my heroes died of syphilis

Superior felt

First off, let me express how sorry I am to people who arrive at this site searching for answers to such conundrums as "my boss has syphilis" or "how much will it cost me if my rabbit has syphalis [sic]". I can't help you. Nevertheless I'm going to ramble about syphilis again in a way that will further frustrate google searches.

One of my favorite syphilis-related curios is an illustration of a woman seated over a mercury pot. Sitting under a cloak to trap mercury vapors was one early type of treatment for the disease, and the curious pyramid-shaped diagram of a woman seated on a stool over a small, toxic steaming pot is as precious as it is weird. As would be expected, mercury treatments caused as much physical harm as they did good, but the tradeoff was considered worthwhile to a majority of people suffering from lesions.

When I'm in my studio figuratively reiterating the woman seated over the mercury pot, my mind always eventually substitutes "mercy seat" for "mercury seat". The amusement of the original Hebrew word used to describe the biblical mercy seat, kapporeth, meaning "thing of wiping out/thing of cleansing", is not lost on me.

(click to enlarge)

Going back to rabbits: yes, they can transmit syphilis (the culprit being Treponema cuniculi, a kissing cousin of Treponema pallidum, but exclusive to rabbits). Despite the slight variation between species, the symptoms produced in rabbits are similar to those present in humans...which raises a question about relations between mad hatters and march hares.

In the 19th century, hatters were notoriously racked with hallucinations and shakes brought on by prolonged exposure to mercury used in the felting process. Mercury was originally discovered to be useful for felting thus: once upon a time in Turkey someone discovered that camel urine applied to camel hair sped up and improved the quality of the felting process, so the use of camel urine to cure pelts became standard practice. In France, with their dearth of camels, workmen used their own urine. Eventually, a Frenchman who was being treated for syphilis with mercury discovered that his urine was producing superior felt. Thenceforth, mercury was the new urine. That mercury intoxication and late stage syphilis produced some twin symptoms is suggestive: I suggest the March Hare was a late stage syphilitic.

Christ's wandering uterus

"[Big] Christ's wandering uterus"
graphite & vellum

I recently finished a new piece that's been gestating in my mind for a while. It hadn't struck me to make a visual depiction of Christ as a hysteric until long after I'd written a handful of "meditations" on Christ's wandering uterus. The concept for the text (as stated in the title) derives primarily from Huysmans' florid description of Grünewald's Crucifixion in his novel Là-Bas, and secondarily from his narrative of Saint Lydwine of Schiedam and his musings on syphilis.

It's hardly a stretch to situate Christ at the center of this decadent pathography - at the center of a triangulation of syphilis, hysteria, and mysticism; it's even quite natural.

Here's a sample; if you want the rest, you can find them here.

Meditations on Christ's wandering uterus (or Christ as hysteric), based on Huysmans' writings concerning Matthias Grünewald's Crucifixion.

mardi
Mardi: On Tuesdays, the Greek physicians believed, the uterus lodged itself in the throat, which accounted for a sense of choking, or globus hystericus. When the doctor pushed a finger into Christ's throat, he could feel the uterine wall pushing back, warm and firm.

(The doctor has placed a fetid herb on his tongue and asked him to swallow it. Supposedly, to inhale the aromas of this plant would effect a movement of the uterus downward from the throat towards its normal position, above the testes.)

J.B. Murry: drawing in tongues

I confess I'm not very familiar with much Outsider Art beyond super big names like Darger or Wolfli, but my sister and her boyfriend recently visited the Folk Art Museum and told me about the art of John "J.B." Murry, which is part of the Approaching Abstraction exhibit on view right now. Needless to say considering my history with and interest in the spiritual "gift of tongues", I am fascinated:

Murry was a sharecropper and a preacher from Georgia who experienced visions and “wrote in the spirit”: the fervor of his technique and the abstract passages that only he could translate are like painted versions of the experience known as speaking in tongues. The artist would hold a water-filled glass bottle up to his artwork to interpret the meanings of his private alphabet, which is composed of squiggles, splashes, and dashes, and conduct a sermonlike reading. As Murry became more comfortable with his material, he modestly increased his scale—from cash-register tape to sheets of stationery to drawing paper—and expanded his medium from ink to paint, applied by brush and finger.

(text and images from the online exhibition catalogue)

(in celebration of) saturnalian dialogues

Seeing Cynthia Norton's Dancing Squared at the Frye recently set a series of thoughts in motion for me. You can watch Robin Held and Greil Marcus discuss the piece's association with ecstatic Shaker dancing in this video segment. Ecstatic religious traditions, particularly in a Christian or western context, interest me because I spent the latter part of my teen years in the midst of what was generally dubbed The Toronto Blessing, a Charismatic revival that claimed the First Great Awakening and Jonathan Edwards as heritage. Hallmarks of this revival were fairly extreme demonstrative outbursts, often sustained for hours or days, which included spiritual drunkenness, laughter, spasms, trances, behaving like animals (dogs, lions, and birds were the common ones I remember), as well as more standard Charismatic demonstrations like being slain or falling in the Spirit. The people involved in this affair were usually very happy, and the atmosphere staged for these gatherings was generally intensely playful, permissive, euphoric. People often declared how like (or superior to) being drunk or stoned these occasions were, and while many critics of the movement claimed it was demonic or harmful, I don't think I ever witnessed anything worse than at least disjointedly silly behavior as a means of expression or as a way to rediscover the material body in a social and symbolic context and at most escapism and delusion.

Because of my interest in hysteria, I can't help but draw occasional parallels between it and much of what took place under the umbrella of the Toronto Blessing. "Mass hysteria" is nearly too easy a pejorative to sling at it, yet the overlapping characteristics of this private-made-public carnival persist, even down to the common poses and gesticulations, the spasmodic or cataleptic trances, the famous arching of the back, the visions, and even choice of animal in the case of delirious mimicry. There is no denying the catharsis of such carnival, but it is dazzling to behold the elaborate exteriorized structures erected around such practices to justify and aid their being -- and this is where the medicalization, theatricalization, and spiritualization of hysterical demonstration overlap strikingly.










video stills from Toronto Blessing type services

Paul Richer: "The patient can also be transformed into a bird, a dog, etc., and she can be seen trying to reproduce the look of these animals. She will speak, however, and answers the questions put to her, without seeming to notice what might be contradictory in the fact of an animal using human language. And nonetheless, the patient claims to be perfectly able to see and feel her beak and feathers, or her muzzle and fur, etc." (Invention of Hysteria, Didi-Huberman)

Freud writes of: "the 'clownism' in boys' hysteria, the imitation of animals and circus scenes...a compulsion to repeat dating from their youth [in which they] seek their satisfaction to the accompaniment of the craziest capers, somersaults and grimaces."

Here (in these aesthetically twinned outbursts) is an ostentatious example of a formalization of Bataille's great expenditure, an exercise in existing for a brief moment in an unreal (or super-real, or surreal) suspension, hovering in a childish space, where the selfishness and willfulness of this heightened experience is at the same time an emptying of self, an ecstatic, dissolving, unraveling moment that hovers at the boundary (of the idea) of death, and a transgression of the limits of jouissance, a hoarding, a greed without limits, a need to feel and be and express the ineffable at all cost.







sketches after Richer's synoptic table of regular hysterical attacks and their variants

When I think of Strindberg I immediately think of the incessant smelling of celery (lechery) and incense, whereas I think I smell incessantly the scent of cinnamon (sin, all kinds of greed and gluttony) and my nostrils will eternally be stopped up with the perfume of old churches, with the smell of oak wood and ancient wax, the stuff-smell of pews which row upon row stink of God and of all the thousands of asses that have rubbed a high shine into their interminable glassy planks. The lightning of Christ will pierce my chest continually until I am convulsing on the ground, my limbs locked in a bow, my pelvis quivering on the end of my spine, which is like a vibrating string anchored at one in on the floor, with the weight of all the earth's gross magnetism, the other end whipping about wildly, like a loose cord -- or a shimmering light -- in an imaginary windstorm.

The body has effected a perfect detachment from mind; it is set free like a kite in a windstorm (terrible freedom). Ecstasy unencumbered by liturgy is like the organs of a body set free from the confines of bones and skin: it pours out liquescent and wild, or like a vivisected animal whose bisection is not girded up with a plate of glass, which then drains, a cascade of expiring viscera out of the shell.

Such formlessness is the frisson towards which [...the choice of pronoun remains a difficulty] urgently grope.