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Drawing an Ellipse

1962 A Book Review: Marshall McLuhan "The Gutenberg Galaxy"

If the human community is to retain meaningful possession of the knowledge it is accumulating, breakthroughs to syntheses of new order are absolutely essential.

Walter Ong

2022 A Dystopic Dispatch: The Atlanitc Magazine

WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OFAMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID

It's not just a phase. ¹

Jonathan Haidt

Sixty years separates Walter Ong's plea and Jonathan Haidt's rebuke. The failure to organize the sensorium is now a story of decadence, decay, and a loss of imagination. Sadly, this is also a failed decade for artists who found themselves play acting in a world of repetition and stagnation.

Recognizing this is a rough polemic, prolegomenon tags² with a series of "in and out marker-dates" and "guiding graphics" follow. While these tags won't quite explain how American life ended up so uniquely stupid (leave that to Haidt) the storyboard they assemble might offer tips on what to do now.

2015: The Guzzardo Septic Turn in the Space of Appearance five city tour began in Dundee Scotland, from there Edinburgh, New Castle upon Tyne, Plymouth, London, then back to Dundee. Septic told of creative statis, over-specialization, and how a sycophantic code got baked into a devolved and bankrupt-American elite. This Septic circuit was one bit in a string of exhibitions, lectures, and conferences sponsored by the Carnegie Trust Scotland. Labeled The City is a Thinking Machine, the lot was to mark the centennial of Patrick Geddes's master work Cities in Evolution. Septic Turn, as an art praxis drill, pushed the Perp Walk as an essential sensorium tool. The logo for this radar tool was Geddes's Medusa drawing. His Medusa jotting is from his notebook about devolution and cities of destruction. In classical antiquity, the image of the head of Medusa appears in the evil-averting device known as the Gorgoneion.

1927 Maurice McNamee begins his training as a Jesuit in St. Louis, Missouri. In his memoir Recollections in Tranquility, McNamee describes his first impression of St. Louis.

"St. Louis at that time was also one of the most polluted cities in the country because of the cheap soft coal available from strip mines in nearby Illinois. Every house and factory in the city belched clouds of pitch-black smoke, and most of the buildings had been blackened with soot."

1929 Father William McCabe completes his dissertation An Introduction to the Jesuit Theater. The same year the Jesuit priest earns his doctoral degree in England from the University of Cambridge. Later as chairman of the Saint Louis University department of English he reworked and published parts of his dissertation, but its entirety was only published posthumously in 1960.

1937 Father McCabe invites Marshall McLuhan to teach at Saint Louis University. Under the supervision of McLuhan, Maurice McNamee begins his doctorate on Francis Bacon's thinking and prose styles.

1938 Walter Ong arrives at Saint Louis University, he too starts a doctorate under Marshall McLuhan's direction.

1997 Jeff Daniel, a journalist with the St. Louis Post Dispatch, interviews Father McNamee and Father Ong. In McLuhan's Two Messengers both priests*,* now in their late eighties, speak fondly of their teacher, friend, and colleague Marshall McLuhan. They chide each other with "Mac" anecdotes as they called him, and what it was like for McLuhan to direct their dissertations.

2010 The son of Marshall and Corinne McLuhan sits for a radio interview with the St. Louis KMOX anchor Charlie Brennan. Eric McLuhan tells Brennan that from 1937- 1944 his father studied his Saint Louis University students, and that was the beginning of the media work.

2011 On the centennial of Marshall McLuhan's birth a Canadian author publishes You Know Nothing of My Work. In his McLuhan biography Douglas Coupland says McLuhan formed a posse in St. Louis. As Coupland tells it the posse was...

...the first members of Marshall's personal proto-Warhol Factory, whose ideas helped to codify and articulate the genesis of Media Theory that would explode in 1962."

2014 Simon & Schuster publishes The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson: Isaacson writes:

Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground. Instead of having a single cause, the great advances of 1937 came from a combination of capabilities, ideas, and needs that coincided in multiple places. As often happens in the annals of invention, especially information technology invention, the time was right and the atmosphere was charged. The development of vacuum tubes for the radio industry paved the way for the creation of electronic digital circuits. That was accompanied by theoretical advances in logic that made circuits more useful.

Isaacson's Innovation 1937 Checklist:

1937: Alan Turing published "On Computable Numbers". He proposed inventing a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence. In essence, Turing excavated the century old dream of Babbage and Lovelace for a completely general-purpose universal machine.

1937: Claude Shannon a MIT graduate student published a paper showing electrical circuits could execute logical operations using an arrangement of on off switches. In other words, you could design a circuit containing a lot of relays and logic gates. Scientific American later dubbed Shannon's paper "the Magna Carta of the Information Age."

1937: Howard Aiken wrote a twenty-two-page memo to his Harvard superiors and executives at IBM making the case that they should fund a modern version of Babbage's digital machine.

1937: Konrad Zuse a German engineer was working on and finishing a prototype for a calculator that was binary and could read instructions from a punched tape. (It got blown up in the war.)

1937: John Vincent Atanasoff, an assistant professor at Iowa State, conceived the first partly electronic digital computer. His eureka moment occurred in December 1937during a long impetuous drive one night from Ames cross the river to Illinois. After a decade of patent litigation, he is now credited with inventing the first electronic digital computer.

2018 Jessica Z Brown and Paul Guzzardo propose an add-on to Isaacson's 1937 register. The rider was called STL 37. It went like this:

In 1937 Jesuit Father William McCabe set up a base camp on Grand Avenue St. Louis for a Canadian's posse to map and triage what was to come.

This add-on was in the form of a request. It was directed to the Cultural Heritage Sector of UNESCO. The ask was for a designation of a New World Cultural Heritage Site, one more legacy notch. STL 37 proposed that Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and the rest of the posse, just like Turing, Shannon, Aiken, Konrad Zuse, Atanasoff, were prescient souls. As the e-switch was being flipped on this St. Louis posse saw a coming digital maelstrom. Brown and Guzzardo hoped that a "New- Media UNESCO Hallowed Ground Designation" would not only mark a site but provoke new tools to retain meaningful possession of the knowledge accumulating.

1992-3: Father Maurice McNamee and Paul Guzzardo collaborate on the design of a new entry for a 1912 concert-lecture hall. The design brief explored the ellipse as passage. The ellipse was not only an integral element of Jesuit baroque theater, it also was a facet of McLuhan's message.

In the Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan quotes George Poulet's "Studies in Human Time." He does it right after he talks about the Baroque shifting "the periphery of vision." Poulet's passage is about bits of passage and bits of us. "But to renounce the depiction of being for the depiction of Passage is not only an enterprise of unprecedented denudation; it is a task of extreme difficulty. To depict Passage is not simply to seize oneself in an object which fades away and by its own blurring, self appears more distinctly; it is not to paint a portrait of oneself which would be all the more faithful by the disappearance of all the traces of occasions which had led its creation. It is to seize the self at the instant when the occasions remove from it its old form and impose upon it a new one."

Maurice McNamee

2001: Saint Louis University Press publishes Father McNamee's Recollections in Tranquility. The five-hundred-fifty-page memoir is exhaustive, taut and seizes you. The storyboard he drew includes near a century of players and settings: a farm boy in Wisconsin, Missouri seminarians, heroic mentors, a world of literature, art, and piety. Deftly carved out, all there but the two years we worked together. Never a mention of the 1912 concert hall retrofit or cast of players. ³ Not surprising, the good Jesuit father was not one to speak ill. But in our kindly parting, and a priest's moment of frankness, he expressed something close to fury about how empty the elites were, the chosen, the ones we were bound to work with in our struggle to draw an ellipse. Our parting might have been an omen, a premonition of a coming stupid?

2007 The book was "The Jesuit Influence on Baroque Architecture." Father McNamee was completing his survey of baroque church architecture when he died. He was ninety-eight years old. The last of the posse, McNamee, credits Father McCabe for his passage into the ellipse. He wrote this in Recollections in Tranquility.

Father McCabe's courses exposed an entirely new horizon for me. It was a course on the Jesuit theater as it had developed at St. Omers, a Jesuit school on the continent for English Catholic students during the years of persecution in England. It revealed to me for the first time what an important part the Jesuits played in the cultural life of the continent before the suppression. The course was the fruit of Father McCabe's doctoral dissertation at Cambridge. He showed that the theaters were an integral part of an education in the traditional Jesuit collegium. They centered specifically on the annual production of a spectacular dramatic performance, which sometimes involved most of the students in the college and many of the city population. It was the duty of the rhetoric teacher to write the text of the play and to oversee its production. The settings for these plays were elaborate, demanding the work of expert designers in the baroque manner. Andrea Pozzo was a Jesuit brother and a world-famous theorist on perspective, as well as an accomplished baroque artist himself. Among other things, he designed the fabulous baroque fresco St. Ignatius in Glory on the ceiling of the San Ignazio Chapel of the Roman College. He devoted some of his time to designing sets for the spectacular Jesuit theater productions. The performances included musical accompaniment and formal dance, so training in both areas was part of the curriculum in the pre-suppression Jesuit schools. I was to learn later how completely involved the early Jesuits were in promoting the arts. They commissioned churches all over Europe designed in the elaborate baroque style, so much so that baroque is sometimes called the Jesuit style. The Jesuits certainly did not invent it, but they used it so extensively that it became identified with them.

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The one that followed the Father continued passage through bewilderment.

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Paul Guzzardo is a lawyer, media activist, and artist-designer based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
paulguzzardo.com @guzzardopaul