Tessellation of the Plane ... and Beer (Again)

The Midwest is awash in independent breweries--and that's good. Jesus, after all, turned water into wine, and the good St. Kevin turned water into beer!

Millstream Brewing Co. is one of the older independents in the midwest. They're in Iowa, bordering me (Minnesota) to the south.

Maybe it's just the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, or maybe it's that I'm their new target penetration market--but I feel like I've been reading about and seeing their beer every time I take a left turn these days.

May I speculate fancily? It seems to me that the rise of the independent brewery is somewhat akin to the Protestants splitting off the Catholics. It gets hard to say if new movements destroy the old movements (anti-tessellation), or if new movement further sub-divide the old, a sort of hyper-tessellation.

Anyhow, I picked up a twack of Millstream the other day, and I was delighted by this label:

Good beer & an interesting label

Good beer & a good label! Let's talk about the label.

Let's Talk About the Label

I was startled to see mountains. And a mill. In Iowa. But damned if Google don't have Iowa mountains and Iowa mills, so pardon my ignorance. Quite frankly, every time I talk to anyone about Iowa, I leave the conversation with two thoughts:

1. Iowa's a much better place that I imagined. 
2. I'm sometimes a bit of a condescending dumbass, which is especially stupid for someone living in Minnesota (not because there's something wrong with Minnesota, but because so many dumbass condescenders direct their condensation our way).

But back to that label. It's a very cool pastoral scene they evoke.

And it contrasts, for me at least, so strongly with their coat of arms.

Granted, there is something definitely medieval feeling about a mill--but that's not what I'm trying to get at here. See, the coat of arms draws my mind immediately to feudalism, and the checkerboard pattern draws my mind even further into the way that feudalism tessellated the land, i.e., dividing it up like a checkerboard for the ruling class.

Meanwhile, the image of the U.S. plains with the mountains in the background and nary a barbed wire fence draws my mind to cowboys and the open frontier. "Open frontier." It's so cliche that it's easy to forget what it means. Even the idea of a stream-powered mill in this image might be taken as an example of someone using the land without a striking sense of ownership--I mean, the stream keeps flowing, after all, free and open for anyone down stream to use. Turner claimed (in his famous Frontier Thesis) that this frontier shaped the U.S. character, made it different from Europe.

Now this is where my thinking gets a little weirded out. I suggested that a prominent aspect of the U.S. frontier is no fences, graze the cattle where you want and don't dam up the streams--and this is started to sound rather communal, nobody owns the land, share and share alike. Too much like a European commons to be the root of the U.S. character?

So we not only have the frontier as an area that is not governed, we also have the frontier as an area that is shared by all and owned by none. (Native peoples, of course, rightfully view this quite different.) This strikes me as closer to anarchy, an idea militantly discouraged by the U.S. government--not an idea that is typically considered the expression of the U.S. character.

On top of that weirdness, we have the tessellated coat of arms mapped atop the image.

Well, what to make of these contrasts?

I bumped this by Daurde, and he pointed me to where we are in this image: according to label, Amana, IA.

Let's Talk About Amana

Amana was a religious colony founded by German Pietists. The Amanians lived communially up until the the 1930s. They cooked and ate in communal kitchens and labored in jobs that were rewarded in credits for Amanian goods and services.

How'd they end up in Iowa? The group started in Germany/Switzerland. They splintered off the Lutherans--depending on your point of view they either tried to bust up the tessellation of Christianity, or they were hyper-tessellators. Anyhow, they fled religious and governmental persecution in Europe and went to the U.S. In the U.S., they initially settled near Buffalo, NY, but eventually found the area too crowded, bringing too many worldly attractions too close to hand and also making it too expensive to expand as their membership flourished.

So, in the 1850s, they fled to the frontiers of Iowa and settled into a new commune.

Let's Tie it Together 

We have an image invoking a communal and government-free frontier. We also have the historical site of a commune settling on to the frontier as part of an escape from official prosecution and from worldly trappings.

Not bad.

But what to make of that coat of arms in the image? It creates a sense of dissonance in the image. Likewise, Amana, a commune, is dissonantly placed on the frontier.

In 1923, under economic and internal social stresses, the Armanian Elders (yes, they actually had Elders with a capital "E") met to vote on disbanding the commune. They ended up with a peculiar half-disbanding, expressed by Wikipedia as:

The Amana Society, Inc., corporate heir to the land and economic assets of communal Amana, continues to own and manage some 26,000 acres (105 km²) of farm, pasture and forest land. Agriculture remains an important economic base today just as it was in communal times. Because the land was not divided up with the end of communalism, the landscape of Amana still reflects its communal heritage.

Is the Amana Society, Inc. the feudal shield stamped atop Iowan frontier?

"Nah," is what I'm totally thinking to myself, "they just drew a pretty picture of the hometown and thought a cool looking knight's shield would be nice, kind of awesome, touch."

Could be--I might be right on that point.

Let's Have Another Beer

On the other hand, I grabbed another Millstream beer from my mixed twak tonight. Get a load of the label on this puppy.

Another good beer and another interesting label

For Pete's sake: Why the tessellating checkerboard blanket tossed across the very image of openness?

Let's grab another beer.

Yet another good beer with an interesting label!

Okay, so for serious foax. I know your thinking I saw all these labels before I wrote any of this, but really, I didn't!

As you can see:

• This label shows the mill encroached upon by a farm, the fence running through the formally open prairie, and the land across the fence is tessellated by a plow (though the buck runs free).
• Other labels show a feudal shield and a tessellated picnic blanket dropped upon the frontier.
• Amana was a commune dropped on the frontier.
• The Amana Society, Inc., dropped a corporate heir upon the land and economy of communal Amana, but the land was not divided.

Am I imaging things? Tell me what you think!

ESP Mail

In my English class a couple of weeks ago we had a discussion about non-compliance issues in aircraft manufacturing, specifically about what they call FOD, or Foreign Object Debris.  (This is a big deal, costing the airline industry an estimated 13 billion dollars per annum in direct and indirect costs, ultimately paid for by the traveller.  More importantly, it can and has resulted in significant loss of human life).

During the course of the discussion someone mentioned a "man-hole cover" on the wing of a plane; this left me puzzled and I struggled to make sense of what they really meant to say.  In fact, man-hole cover is perfectly correct.  A man-hole is a small access port to the interior of a wing, where the fuel tanks of large commercial aircraft are located (neat, eh?).

These covers are made of carbon-based composite, which forms an increasingly large part of aircraft structures. Something like 50% of the principal structure of Boeing's Dreamliner, for example, is made of composite.  It's lighter and thus cuts down on fuel-consumption, but to be honest, it's not an entirely reassuring choice; I predict serious problems with composite planes in the coming decades.  Hell, they've got serious problems already.  Boeing and Airbus would prefer that not get around too much though....

So the day after this FOD discussion, I open my junkmail and I get an email titled "composite manhole covers".   I thought a student was sending me a link to some sort of article on the subject.  But no, it was spam from a Chinese company that sells....carbon man-hole covers.  The kind for sewers.

What's the point of randomly spamming people to flog such a specialized product, purchased only, one would assume, by municipal procurement agencies?

I was actually a bit startled by this coincidence.  That I would discuss the subject one day is not odd; I work for an aerospace subcontractor after all.  That I'd get a spam for an entirely different product using the same terms I'd used the day before was....unusual, especially given the product.  If I'd been discussing the sad spectacle of retired Americans taking buses to Canada in order to afford their medications (generic Viagra anyone?) that would be different.  Cheap pills and penile enhancement are spam classics.  But man-hole covers?

If that was the only occurence, this post wouldn't have come about....

A few days ago, my attention was drawn to a footnote in an essay in the anthology I'm reading (Death, Dismemberment, and Memory: Body Politics in Latin America), thanking a person by the name of Xóchitl M-----.  The name (meaning "flower" in Nahuatl) jumped out at me because of its relative rarity, plus the fact that is was one of only two Mexican names in the list of thankees (the article being about Mexico).

The very next day, in my junkmail, I received a spam from one "Nereida Xochitl."

At this point I was jolted.  The name is rare.  It's not as if I'd gotten an email from John Smith.  My junkmail was once a riot of cool bot-generated monikers, but this one, the day after I'd first seen it, in a footnote?  Reading a book which I was led to after writing a post in which I discussed, among other things, the phenomenon of coincidence?  Seriously?

Coming upon us unexpectedly, the recurrence of images in which we've taken an interest can be delightful, startling, even alarming.  Crediting these sudden appearances with special significance, however, is more than a paranoid delusion; for some it's a sign of conspiracy, for others mystical synchronicity.  It certainly has a poetic aspect to it.  For many it's simply an excuse to say "It's like, weird" and go on to mimic The Twilight Zone theme music.

So basically, my mind began turning and I jokingly imagined the only way this would be possible is if someone or something were reading my mind.  I amused myself with other explanations:  Amazon had contacted some marketing agency, giving them the title of books I'd ordered; a computer then picked out a random word to use in a name to capture my attention.  Maybe I'd seen the word, maybe not.  Any chance was better than none.

In the case of the manhole covers, a student of mine had contacted the same or another agency to feed them unique terms which I'd recognize.  While this is more possible within the constraints of the physical universe as we know it, the possibility of marketing by ESP actually seems more probable than Amazon or a colleague in cahoots with some Spam Lord, using dubious marketing tactics requiring a global network of informants to target a single person.

Of course, these thoughts of mind-reading and targeted marketing are just diversions.  I call it coincidence.  See Littlewood's Law or the Baader-Meinhof  Phenomenon, which we've touched on a couple of times and which  are the unspoken understanding behind a lot of our posts.  My coincidences are not "objectively" meaningful, but they are meaningful....the genesis of poetry and, if all the stars are in alignment, a cosmic trigger.  A random peal of laughter precipitating the fall, if ya get me.

Unless of course there is a vast marketing campaign targeting me using a global network of informants and/or mind-reading devices.

Because I am that important, you know.

Take heart!

We've grappled with disembodied hands at great length; kicked about the mystery of Canada's floating feet; taken a look at the removal of eyes; milked the story of amputated breasts and chewed on the puzzle of  mysterious teeth found in a house's walls.  We've dicked about with symbolic castrations until our energy petered out.  We've picked our brains about the Egyptian practice of removing them through the nose.  We've talked the subject of corpses into the ground and raised hell about relics and saints.  Small wonder then that when Gid and I both came across this tale, independently, he signaled it to me and I'd linked to it on Facebook.

During the night this weekend, a relic of St. Laurence O'Toole (1128-1180), a heart housed in a heart-shaped box, was stolen from an iron cage affixed to the wall.

A stolen heart, a literal stolen heart, the relic of a saint no less, cannot but be mentioned here on LoS.

Says the article:  "His heart has [had] been preserved in Christ Church Cathedral since the 13th century and was a major pilgrimage site during the medieval period."

Rev. Dermot Dunne, cathedral dean said:  "It has no economic value but it is a priceless treasure that links our present foundation with its founding father, St. Laurence O'Toole."

He added: "We have a peace candle, and we invite people to light candles during the day ... when staff were on their rounds, they found that it was lit already.  And then in our Trinity chapel - our prayer chapel on the north transept - all the candles were lit there. It's quite confusing."

Well, Dunne don't have much faith in his own relics.  A true believer might pay a small fortune for the miracle-producing church organ.  The lit candles may indicate the thief/thieves were religious men or women, praying for forgiveness as they defaced the church and stole away in the night.

The cathedral has a venerable history and dates from some time after 1028, about the time a Dane named Sitric Silkenbeard (!) made a pilgrimage to Rome.  A lot of other stuff happened after that.

Our man O'Toole, patron saint of actors (not), was honored with a chapel erected in the 13th-century.  All light-heartedness aside, the cathedral has a colorful history worth looking into, but I'll focus bit on the saint.
(Though I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the church also displays the mummified remains of a cat and rat found behind an organ, known by locals as "Tom and Jerry" and mentioned by Joyce in Finnegan's Wake....)

O'Toole was born Lorcán Ua Tuathail into a noble family down in the county Kildare.  O'Toole was the kind of man you don't meet everyday.  In his professional career he played important roles as a diplomat, church reformer and cleric.  Indeed, during a pause in an important series of negotiations, O'Toole was off saying Mass at the Shrine of Thomas Becket in Caterbury when an allegedly deranged fellow with the idea of creating another martyr struck him on the head.  Not one to let history repeat itself with a wooden blow to the top of his head, Ua Tuathail got knocked down, got back up again and finished Mass.

He died of an unrelated illness four year later while on yet another diplomatic mission, in Normandy.

Actor Peter Seamus Lorcan O'Toole, btw, played in 1964's Becket opposite Ricard Burton as Henry II, the man behind Becket's death....

O'Toole was a vegetarian ascetic, fasting every Friday and taking a retreat every Lent for the full 40 days.  Like another man with a famous head wound--John the Baptist--O'Toole wore a hairshirt.  (And here we are nearing Lent, which we've recently discussed, also recently citing a sculpture of JB that pales in comparison to an obscure Black Madonna).  O'Toole was canonized 45 years after his death due to a rapid succession of miracles at his tomb.  His bones were interred separately from his skull, the former disappearing some time duting the Reformation; his heart was brought to Christ Church, where it had stayed until this weekend.

(Biografickal info Wiki sourced)

Does the post-mortem fate of O'Toole's heart reflect the growth of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus?  His execution actually predates the most popular period of this devotion; in O'Toole's time it was a more latent than widespred and its diffusion belongs more properly to the centuries after O'Toole's martyrdom.  Yet it was present in some form in the 10th and 11th centuries.  It's possible that St. Laurence was a devotee of sorts, but I haven't found anyhing linking him to it directly.

Whereas the head is the expressive faculty of the interior life and the windows on the world and into the soul, it is obvious choice for special veneration and unsurprisingly widespread from the earliest days of Christianity.  The martyrdom of John the Baptist was represented by the prophet's head on a plate.  We have already mentioned the cephalaphores in a few other posts.  These are saints whose heads continued to speak after their death and who are especially numerous in France.  We have also seen them connected with the Virgin Martyr genre in Portuguese exemplars as well as Saint Saturnina in northern France.  St. Denis, patron of Paris and arguably the most important saint of early Chrisian France, was a cephalaphore.

This "head worship" seems to have leaked into other domains as well.  The Templars, crushed in the 14th century, were accused of worshipping an idol representing a human head.  The guilloutine has always seemed to me to be something much more than an efficient killing machine.  It exerted a gruesome fascination upon the Parisian crowds and I'm tempted to see in it a reflection of a particular Gaulish psychological preoccupation with the head as an object of veneration.  There are tales from the Revolution of decapitated heads looking with terror at the crowds, mouths moving as if to speak, last vestiges of life.... Secular cephalaphores, a new kind or martyr.

In any event, the Middle Ages are rife with tales wherein relics are bought and sold, fabricated out of thin air, stolen, traded and raided.  An important relic could bring immense wealth and glory to a ctity, stir immense civic pride.  I'm currently reading an anthology entitled Death, Dismemberment, and Memory: Body Politics in Latin America.  Various authors evokes the cult of the saints as a precedent for the struggle over bodies and body parts of national heroes in Latin American politics.  This fascinating series of essays demonstrates the power of relics in our own times.  In a religious sense, that power remains wholly undiminished:  Jesus is found on a Cheeto, the Virgin on a piece of toast.  We've even reported on a dog piss-stain revered as a portrait of Jesus.  Even when the Church is reluctant to name new saints, the people force them upon the church.  Such is the case that unofficial saints have developed wholly outside Church authority:  Santa Hélèna of Toulouse, Gauchito Gil in Argentina, Jesus Malverde in Mexico, Saint Wilgifortis in Flanders.  A relic is powerful magic, a body part even more so.  But whereas reliquaries in the south of France might hold a meager chip of bone, Dublin had an entire organ....a human heart!  Which is actually small potatoes.  Churches in Italy are wont to have entire cadavers on display.  I've seen one Roman chapel where the altars and decorative niches were made entirely of human bones and full skeletons used for a series of decorative memento mori. 

The economic and even genuine spiritual value of relics is obvious to me and I'm not surprised by this theft at all.  Sadly though, the result will be that churches will become locked when not in use, making access more restricted.  A loss of innocence and convenience both for the faithful, the curious and writers such as I. (Fuck the faithful masses of Dublin, this is my blog we're talking about!)  But seriously, I've missed out on a lot of opportunties due to a locked church door.  That these last bastions of trust (the buildings, not the institution) are endangered by thievery is not a shock in our thoroughly debased world, but it is, erm, disheartening. 

Some time soon, we'll do up a bit on heart removal; from a Mexican devotee of the Emperor Iturbide to the Temple of Doom, heart removal has a fun and colorful history....

Sad Feet

We've been tracking the strange saga of shoe-clad feed washing ashore in the Salish Sea (British Columbia) pretty closely.

According the authorities--the mystery's been solved: it's suicides: "Mr Fonseca [an investigator on the case] told the New York Post that most of the victims jumped from a bridge over the Fraser River, which flows into the Pacific Ocean at Vancouver [..] Mr Fonseca said: ‘It’s very explainable. The unusual nature of this is that the feet were found in a very short period of time.’"

I'm not sure exactly which bridge Mr. Fonseca is referring to--perhaps the Skybridge?

Skybridge over the Frazier River in Canada

There do seem to certain structures that are suicide magnets, like the Golden Gate Bridge and Toronto's Prince Edward Viaduct. (Toronto's Prince Edward Viaduct lost its draw after the installation of the Luminous Veil, a barrier stopping would be jumpers.)

It's difficult, quite frankly, for me to write about this because suicide has touched my life too many times. Once I had to wake my aunt up in the middle of the night when the police called us to tell her that her son had killed himself. Over the next several years, both of her other children--my older cousins--killed themselves. That's not the only time I've been with a parent when they heard that their child had committed suicide. And another time I sent a postcard to a friend who was living with his parents, only to find out, minutes after I dropped the postcard in the mailbox, that he had killed himself about a month before.

So I'm keenly aware of the tragedy and horror of these events.

But I do have to say that, to quote Mr. Fonseca, the fact that "the feet were found in a very short period of time" does still seem awfully bizarre to me.

Has anyone explained this element of the mystery?