The Sun's in its orbit, yet I feel morbid.
Act
Ladies and gentlemen and the day!
All ye made of sweet human clay!
Let me tell you: you are o'kay.
Our show is to start without much delay.
So let me inform you right away: this is not a play but the end of the play that has been on for some eighty years.
It received its boos and received its cheers.
It won't last for long, one fears.
Men and machines lie to rest or rust.
Nothing arrives as quick as the Past.
What we'll show you presently is the cast of characters who have ceased to act.
Each of these lives has become a fact from which you presumably can subtract but to which you blissfully cannot add.
The consequences of that could be bad for your looks or your blood.
For they are the cause, you are the effect. because they lie flat, you are still erect.
Citizens!
Don't neglect history!
History holds the clue to your taxes and to your flu, to what comes out of the blue.
We'll show you battlefields, bedrooms, labs, sinking ships and escaping subs, cradles, weddings, divorces, slabs.
Folks!
The curtain's about to rise!
What you'll see won't look like a Paradise.
Still, the Past may moisten a pair of eyes, for its prices were lower than our sales, for it was ruining cities: not blood cells; for on the horizon it's not taut sails but the wind that fails. 1900.
A quiet year, you bet.
True: none of you is alive as yet.
The '00' stands for the lack of you.
Still, things are happening, quite a few.
In China, the Boxers are smashing whites.
In Russia,
A.
P.
Chekhov writes.
In Italy,
Floria Tosca screams.
Freud, in Vienna, interprets dreams.
The Impressionists paint,
Rodin still sculpts.
In Africa,
Boers grab the British scalps or vice versa (who cares, my dear?).
And
Kinley is re-elected here.
There are four great empires, three good democracies.
The rest of the world sports loin-cloths and moccasins, speaking both figuratively and literally.
Upstaging "Umberto's" in Little Italy, in the big one Umberto the Ist's shot dead. (Not all that's written on walls is read).
And marking the century's real turn,
Friedrich Nietzsche dies,
Louis Armstrong's born to refute the great Kraut's unholy "God is dead" with "Hello,
Dolly." The man of the year, though, is an engineer.
John Browning is his name.
He's patented something.
So let us hear about John's claim to fame. ( John Moses Browning )"I looked at the calendar, and I saw that there are a hundred years to go.
That made me a little nervous for I thought of my neighbors.
I've multiplied them one hundred times: it came to them being all over!
So I went to my study that looks out on limes and invented this cute revolver!" 1901.
A swell, modest time.
A T-bone steak is about a dime.
Queen Victoria dies; but then Australia repeats her silhouette and, inter alia, joins the Commonwealth.
In the humid woods of Tahiti,
Gauguin paints his swarthy nudes.
In China, the Boxers take the rap.
Max Planck in his lab (not on his lap yet) in studying radiation.
Verdi dies too.
But our proud nation, represented by Mrs.
Disney, awards the world with a kid by the name of Walt who'll animate the screen.
Off screen, the British launch their first submarine.
But it's a cake-walk or a Strindberg play or Freud's "Psychopathology of Everyday Life" that really are not to be missed!
And
Kinley's shot dead by an anarchist.
The man of the year is Signore Marconi.
He is an Italian, a Roman.
His name prophetically rhymes with "Sony": they have a few things in common. ( Guglieimo Marconi )"In a Catholic country where the sky is blue and clouds look like cherubs' vestiges, one daily receives through the air a few wordless but clear messages.
Regular speech has its boring spoils: it leads to more speech, to violence, it looks like spaghetti, it also coils.
That's why I've built the wireless!" 1902.
Just another bland peaceful year.
They dissect a gland and discover hormones.
And a hormone once discovered is never gone.
The Boer War (ten thousand dead) is over.
Elsewhere, kind Europeans offer railroad chains to a noble savage.
A stork leaves a bundle in a Persian cabbage patch, and the tag reads "Khomeini".
Greeks,
Serbs,
Croats, and Bulgars are at each others' throats.
Claude Monet paints bridges nevertheless.
The population of the U.
S. is approximately 76 million: all of them having sex to affect our present rent.
Plus Teddy Roosevelt's the President.
The man of the year is Arthur Conan Doyle, a writer.
The subjects of his great toil are a private dick and a paunchy doc; occasionally, a dog. ( Sir Arthur Conan Doyle )"Imagine the worst: your subconscious is as dull as your conscience.
And you, a noble soul, grab a Luger and make Swiss cheese out of your skull.
Better take my novel about the Hound of the Baskervilles!
It'll save a handful of your brain cells and beef up your dreams.
For it simply kills time and somebody else!" 1903.
You may start to spy on the future.
Old Europe's sky is a little dim.
To increase its dimness,
The Krupp Works in Essen erect their chimneys. (Thus the sense of Geld breeds the sense of guilt.) Still, more smoke comes from London, from a smoke-filled room where with guile and passion Bolsheviks curse Mensheviks in Russian.
Speaking of Slavs:
The Serbian King and Queen are done by local well-wishers in.
Painters Whistler,
Gauguin,
Pissarro are gone.
Panama rents us its Canal Zone.
While bidding their maidens bye-bye and cheerio, the tommies sail off to grab Nigeria and turn it into a British colony: to date, a nation's greatest felony is if it's neither friend nor foe.
My father is born.
So is Evelyn Waugh.
Man of the year,
I am proud to say is two men.
They are brothers.
Together, they sport two heads, four legs and four hands-which brings us to their bird's four wings. ( The Wright Brothers )"We are Orville and Wilbur Wright.
Our name simply rhymes with 'flight'!
This may partially explain why we decided to build a plane.
Oh there are no men in the skies, just wind!
Cities look like newspaper print.
Mountains glitter and rivers bend.
But the ultimate plane'd rather bomb than land!" 1904.
Things which were in store hit the counter.
There is a war.
Japan, ever so smiling, gnashes teeth and bites off what, in fact, in Russia's.
Other than that, in Milan police crack local skulls.
But more common is the touch of the new safety razor blade.
The nuances of the White Slave Trade,
Mount St.
Victoire by Monsieur Cezanne and other trifles under the sun including popular French disgust with the Vatican, are discussed in every Partisan cafeteria.
Radioactivity - still a theory - is stated by Rutherford (when a particle brings you a lordship we call it practical).
And as the first Rolls Royce engines churn,
Chekhov dies but Graham Greene is born, so is George Balanchine, to upgrade the stage, so too - though it's sin to disclose her age - is Miss Dietrich, to daunt the screen.
And New York hears its subway's first horrid scream!
The man of the year is a Hottentot.
South-West Africa's where he dwells.
In a German colony.
And is being taught German.
So he rebels. ( A Hottentot )"Germans to me are extremely white.
They are white in broad daylight and what's more, at night.
Plus if you try to win minds and hearts of locals, you don't call a black guy "schwarz" - "Schwarz" sounds shoddy and worse than "black".
Change your language and then come back!
Fly, my arrow, and hit a Hans to cure a Hans of his arrogance!" 1905.
In the news:
Japan.
Which means that the century is upon us.
Diminishing the lifespan of Russian dreadnoughts to naught,
Japan tells urbi et orbi it's loathe to lurk in the wings of geography.
In Petersburg those whose empty stomachs churn take to the streets.
Yet they won't return home, for the Cossacks adore long streets.
A salesman of the Singer sewing devices greets in Latvia the arrival of yet another daughter, who is to become my mother.
In Spain, unaware of this clever ploy,
Pablo Picasso depicts his "Boy With Pipe" in blue.
While the shades of blonde,
Swedes and Norwegians, dissolve their bond.
And Norway goes independent; yet that's not enough to turn brunette.
Speaking of things that sound rather queer,
E is equated to MC square by Albert Einstein, and the Fauvists (Les Fauves is the French for unruly beasts) unleash Henri Matisse in Paris. "The Merry Widow" by Franz Lehar is the toast of the town.
Plus Transvaal gets its constitution called by the natives "the pits".
And Greta Garbo,
La belle dame sans merci, is born.
So are neon signs.
The man of the year, our record tells, is neither Strindberg nor H.
G.
Wells, he is not Albert Schweitzer, not Oscar Wilde: his name is obscured by his own brain-child. ( Camouflage )"I am what gentleman wear in the field when they are afraid that they may be killed.
I am called camouflage.
Sporting me, each creature feels both safer and close to Nature.
The green makes your simper's pupil sore.
That's what forests and swamps are for.
The planet itself wears me: the design is as French as it is divine." 1906.
Time stands at ease.
Having one letter in common with his subject,
Freud adds to our bookshelf preparing the century for itself.
On the whole,
Europeans become much nicer to each other: in Africa.
Still, the Kaiser when asked of the growth of his navy, lies.
The Japs, for some reason, nationalize their railroads of whose existence none, save several spices, had known.
Along the same, so to speak cast-iron lines, aping the rod of Aaron, the Simplon Tunnel opens to hit your sight with a smoking non-stop Vis-a-vis.
Aside from that the civilized world condemns night shifts (in factories though) for dames.
Prime ministers are leapfrogging in Russia, as though they've seen in a crystal ball that the future keeps no room for these kinds of leaps.
The French Government warily says "pardon" to Captain Dreyfus, a Jew who's done ten years in the slimmer on the charge of treason.
Still, this distinction between a prison and a Jew has no prophetic air.
The U.
S. troops have a brief affair with the Island of Cuba: their first tete-a-tete.
Samuel Beckett is born.
Paul Cezanne is dead.
The man of the year is Herr von Pirquet.
He stings like honey-bee.
The sting screams like Prince Hamlet's sick parakeet:
TB or not TB. ( Dr.
Clement von Pirquet )"What I call allergy, you call rash.
I'll give you an analogy: each time you blush, it shows you're too susceptible to something lurid, obscene and antiseptical to hope to cure it.
This, roughly, is the principle that guides my needle.
To prove you are invincible it hurts a little; it plucks from your pale cheeks the blooming roses and checks their petals for tuberculosis!" As for 1907, it's neither here not there.
But Auden is born this year!
This birth is the greatest of all prologues!
Still,
Pavlov gets interested in dogs.
Next door Mendeleev, his bearded neighbor who gave the universe the table of its elements, slips into a coma.
The Cubists' first show, while Oklahoma becomes the Union's 46th state.
Elsewhere New Zeland seeks to fly the Union Jack.
Lumiere develops the colored pictures ere anyone else (we all owe it to him!) The Roman Pope takes a rather dim view of modernism: jealous Iago!
Having squashed (4-0) Detroit,
Chicago forever thirsting for Gloria Mundi wins the World Series.
In Swinemunde Nicholas the
Ind meets the German Kaiser for a cup of tea.
That, again, is neither here not there, like Kalamazoo.
And Carl Hagenbeck opens his careless zoo where walruses swim, lions pace, birds fly proving: animals also can live a lie.
The man of the year, you won't believe, is Joseph Stalin, then just a tried.
He is young; he is twenty-eight; but History's there, and he cannot wait. ( Joseph Dzhugashvili, alias Stalin )"My childhood was rotten,
I lived in mud.
I hold up banks 'cause I miss my dad.
So to help the party, for all my troubles one day I took four hundred grand in roubles.
Thus far, it was the greatest heist in the Russian history after Christ.
Some call me eager, some call me zealous;
I just like big figures with their crowd of zeroes." 1908 is a real bore though it provides a new high in gore by means of an earthquake in the Southern part of Calabria,
Italy.
Still, the world of art tries to replace those one hundred fifty thousand victims with things as nifty as Monet's depiction of the Ducal Palace in Venice, or with Isadora's galas, or with the birth of Ian Fleming: to fill the crater.
In the World Series Chicago's again a winner.
In the Balkans,
Bosnia and Herzegovina are taken by Austria (for what it took it will pay somewhat later with its Archduke).
And the fountain pen is in vogue worldwide.
The gas of helium's liquefied in Holland which means the rising of that flat country a bit above sea level, which means thoughts vertical.
The king and the crown prince are killed in Portugal, for horizontality's sake no doubt.
Also, the first Model T is out in Dearborn to roam our blissful quarters trailed by the news that General Motors is incorporated.
The English Edward and Russia's Nicholas make an effort to know each other aboard a yacht.
The Germans watch it but don't react - or do, but that cannot be photographed.
And the Republic calls on William Taft.
The man of the year is German scientist Paul Ehrlich.
He digs bacterias and sires immunology.
All the sapiens owe a lot to his theories. ( Paul Ehrlich )"The world is essentially a community and to syphilis, nobody has immunity.
So what I've invented beefs up your arsenal for living a life that's a bit more personal.
I've made Salvarsan.
Oh my Salvarsan!
It may cure your wife, it may cure your son, it may cure yourself and your mistress fast.
Think of Paul Ehrlich as you pull or thrust!" 1909 trots a fine straight line.
Three Lives are published by Gertrude Stein. (On the strength of this book, if its author vies for the man of the year, she sure qualifies.) Other than that, there is something murky about the political life in Turkey: in those parts, every man has a younger brother, and as Sultans they love to depose each other.
The same goes apparently in Iran:
Ahmed Shah tells Mohammed Ali: "I run the show", though he's 12 years old.
In Paris,
Sergei Diaghilev strikes gold with his "Ballets Russes".
While in Honduras, screaming the usual "God, endure us!" peasants slaughter each other: it's a civil war.
Sigmund Freud crosses the waters for to tell our Wonderland's cats and Alices a few things about psychoanalysis.
But David Griffith of Motion Pictures, boggling one's dreams, casts Mary Pickford.
The Brits, aping the Royal Dutch Shell Company, too, legalize their touch on the Persian oil.
The Rockefeller Foundation is launched to stall a failure and to boost a genus.
Leaving all the blight, glitter and stuff made of Bake light (that heralds the Plastic Age) far below, the weary bearded and valiant Captain Robert Peary reaches the North Pole, and thus subscribes virginal white to the Stars and Stripes.
Ah those days when one's thoughts were glued to this version of the Absolute!
The man of the year is the unknown nameless hairdresser in London Town.
Stirred either by its cumulous firmament or by the British anthem, he invents the permanent. ( A London hairdresser )"The Sun never sets over this Empire.
Still, all empires one day expire.
They go to pieces, they get undone.
The wind of history is no fun.
Let England be England and rule the waves!
And let those waves be real raves.
Let them be dark, red, chestnut, blonde unruffled by great events beyond!" 1910 marks the end of the first decade.
As such, it can definitely be okayed.
For there is clearly a democratic trend.
Though at times things take an erratic turn.
Like when Egypt's Prime Minister, through no fault of his, gets murdered.
But the revolt in Albania is the work of masses (although how they tell their oppressed from their ruling class is anyone's guess).
Plus Portugal bravely rids itself of its king, and as he's hugged by the Brits, becomes a republic.
As for the Brits themselves, one more generation of them learns God saves no king, and mourning the sad demise of Edward the Seventh, they fix their eyes on George the Fifth.
Mark Twain and Tolstoy die too.
But Karl May has just published his Winnetou in German.
In Paris, they've seen and heard Stravinsky-cum-Diaghilev's "Firebird".
That causes some riot, albeit a tiny one.
Whereas the twangs of the Argentinean Tango do to the world what the feared and hailed Halley's comet, thank heavens, failed to do.
And our watchful Congress finds it illegal if not incongruous to take ladies across state lines for purposes it declines to spell out, while Japan moves nearer to Korea: a face that invades a mirror.
The man of the year is an architect.
His name is Frank Lloyd Wright.
Things that he's built still stand erect, nay! hug what they stand on tight. (Frank Lloyd Wright)"Nature and space have no walls or doors, and roaming at will is what man adores.
So, a builder of houses,
I decide to bring the outside inside.
You don't build them tall: you build them flat.
That's what Nature is so good at.
You go easy on bricks and big on glass so that space may sashay your parquets like grass." 1911 is wholly given to looking balanced albeit uneven.
In Hamburg, stirring his nation's helm the German Kaiser (for you,
Wilhelm the Second) demands what sounds weird for some: "A Place for Germany in the Sun".
It you were French, you would say C'est tout.
Yet Hitler is barely twenty-two and things in the sun aren't so hot besides.
The activity of the sun excites the Chinese to abolish pigtails and then proclaim a republic with Sun Yat-Sen their first President. (Although how three hundred twenty-five millions can be handled by a Parliament, frankly, beats me.
That is, how many seats would they have had in that grand pavilion?
And even if it's just one guy per million what would a minority of, say, ten percent add up to?
This is like counting sand!
For this democracy has no lexicon!) Along the same latitude, the Mexican Civil War is over, and saintly, hesitant Francisco Madero becomes the President.
Italy finding the Turks too coarse to deal with, resorts to the air force for the first time in history, while da Vinci's Mona Lisa gets stolen from the Louver - which is why the cops in Paris grab Monsieur Guillaume Apollinaire who though born in Rome, writes in French, and has other energies.
Rilke prints his Duinese Elegies and in London, suffragettes poke their black umbrellas at Whitehall and cry Alack!
Man of the year is a great Norwegian.
The crucial word in their tongue is "Skol".
They are born wearing turtlenecks in that region.
When they go South, they hit the Pole. (Roald Amundsen)"I am Roald Amundsen.
I like ice.
The world is my oyster for it's capped twice with ice: first,
Arctical, then Antarctical.
Human life in those parts is a missing article.
O! when the temperature falls subzero the eyes grow blue, the heart sincere.
There are neither doubts nor a question mark: it's the tails of your huskies which pull and bark". 1912.
Captain Robert Scott reaches the South Pole also.
Except he got there later than Amundsen.
He stares at ice, thinks of his family, prays, and dies.
Ice, however, is not through yet.
S.
S.
Titanic hits an iceberg at full speed and goes down.
The bell grimly tolls at Lloyd's in London.
Fifteen hundred souls are lost, if not more.
Therefore, let's turn to Romania where Eugene Ionesco's born or to Turkey and her Balkan neighbors: each one of them feels an itch to reach for the gun; on reflection, though, they abandon the idea.
It's peace everywhere.
In London by now there are five hundred movie theaters which makes an issue of baby-sitters.
At home, after having less done than said;
Woodrow Wilson becomes the Prez.
Dead-set to pocket the dizzy with flipping coin New Mexico and Arizona join the Union.
For all its steel mills and farms the Union keeps currently under arms only one hundred thousand men.
That's barmy considering five million in the Russian Army, or four million in Germany, or the French who, too, have as many to fill a trench.
This sounds to some like a lack of caution.
But then there is the Atlantic Ocean between the Continent and the U.
S., and it's only 1912,
God bless, and the hemispheres luckily seem unable to play the now popular Cain and Abel.
The man of the year is both short and tall.
He's nameless, and well he should stay nameless: for spoiling for us free fall by using a parachute. (Captain Albert Berry)"Leaving home with umbrella?
Take a parachute!
When it rains from below, that is when they shoot down a plane and its pilot objects to die, when you wand to grab Holland or drop a spy behind enemy lines, you need parachutes.
O, they'll be more popular than a pair of shoes.
In their soft descent they suggest a dove.
Aye! it's not only love that comes from above!" 1913.
Peace is wearing thin in the Balkans.
Great powers try their pristine routine of talks, but only soil white gloves:
Turkey and the whole bunch of Slavs slash one another as if there is no tomorrow.
The States think there is; and being thorough introduce the federal income tax.
Still, what really spells the Pax Americana is the assembly line Ford installs in Michigan.
Some decline of capitalism!
No libertine or Marxist could foresee this development in the darkest possible dream.
Speaking of such a dream,
California hears the first natal scream of Richard Nixon.
However, the most loaded sounds are those uttered by Robert Frost whose A Boy's Will and North of Boston are printed in England and nearly lost on his compatriots eyeing in sentimental rapture the newly-built Grand Central Station where they later would act as though hired by Hollywood.
In the meantime,
M.
Proust lets his stylus saunter the Swann's Way,
H.
Geyger designs his counter; probing nothing perilous or perdu,
Stravinsky produces Le Sacre du Printemps, a ballet, in Paris,
France.
But the fox-trot is what people really dance.
And as Schweitzer cures lepers and subs dive deeper, the hottest news is the modest zipper.
Think of the preliminaries it skips timing your lips with you fingertips!
The man of the year is,
I fear,
Niels Bohr.
He comes from the same place as danishes.
He builds what one feels like when one can't score or what one looks like when one vanishes. (Niels Bohr)Atoms are small.
Atoms are nice.
Until you split one, of course.
Then they get large enough to play dice with your whole universe.
A model of an atom is what I've built!
Something both small and big!
Inside, it resembles the sense of guilt.
Outside, the lunar dig. 1914 Nineteen-fourteen!
Oh, nineteen-fourteen!
Ah, some years shouldn't be let out of quarantine!
Well, this is one of them.
Things get raw:
In Paris, the editor of Figaro is shot dead by the wife of the French finance minister, for printing this lady's - sans merci, should we add? - steamy letters to - ah, who cares!..
And apparently it's c'est tout also for a socialist and pacifist of all times,
Jean Jaures.
He who shook his fist at the Parliament urging hot heads to cool it, dies, as he dines, by some bigot's bullet in a cafe.
Ah, those early, single shots of Nineteen-fourteen! ah, the index finger of an assassin! ah, white puffs in the blue acrylic!..
There is something pastoral, nay! idyllic about these murders.
About that Irish enema the Brits suffer in Dublin again.
And about Panama Canal's grand opening.
Or about that doc and his open heart surgery on his dog...
Well, to make these things disappear forever, the Archduke is arriving at Sarajevo; and there is in the crowd that unshaven, timid youth, with his handgun.... (To be continued).
