Posting Mabel

Postcard 1: Calling the Dead

Telephone a nuisance—radio a joy to Alexander Graham Bell. Reproduced from the Collections of the Library of Congress.

Dear Mabel:

I confess, I have found my way to you through your husband, Alexander Graham Bell. I suspect I am not the only one who met or wrote you through this channel. Your presence first appeared to me in a poem I once wrote to “Alec” himself. The poem began like this:

Call to A. G. BellGot some quartersso I call you up on the telephonering-ring-ringbut only your wife and mother are home,so no one answers.You are out charting and graphingmarriages and progenyof the deaf,while only your wife and mother—deaf—are home.

(ringed in)

Using my literary license, I tried to phone Alec back through the ages. Rumor has it, however, that he was never very fond of the phone himself.

The image on the front of this postcard is from a photo dated May 5, 1922—just three months before his death and the last clearly dated photograph of him in the U.S. Library of Congress collection. It shows him sitting in front of a radio, wearing headphones, and holding his pipe. I know how much the keeping of records and the legacy of your husband and his work mattered to you, Mabel; you were, after all, the primary reason we even now have such extensive records of his letters, your letters, and all these photographs. I thought you would be interested to know that the record of this last living image from the archives has a caption attached to it that is uncharacteristically interpretive when compared to many of the other more plainly descriptive captions in the entire collection of A.G. Bell images. This caption tells us: “Telephone a nuisance—radio a joy to Alexander Graham Bell.”

I hope it is not a nuisance that I am writing postcards to you now. These seem a more useful way for me to approach you than, say, a séance. I’m an academic, after all, and not given much to spiritualism—table tipping, channeled voices, near-dark rooms, or automatic writing (although that might come in handy for university paperwork). What good are those to a deaf person anyway? I have enough trouble just communicating with the living.

I’m deaf, but like you, Mabel, I’m also a very skilled “speechreader.” My deafness is genetic. I’d like to write to you again. May I? BJB

Postcard 2: Communicating with Alec

Dear Mabel:

There is no image on this postcard. You’ll just have to imagine. I think you can.

Current copyright laws won’t let me get this picture to you; it’s too complicated, too anachronistic, too much creative license. It’s “too-too,” as we would say these days. Following on Hamlet’s first soliloquy, if I could show this image to you, then perhaps this “too too solid flesh would melt.” Things might unravel.

I took an official portrait of the great A.G. Bell in his later years, and I played with it using Photoshop. In the portrait, Alec is quite fleshy. I know you worried much about his girth. I can see why. It doesn’t seem to be the kind that would melt easily. On the image, I’ve applied some shading and an antiqued filter, using an overlay of brown and orange tones, to give the image more depth and warmth and also to offer an even more stately, perhaps even an ominous, tone as I channeled him forward into my era, an age of awesome digital media technologies. (Maybe I’m interested in séances after all?) I’ve also worked in various newer telecommunications devices and embodied him with them (or is it them I’ve embodied with him?) A little image of a TV, with another image of me playing on the screen, has been placed, perhaps telepathically, on his forehead; an AOL instant messaging screen...