welcome, double agent

A column for Cabinet: An Arts and Culture Quarterly: The Thing

While living in New Mexico, I came across a glass display case at the university’s medical library that contained ephemera from the Tuberculosis retreats located in the surrounding desert in the teens and 1920’s. One panel documented a longer history of TB treatments within the greater US and included a fragile drawing made by a Kentucky TB patient, uncannily similar to the creature in question.

Prepared for the Speleological Oral History Record in April of 1912 by Phineas Hamil of the Kentucky State Cave` Society

In a more southernly county of Kentucky- and before the Civil War- Stephen Bishop, a slave speleologist, of African and white descent, dunked his hands in a sluggish and warm underground stream located within the cave that he regularly described as “grand, gloomy, and peculiar” to the tour groups he led for his master; when his hands emerged from the stream, he held within them a small, blind, luminescent creature from the phylum arthropoda. This freshwater troglodyte was the size of his fingernail. Stephen Bishop knew everything about these caverns –the fugitive slaves that took shelter underground before they continued northward, the paleo-indian mummies, the slender glass lizards, the pistolgrip mussels, the black gypsum deposits. However, he was not familiar with this animal. It was laterally compressed – not unlike whale lice or skeleton shrimp- and when he cracked open its legs they were hollow; its body cavity was an open space where tissue, sinuses and blood loosely floated.

Several years later, Dr. John Croghin, the new owner of the cave and of Stephen Bishop, had twelve wood and stone huts built within the cavern because he believed that the perpetually cool and humid air would heal the botched lungs of tuberculosis patients. Several died, the rest fled to drier climes, but one remained long enough to draw the only extant drawing of Stephen Bishop’s Troglodyte. The last specimen was found that year of experimental cavern treatment, in a silty pond not far from the huts. The creature was hardly breathing and it could not stand the weakest light, averting its so-called face, (which was translucent and smooth, save an orifice for eating) from the candle’s flame. Underneath the drawing, the artist cum tubercular patient inscribed in careful cursive: Croghin’s Troglodyte. Despite Stephen Bishop’s eventual manumission and the departure of other freed slaves in the township to Liberia, he stayed behind and died there. * * *

“The Thing”, a column in Cabinet: an Arts and Culture Quarterly, invites writers to conjure an imaginary history for an object that appears to have no easily locatable proviniance or use. Mary Walling Blackburn wrote the above description of an unidentified organic form for the magazine issue that focused on the Average.

Although this Cabinet column is supposed to give license to fantasy, certain aspects were lifted from the historical record. For example, tuberculosis (TB) was often treated in arid desert climes and Albuquerque was one of the “White Plague” (as it was then referred to) destinations. Another fact cited is that Dr. John Croghin owned and operated an unsuccesful TB sanitarium in Mammoth Cave. Finally, Stephen Bishop, was a flesh and blood slave speliologist who, according to some sources, declined manumission and a second life in Liberia. Contrary to some reader’s perceptions, the quote within the article’s guesswork, is in fact Bishop’s. He often gave tours to New England litterati (as Emerson and Thoreau’s constituents were known to trek here) and lectured with a similar erudition. Bishop was adept at discovering parts of the cave previously unknown to 19th century Kentuckians and locating signs of ancient Native American exploration. The cave was originally a saltpeter mine operated by slaves. (Saltpeter is a nitrate-rich soil used in gunpowder production).

Today, the cave is situated within a National Park and offers an artist residency.

The residency is not situated within the cave. The image above appears to be documentation of a performance in Mammoth Cave where young bearded men enjoy re-enactment drag (AKA Allison Smith). It isn’t. Kleitman, the “Father of Sleep“, the first sleep researcher and author of the seminal text, “Sleep and Wakefulness”, is investigating circadian rhythms. It is 1938. They have set up a bed on the gunpowder floor of the cave. The milky water pitcher, the flowered coverlet, the manner in which he kneels beside his patient communicate a sort of tenderness generally not associated with scientific research.

In regards to the parts where Albuquerque and tuberculosis are cited: The back alleys of Albuquerque often provide a clear view into the backyards of many houses. Situated at the backend of many lots are small inhabitable shacks that were originally built to house TB patients who had travled to New Mexico for treatment. In 1913, 50% of ABQ households contained a TB patient. 90% of these patients had traveled from out of state for treatment in New Mexico.Most of the sanitariums have been demolished. But another telltale remain of TB architecture are back porches with awnings, where patients with blood-filled lungs inhaled cool night air. Conversely, the stone huts in Mammoth Cave was filled with moist air and its patients died within a year.

“The Bull Rider and the Ballerina: Towards a Taxonomy of Falling”, by Mary Walling Blackburn, was published in the Flight issue of Cabinet: An Arts and Culture Quarterly.

Cabinet requested a photograph of my grandfather, a bull-rider and bronc-buster, to accompany the text below. However, the picture album of his rodeo wins and the winner’s belts disappeared with an old British girlfriend decades ago. She was untrackable. And because, ultimately, he had treated her so poorly, it was uncertain as to whether the album even existed anymore. Consequentially, he was represented by a photo that could be any cowboy mannequin read through various heterosexual and homosexual range life mythologies. The generic cowboy hardly communicated my grandfather’s lone dog rage or his ruinous sorrow- because this photo was a stand in- a performing cowboy.

And me, I perform class as well, multiple classes and sometimes many at once. That is what is at core to this text. How is class perfomed and who takes the fall for its inequities, its graceless dismount? How does class warp the form that gravity’s struggle takes?

The article originated in a course entitled, “Falling”, taught by Andre Lepecki in the Performance Studies Department at NYU. Professor Lepecki provided Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theater” but he also spoke of Monk crawling on his hands and knees from his piano to the bar and how that was somehow in correlation to the devastating space between the ecstasy of playing and the depths of the return to “this”, a world after the last note resolves itself. And unforgettably, rising from the remains of syncope- white spectatorship looms. Given this power imbalance, it becomes not unreasonable to ask, who does Monk fall for? Are his falls and resurrections repossessed by the Great White Other? And I wondered about my grandfather’s body, dragged from under a bull, drugged with drink, breaking the beast over and over again. For whose pleasure and whose salvation?

This article had a second life outside of the magazine. The board that administers the Canadian version of the SAT’s include a passage in the essay section. Callow, stressed, teenage Albertans are forced to analyze my class anxieties in Calgary gymnasiums. Is it fair? Do they remember?

This introduction will fold with the image below-a geometry of Basque sheepherders in Idaho [look closely]… perhaps its the loaner picture I would have liked to accompany the published text. Although his heart exploded, while walking down the street in Houston, my grandfather started here, in Idaho, in a town surrounded by ranches and their sheep, and a town eventually irradiated by Montsano’s chemical operations . I visited long after this article was published.

A geyser was located behind the town hotel; it discharged its spume by a timer installed by engineers. We ate in the hotel’s lunch hall and learned that my cousin, a rancher, had just sold the last of her sheep and she said it was a relief. While we ate, we learned that my Grandfather’s brother was beaten to death by local cops and maybe illogically, we felt new grief for old grievances. I know I imagined his brother’s body flying through the air from the force of their boots and finally, his falling to the ground, which is so green there.

To read the Bullrider and the Ballerina open this file: the-bull-rider-and-the-ballerina.doc

The Brooklyn Rail published the “Fire Manifesto” by M.W.Blackburn (November 2004).

Because I was teaching NYU art students how to write about art, the Fire Manifesto’s original purpose was to provide a quick, rough example of how a manifesto can be light, exploratory, and hopefully, a little bit off kilter- persuading its artist-reader to make her way towards weirder climes. Essentially, the “Fire Manifesto” claims that all art is improved if one simply adds flames. It is obviously one-dimensional and fails to include any real analysis of fire and its relationship to illuminated souls or revolutionary destruction.

Pictured below is the baby of evangelist Billy Sunday, lying naked on a pillow on a table in a room. The baby’s papa has a fire sermon in him we could just as easily call a secular manifesto.

The photograph was taken in Chicago in 1917. The exposure itself plays at sermon- referancing an old faith that made mangers of tenements and hay of newspaper copy. Each object appears to be degrading at the edges- whether it is swollen with a stain, breaking away at the edge or finely glowing. I find myself focusing on the hand raised to the air- a clean human claw testing the temperature. I find my eye floating upward to a pale rag hung on the door and then it just continues to circulate as if the gaze, too, could be a divine presence.

(The photograph remains in the Library of Congress.)

At the same time that I was writing the “Fire Manifesto”, I was working on an autobiographical essay, “C or F”, about a fire I had witnessed as a child in the desert and a preliminary exploration of the summers I spent with my biological father, a fundamentalist Christian, and his family. Somehow, each text careens close to fire without immolation. This is a problem.

Here is “C or F” (June 2004):

C or F
(Corrupted Hearts) (Fire) (A Memoir in Minor)

We stood in our yard while the desert burned. We stood in dirty bathing suits. The fire came down the hills towards us, my brother, my sister and I, and we watched. We looked straight through the dark to the bright sky directly above the smoke.

There were no trees to obstruct the view. There was endless sunshine. There was a hose in my hand. My brother and I had been flooding good water into every available ant hole. On the hills, helicopters flew in place over the burning houses; they treaded air. And my siblings beside me, small and sun burnt and strong, their hair blew around and it was the color of fire.

The yards flamed. Wild rabbits ran through burning creosote and cholla cacti. Their rabbit ears were singed and they were separated from father and mother.

Later, walking on the blackened earth, our eye stopped at the fine soot line where the flames had ended and the yellow grasses began again. Our house, followed soon after- never touched.

My stepmother warned us that the devil had made those shirtless boy children set fire to the desert that day. But it seemed to me that the boys who were burning their parents’ homes weren’t so much moved by the devil, as it was that the hands of god were moving through them- their parents were paying for taking what wasn’t theirs.

But how come the fire stopped short, I wondered? Why weren’t we subsumed?
We, too, had stolen land from an unnamed Native American tribe; to be precise, just enough land to build a three-bedroom track-housing unit surrounded by ant holes.

At eight years old, whether I looked at the burnt earth or highway wreckage or silky television footage of explosions and massacres, it simply seemed like some humans weren’t going to wait for hell to punish us; god’s will would move through us like lightening and we’d figure out ways to punish ourselves right here on earth – in this lifetime.

In this lifetime, we lived on Micmac Street in the Mojave Desert. The Micmacs were nowhere to be seen. This was because they are a Native American tribe that lives in the Northeastern Maritime. Their name emblazoned on a Californian signpost was part of my education in dislocation and appropriation. But the tribe wasn’t haunting the space by name alone- it was an emptier transaction than that. The tribal signage was a home school lesson in subtraction that bordered on the conceptual; a simple set of diminishing numerals were swapped for bodies separated from language.

Yet I knew white property, including our property, was suspect and I came to this early. My biological father was the sort of born-again Christian who also adored a sort of property-less and holy pseudo “Super Indian” he had single-handedly conjured. His “Super Indian” combined all the traits of all Native American tribes in one; “Super Indian” was a kind of companion Jesus- his bonus.

My father encouraged us to be like the “Super Indian”. We were to embody “Super Indian’s” love of wilderness, his relationship to animals, and his suspicion of ownership and outsiders. At the same time that we indulged our father’s redface minstrelsy, we felt tremendous guilt for what had been done onto the Super Indian/Jesus in order to ensure our own spiritual and material survival. But when we hiked through fenced properties, we continued to make up pseudo Super Indian names and suck on stones to distract ourselves from dehydration. The signs we ducked under read, “Trespassers will be shot”, and my father always recycled the same gesture, raising his fingers to his lips in the universal sign for silence. Later, we would thank God for our safe passage.

My born-again Christian family spent years, and I spent the summers I lived with them, navigating, this Fundamentalist Christian Imaginary –and in that burning desert, we voiced our fantasies in the form of prayer. Sure we praised piecemeal deliverance but we also prayed for a punishment that swept us clean of sin; a safe passage through a valley of death; a desert void of gunmen and pornographers. But these fantasies, masochistic and unrealistic, were unrequited.

And other visions rose in their deficit: when we hiked, my tall, pretty father always tucked a revolver into the back of his pants, between back and belt. Once he pointed to a concrete fortress in the distance and told us that he was dead sure that pornography was shot there. I imagined porn stars pressing their breasts and penis’ into the newly poured wet concrete driveway, the way we children pressed our hands into a fresh sidewalk.

The Final Fantasy is the Imaginary Fire: my family ‘s house exploding in flames and the blaze stopping short of our very old white Volkswagen bug. All would pile into the car – biological father, step-mother, half-sister, half-brother, foster brother, foster-sister, self, dogs and cat – and because my father had set his racing pigeons loose at the last moment, hundreds would fly in circles above where our home had been. Steam from the earth would rise up to meet them. The heat would touch their wings and they would fly higher. Underneath their formation, we would drive to Lotta Burger – the cheapest fast food burger joint in town – and before we began eating – we would- as always- link hands around the plastic table – bow our heads, shut our eyes – and say grace. Dear Lord thank you for this burger and fries…. and this time we would add And Lord, thank you for saving us from the flames that swallowed our home. We are eternally grateful.

The Domestic Struggle Part Two, according to curator Mike Wolf and the Network of Casual Art, is a series of travels, social events and an exhibition intended to draw links with, and speculate about, remote enclaves, marginal and alternative domesticities, caravans, refugia, retreats, marginal travel infrastructures, rural cultural networks, rarefied spaces, and hopeful place making.

The exhibition landed at Roots and Culture in October, 2008. Contrary to the associations (herbal and anthropological) one might have ascribed to the name of the gallery, it is a non-commercial arts space located in Chicago, Illinois. Wolf produced an accompanying pamphlet for “The Domestic Struggle Part 2″, soliciting writing from the participants. Wolf requested a fragment of a longer fictional work, “Begin Civil Twilight”, by M.W.Blackburn because the text’s narrators traversed the state of Minnesota, which is a state that figures largely in the show.

Here is a fragment of the M.W. Blackburn text, porch_ontology.doc, included in Wolf’s pamphlet.

When an email regarding the show was initially sent, a photo, featured below, of Air Force One flying President Bush over Gutzon Borglum’s Mount Rushmore was included, at my bequest. Gutzon Borglum and his gigantic sculpture works in contradiction to the Network of Casual Art; he resists place, displaces the local, and produces enemies with a breathtaking totality.

The National Park Services’ biography of Gutzon Borglum, linked above, will reveal his work prior to Rushmore, which includes a public battle over the gender of angels and a cursory history of Stone Mountain, the site of a botched memorial to major confederate leaders. Stone Mountain, later became a location for Klu Klux Klan gatherings and Mount Rushmore, an embattled ground for the Lakota Sioux who consider the carved open site sacred. Furthermore, Susan B. Anthony was the congress appointed (1937) fifth head never carved.

Arhitentonski Ninja means Ninja Architecture. It refers to the subterranean and marginally legal activities of the now deceased ‘Ninjaliscious’. He was a Canadian who specialized in scaling walls, rowing out to abandoned ships, limning rooftops, and the like. His zine was entitled “Infiltration.” M.W.Blackburn interviewed him for ‘Loudpaper: Dedicated to Increasing Architectural Discourse” (Volume 3, Issue 3, 1997). In June of 2004, Zarez, a Croatian biweekly paper, located in Zagreb, translated the article and republished it as “Arhitentonski Ninja.”

An excerpt from Ninjaliscious’s chronicle of the urban explorer:

“November 1793: Philibert Aspairt, considered by some the first cataphile, becomes lost while exploring the Parisian catacombs by candlelight. His body is found 11 years later.”

“1968: Inspired by the publications of the French resistance that operated through the catacomb network during WWII, Parisian cataphiles begin adopting pseudonyms and communicating with each other through printed paper leaflets they call tracts.”

Utility Pit, graphite on paper, 18″ x 12″, 2006.

Infiltration, An Attempt: January 2008

SK drove me to a series of old WWII munitions bunkers outside of Joliet, Illinois during hunting season. She had forgotten that the preserve was also a hunting ground and we were not wearing orange. In fact, we were wearing black and brown, as if we were a couple of hyper thyroid woodland beasts out for a murderous stroll. Each bunker was dusted in snow and it appeared that we were walking through a great avenue of burial mounds. We ate a picnic on a pile of wood and we failed to infiltrate the bunkers. They had been locked tight since her last visit, but we could hear the volumes of space within when SK knocked on the door. The sound took a long time to return to us. On our return, a man with large bow and arrow strode past. In the parking lot, other sleepy white men unloaded bicycles and weapons.

Jeanette Winterson cites another penetration of public space, but it is not in the league of a man-boy “buildering” the Sears tower with suction cups or a skateboarder mastering a cement ditch. Miraculously, it involves disrupted hunters on bicycles:

“In the late ‘60’s and 70’s she [Rebecca Horn] worked on one of my favourite pieces, Unicorn, where she made a costume for a fellow-student, and sent her walking in the woods, wearing it, at dawn one summer day. It is a cross between performance and installation. It is ridiculous and sublime. The woman is naked, except for her modest bandaging, and ‘there is a large unicorn (einhorn) on her head. ‘She agreed to wear it, albeit grudgingly, as she was very bourgeois.’
Rebecca Horn always laughs when she tells this story, and of the hunters who ‘fell off their bicycles.’ She likes her audience to collide with her work. She likes to unseat us.” Like a ninja? No. Like a ninja-unicorn hybrid? No. But the work does manage to be stealthy and magical. Moreover, it situates itself outside of permanent buildings AND the regular ways a body might rebel against the infrastructure.

“The Language of Explosion: Documenting Nuclear Craters in the American West”, by Mary Walling Blackburn, was published in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory in the issue on “falling” in the autumn of 2004.

The visual phenomenology of the crater has hardly been critically exhausted. For example, the article does not touch upon the photographs of bomb craters, created and photographed during the Vietnam War. On photos posted on veteran’s web sites, the craters take on multiple architectual dimensions- swimming pool, fish farm, emergency room. Where whence exploded bodies lay, soldiers swim. In other flooded craters, Vietnamese farmers raise fish. In the bottom of a dry bomb crater, US soldiers place their wounded men until the helicopter can evacuate. And so on.

To inhabit the crater, swimmer or the farmer, appears to have no truck with death. The swimmer or farmer defies culturally held notions that horror is locationally situated and that to dwell in its remains contaminates. But when they set up shop in craters, is it a cool refution of the past or is it a trembling dare? Does the crater dweller refuse to see a boundary between death and himself? And what of the viewer’s boundaries? How do we reconcile the fact that we notice the swimmer’s body in something that isn’t entirely outside of desire or the desire to laugh?

In the photo below, taken outside of Tay Ninh, the emerging soldier’s legs have been stripped of color; the photographer muses that perhaps the chemicals in the water had contaminated them all. And if we follow through on this line of thinking and realize that environmental cancers are sometimes created by this kind of contamination, we realize that a death by explosion can travel very slowly from a long ways of off. In an interview, Dee Dee Ramone (of the Ramones) describes an uncle who faught for the Nazis in Russia for six years. When he returns home to Germany, he goes swimming in a bomb crater and drowns. Making sense of this enemy soldier’s death is not unlike gaging the distance of the storm by its thunder; we can count the miles between explosive sound and its contact with the body.

Here is the pdf for “The Language of Explosion” language_of_explosion.pdf

“The Library is on Fire: Wood as Cultural Signifier”, by M.W.Blackburn, was published by ctheory (“an international journal of theory, technology, and culture) in January of 2007. The first draft was prepared for a conference, Words, Images, and the Framing of Social Reality, Graduate Faculty department of Liberal Studies, New School of Social Research.

Here is the link to the article

At the conference, a small homemade pamphlet (with an earlier version of the text published by ctheory) was distributed throughout the room. It was illustrated by small watercolors.

The paper was not read aloud; people could read the dense network of theory and observation later. Instead, other examples of burning libraries and perverted uses of wood were relayed and the oral transmission of lost information provided another model for storage, fragments passed from body to body. In that moment, a news story was retold- of US soldiers in Iraq bulldozing an ancient fruit orchard because village interviews had not revealed any data that was useful for the army. One soldier blared jazz music as he carried out his orders –crushing palm, orange, and lemon trees. Another soldier broke down and cried. The villagers stood beside. When the bulldozer was turned off, they gathered the wood for fire.

“Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: “They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn’t capture anything. They didn’t find any weapons.”"

“…Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a
distraught voice: “It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked
me how much my hands were worth.” [from The Independent, October 12, 2003]

Ten years ago, I was living in Saigon/ HCMC, Vietnam. At arrival, I followed other tourists from the airport because I had predicted that would be the simplest way to find shelter. At the time, foreigners were not allowed to live in private households. My hotel room cost four dollars per night and included breakfast. One morning, a white man was eating breakfast in the living room. He wore a white suit and had white hair. Beside him on the couch was a young Vietnamese man and I assumed the young man was his lover. The white man told me that street orphans were locked in the Saigon Zoo at night and that was the safest option. I had lived near the zoo in Seattle and knew you could hear lions roaring in the night. I remember thinking this but I also remember staring at the white cuff of his blazer, the thin hand, the metal fork, the yellow omelet. It was a simpler image for me, simpler than the imagined acoustics drifting across the imagined skin of abandoned boys. That was the origin point for the article, “Saigon Zoo”.

The owners of the hotel were a couple with one teenage daughter. The father often sat in the alley in a lawn chair. He was smoking. I remember only one conversation. He was describing a rice field full of ghosts. All of the ghosts were dead soldiers. He was smiling. There wasn’t any punch line.

My mother’s stories about the American-Vietnam War (ruined hometown soldiers, anti-war protests and her own stepfather’s six tours of duty in Vietnam) produced a compulsion in me to bear witness to the aftermath. I set up house in a district that was rife with prostitution. We, the hookers and me, ate at the same cafes, drank together, and hung out with the same men. What I mean is that my American friends purchased sex from these neighborhood women. One night, one woman prostitute showed up on the street with a newly shorn head. Her scalp was clean of hair. She was grinning and laughing to herself. It was difficult to match her smile. At that time, it was only the Buddhist nuns and monks who shaved their heads and I was wondering what she was claiming- holiness? Exemption?

I can’t describe her further except to say she was exceptionally tall and frighteningly beautiful; in that moment I gave up my preparations for a documentary on the sex industry during the Vietnam War. I suddenly knew the material was deeper and more ruinous than my abilities. This article is the sum total of my six months in Vietnam. Not long ago, one of my student’s in Chicago relayed that her sister was assigned this same essay in her urban theory course at Vassar.

I hear that the Saigon Zoo has much improved in the last decade.

The original article regarding the Saigon Zoo: http://www.loudpapermag.com/article.php?id=36

Because I have no pictures of the Saigon Zoo, I have attached a picture of a man baking bread for the bears at the National Zoo in Washington DC. I’m searching for the recipe.

“Eighty Left Feet: Revolutionary Footnotes” was written by Mary Walling Blackburn as invited writer for artist, Judd Morrissey’s “The Last Performance.” In his words: “The Last Performance is a constraint-based collaborative writing, archiving and text-visualization project responding to the theme of lastness in relation to architectural forms, acts of building, a final performance, and the interruption (that becomes the promise) of community.” It is in collaboration with Goat Island Performance Group and “is a project of the Andy Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital Arts’ Writers Grant Program.”

The invitation required two texts. The navigation of this site requires a certain patience and sustained curiosity. I am posting the link to the site here.

Here is a file for one of the documents if you would simply like to read one of the texts without searching for it: eighty left feet revised 2008

[The above photograph features a detail of a cupboard located in Room 10 of the Palacio Real in Sant Fe, New Mexico. Some historians have claimed- but not documented- that in 1609 Don Juan Onate ordered the construction of the Governor's palace to be built on the foundation of 'an old indian house.' What has been documented is Onate's amputation of eighty left feet of villagers in Acoma , New Mexico. Here, perhaps metaphorically, a house is swapped for a body.

This image is from the Library of Congress. It was taken in 1934 by M. James Slack.]

The 30 x 30cm Project, in Marfa Texas, functions as a “collaboration between Arber & Sons Editions and visiting artists-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation”. The essay on John Beech’s “Container Series” was written by Mary Walling Blackburn.

An alternate title is provided above.

http://www.30×30cmproject.com/volume6.html

In 1992, Professor Kristin Gager, who was then specializing in the history of French orphanages, brought my attention to “The Peasants of Languedoc” by Emannuel Le Roy La Durie. The following paragraph from Page 161 surfaces in the Beech article 15 years later.

“The third category [of signature]… is the simple sign or mark, which was evidence of complete illiteracy. It might be geometric or a “trade mark”- for an artisan “a rough hammer”, for example; for the peasants; a conical plowshare (reille) or rake. Very often the mark was a cross or else, at the lowest level, a meaningless scrawl or blob of ink.”