On Numinous Objects and Their Manufacture

(Part One of a Potentially Endless Work)


By Peter Blegvad (Amateur)



footnotes

1. Daemon - the animating spirit of a place or thing. Cf. the painter, Giorgio de Chrico's dictat: "One must discover the daemon in everything."

2. Numinous - invested with power or spirit.

3. Guy Davenport: "...science and poetry from the Renaissance forward have been trying to discover what is alive and what isn't. In science the discovery spanned three centuries, from Gassendi to Niels Bohr, and the answer is that everything is alive." Davenport also quotes Einstein: "...every clod of earth, every feather, every speck of dust is a prodigious reservoir of entrapped energy." (from _Olson,_ in _The Geography of the Imagination_)

4. Cf. Leonora Carrington: "The explosion... had momentarily dispersed the powers that always gathered around the Cup in enclosed areas. This is a magic law and true for nearly all charged objects." (from _The Hearing Trumpet_)

5. Cf. Wilhelm Reich and his "accumulators" and "boosters" (of "orgone energy").

6. One reason the list of materials is potentially endless is that science keeps inventing new, potentially numinous, matter. Dr. Cyril Drake, for example, "accidentally made a glass that dissoved in water." "Without silicon, using phosphorous, calcium and sodium oxides", the ingredients in Dr. Drake's soluble glass can be adjusted to make it dissolve as swiftly or as slowly as required, "from a few minutes up to ten years."

7. House not picture in the Second Morphological Table.

8. James Joyce, describing the "epiphany" of an object.

















































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that was the only way I could figure out how to scroll to the footnotes right!