art

History, dated 2026. History’s words, relatively dateless.

By executive order at the beginning of the second administration of President Donald J. Trump (Republican, 2025 – ), the United States’ Department of Defense was reverted to its older name, Department of War. The new Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, was an army veteran who had reached the rank of major, a Princeton and Harvard graduate who talked like Ancient Pistol and decorated his skin with mystical tattoos, and a news media personality. In the media, he spoke of the men under his command as “warfighters.” Of the women he spoke little.

But he lived in the midst of the men. To the media he posted videos of himself doing pullups among their young bodies, his own middle-aged muscles taut and his graying hair gelled. On July 16, 2026, a month after his forty-sixth birthday, he proclaimed in the presence of the media that warfighters no longer young will now undergo testosterone titration. The words of a hymn for that ritual might be “Stay big.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/us/politics/hegseth-troops-testosterone.html

But Representative Becca Balint of Vermont, a Democrat with a Harvard M.Ed., proceeded to teach a lesson about them in psychosexual translation.

https://thehill.com/homenew ofs/house/5972080-becca-balint-pete-hegseth-pentagon-testosterone-screenings-lgbtq-homoeroticism

Her lesson evoked a carbon-based life form male like Secretary Hegseth’s but structurally arranged as graphite, not flesh. Such life forms art do exist, Representative Balint said. They are on record in, for instance, the output history of Tom of Finland. Nom de crayon of an artist named Touko Valio Laaksonen (1920-1991), Tom was a graphiting machine that carried out such procedures as

https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/swanngalleries/26/796726/H0132-L413804779.JPG

Its output was man. Not living man; only man. At man-forming it was solely a work of art. Whether accessed by seeing or by foreseen touch, the forms assumed by its body-molding leathers were never not perfect. Etymologically, perfect means complete. If you read this art bulletin much after July 2026, it’s foreseeable that its first links are now incomplete themselves.  They linked to current events, and what makes an event an event is precisely its currency, which etymologically means its fleetingness. When Dr. Faustus cried O lente, lente, currite noctis equi just before the end, he was quoting a Roman metaphor relating time to motion, and in Rome the motion was typically stopped at the end of its course by a stone tomb erected beside a busy road.

But tombs are business-zoned for a traffic of words. Read down, for instance, to the title tombeau in this book published during the significant year 1914. On the historical record, words that are still readable so many years after their inscription must still bear some read meaning, whatever it may be. But even if the term “read meaning” could once have been made to refer to a lexicon of nameable bodies cataloged in an archive bounded at its beginning by a logically conceivable ante quem, that task can’t be performed now. Once all the tombs of 1914 were complete, the language of their archive was post quem inexplicable. Thenceforth it communicated only the sense of its last page: a The End, not a beginning. The The End’s language had translated itself into what Italian calls storia: a term that translates indifferently as, take your pick, either non-fictional history or fictional story. Either way, in the pages written before 1914 that you’re about to read, there is only storia. From it you can’t logically hope to extract anything more: meaning or truth or anything datable before 1914 or, for that matter, since.

https://archive.org/details/officeroprussian00lawrrich

But on the page that lay in your hand a moment ago, you were read by some words that evoked a machine-shaped man. Now that you have read it, hasn’t that shape entered the teaxonomy of your own life? Isn’t it, at least for this moment, a part of your biology?

If it is, it must be continuous with the biology of language extant before now. Unless continuity is broken, a word that has achieved significance will remain significant even after those who spoke it have returned to insignificant earth. Ezra Pound’s epigram about that event, “Literature is news that STAYS news,” isn’t a definition but an anthology of words that have remained visible on their pages through greater or lesser extents of time. There were macassar-oil words for 1914 just as there are hair-gel words for 2026, but on the pages of the anthology most of those are now just stains. Macassar’s trace faded away before healthy Secretary Pete could even be born, but tubercular D. H. Lawrence’s words are still coughing up a lifeblood. For newer words on other pages we’ll have to wait for vital signs, but perhaps we owe our future the thought that hair gel may be gluing us down to mortal physique in ways that words don’t.

Art has anticipated what we think of as experience

In 1955, we were told that this was fiction.

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But it had already become what’s called real.

The New Yorker, September 24, 1949

Look at Studebaker’s wardrobe for 1949, think of the then new jet plane acting a new role in the unchanging plot of dream, and you’ll understand that Studebaker wasn’t at all the first walk-on to carry a bag of props. What’s called an event is only one of infinitely many acts already staged in the past tense. Regardless of wardrobe, the last act every night everywhere is the one that darkens all the universe into background for a marquee.

And the marquee’s only words, always, are the three that glow Lasciate ogne speranza.

Shod forever in red: two modes of immortality

1. That which never can change:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=eX6e8A9mk-g

Its oriflamme is, “The red shoes dance on.”

2. That which refashions mother memory into statesmanship:Its talisman in words is, “Make [name of myth] great again.”

As if the word again could ever have had a not yet changed meaning – that is, a meaning not yet tangled in myth’s pubic hair.

—

This is an anonymous, unattributed repost of a document dating from about 1938. Its text translates as, “Germanic Civilization and Way of Life: The Knowledge of the Sacredness of the Blood.”

Iste perfecit opus

In Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi,” the artist who narrates the poem asks us to consider a painting filled to the margins with brilliantly illuminated images of men and women, every one of them as singularly alive as it’s possible for a human creator to make. Among all of those, one will bear a caption: Iste perfecit opus, “This man made the work.”

Browning read those words as the credo of the kind of artist who mines his way through the material of any world that comes to his hand. The credo’s key word is the one that guides Fra Lippo’s kind of art-labor: the adverb intensely.

                                        This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
.
—
,
Intensely through the course of his career, Donald Trump has often made it known that he’d like to see a new colossus blasted into the granite of Mount Rushmore, in addition to or instead of the existing four. This would be, obviously, the one depicting himself. However, the analysis of John Branch and Jeremy White concludes that that desire won’t be fulfilled. Geology prohibits it.
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To an ordinary artist, that would count as a rejection. But an artist possessed by intensity will resculpt rejection into a constructive consolation. Properly, a labor that is intense will be powered by nothing but biology. It will transcend human tools, even the power drills and dynamite that Gutzon Borglum used when he subjugated the granite of Mount Rushmore to fame. After all, even that fame was a limited one, incomprehensible beyond the limits of a single nation’s history. Its scope was physically ambitious but deficient in desire. But the moment when desire understands that what it desires is only desire itself – desire unfulfillable because unending and unending because illimitable – the limiting specifics of its implements will cease to matter.
.

—

After all, the implements might be a mere chisel, a mere paintbrush, a mere pen. How much work has been done with those!

Or, for another mere instance:

—

John Branch and Jeremy White, “Should (or Could) Trump Be Added to Mount Rushmore?” New York Times, June 27, 2025

History in an era before irony. Art in an era before color.

After the World Series of 1913, the New York Giants and the Chicago White Sox boarded the first of many trains and headed west for a series of exhibition games. After they arrived in California, they kept right on rounding bases through Asia, Australia, and then Europe. In England they played a game before King George V, then boarded one last steamer for their return to the United States. It arrived in New York on the morning of March 6, 1914.

It docked two hours late, and the weather over the harbor was rainy and snowy. Nevertheless, a riverboat brought hundreds of people alongside, cheering. A photographer from the Bain News Service recorded their approach, and after that somebody scratched three words of explanation into the silent negative that survived the event. Using a photo-editing program, I’ve erased them from this print. Trying to read them on their own single term is pointless now, because “now” is the period of time extending almost all the way back to the instant of shutter release. To read the word “now” requires a supplementary history archived far from the site of anything instant.

The words that no longer mean are “Ship with fans.” Other attempts at inscribing meaning might have been made, of course: words such as “prow,” “angular,” and perhaps “geometric” or “abstract.” Two more would have to have been “white” and “black.” Think of a Mondrian shape without color. As of March 6, 1914, however, the time for such a thing hadn’t yet arrived.

But one more incision scratched into the negative cut all the way through to the time beyond 1914. Referring across a few more inches of silver halide emulsion to the word “ship,” it gave it a name bearing the colors of a future. In 1914 “ship” in plain black and white was all it needed to be. For the purposes of a news service’s lexicon in 1914, the ship was only a mode of baseball delivery. The second scratching gave “Ship” a proper name, but as of 1914 that amounted only to journalism’s who-what-where practice at its automated busywork. The name itself remained insignificant.

But in 1915 it suddenly began signifying on its own. Suddenly the ship sank below the visible surface of things; suddenly the letters on its bow and stern became unreadable; suddenly, then, they were transformed from a string of morphemes painted on metal to a meaning capable of existing anywhere. Now that they are gone into history, the metal letters are history.  Their historiography took only a few minutes to accomplish, and in its final form it is only one synecdochic word long.

Say the synecdoche. In memory, as memory, say Lusitania. Like Guernica, it will be one of the words in which some artists of the twentieth century defined a mortal passage out of time.

Sources:

Tom Clavin, “The Inside Story of Baseball’s Grand World Tour of 1914.” Smithsonian Magazine, March 21, 2014. 

“Giants Get Rousing Welcome Home.” New York Times, March 7, 1914, page 12.

[“LUSITANIA, 1907-1914 . . .”] George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002721377/

Not heard coming

The cartoon is about something that was on a lot of front pages in September 1903: “the problem of aerial navigation.” Just below the picture, a little story about the impending voyage of Samuel Pierpont Langley’s flying machine Aerodrome is to be read as a footnote in advance.

Pedagogically, it teaches us that on October 7 and again on December 8, the Aerodrome and its pilot catapulted themselves into the air from a boat moored in the Potomac River but then nosed down and sank. Langley’s attempt at powered flight had been supported by the resources and publicity apparatus of the Smithsonian Institution, but when the ripples closed above them, the problem of aerial navigation remained unsolved.

It was to be solved on December 17 by Orville Wright, but even during the moment of the immediately post-Langley nobody at the Indianapolis Star was in position to see that coming. Elsewhere in its front-page layout for September 28 the Star had offered its subscribers opportunities to read about several murders, a gallows confession, an accidental electrocution, and a horse-show scandal. All those readings, however, were rooted in the still earth of September 1903.  The problem of aerial navigation remained as unsolved as ever. Column 1’s long article about a train falling from a trestle could treat only the idea of descent from ground to ground.

But the Wright Brothers solved the falling-body problem, and over the following years the solution became known. By 1924 the body at the foot of the trestle could be imagined on the rise. According to Wikipedia, this record of the change was the first country song to sell a million copies.

https://archive.org/details/wreck-of-the-old-97_202102

Listen to its cheerful whistlings. Fast mail train no. 97 had taken on feathered flesh. Now it could fly on to heaven, leaving its wood and metal mortalities in death-filled earth.