Petrushka: Proceedings of a Meeting on Severe Epidemic Phytonotic Syndrome (SEPS)

Conference participants on Lieutenant’s Island, Cape Cod: Susan Vo (report writer), Eric Hamlin, Caterina Borelli, Stephen Rapp, Elisa Hammond, Chuck Peters, Mariarosaria Cardines, Jim Cronin, Laura Frader, Jesus Ramirez-Valles and Doug Maclean. Andy Ramsay, on video from the other side of the Atlantic, provided the epidemiological update that was discussed at the meeting. Photo by Peter McCarey.

Events

Noon, Friday 15 September 2017: seminar at NYU Center for Experimental Humanities, hosted by Professor Sukhdev Sandhu

6-8pm, Friday 15 September 2017: launch at
Printed Matter, Inc.
231 11th Ave.
New York,

Prof. Sukhdev Sandhu of the Center for Experimental Humanities, NYU, organized a lunch-time seminar on Petrushka. Here he is with Caterina Borelli’s images in the background:

It was attended by students, staff, innocent bystanders and a few undocumented autotrophs. The more cautious participants kept to corners of the room.

That same evening there was a launch at Printed Matter, for which five of the original conference members converged on the venue: Chuck Peters, Elysa Hammond, Stephen Rapp, Mariarosaria Cardines and Peter McCarey.

A few minutes before the reading started the bookstore emptied out; even the staff disappeared. Fear of infection is a terrible thing. We read to an old gent who believed the pandemic was real and who was perhaps too terrified to move. We left him there and went off for a burger.

Chuck Peters, at the microphone, had said that half the topsoil on the planet had been lost in the last 150 years. He looked up and said “I didn’t notice any reaction to that”. Me, I had stopped breathing. Just as you think that Petrushka is only a story, you realize we really are in trouble.

Possible instances of severe epidemic phytonotic syndrome (SEPS)

At a memorial event for the poet Alexander Hutchison at StAnza this year, some rare copies of his books were given away. One contained this:

– Alexander Hutchison, “from Famous Last Words”, The Moon Calf (Edinburgh, Galliard, 1990), p. 65)

This is a classic description of phytonotic syndrome, decades before the conference was convened.

Another instance, with a non-fatal outcome, featured in the British Daily Mail:

illustration: detail from triptych… Metropolitan Museum, New York

Petrushka in New York

At the Met, a fairly thorough search for human-plant transformations in non-Ovidian cultures found only one example – though it was big:

Headdress effigy (Hareigna), Chachet Baining people, New Britain, Papua New Guinea, late 19th-early 20th century. Bark cloth, bamboo, leaves, paint.

(The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1969 (1978.412.1495))

“Carried atop the heads of dancers, the colossal hareiga … reached up to fifty feet (15 meters) in height … the tree-like bodies and tuber-shaped heads of hareiga suggest that they combine features of humans and crop plants, perhaps symbolizing the connection between the ancestors and a bountiful harvest”.

Before the Pandemic

In view of the Hutchison text above we cannot confidently date any event to “before the pandemic”. Nevertheless, this series of images by Caterina Borelli, presented to the conference at Cape Cod, portrays the conflicted relations between humans and autotrophs before SEPS took hold (item 1 of the agenda).