Camp Concentration/Book One: June 16 to June 22

Summary

Sacchetti observes more of the fruits of Mordecai's genius: his apparently pointless research into alchemy, and a short story he has written on a Faustian theme. Louis's own creative writing has also gained new energy. Mordecai, assisted by the credulous Haast, presents a public enactment of a "Magnum Opus" that he claims will produce an elixir of life; instead it leaves him dead. Louis ends Book One with the realization that he too, for more than a month, has been infected with the disease Pallidine.

June 16

Morituri te salutamus

Latin: "We who are about to die salute you"— allegedly a standard greeting to Roman emperors by gladiators entering the arena, although it is only documented in one case.

Quid nunc?

Latin: "What now?"

A base of charity ... neutralizes the acids of self-doubt

Mordecai is using "base" in the sense of alkaline. "Acids of self-doubt" seems to have become a cliché expression— the phrase appears without attribution from many authors— but the original source, if any, is unclear.

Opsi! Mopsi! Cottontail!

Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail were the sisters of Peter Rabbit.

Farmer MacGregor got to him

Peter Rabbit's nemesis.

Hasting's Encyclopaedia of Pathology

A joke on the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (1908-1926).

oblivious to the low soma

The soma is the body, as distinguished from the mind.

cud-blurbling ... a spoonerism, somewhat

An exact Spoonerism for "blood-curdling" would be "cud-blurdling."

the Ghent altarpiece

A 15th-century Flemish painting in 12 panels. Wikipedia

Several books on alchemy

Tabula smargdina: Wikipedia, Rosicrucian Archive. A Golden and Blessed Casket of Nature's Marvels: full text. "Geber's Works": either Jābir ibn Hayyān or the Pseudo-Geber. "Poisson's Nicolas Flamel": by a 19th-century occultist, about a 14th-century scribe who was later said to be an alchemist.

DNA Engineering

Fictional.

Raphael's School of Athens

Depicts a gathering of Classical philosophers; "recently interpreted as an exhortation to philosophy and, in a deeper way, as a visual representation of the role of Love in elevating people toward upper knowledge" (Wikipedia).

Durer's Melancholia

An allegorical print containing numerous mathematical and scientific references, whose possible interpretations include "the spiritual self-portrait of Dürer" (Wikipedia).

what use Luther made of inkpots

Throwing them at the Devil.

Yarrowsticks

Dried stems sometimes used in consulting the I Ching; slower than other methods of doing so.

comme il faut

French: "as it should be."

this post-Keynesian age

John Maynard Keynes was influential in convincing European governments to abandon the gold standard in the 20th century.

Raymond Lully

Ramon Llull, 14th-century theologian and mathematician. The warning that "if you reveal this, you shall be damned" is cited by several authors [1][2], but with no specific source, and may be apocryphal.

Whatever Isis is willing to unveil

A reference to Isis Unveiled (1877) by the occultist Madame Blavatsky.

I keep thinking of Ben Jonson

Louis is referring to Jonson's The Alchemist (1610), in which the con artist Subtle baffles his marks with alchemical jargon. Sample:

It is, of the one part,
A humid exhalation, which we call
Material liquida, or the unctuous water;
On the other part, a certain crass and vicious
Portion of earth; both which, concorporate,
Do make the elementary matter of gold;
Which is not yet propria materia,
But common to all metals and all stones;
For, where it is forsaken of that moisture,
And hath more driness, it becomes a stone:
Where it retains more of the humid fatness,
It turns to sulphur, or to quicksilver,
Who are the parents of all other metals.

a fellow alchemist, Arthur Rimbaud—Science est trop lente

French: "Science is too slow," from Rimbaud's poem A Season in Hell. Rimbaud was not literally an alchemist, but used mystical imagery to represent violent spiritual transformation. A phrase from his "Letter of the Seer" is particularly appropriate to Camp Concentration: "The poet makes himself a seer by a long, rational, and immense disordering of all the senses."

carrying coals to Newcastle

A British expression referring to any pointless or redundant action, since Newcastle was a major center of coal mining.

I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise

From the George Gershwin musical An American in Paris.

June 17

Portrait of Pompanianus

Hugo van der Goes paints this fictional portrait in Mordecai's story after his own supposed death, in a magical effort "no longer to mirror reality but ... to compel it," thereby causing some event that Sacchetti describes only as a "catastrophe." This may be a reference to Tascius Pomponianus, who figures in Pliny the Younger's account of the eruption of Vesuvius: a friend of Pliny the Elder, he inadvertently causes the latter's death because, as Pliny is escaping the volcano by ship, he stops to pick up Pomponianus but stays too long on shore and suffocates. The fate of Pomponianus himself is unknown.

"A Lodging for the Night"

This story by Stevenson (full text) consists mostly of a dialogue between the medieval poet/brigand François Villon and an elderly nobleman who tries to convince him to mend his ways.

Bowdler confronted with a copy of Naked Lunch

Thomas Bowdler was known for publishing expurgated works of Shakespeare, in which he removed not only words but also plot developments that he considered unsuitable for women and children. A Bowdlerization of Naked Lunch would presumably retain no part of the novel.

Angels and ministers of grace

Hamlet, I.iv: Hamlet's exclamation when he first sees his father's ghost.

June 19

Fellini's Commedia

Fictional, apparently a future work of Fellini (who was only 47 when Camp Concentration was written).

Griffith's film of Ibsen's Ghosts

Fictional film adaptation of the 1881 play; one of the leading characters is a young artist who was born with syphilis due to his father's infidelities.

croquet (based partly on Lewis Carroll's game)

The croquet game overseen by the Queen of Hearts in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has no particular rules, but is played using live flamingoes, hedgehogs, and soldiers in place of mallets, balls, and hoops.

June 21

the supplicant invoked another in the place of the one he intended

Louis refers to this passage as if it is describing a demonic conjuration, but in context, Augustine is saying that someone who lacks religious guidance can nevertheless call on God: "...for he that knoweth Thee not, may call on Thee as other than Thou art."

the hypogeal daedal of corridors ... its minotaur ... Haast

Hypogeal, below ground; daedal, any intricate construction, referring to Daedalus who built the Labyrinth of Crete to imprison the Minotaur.

People made fun of Isaac Newton ... because he studied astrology

As usual, Haast misunderstands the history of the people he admires. Newton never wrote about astrology, and his alleged remark to Edmond Halley ("I have studied the matter, you have not!") was in fact about theology, not astrology. Although Haast surprisingly fails to mention it, Newton was extremely interested in alchemy; however, he published little about it during his lifetime and was not "made fun of" for this.

the first act of Tosca at the Amato Opera

The Amato Opera was a small opera company located about a mile from Disch's home in Manhattan. The opening of Tosca takes place in the Church of Sant'Andrea della Valle; the Amato's small stage would have required a scaled-down depiction of this setting.

Spirits to enforce, art to enchant

From the end of The Tempest, Prospero's parting words after he has renounced magic:

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint ....
... Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

the dura mater, the arachnoid, and the pia mater

The three layers of the meninges that surround the brain.

the Carmot

Alchemical name for the substance of which the Philosopher's Stone was composed.

Aquinas' Eucharistic hymn

"O esca viatorum" is sometimes attributed to Aquinas, but may instead be the work of an unknown 17th-century writer. The Bishop's English translation ("O food of wayfarers!") is similar to that in The English Hymnal.

June 22

I can float. Often to the height of a cubit

Aquinas never claimed himself to be able to levitate or perform any other miracles, but others later claimed to have seen this; G.K. Chesterton's essay on Aquinas confused the matter, saying that "[h]is experiences included well-attested cases of levitation in ecstasy", although Chesterton's later book amended this to say only that "somebody" claimed to have seen such an event.

Quantam sufficit

Latin: "A sufficient quantity"; abbreviated as q.s. in pharmaceutical prescriptions.

Why did the hyperdulia pray to the Pia Mater?

Hyperdulia, a Catholic term for the proper degree of devotion to give to the Virgin Mary; from the Greek for "higher servitude." Pia mater, one of the meningeal layers (see above), but whose literal meaning in Latin is "gentle mother."

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

A riddle asked by the Mad Hatter, and never answered, in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll, in a preface to a later edition, said he originally had no particular answer in mind but offered two possible ones.

Disch's friend John Sladek, in his 1980 novel Roderick, used the same riddle as a test of an artificial intelligence's creativity.

Abbot Suger was especially keen on Dionysius

This refers not to the historical Dionysius who was the first Bishop of Athens, but to Pseudo-Dionysius, the unknown author of mystical texts that were wrongly attributed to Dionysius (similarly, Haast earlier referred to Albertus Magnus when he really meant Pseudo-Albertus). Abbot Suger was said to have based the architecture of the Abbey of Saint-Denis on Pseudo-Dionysius's writings, but this theory is controversial.

I died from eating miraculous herrings

The alleged "miracle of the herrings"— in which, as described here, a barrel of sardines turned into the herrings that Aquinas preferred— would have been of no consequence except that it just barely met the Church's criteria for granting Aquinas sainthood. As described in the canonization testimony, contrary to what the dream-Aquinas says here, "when the herrings were brought to Thomas, he would not eat them."

The cause of his death is unknown, but he was already ill when he stopped at Maenza where the herring incident was said to have happened. Disch's notion that he was killed by the herrings may be a joke on Dante's unsubstantiated allegation, in the Inferno, that Aquinas was poisoned by the King of Sicily.

a thin white host covered with indecipherable script

Similar to the "little scroll" in the book of Revelation:

...the voice which I had heard from heaven spoke to me again, saying, "Go, take the scroll which is open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land."
So I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me, "Take it and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth."
And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter.