Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundances.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage thither, by Domingo Gonsales,

It was now the season that these Birds were wont to take their flight away, as our Cuckoes and swallowes doe in Spaine towards the Autumne. They (as after I perceived) mindfull of their usuall voyage, even as I began to settle my selfe for the taking of them in, as it were with one consent, rose up, and having no other place higher to make toward, to my unspeakeable feare and amazement strooke bolt upright, and never did linne towring upward, and still upward, for the space, as I might guesse, of one whole hower, toward the end of which time, mee thought I might perceive them to labour lesse and lesse; till at length, O incredible thing, they forbare moving any thing at al ! and yet remained unmoveable, as stedfastly, as if they had beene upon so many perches; the Lines slacked; neither I, nor the Engine moved at all, but abode still as having no manner of weight.

I found then by this Experience that which no Philosopher ever dreamed of, to wit, that those things which wee call heavie, do not sinke toward the Center of the Earth, as their naturall place, but as drawen by a secret property of the Globe of the Earth, or rather some thing within the same, in like sort as the Loadstone draweth Iron, being within the compass of the beames attractive.

This appears to be the first description of the idea of weightlessness in space.
Francis Godwin (1562-1633) Bishop of Hereford and author of what is arguably the first science fiction story to be written in the English language.


MOON: All that I have to say is to tell you that the lanthorn is the moon, I, the man i' the moon, this thornbush my thornbush, and this dog my dog. (V.1.241-3)

misterie solved

Livery Companies originated when medieval merchants banded together to form guilds or fraternities, also known as 'misteries', from the Latin ministerium, meaning occupation.

deers' heads

The enclosed to your lordship is from Francis Seagar, servant to the Lantgrave of Hesse. He has also sent you 2 deers' heads, one of a reindeer, the other of an eland. They are here at my chambers at Somerset House, till it pleases you to have them brought to Court to see them. They were sent me by Garter King at Arms, Francis Seagar's brother.—Somerset House, 30 Nov. 1605.
Holograph. 1 p. (113. 60.)

1620 or so

bleak house

The clear, cold sunshine glances into the brittle woods and approvingly beholds the sharp wind scattering the leaves and drying the moss. It glides over the park after the moving shadows of the clouds, and chases them, and never catches them, all day. It looks in at windows and touches the ancestral portraits with bars and patches of brightness never contemplated by the painters. Athwart the picture of my Lady, over the great chimneypiece, it throws a broad bend-sinister of light that strikes down crookedly into the hearth and seems to rend it.

the winter queen

Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia by Robert Peake the Elder oil on canvas, circa 1610

Elizabeth, queen of bohemia 1642, Gerrit van Honthorst

Elizabeth Stuart (1596 - 1662), known as the 'Winter Queen', was the eldest daughter of James I of England. She married Frederick, the Elector of the Palatinate, in 1613. He accepted the Bohemian crown in 1619, and was expelled from Bohemia in the following year. They lived in exile in Holland from 1621 onwards. She returned to England in 1661, and stayed in the London house of the 1st Earl Craven. In the following year she moved into Leicester House in Leicester Square where she died a few weeks later on 13 February.

The picture was painted during the Queen's exile in Holland, ten years after she had been widowed, and may have been commissioned to mark this anniversary. She is shown as a grieving widow, wearing black with very few pieces of jewellery, notably the pearl earrings which had been given to her by her husband. She holds a stem in her hand on which there are two roses, one healthy and one wilted, a symbol of her widowed state along with the black ribbon on her arm. The dog can be interpreted as a symbol of fidelity.


she corresponded with Descartes