Alias Arts

Anatomy has been a controversial practice ever since Andreas Vesalius and his colleagues founded the modern anatomical tradition in the mid-sixteenth century. There was a great stigma attached to anatomical dissection and, even worse, the display of human remains. The public regarded such activities as a deliberate desecration of the dead, and this response disputed the central premise of anatomical science. Anatomists claimed to “shine a light on the interior of the body,” and dissection became the key method through which physicians and surgeons produced scientific knowledge of the body, as well as the privileged ritual that inducted students into the medical profession. Anatomy was praised as one of the exemplary sciences of the Enlightenment.

The black granite Ka’ba, the cubical structure that stands as the holiest center of Islam, features at its eastern vertex a small black stone about the size of a grapefruit, the al-hajar al-aswad, which may or may not have fallen to earth in the time of Adam and Eve. Supported in a silver frame, this obsidian-like cipher structures space for some billion Muslims, standing as it does at the culminating point known as the qibla—the direction to which devout followers of Mohammed address their five daily obeisances. Tradition has it that the rock was once snowy white, and has darkened over time through exposure to human sin.

A snowy white stone that gives shape to the universe: as it happens, we all carry within our skulls the vestige of such a thing, a kind of existentially reversed qibla (this one perspectival, the other metaphysical) that gives us our sense of being at the center of things, the sense that we are upright at the origin point of a three-dimensional space. The “otolithic organs,” as they are known, are a pair of sensors—the utricle and the saccule—nestled in the labyrinthine architecture of the inner ear.

The Swedish physician Gustav Zander’s institute in Stockholm, founded in the late nineteenth century and stocked with twenty-seven of his custom-built machines, was the first “gym” in the sense that we know the word today. His mechanical horse was an early version of the Stairmaster, a contraption for cardiovascular fitness designed to imitate a “natural” activity. His stomach-punching apparatus evokes contemporary “ab-crunching” machines. What makes Zander so important, for anyone trying to trace the Cybex family tree, is what happened when his machines, created in a European cultural context, immigrated to the US in the early twentieth century. They are prototypes of the workout equipment now ubiquitous in American life.

Not far from our hotel in the center of Palermo is Oratorio di San Lorenzo, a little Baroque church founded by one of those orders that looks after the unwanted dead. The space is crammed with plaster skulls and skeletons, mostly painted, but the last chapel on the right held what we had come to see: matching pairs of stucco corpses by the sculptor Giacomo Serpotta, who could impart life and motion to all kinds of unlikely entities, such as abstract Virtues and tired old scriptural stories. These are called skeletons in the guidebook, but at least half the flesh still clings to the bones, especially on the chest and diaphragm. They’ve also kept their original grime; in the shadows, the stark white flesh is almost black with it.

What happens to levitation, one of the great imaginative figures of art and literature, in the transition from a religious culture to the disenchanted universe of modern science? What becomes of ecstasy, rapture, ascension, transcendence, grace wh­e­n these give way to "space oddity": man enclosed in a tin can floating far above the world? Is the cosmonaut a prophet of the erotic future, avatar of man’­s stellar renaissance, as Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke once imagined? Or is he like Nietzsche’s madman, proclaiming as Gagarin himself was rumored to have said: "I don’t see any God up here"?

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LEVITATION: WHAT IS IT?
­The word levitation has several senses and connotations: miraculous, magical, oneiric, but also scientific and technological. ­Levitation is equally an affair of mystics and engineers, charlatans and poets. One thinks of the feats of the Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Home, who on December 13, 1868 (one of the most auspicious days in the history of levitation) floated out of a third- story window and returned through the window of an adjoining room; or the ascension of Christ, archetype of all saintly air travel; or the magnetic levitation train zipping commuters between Shanghai and the Pudong International Airport at a maximum speed of 431 km/h.

"I collected the
instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being
into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet…By the glimmer of the
half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature
open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."¹ Thus the magic moment in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818) when the creature is brought to life by what is usually
considered (though Shelley does not say so outright) the infusion of an
electric "spark of being" into a constructed body. Shelley’s story
emerged amid heated disputes among London physicians over the nature of
life itself. Against the view of mechanists and materialists, who
argued life could be reduced to the complex organization of physiology,
vitalists asserted that some other force or spirit must be superadded
to bodies to achieve living animation. Vitalist John Abernethy thus
declared, "The phaenomena of electricity and of life correspond."²­­­

It was not guilt they felt, not at first. That would come later, after
instruction. Guilt must be learned; shame, it appears, comes naturally.

The story is so brief that even a mere summary of it amounts to
commentary. The man and the woman were placed in the garden and allowed
to eat the fruit of every tree there save one, “the tree of knowledge,
good and evil”—I am using Robert Alter’s translation—”for on the day
you eat from it, you are doomed to die.” But the serpent told the woman
they would not die: instead, “your eyes will be opened and you will
become as gods knowing good and evil.”

And the woman saw that the tree was good for eating
and that it was lust to the eyes and the tree was lovely to look at,
and she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave to her man, and he
ate. And the eyes of the two were opened, and they knew they were
naked, and they sewed fig leaves and made themselves loincloths.

The black granite Ka’ba, the cubical structure that stands as the
holiest center of Islam, features at its eastern vertex a small black
stone about the size of a grapefruit, the al-hajar al-aswad,
which may or may not have fallen to earth in the time of Adam and Eve.
Supported in a silver frame, this obsidian-like cipher structures space
for some billion Muslims, standing as it does at the culminating point
known as the qibla—the direction to which devout followers of
Mohammed address their five daily obeisances. Tradition has it that the
rock was once snowy white, and has darkened over time through exposure
to human sin.

A snowy white stone that gives shape to the universe: as it happens, we
all carry within our skulls the vestige of such a thing, a kind of
existentially reversed qibla
(this one perspectival, the other metaphysical) that gives us our sense
of being at the center of things, the sense that we are upright at the
origin point of a three-dimensional space. The “otolithic organs,” as
they are known, are a pair of sensors—the utricle and the
saccule—nestled in the labyrinthine architecture of the inner ear.