The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

The following art from China Miéville and accompanying descriptions by writer Helen Oyeyemi and “philosopher prince” Reza Negarestani first came to our attention by an exceedingly circuitous route that started with an anonymous e-mail that linked to a long article on Lambshead’s “secret past” published by an Athens newspaper. A week later, a letter with a Malaysian postmark arrived from someone named only “Incognitum,” who claimed to belong to a secret radical society devoted to change “through extreme re-contextualization and cross-pollination.” The envelope contained a key to decode the article. Two weeks after that development, the editors of this volume had an unpleasant encounter with a masked stranger who shadowed the house for two weeks before leaving a rather less encrypted message on the garage door.

Decoding the article revealed the text for “The Very Shoe” and “The Gallows-horse.” Photographs of the crudely related pictographs on the garage door with the initials “CM” scrawled beside them were sent to the agent of China Miéville, whose sole response was to provide the two images reproduced herein. Failed attempts were made to telephone both Helen Oyeyemi and the Philosopher Army or “Shield Wall” dedicated to preventing Reza Negarestani from being contaminated by the world.

Although these inquiries yielded no direct results, we subsequently received permissions to reprint from the same Malaysian address, which a Google Earth search revealed to be an empty lot in Kuala Lumpur. Thus, while we present this material as “in the spirit” of the cabinet, we cannot verify that Dr. Lambshead ever possessed such a shoe, or such a gallows-horse. As of this writing, there seem few options for obtaining further information. (It was a condition of Miéville’s participation in this compilation “and any future project that you may wish to pursue with him until either his demise or your own,” per telephone conversations with his designated “metamorphosis attaché,” that we not question him further on the subject.)

The Very Shoe

As Told to and Compiled by Helen Oyeyemi

Created: circa 1940–1941

Creator: Radim Kasparek (1901–1971) of Bohumil, Moravia

Materials: Silk and canvas, with leather uppers, glass strip (3 cm), pinewood heel. Antenna: galvanized steel. Inner compartment (low-grade balsa wood, cotton lining) and accompanying window (low-grade balsa wood, 10 denier nylon) at the front of the outer sole added at a later date by person/s unknown

Property of: Petra Neumann née Tichy (1970–), legal owner of shoe as per inheritance. Lambshead’s diary notes that “the most curious shoe” arrived in the first post on September 28, 1995, in a box postmarked Lausanne, accompanied by a note dated “October 1990”: “I trust you, Lambshead—inasmuch as I can be bothered to trust anybody. We are forbidden to bring material possessions to the monastery, so I leave this in your hands. Its value is beyond measure to me. It is my great-aunt’s shoe—the other one is lost, but the story in the family is that when Ludmila first saw the pair she was absolutely thrilled, clasped her hands together, and said in her best English: ‘They’re just too very very!’ So I call it ‘the Very Shoe.’ This thing is a witness, my friend. It stands by and it does not change its story. Extend the antenna and listen. Then tell me: am I mad, or are there still miracles in the world?” It can be seen that the doctor underlined the words “the monastery” and surrounded them with red exclamation marks, and indeed, the location and affiliation of this “monastery” Neumann mentions is unknown; subsequently, so are Neumann’s current whereabouts. The only other extant note from Neumann to Lambshead mentioning this institution is found among his papers—Neumann describes “the monastery” as “a place you go to learn conversation with stones, to find out what it is stones know.”

Accession number: L1990.43

The story of this shoe is quite a plain one, I’m afraid—the shoe has no ethnographic significance, nor does it have anything as exciting as a curse or a long-standing feud associated with it. It was made by a man who was not exactly poor, but close enough. He was awkward-looking, and he stammered because he was shy, and he always said the wrong thing to women, so they didn’t like him. He believed that he was born to loneliness. He ended up alone, so maybe he was. There was a William Blake poem that he muttered to himself as he worked, joining soles and heels:

Man was made for joy and woe;

And when this we rightly know

Through the world we safely go . . .

(there’s more but it is a long poem)

. . . Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night