sets above the stone and into the entrance to Maestowe.

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“The frequency for Maeshowe was a drum being beaten at 2hz creating an infrasonic frequency that, although  inaudible to us, could be felt as a physical or psychological sensations such as dizziness, raised heartbeat, and flying sensations. And that’s before we factor in the drugs.”

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As much as Maeshowe is a place of the dead, it is also a temple to sound. Dr Aaron Watson, an  honorary fellow from Exeter University, spent a number of years researching the effects of sound  at different prehistoric sites. He found that specific pitches of vocal chants and different types of drumming could produce strange, amplified sound effects known as ‘standing waves’. These are very distinct areas of high and low intensity which seem to bear no relation to the source of the  sound. In the case of Maeshowe, a drummer in the central chamber could be muted to those  standing nearby but the sound would be vastly magnified in the side chambers. The acoustics are  so powerful that the Neolithic builders must have known what they were doing when they built the structure. A recessed niche in one of the tunnel walls allowed a large stone to be dragged into the passageway blocking the passage and amplifying the sound.  

Even more impressively was the possibility that Maeshowe displayed elements of the Helmholtz  Effect - a phenomenon of air resonance in a cavity - but on a much larger scale. The frequency for Maeshowe was a drum being beaten at 2hz creating an infrasonic frequency that, although  inaudible to us, could be felt as a physical or psychological sensations such as dizziness, raised heartbeat, and flying sensations. And that’s before we factor in the drugs. These European  prehistoric societies made ample use of regular magic mushrooms and the red-and-white spotted  Fly Agaric. To the Neolithic visitors the acoustics effects of Maeshowe alone must have been  powerful but to combined with hallucinations it must have been one of the most profound and life changing experiences of their lives. 

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Viking runes carved into the walls of Maeshowe.

The tomb was rediscovered in 1861. I write ‘rediscovered’ because when the Victorian antiquarians began to clear soil and debris from the inner chambers, they came across evidence that they were not the first ones there since prehistoric times: the walls were adorned with Viking runes.  

We have a very good idea who these Vikings were thanks to the Orkneyinga Saga, a medieval  narrative history document woven through and embellished with myths. There appear to be two  sets of culprits. Firstly, in 1151, a group of Viking Crusaders led by Earl Rognvald on their way to the Holy Land. Then, a couple years later - Christmas 1153 to be precise - a band of Viking  looters on a raid led by Earl Harald.  

The Norse traditionally held such ancient places with dread and it is not known what drove them to risk their mortal souls and enter the mound: a terrible storm is mentioned, but it may have been the legends of treasure too. The saga records that two of the Earl Rognvald’s men went mad with fear of the mythical Hogboon, from Old Norse hiagbui, or mound-dweller. 

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There are some 30 runes in Maeshowe, the largest collection outside Scandinavia. Here is a  sample:  

Crusaders broke into Maeshowe. Lif the earl's cook carved these runes. To the north-west is a great treasure hidden. It was long ago that a great treasure was hidden here. Happy is he that might find that great treasure.  

Ofram, the son of Sigurd carved these runes.  

Haermund Hardaxe carved these runes.  

Thatir the weary Viking came here.  

Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women (carved beside a picture of a slavering dog). 

Thorni fucked. Helgi carved.  

All too often historians and archaeologists concern themselves with official inscriptions left by kings and emperors and other fevered egos but I don’t think that anything quite says ‘Look on my works ye mighty and despair’ than a Viking warrior getting laid and then recording it on the rock of ages with his axe.

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Ben Timberlake is an archaeologist who works in Iraq and Syria. His writing has appeared in Esquire, the Financial Times and the Economist. He is the author of 'High Risk: A True Story of the SAS, Drugs and other Bad Behaviour'.