In the Shelter of Dust: The Obscured Grace of Stefan Themerson
It is the peculiar fate of radical thinkers to live in the wings of their centuries, seldom occupying the proscenium of cultural posterity. Such is the case with Stefan Themerson (1910–1988), a Polish-born writer, poet, filmmaker, and philosopher whose protean oeuvre glimmers obscurely beneath the surface of 20th-century European avant-garde literature. Neither fully absorbed by the Anglo-Saxon canon, nor wholly claimed by his birthplace, Themerson lived his life, like many of his characters, between languages, countries, and ontologies. His is a literature of margin and prank, of epistemological disobedience encased in the mellow loam of polymathic insight.
Born in Płock, Poland, into an erudite Jewish family, Themerson received early exposure to the classics, mathematics, and music. After brief studies in physics at the University of Warsaw, he turned his attention to the poetics of media, producing experimental films with his wife, Franciszka Weinles. The married couple fled occupied Poland during World War II, ultimately settling in London, where they co-established Gaberbocchus Press in 1948—a small publishing house dedicated to the dissemination of “best lookers rather than best sellers.” It was through this press that Themerson published much of his mature literary work, including philosophical fictions such as “Professor Mmaa’s Lecture” (1953) and “The Mystery of the Sardine” (1986), as well as translations of Alfred Jarry and Raymond Queneau into English.
To speak of Stefan Themerson as a singular literary phenomenon is to abridge the polyphonic multiplicity of his craft. He wrote children’s books with melodies that veered into metaphysical motifs; he wove philosophical essays from paper-fiber novellas. His writing, while whimsical on the surface, reveals a brooding precision underneath—composed in a register akin to that of Ionesco filtered through Spinoza. One might say his literary mission was to reveal serious epistemologies through unserious satirical architecture.
The novel “Professor Mmaa’s Lecture” stands as a pivotal text in apprehending Themerson’s worldview. On its surface, it is a tale of an intellectual termite giving a lecture on the origins and function of society to a congress of other insects—an entomological parody of man’s epistemological hubris. But beneath its bestiary absurdism lies a deeply trenchant inquiry into the relationship between language, power, and ideology. Themerson’s premise is that ideologies, no matter how dressed in scientific or logical garb, inevitably become aesthetic at their core—a performance of persuasion. As Professor Mmaa proclaims, “The form of a thought is as binding as its content. You cannot say just anything. You must say it in the correct manner. Otherwise, it is not a thought, but a noise.”¹
It is within such reflections that Themerson’s purity of vision emerges—not as a codified philosophical system, but as an unwavering commitment to epistemological hygiene. Themerson did not believe in the supremacy of logic as such, but rather in its responsible stewardship. He wrote often of a concept he called semantic subversion, whereby the clarity of a term, through repetition and ceremonial usage, becomes occluded—its original referent bloated and abstracted. This is the central alarm sounded in “Euclid was an Ass” (1956), wherein the narrative voice, partly derisive, partly melancholic, confesses: “To believe in Euclid is to flatten the shape of becoming. I am not inclined. My theorems have elbows and jowls.”²
Crucially, Themerson’s literature is not void of empathy. Where many satirists condemn stupidity, Themerson interrogates the structural affordances that allow stupidity to flourish in positions of authority. His compassion extends even to the most absurd characters, who may seem foolish but are never demonized. This is perhaps best articulated in his essay-essay hybrid “On Semantic Poetry” (1975), wherein he introduces the idea that a poet’s goal is not to reproduce the world, but to upturn it gently—like a stone—to witness the inverse crawling beneath. “The truth is an asymptote,” he writes, “we approach it not in conquest but in dancing.”³
To appropriately reckon with Themerson’s work, one must step away from thematic analysis and, instead, enter into a liminal space where aesthetic constellations are preferred over hardened interpretations. His texts do not seduce the reader with catharsis or narrative arc; they function as distillations of metaphysical odors—puzzling, beguiling, and utterly resistant to domestication. They are anarchic not in content alone but in form: poems disrupted by geometry, novels interrupted by diagrams, treatises sparring with acrostics.
I was once reading an English translation of “Bayamus” (1949) while waiting in the crook of some European train station. The novella follows an armless man who, after introducing a fictional concept—the “Semantic Poetry”—meanders through London positing redefinitions of reality’s furniture. The narrator, both unreliable and jubilant, one day addresses the reader directly and says: “Do not confuse the words with the things, lest you copulate with grammar and produce legislatures.”⁴ I chuckled aloud, embarrassed by my own laughter, though no one was watching.
And yet, struck with the vegetal stillness of trains arriving and pausing unsupervised, I began to understand: Themerson’s literary revolt is not directed at systems per se, but at the ossification of meanings these systems promote. His call is not revolutionary in the Rousseauvian sense, but molecular, psychological, interior. It is a gentle peeling away of word-bark to rescue the sap beneath. If you linger long enough with such a sentence, you may even begin to feel it breathing, spasming with its own peculiar musculature.
There is a kind of resistance in Themerson’s prose that puts the reader into a philosophical posture—not the hard-laced rigidity of doctrinal reception, but the supple attentiveness required of those traversing unfamiliar terrain by instinct. He teaches us that insight does not proceed from certainty but from flirtation—with error, metaphor, rhythm. Themerson offers us no answers, only provocations disguised as riddled laughter. When asked about the function of literature, he once replied: “Perhaps it’s to make us ever so slightly more intelligent than our leaders.”⁵
Herein lies the haunting resonance of Themerson’s legacy: to write not in order to instruct, but to disinfect. To apply irony not as a poison, but as an antidote to verbal lethargy. In a world dulled by bombast, Stefan Themerson’s books remain small nebulae of resistance: they do not teach you what to think, but reveal the ill-proportioned architecture of thought itself.
In the end, we return to the old termite, Professor Mmaa, gesturing at a chalkboard with non-existent arms, attempting to explain war, love, and governance in a lecture none fully understand—only to finally admit, in a moment of reluctant transparency: “Perhaps all our consensus is merely synchronized confusion.”¹ Let that be the tagline etched in the bark of memory, a phrase that flickers between sobering clarity and trembling jest.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, satire, exile
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¹ Themerson, Stefan. *Professor Mmaa’s Lecture*. Gaberbocchus Press, 1953.
² Themerson, Stefan. *Euclid Was an Ass*. Gaberbocchus Press, 1956.
³ Themerson, Stefan. *On Semantic Poetry*. Gaberbocchus Press, 1975.
⁴ Themerson, Stefan. *Bayamus*. Gaberbocchus Press, 1949.
⁵ Statement quoted in: Ford, Sara. “Semantic Laughter: The Literary Ethics of Stefan Themerson.” *Modernist Fringe*, vol. 8, no. 1, 2003, pp. 92-105.