Romantic-era paranoia: the Air Looms Revolution

The Air Loom Gang explores the intense, political, technological, uncanny madness of one James Tilly Matthews, who went quite productively mad during the French Revolutionary wars and Napoleonic era. Listen to this, at length:

Matthews was convinced that outside the grounds of Bedlam, in a basement cellar by London Wall, a gang of villains were controlling and tormenting his mind with diabolical rays. They were using a machine called an 'Air Loom', of which Matthews was able to draw immaculate technical diagrams, and which combined recent developments in gas chemistry with the strange force of animal magnetism, or mesmerism. It incorporated keys, levers, barrels, batteries, sails, brass retorts and magnetic fluid, and worked by directing and modulating magnetically charged air currents, rather as the stops of an organ modulate its tones. It ran on a mixture of foul substances, including 'spermatic-animal-seminal rays', 'effluvia of dogs' and 'putrid human breath', and its discharges of magnetic fluid were focused to deliver thoughts, feelings and sensations directly into Matthews' brain. There were many of these mind-control settings, all classified by vivid names: 'fluid locking', 'stone making', 'thigh talking', 'lobster-cracking', 'bomb-bursting', and the dreaded 'brain-saying', whereby thoughts were forced into his brain against his will. To facilitate this process, the gang had implanted a magnet into his head. As a result of the Air Loom, Matthews was tormented constantly by delusions, physical agonies, fits of laughter and being forced to parrot whatever nonsense they chose to feed into his head. No wonder some people thought he was mad.

You can see in this all sorts of hieroglyphics for his material world: massive wars and revolutions, increasingly related scientific discovery. But, imported, the textus gets exported right back:

The Air Loom was being run by a gang of undercover Jacobin revolutionaries, bent on forcing Britain into a disastrous war with Revolutionary France. These characters, too, Matthews could describe with haunting precision. They were led by a puppet-master named 'Bill the King'; all details were recorded by his second-in-command, 'Jack the Schoolmaster'. The French liaison was accomplished by a woman called Charlotte, who seemed to Matthews to be as much a prisoner as himself, and was often chained up near-naked. 'Sir Archy' was a woman who dressed as a man and spoke in obscenities; the machine itself was operated by the sinister, pockmarked and nameless 'Glove Woman'. If Matthews were to see any of these characters in the street, they would grasp batons of magnetic metal which would cause them to disappear.

But all this activity wasn't directed solely at Matthews. There were many Air Loom gangs all over London, influencing the minds of politicians and public figures, and with a particularly firm grasp of the Prime Minister, William Pitt. They were lurking in streets, theatres and coffee-houses, where they tricked the unsuspecting into inhaling the magnetic fluid which would place them under the control of the Air Loom. By poisoning the minds of politicians on both sides of the Channel with paranoid 'brain-sayings', they were threatening national and international catastrophe.

There's a traditionally disturbing aspect to this, of course, voyeurism of the ill. But there's such complexity and sustainability to this narrative; like a steampunk X-Files episode, it feels oddly analytical, prescient, all too familiar.

(via MetaFilterismo)

Comments

[zer0]

This guy's mad delusions sound a lot like those of famed 20th Century kook Francis E. Dec, Esq. I don't know if anyone reading this has ever heard of him - he wrote of much the same claims as Matthews did, except he spoke at length of being "Frankenstein controlled" by what he termed "The Worldwide Mad Deadly Gangster Computer God". However, it is possible to see strong simialrities between the claims of the two men when one studies their rants comparatively. Fascinating stuff!

For more info on Dec, see this web page: http://www.bentoandstarchky.com/dec/