The King’s Elephant

Last month, someone broke into the Paleontology wing of the Paris Museum of Natural History, and used a chain saw to cut off one of the tusks of the elephant skeleton there.  The skeleton dates from 1681 and is the oldest specimen at the museum.  Here is a little on the skeleton’s origins, from my just-finished book, The Courtiers’ Anatomists, and a picture I took of the skeleton last summer, with both tusks.

The anatomists from the Paris Academy of Sciences set out for Versailles with many tools and crates in the dark early morning of Wednesday, 22 January 1681.   When they reached the château, the dead elephant had already been hauled up onto a platform, “a kind of theatre,” as Fontenelle described it, ready for dissection.

The African elephant had been a gift from the King of Portugal thirteen years before, and had survived many Parisian winters before finally succumbing the previous day.  Four years old when she travelled from the Congo to Paris, she was therefore 17 at her death.  She was not the only elephant in Paris; a young Asian elephant had been on show when she arrived at Versailles.  But by the time of her death she was certainly the best known.  In the summer, her many visitors could see her in an open pen; in winter, they could view her through the glass of her heated chamber.  Artists came to draw her.  She ate 24 pounds of bread and twelve pints of wine each day, supplemented by two buckets of “potage” or sometimes cooked rice.  During her summer promenades through Versailles she pulled up grass with her trunk and ate it.  Generally very gentle, she knocked to the ground an artist who teased her; another she soaked with water from her trunk.  Her trunk was a marvel: she could untie knots with it, and one night opened the door of her enclosure without waking her keeper and wandered around the menagerie.

Elephants had a properly royal history in France: the Caliph Harun al-Rashid had sent Charlemagne an elephant named Abul-Abbas, and Henri IV sent an elephant he owned as a gift to Queen Elizabeth in 1591.  During the reign of Louis XIII, an elephant made a progress through France.  An elephant figured prominently in the fourth of five paintings in Charles LeBrun’s series The Triumphs of Alexander.  The painting, Triumphal Entry into Babylon, completed around 1670, depicts an African elephant like the one at Versailles rather than, as the subject might have demanded, an Asian one.  The series was much copied in tapestries and engravings. 

Such a wondrous and enormous beast as the Versailles animal (eight and a half feet long, seven and a half high) held great interest for Claude Perrault and the Academy.  Few previous dissections of elephants had been made, and much about the anatomy and even the external morphology of the elephant was unknown.  Perrault and the Compagnie carefully examined and measured the elephant’s exterior, even scrutinizing her skin through a microscope.  It took over twenty pages in the printed description (only published in 1733) before the anatomist Duverney made the first cut.   He proceeded slowly and methodically, removing individual organs and parts, including the trunk, to be transported to the Academy for further examination.  Perrault took detailed notes and Philippe de La Hire sketched.  They discovered that the elephant, which had been thought to be male, was in fact female.  At some point in the proceedings, when Duverney was literally immersed in the beast, King Louis made an appearance and demanded to know where the anatomist was; presumably he knew Duverney as one of the tutors of the Dauphin.  In Fontenelle’s words, Duverney “rose from the flank of the animal, where he had been, so to speak, engulfed” and greeted his king.

Even with winter weather, the parts of the elephant would soon have begun to deteriorate, and the Compagnie met the following Sunday and Monday as well as on their regular Wednesday meeting to witness Duverney’s dissection of the head and other parts, accompanied by Perrault’s explanation.  Dissection of the trunk extended into the middle of February.  The reading of Duverney’s memoire of the dissection and Perrault’s account of the exterior occupied several more weeks.  The Compagnie was still talking about the elephant the following summer, and she featured prominently in the Academy’s annual report to Colbert.  A year later, the Compagnie met at the King’s Garden to look at the elephant’s skeleton, which had been assembled there.  The skeleton’s interest lay mainly in its enormous size and the fortuitous structure of the elephant’s defenses that made her such a deadly foe, and that made her gentleness at Versailles all the more remarkable.

Dead Man Eating

A week ago I saw the Eugene Opera’s production of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean.  The story is well known, thanks to the 1995 movie.  Sister Helen is asked to be the spiritual advisor of a man on death row at Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison.  There is no doubt that the man – here called Joseph de Rocher – is guilty of a particularly horrific murder.  He claims he is innocent.  Sister Helen works to get him to admit his guilt and seek forgiveness.  This forgiveness comes both from God and from the family of his victim, and the theme of forgiveness is less religious than based on universal values and emotions.

The opera, wonderfully acted and sung by the leads Janis Kelly and Michael Mayes, was powerful and moving.  Heggie’s music, tonal rather than abstract, carried the story and its emotions effectively, with hints of jazz and rock and a folkish hymn that threads through the work.  Michael Mayes, his body pumped up and tattooed, his gait hunched and splay-footed, showed us Joe de Rocher before he ever opened his mouth.  The only false note was in the execution scene, when de Rocher is posed against a wall with outstretched arms, a forced and unnecessary evocation of Christ.

The last wish of de Rocher’s mother is that he be allowed to have the cookies she baked for him.  We don’t hear about his last meal.  But the Corvallis artist Julie Green has, in her series “The Last Supper,” painted over 500 plates with images of the last meals of death row inmates.  I saw them at the Corvallis Arts Center last month, where I took these pictures.  Most of them, like Mrs. de Rocher’s cookies, are painfully banal: cheeseburgers, pizza, fried chicken, French fries, ice cream.  Occasionally the prisoner refuses a meal; one requested only “God’s word.” Painted in blue on found plates, Green’s series gives the date of execution and the state, and the description of the meal as provided by the Department of Corrections.  The plates form a sorrowful parade of mundane wishes.  Green aims to add fifty plates a year until capital punishment is abolished in all fifty states; it has been abolished in 17 states plus the District of Columbia, but the vast majority of executions since 1976 (when the death penalty was reinstated after a brief hiatus) have taken place in Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma.  (The Death Penalty Information Center gives full background.)

Green’s work makes no overt statement about the death penalty, but like Dead Man Walking, it forcefully expresses the essential humanity of even those we deem the worst among us.  It challenges the idea that we can, or should, legally kill others as a form of punishment.

Fake meat and factory meat

Last week the Oregonian food section had a recipe for vegan coq au vin.  I have nothing against vegans, but this just seemed perverse to me; not only the imitation of a meat dish, which was never going to taste like the original, but its use of all kinds of fake meat products.   The ingredients included seitan (a wheat-based meat substitute, also known as mock duck), liquid smoke, fake bacon and fake parmesan cheese.  It seemed a travesty of real food.  There are plenty of vegetarian and vegan cooks who don’t feel the need to use fake meat – I love Heidi Swanson, and Bryant Terry is fabulous – and I honestly do not understand the necessity of developing a vegan cuisine which is an artificial version of a meat-based diet.  There are so many great vegetables out there.

Not that I don’t recognize the issues surrounding eating meat.  Joy Mench, an animal scientist from UC Davis, raised a bunch of these in her talk at OSU the other night.  She began with a shout-out to Emily Anthes’s new book Frankenstein’s Cat, which argues that biotechnology “puts human and animal welfare in conflict.” (here’s a recent interview of Anthes with Terry Gross).  Mench pointed out that biotechnology is only one of many technologies that are applied to food animals and that allow for greatly intensified animal husbandry and, for Americans, the cheapest food in the Western world.

Mench got her Ph.D. in the UK and contrasts American practices to European ones.  The British activist Ruth Harrison coined the termed “factory farming” back in the 1960s, and American farms have become more factory-like while Europeans, for a number of reasons, are backing off from the factory model.  One example is the use of CAFOs – confined animal feeding operations, the tiny “crates” that are used to confine pigs and other animals.  From an economic point of view, these certainly have advantages in terms of ease of feeding and preventing injury to the animal.  From a behavioral point of view (not to mention an ethical one) they are terrible.  Europeans have largely outlawed CAFOs; but legislation, said Mench, is not the answer in the more market-oriented US.  Although Proposition 2 in California prohibited CAFOs, not all states will pass such laws (Idaho and Nevada have attempted to attract California chicken farmers when Prop. 2 goes into effect in 2015).

Mench believes the necessary work toward more humane animal husbandry must be at the level of the retailer and the consumer – that in the US we need to work via the market. She is skeptical of the value of labeling, since many terms such as “natural” and “humane” have no legal meaning, and others such as “free range” imply oversight that is non-existent.  Instead she points to the effectiveness of consumer boycotts in forcing companies such as McDonalds to use humanely raised eggs, and believes that similar consumer pressure will lead to the elimination of CAFOs in the next decade.   I certainly hope that she is right.

The Codex is Dead, Long Live the Codex

Yesterday’s New York Times included this paean to MOOCs by Tom Friedman, fan of all things techy even if he does not understand their implications very well.  MOOCs (massive open online courses) were one of the topics covered in a very lively workshop (or symposium) I organized last Friday on “Digital Humanities.”  I think MOOCs are swell but I don’t think online lectures are teaching.  They’re lecturing, which is not the same thing.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  The workshop (or symposium, which sounds a little too Platonic to me), started with four short presentations on varying aspects of the digital world and its impact on the humanities.  Dan Rosenberg of the University of Oregon gave a lovely riff on the term “data” and its numerous ramifications.  The term “data” to refer to pieces of information emerged in English in the seventeenth century; “data” comes from the Latin “dare,” to give, whereas “fact” comes from “facere,” to do or make.  Data are givens, and rhetorical as opposed to the ontological fact.  Patrick McCray of UC-Santa Barbara talked about “big data” and how it has been used in sciences such as astronomy, noting increasingly complex organizational structures (according to this recent piece in Perspectives on History, historians’ organization of data is rather lacking in technological expertise).  He asked the important question of how data relates to our identity as historians.

I talked about Google books and the N-gram, again raising some of the points I had made here.  I went on to talk about the claim that history needs to be more rigorous and scientific, and what that might mean, pointing out that some of these critiques are not new, but that now more than ever we need to communicate what it is that historians actually do.  Rob Iliffe, who gave a wonderful keynote talk the day before on the Newton Project, declared that the impact of digitization in the humanities meant the end of close reading and the end of the life of the mind, turning libraries into “information hubs.”  “Modern books, “ he announced, “are museological artefacts,” and (my favorite bon mot) “presence is a fetish.”  But his conclusions were not all gloom and doom.  We humanists are on the edge of a brave new world, and we need to seize it and shape it – and in so doing rearticulate the value of the humanities to an increasingly skeptical world.  The two hours of passionate discussion that followed did not resolve anything but gave this “bibliobimbo” a lot to think about.

Modernist Cuisine and Nonna’s Cucina

At the AAAS meeting last week, Nathan Myhrvold gave one of the plenary talks.  He is a physicist but is also the author of the magnum opus (really magnum, 6 volumes and 2400 pages) Modernist Cuisine, and more recently the somewhat more user-friendly Modernist Cuisine at Home, which introduces the home cook to the world of foams and sous vide cooking and the Pacojet, a super-powerful (and powerfully expensive) blender.

Myhrvold’s talk, accompanied by lots of video, was great fun, smart and witty.  But I remain of two minds about modernist cuisine.  It is certainly fun and original and imaginative.  Yet reducing cooking to physics and chemistry to me robs it of its spontaneity.  It takes away, to a large extent, that element of chance that could lead to failure but could also lead to serendipitous moments of pure rapture.  And the centrifuges and liquid nitrogen and airs and foams strike me at times as simply gimmicky.

To be sure, modernist cooking has deconstructed and turned upside down and inside out our ideas about food, and that had led to some amazing experiences; I think of Grant Achatz’s Alinea and Aviary in Chicago, or my friend Jonathan Kaplan’s spectacular dinner parties here in Corvallis.  Their aim of engaging all of the senses is a worthy one, and the range of new tastes is astonishing.  That a gastropub in Portland recently offered a sandwich with Douglas fir mayonnaise shows, I think, how broadly these new flavors have reached.

But I persist in think that something is missing, and that at the end of twenty tiny courses one might be physically full and sensually sated but spiritually hungry.  Myhrvold discussed the physics behind decanting red wine, and to gasps from the audience demonstrated that the blender is a far better tool to aerate wine than a decanter.  But I would miss the ritual of slowly pouring the wine into the decanter and watching it sheet down the sides, of gently swirling it and smelling it.  I suppose I could pour it from the bender into the decanter.  I am happy to eat food from a centrifuge.  But I would rather eat my grandmother’s cannoli than anything else in the world.

Are trees always good?

Scientific American has just written about the research on mountain meadows of OSU’s Harold Zald.  Harold was one of the featured participants in Alpine Environment workshop I organized last month.

Sendak and Hoban

Within the past year, two of my favorite authors died, Maurice Sendak and Russell Hoban.  Sendak was undoubtedly the better known, author of picture books such as the wonderful Where the Wild Things Are and my favorite, In the Night Kitchen, as well as an illustrator of many more books.  Hoban also wrote children’s books, the wry and gentle series about Frances the Badger (mainly illustrated by the inimitable Garth Williams, who created Charlotte the spider).  He wrote adult novels as well, which I have not read, and the extraordinary Riddley Walker.

            Riddley Walker (1980) is a post-apocalytic story about a twelve-year-old boy who has the power to interpret myth – to riddle.  He lives in southeast England some centuries after a nuclear war has ended Western civilization.  Odd remnants of it remain in the form of a legend known as the Eusa story and in a traveling Punch and Judy show that serves as what government there is in the rough settlements of what used to be Kent.  All of this sounds strange, and it is; but what makes this novel extraordinary is its use of language.  When civilization collapsed, so did language.  Riddley speaks and writes a phonetic, garbled patois.  Hoban’s imagining of this shattered language gives this novel its power.  I recently read Cloud Atlas and its central post-apocalyptic story is also written in its own half-collapsed language.

Like Hoban, Sendak dealt with myths and half-remembered fears.  His books all have that quality of dreams which bend and distort reality.  Max sails for a year and a day, and Mickey falls through the floor (and out of his clothes) into the kitchen.  Goblins steal babies (I found Outside over There too dark to read to my toddlers).  He too played with language, slipping in and out of meaning as his images slipped between waking and dreaming.

To Sendak, technology is toy-like and playful: Max’s boat could be folded of paper, and Mickey’s airplane is made of bread dough.  Technology is much more ominous to Riddley Walker.  As in Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (written two decades earlier), the remnants of techno-civilization are mysterious and awe-inspiring.  Riddley marvels at the remains of a power plant in Cambry (Canterbury).  But the awe elides to a pervasive sense of loss, as Riddley recognizes how much knowledge has disappeared.  No one knows how any of this might have worked.  Many seek the secret of the Little Shyning Man the Attom.

When Riddley finds a stained glass window in Canterbury Cathedral dedicated to St. Eustace, this myth mingles with the Eusa story.  Hoban explores history and language, how our stories develop and change over time, and how we need stories to tell ourselves.  Like Max and Mickey, Riddley reaches deeply into the half-slumbering core of ourselves to find what meaning he can.