Trapeze Artistes and kthrr Acrobats under the Big Top

 

Trapeze Artistes and other Acrobats under the Big Top:

Zones of Dismay, Danger and Daring

 

Norman Simms

 

He floats through the air with the greatest of ease

The daring young man on the flying trapeze

His actions are graceful, all girls he does please

And  my love he has stolen away

 

So sang Eddie Cantor and many a pop star of the early days of phonograph and radio. In what came to be known as a “novelty number,” the radio and recording singers picked up an odd piece of information and ran with it as far as they could go. Such was not the staple of crooners, with their chansons d’amour, lyrics of longing and blues of betrayal, but of comic artists, dialect specialists and representatives of migrants and minorities.

 

Cantor’s version of the song goes on for more than eighty lines, repeating the refrain cited above five times before giving the concluding sixth version with significant changes in the words. The long poem tells the story of a young man who takes his teenage girl friend to the circus and watches with horror as she becomes enthralled with the leotard-wearing acrobat sailing through the air, turning numerous twists and making last-minute catches to a fellow artist or  a carefully-timed second swing to which he leaps. The betrayed young lover grows frustrated, plots his revenge and finally rids himself of this impediment to his life’s happiness.

 

The central object in the poem is the flying trapeze invented in 1859 and named after a geometric shape by Jules Léotard. It was soon integrated into the repertoire of festival, fairgrounds and popular music hall performers, collectively known, along with other acrobats, tightrope walkers and jugglers, as the funumbules. After the 1830s, when only selected theatres in  Paris were licensed to put on scripted dramatic performances, and other could operate so long as what was staged was acrobatic and speechless-farce, the number of funumbules venues increased. Other devices, routines, tricks and modes of display—electric beams, musical fanfares, equestrian rides—expanded the repertoire of these smaller venues. Picked up by P.T. Barnum, for example, the trapeze and its artists soon became a spectacular part of the travelling circus in America. Audiences around the world held their breaths, gasped in anticipated horror and sighed with relief when one of the scantily-clad performers leaping through the air from one swing to another did not fall down, either with or without a safety net below.

 

One of the best moving pictures ever made is Les Enfants du Paradis or Children of Paradise.  Paradise refers to the gallery (or second balcony), like the cheap seats “among the gods” in London playhouses and in the popular theatres of Paris.  The film was made during the war years of 1943, 1944 and early 1945 by Marcel Carné, though set in the France of the 1830s. It was released in March 1945 as a two-part extravaganza and touted as the French equivalent of Gone With The Wind.

 

Before there were female trapeze artists for rich, over-weight men and callow youth with no money to ogle at, however, there were the ballet girls, as Edgar Degas well knew, “in tights and short petticoats.”[1]  Urged on by their stage-mothers, these young girls were as naïve as they looked and sought to become mistresses as well prima ballerinas in their careers.  Less sophisticated were the adolescents trapped in situations where they would be trained to perform tricks in fairs and circuses, with no career paths opening before them, only exploitation for a few years:

I was tiny as an insect, and they [circus performers] taught me no difficult tricks, to dance on the tightrope and to perform. I was beaten as if I had been a bit of plaster…[2]

 

Insofar as an opportunity to advance their station in life, the high-wire or trapeze did not offer somewhere secure or safe in any sense of the word. While the performers looked down from their precarious positions high above the audience, where children of all ages and classes and especially bourgeois families would nervously laugh at what was going on, respectable members of the audience looked down on these artistes as little more than paid employees of the entrepreneurs. Even an inn-keeper’s wife has this to say in dislike of such wandering players.

His wife was on the point of expressing her dislike to all these tricks which endanger th necks when the person whom they had observed as being superior to the rest, advanced towards them and after making a low bow asked permission to remain there a few days. [3]

 

This realization that the head of the company wanted to perform in such a small village makes the inn=keeper and his wife lose their initial respect for him—as well as the mere strolling players. This provincial snobbery against the organizer of this small group of “mountebanks”[4] is, to be sure, not the same as the concern Judit Frigyesi shows for the actual perils faced by high-wire an trapeze artists.

 

It is close to what an acrobat might feel when walking the high rope: one part of the mind is secure in the body’s ingrown sense of balance, while the other trembles with fear of death.[5]

 

 

 

Besides the two short stories by Guy de Maupassant discussed above, there is also an interesting narrative from the anonymous Tales of the Dead.[6] In “The Death’s Head,” a group of travelling fairground players who include a team of rope-men, that is, what we would call trapeze artists, tightrope or high-wire walkers, jugglers and other balancing acts performed both at a great height as well as on ground level. These acrobats do their actions at manifest danger to themselves, something that makes them more awesome to the audience.  Others in the troupe depicted in this narrative, there are also tumblers, jugglers, ventriloquists and clowns. All may merge their talents in certain larger venues during their tours in producing another type of show that inspires both fear and admiration, the phantasmagoria.

 

 

 

Whereas young Marcel Proust found on the beach, on the shoreline being built up with luxury hotels, casinos and other bourgeois establishments a place of sexual and social release between the cloying salons of Paris and the rest of modernizing France,[7] there seems to be another privileged location for ordinary young men and women in the modern world; under the Big Top of the circus, such as Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth.”

 

In Proust’s seaside scenes in A la recherche, a flutter of adolescent females ride past on their bicycles, screaming with delight as they pass over the heads of paunchy middle-aged bankers, provincial magistrates, and other staid bourgeois characters. Young Marcel, the narrator of the great novel, watches with envy and regret that he cannot join them. The vision of such dynamic sexual energy stays with him throughout the rest of his life. It proves to be, as well, a literary counterpart to the scenes that take place in the great popular theatres and circus tents elsewhere at the same time. But instead of the budding form of the young girls racing along the beach, under the big circus tops there is a new enclosed vertical abyss, a space of twirling, swinging and balancing acts, with ropes dangling from the very apex to the space beneath. Bodies, young and lithe, seem to be in movement everywhere from top to bottom, bundles of modern energy, and especially with the organic vibrations of energy suddenly released from centuries of sexual repression and stigmatization.

 

 

---

[1] De Maupassant, “Virtue in the Ballet”  (Book League edition) p. 297.

[2] De Maupassant, “Liie Lala”  (Book League Edition) p. 136.

[3] “The Death’s Head” p. 97.

[4] The Death’s Head” p. 182.

[5] Frigyesi, Writing on Water, p. 126.

[6] ed. and. trans not given (London; White, Cochrane and Co., 1813) p. 21. Orignal translation into French: Fantasmagoriana; ou recueil d’histoires d’apparitions, de spectres revenans, fantômes, &c. Traduite de l’Allemand, par un Amateur, 1812, 2 tom, 12 mo.

 

[7] Hannah Freed-Thall, “Proust on the Beach” Paragraph 45:1 (2022)  112-131.

Marcel Proust the Jew Norman Simms Gaby Levin in Haaretz (5 May 2022) discusses a new book and an associated exhibition on the question of how Jewish was Marcel Proust. “How Being Jewish Changed Proust’s Life” seems a strange way to entitle the review, as though he were not partly Jewish through his mother all his life. Though baptized as Catholic, this did not seem to be highly influential, nor the fact that he was a homosexual. That was what he was. He belonged to a family of the upper middle--class, associated with salon habitués, knew a fair number of Jewish intellectuals, and, when Zola’s J’accuse appeared, he had no hesitation in joining fellow writers and artists (Jewish and not Jewish) in signing a petition calling for a retrial of the Jewish officer found guilty of treason. Without having access to the book under review, Antoine Compagnon, Proust du cote juif (Paris: Gallimard, 2022) and the exhibition at the Jewish Museum curated by Isabelle Cahn in Paris, it is not proper for me to comment on either, outside of what Gaby Levin writes. She has interviewed other Proustian experts in Paris (Natalie Mauriac Dyer) and Israel (Helit Yeshurin), and has access to other books, documents and exhibitions which I, of course, do not have. But it seems to me, looking at this distance, and after my own work on Proust and Dreyfus as well as other Jewish figures in France and elsewhere in Europe of the same period, that what Levin reports rings true. Marcel Proust was a secular man, didn’t care for religion as such, and was concerned in forging a new kind of fictional style that probed the nature of psychology and aesthetics, and especially the role of memory in modern consciousness. I do not find any reference in the review, though it might be there in the book an the Jewish Museum’s displays and catalogue, that Proust was influenced by rabbinical modes of storytelling and commentary, especially Talmud and Midrash. My own reading of A la recherché du temps perdu (In Search of or Rec90v erring Lost Time) suggested that he was aware of these modes of discourse. There certainly were French translations available and there were journals devoted to Jewish history and culture. In recent years, too, some scholars have looked at the influences of such Jewish stories of writing. That the great scven-volume novel has key characters based on Jewish people in his life—Swann, Marcel’s mother and grandmother—make sense if the author was aware of their Jewishness, no matter how assimilated they may have seemed; and he respects them, even while some minor figures come in for satirical effect in their supposedly typical lower middle class materialism and lack of refinement. He certainly also knew that assimilation, even conversion, was no protection for the anti-Semitism that was not only alive and well in fin-de-siècle Paris, but that would become more virulent in the next few decades. So rather than the question in implied in the title as to whether Judaism changed Proust’s life, we offer two alternative responses, since the fact that he was born half-Jewish did not change but made his life. .In the first case, what did change his life was the onset of acute asthma; it caused him do his best writing in a cork-lined chamber, sitting up in bed all night. In the second, the terms should probably be reversed and one should ask how Proust changed Europe’s modern self. Where would modern literature be without Marcel Proust and his fellow Jewish writers Franz Kafka, Albert Cohen and Elias Cannetti, let alone without Karl Marx, Albert Einstein and Aby Warburg?

 Marcus Aurelius

Thank you, Marcus the Golden One, for what you said,

that people who know nothing have opinions that are worthless,

and you might have added, that most of them and us, are crazy.

You can’t walk around the Porch these days to ponder

all the great big thoughts you want to know about.

Jabber and twittering of idiot birds, not bards

or even men and women who share pensées

who couldn’t sharpen a pencil or fill a pen

with ink and never had a notebook to scribble thoughts.

Tourists clustered around the outsize head of Kafka

in Prague could not identify who it was

or ever read a story or aphorism he wrote,

like my students who couldn’t decode Roman numerals

nor wanted to learn how—and always mistook the eighteen hundreds

for the eighteenth century or saw the difference between

Keats and Yeats, sequins and sequence, Minsk

and Pinsk or Omsk and Tomsk, as my grandma used to say.

Al in a muddle of big an little thoughts,

Memories of times, Marcus, you never lived through,

But I am burdened with guilt of ancestors you would have killed.

 

 

 On Turtle Lake, Hamilton

 

A turtle’s head glides through the water,

almost obscured

by autumn leaves on the surface.

We haven’t seen him in several years,

He and his little family.

They used to sun themselves on the rock

Near the artificial waterfalls.

One of those boulders has a group

Of metal statues on it

As though the little pond

Needed creatures of this sort

To earn its name, but no real ones

Are allowed. The rats and guardians

Of the gardens see to that.

Once every few years

we see this head and imagine the rest,

His body and his family.

Meanwhile someone pried off

one of the turtles from the rock.

Everything is obscure

And out of balance.

+Paris Impressions

 

Paris Impressions

 

It was my first time in Paris. I was booked into a little hotel on the Rue de l’école de medecine. As I walked down the narrow street towards the boulevard, someone tapped me on the shoulder and I was feeling ill. Startled, I realized the question was in English and the spacer an old friend also attending the conference I had travelled to France to attend. You look dizzy, he said. Not at all, but all those interesting balconies and shutters, I am fascinated. He laughed.

The next morning quite early I went out of the hotel and started tow all down to the Seine. It was still half-dark, as happens in winter, there was a bluish-purple mist. I walked down one side of the river for nearly an hour, then crossed the bridge and walked back. It was true. Paris is magical, a city of misty light and muffled silence.

One day, sauntering along in front of Notre Dame, I thought to myself that lonely a big city could be even with large crowds of tourists moving along all around. Then suddenly out of a small group of lycée students stepped a man grabbed me by the shoulders and gave me a proper kiss on both cheeks.  It was my friend from Vichy taking his class on an excursion. Maybe the world isn’t so big and unfriendly as supposed.

Seated with my friend William on the steps leading up a monument, I saw a tour bus draw up, stop, and disgorge a few dozen Japanese tourists,. They gathered around William and myself and started taking pictures. Then the tour guide came over and said, “Thank you, typical Frenchmen in Pairs.”

I am always nervous and shy when I come to a new city. When I arrive at the destination, it takes a while to be used to the place and, unless someone takes me out, I sit alone, quietly, letting the precious time go by. Then I venture out into the street and in gradually expanding stages explore the neighborhood.

Two things I could never bring myself to do in what is probably the most typical of Parisian activities. One is to sit at a small café table on the footpath, sip coffee and read a newspaper. First if all, I can’t stand the taste or smell of coffee. Second, it goes against the grain of some puritanical part of me to spend time all alone hovering over a drink of any kind. Two is to wait patiently for someone to come meet me at that café.  I am too nervous and get up and walk around and around the street until a friend comes. I am too afraid of missing out, trough I have to keep moving further and further away from our rendez-vous.

One of the lovely experiencers on the Paris metro is the performance of small groups of buskers, usually composed of various ethnicities and nationalities.  They enter the carriage, set up their instruments, play, and then exit at the next station. They make a few francs (or Euros now) and move on.

Forty odd years after I did some teaching at the Sorbonne, in what I was told the first cycle of a university degree, I have no idea what I was supposed to do. My friends told me it was easy and gave me a sort of student handbook called a vade-mecum. Though I read it many times, nothing made any sense. In the class during “travaux dirigés”, when students form into small groups and make presentations, I could not figure out what their topics were supposed to be; nor even how I was to mark them for their work. When I asked my friends, they didn’t seem to understand what the problem was.  Two memories stand out. The first as the day I arrived in class and there were all the students in their places. My watch said there was still a half hour to go, so I sat and read the International Herald Tribune for a while, until one young man came to me and asked why I wasn’t teaching. Then he explained that this eas the day daylight savings time began.  The second is the day when a group of young students started to give their presentations and one, a very beautiful young woman, began to blush: a deep crimson went from her forehead down the rest of the body as she sat there silently. No one else in her group or in the class seemed to notice.

Along the Seine there is the row on row of secondhand booksellers. Each book is wrapped in a heavy wax paper and taped shut. I would walk for hours from stand to stand looking at what was there. Only occasionally would I make a purchase. Not long after, when my interests had shifted, I remembered rare and wonderful treasures passed by, and now never to be bought or read,

Essay: The Idea of Prehistory

 

The Idea of Prehistory:

A Preview of a New Book

 

Norman Simms

In a new book I am finishing about the idea of prehistory my argument turns on something that may upset professional archaeologists, anthropologists and prehistorians, namely, that the sense of prehistory is not chronological, but psychohistorical, that is, a state of mind. The idea is that at certain points in the life of individuals, small groups and whole nations they confront shocking experiences, trauma, which can cause both an existential and an epistemological crisis. Things do not make sense any longer and (as W.B. Yeats put it) “the centre does not hold”: things that they thought they knew and techniques which could reach practical, common sense decisions no longer worked. Such catastrophes can be natural or historical, such as great shifts in the climate, volcanic eruptions that cause long periods of cold and darkness, earthquakes that disfigure the known landscape or epidemics that not only interfere or interrupt with everyday life but cause the loss of specialists who can no longer pass on technical skills and wise sayings and of elders who are the repositories of history and spiritual rituals.  There are also wars, invasions and colonial conquests, resulting in the dispersal or disappearance of large numbers of people who are forced to migrate great distances, enter unfamiliar and hostile territories and adapt and adopt new languages, modes of knowledge and patterns of social connectivity. It is this blockage to what had seemed normal and natural developments that pushes people back down an abyss of unknowing and confused feelings that brings them to the point of prehistory, the time and place where they have to begin more or less all over again.

These kind of shocking events—and they may last only a short time or stretch over ten thousand years which cause blockages, interruptions and disappearances in the archaeological and historical records initiate changes in consciousness, culture and language that we can try to explain in several different ways.[1]

One way draws on the insights of psychoanalysis and takes its name from a Freudian expression: Nachträglichkeit.[2] In the phenomenon of Nachträglichkeit a person experiences some traumatic event, usually in early childhood, and this shock disrupts the normal pattern of personality development, so that in all subsequent life events the shape of the earliest crisis influences the way in which the latest disturbance in felt, remembered and expressed. What makes this process different from the notion that there is a general forward motion through time and a consistent painful, humiliating and confusing engagement with the present is that in Nachträglichkeit the force of all subsequent reactions to the current crisis act on one another, including the earliest recollections, no matter deeply hidden and encrypted they are, as well as the present event which comes into focus in a distorted, fragmented and apparently illogical way. In other words, the very blow that puts the mind off balance and sees it regress to a much earlier stage in the formation of recognizable images, feelings and ideas sets off a dynamic transformation in the memory.

When groups of people are involved, be they a close-knit family, small community or larger collection of individuals seeming to share the same language and culture, their regression occurs in visible and tangible ways. Including the performance of publically shared dreams or myths, whether manifest in khora or choral dances, gatherings at sacred sites to see and be fascinated by drawings, carvings and altered landscape features so ancient as to seem like revelations of another state of consciousness or world of cosmic forces altogether different than they can recall. While no member of the group may have ever seen or felt the power of such human markings, drawings, carvings or erected standing stones, the response is a feeling of uncanniness, in the sense that Freud gave to the term (unheimlich),[3] something at once vaguely and frighteningly familiar and yet shockingly new and unrecognizable. The place is attractive and fascinating because it is and becomes by the regressive visits sacred: sacred here in its strictly etymological sense of being split between the known and the unknown, the holy and the profane. People in their state of trauma are drawn to such sacred places by a search for profound sounds that rumble through the tunnels under the earth, streams and waterfalls that thunder down mountains and cliffs, hillsides and standing rocks around which winds howl, and places where lights flicker through crystal and other translucent and luminous materials.

It seems that the crisis induces at least in some portion of the population, capacities of processing sensory experience from the external world that have all but disappeared from normal neuronal development. For example, a few individuals today do experience synesthesia, a condition in which different physical sensations vibrate in accord with parts of the brain that process other sensory experiences, so that they hear musical tones in terms of colour so sense various textures in both visible and tangible form.[4] Usually such mixed co-ordinations of sense experiences disappear as the infant’s neuronal connections come to the patterns supported by the culture of the first care-givers and later siblings and adult inhabitants of the domestic environment. Very likely, contemporary researchers have found, our most ancient ancestors either continued to have those synthetic qualities or had larger proportions of their population with such abilities.[5]

We suggest that during epistemological crises more than the usual number of people revert to these pre-modern melded sensations. They are the so-called shamans who could hear and feel the humming of the earth’s inner movements and react to the vibrations from distant rivers, waterfalls and deep ocean currents.[6] When they alone or with representative members of the group (theoroi)[7] arrived at the sacred sites and see the marks, holes and carvings, they respond by drawing over the images, deepen and expand the tracery of cupules and reshape the statuary. It is as though they see what is hidden inside the rocks, hear the voices of beings on the other side and create memory models of their own engagement with the energies that seek to absorb.

From another discipline, that of Aby Warburg’s Kulturgeschichte or deep art history, we draw a few other terms to help explain our discussion of prehistory and the return to the time and place of new beginnings. Two of the two key terms introduced by Warburg are Pathosformel and Nachleben.  Pathosformel are passionately-charged or cathected images, word-clusters, gestural movements and congeries of lines and colours that make it possible to speak the unspeakable, picture the unimaginable, think the inconceivable and live in a tolerable way with experiences that are otherwise unbearable.[8] Without such formulated means of expression and articulation the traumatized individuals and groups can only continue to be assailed by frightful anxiety-ridden and humiliating sensations without form or shape—or apparent sense and meaning. From their first formulation, the manifested stresses and strains allow the small group and the larger community not only to communicate within themselves and across the boundaries of language and culture, but to develop new skills, acquire greater knowledge and understand more accurately and delicately who and what they are. These developments of passion-laden formula also reverberate in the neurons of the brain and form patterns which Warburg called engrammes. The history of such variations and adjustments to historical circumstances forms the Nachleben (afterlife) of the primary formulae.

Giorgio Agamben comes closer to a more dynamic view of Aby Warburg’s tracing out the transformation of such pre- and non-verbal experiences into words, images and collective gestures.[9] These passionate formulae mark out the Nachleben or afterlife (but not the strict renewal or renaissance, rather the “transmission”)[10] of the original trauma through a punctuated series of iterations, never exactly the same, moments of individual and group shock, crisis and re-creation.[11]

As with the theory of oral formulaic epic poems and stories propounded by Albert Lord and Milman Parry[12] and developed by their students, wherein performance and composition are one and the same, so with the visual, tactile and performative arts.[13] .  Albert Lord and Milman Parry in their Singer of Tales (1960) based the theory of formulaic oral poetry on field studies begun among the oral bards in the former Yugoslavia who could chant for hours, or even days on end. The tales were based on the warriors and leaders during the struggle between local Slavic people and the invading Ottoman Turks for control of the Balkan countries. Lord and Parry discovered that these usually uneducated, sometimes illiterate singers could perform unbelievable feats of memory, stories that were ten or more times the length of the two extant Homeric epics, Iliad and Odyssey. The two scholars recorded these performances in situ on tape, then transcribed them, and studied their content, style and construction.  They found that not only did no performer ever repeat the same epic in exactly the same way each time he was recorded, whether within weeks or years of each performance, but when asked what the difference was, the teller could not comprehend what was asked.  Similarly, when prompted to explain some obscure phrase or allusion, he could not provide any answer and swore that each version was exactly the same.  More shocking to Albert Lord was the fact that if he stopped a singer in the midst of chanted epic to make a comment or ask a question and then told the performer to carry on; the singer had to start the entire poem from the beginning or from clearly demarcated episode in the lengthy epic. 

Normally, pre-modern artists work within a community of shared knowledge, a similar range of emotional displays and technical skills and strategies passed down through the generations. Before attempting either to represent what is seen, heard and felt from the external world, the artist learns to copy previous works of art. Before seeking to express a unique and private interior life of his or her own, the artist works to answer to the explicit or implicit requirements of the patron, the audience and the community. The verbal formulae found in epic poetry from around the world tends to be made up not of individual lexical units (words, idioms, concepts) but of sounds, tones and rhythms that embody or encrypt primary emotions, that is, the very passions formulated in Warburg’s Pathosformel and connected arcoss nerve synapses as engrammes.[14] Particular characters, events, situations and moral messages are subsequent rationalizations of the more elementary energies in the formulaic expressions.

The narrator in the mid-nineteenth-century novelist George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil puts it this way:

We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.[15]

The gaps and traces of distortion remain available when subsequent trauma strikes, the until-then normality of existence shudders, begins to fall apart and no longer makes practical or emotional sense. Archaic memories come up into consciousness again, detached particles of tradition reassemble themselves in unfamiliar and yet satisfying new patterns of expression, and new rationalizations are created to justify or deny the evident transformations.[16]

In searching for the time and place of prehistory returned to during times of profound shocks to the individual and the community we come to the phenomenon of sub-microscopic visions and works of art. This is found in the way early humans gouged out holes in rock faces and into the walls of caves, these cupules being returned to again and again over short and long intervals by which the hole, abyss or entry into other worlds were affected, on the one hand, the exploration and attempt to communicate with a reality inside or on the other side of the rock and cave wall; and on the other, to imagine oneself entering into one’s own mind and there discovering the sources of imagination.

The early twentieth-century German-Jewish novelist Jacob Wassermann described this process in regard to his own sources of memory and inspiration:

…this inner landscape , inherent in the soul and born with it into this world; it determines the nature and color of dreams, of dreams in the broadest sense, and all the other secret and unknown paths of the mind which constitute its atmosphere and its abode, More than imagined pictures of sea and mountains, of caves and parks and jungles, more than the paradisiacal ideal of immature yearning, more than an escape and refuge from disappointment in the present, this inner landscape is the crystal center of true life itself, the spot where its laws are dictated and the source of its actual identity, of which our so-called reality may be a mere reflection.[17]

Taking outer landscape to refer to both the natural and the human-shaped environment, it is possible to see here a description of what has happened again and again the return to prehistorical times and places and the attempt to formulate passion-laden formulae that make life bearable.

In another place, Wassermann expands on this idea and in a way applicable to the developments of new creative thoughts possible after the resolution of the inhibiting and disabling effects of an epistemological crisis:

I believe that at bottom all production is an attempt at reproduction, at an approach to things seen, heard and felt that have passed through to the other side of our consciousness and now must be dug out piecemeal, in shattered fragments.[18]

The fascination with the small led thinkers in our own time to question what there was about making things small, or imagining kingdoms of fairies and other tiny creatures, especially more recently when museum curators put on a display of seventeenth and eighteenth-century prayer beads, prayer nuts and other intricately carved works of art made of boxwood, jade and crystal:[19] they found that when subject to electronic microscopic examination and digital Magnetic instruments whole new layers of detail were revealed—not just beyond the range of the naked eye but also of microscopes and magnifying glasses available in the past. There are analogous traditions of artists or specialists in the sacred from China and India during earlier periods who also perfected techniques for such extremely delicate miniaturized work of art, and without the use of magnifying or microscopes.[20]

Already it has been shown that prehistoric tool- and weapon-makers started to use smaller and smaller blades, bladelets,[21] arrow-heads and other instruments to refine their hunting and fighting techniques when climatic change removed large game from the territories they usually roamed during the chase and when more fat and marrow needed to be extracted from prey. Small objects being more portable, accurate and efficient, they were favoured and in some ancient cultures microliths predominated for many thousands of years without any significant changes in manufacture or use.[22] To engage in these activities, and to be trained by older experts, required new kinds of skill: the delicate and subtle manipulation of hands, the intense focussing of eyes and the deep concentration of attention of the mind were necessary—and were reinforced by songs, stories and ritual gestures, thus also strengthening bonds to the contextual community.

 

Here is one such instance from the writings of Charles Fort who was fascinated by how little was actually known and hence how much needed to be exposed through his satirical studies:

“Pygmy flints” are tiny, prehistoric implements. Some of them are a quarter of an inch in size. England, India, France, South Africa—they’ve been found in many parts of the world—whether carved there or not. They belong high up in the froth of the accursed; they are not denied, and they have not been disregarded; there is an abundant literature upon this subject. One attempt to rationalize them, or assimilate them, or take them into the scientific fold, has been the notion that they were the toys of prehistoric children….Against the notion of toys, the higher approximations is that where “pygmy flints” are found, all flints are pygmies—at least so in India, where larger implements have been found in the same place, there are separations by strata.[23]

Most technical studies of prehistoric tools categorized as microlithic artefacts[24] those which can be held in the hand, as opposed to standing stones, statues and marked boulders and walls of caves. Several sub-categories of such very small and hand-held prehistoric objects seem n either miniatures nor toy replicas.  Brigit Katz reports on work done in the Pacific North-West of the United States and Canada where among other whalebone artefacts were found those that “were quite small—too small, in fact, to have been used by adults.”[25]  Like the ‘pygmy’ prehistoric objects spoken of by Fort, these Salish artefacts are not only small (‘tiny’) enough to be held in the hand for purposes of scraping and chipping, but are actually too small to be considered tools or weapons, such as spear-points, fishing hooks, needles or beads, and the deliberate markings found on them may be only discernible to the naked eye through extreme squinting. Jane Eva Baxter suggests that “miniaturized instruments like the small atlatls[26] are unique because they straddle the boundary between work and play.”[27]  The mystery can be solved only by taking into account other options, such as gaining control over an imaginary representation of the world, exercising spiritual powers through mimetic rituals, generating important new memories and releasing funerary energies by manipulation in a micro-environment.

For our ancestors to carry out these projects, more refinement and delicacy of finger dexterity was needed, as well as greater focusing of the eyes for sustained periods, and longer and deeper periods of mental concentration. Because of the urgency of needed adjustments to changes in the external landscape, and in the course of an abbreviated and punctuated evolutionary time—cut short by the way we now know expression of genes could circumvent the long periods needed for species to transform themselves to better hunters, gatherers, fishers and farmers—a whole new patterning of brain neurons and supporting hormonal triggers took place.

Nineteenth-century explorers, adventurers and other travellers sometimes noted these two key facets of the archaeological and anthropological sites they attempted to describe and understand. Nevertheless, as the contemporary Canadian thinker Dominic Forcier argues, standing at the edge of an abyss of mysticism and irrationality:

The entirety of your mind, all of “you”, from what you sense to what you do, all of your thoughts and how they make you feel—your entire living essence, is brought forth from the interactions between smaller living creatures, with distinct minds of their own, like your living cells, communicating and acting together.[28]

This makes some sense within his general argument that the universe and all it contains are infinite. His main examples come from Jewish Kabbalah and Muslim Sufism by which the constituent letters of the respective scripts do more than articulate narratives, arguments and descriptions of real and unreal worlds: they are shaped objects, resonant markers of sound, tone and rhythm and triggers for energy release and cathection. While we think there are better arguments of this kind to be found in contemporary Jewish students of mystical word-play and letter-combinations, such as Marc-Alain Ouaknin, we have taken for our model of how the various psychoanalytical and psychohistorical processes work the two books by Sergey Dolgopolski..[29] He shows how Talmudic argument and debates among ancient Jewish sages after the Fall of Jerusalem in 69 C.E. and the Destruction of the Temple the following year work to obviate chronological time and space and to make each learned conversation among these early rabbis a way of returning to a time and place of origins and renewal, a  point where differences are not resolved or reconciled but instead taken as the source of energy for passing beyond the limits of history and generating a speculative and creative force. Dolgopolski sees each such return as a moment of transformation and reformation. What we do is to translate his terms into those of psychohistory and the history of mentalities, or the juxtaposition and intertwining of two landscapes, the internal and the external. Out of resistance, blockage and catastrophe comes the new start to life and understanding, as much for the ancient peoples who created rock art and standing stones, as for the novelists, psychologists and archaeologists of our own time. I have called this process midrashing, and here follow the words of Monica Osborne:

A midrashic story is not conceived as something that exists outside of the text; rather, it is continuous with it. Midrash implies the failure of the sources from which it comes to evoke a final answer. As metonymy, rather than metaphor—extension rather than representation—midrash reveals the gaps it seeks to fill and extends the primary text in which they exist. It reminds us of the voids that precede it. And although narrative, a traditional representational mode, is the device used to do this, we inevitably focus not only on the representation, but also on the impetus for it: an absence.[30]

The situation of a person caught in the painful tensions of an epistemological crisis can be seen here in a passage from one of Wassermann’s novels:

Every time he began she struggled, but she always yielded to that force. She always began by turning her face in horror from her own past. But soon she was forced by an implacable power to embrace that vision, and everything that she had experienced, everything that had vanished, all that was desolate, turbid, dark, and dangerous reappeared with an incomparable vividness. It was her own life, and yet seemed another’s, who was herself and yet someone else. It seemed to her that all those desolate, turbid, dark, dangerous things began over again, doubly terrible, with a foreknowledge of each day’s disconsolate end.[31] Even earlier, in George Eliot’s mid-nineteenth-century novel Felix Holt: The Radical, set between the great Reform Acts of the opening decades of that century, a time when again things were falling apart and the centre was at the point of collapsing in on itself. There is a description of the female protagonist feeling herself being drawn into the middle of her life and all her experiences contracted to a tiny internal time and place:

Here she moved to and fro amongst the rose-coloured satin of chairs and curtains—the great story of this world reduced for her to the little tale of her own existence—dull obscurity everywhere, except where the keen light fell on the narrow track of her own lot, wide only for a woman’s anguish[32]

Eliot in another place in the novel speaks about the inadequacy of contemporary microscopes to see into this highly intense and intricate model of the modern mind, and implies that the best instrument for seeing these responses to personal and national crises is the novel itself. For this reason, we have tried to trace out the constant return to points of crisis and difference in the development of human consciousness, culture and language, from prehistoric cupules, cave drawings and cliff-face markings through to classical miniature portraits and intricately carved intaglios through to early modern prayer beads and nuts with their sub-microscopic details and layers of concentration and miniaturization of hidden internal worlds of experience.

 

---

[1] Michael P. Neeley, “Going Microlithic: A Levantine Perspective on the Adoption of Microlithic Techniques” in Elston and Kuhn, eds., Thinking Small, pp. 45-35.

[2]  Alessandra Campo,  Nachträglichkeit: Il contributo della psicoanalisi alla definizione di una filosofia del processo. Università degli Studi di Roma Tre: Tesi di dottorato un Filosofia e Teoria delle Scienze Umane, 2014/2015.

 

[3] Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David Mclintock (London: Penguin, 2003); originally in German as Das Unheimlich (1919)

[4] Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, revised and expanded (London: Picador,  2008)   pp. 177-197.

[5] Sacks, Musicophilia, p. 193.

[6] Benjamin J. Williamson, Philippe Blondel, Laura D. Williamson and Beth E. Scott, “Application of a Multibeam Echosounder to Document Changes in Animal Movement and Behaviour Around a Tidal Turbine Structure” ICES Journal of Marine Science (2021) 1-15 online at doi:10.1093/icesjms/fsab017.

[6] On these seismic, sonic and deep humming sounds, see for instance: Jason Daley, “Earth’s Mysterious Hum Recorded in the Deep Sea for the First Time” Smithsonian Magazine (11December 2017) online at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new/mysterious-world-hum-recorded-seafloor-first-time-1808967487.

[7] In ancient Greek cities ambassadors were covertly sent to witness the sacred and secret rites of other cities. They would report back what they saw and heard and their vivid accounts were thought to be as powerful as the events observed: hence those who heard the stories gained some of the power inherent in those rites. The official witnesses and their accounts were considered theoroi, those with godlike theoretical knowledge.

[8] Barbara Baert, “The Weeping Rock: Revisiting Niobe through Paragone, Pathosformel and Petrification” Revista di Engramma 168 (2019) 1-21; online  at Niobe_through_Paragone_ Pathosformel and_ Petrification_in_Revista_di_Engramma

 

[9] Giorgio Agamben, “Aby Warburg et la science sans nom” in Image et mémoire (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2004) pp. 11, 16.

[10] Agamben, “Aby Warburg et la science sans nom” p. 20.

[11] Agamben, “Aby Warburg et la science sans nom” p. 16, n. 14

[12] Milman Parry, L’epithèt traditionnelle dans Homère (Paris, 1928); Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 4. This late edition includes important introductory remarks on Parry’s original fieldwork in what was then Yugoslavia.

[13]  Robert Payson Creed. “A Context for the Study of Oral Traditions” in Simms, The Word Singers (1984) pp. 11-15 and “Beowulf and the Language of Hoarding” in  Papers of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, ed. Charles L. Redman (Binghamton, NY: State University of New York. 1989) pp. 155-167.

[14] Because Warburg wrote very little in his lifetime, information on his key ideas and working-methods must be gleaned from his students and disciples, such as G.H. Gombrich, Gertrude Bing, Erwin Panofsky.

[15] George Eliot, The Lifted Veil, p. 52. Emphasis in the original.

[16] Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Lire aux éclats : « La tradition est la transmission, d’une part de ces clefs, d’autre part du sens acquis constitué—‘parole parlée’—mais en même temps renouvelé par le Maître porteur de la Tradition- Révélation-Création, porte parceque nous appelons, avec Merleau-Ponty, une ‘parole parlante’’ (“Tradition is the transmission, on the one hand, one of these key [words], on the other by the constituent sense—‘the spoken word’—and, at the same time,  renewed by the Master of Tradition-Revelation-Creation, carried by the one we  call pace Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘the speaker of the word.’”) p. xii.

[17] Jacob Wasser Jacob Wassermann, My Life as a German and a Jew,  trans. S. N Brainin (New York: Coward-McCann, 1933) pp 28-29. . Originally: Mein Weg also Deutscher und Jude (1921).

[18] Wassermann, My Life as a German and a Jew, p. 31.

[19] Johanna Hecht, “Ivory and Boxwood Carvings, 1450-1800” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (October 2008) online at https://www/metmuseum.org/toah.hd/boxw/hd_boxw.

[20] Robert G. Bednarik, “The Global Context of Lower Palaeolithic Indian Palaeoart” Man and Environment 24:2 (2009) 1-16; and  Nicole  Boivin, “Rock Art and Rock Music: Petroglyphs of the South Indian Neolithic” Antiquity 78; 299 (March 2004) pp. 38-53.

[21] K.A. Kolabova, A.I. Krivoshapkin, and K.K. Pavienok, “Carinated Pieces in Paleolithic Assemblages of Central Asia” Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia  42:4 (2014)  13-29.

[22]  Robert G.  Elston and Steven L. Kuhn, eds. Thinking Small: Global Perspective on Microlthization, Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, No. 12. Arlington, VA, 2002.

[23] Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919) p. 100. Online at www.g utenberg.org/files/224272/22472-h/22472-h.

[24] The whole question of what art means in relation to prehistoric, anthropological and non-western cultures turns on the notion that art in the modern sense comes into being only in the Italian Renaissance and gains its most current connotations in the Romantic period, eventually settling into the post-Impressionistic notion of “art for art’s sake.”  However, on the one hand, there is the common sense understanding that our own normal usage of the term art makes it stand for something that can be both high art—cultured, sophisticated, refined and elite, and thus expressive of the artist’s deeply profound and spiritual identity and the connoisseur’s taste and appreciation; while on the other hand, there is a historical recognition that art represents the skilled work of craftsman, the artisan, who is an employee or servant of his social superiors who can pay to have their lives enhanced by expensive, beautiful and meaningful objects and performances, and that when the sponsoring society changes or disappears, what is left over is an artefact.

[25] Brigit Katz, “These Miniature Tools Taught Ancient Children How to Hunt and Fight” Smithsonian Magazine (20 December 2019) online at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-newsd/these-mini-tools-taught-ancient-children-how-hunt-and-fight-180973838.

[26] “These devices, which had a grip at one end and a hook for a dart at the other, helped increase the range and force of a weapon.  But they weren’t easy to use. Operators had to apply torque as the dart was released from the hand, and because atlatls were not as accurate as bows, hunting with the instrument likely required the coordination of multiple individuals” (Katz, “These Miniature Tools Taught Ancient Children How to Hunt and Fight”).

[27] Cited in Katz, “These Miniature Tools Taught Ancient Children How to Hunt and Fight.”

[28] Dominic Forcier, “The Infinite Universe in a Nutshell” in  The Infinite and the Alephbet (2011) online at http://awesomegang.com.

[29]   Sergey Dolgopolski, The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013; and What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.

[30] Monica Osborne, “Making the Wound Visible: On Midrash and Catastrophe” Religion & Literature 43:2 (2011) 164.

[31] Jacob Wasserman, The World’s Illusion, II, p. 25. First published in German as Christian Wahnschaffe (1919) issued in translation under the title: The World's Illusion  (1920).

[32] George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical, ed. Peter Goveney (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1987) p. 438. The original was published in 1866.