A Raindrop Unfallen: innocence and Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre's Paul and Virginia (1788)
A Raindrop Unfallen: innocence and Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s Paul and Virginia (1788), by Carol Mavor.
"Once upon a time, there was a real glistening raindrop, a beautiful miniature world, which could be held, impossibly, in the air, never dropping to the ground. It all began with a magical machine made in England in the early 1970s by the Physics Department at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. (Manchester, of course, also happens to be a particularly rainy part of the rainy United Kingdom: a very fitting place to make raindrops that never fall.) Decades later, the British artist Alistair McClymont came across the experiment and was beguiled. With a self-proclaimed childish glee for science, McClymont set about building an artist’s reconstruction of the physicists’ apparatus. By 2012, after two years of experimentation, McClymont was able to make a raindrop that did not fall, apprehending it above a specially designed wind tunnel. Like a stuttering word, the lone raindrop shudders in its suspension. McClymont’s dreamlike raindrop whispers micro-worlds detained: a little crystal biosphere; a very small snow globe; a tiny glass jellyfish; a frozen Tom-Thumb soap bubble. Of interest are its camera-lens properties: looking through it reveals a contained world upside down and back to front.
A raindrop is ordinary, but you never see just one, which makes McClymont’s singular raindrop extraordinary. As if it were the last dodo on Mauritius, the rain-drop, it too, quivers with extinction. It shakes with the wind, like the solitary surviving Hyophorbe amaricaulis (also known as the ‘Loneliest Palm’), which grows in the botanical gardens of Curepipe (an inland town in Mauritius) and is the only known example in the world. The ‘Loneliest Palm’ stands thirty feet high and is surrounded by scaffolding and ‘is as close to extinction as a non-extinct species can be’.
McClymont’s raindrop may quiver in fear, but it also suspends time, by not falling."
