I Am The Fly Lee Triming
Essay for Debra Swann, Curiosity Shop, Coleman Project Space
In modern Hebrew, the word "golem" can be used to mean "fool", "silly", "stupid", "clueless" or "dumb". Its literal meaning is "cocoon". Etymologically, it appears to derive from the word "gelem", meaning "raw material."
Gaston Bachelard was a postmaster in Bar-Sur-Aube before rising to prominence as a philosopher and member of the French Academy. Though most often recognised in the English-speaking world for his work on reverie and the creative imagination, he was also deeply concerned with the philosophy of science, and argued that the accumulation of new scientific knowledge can lead to a fundamental reformulation of reality, just as preexisting formulations of reality imposed on the natural world can predispose the observer to entertain certain hypotheses but not others.
Take a roll of parcel tape, and one of clear sellotape. Take also a quantity of bin liners, and as numerous an assortment of spools of domestic cotton thread as may be thought prudent for the operation in hand. Take jam jars also, and sheets of waxed paper in equal number to these. Take substantial lengths of wire, and an assortment of decorative glass beads whose eyelets can happily accommodate the girth of that wire which you have seen fit to select for your task. Ensure that this wire is of a goodly and resilient substance; it needs not only to attract, but also to withstand the thrashing and most insistent struggling of that about which it will eventually draw closed.
"I am the fly / I am the fly / I am the fly / I am the fly / fly in the / fly in the / ointment."
- "I Am The Fly", Wire.
You will need darkness also. The unlit places of the kitchen cupboard, bathroom cabinet, box room, built-in wardrobe, meat safe, tool shed or two-car garage are all more than adequate to requirements. For things will need to gestate; to bake in the secret places of the home until the first stirrings of the life you have willed into them can take root and begin to wriggle about in the gummy, synthetic hearts of their previously harmless and unremarkable fabric. Be not disheartened by these, the unassuming and banal foundations for your glorious endeavours: for there is indeed a grand tradition of scientific breakthrough in the home, from Archimedes in his bath to Jeff Goldblum teleporting heroically betwixt quadrants of his Manhattan-style loft apartment. Dr Henry Jekyll, Victor von Frankenstein - take these dedicated homebodies as your exemplars as you wind your cocoons of tape, your glittering nooses and expectant, fragile carapaces; knowing that these humble vessels too are ripe, if not even now pregnant with the capacity to shock and confound the minds of those more conventional thinkers who see in a roll of adhesive tape something good only for the most menial of domestic tasks, blinded as they are by convention to the sparkling mysteries that you detect behind its deceptive and familiar surface.
"Yes, I am the fly / I am the fly / I am the fly / I am the fly / fly in the / fly in the / ointment!"
- Ibid.
"Hobbyist" - what a word. Victorian men with big beards twiddling around with Bunsen burners like sixth formers and incidentally inventing time machines. While Muggins upstairs is buried in housework; or, in more genteel households, a little light needlecraft or a tiresome Sunday watercolour class. That's what the books and films would have you believe; diaphanous ladies flitting about at the edges of the frame with heads as empty as cellophane bubbles. No inventors of time machines we, surely; no dabblers in the great unknowns (we learnt our lesson well, it seems, from all the times our curiosity got us burnt at the stake.) No place in the Gothic romance for Maria Mitchell, who, seeing as no university in the early 19th century would accept a female student, taught herself astronomy in the library where she worked. She discovered a comet in 1847, and was awarded a gold medal by the King of Denmark. In 1874 she became the first person to successfully photograph the surface of the sun. (None of her recipes for jam, however, seem to have been recorded.)
What you see vs. what you get. What someone/thing makes vs. what is left behind in the process. Genetic memories, which, if we have them, sit forgotten in our cells like crumbs at the bottom of a draw. What has a hollow chrysalis become: a marker for the presence of something now elsewhere hidden, or a shell waiting impassively for the ghost set to reanimate it? Rolls of tape lurk forgotten under sinks, coiled up with candles and scissors, with spiders crawling over them when no one is looking. And most of the time, no one is. When I was at Infant School we used to sometimes do a play about toys coming to life at night. Then later, when I went to bed, I'd lay awake wondering what was happening in the dark rooms, in cupboards and drawers that I couldn't see: the secret lives of spoons and knives and hammers and string.
In the 16th century, Alchemists made homunculi by putrefying semen in the uterus of a dead horse. In the fifties, B-Movie monsters could be conjured using everything from lobster silhouettes and rubber tree stumps to college football teams under shaggy carpets and dogs in wigs. The holiest of Rabbis have been reported to create golems from nothing more than clay, water and dust moulded into human form and inscribed with the name of God. Things lurk in the dullest and unlikeliest of materials. Make no mistake. You just have to know how to wake them up.
Lee Triming 2006