language

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.

“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

Commercial appeal:

thou wast not born for death. Printed on a small surface, a poem addressed to a bird told the bird so. But then the bird entered the past tense, leaving the poem behind in the present. Said the poem to itself, silently: “Fled is that music.”

Afterward, on a large surface, these other words were printed:

“cheese-box”

Head-Phone

Watcher-of-the-Silent-Places

Quote:

Silently, on their paper, for the time that was then being, they were a promise of something not on the paper: unsilence. But they were nouns, not verbs. They were a promise that could be but not be made. Listen in again, a century later, and confirm: promised unsilence has failed to descend over the Port-of-Missing-Men. The promise’s  typographical manifestation, this decor of quotation marks and hyphens and capital letters, is a written language, not a spoken language. Just above its surface, the air is still still.

Parlophone

I approached the leaf and the vine from behind a camera. I manipulated the apparatus to make them seem rounder and curvier, and then to their shaped roundness I linked a song in the Darwinian genre of jazz, with solos evolving into one another.  The new record backed up its Piltdown hoax with a lyric that was detectable only with a fossil apparatus.

The leaf and the song had merged into an ensemble. Their lyric was a fuller, jazzier sense of a preexistent word: in this case, the tumid old word “swell.” Now it sounded lifelike. Having been looped into white noise, it linked the prehuman locution “Let there be” with a flip side of words.

But from the beginning, the record had always been scheduled to end. In his groove, the philosopher of the scientific method understood that fadeout has always been anatomically a trait of any flora you once could see.


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https://jonathanmorse.blog/2025/07/14/swell-2/

Francis Bacon, “Of Truth.” The essayes or counsels, ciuill and morall, of Francis Lo. Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, 1625.

Terms of art, 1847

Footnotes in advance:

1. “Now exhibiting” means “now being exhibited.” It’s a progressive passive construction that now survives only in a few expressions such as “Now showing” (= “Now being shown”) and “What’s cooking?” (= “What’s being cooked?”).

2. The epigraph from Hamlet’s “Speak the speech, I pray you” had extra force in 1847, when its readers would have known that a daguerreotype’s surface is reflective, like a mirror.

3. “Fleeting and happy expressions” means “fleeting and lucky expressions.”

4. “Saloon” means “studio,” “likely” means “capable,” and “sold for no fault” means “money-back guarantee.”

On the other hand, “Seamstresses for sale” has kept on meaning “Seamstresses for sale,” not only as of 1847 but at present as well. The Civil War dismantled the text machines that had fabricated the phrase, and so “Seamstresses for sale” is no longer a tissue of truths. But its bared minimum, “We have for sale GIRLS,” remains on the loom. It still means what it says.

Richmond [Virginia] Times-Dispatch, Tuesday, March 23, 1847, page 3

Libraries: antique shops of language

In a depressing article the other day about academic anti-“Zionism,” one of the Jewish newspapers I read published a photograph of a restaurant reservation form from the twentieth century which asks, “Are there any Hebrews in your party?” and then requires applicants to certify their answer with an affidavit beginning, “I hereby swear.”* That view from a newly rereadable past inspired me to hit up Archive.org for Laura Z. Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement, a 1947 bestseller about American social antisemitism whose movie version featured the novelty of actual names actually named, such as those of the Jew-free New York suburb of Darien, Connecticut, and the flamboyantly antisemitic Mississippi congressman John E. Rankin, a swaggering caricature of a racist prick who once started a fistfight on the House floor. Otherwise, though, the movie isn’t very interesting (it stars Gregory Peck) (this is not a non sequitur), so yesterday I took out my e-loan and started reading. Archive’s copy of the book was brown with age and bore the markings of an owner’s penmanshipped name in browned ink and a “Withdrawn” stamp from a Catholic college library.

https://archive.org/details/gentlemansagreem0000unse_v8n0/mode/2up

But the prose was immortally bestseller. It went clunk clunk at me for about sixty pages, and then I shut the book. At the instant the cover closed over her, Laura was still clunking away at our divorced hero’s awakening interest in our heroine, without yet a Jew in view. Lots of historical business with Scotch-or-rye and crisply clicking cigarette lighters, though.

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* https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/cold-war-against-jews

The memory of Charles Lamb

In the current issue of Modernism / modernity (September 2023, published early 2024), Christian H. Gelder’s “‘To Measure is All We Know’: William Carlos Williams and the Science of Measurement” offers readings of the persistent word measure in Williams’s oeuvre. Williams’s long-term readers know that that’s an important word for Williams precisely because he never defines it. It’s just out there in the oeuvre, a term endlessly approaching an ever-receding frontier of meaning.

Until today, I considered myself one of those long-term readers. I taught Williams for years, I wrote about him, and I continue to love him. I was a loving reader on campus. Until today, I could have put that sentence in the present tense. But Gelder’s article looks like a chapter of a dissertation, heavy on current citations — and those citations are to a scholarship that seems to have appeared while I was off campus. Title after title in the bibliography refers now to a pair of concepts that I’d failed until now to consider even separately: autobiography (of the article’s author, not of Williams) and race. Says article after article now: this is what I have to say about the racial meanings of Williams’s mathematical word measure, and I say what I say as a member of an ethnic category.

During the years when I was writing I wasn’t that kind of I. I didn’t say the pronoun that way. I didn’t say, “Speaking as a [name of ethnic category], I . . .” But (says the bibliography) not many people on campus now seem to say I in any other way. They have become what I seem never to have been, and I and whatever I once was have been rolled out of the lexicon. Outside it, we are unreadable. Whatever might have been sayable of us then as a single term, such as writer or I, can no longer be said of us now at all. All that may remain now of whatever is something prior in the void.

Here in the void, consider the conversational essay by Charles Lamb in which somebody once upon a time uttered four words in a voice that then became the passive voice. It was a moment when passivity took dominion, and it was forever. To its grammatical object then, something that was said in the moment has now exited the moment. Ever since and forever, it now says:

“Madam, you are superannuated.”