Stance 1, 1889

Within a library, we read under library guidance, selectively. Today’s protocol for selectivity, for example, has been a corpus of the locomotive. We are reading locomotive, only: the Louis A. Marre Rail Transportation Photograph Collection. Today’s item entered the collection bearing the name of Number 44, and library protocol has guided us toward learning that in 1876 Number 44 played a part in the centennial of the American Revolution.

The Library adds that it once went to the trouble of intensifying Number 44’s curated image. Until recently, however, the result wasn’t intense. Emotionally, it was a page from a history book that remained unillustrated. Its only stimulus to vision was a blur. Almost unpopulated, too, was the book’s aura of words. “Loss of life” is a phrase unfigured in its blank white, even though it hints at the death of 2208 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on May 31, 1889, in the churning course of a flood.

But the twenty-first century has delivered a trainload of computers with operating manuals that promise to teach us a smarter way of thinking through our pain. In artificially intelligent sequence, you can see now what the Library might claim to have been unable to reveal until now.

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And up they come at last, or at least apparently at last: Number 44, part of a forest’s stacked harvest, and a crew of men who labored to deliver the harvest to Number 44 for the sake of life. At next to last, the sake of  has become a phrase that almost seems to have delivered itself itself into words en route.

It didn’t, however. We didn’t learn it all the way to its end. Number 44 failed to become fully at one with us. On its page of text there is no hissing or chugging yet to be understood, or noise of floodwater still rushing away under timber. On this page, the only life actually perceptible is an irregular array of shadowy shapes distributed among whatever spaces aren’t filled so far by Number 44. After all, the stilled machine had only been pausing on its progress through history. The men’s heroic pose couldn’t have lasted. It didn’t last, never will last. In nineteenth-century iconography, a pose like the one you now see post-nineteenth century was intended to signify an overcoming of natural force. Bibliographies now shelved in the library will tell you that. The pose was intended to mean Hold back. Hold still.

Stance 2, 1889

But the river didn’t stop moving.

You knew that all along, of course, even though you may not have known of course itself until just now. But yes: of course does flow from its page as if it were a wordless song.

Of course is never not a song singing a river’s course. It fills its way into you, and with that you have learned to hear and then see and know. So, never not never: