In retrospect, this week’s card needs some further explanation.

An ecorche is a flayed human figure, used for anatomical and moral instruction. For our purposes, the ecorche is always a dyad, never a monad; always both male and female, always two figures. This paired figure represents the development of science and art, and the way they play off of and influence each other. Also the ways in which art and science distinguish themselves from each other. The ecorche occupies a middle ground between the two styles, or, rather, a position prior to the speciation of concepts. Despite this, the ecorche is not a particularly ambivalent figure; not an uneasy blending of disparate elements but its own singular unity.

The ecorche is also the study of interior human landscapes, both physical and social, as well as the artistic and selective presentation of that study. It is not purely observation, nor purely invention, but instead taste, discretion, thesis and antithesis.

The ecorche is a summer figure.

Strange realm: didactic art. To look so closely, and reject so deeply, he searches through two hundred imperfect skeletons (half again that many for the female!) to build one perfect figure. Like any connoisseur, he samples, he tastes—here a clavicle, here a patella, here a graceful zygomatic arch. And when he has his perfect skeleton—his flawless man, his peerless woman—and has cast them, then what?

He poses them: layers muscles, tendons, ligaments upon his perfect bones, cloaks them at last in waxen skin. Then strips them down again—as woman tempts, as man falls—as decay breathes its rude breath upon the frost-flowers of their youth—instructional metaphor. Be not proud, they say, O man, and woman, be thou humbler still. This conquerer worm was coiled about your apple, Eve.

Across town, she sculpts her own hand in wax. Imperfect hand, heavy with middle-class comfort, she has dissected dozens of cadavers to see her own muscles so clearly at play. She sculpts an eye, a stomach, a wide-winged clitoris. She remembers, compares, contrasts, observes: the perfect has no truck with her. Her ecorchés are all of them individual, unique. This too is science.

Winged lion, king-headed beast. His eyes are gods: distant, merciless, just. He is always smiling slightly, for he knows all things.

Note his long beard, square beard and curly. His voice, when he unlocks his throat, is kingly, kindly and incomprehensible. He tongues an ur-tongue, a regal jargon, an untranslatable, infectious wash of sound. His words are a tall tree in our ear. His blood is carried to hidden places. His wings are seven winds: the evil wind, the wild wind, the dust wind, the whirl wind, the four winds, the seven winds, the wind that conquers. He breathes plague and famine. His claws are drought and decay.

He is the giver of gifts. In his mighty steps grow sweet corn, golden wheat. He is forever moving, shoulders topless towers, back a broad highway, seven mile mouth sweetly smiling. He circles to the north and then to the south. He comes up from the desert and goes down to the sea. His piss is the fertile water.

From him come all our graces; from him all our woes. Before the fruitful garden he stands watch, jaws athwart the gates, a flaming sword.

As you know, the concept of the suction pump is centuries old. Really, that’s all this is, except that instead of sucking water, I’m sucking life. I’ve just sucked one year of your life away. I might one day go as high as five, but I really don’t know what that would do to you.

—Count Rugen, The Princess Bride

The Machine is lost knowledge. It is a complex anachronism, a tide line aged into inscrutability.

In 1900, divers off the the Greek island Antikythera discovered a shipwreck containing several sculptures and a complex geared machine embedded in a rock. The machine, dubbed the Antikythera Device, baffled scientists, as the wreck was thought to date from the first century BCE but the Device itself utilized engineering techniques not rediscovered until fifteen centuries later.

The Machine indicates not just a flowering of knowledge and technology, but also the subsequent destruction of that knowledge. The Machine is never merely an antique reminder of a style long out of fashion, but always an aberration; a coelacanth threatening and vital in modern waters.

Following the destruction of the Roman empire, much of imperial viticulture was lost. While wine cultivation continued throughout Europe, it was centuries before the generational toil of monks rediscovered techniques detailed in Columella’s first century CE work De Re Rustica.

But it is also always the rediscovery of those techniques. It is the forest before the fire, the fire itself, and the green spiral of new growth through the ashes. The Machine therefore represents the eternal wheel of the life of the mind, which spins through dark ages and light, and where every point is a new point on the same wheel.

At 188 days, it is the longest anyone has ever stayed in space. Six months in microgravity. Six months of speaking Russian, eating Russian, drinking Russian. Quail eggs and treadmills. Maintenance and publicity.

They unpack battery after battery. In the module they float in a sea of batteries, plastic feet, scrap metal. The metal drifts, collides, chimes: clear metal tones like cathedral bells, music of the spheres. She measures her blood for radioactivity, runs on the treadmill, takes pictures of wildfires burning in Magnolia.

She calls Houston. Reads Dickens. In May they build and film an enormous model of a Pepsi can for a commercial that never airs. Her stay spirals into the indefinite future: hurricane season on earth and the blue coil of a candle flame.