Jonson

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

“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

Footnote: take your medicine

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Sources:

Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. Philip Brockbank. 1968; New York: Norton, 1992. The illustration by Audrey Beardsley (not in this edition) shows Volpone saying, “Hail the world’s soul, and mine!”as he begins his morning prayer to his gold.

The advertisement “‘Tis the Genuine” has been photoshopped from the online original at https://www.flickr.com/photos/library-company-of-philadelphia/6857386818/  On this site, the text explains:

“Advertisement for the Antikamnia Chemical Company established around 1890. Depicts the skull-headed company icon ‘Funny Bones,’ wearing glasses, attired in a suit, and holding an “AK” tablet in his hand, and shrugging. Antikamnia (opposed to pain) was a toxic and addictive medicine often mixed with codeine and quinine. Funny Bones was designed by pharmacist and doctor Louis Crucius.”