This 200 foot high shadow figure lurking about the misty mountaintops goes by various names, mountain specter for instance, in China it is called Buddha’s Light,  and one would assume that somewhere, at some time, it must be have been called something along the lines of “The Holy Crapuolossus: Bowel Evacuator.” It is best known, however, as the Brockengespenst or Brocken Spectre, owing to the ideal conditions at The Brocken, a peak in the Harz Mountains in northern Germany, for its sudden appearance.

Quote: “A gigantic figure haunts the Mountains, known by the name of “The Spectre of the Brocken.” The ignorant peasants were, in former times, in great fear of it, thinking it a supernatural being, and fancying that it brought upon them all manner of evil. And it must be confessed it was a fearful sight to behold suddenly upon the summit of a lofty mountain an immense giant, sometimes pointing in a threatening attitude to a village below, as if dooming it to destruction; sometimes with arms upraised, as if invoking ruin upon all the country; and sometimes stalking along with such tremendous strides as to make but one step from peak to peak; often dwarfing himself to nothingness, and again stretching up until his head is in the clouds, then disappearing entirely for a moment, only to reappear more formidable than before.” -Frank Richard Stockton, from Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy c. 1910.

De Quincy in his Confessions of an Opium Eater devotes a section to “The Apparition of the Brocken.” If we selectively string together a few sentences (leaving out the far larger chunks about testing the apparition’s faith for fear that centuries of bearing witness to the dark idolatries of pagan sorcerers have made him impure, and the sections about weeping for lost childhood love, like Judea, under a palm-tree) we get this-

“Who and what is he? ...in order to test the nature of this mysterious apparition, we will try two or three experiments upon him… Make the sign of the cross, and observe whether he repeats it. Look! he does repeat it… You are now satisfied that the apparition is but a reflex of yourself.”

Which is, of course, a case of a poet’s hallucinatory metaphor unintentionally touching upon the truth of a thing.

Quote: “A wild tale has long circulated about a giant specter seen by mountain climbers on the Bocken, a German mountain. As the story goes, there was once a climber working his way along the precipice who suddenly saw an immense human figure rise out of the mists toward him. In his fright he lost his footing and fell to his death. Doubtless this is just a story, but the Brocken specter does exist, not only in Brocken but wherever shadows are cast upon mist, fog, and fine water droplets” -Willim R. Corliss, from The Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena.

As it happens these specters are in fact the result of multiple, comparatively rare, optical phenomena acting in tandem to produce a sort of “perfect storm” of visual trickery. In truth it’s hard to imagine an illusion more tailor made to give a human onlooker reason for serious pause than a giant, mysterious, mountain dwelling shadow-figure, whose head is surrounded by a luminous nimbus of rainbow-colored light. Perhaps if it also had tits?

I say “comparatively rare” optical phenomena, but of course that’s misleading. This is science we’re talking about here and these phenomena will reliably occur wherever the conditions are right.

From wikipedia: “A Brocken spectre, also called Brocken bow or mountain spectre, is the apparently enormously magnified shadow of an observer, cast upon the upper surfaces of clouds opposite the sun.

The ‘spectre’ appears when the sun shines from behind a climber who is looking down from a ridge or peak into mist. The light projects the climber’s shadow forward through the mist, often in an odd triangular shape due to perspective. The apparent magnification of size of the shadow is an optical illusion that occurs when the observer judges his shadow on relatively nearby clouds to be at the same distance as faraway land objects seen through gaps in the clouds, or when there are no reference points at all by which to judge its size. The shadow also falls on water droplets of varying distances from the eye, confusing depth perception. The ghost can appear to move (sometimes quite suddenly) because of the movement of the cloud layer.

The head of the figure is often surrounded by the glowing halo-like rings of a glory, rings of coloured light that appear directly opposite the sun when sunlight is reflected by a cloud of uniformly-sized water droplets.”

The comparative rarity here is that prior to human flight a comparatively few people actually had occasion to witness this phenomena. In as much you can hardly blame the folks who did for descending the mountain and heading straight for the local Pub to get hammered and spread their tales of giant ghostly figures and high altitude pants crapping.

In any case the illustrations above hardly do justice to the oddity and, yes, beauty, of the Brocken Spectre. As such I’ve gathered together a group of photographs for your viewing pleasure. See below-

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure a still photo, transmitted over “the tubes,” and viewed on one’s computer screen really does the phenomena justice either. I’m sure under the right circumstances, say pumped full of hallucinogens and trudging alone at dusk on a German mountainside, even we learned moderns might find a landslide accidentally triggered in our lederhosen before our rational minds managed to get the “all’s clear” message out to our jumpy animal parts. Either that or we’d find ourselves not too long afterward telling our bemused mates- “That’s right, I’m quitting my job, changing my name to Baron Fogdancer, and building the worlds largest lollipop factory… Because God appeared to me and told me to! That’s why!”

Anyhow, hope you enjoyed.

For more check out Brocken spectres, bows, and glories  by Henry Sharpe.

Can there be a more poetically potent act than that of drinking, and literally drawing sustenance from, another creatures tears?! Drinking tears for christ sake! Really, in human terms, it does not get much more poetically evocative than that, unless of course there is an animal lurking out there in the underbrush who subsists exclusively on the torn-out hearts of pregnant war widows.

For the animals who engage in this behavior, mainly a few species of moth, nothing could be more straight forward. Tears are as good a source of water and salt as any other (not to mention those delicious trace-levels of protein! Yum.) and hell, if no one else is gonna make use of it… Mommy didn’t raise no dummy-larva!

Even so, as a human it would seem nearly impossibly to explain lachryphagy without at least tacitly acknowledging the crazy, unintentional drama the whole undertaking is fraught with from our emotional and symbol-ridden point of view.

Quote: “Some species of moth engage in an almost romantic kissing of the eyes. Mara elephantophila, for example, which drinks the tears of elephants, is among the smallest of such moths. A shy, delicate creature, its tiny size allows it to steal a tear without elephants seemingly noticing.

The highly specialized Lobocraspis griseifusa Does not wait for an animal’s eyes to moisten. When it has landed, it sweeps its proboscis across the eye of its unfortunate host, irritating the eyeball, encouraging it to produce tears. It can even insert its proboscis between the eyelids, ensuring it can feed even while its host is sleeping. Whereas a moth of the genus Poncetia goes to the opposite extreme. It’s proboscis is so short it must cling to the eyeball itself to drink. But it must be careful. If its weeping host blinks, the moth is often crushed to death.” -Matt Walker, from Fish That Fake Orgasms: And Other Zoological Curiosities.

Yes!!!

I literally can’t read that without my brain just shivering in delight. 

“Delight?” you ask. Well, yeah, I mean, we’re talking about insects drinking animal tears. As with Love and War, all’s fair in Nature baby, that’s just plain good times. If, on the other hand, moths were dunking those proboscises (who knows where they’ve been!?) and greedily guzzling the wine of human sadness, well…

Quote: “I was observing zoophilous moths in a herd of zebu. One C. ludovicae took tears from a zebu at 1840 h. Shortly afterwards the specimen flew onto my wrist where it sucked perspiration for 10 minutes before it flew onto my naked leg and back onto the front of my head where it continued to take sweat. It flew off and back to my cheek, climbed towards my right eye. finally settling near its lower edge. The perception I now felt was unpleasant and was comparable the that of a particularly edgy grain of sand being rubbed between eye and lid. the source of th epain is revealed in a flash photograph (pictured above) I took 1.5 minutes after the moth settled: the right fore tarsus was hooked onto the delicate conjunctiva of the lid near the eyeball, while the the tear sucking proboscis applied to the eyeball caused less disturbance. Unfortunately the flash scared the moth away which did not return.” - Hans Biinziger, from the paper Remarkable New Cases of Moths Drinking Human Tears In Thailand. (pdf)

No!!!

That moth got away and its tear-fattened progeny are almost surely licking a human eyeball somewhere in Thailand at this very moment! Not to mention these guys…

Yeesh. See, now my brain is shuddering in repulsion, and rather than the sensitive and knowing Emersonian verse which had been growing in the back of my mind, I find poorly written scripts for low-budget horror flicks scrolling across my mind’s eye… Hey! Stay away from my mind’s eye, you damn pesky tear-burglars.

Anyhow, thinking it over, I cant help but get to wondering. Were it not for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth scaring them away, would moths prefer the hormone and painkiller-rich vintage of “psychic tears” (i.e. the type created by stress, suffering, or pain induced weeping) over the run-of-the-mill “reflex’ brand? And for that matter would, say, a toddler’s skinned-knee tears be more or less delicious than a 17 year old’s “we’re both going off to different schools and will want to see other people” tears? Are the tears of a Cubs’ fan in September any good? And what about crocodile tears or the tears of a clown?

Your average elephant or water buffalo doesn’t care much about such things, they just make a loud noise and shake their head about to scare off the moths and then get back to their business, but as I said in the beginning, such is the joy of being a deliriously “aware” human. It is our purview, and ours alone, to get wrapped up in the poetry and metaphorical emotional payload inherent to the survival strategy of an insect, who given the chance, will fly directly into an open flame.

Afterword 1-

The image which began this post, of a deer’s eye surrounded by tear bandits, is a fabrication. I concocted it to resemble a very low resolution image I found showing a similar gathering around a water buffalo’s eye. As much as it pains me to admit it- the deer is stuffed, the eye is glass, and the moths are, well… I don’t know what they are.

How is this even remotely relevant to the discussion at hand you ask? Well, coincidentally (or not), in seeking to create the illustration I found that, for a layman at least, the act of searching out images of specific moths, armed with nothing but the maddeningly complex knot of Latin genus/subgenus/family/sub-family/tribe/ names also happens to induce lacrymation, rather quickly and angrily I might add, and I half expected my face to be swarmed with fluttery little wings terminating in thirsty barbed probosci.

Afterword 2-

In the year 2048, after the fall of western civilization, when an individual’s knowledge and skill-set no longer qualify he or she for well paying jobs but rather automatically initiate them into vicious, roving, cannibalistic street gangs, murderous and vengeful lepidopterologists (and Nabokov scholars) will appropriate the image of the lachryphage, potent and poetic as it is, and use it in the following manner-

And this tattoo will strike fear into the hearts of their enemies. 

Hope you enjoyed.

Related from New Scientist:
Moths with a taste for tears
Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds

Possibly related:
The Jimsonweed Junkies

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1898 Reflections Appropriate to “The Fourth”, published in The Century a popular quarterly.

Quote: “The significance of Independence Day this year is greatly enlarged by reason of the war with Spain. The temptation of the Fourth-of-July orator will be to lose sight, in the brilliance of martial events, of the steady white light of national aspiration so clearly reflected in one of the noblest of our patriotic hymns, “America.” This lofty hymn may help to remind us that not in victory alone, certainly not in extension of territory, but in a steadfast dedication to the principles of liberty and justice, lies the true greatness of a nation. The hymn contains no line of boasting or self-glorification, and the contemplation of its pure sentiment will be useful at this time, lest we forget in the allurements of martial success that war is only a means to an honorable peace.”

-

1938 From the WPA funded American Folklore Project.

Quote from Miss Nettie Spencer, of Portland Oregon, remembering the Fourth of her childhood:

“It was the big event of the year. Everyone in the countryside got together on that day for the only time in the year. There would be floats in the morning and the one that got the [girls?] eye was the Goddess of Liberty. She was supposed to be the most wholesome and prettiest girl in the countryside — if she wasn’t she had friends who thought she was. But the rest of us weren’t always in agreement on that… Following the float would be the Oregon Agricultural College cadets, and some kind of a band. Sometimes there would be political effigies.

Just before lunch - and we’d always hold lunch up for an hour - some Senator or lawyer would speak. These speeches always had one pattern. First the speaker would challenge England to a fight and berate the King and say that he was a skunk. This was known as twisting the lion’s tail. Then the next theme was that any one could find freedom and liberty on our shores. The speaker would invite those who were heavy laden in other lands to come to us and find peace. The speeches were pretty fiery and by that time the men who drank got into fights and called each other Englishmen. In the afternoon we had what we called the ‘plug uglies’ — funny floats and clowns who took off on the political subjects of the day…The Fourth was the day of the year that really counted then. Christmas wasn’t much; a Church tree or something, but no one twisted the lion’s tail.”

Hope you found these to be interesting or thought provoking or at very the least visually stimulating.

Happy 4th.

He was William Buehler Seabrook, a reporter and Lost Generation writer (claiming the minor distinction of having written the first celebrity rehab tell-all) and it was his book, The Magic Island, a sensationalized account of his voodoo-mad travels throughout Haiti, that first ushered our beloved un-dead bugaboo, the zombie, onto American shores.

Though The Magic Island did

represent the first usage in English print of the word zombie (it appeared as a term connected to a Voodoo snake god much earlier) as the author later claimed in his autobiography, Seabrook’s book was the first popular English language text to confront the phenomena of the Haitian “living dead” head-on. The book referred to these shambling, dead-eyed, unfortunates as “Zombies” + and they have moved, at varying speeds, among us ever since.

The popularity of his book, with its sensational but not altogether unsympathetic characterizations, dovetailed perfectly with a zeitgeist that would also yield the nearly concurrent release of Hollywood’s iconic monster features. The result of which was an immediate pop-cultural embrace, bringing this new terror into our stable of more veteran ghouls like Dracula and Frankenstein without so much as a second interview. Seabrook’s book was all it took. 

The giddy excitement entertainers felt at having a new abomination to play with resulted, almost immediately, in a broadway play—Kenneth Webb’s 1932 flop Zombie—and a film—the infamous 1932 indie, and granddaddy of all zombie flicks, White Zombie—not to mention multiple lawsuits. A scant 3 years after America first saw the word in print courts were obliged to rule “zombies” as being in the public domain. And are they ever. After 1932 it is a truly rare thing for a year to pass by completely undisturbed by the walking dead. 

Zombie! Zombie!! Zombie!!!

Though it is most notable for this popularization The Magic Island, a 336p book, in actuality only devoted 12 scant pages, a single chapter titled “...Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields” to le culte des morts’ handiwork. The rest of the book is full of sensational tales of ritual, magic, sacrifice, potions, feverish midnight sex-dances, and all of the objective reportage one might expect from an alcoholic, occult-dabbling, middle-aged white man traveling through Haiti in the 1920’s.

I picked up a first edition copy a few weeks back, just out of curiosity, and was thrilled to find that not only is it a pretty fascinating read, biases and euphemistic “of it’s time” pronouncements aside, but that their were pictures! Joy! The book contains about 30 photographs taken by Seabrook during his travels, but more interestingly a large group of original illustrations by a one Alexander King.

A search for more info on Mr. King does not offer much.

AskArt offers us this: “Described as a thief, morphine addict, failing playwright and painter, Alexander King was a man of iconoclastic observations and caustic humor who began his career as a painter of human figures, focused primarily on the face. Then he became an art thief, stealing fifty prints from the Metropolitan Museum. He was jailed twice, and married four times.”

While the IMDb says only: “Alexander King, by his own admission, had a very checkered career before becoming racontuer on residence during the Jack Parr years of “The Tonight Show”. A veteran newspaperman turned press agent, he published his various anecdotes in a series of off-beat books that were very popular at the time. Nearly forgotten today, King, who claimed to have been married five times, was a fixture on the TV talk show circuit from roughly the mid-1950s until his death in 1965.”

Various searches do reveal, without a doubt, that he illustrated many books throughout the 30’s and 40’s however, and with the pedigree outlined above, he was a perfect match for Seabrook and his Magic Island.

Below I’ve reproduced 9 of King’s illustrations from The magic Island including, for a few, some corresponding text by Seabrook. Have a look…

Quote: “Louis, son of Catherine Ozias of Orblanche, paternity unknown—and thus without a surname was he inscribed in the Haitian civil register—reminded me always of that proverb out of hell in which Blake said, “He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.” It was not because Louis’ black face, frequently perspiring, shone like patent leather; it glowed also with a mystic light that was not always heavenly. For Louis belonged to the chimeric company of saints, monsters, poets, and divine idiots. He used to get besotted drunk in a corner, and then would hold long converse with seraphim and demons, also from time to time with his dead grandmother who had been a sorceress.”

Quote: “The celebrants approached, processionally, singing, from the mystery house. At the head came the papaloi, an old man, blue-overalled, bare-footed, but with a surplice over his shoulders and a red turban on his head, waving before him the açon, a gourd-rattle wound round with snake-vertebrae. At his right and left, keeping pace with him, two young women held aloft, crossed above his head, two flags on which were serpentine and cabalistic symbols, sewn on with metallic, glittering beads. Behind him marched a young man bearing aloft, horizontally on his upstretched palms, a sword, and next the mamaloi, a woman in a scarlet robe and feathered headdress, who revolved as she progressed in a sort of dervish dance; next came marching, two and two, a chorus of twenty or more women robed in white, with white cloths wound bandana-wise on their heads, and as they slowly marched they chanted:

Damballa Oueddo,
Nous p’ vim

It would be best translated, I think, Oh, Serpent God, we come.”

Quote: “In the red light of torches which made the moon turn pale, leaping, screaming, writhing black bodies, blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened, drunken, whirled and danced their dark saturnalia, heads thrown weirdly back as if their necks were broken, white teeth and eyeballs gleaming, while couples seizing one another from time to time fled from the circle, as if pursued by furies, into the forest to share and slake their ecstasy.”

Quote: “One of the most dreaded forms of Haitian-African magic includes the dressing of a corpse in a garment of the person marked for vengeance and then exposing it to rot away in some secret place in the jungle. Men have gone stark mad seeking that jungle-hidden horror, and others have died hopelessly, searching. Fear, hunger, thirst, jungle-terror, one may say. Names again, tags, labels. But marked for death by the Voodoo curse, they died.”

Quote: “It seemed that while the zombie came from the grave, it was neither a ghost, nor yet a person who had been raised like Lazarus from the dead. The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life—it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive. People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the body before it has had time to rot, galvanize it into movement, and then make of it a servant or slave, occasionally for the commission of some crime, more often simply as a drudge around the habitation or the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens.”


So while this text offers the first English language popularization of the word “zombie” those last 3 Illustrations, interestingly, represent the first images anyone associated the word. All in all fascinating bit of pop-cultural, if not exactly ethnographic or anthropological, history.

Jay A. Graybeal says in his terrific summation of Seabrook’s story: “Big lusty, restless, red-haired William Buehler Seabrook spent more than 20 years seeking fantastic adventure, then putting what he found into books which thrilled some, shocked many.  But he never will write the story of his greatest adventure. Secretly and alone he embarked upon it not long ago by way of an overdose of sedative. The coroner says Bill Seabrook committed suicide. But his friends have a different explanation for what happened.  They say he only was making another more drastic attempt to accomplish what he had tried, vainly, all his life to do—to get away from himself.”

Alester Crowley, an acquaintance of Seabrook’s, put it rather more bluntly in a diary entry: “The swine-dog W. B. Seabrook has killed himself at last.”

In 1966, a year after his death, a critic writing a review for a Seabrook biography said: “his principal literary contribution, it would seem, is the word zombie.” That may in fact be the truth. But how very impressive, built as it was on 12 short pages of reportage, that contribution turned out to be.

Zombie! Zombie!! Zombie!!!

Hope you enjoyed.

-

Related Linkage:

The Roots of the Modern Zombie Movie
Zombies in Popular Culture
Scifipedia: Zombies
The History of Zombies
Zombies in Early Horror Films
Voodoos and Obeahs
Gothic capitalism: The Horror of Accumulation and the Commodification of Humanity.
Black Religion and Black Magic: Prejudice and Projection in Images of African-derived Religions

As it happens just yesterday I came across the perfect resource to illustrate that point, the 1971 book The Poster Art of Tomi Ungerer, compiled and edited by Jack Rennert. Below I’ve reproduced, for your viewing pleasure and Mr. Ungerer’s glorification, a small sampling of the terrific poster work contained therein. Have a look…

Quote: “Expect the unexpected” is a fitting description of all of Tomi’s posters. The element of surprise, the element of the absurd, is a clear constant in his posters. When Tomi is finished with a poster design, he will step back a bit, and if he’s really satisfied with what he’s done, he’ll say, “It’s absurd!”

This very absurdity, achieved by elements of surprise and exaggeration, makes for a good poster: one of the key elements of a good poster is that it be arresting, that it be immediately compelling. This propensity for gleefully combining the improbable with the absurd is carried through in all of Tomi’s works.” -Jack Rennert.

Quote: “Hans Pflug, writing about Tomi’s work when he first came to the United States, noted: ‘His drawings and advertisements all give the impression of having occurred to him in a flash, and of having been captured on paper with equal immediacy.’ To watch Tomi at work is to know that this was an accurate observation and is still so. What is amazing to me, is that Tomi at once gets a complete image of what he wants to do, and putting it down on paper becomes almost the automatic reflex of his clearly ‘seen’ image. He rarely goes back over his lines. They are immediately, cleanly, and finally, put down on paper. He may not be satisfied when he’s finished and will throw the whole thing out, but he’ll seldom redo or rework his lines or colors.” -Jack Rennert.

Quote: “The main influences in my work were, as a child, Mathias Grunewald, Durer, Schongauer, as well as Hansi and Schnugg, both Alsatian illustrators. Later came Goya, Bosch, the Japanese graphists (Hokusai, etc.), the old issues of Simplicissimus, and Wilhelm Busch.

My high school records were crowned with the final remark: ‘Perverse and subversive.’

My interest and hobbies vary and alternate: flying kites and balloons, old toys, books, bondage, erotica, minerology, botany, medicine, jazz-the list is vain and endless. My most meaningful author is Louis Ferdinand Celine, my favorite painter is Ingres, and Bach’s is just about the only music that gives me total satisfaction.” -Tomi Ungerer, from the introduction to The Poster Art of Toimi Ungerer

It was no easy task choosing what to include here but I hope you enjoyed these.

You can visit Tomi Ungerer’s homepage if you’d like to see some more of his work.

Also I’ve posted a small set of pieces Mr. Ungerer created for a 1966 IBM exhibition called Some Computer ABC’s over at the Nonist Annex.

Lastly, in that I was unable to find anything comparable on the web—the horse’s mouth and all that—I wanted to offer the full text of the biographical sketch Mr. Ungerer wrote for the introduction to the book. You can read it here.

As a young man Hsueh Shao-Tang fantasized about being an artist, but life intervened, as it has a nasty habit of doing. He was living in Peking when Mao Tse-Tung’s Communists swept through northern China, so the first order of business had to be entirely more practical. Hsueh’s family had an ancestral silk business but the war-time conditions of Peking had made it impossible to continue and Hsueh was ultimately reduced to roaming the countryside to hunt out food for his parents and sister. The hunt brought him to Shanghai where he was snatched off the street by “recruiters” for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army. He spent the next six years guarding against communist invasion in Taiwan and never saw his family again.

After being discharged he was desperate for some reliable means to support himself (and his new family- a wife and two children) so he enrolled in a school for classical Chinese cuisine. He did so well as a chef that after graduating cum laude he was sent to Turkey as the official chef for the Chinese ambassador there. It was during this three year period that he began to once again devote private hours to his art. Said art consisted of cutting postage stamps into fine little shards and gluing them onto silk to form traditional compositions. After the ambassador’s death he was invited to bring his family to Geneva, where he would cook banquets on holidays and could devote the rest of his time to his art.

What follows are 10 pieces created by Hsueh Shao-Tang during his time in Geneva.

Quote: “How many stamps have I cut to pieces making pictures? I’ve made about five hundred pictures—given them to friends and sold some, too. Big ones take up to a month. Let’s say they average fifteen hundred stamps apiece. But, of course, some need many more—up to ten thousand. For one picture! Anyway, I’ve chopped up nearly a million stamps. Whole stamps—forget the fragments! And, some days, it seems like that many cabbages, too, for those spring rolls!

I need maybe a thousand different Chinese stamps. Not Red Chinese . . . Taiwan! Friends buy them and send them from Taipeh. It’s terrible how the cost has increased in ten years! Of course, all are old stamps. Nobody could buy new ones. I’ve never used any Communist stamps although their colors are very strong. But not as good as Taiwanese. They’re the best. I’ve used about five hundred different Western stamps, too, but they are very expensive and the colors aren’t as beautiful. Naturally, my glue is special—my secret. It will never stain stamps or the silk on which I paste the fragments—it holds stamps and silk together perfectly . . . maybe forever!” -Hsueh Shao-Tang.

Gorgeous. The little snatches of text and image you find in say a bird feather, the tiger’s skin, or some leaves is fantastic. I’d love to see one up close and personal.

All of the quotes and images are from the book Magic Worlds of Fantasy by David Douglas Duncan, published 1978.

Unfortunately I was unable to find any further information on Hsueh Shao-Tang beyond that shared by Mr. Duncan, and while there are plenty of copies of Magic Worlds of Fantasy to be found for purchase on the web I was only able to find two small images of Hsueh Shao-Tang’s work. That strikes me as a real shame, as I’d love to see more of his work, but more so, after such a touching biographical sketch, I’d love to know how the artist and his art fared once he was able to devote himself to it.

Hope you enjoyed.

Religiosity penetrates language like mold veins an exceptionally blue cheese. This is true for the English language in general but is particularly pronounced when it comes to profanity. This fact is not remotely surprising if you take even a second to think on it. The word profanity itself is a religious one for Christ’s sake! ⊕ Were it not for the act of measuring all utterances against God’s hair-trigger wrath, there would, strictly speaking, be no such thing as “profanity.” 

Profane,  from the Latin profanare “to desecrate,” from profanus “unholy, not consecrated,” from pro fano “not admitted into the temple (with the initiates).

The term has been broadened, in modern usage, to encompass any “naughty” words not fit for “polite” company ⊕ Even so, the desire to have something forceful to say, which properly utilizes a good long row of exclamation points ⊕, when we stub our toe, or cum, or get punched in the neck, or open a cable bill while in public has lead us to coin a plethora of seemingly benign substitution expletives.

Today these substitutes, so numerous as to vastly outnumber the “curses” they stand-in for,  are mostly the kind of limp, forceless words you associate with grandparents, cartoon characters, and 7 year-olds. They are also the kind of words that are so ingrained in our language and minds that we never give a thought to their origins or what they are actually standing-in for. A euphemistic substitute of this kind has a name, if you were not aware, and that name is “minced oath.” ⊕

Minced Oath.  A semi-technical term for a specific kind of euphemism or disguise mechanism, whereby an offending term or taboo phrase is modified so as to be used without giving offense. Periphrasis or circumlocution is the most common modification, that is, to “speak around” a profane word, implying it without saying it.

While there have long been linguistic taboos associated with the scatological and the sexual ⊕ it will not surprise you to learn minced oaths are, as a group, overwhelmingly Religious in origin.

Just a few examples:

Gosh darn it — God damn it
Jeepers Creepers — Jesus Christ
Tarnation — Damnation
Dad gum — God damn
Doggone it— God damn it
Jiminy Cricket — Jesus Christ
For Pete’s sake — For St. Peter’s Sake
By golly — By God’s body
By Jove — By Jupiter/Jehovah
Judas Priest — Jesus Christ
Good gravy — Good God
Drat — God rot it
For crying out loud — For Christ’s sake
Goodness gracious — Good God
Holy mackerel — Holy flesh
Jumping Jehosaphat — Jumping Jesus
Suffering succotash — Suffering saviour
Blimey — God blind me
Dangnabbit — God damn it
Gee whizz / geewhillikers — Jesus’ whiskers
Good grief — Good God
Egad — Oh God
Gadzooks — God’s hooks
Zounds — God’s wounds +
Etc…

That there are so very many of these types of minced oaths is actually somewhat comical, not to mention quite revealing in regard to Man’s outlook on taboo language.

Why comical? Because these archaic forms sound silly to our modern ears? ⊕ No. Because as a good hardline theologian (or hardline amateur) will happily remind you, any God worth the knee-pains of prostrating oneself before would not, could not, be fooled by a bit of loophole-exploiting linguistic flimflam. Which is to say, minced or not, the intention is identical and so the iniquity is equal.

 
Quote: “It is a vain endeavor on the part of some to avoid the guilt of profane swearing by mincing their oaths, as is the practice of many whose consciences still trouble them so much as to hinder them from the more out-breaking forms of this sin. Minced oaths are either oaths, or they are nonsense. If oaths, they are of course profane. If they are nonsense, they are not “good nonsense,” and are clearly forbidden by Matt. xii. 36. -William S, Plumer, D.D. LL.D., The Law of God, 1864.

It’s our persistence, in spite of this fact, which I find revealing. It would seem that we modify our speech knowing full well that the modification does not successfully solve the “problem.” We are motivated not by fear of God’s wrath ⊕ evidently but by fear of more tangibly immediate reprisals by the morality patrol. In short we will modify our behavior so as not to hassled by other (very real, persistent, and annoying) humans but not to protect against “eternal damnation” in the (very theoretical, abstract, quite possibly imaginary) afterlife.

Eeentahresting.

I am tempted to say that not only has profanity been historically framed by Religious attitudes, but that ultimately, and in more than merely a semantic way, it’s precisely Religion’s imperative against profanity which powers the great profanity dynamo. The whole purpose (and satisfaction) of cursing is the emphasis it affords, the action of saying something instantly an unmistakably recognizable as apart from genteel speech. Had Religious attitudes, over centuries, not explicitly shaped an entire canon of taboo utterances for us to utilize… well, where would we be then? We’d be grunting and groaning in exclamatory frustration.

Either that hurling fistfuls of feces.

Anyhoo, let’s amble back around to profanity and my atheism shall we?

As I said, I tend to feel betrayed by my own profane vocabulary when cursing. As though using Religious words, in the service of that perfect angered emphasis, were offering free press to Christianity, or worse, an implicit acceptance of their “sacredness.” It is habitual, after all, yet I can’t help but feel a twinge of annoyance that even in the midst of my passionate, animal, fist-shaking, secular tirades Religion ought to impose itself into my life. Of course, when I take the time to analyze this reaction, the irony of it, I can’t help but laugh.

For one thing our modern take on the term “profanity” has clouded an important distinction…

“The person on the street uses the term “profanity” broadly to refer to all categories of offensive speech. however, profanity and blasphemy are specific categories of religious speech sanctioned by religious authorities. To be profane means to be secular or indifferent toward religion. Blasphemy is more troublesome; it is an attack on religion and religious figures. It represents and intentional and offensive threat to religion…” -Why We Curse: A Neuro-psyco-social Theory of Speech, by Timothy Jay

So adhering to this more precise definition my existence is the “profanity,” while my use of Christian terminology, when swearing oaths, is more accurately “blasphemy.” That distinction goes a long way in easing my mind since blasphemy is something, as an atheist, I really don’t need to lose any sleep over or shy away from. 

Moreover, when you get right down to it, were I able to remove all references to “bearded men in the sky” from my angry outbursts, what would be the result? I’d be very obediently following the 2nd commandment in a way most devout, minced-oath-bandying believers can’t seem to manage, and that, my potty-mouthed friends, is just plain crazy talk.

In closing-

Having thus, worked it all out in my mind I’m confident I will no longer feel embarrassed by involuntary blurtings of “Jesus fucking Christ!” when, say, a rabid squirrel scampers up my pant-leg or a coworker, smilingly, asks me about my weekend.

Still, I think that it would be useful to have a good long list of non-religious oaths at our disposal should we choose to “go in another direction” with our anger. In as much I’ve started a post over at the annex where I’m soliciting your best minced oaths, in-use, inherited, or invented. If you’d like to contribute click here.

Hope you enjoyed.

I’M A MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN

I admit it, I’m a hog. In other words human. I enjoy women and a pair of doughnuts like anybody else. Say tomorrer I wake up I’m covered in communism, say I can go and get what I want by asking -

want six wives. You maybe want 24 suits and him, they gotta give him twelve yachts, - otherwise he’s miserable. We’re nuts, we’re all deprived so long we went nuts. Plain hogs. It’s chemical, you can’t do nothing. We’re 90% water, H20, and 10% other things - sodium helium oxygen hydrogen potassium phosphorus calcium and so forth. At the same time in this kinda world 2 plus 2 makes 5.

Now. Look at me. I look like a dirt monkey. True? I’m among the world of missing men. I’m so insignificant if they sent out a radio call for me a hundred years nobody would find me. Economically I’m collapsed, I could write my whole will on a postage stamp, not a single coin of the realm you’ll find in my pocket, I ain’t got enough real estate to put in a flower pot. Tell me, then, why should I sing my country tis of thee or welcome sweet springtime I greet you in song?

, my friend, you can never tell the way you stand by the way you’re sitting down. Listen to what I’m gonna say to you now, carefully - the bacteriologist of today was himself a bacteria in primeval times. Sh! Don’t talk. Think that over…

Myself, I’m a might-have-been. I could tell you something else - I’m a genius and so forth, after all, you’re a stranger tome. But it ain’t what you call yourself, you can say you’re Jesus and you ain’t even St. Patrick. True? Well, I got lost inside a sweat shop like a fly in winter time. You go into it a man and you come out cockeyed hunchbacked knockneed pigeontoed flatchested - you’re a washrag and a walking prospect for the undertaker. You gotta put a mark on your feet to know right from left. The gray matter and the different parts of cerebellum are deflated. So I was fired. The boss said he gotta take sacrifices and he started with

, I was lost, after I was still worse. I had bicycles in my brain. I was asking myself always: am I coming from or going to? Here I was free, the whole day in the air, in the sun, but still I was groping, the park was the same as the shop.

One swallow don’t make a summer. When you’re alone you can bark at the moon like a boogie dog, you can go sit down on the ground and open up your mouth you’ll catch mosquitoes, that’s all. A chain is strong like its weakest link and that was me. I don’t say I didn’t let off a lotta hot air in them trying times, it’s a free country. I lived by my own oxygen. But also - we got a check and balance system here, there ain’t no dictatorship, nobody gets away with murder, you can manifest yourself, true, you can express yourself, but the other guy can check up on you if he wants to.

Well, I got plenty checking up but

-gressive. You find some people in this day and age they like to be both. If they’re down in the Battery they’re up in the Bronx too, these budweisers, these political fakers. They claim if you’re in a steam room at the highest temperature you’re freezing and if you go into a frigidaire you’re hot. Why does ice smoke? They tell you: because it went crazy with frost. They’re always arguing: if it’s hot as it’s warm while it’s freezing it should be cold you think it’s gonna be hot? Bah! I wouldn’t stoop myself so low. The average man should think twice before he speaks and then - shut up.

Which reminds me - ain’t it time for me too? Here I’m riding a whole cavalry of ideas and I ain’t got enough to buy doughnuts. If I had my live to live over again I’d choose an existence of plenty. But, for the present, it’s my opinion the government should take us over, otherwise it’s better for us to shut our eyes, the undertaker downtown got a special this week.

Which means this, this whole spiel. It’s an explosion, I mean an explanation, of one thing - I got cursed with a social consciousness and how much I would like to do something about it I can’t. Brain I got plenty, but the will power of a Chinese Eskimo.

-

I would offer you the link to the original typewritten pages but the Library of Congress site, where it is hosted, to my constant frustration does not allow for such modern conveniences as direct linking. In any case… terrific no? Expect some more highlights from this collections in future.

1: A photographic reconstruction of various stages in a complex medieval spell to preserve the chastity of a high-born maiden while her betrothed is away at the wars.

2: A meeting of a coven of white witches in Hertfordshire, England, in June 1964.

As you can see the simple answer is- Because its fun! I mean come on! In what other context do sad old dudes get to prance about waving wands over nubile flower-carrying virgins, flanked with skulls and incense and sheer fabrics? At what other point in their lives do most older women get to heft daggers and dance around naked together and point longswords at blindfolded initiates? The occult is just too damned fun to disapear. Not so much for the goats and chickens, granted, but for humans? A really swell time.

Seriously, you just try taking it away from desperate middle-aged naked people with swords, I dare you.

-

All images and accompanying text from the book The Supernatural by Douglas Hill and Pat Williams, published in 1965.

Hope you enjoyed.

Below, for your viewing pleasure, I’ve reproduced 16 images from the book State of the Art, by Stan Augarten, published in 1983, by way of illustrating that even 25 years ago, a mere halfway-point in this technology’s development, complexity had evolved the integrated circuit out of human hands, and, for most of us, created something really and truly indistinguishable from magic.

For the most part, as was surely the book’s intention, I find these to be quite beautiful objects from a purely aesthetic point of view. Whether I understand them or not I can still appreciate their appearance. Interestingly, however, relative complexity has a role in even this most basic way of regarding the IC I think.

Perhaps it is simply the mind’s facility for pattern recognition but I find the earlier chips evoke one set of largely pleasant aesthetic comparisons, while the more complex chips evoke an entirely different, less obviously pleasant set. In the earlier chips I see science-fictional interiors and illustration, information graphics, diagrams, and the outer fringes of minimalism. In the later one’s however, I see parking lots, and power plants, and freeway systems, and refineries along the Garden State Parkway. 

I’d make the argument that from a visual standpoint, there is a sweet-spot in evidence here, where the forms which make-up the IC’s are complex enough to grab the eye, hold attention, and ignite curiosity, but still simple enough to please our senses of order and balance; or to put it another way, simple enough to feel familiar but complex enough to remain interesting.

Then again, perhaps It’s just my own aesthetic prejudices at work.

In any case, I hope you enjoyed.

For more on the subject see:

History of the Integrated Circuit at nobelprize.org.

The Compuetr History Museum

Chipshots at Molecular Expressions.

And finally, check out Smithsonian Chips which, I only realized after I scanned all these images, has a full version of State of the Art, by Stan Augarten on offer.