In Which We Notice Something Odd About The Whole Scene

The Houseguest

by ISABELLA YEAGER

It wasn’t long after Ian died of an asthma attack that he started hanging around my apartment, asking me if I could check out books from the library for him and complaining that he was hungry and bored. It was fine at first but when he realized during the introduction to Swann’s Way that he couldn’t turn pages by himself I realized I’d taken on something I was maybe too busy to deal with at the time. We got him working on being more self-sufficient and he would sit in the windowsill in the evenings and do solidity exercises. Eventually though he began to have sneezing fits that he attributed to exposure to dust caught in sunrays between the hours of four and six p.m., so he started spending time before dinner lying under the bed in the dark.

I found out he was back when I woke up one night with what I thought was a bad case of dead hand. My arm was flung out over the edge of the bed and felt cold and numb and tingly. What I didn’t expect was that when I wiggled my fingers around to wake it up and blinked into the dark room I’d see Ian standing there, orblike eyes and a stomach full of my forearm. Later he said he’d positioned himself in a ray of moonlight so that I was more likely to see him.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked. We both thought this was stupid. He asked me if I had any milk in the house. I reminded him that I was lactose intolerant and he said he was sorry to have forgotten. I said it was fine.

After he died Ian’s parents had moved to Minneapolis but no one had told him. He wasn’t sure whether he should write to them or call and even less sure that he was prepared to travel. I told him he could stay at my place for as long as he wanted and then it was just like old times for a while, since Ian had spent most of his time at my apartment in life and hadn’t been very social then either. He had always liked to read and was neat as a pin. These things were the same.

During the days after he’d relearned how to make a physical impression on the world around him, Ian worked on some experiments he was doing in physics and sent me to the library with a list of books on light and the cosmos that he wanted for his work. He didn’t really explain what he was aiming at but some nice things came of it. One of his favorite tricks was to spread his body thinly over the entirety of the kitchen window, which faced east and got great light in the morning, and make refractions on the wall opposite – colors I haven’t seen anywhere else. Another time I found him compressed neatly into a Ball jar with the lid sealed. We didn’t talk about it.

He took to gardening a few weeks into his stay and I picked up a copy of Audel’s Gardeners and Growers Guide to Beautiful Flowers – Successful Cultivation, Propagation. He noticed a week or so in that he had quite the green thumb and would stand for hours, sometimes overnight, with his fingers plunged into the soil of newly seeded pots. Within a day we’d observe life pushing up through the dirt, sometimes moving so quick we could see it happen, rushing up and out and curving hungrily towards Ian’s body. Since he had other projects to attend to, Ian worked to wean them off whatever they liked about him by standing with them in the sun until they leaned towards the windows instead.

We actually talked a lot about what was going on –  not at first, but after Ian had stumbled on a collection of English ghost stories I’d carelessly left out. He said he’d been working on moving between gliding and walking at will around my bedroom and had tripped over the book because he was very focused. He fell against the radiator and waited for several days for a bruise to appear. None did and he was vocally disappointed.

He wanted to talk a lot all of a sudden about what it was like to be a ghost and in particular about the politics of horror writers trying to express things they hardly could have had personal experience with. He told me that one of the worst things about being a ghost that he’d noticed so far was an inconsistency with human beings’  concept of time – the hours I spent out of the house, he confessed, felt like days, sometimes weeks, to him, and he got pretty lonely. I asked him if this was why he was able to get so much done in what seemed like such short periods and he said he wasn’t sure but probably. He wrote furiously in a half-filled notepad he found in one of my drawers and asked to use. He was protective of his writing and sometimes tried to shield the page with his body when I’d come into the room. I’d look away to avoid reminding him of his transparency. Once though when he had taken a rare foray out onto the fire escape I snooped, fearing that all this research into dark subjects might cause his mental state to take some sinister turn.

It was mostly lists. Even more books he hoped to read, about the supernatural and spiritual; a string of activities he thought might be enjoyable to try around the house, involving food coloring, filling the bathroom with steam, and miming, to name a few. He had written down some things I figured were dreams, which answered a residual question of mine about whether what he was doing at night was anything like sleeping as I knew it, and in the back, a chart of things to watch out for. When he vanished once for two days, I searched this list frantically for clues, and finally positioned myself in the bathroom between the two mirrors in there that created one of those endless hallways of reflection. I waited for him and he finally came out, looking rough. He went straight into my bedroom and I took one of the mirrors off the wall and covered it with a towel.

Christmas was coming up and Ian figured out a way to make long-lasting bubble garlands out of his own spit. One night he put on Bing Crosby and strung these up around the doorframes. They looked really nice and I asked him to make a few more that I could send to my mother and sister as gifts. When my mother called later on to thank me for the weird present Ian picked up the phone by accident and after they had chatted for a few minutes passed it to me. He looked worried and when my mother asked who that had been on the other end she added, “and why did he sound so bizarre there right before he got off? It’s like he forgot how to talk.”

I didn’t see Ian for the rest of the night and the next day. I knew he was in my room but I kept busy and didn’t bother him. When he emerged he said he really needed to prioritize some things because he had a bad feeling. I didn’t really know what he meant –  I figured things could either get no worse than being dead or drastically so in ways I couldn’t fathom but either way, that’s all he wanted to say on the subject and I didn’t push it.

Maybe the only time I was afraid of Ian was a few nights after the day he decided to reprioritize his time. I was sleeping and got hot and woke up thinking I’d go get some water and Ian had pulled a chair up to the bottom of my bed and was sitting there crying, I could hear him crying – only his face was longer than usual and there was just blackness where his eyes should have been. I heard him say that he couldn’t see anything and then he asked me if there was a problem with the pipes or the boiler in the basement or something, that there was a lot of clanging and loud noise while he was trying to sleep. I didn’t say anything to him and he stood up from the chair and was taller than I thought I remembered him being. He was sniffing loudly like a little kid but his eyes stayed black and too big and when he put his hands up to wipe them the hands sort of sunk into the blackness up to the wrists and didn’t come back out. I shut my eyes and lay there until I guess I went back to sleep. The next day he looked normal but wasn’t hungry and for the first time I noticed something jilting in his speech that reminded me of what my mother had said on the phone about him forgetting how to talk. I had to go out and left him with some hot tea, which he liked to smell, and sitting staring out the kitchen window into the sun. The spots where light passed through his body left the crystals, those indescribable colors, scattered all over the floor.

It was mid-January and he was curious about the snow so I scraped a bit up and brought it inside for him to do some experiments on. He melted the chunk of it pretty quick by passing through it happily several times, swallowing it and reaching into his stomach to pull it back out with his hand; but the feeling of the snow in his belly bothered him a lot and he put the rest of the snow into a cup and told me he couldn’t be around anything cold right now, that he hated the cold and that it had been a stupid idea. He wrapped himself in blankets and sat in the living room with his eyes shut. Later on he threw up on the floor like a cat and it looked like icicles and smelled tart. He tried to apologize but couldn’t seem to find the words and started to cry again so not knowing what else to do I brought him a book on fishing and also the copy of Flatland I was reading for a class and they seemed to soothe him.

In the last few weeks of his stay he needed to be by a heat source at all times. When the radiators weren’t enough I turned the oven on for him and he’d pull up a chair and sit by it for hours. I couldn’t be in there because it was so dry I’d get nosebleeds but he liked it. In the last week he complained of poor eyesight and that it was exhausting for him to turn pages and so I got him some books on tape, which he enjoyed a lot, among them Dante’s Purgatorio and Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. They were both homemade tapes I’d found at the university, recorded by students maybe to make multitasking easier while cramming for exams, and then dropped off in a bin near the librarian’s office.

After a while Ian stopped listening to the Dante and just asked that I put Calvino’s chapter on visibility on repeat for him. He had grown to love the smell of lapsang souchang tea and I made a pot for him to sit near while he listened. He lost a lot of his vocabulary or rather, seemed unable to speak at all except to repeat things that I said, or that the tape said. I would hear him in the next room reciting the tapes word for word as they played.

“The link between the three worlds,” said the tape, and immediately after, Ian, “is the indefinable spoken of by Balzac: or, rather, I would call it the undecidable, the paradox of an infinite whole that contains other infinite wholes.”

And later,

“Still, all realities and fantasies can take on form only by means of writing, in which outwardness and innerness, the world and I, experience and fantasy, appear composed of the same verbal material.”

“…appear composed,” Ian echoed.

The last time I ever saw Ian was one afternoon when I came out of my bedroom to make dinner. I had left him in the kitchen by the oven and there he sat, writing. I was surprised mainly because he hadn’t done anything this industrious in weeks. He had just completed what seemed to be the first line of something but before I got a chance to comment I noticed something truly odd about the whole scene. Ian finished the line and in the time it took for me to blink he was starting the line over as though for the first time. The page seemed to clear and Ian’s movements exactly copied themselves once and then again. I can only describe it by saying he looked like that moment where Princess Leia gets projected out of R2-D2 and tells Obi Wan he’s her only hope, like forty times. He was even sort of flickering around the edges and when I went over by him it was like I got in the way of a light source that couldn’t pass through my body. He disappeared behind where I was standing and that was it, he was gone. I read what he’d been writing, picked up the paper and took it to my room. I tacked it up above my bed. It says,

“Fantasy is a place where it rains.”

Isabella Yeager is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She twitters here and tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Rilke and Rodin.

In Which We Run From The Large Object

If Rodin had lived, today he would turn 172.

The Birdlike Ones

by ISABELLA YEAGER

Deeply affected by the loss of her infant daughter, René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke’s mother Phia dealt with parts of her grief by dressing her young son in girl’s clothing. As historian Ralph Freedman put it, "on one occasion when he was expecting to be punished the seven-year-old boy made himself into a girl to placate his mother. His long hair done up in braids, his sleeves rolled up to bare his thin, girlish arms, he appeared in his mother’s room. 'Ismene is staying with dear Mama,’ he is quoted as saying. ‘Rene is a no-good. I sent him away. Girls are after all so much nicer.'"

The connections between verse and a feminine sensibility were made uncomfortably explicit by Phia herself, who exposed her son to poetry before he was able to read. A catalog of vivid imagery and language accumulated in his mind, as his mother saturated his childhood with stories of saints’ lives, holy relics, religious art and ardent devotional rhetoric.

His parents separated in 1884. After their divorce they insisted Rilke attend a military academy, which he left in poor health. He wrote,

Someone will tell a story of a child that often forgot to eat because it seemed more important to him to carve cheap wood with a cheap knife, and someone will relate some event of the days of early manhood that contained promise of future greatness – one of those incidents that are intimate and prophetic. 

He was accepted into university and studied literature, art history, and philosophy in Prague and Munich, where he met and fell in love with the sophisticated, articulate and married Lou Andreas-Salome, at whose urging he had his name changed from Rene to what she considered to be the more masculine "Rainer." Rilke traveled with Salome and her husband Friedrich Andreas into Eastern Europe, Bohemia, and Russia.

In 1900 Rilke visited the artists’ colony Worpswede, where he met and wed sculptor Clara Westhoff. The couple’s child Ruth was born at Worpswede, but a year later Rilke traveled to Paris to begin his treatise on Auguste Rodin, to whom he acted as secretary. While in Paris he lived adjacent to Rodin at 77 Rue de Varenne, in the old mansion surrounded by a park which is now the Musee de Rodin. Clara followed soon after, leaving their daughter with her parents. Their efforts at divorce in the coming years were thwarted by the technicalities of Catholicism.

Rilke’s writing on Rodin begins,

It is a life that has lost nothing and has forgotten nothing; a life that has absorbed all things as it passed, for only out of a life such as this, we believe, could have risen such fulness and abundance of work; only such a life as this, in which everything is simultaneous and awake, in which nothing passes unnoticed, could remain young and strong and rise again to such high creations. 

Rodin in 1910

Auguste Rodin was the son of a police department clerk. In his school years, his drawing teacher believed that in order to encourage his students to draw from recollection and with independent vision, the personality should be developed and encouraged before artistic instruction began. Rodin’s sister Maria died of peritonitis, an abdominal infection caused by rupture to a hollow organ, and exacerbated by the flexing of the hips. Rodin was wracked by guilt at the possibility that the suitor to whom he had introduced Maria had been unfaithful.

Consistently denied access to Parisian art academies, Rodin spent his early career earning a living as a craftsman and an architectural ornamenter. Rodin’s sense of interior and surface evolved during the course of his work with goldsmith and animal sculptor Antoine-Louis Bayre, a fine worker in musculature and movement.

The Crying Lion, 1881

Of animals rendered in stone, Rilke writes:

There were small figures, animals particularly, that moved, stretched or curled; and although a bird perched quietly, it contained the element of flight. …There was stillness in the stunted animals that stood to support the cornices of the cathedrals or cowered and cringed beneath the consoles, too inert to bear the weight; and there were dogs and squirrels, wood-peckers and lizards, tortoises, rats and snakes.

Other animals could be found that were born in this petrified environment, without remembrance of a former existence. They were entirely the natives of this erect, rising, steeply ascending world. Over skeleton-like arches they stood in their fanatic meagerness, with mouths open, like those of pigeons; shrieking, for the nearness of the bells had destroyed their hearing. They did not bear their weight where they stood, but stretched themselves and thus helped the stones to rise. The birdlike ones were perched high up on the balustrades, as though they were on their way to other climes, and wanted but to rest a few centuries and look down upon the growing city. Others in the form of dogs were suspended horizontally from the eaves, high up in the air, ready to throw the rainwater out of their jaws that were swollen from vomiting. All had transformed and accommodated themselves to this environment; they had lost nothing of life.  

Rilke has that innate consciousness of internal structure, of the rigid constraints that provide so much of the impetus for creativity, that play a key role in a poet’s work. It is easy to see how his understanding of rhyme might lend itself to that of a gargoyle: of both as ornamental and architecturally functional. 

His muscular prose has no trouble conveying the immense energy contained within these stone creatures, whose appearance is that of halted motion – in physics, of potential. Words regarding Rodin’s later piece Illusion, the Daughter of Ikarus also call to attention the motion found here, this time in bronze and in human form, calling her that dazzling embodiment of a long, helpless fall.

Rodin called Rilke’s finished book, Auguste Rodin, the definitive interpretation of his work. Rilke’s writing on the sculptor is in its essence an act of translation: from visual to written, from one artist to another. It is unsurprising that to Rilke, who wrote with equal ease in his native German and in French, translation came naturally.

The task of the translator is a weighty one: he is bound inextricably by several opposing responsibilities. As only a creative mind is able, he must somehow see past the gleam of the finished product to discern the masonry beneath, and in retracing these steps seek to follow them himself. But translation as a creative effort gives little creative license: the translator has to understand that the tool he uses is not his own; that in his case creativity serves only to aid in the production of a loyal representation of an original. In short, the translator must look deeply into the polished surface of a work without pausing at his own reflection.

The act of translating is a process marked by its tenuous balance between dutiful distance and moments of measured emotional release, at once intimate and bound by the most formal kind of duty and restraint. One must seek, find, and convey something without for a moment claiming it; one must break apart and reconstruct but leave no mark or signature. One must hold with no intention to own.

At that time the war came and Rodin went to Brussels. He modeled some figures for private houses and several of the groups on top of the Bourse, and also the four large corner figures on the monument erected to Loos, City-mayor in the Parc d’Anvers. These were orders which he carried out conscientiously, without allowing his growing personality to speak. His real development took place outside of this; it was compressed into the free hours of the evening and unfolded itself in the solitary stillness of the nights; and he had to bear this division of his energy for years. 

Beginning in 1870, Rodin’s work sat in his workshop, unseen, as he was unable to afford castings. His submissions of models to competitions for sculpture commissions failed but on his own time he began work on St. John the Baptist Preaching. 

And we have that “John” with the eloquent, agitated arms, with the great stride of one who feels another coming after him. This man’s body is not untested: the fires of the desert have scorched him, hunger has racked him, thirst of every kind has tried him. He has come through all and is hardened. The lean, ascetic body is like a wooden handle in which is set the wide fork of the stride. He advances, advances as though all the wide spaces of the world were within him, as if he were apportioning them with his stride. He advances. His arms express it, his fingers are widespread, seeming to make the sign of striding forward in the air. This “John” is the first pedestrian figure in Rodin’s work. Many follow. 

We recall John later on, when Rilke outlines Rodin’s progression from master of the face to master of the body, of the gesture, of surface, and of the step.

When Rodin won the 1880 commission to build a portal for a museum of decorative arts, he begun what were to be four decades of work on Gates of Hell. The museum remained unbuilt and the gates themselves unfinished, but several of the work’s more famous elements include the now-ubiquitous The Thinker and The Kiss. 

Implicit in Rilke’s exploration of Rodin as a reader is the sense that literature and art have a natural relationship and in many cases can share a vocabulary. At times he wrote of literature’s direct, emotional effect on Rodin:

He read for the first time Dante’s Divina Comedia. It was a revelation. The suffering bodies of another generation passed before him. He gazed into a century the garments of which had been torn off; he saw the great and never-to-be-forgotten judgment of a poet on his age. There were pictures that justified him in his ideas; when he read about the weeping feet of Nicholas the Third, he realized that there were such feet, that there was a weeping which was everywhere, over the whole of mankind, and that there were tears that came from all pores. 

At others, he used the vocabulary of plastic arts to illustrate the relationship between sculpture and writing, and the ability of one to communicate the sense of the other:

He gave reality to all the figures and forms of Dante’s dream, lifted them as it were from the stirred depths of his own memory and gave to each in turn the silent deliverance of material existence. Hundreds of figures and groups were thus created. But the movements, which he found in the words of the poet, belonged to another age; they awoke in the creative artist, who restored them to life, the knowledge of thousands of other movements, gestures of appropriation, of loss, of suffering and of resignation which had been evolved in the intervening years, and his tireless hands went on and on beyond the world of the Florentine poet to ever new gestures and figures. 

From Dante he came to Baudelaire. …In this poet’s verses there were passages, standing out prominently, that did not seem to have been written but moulded; words and groups of words that had melted under the glowing touch of the poet; lines that were like reliefs and sonnets that carried like columns with interlaced capitals the burden of a cumulating thought. He felt dimly that this poetic art, where it ended abruptly, bordered on the beginning of another art and that it reached out toward this other art. In Baudelaire he felt the artist who had preceded him, who had not allowed himself to be deluded by faces but who sought bodies in which life was greater, more cruel and more restless...

Later, when as a creator he again touched those realms, their forms rose like memories in his own life, aching and real, and entered into his work as though into a home. 

It seems effortless for the poet to understand the way that words might so energetically produce images and shapes in the mind of the sculptor, perhaps because as a writer his mastery is in putting shape and object to words.

isabelle adjani & gerard depardieu in "Camille Claudel"

Rilke recalls how Rodin’s maturation as an artist followed a series of revelations he experienced as to the nature of surface, of body and of the relationship of the conceptual to the physical. These developments took place around the same time as his drama-filled affair with sculptor and graphic artist Camille Claudel.

While he was working on the Exchange of Brussels, he may have felt that there were no more buildings which admitted of the worth of sculpture as the cathedrals had done, those great magnets of plastic art of past times. Sculpture was a separate thing, as was the easel picture, but it did not require a wall like the picture. It did not even need a roof. It was an object that could exist for itself alone, and it was well to give it entirely the character of a complete thing about which one could walk, and which one could look at from all sides. And yet it had to distinguish itself somehow from other things, the ordinary things which everyone could touch. 

And further,

It must be intercalated in the silent continuance of space and its great laws. It had to be fitted into the space that surrounded it, as into a niche; its certainty, steadiness and loftiness did not spring from its significance but from its harmonious adjustment to its environment.

Of the Danaide, Rilke praises spatial presence: flinging herself from a kneeling position into her flowing hair… it is wonderful to pass slowly round this marble, to follow the long, long way which passes from the full, rich curve of the back to the face losing itself in the stone as if in a great weeping….

He goes on to expand upon Rodin’s development of the body as a medium and as a vehicle to and from ideas.

Rodin knew that, first of all, sculpture depended upon an infallible knowledge of the human body. … Rodin had now discovered the fundamental element of his art;…it was the surface,– this differently great surface, variedly accentuated, accurately measured, out of which everything must rise,– which was from this moment the subject matter of his art. … His art was not built upon a great idea, but upon a minute, conscientious realization, upon the attainable, upon a craft. …With this awakening Rodin’s most individual work began. 

The public’s disdain at Rodin’s early work reflected a culture that, in Rilke’s words,

held to the superficial, cheap and comfortable metier that was satisfied with the more or less skillful repetition of some sanctified appeal. In this environment the head of The Man with the Broken Nose should have roused the storm that did not break out until the occasion of some of the later works of Rodin.

This face had not been touched by life, it had been permeated through and through with it as though an inexorable hand had thrust it into fate and held it there as in the whirlpool of a washing, gnawing torrent.

When one holds and turns this mask in the hand, one is surprised at the continuous change of profiles, none of which is incidental, imagined or indefinite. There is on this head no line, no exaggeration, no contour that Rodin has not seen and willed. One feels that some of the wrinkles came early, others later, that between this and that deep furrow lie years, terrible years.

But this beauty is not the result of the incomparable technique alone. It rises from the feeling of balance and equilibrium in all these moving surfaces, from the knowledge that all these moments of emotion originate and come to an end in the thing itself.  

However great the movement of a sculpture may be, though it spring out of infinite distances, even from the depths of the sky, it must return to itself, the great circle must complete itself, the circle of solitude that encloses a work of art. This is the law which, unwritten, lived in the sculptures of times gone by. Rodin recognized it; he knew that that which gave distinction to a plastic work of art was its complete self-absorption. It must not demand nor expect aught from outside, it should refer to nothing that lay beyond it, see nothing that was not within itself; its environment must lie within its own boundaries.

rodin in 1862, photograph by charles aubryUnlike a portrait, which as children freaked us out because its eyes always seemed to meet our gaze, "the sculptor Leonardo has given to Gioconda that unapproachableness, that movement that turns inward, that look which one cannot catch or meet." Rodin’s studies of the body, of a surface "with infinitely many movements," reflected his new commitment to his medium and to craft, and produced two of his most famous pieces and nods to literary influence, Monument to Victor Hugo and Balzac.

In response to the former, the Times observed in 1909 that "there is some show of reason in the complaint that his conceptions are sometimes unsuited to his medium, and that in such cases they overstrain his vast technical powers." The latter was panned with “there may come a time, and doubtless will come a time, when it will not seem outre to represent a great novelist as a huge comic mask crowning a bathrobe, but even at the present day this statue impresses one as slang."

Monet and Debussy, on the other hand, signed a manifesto in its defense. Rilke too was into it: if The Man With the Broken Nose was proof of Rodin’s mastery of the face, he writes, The Man of Early Times had shown his adeptness at the body and the entry of gesture into Rodin’s work; of John and The Burghers of Calais – with their lean, rough musculature and strikingly directed movement: "setting out on their grievous journey – …all his walking figures seem to be but a preparation for the great, challenging step of Balzac."

Rilke had a rough time in Paris at first. His exposure to and fascination with Rodin’s work eventually contributed to a stylistic overhaul in his poetry. The man who once wrote a short book of letters to God with stunning if intangible subject matter (The Book of Hours) turned now to ideas as concrete as to be titled The Book of Images, and finally, simply, New Poems in 1907. These gemlike poems each stemmed from a discrete idea or image, and yielded markedly physical, visual, and aesthetic works. "The Panther" deals with the gaze, with supple movement and occupation of space, with musculature, physicality, and emotion.

Strong and supple strides around
and back to their beginning come.
A swirling play of power surrounds
a noble will that stands there numb.

This could almost be a continuation of Rilke’s writing on sculpture. In it there are the elements of life; of endurance; of physical representation of self that he alludes to when describing the impossibly lifelike lines etched in face of The Man With the Broken Nose. 

But it is in "Morgue" that Rilke outdoes himself, subtly but definitely, in creating a poem whose nuance is so great, its allusions to creator and created, of seer and seen, of captured life so complex, that it seems inevitable to compare it to a finely-wrought object, a gesture, a step.

They lie here ready, as if we ought to find 
a mission for them — something they’d be told 
was urgent, which might reconcile and bind 
them to each other, even to the cold:

An invitation to a final club, 
an unexpected scrap of paper found 
in one of their pockets. The bored look around 
their mouths, which someone gave a rub,

did not come off, but just got very clean. 
Their beards are waxy, stiffer on the chin, 
trimly agreeing with the warden’s taste.

He wants us to appreciate the scene. 
Beneath the lids, their sight has been replaced 
with rolled-back eyes that dwell on things within.

Isabella Yeager is the senior contributor to This Recording.  She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She twitters here and tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about a foreshadowing of death.

"Bye Bye Bye" - School of Seven Bells (mp3)

"Babelonia" - School of Seven Bells (mp3)

In Which It Is Not A Foreshadowing Of Death

The Pendulum

by ISABELLA YEAGER

The following is pulled from research conducted by mathematician and historian Tacitus Dune in preparation for the lecture he planned to give at the University of South Edinburgh's 1985 "Techniques in Visualization" conference. It is not known whether the lecture was given elsewhere, but it was not, in the end, presented at Edinburgh. One possible reason could have been Dune’s declining health at the time of the conference – in 1982 he was diagnosed with a small lesion of the brain stem, and died on June 3, 1984. Another explanation, arguably more troubling, could be the fact that a quantity of information presented as fact has not been confirmed as true.

The text below – an incomplete timeline of the pendulum's development – was found among Dune's extensive collection of three-ring notebooks, into which he inserted reams of pages written on typewriter. 

CHINA, EASTERN HAN DYNASTY

The Chinese scientist Zhang Heng monitored the earth's stability with a seismograph comprising an urn, a lever, a ball, and eight frogs sitting open-mouthed at the eight points of the compass. Inside, an inverted pendulum that stirred with the earth struck the ball to rolling down, down a slope, into a gullet at the north, south, east, or west. The frogs waited while the earth slept, each dreaming of the day that his gaping throat might bear proof of the rod's tremblings and witness to the doom at hand.

photo by Marilyn Shea

17th CENTURY

Galileo Galilei came to understand that a small pendulum was a good visualization of regularity.

The time it takes a small pendulum to swing back and forth is its period and relies not at all on how far it has to go. So it is isochronous.

A part of the oscillator family alongside AC power, the pendulum operates in perfectly even time around a fixed point of stasis. Galileo and others found that this made a pendulum the ideal mechanism to keep musicians on tempo and to monitor the pulses of both anxious and unimpressed medical patients.

The regularity that Galileo made explicit with the pendulum clock anticipated another of the pendulum's known behaviors: the coupled oscillation that our Dutch colleague Christiaan Hyugens called "odd sympathy." Lying on his back in bed, at sea, in 1665, Hyugens observed two pendulum clocks strung from the same beam tend towards perfectly synchronized though opposing motion, and eventually guessed that this resulted from the accumulated influence of minute stirrings of the supporting beam. The pendulums became a mirror image of each other, each driving and being driven by the other. Under the influence of this same "odd sympathy," the two pendulums could fall still together, a phenomenon Hyugens, again slanting towards personification, called a "death state."

It was the realization that pendulum clocks swung at different speeds in different parts of the world that led to the discovery of Earth's oblatitude, or slightly elliptical shape. Records of gravity's strength collected at points along countless travelers' journeys combined to give us the correct dimensions of the earth. Via these measurements, Westerners came to understand lines of longitude and latitude (explicated in Isaac Newton's monograph Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica), and in so doing grasped the true meaning of the ancient Chinese expression "throwing a net over the world" – which they had until that point mistakenly used in conjunction with their own phrase, "The sun never sets on the British empire."

Galileo noted the pendulum's demonstration of simple harmonic motion, by which a system departs from and returns to equilibrium, and so determined that the pendulum performs both order and disorder. When this order-disorder relationship is visualized as a system acting in phase space, where all possible states of a system are shown, it yields this phase portrait:

18^th CENTURY

Some say it is no coincidence that this portrait resembles a stylized map of the city of Paris: its dimensions, the assemblage of its arrondissements, and the placement of its main body of water. Using the same rationale that throughout literature attributes the presence of Indian burial grounds beneath remote American villages to sinister activity above, it's been well argued that the pendulum's model for departure from and return to equilibrium – more simply, for disorder – was built into the foundations of the city, and so can account for (and illuminate) some of Paris's major moments of political turbulence. 

One writer, taking this theory further than most, even posits that the careful reader can locate the pendulum's model for disorder at the heart of some of the French Revolution's better-known texts. Robespierre, he asserts, stumbled upon the idea for his treatise "Terror Is the Order of the Day" while gazing upon the family pendulum clock sitting on his writing desk.

It is not impossible to imagine a connection between the constant state of potential maintained in the pendulum and the potential energy (and a demand for the kinetic) found in statements like these:

Danton: . . . You have just proclaimed to all of France that it is still in a real and active state of revolution. Well, this revolution must be consummated....I therefore ask that you decree at least 100 million [francs] to produce all kinds of weapons because, had we all had arms, we would all have marched.

Despite steps taken towards grasping the nature of the pendulum as a timekeeper, scientists did not discover until 1721 that climate had the ability to interrupt the regular motion of the pendulum, as the rod expanded and shrank in response to changes in ambient temperature. It is believed that this margin of error may be the key to the odd circumstances surrounding the London-based Italian romantic painter Agostino Brunias and his three-year disappearance in the West Indies. Painting in the tradition of verité éthnographique, departed in 1770, after a spat with a fellow painter, for the West Indies, where it is presumed he remained until he made his sudden reappearance in Europe in 1773, bearing with him a great many oil depictions of Caribbean life and people, including the now-infamous "Barbados Mulatto Girl" and "Washing Clothes In a River."

Not long after Brunias's return to the continent, however, it became clear that he was himself quite disoriented, believing that only a few months had passed since his departure, and alarmed at the changed state in which he found his old haunts and the altered appearance of his friends. Thanks to the discovery of Brunias's journals, we now know that the painter kept track of time while traveling using an outdated pendulum clock that was not temperature-compensated, whose stem, in the damp heat of the Caribbean, warped and allowed almost two-and-a-half years to pass Brunias by unawares. With this information, it seems possible that any number of his contemporaries may have experienced similar phenomena, and that texts of the period ought to be examined closely for odd anachronisms that could indicate reliance on an uncompensated timekeeping device.

19^th CENTURY

Edgar Allen Poe published his short story "The Pit and the Pendulum" in the 1840 edition of The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present. His interest in pendulums has to do not only with their narrative quality (as we see in "The Pit", the pendulum is the perfect prop for a slow-building horror tale), but also with their aesthetic relationship to duality and mirroring, of the sort present in Hyugens’ work. In the short story "William Wilson", in which a man kills his doppelgänger only to have his bloody reflection in the mirror inform him that he has slain himself, the partnership, or odd sympathy, that we find in Hyugens occurs in Poe’s use of the Double. Both William Wilson and the Double are mentioned in Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings. Borges writes, "Suggested or inspired by mirrors, the surface of still water, and twins, the concept of the Double is common to many lands." He goes on:

It seems likely that statements such as Pythagoras’ “A friend is another myself” and Plato’s  “Know thyself” were inspired by it. In Germany, it is called the Doppelgänger; in Scotland, the fetch, because it comes to fetch men to their death. Meeting oneself was, therefore, most ominous; the tragic ballad “Ticonderoga” by Robert Louis Stevenson recounts a legend on this theme. We might also recall that strange painting by Rossetti called “How They Met Themselves” – two lovers meet themselves at dusk in a forest. One need only mention other instances in Hawthorne, Dostoyevsky, and Alfred de Musset. 

For the Jews, on the other hand, the apparition of the Double was not a foreshadowing of death, but rather a proof that the person to whom it appeared had achieved the rank of prophet. This is the explanation offered by Gershom Scholem. A tradition included in the Talmud tells the story of a man, searching for God, who met himself. 

In Poe’s story “William Wilson”, the Double is the hero’s conscience; when the hero kills his double, he dies. In the poetry of William Butler Yeats, the Double is our “other side”, our opposite, our complement, that person that we are not and shall never be.

Plutarch wrote that the Greeks called the king’s representative the “other I”. 

-Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings

The Double appears both as a catalyst of motion and development (Scholem) and as a herald of death (Stevenson, Poe). This tension recalls the symmetry of the coupled oscillator, which can both drive and halt the motion of its doppelgänger. If we label the two parts of the Double’s respective motion and stop with Hyugens's terms "odd sympathy" and "death state," the coupled oscillator seems like a perfect mechanical incarnation of the Scottish “fetch,” coming to fetch others to their death.

It was in Paris that Foucault suspended his pendulum from the dome of the Pantheon and showed the rotation of the earth in the first manner that didn't require celestial observation. Thousands flocked to see the device prove that the surface they stood on behaved in unseen ways.

20^th CENTURY

In the late 1970s a progressive academy for advanced mathematics in upstate New York revised its assessment-based grading system in response to requests from students and parents. Until that point, the school had been using the simple pendulum formula devised by Galileo (see above) as means to appraise its students’ work, with T standing for the student's assessment result, 2π for the two-semester school year, L for ingenuity and g for net performance improvement. However, after pupils overwhelmingly complained that they felt unfairly limited by the use of a closed formula to judge the quality of their minds, the school issued a statement in their biannual newsletter to the effect that, considering the immeasurable and exponential capacities of the human brain, students should from that point forward be graded using an infinite series. Below is the infinite series developed by Galileo to represent the motion of larger pendulums, and adopted by the academy as an improved method for calculating its students' progress.

Here Dune’s timeline ends, and the entries following become highly disjointed. We can, however, gain a good deal of insight into his mental state from their content. Among the most coherent are these:

Tuesday, 5/29/84

In studying the pendulum I have come to appreciate in greater depth aspects that might fascinate anyone who stops to observe its regular motion, its elegant lines and its perfect, calculated weight; who considers its relationship to the eternal and the revelatory properties which have told us over time so much about the universe we inhabit. All these things drew me deeper into the study of its history but I cannot deny a growing alertness to a sinister quality that, when cast in a certain light, the pendulum might be said to possess. It is a generous instrument, providing much information to the onlooker about imminent disturbances in the earth, the passing of time, the shape of the globe on which we rest. It gives energy to its twin through the force of its own motion. It yields much. But in cases like that which Edgar Allan Poe illustrates so vividly in The Pit and the Pendulum, the device can also take a great deal from its viewer.

As the pendulum descends towards its victim in Poe’s short story, its destructive power lies as much in the blade fixed to its end as in its sapping the victim of sanity through its steady, repetitive motion. At its most extreme, hypnosis draws the watcher in, draining him of independent thought, of strength, and of motion. Oddly contrary to the mutually sustaining movement Hyugens described in his studies, this process is vampiric in the most classic sense. Considering this, I could not help recalling with some displeasure that Hyugens’ theories of were later disproved, and the two pendulums’ mirror movement attributed to other sources of energy, which, when sapped, caused them to fall still.

When I began delving into this history, I bought, for the purposes of research, a small pendulum that I placed on my desk and looked on daily. Seeing it there felt energizing, and my research and writing pushed ahead with a speed I had rarely felt. Soon I took to writing late into the night, having my meals at the desk, and finally to sleeping in my office, always with the pendulum angled so that even in sleep I faced it, since I discovered I slept more soundly – and often dreamlessly – this way.

Though was almost surely a result of close quarters and too many hours in front of the typewriter, I began to suspect my pendulum moved with a greater energy than it had in the past. But after a month or so of rarely leaving my study I myself began to experience a listlessness and, more disturbingly to me, an absentmindedness that made work difficult and sleep both appealing and unsatisfying. It was during this period that I reread Poe’s short story about the pendulum as a hypnotizing torture device and began to feel a sort of inexplicable chill when I looked at the one I had placed on my desk. I have now put it out of sight, on the bookshelf behind a row of books, but my energy goes on dwindling.

Saturday, 6/2/84

I cannot continue writing at this time. I have moved the typewriter to the bedside but will now pause for a few minutes to rest.

Sunday, 6/3/84

I have gotten out of bed finally to get some water from the kitchen. On my way back to bed I stopped at the bookshelf and moved aside some of the books I had placed in front of the pendulum. The pendulum has stopped.

Isabella Yeager is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She twitters here and tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Rodin and Rilke.

"Hypnotized" - Spacemen 3 (mp3)

"Clamour" -  Glasser (mp3)