Saltwork

Pam and I went tonight to the opening of a show of cyanotypes and daguerreotypes by our friend Alyssa Salomon. On the walk there, we started talking about technology and wonder. I’d heard a piece on Radio Lab about EMI, a computer algorithm that analyzes a composer’s work—say, Bach—and then writes the unwritten piece, Emi Bach. Sometimes the results are stilted, but sometimes they are genuinely moving, engendering in the listener the same kinds of emotions that arise with the music of the flesh and blood Bach. We so often think of wonder as the ultra-human, as humanism in the extreme, so this kind of a program is disconcerting to say the least. (It’s possible to try to bring the human back into the picture by noting that it was a person who created EMI, but I think that misses the point.)

But I think we need to be much more thoughtful about technology and wonder, not opposing them but rather looking for ways that they work together. Here’s what Alyssa had to say about her show, called Saltwork:

Light sensitive salts produce photographs. Nearly alchemy, these salts convert light energy into physical matter. Silver salts formed with bromine and iodine, enhanced with gold, generate images on a daguerreotype plate. Iron salts on paper yield deep blue cyanotypes. Intellectually, I understand these chemistries. I am a saltworker. I concoct the formulas in my studio; employ them to retell knowledge and experience. Yet every time, their results emerge wondrous.

Is that the crucial wonder-gap, between the understandable science and the wondrous results? Where does she fit in, the artist/alchemist (who not coincidentally was the first person to tell me about the Museum of Jurassic Technology)?

On a different note, one of the things I think about when I look at Alyssa’s daguerreotypes is the difference between the way I see them and the way a nineteenth-century viewer would have seen them. Then, the wonder would have come from the new possibilities of affixing an image. (Did photography do to painting what EMI does to composing?) But now, we come to that same process belatedly: this is not something new, but something old, so that it is less the novelty than the archaic quality that fascinates me. That, and the fact that these books are hovering backward in their blue depth.

Wit and Judgment

I’ve been reading Lawrence Weschler’s Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences, in which he puts images unexpectedly side by side: a photograph of an ironworker at the World Trade Center next to Rodin’s Adam, George de La Tour’s Newborn Child next to Matisse’s Study of a Woman and Hannah Wilke’s Self Portrait. There’s something indisputably wonder-ful about all these surprises: this aha feeling that hits when we look at Velasquez next to Jeffrey Barbee and see similarities that we’ve never thought about before.

It makes me think about the distinction John Locke makes between wit and judgment:

Men who have a great deal of wit and prompt memories, have not always the clearest judgment, or deepest reason. For wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another. This is a way of proceeding quite contrary to metaphor and allusion wherein, for the most part, lies that entertainment and pleasantry of wit which strikes so lively on the fancy, and is therefore so acceptable to all people.’

The eighteenth century is supposed to be the great century of wit, but it’s also a century that suspected wit : Addison distinguishes true wit from false wit in Spectator 62, and Johnson disapproves of the metaphysicals’ propensity of yoking disparate ideas together with violence. To compare love to a compass, as Donne did, was to pull together two things that Johnson thought should stay separated.

A lot of academic work goes into judgment: learning how to distinguish ideas one from the other. But a lot of wonder, by contrast, comes in seeing the connections that others have overlooked. It’s the reason that interdisciplinary work is often the most exciting, because there a writer is making connections that are “agreeable to the fancy.” I wonder if it’s also the reason that academic specialization can kill wonder: because we get better and better and making distinctions (it’s not uncommon, after all, to be “misled by similitude”), and worse at making unexpected connections. But the whole nature of metaphor is making connections. I’d love to read Weschler’s book as an introduction to poetic metaphor.