BPR 52 | 2025
Wilhelm Kühne (1837–1900)
Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904)
James Marion Sims (1813–83)
Directions: Use your five-finger discount from a corner store
to obtain a pack of apple Now & Laters. Freeze-dry them
and combine with the pestle-ground shell of a blister beetle.
Apply the neon green concoction as eye shadow and wear
for four hours dancing nonstop in the strobe light beside the
DJ booth on Grown and Sexy night.
Act as if you are enchanted by the advances
Wilhelm Kühne made in science while you
imagine him explaining how he believed the
merest blink of an eye could arrest time,
just as the photographer Eddie Muybridge
proved a horse can fly by chopping one
into millisecond freeze-frames. With Kühne,
it was always rabbit season. He made his lab
a factory and fitted the little furballs
with hostage hoods to charge their eyes
with the enzyme rhodopsin so that the
light he would later bathe them in might, like
trauma, chemically remain. One by one,
he yanked the rabbits from their cages
like Kleenex. One by one, Kühne removed
the hoods and face-baked a hundred bunnies.
Or so. Why count bunnies abundant
as HeLa cells are today? Kühne clamped
their heads in his vise and pinned their lids
open to imprint waffle-grids of sunbeam
from his windowpane. We might say he
gave them to the light, which is an idiom
for giving birth, but to keep the first
brightness fresh as snowfall, one
by one, he lopped the bunnies’ heads
with a mortal shutterclick. Then he peeled
their corneas like old-school Polaroids.
Wilhelm Kühne, your lab results prove
you are the father of optography.
You found the light of yon window
burnt, like Jesus in the toast, onto one in one
thousand eyeballs. Who was counting.
Your science proved what’s possible
depends on what you’re willing to sacrifice.
This charm channels
the soft power of all those rabbit’s
foot amulets squandered in Kühne’s hunt
for death’s peephole, aka the sublime. This
charm will recharge as you meditate
on the ritual nature of sacrifice, how it
positions suffering as a renewable resource,
meditate on its multifarious forms from enslaved
women unnamed by history and forced
by the speculum of J. Marion Sims, the father
of gynecology, to give light to their suffering
in the name of science, to other oblivions from
which, with practice, you may also draw fire, e.g.
Tuskegee, the plundered corpses of unrecorded
Negro cemeteries, forced sterilizations. Yet, as
pain is no one’s birthright, this charm
will lift you in weightless ecstasy and crowd
surf you, as in a Marian procession, across a sea
of bodies grooving, relentless masses stirring
with the epigenetic dreams their ancestors
stitched into their methylated genomes.