A colloid is a suspension of one or more substances in another. Two thirds of the ingredients of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich are colloids. A long time ago, I knew a guy who liked banana and mayonnaise sandwiches. (They smelled like house paint.) Only one third of his ingredients--mayonnaise--is colloidal. Protoplasm is a colloid, too, so when John Corliss Cranmer's giant amoeba gulped down first his daughter-in-law, then his son, people were the meal and the colloid was the eater of the meal. But then the people were made of cells brimming with protoplasm, too, and so it was a case of one big colloidal mass eating lots of little ones--if you're a reductionist, that is.
The word colloid is from the French, originally from the Greek. It means "a substance in a gelatinous or gluey state," originally, simply, "glue." Colloid as a word and a scientific concept is from the mid-nineteenth century, as so many things in our daily lives and so many of the ideas in our busy little brains are. There are other gluey concepts in science, collagen, for example, also the subatomic particles called gluons. There are also gluey crafts and gluey art forms. The collage is the most obvious example of these.
People have made collages for a long, long time, but the collage as a work of art dates from the modern period, maybe from the eighteenth century, certainly no later than the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso made collages and coined the term papier collé. Those two artists, along with Juan Gris, were originators first of analytical cubism, then of synthetic cubism. In analytical cubism, the artist looks at his or her subject from many different points if view. That's why, in a work by Picasso for example, you can see both eyes in a portrait seemingly done in profile. So, no, Picasso's people are not part flounder. In synthetic cubism--I think a more playful and not so mathematically exacting variation--a work of cubistic art is synthesized by gluing together scraps and cuttings of paper, thus the collage or papier collé. I guess making collages would have been hard to do before there was a mass and popular press as a source of material.
In moving towards synthesis, or what we might call literary collage, modern authors followed modern artists, I think. The art seems to have come first--synthetic cubism was in flower, if you can call it that, in 1912-1914. Then came the literary works, "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot, for example, in 1922, Show Girl by J.P. McEvoy in 1928, John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy in 1930-1936. I think we can include "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928) in that list, too. Several stories in the first issue of Weird Tales (Mar. 1923) include notes, clippings, diary entries, and so forth, as if the story were a scrapbook or a collage. That kind of thing would continue in future issues.
"The Call of Cthulhu" also has an analytical approach, as do other works of weird fiction that refer or allude to weird geometries, outré mathematics, and multiple dimensions. Maybe pulp fiction wasn't very far behind mainstream literature in the 1910s-1930s in its move towards modernism. But maybe the pulp fiction genres--especially science fiction--were a little bit ahead because they were in such close contact with the scientific developments of their time. Mainstream authors of the early twentieth century could disregard science. F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck didn't write science fiction. But then science and the future barged into the room and Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy, and Margaret Atwood did and have. How times change.
There will be more on Ms. Atwood in a minute.
Dr. Frankenstein made a kind of collage using parts from different bodies, plus an Abby Normal brain. His goal was the synthesis of life from non-life. "I had worked hard for nearly two years," he wrote, "for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body." Lightning was the literal spark of life by which he would do it. And so his monster lived. A long line of proto-scientists, semi-scientists, pseudoscientists, and maybe the rarest kind, real scientists, has proposed that early in the earth's history lightning infused life in what they have called the primordial soup or primordial ooze, ooze being a species of colloid. Anthony M. Rud seems to have alluded to the primordial ooze--or jelly in H.G. Wells' formulation--in his story "Ooze" (Weird Tales, March 1923). Since the early nineteenth century, real-life scientists seem to have followed the example of Victor Frankenstein. We, the world over, recently had a deadly encounter with their Frankensteinian brand of science in the form of a lowly virus raised to the top of a Chinese/U.S. government-built Tower of Babel. They'll do it again. We can be sure of that. Next time it's likely to be worse, but that will be good for them because they can take more of what is ours in the process.
Life arising from non-life, called spontaneous generation, was debunked a long time ago. But I guess debunked things don't always stay that way. For example, there are yet again people who believe that a person can change his or her bodily form by some magical process of mind or by a series of practices they call "care," practices that the rest of us can only consider criminal, immoral, and unethical mutilations of the human body, a kind of witch-doctory or pseudo-medical falling-back on superstition, ultimately a literal diabolism. People who can supposedly transform themselves used to be called shape-shifters or skin-walkers, and they did what they did by supernatural processes. Now they go by a different name and we're supposed to believe that there is science behind it.
From the moment we ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we have believed ourselves to be as gods and to hold in our hands godlike power, godlike authority, and godlike wisdom. Our punishment was expulsion from the Garden and a realization of death. The difference is that we once knew shame and walked in shame, out of the gates and into exile. Now there isn't any shame, only pride, or Pride as it is now capitalized. Now we walk in history every day, as the worst among us might say. Anyway, I guess if we're gods, we can create and mold bodies and parts of bodies, just as Dr. Frankenstein did. In creating our modern-day monster, we will fashion his/her whole body--his veins, his feet, his hands, his organs--everything, including a Frankenstein's schwanzstucker made from the flesh of her forearm--according to our own whims. It won't be real, but we will be required to call it real and her a man. It will in fact be grotesque, a monstrous simulacrum, at once a symbol and a manifestation of our reaching into hell in our efforts to reach into heaven, where we believe we are or shall be enthroned. And, no, she's not gonna be very popular because of it.
Margaret Atwood, who has been called a TERF because she knows what everybody in the whole history of the world knew until ten minutes ago, famously said, "Science fiction is rockets, chemicals and talking squids in outer space." As we know, squids are cephalopods and the bearers of tentacles. So Ms. Atwood has offended not only people who don't know what a woman is, but she has probably also offended a lot of science fiction fans with her opinions on these things. If you're an offended Star Wars fan, though, you might want to just slink away, the reason being that in the Star Wars universe, there is a literal talking squid. His title is Admiral and his name is Ackbar, and though his tentacles are small (they're more like the barbels of a catfish), he is a member of a race called the Mon Calamari, meaning, in una bella lingua of a faraway planet spinning on its axis a long, long time in the future, squid. (The noun is Italian, the possessive pronoun French.)
There are other tentacled aliens in the Star Wars universe. Oola is one. Ahsoka is another. They have tentacles coming out of their heads. The Thermians in Galaxy Quest (1999) are, in their true form, tentacled. They are one form but take another. Call them trans, I guess. Cthulhu of course has tentacles. In Frank Frazetta's interior illustration for The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1922), there are tentacled heads, called Kaldanes in the story, that frighten and horrify Tara of Helium. In Gino d'Achille's cover version, the Kaldanes are more spider-like. I believe the Kaldanes have both kinds of members, though, both tentacles and jointed legs. Maybe a Burroughs fan can let us know for sure. That reaching down through the neck to control a host body is also in The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein (1951), the Star Trek Episode "Operation -- Annihilate!" (1967), and, if I remember right, a skit on SCTV in which cabbage leaves attach themselves to the backs of people's heads. In the Star Trek episode at least, the controlling aliens are colloidal, made by the prop master from bags of fake vomit. By the way, the ninth book in Burroughs' Mars series is The Synthetic Men of Mars, originally published in 1939, and so we have another example of Frankensteinian synthesis in genre fiction.
Colloids are sometimes fun. Give a child a bottle of Elmer's Glue-All along with some construction paper and glitter and see how she entertains herself. But in science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction, colloids are more often gross, nasty, disgusting, and revolting--when they are not creeping, crawling, encroaching, and deadly in the way shoggoths or the Blob is. We have a different reaction to tentacled creatures, owing, I think, to our hundred-thousand-year experience with them. They are real, discrete, recognizable, nameable, alive. They look back at us with the biggest eyes in nature. And the smartest of them are very smart. More than any of that, though, they seem alien in their star-shaped or radially symmetrical bodies. It's no wonder tentacled creatures became the aliens of science fiction, or more accurately, why science fiction authors, beginning with H.G. Wells, would have fashioned the tentacled creatures of earth into aliens from outer space. Maybe we have atavistic memories of when octopuses first came to our planet, raining down on us in their iron spaceships.
We were made in the image of our Creator, and so we wish to create, thus our art and literature, among so many other great and wonderful things, including most of all love, which allows us an escape into eternity. Where we make our mistake is in believing we can create or re-create the things that he first created. And so Frankensteinian scientists, engineers, and technicians are busy. They believe they can create life (or that life was created) from non-life. They believe they can alter unalterable facts about human nature, human anatomy, and human biology. They believe they can make of us something beyond human, better than human, other than human, transhuman. They're working on synthesizing new forms from fragments of previously existing ones. The coronavirus and a million dead are one result of that. The supposedly counteractive "vaccine" and a million more dead are another. They also believe they can transfer the human mind into a machine, thus surviving their own deaths.* In fact, they appear to see little difference between the ghost and the machine. One can be the other. One is the other. And so we will soon have machines taking the place of human beings. Soon after that, our machines will probably enslave or kill us. If you have never read "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison (1967), you probably should, like right now. It may give you a glimpse into our caliginous--not collagenous but caliginous--future. Anyway, thanks, scientists, but ultimately, thanks, all of us, for we have all done this. Scientists--others, too--are only at the vanguard of our limitless depravity in our fallen state. We fall. The asymptotic curve of our pursuit of perfection--of a perfect and limitless depravity--moves forever upwards.
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*Having eaten the forbidden fruit, they believe that the knowledge they have thereby gained will reopen the gates and allow them back into the Garden.
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| "To Tara's horror, the headless body moved, took the hideous head in its hands and set it on its shoulders." Illustration by Frank Frazetta from The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. |
Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley
