Under the Hill

I am grateful to the Cypher Press—publishers of ‘beautiful, pointless books’—for presenting an on-line edition of Aubrey Beardsley’s collected literary remains, including his unfinished novel, Under the Hill. Much better known, of course, as an illustrator and graphic artist, Beardsley’s way with prose was scarcely less idiosyncratic, elegant & perverse than his graphic style. Under the Hill, also known as The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, was published, posthumously, in a number of more-or-less bowdlerised versions during the first decade of the last century. I happened to pick up a copy of a reprint of the Olympia Press edition (in which the tale is infelictously continued to completion by another hand) from the Wise Owl bookshop in Bristol, ca. 1995…

Some little excerpts might hint at the flavour of Beardsley’s writing: affectedly camp, yet somehow richly lovely, its decidedly pornographic subject-matter notwithstanding:

His hand, slim and gracious as La Marquise du Deffand’s in the drawing by Carmontelle, played nervously about the gold hair that fell upon his shoulders like a finely-curled peruke, and from point to point of a precise toilet the fingers wandered, quelling the little mutinies of cravat and ruffle.

Priapusa’s voice was full of salacious unction; she had terrible little gestures with the hands, strange movements with the shoulders, a short respiration that made surprising wrinkles in her bodice, a corrupt skin, large horny eyes, a parrot’s nose, a small loose mouth, great flaccid cheeks, and chin after chin.

It is always delightful to wake up in a new bedroom. The fresh wall-paper, the strange pictures, the positions of doors and windows—imperfectly grasped the night before—are revealed with all the charm of surprise when we open our eyes the next morning.

In the afternoon light that came through the great silken-blinded windows of the Casino, all the gilded decorations, all the chandeliers, the mirrors, the polished floor, the painted ceiling, the horses galloping round their green meadow, the fat rouleaux of gold and silver, the ivory rakes, the fanned and strange-frocked crowd of dandy gamesters looked magnificently rich and warm. Tea was being served. It was so pretty to see some plush little lady sipping nervously, and keeping her eyes over the cup’s edge intently upon the slackening horses.

Besides Under the Hill, the Cypher Press site also presents Beardley’s handful of published poems, some juvenalia, and other odds & ends of prose including a few wittily barbed letters to his critics, of which I particularly liked the following:

Sir,

No one more than myself welcomes frank, nay hostile, criticism, or enjoys more thoroughly a personal remark. But your art critic surely goes a little too far in last week’s issue of St. Paul’s, and I may be forgiven if I take up the pen of resentment. He says that I am ‘sexless and unclean.’

As to my uncleanliness, I do the best for it in my morning bath, and if he has really any doubts as to my sex, he may come and see me take it.

Yours obediently,

Aubrey Beardsley

The images above were also lifted from the Cypher Press site. For more information about Beardsley’s life and works, this page at ‘The Victorian Web’ looks like a good-starting point. And to find more of Beardsley’s graphic works, one could look here, or here.

‘Behmenists and Philadelphians’, etc.

Saturday lunchtime I brought home two paperbacks from the Antikvariat on the street where I live. I normally enjoy browsing in second-hand bookstores, but I’m not so keen on this place. Its proprietor is altogether too solicitous: ‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’ he asked, & I replied that no I was just browsing, and that I knew where the English books were to be found. So I browsed, but sensed the man’s impatience, as I had on previous visits to his shop, and so didn’t feel quite comfortable just browsing, and then, after no more than fifteen minutes, when I selected my two volumes, and handed them to him, he made a comment to the effect of ‘So, at last, you have found something you wanted,’ as if to indicate dissatisfaction at my unhurriedness.

Anyway, one of these two books, the one I am currently reading, is a splendidly obscure thing by the title of The Behmenists and the Philadelphians: a Contribtion to the Study of English Mysticism, written by one Nils Thune, apparently as his doctoral dissertation, published (in English) at Uppsala in 1948. A Behmenist, by the way, was a follower of the thought of the Teutonic theosophist Jacob Böhme (1575-1624). The Philadelphians (in this context) were a society of Behmenists in 17th/18th-Century England centered around the figure of Mrs Jane Lead (or Leade, 1624-1704).

I’m reading this book even though I hadn’t finished either of the two novels I’d been pecking away at before: Michael Cisco’s The Tyrant and Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, which, as unalike as they are, could both still be described as varieties of horror story, I suppose. And I’d started reading those after having gotten bogged down in Peter Eszterhazy’s novel The Celestial Harmonies… it’s been weeks since I’ve found myself at the end of a book.

I don’t know what it is about a mystic like Böhme that appeals, superficially at least, to an atheist like me: perhaps it’s the aesthetic dimension to his thinking, and its imaginative power. In his book, Thune concedes that Böhme is perhaps more of a poet than he is a philosopher, that his thinking, whilst it derives from a state of profound inspiration, is untidy, unsystematic and sometimes inarticulate, in the sense that he seems often to lack the right words to communicate the intensity of his experiences.

What is still concealed? The true teaching of Christ? No! But the philosophy and the deep Ground of God, celestial bliss; the revelation of the creation of angels; the revelation of the horrible fall of the Devil, which is the origin of evil; the creation of this world; the deep Ground and mystery of man and of all the creatures of this world; the last judgement and the metamorphosis of this world; the mystery of the resurrection of the dead and of eternal life - Jacob Böhme, quoted by Nils Thune.

It was Böhme’s ambitious project to explain the insights he had claimed he had been granted into these subjects…

According to Böhme, the drama of the Creation came forth from an eternal stillness, an apparent nothingness which nevertheless contained everything, ‘the Abyss,’ as Böhme termed it, in which there arose an ever increasing longing in God to be conscious of Himself. The eternal abysmal Will, from which everything created has its origin, ‘expressed’ itself, in Böhme’s words, ‘in a longing to reveal Itself.’ As this longing intensified, the divine Will turned inward on itself, as if in introspection, and in so doing, God ‘made a mirror for Himself’, and beheld the wonders concealed within Him, giving rise to a second yearning, one which would see these wonders realised. And so on to the creation of the Angels, and of the World, and of Man, and the twin catastrophes of Lucifer’s rebellion, and Adam’s temptation: interestingly, earthly sexuality, and, presumably, Eve, are consequences of the Fall of Man as Böhme tells it.

Böhme wrote dozens of books, so that’s just the tippy-top of a very large & complex iceberg. The images above, by the way, are details from a series of frontispieces (and other illustrations) from the works of Böhme as collected in a 1682 publication of his collected Theosophical Works and reproduced in Stanislas Klossowski de Rola’s book, The Golden Game (previously mentioned here). To see the complete images from which these details were cut, click here, here, here and here.

Il Ballarino

The first thing I stumbled upon at Greg Lindahl’s site was his facsimile presentation of John Florio’s New World of Words, a fascinating Italian-to-English dictionary dating from 1611. Florio (1553-1625) was the offspring of an Italian Protestant who had found refuge in England. He is best remembered for his dictionaries (his first Worlde of Wordes was published in 1598), and for his translations of Montaigne’s Essays. It took me a couple more visits before I discovered that this was just one among several works presented by Mr Lindahl: among these is a dance-manual, Fabritio Caroso’s Il Ballarino, dating from 1581, from which I lifted the following images:

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Il Ballerino (1581) is an important source of information on sixteenth century dances, containing rules for the art of dancing and lute arrangements of dance music. An expanded edition, Nobiltà di Dame, appeared in 1600. Although Nobiltà contains many of the same dances as Il Ballarino, many of them have changed or updated choreographies - source here.

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As well as Florio’s dictionary, there is also a facsimile of a Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues compiled by one Randle Cotgrave, which also dates from 1611. In addition to these, there are a few other dance manuals, and sundry books on fencing, music, cookery, brewing and needlework.

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Click on the images to see them enlarged - there are higher-resolution versions of these images on Mr Lindahls’s site.

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Haavikko

Paavo Haavikko (1931-) is one Finland’s foremost poets, and was, along with Pentti Saarikoski, one of the main proponents of a belated literary modernism that rejuvenated Finnish poetry in the 1950s.

Helsinki-born and based in the city, the son of a businessman, Paavo Haavikko has published more than 60 titles over almost 40 years. These include novels, short stories, narrative poems with characters from the Kalevala, a thriller, collections of economic and political aphorisms, libretti, […], plays, TV scripts, and historical works […] He is also an accomplished businessman, investor and publisher, and […] at age 58, he founded a flourishing advertising and publishing company of his own - Herbert Lomas.

Haavikko’s poetry tends to pessimism, is richly aphoristic, and delights in paradox. ‘His favourite form’, Herbert Lomas writes, ‘is the sequence: short, condensed, […] organisations of abstract, contradictory pseudo-statements’. These often feature startling, quicksilver changes of viewpoint. His work is informed with a sceptically conservative outlook on history and politics: he is supposed to have said ‘I don’t wish to change the system. It’s bad enough already’. It seems to me that many of his poems have an autumnal quality to them: rich and full, but with a certain coolness, with an apprehension of the coming winter…

Haavikko’s long poem The Winter Palace, published in 1959, is seen by many as his crowning achievement. Unpromisingly, perhaps, it could be described as a series of reflections on the difficulties of writing poetry, and of ‘building’ with language, in general. The happy outcome of this rather self-referential project, however, is a dazzling and suitably palatial literary construction.

With the precision of a scientist [Haavikko] often juxtaposes images so that phenomena are examined through their antitheses. The tone is unsentimental and neutral, but he does not hesitate to give advice or teach: ‘When they’re buying, sell. Buy when they’re selling. / First think slowly, then act quickly. / Get out of bad businesses fast / Forget them.’ (from In the World, 1974) One of Haavikko’s collections of aphorisms is actually entitled Speak, Answer, Teach (1972). His aphoristic style has created sayings that have become national property as if they had long existed in folklore. Among them is the much quoted ‘real delicacies are raw: oysters, salmon, and power’ - source here.

My source for most of the translations featured above was Anselm Hollo’s volume of Haavikko’s Selected Poems published by Carcanet in 1991, although in one or two cases I have used Herbert Lomas’ translations, from his anthology Contemporary Finnish Poetry, published by Bloodaxe (also 1991). A few of the quotations above, and the author photograph below (by Irmeli Jung) were also lifted from this latter volume. Click on the poems (or sections thereof) above to see a little more of the same, or, alternatively, click here to see them in a 4-page PDF document.

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Lambsprinck

In 1625, the Frankfurt-based publisher Lucas Jennis published an alchemical emblem-book entitled De Lapide Philisophico, ‘Of the Philosophical Stone’. This was based on a text that had been translated into Latin from a German manuscript by one Nicolaus Barnaud, and which had been published, unillustrated, in Leiden, in 1599. The identity of the original author, given pseudonymously as Lambsprinck (Lamb-Spring), is unknown. Jennis, who published numerous alchemical, ‘Rosicrucian’ and Paracelsan titles, breathed new life into the work by illustrating it with fifteen beautiful engravings, eight of which I’ve reproduced below…

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The symbolism of these images is such that they can support multiple interpretations which, singly, may be straightforward & specific enough, but which collectively blur into a rather vague & enigmatic whole. In the text accompanying the second of the images (above), for instance, we read that the forest represents the Body, the unicorn the Spirit and the deer the Soul. At the same time, however, we are told that ‘within the Forest of the Work are found the twin Natures, Mercury the Stag and Sulphur the Unicorn’.

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The four images that follow belong to the book’s final sequence, and feature three distinct figures: the Father, the Son and the Angel, or Guide. While these three again abstractly represent the Body, the Spirit and the Soul, they are also shown to be enacting what we would consider to be purely chemical reactions, or physical processes such as sublimation, absorption and solution. For example, in the image below, ‘Taking the Son (extracted from the Body) to the highest Mountain—i.e. to the top of the Vessel, where he receives the celestial influences from above and is metaphorically purified from the ignorance of matter—the Angel sublimates the Fixed.’

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My source for the present images is Stanislas Klossowski de Rola’s book The Golden Game, a fascinating volume that presents hundreds of 17th-century alchemical emblems and illustrations. The complete set of emblems from De Lapide Philisophico can also be seen here, and, coloured in, here, at Adam McLean’s alchemy website. McLean also presents an interesting essay about this book.

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Click on the images to see them enlarged…

The Flight into Egypt

One day in July I found my way back to one of the very first web-sites I can recall ever having visited, François Almaleh’s. Amongst the things there that caught my eye were some scans from a book called The Flight into Egypt by Timothy C. Ely, an American book-artist. A quick check at Abebooks revealed that this volume was readily and quite cheaply available: I ordered a copy from Spoonbill & Sugartown in Brooklyn, which arrived here a few days ago.

Ely makes books: beautiful, hand-made, one-of-a-kind books full of intricate diagrams, drawings and maps, accompanied by an indecipherable script of his own devising. He draws much of his inspiration from such esoterica as UFOs, alchemy and sacred geometry. Besides his unique productions, Ely has collaborated with the late ethnopharmacologist and psychonaut Terence McKenna on a limited-edition book called Synesthesia. As far as I know, The Flight into Egypt is the only one of Ely’s works to have been multiplied into a normal, trade edition: it was published by Chronicle Books in 1995.

In his foreword to the Chronicle edition, McKenna provides a memorable account of his encounter with the original manuscript:

I had never experienced the actual presence of the original Flight into Egypt until that moment, when alone, in good light and suitably activated by the lighter esters of delta six tetra-hydrocannibinol, I removed brass screws from a heavily insured wooden packing crate, lifted away the top, and gazed upon the work. Reality outran apprehension at last, and the thing lay before me.

Inside […] lay the book itself: a most unlikely object. The binding was a symbol-studded, finely worked leather of many colors and textures. The binding style seemed more sixteenth-century than modern. I could not help but notice the colored threads at the base of the spine, their placement obedient to some logic I could not discern. In the act of opening the book, my anticipation of otherness bordered on the Borgesian.

And there it was, the open tome […] part book, part journey, part secret doctrine, part jewel. The heavy pages must be turned carefully; the aura of magical craft is inescapable. The impression is of cartography, landforms and mindscapes. [...] There is text, but little is recognizable. Most is glyptoglossia, the rare written equivalent of spoken glossolalia...

In his introduction, Ely reveals that his primary inspiration for the book came from a notebook of his grandfather’s that contained a fragmentary record of the latter’s trip to Egypt: ‘Between the two world wars, for some sixteen weeks, my grandfather had journeyed on a solo mission of undetermined logic to a land difficult to reach’. Puzzlingly, Ely writes, the notebook gave neither the exact year when the trip was made, nor its purpose. Over this background, Ely has superimposed his own perceptions of ancient Egypt, fused with his experiences as a book-maker: several of the book’s illustrations depict the book’s own creation as a physical object. The result is a rather impenetrable, yet richly resonant work: ‘I wanted to create a manual, a device which, like a mandala, would impart or reveal certain knowledge if meditated upon,’ Ely adds.

Regarding the invented script, McKenna’s glyptoglossia, Ely has the following to say:

The “language” in my books comes from a peculiar situation that feels like a hybrid of automatic writing, automatic drawing, automatic marking. I can’t say that I’m tranecstatic when it’s happening. I do feel that when I am drawing it, making it, that the marks themselves correspond to the ideas that I am currently dazzled with.

Click on the images to see them enlarged. Note that the book’s pages are larger than A4 size, and all but the first of these images offer incomplete views of the contents of a given page. If I’d given it a little more thought, I would have scanned pages not already shown on M. Alamleh’s site: oh well. The images are Copyright © Timothy C. Ely, and are reproduced without permission, only for as long as no-one objects to their presence here.

Les Raisons des Forces Mouvantes

Among the books that have been digitised and presented on-line by Le Conservatoire numérique des Arts & Métiers (CNUM, for short) is a 1615 treatise by the engineer and architect Salomon de Caus (1576-1626) entitled Les Raisons des Forces Mouvantes, avec diverses machines tant utiles que puissantes, auxquelles sont adjoints plusieurs dessings de grotes & fontaines, from which I have snipped the images that follow below…

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I first learned of de Caus from Frances Yates’s book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Yates writes that de Caus was an ‘extremely brilliant garden-architect, and hydraulic engineer’, and that he was on intimate terms with the architect Inigo Jones, with whom he worked in the service of King James VI & I’s son and heir, Prince Henry, who:

…had been deeply interested in Renaissance garden design, in mechanical fountains which could play musical tunes, in speaking statues, and other devices of this kind, the taste for which had been stimulated by the recent recovery of ancient texts describing such marvels by Hero of Alexandria and his school.

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After Henry’s early death (aged only eighteen), de Caus enetered the service of the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, and his wife Princess Elizabeth, Henry’s sister. He was installed at Frederick’s palace at Heidelberg, where he began work, ca 1614, on what was to become his masterpiece, the spectacular garden known as the Hortus Palatinus. Work on this formal garden, and its elaborate fountains and artificial grottoes continued until Frederick’s political ambitions were decisively defeated in 1620. The Hortus was thereafter reduced to ruins, but, more recently there has been some partial reconstruction work done following the detailed plans left by de Caus in a 1620 publication (also called Hortus Palatinus) that was bound with later editions of Les Raisons….

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After 1620, de Caus returned to his native France, from which he had fled, as a Hugenot refugee, many years earlier. He died in Paris. As well as Les Raisons and Hortus Palatinus, de Caus also published a treatise on perspective, La Perspective, Avec la Raison des Ombres et Miroirs (1612) and a work on sundials: La Pratique et Demonstration des Horloges Solaires (1624).

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Click on the images to see them enlarged.