On a recent program, NPR’s The Story, Yolette Etienne described finding her mother dead in the family’s garden after the Haitian earthquake. An Oxfam worker, she was one of the better off of Haiti’s citizens, though, I would guess, not wealthy by American standards. Nevertheless, her house had been in a neighborhood of walled-in gardens–the gardens of those who were better off than most. The earthquake brought down the walls, and then there was no longer a way to tell who had money and who didn’t.

There was ruin everywhere—but no more walls.

I don’t want to ascribe any particular meaning to the story—I have no rant to make about Romney’s millions or the awful gap between rich and poor. I don’t want to talk about God’s will for the wealthy or the impoverished, or how difficult it’s going to be for Romney to get through the eye of the New Testament needle.

It’s just that the story sheds light on wealth and walls. Spend some time with it. You may not feel better about the injustices that riddle our world, but your connection with the rest of humanity will be revitalized.

This blurring of the lines between celebrities and the rest of us has made many people famous for at least Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes.

Madame Tussaud was only one of the many people who made it happen. P.T. Barnum was another; Wild Bill Hickok and his Wild West show helped the process along. Technology was the most important influence through photographs, movies, television and, now, the social media. The effigies grow in number and so do the visitors, fans posing with their favorite famous people: arm-in-arm, kissing…. there’s a picture on-line of a woman acting out the part of Monica Lewinsky with a wax Bill Clinton.

In wax museums visitors try to figure out who’s alive and who’s dead.

The uncanniness of wax effigies is almost certainly about their lifelessness. The living blink, swallow and breathe. The effigies, on the other hand, are only about appearance. But it doesn’t even matter whether or not they represent someone living. The dead will do. The celebrity worshipper may be just as happy to get chummy with Einstein, Gandhi or Marilyn Monroe as with Britney Spears. The deification of Monroe and Elvis Presley is as ongoing as ever it was for George Washington. Whether celebrities are dead or alive isn’t that important to our need to associate ourselves with them.

They don’t even have to be real. Shrek is at Madame Tussaud’s.

Recent surveys reveal how young people feel about the subject of themselves and fame. American teenage girls responded that if they could press a button and become one of the following—smarter, stronger, more beautiful, or famous—they would choose the last. In another survey of “American students,” the choice was among “the CEO of a Fortune 500 company,” “president of Harvard/Yale,” “a Navy Seal” “a U.S. senator”, and “an assistant to a celebrity.”  The celebrity post won hands-down.

Perhaps it’s true, as Thomas de Zengotita suggests in his book Mediated, that “In this society, if you’re not famous, there is a certain very real sense in which you don’t exist.?”

The wax statue of the creator of Madame Tussaud's waxworks, Madame Tussaud herself in the museum. Photo by Rudolph Afurtdo. Creative Commons.

A decade ago, a New York Assemblyman tried to have Arafat removed from Madame Tussaud’s in New York City. He threatened to cancel a Republican fundraiser at the wax museum if the Palestinian leader wasn’t removed.
It’s not just amazing that wax museums are at least as popular as ever, but that they’re taken as seriously. Long lines formed in Washington, D.C. when Michelle Obama’s figure was unveiled. At Madame Tussaud’s in Berlin, a visitor beheaded Hitler. The costliest figure to maintain at New York City’s Tussaud’s was Brad Pitt because of the lipstick marks on his lovely waxen features.

Brad Pitt at Tussaud's

In its beginnings and still today, Madame Tussaud’s keeps up with the latest celebrities, inducting them at a rapid pace (and, I presume, although I haven’t seen evidence of it,disposing of a large number at the same rapid clip). The gestation period for each celebrity is six months and the process is lengthy and complex. As many as 250 measurements are made. Molds are taken from clay busts produced by sculptors who depend on the measurements and photographs of the subject, not real heads as in the distant past. Hot wax is poured into the molds and left to cool. When the heads are ready, hair, eyelashes, whiskers and eyebrows are plugged in, one strand at a time, a process that can take as long as five weeks. In Madame Tussaud’s earliest pieces, real teeth from the streets of Paris, were used, but today they’re made of porcelain or dental acrylic. Tussaud’s asks celebrities to donate the clothes they want their figure to be wearing. The cost to produce a figure can be as high as $300,000.
Presumably, Madame Tussaud’s is still the last word on who is and who is not a celebrity. In  2002, the wax works in London refused to include the Conservative Party leader because he was too dull. “We want figure who will inspire strong emotions and provoke strong reactions. In our view, Mr. Duncan Smith, whom most people have never heard of, is unlikely to achieve either of these feats. Ever.” There was no report of Mr. Smith’s reaction. I wonder if  he was mortified.
In Los Angeles, Tussaud’s competition with the rival Hollywood Wax Museum recently took on new life when Tussaud’s set up an exhibit in its lobby, juxtaposing its celebrity effigies with photos of the Hollywood Museum’s, beginning with Angela Jolie. It’s figures were much more lifelike, argued Tussaud’s. Fascinating that a photo of the Hollywood Museum’s Jolie stood in for the effigy. Photographs are like effigies in that they presume to be copies of what is real. In the last century, photographers would sometimes use Tussaud’s tableaus, pretending they were copies of the real event. (In fact, a photograph of the pope’s effigy was acclaimed as more true to life than the actual pope in the real setting.) The waxworks then had a policy that forbade visitors from taking photographs inside the Museum in order to keep nefarious reporters from representing them as snapshots of the real people.

Today, the Museum depends on the camera. That’s what people come to do. Not just to mingle with the famous (or rather, their facsimiles), but to record themselves in their company.

But something else is happening and that’s what makes this subject interesting. There is something oddly uncomfortable about a wax museum that can be summed up in the following remarks by a young employee at the London museum. He reported that he was often asked by visitors,

“What is it like at night?” Or my favourite. “How do you DARE to be there all alone?”I sometimes wonder if people enjoy them (the wax figures) because of the possibility of rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous, or because of the tiny little thrill of coming into a room and not knowing who is alive and who is not.

As William Poundstone writes in“The Battle of the Wax Museums,”

….the truly interesting thing about wax museums is how creepy they are. This is better described by a third-millenium coinage: the “uncanny valley.” That’s the notion that not-quite-perfect simulacra of the human form create a sense of weirdness or revulsion. .. Somewhere between the humanoid and the human, things get weird. These imperfect likenesses fall into a dip in the curve, and are much less accepted than less-perfect ones. ….

The uncanny valley explains why there are so many horror movies about evil dolls, clowns, ventriloquist’s dummies, wax museums, zombies, and cyborgs. …”
The phenomenon of the uncanny valley was observed in connection with the creation of robots. At a certain point, when the robot is very much like a human but not like one really, witnesses were seized with revulsion.

What is even more curious is how much of the thinking that’s evolved to explain the uncanny valley has to do with death.

I can’t get quite beyond this point yet, and perhaps I won’t. Any one with experience of the uncanny valley out there? I intend to give it at least one more try in these posts. Maybe more.

Because it is curious, isn’t it, that Madame Tussaud’s wax museum began in death and continues, in this later age, to be “mired” in it. I think, because automatons,wax effigies and celebrities are all related to human identity in a way that is profoundly disturbing. Our world begins to wobble when we think too hard about them.

Jean Paul Marat, stabbed to death in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday, July 13, 1793. A wax model made immediately after his death.

According to her grandson, John Theodore Tussaud, in The Romance of Madame Tussaud’s, when the Revolutionary leader, Marat, was killed in his bathtub, Marie Tussaud was taken immediately to the scene of the crime and made to model his head (take a cast of his face).

He was still warm, and his bleedy body and the cadaverous aspect of his almost diabolical features presented a picture replete with horror, and Madame Tussaud performed her task under the influence of the most painful emotions.

 
The tableau that was presented in Paris of Marat in his bathtub is similar to the one that’s the subject of the famous painting by Jacque Louis David. The artist had been a close friend of the dead man. Where Tussaud saw “diabolical features,” David saw the features of a man he loved and admired. The representation of the murder of each is in large part the result of their relationship to the man and the French Revolution. David’s painting was lauded as the great historical painting it is. Tussaud’s depiction, on the other hand, was all about the death of a body—its abruptness, its gruesomeness.

Death of Marat by Jacques Louis David

Of course, David was an artist and Madame Tussaud was a waxworker. Apparently, Curtius’s museum wasn’t the only wax museum that featured the murder of Marat by Charlotte Corday. Some thinkers of the time worried that the attraction to violent and tragic scenes was unhealthy, that it would not lead to a society of people who could empathize with one another, but one that was brutalized and disconnected.

Although Tussaud claims to have provided the model for David’s painting, (very likely the reverse was true), the two images represent entirely different viewing experiences. In David’s painting the powerful immediacy of the scene was used to transcend the limits of death, to bring Marat back ‘tout entier….’  The waxworks tableau to be found at Curtius’s Salon, by contrast, sought to make Marat’s assassination palpable for the viewer, not to transcend but rather to capture death.

Palpable wounds were, by contrast, what Tussaud specialized in. The attraction of her waxworks depended on a kind of forensic gaze. David deploys a familiar aesthetics of martyrdom where the violated body is intended to move the viewer to the contemplation of immaterial values. Madame Tussaud’s Adjoining Room [later the Chamber of Horrors] instead concentrated on bringing death itself close, in all its abject details. Marie-Helene Huet notes, “the perversion inherent in Madame Tussaud’s peculiar art is that this art imitates death and that the product of this imitation of death is an imitation of life…In the Chamber of the Dead, the illusion of life never brings the dead back to life. On the contrary, one could say of Madame Tussaud that she brings the dead back to death.

- A Proximate Violence: Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors by Lela Graybill

The wax worker tried to copy his or her subject as nearly as possible, (whether that subject was alive or dead). The artist does more than that—art never intends to just imitate. Madame Tussaud’s has always been dedicated to getting as close to what is immediately and physically real as possible. In the beginning many of  Tussaud’s and Curtius’s figures were actually constructed from wax molds made by taking a cast the subject’s face. “From life” is very close to the real person!

Curtius and his protegé had two impulses in the creation of their wax museums: to entertain and to witness to history.

A few years after her arrival in Great Britain, Marie Tussaud searched for, found and bought parts of the guillotine. Later, she heard about and bought the carriage Napoleon rode in when he went to conquer Russia, and when he turned around and was defeated at Waterloo. John Theodore Tussaud, describes the vehicle in great detail, taking two chapters to marvel at the carriage and its contents and the great man’s past closeness to them. For many years, the carriage was displayed (along with its waxen driver) and visitors were allowed to sit inside and touch the things that had once been Napoleon’s. When some of them began taking bits of the vehicle away for mementos, a red ribbon was strung around it and visitors were no longer allowed to touch it.

Napoleon's carriage at Tussaud's

It’s amusing to read that in Curtius’s museum in Paris, rich visitors were allowed to wander around an exhibit of the royal family at supper, touching the models, while the less well-off stood in a roped-off area in the rear where they could pass the time trying to guess which of the figures below was real.
Today, if I read the situation right, visitors of every income level are allowed to fraternize with waxen celebrities. (I doubt that many of them are interested in Napoleon’s carriage, which I’m certain is  still roped off!) They come to stand next to them, to pretend that the silent figures who look so very alive but who never move, are not only the real thing, but friends, intimates even. They have their pictures taken with celebrity actors and dictators. It’s not exactly fifteen minutes of fame, but it feels close.

More next time.

Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Jacques Rene Hebert, Fouquier Tinville, Carrier

The image was grotesque: Madame Tussaud searching among the guillotined heads of her royalist  friends in the Madelaine Cemetery in Paris, taking measurements to make death masks and wax copies: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Marat, Robespierres….
I was immediately enthralled: the beginnings of the modern-day cult of the celebrity were mired in blood. That was four or five days ago. I haven’t been able to let go of the subject since.

I guess I’ve always been fascinated by the mystery of personal identity or self-consciousness in all its forms. The cult of celebrity, our infatuation with the celebrated other, has always engaged my imagination, although I’ve never given much thought to wax copies of the famous and infamous before now.

Celebrating the 250th birthday of its founder this year, Madame Tussaud’s waxworks is a billion dollar global business with branches in London, Amsterdam, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Las Vegas, Shanghai, Berlin, Washington D.C., New York City and Hollywood. Wax effigies have not only survived in a culture that celebrates the famous in photos, movies and television, as well as in print media and on the Internet, but grown in popularity.  What is it about these wax dummies that makes them important to us?

Madame Marie Tussaud (born Marie Grosholtz) learned to make wax copies of people from Philippe Curtius, her mother’s employer and her adopted uncle. A doctor, he first did anatomical figures for his medical practice. They were so lifelike that his reputation grew and he gradually turned from the medical profession to entertainment.  When his expertise in the art took him to late 18th century Paris, Marie and her mother went with him. She made her first wax figure—Jean Jacques Rousseau—at the age of 17, and followed that with Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. Not long after, she was employed to teach the art of wax modeling to Louis XVI’s sister, Elizabeth. By the time of the French Revolution, she was so identified with royalty, she was arrested (along with Josephine de Beauharnais, who later became the mistress, and then wife of Napoleon Bonaparte). It is said that the two women’s heads were even shaved in preparation for beheading. But Curtius, who had important friends, was able to save his neice and protegé.

It’s not important whether she was employed to make death masks of the victims of the guillotine before or after that experience. There’s every reason to think that she had no choice as to whether she should do it or not. So, in her grandson’s memoirs of the famous lady, she describes the table manners of Robespierre at dinner, and not long after examines and measures his head for her waxworks. Some of her heads were displayed on spikes as revolutionary flags and paraded through the streets of Paris.
In 1794, Phillipe Curtius died and Madame Tussaud inherited the waxworks. The following year she married an engineer named Tussaud and, in the course of what was apparently a unhappy union, had two sons. Five years later, when it became possible to leave France, she crossed the channel to London, taking with her many of her waxworks. She toured with her show for many years, finally establishing a permanent museum in London’s Baker Street in 1835.

Madame Tussaud was quite a business woman. She recognized that the world was constantly producing more celebrities and that her show must keep up to date. She knew that the more important the people, the more dramatic their stories, the more exciting their personalities, the better the show. People would come to stand in awe of Napoleon in one of his original carriages (she had collected several significant artifacts from the Revolution, including a guillotine). The waxwork wasn’t like other paintings or figures representing someone well-known. The measurements were taken directly from real people.  They had made actual impressions on the wax—or so it seemed.  The likeness was more than just a likeness.

Madame Tussaud also knew that her guillotined figures made an even greater impression. Like the mobs who’d cheered the executioners on, the people who came to see Marie Antoinette’s head on a spike or Marat lying bleeding in his bathtub, relished the grimness and gore, and found a thrill in being late witnesses to violent death.
Because I’m obsessed with Marie Tussaud, her wax museum, and her Chamber of Horrors, my readers will have to bear with me. There will be more to come.

Madame Tussaud at age 42

I’ve been trying to think of something to write about Christmas that hasn’t been written many times before. I come up with Santa Claus’ boot print, Christmas recitations at church,  uncomfortable family dinners, orange candies…. but I really don’t have any compelling stories to tell. What I love most is the wonderful music. As I write this I’m listening to wall-to-wall Bach on New York City’s WKCR. For some reason that’s not entirely clear, Christmas is a celebration of the human voice. Choirs and choruses reveal themselves.

I think I’ve understood for some years what Christmas is about. The intersection of the sacred and the secular, the revelation of— depending on the form your understanding of the world takes—the Divine, the Light, the Truth, the son of God, the essential nothingness at the heart of the universe…..  the conflation of love, the weak and the meek, the human, the Word, with whatever it is that’s at the heart of all that is and is not.

A little like this:

A confusion of black spruce
and smoking moonbeams.
Here’s the cottage lying low
and not a sign o flife.

Till the morning dew murmurs
and an old man opens
—with a shaky hand—his window
and lets out an owl.

- Tomas Transtromer (see the October 31, 2011 New Yorker in a review of Transtromer’s work  by Dan Chiasson)

Every once in a while someone will come along who says it all so that I almost understand it. I hope that happens for you, whoever you are, this Christmas.

PBS ran the San Francisco Ballet’s production of  “The Little Mermaid” the other night. It was beautiful, and deeply, deeply sad. The Disney movie has Andersen’s mermaid making the transfer from fish to woman with little difficulty, but this mermaid suffers terribly. In one of the most affective performances I’ve ever seen, the dancer Yuan Yuan Tan wakes up with legs and feet, her wonderful fish tail gone. Because she’s in love with an earthling Prince, she wants legs and feet, and she counts her toes and fingers with glee, but she doesn’t know what to do with her new limbs and they dangle and tangle up with one another as, fish at heart, she tries to move through air as she had through water. It doesn’t translate.

The Mermaid and the Prince by Edmund Dulac, 1911

I’ve been thinking about it a lot—life’s different forms—like the snail I talked about in a recent post, moving without sight and sound, finding its way through life with touch, taste and smell. On a less drastic level, I’ve been reading about color-blindness, especially when it’s extreme. There are people who can see only in black and white. The wonderful Oliver Sacks tells of a painter who, mid-career, loses his ability to see color. After a period of despair and readjustment, he begins to paint in black and white. If it were possible to have his color vision restored, he wouldn’t want it. “The world he perceives is—in Sacks words, too “coherent and complete”—to want any other. To see in black and white is to see texture where you missed it before, to trace the shapes of things where you never did, to appreciate the intersection of one thing with another.

Unlike the Mermaid, the painter makes the transition, and that despite the physical disabilities the truly colorblind can face in their daily lives.

I’ll bet Matisse wouldn’t have have made the same transition. Color was essential to his being.

I know that fishiness, the life of the snail, and color vision are very different, but the painful clumsiness of the Mermaid made me think about each of us and how different we are. In The Little Mermaid, the Poet, Hans Christian Anderson, is also in love with the yellow-haired Prince. The Poet is another aspect of the Mermaid, and her creator. He has as much trouble as she does swimming through air, relating to people, achieving love.

The Poet and the Mermaid are not unlike elderly people who used to run and flex muscle, wiggle and flirt, and move from one place to another effortlessly and with style, who suddenly catch a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, or wake up with stiff joints. Things have changed. They don’t look or move the way they did. Nothing is what it was. Like the Mermaid, they’re not used to their bodies. They’ve become disjointed and turned all akimbo.

Which reminds me of a recent TV interview with Justin Hines, the wheelchair-bound Canadian singer who is seriously disabled with a rare disease called Larsen’s syndrome. When he was five or six years old, Hines recalls, he asked his mother what it felt like to walk. Taken aback, she came up with as perfect an answer as possible. She put each of his feet on her own, and holding him up, walked with him. Walking, it turned out, wasn’t at all what it was cracked up to be, remembers Hines.  How much better to roll around on four wheels.

I was watching someone on television sing Salomé’s last aria in Strauss’s Salomé. I don’t remember who, I don’t remember where the concert was, or why. Only one thing stayed with me. She sang to the lopped-off head of John the Baptist “If you had looked at me, you would have loved me.” And I wondered, “Is that true? Would he have loved her if he’d really looked at her?”

I think the opera is based on the play by Oscar Wilde, and I suppose the line is his.

I don’t know whether John could have loved a woman whose lust for his attention was so overwhelming, she danced naked for his head, and made love to her prize on its tray. But I do think that love is impossible if there is no seeing. Why didn’t he see her? He had eyes. There was light. He was the Son of God’s prophet. Of all people, surely he would be able to see her. Of course, our vision is a cultural and social construct; nothing and no one we see comes to us pure—as they are. We can guess that he was so wrapped up in his mission that, as sensual as she was, he couldn’t see poor, wicked Salomé.

At a performance of Handel’s “Messiah” last week—at the annual concert of the Northeast Kingdom’s very excellent Northsong choral ensemble—I found myself upended as I listened to the bass aria, “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.” I had never thought before how amazing this must have sounded when it was first set to music, and even more amazing when the words were first written down or just read aloud. People knew then what true darkness was. There was no bulb to switch on. Just a few oil lamps, I guess. The world was in blackness for much of every day. The figure of light must have been so striking, so much more incredible than it is today. Anyone who has spent any time at all where there is no light will know what I’m trying to say. A cloudy, moonless night in the country. You can’t see anything.

Light is vital. Without light, we couldn’t see. Could we love? Without light there’s only cold and darkness. Without light there would be nothing manufactured. Space would be an utter mystery, and we would be lost in it.

But the snail, the subject of my last post, sees only the vaguest shadowy light, so dim it can’t be relied on for anything. Nothing to guide it, to help it in its day-to-day hunt for food and shelter. The snail can’t even hear. It depends entirely on the senses of smell, taste and touch. Try to imagine that! Imagine a life where your primary sense is smell, and head out to find the source of the smell. You touch something squirmy and cool: ah, it feels like dinner. Take a bite. Yes, that’s what it is. But you never see it. Because in your life there is no light. And you’ll never hear “The people have seen a great light” because, while it’s true that  you can just barely see, you can’t hear at all.

Is it possible that smell, touch or taste is equivalent to light in the world of the snail? You see, I hope, that it’s a hard notion to grasp.

“If you had looked at me, you would have loved me.”
“If you had smelled me, you would have loved me.”
“If you had touched me, you would have loved me.”
“ If you had tasted me, you would have loved me.”

Let there be light and there was light and ….

The snail and Helen Keller.

Light is a form of energy, the source of all we see and much that we can’t. God is light. Truth is light. And if we couldn’t see? If we only smelled, or touched, or tasted? Would God be God? Would anything be like it is, or seems to be?

We were in the bookstore in a neighboring town, a small shop, but at the center of its community, the kind of place where you’d find the book I found. The title caught my imagination: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.

Fifteen years ago Elizabeth Tova Bailey became ill on a trip to Europe. She was only 34. It rendered her paralyzed and helpless for months,sometimes for years at a time.

The book is about her relationship to a snail, her snail as it turned out. She was staying in a room alone, only able to move minimally, with very occasional visits from friends and a caretaker who came and went. A friend discovered the snail in the woods near where she was staying and brought it to her where it lived for a while in a vase of violets on the table next to her bed – and then in a terrarium. The snail’s small life became a comfort to her because her life had become so small. She learned from the little mollusc that the life that seems most inconsequential and most limited is still a marvel.

This little book about a snail allowed me to imagine a reality very different from my own, one where everything moves slowly, quietly, impossibly. Life doesn’t look quite like it did before I read it. I came away with a deep respect for the snail and the author.

I walked into The Turquoise Door in Austin, Texas and found Death singing, playing cards, feasting on tamales and papayas, and riding bicycles. It was moving in procession down the length of counters and across tables. I could almost hear the percussion of its bones. Its many moods could not be seen in its bony faces: skulls are less malleable even than botoxed flesh. They can neither smile or frown. But oh, the color–the liveliness of it all.

The Turquoise Door was given over to the Day of the Dead, but it wasn’t just for a day, it was a time and place where saints, demons, and human beings–living, dead–were joined in perpetual celebration of each other. Some of the figures could have filled a coffee table; others were as small as the charms for a bracelet. Clay, paper maiche, ceramic, wood–they were playing instruments–violins, concertinas, pianos, trumpets and saxophones. They were dipping and turning in dance. They were piling up marigolds. On the walls were ceremonial masks,  their empty eyes staring at the sights below.

 
There were trees of life with the Virgin Mary and apple trees at their centers, but in one the skeleton in his snappy black uniform replaced them.. Death at the heart of life.

 
I don’t know much about the Day of the Dead. I know even less about Death itself. I do know that The Turquoise Door made me laugh, and it’s not very often that Death does that.