Angelic & Satanic Mills
Part Two: Fractals and the Malthusian Cat
© James Beswick Whitehead, 2001
version IV, 4th - 5th April 2001, 5th April, 8th April, revised 24th April 2001,
30th May, June 2001
1: Manufacturing Men & Monsters3: The Haunted Mill at Willington
6: Hunting Adam's Umbilical Cord
The screenwriters John L. Balderston, Francis Edward Farogoh and Garrett Ford are known only to obsessive film buffs but it was by their doing that the monster appears to perish in a blazing mill at the end of James Whale's Frankenstein, leaving the way open for his reappearance in any number of sequels. Such final yet open endings would become run-of-the-mill, the blazing set forever offering itself as the substitute victim and allowing the evil to be banished temporarily. Like certain forms of vegetation, the monsters would thrive on their ashes. Mary Shelley's ending was bleaker but also drew back from depicting the creature's death. Spurned by his creator, the monster dreams of a spectacular immolation on a blazing pyre but we last see him leaping from a cabin window onto an ice-raft, on which he drifts from view. The remade story therefore appears to grant the monster his own fantasy of a more spectacular and conspicuous end. There is no mention of a windmill anywhere in Mary Shelley's novel, yet its appearances in these films about a manufactured man seem appropriate, especially as mill-fires had been a frequent and often deadly reality. The strategic control of a water-mill forms a key stage in the battles of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and, once seen, it is not easy to forget the white nightmare of the mill in Dreyer's Vampyr. That ghostly coating of dust on everything had been prefigured by Thomas Hardy in The Trumpet Major, where the mill and its inhabitants endure the alarms of the English countryside during the Napoleonic Wars. And the cinema, in Britain at least, was also fundamentally tied to the mill in the shape of the Rank Organization, flour magnates whose film-making began with Methodist shorts and whose religious scruples caused them to resist grinding out adult material until it hurt them financially.
Pope's hymn to the mill was to the coffee-mill, that stimulating drink which was to fuel an age of wit and gossip.
For lo! the board with cups and spoons is crown'd,
The berries crackle, and the mill turns round;
On shining altars of Japan they raise
The silver lamp; the fiery spirits blaze:
From silver spouts the grateful liquors glide,
While China's earth receives the smoking tide:
At once they gratify their scent and taste,
And frequent cups prolong the rich repast.
. . .
Coffee, (which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes)
Sent up in vapours to the Baron's brain
New stratagems, the radiant lock to gain.The Rape of the Lock lines 105 - 120
Pope's celebrated exercise in the mock-heroic emphasizes the ritual of preparing coffee as an exotic rite and the mental effects of the drug. There is a great deal of practical detail about contemporary coffee-making half hidden beneath the elaborate artifice. It would appear as if the berries were roasted at the table, unless the crackle refers to their being ground. The emphasis upon scent and vapours suggests the permeation of thought by the liquor. On its first arrival in England, coffee was an exotic novelty with which travellers would amuse their friends. Its potential to become the ritual around which society would organize itself did not become obvious until the rise of the public coffee-houses. The earliest of these was said to have been established in Oxford around the same time as the first stirrings of what was to become the Royal Society.
The coffee-houses soon became associated with political factionalism, diatribe-culture and rumour-mills which were to be the perfect conditions for mad projects such as the South Sea Island Bubble. Lloyds of London began as a coffee-house. The coffee-houses' decline as an institution in the nineteenth century was essentially due to the emergence of the need for more elaborate administration from individual city offices. For a while, however, the business man knew all his customers and they knew where to find him. The "Turkish Gruel" had its detractors and to some its fumes were as noxious as tobacco. It was a topic of the very conversation that it fuelled and became the subject of a cantata by Bach. Today, the coffee-house is reappearing as a fashionable business, though its social function seems subdued and its American airs seem a poor counterpart to the exotic atmosphere of the East in which it was original swathed. There is a tendency for the drink to be more highly valued when its style or manner of preparation is attributed to a third country which is neither its place of origin nor its place of consumption. So we have Greek and Turkish coffee, Mexican coffee, French, Italian and Irish coffees. I have never heard of English coffee being served here. Perhaps a pale, milky instant coffee is the English style, or perhaps it is a wondrously exotic type that can only be had abroad.
Haunted mills are a fixture of ghost stories and an extensive account of the haunting of the old mill at Willington near Newcastle-upon-Tyne appears in Catherine Crowe's The Night Side of Nature. The Victorian craze for the supernatural is often dated from 1849, when the first rumours of the Fox family and their table-turning seances in Hydesville, New York, crossed the Atlantic. However, Catherine Crowe's translation of Kerner's Seeress of Prevorst had came out in 1845 and The Night Side of Nature, an original study of spirits, premonitions and doppelgängers appeared in 1848. The letters which contain the details of the haunting at Willington date from 1840 and are full of fascinating detail, from the Quaker forms of address used by the miller Joseph Procter to the situation of the mill buildings, now in the shadow of a vast railway viaduct. By this date, the tidal watercourses about the mill were no longer its motive power and it is described by the witness as "a large steam flour-mill, like a factory".
The little children play with toy windmills in the glorious illustrations to the alchemical text of the Splendor Solis, where their activities are symbolic of the stage in the Magnum Opus called child's play or women's work. This was the point at which the alchemist could relax a little and await the outcome of his labours. There can be few children throughout the last six hundred years or more who have not at some point in their lives been given one of these fragile toys. They were celebrated musically by François Couperin in his 17th Ordre for harpsichord in the piece Les Petits moulins à vent.
The German composer Karl Gottlieb Reissiger, 1798 - 1859, is credited with having written an overture called The Mill on the Floss in 1831, which would be notable as a German opera based on an English book and even more notable because George Eliot's novel did not appear until the year after Reissiger's death and the authoress was aged just twelve in the year of his opera. Disappointingly, the mystery boils down to an inventive English publisher's translation of Die Felsenmühle zu Estalières, the real name of the opera to which the overture originally belonged. Whether a generation of concertgoers really sat through the dramatic piece with images of Maggie Tulliver's intellectual starvation or the publisher's we may never know or learn to care. At least a mill was involved even if its translation involved a trip across the channel and a total change of cast.
When buried millstones are unearthed at crossroads and other sacred sites, the name of the Omphalos is evoked and it may be that later ages used any convenient circular stone for the purpose of declaring the site a centre. The ancient Greek Omphalos, meaning navel, had actually been a bee-hive shaped stone, often ornamented, the one at Delphi being the most celebrated. As a place of pilgramage, the Omphalos was thought to allow direct communication with the Gods. Such an Omphalos-Millstone was found at Royston in 1764 and written about by the antiquarian Stukely. It formed a lid and when it was raised there was a kind of bottle-shaped cave beneath. Not a direct route to the Gods, perhaps, but better than a family of slugs. Some have speculated if it was built as a place of safety for the Knights Templar, without whom any mystery would feel underpopulated. Millstones were regularly placed at crossroads, as if the horizontal crossing of the ways could also be a vertical one. A Maypole was traditionally erected in the hole and surmounted with a garland.
The Omphalos has given its name to an argument which begins by gazing at Adam's belly-button. As he was created without a mother, he would have a navel only as a sign. If Adam bore such a spurious maker's mark, might not all inconvenient evidence against creationism be explained along similar lines? So it was that in 1857, Philip Henry Gosse, father of Edmund, laboured and produced a somewhat Borgesian Universe which might be aeons old or created fifty or one hundred years ago. His book Omphalos suggested that quite possibly the universe has come into being this very minute with fossils and your memories as ready-made parts of it. It is impossible to disprove, though the greatest protesters have been Christians, who feel that this God of false histories is a demonic concept. As for scientists, in this scenario, they can be summed up as honest fools who report what they find but don't appreciate that it is just a story. It has modern variants such as the notion that light from distant stars may have been created en route. Gosse has made his greatest appeal to writers who see in his God the image of themselves.
In Heraldry, the Moline Cross, a cross with bifurcated arms, is said to represent the Millrind or support of the upper millstone. It symbolizes the mutual conversation of human society. This is not unlike the concept of the Masonic squared ashlar which also represents man as a social animal, taking his place in the structure of society. The millstone is also associated with the Celtic cross, which is said to predate Christianity. There is a more accidental Christian association in the subject of Molinism, the name given to the beliefs of the Jesuit Louis Molina, 1535 - 1600, who made an attempt to reconcile the doctrines of Grace and Free Will.
In the poem of Milton, Blake sees Swedenborg as "The Samson shorn by the Churches". Blake takes it on himself to correct the vision of Milton and of Swedenborg. In fact, a study has been written which views the geography of the poem as being based on the structure of the eye. What Blake may not have known was that, before his religious conversion, Swedenborg had taken a practical interest in all forms of manufacture and made a special study of the craft of lens-grinding.
If Samson is the Hebrew Heracles, then his slave-labour at the mill is the equivalent of Heracles' labours at the spinning wheel of Omphale. Later both strong heroes are associated with springs. The loss of his hair is often taken to represent a symbolic castration, later he is blinded, both operations being associated with the management of animals and both an affront to human dignity. Both he and Heracles undergo ultimate humiliation as creatures tamed and harnessed to the machine. It is interesting in this connection to note that Saint-Saëns only opera to stay in the repertoire is based on Samson, while he wrote not one but two symphonic poems on the theme of Hercules: Le Jeunesse d'Hercules & Le Rouet d'Omphale, celebrating the hero in the lustihood of his youth and as the slave of the machine.
The relationship of Omphale with the Omphalos or navel of the world is suggestive but the rotation of the spinning wheel is clearly symbolic of the complete change in Heracles' fortunes and status. In some versions of the myth, the strong man is feminized by this dominant female who makes him wear her dress while she appropriates his normal lion-skin. Spinning was universally regarded as women's work, though the spinning-wheel of Omphale may have been a simple distaff. With his rages and bouts of madness, Heracles testosterone problems suggest that he had been denying his feminine aspect for too long.
Esoterically associated with the passage of the sun through the heavens, in some mythologies Samson is identified with the planet Mars. Though his relationship with architecture is destructive, Samson as a man between two pillars, also has a place in the cheerfully syncretic world of Masonic symbolism. The character of Samson has generally baffled attempts by Biblical scholars to make him a good example of anything especially religious. Frazer, in Folk Lore in the Old Testament, sees him as an essentially secular folklore character. He is certainly an unruly and violent creature, often boastful and intemperate. He seems to have got into the Bible through sheer force of personality, like the popular folk-hero who could hardly be excluded. Alternatively by a handshake or the power of anagram.
The Biblical significance of the mill is sometimes lost in translation. Gethsemane, for example, is identified with Mount Olive as the location of Christ's agony before his arrest. The name Gethsemane means an olive-mill and the pressure under which Christ sweats and weeps in Gethsemane relates him in a very earthy way to one of the most precious commodities of daily life in Palestine. He gives his juices, like the olive, in order that mankind may live. In the prophets' visions of the last days, images of the harvest and the vintage are firmly rooted in the cycles of Nature and the application of technology to the supply of food and drink. Yet the agony in the garden is beyond the remit of pastoral poetry such as that of James Thomson's The Seasons, which celebrates earthly life in the harvest and vintage with an awareness that draws on Biblical precedent to suggest that Man, Earth and Heaven are in harmony. The work of the mill and the presses are the process of turning the fallen world into an earthly paradise.
For Blake, the hectic work of the harvest and vintage is not enough and needs to be supplemented by the visionary work of the poet. This is seen as the strenuous rhythmic forging of the blacksmith Los. Much ink has been spent on drawing out the implications of the name of this very significant Blakean figure, the alchemical sun backwards? A prophet named Los may be lugubrious humour. For Blake, the physical regeneration of the world by agriculture would restore only the Eden of vegetation and a Heaven of Natural Religion. Human redemption was an intellectual struggle and involved the awakening of the whole man in the Imagination.
Blake's kaleidoscopic visions in Milton and Jerusalem have never settled into an agreed niche in English Literature. The difficulty of the so-called prophetic books resides in the way Blake is willing to overthrow the reader's expectations of a linear narrative in favour of a way of enclosing events within events. There are signs along the way but every step seems to teem with energy, like those animated fractal images which suggest an endlessly repeating process. This perception of worlds within grains of sand bears some resemblance to the altered states of the schizoid mind as well as to the visions of a brain under the influence of drugs. Blake's has found some fervent admirer's who recognize and identify with this aspect of his art. Ironically, in view of his artworks, a much stronger case can be made for him as a poet with a strong intellectual and almost anti-visual poet.
Anyone growing up in UK during the sixties would have been troubled by a song about clog-wearing mice living in an Amsterdam Windmill. Their anthropomorphic clog-wearing may derive from some frightening memory of the huge shoes worn by Micky and Minnie Mouse. Clogs and mills go together in Holland or in Lancashire and it was the French sabot in the works that gave the world the gift of sabotage. The song tells of the ever-increasing family of these unnatural rodents who reproduce until they triumphantly possess the mill. Their exponential increase in numbers is not countered by Malthusian economics nor even by a half-capable cat.
The Dutchness of the mice is puzzling and did not seem to reflect any widespread British fear of the Dutch overrunning Europe. On the contrary, the Dutch cap was said to be an effective discouragement to reproduction from a famously Protestant country. It may be that the song, directed at children, would lay down ideas of contraception, before there were any clear notions of sex, except that the breeding mice seem happy, if lacking any advanced culture. It could be read, in fact, as an encouragement to breed as an aggressive act. It is difficult to say how far it can be blamed for thoughtless reproductive acts but it would be a pity not to blame it for something.
The old power of making has fallen from its heavenly association with creation out of nothing down to the level of mere replication. To find three mice is the sure sign that multiplication has begun, and the blindness may be hereditary. The dizzying and maddening activities of a rodent-infested mill are busy without being productive and, in confirmation, another song arises within a year or so in which the turning wheels are seen as separate from the environment, moving but getting nowhere.
The Windmills of Your Mind, words by Alan & Marilyn Bergman, music by Michel Legrand was a song that won an Oscar, having featured in the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair. "Windmills in the head" was Sancho Panza's comment patching up the wounded Quixote after his skirmish with the "Giants".
"Did I not tell your worship they were windmills? and who could have thought otherwise except such as had windmills in their head?" Book One Chapter VIII
Strictly it is Giants that Quixote has in his head but his servant sees the turning of the sails as a symbol of a mind turning meanings around. In Cervantes there is a hard reality to bring the Knight down to Earth with a series of repeated bumps. In the twentieth-century song there is no objective reality, just a bewildering series of images, variations on a circular theme. The repetitive patterns of the song exactly reflect the notion of the words that jangle in the head. The passage of time is suggested but the images succeed each other as if in memory. Though the pictures evoked seem to tell the story of a love affair and have a romantic cast, they are also disturbing and fragmentary leading to an awareness of ending.
These mental windmills have ceased to civilize and humanize the environment, instead they spew out a series of external correlatives from a mind that is drowning in a whirlpool of memories. The success of a popular song depends on the experience being generalized so this view of the mind obsessively moving in circles seems to be a common one. The list of images are none of them so personal as to particularize the experience. The multiplication of images in this song of romantic memories suggests an alternative or substitute family of shadows from the love affair instead of a brood of youngsters.
© James Beswick Whitehead, 2001