Cabinet no. 59

c

A QUARTERLY OF ART AND CULTURE

ISSUE 59 THE NORTH

US $12 CANADA $12 UK £7

CABINET

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Issue 59, Fall 2016

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>.

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Contents © 2015 Immaterial Incorporated and the authors and artists.

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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

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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>.

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>.

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 Boğaziçi 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>.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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>.

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).

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.

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.

COLUMNS

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

MAIN

23 DRAWING THE FOUL

Luke Healey

Simulation and dissimulation on the soccer pitch

30 ASTRONYMY

Justin E. H. Smith

The philosopher’s stone

34 ELECTRIC CARESSES

Dominic Pettman

Rilke, Balthus, and Mitsou

41 THE MANSION HOUSE TAVERN OF

CROSSED DESTINIES

Jonathan Allen

Reading the tarot deck of Austin Osman Spare

49 ARTIST PROJECT / CYCLURA NUBILA

David Birkin

56 A MODEL RAILWAY JOURNEY

Ava Kofman

Inside Hamburg’s Miniatur Wunderland

THE NORTH

65 A MIND OF WINTER

Charlie Fox

The feeling of snow

73 MAN ON GLACIER

Matthew Spellberg

Reveries of a solitary roamer

AND

80½ POSTCARD / POLAR POSTMARKS

96 ½ BOOKMARK / SOUTH BY SOUTH

106 KIOSK / FALL 2015

82 ARTIST PROJECT / THE NORTH

Hanna Ljungh

88 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

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 INGESTION

Amphorae shards piled to form terraces at Monte Testaccio.

9 INGESTION

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.

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 INGESTION

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.

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.

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.

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 COLORS

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

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 guide’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 LEFTOVERS

19 LEFTOVERS

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

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 LEFTOVERS

21 LEFTOVERS

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 DRAWING 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 DRAWING 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

DRAWING 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

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

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.

• • •

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

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.

5 Alan Thompson, “Now Hit Them

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, “Fall-

Guys Will Need Our Help,” Daily

Express, 25 March 2006.

10 Steven Connor, A Philosophy

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

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.

4 See my blog post “Bébert,” 27

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 Heraclitus

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.


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.


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.


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:

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

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:

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.

Balthus, The King of Cats, 1935.

ELECTRIC CARESSES

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 (Self-

Love): 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.


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


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

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

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

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 / CYCLURA 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


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


“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

David Birkin, Cyclura nubila, 2014.

55 ARTIST PROJECT / CYCLURA NUBILA

56

A MODEL RAILWAY JOURNEY

Ava Kofman

i. the world is everything that

is in the 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.


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 wunderland

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 Coca-

Cola 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. train dreams

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


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.

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

Above and overleaf: Life inside the Wunderland.

60 AVA KOFMAN


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


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.

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.

• • •

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

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

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.”

1 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory:

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

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 Shiva’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


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.


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.

82

ARTIST PROJECT / THE NORTH

Hanna Ljungh

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


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


86 HANNA LJUNGH


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


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,


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


“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

‘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.

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: Blue-

Bridge Books, 2006), p. 93.

13 Roland Huntford, Nansen: The

Explorer as Hero (London: Duckworth,

1997), p. 357.

14 Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest

North, p. 568.

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.


Ice hut built by Nansen’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.


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. GRAHAM 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.


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. GRAHAM 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,


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

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.

6 I am thinking here of the

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.

what to wear?

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.

before 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 2006–2007 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, participants’ 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 fc9154

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.

where to walk in svalbard

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.

detours

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.

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).

afterward

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

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.

Cabinet no. 59

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