Storming the Gates of Paradise (23 page)

I have fallen in love with American names,

The sharp ones that never get fat,

The snakeskin-titles of mining claims,

The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,

Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

This is the poem that ends:

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

This pleasure of names flared up again in country music during its classic era, when countless songs suggested that though you couldn’t count on love, you could count on geography and lovingly reeled off the names of lost homes yearned for, destinations not yet reached, stops along railroad lines and highways. The popular song “Route 66” does the same; with its litany of names, it made the road a major tourist attraction. Names structure the landscape as surely as buildings and roads do. They can be pointers and blinders, billboards and graves, though often descriptions and commemorations eventually become true proper names—after the general was forgotten, Reno came to mean only the “biggest little city in the world.”

An English place-name dictionary begins, “Most place-names today are what could be termed ‘linguistic fossils.’ Although they originated as living units of speech, coined by our distant ancestors as descriptions of places in terms of their topography, appearance, situation, use, ownership, or other association, most have become, in the course of time, mere labels, no longer possessing a clear linguistic meaning. This is perhaps not surprising when one considers that most place-names are a thousand years old or more.” One might say that rather than possessing no clear linguistic meaning, they mean nothing but themselves; the descriptions have become proper nouns united with that which they describe. During the heyday of American naming, Ralph Waldo Emerson took up the subject of names, saying, “The poets made all the words and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the Muses. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.” It is too soon to forget the original
names or the acts of naming that sought to reinvent this place as something else, too soon for the shells of the animalcules to lose their echo and fossilize.

In places whose inhabitants have been there longer than memory, the names are laid thick upon the land, with the intimacy of the local. In Ireland, I once went on a ten-mile walk that took me from Ballydehob past the Bownuknockane River where it enters Roaringwater Bay; past Knockroe, Knockaphukeen, the Dawnuknockane, Coosane, Ballybane, Barnaghgeehy; across Letterlicky Bridge; across the Durrus, Hollyhill, Cappanaloha to Bantry Bay. Of these Irish names I know only that
Knock
means hill, and this density of naming means that the place was inhabited by intensely local people, people who had reason to distinguish each hill, each small region, for navigation and conversation. The anthropologist and essayist Richard K. Nelson writes of traveling in a sealskin boat along the arctic coast of Alaska and hearing one of his walrus-hunting hosts and guides begin to name the places they passed: “Nullagvik, Pauktugvik, Milliktagvik, Avgumman, Aquisaq, Inmaurat. For a few he offered translations: Quilamittagvik: ‘Place to Hunt Ducks with Ivory Bolas,’ Mitqutailat: Arctic Terns,’ Nannugvik: ‘Place to Hunt Polar Bears,’ Inuktuyuk: ‘Man-Eater,’ a spring hunting-camp used by those willing to overlook its ominous name.” Nelson imagines

the entire North American continent in a time before living memory—this enormous sprawl of land, sheathed and cloaked and brilliantly arrayed with names. Names covering the terrain like an unbroken forest. Names that wove people profoundly into the landscape, and that infused landscape profoundly into the people who were its inhabitants. . . . I imagined how these names had dwindled with the deaths of elders, beginning five hundred years ago; a steady impoverishment of names, as the Europeans spread west, knowing too little of the land and its people to realize what was being lost. Many parts of the continent were plundered of their names, left desolate, emptied of mind and memory and meaning. But all is not lost. Many Native American names survive, others are now being recorded, and some are finding their rightful places on maps.

He mentions Denali, which means “the High One” in Koyukon, a more apt name than McKinley for the highest mountain on the continent.

Monument Valley is a formalist name, drawing attention to the aesthetics of the place, the way the abruptly rising buttes stand like pillars or pedestals, articulating the depth of space and perspective that makes the place so spectacular. Since ordinary monuments commemorate something other than themselves, this name makes the place a monument to nothing but monumentality. The individual rock formations have names that are clearly imported: along with the famous Mittens, there’s an Elephant Rock and a Camel Rock, though neither of those beasts has been native to this continent since the last ice age. But Monument Valley has another name. A Navajo medicine person, Mike Mitchell, says,

Monument Valley’s Navajo name is
Tse Bii’Nidzisigai
(White Rocks Inside). The story is that the valley is where “Rocks Are Pointing Upward” (
Tsenideezhazhaii
). Before that it was called White Rocks Inside. As they tell the story there used to be monsters out there. The monsters were the enemies of the Navajo and used to be somewhere in White Rocks Inside. There are Holy People who live there now and they say that important Holy Way ceremonial stories were originally formed there. The valley is protected. . . . Now for some, the valley’s purpose is sightseeing. For others, its purpose is to produce good minds and good thoughts, and hogans are built here and there.

The place looks different under this name. Tse Bii’Nidzisigai is clearly a place where people lived and history unfolded long before John Wayne scowled across its distance for John Ford’s movie camera, a place that tells us there is more there than we can know.

When it comes to naming, clouds pose a different, almost an opposite, challenge than that posed by constellations. While constellations are unchanging over millennia, so that they can be collectively named and assimilated into the culture, clouds are evanescent, changeable. They function something like Rorschach blots, suggesting private resemblances that individuals can read to themselves. (In the
1960s, the comic strip
Peanuts
had a recurrent episode in which Charlie Brown and Linus displayed their personalities through cloud interpretation; Charlie always saw the simple and obvious, Linus the elaborate and arcane.) For something to be named, it must have a distinct and durable identity, but clouds appear, metamorphose, and vanish too quickly. Only storms with the force or speed to do permanent damage are named, at least since 1938, when meteorologists began to give them women’s names, beginning with A and moving through the alphabet each season. Probably something about Euro-American gender politics could be found in the idea of storms labeled with women’s first names sweeping over mountains given men’s last names (though as I write, Hurricane Dennis is menacing the Carolina coast—about fifteen years ago the meteorological authorities decided to give men’s as well as women’s names to storms).

Because clouds themselves cannot be named, nomenclatural passion has focused instead on classifying and naming their standard formations. Though knowledge of the weather had previously been the province of shepherds and sailors, meteorologists latinized the formations: a cirrus, for example, is “a form of cloud, generally at a high elevation, presenting the appearance of divergent filaments or wisps, often resembling a curl or lock of hair or wool. Particular varieties are known as cat’s or mare’s tails,” says the
Oxford English Dictionary. Cirrus
is a word that itself means “a curl-like tuft, fringe or filament.” Like Linnean plant names, the cloud names create a metaphorical structure: an information tree. There are four principal forms, according to this system—cumulus, stratus, cirrus, and nimbus—meaning, in English, heap, layer, curl of hair, and rain; and these can be classified in various groups according to altitude. Further names describe cloud types that do not fit into these four groups, a category of the uncategorizable, suggesting something about the amorphousness of clouds and the tenaciousness of the desire to order the world through language and representation—and not the language of mare’s tails that relies on metaphor and resemblance, but the language of science in which the stories and analogies are hidden in a dead language. Clouds and cloud terminology are an acute and comic form of the pervasive gap between words and things, between the particulars of experience and the universals of classification.

At workshops for more than twenty years, Richard Misrach has been presenting an exercise in which the participants are invited to write down their interpretations of a photograph that has been given three different titles—for example, a Charles Sheeler industrial-modernist photograph that is first introduced to them as “Industry,” then as “Five Hundred Tons of Airborne Pollutants a Year,” then as “Untitled.” Each title inflects the image differently, tells the viewer what to look for, what to ignore. “Untitled,” Misrach remarks, always means art, high and disassociated. Names are one of the most important and overlooked sites of visual art, guiding people as powerfully as place-names do. Titles are hypnotic suggestions, operating instructions, associational links, pedigrees, home addresses, credentials, and disclaimers. They constellate a work of art: the title changes the way the image is seen, and the two together describe something in the outside world, whether a place, person, event, idea, or value, differently than either alone. Titles undermine the idea that most visual art is purely visual.

Think how different Robert Motherwell’s abstract-expressionist paintings would look were they not titled
Homage to the Spanish Civil War
or how Barnett Newman’s
Stations of the Cross
would look without a title that refers not only to sequentiality but to suffering and impending apotheosis. Andy Warhol took the opposite tack, with titles that offered to siphon the lifeblood of content away:
Lavender Disaster
and
Saturday Disaster
pick at the scabs of formalism while seeming to follow in James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s footsteps—for the painting commonly known as
Whistler’s Mother
is in fact titled
Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: The Artist’s Mother
, a title requesting that viewers give more weight to composition than to content. On the other hand, Robert Rauschenberg’s famous
Erased de Kooning
is entirely dependent on its title to reveal the act behind the faintly inscribed piece of paper and thus give the piece its iconoclastic impact. Conceptual artists had fun with titles, making them either amusingly literal—Mel Bochner’s
Three Drymounted Photographs and One Diagram
, Ed Ruscha’s
Every Building on Sunset Strip
—or aggressively, mockingly instructive—John Baldessari’s painting titled and inscribed
Everything Is Purged from This Painting
but Art. No Ideas Have Entered This Work
. Titles tell us that this is not a janitor but a king we are looking at; that this landscape that could be anywhere is in fact somewhere history took place; that this still life was documented on a particular date.

Titles are operating instructions, telling us how the artist would like the work used, in what direction he or she imagines it can take us, and “Untitled” is as different from “Five Hundred Tons of Airborne Pollutants” as Monument Valley is different from Tse Bii’Nidzisigai. In recent decades, curators and photo-historians have been trying to make the photographers of the U.S. Geological Surveys of the 1870s into artists and their photographs into art. Theirs is an act not unlike Misrach’s exercise with the Sheeler photograph; they ask us to look at each picture not as, for example, “rock formation suggesting the validity of the catastrophic theory of geology” or “suitable place to bring the railroad through,” but as “untitled.” Though they are indeed often beautiful photographs taken by men with great visual acuity, to look at them this way is to forget that the camera, like the telescope, has many uses. Galileo’s first telescope was an instrument of political power; it was his second that was dedicated to celestial observation. The cameras of the U.S. Geological Surveys were instruments of national power, just as aerial photography was during World War II and satellite imaging often is nowadays.

The titles on Richard Misrach’s celestial photographs ask you to come back to earth, tugging against the boundless sublimity the visual matter itself offers, tethering it to earthly problems of meaning and political history. All these histories of names are part of his continuing investigation of both the formal vocabularies of landscape and photography and the political grammar of the American West. One could say of these photographs what Robert Rosenblum said of Mark Rothko’s radiant field paintings: “And ultimately, the basic configuration of Rothko’s abstract paintings finds its source in the great Romantics: in Turner, who similarly
achieved the dissolution of all matter into a silent, mystical luminosity; in Friedrich, who also placed the spectator before an abyss that provoked ultimate questions whose answers, without traditional religious faith and imagery, remained as uncertain as the questions themselves.” These photographs look like color field paintings, abstract expressionism, Turner’s skies, like painting with its claims to the subjective and the expressive, but as photographs they also can claim the documentary status Stieglitz disavowed in his photographs of clouds. Traditionally, abstract and sublime art invites the viewer to remain indefinitely in the realm of the beautiful, the visual, the emotional. The titles on these yank viewers over to the territories of conceptual and political art. Together, image and title draw up their own constellations—relationships between celestial and earthly names, between eternity and the exact time, between language and visual representation, and, as ever in Misrach’s work, between beauty and politics. This time, the questions are about place and politics too.