Having pooh-poohed Hélène Smith's Space Seances in the last post, this afternoon I learnt – completely coincidentally – that the overlap between Occultism and the American Space Programme is bigger than I'd realised: The name Jack Parsons popped up in the latest episode of Comedy Bang Bang, which I was listening to while out trying to catch the last of the sun – Oh, here...
... and from what little I could pick up, Parsons' esoteric approach to rocket science makes Nicola Tesla look like Clive Sinclair. I researched him a little further on my return, hence the links in this post, but I reckon the less you know about him, the more you'll enjoy the beautiful introductory video below – a perfect jarring of data and delivery that I've now watched five times. Samba music aside, Christian Sager seems a consummate host, a no-nonsense kind of guy. He doesn't even mention, for example, Parsons' attempt to gestate a "Moonchild" with L. Ron Hubbard – Sorry, I'll shut up.
"I-stroke-we have been given many names..." Twitter's just reminded me, it was four years ago today that the first of Time Spanner's two episodes were broadcast (still hearable here, shush). I've already written a little about the fug I got into trying to decide exactly what to call Belinda Stewart-Wilson's pan-dimensional inhabitant of the Fons et Origo, or "Heaven". Producer Gareth decided upon "Angel", which made a lot of sense, but did risk ruling out the possibility she might be God. I was tickled therefore, and probably a little jealous, when I came to watch Soul, and saw that its own dimensionally difficult inhabitants of an Afterlife-cum-Source-of-all-Inspiration had managed to cut through all this theological faff by just calling each other "Jerry". I also liked that the Jerrys were composed of a single line. If you're going to try to visualise a non-religious Heaven, mathematics seems a pleasing place to start, and I spent quite a bit of the film trying to work out why (beyond the cuteness of bureaucracy).
In 1887, B. W. Betts tried to model the evolution of human psychology through pure geometry, although he maybe didn't try that hard. (More here).
Paradise is another word for Garden... I'd also just been rewatching The Crown*, and remembered how Prince Charles, nosing around his new estate in Highgrove, had said "there are no straight lines in Nature." But if that's the case, I suddenly thought, how do you know where something will land when you drop it? Thanks to gravity, if we could perceive the world in four dimensions, we'd see that Nature is actually fullof straight lines. And ellipses, and perfect geometric figures, and maybe that's what's so pleasing about these images: not their simplicity, but their powers of prophecy. And maybe, then, that's the kind of thing we'd hope to see in Heaven, especially if we weren't waiting to see God.
* (Olivia Colman speaks quickly. Elizabeth II speaks slowly. It's taken me two series to realise my one problem with it.)
Yes, enough Greeks for a bit, back to the Persians: Faren Taghizadeh – whose instagram account had introduced me to the shivering quills and eyelash-batting masks of Behnaz Farahi – has also shared the following short but bracing book review from performance artist Alok Vaid-Menon, whose findings were all completely new to me despite my previous professional toying with both angels and moustaches...
Alok's instagram is here, and if you're looking for some ungendered goodies of your own to put under the tree, my friends from the London Dungeon Charlotte and Nav have moved to Folkstone and opened this fantastic shop.
The second installment of Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, as read aloud by me, is now up on youtube and posted below. Briefly mentioned in it is the medieval philosopher Roger Bacon, a friar and early empirical scholar who also, rather confusingly, was renowned as the inventor of a mechanical head that could predict the future, "Doctor Mirabilis". Friar Bacon first popped up on my rader last week, in my landlord's superb podcast All Rather Mysterious, where he is proposed as a possible author of the enigmatic "Voynich Manuscript", which is this:
You can leaf through the entire manuscript here. The writing is meaningless, and it's fair to say the pictures are as well, but pictures don't have to mean anything, so rather than being a "hoax" textbook as some have suggested, I prefer David Reed's "princess in a tower" theory, that this is simply the work of someone who "was illiterate, but had seen books, and was excited by them." I don't know if Luigi Serafini had ever seen the Voynich Manuscript, but a similar excitement seems to have inspired the Italian architects's Codex Seraphinianus...
Serafini said himself that "he wanted his alphabet to convey the sensation that
children feel in front of books they cannot yet understand", and like the writing in the Voynich Manuscript it is asemic, a word I've just learned. This hasn't stopped people trying to "decode" the book's "secrets" ever since its publication in 1981, but the only difference I can see between the impeti behind the Codex Seraphinianus and the Voynich Manuscript is that Serafini's book was definitely meant for public consumption.
Maybe we should all be taking this time under lockdown to work on our own asemic codices, now that we're all princess in a tower. Nothing too big to start with. Only yesterday I learnt from The Wellcome Collection of all places, how to make an eight-page "zine" out of a single piece of paper:
Is this new learning? Certainly I was never taught it in all my childhood of making half-finished comic books! Oh well, here's episode 2 - Court-blaming, comet-shaming, and not getting the angel:
In late and happy conversation with my sister on Saturday night I
hit upon a neat idea of what I need: "lessons and homework". It hasn't
changed since I was four. Lessons and homework. And a girl who smiles
back.
I've moved my chair round. It faces the bookcase now so I
can sit and write without staring at my bed and my desk feels more like a
nest. But the slope in the floor's a lot more more pronounced this side
of it. I'm sort of leaning to the left. Swings and roundabouts. I had
to move boxes to do this. It's good they've moved. And here's another
drawing from when I was eight. It illustrates: Joseph of
Arimathaea's request to entomb the body of Jesus... Pilate's provision
of a guard for the tomb... and Mary Magdalen's encounter with an angel
on Easter morning. (In the Gospel according to Mark it's a "young man
arrayed in a white robe". In Luke it's "two men in dazzling apparel". In
Matthew it's an angel and an earthquake, which may be why my guard has
fallen over. Or he's swooned.)
Tick.
Tick. Tick. See? Is your favorite bit the fact that my understanding
of angels as beings of absolute goodness means I have to make him
apologize for his own existence? Mine too.
