Once upon a time, perhaps in 1922 — the publication date of Ulysses and The Waste Land, and of Sinclair Lewis’s social satire Babbitt, with its phonographic transcripts of the way Americans talked in 1922, and of vol. 1, no. 1 of Babbitt’s real-time control corpus Reader’s Digest —

once upon a time, perhaps in that year when modes of perceiving words changed, someone looked at a photograph captioned with a Connecticut title and asked it the beginning of a question.

Adjusting the clarity and contrast of this dog bounded between words restores visibility to what he is doing: wagging his tail. But the bounding question, as worded, hasn’t been brought to completion. What we perceive of the dog doesn’t have a context. The question may signify, “At what address in Westbrook, Conn., was Major?” But alternatively it may signify, “What became of Major, forever after?” Whatever the answer may be to either of those sub-questions, it can’t be now what it would have been in 1922, the year C. K. Ogden translated into English the sentences, “The world is everything that is the case” and then “The picture is a model of reality” and “The picture is a fact” (Tractatus 1, 2.12, 2.141). In perhaps 1922 someone writing a graceful nineteenth-century hand molded the words
“Westbrook           Conn.” around a void and shaped it into a model of the fact of permanent self-evidence. The case of the top margin is Westbrook           Conn.; what else can it ever be? But evidence of any kind is missing from the laborious blockprint at the bottom. Down there, there is no connection between the question on the left and the date on the right. More, and terribly: the writing at the bottom may be an old writer’s correction of the erratum she herself created at the top while she was young. The R’s are similarly formed. Now that the writer understands that her mood should have been interrogative rather than indicative, she writes correspondents from the time zone after 1922 an interrogative letter of request. Skipping past the image between its two lines of words, we are to write back with any story we can tell about a dog who slipped the words.

We hold the letter from perhaps 1922 in our hands: a little slip of paper marked with ink in its margins and silver halides at its center. Any answer we make will have to be marginal, skipping from top to bottom past the halides and their caption reading “Connecticut.” Centered in the halides, the wordless part of the story is the dog’s life.