Jean-Daniel Causse: “Il n’y a donc pas une seule écriture; il y a deux écritures avec deux verbes grecs qui les deux fois ne sont pas tout à fait les mêmes. Il n’y a donc pas simple répétition, mais deux traits qui sont à la fois différents et corrélés. La première fois, le verbe grec utilisé est katagraphein ; la seconde fois, au lieu du verbe kata-graphein, on trouve le verbe simple graphein. Dans la littérature néotestamentaire, katagraphein est un hapax — une seule utilisation donc — alors qu’on trouve plus de cinq cents fois le verbe graphein. Comment les différencier?” [“L’identité et l’identification: des sœurs ennemies * ?,” Culture/Clinic 1 (2013), vii-xvi.]
The “deep mark” theme is ancient. It differs from the idea of a mark made “on top of” a medium in that the medium itself is changed indelibly, penetrated, deformed, or stained — wounded. The first appearance of katagraphein in the Bible is the only one: when Jesus is confronted in the Temple and asked by the Pharisees and Scribes whether he would dismiss or condemn the woman accused of adultery, the intent is to entrap him into contradicting the Law, justifying censure and arrest. Jesus however kneels and begins scribbling on the pavement (John 8:1–20). The word used to describe this action, katagraphein, was known in Arabic writing to be a gesture to indicate thought (E. Power, “Writing on the Ground,” Biblica 2, 1, 1921, 54–57). The sense is that of a judgment given to hypocrites, but earlier sources connect katagraphein with magic, in particular marks made by wands made of wood taken from vines. Here, legal pronouncements are blended with divination practices, and Power’s desire to separate the two forces, magic and judgment, need only be displaced to a broader history of mark-making.
The meaning of the katagraphic mark itself cuts into and stains the history of mark-making as we look to associations of staining and dying (think of Cervantes’ la mancha, the cursed plain as a palimpsest across which the fabled knight Don Quixote traces a path that is simultaneously fantastic and redemptory), but the contronymic term cœlum, both “heaven” and “wedge” — anything from an axe to an engraver’s burin — stretch as far back as the story of the birth of Athena, freed from the skull of Jove (= the blue carapace of heaven) to occupy the Acropolis citadel fully armed. Topographically, the place of judgment is sharp, high, and fortified. More significantly, it is beyond the plenum considered to be a writing surface marked by the movement of planets and stars. The citadel as katagraphic is perhaps the most cosmic paradigm of this kind of penetrating mark.
catalog of katagraphics
With examples from Prof, Alizarin, Prof. Quinacridone and others†, this minimally annotated list includes penetrative, staining, katagraphic marks of any and every kind of cœlum. The intent of this encyclopedia is to inspire speculation about the relations connecting writing, magic, judgment, and thought, held together by the concept of incision.
Prof. Alizarin’s iconografia catalogo
tile 1 (professor alizarin)
Magic ideogram, looking for the magic footprint. For years, the floor plans have been seen to depict the area of the enclosures. To show the walls that will enclose everything that goes in the interior. The transit of life, where moments pass, in short, all the magic of being. According to contemporary conventions, the architectural plans show the horizontal section of the buildings; for the ancients, it was a vertical relationship, like a rope that falls from the sky and gives the guidelines on how to draw the structure. This line is a mark on the ground, an incision that makes the invisible real; however, it does not represent the invisible. Can autostereograms make us see the invisible? For this katagraphic, the plan was drawn by Le Corbusier of the unbuilt project of the Chapel of the Delgado Chalbaud.
tile 2 (professor quinacridone)
From Dead of Night (1945). In this Ealing Studios post-war thriller, a psychoanalyst narrates the story of Hugo, a ventriloquist’s dummy, who gains psychotic hold over his master, Maxwell Frere. The internal division of voices in the human performer’s head has turned adversarial, and the dummy actively seeks a new partner. When a fellow-ventriloquist (Sylvester Kee) visits Frere in his dressing room, Hugo makes a pitch to recruit Kee, and Frere muffles him with his hand. Spookily, we hear Frere talk over Hugo’s muffled protests.
Just before Kee leaves, Hugo bites Frere’s hand. Technically this is a self-inflicted wound, a symptom of autoimmunity, but given Frere’s divided psyche, it is a deep mark of from one side to the other of the divided self, from the one, to a one.
tile 3 (professor alizarin)
The Rend of the Compass
tile 4 (professor ultramarine)
What if the katagraphic line is an evolutionary deviant? Where depth was, from proto-subjective times (before the human animal started to speak “proper language”), a matter of survival, depth was a measure of how far away some object of fear (or attraction) was. Should I flee or stand to fight? Should I chase? Should I patiently track (because the pray runs much faster than me)? These life-and-death considerations make depth estimates, and the whole apparatuses for calculating them, just as life-and-death-significant. As with all the other bodily systems dead-icated to such responses (the sympathetic nervous system under management of the “master-nerve,” the vagus), this vector has to serve the interests of survival by being bi-directional. Depth itself is a matter of call and response, a toward or away from.
When a line is able to point or move in two directions, its double nature is built in to it beneath the level of conscious control, if only because most of the effectiveness of our depth estimates requires our responses to be un-thoughtful. If our ancestors had asked, “give me time to think about it,” we would not be here. This does not mean that the fight-or-flight response is unthoughtful. RATHER, it means that the thought is automated, holographic, instantaneous. We know about it not intellectually but affectively, emotionally.
My katagraphic offering for tile 3 is, therefore, the short story by the Argentine master of the short story, Jorge Luis Borges, a cat-and-mouse murder mystery that leads the POV character, the detective Erik Lönnrot, to his death in a house that internalizes the Lacanian phenomenon of extimity, or should I say it externalizes the Lacanian phenomenon of intimacy. Extimité covers both statements.
Thanks to the chemistry of neurotransmitters (dopamine mostly), compulsive gamblers experience greater pleasure at losing than winning. In “Death and the Compass,” the detective is drawn to Triste-le-Roy because his line of travel is katagraphic. It is both the desire to flee and the desire to chase and fight. The combination distills the line into a vector of pure desire.
Possibly the katagraphic line is not the deviant swerving away from the fight–or–flight function of depth perception, but the primitive Id of depth, the line that “had to exist logically before” any depth line could appear in evolutionary development. Once it is formed, it becomes a case of ex falso sequitur quodlibit — anything can happen as long as the original is suppressed. When it returns, however, it returns as a palindrome of its first self, and the palindrome returns it immediately to its first nature, as the same two-pointed arrow that Eros used to inflame Apollo with live and Daphne with hate — another story whose logically prior element appeared only after its sequel in history was given.
tile 5 (professor quinacridone)
The Biblical use of katagraphein is a “hapax,” a first-and-only use. Elsewhere, graphein is used, even in the mysterious case in the Book of Daniel where the young prophet is called to interpret the writing on the wall of a mysterious floating hand: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN (מנא מנא תקל ופרסין). In my view, this should also be a katagraphic, on account of its dread advice (source: Wikipedia): “MENE, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; TEKEL, you have been weighed … and found wanting;” and “UPHARSIN”, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.” Indeed, the day after this all came true for the poor Belshazzar, Jr., who dared to use golden cups stolen from the Temple in Jerusalem. The only instance of katagraphein occurs in the Book of John, viii 6: “But Jesus simply bent down and started drawing on the ground with his finger.” Raymond E. Brown comments on this unusual moment, citing E. Power, Biblica 2 (1921). Vol. 2, No. 1 (1921), pp. 54-57.
Power notes that “the writing is the mechanical action of tracing figures or letters on the ground, not the intellectual one of expressing thought by written words, also that the writing is done with a rod or with the finger according as the person is standing or sitting on the ground.” This alerts us to the similarity between Jesus’s effective katagraphic (the accusing Sanhedrin simply exited the Temple, leaving the accused woman unharmed) and the equally effective “Injunction of Pophilius,” a story told by the Roman historian Livy. Pophilius, a Roman Consul, met the Assyrian king on the outskirts of Alexandria and, instead of protesting the king’s planned invasion, drew a circle around him using a “wand” cut from a vine. The king was somehow impressed by this action and declined to invade.
This equally magical “deep mark” harkens back to the employment of circles drawn to cure or harm. In the case of the Navaho and Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas, there is simultaneously a magical invocation and therapeutic benefit. The Yoruba practice of marking architecture with cosmograms made by object buried in walls and floors to “amplify” the weak signals of curses and blessing has been documented by archaeologists working in Annapolis, Maryland.
tile 6 (professor alizarin)
The deer without a horn. Book of Leviticus 11
In the moral practices of Leviticus, God has given instructions on what pure or impure animals are. This instruction follows the idea of the one that can be eaten and the one who is forbidden. According to the Leviticus book instruction, a deer, it’s pure to be eaten. Still, they don’t exemplify if the animal isn’t complete, as a deer, without a horn, and in a piece of daydream, could be considered to be one of the most forbidden mistakes on earth, and if that deer without a horn, in a daydream, look at you in the eyes, could be the sentence of life.
tile 6 (professor alizarin)
Footprint / Raven. Professor Quinacridone comments: “On January 29, 1845, American author Edgar Allan Poe’s famously eerie poem ‘The Raven’ was published in the New York Evening Mirror. On that same day in Indiana, an amateur naturalist stuffed and displayed a bird he had shot that morning in a small town square in Indiana, some nine hundred fifty miles from Boston (Poe’s residence at the time), art historian Alexander Nemerov notes. The bird was never identified, although for the next hundred years ornithologists would visit the museum to inspect it. Finally, it was considered to be a genetic mutation, a ‘one of a kind.’ One is reminded of Wallace Stevens’ poem, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
†Other Professors are invited to participate, under one or more rubrics from the following list: Prof. Aureolin, Prof. Bordeaux, Prof. Delft, Prof. Forest, Prof. Cerulean, Prof. Hooker, Prof. Lapis, Prof. Rose-Madder, Prof. Magenta, Prof. Mars, Prof. Payne, Prof. Perylene, Prof. Potter, Prof. Rose Madder, Prof. Schmincke, Prof. Spinel-Brown, Prof. Hansa, Prof. Pyrrol, Prof. Mayan, Prof. Turner, Prof. Van Dyke, and Prof. Vanadium. Team contributions are welcome, under the special contributing authors team list, Prof. Yttrium, Prof. Indium, and Prof. Manganese. Contact the Deep Mark Editor, Prof. Quinacridone, for a name choice and topic. You will then be asked to submit text, illustration with caption, and citations. Please be sure to put “katagraphic” in the subject header.