1. A record of a life, partially erased

2. Some news, some weather, and some poetry, brought together in time and preserved sans rature on a page in an archive. Click to enlarge.

3. “S.S. Lucania, July 28, 1894.” Photograph by John S. Johnston

Source:  Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det1994011734/PP/. Photoshopped.

When John S. Johnston squeezed a rubber bulb which actuated the shutter release on his 8-by-10-inch view camera, his closing hand juxtaposed into existence an array of detail in time and space. It isn’t a permanent array; it won’t last forever in the way the diagrams in Euclid will. It is merely historical. A part of its beauty is owed to the humorous operation of mere coincidence in space and time. On the hottest day in thirteen years, with the sky the color of copper, brush your teeth with the white hand of Beauty and fill your mouth with the taste of hay. For the moment, you might as well. Good hay, sweet hay, as Nick Bottom reminded us one night when the weather report was different, hath no fellow.

But before a backdrop of coppery sky with sun-ball suspended, John S. Johnston’s hand once did close around something that admitted to memory, for a while, a lacework of davits and railings, a haze of coal smoke, and a flag on thick damp cloth flopping in the steady breeze of a passage across time.