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jon-snows-man-bun · 8 months ago

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By Turns

Chapter Five

The closer Eris gets to his goals the harder he has to work to keep all plates spinning. Tensions simmer underneath his new alliances, pulling him into the Hewn City where the impact of Rhysand’s rule shapes the future.

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A/N: A lot of worldbuilding ahead! And a hint of anti-lower-fae sentiment. A few notes:

SJM doesn’t give us a lot of detail about the magic system in Prythian, especially about the distinctions between the various courts beyond being vaguely elemental/metaphysical. Night Court obviously has darkness powers - the army is called the Darkbringers, so I’ve assumed they have it as well even though I don’t think it’s mentioned in text. Mor has “truth” power and Rhys is a daemati, so I’ve gone with the idea that Night’s specialty is mental influence - secrets, truths, dreams, that sort of thing.

The moon rotunda Aisling mentions is based off of the Whispering Gallery in St Paul’s cathedral.

Aisling’s dress.

“Aisling!”

Aisling turned at the cry of her name, delighted when her arm was swept up by Niamh, a willowy blonde. Beautiful and funny, Niamh was always good company; her cutting remarks and mocking jests about the occupants of the City had sent Aisling into fits of laughter more times than she could count.

Niamh had been married five years ago to Padraig, a rising Darkbringer officer. The match had been arranged by her father and Lord Thanatos, but it was a fair one - Padraig seemed to have seen her natural gifts and rather than dulling her, began sharpening Niamh into a blade, shaping her tongue into a lethal weapon to be wielded at dinner parties and court. The last time Aisling had sat beside the pair at a meal, Niamh had kept the wife of Padraig’s superior well entertained, sparkling like the diamonds she wore. At the night’s close, Niamh had deftly planted hints of another officer’s cuckolding and the lady had listened raptly, drinking in every detail.

The rumour had circulated, tearing down Padraig’s competition, flattering him by comparison. Males had one sort of warfare, females another.

There would be no better companion through several hours of court. Besides, Niamh was a vector of all gossip; Aisling might catch a tidbit from her mouth. Or shape her own, she thought, remembering Eris’ call upon her.

“Escort me, my lady, I beg of you. We must both suffer through court but our suffering shall be halved if we share it,” Niamh said, tucking her arm through Aisling’s. Niamh shone in diamonds - many of them new, Aisling could see - and Aisling ducked in a quick curtsy to Padraig behind them. Niamh dragged her up impatiently.

“Lady Aisling,” he greeted amicably. “You look well.”

“Thank you kindly, my lord,” Aisling demurred.

“Shall we see what delights our High Lord has in store for us?” Padraig offered, sweeping them forward firmly. It was a short distance to the throne room, the heart of the City, directly under the mountain’s peak so high above them. The carved beasts snarled down at them as they passed under its columns, warning all who stepped through, but they were of the City. The beasts struck no fear in Aisling anymore.

The throne room glittered darkly as it always did underneath that great onyx chandelier, the males moving like black wraiths and the females sparkling like frosted peacocks. The marble floor should have been deafening with echoes but swallowed their footsteps and voices - despite its cavernous size, the throne room was always hushed and holding its breath.

The room had seen too much spilt blood to be a neutral place. The air always seemed thick here - with fear, or with fog.

They had only been summoned for court today. No feasting, no balls, just the High Lord and his courtiers. They didn’t hold petitions here; it was only Keir and Thanatos who spoke with them, but the gentry of the City was called to watch regardless. To that end, Aisling had chosen a simple black dress, the neckline cut low, nearly to her navel. The High Lady and Morrigan had set the style of dress with their scandalous ensembles, but Aisling had opted to flout the trend and wore a thick black and gold brocade cape overtop. She was often cold when they were not permitted to dance.

She pulled her hands back within the long dagged sleeves, twisting her onyx and gold ring as the crack of the High Lord and his party arriving shook the throne room. The chandelier flickered overhead. Next to her Niamh stifled a yawn, leaning her head on her husband’s shoulder for a moment. He held her hand lightly.

After the theatrics of their entrance and being made to kneel, Aisling rose with the rest of the court to watch Rhysand take his monthly tilt at ruling. It was always this way: you were silent and watchful while your life was decided, and then you kneeled.

They were far from the throne and dais, somewhat thankfully. Aisling did not dare let herself be anything but meek and silent here, but further back was always better, doubly safe. Thanatos and Keir were summoned forward, discussing the news of the City.

The shadowsinger was there, half swallowed in that unnatural darkness; the general and the High Lady as well. Morrigan, too, shining in blood red and yellow gold, marching to the beat of her own drum. The shadowsinger was the one everyone watched, though. He was beautiful, and dangerous; his face had been carved by the hand of the Mother for beauty and cruelty. He moved with lethality and it always seemed there was something barely leashed in him.

Aisling remembered the last time they were here, when Eoin had been taken to the dungeons. The shadowsinger had moved like a wraith, on Eoin in an instant. She averted her eyes as she recalled the Eoin and the way he had fought against those eerie shadows.

“Oisin Bray is dead,” Lord Thanatos said. He was always cold as stone, slick as ice; his eyes reminded her of the stuffed boar’s head hanging in what was her father’s office. Flat and black and dead. Everyone said his darkness was edged with malice and gave you fear when it touched you.

“A training accident,” Thanatos was saying, stood there before the High Lord and Lady and their courtiers. “Very unfortunate. He was sparring and a blow was struck to his head that felled him.”

The High Lord was sneering down at him, the High Lady’s face a mask of cruel indifference. Thanatos seemed unrepentant, unbowed.

“This is the second difficulty with your legion in as many months, Keir,” Rhysand said, not bothering to address him with his title. He never did. “Is there a problem with your leadership?”

“A problem with boredom, perhaps,” Lord Keir rolled his eyes. “A war would suffice, to let off the pressure. We need such things now and again.”

“You desire more war? So soon?” The general, towering at the High Lord’s right hand, huffed in amusement.

“For the fresh air and sunshine,” Keir sneered. “Unlike your Illyrian dogs, Darkbringers need to kill for such things instead of being born to them like spoiled children.”

The general snarled at that, baring his teeth. Niamh, standing next to Aisling, rolled her eyes subtly.

“They snarl and snap like dogs, too,” she turned her head to whisper directly in Aisling’s ear conspiratorially. Aisling stifled a smile, covering it with her hand.

“I wonder if they’d like to wear collars?” Aisling whispered back, making Niamh cough to cover her fit of giggles. Her husband cut his eyes over to them, gaze dark in a silent warning.

The rest of court passed in this manner; the longer they were there, the more restless with the pageantry Aisling grew. Her thoughts kept wandering to Eris; the feather, his questions. The look in his eyes. As the gentry was dismissed and she left with Niamh and Padraig, she carefully avoided the lord steward’s eye. Perhaps she was being paranoid, she mused. Perhaps Eris was genuine and wanted to court her, perhaps she was making herself as small as possible for nothing and Lord Keir cared not what she did.

How much are you willing to lay on that chance? a voice in her head asked that sounded much like her father.

It was while she was walking back that Niamh’s sleeve fell back to show a glimpse of an elegant pearl and amethyst bracelet in yellow gold. Aisling stared, and Niamh fluttered her eyelashes when she caught her looking.

“Do you like it?” She asked, holding her wrist out for Aisling’s perusal.

“It’s lovely,” Aisling answered, touching it gently. It was obviously not from the Hewn City, or even from Night - the style was too different, too organic. “Where did you get it?”

Niamh smirked at that, acting coy. “Trade secret,” she demurred. Aisling rolled her eyes, knowing full well Niamh could hold a secret as well as a sieve held water. She waited her out, falling silent.

“Padraig got it. It’s from Summer, but he told me he bought it at the floating market.”

The floating market, Aisling mused. Of course. Commerce in the City was tightly controlled; with only one main gate, the Darkbringers carefully monitored who passed in and out, and there were a select few merchants and dealers that were chosen by Lord Keir to do so. Most of what the Hewn City bought and sold was produced by themselves because of this, but what wasn’t came at a premium and was well in demand. For the gentry - such as herself - it wasn’t a problem, even if purchases were taxed twice and exports thrice, to whet each beak along the way: Rhysand, Keir, and the court of import.

But the small number of merchants from outside couldn’t meet the entirety of demand, especially for those not of the gentry who couldn’t afford the dear costs of outside goods. There were supposedly doors where goods came in, places where stolen or smuggled things were sold. Places where even more devious things happened, blood and poison and flesh on offer. The rumours of these places, the floating markets, drifted around the City like will-o-the-wisps; sometimes here, sometimes there, nearly impossible to catch. The markets moved, and supposedly you had to be invited and brought to one, to know the password.

Females, needless to say, were not invited. Aisling had heard there was one every hunter’s moon if you went behind a certain tapestry and crawled through a passage, but had no idea if it was true. Supposedly these were grim, lawless places where the worst of the City plied their trade. She mulled over it in her mind, still admiring the bracelet.

“Lovely,” she said again, releasing Niamh’s wrist.

Aisling felt scattered tonight, mind running away from her in a dozen different directions. It was when she was back in her home, tucked in what was her father’s office, that her thoughts returned to Eris. Truthfully he was never far from them - even several weeks after his visit, he had ensured he remained at the forefront with his little gift.

An idea came to mind. Picking up a pen and stationary, she drafted a quick note, deciding to gift Eris something in return. Perhaps he had only wanted some perspective in truth and this would be the end of it all. But if he was intending to court her, why should she let him dictate the terms? He would grow bored soon enough if it were true, and she would be left with the consequences.

Aisling was of the City. Games were in her nature.

She sat in an armchair beside the cold hearth, only lit by a single faelight. It was easier that way, in the near darkness. She carefully cleared her mind and found that place within herself, somewhere between her lungs.

She had touched Eris, had seen his eyes. She could find him even through the wards. She held what she wanted him to see in her mind, felt the feeling she wanted him to have. And then she thought of him as clearly as she could and the dream was on its way with her breath.

It was easier than she thought it would be to reach him. Normally to get through the wards of the City she had to push hard, but with Eris it was no effort at all.

The moon rotunda in the east wing of the city by the main gate had a walkway all the way around its high carved dome, looked over by paintings of long-dead stewards of the City. She had discovered as a child - playing in the rotunda when she should not have been - that if she stood on one side of the great dome and a friend on the other and they whispered quietly, the stone would carry their voices and it would sound as if she was stood right next to her friend. That was how it felt to dream-weave for Eris; no matter where he was, all she had to do was lean over and whisper into his ear.

Perhaps because she knew what she wanted him to see so clearly. Sometimes she struggled to separate what she was feeling from the feeling the dream should have and they ended up muddled; occasionally she felt as if she had truly been turned to stone and couldn’t summon any feeling for the dreams at all.

Aisling opened her eyes, breathing slowly, ignoring the prickling in her fingertips.

———————

Rhysand kept them under a rock like roaches.

The letter he received that morning was prettily worded, but his mother had taught him to hear what a lady didn’t say as much as what she did. Aisling was courteous and well-mannered but he could mark her words plainly for what they were.

I thank you kindly for your gift, and will think of you gladly and with fondness whenever I wear the hair comb. If the humble game birds of your home can wear such beauty and still be considered a common sight, I can scarcely imagine the splendour of Autumn. I fear the carved stone of the Hewn City cannot compare, but I hope you find it pleasing nonetheless.

As a token of my gratitude, I have sent you a gift. I hope it brings you joy.

There had been no gift enclosed which had puzzled him, but he didn’t spare it much thought until late that night. He had been at his desk until late, working by candlelight on correspondence with several vassals, when the urge to retire to bed seized him with a vengeance to claim the debt of sleep he had accrued. As he lay in his chambers, slumber brushed against his mind with a soft hand, taking him gently and leading him into the darkness.

He dreamt like he had never dreamt before.

The starlit garden he walked through was made of moonlight, velvet and rich against his fingers while light as air, and the night twined around him like a lover. Night-blooming flowers curled against him soft as silk, moths dancing against the stars, and he was filled with nothing but peace. The feeling held him, cradled him, and he drank it in greedily while the darkness swept along his brow and his chest and his legs. He was cleansed and weightless, all his secrets held here between him and the moon which watched overhead like a sentinel.

I see you, the moon sang, just for him. I know you, I love you.

Eris slept so fully in that starlit space that waking was onerous, the weight of duty settling on his chest like a millstone as soon as the dawn greeted him. He craved the lull of the dream immediately; having it ripped away was like being doused with cold water.

Aisling , he thought. The dream-weaver. Of course - she was of the Night Court, whose magic skewed towards darkness and mental gifts, its purest distillation in Rhysand. The magic of dreams and sleeping and secrets belonged to Night, and Aisling was its daughter. For the eye here, she had told him, touching his brow.

What a gift. As surely as she gave him a dream as soft as a kiss, he knew instinctively that she could also weave a nightmare like a chain or a whip, to scour and torture the soul. His mind ticked with the urge to see into the depths of what she could do.

Did Rhysand know what treasures he had stashed underneath that mountain, buried in the rock? He must. Did he resent them so much that he was willing to punish them all and lose that magic? Or did he view them as he viewed the Illyrians, a tool to be wielded whenever he desired? Keir held a sneering disdain for Rhysand and Feyre, which he had always known extended far beyond Morrigan. Aisling’s letter had rippled with longing to be free. The entire court could not be content to live their immortal lives trapped in the Hewn City.

The fifty years under Amarantha had been torture. Not many Night Court fae were there; it was assumed that they were granted more freedoms because of Rhysand’s complicity, but perhaps it was because they were trapped under their own mountain and would simply be trading one jailer for another.

At least they were spared Amarantha’s cruel, stomach-turning games and entertainment. Fifty years had crawled by like molasses for him, tinged with fear and hatred. He could not imagine a lifetime spent in that way, in the dark.

And he had pushed back the date for the Hewn City’s entrance to the whispered-of Velaris, Eris thought sourly. He had done that, and for what? To make Rhysand and his ilk more comfortable . Rhysand would surely find a way to postpone it indefinitely… until he needed the Darkbringers again. He had not seen Velaris with his own eyes, but he was certain it was far lovelier than the Hewn City if it was such a prized secret; Lucien had described it as such.

There was opportunity here, if he was careful. The dream followed him through his morning, and was still on his mind as he sat down at his desk and began to write.

#eris vanserra #eris vanserra x oc #eris vanserra fanfic #acotar fanfiction #acotar fanfic #by turns #my writing

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sassysuitdonut · 5 months ago

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creativeworld111 · 7 months ago

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MSc Psychology: Clinical, Industrial, and Child Specializations

Exploring the Boundless Horizons of Psychology

The Learning Experience

Year-by-Year Journey

Assessment Methods

Navigating the Future of Psychology

For those who wish to do MSc Psychology in Bangalore, admissions are open at ST PAULS COLLEGE. For more details visit: https://blr.stpaulscollege.edu.in/msc-psychology/.

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deadcityhq · 10 months ago

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**CHARACTER NAME:** whitt hirsch

**CHARACTER FACECLAIM:** brett goldstein

**CHARACTER AGE/DOB (if relevant/they’re not old af):** september 9th, 1982

**CHARACTER PRONOUNS/GENDER IDENTITY/SEXUALITY ETC:** he/him | cis man | bisexual

**CHARACTER FANDOM (if relevant):** oc

**OC OR CANON:** oc

**CHARACTER TYPE (for example: werewolf, shadowhunter, warlock, demon etc):** werewolf

**HOW LONG HAVE THEY BEEN IN NEW YORK/WHY ARE THEY THERE ETC:** number one i’m going to release live crabs in azula’s jeep, number two whitt has been in nyc for roughly a year, and yes, dragged theo with him.

**IMPORTANT CHARACTER INFORMATION TO NOTE AND SHARE (this could be important headcanons for initial plotting, mini bios etc, supporting docs):**

Whitt was born into a working-class family in the suburbs of St. Paul. He grew up in a fairly standard way with a typically emotionally distant set of parents who associated providing food and shelter and little else with good parenting. Nothing that Whitt would blame them for, but true nonetheless.

They should have been a much more tight-knit family considering how lycanthropy set them apart from the little suburban community where they lived, but perhaps the strain of behaving oh-so-normally for the humans around them and keeping a paranoid eye out for the sort of hunters that might want them dead, had made their familial bonds more like a professional responsibility.

This only got worse when there was a scare with a group of hunters combing through St. Paul for a murderer who wasn’t even anything but a garden-variety human anyway, and they were forced to leave overnight. They bounced around to smaller towns throughout Minnesota and Iowa. Whitt wound up finishing school at a VoTech school and became a mechanic to primarily serve people like himself. And like, truck drivers. His specialty is diesel-powered vehicles.

He remained close to his sister as he grew older even as his parents became people he might see twice a year at best. They continued being a family unit even when things got significantly harder. For instance, when his sister made a few choices and ended up pregnant. A hunter’s baby, even.

It might be a little silly for him to say, but his niece being born sobered him quickly from the kind of werewolf that enjoyed causing problems on purpose to one more pack-minded. His sister was an adult and he more than trusted her ability to take care of herself despite what had happened, but the baby left him with more to consider in terms of making sure they were all safe.

This might have led to some justified but over-the-top paranoia, which might have led to looking for the best home possible. They moved a few times over the next five or so years, typically with Whitt going ahead and finding a place for them first. He was always the height of caution and being prepared.

Which, of course, makes what happened with Theo a complete lapse in his judgment. He still can’t really explain himself; he’d always sworn he’d never turn anyone himself. He had all sorts of speeches about the inherently unethical nature of making a human into a werewolf. All of that went out of the window finding Theo nearly dead. It was fucking embarrassing, frankly.

That buried embarrassment will be blisteringly obvious to his sister when he asks her to join him and Theo in New York (besides the fact that he might be lying about Theo’s existence to her at present) but right now he’s trying to focus on preparing life for a pack in the city, as well as teaching a brand new werewolf how to behave. He might be just a little (a lot) stressed out.

**THREE AESTHETICS THAT REMIND YOU OF YOUR CHARACTER:** black coffee from a drip machine that hasn’t been cleaned since glee was still airing, wintergreen gum so minty it makes you feel like you’re kissing a snowman, the sharp earthy grass smell of pure vetiver.

OOC INFORMATION:

**MUN NAME/ALIAS:** jesse

**MUN AGE:** 30

**MUN TRIGGERS:** n/a

#whitt hirsch app #accepted

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phillip-nashrp · 1 year ago

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Timeline

1980; Age 0

September 15: Phillip David Nash is born at Oslo University Hospital, Ulleval, in Oslo, Norway, to Emma Neilson, a Pharmaceutical Sales Representative. Phillip's father, Benjamin Nash, a renowned Neurologist, is not present or aware of his birth, believing that his mistress had an abortion and returned to Norway.

1985; Age Five

October 12: While visiting London on business, Emma Neilson is involved in a deadly car accident. She later dies in the same hospital where Phillip's father was working. Later that night, Benjamin Nash learns that Emma had carried their son to full term and given birth five years earlier. September: Despite being married with a daughter, Benjamin Nash begins to fight for custody of Phillip.

1986; Age Six

May: After a lengthy custody battle between the Neilson's, Benjamin Nash is granted full custody of Phillip Nash. Phillip is then uprooted from his home in Oslo to live in London with his father, stepmother, and half-sister. June: It's clear to Benjamin, after living with Phillip for a few short months, that the six-year-old is incredibly intelligent.

1987; Age Seven:

September: Phillip begins his education at St. Phillip's, a private preparatory school for boys.

1988; Age Eight

December: Phillip is struck by his father for the first time after Phillip after Phillip's half-sister, Rebecca, says that Phillip ripped up her Maths homework.

1990; Age Ten:

November: Phillip wins first place at St. Phillip's Science Fair, along with a cash prize for his project on how genetics can affect whether or not a person can develop an autoimmune disorder. Later that night, at home, Benjamin Nash takes Phillip into his study, where he berates Phillip for "cheating" on his science fair project.

1993; Age Thirteen:

September: Phillip begins attending St. Paul's boarding School for Boys. Phillip revels in his freedom at the boarding school, finally living without his father's constant abuse, his stepmother's anger, and his half-sister's jealousy.

1994; Age Fourteen:

June: During summer break, Phillip returns home, only to find that his half-sister and stepmother have moved out of the Nash Estate. During this summer break, Phillip discovers that his father has started drinking to the point of excess. September: Before returning to school, Phillip and his father have a heated argument in which Phillip learns that his mother was Benjamin's mistress and Phillip was born out of wedlock. Benjamin blames Phillip for the end of his marriage and angrily throws a glass tumbler filled with scotch at Phillip's face. The glass shatters and leaves Phillip injured. Benjamin refuses to take Phillip to the hospital and states that he might be intelligent, but he'll never be a true Nash due to being a bastard. Phillip cleans, stitches, and bandages his wound without help from his father. He's left with a small, barely noticeable scar on his forehead.

1996; Age Sixteen:

September: Phillip begins to tailor his education toward his dreams of becoming a Surgeon.

1998; Age Eighteen:

May: Upon leaving St. Paul's, Phillip is accepted into St. Georges University of London.

2003; Age Twenty-Three:

August: After receiving his Bachelor of Surgery, Phillip prepares for his Foundation Programme.

2005; Age Twenty-Five:

May: Upon finishing his Foundation Programme, Phillip begins two years of core surgical training at St. Georges. His father, a Surgeon at St. Georges, oversees much of his son's training. The two men frequently argue about Benjamin Nash's drinking.

2006; Age Twenty-Six:

May: Phillip begins to date Juliette Frasier, a fellow medical student.

2007; Age Twenty-Seven:

September: Phillip begins his specialty training to become a spinal surgeon directly under his father.

2008; Age Twenty-Eight:

September: Juliette Frasier and Phillip Nash break up. The break-up is amicable, as both realize they're too focused on their careers to entertain a serious relationship. October: After only four years of specialty training, Phillip Nash is hired as a Spinal Surgeon at St. Georges. Phillip is quick to make a name for himself, and it isn't long before he's one of the most sought-after Surgeons in London.

2011; Age Thirty-One:

February: Phillip begins a romance with Allison Craig, an MRI Tech.

2013; Age Thirty-Three:

April: Phillip ends his relationship with Allison Craig after discovering she was unfaithful. September: At a Fundraising Gala, Phillip meets Esmeralda Whitlock, a young woman in her twenties attending the Gala with Ted Whitlock, a respected colleague of Phillip's. Sparks ignite between Phillip and Esmeralda, and they have an evening of talking, drinking, and dancing. Phillip gives Esmeralda his number, but the woman leaves the next day, and the two don't speak again. November: Phillip is offered the position of Chief of Surgery at St. George's. After thinking it over, Phillip declines the job and is promoted to Head of Neurosurgery.

2014; Age Thirty-Four:

January: Phillip begins to date Charlotte Bryne, a Dermatologist. February: In the middle of the night, Phillip is called into a complicated surgery. As he begins to assist, Phillip is told that his father had started the surgery but abruptly left when Phillip was requested. Unfourtently, Phillip cannot repair the damage his father did, but he does save the woman's life. It's assumed that she'll never be able to walk again. Later, Phillip finds his father throwing up in the bathroom. Phillip accuses his father of being drunk and butchering the surgery. They have a heated argument in which Phillip assaults his father. Afterward, Benjamin Nash begs his son not to fire him. March: After a month-long investigation, Benjamin Nash is fired from St. Georges.

2016; Age Thirty-Six:

January: Phillip begins to worry that his own reputation has been damaged due to his father's actions. Phillip, always a hard worker, begins to dive even deeper into his work. February: Tensions begin to arise between Phillip and his co-workers. Eventually, Phillip wonders if he needs a change and starts looking for jobs outside London. Taking a chance, he applies for a Chief of Surgery position in the United States. May: Phillip is offered the position in the United States; if he accepts, it will make him Lake Sapphire's youngest Chief of Surgery. June: Phillip accepts the Chief of Surgery position at Lake Sapphire Hospital in Laurel, Maine. His girlfriend, Charlotte, does not want to leave London and ends their relationship.

2018; Age Thirty-Eight:

March: Phillip meets Damian Ixmata, a new Clinical Pharmacologist recently hired at Lake Sapphire. The two bond over their dislike of co-workers, annoyance at younger employees, and shared hobbies. May: Phillip receives a phone call from his Half-Sister. Rebecca tells Phillip that their father was in a car accident and did not survive. Phillip Nash is named as the sole heir to Benjamin Nash's estate. Phillip donates a portion of the money between St. George's, Lake Sapphire, and the woman injured by his father's mistakes. He then takes most of what's left and gives it to his half-sister. The remaining portion, Phillip puts away, hoping one day to build a house with it.

2019; Age Thirty-Nine:

December: Phillip and Damian decide to go half-in on a piece of land, where Phillip finally builds his dream home. Damian also makes a home on the property, allowing them to be nearby to one another, but have enough solitude and isolation for each of them.

2022: Age Forty-One:

November: Damian's troubled sister passes away while staying with Damian. Phillip does his best to be there for his friend, but he's struggling to accept the loss.

#timeline

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mishinashen · 3 years ago

Photo

Self-Portrait by Alphonse Mucha, 1899

Alfons Maria Mucha (Czech: 24 July 1860 – 14 July 1939), known internationally as Alphonse Mucha, was a Czech painter, illustrator, and graphic artist, living in Paris during the Art Nouveau period, best known for his distinctly stylized and decorative theatrical posters, particularly those of Sarah Bernhardt. He produced illustrations, advertisements, decorative panels, and designs, which became among the best-known images of the period.

In the second part of his career, at the age of 43, he returned to his homeland of Bohemia-Moravia region in Austria and devoted himself to painting a series of twenty monumental canvases known as The Slav Epic, depicting the history of all the Slavic peoples of the world, which he painted between 1912 and 1926. In 1928, on the 10th anniversary of the independence of Czechoslovakia, he presented the series to the Czech nation. He considered it his most important work. It is now on display in Prague.

Alphonse Mucha was born on 24 July 1860 in the small town of Ivančice in southern Moravia, then a province of the Austrian Empire (currently a region of the Czech Republic). His family had a very modest income; his father Ondřej was a court usher, and his mother Amálie was a miller's daughter. Ondřej had six children, all with names starting with A. Alphonse was his first child with Amálie, followed by Anna and Anděla.

Alphonse showed an early talent for drawing; a local merchant impressed by his work provided him with paper for free, though it was considered a luxury. In the preschool period, he drew exclusively with his left hand. He also had a talent for music: he was an alto singer and violin player

After completing volksschule, he wanted to continue with his studies, but his family was not able to fund them, as they were already funding the studies of his three step-siblings] His music teacher sent him to Pavel Křížkovský, choirmaster of St Thomas's Abbey in Brno, to be admitted to the choir and to have his studies funded by the monastery. Křížovský was impressed by his talent, but he was not able to admit and fund him, as he had just admitted another talented young musician, Leoš Janáček.

Křížovský sent him to a choirmaster of the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul, who admitted him as a chorister and funded his studies at the gymnasium in Brno, where he received his secondary school education. After his voice broke, he gave up his chorister position, but played as a violinist during masses.

He became devoutly religious, and wrote later, "For me, the notions of painting, going to church, and music are so closely knit that often I cannot decide whether I like church for its music, or music for its place in the mystery which it accompanies." He grew up in an environment of intense Czech nationalism in all the arts, from music to literature and painting. He designed flyers and posters for patriotic rallies.

His singing abilities allowed him to continue his musical education at the Gymnázium Brno in the Moravian capital of Brno, but his true ambition was to become an artist. He found some employment designing theatrical scenery and other decorations. In 1878 he applied without success to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, but was rejected and advised to "find a different career". In 1880, at the age of 19, he traveled to Vienna, the political and cultural capital of the Empire, and found employment as an apprentice scenery painter for a company which made sets for Vienna theaters. While in Vienna, he discovered the museums, churches, palaces and especially theaters, for which he received free tickets from his employer. He also discovered Hans Makart, a very prominent academic painter, who created murals for many of the palaces and government buildings in Vienna, and was a master of portraits and historical paintings in grand format. His style turned Mucha in that artistic direction and influenced his later work. He also began experimenting with photography, which became an important tool in his later work.

To his misfortune, a terrible fire in 1881 destroyed the Ringtheater, the major client of his firm. Later in 1881, almost without funds, he took a train as far north as his money would take him. He arrived in Mikulov in southern Moravia, and began making portraits, decorative art and lettering for tombstones. His work was appreciated, and he was commissioned by Count Eduard Khuen Belasi, a local landlord and nobleman, to paint a series of murals for his residence at Emmahof Castle, and then at his ancestral home in the Tyrol, Gandegg Castle. The paintings at Emmahof were destroyed by fire in 1948, but his early versions in small format exist (now on display at the museum in Brno). He showed his skill at mythological themes, the female form, and lush vegetal decoration. Belasi, who was also an amateur painter, took Mucha on expeditions to see art in Venice, Florence and Milan, and introduced him to many artists, including the famous Bavarian romantic painter, Wilhelm Kray, who lived in Munich.

Count Belasi decided to bring Mucha to Munich for formal training, and paid his tuition fees and living expenses at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. He moved there in September 1885. It is not clear how Mucha actually studied at the Munich Academy; there is no record of his being enrolled as a student there. However, he did become friends with a number of notable Slavic artists there, including the Czechs Karel Vítězslav Mašek and Ludek Marold and the Russian Leonid Pasternak, father of the famous poet and novelist Boris Pasternak. He founded a Czech students' club, and contributed political illustrations to nationalist publications in Prague. In 1886 he received a notable commission for a painting of the Czech patron saints Cyril and Methodius, from a group of Czech emigrants, including some of his relatives, who had founded a Roman Catholic church in the town of Pisek, North Dakota. He was very happy with the artistic environment of Munich: he wrote to friends, "Here I am in my new element, painting. I cross all sorts of currents, but without effort, and even with joy. Here, for the first time, I can find the objectives to reach which used to seem inaccessible." However, he found he could not remain forever in Munich; the Bavarian authorities imposed increasing restrictions upon foreign students and residents. Count Belasi suggested that he travel either to Rome or to Paris. With Belasi's financial support, he decided in 1887 to move to Paris.

Mucha moved to Paris in 1888 where he enrolled in the Académie Julian[18] and the following year, 1889, Académie Colarossi. The two schools taught a wide variety of different styles. His first professors at the Academie Julien were Jules Lefebvre who specialized in female nudes and allegorical paintings, and Jean-Paul Laurens, whose specialties were historical and religious paintings in a realistic and dramatic style. At the end of 1889, as he approached the age of thirty, his patron, Count Belasi, decided that Mucha had received enough education and ended his subsidies.

When he arrived in Paris, Mucha found shelter with the help of the large Slavic community. He lived in a boarding house called the Crémerie at 13 rue de la Grande Chaumière, whose owner, Charlotte Caron, was famous for sheltering struggling artists; when needed she accepted paintings or drawings in place of rent. Mucha decided to follow the path of another Czech painter he knew from Munich, Ludek Marold, who had made a successful career as an illustrator for magazines. In 1890 and 1891, he began providing illustrations for the weekly magazine La Vie populaire, which published novels in weekly segments. His illustration for a novel by Guy de Maupassant, called The Useless Beauty, was on the cover of 22 May 1890 edition. He also made illustrations for Le Petit Français Illustré, which published stories for young people in both magazine and book form. For this magazine he provided dramatic scenes of battles and other historic events, including a cover illustration of a scene from the Franco-Prussian War which was on 23 January 1892 edition.

His illustrations began to give him a regular income. He was able to buy a harmonium to continue his musical interests, and his first camera, which used glass-plate negatives. He took pictures of himself and his friends, and also regularly used it to compose his drawings. He became friends with Paul Gauguin, and shared a studio with him for a time when Gauguin returned from Tahiti in the summer of 1893. In late autumn 1894 he also became friends with the playwright August Strindberg, with whom he had a common interest in philosophy and mysticism.

His magazine illustrations led to book illustration; he was commissioned to provide illustrations for Scenes and Episodes of German History by historian Charles Seignobos. Four of his illustrations, including one depicting the death of Frederic Barbarossa, were chosen for display at the 1894 Paris Salon of Artists. He received a medal of honor, his first official recognition.

Mucha added another important client in the early 1890s; the Central Library of Fine Arts, which specialized in the publication of books about art, architecture and the decorative arts. It later launched a new magazine in 1897 called Art et Decoration, which played an early and important role in publicizing the Art Nouveau style. He continued to publish illustrations for his other clients, including illustrating a children's book of poetry by Eugène Manuel, and illustrations for a magazine of the theater arts, called La Costume au théâtre.

#czech art #art noveau

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equatorjournal · 4 years ago

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Flip Schulke, 1974. Flip Schulke was one of America’s premier photojournalists for more than forty-five years. A native of New Ulm, Minnesota, and a graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, Schulke moved to Miami in the 1950s, where he developed specialties in underwater photography, auto racing, the space program, and the history of the Berlin Wall. Through his close friendship with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he became best known as one of the leading chroniclers of the Southern civil-rights movement. He covered nearly every major civil-rights story in the South from the 1950s until Dr. King’s assination in 1968. For many years, Schulke was a contract photographer for Life magazine. His work has also appeared in National Geographic magazine, Sports Illustrated, Time, Newsweek, The Saturday Evening Post, Der Stern, and numerous other publications. Schulke won dozens of national photojournalism awards, including first-prize honours for Picture of the Year. https://www.instagram.com/p/CEFQO-whAGr/?igshid=yr2dcv1nb9ga

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davewalthertravels · 4 years ago

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Who wants to do this trip? Book it through Walther Travels now.

ITINERARY

DAY 1 ARRIVE IN NEW ORLEANS

Welcome to New Orleans! At 6 pm, meet your Tour Director and traveling companions for a welcome drink.

DAY 2 NEW ORLEANS–WAVELAND–BAY ST. LOUIS–BILOXI

NEW ORLEANS City sightseeing with Local Guide this morning, followed by free time for lunch.

WAVELAND Visit the Ground Zero Hurricane Museum.

BAY ST. LOUIS Free time.

BILOXI Free time this afternoon before a regional dinner at a local restaurant.

Breakfast

Dinner

DAY 3 BILOXI

BILOXI YourChoice Excursions include one of the following activities of your choice:

FLOAT: For the Birds

Follow us into the wild at the gateway to the Pascagoula River -the largest free-flowing river in continental U.S.--with a visit to the Pascagoula River Audubon Center. Through the efforts of The Nature Conservancy, this 70,000-acre wildlife sanctuary is home to a wealth of protected wildlife, including animals and plant life unique to the region, and more than 300 species of migrating birds. Watch for bald eagles, blue herons, pelicans, and the swallow-tailed kite, to name just a few in this beautiful bayou paradise. Your visit includes a 2-hour kayak float trip to spot the magnificent birds that call these waters home.

GAZE: Artistic Vision

A guided tour of the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art celebrates the innovative and creative spirit of its namesake, Mississippi master ceramist George Ohr, aka "The Mad Potter of Biloxi." Predicting the ultimate recognition of his artistic genius, Ohr created innovative ceramic designs from 1883 to 1910, which became central to the artistic heritage of the Gulf South and American Art at large. More than 100 years later, Ohr is considered an early pioneer in the American modernist movement. In a tribute to Ohr's contributions, famed artist/architect Frank Gehry designed an award-winning museum campus of bold, intriguing, and self-contained buildings to offer visitors separate exhibits that together create a unified vision through an expansive brick plaza and majestic Southern live oaks on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

DELVE: Maritime Mississippi Queens

Experience an ocean of exhibits at the Maritime & Seafood Museum. Dive deep into the history of shrimping, oystering, recreational fishing, wetlands, marine resource management, charter boats, marine blacksmithing, wooden-boat building, net making, catboats/Biloxi skiff, shrimp-peeling machine and an in-depth collection of historic photographs and artifacts. Relive the traditions of the Mississippi Gulf Coast as you step on board an authentic replica of a Biloxi Schooner for a 2½-hour sailing. These "White Winged Queens" sailed the Coast from the late 1800's to the early 1900's.

Afternoon sightseeing includes a guided tour of Jefferson Davis’ home and presidential library, Beauvoir. Free time this evening.

Breakfast

DAY 4 BILOXI–MONROEVILLE–MONTGOMERY

MONROEVILLE Sightseeing in the hometown of authors Truman Capote and Harper Lee includes the Old Courthouse Museum in the “Literary Capital of Alabama.” Learn how Monroeville served as the inspiration for Lee’s 1961 Pulitzer-Prize-winning “To Kill a Mockingbird,” examining the historical prejudice of the deep South and loosely based on the life of the author’s father—a state legislator and county lawyer who defended two black men accused of murdering a white storekeeper. Free time this afternoon.

MONTGOMERY Free time this evening.

Breakfast

DAY 5 MONTGOMERY

MONTGOMERY The capital of Alabama, Montgomery is historic as an important place in the fight for voting rights, with the Alabama State Capitol Building having served as the ending point of the third march for voting rights from Selma. See the sights with a Local Guide this morning, including the State Capitol Building, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the Civil Rights Memorial, and the Rosa Parks Museum. Take a docent-led tour of the courthouse where Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. first legalized the desegregation of buses in 1956 and ruled the march from Selma was a legal protest to be allowed in 1965 (based on availability). Next, enjoy true Southern comfort food with lunch at Martha’s Place—born of one woman’s dream to overcome personal adversity and give back to others in her native Montgomery. Feed your soul with authentic, made-from-scratch Southern specialties—from fried chicken to fried green tomatoes, to black-eyed peas and pecan pie. Free time this evening.

YourChoice Excursions include one of the following activities of your choice:

DELVE: Moving Memorials

Go deeper into the history of the U.S. Civil Rights movement with a visit to two important sites. Visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the first memorial of its kind, which recognizes the thousands of enslaved black Americans who suffered lynching -many of which went unreported or unprosecuted. Gain a deeper historical perspective with a visit to the Legacy Museum, highlighting injustices from slavery to mass incarcerations, located near one of the most notorious slave-auction sites 19th-century America. Be moved by the exhibits reflecting the effects of racial injustice of the past and its impact today.

STROLL: Everything Old is New Again

Walk through Old Alabama Town on a guided tour to see history preserved in more than 50 authentically restored and refurnished 19th- and 20th-century homes and structures spanning six blocks in downtown Montgomery. Stroll the nostalgic neighborhood and be transported in time, with interpreters available along your route to shed light on the historic preservation here. Take an inside tour of the block's 1850s centerpiece, the Ordeman-Mitchell-Shaw House, and follow your complimentary map and guide to see the 1895 Adams Chapel School; the 1892 Corner Grocery Store; and the stunning, circa 1850 Ware-Farley-Hood House.

CLAP: Lovesick Blues

Home to country music legend, Hank Williams, Montgomery is also the home of The Hank Williams Museum. Visit the museum on a guided tour for a glimpse into this country-music legend's life and legacy through the most complete collection of Hank Williams memorabilia. Hear how Williams' classics like "Your Cheatin' Heart," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," and "Hey, Good Lookin" continue to influence musical artists today.

Breakfast

Lunch

DAY 6 MONTGOMERY–SELMA–BIRMINGHAM–FLORENCE (MUSCLE SHOALS)

MONTGOMERY Travel the National Historic Trail of 1966 between Montgomery and Selma, which served as the route of Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1965 Voting Rights March.

SELMA Join your Local Guide to visit the National Voting Rights Museum and the Slavery and Civil War Museums. Also visit the historic Brown Chapel A.M.E Church and walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge—a National Historic Landmark and site of the infamous “Bloody Sunday”—where over 600 non-violent marchers, led by the late Freedom Rider and Congressional Representative John Lewis, were brutally attacked by police while attempting to cross the bridge.

BIRMINGHAM Free time this afternoon before continuing to Muscle Shoals.

FLORENCE (MUSCLE SHOALS) Free time this evening.

Breakfast

DAY 7 FLORENCE (MUSCLE SHOALS)

FLORENCE (MUSCLE SHOALS) Join in a guided sightseeing tour of Florence—“the gem of the South”—and learn about the “Muscle Shoals Sound” produced here since the 1960s with state-of-the-art recording studios for iconic artists and producers. See the old town and the home of W.C. Handy—the “Father of the Blues.” See the original Muscle Shoals Sound Studios building, and tour the Alabama Music Hall of Fame with a docent. Enjoy free time this afternoon.

YourChoice Excursions include one of the following activities of your choice:

GAZE: Symmetry in Motion

Visit the Rosenbaum House on a guided tour of renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The only Wright structure in Alabama, the house offers rare access to the prolific architect's design with free time to explore the grounds and shop for mementos.

DELVE: A Miracle in the Making

Take a guided tour of Ivy Green, birthplace of Helen Keller. Where she lived and learned in what would become an incredible story of tenacity and triumph with teacher Anne Sullivan. Born without sight or hearing, Keller overcame her disabilities to become one of the world's most inspirational women. See her living quarters and the well where her first breakthrough began a life of achievement as a baccalaureate, activist, and author. Now a museum, Keller's home at Ivy Green was the setting for her autobiography, "The Story of My Life" -adapted for stage and screen as "The Miracle Worker."

CLAP: Laying Down Tracks

Tour the Florence Alabama Music Enterprise (FAME) with a guide. See where Rick Hall created a blend of Southern soul music, which became the hailed as The Muscle Shoals Sound." A who's who of musical greats have recorded here -from Etta James to Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon, and the Rolling Stones, to name a few. The studio - home to more than 80, "Top 10" records - continues to be in demand by countless musicians today.

Farewell dinner this evening featuring live music.

Breakfast

Dinner

DAY 8 FLORENCE–NASHVILLE

This morning, travel to Nashville International Airport or the Westin Hotel Downtown. Please schedule departing flights after 1pm.

Breakfast

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tilethis · 5 years ago

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Tile This

With over 45 years of experience in the ceramic tile and stone industry, Tile This provides proven systems and tools to aid contractors in building a solid application they can stand behind. We strive to build relationships with contractors and supply our customers with quality, name-brand products such as Schluter, Rubi, Sigma, Nuheat, RTC, Raimondi, Alpha and much more! We offer our products on all major platforms including our website and in our brick and mortar store open to contractors and the general public. Our goal is to help equip contractors with tile and stone installation systems and tools to improve efficiency in both residential and commercial projects. Based out of Burnsville, MN (just south of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul), our distribution warehouse is stocked with some of the best installation systems and tools. We are known for our large selection of specialty tile tools and fast shipping processes that help our customers’ schedules move forward without disruption.

#Tile-tools-online

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trivialqueen · 5 years ago

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Here’s the next section of that original story.

As always, I’m neither a doctor, nor British. I’m just a girl who fancies herself a writer and likes slow burns, smart women, and tall men.

St. Sebastian’s was a world class hospital with some of the worst aesthetics he’d ever seen. The exterior was in an uninspired brutalist style. The interior had been remolded several times since the early 1960s, but only ever with an eye toward function and technology, never design or comfort. The cardiothoracic ward, known as Harvey, was as bland as the rest of the hospital, but with the extra unattractive feature of ghastly aqua accents throughout. As if that was a substitute for style. Felix leaned against the nurses’ station, feigning interest in a chart. It had been over a week since his introduction as Director of Surgery. In the subsequent ten days his true role in the hospital had spread like, well, gossip in a hospital. He’s the Dread Pirate Roberts here for your jjjoooobbb!! The rumors were absolutely true, but he didn’t want to let that on. To make an accurate assessment of viability and redundancies he needed to see the hospital in action, not performance. Changes were only as good as their usefulness and longevity. So whenever possible he preferred to observe as inconspicuously as a man of his height could. This tended to involve a lot of pretending to read and “sneaking”.

Even if he wasn’t half secretly overseeing a major shakeup in the hospital, being the Director of Surgery meant he bounced from ward to ward far more than his colleagues did. Which was how he found himself on Harvey that afternoon. He appreciated the challenges that this brought, it tested and stretched diagnostic muscles he’d not used since deciding a specialty, but it also ate into his time as a surgeon. He’d accepted a more administrative position as it was the next logical career move, but in his heart, he was a doctor first and foremost, a bureaucrat a distant second. His pantomime reading of one of Paul Elliot’s old transplant cases was interrupted by a sandy haired teen with a strong Belfast accent.

“It’s ma Dad, he needs help.” A quick survey of the room told him two things: one, no one was collapsed on the floor, meaning the Dad in question was already a patient in a bed, and two, none of the CT consultants, or even a registrar, were in the immediate vicinity. The boy was talking to him.

“Who’s his consultant?”

“Ms. Hale.” The boy fairly spat.

“Then I suggest you wait for her.” She was likely doing something maverick and self-righteous, but he had no doubts she’d be back.

“She doesn’t know a damn thing what she’s doing! She’s done like fifteen tests on ma Dad and all she says is ‘wait and see’. Now you tell me to wait! I’m sick of waiting. He’s in pain, real pain.”

“Alright.” He could at least do something about the pain, if nothing else.

Sofia Grace Hale had a scrivener’s hand, surprising for a doctor. It was large, round, looping, and very legible, unlike his own tight, scratchy scrawl. ‘Abdominal pain’ jumped out from the meticulous notes. Most of Mr. Patrick Baxter’s ailments were CT related and not necessarily caused by his MS– the dilated aorta first among them. Ms. Hale was undoubtable chasing all of their causes and symptoms, but the abdominal pain… well he could check on that. It would also make the teen happy, hopefully, if he could even answer one question.

“Mr. Baxter, my name is Felix Magnusson, and I’d like to do a few tests regarding your abdominal pain, I’ll be arranging for your transfer to our general surgery ward, St. Irene’s.”

Ms. Hale’s red tassel earrings matched her lipstick and made her double take particularly dramatic as she passed Mr. Baxter, his son Kevin, and the porter taking them to the third floor.

“Where are you taking Mr. Baxter?”

“Down to Irene.” Her coffee colored eyes widened and that fire he’d seen during their first meeting began to smolder. She had eyes that could lead a man to hell. Perhaps one day she might look at him without an indignant flame in her gaze. But until then he would warm himself by the fire in her eyes.

“What?”

“He needs an ultrasound.”

“Why isn’t he having one here?” She crossed her arms under her breast as she glared up at him. Even in her high heels her head only came to about his shoulders. To keep eye contact she was forced to crane her neck slightly. Which she did, pale throat exposed, creating a lovely long line down her neck to her décolletage, where he resolutely refused to look, no matter how tempting.

“There seems little point in taking up a CT bed when his problem is clearly GS related.”

“Clearly GS related? The worst pain is in his chest, and the echo shows a dilated aorta.”

“I’ve read your notes. He also has severe abdominal pain. So, what’s your diagnosis?”

She wanted to scream. That arrogant bastard. That absolute arschloch. ‘What’s your diagnosis?’ like she was a bloody F1. God, his tone. ‘Was ist deine diagnose?’ It was that same clipped, ‘I don’t think you have this in you’ tone her clinical skills lead at Tübingen had taken with her. Except he was speaking English. And she wasn’t a F1 anymore. She was a consultant, goddamnit.

(The worst part was, of course, the fact she didn’t have a diagnosis. Not yet anyway, and that uncertainty made her feel even more like a bloody first year all over again. ‘Was ist deine diagnose?’ ‘Keine Ahnung.’)

“I’ve ruled out ischemic heart disease but I’m still waiting on his blood pressure.”

“That is not a diagnosis.” Her eyes flamed beautifully. Her temper was quick and exquisite.

“I’m well aware! As I said, I’m waiting on his test results.”

“The patient was admitted thirty-six hours ago, and you don’t have a diagnosis yet. Surly a change of tact can only assist in figuring this out.” He cocked a brow, his supreme confidence in his own ability shining in his eyes, the quirk of his lips. He took a step closer to her, forcing her head back further, as if he wanted to force her to look away. She wouldn’t. She’d hold her ground and his gaze, even if meant he put her in Anuvittasana to do it. She could catch a whiff of his aftershave, something with sandalwood in it. He smelled of it, hospital, fresh laundry, and perhaps faintly, of old books.

“Is it common elsewhere to steal other consultants’ patients? Or is this because you think you know everything?” He stared at her a moment, tongue moistening his thin lips before he spoke.

“We are both consultants, are we not?” He could see her hands flexing at her side, as if she was thinking about strangling him, and he could taste her anger, capsaicin hot.

“Yes.” She spat out from between cayenne colored lips.

“then surly Mr. Baxter can be our patient. Now let me see what I can learn about the GS part of our current problem, hm?” And with that patronizing hum in his throat he left. Left her in the hallway struggling to keep from screaming, her breath coming in choppy, short burst.

She really did not like that man.

He heard her before he saw her, the determined click of spike heels on linoleum making the announcement: Gird your loins. The moment Mr. Baxter was back from his ultrasound she was at his bedside, chart in hand.

“Your blood pressure is constantly going from high to normal-”

“Of course, it is Love, you keep bothering me. Now, I don’t wanna be rude…” His tone suggested otherwise as his gaze raked down her body, coming to rest on her legs with appreciation. “I’ve lived with this condition for fifteen years; you’re not going to tell me anything I don’t already know.” She did have stunning legs, but that did not give the man the right to stare like that. Felix could feel his jaw tighten as he watched patient and consultant converse.

“Right, Jeyne, I’d like to do a blood culture and another echo, please.”

“Love, you’re not listening to me. You’re wasting your time running these bloody tests.” Ms. Hale was very clearly listening to the man, her back was visibly tense from across the room, spine straight and hard as steel. She gave him a curt nod and walked away, his eyes following her with a lascivious grin spreading across his face. He caught her eye as she brushed past him down the hall, for once that burning anger wasn’t directed at him. Once the click-click of her heels was out of earshot he released the breath he’d not realized he’d been holding. The glower he knew he wore, however, remained.

The ward was mostly dark as he made his final rounds for the evening. Meetings had taken up most of his afternoon, bowel resection aside, and had pushed any patient follow ups or paperwork into late in the evening. Most of the residents on the ward were asleep, with a few readings or playing on their devices, providing patches of light throughout the otherwise dim floor. Mr. Baxter was asleep, looking almost peaceful. He snagged the man’s file and retreated to the better lighting of the nurses’ station.

“She said I could sit here.” The voice almost startled him, if he was the sort to be startled. Kevin Baxter sat at the nursing station, text book and papers spread about him in messy piles. Felix felt his fingers twitch, itch to straighten them up, keep them from jumbling together or with anything important still on the desk.

“Who did?”

“Sister Jacobs. Gotta do my homework somewhere.” He held up a battered German language primer.

“Ah! Sprichst du Deutsch?”

“Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof.” He could only smile at his response. There was always something deliciously ironic about complaining that one did not speak the language in idioms of the language.

He’d learned Latin at his father’s knee, and learned it perfectly, for his father would not have settled for anything less. It was both his personality and his profession, as a professor of classics and philologist. English had come quickly in school and become his primary language when at ten he’d been sent to boarding school. He’d learned French first, having tested out of the Latin classes, followed shortly by German. At the time French had been the easier language to pick up, but after quickly realizing that speaking it frequently would require interacting with the French, he’d not pursued it beyond conversational. His mastery of German had been improved tremendously the year he spent in Heidelberg but since his return to the UK it had fallen by the wayside, reading skills aside. He still enjoyed keeping up with his former colleagues’ research. He now also had a stack of publications by S.G. Hale sitting on his desk to peruse.

“Deutsche Sprache, Schwere Sprache.”

“Ja, und ich mag es nicht. Es ist eine mean, hateful Sprache.”

“If you need help, Ms. Hale is a fluent German speaker, she went to school there.” The boy pulled a face. “Do you always work at night?” He was not interested in hearing the boy complain about one of the hospital’s more talented surgeons because his father had a particularly difficult case to diagnose; sifting out preexisting MS symptoms from the new ones, causes still unknown.

“It’s the only time we get any peace, when he’s asleep. Then it’s like everything’s… dunno, normal, I guess, whatever that means.” He sounded so old for one so young. Felix followed the boy’s eyes as they rested on his father, who was still resting as peacefully as one could in a hospital bed. I could not be easy for either of them, as far as he could tell there was no one else in the Baxter household at the moment except Patrick and Kevin. Being primary caretaker and a teenager was no easy task. “It’s become secondary progressive, hasn’t it?” His jaw clenched.

“What makes you say that?”

“Cuz it’s obvious,” The boy said in that way that only teenagers could. “The migraines, the flashing before his eyes, the coughing like he’s got consumption, the going crazy mad for no reasons.” Felix felt his body tense. This was new information. Important and new. Given how consistently condescending and rude he’d been to Ms. Hale while simultaneously ogling her admittedly very fine legs and even better backside, he’d assumed the man had always had a bad temper. That it was a personality trait, not a symptom.

“He’s not always had a temper?” His mind buzzed with new connections.

“Just lately. Why?”

“Do your homework.” The Baxters might complain about excessive tests but he was fairly confident the next two would provide all the answers they needed.

She was too old for this shit. Sofia Grace did her best to stifle a yawn before going to speak to Mr. Baxter. She’d been up entirely too late trying to figure out his diagnosis, but she’d finally made one. It was a pity that as her vice of choice, she’d developed a tolerance to caffeine so high that the amount necessary to actually keep her awake would also, quite possibly, kill her. But given how Mr. Baxter rankled her with his distain and condescension she knew that her blood would undoubtedly be pumping in now time. Straightening her blouse, she approached his bed, Kevin had already left for school it seemed.

“Good morning, Mr. Baxter. My sincerest apologies for it taking so long, but I think I’ve come up with an explanation for your symptoms.”

“No need, Love, really.” It was a dismissal but not nearly as rude as his usual attitude.

“Sorry?” In fact, he looked rather resigned.

“Catecholamine.” A baritone voice in her ear supplied. Sofia Grace felt herself jump out of her skin. She wheeled around. There, standing in her personal space was Felix Magnusson. Tall as ever, as immovable as a brick wall, and radiating a warmth from his chest that made the rest of the room feel chilly. She’d had no idea he was on the ward, let alone able to stand directly behind her.

“What?”

“I’ve explained it all to Mr. Baxter already,” He continued on, as efficient as ever, pulling out a CT scan from its large brown envelope with flourish. “It accounts for all the symptoms and really, it’s blindingly obvious when you really think about it. I feel a little ashamed for not realizing sooner.” He held the scan out in front of her, he was so close to her back and his arms were so long that she only needed to lean back slightly into his chest to see what he was looking at. “Textbook Pheochromocytoma.” There was indeed a tumor on the adrenal gland and up into the chest cavity, partially around the diaphragm. The pain, headaches, palpitations, elevated heartrate and blood pressure… all the signs and symptoms. The dilated aorta was a problem, but not related to the other symptoms. It really was a general surgery problem, Hurensohn! He lowered his arm but didn’t step back from her.

“So, what do we do now?” It was the first time the man in the bed had looked up at her with anything other than contempt.

“Well,” his MS did complicate things, he wasn’t wrong when he’d asserted that. They’d have to determine if he was fit for surgery, speak with the neuro and physio specialists, get a theatre slot if he was determined fit or wait longer if he wasn’t.

“There’s a procedure. We have a slot in theatre this morning.” She did step away from him then. They needed to have a discussion, now. And it couldn’t be in front of Patrick Baxter. Her fingers itched to grab him by the tie (burgundy silk against a pale blue shirt and navy suit) and tow him away from the bed.

“Mr. Magnusson, could I have a word?” Keeping her tone light and professional was a challenge. They’d only worked together for two weeks and Sofia Grace wasn’t entirely certain she hadn’t developed a twitch in that time.

“Just a moment, Ms. Hale.” He didn’t quite hand wave her away, but it was close. God grant me the strength to deal with condescending men. “There’s a theatre slot this morning; would you like us to call your son?” Magnusson was hard to read, but this look was particularly inscrutable.

“No, not till after. If that’s possible. He’s got a maths test today and doesn’t need more worry than he’s already got.” Ever so slightly the lines around his eyes and mouth relaxed as he studied the man in the bed.

“Mr. Magnusson, if you don’t mind?” It took some effort to steer him away, mostly with herself to keep from grabbing him by the tie to do it. Instead a firm hand on his elbow did the trick, only making her feel slightly like a tiny tugboat, although instead of bringing a Nordic cruise ship out to sea, she was dragging a Swedish surgeon over to the light box.

“You’re just assuming he’s fit for surgery!” She hissed.

“The Neuro and Physio specialists seem to agree with me.” He hung the scan on the viewer, turned it on, and then reached into his breast pocket for his glasses. Resolutely not looking at her.

“So, let me get this straight,” Sabrina had suggested that he wasn't awful, but she’d just let him get under her skin. And then he did shit like this. “You talked to Stewart and Noah before you talked to me about our patient?” He ignored her. Outright.

“If you’re still concerned, let’s get a second opinion.” He turned and spotted Griffin Richards walking across the ward, cup of coffee in one hand, a stack of files in the other. Sofia liked Griffin; he was an excellent GS surgeon with a flair for the upper GI. He was committed to helping people and passionate about the NHS. Patients came first and she’d only ever seen him play politics to that end. He was a good colleague, even if his personal life was a bit of a shambles. Discreetly she peeked at his hands, no wedding band this morning. So, he was on the outs with his wife this week.

“Ah, Mr. Richards, would you be so kind as to act as arbitrator?” He waved Griffin over politely.

“For what?” He asked, giving Magnusson a wary look but gifting her with a warm smile. He was a handsome and charming man; it was easy to see how he got his wife. It was only a shame that it didn’t seem like he was able to keep her.

“Pheochromocytoma on the adrenal gland that has attached itself to the diaphragm.” Magnusson used the ear piece of his glasses to point to the tumor.

“Mr. Magnusson seems keen to slice and dice, despite the fact the patient has MS.”

“And you would do what exactly, Ms. Hale? Key hole through the chest?” It was a valid option, but he said it as if he might have said, “Try crystal healing?” Griffin put on his own glasses and studied the scan quietly for a moment, sipping his coffee.

“Well if it were my patient, given the position of the tumor, I would suggest you and I operate together.” Another smile, this one less charming as he’d just sold her out. Magnusson was smiling as well, thin lipped and smug as hell.

“And there’s our answer,” he tapped the scan with his glasses, “a CT/GS collaboration, as I was saying. Thank you, Mr. Richards. I’ll see you on the ice, Ms. Hale.” And with that he walked off. Just like that. Sofia knew she was gawping, but she couldn’t help it, the arrogance of the man left her speechless.

Dieser Arschgesicht!

Well, perhaps not entirely…

Ms. Hale was already at the sink when he arrived for surgery. She was in pale blue scrubs today, unlike the wine-colored ones he’d first met her in, her dark curls covered by her floral cap. She didn’t look up at him as she scrubbed her hands but gave him a slight nod as he took the faucet next to her to begin his own cleansing ritual.

“I have reasons for wanting to do a keyhole procedure on Mr. Baxter, it’s not just a ‘CT’ thing or whatever you seem to think. If we do keyhole-”

“We’re doing this open procedure, Ms. Hale.”

“But there’s a risk of-”

“The theatre is set up.” Her cayenne lips pursed into a stubborn line. Her face was already so expressive, but with her mouth painted bright red it was impossible not to look at her lips. They were full, with a cupid’s bow, and clearly holding back several things she’d like to say. Her eyes said them for her, sparking as she gave him a last look before heading off to get her gown and gloves on. If she was half as dynamic of a surgeon as she was as a woman this was going to be quite the operation.

Perhaps it was because she had a scalpel in her hands, but Magnusson was at least inclined to follow her instructions while they were in theatre. He retracted when asked, clamped where she needed him to clamp and generally stayed out of her way as she dealt with Mr. Baxter’s diaphragm. She also didn’t need to look up from her work to know that he was watching her every move with a critical eye.

“Enjoying your foray into Cardiothoracics?” He’d declined the suggestion of background music, leaving nothing to fill the silence except for either one’s thoughts or small talk. And Sofia Grace never much liked being alone with her own thoughts.

“Believe it or not, I was not considering my life lacking in any way for not spending time playing with people’s hearts. What is it about CT surgeons thinking the heart is the only organ in the body?” She’d meant it as small talk, a reference to the fact he was currently assisting her. But nope, he was gunna be an ass about this too. Jesus H. Christ and a windmill full of corpses what is his problem?!

“To be fair, it is kinda important.” He didn’t look up and neither did she as she finished off the last stitch she needed, and they could transition from the more CT oriented to GS oriented surgery.

“It likes to think that, certainly.” He said, picking up a scalpel. “Whereas the kidneys just get on with their job, filtering toxins out and letting the body function. Efficient, beautiful, and secure enough in themselves that they don’t need to shout about it.” Normally she would argue that picking a favorite or most important body part was a stupid endeavor. Most of the organs in the body were necessary and linked together in ways that pulling one out of the system without compensating for it would lead to problems in a variety of other areas. There was no one organ that was better than any other body part, there was only what needed to be dealt with immediately or later to ensure quality of life.

This being said, if he was just going to talk shit because he had some weird hang-up about CT surgeons, she’d double down for the heart. (It was her favorite organ, even if picking favorites was stupid).

“So indispensable you can lose one and still survive.”

“Hack a piece of kidney off and it’ll just grow back,” He picked up a scalpel, “the minute the heart breaks it becomes a useless piece of tissue. And then of course there’s the fact we can now replace a faulty heart with a machine the size of a cigarette packet.” He shot her a look over the top of his glasses before he started cutting, she could almost see the smug smirk behind his surgical mask.

“And in some cases, Mr. Magnusson, it seems as if people can survive without any heart at all.” She met his eye steadily, arching one brow defiantly. He stared at her for a moment. Somewhere behind her, someone sounding a lot like Dan Flannery whispered, “Ooo burn.”

“We need to keep moving.” He muttered awkwardly, getting back to the task at hand.

A hit, a very palpable hit.

They worked in silence after that, only the beeps and pings of the machines and occasional request breaking up the quiet.

“BP is plummeting.” Magnusson reported calmly. This was exactly why she hadn’t wanted to do open surgery in the first place.

“If we had gone with the keyhole procedure-”

Which we did not so I fail to see the usefulness of that comment.” He snapped, voice cold and quick and sharp. Brooking no retort.

“We did not go with the keyhole procedure because you decided that we shouldn’t, not because we mutually agreed this method. You decided what was best for this procedure, without listening to my reasons, I might add.”

“I am trying to concentrate, Ms. Hale, if you don’t mind?” Out of respect for Mr. Baxter she bit back the rest of what she wanted to say. At least for the moment.

“It’s funny that of all the words to get lost in translation, partners, seems to mean nothing to you.” Mr. Baxter was now Pheochromocytoma free and on his way back to bed for his recovery.

“What?” Magnusson looked at her sideways as she began washing her hands beside him at the sink. Thoroughly washing her hands gave her something to focus on while she tried to find the right words. There were so many things she wanted to say. Most of them rude. But as therapeutic she’d find it to smash his face in and curse him out, it wouldn’t change what she needed to have changed. Word on the street was he would be staying at Saint Seb’s for the foreseeable future, she needed to play the long game, not for immediate gratification.

“In addition to unilaterally deciding on the method of today’s surgery without consulting me, your CT specialist for this surgery and Co-consultant. You also figured out some significant information about our shared patient and did not tell me.” He stopped washing his hands to stare at her, hands raised slightly, allowing the soap and water to drip down his long forearms to the floor. “No, instead, you went straight to the patient himself and explained everything, leaving me in the dark, and then looking like a complete ass with my dick in the wind trying to discuss his condition without the full picture. To compound this, you swoop in and make me look even more stupid in front of our patient. A patient who already had limited regard for my expertise and position as a Doctor.” She turned the faucet off with her elbow and flicked the excess water from her hands into the sink with a flourish before turning to face him. He was staring at her intently, square jaw working but his mouth wisely closed.

“You complain that I make arrogant, rash decisions and that surgeons who make decisions for their own ends are a menace. Next time you work with me, you either keep me in the loop and treat me as an equal or find someone else to handle your heart.” She didn’t wait for his response, instead she grabbed a towel from beside him and brushed past, leaving him alone in the scrub room.

#Cait writes #Hospital Romance Drama #original fiction #Sofia Grace is Chaotic Good chaffing under Lawful Good Rules

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rallamajoop · 6 years ago

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An update on that charity auction thing (or, how I spent several months constructing elaborate headcanons about undercover agent air hostesses instead of just writing the damn fic)

Point the first: I still have not written the auction-winner's fic which I owe from way back in January. Her request called for case fic starring one of UNCLE's recurring female cast, such as Sarah Johnson or Heather McNabb, which was all well and good.

The sensible thing for me to do at this point would probably have been to churn out something starring Sarah, who is My Favourite and the much better developed of the two (I've had half-an-idea for something along those lines for ages). Heather (who, for all her established qualifications, mostly seems to be stuck being the girl back at the office who answers the phone) gives you far less to work with character-wise -- so little that the question of how to make a case-fic starring her work at all struck me as a real conundrum.

Unfortunately, I never can resist a good conundrum, and that's the long and short of how I found myself mentally committed to filling out that auction fic the hard way.

I could ramble on about the process here,* but the bottom line is that I've had the thing basically plotted out since around, oh, May or June or so, minus a few key details that remain sticking points (like a rather infuriating innocent-shaped-hole in the story). It was there that it dawned on me that one of the little details I really ought to have pinned down about Heather herself -- at least in my head, whether or not it came up in the story -- was the dangling question of just who her roommate was.

Some context: among the few things we do learn about Heather in her very first appearance is this bit of dialogue from Napoleon:

Napoleon: Oh, no, Heather's been with us almost a year. She used to be a stewardess. She rooms with--

But Waverly cuts him off there, so we never hear who she rooms with -- let alone why Napoleon might thing it worth mentioning to his superior.

Knowing Napoleon, the obvious answer is that Heather rooms with some other attractive young woman he has dated, or would like to date -- perhaps another beautiful UNCLE girl (or stewardess). All the same, I spent some time casting for alternate possibilities before my brain inevitably went, "Well, duh, it's Wanda Townsend from S3 -- the other stewardess-cum-UNCLE-staffer, who very nearly became Heather herself? Who else would it be?"

This would call for a little context from what has become my specialty subject in the land of fandom trivia, the women of UNCLE. See, back before May Heatherly was cast as Heather McNabb, the role very nearly went to an actress called Sharyn Hillyer, who had a small role in the UNCLE pilot as the stewardess on the plane with Napoleon in the final scene (pic on the left below). I'm halfway-convinced that line I just quoted about how Heather used to be a stewardess could very well be an artifact leftover from when Hillyer was in the lead for the role, by way of explaining to the audience why a woman we'd last seen playing a stewardess was suddenly working for UNCLE as of episode 2 (it's certainly more interesting than to assume the writers were simply going "how can we make this sexy woman even MORE sexy to our straight-male-target-audience?" -- which it might still be, but I digress).

Hillyer's story on UNCLE doesn't end there, however, because she was eventually cast as a recurring UNCLE girl (the affore-mentioned Wanda Townsend) starting with The Indian Affairs Affair at the end of S2. But by Indian Affairs, Hillyer was actually making her third appearance in the show -- just 4 episodes previously, she'd appeared as another stewardess in The Project Deephole Affair (pic on the right above).

There's nothing remarkable about the same actress getting called back for multiple different roles in a show like UNCLE, of course, but the neat thing about Hillyer's parts is that you can so easily headcanon them them all into the same character. Her stewardess character from the pilot certainly seems to know Napoleon -- perhaps even who he works for -- and though it's subtler in Project Deephole, I always did like the idea she might just have been an UNCLE plant there too, helping keep an eye on the episode's hapless innocent. Heck, if UNCLE (read: probably Napoleon) canonically recruited one stewardess into their regular staff with Heather, why shouldn't there be more?

Now, I reiterate, to this point I have already dedicated north of 4K words to the subject of these characters and their place in UNCLE, from every obvious angle (and a number of less obvious). But so habituated had I become to thinking of the various Wandas as underdeveloped punchlines, and of the 60's stewardess as a one-dimensional male fantasy, that I am ashamed to admit it was only now that it hit me: recruiting stewardesses as UNCLE staff isn't just a convenient backstory for a couple of bit-parts, it's an act of genius!

Not seeing it? Let me explain!

To start with, the stewardess is the perfect courier. She might travel anywhere in the world as part of her daily routine, carrying items on and off the plane without half the fuss facing the average traveler. If there's a person of interest among the passengers, the stewardess is the one person on the plane who can walk by his seat a dozen times in an hour without looking the least bit suspicious, who can "helpfully" take an interest in whatever he's doing. Many in the job speak multiple languages, and what better job to give you familiarity with locations across the country, if not the world? Finally, after all that time in customer service, she'll have ample practice at sizing people up at a glance, quickly remembering names and faces, and maintaining a cheery smile no matter how much stress she's under (which may well include real life-or-death situations, given that air safety in the 60s was not what it is today). All invaluable skills for the budding spy!**

And if UNCLE aren't forward-thinking enough to have put all that together long ago, you can bet your liver Napoleon would be the one to rectify it. What better way to pass some microfilm to a courier than to conceal it in a bunch of roses, to be presented to his latest stewardess-girlfriend over dinner (during which he'll ask if she's ever been to Paris -- oh, you're scheduled to fly out this week? You must try this little shop -- let me write down the address -- ask for Jean-Louis, drop my name if you need to -- you won't regret it, I promise).

Heather may well have been one of his first recruits. This is all ancient history by the time we meet her, of course, as she's long since transferred to UNCLE New York full time (where, if her first bio is to be believed, she's since been promoted to head of Communications). Maybe she even personally recommended Wanda to Napoleon as another recruit. Wanda herself started out in nursing before moving to aviation (which was actually the normal career path for stewardesses back in the 30's, and far from unheard of even in the 50's and 60's -- neatly explaining how Wanda is qualified to give Napoleon all those shots in My Friend the Gorilla). Wanda was obviously spent at least a good couple of years working as one of UNCLE's stewardess-air-couriers, given she's in the same job from the pilot right up until late S2, But by this point, Heather had long-since disappeared from the office (probably transferred to some other UNCLE office elsewhere in the world), and the New York office was short-staffed, so this would be when Napoleon talks Wanda into transferring to the office full time.

This is also where it all starts to go wrong. Napoleon, inveterate flirt that he is, leaves Wanda with the impression that he wasn't just offering her a transfer, he was also asking her to go steady -- and when it comes right down to it, both of them were a little at fault for that bit of miscommunication. Gentleman that he is, Napoleon did his best not to let her down when he realised the mistake (see: dates mentioned in Monks of St Thomas and Pop Art). But truthfully he just wasn’t that into Wanda, and got far too much use out of charm in the field (see: Do It Yourself Dreadful) to stay faithful very long. (Sharyn Hillyer herself once suggested that the particular joy Wanda takes out of sticking Napoleon with all those needles in Gorilla was a subtle little bit of revenge for all that cheating, and I don't think I can add much to that.) But by the end of the season, she's come to terms with the reality of the situation. (Maybe she has a rebound office-fling with Paul Westcott, guaranteeing maximum shadenfreude when Napoleon inevitably found out about her new beau).

No-one else at UNCLE has any great sympathy for Napoleon through all this. It may not have been entirely his own fault, but he absolutely brings it on himself.

(FWIW, feel free to adopt any part of all that needlessly-elaborate headcanon for your own fic use if you like it. I mean, I’d like to hear about it if you do, but c'mon -- now that I've put the idea in your head, there's just no way Napoleon isn't recruiting stewardesses to UNCLE's cause, is there?)

All well and good, but jumping back several topics, it is now still over 6 months since I promised that fic, and excited as I am by all this backstory, I am no closer to having anything to show for it. What the hell, thought I, even if there isn't a proper fic in all this, surely I can at least get a short prelude ficlet about how Heather was originally recruited to UNCLE out of it. I'll still have the case-fic to write, but I should be able to bang it out quickly as a quick apology to my requester for making her wait so long.

Naturally, this was my cue to... start furiously researching the world of the 60's stewardess, buy two different books, track down a library copy of a third, watch a few documentaries and generally get myself so excited over the research aspect that the fic still hasn't been written.

Over air hostesses. No, I know. I was not expecting this either.

But easy as it is to write them off as an outdated male fantasy, the world of the 60′s stewardess turned out to be a mess of fascinating contradictions -- not to mention a truly enlightening (and frequently horrifying) window into the world of Cold War gender politics. In an era when aviation was still something new, exciting and prohibitively expensive to the masses, it's hard to overstate how much it meant to some of these women just to have the opportunity to fly. So many applied for every opening that the airlines could pick and choose. Many if not most had college educations, spoke two or even more languages -- a small handful even had pilots licenses, but the airlines wouldn't hire female pilots, so they took the next best thing.

Yet for all their qualifications, no-one could hope to be hired if she didn't meet the airline's exacting beauty standards, and girls could be fired for no more than putting on a few pounds or turning up in the wrong underwear. They were 'acceptable' to mores of the day only because they played a suitably servile role, usually for no more than a year or two before leaving the job to get married (wedded stewardesses were, of course, forbidden) -- but a minority still made the work into a lifelong career, used their salaries to buy homes and independence, and their image in the fight for feminist causes. And for all that the airlines had originally hired women in the belief they'd be that much less likely to unionise and make trouble, there seems to have almost never been a time before these women had begun fighting for their rights. My reading list includes two different personal accounts from former stewardesses, both of whom worked 5 years for the same airline, barely a decade apart, and their experiences could hardly be more diametrically opposed. It's fascinating.

...and 2K more words of meta later, I still have not written my fic.

It's coming, I promise. It’s just not exactly written just yet. >.>

(Quite possibly there is yet another post’s worth of shameless history-geek-out over the world of the airline stewardess coming too, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point.)

* Did I mention I also spent some of those months finishing a PhD and starting a new full-time job again for the first time in years? I don’t mention this to boast, it’s just, well, that sort of thing does get a bit distracting. Ahem.

** Lest you imagine I’ve come up with anything remotely original here, I’d point out that while researching the topic, I also discovered that idea of stewardesses as spies was a major plot point in the short-lived 2011 series Pan Am. It wasn’t a particularly great show -- I barely made it two episodes in -- but it did spark enough online discussion that I have seen former flight attendants (and various other commentators) both dismiss it as ridiculous, and suggest there was no way it didn’t happen -- especially once regular commercial Russian flights began. So take that as you will.

#The Man from U.N.C.L.E.#The Man from UNCLE #Heather McNabb #Napoleon Solo #Wanda Townsend #Wanda #aviation #fic #headcanon #the women of UNCLE

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sassysuitdonut · 5 months ago

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MSc Psychology: Clinical, Industrial, and Child Specializations

Exploring the Boundless Horizons of Psychology

The Learning Experience

Year-by-Year Journey

Assessment Methods

Navigating the Future of Psychology

For those who wish to do MSc Psychology in Bangalore, admissions are open at ST PAULS COLLEGE. For more details visit: https://blr.stpaulscollege.edu.in/msc-psychology/.

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stillellensibley · 6 years ago

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Becoming Machine: Surrealist Automatism and Some Contemporary Instances

Involuntary Drawing

DAVID LOMAS

Examining the idea of being ‘machine-like’ and its impact on the practice of automatic writing, this article charts a history of automatism from the late nineteenth century to the present day, exploring the intersections between physiology, psychology, poetry and art.

Philippe Parreno’s The Writer 2007 (fig.1) is a video, played on a screen the size of a painted miniature, of the famous eighteenth-century Jaquet-Droz automaton recorded in the act of writing with a goose quill pen. Zooming in on the automaton’s hand and face, Parreno contrives to produce a sense of uncertainty as to the human or robotic nature of the doll. It is an example of a contemporary fascination with cyborgs and with the increasingly blurred dividing line between machine and organism. In a manner worthy of surrealist artist René Magritte, Parreno plays on the viewer’s sense of astonishment. As the camera rolls, the android deliberates before slowly writing: ‘What do you believe, your eyes or my words?’ The ‘Écrivain’ is one of the most celebrated automata that enjoyed a huge vogue in Enlightenment Europe. In a lavish two-volume book, Le Monde des automates (1928), Edouard Gélis and Alfred Chapuis define the android as ‘an automaton with a human face’.1 A chapter of this book, which supplied the illustrations for an article in the surrealist journal Minotaure, is devoted to drawing and writing automata.2 The oldest example Gélis and Chapuis cite was fabricated by the German inventor Friedrich von Knauss whom, they state, laboured at the problem of ‘automatic writing’ for twenty years before presenting his first apparatus in 1753.3

Fig.1 Philippe Parreno The Writer 2007 Photographic still from DVD 3:58 minutes Courtesy the artist and Haunch of Venison, London © Philippe Parreno

The graphic trace

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, recording instruments became vital tools in the production of scientific knowledge in a range of disciplines that were of direct relevance to surrealism. Such mechanical apparatuses, synonymous with the values of precision and objectivity, quickly became the benchmark of an experimental method. The inexorable rise of the graphic method has been intensively studied by historians of science and visual culture, but surrealism has not yet been considered as partaking of this transformation in the field of visual representation. In what follows, recording instruments are shown to have helped to underwrite surrealism’s scientific aspects and bolster its credentials as an experimental avant-garde.

The graphic method inaugurated a novel paradigm of visual representation, one geared towards capturing dynamic phenomena in their essence. It was the product of a radically new scientific conception of the physical universe in terms of dynamic forces, a world view that is doubtless at some level a naturalisation of the energies, both destructive and creative, unleashed by industrial capitalism.5The proliferation of mechanical inscription devices in the life sciences coincided with the displacement of anatomy, as a static principle of localisation, by physiology, which analysed and studied forces and functions. Étienne-Jules Marey, known today as an inventor of chronophotography, was one of the main exponents of the graphic method in France, and he personally devised a number of instruments whose aid, he wrote, made it possible to ‘penetrate the intimate functions of organs where life seems to translate itself by an incessant mobility’.6 As an apparatus for visualisation, the graphic method carries implications for how to construe figures of the visible and invisible. It was not simply a technology for making visible something that lay beneath the human perceptual threshold (like a microscope), but rather a technology for producing a visual analogue – a translation – of forces and phenomena that do not themselves belong to a visual order of things.7

At its simplest, a frog’s leg muscle is hooked directly to a pointed stylus that rests on a drum whose surface is blackened with particles of soot from a candle flame (fig.2). An electrical stimulus causes the muscle to contract, deflecting the stylus and thus producing on the revolving drum a typical white on black curvilinear trace. Fatigue of the muscle produces an increased duration and diminished amplitude of successive contractions, as shown in the figure at the bottom. A more sophisticated device pictured by Marey consisted of a flexible diaphragm, a sort of primitive transducer, connected by a hollow rubber tube to a stylus, which inscribed onto a continuous strip of paper. At the heart of the graphic method is the production of a visible trace.8 A stylus roving back and forth on a rotating cylinder or a moving band of paper translates forces into a universal script that Marey regarded as ‘the language of the phenomena themselves’ and which he proclaimed is superior to the written word.9 In an era where quantitative data gradually became the common currency of scientific discourse, Marey considered written language, ‘born before science and not being made for it’, as inadequate to express ‘exact measures and well-defined relations’.10 The incorporation of a time axis owing to the continuous regular movement of the drum lends a distinctive property to the graphic trace. The historian Robert Brain remarks that ‘the graphic representation is not an object or field like that of linear perspective, but a spatial product of a temporal process, whose order is serial or syntagmatic’.11 Units of time are marked off at the bottom of the myographic trace as regular blips on a horizontal axis; additionally, the passage of time is registered in the palimpsest-like layering of successive traces.12

Fig.2 Simple myograph (top) and trace of repeated muscular contractions (bottom) From Etienne-Jules Marey, La Méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine, Paris 1875, p.194

From its initial applications in physiology, the graphic method soon made inroads into areas such as medicine and psychology, eager to prove their scientific legitimacy. The familiar chart of a patient’s temperature, pulse, and respiration had become standard fare in hospital wards by the mid-nineteenth century.13 Marey went so far as to predict that the visual tableau comprised of such ‘medical curves’ would replace altogether the written record. The growth of medical specialties saw doctors attempting to justify their status and claims to authoritative knowledge by adopting the tools-in-trade of an experimental science. The Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, under neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, was at the forefront of these developments, and graphic traces are liberally interspersed among the better-known photographs, engravings, and fine art reproductions of Charcot’s book Iconographie de la Salpêtrière (1878). Employed first for the investigation of muscular and nervous disorders, the myograph was subsequently applied by Charcot to the study of hysteria. By enabling the hysterical attack to be objectively recorded in the form of a linear visual narrative, the graphic trace performed an invaluable service in conferring a semblance of reality upon a condition that was widely dismissed as mere playacting or simulation (fig.3).

Fig.3 Epileptic phase of an hysterical attack From Paul Richer, Études cliniques sur l’hystéro-épilepsie ou grande hystérie, Paris 1885, p.40.

Nearer in time to the surrealists, the hysteria problem was revived with particular urgency in the guise of shellshock, and there again physicians placed their faith in the graphic method as a means of reliably excluding simulation where clinical observation alone was of no avail. Evidence of the surrealist André Breton’s first-hand acquaintance with such devices is not hard to find. Soon after his arrival at the neuro-psychiatric centre at St Dizier in August 1916 he writes excitedly to Théodore Fraenkel, a fellow medical student, saying that all his time is devoted to examining patients. He details his technique for interrogating his charges and in the same breath adds ‘and I manipulate the sphygmometric oscillometer’.14 The instrument to which Breton refers gives a measure of the peripheral pulses and would have been used by him to detect an exaggerated vascular response to cold that was held to be a diagnostic feature of reflex nervous disorders. There is a reasonable likelihood that Breton also came in contact with the use of a myograph for the same purpose, either at St Dizier or the following year when he was attached as a trainee to neurologist Joseph Babinski’s unit at the Pitié Hospital in Paris. Breton possessed a copy, with a personal dedication from the authors, of Babinski and Jules Froment’s Hystérie-pithiatisme et troubles nerveux d’ordre réflexe en neurologie de guerre (1917), a textbook profusely illustrated with myographic traces.

As a newly formed discipline, psychology was also quick to integrate the paraphernalia of experimental physiology.15 Alfred Binet, one of the pioneers of psychology in France, employed the graphic trace as an instrument more sensitive in his opinion than automatic writing for revealing a dissociation of the personality in cases of hysteria. ‘In following our study of the methods that enable us to reveal this hidden personality’, Binet writes, ‘we are now to have recourse to the so-called graphic method, the employment of which, at first restricted to the work-rooms of physiology, seems, at the present time, destined to find its way into the current practice of medicine’.16 The definition of psychology as experimental is seen to be closely tied with the use of a measuring instrument. Binet’s goal appears to be an almost paradoxical exclusion of the subject, with its nigh infinite capacity for dissimulation, from the scientific investigation of that subject’s own subjectivity. Coinciding with the introduction of quantitative forms of measurement, introspection rapidly fell into disrepute as a method of inquiry. Robert Brain’s observation that in the field of psychology ‘the graphic method served both as a research tool and a source of analogies for investigating mental activities’ is certainly to be borne in mind with regard to surrealism.17

Alongside mainstream science, recording devices also made incursions into psychical research. The use of such apparatuses to restrict the latitude for fraud contributed to the general air of scientific enquiry. The historian Richard Noakes has shown that the intractable problems of researching mediums, their notoriously capricious and untrustworthy nature, led some experimenters to suggest that sensitive instruments alone could replace the human subject as a means of accessing the spirit world.18 In the 1870s, William Crookes, a respected chemist and a pioneer in the application of measuring instruments to spiritualist research, devised an apparatus for recording emanations from the body of the medium Daniel Dunglas Home, as a result of which he claimed to have discovered a mysterious new form of energy, which he termed ‘Psychic Force’ (fig.4).19 A Marey drum was used to make physiological recordings of the medium Eusapia Palladino, who had been often exposed for cheating in the past, during a highly publicised series of séances conducted under controlled experimental conditions at the laboratories of the Institut général de psychologie in Paris.20

Fig.4 Apparatus for recording the emanation of psychic force from a medium. From William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, London 1874.

Modest recording instruments

It would appear that surrealism was not indifferent to the lure of the graphic method. The particular aspect to foreground here is the promise of objectivity. The graphic method offered the prospect of bypassing altogether the human observer who was increasingly liable to be viewed as a source of error in scientific experiment. With precision and objectivity the yardsticks of science by the latter part of the nineteenth century, the historian Peter Galison remarks that ‘the machine as a neutral and transparent operator … would serve as instrument of registration without intervention and as an ideal for the moral discipline of the scientists themselves’.21 Addressing the graphic trace in these terms, Marey strikingly adumbrates the language of surrealism in remarking that ‘one endeavoured to write automatically certain phenomena’.22 The surrealists spoke of their art and literary productions as objective documents and advocated an objective stance that sidelines the authorial subject who was meant to be as near as possible a passive onlooker at the birth of the work. Or, in Breton’s words, a modest recording device: ‘we, who have made no effort whatsoever to filter, who in our works have made ourselves into simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest recording instruments not mesmerised by the drawings we are making.’23 Closely allied with this imperative to become akin to a machine is a metaphorics of the trace and tracing: ‘here again it is not a matter of drawing, but simply of tracing’, Breton insisted in the 1924 ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’.24

The accent on objectivity is consonant with surrealism’s avant-gardist ethos of experiment, stemming ultimately from science. In fact, Breton contended that by the time the manifesto had been published, five years of uninterrupted experimental activity already lay behind it.25 Around the time of the manifesto, the surrealists set about creating a research centre of sorts, the short-lived Bureau of Surrealist Research, testifying to the earnestness of their experimental impulse. However, it was no ordinary laboratory that opened to the public at 15 Rue de Grenelle, Paris, in October 1924. The surrealist playwright and poet Antonin Artaud recalls that a mannequin hung from the ceiling and, reputedly, copies of the crime fiction volume Fantômas and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretations of Dreams framed with spoons were enthroned on a makeshift altarpiece. The second issue of the house journal La Révolution surréaliste, the cover of which was modeled on the popular science magazine La Nature, carried an announcement of its purpose:

The Bureau of Surrealist Research is applying itself to collecting by all appropriate means communications concerning the diverse forms taken by the mind’s unconscious activity. No specific field has been defined for this project and surrealism plans to assemble as much experimental data as possible, without knowing yet what the end result might be.26

Asserting a parallel with science, as Breton was fond of doing, was a way of implying that surrealism was dedicated to finding practical solutions to vital problems of human existence, and of distancing it as far as possible from a posture of aesthetic detachment. The statement above identifies the unconscious as the privileged object of surrealist research. Automatism, from this point of view, could be understood as a research method, a set of investigative procedures that organise and govern practice but do not determine outcomes. The openness of scientific inquiry is something that may have been especially attractive to surrealism; the final clause above insists upon their refusal to define goals – a programme – which would have run the risks of a reductive instrumentalism or empty utopianism. At the same time, however, bearing in mind the extreme animosity towards positivism that Breton notoriously gives vent to in the 1924 manifesto, the dangers for surrealism of too close a proximity to science should not be overlooked. Perhaps for this reason, Artaud, in a report on the bureau carried in the third issue of the journal, argues warily for the necessity of a certain surrealist mysticism. A survey of the terms ‘research’ and ‘experiment’ in the period would reveal that much the same vocabulary was utilised in the marginal, pseudo-scientific world of spiritualism and parapsychology as by mainstream science, and it is notable that surrealist experimentation happily straddles these seemingly contradictory currents. The hypnotic trance sessions, one of the main experimental activities engaged in by the nascent surrealist group, are illustrative of this cross-over between science and the occult. 543 pages of notes and drawings obsessively documenting the sessions, which took place nightly between September and October 1922, were preserved by Breton and included among a list of artworks, books and other objects housed in the bureau.

While Salvador Dalí did not partake of the ‘birth pangs’ of surrealism, as Breton ruefully observed, his overheated imagination provides a vivid if fanciful evocation of this first phase of surrealist experiment. In an essay written in 1932, Dalí conjures up an improbable scenario of hypnotic subjects wired to recording devices like the unfortunate frog in Marey’s illustration, though in this case it is the trace of poetic inspiration that is expectantly awaited:

All night long a few surrealists would gather round the big table used for experiments, their eyes protected and masked by thin though opaque mechanical slats on which the blinding curve of the convulsive graphs would appear intermittently in fleeting luminous signals, a delicate nickel apparatus like an astrolabe being fixed to their necks and fitted with animal membranes to record by interpenetration the apparition of each fresh poetic streak, their bodies being bound to their chairs by an ingenious system of straps, so that they could only move a hand in a certain way and the sinuous line was allowed to inscribe the appropriate white cylinders. Meanwhile their friends, holding their breath and biting their lower lips in concentrated attention, would lean over the recording apparatus and with dilated pupils await the expected but unknown movement, sentence, or image.27

Dalí clearly took to heart Breton’s exhortation to his fellow surrealists that they should make themselves into ‘modest recording instruments’. Inspired by extant photographs that afford a rare glimpse of the legendary bureau, Dalí conjures up a fantastical laboratory with pliant subjects hooked to a plethora of arcane recording devices.

Beyond a serviceable metaphor employed by Breton, what evidence is there for the graphic method as having any bearing on the actual practice of automatic drawing? While scattered instances of direct citation of graphic traces can be demonstrated, what is more significant is that this novel regime of visuality, beginning as a style of scientific imaging and becoming by the time of surrealism a widely circulated and understood visual idiom, was a necessary historical antecedent in order that the automatist line might be imbued with meaning as the authentic trace of unconscious instinctual forces and energies (in its absence, they would have been literally unreadable in these terms). With the precedent of the graphic trace available to them, it was possible for surrealist artists to imagine how they might square the circle by integrating temporal duration within a static visual medium.

‘Could it be that Marcel Duchamp reaches the critical point of ideas faster than anyone else?’, wondered Breton. It is a question that can profitably be asked in examining the impact on avant-garde artists of an avowedly scientific visual idiom. Duchamp, and his artistic collaborator Francis Picabia, around 1912 to 1913 rejected traditional painterly techniques, along with extreme subjectivism that had reached a zenith in the neo-symbolist circles both artists had been involved with up until that point, and turned instead to technical drawing and scientific illustrations as alternative, non-artistic sources of inspiration. Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages 1913–14 (fig.5) is evidence of his search for what art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson calls ‘the beauty of indifference, the counterpart to his painting of precision’.28 For this work, one-metre lengths of thread were allowed to fall from a height of one metre, and the random configurations formed as they came to rest on the ground were fixed and recorded. Displaying the resultant shapes as curved white lines on a long horizontal black strip of canvas would have rung bells with viewers familiar with the then standard repertoire of scientific imaging practices. The typical format of the graphic trace served as a convenient shorthand by means of which Duchamp encoded the desired values of precise measurement and objectivity. Not for the first (or last) time did Duchamp appeal to forms of visual competency that had begun to creep into the common culture, as art historian Molly Nesbitt’s pioneering study relating his use of technical drawing to reforms in the French school curriculum shows.29 The creation of wooden templates or stencils based on the resultant curves is also significant: these were utilised to transfer the curves to other works, notably Network of Stoppages 1914 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the capillary tubes in the Large Glass 1915–23 (Tate T02011), but in addition they provide a measure of the area beneath the curve which, as every student of basic calculus knows, is equal to the integral of the curve.

Marcel Duchamp 3 stoppages étalon (3 Standard Stoppages) 1913–14, replica 1964 Tate © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

Of the surrealist artists, links between art and science run deepest in the work of Max Ernst, who attended lecture courses on psychology while he was a student at university in Bonn.30 Scientific illustrations and tables are frequent source materials for Ernst’s collage, among which are examples of graphic traces, most notably the illustrations to the book Les Malheurs des immortels (1922), a collection of collages and automatic poems produced collaboratively with the surrealist poet Paul Éluard. Between the Two Poles of Politeness is one of at least two collages in the book to utilise a graphic trace, which functions as a ground for the image and a springboard for the artist’s imagination. The typical white-on-black format is exploited by Ernst to evoke a night sky against which the solid white line of the trace stands out starkly. He embellishes the horizontal x-axis marked on the graph by a dotted line with a distant polar landscape that appears to echo the peaks and troughs of the graphic trace. At the left-hand edge of the image, the lines of the graph are extended so they appear to converge towards a vanishing point; the net effect of these hand-drawn additions is to produce incongruities of scale as well as an ambiguous play between the flat space of the diagram and an illusory perspectival space. Accentuating the horizon serves to foreground the idea of a horizon of vision, beyond which normally one cannot see, and thus implies the existence of an invisible realm to which surrealism affords access.

From 1919 through to the manifesto of 1924 – a period of intense experiment with automatic writing and other means for penetrating the unconscious, including hypnosis – Breton’s poetry is replete with imagery of electric currents and magnetic fields, to which the title of Ernst’s collage may allude. Ernst’s deployment of a graphic trace in the context of this book can be seen as mounting a polemic in favour of collage as an equivalent to automatic writing. Breton, who the following year in his poem ‘Sunflower’ penned the exquisitely apposite phrase, ‘the white curve on a black ground that we call thought’, would have understood that the graphic trace in Ernst’s collage offers itself to be read as an indexical equivalent to thought, in no ways inferior in this respect to the automatic text on the facing page.31Ernst’s painting North Pole 1922 is contemporaneous with the collage and closely related to it.32 A distinctive fine wavy pattern across the upper half of the canvas, the result of dragging a fine comb or something similar across the black oil paint so as to expose the white support, is highly suggestive of a seismographic or magnetic trace. There is a direct connection between this work and Ernst’s use of frottage and other automatic procedures in the 1920s. Between 1927 and 1928 Yves Tanguy produced a number of quite distinctive automatist paintings in which undulating lines are scratched into a black ground. Of even greater significance than such isolated examples of the direct citation of graphic traces, however, is to recognise that the novel regime of visuality it inaugurated made possible a mindset that saw the automatist line as an authentic trace of unconscious instinctual forces and energies. In its absence, they would have been literally unreadable in these terms. The surrealists were not alone in choosing to regard the unconscious as a repository of imperceptible, yet powerfully active forces. Sigmund Freud commonly spoke of the unconscious in terms of an energetics of instinctual cathexes and circuits.33 But what has been lost sight of is that these were never any more than metaphorical descriptions or analogies, a way of talking. The mistake is to think that the wavy lines in an Ernst painting are actually a trace of anything, least of all Ernst’s unconscious, rather than a polemical mobilisation of the idea (or metaphor) of the indexical trace.

Re-inscriptions of automatism

It comes as a surprise to learn that, notwithstanding the seemingly intractable difficulties posed by the Bretonian concept of ‘pure psychic automatism’, a considerable number of more recent artists and poets have not been deterred from taking up such practices, often in the context of an overt re-engagement with the historical avant-garde.

In the main, the aleatory and automatic practices to be surveyed here no longer purport to be indexical traces or expressions of the unconscious. These recent examples prompt the question afresh: is surrealist automatism expressive, and if so what is it expressive of? This question is inseparable from another concerning the status of chance in surrealism.34 Here, it is necessary to make a distinction between Breton’s objective chance (‘hasard objectif’) and true randomness.35 Freud maintained that seemingly chance events, slips of the tongue and so forth, are actually governed by a strict order of psychic determinism: nothing in the mind, he believed, is arbitrary or undetermined.36 This alone is what assures the validity of dream interpretation. Without the supposition of unconscious causation, the whole hermeneutic project of psychoanalysis would be pointless. Automatism, from this angle, registers an unconscious level of determination, that is to say, of meaning. But what if it turned out that surrealist automatism had been all along simply a method for generating randomness?

Between October 2003 and June 2005 the musician and composer Jeremy ‘Jem’ Finer was artist in residence in the astrophysics department at OxfordUniversity, where Roger Penrose, nephew of the surrealist artist Roland Penrose, had conducted pioneering work in theoretical physics on black holes and the early conditions of the universe. Finer’s Everywhere, All the Time 2005 (fig.6) comprised part of a larger sculptural project arising from the residency. As Finer explains:

A chart recorder is transformed into an automatic drawing machine, its source the electrical fluctuations of a detuned radio. The universe is permeated by radiation, the Cosmic Microwave Background, which contemporary cosmology concludes is the cooled remnant of the Big Bang. Everywhere, all the time, it’s visible in the snow between channels on a television, the hiss of static on a radio, the rattling pen of the chart recorder, like a spirit hand.37

Fig.6 Jem Finer Everywhere, All the Time 2005 Chart recorder, transistor radio and paper Courtesy the artist Photograph © Jem Finer

The automatic messages that are of concern to Finer – ‘an unreadable communication with its own inner sense’ – are of an impersonal, non-human nature (fig.7). Rendering literal the Bretonian metaphor of a simple recording instrument, Finer bypasses altogether the artist as expressive origin of the message: ‘Endless gyres, overwriting, obliterating, annihilating any pretence of analysis, the chart recorder is transformed into an automatic drawing machine, the universe the invisible hand.’38

Fig.7 Jem Finer Everywhere, All the Time 2005 Graphic trace from chart recorder Courtesy the artist Photograph © Jem Finer

It is fruitful to think about Finer’s practice in terms of a tension between noise and message as theorised by communication theory. Random noise can be understood as interference within a system of meaning production. In this respect, it might be understood to be quite similar to a Freudian slip, which manifests as an interruption or distortion of the intended message. However, the apparently chance or accidental nature of the latter turns out to be illusory and the lapsus is, in fact, subject to a strict psychic determinism. True randomness, which is the arena of contemporary practitioners’ interest, implies a breach in causality and hence ought not to be confused with the surrealist notion of objective chance, though it is compatible with the surrealists’ interrogation of the author function. The ratcheting-up of randomness undercuts the expressive paradigm of a subject who is the putative origin of a message.

Finer’s reference to a spirit hand resonates with surrealist automatism, whose derivation from mediumistic writing and drawing Breton acknowledged in his essay ‘The Automatic Message’ (1933). It also recalls a passage from the philosopher Roland Barthes’s famous text ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) that implicitly appeals to the precedent of automatic writing: ‘the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin.’39 Barthes conceives of the writer not as expressive origin but rather as a kind of radio antenna picking up and remixing messages randomly absorbed. Tuning in to white noise instead of the overt communicative content of their chosen medium, postmodern artists perpetuate as well as update the historical avant-garde’s engagements with chance. In an essay on Cy Twombly, Barthes made an explicit analogy to white noise, writing of the picture Panorama 1955 (private collection) that: ‘The whole space is crackling in the manner of a television screen before any image appears on it.’40 Twombly reinterpreted an automatist practice in a manner contrary to the expressive paradigm that had dominated in the previous generation of artists. It is thus comparable to other gestures of cancellation, such as his friend Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing 1953 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). The artist in the abstract expressionist mould was not only masculine, he was also stridently hetero-normative, a factor that art historian Jonathan Katz has argued lay behind the next generation of artists’ wish to distance themselves.41 Barthes refers to a new technological analogy for an automatist procedure in the television set, which, by the mid-1950s, had become nigh ubiquitous in American households. The origins of information theory in the immediate post-war period narrowly preceded the arrival of this new medium of mass communication. The white on black of Twombly’s Panorama evidently reminded Barthes of the cathode ray screen.

The experimental filmmaker Peter Rose explains that his sixteen minute film Secondary Currents 1982 is about the relationships between the mind and language: ‘A kind of comic opera, the film is a dark metaphor for the order and entropy of language.’42 In the course of the film, words – white on a black ground – gradually decompose into constituent letters that jostle in a random, Brownian motion, such that the screen becomes an almost literal representation of white noise (fig.8). Rose’s work relates to concrete poetry but also draws upon his mathematical training. In communication theory, the concept of entropy is closely related to randomness. As expounded by engineer John R. Pierce in his book Symbols, Signals and Noise (1961): ‘entropy increases as the number of messages among which the source may choose increases. It also increases as the freedom of choice (or the uncertainty to the recipient) increases and decreases as the freedom of choice and the uncertainty are restricted.’43

Fig.8 Peter Rose Secondary Currents 1982 Still from film 16 minutes, 16 mm, black and white, sound Courtesy the artist Photograph © Peter Rose

Might it be possible to consider Rose’s language experiments as offering a route in to the final automatic text of Breton and Éluard’s ‘The Possessions’, the ‘attempt at simulating schizophrenia’ (‘démence précoce’), which plots a similar stepwise dissolution of language and sense? Under the guise of emulating the language of the insane, Breton and Éluard can be understood as exploring in an intuitive vein the relationship between a poetic or creative use of language and entropy. The act of collaboration seems to have been one means for interrupting the smooth flow of logical sense, an express aim of automatic writing being to divert language from its communicative function. In a manner not dissimilar to Rose, the schizophrenic treats words as things; their language was described in the kinds of manuals to which Breton and Éluard had access as propagating on the basis of chance associations or incidental resemblances between words. One can point to numerous examples of this in Breton and Éluard’s text. Within certain limits, an increase in randomness is experienced as poetic indeterminacy. However, the final paragraph of their exercise in simulation presses way beyond this threshold:

Fils de Judas rondève, qu’A Linné pasteur hippomythe U vraïli ouabi bencirog plaïol fernaca gla …lanco. U quaïon purlo ouam gacirog olaïama oual, u feaïva zuaïailo, gaci zulo. Gaci zulo plef. U feaïva oradarfonsedarca nic olp figilê. U elaïaïpi mouco drer hôdarca hualica-siptur. Oradargacirog vraïlim…u feaïva drer kurmaca ribag nic javli.44

Extraordinarily, this was among the texts that Samuel Beckett chose to translate.

The fact that The Magnetic Fields (1920), the true ur-texts of surrealist automatic writing, were composed jointly by Breton and Philippe Soupault (most obviously the texts called ‘Barrières’ (Barriers) which take the form of a dialogue or conversation) demonstrates that believing automatic writing to be the outpouring of a single unconscious is a misconception. In these texts, the writing subject makes use of an interlocutor in order to interrupt the flow and continuity of his discourse; a systematic interference with communicative language is thus built in to the procedure. It is a device that maximises incongruities. This can also be seen in the long distance collaboration of Ernst and Éluard in Les Malheurs des immortels. In his later comments on The Magnetic Fields, Breton placed great value on the speed of execution as the guarantor of the authenticity of a message that was to be as far as possible an uncorrupted record of unconscious thought. It is necessary to consider that the factor that comes increasingly into play as the speed of writing increases is not the unconscious but sheer randomness, which beyond a certain point manifests as a lexical decomposition.

Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages, and other artworks utilising chance, the New York conceptual artist William Anastasi began creating Pocket Drawings on folded sheets of paper while he was at the cinema in the 1960s. These led on to Subway Drawings that started as he was travelling to and from daily chess games with his friend, the composer John Cage, and which he has continued to produce (fig.9). Sitting with a pencil in each hand and a drawing board on his lap, his elbows at an angle of 90 degrees, his shoulders away from the backrest, Anastasi surrenders to a random process. His body operates likes a seismograph, allowing the rhythm of the moving train – its starts, stops and turns, accelerations and decelerations – to be transmitted onto the sheet of paper. In a 1990 interview, Cage talked about Anastasi’s modus operandi vis-à-vis surrealist automatism, insisting that: ‘It’s not psychological; it’s physical.’45

Fig.9 William Anastasi Subway Drawing Courtesy Gering & Lopez Gallery, New York

It is instructive to compare Anastasi’s Subway Drawings with another work that references the movement of a train and its effects on the human body, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train 1911–12 (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice).46 For Anastasi and the other artists in Cage’s circle, Duchamp was a cardinal reference point. The picture depicts the pipe-smoking artist on a train journey between Paris and Rouen. It is, Duchamp explained, a painting of ‘two parallel movements corresponding to each other’, that is to say, the forward velocity of the train together with the sideways rocking motion of the man standing in the crowded carriage.47 The passivity of a body acted upon by external mechanical forces is certainly akin to Anastasi’s Subway Drawings. The painting’s multiple registrations of a single figure, comparable to the more famous Nude Descending a Staircase 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), reflects Duchamp’s preoccupation with Marey’s chronophotography. Moreover, the picture might be said to represent a quirky response to the futurist cult of machines and the dynamism of speed. Slightly perplexing is the undress of the solitary figure, who, it has been suggested, is depicted in a state of sexual arousal. What the picture represents, then, is a bachelor machine: the kinetic energy of the train transformed via the onanistic rhythms of a swaying body into libidinal energy. A helpful commentary on this state of affairs comes from faraway Vienna. Asserting that ‘mechanical agitation must be recognised as one of the sources of sexual excitation’, Freud, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), specifically relates the pleasurable effects of this mechanical stimulus to train travel:

The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or other in his life wanted to be an engine driver or a coachman. It is a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things connected with railways, and, at an age at which the production of phantasies is most active (shortly before puberty), use those things as the nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensation of movement.48

Freud contends that any physical stimulus to the body releases a quota of energy and this release of (libidinal) energy is felt as pleasurable. He instances the rocking of a child in order to put it to sleep. Duchamp wrote enigmatically of the period immediately preceding the First World War: ‘The machine, motion and eros were things which touched me in a poetic way. They were in the air and I felt I could use them for my art.’

Anastasi is well aware that his drawing could be seen as a displacement of a forbidden act. He says as much when he explains that he began making the Subway Drawings instead of the Pocket Drawingsbecause he was concerned about what fellow passengers might think he was doing with his hands in his pockets. The drawing is done on a sheet of paper that rests directly on the artist’s lap. For a near equivalent, one must look to surrealism’s disreputable left field, to the sole example of what Salvador Dalí dubbed ‘espasmo-graphisme’. An inscription on the etching, purpose-made as a frontispiece to a collection of poems by Georges Hugnet titled Onan (1934), forthrightly confesses: ‘“ESPASMO-GRAPHISME” OBTAINED WITH THE LEFT HAND WHILE MASTURBATING WITH THE RIGHT HAND UNTIL BLOODUNTIL BONE UNTIL SCAR!’ The image harks back stylistically to some tentative experiments by Dalí with an automatic technique in the late 1920s, quickly abandoned as he evolved his more characteristic illusionism. The jagged, staccato rhythms of the compulsively repeated doodles mime the action believed to have been carried out with the artist’s other hand. There is a crucial distinction to be drawn between illustrating the act of masturbation, which Dalí plainly was not reluctant to do, and producing a non-representational, so to speak, automatic trace of the activity, as he does here. Using his left hand to engrave the plate – Dalí was right-handed – eliminates at one stroke any semblance of manual skill or virtuosity. One is reminded that for Freud the solitary vice of masturbation was a frequent cause of neurosis. If this opinion, oddly indebted to Victorian prudery, is accepted for a moment, then Dalí chooses the shortest possible route between the supposed forbidden activity and its unfettered, automatic expression.49 But in doing so, it seems that he short-circuits the whole Freudian apparatus of the unconscious and repression. An area of staining across the centre of the sheet raises other questions for the inquisitive critic: does it merely simulate what it purports to be, or is it the forensic evidence one is searching for, the veridical trace that authenticates the automatic message? Granted, the work is parodic in intent, tossed off in a matter of minutes, but it is nonetheless a wry, amusing commentary on the discourse and practice of surrealist automatism.

Finally, Rebecca Horn’s Pencil Mask 1972 (fig.10) is a sort of mechanical prosthesis that transforms the artist into a drawing machine. It is a sinister and disturbing piece, more autistic than artistic. Horn describes its operation thus: ‘All the pencils are about two inches long and produce the profile of my face in three dimensions … I move my body rhythmically from left to right in front of the white wall. The pencils make marks on the wall the image of which corresponds to the rhythm of my movements.’50Strapped around her face, the harness turns the wearer into a blind automatic drawing instrument. There is not space here to do justice to this arresting work, nor to tease out its relation, on the one hand, to her robotic painting machines or the pseudo-expressivity of her later Artaud-like drawings.51 The key point, however, is the way it encircles the artist’s head, interposing a physical barrier between the artist and the sheet of paper. The ‘unconscious’ is simply bracketed off from whatever is going on. Horn and the other contemporary artists discussed here point to ways of understanding surrealist automatism beyond the impasses of the assumption that such works are, or ever were, the expression of such a thing.

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