He must be wicked to deserve such pain

1: the natural history of a page

William Bartram's Travels is to be read capaciously. The first American science book, it made fundamental contributions to botany, zoology, geography, and (in its concluding chapters about the indigenous tribes of the Southeast) history and anthropology. But it was also read and loved by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and its imagery can be tracked, line by line, through "Kubla Khan" and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

That energy can't be represented externally to the text, of course -- not even in words. Because it faithfully obeys eighteenth-century typographical convention, the title page of Bartram's Travels is primarily an image, not a text at all. An utterance not of a writer but of a printer, it can claim only to be a representation in words of what an explorer equipped with words will encounter once he leaves it behind and ventures into the interior.

Facsimile from the 1928 edition,

rpt. New York: Dover, 1955

Click to enlarge.

Those words promise us a single verbal experience, singly intelligible: the idea of exploration. We do explore, too. We have our Silent upon a peak in Darien moments as Bartram guides us word by descriptive word through forests of magnolia filled with the song of the now extinct Carolina parakeet. But from time to time Bartram stops walking, and then his words change and something very bad begins.

At those moments, the words on the pages of Travels cease being explorations -- that is, settings forth from a beginning toward an end -- but writhing knots of instants of the terrible. The sentences are as paratactic as Hemingway's, and for the same reason: all they are capable of uttering is perception, one tiny terrified word at a time.

This passage occurs on page 115. One paragraph later, the massed alligators go on the attack and Bartram is forced to defend himself with a club. Two pages later, he has been reduced to a sense of victory.

Bartram's word fusee is the French fusil, musket. Two pages after the battle between the alligators, the attack on an alligator by a man is in a different language. The vocabulary has become technical, the sentences have become long, and the gentle Quaker Bartram has been brought down to self-justifying cliché ("I resolved he should pay for his temerity"). He has achieved literature, but now he is nothing but a writer. He eats his supper, resumes his walk, and sinks back, like the corpse of an alligator, into his surrounding medium: words.

2: but now digitally:

What you're looking at here is an image surrounded not exactly by words but by word technology. The words at the very top and bottom of the frame, for instance, signify that the image came to me via the web and my computer. If you have the vocabulary to read that sentence of mine in off-the-page detail, you'll have deduced that the other words farther inside the frame arrived as a PDF which I converted to a JPEG with Photoshop. At the same time, in a slightly older historical register, you'll have understood that both the words and their cyberform originated with Luceo, a site that offers computer-equipped readers the products of a politically engaged photojournalism. Over the web, Luceo has let us know that it transmitted to us the work product of Matt Eich, a photographer now documenting the labor of men on the Louisiana coast who live by killing alligators.

I took delivery of my image of a Louisiana alligator's death on May 17, 2010. On the previous day, as the largest oil spill in American history seemed headed for the Louisiana coast, cybertechnology had disseminated an image of the Republican theologian Brit Hume promising Fox News and its viewers that neither the alligators nor the men who kill them would come to any harm, because -- well, because.

[JUAN] WILLIAMS: But I think it will damage the environment in the gulf and damage tourism and damage fishing. I don’t think there's any question this is in excess of anything we've previously asked the ocean to absorb.

HUME: We’ll see if it is. We’ll see if it is. The ocean absorbs a lot, Juan, an awful lot. The ocean absorbs a lot.

WILLIAMS: I think Rush Limbaugh went down this road, "The ocean can handle it." I think we have to take some responsibility for the environment and be responsible to people who live in the area, vacation in that area, fish in that area. It's just wrong to think, "You know what? Dump it on the ocean and let the ocean handle it."

HUME: Who said that? Who is saying that? No one's making that argument.

-- http://thinkprogress.org/2010/05/16/hume-where-is-oil/

The sound of Hume's voice came through speakers in the same house as a monitor displaying a dying alligator. Words and images recombined in the ether: a kernel of written words dissolving into image, and an ever-expanding shell of spoken echo and unutterable religious faith in its digital surround. At the center of that composite work of art, we'd like to think, would be a Hemingwayesque minimalism of life and death, as there is in Bartram's prose. But before we can reach the center of the alligator's web page, we have to do business with a distracting gift shop of other images in several price ranges: a tattoo, a pistol, and then at last, off camera itself, a camera with a fast lens, a high-speed shutter, and a sensor capable of handling high ISO. At its own center, the image by Matt Eich is richly overlaid with price points, but few of them will be visible to the only man actually within the image -- the man with the pistol. At that, within the image he is less a man than a thin leathery purse containing little but synecdoche: an arm, a firearm, and the hieroglyph of a tattoo. Technologists call the JPEG format "lossy," and the rest of the man has indeed been lost: suspended by the trading rules of social construction and photographic composition.

And of course the alligator is completely out of the money. For now, until the oil arrives, we bipeds are in full control of the object of aesthetic contemplation to which we've reduced him: splash and spasm and blood, in transit from life to an economic artifact.  That's why he looks not like prey but like a victim.

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The subject line of this post refers to another animal out of the money: the blind, starving horse in stanzas 13 and 14 of "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.'" We don't price that horse as we do the alligator, but we do desperately want to know what market controls his value. We can't know, however. Browning's nightmare poem is a quest narrative set in a forest of symbols which speak an unknown tongue. Among those symbols, whatever the hero sees he can see only involuntarily. He can't control the images that approach his eyes; he has lost the connection between perception of and assertion about. That's why his attempt to speak of the horse can only throw him back on the universal rationalization for our own ignorant suffering: "We must be wicked."

In the final sentence of Badenheim 1939 Aharon Appelfeld crystallized that rationalization into an image actually made of words.

An engine, an engine coupled to four filthy freight cars, emerged from the hills and stopped at the station. Its appearance was as sudden as if it had risen from a pit in the ground. "Get in!" yelled invisible voices. And the people were sucked in. Even those who were standing with a bottle of lemonade in their hands, a bar of chocolate, the headwaiter with his dog -- they were all sucked in as easily as grains of wheat poured into a funnel. Nevertheless Dr. Pappenheim found time to make the following remark: "If the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go."

-- Trans. Dalya Bilu. 1980; rpt. New York: Washington Square Press, 1981. 175.

The passage is easy enough to read, because a history with pistols in it has taught us. Its lesson says: formulas such as "the following" and "it must mean" don't mean -- not here at this stop on this rail line; not any more, ever again. Verbal artifacts of a universe as orderly and conventionalized as an eighteenth-century title page or a nineteenth-century railroad map, "the following" and "it must mean" are governed by a grammar that no longer applies. They are words in a dead language. And the man who speaks them is about to be stripped of his skin.

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But see how pretty the skin is? Let's time the arrival of the oil.