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Click on the ? for answers. All PhenomeNonsense Puzzle Cards © Lea Redmond.

Robert Desnos and Kiki de Montparnasse, still from Man Ray’s L’étoile de mer, 1928. Watch the whole film here.

‘There Is a Star in the Sea’
(Pliny, Natural History, Book IX)

by Dan Chiasson

‘There is a star in the sea, and it burns up everything
it touches. Though men who walk on land deny it,

one night a star fell from the sky and landed in the sea.
It had the good sense to become a fish, but the wit

to keep its shape. It sleeps on the bottom of the sea,
but one day I’ll play a trick on it - I’ll turn the ocean

upside down! Then it will shine again, coral bluff,
rusted galleon in the night sky, and I will pray to it.’

From Dan Chiasson, Natural History and Other Poems.

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.

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.

The common cold (rhinovirus).

Ear ache (S. pneumoniae).

The flu (orthomyxovirus).

Cough (bordetella pertussis).

Sore throat (streptococcus).

PLUS:

Brain cell (neuron).

Writing and thinking about play (Huizinga, Caillois) and Surrealist games and trick objects related to nineteenth-century scientific toys while fighting off a cold.

All toys from GIANTmicrobes.com.

C.R. Cockerell (1788-1863), The Professor’s Dream, 1848, in the Royal Academy of Arts collection.

Remember Amélie, waitress in Montmartre and expert of life’s little pleasures? There’s one scene where she’s running her fingers through a sackful of grain, and throughout the film, she keeps picking up flat, smooth stones and pebbles for stone-skimming on Canal Saint-Martin.

Do you also catch yourself having Amélie-esque habits, such as ceaselessly running your fingers through the tassels of your blue scarf, or feeling the urge to touch this whenever you see a reproduction of it? Surrealist objects are disturbing, it’s true, but I’d nevertheless like to stroke the fur-lined tea cup. Breton said of the objects in Apollinaire’s studio, “ils prennent le goût à rebrousse-poil.” I like this expression, for it captures the slight uneasiness provoked by the materiality of some objects, a feeling of both attraction and repulsion resulting in a peculiar kind of pleasure, giving you the heebie-jeebies. Imagine stroking a cat’s fur against the grain; it’ll make her purr and hiss at the same time.

Do you also often feel the impulse to touch and hug people, but are too afraid to break into their comfort zone - not to mention the sensitive issue of cultural differences? Do you also sometimes deplore the disappearance of letters? It’s hard to imagine life without e-mails and the Internet, but I can’t help thinking how wonderful it would be to receive more letters like the one Mimi Parent sent to André and Élisa Breton in the summer of 1959. Attaching two dragonfly wings to the initial of “amis” - what a beautiful, touching image of summer, playfulness, lightness and friendship.

Distorting mirror (’miroir de sorcière’) from André Breton’s collection of art, ethnographic/oceanic objects, objets trouvés, natural objects and objects of curiosity;

in Breton’s studio at 42, rue Fontaine in Paris in the 1930s (the round object right above his head…);

and as part of the ‘Breton Wall’ at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 2005 (see right lower section of the picture).

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.

“Out of the strong came forth sweetness”
Swarm of bees generated from a lion’s carcass on a tin of Lyle’s Golden Syrup.

What I remember most vividly from Matthew Cobb’s lecture Life Before Linnaeus, given last May at the Manchester Museum to accompany the exhibition A Place for Everything celebrating the Linnaeus Tercentenary, are the examples of spontaneous generation he presented - mice generated from grain, lion carcasses giving birth to bees, and the like (he actually mentioned the wonderfully out-of-date Golden Syrup tins with their biblical symbolism as well).

I came across his work again when reading his article on seventeenth-century Dutch naturalist and microscopist Jan Swammerdam in the latest issue of TLS last weekend, and I think I can already predict what will stay stuck in my mind this time: Swammerdam was the first to demonstrate that movement - the contraction of muscles - was not, as Descartes had claimed, caused by the influx of animal spirits into the muscle.

More on Swammerdam’s experiment (which consisted of placing a frog heart in an air-tight syringe) here.