alison powell's nomen nudum

My first love and I once drove from Indiana to a cabin in Vermont. There I met a philosopher named George who said if, instead of eating, there was a pill to take that would provide all the nutrients necessary, he’d be the first to sign up. In his spare time the philosopher sang country ballads with the voice of George Jones and I desired him very much, though his lack of passion for gastronomy and seeming asexuality were surely related. Also I was painfully in love with his good friend. Too much appetite, I guess.

I think of the pill he says he’d take. I imagine it must be unlike any other pill in the world. Perhaps it could be shaped to look like food: a miniature egg, say, or a tiny apple.

A philosopher is unlike a geologist in important ways. Put in the simplest terms, if a geologist is an explorer, a cataloguer of the physical world, a philosopher regards the existence of the earth akin to how the elderly view meteorological science: they aren’t sure it exists at all, and would prefer to have conversations about the weather, to know if your weather is their weather. A geologist is unlike the poet, bobbing in an ocean of anticipatory nostalgia for the physical world despite paying taxes within it. The poet’s body darting around like a little lost bird heart, fast and meaty. And the geologist is unlike the prostitute, who becomes unto herself a heroic virtuoso of the physical. A made-to-order thumb harp.

*

The discovery of an ancient animal skeleton can make a person feel suddenly proud in a parental kind of way, like the astronomer who names a star for his daughter and sees it as homage rather than absurd, if poignant, sentimentalism. You should know it was William who discovered the “Great Fossil Lizard,” the very first material record of a non-avian dinosaur. The story of the discovery is for another time. In fact he was to announce his discovery of the “Great Lizard,” or “Megolasaurus,” in a publication in 1822, but it failed to print. And so for some time the “Great Fossil Lizard” had what is called in science a nomen nudum, naked name, a scientific name given to an organism when the circumstances of the thing’s discovery, and its given name, haven’t yet been published in print. In other words, the Megolasaurus was baptized but not yet confirmed.

Somewhere another doctor began talking about the bones himself, scooping William’s discovery, so there was a race to name the thing like the race to the moon, or a race to name the moon—which seems a good metaphor for naming a dinosaur which is, after all, another terrifyingly large thing humans had never seen up close. Later another scientist named Ferdinand tried to christen the Great Lizard with a complete binomial: megalosaurus conybeare. But that one is nomen oblitum—a name to be forgotten, as scientists thereafter didn’t much take to it. In science nomen oblitum means the name is not supposed to be used. I apologize for using it now. Please forget I used the forgotten name. Please remember only what the thing is called today, a name given in 1827: Megolasaurus bucklandii.

I offer you this anecdote by way of penance: when I was a girl I went to a Christian summer camp called Camp Tecumseh located near Delphi, Indiana, on the Tippecanoe River. The girls in my cabin and I moved through woods to make it to chapel on Sundays, rows of wood benches set into a hillside by the lake, in front of a giant wooden cross. While there I made everyone call me Charlie. Charlie was a good sport. Charlie prayed nightly and woke at dawn to swim. Because of Camp Tecumseh, Margaret Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” has always haunted me: the reluctant, small landscape paintings in the narrator’s living room; the girl dropping from the cliff without a sound. Silent as Wordsworth’s Lucy Gray who disappears—poof!—into a puff of snow while crossing a river.

Girl vanishings are very quiet. Nomen oblitum.

*

My parents decided to get married after one week of dates. On the first— perhaps on Sunday—my father got a flat tire and he exited the car in the Indiana heat, kicked the hubcap in frustration, and cursed. Still they made it to open mic night at a local bar where my father sang a Dylan song in his sly baritone and watched as my mother chatted with a man to her left. When answering his question about how his performance went, my mother said something affirmative, to which my father asked, pointedly, How do you know? My mother felt these things—irritability, quickness

to anger, jealousy—made him legible. He was not, as she would later tell it, a game player. He is, she would say with equal parts resignation and self-congratulation, what he is, by which she meant a man of the type she recognized. A man static as asphalt. When they married my mother erased her middle name, which had been her mother’s name, Marie, to make space for her maiden name. So in marrying she traded her mother for her father, or rather, traded her mother’s name to ensure her father’s would stay. On documents and such.

My mother’s sentimental attachment is understandable: her father had died of a stroke when she was nineteen. He was working in the pharmacy he ran when a strong headache suddenly came on. Excusing himself, this man—Charles, a man I never met, who would not properly be called a grandfather—walked into his back office, pausing only to pick up the Encyclopedia Brittanica which he had been reading in fits and starts that year. His death was sudden as a snapping of the fingers. Surrounded by white porcelain jars full of gelatin capsules, powders of varied granulation, apothecary jars scrawled with gold enamel script, the youngish tall man wearing glasses dropped. The man who liked science. A man who played the trumpet.

*

In 1823, having been told his neighbors had stumbled on some unusually large bones, William began a dig at Goat’s Hole Cave, a limestone cave in south Wales. It is not known whether Buckland carried on this expedition, as he usually did, a large blue pouch that held mammoth teeth, skin, feces, a hyena skull. Portraits of the time show the pouch to be more of a sack, hung jauntily from a belt loop. While there William indeed found a mammoth skull. More startingly, nestled nearby were pieces of a human skeleton that had been soaked in red ochre, a pigment found in Tuscan clay. Where a pocket might have once been William found a handful of periwinkle shells; around the waist, a belt of forty or fifty rods made of mammoth bone. Around its neck was a necklace of perforated seashells. The red bones lay there, shallow under the dry earth, scattered like matchsticks.

William was sure, along with many other Reverends then and now, that before Noah’s flood there was—at least as far as humanity is concerned— nothingness. This belief, alongside the jewelry, led William to declare he’d uncovered the burial site of a Roman prostitute or witch. The latter seemed more likely by the presence of another animal bone—a sheep’s shoulder blade—buried with the body, a particular type of

bone once thought to have magical powers. William named the skeleton the Red Lady of Paviland, writing jocularly that the discovery of sheep shoulder would “afford ample matter for a Romance to be entitled the Red Woman or the Witch of Paviland.”

If William was a cut up, the Red Lady was a shape-shifter, hard to pin down. At first sight, William thought the body might be that of an early tax collector, killed by a disgruntled debtor. But the body was also, as he would later write, very thin and tall, “as a witch should be.” Friends suggested to William that “[his] enchantress” may have aroused the men in the area to “warlike deeds,” that the mammoth bone rods were not part of a belt but pieces of a crude chess or backgammon-type game, and the yellowish shells kept in her pocket simply because they were beautiful. Because as William would note in a lecture before the British Archaeological Society, of which he was a member, “even among the uncivilized races, the female part of our species... [is] anxious to decorate themselves with beads.” She shifted shape many more times in William’s mind. She was a loose woman, a prostitute; she ran a sort of gambler’s casino out of her sorceress’ cave. She may have even been, he quipped, Eve herself, which would explain her red color: “for it is not extraordinary when Adam was made of [red earth], that his rib should have a tinge of ruddle.”

*

Let us imagine William carries her from the cave like a clackity bride. Meanwhile Mrs. Buckland—Mary, née Morland—gave their sons instruction on geography using globes she had made out of paper, colored, and inflated. She was secretly a scientist but her mind had to be phrased differently because her husband disapproved. Her son Frank later said she was “particularly clever and neat in mending broken fossils;” many of these reconstructions are now preserved at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, filed under the name Buckland.

When I was in middle school all the girls wore Wet n Wild 501 lipstick. It wasn’t red, it was purple, the color of a dangerous bruise, and in this way we signaled we were not whores but witches.

*

Once in college I overheard a docent at the Chicago Museum of Modern Art explain to a group of children that x-ray has revealed that Picasso’s The Old Guitarist was

painted onto a canvas that had originally been painted with the figure of a woman. One could, she explained, just barely make out the woman’s hip with the naked eye. Though the hip is literally painted under the man’s leg, it still appears she is sitting on his lap. Flirt. It felt as though the docent was uncovering two things at once; something like the falsehood of the man’s loneliness against the existence of the sad woman beneath him. Or on top of him. Because the painting was begun and completed during Picasso’s Blue Period it is likely the woman was a prostitute. He painted during this time prostitutes, beggars, and drunks, in varied shades of blue, famously sinking into a famous depression worsened by the fact that no one wanted to buy his sad paintings of poor people, leaving him, tautologically, poor and sadder.

The Red Lady’s body had been wrapped in fabric dyed with red ochre, a wet iron oxide. Its color varies according to the local soil. The painstaking procurement of red ochre for the dye is described by the 15th century painter Cennino Cennini. Having hunted and dug for it in the mountains of Tuscany—he describes the red pigment running through the land as a scar on a face—he used his horse hair tipped brushes to paint images of flesh, buildings, hair, draperies. It’s easier to excavate metal and grind it into pigment, say—you actually cannot grind too much, Cennini says—than to identify a skeleton and lift the puzzle pieces from the earth without eradicating evidence—which is, as we surely know by now, a kind of story.

To take old iron which is there, and make it into art—which records what happens, or what could have happened, or what was dreamt of or wished for or what was burdened—is a rebirthing. To take the earth which is there and make it into faith, which records what was dreamt of; to newly burden the earth with that faith, is discovery.

*

A portrait of William in Westminster Abbey shows him holding a hyena skull. He wears a large black robe and smiles, looking out at something to the right. The background is black. He cradles the skull, his round white and pink face floating happily in the darkness. It is said that William would race up and down the aisles

of a lecture hall dressed like a Franciscan preacher, shoving a huge hyena skull in the faces of terrified undergraduates. He would shout again and again, “What rules the world?” until someone would offer an answer. One student describes answering “Haven’t an idea,” to which William replied, “The stomach, sir, rules the world. The great ones eat the less, the less the lesser still!”

I have never held an animal skull that I can offhand recall, though it seems like a thing I’ve likely done. My brother and I once got lost in the Hoosier National Forest after smoking some pot, and feared we’d not make it out by night. The sky darkened like an invitation, that, when opened, reveals a dark gold sheen. The fall leaves were in some places nearly up to our knees, as though we were wading through a burning lake. Eventually I was delighted to find one small deer antler for my trouble.Today I display it on my fireplace mantle. It is sprouts like a fat, hard branch from a vase of the same ivory color. Occasionally my son takes it down and jabs it menacingly at his sister.

*

In the 1950s some lab tech, assisted by carbon dating technology, read the Red Lady of Paviland’s bone protein like a primer and found it was 20% fish, part woolly rhinoceros, part reindeer, and all male—not a Red Lady at all. For this error, perhaps Buckland should be forgiven. He became confused: the bones had been dyed in red ochre. They looked to him like food, like something to consume. Or perhaps he should not: he had not examined the skeleton before declaring it that of a woman. It was the ivory bracelets that convinced him, allowing him to make jokes about the ancient British witch to his colleagues at the Royal Society of London.

I feel sad imagining the world’s anxiety over water and ice, and the female body, the belief that it speaks only in symbols, meaning, it speaks without argument, is made of ovaries, periwinkle, spit, antiquity. In this way, the female body is like the afikomen. Present yet undiscovered. Maybe this is why Adam only slept the once, when God forced it upon him so he could create woman in the meantime. Fragile yet foundational. Most consumable when consumptive. Most ideally, a delicious unknown.

Yet: not knowing in what way you mean consumable gets in the way of knowing, of knowing what you are, of how you may be incorporated. The Oxford English Dictionary gives three meanings. A) adjective: Of a foodstuff: suitable for consumption, edible. B) able to be destroyed, esp. by fire; combustible. C) as a noun: a commodity that is intended to be used up or worn out by use. Cross-referenced with adj. durable.

One might say it is a Choose Your Own Adventure piece. A love poem—no, an ars poetica—to the OED itself. Or: names are humiliating. The great ones name the less; the less, the lesser still.

Afikomen: a word originating with the Greek epikomen, meaning “that which comes after.”

*

My son makes sense of death like this: the body of a person is chewed by animals or swallowed into a shallow belly of earth, so they become and become and become, always becoming. Never dissolved. At night his body becomes very hot, his feet twitch, and he explains to me how, in death, he will fold up inside a scarlet macaw and we will meet somehow in our new jungle.

Two mouse feet lying still on little bread beds.

*

William would become more skilled, learn there are delicate excavations and excavations akin to lobbing a porcelain dish at a wall, that there can be an art to digging. And that there was much before the flood. He became, in fact, author of Evidence of the Flood, eventually arguing it is irrelevant whether one called it a flood or a glacier. The water simply wiped out everything before.

When people describe having always felt one sex or another, assigned or not, or attraction to one sex or another, straight or not, I cannot help but feel disappointed. The rhetoric of sustained identity is the cause of so much trouble. Are they not the same? Does one not make the other? Does the human not shift just as dispassionately as land?

*

The Red Lady’s bones are now a museum display. S/he has been transformed from waiting-to-be-discovered to a patchwork skeleton worth celebrating, a diva of sorts, a reality show winner. The curators have arranged the bones on a glass table, and a projector shines down like the sun, projecting an image of flesh as if there were flesh to see. S/he is like Snow White or a crime outline, or Alexander McQueen’s best work except she is thirty thousand years old and the Real Thing. S/he has real bones instead of a gown that makes a woman look like a bird, a dancer, or—irony—a skeleton.

Gentlepersons, the Red Lady of Paviland, the first human fossil found in what appears to be the oldest ceremonial burial in all of western Europe—the tinny voice chimes eternally from the speaker, so often one engages in intentional mishearing: gentle purse on. Thread laid eve of Paviland. The first hue man...

As I typed ars in ars poetica, just now, sitting by this fire, Word autocorrected it to mrs. And then: are. And then: art.

*

Sometimes a scholar names a thing and it falls under the waves of time and is worn smooth like a stone until it no longer appears a discovery. Then a new scholar names the same original thing and it is suddenly new again, like an excavation of discourse. Imagine archeological excavation; perhaps the existential dizziness becomes vertigo in grandness, having been stretched across tens of thousands of years. And reassuring: one can become very tired of oneself and one’s species. Thinking about this is like thinking about the holes in Francis Bacon’s paintings, which can never be discovered and that is all right because they are terrifying.

Recently I began to paint. I bought tubes of acrylic paints from the Michaels in town. I bought canvases and paper and a used easel and a drafting table that stood in the corner of the office unused and discerning. I painted women’s faces, very large and very fast, as a child learning guitar bangs out chords. I found pictures of women everywhere; on book covers, in bookstores, magazines. I gave them green colors. And then one day a friend visited and I showed her the paintings, both sheepish and proud. You have always painted, she told me. I didn’t recall. Before you left Missouri, you gave me a painting of a vase of flowers. I didn’t recall. It is still hanging in my house, she said. I said, Well! What do you know. Here are some sad looking women.

To pry something out of someone, the meat of a walnut from its enamellike shell, is an excavation—to uncover a lie, an infidelity. When confronted with the impossibility of knowing anything, I feel like an engine that won’t turn over. Which makes one face the exhausting knowledge one carries about oneself like a carapace, and I feel very tired and want to stop moving.

To unearth a secret identity is an excavation of the delicate type. Except the Red Lady’s identity was there, until, in being “discovered,” it was blended into Buckland’s want.

*

The Roman word for brothel is lupanar, meaning a wolf den. A prostitute was called a lupa (“she-wolf ”), as a girl is a Red Riding Hood, a wolf a becoming father; a she-wolf a fathering forth of lust; a warrior, a devil. Roman women used to dip lead-coated combs in vinegar and carry them through their hair so the salts would deepen their color. How heavy that must be. Heavy as a petticoat, whalebone, chastity belt. As the discovery of one of the world’s oldest ceremonial burials.

Graffiti in Pompeii found in 1824: “Let everyone in love come and see. I want to break Venus’ ribs with clubs and cripple the goddess’ loins. If she can strike through my soft chest, then why can’t I smash her head with a club?” LOL.

When analyzing the sketches of large game found in ancient cave systems, scholars have determined that some scrapes and dents in the stone surface indicates that the paintings were attacked, possibly in the belief that harming the image would wound a real-life animal.

*

I feel aware that I have not brought these threads together. I have been an inefficient spider. I have made for you, as I wished, a museum of the Red Lady.

Sometimes I pretend to be William and he speaks like a professor: I, like all men of science, know the body because of women and criminals; it was the dissection of these that founded modern medicine, that gave us the ecstatic illustrations in Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica.

After the flood Noah sent out a raven and a dove into the wildness. Raven may mean death, dove may mean peace. Raven may mean storm, or deliciousness, the child’s delight in destruction. Dove may mean storms, or deliciousness, or the child’s delight in destruction. Wildness may mean raven or dove. Untouched by civilization, by humanity. Animally estimated.

In Vesalius’ anatomy treatise the dissected bodies throw their discuses at the sun like superheroes, though flayed from top to bottom and inaccurate. They are triumphant. Sometimes I pretend to be William and he speaks like a lover: my love, my red love, my Achilles of petticoats. I listen. I throw up my hands in ecstasy at all the unknowing.