“There is no smallest among the small and no largest among the large,
but always something still smaller and something still larger.”
— Anaxagoras
When we speak of the internet we speak of looms. We speak of fabric, of threads unspooling; a Borgesian tapestry of total information, weaved into our lives, into itself, into our social fabric; webbed texts linked in threads sewn to other threads. Texts are textile in nature. In the many branched evolutionary tree of computing, between the great-great grandfathers of the analytical machine and the abacus, the slide rule and the calculating tool, is the loom. Silence is next to Godliness, and today’s silent microscopic transistors are but a few generations removed from the racket of wooden shuttles rocketing back and forth, from the panting and cursing of the factory floor, from clacking pedals and hawked tobacco spit. Sprouted from this first branch is the 19th century’s Jacquard loom. It possessed animal intelligence. It gorged on paper and shat out rugs. Its instructions were not in barnyard language— hollers, whoops, swatted rears— but perforated paper, reams of perforated paper, careful arrangements. The holes mean things, to the loom. This is the loom’s contribution to the computer, this new level of abstraction, where the symbolism becomes unintelligible to untrained eyes; this is not an abacus with strings of beads in base ten, this is not even a slide where the digits are at least legible, no, this is a new language, divorced from finger counting, this is a new world, where the density of information is too high for a human mind, even though the punches obey a strict grammar. There is wonderment here: you cannot predict what the finished weave looks like from the cipher of paper holes, and so finished it is magic. This is no reason to despair. In Lyon two men designed the papers for a prayer book, fifty eight pages long, to be woven in silk, each leaf adorned with the most intricate of images; Dürer woodcuts of Adam, Samson Rending the Lion, this is the apex of piety, this is perfection, we are becoming closer to God, and they say someday the looms will design the images themselves. Marvel at the efficiency, no longer do weavers need memorize complex designs or patterns, nor master thousands of tiny, intricate movements, the symphony of hands and feet and fingers; feed the machine paper and it can do it all on its own. A pattern maker need only punch the paper correctly once, a weaver needs to conduct the concerto perfectly every time. You lose the human touch, but the human touch has always been the puckering in the seam, the wen in the fabric, the unbalanced stitch, the flaw that unravels the garment whole and leaves you bare. Hide your nakedness, put on your clothes and stand upright, abandon the animal and the barbaric.
The Jacquard loom’s direct descendants were only derivative children, mere iterations of itself, focused on fabric and efficiency. Like Mary, it was the loom’s illegitimate child that was most divine. Fornication brings together the punched paper and the file card and gives you a new god.
***
In 1860 Herman Hollerith was Buffalo born and in 1929 he was Georgetown buried. His parents were German but he was true American stock, not because of his appearance (although in his high cheeks and blue eyes he emanated WASPishness and he could pantomime the affect of ‘good breeding and fine stock’ if called upon) but because he carried the national impishness, the refusal to abide by rules that to him did not apply. Attending elementary schooling in New York City he would slip out from his classroom just before lessons, the whisper of his coattails against the door frame lost in the clatter of desks opened and shut and chairs scraping on chipped tile. When the schoolmarm discovered this she locked the door before the next session. In response Hollerith jumped out the second story window. He landed in a newly planted buttonbrush, which, in the course of his fall and subsequent attempts to pull himself free of its thistles, he killed. He was expelled. His mother was then forced to hire a long series of private tutors whom Hollerith would torture with pranks and unsolvable riddles, chemistry ‘experiments’ whose results were predetermined and involved a measure of pyromania.
Hollerith also carried the frontiersman’s craving for isolation, for freedom from the demands and impositions on his character social society placed upon him. He did not understand people and this frightened him. Crowds overwhelmed him. While Hollerith’s mother, not entirely incorrect, attributed her son’s schoolboy mischief to boredom with material he had long since mastered, the reality was more oblique. When he had attended the boarding academy, the schoolyard games and tussles terrified him, because their conclusions could not be predicted or determined by set rule or formula or even rough heuristic. A deskmate was just as likely to throw a punch as share with him hard candy. This boy, so accustomed to knowing, to intuiting, withdrew in fear from that he could not comprehend. All his life, Hollerith would shrink from the individual, deriving understanding from the mass, from the aggregate, from data, from completeness.
At fifteen, the supply of tutors exhausted, he returned to New York City to attend City College, and then, at seventeen, Columbia University’s nascent School of Mines. He was restless, bored quickly, and in need of work, so one of his professors, William P. Trowbridge, enlisted him for a summer as a ghostwriter for a section of the US census, where he’d been employed as a chief special agent on machinery and mechanics. Hollerith had acne at his temples, a predilection for heavy coats, and the first traces of the walrus mustache he was to wear the rest of his life. He was eighteen years old. Hollerith turned in his report before Trowbridge had even commenced his own work and then set about wandering the halls of the Division of Vital Statistics, looking for someone else willing to offload their work to a fresh and restless undergraduate. John Shaw Billings, the department’s head, took a kind of cruel pity on Hollerith, and tasked him with auditing piles of paperwork in his office. While Hollerith mucked through the documentary quagmire, Billings would strip to shirtsleeves, kick his feet onto his desk, and eat nearly a quarter bushel of apples while complaining about the general disorganization and inefficiency of the census department. Occasionally, Hollerith would complain in turn from amidst the mountains of paper he approached knees first, his notepad overflowing with marked errors, claiming the entire census process could be mechanized and completed four times as quickly by means of symbolism on paper, “like a Jacquard loom, or the rolls of the player piano!” He would dodge the apple core Billings threw and his proclamations that “no idea you propose for the altering of our census is worth the air you expel in speaking it!”
And yet in the paper labyrinths Hollerith’s mind whirred, as he imposed order, his own order, his own sense-making on the data. He loved this, the categorization and summation of figures, enormous figures, immense quantities and values too large to be held in the human head but that could be wrangled and wrestled until they were subdued and understood. In the errata and datum, Hollerith first understood man. The census became an obsession. At first, he only stayed past Billings’ six P.M. departure, wandering the office’s enormous attached warehouse, pulling open filing drawers at random, rifling through handwritten intake forms and catalogue cards, making adjustments to their ordering as he saw fit. Soon he was sleeping on the floor of the coat check office and pilfering sandwiches from the nighttime janitors, who called him ‘Holly’ and remarked on his “occult comings and goings.” He was known to masturbate to the census forms of young women, but only to their memory, in the restroom, careful not to damage the original document. He slept rarely, agitated as he was, but when he managed he fell into half-dreams of cards and paper reams and ticker-tape that whirled around him, picked up by dust-devil winds; he saw himself wandering the Census archives with pen and paper, drawing arcane diagrams and maps, fumbling blindly towards complete and total knowledge.
A year into his work as paperwork jockey, Billings departed to direct the New York Public Library, and Hollerith was forced to return to his studies. Freshly nineteen, he graduated with a degree in Mining Engineering and was soon adrift in New York City. Although he had chafed against the structure of his education from the very beginning he now found he could not function without it. Without rules and authorities with which to struggle and argue he could not lasso his many divergent impulses and interests. He slunk between his former classmates’ apartments and prostitutes’ tenements, awake only nocturnally, given to rantings about automation and thinking machines and the end of writing. He carried with him rolls of paper he was given to brandishing in the course of monologue. His mother wrote him long, anxious letters that went entirely unread, except perhaps by the actual residents of the apartment Hollerith claimed to be renting. One morning his temporary roommate J. Holdsworth Gordon awoke to a draft in his studio and discovered the front door ajar. Of his meager possessions, only Hollerith’s worn overcoat was missing. As in his boyhood, he had slipped by the coattails out into freedom.
He train-hopped West, dodging ticket-takers and porters the entire way, taking refuge in lavatories and luggage compartments, jostled about among shit and suitcases alike. His eventual goal was Indian Territory, as far into the frontier as one could travel by rail. He pursued doggedly this goal, conning and conniving, performing a fumbling impression of a respectable coastal banker who had run out of liquid funds. He eschewed sleeping cars and slept upright in his coat in the bulk seats, ears tuned for footfall. Like a cat burglar he became an expert in the procedures of trainmen, a scholar of their routes and processes, weary of their pistol-like hole-punchers they carried in holsters like sheriffs. To prevent discounted multi-trip passes from being shared between travelers, conductors punched in information about the passengers’ hair and sex and build into their tickets. Hollerith became obsessed with these “punch photographs,” and it was this fascination that ultimately forced him off the train.
It was just after sunrise a January morning, the tallgrass of the plainsfields dew frozen, immobile in the wind, orange earlylight glinting kaleidoscopically off the grass stalks, starlings firing like arrows from the thatched brush quiver. Hollerith in his cheap seat, half awake, muttering to himself exhaustion warped versions of his New York ravings as the ticket-taker worked the aisle, rousing the unconscious farm hands and Mormon missionaries westward bound. After nearly a week aboard, the clang of the train bell and the rattle and shuttle of wheel on track had rendered Hollerith numb and stupid. The conductor approached him and asked for his ticket.
“I will sir, but I ask that at first I may inspect the instrument you are holding, there.”
“This?” the man said. He held the ticket-puncher up to his eyes like he was seeing it for the first time. He looked at Hollerith, who was shivering, shaking, snot nosed. “I think not. Ticket, please.”
“Yes, I have it here,” Hollerith said, patting about his overcoat, “but I must register with you my curiosity. By what mechanism does the device cut? Does the lever bring the blade to the paper, or is the die cut immobile and the paper lifted heavenwards?”
“Damn it, son. Just give me your ticket,” the conductor said, and he reached towards Hollerith’s breast pocket.
Hollerith leaped from his seat and, slight though he was, into the conductor, who was knocked to the floor. The ticket-puncher went clattering. Hollerith, hunching away from the rain of fists and feet of the rail crew and passengers now about him, dove for the hole punch. Although he managed to hold it a moment, given that he was prostrate, he was soon bound, hog-tied, and summarily deposited in Knoxville.
The historical record loses Hollerith here for a period. Neither Gordon nor his mother had any idea of his intentions or whereabouts. Around the alumni soirees passed absurd rumors that he had fathered a son somewhere west of the Mississippi or that he had run for the state legislature of Illinois, lost, and then committed suicide by exile. And yet, in muggy May 1882, the Boston Institute of Technology’s cocksure and cock-eyed senior class found themselves eligible for a seminar entitled “Advanced Studies in Hydraulic Motors, Descriptive Geometry, Blacksmith & Metallurgy, and other Curious Subjects” taught by one Herman S. Hollerith. He taught over the summer, in steaming classrooms where he never removed his tattered coat, his mustache dampening and then dripping over the course of a lecture, speckling his handwritten notes with water spots. He held permanent and continuous office hours, as this allowed him to stay in his stinking office overnight, tinkering with punchcards and ticker-tape, reams of it strewn about with no respect for order or precision, the mirror of Billings’ five years past. He ran electricity through the window. He did not sleep, at least not in the way men sleep.
At this time, the apparitions returned. Several of his students’ journals from this time make notes such as these: “visited Queer Prof. Holly & the poor man was beset by beings and notions I could not myself discern” or “went to Hollerith. The entirety of our meeting he answered questions I did not ask, addressed to a David, and an Abraham”. Some nights he groped darkly through Boston’s halls, lost in the labyrinth, an amalgam of buildings colonial, purpose built, acquired; Hollerith in his coat, tails fluttering, the chest pocket over the heart torn asunder, speaking in low voice to himself. Were a stray student or professor to cross his path, he would nod curtly and continue on, safe in his belief that they were but one of the specters that besieged him.
And yet he managed to administer his class successfully and received high marks from his students in their evaluations. He was invited to return for the fall semester, to teach two sections of “Curious Subjects,” but he balked at repeating the same course, and quit the Boston Institute of Technology entirely. He vanished again, taking his mysterious “crude experiments” with him in crates.
In 1884, destitute and near starving, he was forced to take a job at the US Patent Office, as an Examiner. He worked there four months, before he was fired for bottom-decking applications he felt verged too closely on his areas of research. He moved back in with J. Holdsworth Gordon, at this point an apprentice banker, who allowed Hollerith to live in his stately apartment so long as he allowed Gordon the right of first refusal on any future business or product he produced. In 1885, at twenty five, patents began to appear in his name: “The Art of Compiling Statistics.” “An Electric Means of Calculation, Processing, and Tabulating Data.” “A Computing Device.” All were approved and granted, most within the year, a speed of processing entirely foreign to the paperwork-drowned office, a fact not lost on auditors, who sent Hollerith a long, accusatory letter. He used it as tinder in Gordon’s enormous fireplace. In need of a larger workspace and more tools, Hollerith enrolled in the doctoral program at Columbia under the condition that he not be required to teach any classes and that his grants and time would be afforded to that which he had been working on the last five years, what he now called the Electromechanical Tabulation Machine.
***
“The herein described method of compiling statistics…”
An elaborate network of multi-latticed grids intertwining about each other. The dance of precise elements. Electricity, dials, heat. Impulses that run in steady time from one coil to another. There are no transistors yet, or silicon, only laborious copper, wrapped and aligned according to involuted diagram, to the dictates of arcane chart and creed, the domain of the appearing figures.
“consists in recording separate statistical items pertaining to the individual by holes or combinations of holes punched in sheets…”
The quiet whine of the punch card feeding through the tabulator. Chugging. A slight hitch in the pull-through of the card. He had travelled to a mill in Kentucky that still had a shed of Jacquards in operation and he had wept as he watched a kitsch tapestry of The Fall manifest before him. He did not weep for beauty, or for art, or for mankind, but at the waste of such technology for religious drivel, and because he knew then it could truly be done, he could build it, he took notes and sketched several studies of the loom in his journal and thanked the mill’s proprietor and masturbated furiously into bushes alongside the road to town.
“These data, bearing a specific relation to each other, and in turn to a standard, are counted and tallied, in separate or in combination, by means of mechanical counters operated by electro-magnets…”
The indicators in the glass, like an array of pocket-watches, ticking up and down on the basis of the observed data. Here are men and women in their constituent elements, the binaries that mark their person: age, sex, race, children. In separate was useful, it was easier to read the indicator dials than the punch card, which was written in a kind of code unfriendly to eyes accustomed to plain English. He of course preferred the card to anything bearing a hand’s touch. “The circuits through which these processes are controlled are directed by the manner of perforation in the sheets, substantially so, and are for this purpose set forth…”
But it was in combination that was the wonder, the magic; when he fed a stack of dummy cards and watched, in real time, the means and deviations and outliers shifting on the basis of each, when a stack completed he almost understood what it meant to be a man.
“These I have tested on the deceased of Maryland and New York and New Jersey. I have conducted a census of the dead, a roll call of our civic graveyards and morgues, and I have compiled the accordant statistics…”
This machine is the gestalt of death.
***
After he was awarded his doctorate for the statistical device, he founded, with Gordon’s backing and goodwill, the Hollerith Electric Tabulating System, which sold all manner of Hollerith contraptions, but whose real purpose was sale of the Electromechanical desk that gorged on punch cards. The 1880 census had taken nearly a decade to process, and the 1890 census was due to begin. With Billings’ good word, Hollerith entered into contract with the census bureau to manufacture, lease, and service nearly ten thousand of his machines at a bill of nearly five million dollars. Now census takers could ask nearly two hundred questions; name, children, language, religion, country of origin. For the first time, a national government could conduct a complete profile of every man in its borders. His machines were shipped to Washington DC from New York in whole barges and assembled by the hundreds in drafty warehouses along the Potomac river. When the cards came in— by hand, by mail, by donkey and telegraph and boat, in dribs and drabs and torrents, in sacks and crates and piles, one for each American, and for each non-American in these borders, each man a card— when the cards came in, it was the image of eighteenth century textile floor, repeated: endless acres of tabulators in narrow rows, women in billowing, sweat-stained dresses, spitting and swearing and loading cards by the armful. In 1894, census completed, America possessed total awareness of each of her children, their bodies, their minds, their work. By 1900, England, Italy, Russia, Austria, Canada, France, and Norway bought Hollerith’s machines for census, as did every public insurance company in the United States.
In 1911, Hollerith’s firm merged with four others to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. Hollerith, aging and senile, the victim of corporate politicking, was shuttled off to his Georgetown townhome, where he erected fifteen foot tall fences around his yard and installed electrified lines on them so that when cats scaled them he could electrocute them. He died there, alone, embittered, fabulously wealthy. In 1924, under the presidency of arch-capitalist Thomas J. Watson, the CTR Company was renamed the International Business Machines Corporation. They kept his name, some places, as a mark of respect or maybe fear. Their German branch, for instance, was called Dehomag, for Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft.
***
We cannot understand figures, you or I. We were meant for simpler things, counting berries, counting fish. Tasked with describing the enormous, we resort to tired metaphors. It doesn’t matter whether we reference the number of stars in the sky or the sweep of salt grains spilled on a tablecloth— for the purposes of understanding, density is unimportant, whether the scale is blown across the sky or confined to the dinner table. Infinite insects toiling underfoot, in our walls, tunneling through solid brick, day by day leaving us buckshot and cold. Printing the whole figure is equally insufficient, the long march of zeroes in neat battalion rows blurs, becomes punctuation, becomes white space, loses meaning, becomes the particulate in the beams of dust whorling before your windowpanes, becomes another bit of data we throw our hands up at. This is why we have the machine, give it to the machine. Consider atoms, or angels on pin heads, the language is unimportant, better to give a name to the number and pretend all parties comprehend it. And what schoolboy did not possess a fascination with the names of numbers, with their growing larger and larger, tacking on digits, digits, inventing mathematical euphemisms to save breath and ink. New notations. We compared them in the schoolyard: a million, a billion, a googol, googolplex. Visualize them as you will. Even in the federal warehouses, rat filled, the air like feces from cheap ink, gazing across the wide sea of shelves and cabinets, I could not ever glimpse a million.
As a young man, in the years following the war between the states, I became obsessed by the blood toll, the body count. Challenged in conversation regarding that conflict I could only cite for you what existed in the popular consciousness, the common wisdom and words that one never truly learned, only absorbed, but in my mind I held ledgers for each skirmish and battle, for each man starved and boy shot. One and a half million died in toto, I believe, and at bloody Gettysburg fifty three thousand. Narrative has never held water for me. What use is there to the story of one man when there were five hundred thousand alongside him? Better to convey scale, impact, scope; better to convey immediately totality. Perhaps we will never know the quantity of corpses created by this great war, the great mounds of men, the trenches even with the surrounding earth if only by the bodies in them. I have no doubt it is enormous and unsurpassable.
As is true for every entry, I am aware of the irony in recording here, scratching down what meager thought I have left. Perhaps it is a form of speech with oneself. There is immense selfishness in journal-keeping. In my peaceful death I will become surely, rightfully, one tally among an nearly infinite stock this century. And yet I am a selfish man. I have made no secret of this in my life, and I shall not do so now. I am tired, and I wish to rest my hands and eyes before the lamp burns low.
Were that I still had my work!
HH
July 2 1928.
***
At Döblin’s Alexanderplatz woman battalions descend, young golden haired Margaretes, country minded, cardboard boxes in their arms, Margaretes descend and scuttle like insects down freshly washed steps to the basement of the PSO office, to a door half cracked, spring, nineteen thirty three, three hundred women, a box each, in a line at the half cracked basement door, golden Margaretes waiting and straining under the weight of cardboard boxes they hold above the damp pavement, red signs, no smoking, geheim!; when the line moves watch a hundred blond halo’d heads ripple like millipede legs over the square and out into the side streets, they have come from Berlin, Munich, Chemnitz, from pastoral green farms and thrumming arrays of steel, anonymous hundreds, they are women to their own but in this line they share a newfound sisterhood, identifiable by red pins and sashes that say Emissary of the PSO, and they smile and chat and plan to meet for cigarettes after, there is a firm clerk at the door, a gatekeeper inspecting, itemizing, initializing Margarete after Margarete, she may step inside and she may place her box on the cart now, danke, two of the red sash’d and red cheek’d boys, poor in class and wealthy in spirit, they shuttle a full cart round the corners to the great hall, a great hall well-lit, upturned copper bowls burning electrically and casting no shadow, there are no dark places to hide in the great hall, no alcove, niche, sewer, attic, let the electric sun shine on this great people and their commendable industriousness, another set of initials and the boxes are loaded onto a rubber belt that rings the room, like an American assembly line, the hall twenty-two thousand square feet, former headquarters of the unemployment office, how beautiful the irony, how uncynical, that this is now be a place of great pride and labor for this people noble and long suffering, follow the box along the track, everything pristine, the rubber hosed down nightly, the cobblestone mopped every morning before the standing army of clerks arrive, see the hives of desks beside the belt, rows and rows, see the gold matrons at each, a bank lamp, a silver letter opener, a number two pencil, an ink pad, a stamp with the signature and swastika, and in the middle the electric desktop processing machine, clacking, humming, smelling of ozone, twelve dials flitting slightly, waiting for ever more input. There is a nameplate stamped in silver on its lid and it reads IBM and it reads Dehomag and it reads Nazi. A box will arrive as soon as she finishes the last, she will stand up straight and with both arms lift it from the belt and place it on her desk and draw the letter opener slowly across the seam and then pull forth the twine bundled cards and set them on her desk. Located at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz in spring nineteen thirty three is the Prussian Statistical Office, and the Margaretes even now are in their home places, in Dresden and Stuttgart and Görlitz, city and countryside alike, astride horses, feet, busses, writing into field and road their paths, in troublesome neighborhoods accompanied by broad stormtroopers and handsome officers, filling by pen, pencil, by ink or graphite, at every home, every door, every hovel, one survey per household, three hundred questions, who lives here, how many, your work, your mother tongue, place of origin, religion, party affiliation, they each woman they are alike in that they have no taste for politics and their hearts are free of hatred but they agree there is something foul afoot, there is something in the air, an obscene stench blowing in on westerly winds, but they set aside their fear, because there is work to be done and here is their contribution: they will take the forms and they will go from tenement to shack to palace asking questions and collating and filing and mailing forms to the Central Processing building just a block from Alexanderplatz where they will be translated into loom language. These Hollerith machines are custom. They have a special chute. They will read twenty four thousand cards an hour for twelve hours a day for thirty days. Certain cards are ejected from the machine into a basket on the floor. The boys take these into a room, a small room, office of the former unemployment commissioner. The radiator is leaking. Things are crawling and scurrying. This is the most important room. These cards go on a ledger and then away to a vault in the Reichsbank. In the main hall are wooden benches lining the wall where schoolchildren can watch the clerks work. They are encouraged to take notes. Pens and pads are provided for this purpose. It is more initiation than earnest study, because even if they could make out the cards they could not read them, intricate dots, foreign grammar. The cards are fractals. In nineteen thirty three the word fractal did not exist. It comes from the Latin, fractus, past participle of frangěre, meaning to break, but fractal really comes from French, defined by the Jewish Polish-French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. He was from Warsaw. A boy. He tended horses, thought of owning one someday, brushing coats, stiff bristles. His family fled Poland and the Nazis for France in 1936. After complex and discontinuous aeronautics and mathematical schooling, in 1958 he too went to work for IBM, at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York. They told him to think about noise. Noise is natural error, ambiguity, inexplicable in its origin. It is a pattern where none exists but also an abstract smear over clear data. Noise exists between any two electrically connected points in transmission. It is a law of physics. On a telephone it is the squawk, the static shriek, the pulse of positive and negative impulses smashing against one other. Mandelbrot discovered noise gestates in packets, in bunches and bundles, in predictable time, and that there was an underlying logic, a hidden structure, a definable geometry of chaos. Noise is an audible manifestation of natural fractals. In nineteen thirty three the cards are fractals. Fractals are just shapes, shapes with detailed structures at an arbitrarily small scale. Card punches exist in arbitrary density, there are punches and punches and punches in combinations that limit and redefine other punches but each punch signifies something, the forms are limited to one topological dimension but split off into the fractal dimension, topological dimension meaning the one you exist in, where you draw breath into your lungs and sing and drink milk and run. If you examine a Mandelbrot fractal and put your nose to it and expand it the fractal reveals a recursive set of itself inside of itself inside of itself with infinitely more meaning and implication; there are mathematical, representational bodies and there are human bodies that are stacked or piled. A fractal has infinite density and thus infinite informational density, recurring and linking and becoming itself, containing everything and signifying nothing, signifying nothing but itself, that it exists, that somewhere in the night burn fires made from men, away from here the fractal is expanding, taking on context, volume, enveloping everything, you will lose yourself in this, it will drive you mad and then some, knowing this, reading this, you sit at your desk, like Kohler you live your life in a chair, typing, reading, with no means of locating yourself. You will read connections where there are none and you will map patterns on dark hills and you will ascend into space like smoke.
Among the noise in these cards exists a signal. Punch four hundred and thirty one: Jude.
Below the subterranean Margaretes a behemoth is nursing. It is a growing body composed of bodies, and forms, and paperwork; this will be a body of schedules, train times, and deliveries; it will be a body of factories, and laboratories, and conventions; and when this body lumbers across Europe, footsteps becoming valleys, cities becoming fields, men becoming ash; when this body eats the people and the land, it will have done so with signatures, and tables, and with the assent of scholars and mathematicians, with the projections of businessmen, and with the passions of the easily persuaded. There have been others like it and there will be more.