In 1961, Man created the Kiss of Life.
Hang on a minute! Surely God creates life not man - surely little man cannot give life, surely?
Let me explain…
From very ancient times there are tales of a mystical art, a ‘blowing of the breath’, so called, that could grasp onto souls as they floated towards death and draw them back to life. The art was named the midwives’ secret, for it was the midwives who first practised it. They used it upon their tiny patients if they were still born. Putting their own mouth over the silent mouth, the midwife would blow the babe into existence - a profound act of beauty. Later, this art came to be practised by the miners - the brothers of the midwives, whose work took them deep into the belly of the earth. There, of a sudden, the air might be filled with stone and a miner’s lungs could fill with stone and then there would be grave danger of him remaining in his underworld forever. But the midwives’ secret could draw him back to life. The third profession who shared the secret were those who worked upon the waterways. These waterman, it is said, could pull bodies from the Styx itself. With their lips.
Imagine that.
And how is it that we know of this?
When was it first written down?
Well, God wrote about it a bit in the Bible, but it was not until 1732 that it was properly written down, by a doctor called William Tossach, after he himself had breathed life into a dead collier called James Blair. The doctor wrote the secret on a piece of paper and this paper sparked interest all over Europe because, in the eighteenth century, the waterways of the metropolises were dense with dead bodies and it was hoped that, with this new science, some might be saved.
And so it was that societies sprung up in Amsterdam, Venice, Paris and St Petersburg. In London was created: The Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned.
But it turned out people didn’t like performing this resuscitation very much. The mouths of bodies in the Thames were often revolting - full of fetid water and sewage and sugar-rotted teeth. On top of this, a body long dead in the river will not be brought back to life no matter what you do. And so the practice sunk back into obscurity. It was once more practised only by the professional watermen, the miners and the midwives.
One midwife was said to have brought five hundred souls into the world.
Some priests thought such an action ungodly.
One doctor called it vulgar, but his wife told him to shut his ugly mouth and let be.
Life continued thus for many years, until 1961.
So…. What happened in 1961?
I hear you ask.
Well.
In 1961, an Austrian doctor called Peter heard tell of the midwives’ secret and he thought it a thing of wonder, so he tried to do it himself on his own patients. He practised and practised until he was really good and then he decided he didn’t want it to be secret any more, so he shouted loudly about it, through the streets of Vienna. But nobody listened.
So he left his home and he travelled through Europe shouting loudly, but nobody listened. He travelled to America shouting loudly, but nobody listened. In his desperation, he travelled far far north, into the silent glaciers of Norway, where he shouted loudly and desperately and there… he chanced upon a toymaker.
Now, this oymaker had a beloved son, named Tore, and the boy had nearly drowned, but the toymaker, knowing some skills of animation himself, had blown into the boy’s airways and saved him. And so the toymaker put down his tools and listened with interest to the doctor’s dilemma. In a fever of excitement, the doctor explained that it was not enough for him to know the craft himself. He felt a great need to tell the world so others could learn.
‘Why keep such a secret? I want to tell the world but no one will listen.’
‘You can make them listen,’ replied the toymaker. ‘But you will need an assistant.’
‘An assistant?’ asked the doctor.
‘Yes. An assistant to play the role of the dead.’ said the toymaker.
The doctor nodded again but he explained that this could never work, for the practice of animation could, paradoxically, do a human assistant great harm. He could break their ribs. Maybe even kill them.
‘So what you need is a puppet… a marionette… a doll.’
The doctor nodded gently. He felt the fever of hope. He felt the toymaker looking deep into the his eyes.
‘I shall make you this assistant,’ said the toymaker. ‘But I shall make it on one condition…’
The doctor took a deep breath.
‘…I shall choose her name.’
The doctor, noticing a trick, replied, ‘Must she be she? That is already one condition.’
‘No. That is simple necessity,’ explained the toymaker. ‘For men in this corrupted age will not be willing to touch their lips to the lips of other men in public. They will hide their faces from you and your cause will be lost.’
‘But,’ cried the doctor, ‘I will give them the gift of bringing their friends and loved ones back to life!’
The toy maker shook his head solemnly. ‘You are a doctor. You don’t understand people.’
The doctor sighed and let be.
‘What will be her name?’
‘The Drowned Mona Lisa,’ the toymaker replied.
I lie.
The toymaker did not say these words. It was Albert Camus who said them. And not to the doctor.
Let me explain.
One night in 1888, the body of a drowned girl was pulled from the Seine at the Quai du Louvre. She was found not by a resuscitation society, but by men of a darker purpose, who swiftly carried her along the embankment to the other end of the Île-de-France, past the shadow of Notre Dame, and straight to the morgue. Once at the morgue, it is said that a gentleman pathologist who prepared her body for display was so entranced by the dead girl’s mysterious expression that he called in a mouleur, to cast her face into a death mask such that he might gaze upon her forever.
The mouleur worked all night. And all the while, close by in the absolute silence and stillness of the Louvre, Mona Lisa smiled.
By dawn, the mask was completed and it was exquisite.
Now at this time, the Paris Morgue was the top tourist destination in the whole city, with queues around the block every day. The crowds came to view the unknown dead, naked on display behind glass, chilled by frozen water. The newspapers imagined lives and deaths for them, spinning wild tales of romance, rape, and suicide. Sometimes all three together in a perverse horror. Then the newspapers’ tales would be picked up by the theatres, who, in turn, spun them into true-to-life horror entertainment at Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol.
And The Morgue had a new star.
They called her : L’Inconnue de la Seine.
L’Inconnue became a celebrity, and her death mask was the merchandise of dreams. Everyone wanted one. And everyone could have one. Of course, some cynics doubted the story of the romantic pathologist, in the same way that they doubted the truth of the theatrical reenactments of her aristocratic love affairs, or her life of debauchery and crime, and these unbelievers claimed the mask of the Unknown Girl was in fact modelled on the face of a beautiful young life model who lived just down the road. But if this was true, the unnamed life model was destined to be cast as an unnamed dead girl for eternity.
For it was this face, this double mystery, that became l’objet du moment. Soon, it became the darling of the arts set. A muse for Man Ray. Pablo Picasso. Rainer Maria Rilke. Vladimir Nabokov.
And it was this face that Albert Camus called ‘The Drowned Mona Lisa’.
And it was this face that the toymaker had in his mind for his doll.
A doll with the face of a drowned girl who would bring people back to life.
He set about his task.
He shut himself up in his workshop for forty days and forty nights, while the doctor waited outside the door thrumming his fingers and smoking cigars. And after much toil and trouble (for this creation required all of the toymaker’s skill), the door opened. There, in the centre of the room, lying on the table, was a doll so life like, so perfect, with such a mysterious smile, that as soon as the doctor saw her, he immediately reached out to touch her, hoping to bring her to breathe indeed. But the toymaker grasped the doctor’s wrist while his nordic eyes grasped the doctor’s anxious gaze.
‘Her name,’ he said, ‘will be Anne.’
The doctor hastily nodded, and he lifted Anne in his arms and took her to his classroom. There, with the help of a few trusted and carefully chosen students, he saw it was true, that those who touched her lips with their own were blessed with the gift of giving life. And he taught them to speak her name and ask if she was OK and she was and he wanted to tell the world and scream her name from the rooftops and so he begged the toymaker to travel with him in search of a newspaper which might print their story.
Their quest took them to London town where they searched high and low for a newspaper man. They finally found one in the offices of the Daily Mail on Fleet Street. He was lounging at the top of a tall tower, in his shirt sleeves, picking dead bits of meat from between his teeth with a shard of glass. In a wild flurry of excitement, the doctor told this journalist of his discovery, his technique, of the toymaker’s wonderful doll and of his hope for the world. In response, the journalist drew his lips together, whistled through his teeth and said, ‘I will print your story on one condition.’
The doctor took a deep breath. ‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘I shall choose the name.’
‘Her name is Anne,’ said the doctor, anxiously glancing at the toymaker, whose nordic eyes were steel.
‘Not her name,’ said the journalist. ‘I shall choose the name of the story. I will call it The Kiss of Life.’
The doctor was flustered. ‘But Why?’ he asked. ‘It already has a name. The Midwives’ Secret.’
‘I shall call it The Kiss of Life,’ said the journalist, ‘because The Kiss of Life sounds romantic.’
The doctor protested that maybe it didn’t need to be romantic. After all, this lesson would give people the possibility of bringing to life strangers and friends, and even their loved ones, even their children and surely that was enough? Like it brought back Tove, the toymaker’s son?
But the journalist shook his head and said, ‘You are a doctor. You don’t understand people.’
The doctor remembered the toymaker’s words and looked at him now. The toymaker nodded solemnly.
‘People are stupid,’ he explained to the doctor.
The doctor sighed and he shook hands with the journalist.
‘The deal is done’.
The toymaker also took the journalist’s hand.
‘But she’s wearing a tracksuit for the photographs,’ he said.
And so it was that in 1961, The Kiss of Life was published in the Daily Mail. A story about a new doll named Anne, built by a toymaker on the vision of a doctor, and that was that. And as we have already established, people love kissing so it turned out the journalist was right. But let us not forget that the toymaker was right too, and before that the doctor was right, and before that the watermen were right, and before that the miners were right, and before that, far back in the ancient times, the midwives were right.
MORAL:
Learning to save people’s lives is a really good use of time.
AFTERWORD : SLEEPING BEAUTY
Of course, the idea of bringing the dead back to life has been well documented by the French since the Medieval period, where it is said that men riding around the place might happen upon sleeping women and kiss them or have sex with them and wake them up. But I’m not 100% sure that the correct term for this is resuscitation so I have not included it in the above lesson.
Nevertheless, between The Bible and 1961, you will remember the French Revolution happened, which seems to me increasingly relevant. For it was at this time that Madame Tussaud started to make her wax impressions of the quick and the dead. She cast the heads chopped off by Madame Guillotine. She was rushed to the death of Marat only minutes after he was found in the bath. She made effigies of the leaders of the revolution to publicise them to the masses. Her journalistic wax museum then popularised the pastime of gawping at the recently deceased, which of course swiftly lead to a public hunger for the morgue itself, which lead to the celebrity of the drowned Mona Lisa which created the face that would resuscitate a thousand dead.
For all her macabre, Madame Tussaud tempts her audience to dream of life. When she brought her museum to London in 1808, the star attraction was Sleeping Beauty - a waxen doll whose breast rises and falls by means of mechanics. A clockwork respirator. An iron lung. Even now, as you gaze upon her face, you ask yourself - could she be real? And maybe, if i kissed her, I would make her so.
Once, perhaps, she was real, for it is said that her face is modelled on the death mask of the beheaded Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, fixed by Tussaud after the lethal French kiss. But there are some holes in the story and it is more likely that she is the little known Madame St. Amaranthe, also a victim of the revolution, who lost her head in Paris, and then her name in London.
Here ends the lesson.
ACTIVITY LESSON FOUR
You are about to participate in making an entirely new audio-visual entertainment experience.
(this will only work on android or computer)
1. Press play on the AUDIO FILE.
2. Once you are sure it has started, count to 3 and press play on the VIDEO FILE.
Sit back and relax as the sound and the visual image happen at the same time!
KISS, 1961 : Bridget Riley
FIN
Mona Lisa : Mona Lisa
L’Inconnue de la Seine : L’Inconnue de la Seine
Anne : Anne
The Doctor : Peter Safar
The Toymaker : Åsmund S. Laerdal
The Journalist : The Journalist
Credits
The Kiss of Life (1967) : Rocco Morabito
Photos of Anne from Stavanger with Care : Nina Tjomsland
Lucerne — Evening (detail) : JMW Turner
La Vierge inconnue du canal de l’Ourcq (1927) : Albert Rudomine
The Paris Morgue : public domain
C’e n’est pas de lui qu’elle avait peur, mais d’elle-même (1944): Man Ray
Aurelian (1944) : Man Ray
Tu comprends elle changeait de lampe (1944) : Man Ray
Mona Lisa (1979) : Andy Warhol
Sleeping Beauty (1795) : Philippe Curtius
The Kiss (1961) : Bridget Riley
Date of publication : 29.4.20
Primary source: thanks to Luke Davidson’s essay in The Kiss in History (Ed. Karen Harvey) which introduced me to the kiss of life. I also looked up some other things too.