reconstruct depth

stop sending me noods


In 'A Berlin Chronicle' (1932) Benjamin describes a lost diagram:

I was struck by the idea of drawing a diagram of my life, and I knew at the same moment exactly how it was to be done. With a very simple question I interrogated my past life, and the answers were inscribed, as if of their own accord, on a sheet of paper that I had with me. A year or two later, when I lost this sheet, I was inconsolable. I have never since been able to restore it as it arose before me then, resembling a series of family trees. Now, however, reconstructing its outline in thought without directly reproducing it, I should, rather, speak of a labyrinth. I am not concerned here with what is installed in the chamber at its enigmatic centre, ego or fate, but all the more with the many entrances leading to the interior. These entrances I call primal acquaintances; each of them is a graphic symbol of my acquaintance with a person whom I met, not through other people, but through neighbourhood, family relationships, school comradeship, mistaken identity, companionship on travels, or other such hardly numerous- situations. So many primal relationships, so many entrances to the maze. But since most of them—at least those that remain in our memory—for their part open up new acquaintances, relations to new people, after some time they branch off these corridors (the male may be drawn to the right, female to the left). Whatever cross connections are finally established between these systems also depends on the inter-twinements of our path through life.

Walter Benjamin, ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, 1932, in One-Way Street: And Other Writings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London: Verso, pp. 293–346

derby day

 Anmer goes down in racing history not for winning anything special (he succeeded in just one small contest at Newmarket) but for being brought down by the suffragette Emily Davison in the 1913 Derby. She later died of her injuries. The jockey Herbert Jones was concussed but recovered; Anmer survived to be placed a few times and was never heard of again, and the first past the post, Craiganour, was disqualified. The eventual winner, Aboyeur, was later lost in the Russian revolution.

The National Horseracing Museum has a racing plate worn by Anmer during his tragic Derby run. It is now thought that Emily Davison did not intend to sacrifice her life, since she had a return train ticket in her pocket. Others consider that Craiganour's disqualification was politically motivated, since his owner was Charles Ismay, son of the owner of the Titanic.

Aboyeur was the winner of the sensational Derby of 1913, in which the first past the post Craganour was disqualified and the King's runner, Anmer, was brought down at Tattenham Corner by a suffragette. Aboyeur, winner of just one of his juvenile starts, was a 100/1 outsider for the Derby. He was a queer tempered customer to train, galloping loose on the downs on more than one occasion. His maternal grandsire Morion had been an absolute savage.

Aboyeur never won again after the Derby and was sold to Russia, where he disappeared during the Revolution. 

http://www.horseracinghistory.co.uk/hrho/action/viewDocument?id=1016

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/may/26/emily-davison-suffragette-death-derby-1913

http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/the-death-of-emily-davison/967.html

http://www.sporthorse-data.com/index.htm

new scientist seals

Cave paintings in Malaga, Spain, could be the oldest yet found – and the first to have been created by Neanderthals.

Looking oddly akin to the DNA double helix, the images in fact depict the seals that the locals would have eaten, says José Luis Sanchidrián at the University of Cordoba, Spain. They have "no parallel in Palaeolithic art", he adds. His team say that charcoal remains found beside six of the paintings – preserved in Spain's Nerja caves – have been radiocarbon dated to between 43,500 and 42,300 years old.

That suggests the paintings may be substantially older than the 30,000-year-old Chauvet cave paintings in south-east France, thought to be the earliest example of Palaeolithic cave art.

The next step is to date the paint pigments. If they are confirmed as being of similar age, this raises the real possibility that the paintings were the handiwork of Neanderthals – an "academic bombshell", says Sanchidrián, because all other cave paintings are thought to have been produced by modern humans.

Neanderthals are in the frame for the paintings since they are thought to have remained in the south and west of the Iberian peninsula until approximately 37,000 years ago – 5000 years after they had been replaced or assimilated by modern humans elsewhere in their European heartland.

Until recently, Neanderthals were thought to have been incapable of creating artistic works. That picture is changing thanks to the discovery of a number of decorated stone and shell objects – although no permanent cave art has previously been attributed to our extinct cousins.

snapshots of the revolution

1919




















In the spring of this year, during the first warm days, wierd, fantastic people crawled out on the streets of Petrograd. Where and how had they lived hitherto? Doubtless in some slum, in old, solitary, crumbling houses, hidden away from life, insulted and rejected by the world. One dominant thought cropped up in my mind every time I saw them: they have forgotten something and are trying to recall it, silently crawling about the town in search of it.
They were dressed in worn-out, tattered clothes, they were dirty and evidently very hungry, but they did not look like beggars and did not ask for alms. Very silently, very carefully, they walked along, watching the ordinary passers-by with suspicion and curiosity. As they stopped before the shop windows, they examined the things exhibited in them with the eyes of folk who are trying to discover - or remember - what use one made of all those things. Motor-cars terrified them, as they terrified country men and women twenty years ago.

Maxim Gorky / Fragments from my Diary / 1924

allegory of succession

The Family of Henry VIII, c. 1543-1547. Unknown artist, after Holbein.
Hampton Court Palace. © The Royal Collection.

Solomon and the Queen of Sheba Lucas de Heere 1559

"Allegory of the Tudor Succession", c. 1572.
Attr. to Lucas de Heere. Sudeley Castle.

Primavera Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510)

"Allegory of the Tudor Succession: The Family of Henry VIII", c. 1590-95.
Artist Unknown. Yale Center for British Art.

prosopography

The word is drawn from the figure prosopoeia in classical rhetoric, introduced by Quintilian, in which an absent or imagined person is figured forth—the "face created" as the Greek suggests—in words, as if present.

Central to prosopography are the concepts of individuals and groups - or networks.

The "principles which make it a distinct form of historical science" are: "that every piece of historical data should, as far as possible, be related to an identifiable historical person, that multiple identities should not be confused, single identities should not be multiplied and collective identities should always be defined in terms of connections between individuals".
[Magdalino]

visitation of the herald

Peake Pedigree

mapping power

the blazoned body of the cathedral, geneaologies inscribed in the archive