photography

Persistence of vision

Chekhov is famous for the effect: just before the end of one of his plays, a sound will add its wordless voice to the words’ dramatic irony. Just before the end of Three Sisters, both the actors onstage and we in the audience hear a shot in the distance, and that (we and the actors are about to learn together, a moment too late) is the sound of Solyony killing Tusenbach. Just before the end of Uncle Vanya we hear jingle bells, and that is the sound of Astrov going away forever. Just before the end of The Cherry Orchard we hear saws and axes, and that is the sound of the orchard being cut down. After the play’s context has enabled us to establish a verbal interpretation for a wordless sound effect (“That is the sound of . . .”), the interpretation turns its newly real countenance toward us and wordlessly says that there will now be no more happiness, before or ever after the final curtain.

Of course, if we’re sophisticated enough to be in a Chekhov audience, we won’t be naive enough to think the sound effects themselves are real. Of course we know they were written into the play. But because they emanate from offstage, they seem somehow to be at least as much a part of the audience function as of the stage function. If they aren’t onstage, then they’re at least partly offstage with us, down here in the dark of our offstage being where we are simultaneously experiencing the sound of the shot (what was that?) and the memory life we brought with us into the theater (did I remember to lock the garage?). A part of the mixed, impure ongoingness of memory, the sound we hear in the theater seems real in a way we can’t fully believe the actors to be. The actors inhabit a system of meaning with a “The End” at the end of it, but the sound can’t. It propagates forever.

—

But it isn’t just sound that propagates. History seems to impose a Chekhovian irony on certain visual artifacts too – for instance, photographs taken just before a moment of change, or taken during the change but focused elsewhere. That photograph of people smiling at their desks in an office? Little do the people in the photograph know that those desks are in the World Trade Center and the date is September 10, 2001. Or the long-skirted women in that black-and-white street scene, going about their business unaware that just on the other side of a monitor there are now, forever after, troubled young men desperate to overlook them and catch their sight of Hitler.

—

In its bin at Costco, the piece of cardboard holding a blister-wrapped camera is big, to discourage shoplifting. With lots of space at its disposal, the cardboard uses that space to signify that this camera, a Canon Elph 100HS, is marketed to women. Words printed all over the front of the card promise that the Elph is small and light and easy to use, and through its blister we can see that the camera itself comes in a variety of pretty colors. The card also offers consumers a look at a picture: a picture of a picture that we are to think might have been taken with a woman’s camera like this one, even though some fine print on the back of the card says it wasn’t. The picture within the picture comes from a woman’s social system, and it seems intended to remind buyers how pictures function as part of a feminine experience of the world.

See: within their pictured frame, three women sit at a table in a restaurant, eating and talking and looking into one another’s faces and laughing. This is a picture that you too will be able to take, promises Costco’s piece of cardboard. You will take the picture, you will pass it around among your friends, and then there will come, for you together with them, a moment of intimate happiness. You will have come into possession of an image that first derived meaning from a context, like a pistol shot offstage, and now reestablishes that context, over and over, one view at a time, as it is passed from hand to hand to hand, forever. Remember yesterday in the restaurant? How happy we were?

Look.

Not yet cut apart and discarded, the cardboard implores us to open its blisters and begin. At the moment you take your picture, promises the cardboard, you’ll be both director and camerawoman, you’ll be active. But a moment later and forever happily ever after, you’ll be a part of an audience, passively taking in the picture as you once passively heard the sound of Solyony’s pistol. From then on, there won’t be a thing you can do about it. Your pretty new camera will have taken in a few meaningless milliseconds and changed them to a meaning, forever.

 

“Snap shots of an event that may become historic”

The microfilm readers in the University of Hawaii’s Hamilton Library are now linked to computers running Irfanview. Scholarly readers no longer have to work with a copy machine’s blurry approximations of the film; now they can scan an image from the film, save the scan to a thumb drive, and then Photoshop that digital copy. Here’s an example of what that labor can make available: visible again after decades of deterioration, three photographs taken in Honolulu harbor just after the United States broke diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3, 1917.

Click to enlarge.

With the United States poised to end its neutrality and enter World War I, the crew of the interned German gunboat Geier had tried but failed to destroy their ship, and a photographer was there, recording. His editor called the results “snap shots of an event that may become historic.” And yes, an independent historiographic record of the event does exist. You can read about it at, for instance,

http://navalwarfare.blogspot.com/2010/05/sms-geieruss-schurz.html

But that record may not quite be history. Readers mark the distinction with a cliché. We don’t quite say the stern word “history” after we close a book about SMS Geier; instead, we tend to Disney-fy our newly read text by calling it something like “a footnote to history.” If it’s the short story of a little warship at the edge of the Great War, beached in a backwater that didn’t become canonical in the history of war until the war that followed this one, then of course (we think) it doesn’t belong in historiography’s large print. Fine-print footnotes like the anecdote about the gunboat Geier are detachable.

Here in Hamilton Library, both the thick books of history and the reels of microfilm testify that the anecdote named Geier was detached a long time ago. The newspaper from 1917 is gone, its microfilm archive is deteriorating, and these images are unlikely ever to be seen again where thick books about the Great War are written. As to the white-suited civilian that Photoshop has now brought back as if he had never left his spot on a pier in Honolulu, he can never again be more than a white footnote to the anonymous anecdote of Geier’s white sailors. The civilian’s hat is still on his head and the wrinkles in his clothes still say that he has a hand in his pocket, but his face has gone under permanent shadow and his body has come under the striped mark of the printing from 1917 that has now obliterated his name. Without Photoshop, he wouldn’t be visible in 2012. But even with Photoshop, he’s now one of the unreadable parts of his own history.

Illusive immortality, then; merely anecdotal monument and memory. Photoshop drills itself into a slip of microfilm, penetrates and reshapes the images there, and then rises with them, glowing, to the surface of a monitor. There, the newly illumined images will endure for the single moment before vision’s format changes again.

—

Update, June 6, 2014: the unphotoshopped original of this picture of Geier in Honolulu is image 000104 in the Al Menasco photo album in the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive,

https://www.flickr.com/photos/sdasmarchives/14359722802/in/photostream/

It must have been taken in March 1916, when Menasco and his partner Art Smith stopped in Honolulu en route to a series of exhibition flights in Asia. (“Art Smith Has Ten Little Red Racers With Him,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin 8 March 1916: 6. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82014682/1916-03-08/ed-1/seq-6/)

Consider yourself duly scolded, and happy new year

“Aesthetic seduction is a risky gambit for a photographer who is interested in questioning the construction of what is recognized as normal.  In fact (and at the risk of invoking a series of critical commonplaces), I would suggest that many critics trained in the academic milieu since the 1980s would find it difficult not to pose certain questions about this work.  Does one think about challenging social, political, or cultural matters standing in front of images like this?  Or does one slip into the cosseting, velvety embrace of beauty?”

— Nathaniel Stein, “Confront Your Seduction:  Katie Koti’s asunder.”
http://thesip.org/2012/01/confront-your-seduction-katie-kotis-asunder/

Good point. Here: stop cosseting your velvety self, watch some TV, and get serious.

Crying News Anchor Breaks the News of Kim Jong Ils Death [www.Keep-Tube.com]

 

Objets d’art

Posting my photographs on the microblog site Tumblr has taught me something cute: some teenage girls like to set up Tumblr pages and decorate them with images appropriated from other Tumblr pages. Tumblr’s nice technical term for the game is “reblogging.” It implies that the girls and the creators are working together at the task of realizing and then furnishing a home space for imagination: a little steel addition to the sensorium, a locker.

My own latest image to be posted in that kind of locker, on December 30, 2011, is a picture of a flower. Tenderly plucked from my own page, it now appears as well in a Tumblr site called “A Room with Color.” There, reblogged into the context articulated by that title, it mingles with reddishness and purplishness, only. The moment the steel door closes on them, my former image’s colors unclothe themselves from the shapes I thought I saw around them and stand forth alone in their new dark. There, all that remains to them is a chaste, autistic beauty. It is color meant to be seen for no more than itself; color as a form that has left behind its non-chromatic meaning. The non-chromatic would include, for instance, any idea.

Click to enlarge.

For whether the chromatic throws its light over lips or Jews, beauty under this regime of pure, unmediated perception has neither object nor subject. It only is; it only is color. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Oscar Wilde, and the people who love Schindler’s List have always been part of the color field. To glow, the images in their sensoria need nothing more than dark.

In the art world, size metamorphoses from a quantity to a quality

1

“‘[Kehinde Wiley is] an interesting contemporary artist who brings together many of the same interests and ideas as the museum’s.’ said Karen Levitov, an associate curator at the Jewish Museum. The members of its curatorial team were so enamored of his work that when they saw ‘Alios Itzhak,’ they decided it was something the museum had to acquire.

“‘It was a perfect match,’ Ms. Levitov said. ‘It’s nine and a half feet tall. . . . ‘”

— Carol Vogel, “A Painting That Begat a Whole Show,” New York Times 16 September 2011: C25

 

2

About Kehinde Wiley: http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize/paintings.html

 

3

“I have purchased a 4 × 5 Graflex and will start making contact prints, unretouched. From now on I will not sign retouched portraits! This is a daring step to make during a major economic crisis, but it had to be done! I have been psychically ill at times from signing my name to work which was not my work. I have done enough aesthetic whoring. I paid for the camera by the biggest and worst job of whoring I have done in years. At times during the work, I came near to throwing it in the fire and telling the poor unsuspecting subjects that I did not want their lousy money. I kept going by repeating to myself: ‘$380, $380! — you must not give in, this means a new camera, a new life.’ And so I went through with it.

“The 4 × 5 size is large enough, I hope, so that I will not be asked to enlarge; which means greater technical perfection; for no matter how well done, an enlargement does lose quality, cannot compare with a contact from the same negative. I do not dare to say ‘no enlargements,’ not yet; that will be the next step. But I will not sign, except duplicate prints from old negatives, any retouched order. This still leaves another step, which will follow logically, that I will accept no order that I am ashamed to sign, that I will never retouch again. But I must go carefully, I cannot let others suffer from my rashness.”

— Edward Weston, December 8, 1932. The Daybooks of Edward Weston. II. California. Ed. Nancy Newhall. Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1973. 265-66.

Mots gratuits

1

In the middle of the crowded final exam, the football player was suddenly in trouble. Waving his arm to attract my attention, he held up his pen, shook it, and pantomimed despair. I held up my own pen, pointed at it to signify comprehension and impending action, and then slow-pitched it over other students’ heads to him.

Every muscle in the football player’s body suddenly became alert. His head swiveled as he followed the trajectory of the approaching pen, and his eyes glittered. With a gesture as efficient as a ballerina’s, he reached up, wrapped his huge hand around the pen, and pulled it down through the air toward himself.

For that fraction of a second, an intelligence had been at work. It had taken control of the pen so completely that it had no need for any words that a pen might write. It was an intelligence purely of flesh making contact with plastic, body to body. It was love.

2

Twice a night, late at night in my time zone, the comment spams come through to my blog. They’re all the same: a few anonymous sentences of extravagant but vague praise, not just mistyped but typed as if the typist doesn’t even know the alphabet. “You hpeled a brother,” say the sentences. “Thnaks!”

I’m told that they look that way because the typists actually don’t know the alphabet. In rooms full of keyboards in India or the Philippines, people type and type and type, for pennies an hour, transmitting alphabets into the aether on behalf of other people who think that such an act will cause search engines to notice their existence. In the aether, electronicized words say “Love.”

3

Click to enlarge.

4

If you have the pen, you don’t need the words. If you have a computer programmed to transmit the word “Thnaks,” you don’t need love. Look:

if you have the shadow, isn’t that enough?

Life: two temporary artifacts

1

On August 21, 2011, Kim Jong Il crossed the border between North Korea and Russia by train and made a brief stop at a station in Siberia to accept the greetings of local officials.

Click to enlarge.

A 24-second video from the scene shows the hemiparetic tyrant walking with a characteristically Korean gait — arms at sides, legs apart, abdomen thrust forward — but also with the toddling little steps of any sick old man, in any culture.

http://portamur.ru/video/133079/

And when Kim reboarded his train after that walk, his ascent was by a ramp built of structural steel.

In this array of tilted perspectives and gazes focused off-scene, the red steel is the stablest element. Only it seems as if it might still be present tomorrow.

2

On September 4, 1939, three days after the beginning of World War II, Adolf Hitler stepped down from his train to confer with his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Beside a coniferous forest somewhere in Germany, a photographer recorded the meeting for a fraction of a second, perhaps the time it would have taken to speak one syllable. The silent record now waits to be seen in Life magazine’s online archive.

I open it in Photoshop. Within minutes, I have undone some of the wastage of time.

Once again, perhaps as in 1939, colors are bright and outlines are sharp. I have pushed the image back across time in the direction of what was once a moment of lived historical experience. But of course the moment itself has now been absorbed by pictorial design. The film is still silent. What Life and I have generated here on your monitor is only the optical illusion of a time with lives in it.

Nevertheless, images like this one attract certain viewers who use them to generate a substitute time: the time universe of dream. Ubiquitous in the comment streams that make up the fantasy life of the world online, these viewers are the fetishists. We can tell them from other viewers because they view as an act of love. Some of them are Hitler fetishists and some are train fetishists, but whatever the ostensible subject of their love, they all experience that love as a generalizing, all-purpose experience. It is a paraphilia made of Agfachrome and pixels: an undying idea which now immortally substitutes for what was once steel and leather, rust-brown rail and green tree.

Unvanquished sepia

In July, the dark summer clouds rolling in from Lake Michigan would have been full of warm rain. But on the flat land beneath them, tiny people in white are moving about in ways that have little to do with the drama overhead. The people in white are forming themselves into a white group before a white arch.

 Click to enlarge.

The clouds and the flat land and the dark sky are vast. They have miniaturized and trivialized everything else in the image. An aerial perspective (in 1904, how? from a balloon?) has scaled down the big buildings and broad streets to fit the tiny people. “Welcome home,” say tiny words on the arch, but up there in the sky is something which is not to be engaged on any terms but its own. The clouds communicate only with themselves, and what they communicate is only moving air and light and the water from which they came, to which they will return.

Within its frame, the picture of clouds and land is captioned, “Welcome home of the General Overseer, Rev. John Alex. Dowie. July, 1904. Zion City, Ill.” Outside the frame, a few clicks in Google will construct a context for those words and convert them to a text illustrated by the people and their arch.

Zion City, Google’s texts can tell us, is a small town north of Chicago, now called simply Zion. With its broad boulevards laid out at the beginning of the twentieth century in the form of the Union Jack, it was a fully planned community with an intended population of 200,000: the proposed Vatican of a cult called the Christian Catholic Church. What it actually became you can learn here from the Zion Historical Society.

http://www.zionhs.com/index.htm

And about its founder and first ruler, John Alexander Dowie (1847-1907), you can see and hear a great deal at this site, including three cylinder recordings of Dowie’s voice and a colorized photograph of Dowie, “First Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ,” in the priestly robes of Elijah the Restorer.

http://www.james-joyce-music.com/extras/dowie_bio.html

These words from outside Zion originate in yet another text: James Joyce’s Ulysses. When the historical John Alexander Dowie passed under his arch into Zion City, there to be overthrown by his followers and to die, he was returning from a tour of the world which took him — in Ulysses, though not in what’s called historical fact — to Dublin, where he passed through the mind of Mr. Leopold Bloom. Searching for Dowie’s words there, the Joycean Kevin McDermott has found them, embalmed them in historical context, and laid them to glorious rest in a cybermausoleum more lasting than any perishable city could ever be under its burden of passing, changing, indifferent cloud.

—

We clicked Google. It surrounded a photograph with words, but the photograph itself couldn’t be changed back to what it might have been in 1904. A century later, it has become nothing but an artifact. It has faded into its own sepia toning, visually and conceptually. But its visual aspect, at least, can be rejuvenated. All that takes is a few clicks in Photoshop.

The clicks transmute the image’s spectrum. They transfer its tonal range from the pale browns and oxidized-silver grays of a Frederick Henry Evans cathedral over to the glare and muddy green-blacks of a Robert Capa D-Day. Post-Photoshop, these clouds have a different kind of weather to dispense. It still won’t be the weather of 1904, of course. The rain that seems about to fall can no longer be thought of as what Zion City might have expected: a bestowal. Having been photoshopped, the sky over Zion City today is nothing but a formalism: not a manifestation of the presence of God, not even a natural map of regions of air, but only an either-or of black and white.

Those contrasty shades of black and white are on the coat of arms of photojournalism. They seem to tell us that Photoshop can bring history back to life and make it news again. Once more, as if no one need ever die, the sky of 1904 seems current. But under that reborn sky, the triumphal arch of 1904 seems even more ephemeral. The newly victorious sky has reduced it to an irony (“Little did the people of Zion City know . . .”). On them and on what we see now of the great flat land stretching to the horizon, Photoshop has brought down what we might call the Ozymandias Process: “Nothing beside remains.”

Before that moment descended on Zion City, we learn, Zion City’s policemen carried clubs and Bibles and wore badges emblazoned with a picture of a dove and the motto “Patience.” Patiently, let’s close that part of the history of this image and acknowledge that it has forever passed over into the region of sepia, where all will eventually fade to white. No, we’ll never again be able to understand this image. Yes, it is lost now, even as it survives on the page as an incomprehensible artifact. But if that thought comes to us through the agency of a written text, there’s a possibility that our loss may be irreversible but not irremediable. Inside Mr. Bloom’s head, James Joyce’s unillustrated words are still at work, translating the black and white of Zion City into bright color.

—

I thank Reinhard Friederich for showing me the DVD database Panoramic Cityscape Photo Collection (EURISKOData.com, 2001), where I found the image of Zion City.

Update, July 2, 2013: the image of Zion City was taken by George R. Lawrence (1869-1938), a pioneer aerial photographer who worked first with balloons and then with arrays of large kites, including one seventeen-kite array that lifted a 50-pound camera to an altitude of 2000 feet.

http://www.openculture.com/2013/06/amazing_aerial_photographs_of_great_american_cities_circa_1906.html

In the Library of Congress collection of Lawrence’s work, the aerial photograph of Zion City is image number 91 of 247.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/panoramic_photo/pnphtgs.html

Scurvy, Negress, typewriter and fountain pen: a poet’s photographs vanish

If it’s taken down from its shelf in a library at Harvard and opened, the crumbling old offprint from The New England Journal of Medicine can teach us that the Americans of three-quarters of a century ago inhabited bodies that were only partly like ours.

Click to enlarge.

Right at the start, for example, a pharmaceutical manufacturer reminds physicians: “In the absence of epidemic amebiasis attention may be diverted from the established fact that 3 to 10 percent of the general population is infected with Endamoeba histolytica. Outright clinical symptoms are most likely to occur during the summer months” (front matter, p. vi). In the technical language of medicine, those words say that in 1939 amoebic dysentery, a disease that Americans now associate only with third-world poverty, was still endemic in the United States. And of the patient discussed in the case record on p. 71, the text matter-of-factly notes, “Two years before admission she had been treated for scurvy.”

The historical strangeness of bodies from the past doesn’t originate only in their diseases, either. When people thought about other people’s bodies in 1939, every part of every body communicated itself through a language that we’d now have to call “1939.” On p. 49 of the offprint, for example, the authors of a statistical study of alcoholism report: “All but 76 patients were white. There were 62 Negroes, 12 Negresses, and 2 Japanese men.” To read the word “Negresses” now seems almost like experiencing a paleontologist’s instant of Keatsian discovery. Coming into startling view on its page, the extinct word emerges from its matrix in the text like a fossil emerging into sunlight under the blows of a sharp little pick-hammer.1

—

I’m reading the word now for the sake of the man who wrote it: Merrill Moore (1903-1957). In the 1920s, Moore was the youngest of a group of remarkable poets who gathered around the Vanderbilt University English professor John Crowe Ransom and published their work in a magazine called The Fugitive. The Fugitive group underwent two metamorphoses after that era: first into a group of right-wing anti-capitalists who called themselves the Southern Agrarians, then into the literary theorists called the New Critics. In English departments, the most enduringly famous members of the group are Ransom himself and his students Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren.

Not Moore, however. As the mentor of the Fugitives, Ransom gathered his students for regular revising sessions, but Moore just wouldn’t revise. For that he had a genuinely amazing excuse: he was quite possibly the most facile poet in the history of the English language, and rather than bring one revised poem to the weekly meetings he’d bring fifty brand new ones. With only a few exceptions, all of his poems were sonnets, and he composed those as fast as he was physically able to write the words down. In fact, he learned shorthand so that he could physically write the words down even faster. That’s why one of his volumes of sonnets (one of many) is called just M — M for Merrill, M for Moore, and M for the Roman numeral. Yes, that one fat book contains a thousand sonnets — that is, 1000 x 14 lines, or a body of verse longer than Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained put together. I flipped through it once, and line after line called to me as I opened the pages into light. There’s no doubt that Moore was a poet. But so far as I was able to see in that one fast scan, he never finished assembling his lines into poems.2 The consequence was predictable. Sixty years ago the anthologist Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977) was still including a few of Moore’s sonnets in his collections, but nobody reads them now.

But Moore’s major at Vanderbilt was pre-medical, and in due time he became a psychiatrist who practiced at hospitals associated with Harvard and wrote the little monograph we’ve been looking at. It’s as a psychiatrist that he’s remembered now to American literary history, because in that capacity he figured in the lives of several other poets. He kept Edwin Arlington Robinson’s depression and alcoholism under control, counseled the Harvard sophomore Robert Lowell to transfer to Kenyon College and study with Allen Tate, advised against releasing Ezra Pound from St. Elizabeths, and failed to prevent Robert Frost’s suicidal son from killing himself but did save Frost’s own life by calling the ambulance when Frost was suffering a toxic reaction to some medicine. During that period, too, some of his sonnets were illustrated by Edward Gorey, who was then an unknown Harvard undergraduate.

You’ll find two more illustrations in the little Harvard biography of Moore at

https://www.countway.harvard.edu/chm/archives/iotm/iotm_2004-04.html

— a conventionally posed photograph taken during World War II and a more dramatic photograph, all foreshortening and intent concentration, of Moore drawing a blood sample from a patient in 1939, the year of his monograph on alcoholism. As it happens, Moore was a photographer himself, and he took his pictures with the same energy he expended on healing patients, writing sonnets, learning languages (in the Pacific during the war, he picked up, among others, Mandarin and Maori), and swimming marathons. By his own estimate, he took 50,000 photographs in the course of his short life.

Ever since I learned that statistic, I’ve wondered it what would it be to experience a photograph by Moore. Might the image be as preternatural as its creator? For instance, might the dramatic photograph on the Harvard site be a self-portrait?

 Click to enlarge.

There might be many things to say about this image: things about the power relationship between doctor and patient, for instance, and what the formalities of visual composition communicate about that relationship. And if the power relationship should also encompass a relationship between artist and model . . .

I sent a query to Harvard. Jessica Murphy, reference archivist at the Harvard Medical School’s Center for the History of Medicine, replied: “The only information with the image indicates that it was taken by Pix Publishing, New York, and was transferred to the library in 1939.”

Pix Publishing was an agency that marketed images by some of the twentieth century’s foremost photojournalists to magazines — most prominently, to Life. Life’s complete photo archive is now in Google, but this image isn’t there. However, Pix Publishing’s own archive is now at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The Resource Centre at the Art Gallery of Ontario lists its hours of operation as 1:00 to 4:45, Wednesdays through Fridays. However (as of July 2011, at any rate), no one ever answers the phone during those hours, and voicemail messages are not returned.

For the practical purposes of ordinary understanding, then, the history of this image is gone. Free-floating now in an ahistorical space, an image that once had a journalistic context in what’s called the real world is now only a composition in black and white. It was once an illustration of Dr. Merrill Moore, but now that literary artifact has been buried on its page under a layer of silver halides.

Words can still cry out from under their coverings, of course. On a shelf at Harvard, bound into the back of Dr. Moore’s monograph in The New England Journal of Medicine, is this.

The due-date slip inside the back cover tells me that I’m the first person to have looked at these words since October 6, 1977. The slip itself is brown with age (its first date stamp is November 6, 1939), and its contents date from another era of economics and of prose style: “A fine of five cents a day is incurred by retaining [this book] beyond the specified time.” The bound-in letter too is appareled in the past: written on a manual typewriter and signed with a fountain pen. It is now one with the word “Negress” and the sonnets of Merrill Moore. There on its slip of Harvard stationery, the document has gone strange. Its verbal syntax is still intelligible, but its historical form is now on the way to incomprehensibility.

Of course that history is still extant, and we’re free to keep searching for dictionaries of its language. Moore’s papers — 590 boxes containing 131,750 items — are now in the Library of Congress.  There, the opening pages of their catalog entry read:

According to a separate catalog entry, the photographs, drawings,and prints include an album containing “136 portraits, World War II and photo of New Guinea female.” The images haven’t been digitized, but I suppose they may be viewed on site at the Library.

But how, now, can anyone see “New Guinea female”? Like a sonnet by the amazing Merrill Moore, which is read now only because it is a sonnet by the amazing Merrill Moore, an image called “New Guinea female” has lost the context it had at the moment it was created. We still own the female’s sequestered image and its companion image of a white man drawing blood from another white man, but even that still comprehensible white glyph has been translated out of our language. For us, now, it can signify only an instant in 1939 — one of the instants when it was possible for an unimaginative reader to understand without effort that Americans were getting scurvy and amoebic dysentery and Merrill Moore was writing sonnets with a fountain pen. That instant would have risen to consciousness through the language called “1939.” But like the word “Negress,” the language called “1939”  — the language written by the poet and photographer Merrill Moore — has now faded to white.

—

1 Technical addendum: the academic matrix surrounding the fossil word “Negresses” has its own petrified ancientness. In this statistical study, for example, no statistical analysis whatever has been performed beyond simple counting. A textual trait of that primitiveness is undeveloped logic, as in this non sequitur: “There appears to be some relation between occupation and certain age levels. Thus, it appears that older men [in this study of alcoholism] tend to be laborers and seamen, whereas the salesmen and longshoremen comprise the middle-aged group. Possibly this indicates a failure to make occupational adjustments and a gradual decline with increasing age into the less skilled or totally unskilled occupational categories” (61). In this passage, the words “failure” and “decline” refer to change within each age group, but there is no control for any difference (such as a difference in education) between the two groups. As of 2011 The New England Journal of Medicine, the most prestigious medical journal in the United States, couldn’t possibly publish such an elementary error. Physicians have a more quantitative education now than they did in 1939.

2 One possible exception to my complaint about no finished poems by Moore is the sonnet I was able to memorize from beginning to end in a single fast reading. It’s a psychiatrist’s sonnet, and it goes:

You’ll be all right, you’ll be all right, you’ll be
All right, you’ll be all right, you’ll be all right,
You’ll be all right, you’ll be all right, you’ll be . . .

etc., for eleven more lines.