Humors and time

According to the Library of Congress, the oldest photograph of a cat in the collection is probably a daguerreotype cataloged as “Unidentified man with cat, three-quarter length portrait, full face, seated” and given the call number http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3d01979. Annotating it for a 2026 blogpost titled “Kittintypes,” the Library conscientiously stipulated that it is nothing but an image. It isn’t even an image of a cat, because it has no cat papers. Libraries exist to transact documents, but this cat and her man are undocumented. We don’t know their names, or where they lived, or how. The nominal when issued to them by the Library (“Between 1840 and 1860”) was only an approximation deduced from the general history of photography, and the only why that’s perceptible on the daguerreotype’s silver surface is a mirror image of your lensed self, reader!, in the instant of your reading at present. History’s one-word language, was, whited itself out before it could turn into is or I know or I am.

But is it an inaudible smile that we hear echoing, even so, through the silent aftermath retrospectively called Unidentified Man with Cat?

If it is, perhaps it signifies that the body fluids called humors have all along been filling the bodily spaces that we happen smilingly to share with Cat, even though we are Men. We weren’t always unidentified. Perhaps one day we will be identifiable again: and this time knowably, because this time to ourselves.


Inside the frame that has protected the daguerreotype image’s delicate silver-mercury amalgam down the years from the touch of fingers, something seems to have illuminated everyone’s visual understanding of a man showing a cat to you with an Egyptian gesture. Open the image frame, clear the haze with your computer, let the silver cat reflect light into your face, and watch yourself. In the catlight, you seem to have known all along that you are happy after all.

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Kristi Finefield, “Kittintypes: Nineteenth-Century Cats in the Daniel Carter Beard Collection.” https://blogs.loc.gov/picturethis/2026/06/kittintypes-nineteenth-century-cats-in-the-daniel-carter-beard-collection/?loclr=eaptb

“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 the line below from a nineteenth-century poem (Ernest Dowson’s “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae”) which includes the words “I have forgot much.” Down among those words, of course, it hasn’t forgotten a word. At that, in the aftermath of the nineteenth century it will help you remember even more words, because this time the line about forgetting will come scrolling by for a second time, this one on a soundtrack.

In 1939, the year the track was laid, it sang a politicized nineteenth-century quickstep whose words then gave way to women’s voices vocalizing only a slow Woo ah. That whited-out libretto was projected from a reel filmed in a nineteenth-century font projected from right to left, and ever since then it has been unscrolling from the nineteenth century back to us. But now, in 2026, the reel may have rereached its 1939 beginning.

At any rate, what we hear now seems to sound once again like beginning’s genre, the commandment. It may say I am that I am; it does say Tolle, lege: take up and read. Then, adding a new register to itself by unreeling filmstock from the lab, it says:

I am reel as I have been scroll. I command you from this day backward. From here, my order of operations will begin on the side facing away from the light. It will be from right to left; from time present to time past; from ending in light to beginning once more in darkness.