Railway Notes: A Bibliographical Essay for “Of Wandering Angels and Lost Landmarks” 


If books are landmarks and ideas angels, then what you’ll find below is the idiosyncratic trail that led me to “Of Wandering Angels and Lost Landmarks.” My deep gratitude to Brent Mathison, without whom none of this would have been written. Nick Triolo and Heather Swan lent me their sharp eyes at a critical moment. And my thanks to the entire Emergence crew, who have opened their home to my ideas.

Mathison’s full photographic portfolio from our Utah trip is available here.

Angels

There is a long tradition in English-language nature and environmental writing of the empirical, materially grounded essay. It is, perhaps, the predominant tradition in such writing, and it seeks to tell us something about the world that we didn't already know. Sometimes this is a delightful fact of natural history; at others, it’s an exposé of environmental destruction.

But there is another, minoritarian, though by no means minor, tradition: the existential essay. These are the ones less concerned with cataloging the world or haranguing us about it, then with what it means to live in it, and though they may also rely on the science so beloved of the more empirical works of nature writing, they draw more upon philosophy, art, and culture.

A stack of such existential books kept me company while I whiled away the nights writing “Of Wandering Angels and Lost Landmarks”: Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk (New York: Harper Perennial, 1982), including both the essay of that same name and her “Total Eclipse,” were constant companions, as was Barry Lopez’s “The Stone Horse” in Crossing Open Ground (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988). On landscape, wandering, and witnessing, I turned to W.G. Sebald: the wonderful trilogy put out by New Directions Press—Vertigo (New York: New Directions Press, 2001), The Emigrants (New York: New Directions Press, 1997), and The Rings of Saturn (New York: New Directions Press, 1979)—as well as Austerlitz (New York: The Modern Library, 2001). The Angel of History is from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” from Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), and on wandering, watching, and thinking, his The Arcades Project (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999) has been something of a trail map. Joan Didion’s “The White Album,” from a collection of the same name (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), and Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, from Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Walden; The Maine Woods; Cape Cod (New York: The Library of America, 1985) are never far from any thought I have, and I was pleased to find Estragon, Vladimir, and Wallace Stevens’s blackbird waiting for me at the Thousand Mile Tree.

Visions

Though I’ve been thinking about this essay since the mid-2000s, it really began in the summer of 2021 when I opened a package sent to me by Brent Mathison—a beautiful cyanotype. I knew when I saw it that Brent was the photographer who could finally make this essay work.

It’s a tricky thing: a joint project in which both words and pictures carry equal weight, do equal work, can stand on their own, but together create a wider, wilder final piece. In thinking about how to work shoulder-by-shoulder with a photographer, I learned from James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (New York: Houhgton Mifflin Company, 2001). Teju Cole’s Blind Spot (New York: Random House, 2017) helped me think through the resonant tension of word and picture. Sarah Sentilles’s Draw Your Weapons (New York: Random House, 2017) and Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (New York: Picador, 2016) were models of writing bewitched by pictures.

For about a decade now, I’ve been writing in bits and pieces about what I’ve been calling the ecology of vision. The clearest articulation I’ve published was for Places Journal, and I won’t repeat it here other than a quick gloss. Many of us treat pictures as if they’re alive. What happens if we, writers and critics, extend that treatment into a practice that we maintain in our work? One outcome of doing so is that we can start to see pictures as species in a wider ecology, which is to say, we can understand them as beings that interact, influence, and socialize with each other, as well as with us. Susan Sontag, John Berger, and, especially, WJT Mitchell are the thinkers who have most influenced my understanding of vision as ecological.

I realized, in writing “Of Wandering Angels and Lost Landmarks,” that there’s a parallel between the ecology of vision and the philosopher Timothy Morton’s darkly ecological version of Object Oriented Ontology, in which he also treats things as alive—or at least as exhibiting the traits and desires that we normally ascribe to the living. If things are alive, then they have a call upon us, and we an ethical obligation toward them. Perhaps ecological citizenship means attuning ourselves not just to the other lives around us, but to other things as well. Perhaps we can be drawn half-way across the country and a century-and-a-half into the past by a tree, a railroad, and a photograph.

Morton is prolific; I’ve relied on his Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2013), and Being Ecological (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018).

Landmarks

Eadweard Muybridge is endlessly fascinating. He was born Edward Muggeridge, in England, and only became Eadweard Muybridge, of California, after a handful of name changes and thousands of miles of travel. He invented the motion picture. He was an inventor who revolutionized photographic equipment. He mastered the art of photographic clouds and reflections. He killed his wife’s lover. He traveled through the western hemisphere photographing Native peoples and rich people’s homes.

Though Muybridge is not the main character in “Of Wandering Angels and Lost Landmarks,” he is the focus of a host of other biographies, chief among them Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003), the best critical, literary, and cultural biography of Muybridge in existence. One of the pleasures of writing my essay was revisiting River of Shadows for another read-through.

I’ve also drawn upon Mary V. Jessup Hood and Robert Bartlett Haas, “Eadweard Muybridge’s Yosemite Valley Photographs, 1867 – 1872,” California Historical Society Quarterly, 42, 1 (March, 1963): 5 – 26, Kevin MacDonnell, Eadweard Muybridge: The Man who Invented the Moving Picture (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), Anita Venture Mozley, Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford Years, 1872-1882 (Palo Alto: Department of Art, Stanford University, 1972), Gordon Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975), Robert Bartlett Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), Paul Hill, Eadweard Muybridge (New York: Phaidon Press Inc., 2001), Stephen Hebert, Eadweard Muybridge: The Kingston Museum Bequest (Hastings: The Projection Box, 2004), Phillip Prodger, Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), Brain Clegg, The Man Who Stopped Time: The Illuminating Story of Eadweard Muybridge—Pioneer Photographer, Father of the Motion Picture, Murderer (Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2007), as well as Arthur P. Shimamura’s, ground-breaking study, “Muybridge in Motion: Travels in Art, Psychology, and Neurology," The History of Photography 26, 4 (Winter, 2002): 341-350, which argues that Muybridge’s violence and artistic brilliance may have been due, in part, to a traumatic brain injury he suffered when he was flung from stagecoach in Texas. Serious Muybridgeans (or those who appreciate photobooks) will want to pick up Philip Brookman’s edited volume, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2010), which contains 194 plates and an enormous bibliography.

There hasn’t been much interest in Muybridge’s railroad stereos, and fixing the date of his visit to the Thousand Mile Tree has been a challenge. Solnit avoids the stereos completely; Brookman deals with them only glancingly, but pins the date as 1869 (actually, Brookman says Muybridge was “beginning work” on the project that would bring him to the Weber Valley in 1869) without citation. And Haas says that Muybridge made the photos sometime between 1867 and 1873. Googling will get you a whole range of dates, between 1868 (which is obviously wrong, because construction wasn’t complete until 1869) and 1874, or even later, from various galleries and museums. Here’s why I think 1873 is the best date:

1.     Stephen Herbert, who runs an exhaustive online timeline of Muybridge’s life and is well respected as a Muybridge expert, lists 1873.

2.     The single best piece of evidence appears in a catalog of stereoscopic views from June, 1873 published by Bradley & Rulofson (the producers and distributors of Muybridge’s work beginning in 1873): “Among his [Muybridge’s] projected trips this season for a series of views…is one along the line of the Transcontinental Railroad.” I haven’t been able to locate a digitized version of the Catalog, but the part in question is reprinted in Hood and Haas, “Eadweard Muybridge’s Yosemite Valley Photographs,” 23.

3.     Two of the three stereoviews that I focus on in this essay (820 and 821) are imprinted with Bradley & Rulofson’s name, and Muybridge did not work with them before 1873.

I’m pinning the season of Muybridge’s trip to the late fall because the stereoviews show leafless trees, and if we accept Bradley & Rulofson’s statement from June 1873, then the trip would have had to happen in the autumn.

If you’re interested in seeing Muybridge’s stereographic triptych of the Thousand Mile Tree:

The most complete set of Muybridge’s stereographic work, which extends far beyond his railroad photography, is the Bancroft Library’s holdings, which, thankfully, have been digitized. The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum also has extensive railroad holdings, which have also been digitized.

If you’re interested in seeing more of Muybridge’s photography, this collaborative project, hosted by the Kingston Museum and Kingston University (Muybridge was born in Kingston upon Thames) is a great overview. Muybridge is mostly remembered for his Animal Locomotion (1887) project, which was undertaken at the University of Pennsylvania. Some of the 784 plates are available here. One of the most technically stunning of Muybridge’s photographs, Panorama of San Francisco from California-Street Hill (1878), has been digitized by Stanford. The Smithsonian American Art Museum has a number of the landscapes he made during his travels through Central America in 1875. The California Historical Society has digitized Muybridge’s photographs from the 1873 Modoc War in California. A number of Muybridge’s 1872 photos of the Yosemite Valley are here.

I have written extensively about the cultural and intellectual history of the US in the post-Civil War United States (as well as about another photographer, A.J. Russell, who also made beautiful photos of the thousand mile tree) in my book, This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018). I have also written extensively about the cultural history of trees in the nineteenth-century US, both in my book, but also in “Reading Tree in Nature's Nation: Toward a Field Guide to Sylvan Literacy in the Nineteenth-Century United States.” The American Historical Review 121, 4 (2016): 1114-1140. Rather than reproduce a long list of influential works here, I’ll just mention three that have shaped my understanding of the era: Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), David E. Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), and Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York: Viking, 2006).

For the history of the Wandering Jew, I’ve leaned heavily on George K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Providence: Brown University Press, 1965), Galit Hasan-Rokem and Alan Dundes, eds. The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) and Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

For the social history of hoboes and homelessness, I’ve found indispensable Kenneth L. Kusmer, Down and Out, on the Road: The Homeless in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003).

There are innumerable books on railroad history. I’ve relied on Richard J. Orsi, Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West 1850-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), Maury Kline, Union Pacific vol. I, 1862 - 1893 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and especially Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011). Paisley Rekdal’s West: A Translation—a multimedia reconsideration of the social and environmental effects of the transcontinental railroad rendered in poem, picture, and film—is an eloquent, multilingual retelling of the traditional, triumphal story of technological progress.

Years ago, long before I had heard of Muybridge or Benjamin or Cartaphilus, I rode the Greyhound overnight from Sacramento to Seattle. At about two in the morning I was awoken by a man who called himself Train Doc—the Tr.D (“because I have a Ph.D in hopping trains!”). He told me that he had ridden more than 600,000 miles of rail and kept me up for hours with his tales of hitching out. We entered Portland as dawn broke, and he invited me to hop a train with him: “I’ll get you to to Seattle,” he said. “Never mind the cops.” I didn’t know it then, but Train Doc is the living patron saint of bumming rides and he was offering to show me how to ride the rails…but I was young, thought the world was secure, and stayed on the road.

This essay is for all the wandering angels.