There were a lot of speeches leading up to the U.S. election last November, and if you listened to most of them, as I did, your ears are probably still hissing with white noise.
This photograph--these two photographs--show what a public speech is like, morphologically speaking. The speaker is in a cage. The cage is the exoskeleton of the speaker's intended message. But the exoskeleton is loose and flimsy and things go awry--even if the speech is to be a reading of a carefully prepared text.
The image at the left is a diagram of the received shape of the proffered address. Say the points to be made are represented here as dots on a field (they look like bullet holes). Say the grid is an ordering device. Its purpose is to guide the progress of the speech.
Normally, the points of the speech are a scattershot of rhetorical jabs. Normally (here too), the grid cannot hold them. What is odd in this case--and quite atypical--is that although the speech-bullets spray wide of their mark, they develop a curious symmetry. This is rare. This is certainly not the recorded pattern of an address by the lethal Hilary Clinton or a bulldozer Donald Trump or a numbing Mike Pence or a smarmy Tim Kaine.
This must be the too-little-too-late eloquence of a Barack Obama. Order in thrall to innovation. You must bring to this diagram a certain unsullied sense of wonder. For we may not witness this kind of oratorical beauty for a long time.
