There is no more sound. The archived document doesn’t include sound’s range of frequencies along the electromagnetic spectrum. There is no more color, there is no more third dimension. The document’s way of being seen is only planar. There is no more motion, which means that the document can be seen in only one state of time, without a before or after.

There is still a Czar.

In the archive, a fraction of a second in time has been preserved as a record whose dimensions don’t include time. There, Stevensian order is reversed. In the archive, seem is finale of be.

Source: “A captain, Russian navy,” photographed in Newport News, Virginia, during the International Columbian Naval Rendezvous of 1893. Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det1994010286/PP/. Photoshopped.

The poem by Wallace Stevens is “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.”