Dickinson

Mirrored from either side

Invented in 1854, the mass-produced 6-by-9 centimeter carte de visite photograph was at its peak of collectible popularity during the 1860s, when Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked,

So Thomas Wentworth Higginson was only exhibiting the common taste of 1862 when he asked Emily Dickinson for her picture. He would have been startled by the first sentence of her reply: “Could you believe me without?” Miss Dickinson went on to explain:

It often alarms Father – He says Death might occur, and he has Molds of all the rest, but has no Mold of me, but I noticed the Quick wore off those things, in a few days, and forestall the dishonor – You will think no caprice of me –

   The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell (Harvard University Press, 2024), no. 345.

And no image followed, then or ever after.

But before, when she was only sixteen, a single earlier image was graven. It was a daguerreotype: an early kind of photograph which was reflective, like a mirror, and unique: lacking a negative and therefore reproducible only by rephotographing. That description sounds like a metaphor custom-fitted for a Dickinson Diana, but the 1847 daguerreotype is mostly generality. William C. North, the traveling “Daguerrian artist” who uncovered his lens in the presence of Emily Dickinson, performed exactly the same repertoire for her mother: pose, prop book and all. Nor was he killed by his own dogs for his presumption.

Daguerreotypes are pitiable on their own terms, too. Consisting only of a thin mercury-amalgam film deposited on a hard surface, a daguerreotype has to be shielded behind glass, and any contact with anything else that’s hard will leave a permanent mark. Over time, contact will be almost unavoidable. And if you try merely to look hard, aided by a lens or a video program, the blemished metal superficies will defeat your vision right there.

But I ask you to run the video once again, this time under the control of a program that commands, “Clean the metal with benzoyl peroxide, but leave the flesh to its blemishes.”

More detail will appear, but it will be only surface detail. Even after it has scribed itself into metal, it will remain only gossip.  “With a metallic grin,” it will titter that sixteen-year-old Emily’s acne was bad and she may have had her hair in a net.* You’ve been trying to penetrate, but you’re still only skating across the impenetrable.

But keep skating. Skate on until you freeze into a snow queen. Because most daguerreotypes  are mirror images, I think we’re warranted in asking Photoshop to reverse itself and make the queen’s icy image our own mirror. Look, therefore. Wait five seconds.

And see: this image’s eye is capable of piercing any lens between itself and you, whether it’s a lens of glass or a lens of vitreous humor. The imaged body moves itself from side to side, toward you.

How ‘scape you killing?

.

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* Fr243, “That after horror”

White – unto the White Creator –

The Time magazine images at

http://lightbox.time.com/2012/08/23/the-convention-draws-near-the-romney-ryan-road-trip-to-the-party-in-tampa

show the current Republican candidates for President and Vice President campaigning and fund-raising in New England and Long Island. One hundred percent of the people in every photograph are white.

But in one of the photographs (by Lauren Fleishman) the personnel have become invisible. Their traces exist only outside the image frame. A moment prior to the image’s time, something human, perhaps even something unwhite, created its composition and then removed itself. Alone before the composition now, we see a still life of an airplane’s tray table in repose. Resting upon it are a plastic plate in green and yellow imitation wicker, a white napkin on which rests a single chocolate chip cookie, and a transparent plastic cup of milk. As the beloved hymn of the party of the War on Christmas says,

All is calm, all is bright.

Like a tag on a toe in a morgue, a caption informs us that the cookie is still warm. When old age shall this generation waste, it will remain.

Malevich, just think how much greater an artist you might have been if you had only owned a dacha in East Hampton!

Sources: Emily Dickinson, “Publication is the auction” (Fr788) and Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White. Click to enlarge.

Subordinate clause: a sentence for the party of states’ rights and family values

At 5 PM on October 1, 1851, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal:

Just put a fugitive slave, who has taken the name of Henry Williams, into the cars for Canada. He escaped from Stafford County, Virginia, to Boston last October; has been in Shadrach’s place at the Cornhill Coffee-House; had been corresponding through an agent with his master, who is his father, about buying himself, his master asking $600, but he having been able to raise only $500. Heard that there were writs out for two Williamses, fugitives. . . . Accordingly fled to Concord last night on foot. 

In mid-nineteenth-century American English, “into the cars” meant “on the train.” However, the terms “agent” and “writ” haven’t changed since Thoreau’s time. They still have the social meanings now that they possessed in 1860, when

the South’s 4 million enslaved human beings were worth between $3 billion and $4 billion: the largest single asset in the entire United States, representing more than the value of all the nation’s railroads and factories combined. Slaves, even more than land, were Southern planters’ safest and most lucrative investment. Prices had been skyrocketing — doubling in the 1850s alone. Natural human reproduction ensured a further return. Slaves could easily be rented, mortgaged, or liquidated. A planter’s slaves were often, in modern terms, not just his work force, but also his stock portfolio.

(Adam Goodheart, “The Color of Money,” New York Times Online 21 June 2011)

With that transactional economics in mind, look at the little phrase I’ve printed in red above: “who is his father.” Grammar calls such an array of words a subordinate clause, meaning that it’s a statement of doing, being, or occurring which depends for its meaning on another statement of doing, being, or occurring. The word “because” in “Because I could not stop for death” changes a complete sentence into a subordinate clause. It’s an agent, like the man in 1851 who presumably charged a fee for trying to change Henry Williams’s relationship with his father from servile to independent.

The transaction wasn’t completed in Thoreau’s lifetime, but for a while in the twentieth century it seemed that the period at the end of the sentence could be in view and it might one day be possible to think of people as priceless. However, the grammar of politics is stubborn and conservative. Perhaps the family history of slavery and freedom is only a cyclical narrative after all, like Walden or the twin narratives of Isaac and Ishmael. If it is, the party of Ayn Rand may understand the idea of subordination better than the party of Henry David Thoreau. For the father and son in Thoreau’s little tale, at any rate, subordination is the basis to which words always return when they need to represent people in relation to other people. That power transaction is language at its ground state: the fathering grammar of what the New England conservative Emily Dickinson called (in “There’s a certain slant of light”)

internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –