As of September 2024, no change in the aspect is detected.
Approximately August 19, 1915
World War I
Power events on an island
Five months ago I published online a little Issuu book about what happened to the history of power in one place, Honolulu, and two times: the 1830s and the nineteen-teens. The first series of events displays Herman Melville plagiarizing the indignation of a German botanist about the tyrannical control of Hawaii’s New England missionaries. The second culminates in an almost successful attempt by German forces during World War I to blow up Honolulu harbor, followed by a near-lynching on a King Street trolleycar.
Force repeats itself. If you’d like a second chance to read how that worked out in Honolulu, your link is
Pity: a change
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
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/father-hand-belgian-congo-1904/
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.
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.
Marvell link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44682/the-garden-56d223dec2ced
Prehistory: objet d’art with ephemeral foreground and cyclorama of stars
Colored, surfacing
Color code
In 1916, wings could still be translucent. Their delicate black markings were shadows of a metaphor for the term endoskeleton. At each tip, these particular wings also shadowed a purely human term: Germany’s black Iron Cross.
On the record, these wings and this thorax are black and white. One of the black and white men accumulating before the lower wing is wearing the tunic ribbon of the Iron Cross, but in 1916 that too would have been black and white. The other tunics are in various 1916 instars: some accurately following contours of flesh and bone, others shaped by the now dead; all black and white.
But in the white space between two of the human bodies hangs a cross in blue. At the time it was inked onto the Rostock print somebody intended it to refer to one or the other of the bodies, but nobody now can tell which. Separated by a shared white space, the black and white bodies are in the midst of an uninked record. The inked cross suspended in the white looks like what we readers think of as an X, but it is the X in an alphabet that can no longer be read. We receive it now only as a shape combined with a color. The color is the color of a sky no longer perturbable by wing.
Pindaric: the horse phase
The heavy cap glowed blue. It was exciting. She could feel the mare pulse under her, bringing and bringing her to the man. Then she had arrived. Stilled, she pressed into a stirrup and lifted, caressing the horse’s fragrant body as she descended its flank. Then she bent to the man on the ground, lifted him into the bed she had carried, and held him in her arms.
Motor ambulancemen John Dos Passos, Malcolm Cowley, E. E. Cummings, Harry Crosby, Ernest Hemingway
Once upon a time, a different language experienced by differently costumed bodies
Pastoral: libretto and score
1.
2. Vienna, 1808: Erwachen heiterer Empfindungen bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande
Gleam
The squire’s coverall is shiny with grease. His shoes are made of wood. His dark eyes are sunken and shadowed.
Standing between him and the slender knight he serves is a piece of high folk art: a coat of arms elaborated to teach Catholic France what its knights of the air live for. In the artwork, the body of one of France’s enemies has been brought back to earth, mockingly flattened out beneath a cross, and dropped between altar candles and the sign of the danse macabre. All around this composition the artist has drawn the sign of a heart, perhaps to signify that he lives on in control over the vanquished dead. But if this icon is a sacred heart, it is a lighthearted one.
Mais qu’il est jeune! qu’il est droit! comme il tient fièrement sa lance!
Qu’il fait de plaisir à voir dans le soleil, plein de menaces et d’élégance,
Tel que le bon écuyer qui soutient son maître face-à-face,
L’Ange . . . !Paul Claudel, “Strasbourg” (1913)
One level up, mounted on a wing above the companions, is the Lady they live to serve: a Lewis machine gun like the one that Jay Gatsby once told his squire Nick about. But this has arrived in the airy zone from outside the angelic order. As her image teaches you, Lewis the mitrailleuse — American-designed, British-made — is sole black steel. She is spectrally far from the rose comme une fiancée of Claudel’s cathedral stone.
But through her solitude she lives. Here in her prose she still is: as sun-touched on the photographic record now as she was then, in about 1916, when a curtain was drawn to open her dark closet for men to see. Age after age, libraries’ worth of history have burned to the muddy ground of Europe, but the opening to returning light always restores gleam to the ruins and their dead.