Storming the Gates of Paradise (22 page)

Ruskin was writing about the sky in the course of mounting his massive defense of J. M. W. Turner, who often had the sky dominate and even overwhelm his paintings and made the sublimity of power, vastness, emptiness, and light as evident as they ever have been. But even when the sky is visible, it is no longer readable to most people, not as a collection of stories, a clock, or a compass. A man tells me that the U.S. Navy has stopped teaching celestial navigation because satellite geopositioning devices have at last, after millennia of skygazing, made knowing the stars unnecessary to knowing where you are, unless the batteries run out.

In the spring of 1609, Galileo Galilei improved upon the telescope that a Flemish inventor had presented to the world the previous year; it was the first vision
expanding machine, though the camera would probably become the most influential. The first telescope Galileo made he gave to the Senate of Venice, after demonstrating how the device could be used to see the approach of enemy ships far earlier than ever before. The second telescope he made he kept and aimed at the heavens to see what had never been seen before. In January 1610, he looked through it at Jupiter and saw “that beside the planet there were three starlets, small indeed, but very bright.” They appeared in various arrays on one or the other side of Jupiter, and he realized that they were satellites orbiting the larger body. In
The Starry Messenger
, his report on what he saw through his telescope, he described “four planets swiftly revolving about Jupiter at differing distances and periods, and known to no one before the author recently perceived them and decided that they should be named the Medicean Stars,” or Siderea Medicea. In fact, he had at first named them the Siderea Cosmica, but the patron he sought to flatter, Cosimo de Medici, duke of Tuscany, preferred that his whole dynasty be commemorated by the name.

Galileo’s sighting and naming of Jupiter’s moons represent many kinds of rupture with the past. The most often observed is that his discoveries confirmed the Copernican, or heliocentric, interpretation of the universe and undermined the Aristotelian, or terracentric, view. The perfection of the nine crystal spheres orbiting the earth was undone by these celestial bodies orbiting around other bodies, and they complicated the elaborate charts of the movements of the heavenly bodies worked out by astronomers. Galileo is often presented as a Prometheus in revolt against tyranny, but, though he subverted traditional knowledge, he flattered contemporary power with his act of naming. He seems almost a prefiguration of the military-industrial-academic complex, with his recognition of the military uses of the telescope and his courting of favor—and tenure—in both Venice and Tuscany.

Another rupture is between stars and constellations, information and stories. Before the telescope, astronomers saw what everyone else saw, and it was their perseverance in observing and skill in interpretation that set them apart from others who craned their necks skyward. After the telescope, the sky began to fill with objects that had no place in culture, that were accessible only to specialists, and
that outreached the ability of culture to assimilate new objects into existing patterns. That is to say, since Galileo’s time, many new stars have been sighted and named, but there have been no new constellations. The very reason he could propose naming Jupiter’s moons after his patron was because they did not belong to the culture at large as part of its experience; that he thought it fitting to name a heavenly body after a mortal makes his discovery akin to the encounters and namings taking place on the other side of the world—makes it colonialism, albeit of a very metaphysical sort. It was the first inkling that the sky itself could become a specialist’s preserve and a political territory, and it spread history’s linear time to the heavens. Galileo’s names never caught on. Instead, what had staying power was the astronomer Johannes Kepler’s facetious suggestion that the moons be named after Jupiter’s sexual conquests—a suggestion that was revived in the nineteenth century: Io, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede are the names of Jupiter’s four largest moons, and they are collectively referred to as the Galilean satellites.

Galileo invented the telescope during the turbulence of the Reformation, and, as we all learned in school, the Reformation was in part about allowing people to read and interpret the Bible directly. It might have marked the beginning of a rise in literacy with fine democratic side effects—but other forms of reading were beginning their decline, at least in Europe: reading the sky, the weather, tracks and footprints, iconographies, plants. As Michel Foucault notes in
The Order of Things
, constellations of meaning linked by metaphor were being replaced by expanding galaxies of information. Calendars and clocks proliferated, making direct observations less necessary and knowledge less accessible to the unequipped (though the Vatican in Galileo’s time and afterward employed astronomers to calculate the correct dates for holy days, just as earlier Muslim astronomers had used their art to calculate the exact direction of Mecca and the correct times for daily prayers). Galileo first saw an eclipse of one of the moons of Jupiter in 1612. He realized that the rapidity and predictability of the event meant that it could be used to calculate time, and thus place, far more precisely than ever before. A traveler with a table of the eclipses, a telescope, and an accurate timekeeping device could note the time of an eclipse of one of Jupiter’s moons, compare it to the time at which it would happen in the locale of the table, and calculate his distance from
that locality. That is, he (or, rarely, she) could calculate longitude. Galileo negotiated with the great colonizers of his day, the Dutch and the Spanish, to perfect this system, but it wasn’t until the end of the seventeenth century that the eclipse of Jupiter’s moons could be used to calculate earthly locations. People who had access to the new astronomy could cease being local without becoming lost: they could go farther with confidence, and they did.

“The streams were timbered with the long-leaved cottonwood and red willow; and during the afternoon a species of onion was very abundant. I obtained here an immersion of the first satellite of Jupiter, which corresponding very nearly with the chronometer, placed us in longitude 106 47′ 25″. The latitude, by observation, was 41 37′ 16″; elevation above the sea, 7,800 feet; and distance from St. Vrain’s fort, 147 miles.” Two hundred years after Galileo, this relationship between celestial knowledge and colonial power persisted, as this August 2, 1843, extract from John C. Fremont’s journal demonstrates. The chronometer, transit telescope, compass, sextant, barometer—and a lot of guns—allowed “the Pathfinder” and his men to map the American West and the West that was not yet America for scientific, military, and commercial purposes. The famous geological surveys of the 1860s and 1870s would follow in their wake, equipped with one further device of conquest: the camera. Though in his heyday the technology was not yet adequate to the circumstances, Fremont attempted to photograph the land as well; on Fremont’s third expedition, the Sephardic Jewish daguerreotypist Solomon Nunes Carvalho became the first to photograph extensively in what would become the American West. Fremont was a superb surveyor, an insubordinate soldier, and a great romanticizer, and he named some of the major features of the West—the Great Basin, the Humboldt River, the Golden Gate—and confirmed the Spanish name of the Sierra Nevada over the English one.

Surveying the land was a military operation reaffirming the relationship between knowledge and power. Knowing the lay of the land was preparatory to
seizing and settling it; being able to read the stars was necessary to write a new meaning on the earth below with names, guns, and laws. On May 23, 1844, while returning from a trespassing foray into Mexican California, Fremont ruminated, “From the Dalles to the point where we turned across the Sierra Nevada, near 1,000 miles, we heard Indian names, and the greater part of the distance none; from Nueva Helvetica [Sacramento] to las Vegas de Santa Clara, about 1,000 more, all were Spanish; from the Mississippi to the Pacific, French and American or English were intermixed; and this prevalence of names indicates the national character of the first explorers.” The names of the stars make clear that Greek and Arab astronomers established much of the knowledge of the night sky for Europe; the constellations are named after Greek gods and heroes. But the surface of the American West is named after Native American observations and events, Spanish saints, and American men and their whims. In Greek mythology, Narcissus and Hyacinth became flowers; Orion and Cassiopeia became constellations. Like ancient heroes, the prominent men of the nineteenth century were at least in name becoming plants, mountains, towns, and rivers. But most often the names led and lead only to a sense of land as real estate, a businessman’s landscape with only occasional odd moments of poetry and reversions to a more profound sense of place. The names on the land often obliterated the original names as part of the act of conquest, replacing them with names that contribute nothing to the place beyond distinguishing it from other places.

There is a great incongruity in the names of men upon the land, for these rogues and bureaucrats are too recent and prosaic to convey the benediction of saints, heroes, gods. Instead of the certainties of mythology, they convey—to those who know the history of the names—turbulence, economics, ambition, and brutality. In Europe, white people are indigenous, and they are often named after places. Some Anglo-Americans were named Winchester after the English cathedral town, and so were some eastern U.S. towns, but the western towns—there are twenty-one Winchesters in the United States—are often named after the men who bore that place-name, including two towns honoring the inventor of the Winchester repeating rifle, “the gun that won the West.”
Winchester
itself comes from a pre-Celtic word and a Latin suffix,
-chester
, meaning a walled town, and the
word is at least twelve centuries old. When places are named after men and not the other way around, people become more real and permanent than land. As Robert Frost once observed, “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”

But even these names tell stories to those who listen. Maps are narratives that sprawl in all directions. Reno was a Civil War general (not the Reno of the Battle of Little Bighorn), but the city of Reno is surrounded by Washoe County, and the Washoes are an indigenous nation. To the south is Fremont’s scout, Indian fighter Kit Carson, in the form of Carson City, Carson Pass, and the Carson River; but passing through Reno on its journey north from Lake Tahoe is the Truckee River, named after the Paiute chief whose son, Winnemucca, gave his name to a town farther east and near the Humboldt River. Yet farther up the Humboldt is Battle Mountain, whose name recalls what George R. Stewart said in his book on American place-names: “Massacre Rocks and Battle Mountain tell their stories to him who knows the language—that where Indians killed whites, it was a massacre; but where whites killed Indians it was a battle.” And the Humboldt River was named by Fremont, who, guided by Carson, explored and mapped the West for American expansion and who named Pyramid Lake, the destination of the Truckee River. Like so many American names, it harked back to an Old World often known only through books and pictures. Fremont had not been to Egypt, but he thought the steep stone island near the lake’s eastern shore looked like the pyramid of Cheops, so Egypt is now memorialized in Nevada. The whole state might have been named Washoe, but Congress insisted on Nevada, which means “snowy” in Spanish and was taken from the mostly Californian Sierra Nevada, named by the Spanish and reaffirmed by Fremont. The lack of Spanish names beyond the Sierra Nevada testifies to the limits of the Spaniards’ travels.

What does it mean to name something, and what to know the names? To name something is to presume to know it or to make it into something knowable, to identify what can be known or to presume that it takes no getting to know. The
West was claimed, named, and settled with too much haste for naming to be anything but a sticking on of handy labels. Names have power: in Hebrew tradition, the name of God was unspeakable; and in Tibetan Buddhism, the names of God are all but infinite. In fairy tales and myths, to call someone by name is to have power over him or her—think of Rumpelstiltskin. Names have weight. They influence how we read a place, how we see the stars, how we estimate each other: Mr. Bernstein is looked at very differently than Mr. Big Eagle.

There are styles in naming that can be read across the map of this country. The Indians usually named descriptively and never commemorated a person, though sometimes an event or a deity. The Spanish often described and obsessively sanctified; Mormons invented themselves as the new Israelites and exported the Old Testament to Zion, Jordan, Moab, and a host of other places in Utah; and non-Mormon whites saw the devil a lot, from Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming to Devils Postpile National Monument in the eastern Sierra. Fremont recorded of one midwestern locale, “The Indian name of the lake is Mini-wakan, the Enchanted Water; converted by the whites into Devil’s Lake.” Euro-Americans often used indigenous language decoratively, for its sound, so that the meaning of the word or its place of origin no longer mattered.
Minnesota
means “muddy water,” but romantics soon made “muddy” into “cloudy,” until the place became “the land of sky-blue water”; Sequoia was a Cherokee chief in the Southeast whose name was appended to the giant trees and then the California national park; the word
Yosemite
means something very different than the namers of the valley, and then the park, intended.

Perhaps the awkwardness and arrogance of some place-names come merely from their recentness; they are still more redolent of the namers than of the places themselves. But time will sand their edges and erase their paternity. Some people relish the sounds of the names for their own sake, as did Stephen Vincent Benet in his famous “American Names”: