On the Grand Canyon Reflectoscope
I’ll make a tour – and, then, I’ll write it. You know full well what my pen can do. I’ll prose it here, verse it there. And picturesque it everywhere.
William Comb (1812) – The Tour of Dr. Syntax: In Search of the Picturesque
1.
In my essay on the Grand Canyon, Below the Rim, posted on this site, I comment on the remarkable images gracing the last chapter of Powell’s The Exploration of the Colorado and Its Canyons. Those drawings were originally part of Powell’s report to the Smithsonian printed as the final chapter of his book. The airy lucidity of those pictures, rendered in a linear calligraphic style, is extraordinary. The pictures breathe with the clear, thin air of the great plateaus of the West and, despite their small size, they are epic in proportion. Furthermore, the pictures in the final chapter, and those appended as two-page spreads at the end of the book, are devised and printed in a very different style than the gloomy/sublime shadow that darkens the other prints in the book – if you study these engravings closely, you can see that they are textured by minute parallel lines that supply gradations of tone to the images, but, also, render them somewhat grim, and, even, ghastly, in aspect.
(The publication history of Powell’s adventures is rather complex. Powell didn’t want to write an account of the river passage because he seems to have feared that it would be self-aggrandizing and accounted as a mere “adventure” story. Powell’s avowed intentions in undertaking the dangerous tour of the canyons were “scientific”. However, he became enmeshed in conflict with his patrons at the Smithsonian Institute – the expedition had been expensive and the Institute was balking at reimbursing him for his very significant expenses. At a loss with respect to recouping his costs, Powell contracted with Scribner’s Magazine, agreeing to write four articles that were to be illustrated by 12 engravings produced by Powell with another $2000, a huge sum in those days, allocated by the publisher as a budget for the acquisition of additional engraved illustrations to be made from photographs the explorer had made in the gorge during the 1871 trip. There was some pressure to get the story printed quickly – during the second voyage down the river in 1871, a commercial photographer named Beaman was one of the expedition members. Beaman was a difficult fellow and was fired, or, perhaps, quit the expedition at Kanab. Disgruntled, Beaman wrote the first account of the traverse of the canyons, printed in Appleton’s Journal in 1874 – this was before the more circumspect Powell had written his report. Beaman was threatening to write a book and, so, Powell had to act quickly. After the publication in Scribner’s, Powell made his formal report to the Director of the Smithsonian. By contract, the engravings produced for the four-part series in the magazine reverted to Powell so that he could publish a book using those images. The first edition of the book was issued by the Government Printing Office in 1875. A subsequent edition, for which Powell wrote a witty and moving preface, was published by Flood and Vincent in 1895. Powell remarks that during his first trip down the river, he was presumed dead and many obituaries were printed: “I was rather flattered by the high esteem in which I was held by the People of the United States” adding – “In my supposed death, I had attained to a glory which I feel my continued life has not fully vindicated.”)
At the Desert Overlook, Mary Colter’s Tower contains several semi-silvered mirrors that she calls “Reflectoscopes”. The mirrors are opposite windows in the heavy masonry walls of the tower and, at first, glance seem to be rectangular black panels, obsidian-colored and glinting obscurely in the light. Closer inspection shows that each mirror holds within its frame an image of the canyon, dimmed to be sure, but complete and more accurate that what the eye can see. Somehow, the reflection of the canyon’s fissured physiognomy is more “visible” than the vast, intimidating landscape of the gorge as viewed from the lookout. The “Reflectoscope” is described on an adjacent hand-lettered sign (painted by Mary Colter herself) as an artistic device used by professional painters as a guide to rendered the canyon – the image on the glass can be traced to provide a true, if abstracted, outline of the gorge.
This mirror is a version of an optical device called a “Claude Glass” (or, sometimes, a “Grey Mirror.” The “Claude Glass” was a slightly convex mirror clasped in a frame that could be opened and, then, held up to the landscape to engender a “poetic” reflection of the scene. Paradoxically, the landscape admirer using the “Claude Glass” stood with his or her back to the actual view. Often, but not always, these glasses were smoked or tinted in sepia so that the landscape appeared as a sort of monochrome grisaille – the idea was to soften the landscape’s aspect into the “picturesque”, an aesthetic category important during the 18th century when the use of these devices was in vogue. An actual cataract or escarpment of slippery rock was both beautiful and terrifying – that is, “sublime.” The “Claude Glass” refined and framed the landscape into something more manageable, a view that could be characterized as “charming” or “picturesque”.
In practice, the “Claude Glass” was used by bumbling tourists, seeking to frame effects similar to the landscapes of the great Claude Lorrain (hence the appellation), sensitive folk who stood with their back to the view and, in fact, adjusting the scene reflected, staggered backward. Not a few such tourists fell into ditches, or slipped off the path into the mud or were menaced by bulls that they had offended in their ass-backward peregrinations. Indeed, the satiric poem cited at the head of this essay, Comb’s The Travels of Dr. Syntax is replete with images of benighted travelers stumbling into peril while brandishing their “Claude Glasses.” One early user of the “Claude Glass” fell backward into a hole and broke “his knuckles’, but, nonetheless, remained outdoors until sunset adorned the peaks of the Lake Country. It was particularly charming to see the sun rise or set, its rays reduced to gentle and serene radiance by the black mirror.
Although once ubiquitous, the “Claude Glass” became unfashionable around the time that actual cameras (and the camera lucida) became available. Ruskin denounced the mirrors as falsifying nature, particularly with respect to the subtle tones and gradations in color and light that a landscape artist must faithfully record. Like the passenger pigeon, the “Claude Glass” became extinct. Today, they are very rare and examples can be expensive if the owner or auctioneer knows what the small convex mirror, set in a compact, and designed to be hand-held, really is. (Sometimes, people acquire them at bargain prices if the owner simply mistakes the thing for a badly damaged hand-mirror, a common misperception.) Even large museums and collections of optical devices don’t own these “grey mirrors” – it is said that there are no artifacts of this kind in any French or German museums.
The use of a “Claude Glass” at the Grand Canyon could certainly be lethal. Adjusting the mirror-view, distracted while walking backward, is not recommended at a site where there are sheer drops of two-thousand feet. As if vaguely recalling the dangers associated with deploying a “Claude Glass”, Mary Colter erected several fixed black mirrors within the safe enclosure of her faux Indian Tower, suggesting that tourists view the sublime gorge from within the safety of the kiva basement in her desert overlook tower.
I am convinced, although I can not prove this, that Major Powell had a “Claude Glass” with him on the expedition down the Colorado. I believe that the beautifully precise curvilinear illustrations in the last chapter of the book are, in effect, field notes that were traced from images of the canyon reflected in such a darkened mirror. Indeed, I don’t think there’s really any other way these images could have been made with such grace and apparent accuracy, the vast spectacle of the canyon reduced to an exquisite linear abstraction of itself.
2.
One of the beautiful and profound images in Powell’s book shows the “Great Unconformity” in the strata at the Canyon. In fact, this is the last picture in the volume, rendered, I think, by the use of some kind of optical device akin to “Claude Mirror”. I have described this geological phenomenon at some length in the essay on the Grand Canyon, Below the Rim, that is elsewhere posted on this site.
In simple terms, “The Uncomformity” is an absence of geological strata representing five-hundred to seven-hundred million years in the rock layers exhibited in the canyon walls. During this period of time, the earth was covered with shallow seas and the sediments from those emense bodies of water were soft, prone to erosion, and, during periods of uplift and mountain building, simply worn away. Thus, the modern sedimentary shales, limestones, and sandstones at the canyon rest upon a primordial bedrock of gnarled metamorphic rock – the so-called Vishnu schist as well as the marbles and gneiss of the inner gorge.
The “Great Uncomformity” haunts me because it seems a reflection, although in a “grey mirror”, of certain aspects of memory. I can recall vividly many episodes from my childhood, although compressed and contorted by the pressure of intervening years, but, nonetheless, resilient and perdurable. And, of course, the past months, the last couple years, are still relatively present to me, more or less, vibrant in the account of my memory. But intervening between my first year or two as a lawyer and the events of the last decade, let us say, there is a great gulf where time has wholly eroded most of my memories – in that empty range of years, I recall a few vivid fights, an illness or two, some family vacations and several horrific trials that I lost, but, for the most part. it is all gone, a “great unconformity” of lost time, events and adventures and friendships, ten-thousand days all vanished as if they never existed in the first place. It frightens me to think that the memories of most of my life have eroded until almost nothing remains. But, in the end, I know, nothing will remain.
3.
Characteristically, Mary Colter, who was not well-educated, got things wrong. A “Reflectoscope” was a kind of magic lantern device, a projector that cast images as condensed on an interior sheet of reflective tin or brass. In fact, the semi-silvered black mirrors at her tower at Desert Overlook are “Claude Glasses” or “Grey Mirrors.”
Miss Colter also was a little shaky with respect to her grammar, spelling, and punctuation on her hand-lettered signs at Desert Overlook. Eighty years ago, she painted a large sign for Desert Outlook, written in neat yellow letters on a blue background. The sign stands shoulder high and is mounted in a very heavy block of old, burnished-looking wood. Describing some of the painted emblems within the tower, Mary Colter tells us that she adapted the designs from insignia used in “womens’ rituals” of the Hopi, Navajo, and Zuni. Needless to say, the possessive apostrophe is located incorrectly in the phrase. Probably, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have noticed the error and simply ignored it.
Not so, Jeff Michael Deck and Benjamin Douglas Herson, two grammar vigilantes that toured the park in 2008. Deck and Herson, then 28-year old graduates of Dartmouth, styled themselves as the founding members of TEAL – that is, Typo Eradication Advancement League. During 2008, the two men embarked on a Kerouac-style road trip, armed with white-out and indelible magic markers. Their objective was to correct grammatical solecisms in signs located in public places – something that they did with a relish. Arriving at the Grand Canyon, they observed that “womens’ spaces” was an egregious error. And, so acting covertly, they whited-out the apostrophe in the wrong location in the phrase and marked it correctly with a permanent and indelible black magic marker. Then, as is the custom with young people, they went on their lap-top computers and issued a proclamation as to their vigilante activities in the National Park. They further observed that Mary Colter had also misspelled “immense” as “emense”, a travesty painful to both of them, but something that they didn’t have the time to correct. As one might expect, Internet snitches immediately ratted-out the vigilante duo and, the next thing they knew, a summons hailed them to appear before the Federal District Judge in Flagstaff, Arizona. They made the trip, were chastised by the Judge for vandalizing a historic national park sign, and, then, fined $3025, the cost of repairing Mary Colter’s painstakingly (if ineptly) lettered sign. To add insult to injury, the fine was applied to work on the sign that actually restored the original error. I checked a recent photograph of the sign taken last year and it mentions “womens’ rituals” and still describes the canyon as “emense.”
There’s a moral hidden here somewhere, but I’m not quite sure what it is.
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