The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities
Page 28
The unusual inclusion of such readily identifiable elements strongly hints that Rats is based on an actual event. The precise nature of this event is obscured by our distance in time from the origins of this print, as well as Stigmata’s notoriously poor record-keeping. Lambshead’s own acquisition notes on the print are strangely sparse as well. Art world rumor whispers that the print depicts a scene from Karneval der Naviscaputer, an occasional festival of deviant performance art held within East Berlin’s underground club culture during the mid-to-late 1960s.
The astute observer would do well to attempt deconstruction of some of the other elements in Rats. Art unexamined is, after all, art unexperienced. In this case, even a close examination is unlikely to reveal the mundane truths behind the print. The emotive truths are, however, most certainly available.
Consider the chain that the rats are climbing. Why do they ascend? From where have they come? A hook dangles or swings not far below the lower rat. It appears ornamented in both shape and detail. Bejeweled, this cannot be an artefact of the working man. Nor does it conform to the Continental notion of kunstbrukt, that design should be both beautiful and functional. This hook is curious and attractive, but hardly something to lift a bale of opium from the decks of a shabby Ceylonese trawler. One must also consider the possibility hinted at in the print’s title, that these are the plague rats Renfield carries into the world for his master Dracula, as depicted repeatedly in cinema.
Examine the chain itself. In Stigmata’s rendering, this could just as easily be a motorcycle chain as a cargo chain or an anchor chain. Were that to be the case, we might assume the rats were being drawn upward, toward the top verge of the image. The dynamism of their forms suggests that they are more than mere passengers. Still, is that no different from a man walking up an escalator?
Taking the Rats to Riga, by Stigmata (1969); image from the collection of Eric Schaller.
Once we have evaluated the context in which the rats appear, the image begins to lose its coherence. Most observers consider the smaller lines in the background to be more distant chains of the same sort the rats are climbing, but Priest has advanced the argument that those may be strings of lightbulbs (Struggles in European Aesthetics, Eden Moore Press, London, 1978). Her assertion is undercut by the strong front lighting on the primary figures in the composition, but given Stigmata’s well-documented disregard for artistic convention, this is an inherently irresolvable issue.
The most visually dominant element in Rats is the tentacled skeleton in the left side of the image. Sarcastically dubbed “The Devil Dog” in a critical essay by Robyn (Contemporary Images, Malachite Books, Ann Arbor, 1975), this name has stuck, and is sometimes misattributed as Stigmata’s title for the work. In stark contrast with the climbing rats, there is nothing natural or realistic about the Devil Dog. Rather, it combines elements of fictional nightmare ranging from Lovecraft’s imaginary Cthulhu mythos to the classic Satanic imagery of Christian art.
Priest (op. cit.) nevertheless suggests that the Devil Dog may, in fact, be representational. Presuming even a grain of truth, this theory could represent the source of Lambshead’s interest in acquiring Rats for his collection, given the doctor’s well-known dedication to his own extensive wunderkammer. It is difficult for the observer to seriously credit Priest’s notion, however, as she advances no reasonable theory as to what creature or artefact the Devil Dog could represent. She simply uses scare words such as “mutant” and “chimera” without substantiation. The burden of proof for such an outlandish assertion lies very strongly with the theorist, not with her critics.
Robyn and other observers have offered the far simpler hypothesis that the Devil Dog is an expression of Stigmata’s own deeper fears. The open jaw seems almost to have been caught in the act of speech. While the eyes are vacant, the detail along the center line of the skull and above the orbitals can be interpreted as flames rather than horns or spurs. For a deep analysis of this interpretation, see Abraham (Oops, I Ate the Rainbow: Challenges of Visual Metaphor, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1986). The tentacles dangle, horrifying yet not precisely threatening to either the artist or the observer. Rising above and behind is an empty rib cage—heartless, gutless, a body devoid of those things that make us real. This is a monster that shames but does not shamble, that bites but does not shit, that writhes but does not grasp.
The most important element in Rats is, without a doubt, the hand rising up to brush at the Devil Dog’s prominent, stabbing beak. It is undeniably primate, and equally so undeniably inhuman. Still, a strong critical consensus prevails that this is Stigmata’s own hand intruding to touch the engine of his fear. While the rats seek to escape up their chain, this long-fingered ape reaches deeper into the illuminated shadows, touching the locus of terror without quite grasping it. The parallels to Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (ca. 1511) are inescapable and disturbing. Who is creating whom here? Is Stigmata being brought to life by his own fears? Or does he birth them into this print, as so many artists do, to release his creation on an unsuspecting world?
We can never answer those questions for Stigmata. Reticent in life, he, like all who have gone before, is thoroughly silent in death. Each of us can answer those questions for ourselves, however, seeing deeper into this print than the casual horror and blatant surrealism to what lies beneath. Much as Lambshead must have done when he bought the piece from the court-appointed master liquidating Stigmata’s troubled estate, via telephone auction in 1993.
What wonder lies in yonder cabinet? Taking the Rats to Riga is a door to open the eyes of the mind. Like all worthwhile art, the piece invites us on a journey that has no path nor map, nor even an endpoint. Only a process, footsteps through the mind of an artist now forever lost to us.
The Book of Categories
Handled, Damaged, Partially Repaired, Damaged Again, and Then Documented by Charles Yu
0 What there is
1 Proper name
The full name for The Book of Categories[1] is as follows:
THE BOOK OF CATEGORIES
(A CATALOG OF CATALOGS
(BEING ITSELF A VOLUME ENCLOSING
A CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE
(SUCH STRUCTURE BEING
COMMONLY REFERRED TO AS AN
(IDEA)-CAGE)))
2 Nature of
2.1 Basic properties of
The Book of Categories is composed of two books, one placed inside the other.
The outer book (formally known as The Outer Book) is a kind of frame wrapped around the inner book, which is known as, uh, The Inner Book.
2.1.1 Paper
The Inner Book’s pages are made of a highly unusual type of paper, which is made of a substance known as (A)CTE, so-called because of its (apocrypha)-chemical-thermo-ephemeral properties, the underlying chemistry of which is not well understood, but the practical significance of which is a peculiar characteristic: with the proper instrument, (A)CTE can be sliced and re-sliced again, page-wise, an indefinite number of times.
2.1.1.1 Method for creation of new pages
Each cut must be swift and precise, and the angle must be metaphysically exact, but if the operation is performed correctly, there is no known lower bound to the possible thinness of a single sheet of (A)CTE paper.
A photograph of pages from The Book of Categories, origin unknown.
2.1.1.1.1 Page count
To wit, as of the time of this writing, despite having total thickness (in a closed position) of just over two inches, The Book of Categories contains no less than 3,739,164 pages.[2]
3 Intended Purpose
3.1 Conjecture
This property of repeated divisibility is believed to be necessary for The Book of Categories to function in its intended purpose (the Intended Purpose).[3]
3.2 Theories regarding Intended Purpose
There are four major theories on what the Intended Purpose is. The first three are unknown. The fourth theory is known but is wrong.
The fi
fth theory of the Intended Purpose (the Fifth Theory) is not yet a theory, it’s still more of a conjecture, but it has a lot of things going for it and everyone’s really pulling for the Fifth Theory and thinks it’s well on its way to theory-hood.
3.2.1 Unsubstantiated assertion (status: in dispute)
Whatever the Intended Purpose may be, this much is clear: the book is a system, method, and space for a comprehensive categorization of all objects, categories of objects, categories of categories of objects, etc.
4 What there is not
5 Mode of propagation
5.1 How the book changes hands
On the left-facing inside cover of The Framing Book, we find the word “DEDICATED,” and underneath, two lines labeled
“From: ________________ ”
and
“To: __________________ ”.
5.2 Each possessor of the book
attempts to impose his numbered ordering of the world by adding categories.
5.3 At some point whether out of frustration or a sense of completion, or a desire to impose such system on others,
a possessor will pass the book on to another user, by excising his or her name from the To line, placing the name in the From line, and then writing in the name of the next possessor of the book in the To line. The excision should be performed with the same instrument used to cut new pages.
6 As you may have realized
6.1 What this means is
The Book of Categories contains what is, in essence, its own chain of title. It is a system of world-ordering, which has, encoded into itself, a history of its own revision and is, in that sense, the opposite of a palimpsest. Nothing is ever overwritten in The Book of Categories, only interspersed, interlineated, or, to be more precise, inter-paginated.
7 Why
7.1 Why
would someone ever give this book away?
8 A man
8.1Looking for what was there
8.1.1Trying to name it
8.1.1.1 Naming being one way
to locate something not quite lost, and not quite found
8.1.1.1.1 A name also seeming
to be a necessary AND sufficient condition to possession of an idea, a name being a kind of idea-cage.
9 Something else you need to realize about the book
9.1 Is that
The sheer number of pages in the book is such that ordinary human fingers cannot turn the pages in a reliably repeatable fashion. Simply breathing in the same room as the book will cause the book’s pages to flail about wildly. Even the Brownian motion of particles has been known to move several hundred pages at a time.
9.2 In fact, if you ever lose your place in the book,
it is unlikely that you will ever be able to return to the same page again in your lifetime
[INSERTED]
6.1.1 One reason
why someone would give this book away: at some point, whether out of frustration or a sense of completion, or a desire to impose such sys- tem on others, a possessor will pass the book on to another user, by
excising his or her name from the To line on the
[INSERTED]
5.2.1 Each possessor of the book [4]
The various possessors of the book can be traced, from which4
10 A man named Chang Hsueh-liang
has possessed the book seventy-three times. No other individual has owned it more than six times.
10.1 Little is known about Chang, a general in the Chinese army,
except that he is believed to have lost a child, a newborn daughter, in a freak accident while on a brief holiday with his family.
10.1.1 The incident
Onlookers who witnessed the incident say there were no words in their language to describe what occurred, only that “the water took her” and that although “nothing impossible happened,” it was, statistically speaking, a “once in a universe event.”
10.1.1.1 His daughter
was five weeks old when she died. For reasons unknown, she had yet to be named.
10.2 It is unclear whether Chang
was repeatedly seeking out the book, or it kept finding its way back to him.
10.3 A medal of some sort, and two insects
are believed to have been placed inside the book by Chang.
10.3.1 The general problem of categorization
Although it is worth noting that the location of these objects is unstable, due to a phenomenon particular to The Book of Categories known as “wobbling,” which can result from stored conceptual potential energy escaping through the frame of The Inner Book and resonating with The Outer Book.
10.5 It is clear from certain sites in the book
that Chang remained obsessed with naming what had happened to his child.
10.5.1 Chang’s last entry
is a clump of (A)CTE paper consisting of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of blank pages, known as The Chang Region. On each page of The Chang Region of the book is written what appears to be an ancient form of a Chinese character. Scholars disagree as to the identity of the character.
11 Eventually, a possessor of the book comes to realize
how hard it is to find any given page, lost among the pages. Trying to find that slice, to cut through it on either side, before the page has been lost.
[INSERTED]
8.1.1.1.1.1 A name actually being
a memorial to the site where an idea once
rested, momentarily, before moving on.
8.1.1.1.1.1.1 If you listen carefully,
you can hear it in there, but when you look inside, the idea-cage is always empty, and in its place, the concrete, the particular, something formerly alive, now dead and smashed.
[1] Which itself is listed in The Book of Books of Categories, vol. III, p. 21573, row K, column FF.
[2] And counting.
[3] The Intended Purpose is unknown, so this is basically just a wild-assed guess.
[4] Lambshead himself has been the caretaker of the book on two separate occasions, each time receiving it from Bertrand Russell, and each time passing it to Alfred North Whitehead.
Objects Discovered in a Novel Under Construction
Documented by Alan Moore
The following items have been retrieved from the construction site of an uncompleted novel, Jerusalem, where completion of the structure’s uppermost level has been delayed by unanticipated setbacks that are unrelated to the project.
The site itself is gigantic in its dimensions, with more than half a million words already in place and the three-tier edifice as yet only a little more than two-thirds of the way into its lengthy building process. The intimidating silence that pervades the vast and temporarily abandoned landscape is exacerbated by the absence of the novel’s characters and by the lack of any background noise resulting from the engineering and the excavation usually associated with such ventures.
Making a considerable contribution to the already unsettling ambience is the anomalous (and even dangerous) approach to architecture that is evident in the unfinished work: the lowest floor, responsible for bearing the immense load of the weightier passages and chambers overhead, seems to be built entirely of distressed red brick and grey slate roofing tiles with much of it already derelict or in a state of imminent collapse. Resting on this, the massive second tier would seem to be constructed mostly out of wood and has been brightly decorated with painted motifs that would appear to be more suited to a nursery or school environment, contrasted with the bleak and even brutal social realism that’s suggested by the weathered brickwork and decrepit terraces immediately below.