Great Lakes

Monochrome

“Huron St. and ferry landing, Port Huron, Mich.,” between about 1905 and 1910. Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016815112/. Contrast and detail restored. The ferry between Port Huron, Michigan, USA and Sarnia, Ontario, Canada was replaced by a bridge in 1938.

The horses on the monochrome thoroughfare have been stilled.

On the boat, the passengers’ chairs are scattered where they were left when the passengers left the image.

Inside the piano store, the unimaged and silence.

Against the bridal day, which was not long

With a conductor’s gesture, a man poised at a brink once brought together two curves.

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Angular flesh and rounded iron approached each other, light and shadow moved over them, and a moment was consummated and became past.

Borne above the shapes like a banner, the word Trimble meant nothing. It only said, as if say were an intransitive verb. It was an order of service: a separately published hymnal to be sung from while the two bodies approached, touched, and then fell away. During that limit instant, the word and the two bodies were united in a single imaged meaning, fully understood but not articulable. Thereafter, in separation, all that could be said in words took the form of a caption (“Davis lock, St, Mary’s Falls canal”) that sang of the watery bed but not of the coming together in light and shadow that had once filled it.

 

Source: Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016800144/. The complete, pre-Photoshopped image is

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The Library dates the image between 1913 and 1920. However, the mustached man with the pipe appears to be wearing a wristwatch — an accessory which didn’t come into wide use until after World War I.

Hoist and convey

Sources:

Wagner, Das Rheingold.

“Cleveland & Pittsburgh Ore Docks, Cleveland,” about 1900. Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det1994000556/PP/. Photoshopped.

Detect the plaque that reads, “Built 1896 by The Brown Hoisting & Conveying Machine Co., Cleveland, O.” It is a spell’s libretto. Singing the verbs hoist and convey over a cargo of ores, it sends them into the smoky sky.