Month: September 2025

Again, Bobby Jr.

Teaching undergraduate literature at second-tier universities in the late twentieth century, I used to get lucky with “The Use of Force,” a short story by a modernist poet who earned his living as a pediatrician. He wrote it in 1938, as a kind of casenote.

https://openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu/premedical-society/wp-content/uploads/sites/328/2020/10/William-Carlos-Williams_The-Use-of-Force.pdf

“You know,” I’d suggest to the class, “this is a story about rape.”

“No!” the class would roar back. “The man is a doctor! He’s trying to help the little girl!” But then we would start actually reading the words that the doctor actually wrote, and faces would light up.

But after the late twentieth century gave way to the early twenty-first, the lights stayed off. “Big deal,” jeered the 19-year-old healthies seventy years after 1938. “Every male-female relationship is a rape.” So I stopped teaching “The Use of Force.”

And after all, by then there remained few physicians who had ever even seen a case of diphtheria.

But oh, Mr. Secretary Jr.: how wonderful the word “again” may be about to become again.

I didn’t say good.

But I do say wonderful.

Blink remembered

At first, all we know of these five people is 24 words set off by brackets from the rest of the universe of language:

[Two unidentified women seated on a sofa, two unidentified men standing behind the sofa, with a woman peering over the back of the sofa.]

The words represent the finest detail visible at the end of a zoom in on the five people’s location in archived history:

Library of Congress, USA;

Prints and Photographs Division;

Daguerreotype Collection;

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004664588/

That is all the zoom is intended to do, and all that words such as “two unidentified women” can do. At the end of the zoom rests a detailed collective body, clothed in modes and tinted, but unable to communicate itself as a body. The tinted body can’t name itself. Between its modes and yours and mine lies no word’s land, the emptied space between the lines where comprehension bleeds away and dies. The five people all had expressive faces, but we’ll never know now what they were expressing.

But if we venture to think that they may still communicate by means of their silence, we might try the experiment of examining the silence as if it were a body. We might, for instance, lay it down on a table, turn up the lights,

and then lean over it.

Leaning, we see a man’s hand and a woman’s hand. Isolated for inspection, they are seen to be speaking complementary dialects of body language. The woman’s hand clings; the man’s hand holds down.

Above and between the hands is a woman’s face. Like the other women’s faces and unlike the men’s, it isn’t set apart from eye contact by a pair of glasses. But even without glasses, of course, we can never see how the woman saw from within her bonnet. Whether she wore the spectacles or we do, there lies between her and us an ever-thickening deposit of optical glass. Lens after lens has been interposed: first by a daguerreotypist during the woman’s floruit (“1840-1860,” says loc.gov), then by us. Seriatim, the lenses deflect the rays that once were direct.

But for the length of a blink, at a location in space and time, this woman became the source of her own light. She was its beginning and end – that is, its history. The history had been latent before its time and it is occulted now, but within its time it was extant. From its blinking open to its close, it endured only long enough to resolve itself to completion like a cadence. But during the resolution – that is, during the only instant when a cadence can be a cadence – it was.

And now we all – once upon their time, for those three women and two men; forever after, for the rest of us – can see that it was. Light had lensed a woman into an image.

“Ha’ you heard better language, sir?”

Venice, 1606. In the crowd, Peregrine and Sir Politic Would-be are listening to Volpone’s medicine show.

Poughkeepsie, New York, November 14, 1902: the Poughkeepsie Eagle-News reports.

As to me and you, you shriveled, salad-eating artisan: of course our language is irregular and subject to weakening drains. In 1902 we couldn’t say “pregnant,” and shortly after that era our words were re-herded into an even tighter propinquity.

But after all, words have never in themselves made the weak strong or the sick well. We do hold that magic in our mouths, but it isn’t a spell to be spoken. Its power is pre-vocable: a watersound of wet chemistry at its work.

Open your body wide to that language and listen. Help it help yourself to it. Immunize.

Surcharge: 25 centimes for unemployed Louis Pasteur

Directions at sunrise

You don’t want to know why I was waiting outside Castle Hospital’s emergency room at  six in the morning, but Uber had told me to expect a red Cadillac driven by a man named Willy. “Oh Detroit,” I thought happily, anticipating a conversation full of memories. And then Cadillac drove up.

It didn’t use the driveway; it, with Willy, waited for me on the other side of the parking lot. I hauled myself up from the hospital’s wheelchair, walked over to the redness, and opened the door. Inside was a sign counseling me to close it carefully, and in the driver’s seat Willy wasn’t what I thought he’d be. He was an elderly local man seated among several thermoses, and from his rear view mirror hung a rosary. Morning sun tinged its red crystal beads, and all of Cadillac’s windows were open, with a cool wind blowing through.

From the T intersection at Castle Junction it’s a short straight drive back to my house in Hawaii Kai, via Waimanalo. But Willy didn’t drive down the T; instead, he turned left and headed toward downtown Honolulu on Pali Highway. I didn’t ask him to correct our course, because it was coming to me that I was embarked on a farewell tour. Sites were showing themselves to me for probably the first time and possibly the last time since I had had to lift my hands from the wheel forever after. Past us once more they came: woods, then the steep climb up Pali Highway to the cliffs; then the tunnel and the peak and the way back down the other side into the city. Again, again, the memory things in their morning light: the Korean consulate; Temple Emanuel; a ramshackle fundamentalist school where Haesun had applied for a librarian’s job right after we moved to Hawaii; the upcurving roofs of the replica of the Byodo-In Temple. Then the Buddhist Center and the on-ramp curving down and east into the morning traffic on Interstate H-1.

After H-1 ends, its continuation on Kalanianaole Highway is contraflowed in the early morning, with four of the six lanes coned to direct traffic west. Cadillac and I were bound east, slow in the remaining two lanes. At our speed there was no longer much air blowing through Cadillac’s windows, so for the first time I could hear what Willy had been paying his attention to.

It was Republican talk radio. “Oh I never knew that!” gushed the straight girl, and after that the man with the voice used his basso to stimulate and arouse. Together, the man and the girl began taking turns admiring Bobby Kennedy Jr. Those . . . senators . . . tried to yell at him, sneered the basso, but he showed them. By now the hospital was on the other side of the island.

—

From Africa has come Elon Musk: now the richest and most mobile man in the world but also known for his eleven or so current children conceived by artificial insemination.

Also from Africa there came Aurlus Mabélé (1953-2020). He died during what, post-Bobby Jr., we may wind up calling the First Covid Pandemic. But while he was among us he fathered thirteen children.

Without apparatus, let us think.