<< Anti-Progressive Syllabus? | Front Page | That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling Commodity >>
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Copernicus, or How To Cosmologise With A Hammer
I’m writing a piece on the Copernican Revolution and science fiction at the moment, and am grubbing around the field. OK. So below the fold is an image of the titlepage of Nikolai Kopernijk‘s paradigm-shifting book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543). There’s been plenty written about that tome, of course; but for the time being one question in particular bugs me, and it concerns the colophon hammer.
Isn’t that image fascinating? Now my understanding (maybe I’m wrong) is that many of the colophons on Renaissance titlepages were generic, or related only to the publisher rather than to the books themselves; so I can believe that there’s not necessarily any connection between the image here and Copernicus’s text. But it’s such an appropriate visual epitome of the earth-shattering (see! the cloud-arm-hammer is shattering the earth!) nature of the work that I’d like to believe otherwise.
The problem is that I have no idea what the image is on about. So: a mighty arm reaches from a cloud bearing a hammer, which it brings crashing down upon the mountain top. Simultaneously a great wind is blown down upon that selfsame mountain top from another cloud, thereby sparking fire from the site of the hammerblow. Is it, perhaps, an illustration from a mythological story that euhumeristically explains. I don’t know, lightning strikes? (But which myth? doesn’t ring any bells with me.) What’s it all about? (Copernicus: ‘hey kids! Not only is the sun the centre of the solar system, and not only does the Earth move, but clouds contain giant arms and huge, like, faces with fire for hair, and hammers and stuff!’ Drugs--just say no.)
Comments
Just a guess, but isn’t it a smithy image to show creation?
Wind? Really? it looks more like that is vomiting if you ask me.
The image strikes me as weird Aristotelian to me. Partly because the arm makes me think of the unmoved mover but also because it’s the idea of a partially mechanised universe whereby natural forces and substances act upon each other but for largely metaphysical reasons.
Karl: funny looking smithy, isn’t it? Would you buy your horseshoes from such an emporium?
Jonathan: now I can’t see anything except splashing vomit. On the other hand I don’t see the Aristotelianism, exactly.
This colophon appears on other editions by Heinrich Petri (Henric Petrina) as well. The image alludes to Latin “petrus” and (perhaps) to Jeremiah 23:29, “Is not my word like as a fire? saith the LORD; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?” ... If you go here and scroll down to number 16, you’ll find your explanation. Cheers.
Quoth-the-Raven: thank you. That explains it.
You must expand your Solaristic horizon: the image is not what you think it is. Nor was this book written by Copernicus. It was, in fact, written by Mayakovsky. The image is Tatlin’s. It was inscribed onto the book in 1917 after the secret revolution in time that took place in that lonely corner of the Cabaret Voltaire where the Troll of Sorrow weeps (for this offense, we have, as usual, the weak-kneed partisans of pseudo-neutral collaboration to thank). Allowing for reverse causation, the revolution of 1917 would doubly displace the Aristotelian paradigm that the one whom we know by the appelation ‘Copernicus’ could only so timidly broach (history was not yet ready for what was to come). Yet as every good reader of literature and history knows (in the German language, we do not differentiate between the two), the Hedgehog will eventually triumph over the Fox, for the Book of Nature is written in the Standard Meter of exilic verse. (The mountains in Tatlin’s image are, in fact, the Appalachian and/0r Alsatian Mountains, where Joseph K. was wandering like a teleporting cloud vommiting Fire and Ice at the time of the Book of Nature’s writing). New Criticism is for the Birds in Flight. Real History is written by the Philosopher Kings of Time in the margins and negative space of scientific texts . . . Join us or wander.
Crazy artists!
The picture has, no doubt, a religious background: as far as I can see it re-presents the word of God, on the one hand (left-hand side). And Copernicus contesting the word of God on the other.
Hence the “religious” and the “scientific” “Weltbild” (world view) fall apart.
Not really “Aristotelian” (anima triplex, anima duplex, and so on) because both, religion and science, are ascribed to the same human faculty, i.e. “Denkvermögen” (faculty of thinking) … “Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust” …
A little bit of Prometheus too? For the fire?
A “piece” ... (“story”; “history”) ... Would make a splendid SF novel too: a gravitational centre shifting from one place to another … A book about a new Sun.
I happened to read you interview with SFRevu (yesterday). I really liked it, particularly the following passage:
… I think, SF has become less centrally a ‘literature of ideas’ and become much more to do with images: I’m talking about both conventional poetic or literary images, but more strikingly potent visual imagery that penetrates culture more generally. It is in the nature of images that they cannot be parsed, explicated and rationalised in the way ‘ideas’ can. Accordingly there is something oblique about the workings of the best SF of the later century; something allusive and affective that can be difficult exactly to pin down.
… image and metaphor are absolutely central to the way I try to write. I tend, in other words, to align SF with poetry. Which is to say, it seems to me that the key moments in the SF of the last half-century have been in essence poetic moments. It’s the resonance and mystery as well as a the beauty of a poetic image is what makes luminous (as it might be) an ape throwing its bone into the sky to metamorphose into a spacecraft; or the star-drenched sky of the final paragraph of “Nightfall”; or Wyndham’s unsettling Midwich children; or Carrie-Anne Moss suspended in mid-air kung-fu as the camera sweeps all the way around her; or the eerie silences of the first two books of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Years of Rice and Salt. There are many hundreds of examples from the best SF, and they all work precisely the way poetic images work.
But you’re free to choose themes for the novels you write, e.g. for Gollancz, no?