Bananas are red.

I’d seen The Blue Planet before I moved to England and was amazed by it, but since my friend A. made me aware of Sir David Attenborough, I’ve been the most faithful fan. I haven’t missed a single episode of Planet Earth, Life in the Undergrowth and Life in Cold Blood.

To watch him kneel or lie in the sand, windswept, donning khakis and a light blue shirt, whispering and pointing to explain to us even the creepiest, crawliest, slimiest creatures with genuine enthusiasm and passion, is simply awe-inspiring. He reminds me that ‘curiosity’, etymologically, is associated with ‘care’.

For two weeks in autumn, I purchased every issue of the Daily Mail (with a slight feeling of guilt, because it’s an appalling newspaper) - and if I couldn’t, for whichever reason, I terrorised E. to do so - to collect single episodes of all the Attenborough series on DVD.

And then, last Wednesday, I had the opportunity, between two meetings in London, to squeeze in a visit to The Queen’s Gallery next to Buckingham Palace to see Amazing Rare Things, the current exhibition of natural drawings from the Royal Collection co-curated by Sir David. Get past the airport-style security and don’t be unnerved by the muffled, repressed atmosphere (I had to sneeze at some point and felt like a terrorist) - and it is quite amazing.

The deep, saturated, velvety red of Maria Sibylla Merian’s Branch of banana tree (Musa paradisiaca) with caterpillar and moth (Automeris liberia), c. 1701-5, still haunts me.

Prepare to be puzzled.

Lea must have heard my recent call for more letters, since this morning, with a big thump, her package arrived, revealing some fantastic curious little things. Lea is an artist from Berkeley, California, who has been sharing her ideas on curiosity, wonder and the everyday with me after stumbling upon this blog. She sent a pencil poem and two sets of her gorgeous PhenomeNonsense Puzzle Cards, which consist of drawings of hybrid creatures and objects on the front and the matching words on the back. They are combinations of two words or phrases that have overlapping sounds, such as, in the first example below,

computer + turtle = computurtle.

Click here for answers to the other ones. And hey. Don’t cheat.

computurtle

 ?

 ?

 ?

 ?

More interested in ideas than in young women…

Roger Caillois (1913-1978), before pursuing a non-academic career in international bureaucracy with UNESCO and being appointed to the Académie Française near the end of his life, was briefly involved with the Surrealist movement around Breton in the early 1930s (later, in 1937, he co-founded the College of Sociology with “dissident” Surrealists Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille).

His eventual break with the group revolved around the supposed incompatibility of science and poetry (with Caillois opting for the former and Breton defending the latter), summarised by the legendary episode of the Mexican jumping bean. One night, during one of their reunions at a café in Paris, Breton refused to slice a jumping bean open that one of the Surrealists had brought to the meeting, because he was afraid that finding a larva inside would irretrievably destroy its mystery. Caillois, on the other hand, promoting a form of the marvellous that does not fear knowledge but thrives on it, had already asked the waiter for a knife.

Much later, in 1973, when recalling his friendship with Surrealist poet Paul Éluard, Caillois reveals his discomfort with the Surrealists’ “indulgent” lifestyle, providing some intriguing insights into their libertine mindset: he recounts, for instance, that Éluard often reproached him “in a friendly way” for being more interested in ideas than in young women. Describing the legendary café meetings on Place Blanche in Paris, he writes:

They had their mandatory rituals. Whenever a woman arrived, Breton would get up and kiss her hand. Even the color of the drinks was ritualized: in winter it was tangerine-curaçao and in summer, pernod. To change color was almost a sign of opposition, as Monnerot pointed out to me.

Quote from Claudine Frank (ed.), The Edge of Surrealism. A Roger Caillois Reader.

Insect Poetics

Studio Ghibli’s bizarre but lovely Japanese anime Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is set in a world 1000 years after the collapse of the ecosystem. Armies of gigantic insects inhabit a toxic forest and sort of reflect how the characters treat the earth: their eyes red with rage, they attack when harm is being caused, but they immediately calm down around the gentle, peace-loving Nausicaä.

Anyway, watching the movie reminded me of recommending and linking to the following recent publications on insects in relation to visual culture and science:

• Cabinet Magazine’s special issue on insects (‘Swarming Season’ Spring 2007)
• Antennae’s two special issues on insect poetics (Autumn 2007/1 and 2)
• Insect Poetics, edited by Eric C. Brown

The articles, essays and interviews, which cover several fields and centuries, largely focus on the insect as “the other” – the monstrous, invasive, menacing, disintegrating, alienating creature that, due to its boundary-threatening and boundary-crossing nature, forces us to reconsider issues of identity and order; but they also dwell on the insect’s mysterious attraction and beauty.

It’s pretty cool.

An act of Buddhist kindness.

Shijo Surimono with fireflies and grasses. Japanese woodcut.

As an act of Buddhist kindness, Basho once ingeniously reversed a cruel haiku made up by his witty disciple.

Kikaku had said: ‘A red firefly / Tear off its wings / A pepper.’

Basho substituted: ‘A pepper / Give it wings / A red firefly.’

From André Breton, Ascendant Sign, 1942.

I dream of a new age of curiosity.

Rosamond Purcell, Goliath beetles.
From Illuminations: A Bestiary, 1986.

Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes “care”; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental. I dream of a new age of curiosity.

Michel Foucault in an interview with Christian Delacampagne, Le Monde, 6./7. April 1980.

Living Jewels

From Poul Beckmann, Living Jewels.

The Marvel of Minuteness

“Billet d’autobus roulé “symétriquement”, forme très rare d’automatisme morphologique avec germes évidents de stéréotypie.”
Brassaï, detail from Sculptures Involontaires, 1933.

I’m thinking about changes in scale as an instance of the marvellous at the moment, so here are some (patchy) notes:

• In 1936, the English collector and art patron Edward James wrote an essay entitled The Marvel of Minuteness, published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure. He analyses portraits by Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Holbein, focussing on their attention to detail, their “almost maniac precision,” which, according to James, gives them a surreal, hallucinatory quality. The opening paragraph is worth quoting:
  

  [...] there is something miraculous about minuteness and precise intricacy, something mysterious about a spider-like wealth of detail, something awe-inspiring which overwhelms us with the simultaneous conception of our own greatness and our own littleness. So felt King David of Israel when he looked at the stars, and so again do we when we lie in the long grass as children to observe the insect world where, even before hearing of Fabre, we know with intrigue and presentiment how intensely complex must be the lives and customs of that diversity of peoples, from the ants and ladybirds down to those curious flies and rare beetles whose names even adult persons seem to be specialists to have learned.

  (This might finally explain my fascination with Sir David Attenboroughs 2005 BBC natural history series Life in the Undergrowth, exploring the lives of invertebrates. Of all his programmes, it’s by far my favourite…)

• Two weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit in a book shop in Toronto. I had come across it earlier this year and made a vague mental note to read it some time soon, but I think what eventually convinced me to buy it was its small size, its compactness.
• Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century collectors of curiosities were attracted to minuscule objects: see for example the famous cherry stone in Dresden’s Green Vault which, when viewed through a magnifying glass, reveals 185 carved faces.
• There’s also a 11 x 13 mm fruit stone on display at David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology: “the front is carved with a Flemish landscape in which is seated a bearded man wearing a biretta, a long tunic of classical character, and thick-soled shoes; he is seated with a viol held between his knees while he tunes one of the strings. In the distance are representations of animals, including a lion, a bear, an elephant ridden by a monkey, a boar, a dog, a donkey, a stag, a camel, a horse, a bull, a bird, a goat a lynx, and a group of rabbits: the latter under a branch on which sit an owl, another bird and a squirrel. On the back is shown an unusually grim Crucifixion, with a soldier on horseback, Longinus piercing Christ’s side with a lance, the cross is surmounted by a titulus inscribed INRI.” (see MJT website)
• The Surrealists’ interest in Karl Blossfeldt photographs of magnified plant parts.
• Went to see an interesting little exhibition at Cube Manchester with R. last week: The World is my Imagination. Media-Model-Miniature. It’s about shifts in scale and “model worlds which replicate physical and imaginary spaces, while reflecting existences and habitats, personal memories and longing.”
• See Susan Stewart’s fabulous book On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection.

Spiders and Pseudoscorpions

Mark Dion, Systema Metropolis, 2007, Species Gallery (from the Handbook accompanying the exhibition currently on view at the Natural History Museum, London).

The giant spider that dwells in our gas meter made me think of how many arthropods must live in the house without me ever noticing them. The fact that my eight-legged housemate has never been witnessed making her way upstairs to my bedroom - remember that the average person swallows and inhales up to eight spiders during their lifetime while asleep - seems infinitely reassuring to me, so I just let her fiddle about and watch her scare British Gas members of staff.

American artist Mark Dion, for his latest exhibition commemorating the Linnaeus tercentenary, collected insect specimens at four different sites in London with a team of Museum staff, identified them, classified them and put them on display in the gallery.

Among the species they found was the reddish two-eyed chelifer (roncus lubricus), a pseudoscorpion which is only 2-3.5 mm long but still highly venomous. Although I’m aware that a creature that size won’t do me any harm, I find the idea that I live with scorpions slightly disturbing. But isn’t it also kind of cool? Pseudoscorpions?

Dion believes that “[t]he objective of the best art and science is not to strip nature of wonder but to enhance it.” Without any doubt, he can pride himself of having saved a Mancunian spider’s life, for had I not seen the exhibition, the aspect of wonder and poetry in a spider that is no pseudospider would have been completely lost on me.

Out of a whim.

Hubert Duprat, Phrygane, c. 1994.

A little bit of fin-de-siècle decadence today, since, reading Umberto Eco’s History of Beauty last week, I came across a passage of Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884) that reminded me of the jewel-encrusted cockroach and French artist Hubert Duprat’s manipulated caddis fly larvae (more about them some time soon). Des Esseintes, Huysmans’s eccentric protagonist, buys a turtle, and to match it with an opulent carpet, he has its shell glazed over with gold and encrusted with gemstones in the shape of a flower.

Illustration by Arthur Zaidenberg.

This turtle was the result of a whim that had suddenly occurred to Des Esseintes a short while before his leaving Paris. Looking one day at an Oriental carpet with iridescent gleams of colour and following with his eyes the silvery glints that ran across the web of the wool, the colours of which were an opaque yellow and a plum violet, he had told himself: it would be a fine experiment to set on this carpet something that would move about and the deep tint of which would bring out and accentuate these tones.

Possessed by this idea, he had strolled at random through the streets; had arrived at the Palais-Royal, and in front of Chevet’s window had suddenly struck his forehead,–a huge turtle met his eyes there, in a tank. He had bought the creature; then, once it was left to itself on the carpet, he had sat down before it and gazed long at it, screwing up his eyes.

[...] he resolved to have his turtle’s back glazed over with gold.

Once back from the jeweller’s who had taken it in to board at his workshop, the beast blazed like a sun in splendour, throwing its flashing rays over the carpet, whose tones were weak and cold in comparison, looking for all the world like a Visigothic targe inlaid with shining scales, the handiwork of some Barbaric craftsman.

At first, Des Esseintes was enchanted with the effect; but he soon came to the conclusion that this gigantic jewel was only half finished, that it would not be really complete and perfect till it was incrusted with precious stones.

[...]

Des Esseintes stood gazing at the turtle where it lay huddled together in one corner of the dining-room, flashing fire in the dim half light.

He felt perfectly happy; his eyes were intoxicated with the splendours of these flowers flashing in jewelled flames against a golden background. Then, contrary to his use, he had an appetite and was dipping his slices of toast spread with super-excellent butter in a cup of tea, an impeccable blend of Si-a-Fayoun, Mo-you-tann and Khansky,–yellow teas, imported from China into Russia by special caravans.

Breton, in one of his many lists in which he constantly forms and reforms the surrealist canon, calls Huysmans a surrealist avant-la-lettre.