The Hermit of Wallasey Village

all info by Steve Jones (fellow admin on North Wirral Facebook Group)

Gotthold Johann Frederick Krueger, who had been known locally as Frederick Krueger, the Wallasey Hermit, was found dead in his hut in a field adjoining Green Lane, Wallasey, on 8th March 1909 by a labourer, Charles Webster of 2 Russell Road. He had lived in the area for up to 30 years and although everyone knew who he was, few knew much about him.

At the inquest some of his past was revealed. He was born in Mecklenburg about 1848 and his family was said to have been on the personal staff of the King of Prussia. He had graduated at Rostock, Munich and Leipzig Universities; was a Greek and Latin scholar as well as being fluent in English, French and Italian; not only a brilliant musician - a concert pianist of some note - but also a composer of some repute; and practised law in Germany; and had been a member of the German Diplomatic Corps where he was supposed to have gone to Peking to represent his country but came to England instead.

It was thought that he had lived in the Wallasey Village area for about 30 years, spending the last 20 years as a recluse living in a corrugated-iron hut on the Wallasey Golf Club links, off Green Lane. He apparently had no relatives in England and his main source of income was a small allowance from Germany. This was barely enough to maintain him but some locals, feeling an affection for him, gave him money out of charity. Probably the only person he was in direct contact with was Samuel Howard, market gardener of Green Lane, Wallasey, at whose address Krueger used to receive any mail. He was in the habit of calling on the market gardener two or three times a week for fresh water.

When Wallasey Golf Club was founded and laid out in 1891, Krueger was already living on the site of the new course and his garden became an out of bounds for the 8th hole. This lasted until 1953 when the rule was abandoned.

On Monday 8th March at 8am, Charles Webster, who was working in a field near Krueger's hut and hadn't seen the hermit for some time, knocked at his door. Receiving no answer but seeing what he thought was a body lying on the floor, he called at the police station. PC Robert Gilpin, stationed at Wallasey, went with Webster and breaking down the door found the hermit in a kneeling position, dead. Very few people had seen inside the hut which was 15ft long, 6ft wide, 12ft high and partioned into three. There was an extensive library including classical subjects in Latin and Greek, and also music by Wagner, Mozart and Krueger himself. However, it was a total clutter.

Removing the body to the Poulton Reading Room in Limekiln Lane was a problem as they had to keep Krueger's five retriever dogs at bay. The corpse was in a very dirty condition and although there was no marks of violence, the Coroner stated that the skin on the left cheek and by the bridge of the nose had been gnawed by rats and that the deceased had suffered from a strangulated hernia and peritonitis, which was the cause of death. The deceased had been dead for three to four days.

Everyone talked about the hermit of Wallasey, who was described as being very hunched, a Bohemian type with a drooping moustache, but very few knew him. He was heard to say that he had no friends and wished to exist alone and all he desired was the right to pass his days in study and contemplation. Why did this highly educated and talented man abandon his cultured world for a country where he had no connections and live the life of a recluse? The Wallasey Villagers clubbed together to pay for a proper funeral, so that he would not have to be buried in a pauper's grave. Frederick Krueger's secret died with him in a small ramshackle hut in Wallasey.

http://www.wirralhistory.uk/

The Age of Solitude. Beyond the stigma: How intentional silence is becoming a modern survival strategy for the soul.

Introduction: The Quiet Revolution of Being Alone

Being alone has never been easy. Throughout history, solitude has been conceived as loneliness—something to be pitied or feared, a condition of the rejected or unwanted. It was the opposite of belonging, an shadow cast by human failure to connect.

And yet, solitude is being repackaged today. In the calm of a corner café, on solitary walks of many miles, or in nights without screens, increasingly people are discovering that solitude can be an act of empowerment, even liberation. No longer connoting loneliness, solitude is increasingly being redefined as a decision: a conscious taking of time and space for reflection, renewal, and focus.

This isn't a fleeting lifestyle phenomenon—it's a fundamental shift in culture. In an age that's both hyperconnected and overstimulated, loneliness is increasingly becoming a survival strategy and a declaration of what it is to live well.

Solitude Throughout Time: From Sacred Practice to Suspicion

The irony of solitude is that even though it has sometimes been demonized, it has at other times been sanctified throughout history.

In spiritual cultures, isolation was a path to transcendence. Christian desert monks of the 3rd and 4th centuries withdrew from the turmoil of the Roman Empire to live in caves, believing silence brought them closer to God. Buddhist monks sat in mountain caves to eliminate illusions. Sufi mystics withdrew to practice khalwa—spiritual solitude.

For artists and philosophers, solitude has always been fertile ground. Thoreau's Walden was a paean of individualism and union with nature. Nietzsche warned that art required distance from "the herd." The Romantic poets, wandering singly through wood and meadow, found in solitude a spiritual affinity with nature.

And yet, there remained suspicion. In most cultures, the lone person was considered strange, even threatening. The 20th century tended to value extroversion—being social was seen as the sign of sanity and achievement. In post-war America, suburban living centered on suburban block parties and corporate collaboration. Loneliness, on the other hand, had the scent of deviance.

This ambivalence still exists today, but it is beginning to shift.

Why Solitude Now? The Modern Drivers of a Movement

Different forces are converging to make loneliness not only more common, but even more appealing.

1. Technology Fatigue.

Our phones make us always available. From Slack notifications, WhatsApp conversations, and Instagram tales, we are rarely alone even when physically remote. The majority now crave solitude as a cure for the fatigue of being always on. A 2023 Pew survey found that nearly 60% of young adults actually schedule "offline time" per week.

2. City Overstimulation.

From cacophonous traffic to bright billboards, modern cities overstimulate our senses. Noise pollution alone has been linked to heightened stress and cardiovascular disease. Aloneness—especially in nature—grants sensory relief.

3. Mental Health and Self-Care.

As burnout speeds up, solitude is increasingly offered as therapy. Loneliness is quoted by psychologists as reducing stress, improving concentration, and maintaining emotions in check. What was once viewed as antisocial now carries the guise of self-care.

4. Generational Shifts.

Millennials and Gen Z are remaking the social playbook. Marriage, children, and group-based living are not the norm anymore. Autonomy, independence, and adaptive lifestyles are coveted by most—solitude snugly fits into these.

5. The Pandemic Reset.

COVID-19, traumatic as it was, rendered solitude the norm. Lockdowns forced individuals to confront solitude. For others, it revealed nice surprises: freedom from the commute, room for hobbies, reflection. Many chose to maintain solitude in the life after the pandemic.

The Psychology of Solitude: Benefits and Threats

The Bright Side.

When voted into office, solitude provides remarkable benefits:

• Creativity. Excellent ideas often come not from brainstorming in groups, but from quiet contemplation alone. Neuroscientists find that "default mode network" brain activity—correlated with creativity—is strongest in quiet, introspective time.

• Self-Reflection. Solitude enables us to think about our own lives without other people's pressure. Journaling, meditating, or daydreaming quietly can bring clarity.

• Restoration. Solitude reduces mental fatigue, lowers cortisol levels, and replenishes emotional reservoirs.

• Autonomy. Alone time enhances agency, offering relief from social expectation.

The Shadow Side.

When solitude turns to isolation, however, risks are incurred:

• Loneliness. Persistent lack of connection is associated with depression and premature death. The U.S. Surgeon General has even labeled loneliness a public health epidemic.

• Social Atrophy. Over-withdrawal can blunt social skills, with re-entry becoming more difficult.

• Stigma. In extroverted societies, alone people can be misunderstood or suspect.

Finally, the distinction is in choice. Solitude is uplifting when voluntary, but damaging when involuntary.

Solitude vs. Isolation: Fasting vs. Starvation

The line between solitude and isolation can be drawn by analogy: solitude is like fasting, while isolation is like starvation. Both are abstentions, but one of them is voluntary and potentially enriching, while the other is coerced and debilitating.

This is significant. The dominance of voluntary solitude today signals empowerment, not abandonment.

Cultural Attitudes: East and West Diverge—Then Converge

Cultural attitudes towards solitude vary extensively.

Extroversion has been idealized in America and much of Western Europe for decades. "Team players" are what employers desire. Children are pressured to have friends and be involved in activities. The solitary student is typically branded "shy" or "troubled.".

Conversely, solitude is widely accepted in many Asian cultures. Sabi—the stillness of solitude—has been cherished by Japanese culture for centuries. Retreat into nature is rejoiced in by the Daoist philosophers in China. Sages who retreat to contemplate are venerated figures in India.

But globalization and technology are eroding these frontiers. In Tokyo, as in New York, people hunger for private escapes from crowded metros and from screen life. A 2021 cross-cultural survey found that teens on the two sides of the Pacific both highly valued solitude as essential to well-being.

How Solitude Is Reshaping Relationships, Community, and Work

The impacts of solitude extend far beyond individual psychology.

1. Relationships.

Solitude is transforming the way that people envision intimacy. Increasing numbers of couples live apart in close relationships—so-called "LAT" (Living Apart Together) partnerships. Friends might get together less frequently, but have richer exchanges when they do. Solitude reimagines closeness not as continuous presence, but as purposeful presence.

2. Communities.

Willful solitude allows for a shift towards less structured, more fluid modes of affiliation. Instead of close but obligatory communities, people are forming interest-based communities, often on-line, where one joins voluntarily. Solitude does not kill off community—it remakes it in more independent forms.

3. Work.

The office is undergoing a revolution of solitude. Remote work, hybrid calendars, and philosophies of "deep work" all recognize that uninterrupted alone time is necessary to productivity. Companies like Basecamp and GitLab explicitly encourage solitude to foster concentration.

Real-World Stories: Solitude in Practice

• Maya, a programmer in Berlin, teleworks three days a week. She spends afternoons alone walking in parks without headphones. "It's the only time I feel I can hear myself think," she says. It keeps her isolated as much as anything but makes her more energetic in team meetings.

• Carlos, a writer in Mexico City, rents a tiny cabin outside the city twice a year for a week of complete solitude. No internet, no phone. “It’s my creative reset,” he explains. “Every big project I’ve finished started in those silent weeks.”

• Ayumi, a nurse in Tokyo, began eating lunch alone during the pandemic. Necessity became preference. "I used to feel ashamed having lunch alone. Now I value it. It's my little act of recovery."

These stories remind us of loneliness not as social withdrawal but as the way for refueling so that connection can be deeper.

Expert Views

Psychologist Dr. Thuy-vy Nguyen noted that loneliness is a learned skill: "People feel uncomfortable at first. But after practicing, solitude proves to be a good tool for emotional regulation."

Philosopher Paul Tillich described solitude as "the glory of being alone," in contrast with loneliness as "the pain of being alone."

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle warns in Alone Together that without the ability to be alone, true intimacy is eclipsed: "If we don't learn to be alone, we will only know how to be lonely."

Solitude in the Digital Age: Resistance or Adaptation?

Is the modern welcome to solitude a resistance—or an adaptation?

On the one hand, it resists the hyperconnected consumerist and social media ethos. To be alone is to reject constant productivity and attention-seeking. Solitude is a rebellion in silence.

On the other hand, it's adaptation. In a time of overstimulation, solitude is balance. Like noise-canceling headphones on a loud train, it's a survival technique.

Perhaps it is both. Solitude in our era is rebellion and accommodation: denial of noise, accommodation to overloading.

The Future: A New Culture of Solitude

As solitude becomes more accepted, society itself may alter in unanticipated ways. Offices may designate "solitude zones." Schools may teach the value of quiet reflection as well as collaboration. Relationships may thrive not through constant contact but through respected boundaries of solitude.

Loneliness may even revolutionize politics and culture. A culture comfortable with loneliness may be immune to polarization fueled by digital echo chambers, as individuals rooted in contemplation may be less likely to react.

Conclusion: The Paradox of Solitude and Belonging

The era of solitude does not portend the demise of community. Instead, it may prophesy its resurgence. Solitude, when self-chosen, allows human beings to recharge and return to society better grounded, truer to themselves, and more capable of relating.

To learn to be alone, we paradoxically expand our capacity for belonging. Solitude is not absence—it is presence. It is presence with oneself, with nature, with mind, and, lastly, with others.

The ascendance of voluntary solitude is not an opting out of society but a rebalancing of it. Perhaps the future will not be about how we connect but how judiciously we oscillate between isolation and people.

In a seething world, solitude is the new frontier of liberty.

About the Creator

The Chaos Cabinet
A collection of fragments—stories, essays, and ideas stitched together like constellations. A little of everything, for the curious mind.

https://vocal.media/authors/the-chaos-cabinet

https://vocal.media/psyche

Picard, Max. The World of Silence. review

 

Chicago: Regnery, 1989. (U.S. ed., English translation)

This classic work is so filled with aphoristic passages that it is easy to lose sight of the larger premise. That premise, that silence is not the absence of noise, the absence of something, but is a phenomenon in itself, was startlingly clear only when this work first appeared in 1948.

As a German Swiss Catholic theologian, Picard is strongly influenced by the Catholic phenomenologist Gabriel Marcel, who wrote the preface to this edition, but also by related philosophers such as Heidegger, and by the whole thrust of lyric German poets like Rilke and Holderlin. Equally strong, however, is the influence of the post-war atmosphere of cautious post-modern conservatism, at home in, say, Gilson, Maritain, and Thibaud - reconstructionists and rehabilitators of a broken world.

To Picard the theologian, then, silence is to be contrasted with language, the gift of consciousness that distinguishes the rational being from the universe, capable of silence and noise. Silence is the context of consciousness, language is the expression of creation. Picard sees language not as the product of the evolution of consciousness but as the gift of God, a divine jump-start for consciousness.

Through the many short chapters of his work, Picard offers impressions of the role of silence in balancing human effort and conserving virtue. But Picard's insistence on the supremacy of language versus the noise of modern technology (from construction noise to the radio) is a weak protest against time and change.

While Picard is to be commended for rescuing silence from its philosophical enemies, several resources for breaking the paradox that he proposes may be found elsewhere. For example, Ricouer's transcendence of modernity as a path, or the Zen limnology that breaks the absolutized boundary of language with silence. There are other channels into which we can navigate without depending upon language or our present "reality."

We can see Picard's hesitancy in a passage in the chapter "Nature and Silence":

The silence of nature is a conflicting silence from the human point of view. It is a blessed silence because it gives man an intuitive feeling of the great silence that was before the world and out of which everything arose. And it is oppressive at the same time because it puts man back into the state in which the word might be taken away from him again into that original silence.

But isn't this exactly what death is, this "taken away from" and return to "original silence"? This state must be explored not because it can be posited but because it suggests the natural restful state of the universe, wherein lies the consciousness we enjoy, wherein is found God. But Picard's orthodoxy makes him wary of approximating his discovery of silence, pushing it metaphysically or theologically to reveal itself. This is the ultimate irresolution of an otherwise breakthrough work.

This work is invaluable in inoculating us against the fear of silence, in seeing silence as a natural state, in preparing us for a life of silence if we choose, the beginning of a mysticism of silence and solitude, and a death which is, after all, silence.

Picard's compelling and even beautiful passages in favorite chapters such as "Nature and Silence," "Poetry and Silence," "The Plastic Arts and Silence," and "Illness, Death and Silence" show us that Picard has a solid instinct. Here are three samples.

Chinese pictures are like figures in a moonlit mist over the world of silence, woven from moon threads over the silence.

The seasons move in silence through the changing year. Spring does not come from winter; it comes from the silence from which winter came.

In the fables of the Golden Age we are told that men understood the language of all animals, trees, flowers, and grasses. That is a reminder of the fact that in the first language that had just come from the fullness of silence, there was still the all-containing fullness.

¶

URL of this page: http://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/picard.html

©2002, Hermitary.com

An Introduction to Caillois’ Stones & Other Texts

“As a member of a species, the human species which is late-coming, temporary, and transient—it will not even last as long as the dinosaurs lasted —I am doomed to error.”

Roger Caillois, 1978.
—-

The work of Roger Caillois (1913-1978) tends to defy classification. In fact, one might suspect that Caillois consciously cultivated a professional persona based on a peculiar combination of scholarly brilliance and intellectual obliqueness—sometimes bordering on the perverse or provocative—and an idiosyncratically disparate choice of subject matter. Described in 1974 by journalist Hector Biancotti as “the last Encyclopedist,” Caillois wrote on such diverse themes as insect behavior, myth, war in ancient China, science-fiction, festivals, the octopus, Hitler, masks, the detective novel, dreams, Montesquieu, the periodic table, poetry, unicorns, Lucifer, and stones.

Flint Magazine’s new translation of Caillois’ 1966 publication Pierres is something of a landmark in the slow progress of disseminating the author’s work to an Anglo-American readership. Despite his election to the prestigious Académie française in 1972, however, those special characteristics of Caillois’ work—its eclecticism, erudition, and challenging language and style—have also rendered his œuvre relatively eccentric within the canon of twentieth-century French lettres. Even Caillois’ best-known work reveals his unorthodox locus as a writer and critic à rebours. As apparent in the structure of Stones, with its sections titled “Mythology,” “Physics,” “Metaphysics,” “Ethics,” and “Testament,” Caillois’ erudition and the fluid complexity of his mature writing, melding poetic reverie, arcane histories and mineralogical insight, demands of his reader (and not least his translator) both sustained attention to philosophical undercurrents and a capacity to drift through intricate layers of descriptive imagery. As neither exactly science nor entirely poetry, much of Caillois’ work tends to confound readers who require clarity of genre. But that kind of isolationist attitude to thought and classification was exactly what Caillois baulked against. Caillois’ encyclopedic drive was rooted in his affinities with surrealist and romantic thinking, in challenging the strictures of classification, not out of a sense of unruliness but, on the contrary, from the basis of a critique which sought to throw into question received ideas and given assumptions about the relations between the stuff of the world.

The paradoxical character and highly-developed eclecticism of Caillois’ writings can in some ways be traced to his formative influences, ranging from surrealism to high academia. In the 1930s he was for a few years a passionate member of André Breton’s Paris surrealist group and after that a founding member of the College of Sociology, the militant collective dedicated to the sociological study of the sacred that he established alongside Georges Bataille and former surrealist-turned-ethnographer, Michel Leiris. Alongside these avant-guard engagements, Caillois simultaneously developed a promising academic career at the École pratiques des hautes études, mentored by the sociologist and anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, and the mythographer and historian of comparative religion, Georges Dumézil. So promising, in fact, that, according to his friend and art historian André Chastel, Dumézil (later a mentor to Michel Foucault), acclaimed Caillois as “the genius of
our time.”

Caillois’ network of engagement during this decade was hugely influential in developing the idiosyncrasy of his method and the thematic focus of his studies. While his avant-garde apprenticeship with Breton and Bataille nurtured his prodigious intellectual boldness (he was only 21 years old when Breton hailed him “the mental compass of surrealism”), through his academic training Caillois developed a keen sense for underlying and inter-connecting structures, whether related to society, myth, games, poetry, the imagination, or the affective character of the natural world. If one reads closely enough, Caillois’ Stones draws together the threads of many such concerns. While the above-mentioned figures influenced the structural and methodological facets of Caillois’ writing, then two other formative twentieth-century figures influenced his style and development as a writer. First, the philosopher of science and the imagination, Gaston Bachelard, who Caillois met in 1934, and whose thoughts about the phenomenology of imagination greatly influenced his writings on stones and his generalizing approach to the poetic relationship between mind and nature. Second, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who Caillois met while living in Buenos Aires between 1939 and 1945, and of whose work he became the first French translator. Indeed, Caillois’ books might even appear like some of those that inhabit the curious libraries or old houses found in the uncanny fictional labyrinths of the Borgesian universe.

The unusual combination of interests and influences that developed the broad scope of Caillos’ œuvre were already reflected in his early publications. For example, his implacable interrogation of the assumed status of art and poetry as claiming a subjective value beyond rational analysis, Art on Trial by Intellect (1935); his essays in the surrealist periodical Minotaure that drew disturbingly uncanny relations between deathly insect behavior and human psycho-sexual complexes, titled “The Praying Mantis: from Biology to Psychoanalysis” (1934) and “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” (1935); and the sociological publications Myth and Man (1938) and Man and the Sacred (1939). These early interests would extend in numerous directions following Caillois’ move to South America, prompted by his distance from Paris and his experience of the vast scale of the natural landscape and cultural complexities of the Americas. Not long before the outbreak of war in Europe, Caillois was invited to Buenos Aires by Victoria Ocampo (editor of the vanguard literary hub of South America, the magazine Sur), and through the 1940s became a celebrated intellectual ambassador of socio-political critique and a lynchpin for French writers and artists in exile. In 1945, he returned to Paris and maintained his links with South America both by founding with the publisher Gaston Gallimard Le Croix du Sud, a series of Ibero-American literary publications, and by joining UNESCO in 1948 in a cultural role which enabled him to travel extensively and took him back to the Americas.

It was during his war-time exile in South America that Caillois had his first memorable encounter with minerals, as he recounts in his autobiographical work Le Fleuve Alphée (The River Alpheus, 1978) during a visit to a mine in Belo Horizonte in 1942. In the sorting area of the mine, at the time a source of trade in quartz for radars between Brazil and Great Britain, Caillois was invited to choose from the rejected prisms scattered over the ground and picked out a beguiling lump of phantom quartz. On his return to Argentina, however, the rock was confiscated by customs officials who regarded it as “strategic material,” despite Caillois’ protestations that the only reason he was allowed to take it was owing to its impaired quality. Although he claims to have been mortified at losing such a fascinating object, Caillois did not at this point begin to write on stones and minerals. It was not until his first book dedicated to the subject some twenty-five years later—this book—that Caillois would implicitly evoke his first mineral seduction through his clear and uncharacteristically warm identification with the Chinese artist and Imperial functionary, Mi Fou, with whom he shared “the same reverence for stones.”

Occasionally in his writings, Caillois acknowledged some cool intellectual fraternity with a historical figure, suitably eccentric or surprising: the pessimistic Blaise Pascal of the Pensées, for example, or the terrifying young militant of the French Revolution, Louis Antoine de Saint-Juste; the irascible Stoic philosopher Diogenes (after whom Caillois named the UNESCO-funded interdisciplinary journal he founded in 1952), or Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist and inventor of the marvelously economical Periodic Table. Caillois’ identification with Mi Fou, however—who he refers to as a “fraternal maniac” and whose name would no doubt have appealed to his surrealist sensibility, suggesting in French “half mad”—is relatively passionate. Clearly relating in Stones to the Chinese poet-official when he describes him as “intolerant and foolhardy, scornful of beaten tracks, keen on enigma, contradiction and challenge,” Caillois’ account of the theft of Mi Fou’s favorite stone recalls his personal distress at the hands of Argentine customs: “I share Mi Fou’s despair. I feel his irreparable loss and I imagine he never recovered from it. Across centuries and meridians, despite the differences in character and destiny, I feel a special sympathy for him, unlike any other.”

Stones, then, is in some way a personal homage to Mi Fou. It expresses his rapport with the significance of stones within Buddhist practice and to the meditative, philosophical, and also modest way in which stones figure in the artistic, intellectual, mythical, and sacred realms of historic Chinese culture. In Stones, as in his other writings on natural phenomena, Caillois follows a conviction that human art—in no way proffering exceptionalism to the species—is but a weak branch of nature’s genius. The reference at the very end of Stones to Chinese artists signing slabs of marble is an acknowledgement of how, long before it became a theorized intention of modern European artists, non-European cultures had a highly nuanced sense of natura naturans, of working in the spirit of nature rather than vainly attempting to copy it. It is also, however, a rather cheeky innuendo that disparages the legendary reputation of his compatriot, Marcel Duchamp, and the conceit of the Occidental avant-garde in thinking that one of their own was the first to sign an object he had not himself made.

As well as drawing upon highly affective or philosophically engaging examples of stones and minerals in oriental culture, Caillois was drawn to the enigmatic image of the polyhedron in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, for example, and recognized another affinity in the depiction of crystals in the metaphysical paintings of the Czech artist, his life-long friend Josef Šíma, which hinted at the formative architectonics underlying and unifying all aspects of nature. Caillois was also drawn to the ways in which stones seemed to provoke an imaginative response in humans which in some way made them difficult to conform to strict systems of classification. Caillois’ writings on stone are nourished by the lyrical tendencies of natural histories which reflect the wonder and confusion of classical and early modern scholars in the face of the hallucinatory pictographic forms of stones and their convergence of the brutal, energetic laws of nature with the play of chance. Throughout Stones, Caillois reveals his love of these kinds of paradoxes, defining stones as a ubiquitous and yet utterly marvelous phenomena. He explores how, through history, stones have fascinated human minds with their host of ambiguities, seeming at once animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, mineral and vegetal, useful and useless, the stuff of poetic reverie and cultural symbolism as well as raw material, the access to which marks the technological advance of human civilization. Stones for Caillois are both an ancient source of human ingenuity and unchained imagination, both finalized by accident during some inhumanly distant epoch and forged according to certain inflexible laws of nature.

For those who might be familiar with his sociological writings on myth, the sacred, and games, Caillois’ writings on stones, and this seemingly distinct efflorescence from the 1960s onwards of what he referred to as his “material mysticism,” might seem a bizarre development. However, although this apparent turn away from the analytical study of the social to a study of the natural realm and its affective force upon the human imagination might seem to separate his writings on stones from earlier work, there are surprising continuities. Caillois himself drew attention to these continuities in numerous publications, such as The Squares of a Chessboard (1970), the title of which signifies his preoccupation with relations between parts and whole and introduced texts he had collated in a way that would alert the reader’s attention to what he called the “interstitial tissue” of his writings. Between his first publications of the 1930s, in the context of surrealism and his encounter with Bachelard, and his later writings on stones, Caillois maintained an understanding of the poetic and imaginary as objectively grounded within deep and fixed relations between mind and world. “Nothing is a stranger to anything. Meaning, that the laws which govern the mind of man are not fundamentally different from those which determine the graphic structure of stones, etc. These laws are the same: simply, they adapt differently to the order—mineral, vegetal or animal—to which they belong.”

Caillois’ turn to stones as his main preoccupation in older age can, then, be read in a number of ways. One way to approach his mineral fascination is to underscore how it relates to his life-long interest, nurtured by his encounter with surrealism, with the idea of a system of encyclopedic knowledge that could incorporate what science and positive analysis necessarily leave out: the poetic, mythical, sacred, emotional, unconscious, oneiric, vertiginous, and imaginative. Caillois makes clear in the first pages of Stones that he is not speaking of their practical utilization: “I overlook mineralogy, ignoring the arts that give stones a purpose.” Nor is he interested in the kinds of stones considered precious in terms of their market value. Such a rejection of utilitarian and economic interests is typical of Caillois’ entire œuvre, influenced as it was by the critical analysis of the over-estimation of restricted economy by Mauss and Bataille. Through this rejection, Caillois aimed to expose the narrow rationalism that overdetermines such concerns and to accentuate the importance of other values and impetus within human life and of other forces that shape societies and cultures.

In Stones and other texts on minerals, Caillois pays homage to various characters who are significant for their innovative, critical, and imaginative development of the kind of expansive and holistic knowledge that he sought to develop. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, for example, who dedicated the final two works of his thirty-seven volume Naturalis Historia to stones, is a latent presence within Caillois’ text. Following Aristotle and the Stoic philosophy of nature, Pliny’s incorporation of stones and other natural objects according to their significance in historical and mythical tales and their valuable and useful properties for humans contributed enormously to the genre of the encyclopedia that developed in the middle ages with the work of church scholars like Albertus Magnus through that of early modern scholars like the sixteenth-century natural philosophers Conrad Gessner, Ulisse Aldrovandi and Giambattista della Porta.

The highly eclectic epistemological scope of the early encyclopedias, with their myths, folklore, moralizing, and magic, offered a richly imaginative model for Caillois’ notion of “diagonal sciences,” the method he proposed for developing a transversal and ambitiously coherent picture of universal knowledge. He was, however, also influenced by the advancement of the more properly scientific developments of the Enlightenment, notably the radical political, materialist, and atheist character of the eighteenth-century Éncyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert (compiled between 1751-1780), which had already provided an insurgent encyclopedic model for Bataille’s heteroclite periodical Documents (1929-30). Into this already heady mix, Caillois introduced the German romantic passion of the poet and geologist Novalis, whose ardent vision of an encyclopedia of everything within the realms of both science and poetry was sketched in his Das Allgemeine Brouillon (Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia, 1798-9). While impressed with Diderot’s Éncyclopédie, Novalis wanted to go beyond the individual distinctions of this model and desired to unify phenomena and our way of thinking them, an approach which would reflect the romantic conception of the profound unity of the world. “A science is perfected,” wrote Novalis, “if it is applicable to everything […] if everything is applicable to it.” Inspired by this romantic pursuit of a vast system of coherency, Caillois thus combined in his work Novalis’ zeal for a universal “encyclopedistics” with the more structuralist approach developed by his tutor, Mauss, and his inter-relational model of the “total social fact.”

Caillois doggedly rejected the anthropocentric view of human preeminence and exceptionalism, declaring in Le Fleuve Alphée:

Man can less and less doubt that he is only an excrescence of nature, with which he remains co-substantial and to the laws of which entirely submitted. Yet he has been so successful in domesticating the energies within reach that he is naively persuaded that nature belongs to him, while he knows very well that it is he who belongs to nature and that he is an extension of it, far from having been parachuted in by some God.

Moreover, he also rejected the idea of human culture as in some way distinct from nature as a whole. Throughout his work, Caillois undermined the economically and utilitarianly rationalized interpretation of what connects humans to nature at large; a view that, according to many contemporary natural scientists and ecologists, has been crudely and often perniciously extrapolated from evolutionary theories. Relegating such supposedly dominant principles of “survival” or “self-preservation” within nature, Caillois argued that the natural world reveals other motives, including those that humans express through art, poetry, the imagination, excess, risk, and intoxication. He thus sought to create links between the human and non-human realms which might open out a less conservative understanding of nature and, concomitantly, a more measured revision of the human place within it; one that would promote such “inadmissible similarities” as to show humans, in fact, to be closer to stones than to any deity. This ambition thus prompted Caillois to pursue his great range of studies and directed his encyclopedic concerns into disparate terrains in search of unexpected similarities that might serve to bridge scientifically-constructed and misleading distinctions between natural realms. His general aim, he wrote, was “to trim back the perceptible universe in order to reveal the correlations, networks, crossroads and regularities” which are normally obscured by isolated modes of research.

While historical analogies in the West between humans and the natural world have tended to draw resemblances between perceived personalities within the animal and vegetal realms or the structures of insect life as productive socio-economic models, for example, Caillois characteristically developed a far more oblique and unusual set of comparisons, of which his identification with the inert, inorganic mineral realm is perhaps the most extreme. Before writing on stones, Caillois focused on establishing “inadmissible similarities” between humans and insects. Nonetheless, we can trace his route to stones through these earlier disquieting or fantastical forays into natural history, especially his attention to perceived visual resemblances in natural forms. Caillois was not only interested in the ways in which marvelous natural objects or creatures “mobilized the imagination,” as he put it, but also, and more challengingly, was riveted to the question as to whether there are detectible patterns or even laws behind the ways in which the human imagination responds to certain natural phenomena. In a text published in The Squares of a Chessboard, titled “Apotheosis of Humiliated Matter,” Caillois expressed his romantic and in fact quasi-ecological conviction of the unity encompassing humans and the natural world through the question of whether there exists a distinction between the notion of beauty (a notion which on the whole held little interest for him) in art and nature. He writes of art as revealing “another proof that the one who looks and that which is looked at are of the same sort, belonging to the same universe, and that the idea of beauty is like a sap which circulates between them in the unity of their substance and which ties the one to the other by new bonds.”

Following Bachelard’s phenomenological approach, Caillois argued that the logic of poetry and the imagination works—not through subjective causality—but through what Bachelard called in The Poetics of Space the “trans-subjective.” Like Bachelard, Caillois argued that the logic of the imagination can be studied objectively, just like any natural phenomenon, and that its force of conveyance through poetry and myth owes nothing to accident but rather—as with the realms of the social, the sacred, and the natural—derives its power of communication, across time and place, through the regularity of laws that may well be mysterious but are not entirely indecipherable. In a way, then, we can see Caillois’ writings on stones as a continuation of Bachelard’s phenomenological studies from the 1930s and ‘40s of an elemental imagination reflected in mythical and poetic thinking about fire, water, and earth. Writing in The Octopus: Essay on the Logic of the Imaginary (1973), Caillois—like a kind of Captain Nemo of the imagination—claimed to be pursuing the “grid of established analogies and discreet connections which constitute the logic of the imaginary,” asserting: “If mystery affects us, if the unusual enthralls us, if poetry is possible, it is only because of the complex and disconcerting correspondences which disperse the unity of the cosmos.” Indeed, for Caillois, the laws which govern the human imagination are not even exclusive to the species but run through the vital, informing processes of the natural world as a whole. He developed this conviction through his notion of “generalized poetics,” declaring in an interview from the early 1970s, for example: “The fantasies of man, the imagination itself are only a prolongation of the general laws of the universe.”

Caillois’ evocative analogies between the formations of minerals and other natural realms—the vegetal and human in particular—are rooted in natural histories, from ancient to modern, which draw attention to paradoxes of classification, ontological slippages and confusions, that reveal the limitations for knowledge in strictly separating the poetic from the scientific. The spell of visual resemblance which Caillois conveys in Stones, was originally initiated by his interest in insects, specifically his early fascination with the apparent form of a skull on the thorax of the Death’s-Head Hawkmoth (Acherontia atropos), which he saw as an uncanny simulacrum or a hallucinatory blazon of deathly morphology. Like his fellow surrealists André Breton and Salvador Dalí, Caillois was compelled to natural objects which appeared to resemble other things, especially if they appeared to transgress an apparently rigid classificatory law: the vegetal appearance of coral, the “masks” worn by insects, the apparition of a human figure, a pine-forest or a Florentine landscape embedded in pictographic stones, and other such visual analogies that have not only been central to mythic, folkloric and poetic thought, but also, as Michel Foucault discussed in The Order of Things (1970) to the world view of early modern natural philosophy in Europe. Caillois came to refer to this perceptual-cognitive impulse to resemblances as “the demon of analogy” (borrowing the term from Stéphane Mallarmé), and in Stones he allows himself the liberty to elaborate upon the endlessly rich poetic chimeras experienced through the mineral realm.

When Caillois writes in Stones “I felt myself taking on parts of the nature of stones,” his identification with the most primeval of matter verges on mystical self-dissolution. There is certainly a melancholic resignation to the process of ageing and inevitable mortal disappearance in Caillois’ writings on stones. While personal, however, this melancholia links the limited human span in terms both ontogenetic and phylogenetic, and—as if meditating through the relative immortality of stones themselves—defines the human in various texts as an “imposter,” describing the species as “transient,” “ephemeral,” and an “episodic species doomed to distinction.” Expressing these views in an interview not long before his death in 1978, Caillois admitted: “From the instant that one situates mankind as a precarious species, it is difficult to escape a certain moroseness.” Thus, Caillois’ writings on stones reflect a kind of philosophical pessimism that seeks a preparatory detachment from the human realm and embraces stones as an “antidote” to the inherent failings of the human, his human being. In terms, though, of the continuity of theme and focus throughout Caillois’ œuvre, this “moroseness” and his general identification with stones can be interpreted through his life-long obsession with detecting an ill-defined instinct within the human towards annihilation and fusion, even at the risk of self-erasure. Caillois pursued evidence for this multivalent impulse in his sociological studies of the sacred, war, and festival, and also through his fascination with the perennial feature of masks in ritual, myth and nature, as exemplified in the mimetic attributes of insects. He connected this impulse to human psychology, drawing, for example, on Sigmund Freud’s notion of the “death instinct” or in Pierre Janet’s theory of psychasthenia, which Caillois interpreted as an inability to sufficiently inhabit a well-defined ego, an urge to assimilate into space or into one’s environment, and a desire to merge from the animate into the inanimate realm.

There is also, however, a kind of evolutionary mythopoesis in Caillois’ reverie on stones that, paradoxically, in spite of their otherworldly and inhuman nature flows from the mythical imaginings of stones as generative and related to human birth and ancestry. Through an ultra-monistic sense of evolution, Caillois sees stone as an original substance within which humans are prefigured; the willo-the-wisps of their forms appearing like hallucinatory and uncanny premonitions within some impersonal and cosmic imagination millions of years before the advent of the species and the development of its compulsive “demon of analogy.” Humans haunt the stones which precede them, and stones haunt the evolutionary event of homo sapiens, our primal matter and the laws which determined our development. For Caillois, stones manifest what humans lack: “Men envy their longevity, their severity, their intransigence and their radiance, their smoothness and impenetrability, and their capacity of being full even as they are shattered.” They also represent what humans aspire to be and to achieve, yet with even the best of their abilities only ever barely approaching their order, structure and brilliance or the concrete pictographic wonder of the forces that formed them.

Donna Roberts
[6] Flint Magazine Issue 1+2
06/2018

https://sensatejournal.com/

Mountain Literature Classics: the Alpine Drawings of Samivel

Ronald Turnbull is carried to an idealised alpine age by the mountain drawings of French cartoonist Samivel, in his book Sous L'Oeil des Choucas, ou Les plaisirs de l'alpinisme (under the eye of the choughs, or the pleasures of alpinism).

Plato tells us that every item of the world – a fish, a biscuit, a mountain – is only as real as it is because it matches up with its eidolon, its true and ideal counterpart in the realm of pure thought. All the biscuits there are, are merely shadows of the abstract Ideal Biscuit: the Biscuit that is crunchy but not too crunchy, chewy but not too chewy, and made (obviously) with Real Butter.

In this pure and philosophical sense, real mountaineering is mountaineering in the Alps; and lasts from Leslie Stephen up to the middle of the twentieth century. A mountain isn't a mountain unless it has sharp snow-crest ridges, and rocky gendarmes, and a glacier at the bottom. But then again, those things in the Himalayas, they really are a bit too big. Mountaineering shouldn't really be about gasping for breath with not enough atmosphere while your brain cells die a million at a time.

And so, for me at any rate, the Ideal of mountaineering is a classic Alpine ridge, at grade AD or AD+, with hardly any fixed rope or other extraneous ironmongery; a climb reached from a mountain hut that still looks like a hut rather than a strangely displaced hotel; starting off with a candle lantern, across a glacier that's basically still there.

It's a classic ridge climbed without queues and indeed with no previous footprints in the snow; climbed with a bit of protection but no hanging about; aided by a single, straight-shafted axe made of steel and hickory and probably by Stubai, plus some flexible steel crampons with leather straps from the house of Salewa; knee-britches optional but they do display ones legs in a rather lovely way.

The iconography of this vanished ideal? It's the ink and watercolour drawings of Samivel. Gently humorous and deeply perceptive, here are the stout leather rucksacks and the candle lanterns, the hempen ropes and abandoned sardine cans; all overlooked by the cynical eye of the Choucas, the Alpine chough.

The book's final two frames are Samivel's anticipation of the present day and beyond. The year 2000: walkway balconies, advertisement hoardings, the final unclimbed pinnacle marked 'Do Not Touch'. Not a tricky prediction! But Year 3000: the Alps empty again, with only the lonely sardine can to say: Humanity Woz Here.

Born with the real name Paul Gayet-Tancrède, as a good multilingual alpinist Samivel took his pseudonym from Dickens' Pickwick Papers. Writer, illustrator and cinematographer, he was cameraman on a French expedition to Greenland in 1948. His many works included guides to Greece, Iceland and the valleys of Mont Blanc. He died in 1992 aged 84.

© Ronald Turnbull
https://www.ukhillwalking.com/user/profile.php?id=133798

Butterfly Wings

THE WINGS OF butterflies and moths, their shape, patterns and colours, continue to be a sort of eternal enigma. I do not think anyone really knows the purpose of so much splendour. It is possible that the colour is of use but not the pattern (with one exception).

The lungs of butterflies are contained within a narrow and rigid framework. In order to fly, these creatures need an additional respiratory surface, which the extended wings provide, and thus serve to absorb oxygen and light. Both are more easily obtained the darker the wings are. I agree. But once more, why the patterns? Plain wings, of the shade suitable to supply the insect with energy, would serve as well or better and I dare say with greater economy of effort. Of course it is affirmed that the striking or soft colours are useful in both cases: the soft colours to make the insect invisible and confuse it with its background, the striking colours to act as obliterating colouring, that is to dazzle the retina of a predator just that fraction of a second which is enough to ensure the escape of the insect. But the patterns are not explained by this. A vivid colour, all over, without a pattern, that the escaping insect shows and then immediately hides, as in some grasshoppers, would serve equally well. For these reasons I dare to advance the opinion that the patterns and the colours of the butterfly wings are insects’ ‘‘paintings”’.

However I do not maintain that a Lepidopter has anything in common with an artist. Still less do I say that a butterfly paints its wings or that one of its far-off ancestors conceived or willed this form at some point in the evolutionary process and that they have been the same ever since and will be transmitted unchanged for many centuries to come. Even using the word “ painting” for the fixed positioning of the small scales that make up the wing is a flagrant abuse of language. I must not overlook any of the points in which a painting differs from a butterfly-wing. But I notice—this is my task— that these differences are just those that separate insect and man, so in a certain sense they are expected and reinforce the view that the argument is well founded. Here are two kinds of surfaces both having coloured parts, brilliant or soft, forming a whole. The two things moreover are both equally useless. They cannot really be compared: nevertheless they are homologues.

The wings owe nothing to the intervention of consciousness, of will, of free choice; they arise through the working of uncontrollable animal mechanism. There are patterns but no plan. They are always the same and have been for thousands of years in all the members of the same species: they seem to be those things that would have been created had some ideally perspicacious spirit, in the undeviating insect world, made in advance the objects which were going to become man’s paintings.

On the other hand, the other surfaces—the paintings —are original things by very definition. The artist’s personality is shown in every one of them. He does not carry them about with him as he does his finger nails, his hair or eyes (but he has colour in his eyes and hair). He alone is responsible for every shade and every stroke in the picture. If a free and capable being, able to work outside himself, started spreading colours on a surface so as to get something like a butterfly’s wing and if you allowed him to use any colour he liked, so as to get the best possible result, he would invent painting, more precisely abstract painting, the geometrical patterns of baskets, pottery and embroidery.

To sum up, the theory leads one to believe that there is with living creatures in general a tendency to produce coloured designs and this “tendency” shows itself particularly in the two evolutionary extremes—a butterfly’s wings and an artist’s paintings. I would not dream of denying—indeed I am stressing—the vast differences which separate the painting and the wing, but I think that these differences are already implied in the all too evident fact that the wing is part of the butterfly whereas the artist invents and carries out his picture himself. It follows from this statement that it becomes interesting to try and determine the singular reasons for man’s achieving a very different destiny from that of other living beings.

This is usually explained by man’s erect posture and the fact that his thumb is opposite his fingers. Neither one of these reasons is completely convincing. ‘The erect posture has not helped the penguin or the kangaroo very much. The lobster and crab do not make much use of their claws to hold before their eyes objects arousing their curiosity. As for monkeys, who stand up when they want to and have the use of four hands, it is clear that they have not profited much from this plurality and abundance. It would seem that the advantages put forward are less decisive than is claimed.

Perhaps the approach to these problems could be helped by making a more exact record of what is gained and what is lost. Man, by assuming the erect posture, sacrificed his running speed and thus became an easier prey for swift predators. On the other hand he liberated his front limbs. Thereafter the conception of the hand became possible. But the selection of the hand with its opposing thumb and gripping fingers was once more to sacrifice some possible alternative such as the hoof or claw. Each time it was as if man “chose” a solution which was at first harmful to him, but which was soon to reward him with additional powers. Man seems to have advanced by a series of successive eliminations. In a way he impoverishes himself and denudes himself to the extreme, finally to gain a greater diversity of useful gifts. At the same time he has “avoided” any too specialised organ, such as the wing or fin, wonderfully adapted as they are, but only to one use. The fur-covered mammal has ‘“‘invented”’ its fleece to protect itself from the cold; the crab its carapace and the mollusc its shell for protection against predators. Man has invented clothes and armour, which he can take off and put on according to his need, always for the purpose of protection or self-defence. His policy is therefore to avoid any organic solutions which would involve a modification of the body, for they have the fault of being permanent and incompatible with each other. Man makes solutions which are external and, as a result, capable of an infinite number of combinations. This is a general principle. The crayfish “chooses” its armour-plating, the bird its wings; but there are no flying crustaceans nor any armour-plated birds, whereas, for man, the construction of an armoured aeroplane—a flying fortress— presents only one difficulty to be overcome, a new relationship to be established between the total weight of the machine and the power of the engine which drives it. The electric eel “invents” its electric discharge and equips itself with a sort of internal accumulator. Man makes use of virtually all the possible applications of electricity.

Another example and not the least. Man does not have that faculty possessed by bees and ants of being able to orientate himself practically infallibly. He has invented for his own use a compass independent of his body, which does not simply help him find his own home but gives him direction over the entire planet.

There is no need to labour the point. It is well known that man differs from animals in that he makes tools, weapons and machines. He has no claws or talons nor natural suckers, but if he needs them he manufactures as many of them, and makes them as powerful and as intricate, as he wants: he sets himself up with a mass of varying articles which he possesses all at the same time and which he can use in turn.

We are, however, dealing with insects. The intention of this brief digression is to show how commonplace my observation is in as much as it does not extend the case beyond the objectives already stated, ones which, I am afraid, are more obvious and superfluous than paradoxical and controversial. However, the opposite happens as soon as I try to suggest the least connection between a butterfly’s wings and an artist’s paintings, although the relationship is the same. On reflection it is no more and no less acceptable in either case. The only difference that I can perceive between the two series of analogies is that the first concerns organs, machines or useful functions: the second superfluities the usefulness of which is obvious.

I have used butterfly’s wings as a special example. I could have chosen others from all the spheres of nature and might have given preference to crystals, flowers, the skins of certain mammals or the scales of numerous fish. These recurring patterns—for the most part it is not a question of anything more than just regularities—simply reveal the principle of distribution which governs living matter. Examples are the allotment of seeds in a pod or the shape of a starfish. Other schemes progress in a modulated rhythm, as the spiral of a shellfish. ‘These geometric patterns, which are easily discerned by man, please him and he is led to speak of beauty. In fact he is only noting equilibrium or symmetry, that is to say, neat arrangements. If the butterfly’s wings seem to present a special case, it is, I think, for two reasons: in the first place the outline and the pattern would appear under the circumstances to be a superfluous ornament which has been arbitrarily added to the organism of the insect and would not appear to be an essential part of its make-up; further, the patterns are often very complex, whereas the symmetry of butterflies—strictly lateral —is reduced to the most simple shape possible—as is the case with the human body. Geometry and simple regularity seem in this case to give way to a richer composition, free of the laws which govern the balanced economy of living matter.

Can we then speak of art? In the human sense of the word, certainly not. But a new principle has appeared over and above geometry. I will explain what I mean. Geometry is a constant principle of the universe, and the universe has examples of it at far from elementary levels. Life, in a way which one might call altogether abstract, at times, develops what could be called polyhedral structures, similar to the perfect bodies which Plato, in the Timaeus, regards as the only things worthy of divine construction.

The Radiolaria are remarkable collections of spherical bodies formed of regular polygons united to each other. Slender spikes radiate from the centres or the angles of the polygons, like rays of light frozen into immobility. In his work E. Hackel¹ alone amassed several hundred types. I shall only quote two examples of these, chosen from among the most simple because they seemed to be complementary to each other. The Circorrhegma dodecahedra (Hackel plate 117, 2) with twelve faces and twenty spines and the Circogonia isocahedra (Hickel plate 117, 1) which has inversely twenty faces and twelve spines. From the depths of the warm seas they appear like a set of delicate tiny models predating the ideal solids deduced by Plato, who knew nothing of these natural prototypes.

At times the central sphere, as is the case with Tuscaretta globosa, remains empty and uninhabited, the eight animalcules which secreted it in common remain suspended from the perforated surface spread out like the eight corners of a phantom cube.

There exists, therefore, a geometry which derives more spontaneously from life and which is considerably more developed than that which is apparent in a spider’s web, a ring of petals, the distribution of leaves on a stem, the spiral on a seashell or the shell of a sea-urchin. I do not intend to enthuse over the alleged wonders of nature.

On the contrary it seems to me completely natural, or rather, more probable and foreseeable than the contrary, that the intelligence of mankind and the purely biological phenomena of calcification among the lower orders of life have, in spite of the abyss which separates them, a deep-seated relationship. However I must stress one point: however many varieties of Radiolaria there are, it is the organic geometry which, in spite of the flexibility of sap and lymph, is important and which shows itself to be limited and unchangeable, without possibilities of development. And it is rigorous reasoning that enables man even to go as far as to operate in a medium without properties and to create there logical entities which the imagination itself cannot represent and which can only be understood on a mathematical basis. Taking the Radiolarians, with their symmetrical forms unchanged since their origin, as prototypes, I am thinking of an endless series of models made of string and wire. Man needs these puzzling fragile constructions in order to make for himself a very rough and almost symbolic representation of the flow of the abstract surfaces which his mind is able to conceive.

The design of corollas and the rhythms of growth are perhaps in accordance with the Law of Golden Proportion, of which the Pythagoreans made such great play. Why should it not be so? The Golden Number is a formula for the perfect use of resources. The symmetrical placing of the Radiolaria spines can be seen to end by giving a creature in which the available resources are used to the best advantage. A simple law of inertia should be able to explain this so economical use of resources. If sand is poured, it forms a regular shape, a cone, which, barring external intervention, keeps the form which its weight gives it. Alain expressed no surprise at the great age of the pyramids: monuments - which, when they were built, were already the natural shape they would be in decay.

Let us return to the butterfly’s wings with their spots, streaks and piping, crescents, seed-like dotting, cameos, scalloping and ocelli vying one with the other, in the display of designs which, on the single wing, in this case owe nothing to symmetry. There is no less fantasy, richness and variety in the colours. What is more, they are not just flat colours. They are greatly enriched by various physical qualities which make them deep or glistening, metallic or moiré. Thus there is the black or brownish velvet of the great ornithoptera, the electric blue of the Morpho, the fiery reflections and variegation of the Uranus and Arcturus, the enamel, mother-of-pearl and mica of numerous species, the light which flickers on the wing whenever the grains which make up the scales have a different index of refraction. Their shapes are elongated, jagged, crenellated, slashed or whole. The wings of Actias are prolonged by its enormous stiff tails which appear to be starched. With the Hypolycena’ they are thin, downy and rolled up in coils. In this mass of shapes, patterns and colours, there is an excess all the more surprising in that it appears to be in complete contradiction to the consistent discipline which has just been operating to make the best distribution of a valuable jelly quivering with life.

This consistency would doubtless give rise to harmony, but only because harmony is a property common to mathematics and aesthetics. A rose window in the form of a corolla is drawn by a compass. In speaking here of beauty man equivocates and is satisfied to designate by an all-embracing and ambiguous name a pleasure which, springs directly from a harmonious division of space. He might with as much right (and lack of propriety) speak of justice.

On the other hand, with butterflies’ wings there is a genuine beauty in the broadest sense of the word. They are a biological creation combining most pleasing shapes and colours which cannot be wholly explained in practical terms. Therefore it is reasonable to speak of art, and more particularly the art which concerns itself with the relationships of shapes and colours, that is, painting. Of course it is important to remember the differences which I have stressed above: on the one hand the external pictures resulting from the inventions of a free imagination; on the other hand, the internal and unalterable pictures, created without conscious invention by the change taking place inside the chrysalis, when the organs and tissues of the caterpillar dissolve and rearrange themselves into the wing of the particular species. The individual has no choice in this matter. Here each species is the artist. The picture, repeated indefinitely, gives all the individual members of each species the livery which they bear in perpetuity from season to season.

Samivel described the insect as an “introverted technician”. He says that they have become “their own machinery, forming the details of their own structure with a view to a particular use”.¹

Thus, by the simple fact that the function creates the organ, what was primitively merely a paw has become “a fin, a weapon, a musical instrument, a burrowing shovel, a spring mechanism, etc.". It would be easier to lengthen this list than to exhaust its possibilities. By contrast in this field which is by definition characterised by superfluity it cannot be a question of the function creating the organ. With butterflies I imagine everyone would be willing to agree that flight developed the wing, but it could just as easily have developed a transparent wing like the dragonfly’s or the bumble-bee’s, the strong wing of the stag-beetle, the cockchafer, the water-beetle or the rose-chafer’ which, with a minimum lifting-surface, carries a far heavier body. Besides in this last case the concealment of the closed, supple wing under its sheath contrasts with the “vanity” of the butterfly who plays with his wings, slowly opening and closing them on a flower, by a stretch of water or on the pebbles of the road.

Therefore, if so many insects appear to be introverted technicians, might not the Lepidoptera be the artists, the introverted painters. In the same way that the others transform parts of their own organisms into specialised tools—hooks, knives, pincers, scissors, borers, syringes or siphons—they, by means of the incredible chemistry of necrosis, produce on themselves a rich and distinctive display less like a picture than a flag or armorial bearings, but armorial bearings so rich and detailed that they suggest not so much heraldry in the human world as painting.

In my opinion this unusual proposition comes up against two major difficulties: the first is that stated by Samivel in connection with the tools and utensils so perfectly adapted by these introverted engineers, when it comes to supposing them created by the insect technician’s decision, even a confused one, a choice, however rudimentary, or a foresight, however obscure. “It is hard to believe that creatures who are in the majority of cases incapable of modifying their own behaviour would be endowed with the extraordinary power of shaping their own structure.” From this he derived a hypothesis which is, to say the least, daring. If one systematically neglects in this instance the theory of natural selection, is it possible to imagine that insects or certain types of insects, ants for example, were, at some given time, intelligent beings, in the sense which we give this term, that is, endowed with a mystique, philosophy, art, science and technology? And that after a mysterious avatar—who knows?—perhaps as the result of a voluntary physiological conditioning brought about by methods similar to ours but further perfected, they have become, by virtue of an unalterable consequence, what they now are, that is to say, machines for living, nothing more, nothing less??

This problem of initiative in the construction of their own selves, the problem of the original decision, even in the weakest sense of that term, would, if it were just a question of any number of purely mechanical consequences brought on by the repetition of one phenomenon at the cellular level, still remain mystifying in the extreme; in fact, unfathomable, to a point where it is perhaps ridiculous to imagine it, because it has no meaning when applied to man. Man’s progress is in the opposite direction, for he, who can fabricate everything externally, is, by way of compensation, virtually unable to modify his own organic structure.

The second great objection arises from the assimilation of useful qualities and attributes of no use. A doctrine of natural selection readily admits or even postulates the pliability which produces the fin of the Hydrophilus, the mantis’s jagged harpoon and the mole-cricket’s excavator, but it refuses by the very nature of its theories to conceive of a similar mechanism for the pattern and colour of the butterfly’s wings. The opposition between the necessary and the superfluous seems here to be decisive. It is argued that anything serving no definite purpose cannot be a determinant. Any non-utility of characteristics cannot be admitted. In other words anything which is superfluous is a priori inexplicable.

I maintain that there is here what I call a “deep anthropomorphism". At all costs people want to avoid talking of art or beauty, blazonry or pictures when considering butterflies’ wings, for these are words which only make sense in relation to human emotions or to human history and little does it matter that anyone who uses these words in this connection takes care to emphasise the differences and contrasts. To avoid the forbidden words it is commonly held preferable to exalt the concept of utility, that is, of survival, as all-important. However, if we stop projecting our human reactions on to the non-human part of nature we find that an immense squandering of resources is the rule there. It is a world where there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to indicate that an ostentatious outpouring of resources, with no intelligible end, may not be a wider and more universal law than the strict vital interest, the imperative of the survival of the species.

Thus man remains convinced that nature does nothing in vain. Just about everything in it suggests the opposite, but he does not cease to believe, if not in the best of all possible worlds, at least in one with the least loss of energy. For me it seems dangerous to accept such a theory.

I wonder at least to what criterion it would be legitimate to resort, to give here a clearly defined meaning for the expression “in vain’’. In the last analysis, I fear, the discrimination is purely human. Herein lies, I suspect, the final anthropomorphic error. Indeed, I have no doubt that it is I who will be accused of delirious anthropomorphism: what could be more ridiculous than to dare compare butterflies’ wings to the works of painters?

However, it could be that my system of references might show itself to be the least distorted of all: for it also provides a presentation of a painter’s pictures as the human equivalent of the butterflies’ wings.

What could such a relationship indicate if not that there appears to be an autonomous aesthetic force in the world of biology in general? This force, doubtless inexplicable, shows the impossibility of going any further in this progression of causes and effects, in certain cases a final goal just as imperious and tyrannical as the sacred survival of the species. It happens that, in different conditions, the most divergent paths lead to the same end: the interplay of shapes and colours. Both men and insects, knowing nothing of their hidden docility, obey the same organic law of the universe. This law, like the law of economics, wherever it reigns, reigns absolutely, without any half-measures, at least when there are no forces to counteract it. A butterfly, which has no consciousness or insight, would not be able to make for itself a wing that was ugly, for it has no power to erect obstacles to this development of forces which produce harmony and beauty naturally. This is too little: I should have said to this natural expansion by which harmony and beauty define themselves, because man (an integral part of this same nature) necessarily perceives harmony and beauty, in conformity with that great canvas which determines the shape of crystals, shells, leaves and corollas and which cunningly suggests to him the relationships wherein he imagines, not without some presumption, that he is exercising his personal genius.

Man is free, clumsy, and wicked on occasions. Without knowing anything about it, and as the result of an incomprehensible metamorphosis, the Lepidopter makes gaily-coloured wings out of the dull paste with which the pupa is filled. Between himself and his work man sets the risk of a decision taken deliberately which may be of doubtful value. He also has to carry out what he has conceived. He calculates and then makes it real.

Each time he risks making a mistake. His reward is to be the true creator of his pictures; but on the other hand an unsuitable choice or bad workmanship by this one fallible being can result in bad painting. It is a far cry from the age-old norms, whose works, being repeated indefinitely, could not help but have a cold and unchangeable perfection about them.

The Mask of Medusa
Roger Caillois

WHETHER THE WINGS of butterflies do, or do not seem to be paintings, it must be admitted that history shows no painter with a special preference for these shimmering surfaces, where his work has already been done. On the contrary painters seem to avoid them, and never reproduce a butterfly-wing except as a minor element in a still life. For instance, they never take part of a wing of some butterfly, enlarge it to the full size of their canvas, all the time most carefully keeping the wing’s pattern, proportions and colours. I put this down without comment. I suspect, however, that this arises from the fact that the artist already sees the wing as a picture and that to paint it would not be to paint a picture but to duplicate an existing work.

[From the next chapter NATURA PICTRIX]

The arduous, risky business of governing

My master was also keen to tease me, saying, ‘I notice that, not expecting to attain nobility yourself, you scorn titles.’ I answered, ‘Master, if I were elevated to your rank at this moment, I should refuse.’ The governor laughed and said, ‘That I believe! The only thing oxen want is straw. Still, with the sort of mindset the noble is said to have, you’d be scrambling after the highest honours and titles all the time. I personally consider it no small thing that good fortune has given me status.’ Sighing deeply, I said, ‘Ah, the bliss of the work burden! You know what, sir? No one in Hanau is to be pitied more than you.’ ‘How so?’ asked my master. ‘What do you mean, calf, what are you getting at? I don’t feel that way at all.’ And my reply? ‘The fact that you ask, sir, proves your blindness to the many cares that being the governor of Hanau sets on your shoulders. Sheer arrogance – and it draws nourishment from your position! Either that or you’re made of iron and have no feelings. Granted, you issue the orders, and everyone under you has to obey. But do they bow and scrape for nothing? Aren’t you their slave, in effect? Aren’t you expected to look after each and every one of them individually? Think about it. Right now enemies surround you, and responsibility for holding the fort is yours and yours alone. It’s for you to decide how to weaken the other side. At the same time, you have to make sure no one betrays your plans. And there are times, are there not, when you yourself must do sentry duty like the lowest infantryman. It’s your job, too, to see that no shortages occur, whether of money, arms, food or men. And that means keeping the contributions coming in. You’re constantly having to raise tolls and levies on the entire region. And when you send parties out to collect your income, what they do mainly is pillage, ransack, burn and kill. Only recently they sacked Orb, seized Braunfels, and torched whole towns. All right, they brought home some lovely plunder, but at the cost of massively increasing your debt of guilt in God’s eyes. OK, pleasure may also be to your taste, just as position is. But tell me this: who’s going to share that pleasure? Even supposing you stay rich (and that’s by no means guaranteed), you’ll be leaving your wealth behind when you go; all you’ll be taking are the sins that gained it. Anyway, say you’re lucky enough to benefit from your booty; you’ll only be squandering the sweat and blood of the poor, who live in squalor when they’re not actually starving to death. If I’ve seen it once I’ve seen it a hundred times: how your wits, distracted by the cares of office, keep you awake while I and my fellow calves can settle to sleep in peace without a worry in the world! If you don’t take this or that action, curtains; if you do, you’ll be failing to deal with something else that should have been done if your subjects and the citadel itself are to survive. Look at me: I’ve no such concerns! I know I owe nature a death, so I don’t worry. Let men storm my byre or force me to slog in the fields all day! If I die young – well, I’ll have escaped the hard life of most oxen, that’s all. For you the struggle looks endless: day after day of anxiety, nights of broken sleep. You’ve to suspect every friend as you fear every foe. The thing is, they all think like you: how can I shorten that fellow’s life, steal his money, trash his reputation, undermine his command, or otherwise do the man harm? From foes one expects hatred; it’s only natural. And self-styled friends will secretly envy your success. But you – you’re not even safe from underlings. To say nothing of how ambition drives you on day after day, constantly looking for ways of winning greater glory, higher rank, mounting wealth, playing the next trick on the enemy, taking a key location by surprise – in a nutshell, doing almost anything to hurt others, harm your own soul, and offend the Almighty! And the worst of it is, you’re so surrounded by flattery you no longer know your own mind. Your arse-lickers have so deadened your wits, you can’t see the risks of the path you’ve chosen. Whatever you do, they nod their approval. Your every vice they hail as a virtue. If you’re harsh, they call it justice. And if you scorch the Earth and exterminate the inhabitants, they call you a bold soldier, egging you on to inflict further pain – so keen are they to retain your favour and go on stuffing their purses.’

‘Hark at smarty-pants!’ my master said. ‘Who taught you to sermonize like that?’ ‘But it’s true, master, isn’t it?’ I replied. ‘By blowing in your ear while sitting on their backsides, your toadies have spoilt you so rotten you’re almost past saving. Not to worry. Others will soon see through you. They’ll find plenty to criticize – not just on big issues; on minor matters, too. Look at the greats of old (they’ll say). Is their example nothing to you? The Athenians used to moan about their Simonides, simply because he always shouted. The Thebans complained of their Paniculus’ habit of spitting. The citizens of Sparta rebuked their Lycurgus for the way he kept his head lowered the whole time. In Rome they objected to Scipio snoring so loudly; they even took exception to Pompey scratching himself with only one finger; and Julius Caesar they mocked because he didn’t wear his belt with sufficient style. Uticans slated the great Cato because, as they thought, he chewed too greedily, filling both cheeks. And the men of Carthage criticized Hannibal for always going about bare-chested. What do you say now, master – do you still think I’d want to swap places with a man who on top of having to eat with a dozen or so smarm merchants and scroungers has hundreds, perhaps thousands of clandestine or overt enemies, parasites and jealous rivals? Just think how fulfilled a ruler should feel under whose protection so many folk shelter! Yes, but remember: everyone needs watching over individually, am I right? Every grievance must be listened to. That alone would be labour enough, surely, even without such hostility, such envy? I can see how bitter it must make you, the sheer amount of discontent that lands on your shoulders. And what, dear master, does it bring you in the end? Where does it all get you? If you can’t answer that, let others do so for you. Take Demosthenes the Greek, who boldly and loyally advanced and protected the common good by upholding his fellow Athenians’ rights; contrary to all law and justice, he met with a most cruel misdeed, being banished from the land and reduced to penury. Socrates was even forced to take poison, while Hannibal was treated so badly by his fellows that he had to roam the world as a penniless exile; Roman Camillus likewise. In Greece, Lycurgus and Solon suffered a similar fate: one they stoned, the other first had an eye put out and was then condemned to life banishment as a murderer. So you can keep your command and all you hope to gain. I want none of it. In the best possible case you’ll come away with nothing but a bad conscience. But if you listen to your conscience you’ll be relieved of your command as being incompetent – just as if, like me, you’d been turned into a stupid calf.’

THE ADVENTURES OF SIMPLICIUS SIMPLICISSIMUS

HANS JACOB CHRISTOFFEL VON GRIMMELSHAUSEN