I’ve located all of the submissions, so far, to this mail art project and will forward them to Dan Sendecki to post at this site. The mail art call was for artists to respond to Swedenborg’s 1714 plans for a crude monoplane. Swedenborg, the celebrated author of Heaven and Hell, spoke with a lisp, was addicted to snuff (and apparently to prostitutes) and had epileptic seizures, during which he spoke to angels and devils. I’ve been fascinated by this unusual character since reading Heaven and Hell when I was 16.

No doubt he had genius, but it was tinged with madness. Blake, Emerson, Balzac, Margaret Fuller, and other 18th/19th century thinkers found his systematic explanations of the mechanism of moral self-judgment intriguing enough to inspire their own writings. Kant was impressed with his industry, as well as some of his insights into the physical sciences.

I have before me the latest catalogue from the Swedenborg Foundation. It’s a slick, 20 page production filled with titles like Voices of Light and Sacred Quest. There’s a page titled Female Sprit/Bible Study, and there are videos with titles like “Johnny Appleseed and the Frontier Within,” (Johnny Appleseed, you see, was also a Swedenborgian.) A New Century Edition of Swedenborg has been prepared to spread the word of this modest gentleman, who supposedly began to grow a new set of teeth in his 80th year.

One title I notice that’s missing from the list, however, is Swedenborg’s Earths In The Universe. In it the seer writes that he was taken “in the spirit” on a tour of the planets. He sees the inhabitants of each planet and describes them. For instance, the inhabitants of the moon are cherub-like beings who communicate through loud eruptions from the stomach. Whether that means loud belches or wind from the other direction, the sound he says was like thunder claps. Surely this is the stuff of pathology, and it gives credence to other, less inviting pictures of Swedenborg in the grip of his mental illness. These accounts have been covered over by the believers of the Church of the New Jerusalem–the Swedenborgian church–but they are out there to be read and pondered, nonetheless.

Swedenborg’s airplane had a tripod landing device–pointing to the landing systems we have today. And evidently, a large version of the design flew around the turn of the century. There’s a model of it at the Smithsonian, next to Leonardo’s ornithopter, with an artist’s lay figure in the pilot seat. Is it possible to be crazy as a loon, and yet still be able to add meaningfully to the sum total of man, and (woman) kind’s art, literature and science? It would be interesting to create a time machine and bring the lisping, snuff chewing visionary back from the 18th century and allow him to confront the well-scrubbed board members of the Swedenborg Foundation of 2004. I wonder how many of these folks would flee in terror when the old man begins to twitch and moan and lose himself at the start of yet another “journey” into the beyond?

More on this subject later.

Update: The exhibit is now up in our newly-formed Gallery; you can jump directly to the gallery by clicking here. Contributions from: Mark K. Cain, Clemente Padin, John M. Bennett, Gianni Simone, Jesse Glass, Pete Spence, Ella Joosten, Roberto Scala, Rose Garden, Shmuel, and Bernd Reichert. Check it out!