Earth, Sea, and Sky: or, Marvels of the Universe

That's the title of a beautiful late nineteenth-century book that I found in the back of a library a few years ago and that I haven't told nearly enough people about. It is a treasure. Remember Bastian Balthazar Bux's eyes when he stumbled through Mr. Coreandor's bookshop and just had to open up The Neverending Story? Those were my eyes when I found this old, dusty, leatherbound volume, with its over 300 engravings and its innumerable pages. The book offers short anecdotes on "all that is wonderful on the globe, in the waters, or in the starry heavens." The language of the book is Victorian and yet not - there is a vitality to its descriptions that is almost desperate. For example, in describing the earthquake that overtook Lisbon a few centuries ago, the book declares of such earthquakes: They bury mountains as we bury the dead.


In the aftermath of this decade's upheavals in Indonesia and Pakistan, we better than our fathers and mothers, perhaps, can feel the full horror and awe of that sentence. Although: what do we, who are here comfortably or somewhat comfortably blogging, know of that? Ask those starving among the bodies about horror.

But this is my favorite of all the books of that century. It is beautiful beyond hope. Take the first paragraph, for example, of one chapter:

There are beautiful creatures in the great deep with colors as gorgeous as those of butterflies; moreover, like butterflies, some of them have wings and rise like birds from the surface of the sea.

How well I remember a crossing from the white cliffs of Dover to Calais many years ago by ferry. I had never seen a flying fish, but that night by moonlight I saw three flashing above the darkness of water beside the ferry, carried so far north by some wild warm current. I watched them, rapt, as the first child must once have watched the first butterflies. And when I stumbled down onto the docks with my French pocket dictionary and a few coins in my pocket, all my mind was consumed by the thought: What beautiful things there are in the sea!

These days, thanks to the existence of the Internet, you can find a copy of Earth, Sea, and Sky on ebay or alibris, though once it must have taken a treasure hunt indeed.

Cherokee Stories

The last few years have seen something that to me is very beautiful: living, current tellings of Cherokee stories - as well as those of other American Indian nations - available to wider audiences. No more the dry anthropologies of the late nineteenth century: these narratives of myth and folklore are bright and vivid in their colors, alive, current, real. Barbara Duncan's Living Stories of the Cherokee - which transcribes the tales of active storytellers in the Eastern Cherokee Band in North Carolina (storytellers who tell their tales at schools or at council meetings, or just on Saturday afternoons on the porch) - is a monument in literary anthropology. Its authenticity and vitality is due to: 1) the fact that Barbara Duncan lived in Cherokee, North Carolina - she was not an outsider brought in; and 2) she treats each story as both story and record, rather than as just one or the other: in this, she grasps something central to this culture's storytelling. Definitely take a look: it is a passionate book.


Also - recent years have seen a surge in children's books - with such art! - telling the old stories: the story of the first strawberries, for instance, is beautifully told and beautifully painted in Bruchac and Vojtech's book:


I wish I had the last painting in that book scanned to offer here, but you will have to buy or borrow the book. It is a breathtaking illustration: the man and the woman together, reunited by the strawberries, and holding the berries cupped in their hands together, their faces lit with the soft red glow of the shining fruit.

These books mean a great deal to me personally. Strawberries and a few other "leftovers" from past generations had great significance in the house in which I grew up, though often without much definition - all that was left of that segment of our heritage. To this day I keep strawberries in the house, by the door or on the mantel - though it was not until I was a teenager that I knew why.

Impersonally, as an admirer of folklorists and all artists and scholars of mythopoeia, I celebrate these books as a great gift to this generation.

Also, take a look at what's coming in Cherokee, North Carolina: this nation has no casino - instead, vibrant drama, a museum, a cultural center. Somehow throughout the brutality of the centuries this people has kept its dignity and its stories and by doing so has remained a people. It is something to be admired and celebrated, and it is a wondrous thing that a wider audience is now listening to their musicians and their storytellers. We are traveling further around the circle of Time.

Didier Massard: Voyages Imaginaires

Today's Morning News: Black and White and Read All Over features an interview with Didier Massard, the Parisian tabletop photographer whose gallery series Voyages Imaginaires features dreamlike or fairy tale scenes.


I think the interviewer hits on the perfect description of the emotive mood of Massard's work: "Didier Massard’s photographs look like they could have been on the cover of your favorite book as a child, or come straight out of that weird dream you had last night." According to Didier Massard himself in the interview:

"I try to keep alive the ability of childhood to transform as a game an object into something else. I am doing the same in a sophisticated way. This means that I have a special relationship with things and consider that they may have a different meaning than what they appear to be. It is a great satisfaction when a trick succeeds."

Consider, for example, this landscape, with a carousel planted in the midst of a snowy wood - the "trick" is indeed beautiful; as Massard claims, the carousel - a recognizable object - becomes something else entirely:


And yet it remains a carousel. Is this not what fairy tales do? Take objects that are quite familiar and every day and plant them in strange surroundings, so that a farmer's daughter finds herself contending with trolls and becomes both more than a farmer's daughter and more fully realized as a farmer's daughter? Or so that a spinning wheel becomes something entirely strange when it begins spinning wool into gold, yet in doing so becomes more fully realized by the reader as a spinning wheel, that is, as a tool with an almost magical power to transform a plain substance into something blindingly wondrous in its usefulness? We forget that in spinning, we turn thread into a coat or a dress or something beautiful. We forget the alchemy that takes place. To remember, we have to see the spinning wheel as if for the first time, as a strange and wondrous artifact. Watching the wheel spin gold allows us to do this. The same is true of the carousel in Didier Massard's photograph: seeing the carousel like a surprise in the snowbound forest, we recover the childhood wonder of our first encounter with a carousel as an artifact strange and beautiful.

To view more of the Voyages Imaginaires, see Didier Massard's website, which is available in both French and English versions.

Coelacanth documentary clip

As a follow-up on my earlier post on cryptozoology, I had to post this - a clip from a Japanese documentary:



40 seconds into the clip, you will be granted an underwater view of the coelacanth, the fish known as the "living fossil," presumed 200,000 years extinct until it appeared in a fishnet off the coast of California. The gracefulness of this fish that time forgot is accented by the musical score for the documentary, an almost outlandishly sweeping romantic melody: suggestive of the nostalgic and heroic overtones of the "lost world" or "land that time forgot" myth.

One further contemporary cryptozoological cultural phenomenon: the wild success of the art galleries - and later the books (I believe there are now four) - of James Gurney's Dinotopia:


Despite contemporary discourse about the shrinking of our world into a "global village" (or perhaps partly because of it?), and even though we no longer draw maps that have white spaces (which is probably a fallacy of our chartography), our artists, writers, and journalists continue to wonder about the white spaces on the map.

Cryptozoo

If you haven't seen it, check out the ongoing Cryptozoo contest, a contest for Photoshopped images of creatures rumored to exist though never scientifically proven. (Now there is the key nostalgic myth of modern society: the myth of the unfound and exotic creature in some white space of the map - the hope that there are white spaces on the map.) Also check out Michael Newton's Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology: A Global Guide to Hidden Animals and Their Pursuers, a surprisingly thorough almanac to the many Bigfoots, yeti, and surviving dinosaurs of the world.


To whet the appetite, here are several of my own favorites from the Cryptozoo contest:



Kraken

Marine biologists - of the deep-diving, adventurous kind - are still searching for living specimens of architeuthis dux, the giant squid, which has the largest living eye of any animal, and which Walt Disney's rendition of 20,000 Leagues has made into an iconic creature. Clyde Roper in New England wrote a wonderful article once detailing his early research into the giant squid - I need to track down a copy - in which he described once preserving a part of a deceased, beached specimen in the deep freeze, and then trying it for dinner at a celebration with his fellow marine biologists. (Apparently in the high spirits of their knowledge-sharing, they were attacked by both the munchies and a case of extreme curiosity. Being a sushi lover, I can understand.) Roper reported that architeuthis dux tasted, regrettably, of ammonia.



Nessie

Not the masterpiece of the original black-and-white, but very classy. This particular Nessie looks like a very beautiful creature.


Sea Eaglephant

My hat goes off to this one. Not since Dumbo without his feather have I seen such grace from an elephant. Look at that leap!



Scuba Dive

Not the best art, but I love the audacity and suggestiveness of it!

Definitely visit Cryptozoo and check out the rest. I believe the contest is still in progress. You can even submit. Some of the entries are just terrible, but all of them are fun.

Opportunity for Comparative Study: Cerberus

Maybe you've noticed my addiction to archiving, or to collecting oddments. Had I lived in the eighteenth century, I would have built a wunderkammern, a cabinet of marvels and beautiful things. Had I lived in the eighteenth century, though, the eighteenth century would have driven me mad.

Here is a collection for the sharing: a cabinet of portraits of Cerberus, the Guardian of the Gates of the Underworld, Hesiod's "Cerberus who eats raw flesh, relentless and strong," whom I first met in raw terror in the pages of Dante. Though I have been unable to find a digital copy of the illustration from my tattered old copy of Mandelbaum's paperback translation of the Inferno (I'll have to scan it later), I remember the illustration upon my first encounter with it gave me vivid nightmares - something about the ice-cold, ravenous eyes. As did Dante's verbal imagery: the three-headed, snarling creature tearing the souls with its claws:

Li occhi ha vermigli, la barba unta e atra,
e 'l ventre largo, e unghiate le mani;
graffia li spirti ed iscoia ed isquatra.

This is what Mandelbaum makes of that last line, trying to capture the viciousness of the sound in English:

His talons tear and rend and flay the shades.

And it is not just the sound that's vicious: it's the way Dante piles ed on ed, and on and: Cerberus does not just tear the damned, he tears them and rends and flays them.

Gustav Dore's Cerberus doesn't do this horror justice at all, although his Cerberus does have a dark grotesquerie to it that I like:


So I met Cerberus first in the pages of Dante. But we can find Cerberus in many places, some of them surprising. First, though, here are some of the older depictions of Cerberus on Greek plates, vases, and amphorae:







And, as proof that Cerberus continues to haunt our imagination, here is the eater of flesh in two renditions in modern popular culture:


Cerberus: Guardian of Hell, a horror film. The one-line pitch for the film: "Three times the terror." Enough said.

Titan Quest: Immortal Throne, a blockbuster PC roleplaying game, sold with a cover illustration of the gaming world's standard scantily-clad amazon facing off with the three-headed beast. Titan Quest deserves much more credit than the Cerberus horror film, though; with a rhapsode in each village to tell the player tales of ancient heroes - Herakles, Orpheus, Achilles slayer of men - often in compelling prose and in a more compelling voice recording, Titan Quest introduces the gamer generation to the attractions of Hellenic mythology.

Levity aside, Cerberus is everywhere. While writing this post, I ran a search on deviantart for "Cerberus" and found 9,372 results, some cartoonish, some deeply haunting. Here is a brief selection - not just from deviantart, but from artists of this century and previous ones, showing how Cerberus has appeared in the dreams and nightmares of many artists. If I've missed some worth noting, please drop a comment or an e-mail! Let's build this menagerie....


That is Herakles in the tradition of Tarzan.

This next Cerberus, with its medusan hair-of-serpents, and with the Boatman in the background, is from Slovenia, I think. See the forlorn slant of light and the snarling of the beast - the emphasis on both the melancholy and the horror of the approach to the dimmer world:


Christopher (Topher) Allen Shephard's Dante and Virgil Encounter Cerberus captures the cruel and mindlessly animal gluttony of the creature:


Things that I really like about Topher's drawing are its antique style and its mix of stylized symbolism and grit-detail: it is almost like a Renaissance emblem.

Here is Cerberus in origami - a creation that truly boggles my mind. Origami as an art both eludes and enchants me - what folding the artist responsible for this one must have taken!


And finally, this gem of a photograph - I have no idea what to say about this one:


The artist offered this comment as a caption: "3 heads, but only 2 hind legs to scratch with. No wonder he got so mean." The photo is a finalist in the Cryptozoo contest, an inspired competition of Photoshopped renditions of "all the animals rumored to exist, but haven't been caught."

What does Cerberus mean to us, to a culture that no longer paints vivid visions of the physicality of hell or the underworld? Why does the image of this deadly guardian, whose claws flay the dead, still pull at our minds?

Sending giant rabbits to North Korea

The photos that are appearing on blogs everywhere have been Photoshopped absurdly (see the one near the end of this post, especially); however, the actual rabbit, prior to its attack of foreshortening, was 22 pounds with eight-inch long ears...a massive rabbit. Their breeder in Germany is now selling them to North Korea, where rabbit breeders want to help the long-eared giants become fruitful and multiply to supplement the North Korean food supply. You can read the story here. NPR quotes Karl Smolinsky, the breeder, as saying:

"During Hitler's time and afterward, I remember how hard it was on everyone. I lived it as a child and wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. I hope through the rabbits I can help a little bit, and that Korea might wake up and start caring more for its people than for the bomb."

Certainly this gives pause for thought. It is almost the foundation of a fairy tale or a bit of folklore - where presidents and princes fail, an altruistic and hard-working farmer sets out to appease the evil dictator of a starving land with the gift of a host of giant rabbits to feed the people. No doubt NPR meant it that way, as well.

We tend to think of "folklore" (or, for that matter, fairy tales) as something that either got told a while back, maybe by our grandparents' grandparents or their ancestors, or else as something indigenous to our earth's few remnants of hunter-gatherer peoples. This allows us to ignore the way that in our movie-downloading, iPod generation we are developing folklore and we are being developed by our folklore all the time. We live in uncertain times - even the most sheltered of us feels this. What stories are we telling to make sense of that uncertainty? What folk heroes are we adopting? What tricksters?


P.S. Here is a film clip with both farmer and rabbit; the real rabbit is perhaps less imposing than his Photoshopped cousins. What is more remarkable is the stories and conversation already springing up about him: