unetched in memory
*
Photograph No. 54. (x50.)
12-inch Navy gun. Slag in unetched specimen.
illustrating Microscopic Examination of Steel,
pages 249-262 in a pamphlet reprinted in Report of the Tests of Metals and other Materials Made at the United States Testing Laboratory at Watertown Arsenal, Massachusetts, during the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1915 (1917)
This (and many more images like it, same document) records and commemorates an event of failure. I remember being struck, when first encountering these photographs, by how beautiful they were, and imagining what beholding them might have meant to the technicians who worked with them.
—
...the way a word is the memory of its meaning.
Anne Michaels, “Words for the Body,” in
The Weight of Oranges (Coach House, 1985)
tags:
failure; incoherence; memory; repetition; rounds; Watertown Arsenal
Anne Michaels