The Society for the Preservation of Lost Things and Missing Time is pleased to announce an auspicious loan to our Florida Arcane exhibit. This recently acquired archive of 2 x 2 inch 35mm Super Slides belonged to Dr. Eugene Birchwood of Chicago, IL, documenting - among other things- his decades-long involvement with the Godspeed Airstream trailer community. Little is yet known about the wandering group of Airstream enthusiasts. However, of interest to the Society is Dr. Eugene Birchwood's documentation of his travels as they had a direct relationship with his scholarly work. According to a diary found with the slides, the good Doctor's travels were vital to his research seeking ley lines, power points, and other mystic convergences of energy around the planet. While in Florida Dr. Birchwood conducted his now infamous work along shorelines, canals, lakes, and other waterways.
Dr. Birchwood’s slides add to the puzzle of his work, a veritable repository of scholarly texts, strange objects, scribbled computations and endless notes. His correspondences with literary, artistic and philosophical luminaries were numerous. They reveal as much about his personal motives as they do the trajectory of his future work.
Always looking for the “lines connecting us to the ether, to the stars, to the ground and to each other”, the benevolent Doctor enjoyed a particularly intense friendship with one J.L.B. His attuned sensitivity to the metaphysical and sublime was made alarmingly clear in the letters exchanged with J.L.B during the months preceding his death
, as evidenced by J.L.B’s candid and poetic reply:
“Whenever I feel sad or sorrowful, I think of death. That is my comfort: to know, for a fact, that I will one day cease to be. I have the certainty - and this beyond some fears of the religious kind that I do harbor -... that I will someday end utterly, and that is a great relief...immortality represents, to me, the worst possible punishment: I believe that any persistent state will eventually turn into misfortune. All things in this world are fortunately fleeting and ephemeral; life would otherwise soon become tedious.”
~ J.L.B, B.A, 1973
1 Dr. Birchwood’s letters to Mr. J.L.B are in the possession of the J.L.B estate and were not made available to TSFPLTMT : FLORIDA ARCANE exhibit. However, the TSFPLTMT does have several letters from J.L.B. to Dr. Birchwood. The above mentioned was originally inscribed in Binary code (pictured here) , as the two friends enjoyed mental games with codes, and puzzles linking their friendship with infinity.
insanely would like to see pictures from travel doctor with their airstrim.
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