Copyright 2024 by Jonathan Morse
Model illustrated
She is looking outward to the flower in her left hand. The sight seems to satisfy a desire to be filled with something to speak of. If it does fill her, however, it has entered the silence of the no longer spoken of. It is immured in what Richard Lovelace called the nunnery of chaste breast and quiet mind.
But behind her, unseen, her fingertips have made contact with her unspeaking body. The touch is turned away from, and between it and her tangible flesh is a shield named Steeltex. Steeltex is what enables her to shrink away, reduced. It comes to her in the form of a sibilant whisper because it tells her, "Hide me; my work is in the dark." In the dark, Steeltex becomes one flesh with large hips and excellently diminishes them.
At the surface where light grazes each now excellent hip is Pink Corset Shop. Pink Corset Shop satiates the now reduced model illustrated with light from a black blossom.
New York Times, Sunday, April 30, 1916, page 24
Approximately August 19, 1915
As of September 2024, no change in the aspect is detected
George Grantham Bain collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014699651/.
Contrast and detail restored.
Solicitude: the idea
The landscape near an aerodrome
In the United Kingdom during the 1930s there thrived four young poets collectively known as MacSpaunday: a compound name that breaks down in aliquot proportions to Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and Cecil Day Lewis. As of 2024, Auden is probably the only one still read off campus, though Cecil did become the father of movie star Daniel.
. But Spender crafted a thudding political allegory in verse which nevertheless opens with the title above and an entomological description of an airliner coming in, “More beautiful and soft than any moth.” Credit where memory is due: think of a library as a building with a guardian insect at the zoom outside and, inside, still, shelves filled like honeycombs with moving, living words.
What looks down is light Downseen. What was seen as dark Returns as light.
