comedy

Humors and time

According to the Library of Congress, the oldest photograph of a cat in the collection is probably a daguerreotype cataloged as “Unidentified man with cat, three-quarter length portrait, full face, seated” and given the call number http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3d01979. Annotating it for a 2026 blogpost titled “Kittintypes,” the Library conscientiously stipulated that it is nothing but an image. It isn’t even an image of a cat, because it has no cat papers. Libraries exist to transact documents, but this cat and her man are undocumented. We don’t know their names, or where they lived, or how. The nominal when issued to them by the Library (“Between 1840 and 1860”) was only an approximation deduced from the general history of photography, and the only why that’s perceptible on the daguerreotype’s silver surface is a mirror image of your lensed self, reader!, in the instant of your reading at present. History’s one-word language, was, whited itself out before it could turn into is or I know or I am.

But is it an inaudible smile that we hear echoing, even so, through the silent aftermath retrospectively called Unidentified Man with Cat?

If it is, perhaps it signifies that the body fluids called humors have all along been filling the bodily spaces that we happen smilingly to share with Cat, even though we are Men. We weren’t always unidentified. Perhaps one day we will be identifiable again: and this time knowably, because this time to ourselves.


Inside the frame that has protected the daguerreotype image’s delicate silver-mercury amalgam down the years from the touch of fingers, something seems to have illuminated everyone’s visual understanding of a man showing a cat to you with an Egyptian gesture. Open the image frame, clear the haze with your computer, let the silver cat reflect light into your face, and watch yourself. In the catlight, you seem to have known all along that you are happy after all.

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Kristi Finefield, “Kittintypes: Nineteenth-Century Cats in the Daniel Carter Beard Collection.” https://blogs.loc.gov/picturethis/2026/06/kittintypes-nineteenth-century-cats-in-the-daniel-carter-beard-collection/?loclr=eaptb

Hat : woman :: machine : machine

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Le Corbusier inscribed those words in the second (1928) edition of his Toward an Architecture. The first sentence is one of the axioms of modernism. A century later, you are running your fingers over it on page 151 of John Goodman’s translation (Getty Research Institute, 2007), where it is shelved under the subtitle “Liners.”

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Liners such as, en route shortly after the launch of Toward an Architecture:

This one was shaped by the modernist aesthetic of Art Deco. Its three sleeked funnels were unequal in height from bow to stern: first tall, then medium, then short (and the short one was a decorative dummy). Viewed from the side, the pattern communicated a knowingly accepted illusion of streamlined speed. Viewed from the bow, the tall funnel allotted the ship’s proportions the way a hat allots a head’s proportions.

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Allotting, the hat inscribed below guides the eye to see a face as a petitesse. Petitesse is a curve and the hat is its generatrix.

Also the hat’s crown rakes back in the illusion of speed while the passive woman within the hat remains still. Also the hat’s ribbon, wrapped halfway up around the domed cylinder of the crown, teaches the senses to imagine ribbon and crown as body parts harmonizing at knowingly accepted cross purposes . . .

Jacques-Henri Lartigue, stereo autochrome Bibi au Restaurant d’Eden Roc, Cap d’Antibes, May 1920.

An eye made use of an apparatus to create this image of a woman designed and curated. She’s more than a century old now but as good as new. You accept the illusion knowingly. You are a member of its comic audience. Defined by the aesthetic of Euclid, a woman is a machine for wearing a hat.