Metaphysical detritus

What might be termed metaphysical detritus: the subtle excremental matter voided by the demons that throng the lower aerial sublunary regions like falling snow or like the swarms of gnats and mosquitoes that obnubilate the skies above the Danube Delta and the Bărăgan Steppe in summer. In his commentary on Leviticus 17:7, (*)  cabbalist Nahmanides reports that demons (šedim) dwell in the far- flung wastes (šedudim) of the cold, septentrional climes and that their substance is elemental, consisting of fire and air only. Although compounded from subtle fire, they emanate a terrifying coldness. But since they are elemental, like humans they are mortal and susceptive to decay. In his dialogue De daemonum operatione, Byzantine philosopher Michael Psellus makes startling allusion to the vermicular seminal matter excreted by such demons. (†)  It would be incorrect, however, to infer that if demons’ physiology allows such excretion (perittōsis), they are therefore possessed of spermatic vessels or vital parts. (‡)  Rather, they feed in the manner of sponges or shellfish by absorbing vapours or moisture from the surrounding air, before voiding the aforementioned secretions. (¶)  Centuries later, thanks to the invention of the microscope, empirical evidence of such demonic matter might be said to have been discovered, based on which Christian Franz Paullini makes a painstaking theologico-physiological inquiry into whether bodily death itself be a ‘wormy substance,’ (§) a maggoty underlying essence, leading the reader through a vast macrocosm whose every nook and cranny, whose every substance, be it animal, mineral or vegetable, swarms with the living death (mors viva) of countless invisible worms (vermes), seethes with their fecund seed, ovules, and animate faeces (excrementa animata).

 

excerpt from Alistair Ian Blyth, Card Catalogue, Dalkey Archive Press, 2020

ISBN-13: 978-1628972696 

(*) ‘And they shall no more offer their sacrifices unto devils, after whom they have gone a whoring. This shall be a statute for ever unto them throughout their generations.’
(†) Sperma nonnulli eorum emittunt, et vermes quosdam spermate procreant 
(‡) vasave spermatica et vitalia 


(¶) Aluntur alii quidem inspiratione, ut spiritus arteriis nervisque contentus, alii humiditate, non tamen ore, ut solemus, excepta, sed spongiarum testaceorumque piscium more adjacentum quidem humorem extrinsecus attrahentes, posteaque concretionem spermati- cam excernentes.
(§)  Disquisitio curiosa an mors naturalis plerumque sit substantia verminosa? Revisa, aucta et emendata, multisque raris, selectis et curiosis DEI, Naturæ Artisque magnalibus, mys- teriis, et memorabilibus illustrata et confirmata, Frankfurt and Leipzig, Apud Johann Christoph Stösseln, 1703.
On 1 October 1803, at Greta Hall, Keswick, S. T. Coleridge opened his copy of this little-read title, which ‘had remained uncut an exact century, 8 years of the time in my possession,’ and was prompted to remark: ‘It is verily and indeed a Book of Maggots.’

See also: De daemonibus (2): physiological processes

 

Alistair Ian Blyth - Card Catalogue

 

Alistair Ian Blyth, Card Catalogue, Dalkey Archive Press, 2020 

ISBN-13: 978-1628972696

 

In the crepuscular Bucharest of the decade after the Revolution, the neurasthenic, amnesic narrator of Card Catalogue meets Obmanschi, a former political prisoner and unpublished writer of the pre-war avant-garde. Over many years, Obmanschi has compiled a minutely detailed card catalogue of the realia to be found in the classic Russian novel, whose categories include not only everyday material items, but also books as tangible objects and even the cockroaches whose rustling presence can be heard in Gogol, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. Meanwhile, the narrator compiles his own catalogue of oneiric books and their insubstantial authors, one of whom, bewilderingly, may be Obmanschi himself. Obmanschi already leads a second, shade-like existence, having been reduced to an independent, fictional character in the informer’s reports submitted to the secret police over the decades by the superintendent of his building. In a series of dreamlike narratives linked by the subject of libraries—book hoarding, book hunting, dreams of infinite other books, past and future—Card Catalogue hints that fiction is ultimately an oneiric world unto itself, in which the characters lead their own tenuous, separate existence, like the shades in Hades.

The cicatrix

Scars can be literal or metaphorical, physical or psychical. The scar is the memory of the wound, imprinted on the warp and weft of the flesh or in the incrassate tissue of the brain. Every scar is unique, the trace left by an unrepeatable concatenation of circumstances and events that culminate in a trauma affecting the body or mind

But the one scar that is common to all is the umbilical cicatrix. It is the primordial scar; it is the mark that unites all men (and, indeed, all living things not born from the seed or egg). For, no man can enter the world without the cord that bound him to the womb being severed and leaving its trace. The umbilicus thus also marks us as separate distinct individuals. For the scholastics, it was a subject of fierce debate whether Adam and Eve, the only humans not to have been formed in the womb, possessed a naval, the umbilical scar. Were their bellies smooth, unblemished, or when God moulded them from the red earth and the rib respectively did He fashion them an umbilicus in order not to be incomplete? Likewise, when God removed the rib from Adam's breast from which to shape Eve, did it leave a scar?

What is certain is that the scar is to be found only in the fallen world, a place of toil, disease, violence, natural shocks and heartaches. We enter the world in a state of original sin, and this entrance is thenceforth and forever marked by a scar. The umbilicus, as the first scar, is the nexus whence all other physical scars radiate, the primal node of a web of accidents, mishaps, injuries and illnesses that forms an intricate and unique map of our passage through the world. Each body has its own uniquely patterned web of scars, and each scar tells its own story. The cicatrix is thus the imprint and bearer of memory, a sign by which man is revealed in his uniqueness, in the particularity of his own unrepeatable acts and sufferings, and the marks made on him by the latter.

When Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a wandering beggar, his old nurse, Eurycleia, recognises him by the scar on his leg, when, bidden by the unwitting Penelope, she washes his feet in the basin of ringing bronze. The cicatrix, once revealed, aches for its tale to be told. And at this moment of agonising suspense in the flow of Homer's epic, when it seems that Odysseus might be unmasked before he can exact his revenge on the upstart suitors, the narrative breaks off and the listener is taken back to Parnassus, whither the young Odysseus had journeyed to visit Autolycus, his mother's father, beloved of cunning Hermes. And thus begins the story of one of the most famous scars in all of literature. Hunting with the sons of Autolycus, among the windy hollows of Mount Parnassus, Odysseus corners a boar, within a glade on the steep forest-clad slopes. Charging from its deep, bosky lair, where neither the rainy winds blow nor the bright rays of Helios ever strike, the boar gashes Odysseus' thigh with its tusk, and in his turn the resourceful son of Laertes transfixes the beast with his spear. In the halls of Autolycus, on the hunters' return, the wound demands that its tale be told, the same as the scar (oulê) will demand that its memory be unfolded by the rhapsode once it is secretly revealed in the halls of Odysseus many years later, after the war on the windy plain of Troy and the many years of bitter wandering that followed. Unlike in the Odyssey, it is significant that in the Iliad, the epic of the wrath of Achilles, a narrative of never-ending fresh wounds, the word oulê (scarred-over wound, cicatrix) does not occur once.

Thus, the recounting of the wound is like a scar that forms a break in the tissue of the narrative. A text itself might be full of scars, if the author, like an over-zealous surgeon, wields the critic's knife, hacking away at even the flesh of healthy passages. Cicatricosus (full of scars) is the adjective used by Roman rhetorician Quntillian in his Institutio Oratoria to describe the bloodless works of those orators who cannot resist tinkering with their manuscripts whenever they have them in their hands, in the belief that every first draft must necessarily be riddled with faults. (1) Of course, for the Romans, who for everyday purposes wrote by incising letters with a stylus upon waxed tablets, a text could be a reticulation of scars in quite a literal sense.

The mind, too, has been likened to a waxed tablet, upon which impressions are imprinted. Impressions and thoughts are incised in the mind, each leaving a deeper or shallower scar. In the Satyricon, it is said that the man of true culture must smooth all irritation (scabitudo, from scabies, "roughness") from his mind without leaving any scar. (2) Ataraxy would therefore be a state of supreme scarlessness. But just as none can enter life unscarred, life itself cannot be lived without incurring or inflicting scars. And the cicatrix is both memory and the inscription of a tale.

(1) Quintillian, Instituio Oratoria 10 4.3. Sunt enim qui ad omnia scripta tanquam vitiosa redeant et, quasi nihil fas sit rectum ess quod primum est, melius existiment quidquid est aliud, idque faciant, quotiens librum in manus resumpserunt, similes medicis etiam integra sectantibus. accidit itaque ut cicatricosa sint et exasanguis et cura pejora. 

(2) Petronius, Satyricon 99. Tantum omnem scabitudinem animo tanquam bonarum artium magister delevet sine cicatrice.

Dies caniculares

Jonah

In the deep places of the earth,
in the utmost depths of the sea,
in the alveoli of the lungs,
in the ventricles of the heart,
in the cavities of the teeth,
in the vesicles of volcanic rock,
in the vacuoles of the cytoplasm,
in the innermost chambers of death,
in the penetralia of the mind,
in the hull of the swart ship,
in the keel of the muffled storm,
in the caul of oblivion,
in the calyx of the dream,
in the shuck of oyster darkness,
in the ventral cavern of the whale,
in the musty cell of a nutshell,
bounded sleeping, enclosed unfeeling,
enveloped fainting, forgetting,
I prayed that I be plucked
from the inner to the outer
surface of mine own hell.