Atmospheric things and circumstantial excursions

Travel advisory ¹

Everything is settled and ready for my excursion; and, if the weather proves favourable I shall go up to-morrow.

Hi,

There’s a fairly dramatic weather warning in place for tomorrow – can you give me a call/text in the morning if you are affected – XXXXXXXXXX I don’t know your actual arrival time and where from?

If things are bad – we may re-jig the programme – and if you get a re-allocated flight then you might join us later/Friday if that’s possible - but just keep in touch and see what transpires …

Hopefully - it will just be a lot of (not so) hot air and not too disruptive …

Safe travels,

Hester

******

Thanks. I actually decided to go for the train in the end – It means I won’t get in until about 1:30. I’ll miss the opening remarks (sorry), but it might mean that I am not blown away by the wind. If the train is delayed I’ll text.

Best

Derek

******

As events transpired, the train did not arrive into Glasgow until late in the afternoon, too late for my scheduled presentation slot. In addition to Hester’s warning, other signs had been there: radio reports of an approaching low pressure area, predictions of possible structural damage, strong advice against non-essential travel. No day for an excursion or jaunt. And, as I set out, there were other omens, if one chose to read them, which gave some shape to the theme of my stories and the conditions into which I might be travelling to deliver them. The cover of The Economist (3rd December 2011, UK issue) purchased early that morning in WH Smith’s, Oxford train station: a cover which, under the heading of ‘Into the Storm’, featured a balloon with an envelope in the colours of the Union Jack approaching billowing cumulonimbus clouds with a fork of lightning in the corner. ³ The balloon was supposed to represent the British economy as it faced and flew into the buffeting turbulence of broader economic conditions.

As I think of this cover now, I begin wondering again if I am telling the right kind of stories. I could be using the balloon to tell more expansive tales of more global states of affairs: stories of how economies are narrated as relatively discrete and fragile entities adrift in a turbulent world and subject to periodic shocks and crises. I could be telling stories of how the properties and movement of balloons and atmospheres can be used to indicate and explain both economic processes and their management. I could be pointing, for instance, to how the Bank of England uses the balloon to tell a story – to younger listeners and viewers – about how it fights inflation:

You are about to go on a balloon flight. Once you’re airborne, rain or snow will cool the balloon making it lose height, while the sun will warm it up to make it go higher. The height of your balloon represents inflation. As the pilot, your job is to keep the balloon flying steady at 200 metres – just like the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee tries to keep inflation at the Government’s 2% target. ⁴

And why stop there? I could be telling even more ambitious tales. Stories of the universe: of its shape, size, and rate of expansion or inflation. ⁵ Stories, indeed, of the very shape of reality in process: reality which, following Henri Bergson, might be understood as ‘global and undivided growth’ resembling ‘a gradually expanding rubber balloon assuming at each moment unexpected forms’. ⁶ And I could be telling stories of the psyche, or mind, as a badly behaved, ever-inflating balloon which, as William Butler Yeats puts it, ‘bellies and drags in the wind’, impossible to keep in its ‘narrow shed’. ⁷

And yet, as the train travels towards Glasgow, idling too long in stations and edging along partially flooded sections of track, and as it opens up and stretches out the interval before the event, I resist the call of some of these balloon stories: but not all. As best I can, I hold on to some sense of the shape of the stories that I had set out to tell, while incorporating minor deviations arising from the circumstances of the event.

In a way, the stories I had set out to tell were also crystallized in the cover image of The Economist: stories of balloons as vehicles for geographical and narrative excursions in atmospheres. Stories that really begin to become public – and indeed start to generate publics – during the late 18th century. Stories that continue to circulate in the present, albeit without such a sense of public anticipation and wonder. Stories, on one level, of ‘Travels in the Air’ in a craft whose horizontal direction is only partially governable, but whose ascent, according to 19th century scientist and balloonist James Glaisher, ‘leaves the observer entire [sic] free to note the phenomena by which he is surrounded. With the ease of an ascending vapour he rises into the atmosphere, carried by the imprisoned gas, which responds with the alacrity of a sentient being to every external circumstance, and lends obedience to the slightest variation of pressure, temperature, or humidity’. ⁸

While they can be told in many ways, my balloon stories are tales of the excursions of atmospheric things: stories of the tense but potentially generative relations between atmospheres as turbulent, relational, processual fields and the form of apparently discrete things that move within while also being shaped by the properties of these fields. Following Michel Serres, I understand atmospheric things to be shaped forms irreducible to objects that are ‘immersed in a turbulent cloud of solicitations that we’d have to call meteorological’. ⁹ More than this, atmospheric thing also refers to the sense of a happening in process: the concept of atmospheric things, like the storm outside, designates the sense of the shape of forces as they make a felt difference across and within bodies, both human and non-human.

The stories of atmospheric things that follow emerge from an interest in how tales told of the excursions of these things are inevitably inflected by the properties of those things, and by their capacities to move and be moved in different ways. These are stories shaped by the processes and relations from which things – as apparently discrete presences – emerge. ¹⁰ They are also stories that take seriously Alfred North Whitehead’s assertion that ‘according to the ontological principle there is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere’. ¹¹ And they reside in the narrative spacetimes of materialisms that foreground simultaneously the turbulent processes and relations generative of shaped forms and the properties and capacities of these forms as things that appear as relatively discrete, partially enclosed entities. ¹²

Companion travellers

I had with me a balloon, enveloped, for some reason, in a plastic bag, as if that might afford it some form of protection. And I planned to tell of how this balloon came to accompany me to Glasgow.

As so often, this story began with a show and tell. Specifically: the first act of an induction field-course for graduate students beginning an MSc on which I taught. A field-course held in an adventure centre in Dorset, late September, 2011, during the first night of which we went around the room: objects, images, mementos, well-thumbed books. ‘Telling small stories’ of interests, practices, aspirations, and events: stories of selves and worlds that need remaking together. ¹³

Eventually – awkwardly – it came around to me: me, who had in haste forgotten to bring anything, me who had forgotten the necessity of his own participation.

Question: What would you have brought, if you had brought anything?

Answer: A balloon.

Some form of impression must have been made. Forward a little to Thursday, December 1st 2011, a week or so before my trip to Glasgow. An end of term Christmas party organized by those same students. A Secret Santa. When my turn comes I am gifted a cluster of balloons adorned with various phrases and concepts remembered, only partially fondly I suspect, from classes I have been teaching.

On the way home, I carried this cluster through streets of revellers. They fully occupied their own seat on the bus home. The children found them early next morning, and their presence seemed to add some pre-festive feeling to a December breakfast. I thought then about how your relations with such things had changed so quickly: about how the differences between you had diminished: about how you had both adjusted, grown fond even, of the presence of these things. About how it had not always been this way: time was at birthday parties when one of you had chased balloons around for the simple shrieking pleasure of popping them, while, at the very same time, the other had recoiled at their mere sight. But now they drew you both together, as if by some attractive static.

The following day, Friday 2nd, while on the London Underground between Marble Arch and Oxford Circus, it came to me: take the balloons to Glasgow. I remember because I wrote it down. Allow them to participate in some, yet to be determined way. Allow them to have an excursion, of sorts, of their own. Later in the day, having spent three hours on a coach journey from London to Oxford that should normally only take half that time, I lowered my ambition. I should take only one.

And now, travelling northwards, I am glad of a less voluminous lot, glad to be relatively unencumbered by fragile companions and their care.

Glasgow balloon excursions

Before the well-timed gift of the cluster, this is how I had imagined beginning, how I had imagined responding to the circumstances of the promising call for participation.

In 1785 the Italian aeronaut Vincenzo Lunardi undertook five balloon excursions in Scotland, including two in Glasgow. Unsurprisingly, public balloon flights were a novelty in late 18th century Glasgow: the first demonstrations of practical balloon flight had taken place in France a little under two years earlier. Fascination with the spectacle of things becoming airborne was therefore still very much in the air, and Lunardi’s balloon generated intense interest, with large crowds paying both to see it inflated and to witness its ascent. According to The Glasgow Advertiser, ‘upwards of 100,000 spectators assembled’ to witness the launch, ‘among whom were the greatest number of Ladies ever seen in Glasgow’. ¹⁴

Like many early aeronauts, Lunardi knew how to mix chemistry and charisma. He also possessed an acute sense of the value of anticipation to the intensity of the promised event. And he had learned from experience that crowds gathered in anticipation are affectively volatile collectives. Just over a year before, Lunardi had undertaken one of the first aerial voyages in England from St. George’s Fields, London – an event attended by up to 150,000 spectators. ¹⁵ Lunardi’s London ascent followed earlier, much advertised, but ultimately unsuccessful launches by other aeronauts, the failure of which generated sufficient anger amongst the assembled crowds to threaten the safety of both balloon and pilot. Eager to avoid this situation, Lunardi’s attention during the hours before his London launch was divided equally between the inflation of the hydrogen balloon and the mood of the crowd. At some point he realized the inflation was proceeding too slowly, and would not be completed by the appointed time for launch. Lunardi made a quick decision designed to calm the assembled spectators: he would begin his ascent before his balloon had been fully inflated with hydrogen, and would ascend without his full complement of advertised passengers. And so:

At five minutes after two, the last gun was fired, the cords divided, and the Balloon rose, the company returning my signals of adieu with most unfeigned acclamations and applause. The effect was that of a miracle on the multitudes which surrounded the place; and they passed from incredulity and menace, into the most extravagant expressions of approbation and joy. ¹⁶

Such balloon ascents – and especially Lunardi’s – were exercises in a form of showmanship. These ascents are also reminders that balloon excursions are atmospheric not only in a meteorological or gaseous sense: they are also atmospheric in an affective sense. These excursions, and their mere prospect, have the capacity to generate and modulate affective relations across and between bodies. Both senses of atmosphere are central to stories that gather around its excursions. In the early days of balloon flight, the mere promise of a spectacular aerial excursion was enough to generate an affective atmosphere of anticipation. And publicity, the storied mediation of the promised event, was crucial to amplifying the anticipation that gathered around and funded these enterprises. For the aeronaut, newspapers, advertisements, and pamphlets were central to generating collective interest in the prospect of a launch. And for those interested in selling a tale, a balloon story promised a public audience:

The Public are respectfully informed, that Mr. Lunardi, the gentleman whose aerial Excursions have rendered him so much the Subject of Fashion and Applause, has written to a Friend at LANCASTER, that he intends to EXHIBIT and ASCEND with his Grand BALLOON, in that town, during the ensuing Races, which commence of Tuesday the 7th of June. ¹⁷

Circumstantial propositions

Not wanting to burst it, I place the balloon on the luggage rack during the first leg of my journey, from Oxford to Birmingham. Beyond my immediate attention, the balloon continues, nevertheless, to address me; or, in Alfred North Whitehead’s terms, it continues to proposition me. ¹⁸ And it does so as a lure for thinking and feeling atmospheres in both a meteorological and an affective sense, offering an invitation to think in the spacetimes between the primacy of process and the intrusive presence of affective materials taking shape as discrete things. For Whitehead, a proposition is not only a speculative assertion about the quality of some worldly phenomenon. It is also the alluring call of the world as it makes the actuality of its becoming felt differentially. Propositions, then, are ‘tales that perhaps might be told about particular actualities’. ¹⁹

Balloon stories are tales that might be told of the actualities of atmospheric things: they are stories shaped by the properties of these things and by the relations and processes from which these things emerge. In other words, these stories are circumstantial. As Geoffrey Bennington, in a discussion of the writing of Jacques Derrida notes, circumstances both ‘bind events into their contexts’, while also ‘just stand[ing] around’ as ‘contingent accessories to a fact or event to which they are not essential’. ²⁰ Elsewhere, as Michel Serres describes it, circumstance ‘describes three things superlatively’. ²¹ First, it gestures towards the ‘imprecise surroundings of subjects, objects or substances’. Then, and second, it denotes ‘highly unpredictable chance occurrences’. And third, the idea of circumstance opens up ‘a tricky history of stasis and equilibrium, disturbances and returns to the original state, deviations towards the fluctuating environment’. ²² If we follow Serres, then, circumstance becomes a way of giving consistency to atmospheric things via partial enclosure or envelopment while also remaining open to the halo of forces, fluctuations, and deviations that both shape the form of this thing and remake it by taking it elsewhere. ²³

Circumstances lead writing and thinking ‘astray’. Because of this, circumstantial writing, like circumstantial evidence, is often understood to be inferior to writing possessed of a strong sense of direction: circumstances are taken to ‘inflect what is imagined to be a good directionality of thinking’, and to ‘deflect [the writer] from the trajectory that the thought is supposed naturally to have, and want to follow’. ²⁴ This is also the very appeal of circumstantial writing, however: it responds to circumstances as the call and refrain of the worlds that gather around and as things. This mode of address moves between circumstances and whatever thing or event they fringe, in the narrative spacetimes populated by what Kathleen Stewart calls the ‘unformed objects’ of a ‘compositional mode of writing’. ²⁵

Circumstances pose the question of how to string together the ‘productive work of the local and its temporary movement, space and time’ ²⁶ : to foreground the circumstantial qualities of stories therefore involves the loose gathering together of a series of semi-bounded enclosures that are always open to the call of the fluctuations and deviations that fringe their ‘membrane or skin or frontier or wall’. This means telling circumstantial stories in a kind of episodic form, in a kind of ongoing enclosing and opening along a skin, surface, or membrane that is both a boundary and a zone of generative exchange. Circumstances are not self-contained, however: each story is, in this sense, what Serres might call a kind of exchanger.

Circumstantial stories of balloons and their excursions can be told in ways that run transversal to parallel efforts to produce a situated history of the emergence of new ways of seeing or being mobile. ²⁷ Inspired by Serres then, my circumstantial balloon stories also take something from the style in which Lunardi narrates his balloon excursions, without necessarily rehearsing the tenor or tone of their telling. Lunardi tells the story of his aerial excursions in a particular genre – the letter: his balloon stories are a series of letters addressed to patrons and friends. Similarly, my balloon stories draw heavily upon mediated public and fictional accounts of the balloon as a device for excursions that generate affects and experiences of variable reach and duration. Crucially, these excursions do not always involve humans as travelling companions: at times they involve only balloons as windblown, independent travellers as they address and are addressed by the relations and affects of worlds beyond the agency of the human.

#Theskinofthething

The storm forming as I travel northwards is the worst to hit Scotland in a decade or so. It began forming – or at least its process of formation began to be recognized and publicized as such – sometime on the 7th of December. It continued taking shape as an ‘explosive deepening’: a meteorological event generated when cold and warm air bodies meet with a resulting pressure drop greater than 24 millibars over a 24 hour period. ²⁸ And it made its presence felt as a meteorological event known sometimes as a ‘weather bomb’.

As it approaches and begins making its power felt in Scotland, the explosive deepening begins trending on twitter, even if I am completely oblivious to this fact. It trends for a time under the hash tag ‘snowstorm’. And then under the hash tag ‘bawbag’, a term I learn, long after the event, is the Scottish word for scrotum, and is used, pejoratively, to name an annoying, mischief-making, although hardly malevolent, character. ²⁹

The UK Met Office issues a Red Alert, warning of the possibility of widespread disruption to transport and power infrastructures. The advice is not to travel unless circumstances make it absolutely necessary.

Ghosts

With little sense of what awaits me in the North, I spend time between trains in the quasi-subterranean world of Birmingham New Street station. Having exhausted the cover and contents of The Economist, in another WH Smith I buy a book whose title on the shelf intrigues – Dark Matter. ³⁰ A ghost story set in Svalbard that tells of the affective matter of memory and the unsettling spectrality of presence. Not having read a real ghost story for goodness knows how long, I have a passing interest in the spectral qualities of encounters with Svalbard, shaped by a fascination with Salomon Andrée’s failed 1897 balloon expedition to the North Pole, and so I buy the book. ³¹ And as I travel northward I really do feel that delightful tingle of vicarious fear. It is so long since I have actually been tensed by the idea of a shadowy malign presence that I have forgotten how enchanting it can become. And after some resistance, I give in to its lure.

A deepening immersion in the story of what happens to Jack as he overwinters at the fictional field station Gruhuken is accentuated by the parallel sense of comfortable disquietude that comes with being inside while a storm rages beyond the window. In a strange way, like Jack, albeit for different reasons, I start to enjoy this simple sense of enclosure, beginning to ‘welcome the storm’ as ‘a known physical force: a rush of snow-laden air, generated by pressure differentials’. ³² Atmospheric pressure outside the train intensifies the palpable sense of spectral presences inside. And as I read, my imagination bellies and drifts and I speculate upon the figure of the explorer and balloonist Andrée. I think of him sitting alone somewhere in the gathering dark on Kvitoya, in September 1897, his companions dead, with nothing but a layer of canvas between him and the elemental. I think of him warding off real and spectral presences while fading into the future.

Elemental matters

I don’t believe in ghosts. But I believe that the palpability of atmospheres is generated by pressure differentials, and that the shaping of atmospheric things is the form of these differentials. And I believe that stories of atmospheric things might begin in the physics of meteorological forces, with the behaviour of atmospheric gases as they move from high to low pressure zones. Or, going further, and following the invitation of Michel Serres, I believe such stories might begin in the midst of the turbulent multiplicity of matter: stories that might challenge any sense of a point of departure, a launch site, or the final shape of a form that registers as the sense of a thing. I believe in stories telling of energies prior to their presencing in the extrusive and associative formation of a world of partially tangible things.

I believe in the possibility of telling periodic tales of elemental matters. ³³ Tales of hydrogen: lightest and most abundant of all the elements; profoundly affective, solicitous, with the capacity to combine, often explosively, with almost anything. Tales of helium, that least affective of all the elements: inert, colourless, odourless, tasteless, and whose existence was only confirmed in 1868, in the sun. Tales of ‘levity’: that strange gas understood mistakenly by the Montgolfier Brothers during their aerostatic experiments to be the essential ingredient of hot air. I believe in elemental stories telling of eventual actualities irreducible to the vocabulary of either objects or things: stories of gaseous states of affairs becoming fields of immersive and generative potential. ³⁴

Partial envelopment

And yet, I also believe that for circumstantial stories of atmospheric things to be told, some degree of ‘enclosure’ is necessary: ³⁵ hydrogen, helium, hot or cold air must be contained, enveloped, if only ever partially and briefly. Put another way, gaseous states of affairs become articulated through a technical process of experimental spherification in which new capacities to act are generated through folding materiality upon itself in a process of differentiation. ³⁶ So the story of atmospheric things is also one of the circumstances of partial enclosure stitched along the pleats of matter, along the seams and skins of technologies of envelopment through which emerge discrete, fabricated presences held in place by differences in density rather than structures or scaffolding. This is a topological process, in which ‘hand and gaze devote themselves to connecting the far and the near, or to creating varieties from a simple line: flat or voluminous, tight or loose, dense or scattered’. ³⁷ More basically, this is a process that begins when ‘hand creates with thread or cable an eye or aperture through which to pass, thereby opening up a distinct interval’. ³⁸

Stitching

The seams of Salomon August Andrée’s balloon, fabricated at the Lachambre Balloon workshop in Paris during the 1890s, were ‘4400 metres long, with 3 or 4 rows of stitching representing a line of single stitching equal to a length of 14,000 metres, and the total length of the cemented strips nearly 9000 metres’. ³⁹ Earlier, during the siege of Paris in 1871, balloon factories were established in two railway stations, and in one of these stations, ‘there might be seen every day nearly a hundred women, silent and attentive, marking with mathematical precision, by means of a pin and card, the distance between each point’. ⁴⁰

The unavailability and expense of silk forced the balloon makers of the Paris siege to use calico. This material was made ‘gas tight’ by being varnished by linseed oil and lead oxide. ⁴¹ The gas-tightness of the skin of the balloon has been achieved in other ways. ‘Goldbeater’s skin’, or more precisely the ‘outside membrane of the large intestine of the ox’ ⁴² , was used to fashion airships and balloons in the late 19th and early 20th century. During the First World War, the ‘collection of goldbeater’s skins was very systematic’ in Germany, and ‘each butcher was required to deliver the ones from the animals he killed. Agents exercised strict control in Austria, Poland and Northern France, where it was forbidden to make sausages’. ⁴³ The skins then went through a complex treatment process before they were glued together by a ‘gluing gang’ that ‘consisted of one forewoman and eight to ten women stationed on both sides of the table. The first two women spread, over an area 1 x 1.3 metres, about 250cc of glue at about 40 Degrees C. The next two women unrolled the fabric and held it up. The next women stretched it and applied it with brushes. These operations had to be performed very rapidly, for the glue hardened on cooling’. ⁴⁴

Thinking topologically like Serres means understanding envelopment not so much as the generation of an object, but as the shaping of generative relation between what Serres would call two ‘phases of matter’. The first such state is gaseous. The second phase is textile, a phase glimpsed in: ‘veil, canvas, tissue, chiffon, fabric, goatskin and sheepskin … all the forms of planes or twists in space, bodily envelopes or writing supports, able to flutter like a curtain, neither liquid nor solid, to be sure, but participating in both conditions. Pliable, tearable, stretchable … topological’. ⁴⁵ This might be taking Serres too literally, of course: but it helps us think of envelopment as a particular relation between different states of matter, a process in which matter folds in on itself, generating the potential for variation in the power and properties of things. And, as Serres also reminds us, with the crafting of the skin of the enveloped thing, a turbulent field of atmospheric gas is ‘organized into an exchanger’. ⁴⁶ And an exchanger allows the diffuse, the atmospheric, to pass into, and give volume to, the circumstantial qualities of the body of the local as a sensing, feeling actuality.

Yarn

The balloons ‘were made of a strong but light Lyons silk, coated with gutta percha. This gummy, resinous substance is absolutely water-proof, and also resists acids and gas perfectly. The silk was doubled, at the upper extremity of the oval, where most of the strain would come’. ⁴⁷ Placed one inside the other, the balloons provided a vehicle for a five-week journey across Africa, in a tale told by Jules Verne. Verne, it should be noted, had a particular affinity for Scotland, and visited the country on two occasions. Yet he was rather unimpressed by what Glasgow had to offer, even if he used it as a backdrop for one of his stories. ⁴⁸

With Five Weeks in a Balloon, Verne’s first commercially successful novel, the balloon becomes the perfect vehicle for stories of geographical excursions mixing science fact and speculative fiction. Central to such stories is the spectacular promise and pleasure of the view from above. As one of his characters notes, from the vantage point provided by Verne’s balloon, ‘the scenery slides along under you to be looked at’. ⁴⁹ Here Verne is merely rehearsing a refrain running through many earlier stories of actual balloon flight: suspended aloft in a basket beneath a balloon it became possible to see and describe the world anew, from a distance, map-like. ⁵⁰ To be sure, as a vehicle for geographical excursions aloft, the balloon offered promising pedagogical opportunities. Eight years before the appearance of Verne’s novel, Samuel Goodrich published an educational travelogue of sorts under the unwieldy title of The Balloon Travels of Robert Merry and His Young Friends Over Various Countries in Europe. For Merry, Geography was ‘a description of the earth’, but his young friends are sceptical when he initially suggests that the balloon might provide a vehicle for such description;

On dirigibility

Merry admits that the promise of the balloon as a vehicle for such pedagogical-geographical excursions turns around the issue of dirigibility: that is, around the question of how to steer lighter-than-air things. In the late 18th century finding the solution to the problem of dirigibility only seemed a matter of time, effort and ingenuity. During his early ascents Lunardi equipped his craft with oars and paddled away believing he was in some way determining the direction of travel and altitude of his balloon. But as the late 18th century was the 19th, the problem of dirigibility became no nearer to being solved. Thus, in Travels in the Air, published in 1871, the scientist and aeronaut James Glaisher noted: ‘the Balloon should be received only as the first principle of some aerial instrument which remains to be suggested’. ⁵² As he continued, ‘to guide the balloon in any horizontal direction appears now as far from practicable as it has ever been. We start from a given point to go where chance directs. The compass we carry with us, not that we may steer our course along a given route, but trace by it the erratic and ungoverned movements of the machine that carries us. We traverse perhaps the segment of a huge circle, the line of our path in space. We proceed and return, advance onward, now gently, now with velocity’. ⁵³

Granted, there are ways in which balloons can be directed by taking advantage of the direction of the wind at different altitudes. But the promise of early balloon flight gave way gradually to a realization that true dirigibility in lighter-than-air craft was not possible. Unlike a sailing boat, for instance, which exploits the difference between the densities of water and air, the balloon, when aloft, is immersed fully in the atmosphere, and therefore has no way of moving against, or disagreeing, with this medium. Balloon excursions involve wandering and drifting according to the speed and direction of the winds. While points of departure for balloon excursions are exact, landing sites can often not be determined in advance with any real precision.

Strange journeys

To take seriously the promise of the balloon as a device for telling circumstantial stories is to respond to the possibility that what may have been a problem and frustration for the early aerial traveller is precisely what might open up interesting ways of telling tales. And it is to realize that a tale with a clear sense of direction and a uniform speed of travel might be the most fantastical of all:

The excellent Kennedy began to feel excited, and yet the vision raised before his eyes made him dizzy. He regarded Samuel admiringly, but also in fear. He already felt as though he were hovering in space.

‘Look here, Samuel. Hold on a bit. Do you mean to say you’ve found a way of steering balloons?’

‘Rather not, that’s utopian’. ⁵⁴

The aerial explorers in Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon do not propose to solve the problem of dirigibility in any direct sense. Their intention, instead, is to control the height of the balloon in order to make use of prevailing winds at different altitudes. And they intend to do this by ‘expanding or contracting the gas contained in the envelope of the balloon by changing the temperature’ of the gas. ⁵⁵

For Verne the balloon is a vehicle for a style of semi-random wandering that links different spacetimes according to prevailing circumstances. And his novel becomes a series of landing sites strung together by lines of open-ended drift. These are journeys whose arcs can be traced via the on-going process of ascending and descending, expansion and contraction.

The narrative spacetimes of which the balloon, as a technology of movement and mobility – as a spacetime machine – are generative, are not strictly directional, even if they may have directional tendencies. They are composed of all kinds of loops and deflections, shortcuts and wormholes creating opportunities for telling stories that fold in and back on themselves in multiple ways. These are what Serres, who is particularly attentive to the qualities of Verne’s spacetime machines, might call ‘strange journeys’. To travel and indeed think with the balloon is to undertake ‘voyages through a plurality of spaces, by means of an exfoliated multiplicity of maps’. To tell of these journeys, ‘one must lose oneself from space to space, from circle to circle, from map to map, from world-map to world-map. According to chance, along the thread, following the warp and woof’. ⁵⁶

Serres’ own writing exemplifies the qualities of these journeys. Indeed, if not read in this way, the topological logic of his pages and paragraphs, which frequently track back and forth across times and places, make little sense. As Laura Salisbury puts it, this style reflects Serres’ own view that the ‘philosopher is simply attentive to the way in which things become unexpectedly close or distant within a temporality that is chaotic and turbulent, a time that is more meteorological in its movements than classically historicist’. ⁵⁷ To take Serres at his word means thinking with the balloon as an imaginative-conceptual vehicle via which to compose strange journeys: journeys that stretch between things as circumstantial gatherings.

Updates

Thanks 4 message. Will let you know if I have 2 turn back. But should be fine. Love, X

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Hi Hester. In preston. Speed restrictions from here 2 glasgow (50mph instead of 125) so can’t say what my eta is. Best, Derek

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3.30 at earliest into glasgow according to train manager.

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Might just make it

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Hey no rush we have rejigged

Powers of the false

It is easy to send up the worthy ambitions of stories of balloon excursions. In Tom Sawyer Abroad Mark Twain tells of a farcical trip in a supposedly dirigible balloon. Drifting over the United States, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn wonder about their whereabouts:

‘Well, then, it’s just as I reckoned. The professor lied.’

‘Why?’

‘Because if we was going so fast we ought to be past Illinois, oughtn’t we?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Well, we ain’t.’

‘What’s the reason we ain’t?’

‘I know by the color. We’re right over Illinois yet. And you can see for yourself that Indiana ain’t in sight.’

‘I wonder what’s the matter with you, Huck. You know by the COLOR?’

‘Yes, of course I do.’

‘What’s the color got to do with it?’

It’s got everything to do with it. Illinois is green, Indiana is pink. You show me any pink down here, if you can. No, sir; it’s green.’

‘Indiana PINK? Why, what a lie!’

‘It ain’t no lie; I’ve seen it on the map, and it’s pink.’ ⁵⁸

A device for humour, the balloon can also be the vehicle for hoaxes. The hoax is a staged public tale of a happening designed to ‘deceive, but only for a time’. ⁵⁹ The event-ness of the hoax is also unstable, exceeding ‘the intentionality of the hoaxer, with the possibility that they will show more than they intend – or something other than what they intend’. ⁶⁰ Edgar Allen Poe understood this more than most. On April 13th, 1844, a balloon story of his appeared under the following headline in a special supplement to The New York Sun:

‘ASTOUNDING NEWS!

BY EXPRESS VIA NORFOLK:

THE ATLANTIC CROSSED

IN THREE DAYS!

SIGNAL TRIUMPH OF

MR. MONCK MASON’S

FLYING MACHINE!!! ⁶¹

The Sun was a penny-daily, the most successful of a new kind of newspaper whose emergence, growth, and circulation had been made possible by advances in print technology. It was sold on street corners by a network of newsboys. Poe understood the power of these newspapers to circulate stories and their affects. He also understood the importance of the formal properties of the successful hoax. As John Tresch notes, Poe’s balloon story ‘reproduces the principles of the technological news article, with the content suggested by the public’s fascination with mechanical wonders and details supplied by various pamphlets and encyclopaedic sources’. ⁶² His tale was also full of technical description and reproduced a journal of the experience of the aeronauts, which unfolded ‘with the same graphic precision (with occasionally effusive passages mimicking the style of its alleged author, Mr Harrison Ainsworth) as did the description of the balloon’s construction; each mechanical difficulty and perceptual novelty is duly recorded, with the author monitoring his own predictably ‘rapturous’ responses along with the progress of the balloon’. ⁶³ In this way the Balloon Hoax sent up the machinic production of news stories whose affects are consumed by mesmerized subjects. Indeed such was the interest generated by the hoax that Poe could not lay his hands on a copy of the newspaper in which it appeared. On April 15th, 1844, a retraction appeared in The Sun acknowledging that the story may have been erroneous, the author adding that ‘the description of the Balloon and the voyage was written with a minuteness and scientific ability calculated to obtain credit everywhere, and was read with great pleasure and satisfaction. We by no means think such a project impossible’. ⁶⁴

Poe’s balloon hoax is one of many. On October 5th, 1851, a Mrs Russell and her family sat down for lunch at their home near Gloucester, England. They noticed a balloon in the garden, and a servant was dispatched to recover it. The balloon had a message attached:

Erebus. 112 Degrees W. Long: 71 Degrees N. Lat. September 3rd 1851. Blocked in. ⁶⁵

By that point, the Franklin expedition had been missing for six years. The Admiralty launched an investigation, determining that while it is not impossible that a balloon might travel the 3500 miles or so from Franklin’s undetermined location to Gloucestershire, it is likely this one had not.

Or the ‘balloon-boy’: six year old Falcon Heene, son of Richard, who, after it was discovered that he was not in a large foil balloon that had floated across Colorado in October 2009, declared that ‘you guys said, um, we did this for the show’. As with Poe, this event was really about the machinic production and circulation of affective stories. As one commentator put it, ‘For several hours on Thursday, Richard Heene’s publicity stunt mesmerized US networks as they scrambled to broadcast live footage of the flying-saucer shaped balloon feared to be carrying his six-year-old son. Yet within 48 hours the drama was exposed as a sham, leaving many outlets wondering how they had been duped by a man who claims to be a descendant of aliens and who once had a close encounter in a fast-food restaurant bathroom’. ⁶⁶ And another: ‘Now it’s instantaneous – there’s no research, no thoughtful producing. It’s all about getting a story, getting it on the air and getting viewers. And what that translates into is this kind of hysterical journalism which feeds on itself. There really is no perspective anymore’. ⁶⁷

Alice in Wonderland

How far – really – might a balloon with a message actually travel alone?

Three-year-old James Dodds has an answer. In July 2011 he released a helium balloon from Peterborough, England, with his name and address attached. Three weeks later he received a reply from Goryachiy Klyuch, near the Black Sea, 1800 miles away. ⁶⁸

Abbey, Ella, and Peter Gardner have an answer. On New Year’s Day 2011, they released a balloon from their garden in Bolton, England. Four months later they received a postcard from Laos, from a man who claimed to have found it near the Mekong River. Their mother, Wendy, remarked: ‘I’m really surprised that the balloon travelled so far. We’d only put a first class-stamp on it, because we thought it might get to Wales or Cornwall. We didn’t expect it to reach the other side of the world’. ⁶⁹

And four-year-old Alice Maines has an answer. On July 15th, 2007, Alice released her balloon. I ‘just let go’, she said. Rising above Flixton Junior School in Manchester, Alice’s balloon carried a numbered ticket promising the finder a special prize: a visit to Chester Zoo. Her father, Andrew, observed: ‘It didn’t seem to get very far. I thought it won’t even make the next street’. ⁷⁰

According to Guinness World Records there is little point in monitoring balloon races because there is no ‘way of tracking the balloons for their entire journey’. ⁷¹ In disappearing thus, the balloon withdraws from the sphere of human influence, entering a turbulent zone in which it only has relations with other things and other agencies. The excursion undertaken by Alice’s balloon might therefore be seen to open up a strange kind of wormhole to elsewhere, speaking of a world, which, left to its own devices, might just return something. This is a topological world in which far can suddenly become very near.

On September 5th, a letter arrived at Alice’s school. Her balloon had been found in China by 26-year-old Xie Yufei, who returned it to Alice, with a message attached.

I want to believe.

Geography lessons

I want to believe that balloon Geography lessons can fold circumstances together through the wanderings of the windblown independent traveller. From The Shoreham Herald, October 30, 2011:

Reception pupils at St Peter’s Primary, in Sullington Way, Shoreham, released 29 balloons to mark the end of their Percy the Park Keeper topic. They had been reading one of the Percy stories, The Hedgehog’s Balloon, and teacher Caroline Hodge thought the balloon race would be a great treat for the end of term. ‘They were very excited,’ said Mrs. Hodge. ‘It was lovely because it was such a clear day and they could see the balloons go for miles.’ As well as reading Percy stories, the children had also been learning geography and finding out about their place in the country. ⁷²

Question: Where do you think my balloon ended up?

Answer: I don’t know. Perhaps it got stick in the gut. Or wrapped itself around the body of the animal, suffocating, drowning, it. Perhaps it was a bird, a turtle, a dolphin.

Litter

Under the 1990 UK Environmental Protection Act, littering is punishable by fines of up to £2500. Under the Scottish version of the bill an offence is committed ‘if any person throws down, drops or otherwise deposits in, into or from any place to which this Section applies, and leaves, any thing whatsoever in such circumstances as to cause, or contribute to, or tend to lead to, the defacement by litter of any place to which this section applies’. ⁷³ Balloons released into the air are not defined as litter. There is no legal connection made between the act of release and the inevitability of depositing. According to the law, and as far as balloons go, what goes up does not come down. It just goes away. But it can disrupt and intrude into other forms of life, returning variously as a power outage, a fire started, an intrusion into airspace. ⁷⁴

Companion things

And sometimes it can return as something more benign. You find the balloon tied to a lamp high above a street in Paris. You climb up, untether it, claim it, and take it with you on your walk to school. As your story unfolds, you tend the balloon, shield it from the rain, before bringing it home. In time you discover that this balloon is absolutely self-dirigible. It follows you.

Alfred Lamorisse’s 1956 film, The Red Balloon, tells of how feelings of and for things draw us into affective relations. It tells of how balloons can become companion things, if not companion species. As a companion, however, the balloon is a frail and vulnerable one. And so Pascal’s balloon is inevitably set upon and destroyed. Despite the redemptive transcendence of the denouement of their story – Pascal is carried aloft over Paris by a cluster of balloons – this is not a tale with a happy ending.

Untethering

Something about the prospect of sudden untethering fills me still with unease. I think of you from time to time. And as I think of you, of how what happened happened, I cannot but feel it: the anticipation of the potential for uplift – for sudden, rapid, uncontrolled ascent.

It was a fair day at an army base, Rheindalen, Germany. June 8th, 2003. You were waiting until it passed.

You, Isobel Callaghan, 5.

An unexpected gust of wind, a squall of uncommon ferocity, and somehow everything became untethered. Somehow you became entangled in the mooring ropes. Somehow you slipped in the muddy grass. Somehow the balloon took you up. Somehow they watched. You were found, 40 miles away, lying still, a short distance from the deflating balloon. ⁷⁵

Torn

Everything in Glasgow turned around this moment; this moment that haunted everything that came before and after. And as I spoke of this, I almost could not go on. Under what possible, unspeakable circumstances, could this thing happen? How does it happen that such things take place?

Something of which I speak is rent, torn, taken away.

Something remembered. That question you posed, one evening after bedtime stories, about what happens when we die: Who finds us?

Never let me go

Something about the act of release makes a difference. Too many people continue to do it for it to be otherwise. ⁷⁶ We could say it is all about the symbolism of the act, about hopes for the transcendence of something more than substantial. Release is however always also a kind of multi-vectored affective event, one that turns now around the assumption that whatever we release might just disappear, or now around the hope that it might show up somewhere, for someone, for something, even if it might never be us.

It will be found. Someone will find you.

Balloon stories sometimes tell of the errant geographies of love. ⁷⁷ In October 2012, Reiner Gumprich, 68, found a balloon with a note attached while he was out picking mushrooms in Westerkappeln, Germany. The message read: ‘In support of Karina Menzies. You will be missed, you were such an amazing person. RIP. Lianey Niki & Megan & Cerys’. Karina Menzies, a 31-year-old mother of three, had been killed a few days earlier in an alleged hit and run, in Ely, Wales. The balloon bearing the message had been released in Cardiff. ⁷⁸

Of course, when balloons show up again they don’t always have notes of explanation, or stories attached. Yet they disclose the displacement of events elsewhere, lost affects, lost souls, irrecoverable encounters, impossible circumstances. ⁷⁹

Angels in the sky

When I was younger, before I knew better, I had hoped they might travel to the edge of space, or beyond: that they would always continue to ascend.

In the short story Fire Balloons, Ray Bradbury tells of priests who travel from Earth to Mars ‘looking for creatures of good will’. ⁸⁰ They find beings that, having long since left their bodies behind, now take the form of phosphorescent blue balloons living ‘in the wind and skies and hills’. An encounter with these creatures generates a memory for one of the priests, which Bradbury’s draws from his own childhood. He remembers ‘the dim faces of dear relatives long dead and mantled with moss as Grandfather lit the tiny candle and let the warm air breathe up to form the balloon plumply luminous in his hands, a shining vision which they held, reluctant to let it go; for, once released, it was yet another year gone from life, another Fourth, another bit of Beauty vanished’. ⁸¹

Messengers in the wind

‘We’re using the sunlight, we’re using the wind, we’re using all of these things to build this network in the sky’. ⁸² This is how one of the engineers on the Google Loon Project describes what it is all about. ‘We can sail with the wind, and shape the waves and patterns of these balloons, so that when one balloon leaves, another balloon is set to take its place’. ⁸³ A dream of angels aloft, a dream of what Serres calls ‘message bearing systems’ which are characterized by a ‘circulation of messengers’. These are systems in which ‘there we have the constructed networks in which we live, and all the various forms of circulation’, and ‘there we have the world of physical fluxes’ like the wind. ⁸⁴ For those who engineer them, the Google balloons are angels that float in the relation between systems and fluxes, between different expressions of what Serres calls the soft: the eddies, currents, and distributions of wind and water, and the torrents of codes and information.

The hard and the soft

The Pincushion Man is a 1935 animated short film directed by Ub Iwerks. It features a land populated by human balloons, in which every object is a balloon, and whose existence is threatened when the gate to the evil that lurks outside is opened, evil embodied in the figure of the Pincushion Man. Once inside he wreaks havoc with his pins before the inhabitants of balloonland eventually rid themselves of his destructive presence by covering him in latex rubber thick enough to hide any sharp points.

So here is a point which risks puncturing it all. The promise of the concept of atmospheric thing is that it points to the existence of a kind of worldly entity that makes its presence felt as something discrete but only insofar as it foregrounds the durational mattering of diffuse atmospheric fields in which it is a participant. These atmospheric things move between two trajectories in the materialisms that circulate in social, spatial and political theory. One is a growing sense of the importance of atmospheres as diffuse yet palpable spacetimes that require particular modes of attunement and genres of address. ⁸⁵ The other is the affirmation of the object as an ontological starting point whose essence is always withdrawn from the world. ⁸⁶ While an atmospherics provides a necessary and important element of any materialism, it does not mean that any sense of the participation of discrete entities disappears from the stories we tell of the world. Equally, while attention to objects reminds us of how something of the world is always withdrawn from us, this claim does not mean that we turn everything into objects defined in terms of ‘that which has a unified life apart from its relations, accidents, qualities, and moments’. ⁸⁷ Equally, the relation between things and the stories told of their excursions might not best be understood in terms of the formation of a new object. ⁸⁸

Serres’ concept of circumstances provides a way of holding onto the consistency of partially enclosed entities that are never resolved into objects because they are always pulled and tugged out of shape by atmospheric deviations and fluctuations around them. Circumstantial stories of atmospheric things emerge instead in the zone of exchange between turbulent, elemental materialities, and the apparently benign presence of self-contained, discrete things. In this zone it becomes possible to draw different moments and forces together, to gather them in a process of partial enclosure always open to the force of exchange. Like the free balloon, stories of atmospheric things can be steered to some limited extent, by finding a gust of wind that takes things in a particular direction and towards a loosely specified outcome. But this dirigibility is only ever a fragile, partial achievement. These are stories always being propositioned by the call of other forces in the world, stories which, just when they appear settled, tethered, or pinned down, might be pulled into another shape by the call of the cluster of circumstantial solicitations that always continue to gather round, in, and beyond it. The stories here in these pages, of course, remain partially tethered, enveloped, or in Serres terms, ‘wrapped’. ⁸⁹ They may well be rather too hard, in another of Serres’ terms, to circulate and endure. And yet, just as Serres’ own endeavour to begin to think like elemental forces and their refrains is shaped by his experience of moving with and within maritime craft, it might also be possible to use the balloon in a similar way: as a device for thinking with and like the atmospheric relations and forces from which it emerges. More precisely, in this way, something as simple as a balloon might become a device for doing atmospheric things as part of the wider cultivation of modes of thinking and writing open to the allure of worlds as they take shape. ⁹⁰

A slow and sudden death

And yet, if I am honest, for all this, on the journey up I did not give much thought to how the balloon might participate in the Glasgow event. I spent so much time on the shape of the story that I forgot to attend to the participation of the thing that had given it some substance. In the end, I sat it there on a table beside me, between screen and audience, mute witness to the story of how the story of its excursion might be folded into the event of its presentation. In retrospect, I am not sure what I thought it might do.

After the excursion, the balloon returned home with me on the train. Its unexplained absence had been noted, and it re-joined the cluster. And this cluster lived with us for a while, a shrinking wrinkling gathering of what Sylvia Plath calls

Oval soul-animals,

Taking up half the space,

Moving and rubbing on the silk

Invisible air drifts,

Giving a shriek and pop

When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling. ⁹¹