Studio with Zouave

Marcus Sparling, “A Zouave” (Roger Fenton in Zouave uniform), Crimea, 1855. Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001697657/

The Crimean War of 1853-56 contributed to the history of form the Raglan sleeve, the balaclava, the cardigan, and Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Then, swelling the record, Roger Fenton made it the first photographed war in history.

Having learned that, you realize that form is unchanged under any of its aspects, and undying.

Waxwork with sound

Once upon a time a U.S. Navy radioman named C. W. Allen served on seaplanes based at the Panama Canal Zone and flew with a camera. His photo album is now in the archives of the San Diego Air and Space Museum and viewable online at

https://www.flickr.com/photos/sdasmarchives/albums/72157635813041746/with/9903098543/

It includes this image of the Navy zeppelin Shenandoah traversing the canal in 1924 or 1925 with its mooring ship Patoka. I’ve previously posted some attempts at reconstructing it, but because editing software keeps improving, the merely historical interest of the original,

grows only more attenuated by the year. It’s small, its resolution is low, some of it has been whited out by the corner stickers that Radioman Allen used to glue it into his album, and every time it’s reseen its aesthetic sense becomes harder to experience in the emotional form of memory. Think of the surface noise of its epoch. It was bad then, even before vinyl and then digital. Now . . .

https://archive.org/details/78_the-wreck-of-the-shenandoah_vernon-dalhart-and-company-maggie-andrews_gbia0334572a

Now, in the workroom of a mortuary, you wouldn’t be able to hear this waltz if it were played over the speakers — not as you would have heard it in its own epoch. Now, instead, you’ll be under obligation to look down at the table where a silent waxwork has been made to appear.

And if something then starts sounding through you, you won’t be able to silence it. The sound coming from your mouth will be an affront to the silence of the past, but it won’t be motivated by any intent, bad or good. It will be a sound that can’t help itself. Think back. Beside the waters of the Zone, a mechanism was wound up with a crank, a needle descended on a spinning shellac surface — right? — and a song welled up automatically.

This business day in the mortuary, you think, “I sound like I’m alive!”