The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

1. “It has been suggested that mimicry such as that of a chameleon is an impulse for dissolving back to the environment from which the individual was once relatively segregated; it is a force that is temporarily lent to the individual entity by nature. In using mimicry, the individual unconsciously utilizes the impulse for dissolution (or death) in order to gain some kind of profit (surviving, preying, or living in harmony with something else). But in reality, in using mimicry, the individual exercises the indifference of its environment to meaningful change and intention, that nature does not have any interest or motive to create meaningful differences, and that even in its most cunning and meaningful acts, the individual affirms the dissolution whereby all differences (including its own) and meanings are eradicated. The semantic mimicry that the gallows-horse undertakes is, in the same vein, neither a tendency to return to a meaningful semantic environment nor a meaningful yet cryptic act in itself. Instead, it is an act that reveals the fragile construction of meaning as the aftereffect of a compulsion to return to a meaningless abyss that precedes all patterns, signs, and signifiers. The gallows-horse communicates a meaning by mimicking its sentential environment, and in doing so, it demonstrates how meaning is the result of mimicry, which is, in fact, a compulsion to flatten all semantic differences and return once again to the meaningless abyss that lingers behind the words horse and gallows, as well as any other word, sign, idea, or image.” (Richard Graansvort, From Cryptography to Neurolinguistic Mimicry in Thackery T. Lambshead’s Memoirs, London: Samuel Buscard Institute, 2009)

2. Shortly after the death of Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead and the publication of a number of his memoirs, the pseudonymous Pravda Online columnist Novena Brines published an exposé on the life of the British scientist. According to Brines, Lambshead was an overseas coordinating officer of MI6, whose scientific journeys and seemingly scandalous Communist sympathies were only shields to protect his true identity. Among the documents and sources that Brines cites as evidences and clues, are Lambshead’s memoirs. Brines particularly focuses on the name “gallows-horse.” She considers gallows-horse as a codename or what she calls an operation-marker. Brines argues that in the majority of cases, the name “gallows-horse” marks an imminent launch of an operation. In her exposé, Brines cites as an example the note “January 10, 1936: The sky is clear and the gallows-horse reigns; canaries sing from crogdaene.” She explains that the note is dated one day before the British MI6 officers departed from Croydon Airport toward the Canary Islands in order to move and protect General Francisco Franco for the nationalist military coup that began with the code “Over all of Spain, the sky is clear” and ignited the Spanish Civil War. Brines, however, fails to provide any more convincing examples or concrete documents and mostly resorts to rumors to the extent that, in a public apology, Pravda’s editor in chief called Brine’s speculation “a wild conspiracy theory more fitting for an American gossip column than Pravda.”

Further Oddities

Further Oddities

Through the catalyst of a generous grant from the Institute for Further Study, additional research into Lambshead’s cabinet was undertaken expressly for this volume. Each item selected has been the subject of intense debate by Lambsheadeans and Lambsheadologists for years, while Lambshead’s own attachment to these items varied from indifference to obsession.

For example, although Lambshead took it upon himself to document (admittedly, in a sardonic mood) the provenance of the Sir Locust armor, it was found upon his death in his clothes closet—wearing lingerie and a sunflower hat, with an Oxford jacket draped over it. One armhole had been turned upward and blocked off with an ashtray that overflowed with Punch cigar stubs. The Thing in the Jar, on the other hand, as chronicled by Michael Cisco, seemed to inspire not just a flurry of speculation as to its origins, but also a pervasive emotion of profound regret, along with bald-faced fictions of a sort not displayed by Lambshead elsewhere in his long recorded history. Items like the two art pieces, The Singing Fish and Taking the Rats to Riga, Lambshead kept in a small locked room, along with a scandalous Chagall and a Picasso titled Quarantine for the Infected. The two times Lambshead possessed The Book of Categories, it also resided therein. The room could only be opened using the Castleblakeney key, which tended to discourage idle curiosity.