Royalty, loving their amusements and clever gadgets of exotic origin, had to have carousels of their own and contrived to have some small versions built for them in their private gardens. Here contests centered around the carousels were held among the court and those Chatty Cathies were so delighted this “secret training device” soon became a popular entertainment.

Quote: The contests were tests of dexterity and equestrian skill involving the tossing of fragile perfumed clay balls from one rider to another. The object of the game was to deftly catch the delicate balls to avoid the unmanly mark of the loser — a bath of sweetly scented fragrance (which reportedly lasted for days).

The popular games spread to France; and, by the sixteenth century, they had expanded into lavish tournaments of pageantry and drama called Carrousels. Designers, wigmakers, seamstresses and artisans of the court spent months preparing elaborate costumes and decorations for these spectacles. Le Grande Carrousel, the most celebrated of all Carrousels, was planned by Louis XIV in 1662, to impress his young mistress, Louise de la Valliere. Cheered by thousands and heralded by choirs and trumpet fanfares, quadrilles of cavaliers demonstrated their equestrian talents as allegorical dances and scenic displays were performed.

In the late seventeenth century, young French noblemen, astride legless wooden ‘horses’, trained for spearing contests by lancing rings as they rode around a center pole. This training device appears to be the forerunner of our present day carousel and its game of ‘catching the brass ring.’ As the ride evolved into a popular form of entertainment, French peasants paid to ride crudely constructed carousels, while the aristocracy circled in elegant seats resembling fancy chariots, bicycles, or boats.

Until the late nineteenth century, rotation power was supplied by a horse, mule, or man pushing, pulling, or cranking the mechanism. The amusement flourished in England, and it was there that the invention of steam as a motive power revolutionized the development of the carousel.”

-Charlotte Dinger, from Art of the Carousel as reprinted in FMR magazine, 1991.

The carousel proved an extremely popular part of local fairs and circuses all over industrialized Europe, and eventually America (where, thanks to an influx of skilled European carvers, the form reached its pinnacle). In as much the device went by many names. Quote: From caroussels and maneges de chevaux de bois in France to the United Kingdom where they were called roundabouts, gallopers, and tilts. In the Netherlands they were called stoomcaroussels and torneos in Italy while in Germany they called them karussels. By the time they reached the United States they were being called everything from flying horses to carousels, whirligigs and steam riding galleries, carry-us-alls and flying and Spinning Jennies, not to mention hobby horses, and, of course, merry-go-rounds.”

In Europe carousel figures took on a dizzying array of shapes and styles. There were pigs, ostriches, roosters, elephants, chariots, dragons, lions, dogs, cats, warhorses, sea horses, mermaids, fish, centaurs, camels, and on and on. In America it seems the classic horse was the vastly preferred form, perhaps owing to a fondness for our own “wild west” legends or perhaps because even then our children were coddled imaginationless little twerps, and carousel owners didn’t want to scare away the customers.

One side of carousel animals was generally more elaborately carved and decorated than the other. The side facing outward, which was called the “romance side.” On American carousel animals this is the right side because our carousels always move in a counter-clockwise direction, where as English roundabout horses move clockwise.

A few more design tidbits are as follows:

Quote: “The fast-moving platform provided a forward thrust that determined the action of the animals. Figures in static poses were meant for young children, who were strapped into position. The other figures, usually on the outer rim of the platform, were designed for more daring riders, and the brass ring also attracted older children to the outside positions. In later years, the up-and-down action of the animals provided an extra thrill.

Softwoods, especially white and yellow pine, were most suitable for the carrousel animals. Pine was easily worked, and greater speed of execution meant the figures could be produced quickly in great numbers. Little sanding or polishing was necessary in the detailing of the head, mane, and tail portions. the rounded areas of the body which required sanding were turned over to assistants and apprentices. Finally, the figure was ready for painting and gilding. These carrousel animals received the same bright-colored treatment as the circus wagons. Frequent refurbishing was necessary to maintain their attractiveness, and often much of the original intention of the artist was obscured.”

-From Treasury of American Design, 1950.

And what of those largely anonymous men who actually carved these beasts? What would they think about the fact that all these years after the carousel’s golden age, owing largely to scarcity, their functional handiwork has been elevated by collectors and historians to an art form?

Quote: “Some of the artists and carvers worked alone, or ran small studios and carving shops. Others were employed in the factories and workshops of the roundabout manufacturers. The degree of creative license allowed by their customers or their employers varied, but in every case their art was strictly functional. With few exceptions these artists and carvers saw themselves as craftsmen and certainly their income largely reflected their comparatively humble status. The fact that their work is now perceived to be ‘art’ would have surprised many of their number, but no doubt would have delighted them all.”

-Geoff Weedon and Richard Ward from Fairground Art, 1981.

Though I’ve only just skimmed the historical surface here I hope you enjoyed.

The images from this post are all from the following sources:

Fairground Art by Geoff Weedon and Richard Ward.
FMR magazine 53, Vol XI. Photos by John Lei.
Treasury of American Design by Clarence P. Hornung.
American Memory Collection page for the Glen Echo Park, Dentzel Carousel.

For more on carousels see:

National Carousel Association
Carousel Magic
iFairground
The Dentzel Family Carousel Story
The Carousel Works
My Carousel
Dentzel Carousel Coloring Book.
The Tournaments of Colonial Times

This quote is taken from the introduction for the book, The Particle Explosion by Frank Close, Michael Marten, and Christine Sutton. It continues as follows:

Quote: “If atoms could speak, what a tale they would tell. Some of the carbon atoms in the ink on this page may have once been part of a dinosaur. Their atomic nuclei may have arrived in cosmic rays, having been fused from hydrogen and helium in distant, extinct stars. But whatever their various histories may be, one thing is certain. Most of their basic constituents, the fundamental particles—the electrons and quarks—have existed since the primordial Big Bang at the start of time. In recent years, physicists have learned to make these particles in the laboratory, and by studying them, they hope to learn about the origin of the Universe.”

Published in 1987 the book is a historical overview (aimed at the layman) of the field of particle physics, from its beginnings in the 1890’s straight through to the time of the book’s writing, the mid-eighties. It is good stuff if I may say so.

One of my favorite aspects of the book are the false color images of particle events as recorded in bubble and cloud chambers. Images of these events are always fascinating, not only because of their scientific implications but for their aesthetics as well. They are just plain ol’ beautiful to look at. In as much I wanted to share some of them with you.

The examples in this book aren’t actually the most beautiful particle event images I’ve come across (a matter of personal taste perhaps but it seems to me that if it’s possible for particles which have existed in some form since the beginning of time to look “dated” or “of a certain era” then these qualify) but they are handome in their way and interesting all the same. In keeping with the fanciful nature of the introductory quote above, I will not only include a brief scientific explanation of the events pictured but also an extrapolation as to just where the particles involved may have been residing at the time of the book’s publication.

Behold.

The particles in this event once dwelled in a nose hair. The hair was knocked from said nose when an extremely irritated John Madden, distracted from an afternoon session of diagraming defensive plays for his Oakland Raiders by the incessant beepings of the Atari game Missile Command, strode from his office, into the living room, and roughly clapped his son on the back of the head. Boom!

The particles shown here were once part of a tiny chunk of foam which was dislodged from the muppet Beaker’s nose by an errant fly fishing lure. The errant lure was cast by a drug addled puppeteer who rather than paying attention to the task at hand was instead gawking at the soundtrack album artwork for John Lennon’s Imagine, on which the cover caricature’s hair was being swept back by a hallucinatory wind.

On Halloween night, 1986, a teenage boy attended a party dressed as the cartoon singer Jem. The party was held at a run down discotheque called Synergy off of the Jersey Turnpike and the main attraction, other than the peppermint schnapps and eyedropper full of acid he’d smuggled in, was the special “Frankie Goes to Hollywood” laser light show. The particles seen here were once part of his retina.

The particles in the event pictured here were once contained in a dollop of antibacterial ointment. The ointment had been applied to the bandages of a burn victim, who, on his way home from an auction where he’d purchased the original umbrella used by Julie Andrews in Marry Poppins, got caught in a heavy downpour. Unable to resist the temptation, he opened the Marry Poppins umbrella which was promptly turned inside out by a gust of wind and blown, with him still grasping it covetously, into a downed power line.

In 1983, in a lovely furnished basement in suburban Ohio, a ritual was preformed by three teenagers hoping to become members of the local chapter of the Church of Satan. The ritual called for the following ingredients to be combined in a silver chalice: the veins of Nicolai Tesla’s left nut, the spinal fluid of a seasoned Deadhead, a crumpled Old Testament page containing the verse Exodus 3:2, and an electric currant from a car battery. The particles in the event seen here were scooped into bags by the local volunteer fire department.

One of the protons pictured here was at some point contained in the tiny section of black ink which described the shape of Charlie Brown’s famously anemic tree on the Betamax sleeve of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Coincidentally the other protons were contained in the sleeve of the VHS version.

Left: The particles pictured here were once contained in a bit of paper pulp, which was itself once part of a crumpled and cast aside first draft of an attempted reworking of the famous Hitchcock profile logo for the television show The New Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Right: The electrons here once existed in a scab on Stevie Ray Vaughn’s fingertip.

After having their minds altered by a mysterious 5-dimensional being calling himself The Fuse, the Green Lantern and Iron Man were training their energy beams on one another in a forced battle to the death. At exactly the moment their beams were about to cross (an act whose explosive force would have decimated the entire city) an unfortunate daddy long-legs spider, set adrift on cluster of windborne dandelion seeds, came between them, inadvertently braking The Fuse’s hold and saving the city. The particles pictured in this image once took up residence in the braincells I would have used to formulate an idea for this paragraph, had I not destroyed them one afternoon in 1987 sniffing super-glue.

The particles here were at one point part of a microscopic shaving from Joan Miró‘s palette knife. The shaving was chipped loose during an altercation at a cocktail party in which he, and a young Ralph Steadman, engaged in a gentleman’s duel (palette knife vs. rapidograph) over the issue of which was a nobler creature, the squid or the sailfish. 

Amongst the birds there is a legend, chirped to hatchlings at night, about a bloodthirsty and merciless Buttonquail whose nest was lined with a thousand bird legs, torn violently from the bodies of a thousand naughty chicks. The particles pictured here were not from said Buttonquail, but from the nest of a disturbed parrot named Lugo who could only be sexually excited when perching on the carcass of a dead stickbug.

“If atoms could speak, what a tale they would tell.” Indeed.

Hope you enjoyed.

That is a section from a well known account of the Myth of Ironus about a boulder and his punishment by the Gods.

His name was Ironus and as the story goes this hulking slab of iron ore was an extremely proud boulder. He had some reason to be. You see he was a Grecian rock and in those ancient days of Greece in which one might glimpse gorgons and one-eyed giants and heroes choking lions with their bare hands or dispatching fire-breathing chimeras, it was none the less highly unusual to find a huge mass of iron ore just lying about. Greece was limestone country after all, and if asked no chalk, calcarenite, coquina, or travertine could remember exactly how Ironus came to rest there in the valley amongst their layers. Everyrock, however, counted that forgotten day of his arrival as a bad one. Ironus was so proud it seems that he was also cruel and blasphemous.

Rocks are a steady, solid folk. They do what they do well and are very nearly single minded about it. The reason for this is not because rocks are simple or lack imagination. Nor is it because they are lazy or particularly taciturn. It’s simply because rocks are, above all else, terrifically devout.

Any God would count himself lucky to have a world full of rocks as his worshippers, and though the rocks themselves would be hard-pressed to deny that there is an entire pantheon of Gods at work out there, shaping the universe, molding creation, and getting up to their considerable mischief, the truth is that rocks are near monotheistic in practice. Sure they’ll embrace one of Death’s little organic trinkets if asked and they’ll bow to the will of Fire if they must (no reason to start trouble), but rocks adore one god above all others. Gravity. They would follow Master Gravity anywhere.

Which brings us to Ironus.

Ironus was a big, heavy, manganese-rich lump of iron ore who had not moved or been eroded a millimeter for as long as anyrock could remember. He just sat there. And understand that “just sitting there” was an act which would have been very admirable for a rock, had he just done so quietly. Instead, prideful Ironus felt compelled to continually taunt the limestones all around him–

“You weakling limestones! How pathetic you are! You’ll erode to nothing and I’ll still be here. You will be broken down, bit by bit, until your so small a goat fart could blow you away! Some tribute to Gravity that will be! You’ll become tiny little grains of sand and be sucked up by the waters, getting dragged here and there by the tides, moving about in a murky solution for eternity! Haha. You’ll end up weightless bits of dust, continually blown about, continually in motion. You’ll probably spend most of your time up in a cloud somewhere praying a raindrop will form around you so you can feel Gravity again and return to Earth. Pathetic limestones! Look at me! I’m as heavy and massive and motionless as I ever was. Why, laying next to me you’re barely true rocks at all!”

Now that was pretty cruel. It was not the limestones’ fault. They knew full well that they’d probably erode long before that most glorious day of days, the one they were waiting for, when Gravity would take it’s rightful place as the King of all Gods, compressing everyrock and everything into itself. It was the day foretold since the beginning of time, when Fire would no longer melt them and Water would no longer wear them down! Huzzah! It was the day the oldest rocks told of, when Gravity became so strong not even fleet footed Light could escape him! It was the day they’d be reunited with every one of their lost particles, when they’d be whole again. Imagine it! All things crushed into one impossibly dense point under Gravity!  It was Heaven. Every limestone new that it would most likely perceive that day in only the dimmest way, as disparate particles spread far and wide over the planet, or worse, as microscopic passengers clinging to the filthy bones of some disgusting animal. This was the fate God had chosen for them and Ironus took every chance to remind them of it.

Cruelty, in and of itself, is hardly a punishable offense where the Gods are concerned. It would be just too hypocritical considering the truly and divinely rarified types of cruelty they’ve been known engage in, but as it so happens, one day, in a fit of self-congratulation, Ironus crossed the line and his simple cruelty to the rocks around him was transformed into blasphemy.

On that particular day some humans had been loping about, chattering as they do, chipping at the limestones with little sticks. Ironus first taunted them, pointing out their disgusting softness and meager life-spans, but when they did not seem to take notice, he directed his scorn again toward the limestones–

“Ah look how easily you are chipped and pulverized! You pathetic collections of sediment. See how the soft ones don’t dare approach me! They sense my power. They are scared! They know I am too strong, that I would tear their flesh and mash their bones in my immovability! They fear me crushing them into the Earth and soaking their iron-rich fluids into myself! They can feel the Gravity on me! Oh yes. Take heed little limestones! I am solidity and permanence. I am weight. I am mysterious and huge and eternal! I am Gravity incarnate!  Heed me little limestones, for when the Great Crush comes it will be I, Ironus, floating here in the center of space, it will be my impossible density which galaxies spiral around! You would do well to please me little limestones for I am Gravity itself!”

Well, needless to say, at this, Master Gravity had heard enough. Cruelty is one thing but putting oneself on equal footing with a God! And shouting it to anyrock within sensing distance! Well that was another matter entirely. That was hubris of the worst kind, the kind which just positively begged to be demolished and crumbled.

It was for this reason that Gravity contrived to have an earthquake occur just then, a simple matter really, and used its’ shaking and shifting pomp to open a fissure in the ground and to draw proud Ironus down into the underworld, surrounding limestones, humans with sticks, and all; Such was his annoyance. There, in a deeper valley, under a darker sky, surrounded by the same berated stones, Ironus would learn the difference between God and mineral.

It is said that as punishment Gravity sentenced Ironus to an eternity of being rolled up a hill.

Each morning, and each afternoon, and each evening, a small soft human would lay hands upon Ironus, and move him forcibly from his resting place, violating his claim to gravity, and pushing him further from the valley and up the hillside. It was a punishment which fit the crime, for if Ironus gave in, and allowed the puny human to move him, he’d be shoved over the hill’s peak, and in a great rumbling roll would find himself accepted again into Gravity’s bosom, in the valley on the other side. If he’d only give in he’d be allowed to sit in all his great weight, unmolested there, forever after. But Gravity knew what a spectacularly prideful creature Ironus was, and knew that his ego would never allow him to give in, or indeed allow him to even perceive this means of release. He knew that day after afternoon after evening Ironus would resist, and he did exactly that.

Ironus, weighty and massive though he was, could never lay claim to any sort of intelligence and never gave any serious thought to the processes at work. All he saw was the soft human whom he despised, and all he heard were the jibes of the limestones all around him. He continuously struggled and fought and did all he could to lower his center of gravity, to shift and to slide from the human’s wet pink little hands. Each day the human began again unperturbed and each day Ironus struggled against him. But all the while he was being acted upon by the friction and moisture of the human’s toil. All the while his surface was being weakened and softened and broken down. Each day he resisted, screaming futilely about his strength and weight and power, and each day he eroded a little bit more.

Gravity knew full well this chunk of ore would resist right up until the moment he found himself taken up into a cloud by the wind, a miniscule little red dust particle, with no recourse but to pray for rain.

And it was so.

As it turns out the great poignant tale of Sisyphus was somewhat misconstrued by we humans, not the least by Sisyphus himself. It was Ironus who was actually being punished, and were Sisyphus to have walked away from Ironus, he would have simply been replaced by another quivering, pink, fleshy little man. But Sisyphus never grasped this fact, possibly because he was himself prideful, or stupid, or had some kind of persecution complex, and after countless millennia of toil, seeing Ironus eroded to dust,  poor Sisyphus simply switched to another rock and kept on going.

–

for some interesting related reading on the myth of Sisyphus check out the following:

The basic myth from mythweb.
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.
The Absurd Hero a reaction to Camus’ famous essay by Bob Lane.
The Myth of Sisyphus: A Cycle by Samanera Bodhesako.
Sisyphus, in his own words at kiro5hin.

Hope you enjoyed.

Note: This post was one in a series of reworkings of old posts which date from before the redesign of The Nonist. The text has been totally reworked and the image is new. I will be periodically adding these reworkings into the flow of new content in an effort to eventually remove all the old pages from circulation.