And at the image’s center is a woman in a white gown, momentarily aglow in the setting sun. She is to walk through 1906 for a short time further, then lade a night boat with children. That moment is still to come. But now, while the shutter of an onshore camera lies open to receive this image of them all, the children can be seen in passage from your left to your right.
The image charts a transit. Rocked by ripples, the children will lie unmoving in their moving boat as it carries them into the night and then into the morning. Moment by moment on the boat’s bridge, the chronometer will entrain boat, lake, all. Moment by moment one night in 1906, one of the infinitely many ever afters will come to be.
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.
For the royal Mr. Kurtz who farmed rubber in the Belgian Congo at the turn of the twentieth century, the punishment for workers who didn’t meet their quotas was amputation, and the amputations were documented in a photograph album. To have seen those is to undergo a reductive surgery on one’s own ability to name and mean. Once the word arm has been retextualized as a term erasable letter by letter, even the gold braid on the King of the Belgians’ sleeve is hard to see through tears of pity. You can experience the procedure yourself at
But when the site of a pity changes, pity can change. See what happened, for instance, when Belgian pity retreated home during the Great War. The moment that happened, the Congolese album closed on pity’s former color scheme. In the new pity’s fashion shot, set off by decorations, blackness was only a fascinating new noun set off by a new black verb. Remember, called the black verb. Belgium, responded the black noun. Remember Belgium, the merged black predicate became. Read once more on its century-old fashion page, it is still thrilling. Because it has become an image, it dwells in your consciousness with an idol’s immortality.
Ellsworth Young, USA, 1918. Color restored.
In its image frame, its silhouette is the only thing with a meaning. Only its name, “Belgium,” is a worded utterance. Everything else namable in the frame — conflagration, pickelhaube, moustache over unspeaking mouth — is an alien import into meaning from a dictionary. Its lexical space is an Andrew Marvell wordscape: a poet’s garden of annihilation. Within it, Belgium is dragged toward her frontier. Soon she will cross it into the silence of non-Belgium.
But we who unzip now in her memory have been benefited by her value. That was extractive, like the Congo’s rubber, and it still bears interest. Black Congo is now only a page in an unopened album, but the value in pity of Belgium’s streaming hair remains a gold standard for pornography.
Once, at a moment in history when ships’ bridges were so new to language that they literally and non-metaphorically were bridges, light broke through clouds above a bridge and people were saved. For that we have the testimony of a picture with words.
From left to right, the fine-print captions under the image read Lockwoods, Pensylvania [sic], Life Boat, St. Andrew, Victoria, and Day & Haghe, Lithrs. to the Queen. Then, larger, comes this confident explication.
The barely legible words at the end appear to be “The Publishers,” perhaps originally in a different color.
But it’s the caption’s other words that are the hard ones to read. The reason is that their key verb, “rescuing,” belongs to a genre that is now extinct: the genre of religious adoration of the present time. In the moment of that genre, the Transcendentalist painter and poet Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892) could write a text called “The Spirit of the Age” which ended:
The mute machine is moved by a law
That knows no accident or flaw,
And the iron thrills to a different chime
Than that which rang in the dead old time.
For Heaven is taking the matter in hand,
And baffling the tricks of the tyrant band.
[. . .]
And some who from their windows mark
The unwonted lights that flood the dark,
Little by little, in slow surprise,
Lift into space their sleepy eyes;
Little by little are made aware
That a spirit of power is passing there,–
That a spirit is passing, strong and free,–
The soul of the nineteenth century.
But because one of your first emotional reactions to the lithograph probably included a distancing term like “museum piece,” you have a historiographic problem with seeing. A century and a half before your time, the soul of the nineteenth century passed into the scene of rescue, but then it continued on through and out, taking with it much of the word rescue’s emotional context. Now this image of rescue is just an item in a museum, but in its own time it was readable in the home as an allegory of salvation. Some happiness then followed. But the picture isn’t making you happy now. Its caption no longer teaches you to adore.
Because (for one reason among many) in the twentieth century, Cranch’s grandnephew T. S. Eliot was to turn the soul away from his ancestor’s poem’s olfactory regime of coal smoke in favor of French cigarettes and then of Anglo-Catholic incense. Before Eliot’s disdainful gaze the unwonted coal-gas light ebbed as well. Under redarkened heavens there no longer remained enough energy to read hope by.
Once upon a time, perhaps in 1922 — the publication date of Ulysses and The Waste Land and of Sinclair Lewis’s social satire Babbitt, with its phonographic transcription of the way Americans talked in 1922 —
once upon a time, perhaps in that year when modes of perceiving words changed, someone looked at a photograph captioned with a Connecticut title and asked it the beginning of a question.
Post-processing this grimy old image of a dog bracketed between sentences restores visibility to what subject dog is doing: wagging his tail. But the bracketing question, as worded, hasn’t been brought to completion. What we perceive of the dog doesn’t have a context. The question may signify, “At what address in Westbrook, Conn., was Major?” But alternatively it may signify, “What became of Major, forever after?” Whatever the answer may be to either of those sub-questions, it can’t be now what it would have been in 1922, the year C. K. Ogden translated into English the sentences, “The world is everything that is the case” and then “The picture is a model of reality” and “The picture is a fact” (Tractatus 1, 2.12, 2.141). In perhaps 1922 someone writing a graceful nineteenth-century hand molded the words “Westbrook Conn.” around a void and shaped it into a model of the fact of permanent self-evidence. The case of the top margin is Westbrook Conn.; what else can it ever be? But evidence is missing from the laborious blockprint at the bottom. Down there, there appears to be no connection between the question on the left and the date on the right.
But the space in the line at the bottom may be a meaning in its own right: a negative one, empty antonym of the space at the top. The gap between Westbrook and Conn at the top is a temporarily vacant lot that can be filled in at any time with more New England, but the question mark at the bottom designates an unbounded void. Worse, and with vast implications, is that the R’s and N’s at the top and bottom of the whole image are similarly formed. The two lines look different at first glance, but they may have had a single writer. What appears to be a real difference may be only an aesthetic one: a consequence of indifferent time. Over the little interval between the top and the bottom of a text the scribe grew old, and the aging worked its way even into the microtexture of each line’s language. The passage from one letter to the next was a decay. Memento mori, therefore: the spaced subject at the bottom, “Where is he? Nov 1922” may signify not just “Major” but “Major as of 1922” or (an all too possible expansion of the frame of understanding) just “1922.” That is, horribly: “1922, when Major and I were, for a moment, alive.”
Major’s picture documents the case of 1922-and-thereafter. During the time it was processed into what you’re now reading it probably remained in physical existence: a soiled little slip of paper marked with silver halides at its center and inked words in its margins. But it’s the center that has now become marginal to the document’s meaning. Any answer we could make to the question “Where is he?” would have to come from there in the halides, but in that sector there never were words to mean with. Once it had been made metallic by a bath in a reducing agent in (let’s say, because we have to say something) 1922, the wordless chemistry of the story became a bords durs trace of what was once a dog’s life. In that dog story it isn’t the exact date of the abrupt transition from blurrily wagging to stilled that matters. Whenever it was imposed, it was imposed forever.
The largest commercial vessel in the world when it was launched in 1913, the Hamburg-America Line’s Vaterland was at its American pier across the river from New York when the Great War broke out, and it remained there until it was seized by the United States in 1917 and renamed Leviathan. The double name and historic magnitude were what came to E. E. Cummings’s mind that year when he saw the ship on his way back to the United States from his French prison: “Was it yesterday or day before saw the Vaterland,I mean the what deuce is it–that biggest in the world afloat boat.” A century later, Vaterland-memory still exists, institutionalized as a Leviathan collection in the Smithsonian Institution containing a model, a menu, the key to the kennel for passengers’ dogs. . . The ship’s orchestra also made records labeled with the Victor dog, and four of those have now been set to permanent work streaming the Roaring Twenties sound of banjos and saxophones from the Library of Congress.
But downstage from Vaterland on December 11, 1914 was this other craft. Like Vaterland, it bore a human name, but the scale of memorial desire undergirding this name was different. It was evidently conceived to immortalize not a large national metaphor but a single individual named, in flesh and blood, Herbert E. Keller.
And so long as it is italicized, Herbert E. Keller’s name does survive. According to the United States Department of Commerce’s Fifty-First Annual List of Merchant Vessels of the United States [. . .] for the Year Ended June 30, 1919 (Government Printing Office, 1920), italic Herbert E. Keller was an iron towboat of 57 gross tons and 39 net tons, with a length of 63.5 feet, width of 18.8 feet, and depth of 8.0 feet. Her indicated horsepower was 200, she carried a crew of four, she was built in Tottenville, NY, in 1911 and homeported in New York, and she was not equipped with wireless apparatus. For “Herbert E. Keller” in roman, Findagrave.com finds nothing approximating a contextually plausible floruit, but I suppose the words may remain readable yet in, say, the records of the Hudson Towboat Company or a history of the port of New York. Three of italic Herbert E. Keller’s crewmen are visible as they ride their boat, too, and two of them show their faces so clearly that modern facial-recognition software might be able to name them from their position in an archive.
But in the photographic record the face of the third crewman is all but indecipherable.
Heat from a cloud of steam has imposed Schlieren distortion on what you see of his part of the boat, and then just below and ahead of him a fingerprint has been pressed into the negative itself, physically altering it. At some time after a photographer for the Bain News Service opened his shutter on December 11, 1914, he or a co-conspirator broke down representation’s fourth wall and branded an image he had captured for the record of history with a mark of his anonymous own.
In the eras before photography, published illustrations often bore two small supplementary captions: at lower left, the artist’s name followed by the Latin identifier pinxit; at lower right, the engraver’s name followed by the Latin identifier sculpsit. In this image, the sculpsit is the oeuvre of somebody in a darkroom, fingerpainting. The artisan laid his hand upon the face of his creation, replacing with a nameless biological datum a face which might have testified to a name and a chronicled life. One of the modes through which Vaterland, the fingerprint’s background image, survives in its forcibly adopted fatherland’s national site of memory happens to be a menu item wittily named Epigrammes, but in the foreground the sculpsit of its creator is witless. Its only communicative function is to blot out whatever possible words might once have named a man.
The menu’s epigram is “Adieu.”
Notes
E. E. Cummings, The Enormous Room, A Typescript Edition, ed. George James Firmage (1922; W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 241.
Keats to his brother and sister-in-law, September 17-27, 1819: “Severn has got a little Baby–all his own let us hope–He told Brown he had given up painting and had turn’d modeller. I hope sincerely tis not a party concern; that no Mʳ ——— or **** is the real Pinxit and Severn the poor Sculpsit to this work of art.” (Selected Letters, ed. John Bernard [Penguin, 2014], p. 432.)
With a conductor’s gesture, a man poised at a brink once brought together two curves.
Angular flesh and rounded iron approached each other, light and shadow moved over them, and a moment was consummated and became past.
Borne above the shapes like a banner, the word Trimble meant nothing. It only said, as if say were an intransitive verb. It was an order of service: a separately published hymnal to be sung from while the two bodies approached, touched, and then fell away. During that limit instant, the word and the two bodies were united in a single imaged meaning, fully understood but not articulable. Thereafter, in separation, all that could be said in words took the form of a caption (“Davis lock, St, Mary’s Falls canal”) that sang of the watery bed but not of the coming together in light and shadow that had once filled it.
The Library dates the image between 1913 and 1920. However, the mustached man with the pipe appears to be wearing a wristwatch — an accessory which didn’t come into wide use until after World War I.
In New York on April 30, 1921, as the liner Aquitania sailed up the bay from quarantine, the tenor John McCormack, one of the most celebrated singers of the time, showed himself before the recording instruments of the media. The role he was performing approximated what his fellow Irishman William Butler Yeats was to call (in “Among School Children”) “a smiling public man.” A space of foggy air and wooden decking separated him from the battery of cameras.
Then, though, the cameras moved in closer and the singer began to speak.
The reporters took down his words. They turned out to be Irish words.
New York Tribune, 1 May 1921, page 12
Along with the celebrated singer, a celebrated newspaper publisher was on board the ship, and so was a celebrated Hollywood producer. We’re willing to believe they were because the story tells us so in indirect discourse. We don’t need the publisher’s or the producer’s actual words to bear witness. And as to the singer, in 1921 all the cameras had to be silent.
