In the spring of 2026 it became true that Jason Arday was the first black professor in the history of the University of Cambridge. In British universities the title professor connotes seniority, but Arday’s age in 2026 was an astonishingly young 37.
Summer followed, however, in a text alleging from Cambridge that astonishing Professor Arday had actually been non-verbal until the age of 11 and unable to read until 18. Now, declared the text, he was not only a world-renowned scholar but also a world-class athlete who once ran 30 marathons in 35 days on a fractured tibia.
After that, naturally (comme on dit), he disappeared. During 2026 the evanishment was briefly visible. But it’s the nature of comings into being like the Arday phenomenon that they keep coming into beings. In 2026 one of the beings called itself Arday. During the Roaring Nineteen-Twenties a being that called itself Lowell (Joan Lowell, thank you) came into being in a book called The Cradle of the Deep about girlhood on board the schooner Minnie A. Caine. In memoirist character, character Joan had herself silent-filmed womaning a helm and spitting on a deck, then arrived at her The End atingle and aswim away from burning Minnie with kittens clinging to her nightie.
A few years earlier, in an anonymously published book titled Thy Son Liveth, a woman claimed to have received first radio and then radioless communications from her son, who had been killed in the Great War. Army life continued in the clouds, the son transmitted. What the doughboys did up there was, you know, stuff. But they did have dogs and cats, and they always made time for Bible study. Up there the text that most engaged them was Genesis 2.24, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh,” and the question they asked of it was,
After the death of a widow who has remarried, in what way(s) will she get together in just one flesh with all her husbands?
The author of Thy Son Liveth later revealed herself to be the writer of children’s books Grace Duffie Boylan, who had been married four times.
But oh well. Of course oh well. I’ve written about both Thy Son Liveth and The Cradle of the Deep before. Thy Son Liveth is a short book, but somebody took the trouble to write a long letter to the New York Times about its errors of military detail. The Maine lyricist Lincoln Colcord, who had grown up 0n board a Down East clipper, did the same thing with maritime detail in a long book review of The Cradle of the Deep. But oh well, one more time:
During the era of Thy Son Liveth and The Cradle of the Deep, a popular poem went
I can’t stand the family Stein.
There’s Gert and there’s Ep and there’s Ein.
Gert’s poems are bunk,
Ep’s statues are junk,
And nobody understands Ein.
But Gertrude’s flying return from France to the United States between October 1934 and May 1935 turned into a triumphal tour. She plunged everyone into her charm. Whelmed and dazed, one reporter asked her, “Why don’t you write the way you talk?”
And from wave’s depth, Gertrude replied, “Why don’t you read the way I write?”
Why not indeed. See below, in pressed shellac, a fossilized trace of Lincoln’s song. Press your ear to it and listen. What you hear is Stein, filling.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6CIDved-bY
