“Of Master and of Slave”: words speakable once again

They’re not only potentially speakable once again, either. In May 2026, the immediate aftermath of the United States Supreme Court’s eradication of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they are being actively spoken in one Southern legislature after another. Most of the legislators speaking happen also to belong to the political party that was once the party of Abraham Lincoln. History rhymes, sometimes. It’s ironic.

It has to be, because rhyme itself is an irony originating in the discovery that even after a word is spoken it’s capable of changing its mind half a line later and meaning something else. Try listening half a line later, for instance, to this line from a nineteenth-century poem (Ernest Dowson’s “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae”) which includes the words “I have forgot much” but down among its those words hasn’t forgotten a word. After the nineteenth century, at that, you’ll even hear more, because this time the line comes scrolling by on a soundtrack.

The track was (in 1939, when it was laid down) and is (now) singing a politicized nineteenth-century quickstep whose words give way to women’s voices slowly vocalizing 0nly Woo ah. In 1939 the whited-out libretto was filmed as a script printed in a nineteenth-century font, and ever since then it has been unscrolling back from the nineteenth century to us. But now, in 2026, we may have rereached a beginning.

At any rate, what we hear now sounds like beginning’s genre: a commandment. It says I am that I am and then it says Tolle, lege; take up and read. And then, no longer in words but on immediately tangible parchment and filmstock, it commands,

I am Scroll. I teach you now from this day backward. My order of operations will be, Time present to time past; right to left; end in light to beginning once again in darkness upon the face of the deep. 

 

One who wraps the napery of his couch / About him

The serious nineteenth-century man of letters William Cullen Bryant was the author of “Thanatopsis,” a serious poem whose title translates from Greek as “contemplation of death.” It concludes with a serious moral, namely:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join   
The innumerable caravan, which moves   
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take   
His chamber in the silent halls of death,   
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,   
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed   
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,   
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch   
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
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“So live, that” translates mostly to “So live in such a way that.”
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And yes, there is such a word as “napery.” Seriously, look it up.
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Stances en route

Stance 1, 1889

Within a library, we read under library guidance, selectively. Today’s protocol for selectivity, for example, has been a corpus of the locomotive. We are reading locomotive, only: the Louis A. Marre Rail Transportation Photograph Collection. Today’s item entered the collection bearing the name of Number 44, and library protocol has guided us toward learning that in 1876 Number 44 played a part in the centennial of the American Revolution.

The Library adds that it once went to the trouble of intensifying Number 44’s curated image. Until recently, however, the result wasn’t intense. Emotionally, it was a page from a history book that remained unillustrated. Its only stimulus to vision was a blur. Almost unpopulated, too, was the book’s aura of words. “Loss of life” is a phrase unfigured in its blank white, even though it hints at the death of 2208 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on May 31, 1889, in the churning course of a flood.

But the twenty-first century has delivered a trainload of computers with operating manuals that promise to teach us a smarter way of thinking through our pain. In artificially intelligent sequence, you can see now what the Library might claim to have been unable to reveal until now.

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And up they come at last, or at least apparently at last: Number 44, part of a forest’s stacked harvest, and a crew of men who labored to deliver the harvest to Number 44 for the sake of life. At next to last, the sake of  has become a phrase that almost seems to have delivered itself itself into words en route.

It didn’t, however. We didn’t learn it all the way to its end. Number 44 failed to become fully at one with us. On its page of text there is no hissing or chugging yet to be understood, or noise of floodwater still rushing away under timber. On this page, the only life actually perceptible is an irregular array of shadowy shapes distributed among whatever spaces aren’t filled so far by Number 44. After all, the stilled machine had only been pausing on its progress through history. The men’s heroic pose couldn’t have lasted. It didn’t last, never will last. In nineteenth-century iconography, a pose like the one you now see post-nineteenth century was intended to signify an overcoming of natural force. Bibliographies now shelved in the library will tell you that. The pose was intended to mean Hold back. Hold still.

Stance 2, 1889

But the river didn’t stop moving.

You knew that all along, of course, even though you may not have known of course itself until just now. You knew because of course is a river phrase signifying that which courses. Its function is to perform the grammar of a wordless song.

Of course is never not a song singing a river’s course. It fills its way into you, and with that you have learned to hear and then see and know. So not never, ever: