The Crimean War of 1853-56 contributed to the history of form the Raglan sleeve, the balaclava, the cardigan, and Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Then, swelling the record, Roger Fenton made it the first photographed war in history.
Having learned that, you realize that form is unchanged under any of its aspects, and undying.
Once upon a time a U.S. Navy radioman named C. W. Allen served on seaplanes based at the Panama Canal Zone and flew with a camera. His photo album is now in the archives of the San Diego Air and Space Museum and viewable online at
https://www.flickr.com/photos/sdasmarchives/albums/72157635813041746/with/9903098543/
It includes this image of the Navy zeppelin Shenandoah traversing the canal in 1924 or 1925 with its mooring ship Patoka. I’ve previously posted some attempts at reconstructing it, but because editing software keeps improving, the merely historical interest of the original,
grows only more attenuated by the year. It’s small, its resolution is low, some of it has been whited out by the corner stickers that Radioman Allen used to glue it into his album, and every time it’s reseen its aesthetic sense becomes harder to experience in the emotional form of memory. Think of the surface noise of its epoch. It was bad then, even before vinyl and then digital. Now . . .
Now, in the workroom of a mortuary, you wouldn’t be able to hear this waltz if it were played over the speakers — not as you would have heard it in its own epoch. Now, instead, you’ll be under obligation to look down at the table where a silent waxwork has been made to appear.
And if something then starts sounding through you, you won’t be able to silence it. The sound coming from your mouth will be an affront to the silence of the past, but it won’t be motivated by any intent, bad or good. It will be a sound that can’t help itself. Think back. Beside the waters of the Zone, a mechanism was wound up with a crank, a needle descended on a spinning shellac surface — right? — and a song welled up automatically.
This business day in the mortuary, you think, “I sound like I’m alive!”
Trace:
Realization:
Eurydice:
Don’t wear. Be.
1. From a second-story roof, an egret watches a new-mown lawn below him. His yellow eyes communicate an idea of intently. The term rests as still in your mind as a dictionary unopened on a shelf. But when the wings open, the stasis breaks. All is in motion then. The egret flaps himself a few inches up, tips himself over the edge, drops to the grass, pecks, flaps again, reascends with legs trailing, and settles with wings and legs folded back on his roof ridge. He has brought back up what he saw down there: a muscular brown centipede. Beat by beat, the egret shifts himself on the roof, elevates his beak, flips the venomous dangle into the air; catches it headfirst, fangfirst; swallows. Between the bird’s unmoving head and unmoving breast the long neck undulates once. A moment ago a dark living something was writhing in the air, yet at that elevation all that survives now is a light, feathery bulk.
A moment ago, the dark something was matter for a life story with a beginning and an end. Now, as it dissolves in the egret, it is an afterthought. What comes back to mind is white, only. About a writhing brown centipede a brown writher of a story is writeable, but it can’t be traced back to ground that any centipede ever crawled. The memory of writhing in the air has dimmed, and the last bird you see will be the one flying to you in white.
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2. From a dove’s wings, frothy light splashes into the firmament. Through fanning feathers, it ripples along from shadow at each wing’s root to light-blurred translucency at its tip.
Aft, between the wings, originates a stout empennage. Holding the rapid beating steady, it aims the dove’s gray little head in the direction of a route. Gray tipped with white, guiding from behind, stiff tailfeathers blaze a way to light.
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Le Corbusier inscribed those words in the second (1928) edition of his Toward an Architecture. The first sentence is one of the axioms of modernism. A century later, you are running your fingers over it on page 151 of John Goodman’s translation (Getty Research Institute, 2007), where it is shelved under the subtitle “Liners.”
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Liners such as, en route shortly after the launch of Toward an Architecture:
This one was shaped by the modernist aesthetic of Art Deco. Its three sleeked funnels were unequal in height from bow to stern: first tall, then medium, then short (and the short one was a decorative dummy). Viewed from the side, the pattern communicated a knowingly accepted illusion of streamlined speed. Viewed from the bow, the tall funnel allotted the ship’s proportions the way a hat allots a head’s proportions.
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Allotting, the hat inscribed below guides the eye to see a face as a petitesse. Petitesse is a curve and the hat is its generatrix.
Also the hat’s crown rakes back in the illusion of speed while the passive woman within the hat remains still. Also the hat’s ribbon, wrapped halfway up around the domed cylinder of the crown, teaches the senses to imagine ribbon and crown as body parts harmonizing at knowingly accepted cross purposes . . .
An eye made use of an apparatus to create this image of a woman designed and curated. She’s more than a century old now but as good as new. You accept the illusion knowingly. You are a member of its comic audience. Defined by the aesthetic of Euclid, a woman is a machine for wearing a hat.
