Adrift in the Fluidium

Mr. Peanut’s Bottle Rocket

 

During the first five years of my life, my family lived in a veterans’ housing project consisting of a dozen or so barrack-like row houses set up along the Mystic River outside of Boston. As a child, I was not aware of the lack of privacy and general shabbiness of these meager circumstances. My days were instead, as any childhood on the banks of the River Mystic should be, full of wonder. I was a fresh human being tentatively stepping into the world. I remember my first rainbow, which seemed to set down with its pot-of-gold promise in the fenced-off landfill on the east side of the projects. I remember dreamily sitting upon my stuffed-animal version of Lassie when she took a leap across the room. I remember flipping over the icy bottoms of old snow that had crusted on top of dead caverns and crystalline spires created by snow melting and refreezing. The child’s imagination animates the world, and the world, in gratitude, animates the child’s soul in natural reciprocity, carving out the child’s internal landscape as surely as the child’s external world expands through curiosity.

I remember stealthily descending the cellar steps on my pajama-clad bottom early one morning, before my parents were awake, to play with my toys. “Good Morning,” a disembodied voice called out to me—I froze halfway down the stairs, gaping around the empty cellar. “Good Morning,” the words echoed again, seemingly emanating from thin air. I ran howling up the stairs, diving between my parents’ sleeping bodies. “Someone said hello; something said hello,” was all I could utter between my fearful sobs. “It was probably just a human being,” croaked my mother, attempting reassurance. To my parents’ befuddlement, my hysteria only increased. The problem was that I had no idea what a “human being” was, so that in my mind’s eye I conjured an enormous apple with a top hat and cane, tap dancing while chanting “Good Morning, Good Morning.” Maybe my subconscious had simply redesigned the Mr. Peanut logo to instill a lifelong fear of anthropomorphized food; nevertheless for weeks I avoided the cellar and the toys it contained, making do with my Lassie who sometimes jumped across the room.

The summer of my fourth year I witnessed my first shooting star (or was it a bottle rocket?). I remember moping toward our front door; I did not want to go inside and watch TV, it seemed as if everyone from the projects was outside that night. There was revelry; I smelled fire; the older kids scampered around playing kick-the-can and stickball. I was holding my father’s hand, looking up for the moon, when what seemed to be a fuzzy snowball with a sparkly silvery tail shot across the dusk-darkened sky toward the river. I tried to yell out but my voice was frozen; I tried to point but one hand was caught in the paternal grip, the other thrust deeply in a pocket. I knew I needed to make a wish, yet I was overwhelmed by the responsibility. I could not sleep that night, replaying the dazzling image and trying to invoke an appropriate wish. It was taking so long that I began to fear that the promise of a wish fulfilled would sour into a threat. Something would happen to my parents, or there would be a terrible flood or fire. The images of disaster proved more vivid than anything positive or wonderful that I might have imaged. By dawn I simply wished that we wouldn’t be killed.

 

Astronomers and Prophets

Celestial events and unexpected visits from peripatetic solar objects have fueled cultural and individual imagination since humans raised their heads to notice the dome above. Science and superstition both begin in observation; what differentiates the two is often just a matter of interpretation. Kidinnu was a Chaldean astronomer and mathematician who lived c. 400 BCE in the city of Sippar (now called Abu Habbah), southwest of Baghdad. Among his many lasting accomplishments, Kidinnu’s precise calculations enabled him to work out the procession of equinoxes and to measure the exact length of the synodic month (the period between two full moons) to within a half-second of current measurements. In Babylonian culture a lunar eclipse was understood to be an omen portending war, famine, or plague; kings and peasants alike dreaded their occurrence.

Despite Kidinnu’s accurate prediction of the patterns of lunar eclipses, which laid the basis for later models of mechanistic universe, the Kings of Babylon remained fearful for their implications, reading rare celestial events as symbols of calamity and “tokens of doom”. Utilizing Kidinnu’s calculations, the king would abdicate a short time before the predicted eclipse and appoint an ineffectual figurehead until the darkened moon regained its luminescence. Because the eclipse occurred during the poor substitute’s watch, he would inevitably be put to death as an offering to the gods and as a fulfillment of the phenomena’s promise. The former king could then safely resume the throne. Despite the visionary clarity Kidinnu contributed to natural philosophy (and the lives of kings he saved), he is rarely noted among the pantheon of ancient or modern astronomical greats such as Ptolemy, Hipparchus, Kepler (who had a day job as an astrologer), Copernicus, Galileo, or Brahe; he is instead remembered by the small crater on the dark side of the moon that bears his name.

For millennia comets, those occasional and ostentatious visitors to our solar system, have regularly but unpredictably barged into our skies and in their shaggy beards have brought entire societies to a hushed standstill. In his unprecedented text the Meteorologica (c. 440 BCE) Aristotle categorized comets according to their shape and where they appeared in the zodiac. According to Aristotle and generations of natural philosophers to come, comets were composed of excess hot and dry “exhalations” that ascended to the atmosphere and were, in effect, messages to humanity from the earth itself. When the exhalations were particularly active, an aster kometes, or “longhaired star”, appeared, causing earthquakes, floods, tidal waves, and/or drought. Aristotle’s contemporaries, Seneca and Pliny, disagreed with Aristotle’s reading of cometary phenomena, observing instead that the arrival of such dramatic objects was more likely part of a cosmic plan and it was humanity’s duty to understand the celestial mechanism orchestrating such events. Did the comet bring disaster, or was it a divine sign that communicated either good or evil?

In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, the reading of a comet’s shape took on iconographic complexity; swords, knives, brooms, and hideous faces all foretold differing fortunes:

… When a Comet, or fiery Meteor, is Round, Cleare, Bright and not Duskie at all, but lookes as it were, like another Sun; it may signifie the Birth of Some Great Prince.

… If they be of a Pyramidall Figure, we shall then suffer great Losses by Fire; and by way of Analogy, may conclude, of some Tyranny approaching.

… If they beare the figure of a Sword, they presage Desolations, which shall be caused by the Sword…

… If the Comet be figured like a Trumpet; it then also foretells of War…

No less distinguished a scientist than Edward Halley (1656-1742), of the eponymous Halley’s Comet, insisted that his powers of observation granted him privilege as interpreter of heavenly events. Halley was one of the first stargazers to understand that comets were detritus of the solar system. Like planetary ne’er-do-wells, comets consisted of random bits of stone and ice that never cohered into anything more substantial. Despite the fact that Halley’s observations established observable and provable theories of cometary origin, Halley continued to affirm the ancient metaphysical concept that comets were harbingers of calamity. Halley fervently believed and publicly proclaimed, for example, that a comet crashing to earth caused Noah’s biblical flood and was a sign of God’s displeasure with his creations.

In the history of science Halley’s predictions of the comet’s return were just as spectacular as the appearance of the object itself. Paradoxically, with the legitimizing rigor of science as his pulpit, Halley became an “authorized prophet” of historical and mythical events, leading him to publicly clash with the scientific, religious, and political authorities of his time. It is assumed that advancing science and technology leads to the extinguishing of the long-held beliefs and traditions of the occult. But instead of drying up in the light of reason, the empire of shadows adapts by darkening the edges of science, vignetting well-lit places with ambiguity.

Paranoia v. Redemption

 

Probably as a result of the hormonal turmoil within their own bodies, adolescents are particularly sensitive to unseen forces and melodramatic interpretations. My friends and I were drawn to all things otherworldly; séances, ghost stories, UFOs, astrology, ESP, and the varied doomsday scenarios fueled by the ongoing Cold War tinged our interests with a paranoid subtext. Terminology was important; supernatural and paranormal described the things we sought. We never uttered the word “occult”, with its evil connotations. We read Asimov, Bradbury, C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, as well as accounts of alien abduction, such as the landmark Incident at Exeter. Our interests, obsessions, and exploits embodied the distinct impulses among the believers of the paranormal, that of the desire to be saved or reassured and the suspicion that everything we were taught to believe by our parents, teachers, priests, and political leaders was a heaping pile of lies. Many television programs in the mid-to-late sixties complemented this murky recipe: The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Star Trek, and The Invaders, a kind of prototypical X-Files starring Roy Thinnes as the only man aware of the ongoing alien occupation of earth.

I have written elsewhere about my exploits with ISP, Investigation of Strange Phenomena, a highly secretive organization of three twelve-year-olds that I founded with my neighborhood friends, John and Paul. Suffice to say here that our voracious hunger to investigate all that seemed odd (which was everything) led us to faraway neighborhoods, church basements, and city hall. On Halloween 1967, we held a séance in the damp cellar of an abandoned house and attempted to contact Edgar Allen Poe. We placed a candle in front of a stained mirror where we expected his face to appear and centered a rosary-wrapped Bible on the table, around which we sat holding hands reciting the titles of Poe’s short stories as a way of getting his attention. The candle flickered and the room temperature seemed to drop a few degrees. Was this a tentative hello? We repeated the experiment several times but never witnessed his brooding face in the mirror. We wondered if maybe he was not a Catholic and was offended by the rosary beads, but we were too afraid of Satan showing up if we went without. We discontinued séances as “too occult”, although we never lost faith that Mr. Poe was out there somewhere.

ISP also busied itself gathering evidence of visitations from UFOs. Armed with binoculars and notepads, we surveyed the skies most every evening during the summers of 1966 and ’67. We recorded hundreds of sighting, especially toward the direction of the airport. But there were occasion inexplicable illuminated objects that have never left my memory, like the time I was in the car with my father driving to the store to buy cigarettes and sub sandwiches. I gazed distractedly out the window thinking about potato chips when a large oblong shape made itself known in my peripheral vision. It seemed simultaneously irrefutably present and insubstantial. I could not detect a surface; it appeared to consist entirely of light. As I turned my frontal gaze toward the object, it shot up in the direction of the zenith and disappeared. I made a few involuntary sounds, while my father, with a Winston hanging from his lips, kept his eyes on the road and ignored me. Did he not see it? Or was he pretending not to notice? Which was the better option, my father’s oblivion, or his duplicity? I would have to keep an eye on him.

After I won a price in the seventh-grade science fair for my project on ants, ant diet, ant sex, ant child rearing, ant tunnel building, and ant death, I turned my attention to magnetism. Who hasn’t been fascinated by the physical manifestation of magnetism, its attractions, and repulsion? The attraction part was cool of course; it allowed us to collect discarded bottle caps from vending machines for example. But the repulsion part was truly mind-boggling; to push the opposing ends of magnets toward one another and feel them resist was evidence enough to prove that so much else was going on in the universe that was not immediately visible. We decided to utilize magnetism to attract alien spacecraft, but we theorized if the extraterrestrials turned out to be hostile, the repulsion part might work in our favor as well.

For months we collected every magnet we could find. We demagnetized every toy and refrigerator door, and earned money by doing extra chores in order to purchase the really powerful horseshoe-shaped magnets sold at the hobby shop. By knotting two pieces of wood together we built a crude antenna/cross about six feet tall and covered the entire surface with magnets. We hot-glued the horseshoe magnets to the three tips of the antenna and planted our magnetic attractor/repulsor on the pitcher’s mound of a baseball field; we hid ourselves in the gnarly underbrush outside the diamond and waited. What we unwittingly had built, with its crescent moon shapes, was kind of a primitive lunate cross, an ancient symbol used by European shamans to symbolize lunar phases. Here were three working-class boys crouching in the weeds who, from the depths of their genetic memories, built a magnetic pagan cross on the banks of the Mystic River in order to stalk being from another planet.

I, who at the mature-enough-to-know-better age of twelve, understood so little about his own body that I prayed to God every night to cure me of my mysterious and constant erection affliction, nevertheless assumed that I had gathered enough evidence to develop elaborate and ever-changing theories concerning alliances between aliens from Venus and the spirits of long-dead gothic writers. We were discontented adolescents trapped by the powers of parents and teachers, longing for divine intervention but also instinctually fearful of what our desires might unleash. Our speculations and endless debates as to the benevolent or malevolent motives of aliens and ghosts fit neatly within the traditional readings of the otherworldly. Through the millennia priests and prognosticators, prophets and madmen have posed the same binary questions: Are the forces with us or against us? Is it God or the Devil? Will we live or are we doomed? We can fathom the meaning and intentions of the inhabitants of the otherworldly even less than we can of those of the stranger who lives across the street. Is he a monster or harmless neighbor? Will he poison my Halloween candy or is it okay?

My So-Called Spirit Guide

The Enlightenment was supposed to clear Western culture of the musty remnants of the medieval imagination, to throw open all the windows and doors in order to ventilate minds, bodies, and souls, refreshing and liberating peasants and royalty alike from useless superstitions and harmful traditions. But superstitions are flexible and seem to adjust to scientific advances. The assumed opposition between science and the occult has not always been so clear; what we now dismiss as pseudo-science or quackery at one point in time had its own visionary utility.

Franz Anton Mesmer was a Viennese doctor who speculated upon the influence that planetary magnetic forces might hold over human behavior and history. Mesmer theorized that magnetism flowed through the universe via the fluidium, “a diaphanous medium that communicated moon vibes to the ocean tides as surely as it allowed Venus and Jupiter to tweak human fate.” The existence of the fluidium allowed the phenomenon in which all bodies, grand and humble, acted upon one another in the universal waltz of influence. Mesmer’s theories were not completely out of step with the science of his time. Although constantly debated, the eighteenth-century universe was though to be governed by the invisible forces of heat, gravity, electricity, and magnetism, all of which flowed through not the void of space but a space filled with the Newtonian concept of ether.

In the late eighteenth century, Mesmer began to experiment with the direct use of magnets to heal the human body, believing that magnetism could unblock the flow of energies that coursed through all of creation, including the human body, to restore physical and spiritual equilibrium. His reputation as a scientist and healer spread among the European aristocracy, and Louis XIV eventually invited him to Paris, where Mesmer became an instant celebrity. Like many a thriving idea run amok, the passing of magnets over the body soon branched out to include magnetized clothing and magnetic baths with protruding iron rods do that several patients could be treated simultaneously. Eventually Mesmer represent himself as a primary magnetic force, prancing around darkened rooms wrapped in a royal purple cloak to “mesmerize” his subjects without the aid of intermediary devices. Mesmer may have gone off the deep end, but not before he inspired a generation of ambulatory “mesmerists”, who practiced what would eventually be recognized as hypnotism. These mesmerizing healers became all-purpose conduits for invisible forces of science and spirituality, hypnotizing the sick so that they could cure their own bodies, and when the need occurred, mesmerists could fall into a self-induced trance, contacting, for an earthly fee of course, the dead and other beings from beyond.

There is a snaking but well-trodden path leading from mesmerism to the Victorian séance, a polite setting that functioned as a kind of camera obscura, darkened in the service of sight. Séances were “laboratories of spirituality”, where a “sensitive” medium functioned as both aperture and lens through which the spirits were focused. Nineteenth-century Spiritualism could attribute its widespread acceptance to, in part, its ability to align itself with the language and look of science and its tools. For example, just four years after Samuel Morse patented the telegraph with its simple language of tapping and silken, the Fox sisters in upstate New York quickly gained notoriety for facilitating communication with the dead via mysterious rapping. And it wasn’t long after the birth of photography that the evidentiary power of the photograph was being used by ambitious mediums, who sought to prove her sensitivities by summoning visible (to the camera at least) pale and diaphanous ghosts or ectoplasmic ejaculations. Even more fascinating than the Spiritualist appropriation of the inventions by Morse, Daguerre, and Edison were the inventions that were specifically designed to communicate with the otherworldly. What Jeffrey Sconce calls the “temporal immediacy and spatial isolation” of the telegraph, of photography, of the phonograph, and of subsequent forms of technological disembodiment informed even the mechanisms of the occult, such as the alphanumeric contraption “psychograph”, which mimicked the telegraph in order to more articulately convey messages from beyond.

The Ouija board is a relic of this nineteenth-century Spiritualist craze. Humanity’s long-held desire to communicate with the dead took new forms as middle-class women asserted their long-suppressed powers within the realms of the spiritual, domesticating necromancy in the Victorian-era parlors. Women were seen to be extra sensitive to invisible forces, more “electrical” more “magnetized,” if you will. Automatic writing was a common strategy of communicating with the dead, in which the medium would become a conduit of otherworldly forces or personalities. The “planchette” (little plank) was a triangular piece of wood with a pencil at one corner upon which the medium would gently place her hand. This method often produced illegible results that more often than not frustrated the medium’s clients. “Talking Boards” printed with the letters of the alphabet and the words yes and no and guided by a modified planchette were devised to help clear up ghostly illegibility. In 1891 three entrepreneurs from Baltimore, Elijah Bond, Charles Kennard, and H.A. Maupin, patented a design for the first mass-marketed talking board. The inventors claimed that the name Ouija was the Egyptian word for “good luck” and that the talking board named itself. As it turns out, this is not the Egyptian for good luck but, in keeping with the Victorian era’s Orientalism, was more likely derived from the legendary Moroccan city of Oujda. Other companies marketed their versions of the talking board and featured names such as “The Wireless Messenger,” “The I Do Psycho Ideograph.” “The Mystifying Oracle,” “The Mystic Hand,” “The Swami,” and “The Rajah Far East Talking Board.”

You can thank the Parker Brothers Company, who eventually acquired the copyright to the Ouija board, for extending its popularity well into the twentieth century, although in the last 100 years it has become more the province of bored teenagers than proper matrons. Although no longer a teenager, in 1988 I found myself sitting on a bed in the Mission District of San Francisco with my hands floating above the Ouija board. Julia had invited me to meet her benevolent spirit guide in order to help me find my own guide to the otherworldly. Being Catholic to the bone, and vivid scenes of The Exorcist easily reanimated in my imagination, I was reluctant to go along with her offer. Julia was housebound with multiple sclerosis. She was a self-described “pagan lesbian,” her politics were good, she was a friend, and I trusted her. I considered myself a rational adult, so I put aside my squeamish hesitance and opened the door.

What unfolded next was a slippery collage of letters, uncanny associations, and chaotic stammering. We encountered my “spirit guide,” who initially seemed mischievous but quickly turned sadistic. My guide accused me of substance abuse (which was not so true then but would become true later) and foretold of violence and mayhem. Although our fingers rested gently on the Ouija’s pointer, it frantically shuffled between the letters Z and M; “Z-M, Z-M, Z-M, Z-M,” it insisted in silent fury. Like trying to get to the surface when swimming in the deep, we retreated through the various levels in order to exit these malevolent waters. Julia’s spirit guide dismissed mine as an “asshole.” I was shaken and cured of any future attraction toward prognostication. Some years later I retold my experience with the Ouija to a friend’s mother, who was a famous Scottish psychic. “Playing with the Ouija board is like living in the city and leaving your doors unlocked. You never know who is going to walk in.” She also suggested that repeating letters might represent the concept of zimzum, a term from the kabbalah that describes the first separation from God, an opening of a primal abyss between knowledge and ignorance. I can never be sure, but now it seems to me that my nasty spirit guide was both a manifestation and a warning of this alienation from God/paradise/knowledge, and if he was fated to personify that immeasurable and terminal loneliness, he had every right to be angry.

Despite the promise of illumination from the Enlightenment, regardless of the Age of Reason, irrespective of the Industrial Revolution, heedless of the Atomic Age, Quantum Physics, and Dialectical Materialism, humans are attracted to the shadows. Now matter how far we extend our knowledge, we also know that there is always something else just beyond our grasp. It appears as if part of our genetic material transforms humans into anti-moths, magnetically drawn to the penumbra, flying skittishly back and forth across the border between light and dark trying to make contact. At this threshold we make religion, we make science, and we make art. Can the human impulse to read the unknown in symbolic terms be attributed simply to deeply ingrained superstitions? Is supernatural thinking only a manifestation of unconscious desires, as Freud believes? In the complex web of cultural tropes it is difficult to extricate what is born of science and what is born of the imagination. Fiction comes from science as easily as science comes from fiction; it is possible to look through both ends of the telescope.

Scientists and artists alike must have the power of visualization to enable them to picture what does not yet exist as theory, hypothesis, model, or knowledge. The liminal zone between what we know and what is beyond us is the place where art, science, religion, and philosophy battle among themselves, while the specter of paranoia plays referee on the sidelines, misjudging all gestures toward knowledge as part of some cosmic conspiracy to obscure “the truth.” Is paranoia a kind of belief? Absolutely, it can be a kind of poetry with its dark permutations. But a poetry that ignores wonder seems inadequate and entirely too cynical. Within the realm of the visible, the Hubble Deep Field imagery is every bit as fantastical as any other vision from humanity’s archive. The Hubble extends our vision in space and time allowing us to gape upon the “Dark Ages,” that gloominess immediately after the Big Bang before stars sparkled up like so many fireflies. And moving in the opposite direction, what could be more mysterious and otherworldly in scratchy black and white than a suggestion of a developing human as imaged by a sonogram? The ghostly mite floats peacefully in sticky darkness animated by an occasional spasm, perhaps signifying foreknowledge of the inevitable expulsion from it warm liquid Eden. We move in and we move out, we construct observational instruments and take notes, and with wonder and skepticism we set ourselves adrift in the fluidium.

Illustrations by Mark Alice Durant c. 2005

Originally Published in Blur of The Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal, Center for Art and Visual Culture, 2006. Editors Mark Alice Durant and Jane D. Marsching, with contributions by Lynne Tillman and Marina Warner