taplow mound and some of what was in it

practical hints:  barrow hunting is strongly recommended as an outdoor hobby for hikers

material humiliations

that they are all glass, and therefore will suffer no man to come near them; that they are all cork, as light as feathers; others as heavy as lead; some are afraid their heads will fall off their shoulders,

glass delusion   1613

People feared that they were made of glass “and therefore likely to shatter into pieces". 

 anxiety of new materials:

alien implants- bio-telemetry
"subdued by "small earphones" placed behind his ears"

alien implants appear to be ordinary materials such as a shard of glass, a jagged piece of metal, and a carbon fiber. The objects are often found lodged in extremities such as noses, toes, hands and shins.
normal objects picked up during a fall or by walking barefoot often become surrounded by scar tissue.

A US town has rejected plans for solar panels amid fears they would 'suck up all the energy from the sun'

a posthuman collectivity, 

an "I" transformed into the "we" of autonomous agents operating together to make a self. 

smith-and-the-devil

With the possible exceptions of the wolf, the raven and the crone, no one has a closer mythological connection with malevolence than the smith. One of the archetypes of northern European folklore is Wayland, the divine but evil blacksmith tutored by the trolls. He was maimed (becoming lame, like Hephaestus, the smith-god of the Greeks) and imprisoned by the legendary King Niduth, who forced him to use his magical skills to make trinkets for the court. The vengeful Wayland lured the king’s children into his forge, raped his daughter, killed his sons and turned their skulls into goblets from which the unwitting king drank. Then he fashioned himself a pair of wings and flew away cackling with delight. Throughout northern Europe his unquiet wight is said to haunt the Neolithic burial mounds reputed to be his smithies.
It is almost certainly Wayland who, in another incarnation, surfaces in the Fens of eastern England. There Will the smith, having been granted an extra life by the Devil, accumulated so much evil in his double span that he turned into the ghastly Will o’ the Wisp, the flickering blue flame of burning marsh gas.
There are stories of smiths using their powers to benign ends: St Dunstan, for example, seized the nose of the Devil (who came in the form of a beautiful temptress) in his blacksmith’s tongs. In other English folk tales a young man arrives at a forge and miraculously hammers an old horse into a young one, or an old woman into a lovely girl.
But these tales are far outnumbered by those which equate the smith with evil. Several tell of smiths entering into a pact with the Devil to get fire and the means of smelting metal; indeed it is arguable that the medieval vision of Hell represents the smith in his forge. His anti-Christian associations persisted into the 19th Century (there is still a sanitised version at Gretna Green today), when British couples who could not get the Church to bless their marriage would leap over a blacksmith’s forge together. In some parts of Britain, the introduction of iron tools was resisted for centuries, as farmers believed that the evil they contained would poison the soil.
Strikingly, archaeological evidence suggests that blacksmiths in Europe may, like the Nkunono, have been isolated, physically and culturally, from the remainder of their tribes. Iron Age forges appear to have been built outside the ramparts of settlements; the smiths’ ceramics, by contrast to those of the rest of society, are full of inclusions, suggesting that they did not have access to the same resources.

speculum obscurum

1. Cor. 13.12
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

Hold up a dark glass with a light behind it, and you will see whatever is on the other side, if only dimly or partially, as in St. Paul's speculum obscurum . If the light is in front of the glass, nothing behind it will be visible, but your reflection will be discernible on its surface, as in a polished mirror. Shattter the glass, and each broken shard will be transparent or reflective, depending upon its position. The human face acts like a dark glass that is alternately transparent, reflective and fractured.

Preface // Ghost in the Shell // Photography and the human soul// Sobieszek // MIT Press



black holes/ white walls ... D/G

endless wedgwood glass animals

one after the other

For Aristotle, the ways in which bees construct their hive in order to shelter their honey and youth, is parallel with the method in plants that produce leaves in order to surround and protect their fruits. Instinctive dispositions in animals like the construction of a hive, the construction of a nest, are comparable to certain modes of growth, which, have a visible finality in plants. What animals do by various movements such as the way bees construct their hive and benefit from the honey comb inside, is the construction of a structure comparable to what we see develop in the growth of a plant, a process with a view towards generation, reproduction. The animal and vegetal world are different, but there is a functional identity.. between these distinct operatory modes. In the less developed, least differentiated animals, the functions that liberate and define other animal forms such as imagination, anticipation. This phantasia aisthetike does not exist in ants worms, or bees, states Aristotle... They work and construct like a plant grows. The society of ants or the society of bees constructs its hive like a plant grows and constructs its branches and leaves during its development. This is where instinct appears. Instinct is a certain faculty of constructing as if it were a way of developing, like that of a plant. What is instinct in animals, is, in plants, the fact of growing in such and such a way, of developing a certain foliar scheme, formula, of the given vegetal form, with very specific characteristics. Consequently, instinct, in as much as it is an operatory mode of construction of a hive or an anthill, instinct is equivalent to a structure of development. It is specific. Instinct is part of specificity, it is a drive in animals and more specifically social animals, which is equivalent to growth defined by specific lines in the plant.

Two Lessons on Animal and Man / Simondon / Univocal Publishing 

They alone hold children in common: own the roofs

of their city as one: and pass their life under the might of the law.

They alone know a country, and a settled home,

and in summer, remembering the winter to come,

undergo labour, storing their gains for all.

For some supervise the gathering of food, and work

in the fields to an agreed rule: some, walled in their homes,

lay the first foundations of the comb, with drops of gum

taken from narcissi, and sticky glue from tree-bark,

then hang the clinging wax: others lead the mature young,

their nation’s hope, others pack purest honey together,

and swell the cells with liquid nectar:
there are those whose lot is to guard the gates,

and in turn they watch out for rain and clouds in the sky,

or accept the incoming loads, or, forming ranks,

they keep the idle crowd of drones away from the hive.

virgil georgics, book 1V

monument to wedgwood glass animals

one on top of the other