history

“Of Master and of Slave”: words speakable once again

They’re not only potentially speakable once again, either. In May 2026, the immediate aftermath of the United States Supreme Court’s eradication of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they are being actively spoken in one Southern legislature after another. Most of the legislators speaking happen also to belong to the political party that was once the party of Abraham Lincoln. History rhymes, sometimes. It’s ironic.

It has to be, because rhyme itself is an irony originating in the discovery that even after a word is spoken it’s capable of changing its mind half a line later and meaning something else. Try listening half a line later, for instance, to the line below from a nineteenth-century poem (Ernest Dowson’s “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae”) which includes the words “I have forgot much.” Down among those words, of course, it hasn’t forgotten a word. At that, in the aftermath of the nineteenth century it will help you remember even more words, because this time the line about forgetting will come scrolling by for a second time, this one on a soundtrack.

In 1939, the year the track was laid, it sang a politicized nineteenth-century quickstep whose words then gave way to women’s voices vocalizing only a slow Woo ah. That whited-out libretto was projected from a reel filmed in a nineteenth-century font projected from right to left, and ever since then it has been unscrolling from the nineteenth century back to us. But now, in 2026, the reel may have rereached its 1939 beginning.

At any rate, what we hear now seems to sound once again like beginning’s genre, the commandment. It may say I am that I am; it does say Tolle, lege: take up and read. Then, adding a new register to itself by unreeling filmstock from the lab, it says:

I am reel as I have been scroll. I command you from this day backward. From here, my order of operations will begin on the side facing away from the light. It will be from right to left; from time present to time past; from ending in light to beginning once more in darkness. 

 

Stances en route

Stance 1, 1889

Within a library, we read under library guidance, selectively. Today’s protocol for selectivity, for example, has been a corpus of the locomotive. We are reading locomotive, only: the Louis A. Marre Rail Transportation Photograph Collection. Today’s item entered the collection bearing the name of Number 44, and library protocol has guided us toward learning that in 1876 Number 44 played a part in the centennial of the American Revolution.

The Library adds that it once went to the trouble of intensifying Number 44’s curated image. Until recently, however, the result wasn’t intense. Emotionally, it was a page from a history book that remained unillustrated. Its only stimulus to vision was a blur. Almost unpopulated, too, was the book’s aura of words. “Loss of life” is a phrase unfigured in its blank white, even though it hints at the death of 2208 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on May 31, 1889, in the churning course of a flood.

But the twenty-first century has delivered a trainload of computers with operating manuals that promise to teach us a smarter way of thinking through our pain. In artificially intelligent sequence, you can see now what the Library might claim to have been unable to reveal until now.

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And up they come at last, or at least apparently at last: Number 44, part of a forest’s stacked harvest, and a crew of men who labored to deliver the harvest to Number 44 for the sake of life. At next to last, the sake of  has become a phrase that almost seems to have delivered itself itself into words en route.

It didn’t, however. We didn’t learn it all the way to its end. Number 44 failed to become fully at one with us. On its page of text there is no hissing or chugging yet to be understood, or noise of floodwater still rushing away under timber. On this page, the only life actually perceptible is an irregular array of shadowy shapes distributed among whatever spaces aren’t filled so far by Number 44. After all, the stilled machine had only been pausing on its progress through history. The men’s heroic pose couldn’t have lasted. It didn’t last, never will last. In nineteenth-century iconography, a pose like the one you now see post-nineteenth century was intended to signify an overcoming of natural force. Bibliographies now shelved in the library will tell you that. The pose was intended to mean Hold back. Hold still.

Stance 2, 1975

But the river didn’t stop moving.

You knew that all along, of course, even though you may not have known of course itself until just now. You knew because of course is a river phrase signifying that which courses. Its function is to perform the grammar of a wordless song.

Of course is never not a song singing a river’s course. It fills its way into you, and with that you have learned to hear and then see and know. So not never, ever:

 

Loss of signal: the unforgettable gets forgotten

On May 31, 2024, I posted to this blog a note about a then current event. Its title incorporated the event’s date in history and an allusion: the word “hats.”

https://jonathanmorse.blog/2024/05/31/may-30-2024-dream-following-loss/

It may not have been a good poem in 2024. In 2026, with the 2024 senses of “May 30, 1924” and “hats” so vanished that even to wonder about them won’t occur to anyone, it can’t be a poem at all. Inevitably, the time occupied by 2026, when “Is he still alive?” was a verse in American English understandable to be the text of an aubade, is due to go on the market as another vacancy. Sansculottisme must become sanscasquettestupidisme.

Perhaps, in grotesque,  it already is.

https://fonts.google.com/?categoryFilters=Sans+Serif:%2FSans%2FGrotesque

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

“Going to the night boat, Petoskey, Mich.,” 1906. Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016800038/. Restored.

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At the image’s left and right margins are artifacts from 1906: a gasometer and a carbon-arc street light. Links to more from 1906 about the Lake Michigan resort town of Petoskey and its overnight steamboats to Chicago are at https://jonathanmorse.blog/2025/01/26/cloud-and-rippling-water-nineteen-six/.

And at the image’s center is a woman in a white gown, momentarily aglow in the setting sun. She is to walk through 1906 for a short time further, then lade a night boat with children. That moment is still to come. But now, while the shutter of an onshore camera lies open to receive this image of them all, the children can be seen in passage from your left to your right.

The image charts a transit. Rocked by ripples, the children will lie unmoving in their moving boat as it carries them into the night and then into the morning. Moment by moment on the boat’s bridge, the chronometer will entrain boat, lake, all. Moment by moment one night in 1906, one of the infinitely many ever afters will come to be.

Behold


In chapter 42 of Moby-Dick (“The Whiteness of the Whale”), Ishmael perceives at the heart of things a “dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – a colorless, all-color of atheism.” Wallace Steven’s whiteboard covered with snowy words is that landscape’s weather report. One word of its text, however, is not atheistic white but sacerdotal black letter: the word Behold.

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The black word’s etymology in the OED is Germanic. Old Saxon bihaldan, Old English bihaldan, and modern German behalten all descend from the Germanic healdan, “to hold.” But, says the dictionary, “The application to watching, looking, is confined to English.”

Some of the word’s uncomplicated first sense of mere holding survived as late as the era of Early Modern English. “Euery man behelde the same oppynyon,” says one of the dictionary’s quotations from 1525, and one from 1650 still keeps it close to “held to be”: “It is beheld in Scripture as most solemn and of highest importance.” But by 1609 the possessive behold had begun twisting together with the spectatorial lo in Shakespeare’s Lover’s Complaint – “And Lo behold these tallents of their heir, With twisted mettle amorously empleacht” – and by 1611, in the King James Bible’s “I, behold I, establish my covenant with you,” we can hear the word approach our sense of it through the course of its deflections from possession through contemplation to self-fascination. As it traversed time, the definition of behold altered its course from “I have” to “Watch me have.”

But in chapter 124 of Moby-Dick (“The Needle”), Ahab remagnetized his ship’s compass with vaunting hammerblows and then cried to his watching crew and us watching readers, “Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!” In cringing retrospect, Ishmael was to moralize about “Ahab in all his fatal pride.” But in the white world beheld by the Snow Man, there is neither retrospect nor prospect. There can never be anything to contemplate but a needle, “quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last [settling] to its place” between dumb blankness and black letter.

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Tom Stoppard, 1937-2025. Because the words he wrote never stopped changing, I happily failed to believe that he would die.

Fadings: low fidelity

Disc 1: the United States ends its neutrality and enters the Great War. Track by track, one side of one historical record sings:

Disc 2: in the same date range, the title of a song has promised its hearers a charm, and those who made the song audible have pledged their fidelity to its magic. But what ever remains of the music of time? Little did they seem to know, Madame Case and Mr. Edison and the performer of the obbligato, how breakable records are.

https://archive.org/details/edison-82078_01_2460

 

Blink remembered

At first, all we know of these five people is 24 words set off by brackets from the rest of the universe of language:

[Two unidentified women seated on a sofa, two unidentified men standing behind the sofa, with a woman peering over the back of the sofa.]

The words represent the finest detail visible at the end of a zoom in on the five people’s location in archived history:

Library of Congress, USA;

Prints and Photographs Division;

Daguerreotype Collection;

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004664588/

That is all the zoom is intended to do, and all that words such as “two unidentified women” can do. At the end of the zoom rests a detailed collective body, clothed in modes and tinted, but unable to communicate itself as a body. The tinted body can’t name itself. Between its modes and yours and mine lies no word’s land, the emptied space between the lines where comprehension bleeds away and dies. The five people all had expressive faces, but we’ll never know now what they were expressing.

But if we venture to think that they may still communicate by means of their silence, we might try the experiment of examining the silence as if it were a body. We might, for instance, lay it down on a table, turn up the lights,

and then lean over it.

Leaning, we see a man’s hand and a woman’s hand. Isolated for inspection, they are seen to be speaking complementary dialects of body language. The woman’s hand clings; the man’s hand holds down.

Above and between the hands is a woman’s face. Like the other women’s faces and unlike the men’s, it isn’t set apart from eye contact by a pair of glasses. But even without glasses, of course, we can never see how the woman saw from within her bonnet. Whether she wore the spectacles or we do, there lies between her and us an ever-thickening deposit of optical glass. Lens after lens has been interposed: first by a daguerreotypist during the woman’s floruit (“1840-1860,” says loc.gov), then by us. Seriatim, the lenses deflect the rays that once were direct.

But for the length of a blink, at a location in space and time, this woman became the source of her own light. She was its beginning and end – that is, its history. The history had been latent before its time and it is occulted now, but within its time it was extant. From its blinking open to its close, it endured only long enough to resolve itself to completion like a cadence. But during the resolution – that is, during the only instant when a cadence can be a cadence – it was.

And now we all – once upon their time, for those three women and two men; forever after, for the rest of us – can see that it was. Light had lensed a woman into an image.

“Ha’ you heard better language, sir?”

Venice, 1606. In the crowd, Peregrine and Sir Politic Would-be are listening to Volpone’s medicine show.

Poughkeepsie, New York, November 14, 1902: the Poughkeepsie Eagle-News reports.

As to me and you, you shriveled, salad-eating artisan: of course our language is irregular and subject to weakening drains. In 1902 we couldn’t say “pregnant,” and shortly after that era our words were re-herded into an even tighter propinquity.

But after all, words have never in themselves made the weak strong or the sick well. We do hold that magic in our mouths, but it isn’t a spell to be spoken. Its power is pre-vocable: a watersound of wet chemistry at its work.

Open your body wide to that language and listen. Help it help yourself to it. Immunize.

Surcharge: 25 centimes for unemployed Louis Pasteur

Apollo*

* Asterisks 2 to n:

* American industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, 1882-1967. He made a fortune in steel and cement.

* As a boy, he was deeply affected by his mother’s premature death. Years later, as an owner of shipyards staffed during World War II by workers not healthy enough to serve in the armed forces, he established for them what’s now the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan. A pair of his glasses used to be on display in the ophthalmology department of Kaiser’s Pensacola Street clinic in Honolulu.

* Elsewhere in Honolulu there’s a big housing development named Hawaii Kai, with its Henry J. Kaiser High School. In Hawaii Kai (kai is the Hawaiian word for “water”), Kaiser lived in an enormous pink oceanfront mansion which fell after his death into Gatsbyesque disrepair and abandonment. But Hawaii Kai thrives, and in Waikiki there also thrives what’s now called the Hilton Hawaiian Village: a Kaiser hotel and apartment complex which once featured an auditorium housed in a silvery geodesic dome.

* One major reason for the Allies’ victory in World War II was Kaiser’s mass-produced Liberty ships: bare-minimum freighters which came pouring off their assembly lines at the rate of a ship per line per month. The admirals laughed at Kaiser for saying “front end” and “back end” instead of “bow” and “stern,” but except for him they might have wound up swabbing decks for fascists.

* And then after the war, with its pent-up demand and its development ideas on hold, there came the Kaiser car, its upscale model the Frazer, and later the Henry J., one of the first subcompacts. You could buy one of those from Sears, Roebuck under Sears’s brand name Allstate.

* About the Kaiser’s own anatomy, I think the statistic is that it was the first car to have a padded dash. There were other evolutions too, such as a three-door vehicle that looked like a sedan but actually was a station wagon. Its left rear door was a dummy; inside, below the window, was the mount for the spare tire.

* But despite all its lookings forward, the Kaiser Motors Corporation died after only a few years, slowly strangled by undercapitalization.

* But the classical bust tucked into the footnote beneath the car derives educationally from an ancient statue called the Apollo Belvedere. Its anatomy, as you see, is perdurable as life is perdurable.

* O Apollo.