Clang, Boom, Steam
Recognising the grace, genius and culmination of human will in the steel and strength of steam engines and the like.
Yesterday I took my boys to a railway museum, with an incredible collection of old steam locomotives and cranes, with a handful of diesel electrics thrown in for good measure. Initially, we were awestruck by their size, towering over us in a manner I never truly appreciated they would. Apparently a lifetime of exposure to these graceful behemoths in still images and saccharine representations on the silver screen did little justice to them. But more than anything, once we adjusted to their daunting size, my attention was drawn to a material physicality of a different kind.
There was something seemingly indestructible about them. Tonnes of steel that had been imagined, designed, smelted, poured, fashioned and fastened into a technological marvel that took your breath away. The damn wheels themselves were utterly enormous, perfectly formed, and nothing less than steel itself. The body of each behemoth, despite the peeling and faded paint that granted more charm than decrepitude, was a marvel of human intention, given life and form in a graceful monolith that could conquer any distance, any expanse, with the kind of sound and fury that belonged only in fable and fiction. An elderly lady we encountered commented on the steam engines being hand made, every last one of them, and you could do little but marvel at the manner in which human will and purpose could be brought to bear on such materials, to shape them into nothing less than this.
We got to climb into a number of cabs, coming to recognise the purpose, consistency and symmetry of a mechanical marvel that by the end of the 19th century, needed little amendment or adjustment. Each of them bore what was essentially the same design, when it came to the controls. We got to know the driver and fireman’s sides; we fell in love with the firebox, the boiler’s water and pressure lever gauges.
My boys fought hard against the firebox door handle to pull the weight of the doors apart, feeling the satisfaction of an immediate, physical reaction and response to their efforts. I laughed at how indestructible the machinery was in our hands, knowing I could leave them there for days and they could do little to damage or disturb even the finer elements and aspects of the controls.
It’s an unaccustomed joy, for our hands to come up against the silent grace of steel that had been casted and forged, brought together to work in such an amazing way. I thought of how nervous I can get with the kids tinkering with the control panel in our car, just waiting for a dial to be torn off, or the vents left bent and askew. But in the cabs of these engines, we’d have to labour, to simply bring its purpose to life, let alone damage something in its design.
As my boys played, there was a wonderful sense of freedom that the indestructibility of it all granted them. They didn’t hold back, throwing their bodies, their wills, their imaginations around with little cause for concern. It was the difference between their inside play at home, which is constantly monitored, assessed and amended in the hopes of no glass breaking, or plaster smashed, and the joy that comes from their tinkering and toiling in our backyard, bringing timber and stone to life in a plot of their own imagining.
It’s another world when compared to the garish plastics, the hypnotic lights, clumsy persuasion and indecipherable muzak of the modern shopping mall - where your senses are assaulted by a banal inconsequentiality in anything and everything around you. There is an enormous gulf between the incredible life of purpose and intent in the engines, that even retired, are a graceful, silent protest against the complacency, the plastic disposability and modern obsession with comfort and convenience.
On the way home, we listened to Ornette Coleman, and I thought of how once more, human will and genius can come to conquer shape, metal, material and form to create something beautiful, something we’ve never seen or known before. In an age where so many are convinced that our greatest satisfaction comes from a recourse to complacency, rather than labour, to conquer an instrument, a language of song, or your tools, your words… we need these marvels of timber, steel and song to bring us back to truth.
We need to be woken up, to crave the taste and sting of our own sweat, our own endeavor, to drive forward into a shape and form that’s all our own, upon a page, a song, a marvel of engineering that speaks of intent, of grace, of a dignity all our own.
The clang, boom, steam of our humanity, ringing out against the cold, digital silence of complacency and despair.