music

“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. 

 

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

 

Directions at sunrise

You don’t want to know why I was waiting outside Castle Hospital’s emergency room at  six in the morning, but Uber had told me to expect a red Cadillac driven by a man named Willy. “Oh Detroit,” I thought happily, anticipating a conversation full of memories. And then Cadillac drove up.

It didn’t use the driveway; it, with Willy, waited for me on the other side of the parking lot. I hauled myself up from the hospital’s wheelchair, walked over to the redness, and opened the door. Inside was a sign counseling me to close it carefully, and in the driver’s seat Willy wasn’t what I thought he’d be. He was an elderly local man seated among several thermoses, and from his rear view mirror hung a rosary. Morning sun tinged its red crystal beads, and all of Cadillac’s windows were open, with a cool wind blowing through.

From the T intersection at Castle Junction it’s a short straight drive back to my house in Hawaii Kai, via Waimanalo. But Willy didn’t drive down the T; instead, he turned left and headed toward downtown Honolulu on Pali Highway. I didn’t ask him to correct our course, because it was coming to me that I was embarked on a farewell tour. Sites were showing themselves to me for probably the first time and possibly the last time since I had had to lift my hands from the wheel forever after. Past us once more they came: woods, then the steep climb up Pali Highway to the cliffs; then the tunnel and the peak and the way back down the other side into the city. Again, again, the memory things in their morning light: the Korean consulate; Temple Emanuel; a ramshackle fundamentalist school where Haesun had applied for a librarian’s job right after we moved to Hawaii; the upcurving roofs of the replica of the Byodo-In Temple. Then the Buddhist Center and the on-ramp curving down and east into the morning traffic on Interstate H-1.

After H-1 ends, its continuation on Kalanianaole Highway is contraflowed in the early morning, with four of the six lanes coned to direct traffic west. Cadillac and I were bound east, slow in the remaining two lanes. At our speed there was no longer much air blowing through Cadillac’s windows, so for the first time I could hear what Willy had been paying his attention to.

It was Republican talk radio. “Oh I never knew that!” gushed the straight girl, and after that the man with the voice used his basso to stimulate and arouse. Together, the man and the girl began taking turns admiring Bobby Kennedy Jr. Those . . . senators . . . tried to yell at him, sneered the basso, but he showed them. By now the hospital was on the other side of the island.

—

From Africa has come Elon Musk: now the richest and most mobile man in the world but also known for his eleven or so current children conceived by artificial insemination.

Also from Africa there came Aurlus Mabélé (1953-2020). He died during what, post-Bobby Jr., we may wind up calling the First Covid Pandemic. But while he was among us he fathered thirteen children.

Without apparatus, let us think.

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.