whollybooks‡
Recently I read a piece in which someone talked about the joy and benefit of visiting museums and being taken to museums as a child and growing teenager. You and your family may be living in reduced circumstances or you may even be poor, but most museums are free and your cultural life doesn’t necessarily have to suffer. It can still be rich and stimulating.
What happens if by nature you are a visitor to museums and galleries, hungry for art and worlds that open in books, a lonely child inclined to cultivate your imagination? But your environment is inimical to your needs and instincts and no-one has any particular interest to show you other possibilities. Is it any wonder something becomes skewed and out-of-kilter? The danger that your imagination might become more real to you than the ‘real’ world is all too real.
And if you are not obedient to suggestions of what you might or should become, how will you find your way alone, come to no harm? In other words, what is your compass?
One journey will almost certainly lead (or stray?!) into the realm of Romanticism, that fruitful shadowy land of the darker side of the Imagination.
An early precursor: Sir Thomas Browne wrote, among other treatises, Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial or A Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk.
A quote:
“What Song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling Questions are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these Ossuaries entered the famous Nations of the dead, and slept with Princes and Counsellours, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above Antiquarism”
Its strange musings, its occupation with the state of mortality and its often melancholy tone (which invited comparisons with Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy) led Virginia Woolf to comment:
“..while the Bible has a gospel to impart, who can be quite sure what Sir Thomas Browne himself believed? The last chapters of Urn Burial beat up on wings of extraordinary sweep and power, yet towards what goal?… Decidedly [Browne's] is the voice of a strange preacher, of a man filled with doubts and subtleties and suddenly swept away by surprising imaginations.”
In the Musaeum Clausum Browne pictured “An Elephant dancing upon the Ropes with a Negro Dwarf upon his Back” and saw in his mind’s eye a ‘quandros’, a Stone taken out of a Vulture’s head, said to have miraculous properties.
All artwork by Erik Desmazières
‡
The source of these two entries comes firstly from an image on a Roman coin , the second, from Martin Ruland’s dictionary of alchemy where the entry
QUANDROS — is a Stone or jewel which is found in the brain and head of the Vulture, and is of a bright white colour. It fills the breasts with milk, and is said to be a safeguard against dangerous accidents.
can be found
Speaking of strange objects Kevin, with even stranger beliefs and rumours attached to them:
Queen Elisabeth once possessed a bezoar, (from pa- zahr: ‘counter-poison, anti-dote, mainly found in the stomach of goats and gazelles; once thought to have possessed mystic powers.) She had it set in gold and added some unicorn’s horn given to her by John Dee, her spy and magician.
Hi Matthew and Emma!
Fascinating site. Which I wouldn’t have found were it not for meeting Raoul this week – he handed me a package of paintings, sketches and miscellaneous pieces of the Past; amongst them was a slip of paper advising me to visit ‘Whollybooks’, leaving me still none the wiser until seeing the material with my own eyes.
At last everything makes sense, especially since we never really chatted in-depth about your personal projects in between Friday swigs of over-priced beer at that regular Guildford watering hole, as I invariably unwind from a tough day at’ pit.
I’ve spent the best part of three hours reading through the various articles, gazing at the artwork, and listening to the music tracks.
I shuddered as I clicked ‘Play’ on Act Of Faith’s “Empire” (1988)… but my keyboard skills weren’t that bad with hindsight! In fact, its particularly clear how far ahead of its time AOF genuinely was in those halcyon 80s days. And a lot of fun while it lasted, particularly those early filmic endeavours from my POV of course. (Remember the Channel 4 Tube competition entry, “Sugar & Spice”? We sweated buckets over those three minutes, but it was worth it.)
I was also pleased to see that Raoul has contributed to the project. He has been through a lot this year, so it pleased me to see his artistic skills in use again, helping him focus on his road to recovery after the accident.
So, yes, I just wanted to pop you both a line to say “Keep Up The Good Work”, and I await future articles with interest.
PS: The Cork radio interview was excellent.