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James Tilly Matthews, Engraving of the Air
Loom, from John Haslam’s “Illustrations of Madness”, 1810. Ink on paper. |
Consigned to Bethlem in 1776, James Tilly Matthews believed he was systematically being tortured by a gang of French spies operating a Mesmeric machine which controlled his mind and body in the following ways (and many others besides).
Fluid Locking – A
locking or constriction of the fibres of the root of the tongue, laterally, by
which the readiness of speech is impeded.
Cutting soul from sense –
A spreading of the magnetic warp, chilled in its expansion, from the root of
the nose, diffused under the basis of the brain, as if a veil were interposed;
so that the sentiments of the heart can have no communication with the
operations of the intellect.
Stone-making – The gang pretend
they can at pleasure produce a precipitation in the bladder of any person
impregnated, and form a calculus. They
boast of having effected this in a very complete manner for the Duke of
Portland.
Thigh-talking – To effect this,
they contrive so to direct their voice-sayings
on the external part of the thigh, that the person assailed is conscious that
his organ of hearing, with all its sensibility, is lodged in that
situation. The sensation is distinctly
felt in the thigh, and the subject understood in the brain.
Kiteing – This is a very singular
and distressing mode of assailment, and much practiced by the gang. As boys raise a kite in the air, so these
wretches, by means of the air-loom and magnetic impregnations, contrive to lift
into the brain some particular idea, which floats and undulates in the
intellect for hours together; and how much soever the person assailed may wish
to direct his mind to other objects, and banish the idea forced upon him, he
finds himself unable; as the idea which they have kited keeps waving in his
mind, and fixes his attention to the exclusion of other thoughts. He is, during the whole time, conscious that
the kited idea is extraneous, and does not belong to the train of his own
cogitations.
Sudden death-squeezing
by them termed Lobster-cracking –
This is an external pressure of the magnetic atmosphere surrounding the person
assailed, so as to stagnate his circulation, impede his vital motions, and
produce instant death.
commentary
source:
John Haslam, Illustrations of
Madness: Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity, And a No Less Remarkable
Difference in Medical Opinions: Developing the Nature of An Assailment, And the
Manner of Working Events; with a Description of Tortures Experienced by
Bomb-Bursting, Lobster-Cracking and Lengthening the Brain. Embellished with a
Curious Plate, 1810.
(1) In the madness of one
like Matthews (1770-1815) there emerges an unprecedented poesis of the machine
– imagination or fancy at the service of an obsession & a fear. Comparable in its appearance & workings
to Jean Tinguely’s twentieth-century “kinetic machines” or Marcel Duchamp’s
“big glass” (machine
célibataire), the latter with its equally remarkable verbal component,
Matthews’ “air-loom machine,” as it comes down to us, is a curious act of
collaboration between Matthews himself and John Haslam, resident apothecary at
Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane, who wrote down Matthews’ words verbatim (or
nearly so). The sense of fear &
trembling underlying Matthews’s account is reminiscent too of the elaborate
torture & execution device in Kafka’s In
the Penal Colony that carves the sentence of the condemned prisoner into
his skin before letting him die. That it coincides with contemporary fears (well-founded) of machine-based
mind control & governmental surveillance is also worth noting.
A fuller description of Matthews’s underlying delusions
& their intimations both of his mental state & of the world around him,
follows.
(2) “James
Tilly Matthews was convinced that outside the grounds of Bedlam, in a basement
cellar by London Wall, a gang of villains were controlling and tormenting his
mind with magnetic fluids and rays. The machine they had developed for this
purpose, the Air Loom, combined recent developments in gas chemistry with the
strange force of animal magnetism, or mesmerism. It incorporated keys, levers,
barrels, batteries, sails, brass retorts and magnetic fluid, and worked by
directing and modulating magnetically charged airs and gases, rather as the
stops of an organ modulate its tones. It ran on a mixture of foul substances
including ‘spermatic-animal-seminal rays’, ‘effluvia of dogs’ and ‘putrid human
breath’, and the discharges of fluid extracted from these substances were
focused to deliver thoughts, feelings and sensations directly into Matthews’
brain. There were many of these modulations, or ‘event-workings’, all vividly
christened: ‘fluid locking’, ‘stone making’, ‘thigh talking’,
‘lobster-cracking’, ‘bomb-bursting’, and the dreaded ‘brain-saying’, whereby
thoughts were forced into his brain against his will. To facilitate this
process, the gang had implanted a magnet inside Matthews’ head. As a result of
the Air Loom, he was tormented constantly by delusions, physical agonies, fits
of laughter and being forced to parrot whatever nonsense they chose to feed
into his head. His confinement in Bedlam represented the success of their
strategy in making him appear mad. …“The
machine itself was operated by the sinister, pockmarked and nameless ‘Glove
Woman’.” (Mike Jay, “James Tilly
Matthews and the Air Loom”, as seen at http://mikejay.net/articles/james-tilly-matthews-and-the-air-loom/
Mike Jay.net)
(3) “A paranoid is a man who knows the facts.” (William
Burroughs)
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