“The Ecstasy” by John Donne

PRIMARY SOURCE: "The Ecstasy" (1635)
Context

• Publication: Likely composed at the same time as the Satires in residence in London, ca. 1593-6, and circulated in manuscript. Up to this point in his life, Donne only struggled with his closeted Catholicism and choice of profession, not the financial, legal, and marital woes that would consume him later. "The Ecstasy" was published in Donne's Songs and Sonnets four years after his death in 1631, in 1635. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars read Donne as one of the foremost metaphysical poets, though not in communication with others due to his purported manuscript circulation. Scholars also read Donne as a Catholic at war with himself.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, metaphysical poetry.

Content

• Form: Alternating quatrains in iambic tetrameter.
• Genre: Love poetry, meditation.
• Conceit: The lovers in bed join souls, and perfect one another.
• Other notes: 
• This is Diadima's idea of love from the Symposium. 
• Famous quote:
  "When love with one another so
  Interanimates two souls,
  That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
  Defects of loneliness controls. "

Art in the Age of Greasy Surfaces, Pt. 2

This is part of a three-part series relating contemporary aesthetic philosophy to early modern print culture. I freely admit that I have never taken a class in philosophy, art history, or multimodal composition. Please excuse my amateurish attempts at all three.

2. What I Talk About When I Talk About Surfaces

Here is one recipe for greasy Renaissance ink, adapted from Andrew Pettegree's The Book in the Renaissance:

1. Gather up some wine lees from your buddy, the vintner.
2. Don't feed it to the pigs! Burn it for a nice black soot.
3. Add some varnish to the soot, such as linseed oil. Mix well.
4. The current mixture will probably be a little thin. Crack an egg and separate the yolk. Mix the whites with the soot-varnish mixture. You can feed the yolk to the pig, or add it to your table beer.
5. Print while drunk.

Here's another recipe from Jo Wheeler's Renaissance Secrets, Recipes and Formulas:

1. (Start early on this step.) Order some German vitriol (iron sulphate) from Venice. It should be yellowish green upon arrival. Also order some arabic gum.
2. Gather some oak galls. Crush. Soak for six days in water.
3. Reduce the gall mixture, add the German vitriol and arabic gum.
4. Print while fresh.

If you cut either recipe with water or another additive, you'll get runny ink that stains too much and doesn't stick on the page. Vellum and rag-paper are excellent vehicles for grease.

I wrote about digital networks and greasy surfaces in the last post, and I pointed to the philosophical pairing of the network and the surface: in a word, relational aesthetics. I wonder whether there's a meaningful sympathy in the comparison of an ontological surface and an artist's surface, or a computer network and a network of being. I learned about the network-surface binary through Graham Harman's synthesis of networks and being. Networks with independent objects are two of the basic tenets of a subset of speculative realism known as Object Oriented Ontology. While most people deploy Object Oriented Ontology for its nonhuman ontology--and typically, then, an ecocritical politics--OOO also contains a powerful critique of correlation. Harman wants Actor-Network Theory to dig below the surfaces, and he wants to add a second dimension of or intentional objects to the network.Networks, in this sense, refer to Bruno Latour's ontology. Harman quotes Latour's germinal anecdote in Prince of Networks:

I knew nothing, then, of what I am writing now but simply repeated to myself: 'Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else'... It and me, them and us, we mutually defined ourselves. And for the first time in my life I saw things unreduced and set free. (13)

Latour's thought wipes out substance from ontology. Each actant resembles an event in Whitehead's thought, yet without recourse to God (as in Whitehead) for correlation with other actants. Instead, one actants is always separated from a second by a third. To refer again to Harman's Prince of Networks:

Whenever one actant has some effect on another, this can be described as 'action at a distance'--all actants, by the mere fact of being themselves, are distant from each other, split off from others by unknown firewalls. (48)

Harman uses the language of the internet, as in the term "firewalls," but I do not mean to naively apply Latour's network to the internet anymore than I would apply Heidegger's surfaces to JK Keller's. In fact,

• the challenge posed by Sterling et al. asks whether the internet is actually interacting (in the sense of an actant) with meatspace, 
• and the challenge posed by Keller's art asks whether humans can ever engage beyond the surface of our technology (with the inhuman actant of technology).

In a lecture at Carnegie Mellon's Institute of Fine Art, Harman makes a few cool moves towards a non-relational aesthetics. The central point, however, is that there are firewalls between relations, and relations can never exhaust objects. But to answer the above questions from an OOO perspective:

• Is the internet actually interacting? Absolutely! But the internet also has alliances with things like electrical grids, and objects in those alliances engage each other in ways we can't access.
• Can humans engage beyond the surface? Not quite! Depth eventually triumphs over surface. A work of art is neither entirely autonomous nor entirely surface.

What, then, about the other greasy surface--the rag-paper print? The printed page is another object, with its own firewalled history and alliances. The printed rag-paper page has a strong alliance with a vat of linen rags, yet a firewalled relationship with electronic media. The printed page also has a strong alliance with illustrations, yet a firewalled relationship with sculpture.

Following McLuhan, however, digital objects enhance the alphabetical properties of print culture yet obsolesce the chemical properties of rag-paper. In the next post, I want to bring more early modern print culture into this discussion: more, that is, than ink recipes.

Art in the Age of Greasy Surfaces Pt. 1

This is part of a three-part series relating contemporary aesthetic philosophy to early modern print culture. I freely admit that I have never taken a class in philosophy, art history, or multimodal composition. Please excuse my amateurish attempts at all three.

1. The Brief and Wondrous Life of the New Aesthetic

In DIS magazine, Nick Scholl asked, "Okay, are we done talking about post-internet, new aesthetic, death of painting, etc.?" Scholl was referring to JK Keller. JK Keller creates patterns of oil on iPhone screens, captures those reflective screens on video, and then transforms the video into .gifs for the internet. (Go look at some.) The .gifs animate light reflected across a jeejah screen after a hundred oily finger-swipes. The finger-swipe medium is grimy, as grimy as all of the dirt missing from Apple's perfectly white and silver surfaces. Indeed, Keller's surfaces subvert easy analogy of [ digital : surface :: physical : depth ] . Keller reminds us that we see the internet through a glass darkly. Dark, stinky and oily, meatspace (in the parlance of the cyberpunks) obfuscates our access to the Realm of (digital) Forms: the internet.

The internet, according to the New Aesthetic, found its way into meatspace; better, it has enjoyed "an eruption of the digital into the physical." "Eruption"--a fantastically Freudian word that exposes the masculinist tendencies of the tech-design crowd--is conspicuously absent in the introduction to the New Aesthetic by James Bridle. Birdle eschews "eruption" in favor of total epistemological tearage. Bridle articulates that tearage by way of Tom Taylor: "It’s 2011, and I have no idea what anything is or does anymore." "Anything is or does" interchangeably, within Taylor's apparently functionalist system. Against modernist functionalism, David Pye wrote in 1964 that,

The concept of function in design, and even the doctrine of functionalism, might be worth a little attention if things ever worked. It is, however, obvious that they do not (The Nature of Design, 10). 

Tom Taylor may have no idea what anything is or does anymore, but Bruce Sterling does. In a pair of outstanding essays, Sterling takes issue with the very clutteredness of the New Aesthetic, then its disposition to "our virtual buddies." First,

These are the forms of imagery that Bridle’s collaborators have thrown over his transom. There’s lots, they’re all cool, and most are rather interesting, and some are even profound, but they don’t march together.
Those cats just don’t herd yet; that puzzle is still in its pieces. One can try to cluster them, in a vague ecumenical way, by saying, “This is how contemporary reality looks to our pals, the visionary machines.” But that’s not convincing... Let’s critically nitpick a little, shall we? Dazzle camouflage has nothing to do with “machine vision.” Machines are incapable of a state of mind like “dazzle.” Camou is all about human vision.

And second,

The real issue now is this intimate participation of machinery in cultural production. Practically everything we do in this era that is novel, and different, and challenging, has some kind of computational flavor.
Forms of creative practice have arisen that are co-discovery with machines. They’re cognition-computation mashups and hybrids. 

Sterling asks us to think of the internet and the New Aesthetic as computational collaborators in our cognitive discoveries. What, then, is the co-discovery of JK Keller and his jeejah?  The easy answer is that there is none: Keller reasserts the supremacy of meatspace by turning his computational co-discoverer back into a shiny surface. The digital seemed to have erupted into the physical, and the physical seems to be re-enveloping the digital. But is this necessarily beyond the boundaries of the New Aesthetics?

I think Sterling, Pye, and Taylor are all confouned by the limits of relational aesthetics. In the next installment, I'll discuss Graham Harman's relevance to the art of greasy surfaces.

The Temple by George Herbert

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Temple (1633)
Context

• Publication: Herbert graduated Trinity and worked as a Reader, than as an orator, at Cambridge. In 1624 he was elected to represent Montgomery in Parliament. He become Rector of Fugglestone in 1630, and died of TB three years later. There is a popular narrative set in 1633, when a dying Herbert gave his manuscript to Nicholas Ferrar with orders to publish or destroy. The narrative explains several salient factors. Nicholas Ferrar founded Little Gidding as an Anglican community in 1625, and in 1633 a scribecreated the Bodleian manuscript Tanner 307.
  I read a diplomatic edition based on Tanner 307, the Bodleian manuscript of Herbert's poems. Thomas Buck published a version of Herbert's collection in 1633, referred to by Mario Di Cesare as "a deft kind of Tottelization." (WELL I NEVER.) The book was printed in eight editions by 1690. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: In the ODNB, Colin Burrow set Herbert among the "central figures" of metaphysical poetry, along with Cranshaw, Marvell, and Vaughan. TS Eliot shaped discussion of the metaphysical poets, so scholars commonly debate Herbert's high-church tendencies, or his use of conceits. Stanley Fish summarized this debate between the catechistic and chaotic Herberts. Fish promoted a synthesis that ultimately favors the chaotic Herbert, though he found The Church Militant to be anticlimactic.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, ekphrasis, figure poetry.

Content

• Form: The Temple is divided into the Church-porch, the Church, and the Church Militant. The Church-porch is entirely in six-line iambic pentameter stanzas (ABABCC) advocating (first) virtues of moderate living, (second) social virtues, and (third) virtues of devotion. The Church is a mixture of poems devoted to church architecture, Biblical geography, the liturgy, scriptures, virtues, parable figures, and other rhetorical figures. The Church Militant is a progressive history in iambic pentameter couplets.
• Genre: Devotional poetry, metaphysical poetry.
• Conceit: The three sections of The Temple describe the church before, during, and after Christ's reign. The Church is the most interesting within this scheme, since Christ's presence through metaphor suggests that Herbert endorsed an amillennial eschatology.
• Other notes: "The Window" is of unique interest to my project.

The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy

CITATION: Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, C.1400-C.1580. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did traditional English religion function before the Henrician reformation?
• Answer: Traditional--more widely held than "popular"--religion regularly included commoners and guilds in feasts, fasts, and rituals that show the broad base of English Catholicism, which fell to the reformation on the strength of early Tudor authority.
• Method: The first two-thirds of Duffy's book cover various aspects of traditional religion, and the final third covers the reformation. In the chapters on traditional religion, Duffy itemizes traditional observances and explores their function at multiple levels of society. The reformation chapters are a more straightforward narrative.
• Assumptions: Duffy responds to a Protestant, Whiggish perspective on religion in England 1400-1580. That is a perspective that views traditional religion as oppressive, superstitious, and ripe for revolt.
• Sententiae:
• "To judge by the amount of interest that has been shown in them, the English religious landscape of the late Middle Ages was peopled largely by Lollards, witches, and leisured, aristocratic ladies. It is my conviction, and a central plank of the argument of the first part of this book, that no substantial gulf existed between the religion of the clergy and the educated elite on the one hand and that of the people at large on the other." (2)
• "In a famous passage of Actes and Monuments, John Foxe asserted the incompatibility of popery and printing: 'How many presses there be in the world, so many block houses there must be against the high castle of St Angelo, so that either the pope must abolish knowledge and printing, or printing must at length root him out.' Had Foxe attended to the history of printing in and for England until the early 1530s, he would not have made this claim. The advent of printing in the 1470s and the enormous surge in numbers of publications after 1505 did not flood the reading public with reforming tracts or refutations of the real presence." (77)
• "... [T]here is an evident preoccupation with the refutation of attacks on the sacramental teaching of the Church in much fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century writing about the power and pre-eminent sanctity of the Eucharist... Grace came by gazing on the Host: to see it was to be blessed. But what one saw was misleading, and Lollardry was only possible because the appearance of bread in the Host cloaked the divine reality which was the true source of blessing." (102)
• "The saint's heroically maintained virginity was important not primarily as an example to be followed in all its craggy contradiction, but rather as the source of their special intercessory relationship with Christ... These virgin saints an their male counterparts were invoked by the prosperous and pious donors of the East Anglian screens not as exemplars calling away from marriage and money-making, nor as patterns of perpetual chastity or defiant disobedience to patriarchy and government, but as helpers of those who would 'have their boon or else a better thing'..." (178)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Frankly I'll have to revisit this. There's too much raw information to process on this schedule, which I believe is a mark of quality.
• Synthesis: Duffy's scholarship seems incompatible with Eisenstein's account of the Printing Revolution. Duffy seems to be working with a much shorter window of observation. I'll have to revisit the Johns-Eisenstein debate.
• Application: A few stray thoughts:
• The saintly image is profoundly anti-mimetic; it is not of this world, it seeks to transfigure the world. Therefore some of the Protestant objections to the representation of Biblical figures accomplishes two things. First and most obviously, it guarantees that grace is achieved only through the Spirit. Second, it promotes a materialist realism within the arts, even as a compliment to low-church Protestantism.
• Foxe's progressive view of print history seems at odds with a profoundly Christian eschatology. Why should it matter that the Pope lose the print war, since Christ is surely coming soon?

Poetry (1) by Robert Herrick

PRIMARY SOURCE: (circa 1648)

1. "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time"
2. "To Marigolds"
3. “His Prayer to Ben Jonson”
4. "Delight in Disorder”

Context

• Publication: Born to a well-to-do London goldsmith and educated at St. John's and Trinity. Consorts with Ben Jonson at the Devil Tavern. Employed as a deacon and chaplain on Buckingham's expedition against Ile de Re, 1627.Vicar of Dean Prior in Devonshire, 1629-47. Enters poems in the Stationers' Register, 1640. Expelled from vicarage for Royalist sympathies, returns to London. Publishes Hesperides in 1648. Returns to Devonshire in 1660, dies in 1674. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars have read Herrick for the Son of Ben poems, as well as his connections to the Royalist faction. Herrick's poetry resembles a neo-classical interest in sexuality and beauty.
• Why I'm reading it: The counter-canon, illustrated title page.

Content

• Form:

1. "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time"
   Ballad meter, abab; four stanzas.
2. "To Marigolds"
   Iambic pentameter, couplets.
3. “His Prayer to Ben Jonson”
   Iambic trimeter in ballad style, abab; three stanzas.
4. "Delight in Disorder”
   Iambic tetrameter; couplets.

• Genre:

1. "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time"
   Commendation
2. "To Marigolds"
   Erotic nature poem
3. “His Prayer to Ben Jonson”
   Elegy, prayer
4. "Delight in Disorder”
   Love lyric?

• Conceit:

1. "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time"
   Life as a day; people should marry young, since they will have old age to tarry.
2. "To Marigolds"
   Marigolds should open to the sun and be maids when he goes away. Marigold flowers = lady parts
3. “His Prayer to Ben Jonson”
   Herrick's poems are prayers to Saint Ben, whose writing is in Herrick's psalter.
4. "Delight in Disorder”
   A little disorder in a woman's dress is more attractive than a perfect outfit.

• Other notes:

The Comely Frontispiece by Margery Corbett and RW Lightbown

CITATION: Corbett, Margery, and R W. Lightbown. The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550-1660. London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1979. Print.
Understanding

• Question: What is the nature of the illustrated frontispiece in Renaissance England?
• Answer: The Renaissance English drew from classical and Continental sources to produce four dominant forms of title-page illustration, defined by: (1) geometric frames, (2) single design, (3) cartouche, and (4) architecture.
• Method: A lengthy introduction surveying the Renaissance conception of the frontispiece is followed by many case-studies of illustrated title-pages.
• Assumptions: Oddly, the authors presume a strong influence of the author on the creation of title-page illustrations: "Perhaps something is added to a knowledge of [authors'] minds; on a different level the idiosyncracies of character which are revealed from time to time afford us an unexpected glimpse of their personalities." (47)
• Sententiae:
• "The four types of design which occur in this book are the title-page divided into geometrical compartments, the title-page which is a single overall design, the title-page whose dominant motif is a cartouche and, most important and interesting of all, the architectural title-page." (3)
• "In origin the device was a characteristic invention of northern fourteenth-century chivalric culture, and spread from France into Italy during the fifteenth century... in its Renaissance guise it was imported north of the Alps where it was believed by many in the late sixteenth century to be an Italian invention. Essentially the device was a heraldry of the mind, a symbol chosen to blazon a personal preoccupation in war or love, an aspiration, an ambition, a vow, a declaration of courageous purpose, of amorous hope, constancy or despair." (10)
• "It will be obvious that emblems, being intended to suggest subjects for craftsmen, were bound to differ from devices, whose application was purely personal, even when their significance might have a wider interest or appeal." (17)
• [from Whitney's A Choice of Emblems, "To the Reader"]:
  "[Emblems are] for adorning of the place: hauinge some wittie devise expressed with cunning woorkemanship, somethinge obscure to be perceiued at first, whereby, when with further consideration it is vnderstood, it maie the greater delighte the behoulder. And althoughe the worde dothe comprehende manie thinges, and diuers matters maie be therein contained; yet all Emblemes for the most parte, maie be reduced into these three kindes, which is historicall, Naturall, & Morall." (17)
• "The prime source from which the Renaissance derived its knowledge of hieroglyphs was not one to weaken such a belief [that hieroglyphs contained the truths of religion and philosophy]. This was the Hieroglyphica for Horapollo... Horapollo's book was rediscovered in 1419 and brought to Florence. In fifteenth-century Italy it was eagerly copied and studied and was printed in the original Greek in 1505 and in a Latin translation in 1515." (23)
• "But in general medals were highly esteemed as a source for allegorical figures and representations of the ancient gods." (26)
• "The Lord commanded Moses to see that 'every man of the children of Israel shall pitch by his own standard, with the ensign of their father's house' (Numbers 2:2). Rabbinical commentators as early perhaps as the fifth century were of the opinion that the standards were emblazoned with the emblems of the twelve sons of Jacob drawn from his Blessing." (94)
• "In an era when merchants travelled all over the world it is not surprising that the impetus which led to a study of 'The naturall Language of the Hand' came from reflections that this was a way in 'which, without teaching, men in all regions of the habitable world doe at first sight most easily understand'; that there were those that drive 'a rich and silent Trade, by signes'; 'In this garbe long ago / We spake with th'Indian Apochankano.' The benefit of a sign language to the deaf and dumb also attracts his notice; it was not his chief interest at this time, but only four years later he was to publish the Philocophus." (205)
• [The argument of Bulwer's Philosophvs: or, the Deafe and Dumb mans friend]
  "EXHIBITING THE Philosophical verity of that subtile Art, which may inable one with an Observant Eie, to Heare what any man speaks by the moving of his lips. UPON THE SAME Ground, with the advantage of an Historicall Exemplification, apparently proving, That a Man borne Deafe and Dumbe, may be taught to Heare the sound of words with his Eie, and thence to speake with his Tongue." (213)
• "'Al sensation is performed by contact'; it follows, therefore, that 'one sense may be exercised by the Organs of another, by changing the offices of the Senses.' This is the 'anagram' or 'transposition to make something new' which is going to make it possible for the deaf and dumb to hear and speak." (215)
• "The title-page is invariably described as anonymous in the English literature, bibliographical and otherwise, of Hobbes and his Leviathan. Yet in France it has been ascribed since the middle of the seventeenth century to one of the most famous Parisian engravers of the day, Abraham Bosse (1602-76) and it has figured regularly in the literature of this artist as an unsigned work. The ascription dates back to Bosse's Parisian contemporary, the Abbe Michel de Marroles (1600-81), a famous connoisseur and collector of engravings, who included the frontispiece in his volumes and engravings by Bosse." (221)

Overstanding

• Assessment: The case studies are less applicable than the introduction, which provides a nice background on the early modern conception of title pages.
• Synthesis: Corbett & Lightbown provide a very interesting set of data to compare to Goldberg, especially in the passages regarding Bulwer's work on sign-language and the mutability of the five senses. In a very real way, the whole world is made text by Bulwer's system: text to be assembled and reassembled in anagrams with comparable meaning.
• Application: I'm most interested in pursuing the work on Bulwer--especially as it presents a materialist yet logocentric theory of perception. Some subsequent questions include: How did Bulwer conceive of the different arts--as mutually intelligible, or signifying differently through the approximation of different senses? How did Bulwer understand the operation of metaphor--on a materialist level of transcription and transliteration?