A horse on a bridge. Men and women under the bridge. Telegraph wires weighed down by birds. A locomotive, steaming.
Their date is 1910. They all are warm to the touch — still and forever.
Paleontology of the warm-blooded
history
Civilization considered as a huge machine
A moral is this aria from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus:
How vain is man, who boasts in fight
The valor of gigantic might,
And dreams not that a hand unseen
Directs and guides this huge machine!
But the libretto directs that the aria’s performer be a coloratura tenor, not a man in coveralls with a dented oilcan and lungs full of coal smoke. The unseen hand and its score are a musical machinery, but the mustached body once was warm and tangible.
—
From “Group of Lackawanna freight engines,” between 1890 and 1901, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016801376/. In 2020 I posted to this blog an earlier edit of the image (no longer shown) under the title “Man in City.” The city is Scranton, Pennsylvania, which between 1851 and 1960 was the headquarters of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad.
History of World War II: two data for the record
Between 1964 and 1969 at the Greenfield, Indiana, laboratories of Eli Lilly & Co., I worked with a man named Donald Richbourg who claimed to have been a member of the guard detail at the Nürnberg war crime trials. His reminiscences about his clients, as I recall, included these two items.
1. Ernst Kaltenbrunner was a big sumbitch.
2. And Julius Streicher used to wash his face in the toilet.
Power events on an island
Five months ago I published online a little Issuu book about what happened to the history of power in one place, Honolulu, and two times: the 1830s and the nineteen-teens. The first series of events displays Herman Melville plagiarizing the indignation of a German botanist about the tyrannical control of Hawaii’s New England missionaries. The second culminates in an almost successful attempt by German forces during World War I to blow up Honolulu harbor, followed by a near-lynching on a King Street trolleycar.
Force repeats itself. If you’d like a second chance to read how that worked out in Honolulu, your link is
Tradition (L) and the Individual Talent (R)
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
Song unseen
I’d guess that this exposure
was followed by a cloud of magnesium smoke filling the studio’s air. The flash was a single-source illumination, and it reflected back at maximum shine from the pretty singer on the right. In the Library of Congress’s George Grantham Bain Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014719169/, it has eventuated in an array of blacks and whites captioned only “D’Alvanez — Martinelli — Tully.” It isn’t dated. What it is is not two women and a man as such, in general, but an image of two woman and a man under specific but unrevealed circumstances. There it is to be seen, not known. In the unrevealed it is solely glare and shadow, striped broadcloth and glittery silk; solely a patterning.
Furthermore, two of the three names in the caption turn out to be historically corrupt. But they and the image of the microphone have still left an uncorrupted remainder attached to an archive of recordings on pressed shellac, and from that entry it’s possible to backtrack a historiography and reconstruct what we have seen into a readable, datable history.
Read once more, then, the name identified as “Tully” turns out to have belonged in the year 1926 to Marion Talley, a teenage soprano who as of her moment on a red Victor label was briefly a star. On its red record, her voice can still be experienced in archival black and white.
But now it can be experienced only as a noise track captured by a single-source microphone and confined to a carceral segment of the audio spectrum. Even in there, too, the shellac grooves of its habitus have undergone metamorphosis. Rossini embodied the idea of his Rosina in a mezzo-soprano voice with embellishments going low, not high, and recording practice in the twenty-first century tends to bypass Marion Talley’s twentieth in a nostalgic joke played on the way back down to a fantasy of the nineteenth. See the current event’s knowing grins.
See the fish silently performing themselves.
Smile in silence for anything that nevertheless may remain of the memory voices of Marguerite, Giovanni, and Marion,
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.
After Darwin, the fossil record
This lurid face once emitted glares and thunderous sounds. Between 1808 and 1900 it was the body of the theologian Edwards Amasa Park, and it influenced American literature at least once: certainly when Emily Dickinson recorded her awed reaction to one of his sermons in a letter to her brother (JL142, November 21, 1853), and later, perhaps, in the form of a poem:
But its physical record is a history of extinction. See how much of the silver-mercury amalgam has been damaged and how little remains. To construct even this partial objet d’art cost me a debt of indeterminable amount to the artifact-generating computer technique called artificial intelligence. With black and white artificially replacing daguerreotype silver, see:
No, it isn’t visible to you now; not accurately, not in any way that would have been received with assent by anyone sitting in a hardwood New England pew in 1853. The Origin of Species was published in 1859, and in due time Emily Dickinson wrote ruefully about it. You see your images now in an evolved way, through a color filter.
So fall into line. You have no choice but to be received into the epoch of tangerine.
It’s in your constitution now.
For detail about Dickinson and Park, see Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (Random House, 2001), pp. 310-313.
Prehistory: objet d’art with ephemeral foreground and cyclorama of stars
Monochrome
The horses on the monochrome thoroughfare have been stilled.
On the boat, the passengers’ chairs are scattered where they were left when the passengers left the image.
Inside the piano store, the unimaged and silence.