A pluralitie of worlds

Angels, who do not propagate, nor multiply, were made at first in an abundant number; and so were starres: But for the things of this world, their blessing was, Encrease; for I think, I need not aske leave to think, that there is no Phoenix; nothing singular, nothing alone: Men that inhere upon Nature only, are so far from thinking, that there is any thing singular in this world, as that they will scarce thinke, that this world it selfe is singular, but that every Planet, and every Starre, is another World like this; They finde reason to conceive, not onely a pluralitie in every Species in the world, but a pluralitie of worlds.

 

John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and severall steps in my Sicknes: digested into 1. Meditations upon our Humane Condition. 2. Expostulations, and Debatements with God. 3. Prayers, upon the severall Occasions, to him. London. Printed by A.M. for Thomas Jones. 1624

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

 

A labyrinth made of labyrinths

The Universe is a labyrinth made of labyrinths. Each leads to another. And wherever we cannot go ourselves, we reach with mathematics. Out of mathematics we build wagons to carry us into the inhuman realms of the world. It is also possible to construct, out of mathematics, worlds outside the Universe, regardless of whether or not they exist. And then, of course, one can always abandon mathematics and its worlds, to venture with one's faith into the world-to-come. 

Stanisław Lem, Fiasco (1986), trans. Michael Kandel, Chapter 4

Hanenpoot

Hanenpoot (1807) is an eight-page picture booklet consisting of pen and ink drawings captioned with rhyming couplets, mostly four to a page, which was made by Willem Bilderdijk for his young son Julius Willem, and whose content is nonsensical and scatological. In Dutch, hanenpoot ('cockspur', Echinochloa crus-galli) can also mean 'illegible handwriting'. Unknown for more than one and a half centuries, Hanenpoot was published in facsimile in 1977 (Willem Bilderdijk, Hanenpoot - Prentenboek voor zijn zoontje Julius Willem, Tjeenk Willink).

                                Cockspur's a clever imp, no doubt,

                                He blows the candles in and out. 

 

 

                                His ingenuity he boasts,

                                When meat and bread alike he toasts.

 

                                Let each one choose the way he goes!

                                As for me, I walk upon my nose.

 

                                What Cockspur in his breeches sows

                                Might the next day smell like a rose.  

                      What fun it is for him to set   

                      Cockspurishness inside a net                 

 

                       Says Jonah, looking out: Beware,

                       Inside the fish there's room to spare.

Translation: Alistair Ian Blyth

Image sources:

 

The Bilderdijkkamer, exhibition curated by Professor Rick Honings in collaboration with Leiden University Libraries and the Things That Talk Foundation to mark the 265th anniversary of Bilderdijk's birth on 7 September 2021.

 75 jaar doodsverlangen: het leven van Bilderdijk in vogelvlucht, exhibition, KB Nationale Bibliotheek

 

Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831), poet and dramatist, historian and millenarianist, lawyer, reactionary satirist and vitriolic controversialist, anti-progress, anti-liberal, anti-democracy and anti-Enlightenment monarchist and mystical nationalist, theosophical Neoplatonist and metaphysical fatalist, was the author of a posthumously published thirteen-volume history of Holland (Geschiedenis des Vaderlands, ed. H. W. Tydeman, 1832-53). His collected poetic works (Dichtwerken, ed. I. da Costa, 1856-9) run to sixteen volumes and include De Geestenwareld (1811), which encapsulates his interest in Swedenborg, spiritualism and the esoteric, and the unfinished epic De ondergang der eerste wareld (1820), which narrates the world's decline from the Fall to the Flood. Bilderdijk believed that the Dutch language alone, if purged of corrupting French and Latin accretions, could provide access to prelapsarian knowledge, as the purest offshoot of the original language of paradise (See: Eijnatten, Joris van. “Vestige of the Third Force: Willem Bilderdijk, Poet, Anti-Skeptic, Millenarian.” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 2 (2001): 313–33).

 

“A monumental and grotesque figure, [Bilderdijk's] great talent and feeling made him appear the leader of a new golden age and think himself the chosen vessel of divine gifts, but his brilliant intellect is debased by lack of self-criticism and distorted by an egotistical and impulsive temperament. His originality and sometimes unbalanced passion are yet harnessed to neo-classical imagery and rococo flourish which mar the greater part of his work. His style is equally effusive whether he is expatiating on the evils of rationalism or the boiling of eggs” (The Penguin Companion to Literature, vol. 2: European, ed. Anthony Thorlby)

Dystheoric and aporetic speculations

Ὡς γὰρ οἱ ἐν νοσήμασι χρονίοις πρὸς τὰ κοινὰ βοηθήματα καὶ τὰς συνήθεις διαίτας ἀπειπόντες ἐπὶ καθαρμοὺς καὶ περίαπτα καὶ ὀνείρους τρέπονται, οὕτως ἀναγκαῖον ἐν δυσθεωρήτοις καὶ ἀπόροις σκέψεσιν, ὅταν οἱ κοινοὶ καὶ ἔνδοξοι καὶ συνήθεις λόγοι μὴ πείθωσι, πειρᾶσθαι τῶν ἀτοπωτέρων καὶ μὴ καταφρονεῖν, ἀλλ’ ἐπᾴδειν ἀτεχνῶς ἑαυτοῖς τὰ τῶν παλαιῶν καὶ διὰ πάντων τἀληθὲς ἐξελέγχειν·

 

Plutarch, Moralia 920 b-c

 

Just as those suffering from chronic diseases give up on the common remedies and the customary regimens and turn to purificatory offerings and periapts and dreams, so too in irreducible and insoluble speculations, when the common and generally accepted and customary arguments are unpersuasive, it is necessary to attempt those that are paradoxical and not to disdain them, but artlessly to repeat to ourselves the magic charms (*) of the ancients and to put the truth to the test by every means. 

 

(*) Cf. Plato, Phaedo 114d, where Socrates, after recounting the eschatological myth of the immortal soul's abodes in the next world, says that it is proper and worthy for the man of sense (νοῦν ἔχων ἀνήρ) to venture to believe such things, and even that he should repeat them to himself like magic charms (χρὴ τὰ τοιαῦτα ὥςπερ ἐπᾴδειν ἑαυτῷ)

Into the hollow halls of the Underworld must every poet venture

Weil vom Wohllaut deiner Lieder 

Selbst das Totenreich erbebte, 

Kam's, daß die Geliebte wieder 

In den lichten Äther schwebte.

 

Hättest du nur nicht so zweifelnd 

Deinen Blick züruckgewendet, 

Wäre ihr ein neues Leben 

Durch des Liedes Kraft gespendet.

 

In der Unterwelt Gehäuse

Muß sich jeder Dichter wagen,

Um wie Orpheus Eurydiken

In das Licht emporzutragen.

 

Meines Weinbergs Hyazinthen,

Welche Muskatduft verhauchen,

Haben ohne Zweifel Wurzeln,

Die bis in den Hades tauchen.

 

Dieser Duft ist wie ein Schlüssel

Zu den allerfernsten Räumen,

Wo die Geister aller Blumen

Ihre Liebesträume träumen.

 

Charons schwarzer Nachen kann nicht

Nach dem andern Ufer finden,

Ohen daß die lichten Horen

Hier ein Rosensträußchen winden.

 

 Friedrich Georg Jünger (1898-1977)

 At the euphony of your songs, the kingdom of the dead itself did tremble. It came about that the beloved did float once more into the bright upper air. / Had you not so doubtingly turned back your gaze, to her would have been granted new life through the power of song. / Into the hollow halls of the Underworld must every poet venture, that like Orpheus he might carry Eurydice up into the light. / There is no doubt that my vineyard hyacinths, which exhale a scent of musk, have roots that plunge into Hades. / This fragrance is like a key to the farthermost spaces, where the spirits of all flowers dream their dreams of love. / Charon's swart boat cannot reach the other shore unless here the bright hours wind a garland of roses.

The horrors of Sleep

Hell? but whence came the descriptions of its Torments? From the imagination? But who having experienced what can be suffered in distempered Sleep, will compare the imaginative unsensational power of the man awake with the imagination that the Soul produces & suffers in Sleep?---One of the most horrible of these states of Morbid Sleep is the Sensation that counterfeits Remorse---& actual Remorse we know, when intense, realizes all the horrors of Sleep & seems indeed the identity or co-inherence of Sleep & Wake, Reality and Imagination.---If then Hell mean, & I know no more rational meaning, the state & natural consequences of a diseased Soul abandoned to itself or additionally tortured by the very organic case which had before sheltered it, and the force of the blows & blunted the point and edge of the daggers---it must contain---& surpass all the description of Hell, that were the portraits of the disturbed imagination---/---To consider the proper consequences an Act or Course of Action is to consider the Act itself, and no way inconsistent with the hatred of Sin for its own sake. 

Entry 4846, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4: 1819-1826, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen, London: Routledge, 2002.

Caryatides

Bucharest

 

Wagner (2)

Wagner's operas tend towards magic delusion, to what Schopenhauer calls 'The outside of the worthless commodity', in short towards phantasmagoria. This is the basis of the primacy of harmonic and instrumental sound in his music. The great phantasmagorias that recur again and again occupy a central position in his work (...) The phantasmagorical nature of the Venusberg music can be analysed technically. Its characteristic sound is created by the device of diminution. A diminished forte predominates, the image of loudness from afar. (...) The Venusberg appears to Tannhäuser diminished in size. It is reminiscent of the distorting mirror effects of the Tanagra theatre that can still be found in fairgrounds and suburban cabarets. (...) the concept of illusion as the absolute reality of the unreal grows in importance. It sums up the unromantic side of the phantasmagoria: phantasmagoria as the point at which aesthetic appearance becomes a function of the character of the commodity. As a commodity it purveys illusions. The absolute reality of the unreal is nothing but the reality of a phenomenon that not only strives unceasingly to spirit away its own origins in human labour, but also, inseparably from this process and in thrall to exchange value, assiduously emphasizes its use value, stressing that this is its authentic reality, that it is 'no imitation' — and all this in order to further the cause of exchange value. In Wagner's day the consumer goods on display turned their phenomenal side seductively towards the mass of consumers while diverting attention from their merely phenomenal character, from the fact that they were beyond reach. Similarly, in the phantasmagoria, Wagner's operas tend to become commodities. Their tableaux assume the characters of wares on display.

Theodor Adorno, Verssuch über Wagner (1952),  

In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Verso, 2005, pp. 74-79

Entrance to the Venusberg

Wagner

At that time I was a great Wagnerian. I never lost an opportunity to hear Wagner's music either in the theatre or at concerts. Today I have lost my love for that music in which I feel something mawkish and immoral, something which is also perhaps bad. 

 

Giorgio de Chirico, Memorie della mia vita (1962),  

The Memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico, trans. Margaret Crosland, 

Peter Owen, London, 1971

 

 

Library-cities (2)

If the world lasts another thousand years and as many books are written as today, then I think entire library-cities will come into being; but time's attrition and various causes will destroy many of them. 

 

Godfrey William Leibnitz, Otium Hanoveranum, ed. Joachim Friedrich Feller, 

Leipzig: Johann Christian Martin, 1718.

 

Si mundus adhuc mille annos durabit, et tot libri, ut hodie, conscribentur, vereor, ne e Bibliothecis integræ civitates fiant; Sed iniuria temporum et casus varii multas perdent. 

 

Otium Hanoveranum, Sive, Miscellanea, Ex ore et schedis Illustris Viri, piæ memoriæ, Godofr. Guilielmi Leibnitii, S. Cæs. Maj. Consiliarii, et S. Reg. Maj. Britanniarum â Consiliis Justitiæ intimis, nec non à scribenda Historia, Quondam notata et descripta, Cum ipsi in colligendis et excerpendis rebus ad Historiam Brunsvicensem pertinentibus operam navaret, Joachimus Fridericus Fellerus, Secretarius Ducalis Saxo-Vinariensis. Additæ sunt coronidis loco Epistolæ Gallicæ amoebeæ Leibnitii et Pelissonii de Tolerantia Religionum et de controversiis quibusdam Theologicis, jampridem editæ, nunc recusa. Quibus præmissum est supplementu vitæ Leibnitianæ. 

Cum Privilegio Reg. Polon. et Elect. Saxon. Lipsiæ M DCC XIIX. 

Impensis Joann. Christiani Martini.

Library-cities

Die Bibliotheken werden endlich Städte werden, sagt Leibniz. [C 212]

Wenn, was Leibniz geweissagt hat, dereinst die Bibliotheken Städte werden, so wird es auch düstere Straßen und Schindergäßchen geben so wie jetzt. [J 861]

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), Sudelbücher

 

Libraries will finally become cities, says Leibniz. 

 

If, as Leibniz prophesied, libraries one day become cities, there will still be dismal streets and back alleys as there are now.

Infinite divisibility

Nothing is more pleasant to the fancy, than to enlarge itself, by degrees, in its contemplation of the various proportions which its several objects bear to each other, when it compares the body of man to the bulk of the whole earth, the earth to the circle it describes round the sun, that circle to the sphere of the fixed stars, the sphere of the fixed stars to the circuit of the whole creation, the whole creation itself to the infinite space that is every where diffused about it; or when the imagination works downward, and considers the bulk of a human body, in respect of an animal, a hundred times less than a mite, the particular limbs of such an animal, the different springs which actuate the limbs, the spirits which set these springs a-going, and the proportionable minuteness of these several parts, before they have arrived at their full growth and perfection. But if, after all this, we take the least particle of these animal spirits, and consider its capacity of being wrought into a world, that shall contain within those narrow dimensions a heaven and earth, stars and planets, and every different species of living creatures, in the same analogy and proportion they bear to each other in our own universe; such a speculation, by reason of its nicety, appears ridiculous to those who have not turned their thoughts that way, though, at the same time, it is founded on no less than the evidence of a demonstration. Nay, we might yet carry it farther, and discover in the smallest particle of this little world, a new inexhausted fund of matter, capable of being spun out into another universe. 

Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No. 420

Realism

Qu’il soit fondé sur un fait ou librement inventé, de toute façon ce n’est pas le sujet qui fait le roman, à plus forte raison ne peut-on lui demander de débrouiller les relations du « vrai » et du « feint », dont la complexité outrepasse de beaucoup l'opposition tranchée admise par les articles des dictionnaires. A strictement parler, en effet, tout est « feint » dans un monde créé de toutes pièces pour être écrit : quelque traitement qu'elle subisse et sous quelque forme qu’elle soit suggérée, la réalité romanesque est fictive, ou plus exactement, c’est toujours une réalité de roman, où des personnages de roman ont une naissance, une mort, des aventures de roman. En ce sens on peut dire qu’il n’y a ni plus ni moins de réalité dans les Voyages de Gulliver que dans Madame Bovary, dans le Château que dans David Copperfield, dans Don Quichotte que dans un roman des Goncourt ou de Zola. Le Prague de Kafka n’est pas plus irréel que le Londres de Dickens ou le Saint-Pétersbourg de Dostoïevski, les trois villes n’ont que la réalité empirique des livres où elles sont créées, celle d’objets dont rien ne tient lieu et qui ne remplacent rien, mais qui viennent un jour s’ajouter réellement aux autres objets réels du monde. Le degré de réalité d’un roman n’est jamais chose mesurable, il ne représente que la part d’illusion dont le romancier se plaît à jouer.

 Marthe Robert, Roman des origines et origines du roman, Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1972

 

Mundus mortuorum

When you get to the end of this book [The Third Policeman] you realise that my hero or main character (he's a heel and a killer) has been dead throughout the book and that all the queer ghastly things which have been happening to him are happening in a sort of hell which he has earned for the killing. Towards the end of the book (before you know he's dead) he manages to get back to his own house where he used to live with another man who helped in the original murder. Although he's been away 3 days, this other fellow is 20 years older and dies of fright when he sees the other lad standing in the door. Then the two of them walk back along the road to the hell place and start going thro' all the same terrible adventures again, the first fellow being surprised and frightened at everything just as he was the first time and as if he'd never been through it before. It is made clear that this sort of thing goes on forever - and there you are. It's supposed to be very funny but I don't know about that either. If it's ever published I'll send you a copy. I envy you the way you write just what you want to and like it when it's finished. I can never seem to get anything just right. Nevertheless, I think the idea of a man being dead all the time is pretty new. When you are writing about the world of the dead - and the damned - where none of the rules and laws (not even the law of gravity) holds good, there is any amount of scope for back-chat and funny cracks. 

 

Flann O'Brien to William Saroyan, 14 February 1940

The dark star

Quare ex particulis hic mundus constat, ac ille


Ex totis, vivis per se, distantibus a se,


Singula nonnulli credunt quoque sidera posse


Dici orbes, terramque appellant sidus opacum,


Cui minimus divum praesit: quia nubibus infra


Imperium teneat, producatque omnia solus,


Corpora, quae aequor habet, tellusque infimus aër:

Umbrarum dominus, simulacraque viva gubernans, 

Cui data sit rerum cura et moderamen earum:

Quae quia non durant, sed tempore corrumpuntur


Exiguo, prope nil possunt, umbraeque vocari.


Hic reor est Pluton, a quo tenebrosa teneri

Regna canunt vates: namque infra nubila nox est,


Supra autem lux clara nitet, splendorque perennis:


Huic igitur, tanquam minimo, Deus ille deorum

Rex genitorque dedit vilissima regna, aliosque


Ut quisque est melior, melioribus addidit astris,


Imperiumque suum natis divisit habendum.

Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus,  Zodiacus vitae (1536), Liber VII

By reason of the fact that this world consists of parts, and that world(*) of wholes, living through themselves, separate from each other, some believe that each star may be said to be a world, and they call the Earth the dark star, over which reigns the least of the gods,(†) for he wields power underneath the clouds, where he alone generates all things, the lord of shadows, governing the living simulacra that are the bodies which exist in sea, on land, and in lower air. To him is given the care and management of these things which, since they do not last, but waste away in a short time, scarcely deserve to be called even shadows. I deem him to be the same Pluto who, so the ancient bards sing, rules the dark kingdom, for underneath the clouds it is night, whereas up above pure light and eternal splendour shine. To him, therefore, as the least of them all, the God of gods, King and Creator, gave the basest realms. The other gods, in order of which was the better, He joined to better stars, dividing the rule of his kingdom among his sons.

* The preceding lines lay out a Platonic hierarchy of Being in descending order, from the higher world of the noumenal to the lower world of the phenomenal, from light to darkness, from indivisible wholes to sundry parts.

† Quoted by Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1.1.2.2): 'The air is not so full of flies in summer as it is at all times of invisible devils: this Paracelsus stiffly maintains, and that they have every one their several chaos; others will have infinite worlds, and each world his peculiar spirits, gods, angels, and devils to govern and punish it. Singula nonnulli credunt . . .  Cui minimus divum praesit.'

Words and things

I wish you to write a book on the power of words, and the processes by which human feelings form affinities with them—in short, I wish you to philosophize Horn Tooke’s system, and to solve the great Questions—whether there be reason to hold, that an action bearing all the semblance of pre-designing Consciousness may yet be simply organic, & whether a series of such actions are possible—and close on the heels of this question would follow the old “Is Logic the Essence of Thinking?” in other words—Is thinking impossible without arbitrary signs? &—how far is the word “arbitrary” a misnomer? Are not words &c parts & germinations of the Plant? And what is the Law of their Growth?—In something of this order I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of Words & Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, & living Things too. 

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, letter to William Godwin, September 1800

Tout est crasse

Nicolas Poussin, Le Triomphe de Cthulu (1633)

Mercredi 10 juillet [1957]

Bref nous vivons au milieu de crétins, en plein crétinisme, chez les sourds et chez les aveugles, que la prétention rend impardonnables puisqu’elle les prive des bénéfices de la naïveté, propre aux limites d’un organisme qui ne se transcende que pour prendre les mauvaises routes. Prêtrise, police, tout cela dans un monde où, s’il existait un humour supérieur au lieu de puissances atroces et bestiales, les hommes seraient sans cesse giflés et bottés par des mains et par des pieds énigmatiques. Mais hélas, tout est crasse, l’éternité, l’infini comme le reste, et la puanteur dont Lovecraft accompagne les manifestations de l’inconnu illustre à merveille la terrible parole de Renan : « Il se pourrait que la vérité fût triste. » Devenue pour moi : « La vérité est triste. D’autant plus triste qu’il n’y a même pas de vérité. »

Jean Cocteau, Le Passé défini, vol. 5, 1956-1957, eds. Pierre Caizergues, Francis Ramirez, Christian Rolot, Paris: Gallimard, 2006, p. 621

In short, we live in the midst of idiots, in complete idiocy, among the deaf and the blind, whose pretension makes them unforgivable because it deprives them of the benefits of the naïveté peculiar to the limits of an organism that goes beyond itself only to take the wrong path. Priesthood, rules of polite society, all this in a world in which, if there existed some higher humour instead of atrocious, bestial powers, people would be constantly slapped and kicked by enigmatic hands and feet. But unfortunately, all is crass, eternity, infinity the same as everything else, and the stench which in Lovecraft* goes along with the manifestations of the unknown perfectly illustrates the grim words of Renan: ‘It may be that the truth is bleak.’ Which for me becomes: ‘The truth is bleak. All the bleaker for there not even being any truth.’

* In 1954, Cocteau had remarked on the stench emanated by Lovecraft’s entities of cosmic evil, when reading Jacques Papy's newly published translations La Couleur tombée du ciel (Paris: Denoël, 1954) and Dans l’abîme du temps (Paris: Denoël, 1954):

[24 octobre 1954] Importance olfactive chez Lovecraft. Son invisible pue. (Ce qui est étrange car il se dénonce par une infecte odeur.) 

Importance of the olfactory in Lovecraft. His invisible [world] stinks. (Which is strange since it gives itself away by a vile odour.)

[14 novembre 1954] L’aspect qu’il donne à ses abominable entités et l’odeur infecte qu’elles répandent autor d’elles ne varient guère d’un conte à l’autre.

The aspect that he lends his abominable entities and the vile odour that they give off varies barely at all from one story to another.

In October 1954, on learning that Hemingway has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Cocteau remarks on the triumph of mediocrity (‘Le médiocre marche tout seul’) and the epoch of journalists who think themselves great modern writers, whereas it took many years for Lovecraft to be translated into French and there are no publishers or translators to be found for Bierce, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu.

Claude Gellée (Le Lorrain), Paysage avec le dieu Cthulu (1634)

A sleep deeper than death

Ich brauche zu meinem Schreiben Abgeschiedenheit, nicht „wie ein Einsiedler“, das wäre nicht genug, sondern wie ein Toter. Schreiben in diesem Sinne ist ein tieferer Schlaf, also Tod, und so wie man einen Toten nicht aus seinem Grabe ziehen wird und kann, so auch mich nicht vom Schreibtisch in der Nacht. 

Franz Kafka, Brief an Felice Bauer, 26.vi.1926

I need isolation for my writing, not ‘like a hermit’, that would not be enough, but like a dead man. Writing in this sense is a sleep deeper than death, and just as one would not and could not drag a dead man out of his grave, so too I will not and cannot be dragged from my writing desk in the night.

Somnial or Morphean Space

Now I propose to note down the characteristics of Dreams, especially my infernal Dreams, as they occur to me—as so many parts of the Problem to be solved. [...]

    The first point of course is the Vision itself—that we see without eyes and hear without Ears.—

    The second (& which I have never seen noticed) is—that we live without consciousness of Breathing. You never suppose the Men & Women of the Dream to breathe—<you do not suppose them not to breathe>—the thought is wholly suspended—and absent from your consciousness. 

    The third concerns the qualities & relations of Somnial or Morphean Space— [...]

    The fourth is the spontaneity of the Dream-personages—Each is its own centre—herein so widely differing from the vivid thoughts & half-images of poetic Day-dreaming. —In sleep you are perfectly detached from the Dramatis Personæ—and they are from you.

    The 5th is the whimsical transfer of familiar Names and the sense of Identity and Individuality to the most unlike Forms & Faces. [...]

    6th. Conversion of bodily Pain into some passion of the Mind—Heart-burn becomes intense Grief, with bitter Weeping; Pain in the Umbilical Region becomes Terror [...]

    7th. Imaginary Air-piercing, Air-shooting, skimming, soaring by successive Jerks of Volition or rather a nisus-analogue of inward volition./

    8. & most interesting—the apparent representative character of particular Forms and Images, repr. I mean, each of some particular organ or structure—Ex. gr. I have never of later years awaked, desiderio mingendi*, but the preceding Dream had presented some water-landskip, Lake, River, Pond, or Splashes, Water-pits. [...]

    9. The frustration most common in Dreams.

    10. Non-descript & yet not composite Animals—the magnificent Fassades [sic] of Architecture. 

    11. The occasional sui generis Elysean Sunshine—/ 

 

Entry 5360, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4: 1819-1826, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen, London: Routledge, 2002.

 * desiderio mingendi - with the urge to urinate

 

Dark reflections from below all life

Habitually to dream magnificently, a man must have a constitutional determination to reverie. This in the first place; and even this, where it exists strongly, is too much liable to disturbance from the gathering agitation of our present English life. Already, what by the procession through fifty years of mighty revolutions amongst the kingdoms of the earth, what by the continual development of vast physical agencies,—steam in all its applications, light getting under harness as a slave for man, powers from heaven upon education and accelerations of the press, powers from hell (as it might seem, but these also celestial) coming round upon artillery and the forces of destruction,—the eye of the calmest observer is troubled; the brain is haunted as if by some jealousy of ghostly beings moving amongst us; and it becomes too evident that, unless this colossal pace of advance can be retarded (a thing not to be expected) [...] left to itself, the natural tendency of so chaotic a tumult must be to evil; for some minds to lunacy, for others a reagency of fleshly torpor. How much this fierce condition of eternal hurry upon an arena too exclusively human in its interests is likely to defeat the grandeur which is latent in all men, may be seen in the ordinary effect from living too constantly in varied company. The word dissipation, in one of its uses, expresses that effect; the action of thought and feeling is consciously dissipated and squandered. [...]

 

Among the powers in man which suffer by this too intense life of the social instincts, none suffers more than the power of dreaming. Let no man think this a trifle. The machinery for dreaming planted in the human brain was not planted for nothing. That faculty, in alliance with the mystery of darkness, is the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy. And the dreaming organ, in connexion with the heart, the eye, and the ear, compose the magnificent apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers of the human brain, and throws dark reflections from eternities below all life upon the mirrors of the sleeping mind. 

Thomas de Quincey, ‘Dreaming’, Suspiria de Profundis, 1845

The harmfulness of knowledge

Scientiæ suntne inutiles?

 

R. Ita probatur. I. Rhetorica est ars mentiendi, ex albo facit nigrum, hominem candidæ vitæ atramento & meris carbonibus denigrat. Theologia superat captum nostrum. Medicina boletos venenatos & artem intoxicandi nos docuit; Ars conquinaria gulositatem inducit. Imo Historiographicus quidam tradit nescio in quo libro coquos in causa fuisse ut dives ille helluo Evangelicus ad inferos descenderit. Nisi enim cibos opipare conditos illi apposuissent non ita genio indulsisset; summa summarum scientia multa incommoda procreat, inducit vigilias, parit catharros, &c. Qualis autem effectus talis causa. Ergo conferamus nos omnes ad Abbatem fratrum ignorantiæ, missos faciamus alchymistas cum suo auro imaginario, Philosophos cum ente rationis, &c. Arrigite aures auditores sicuti lepores; hoc enim scriptum inveni in vocabulo Reformatorum, quam pravam imaginationem tum perversis quibusdam hominibus ademeris, cum crepitum ex asino mortuo extruseris.  

 

Nugæ Venales, sive Thesaurus Ridendi et Jocandi. Ad Gravissimos Severissimosque Viros, Patres Melancholicorum Conscriptos. Anno 1689. Prostant Neminem; sed tamen Ubique. 

 

Is knowledge harmful?

Answer. Yes, proven thus: 1. Rhetoric is the art of lying, it makes white black, with ink and bare coals it dyes black the man whose life is pure white. Theology soars above our ken. Medicine teaches us deadly mushrooms and the art of poisoning. The art of cookery leads to gluttony. There's even a historian who puts forward in some book or other that it was because of cooks that the gourmandising rich man of the Gospel descended to hell. If they hadn't set those lavishly seasoned meals before him, he wouldn't have indulged in such good living; all in all, much knowledge begets inconveniences, it keeps you up at night, it gives you a runny nose, etc. As the effect, so the cause. Therefore let all us join brother Abbot of Ignorance, let us send packing the alchemists and their imaginary gold, the philosophers and their ens rationis,* etc. Listeners, pluck up your ears like rabbits, for I have devised this text in the name of the Reformers: you would as much deprive certain bad men of their mistaken mental image as you could squeeze a fart out of a dead donkey.

 

* ens rationis - entity that exists only in the mind. Entia rationis are opposed to entia realia, beings that have a real existence outside the mind. 

translation: Alistair Ian Blyth

Toad-imp whispers

26 April 1826. Wednesday Night. This Morning a little before three suffered one of my most grievous and alarming <Scream->Dreams—and on at length struggling myself awake found just such a focus of Ferment just above the Navel as if the Dæmon of Aqua Fortis had just closed in with the Genie Magnesia, or as if a Chocolate Mill were making a Water-spout dance a reel in dizzy-frisk.—It is strongly impressed on my mind, that I shall imitate my dear Father in this as faithfully as Nature imitates or repeats him in me in so many other points—viz. that I shall die in sleep […]
    Since I first read Swedenborg’s De Coelo et de Inferno ex Auditis et Visis, every horrid Dream, that I have, my thoughts involuntarily turn to the passage […] (indeed to the whole Book I am indebted for imagining myself always in Hell, i.e. imagining all the wild Chambers, Ruins, Prisons, Bridewells, to be in Hell)—Sunt Spiritus, qui nondum in conjunctione cum Inferno sunt: illi amant indigesta et maligna, qualia sunt sordescentium Ciborum in Ventriculo*—Swedenborg had often talked with them, and driven them away, & immediately the poor Sleeper’s frightful Dreams were removed, they being the spiritual Linguifacture of these Toad-Imps’ whispers. 

 

Entry 5360, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4: 1819-1826, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen, London: Routledge, 2002.

 

* There are spirits that are not yet conjoined with Hell: they love things undigested and malignant such as befouled victuals in the belly.

Privy matters (4)

Quænam in mundo admiranda?

 

Resp. Quod omnes cornices sint nigræ; quod ratti æque cito currant ac mures; quod canes ossa arrodant et duglutiant; quod rusticus armaturam induat, galeam capiti imponat, hastam arripiat ad defendendum pullos gallinaceos, cum singulis diebus tam diligenter observentur a vulpium orphanis. Mirabile quod feles nequam post cœnam, densis existentibus tenebris, sine lumine, sine gladio, sine pileo, nudis auribus pedibusque, absque crepidis calopodiisque audeant aggredi ingentem exercitum honestorum murium et glirium. Mirabilius quod hiems nunquam ita caleat sicuti æstas; uti legitur apud Quinquarillam,* sine perspicillo† in libro per omnia albo, in illis verbis pata, pata, pon.§ Mirabilissimum omnes fœminas hoc vitio laborare, ut per unum idemque foramen mingant et cacent, cum (scilicet) latrinæ podicem obverterint.

 

Nugæ Venales, sive Thesaurus Ridendi et Jocandi. Ad Gravissimos Severissimosque Viros, Patres Melancholicorum Conscriptos. Anno 1689. Prostant Neminem; sed tamen Ubique. 

What things in the world are to be marvelled at?

Answer. That all crows are black; that rats run as fast as mice; that dogs gnaw and suck bones; that the peasant dons armour, puts a helmet on his bonce, lays hold of a spear to defend his hens’ chicks, as noted by orphaned fox cubs every day. It is a marvel that rascally cats, emerging in post-prandial pitch darkness, without a light, without a sword, without a cap, their ears and feet bare, dispensing with sandals and clogs, dare to attack the vast army of noble mice and dormice. More marvellous still is that winter is never as hot as summer, as may be read in the Quinquarilla, without eyeglasses, a book completely blank, worded tappity-tappity-tap. Most marvellous of all is that all women labour under the fault that they micturate and defecate through the same orifice, as is obvious from the fact that in both cases they turn their rump to the privy .

* Quinquarilla (fem. sing.) - ‘Five-Basket’, a hapax legomenon, derived from quasillum, the diminutive of qualus ‘wicker basket’, and perhaps with an echo of Quinquatria (neut. pl.), a Roman festival of Minerva thus named, according to Varro, because it began five days after the Ides of March. The anonymous author of the Nugae Venales (first published in 1632), a work steeped in the Latin-speaking student (sub)culture of the German universities, here provides an inventive translation of the phrase ‘the first Shrove Tuedsay basket’, found in Bruscambille’s ‘Autre prologue & discours’ (Fantaisies, 1612): ‘Comme li se lit sans lunettes au premier pannier de Mardy gras en ces mots pata, pata, pon.’ On borrowings from Bruscambille in the Nugae Venales, see: Annette Tomarken, ‘Borrowed Nonsense: The Nugae Venales and the Prologues of Bruscambille’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, Vol. 64 (2015).

† perspicillus - the word for telescope used by Galileo in the Sidereus Nuncius (1610) and which in subsequent early modern texts was also used in the sense of ‘eyeglasses’.

§ pata, pata, pon - onomatopoeic. ‘Mot inventé pour exprimer le bruit d’un tambour’: Philibert-Joseph le Roux, Dictionnaire Comique, Satyrique, Critique, Burlesque, Libre et Proverbial. Avec une Explication très-fidèle de toutes les manières de parler Burlesques, Comiques, Libres, Satyriques, Critiques & Proverbiales, qui peuvent se rencontrer dans les meilleurs Auteurs, tant Anciens que Modernes. Le Tout Pour faciliter aux Etrangers, & aux François mêmes, l’intelligence de toutes sortes de Livres (Lyon, 1735).

Privy matters (1)

 

Privy matters (2) 

Privy matters (3)

Une maison onirique

La poésie, dans sa grande fonction, nous redonne les situations du songe. La maison natale est plus qu'un corps de logis, elle est un corps de songes. Chacun de ses réduits fut un gîte de rêverie. Et le gîte a souvent particularisé la rêverie. Nous y avons pris des habitudes de rêverie particuliere. La maison, la chambre, le grenier où l'on été seul, donnent les cadres d'une rêverie interminable, d'une rêverie que la poésie pourrait seule, par une œuvre, achever, accomplir. Si l'on donne à toutes ces retraites leur fonction qui fut d'arbitrer des songes, on peut dire [...] qu'il existe pour chacun de nous une maison onirique, une maison du souvenir-songe, perdue dans l'ombre d'un au-delà du passé vrai. 

Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l'espace, Presses Universitaires de France, 1957

The great function of poetry is to restore to us the situations of the dream. The house of our birth is more than an embodiment of home, it is an embodiment of dreams. Its every corner was a refuge for reverie. And often the refuge placed its distinguishing mark on the reverie. It was here that we acquired the habits of distinctive reverie. The house, the bedroom, the attic where we were alone furnished the frameworks of endless reverie, of a reverie that only poetry, through a poetic work, would otherwise be able to accomplish, to attain. If we grant to all these refuges their function of having arbitrated dreams, we may say that there exists for each of us an oneiric house, a house of dream-memory, lost in the shadow of an otherworld of the real past.

Quis nasus est optimus?

Quis nasus est optimus?

R. Magnus. Vide catalogum Imperatorum Romanorum, omnes fuerunt nasuti. Numa secundus rex Romanorum sesquipedalem nasum habebat, ideoque nominatus fuit Pompilius, quasi dicas, nasus in superlativo gradu. Lycurgus et Solon habebant insignem nasum, si fides sit adhibenda Plutarcho. Summa omnes reges Italiae fuerunt nasuti, excepto Tarquinio superbo, qui ideo etiam urbe et regno pulsus fuit. Quisque apprehendat nasum suum, et videat, num possit fieri Imperator. Qui habent magnum nasum cæteris sapientiores sunt, et melius exercent animi functiones, quia melius excrementa exeunt. Unde Homerus quia era sapiens nasutus dicitur. Et proverbio illi dicuntur prudentes qui e longinquo odorantur, et de stupido dicitur, non habet nasum. 

Nugæ Venales, sive Thesaurus Ridendi et Jocandi. Ad Gravissimos Severissimosque Viros, Patres Melancholicorum Conscriptos. Anno 1689. Prostant Neminem; sed tamen Ubique.

Which nose is best?

Answer. Big. See the list of Roman Emperors: all had big noses.* Numa, the second king of the Romans, had a one-and-a-half-foot nose, on which account he was named Pompilius,† as if to say 'nose in the superlative degree'. Lycurgus and Solon had prominent noses, if that which Plutarch reports is reliable. In the main, all the kings of Italy were big-nosed, with the exception of Tarquin the Proud, who for that very reason was expelled from the city and kingdom. Whoever can grasp his own nose in his hand, whoever can see the end of his own nose, might be made Emperor. Those who have big noses are wiser than anybody else and better able to exercise the mental faculties, because they are better able to pass mucus. Whence Homer was said to be big-nosed because he was wise. Also, the intelligent are proverbially those who can smell from afar, whereas it is said that the stupid have no nose. 

 

* Cf. Dante, Purgatorio, Canto 7, where, in listing the late-repentant negligent rulers, Sordello dwells on their nasal appendages: Philip III of France is 'quel nasetto', or 'the snub-nosed one' (Purg. 7, 103), Peter III of Aragon is 'colui dal maschio naso', or 'he of the manly nose' (Purg. 7, 113), Peter, son of Charles I of Anjou, is 'nasuto', or 'big-nosed' (Purg. 7, 124).

† Pompilius, the name of a Roman gens, derives from the Greek πομπίλος, the pilot-fish (Gasterosteus ductor), a term sometimes also applied to the nautilus, but here it is humorously taken to derive from the early modern Dutch pompe or Middle Low German pompe, pumpe, a wooden water pipe or ship's pump.

Privy matters (3)

 —then the fantastic puppet-old-man that threw himself in my way and under my feet where ever I went—my intreatng some one to take him away—and a huge bloater fat fellow came & sat on him, saying, there was no other way—I went it—and a villainous little dog contrived to fly at me & bit me, with a sharp nip (the nearest imitation of proper pain, that I have found occur in sleep—Some one of the half-friendly Inhabitants of the Sleep-world observed, that the little old man had contrived to let the dog slip in the moment, the fat fellow sate on him—then the Drama of Puppets—& that I must stay it out before I could go to relieve myself—but I grew angry—& stole away down a hollow lane that led to a river, on the other side of which was a field or plot with a number of rather pretty yet fear-inspiring Child-men, with sheaves, as in a harvest field, of dry exceedingly light <Bean> Halms or the dried out Rushes in a dry summer ditch/ —I was on a sloping hillock or bank of the River—& said to myself—These are Tieck’s Fairies / alluding in my mind to the exquisite tale of the Girl who passed from Childhood to Womanhood among the Fairies & supposed she had been only a few hours / —and then a white-faced Boy came on the left of the harvest field but the other side of the Stream, as if to watch what I was about to do—and as I thought, to bring the natives about me, should I persist in profaning the place by letting down my small clothes— —& in this uneasy feeling I awoke—.. P.S. I had deferred taking my regular quantity of Mustard Seed till the moment, that I was undressing—three hours later than my wont—& in consequence, had to undergo all the process in sleep / But from these dreams (and no week occurs in which I have not one or two; always originating in the Kidneys, or Bladder, or Intestinal Canal) I derive convincing confirmation of the diversity between Reason & Understanding. The latter we retain in Dreams—it is “I” still, & the Understanding belongs to “I”—but Reason is a Loan, a Light.—The memory is lost: for it is objectivity that differences Memory from Fancy—and Objectivity, the offspring of Reason, is by divine ordinance connected with the Senses in our present fallen state—We have not God within; but must look out of ourselves for him.

 

Entry 5641, November 1827,  The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 5: 1827-1834, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Anthony John Harding, Routledge, 2002