railroad

Rolling stock

1

This poster dates from 1915. In it, beside the artillery insigne on the boxcar belonging to Russia’s Northwest Railroad, a printed word says “Supplies,” and below that a chalk scrawl says “Due,” in the sense of a bill that has to be paid. In that picture and those words, the image illustrates the idea of a weapon being trundled through a snowy landscape toward the completion of its purpose. Like the picture on a banknote, it realizes one of the transactions which it is the business of a government to execute. Below the picture, a caption educationally adds: “War loan, 5½%. The more funds, the more munitions and supplies, the sooner the victory.”

Source: http://blog.vintascope.com/post/100172424646/russian-poster-wwi-051. Photoshopped.

Not long after this edition rolled in its thousands out of a press, a different train delivered Lenin to the Finland Station, and then all those who had trusted that the Czar’s word was his 5½-percent bond lost their investment. Ironic interpretations followed. To the designers whose political labor brought this poster into existence, history was something toward which to roll. It was a future at the end of a line. A century later, we might read the poster differently — for instance, as an allegory of the term “wreck.” According to such an interpretation, wreckage may not be visible on the surface of the poster, but catastrophe always has been implicit in the design.

2

In Peconic, Long Island, New York, on March 3, 1942, a train collided with a car. At the site where I found this image of the aftermath, someone has taken care to note that the woman driving the car wasn’t injured.

However, matters of life and death aren’t the primary concerns of this page, because it is a picture history of the Long Island Rail Road. Asking us to read images as if we were not living men and women but creatures in a picture, this history deploys its picture archive only to direct our attention away from our lives and toward to a text. In turn, the text enters a strictly numeric register as it chronicles the beginning and end of the little station bearing the name “Peconic”: built, August 1876; torn down, April 1942, just a month after it was pictured with boarded-up windows across the tracks from the damaged automobile. For a moment during that interval, a train with a caboose passed down one of those tracks between the abandoned station and the wrecked car. For the duration of that time, someone in Peconic could have seen in the distance the smoke from the train’s steam engine. Both the caboose (an obsolete piece of rolling stock) and the steam engine (another obsolete piece of rolling stock) are gone now, of course. We’ll never see their like again. But the only thing in this image that can now matter to the text called history is the building’s unpicturable abstract hic jacet: 1876-1942.

Source: http://www.trainsarefun.com/lirr/peconic/peconic.htm. Photoshopped.

 3

“Nothing beside remains,” as the traveler from an antique land reported to Shelley. But the antique land itself pleads:

Credit this photo: State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/157308
(please include photographer’s name when noted).

The photographer’s name isn’t noted, so I can’t grant to his memory what is due. But as if my word were my bond, I can at least point at the anonymous text appended to a dateless image found in the archive and say:

“Look. The words printed above it say, ‘Woman and girl stand near the train wreck — Lloyd, Florida.’”

The words — either my words or the words I’m now writing about — mean almost nothing. Outside Lloyd, Florida, at some unspecified time during perhaps (to judge from the clothing) the 1940s, they are probably all but lost to the text of history. In the phrase “the train wreck,” the definite article the can’t be read now as anything but a symptom of delusion. The train wreck? What train wreck?

But in the interstices between what the text of history designates as events, it’s still possible for light to fall, and for sight and memory to account for that other, wordless event. So long as we remain near the wreck ourselves, we wordlessly know it.

As things fade to white

Between 1903 and 1917, a woman named Phoebe Snow traveled like a celestial body along the tracks of one of America’s regional railroads, the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western.

Click to enlarge.

The creature of one of the most successful advertising campaigns in American history, Miss Snow existed only to be unceasing: unceasingly in motion along a pounding iambic dimeter, unceasingly white, unceasingly bountiful of her whiteness. In her unceasingness, she was loved.

This illustrated history may help show you why. A comet always arriving, destined never to drop back into the dark and go still, Phoebe lived as light and motion, bestowing herself on everyone beside the track who existed to make her sidereal. Along the path of her orbit, brilliance illuminated the labor of engine crews, yard crews, porters and dining car waiters and the brilliantly white-clad cooks in the dining car’s galley. In her presence, light entered into the interior of what it seemed to mean to be human, dissolving secrecy and shame and shadow into a single all-encompassing whiteness.

http://scout901.hubpages.com/hub/Phoebe-Snow-Railroad-Advertising-Icon

The whiteness released her victims from darkness into love. It even extended underground, to the veins of coal and the men who worked them and the mules who worked alongside the men like brothers of Phoebe’s. There underground, Phoebe became her picture’s source of light. Descending into the dark and then ascending again, she traced letters from light across the darkness, and interpreted them to mean that all will be happy now, even in the face of death.

—

On August 8, 1914, that consciousness was still alive and still animating a gentleman in love with nature. By then, however, it had abruptly become remarkable. On August 9, a reporter for The New York Times observed it in its descent toward incomprehensibility. Far down now in the third paragraph of an article, it was barely readable by then; too deep in the shade cast by the headline. The language of that headline was a dark new dialect whose words could not have endured in the sunshine vocabulary of Snow.

Not far from the pier, the transatlantic cables surfacing in New York were drowning Phoebe’s meters in irregular sobbings, and Belgian reservists were boarding a ship bound eastward, where the dark was rising.

To understand, then, we have to look away from Phoebe and the gentleman entomologist.. A camera creature has surfaced from the dark flood, extending a black-and-white photograph of the Olympic’s cheering stewards to us.

Source of this image and the next two:
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2005017010/
The next two have been Photoshopped for contrast.

From this angle in the photograph’s space, the time is the present. The stewards are and will always have been seen to be in mid-cheer. Panning toward the Olympic’s sister ship, the cameraman records the visual testimony of the Belgian reservists singing and cheering back. As they sing, marking time, they are moving outward. The stern of the Adriatic is being eased away from the pier.

That motion has prepared us to receive an image that history, in due time, will call definitive. Now and forever, this image holds us back on August 8, 1914, at the watery verge of a pier in New York. At the far boundary of the space, receding as we watch, the White Star liner Adriatic is now becoming visible as a whole. On board the ship, certain men who will soon die can no longer be seen, though unillustrated abstract history provisionally asserts that they are still, for the moment of August 8, 1914, alive.

In comparison with the blankness into which the ship is now disappearing, Phoebe Snow’s immortally conceived whiteness was only a whim. Anthracite burns cleaner (a little cleaner) than soft coal, but to have believed in Phoebe’s absolute whiteness was never more than a suspension of disbelief. “Of course,” says Phoebe’s image to you, “I am only one of art’s happy ways of helping you imagine possibility. You always knew that.” To have looked at Phoebe’s picture, read her poem, and then bought a ticket on the Road of Anthracite was never a more significant act than, say, buying a ticket to a movie with the cheerful intent of surrendering for a couple of hours to an optical illusion. If Miss Marion Murray had been in this scene, she would have been stationed among us dark-clad neutrals left behind on terra firma, imagining like us rather than being imagined like Phoebe. The optics of this photograph don’t work only on the mind’s eye the way an image of Phoebe does.

Because as the Adriatic begins fading into the dazzle of a hazed atmosphere just at the moment when we take it in, it becomes less visible to the eye even as it becomes more conceivable to the imagination. On August 8, 1914, men and women on a pier and in boats and barges saw a ship loom up through space under clouds of coal smoke and then fade in accordance with the laws of physics. If we could only see it now, we would see it as they did: as a mortal body fading to white, as graceful as it traverses its bright vanishing instant as Miss Marion Murray ever was.

Perfect

From where we stand on our hillside, the train at a station in Michigan can’t be seen. It’s there, however, or perhaps it was there a moment ago. We know, because a cloud of smoke is drifting away from the station. In a zone just outside the visible portion of this image, a steam engine is, or is about to be, somewhere else in space and time.

“Michigan Central railroad station”
http://www.shorpy.com/node/10829
Click to enlarge.

The image comes to us now trailing a Shorpy comment stream, and from there we can learn that this building in Michigan is located at 401 Depot Street, Ann Arbor. Still standing and in good repair, it looks much as it did when this image of horses and derby hats was captured. Two more images in the stream, captured at approximately the present time, demonstrate. One of the two is a download from Google Street, and with its help we can take a virtual walk around the building, just as if we were alive on the spot.

Simultaneously, from a dig where the stream cuts through the past, a researcher reports that The Awakening of Helena Richie, one of the plays advertised on the billboards to the left of the street, ran on Broadway from September 1909 to January 1910, then went on tour in the spring. That locates a terminus in time for the mixed group of buggies and cars in front of the station. The year when somebody put his head under a photographer’s dark hood to see the group this way was 1910, two years after Henry Ford’s Model T, forty miles down the rail line in Detroit, had begun changing the mix. The camera could record the mix but not the change. Photography is the art of stillness in the momentary.

But then, blurred a little by his passage into and then out through the stillness, a man carrying a winter overcoat but wearing a summer suit began climbing the hill from the station. Because he wasn’t in the stillness then, he will never stop now. Trudging toward us along a borderline between the seasons of his year, he is headed past the camera toward a destination somewhere over the camera’s shoulder. His course is set toward a space created by the educational conventions of perspective between ourselves and the composition’s foreground. If the lesson is successful and we bring ourselves to think of him coming to rest there, he will have left the picture’s depicted fraction of a second and arrived in a future.

However, that future isn’t depicted in the picture itself, and it can’t be depicted anywhere else because both the man and the fraction of a second when he was have vanished from time. It’s true that while the camera’s shutter was open, the man’s left foot in its buttoned shoe seemed still, as if it could claim a place, no matter how tiny, in a finally fixed and stable history. But of course it couldn’t. Freeze-framed on the pavement by the camera’s virtual way of seeing, visible there only as an illusion of motion stopped and about to start again, that not really unmoving shoe is something like a visual equivalent of grammar’s future perfect tense: the representation of an action completed (Latin perfectus) with respect to a moment in the future.

In that grammatical sense, perhaps every instant when a shutter opens and closes and time seems to stop is a perfect instant. It may be that an image is only an a perfect instant confined within a frame. Of this moment in 1910, at any rate, nothing remains except what is interior to its frame. As unconfined creating light passed westward through the exterior and away along its track, the end came for everything: the horses on their dirt road, the railroad station which is now a restaurant with a railroad theme, the men in their derby hats. But when we put the frame around our tiny image of the man walking up a little hill toward us, we locked in the illusion it had created of a moment held still for us to see, forever. It was a moment in the interior, with the end locked out.

Then, at the end, we let the man escape into the end. Hold his image up to the light, let the light penetrate, and look. From its foreground in the past, this picture seems to extend toward the invisible place over our shoulder where the man with his suitcase will finally have gone.

Second homes

March 20, 1939: Gershom Scholem, in Jerusalem, writes to Walter Benjamin, in Paris:

I’ll be traveling to Port Said at the beginning of next week, to see my mother for three hours once again when her ship [carrying her from Germany to exile in Australia] puts into harbor there: this is likely to be our last meeting by human reckoning. I’ll be writing much more soon. I will certainly make use of any opportunity I might somehow, somewhere, come across for you. I am asking myself whether you shouldn’t try to get into the U.S.A. while you still can, and whether that wouldn’t be better for you than anything else. (251)

September 25, 1942: snow falls in Iowa and Illinois, USA. For the weather bureau in Des Moines this is the first September snowfall on record, and elsewhere in the state the football game between Garner and Buffalo Center has to be called after wet, wind-blown snow breaks seven lights on the field. On a train, the conductor and brakeman are impressed enough to make a note. In chalk, one of them writes “1′ / of Snow 9-25 5 PM” on one of the rafters that support the roof of his caboose. The words will still be there four months later, when the photographer Jack Delano records a moment in the history of the caboose for the Office of War Information.

http://www.shorpy.com/node/9733
Click to enlarge.

To posterity, Delano will later explain: “Freight train operations on the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad between Chicago and Clinton, Iowa. The caboose is the conductor’s second home. He always uses the same one and many conductors cook and sleep there while waiting for trains to take back from division points.” After Delano, other viewers of the image will follow his narrative to its completion. To the comment stream where I found the image on Shorpy.com, one will contribute the weather report for September 25, 1942, while others will observe the splatters of tobacco juice on the floorboards and the different sorts of girls’ pictures on the bulkheads. Those data are precious to the commentators because they are history, because there are no cabooses now. The commentators explain: brakemen are no longer needed to watch for fires under the train because wheel bearings are no longer packed with oil-soaked rags; and switches now are thrown electrically under radio control, not manually by a brakeman who has climbed down from a caboose; and air pressure in the train’s brake lines is now read and communicated to the engineer by electronic sensors, not by a brakeman swinging a lantern.

But the brakeman in Jack Delano’s picture doesn’t know. For the camera he is wearing new overalls and a new shirt and smoking a pipe, as many American men did in January 1943, the month that shows on the calendar beside his head. Photography has done its magic again; looking, we believe the moment can be 1943 forever, with the pipe scenting the air along with coal smoke from the iron stove. And above the conductor’s head, as he sits at his desk, is the punctum of the men’s presence in the moment: inconspicuous on the bulkhead behind the girl prettily standing on tiptoe to hang laundry on a line the way American women did in 1943, an air pressure gauge. Until that indicated a certain number to a brakeman, a train in 1943 couldn’t move. But of course there’s nothing left of any of this information, now, except a still photographic image bearing pictures of a conductor and a brakeman and some scribbled words and some pretty girls who are less likely than the two men in their little portable home to have gone invisible to memory.

As to Gershom Scholem’s mother, she disappears from the text of The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem after the sentence I’ve quoted above. The correspondence itself ends fourteen pages later. We know how it turned out. In an appendix, Scholem notes that cemetery attendants in Port Bou “who, in consideration of the number of inquiries, wanted to assure themselves of a tip” (268) used to show visitors an enclosed plot of ground and tell them it was Benjamin’s grave. But it wasn’t a grave.

Here below are some more plats of homes from which Walter Benjamin was absented. And Susan Schultz, whose mother now listens as an attendant in what’s called a home reads to her from The Little Prince, thinks of exile and a lost kingdom and writes:

There was a happy ending, at least for a time. Using dowsing sticks, they found a spot, unmarked by stone or twig, dug until they reached a vein of water. They drank from the same bucket, sharing more than the cold water. But then the daughters came, and their retinues, and their resentments, even the youngest one’s recovered love. There were swords and bitter words, nothing water could wash away, not yet.

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http://www.shorpy.com/node/10430  “Haifa, British Mandate Palestine, circa 1940. ‘Swimming pool at the Casino, Bat Galim neighborhood.’ Medium-format acetate negative by the American Colony Photo Department/Matson Photo Service.”

 

Works cited:

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932-1940. Ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere. New York: Schocken, 1989.

Schultz, Susan. “King Lear Enters The Little Prince.” http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2011/04/king-lear-enters-little-prince.html, 25 April 2011.