Category: Blank and Empty Things; A History of

JF Ptak
Science Books  Post 802 (from 2009, revised and expanded)

Looking at little things has its rewards, though what rewards those are may be a little oblique.  Today’s post is relegated to looking at the sidewalk on a stroll rather than the surroundings, and the sidewalk view is more like Baudelaire’s sidewalk botanist than Proust’s golden Parisian sidewalks. So it goes.

Petrus Ciacconius Toledanus (Pedro Chacon,1525-1581) was a scholar who wrote on many things; this book, De Triclinio sive De modo co
nvivandiapud priscos Romanos…(printed in 1664, 63 years after the author’s death) , takes a wide and classically scholarly look at bathing practices…and that includes bathing in water or in wine, and bathing once or six times a day, with dinner in the water or not, what to wear bathside, and all sorts of other bathing entertainments and necessaries.

But that’s not why I’m making this short stop here—it’s the odd bit in this illustration that has my attention.  I’m also not sure about the activity in the print—I’m fixed on the little bit of shrubbery that we can see in the background windows.  Having looked at thousands and thousands of images like this, I must say that seeing natural nothingness like this outside a window is very unusual.  In the unknown, unused and non-existent
art appreciation genre of “Boring Things Seen Through Windows”, this print would be standard fare.

But the real issue here for me is that the window is just a window in this print.  It doesn’t have any of the heavy significance associated with windows-in-art of the past, the window dripping with symbolic/spiritual significance (illumination, enlightenment, vision, godhead, divinity).  The window as a simple source of light or vehicle to relieve crowded interiors seems to be

overwhelmed by the religious/needy windows at least t
hrough the first half of the 17^th century.  (At least that’s my sense of it—I haven’t a single figure to back anything up.) The little windows that creep into the work of Van Eyck–especially in the famous “The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna  Cenami” of 1434—are interesting examples of the window as a simple source of light. (In the “Marriage” painting the window is much more visible in the iconic reverse double-painting seen in the mirror on the wall in the background.)

Same too for the windows in some Vermeers, where you can virtually feel the breeze coming through them and into the  occasionally stuffy rooms.  And also for Durer:  while his great study of St. Jerome has a presiding possibility of Pure Holy Light coming into his room, it might also just be sunlight; on the other hand there is little doubt that the windows in his famous depi
ction of an artist working a perspective study of a model through a dividing screen have nothing to do with the spiritual, and are just simple mundane windows.

By the 17^th century there is a new genre of paintings having people looking out of windows (as with the case of Gerrit Dou, where we observe what seems like every one of his subjects looking out through a window),

which means I guess that the observer is the one who might shine in.  Enter the 20^th century and the window takes on new meanings, as in bent/draped windows in Dali, or floating windows looking into the lonely world of Magritte, or the solitary nothing-but-a-window sculpture of Duchamp. 

The unintended nothingness of the 16^th century is what I think I like the best.

Notes:

For some pretty interesting books written on the window in art, see: Carlo Gottlieg, The Window in Art (University of Michigan, 1981, and which is a nice chronological treatment of the window, plus some psychological stuff) and Suzanne Delehenty, The Window in Twentieth-Century Art (1986), among others.  These will point the way.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2247

(From the Passion of Former Days site–with many more Very Highly Colorful examples of motel advertising postcard art, here.)

Slate Vault‘s Rebecca Onion shared a great post from the Passion of Former Days site, a feature of colors-not-found-in-nature color postcards from the 1950’s or so.  They are all striking, and striking in one form or another above being simply striking, but the most striking for me was the Allendale Motor Court’s floating Allendale Eden.  It is, in its thrift-store-velvet way, a sublime image, a late Renaissance woodblock image depicting normality and piety and an expression of what could come for the obedient and penitent, the promise of the rewarded afterlife (as seen in so many images published in the first 50 years after Gutenberg), lifted from that dusty sleep and re-imagined on this linen-backed postcard promising a happy sleep removed from a dirt road in deep South Carolina. 

Above all else, whatever it is in this floating paradise, it is all air conditioned. And heated with steam. And with a telephone.  And a “Room TV” (thanks to Linda Anderson for that clarification!)

And today:

The town has seen better days. It is a small place–3 square miles–and has a population of 3,800, down from 4,000 a decade ago.  The tough part is that the median income in Allendale is $16,000, and the per capita is just $10,000, making for a very hard go.  About 60% of the town’s under-18 population lives under the poverty line, as does 41% of the population in general. This makes it a poor city in a poor county of a poor state–S.C. ranks 48th in per capita income in the country ($34,000 against a national average of $42,000).[Source] Another site listing S.C. counties and places shows Allendale at 348th in 368 listed areas in the state, with Allendale county coming in at 43rd out of 46 counties for per capita income.  

Nearly a third of the town is single-mother households.  That is a hard life.  I don’t know what the percentage of children in town that figure represents–that is, how many of all of the town’s children are being raised in single-parent households…but the number seems big.  Bigger than the big number that is the national average, where something approaching 30% of all American children are being raised by single parents.  

Somehow this is so even though the University of South Carolina Salkehatchie campus is located there–a public school with an enrollment of 1100 and an academic staff of 57.  Evidently it does not draw much income for the town. 

Part of this problem surely are the sky-high unemployment figures for the town, which topped out at 22% in the years following the 2008 Disaster.  Today unemployment stands at about 10%, far above the national avergae of 6.6 (whatever)%  There is no telling what these Allendale numbers mean, not knowing how many people simply fell out of the queue for work.  The numbers sound mean and nasty.  

The floating Eden I think has not been seen in Allendale for quite some time–or at least since Route 95 skirted the town and made one of the major north-south arteries–Route 301–a thing of the past. Or passed.  301 goes through Allendale and in pre-95 times there was quite a tourist trade.  I called the newly-expanded library in Allendale and the librarian I spoke with confirmed this. She did tell me though that for as small a place as Allendale is that they get 150-200 patrons a day, which is about 5% of the town’s population, which is pretty high traffic, per capita.  She was very enthusiastic about her town, and I commmend her for it. “We’re expecting great things to happen in Allendale” she said. And I wish every good thing for her.  

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Earlier this month I wrote two posts on the un-prefix in words occurring in Joyce’s Ulysses and in Webster’s 1828 dictionary–there were many surprises, including an entire category of new words outside their original intentions. One example that came up today, flushed out while reading in a very erudite but long-nosed and very sniffily dismissive work by F.W. Bussell (Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages, published in 1918).  The author was a man of very deep and long learning who wrote a bit, thick-as-a-brick-or-two book of high physical appeal. It seemed to me though that his understanding of some “foreign” religions did not broaden his own appreciation of difference in cultures, as some of the heretical belief systems included Buddhism and Hinduism. 

As much as Bussell seems to put god into various religious equations, he more than occasionally proves judgmental in taking god out of others. Here’s a sampel from Mr. Bussell:

It’s a difficult go. 

And rightly or wrongly it brought up ungod/ungodded/ungoding, the words I bumped into in Webster’s, and so their appearance in the OED:

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  A History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things 

 

In this blog’s series on the History of Blank, Empty, and Missing Things there have been I think no contributions to nothingness in the political sphere–which is odd, given how much of the time politics is about just that, staffed by people of that same quality.  The experience of seeing nothing portrayed in a political caricature as seen below was such that it struck me how little I have seen any images quite like it.  The “zero” appears in J. Grand-Carteret’s Les Moeurs et la Caricature en France, a thick book published in 1888 detailing the history of caricature and satiric expression in France.  The image appears in chapter eight, on the political situation in France between 1816 and 1848 (Louis XVIII, Charles X, and Louis-Philippe). (Two years after abdication of Napoleon and right up to the revolutions of 1848.  I wonder what it was like for Napoleon’s mother, outliving her son by 15 years?)

And the full image:

It is a overt play on the missing color of the tricolor–the flag and the colors of the flag that came into existence in France beginning with the revolution of 1789, and became the flag of the new republic.  The color of course are red, white and blue (liberty, equality, and fraternity, or perhaps the colors of Paris (red and blue) and the white of the House of Bourbon, or something else.  In any event, the “white” as the artist/commentator saw it, the leader filling that space, was not yet present. 

The entire book is located at the University of Heidelberg site, here. The book is very highly illustrated, and it also has an appendix with a very useful list of caricature journals (pp 554-620) and biographies of artists (pp 620-675). 

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2121  Part of the series, a History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things

 

This is a detail from an image of great hope lost.  Here’s the full picture, one of many, of hundreds like it:

This is a letter from a woman named Emma Hauck, a “pateint”, a committed person, in an asylum for the “fatally” insane, a schizophrenic, an incurable who simply wanted to go home. She was not insane enough to know where she was, not insane enough to not want to get out, not insane enough to know that she was in desperate straights, not insane enough to try to get some help.  Emma Hauck wrote letters to her husband, Mark.  Mostly, the letters were composed of single words (like “kommen, kommen”, “come/come” and “Herzensschatzi komm” or “sweetheart/come”) written concisely and tightly, over and over again, layers of kommen/kommen, so many that there is a geology of letters, though there is no geologist.

The images appear in the book and collection of psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933), in his Bildnerei der Geisteskranken: ein Beitrag zur Psychologie und Psychopathologie der Gestaltung¹, which was published in Berlin in 1922.  Prinzhorn was among the first in his profession to study the art of the insane, and to use it in diagnosis.  In the meantime, over dozens of years, he accummulated a collection of thousands of works of art (many coming when he was an assistant to Karl Wilmanns at the psychiatric hospital of the University of Heidelberg), most of which are housed today in the Sammlung Prnzhorn (UniversitätsKlinikum Heidelberg, here).

The Emma Hauck images are astounding, and deeply private, communicating hope and despair in an illegible performance.  Letters sent in hope to her husband to come and save her; letters which were never sent. 

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2118   Part of the series A History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things 

Concevons qu’on ait dressé un million
de singes à frapper au hasard sur les touches d’une machine à écrire …
[translation: Let us imagine a million monkeys typing haphazardly on
typewriters …”¹

[Gasoline Alley, 1931]

There are some ideas that leave me with a powerful sense of nothing.

To me, “nothing” can be very important–especially in writing and speaking and action, doing or saying nothing has been the important and the correct thing to do.  “Nothing” isn’t necessarily an ending, and, just a period or a coma, can just be a placeholder for something that is developing.  There can be long nothings and short one, forever- and micro-nothings, and nothing that is nothing for almost nothing.  Nothing can be implied, insinuated, broadcast and defined, though self-defined extended nothingnesses (like John Cage’s 4’33”) is a tricky thing to make happen with success. 

The ideas that leave me with a sense of nothing are interesting things.  And there are a lot of them. When I can remember them they are in my nothing file, waiting for nothing–or something–to happen.

This is the sense I had when I was trying to explain randomness to my 10-year-old daughter and her 11-year-old cousin, sitting out in a park, looking at stuff.  Somehow I reached into the past and pulled up the infinite monkey theorem, and tried to make that interesting, but just couldn’t do it. Maybe it was the difficulty of super-large numbers, or the fascinating but incomprehensible thought-threats of Borges and his infinite library, but I was left with nothing.

It is Borges who writes a lovely piece on the history of producing everything from nothing, appearing in his “The Total Library” in 1939 (and then again in “The Library of Babel” in 1941²), reviewing machines and such of spectacular randomization that could produce the whole of what we recognize as what we know. 

Emile Borel wrote on it in 1913, finding the possibility of one million monkeys pounding away at one million typewriters.  In his wonderful work, The Math Book³, Cliff Pickover looks at 250 big ideas in the history of mathematics and gives each of them one page only for presentation and explanation.  He approaches the infinite monkey theorem by looking at one monkey wailing away at one typewriter, striking the keys, and analyzing how long it might take for the one monkey to produce one line from one book.  The line is “In the beginning…” at the beginning of one great nothingness, from the Old Testament, a 56-object sentence (including punctuation and spaces) and, Pickover reasons, that if there is a 93-character keyboard,then this monkey will have a 1/93⁵⁶ possibility times 10¹⁰⁰ of getting it right, and that if it worked for 24 hours a day striking one key every second then it will have used all of the time in the present universe–the Big Bang Monkey.

All I got back were big stares, and a big sense of nothing in my gut.  It reminded me of the cartoon featured above, a toss-off sub-cartoon in a panel of the Gasoline Alley series.  Did he actually look at the coin?  Did he just decide to keep it?  And why keep a phoney nickel? And who counterfeits nickels, even during the Depression?  What is the outcome of the panels–just some guy walking down the street with a nickel in his pocket.  Something may have happened, but it was a lot of nothing. 

I know that I should have a bigger sense of what Felix Edouard Justin Emile Borel and Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges were writing about and in many ways I do, but in the end I know that I am left with nothing.  But I have it in my pocket.  

Notes

1. Émile Borel (1913). “Mécanique Statistique et Irréversibilité”. Statistical mechanics and irreversibility) J. Phys. 5e série 3: 189–196.

2.  Jorge Borges,  “La biblioteca total” (The Total Library), Sur No. 59, August 1939. Translated by Eliot Weinberger, in Selected Non-Fictions (Penguin: 1999)

3.  Clifford Pickover, The Math Book, (2009), Sterling, page 328.