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And the night was alive with a thousand voices
I was not planning on posting anything for the sinking of the Titanic, but this came courtesy of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel: the Titanic in her own words.
"This is Titanic. CQD."
There's the Carpathia, the Californian, the Caronia, the Baltic. Those are not actors reading the Morse transmissions that flashed back and forth across the wireless of the North Atlantic, jaunty, terse, desperate, encouraging, steadfast, frustrated, lost. Those voices are the product of speech synthesis software, only as capable of dramatization as the clicks and beeps of the telegraph key—ghosts speaking, but the ghosts in the machine, not the sea or our minds. Everything resides in the words. The words are devastating.
CQD. SOS. SOS. SOS. CQD.
derspatchel: the Titanic in her own words."This is Titanic. CQD."
There's the Carpathia, the Californian, the Caronia, the Baltic. Those are not actors reading the Morse transmissions that flashed back and forth across the wireless of the North Atlantic, jaunty, terse, desperate, encouraging, steadfast, frustrated, lost. Those voices are the product of speech synthesis software, only as capable of dramatization as the clicks and beeps of the telegraph key—ghosts speaking, but the ghosts in the machine, not the sea or our minds. Everything resides in the words. The words are devastating.
CQD. SOS. SOS. SOS. CQD.
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Nine
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Most ghosts are.
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... --- ...
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Yes.
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It's just . . . the calm effect of it, and yet you know what's going on behind the words, and that makes it all the more devastating.
(Though I do want to punch whoever threw that ad in right at the moment when Titanic falls silent. "All's Well That Ends Well -- in Gujarati!" SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.)
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I really don't think they could have done the same with human actors. Just in this particular instance of technology, it's the closest we can get to the dead speaking for themselves.
(Though I do want to punch whoever threw that ad in right at the moment when Titanic falls silent. "All's Well That Ends Well -- in Gujarati!" SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.)
That was not the best-timed advertisement, no.
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I had. Only a very few of them were known to me. I looked at so many of the dead and thought, "They're young."
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The irony I always return to is that to work on a liner like that was a really good job, and they were being paid well for comparatively light duty because the ship was so well and completely staffed up, and in the end that just meant more lives lost.
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And being a wireless operator for the Marconi Company was a techie job, young men in a new field—the way every other person you knew in college was working IT. Jack Phillips was twenty-five, Harold Bride twenty-two. Cyril Evans on the Californian was twenty and Harold Cottam of the Carpathia twenty-one. You worked different ships, wherever the company sent you; you saw the world and you traveled for free. You got some steadier, shorebound job when you settled down. Out on the Atlantic, you were a community of your own. "Shut up shut up I am busy working Cape Race."
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-- From the Olympic, I think, but really from any kid with a text-capable phone, any time in the last hour...
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I think it is beautiful that someone thought to do it.
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I agree with
(I have not seen that icon before. That's good.)
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Like most people I've never really thought about what answering that CQD would have entailed - namely, entering the iceberg field that had just taken out the Ship That Couldn't Be Sunk. In the dark. At full speed.
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No. I had never thought of that at all. I should have.
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I bet it's cool, though, in its eerie, forever-speaking way.
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!
As awful as my sleep is this time of year, I have to think of Captain Rostron of the Carpathia, stolid company man of a rival company, steaming like mad into the wall of the greatest possible oh shit oh shit oh shit moment of his life, to try and help, and coming upon that white-littered sea. I hope he slept again, sometime, ever.
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If you think you can write it and ever sleep again yourself, there should be a poem for him.
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Oh, dear. That does not sound like a good idea.
I'd like good astronaut hymns. I suspect they'd have to be written by people I know.
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I don't know that! And I like Saint-Saëns. Thanks for the recommendation.
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"Rostron then did something which is often overlooked by many books and films; he ordered Carpathia's new course before checking that what Cottam was telling him was indeed fact, and not a garbled message of some sort, which was quite possible in those days of early communication, then he worked out the relative positions of both ships and set a more accurate course."
Here's to the Electric Spark of the Cunard Line. I'm sorry I didn't know about him sooner.
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I would love to read hers. And yours.
Nine