The Anatomical Machines, Giuseppe Salerno, C. 1756-64

The Anatomical Machines, Giuseppe Salerno, C. 1756-64
The Anatomical Machines, Giuseppe Salerno, C. 1756-64
The Anatomical Machines, Giuseppe Salerno, C. 1756-64
The Anatomical Machines, Giuseppe Salerno, C. 1756-64
The Anatomical Machines, Giuseppe Salerno, C. 1756-64
The Anatomical Machines, Giuseppe Salerno, C. 1756-64

The Anatomical Machines, Giuseppe Salerno, c. 1756-64

In the Underground Chamber of the Sansevero Chapel, housed in two glass cases, are the famous Anatomical Machines, or Anatomical Studies, i.e. the skeletons of a man and a woman in upright position with their arteriovenous system almost perfectly intact. The circulatory system depicted on the anatomical machines was artificially fabricated with waxes, an iron wire and silk fibers, probably following techniques commonly used by anatomists of that time

These disquieting objects were kept in a room in the palace of the Prince of Sansevero called “the Apartment of the Phoenix”, as a number of travellers and the Breve nota di quel che si vede in casa del principe di Sansevero, an anonymous eighteenth-century guide to the Palace and the Sansevero Chapel, attest. This source describes the Machines in detail, from the blood vessels of the head to those of the tongue and adds that at the feet of the woman was placed “the tiny body of a foetus”, alongside which there was even the open placenta, connected to the foetus by the umbilical cord. The two anatomical studies were moved to the Chapel, and in this way saved from destruction or loss, long after the death of the Prince. The remains of the foetus were still visible up to a few decades ago, when they were stolen.

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Our proximity to Unreality conferred many advantages, and we were able to do things in our town that weren’t actually possible. We could survive fatal accidents and walk away without a scratch. Things that were lost forever were found again, and sometimes, if you didn’t think about it too directly, failures transformed into successes just like that. It was as though thought itself was a physical substance that could bend the shape of the world in our favor. Life was good in the little town of Event Horizon, where things always seemed to work out and Lady Luck lived on our side.

But Event Horizon also experienced “reality-quakes”. Now and then the fabric of spacetime would ripple, and shockwaves would rock our little town violently. Sometimes things would shake loose and get drawn in to the Unreality, and even people could be lost this way. They quakes weren’t common, but they seemed to be occurring with more frequency, leading to fears that we were becoming unmoored in spacetime and might lose the equilibrium that allowed us to survive and take advantage of the flexibility of reality.

Thought could stabilize things, if we projected our minds as physical forces to hold things in place. You could cast your thoughts out as a net and pull against the draw of Unreality. But that only worked if we were prepared and braced ourselves against the quake ahead of time, and people needed to work and eat and sleep and go to school. There was no way that everyone could be on anchoring duty all the time.

That’s why we had a lottery. Every twenty years, one among us would be selected to by the community to be the Achor for the entire town—a full-time psychic resistance against entropy. The Anchor would enter a trance state and project their mind out to touch every structure, every tree, every pebble, every person in Event Horizon, and hold them there. Constantly. For twenty years.

People would come to tend to the Anchor, to feed and bathe them and keep them comfortable, but the Anchor rarely became lucid enough to recognize them. It was a vital, respected, honorable position, but there was no glory in it. If you found out you had been selected to be the next Anchor, your family would grieve for you as though you had died. If you had children, they would be taken care of in a princely fashion as wards of the state, and your family would be honored and want for nothing, because even though your assignment was only twenty years, former Anchors did not tend to live for very long. They’d be made comfortable and lavished with good things, but their life energy would be sapped, and they’d fade away quickly.

My dream was 90% exposition and very little in-the-moment action, but I had just discovered that I would be the new Anchor, and I was not happy about it. The most vivid action scene I remember was standing in my kitchen staring at breakfast cereal boxes on a shelf and touching them with my mind, feeling every grain of cereal within and thinking, “Even this? Even this?”

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4 years ago
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3 years ago

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4 years ago

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