Cabinet Issue 59, The North

c

A QUARTERLY OF ART AND CULTURE ISSUE 59 THE NORTH US $12 CANADA $12 UK £7

CABINET 181 Wyckoff Street Brooklyn, NY 11217 USA phone + 1 718 222-8434 fax + 1 718 222-3700 info @ cabinetmagazine.org www.cabinetmagazine.org

POSTMASTER Please send address changes to Cabinet, 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217.

Cabinet (USPS # 020-348, ISSN 1531-1430) is a quarterly magazine published by Immaterial Incorporated, 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217. Periodicals Postage paid at Brooklyn, NY, and additional mailing offices.

Issue 59, Fall 2016 Printed in Belgium by Die Keure, whose home is to the north of ours.

Cover: Evgenia Arbugaeva, Slava in his Handmade Boat, 2014. This image is part of “Weather Man,” a suite of photographs by Arbugaeva documenting the life of Vyacheslav “Slava” Korotki, a Russian meteorologist stationed alone since 2001 on a small peninsula in the Barents Sea. For more on the series, see <evgeniaarbugaeva.com>.

ADVERTISING phone + 1 718 222-8434 advertising @ cabinetmagazine.org DISTRIBUTION Cabinet is available in the US and Canada through Disticor, which distributes both using its own network and through Ingram, Ubiquity, Hudson News, Media Marketing Research, Small Changes, Cowley Distribution, Kent News, MSolutions, the News Group, Chris Stadler, and Don Olson Distribution.

To carry Cabinet through one of these distributors, contact Melanie Raucci at Disticor: phone + 1 631 587-1160, mraucci @ disticor.com Cabinet is available in Europe and elsewhere through Central Books, London: orders @ centralbooks.com Cabinet is available worldwide as a book, with an ISBN, through DAP: phone + 1 212 627-1999, dap@dapinc.com For further information, contact: circulation @ cabinetmagazine.org INDIVIDUAL SUBSCRIPTIONS 1 year (4 issues): US $32 Canada $38 Western Europe $40 Elsewhere $50

2 years (8 issues): US $60 Canada $72 Western Europe $76 Elsewhere $96

Please send a check in US dollars made out to “Cabinet,” or mail, fax, or email us your Visa/MC/AmEx/Discover info to: 181 Wyckoff Street Brooklyn, NY 11217 USA phone + 1 718 222-8434 fax + 1 718 222-3700 subscriptions @ cabinetmagazine.org www.cabinetmagazine.org/subscribe INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS Institutional subscriptions are available through library agencies such as EBSCO, or directly from Cabinet: www.cabinetmagazine.org/subscribe SUBMISSIONS We only accept submissions via email. Guidelines available at: www.cabinetmagazine.org/information/submissions.php Contents © 2015 Immaterial Incorporated and the authors and artists.

All rights in the magazine reserved by Immaterial Incorporated, and rights in the works contained herein reserved by their owners. Fair users are of course free to do their thing. The views published here are not necessarily those of the writers and artists, let alone the editors of Cabinet, who go south whenever things get tough.

Editor-in-chief Sina Najafi Senior editor Jeffrey Kastner Editors D. Graham Burnett, Christopher Turner UK editor Brian Dillon Art director Everything Studio Operations manager William Simpson Associate editor Julian Lucas Website directors Ryan O’Toole, Luke Murphy Editors-at-large Saul Anton, Sasha Archibald, Mats Bigert, Brian Conley, Christoph Cox, Jeff Dolven, Leland de la Durantaye, Jesse Lerner, Jennifer Liese, Ryo Manabe, Alexander Nagel, George Prochnik, Frances Richard, Daniel Rosenberg, Aaron Schuster, David Serlin, Debra Singer, Justin E. H. Smith, Margaret Sundell, Allen S. Weiss, Eyal Weizman, Margaret Wertheim, Gregory Williams, Jay Worthington, Tirdad Zolghadr Contributing editors Molly Blieden, Eric Bunge, Pip Day, Charles Green, Adam Jasper, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Lytle Shaw, Cecilia Sjöholm, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Sven-Olov Wallenstein Events Bryony Quinn (London) Cabinet national librarian Matthew Passmore

Cabinet is a non-profit 501(c)(3) magazine published by Immaterial Incorporated. Our survival depends on support from generous foundations and individuals. Please consider supporting us at whatever level you can. Donations are tax-deductible for those who deal with Uncle Sam. All gifts are acknowledged online. Contributions of $25 or more will be acknowledged in the next possible issue; those above $100 will be noted in four issues. Checks to “Cabinet” can be sent to our office; please write “This will thaw your hearts” on the envelope.

Cabinet wishes to thank the following visionary foundations and individuals for their support of our activities during 2015–2016.

Additionally, we will forever be indebted to the extraordinary contribution of the Flora Family Foundation from 1999 to 2004; without their support, this publication would not exist. We would also like to extend our enormous gratitude to the Orphiflamme Foundation and the Opaline Fund for their generous support. $100,000 The Lambent Foundation $50,000 The Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts $15,000 The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs $10,000 The National Endowment for the Arts $8,000 The New York State Council on the Arts $3,000 The Danielson Foundation $1,500–$2,500 Stina & Herant Katchadourian, Terry Winters $501–$1,000 Anonymous, Martha & Thomas G. Armstrong, Sara Clugage, Spencer Finch, Alexander Nagel, Steven Rand & Nancy Wender, Christian Scheidemann, Sandy Tait & Hal Foster $500 or under Pamela Cederquist, Steven Igou, Deborah Lovely, Meredith Martin & Joshua Siegel & Maisie Martin Siegel, Lenore & Richard Niles, Case Randall, Margaret Sundell & Reinaldo Laddaga $250 or under Tauba Auerbach, Jeff Beall, Freya Cooper Kiddie, Mia Enell & Nicholas Fries, George Ganat, Jair Gonzalez, Alex Goodfriend, Cynthia Hansen, Peter Hapstak, Peter Jaszi, Craig Kalpakjian, James Katzenberger, Carin Kuoni & John Oakes, Scott LeBouef, Tod Lippy, Paul McConnell, Elizabeth Merena, Helen Mirra, Jason Olin, Andrew Pederson, Paul Ramirez Jonas, John Sargent, Eric Schmid, Pooja Shah & Rebecca Ward, John Sherburne, James Siena, Debra Singer & Jay Worthington, Jude Tallichet & Matt Freedman $100 or under Mark Allen, John Baldwin, Charlie Beard, Anne Brydon, John Carney, Alf Coles, Carrie Cooperider, Chris Davidson, Vernon Edwards, Dan Fogarty, Susan Harris, Adriana Lima, Molly McGee, Fabienne Radi, Michael Regnier, Lisa Sanditz & Tim Davis, Gretchen Schaffner, Nasrine Seraji, Georgios Sirmpos, Liesel Sylwester, Trilety Wade, Stephen Walker, William Whitmer, Christopher Williams, Catherine Vu

CONTRIBUTORS Jonathan Allen is a London-based artist and writer, and a curator at the Magic Circle Museum. His book Lost Envoy: The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare will be published in 2016 by Strange Attractor Press. For more information, visit <jonathanallen.info>.

Julian Lucas is a writer from New Jersey and an associate editor of Cabinet. He has published in the New York Review of Books and the Harvard Advocate, where he edited the 2015 “Possession” issue. He is currently working on a book of essays about historical reenactments, computer games, and the Underground Railroad.

David Birkin is an Anglo-American artist working in London and New York. He studied anthropology at Oxford University and fine art at the Slade School of Fine Art, and was a studio fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. Birkin has written for Creative Time Reports, the Harvard Advocate, and the American Civil Liberties Union, and has been an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Art and Law Program in New York. His solo exhibition “Mouths at the Invisible Event” was held at the Mosaic Rooms in London in 2015. For more information, visit <davidbirkin.net>.

Dominic Pettman is chair of the Department of Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research and a professor of culture and media at Eugene Lang College, New York. He has published numerous books, including Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Infinite Distraction: Paying Attention to Social Media (Polity, 2015), and Humid, All Too Humid (Punctum Books, 2016). Forthcoming titles include Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More, and Less, than Human (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and Sonic Intimacies: Voice, Species, Technics (Stanford University Press, 2017).

D. Graham Burnett is an editor of Cabinet and teaches at Princeton University. Recent work includes “The Exercise of the Trochilus” at the Asian Arts Theater, Gwangju, South Korea; “The Bogaziçi ˘ Rolls” at SALT (Galata), Istanbul; and “The Hale Transcripts,” as part of the 2016 Prague Quadrennial. He is affiliated with the collective ESTAR(SER). For more information, visit <estarser.net>.

Jessica Segall is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. She is a 2015 recipient of a New York State Council on the Arts grant for video and a 2015–2016 resident at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program.

Upcoming exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts will include sculptural work involving live bees. For more information, visit <jessicasegall.com>.

Polly Dickson is a PhD candidate in the French and German departments at the University of Cambridge working on the literature of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Honoré de Balzac. She is a former editorial assistant of Cabinet.

Justin E. H. Smith teaches the history of science at the University of Paris 7 Diderot. He is the author, most recently, of The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Leland de la Durantaye is a professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College. The translator of Jacques Jouet’s Upstaged (Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), he is also the author of Beckett’s Art of Mismaking (Harvard University Press, 2016), Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford University Press, 2009), and Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (Cornell University Press, 2007).

Charlie Fox is a writer who lives in London. His book, long thought to be about recluses, has lately changed shape.

Luke Healey is a writer and a PhD candidate in the department of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. His doctoral research concerns the relationship between football and visual culture at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

Jeffrey Kastner is the senior editor of Cabinet.

Alexander Keefe is a writer living in Claremont, California. His work has appeared in Bidoun, East of Borneo, and Artforum, among other publications. He currently holds the inaugural Alan Erasmus Fellowship in Unpopular Culture at New York University’s Colloquium for Unpopular Culture.

Ava Kofman is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the Nation, the New Republic, and elsewhere. She is on the editorial staff of Harper’s Magazine.

Hanna Ljungh is a Swedish artist based in Stockholm. She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design, New York, and her MFA from Konstfack, Stockholm. Ljungh recently had her second solo show at Annaellegallery in Stockholm, and was part of the exhibition “D’après nature” at the Swedish Institute in Paris. In the spring of 2016, she will participate in the opening exhibition of the Bait Muzna for Art Film in Muscat, Oman.

Matthew Spellberg is a graduate student in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His work has appeared in the Yale Review, the Southwest Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, and other journals and magazines. He is working on a study of solitude and ecstasy, and a book about dreaming.

COLUMNS

MAIN

7

INGESTION / PITCHERS MOUND

Leland de la Durantaye How the olive oil trade built the eighth hill of Rome

11

COLORS / ARMY GREEN

Alexander Keefe Half-alive at best

15 INVENTORY / MOTORING WHILE BLACK

Julian Lucas On the road with the Green Book in Jim Crow America

19

LEFTOVERS / BIRDS OF A FEATHER

Jeffrey Kastner The baroque bestiary of a Milanese gardner

23

DRAWING THE FOUL

Luke Healey Simulation and dissimulation on the soccer pitch

30 ASTRONYMY

34

Justin E. H. Smith The philosopher’s stone ELECTRIC CARESSES

Dominic Pettman Rilke, Balthus, and Mitsou

41

THE MANSION HOUSE TAVERN OF CROSSED DESTINIES

49

ARTIST PROJECT / CYCLUR A NUBILA

56

Jonathan Allen Reading the tarot deck of Austin Osman Spare

David Birkin

A MODEL RAILWAY JOURNEY

Ava Kofman Inside Hamburg’s Miniatur Wunderland

THE NORTH 65

73

82

88

A MIND OF WINTER

96 ½ BOOKMARK / SOUTH BY SOUTH

MAN ON GLACIER

106 KIOSK / FALL 2015

Matthew Spellberg Reveries of a solitary roamer ARTIST PROJECT / THE NORTH

Hanna Ljungh

PEASE PORRIDGE, COLD

Polly Dickson What to eat at the North Pole

96

THE ARCHIVE OF ICE

D. Graham Burnett Tracing climate change at the National Ice Core Laboratory

102 ARTIST PROJECT / HOW TO BE AN INTENTIONAL AGENT OF ANTHROPOCHORY

80½ POSTCARD / POLAR POSTMARKS

Charlie Fox The feeling of snow

AND

Jessica Segall

COLUMNS

7

INGESTION

INGESTION / PITCHERS MOUND Leland de la Durantaye “Ingestion” is a column that explores its topic within a framework informed by history, aesthetics, and philosophy.

“In the second century of the Christian Aera, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor.

The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces.

Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury.”1 Rome was, in a word, nice. So incredibly so that all marveled at it. Visiting ambassadors were known to abandon their diplomatic mission so as to become simple citizens of Rome. And so we wonder what it was like.

Of the Roman archaeological sites dating to the second century of our Christian Aera, far and away the best preserved has also proven the most mysterious: “the eighth hill of Rome,” “the hill from across the seas,” what its greatest student called both “a sort of monument malgré lui” and “an abortive child of classical antiquity.” 2 Monte Testaccio, the Hill of Shards, dates from the time of the “Five Good Emperors,” as Machiavelli called them: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius. Under their rule, Rome knew its maximal power and prosperity, its greatest peace, and after them things went so steadily and thoroughly downhill that by the deposition in 476 of the last Roman emperor, given the desperate name Romulus Augustus, the world would scarcely take any notice at all.

Broken olive oil amphorae at Rome’s Monte Testaccio, “The Hill of Shards.”

What then was Rome like before the decline, before the fall? From the Colosseum, completed in the first century with stones from the Second Temple of Jerusalem, we see that the Romans loved the spectacle of blood sport. From the Pantheon, we see that they possessed an architectural sense and skill that would soon be lost, as the architects of the great cathedrals of the middle ages and early Renaissance found themselves unable to understand how it had been built. From Trajan’s column, we see that Rome loved conquest, and its monumental narration. And from Monte Testaccio, we see that the Romans loved olive oil, and order.

They loved olive oil with their food, they loved it on their bodies, they loved it to light Rome. Under the Five Good Emperors, roughly a million people lived in Rome, which meant massive quantities of olive oil arriving

at a port that was near the place, according to the legend, where the infants Romulus and Remus, floating downstream in a basket, came to rest against a fig tree, and where they found their wolf.

Olive oil arrived at Rome’s port on the Tiber in large terra-cotta amphorae that were then emptied into more portable receptacles and discarded.

Every day, amphorae carrying the most varied things arrived from all over the empire—grain from Egypt, wine from Gaul, fruit from Spain, salted fish from the Black Sea. But the amphorae that carried olive oil had a peculiarity such that they could not be reused or recycled in the customary manner. Other unwanted amphorae were crushed and mixed with lime to make cement. Upon contact with olive oil, however, lime produces a surprising chemical reaction, creating a soap that prevents

8

Amphorae shards piled to form terraces at Monte Testaccio.

INGESTION

9 cement from hardening. Moreover, the form of the olive oil amphorae made them difficult to crush. What does the most civilized portion of mankind under the gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners do in such a case? History’s answer is clear. It sets aside a space near its port where the amphorae were not hurled vaguely in a certain direction, nor thrown casually onto a pile, but where they were shattered, their shards carefully stacked one atop the other, with rows left for passage, and sprinkled with lime so as to produce the soap that would prevent the smell of rancid oil from disturbing those nearby. The Hill of Shards then grew, and grew, and grew, so much so that by the time the site fell into disuse in the middle of the third century, due to the introduction of a new type of amphorae and the relocation of the city’s docks, it was over 120 feet high and more than a half-mile around.

After the Five Good Emperors, the successive ones were, as Machiavelli noted, “bad.” Rome was sacked by Visigoths (410) and Vandals (455).

In the space of a few centuries, the city that had housed a million when Christ was born shrunk to under a tenth of that. The fire of the Vestals went out. Civil order dissolved. Sheep grazed in the Colosseum. Dogs slept on the floor of the Senate. Barbarians came and went, astonished and indifferent. Rome slept. And as the grass grew higher and higher on it, the nature, origin, and even name of the Hill of Shards were forgotten.

Enter a large bull. Enter a cart full of hogs. Enter the dark ages. And watch as they are pushed from the top of Monte Testaccio, running, falling, rising, smashed and smashing their way down the hill, crushing carts and animals until at last reaching the bottom they are set upon by the local populace, who chase, kill, and butcher them on site. This was not the Rome of Marcus Aurelius. And this brutal blood feast did not occur once but every year, during Carnival.

INGESTION

Aerial photograph of Monte Testaccio, late 1970s.

Enter the Church, which in the fifteenth century radically repurposed the site. Jerusalem being at that point seriously unvisitable due to Muslim control, the pope decided to bring the mountain to Muhammad, tracing a Via Crucis through Rome with Monte Testaccio as its Golgotha. The site of the final mistreatment of the Messiah on Good Friday every year, the hill became so well known that Cervantes, in a 1613 story about a love potion, has a character cry out, “What do you want of me, stubborn as flies, dirty as bedbugs, courageous as fleas? Am I Rome’s Monte Testaccio that you throw shards and shingles at me?”

From there things went inward. In the next century, the focus turned to the hill’s base, as Romans realized the peculiar virtues of an artificial hill and exploited them by digging increasingly large wine caves, which are still there today, into its sides.

Terra-cotta’s insulating nature, and the unusual ventilation offered by a Hill of Shards, produced an agreeably constant temperature (ten degrees Celsius) during even the most blazing of summers, making it

an ideal location in which to store wine. Monte Testaccio became the site for Rome’s ancient October festival (Ottobrate), with dancing, singing, and poetic contests that evolved from bacchic rites dating from the time when the empire of Rome still comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.

Over the millennia, the Hill of Shards had grown mysterious, memory of its initial purpose and nature having disappeared. Rumors circulated concerning its origin, such as that it was formed from the remnants of the great fire of 64 CE that destroyed much of the city and during which enough of the Roman population thought that if Nero hadn’t been playing the harp, he might as well have. (This resulted in his assisted suicide). Like the story of the fire, the other explanations were also based on rumors, and the eighth hill of Rome became all the more mysterious when ancient maps were consulted and the prominent landmark was nowhere indicated, those maps having no more reason to note its location than today’s tourist maps

10 have to designate the location of New York’s landfills.

Enter the great age of German Excavation. Work at Troy began in 1871, on Monte Testaccio the following year. The Mycenaean “Mask of Agamemnon” was discovered by Schliemann in 1876. Five years later, to much less fanfare, Heinrich Dressel rediscovered the origin and nature of Monte Testaccio. Not only did he and his successors establish that the hill was made exclusively of shards, they were more specific. The hill was composed of fifty-three million terra-cotta amphorae, which had once contained some six billion liters of olive oil and had been deposited with care beginning around the year 140 and ending around the year 260. While less glamorous than the Homeric excavations, it was pathbreaking work. As the amphorae were examined and their peculiar markings deciphered, it was discovered that the vast majority of the shards came from a single area in present-day Andalusia, paradise of olives, and almost all the rest from present-day Tunisia, making it truly a “hill from across the seas.” It was discovered how—before being smashed and before terrified bulls and pigs came tumbling over them, before supporting the symbolic body of Christ in His passion, before grass and time and target practice and the artillery battery Garibaldi placed there during the siege of Rome in 1849, before Ottobrate and neglect—the amphorae had been stamped by their producers to designate the contents, sender, shipment, destination, and, on occasion, recipient, resulting in a veritable map of ancient trade and a fundamental contribution to economic history. No Mask of Agamemnon, no Troy, but then again it had begun as a garbage heap.

1 These are the first lines of Edward Gibbon’s

genial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

2 Emilio Rodríguez Almeida, Il Monte Testaccio: Ambiente, storia, materiale (Roma: Edizioni Quasar, 1984), p. 9. My translation.

INGESTION

Detail from a map of ancient Rome showing Monte Testaccio. Included in the 1614 edition of volume four of Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg’s Civitates orbis terrarum, it draws on a map by the Italian painter and architect Pirro Ligorio published in 1561.

11

COLORS

COLORS / ARMY GREEN Alexander Keefe “Colors” is a column in which a writer responds to a specific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet.

Late Motörhead front man and Nazi-memorabilia collector Lemmy Kilmister once said of his preference for the German side’s kit that he would have collected and worn British uniforms from the same period had their khaki color not made whoever put them on look “like a fucking swamp frog.” Much the same could have been said of the US Army’s World War II uniforms, characterized by an ochreous, greenish, khaki-like color known as olive drab. And Lemmy was not alone in his disdain for the dusty greens and taupes favored by the Allies; indeed, he was late to the game. Almost as soon as the war was over, mutters of dissatisfaction with olive drab in the United States turned into explicit concern. Army brass began to feel a pressing need for an appealing, ennobling color that could distinguish the army from its rivals—the other (generally blue-toned) branches of the US armed services. Committees were formed, reports drawn up, and after much debate it was decided that olive drab had to go, no matter the cost; the all-too-familiar sight of plumbers, garbagemen, and service station attendants working in battered, shit-brown Ike jackets across small-town America had finally put an end to whatever glimmer of romantic, colonial swagger had once attached to khaki and its confreres. And anyway, the colonial age was over, at least for the Brits—the war had put paid to that set of fantasies—and something new was beginning: call it the Cold War, call it the space age, call it the age of advertising. Call it Pax Americana or the beginning

of America’s long half-century.

Whatever it was, it cried out for a new color, something plastic, identifying, unifying, and good. Reluctantly, the army also concluded that it would have to be some shade of green, an unfortunate color that, as historian Michel Pastoureau has pointed out, carries a profound ambivalence in the Western tradition—“a symbol of life, luck, and hope on the one hand, an attribute of disorder, poison, the devil and all his creatures on the other.”

This was not going to be easy.

Poison and springtime, nausea and new life, medicine and envy,

grass and the devil: green is the most inconstant of colors—or so it was believed to be by early modern alchemists. When a Swedish chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, invented the first modern, chemical green in 1778—Scheele’s green—one of its active ingredients was arsenic, then still poorly understood. Vibrant, appealing, and relatively inexpensive, Scheele’s arsenic-charged green quickly made its way into fashionable wallpapers, curtains, candles, ball gowns, and military uniforms across northern Europe and Britain, lending its color to an era. Paris green,

Wearing his iconic army green uniform, Fidel Castro addresses the United Nations on 12 October 1979. Photo Yutaka Nagata.

12 a brighter, more emerald cousin to Scheele’s original pigment, was even more dangerous; beloved by plein-air impressionist and post-impressionist painters, it was also used to kill rats in the Paris sewers. Indeed, arsenicbased green pigments have been blamed for everything from accidental sweetmeat poisonings in Regencyera London to Napoleon’s death in a set of damp, green rooms on lonesome Saint Helena; from Monet’s blindness to Van Gogh’s madness, to be modern was to be spiked by the vapors of some shade of green.

Those arsenic greens were as vivid as they were deadly; anodyne army green, while no less dangerous in the broadest sense, works a far more banal juju. And that’s part of what makes it such a curious, even quixotic, color choice for the space age, especially given how much research went into it. It’s an ephemeral, rotten sort of green, half-alive at best, a fecund hue the color of spoilage on top of industrially produced hummus, the green of new grass growing up through the dense tangle of last year’s dead.

Vincent van Gogh once wrote to his brother Theo that “it is impossible to say … how many different greengrays there are; it varies infinitely.”

He didn’t know how right he was; army green, arguably the most successful and ubiquitous in this family, wouldn’t be invented for over half a century. The story of that invention is the story of what happened when the best and the brightest in America— everyone from the editor-in-chief of Vogue and the head of the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to the future chairman of the Kestnbaum Commission—came together to solve the army’s color problem. These representatives of the power elite participated in the design and implementation of the new army green uniforms, alongside teams of color scientists and textile specialists who conducted thousands of hours of market research and testing at bases

COLORS across Europe and the United States.

It required years of mass, organized effort to make army green look good; it would take just one man to make it look hot. Well, two actually: if it had been up to Elvis himself, he would have spent his mandatory stint in the US Army in the so-called Special Services, singing to the troops and living it up. But there was no way in hell his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was going to let the army take control of Elvis’s recording career for even a day, let alone two years; instead, he cast the reluctant young draftee in the role of a regular joe, a jeep driver in a tank brigade headed for Cold War West Germany.

It was partly a PR stunt, and partly a public rite of passage. Elvis in AG-44, the first of several designations used by the army for its green, managed to win not only the grudging respect of an older generation (which had until then mostly regarded him as a pervert and danger to America) but also the more specific affections of a teenaged Air Force brat named Priscilla.

It was a weird couple of years for Elvis; he had ten Top 40 hits, his mother died, and he also developed a raging addiction to army-prescribed goofballs and uppers. But Parker was right in the end; Elvis returned to civilian life a bigger star than ever.

He had proved that he was a man, “not only to the people who were wondering,” as he put it at the press conference held by the army to mark his discharge, “but to myself.” Photos from the event show his Melungeon pompadour intact, agleam like an orca’s fin over a taut, shimmering green. Less than a year later, he was starring in G.I. Blues, a sexedup Technicolor musical metafiction (original title: “Cafe Europa”). You wouldn’t know it from the name, but G.I. Blues put army green—wrapped around Elvis as he rode around in a tank of the same color—on the big screen as never before.

No wonder it all went so feral so fast. In 1960, the same year G.I. Blues

was released, Fidel Castro showed up in New York to address the UN General Assembly. He was wearing army green. Fickle army green. By May 1963, Lieutenant General Hamilton H. Howze was moved to write Army Chief of Staff General Earle G. Wheeler: “A very tight rein should be kept on quality control,” he warned. “The issue-enlisted green uniform is soft and fuzzy, and so are many uniforms found on officers. All cloth should be of the hard variety, capable of accepting and keeping a sharp press.” Army green was going soft—and, worse still, fuzzy.

A color calibrated to project US hegemony at home and abroad, to naturalize that hegemony by affiliating it with what Van Gogh called “the grays of nature,” and to make the people wearing it look good, army green was destined to be stolen and repurposed.

“Third World” guerrillas were wearing it by the early 1960s, and soon, so were antiwar protestors and rock stars. By the end of the decade, army green uniforms had become as closely identified with the hip militarism of the counterculture as with the national guardsmen who shot protestors at Kent State and elsewhere. Designed to project identity and stability, army green had come, by the time the Vietnam War ended in 1975, to mean something more like disunion and dissent, burnout and defeat. And then, in the decade after that, nothing very specific, its semiotics so overloaded that it became impenetrable, a thicket of kitsch and disaffection, a miasmic fog of bad vibes and nostalgia: John Lennon in New York, post-Beatles; Laurie Bird as the fungible, doomed Girl in Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), bound for anywhere, waiting with her thumb out by the side of road; Travis Bickle in an M-65 field jacket (1976); Rambo showing up in 1982, quantum stranger at the edge of small-town America, he’s wearing army green. We all are.

13

COLORS

Elvis Presley at a press conference at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in March 1960, two days before being discharged from the US Army.

14

INVENTORY

The cover of the 1940 edition of the Green Book, first published in 1936. The guideâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name changed frequently; the hyphenated form of the title shown here was a temporary convention. The most comprehensive collection of the publication, housed at the New York Public Library, does not include a number of editions, including the inaugural one. Scholars assume that the unhyphenated title of the second edition was also used for the first. All images courtesy New York Public Library.

15

INVENTORY

INVENTORY / MOTORING WHILE BLACK Julian Lucas “Inventory” examines or presents a list, catalogue, or register.

When The Negro Motorist Green Book was first published in 1936, it was a slim pamphlet listing those hotels, restaurants, garages, and other businesses in New York City where black travelers could be sure of good service and equitable treatment. This was not the case at every establishment; the New York of the day could be as discriminatory, even as dangerous, as the segregated South. But the guide’s publisher, Victor H. Green, was an experienced provider of safe, reliable transit. He was a letter carrier for the postal service, whose unofficial motto— inscribed over the doors of the Farley building in Manhattan—proclaims its commitment to freedom of movement: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

Nor would discrimination stay Green’s “Negro Motorists.” Inspired

by Green’s own brushes with racism, and modeled after similar guides in the Jewish press, the Green Book offered black travelers “assured protection.” It was sold at gas stations for a quarter, and became so immediately popular that Green rented an office, hired a staff, and published an expanded second edition, which included listings for as much of the country as he and his part-time agents could cover. Readers quickly began to consider the guide an important component of black civil society: “We earnestly believe ‘The Negro Motorist Green Book’ will mean as much if not more to us as the A.A.A. means to the white

race,” one subscriber wrote in.

The editors had aims as high as their reader’s expectations. The guide they wanted to publish would be not only an almanac of racial prejudice, but in their words, “something authentic to travel by”—a promise that you and your family would never go bedless in Bethlehem, however far afield. The Green Book would also serve as an optimistic window on what W. E. B. Du Bois called the nation within a nation: a parallel world of black businesses, colleges, community organizations, and social networks, all of which seemed, to some, a promise of broader transformations. Between listings, the Green Book’s editors printed dispatches from this other world: portraits of black excellence that suggested, however vaguely, that equality would soon come. Some were inspirational biographies, like the 1939 edition’s sketch of one of the guide’s patrons, James A. Jackson, who began his career as a bellboy and minstrel performer before becoming a marketing specialist for Standard Oil. Others were travel essays, noting such things as the “many beautiful homes” owned by black residents of Greenville, South Carolina; the prosperity of the majority-black town of Robbins, Illinois; or the cigar-chomping panache of a black captain, employed as a pilot on a Sea Islands steamer.

These positive sketches have a note of that tendency toward fantasy that the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier would excoriate, in his book Black Bourgeoisie (1957), as the vain “wish-fulfillment” of the “Negro Press.” The Green Book also adopted a genteel tone of euphemistic cheer, a dancing around the social realities that had necessitated the guide in the first place. Early editions are rarely explicit about segregation, referring only to the black traveler’s “embarrassments,” a word that means not only occasions for shame, but in its original

definition, obstacles, impediments to freedom of movement. (And what could be more embarrassing in America—the country of the car, the pilgrim, the pioneer—than obstacles to free movement?)

The guide’s editors didn’t elaborate on these embarrassments; it was their job to clear them away.

This was accomplished by freelance special agents, who visited hundreds of businesses and private homes each year to vet their friendliness and safety for black travelers.

(Scouting for discrimination must not have been particularly enticing work; the guide was always looking for new agents.) The editors also wrote letters to towns that agents hadn’t visited, asking if there were any local businesses that might be willing to be included in the guide. They were generally optimistic, reasoning that most white businesses would eventually respond to the growing economic power of the black middle class. But in a moment of rare candor, they published a selection of ambivalent replies to their letters in the 1948 issue. These show what a tepid, provisional welcome black travelers could expect to receive even in places that had—at least on the books—no segregation.

One letter from Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, explained that although black travelers were welcome to pass through the town, they would have nowhere to stay overnight. Devil’s Lake was all white, and consequently there was no housing available for Negro travelers. A cleverer correspondent in Montana equivocated that while local businesses were willing to serve Negroes, “they hesitate to put their names in your directory for fear of finding all touring Negroes near here over-crowding the facilities to the exclusion of old customers.”

(As though the large number of “touring Negroes” was the cause of the exclusion.)

Responses like these didn’t prevent The Negro Motorist Green

16

INVENTORY

Cover of the 1956 edition of the Green Book.

Book’s editors from maintaining a certain confidence, a belief that the black world’s borders would, inevitably, expand. They did, and so did the guide: in 1947, it added a booking service; in 1952, it became The Negro Travelers Green Book (subsequently Travelers’ ); in the following years, it came out in special editions that included information on trains (1951), planes (1953), and international travel (1955). And for the 1956 twentieth-anniversary edition, one of the editors even boasted that the guide would someday offer listings for Negro travelers to the moon.

Would this mean lunar segregation? The bleak implication calls to mind Gil Scott-Heron’s song “Whitey on the Moon” (1970), a sarcastic

indictment of racism in the space age. (“I can’t pay no doctor bills / But Whitey’s on the moon.”) But the Green Book’s editors belonged to an earlier, more optimistic moment; it’s more likely they were looking forward to the first black travelers in space.

They maintained a steady hopefulness about the possibility of racial equality, expressed most poignantly in an editors’ note predicting the ultimate suspension of the guide.

“There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published,” it begins, amid the clamor of telephone numbers and business bulletins. “That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States.”

The Green Book lasted long enough to see this happen (at least in the letter of discrimination law) and the exultant 1964 edition, published two years before the guide was discontinued, includes a brief section on “Your rights.” Praising the successful young demonstrators of the Civil Rights movement, the editors go on to give a state-by-state account of changes to racially discriminatory laws. The world open to Negro travelers was increasingly indistinguishable from the world at large.

As though taking possession of this newly integrated world, a black boy on the cover illustration of the 1960 guide—now simply The Travelers’ Green Book—gazes upon the globe: a sphere congruent in shape and equal in dimension to him. It is a simple, even sentimental, image. But it also strikingly epitomizes a centuries-long effort, in which the access of black people to geography—the right to know it and the ability to pass unmolested through it—has long been the reliable index of unreliable freedom.

The history of black people in the United States has always been, among other things, a struggle to move freely in what Du Bois expansively thought of as our “American world.” A world filled with “embarrassments,” hostile to knowledge and navigation, made opaque by the deracination of enslavement, the forced illiteracy and travel pass system of the plantation, and the vagrancy laws that, after abolition, held the so-called freedmen in place.

A world that still throws up obstacles to Negro Travelers—invisible boundaries that, when crossed, can assert themselves with all the brutal bluntness of a bullet from the gun of a police officer or a neighborhood watchman. It continues, this long struggle for the freedom to move.

Among its instruments, somewhere between the fugitive’s forged pass and the smartphone camera, The Green Book takes its modest place.

17

INVENTORY

Page from the 1947 edition of the Green Book listing establishments in New York City hospitable to African Americans.

18

LEF TOVERS

19

LEFTOVERS / BIRDS OF A FEATHER Jeffrey Kastner “Leftovers” investigates the cultural significance of detritus.

An artifact poised uncannily between thing and representation, the early seventeenth-century volume known as the “Feather Book of Dionisio Minaggio” is a virtually unique example of secular featherwork from the European Baroque era. Created

by Minaggio in 1618 during his tenure as chief gardener to the Spanish governor of the Duchy of Milan, Pedro de Toledo Osorio, the book comprises 112 images of birds created entirely from feathers and other body parts—in most cases, their very own—such as beaks, claws, and skin.

(An additional 44 images, similarly fashioned from feathers, primarily feature depictions of leading actors from the city’s commedia dell’arte companies.) Although traditions of elaborate artworks, clothing, and ceremonial attire made from feathers were not uncommon in other parts of the world during this period—especially among Central and South American cultures—there were few examples of ars plumaria made in Europe at the time. Minaggio’s book, beyond its obvious value as an extraordinary work of folk art, also constitutes a rare illustrated record of both avifauna and Milanese theater culture at the beginning of the 1600s.1 The genesis of Minaggio’s project is uncertain. Almost nothing is known of the gardener’s life and the provenance of the book itself is murky until it appears in an inventory of the collection of the British naturalist Taylor White in the mid-eighteenth century. Held since the early twentieth century by McGill University in Montreal, the Feather Book was originally bound in oak boards covered in

LEF TOVERS leather, although university librarians disassembled it in the 1960s for conservation purposes and eventually mounted the pages individually behind glass.

Each of the bird illustrations was created by gluing the body parts and feathers of the birds to sheets of paper, which were then attached to support sheets roughly twelve inches by nineteen inches in size. Many pages include a caption in Minaggio’s own hand identifying the bird; a number feature additional scenography such as trees, buildings, and human figures. Although the colors have in some cases faded and the anatomical elements of the birds show occasional damage, many remain in remarkably vivid condition. In one, a kestrel and a siskin perch in a tree above a solider guarding the door to a church, the tip of his lance made from tiny sapphire plumes; in another, a hawklike hobby clutches a branch above a complex of structures, including a castle, a church, and a mill complete with waterwheel and flowing blue stream.

Though rare for the conventions of avian illustration at the time, a few of Minaggio’s birds are even shown in flight—in one image, an awkwardly soaring tern looks as though it’s about to crash into the small houses below.

And while most of the birds depicted do seem to be Lombard in origin, the collection also includes a handful of exotic specimens, such as an Amazonian parrot and even, in one image, what resembles—and in a later hand, attended by a tentative question mark, is identified as—a dodo.

The few scholarly treatments of Minaggio’s book contain a variety of speculations about its inspiration.

Although featherwork was primarily a New World craft, Milan was in fact home to one of Europe’s most celebrated examples of ecclesiastical feather embroidery, a sixteenthcentury miter made for Pope Pius IV

by Amerindian craftsmen and later given by the pontiff to his nephew Carlo Borromeo that is still held in

the collection of the city’s duomo.

(The cabinet of the great Milanese collector Manfredo Settala also contained examples of South American birds and objects, such as a great cloak, made from their feathers.)

And Minaggio’s patron, Don Pedro, appears to have been something of an ornithological enthusiast—he had become acquainted with King Henry IV of France when on diplomatic business in Paris and upon his departure, the monarch asked that he send him some rare birds from Spain and its dependencies in the West Indies for an aviary he had built himself at Fontainebleau. Whether specifically commissioned by the governor, an attempt by the gardener to ingratiate himself to his employer, or simply a hobby activity—perhaps done by Minaggio and his assistants during the cold winter months when the garden lay fallow—the Feather Book is a rarity of Baroque art, bestiary and natural history museum bound into one.

1 Given the highly unusual nature of Minaggio’s

work, surprisingly few in-depth studies of the Feather Book have been carried out. For a rare detailed consideration, see Beatrice Corrigan, “Commedia dell’Arte Portraits in the McGill Feather Book,” in Renaissance Drama, New Series, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). Though it has a particular focus on the Feather Book’s significance to theatrical history, Corrigan’s study also places Minaggio’s project in its broader cultural context. See also Eleanor MacLean, “The Feather Book of Dionisio Minaggio,” a paper delivered at the conference “Feather Creations: Materials, Production and Circulation,” organized by the Hispanic Society and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2004. Available at <nuevomundo.revues.org/1629>. In addition to tracing the volume’s general background, MacLean—a McGill librarian who had first-hand experience with the material—offers a valuable summary of its conservation history at the university. This text is indebted to both articles.

Opposite and overleaf: Pages from the “Feather Book.” The Italian inscription on the frontispiece (opposite, top left) reads: “Dionisio Minaggio, gardener to His Excellency the Governor of Milan, was the creator, and he made [this book] in the year 1618.” All images courtesy McGill University Library.

20

LEF TOVERS

21

LEF TOVERS

MAIN

23

DRAWING THE FOUL Luke Healey

On 2 April 2014, the German soccer magazine 11Freunde tweeted one of its occasional “Bei der Geburt getrennt” (separated at birth) vignettes, which typically attempt to milk humor from the resemblance between footballers and other public figures from culturally disparate fields. The diptych concerned the European Champions League quarterfinal match between Manchester United and Bayern Munich played the previous evening. Late in the game, the referee had made a controversial decision to send off Bayern’s Bastian Schweinsteiger for a sliding tackle on United’s Wayne Rooney—his second bookable offence. Rooney was widely judged to have made Schweinsteiger’s tackle look more brutal than it really was, and thus stood accused of “simulation,” an offense prohibited following a ruling of the International Football Association Board in March 1999. In that year, the twelfth of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s seventeen Laws of the Game was changed to include a clause stating, “Any simulating action anywhere on the field, which is intended to deceive

the referee, must be sanctioned as unsporting behaviour.”1 Since then, a player guilty of simulation—or “diving,” as it is colloquially known—must be shown a yellow card.

The wags behind 11Freunde’s social media rendered their own accusation of simulation by suggesting kinship between Rooney and a dying soldier depicted in an antiwar poster. These two images do indeed contain a common gesture: like the soldier, Rooney’s arms are extended behind his body, his knees buckled, and his face arranged in a grimace. The spirit of this gag is clear: Rooney had no right to assume the posture of a dying brother-in-arms, and was a pompous fraud for having done so. For anyone weaned on the English Premier League, which supplanted the old Football League Division One in 1992, there is another irony.

Above: Separated at birth. German soccer magazine 11Freunde juxtaposed these two images to satirize Wayne Rooney’s dive in a match between Manchester United and Bayern Munich. Photo at right: Matt West.

24

LUKE HEALEY

When increased television revenues made it easier for Premier League clubs to recruit talented foreign players—aided in turn by the so-called Bosman Ruling of 1995, which made it illegal for leagues in the European Union to place restrictions on the number of eu citizens their teams were permitted to sign—it was German footballers who became the first foreign group to be saddled with a blanket reputation as divers by the English press. The caption to a photograph of Jürgen Kohler, published in the Times in June 1994, described the defender as “executing a nine-point dive in the accepted German manner.”2 When striker Jürgen Klinsmann (latterly coach of the us men’s national soccer team) joined Tottenham Hotspur in 1994, his deceitful reputation was so entrenched that he acknowledged it in goal celebrations in which he dived theatrically onto his stomach and slid along the turf.

(The ever-inflammatory Luis Suarez did likewise in 2012, in response to accusations from Everton manager David Moyes.)

English footballers, by contrast, have long been seen by their fans as untainted by the duplicitousness made manifest in diving. The notion of diving as a foreign contagion was notoriously espoused by Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson and England national captain John Terry, among others, the latter opining in 2009, “I can speak about the England lads and I think it is something we don’t do. … I think we’re too honest, sometimes even in the Premier League you see the English lads get a bit of contact and stay on their feet and try and score from the chance they have been given.”3 Diving is antithetical to the self-ascribed characteristics of the English game— “strength, power, energy, fortitude, loyalty, courage,” as enumerated by David Winner in his book Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football.4 These salt-of-theearth virtues are widely supposed to be dying out in English soccer as it moves further and further away from its traditional social base, as the leagues fill up with flashy migrants, and working-class communities find themselves excluded from elite-level games by ticket price hikes. Given this, English fans find it especially difficult to accept diving from the decidedly less-than-cosmopolitan Rooney, a rumbustious and powerful forward who has been trading for some years off the reputation he established, during his early seasons at Everton and Manchester United, as a prototype of virtuous English football.

The English idea that diving is a foreign novelty introduced by the international reach of the Premier League is contradicted by earlier commentary on the game. Perhaps the moral panic over the rise of cynicism in soccer can be traced back to the day after the sport’s initial codification in December 1863. But certainly by 1975—long before the arrival of foreign players— a Daily Express article could record the Huddersfield player Brian O’Neil’s “cheerful” admission “that he had dived to win a penalty ... in other words that he had faked and cheated,” warning that with this confession, soccer had been “sent hurtling faster still towards complete moral decay.”5 The language here is practically indistinguishable from commentaries on diving from the 1990s and 2000s: Mick Dennis’s article from a 2011 issue of the Daily Express, for example, presents a dive

by Bulgarian striker Dimitar Berbatov as evidence that “chicanery has become commonplace” and an illustration of “how debased football has become.”6 Historical continuities notwithstanding, newspaper archives clearly demonstrate that with English soccer settling uneasily into the cosmopolitan, highly mediatized, commodified, and embourgeoisified paradigm introduced by the Premier League, the 1990s marked the moment when diving became the national game’s Big Bad. This context alone does not, of course, fully explain the increase in commentaries on diving from the early 1990s on. For instance, television coverage of English soccer increased rapidly during this time, accompanied by improvements in instant replay technology, and both made diving incidents easier to spot and analyze. But regardless of the real causes, it is undeniable that over the course of the decade, commentaries on diving became a rhetorical device through which certain perceptions about the pitfalls of increased internationalization could be represented.

Often, and perhaps unsurprisingly, this rhetoric uses diving as a means of associating foreignness with effeminacy. Though the occasional overseas player has been known to flop to the floor “like a sack of potatoes,”7 it is more characteristic to find them swooning like the hysterical transvestite Emily from the bbc sketch show Little Britain, or “going down like Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office”—to offer just two images from the columns of tabloid journalist Des Kelly.8 When they don’t employ direct homo- or transphobia, commentators may choose to characterize divers as merely louche, luxurious, and effete:

25

DR AWING THE FOUL

A form perfected. The Ivory Coast’s Didier Drogba demonstrates a classic “archer’s bow” as he is tackled

by Argentina’s Gabriel Heinze in the 2006 World Cup. Photo Alex Livesey.

26

LUKE HEALEY

27

DR AWING THE FOUL

this impression is summoned, for example, by Kevin Moseley’s image of Klinsmann taking “a quick dive into the Mediterranean” from Tottenham chairman Alan Sugar’s yacht in Monte Carlo, or by Harry Harris’s reference to the “dying swan impression” of Chelsea’s Ivorian striker Didier Drogba.9 The idea of an English soccer player engaging in transvestism, going down on a world leader, schmoozing in Monaco, or lacing up a pair of ballet pumps is, we are supposed to believe, ludicrous and beyond the pale.

•

•

•

There can be little room for error in the 11Freunde tweet, however: Rooney’s posture could hardly be more redolent of the characteristic iconography of diving.

The pose—which calls to mind nothing so much as the arc de cercle that nineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot noted in outbursts of hysteria in patients at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris—is a go-to resource for newspaper editors seeking to stir up scandal around the issue of diving. It is also increasingly found in representations like the piñata made in the likeness of certified diver Arjen Robben, created

by Mexican fans after their 2014 World Cup defeat to the Netherlands. One of the most widespread images of this type among amateur writers publishing online is a professional photograph of Drogba taken during the Ivory Coast’s 2006 World Cup match against Argentina. In it, the circular effect of the player’s bent limbs shares something of the gestural elegance of the platform diver, demonstrating what Steven Connor, in reference to those athletes, has described as a “closing of the curve on itself, in a defiance of the order of the direct and the perpendicular.”10 The observations that can be made of images like the ones of Drogba and Rooney—or, to add a third, of Neal Simpson’s photograph of Leeds United’s Harry Kewell taken during the 1999–2000 Premier League season—tend toward the paradoxical. The players in question appear to have lost all control, their bodies tormented by the demonic energies of a hysterical episode or by a fatal blow to the back. At the same time, their poses are articulated with a certain grace and artistry that invites sustained contemplation of such images. Taking the comparison with hysteric patients a step further, one might note the tendency toward “simulation” that was known to occur under Charcot’s watch. Georges Didi-Huberman, for instance, argues

that in Charcot’s wards at the Salpêtrière, “every hysteric had to make a regular show of her orthodox ‘hysterical nature’” in order “to avoid being transferred to the severe ‘division’ [for] … incurable ‘alienated women.’”11 Hysterics, by this account, retained some mastery over their violent displays, pressing them into the most stereotypical forms when doing so enabled them to gain some small amelioration of their miseries.

Footballers may be worlds apart from hysteric patients in most respects, but their simulations are similarly calculated to eke out advantages, which are sometimes enough to change the game: witness Fred’s dive in the box to win the penalty that gave Brazil the lead over Croatia in the opening game of the 2014 World Cup. •

•

•

In Paul H. Morris and David Lewis’s behavioral psychology study “Tackling Diving: The Perception of Deceptive Intentions in Association Football (Soccer),” the researchers present a taxonomy of simulation in soccer. It has four categories, all of which offer referees clear guidance in distinguishing simulation from genuine foul play. The absence of “temporal contiguity,” “ballistic continuity,” or “contact consistency” in relation to the tackle that prompted the fall in question are all indications that the player has in fact dived.12 In addition, Morris and Lewis identify a fourth category, which they call the “archer’s bow,” a behavior “unique to deception.”13 In “its most complete form,” the authors state, “the tackled player resembles a drawn bow: the chest is thrust out; the head is back; the arms are fully raised and pointing upwards and back; the legs are raised off the ground and bent at the knee.”14 Morris and Lewis’s identification of this posture advances the notion that diving has its own proper form of expression, arising independently of the actions integral to the rest of the game. The images of Drogba and Kewell show this form of expression in its most “perfected” state.

Morris and Lewis confess that “the origin of the set of behaviours we name the ‘archer’s bow’ is to a degree puzzling,” before noting that the most straightforward Opposite: The hysteric’s arc de cercle. French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who named the pose, placed it within the “clownism” phase of his schema for how a hysterical attack proceeds. Plate from Paul Richer, Études cliniques sur l’hystéro-épilepsie, ou Grande hystérie (1881).

28

LUKE HEALEY

motivation is communicability: “the behaviour is clearly noticeable.”15 Remarking that the position adopted by players performing the “archer’s bow” is contrary to the momentum that challenges would ordinarily create in the tackled player, and furthermore offers little by way of self-protection, the researchers surmise that “the ‘archer’s bow’ is used by the player to convey the extreme nature of the collision; it is so intense that all the normal self-protection mechanisms involved with preparing for the fall cannot be utilized.”16 In reaching for the apex of expressive representation, the “archer’s bow” thus reveals its own essential falsity. Morris and Lewis subsequently compare the ur-image of the “archer’s bow” to Robert Capa’s famous 1936 photograph of a dying Spanish Republican soldier, a juxtaposition intended to connect their own material to a work that belongs to a visual tradition of hyperbolic violence and heroic suffering.

(I will leave aside the controversy over the veracity of this photograph, which has at least since 1975 been suspected of having been staged.) This, of course, is the same gesture made by the 11Freunde diptych. For those interested in iconography, these pairings propose diving as a kind of bodily autopoiesis, a moment stolen from the normal creative performance of “the beautiful game” in which the player strives to embody a resonant posture, to become more artwork than artist.

•

•

•

As much as diving represents a problem of sporting ethics, the phenomenon cannot be fully understood without a consideration of aesthetics. Diving is profoundly tied to questions about the status of images and of image making. The idea that star players produce picture-worthy moments of sublime skill while humbling their opposition is as old as the game itself. Today, working symbiotically with a photographic apparatus that records their every movement, soccer players can attempt the “archer’s bow” as a means of turning themselves into pictures, visual representations of violence and vulnerability calculated to affect and influence the relevant audience, namely the referee and his or her assistants.

What a gift this is to an art historian! Though not their direct intention, diving soccer players are a boon to the visual analyst who wants to take sports photography seriously, who seeks deep lineages for its iconographies and pathos formulae. The talented diver

calls to mind Laocoön, or Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa, because there are few stronger examples of the representation of bodily extremes. The flip side of this expert performance is opprobrium from the world of soccer itself. W. J. T. Mitchell has written of the “default feminization of the picture,” and his words resonate with an intriguingly iconophobic article from the September 1981 edition of fifa’s in-house publication, fifa News.17 Written by René Courte, then public relations and press officer for the federation, the piece describes the resolutions of a meeting of fifa’s Technical Committee, whose members, Courte recounts, expressed their concern about the excessive demonstrative attitude of some players and teams when a goal is scored. For several years various National Associations have attempted to subdue the un-manly behaviour of some football players who embrace, kiss and hug each other in an over-emotional fashion after scoring a goal.18 The identification of an “excessive demonstrative attitude” in goal celebrations suggests a suspicion that visuality is a subversive force, one that fifa feels compelled to police and regulate. Visual historian and soccer scholar Horst Bredekamp notes that the attempted implementation of Courte’s ideas was at the time badly received, arguing that virtually no “announcement of recent times has met with such unanimous refusal as this ban on body contact.”19 The proscription was never ratified, yet the 1981 Technical Committee’s concern over visual exuberance has gradually found expression in rules such as the one that punishes players who remove their shirts to celebrate goals, added to fifa’s Laws of the Game in 2004. As contemporary tabloid rhetoric about simulation shows, similar anxieties over excessive demonstrativeness, and associated fears about feminization, also frame commentaries on diving.

Courte’s generation of regulators did not have to contend with the vast image economy that soccer spawned in the following decades. Commentators like Des Kelly appear as residual believers in the ethos outlined in the 1981 document, writing late into the profoundly mediatized 1990s. In a 1999 column for the Mirror, a British tabloid, Kelly discusses the French winger David Ginola, then playing for Tottenham.

Ginola’s long hair and silky skills already placed him under a certain degree of suspicion in the muscular,

29

DR AWING THE FOUL

no-nonsense world of English soccer. That Ginola was also known to dive transformed this suspicion into a full-blown crisis of masculinity. Kelly criticizes the player for possessing the “morals of a pop tart,” and finds a way to intimately tie his Frenchness to his suspect masculinity by referring to him, in an appropriation of the name of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s beloved character, as a “Little Ponce.”20 Kelly has no problems admitting that Ginola is a fine footballer; what is taboo here is the player’s awareness that he is one of the best, a self-consciousness that manifests itself distastefully whenever he dives: Ginola is revered by the Spurs fans, not because he has mastered the careful flick of the locks, the Gallic shrug, or the winning smile for the camera. He is lauded at the club because he is a footballer who has the ability to make the White Hart Lane admission charge seem worthwhile with one scintillating run, a jaw-dropping turn or a searing shot.

Sadly, he does not seem to understand that one pitiful somersault with pike over an imaginary leg destroys that magic.21

ideas put forward by Denis Diderot in his Paradoxe sur le comédien, with particular gender conceptions thrown in.22 To wit, when Ginola’s performance dissolves into a form of demonstrativity that implicitly acknowledges the presence of an audience, he debases the game and feminizes himself. However, Ginola’s feminization is not just self-directed: if, following Mitchell, we consider the picture to possess a value coded feminine by default, then Ginola’s dives dismantle football’s magic, the magic that justifies an admission charge, by portraying in unacceptable clarity the player’s exhibition value. Ginola’s critical act of autopoiesis, his sudden shift from artist to artwork, reflects the audience’s gaze back on itself, bringing to light a massive, non-normative circuitry of men-watching-other-men, found anywhere sport is followed.

•

•

•

For Kelly, Ginola rewards those who invest in the spectacle of his performances when he demonstrates his skills. His ability to turn his absorption in the game into beautiful play leads in turn to an absorbing spectacle for the gathered crowd. When Ginola reaches beyond on-field absorption, however, and dives—and Kelly ties this expressly to the player’s exotic sense of vanity—he pulls back the curtain to “destroy the magic.” This argument calls to mind the anti-theatrical

Soccer’s reputation as “the beautiful game” means that its events and protagonists are often described in terms that borrow from high aesthetic discourse.

Doing so, however, can sometimes feel like a colonization, a means of forcing a vibrant and historically proletarian entertainment into a framework of genteel discourse. In diving, soccer players insert themselves into this process of translation as they claim for their own ends forms of representation that lie outside of the relatively narrow range of available on-field actions.

In so doing, they reach out to the visual analyst on their own terms, at great risk to their professional credibility. For these beautiful, unacceptably expressive images, I thank them.

1 Fédération Internationale de

5 Alan Thompson, “Now Hit Them

10 Steven Connor, A Philosophy

Football Association, Laws of the Game 1999 (Zurich: Fédération Internationale de Football Association, 1999), p. 27.

2 Simon Barnes, “Bizarre Moments Attract Coveted Awards,” The Times, 29 June 1994.

3 Mikey Stafford, “England v Slovenia: England Are Too Honest to Dive, Says Terry: Playing Fair Can Go Against Us, Says Capello’s Captain: ‘England Lads Get Contact But Try to Stay on Feet,’” The Guardian, 5 September 2009.

4 David Winner, Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), p. 7.

Hard,” Daily Express, 3 November 1975.

6 Mick Dennis, “Honest Theo Shouldn’t Be the Fall Guy,” Daily Express, 11 January 2011.

7 Richard Lewis, “Flop Yuran Is Warned: Don’t Blow It by Diving,” Daily Express, 15 January 1996.

8 Des Kelly, “Football’s Prize Hams Make My Stomach Turn,” Daily Mail, 29 December 2004; Des Kelly, “The Dive Artist Formerly Known as Prince...,” The Mirror, 22 January 1999.

9 Kevin Moseley, “The Diver with a Soft Centre!,” Daily Express, 30 July 1994; Harry Harris, “FallGuys Will Need Our Help,” Daily Express, 25 March 2006.

of Sport (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), p. 115.

11 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 170.

12 Paul H. Morris & David Lewis, “Tackling Diving: The Perception of Deceptive Intentions in Association Football (Soccer),” The Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, vol.

34, no. 1 (March 2010), p. 8.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., p. 11.

16 Ibid., p. 12.

17 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do

Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 44.

18 René Courte, “Editorial,” FIFA News, no. 220 (September 1981), p. 461.

19 Horst Bredekamp, Bilder bewegen: Von der kunstkammer zum endspiel aufsätze und reden (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2007), p. 159. My translation.

20 Des Kelly, “The Dive Artist Formerly Known as Prince.”

21 Ibid.

22 See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

30

ASTRONYMY Justin E. H. Smith

There is a main-belt asteroid of stony composition, roughly four kilometers in diameter, and with an albedo, or solar reflection coefficient, of around 17 percent. It bears the same name as the author of the present article, though with the middle initials eliminated, the first and last names concatenated, and a string of numbers added to the beginning: 13585 Justinsmith. To be more precise, it does not just have the same name as the author, but was in fact named after the author. Its relationship to the author is like that of Colombia to Columbus, or of the Vince Lombardi Travel Plaza to Vince Lombardi: a relationship of eponymy.

“I hope that some people see some connection between the two topics in the title,” is how, in 1970, Saul Kripke began the first of his lectures on “Naming and Necessity.”1 Plainly, though, it was not necessary that Justinsmith should come to bear my name. The asteroid was first observed in 1993, when I was twentyone years old and had yet to accomplish anything that would merit so much as an eponymous clod of dirt.

According to the rules established by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, discoverers enjoy the exclusive right of naming for the first ten years, though they may still choose a name after that deadline, pending approval by the iau ’s fifteenmember Committee for Small-Body Nomenclature, if no one else has gone through the complicated steps necessary to do so.2 In this case, the discoverer, Belgian astronomer Eric W. Elst, would not choose the name until the middle of 2015: it was, after all, only one of at least 3,600 asteroids he had discovered in his long and distinguished career.

While trans-Neptunian bodies may only be named after divinities, main-belt objects—those, that is, generally found orbiting at a distance from the sun somewhere between Mars and Jupiter—may be named after any person, living or dead, who has done anything at all of note, though there is a waiting period of one hundred years after the death of anyone noted for contributions in the field of politics: a measure taken, we may presume, to prevent the partisan carving up of outer space.

Information gleaned from the Internet tells us that Elst is a devoted student of the history of philosophy,

and particularly admires Enlightenment-era materialism. He is in fact the founder of the D’Holbach Foundation, dedicated to the study and promotion of the work of the atheistic and radically anticlerical author of the 1770 treatise Système de la nature. In October, having just learned of 13585 Justinsmith, I sent Elst a message care of the Royal Belgian Observatory, from which he had retired some years earlier, expressing my sincere thanks for this great honor, and also explaining that I am not, myself, a materialist, but rather somewhat closer to a phenomenalism of the Leibnizian variety. I cited to him G. W. Leibniz’s motto: “Où il n’y a pas un être, il n’y a pas un être,” which tells us that where there is no true unity, there can be no being. “But material bodies are by definition composite,” I went on, “while only minds or mind-like entities are simple and one. So, if bodies are real, this reality must in some way result from, and be underlain by, minds. This explanation would certainly apply to bodies such as asteroids and planets, not in order to explain them away as illusory (as some versions of idealism might be said to do) but only to provide an adequate account of their nature.” I did not receive a reply.

The biographical information on 13585 Justinsmith given in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Small-Body Database tells us that “Justin Erik Halldór Smith (1972) is an American-Canadian philosopher, at present a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Sciences at Diderot University, Paris. His recent book Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference (2015) is a collection of philosophical essays.”3 It is not clear who composed this text, but whoever it was does not know my work well. The book cited is not in any sense a collection of essays, and there is no Department of Philosophy and Sciences at my university. But in any case, the real reason for the naming seems to have nothing to do with the book, or with my work as a professor of the history and philosophy of science.

According to an explanation offered by Elst himself to the California Institute of Technology astronomer Chris Martin (who was more successful than I in contacting him), it has rather to do with a fairly minor post I wrote in May 2013, on my website, <jehsmith. com>, concerning Bébert, the cat that belonged to the

31

ASTRONYMY

The future 13585 Justinsmith gliding across the heavens on 14 January 2010, blissfully unaware of its impending appointment with onomastic destiny.

Courtesy NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive.

32

JUSTIN E. H. SMITH

ingenious and notorious French author and anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and that figured centrally in his 1957 novel Castle to Castle. France is for cat lovers, Germany for dog lovers, was basically the whole argument of this trifle of a post.4 Elst read it, and enjoyed it. And for this, twenty-two years after 13585 Justinsmith’s discovery and forty-three years after Justin E. H. Smith’s birth, I received not an eponymous dirt clod, but an asteroid.

There was, I repeat, nothing necessary about any of this. My very coming into the world was no sure thing, let alone my decision to write that post. In fact, the particular occasion for writing it was a cat I had seen sitting outside a café called Chez Bebert (without accent) near Gare Montparnasse. If that cat had not come out to sit on the sidewalk at the moment it had, the history of planetoid onomastics would have been at least slightly different.

But now that it does bear my name, might necessity somehow enter into the picture, as Kripke suspects? A company known as the International Star Registry has since 1979 been naming stars according to the wishes of paying customers. “Flowers, cards, and candy are nice,” their website explains, but “when you name a star for a loved one, your gift will stand the test of time.

When you buy a star from us, you will be purchasing an unforgettable gift that you can share forever.” The website features a toll-free number, takes all major credit cards, and offers to send not just a certificate confirming ownership, but also, at an additional price, a heart-shaped pendant inscribed with the name and coordinates of the star.

What, now, honestly, is the difference between the International Astronomical Union and the International Star Registry? From the point of view of the heavens, there is none. Our astral naming practices, our astronymy, have no necessity out there. Nor do they have any force. 13585 Justinsmith was cycling through its twenty-four-year orbit for eons before I came along, and will continue to do so for eons after I am gone. It would be a strange metaphysics indeed that would insist that some real change came about in it sometime in 2015 as a result of the ceremonial procedures of a certain human organization some planets away. And surely if Justinsmith is indifferent to the iau, then it also does not appreciate the elite or authoritative status this organization enjoys by comparison to the isr . And if it is all the same to the celestial bodies anyway, why

not aim for the stars, as they say, rather than settling for a mere asteroid, which, as the word implies, is merely “star-like”? Why is it better to be Justinsmith, four kilometers wide, a stony mass in the main belt, when you can be some Kaylee or Steve or Shawna, blazing white-hot somewhere out in Alpha Centauri, and inscribed on an attractive pendant?

Come to think of it, neither does Mars know or care that it is called “Mars,” nor even Earth “Earth.”

These are conventions, too, and what seems to make the difference between “Mars,” “Justinsmith,” and “Kaylee” is the relative augustness of the social institutions that recognize these names, and the established legacies of their actual usage. This is all just a matter of sociology, not metaphysics.

And yet, and yet, I am certain, but morally certain, that something has changed. “The sun and man generate man,” Aristotle said.5 The eternal rotations of the celestial bodies had their role in the cycles of coming-into-being and passing-away among earthly creatures. Biology could not make any sense independently of cosmology, as the birth and reproduction and death of sublunar beings were a sort of imitation, to the extent that their natures allowed, of the constant circular motion of the immortal celestial bodies beyond the moon.

I am writing this from the bedside of my sleeping father, in a veterans’ hospital just off Interstate 10 in San Bernardino. He is in the advanced stages of cancer, and it has fallen to my sister and to me to come to him to talk about good things from the past, and to help him with the weighty decisions that attend such a grave illness. Nor am I so young as to fail to perceive the chain that binds us, and the shared identity, in what really matters, of its links. He is me, just not for now.

With the sun’s help (and, contra Aristotle, my mother’s too), he generated me: he approximated, as best he could, the cycles of the heavens. The sun has offered its help to me too, it has warmed my seed, but I have sought immortality in other, mostly futile, ways: by striving, at the beginning of what appears to be a postliterate age, to translate fragments of my soul into written words. We do not know what the future of data storage will look like, let alone the future of readership, and in the best case, it may still turn out that my words have nothing about them that is particularly worthy of preservation. We do know that the main-belt asteroids will continue in their orbit, that the Smith

33

ASTRONYMY

family name will endure out there, and not just in kind, which is the best that can be hoped for among sublunar corruptible creatures, but in number.6 I do not feel as if I have become immortal, but to be honest, the naming of 13585 Justinsmith has changed my comportment toward death, in a way that my scattered attempts at writing never could.

If you were to condense all the main-belt asteroids into a single body, its mass would be roughly 4 percent that of the earth’s moon. Only one of its members, Ceres, is large enough to have taken on a spherical shape by force of its own gravity. The rest are jaunty, oblong, hooked, like the atoms of Democritus. Though the asteroids are numerous, the belt itself is largely empty, and other than bombardment by radiation and periodic strafing by micrometeorites, Justinsmith mostly just continues in its orbit, without risk of collision. Space weathering will eventually wear it down, long before the earth is engulfed by the sun, but so far from now that it is, by any reasonable human scale, immortal.

For Aristotle, the soul dissolves when the body corrupts. Many others preferred to believe that nothing dies of what comes to be, and one plausible account of what happens to the soul is that it goes to the stars, either because it was originally composed of star stuff (we have been “given a soul out of those eternal fires which you call stars and planets,” Cicero cites Scipio Africanus as saying), or because it is elevated or promoted to the astral realm after death.7 Heraclitus calls the soul a “spark of starry substance.”8 In the Timaeus, Plato maintains that each soul is assigned a star, though for him, it is only those who live good lives who return there to inhabit it after death.9 The

Pythagoreans, similarly, are said to have held that only some souls ascend to the stars after death—those of the brave.10 The Girl Scouts of San Bernardino have been making Christmas cards to be distributed at random to the patients at the veterans’ hospital. “Thank you so much for serving our country!” said the one my father received. “Happy holidays! Without you our country would be in big danger.”

One of the supposed advances of modern natural philosophy beginning from the late sixteenth century was to show that the stars are bodies just like those here on Earth, that there is no great cosmic division between the celestial quasi-divinities and the sublunar elements. Star stuff is not soul stuff, but only rock stuff and fire stuff. Over the following few centuries, science would also converge on the view that if there is anything to be called a “soul” at all, it is, as Aristotle had thought, a consequence of the arrangement of the body, rather than the cause of that arrangement, which precedes and survives it.

So we are mortal, and the stars are just bodies. We are corrupting, my father and I, and 13585 Justinsmith is a stony body four kilometers wide. We, like it, are charted and known by our ephemerides. There is, however, power—at least for us—in names, and the strict naming rules of the iau, rules that are ignored by the isr , reflect the ancient idea that to give one’s name to a heavenly body is itself a sort of catasterism, an ascent to the heavens. That we know that this is not in fact what is happening does nothing to liberate us from the weight of ancient meanings—any more than our knowledge of the biology of birth and death can free us from the sense that it is not protein sequences, but love, that binds the generations together.

1 See Saul A. Kripke, “Naming and

4 See my blog post “Bébert,” 27

Necessity,” in Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman, eds., Semantics of Natural Language (New York: Humanities Press, 1972), p. 253.

2 See the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center’s protocol “How Are Minor Planets Named?” Available at <minorplanetcenter.net/iau/info/HowNamed. html>. Accessed 25 December 2015.

3 See the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Small-Body Database Browser. Available at <ssd.jpl. nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=13585>.

Last modified 2 September 2015.

May 2013. Available at <jehsmith. com/1/2013/05/bébert-and-thecats-of-france.html>.

5 See Aristotle, Physics, Volume I: Books 1–4, trans. P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford, Loeb Classical Library 228 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 126. For the text quoted, I have substituted my own translation of this edition’s original Greek.

6 The distinction between eternity “in kind” or “in form” and eternity “in number” is found in Book II of Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals: “That which comes into

being is eternal in the way that is possible for it. Now it is not possible in number (for the being of existing things is in the particular and if this were such, it would be an eternal), but it is possible in form.

That is why there is always a kind of men and animals and plants.” See Aristotle’s De Partibus Animalium I. De Generatione Animalium I, trans. David M. Balme (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 58.

7 Cicero, On the Republic. On the Laws, trans. Clinton W. Keys, Loeb Classical Library 213 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), p. 266.

8 This lost fragment of Heracli-

tus is cited by Macrobius in his Commentariorum in somnium Scipionis. See Macrobius, ed.

Franz Rudolph Eyssenhardt (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1893), p. 543.

9 Plato, Timaeus, trans. R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library 234 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), pp. 88–91.

10 See M. David Litwa, We Are Being Transformed: Deification in Paul’s Soteriology (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), p. 140.

34

ELECTRIC CARESSES Dominic Pettman

In 1920, as Europe reeled from the Great War, as well as from all the questions about human nature and progress it provoked, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke visited a close friend, Elisabeth Klossowska, near Lake Geneva. This woman had a twelve-year-old son, who would grow up to be known simply as Balthus, a painter notorious for his voyeuristic depictions of tender-aged girls, often shown in secret, somber interactions with cats. The critical reflex, when confronted with such imagery, was—and indeed still is—to acknowledge the totemic function of this animal within the frame, which symbolically mirrors the girls themselves (coded as feline, or “kittenish”), while also evoking in plain sight a metaphoric allusion to the taboo part of the subject’s body the painter presumably most desired. But this view changes when we learn about a trauma Balthus suffered a year before Rilke’s visit.

Having taken in a stray cat, the young boy named his new companion Mitsou, and loved his enigmatic adoptee with the unthinking intensity of a sensitive child. But just as quickly as she had come into the boy’s life, the cat disappeared, leaving only a single year of memories. To cope with the devastating pain of abandonment, the precocious Balthus made forty ink drawings of fond moments they had spent together.

Mitsou taken to the park. Mitsou keeping the young boy company as he reads a book. Mitsou in Balthus’s arms as the family waits to board a ferry. Mitsou being scolded after the first dress rehearsal for disappearance. And then the last sequence of pictures: the young boy, frantic and disconsolate as he searches for his friend, and finally in tears, distraught as he realizes that Mitsou is gone forever.

When Rilke visited the house, one year after this sad event, he was shown the drawings by the budding artist. The poet was so impressed with the story these told that he arranged for the drawings to be published, even writing a short preface in French for the book. Clearly more than sentimental juvenilia—the celebrated German publisher Kurt Wolff, for instance, called them “astounding and almost frightening”— these pictures shed a different light on Balthus’s later work, which many find uncomfortably pedophilic. (It is no coincidence that one of his paintings, Jeune fille

au chat, became a cover image for modern editions of Nabokov’s Lolita.) As one art critic recently noted, “Mitsou almost feels like a lost first love,” an observation that suggests that the cats in his paintings might not simply function as totemic invocations of the young girls.1 But why almost? Childhood pets allow an experience of intersubjective intimacy too often cast as merely a passing apprenticeship on the long and winding road to proper, mature, human love; as if the affection one has for a cat, dog, or horse is less meaningful or affectively charged than the feelings one has for a sibling or friend. If we accept that the cats in Balthus’s adult oeuvre represent a real desire directed toward the feline, it becomes clear that his paintings allow, beyond or within the problematic gendered gaze, the refusal to choose between humans or animals when it comes to a privileged object of affection. Or better, they allow us to see a certain continuum between humans and other animals, united in play, in boredom, in domestic daydreams.

Rilke’s preface, however, reminds us not to collapse such a continuum too quickly. He begins by asking: “Does anyone know cats? … I must admit I have always considered that their existence was never anything but shakily hypothetical.” Dogs, in sharp contrast, are much easier to “know,” since they “live at the very limits of their nature, constantly—through the humanness of their gaze, their nostalgic nuzzlings.”2 But what attitude do cats adopt? Cats are just that: cats.

And their world is utterly, through and through, a cat’s world. You think they look at us? Has anyone ever truly known whether or not they deign to register for one instant on the sunken surface of their retina our trifling forms?

As they stare at us they might merely be eliminating us magically from their gaze, eternally replete. True, some of Opposite above: Balthus, The Living Room, 1942.

Opposite below: Balthus, The Cat of La Méditerranée, 1949. Painting made for La Méditerranée, a Paris restaurant frequented by the artist. The young woman in the boat was modeled on the daughter of Balthus’s friend Georges Bataille.

35

ELECTRIC CARESSES

36

DOMINIC PETTMAN

Above and opposite: Ink drawings by an eleven-yearold Balthus telling the story of his relationship with his cat Mitsou. In the final image, the boy weeps when his search for his lost friend proves futile.

37

ELECTRIC CARESSES

38

DOMINIC PETTMAN

us indulge our susceptibility to their wheedling and electric caresses. But let such persons remember the strange, brusque, and offhand way in which their favorite animal frequently cuts short the effusions they had fondly imagined to be reciprocal. … Has man ever been their coeval? I doubt it. And I can assure you that sometimes, in the twilight, the cat next door pounces across and through my body, either unaware of me or as demonstration to some eerie spectator that I really don’t exist.3

In other words, different creatures can inhabit the same objective space (if today’s quantum physicists will allow such a conceit), but not the same phenomenological one. Or to paraphrase Lacan, il n’y a pas de rapport félin. Cat fur may rub along a human leg, but the cat and the human are the loci for two different and unconnected relationships to this instance of physical contact.

There is nothing we could describe as a shared experience. (Of course, the same can be said of human lovers.)

Balthus’s own paintings, however, seem to allow for a space of ontological exchange, or at least a possibility of mutual recognition. In one sense, cats are his subjects, such as the one that stands at his feet in the large self-portrait The King of Cats (1935). In other depictions, the cat has its own sovereign presence and energy, as with The Cat of La Méditerranée (1949), which served as a mural in La Méditerranée, a Parisian restaurant frequented by André Malraux, Albert Camus, and Georges Bataille. Clearly, Mitsou’s soft and elusive fur lived on in many different avatars, produced by the horsetail brushes of her brief “owner.” Art thus fulfills one of its primary functions in fixing, or at least attempting to fix, the evanescent essence of the beloved other; the silhouette of another ensouled body that will soon be, if it is not already, absent.

At the end of his preface, Rilke reflects—in a striking passage so underread that it deserves to be quoted in full—on the melancholic dynamic of unexpected acquisition and loss, bestowing a special role on cats in the ongoing fort/da game that punctuates all of our lives: It is always diverting to find something: a moment before, and it was not yet there. But to find a cat: that is unheard of! For you must agree with me that a cat does not become an integral part of our lives, not like, for example, some toy might be: even though it belongs to us now, it remains somehow apart, outside, and thus we always have:

life + a cat,

which, I can assure you, adds up to an incalculable sum.

It is sad to lose something. We imagine that it may be suffering, that it may have hurt itself somehow, that it will end up in utter misery. But to lose a cat: no! that is unheard of.

No one has ever lost a cat. Can one lose a cat, a living thing, a living being, a life? But losing something living is death!

Very well, it is death.

Finding. Losing. Have you really thought what loss is? It is not simply the negation of that generous moment that had replied to an expectation you yourself had never sensed or suspected. For between that moment and that loss there is always something that we call—the word is clumsy enough, I admit—possession.

Now, loss, cruel as it may be, cannot prevail over possession; it can, if you like, terminate it; it affirms it; in the end it is like a second acquisition, but this time totally interiorized, in another way intense.

Of course, you felt this, Baltusz. No longer able to see Mitsou, you bent your efforts to seeing her even more clearly.

Is she still alive? She lives within you, and her insouciant kitten’s frolics that once diverted you now compel you: you fulfilled your obligation through your painstaking melancholy.

And so, a year later, I discovered you grown taller, consoled.

Nevertheless, for those who will always see you bathed in tears at the end of your book I composed the first—somewhat whimsical—part of this preface. Just to be able to say at the end: “Don’t worry: I am. Baltusz exists. Our world is sound.

There are no cats.”4

1 Roberta Smith, “Infatuations,

Female and Feline,” The New York Times, 26 September 2013.

2 Rainer Maria Rilke, introduction to Balthus, Mitsou: Forty Images,

trans. Richard Miller (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1984), p. 9.

3 Ibid., pp. 9–10.

4 Ibid., pp. 12–13.

ELECTRIC CARESSES

Balthus, The King of Cats, 1935.

40

41

THE MANSION HOUSE TAVERN OF CROSSED DESTINIES Jonathan Allen

In Raymond Roussel’s proto-surrealist novel Locus Solus (1914), the proprietor of a country estate, Martial Canterel, conducts a tour of his extensive grounds, presenting his guests with a sequence of increasingly eccentric and spectacular inventions. In the book’s penultimate chapter, the group encounters Felicity, a “renowned sibyl” in possession of a deck of luminous musical tarot cards. As Canterel explains, a talented watchmaker had, at Felicity’s request, inserted within the layers of each card a mechanism harnessing a number of insects of exceptional flatness—so-called emeralds—that when sung to by the sibyl emitted tiny haloes of green light and accompanied her with a melody reminiscent of “The Bluebells of Scotland.”

Roussel’s tarot cards are animated, of course, by nothing more than the writer’s prose. As Michel Foucault observes in Death and the Labyrinth—his sole foray into literary criticism—the insects trapped within Felicity’s cards “do not come from a fantastic forest, nor from the hands of a magician; no spell endowed them with malevolent signals.”1 Rather they are born from within the material processes of the literary imaginary, which, as Roussel reveals in his posthumous exposé How I Wrote Certain of My Books (1935), had required the laborious, almost machine-like linking together of homonyms and near-homophones. Indeed it was the automaton-like character of Roussel’s art that recommended the writer to André Breton, who viewed him, alongside Lautréamont, as “the greatest mesmerizer of modern times.”2 A decade before Roussel wrote Locus Solus, an actual tarot deck that incorporated an unprecedented technology and implicit interiority suggestive of Roussel’s emerald-filled cards was being created in London. Its maker—also described by some as a forerunner of surrealism—was the English artist and mystic Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956), and the handpainted tarot deck he produced around 1906 has only recently emerged from within the archives of London’s Magic Circle Museum, where it had lain for the past seventy years, accessible only to the clandestine organization’s community of theatrical magicians.

Even in the art world, Austin Spare’s name often passes unrecognized. The son of a policeman, Spare was born in London’s Smithfield neighborhood in

Opposite: Austin Spare (standing) on the opening day of his exhibition at the Mansion House Tavern, London, 12 June 1952. Courtesy The Daily Mirror Library.

Above: Card from and packaging for Spare’s “Surrealist Racing Forecast Cards,” ca. 1936. Courtesy and copyright The Magic Circle, London.

42

JONATHAN ALLEN

1886. At a young age he was embraced by the art establishment and hailed a “genius” by the popular press due to his remarkable talent for drawing and his precocious inclusion in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1904. Spare’s biographer Phil Baker observes that, despite his early professional success, the artist “had his career the wrong way round … he began as a controversial West End celebrity and went on to obscurity in a south London basement.”

Baker cites the “hidden injuries of class” as a factor in Spare’s troubled professional trajectory but an equally significant factor during his lifetime may have been his claim that mystical practices lay behind the production of his artwork, as well as his association with influential occultists, including the notorious mage Aleister Crowley.3 In recent years, as cultural historians have acknowledged the important influence of occult histories on the development of twentiethcentury modernity, Spare’s work has been read more sympathetically. For a younger generation of artists, he has become something of a folk hero, a tenacious antiestablishment sorcerer whose penchant for mounting exhibitions in the wood-paneled taverns of south London has only added to his dissident appeal.

Spare’s work is now in collections around the world, with significant examples in the United Kingdom at the

Victoria & Albert Museum, the Imperial War Museum, and the Wellcome Collection.

The claim by commentators that Spare foreshadowed Continental surrealism has its roots largely in his early use of automatism, as theorized in his seminal magical treatise The Book of Pleasure (SelfLove): The Psychology of Ecstasy (1913).4 In reality, the artist’s subsequent use of automatic drawing had as much in common with the mediumistic automatism of spiritualism as it did with Breton’s later “pure psychic automatism.” Yet the perception of this kinship nevertheless prompted a memorable 1938 newspaper headline: “The Father of Surrealism—He’s a Cockney.”

Scholarship relating to Spare’s contribution to the history of modern occultism has tended to concentrate on his deployment of “sigils”—compressed magical letterforms believed by the artist to condense and redirect transformative energies through a combination of willed and unwilled concentration. Two Tracts on Cartomancy by Austin Osman Spare (1997), with a long introduction by Gavin W. Semple, however, brought the artist’s lifelong preoccupation with divination cards to the attention of researchers, while at the same time highlighting the scarcity of surviving examples fabricated by the artist himself. A small number of the hand-colored calligraphic cards relating to his Arena

43

THE MANSION HOUSE TAVERN OF CROSSED DESTINIES

of Anon divination system (ca. 1927) have survived, as have some sets of his “Surrealist Racing Forecast Cards,” produced around 1936. But the recent rediscovery in the Magic Circle archives of a complete tarot deck seems likely to prompt speculation in a variety of critical fields, not least among Spare researchers.

Tarot historians in particular will note the deck’s estimated date of production of ca. 1906, placing it a few years ahead of one of the enduring artifacts of the turn-of-the-century British occult revival and possibly the most widely reproduced tarot deck of all time: the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, published in 1909 in London by the writer and occultist Arthur Waite and drawn by the artist Pamela Colman Smith.5 Beyond its potential significance for tarot’s timeline, the deck has a number of unexpectedly modernist traits. Consider first its unconventional architecture.

A standard tarot deck comprises seventy-eight cards divided into two sections or “arcana”: a so-called major arcana comprising tarot’s twenty-two familiar picture cards—the hanged man, the wheel of fortune, the empress, etc.—and a “minor” arcana made up of fiftysix number and court cards that bear the tarot suits of wands, pentacles, swords, and cups. Spare’s deck has the same major arcana, but his minor arcana use the more familiar French playing-card suits of diamonds,

clubs, spades, and hearts. Put more simply, he has grafted the top half of a tarot deck onto the body of an ordinary playing card deck. This hybrid format—which may be unprecedented—collapses the clear distinction between playing-card cartomancy, which at the turn of the last century was a popular and mainly middle- to working-class pastime, and tarot cartomancy, which was then largely the preserve of an educated elite with esoteric interests. Spare himself confounded such class distinctions during the early part of his career, transforming himself from a working-class lad into a “darling of Mayfair” before returning to his class roots in south London—“a swine with swine,” to use the artist’s own words.6 Among the remarkable features of Spare’s deck are the larger visual and textual patterns that emerge when the cards are placed alongside one another. An innovative system of cartomantic linking joins together divided abstract geometric shapes and natural forms, drawings of human figures and symbolic objects, and banderoles containing single words or short phrases.

The cards interconnect through over one hundred of Above: Sequence of seemingly unrelated tarot cards from Spare’s deck that combine to form a broad yellow arc.

Courtesy and copyright The Magic Circle, London.

44

JONATHAN ALLEN

these tiny ligatures, drawn by the artist perhaps to imbue the deck with a kind of oracular consciousness, or to program it with a system of decorative mnemonic prompts that might assist him during readings. In some cases, a single image links several cards—a notable example being the purple and green snake born between four of the spade cards. At the same time as the deck generates harmonious links between some cards, it produces fracturing disassociations between others. The sequence of cards that forms the snake, for instance, produces a misalignment between one half of a small boat and the tail of a flickering flame, while at the opposite edge of the same card a pointing hand is truncated at the wrist. Whatever its intended use, this form of contiguous montaging appears to be without precedent in the history of cartomancy, although related precursors do exist in the context of nineteenthcentury recreational and educational games such as the myriorama, or continuous landscape.

Given that Spare’s deck came to rest finally at the Magic Circle, it is intriguing that one of the cards featuring the most complex system of connective devices is the Juggler (or Magician). The card aligns with the knight of spades to form a craftsman’s rasp or file, and with the High Priestess to form a circle containing the word sciences. With the four of diamonds, the Juggler forms a theatrical mask and a jester’s marotte alongside the words actor and actress, and in a different configuration with the same card, a violin-marotte hybrid accompanied by the words vereity artich (presumably a garbled version of “variety artist”). With the five of diamonds, another version of the violin-marotte appears along the Juggler’s upper left edge, while on the upper right edge, a small banderole reading music can be formed. The extensiveness Below: The secret correspondences of the Juggler.

Courtesy and copyright The Magic Circle, London.

45

THE MANSION HOUSE TAVERN OF CROSSED DESTINIES

of these interconnections suggest that the Juggler/ Magician was an important figure for Spare at the time, perhaps one emblematic of the artfulness, even dissemblance, that the fledgling artist needed to navigate the decadent fin de siècle milieus into which his celebrity thrust him at such an young age.

Many of the images that animate the borders of Spare’s cards—the torn parchment, the poisoned chalice, the writhing serpent—belong to a latesymbolist world of allegory and popular fantasy. One motif, however, may point to a more canonical arthistorical source. By linking the Emperor and Justice cards, a conspicuous s-shaped motif can be identified, accompanied on both cards by the word beauty. This is probably a reference to William Hogarth’s famous “line of beauty,” which features prominently in his self-portrait The Painter and His Pug (1745), a painting Spare could easily have seen in London at the National Gallery. In Hogarth’s aesthetic treatise The Analysis of Beauty (1753), he compares the dynamism of this curving logogram to “the activity of the flame and of the serpent.”7 It is significant then that by recombining various cards within Spare’s deck, several elongated serpent-like forms can be found to mirror similarly extended flame-like forms. These apparent references to Hogarth may be a remnant of Spare’s training at the Royal College of Art; alternatively, they could point to a more personal identification with the contrarian and animal-loving satirist, born just a few streets away from Spare’s own birthplace in London. Spare was soon to publish his own graphic indictment of establishment

mores in A Book of Satyrs (1907) and went on to become, like Hogarth, an empathic chronicler of London’s marginalized poor.

Numerous aspects of Spare’s deck warrant further study. For example, ten cards (including the Juggler) depict radiating auras of color that recall the “thought forms” of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, enigmatic visual abstractions that Spare would probably have known through his reading of the publications of the influential British Theosophists, and which are thought to have directly inspired the Russian abstract painter Vasily Kandinsky. Indeed, the use of color throughout the deck may carry as-yet-undeciphered meaning, with purple, green, and pink predominating on both the faces and backs of the cards. For Besant and Leadbeater, the three colors symbolized “devotion mixed with affection,” “adaptability,” and “love for humanity,” respectively.8 A broad yellow stripe arcs between seven otherwise seemingly unrelated cards, as if drawing together all of the deck’s experimental trajectories in one unifying stroke.

•

•

•

It is unlikely that Raymond Roussel ever heard the name Austin Osman Spare. Spare’s sway near the end of his life stretched little beyond a close circle of supporters and clients of south London pubs such as the Mansion House Tavern where, disadvantaged Above: A serpent winds its way across four cards. Courtesy and copyright The Magic Circle, London.

46

JONATHAN ALLEN Left: William Hogarth’s self-portrait The Painter and His Pug (1745), featuring the artist’s socalled line of beauty.

Opposite: The serpentine form made by linking the Emperor and Justice cards in Spare’s deck is likely an allusion to Hogarth’s motif.

Courtesy and copyright The Magic Circle, London.

by his poverty and outmaneuvered by a modernist avant-garde too protean for him to keep pace with, the artist mounted one of his final exhibitions. By contrast, Roussel’s output was to influence just about every major French literary and artistic movement of the twentieth century. Among the groups strongly influenced by Roussel’s legacy was the Oulipo (ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or “workshop of potential literature”), a loose collective of writers and mathematicians that included a member for whom tarot became a tool of structuralist experimentation. Italo Calvino’s wellknown experiments “The Castle of Crossed Destinies”

and “The Tavern of Crossed Destinies”—two suites of stories published in 1969 and 1973, respectively—led the writer to describe the tarot deck as “una macchina narrativa combinatoria,” or “a combinatorial narrative machine.”9 Although Spare may not have described his own tarot deck in such a machinic way, its combinatorial system might well have appealed to Calvino’s algorithmic sensibility at the time. If Spare’s deck resembles any technology, however, it is surely that of film, with each card correlating to a spliced frame montaged against another to generate multiple contingencies

47

THE MANSION HOUSE TAVERN OF CROSSED DESTINIES

and alternate temporalities every bit as fantastical as those generated by Roussel, and as narratively generative as the montage film practices that would follow.

One juxtaposition of Spare’s cards even produces a sprocketed cog, an image evoking the mechanics of the cinematic technologies that were already reframing modernity as he inked his deck.

On Spare’s eight of clubs, a pickpocket’s hand seems to reach through the surface of the card, as if seeking its internal workings. Yet the pinkishness into which the hand is about to delve seems more 1 Michel Foucault, Death and the

Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas (London: Athlone Press, 1987), p. 82.

2 André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, trans. Mark Polizzotti (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), p. 227.

3 Phil Baker, “Austin Osman Spare: Cockney Visionary,” The Guardian, 6 May 2011.

4 Austin Osman Spare, The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy (London: privately printed, 1913), p. 55–56.

5 The author of this essay recognized Spare’s tarot deck in 2013 among long-forgotten items in the archive of London’s Magic Circle Museum. The museum’s former longtime curator Arthur Ivey, who discussed the deck in his short article “Tarot Cards and a Pack in the Magic Circle Museum,” The Magic Circular, vol. 64, no. 707 (November 1969), was aware that it was by Spare but did not consider this particularly noteworthy given the artist’s relative obscurity at the time. Ivey dated the cards to circa 1910, but a closer analysis of their stylistic character and iconographical content strongly suggest that the artist constructed the deck over an extended period, during

the years between 1904 and 1906.

See Jonathan Allen, ed., Lost Envoy: The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2016), and “The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare” The Magic Circular, vol.

110, no. 1194 (January 2016).

6 Phil Baker, Austin Osman Spare: The Life & Legend of London’s Lost Artist (London: Strange Attractor Press, (2012), p. 49.

7 Hogarth writes, “A fine figure and its parts ought always to have a serpent-like and flaming form: naturally those sort of lines have I know not what of life and seeming motion in them, which very much resembles the activity of the flame and of the serpent.” William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (London: printed by J. Reeves for the author, 1753), pp. vi–vii.

8 C. W. Leadbeater, Man Visible and Invisible: Examples of Different Types of Men as Seen by Means of Trained Clairvoyance (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1902), frontispiece. Interestingly, Spare was a close friend of suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, for whom purple, white, and green (representing dignity, purity, and hope, respectively) would become significant when they

bodily than the mechanical interior of Roussel’s cards. The insects of Felicity’s genteel Parisian deck had intoned “The Bluebells of Scotland” because, as Martial Canterel explains, the miraculous creatures could recall the herdsmen’s songs from the hills upon which they had once basked. Spare’s cards, like their proletarian maker, instead might have felt inclined to bawl out a scatological pub song popular in London during the artist’s final years, and one whose punning would no doubt have appealed even to the aristocratic Roussel. Having followed his fortunes from Mayfair to the Mansion House Tavern, from riches to rags, Spare’s cards could have surely comforted their maker with their own vulgar pleasures: What a wonderful fish a sole is, Like salmon, they all swim in shoals, But the best of all fish, When laid on a dish, Are sole, are sole, are sole.10

were officially announced as the emblematic colors of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1908.

9 Eight stories written by Calvino and collectively titled “The Castle of Crossed Destinies” were originally published in Tarocchi: Il mazzo visconteo di Bergamo e New York (Franco Maria Ricci Editore: Parma, 1969). Calvino based his stories on the mid-fifteenthcentury tarot deck handpainted by Bonifacio Bembo for Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, and his successor and son-in-law Francesco Sforza. The same stories were republished alongside a collection of eight new stories written

by Calvino using the Marseille tarot deck (the standard pack made

by French and Swiss card makers from about 1700) and which the writer titled “The Tavern of Crossed Destinies.” Confusingly, this later suite was first published in 1973 alongside the first eight stories in a volume titled Il castello dei destini incrociati (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1973), taking the name of the original 1969 grouping for the entire collection. In the author’s note that appears in the 1973 volume, Calvino describes the tarot as a “macchina narrativa combinatoria”—the phrase was

mistranslated by William Weaver in a 1976 English edition as “a machine for constructing stories.”

The latter has more in common with the phrase “story-making machine,” commonly attributed to Georges Perec. Calvino was personally invited to join the Oulipo group (of which Perec was a member) by Raymond Queneau in 1972, a period during which he was still working on his tarot-based experiments. Both the Bembo and Marseille cards originate from a period that precedes tarot’s first use as an instrument of magic and divination, which developed in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. Before that time, tarot functioned primarily as a trick-taking recreational game, designed as an allegory for life and involving both skill and chance.

10 Speakers of British English will hear the phrase “are sole” as the word “arsehole,” corresponding to “asshole” for American readers.

A recording of “What a Wonderful Fish a Sole Is,” as sung by Sid Fowler in 1986 at the Nautical Club, Birmingham, UK, can be found in the British Library sound archive at <bit.ly/1Xgp2HB>.

48

49

ARTIST PROJECT / CYCLUR A NUBILA David Birkin

These people are very gentle and timid; they go naked, as I have said, without arms and without law.

——Christopher Columbus, diary entry of 4 November 1492

Situated on the southeast coast of Cuba, the natural harbor of Guantánamo has been colonized continuously for over half a millennium. Named by the indigenous Taíno, who inhabited the island before their communities were wiped out by the arrival of Europeans, this “land between rivers” is home to the sole US military base in a communist country, and was, until the recent rapprochement, the site of the only base in a country with which the United States did not maintain diplomatic relations.

President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration began leasing territory around Guantánamo Bay from the nascent Cuban government following Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898.

As a condition for the withdrawal of US troops, the 1903 Cuban-American Treaty of Relations asserted the imperial power’s right to buy or lease Cuban lands for its own defense, as well as “to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof.” Although much of the treaty was abrogated in 1934 as a result of the “Good Neighbor” policy toward Latin America instituted by Theodore’s cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt, Naval Station Guantanamo Bay——or GTMO, in military parlance——is one remnant that remains operational.

Under the terms of the agreement, Washington exercises complete jurisdiction and control over the land, while ultimate sovereignty resides with Havana. Rent for the forty-five-square-mile former coaling station has been fixed at $4,085 per annum since 1938. The lease is perpetual, and can only be terminated by abandonment or by the mutual agreement of both parties. After the revolution of 1953–1959, the new government of Fidel Castro, arguing that the treaty had been imposed under duress and was incompatible with modern international law, stopped cashing the checks. But the United States keeps sending them anyway——­ an unwanted tenant who knows not to miss a payment.

The Cold War–era “Cactus Curtain,” an eight-mile stretch of heavily fortified prickly pear planted in 1961 near the base to deter Cubans from defecting in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, still makes itself felt from time to time as the island’s giant banana rats scurry across the mines that line the Cuban side.

50

DAVID BIRKIN

51

ARTIST PROJECT / CYCLURA NUBILA

The name “Guantanamo” entered the public consciousness this century following the attacks of September 11 as a synonym for the Bush administration’s program of rendition and detention.

After the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, the United States began offering bounties of thousands of dollars a head for the capture of alleged Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. Flyers promising “wealth and power beyond your dreams” and “enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life” were strewn across Afghan villages “like snowflakes in December in Chicago,” as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld himself put it.

The tactic yielded results, but at the expense of accuracy as hundreds of innocent Afghans and foreign nationals——including Saudis, Yemenis, Pakistanis, and ethnic Uighurs escaping persecution in China——were apprehended by local warlords and turned over to the Americans, with boys as young as twelve and men as old as ninety-three being shipped off to Guantanamo.

Once images appeared in the press of prisoners shackled in those now-infamous orange jumpsuits, sensory-deprived and kneeling behind rows of razor wire, it became politically expedient to simply leave them there, as depictions of alleged terrorists in US custody could be used to signal success in the military campaign, while admissions of error would call into question the government’s handling of the war. Thus began a narrative whereby “the worst of the worst” had to be kept off American soil.

Guantanamo is, in a very literal sense, a lawless place. The Center for Constitutional Rights describes the camp as an “island prison designed to exist beyond the rule of law.” Language plays an important role in justifying this status. Designated “illegal enemy combatants” (an invented term intended to sidestep the Geneva Convention’s distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants), the “detainees” receive no statutory protection vis-à-vis the laws governing conduct during war. Instead, most exist in an unending state of legal limbo: either innocent and cleared for release but left waiting, or else deemed too dangerous for release but without evidence untainted by torture to support the allegation. They are the product of judicial slippage——liminal entities falling between multiple legislative frameworks, interned on a stretch of no-man’s-land.

The erasure of a person’s legal status and the indefinite deferral of their rights is what defines Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the “state of exception,” in which the political power of a government operates outside the law during times of crisis. It is an insidious tactic, routinely deployed by authoritarian regimes, and is epitomized by that most regressive of acts, the suspension of habeas corpus. Of the 780 individuals held at Guantanamo since 2002, 680 were deemed no threat to the United States and released without charge, often after spending years in solitary confinement in an eight-foot-by-ten-foot cell. A further 9 people have died in custody——a greater number than were ever convicted. One of the most senselessly cruel practices at the camp is the force-feeding of inmates who are on hunger strike, an excruciating daily process that involves navy medics snaking a tube up a person’s nostril and down the back of their throat to pump in 2,600 calories of nutritional supplement. Already stripped to what Agamben terms “bare life,” prisoners who refuse to eat are, by some Kafkaesque twist of logic, accused of engaging in “asymmetric warfare.”

Contradictions abound at Guantanamo. Despite its ambivalent legal status, the base bears an unmistakable resemblance to the United States, with its churches, supermarkets, yellow school buses, open-air cinema, golf club, bowling alley, and McDonald’s and Pizza Hut franchises. Every morning, at eight o’clock sharp, “The Star-Spangled Banner” rings out across a tract of desert dotted with suburban-style houses, and every year, on the Fourth of July, fireworks ignite the night sky. Behind the prison walls, a population of Muslim men incarcerated without any prospect of release are offered “enriching your life” classes that include learning to paint, learning to type, writing a résumé, and handling personal finances, all while still shackled to their seats.

A prison library provides books and DVDs in an array of languages——from French and Russian to Arabic, Urdu, Pashto, and Farsi——with anti-American sentiment and explicit scenes of sex and violence “screened out” by the prison’s censors, despite the fact that many of the men have endured physical and sexual abuse at the hands of CIA interrogators at black sites across the globe. The whole place costs around $400 million a year to operate ($2.7 million per detainee, compared to $34,000 at most federal high-security prisons), yet its closure is obstructed by a Congress otherwise bent on cutting public spending. At the start of 2016, the total bill to taxpayers was approaching $6 billion.

52

DAVID BIRKIN

53

ARTIST PROJECT / CYCLURA NUBILA

“Camp Iguana” was the name given to Guantanamo’s juvenile detention center where three boys, all under the age of sixteen, were incarcerated between 2002 and 2004. An additional twenty or so juveniles were also imprisoned at the base, but because the Department of Defense lowered the definition of a “minor” from eighteen (the internationally recognized age) to sixteen, they were held in the main sections of the camp. Typical of the kind of legal irony that has come to characterize Guantanamo, the iguanas themselves——endemic to the area around the camp——were to play a pivotal role in determining the prisoners’ fates.

In 2003, as part of his effort to persuade the US Supreme Court to hear the case of a dozen Kuwaiti detainees being held in isolation, attorney Tom Wilner presented three arguments to the justices. The first two focused on the need to restore America’s reputation as a law-abiding nation, and to afford the prisoners their right to a fair hearing. The last presented the case of Cyclura nubila, also known as the Cuban rock iguana——a herbivorous lizard protected under the United States Endangered Species Act of 1973. The moment an iguana crosses the perimeter fence into the naval base, it becomes subject to US law, with military personnel liable to prosecution and fines of up to $10,000 for harming the animals. Wilner argued that to invoke jurisdiction over the iguanas, while at the same time denying the detainees due process, was to afford the reptiles more rights than the humans. The Supreme Court subsequently agreed to hear their case.

Cyclura is etymologically derived from the Greek cyclos, or circular; nubila is Latin for cloudy. Trials by the Guantanamo military commission are held in closed session, and cameras are forbidden in the courtroom. Janet Hamlin, the primary courtroom sketch artist at the tribunals, has been documenting the proceedings since 2006. Each of her drawings is cleared by the military censor prior to release. Cyclura nubila (2014) comprises a series of portraits I commissioned from Hamlin on standard nineteen-by-twenty-five-inch courtroom sketch paper of the iguanas roaming, freely, across the grounds of Naval Station Guantanamo Bay.

54

David Birkin, Cyclura nubila, 2014.

DAVID BIRKIN

55

ARTIST PROJECT / CYCLURA NUBILA

56

A MODEL RAILWAY JOURNEY Ava Kofman

i. th e world is ev ery thing th at is in th e case The impulse to miniaturize the world and reproduce it as an image is an old one. Encyclopedias, the Whole Earth Catalog, Gravity’s Rainbow, cabinets of wonder, Google Maps—the examples are endless. But by far the most earnest, absurd, and tender of such visions is the world’s largest miniature railway.

As with so many aspirations to totality, the world’s largest miniature railway was fueled by colossal, quixotic ambitions. In 2000, a nightclub owner by the name of Frederik Braun visited a model train shop in Zurich when, as he tells it, he started to dream. He dreamt of building the largest model railway the world had ever seen. He called his twin brother and business partner, Gerrit, “who is more rational and skeptical by nature,” and tried to convince him that his idea wasn’t insane.

Eventually, he succeeded. And, as in a fairy tale, a few years and tens of thousands of dollars later, a team of engineers helped make their dream come true.

In 2003, along the banks of the Elbe River where it snakes through downtown Hamburg, the Miniatur Wunderland was born. Housed in a repurposed warehouse, it is a sprawling reproduction of elements of the world’s geography, connected by nearly ten miles of intricate built-to-scale railway tracks, which lengthen with each passing year. The constituent parts are tiny, but the Wunderland’s scale staggers: over 200,000 individually designed human figurines, 930 trains, 8,850 cars and ships, 215,000 trees, 300 people-sized employees, and millions of annual visitors from around the world.

I first learned of Hamburg’s most popular tourist attraction from its promotional trailer on YouTube, which has over twenty million views. A clipped, German-accented voice tells of the Wunderland’s numerological marvels with unselfconsciously comic exactitude. It describes how its replicas of Scandinavia, Above: Visitors at Hamburg’s Miniatur Wunderland. All photos Ava Kofman.

57

A MODEL R AILWAY JOURNEY

Germany, Switzerland, and parts of the United States will soon be joined by “parts of Africa.” Adopting the rhetoric of a conquering empire, it boasts that the Miniatur Wunderland is always expanding.

What was it, I wondered, as I watched aerial shots of tiny shimmering cities, tiny airports, tiny humans making love in a field of tiny sunflowers, that would lead someone to build such a gigantic small world? Was it just my imagination or was there something about the Wunderland’s suggestion of infinity, its potential to expand and swallow the real world, that echoed Germany’s own imperial, industrial, and military histories?

Not long after, I booked a flight, a train, and a ferry to Hamburg. I went to the Wunderland expecting to find a metaphor both less and more than the sum of its improbably numerous parts, its machinery caught between a positivist dream and a totalitarian nightmare. But what I discovered was not so much a Gesamtkunstwerk as a protean work-in-progress, a workshop suffused with a model train enthusiast’s sense of wonder.

ii. in w underla nd When the optimist twin Freddie called the pessimist twin Gerrit from Zurich to tell him about his idea for a model railway, Gerrit asked him if he was suffering from a sunstroke. The two had run a successful nightclub together for over a decade, despite the frequent turnover of discos in Hamburg. So, despite his initial skepticism, Gerrit was soon on board. “You share your luck and double it with a twin brother,” he explained.

When Frederik returned to Hamburg, the brothers began to discuss what a miniature train world might look like. They knew of at least ten model train set exhibitions in Germany alone. Featuring trains as the main attraction, with the surrounding landscape serving as background, they were of little interest to anyone who was not already a die-hard train hobbyist.

Considering what their competitors lacked, the twins began to list what they might put in their new world and quickly realized that 90 percent of their ideas had nothing to do with trains at all. They fantasized about building a mini–mini golf course, a massive music festival, the Eiffel Tower, the Eiffel Tower of Las Vegas, a chocolate factory. What most excited them was the act of miniaturization—its

technical challenges, its inherent comedy, its demiurgic allure. They wanted to build a world where some people came for the trains, but everyone stayed for the scenery. It would be “a small world in front” for tourists and families, “with trains in the back” for model railway enthusiasts.

But even with these populist goals, they were nervous: the demographics of model railway enthusiasts skew very elderly, very male; they worried that women might not respond to the attraction, that teenagers might be bored. One of their solutions was the name Miniatur Wunderland, which, by not referencing trains, allowed them greater creative freedom.

Gerrit told me that whenever train enthusiasts point out historical inaccuracies in a given layout, he replies, “It’s a Wunderland.” “Wunder” lets the twins sidestep the realist constraints of model railroading. It has also made their enterprise immensely popular.

Sebastian Dreschler, a younger half-brother of the twins and the Wunderland’s head of communications, described the Wunderland’s vast, two-story layout as a “huge playground.” And as he gave me a tour, I started to see what he meant. Quirky details and inside jokes fill every inch of the display: a CocaCola bear dances on an iceberg in Sweden; the German soccer team always wins its animatronic match; cars follow traffic rules; a gas station adjusts its prices for inflation; a mob boss hides a dead body in one of many forests; over twenty thousand figurines attend a music festival complete with a rotating cast of tiny performers. In Borgesian fashion, there’s even a scale replica of the Miniatur Wunderland itself. If you push a button, a miniature miniature train circles a tiny track.

Frederik and Gerrit’s fundamental insight, in reversing the foreground and background, was to extend the panoramic perspective afforded by model train sets to the objects of the world. At such a scale, Sebastian says, there is “enough space to think and to play,” even to fantasize about smaller-than-life solutions to real-world problems. When I visited in the fall of 2014, Hamburg’s new concert hall, the Elbharmonie, was closed to the public due to construction delays. But the Wunderland’s own Elbharmonie was very much open, so much so that Frederik and Gerrit hosted the city’s philharmonic orchestra for a live concert, which they synced with the movements of the miniature musicians.

58

AVA KOFMAN

Gerrit sees the Wunderland as a makeshift refuge for the many who make the pilgrimage. “They can leave all [their] problems behind,” he said, “and can dream.” Nearly eight hundred visitors have annual membership cards and visit multiple times a year. One man has visited every Tuesday for the past nine years, adhering to his own internal train schedule. Another spent three days traveling from Tokyo to immerse himself in the exhibition. Gerrit told me he never anticipated all of the fan mail, or the amount of visitors who seemed to be “enthusiasts, not tourists.”

Sebastian said he initially thought of model trains as a “stupid, dusty hobby,” not an attraction that would draw nearly two million visitors. He couldn’t believe that “a woman from New York”—he gestured to me—would come to see it for three days. In his view, part of the Wunderland’s appeal is that it appears less like a business and more like a collective participatory dream. “People don’t usually ‘throw it all in’ in Germany,” he said, referring to his brothers’ decision to turn the whimsical project their into life’s work.

According to him, visitors to the Wunderland are not just buying into the delight that comes from gazing upon its meticulously engineered vistas; they are also enchanted by the “do what you love” ethos evoked by its founding myth.

When I asked Sebastian when the Wunderland’s construction would be over, he laughed. “It will never be finished.”

iii. tr ain dr eams

Above: Backstage at the Wunderland.

The Wunderland’s amusement-park vision of mechanical harmony mirrors the utopian fantasies that were once attached to the real railroad. To its boosters in the mid-nineteenth century, the train was an engine of progress. Just as early celebrants of the Internet saw it as an unambiguously democratic platform, these techno-optimists saw the railway as a great equalizer, one that would usher in a brighter, better age.

At the very least, the railway provided both young and old with a sensory education. It shrunk vast distances into mere seconds—what Marx famously called “the annihilation of space by time.” Travelers now found themselves in a miniaturized world. “The Mediterranean, which is now only a week from us, has before our eyes shrunk into a lake,” exclaimed an article in the 1839 Quarterly Review, “and the great

59

A MODEL R AILWAY JOURNEY

lakes of the world are rapidly drying into ponds!”

Even as it destroyed the distance between towns, the railroad also opened up a greater amount of space than had ever before been accessible. The German poet Heinrich Heine captured this sense when he wrote, “I feel as if the mountains and the forests of all countries were advancing on Paris.” Distant towns, cities, and countries were no longer worlds apart.

Now, in the words of the great railway historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch, you could travel between them “untouched by the space traversed.”

To accomplish this spatial reconfiguration, the railroad needed to make space regular. Because tracks needed to be constructed on certain gradients, and were intensely sensitive to the exigencies of topography, the rails had to reshape the land according to their needs. No wonder one fin de siècle writer described traveling by train as “really being nowhere.” Speeding through this newly flattened countryside on smooth rails was a far cry from taking a rambling walk or making a sweaty journey by horse. Impressions flew by quickly, and were often lost. Tunnels and telegraph poles interrupted views of the landscape so that it was perceived less as a vista than as a moving background.

Above and overleaf: Life inside the Wunderland.

Ralph Waldo Emerson described the passing towns he encountered during his “dreamlike travelling on the railroad” as “pictures on a wall.” The train car was a sort of theater, its images overlapping in quick succession as in an early filmic montage.

It is no accident, according to Schivelbusch, that the mobile, roaming gaze enabled by the railway emerged alongside both the panorama, the late nineteenth century’s dominant visual attraction, and the department store, its mass incarnation. “In panoramic perception,” Schivelbusch writes, “the objects were attractive in their state of dispersal.” Seen from a railway car, the landscape could no longer be evaluated in terms of particular local features, such as a village, a mountain, or a church. Aesthetic appeal was based, instead, on the sum of these fleeting impressions.

As with a full-sized railway, the pleasure of gazing at the Wunderland’s shrunken, swollen universe depends less on appreciating any given miniature scene in isolation than it does on experiencing the sweep of its rolling landscapes. Like a department store, its novelty lies in its impressive assemblage and circulation of heterogeneous parts. The Wunderland tourist is constantly in motion, soaking up the details

60

AVA KOFMAN

61

A MODEL R AILWAY JOURNEY

62

AVA KOFMAN

of the layout’s particulars. Yet when her eye rests for too long on any given particular, she is spurred back into motion by the system’s circulation, by the approach of a train or the push of someone in the crowd angling for a better view.

As we toured an Italian landscape then under construction, Sebastian told me that people visited the Wunderland for the same reason they went to the Empire State Building. “From above,” he said, “you can dream about the world.”

iv. weltanschauung In 2013, the Wunderland donated one square meter to each of the six major political parties in Germany, asking them to envision what the nation would look like if their party were in power. Top politicians and their advisors visited the Wunderland to participate in this special “Utopia” exhibition. They fretted for weeks over the small details, which each took on the symbolic importance of a plank in a political platform.

They had to decide what to include, what to emphasize, and which scenarios would convey their policies most precisely; essentially, what kind of world they wanted to imagine into existence.

These are the same questions facing the Wunderland’s designers. In their heroic quest for a signature type of realism, they, too, weigh abstraction and accuracy. Choosing the materials, the colors, the scale—these are the easy decisions. Then there are the questions that are not simply practical, but ideological: Which of a nation’s features and landmarks should be considered? What criteria (popularity, proximity, and so on) should determine their inclusion? What type of realism is at stake? Whose point of view is this, anyway?

Frederik tells me that they initially developed the exhibition as a pure fantasy. The first section of the layout, Knuffingen, was a fictional German town, an everywhere that is nowhere in particular. He explained that later sections, inspired by specific locations, attempted to evoke recognizable tropes. At one point, the Swiss embassy complained that their section of the layout was “all stereotype.” But it would be more accurate to say that the entire Wunderland is itself a stereotype of a stereotype, dull in its reproduction of well-worn touristic desires, though occasionally brilliant in its descriptive precision.

When planning the Italy layout, the entire construction team traveled to the Amalfi coast for a week.

They took numerous pictures of the dramatic cliffs, in an effort to reproduce the fine textures of the rocks.

“Never before, we had to squeeze so much history into such close quarters,” reads a press release for the new Italy layout, in a slightly off-kilter English translation.

But “history” might be a generous term for describing what the Wunderland’s realism includes.

Although many people are interested in the Wunderland in spite of its railways, the attraction’s aesthetics remain a testament to the railway enthusiast’s ingenuity. In order to incorporate its own mechanics into its spectacle, the Wunderland shows you both the view from above—peaceful, serene, perfect—as well as the view from below: the ongoing labor of its construction, its hidden tracks and wires.

Glass panels along the sides of mountains reveal the layers of wood, wiring, and plaster beneath the layout.

Through a large window, visitors can watch technicians and artists as they work on new regions of the model. The craftsman, too, becomes part of the small world.

By far the most enthusiastic of the Wunderland’s motley crew was Andy Uhl. Uhl starred in the videos on the company’s prolific YouTube channel, which has nearly eighty thousand subscribers and a horde of international fans who comment constantly. While some of the videos are fictional narratives, most showcase the Wunderland’s obsessive attention to technical detail, geographic realism, and troubleshooting. Even in its promotional videos, the Wunderland reveals both its photogenic surfaces and behind-the-scenes calculations.

Sebastian explained that the Wunderland’s trick perspectives comprise “the sum of so many different views and more than five hundred hands, which together create the real view.” Unlike Disneyland, which makes a point of hiding its craft in the service of magic, the Wunderland is all about pulling back the curtain, displaying its labor of love.

By far the strangest of these many “reveals” is the Wunderland’s control room, which serves as the routing system for the hundreds of trains. An array of Tron-like screens beams their coming and goings.

Wunderland workers watch the displays and push buttons, ostensibly to help things along. But when I first saw the control room featured in the promotional

63

A MODEL R AILWAY JOURNEY

trailer, a part of me wondered if it was just for show: a simulacrum of control, its buttons leading nowhere.

In retrospect, I wonder if the control room was, in its aspirations to real-world power, a sort of life-sized miniature. The room appears as a throwback to a Cold War bunker, a fantasy of (small) world domination.

Gerrit said that he built a larger control room than was originally needed, anticipating that the Wunderland would expand. He bet correctly—both in terms of the expansion of its own world and its expansion into ours. “There are only six countries left from which we had no visitors so far,” one press release maintains. “We hope to erase one or the other blank spot on the map in 2014.”

Of course, the logic of the toy train has incorporated the possibility for infinite expansion from its beginnings. Some of the earliest locomotive models were built as marketing materials for railways, perhaps in the hope that miniaturizing these giant machines would make them more palatable to the masses. When the first mass-produced toy train set was launched by the German firm Marklin in 1891, the company introduced a series of standard parts, so that children and adults could expand their starter sets indefinitely. This iterative marketing scheme created an insatiable imperial desire in rich and poor consumers alike, both of whom could satisfy their needs at different price points and sizes. For Marklin, it created a constant revenue stream.

Unsurprisingly, groups from around the world, including Qatar, Dubai, Japan, Korea, and New York City, have offered Fredrik and Gerrit large sums to build them Wunderlands. But the brothers have all emphasized their commitment to their hometown.

Though knockoffs have opened in the past year, none have achieved anything close to the Wunderland’s level of success. “Our success is known all over the world,” Fredrik stated. “It’s really good for Hamburg.”

Sebastian explained that if they stay (relatively) small then they can’t be “accused of being a business, of being in it for something other than craftsmanship and joy and fun.” Passion, not business. Wonder, not trains.

•

•

•

At the end of my first day at the Wunderland, I took a walk along the placid Elbe, wondering how the experience of the attraction would affect my experience of moving through the world beyond its multi-story

realm. All at once I felt—or, maybe, was trying to make myself feel—as though I was becoming more observant of everyday details. A man talking to himself. A stray dog peeing into the water. A bride and groom snapping wedding photos on one of the river’s many bridges.

Cranes like matchsticks in the harbor. Like latter-day Balzacs, the model-makers collect moments like these from the city, and bind them together with a mathematical understanding of realism as the sum of many small parts.

The next day, when I returned to the Wunderland, televisions in the cafeteria and waiting room were already playing an Ice Bucket Challenge video that the staff had filmed just days earlier. The Wunderland, I realized, was not just a static model city but a vast multimedia apparatus—digesting, remixing, and replaying its own parts. Even the waiting room was well stocked with glossy books detailing the Wunderland’s colorful history in multiple languages.

In this light, the Wunderland’s partnership with Google Maps to produce thousands of panoramic “Street View” images of the layout is just its latest ingenious publicity stunt.

A titanic mythmaking operation, the Wunderland sells the promise that at the right scale, all of your dreams can come true. It’s a tempting fantasy, especially in a time of widespread austerity. One model-builder constructed his dream house in Norway, on the far end of the Scandinavia layout. On the front porch, he placed a little model of himself, enjoying the view.

THE NORTH

65

A MIND OF WINTER Charlie Fox

Consider an author, alone in the snow. Vladimir Nabokov has frozen still, caught out between the past and present as he drifts back into the memory of a childhood winter, its distant sleigh bells ringing in his ears. “What am I doing in this stereoscopic dreamland?” he asks. “How did I get here?”1 Suddenly no longer the small child with the puppyish gaze who spent “snow-muffled rides” hallucinating a role in “all the famous duels a Russian boy knew so well” but the impish old man of writerly legend, he rediscovers himself aged in his New England exile. (He and Vera have not yet left America to live at the foot of the snow-capped Alps in Montreux.) The memories are immaterial; “the snow is real, though, and as I bend to it and scoop up a handful, sixty years crumble to glittering frost-dust between my fingers.” So much is condensed in this handful of snow, now solid, now melting: a whole collection of memories and wonders.

But what is the material supposed to mean? Perhaps you have to develop what Wallace Stevens calls, at the start of his poem “The Snow Man” (1921), “a mind of winter” to know.2 Snow, like so many other materials, keeps its own special area in our thinking, and has its own blizzard of effects on our minds.

A more depressive survey than my own might be occupied by sketching out the imaginary equivalent of the Arctic across these pages. Indeed, snow’s richest metaphorical potential probably lies in its capacity to accurately map states of mental desolation, ranging from inertia to catatonia, through its exquisite blankness. But turn away from this icy eloquence and there Above: Maira Kalman, Man in the Snow, 2012. Kalman’s painting of Robert Walser is based on a photograph taken

by Carl Seelig documenting the scene of his friend’s death, Christmas Day 1956.

66

CHARLIE FOX

The burning of the Böögg. Effigy of snowman alight at the 2011 Sechseläuten festival in Zurich. Courtesy “Roland Zh” via Wikimedia Commons.

67

A MIND OF WINTER

are many other properties to be found, a full arc of thinking that curves from the trashy to the numinous.

Snow coats reality in a fresh layer of strangeness. The psychological territory it occupies is vast and shapeshifting—if snow sends Nabokov into an elegiac mood, it can also account for great flurries of joy. The most logical response might be simply to play with it, following the thoughts that swirl through the mind as it responds to your attention.

Bob Eckstein’s book The History of the Snowman (2007) is intended as a festive novelty, a goofy stocking filler, but examined with monomaniacal attentiveness over a dismal summer, it seems more like a thorough and eccentric work of anthropology: “The biggest niche in snowman retail is ... the artificial snowman industry.

Plastic, Styrofoam, glass, wood, wool, silk, ceramic, Lenox, wax, rubber ... white chocolate, marshmallow, singing, dancing, lit up, blown up, hung up, strung out.”3 Eckstein’s manic and materially various catalogue indicates the supernatural versatility of artificial snow, but also illuminates the discreet oddity of the snowman himself, a creature at once cuddly and cold.

There’s a touch of cruel fairytale transformation—the fat man turned into a winter vagabond—lurking at the heart of these homemade sculptures as they cannily freeze the body, repurposing a carrot into a nose and coal into eyes. But this ingenuity with humdrum domestic stuff also supplies the snowman with a weird indigent charm, as if he were a jolly hobo paying a yuletide visit. He is a figure of fun, but you might wonder exactly what he represents for the family inside the house. A happy mascot with a balloon physique, the snowman keeps watch over the outside world. He might be a parody of the father or of all fathers and the gloom they supposedly exude, especially in Victoriana (cold, heartless, at some definitive remove from the orbit of the house), or a thrifty homage to an elder, signified by cozy but archaic accoutrements like the muffler and the pipe. The snowman could be an avuncular totem pole.

Beware the authentic snowman in decline, dying when the weather turns, because he seems to have stumbled out of a nightmare. The finest chronicle of this decline is David Lynch’s photographic project on snowmen.4 As winter dwindled in early 1993, the filmmaker stole through the suburbs of Boise, Idaho, photographing the snowmen’s eerie struggle against the changing seasons. Lynch explained his fascination:

“I don’t know who built the first snowman, but they always had coal for eyes and you’d put a pipe in there, and you’d put a muffler on him. That’s gone right out the window now. People do much weirder snowmen. … They’re made out of snow, which is a material you don’t get a chance to work with too often. And it really makes the human body look fantastic. I would like to take more pictures, because the houses behind the snowmen are also really interesting. And then the snowmen themselves are like aliens.”5 Lynch treats his snowmen as freakish assemblages by unschooled artists, suggesting that far more monsters and phantoms run amok in the average mind than you might think, and giving extra unsettling life to that favorite theme of his films—the menace visiting the home.

Lacking their traditional scarves or pipes, these snowmen look like lonesome ogres, huddled between little houses and witchy trees on lawns pockmarked with abrasive grass. Some have jack-o’-lantern grins and others are falling back into gnarly abstraction as time drifts on. With no full moon glow, the snow remaining on the ground is closer to a mean smear of industrial sludge than the spangled quilt you might dream about or find in melancholy winter films like Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) and A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965). (Cartoon snow requires its own taxonomy: in The Simpsons, it glows, covering Springfield’s turf like whipped cream.)

In addition to expending a good amount of genuine obsessive energy on such topics as “Early American Snowmen in the Seventeenth Century: New World, Fresh Snow” and “The Dean Martin Years: Drunken Debauchery and Other Misgivings,” Eckstein’s History of the Snowman is also instructive purely as a catalogue of whimsical practices and products. You can purchase, for example, inflatable snowmen as well as snowman kits, complete with “prefabricated hats” and “pseudo coal.” And he describes at length the annual Swiss spring festival Sechseläuten, which marks winter’s end by using a large amount of explosives “to blow up an innocent snowman”—a spectacle that combines the sacred pageantry documented in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough with the anarchic spirit of Looney Tunes cartoons. The best thing in Eckstein’s book might be the reproduction of a sweet but curiously eldritch etching on a chocolate box commemorating Sechseläuten. The wooden snowman—complete with fetching rustic

68

CHARLIE FOX

feather cap and broom, his hollow body stuffed with fireworks—appears on the roof of a cart, a gargantuan schoolboy about to be heaved onto a bonfire.

•

•

•

On the afternoon of Christmas Day 1956, in a snow-covered field on the outskirts of the small Swiss town of Herisau, some children and their dog discovered the body of a dead man, hand clutched tight to his stilled heart. It was the writer Robert Walser, who had died that day, aged seventy-eight, while out walking far from the mental institution where he had dwelled for the previous two decades. A photograph taken by his friend Carl Seelig shows the body at rest, left arm thrown out as in the style of a sleeper midway through a restless night, while two shadowy figures at the margins look on. The sorrow of the scene is rather gently assuaged by the odd fact that Walser’s hat, perhaps moved by a breeze, lies at a modest distance from his body, as if it has leapt off his head to cartoonishly express surprise at its owner’s death. A few distant trees squeeze into the top of the frame like awkward mourners paying their respects. The snow, even on the ground but for a few shaggy lumps close to his boots, appears at first to be nothing more than a dazzling absence, as if the dead Walser were floating on a white winter sky.

In his essay on Walser, William H. Gass takes the perspective of one of those marginal witnesses and studies the photograph as a peculiar abstraction: “I like to think the field he fell in was as smoothly white as writing paper. There his figure … could pretend to be a word—not a statement, not a query, not an exclamation—but a word, unassertive and nearly illegible, squeezed into smallness by a cramped hand.”6 Another photograph of the scene by Seelig taken from a different angle reveals the fateful trail of footprints— the only other marks in the snow. Examine them with a Gass-like slant and they become an ellipsis on this near-blank page, trailing away from a last, unfinished thought.

In his prose, Walser assumes the voice of a bewildered innocent, neither a child nor a full-grown man, enchanted and unsettled by the surrounding world.

Snow was certainly something that fascinated him, and perhaps left him a little scared: “If there is snow, everything is soft, it’s as if you were walking on a carpet.”7 Before this comes the little wonder of watching snow

fall “slowly, that is, bit by bit, which means flake by flake, down to the earth.”8 The schoolboy narrator of Fritz Kocher’s Essays adores snow because it smoothly removes the loud distraction of color from the landscape: “Colors fill up your mind too much with all sorts of muddled stuff. … I love things in one color, monotonous things. Snow is such a monotonous song.”9 The empty page might be a snowscape, waiting to be blackened with words, but maybe the opposite thought is beautiful, too: words, like snow, slow the world down, inventing a quiet that can be vanished into and inhabited. John Ashbery imagines reading such a page (white on white) in his poem “The Skaters” (1966): “Words fly briskly across, each time / Bringing down meaning as snow from a low sky.”10 •

•

•

Hollywood now relies on innocuous paper snow or computer trickery to create its winter wonderlands, but the history of this special effect is far more sinister.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, asbestos fibers were repurposed as a low-price snow simulant for use in both domestic decorations and cinematic landscapes.

The toxic substance was sold in gaudy boxes that bore names like White Magic and Snow Drift and featured cartoons depicting dreamtime scenes—vanilla ice cream snowscapes, velvet skies, expressionless children in snowsuits (no trolls, no witches, no carcinogens), and stars scattered like powdered sugar around the cake of the moon. Always depicting a backyard Narnia, these kitschy scenes exist within a cultural tradition where winter turns domestic. Thoughts of lupine hunger are banished, and the season is transformed into summer’s Nordic cousin: heartwarming and inviting endless play in the open air, despite the gathering chill. (Classical example: the frolics in the hinterland of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow from 1565.) There’s also a surreal sensory jolt induced when you come across the reality-distorting phrase “fireproof snow” on certain boxes, rhetoric designed to position the material as a safe option for your cozy home.

But that’s snow’s greatest mythic property, its paradoxical power to convey warmth (the proverbial “warm and fuzzy” feeling induced by a sentimental or festive mood), an affect that would be much more difficult to transmit through some winter scene depicting, perhaps, an enchanting mirror of fresh ice on a lake.11 Remember that moment in The Wizard of

69

A MIND OF WINTER

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow, 1565.

70

CHARLIE FOX

Oz (1939) where the bewitched ruby-red poppy field sends Dorothy, Toto, and the Cowardly Lion to sleep.

Only the Good Witch’s counterspell—a sudden flurry of snow—wakes them. Poor Judy Garland comes to amid the stalks, coated in fantastic dust. “Unusual weather we’re having, ain’t it?” cracks the Cowardly Lion in the sunshine, not knowing that the snow has rusted the Tin Man’s joints once more. The presence of this little toxic cloud floating over everybody’s favorite Technicolor fable is maybe just ghoulish trivia but the scene offers, too, a woozy meditation on the magic of art, especially its power to transform or tame weather and remake it as a sweet illusion.

“Unusual weather” also sweeps through William Dieterle’s Portrait of Jennie (1948), the most luxurious artificial snow reverie from Hollywood’s golden age.

A love story coated with a creepy psychological frost straight from Edgar Allan Poe—doomed artist goes to the edge of madness in his attempt to capture the titular heroine in all her will-o’-the-wisp beauty—the film is a lavish mash note from its producer David O. Selznick to Jennifer Jones, its star and his new bride.

A penniless painter (Joseph Cotten) is out roaming New York City on a ferocious winter evening during

the Great Depression, when who should he encounter in Central Park but Miss Jones, playing a saucer-eyed nymph. He’s immediately spellbound by this innocent adolescent wearing schoolgirl plaid and rabbit-paw mittens, but she disappears after a little playful conversation, not even leaving a footprint behind. At their next meeting, he discovers that she’s the orphan daughter of high-flying—and falling—trapeze artists.

The painter and the girl develop a fey friendship, all hot chocolate and chilly breath, as he grows ever more obsessed with her. Jennie is captured in an early charcoal sketch as a doll-like little creature at the end of a twilit avenue, enclosed by a protective roof of haggard branches.12 With every fresh encounter, Jennie ages, growing from perky fawn to near-adult maiden in the course of the story, and soon it becomes clear that she’s nothing but an apparition. Vanishing and returning according to her own dreamy whims, Jennie is a symbol for the vagrant nature of inspiration, and, of course, other febrile desires: “I wanted more than just dreams,” Cotten confesses in his nighthawk voice-over, “but that was impossible.” Snow—strewn over the dark streets in fluorescent marble chunks, laid flat in an angel’s-eye Left: Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) and Jennie Appleton (Jennifer Jones) sipping hot chocolate in Central Park. Film still from Portrait of Jennie, dir. William Dieterle, 1948. Courtesy Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and Daniel Selznick.

Opposite: A medieval snowman roasts in the margin of a Dutch book of hours, late fourteenth century. Courtesy National Library of the Netherlands.

71

A MIND OF WINTER

72

CHARLIE FOX

view of the park like sparkling glass, or settled, snug, on the earth like an animal’s fur—turns the city into a drowsy little world. This enchanted climate indicates an erotic condition—a frozen longing—that finally thaws when Jennie reaches adulthood with the spring.

Monochrome, too, dissolves into wild-sea green at the finale, which is in turn a mere warm-up for the Technicolor epilogue where the long-dreamed-of portrait is unveiled. (Selznick hung this real treasure in their house.) It’s a faithful trick from Gothic fiction, making the weather into a barometer for a character’s moods: snow manifests a state of mind.

•

•

•

Gaston Bachelard’s response to snow is cool, conspicuously lacking the kind of boyish glee found in Walser’s writing. In The Poetics of Space, he observes that “snow … reduces the exterior world to nothing rather too easily.”13 Why swoon over snow with its far too obvious charms, Bachelard asks, when you can find the subtle thrills that come from studying a shell or a bird’s nest?

But his writing on snow has its own uncommon beauty, recording with the same careful attention found in Walser’s prose just how this shift in the weather reshapes our thinking and transforms our surroundings. Though he’s reluctant to find solace in the monochromatic, or to be wholly lured by its seductive nothingness, he remains a masterful chronicler of its lulling, narcotic effects. Snow “covers all tracks, blurs the road, muffles every sound, conceals all colors.”14

1 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Mem-

ory: An Autobiography Revisited (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 66.

The hallucinated duels appear on page 152.

2 Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man,” in Complete Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1995), p. 8.

3 Bob Eckstein, The History of the Snowman (New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2007), pp. 45–46.

4 See David Lynch, Snowmen (Paris & Göttingen: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain & Steidl, 2007) and David Lynch, Images (New York: Hyperion, 1995).

5 Chris Rodley, ed., Lynch on Lynch, rev. ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), pp. 217–219.

6 William H. Gass, “Robert

Walser,” in Finding a Form (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 65.

7 Robert Walser, “Winter” in The Walk, trans. Christopher Middleton et al. (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013), p. 126.

8 Ibid., p. 127.

9 Robert Walser, “Autumn,” from Fritz Kocher’s Essays, in A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories, trans. Damion Searls (New York Review Books: New York, 2013), p. 6.

10 John Ashbery, “The Skaters,” Collected Poems, 1956–1987 (New York: Library of America, 2008), p. 149.

11 Right down to the frisky italics on “warmth,” this discussion of myth obviously has Roland Barthes’s sensualist fingerprints all over it, though he devotes little

For those within the house, it encourages the profitable hibernation that gives rise to new reveries and dreams.

Time turns misty: “on snowy days, the house too is old.

It is as though it were living in the past of centuries gone by.”15 As the world beyond the house is turned into a “diminished entity” by the weather, the thoughts of its inhabitant (always, for Bachelard, the solitary “dreamer of houses”) can resonate with greater intensity.16 A double retreat to the interior is staged, at once into the house and further into the shelter of the mind.

Here, in this fading light, you can see where snow falls in what the poet and critic Bruce Hainley has wisely called “the psyche’s meteorology.”17 Slowly, it activates reverie, daydreaming, and digression within digression. Perhaps this is not only because it temporarily hushes the flow of the outside world, but because its appearance (remaking a field as a map gone blank) lays out a space approximating an empty mind. In this climate, thinking wanders or stops still, allowing you, as Stevens wrote in “The Snow Man,” to “behold nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

space in his omnivorous works to snow beyond that lovely vision from Mythologies (1957) of Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1933) and “her snowy solitary face.” For a more thorough investigation of the semiotics of snow, hunt out Gilbert Adair’s neat essay in his collection Surfing the Zeitgeist (1997): “What a coating of snow provides is the winter’s equivalent of a beach,” and his splendid classification of snow as the “raw, powdery material of nostalgia, existing either in the past as a memory or in the future as a dream.”

12 Perhaps it’s no surprise that the novella from 1940 of the same name by Robert Nathan, on which the film is based, was a favorite of the artist Joseph Cornell. (He also kept a dossier on Jennifer

Jones in his legendary basement in Queens.) The film and the book are an index of Cornell’s obsessions: winter, circus lore, wondrous but ungraspable girls, nineteenth-century New York, art’s capacity to stop time, etc. The domain of his work is uncannily forecast by a mournful line in the voice-over: “The world of my art remained an empty box.”

13 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 40.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., p. 41.

16 Ibid.

17 Bruce Hainley, “Seen and Not Seen: Maureen Gallace,” Frieze, no. 57 (March 2001). Available at <frieze.com/issue/article/ seen_and_not_seen1>.

73

MAN ON GLACIER Matthew Spellberg

Aerial view of Kluane National Park, Yukon. Photo Travis Persaud.

Solitude. Where does its value lie? For in solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention. If we could be attentive to the same degree in the presence of a human being…

— Simone Weil He has made a life of traveling to places remote and distant, but since retiring—when I first met him in 2012, he was seventy-two—the glaciologist G. has been truly away, working by himself on the subpolar ice fields of the Yukon and southern Alaska. He is one of the few people to go alone into the Saint Elias wilderness, the largest unbroken mass of ice outside the polar circles, and he is flown in by ski-plane, sometimes for weeks at a time. He is thin, almost wiry, with outsize hands, and his skin is ruddy and worn. I once saw him get into a bush plane wearing a rather ridiculous pair of puffy, purple, down coveralls, and wondered how long he could possibly survive on the icy expanse. But

he emerged from the same plane a few weeks later, and the following summer he lived by himself in a tent on a finger of the Malaspina Glacier, which runs for miles up and down the Alaska Panhandle. He mentioned casually that he had endured, by himself, two considerable earthquakes and the attentions of a lonely grizzly.

I had wanted to talk with him about dreams and visions when we first met at a research base in the southwestern Yukon, but he brushed away my questions, explaining that such things were unimportant to him, especially given that he was just then investigating a piece of wood he had found, miles into the ice field, near an automated weather station he had flown in to repair. In the Saint Elias, there are no trees or shrubs; there isn’t even lichen on the ice. What Overleaf: Members of the Duke of the Abruzzi’s Yukon expedition traversing the Hitchcock Glacier on their return from Mount Saint Elias in 1897. The slatted object protruding from the back of the load may be the duke’s bed. Photo Vittorio Sella.

74

75

MAN ON GLACIER

76

MATTHEW SPELLBERG

Members of the 1937 Shivaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Temple expedition gather in front of the airplane that delivered their supplies via parachute to the summit. W. and F. stand at right. Photo James B. Shackelford. Courtesy American Museum of Natural History.

77

MAN ON GLACIER

was the wood doing there, he wanted to know. Many possibilities were entertained: that there had once been a prehistoric forest over the ice field (doubtful, and certainly not in eons), or that the ice field had once advanced across a boreal forest, cut off a tree branch, and carried it here (a hypothesis almost certainly ruled out by the known movements of the ice sheets in the region). It was much more likely—though still, all things considered, quite astonishing—that some person had once left it there. If the piece of wood had arrived there by human means, then it might have been left by an early mountaineering expedition, such as that of the Duke of the Abruzzi, who climbed Mount Saint Elias in 1897 with a team of Italian adventurers, bringing with him, among many other things, a collapsible iron bed on which to sleep. (I doubted this fantastical accretion of details until later, in the Columbia University archives, I discovered full newspaper reports of the expedition, which mentioned the duke’s bed, and also the curious fact that several members of that expedition claimed to have seen a phantom city with gilded towers suspended over the glaciers of Icy Bay.) But by most accounts the duke and his equipage didn’t cross this particular pass, so a more likely explanation was that the wood had been left by a 1925 expedition undertaken by the United States and Canada, whose members used willow wands to hold their ropes in place. But willow wands for climbing must be straight and sturdy, and this lonesome object was gnarly, brittle, and tangled. If such a branch had truly been deposited by a human passing that way, it could only have been intended as firewood, and firewood would mean no modern expedition.

Anthropologists early in the twentieth century had heard that native parties regularly carried firewood on trips from the interior to the coast. A native chieftain had sketched a map of routes over the Slims River and the Kaskawulsh Glacier, but no Koyukon or Kluane had ever been recorded traveling the Saint Elias ice fields.

No doubt they would have seen the peak of Mount Saint Elias and quickly turned around. The possibility that they were traveling in the other direction G. entertained and ruled out immediately: from the coast, a trip over the peaks would have been suicide.

The wood might hold an “anthropological signal,” he told me, however faint, however inconclusive. His carbon dating of samples revealed them to be more than twenty-five hundred years old. What impelled

these persons—if indeed it was persons who left the wood on the glacier—to travel into the mountains? It is known from ice core sampling that eighteen hundred years ago Mount Bona-Churchill erupted nearby, but that would have been seven hundred years too late for this artifact—if an artifact is indeed what it is.

The ice cores from Mount Logan also show a major volcanic eruption roughly thirty-four hundred years ago, but this would have been too early to set the intrepid travelers moving. Could there have been a volcanic eruption in between? An ice core can easily fail to register a nearby volcanic explosion if the wind is scattering ash away from the mountains. And if no explosion, could there have been an earthquake, or a famine, or a war?

G.’s findings suggest that perhaps there was a society of people, unnamed and unknown, with obliterated myths and rivalries, reeling from some catastrophe, equally unnamed and unknown, who tried around 500 bce to cross the Saint Elias mountains in an act of desperation and quite possibly suicide. All that is left of them is a piece of firewood.

Or: all that ever existed of them is the fact that a single man once found some wood in the middle of a desolate and denuded expanse of sheet ice.

All of this, G. sometimes says, is a “thought experiment.” (“Very well known in the physics community,” he adds gravely.) I would also call it an exercise in inner demographics. When G. touches down on the ice, a quarrel of people flock down by his side. Gathered around the piece of wood, they pass it to one another like the torch in a relay race: the Duke of the Abruzzi, the members of the joint expedition, the unknown clan worshipping forgotten gods in flight from an unspoken catstrophe. And G. on the sheet ice behind them, running and shouting, Wait, you’ve dropped your firewood!

The society of the phantom limb of firewood is however only our preamble. G.’s real ambitions are much grander in scope, and, consequently, begin still more circuitously. A decade ago, G. began to write a biography of his late mentor, a patrician mountaineer and geologist named W. A digression on this man is warranted, since without him G. would never have made the leap into infinity that makes him the subject of our interest. A key surveyor of the Lower Arctic, W. was an American trained by Swiss mountaineers and president of the twee Explorers Club. His papers

78

MATTHEW SPELLBERG

are kept at the club’s headquarters on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in a mansion strewn with whale phalluses and elephant tusks. On the day I visited, an elderly man dressed in the khaki uniform of a biggame hunter was standing in the lobby, paying court to a young woman with a pierced nose and a punk haircut. The woman took my name and summoned by phone a decidedly unadventurous-seeming archivist, who walked me up a long gothic staircase to an attic where the records of W.’s life were spread on a table. I learned, among other things, that he had trained Arctic commandos during World War ii for a polar conflict that never materialized; that he had climbed Mount Ararat in search of Noah’s Ark, which was nowhere to be found; and that he had once guided an expedition to climb the Arizona mesa called Shiva’s Temple, which rises twelve hundred feet in the middle of the Grand Canyon, and preserves on its high plateau a forest that the canyon had separated from the surrounding landscape during the last ice age. In 1937, he traveled there with scientists to investigate the possibility that this celestial island, like the plateau in Conan Doyle’s Lost World, might contain survivors from earlier ecological periods, or unknown species whose evolution had diverged from their earthbound relatives during centuries of isolation. The newspapers chattered with eager speculation about what creatures the renowned mountaineer W. might find after scaling the mesa and lowering a sturdy rope ladder to the scientists below.

While the expedition was still in transit to Arizona, glossy magazines like Popular Science gave it generous coverage, complete with pictures of feminine dinosaurs idling amid cretaceous ferns.

One imagines the sober glory involved in being the first human ever to set foot on a continent bordered by clouds, prolonging the Age of Exploration at right angles to Darwin, with a vertical thrust into the sky.

What a wonder to see a place untouched, unsanctified, undescribed—to return to Eden, alone but not lonely.

So what a disappointment when it turned out that in place of pastoral saurians delectating on extinct plants, the expedition found a burlap flag waving from a tree, and a few tissues lewdly smeared with red lipstick.

The initial reports of the expedition, while admitting that no unknown species were uncovered on this high mesa, make no mention of the evidence of previous and flagrantly recent human presence, except to say that a rope had been found on a lower saddle of the

mountain, indicating previous attempts on the summit.

It was not until many years later that a local Arizona mountaineer owned up to the prank. He had taken the summit a few days earlier in revenge for having been turned down, despite his knowledge of the region, in favor of the more famous W. Hearing that W.’s wife was to be on the expedition, the vindictive mountaineer brought two ladies to make certain that the New Yorkers wouldn’t even be able to bring the first woman to Shiva’s Temple. He left the lipsticked tissues to make certain they knew.

This was not the only expedition in which F., W.’s fierce patrician wife, took part. She was his equal in every way: an accomplished mountaineer, who first met her husband in Tibet; one of the pioneering aerial photographers of the Arctic; apparently, a muchadmired hostess in New York and Ottawa, but also well known in Paris and San Francisco. G. realized that he could not write the biography of W. without writing the biography of F., that is, without writing a “double biography.” F.’s move to the foreground changed the nature of the book, for you see, she was a philosophical and spiritual character, as he explained it, “a determinist who went with the whole scheme.” She used to frequent fortune-tellers, and one of them told her that she would be in three vehicular accidents, and that the third would kill her. She was twice hit by a car, and then died in a plane crash flying over the Saint Elias ice fields on the way to Yakutat over half a century ago.

The plane and its passengers were never recovered.

The problem that bothered G. (besides the mystery of the plane, which he has been trying to find for years now) was how to address the fortune-teller’s apparent clairvoyance in the biography of a distinguished scientist without arousing the derision of his peers. The answer seemed simple: find a scientific explanation for clairvoyance. And, as he explained, there was really only one possible solution, only one that was elegant and simple and sufficiently thorough: develop an entirely new theoretical account of the cosmos.

This he promptly set himself to doing, during hours spent alone in his tent waiting for a weather front to pass, or fighting off insomnia in the lingering summer twilight. Although they have since become two separate projects, originally the double biography and the cosmic theory were bound together. I have often imagined what would have happened if they had not been eventually decoupled. There would have been

79

MAN ON GLACIER

a biography of W. and F. with an immense interlude interrupting the story right after F.’s death in order to explain the nature and history of the universe. Only afterward could the biography of W., now widowed, resume. This would have been, needless to say, a very long book, but also an unprecedented innovation in the genre of biography, in which to tell the story of a single person’s life you must give an account of the entire history of time leading up to and determining the course of that one existence.

Why, I once asked G., did he feel the need to construct a new account (which he calls the Model, or the Blueprint) of the universe because of something a fortune-teller had once told a woman who’d been dead for sixty years? “I have the mentality of a cop,” he told me, “I don’t care how long it takes, just stalk ’em down and bang ’em.”

That means, in this particular case, the following.

There was first a big bang (although G. prefers the term Genesis Event) from which the universe sprang, and began to grow. It will continue to grow until it reaches its limits and begins to shrink; then it will end in what mainstream cosmology calls the big crunch. So far, G.’s theory is no radical departure from the accepted scientific narrative. But the differences begin in the

first iota of time. For immediately after the first Genesis Event (possibly in the amount of time measured by the passage of light over a Planck Constant, the shortest theoretically measurable distance in our universe), a second, almost identical Genesis goes off in another dimension, in another realm of space. And then, in the next iota of time, yet another identical Genesis.

And another in the next, and another in the next. Each Genesis is exactly identical, and produces a universe the same as the one before it except, of course, that it is delayed in time.

Everything that happens in every universe except for the first universe, known as the template, is in some sense already determined, for every universe is an exact copy of the first. It’s possible that this means that the template actively exerts influence over the other universes; it’s also possible that because each universe was created under identical conditions, Above: “Panorama from Point Sublime,” drawn by William H. Holmes for the United States Geological Survey. Shiva’s Temple is the large structure whose flat top parallels the horizon line above the heads of the two climbers. From Clarence E. Dutton, The Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District, 1882.

80

MATTHEW SPELLBERG

any one cannot help but be the same as every other, though in that case there would be no direct causal link between them. Either way, it’s clear that only in the template can one be said to possess free will; everywhere else, life is a reprise, and therefore fixed in all of its particulars. However, in these other universes, as a sort of compensation, a person can sometimes see into the past or future, except, of course, it’s not actually into the past or future, but rather into the present of another universe unfurling at a different moment in one shared history. For to us it is 2016, but in another universe it is 2030, or 2032, or 1912. In yet another, it is the eighteenth of Brumaire, in yet another, the first year of the hajj, and in another, the last days of the reign of Solomon.

“But why do human minds have this gift, and, presumably, not rocks or badgers or blades of grass?”

I once asked G. “Because it’s in the very nature of our consciousness,” he replied. G. thinks that many phenomena conventionally labeled as paranormal—that is, dismissed—are important clues to the metaphysical structure of his Model. Like William James, he frequents meetings of psychics and spiritualists, and is known to conduct ethnographic research in New Age shops. He once came to believe that an “entity” was living in his basement on Vancouver Island, and he seized the occasion to put certain techniques to the test. He convinced a psychic and her friend to come and try to extricate it. He bought, on the psychic’s instructions, a sage bundle, and she brought fifteen candles (the number must be odd), which she set up in groups of three. She proceeded to pour salt all along the outside of the house and inside along the walls. She saw a mirror on G.’s workbench and she told him: “Take it away, it’s evil.” She made him turn on a camcorder in the house, leave his shoes facing in opposite directions in a straight line running to the door, and set up a tent in the backyard. The two women stayed in the house while G. slept in the tent. In the morning, everything was as it had been, except for a mysterious puddle of water underneath one of his shoes. He had the water tested and found it to have a pH considerably higher than that of the tap water in his house. But he readily concedes that any number of variables render those results inconclusive.

Entities, often shaped like glowing orbs and occasionally captured on film, are important to the Model because they may be souls in the throes of

transmigration. For G. believes that although each person is identical to his or her avatars in other universes, every living being possesses a distinct soul, which is immortal and which reincarnates itself in many different forms and many universes, often wandering about the cosmos in the meantime.

These souls, which have no say over the lives of their hosts, are like stowaways on a ship, peering at the sea through the portholes. Their primary purpose seems to be to witness and study the manifold forms of life—with free will and without, rich and poor, every gradation of suffering and pleasure—and perhaps report back about their work to the Higher Soul, who is, it seems, some form of God. G. believes that T. S. Eliot might have subscribed to a variant of his theory, at least while he was writing Burnt Norton. I asked G. where he thought Eliot had learned of the Model, and he explained with confidence it was probably from a man named John W. Dunne, who in 1927 had published a book entitled An Experiment with Time with Faber, where Eliot worked.

Many years later, I was reading some of Eliot’s correspondence and found, somewhat to my surprise, that Eliot had in fact known of Dunne’s book. But it’s not only Eliot who has attracted G.’s attention. The author of Ecclesiastes (“King Solomon,” he reminded me, “or so they reckon”) also seems to have been a coconspirator: “That which hath been is now, that which is to be hath already been, and God requireth the past.” The king and the poet are his compatriots in this endeavor, guests seated at his celestial dinner table.

That this Model arose over years of isolated fieldwork on a subarctic glacier, far from any dinner guests, is no accident. When a person is truly alone, the world becomes alive and labile, filled with hidden friends and enemies. The idea of landscape as a phenomenon independent of living presences is a nostalgia only possible for those who live in civilizations that have made the world almost completely artifactual, and therefore completely and reassuringly imbued with the human.

To create a system that at once explains and animates the cosmos when you are truly alone is not necessarily Romanticism; it is more likely pragmatism, in its own way like building a table or a tent. The danger, as with all systematic ways of thinking, is that it will be either mocked or harden into dogma. But the advantage, by no means assured, is the intellectual stability that comes of feeling oneself among friends and in place,

81

MAN ON GLACIER

knowing with conviction that there are lines that extend outward from the eyes to the stars, from the heart to the beginning and the end. As a boy, G. was spellbound by the galaxies and planets in the night sky.

They seemed to be forever asking the question, “What am I doing here?” Now he feels: “It’s falling into place.”

I had continued to ask about G.’s dreams—those paradigmatic experiences of a private world, a place which only the dreamer can see—over the course of our acquaintance, and I was disappointed to hear him say that he rarely remembered or cared for them.

(T. S. Eliot wrote once in a letter, “My dreams are very fragmentary and valueless.” “My dreams are the same as that!” G. exclaimed on learning this, with a thrill of identification.) But after many hours of conversation, my nonsensical persistence was rewarded. A dream he had once had about his Model occurred to him and he turned to me and said, “Well, I could actually go and get the dream log!”

Moments later he came back with a notebook. This log, which he had never before mentioned, contained vivid descriptions of his dreams and meticulously noted interpretations, each bent in such a way as to provide evidence or solve a problem within the vast but strictly delimited labyrinth of the Model. Of singular importance to G. was a dream in which he confronted the sinuous outline of an irregularly shaped loop on a tabletop. In the dream he was with someone he knew very well, who could have been his brother or a close friend. Their task was to lay paper over the loop and trace its shape. “I tried, but for some reason I was using two pieces of tracing paper. I remember doing some tracing, it was hard going, then the two papers started to drift apart, and I had to start again. I never finished, then I woke up.”

Neatly noted underneath the dream report in his diary was the word “Eureka,” followed by a detailed interpretation: “The loop is a defined path that signifies events in a previous universe, of which we are supposed to be a copy.” It represents “La Forza del Destino.” When I asked him why the title of an opera, he explained it was because Giuseppe Verdi must have been a determinist; his daughter and wife died one after the other early in his life, and he wrote his operas in the face of these tragedies.

The habits of the dream and the habits of mysticism stand in close parallel to one another. These two forms of radical aloneness are governed, in certain cases, by

surprisingly recognizable patterns. The dead return to life; the realm of spirit expands out to deceased composers and undulating semi-animate shapes laid out on a tabletop. The linear structure of time tends to waver or hesitate, and becomes, so to speak, experimentally circular, lateral, capricious, present all at once. Other minds are swallowed into the fabric of the subjective consciousness. The interpenetration of these qualities may be partly responsible for the rich and inescapable pressure toward interpretation dreams and visions exert on the mind. In fact, a day after he had shared the loop dream with me, G. revised the interpretation of his own dream exegesis: La Forza del Destino is an opera, meant to be performed many times in many places. So it is with the Model, that all time and life is replayed in different theaters in different universes, but always from the same score.

In making sense of G.’s familiar and alien system, it may be helpful to imagine the Model, as I sometimes do, as a metaphysical garden. There is a green field suspended on a plane in the still center of the cosmos; universes open and close like flowers in the sky above; souls streak from world to world like swallows.

Below, milling about on the grass, are T. S. Eliot, King Solomon, the entity from G.’s basement, the mourning Verdi, and the wood carriers from the Saint Elias. The gracious F., wife of W. and patron of the whole project, emerges from a gazebo and invites everyone in to tea, making sure to seat G. at the place of honor.

Few of the patterns by which we organize the world around us originate in our minds. We borrow the better part of our sentiments from others, and leave the weightier measure of the truth in their trust. But that does not relieve us of the fundamental need to be embraced by a picture of the universe, by a speculum mundi in which we can locate ourselves at a fixed point.

It is an indication of its urgency and difficulty that, for most of us, culture long ago did most of this mapping on our behalf, as if not trusting so precious a task to the whims of the individual mind.

How rare, then, to encounter someone who, by some combination of character and circumstance, has seen fit to make a world-picture all for himself, to build it from the ground up. That in the end this world-picture should be quite familiar is a lesson in the structure of conviction and belief: there are forms of thought we are finally able to share in common when we have come to them alone.

ARTIST PROJECT / THE NORTH Hanna Ljungh

82

This is a journey in three parts to the North, from three different moments in time. The first part is a scene from a film; the second, a reenactment of that scene; the third, a visit. While the first part is fiction, the other two are experiments, or trials, in art.

“The North” is an ongoing project about the fleeing bodies of mankind, about filth and the shifting, changing body mass of a glacier. It’s a meditation on time, entropy, and the body. It’s a reflection of, and play with, the image of the North. An image of cleanliness, whiteness, and purity—of the untouched.

part i: scene from the film five easy pieces, 1970 synopsis: Bobby and his girlfriend are driving north

to visit his parents. They pick up two hitchhikers who are moving to Alaska in order to flee from society.

characters:

Bobby Bobby’s Girlfriend Palm Apodaca Terry Grouse

bobby: Where are you going? palm : Alaska. bobby: Alaska? What are you, on vacation? terry: She wants to live there, cause it’s cleaner. bobby: Cleaner? Cleaner than what? palm (to terry): You don’t have to tell everybody

about it; pretty soon they’ll all go there and they won’t be so clean. bobby: What makes you think it’s cleaner? palm : I saw a picture of it. Alaska is very clean, it appeared to look very white to me. Don’t you think? bobby: Yup, that was before the big thaw. palm : Before the what?

Later, still in the car.

palm : I had to leave this place because I got depressed seeing all the crap. And the thing is they’re making more crap, you know? They got so many stores and stuff and junk full of crap, I can’t believe it.

bobby: Who? palm : Who? Man, that’s who. Pretty soon there won’t

be any room for Man. They’re selling more crap that people go and buy than you can imagine. Crap. I believe everybody should have a big hole where they throw this stuff in and burn it. bobby’s girlfriend : They’d never find a hole big enough, never. Now take me, now look at me. When I was just one person, before I was with Bobby, I was collecting onto me more garbage, every day, till I was getting to thinking that I should get a disposal. palm : Disposal? What’s that but more crap, I’ve never seen such crap.

Later, during a stop.

terry: Mass production is what does it. palm : What do you mean mass? I have to come out and tell you the truth, you’re not that clean either. terry: Wait a minute, I’m not that neat maybe, but I am clean. palm : Well, you’re not that bad. But some people, ugh, people’s homes, just filth. I’ve been in people’s homes and I— terry: In my personal observation I think that more people are neat than are clean. palm : My personal thing, I don’t see that; I’m seeing more filth, a lot of filth. What they need to do every day, no, once in a while, is do a cockroach thing, you know where they, ugh, spray the homes and—can you imagine if their doors were painted a pretty color and they had a pot outside? terry: Yeah, could be adorable. palm : And they picked up!

Later, back in the car.

palm : I mean, then they wouldn’t be filthy with, ugh,

coke bottles and whisky and, ugh, those signs everywhere, they should be erased, all those signs selling you crap and more crap and more crap and, ugh, I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t even want to talk about it. bobby: Well— palm : It’s just filthy, people are filthy, I think that’s the biggest thing that’s wrong with people. I think they

83

ARTIST PROJECT / THE NORTH

wouldn’t be as violent if they were clean, because then they wouldn’t have anyone to pick on. Ugh. Dirt. Not dirt. See, dirt isn’t bad, it’s filth, filth is bad. That’s what starts maggots and riots. Hey, follow that truck, they know the best places to stop.

part ii: reenactment of the scene, 2003 synopsis: Two artists, Hanna and Hanna, are hitching a ride north, to Lapland, from a gas station outside Stockholm. They play out the script from the film with the truck driver who picks them up.

characters:

Driver Hanna Ljungh Hanna Hogfors

driver : But you have to know where in Lapland you are going?

hanna l : No, well… hanna h : We haven’t decided yet. driver : You haven’t decided yet, are you going on

vacation? Or what is this? hanna h : No, we are moving there. driver : You are moving there, you don’t have much luggage for a move. hanna h : You don’t need much. hanna l : Hanna thinks it’s cleaner there. driver : Aha … ok. hanna h : I think it’s so depressing when it’s dirty everywhere, pollution … all the filth that Man produces. driver : Well, then you have to go out into the wilderness up there, to get a cleaner society; in the cities, it’s all the same. hanna h : But in photographs it’s all white. driver : Yes, I guess it’s winter then, he-he. hanna l : What it really comes down to is mass production, that’s the problem. driver : Well, I don’t know. hanna h : What do you mean mass production, you’re not that clean either. hanna l : Wait, I’m not that neat maybe but I am clean. hanna h : Everyone should clean out their homes and… driver : But then you get a lot of crap to throw away.

hanna h : And then you dig a big hole in the ground

and throw all the crap in there. driver : Well, then you still have the crap in the earth. hanna h : No, because once it’s down there you burn it, once and for all, and then people have to ration and keep clean all the time, and not let it grow dirty again. driver : I have three cats at home, I have to hoover all the time, it gets dirty as hell, for example. hanna h : Animals are not dirty, they keep clean. driver : What? hanna h : Animals are clean, they don’t pollute. driver : No, but they don’t have the capacity to do that, they can’t produce like we do. hanna h : I don’t think they would even if they could. driver : But we can’t live like animals. hanna h : You can do whatever you want to. driver : No, you can’t bloody well live like animals, you just can’t! hanna h : But it’s not the filth that I am afraid or worried about, it’s that … that Man wants to create filth. driver : No, it’s just that Man is very lazy, that’s the biggest problem. hanna l : What? driver : Man is lazy! hanna h : Is it a tape or the radio? driver : Rock classics. hanna h : Can you turn it up? driver : Guess I can.

part iii: visit to the north, 2015 The vantage point is the northern peak of the highest mountain in Lapland, looking down from the summit at a melting glacier. The cracks: gray, pink, and blue patterns of filth, ice, and algae.

84

HANNA LJUNGH

85

ARTIST PROJECT / THE NORTH

86

HANNA LJUNGH

87

ARTIST PROJECT / THE NORTH

88

PEASE PORRIDGE, COLD Polly Dickson

Even more vital than the choice of sledges, more vital than anything else, I knew, in such a trip as I proposed, is the care of the stomach. … The gastronomic need differs with every man. It differs with every expedition, and it is radically different with every nation. … Nor is it safe to listen to scientific advice, for the stomach is arbitrary, and stands as autocrat over every human sense and passion and will not easily yield to dictates.1 —Frederick Cook, My Attainment of the Pole (1912) At a lecture to the Norwegian Geographical Society in 1890, explorer and scientist Fridtjof Nansen put forward his plans for an unconventional Arctic venture. “I believe,” he announced, “that if we study the forces of nature itself which are here ready to hand, and try to work with them instead of against them, we shall find the surest and easiest way of reaching the Pole. It is useless to work against the current, as previous expeditions have done; we must see if there is not a current that will work with us.”2 Despite the derision it met at the society and elsewhere, Nansen’s hunch about the current was correct, and his expedition of 1893–1896 marked a break in the history of polar exploration. For the first time, a voyage to the Arctic was one made in relative comfort. Nansen and his twelve-man crew, holed up in their ship the Fram (Norwegian for “forward”) against the unyielding elements that had beaten down so many before them, tracked up east of the North Pole, just off the coast of Siberia. They then allowed the ship to freeze into the pack ice and to be carried westward toward the pole by the Arctic drift. In the spring of 1895—at a latitude of 84°4´ north and frustrated by the zigzagging motion of the current that had put them behind his projected schedule—Nansen began doggedly sledding across the ice with one companion, Hjalmar Johansen, aiming for the pole. Although they never reached it, struggling across unanticipatedly uneven terrain with failing equipment, they nonetheless attained a latitude of 86°14´ north, almost three degrees further north than anyone had come before. This was the biggest single advance made in nearly four hundred years.3 If the expedition was not strictly a success, Nansen had still come the closest of anybody to either pole of the earth. And, over the course of his trip, Nansen changed

polar exploration in one further, vital way, through his role as a pioneering practical nutritionist. His observations on polar rationing were to set a new standard for Amundsen, Peary, Cook, and others for the next two decades.

On its departure in 1893, the Fram was stocked with five years’ worth of provisions, including a variety of canned meats, soups, preserved vegetables, fish powder, bread, biscuits, and berries. Nansen, who spent two years preparing for the trip—during which time he had solicited advice from the Danish nutritionist Sophus Torup—prided himself on the diversity and nutritional quality of their food. The meals he records in Farthest North (1897), his written account of the journey, read nothing like the usual scanty fare of such expeditions. A typical dinner consisted of a generous three- or four-course meal: 1. Tomato soup.

2. Cod roe with melted butter and potatoes.

3. Roast reindeer, with green pease,4 potatoes, and cranberry jam.

4. Cloudberries with milk.

Ringnes beer.5 Notable occasions such as holidays and geographical milestones called for long, celebratory binges. On reaching 81° north on 17 May 1894, Nansen recounts a feast: Minced fish with curried lobster, melted butter and potatoes; music; pork cutlets, with green pease, potatoes, mango chutney, and Worcester sauce; music; apricots and custard, with cream; much music. After this a siesta; then coffee, currants, figs, cakes.6 Descriptions of such meals are punctuated by his comments, made first in amusement, then in growing alarm—and not a little guilt—on the general weight gain that resulted from this life of plenty: “The way we are laying on flesh is getting serious. Several of us are like prize pigs. … Must begin to think of a course of short rations now.”7 Under the blank, oppressive northern night, it is perhaps no wonder that food was a reigning pastime

89

PEASE PORRIDGE, COLD

Fridtjof Nansen smoking his pipe in front of the Fram, 16 June 1894. When reproduced in Farthest North, Nansen’s account of his voyage, the photograph was labeled “Homesickness.” Courtesy National Library of Norway.

90

POLLY DICKSON

“No. 1 Arctic Ale,” brewed by Ind Coope and Allsopp, early 1950s. Courtesy National Brewery Centre, United Kingdom.

Nansen’s letter of 1915 to Christian Bjelland & Co. authorizing the use of his name and likeness to market the firm’s canned sardines. Courtesy Norwegian Canning Museum.

and pleasure for the crew. So too, for Nansen, was journaling. This was a habit common among Arctic travelers, who invariably recorded their trips in exquisitely detailed travelogues. For most people back home, the Arctic—a habitat that could only be known through the accounts of these explorers—came to be indistinguishable from the narratives salvaged from, and fantasies constructed around, it. Some of the most telling moments of Farthest North are correspondingly when Nansen writes about reading the texts of expeditions made before him, engaging with Arctic history as he contributes his own chapter to it. “I am reading the story of Kane’s expedition just now,” he writes. Elisha Kent Kane, an American, had led an unsuccessful, scurvy-ridden expedition in 1853–1855: “Unfortunate man, his preparations were miserably inadequate. …

He learned a wholesome awe of the Arctic night, and one can hardly wonder at it.”8 Nansen admits to feeling “almost ashamed of the life we lead, with none of those darkly painted sufferings of the long winter night which are indispensable to a properly exciting Arctic expedition,” lamenting that “we shall have nothing to write about when we get home.”

In fact, he found plenty to write about—not least the food—and when Farthest North was published, to great critical acclaim, its two volumes amounted to three hundred thousand words. But his association of the Arctic narrative so explicitly with hunger, even seeing a certain failure in the comfort they enjoyed on board the Fram, rings with the break he had made from the canonical Arctic narrative. “Truly,” he writes, in his characteristically unassuming tone, “the whole secret lies in arranging things sensibly, and especially in being careful about the food.”9 Nineteenth-century accounts of polar travel prior to Nansen’s were, almost without exception, stories of disaster. The expedition of John Franklin occupies an odd centrality in this grisly timeline, being both the best known and the most obscure of them all. In 1845, stocked with four years’ worth of rations, Franklin set out for the pole with 129 men. None of them were ever seen again. This disappearance haunted European imaginings of the Arctic for the rest of the century. It began to code the space of the Arctic as an object of ambition, even of a certain greed: both to conquer the elusive pole once and for all, and to dredge up whatever was left of Franklin’s lost team in return for a hefty financial reward. During the next fifteen years,

91

PEASE PORRIDGE, COLD

over fifty expeditions were organized to search for the Franklin remains, which emerged piece by piece. It was John Rae, an American who led an expedition in 1853, who was first able to account for the events of its grim ending, finding clear signs that the men had “been driven to the dread alternative of cannibalism as a means of sustaining life.”10 Over a century later, in the 1980s, Dr. Owen Beattie of the University of Alberta conducted a series of tests on the bodies of some of the Franklin crew that had been almost perfectly preserved in the ice. He not only confirmed the suspicion of cannibalism—in cut marks made by metal implements on the bones—but found extremely high levels of lead in their skeletal remains and hair, suggesting poisoning caused no doubt by poorly soldered cans of food.11 Whether a result of starvation, a nutritional deficiency such as scurvy (the usual cause of death on these expeditions), or madness caused by lead poisoning, the Franklin disaster was unquestionably related to food—or rather, hunger.

Most of the expeditions on the trail of Franklin’s remains were themselves beset with hardships resulting from poor nutrition, scurvy, and starvation.

The estimated death rate on polar expeditions between 1770 and 1918 was 50 percent.12 And yet, Nansen’s whole crew returned to Norway in resounding health.

Nansen himself records having gained twenty-two pounds, even after trekking and sledding for months across the ice. His wife, Eva, on his return wrote to a friend: “My man looks wonderful, well-fed, fat and strong. I had expected to find a skeleton.”13 As Nansen admits himself rather doubtfully towards the end of Farthest North, “It is not quite like the experiences of others in parallel circumstances.”14 One of his greatest feats was to have avoided scurvy, the threat of which was never far behind Arctic expeditions. In fact, the two have a curiously entangled relationship: for while scurvy fatally impeded the early history of Arctic exploration, Arctic exploration left its own mark on the medical history of scurvy. James Lind had already discovered the cure for it—citrus fruits—in 1747 (though he failed to acknowledge them as a preventative), and from 1799, the rationing of lemon juice was made a requirement on all of Britain’s Royal Navy ships. Yet this knowledge was seemingly undone amid the scientific and industrial progress of the second half of the nineteenth century. With the development of steam power, naval travel times were

Bjelland & Co. had used Nansen’s image to sell its sardines for nearly two decades without his explicit permission; this can dates from 1896, the year the explorer returned from his North Pole expedition.

Courtesy National Library of Norway.

Antarctic explorers were also useful for marketing Norwegian sardines. Here, Roald Amundsen and his crew, who used the Fram for their successful expedition to the South Pole, are featured on a tin produced by the Viking Canning Company in 1912.

Courtesy Norwegian Canning Museum.

92

POLLY DICKSON

generally shorter and fewer ships were deprived of fresh food for great lengths of time. And so when, in the mid-nineteenth century, concentrated lime juice came to be substituted for lemon juice, it was not immediately apparent on these shorter voyages—which simply did not last long enough for sailors to fall ill—that the former was less effective than the latter in curing scurvy. This was due both to concentrated lime juice’s lower vitamin C content and to its manufacturing process, during which it was pumped through copper tubing, a procedure that lessened its efficacy.

Its lessened effectiveness was first made clear on polar voyages, which often lasted for several years and were almost wholly dependent on pre-stocked food and whatever fresh meat could be procured from the lifeless landscape. The frequent, catastrophic outbreaks of scurvy during these trips led to a renewed set of confusions and myths about the disease.

During the disastrous British Arctic Expedition of 1875–1876 led by Sir George Nares—named by one newspaper “The Polar Failure”—59 of the 122 officers and crew members of its two ships contracted scurvy, and four died of it. Nares fared badly in the five-hundred-page 1877 report commissioned by the admiralty, which accused him of poor leadership for not having equipped his various sledging parties with lime juice.15 Nares had, in fact, as many of his allies were at pains to point out, issued lime juice to his crew, as advised; he had even doubled these rations in the weeks preceding the sledging trips because he feared that the juice would likely freeze. But of course the real problem lay in the low vitamin C content of the concentrated lime juice itself, and since no other rations on board were rich in the nutrient (Nares’s provisions mostly amounting to various preserved meats), the sledgers’ stores of the vitamin were negligible before they had even left port. But the scurvy report reveals just how much confusion had arisen in medical minds as to the actual cause of the condition, blaming it variously on lack of fresh food, prolonged darkness, lack of eggs, “the breathing of an impure atmosphere and exposure to dampness,” and the cold.

Elisha Kent Kane, in his scurvy-crippled expedition twenty years earlier, had prescribed his crew grated potatoes lubricated with oil and himself dined on “a fresh-meat soup” made from the ship’s rats, which synthesize large amounts of vitamin C. (His crew refused to join him.)16 Other imaginative ideas

about the antiscorbutic properties of certain foodstuffs abounded. Ale was a standard article of sea rationing dating back to the fourteenth century, administered with the explicit aim of preventing and curing scurvy.

Allsopp’s Arctic Ale was specially created for Edward Belcher’s expedition of 1852, after the British government asked the Allsopp & Sons brewery to design an ale fit for polar regions. The result was a rich brew with a 12 percent alcohol content, and supposedly a first-class defense against scurvy as it contained a large amount of unfermented extract, providing what the Allsopp’s director A. Maxwell Tod vaguely referred to as “nutritive qualities.” This brew was a staple feature of many future British expeditions, including that of Nares, who declared it “as mellow as old Burgundy and as nourishing as beef steak” (which was proven, in the end, not to be the case).

Not one member of Nansen’s crew suffered from scurvy—or from much of anything at all, according to Nansen, who describes how bored his ship’s doctor had grown: “Of late he has taken to studying the diseases of dogs; perhaps he may find a more profitable practice in this department.” Nor, surprisingly, did Nansen or Johansen succumb to the illness during their sledgetrip across the ice. Nansen attributed scurvy to rotten meat, and put his unfailing health down to having brought enough sterilized dried and canned meat to last the crew several years. He was a great proponent of what he and some others called the “ptomaine theory,” which (wrongly) accounted for scurvy as a kind of food poisoning caused by the bacterial contamination of meat in poorly preserved supplies. It is true—as Arctic experience had shown time and again—that fresh meat helps to prevent scurvy. Organ meats in particular are, especially when raw, relatively high in vitamin C. But a more likely reason for the Fram crew’s immunity to scurvy lay in Nansen’s accidentally, or intuitively, antiscorbutic provisions, which included a varied supply of vitamin-rich fruits and vegetables. A particular treat among these were cloudberries, “the noble grape of the polar regions,” a source of vitamin C even more potent than citrus fruits and upon which Inuits and Viking explorers had long depended for their health in extreme northern climates.17 On the occasion of their second Arctic Christmas, the crew even combined cloudberries with wine, jam, baking powder, and water to mix a “Polar Champagne 83°” (a rare treat, for Nansen was generally disinclined toward the

93

PEASE PORRIDGE, COLD

“I’m stuffed, thanks.”

The well-fed crew of the Fram at an evening meal, February 1895.

Photo Fridtjof Nansen.

Courtesy National Library of Norway.

non-medical use of alcohol on the ship). It is a curious feat that despite his own contribution to the confusion around scurvy, Nansen’s instinctive sense of nutrition was enough to guarantee the health of everyone on board.

The second stage of Nansen’s adventure—his expedition with Johansen across the ice—was a far cry from the life of comfort established on the Fram. As the twenty-eight dogs pulling their sledges died one by one of exhaustion and hunger, Nansen and Johannsen fed their corpses to the remaining living ones. Their own main meals now rotated between fiskegratin (fish meal mixed with flour and butter); lobscouse (pemmican and dried potatoes); and pea, bean, or lentil soup with bread and pemmican. Pemmican was a staple of almost every nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arctic expedition. Valued more for its high-calorie content, longevity, and compactness than for its taste (“It keeps the body twitching, but not the soul,” as explorer Gino Watkins put it), pemmican derived from a recipe of the aboriginal people of North America. It resembled a solid mass of protein and fat, consisting of dried strips of buffalo or venison meat mashed into a powder, sometimes with berries, mixed with melted fat, and molded into cakes or canned for transportation.

The word pemmican derives from the Cree pemy, meaning “grease,” and hkexw, meaning “make.” Grease making, as Nansen knew from past experience, was essential to keeping the body alive in polar conditions.

Subjected to extreme cold, shivering all day and night, and engaged in the intensive labor involved in sledding and managing the difficult terrain, the human body, if not adequately fed, will turn first to its own fat reserves, then to muscle, and then to any tissue it can to maintain the vital organs. A body exposed to such conditions quickly develops a craving for energy-rich foods. On his expedition over Greenland a decade earlier, Nansen had suffered from what he called “fathunger, of which no one who has not experienced it can form any idea.” He stocked the Fram, in consequence, with no less than 13,000 pounds of butter, and packed for the sledge expedition 320 pounds of meat in the form of liver and pemmican, purchased from the firm J. D. Beauvais in Copenhagen.

After an impossibly difficult trek south across the ice, a serendipitous encounter with British explorer Frederick Jackson on Franz Josef Land, and a final reunion with his ship and crew in August 1896, Nansen returned home to Oslo (or Christiania, as it was then known) the following month. He was greeted

94

POLLY DICKSON

by an armada and crowds that represented a third of the population of the city. At the age of twentyeight, Nansen had become a national superstar. In the expansive lifetime that followed—during which he was instrumental in establishing Norway’s independence in 1905, provided invaluable help to other polar explorers including Amundsen, and headed food relief to the ussr , an endeavor for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922—he became an international hero.18 It seems appropriate that one of the manifestations of the “Nansen fever” that raged following his trip was in food branding, as companies adopted his image as a shorthand for the bracing, hardy, healthy Scandinavian body. Nansen-brand sardines and salmon came on the market, as well as Nansen and Fram cigars; Cadbury’s used his image in an advertisement, and today there are still Nansen-branded bottles of cognac and aquavit.

A satirical Punch article from 24 April 1897 claims to advertise casks of “guaranteed superfine sea-air” made by “Atmospheric Supply Stores, Unlimited” for the health and constitution of their consumers. These casks include, they claim, “our special ‘Nansen’ brand—a particularly bracing variety, imported direct from the Arctic regions.” Many other companies greedily claimed that he had taken their wares on the Fram. So many, in fact, as one journalist drily pointed out, “that if the public were to credit the assertions of rival manufacturers, Dr. Nansen’s Expedition must have been 1 Frederick Cook, My Attainment

of the Pole (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912), p. 134. Cook claimed that he had reached the North Pole in 1908, which would have made him the first man to achieve the feat. This was a year before Robert Peary would make the same claim for himself, and twelve years after Fridtjof Nansen almost got there.

2 S. L. Berens, ed., The “Fram” Expedition: Nansen in the Frozen World (Philadelphia: A. J. Holman, 1897), p. 177.

3 This according to Roland Huntford, in his introduction to Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North (New York: Modern Library, 1999).

4 Pease is an archaic spelling of peas.

5 Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North: The Epic Adventure of a Visionary Explorer (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2008), p. 183. All

subsequent quotations from Nansen’s book are from this edition.

6 Ibid., p. 245.

7 Ibid., p. 204.

8 Ibid., p. 179.

9 Ibid., p. 181.

10 John Rae, John Rae’s Arctic Correspondence, 1844–1855 (Victoria, Canada: TouchWood Editions, 2014), p. 342.

11 For more about the possible impact of lead poisoning on the expedition, see Owen Beattie and John Geiger, Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition (London: Bloomsbury, 1987).

12 Sarah Moss, The Frozen Ship: The Histories and Tales of Polar Exploration (New York: BlueBridge Books, 2006), p. 93.

13 Roland Huntford, Nansen: The Explorer as Hero (London: Duckworth, 1997), p. 357.

14 Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North, p. 568.

‘exclusively’ supplied by scores of firms and he must have taken with him food enough for his Expedition for some hundreds of years.”19 If Franklin was, in Margaret Atwood’s words, “a victim of bad packaging,” Nansen seems to be a hero of it.20 What remains from his expedition—in contrast to the scattered bits and pieces of, say, the Franklin mission—is the image of a body, whole, intact, and robust, printed on the labels of foodstuffs. Hunger for the Arctic produced a number of confused narratives: the endless quibbling about who got there first (the messy Cook versus Peary debate was never definitively settled), the mysteries of Franklin, the confusion about scurvy. But the lasting impression of the Nansen narrative is simple: an unfaltering ability always to answer the appetites of his men, and his own.

15 See “Report of the Committee

Appointed by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, to Enquire into the Causes of the Outbreak of Scurvy in the Recent Arctic Expedition; The Adequacy of the Provision Made by the Admiralty in the Way of Food, Medicine, and Medical Comforts; And the Propriety of the Orders Given by the Commander of the Expedition for Provisioning the Sledge Parties.”

Available at <umanitoba.ca/libraries/units/archives/collections/ subject/arcticstudies/arcticbb/ viewbb.php?t=1877b&p = i1>.

16 Elisha Kent Kane, Arctic Explorations in Search of Sir John Franklin (London: T. Nelson & Sons, 1877), p. 236.

17 Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North, p. 317.

18 The explorer also invented a companion device for the popular Primus stove, the so-called

Nansen cooker, “an ingenious reimagining of the relationship between pot and stove ... [that] traps [the] heat and forces it back down again.” See Jason C. Anthony, Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), p. 68.

19 “The Food Supplies of Nansen’s Expedition,” Food and Sanitation, 19 August 1893; reprinted in Food and Sanitation: Volume 3, p. 242. Available at <books.google.com/books?id = D XgBAAAAYAAJ&pg = PA242>.

20 See Margaret Atwood, “Introduction,” in Owen Beattie and John Geiger, Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2004), p. 6.

95

PEASE PORRIDGE, COLD

Ice hut built by Nansenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s team for taking magnetic measurements, September 1895. The scarecrow on top was placed there to prevent the crew of the Fram from turning the structure into a slide. Photo Sigurd Scott Hansen.

Courtesy National Library of Norway.

96

THE ARCHIVE OF ICE D. Graham Burnett

The main archive freezer at the US National Ice Core Laboratory, Lakewood, Colorado.

97

THE ARCHIVE OF ICE

Nestled in a neighborhood of comparably nondescript brick buildings and office warehouses west of Denver (the town is Lakewood; the Front Range defines the horizon; there is lots of parking) sits an uncanny little perturbation in time, space, and temperature: the us National Ice Core Laboratory (nicl), the largest repository of archived ancient ice on the planet. Within the unremarkable walls of this federal institution, in a freezer room ninety-four feet long, fifty-five feet wide, and twelve feet high (the steady temperature of which is maintained at negative thirty-eight degrees Celsius), more than seventeen thousand meters of columnar ice lie still in silvered cardboard tubes stacked on steel racks.

The visitor stands in this room (though not for very long, since it is extremely cold) in the presence of more than ten miles of deep time, arranged as if by Walter de Maria: a receding vista of indexed cylinders, which secrete many broken kilometers—not of brass, but of white-blue waterglass cored from nearly two hundred ice sheets and glaciers and mountaintops around the world. Here, on these shelves, sleep millions upon millions of little slivers of compressed snow— preserved slips of all the winters the earth has seen in the last five hundred thousand years.

A great deal of what we now think we know about the changing climate of our planet hails from these transparent bars of ancient water. And it is a testimony to how rapidly that climate is changing that a number of the cores in Lakewood came from glaciers that no longer exist. The keepers of the archive of ice have, of necessity, gone to great lengths to ensure redundancy upon redundancy in their refrigeration capacity— multiple compressors and automatic backup generators and an emergency mechanical team on call to service the cooling systems 24 hours a day 365 days a year.

Since there is ice in this freezer that cannot now be replaced.

•

•

•

Ice core science sits at the center of some of the very most contentious geopolitical and epistemic controversies of our time. How exactly to read the long chronicle of Earth history that appears to be preserved in the tight-packed layers of the ancient ice? This is the nittygritty of disputes between climate-change deniers and their opponents. The bench-science details are complex, but a brief résumé of the basics is easy enough.1

Anywhere that repeated, cyclical snowfalls build up over considerable periods of time—high altitudes, high latitudes—one sees, eventually, the compression of sequential snow layers into stratigraphic ice formations.

The resulting mass preserves the layering structure of its deposition. During the process of compression, bubbles of atmospheric air are trapped in these layers.

The result? Large, old glaciers are effectively gigantic napoleons (meaning the pastry, not the general) of prehistoric water and atmosphere—dense mille-feuilles, each “leaf” of which records the conditions of the planet in a given winter now long past. We can now answer, concisely, François Villon’s heartrending refrain from the “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” (ca. 1460): Où sont les neiges d’antan? Where are the snows of yore?

They are in Lakewood, Colorado, sitting on a shelf.

Within them, the earth-breath of yesteryear.

Extracting those trapped atmospheric gasses— layer by layer—is a matter of delicate chemistry, but once they have been liberated, the proportions of co 2 and other important fractional components can be measured and (significantly, in the context of debates about anthropogenic warming and greenhouse gasses) correlated with inferences about global temperature.

These too, can be derived from the cores, though reading temperature in the layers—in other words, reading the ice as an archive of paleoclimates—is an even more finicky (and in many ways remarkable) exercise in geochemical forensics. It turns out that, at the molecular level, not all the h 2 o on the earth is the same. Some is “heavy” (which is to say, some is made up of an isotope of oxygen that has some extra weight in its nucleus, in the form of that neutral subatomic particle known as a neutron). Heavy water precipitates out of the atmosphere (i.e., falls to earth as rain or snow) a little more readily than the lighter stuff. In cold parts of the globe, precipitation is a pretty direct function of temperature: the colder the air, the less snow and rain happen, because colder air tends to be drier air—air that has lost more of its moisture as it has made its way to the frigid zones. A corollary of all this is that the proportion of heavy water frozen in a given layer of ancient ice offers a workable index of the average global temperature in the year that the latter formed: in colder years, moist atmospheric air, circulating its way to the poles, has lost more of its moisture by the time it gets there—hence the ice deposited in these regions in colder years will contain less heavy water than it will in warmer years.

98

D. GR AHAM BURNETT

Right now, in laboratories all over the world (beneath vacuum hoods and within the detection modules of mass spectrometers and wired to the probes of electro-conductivity machines), scientists of various stripes are grating, melting, shocking, and subliming countless sticks, cubes, disks, and slabs of ancient ice as part of a very important collective effort to read the ice archive from beginning to end. This work bears directly, of course, on some significant questions. For instance, “How much of Manhattan will be underwater in 2080?”

•

•

•

Many histories of science are coiled up under and inside the three preceding paragraphs. Let me offer one macroscale observation about the history of ice-core science and one related microscale historical anecdote.

The anecdote first.

Who got the idea that ancient atmospheres might be preserved in the ice column? It is hard to be sure about these things, but a plausible contender for the honor would be the colorful American extreme-state physiologist Per Fredrik “Pete” Scholander (1905–1980), a Swedish-born cowboy-scientist with a penchant for latrine humor and a modest proclivity—characteristic of his milieu of military doctors studying life at the

edges of death—in the direction of sadomasochistic human experimentation (e.g., his efforts to secure the rectal temperatures of Australian Aboriginals sleeping naked in the bush).2 Working on Arctic physiology for the Office of Naval Research in Alaska in the 1950s, Scholander heard tales of sled dogs vomiting up small fish that were still flapping around—the kicker being that they had ostensibly been eaten frozen. Increasingly interested in organisms adapted to survive “supercooled” conditions, he began work on the little aquatic larvae of the gnats (Chironomidae) that eke out a living over marshes in the brief tundra summers. These larvae regularly turned up frozen solid in blocks of arctic ice. Back in the makeshift tent lab, warmed up, the creatures would be happily feeding within a few hours.3 Scholander and his colleagues began experimenting to determine whether the larvae were capable of some form of respiration during their ice-suspended intervals. And this, in combination with other studies of the phenomenon of cryogenic suspension, led to the realization that gas transfer in frozen water was very close to nil. Scholander subsequently speculated that air trapped in ice would likely be preserved indefinitely, and might, therefore, in conjunction with the layered structure of glaciers and other ice sheets, result in legible archives of past atmospheres.

99

THE ARCHIVE OF ICE

But who first explored the structure of glaciers? Who probed the deep architecture of ice, and when and why were the first ice cores drilled? Here we tip open a much larger and more complicated story about the coldest part of the Cold War. True, a number of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physical geographers and polar explorers dug snow pits and probed the depth of mountain ice. But the real history of the scientific study of ice architecture in general—and ice coring specifically—is inseparable from the military ambitions of the nuclear superpowers in the immediate wake of World War ii .

Much of the (paper) archive of this history may well remain classified, but no one now disputes that the United States undertook an elaborate clandestine program, preparations for which began in the early 1950s, to tunnel northern Greenland with a network of nuclear missile launch stations and associated support and logistical infrastructure.4 Project Iceworm, as it was called, foresaw mobile Minuteman-style silos honeycombed into the ice sheet, largely invisible and capable of hitting targets in the Soviet Union with unmatched speed. Bracketing the diplomatic/geopolitical challenge of Greenland being the sovereign territory of Denmark (the leadership of which was not kept informed about us plans), the technical hurdles that needed to be cleared in order to erect a vast

military base under the ice of the polar cap precipitated a major research initiative into the deep structure of glaciers. As early as 1950, one can find a sipre (Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Research Establishment of the Army Corps of Engineers) report opining as follows: There is a need for development of ice excavation techniques.

Tunneling in ice may provide cheap and rapid means for storing small or large quantities of food and equipment and for providing bomb-proof shelter. The development of adequate tools for tunneling by hand or machine is necessary.

It should be possible to build a machine capable of driving a tunnel in ice at high speed, of the order of several feet per minute. A technique for core drilling in névé and ice should also be developed.5 The last sentence is the key one for our purposes, and its context is telling. Several of the scientists and engineers in that sipre working group indeed went on to become leading figures in what became the peacetime scientific activity of coring glaciers—and they Opposite and above: A beef chart for the cores. Crosssectional diagrams used by scientists when sectioning the ancient ice at the National Ice Core Laboratory into samples for distribution to different laboratories.

100

D. GR AHAM BURNETT

are, in effect, the founding fathers of the Lakewood facility.6 In fact, one of the cores that currently lives in Lakewood hails from an early exploratory drill hole bored at Camp Century, the Dr. Strangelove–esque experimental nuclear-powered living facility built by the us Army under the Greenland ice sheet 150 miles east of the military air base at Thule—a test run for the construction and logistics that would be necessary for Project Iceworm.7 Upshot? Ice core science—like most of the sciences of earth, sky, and sea in the postwar period—nursed at the warm and flowing teat of the Cold War militaryindustrial complex.

•

•

•

History is history. That was then, and this is now. So what about now? Well, right now there are perhaps half a dozen major ice core archives around the world, all of them linked to the large-scale climate research programs of Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Copenhagen is home to one of the oldest and largest repositories; the Alfred Wegner Institute in Bremerhaven maintains many of the best cores drilled by eu researchers; other important collections exist in Japan, China, Russia, and Canada, among other places.

But the us National Ice Core Laboratory is distinctive.

The other ice core caches tend to be quite closely held by specific research institutions and their researchers.

Access moves through channels of mutual scientific collaboration, interlocking grant applications, and informal networks of publication credit. While the us research community certainly participates in such dynamics, none of the other global ice-core repositories maintains a friendly website like nicl , complete with clear tabs reading “Accessing the Ice Cores” and “Scheduling a Sampling Visit.”

Which doesn’t mean every school kid in America can write in and get a piece of ancient ice (though, as it happens, a few have). It does mean that if you have plausible need of a segment from the 120-meter depth of the McBales Summit Core, you can write up what you want to do and file a request form—and the odds are good that after a relatively brief administrative approval procedure, Geoffrey Hargreaves or Richard Nunn or one of the other folks in Lakewood will don long underwear, a fleece layer, a snowmobile-style insulated snowsuit, and a pair of double-bladder “Bunny boots” (Korean War–era jump boots favored by

Arctic toughs), together with multiple layers of gloves (latex food-handling gloves, thermal running gloves, another pair of surgical gloves), and head into the freezer to pull down 1 or 2 of the 136 tubes containing all the borings made by Joe McConnell and Roger Bales back in 1999 in the frozen central wastes of Greenland (circa 72° north by 38° west). Then, depending on exactly how much ice you need, and what you intend to do with it (isotope studies tend to get bits from the periphery of the cross section, while gas analysts get heartwood from the trunk, according to a kind of ancient-ice beef chart used in Lakewood), the hard ice bar comes out of the tube and goes on the band saw to be sliced and diced to the relevant specs. Next, your sample—which represents, in this case, a bit of snow frozen around the time of the French Revolution— goes in a plastic baggie, and gets wedged among blue coolant packs in a Styrofoam box for pickup by FedEx. You have the ice in hand the next day. As much as twenty thousand pounds of ice will make its way out the door of nicl in a given year in this way, though no shipments in December—there seems to be a sense that it is bad luck to mail ice around the holidays.

New cores come in on a regular basis too. The Antarctic ones via refrigerated container units loaded onto vessels that make their way up from the southern hemisphere to Port Hueneme, just north of Los Angeles, and from there overland in container-frame eighteen-wheelers across the Rockies. The Greenland and other northern cores tend to get flown to Stratton Air Base (near Schenectady) onboard borrowed military lc -130 Hercules cargo planes—polar-outfitted versions of the standard C-130, equipped with skis for landing directly on the ice. From upstate New York, the ice is generally transported via commercial freezertrucks—though once, for a particularly large batch of polar core, the ice scientists rented a whole Boeing 737 to fly the cold crates directly to Denver. In all the years of moving cores, very few have been lost. But it can happen. Back in 1985, a power failure on an Antarctic cargo ship produced the dreaded result: when the insulated shipping crates were opened, they contained a sad slosh of no scientific value—a flavorless cocktail of ancient waters, both shaken and stirred. A puddle.

Cocktail. That raises the semi-taboo subject of consuming ancient ice. This is not much discussed (at least not in writing) among professionals in the international ice core science community. However,

101

THE ARCHIVE OF ICE

an unofficial rite of Arctic-scientist passage at the demanding and intimate polar drill camps has been known to include chilling the hooch with chips of ancient ice kicked out of a dry bore hole or brought up by the “sonde” (the technical name for the drill head).

It’s just ice, after all. Same as any other ice. Except, as neophytes can be taught in fun-loving ways, for the ice that comes from the region six hundred to twelve hundred meters down. That ice, known as “brittle ice,” actually behaves quite differently. In that region of the depth column, the trapped air bubbles are actually under tremendous pressure—enough pressure to rupture the crystalline structure of the ice that contains them. Put a little brittle ice in your aquavit and …

Ker-pow ! On the tongue, I am told, it’s like the mother of all Pop Rocks.8 Those contemplating this form of communion with the Pleistocene may have cause for pause, however, in light of the surprising recent discovery that ancient ice contains vast numbers of ancient microorganisms.9 Frozen, of course, but capable—like Scholander’s Chironomidae larvae—of thermal resurrection. The archive of ice, as it turns out, is, astonishingly, an archive of life. Which means the nicl is less a library of archaic snowfalls than a vast frozen zoo of ancient bacteria, fungi, and viruses.

Biohazard? Probably not. Most of what is bad for people comes from people (and sometimes other mammals), whereas the microfauna of the ice cores presumably hails from regions that saw little contact with mammals in general, much less Homo sapiens, who tend to aggregate in tropical and temperate environments.

And anyway, if you keep the drink very strong, the alcohol will probably finish off the bugs as they thaw.

They are pretty weak when they first come to.

The really strange thing to contemplate, though, is that the earth’s melting glaciers are currently pouring into the polar oceans billions and billions of small living organisms that haven’t been seen on the planet in eons.

Given the cyclicities of the terraqueous paleoclimate, it stands to reason that some of them were frozen under conditions that looked more like the climate we increasingly have (and will have in the years ahead), than the climate we had in the recent, pre-global-warming age.

Presumably this will confer some evolutionary advantage on those particular nano Rip Van Winkles, who may be more ready for significant features of the world into which they thaw than their surrounding descendants, madly trying to make a living in a fast-changing ecology.

It is therefore by no means impossible that the microecology of our future seas will represent something like a fold in time—a vast reanimation out of the archive of ice.

1 Readers wanting more detail

6 I am thinking here of the

may wish to consult Richard B. Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Paul Andrew Mayewski and Frank White, The Ice Chronicles (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002).

2 Per Fredrik Scholander, Harold T. Hammel, Kristian Lange Andersen, and Yngve Løyning, “Metabolic Acclimation to Cold in Man,” Journal of Applied Physiology, vol. 12, no. 1 (January 1958).

More generally on Scholander’s science, see Robert Elsner, “The Irving-Scholander Legacy in Polar Physiology,” Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Part A: Molecular & Integrative Physiology, vol. 126, no. 2 (June 2000).

3 Per Fredrik Scholander, Enjoying a Life in Science (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1990), pp. 53–66, 105–113.

4 For a brief and authoritative early discussion of Project Iceworm, see William C. Baldwin, The Engineer

Studies Center and Army Analysis: A History of the U.S. Army Engineers Study Center, 1943–1982 (Washington, DC: Army Corps of Engineers, 1985), pp. 53–56.

5 Engineering Experiment Station, Interim Report to SIPRE (Minneapolis: Army Corps of Engineers, 1950), p. 16. The quote finishes with the suggestion that coring will be primarily of scientific use (rather than immediately operational for military objectives), though the distinction must here be regarded with some suspicion: it is worth recalling that similar coring techniques were significant in the (slightly earlier) work of Operation Crossroads in the Pacific, where cores from coral atolls were used to assess the stability of islands slated for nuclear tests, as well as to investigate radioactivity. It is not impossible that these communities of military-linked core-drilling scientists and engineers were known to each other and/or collaborated, but I have not found any concrete evidence of such relationships.

Swiss-born mineralogist and polar scientist Henri Bader (1907–1998), who was a formative influence on many in the ice-coring research community (including Chester C. Langway, who organized and administered the forerunner ice-core archive out of which the National Ice Core Laboratory was eventually formed).

Valuable as a participant history is Chester C. Langway, The History of Early Polar Ice Cores (Hanover, NH: Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, 2008).

This document is distributed as US Army Corps of Engineers Report ERDC/CRREL TR-08-1.

Also useful as a general overview of the history of ice cores is Jean Jouzel, “A Brief History of Ice Core Science over the Last 50 Years,” Climates of the Past, vol. 9 (July 2013).

7 There are several academic articles on Camp Century, e.g., Kristian H. Nielsena, Henry Nielsena, and Janet Martin-Nielsena, “City

under the Ice: The Closed World of Camp Century in Cold War Culture,” Science in Culture, vol.

23, no. 4 (February 2014), but it is hard to beat the US Army’s own internal promotional film, which is available on YouTube: <youtube. com/watch?feature = player_ detailpage&v=1Ujx_pND9wg# t=1201>.

8 Inquiring minds may wonder why the Pop Rock phenomenon tails off below twelve hundred meters.

Interestingly, below that depth the pressure and temperature are sufficient actually to crystallize the gases in the bubbles, creating a new physical equilibrium. Brittle ice must be permitted to “relax” for as much as a year before being cut.

9 John C. Priscu, Brent C. Christner, Christine M. Foreman, and George Royston-Bishop, “Biological Material in Ice Cores,” in Scott A. Elias, ed., The Encyclopedia of Quaternary Sciences, vol. 2 (London: Elsevier, 2007).

102

ARTIST PROJECT / HOW TO BE AN INTENTIONAL AGENT OF ANTHROPOCHORY Jessica Segall

Seeds—they hitch rides in our hair and on our clothing, and hang out in our digestive systems to be dropped a day later in a new location. The clever twin to agriculture, involuntary anthropochory—defined by botanists as the accidental, human-mediated dispersal of plant propagules such as seeds—results in the incidental distribution of flora wherever we go.

Ten thousand years ago, the archipelago of Svalbard was completely covered in ice. It currently hosts 185 native vascular plants that can survive the subzero climate, but according to researchers who have conducted field studies and reviewed records going back to the nineteenth century, 105 alien taxa were also found at one time or another on the archipelago, some 30 of which are growing there today. While a few were planted with ornamental intention, the decorative plant trade has had little historical influence on the number of introduced plants in Svalbard; instead, most of these plants are assumed to be of anthropogenic origin and arrived by accident.

In 2008, visitors arriving at the airport in Longyearbyen—the archipelago’s main settlement, located on the island of Spitsbergen—were asked to participate in an unusual experiment. Those wearing hiking boots, running shoes, and other footwear with soles capable of carrying significant quantities of soil were asked to remove them so that they could be scraped. The debris from each pair of footwear was placed in its own plastic bag and the material was brought to the University Centre in Svalbard for analysis. The study found 53 identifiable seed species, which had arrived on the island tucked in the treads of soles or clinging to the shoes’ laces. Each pair of footwear carried, on average, 3.9 seeds, with 117 being the highest number found on a single person. From this small sample, the study estimated that 270,000 seeds, the majority of which were non-native, enter Svalbard annually via air travelers’ footwear.

The Arctic is a ring of archipelagos under various sovereignties, and as such has no unified environmental policy. The Svalbard Environmental Protection Act of 2002, however, does regulate the introduction of non-native species. The following guide will help you

participate as an informed agent of ecological change and enable you to discreetly bypass local regulations in order to transport and establish new flora in the pristine ecological wilderness.

w h at to w ea r?

1. Wear hiking boots with deep, asymmetrical tread on the soles—the deeper the lugs, the better. If the word “aggressive” is used to describe the boot in the advertisement, buy it! Mechanistic studies of human-mediated seed dispersal show that a good hiking tread can carry seeds up to six miles.

2. Do not wear Wellingtons or other rubber boots; their uniform bodies lack laces and typically have fewer textured surfaces or crevices for seeds to hide inside. Laugh at the thought of Arctic whalers years ago slipping over the ice on smooth leather soles and at early mountaineers ascending rock faces in wooden clogs. Thank the invention of vulcanized rubber and the electric waffle iron, both of which contributed to the design of modern hiking boot soles.

befor e you go 1. Within three months before your trip, trek through an alpine or boreal forested region—chances are that the seeds you collect there will be most likely to survive the Arctic climate. The polar temperature is expected to rise eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, so choose a preliminary walk in a region where the summer climate is slightly warmer than that of Svalbard. Aim for a summer mean of fifty-six degrees.

2. If you see mud, walk in it; it increases your chances of collecting seeds and also brings fertile soil to the Arctic.

3. Size matters. Do not aim to bring tall pines or overly ambitious flora to the Arctic tundra. Choose plants with short roots that extend just a few

103

ARTIST PROJECT / HOW TO BE AN INTENTIONAL AGENT OF ANTHROPOCHORY

Above and overleaf: A selection of the thirty-odd plants growing on Svalbard today. All photos Inger Greve Alsos.

104

JESSICA SEGALL

inches into the topsoil and will stop short of the permafrost. Weedy grasses, sorrel, dandelions, and clovers are the alien plants most often found in the Arctic. Check which species in lower Arctic regions have a record of aggressive cultivation and be sure to walk in areas where such plants grow. Plan this trek at a time when target species are producing and dispersing seed.

4. After hiking, store your boots somewhere dry and cool. Place them in a plastic bag in your luggage before your flight and open them just before your Arctic hike. Do not attempt to clean your boots in the interim. Studies have found that cleaning boots had little to no impact as to the number of seeds brought in, but take no chances!

5. If you have no access to alpine or boreal forests before your trip, take direction from an anthropochory experiment conducted in 2006â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2007 in Dorset, England. In this study, participants took twenty steps in a tray of mud and then the same number in a tray containing Brassica seeds that had been dyed hot pink, before walking a determined distance on a flat lawn. At the end of each walk, participantsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; shoes were examined and the remaining seeds counted to calculate how many had been shed along the path. Those living in warmer climes can use the method developed for this study; simply order Arctic-appropriate seeds and fill one tray with mud and another with roughly a hundred of your seeds. Take about twenty steps in each of the two trays. Dye the seeds hot pink in advance if you too want to check your progress at the end of your Arctic trek by counting the number of seeds left in your soles.

6. A later anthropochory study in Antarctica in which not only the shoes but also the clothing, luggage, and equipment of scientists, support staff, and other visitors arriving by air or sea were vacuumed (with a Philips Performer AnimalCare fc 9154 vacuum cleaner) found that after footwear, the most effective carriers of rogue seeds were bags, pants, and outerwear. Wear polar fleece and roughtextured pants while walking on your path. Take naps in clover fields and sling your camera bag on the ground for use as a pillow.

w h er e to walk in svalba rd 1. Fertilizer can readily be found nearby; give your seeds an advantage by taking a few generous steps in any droppings left by polar bears or sled dogs.

Explore areas underneath cliffs where migrating birds gather and fertilize the soil below.

2. Look for a green area of tundra and then veer off-path to an ice-covered area, but not too far from fertile land. Expect that the ice will melt in the next hundred years, creating more real estate for your alien seeds; in the meantime, the ice will keep them frozen until germination conditions are favorable.

The warming climate will favor these introduced species.

105

ARTIST PROJECT / HOW TO BE AN INTENTIONAL AGENT OF ANTHROPOCHORY

3. If you are armed, and have scouted the area for bears, choose an untrammeled place to explore.

Avoid well-trodden areas where the presence of tourists causes soil erosion.

detou rs 1. On your Svalbard trip, take some time to visit the Global Seed Vault just outside Longyearbyen. The vault is a multi-million-dollar gene bank of the world’s edible plants. It houses hundreds of thousands of seeds tucked away in black boxes lining shelves below the permafrost, awaiting retrieval in times of disaster. If the countries of the world ever need to access the vault to replace a ravaged global ecology, know that this should be about the same time that the polar ice has melted and your seeds will be thriving nearby.

2. In addition, visit the ghost town of Pyramiden to witness what has been called “the largest beautification project likely ever to take place in the Arctic.” Pyramiden was a settlement developed in the 1930s by the Soviet Union through the state-run mining company Trust Arktikugol. City planners created a hospitable environment for the workers in the isolated Arctic terrain. In addition to a pool, gym, and auditorium for theatrical performances and films, shiploads of soil were imported from present-day Ukraine to provide a lawn down the main thoroughfare. The great lawn lay dormant from October to May in the twenty-four-hour darkness, but provided a public square during the short summer season. The town was abandoned in 1998, yet the lawn persists.

a f terwa rd If possible, repeat your procedure the following year.

At the time of the Svalbard footwear study, only seven of the fifty-three species whose seeds were found on visitors’ shoes and boots had previously managed to establish themselves on the island. However, do not despair! More than 47 percent of the species identified in the study germinated when cultivated in a laboratory simulation of the Svalbard summer.

If you cannot make a return trip, all is not lost; you are only one of the fifty thousand tourists who visit

Svalbard each year. The same sentiment that led to the creation of the Global Seed Vault drives a booming industry that serves tourists seeking an experience of the world’s last pristine wildernesses before major ecological shifts cause them to vanish. Chances are that with the boom in Arctic tourism, and rising global temperatures, your little seeds will have a decent shot at life.

Sources Inger Greve Alsos, Chris Ware, and Reidar Elven, “Past Arctic Aliens Have Passed Away, Current Ones May Stay,” Biological Invasions, vol.

17, no. 11 (November 2015).

Rachel Nuwer, “A Soviet Ghost Town in the Arctic Circle, Pyramiden Stands Alone,” Smithsonian.com, 19 May 2014. Available at <smithsonianmag.com/travel/soviet-ghost-town-arctic-circle-pyramiden-stands -alone-180951429>.

Chris Ware, Dana M. Bergstrom, Eike Müller, and Inger Greve Alsos, “Humans Introduce Viable Seeds to the Arctic on Footwear,” Biological Invasions, vol. 14, no. 3 (March 2012).

Matthias C. Wichmann et al., “Human-Mediated Dispersal of Seeds over Long Distances,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol. 276, no. 1656 (7 February 2009).

H. L. Huiskes et al., “Aliens in Antarctica: Assessing Transfer of Plant Propagules by Human Visitors to Reduce Invasion Risk,” Biological Conservation, vol. 171 (March 2014).

106

KIOSK

Late again, late once more, late we are. We are writing this installment of Kiosk for the Fall 2015 issue as the winter of 2016 draws to a close. We have only ourselves to blame, but since we control these two pages, we’d like to take this opportunity to blame others. We are late, in part, because over the past two years we have increasingly become vassals to a new and powerful cultural overlord, namely the film and television industry. In this pageant, we neither act nor direct. Nor are we extras, though we do feel extraneous. The truth is that we are, lamentably, located roughly a hundred yards from a newish and very busy film studio. As often seems to be the case, said film studio provides no parking of its own, instead relying on their clients to obtain permits from the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting (MOFTB) to use, often five days a week, some six to eight entire blocks around us to park their oversized trailers and food trucks. Since our shabbily picturesque neighborhood screams “rundown American city, ca.

1980,” it is also often used for location shoots by the studio’s largest client—FX’s television series The Americans. Some time ago, exasperated by the fact that on several occasions we could not enter or leave our space during shoots because our anachronistic presence would disrupt the show’s “period feel,” we spoke to one of the producers of the series, who informed us that if we wished to come and go as we pleased, all we needed to do was to groom ourselves and dress in a manner appropriate to the early 1980s.

Our next grant application thus includes a request for $2,000 for cowl-neck sweaters, leg warmers, and spandex shorts.

Others in the neighborhood, more reluctant to relive the sartorial horrors of the early 1980s, banded together last year and sent a petition to MOFTB asking for clarification on the process for issuing permits continuously in a neighborhood that has so many active small businesses reliant on deliveries. This petition received no response, though public statements made by the head of that office, Cynthia Lopez, and her henchman Dean McCann clarified all too well their policies.

When the pair appeared in January 2015 at a hearing convened by New York’s City Council to consider a bill requiring MOFTB to provide compiled data on the number of parking and film permits issued in each neighborhood, Lopez claimed that though her office was committed to government transparency, she was concerned that said transparency would “send a complicated message to the productions.” Henchman McCann concurred, adding that “on the face of it, this bill is harmless.

It’s the next step with regard to what people do with the data that is of extreme concern, not only to the mayor’s office, but to the industry.” Neither was it always possible to provide citizens with advance notification of parking restrictions because films and television series often finalize their plans at the last minute: the “script that’s going to be shot for the next episode of Law and Order,” he helpfully pointed out, “hasn’t been written yet.” McCann also claimed that providing this data was, in any event, technically impossible, since MOFTB’s system had in fact been designed to generate permits, but not account for them. So perhaps it’s not just the early 1980s here on Nevins Street, but also at City Hall, which is apparently still using typewriters and adding machines. We are therefore budgeting a further $2,000 of our next grant to purchase a Commodore 64 computer for MOFTB.

107

KIOSK Speaking of transparency, it’s time for a confession. We have recently come to realize that we, the editors, have absolutely no idea what we mean when we date an artifact using the familiar term “circa.” What does “circa 1850” mean? That the artifact was made between 1849 and 1851? Between 1845 and 1855? And why does “circa” feel like it indicates a narrower range when used with a year that is not a round number? Why does “circa 1849,” for example, suggest a frame of one or two years rather than five or ten?

To make matters worse, the further back in time you go, the more elastic the term seems to become. “Circa 8000 BCE” is certainly not likely to be describing a date between 7995 BCE and 8005 BCE. And don’t even get us started on “circa 1,000,000 BCE.” If these impressions are accurate, how can this ubiquitous little editorial shortcut ever be used transparently? In an attempt to codify a policy, we consulted a number of catalogues published by one of the most august cultural institutions in the world—the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And lo and behold, it became clear that they too were totally befuddled as to how to consistently apply this pesky word. Let it here be known that we are currently compiling a circa policy, and that this policy will be posted online, ca. 2016, so that inordinately curious readers can understand the range of years we intend to imply when using this vexing term in different temporal contexts.

Coming back to our (circa) Fall 2015 issue, we were pleased, though also spooked, to have recently found what seems to be one potential solution to our own ongoing anachronism. Four months before going to press, a Google Alert informed us of a miraculous development: the very issue you have in your hands was already available for download from a somewhat shady-looking website, even though we had not even begun editing it.

We were too cowardly to click on the ensorcelling link, fearing not just viruses but also that the phantom issue might be better than anything we ourselves could make.

In light of this curious rip in the fabric of space-time, we wish to let Dean McCann know that scripts for all future films and television series are in fact available online before they are written, thus making it possible for him to let the good citizens of New York know a few days in advance that they will be screwed, instead of finding out as it is happening.

Unlike us, McCann will probably be safe from viruses—his fancy new Commodore 64 will no doubt confound any contemporary malware that he might encounter on his journey into the wilds of the World Wide Web.