Gone this week

Despite my best intentions of doing something ahead of time, I don't have a post this week as I am at a writer's conference all week. Sorry, folks, and see you next week...!

Weird Stones

Bezoar stone from India

My first conscious awareness of lodestones magical stones was in a horrific scene in Susan Cooper's The Grey King, from the Dark is Rising series (If you have not read this, you should; or at least buy it for someone young in your life, and watch them get all interested). In this scene, the main characters can't find their dog. They search and search, if I remember rightly, and finally find him in an abandoned building, flattened against the floor in a terrible, unnatural position. They realize, after a moment of horror, that there's a lodestone warestone pinning the dog to the floor. No one can move it; it's stuck fast to the ground.

I don't, unfortunately, remember what they did about the situation, but the image has stuck vividly in my mind, a reminder of a deeper reality.

The books have a wonderful memory for the kind of tale-telling that was done in historic Britain, especially the kind of tricks that evil spirits might visit upon their enemies, and a kind of lowering, glowering landscape behind and between the usual holidaying sunshine of a proper British adventure book. Really great stuff, and metaphorically very apt, as the darkness behind the light is so true of those isles: the modern (as in post-Victorian) English image, for example, being one of bramble jelly and short pants, seaside holidays and cricket and tea on the lawn of half-timbered houses in suburban villages. Or second World War images like those in The Chamomile Lawn, by Mary Wesley (another great author). Behind this lays the old Britain: woad-painted warriors and unhappy Romans, Saxons and witchcraft and sprites both evil and beneficent; the evil eye, the hollow hills; Stonehenge. ...All of which, unfortunately, have been exploited within an inch of their lives in recent years, resulting in a zeitgeist of mass-market Lord-of-the-Rings-driven mythological consumption. The darkness is lost in the endless discussion pigeonholing each relevant part into fantasy role-playing and alternative realities.

If you really look at some of the old stories, you see a lack of unified cosmology; what you have instead is a clear, if uncohesive, sense of other beings living side-by-side with the rest of us. These beliefs, these myths and stories were not an alternative reality, a game to play: they were entirely real, entirely contextual to regular life; they often involved malevolent beings and influences living in one's house, in one's village. Think of Calvinist witch-hunts: look, if you can, at the transcripts from those trials, the kinds of things those poor wretches were accused of. People were more isolated then, more frightened of the power of the natural world all around them. To quote Thomas Hobbes, their lives were "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." And their magic was dark, hairy, and very local.

Chinese lodestone "spoon" compass, circa 2nd c. CE; the Chinese understood lodestones to be trying to return to their mother stone. They also believed lodestones to be an important factor in geomancy, otherwise known as feng shui

In any case, I've spent many years thinking of lodestones as this magical thing, this alchemically deep side of an everyday object, something from that dark crack in the sunshine of reality. Even if they are not the magical stone that I remember from the Grey King, they have a long history in alchemy and other places of being deeply, magically meaningful in the order of the universe. However, looking through all the references on the Web, I find no mention of lodestones in this context. The relevant information has been reduced to just that: information, a scientific description, a history of nautical navigation. Magnetism and geology. Gone is the magic that lodestones once held in the minds of the public.

Lodestones are "a magnetic mineral form of iron(II), iron(III) oxide Fe3O4, one of several iron oxides. A piece of intensely magnetic magnetite... was used as an early form of magnetic compass [since] iron, steel and ordinary magnetite are attracted to a magnetic field, including the Earth's magnetic field. Only magnetite with a particular crystalline structure, lodestone, can act as a natural magnet and attract and magnetize iron." wiki


If you peer under the surface of all the factual writing, sift it all and look back into the depths of history, starting in 1st century China, what you will see is a magical phenomenon: the discovery of a rock which moves on its own. Not only moves, but has this attraction to things. And even more magical: sometimes the rock doesn't do this - only certain ones actually work. The rock seems to want to point to a star. Perhaps it is in league with the star; perhaps it is the influence of spirits. As the Chinese discovered, the rock had a life of its own, no matter where you are in the world.

Curiously, at the opposite end of the universe from geology are bezoar stones, or bezars, which are stones of mineral and hair found in the digestive tracts of ruminants such as goats, sheep, llamas and deer. Originally, bezoars were found in goats living in the mountains of Western Persia. They came to Europe from the Middle East around in the 11th century, and their believed usefulness against poison made them magical: European people went on using them until the 18th century, their supposed powers becoming more and more complex until they lost credibility entirely.

A hairy bezoar, one without much calcification

"Many persons of status accepted potential poisoning as a chronic threat and armed themselves for battle against it. Medicine of the time was often practiced by improperly trained and unlicensed "surgeons" who could often do more harm than good. Those who were wise would take preventive action to avoid having to depend on unreliable "cures." Because wine and other drinks were often laced with arsenic, the most popular poison of the period, many magical devices were employed to negate its deleterious effects before it was consumed. Amethyst, crushed emerald and "unicorn horn" (often narwhal tusk) were all immersed in suspect beverages in the belief that they would render them safe. The most common and effective of these amulets was the bezoar stone...

"Discoveries on the wreck of Nuestra Señora de Atocha show that, in colonial Spanish-America of 1622, bezoar stones were certainly popular, and relied upon. Bezoars were rare, and the extravagant contexts from which they were found on the wreck show the power and esteem that was ascribed to them. The most spectacular item to reflect this belief is the gold "poison" cup, which once held a permanently mounted bezoar in its interior to absorb the poison from any drink it may have held. Another, chicken-egg sized bezoar is beautifully mounted in an engraved and enameled gold framework that was apparently designed to be suspended from a chain. This stone could then be immersed in any drinking vessel to remove toxins. A group of ten unadorned bezoars was found in a silver canister, apparently being shipped to Spain for more formal treatment. Because the Atocha primarily traded in South America, it is assumed these bezoars were extracted from llamas or alpacas, although there are accounts of the Spanish taking them from deer in the New World."

Bezoars were commonly thought to be an old-wives' tale until recently:

"Modern examinations of the properties of bezoars by Gustaf Arrhenius and Andrew A. Benson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have shown that they could, when immersed in an arsenic-laced solution, remove the poison. The toxic compounds in arsenic are arsenate and arsenite. Each is acted upon differently, but effectively, by bezoar stones. Arsenate is removed by being exchanged for phosphate in the mineral brushite, a crystalline structure found in the stones. Arsenite is found to bond to sulfur compounds in the protein of degraded hair, which is a key component in bezoars.

By the eighteenth century the marriage of magic and medicine was coming unraveled. Too many ailments, such as epilepsy, jaundice and plague were said to be treatable by bezoars, and people began to grow wary of such claims. The popularity of the bezoar soon faded."

-- Quotes from the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society

"The scarcity of bezoar stones by the 17th century led a group of Portuguese Jesuits working in Goa to come up with a man made version. These so called 'Goa Stones' were a mixture of bezoar as well as other precious objects believed to have curative powers. Until the beginning of the 18th century, when medical authorities began to debunk the belief in these stones, they could sell for more then their weight in gold and were often contained in cases such as the example offered here."

-- from Columbia University's website on South Asian Studies



The question I have, after all this, is: does something have to have no pragmatic use for it to be remembered as magical? It's clear that bezoar stones are now thoroughly explained (like a pearl, bezoar stones - as opposed to another kind of bezoar, like a hairy bezoar - are usually caused by the initial introduction of some irritant into the digestive tract). Yet their magic lives on. They continue to weird us out. We see them and they feel alien, something not-normal. You can see them in museums, on display in their original, sanctified splendor.

Lodestones, however, have been co-opted by their usefulness. As soon as magnetism was fully explained, and people began being able to make imitation lodestones (magnets), the basic mystery about their actual status as weird stones seems to have lost its power. Why? They are still found in the ground, the only stone on the earth which is naturally and permanently magnetic. To me that's like a little crumb of the universe, a bit of the True Earth showing up. Like holograms, a piece which shows the whole, though it be the tiniest fragment. When did they lose their mythological status? Think about the incredible fact that you can rub a bit of metal against these stones, and the metal will come away with the same properties as the rock. If that's not magical, what is?

Here is more than you could ever want to know what has been written throughout history on bezoar, or bezar, stones.

For a revolting example of a hairy bezoar you can try Neil Gaiman's Sandman book #3, "Calliope"

And, if you want a kind of repellent example of how magic has been turned into corporate commerce, check out this website, where a big-money diving company sells treasure at exhorbitant prices. Now you too can sit in the comfort of your own home and purchase real treasure, including gold-encrusted bezoars, online.

Wunderkammer Alert

Brief news flash:

A friend of mine just came back from Washington, DC and tells me there is a really interesting exhibit at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, titled "Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries," on until September 16th. The show is about Portugal and exploration, and the effect it had on the culture of the times.

To look at Henricus Martellus's 1490 map of the world is to behold a strange, unsettling planet. Europe seems vaguely familiar, but beyond the Mediterranean everything dissolves wildly into myth. Africa is a squarish blob, connected to Asia by a long strip of land. A huge island called Taprobana dominates the Indian Ocean, and there's no hint of the Americas or the Pacific Ocean; the map simply stops at China. Half the world is a confused jumble, and the other half is not yet even imagined.

But jump ahead a half-century to Pero Fernandes's map of 1545 -- and the planet is utterly transformed. A huge wave of exploration has brought the world into focus for the first time: Africa has taken on its distinctive shape, India is no longer an insignificant bump, the Pacific is there in all its vastness, and the Americas have appeared. Guesswork has given way to knowledge: A new world, with all its complexities and possibilities, has suddenly come into being.

.."It's hard for us to imagine how transformatory this period was," says Julian Raby, the director of the Smithsonian's Sackler and Freer galleries. "It's the first moment of globalization -- information about the variety of the world, in terms of its peoples and cultures, was just pouring in. And part of what we want to get across is that sense of wonder at the complexities and textures of the world."

-- from the Brooke's review in the Washington Post

Here's a secret, though: If you go down to the lowest basement level of the gallery, near the back somewhere, there is a room full of pieces from a Wunderkammer. My friend says it's not set up or organized like one, but there are some really marvelous pieces: a rhinoceros horn wrapped in gold, a bezoar the size of your fist (also decorated with gold), and a number of other really interesting, wonder-ful things.

And of course the show has maps. Lots of cool maps.


"When Ferdinand Magellan set out on the expedition that would circumnavigate the globe (1519-1521), he was looking for a route to the Spice Islands, or the Moluccas, now part of Indonesia. Magellan was killed en route, but his navigator Antonio Pigafetta survived. This map, which includes a clove tree, is a from a 1525 French copy of Pigafetta’s journal."

-- From Smithsonian Magazine online.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (and other shadow beings)

My friend Gwyan lent me this film, and I am forever in his debt, for it is one of the most amazing films I've ever seen.

I've been fascinated by shadow puppetry since I was a teenager, when I had an anthropology teacher who was an expert on Bali. She showed us Balinese dancing and Balinese shadow puppets, among other things, and thus my introduction to Wayang theatre, or Indonesian shadow puppet theatre. In my first novel (as yet unpublished), the Wayang plays an important role, as in some parts of Java, in certain situations, it is used as an exorcism ceremony.

Lotte Reiniger was one of those peculiarly creative souls who was lucky enough to have the support and resources to follow her interest - and her interest, from a young child, was silhouettes. She even built her own theatre, so she could put on silhouette performances for her family and friends. Through a series of fortunate circumstances, she was able to work her way into a select group of avant-garde filmmakers and artists and thus begin making short films using silhouettes, and animation techniques that were, at that time, very new.

She was quite successful, and in 1923 she was the recipient of a large amount of raw film, and so was able to set about creating a longer film, now the oldest surviving feature-length animation. Reiniger anticipated Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks by a decade by devising the first multi-plane camera for certain effects, and her animation - in detail, subtlety, and sheer design sense - is stunning.


Apparently, the original print was lost in World War ll bombing; all German nitrate prints, which had colored backgrounds, were lost as well. The only remaining prints were all black and white, and even then only fragments were found. Working from these surviving bits, German and British archivists have restored the film including adding back the original delicately-tinted pastel backgrounds, which enliven the lovely background designs of Walther Ruttmann.

The extraordinary thing about this film is its obvious brilliance. Working with cardboard, scissors, and thin sheets of lead, Ms. Reiniger created some of the most delicate, detailed images in film or shadow theatre. The beauty, the sensibility, the naturalistic movement, are in some respects still unparallelled in animation today. Her images are reminiscent of other artists, such as Kay Nielsen, who teetered in the Chinoiserie space between curvaceous Art Nouveau and more muscular, clean-cut Art Deco; like traditional wayang, she worked with characters carved into mere slivers of shadow. However, unlike traditional wayang, these puppets move all over: their hair, their clothes, their wrists and ankles.

As Art on Paper says:

"The only daughter of a banker and a homemaker, Reiniger set great stock by her birth in the last year of the nineteenth century. Except for the fact that she worked in film, her techniques and sensibilities reflected the earlier century more than her own. She described her childhood as 'extraordinarily' happy, her artistic interests celebrated and encouraged by both her parents. Theater captured her imagination early on, but after her first film, she was hooked; she had in the meantime discovered her 'unsettling gift' for making silhouettes.

Though inspired by shadow theater, Reiniger’s figures appear to have none of the stiffness of their non-film predecessors. 'Film is movement,' she noted, often comparing filmmaking to ballet. 'It’s the combination of curves and diagonals that gives ballet and animation their sweet tenderness and their striking directness.' While using literal light and shadow, Reiniger also relied on the shadings of music: the fine variations in her animations often parallel the tone and stress of musical notes rather than the hiccoughs of flip-book style animating techniques. She rather modestly noted that, "even with primitive materials, one can work small wonders."

The story is based on a melange of stories from the Arabian Nights, fitting several ideas neatly together to fill in spaces in the familiar tale of Aladdin. It's a fairy tale, with all the trimmings, a really good adventure story with visuals that stimulate that wild-longing-part-of-the-brain, the part that says "I wanna go there!" I love it all, except perhaps the parts where the Princess lies back passively, while yet another person abducts her against her will.

My biggest issue with this really beautiful restoration is that Milestone Films, the people who are distributing this work of art, are resolutely issuing cease-and-desist orders for all YouTube and other clips on the Internet. Personally, I think this is a publicity disaster, and I hesitate to recommend you spend money on these people, but the film is really so wonderful that you should at least check it out. I'm going to buy it, PR department or no PR department.


Along the same lines, may I recommend a group called Shadowlight Productions, who have been putting on really wonderful shows around the San Francisco Bay Area (and elsewhere) for years now.
Another example of creative people using the Wayang as a springboard, Shadowlight produces video of their work, which run from bringing to life a jazz-age poem from the 1920's, to telling a funny Native American story about Coyote, to Xanadu, the epic Chinese love story about Kublai Khan.

"ShadowLight Productions, founded by Larry Reed in 1972, has a mission to bring the stories of the world to light. [They] hope to build a world community through crosscultural storytelling and the magic of shadow theater."

They have been known to use huge projection screens as large as 30ft x 15ft, ensuring that their wonderful images come across much larger than life, and immersing the audience in the story in a way that traditional small shadow puppetry might not. Their images, which often use live actors costumed in shadow-making armatures, are startling, while still referring to the tradition of Balinese shadow puppetry. Wonderful stuff.



PS. I seem unable to access their site, except for the link above, to their store. I will look into it. Sorry!

Mechanical Thinking and the Human Soul

Holding Onto Myself, by Peter Callesen

Machine With Wishbone, by Arthur Ganson, where the machine that gives the wishbone life is also its burden to pull

My apologies for being late this week. Firstly, for those of us on academic schedules, the After School Chaos Control kicks in, where all the cleanup happens after weeks of grading; then we naturally go through a bit of slacking when the big push is done, and I'm afraid it has all lasted longer than I planned!

For your perusal this week I have a couple of great examples of mechanical thinking and the possibility of a lyrical end-product. By mechanical thinking I don't always mean the ability to fix clocks or understand what the car mechanic is saying, but rather the ability to envision how something is put together; to see the flat outlines of something that will be three-dimensional; to have an intuitive grasp of how something will work before it is created and, when it doesn't quite work how you wanted, to be able to envision an interesting solution.

A few examples of mechanical thinking are:
- Creation of machinery (of course)
- Packing a lot of things into a small space
- Paper engineering
- Rowing a boat
- Building structures, like treehouses, chicken coops, and of course larger constructions
- Rubix cubes (when you're able to be successful)
- Pattern drafting, for making clothes
- Sewing too, in a different way
- Puzzles of all sorts
- Mold making, especially several-part molds
- Glass-blowing, throwing pottery, and many of the sculptural arts
- Animation

Some of these could be conceived as spacial abilities, or simply artistic vision, but I think there is another element involved, about working with many pieces and parts and managing, somehow, to make them all work together. Paper engineering and patternmaking are, indeed, a kind of spacial imagining: taking flat sheets and bending them to encompass volumes of space. But there is often the matter of collars, sleeves and so on (or interlocking cuts and twists, for paper), which must be fitted together properly. Sewing, long denigrated by society as a "hobby", is actually quite fascinating, like a wearable puzzle: there are so many kinds of seams, so many intricate and complex ways of putting things together and turning them inside-out, that it is mind-twisting sometimes to understand what the result will be.

Other everyday examples, such as packing or rowing a boat, require a willingness to turn space around in one's mind and discover the trick which will make it work. Not only are you thinking of how something will happen in space, you are in effect twiddling the dials of reality, turning the world upside-down and backwards to get where you need to go.

The Machine with Artichoke Petal makes a plain piece of dried artichoke walk, plodding eternally on a turning wheel - which is also the driver for his walking

Arthur Ganson, who I found (despite his apparent fame) via a completely different link on Boing Boing, is a kinetic sculptor who - unlike many mechanical scuptors - creates his own parts. The elements of his machines: cogs, gears, worm gears, arms, wheels, dangly bits and so on, are built by hand from wire and other materials. But best of all are the odd elements he integrates into his machines: artichoke leaves, wishbones, and toy chairs are animated and integrated in such a way as to make us see them in a contemplative, funny, anthropomorphic way. This sideways-type thinking, the ever-present consciousness of art-making, is so clear and present in Mr. Ganson's work, that it bowls me over. Just the type of reality-twiddling that we need more of in this world.

The marvelously contemplative "Thinking Chair," which seems to pace its rock eternally, thoughtfully.

Thinking Chair, detail

Inspired by the work of such artists as Jean Tinguely and Paul Klee, as well as his own observation of people and human nature, Ganson's delicate, complex mechanisms work in the same fluid, skeletal way that bodies work. Their simplicity and self-containedness allows us to see either the mechanisms themselves, or the everyday items attached to them, as living creatures - rather than puppets dancing to the (comparatively enormous) machine's direction. It is easy to see emotion and humor in the machines; their humble materials, so clearly homemade, make you look closer and breathe, "Wo-o-ow!" - and wish that you could meet the man, see the machines in person. Smithsonian Magazine describes his work as "Rube Goldberg meets Jean-Paul Sartre." MIT Museum describes it as "Gestural Engineering." Mr. Ganson himself says that he is "not interested in intellectual sculpture that needs to be explained to be understood." And yet, he makes us think that an artichoke petal is a person, and imbues that person with so much expression, simply by means of mechanical movement. His inspiration is bewildering in its enormous obviousness, its excellent, mundane, intuitive sense of wonder.

You can see many of his pieces beautifully video-documented on eBaumsworld, as well as on his own site (beware the T-1 warning; these seem to work perfectly well on DSL).

Impenetrable Castle

Impenetrable Castle, detail

Another person worth noting, since I mention paper-engineering, is Danish artist Peter Callesen, whose "A4 papercut" series is all about the human condition. Playing on the idea of the object and its materials, Mr. Callesen creates 3-dimensional figures who are permanently fixed in place by the very stuff that made them. The results, as he points out, can be full of pathos:

"I find this materialization of a flat piece of paper into a 3D form almost as a magic process - or maybe one could call it obvious magic, because the process is obvious and the figures still stick to their origin, without the possibility of escaping. In that sense there is also an aspect of something tragic in most of the cuts."

Closet

Closet, detail (note the monsters all crammed inside)

Following the theme of imbuing parts with a further meaning and scope, Mr. Callesen is another artist who takes his materials and pulls them together into an amalgam of human consciousness. Helene Nyborg Gallery describes his work with the words, "Beauty, fragility, and failure."

Looking Back

"Big wave moving towards a small castle made of sand": stunning simplicity

Angel

Like Arthur Ganson, Peter Callesen's work is often stunning in its simplicity, yet surprisingly moving. Like Mr. Ganson's work, Mr. Callesen's are exquisitely detailed, obsession-driven, and intensely personal (in the sense of not-grandiose). Both artists create wonders out of simple materials, and each, in his own way, deserve a place in the Cabinet.

On Friday, if I have time, I'll be posting another amazing, obsessive artist who created a really extraordinary film - using scissors and paper.

Thank You

Thanks to all the readers who answered my plea! It was unanimous that the "Read On" links were unpleasant, so I have pulled them. Whew. What a wild-goose chase!

Looking forward to posting more soon,

Heather

Editor's Plea

To all my readers,

I have just begun adding "Read More" links to turn some of my posts into "folding" posts, so that there is not so much to scroll through when you're perusing the blog. I'm somewhat ambivalent about this, as sometimes I would like the full text of the (shorter) posts to simply be there, and have not seen a way to allow the link on some pages and not on others (it is built into the template). If I leave them up, I will have to go back and reformat all the old ones - which I am happy to do if it seems worthwhile.

I would like to ask you, who actually read the thing, what you would prefer: all posts simply there and undivided (which I sometimes feel disrupts the flow of an essay), or the ability to scroll through and pick and choose. I don't put a whole lot of posts up, so perhaps it doesn't matter. Still, I'd like your feedback so I'm not going about trying to please the wrong people.

Thanks!

Heather