Ca Quarterly of Art and Culture Issue 32 Fire Us $12 Canada $12 Uk £7
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Cabinet is available in Europe and elsewhere through Central Books, London. Email: [email protected]. Cover: US Air Force firefighters on Aviano Air Base, Italy, work to extinguish a simulated aircraft fire at their new training facility, 14 March 2008. Courtesy US A version of Cabinet printed as a book (and sporting an ISBN) is available through Air Force . D.A.P./ Distributed Art Publishers. To order through DAP, call + 1 212 627 1999 or email [email protected]. Page 4: Building encased in ice after a fire, 65–83 Little St. James Street, Montreal. Collection Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Email [email protected] or call + 1 718 222 8434 if you need further information. Contents © 2009 Immaterial Incorporated and the authors and artists. All rights in the magazine reserved by Immaterial Incorporated, and rights in the works Submissions contained herein reserved by their owners. Fair users are of course free to do See
7 Ingestion / Power Hungry 23 The Cosmonaut of the Erotic Future Ben Kafka Aaron Schuster Dining with the Committee of Public Safety A brief history of levitation from St. Joseph to Yuri Gagarin 12 A Minor History of / Falling from Great Heights 32 To Sit, to Stand, to Write Joshua Foer George Pendle Down to earth The author’s position
17 Colors / Puce 36 Notes on Scent Barry Sanders Adam Jasper & Nadia WagneR A flea in your ear How do you smell?
19 Inventory / Everyone Once in Berlin! 43 A Fish Called Plaice Mel Gordon An introduction A semiotics of the Weimar streetwalker 44 Artist Project: Flounder No. 2 Nesta Mayo
45 Plaice and Place Sanelma Nicht The significance of space and locality in the investigation of Pleuronectes platessa
47 Artist Project: Plaice dan woerner
48 Plaice names Allen S. Weiss A real mouthful
51 SCREENPLAY PITCH FOR An American Plaice Tim Davis Coming, perhaps, to a cinema near you
52 Hook, Line, and Sinker: An Interview with Russ Symons Jeffrey Kastner A quiet sort of fishing
54 Tour of Duty
Therese Robert USS Plaice at war
55 Beginning the End Jon Calame In the zero thickness of the International Date Line fire AND
61 Fire and TrutH Postcard / Artist Project: Re-branding D. Graham Burnett Denmark Learning from spectroscopy Superflex
67 Iron Ivy Bookmark / fire in the hole Thomas A. P. Van Leeuwen The Scoville Scale The picturesque charm of the American fire escape
75 George R. Lawrence, Aeronaut- Photographer Christopher Turner Above the ruins of San Francisco
80 Superflex and the Re-branding of Denmark Mats Bigert
81 The Great Integrator: An interview with Stephen J. Pyne Jeffrey Kastner Fire in North America
88 Marks of Assurance Janet Connelly The birth of fire insurance
91 Sparks of Life Simon Werrett Fireworks and physiology
99 The Rational Hearth Frumento Combusti Gauger, Descartes, and the Vestal Complex
103 Domesday Julia Wolcott Bucky Fuller’s dome on fire
Contributors Aaron Schuster is a writer based in Brussels. He has lectured and published widely on psychoanalysis and contemporary philosophy, and his writings on Mats Bigert is an editor-at-large of Cabinet and one half of the Swedish artist art have appeared in Frieze, Frog, Metropolis M, and De Witte Raaf. He co- duo Bigert & Bergström. Life Extended, their new film on the utopian quest for authored the libretto for Cellar Door: An Opera in Almost One Act (JRP Ringier, immortality, will have its world premiere at the “Documentary Fortnight” at 2008), and his Cosmonaut of The Erotic Future: A Brief History of Levitation the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in February 2009. from St. Joseph to Yuri Gargarin will appear as a book in 2009.
D. Graham Burnett is an editor at Cabinet and a historian of science at Princ- Superflex is a Danish artist collective founded in 1993. eton University. He is the author of four books, including Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest (American Philosophical Society, 2005) and A Trial By Jury Russ Symons has fished out of Plymouth, England, all his life and has held (Knopf, 2001). A winner of the 2009 Mellon New Directions Fellowship, Bur- two International Game Fish Association world records for pollack, as well as nett is currently working on the history of aesthetics. several European and British line class records for a variety of other species. For the last twenty years, he has worked as a photographer and writer using Jon Calame is a partner with the non-profit consultancy group Minerva Part- the sea and his fishing as his subjects. ners and specializes in post-conflict urban rehabilitation. His book, Divided Cities: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar and Nicosia (University of Pennsylva- Christopher Turner is an editor of Cabinet. His book, Adventures in the Orgas- nia Press, 2009), examines shared sequences of partition. matron: How the Sexual Revolution Came To America, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Frumento Combusti was born in France and is a principal in Los Gallos, LLC, a company based in Colorado. He is working on a history of the nineteenth- Thomas A. P. Van Leeuwen was professor of architectural history, cultural century Russian-Jewish colony of Cotopaxi, on the Arkansas River. history, and art criticism at Leyden University for many years. He presently teaches at the Berlage Institute, Rotterdam. His books include The Skyward Janet Connelly is a Brooklyn-based writer currently working on the history of Trend of Thought: Metaphysics of the American Skyscraper (MIT Press, 1988) fire insurance in Europe and the US. and The Springboard in the Pond: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool (MIT Press, 1998). These studies are part of a tetralogy with each volume Tim Davis is an artist and writer living in Tivoli, New York, and teaching pho- centered on the relationship between architecture and one of the classical tography at Bard College. His most recent solo shows, “Kings of Cyan” and elements. In preparation are Columns of Fire: The Un-doing of Architecture “My Life in Politics,” were at Galerie Edward Mitterand in Zurich and the Luck- and The Thinking Foot: A Pedestrian View of Architecture. man Fine Art Center in Los Angeles, respectively. Nadia Wagner teaches design at the College of Fine Arts, University of New Joshua Foer is a freelance science writer. He is working on a book about the South Wales, Sydney. She is currently researching the role of smell in design art and science of memory, forthcoming from Penguin. He can be reached at and architecture.
Nesta Mayo, an artist based in Brooklyn, received her MFA from Hunter College, New York, in 2005. She recently exhibited in New York City at the Stanton Chapter and Nurture Art. For more information, see
Sanelma Nicht directs the Project for Applied Historical Biometrics, an HMAP-funded initiative within the School of Future Fisheries at the University of Turku in southwestern Finland. She worked on Alaskan halibut boats for almost ten years, and has contributed to Parakett, Kiiltomato, and Ildfisken. She can be reached at
George Pendle has written for the Times, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. He is the author of Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (Harcourt, 2005), The Remarkable Millard Fillmore: The Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President (Three Rivers Press, 2007), and the recently published Death: A Life (Three Rivers Press, 2008). He is currently writing an in-depth study of airport carpeting.
Stephen J. Pyne is a professor at Arizona State University, and the author most recently of Awful Splendour: A Fire History of Canada (University of Brit- ish Columbia Press, 2008).
Therese Robert is an artist based in Long Island City. She is working on a book composed solely of images of various kinds of flounders.
Barry Sanders spends his time writing in Pasadena and Portland. His last book, with Francis Adams, was Alienable Rights: The Exclusion of African Americans In A White Man’s Land, 1619–2000 (Harper Collins, 2003). Two books are forthcoming: The Green Zone: Militarism and the Degradation of the Environment (AK Press) and Unsuspecting Souls: The Disappearance of Human Essence in the Nineteenth Century (Counterpoint Press). columns
“Ingestion“ is a column that explores food within a Ingestion / Power Hungry framework informed by aesthetics, history, and phi- Ben Kafka losophy. / “A Minor History Of,” a column by Joshua Foer, investigates an overlooked cultural phenomenon In the final years of the eighteenth century, the using a timeline. / “Colors” is a column in which a writer Göttingen physicist, tinkerer, and man-about-town G. C. responds to a specific color assigned by the editors of Lichtenberg—whose habit of procrastination, Wikipedia Cabinet. / “Inventory” is a column that examines a list, helpfully tells us, led to his “failure to launch the first catalogue, or register. ever hydrogen balloon”—recorded a series of observa- tions on human nature. Among these was a proposal for a “Compass of Motives,” which would allow intrepid explorers of individual character to chart human inclina- tions with a greater degree of precision. “The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds, and might be given names according- ly, for instance, ‘food-food-fame’ or ‘fame-fame-food.’”1 This observation was a favorite of Freud’s, who took it up twice, the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), he offered Lichtenberg’s proposal as an example of the role of absurdity in the formation of jokes. The juxtaposition of fame and food, ambition and appetite, struck him as ridiculous, at least at the time. But he was no longer laughing when he returned to Lichtenberg’s observation in an open exchange of letters with Albert Einstein, published by the League of Nations’ Inter- national Institute for Intellectual Cooperation as Why War? (1933). This time Freud invoked Lichtenberg’s compass of motives as a genuine psychological insight. Our drives, our motives, are never pure, he suggested. They are always mixed, fused, alloyed. The “food” in the Lichtenberg allusion seemed to be a nod to Einstein’s suggestion that there was a deadly “power hunger” at work in the world. “Power hunger” is almost always taken metaphori- cally, that is to say, as mankind’s supposedly immutable appetite for power. What if we took it literally? What if we took it to mean the kind of appetite you work up after a long day at the office making decisions about national security or monetary policy? This can be exhausting. Indeed, physiologists have spent considerable time and government research funds quantifying the amount of energy expended on various office tasks, from sitting at one’s desk writing memos to the various subcategories of standing (“light/moderate,” “duplicat- ing machine”). The standard reference on this subject makes no mention of how much energy it takes to order a bunch of people around, but it does tell us that “sitting-meetings, general, and/or with talking involved” consume 1.5 METs—a unit representing the ratio of working metabolic rate to a resting metabolic rate—while conducting an orchestra consumes 2.5
Bill for food provided to the Committee of Public Safety. It is signed bythe celebrated chef Méot. Photo Ben Kafka.
METs.2 Such measurements can’t be taken too seri- without which virtue is powerless.”3 Of course it took a ously, of course. But they nevertheless signal something lot of effort to maintain virtue and terror both in a nation important about the kinds of material resources—some of twenty-eight million people. The republic was at war abundant, others scarce—that make state power pos- with the British, the Austrians, the Prussians, the Span- sible on a daily basis. The hunger for fame, perhaps. The ish, and the Dutch. And it was at war with itself, as angry hunger for lunch, definitely. royalists, refractory priests, and their sympathizers in the As usual, to reinvigorate our understanding of the Vendée fought against Parisian control. Bad harvests, history and theory of power, we can turn to the French sabotage, hoarding, and profiteering added to the diffi- Revolution. More than two centuries later, it remains culty of supplying the troops, feeding the populace, and both eerily familiar and irreducibly strange. The Commit- managing the nation. tee of Public Safety is remembered more for the blood What’s more, office hours were brutal; during the on its hands than for the grease on its fingers. During daytime, committee members would work in their the revolutionary Terror of 1793–1794, its twelve (later separate bureaus, overseeing large staffs of clerks eleven) members implemented a series of more or and copyists, handling hundreds of reports, circulars, less ruthless measures designed to protect the young memos, and other documents. In the evening, they republic from its enemies, internal and external, real would assemble in a chamber high up in the Tuileries, and imaginary. “If the mainspring of popular govern- the palace once located between the Louvre and what is ment in peacetime is virtue,” Robespierre said in his now known as the Place de la Concorde, but at the time famous discourse on political morality, “the mainspring was known as the Place de la Revolution. The chamber, of popular government in revolution is virtue and terror which had formerly served Louis XVI as a private office, both: virtue, without which terror is disastrous; terror, was called the “Green Room,” after the color scheme of
its wallpaper and conference table. Here, Robespierre, Food made its way into the committee by three Saint-Just, Carnot, and the other committee members— routes. The first was a supply of snacks and bever- who didn’t much like one another—would report on their ages brought in by the committee’s clerks, who were respective departments, argue about proper procedure, reimbursed for the cost. One receipt is titled “Itemized come to agreements, and plot courses of action. These Expenses Incurred both for the Bureaus and the Central meetings usually lasted until three or four in the morn- Office of the Committee of Public Safety during the ing. Then they got to go to bed. month of Brumaire Year III of the Republic One and There are no records of what was said or eaten in Indivisible”—roughly November 1794. In it, we see that the Green Room during the Terror. What scant evidence the committee and its bureaus consumed 178 livres‘ I’ve been able to find suggests that the committee mem- worth of “syrups”—sweet concentrates to be mixed with bers were largely left to fend for themselves. Carnot later water—and “victuals,” which could mean pretty much recounted: “I worked so hard that I did not even give anything. To give some sense of relative prices, this was myself time to go dine with my wife, even though I lived approximately a month’s salary for a low-level clerk. on rue Florentin [just a few blocks away]. I dined each Another seventy-five livres and change went to cheese evening on the terrace of the Feuillants, with food from and fruit; half as much again to biscuits and little cakes. a caterer named Gervais.”4 After one especially bitter These were mainly provided by a certain Madame argument with Robespierre, the latter had Carnot’s Uzépy, the only woman to find employment as a clerk caterer arrested, just for the heck of it. Or so Carnot later in the Committee of Public Safety; she was hired after claimed—he was facing accusations of colluding with her husband was killed on an official mission. It seems the terrorists and was doing everything he could to dis- that her son worked there too—it was not uncommon tance himself from the “Incorruptible.” for boys as young as twelve to perform various ancillary On the night of 27 July 1794, the regime’s oppo- office tasks. And then there was the wine. The offices nents staged a coup, invading the Green Room and of the subcommittee responsible for military affairs arresting several committee members. Robespierre consumed sixty-six bottles over the course of the month; shot himself in the face as he was being wrestled to thirty-one more went to the conference room where the the ground; with no linen on hand to make bandages, committee itself met; eighteen more to the library. his captors tried to staunch the bleeding with sheets This is routine stuff, not that much different from of paper. The Committee of Public Safety, which had what any workplace might consume, except maybe a been functioning as a largely autonomous executive bit boozier. Far more interesting is what the committee power, deciding everything from postal routes to itself ate on a daily basis. And this we can determine in peace treaties, was purged of its most militant elements. still more detail. Another document, from the revolution- The night is best known by its date on the revolutionary ary month of Pluviose Year III, or approximately February calendar, 9 Thermidor—and in French “Thermidorian” 1795, shows a day-by-day inventory of the catered meals is immediately associated with “reactionary.” Not only at the post-Thermidor Committee of Public Safety. were Jacobins hunted down and punished—Jacobin On the first of the month, a ham in aspic, four red par- women, for example, were stripped naked and flogged tridges, pastries, and biscuits. On the second, pastries in the streets by gangs of so-called “gilded youth”—but and biscuits. On the third, a veal tongue, four more red the entire culture took on a gothic cast, with flourishes of partridges, and the ubiquitous pastries and biscuits. And extreme luxury, even decadence, framed by a general so on. morbidity. Now granted, these inventories aren’t menus, and don’t tell us much about how the dishes were actually • • • prepared and presented. I was particularly curious about all these red partridges—a relatively banal game bird At this point, the archives suddenly get very interesting, that could not have been that much fun to eat day after at least from a culinary perspective. I was going through day. (Alexandre Dumas’s culinary dictionary, published old payroll records in France’s National Archives when in 1873, explains that the grey partridge was much pre- I came across a series of bills and receipts showing, in ferred in the eighteenth century.)5 What we can say with splendid detail, how the committee fed itself from one some certainty is that the execution of these meals must day to the next. Instead of forcing its members to find have been creative enough and elaborate enough to dinner on their own, the reformed Committee of Public compensate for the monotony of the main ingredients. Safety began to order its meals in. This can be gathered from the signature on these bills,
which belonged to Méot, one of the most celebrated says: “coupon for thirty bottles of wine, twenty-five restaurateurs of the revolutionary era. He had opened pounds of bread, and thirty pounds of meat to be deliv- his restaurant in 1791 after his former employer, the ered by Citizen Méot, caterer. He will also include two Prince de Condé, fled to Coblenz to organize a counter- bottles of barley syrup”—a sweet dessert sort of drink, revolutionary army allied with the Austrians. generally non-alcoholic—“and ten rice porridges.” And Méot’s eponymous restaurant was famous for its it’s signed “The Representatives of the People Charged superb cuisine, sumptuous decor, and, above all, its with the Direction of the Armed Forces, J. F. B. Delmas.” powerful clientele. Louis Sébastien Mercier, the great Beneath, tabulated in what appears to be Méot’s hand- chronicler of Parisian life in the final decades of the writing, though it may be that of one of his assistants, eighteenth century, described the meals at Méot as we read “one veal shoulder, one veal tongue, one paté the best in Paris, and thus anywhere in the world. The of poulard,” and the rest of the items that Delmas had food was “warm, prompt, well-made,” the dining rooms requested. Best of all—and it’s a nice touch—what look “gilded, sculpted, theatrical.” Finally, the prices were to me very much like grease stains.
the highest in Paris.6 Méot’s bill for the month of Pluvi- ose Year III, for instance, came to 2623 livres, or about 1 Lichtenberg, quoted in Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the fifteen times a clerk’s monthly salary. In the decades Unconscious [1905], in Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychologi- cal Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, with Alex Strachey following the French Revolution, Méot would be lauded (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974), vol. 8, p. 86. Translation slightly modified. as a pioneer by both Grimod de La Reynière and Brillat- 2 Barbara E. Ainsworth, William L. Haskell, Melicia C. Whitt, et al., “Compen- Savarin. In addition to members of the Committee of dium of Physical Activities: an update of activity codes and MET intensities,” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, vol. 32, no. 9, suppl. (2000). Public Safety, who are said to have drafted France’s first 3 Maximilien Robespierre, “On the Principles of Political Morality that Should republican constitution over lunch at Méot in June 1793 Guide the National Convention in the Domestic Administration of the Republic,” (earning the document the nickname in Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 2007), la constitution p. 115. Méot), famous revolutionary customers included Marie- 4 Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur (Paris: Plon, 1863–1870), vol. 24, p. 74 Antoinette’s judges, who celebrated her condemnation (10 Germinal, Year III / March 30, 1795). at the restaurant in October of the same year. 5 Alexandre Dumas, Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine (Paris: Alphone Lemerre, 1873), p. 814. Given Méot’s legendary extravagance, how might 6 Louis Sébastien Mercier, Le Nouveau Paris [1799], ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet the Committee’s red partridges have been prepared? (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994); pp. 608–609. On restaurant culture in the Though we have no recipe from Méot himself, one of his revolutionary era, see Rebecca Spang’s wonderful study, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge: Harvard Uni- greatest rivals, Antoine Beauvilliers, later published one versity Press, 2000). in his Art of Cookery (1814). Chef Beauvilliers instructs the cook to take three partridges, remove the feathers, trim the claws, stuff them with a pound of truffles and a half pound of lard that’s been mixed with truffle pairings, sew the cavity, and truss the legs. Fill a pot with lard, ham, the fat of veal kidneys, a mirepoix, a bouquet garni, half a glass of white wine, a spoonful of consommé, and a little salt. Gently lay the partridges breast-down on top of this mixture, cover with slices of lemon and bacon, bring to a boil, lower to a simmer, and braise for forty- five minutes. Drain, carve, and serve with a Perigord sauce—a madeira-based sauce embellished with diced truffle. There is one final route that food took into the committee’s offices and stomachs, one that seems to be associated with special occasions, and that attests to power hunger at its most robust. Unlike the snacks sup- plied by the committee’s clerks, or the meals delivered daily by the caterer, these were ordered in advance, with the ingredients stipulated by the officials themselves. On a standard pre-printed form of the sort used for record- opposite: Order for food signed by Jean-François-Bertrand Delmas during a meeting with the Committee of Public Safety. Beneath the order is the ing official decisions, we find a handwritten note, which caterer’s tally of the cost of each item ordered. Photo Ben Kafka.
10 11 ca. 1500
1618 ca. 8 AD
1617
A Minor History of / Falling from from the Tower of the Golden Phoenix. The emperor Great Heights calls it a “liberation of living creatures.” In fact, all the Joshua Foer prisoners die upon striking the ground. ca. 8 AD Ovid publishes his canonical account of the ca. 875 Feathered and wearing a large winged cloak, myth of the wax-winged Icarus, spurring generations of the Berber astronomer and poet Abbas Ibn Firnas climbs like-minded daredevils to fall to their deaths. a tower near Cordoba and pronounces, “Presently, I shall take leave of you. By guiding these wings up and down, I 3rd century To ensure that the builder of one of his should ascend like the birds. If all goes well, after soaring beloved towers would never replicate his work else- for a time I should be able to return safely to your side.” where, the Persian king Shapur I orders the architect to All does not go well. After flying a short distance, Ibn construct the tower’s roof without providing any means Firnas crashes to the ground, badly injuring his back. for his own descent. “The architect, in no position to reject the offer, requested only that he have enough ca. 1500 According to legend, a Ming dynasty bureau- wood to build a shack to protect himself from vultures,” crat named Wan Hu constructs a rocket-propelled chair writes Michael Abrams, author of the definitive history with the aim of travelling to the stars. He attaches forty- Birdmen, Batmen, and Skyflyers. “Once the tower was seven large black-powder rockets and a pair of kites to complete, the architect hewed himself a pair of wings a wooden chair, robes himself in his finest attire, and with the wood and, with a little help from a strong wind, invites forty-seven assistants to light the fuses simulta- flew to his escape.” neously. When the smoke and flames clear, Wan Hu and his chair are gone. 6th century In perhaps the earliest recorded attempt at human flight, the short-lived tyrannical Chinese 1617 Inspired by the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci, the emperor Kao Yang orders a group of condemned pris- Croatian polymath Faust Vrancic builds the world’s first oners to attach bamboo wings to their backs and jump rigid parachute, and then uses it to successfully leap
12 1887
1877 1891
from a Venetian tower. He dubs his invention Homo cylinder that was patented six years earlier by “the Great Volans, the Flying Man. Farini,” Zazel is launched into the air accompanied by fireworks and a loud bang, and lands in a net sixty feet 1618 A group of irate Bohemian Protestants storm away. Many years later, having grown wealthy and the Hradschin Castle and hurl two leading members famous from her cannonball act, Richter is crippled of the Catholic Council of Regents and a scribe out of when the stunt goes awry. a high window. Though they land on a pile of garbage and survive, the Defenestration of Prague nonetheless 1887 Apparently drunk, renowned funambulist sparks the Thirty Years War. The surviving scribe, Philip Stephen Peer loses his balance and plummets forty-five Fabricius, is later granted the title Baron von Hohenfall, feet to his death while attempting a midnight cross- literally “the Baron of Highfall.” ing of the thinnest tightrope ever strung over Niagara Falls, a steel cable a mere five-eighths of an inch thick. 17th century In a letter to his friend Sir Isaac Newton, According to local Niagara lore, it was not a wire-walk- Robert Hooke outlines the consequences of digging a ing misstep that did Peer in, but rather a bullet shot by tunnel from one side of the earth to the other. A “gravity one of his funambulatory rivals. train” dropped into such a tunnel would accelerate in free fall to some 25,000 miles per hour until it reached 1891 Monsieur Carron unveils his “Machine for the center of the earth, at which point it would begin Sensational Emotions” to the editors of Nature maga- decelerating until eventually coming to a complete zine. The mortar-shaped thrill-ride, containing a cabin rest at the other end of the planet. Total trans-planetary large enough for fifteen intrepid thrill-seekers and a travel time: 42 minutes and 12 seconds. large bed of springs underneath, is to be dropped from the top of the Eiffel tower. According to Carron, it will 1877 Fourteen-year-old Rossa Matilda Richter, working reach a speed of 172 miles per hour in free fall, faster under the stage name Zazel, inaugurates her acclaimed than any human being had theretofore travelled, and “it human cannonball act. Stuffed into a spring-loaded will be prevented from being dashed to smithereens by
13 1912
1901 1972
falling into a water-filled pond shaped like a champagne- Air Show, he assures an onlooker, “I feel as safe as you glass.” Mr. Carron assures the editors of Nature that “the would in your grandmother’s kitchen.” shock felt by the occupants on landing will be in no way unpleasant.” 1942 Hugh De Haven, an American pilot who survived a World War I airplane crash, publishes his landmark 1901 In search of fame and fortune, a sixty-three-year- paper “Mechanical Analysis of Survival in Falls from old retired dancing instructor named Annie Edson Taylor Heights of Fifty to One Hundred and Fifty Feet,” which becomes the first person ever to plunge over Niagara concludes that “the human body can tolerate … a force Falls in a barrel and survive. Upon recovering from of two hundred times the force of gravity for brief inter- her concussion, she tells reporters, “If it was my dying vals.” Thirteen years later, De Haven is issued a patent breath, I would caution anyone against attempting the for the first three-point seatbelt. feat.” 1960 Air force pilot Joe Kittinger is lifted 102,800 feet 1912 With a film camera trained on him, Austrian tailor into the sky in a pressurized balloon. At the end of his Franz Reichelt steps off the observation deck of the three-hour ascent, at the edge of space, looking out Eiffel Tower wearing a combination overcoat-parachute across the arc of the Earth, he opens the capsule and garment of his own design. He expects onlookers will jumps into the vanishingly thin air. During his twenty-six- measure the duration of his flight. Instead, they measure kilometer free fall, which lasts four-and-a-half minutes, the depth of his crater. he accelerates to 615 miles per hour, arguably becom- ing the first man to touch space and certainly the first to 1937 “Someday I think that everyone will have wings break the sound barrier outside of an aircraft. and be able to soar from housetops. But there must be a lot more experimenting before that can happen,” says 1972 Croatian terrorists blow up a DC-9 jet 33,316 feet Clem Sohn, also known as “Michigan Icarus” and “the above Czechoslovakia, killing all twenty-nine passen- human bat.” Just before falling to his death at the Paris gers and crew, save one, a twenty-two-year-old Serbian
14 1974
2008
1987
stewardess named Vesna Vulovic, who free-falls for over 2001 Between 8:46 am and 10:28 am on September three minutes without a parachute, before colliding with 11th, at least two hundred people jump to their deaths the side of a snow-covered mountain. Miraculously, she from the north tower of New York City’s World Trade survives. Center. According to USA Today, which systemati- cally studied videos of the horrific day: “For those who 1974 Queen Elizabeth II travels to Pentecost Island, in jumped, the fall lasted 10 seconds. They struck the Vanuatu, to witness the world’s most primitive form of ground at just less than 150 miles per hour—not fast bungee jumping. Each spring, just after the first yams enough to cause unconsciousness while falling, but begin to emerge from the soil, the men of the South fast enough to ensure instant death on impact. … They Pacific island erect enormous wooden towers, some as jumped alone, in pairs and in groups.” tall as seventy-five feet, in each of the island’s villages. The men climb to the top of these towers, attach two 2008 Harnessing himself to 1,000 helium-filled bal- long elastic vines to their ankles, announce to the world loons, Father Adelir Antonio de Carli takes off from the their most intimate (and occasionally last) thoughts, and Brazilian port of Paranagua in a fundraising stunt to help then leap. The vines are supposed to catch the jumper build a spiritual rest stop for truck drivers. After reach- just at the point where his hair is able to brush the ing an altitude of 20,000 feet, an unexpected change ground, ritually fertilizing it for a bountiful yam harvest. in wind patterns blows the Catholic priest out to sea, where he loses radio contact with the ground, and 1987 The Journal of the American Veterinary Medical eventually plunges to his death. Several days later, his Association publishes a study of 132 cats that fell from balloons are discovered floating on the ocean waves, high-rise buildings. It concludes that, contrary to expec- but not his body. tations, the higher the fall, the more likely the cat is to survive. Researchers hypothesize that in falls of more than seven stories, cats are able to flay their bodies like a parachute, decreasing their terminal velocity.
15 Adolphe Neyt, photomicrograph of a flea, ca. 1865. Colors / Puce l’oreille” (“to have a flea in one’s ear”), meaning that one Barry Sanders harbors a libidinous urge, “a sexual itch.” Say the word puce today, and a Frenchman will either titter or offer a Some French wag in the seventeenth century played a knowing wink. colossal joke on the world, creating a color that every- As far back as antiquity, that little black speck one has heard of but, over three hundred years later, starred in some of the most elaborate metaphors of love, very few can define. The color is puce. But that’s not the beginning with a volume of poems entitled Carmen de joke. It’s that puce turns out to be the most decidedly Pulice, “Songs of the Flea,” which some historians attri- sexual and most violent color in the paint box. Puce is bute to Catullus, and others to Ovid. But while the flea’s about plotting. Puce is about villainy. And it is not just sexual career blossomed in the fifteenth and sixteenth about simple murder, but the emotionally charged and centuries with a rash of erotic flea poetry, it really took deranged murder usually associated with love—with hold in late sixteenth-century France after a celebrated jealous, overheated love. Think twice about using puce, court scandal. A flea, it seems, can fell a nation. or at least heed its creepy history. The events in question unfolded in the most inno- The first but by no means strangest fact about puce cent way. One particular evening in the summer of 1579, is that it owes its existence to one of the tiniest animals Monsieur Étienne Pasquier, a lawyer and distinguished in the kingdom, the flea—in Latin, pulic or pulex, or more man of letters, made a call on Madame Madeleine Des- descriptively, pulex irritans. In Old French, flea is pulce, Roches at Poitiers, and, to his surprise, noticed a flea on which by the time of the Renaissance becomes puce. the bosom of her daughter, Mademoiselle Catherine. Which prompts the question: how did we get from the Pasquier, along with the other assembled gentle- loathly flea to the lovely puce? The answer is a surprising men, showed special interest in the flea’s audacity but one—especially in the usually predictable world of the delighted even more in the privileged spot the flea had color wheel. chosen for itself. A great commotion ensued, the men Don’t expect to find the answer in the Oxford Eng- huddling in the corner to plot a course of action: should lish Dictionary, for it offers only the following thoroughly one of them pluck the flea, so to speak, or should they confusing definition: “Of a flea-color; purple brown, or ignore the tiny parasite altogether? brownish purple.” Does the OED deliberately deceive? No, they decided, they could not completely side- Puce is not flea-color—that would render the color step the flea and the virgin. And so, as distinguished black. And black is far from either brown or purple. The men of letters, they decided to commemorate the supreme arbiter of the English language only perpetu- event by composing poems about the jet-black flea on ates the mystery. Mademoiselle’s snow-white bosom. With great fanfare, Even putting aside the differences of color, we have they published their cycle of some fifty poems, in 1582, to ask: Why would anyone memorialize such a nasty, giving it the very direct but nonetheless provocative outrageously useless pest? Surely, there must be some- title, La Puce de Madame Des-Roches. In an attempt thing other than perversity going on here. Camel brown to dazzle Mademoiselle Catherine with the far-fetched and dove gray, colors that take their name from respect- reaches of his poetic imagination, the rather portly able animals, we can understand. But a flea seems out Pasquier imagined himself as a flea—more accurately, of the question. After all, fleas have been responsible perhaps, as a pest—so as to better play the lover: “If only over the centuries for millions of deaths. The flea is the God permitted me / I’d myself become a flea. / I’d take plague; the flea is the Black Death. Moreover, everyone flight immediately / To the best spot on your neck, / or knows the flea’s intimacy with that dreaded rodent, else, in sweet larceny, / I would suck upon your breast, / the rat—a relationship just too, too disgusting for most or else, slowly, step by step, / I would still farther down, people. / and with a wanton muzzle / I’d commit flea idolatry, And yet the flea has another side, this one outland- /nipping I will not say what, / which I love far more than ishly sexual. It’s what appealed, I am certain, to our myself.” anonymous French wag. The flea took on its sexual Lacking in restraint (and good taste), Pasquier grew identity from a string of suggestive cognates with puce, even more tedious as he brought his love to a climax of like pucelle, “maiden” (and in certain contexts, “slut”); sorts, falling back on that overused French phrase: “Oh pucelage, “maidenhead”; and depuceler, “to deflower.” flea . . . / Thanks to you, Madame / Is aroused for me. / In addition, the French eroticize the flea in a phrase For me she is aroused / And has a flea in her ear.” We popular since the fourteenth century, “avoir la puce à have no record of Catherine’s or her mother’s reaction
17 to Pasquier’s rugged doggerel. Critics, too, chose not to speaker’s overblown argument by literally taking mat- comment. ters into her own hands. She kills the flea, which brazen Most of the assembled gentlemen wanted to kill act draws a shriek of protest from the speaker: “Cruel the flea, but stopped themselves. Which takes us to and sudden, hast thou since / Purpled thy nail in blood the very dark heart of the joke. A flea’s color does not of innocence?” In her mind, the need for revenge; on her change after it bites an animal or a person: the flea, fingers, the evidence of the abuse of puce. both pre- and post-bite, retains its jet-black appearance. Donne describes a woman who breaks convention Some poets boasted that they could notice a change in to assert herself: I’ll kill the flea myself, she seems to be the size of a flea after it had taken a bite, the image of an saying, and remain whole and intact, to boot. Her under- engorged flea designed to bolster the insect as sexual sized revolutionary act did not go unnoticed. Just a few symbol. But to discover if a flea has blood inside it or years later, for example, the Renaissance French painter not—in this case, Mademoiselle Catherine’s elegant and Georges de La Tour made that same bold statement the refined blood—requires one thing only: a person must subject of his painting, La Femme à la puce (ca. 1640), flatten it. sometimes translated as The Flea-Catcher. His famous That’s what the men at the Des-Roches court all Femme brings to a conclusion the history of puce. knew: the temptation to kill the flea is always present, A woman, draped loosely so as to reveal her breasts always a reality. Confronted with the flea, each one and a good deal of her mid-section, sits in front of a of us, even the most normal-seeming person, just candle with a flea trapped between her thumbnails: cannot wait to get that irritating pest between our we catch her in the act of killing. She makes visible the nails—especially after it has bitten an arm or leg—and desire of the woman in Donne’s poem, to put an end for slowly, deliberately squeeze until we hear that tell-tale all time to such demeaning, flea-sized sexual foppery. pop. Call it what you want, but that death squeeze Indeed, one needs a magnifying glass to see the flea constitutes an act of revenge. And it’s that trace left in La Tour’s painting, and even then it is doubtful one behind on your fingertips, the reddish stain, that our could actually make out its tiny shape. The flea seems seventeenth-century French practical joker memorial- to have totally disappeared. We are aware of it solely ized as “la couleur puce.” in La Tour’s title. Woman has triumphed, and that is in And thus the catch—the real joke. We can only part why some art historians choose to identify La Tour’s enjoy the color puce, only experience it first hand, by kill- lady as Mary Magdalene—more upstart and aggressive ing. In order to spill our own artistic guts, we must first than most women in the Bible, more so than her discreet spill the flea’s. And given its sexual connotations—recall sister, and more so, certainly, than that other Mary. pucelage and “maidenhead”—“popping the flea” rever- And thus all we can really see, and what has been berates with sexual innuendo, specifically with breaking left behind in the painting, is pure color. La Tour has the hymen. Puce is love’s stain. Hence none of those bathed the entire canvas in a purple brown or brownish respectable gentlemen around Catherine would dare purple, depending on how the candle illuminates parts “kill the flea,” so to speak, at least not in public view. of the background. The Flea-Catcher, a radical painting Like vampires and vampire bats, the flea feeds on in the history of art, takes on a bit of philosophical impor- human blood, but in the sixteenth century it sucked with tance, as well. For La Tour destroys not just the animal, much more meaning. Aristotelian science, popular in but also the sexual origins of that single, sneaky, most the Renaissance, imagined coitus as the mingling of playful and dangerous color, already a part of the French the man and woman’s blood—just the perfect thing to palette by La Tour’s time, la couleur puce. The flea is fire the imagination of one of the period’s most clever dead—“out of the picture.” Only the pure color remains, poets, John Donne. In the opening to his sonnet “The cleverly present in the painting’s title, this time in the Flea” (1633), the speaker tries to persuade his mistress second meaning of puce. And that’s the color we use to go to bed with him, using a flea bite as his come-on today—still elusive, still playful, but decidedly asexual. for coupling: “Mark but this flea, and mark in this, / How Even after some three hundred years, ask what little that which thou deniest me is; / It sucked me first, color puce is and most people will immediately think of and now sucks thee, / And in this flea our two bloods puke—a yucky green or even a slightly ratty brown. They mingled be.” have no idea of purple brown or brownish purple, and The mistress remains silent throughout the poem. know nothing at all of fleas or flirting or bloody murder. We never hear her speak. Clearly, however, she has been stewing. For, in the last stanza, she destroys the
18 Inventory / Everyone once in berlin! Curt Moreck reported on the same corner: “One favorite mel gordon tourist site is located near the corner of Passauer and Ansbacher streets, west of Wittenberg Platz. There, a Between 1919 and 1933, Berlin was one of the Jazz trio of six-foot-tall Boot Girls are garishly costumed in red Age’s primary destinations for sex tourists. Its civic lead- and black attire like nineteenth-century horsewomen. ers even promoted this unsavory attraction in 1927 with Snapping a riding crop, the tallest Amazon bellows men- the oblique and comic proclamation, “Everyone Once acingly, ‘Who will be my slave tonight?’” in Berlin!” Nocturnal erotic delights, in fact, had become The following is an inventory of the services offered the metropolis’s third most lucrative industry. by the various types of prostitutes working indoors and The very first thing foreigners noticed in Berlin was outdoors in Weimar Berlin. its thousands of prostitutes, on the streets, in hotel lob- bies, and seated at cafés and clubs. How many women made their living selling sex in Berlin during the Golden Twenties is impossible to calculate, but estimates range from a low of 5,000 to the oft-published figure of 120,000 (not including the city’s estimated 35,000 male prosti- tutes). It all depended on one’s definition of the term. Commercialized sex in the Prussian capital was technically unlawful but allowed in practice. Only two strictures were consistent: unlike Paris, Buenos Aries, or Shanghai, Berlin had no established red-light district or legalized brothels, and prostitutes were prohibited from verbally soliciting customers or announcing their services in print. Instead, they had to signal their voca- tion and specialized activities by other means: through frequenting specific locales, using the subterfuge of evocative pseudonyms, or adopting particular codes of dress. altogether there were seventeen distinct variet- ies of female prostitutes in Weimar Berlin. Although relatively few in number (300 to 350), Boot Girls, domi- natrices near the Wittenberg Platz, provided Berlin nightlife with its most ubiquitous local color. Since the fur-coated Boot Girls’ particular services were suggested by the iridescent colors of their calf-length, patent- leather boots and shoelaces, suitors had to be intimately familiar with their semaphore-like advertising before accompanying them to nearby apartments. Naturally, only devoted aficionados could decipher such specific messages with confidence. Other potential clients had to buy special primers, where Berlin’s complex street semiotics were thoughtfully decoded for the uninitiated. arriving in Berlin during the inflation crisis of 1922– 1923, Klaus Mann remembered walking past a group of the outdoor dominatrices: “Some of them looked like fierce Amazons, strutting in high boots made of green, glossy leather. One of them brandished a supple cane Two guides to nightlife in the Weimar capital: So It Seems— and leered at me as I passed by. ‘Good evening, Madam,’ Berlin! (1927) and Berlin: What’s Not in the Baedecker Guide I said. She whispered into my ear, ‘Want to be my slave? (1927). Costs only six billion and a cigarette. A bargain. Come along, honey!’” Eight years after Mann’s encounter,
19 Indoor Prostitutes Telephone Girls Grasshoppers Child prostitutes, aged twelve to Lowly streetwalkers who per- Chontes seventeen, who were made to formed oral sex in the Tiergarten. Polish-born Jews, also knows as resemble junior versions of theater Lublins, from the Polish industrial or film starlets and were ordered by Gravelstones town of Lublin. telephone. Physically deformed women who worked in north Berlin. Demi-Castors Outdoor Prostitutes Young women from good families Half-Silks who occasionally supplemented Boot Girls Occasional prostitutes, often sec- their allowances by working in high- Dominatrices near the Wittenberg retaries, shopkeepers, and office class houses in west Berlin. Platz whose sexual services were clerks supplementing their incomes signaled by the colors of their boots, after work. Dominas laces, and ribbons, sometimes worn Leather-clad women who special- in combination. Kontroll Girls ized in whipping, humiliation, and Three defined classes of licensed other forms of punishment, and —Black boots: buttocks cropping prostitutes, whose health was certi- worked in lesbian nightclubs that (lying on bed). fied by city physicians. admitted heterosexual couples and free-spending male clients. —Brown boots: asphyxiation by Münzis boot or stockinged foot. Pregnant women who waited under Fohses lampposts on Münzstrasse. Independent prostitutes who adver- —Cobalt blue boots: forced femini- tised in newspapers and magazines zation; penetration by female. Nuttes as manicurists or masseuses. Boyish teenage girls who framed —Lacquered gold boots: bound their transactions with the protocols Medicine girls feminization; physical torture. of dating, enticing their customers Child prostitutes who were with lines such as, “Don’t you think “prescribed” by pimps posing as —Poisonous green boots: psycho- we should have a coffee first?” physicians in phony pharmacies in logical enslavement. west Berlin. Tauentzien Girls —Brick red boots: buttocks flagella- Women wearing the latest fashions Minettes tion (tied to bed or cross). and hairstyles, often working in Exclusive call girls who enacted mother-and-daughter teams near S&M fantasy scenes involving foot —Scarlet boots: forced feminiza- the Kaiser Memorial Church. worship and forced transvestitism. tion; transvestite humiliation.
Race Horses —Black laces: punishment with a Masochistic prostitutes who short whip. worked in “Institutes for Foreign Language Instruction” where the —Gold laces: defecation on chest. schoolrooms were equipped with bondage equipment. —Maroon laces: verbal humiliation.
Table Ladies —White laces: collared like a dog. Prostitutes who worked at expen- sive nightclubs often frequented by —White ribbons on top of boots: politicians and businessmen who a roleplay scenario in which the paid “table money” for an evening male customer begins as the of champagne and conversation dominant figure and ends as the
prior to a backroom encounter. submissive party. opposite: illustration of Weimar-era prostitute.
20 21 MAIN
22 Saint Joseph of Copertino, artist unknown. Yves Klein, The Leap into the Void, 1960.
The cosmonaut of the erotic future who on December 13, 1868 (one of the most auspicious Aaron Schuster days in the history of levitation) floated out of a third- story window and returned through the window of an What happens to levitation, one of the great imaginative adjoining room; or the ascension of Christ, archetype figures of art and literature, in the transition from a reli- of all saintly air travel; or the magnetic levitation train gious culture to the disenchanted universe of modern zipping commuters between Shanghai and the Pudong science? What becomes of ecstasy, rapture, ascension, International Airport at a maximum speed of 431 km/h. transcendence, grace when these give way to “space Levitation derives from the Latin levitas, meaning oddity”: man enclosed in a tin can floating far above lightness. The term would appear to have been coined the world? Is the cosmonaut a prophet of the erotic as the opposite of gravitation, sometime in the early future, avatar of man’s stellar renaissance, as Stanley seventeenth century when humanity’s conception of Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke once imagined? Or is he like the cosmos was being revolutionized by Brahe, Coperni- Nietzsche’s madman, proclaiming as Gagarin himself cus, and Kepler. Rather than being based on qualitative was rumored to have said: “I don’t see any God up here”? “elective affinities,” the attraction of bodies became a matter of purely quantitative relations expressed by Levitation: what is it? algebraic symbols. Though the ancient cosmology was The word levitation has several senses and connota- effectively vanquished by the new clockwork universe, tions: miraculous, magical, oneiric, but also scientific this was hardly a simple or straightforward affair. Even and technological. Levitation is equally an affair of mys- Sir Isaac Newton hedged his bets. While developing his tics and engineers, charlatans and poets. One thinks of theory of gravitation, Newton was also privately elaborat- the feats of the Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Home, ing a highly idiosyncratic theology. According to certain
23 Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni), The Blessed Ranieri Rasini Freeing Poor People from Prison in Florence, 1437–1444.
obscure and, until recently, largely neglected writings, II and published in 1949, Cendrars’s book presents a after the Apocalypse “children of the resurrection” (nota- kind of literary collage. Prose poetry, exotic travelogues, bly Newton himself) would be able to levitate at will, personal memoirs, and found texts, including scholarly soaring “to the furthermost extremities of the universe.”1 documents, are all pasted together in a complex con- Levitation is also related to levity, to the light- struction. Cendrars is renowned as an adventurer, and hearted, the frivolous, and the fun. The link between the stories he recounts here do not disappoint: there levitation, levity, and laughter was made explicit in the is his trip across Siberia with a jewelry merchant, his 1964 Walt Disney classic Mary Poppins (as we’ll see, the pilgrimage to a strange Brazilian doctor obsessed with the 1960s was an absolutely crucial decade for levita- Sarah Bernhardt, his voyage from Rio to Cherbourg with tion). Near the end of the film, the curmudgeonly bank 250 tropical birds (none survive the boat ride), his work director miraculously ascends as he goes into hysterics as a war correspondent for British headquarters in Paris. at an employee’s little joke. I won’t tell you the joke—it’s But it is the death of his son Rémy, a pilot who perished not very good. Later we learn that the old man died. But in the early months of the war, that provides the novel’s he died happy from levitating laughter. “center of gravity.” Often Cendrars’s “parceling of the sky” is interpreted as an act of mourning. He had spoken Parceling the sky with his son about the idea of proposing St. Joseph of One of the great literary works of the past century deal- Copertino, famed levitator, as the patron saint of French ing with levitation, combining the technology of aviation aviators. Though Cendrars’s plan was foiled by the with Christian mysticism, is Blaise Cendrars’s Le lotisse- American air force, which adopted St. Joseph as their ment du ciel (literally “The Parceling of the Sky” but own guardian angel in 1943, his fascination for the flying translated as Sky Memoirs). Begun during World War priest was unabated. While hiding from the Gestapo in
24 Aix-en-Provence, he spent his time in the library immers- ing himself in the study of levitation, and in particular the life of St. Joseph. Cendrars ends the first part of the book with a pas- sionate proposal to make a film about the levitating saint: “If a producer ever feels like making this prodi- gious film, I—I, who have sworn never again to waste my time making films—will drop everything, give up my solitude, my tranquility, and my writing, to make this film about St. Joseph of Copertino, in memory of my son, Rémy, the pilot, and as a souvenir for his sometime girlfriend, the out-of-work baker’s girl, with whom I lost touch in wartime Paris.”2
St. Joseph: The Movie What might this cinema of levitation have looked like? And what genre would it be? Perhaps an action film? That would certainly fit the temperament of
Cendrars, but, frankly, there is not much in the life of the Anonymous, The Ascension of Christ, from the series Travels and seventeenth-century Italian priest to recommend such Wanderings Through the Holy Land, ca. 1481. an approach. It is true that Joseph’s miraculous flights did provoke suspicion, and that he was investigated by the Inquisition at Naples for several weeks. But in The show centered on the adventures of a group of the end, Joseph was released after the judges found nuns in the Convent San Tanco in Puerto Rico. Sister no demonic wrongdoing. A historical drama, then? Bertrille could be counted on to get the nuns out of any Large portions of Cendrars’s book are simply transcrip- jam by virtue of her unexplained ability to fly (perhaps it tions of the classic 1928 study by Olivier Leroy titled La had to do with the aerodynamics of her oversized hat). Lévitation: Contribution historique et critique à l’étude Of course the storylines were limited—there are only so du merveilleux. One could imagine a Duras-style film many situations one can devise that require the heroine essay with long shots of airplanes taking off and landing, to levitate—and so the show was cancelled after three perhaps an image of a tropical sun floating languidly seasons. in the sky, while the voice-over endlessly recites pas- As it happens, a film was made about the life of St. sages from Leroy. Personally, I like to think that it would Joseph. It is titled The Reluctant Saint and was released have been a slapstick-style comedy with lots of physical in 1962. The movie was directed by Edward Dmytryk, gags—the unfortunate priest always being lifted off at who is best known for The Caine Mutiny and for being just the wrong moment, flying away while sitting on one of the “Hollywood Ten.” It is very difficult to get the toilet, and so on. There are two details that speak in hold of a copy of this film. I have seen it and can report favor of this conception. First, Joseph was the only saint that it is rather conventional and dull. Yet with Ricardo ever to have succeeded in flying backwards: retrorsum Montalban playing the suspicious Father Raspi, and the volantem. Cendrars was especially delighted by this fact. great Maximilian Schell in the role of St. Joseph, it is still Second, Joseph was a total imbecile who (ironically) definitely worth a view. became the patron saint for candidates for the priest- hood and people taking university degrees. So, what we The artist levitator have in effect is a dim-witted backwards-flying priest, a I think it would not be terribly controversial to call Yves role that would have been perfect for Jerry Lewis in his Klein the artist-levitator of the twentieth century. Indeed, prime. with Klein, levitation becomes a veritable revolution- In order to envision the appropriate kitsch aesthet- ary program. In his 1959 manifesto Overcoming the ics for our hypothetical comedy, we need look no further Problematics of Art, the artist proclaims: “We shall than The Flying Nun, a highly eccentric television series thus become aerial men. We shall know the forces that that ran from 1967 to 1970. No history of levitation pull us upwards to the heavens, to space, to what is would be complete without mentioning this program. both nowhere and everywhere. The terrestrial force of
25 Gianni Motti, Levitation, 1995 (in collaboration with illusionist Mister RG).
James Bond levitates in orbit with Holly Goodhead in Lewis Gilbert’s Moonraker, 1979.
Bruce Nauman, Failing to Levitate in the Studio, 1966.
The miracle of love as levitation in Andrei Tarkovsky, The Mirror, 1975.
26 attraction thus mastered, we shall literally levitate into a his balcony—and broke a leg. There should be a name complete physical and spiritual freedom!”3 for this kind of vertiginous mimetic behavior. Perhaps This ideal, which is simultaneously that of the artist, after the Stendhal syndrome, we could call it the Klein the artwork, and life itself, is embodied in Klein’s iconic syndrome. photograph The Leap Into the Void; its other, lesser known title is Obsession of Levitation. The artist’s auda- Psychoanalyzing the cosmonaut cious plunge is that of a saint announcing the dawn of “The cosmonaut of the erotic future” is a phrase that a new era,4 an epoch of immateriality where buildings occurs once, in passing, in the 14 March 1962 session will be fashioned from air currents, color dissolved into of Lacan’s seminar Identification—the same year as the the void, and life and art merged in blissful union. In the release of the film The Reluctant Saint, almost one year caption beneath the photograph, it is written: “Today the after Yuri Gagarin’s space flight aboard Vostok-1 on 12 painter of space must, in fact, go into space to paint, but April 1961, and approximately sixteen months after the he must go there without trickery or deception, and not appearance of The Leap Into The Void. In other words, a in an airplane, nor by parachute, nor in a rocket: he must particularly propitious moment in the history of levitation. go there on his own strength, using an autonomous, indi- How does the analyst interpret Gagarin’s voyage? vidual force; in short, he must be capable of levitation.”5 Lacan paints a vivid portrait of the cosmonaut as living With his leap, Klein both anticipates the space flight of pulp implanted in a tin can, quivering flesh plugged into Yuri Gagarin and outdoes him. The artist is superior to a complex technological apparatus. If for Freud man had the cosmonaut in that his journey into space is made already become a “prosthetic God,”7 in the era of the without the aid of technological gadgetry. Of course, it is cosmonaut he would seem to be relegated to a button ironic that The Leap Into the Void is precisely a doctored pusher, utterly dependent on the machine that supports photograph, an early and masterful example of image his life functions and extends his limited sensorium. manipulation before the days of Photoshop. As much as Gagarin himself, together with Soviet psychologist Vlad- it may aspire to “True Life,” art, after all, remains a matter imir Lebedev, stated plainly: “The main function of the of illusion. The photograph was staged on October 19, operator in the ‘man-machine’ system, provided it func- 1960, with Klein’s judo pals holding a blue sheet to catch tions normally, is to take the reading of instruments.”8 the levitating artist. It appeared soon after in the publica- For Lacan, the precarious situation of the cos- tion Dimanche 27 novembre. Le Journal d’un seul jour monaut hooked into an impenetrable mechanism (Sunday November 27th: Newspaper of a Single Day). is not an isolated or extreme case, but reveals the universal condition of the human subject. We are all Failing to levitate, or the art of the fall erotic cosmonauts, split between our everyday, phe- Bruce Nauman’s photograph Failing to Levitate in the nomenological life experience and the computing Studio appears six years later as a kind of counter- apparatus—what Lacan calls the “symbolic order”—that weight to Klein’s ascensional sublimation (sublimation parasites our body and secretly controls our thoughts being one of Klein’s favorite words). From the trium- and desires. The lot of the modern subject, adrift in a phant leap of the artist-levitator, always suspected of universe of significations without substantial support or charlatanry and cheap showmanship, we are presented foundation, is perfectly encapsulated by the “the experi- with the fall of the clown. (Nauman once famously trans- ence of the cosmonaut: a body that can open and close formed himself into a spitting fountain.) Later, Nauman itself weighing nothing and bearing on nothing.”9 staged a performance in which two actors were instruct- ed to sink into the floor or, more mysteriously, let the Space sex floor rise above them. At one point during his speculations on the cosmonaut, If the classical ideal of art is a kind of elevation, Lacan raises the delicate matter of the effects of anti- lifting up or spiritualization, one way of characterizing gravitation on sexual desire: “What happens in the state contemporary art is as an “art of the fall.”6 Rather than of weightlessness to the sexual drive, which usually the miraculous flight of the saint, its iconic figure is the manifests itself as going against gravity?”10 In other well-timed tumble of the slapstick artist. In short: Buster words, what happens to male erection in outer space? Keaton in place of St. Joseph. I am thinking especially of How can the phallus properly “levitate” in a gravity- Bas Jan Ader’s Fall films, but there are many failed levita- free environment?11 There have been internet rumors tions in recent art history. After hearing about The Leap circulating for some time about sexual experiments con- Into the Void, Paul McCarthy reportedly jumped from ducted by NASA and the Russians, but it was popular
27 French science writer Pierre Kohler who first discussed impresses the crowds; it is not the sporting achieve- them in print in La Dernière mission: Mir l’aventure ment of having gone further than the others and humaine (The Last Mission: Mir, The Human Adventure), broken the world records for height and speed. What published in 2000. The chapter titled “Cosmic Love” (in counts more is the probable opening up of new forms English) begins with a precise scientific question: “Have of knowledge and new technological possibilities, the astronauts—or the cosmonauts—already made love Gagarin’s personal courage and virtues, the science in outer space? If so, how many of them … and who?” that made the feat possible, and everything which that Considering the secrecy of government organizations, in turn assumes in the way of abnegation and sacrifice. we may never know the answer. For the conspiracy- But what perhaps counts most of all is that he left the minded, Kohler reports that information regarding Place. For one hour, man existed beyond any hori- the best positions for sexual intercourse in a state of zon—everything around him was sky or, more exactly, weightlessness is to be found in the NASA dossier STS- everything was geometrical space. A man existed in 75-Experiment no. 8. At the end of the film Moonraker, the absolute of homogeneous space.14 James Bond floats in amorous embrace with Dr. Holly Goodhead, but this is a highly idealized picture. As In brief, Gagarin is the ultimate figure of exile: a man Kohler informs us, zero-gravity sex is no easy proposi- without roots in a cosmic desert without horizon or end. tion: best first to strap yourself to your partner.12 Mel Brooks once made a comedy sketch called “Jews in Space,” but Levinas goes even further: in the vast Jews in space expanses of space, we are all wandering Jews. Compared to the Christians, levitation is not really a Jewish strong point. One can, of course, find some scat- Remembering how to fly tered episodes of miraculous flight in the Old Testament, In the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Hand but the phenomenon of levitation, especially as ecstatic Surgery, there appeared an article by Dr. Samuel O. experience, is largely absent from the Jewish tradition.13 Poore examining the question of whether, through There is an important exception to this general neglect: reconstructive surgery, the human arm may be trans- Emmanuel Levinas’s reflections on Yuri Gagarin, contained formed into a functional wing. Can man’s ancient dream in his short 1961 essay “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us.” of unassisted flight finally be realized through cutting- What does space flight signify for the Jewish phi- edge surgical techniques? After thoroughly detailing the losopher? The first thing that strikes the eye is the way medical possibilities and problems, the answer finally is that Levinas puts Gagarin and Heidegger back to back. no.15 Yet as a certain literature would have it, the power Strange comparison: what do the Russian cosmonaut to fly, far from being a vain aspiration, is a most ordinary and the rustic thinker of Todtnauberg have to do with and general human capacity. Everyone can fly. Only, we one another? In fact, they represent absolute antipodes: have forgotten how to do so. Soviet Communism and German Fascism, technologi- The historian of levitation cannot fail to be cal wizardry and technophobic anti-modernism, vita impressed by the different ways in which levitation is activa and vita contemplativa. Most importantly, for posited as universal destiny. Who is the cosmonaut Levinas this impossible couple stands for the choice of the erotic future? Is he the soaring angel of ecstasy between “enlightened uprootedness” (enracinement that augurs the coming of paradise on earth? Is he the éclairé) and “earthly attachment” (attachement ter- machinic apparatus that parasitizes our body and con- restre). By voyaging into space, man leaves behind his trols our deepest desires? Or is he the geometric prophet mythic homeland: even further, he discovers that this of a new interstellar Diaspora? One of Eugene Ionesco’s hallowed place was never anything but superstition lesser-known plays, A Stroll in the Air, first performed on and idolatry. Levitation makes of the human being a December 15, 1962 (a little more than one month after creature of the universe. Against the philosopher of the the release of Dmytryk’s film on St. Joseph), suggests forest clearing, Levinas defends the astral desires of that salvation lies in reclaiming our innate levitative technological man. powers. When Monsieur Bérenger rises into the sky one To quote Levinas’s remarkable elegy to Gagarin Sunday afternoon, he explains his behavior to dubious in full: onlookers thus: “Man has a crying need to fly.... It’s as necessary and natural as breathing .... Everyone knows What is admirable about Gagarin’s feat is certainly how to fly. It’s an innate gift but everyone forgets.”16 The not his magnificent Luna Park performance which same sentiment was later echoed in Paul Auster’s Mr.
28 From “Jews in Space,” a segment in Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part I, 1981.
Alexei Leonov, Over the Planet, 2003. Painting of the first spacewalk by the cosmonaut who accomplished it. Courtesy Alex Panchenko.
Marc Chagall, Over Vitebsk, 1915–1920.
29 Cover for edition of two plays by Eugene Ionesco. Poster for Steven Spielberg’s E.T., 1982.
30 Vertigo. At the novel’s end, the narrator, once a vaude- involving as it does an apparent suspension of the laws of gravity.” The Inter- villian “Wonder Boy” renowned for his gravity-defying pretation of Dreams, in Standard Edition, vol. 5, p. 394. Freud’s colleague Victor stunts, offers the following simple instructions for Tausk adds that erection is first experienced as “an exceptional and mysterious feat,” something “independent of the ego, a part of the outer world not com- levitation: pletely mastered,” and even a kind of “machine subordinated to a foreign will.” See “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia” [1919], Sexu- ality, War, and Schizophrenia: Collected Psychoanalytic Papers, ed. Paul Roazen Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1991), pp. 213–214. for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in 12 In contrast, in the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, levitation always occurs in the air. We all have it in us—every man, woman, and place of the sexual act. By virtue of its unreal, miraculous character, levitation is apt to convey the miracle of love, which, according to Tarkovsky, is completely child—and with enough hard work and concentration, obscured by images of copulating bodies. Incidentally, it was another Soviet every human being is capable of duplicating the feats I filmmaker, Pavel Klushantsev, who first filmed zero-gravity space scenes. accomplished as Walt the Wonder Boy. You must learn 13 One should not forget, however, the mystical tradition of Judaism, which includes flying rabbis; see, for example, the floating Jews in Cynthia Ozick’s to stop yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything short story “Levitation,” or scenes of flight in the paintings of Marc Chagall. Like else follows from that. You must let yourself evapo- Judaism, official Islam also de-emphasizes levitation. One of the most interest- rate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel ing treatments of levitation in the Islamic tradition is found in the work of Avi- cenna, who, some six centuries prior to Descartes, proposed a radical thought your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. experiment to demonstrate the nature of self-consciousness. This experiment, That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body in which a man is imagined deprived of sense data, floating in a void, was later grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, dubbed the “Flying Man.” 14 Emmanuel Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us” [1961] in Difficult Freedom: you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your Essays on Judaism, transl. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997), p. 233. eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. 15 Samuel O. Poore, “The Morphological Basis of the Arm-to-Wing Transition,” And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground. Journal of Hand Surgery, vol. 33 (February 2008). I thank Darius Miksys for this reference. 17 Like so. 16 Eugene Ionesco, “A Stroll in the Air,” in Plays, vol. 6, transl. Donald Watson (London: John Calder, 1965), pp. 46–47. 17 Paul Auster, Mr. Vertigo (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 293. This essay is adapted from a talk given as part of the night program of the Berlin Biennial (“Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours”) in the Zeiss Planetarium, Berlin, on 4 May 2008.
1 Frank Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (London: Oxford, 1974), p. 102. I also draw here on Joel D. Black, “Levana: Levitation in Jean Paul and Thomas de Quincey,” Comparative Literature, vol. 32, no. 1 (Winter 1980), pp. 44–45. 2 Blaise Cendrars, Sky Memoirs, transl. Nina Rootes (New York: Paragon House, 1992), p. 148. The other great writer of the twentieth century fascinated with St. Joseph was Italian playwright and actor Carmelo Bene, who wrote a whole play about the flying priest. For Bene, the most interesting characteristic of St. Joseph was his imbecility—he quips that Joseph was so stupid he didn’t even know the law of gravity. 3 Yves Klein, “Overcoming the Problematics of Art,” in Overcoming the Prob- lematics of Art, transl. Klaus Ottmann (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2007), p. 64; translation modified. 4 The suspended pose of the self-defenestrating artist might best be described with the paradoxical expression of an “upwards fall.” As Cendrars writes: “The saint who falls into ecstasy falls into the abyss, floats On High, levitates, gyrates in a transport, breaks out, and is no longer in possession of himself. At the most, he lets out a cry or a last sigh. Then he lets himself go and plummets into the very depths of the Word of God. He soars…” op. cit., p. 135. 5 Klein, “Selections from ‘Dimanche,’” in Overcoming the Problematics of Art, op. cit., p. 106. 6 See Gérard Wajcman, “Desublimation: An Art of What Falls,” Lacanian Ink, no. 29 (Spring 2007). 7 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, transl. James Strachey (Lon- don: Hogarth, 1955) vol. 21, pp. 91–92. 8 Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Lebedev, Psychology and Space [1968], transl. Boris Belitsky (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), p. 259. 9 Jacques Lacan, “Merleau-Ponty: In Memoriam,” Merleau-Ponty and Psychol- ogy, ed. Keith Hoeller, transl. Wilfried Ver Eecke and Dirk de Schutter (New Jer- sey: Humanities Press, 1993), p. 74; translation modified. 10 Lacan, Seminar IX, L’Identification, session of 28 February 1962 (unpublished). 11 For the father of psychoanalysis, the paradigmatic levitating object is the phallus. “The remarkable phenomenon of erection,” Freud writes, “around which the human imagination has constantly played, cannot fail to be impressive,
31 To sit, to stand, to write the Nietzschean decree that all writing should “dance.” George Pendle But what do we then make of Roald Dahl, also six-foot- six, who everyday climbed into a sleeping bag before One of the more curious denouncements to appear settling into an old wing-backed chair, his feet resting in Friedrich Nietzsche’s supremely truculent Twilight immobile on a battered traveling case full of logs? Dahl’s of the Idols (1888) is a brief but furious attack on the claim that “all the best stuff comes at the desk,” is a writing habits of Gustave Flaubert. In a letter to Guy de simple modern variation on Flaubert’s static dictum. Maupassant, his protégé, Flaubert had made the seem- Occasionally the hint of a philosophical similar- ingly innocuous statement: “One cannot think and write ity can be drawn between those who share the same except when seated.” The author of Madame Bovary manner of writing. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—the (1856) had always been a sedentary sort and had previ- Supreme Court justice who coined the phrase “clear and ously informed Maupassant that “a civilized person present danger” to limit the First Amendment when its needs much less locomotion than the doctors claim.” practice endangered the state—wrote his concise legal However, to Nietzsche’s ear, finely attuned to the slight- opinions while standing at a lectern because “nothing est signs of cultural decadence, Flaubert’s admission conduces to brevity like a caving in of the knees.” Such was nothing less than an attack on the nature of creativ- a sentiment seemed to be echoed, albeit in a somewhat ity itself. “There I have caught you, nihilist!” he snapped distorted manner, by another member of the federal triumphantly. “The sedentary life (das sitzfleisch—liter- government (and fellow vertical writer), the former sec- ally “sitting meat”) is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. retary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. When Rumsfeld Only thoughts reached by walking have value.” was handed a list of approved torture techniques being Ever since Nietzsche’s declaration, there has been used at Guantanamo Bay, he infamously scribbled a some disagreement among writers, thinkers, doctors, query on it: “I stand for 8-10 hours. Why is standing [of and designers as to whether inspiration and creativity prisoners] limited to four hours?” come from being seated and quiescent, or from being If we look to prehistory for guidance on the ideal upright and vigorous. (Full disclosure: This article is creative posture, we gain only indistinct clues. In the being written standing up.) It was the early twentieth Book of Genesis, we hear that as God created the century labor journalist and suffragette, Mary Heaton heavens and the earth He “moved upon the face of the Vorse, who pithily described the art of writing as “the art waters.” While this suggests that He wasn’t following of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” the Flaubertian prescription of motionless creativity, Vorse was expressing a distinctly Flaubertian sentiment what He was doing seems more like sailing or boating— that was all the more radical when one considers how Noah’s ark is also described as “moving upon the face of few women wore pants at the time. Ernest Hemingway, the waters”—neither of which activity entirely meets the by contrast, proved to be a strict Nietzschean, declar- orthodox Nietzschean standard. ing that “writing and travel broaden your ass if not your History is not much more helpful. Aristotle’s fol- mind and I like to write standing up,” which he did by lowers were known as Peripatetics, although no one is perching his typewriter on a chest-high shelf, while his entirely sure whether this stems from Aristotle’s habit of desk became obscured by books. walking about while he talked (his followers taking their Yet trying to find out whether authors who share name from the word peripatêtikos, meaning “given to similar writing positions also share similar writing styles walking about”) or because he held lessons beneath the is by no means easy. Such disparate authors as Virginia colonnades (or peripatoi) of the Lyceum. Woolf, Lewis Carroll, and Fernando Pessoa all wrote Etymological study initially seems to favor the standing up, while Mark Twain, Marcel Proust, and Nietzschean attitude of being vital, upright, and mobile Truman Capote took the Flaubertian creed to its ultimate in the moment of one’s creation. The ancient Greek extent by writing while lying down. Indeed, Capote went word theoria—from which the word theory stems— so far as to declare himself “a completely horizontal included within it the idea of a journey, in particular a writer.” pilgrimage undertaken to the dwelling of a god or god- We can conjecture that it was physical consider- dess. Yet modern words seem to lean towards a supine ations that caused the six-foot-six-inch Thomas Wolfe Flaubertianism; after all, surely the modern English to write his opulent, autobiographical novels using the homophones stationary—meaning motionless—and top of the refrigerator as his desk, the shifting of his stationery—meaning writing paper—sound the same for weight from foot to foot being a neat approximation of a reason.
32 Tuck’s Postcard showing Mark Twain at work, ca. 1900. Courtesy Barrett Collection, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.
33 Roald Dahl in his writing hut, ca. 1990. Copyright Jan Baldwin. Courtesy the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre.
In 1967, Jacques Derrida attempted to quash the to the sky (see Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment). whole argument in Writing and Difference, insisting The “monolithic insanity” of it was anathema to creation. that Nietzsche was being disingenuous in his attack “It saps vitality,” Propst asserted, “blocks talent, frus- on sitting and writing. “Nietzsche was certain that the trates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled writer would never be upright,” Derrida insisted. Even intentions and failed effort.” Propst declared that he Zarathustra eventually had to stop “tracing figures of fire wanted offices to be less soulless and allow workers to in the heavens” and hunch down over a desk since “writ- circulate more freely. “It’s truly amazing the number of ing is first and always something over which one bends.” decisive events and critical dialogues that occur when The vast majority of the world would agree with people are out of their seated, stuffy contexts.” Derrida. Since its heyday in the eighteenth and nine- Although he may not have known it, Propst teenth centuries, the standing desk has become almost seemed to be directly channeling the posture theories obsolete, and today in offices and libraries in every conti- of Nietzsche who, in The Gay Science (1882), had linked nent, workers are bound to their desks like Prometheus the deleterious effect of a bad workspace (and bad to his rock. But the contemporary office environment digestion) to the quality of a person’s work: “How quickly owes less to the persuasiveness of Flaubert and Derrida we guess how someone has come by his ideas; whether than to a designer named Bob Propst. it was while sitting in front of his inkwell, with a pinched In 1968, Propst, a former professor of fine arts who belly, his head bowed low over the paper—in which case had become head of research at the Herman Miller com- we are quickly finished with his book, too! Cramped pany, surveyed the common office space and declared intestines betray themselves—you can bet on that—no it a wasteland. Row after row of orderly desks and chairs less than closet air, closet ceilings, closet narrowness.” stretched to the horizon, and filing cabinets reached up Propst’s answer to the “closet narrowness” of
34 the mid-twentieth-century office was what he called the Action Office System. A truly Nietzschean accom- plishment, the Action Office System used moveable partitions to create free-wheeling semi-enclosed spaces that offered a social kind of privacy. Varying desk levels allowed employees to work standing up, thus encouraging blood flow, and management would be readily approachable, not hidden away in an office. It was intended as “a low-key, unself-conscious prod- uct” that changed the very position in which people worked. But as with so many other Nietzschean ideals, the Action Office System was seized upon by unscrupulous individuals and twisted out of shape. Companies soon realized that the moveable partitions of the Action Office System could be used to cram more and more work- ers into smaller and smaller spaces. The varying desk levels were removed as being extraneous, the holistic experience was betrayed, and soon Action Office parti- tions were lined up in identical rows, as desks had been before them (see Mike Judge’s Office Space, from 1999). Nihilism had returned. The Action Office system had become the cubicle. Ernest Hemingway prefered to write standing up. The stunning corruption of Propst’s Nietzschean ideals made it seem as if the Flaubertian school of pos- ture had triumphed for good. But in 2005, Dr. James Levine, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic in Minne- sota, created what was perhaps the fullest embodiment of the Nietzschean posture ideal to date. Levine is an expert in N.E.A.T., or non-exercise activ- ity thermogenesis. Using custom-made data-logging undergarments with motion-sensing technology, Levine measured how many calories we burn through in our simple day-to-day activities. His remarkable discovery was that slender people are on their feet an average of 152 more minutes a day than overweight people. His ingenious solution was to invent a treadmill desk—a computer terminal with a treadmill taking the place of a chair. Noticing that the sedentary Flaubertian style of According to Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf’s nephew and biog- working barely used any calories at all, Levine showed rapher, Woolf “had a desk standing about three feet six inches that simply walking at one mile per hour while writing high with a sloping top; it was so high that she had to stand to her work.” This work habit continued until about 1912. Later and making telephone calls could burn approximately in her life, Woolf often wrote in a low armchair with a plywood 125 calories per hour. Levine now sells such “walksta- board across her knees. tions” for $4,000 each. Admittedly Levine’s walkstations are primarily aimed at those who wish to lose weight, rather than those who wish to create undying philosophical works of eternal value. Still, it is the most significant vertical riposte to the fixed Flaubertian immobile in many years.
35 Fragrance circle used by Drom, a global scent company founded in Germany in 1911.
Notes on Scent dismissed as subjective. Smell has been held in low Adam Jasper & Nadia Wagner esteem since the height of the Enlightenment. When Condillac, in his Treatise on the Sensations (1754), 1. It is commonly estimated that we can smell roughly imagined a statue that would be granted all the capaci- 10,000 distinct scents, but no one has made a definitive ties of thinking and feeling one by one, smell was the claim regarding the number of smells an individual can first capability he bestowed upon it, because he held differentiate. Unlike hearing and sight, whose mechan- smell to be the most primitive of senses and the one that ics and molecular biology have been exhaustively contributes least to the mind. Condillac maintained that, mapped in the course of the twentieth century, there is should his statue smell a rose, it would not thereby gain little agreement on how smell works. any concept of the rose as an entity distinct from itself. When it smells a rose, it simply exists within the sensa- 2. Our sense of smell is beyond doubt a tool of great tion of the scent of a rose. Smell, this position implies, precision. Strange, then, that in the history of Western teaches us nothing about the outside world, but pro- philosophy it should be so little discussed, and so often duces pleasant or unpleasant sensations that go on to
36 determine what we desire, rather than what we know. argues that experiences of smell or taste are things that we are interested in, personally, and compromised by in 2.1 This demotion of smell has continued more or both senses of the word. This prevents us from the sort less uninterrupted, as demonstrated by the manner in of disinterested contemplation that aesthetic experi- which Septimus Piesse attempted to defend the util- ence requires. Kant’s dogmatic exclusion of taste and ity of perfumes in his 1857 book The Art of Perfumery smell from the aesthetic has either been reproduced and Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants: “Of the without question or thrown out of court (see Frank five senses, that of smelling is the least valued, and, as Sibley’s essay “Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics”), but no a consequence, is the least tutored; but we must not one seems to have considered that maybe he was half- conclude from this, our own act, that it is of insignificant right. Smell is deeply connected with the unconscious, importance to our welfare and happiness. By neglect- divorced from representation, and consequently in ing to tutor the olfactory nerve, we are constantly led to some respects more primal than the other senses. It indi- breathe impure air, and thus poison the body by neglect- cates a royal road to our animal and emotional being, ing the warning given at the gate of the lungs. Persons offering a way of thinking, or at least of drawing conclu- who use perfumes are more sensitive to the presence of sions, that is not conceptual but intuitive. a vitiated atmosphere than those who consider the fac- ulty of smelling as an almost useless gift.” 3.1 Smells have two qualities that make them ill-suited to the Enlightenment project of establishing a firm foun-
A. Chlorine (Cl2 at room temperature and pressure) is dation for our knowledge of the world. First, they do not a pale green gas that was described by the soldiers persist. Most smells are fleeting—the smell of violets that first encountered it in Ypres in 1915 as having (methyl ionone) is famous among perfumers for persist- a distinctive smell part-way between pepper and ing for only about half the duration of an inhalation before pineapples. The characteristic acrid odor we associ- it becomes imperceptible. Other scents are more persis- ate with chlorine pools is not that of chlorine itself tent, but even the most penetrating perfume becomes but of chloramine (NH2Cl), the product of a reaction undetectable to the wearer after a short period of time. between chlorine and an organic molecule. When a pool smells intensely of chloramine, it’s an indicator 3.2 Second, as Kant writes in Reflexionen zur that the water is dirty, not clean, and the persistent Anthropologie, “all the senses have their own descrip- smell that we carry for hours after a swim is the smell tive vocabularies, e.g. for sight, there is red, green, and of free chlorine molecules reacting with our hair and yellow, and for taste there is sweet and sour, etc. But the skin. We become conscious of chlorine, in its peculiar sense of smell can have no descriptive vocabulary of its chlorineness, at a concentration of three parts per own. Rather, we borrow our adjectives from the other million. At five parts per million it produces a choking senses, so that it smells sour, or has a smell like roses or sensation. At thirty it induces coughing and vomiting. cloves or musk. They are all, however, terms drawn from At sixty it begins to corrode the lungs. other senses. Consequently, we cannot describe our sense of smell” (our translation). 3. Kant makes almost no reference to smell in the Critique of Judgment nor elsewhere in his writing on 3.2.1 Kant’s observation does not seem to be a limita- aesthetics. He does, however, discuss smell at length tion of his Baltic Sea dialect. There are also no words in his Reflexionen zur Anthropologie. There, he makes in the English language that are exclusively devoted to a curious distinction between the senses by which describing a smell. All the other senses have a specific we as rational beings come to know things, and the vocabulary that is part of everyday speech and in no senses that work on a more intuitive basis. Looking at way technical (bright, loud, hard, soft, smooth, bitter, things, hearing them, and even touching them require etc). Smell proceeds entirely via euphemism. Typical Wahrnehmung, or perception. But smelling things, words for describing citrus scents include fruity, refresh- like eating them, involves a sort of carnal knowledge, ing, sweet, sharp. “Fruity” is derived from a noun. Einnehmung, or ingestion. By smelling things, we “Refreshing” is stolen from an affect. “Sweet” belongs to absorb them directly into our bodies, and consequently taste. “Sharp” to touch. The word citrus, in toto, is use- they provide what Kant otherwise only attributes to God: less for anyone who has not smelt citrus already, and unmediated knowledge of the thing in itself. To prevent none of the descriptive words belong to the sense of this from becoming a crisis for his epistemology, Kant smell except in a metaphorical sense.
37 B. A curious piece of trivia claims that all medical unlike the sense of sight, in which knowing and naming anesthetics are olfactants, that is, they have a pecu- are intimately interconnected activities. In a peculiar liar and identifiable smell. From chloroform on, syn- way, smelling short-circuits conscious thoughts. It thetic molecules used to knock you out (things you bonds to memory and emotion before it subjects itself couldn’t possibly have evolved to be able to experi- to concepts, and emerges as already a part of the bodily ence) have distinct odors. unconscious.
4. Freud said that “wishes are immortal.” In this respect, 5.2 Although there has been substantial research on the smells and wishes are the same. The passage of time, olfactory bulb, olfaction is dwarfed by the other senses which rots and corrodes the content of visual memory, in the amount of research committed to it, and ignored has no measurable impact on the olfactory memory in undergraduate studies (a 2008 textbook on cogni- (Trygg Engen, “Remembering Odors and Their Names,” tive neuroscience offers a chapter on sight, another on American Scientist, no. 75, 1987). On the condition that touch, but exactly two sentences on smell). This might a smell is linked to an emotionally significant episode, have something to do with the following: no one agrees the ability of specific smells to trigger episodic memo- on how smell works. Although the problems posed by ries is immortal (the Proust Effect). Strangely, we are hearing and sight on the cellular level were to a large terrible at recalling the impression of smells—nearly as degree cracked by the 1950s and 1960s, there is still no bad as we are at remembering physical pain. It’s easy to consensus on how a molecule of olfactant entering the recall the shape and color of a lemon, but almost impos- nose brings a single neuron to fire. sible to conjure up its absent scent. 5.3 In 1996, Luca Turin—a research biologist and well- C. Is the sense of smell really subjective? Zookeepers known perfume reviewer—resurrected an exotic theory have long noted that the smell of tiger’s urine resem- of the sense of smell that had first been mooted and bles fragrant basmati rice. It was only in the course dismissed in the 1950s. It suggests that the smell of a of the 1980s that Indian biologists realized that the compound is not dependent on the shape of the mol- same molecule is active in both—2 acetyl-1-pyrroline. ecule (although this is the standard hypothesis, as “lock (R. L. Brahmachary, M. P. Sarkar, & J. Dutta, “The Aro- and key” ligand-binding is the mechanism by which ma of Rice ... and Tiger,” Nature, vol. 344, no. 6261, p. most chemical signaling within the brain takes place, 26.) Furthermore, it’s been noted that we can detect as well as the way in which the immune system func- certain pyrazines, such as 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyr- tions). Rather, Turin solves the combinatorial problem of azine—which is found in peas and paprika—at a con- smell by arguing that embedded in the cell membrane centration of 1 part in 500,000 million, that is, virtu- is a kind of electron-tunneling spectrograph, and so the ally molecule by molecule. smell of a molecule is dependent upon its chief vibra- tional resonance. 5. The olfactory bulb in humans is relatively small com- pared to, say, a white-eared opossum, a West European D. The port wine magnolia has small purple and white hedgehog, a polar bear, or a domestic dog, especially inflorescences that smell distinctly like nail polish when taken in proportion to the size of the brain. But the remover (acetone) and wine jujubes. The scent is number of human genes that encode scent has turned strong, sweet, and slightly nauseating. Other magno- out to be unexpectedly large. According to Linda B. Buck lias smell like citrus. Not exactly like citrus, but some- and Richard Axel’s research, about 1,000 genes code for what like citrus. Is acetone a pollutant that is actually proteins that are only expressed in the olfactory epitheli- found in cheap port wine? um. This means that roughly three per cent of the human genome is devoted to the olfactory system. That’s an 6. The relationship between smell, long-term memory, enormous share. and emotion is not a trivial one, and it’s not meaning- less to say that they’re all one thing. Everyone knows 5.1 The olfactory bulb feeds directly into the limbic that smell evokes strong memories, but the relationship system, the seat of both long-term memory and the works both ways. The olfactory bulb is the only part of emotions. The results of smelling are processed here, the brain that continues to grow throughout our lives, and loaded with associations, before they even reach and constantly generates new neurons (Buck & Axel the upper cortex, where language is composed. This is won a Nobel prize for figuring this out). The ability to
38 recognize common smells is now used as a diagnostic responsible for serious explosions in fragrance labora- tool in identifying neuro-degenerative diseases. People tories, and the death of more than a few fragrancers. without memory—Alzheimer’s patients—have massively reduced sensitivity to smell. 6.1 It is as if, when chemistry evolved out of alchemy to become an Enlightenment science, smell was left E. Real musk is obtained from the dried gland of a wild behind. Appropriately, the perfumer behaves more as male deer, and fresh from the wild it has a repulsive a member of a medieval guild than as part of a contem- smell. Harvesting musk involves hanging out in for- porary scientific discipline. Alchemists guarded their ests during mating season with a high-powered rifle, mysteries, whereas chemistry is based on peer-review shooting a medium-large mammal, cutting out a small and the broadest possible dissemination of results. gland, and then taking and preparing that gland for a Perfumers are likewise notoriously secretive about their luxury product. Hunters can’t tell whether the deer in ingredients, even though the field involves the mass their sights is a buck or a doe, and consequently half production of tons of refined chemical products. They of the animals they shoot are the wrong sex. That’s are even loath to talk about how they arrange their fra- one reason for synthetic musks. Another is that real grance libraries (this seemingly innocent question was musk is a mélange of chemicals that will cause some in fact the impetus for this text). There is a legal reason wearers to break out in hives. The first synthetic vari- for this: it’s not possible to patent a scent. You can patent ant—Musk Xylol— was produced in 1888, and as the the individual synthetic molecules that might be used industry bible by Steffen Arctander notes, it is a close in a scent, but you can’t patent what something smells relative of trinitrotoluene, or TNT. Attempts to synthe- like in the same way that you can patent the way in size Musk Xylol in commercial quantities have been which a product looks and feels. Knock-off perfumes are
floral floral oriental oriental notes notes soft soft floral oriental
floral oriental
aromatic fougere woody water oriental
mossy green woods
fresh dry woody citrus notes woods notes
Michael Edwards’s fragrance wheel, 1983.
39 prosecuted for copying the packaging of the original, not F Civet for smelling identical. As a result, perfumers are particu- larly clandestine about what’s in their bottles. The other e verbena reason for their secretiveness is that, even if they want to D Citronella C Rose talk about what they are doing, they seem to find it pretty C Pineapple B Cinnamon difficult. B Peppermint A Tolu A Lavender G Sweet Pea 6.2 Systems of smell resemble medieval bestiaries that G Magnolia F Musk have swollen in population without gaining in order. F ambergris e orris
Aristotle classified smells into five categories. Linnaeus’s E Cedrat D Heliotrope
system contained seven categories, but by the early D Bergamot C Geranium twentieth century Zwaardemaker’s had swollen to nine. C Jasmine B Stocks and Pinks Gerbelaud’s system from the 1950s encompassed forty- B Mint A Peru Balsam five categories, and a decade later Arctander’s included eighty-eight separate groups. Even more striking than A Tonquin bean G Pergaloria the increasing complexity of the proposed systems is G Syringa F Castor the parallel proliferation in the taxonomies themselves. F Jonquil E Calamus A comprehensive taxonomy of taxonomies is hardly E Portugal D Clematis possible, but we can enumerate a few. D Almond C Santal C Camphor B Clove
6.3 Crocker and Henderson’s 1927 model derives many B Southernwood A Storax
of its terms from Zwaardemaker’s model of 1895, which A New-mown Hay G Frangipani itself draws from Carl Linnaeus’s original taxonomy of G Orange Flower F Benzoin 1756. According to Crocker and Henderson’s ingenious F tuberose e wallflower scheme, each odor can be considered in terms of the e acacia D Vanilla extent to which it is fragrant, acid, burnt, or caprylic, each on a scale of 1 to 8. Thus, vanillin has an odor of D Violet C Patchouli 7122. Unfortunately, there is often disagreement as to the precise score to give a scent on each of its character- istics, although Crocker and Henderson do attempt to provide a structured language for comparing scents. A music-inspired taxonomy of scent offered by English chemist and perfumer George William Septimus Piesse in his seminal book The Art of Perfumery (1857). 6.4 Some industrial scent manufacturers arrange smells into a sort of “color wheel” in order to describe them. But this is a weak analogy, as smells, unlike colors, do not naturally form a continuous spectrum. The Drom spec- tells you it’s strawberry, you’ll believe them, and if they tral wheel, for instance, implausibly places citrus directly ask you to sniff onion and tell you it’s garlic, you’ll notice next to musk, but spatially opposite to “fruity” scents. nothing amiss. Different wheels have been proposed, but their insuf- ficiency is highlighted by their proliferation. 6.6 There have been more inventive attempts to taxono- mize odor. In the nineteenth century, Septimus Piesse 6.5 Even fragrance wheels specific to the perfume arranged smell on a musical scale to show how har- industry (such as Michael Edwards’s 1983 version) are monious perfumes could be composed, a better (more not designed as an objective tool for the fragrancers, but multi-dimensional) approach than a linear spectrum. as a marketing guide for clients. To make matters worse, He was the first to apply the term note to a distinctive it seems that we are particularly susceptible to being odor, as well as introducing the terms chord, harmony, suckered when we are told what we “ought” to be smell- and progression, all metaphors that are still current in ing. As Trygg Engen notes: “The associative strength of the perfume industry. Piesse proposed that “sounds an odor-name pair is weak and asymmetric and is easily appear to influence the olfactory nerves in certain defi- influenced by the verbal factor” (p. 502). In other words, nite degrees,” and that “there are octaves in odors like if someone offers you a bad synthetic frambinone, and octaves in music.” Piesse took his model quite literally.
40 According to his theory, a harmonious fragrance can be 'MPXFSZ 'SVJUZ composed by bringing together those odor notes that correspond to harmonious musical chords. Conversely, discord, a cacophony of smells, is the result of combin- 1VUSJE ing olfactory notes that would produce discordant sounds if played musically together. In his invention, Piesse resembles Des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature, the great novel of dandyism, who com- poses for himself a “taste symphony” by assigning a 4QJDZ 3FTJOPVT different note to each liquor. Via this artifice, Huysmans’s character could play himself his favorite refrains from classical music by sequentially tasting various spirits. #VSOU
6.7 Perhaps one of the most interesting models is Hans Henning’s Odor Prism, 1915-1916. the Henning Odor Prism, or Henning Olfactory Prism (1915–1916), a triangular prism that resolves the prob- lem of how to visually depict the complex variability of smells by presenting them as points on the surface of a themselves from each other in their odor profile during three-dimensional model. The prism has six apexes and decomposition. Also, it is noteworthy that the flowery/ five faces, and allows for any smell to be described in fruity/putrid (less stable) and the spicy/burnt/resinous terms of the six categories: flowery/fruity/putrid/spicy/ (less volatile) take opposite ends of the Henning Prism. burnt/resinous. This would not be a substantial addition to extant theories, except that Henning goes on to argue 6.7.2 Intriguingly, the Henning Prism also suggests the that all smells can be described as being on the surface possibility of charting “smell trajectories,” that is, the of the prism, but not within it. Therefore, a smell cannot characteristic changes in smell as a perfume’s volatile be spicy, burnt and resinous as well as being putrid, and top note lifts to reveal its middle and base note, as a fruit likewise, a fruity, flowery, putrid and spicy odor cannot ripens, or as an organic product undergoes metabolic exist. In making assertions of this kind, the Henning decomposition. By what habitual route does an unripe prism is at least putatively falsifiable, unlike most other peach slowly lose its spicy, flowery characteristics to smell models. This is no small virtue. sweeten into an odor more fruity and perhaps more res- inous? And via what path does this scent become putrid 6.7.1 The Henning Prism becomes more interesting as the peach begins to rot? Is it curved, or straight? when one notes the sub-groupings that the on-the- surface rule implies. Cover two of the terms at a time, 6.7.3 Henning attempted to relate different chemical and look again at the set of characteristics flowery/ groups to the various sections of his prism, noting, for putrid/spicy/burnt versus the set fruity/putrid/burnt/ instance, that the category of the putrid is marked by resinous. It could be argued that both groups have volatile sulphides. Unfortunately, while some molecules enough terms to adequately describe any smell, and might have predictable characteristics, like a bad gram- there is a risk of that, but that isn’t what Henning intend- matical model, there are nearly as many exceptions to ed. What is it about these two groups that make them each category as well-behaved instances that fit the rules. mutually exclusive? Certainly the flowery/fruity/spicy/ resinous—the general realm of attractive smells—can F. Ambergris is another highly valued ingredient in coexist, but not together with the putrid and burnt. The perfumes. It is made of a sort of fatty hairball coughed putrid and the burnt both mark out forms of decomposi- up by a sperm whale that then floats upon the surface tion. The putrid indicates metabolic decay carried out of the ocean. Over time it darkens to black, and its by simple life forms, whereas the burnt is the rather scent mellows until it becomes what is described as more chaotic decay caused by heat (both processes are a “soft, suave, dry-mossy, musty and seaweed-like marked by increasing variety but reducing complexity in fragrance that is extremely difficult to duplicate with the organic molecules present). Whereas flowery and complete fidelity.” The trade in ambergris is now fruity scents may, in their freshness, have much in com- banned, and a wholly synthetic version of the scent, mon, according to the Henning prism they differentiate Ambroxan, is sold in its place.
41 6.8 In 1951, Dr. Paul Jellinek proposed a new scheme how many dimensions it would have to incorporate in for the classification of scents. Although a professional order that all its observable contradictions disappear. perfumer, his system (which has been restated in The Much like experimental versions of Mendeleev’s original Psychological Basis of Perfumery, 4th Edition, 1997) periodic table, there are interesting possibilities for new has the virtue of attempting a degree of generality. The spatial models for representing scents. Perhaps future schema, however, is tendentious in the worst sense. models of smell will have to address similar orders of As Jellinek held that the sense of smell is enthralled by complexity, and the solution just hasn’t been drawn up sexuality, he arranges all odors on a scale based on their yet. Alternatively, there may simply be no way to repre- purported psychological effect. One axis connects the sent visually the variability presented by scents. erogenic to the anti-erogenic, another axis runs from the narcotic to the stimulating. Following Jellinek, cheesy 9. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud tells an smells are both highly erogenic and slightly stimulating, originary myth, in which Man goes from walking on all whereas fruity smells are anti-erogenic and somewhat fours to standing erect. As he does so, the genitals are narcotic. The problem, of course, is that as soon as one exposed, the sense of sight is privileged, and the sense questions the psychological model behind the clas- of smell is denigrated. Whether or not the story refers to sification, the schema collapses. And in spite of all the an actual historical event doesn’t matter, Freud’s point enthusiasm about pheromones, they remain more or is that somewhere in our development, we learn shame less mysterious. It’s also not advisable to buy synthetic for what has become the spectacle of shit and lose the pheromones from dispensing machines in toilets, as capacity to smell it with any finesse. However, there’s androstenones, the closest pheromones to humans that a simpler physical explanation for why walking on two have been extensively synthesized, are from the family legs might lead to a demotion for the sense of smell: porcine. The only mammals that you are likely to arouse olfactants are heavier than air, and consequently they irresistibly are pigs. fall to the ground. If you want to make a map of how your room smells, you need to get down on your hands 7. Luca Turin’s thesis of the vibrational basis of smell and knees. has come up against entrenched opposition from the scientific establishment. Perhaps, here again, it is the 10. And finally, how do professional perfumers arrange enchantment of the diagram that is responsible, for their smells? Alphabetically, of course. should his argument prove to be correct, the wire-frame and space-filling molecular models that mesmerize fragrance designers worldwide would have precious little relevance in predicting how a chemical will actu- ally smell. The thousands of line drawings of organic molecules that fill fragrance textbooks will turn out to be as much a fetish as Piesse’s musical scale, because we have been studying the wrong characteristics.
G. Oak moss has a particularly wonderful smell— neither vegetable nor animal, but richly aromatic. The moss grows only on oak trees, and only in the most established and ancient woods. For a very long time, the majority of it was harvested in Yugoslavia. However, it soaks up radioactive waste more effec- tively than just about any other life form, and ever since the Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine, it has been exceedingly rare and expensive.
8. In conclusion, smell is not subjective; rather, it is sim- ply very hard to communicate objectively, that is, to talk about and achieve any sort of consensus. One possibility would be to unwind the “color wheel” model, and ask Perfumer Paul Jellinek’s classificatory system, 1951.
42 American plaice (Hippoglossoides platessoides).
A FISH called plaice to say, the pun did not work in Spanish and so we put aside our piscine project. The following portfolio of texts and images was origi- And yet we had become enamored of these fish nally assembled in response to a request that Cabinet whose strange looks are matched by truly strange lives. received to contribute to a Spanish catalogue examining In an 1876 paper on flounder, for example, the natural- the notion of “place.” Our initial idea had been to inves- ist Alexander Agassiz describes how the symmetrical tigate how much a notion of place needs to be localized hatchling, swimming along with eyes on both sides of its in order to be meaningful. Can we, for example, in any head, eventually must lie down on the ocean floor. The useful sense speak of an American or European notion decision it makes about which side to lie down on is the of place? most crucial moment in the fish’s life. If it settles on the As we conducted our research, a simple typing correct side, its lower eye, now looking directly into the error while Googling made us realize that while an ocean sand, can migrate to the upper part of its head. “American place” may not exist, the American plaice Falling on the wrong side results in death. Right-eye (Hippoglossoides platessoides) certainly does, as does flounders, for example, must lie on their left side. Per- the European plaice (Pleuronectes platessa). Soon our haps the quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger should project derailed as we became increasingly infatuated have turned to the flounder for his famous thought by these asymmetrical right-eye flounders, and we experiment instead of a cat. decided to investigate some of the places in which one —Eds. can find these fish—from the ocean to the restaurant— as a way of fulfilling our Spanish commission. Needless
43 Nesta Mayo, Flounder no. 2, 2007.
44
Dan Woerner, Plaice, 2006.
47 Plaice Names opposed to the limande.”) In turn, the limande, a “pois- Allen S. Weiss son de mer fort plat” (“a very flat sea fish”—the adjective very is here rather striking), is designated as being more How do we get from a plaice to a place? This is an or less similar to the carrelet, and, unusual in the Littré, ancient tale, so we would do well to begin with etymol- the same quotation from the Ménagier is offered. But ogy. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary two additional meanings of carrelet are of interest: a teaches that plaice has numerous derivations: plaice large and flat ruler (carpenter’s or mason’s straight-edge) or plais in Middle English, plaïs or plaïz in Old French, and a flat piece of wood used for boat repairs (grav- platensis in Late Latin, platys in Greek, all somehow ing piece). Furthermore, the fact that the term faire la alluding to flatness, broadness, place, and specifically limande means “a slap in the face” is not without interest. indicating the European flounder (Pleuronectes plates- At this point we probably have enough information sa), also known as the summer flounder, and the fluke in to answer our initial question. The plaice is a square England. flatfish; the place, plaza, piazza is the town square, eter- Further research reveals that flatfish refers to nally traversed by sandal-shod soles. Such a flat, square, the order Heterosomata, which includes the halibuts, grid-like space is the utopia of the surveyor, cartogra- flounders, turbots, and soles. Reference to sole, in turn, pher, geometer, urbanist, and occasionally (Cartesian) reinforces our initial etymology, as the name of these philosopher. The place is an ideal plaice, perfect in its flatfish of the family Soleidae, including the famed Euro- quadrature, its flatness, its levelness, its smoothness. pean foodfish Solea solea, is derived from the Latin, Inversely, the plaice is a camouflaged, dissimulated Middle French, and Middle English solea or sandal. place, perpetually hiding its true physical qualities. But Harrap’s New Standard Dictionary translates plaice by why is it, we may ask, that in the Scandinavian countries two different names: plie and carrelet. We learn, thanks plaice is so highly valued as a food-fish, while in France to Le Petit Robert, that plie (whose first instance in Old it is rarely seen on menus or in recipes? Here we must French occurs in 1530 as plaïs, derived from twelfth- delve into the culinary unconscious. As a camouflaged century Low Latin) is not only a false homonym for pli fish, plaice is fundamentally indistinguishable from its (fold), but in fact its antonym, as this fish is actually flat— place. This fact is accentuated in the French definitions as Old English, Middle English, and Old High German where, as we will remember from the Ménagier cita- imply—and not at all folded. We are given a further clue, tion, plie and limande are differentiated by touch, not as the dictionary refers plie to carrelet. sight. For the Gallic chef, the plie and the limande are Here the plot thickens, since carrelet is derived invisible, and as such are rarely served. To the contrary, as early as 1360 from quarlet, carrel, carreau, and is in the Scandinavian countries, the plaice is named thus not only a flatfish, but a squarefish, a fish of “quad- according to its red spots—Rödspätta (Swedish), Rød- rangular form.” But by 1694, we are confronted with a spette (Norwegian), Rødspætte (Danish)—and it is as if great irony, or perhaps sarcasm, as the carrelet at that these aquatic targets call out to be caught and cooked. moment also comes to designate a square fishing net, Unlike the plaice, which doubles as its place, the redspot such that the carrelet may be used to catch the car- distinguishes itself from its place. We might conclude relet. A further set of definitions expresses the richness by claiming that genius loci in fact means, “the sole and rectitude of the term carrelet, which also signifies of the plaice.” Yet in that case, we would also need to a square ruler, whence its relation to the noun car- consider the pollack or coalfish, known in French as the relage (floor tile) and the verb carreler (to tile or to draw lieu—French for “place.” But that would be a whole other squares or to cobble shoes), all derived from the noun story. and adjective carré, square. We are moving towards a greater coherence, so we might recapitulate using the classic dictionary Littré: the plie is a flatfish related to the limande and also known as carrelet; there also exists a related species, the plie rude, commonly known as the flétan, but obviously a different species. Of particular interest is the illustrative citation culled from the Ménagier, a fourteenth-century cookbook: “Plais sont doulces à applanier à la main, et lymandes au contraire.” (“Plaice is soft to the touch, as
48 Plaice being served in Jacques Tati’s Playtime, 1967.
49 Sketch for a poster for An American Plaice. Image Alicia Puglionesi.
50 Screenplay Pitch for An American Gutsy Housewife looks good sweating in The Plaice Gobbler’s hold, and her choir training helps her find Tim Davis acceptance among the diverse and muscular radicals. As they polish brightwork under a moody dawn, she We see Gutsy Housewife (Holly Hunter) noticing some- sings their altered sea shanty: thing new. The chilled counter is featuring American plaice, a fish she’s never heard of, whose fillets look And it’s roll, roll, Gobblers roll flaky and light, and might just fail to offend Ty and Babe, Them Japanese driftnetters got us in tow her fraternal twins. Ty is fat and jovial; Babe, lean and severe, but neither of them will sniff at fish. It is the ‘80s The Haydukers are gaudily eclectic and habitually in America and the Library of Congress has just changed underfunded. Before leaving port, Pere Jules (Bruce its subject heading for “Macaroni” to “Pasta.” Yuppie Willis), the crusty first mate, teaches Ty and Babe a bit foods are appearing on shelves; people wrap their of fundraising. They approach seaside tourists who are mouths around “mahi-mahi,” “polenta,” and “wasabi,” alternating photographing one another and offer to take like they were exotic strains of flu. Gutsy Housewife their picture together. The twins wave them back, wave is recently divorced and keen to feed her kids deeper them back, into the scene, and then disappear down the meanings. The Grocer (Chris Cooper) is cute, divorced- port’s tiny alleys to fence their booty. On the high seas, looking, a little ragged around the edges, but solid, this family, so dissolute in the suburbs, throws itself into clear-eyed and thorough, the kind of man you’d be hap- its work. The kids, once too timid to vacuum up after py to find in your life-raft. He offers her a recipe for plaice the chinchilla, swab the decks with the passion of con- featuring something called a “cardamom glaze,” which verts amid nautical perils. And perils there are! A hail of she snatches with a flirty whack. gelatinous material, which Pere Jules calls a “goonami,” ty and Babe love the cardamom-glazed plaice. blankets the ship. Three-beaked octopi clamor on board. They ask for it night after night and Gutsy Housewife A neocon mole is found among the bunch, morsing their observes their lives transforming as they start staying coordinates to Interpol. Dinner is tofu. home to cook rather than huddle playing Dungeons Shipboard romance can run from African Queen & Dragons with acned local boys. When the Grocer is to Dance, Fools, Dance, depending on the state of PG- invited to dinner, he smiles utterly radiantly, insisting 13. See moonlight on the waves, and kisses to bazouki he’ll bring the plaice. Frenzied house cleaning to Fleet- music. See jealousy from sexier, younger, more com- wood Mac. The twins produce a raspberry chocolate mitted mates. But when their white whale is spotted, a torte; the table is set with a center garland of autumn Japanese fishing trawler scooping up holdsful of plaice bittersweet. in protected waters, elaborate and free-wheeling unity When the Grocer shows up, he is kissed furtively breaks loose. A good old-fashioned naval set-to is staged and hard by Gutsy Housewife on the front landing. for easy translation into theme park rides. The twins Their suburban cul-de-sac is misty after a late rain, and swing in on enormous ropes, and deploy the chinchilla they both look around at the unlikely setting for such a to chew through the trawler’s electrical cables. The romantic effusion. She sneaks a look at his hands but captain, a jovial, bearded former restaurateur (Phillip finds them empty. “Let’s all sit down,” he insists with a Seymour Hoffman) bellows Puccini while trying to ram twinkle. “Have you heard of ‘overfishing’?” the offending vessel. Evasive action leads to a video- here’s where our Kramer vs. Kramer goes Little game-tie-in-ready chase amid icebergs. The fishing ship Miss Sunshine on its way to Pirates of the Caribbean. is rammed, and as its sailors climb into life-rafts, the The Grocer is not a grocer, but an agent of “Project camera pulls back to find Pere Jules and the twins sign- Hayduke,” a radical cell of environmentalists named ing an oath in blood. The two young actors didn’t know for George W. Hayduke, the leader of Edward Abbey’s it at the time, but the prop oath was a bona fide contract Monkey Wrench Gang. The American plaice is ecologi- for three sequels. cally fragile, they are told, and is quickly being fished out. “Your nuclear family atom is split,” the Grocer entreats them, “join us and shine again.” Frenzied packing to Kenny Loggins. Little Babe hangs a “Gone Fishin” sign on their door, as Ty loads Blondie, their pet chinchilla, into an idling Vanagon.
51 HOOK, LINE, and SINKER: An Interview on them. So when the plaice first come in, we use crab with Russ Symons and worm bait, but from April into June we can use sand Jeffrey Kastner eel or worms. Most fishing for plaice happens during those three or four early season trips because the deep Tell me a little about yourself. You’ve been a fisher- water fish are not plentiful, and to travel twenty or thirty man all your life? miles out to the deep-water wrecks is not worthwhile. So it’s mostly very early season fishing, although late in Yes, indeed. I was brought up on the Barbican, a very the season, at the end of September and October, when old part of Plymouth. My great-grandfather was a sailor the fish are migrating back to the deep water, you also from way back; he used to do the old tea runs from get a good flurry of decent fish tight at the back end. But Shanghai back to Liverpool and places like that. And that will only last a few weeks because the migration my father and all my family have been sailors, so I’m goes quickly. Sometimes we get them in February, but probably the first one in generations not to actually go then they are usually very, very thin fish, really out of to sea, but it’s there somewhere, because I spend a condition, and they need to be on the banks for three or couple of days each week at sea, fishing for this, that, four weeks feeding up before they’re worth catching. and the other, you know. And if it’s too rough to go to sea, I go fly-fishing. How deep do you fish for plaice in the shallow water?
And you always did both ocean and inland fishing. Fifty feet, as opposed to 200 to 250 feet for deep-water fishing. Oh, yes. One kind of grew out of the other really, because we fished on the Great Reefs off Plymouth. And what kind of structure do the plaice like? They’re fourteen miles off, and if it was too rough to go fourteen miles out, then I used to go home and just They like fast water over sandbanks, like Start Point change my clothes and my tackle and go trout fishing. just east of Plymouth. There is a very big sand bank, the Skerries Bank, that’s been built up over the years by the Are there particular places where you have to go to current sweeping around Start Point and depositing fish for plaice? the sand like an arc around its back. Then up around Weymouth, there’s another bank called the Shambles, That’s right, and that is half the battle. What you have which is another famous plaice mark. Those are really to understand about plaice is that during the winter the two most famous plaice marks in UK waters. months, we get some deep-water wreck fishing, which we go to if the weather allows us to. But usually round Do you always fish with live bait? Will plaice take arti- about January, February, the weather turns, and very ficial lures? often we can’t go to sea. So that’s the time we take the boats out of the water and refurbish them. And then, No, they’re not like the American flounder, which is toward the end of March, we get the boats back in the quite a voracious fish. In terms of technique, it’s a water and the first fish we go looking for—it’s sort of a question of keeping the bait near the bottom, because harbinger of spring, if you like—is plaice. We go nearly you fish from a drifting boat most of the time. It’s that up to Dartmouth, to a place called the Skerries Bank. sort of fishing—a quiet, contemplative sort of fishing. Sometimes the fish come in a flurry and then it’s quiet And what is it about that time of year? for a few hours and then they come again. It’s the type of fishing where you can sit down and talk. When the It has to do with the migration of the plaice. From the water’s nice and quiet, at the neap end of the tide, you end of February, you find that the plaice come inshore can sometimes put the anchor down and brew a pot of from the deeper water where they’ve been during the tea. The fish are affected by the tide. When the tide just winter months. They come in to the shallow water to starts to flood, you find most of the fish will be down at look for something to eat and get up to their breeding. the west end; I think they go down there because the And they usually start feeding on small crabs and inver- water starts to pick up and comes around in a rush and tebrates, razor fish, and so forth. And around the end of when it does, it will bring with it the sort of thing the March, the sand eels arrive and the plaice start feeding plaice are looking to eat.
52 Dinner. Photo Russ Symons.
Because they’re basically stationary, right? They Do they hit aggressively? settle down in one place and wait for the food to come to them. You get two sorts of bites. They seem to either hammer into the bait and really give you a good tug, or they’ll be That’s right. They go on the bottom and they shuffle so subtle in their take, well, we just call them “whoop- down, so they’re basically covered with sand apart from sies” because you start to reel in and go “Whoops, I got those two little eyes and they just wait in ambush. And one!” I would say seventy-five percent of the time you the little crab will walk past or the bait will trickle past feel the fish take the bait; the rest of the time, you never and then out they come and they’ll pounce on it. It’s a even notice, and when you come to pick the rod up to fish that has great curiosity. It’s very important to use a reel in, you realize you got one. fairly heavy weight to make sure your bait stays on the bottom, because in this fast water it’s very easy for the What is a good-sized plaice? lift of the line to pull your sinker up, and the fish won’t take it once it’s even a foot or two off the bottom. We Well, anything over four pounds is a specimen fish. A use weights with little spikes on them in order to grip five-pound fish is a really excellent fish and a six-pound better, and when you’re on the drift, this drags along and fish is a fish of a lifetime. A two to three pound fish is a makes a little cloud of sand. good eating fish.
Much like a crab might. So they are good to eat?
Much like a crab might. And we put colored beads right Oh, yes, I think so. Actually, some people absolutely love next to the bait or maybe a flashing spoon to excite the them and others are a little iffy with them. But if it’s a good fish’s curiosity. And the bait moves with the drifting of fish and you get a good fillet, it’s a tasty fish. I just do them the boat. in a frying pan, with a little butter and some spices.
53 Replica of battle flag of USS Plaice.
TOUR OF DUTY engaged three targets near the Ryukyu Islands and sank THERESE ROBERT one, but encountered none on her third mission. In Janu- ary 1945, she joined a wolf pack in the Luzon Straits, One of 119 Balao-class submarines built by the US dur- but the fifty-eight-day patrol of that group—including ing World War II, USS Plaice was constructed at the Archerfish, Batfish, Blackfish, Scabbardfish, and Sea Portsmouth Naval Yard and launched on November 15, Poacher—encountered only one target and sunk none. 1943. More than 300 feet long and equipped with torpe- On Plaice’s fifth patrol in April, she engaged a number of does and deck guns, she began a tour of duty on April small boats with surface guns and sank several of them, 15, 1944, transiting the Panama Canal with her crew of and on her final mission in July, she made no enemy eighty-one sailors en route to Pearl Harbor. contact, but did rescue five Army aviators whose B-25 Plaice’s maiden war patrol began on June 4, 1944, had been shot down over the East China Sea. and twenty-six days later she sunk her first enemy When the war ended on August 15, 1945, Plaice vessel, the 986-ton Japanese ex-gunboat Hyakufuku was still at sea—her final patrol concluded nine days Maru, near the Bonin Islands—an archipelago that later when she pulled into Midway Island. She was includes Iwo Jima, the site of the pivotal 1945 battle. placed in reserve and in 1963 was loaned to the Brazilian She returned to base at the end of July, but not before Navy, which renamed her Bahia. In 1973, she was again she sank two more ships: the 857-ton ex-net tender Kogi decommissioned and sold to the Brazilian Museum of Maru and the 300-ton Submarine Chaser No. 50. Naval Technology in Santos for use in an exhibition. Over the next fourteen months, Plaice went on five However, the museum project was never completed more patrols. Each lasted roughly six weeks, and none and in 1978 she was towed back to Rio de Janeiro, was as eventful as her first. On her second patrol she where she ended her life as scrap.
54 Beginning the End forty-eight hours on the globe: the first twenty-four as it Jon Calame “pushes the previous day out of existence ahead of it” and another twenty-four as it is “squeezed into oblivion” A few things are certain about the passage of days and by its successor.3 nights: now we face the light, now we hide from it, mov- Another example: after 1750, sailors on long ocean ing in perfect circles around the axis of the earth. We journeys measured physical progress east or west in plunge into darkness and out again through fixed turn- degrees, minutes, and seconds of longitude when they stiles of twilight and dawn. To use the modular language measured the hours, minutes, and seconds of discrepant of linear time while spinning on a globe is to risk entan- time between an untouched home port chronometer glement with “some spurious concept ... nothing but the and another adjusted optically each noon, with a ritual ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness.”1 observed by Melville in his 1850 novel White Jacket: For instance, at each moment there are two cal- endar days afoot, occasionally three.2 Each day lasts a “Twelve o’clock reported, sir,” says the middy. day at any fixed location but has a life span of exactly “Make it so,” replies the captain.
180th IDL IDL IDL IDL IDL meridian 1867 1892 1910 1921 1995
The evolution of the International Date Line. Courtesy Jon Calame.
55 And the bell is struck eight by the messenger-boy, times and the traveler passing through was obliged to and twelve o’clock it is. adjust his timepiece accordingly. But the shift to Stan- dard Time was not without detractors. In Bangor, Maine, A minor wrinkle in trans-Pacific shipboard timekeeping where citizens on the far edge of the proposed Eastern had emerged in 1522 when Antonio Pigafetta, a survivor Standard Time would experience a maximum displace- of Magellan’s voyage, verified Ismail Abu al-Fida’s 1323 ment of local time, associations between sunlight and hypothesis regarding a “circumnavigator’s paradox,” working hours were jolted out of their traditional align- which held that exactly one day would be inevitably lost ment and heating costs increased during darker winter by long-distance travelers “bearing the Sun company.” afternoons. In reply, Mayor Frederick Cummings cited Prior to 1884, sailors resolved the paradox by making “the immutable laws of God” when he vetoed a compli- routine adjustments of plus-or-minus twenty-four hours ance initiative in 1883 supported by his political rivals. in their ship’s log somewhere in the far west Pacific. Bangor’s public clocks kept two times (local and EST, These de facto date lines, determined by nationality, Democratic and Republican, respectively) until Cum- customary prime meridian, or cartographer, served well mings was overruled by the state legislature in 1887.8 enough while traffic across the lines was light. Meanwhile, advocates marketed Standard Time By the early nineteenth century, however, distances throughout the 1880s. They offered reassurance to between major destinations seemed to be shrinking members of the general public who questioned the quickly.4 Heavier traffic, faster journeys, and more costly need for so much conformity: “We do not, of course, cargo introduced increasingly large flows of capital wish to suppress local time in common life ... we do not between and across continents. Major political and dream of forcing the population of certain countries to commercial agents eventually pooled their frustrations rise at noon, nor of forcing others to dine at midnight.”9 in an international consortium to curtail “the thousand In the end, the world’s civilian population was obliged to engagements broken by the discrepancies of time.”5 adopt Standard Time as specified by the observatories, They funded research, hired experts, and hosted an distributed by the telegram, and apportioned by the extensive series of deliberations6 about what, exactly, railroads. “Henceforth,” as one historian has noted, “the should be done about rife timekeeping “discontinuities.” localities are no longer spatially individual or autono- Isolated struggles had hardened into a pitched battle mous: they are moments in the traffic that makes them between planetary motion and commercial punctuality. possible.”10 In 1884, these efforts culminated in the Inter- Localities into moments, more ghosts of space. national Meridian Conference in Washington, DC. Inquiring about time, space is consulted, and inquir- Forty-one delegates from twenty-five countries attended ing about space, time is invoked11 as “every expansion the Washington meeting and agreed upon a universal of the physical milieu makes it more important to do Prime Meridian at Greenwich,7 noting the convenience something about time.”12 Proper functioning of the stan- of an anti-meridian 180° away falling through the west- dardized grid of days and hours requires a fixed anchor ern Pacific. Consensus regarding placement of the date (0°, or Prime Meridian), which in turn fixes the location line was viewed as a vital step towards synchronization of a calendar reset switch (International Date Line, or of physical movement in calendar time—shunting west- anti-meridian) engineered to trigger upon contact “that bound cargo into tomorrow and eastbound cargo into unnatural yet unavoidable jump of twenty-four hours”13 yesterday—without which, it was claimed, confusion and enable maritime punctuality. would result for the traveler. These imaginary lines are the cartographic paren- Of course, even now it is rare to find a private citizen theses girdling a global system of uniform time zones rushing across the Pacific to keep appointments on the that gradually replaced intuitive “local time” and allowed other side. The more influential consumers of regulated, for the upscaling of predictable, profitable long-range synchronized time were the telegraph companies, rail- commerce on sea and land. Still, the “so-called Interna- road managers, astronomers, and colonial surveyors tional Date Line” that appears on most maps after 1900 who appealed to their governments for time uniformity was adopted only customarily “among the commercial in order to facilitate the “intimate intercourse of civilized steamships of the principal maritime countries.”14 It had peoples” and keep the wheels of international com- to be located somewhere, it might have been located merce spinning smoothly. Prior to adoption of Standard Time in the US, for The International Date Line today. It deviates from the 180th meridian on a example, Wisconsin used thirty-eight different local number of occasions, most dramatically to include all of Kiribati to its west.
56 57 ‘Frontispiece’ and ‘Time Chart of the World’ from The Pocket Atlas of the World by John Bartholomew (1887). The International Date Line, shown here in its de jure perfection, splits the world perfectly in two along the 180th meridian. Courtesy the British Library. anywhere,15 and it was intended to follow the 180th the de jure date line allow three calendar days to be simultaneously observed meridian only “as closely as political and geographic cir- for one hour out of every twenty-four. For example: when it is 11:30pm Tuesday night in Samoa, it is 5:30am Wednesday morning in New York City and, strange- cumstances will admit.”16 ly, 12:30am Thursday morning on the Kiribati Islands. Routinely gerrymandered to skirt national boundar- 3 James Stokley, “The Day and the Date Line,” The Scientific Monthly, vol. 74, ies, the date line now deviates as much as 2,020 statute no. 4, (April 1952), p. 238. The snub-nosed prow of each new day, cutting into miles eastward and 520 westward from the 180th and “squeezing” out the old, is the International Date Line. Of special interest is Stokley’s reliance on spatial metaphors; Bergson observed that “as soon as we meridian designated in 1884. Migrations began as early try to measure [time], we unwittingly replace it by space.” as the 1840s, when the economic interests of the Philip- 4 Regarding the linkage of European cities and hinterlands by rail, Heinrich pines turned from Spain’s Mexican ports to the Dutch Heine noted in 1843: “I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden trees; the North East Indies and the country was officially moved from Sea’s breakers are rolling against my door.” the eastern to the western side of the de facto date line. 5 Leonard Waldo, “The Distribution of Time,” Science, vol. 1, no. 23 (December When the United States purchased Alaska in 1867, the 4, 1880), p. 277. 6 International conferences directly related to the standardization of time, de facto date line was deflected eastward through the distance, and commerce included: the 1879 Conference on International Bering Strait and westward around the Aleutian Islands Telegraphy in London; the 1881 Conference of Berne to regulate railroad trans- to capture all formerly Russian territory in one Ameri- portation; the 1881 General Time Convention in New York (later to become the Association of American Railroads Convention); the 1881 3rd International can day. The Samoan archipelago had traditionally Geographic Congress in Venice; the 1881 International Association for the observed an Asian day, but in 1892 King Malietoa relo- Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations in Cologne; the 1882 American cated his country from the western to the eastern side Society of Civil Engineers in Washington D.C.; and the 1883 7th International Geodetic Conference in Rome, culminating in the Meridian Conference of 1884. of the de jure date line in order to strengthen ties with 7 Following animated debate, delegates in the affirmative: Austria-Hungary, American businesses, allowing for the celebration of Mexico, Chile, Netherlands, Columbia, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Russia, Germany, July 4th twice that year. In 1995, the Republic of Kiribati Salvador, Great Britain, Spain, Guatemala, Sweden, Hawaii, Switzerland, Italy, Turkey, Japan, United States, Liberia, and Venezuela; in the negative: San ended calendrical segregation by deflecting the de jure Domingo; abstaining: Brazil and France. date line dramatically eastward (almost as far as 150° 8 Carlene E. Stephens, On Time: How America Has Learned to Live by the Clock west), unifying the sprawling nation in a single Asian day. (New York: Bulfinch Press: 2002), pp. 119–120. 9 Editorial in Science, vol. 3, no. 64 (25 April 1884), p. 518. The International Meridian Conference, with a 10 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, “Railroad Space and Railroad Time,” New German neat piece of cartographic cosmetic surgery, rendered Critique, no. 14 (Spring 1978), p. 40. possible the impossibility of keeping one-way time on a 11 Accordingly, astromoner Friederich Bessel coined the term “light-year” in 1838 to describe units of distance (10.4 of them) between the Earth and a star rotating sphere. The operation left a discreet scar in the called 61 Cygni, or “Piazzi’s Flying Star.” far western Pacific. The traditional frontier where East 12 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power [1960] (New York: Farrar, Straus and Gir- met West—always at the map’s edge—was enveloped oux, 1984), p. 399. 13 Percival Lowell, The Land of the Morning Calm: A Sketch of Korea (Boston: by the de jure date line. This sleight of hand concluded Ticknor & Co., 1885), p. 1. the western narrative in which Ulysses ruptured the 14 Correspondence from Professor George Davidson, formerly assistant in Mediterranean boundary, Columbus ruptured the Atlan- charge of the United States Coast Survey Office in San Francisco, to the Ameri- can Geographical Society dated 6 August 1899. In “Universal World Time,” tic boundary, Magellan ruptured the Pacific boundary, Geographical Review, vol. 25, no. 3 (July 1935), p. 484, Helen M. Strong notes and, no oceans remaining, Melville’s Ahab “is full stop” that “although this line is used by navigators of all nations, there seems to be no general agreement concerning the name of ‘the line,’ no international agree- at “the end of the UNKNOWN.”17 The imaginary margin ment has defined it, nor have the nations formally sanctioned it.” of the known had narrowed to zero thickness: a line. 15 A popular prerogative of isolated or imperial governments was to establish Arriving late in the western Pacific, one colonial their own Prime Meridian. Prior to the consensus of 1884, a functional date line power still sought the uncharted and tenantless spaces might have been situated 180° east or west from prime meridians recognized in Paris, Washington, Rome, Gibraltar, Naples, Copenhagen, Brussels, Rio de formerly in abundance there. In 1947, the United States Janeiro, Ferro, Cordoba, Lisbon, Madrid, Berne, Pisa, Oslo, Warsaw, Alexandria, undertook one more misadventure athwart the dis- St. Petersburg, Jerusalem, Mecca, or Ujjain (central India). Some Talmudic mantled frontier when it assumed trusteeship of 2,000 scholars situate a Halachic date line, the Kav Hataarich, 24° east of Jerusalem along the 149°E meridian. islands clustered near the 180th meridian to create the 16 A. W. Downing, “The Date Line in the Pacific,” The Geographic Journal, vol. “Pacific Proving Grounds.” Thousands of islanders were 15, no. 4 (April 1900), p. 415. evacuated to allow for the detonation of 102 nuclear 17 Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), p. 119. weapons. A contaminated cloud formed, drifting for years and hundreds of miles, over into the day before and back again.
1 Henri Bergson in Time and Free Will (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 99. 2 Interpenetrating time zones resulting from large east-west deflections along
59 fire
60 Burning to know: the sunny side of youthful experimentation, as depicted on Porter Chemical Company’s 1947 chemistry kit. Photo Gregory Tobias.
Fire and Truth be heard in the ranks about this charismatic peasant D. Graham Burnett (whose visions had continued unabated) and his rusty relic (which served him as a kind of scepter). Was he Late in the eleventh century, in the thick of the first entirely for real? Why not check? crusade, when the Christian sackers of Antioch found And so, with Peter’s indignant indulgence, a gazebo themselves miserably besieged and starving in the of dry olive branches was erected, fourteen feet long and citadel of their prize, a devout soldier of the Lord named four feet high, down the middle of which ran a narrow Peter Bartholomew, a commoner, awoke from a fit- passage some twelve inches in breadth. After three days ful sleep to announce a vision. Rousing his fellow holy of purgatory fasting, Peter emerged from prayerful seclu- marauders, he led them to a site indicated in his dream sion dressed in a light shift and carrying his disputed and pressed them to dig, whereupon they uncovered lance. Kindled, the olive bower burst into a tunnel of roar- a rusty pike, buried deep in the earth. Falling down in ing flame, into which Peter, nearly naked, plunged wildly, ecstatic spasms, Peter declared the relic nothing less disappearing from view in the white heat. than the lance driven into the side of the Savior as he Here, unfortunately, the ancient chroniclers hung upon the cross. Inspired by this apparent sign of diverge, suggesting a historical record indelibly tainted divine favor, Peter and the Christians blazed with new by partisanship. One line of texts has it that Peter and vigor, and undertook a breakout maneuver against their his false relic were thoroughly consumed in the con- infidel enemies, driving them down in a great slaughter. flagration, laying permanently to rest his usurpatory But not all the knights of Christ were entirely enthu- deceptions. But a more sympathetic tradition holds that siastic about Peter’s sudden spiritual (and worldly) Peter emerged from the fiery gauntlet merely singed, ascendancy—a certain palpable grumbling could soon and thus thoroughly exonerated, only to be caught
61 up in the thronging masses of his crazed acolytes, fortuitous that Alter, in perusing the ruins of the who crushed and trampled him to martyrdom in their Bakewell-Pears Glasshouse, stumbled on a thick chunk enthusiasm—proliferating the immediate supply of of what looked to be premium flint glass. He pocketed relic material, but terminating (despite themselves) his it, and back in Freeport set about grinding it down into a broader bid for temporal leadership. prism. Then, over the next decade, in his small workshop What is striking in these otherwise incommensurable in the Alleghenies, Alter conducted a series of experi- endings is their perfect consensus on the forensic value ments that would earn him footnote status in the history of flame: fire, here as elsewhere in the history of the Medi- of the physical sciences. eval trial by ordeal, is a basic technology of truth. Burned, Here is what he did: he rigged up his new prism at the things of the world reveal their essential nature. The the heart of a simple spectroscope, by affixing it in a scriptural basis for this notion is iffy (Lot surviving the black box through which light was admitted only via a flames of Sodom? Moses’ encounter with the burning narrow slit. Pointing this device at a light source—say, bush?). The physics of the proposition, however, proves the sun—yielded a tidy smear of rainbow that could be to be spot-on: everything that burns speaks with tongues projected on a sheet of paper. Alter was well aware that of flame that cannot lie. This is called spectroscopy. earlier in the century the gifted German optician Joseph von Fraunhofer, messing about with just such an instru- • • • ment, had noticed that the sun’s spectrum was not perfectly continuous. Rather, it was striped throughout It is itself a phoenix science, at least in its nativist nar- by irregularly spaced dark bars—perhaps ten, perhaps ration. On the 10th of April 1845, around mid-day, a fifty or more (it could be hard to decide, squinting at a small fire broke out in an icehouse on Second Avenue blurry rainbow for hours on end; different observers saw in downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In a matter of things differently). These lacunae in the solar spectrum hours, some fifty acres and more than a thousand struc- were a major-minor physics mystery of the first half of tures had been reduced to smoldering embers. As one the nineteenth century—a challenge to astronomers newspaper reported: and a stumper to the rump of natural theologians still trying to read God’s providential inscriptions in the book The fire, as though impelled by the hand of the of nature (the rainbow had been, after all, a divine cov- Destroying Angel, rolled on from building to building, enant—why these strike-outs in the contract?). with the flight of a fiery flying serpent, consuming every Like a number of his contemporary practitioners of house with the angry fury of a Vulcan, speeding its the natural sciences, Alter was thus keen to investigate way with awful and terrific progress, threatening the these queer lines, and one way to get at the problem whole city, inhabitants and all, and only ceased its mad was to use his salvage spectroscope to look at a variety career in the line of the river, because there was noth- of other sources of light: what sort of spectra would they ing more for it to destroy, having swept every thing in generate? Already equipped with a galvanic generator its way for one mile and a quarter! Never did any event and other accoutrements of the electro-mechanical labo- appear more like Judgment Day. People running, some ratory (he had tried to patent a proto-telegraph several screaming, others hallowing, warning the people to fly years earlier), Alter rigged up a crankable sparking device for their lives, carts, drays, furniture wagons, omnibus- which, when juiced and whirling, crackled with a brilliant es, horses, and all and every kind of vehicle, crowded flash that arced between two metal plates. By swapping the streets to an excess which made it difficult for each out the plates, Alter was able to establish that, although to escape, and threatened destruction to all! May we different metals all yielded a more or less “white” spark, never again witness such a scene, until the last confla- this white light, when observed through the spectro- gration of this terrestrial globe! scope, resolved not into a full rainbow-like spectrum, but rather into sequences of characteristically colored bars: To the ash field of this disaster came, several days later, copper, for instance, consistently produced two orange a thirty-seven-year-old medical doctor and tinkerer stripes and three green, together with a bit of fuzzy red- named David Alter, resident of the town of Freeport, dish-yellow; zinc, by contrast, reliably turned up one some two dozen miles northeast of the ruins. The pillar strong red bar, together with two orange stripes, three of smoke drew him. of blue, and a little smearing over in the yellow. Pittsburgh had been for a generation the center Admittedly, this sort of thing had been noticed of American glass production, so it was not entirely before, but Alter went so far as to suggest that an alloy
62 like brass (a mixture of copper and zinc) generated a electrodes to a severed extension cord—one carbon bar spectrum that superimposed the distinctive color signa- attached to one wire, the other to the other. Plugging tures of its component elements. This observation—a in the cord, with a well-taped electrode in each hand, little off-hand, and published in an American journal not one carefully brought their sharpened tips into contact, on the desk of every European savant—has earned Alter producing a searing hum, a blinding magnesium-white a claim to be the inventor of “spectral analysis,” the busi- light—and instantly blowing the mains in the house. ness of reading the tongues of fire. We developed a work-around for this problem: a Put aside his (somewhat tenuous) priority. What rheostat to control the current. It was primitive, but very matters is that within a decade the notion that each ele- functional: we split one of the electrode leads and wired ment cannot but declare itself when submitted to the in a pair of coffee can lids. These were then placed—not torch would become a central dogma of chemistry, and touching, weighted down with small stones—in the an extension of this notion to the heavens would mean bottom of a Pyrex baking dish filled with salt water. The that every star could be understood to be forever calling water served as a resistor, and by sliding the lids closer out its essential elements. Out of this realization—that together (with a stick, so as not to be electrocuted in the starlight was the continuous twinkle of a chorus of dish of water that was plugged into the wall) we could celestial confessions—modern astrophysics was born. increase the juice to the arc. Adding more salt Even the dark was found to speak: those troublesome also kicked up the charge. privations in the solar spectrum noticed by Fraunhofer This device worked like a charm. We drilled a pair were soon shown to correspond to the signature lines of holes in a small clay flowerpot, and fed the carbon of known substances. His lines were, in the end, tell-tale electrodes through, to make a little crucible. With the shadows; the materials they signaled were indeed out arc struck (and carefully maintained by just the right there, but they were not burning, only lurking in celestial “touch”—the sharpened tips had to be close, but not clouds—nevertheless, they could not hide from the per- too close, for maximum heat and light) the pot became vasive fire of the heavens. a raging inferno in which one could easily and quickly melt down a screwdriver. • • • Which was entertaining, but we were after bigger game: spectroscopy. So we procured a number of chem- Alter’s experiments have become standard high school ical compounds whose emission spectra promised to science: a choice laboratory exercise in the modern be clear and bright. My own enthusiasm was highest for methods of truth making. And it was with some sense of some potassium nitrate, which I had found on a dusty their canonicity that I set about reproducing them for my back shelf of the local pharmacy, where it was sold, I sixth-grade science fair. I was, at the time, a basement- believe, as an anaphrodisiac (its powers to suppress dwelling pre-adolescent with an elaborate chemistry set, auto-erotic behavior are now discredited). Several heap- living in West Philadelphia and attending a forbidding ing tablespoons of this white powder were shoveled Catholic grammar school. Limited parental oversight into the small furnace, and I struck the arc. Dave stood had permitted me to install a pump-driven respirator that by with the spectroscope (a shoebox, rigged up with a fed air from the kitchen down to a diving mask I wore pinhole and a prism). when conducting particularly hazardous work with chlo- It is difficult to describe what happened next, but it rine gas. My assistant, a precocious Mexican neighbor was very scary. I have come to suspect that our potas- named Dave del Río, had a nervous stutter and no mask. sium nitrate had been adulterated with sugar (perhaps He was very skilled at Dungeons & Dragons. to make it more palatable to little masturbators), which The spectroscope was easy, but the sparking combination—saltpeter and sugar—is the basic recipe device never worked properly. Dave and I moved on to for very effective smoke bombs. Whether this was the a more elaborate scheme: to build a crucible in which case or no, the sample, under the influence of the white we might burn anything—metal salts and even metals heat, rapidly congealed into a lava-like ball of orange themselves. The key lay in an apparatus known as an magma. Immediately unnerved by its spitting and gelati- “arc furnace,” instructions for the building of which we nous vigor, I broke the arc and stepped away, glad to be found in a science activity book published before the era wearing my respirator. But the cessation of the applied of widespread liability litigation. The core of the device heat did not stop the unfolding auto-catalytic process: involved removing the carbon rod from the center of within seconds, a geyser of furious and terrifying smoke a pair of D-cell batteries and wiring these pencil-like blasted up and choked out the room. Meteoric lumps of
63 The sun confesses (ca. 1814): using a spectroscope of his own manufacture, German optician Joseph von Fraunhofer discerned a set of “blanks” in the solar spectrum—dark lines that would later be read as clues to the chemical composition of extraterrestrial matter. Courtesy Deutsches Museum.
64 65 molten stone sprayed left and right. Dave, discarding the With a light step, and sensing myself newly a partic- spectroscope, gasping for breath, upended the rheostat, ipant in the complex and always contingent process of blowing the fuse and cutting off the flow of air to my creating knowledge, I headed down to the gymnasium mask. Groping, we found our way through the darkness, to set up my arc furnace and spectroscope on a wobbly and tumbled up the steps to the relative safety of the card-table. I had carefully written out instructions for kitchen. how the sisters appointed as judges might themselves “Did you get a reading?” I asked him, as we lay endeavor to strike the arc, though I decided it was best panting on the floor, still genuinely afraid, thick smoke not to leave any potassium nitrate around. And I did put seeping under the basement door. a sign on the Pyrex baking dish, in large letters, warning “No,” answered Dave. “I couldn’t see a thing.” everyone to keep their hands out of the water.
• • • • • •
That night I wrote up our results in my laboratory note- I was, of course, disqualified. Though it entirely sur- book (the basic accoutrement of a science-fair project), prised me when I returned to my table to find an icy pink and opted to keep the story simple for the nuns: the salt- disciplinary slip in my (unplugged) crucible, since I had peter, in my reconstruction, glowed helpfully, and Dave secretly come to expect nothing less than a blue ribbon. and I were able to witness, at our spectroscopic leisure, Who could have done something better? (The winner, I a brilliant panorama of the tell-tale emission spectra for recall, had looked at his cheek cells under a dime-store both potassium (heavy striping in the blue/violet range microscope.) The nuns had been understandably dis- together with three nice green bars) and nitrogen (some mayed by the white-knuckle narrative of the notebook, red, some yellow, some light green). I got all of this, but more so (and justifiably, it must be said) by the fact needless to say, from a book. Then I packed up our fur- that I had left a plugged-in dish of water in a crowded nace, and headed off to school for the science fair. school gymnasium. There would be a reckoning. With It was in the car that morning that I offered my sister William Mary, known among the boys as “Willard, mother, without too much detail, the story of what had the Rat King.” She who carried (but had not been seen actually happened, and mentioned that I had touched up to use) a thick wooden ruler, triangular in section, upon the results for the consumption of the judges. But she, which misfeasors were said to be forced to kneel. It was, being at heart a teacher (if not a scientist—she taught of course, a long prism. French), took the occasion to stump for the virtues of Carrying that slip down the carpeted hall of the con- absolute candor in a laboratory notebook. I sat in the vent toward the office of the principal that afternoon, I back, looking out the window, listening to her expound was very afraid: the walls felt close, and I burned with an a general history of the rise of the sciences as nothing unhappy combination of shame and anxiety. But at the less than the sequential progress of unflinching truth same time there was, in that small boy’s fear, a delicious over mere slavish orthodoxy. Galileo was brought into shiver of righteousness. evidence; the fortuitous discovery of penicillin made an To be a scientist was grand; but to be a martyr— appearance; disparaging remarks were adduced con- what could compare? cerning the anti-empirical tendencies of scholasticism. I stepped from the car chastened, and resolved to mend my ways. I forfeited recess to the excision of the carefully penned and artfully idealized narrative of our work, and set to scribbling at impassioned speed a faultlessly factual account of the withering disaster: the explosion, the evacuation of the makeshift laboratory, the damage to the fuse-box, my father’s great anger on discovering that the laundry room had sustained fire damage, etc. My “conclusion” section, too, required a total re-write. No longer the self-satisfied confirmation of the spectroscopic commonplaces, but rather a more provisional and open-ended valediction, calling for fur- ther work in this difficult and dangerous area of research.
66 Iron ivy on a building in downtown Manhattan. Photo Thomas A. P. Van Leeuwen.
IRON IVY upper Manhattan like Inwood and Washington Heights Thomas A. P. Van Leeuwen were making ingenious use of their fire escapes: “For many working-class residents in older tenement build- “Tonight, Tonight!” ings without balconies or rooftop access, the humble “Tonight, tonight,” Maria and Tony sing in urgent unison fire escape has always been the next best thing. It is while holding onto a fire escape. They sing because they their makeshift stoop in the sky.”2 are in love. But they sing on a fire escape because they As in West Side Story, the fire escape stands for are in love in the United States of America, and only in something else, something more romantic, a balcony, the United States of America do you find fire escapes. or even a “box seat,” as one of Inwood’s residents calls Together with their aquatic counterpart—the water it.3 West Side Story, a 1957 Broadway musical made tower—fire escapes have become characteristic ele- into a Hollywood film in 1961, was so heavily identified ments of the American cityscape. with the architectural environment in which it was set America’s exterior fire escapes hang on old and that a few schematic flights of stairs from a fire escape decrepit buildings in inner cities, on residential and com- became its unmistakable logo.4 Even today, when the mercial buildings, on low and tall buildings, and even on fire escape is disappearing from our memories, posters early skyscrapers. Countless at the turn of the twentieth announcing new stage productions of West Side Story century, their numbers have now been greatly reduced. still use the same iconic image of three flights of black In 2004, the New York Times reported: “No one is sure iron stairs set against a red background. exactly how many fire escapes are left; Vincent J. Dunn, Stairs and balconies are viewing platforms, look- a retired deputy chief with New York City’s Fire Depart- outs onto the world, and West Side Story cleverly ment, guesses there may be 200,000” in New York City.1 replaced Romeo and Juliet’s noble balcony with a fire They are more likely to be found in the less affluent parts escape tête-à-tête between working-class Tony and of New York: West Side Story, for example, was set on immigrant Maria. But despite the insecurity and depriva- Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a neglected tenement tion represented by the setting, the romance was the district in the late 1950s when the film was made. same, better even—stronger and charged with a more acute sense of escape. Of course, fire escapes are also Porches in the Sky meant to help you escape a building in case of a fire. The New York Times article also reported that the pre- But even that was not always as self-evident as it might dominantly Dominican immigrants living in areas of seem.
67 To Get Close to the Fire They were six-wheeled ladder wagons, “strategically Originally, fire escapes were not attached to buildings. placed in streets to be run by conductors to the fire with They were not even intended to help people get away the object of effecting any necessary rescues.”5 from fires. The first so-called “fire escapes,” introduced in Mobile fire escapes were, however, risky contrap- England during the late 1820s, were ladders on wheels tions. Climbing them was the work of professionals, and carried along by firemen in order to gain better access to civilians, even in times of utmost desperation, balked the fire. As buildings had grown taller, the upper stories at trusting their lives to such apparently unstable struc- could no longer be reached with standard ladders; the tures. Victims of a fire instinctively climb to the highest longer “fire escape” ladders were therefore designed to point in an effort to remain ahead of the increasing give fire-fighters access to the roofs of buildings, a posi- smoke and heat. The roof— typically reached through tion from which they could more easily douse the fire. a hatch or “scuttle”—would be the nearest point of relief, The first “fire escape” ladders that also allowed victims but also the last.6 When a building catches on fire, the to descend were operated by London’s Royal Society first thing that burns is the staircase. Made of wood and for the Protection of Life from Fire, established in 1836. designed to connect the various floors, staircases act
The iconic image designed by Saul Bass for the film version of West Side Story (1961).
68 like fast-burning fuses. Meanwhile, the roof of a burning then the city burned again in 1856 and was almost entire- building is akin to the top of a funeral pyre; the hottest ly destroyed. Chicago knew an almost uninterrupted and smokiest spot available. Nevertheless, picking history of city fires, including those of 1857, 1859, 1866, up refugees from the roof was the motivation behind 1868, 1871 (“the Great Fire”) and 1874 (“the Forgotten establishing London’s mobile fire escape brigades. Their Fire,” the most destructive of them all.) Although efforts escape ladders had to be constantly refigured to keep up in fireproofing became a dominant feature of the new with the ever-increasing heights of buildings, a progres- commercial architecture, the problem of reducing the sion that finally reached its limit with the advent of tall, risk of deadly fire in residential buildings was much less steel-framed buildings in the late nineteenth century. urgently tackled. Business counted, not lives. At that point, victims in tall buildings on both sides Official reports of great fires counted property of the Atlantic were left no other choice than to jump. losses, not human casualties. Warehouses were nor- This was dramatized most poignantly in the 1874 fire at mally better constructed than tenement blocks, and a textile mill in Fall River, Massachusetts, which shocked fireproofing was first applied to factories and storage a nation that learned of the events through dramatic facilities. “Thus, again and again, in town and country woodcuts, published by magazines and newspapers, of alike, Americans encountered the disturbing scent of desperate victims jumping out of windows. Finding the burnt money. And yet, although an overview of the general stair tower blocked and firemen’s ladders too ‘great fires’ helps to establish the dimensions of the short to even reach the second-floor windows, workers problem, the preoccupation with statistics almost at the cotton mill tried to escape the flames by jumping trivializes the severity of the destruction.”7 Despite this out of fourth-floor windows. Twenty-three died; many nonchalance, however, pressure from the news media— more were permanently injured. The factory’s printmaker the unconscious of the nation in those days—slowly did his best to catch the jumpers by hovering under their helped to formulate laws and regulations. final destination on the pavement. Such acts of “defenes- Before these laws were passed in the second tration” signal, of course, that the victim chose death by half of the nineteenth century, property owners were falling over death by incineration. It is small consolation not held responsible for injuries or loss of lives resulting that most victims of a fire are killed by smoke rather than from fires in their buildings. It was only after a series of the fire itself, and that jumpers often experience a fatal extreme cases of what we would now call criminal heart attack before they hit the pavement. The Fall River disaster naturally resulted in an on- going national investigation into other means of egress. Many ingenious solutions were proposed, ranging from ropes and derricks (such a thing was fitted on the balcony of the White House for the obese American president Taft) to textile chutes, nets, inflated cushions, parachutes, and many other more or less daring pre- cursors to human flight. In the end, the only realistic approach remained a fixed, external fire escape, made of iron balconies and interconnecting stairs. Originally, the stairs were vertical ladders, but gradually, starting with recommendations made in 1885, they acquired a more comfortable angle for descent. The horizontal fire balcony, made of iron and consisting of a platform and railings, was bolted to the building and supported by iron braces. Victims of fire no longer had to wait for fire- men to rescue them.
To Get Away from the Fire From the 1850s to the 1870s, many American cities were repeatedly devastated by large conflagrations. A quarter Fall River factory fire of 1874. of the city of Boston, for example, was destroyed in 1872. Half of Charleston, South Carolina, was lost in 1838, and
69 negligence that owners were obliged to install alternative escape, which could not be easily reached because of means of egress in case of a calamity. In the winter of a locked door, became so hot that it bent and finally col- 1860, the New York Times started a campaign for better lapsed under the weight of those who had found their safety measures after a particularly horrible fire in a way there, sending twenty-five garment workers down large tenement house on Elm Street claimed thirty lives. to their deaths in the alley below. After the 1911 disaster, Historian Sara E. Wermiel writes: “This fire outraged the construction of external fire escapes on new build- the editors of the New York Times, who reproached ings was increasingly restricted by individual states and New Yorkers for fretting over the welfare of slaves in localities in favor of internal fire-resistant stairs.10 the South while ignoring the safety of their own poor neighbors. Within a couple of months, the state enacted Monuments of Inadequacy a new, comprehensive building code for New York City. In his provocative 1931 book, Fire, Thomas F. Dougherty, An early draft of this law called for making landlords Assistant Chief at the New York City Fire Department, liable for injuries sustained at fires in their buildings, but went so far as to accompany a photograph of a destroyed lawmakers deleted this provision from the final version. fire escape with the text “Fire escape or griddle? That the Nonetheless, this 1860 law introduced several novel outside fire escape is often worthless is well demonstrat- requirements pertaining to egress, the most important ed by the distortion of this one from the heat of the fire.”11 of which was a device that became a signature feature Edward Croker, Chief of the Fire Department of New York of America’s downtowns: the outside fire escape.”8 City, who became famous as the voice that spoke up after The 1860 law required every large apartment the Triangle disaster, similarly concluded that even if the building (nine or more units) in the city to have either hapless factory workers had been able to reach the fire a fireproof stair tower or else “fireproof balconies on escape on the ninth floor of the burning Asch Building, each story on the outside of the building, connected by they would still have been far from safety: fireproof stairs.” The vagueness of the wording led to the development of many types of fire escapes, the majority A device more futile or treacherous than the average of which paid lip service to the new laws. Other Ameri- present-day fire escape would be hard to devise. True, can cities and states soon followed New York’s lead, many lives have been saved by means of them, because but it was not until 1885 that a fire escape was legally any additional means of escape or of rescue is of value; defined as an “outside, open, iron stairway, of not more but a great number of lives, I believe, have been lost than forty-five degrees slant, with steps not less than six as well. Usually of material too light to stand the strain inches in width and twenty-four inches in length.”9 Good they are called upon to bear in times of crowding and intentions notwithstanding, the external fire escape emergency, they are also, in many cases, improperly never completely fulfilled expectations. Whoever tried anchored to the walls, tearing away and sagging under to climb out of a window on the fifth floor of a burning the weight of thronging bodies. ... They readily become tenement, let alone a twenty-story office building, was hot and many an unfortunate has been severely burned challenging fate. Fire escapes were either too cold or too on them, or driven back into the furnace, as was the hot to allow a comfortable hold, and this does not even case at the famous fire in the Windsor Hotel, in the take into account the period’s uncomfortable clothes Washington Place [Triangle Shirtwaist] fire already and slippery, leather-soled shoes. mentioned and in scores of minor disasters in tene- Another infamous New York fire, the 1911 Triangle ment houses, lofts and hotels throughout the country.12 Shirtwaist Factory fire, announced the effective end of the life of the outside fire escape. Though it finally claimed Another drawback of the outside fire escape was that 146 lives, the fire itself had not been especially danger- it was practically an open invitation to burglars. From ous. The Asch Building, of which only the top floors were street level or from neighboring platforms, with or with- used by the Triangle Shirtwaist company, was a solid out athletic training, access was guaranteed. To solve fireproof building which, almost a century after the fire, this problem, windows were barricaded with a variety is still standing in what is now the New York University of grilles, the most popular of which was the retractable campus. But the dramatic loss of life was the result of the grille. But the solution was even more dangerous than hopelessly inadequate system of emergency egresses the problem. In case of an emergency, the barrier could established by the owners of the sweatshop, who found get stuck, be locked, and, in case of a fire, it could be it cheaper to purchase fire insurance policies than invest deformed by the heat and jammed shut. in fire-prevention systems. The Asch Building’s fire It was to be expected that in the end, external fire
70 escapes were no more than what they had been from Why Not in Europe? the beginning: quick solutions for an otherwise insoluble In Europe, the outside fire escape is a rarity. The reason situation. Landlords preferred the fire escape as a quick is simple: from the thirteenth century on, European cities fix for their hazardous real estate. And as far as quick have been “petrified,” that is, structures made of wood fixes went, fire escapes were more concerned with were banned from the inner cities in favor of those built the law than safety. The true solution was to raise from stone and brick. The cavity wall was introduced, the building construction standards. People like Croker widths of streets were determined by law, and, particu- and Dougherty continued to warn against the dangers larly after London’s Great Fire of 1666, access routes for of flammable materials and proposed the use of fire- fire-fighting equipment were straightened and widened. proofing techniques, not only for the outside but, even Amsterdam, for example, never suffered a major confla- more urgently, for the inside of buildings. Their key pro- gration in the eighteenth century, thanks to the fact that posal was internal, insulated, fire-proof stairs—an option the city was built almost entirely of brick, its roads were that many European countries had already adopted. paved, and the canals provided a well-stocked reservoir Although Croker was responsible for important revi- of water. Thanks also went to the work of people like sions of the fire laws in effect in 1911 (which, together the painter Jan van der Heyden, who invented the pli- with other recommendations, formed the basis of New able fire hose and was a major advocate for fire safety. York City’s Building Exits Code of 1923), few of his pro- Amsterdam’s inner city was so well-protected that even posed solutions, such as interior fire-proof stairs, were, when the Amsterdam Opera burned down in a spectacu- or indeed still have been, fully implemented. In fact, lar fire in May 1772, the neighboring houses were spared building codes since 1860 had called for such improve- due to van der Heyden’s inventions. ments in “buildings of a public character” but owners Paris, almost entirely built of stone and brick and had nevertheless been allowed to resort to the outside the first modern city with wide, stone-paved streets fire escape, which remained “the all-purpose solution and squares, suffered numerous local fires due to its for emergency egress.”13 numerous theaters, which were often made of wood but employed fire for lighting and stage effects. The Palais Dark Tourism Royal, the city’s central pleasure garden, was home to In the late nineteenth century, sensation-seeking two important theaters, the Comédie Française and the travelers from Europe flocking to the poor, fire-prone Théâtre du Palais Royal. The Comédie Française was neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan were amazed destroyed by fire in 1900 and rebuilt with interior fire by the strange growths of iron. Spoiled by the relative stairs.The Théâtre du Palais Royal, on the other hand, safety of European cities, they were fascinated by the lacking surplus interior space and with no room to eerie forest of dark webs stretching from block to block, expand, had in 1880 commissioned the respected archi- from pavement to roof. German diplomat Roger Nielsen, tect Paul Sédille, famous for the Parisian department author of Amerika in Bildern (1924), interpreted the fire store Au Printemps, to provide the theater with an appro- escapes on Mott Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown as priate egress system.15 The balconies and staircases of souvenirs of the days of opium and crime: faded lace this rare European example of an external fire escape are curtains hanging over the spirits of the old opium kits. compacted into one block and integrated gracefully onto But fire escapes were seen not only as mementos the back of the theater. The result was widely admired of past urban devastation, but also as presaging catas- for its elegance. trophes in the making. They were thought to act as Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centu- admonitions of “the accident,” in Paul Virilio’s words, ries, European cities increased their immunity against of “what can happen,” a bit like the dinky life-jackets fire, whereas on the other side of the Atlantic, wood with their pull cords and ominous toy whistles hiding remained the preferred building material, one reason under the seats of our passenger airliners. Visitors like why there are still to this day annual conflagrations in Jules Huret were very much aware of the fire escape’s the coastal areas of greater Los Angeles. numinous character. As a caption for a photograph in his monumental L’amérique moderne (1911), he wrote: “Ivy and Creepers” “The East Side, populous neighborhood in New York. Fire escapes are uniquely shaped, simply engineered, Fires occur in this neighborhood with such frequency and easy to understand. They are also disfiguring, para- that, as a security measure, the floors of the apartment sitically clinging to both tenements and townhouses. buildings are connected by iron ladders.”14 Yet these urban scars also retain a certain beauty, one
71 Jan van der Heyden, A Comparison of Old and New Firefighting Methods, from the canal, and then pumps the water through a thin leather firehose 1680s. Van der Heyden uses the diagram to show the many advantages of that can be taken all the way into the building. This drawing served as the his new inventions—the pliable fire hose and a more efficient fire engine. On model for the first illustration in van der Heyden’s book Beschryving der the left, we see the old methods, dependent on drawing water in buckets nieuwlyks uitgevonden en geoctrojeerde Slang-Brand-Spuiten en Haare from a canal and filling the heavy, large fire engine whose fixed nozzle could Wyze van Brand-Blussen, better known as Brandspuitenboek (The Fire only move in a circle. On the right, we see the new, small fire engine, which Engine Book), and published in Amsterdam in 1690. uses a trestle equipped with a pliable, treated canvas hose to draw water
72 that echoes the fondness of the eighteenth-century boards, and signs with forgotten commercial messages Picturesque for contrasting materials climbing up a brick were removed. The pretty putto over the main entrance wall. Garden architect John Claudius Loudon, for exam- of the building, obscured in photographs from 1972, has ple, designed “a house calculated for being decorated now been freed from all the obscuring junk and restored with Ivy and Creepers” and the artist-theorist Reverend to its original glory. But where is its F. P. Smith fire Gilpin observed that “ivy in masses uncommonly large, escape, visible in so many earlier photographs? Chicago has taken possession of many parts of the walls; and was not only a great place to study early skyscrapers, it gives a happy contrast to the grey-coloured stone.”16 was also a place to study old fire escapes. At some point, From Alfred Stieglitz to Alfred Hitchcock, fire early, tall Chicago Style buildings had been equipped escapes were photographed, painted, sketched, and with external fire escapes, and these enormous fire filmed. Fire escapes invite photography, just as masts escapes had to be manufactured by large iron works. of sailing boats invited painters.17 They add elegance Naturally, they were more legal additives than instru- to otherwise uninteresting blocks of brick. Zigzag lines ments of salvation (who in his right, or wrong, mind in dark paint over a background of glowing brick were would jump on a fire escape twenty or more floors above used by George Bellows in his 1913 Cliff Dwellers. John street level?). But from the standpoint of architectural Sloan’s rooftop scene Pigeons (1910) used fire escapes history, they did at least bear the names of their makers. and balconies to enliven the faceless façades of New Stamped in a medal-shaped counterweight on the lower York townhouses. Still, picturesque or not, many house landing of the fire escape on the Fisher Building was the owners wanted to get rid of their fire escapes at the first name “F. P. Smith Wire and Iron Works, Chicago.” With opportunity. This became possible in the 1960s and some difficulty, it could still be read in a faded color slide early 1970s with the great clean-up that raged across all that I took in 1971. The same F. P. Smith was also the the cities of the Western world. Everything had to make author of the fire escape at an even more famous front, way for the new motor-based economy. that of the Sullivan and Adler Auditorium Building at the corner of South Michigan Avenue and Congress Park- The First to Disappear way, just a block away from the Fisher Building. Another Architects and historians following the events all over signed fire escape, which was cleared away, was on the world held their breath. Exactly a hundred years an equally famous former office building, now turned after Chicago’s Great Fire, a large-scale destruction cam- residential, on South Dearborn Street: William LeBaron paign, led by the notorious mayor Richard A. Daley, was Jenney’s bay-windowed Manhattan Building of 1891. about to destroy Chicago’s famous Loop. “Daley wanted Pictures from the period of analogue photography allow to clear the terrain of Chicago as neatly as had the Great endless enlargement, and so we can see the decorative Chicago Fire in 1871,” Richard Cahan wrote. “He wanted counterweight and lever bearing the name of its maker: to rebuild. Miles of homes, thousands of buildings, “United States Fire Escape Co. Chicago, Ill.”19 even entire neighborhoods were cleared in the name of Yet, by and large, fire escapes are anonymous. growth and increased tax dollars.”18 Their makers might have been foundries, modest iron A small army of preservationists furiously resisted works, or small-scale blacksmiths who specialized in the mayor and his developers. Professional and ama- individually adapting ready-made fire escapes. Some teur photographers alike took roll after roll of pictures manufacturers advertised in architectural magazines, as of threatened buildings. A denser concentration of did Marshall Brothers of Pittsburgh with their “Iron City monuments of pre-modern architecture was hard to Elevator Works,” offering ready-made units of balconies find. Shoulder to shoulder they stood, challenging the and stairs for existing buildings. But for the rest we are wrecker’s ball: William Jenney’s Manhattan Building, left with guesswork. Everything made of iron is usually Burnham and Root’s Fisher Building, their Monadnock stamped with the name and address of its maker: man- Building, and Holabird and Roche’s Marquette Build- hole covers, steel-rimmed curbs, and cast-iron basement ing. Thanks to the combined preservationist forces, the skylights are extensively signed.20 Former industrial dis- South Dearborn landmarks were saved. By 1978, most tricts such as Manhattan’s SoHo functioned as open-air of the surviving Chicago School buildings had been des- catalogues for the iron works that made their façades. ignated historical landmarks. So why were fire escapes left anonymous? The 1896 Fisher Building, one of the most elegant Maybe it had to do with scale. The tall Chicago but covered in soot and provisionally patched up, was buildings relied on large companies to comply with subsequently restored as a luxury apartment-hotel. Soot, the safety codes, but the more modest units could be
73 serviced by small workshops. Since fire escapes were 1 David W. Chen, “An Escape, and a Retreat: A Neighborhood Communicates, not forged but assembled from available strips of iron Plays and Daydreams on Its Porches in the Sky,” The New York Times, 15 August and bolted and welded together, even a small smithy 2004, pp. 33 and 38–39. Early egress laws concentrated on buildings with high occupancy, such as tenements, hotels, factories, and office buildings. Housing could provide an average building with an average fire for the more affluent was generally better built, was less densely occupied, and escape. had safer egresses. 2 Ibid. 3 In Amsterdam, where fire escapes are non-existent and balconies are rare, a Signatures new element has appeared recently: balconies that look like fire escapes. Stuck America’s nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were on brick-faced walls, the new balconies are like baskets of black iron. an age of iron and steel. Foundries dotted the commer- 4 The film West Side Story was partly shot on location in Manhattan in aban- doned West Side tenements around 110th Street. cial directories. Lower Manhattan was as black as the 5 Roger C. Mardon,
74 San Francisco in ruins after the fire of 1906. The panoramic photo by Law- rence was taken from his “Captive Airship” 2,000 feet above San Francisco Bay. Courtesy Library of Congress.
George R. Lawrence, Aeronaut- light, almost as if to hint at new beginnings. Photographer The photograph was taken by George R. Lawrence, Christopher Turner using what he describes, in an inscription on the enor- mous 48 x 183⁄4 inch print, as a “Captive Airship.” The On 18 April 1906, at 5:12 am, San Francisco was hit by image was deemed by many to be a composite fake. an earthquake that is estimated to have been 8.25 on the Manpowered flight was still in its haphazard infancy Richter scale. The earth shuddered for a full minute and— (the Wright brothers were granted a patent for their as chimneys fell, gas pipes burst, and electrical circuits Flyer only six days before Lawrence took his photo), and, shorted—fires broke out all over the city. These were far though Nadar had shot Paris from a hot air balloon in more devastating than the quake or its aftershocks. The 1868, the even lighting in Lawrence’s aerial view of San city’s subterranean water system was so badly damaged Francisco placed its author under suspicion. The fact that there were few resources with which to fight the that Lawrence claimed to have taken his picture from flames. The fire department dynamited whole rows of a boat with a camera that had been fastened to a series buildings to try and create firebreaks, and created more of kites did nothing to reassure the skeptics. fires in the process. Several firestorms joined together Lawrence had a photographic company in Chicago in one great inferno that blazed for three days; 490 city whose slogan was “The hitherto impossible in photog- blocks were razed and over 250,000 people were made raphy is our specialty.” He had earned the nickname homeless. Almost two-thirds of the city was destroyed. “Flashlight Lawrence” because of his pioneering work The extent of this devastation was captured in an with magnesium flares—experimentation that, accord- iconic photograph, San Francisco in Ruins, taken six ing to an obituary published in 1939, caused “numerous weeks after the fires burnt out. Shot from 2,000 feet explosions which burned off his hair, eyebrows, and in the air, the 160-degree panoramic image shows a mustache, and burst his eardrums.” His ingenious solu- view of the city from Ferry House to Twin Peaks, ten tion to these problems was a system that released a kilometers inland. The signage on the waterfront is canvas bag over the discharged lighting apparatus so as clearly visible, and you can make out figures amidst to extinguish any fires and contain the smoke, allowing the masonry-strewn ruins. The flattened city looks like him to shoot indoor scenes without choking or setting a ploughed field, the streets shiny furrows that have fire to his subjects. He was hired to take panoramas of thrown up black ridges of charred wreckage. The sun’s rays emerge from behind a cloud over the mouth of the overleaf: Aerial panoramic photograph of San Francisco taken by Lawrence San Francisco bay, sparkling the water with glowing on 5 May 1906. Courtesy Library of Congress.
75 76 77 Lawrence and his crew installing his 1400-pound camera to photo- graph the Alton Limited, 1900 . Courtesy Chicago History Museum.
Lawrence used a train of kites to hoist his camera, which was sus- pended from the bottom kite. Each kite was attached to the main line by its own short line and prevented from becoming entangled with it by means of a light bamboo rod. Courtesy Chicago History Museum.
78 political conventions, legislative sessions, and festive had been taken, and Lawrence hauled down the kites so occasions, to which he gave titles such as “Secretary that the camera could be reloaded. Taft’s Philippine Party Dinner.” Nadar’s aerial photography had attracted the atten- Lawrence was also famous for having created what tion of the French military; Lawrence’s kite images were was billed as “the world’s largest camera.” It cost $5,000 also thought to have possible wartime uses. In August to make, weighed 1,400 pounds, had twenty-foot bel- 1905, at President Theodore Roosevelt’s personal rec- lows, and required fifteen people to carry it. One picture ommendation, Lawrence was invited aboard the USS of Lawrence shows him with a lens cap the size of a Maine to demonstrate his system as a possible recon- garbage can lid under his arm, timing the exposure of his naissance tool. Because of high winds, the results of gargantuan device. The oversized camera was commis- these military tests were mostly blurred, and Lawrence sioned to create an 8 x 41⁄2 foot photograph of the Alton did not get the sum that he wanted for his invention, but Limited, a sleek passenger train that had recently been the lengthy report on the trials is an invaluable docu- built to run the Chicago to St. Louis line. The resulting ment in explaining the camera’s workings. print, promoted as The Largest Photograph in the World To take his panoramas of San Francisco, as the navy of the Handsomest Train in the World, was exhibited report illuminates, Lawrence stabilized his bulky camera at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and, like the later image with three fifteen-foot-long bamboo poles attached to taken by his kite camera, was judged a patchwork fake. its sides (these had to be cropped off or retouched out The French Consul General was sent from New York of the corners of his pictures); from each of these a 120- to Chicago to verify the photograph and, after he’d foot silk cord was hung, and these joined together to inspected the camera and enormous glass plate, Law- support a three-pound weight that helped prevent the rence was awarded the “Grand Prize of the World for camera from swaying in the wind. The camera had a Photographic Excellence.” nineteen-inch focal length, and the impressive depth of The photographer continued to innovate, challeng- field was achieved by having the camera’s shutter taper ing himself to perfect aerial views of urban scenes, such from half an inch at the bottom to four inches at the top, as racetracks and ballparks. He invented a telescoping so that when the lens swung through its 160-degree tower that could lift him up to 200 feet, before custom- arc the murkier distance was exposed for eight times as izing gas-filled hot air balloons to get bird’s eye views long as the brighter foreground. from five times farther up. On 20 June 1901, Lawrence Lawrence sold his spectacular pictures of the was almost killed while photographing the Chicago earthquake wreckage for $125 a copy; in total, he made Union Stock Yards from the air. His balloon broke free $15,000. After an expensive trip to Africa, where he tried of its anchor in heavy winds and floated off over Lake to take panoramas of animals in their natural habitat Michigan. He had built a special platform to replace the from balloons and to flashlight lions—who, instead of traditional basket, so as to obtain an unobstructed view, running away, attacked and destroyed several precious and this suddenly gave way: he fell 230 feet. Lawrence cameras—Lawrence gave up photography in order to survived only because his fall was broken by telegraph concentrate on aircraft design. He started a company and telephone wires; according to his obituary, the expe- that built “enclosed-cabin flying boats,” wooden sea- rience “(temporarily) cured him of further use of balloons planes that resembled Zeppelins with wings. Lawrence to get spectacular views.” soon held patents for over a hundred inventions relating When Lawrence saw a kite trailing an advertising to airplanes. banner over Chicago, he imagined a less risky way of It is fitting that Lawrence made this career change obtaining lofty perspectives. He began using trains of up from aerial photography to aeronautics. Nadar, the to seventeen kites to lift a forty-nine-pound panoramic photographer he emulated but never met, set up the camera that he specially adapted for the purpose. Unbe- Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by knownst to him, a precursor to this device had been built Means of Machines Heavier than Air (which had Jules twenty years earlier by French inventor Arthur Batut, who Verne amongst its members), founded the newspaper shot a series of aerial views of La Bruguiere in southern L’Aéronaute, raised money for research into flight by France with a kite camera. Batut had used a slow-burning giving rides in his balloon, and exhibited early flying fuse to trigger the camera’s shutter; Lawrence set his off machines in his studio. “Man will fly like the bird,” Nadar with an electrical current transmitted through the metal promised, “better than the bird; for … it is certain that kite line (like Benjamin Franklin, but backwards). A small man will be obliged to fly better than the bird, in order parachute would be released to indicate that a picture to fly merely as well.”
79 superflex and the re-branding of denmark mats bigert
In February 2006, the Danish embassy in Damascus was attacked by a furious mob, which set it on fire using the offices’ own furniture. The hatred in the Islamic world toward Denmark following the publication in Jyllands-Posten of the caricatures of the prophet Mohammed had spilled over; The embassy of Norway, one of whose newspapers had reprinted the caricatures, was also torched by Syrian protestors. All Scandinavian countries with a cross on their flag, it seemed, were sud- denly vulnerable. But when the mob went from torching embassies to burning flags, it only saw red—the pre- dominant color of the Danish flag. The Lilliputian country of Hans Christian Andersen was under attack, and the xenophobia encouraged by the nation’s right-wing gov- ernment had come back to bite the Danes. But the burning Danish flags seen on the news for weeks didn’t just raise questions of a religious or ideological nature. There were also some practical ques- tions, such as: Where did all the flags come from? Surely Middle Eastern flag factories had not been hoarding a surplus of Danish flags. A closer study of some prime- time desecrations showed that most of the flags were in fact poor DIY replicas, with uneven lines, off-kilter crosses, and only an approximation of Denmark’s trade- mark red. Luckily for the DIYers, the Danish flag is one of the easiest to copy—a white sheet and some red household paint will do the job. If Norway’s flag had been the main target, its third color would have made for a somewhat more complex task, and the number of public desecrations might have been reduced. Ironically, it is legal in Denmark to burn the “Dannebrog,” as their flag is called, but not the flags of other nations. The rea- soning behind this curious law is that burning a foreign flag is a matter of foreign policy insofar as it might be construed as a threat to the other nation. In their project Re-branding Denmark, the Danish artist collective Superflex asks whether this national trauma could be turned into a productive discourse. Is it possible to extract new meaning from the graphic image of the burning Danish flag? What are the consequences for a small, slumbering nation to be drawn into the maelstrom of international politics? Will the new graphic symbol be a brand of shame to be held up for coming generations, or can a re-branded national symbol, boasting a cool custom flamejob, be viewed as a radical statement of newly gained political awareness?
80 the great integrator: An Interview charcoal evidence in the geological record. The reason with Stephen j. Pyne fire appeared when and as it did was because life was Jeffrey Kastner colonizing land and had created enough oxygen in the atmosphere to support combustion. At that point, Harnessing fire’s ferocious physical force in the service lightning could supply the spark so that oxygen in the of hunting, agriculture, and industry gave humanity the atmosphere and hydrocarbons on the land could react. power to alter an often inhospitable landscape for its So fire is literally a creation of the living world. One of our own purposes. Yet our control over fire remains imper- current failings is our inability to appreciate the extent to fect at best. Unchecked in nature, it remains a constant, which fire is biologically constructed. It’s not just a physi- unpredictable threat to the very civilization to which it cal event that slams into ecosystems like a hurricane or gave rise. The rich socio-cultural effects of this biological or a flood. It’s something that feeds off of, that is literally phenomenon have been the focus of environmental his- sustained by, a biological matrix. You can have a hurri- torian Stephen J. Pyne’s work for nearly three decades. cane without anything living around it, but not fire. Author of over a dozen books on the history, ecology, and management of fire, Pyne—Regents’ Professor in You write about three ways in which fire came to the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University— North America—from nature, from Asia with the first recently spoke with Jeffrey Kastner about the arrival humans to arrive on the continent, and later from of fire in North America, its uses by successive groups Europe. of settlers, and its role in the development of modern approaches to forestry management. Let’s begin with the natural circumstance. Why does fire exist where it does? What you need is a pattern You start your book, Fire in America, with an explana- of wetting and drying. That supplies the fundamental tion of the principles of fire behavior. Can you walk us rhythm—it has to be wet enough to grow things and through the physics of fire in the natural environment? then there has to be a dry period where things can dry out and burn. The majority of fires, however, are caused Fire is a chemical reaction, a very rapid oxidation of hydro- by humans, and, in a perhaps perverse way, I see this carbons. The zone of that reaction is shaped by physical as furthering life’s control over fire. We ourselves are surroundings. This includes things like terrain: Are you biological agents, and we can overwhelm natural igni- going uphill or downhill, through mountain passes or val- tion patterns. In the book, I emphasized the multiple leys? It would also include weather and climate: Is it dry, sources of fire because I wanted to get away from the wet, windy? And then there’s the stuff that actually burns. usual narrative of the Europeans coming in and burning Most of us think of it as part of the natural world—trees everything, chopping it down, making a mess—the usual and pine needles and grasses and shrubs. But for under- frontier story. Fire is a property of humanity: all people standing how fire behaves, it’s all just so much fuel, just so have fire, and only people. That story began earlier than much combustible matter. The setting shapes the kinds the Europeans. The human impact of fire on the land of fire that result: creeping ground fire in dried peat or really started when the earliest people came to North swamp; brisk grass fires in the prairies; blazing shrub fires America. But it was very hard to find evidence—nobody and chaparral fires in Southern California; different kinds had really looked at it that way. Since then, there of forest fires, such as the very high-intensity fires that get have been a number of studies, including some out of into the crown, the ones that make it onto television. Australia, that demonstrate the astonishing power of Fire is not a substance like water, air, or earth. It’s a Aboriginal fire, that is, what control over ignition alone reaction: it’s purely what its surroundings make of it. This can do. fact makes fire a great integrator, which is marvelous for someone interested in synthetic history, because fire inte- One can extrapolate from Aboriginal practice back to grates all the factors that shape how the combustibles sit the North American experience? on the landscape. Yes, I think so. The Aborigines have a similar economy Is there a particular point at which fire started to be to many early peoples here, a similar level of technol- part of the ecosystem? ogy. Southern California, for example, is very similar to much of southern Australia—a Mediterranean climate Fire goes back four hundred million years—we can find prone to burn and subject to explosive winds. Accounts
81 Forest fire on Wolf Creek, Ochoco National Forest, Oregon. August 1951. Courtesy US Forest Service.
we have of burning by indigenous people in California They certainly burned for hunting—not just to drive from early Spanish contacts are very similar to what in animals, but also to create attractive feeding sites. How Australia has been termed “firestick farming.” When you many hunted animals thrive in old-growth forests? None. approach the subject in this way, however, you can trig- One of the ways you can keep the landscape stirred up ger very passionate counterarguments because it gets is by burning it. You burn to encourage other species tied up with the founding myths of the US: that it was of flora—things animals like to eat, such as berries, an empty wilderness, that it was settled primarily from browse, and tubers, do well in a systematically burned Europe. If it turns out that for thousands of years there landscape. You burn shrubs to produce new growth of were people working this way on the landscape, such an twigs that then get used in basketry. You also burn just argument is difficult. to keep open landscape. Australia again is an example of this—fire used in this way is about managing the land. You discuss the many ways fire was used by the The second phase is agricultural fire. In this case, Native Americans—as both a hunting tool and an agri- you prepare the fields by burning them; that way you cultural method. don’t have to rely on nature to supply fuels. You can
82 define the climate and create fire environments where the normal burning system because they were never there aren’t any. If you look at what happens after a burn dry enough. They also introduced a whole slate of cereal in a mixed environment, the cycle of recovery takes crops. about three years. In the first year, you’ve changed the In fact, much of the landscape the Europeans structure of the place—you’ve opened it up, allowed in moved into had already been cleared, in a sense broken more sun and more wind, you’ve left lots of ash on the to the agricultural harness and adapted to fire, and they ground, which is a fertilizer. But even more effective is took those sites and adjusted them for their own plants the fumigating effect of the fire. It purges the land of the and animals. They also established very different pat- resident plants and micro-organisms. This cleansing terns of land ownership. This was important because doesn’t last very long; by the second year, most of the the old patterns of fire always required that you move original flora has recovered, and by the third year it has around the landscape, so that you were not in the same pretty much re-established itself. Now that’s what hap- place that you were burning. But when you have fixed pens in nature. What you do with agriculture is to apply plots, you have to stay on them because you own them this effect to your own purposes—you create an artificial or are otherwise attached to them, and so the pattern environment in which you can introduce exotic plants, of burning changes. It’s no longer possible to do large- species that aren’t native there and cannot compete scale burning—it’s now at the level of individual plots, in a natural setting. The indigenous plants, now called so instead of slashing and burning and moving around weeds, will try to reclaim the land, and so the proce- the countryside, you slash and burn on a given plot and dure has to be repeated. The Native Americans were establish what is essentially a pattern of field rotation using these techniques to introduce corn, beans, and using fire. squash—the classic Mesoamerican trilogy—and then they could supplement it with things like berries in the Was this the pattern of land management that was surrounding, similarly burned, landscapes. The system being used in Europe? only works if you burn. Absolutely. The part of Europe between the Because there’s no other way to have such large-scale Mediterranean and the boreal forests is not a fire effects on the ecosystem? climate, and it’s odd that the most aggressive of the settlement cultures came from a place without fire. That’s right. You can’t do this everywhere, but where They were always conquering fire-prone places and you can, you do it. This has been going on for a very long were confounded by flames. There was in fact plenty time. And in many ways, this old pattern of agriculture, of fire in their own background, because they couldn’t which was also present in Europe, was very good from make agriculture work without burning. But basically a biodiversity standpoint because it creates all kinds of that whole zone in the middle of Europe is a very fire- habitats from the various stages of recovery and they immune place; fire exists there because people put it could be used and tweaked in assorted ways. in. This got translated into the idea that the way to con- When Europeans came to North America, they trol fire was to control society, so they sought ways to brought different approaches to fire, but they also eliminate fire and find an alternative. To their minds, learned from the native population, so what you get is a if you used fire, you were primitive. Some of the most hybrid. The Europeans had more effective axes made of pyrophobic societies ended up in some of the most fire- steel and they also had markets overseas; so they were flush landscapes and they were really stunned. And willing to do land clearing on a larger scale by logging, they had to find some way to come to grips with fire, and then export that material or use it for construction, because they felt they couldn’t dominate these land- and further convert the land. They also introduced ani- scapes if they couldn’t control it. mals—sheep, pigs, cows, horses, goats—that began replacing the wild animals and this changed both what Do they bring this pyrophobic attitude to the US? was available to burn and, more importantly, what your interest in burning was. You now wanted to promote There was very much a divide between officials and peo- browse, which supports these animals, so you had to ple on the ground. The people on the ground all resorted enlarge your pastures. Europeans were also accus- to fire, because it was the only thing that worked. But tomed to draining land, and they began burning lots of the officials—academics, ministers of agriculture, forest- areas that were swampy or marshy or otherwise outside ers—all hated fire and wanted to remove it.
83 You talk about the figure of the English forester as the commerce, but arguments were also made on the basis representative of the state coming in and prevent- of climate stabilization and public health. These were ing local people from using the land in the way they places that were being burned everywhere, all the time, always had. I can imagine that being very resonant for and it was just a shock to the British. So they organized settlers in the US as well. a conference in 1875 and the first question asked was whether fire control was possible and, if possible, wheth- The story is a very interesting one and it’s tied up with er it was desirable. Everything else would follow from European imperialism. The great testing ground for this this. And there was a split—everybody on the ground policy was India. In the nineteenth century, the British said, “This is a bad idea. You’re not going to be able do began to establish forest reserves there as part of a ratio- it. You’re going to make things worse.” All those predic- nalizing presence, to bring order to an “unruly” place. tions turned out to be true. But officialdom prevailed, and They didn’t know what forestry meant; they had to bring the British approach became a model for all the other in Germans to do it. A fellow named Dietrich Brandis was imperial experiments (the French had their own style, really the genius on this. Brandis was a tropical botanist, with similar consequences). It also influenced policy here and found himself in the teak forests of Burma. It was in the US. In 1891, President Harrison established forest here that he began moving from botany to forestry, even- reserves out of public land, and this was followed in 1897 tually becoming Inspector General of Forests in India. by the Forest Management Act, or the so-called Organic The British set up reserves for teak in India, and starting Act, which was concerned with the question of what we in the late 1850s instituted a series of laws for resource do with this land now that we’ve set it aside. management and fire control that they continued to develop into the 1870s. The goal was to protect wood for Was this an ecological impulse or a commercial one?
Fire-prevention posters commissioned and disseminated by the US Forest Service. The Smokey poster, designed in 1944, marks the first appearance of the much-beloved icon. Courtesy US Forest Service.
84 This is simply what a civilized society did. You protected A man named Gifford Pinchot, self-styled as Amer- these reserves because otherwise people would cut ica’s first native-born forester, was a member of the them down and burn them up. This was a global phe- Academy’s committee. At the time, he was heading the nomenon. If you’re a fan of the “Jungle Books,” you Bureau of Forestry, which was just an obscure advisory might have wondered what happens to Mowgli after bureau in the Agriculture Department because it didn’t he grows up. Well, Kipling wrote a sequel: Mowgli control any land—that didn’t happen until 1905. But in joins the Indian forest service and fights forest fires. So the meantime, as part of Pinchot’s self-education in for- this approach had very wide currency; it was seen as estry, he started corresponding with Brandis, who was progressive. The idea was that you couldn’t trust local now back in Germany and had set up a forestry school. people—you needed the intervention of high-level insti- Pinchot went there and he later wrote that he wanted to tutions to prevent the land from being destroyed. So do in this country something of what Brandis had done in the US, the National Academy of Sciences set up a in India. Pinchot got impatient and dropped out, but his committee in 1896 to figure out what to do, and they rec- successor, Henry Graves, went through the whole pro- ommended that we teach forestry at West Point—that gram, actually went to India on a study tour, and even we, in effect, militarize it. And the model for that was the went to America’s new colony in the Philippines. US Cavalry, which had taken over Yellowstone National These men, who established US policy toward for- Park in 1886, and then all of the other national parks, estry, came to see fire control as a necessary thing, but and had provided the first federal fire-fighting force. It also as a great public relations ploy. Remember we’re was a paramilitary model from the very start, and this in the middle of the Gilded Age, a time of unrestrained was similar to what was going on with the other imperial capitalism, so why aren’t we turning these lands over countries as well. to private use? One way to justify it is on the basis of fire
85 control—everyone can see that the damn thing is burn- We haven’t done any good. We should just stand aside ing up and we have to stop it! They thought the danger and let nature run its course.” The other faction said, of fire would lessen as time went on, but they were “You can’t do that. You have to hit every fire, and early wrong. Fire control turns out to be the defining aspect enough so that none of them get big.” The head of the of forest management and we’re still struggling with it. service was the number two guy in the northern Rockies during the Big Blowup and here was his chance to fight How have these original attitudes evolved over the it again. So he announced what was called the “10 am last century? Policy,” the idea that by 10 am the next morning every fire will be controlled, and if you fail, then you plan to All the questions we’re asking now were asked a hun- get control by 10 am the next day, and so on. As a strict dred years ago or more. Fire fighting is now consuming guide, it’s gone. But we still have traces of it in today’s fifty to sixty percent of the Forest Service budget. We fire-fighting approaches. thought it had been beaten down, but all we did is set up an ecological insurgency. The original intention behind Isn’t there more recognition now of the concept of let- the forest reserves was to rationalize usage, not to set ting nature take its course? A policy of containment, the land aside as pristine preserves. It was very much on in a sense? a par with attempts to straighten out rivers and kill pred- ators—the idea that we can apply scientific knowledge It is widely understood that fire has a natural role to play and make it work. in the landscape, and so that debate has essentially A major event in the development of policy atti- been over as a matter of policy for thirty to forty years. tudes happened in 1910. Pinchot had been fired in The idea that we ought to be looking at re-introducing January, and that summer his successor faced a huge fire in the right way is well established. The problem is outbreak of fires throughout the West, culminating in how to do it on the ground. It’s like re-introducing a lost what became known as the Big Blowup when on 20 species—in a sense you’ve got to have the right habitat and 21 August something like 3.25 million acres in the for it to occupy, and the fact is that the habitat has now northern Rockies burned in one gulp—possibly two- been dramatically altered. Fire is not behaving as it did thirds of that in thirty-six hours or so. This was the first in the past. Now we’ve got invasive species coming in time the Forest Service had tried to fight fire in a seri- that respond to fire differently. And then there’s climate ous way. They had 9,000 to 10,000 people out on the change. The past may no longer be a good prologue to fire line, and essentially all the standing military of the the future. American northwest, but they had no inkling what was coming. Seventy-eight firefighters were killed in dif- ferent incidents—it was enormously traumatic for the Forest Service. At the same time, the whole “light burning” con- troversy erupted in California, pitting people who supported burning as a useful stewardship practice against those who were trying to stamp fire out. But all these brave men had just died fighting fires in the Rock- ies, so the whole discussion got skewed for some time. The next four chiefs of the Forest Service were all per- sonally on the 1910 fire line, and it’s not until 1939 that that generation passed from the scene, and the agency would consider any other alternative other than fighting fire mano a mano. In the 1930s, the whole thing comes up again because drought had returned—it was the forest equivalent of the Dust Bowl, with big fires break- ing out everywhere—and the Forest Service convened their best minds in Missoula, Montana, and asked them what to do. During the debate, one group, including a veteran of 1910, said, “We ought to just get the hell out.
86 Ruins of Coeur d’Alene Hardware Warehouse in town of Wallace, Idaho, after the Big Blowup of 1910. Courtesy Special Collections & Archives, University of Idaho Library.
87 marks of assurance remains for Barbon’s one-man insurance shop in the janet connelly years immediately following the Great Fire, by 1680 he had opened what is considered to be the first modern Though organized firefighting can be traced back at fire insurance company, The Fire Office. An advertise- least to the vigiles, the watchmen who served as the ment published on May 12 of that year was placed “to public fire and police force of Imperial Rome, the prac- give notice that the persons that propose to insure tice of fighting fires remained a dangerously haphazard Houses from Fire do now attend at their office in Thread- affair in European cities well into the seventeenth cen- needle Street, against The Exchange, every day from 9 tury. The Great Fire of London in 1666—perhaps the to 12 in the morning and from 3 to 6 in the afternoon.” most infamous of all urban conflagrations, it destroyed There, individuals could pay a standardized rate to cover nearly ninety percent of the medieval City between the the costs of repairing a home “Burnt down, Demolished, Tower of London and Whitehall along the north bank of or otherwise damnified by reason of fire.” But because the Thames—threw the inadequacy of urban firefighting the best way to avoid having to pay off premiums was methods into stark relief. Attempts by the “Train-band,” to prevent fire damage in the first place, the Fire Office or the local London militia, to fight the fire with leather went one step further, forming and outfitting its own buckets and small hand-operated syringes were com- private fire brigade. plicated by the tinderbox of poorly constructed, largely Soon other insurance companies with their own wooden structures that crowded the area’s narrow private fire-fighting forces were founded as well, includ- streets and fatally compromised by the lack of any ing the Friendly Society (1683), the Hand-in-Hand Fire coordinated municipal plan for battling a blaze of such and Life Insurance Company (1696) and the Sun Fire magnitude. Office (1710). Dressed in the distinctive livery and regalia The enormous losses—even London’s great cathe- of their individual companies, these new breed of fire dral, St. Paul’s, succumbed; lead from its roof, wrote fighters were first and foremost charged with the pro- the diarist John Evelyn, was seen “mealting down the tection of their firm’s properties. To distinguish these, streetes in a streame”—led to new legislation in the they developed a system of affixing small metal plaques, form of the 1668 “Act for Preventing and Suppressing of or fire marks, bearing the symbol of the company to the Fires within the City of London and Liberties Thereof.” exterior of the insured structures, a necessity given the The twenty-eight point plan enjoined the citizens to tangle of unmarked houses that lined London’s many refrain from keeping certain flammable materials in their unnamed streets—for example, one insured home, homes and directed that the various companies of work- policy no. 4536 of the Fire Office, is described in com- men across the city select individuals from their ranks pany records as being “[s]cituate on the South Side of “to be ready upon all occasions of Fire to attend the Lord Three Cupp Court also Castle Court between Newgate Mayor and Sheriffs for quenching the flame.” But in prac- streete and Pater Noster Roe; now in the possession tice the ad hoc staffing provided for in the Act did little of John Mumriffe Coffeeman being the second Howse to improve the quality of fire control in the city. Instead Westward from the South East end of the said Court it was the creation of private fire brigades, charged not and distant from them to the middle of the Howse about by the city nor seconded from the guilds but employed Thirty foote.” by the first firms of the nascent fire insurance industry, The individual designs for the various firms—a that changed the character of fire service in London and phoenix for the Fire Office; five arrows entwined by a beyond. snake for the Friendly Society; a handshake beneath Fire insurance is generally considered to be the a crown for the Hand-in-Hand; a sixteen-rayed Sol for invention of Nicholas Barbon, the son of the preacher the Sun—were not only a locating aid to firemen, they and Cromwellian parliamentarian Praise-God Barebone were also a form of advertising, symbols of the often (who burdened his heir with the extraordinary name fierce free-enterprise competition between the various Unless-Christ-had-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been- companies. Indeed, stories circulated of fire brigades damned Barebone). Trained as a physician, Barbon standing by while buildings not bearing their firm’s fire turned to land speculation in London in the immedi- mark burned to the ground, though there were also ate aftermath of the fire, and seeing the potential for a many accounts of cooperation between the various fire- system by which individuals could protect their homes fighting units. By the end of the eighteenth century, the from future calamities, began offering a form of fire major fire companies of London had pooled resources, insurance as early as 1667. Although little evidence setting the stage for the formation in 1833 of the joint
88 1851 fire mark of the Associated Firemen’s Insurance Company The Green Tree fire mark, originally issued by the Mutual Assurance of Pittsburgh. In his left hand, the figure carries a wrench for Company of Philadelphia. tapping the fire plug beside him.
Late eighteenth-century fire mark of the Philadelphia Contribu- The fire mark of the Friendly Society, founded in 1684. The earliest tionship. Courtesy the Philadelphia Contributionship. Photo Will known fire mark, it featured arrows entwined by a snake, an element Brown. from the coat of arms of William Hale, one of the Society’s directors.
89 London Fire Engine Establishment, the private fore- rival emerged, when a group of the Contributionship’s runner of today’s public London Fire Brigade. members, angered by the firm’s demand that owners of By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the insured houses cut down all trees on their sidewalks, left growing cities of colonial America were similarly in need to form their own firm, the Mutual Assurance Company. of coordinated fire-fighting services. Unlike in England, In a small echo perhaps of the spirit of sharp-elbowed however, the earliest American companies were not competition that governed the emergence of the first fire created through private enterprise, but rather were marks, the upstart new concern chose for its identity an organized as volunteer groups which, because of the image that symbolized the point of contention between settlements’ relatively modest size and newness, were it and its well-established competitor: a green tree. governed by a greater sense of shared responsibility and community spirit. By the end of the seventeenth century, both Boston and New York had well-established sys- tems of community wardens charged with organizing public responses to fire and in 1736, Benjamin Franklin, who lamented “As to our Conduct in the Affair of Extin- guishing Fires, tho’ we do not want Hands of Good-Will, yet we seem to want Order and Method,” organized the Union Fire Company, the first volunteer fire-fighting force in Philadelphia, which was by then well on its way to being colonial America’s largest city. In this environ- ment, private insurance companies were not created to help fight fires, but instead to simply help rationalize the costs stemming from fire damage. The first recorded fire insurance firm in the US was the Friendly Society of Charleston, South Caro- lina, established in 1735. But it was short-lived, going bankrupt after a disastrous fire that burned over three hundred houses, along with stables, warehouse, and wharves, in November of 1740. Within a decade, however, Franklin had begun conceiving his own fire insurance firm and in 1752 he founded the Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire with a group of prominent local citizens. Like its English forerunners, the Contributionship also adopted the practice of affixing a fire mark—in its case, a sign depicting four hands clasped and crossed—to the structures it insured. But whereas in London the private nature of the fire-fighting companies meant that there was a potential disincentive to put out fires at build- ings insured by other firms, in the American system the various fire-fighting companies, as they became increas- ingly professionalized over the following decades, would vie (and occasionally even come to blows with each other) to extinguish a blaze and earn a resulting
payment from the insurer. Engraving by W. H. Tyne, ca. 1806, depicting a foreman and fire The Contributionship remained America’s only fire brigade members in the livery of the Sun Fire Office. insurance company through the years of the Revolution- ary War (though it did suspend its practice of affixing lead fire marks to insured houses during those years, melting down those on hand to be cast into bullets for the Continental Army). It wasn’t until 1784 that a
90 Sparks of Life my last live ember.”4 But from the sixteenth to the eigh- Simon Werrett teenth century, this vital flame was often equated with gunpowder. There was fire in the blood: not electric, but “I collected the instruments of life around me, that I pyrotechnic fire. might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that The ancients knew that air was necessary to both lay at my feet. … By the glimmer of the half-extinguished combustion and respiration. They combined both pro- light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; cesses in the term flamma vitalis, the “vital flame” or it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated “flame of life.” Aristotle identified the heart as the center its limbs.”1 Thus the magic moment in Mary Shelley’s of the body’s warmth, the place where “the soul is set Frankenstein (1818) when the creature is brought to aglow with fire.”5 By the sixteenth century, as European life by what is usually considered (though Shelley does science was being transformed through engagement not say so outright) the infusion of an electric “spark of with flourishing princely courts, the flamma vitalis being” into a constructed body. Shelley’s story emerged entered a complex moral economy of fire. Balthasare amid heated disputes among London physicians over Castiglione, in his Book of the Courtier (1528), identified the nature of life itself. Against the view of mechanists the appropriate behavior of courtiers with the manage- and materialists, who argued life could be reduced to ment of the fiery desires, passions, and appetites that the complex organization of physiology, vitalists assert- ignited in the body.6 Vannoccio Biringuccio described ed that some other force or spirit must be superadded the burning fire of love in Pirotechnia (1540) as “the fire to bodies to achieve living animation. Vitalist John that consumes without leaving ashes.”7 Alchemists, Abernethy thus declared, “The phaenomena of electrici- magicians, and proponents of the new mechanical and ty and of life correspond.”2 To support their case, vitalists experimental philosophies sought a deeper comprehen- often pointed to the “animal electricity” described by sion of these mysterious life-giving fires, and inquired Bolognese physician Luigi Galvani, who had seen the into the nature of combustion and the role of breathing. legs of a dissected frog twitch when touched with a Gunpowder, with its volatile ingredients of niter (also metal scalpel in the presence of electricity. Another known as saltpeter, and today as potassium nitrate: Italian, Alessandro Volta, rejected Galvani’s claim that a white, powdery mineral) and sulfur (a lemon-yellow such animal electricity was a distinctive form of electric- crystal), offered the principal model for comprehending ity, and simulated it by bringing different metals into these processes. contact in moisture, thus contributing to his invention of In late seventeenth-century England, a physician the “voltaic pile” or battery. Volta’s experiments troubled named John Mayow presented an argument that what vitalist accounts, but dramatic experiments supported he called “nitrous” and “sulphureous” particles could them. In London in 1803, and again in Scotland in 1818, account for a huge array of phenomena in the universe. experimenters charged the bodies of dead criminals Mayow, an Oxford graduate and Fellow of the Royal with electricity to witness astonishing convulsions and Society, claimed that “nitrous particles,” similar to those spasms, suggesting electricity was essential to life: making up mineral saltpeter, formed a part of the air “[E]very muscle in his countenance was simultaneously (previously thought to be an homogenous element). thrown into fearful action: fear, horror, despair, and When a body burned, its sulfurous parts reacted with ghastly smiles, united their expression in the murderer’s this “nitro-aerial spirit” in the air to give off heat. The face, surpassing far the wildest representations of a reaction used up nitrous particles in the air, and unless a Fuseli or a Kean.”3 fresh supply of air were available, eventually the burning That the electric “spark of life” figured prominently would cease when all the “aerial nitre” was exhausted. in debates over the nature of life in the late eighteenth Mayow conducted ingenious experiments to and early nineteenth centuries is well known. Less well extend this explanation to physiological processes. He known is the fact that prior to this period, gunpowder compared the processes of burning and breathing, argu- was often identified with the substances that were ing that nitrous particles in the air were also necessary necessary to life, if not as a vitalistic spirit, then as an to respiration. In order to demonstrate this hypothesis, essential element in the animation of the body. The idea he lowered into a vessel of water a bell jar containing a of a spark of life went back to ancient times, likening small animal suspended above the water inside a cage. living beings to the glowing embers of a fire. In the Old Initially, the water level was the same inside and outside Testament, for example, the wise woman of Tekoah the jar but as the animal breathed, the level of water rose begs for the life of her son, pleading “they will stamp out in the jar, indicating that air was being used up—about
91 Monk and nun dancing on a turning wheel. From anonymous manuscript titled Feuerwerksbuch, Strasbourg, ca. 1598.
one-fourteenth of the total volume.8 A similar effect was ideas, and others extended his “nitro-sulphureous” seen when camphor was burned inside the jar. If both theory to different aspects of physiology. a burning candle and an animal were placed in the jar, Another physician, the Oxford fellow Thomas the animal did not live long after the candle went out, Willis, proposed that nitro-sulphureous particles might because, reasoned Mayow, “the air enclosed in the glass explain the action of the muscles. Scholars knew that is in part deprived of its nitro-aerial particles by the burn- muscles moved through contraction, but did not under- ing … hence not only the lamp but also the animal soon stand how this contraction occurred. Willis proposed expires for want of nitro-aerial particles.” Mayow thus a “gunpowder” explanation. The act of breathing, he established for the first time that part of the air was used claimed, introduced aerial niter into the bloodstream, in respiration, and this was the same part consumed by where it combined with sulphureous particles to pro- fire.9 duce nitro-sulphureous particles. When arteries carried Mayow extended his “gunpowder” explanation of this nitro-sulphureous blood into the muscles, it met physiology to many other matters, earthly and cosmo- with “animal spirits,” or a nervous fluid, to produce an logical. He explained that nitrous and sulfurous particles “explosion”: the particles “suddenly intumified, they, as were “engaged in perpetual hostilities with each other” if inkindled, are exploded.” The nerve acted as an igni- and from their struggle arose “by turns all the changes tion mechanism, controlled from the brain, producing of things.”10 His work probably influenced the young “the fiery inkindling or the match … [to] blow up the Isaac Newton, whose alchemical studies included a Muscle.”11 Human movement thus depended on pyro- keen interest in vivifying spirits circulating through the technics in the blood. universe (a model for his later ideas of universal gravita- What were the sources for this gunpowder physi- tion). But Mayow was not alone in propounding these ology, this pyrotechnic vision of the flamma vitalis?
92 A Christian knight and a Turk in battle. From manuscript book by Friedrich Mayer, Bichssenmeistery auch/ von allerley schimpfflichen und ernst- / lichen Feuerwerkchen, Strasbourg, 1594.
Some historians suggest that sixteenth-century alche- together into an explosive mixture, provided a convinc- mists began the equation of living spirits with “aerial ing account for the flash of lightning and rumble of nitre,” a symbolic relationship that gradually became thunder, in addition to a host of exotic “fiery meteors” more physical and mechanical during the seventeenth illuminating early modern European skies.12 Already by century. The “philosopher’s saltpeter” thus appeared in the late Renaissance, scholars had associated bodily the work of Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius as a pyrotechnics with these heavenly explosions because symbol of growth, by analogy to the way niter grew out the human body was understood as a microcosm of of the earth like a mossy plant. At the beginning of the the larger world. Thus the French Paracelsan Joseph du seventeenth century, followers of the German physician Chesne, writing in the first decade of the seventeenth and alchemist Paracelsus equated the flamma vitalis century, explained thunder and lightning in terms of with a more material substance, an “aerial sulfur,” a “fyre nitro-sulfurous causes, and then claimed that “[t]his which nourisheth and quickeneth mans body.” Para- Niter-Sulphurus stinke is that which manifestly causeth celsus also described an aerial niter that nourished the in us fiery meteors… which bringeth forth innumerable muscles via the lungs, and his followers developed the passions and paines.”13 idea and applied it to other phenomena. There were also material sources for gunpowder Another important resource for the gunpowder physiology—most obviously gunpowder itself, which theory was meteorology, because many forms of Mayow and Willis would certainly have had in mind weather were thought to be caused by explosions in the sky analogous to the explosions of gunpowder. overleaf: C. H. Fritsche, Firework on the Elbe on the Occasion of the Visit of In the century before Benjamin Franklin showed that the King of Denmark, 6 June 1709, ca. 1709. King Frederik IV of Denmark’s initials— F.4.R.D.—can be seen on the fireworks castle in the middle of the lightning was electricity, aerial niter and sulfur, brought river. Courtesy Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.
93 94 95 Construction of a seated figure. From manuscript book by Johann I. von Nassau-Siegen titled Etliche schöne Tractaten von aller-/handt Feüer- wercken und deren Künstlichen Zubereitung, 1610.
96 when elaborating their theories of “aerial niter.” A Using “artificial fireworks,” gunners mimicked the natu- seventeenth-century gentleman might have come into ral fires of thunder, lightning, shooting stars, comets, contact with gunpowder in a number of ways. Ord- suns, and volcanoes. A typically marvel-filled display in nance, or great cannons, had become commonplace in Elizabethan England showed “[a] blaze of burning darts, European cities since their introduction in the thirteenth flying to and fro … streams and hails of fiery sparks, light- century, and theories of meteors and muscle action nings of wildfire on water and land, flight and shot of often analogized the powers of nature and the human thunderbolts: all with such continuous terror and vehe- body with these devastating modern technologies. mency, that the heavens thundered, the waters surged, Mayow’s assertion that niter and sulfur were “engaged the earth shook.”15 Fireworks imitated meteors as well, in perpetual hostilities with each other” reflected the so it is not surprising that contemporary accounts prevailing view that thunderstorms and lightning were explained the causes of natural meteors by analogy Nature’s version of an artillery battle in the heavens. to the effects of gunpowder. As the English physician Willis alternatively claimed some inspiration for his pyro- and author Thomas Browne put it in 1650, “Surely a technic view of muscle action from the French atomist main reason why the Ancients were so imperfect in the Pierre Gassendi, who supposed a powerful and compact doctrine of Meteors, was their ignorance of Gunpowder force was needed to move the “animal machine”: “Who and Fire-works, which best discover the causes of many can easily comprehend that small thing … within the thereof.”16 body of an Elephant … that it should be able to agitate Fireworks were also used to imitate the human such a bulk, and to cause it to perform a swift and har- body in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. monious dance? But indeed, the same fiery nature of the The earliest festive fireworks in Europe were shown soul, serves within the body by its own mobility, what a in theatrical settings, providing added drama to stage little flame of gunpowder does in a Cannon: it not only scenery in religious plays. Sparks crackled from papier- drives the bullet with so much force, but also drives back mâché doves, representing the Holy Spirit, made to the whole machine with so great strength.”14 descend along a string before audiences. Flames issued Equating the body with pyrotechnic artillery from the figures of angels winched up into the air, or reflected another common reference in sixteenth- and from the bodies of diabolical dragons and demons. As seventeenth-century science—fireworks. “Artificial fireworks developed into an autonomous genre of didac- Fireworks” and the gunpowder theory of meteors and tic entertainment, they continued to be shown around physiology grew up in Europe at about the same time. stage scenery. Fireworks exploded above temples, In the East, in India and China, gunpowder fireworks— arches, obelisks, and rocks made with painted canvas rockets, wheels, squibs, and bombs—had been used and wooden frame. Displays also included elaborate for festivals and warfare since their invention by the automata, or moving figures of humans, animals, giants, Chinese sometime in the eleventh or twelfth century. and monsters. The classical engineer Hero of Alexandria Arriving in Europe in the fourteenth century, fireworks had shown how to make moving figures of human and were used in battle, and occasionally in church dramas animal bodies using pipes filled with water, and Renais- and royal pageants. By the sixteenth century, fireworks sance grottos abounded with such devices, some of were a common element of courtly festivities across which inspired René Descartes’s startling proposal that Europe. Princes hired gunners and artisans to design man could be understood as a kind of machine. Gunners spectacular displays, whose dramatic effects of sparks, could now deploy pyrotechnics rather than water to noise, and smoke were intended to make a terrifying bring their artificial creatures to life. display of the prince’s power over the formidable ele- Around 1600, remarkable painted manuscript ment of fire. Fireworks were shown for royal weddings books were prepared for German princes, illustrating and birthdays, to celebrate military triumphs, or to see the many varied forms of human, animal, and mon- in the new year: crowds gathered on riverbanks and strous figures that his artificers were capable of making. city squares to watch the shows, which were often per- The illustrations testify not only to the skill of German formed over water to heighten their effect. artificers, but also to the playful and ingenious nature The purveyors of these entertainments viewed their of these early pyrotechnics. One showed the life-sized work as an imitation of the great fiery spectacles of the figures of a monk and a nun erected on a wooden cart- natural world, and for this reason they called their fire- wheel, which was made to spin by pulling on a rope works “artificial.” (Contemporary English has dropped around its circumference, sending the monk and nun this term, but the French still speak of feux d’artifice). into a whirling dance. Fires emanating from the monk
97 and nun’s bodies show these figures were filled with explosions.”20 Nevertheless, what might be called the fireworks. Other illustrations showed the manner of “gunpowder paradigm” had lasted for some two hun- filling bodies with pyrotechnics. Inside human figures dred years before electric theories replaced it beginning constructed of paper, cloth, and wood, a system of tubes in the mid-eighteenth century. Even then, fireworks con- was arranged to carry fireworks, which would erupt tinued to be associated with heated passions and sexual into gushing fountains of sparks when ignited. Two desire; the gunpowder theory, meanwhile, persisted battling warriors, a Christian knight and a fighting Turk, within the parameters of early electrical research, which could be attached to a long wooden beam or a firm rope similarly set out to provide a comprehensive explanation and made to fly towards one another by rocket propul- for diverse phenomena including meteors, lightning, sion. Different treatises showed how the figures of St. and human physiology. In the nineteenth century, the George and the Dragon could be made to do battle in a success of Shelley’s Frankenstein and new theories similar manner, and suggested a variety of pyrotechnic proposing an electric basis for nerve and muscle action devices to make bodies move with fireworks. The Eng- secured an electrical image for the “spark of life.” But for lish gunner John Babington, whose displays may have many years before, this spark was pyrotechnic. been witnessed by Mayow and Willis, described making human figures from basket-weavers’ rods, which were 1 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York & London: Norton, weighted with sand to float upright in water, where they 1996), p. 34. 2 John Abernethy, An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunt- moved around by the action of hidden rockets.17 er’s Theory of Life (London: Longman et al.,1814), p. 42. Pyrotechnic physiology, the thought that bodies 3 Andrew Ure, quoted in Iwan Rhys Morus, “Galvanic Cultures: Electricity and move and live by the action of gunpowder-like particles Life in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Endeavour, 1998, vol. 22, no. 1, p. 8. exploding in the blood and muscles, proliferated in the 4 Samuel, Book II, xiv, 7, in The Revised King James Bible, with the Apocrypha, (Oxford & Cambridge: Oxford University Press & Cambridge University Press, context of such animated fireworks displays. Mayow 1989), p. 270; John Wycliffe, The Holy Bible, made from the Latin Vulgate by cited mechanical bodies as an inspiration for his nitro- John Wycliffe and his Followers, eds. J. Forshall & Sir F. Madden (Oxford: Clar- sulphureous theories: “[W]e must suppose that the endon Press, 1850), rendered the translation “Thei sechen to quench my spark that is laft.” sulphureous and nitro-aerial particles … are fashioned by 5 Gad Freudenthal, Aristotle’s Theory of Material Substance: Heat and Pneuma, the supreme Artificer [i.e. God] with truly marvellous skill Form and Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 20. … as much skill … as in automata constructed with the 6 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (London: Penguin Classics, 1976), pp. 294, 328, 340–342. most accurate human art.”18 Fireworks, like fountains, 7 Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi, eds., The Pirotechnia of Vannoc- were “machines,” and as the body came to be viewed as cio Biringuccio (New York: Dover, 1990), p. 444. a machine so these mechanisms offered models for sci- 8 Mayow did not know carbon dioxide being breathed out by the animal was dissolving into the water. entific theories. As Willis wrote, science benefited from 9 John Mayow, Medico-Physical Works (Edinburgh: Alembic Club Reprints, “artificial things, from the Analogie of whose motions, 1907), p. 76. in an animated body, both regularly and irregularly 10 Ibid., p. 35. 11 Thomas Willis, “The Anatomy of the Brain,” in Dr. Willis’s Practice of Physick performed, most apt reasons are to be taken.”19 The (London: 1684), pp. 105, 111. new mechanical philosophy, equating the body with a 12 Royal Society fellow John Wallis, for example, explained how “Thunder and machine, also gave added urgency to the question of Lightning are so very like the Effects of fired Gun-Powder, that we may reason- ably judge them to proceed from the like Causes. … Thunder and Lightning were what animated the body: was life caused by the coming a kind of natural Gun-Powder, and [gunpowder] a kind of artificial Thunder and together of many mechanical parts, or was it something Lightning.” See John Wallis, “A Letter of Dr. Wallis to Dr. Sloane, concerning the else, a force added to make those parts move and come Generation of Hail, and of Thunder and Lightning, and the Effects thereof,” in Royal Society, Miscellanea curiosa, (London, 1705–1707), vol. 2, p. 317. to life? 13 Josephus Quersetanus, The Practise of Chymicall, and Hermeticall Physicke, Men of science in the age of Frankenstein were still for the Preservation of Health, trans. Thomas Tymme (London: 1605), Sig. Y. 4. debating these questions, but by the early nineteenth verso. 14 Thomas Willis, “Of Convulsive Diseases,” in Dr. Willis’s Practice of Physick, op. century the causes of muscle motion and animation cit., p. 2. in bodies were no longer equated with gunpowder 15 Robert Laneham, A letter whearin part of the entertainment vntoo the but with electricity. Critics hastened the decline of the Queenz Maiesty at Killingwoorth Castl in Warwik sheer in this soomerz progress 1575 is signified (London: 1575), p. 16. (Note: the spelling has been rendered in gunpowder theory by arguing that explosions in the modern English). body would be too uncontrollable to account for human 16 Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica (London: 1672), p. 93. movements. “What dominion could the Soul have over 17 John Babington, Pyrotechnia (London: 1635), pp. 64–66. 18 John Mayow, Medico-Physical Works, op. cit., p. 120. the Muscles … if they were agitated every moment by 19 Thomas Willis, “Of Convulsive Diseases,” in Dr. Willis’s Practice of Physick, op. Squibbs or Crackers breaking within them? Certainly cit., p. 2. she could never moderate such violent and tumultuose 20 Walter Charlton, Three Anatomic Lectures (London: 1683), p. 99.
98 The Rational Hearth fluid or breath. He called this latter form of heat “tran- Frumento Combusti spiration,” and outfitted his new fireplaces to breathe this aspect of fire gently into the room: an elaborate In his 1637 treatise on optics, La Dioptrique, the French system of vents and ducts both fed the fire from below philosopher, mathematician, and cosmologist René and circulated external air through a sequence of baffles Descartes concerned himself at some length with around the firebox; once warmed, this heat-breath could the problem of the “anaclastic,” a general term for the blow out from mouths in the hearth stone. geometry of lenses and mirrors capable of effecting (at Gauger touted his improved fire-mechanisms as least in theory) a perfect focal point. His innovative solu- something more than the rational taming of the ancient tions, which involved elaborate constructions of conic violence of flame, though they were certainly that. They sections (and elegant proofs of some thorny theorems), were also, however, therapeutic devices, ideally crafted were not only essential to the development of tele- to improve health, sanitation, and domestic welfare. The scopes and microscopes for more than a century, they ill, so in need of warmth, were gravely endangered by also embodied the spirit of the new sciences—those shutting themselves off from fresh air in sealed rooms, mechanico-mathematical reconstructions of nature that as were their attendants, who poisoned themselves birthed modernity in the seventeenth century. slowly by re-breathing the exhalations of their wards. Steeped in Latinity, Descartes would have been Worse still, the sick tended to bundle themselves well aware that the word focus secreted in its etymology against the pervasive drafts of poorly heated rooms, the primordial centering point of civilized life: the hearth but this swaddling enclosed and concentrated their (Lat. focus). It might have surprised him, however, had maladies. With Gauger’s new devices, rooms could be he lived long enough to see his optical methods for cal- continuously heated by a gentle, adjustable stream of culating foci mobilized for the purposes of “hearth-craft” fresh, warm air, permitting bodies to be exposed, com- by an idiosyncratic Cartesian disciple, the Parisian jurist fortable, and together—all without risk of infection or and tinkerer Nicolas Gauger, whose Méchanique du Feu inconvenience of discomfort. The benefits would fall of 1714 is a most unlikely hybrid: a masonry handbook above all, of course, to women, whose delicate skin, that keeps lapsing into a metaphysical treatise on ther- sensitive eyes, and vulnerable complexions would be modynamics and domesticity. guarded from the insults of smoke and flame, draft and Much as the English “practical Newtonians” of chill. Once understood as the essential tenders of the the eighteenth century churned out reams of dodgy hearth, women were, by 1714, well on their way to being pamphlets that applied their hero’s law of gravitation re-imagined as hothouse flowers. to everything from animal husbandry to cardsharp- Having completed, in 1927, an exacting technical ing, “practical Cartesians” like Gauger, inspired by the history of the science of heat propagation, the anti- ésprit géometrique, took up the ancient nuisances of positivist postmaster-turned-epistemologist Gaston the smoky fireplace and the icy bedchamber, confident Bachelard turned to the project that would become, a that Descartes’s analytical tools could provide heat, not decade later, La Psychanalyse du Feu, a defiantly Jung- merely light. ian effort to re-ground scientific objectivity on the poetic Reasoning that heat traveled in rays that obeyed discernments of our deep psychology. Writing there of the laws of optics, Gauger advocated parabolic fire- what he called “The Prometheus Complex,” Bachelard places that would, in his analysis, optimally redirect recalled himself as an invalid, and his father as the pri- emergent heat-rays out into the room. Standardized mordial focarius, the first stoker, the mythic fire-man: log-lengths were essential to his fire-science, since the proper construction of a given hearth required that the When I was sick my father would light a fire in my room. geometrical focus and directrix of its parabolic sides He would take great care in arranging the logs over the be calculated with respect to the specific size of fire it kindling chips and in slipping the handful of shavings would house. between the andirons. To fail to light the fire would But does fire actually behave like light? Without ref- have been incredibly stupid. I could not imagine my erence to an energistic conception of heat (which would father having any equal in the performance of this func- only arise in the nineteenth century, in connection with tion, which he would never allow anyone else to carry studies of the efficiency of steam engines), Gauger was out. Indeed, I do not think I lit a fire myself before I was left to muse on the slippery nature of warmth, which eighteen years old. It was only when I lived alone that I sometimes acted like a ray, but at others like a pervasive became master of my own hearth.
99 Rational hearth-craft, ca. 1714: a construction diagram from Nicolas Gauger’s Méchanique du Feu, illustrating the proper configuration of the firebox and ventilation systems for a scientifically optimized fireplace. Note the rounded back corners, which are actually parabolic arcs, calculated with respect to the length of the log to be burned, and intended to maximize the reflection of heat rays back into the room. The entablature, fireback, and hearth floor all admit the passage of ducts for the circulation of regulated flows of air—some to feed the fire, some to transfer its warmth.
100 Controlling smoke and heat: a sequence of Gauger’s illustrations showing different arrangements of baffles and associated “thermodynamic” pat- terns. At right, a full cross-section of a flue and chimney. Dotted straight lines like EG and eg are geometrical constructions intended to guide build- ers and explain the behavior of the fire. Gauger, like other “smoke doctors,” was particularly concerned about downdrafts (see his annotations at top right).
101 For Bachelard, the Prometheus Complex was, as he put it, “the Oedipus Complex of the life of the intellect,” under which rubric he proposed to gather all those “tendencies which impel us to know as much as our fathers, more than our fathers.” Here the basic drama of civilization becomes a kind of competitive “quest for fire” in which knowledge is hearth-craft, and hearth-craft is, as it happens, patriarchy. It is this last move that surprises. Patriarchy? But what has become of Vesta, the archaic keeper of the Olympian fire? Or, to put it a different way, what has become of the sexual drama that lies at the heart of the original Oedipus Complex? In transferring that drama to the realm of the (masculine) intellect, Bachelard sublimed it, burning off the taint of eros, erasing the oozy mess of woman-love, and reinventing the domestic drama as a tidy game of boys against boys. How did women come, like sick boys, to sit by the fire, instead of tending it? This, in the end, is perhaps the real story of La Méchanique du Feu. After all, what could be a better answer to this question than the chronicle of the rise of domestic comfort, the mechano-architectural evolution of bourgeois domesticity? And Gauger, to be sure, merits more than a footnote in that history. But is this enough? What if we were instead to follow Bach- elard, and sift beneath that plodding (if worthy) story of centralized heat and running water, slipping our fingers down into the first darkness to feel for the mind that has, as yet, no focus. In other words, what if we were to recover a psychoanalysis of domestic fire? We would discover, it seems, what we might call the “Vestal Com- plex,” under which designation can be gathered all those tendencies that impel men to replace “their” women with machines. The mechanical hearth, by these lights, becomes the prehistory of what Duchamp would eventu- ally call the machine célibataire. Which leads back, of course, to Descartes, who figured himself at the scene of his most profound discov- ery—at the moment of his regrounding of the Western philosophical tradition—as a focarius, attending on his over-heated stove in a small and airless room. Only the Vestal Complex can explain the irrepressible rumor that has dogged his memory ever since: that using his new mechanical philosophy, he fashioned a refined automaton-daughter, Francine, and took her as his android-lover. Here was a solution to the anaclastic of desire; here we find a suitable keeper of the Cartesian flame. Picture her sitting comfortably beside the Gauger hearths reproduced in these pages.
The author would like to thank Daniel Zauber for his contributions to this essay.
102 domesday After Expo’67, the US government donated its pavil- julia wolcott ion to the City of Montreal, which took official possession on 31 January 1968. Despite its public appeal, however, Commissioned to build the US Pavilion at Expo ‘67 in Fuller’s structure was not suited to the Canadian climate. Montreal, Buckminster Fuller created his most dramatic It was impossible to heat and the wide seasonal varia- structure to date. While his previous geodesic domes tions in temperature caused the metal tubes and acrylic had been hemispherical, the Montreal dome was a outer panels to expand and contract considerably. Leaks three-quarter sphere that rose to over two hundred were common. On 20 May 1976, a welding operation feet. Its trellis-like frame was made of welded steel during the maintenance of the outer covering caused a tubes and was covered by a transparent skin of acrylic fire that destroyed the entire acrylic shell in half an hour. panels. Despite its enormous size, its transparency The tubular frame remained intact and survives to this made it seem like an oversized dandelion. Visitors were day; the acrylic skin was never replaced, despite Fuller’s enthralled by it, but another kind of love was also in play. proposal for how it might be done. Fuller dedicated the dome to his wife in honor of their fiftieth anniversary, naming it “Anne’s Taj Mahal.”
“Anne’s Taj Mahal” on fire, Montreal, 20 May 1976. Courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.
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