The act of shedding a part of the self in order to save the rest is, in fact, common among organisms (such as lizards shedding their tails or the so-called scratching tic) as a primitive yet powerful means of self-preservation. The curious and interesting aspect of Bermudez’s traumatic experience is that while he was degraded at the foot of the gallows, it was not his human self that cut off a part of itself but his earlier identification of his self with a horse. Since Bermudez’s ego had already fully identified with a horse, at the moment of the traumatizing blow, it was his equine self that cut parts of itself in order to save the integrity of the rest of the horse (or, more accurately, Bermudez’s full mental identification with a horse). When Bermudez’s ego dismembered itself to ensure the survival of the greater part, a void was left in his nervous system, a deep hole punctured in the horse that had already replaced the mental human image of the self. Knocked down at the foot of the gallows and his ego dismembered, Bermudez’s equine self had no option to restore its “lost chunk” (Spielrein) other than by filling in the new cavity with the invasive force of trauma that could neither be expelled nor be allowed to shatter the entire nervous system. The cross-horse is precisely the mental object created by these traumatic tensions and breaches in Bermudez’s psychic structure, the beheaded horse was permanently trephinated by the gallows, which was but the mental identification of the traumatic force. Spielrein writes that not only the damaged cervical vertebrae of the horse tightly locked into the wooden end of the gallows but also the intrusive traumatic force of the gallows impaled the horse from precisely where it had already torn off one of its parts. The upright pole of the gallows was re-erected as the restored cervical vertebrae of the horse, the triangle formed by the cross-beam its new cranium and the noose-hole the space between the mandible and the higher jaw.
An offspring of a traumatic invasion, a traumatic object with a spontaneous anatomical structure, the Equcrux intriguingly does not signify a receding tendency toward earlier states of the evolutionary chain. In other words, for Bermudez, the trauma of the mock execution did not—unlike other instances of trauma and toppling of the ego—cause the individual to relapse into an earlier state of evolution when the species was still crawling, due to the lack of spinal developments. On the contrary, the Equcrux melds the bestial locomotion or four-legged model of walking with the anatomy of a straightened spine, which characterizes the bipedal species. The quadrupedal horse gets a new spine that exhibits the traits of a straightened—perhaps even too straightened—spinal curvature that has been transplanted by the L-shaped and the obsessively perpendicular composition of the gallows. For this reason alone, the spinal anatomy of the Equcrux cannot be compared with the spinal formations in monstrous mental categories, such as that of a centaur, in which the curved spine of the horse shifts to the less curved spine of the human. In the Equcrux, the spinal curvature is not produced by extending a more curved spine to a less curved one; it is the creation of a mathematical marriage between a curve (the quadrupedal spine) and a straight line (the gallows).
Spielrein continues by stating that from the day of the great humiliation onward, the Equcrux became the sole mental and artistic image of the Spanish portraitist, for it was not really a passing traumatic object anymore but his very self and psychic structure that had turned into a full-fledged object. After a monthlong pause, Bermudez recommenced writing his diaries, which were, this time, exclusively dominated by his ambitious rants about replicating the Equcrux by any means or method of fabrication, and his immutable and recurring dreams, wherein he was always a drove of gallows-horses rushing down in great numbers from a hilltop toward a city.
The Equcrux, or Gaspar Bermudez, as he was traumatically conceived in the form of the gallows-horse, is currently kept in the Hall of the Man-Object in an empty vitrine labeled Gaspar Bermudez, the gallows-horse. A motto runs under the label: ¡Suelta a los raros!
ENDNOTES
1. “It has been suggested that mimicry such as that of a chameleon is an impulse for dissolving back to the environment from which the individual was once relatively segregated; it is a force that is temporarily lent to the individual entity by nature. In using mimicry, the individual unconsciously utilizes the impulse for dissolution (or death) in order to gain some kind of profit (surviving, preying, or living in harmony with something else). But in reality, in using mimicry, the individual exercises the indifference of its environment to meaningful change and intention, that nature does not have any interest or motive to create meaningful differences, and that even in its most cunning and meaningful acts, the individual affirms the dissolution whereby all differences (including its own) and meanings are eradicated. The semantic mimicry that the gallows-horse undertakes is, in the same vein, neither a tendency to return to a meaningful semantic environment nor a meaningful yet cryptic act in itself. Instead, it is an act that reveals the fragile construction of meaning as the aftereffect of a compulsion to return to a meaningless abyss that precedes all patterns, signs, and signifiers. The gallows-horse communicates a meaning by mimicking its sentential environment, and in doing so, it demonstrates how meaning is the result of mimicry, which is, in fact, a compulsion to flatten all semantic differences and return once again to the meaningless abyss that lingers behind the words horse and gallows, as well as any other word, sign, idea, or image.” (Richard Graansvort, From Cryptography to Neurolinguistic Mimicry in Thackery T. Lambshead’s Memoirs, London: Samuel Buscard Institute, 2009)
2. Shortly after the death of Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead and the publication of a number of his memoirs, the pseudonymous Pravda Online columnist Novena Brines published an exposé on the life of the British scientist. According to Brines, Lambshead was an overseas coordinating officer of MI6, whose scientific journeys and seemingly scandalous Communist sympathies were only shields to protect his true identity. Among the documents and sources that Brines cites as evidences and clues, are Lambshead’s memoirs. Brines particularly focuses on the name “gallows-horse.” She considers gallows-horse as a codename or what she calls an operation-marker. Brines argues that in the majority of cases, the name “gallows-horse” marks an imminent launch of an operation. In her exposé, Brines cites as an example the note “January 10, 1936: The sky is clear and the gallows-horse reigns; canaries sing from crogdaene.” She explains that the note is dated one day before the British MI6 officers departed from Croydon Airport toward the Canary Islands in order to move and protect General Francisco Franco for the nationalist military coup that began with the code “Over all of Spain, the sky is clear” and ignited the Spanish Civil War. Brines, however, fails to provide any more convincing examples or concrete documents and mostly resorts to rumors to the extent that, in a public apology, Pravda’s editor in chief called Brine’s speculation “a wild conspiracy theory more fitting for an American gossip column than Pravda.”
Further Oddities
Further Oddities
Through the catalyst of a generous grant from the Institute for Further Study, additional research into Lambshead’s cabinet was undertaken expressly for this volume. Each item selected has been the subject of intense debate by Lambsheadeans and Lambsheadologists for years, while Lambshead’s own attachment to these items varied from indifference to obsession.
For example, although Lambshead took it upon himself to document (admittedly, in a sardonic mood) the provenance of the Sir Locust armor, it was found upon his death in his clothes closet—wearing lingerie and a sunflower hat, with an Oxford jacket draped over it. One armhole had been turned upward and blocked off with an ashtray that overflowed with Punch cigar stubs. The Thing in the Jar, on the other hand, as chronicled by Michael Cisco, seemed to inspire not just a flurry of speculation as to its origins, but also a pervasive emotion of profound regret, along with bald-faced fictions of a sort not displayed by Lambshead elsewhere in his long recorded history. Items like the two art pieces, The Singing Fish and Taking the Rats to Riga, Lambshead kept in a small locked room, along wi
th a scandalous Chagall and a Picasso titled Quarantine for the Infected. The two times Lambshead possessed The Book of Categories, it also resided therein. The room could only be opened using the Castleblakeney key, which tended to discourage idle curiosity.
Some might question the editorial decision to include research from Amal El-Mohtar and Caitlín R. Kiernan, given their criticism of, and wild theories about, Lambshead. However, it should be noted that the doctor himself, in his will, cited both “as members of the loyal opposition” who should be given “as much equal opportunity to feast on my corpse as anyone else. They’ve earned it.”
The Thing in the Jar
Researched and Documented by Michael Cisco
The Thing in the Jar was presented to Dr. Lambshead by an African anthropologist specializing in the study of Europeans, one Prof. Manjakanony Ramahefajonatana, of the University of Antananarivo, Antananarivo, Madagascar, in exchange for some assistance rendered in accumulating a representative collection of items of contemporary everyday English use. The object was discovered by Prof. Ramahefajonatana’s principal research assistant, Vololoniaina Rasendranoro, who, owing to a condition of amnesia brought on by a clout she received on the head as she was escaping from a burning barn in Essex, was entirely unable ever to account for how she came across it. The only definitely known fact about the jar’s past is that it was found in England, and does not appear to have originated elsewhere.
The object is a cylindrical glass jar, fifteen inches tall and six inches in diameter, weighing about twenty-five pounds, with a bronze base and lid. The bottom is wrapped in a fringed skirt of faded red velvet with gold tassels, and bears at its center an engraving of an owl in semi-profile and the legend “Griscyple Bros.—1737.” The top is hermetically sealed with black wax.
The jar contains an anthropic creature.
This object is associated with a manuscript in Dr. Lambshead’s own hand, consisting of a great many sheets of different hotel stationery, contained in a manila file folder. The folder’s projecting tab is covered with a stack of adhesive labels, one laid atop another. The exposed, uppermost label had something written on it which was then aggressively scribbled over, and the rest of the folder is leopard-spotted with scribbled-out words or phrases. The only unmarred writing on the folder itself consists of three words inscribed in a column on the inner surface of the front, or untabbed, half of the folder. They are, from top to bottom: MUSHROOMS, BACON, OVALTINE.
Not unlike the folder, the manuscript is also heavily emended, with many strikethroughs and insertions. The battered, fraying pages show signs of having been much handled. Not only are all the pages from different hotels, but they are written and marked in a variety of media, including ink, pencil, lipstick, crayon, pastels, and, in one case, a dry and crusty reddish-brown fluid that has the characteristics of blood. The alterations are, more often than not, written in a medium different from that of the older text. The implements used also must have been highly varied, ranging from rare and expensive Sheaffer or Pelikan fountain pens to the quills of exotic birds to ordinary run-of-the-mill ballpoint pens and No. 2 pencils to sharpened fragments of bone or medical implements dipped in ink or stain. In one case, a correction is actually cut into the paper with a sharp instrument, perhaps a scalpel, and there are minute discolorations around the incisions suggesting the scalpel had been in surgical use quite recently when the correction was made, or, perhaps, that Dr. Lambshead had been struck by an idea in the very midst of performing an operation, and had paused to make the change in the text using literally what he had in his hand just at that moment.
In content, the manuscript consists of a list and seven fragmentary narratives or descriptions, all of which seem intended to account for the existence of the Thing in the Jar. All of them are, also, mutually exclusive, and it is impossible to ascertain which of them, if any, is the true explanation.
The list reads, in part, as follows:
imp / witch’s brat
immature yeti
immature yama / yamantaka
buffalo spirit
buffalo minotaur
hoax by M.
motile fruiting body from enormous Kamchatkan mycelium
found in meteor / chrysolite
automaton replacement for lost child, abused, becomes monster
Japanese legend: pregnant mother murdered, stillborn child avenger
stillborn specimen, ankylopsoriasis
found blocking sewer drain under big city
infant gorilla raised by crocodiles
wandered into small German town in 1762 with note
discovered in exhumed coffin in place of body: cadaver changeling
conceit of insane taxidermist
small island North Atlantic where wrecked Vikings married wolves
mature specimen of gnome
“Thing in Jar” as first reproduced within Ramahefajonatana’s dissertation, Les Articles des Usages Quotidiens des Communautes Rurales et Semi-Rurales de l’Angleterre du milieu du Siècle Vingtième (Paris: Plon, 1957)
According to the first narrative, the Thing is a fetish, created for some religious purpose. A sentence to the effect that it was made by the Akimel O’odham people of the American Southwest is struck out and somewhat ambiguously modified to mean something else that isn’t exactly clear. The intention seems to be that this fetish was found among or traded from, or possibly to, the Akimel O’odham, and/or might be Aztec in origin. The text does clearly state that the fetish was placed in the jar by a white American individual who acquired it by theft. Many possible names for this recipient, or thief, are given, all of them crossed out: Buckwaldo Mudthumper, Eustace Bucke, Cornelius Abereustace, Haldernablou Yuchachev, Steven Williams, Shi Mu-ke, Beldu Terrance, Josephine Mouse, Melinda Postoffice, Macfitzhugh O’Donaldin, Wigberto Fuentes, Mustafa Mukhtar al Kateb, Bradford Frederic. The story breaks off after mention of this person, with no indication of its intended ending.
The second manuscript bluntly identifies the Thing as an aborted minotaur. This is cancelled and replaced with the phrase “reverse minotaur,” meaning not the offspring of a bull and a woman, as in the fable, but of a man and a cow. A partial list of the less well-known of the Greek islands is included; most likely, Dr. Lambshead intended to select one of these as the setting for his story, but abandoned it altogether before doing so.
The third and longest fragment is a rambling narrative, based on documented events, of an expedition to Saibai in the Torres Strait, and the Biak-Numfoor rain forests of the Schouten Islands. After many pages of laborious description mainly devoted to detailing their efforts to capture a living specimen of the Biak Naked-backed Fruit Bat (Dobsonia emersaa), Dr. Lambshead turns his attention to the island of Saibai and the Zaman Wislin cargo cult he and his companions discovered there. One practitioner in particular, a “pariah” who was compelled to live apart from the other inhabitants of the island, was rumored to have made strange use of an infant for magical purposes. Deleted segments of the story made this person a member of the cult in good standing at first, then “a demented European convert,” but in the end Dr. Lambshead chose the native pariah variant. It was said that this man [“woman” was written first, then struck out] used to put a baby in a pot of boiling elixir [“water” had been written first, then struck out]. There is a careted phrase for insertion that indicates this was to be after incantations had been chanted over the baby for . . . and then this is followed by only a blank, presumably to be filled in later, but which remains empty.
When the enchanted baby would be placed in the pot, the boiling fluid would recoil away from the baby’s body. Unharmed in any way, the baby would go to sleep in the warm pot, “in a kind of magnetic bubble” that prevented the fluid from injuring it. Meanwhile, “the crazed practitioner would solemnly open an elaborately carved box, and, with many gestures of sanctification and holiness, take out from the box a battered, ramshackle pair of aviator headphones. Handling them with exaggerated care, he would ins
ert the plug at the end of the headphone cable into a crude, jury-rigged jack, basically just a hole cut into a large, hollow nut, affixed to the side of the pot by a stinking lump of coal tar. Then, placing the headphones on his own head, this man would pantomime efforts to ‘tune’ the pot by turning knobs he’d fashioned out of spools, and attached to a board. Through these headphones, the man claimed to be able to hear the voices of ancestral spirits, and of the gods themselves, talking to him. When asked what they sounded like, he raised his voice to a high falsetto and faintly repeated distinct phrases, much separated in time. While some were in Kalau Kauau Ya [the native language], most were American English. I plainly heard him say, ‘I am the one who does not come when called.’ What could be discerned of the remainder in English consisted of fragments: ‘. . . the water of skulls . . .’ ‘. . . too much is happening when I try to sleep . . . sleep . . . sleep . . . in my sleep . . .’ ‘. . . anyone dead must be treated or they may do more . . .’ With this last, he began to shake violently, and threw a fit that seemed to me to have no obvious somatic cause.”
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities Page 23