1: A Harmonic Alphabet
2: A Natural Architect
3: The Bone Gramophone
4: Opening the Door
5: The Inferno and the Celestographs

Like Goethe, the circle of Romantic Danish writers were immersed in scientific studies which informed their agenda. In the case of Adam Oehlenschlager, 1779 - 1850, he was fascinated by the sound-figures which are produced when fine particles are subjected to sound-waves.These had first been demonstrated by Ernst Chladni, 1756 - 1827, in his book Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klangs of 1787. It seemed for many that these gave a demonstrable proof of the ancient harmony of the universe. Novalis even speculated as to whether the letters of the alphabet had originated in these sound-shapes.

2: A Natural Architect

This notion of a Palace materializing in obedience to the call of a child of Nature would appear to be a related concept and Oehlenschlager's Aladdin is a play with some obvious Masonic implications. The evil magician is not a child of Nature and cannot comprehend the organising principal that Aladdin represents. Through his unleashed geni the boy is responsible for the erection of a massive palace. The magician is seeking to comprehend a Great Architect while Aladdin has connected to the creative core.

Busoni took the mystic final chorus as the crowning piece for his monumental Piano Concerto, Op.39. The Masonry and exotic images on the cover appear to relate to Naples, Egypt and Rome and promise a work steeped in mysteries. There may have been an analogy intended with Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, Op.80, another Masonic piece.

Carl Nielsen also wrote incidental music for Aladdin, as did Hornemann. As Danes, it seemed natural. Nielsen's music does not appear to be especially occult, though the market-place scene for four orchestras brings to mind Mozart's Serenata Notturna as a concept.

The story of Aladdin as we have it in the Arabian Nights is from Persian sources but set in a mythical China. The sinister magician who pretends to be Aladdin's long-lost uncle is described as an African. Probably every Nation has its chosen exotics. Aladdin is a strongly archetypal story, recurring often where it does not seem immediately obvious. Take Charles Laughton's film of the Night of the Hunter, where the evil uncle becomes the childrens' step-father in order to locate the treasure they are keeping. In one key sequence, the young boy lights a candle to take the evil preacher down to a cellar, where he lies about the treasure being hidden under a stone. In the film as in the story, a boy's native shrewdness will prevent him from being the instrument of an evil master.

Rainer Maria Rilke had been introduced to the concept of sound-recording in the 1890s when a teacher had shown him a primitive apparatus using wax and a bristle for needle. It was a two-way process, the same equipment being used for both recording and playback. Some fifteen years later, studying anatomy, Rilke noted how the seams of the human skull resembled the grooves of a gramophone record. Fascinated by the way in which machinery was expanding the range of consciousness, Rilke proposed a cross-fertilization of nature and the machine. What if the messages of nature in the groove of the skull were to be played back as if they were a sound recording? In the short prose text Ur-Geräusch, 1919, Rilke makes this proposal for the union of the senses. The proposal was founded on the poetic notion that this gap in the bones of the skull represented a leakage between the inner and the outer worlds. With time the gap becomes a mere symbol of what was open in the child.

The author Karl-Erik Tallmo has suggested that Rilke's synesthetic experiments can be easily extended today now that texts, music and images are all stored as digital data. Opening a graphic as text or translating words into music are leakages between applications, though the results are seldom so interesting as the concept. A gramophone pick-up dragged across the coronal suture produces noise rather than music. A more rewarding approach to cross-fertilization in computing is the 1995 programme called Making Music, where the composer Morton Subotnick allows children and adults to "paint" music directly onto the computer screen, freeing us from all the restraints of conventional notation and enabling an immediate grasp of the possibilities of pattern-making in sound. Tallmo compares the reading of the seams of the bones with Man's ancient preoccupation with reading the stars or the clouds.

Fox-Talbot's calotypes represent some of the earliest photographic images of the world but he saw his invention initially as a means of making artistic views in accordance with the traditional formulae of landscape artists. His own images were carefully constructed works of art rather than snapshots. Things rather than people seem to have been the stars of these earliest photographs. Lengthy exposure times meant that people could walk through the scene leaving little trace of themselves. The longer they stayed still, the more they materialized. There are therefore many ghosts on these early photographs, before the spirit photographers got to work in serving the demand for departed souls to appear. How deliberate these earlier ghosts were it is hard to say, but it seems likely that the Edinburgh tomb picture with its kneeling phantom figure beside the boy was an intentional piece of mischief.

Fox-Talbot himself was a likeably unphotogenic figure, seeming never to be at his ease in front of his invention. His features are unguarded in their tetchiness and carry an air of uncomposed authenticity.

The Open Door, which Lady Talbot rechristened The Meditations of a Broomstick.

Though he claimed others would perfect what he had merely initiated, the calotypes of Fox Talbot possess a magic of their own which has never been approached. This is not a matter merely of their early date so much as the Gothic circumstances of Talbot's environment and sensibility. The availability of his own Abbey as a subject to be captured from all corners was extremely fortunate but Talbot's romanticism extended to a nearly Wordsworthian interest in the lives and environments of his workers. Here, he seems to relish the artful clutter of old timbers, the absorption of characters in their landscapes, like birds in their trees. They become objects in the composition, afforded the same respect as the inanimate. Yet it is the things that haunt not the people. Lady Fox Talbot referred to the Open Door as "The Meditations of a Broomstick" and there is no more bewitching image. The title was an echo of Swift's essay "Meditation upon a Broomstick" in which the satirist, exercised a sorcery of his own, seeing the tired, old brush as a symbol of the human condition.

Once the sight has adjusted to the tonal range of the calotypes, their softness and subtlety seems almost infinite. Sunlight on stone has never been more perfectly conveyed and the lights within are the promise of another world. Even the examples which seem less perfect than the justly famed Open Door, amply reward prolonged study as if to mirror their prolonged exposures. Looking at the galleries within the Abbey or the still-life table set out for the camera cannot be a casual glance, such as we might give a snapshot. Their full beauty begins to bloom in silence and then it seems as if these earliest photographs captured a more extended reality. In the supposed perfection of the technical process, some massive exclusions have been allowed: brighter, bigger, sharper images may speak quicker to the eyes but leave no echoes in the head.

A calotype of York Minster which appears as unreal as a backdrop yet it draws the viewer in.

Along with his photographic researches Fox-Talbot maintained interests in mathematics, astronomy, botany, etymology, ancient languages and Biblical scholarship. In these fields he was regarded, even at the time, as something of a dilettante. The botanical interests were reflected in his series of direct prints made from flowers and leaves on photographic paper left in sunlight. These images of Nature up close, like his direct prints of lace, are strangely matter-of-fact, as if the 1840s, photography needed a lens to produce magic. In this panoramic view of his workshop at Reading, made from two joined calotypes, some of the players on Fox-Talbot's stage have moved to new positions so that they appear in different rôles simultaneously. We have become unused to such depiction, though it was a common technique in early paintings, where Christ could appear simultaneously in Gethsemane, before Pilate and upon the cross.

Between the 1840s and the 1890s, the speed of photographic plates had increased to the point that it was necessary for daylight and the focussing lens to be removed before magical images could be possible again. During his Inferno years in Paris, when Strindberg became obsessed with alchemy and occult science, he produced a number of photographs taken without the interference of a lens. These direct impressions of the night-sky on the sensitive plates, which he called Celestographs, resulted in some images of accidental beauty.

© James Beswick Whitehead, 2001

version I, 14th August, 2001