The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

1.2. The Damascene Moment

The famous Lambshead passage at the start of this entry, from the “Violent Philosophy . . . ,” has been repeatedly parsed and interpreted, according to most hermeneutics going. What had, until the discovery in the Dental Museum attic, been less universally considered was the asterisk that beckoned at that paragraph’s end, to whisper its content from page bottom: “At least once, we should say. And what of the artefact that is born twice? What of such ontological profligacy? Deep understanding seems to slide with appearance, reappearance; now inspiring, now gone.”

The existence of the object in the museum attic was no secret from Lambsheadians from the time of its discovery, but it was not considered a major piece, and was not much studied (even allowing for difficulties of access), until events at the notorious 2005 Conference on Lambshead Studies drew researchers’ attention to it. Auto-argumentative footnotes such as the one quoted here have always commanded the attention of a small subgroup of specialist Lambsheadologists; dissidents among dissidents, the Digressionists, who insisted that these were the keys, bloated with import, master codes, the texts to which they pretended to be adjuncts, messages to be unpicked. Condemned by more traditional textualists as tendentious, they insisted that this particular passage, for example, must refer to an artefact known not merely to have been found and lost again, but to have been discovered twice, unique and different each time.

Determined to humiliate them and destroy the credibility of these avant-garde heretics, the leading scholars of mainstream Lambsheadianism invited Simone Mukhopadhay, the most eloquent of the Digressionists, to a debate with Alan Demont, secretary of Lambshead Studies. As Demont started his careful demolition job, focusing on what he insisted was the lack of deep meaning in the “Twice-born Footnote” above, as it was called, from “The Violent Philosophy of the Archive,” his eight-year-old daughter (who was present at the session, crèche facilities unavailable, and who was drawing a tiger on the back of, and a forest in the margins of a printout of his paper) interrupted him, in front of the audience, to point out that the first letters of the last, oddly syntaxed sentence of that footnote spelled out a message. (She had picked out the relevant letters with crayoned flowers.)

Lambshead, it transpired, was more than a curator of this piece; he was, indeed, unusually active in its creation. From that Rosetta-stone footnote moment, identifying as it did the object of its own attention, it was a relatively short time until, by dint of intense and sometimes destructive rummaging through the doctor’s effects, papers, and above all his diaries, first the identity, then the story of the twice-found object and, to a limited extent, Lambshead’s peripheral and unclear role in its creation, came out. So many mentions of so many objects litter those extraordinarily extensive records that it is often only with such external prods that the distinctions between items of importance, and pretty rocks or banged together bits of wood with which Lambshead was momentarily taken, can be ascertained. These passages had been read many times, but no one had put them together, until that acronym came to light, and the memory of the attic, and the specific anecdote became important.

Here the focus must be on the reconstructed story: the history, prehistory, and two births of the artefact itself, the Pulvadmonitor. Or, in the name given it by Lambshead’s acronym, about the deep understanding that seems to slide with appearance, and so on: the Dust’s Warning.

will you your will?

will it to me.

I will you mine.

—UNKNOWN, “ODE TO EVERYTHING”

2. The First Birth

The professor, though a man of science, was a polymath. He enjoyed the company of, and endeavoured to participate in salons and discussion groups with, artists, writers, poets, and various other representatives of La bohème. One from such a milieu was the literary critic Thomas Thomas. It was to Lambshead that Thomas came in 1952, begging his help, bearing a large box and several books. Lambshead was surprised to see him, as their particular circle had mostly attenuated by the mid-1940s, and it was some years since he and Thomas had been in each other’s company.

After abbreviated pleasantries, Thomas explained his message and presence. He had been put in an awkward position, he explained, by Xanthe Serkis, and seeking Lambshead’s advice. Serkis was a critic, known to the professor, but only very slightly, a good decade previously. When he had met her, she had been working on a book about David Gascoyne and other British surrealists.

“That’s correct,” Thomas told him. “She still is. That’s rather the point.”