Locomotive In A Mallarmé Poem

I came across a locomotive in a Mallarmé poem. It was a broken-down wreck, rusted & decrepit, a hulking desuetude of machinery long out of use. This happens when a body of writing has ceased to be read for a long time. Images decay. Ideas disintegrate. Visions rot in moldy basement windows. Writing needs eyes & brains & imaginations to keep everything in working order. Even the rails of the old locomotive were twisted, the ties loose, rivets gone astray. Everything once shiny & evocative now bore the dreary embrace of the empirical realm. The irony is, of course, that such relics as these are often the result of technologies becoming more & more sophisticated, so that attentions are more easily diverted from imaginative pursuits & emptied of their contents. Zombies are now a common sight, eviscerated humans led down streets by small handheld devices clutched desperately by both hands. Even gossip, that old reliable engine of conversation, has turned ugly & sour. It has given birth to a great monster called cancel culture. This is why, occasionally, I come across old locomotives & airplanes, once wild & crazy metaphors that are now indistinguishable from the rest of the junk in the landfill. The wisest among us have ceased trying to appeal to the market and to popularity and awards and have taken the art back deep into the caves. Doesn’t have to be an actual cave, which are cold and difficult of access and hard on the knees, a cave can be a certain space, a place for retreat, for seclusion. Not even that. A cave can be a frame of mind. The place where you’re no longer under surveillance. No obligation to smile and make conversation. Not a social media. Not a social platform. This is not a platform, this is a cave, a subterranean labyrinth of chambers and interludes, limestone dripping with candor, the communion of stone, the mineral richness of hematite and calcite, traces of gold, the roots of an artistic impulse smoking like a sacrifice in the skull of a lion. This is where art is a foreign animal in the guise of a searching human eye. And the sound of an engine chuffs into action. And everything moves. Steel wheels on bright steel rails. Going forward. Whatever forward means. Direction is ancillary. Existence extraordinary.