In classical music there are essentially two different types: absolute music and program music. Absolute music is, in simplest terms, that which does attempt to explicitly portray a story, or specified imagery. Program music, on the other hand, does have a story or imagery predefined by the composer. If one were to take the term “absolute music” in a very strict sense, it would then be that which is free of any association with a concrete expressive medium, for example, instrumentation. The only instance, or at least the only well-known instance, of a major composition written without any trace of instrumentation is Johann Sebastian Bach’s Art of Fugue.

Art of Fugue is written in what is known as open scoring, that is, where each voice is given its own separate staff in the score, as opposed to closed scoring, in which all voices are written on a grand staff. The piece is written in the typical format of contrapuntal exercises with heavy use of C clefs (soprano, alto and tenor clef). This has led to the assumption that Bach intended the piece to be studied and not heard, or at least, not aurally heard. Others purport that Bach intended the keyboard as the performing medium for the work. This is likely due to the fact that most keyboardists were more than capable of playing from a score made up of multiple parts and that the Art of Fugue does not contain any unplayable sections in regard to keyboard instruments. However, by the very nature of the work, it is most likely that Bach intended the work as one for study and purposely left the instrumentation unspecified so as to allow the possibility of performance in nearly any performance medium. For personal study, mentally reproducing the score is unquestionably the best method, however, for those with the requisite technique can perform the work at the keyboard. For public performance, the keyboard or any other four-voiced ensemble (string quartet, etc.) is possible. The emphasis, however, remains that it is a work designed to teach and there can be little doubt that was Bach’s intention. The very title indicates this and it would have been appropriate had Bach indicated on the title page a similar explanation as he did on the title page of the Well-Tempered Clavier: “for the Use and Profit of the Musical Youth Desirous of Learning.” With two colossal and intellectual pieces as the Art of Fugue and Well-Tempered Clavier, designed for the education of future composers, Bach remains one of the greatest pedagogues in classical music.

“What the FUGUE!?” (if i ever start a blog devoted to organ from the baroque era, this would the name i would give it)

Thursday was fucking traumatic, a state of affairs of which you are probably aware given my citation of the disturbing imagery of Metallica’s Until It Sleeps that evening. You’ll have seen on that post that my iPod was reading my mind again in playing it – and other songs on similarly dark themes – but what is most interesting about this is that this strange form of electronic ESP took place as I was driving home from an utterly pointless dissociative trip to a coastal town about 20 miles from home.

My first proper awareness of going to said town was when I realised I was in the centre of it. I do have a very vague recollection of noticing my normal turn off and thinking that the traffic was heavy, but at no time did I think, “why the fuck are you not in that heavy traffic?” I don’t remember deciding to drive on, and I don’t remember the journey. Another small-scale fugue-like episode. Sweet.

I had been quite good on the self-harm front of late, but the good spell has been broken. ‘Bitch’ and ‘grief’ are the latest, though I don’t remember doing the former (it must have bled like fuck though as I had seemingly used a towel to stem the bloodflow). Grief. Am I grieving for myself, or for what I should have been? If so, is that good? Presumably one is meant to say, “well, the self-harm bit isn’t good,” but you know me folks – not really one to listen to that sort of argument. A is raging with C; in A’s eyes, it is C’s fault that I have taken to cutting myself again. But it isn’t. It really isn’t. All C has done is facilitate triggering discussions, and been someone to whom I am hopelessly attached, which is hardly his fault. We can’t avoid matters of this importance simply because there is a risk it may act as a trigger; the entire psychotherapeutic process would then be pointless, and I’d be left as mental as I ever was.

I’m unsure as to what exactly this entry will amount to, as I remember surprisingly little of the session – perhaps unsurprisingly. But let’s start at the very beginning and see what happens.

C pointed out that he’d been looking through his diary and saw that our current contract was due to end shortly (he thought there were two sessions remaining after Thursday; I thought one, but as it turns out it will not matter). This was something of which I was horribly well aware. Having only begun to open up to C properly in the last few weeks, I was convinced that he’d see me as a manipulative bitch – it looked, to my cynical mind, like I was trying to wrangle more time out of him by leaving the avalanche of confessions until this point. Given that my primary diagnosis is borderline personality disorder, it reasonably follows (in my eyes) that he could believe me to be manipulative, as the psychiatric establishment still seems to think that about those who have BPD more than any other psychiatric problem.

Of course, he didn’t like either the idea that he would find me manipulative, nor in particular that he would think this because I have BPD – that fixates on labels, don’t you know. Actually, it doesn’t, because it’s what I think he should think anyway – the fact that BPD is the only psychiatric diagnosis to still be treated with open contempt by mental health professionals just reinforces that point – though to be fair, I have not experienced that disdain personally, thank God.

I honestly don’t think I was being manipulative – not consciously, anyhow – but it did look like it, and that had been my worry all week. Of course, C refused to concede that this was the case in his eyes. Did he point blank deny it? I think he may well have done, but I don’t remember clearly enough to say for certain. What he was willing to admit to was that I may, consciously or otherwise, fear the end of the relationship, and act accordingly to preserve it. Which is apparently not manipulative. Hmm.

The issue of the end of therapy raised its ugly head a couple of times during the meeting. What he said at this juncture was that we should “…continue seeing each other until Christmas, at which point [he'll] be off for a fortnight, and then we’ll review the situation in January.”

Review the situation in January. You can take a wild guess as to what I think about that. He is going to throw me out with the dirty water in cunting January. Just over a month away, after the most stressful time of the year for me (ah yes, I’m sure you’ll be treated to a delicious rant about fucking Christmas in the near future, dearest readers). A tells me that this is not what C meant; apparently, he literally meant that we shall review the situation, and if further therapy is required (as if it won’t be), then that is what the case shall be. Well, Ms Rationality of course says, “yeah, right” to that. He is going to abandon me.

I honesty don’t remember how I reacted in session to the comment about ‘reviewing things in January’. I think I simply agreed and didn’t voice the aforementioned rejection worries, but I wouldn’t swear to it. As I said, it did indeed come up again, but I don’t remember under what circumstances. I can and do appreciate that the relationship can’t be permanent – in the most rational of ways, I don’t want it to be. I want to live an independent life, free of a need for a surrogate daddy. But can C realistically expect to change 13+ years of misery and being fucked about by the NHS in seven-ish months, particularly when I have such a strong neurotic attachment to him? Trying to be objective about it, I cannot honestly fathom that as reasonable, except in especially productive scenarios (which are about as applicable to me as…um…er…something that is very un-applicable to me). This is a personality disorder. It is ingrained into every metaphorical fibre of my self, the conscious, the unconscious, whatever – and it is causing me to self-destruct. Can something of such enormity and longevity honestly be treated adequately in just over half a year?

In any case, eventually the discussion – predictably enough – returned to the eminently delightful subject matter of the preceeding week. Eugh. It was me that raised it, though not exactly through choice; we were talking about something else (no idea what now) which triggered some sort of memory – it’s a shame I’ve forgotten what that subject was, as it would be useful to know these triggers, especially in cases where there is no obvious correlation, as I think the case was in this instance.

I became rather agitated and told C that I wasn’t “going there”. I hid.

Despite my telling him to leave it, he continued to probe me – but gently and quite subtly, to be fair. I eventually admitted that I was thinking about the Pandora’s Box.

My memory is even more fragmented from here on in, though some things do stick out in my mind very clearly. I was very, very careful not to verbally articulate much at all; at one point I desperately begged, “look, don’t you see where I’m going with this?” But it appears that he believes that I need to say the words. I still have not used the word ‘rape’, and strictly speaking he could still be under the impression that it was something other than rape – but he’s not that stupid.

He must have asked what was so troubling about verbalising this material, because I remember then telling him that I am fairly tolerant of articulating the gruesome information on this blog.

“Which is odd,” I mused, “given that it is all the more real when it is written down, even more so than if I verbally discuss it. It’s there, on the blog, in black and white.” (See here, for example).

I went on to postulate the idea that perhaps it is easier to deal with in writing because I can rationalise everything; life events become something that is seen in the third person, by a narrator, an observer with at least a modicum of theoretical knowledge of that about which she writes. If I have to talk about it, I have to feel it. I am there, in the midst of it, with the rawness, the vileness, the trauma of it all.

He agreed. He didn’t say so, but a sense that he wants me to feel that repressed pain was very palpable. Maybe that is why he was such a cock when I put this, and other shit, in writing for him – in fact, I’m certain it is. What kind of profession capitalises on other people’s grief? If I asked him why he became a clinical psychologist, I’m sure he’d respond along the lines of that old cliché, “I want to help people.” What, by making them relive their darkest memories, by making them suffer through them all again? Does that not take a special kind of sadism?

I am, of course, being a little facetious; I don’t believe C to be a sadist in the least, and I do believe he is in his job for the right reasons. But the human mind, and the sciences that arise therefrom, are odd things indeed. It strikes me as strange that it is an apparent psychological necessity to directly face that which you most revile in your past, before you can heal from the wounds it inflicted.

But this is not a post about the curious concept of psychology as an academic discipline, nor is it a post about the mindsets of those practising this form of figurative alchemy; it is a post about a session I had with my therapist. So…was it at this point that I lost it? I’m not sure, but anyway, in my next clear memory, all I could see in my head was the INCIDENT, or more specifically, the moments during which I was pushed to the floor of the outhouse in which it took place and served up as tasty piece of young meat for the delectation of my uncle. I recall very strongly that (in C’s office, not in my mind) I had my head in my lap and was pelting my skull with both fists with as much strength as I could muster. I have never done anything of this ilk in C’s company before.

And so he too did something that he has never done before; he raised his voice to me. He didn’t shout, but he did raise his voice just enough to try and penetrate through the mentalism that had tenaciously gripped my mind.

“SI!” he called. Well, he didn’t of course – perhaps it will surprise some of you to learn that I have a name, a normal, very ordinary name, and he used that instead – but you know what I mean. One thing I’ll not forget about this session was that he actually used my name three times, and at one point I used his too – these things are unheard of in the whole time we’ve known each other. Does it mean something? Why do I attach such importance to something so apparently normal and trivial? Is it because using names is personal, and that I want to see him as a person, not a canvas? Who knows. I certainly don’t, but I do know that that memory sticks with me.

I think he must have somehow brought me back from this mental place, but I don’t remember the specifics. The next part of the conversation that I recall was when he asked me how I felt about myself and that I told him that I felt like a “dirty, fetid little slut.” I then rationalised things for a bit, proclaiming that I am in actuality not a slut. Unfortunately, I still felt (feel) like one.

Then I lost it again. “I’m a filthy whore,” I spat, hiding from him again with my hands.

I think he actually went as far as to tell me that I am not a whore, but that could be a phantom memory. I mean, how the fuck would he know? I could have sold sex in 28 European capitals for all he knows. One thing he definitely did do was try and help me regain my composure. I sat up and pretended to be fine, sticking out my hand to measure how much it was shaking. I have used an incident when I was about 15 as a yardstick to measure anxiety; the day after I found out about an incredibly twisted lie from my first real boyfriend (a long story that I will have to detail some day), I went into school and, in English, happened to notice how much my hand was shaking. That denotes severe anxiety and/or anger. If the shaking is less than that, things could be worse.

I told C about this. However, a brief reference to the lying cunt of an ex must have touched on the self-disgust I was already feeling over my own lying to C about the INCIDENT (when we first met I told him it was ‘mere’ touching, but that was only part of it, obviously. More on this shortly). I told him this – still without using that word – and went into a major self-invective of utter disgust and abhorrence. It was filled with ranting about how much of a shameful, lying, grotesque, hateful slag I am, lying to the one person that might be able to bring me back a little hope in this sorry mental battle, and about how guilty and sorry I am, blah blah de blah.

When I took a second to draw breath, he jumped in to try and (a) reassure me that I had nothing to feel guilty about and (b) establish exactly what it was that I felt I’d lied about.

I answered (b) first, at least to the best of my recollection. He’d specifically asked in our initial assessment sessions what form the sexual abuse took. As is my wont, I had avoided articulating myself properly, and instead managed to answer the question merely by his probing. I think, though I am not certain, that he asked if I was raped, and that I said ‘no’. I am sure that when he asked if it was inappropriate touching that I said ‘yes’, and that I led him to believe that that was all. In my defence – and I told him this in the session to which this post refers – I have dissociated a lot of the INCIDENT. I remember ghastly, loathsome pieces of it in fleeting glimpses, like looking at still pictures in an album or, sometimes, short video clips. I remember the sensations of pain and terror in these moments too. I am grateful that the memories are so brief, but also resentful of it too, as it feels like it removes my power to understand the INCIDENT and my reactions to it. Furthermore, obviously part of me does remember it, and that part is mentally fucked – perhaps it would be easier to address were it all consciously there at the front of my mind.

Anyhow, I then proceeded to respond C’s (a) point. “I lied to you,” I said simply. “Aren’t you angry with me?”

“No, of course I’m not angry with you.”

“Why not? You should be.”

He sort of laughed (he mustn’t have realised I was serious), but seeing the look on my face, he desisted from doing so abruptly.

“SI,” he said again, firmly, looking straight at me. “Do you seriously think that I should be angry with you?” His tone was a more compassionate version of ‘incredulous’.

“Yes,” I began, “fucking dirty, lying, grotesque little bitch, fucking…”

“One,” he interrupted, rather dramatically, leaning forward and counting on his fingers as he did. “We had only just met and you can’t honestly have expected yourself to deeply discuss such sensitive matters with someone you didn’t know. Two, you didn’t lie, you omitted some information…”

“But then that’s a lie of omission…” I began.

“Three!” he went on, raising his eyebrow in a surprisingly authoritative fashion, signaling that I was to let him finish, “three, this is hard for you to talk about, so it is not surprising you withheld it. What is there to be angry with?! I am not angry with you, and neither should I be.”

Well, that was me told, then. I was quite taken aback by the forcefulness of his tone. Actually, ‘forcefulness’ is a horrid word to use as it has negative connotations – let’s say ‘emphatic’ instead. He was incredibly emphatic. I gaped at him in a sort of stupefied disorientation for a minute or two.

He sat back in his chair, recovered his blank canvas and either asked me how I felt, or signalled for me to speak.

“Um…” I muddled. “That’s reassuring. I do feel reassured. But it also confuses me; you have a completely different attitude to it from me.”

He seemed to understand that in fairness, which not an awful lot of people would. He was able to see the black-and-white chain of logic that I was following in believing that he ought to be angry, but luckily for C things in his world do not seem to be as black and white as they are in mine.

I don’t remember how things ended. I know that I was battered and bruised psychologically (and physically to boot what with punching my head). At no point had I been tearful, but one does not need to weep to mentally suffer. I went and sat in the car and phoned A for catharsis and reorientation purposes. Although the trauma of reliving the INCIDENT had been the most awful aspect of the session, the fact that I fixatedly whined to A that C ‘wants to abandon me’ before I even touched on the rest of things is very telling.

In later discussions A urged me to tell C about this abject fear. What’s the point? C already knows I’m terrified of him abandoning me. Perhaps the real question is ‘is my attachment to him healthy?’ There have been mixed views on this from the readership of this blog. cbtish, for example, thinks it puts me in an intolerable position (cbtish is a therapist). Vanessa from eTransference, a clinical psychologist in training who has a particular interest in the phenomenon of transference, thinks it ought to be encouraged in many ways. Others undergoing therapy – bourach and thesamesky (who’s also a counsellor) for example – have their own struggles with the therapeutic dyad (bourach in particular will understand why I thought C should be angry with me, given this post of her’s).

I don’t know what the answer is; just that the attachment is very real. Just that I feel guilty for withholding information and for lying (though he wants me to stop that – and I’ve just remembered that the session ended with him asking me, again, to try and not post-mortem things in therapy. Oops. He was also worried, after what happened with VCB’s SHO in September, that his actions or words could have a…er…detrimental effect on me. Double oops. All I can say is that I think our current dialogue is progress, regardless of any self-harm that follows). And at least I am far from alone in withholding, and even lying.

But it’s still all a bit of a quagmire, yes?

Recall that I reported some time ago now on the Seven Vials Cycle and the very odd manner in which it was discovered. Seemingly some sort of symbolic work rife with numeric references to the Book of Revelation. Recently, I stumbled across a blog published by Kristofer Emerig (assuming this is the same individual) on his use of Fibonacci sequences in the generation of motivic materials. This is truly a development in our research and I am eager to re-examine the body of work in the Seven Vials Cycle under this new light. And while the so called “Golden Section” was clearly examined previously as at least one angle in these works structurally, until now I had not considered looking for such an explicit application of the idea.

In an unrelated matter, I have also come upon a project conducted by Rie Takahashi, Jeffrey H Miller, and Frank Pettit, which offers to convert any DNA code you provide into music, by means of some rather veiled and unspecified algorithm, into music. I’m very eager to look into this matter as well. I’ll be reporting on my findings as soon as they come, so please look in from time to time.

in this experience                                                     i am looking for the item i
i walk back in my own tracks                         lost due to short attention span.
taking the exact same steps                                           i was forgetting to watch
my feet pointed
in the opposite direction                                   the further i went walking back

entrusted to the one of us                  and dropped it somewhere along the way

the greater the time since the losing           i will not find what was dropped
the longer i spend not finding                                        so i turn my feet around
the less i believe i ever will                                         and when i decide it is lost
the more i forget what it was                         and i look for the first time, again
or why i was looking for it                                           to walk back forward again
the faster it stops be-ing                                           after walking there and back
in my forward-backwards mind                      the details will all switch places
working through each move i made         when i trace my steps a third time
forward the first time                                                 the object lost is no longer
along the way i’m walking again be-ing,                   now replaced by memory
for the first time again                                      the presence of the thing missing
the other way that says,                                                    saying, this is not so.

for example
what was red is now yellow                        and in that memory’s memory,
but yellow is a memory tagged
with a confusing clarification,
untrustworthy, worthy only to fuel
inferior composite memories
an indulgence, useful in a pinch,
which changes the mind
to assume that what was merely lost
actually never existed.                                                               it no longer does.

the trick is to never walk backward                       but if you do lose it, it will be
or forward with the feet reversed.                               to make yourself believe
this is the trick:                                                                            you will find it
to keep walking forward.                        to convince your self          
to keep holding on to all                                it will never stop be-ing
that is in your hands.                or becoming something else             
and watching the others
so they don’t drop it.                                                                    until to you do.

“by doing what he did”          ”by doing what he did”
doing what he did                                        what he did
what he did                                                          by doing
he did                                                                           he did
by doing                                                           what he did
what he did                                         doing what he did
“by doing what he did”            ”by doing what he did”

It was dead when the body hit the ground.

Death was not in mind that morning. Only a bright late autumn morning with a clear blue sky and a slight sharpness of temperature. All the more reason to generate some heat and so that was why he was there in that place. His mind was alive with opportunity for the future and to the casual onlooker, the youngster was too young to have noticed death let alone have experienced it close up. He could feel the air on his face as he moved through the cold air cutting the stillness like an icebreaker crushing the arctic ice before it.

Like so much these days it was an accident waiting to happen, destined to take place; the elements relentlessly, progressively, unstoppable, fatefully moving closer like some carefully constructed stretto in the fugue that is life. I could imagine Bach at his writing desk forming each phrase, seeing the conclusion and smiling to himself as he intentionally delayed the sickening  but inevitable nexus.

No one reached out to stop it. No passer-by felt inclined to interfere, to save the young life. They couldn’t have even had they wanted to. It was beyond their control, beyond anyone’s control. Save God’s.

When death came it was a dark shape. Hard. Unforgiving. Unyielding. Quick. Cold.

He fell to the ground almost immediately motionless.

For those who could see, who took the time to look on at this passing from life, they would have noticed a tremble in the legs; a  last heaving of the breast valiantly drawing in vital air; a twisting of the neck and head – perhaps looking for someone to hold the expiring body, with whom he could share his last minute. But no one came. No one saw.

No one cared.

Is life now so cheap that we can discard it and no longer care. No one will mourn his passing and no one will lift his body and lay it in earth.

“Remember me, remember me, but ah, forget my fate” sings Dido in Purcell’s opera. This life had not the time to seek remembrance. It is a life that will be easily forgotten.

The bus continued its journey unaware of the life it had claimed.

The seagull lay on its back in the road.

Dead

JohnF

Meh. It’s Wednesday night and I’m in a weird funk. The week (school wise) is done (after two papers that I probably shouldn’t bring up because I did them completely incorrectly).

On to happier things. Originally I wanted to post about Music Hum (mostly because I have no idea what is going on) but also because we learned about fugues today. I didn’t take music junior year of high school, but I do remember when everyone else had to write a fugue (I still don’t fully understand what it is). ANYWAY tried to find the “food fight” one (for some reason that’s what stuck with me) but I couldn’t find a video. When I searched on youtube I found this. Anyone (mostly agoos) know where I can find a clip?

Instead, going to write about last night when Shif and I went to an awesome lecture by Marina Abramovic at Miller Theater. She’s kinda crazy/interesting and is having a retrospective at MoMA this winter. It was a bit surreal to have her talk about her work in such a cool and collected way when everything she does is so totally out there. It’s also really fun when there are cool free things like this on campus. Really sad that I’m missing this tomorrow.

Tonight I had a lovely and inspiring chat with JFeld during/after yet another EC fire alarm and he told me I should write a blog post (he was mostly making fun of me) so I did.

Blarg. I should probably go to senior night.

30 septembre 2007

Today, I found a small purple flower on the sidewalk. It was so out of place I had to find where it came from. The color was vivid and I wanted more so I climbed the slope next to the tunnel where I was, near the Arwater market, and I realized there was the railway tracks.

Funny how you can know something’s there but don’t quite realize it. The flowers weren’t there but I had another point of view of where I was and as I was looking at the tracks I was very nostalgic. I decided to walk on them for a while.

When I was younger, I used to go to the library on foot almost every day. This was when I lived in my hometown and there is no bus line and no subway. Sometimes I would walk on the railroad tracks and imagine they went very very far. I imagined I could go to China by walking. Until I couldn’t fight back the thought that you had to cross a sea to go there no more. I wanted to pack my things and run away following the tracks and never come back.

Being a realist I knew that if I did someone would bring me back, something bad would happen to me or I would have to do something bad to survive. But everytime I walked on these rocks and these rods I wanted so badly to go away from home. I wanted to be rid of my life, of my parents, I wanted to be adopted, to find out I came from aliens, anything that would be an excuse for me to disappear.

And as I was walking on these tracks today, I realized how it had given me hope for something better when I had no hope and all I had was sadness and fear.

Visually stunning. My son loved watching this!

Je déteste.

Les désormais célèbres disparitions de Cédrika Provencher et David Fortin…C’est triste, vraiment, mais on a fait le tour, je crois. Les opportunistes ont sauté sur l’occasion comme de vrais loups affamés d’attention. Ce soir, j’ai vu un groupe Facebook d’une femme au personnage douteux qui invite les gens à se sensibiliser à la cause du jeune David Fortin. Beau geste, mais difficile de ne pas voir ça comme de l’opportunisme. À ce que je sache, il n’y a pas que deux enfants disparus à travers le Québec, pourquoi cette Berthe St-Germain, qui doit être la seule personne à se considérer humoriste, doit-elle choisir, comme tous les autres, un des plus médiatisés? Pourquoi ne pas donner de la visibilité à ceux dont on ne parle pas? Ils méritent qu’on les retrouve tout autant que Cédrika et David. Ce ne sont pas tous les parents qui acceptent de se faire voir tous les jours à la télévision, ne les pénalisons pas pour ça.

Pendant que les imbéciles tentent de se faire un nom sur le dos de ces pauvres enfants, je vous invite à prendre le temps de visionner les photos de quelques jeunes disparus dont on ne parle jamais, alors qu’on devrait.

Diego Königsthal, 1 an

Sara Linklater, 13 ans

Kenny Thompson-Desjarlais, 16 ans

Mélissa Charron, 15 ans

Pour plus d’informations ou pour voir d’autres personnes disparues, visitez le site web de la chaîne de télévision Avis de Recherche.

The piano is, by far, the most flexible instrument. I don’t mean flexability when it comes to playing in certain locations, no. The piano is flexible musically. If one can learn to play the piano, he or she has access to almost any music style, save that rap junk. Popular music is including piano in some of it’s hits, there is a piano arrangement for about any symphony or fugue on the planet, and jazz should be a given.
This is because there are so many different styles of playing piano. One musician might sound more elaborate while playing, the other perfers simplicity, as in “Chopsticks”. Of course there is the jazz method of playing, and the blues method.
The piano is the easiest instrument through which to portray a mood. While on a trumpet, clarinet, or violin there is some difficulty improvising, much of what I do with the piano is improvising.
With the addition of electronic keyboards to many of today’s ensembles, piano players have been opened up to an entirely new realm of sounds they have never made before. Learn the piano, and you have learned every instrument in existence.

ACTUALISATION DU 7 AOUT :

Durant dix jours, Will a eu les honneurs des médias.

Ce kangourou charentais (en fait un wallaby) se promenait dans la campagne cognaçaise, faisant de furtives apparitions, ici ou là.

Après avoir quitté son domicile de Genté, au sud de Cognac, il a été vu une première fois, le 27 juillet, à Angeac-Champagne. Puis ce fut au tour des habitants de Roissac, Julliac-le-Coq… de recevoir la visite de ce wallaby.

A Julliac-le-Coq, il aurait même été même immortalisé par le téléphone portable d’un jeune chasseur.

Puis par de nombreux habitants, dont le maire.

C’est que Will avait pris ses quartiers dans un champ de maïs, à proximité du village, révèle Sud Ouest.

Mercredi, à la tombée de la nuit, Will s’est rendu.

En fait, pas tout à fait de son plein gré…

Son vétérinaire de maître pensait pouvoir “l’endormir avec une sarbacane”.

Ce qui n’a pas été le cas.

“C’est finalement les gardes nationaux de la chasse et de la faune sauvage qui l’ont fléché avec une carabine à air comprimé” précise Sud Ouest.

Le propriétaire de Will est encore tout étonné de la ferveur médiatique provoquée par son escapade:

“Des amis m’appelaient de toute la France pour m’en parler; de la Charente bien évidemment, mais aussi d’Alsace, de Corse, du fin fond de la Somme… Et je ne parle pas des médias. Même le journal de mes enfants l’évoquait.”

“Je pense qu’au moins un million de Français en auront entendu parler” confie le vétérinaire dans Sud Ouest.

A quand les “Mémoires de Will?”

Norton's Ordinall of Alchemy

    One of the points I hope to make as I build podcast episodes for The Elements Unearthed project is to show the threads that lead to modern chemistry as an empirical science. I have seen from my research here at Chemical Heritage Foundation that there are at least three major threads that all came together in the 17th and 18th Centuries to define what we call Chemistry today.

    The first thread was that of Theory or Logical Speculation – beginning with the Greek philosophers (such as Democritus and Aristotle) and continuing with attempts through the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods to reconcile atomic theory with church dogma (such as the attempts of Pierre Gassendi) or to refine and build on elemental (Aristotelian) theory, such as the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. This thread wasn’t concerned with experimental proof – that would only come later – but instead valued logical consistency and careful reasoning. The culmination of this thread was the revised (modern) atomic and corpuscular theories of Daniel Sennert, Robert Boyle, and John Dalton.

Emblem VI in Atalanta Fugiens by Michael Maier

    The second thread was that of Alchemy, which I have been pursuing these past three weeks by locating related books in the CHF archives and photographing interesting pages. The alchemists had several goals in mind – the transmutation of base metals into gold, the creation of immortality (or at lest the cure of diseases) through the Elixir of Life or Philosopher’s Stone, and the purification of the inner self (spriritual alchemy). Despite their tendency to become secretive and overly allegorical, their constant experiments toward these goals laid a basic foundation for modern chemistry through all the compounds and materials they created which were failures. Sometimes the symbolism can be a lot of fun, such as this page from Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (Atlanta Fleeing). In a series of emblems representing different alchemical processes, Maier created a publishing masterpiece that includes symbolic drawings (the first eleven are even hand colored), epigrams (riddles), songs, and other brain teasers. Perhaps even his title is a pun; maybe Fugiens is a play on the word fugue (again my lack of Latin training could be steering me wrong). If so, it would place his work in the company of Bach and Escher. I photographed all the emblems and all the music, and I hope to try out the songs and see if they have any fugue-ish qualities. If so, it would be fun to record them and use them for background music for the podcast episodes. 

A page from Pyrotechnia by Biringucci

    The final thread, which is perhaps under appreciated, is that of the craftsman. These were the metalworkers, glass makers, stonecutters, painters, masons, engravers, sculptures, dyers, miners, printers, book binders, potters, jewelers, and other people who made practical materials and works of art. They developed high levels of technical skill during the Middle Ages (one of the reasons we don’t call them the Dark Ages anymore). Their skills were rarely written down, and even then usually as a set of lab notes of basic recipes without much explanation. Some of these lab notes have come down to us, recopied and much garbled, such as the Leydon Papyrus X, the writings of Pseudo-Democritus (Bolos of Mendes), the Natural History of Pliny, the Mappae Clavicula, and a very few others. I have been looking over a modern translation of the Treatise of Theophilus, who has been identified as one Roger of Helmarshausen, a talented metalworker who lived around 1100. Some of his works, such a portable alters and elaborate book covers, still exist in museums. His book is much more than the standard lab recipes; he gives detailed instructions and his chapter on metalwork is especially vivid and shows the first-person perspective of someone who did metalwork every day. His work was very influential in later technical books, such as the Pyrotechnia of Biringucci (1540) shown here or Antonio Neri’s Art of Glass or Agricola’s De Re Metallica. In this page, Biringucci shows how to hang bells that have been cast. Theophilus discussed how to cast and hang bells as well, showing this to be an ancient and highly technical skill.

The Sceptical Chymist by Robert Boyle

    This past week I have begun to tie these threads together into the beginnings of modern chemistry. Although Antoine Lavoisier is credited with finally turning chemistry into a quantitative science, it was Robert Boyle who first proposed that chemistry should be based on experimentation and observation rather than logic and speculation. If there was one moment when Aristotle was finally cast into the fire, it was 1661 when Boyle first published The Sceptical Chymist. You see here a photo of the title page of a first edition of that book, which is extremely rare (less than 35 copies remain). We held an open house at CHF this Wednesday for invited guests (mostly chemistry experts and historians) and the archivists brought this book out and I managed to get a few photos of it. In addition, they had the first full printed version of Mendeleyev’s periodic table, and the notebook of Richard Smalley from 1985 where he first drew the structure of buckminsterfullerine (the famous bucky ball) that won him a Noble Prize. All very cool stuff for us chemistry geeks.

First fold-out periodic table

Richard Smalley's drawing of a Bucky Ball

    Finally, more on the order of a teaser than for any other reason, here is another Earth animation. The texture this time is a NASA photographic montage of the Earth taken in May, 2007 (notice the recent snow in Europe) with ocean bathymetric data added. This is the most detailed Earth texture I have tried yet. I haven’t created any new animations this week because I’ve been having so much fun with the rare books, but the progress toward final editing of the student episodes is continuing; my plan remains to have serveral episodes ready to upload by August 31, with more shortly thereafter. I’ll have more teasers in the weeks to come. August will be a productive month for this project as I am planning to duplicate some of the CHF photo collection; interview several experts on matter theories, the history of chemistry, and the periodic table; and to visit several mine sites including a zinc mine in New Jersey, a coal mine in Scranton, and the mineral exhibit at the Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. All of this will be shown in future posts. Until then . . . . TTFN.

For about twenty years now, I’ve been idly noticing that the melody of Leo the Lion fits over the top of itself, at least at the start.  This makes it ripe for fugal treatment.

I finally did something about it.  You can see it here:

Fugue On a Well-Known Australian Children’s Song

And hear it here:

“Eh, gamine, arrête de faire la tronche… Je sais que tu as soif, qu’il fait chaud, mais je n’y suis pour rien… Je ne t’ai pas demandé de foutre le camp de chez tes parents… Fallait réfléchir avant, t’as regardé trop de films, t’as joué, t’as perdu, maintenant… tu rentres au bercail. Me regarde pas avec cet air, et je te préviens, tu remets quelque chose quand on arrive en ville, pas envie de me faire coffrer pour détournement de mineur ! Et n’y pense même pas, tu auras pris une branlée avant d’avoir dit ouf si tu n’obtempères pas… Mais qu’est-ce que tu es allé foutre avec ce type, ce minable ?! Même pas foutu de te défendre, même pour la forme… Fallait le voir se cavaler dans la poussière. Non, franchement, tu as mieux à faire. Bosse à l’école, soit une bonne fille, aide ta mère, et ton heure viendra toute seule, crois moi…”

Retour au bercail...

The Seven Vials Cycle, its discovery (known now as the Newton County Event), and mysteries surrounding the meaning of the works of Kristofer Emerig:

In late April, while clearing an abandoned farm field (some 60 miles southeast of Chicago) in preparation for sale, a worker stumbled upon a curious discovery; A shallowly buried, wooden box, carefully crafted and containing a single music score, entitled [The] Seven Vial[s] Cycle V, signed Kristf[e]r Emeri[g]. Two additional boxes, apparently exposed by weather and the workers’ activities, were unearthed on the same day, each containing its own composition. An associate, hereafter “FW”, in Chicago contacted me almost immediately after the landowner presented him with the unusual discovery, knowing my background in musicology and keen interest in a good mystery. What would surface in the ensuing days would prove to be a genuine mystery indeed.

The manner in which these artifacts were crafted and interred at the site was astounding in its methodical ritual. The boxes were carved and numbered, and arranged both numerically and geometrically such that their discovery, after the first three, was not as difficult as one might have imagined. A pattern gradually emerged, yielding a circle or hexagon, depending on your interpretation, with a single point at the center, forming seven equidistant loci. The Roman numbering on the boxes, with IV at the center, was such that any “row” through the center yielded a sum of twelve, a significant number for this composer, along with the number seven (e.g., the Discipular Cycle), as I would later discover. I would later ponder whether this was somehow pointing to a connection to or answer within The Discipular Cycle. I have not found it. The geometric arrangement was extraordinarily precise, leading us to ponder how someone might have completed this task near a state highway in broad daylight, risking discovery, or in darkness, to such exact accuracy. Each chord, or hexagon side, was precisely 72 yards (216 ft) and each vertex exactly the same from the center, a diameter of 432 ft. We could not have found the remaining boxes were their placement not exact, as a few were still buried several-6 inches deep.

At first examination, I believed the compositions to be hand copied forgeries of some Baroque master or another, perhaps obscure enough to evade discovery from most, but this is my area of expertise and, having studied them, I am now convinced of their authenticity as original compositions of extraordinary genius. All in the form of Prelude and Fugue, in a style and method closely mirroring J.S. Bach. I am still studying their complexities months later, trying to extract the numerological portent they seem to contain. Incidentally, or maybe not, these were also numbered by Roman numeral, but did not match the box numbers. The composition numbers formed rows which totaled 14, and each differed from its box number by three or four, alternately. Still a clear pattern, but what does it mean?

I have since found evidence of the composer’s activities in the Chicago region, including some bootleg recordings, webpages,  and even a spinet reputedly owned once by him.  All inquiries regarding The Newton County Event have been met with silence. If you have information,  insight, or interpretations, please post here and/or contact me.