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Prosthesis

It is America in the 1930s or forties and you are an unhappy, unsuccessful white man. For you there exists Popular Science: a magazine that published William James and Charles Sanders Peirce in the nineteenth century but now runs mostly repeats of the story about building a boat in the back yard and the story about the diagnostic skills of Gus the mechanic. For Popular Science by then, science was primarily a stimulus to fantasy. In the magazine’s advertisements the fantasy was overt, and what the fantasy typically evoked was a do-it-yourself hope of success through education.

A delicate vestige of the days of James and Peirce was the running ad for the Harvard Classics, a collection of books which promised its purchaser a comprehensive liberal education bounded within the left and right ends of what the copy called “Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf.”

President Charles William Eliot of Harvard, by John Singer Sargent

More modest hopes were encouraged by the enticements of a starter pair of breeding hamsters and a training course for railroad mail clerks. Specifically for the era of Marconi, too, were the very many courses in radio repair. In the unscientific literature, those became a fully developed trope: an ironic symbol of self-delusion. Readers following the stories of Connie in The Grapes of Wrath, Biff in Death of a Salesman and Jim in The Glass Menagerie knew from the first page that those radios of theirs never were going to work.

But the Popular Science Monthly of James and Peirce had carried no advertising and was printed in monochrome. The senses of Connie and Biff and Jim, on the other hand, were nourished by color. Reader, try to resist this.

This image doesn’t depict the car named Studebaker; it is Studebaker. Studebaker is one, only. In and around it, nothing is peopled. Studebaker is to be seen only from below, and Studebaker’s Indiana is only desert. In 1949, an influence on the mind of Popular Science’s failure of a reader was the new jet plane, and Popular Science made that innovation comprehensible by making it personal. Crushing Indiana underfoot, Studebaker has left doing behind and entered pure being. It is a being in synecdoche: a single organ standing for the whole body, a nose thrusting stiffly and forever into Indiana. Studebaker takes in forever Indiana’s dry, odorless, dead air.

Says the nose to the failed man: don’t worry. I will dispose of your life.

Two remedies for distress

In my state, the current lieutenant governor spends one day a week working his other job as an emergency room physician. He also makes media appearances to discuss the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But because he promotes science and because he is a Jew, the congregants of a Christian chapel now picket his residence at night, flashing strobes and creating noisy disorder. In the comment stream of the local newspaper they also discuss health policy in language whose wordplay seems to show the influence of Ezra Pound. There, the words attributed to the lieutenant governor are a sheeny dialect from about 1908, the year that Pound left the United States and cut himself off from American language. Of course if you turn on the TV in 2022 you won’t hear the lieutenant governor speaking like that, but Pound was the poet who wrote for eternity, “Literature is news that STAYS news.”

The dictum must also be true for other ways of thinking in language, such as politics and religion. So would you yourself like to be cured of distress, reader? Then perhaps the time has come for you to open your mind to one or both of these ancient word-cures. Their strength is still unexpired.

Hear it. Open a window anywhere in America. The air that flows in will be filled with voices chanting, “Gimme that ol’ time,” and time will be mingled with them. Once more, time sings through the varied carols of America, and once again, as once in 1849, it writes this lyric prescription for healing. Take it now. You are no longer in the past, but the past will be to you a nutritional supplement.

Handbill, Duke University Libraries, https://repository.duke.edu/dc/eaa/B0178. Contrast and detail restored.

And this second revelation, datable to an American childhood in the Eisenhower years, has turned out to be a text immune to time. In your old age it now teaches you, at last! that all you have ever needed is the happiness of feeling with your body a red hat, a red tie, and a gun for threatening with.

Contrast, color and detail restored. About the line “Our 60th year,” this source says the Wilson Chemical Company was founded in 1895: https://perma.cc/96CR-QS3A.

You may address your prayer to the fulfillment department.

 

She woke from a dream of flight by alphabet

She was Phoebe Snow, the white-gowned heroine of one of the most successful advertising campaigns in American business history: Earnest Elmo Calkins’s series of streetcar advertising cards (1903-1917) for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. This was the onset of Phoebe’s dream.

 

 

Its poems and its history can be read at http://cs.trains.com/ctr/f/3/p/264453/2986868.aspx. For the dream itself, however, no language was required beyond a few alphabetic cells of the meaning into which Phoebe was to awaken .

 

 

And because the alphabet was a dream, the awakening from dream to meaning was happy.

 

I also discuss Phoebe at https://jonathanmorse.blog/2012/05/26/as-things-fade-to-white/. The photograph above comes from the story of Earnest Elmo Calkins. I’ve post-processed it for color and detail.