Author: jonathanmorse

The memory of Charles Lamb

In the current issue of Modernism / modernity (September 2023, published early 2024), Christian H. Gelder’s “‘To Measure is All We Know’: William Carlos Williams and the Science of Measurement” offers readings of the persistent word measure in Williams’s oeuvre. Williams’s long-term readers know that that’s an important word for Williams precisely because he never defines it. It’s just out there in the oeuvre, a term endlessly approaching an ever-receding frontier of meaning.

Until today, I considered myself one of those long-term readers. I taught Williams for years, I wrote about him, and I continue to love him. I was a loving reader on campus. Until today, I could have put that sentence in the present tense. But Gelder’s article looks like a chapter of a dissertation, heavy on current citations — and those citations are to a scholarship that seems to have appeared while I was off campus. Title after title in the bibliography refers now to a pair of concepts that I’d failed until now to consider even separately: autobiography (of the article’s author, not of Williams) and race. Says article after article now: this is what I have to say about the racial meanings of Williams’s mathematical word measure, and I say what I say as a member of an ethnic category.

During the years when I was writing I wasn’t that kind of I. I didn’t say the pronoun that way. I didn’t say, “Speaking as a [name of ethnic category], I . . .” But (says the bibliography) not many people on campus now seem to say I in any other way. They have become what I seem never to have been, and I and whatever I once was have been rolled out of the lexicon. Outside it, we are unreadable. Whatever might have been sayable of us then as a single term, such as writer or I, can no longer be said of us now at all. All that may remain now of whatever is something prior in the void.

Here in the void, consider the conversational essay by Charles Lamb in which somebody once upon a time uttered four words in a voice that then became the passive voice. It was a moment when passivity took dominion, and it was forever. To its grammatical object then, something that was said in the moment has now exited the moment. Ever since and forever, it now says:

“Madam, you are superannuated.”

Power events on an island

Five months ago I published online a little Issuu book about what happened to the history of power in one place, Honolulu, and two times: the 1830s and the nineteen-teens. The first series of events displays Herman Melville plagiarizing the indignation of a German botanist about the tyrannical control of Hawaii’s New England missionaries. The second culminates in an almost successful attempt by German forces during World War I to blow up Honolulu harbor, followed by a near-lynching on a King Street trolleycar.

Force repeats itself. If you’d like a second chance to read how that worked out in Honolulu, your link is

Repost words and poem words

Jorie Graham, holder for the second time of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and Harvard University’s Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, maintains a busy practice online as a poet on the ideal model of Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry”: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Professor Graham’s daily legislations there are typically reposts dealing with a current event: global warming, environmental pollution, whatever people are talking about on campus today. Read off campus, the reposts don’t show any demonstrable expertise. In themselves, they offer us no reason to read them. But they have been compiled to be read in campus mode on social media, and what the act of reading does there is the social. Don’t believe me, it says. You don’t have to, and in any case language teaches you that you can’t. You can’t believe me, but — see! here on the screen! — you are me.

A recent Jorie Graham repost, for instance, looks in its entirety like this.

For some time, attributive adjectival tags such as “American Jew Rabbi” have been standard syntax in the language of social media. I’d guess that the practice dates back at least as far as Newt Gingrich’s lists of pejorative words recommended for use against Democrats, but as of 2024 it’s simply a part of communication’s background noise. Qua noise it communicates nothing: nothing about what Yaakov Shapiro believes or says or is; just nothing. Replacing a name, Yaakov Shapiro, with a nametag, jewrabbi, noise makes it inaudibly unnecessary. The name’s former space in the electromagnetic spectrum  is now only a rature. Layered over it is a coded statement about identity. Wave the code transmitter and that will turn itself on.

The transmission says Yaakov Shapiro is an American Jew rabbi. Having received the transmission, you have received everything that transmission can communicate. Professor Graham, notable for playing campus politics with poetry at Harvard, plays it briskly and lucidly here, as a repost of what oh everybody knows. Everybody knows: this is this.

But when the language of Jorie Graham’s own poetry speaks through her, she doesn’t sound  like that, with a one-word vocabulary, this. Her this repost lies flattened on its prose page, but her multi-word efforts to mean originate in a body-round prosodic force which creates not from the oh everybody knows of words in synonymy but from the never yet definable emptinesses where words are not.

to be the last human jorie graham

If Professor Graham could find words to speak that language about Yaakov Shapiro, then and only then she might assume the poet’s Shelleyan role of teaching us what Yaakov Shapiro is. But in its repost mode, all that her language expresses is a sound without reference: jew. In poem language, which is noun language, “Jew” does have reference. It is rich and complicated, modulated by an ever-changing flow of connotation. I sometimes get complicated with myself that way, the way I suppose all of us do on the occasions when we think of ourselves as sharing a complicated being. But repost language retranslates every complication back to a single-meaning simplicity. It says to Yaakov Shapiro, in the words of the language recycler Jorie Graham:

“You’re a POJ. It’s that simple. You’re a POJ. You’re a POJ.

“What else do I have a computer for, hunh?”

Smash forever: a note on the conservatism of Left language

In current (February 2024) Left discourse, a popular utterance, rising into the air amid waving banners, is, “Smash Zionism!” But an odd thing about the utterers marching with their flags is that their word smash, the verb that says what they think they mean, is much older than they know. I first encountered it myself more than fifty years ago, on a college campus where some very old professors from the days of CPUSA had organized a congregation of the Progressive Labor Party and were using it to teach the young the hymns of their youth. Just then they were abstractly exhorting us all to smash racism, but you can imagine Hegel being equally abstract long before that time and place — say, silently in 1927, before the screen in a German movie theater.

In any case, the marchers don’t seem to be any closer to their arrival now than they were then. Their metaphor remains in the future tense. It seems to want to be in the imperative mode there, but over the bullhorns it sounds more like a jussive: “You guys! Let’s smash!”

And likewise with the yo ho ho Treasure Island jollity of “Hands off Gaza.” When, o human reader, was the last time you yourself ever said “Hands off”? Can you even imagine how your voice would sound to yourself in its moment of utterance? It could be only one part of a uniform roar, with all the separate words blurred by the loud.

But here’s a literary history that may help with the speech problem.  Its data were compiled many decades ago, words and wardrobe and all. Its original beneficiary, Nabokov’s exiled T. P. Pnin, is here to be discovered before another movie screen — this one, however, in an American classroom far from the home that he will never see again.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957)

You can fill in the part after the hyphen yourself. Professor Pnin, the last speaker of his lost language, was weeping for Ruki proch, which translates to “Hands off.” It isn’t a phrase he was ever taught to understand. He is one of those on whose language hands were laid.

Under the same hands today, the hand metaphor is no longer a matter of language but a body function. Its hymnody isn’t composed for words on a banner but for an electronic simulation of horned bulls. The bulls bellow by the codes of machine learning. Horns held in their still human hands, they now rush through the chutes they have built for themselves to the abattoirs.

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A history of my 1970s experience with smash is available at https://jonathanmorse.blog/2014/01/08/political-history-book-song-anecdote/