THE LITTLE ENGINE AND THE FACTORY SHIP
The Little Engine That Could (Watty Piper, 1930) is the West’s answer to the myth of Sisyphus. He, you will recall, was doomed to push a boulder perpetually up a hill, at the top of which, of course, it rolled down again. I’ve often wondered about his mood during the ascent, but it occurs to me it may have been even worse climbing down to retrieve the stupid rock.
But the L. Engine is the triumph of resolve over reluctance. It’s Christmas Eve, and the Big Engines are, for some reason, unwilling to pull the train full of toys over the mountain to the Good Little Children.
Our Little friend knows himself to be incapable of the task, but he volunteers anyway, puffing as he pulls, his mantra “I think I can, I think I can.” And he succeeds.
Because he Believed in Himself? Yup.
Greeks and the Europeans who were their philosophic like were born into their Place, and stayed there, controlled either by the Whip or by a Church which preached that God has called each man to his appointed station. It was superfluous to add, “And you’d better stay there,” as there was nowhere else to go.
Until North America was opened to European immigration. And then, beginning with the western migration out of the seaboard, folk like the Little Engine could take their chances; opportunity, death, starvation, and disease bulking larger, as government and religious control diminished. And tons of millions took the bet. One hundred and change years ago, the wretched refuse had come all the way to Hollywood. And here we still are, now in reversion to the previous Grecian paradigm.
Was ever anyone as long-suffering as Poor I, whose sole desire was to get the Toys to the Good Little Children on the Other Side of the Mountain? No.
For “mountain” we may, if we’ll excuse the nicety, read “footlights”—the Good Little Children are of course our friends out there in the dark.
Previous to my Locomotive incarnation I was the Factory Ship. I’d come home from the office brooding and depressed, and my wife would say, “Oh, Dave… is it the ‘Factory Ship’ again? The Factory Ship, never stopping, never resting, never touching land, and toiling, far from notice, till the bottom rusts out and she sinks, unmourned, to the Floor of the Sea…?”
“Yes,” I would respond. “That’s right.”
Reimagined, my improved self, the engine, was first the embodiment of Descartes and then the locomotive assassin of Anna Karenina. A two-letter man, I, both a philosopher, bringing wisdom, and a destroyer, my mission the imposition of destruction.
I won a Joke Competition in New York mag, decades back, by suggesting the World’s Perfect Theatrical Review: “I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I’ve ever written. When you read this I’ll be dead.”
Lately, and after the demise of The Theater, my fantasy has turned to The Memorial.
Here I am, dead. And the most eloquent Speaker—have the wise planners put him first or last?—mounts the stage and says, “We shall not see his like again.”
Alright, but constant recurrence to the fantasy suggested (true enough) that it was “too pat” or “off the shelf.” My new favorite is a modern application of the speech uttered by the French soldier who burned Joan of Arc: “We have just killed a saint.”
Who but those blessed with infinite patience and understanding would put up with the swine going pee-pee over his various Gifts to Humankind?
It is as if the Little Engine arrived, exhausted and near death, and the Good Little Children opened the boxcar doors to find not dolls and spaniel puppies but healthy, tasty vegetables. And then they killed him.
