ALCHIMIE_DISCURSIVE_OU_NÉCRO_ÉTHIQUE<>? _THÉORIE_DU_DRONE

« On peut y voir l’aboutissement d’un désir ancien, qui anime toute l’histoire des armes balistiques : accroître son allonge de sorte de pouvoir atteindre l’ennemi à distance, avant que celui-ci ne soit en mesure de le faire. Mais la spécificité du drone tient à ce qu’il joue sur un autre segment de distance. Entre la gâchette, sur laquelle on a le doigt, et le canon, d’où la balle va sortir, s’intercalent désormais des milliers de kilomètres. A la distance de la portée – distance de l’arme à sa cible – s’ajoute celle de la télécommande – distance de l’opérateur à son arme ». (p. 23)

« Cette tentative d’éradication de toute réciprocité dans l’exposition à la violence dans l’hostilité reconfigure non seulement la conduite matérielle de la violence armée, techniquement, tactiquement, psychiquement, mais aussi les principes traditionnels d’un ethos militaire officiellement fondé sur la bravoure et l’esprit de sacrifice. À l’aune des catégories classiques, le drone apparaît comme l’arme du lâche ». (p. 30)

« Cela n’empêche pas ses partisans de la proclamer être l’arme la plus éthique que l’humanité ait jamais connue. Opérer cette conversion morale, cette transmutation des valeurs est la tâche à laquelle s’attellent aujourd’hui des philosophes qui oeuvrent dans le petit champ de l’éthique militaire. Le drone, disent-ils, est l’arme humanitaire par excellence. Leur travail discursif est essentiel pour assurer l’acceptabilité sociale et politique de cette arme. Dans ces discours de légitimation, les « éléments de langage » de marchands d’armes et de porte-parole des forces armées se trouvent recyclés, par de grossiers processus d’alchimie discursive, en principes directeurs d’une philosophie éthique de nouveau genre – une « nécro-éthique », dont il est urgent de faire la critique ». (pp. 30-31)

IMAGES : 

« The Magician », Martin Sharp Tarot (1967)

« The Queen of Swords », Hexen 2.0 Tarot de Suzanne Treister (2009-2011)

« The flow of energy through a system acts to organise that system », Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand et al., citation de Norbert Wiener (1968)

« Untitled (p. 180) », Brion Gysin,  William S. Burroughs, (circa 1965)

TEXT :

Grégoire Chamayou, Théorie du drone, Paris : La Fabrique (2013)

ECUSSONS :

Les écussons de l'USAF Pararescue et de l'USAF MQ-9 Reaper drone (la faucheuse)

THE_MIND_ATTACHED_BY_AN_ELASTIC_CORD _TO_THE_VAGRANT_SENSES : HOLDER_&_TIMOFEEV

“These predicates are only negatively conceivable, and are approached only by abstracting from all positive predicates. Dionysius states that God’s being is ‘presubstantial’ and absolutely unattainable for man. Thus an ironic situation presents itself, in which the worshipper must praise without being able to do so, must shout without knowing what to shout, and must speak without a voice. In this text, the pious dilemma does not end in mystical silence but in the acknowledgement that every act of naming is ambiguous.”

Gershom Scholem on divine predicates and Dionysius the Areopagite.

"I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go. [...] With E.S.P. anything may happen."

Alan Turing on E.S.P. « Computing Machinery and Intelligence », Mind, 1950

"Apparently that kind of ordering which is the most irrepressible among the artistic powers, is awakened most urgently by two different inner states: by the consciousness of overabundance and by the full collapse in a person: which gives rise to yet another overabundance."

Rainer Maria Rilke on Adolf Wölfli, after the case study by the doctor Morgenthaler.

"The visions were not blurred or uncertain. They were sharply focused, the lines and colours being so sharp that they seemed more real to me than anything I had ever seen with my own eyes. I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view; I was seeing the archetypes, the Plantonic ideas, that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life.

.. for the effect of the mushrooms is to bring about a fissure of the spirit, a split in the person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other side is enjoying. The mind is attached as by an elastic cord to the vagrant senses."

R. Gordon Wasson, on his second mushroom experience in Mexico, (Seeking the Magic Mushroom)

JOEY HOLDER AND VIKTOR TIMOFEEV

« LAMENT OF UR » @ KARST, UK

a calendar (not a bible)... cybernetics, time refusal, "a floating image in mid air is no longer just a dream."

Jan Provoost, Sacred Allegory, XVIe siècle

The radical mystic Suso of Cologne, v. 1330: “Whence have you come?” The image answers, “I came from nowhere.” “Tell me, what are you?’ ‘I am not.’ ‘What do you wish?’ ‘I do not wish.’ ‘This is a miracle! Tell me, what is your name?’ ‘I am called Nameless Wilderness.’ ‘Where does your insight lead to?’ ‘To untrammelled freedom.’ ‘Tell me, what do you call untrammelled freedom?’ ‘When a man lives according to all his caprices without distinguishing between God and himself, and without looking before or after…’

Suso’s explicitly anti-time utterance = an element of time refusal.

A new level of spatialisation was involved in the defeat of the 14th century resistance to time; the emergence of the modern map in the 15th c. and the ensuing age of great voyages / Braudel’s phrase regarding modern civilisation’s “war against empty space” is best understood in this light.

The first document known to have been printed on Gutenberg’s press in the mid 15th century was a calendar (not a bible).

Notes from John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal

Harry Sanderson, Human Resolution @ Arcadia Missa

HB: We should talk about Haptics, where artist Yuri Pattison invited you to make a touchable 3D hologram within his Faraday Cage project (a Faraday cage is a 19th century invention that blocks out external electric currents, which Pattison recreated as a residency space in SPACE Studios). What's the difference between this work and Human Resolution? 

HS: [...] Haptics was just a straight desire to reproduce this technology that I'd heard about, which was this touchable hologram, which I thought was potentially quite beautiful: that you could touch something [...] that wasn't actually there. I found that more poetic and emotive and moving, in a more personal sense [...] The promotional video for that technology contained one line that was "a floating image in mid air is no longer just a dream." There's this desire to give technology a physical form so there's at least there's something that will push back at you. I think I found that profound, in a way, because it means that people still desire each other, even if it's so mediated that they just desire to create some kind of holographic representation of something. [...]

Human Resolution's a bit more negative, saying "look at you here as nothing but data". There's that Ashbery poem we were reading the other day where he says "much that is beautiful must be discarded so that we may resemble a taller impression of ourselves." There's a constant aspiration toward this image we've created of ourselves that we can't ever quite get to which is this, I suppose, want or desire: the "big other." You can't ever get it, you can't touch it. And data and Cloud computing perfectly fits into that as an ideological form because it's completely inaddressible. 

[...] The desire to make machines instantly responsive to the body plays on a strange sort of humanism, which is so close to digital property protection. We have these swipe screens and fingerprint scans under the remit of protecting oneself against identity theft, but it's also the protection of private property, which is inseparable from force in some sense.

Harry Burke / Harry Sanderson, hitherr >?>>>

"The card represents life of the imagination apart from life of the spirit." (Waite)

This card consequently means the life of the soul in particular, the feelings and sentiments, emotions (not only fear, etc.), changes wrought in existence by them, water and the female element in general. It is the sign of panta rei: everything passing, flowing or ebbing away in life, consequently uncertainty. It may relate to dreams, to exhibitions, popular plays, and games, theatres, and to the lower class of people. Physically it means the brain and the stomach.

"Servile spirits (the dog), savage souls (the wolf), and crawling creatures (the crayfish) are all present watching the fall of the soul, hoping to aid in its destruction." (Papus) That is true. And it may happen to us, that a lower current of the Moon brings our way people who have no higher aim than to 'aid in our destruction' even if we ourselves have no intention whatever of 'falling'.

Unfortunately, so firmly were the prevailing nineteenth century conceptions committed to the notion of man as primarily homo faber, the toolmaker, rather than homo sapiens, the mind maker, that […] the first discovery of the art of the Altamira caves was dismissed as a hoax, because the leading paleoethnologists would not admit that the Ice Age hunters, whose weapons and tools they had recently discovered, could have had either the leisure or the mental inclination to produce art – not crude forms, but images that showed powers of observation and abstraction of a high order.

Notes from Lewis Mumford, Tool Users vs. Homo Sapiens and the Megamachine

Theodore Kaczynski in Lutz Dammbeck's The Net (2003)

If one wants teamwork he should join the army... Coum, Treister, Smithson

Combining thee fruit of experience to create precious, yet expendable, moments in time - COUM by Deborah Birch on Mixcloud

Suzanne Treister Hexen 2.0 Tarot

One way to describe thee moment we wish to capture in our actions is this. Imagine an average living room in a house, probably in a city in Europe. In this room are two people. A man and a woman as it happens, but it could be two men, or two women, ages are not important. They are only figures with no attachment, no specific identity. They sit watching a television set. Black and white. An old film is playing, late at night. In thee Television studio thee old film snaps unexpectedly. A technician pushes aside his coffee and switches to a contingency card apologising for thee loss of picture. This takes only a second, an immeasurable moment. In thee living room there is a moment also. A moment when thee film has stopped, but thee two peoples brains have not registered it has gone, yet thee last visual picture is ended, and thee brain has also not registered thee arrival of new information in thee form of thee contingency card. For this moment neither brain is registering anything, it is too tiny in a way to be accepted as existing, yet in a strange way, it must exist. This moment is what we are interested in with coum.

This moment in time is also thee exact moment when one is neither asleep or awake, thee moment directly before coumplete death when one’s life is said to totally pass before one, both fantasy life, and parafantastical life. Thee moment after/before, or, residual appreciation.

COUM TRANSMISSIONS

//


Dear Mr. Gyorgy Kepes,

I have reconsidered the context of the exhibition* and feel that my art will not fit. To celebrate the power of technology through art strikes me as a sad parody of NASA. I do not share the confidence of the astronauts. The rationalism and logic of the engineer is too self-assured. Art aping science turns into a cultural malaise.The righteousness of "team spirit" is no solution for art. Technology promises a new kind of art, yet its very program excludes the artist from his own art. The optimism of technical progress results in political despair. To many artists of Brazil technology and politics reflect each other. All the "fancy junk" of science cannot hide the void. I am sick of "lighting candles," I want to know what the "darkness" is, I don't "curse" it or praise it, but I know it is there. As rockets go to the moon the darkness around the Earth grows deeper and darker. The "team spirit" of the exhibition could be seen as endorsement of NASA's Mission Operations Control Room with all its crew- cut teamwork. Some Brazilians see the "advances" of technology as a military byproduct. I am withdrawing from the show because it promises nothing but a distraction amid the general nausea. If technology is to have any chance at all, it must become more self-critical. If one wants teamwork he should join the army. A panel called "What's Wrong with Technological Art" might help.

*The United States section of the x Sao Paulo Bienale, September through December 1969, presented by the International Art Program of the National Collection of Fine Arts in collaboration with the Center for Advanced Visual Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A group composed of Fellows of the Center was responsible for the development of the exhibition, under the direction of the Center's director, Gyorgy Kepes 

Robert Smithson, “Letter to Gyorgy Kepes (1969)” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Jack Flam, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 369.

RANDOM DARKNET SHOPPER

!MEDIENGRUPPE BITNIK

  

RANDOM DARKNET SHOPPER (2014)

The Random Darknet Shopper is an automated online shopping bot which we provide with a budget of $100 in Bitcoins per week. Once a week the bot goes on shopping spree in the deep web where it randomly choses and purchases one item and has it mailed to us. The items are shown in the exhibition «The Darknet. From Memes to Onionland» at Kunst Halle St. Gallen. Each new object ads to a landscape of traded goods from the Darknet.

The Random Darknet Shopper is a live Mail Art piece, an exploration of the deep web via the goods traded there. It directly connects the Darknet with the art space (exhibition space). By randomizing our consumerism, we are guaranteed a wide selection of goods from the over 16'000 listed on Agora market place.

---

10.12.14
HUNGARY HQ PASSPORT SCAN

AS A LAST ITEM IN THIS SERIES, RANDOM DARKNET SHOPPER BOUGHT A PASSPORT SCAN FOR 25 USD.

From the description:
«All passport is real, valid, colored, scanned passports for online verification...»

Wintermute-wasted Turing-cops, sensitive silicon, socket-head subversion... skin, interfaces, & mimetic flesh; Fanged Noumena, Digital Delirium, & Stelarc

/ Stelarc \

Fanged Noumena; Nick Land, hither>>>

Memetic flesh as a floating outlaw zone where memes fold into genes, where the delirious spectacle of cyber-culture reconfigures the future of the molecular body. In Ars California, mimetic flesh is neither future nor history, but the molecular present. Pure California Gening. . . . Neither techno-utopian nor techno-phobic, mimetic art in the streets of SF is always dirty, always rubbing memes against genes, always clicking into (our) memetic flesh.

Arthur and Marilouise Kroker eds. Digital Delirium, in Information Arts; Stephen Wilson, hither>>

My latest filmic foray into the world of WWE (formerly WWF, the wildlife guys were 

getting wild) where cold war agitprop gilded the flesh fight ; Paris 2014

The skin has been a boundary for the soul, for the self, and simultaneously, a beginning to the world. Once technology stretches and pierces the skin, the skin as a barrier is erased.

How can the body function within this landscape of machines? Technology has speeded up the body. The body now attains planetary-escape velocity, has to function in zero-G and in greater time-space continuums. For me this demonstrates the biological inadequacy of the body. Given that these things have occurred, perhaps an ergonomic approach is no longer meaningful. In other words, we can't continue designing technology for the body because that technology begins to usurp and outperform the body. 

Perhaps it's now time to design the body to match it's machines. We somehow have to turbo-drive the body-implant and augment the brain. We have to provide ways of connecting it to the cyber-network. At the moment this is not easily done, and it's done indirectly via keyboards and other devices. There's no way of directly jacking in. Mind you, I'm not talking here in terms of sci-fi speculation. For me, these possibilities are already apparent. What do we do when confronted with the situation where we discover the body is obsolete? We have to start thinking of strategies for redesigning the body.

 Technology is what defines being human. It's not an antagonistic alien sort of object, it's part of our human nature. It constructs our human nature. We shouldn't have a Frankensteinian fear of incorporating technology into the body, and we shouldn't consider our relationship to technology in a Faustian way - that we're somehow selling our soul because we're using these forbidden energies. My attitude is that technology is, and always has been, an appendage of the body.

CTheory interview with Stelarc, hither>>>

You could bump into Allah, into the Prince of the Rebel Angels, and into all the dead stars of the universe. Before the fault, nothing had happened // Krasznahorkai & Stiegler

War & War

… this, said Korin, was what struck him as he walked those hundred furiously-thinking paces on the evening of his birthday: that is to say that he understood the infinite significance of his faith and was given a new insight into what the ancients had long known, that it was faith in its existence that had both created and maintained the world; the corollary of which was that it was the loss of his own faith that was now erasing it, the result of which realisation being, he said, that he experienced a sudden, utterly numbing, quite awful feeling of abundance, because from that time on he knew that whatever had once existed, existed still and that, quite unexpectedly, he had stumbled on an ontological place of such gravity that he could see - oh but how, he sighed, how to begin - that Zeus, for instance, to take an arbitrary example, was still "there," now, in the present, just as all the other old gods of Olympus were "there," as was Yahweh and The Lord God of Hosts, and there alongside them, the ghost of every nook and cranny, and that this meant they had nothing and yet everything to fear, for nothing ever disappeared without trace, for the absent had a structure as real as the structure of whatever existed, and so, in other words, you could bump into Allah, into the Prince of the Rebel Angels, and into all the dead stars of the universe, which would of course include the barren unpopulated earth with its godless laws of being as well as the terrifying reality of hell and pandemonium which was the domain of the demons, and that was reality, said Korin: thousands upon thousands of worlds, each one different, majestic or fearsome; thousands upon thousands in their ranks, he continued, his voice rising, in a single absent relationship, that was how it all appeared to him then, he explained, and it was then, when he had got so far, continually reliving the infinite capacity of the process of becoming, that the trouble with his head first started… 

Technics and Time, 1

Thus the deviation, if there is one, is not in relation to nature but in relation to the divine. Again this means that the real issue here concerns the relation of mortals to immortality, that this anthropogony is in the first instance a thanatology. Anthropogony only acquires meaning in theogony, the conflict between the Olympians and the Titans, which continues, in an underhanded way, with the struggle between Zeus and Prometheus. It is in this sense that humans participate in the divine, on the basis of the double fault, particularly that of the theft of fire, erecting altars to the gods qua those who are immortal. It is a religion entirely made up of trepidations at the condition of technicity (its power, implying equally the powerlessness of mortals). Before the fault, nothing had happened. 

...

Through sacrifice mortals are put in their place: between the beasts and the gods, this in-between (between appearing and disappearing) resulting from a deviation. It is not a matter of recalling a state of nature, nor of claiming what "human nature" ought to have been; there was no fall, but a fault, no hap or mishap, but mortality.

... 

Man invents, discovers, finds (eurisko), imagines (mêkhanê), and realises what he imagines: protheses, expedients. A pro-thesis is what is placed in front, that is, what is outside, outside what it is placed in front of. However, if what is outside constitutes the very being of what it lies outside of, the this being is outside itself. The being of humankind is to be outside itself. In order to make up for the fault of Epimetheus, Prometheus gives humans the present of putting themselves outside themselves.

Humankind, we might say, puts into effect what it imagines because it is endowed with reason, with logos - that is, also with language. Or, should we rather say that it is because it realises what it imagines - as we said a moment ago, because it lies outside itself - that humanity is endowed with reason, that is, with language? Is it tekhnê that arises from logos, or the reverse? Or rather, is it not that logos and tekhnê are modalities of the same being-outside-oneself?

...

Discovery, insight, invention, imagination are all, according to the narrative of the myth, characteristic of a de-fault. Animals are already marked by a de-fault (in relation to being as it is and as it endures through change, and in relation to the gods): they perish. One must understand "de-fault" here in relation to what is, that is, a flaw in being. And yet, whereas animals are positively endowed with qualities, is it tekhnê that forms the lot of humans, and tekhnê is prosthetic; that is, it is entirely artifice. The qualities of animals make up a sort of nature, in any case a positive gift to the gods: a predestination. The gift made to humanity is not positive: it is there to compensate. Humanity is without qualities, without predestination: it must invent, realise, produce qualities, and nothing indicates that, once produced, these qualities will bring about humanity, that they will become its qualities; for they may rather become those of technics.

...

Prometheus robs Hephaestus and Athena. By pursuing Athena, Hephaestus becomes the father of the Athenians. Here arms, tools, and instruments of war play a large role: Athena rose from the head of Zeus clad in arms, delivered by the patron god of handicraft with an axe. Athena is in turn pursued by Hephaestus when she orders arms from him: in this manner the craftsman's sperm is spilt on the earth, constituting the myth of Athenian autochthony… Origin, war, politics: with each it is a matter of instruments. From these gods who handle instruments is stolen "the creative genius of the arts" (which translates ten entekhnen sophian: it is, again, a matter of sophia and tekhnê).

Laszlo Krasznahorkai; War & WarBernard Stiegler; Technics and Time, 1

dearest mother, send me immediately a hundred thousand bon bons; criminals, Kantsaywhere, eugenics, & indentification

carissima mamma, mandami subito centomila bon bons se no faccio la cattiva
Eugenie

dearest mother, send me immediately a hundred thousand bon bons if I do not the bad. 
Eugenie


From Writing of a criminal by hypnotic suggestion; Cesare Lombroso.

The above is a google translation and although I know it's not 'correct' I quite prefer it. The bad sums up perfectly the diffuse and unclear boundaries between right and wrong in childhood. The inevitable question to 'don't do that' is 'why?' and often you hear parents saying, 'because it's bad' or simply 'because I said so'. Eugenie is a great little imp. In her desire for bon bons - and with the sense that out of the myriad things that you might feel like doing, some of them are 'bad' and some 'good' and some just go unnoticed (the 'ugly' comes later in this spaghetti western) - she's equating everything that does not lead to bon bons with what she will not do. Bad - no bon bons - won't do it. 

But this is what Nietzsche means when he talks about the 'actual right to make promises' which children don't have because, you can be sure, once those bon bons are in Eugenie's belly and she is oh-so-satisfied and thankyou very much carissima mamma, all bets are off. But we are expected to extend to children the rights (if not the responsibilities) of the adult because they are in potentia - potential full humans. Laws relating to the rights of children are mostly a 19th and 20th century phenomenon and they sprang into being around the same time that laws was being developed to mediate the rights of those considered degenerate, insane, innately criminal, and delinquent. 

Cesare Lombroso was most famous for his book L'uomo delinquente (1878) and was the founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology. Lombroso's general theory suggested that criminals are distinguished from noncriminals by multiple physical anomalies. This is where the Ugly comes in. I suggest heading to Sander Gilman's 1995 book, Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference, where he details the correlation of the unhealthy and the ugly in this crucial 19th century. Back to Lombroso, who postulated that criminals represented a reversion to a primitive or subhuman type of man. This earlier type is characterised by physical features reminiscent of apes, lower primates that are to some extent preserved in modern "savages" (his term). The behaviour of these biological "throwbacks" will inevitably be contrary to the rules and expectations of modern civilised society. Lombroso suggested that the discretion of the doctor as to whether a criminal was born (reo nato) or simply a 'criminaloid' (occasional criminals by 'passion') should be used to decide on a legislated course of action in order to propagate the right plants and weed out the others. 

nota bene the pencil additions of defensive conscience, however commendable in itself.

Social darwinism is the name that was eventually given to these tendencies, but whilst Darwin was worried about 'breeding' - and more specifically about the effects of marriage between cousins because he was married to his - it was Francis Galton, another cousin who Darwin was not married to, who really pushed the agenda. He is famous for his composite photographs (more, hither), an article called Africa for the Chinese (intriguing given the heavy investment of Chinese companies in African resources in recent times - read it, hither) but he also wrote a terrible but very intriguing novel called Kantsaywhere, which is Brave New World written by a statistician, i.e. dry, clinical, lacklustre, and slightly gormless. The narrator is actually a fictional professor of vital statistics at Kantsaywhere, which might explain some of its charmlessness, though the more juicy bits were edited out by his niece, Milly who “destroyed all the story, all poor Miss Augusta, the Nonnyson anecdotes, and in fact everything not to the point”. You can read extracts from the rest of it @ UCL Library Services, hither.

Moholy-Nagy's Painting, Photography, Film shows the possibilities of wireless imaging; 1925

Japanese collective, Dumb Type

 Dumb Type on Pleasure Life - "technology has in many ways created a network covering the globe, making the world smaller, and sending information tens of thousands of miles, from point A to point B, in just a few seconds. In reality, however, when we try to communicate, for example, the few words 'I love you,' just these words, we are forced to realise the vast distances that lie between us."

Pleasure Life was an ordered enterprise, and hi-tech. A performer throws away a banana and a robotic tractor whirrs out and cleans it up. There is no surprise, spontaneity, or ambiguity, and the natural landscape comes wrapped in the glass and plastic of television sets.

pH looks at the rise of Japanese information and consumer culture. Furuhashi - "pH is a science term and pH7 is the centre, where things are balanced. It's like heaven, limbo and hell. Japanese society now, especially Tokyo, is like limbo. People think it's heaven but it's not. It's really destructive."

primal sound... Rilke playing skulls, probing space.. !!!

it must have been when i was a boy at school that the phonograph was invented. at any rate it was at that time a chief object of public wonder; this was probably the reason why our science master, a man given to busying himself with all kinds of handiwork, encouraged us to try our skill in making one of these instruments from the material that lay nearest to hand. nothing more was needed than a piece of pliable cardboard bent to the shape of a funnel, on the narrower round orifice of which was stuck a piece of impermeable paper of the kind used to seal bottled fruit. this provided a vibrating membrane, in the middle of which we then stuck a bristle from a coarse clothes brush at right angles to its surface. with these few things one part of the mysterious machine was made, receiver and reproducer were complete. it now only remained to construct the receiving cylinder, which could be moved close to the needle marking the sounds by means of a small rotating handle. i do not now remember what we made it of; there was some kind of cylinder which we covered with a thin coating of candle wax to the best of our ability. our impatience, brought to a pitch by the excitement of sticking and fitting the parts, as we jostled one another over it, was such that the wax had scarcely cooled and hardened before we put our work to the test.

how this was done can easily be imagined. when someone spoke or sang into the funnel, the needle in the parchment transferred the sound-waves to the receptive surface of the roll turning slowly beneath it, and then, when the moving needle was made to retrace its path (which had been fixed in the meantime with a coat of varnish), the sound which had been ours came back to us tremblingly, haltingly from the paper funnel, uncertain, infinitely soft and hesitating and fading out altogether in places. each time the effect was complete. our class was not exactly one of the quietest, and there can have been few moments in its history when it had been able as a body to achieve such a degree of silence. the phenomenon, on every repetition of it, remained astonishing, indeed positively staggering. we were confronting, as it were, a new and infinitely delicate point in the texture of reality, from which something far greater than ourselves, yet indescribably immature, seemed to be appealing to us as if seeking help. at the time and all through the intervening years i believed that that independent sound, taken from us and preserved outside us, would be unforgettable. that it turned out otherwise is the cause of my writing the present account. as will be seen, what impressed itself on my memory most deeply was not the sound from the funnel but the markings traced on the cylinder; these made a most definite impression.

i first became aware of this some fourteen or fifteen years after my school-days were past. it was during my first stay in paris. at that time i was attending the anatomy lectures in the école des beaux-arts with considerable enthusiasm. it was not so much the manifold interlacing of the muscles and sinews nor the complete agreement of the inner organs one with another that appealed to me, but rather the bare skeleton, the restrained energy and elasticity of which i had already noticed when studying the drawings of leonardo. however much i puzzled over the structure of the whole, it was more than i could deal with; my attention always reverted to the study of the skull, which seemed to me to constitute the utmost achievement, as it were, of which this chalky element was capable; it was as if it had been persuaded to make just in this part a special effort to render a decisive service by providing a most solid protection for the most daring feature of all, for something which, although itself narrowly confined, had a field of activity which was boundless. the fascination which this particular structure had for me reached such a pitch finally, that i procured a skull in order to spend many hours of the night with it; and, as always happens with me and things, it was not only the moments of deliberate attention which made this ambiguous object really mine: i owe my familiarity with it, beyond doubt, in part to that passing glance, with which we involuntarily examine and perceive our daily environment, when there exists any relationship at all between it and us. it was a passing glance of this kind which i suddenly checked in its course, making it exact and attentive. by candlelight– which is often so peculiarly alive and challenging–the coronal suture had become strikingly visible, and i knew at once what it reminded me of: one of those unforgotten grooves, which had been scratched in a little wax cylinder by the point of a bristle!