Pose (2): armor, X-ray

1

With a silent text in front of us, is there any way we can listen for the sound of laughter on the other side of the door between the past and us? Perhaps not. Reading a letter that Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend Elizabeth Holland on about January 20, 1856, I realize that I can't know what I'm hearing when I listen for meaning among its cooing ladylike words.

I cannot tell you how we moved. I had rather not remember. I believe my "effects" were brought in a bandbox, and the "deathless me," on foot, not many moments after. I took at the time a memorandum of my several senses, and also of my hat and coat, and my best shoes -- but it was lost in the mêlée, and I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.

Such wits as I reserved, are so badly shattered that repair is useless -- and still I can't help laughing at my own catastrophe. I supposed we were going to make a "transit," as heavenly bodies did -- but we came budget by budget, as our fellows do, till we fulfilled the pantomime contained in the word "moved." It is a kind of gone-to-Kansas feeling, and if I sat in a long wagon, with my family tied behind, I should suppose without doubt I was a party of emigrants!

 (Letters, no. 182; hereafter cited by letter number, not page number, as L.)

At the instant those lines make me laugh, I may think that I've been granted the privilege of listening in on an event of comic intimacy between Miss Dickinson and her friend Mrs. Holland. But what happens to the loving communion when the poet's voice says "catastrophe" and defines her term by speaking of herself as a disembodied soul remembering her own funeral?

The lexicon I share with Dickinson's biography won't help me translate those tones. Cryptically but in the unambiguous language of numbers, biography reports that Dickinson wrote this letter a full two months after her family had made a move from one house in the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts, to another -- a matter of six blocks. Translating the numbers 2 and 6 into my own language, I can't help simultaneously translating the laugh matrix in which they're embedded, and realizing that (in my translation, at least) I'm not getting the joke. "Dickinson was a young woman of 25 when she wrote that letter," I think. "And two months ought to be enough time to unpack from a move and get on with things. And six blocks aren't a long distance. I don't understand. "

Responding to my distress, biography enters the library with a bilingual jokebook and tries to help me by transferring the numbers from the lobe of the brain where I think historically to the lobe where I think psychiatrically. Dickinson was a recluse for most of her life, says psychiatry, with symptoms that first manifested themselves in her teens and grew steadily more peremptory. Toward the end she explained to a man she had invited to call on her but then refused to admit: "I had hoped to see you, but have no grace to talk, and my own Words so chill and burn me, that the temperature of other Minds is too new an Awe --" (L798, early 1883; about three years of life remaining). Down through the posthumous years of Dickinson scholarship, psychiatrists have pushed that biographical corpus into one or another of their own language categories: agoraphobia, panic attack syndrome, epilepsy. And as to the laughter, the humorist herself explained: "Mirth is the mail of Anguish" (Fr181, "A wounded deer leaps highest").

2

However, at her moment of greatest creativity, Dickinson also wrote a little technical study of that armor. Encouraged by Thomas Wentworth Higginson's essay "Letter to a Young Contributor" in the April, 1862, Atlantic Monthly, Dickinson had introduced herself on April 15 in a letter which began, "Mr Higginson, Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" (L260). The envelope also enclosed four poems, and the correspondence that followed would last the rest of Dickinson's life and eventuate after her death in the first published volume of her verse. 

Higginson's reply is lost, but it seems to have misinterpreted what was in fact an ultimatum from Dickinson to him: read me and surrender to my words. At any rate, Higginson did make the mistake of trying to respond with an unsupported conversational offensive. "You asked how old I was?" replied Dickinson to Higginson on April 25, and we can see a lady's delicately raised eyebrow in the curved punctuation mark that disarms its appended declarative sentence by reducing it to a merely rhetorical question. Then comes the deflecting counterattack: "I made no verse -- but one or two -- until this winter -- Sir --" (L261). It's charming and witty, and the final monosyllable "Sir" makes the sentence into a ballad-meter distich like "Because I could not stop for death / He kindly stopped for me." Higginson had written to Dickinson as if her request were a human one from a woman to a man, and Dickinson countered with creative writing. 

It wasn't mere non-fiction, either. In the register of fact, Dickinson's first surviving poem dates from 1850, when she was nineteen years old, and the last dates from 1886, the year of her death; but more than three fifths of the 1,789 poems in the Franklin edition were composed in the eight years between 1858 and 1865. Franklin's estimate is that in 1862 alone Dickinson was to write 227 poems, including many of her greatest. But as of April 25, 1862, she was not yet ready to reveal the size and value of her treasure to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Instead, she made herself tiny inside her armor and babytalked through the beaver: "My size felt small -- to me -- I read your Chapters in the Atlantic -- and experienced honor for you -- I was sure you would not reject a confiding question --"

It was a joke that Higginson was in no position to get. Unable to navigate it in the dark, he followed up his defeated request for factual biography with a request for a connection to the humble truth of sight in a friendly parlor; that is, a photograph for his album. Once again, however, Dickinson deployed literature and rescued herself from capture. "Could you believe me -- without?" she coyly pleaded in L268. "I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur -- and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves -- Would this do just as well?" Again, as in the first battle, a feint has thrown off a clumsy frontal assault. This time, however, Dickinson adds the element of camouflage. As David Cody has recently demonstrated (37-38), all three of the similes that seem to comprise the self-portrait in this letter originate in passages by the manically descriptive short story writer Harriet Prescott Spofford -- a writer Higginson knew well because she was a contributor to the Atlantic herself and one of his many literary protégées. Stalking what he hoped would be a photograph of Emily Dickinson, Higginson walked into his own pitfall and found there only some other lady's mirror. It wasn't a portrait, even in words; it was only a joky verbal allusion. Meanwhile, Dickinson's actual words remained within the cryptic language of their poetry: an anguish in the dark, invisible even as its protective armor flashed in the sun and dazzled the gaze of the stalker.

3

Emily Dickinson's brother understood the tactic. To her journal, his lover Mabel Loomis Todd, Dickinson's first editor, explained:

As to the letters. . . . Those to Mr. Higginson are not of a private nature, and as to the "innocent and confiding" nature of them, Austin smiles. He says Emily definitely posed in those letters, he knows her thoroughly, through and through, as no one else ever did. (Sewall 538)

From the perspective of an artist who forces poses on others, Edward Weston analyzed that defense in the same way. Here he is as he begins approaching Robinson Jeffers (http://jonathan-morse.blogspot.com/2010/05/tycoon-classic-studio-pose.html).

[I found] him unexpectedly conscious, not nervous as some are in front of a camera,-- that tendency can be usually overcome, but Jeffers really posed, tried to appear as he thought he should be seen. I caught him looking out of the corner of his eye at me, and then would come a definite attempt to assume a pose,-- throwing back the head, feeling the part he was to play. This was disconcerting.

I am inclined to think there is much "bunk" talk about Jeffers,-- about his way of work, unconscious of what he is doing. Any great man, artist, is quite aware,-- conscious of his unconscious, if that means anything, if my words make clear my thought. And so Jeffers. (Daybook 15 May 1929, II.123)

Conscious of his unconscious and interested in making it available to consumers, the poser arranges his face to create the effect of what-it-looks-like-to-be-a-poet. Emily Dickinson did the same thing with words, in the borrowed wardrobe of another writer's similes, and when the time came for her to pose in the flesh, she did so with theatrical enthusiasm.

She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said "These are my introduction" in a soft frightened breathless childlike voice -- & added under her breath Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say -- but she talked soon & thenceforward continuously -- & deferentially -- sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her -- but readily recommencing. (L342a: Higginson to his wife, evening of August 16, 1870)

"Pay attention!" pose commands its audience. "I said, 'Enough about me!'" The imperative paradox is part of a body language left over from the pre-Freudian age, when insight into our own motives may have been a rarer part of the vocabulary than it is now. However, the language of pose still remains current. It helps us get the paired jokes of the poems of Emily Dickinson and the aquiline visage of Robinson Jeffers, poet of hawks, as he aligned it for the camera of Edward Weston.

4

Yet just over a century ago, science seemed on the brink of seeing with complete clarity through pose. The meanings that had lain in us, in darkness, from the instant we were conceived, now seemed ready for delivery into a different area of the spectrum, one that could let us see the invisible as it took on motion and became perceptible across time. Now, it appeared, we could see sub specie aeternitatis. Freud taught us that hope, and so did a new prosthesis for the eye.

After all, the evidence was there for everyone to see -- evidence like this image of Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen looking within. As his X-ray apparatus begins to enclose its object, her body unconsciously breathes as bodies have always done. Then, however, for the first time in history, Professor Röntgen intervenes behind it with his fluoroscopic plate and begins exploring the dark place where breath itself begins to form. Once we have made our own way into that dark, poetry will no longer have to be. Nothing will remain that is not penetrable. Now and forever after, insight will be armor-piercing.

Frau Chauchat had again lightly crossed one leg over the other, and now the slender outline of the whole leg was visible under the blue fabric of her skirt. She was of only average height, which Hans Castorp found very agreeable, just the right size. But she had relatively long legs and was not at all broad in the hips. She was not leaning back now, but was bent forward, her forearms folded and resting on the thigh of the crossed leg, her back rounded and her shoulders hunched so that the bones of her neck stuck out -- you could almost see her spinal column under the close-fitting sweater. Her breasts, which were not voluptuous and high-set like Marusya's but the small breasts of a young girl, were pressed together from both sides. Suddenly Hans Castorp realized that she was also here waiting to be X-rayed. The director was painting her, interpreting her external appearance with color and oils on canvas. But there in the twilight, he would turn rays on her that would expose the inside of her body. And at the thought, Hans Castorp turned his head to one side, and his face darkened with the shadow of respectability and assumed a look of discretion and propriety that seemed appropriate to such a vision. (210)

This last instant before the penetration has found Thomas Mann's comic hero in the waiting room of a tuberculosis sanatorium. Just a moment from now, the buzzing apparatus in the next room seems to promise, there will be nothing to know about us that can't be fully seen. Life after X-ray will be nothing but unmediated perception happily ever after, and it will have only one genre: the entirely unironic comedy of nakedness, both external and internal. Because there will no longer be secrets, there will no longer be any need for the concealments of costume or makeup, plot or characterization. Still enclosed in the not yet transparent mail of her skin as she waits, Frau Chauchat seems to promise Hans a return (any moment now, after the briefest of exposures!) to an Eden that was always there, waiting for him: a no longer invisible paradise where the light falls from the sky forever on a bodyscape shadowless and unposed. 

In the end, of course, the shadows of irony don't lift. Hans descends the magic mountain, covers his head in radiopaque steel, and takes his place in the uniform ranks of those about to die. His armor will never become transparent to his own sight, let alone anyone else's. He and we won't even be permitted to know whether he will live on after his embodying book's last paragraph. Whether we know it or not, we'll never be able to laugh at the dark jokes concealed within that opacity, and so our life in language will continue needing poetry.

And when we arrive at the library, we'll see that Emily Dickinson will have been there herself all along, repairing the armor. In her letter about the unseeable horror at the heart of a six-block move, she was at work preparing time for the epoch following Röntgen and Freud and the brief moment when we thought they could show us how to see and how to read. Let us imagine Dickinson, then, at her field forge amid bloodshed, laughing at us as she hammers home her words: the nineteenth century's couturière of armor.



Works cited:

Cody, David. "'When one's soul's at a white heat': Dickinson and the 'Azarian School.'" Emily Dickinson Journal 19.1 (2010): 30-59.

Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

---. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.

Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. 1924. Trans. John E. Woods. New York: Knopf, 1995. 

Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. 1974. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Weston, Edward. The Daybooks of Edward Weston. II: California. Ed. Nancy Newhall. Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1973.

Pose

Click to enlarge.

During his great period, Edward Weston returned over and over to a view of the face from below, at an angle. That's the pose of some of Weston's greatest images of the human, such as "Tina Modotti with Tear" (http://jonathan-morse.blogspot.com/2009/07/windows-car-drugstore-light.html) and "Galván Shooting."

The power behind each of these images was great enough to stop and redirect its subject's progress through time. The instant when the shutter of Edward Weston's camera opened and then closed was as definitive a change as the signing of a surrender. In that fraction of a second, Tina Modotti and Manuel Hernández Galván became ceded imagery. From now on, so far as history is concerned, they will be part of that which was taken over by Edward Weston and remade. Aes perennius, their lives have been replaced by shadow and angle and undying light. From now on, things will be different for them.

USS Missouri, Tokyo Bay, September 2, 1945

But what of Weston's image of his friend Robinson Jeffers? If our reaction to one of  Weston's seizures of power eventuates in words, what will happen to us when we read Weston's conquest of the face of a poet?

In 1933, when Weston seized the image at the top of this page, Jeffers wasn't just a poet; he was universally believed to be a poet. His long lines in their vaguely classical prosody told stories of rocks and hawks and incest and violent death close to the elements along the California coast, and his admirers were fond of dropping the name of Aeschylus. That claim on history was to die during the Second World War, embarrassed to death by Jeffers's lofty pronouncements that it didn't matter in the slightest who won, because all of us are doomed! doomed, I say! But Weston's 1933 image is of a face at the moment when it seemed in contact with the same power that was helping Weston see.

In words, Jeffers's medium, Weston once tried to think about that power after an unpleasant encounter with the lionized sculptor Jo Davidson. Passing judgment afterwards, Weston awarded himself a laurel made of words: the title "portrait photographer." But when he thought about what those words had cost him, his grammar broke down. The subject "Twenty years of pleasing others" was so awful that Weston couldn't bear to see it through to conclusion in a predicate.

Davidson was jealous of my work, his aggressiveness was a defense. My portraits of Jeffers made his bust of Jeffers look weak. That's the whole story. He had to keep his exalted position on a shaky pedestal. Now I know my portraits, and I realize they seldom reach the importance that my other work has, not even when I make them for myself -- with intention. In the first place my professional routine worries me, so I throw my best creative effort into trees, rocks, peppers, to escape the other: I admit, too, that twenty years of pleasing others,-- probably I have made near to five thousand portraits, always trying to please the sitter, for a price, this must often tinge my conception when I work for myself,-- habit! This is my 'out.' But I do know when I rise above habit, often enough to place me far ahead of Davidson, often enough to have me considered by some very fine minds, the best portrait photographer in America which means the world so far as I know from reproductions.

-- The Daybooks of Edward Weston. II. California. Ed. Nancy Newhall (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1973) 161 (May 19, 1930).

Still, all you have to do to understand Weston's missing words is place a pair of wordless images side by side: Weston's portrait and Nat Farbman's 1948 Life magazine photograph of Jeffers with the Davidson bust.

This photograph shows Robinson Jeffers diminished because postwar. But the change hasn't remade his face into a tragic mask; it has only lent it to a professor at his retirement party, posing between his tribute bust by a commercial artist and the manuscript of his speech of acceptance. Weston's photograph has no props except the poet's own hand, and it's different in another way too. Weston has used his repertoire of studio techniques -- the rapt upward gaze, the pin spotlight aimed at the eyes -- as an extension not of his subject's face but of his own hand. Weston's Jeffers isn't posing; he has been posed. "I am nothing but a photograph," says the image, without words but as clearly as as words could speak if they spoke the language of the sun -- "but to be nothing but a photograph is the quiet destination of my short noisy transit through language. As I'm about to show you, a poet's words are only a way of bringing you closer to the poet's image. To read a poet's words is only the first stage of reading the poet. Reading is only another way of seeing." 

That is: a view of a face seen by Edward Weston reduces to a grammar. It is the most minimal of grammars: a single word, an adjective in transition to a pronoun without a referent and out of time. It strives only to say: this.

Robinson Jeffers, a poet of the sole self, never learned how to write that referentless language. Wallace Stevens, a poet of poetry, did learn at the end of "The Man on the Dump," where the poet he has envisioned into existence realizes that he has been searching all along only for the definite article: "the the."

                That's the moment when the moon creeps up
To the bubbling of bassoons. That's the time
One looks at the elephant-colorings of tires.
Everything is shed.

Vision came to the man on his way down through the dump's strata of meaning. A counterpart to that advent, Edward Weston's way of reading a face was a way of seeing upward. And perhaps a Weston way of reading in our own time, post-Weston, would involve us in looking at the shape of words from below, reading upward from language's roots in the soil of the human and toward the space in light where an image comes to be.

Edward Weston and digital photography

On November 17, I formally opened my photo exhibit in the University of Hawaii at Manoa's Kuykendall Gallery with this 9-minute talk about one thing I share with the great Edward Weston: a desire to perceive form with a minimum of technical intermediation between my eye and the reality. Here's a link to the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQv4WciSfUQ

Lens

I

Duccio, Madonna and Child.
Click to enlarge.

Dorothea Lange's "On the road with her family one month from South Dakota. Tulelake, Siskiyou County, Calif. September 1939" is culturally encoded for viewing in an American system. In the Whitney, for instance, the Coca-Cola bottle that holds the baby's milk would signify only desperation, but in the Louvre it might just as plausibly signify American materialism or American vulgarity. In a European museum in 1939, too, the idea that a family could own a car yet be poor would require a large wall caption, explaining. And of course migrant labor wasn't of much aesthetic concern to Europe during the month when World War II began.

So Lange's image is culturally on its own, like the mother and children it depicts. In western art, we'll approach almost any image of a mother and her baby in the expectation of a view of the Christ, but Lange's madonna doesn't respond to our inquiry in either of the two traditional European ways. She looks neither out of her picture at us nor down within her picture at her child, but only forward through her car's windshield. In her glasses we can see, reflected, what look like utility poles along a highway. They lead our gaze out of the picture and on. With us, they are bound to the woman through the passage of a time measurable on the heroically human scale of miles per hour.

Library of Congress, from http://shorpy.com.

To read the picture in that way is almost automatically to think of it as a work of American art -- specifically, of American art of the Popular Front era, when W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten were at work on an operetta about Paul Bunyan, Heroic Worker Turned Exploiter. But those lenses complicate everything. Under the Khmer Rouge, a need for glasses was a capital offense. Lange's woman from South Dakota may be a member of the bourgeoisie who has lost everything except a vestige of her former class taint, or she may be a kulak wealthy enough to own spectacles. In the cultural nationalist terms of the 1930s, either of those possibilities constitutes an aesthetic embarrassment. If the woman from South Dakota were being painted by John Steuart Curry or written about by Stephen Vincent Benét or composed about by Virgil Thomson, we can be sure that the artist would buff up her muscles and lose the glasses. But if the artist is a photographer, the embarrassments will have to stay in, and the second drafts of the artist's vision will have to be turned over to us spectators.

II

One of the twentieth century's iconic images of a woman in glasses lives on in our nightmares as an aftereffect of Eisenstein's Potemkin. Early in the film, a ship's doctor removes his pince-nez, folds the two lenses together to make a magnifying glass, and stares through it at a side of meat crawling with maggots which he says aren't there. Obligingly, the camera peers over the doctor's shoulder and transmits its view through the lens to us who sit in our theater. Yes, says the image onscreen, and Yes, we agree, passing judgment: those are maggots. The doctor's lens works for the camera, but it doesn't work for the doctor. No matter how much we may shout at the screen, he won't see. His officer's uniform is only a costume, his glasses are only costume jewelry, and the regime for which he obligingly refuses to see is only a movie. But then, in its Odessa Steps sequence, the movie Potemkin shatters a lens. I am not a movie now, it tells us. Look at me lensless. My eyes are undefended.

By contrast, the lenses in Edward Weston's portrait of José Clemente Orozco reflect light defiantly back from Orozco's face. Fully equipped, Orozco, an artist, will now deal with light on his own terms. The space beside him is empty. He needs no child; he needs no woman. When he goes pioneering, it will be into unlensed light, light seen on its own unmodified terms. And when light is in the hands of the shaper Edward Weston, it hammers the transparent and leaves it bulletproof.

III

As to Dorothea Lange's woman from South Dakota, we were probably used to thinking of her in photographic terms even before we were aware of her existence. In 1939, in The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck told her story in the general terms of a myth, and the next year John Ford retold the story in a moving picture which is still showing in the American dream. But thanks to Europe in 1939, the historical substrate of that chapter of the dream has changed. Steinbeck's Okies and Arkies soon migrated from California's orchards to California's defense plants, and once they were there they ceased to be peasantry. Then, as their postures and their faces and their bodies underwent metamorphosis, some of the most beautiful among them began returning the idea of American photography to a European model.

Alfred Palmer, "Bombardier nose section of a B-17F
Navy bomber at the Douglas Aircraft plant in Long Beach,
Calif. October 1942. The B-17F 'Flying Fortress' is a later
model of the B-17." Library of Congress, from http://shorpy.com.

The woman in this image, for instance, is post-Lange and post-Eisenstein. Even as she plays a part in a war, she is clean and made up, and wearing a ring and a golden watch. One of her fingers is bandaged, but her nails are manicured. Her eyes are modestly downcast, and her head is curved downward in the immemorial gesture of maternal love. Quietly living through her great adventure, she is safe. She is studio art. All around her, enclosing, nestling, is a great lens.

Like Duccio's madonna, this image entered history with a purpose. At considerable expense for 1942, it was made on 4-by-5 inch Kodachrome by one of many photographers working in a coordinated effort for the United States Office of War Information. Within that context, it would be anachronistic to say anything explicit about the function of the death-dealing thing through whose curved opening a woman emerges into black drapery. We are to think of that solid transparency only as a shell which encloses goodness. The madonna of this shell is a madonna not for eternity but only for the duration. Three years earlier, she may have been one of Dorothea Lange's migrants, but now she is a lady. After the war ends, who can say what she'll be? But for now, unfaded in Kodachrome, she lives on.

Perhaps more disturbing, so does the formal beauty of the photographer's composition, and so does the formal beauty of that streamlined shell, protecting the woman even as it delivers her into the lighting that bathes her form. Refracted by a methacrylate matrix, time bends and the duration reaches from 1942 forward to us and backward to Duccio. Would you like to drink to that? There may be some milk left in the Coke bottle just outside the image.

Body language: the muse of reading

I

Down the wall from me at the Detroit Institute of Art that day in the mid-1970s, a commotion was going on. The gallery was glowing with the small, intense lights of a traveling exhibit of Edward Weston prints, and a group of young black men was noisily reacting. A moment later, one of them walked up to one of the images that Weston saw of his future wife Charis in 1936 --

and took critical action.

"White bitch!" he shouted. "Ungh!"

And, inches from the contact print that had once been brought to life under Weston's hands, he delivered a karate kick.

In the Detroit of the 1970s, rapidly emptying of its population in the years after it hosted the most destructive race riot in American history, that kick was a reading of the picture's body language. A translation in Looking-Glass language was prepared a few years later by the photographer Robert Adams, who wrote about the same air view of a woman's body:

With the exception of two full-length nudes of Tina Modotti in Mexico, and five of Charis Wilson on the Oceano dunes (not many, considering the number of nudes Weston took), the pictures that supposedly resulted from Weston's love for his subjects are, relative to the rest of his life's work, unsuccessful; they are cold to the point of being dead . . . and thus unattractive on any but the most icily aesthetic terms. . . . [W]hat seems clear on the basis of the pictures is that Weston was inclined to treat the bodies of his lovers as things free of individual personality -- an inclination not too different from that of the pornographers, though the results are in some ways dissimilar -- and imperfectly related to Weston's statements of affection for his models. . . . The nudes record not desire, but a sad sort of invention and staring.

(Robert Adams, "The Achievement of Edward Weston: The Biography I'd Like to Read." EW 100: Centennial Essays in Honor of Edward Weston, ed. Peter C. Bunnell and David Featherstone [Carmel, CA: The Friends of Photography, 1986] 28-29)

Adams is right about the bodies free of individual personality, of course. My June 4 post to this blog gets its title from Weston's own reading of one of his abstract nudes: "Entirely impersonal, lacking in any human interest." Adams made an exception of the photograph of Charis for the same reason that the young black man did: because it can stimulate a body function and then instantly moralize it. Unmediated by what Adams calls the icily aesthetic, the reflex arc brings the male body into contact with the female body and leaves the female body tagged with a label.

II

'Next,' said M'sieur Pierre, 'we pass on to pleasures of a spiritual order. Remember the times when, in a fabulous picture gallery, or museum, you would suddenly stop and be unable to take your eyes off some piquant torso -- made, alas, of bronze or marble. This we can call pleasure of art; it occupies an important place in life.' -- Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, trans. Dmitri Nabokov and Vladimir Nabokov, ch. 14

M'sieur Pierre, the man who delivers this lecture, is an employee of a totalitarian state with ideas about how its citizens' bodies should be trained to experience. The audience for his discourse about desire in art consists of two of his fellow educators and the pupil whose head, on the last page of the book, he will chop off. In 1959, Nabokov listened in once more on M'sieur Pierre's words and wrote, in his foreword to their English translation:

I composed the Russian original exactly a quarter of a century ago in Berlin, some fifteen years after escaping from the Bolshevist regime, and just before the Nazi regime reached its full volume of welcome. The question whether or not my seeing both in terms of one dull beastly farce had any effect on this book, should concern the good reader as little as it does me.

By "good reader," Nabokov seems to mean here a Weston rather than an Adams; that is, a reader for the icily aesthetic rather than a reader with a taste for the composite author-function that Nabokov calls, one paragraph later, "G. H. Orwell or other popular purveyors of illustrated ideas and publicistic fiction." Those illustrated ideas, after all, can be individualized to show as much piquant detail as their pragmatic function requires, right down to impish grin and frizzy hair.

( TLS 8 May 2009: 30)

But the whole point of the piquant details is that they are nothing but details. In the language of a book or an image, their function is rhetorical, not grammatical. Anecdotal images like this one out of Nazi Germany are designed with an inherently contradictory purpose: to serve as auxiliaries to words aimed at stirring us to wordless action. In Adams's view and the view of the young black man in the museum, Weston's image of Charis has a similar purposive function, even though it is too visually complex in itself to be reduced to a slogan (Auch du . . .). To viewers in search of a verbal paraphrase, a complexity of vision like Weston's doesn't matter; if the words of a slogan aren't printed on the image, they'll be imagined and then believed to have been seen. Seen in that pragmatic way, a woman's body will become an allegory: the vehicle of a tenor simple ("Let's go to bed") or complex ("White woman on expensive real estate . . . kill!")

But if allegory's emblematic tags (face, facial expression or bodily posture) aren't present to help the reading along, the readers who read for action will be lost. They'll have been stranded on the icily aesthetic.

III

Adams, who has a Ph.D. in English, seems dismayed that Weston, who never went to college, was better at taking pictures than at following their traces back to a source in himself or forward to a source in Robert Adams. "What I would really like to know from a biography about Edward Weston," he complains, ". . . is where the greatest pictures came from. I think they did not necessarily come from the sometimes foolish man who was a vegetarian but enjoyed bullfights, the one who believed in astrology and wore a velvet cape. They must have come from a more thoughtful person, one who suffered enough to learn" (26). Twenty-three years after writing those words, Adams still isn't as good a photographer as Weston, so the magical Erziehungsbiographie of Weston would appear not to have been written yet. Before a Weston image, we're still left in dumb contemplation. We can't explain it any better than Weston could. And that Weston lived with contradiction is, I should think, the least surprising, least original, least interesting thing there possibly can be to learn about him. In that one respect, reader, Edward Weston was just like you and me. It's only in the respect that he was a great artist that he differed -- and because you and I aren't great artists, we lack the art to understand his art.

What we can try to do, though, is carry out our dumb contemplation on Weston's terms. Twenty-three years after Adams's attempt at a demolition job, Weston's abstract nudes are still standing, and our culture is still responding to them in its own dumb ways. Weston may help us understand those ways, but of course those ways can't help us understand Weston. As Shelley said about Keats, he has outsoared the shadow of our night. "Sold for $1.6 Million Record," trumpets Sotheby's about the 1925 abstract nude print bearing Weston's talismanic signature. "The Packard exchange will mean a fifty dollar first payment of which I have but twenty-five," Weston confided to his Daybook on January 25, 1928, about a used car. "So far I cannot foresee from where the other half will come. And then how will I eat afterwards?!"

(The Daybooks of Edward Weston. Volume II: California, ed. Nancy Newhall [Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1973] 46)

And no, we sub-Chelsea types aren't any better at understanding our way across the chasm than the art world is. After all, Sotheby's caption hasn't only changed the way we read Weston's signature; it has changed the way we see through Weston's picture to the idea of body. A million and a half bucks' worth of bankable prestige will go a long way toward warming up the icily aesthetic. On this image, too, there might as well be a slogan.


But cover the words and look at the shape: unreadable because unsayable, unsayable because not reducible to a simple, allegorized desire. It will never be enough for us, but that is its great promise: because you can never know me, you will never cease desiring.

Windows: car, drugstore, light

After World War II, one department of Japanese visual culture reindustrialized itself as cute. It became a powerhouse of cute, selling the world on Hello Kitty, the monster movies of Inoshiro Honda with their childish themes and boyish heroes, the sinister art of manga with its babyface graphics, and the fetish toys of Takashi Murakami. For 2009, it brought us the Nissan Cube.


In the United States, this inexpensive little car seems to be marketed almost exclusively to teenage girls. The floor model at my Nissan dealer, for instance, is placarded with impulse-buy copy tempting you to think how cute you'll look behind those round little windows. Of course it's merely poignant to imagine the teenager ten years after that impulse purchase, still driving her Cube because things haven't worked out the way she thought they would. But cuteness is a style of being, and style has a permanent claim to its own moment. The impulse toward style remains; only the accessories and the personnel change.

That's true of style in many genres beside fashion and automobile design, of course. From the high European-American culture of the 1950s alone, ubi sunt the music of Gian-Carlo Menotti, the novels of Carson McCullers, the philosophy of Colin Wilson? "We were obliged to confess," says stern Emerson in "The Poet," "that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man." Menotti, McCullers, Wilson, and their congeners vanished for the same reason they throve in their season: they were stylish. They were mannequins helping purchasers visualize their era's distinctive mode for themselves. A mode is distinctive because it is different from the mode that preceded it, which is to say that is a part of an era immer schon changing and being devalued from immediate reality to mere history.

And genre itself has its eras. Every work of art is mediated by the labor of somebody working in a culturally conditioned technique. You could call that cultural conditioning an etiquette, and it does change with time as etiquettes do. Even photography, that semi-robotic art form, comes into being at the instant when a photographer listens to the voice of an etiquette in her head as she aims the camera. That instant is no different for the photographer than it was for Lily Briscoe at the end of To the Lighthouse, finally knowing (thanks to the manners of gracious seeing that she has learned from Mrs. Ramsay) where to place the last brushstroke on her painting. But here is something different that may be unique to photography: once the photographer has pressed the shutter release, control over the final work has been handed off to the camera. At that point, etiquette vanishes. From this second instant, all that is is seen, without editorship. That is the instant of photography.

Consider, for example, this catalog for an exhibition at the University of Michigan in 2008. It will be worth your while to enlarge the image by clicking, as it may not have been for the image of the cute little car in its Tokyo cityscape.

Morris Engel was the cameraman at the moment in 1938 when his camera took in this windowful of words, and Morris Engel was likewise the artist of an older genre, literature, who chose some of those words on literature's behalf to caption the look passing between the man and the woman. The words just under that steadfast gaze are "Sweet Evelyn," and thanks to Morris Engel's literary choice they now belong to the picture as a whole -- that is, to the picture translated from a wall in the Howard Greenberg Gallery to the cover of a book, and beyond that to the generalizing curatorial geography of the words inscribed under that picture, and beyond that to the visual busywork you, reader, are now engaged in with the picture. The picture, not the photographer or the curator, also provides itself with an alternative title. It's at the top of the image, in rebus, and below it is the rebus's own translation into a piece of literature about the picture and you: "EYES EXAMINED."

The fonts in which all those words are embedded date the image's historical context to the 1930s. So too do the man's sleeked hair and wide-lapelled suit. If Morris Engel's darkroom records or a curator at the Howard Greenberg Gallery or the University of Michigan can narrow the context more specifically to 1938, that's all to the good for us. That educational activity will press the style of an era into the service of helping us see historically. We can also make a useful detour from seeing historically to thinking historically when we open the catalog, where we'll learn that the educational purpose of this exhibition was to document the continuing influence of the New York Photo League, a "vibrant working-class space [which] served as a club, school and professional organization" between 1936 and 1951 for a group of young Jewish photographers.

Which is to say, as long as we're on campus, that "Sweet Evelyn," the picture, conforms to etiquettes of race, milieu, époque, just as Hippolyte Taine said, long ago, that literature does. But it hasn't aged away from its epoch in the way our mental image of the teenager in her Nissan Cube is sure to. It has even achieved its modest immortality without the aid of such cultural mascara as the impressive words "Grecian" or "urn." What it does have is photography --

photography, the art which says, "The image was there all along, waiting for its instant. Let the apparatus of seeing complete that instant. Let the camera work on its own, escaping any government by human etiquettes or human history." Edward Weston understood that vast, wonderful, and terrifying generalization in specific photographic terms when he wrote in his Daybook on January 30, 1924:

Some of the tragedy of our present life may be captured, nothing can be hidden under this cloudless cruel sky. She leaned against a whitewashed wall. I drew close . . . and kissed her. A tear rolled down her cheek -- and then I captured forever the moment. . . .

Let me see, f. 8 -- 1/10 sec. K I filter, panchromatic film -- how mechanical and calculated it sounds, yet really how spontaneous and genuine, for I have so overcome the mechanics of my camera that it functions responsive to my desires. My shutter coordinating with my brain is released in a way as natural as I might move my arm. (The Daybooks of Edward Weston. Volume I, Mexico, ed. Nancy Newhall [Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1973] 46. Ellipses in original.)

The image that resulted from that triple communion between the bodies of the photographer, his model, and his camera is the one that the histories of photography now call "Tina Modotti with Tear." The tear itself is only a tiny glistening on a cheek -- ephemeral but, as Weston says, forever. Unlike the circumstantially specific window and subway entrance in "Sweet Evelyn," the woman's face has been reduced to an array of shapes. Even the top of the woman's head is missing, because it isn't necessary to the composition. Because of this elimination of the human, the shapes in Weston's picture are less busy than the words and gazes in Engel's picture, but they are paradoxically more complex because almost fully abstracted into a general form. Edward Weston, promiscuous in his relations with women, remained faithful to their form.



But one similarity between Weston and Engel is this: window. The only difference is a matter of the degree of window function. Engel's drugstore window is a display of words acting as the literary backdrop to a communication in body language. Thanks to its literary content, "Sweet Evelyn" is witty in ways that no picture by Weston is. The image is a vitrine full of history, like a poem by Pope. By contrast, the rectangular frame of Weston's blurred, truncated image of pure form is a a stolid, carpenterish thing, nothing but window. All it does is open and shut: open to light, shut to black.

But that is its wonder. Light and black are generalities whose grammar existed before we people came along to tailor them into the time-specific fashion statements of (for instance) a car. Light and black are pure transport. They are always there to be seen, but perhaps not by anything less open to them than a camera, or a man who has become a camera. For us human beings there are lesser technologies of understanding, such as the Cube. The Cube's windows are costume jewelry, and that's cute. Edward and his camera provide a different kind of transport.

Four days after he took this picture of Tina, Edward Weston climbed a mountain where he retrieved another famous image from the dark: the image now called "Manuel Hernández Galván, Shooting." After he descended, he complained to the Daybook (47), "My camera slowed me down." But then he added, without a break: "It is always so. I pay the price of my love,-- perhaps my only love."