67.The shield of Achilles

Marked or stamped in stainless steel: Mirro, alluding to the mirrors of memory, the many ways in which time might be dialed, measured or watched, but still inexorably unwind. Joan Miró, growing up in the radial streets and gaudy plazas of Barcelona, running through the dappled patches of heat and shade in the Barri Gòtic from the Rambla to blue vistas of the Mediterranean and the sudden smell of fish and brine, would measure these ideas with blue glass beads, the size of seeds, which he kept in the pockets of his herringbone jacket, and return to the shop his father owned, through the chimes and cuckoo tones and descending weights of the front, to the cluttered wooden workroom in the back, where his father would sit squinting through monocular glasses of various powers, opening the plated cases of wristwatches and clocks, holding the circular movements to the light, rubricated bearings shining like fire, and coilsprings breathing, as if alive. Look, a tourbillon, invented in 1795 by Abraham-Louis Breguet, spinning about a tiny cage of

its own, to counteract the ravages of gravity and weight....you see the escapement there? And here, look, the balance wheel...no, you mustn’t touch...very fragile... this is a bimetallic wheel designed to compensate for changes in the temperature, even metal reacts to world around...it does the very same thing as a pendulum, that is to say, it pulses or oscillates like this...(Miró’s father rhythmically tapped the coarse grain of the workbench with the four fingers of his left hand)...you see? The isochronous motion of pendulums were first noticed by Galileo after 1602, and the pendulum, as an horological device, was invented by Christian Huygens in 1656.

 

But the spring escapement itself was devised by Robert Hooke...now look, we’ll close this particular watch like this. Growing up in the Barcelona, Joan Miró knew that the British natural philosopher Robert Hooke had also graphically captured the cells of sliced cork in his Micrographia, and knew that he was composed of similar cells, similarly eukaryotic, although without the cell walls or chloroplasts of plants; his components could engage in mitosis and contained nuclei, mitochondria, Golgi apparatus, and varied accordingly to make him who he was, although he did not yet know how. At some scale, though, the distinction between the components that might properly be called organic and those that weren’t became quite indistinct....he had read of atoms in Catalonian Science at the round corner news & serial stand... a cloud of electrons, negatively charged, surrounding a nucleus smaller than a single angstrom or capital A marked with a disc of degree. Years later, in the Montparnasse, Miró mentioned these memories at a dinner party with a

menu that would eventually inspire the films of Louis Bu?uel. Henri Lautreamont had returned from the library with a tray of faceted glasses and a bottle of Glen St. Kilda unfiltered Scotch whiskey, which everyone soon agreed was the highlight of the party, and much better than the mock-lobster soufflés that Salvador Dalí had made especially for the affair.

 

Hence we find that G. has alluded to the clockwork biology of Joan Miró, the translations of Hugh Evelyn-White of the Shield of Herakles ascribed to Hesiod, and the precedent passages in the Iliad 18. 478-608, where the ekphrasis of the shield can be viewed as a microcosm of the earth: the microcosm of modern existence is uniform, banal, either reflective or brushed, recursive, marked with gradients on the invisible far side, and doomed to unwind. But it has been modified by individual experience regardless. The spiral-bound notebook that G. purchased on a rainy day at a Woolworth’s on Broadway evinces that he planned to develop the photograph of the two robins to the left, each a type of North American Thrush, into an extended meditation on their tiny biotopes defended by an acquired and sophisticated song, woven from discrete elements, repeated and rearranged, rather like the oral hexameters of the Iliad were first arranged from a discrete cluster of phrases embedded in memory, and shaped by song. During the course of his research, Albert Bates Lord had not only noticed parallels between the Homeric epics and Bosnian oral tradition, but had traveled to the outer Hebrides collecting recordings of Gaelic

songs; one of his destinations had been a gray and mossy cluster of stone cottages huddled around a red brick distillery in the archipelago of St. Kilda, in the cold seas

sixty-four kilometers north of North Uist, the outermost Hebrides, the epicenter of nowhere, the end of the world.

 

The photograph to the right is an image of the Glen St. Kilda distillery on the island of Hirta, but the last known image of the distillery remains in the visual reference files owned by the estate of the famed Belgian cartoonist Yves Bucquoy, better known by the nom de plume Spirou, creator of Knip Swaarte. When Scotland Yard closed the Fabbri case in 1932, the collected photographs of Kaspar Linz, the Austrian photographer and detective assigned to Lautreamont for decades, were consigned to a suitcase and left in an alley, together with several speed-graphics backs and several unused bottles of emulsion. They were accidentally discovered by a Belgian ephemera dealer, who had arrived in Paris in search of siege-era magazines (Le Père Duchesne was a favorite) and contemporary menus featuring carefully prepared zoo animals from Voisin’s. He had become drunk on an unfamiliar brand of absinthe, and had wandered into the alley attempting his best impression of an Arnaut Daniel poem in improvised Occitan, before he passed out on the suitcase, a mound of wilted cabbage mixed with sawdust, and two empty bottles of champagne.

 

In the gray light of a cloudy morning, he awoke to a sepia image of a man engaged in the act of painting, blurred from motion, out of focus, through a window, but compelling nonetheless. He transported the entire case back to Brussels and tried to sell the photographs as a lot, within the battered morocco case with its festoon of pasted railway stickers, as evidence from a forgotten mystery. His ephemera store became insolvent after he died in 1937, and its contents (deemed worthless by the property owners) were consigned to the curb, where they were discovered by Spirou, who had been thinking of increasing the realism of his Knip series through carefully adapted visual files. One of the photographs depicted the label on a wooden crate that had once held twelve bottles of single malt, unfiltered Glen St. Kilda whiskey: a brick smokestack for peat fires, a small brick bulding, copied from an engraving that had been commissioned in 1897 by the distillery owners, the descendants and heirs of Prince Charles Edward Stuart (or so they

believed), when the island was at the height of its fortunes (which were never that fortunate at all). When barrels of the whiskey were complete, a bonfire would be lighted on the peak of Conchair, and a ship would depart from the village at Beneray, after being noticed by the lighthouse keeper. Always highly prized, the whiskey would be lost forever when the inhabitants of the island were swept away by a squall on Midsummer night, when they were participating in the traditional cliffside stilt-walking contest practiced throughout the Hebrides.

 

After several months of research, Spirou made the remote and gannet-haunted island the setting for a Knip Adventure, containing mysterious flights by VS-300 helicopters (which were still in development by Vought-Sikorsky when Spirou began drawing his book) over Plymouth Sound in Devon, England, and Midsummer festivals on the island of Hirta. G. had lost the book in Chicago, years ago, and reprints were almost impossible to find. Still, he painted a memory that had been submerged for decades, one which had survived through a dozen permutations, and remained.

 

This painting is a copy of the original, painted in 2005. Oil on canvas, 9 x 12 in (22.9 x 30.5 cm). Collection of the artist.

Done