A rudimentary taxonomic vocabulary for hybrid creatures

Detail from the bottom of the central panel of Bosch’s Last Judgment in Vienna.

In my previous post[1] I mistakenly claimed that bodyhead is the term for what we Dutch-language speakers call koppoter or kopvoeter.

In reality, the term bodyhead was coined by English artist Paul Rumsey in the late 20th and early 21st century as titles to his own Two Bodyheads. A quick search in Google Books confirms this.[2]

Paul pointed me to the gryllus, a creature similar to gastrocephalic creatures (belly faces), to blemmyae and to his own bodyheads.

Gryllus, a term new to me, appears to be an interesting word, leading me to the discovery of the rudimentary taxonomy of hybrid creatures of the title of this post.

How so, you ask?

Here we go:

Gryllus (plural grylli) means pig in Greek and cricket in Latin. (Marina Warner, Monsters of Our Own Making).

In Plutarch’s Moralia, Gryllus was one of Circe’s victims who preferred to stay a pig after his transformation. This episode is known as “Ulysses and Gryllus“. Innumerable writers have commented on this episode, see “reasoning beasts”.

Another ancient writer who mentions grylli is Pliny the Elder in his Natural History. His concern is visual, i.e. painting. He uses the word gryllus for a class of grotesque figures first used in painting by Antiphilus of Alexandria: “he painted a figure in a ridiculous costume, known jocosely as the Gryllus; and hence it is that pictures of this class are generally known as “Grylli.”

The history of the grylli has received its most in-depth study in Marina Warner’s Monsters of Our Own Making. Most sources agree that the current meaning of the gryllus derives from Le moyen âge fantastique (1955) by Jurgis Baltrusaitis.[3]

The book Images, Texts, and Marginalia in a “Vows of the Peacock” by Domenic Leo gives a taxonomic vocabulary of hybrids in which the gryllus is one element:

“I am using terminology proposed by Sandler, “Reflections on the Construction of Hybrids,” and Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Le moyen âge fantastique. The rudimentary taxonomic vocabulary for hybrids is as follows: bifurcated (head as center with two bodies), gryllus (body with no torso: head replaces genitals), pushmepullu (one body with a head emerging from each side), and composite (hybrids created from multiple parts).”

There is also this excellent Spanish-language page on grotesque grylli.[4].

Before the ocean and the earth appeared

Magnum Chaos (c. 1524 ) by Lorenzo Lotto

“Before the ocean and the earth appeared— before the skies had overspread them all— the face of Nature in a vast expanse was naught but Chaos uniformly waste. It was a rude and undeveloped mass, that nothing made except a ponderous weight; and all discordant elements confused, were there congested in a shapeless heap.” (trans.Brookes More)

490 years ago Italian artist Lorenzo Lotto produced the image above. The design is a representation of chaos and is entitled Magnum Chaos. It is an intarsia made for a church choir in Bergamo, North Italy. It feels very modern today.

It’s a nice example of the eye as independent body part, the eye carried forth by two legs and two feet and in control of both arms and hands.

It is also an example of a what we in Dutch call a ‘kopvoeter’ (lit. headfooter) or a ‘koppoter’ (lit. headlegger), a style of drawing made by children from about age three in which people are drawn without a body and with arms emerging directly from the head. (see Child_art#Pre-symbolism, belly face and body image.)

~~They are called bodyheads in English~~. See update.

Apparently, Rudolf Steiner says something about child art and ‘bodyheads’ in Allgemeine Menschenkunde als Grundlage der Pädagogik, 1919, but I have been unable to find out what.

The Magnum Chaos reminds me of the André Masson acéphale illustrations.

And other grotesques of course.

The image shown above is upside down from the original at Bergamo.

Update 20/2/14: A possible English translation of kopvoeter and koppoter is bodyhead, a neologism coined by English artist Paul Rumsey and given as the title to a number of prints.

Man created God in his own image

Last summer I first stumbled upon the Greek philosopher Xenophanes who famously speculated more than 2,500 years ago that if animals had means to create art, they would depict their gods in their own image, in other words, as animals.

Yesterday, I researched “Man created God in his own image,” the dictum that reverses the biblical phrase “God created man in his own image”.

It goes back to Sigmund Freud and ultimately to Ludwig Feuerbach.

Feuerbach, whom I know via French Situationist Guy Debord, who quoted him in The Society of the Spectacle.

Freud, who saw the reverse dictum as exemplary in his psychological projection theory.

Connected terms are anthropology of religion, Image of God, theomorphism, depiction of God, and anthropotheism.

The illustration (above) is Michelangelo’s detail of Sistine Chapel fresco Creation of the Sun and Moon by which depicts God as an old man with a white beard.

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Giordano Bruno and the one hundred twelfth thrust

It’s been a while since a piece of writing has given me so much pleasure.

The text that caused this merriment is Giordano Bruno‘s satire on divine providence in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast(1584).

It had me sniggering all the way through.

Especially this excerpt:

“Ambrogio on the one hundred twelfth thrust shall finally have driven home his business with his wife, but shall not impregnate her this time, but rather another, using the sperm into which the cooked leek that he has just eaten with millet and wine sauce shall have been converted.”

But really, the whole passage is excellent in its power of imagination, in its ability to trivialize providence and omnipotence, in making it ridiculous by giving inane details, which seem like endless digressions à la Tristram Shandy. If you’re curious, you can read the rest of that passage here.

I wondered what the exact nature of the ‘triumphant beast’ of the title of the text was, and why, if so triumphant, it needed to be expelled. Some googling learnt that the beast is the the Pope or the Catholic Church.

Sadly, the wit in this text was fatal for Giordano. After a trial that lasted eight years, Bruno was burnt at the stake in 1600 for his derision. He was barely 52.

PS. I came upon Giordano Bruno by studying De rerum natura, that breviary of atheism, which can be briefly summarized by reading the following three passages: 1)on the helplessness of the human infant, 2) on the inability to reach bodily satisfaction and 3) on the pleasure of standing on shore watching a shipwreck.

Image: Woodcut from ‘Articuli centum et sexaginta adversus huius tempestatis mathematicos atque philosophos’ by Giordano Bruno.

William Burroughs @100

William S. Burroughs would have celebrated his centennial tonight had he not died one summer day in 1997. I haven’t read all that much by Burroughs (I haven’t read all that much, actually), although over the summer I bought a second hand battered version of Queer in Turkey, which I enjoyed a lot and a couple of years ago in the Pyrenees I read Cities of the Red Night.

And of course I’ve seen Cronenberg’s film adaption of Naked Lunch.

There is one citation which nicely sums up his work. Burroughs is talking:

“‘Nihilism, unrelieved despair and negation, misanthropy, pessimism‘ – very much the same set of clichés that greeted Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, which to my mind is a very funny book, in a picaresque tradition stretching back to Petronius and to The Unfortunate Traveller by Thomas Nashe. I have always seen my own work in the light of the picaresque – a series of adventures and misadventures, horrific and comic, encountered by an antihero.”

And then there is this hilarious film fragment he did with Antony Balch: The Cut-Ups, which surprise, surprise is still up on Youtube:

“You’ve invented a metaphor!”

One of the most beautiful scenes in cinema is the invention-of-a-metaphor scene in in Il Postino. An eager-to-learn mailman becomes seasick after listening to a poem of a restless sea recited by Pablo Neruda. He feels like he were “tossing on words”.

Pablo Neruda: [after reading a poem] What do you think?

Mario Ruoppolo: I felt seasick, in fact.

Mario Ruoppolo: I can’t explain it. I felt like…like a boat tossing around on those words.[…]

Pablo Neruda: Do you know what you’ve done, Mario?

Mario Ruoppolo: No, what?

Pablo Neruda: You’ve invented a metaphor. Yes, you have!

The castrated woman of Laura Mulvey

Yesterday, a fascinating but notoriously obscurantist text became a little clearer. In the process I was reconciled to French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

My eldest daughter, now in her second year of theatre studies, is studying one of the texts that had for a long time baffled as much as fascinated me: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema“[1], a 1970s film theory essay by Laura Mulvey.

Now, it is my belief that the most valuable philosophers are not always the most lucid ones. I agree with Emil Cioran: ‘between the demand to be clear, and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.’

Philosophers such as Georges Bataille (‘Eroticism … is assenting to life up to the point of death’) and Gilles Deleuze (‘flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration’) I’ve never fully understood, but I’ve always been fascinated by them and and felt that it was not impossible to reach some kind of comprehension of their texts, even if the explanation remained ambiguous.

However, Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure …” is so stooped in litcrit and psycrit jargon that it is almost unreadable. Key terms in the vocabulary of that essay are lack, castration, fetishism, voyeurism, gaze and scopophilia. So far so good. These are difficult terms to grapple with but not beyond comprehension (except for perhaps the Lacanian lack).

The trouble starts on the first line of the second paragraph:

“The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies.”

Castrated woman?

I start Googling.

I find the phrase ‘castrated woman’ in Spurs, Nietzsche’s Styles (1978), a work by Jacques Derrida in which one reads, toward the end:

He was, he dreaded this castrated woman.
He was, he dreaded this castrating woman.
He was, he loved this affirming woman.

So that’s were the notion of the ‘castrated woman’ comes from.

I continue my quest. I find a video[2] by American professor Rick Roderick who defends Derrida’s sense of humor.

I’ve never much cared for Derrida. I’m fond of many 20th century French philosophers but Derrida has been my least favorite and the most dislikeable ‘bums to be kissed by American academics’, to say it in Paglia’s words.

Nevertheless, the premise of Spurs is fascinating. In it, Derrida “imagines that Nietzsche left behind, among his many papers a little scrap of paper that says: “I forgot my umbrella”. Then Derrida goes through a long, complex way that an academic interpreter would try to fit this brilliant aphorism of Nietzsche’s into the body of his work. I mean, after all, it might just mean “I forgot my umbrella”, but on the other hand…”

I am reminded that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

I’m happy with my philosophical detective work.

And I may just seek out that “I forgot my umbrella” book by Derrida.

Illustration: Venus at the Opera (1844, Grandville), perhaps the best illustration to the male gaze.

I call myself an amateur

The Monkey Connoisseurs (1837) by Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps

I call myself an amateur and a dilettante, despite the negative connotations these two terms carry.

I want to restore to them their original meaning, which is to be found in their etymologies, love in the case of amateur (from amor) and delight in the case of dilettante (ultimately from delectare from whence also came delicatessen for example).

I even dislike the antonym of amateur and dilletante, which is professionalism, a term tainted by the connotation of monetary pursuits and of being close-mindedly ‘stuck’ in a field of expertise.

I’m sure the monkeys agree.

Marie Bonaparte on humankind’s deep-rooted sadism

A few days ago, while studying Goya and his depiction of the horrors of life, I was reminded of a dictum on rape:

“if a woman is raped by an individual, she stands a good chance of surviving the ordeal. If, however, she is raped by a multitude, a mob, the risk is real that she will pay for it with her life.”

It’s from a book by Roland Villeneuve (1922 – 2003), either from Le Musée des supplices or La Beauté du diable, since these are the only two books by him I own.

I started googling for the exact quotation.

Unsuccessfully.

I did find this intriguing dictum instead:

“When one of these great perverts such as Vacher [a French serial killer] or Kürten [a German serial killer] appears on the scene, men who kill simply for pleasure, a wave of excitement sweeps through the masses. Not only by the mere horror, but by a strange interest in the crime, which is our deep-rooted sadism‘s response to theirs. It is as though, civilized and wretched, with our instincts fettered, we were all, in some way, grateful to these great and disinterested criminals for offering us, from time to time, the spectacle of our most culpable, primitive desires at last enacted.” —[…]

These words are from Marie Bonaparte (descendant of Napoleon and known for surgically displacing her clitoris at least two times), from her book The Life and Works of E. A. Poe: a Psychoanalytic Interpretation which I reviewed a while back[1].

The dictum diagnoses human nature as inherently cruel and sadistic, which is hardly a secret when taking into account for example the historic fascination with public executions.

What Marie is saying is that there is a sadist in all of us. That humankind’s collective unconscious is a bit like that of a cruel serial killer.

That’s sociatry for you.

Isn’t it?

Jan van Kessel and the Flemish fantastique and grotesque

I hail from Flanders so I’m biased when I say I love Flemish art, and equally biased when I say I love the Flemish fantastique and grotesque.

It’s not every day I find something new and yesterday my eye caught the wonderful Shells, Butterflies, Flowers and Insects on White Background by Jan van Kessel, senior (Antwerp, 1626 – idem, 1679).

Van Kessel senior was born in Antwerp, hometown of Rubens, where I have lived since 1987.

Furthering my research today, I find Festoon, Masks and Rosettes Made of Shells (1656) by that same Jan van Kessel. It is a “decorative and anthropomorphic composition with shells”.

Not a classic composition as a matter of fact, more a composite of small composites actually, in the vein of those of Arcimboldo, king of composites.

The detail is reminiscent of one of the grotesque masks by Joris Hoefnagel produced a hundred years earlier.

Van Kessel’s work is a species of early intermedia, located in the no man’s land between natural history illustration and fine art.

Jahsonic

Burgemeester van Dodenstad