History of Wonder

Where do we look for wonder? Where have we looked? And what is the history of those places? For the first time, I’m thinking about a chronology, or at least a series: Renaissance cabinets of curiosities, Burke on the sublime, the Romantic inward turn, Freud as the last Romantic. In other words, get students thinking about the fact that different arenas of wonder open themselves at different times. Wonder depends upon an elusiveness–pin something down too tightly and the wonder ceases–but our sense of what is elusive changes with time. Some time in the eighteenth century, for instance, childhood begins to be a source of wonder–not with Locke but with Rousseau, and with that change eventually we arrive at a wondering (and wandering) Proust. We need to think about the relationship of wonder and the sublime: they are related, but not synonymous, since the sublime can threaten to overwhelm the playful, interactive quality of wonder.

Staring

Wonder is a good thing, right? Except that I keep coming back to Gulliver’s Travels, in which wonder produces not thoughtfulness or even curiosity but stupefaction. Forty years after Gulliver, The Female American: or, the Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield was published. It was described as “a sort of second Robinson Crusoe; full of wonders, and well calculated to make one sort of readers stare.” That anonymous reviewer caught some of Swift’s point: that wonder can lead to passivity. Also that wonder, which we usually consider in such humanistic terms, can be calculated. My new neighbor works for an ad agency; I doubt he’d find this surprising.

Saltwork

Pam and I went tonight to the opening of a show of cyanotypes and daguerreotypes by our friend Alyssa Salomon. On the walk there, we started talking about technology and wonder. I’d heard a piece on Radio Lab about EMI, a computer algorithm that analyzes a composer’s work—say, Bach—and then writes the unwritten piece, Emi Bach. Sometimes the results are stilted, but sometimes they are genuinely moving, engendering in the listener the same kinds of emotions that arise with the music of the flesh and blood Bach. We so often think of wonder as the ultra-human, as humanism in the extreme, so this kind of a program is disconcerting to say the least. (It’s possible to try to bring the human back into the picture by noting that it was a person who created EMI, but I think that misses the point.)

But I think we need to be much more thoughtful about technology and wonder, not opposing them but rather looking for ways that they work together. Here’s what Alyssa had to say about her show, called Saltwork:

Light sensitive salts produce photographs. Nearly alchemy, these salts convert light energy into physical matter. Silver salts formed with bromine and iodine, enhanced with gold, generate images on a daguerreotype plate. Iron salts on paper yield deep blue cyanotypes. Intellectually, I understand these chemistries. I am a saltworker. I concoct the formulas in my studio; employ them to retell knowledge and experience. Yet every time, their results emerge wondrous.

Is that the crucial wonder-gap, between the understandable science and the wondrous results? Where does she fit in, the artist/alchemist (who not coincidentally was the first person to tell me about the Museum of Jurassic Technology)?

On a different note, one of the things I think about when I look at Alyssa’s daguerreotypes is the difference between the way I see them and the way a nineteenth-century viewer would have seen them. Then, the wonder would have come from the new possibilities of affixing an image. (Did photography do to painting what EMI does to composing?) But now, we come to that same process belatedly: this is not something new, but something old, so that it is less the novelty than the archaic quality that fascinates me. That, and the fact that these books are hovering backward in their blue depth.

Wit and Judgment

I’ve been reading Lawrence Weschler’s Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences, in which he puts images unexpectedly side by side: a photograph of an ironworker at the World Trade Center next to Rodin’s Adam, George de La Tour’s Newborn Child next to Matisse’s Study of a Woman and Hannah Wilke’s Self Portrait. There’s something indisputably wonder-ful about all these surprises: this aha feeling that hits when we look at Velasquez next to Jeffrey Barbee and see similarities that we’ve never thought about before.

It makes me think about the distinction John Locke makes between wit and judgment:

Men who have a great deal of wit and prompt memories, have not always the clearest judgment, or deepest reason. For wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another. This is a way of proceeding quite contrary to metaphor and allusion wherein, for the most part, lies that entertainment and pleasantry of wit which strikes so lively on the fancy, and is therefore so acceptable to all people.’

The eighteenth century is supposed to be the great century of wit, but it’s also a century that suspected wit : Addison distinguishes true wit from false wit in Spectator 62, and Johnson disapproves of the metaphysicals’ propensity of yoking disparate ideas together with violence. To compare love to a compass, as Donne did, was to pull together two things that Johnson thought should stay separated.

A lot of academic work goes into judgment: learning how to distinguish ideas one from the other. But a lot of wonder, by contrast, comes in seeing the connections that others have overlooked. It’s the reason that interdisciplinary work is often the most exciting, because there a writer is making connections that are “agreeable to the fancy.” I wonder if it’s also the reason that academic specialization can kill wonder: because we get better and better and making distinctions (it’s not uncommon, after all, to be “misled by similitude”), and worse at making unexpected connections. But the whole nature of metaphor is making connections. I’d love to read Weschler’s book as an introduction to poetic metaphor.

Hoaxes and unmasking wonder

I love the idea of thinking about pseudo scientific documents–Fontcuberta could fit in with Lawrence Weschler‘s book, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology. (Allan Rosenbaum told me a few days ago that Weschler is coming to VCU this spring.) It all makes me wonder (there’s that word again) about the relationship between wonder and hoaxes–Are hoaxes an unmasking of wonder, showing us that our wonder leaves us open to fraud, or is a hoax an ultimate expression of wonder, blurring lines between reality and imagination? there’s a line in Emma Donaghu’s story about Mary Toft, the 18th century woman who gave birth to 18 baby bunnies, where one of the doctors who uncovers the hoax really wanted the miracle to be true, even as he tried to unmask it.

Fucuberta and Pseudo-Science

From Pam:

Wow (Maybe the black seadevil should be part of the masculinity symposium)

I like the idea of wonder in science. This brings to mind the Spanish artist John Fontcuberta who created pseudo scientific documents – so convincing that at first they appear to be factual.

(Fontcuberta’s frames his work this way)

Here is a little clip from a gallery review -

About 1987 Fontcuberta and Formiguera apparently made a startling discovery. During a visit to Scotland, in the attic of a house in Glasgow, they found the archive of Dr. Ameisenhaufen who had died in a car crash in 1955. After further research into the life and work of the Doctor, they learned that his discoveries, which document what appears to be many previously-unknown, bizarre genetic mishaps, had provoked great debate and controversy during his time. But can any of it be trueNULL

Solenoglypha Polipodida is a snake-like creature, with twelve feet, that is supposed to be able to paralyze its prey with a high-pitched whistle. And there’s a squirrel with webbed feet and a snake tail – Myodorifera colubercauda. There is Micostrium vulgaris, a menacing weapon-swinging mollusk, and Centaurus Neandertalensis, which Dr. Ameisenhaufen didn’t known whether to treat as a semi-humanoid, as a living myth, or simply as a zoological specimen. As one reviewer put it: This modern-day bestiary is every bit as fascinating as the strange illuminations of the medieval age, and all the more disconcerting as the camera seems to bear undeniable witness to the beasties’ meanderings. (Melissa Rombout, Boston).

http://imagearts.ryerson.ca/imagesandideas/pages/reference.cfm?page=222 (see a photo and more about the project here)

Absorbing Seadevils

I keep meaning to set up a document to jot notes about the Wonder course. Right now, I’m in the middle of a NY Review of Books article by Tim Flannery about two books: The Deep (Claire Nouvian) and The Silent Deep (Tony Koslow). Here are the paragraphs that made me stop and make notes:

To understand the full extent of the constraints that the abyss places on life, consider the black seadevil. it’s a somber, grapefruit-sized globe of a fish–seemingly all fangs and gape–with a “fishing rod” affixed between its eyes whose luminescent bait jerks above the trap-like mouth. Clearly, food is a priority for this creature, for it can swallow a victim nearly as large as itself. But that is only half the story, for this description pertains solely to the female: the male is a minnow-like being content to feed on specks in the sea–until, that is, he encounters his sexual partner.

The first time that a black seadevil meets his much larger mate, he bites her and never lets go. Over time, his veins and arteries grow together with hers, until he becomes a fetus-like dependent who receives from his mate’s blood all the food, oxygen, and hormones he requires to exist. The cost of this utter dependence is a loss of function in all of his organs but his testicles, but even those, it seems, are stimulated to action solely at the pleasure of the engulfing female. When she has had her way with him, the male seadevil simply vanishes, having been completely absorbed and dissipated into the flesh of his paramour, leaving her free to seek another mate. Not even Dante imagined such a fate.

I don’t know what we’d do with a description like that, which tops anything from the Museum of Jurrasic Technology. But it makes me think that we need to talk to some folks in Gilmer about wonder in science.

Can we do something with Elizabeth King’s work and the automatons of the Renaissance, which I think showed up in their cabinets of curiosities? (These also remind me of the short stories of ETA Hoffman, in which young men repeatedly fall in love with women who turn out to be automatons.)
11/30/2007