The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Pulvadmonitor: The Dust’s Warning Researched and Documented by China Miéville

British Dental Association Museum

64 Wimpole Street, London

Xanthe Serkis (British, 1903–1953), Thomas Thomas (British, 1890–1964)

Pulvadmonitor; the Dust’s Warning (c. 1937–1952, 1952–1986)

Glass, wood, brass, leather, wire, mechanisms, dentures, dust

Undocumented (twice)

To be discovered is the task and telos of an artefact. Its historic mission is to be born, midwifed into the light like any other whelp, pulled out of the earth or delivered from a long-forgotten cupboard womb. It dies when it is born, of course: and its post-birth duties in the museum where we trap it are an afterlife in a most literal sense, and as drab, doubtless, as quotidianly dull as the afterlives that await us. It is best to avoid consideration of what it is we commit when we investigate: curation is an unkindness we perpetrate against objects and we must hope their revenge is endlessly deferred. After all, we must do it. To be themselves, all artefact are born once.

—THACKERY T. LAMBSHEAD, “THE VIOLENT PHILOSOPHY OF THE ARCHIVE”

when because it comes and

what may we say among those things

shall not be if we have shame enough for truth

that we were not warned

—UNKNOWN, “ODE TO EVERYTHING”

1. The Second Birth

In 1986, under a brisk new administration, the British Dental Association Museum, until then an institution that had been allowed to tick over in a relatively sedate manner, somewhat insulated from the ravages of visitors, was subjected to a vigorous clearout and cleaning. What, in their later paper, the Trades Union Congress called “this notorious Cleansing Event” was conducted in an atmosphere of laissez-faire vim, blamed by some participants for several breakages and the disappearances of at least four artefacts. Considerably less discussed—meriting only an oblique and en passant mention in Thatcher’s Mops, Cecily Fetchpaw’s otherwise exhaustive book on the subject—is what was uncovered in the museum attic as it was emptied of cardboard boxes, spider corpses, and long-ossified cleaning products.

The agency staff, they later testified, hesitated as they ascended the stepladders at a sound they thought was a gas leak. When, gingerly, their team-leader raised her head through the hatch and scanned the area with her torch, she was shocked initially to realise how much further the unlit room extended. Immediately, she was shocked, and much more violently, again, when the light reached into a low triangular nook below a staircase at the windowless chamber’s rear, onto the heads of a sarcophagus and an antique Anubis, various other items of Egyptiana, and a bell jar containing a head, on the floor, eyes at the level of her eyes. What caused her, it emerged, to stagger on her precarious perch, fall, and break her hip, was when the ash-coloured lips behind the glass moved.

Word spread, of course. A number of staff bypassed the inefficient, jury-rigged security and went to look. This was an age before camera phones, but someone procured the Polaroid used for artefact records, and there exist three bad pictures of inquisitive students of dental surgery and museum workers ranged around the bell jar in what looks like worship. Even such inadequate still images give a sense of the atmosphere at the scene. According to those present, the head, though it did not at any point open its eyes, moved its mouth and bit startlingly white teeth, hard enough that the chattering was audible through the bell-jar glass. Next to it, wired up to it, hissing faintly and clattering like a telegraph machine, was a battery or engine, with gently pulsing gauges.

“We didn’t shine the lights on it too hard,” according to one of the cleaners. “Not too often. It seemed like that might be a bit . . . much for its eyes.” “It definitely wasn’t alive,” according to the Head of Dentures. “No way. Yes, I know it was moving. But it was grey, grey, grey. And dry. Mummified or saponified or something. No, I don’t know how it was moving. Electricity or something. No, I don’t know. I have nothing more to say.”

Even by the indirect light, the extraordinary texture of the head was clear. It moved in small spasms, creasing its dun self in unnatural directions. “Not like a head,” one witness said. Its teeth, gleaming from behind dirt-coloured lips, ceramic-white and vivid, look in the photographs overlaid on the picture like a crude collage, part of a wholly different image with a quite different palate. At seconds when the dials on the little motor twitched, the face might slightly crease its eyes or wince as if in pain, in response or cause, it was impossible to say.

Another unfortunate participant

It was not long until a small team of uniformed men and women arrived and declared the attic out of bounds. They hauled equipment up the ladder and in, and the staff on duty on the floor below grew used to the scuffing sounds of whatever their investigations were. It was two days before anyone from the museum realised that what the visitors wore were not scene-of-crime police overalls, although similar. The women and men who had received the information about the find and were performing their forensics in the attic were not police. (It was, indeed, for exactly such exigencies as this accidental discovery, and not for the spurious reasons set out elsewhere in this volume, that Professor Lambshead kept his extensive network of sleeper agents on retainer at most museums worldwide.) Before any scandal could ensue, Lambshead himself had arrived from his Polish trip and arranged a private meeting with the head of the Dental Museum, in the aftermath of which the police were never called and the cut of the director’s clothes improved.

it is not through pages turning to elements

nor through liminals nor tumbling streets

and there is no etherized sky above us as we

that we walk only rather by this cleanest

steel yet this steel glass this tough clean material

also sheds time’s exhaust

—UNKNOWN, “ODE TO EVERYTHING”

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.”

In a pre-echo of Thomas’s approach to Lambshead, Serkis, who had absented herself from the poetic and critical scene for several months, had recently and aggressively contacted Thomas, demanding to see him. Some months earlier, Serkis had received, she told him, a copy of Gascoyne’s Man’s Life Is This Meat, preceding the 1936 Parton Press edition. She had shown it to him, and he described it to Lambshead: imperfectly printed, the publisher Down-Dandelion Press, its colophon showing a stylised upside-down flower, its roots above the earth, its bloom below. In content, it was largely the same as the later official editions, except for a few differences of punctuation, and, the one substantial difference, a whole extra poem inserted into the text. Its title was “Ode to Everything.”

Serkis had received the book in the post. That she did not remember ordering it did not surprise her overmuch: as a critic of solid though unorthodox reputation, she received a good deal of material unsolicited, most of it from small presses anxious to gain her mention. There was, however, no return address, no covering note, no enclosure of any kind. She could find no details on DownDandelion Press from any of her usual sources, and later and exhaustive searches failed to turn up any more copies of the book. Gascoyne himself, whom she knew though not well, denied any knowledge of the copy or the poem, and seemed mildly amused but not very interested by them.

In truth, Serkis hadn’t felt much different at first, thinking the book some illicit curio, a mischievous thing put together from a proof, leaked to her with, she vaguely assumed, the “Ode . . .” inserted to draw attention—camouflaged by Gascoyne’s minor but real reputation—to another, shyer poet’s work. “She told Thomas,” Lambshead’s journals read, “that she had included a one-line mention of the odd edition in her monograph. Then padded that one line with another. Returned again, to add some few words, on the subject of the ode itself, interpreting it, with a tendentious and provocative heuristic, as if it were, in fact, one of Gascoyne’s, to see what it told us about the rest of his corpus.”

The teleology is clear. Lambshead recounts Thomas’s recollections. “What started as that mention became a paragraph, then a chapter—a chapter devoted to an interloping poem!—then a whole section. Abruptly, it was the subject of her book, still at first, in an increasingly absurd pretence, discussed as if Gascoyne had written it, until the title had been changed to Anon’s Ode. But that was not the end of it, either. Her focus did not stop. Had continued down like the switching and switching of a microscope’s field of focus, probing no longer the whole poem but one section, stanza, on down.”

Thomas had brought a copy of the “Ode to Everything,” the initial stanzas of which read to Lambshead, he tells us, like a rather too-unreconstructed riff on one thing or another, though here and there, a turn of phrase—“this minatory summer,” he mentions; “your felt-silenced castanets”; “the slander that a lizard feels no love”—startled him. (The few snips and stanzas that he reproduces, in passing praise, reproduced again here, are all we have. The poem, indeed the book, the few details available, are untraceable. Nor does the Internet help us, whatever the search string.)

Months of research, she had told Thomas; hundreds of pages of notes; reams of started, interrupted, and restarted chapters—all of which she brought out in sheaves and bundles and laid across his desk to prove her point—and Serkis had been moved to write her monograph entirely on one line: “What does the dust wish to tell us?”

“That’s the question,” she told Thomas. “That’s the only question.”

Thomas, quailing, had gently prodded, offered to read her book, and she had

looked at him with bewildered anger. She swept her papers off his table. Forget the book, she said. The book, she assured him, was no longer the focus of her work. Thomas had understood abruptly that what had been a project of interpretation had become one of lunatic detection. She was not, as he had thought at first, applying her considerable critical skills to the eight-word question: she was, rather, attempting to answer it. What does the dust wish to tell us?

She had opened her box. She had brought out for Thomas a glass dome, its base connected to that mockery of a battery. From the front of the dome jutted a flared tube, and rattling around within the glass, unsecured, were a pair of dentures. The two of them had regarded the collection of equipment for some time, in silence. “It took me three years of physics,” Serkis said, “but I worked out how to build it.”

“I need you to look after it,” Serkis said. “I have a fear.”

“ ‘By this time, old man, as you can imagine,’ Thomas said to me, ‘I had my doubts about poor old Xanthe’s sanity,’ ” Lambshead wrote. “ ‘And where are you going?’ I asked her. Answer, as she left, came there none.” Thomas, aware in vague terms of his friend’s interests and predilections, had immediately decided to bring it to Lambshead. As for Xanthe, neither Thomas, nor Lambshead saw her again.

What would have looked to the nonspecialist like a disconnected pile of rubbish was not something Lambshead, with his considerable experience, would ever dismiss out of hand, of course. For two weeks, he fiddled. He put his ear close to the speaking tube. He tinkered with the battery. When one combination of switches were switched, he records, he heard a tiny hiss: pushed another way, he heard nothing. What the dials measured remained opaque to him, but measure it they did, tweaking and jumping in response to he knew not what. He, attuned to the importance of time, left the bell jar alone for several days. He waited, one of his assistants reported, “with more than mere patience.” On his return, all was as it had been.

“I gave it one last shake,” he writes, “listened to the rattle of the teeth through that upturned speaking trumpet, and nothing else.”

A year and three months after his visit from Thomas—during one of his periodic clear-outs of artefacts for which he no longer had space, or in which he no longer had interest, or which were “not working”—the professor is believed to have given what we later came to know as the Pulvadmonitor to the Dental Museum; on the grounds, presumably, that what it appeared to be designed to showcase, if for reasons beyond him, were the disaggregated dentures. In the museum itself, sterling detective work has uncovered an acquisition note for what is recorded simply as “Item,” on which note is an irate scribbled exchange in two hands: “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” “Bung it in the bloody attic.”

Where, undisturbed, it did not so much languish as prepare itself for its second birth, for more than thirty years.

beyond any fog

in which copyright has been asserted

is where the geese live

—UNKNOWN, “ODE TO EVERYTHING”

3. The Internatal Decades

Lambshead quickly ascertained, after the second birth of what was later named Pulvadmonitor, that it was too fragile to be moved. It remained, and remains, in the attic of the Dental Museum. It was simple, with the resources and unorthodox measuring equipment to which Lambshead had access, to ascertain that, contrary to the assumption made by all other observers in the team, no long-mummified head had been placed within the container to be minutely animated by current from the battery. There was no residue of any matter transference. The head was not a speaker of, or for, the dead.

The realisation came, at last, according to the simpler exigency of placing a hand over the mouth of the trumpet, and observing the start of a slow collapse and agitation in the face within, that rather than a speaking tube leading out, it was a funnel drawing in.

A little super-gentle unscrewing of the outer rim, and Lambshead uncovered a filter like a finely holed sieve, clogged by now with three decades of hairs and larger airborne particles. This he cleaned and replaced. There was another, finer-grained filter further down the tube. The inside of the bell jar was under constant negative pressure. Air emerged from the grille at its base, but it was sucked in fractionally quicker through the trumpet, and from it was removed in stages the larger scobs of airborne debris, so that what it deposited at last within the long-undisturbed glass was a constant, extraordinarily slow, stream of London dust.

And it was from thirty-plus years of that dust that the head within had slowly self-organised. Around the palate and fake gums and teeth from which it could make a mouth.

“She did it,” Lambshead was to write. “My poor lost friend Serkis. She found a means to give the dust a voice.”

neither lens nor cheque can clear for you

nor shall this cat and nor shall these beaked bones intervene

—UNKNOWN, “ODE TO EVERYTHING”

4. The Dust’s Warning

With this realisation, it became doubly imperative that the object not be moved, the battery not turned off (not that any researcher knew what combination of dials and switches might perform that action, nor how it had been left in an “on” position initially). The tiny chatterings and whisperings of the head were already enough to strain the integrity of the desiccated coagulum, held together by air pressure and the willpower of dust clearly desperate to communicate a message.

If the mouth opens—for it opens still now—more than the tiniest crack, the lines of the face go deep, and a little avalanche of mouse-back-coloured substance spills away. Its shape is constantly replenished by the slow intake from the funnel, and so long as the losses occasioned by such linguistic exigencies are in balance with that new matter, the head can sustain itself. A sudden movement, a loss of power, and the face-slide would be catastrophic.

Anyone who wishes to study or learn from the Pulvadmonitor must scooch uncomfortably down on the attic floor, to its eye level, more or less, making their notes in the dim illumination of field lights (more permanent alterations to the room to accommodate a better display would cause vibrations that might destroy the emissary).

Almost all our questions remain unanswered. Why does the dust not open its eyes? What nature of eyes exist, indeed, if any, below those powder lids? Was it some sense of propriety that led the dust to construct the top of a collar, as if it was the bust only of a full person? As if, having decided to mimic our shape to make the transmission of information easier, in consideration for our psychology, there was no point in doing less than a thorough job. And, on the other side, what uncanny intuition for transubstantial courtesy was it that led Xanthe Serkis to place teeth ready for the soft-palateless dust, that it had grown around and constructed its dust-lips around, to ease its shaping of our words?

Of course, the main question has always been, what is the dust’s warning?

no

no no no

o really?

yes no

—UNKNOWN, “ODE TO EVERYTHING”

5. The Tragedy of Design

There can be no doubting the urgency of whatever message it is the dust wishes to convey. Whenever footprints, be they ever so careful, cross the floor towards it, it appears to become aware that it has watchers. Its mouth moves as quickly as it dares, it speaks as eagerly as its substance allows, its teeth, those little ceramic flashes in otherwise quite matt, quite indistinguishable dun skin, chatter like a telegraph operator. It wants to tell us something.

The funnel is just in front of its lips, so tantalisingly like the speaking tube we know it is not. It might even operate like one, amplifying its breathless voice enough for us to hear, but that the soft current of air from out to in effaces whatever minutely whispered phrases the head might speak. Its voice is so faint that not even stethoscopes on the glass can help. It is simply inaudible. Only the click of those teeth can be heard, and if they tap in code, it is not one amenable to our codebreakers.

Of course, lip-readers of countless languages have been brought to watch the head, to decipher its words. What is most frustrating of all to dust-watchers is not that none of them can discern any meaning but rather that they often see a few phrases, always disputed, never quite clear.

Two English-speaking lip-readers have claimed the dust said this dog will never be your friend amid a stream of meaningless syllables. An Italianophone claimed that it told her three times to cross the bridge. It is too late for the light has been seen spoken in four languages. In 2002, a Hindi reader and a Finnish one both claimed to have read the lips at the same moment, the first seeing stop up all these gaps before it comes, the latter consider where your own bones go.

Opinion is divided as to how to proceed. Lambshead was a pessimist on this issue. “As Lichtenberg said of angels,” he wrote in one of his last letters, “so I say of dust. If they, or it, ever could speak to us, why in God’s name should we understand?”

Two things remain unclear, and intemperately debated. One is the origin of the quiet Egyptian heads that watch the Pulvadmonitor, the Dust’s Warning, approvingly. They were not a gift from Lambshead. No one knows their provenance, and there is no record of their arrival.

The second concerns the “Violent Philosophy of the Archive.” This essay, in which is the footnote where first is mentioned the Dust’s Warning, and which hints at the importance of its (second) birth, was found in a sheaf of Lambshead’s papers dating from the mid-1980s and published posthumously. What is controversial is precisely when it was written. Textual evidence suggests that while it might have been just after, it could very well have been just before, the nook in the museum attic was uncovered. The question is whether, in other words, Lambshead was musing on something recently discovered; or was waiting impatiently for something that he had prepared to be found again.

The dust doubtless knows the answer, and its agitated efforts notwithstanding, can tell us, and warn us of, nothing.