Bits for today.

--- One of my favorite French authors, Raymond Queneau, was fascinated by "homemade" science - theories developed outside the purlieus of rationality which unfold with rigorous logic from a set of illogical premises - like Novalis' "blue flowers" - encyclopedic offspring of the night, deviant heliophobes. Queneau worked, briefly, on creating an anthology of visionaries from old pamphlets, police reports, and other disjecta - rather like Foucault's later attempt to find, in the archives, micro-historical deviancies beneath the level of hegemony. Anyway, Queneau would have loved the internet. I just found the Ed Conrad site, which brought to mind, irresistably, some of Queneau's cases. If you've ever wondered if man really was around 300 million years ago, Mr. Conrad is your man.

-- I was reading Richard Holmes Footsteps last night. Holmes is the biographer of Shelley and Coleridge. Footsteps is a collection of biographical essays, expressing Holmes' biographical method - that one literally follows in the footsteps of ones subjects. Being in the footstep is different from pretending to be "in" the subject - which I suppose could be called the Bob Woodward theory of biography, in which we presume the author has bugged his subject's mind, gone through his old underwear, and kept watch beneath his bed. Holmes submits to the evidence that the biographer is always outside the subject, knocking on the door. But much as Dupin, Poe's great detective, recommends that one try to "feel" one's way into the psychology of one's opponent by assuming his postures and facial expressions, Holmes tries to feel his way into his subjects by tracing their physical journeys. Of course, the footsteps aren't literally there - what Shelley actually saw in August, 1823 is long gone news. But there is something still powerful for us in sympathetic magic - Fraser's term, in the Golden Bough, for obtaining some object belonging to the target of the magician's spell in order to effect that spell. It is why we collect autographs and read biographies. And Holmes operates within that mentality.

The collection contains a very pretty essay on Mary Wollstonecraft, and in it Holmes quotes Hazlitt about William Godwin - MW's second husband, and a political radical in the 1790s, although not so radical in the 1820s:
"Is the truth then so variable? Is it one thing at twenty and another at forty? Is it a burning heat in 1793 and below zero in 1814?... Were we fools then, or are we dishonest now? Or was the impulse of the mind less likely to be true and sound when it arose from high thought at wram feeling, than afterwards, when it was warped and debased by the example, the vices, and follies of the world?"

Which is my question of the day.