Looks like a Chuck Close of Albert Einstein, yes?  Well, its not–its just a heavily pixilated enlargement of Einstein’s son, Hans Albert Einstein, who at age 3 or 4 looks pretty much like his father, very much so, actually. 

The Mona Lisa smile is another missing–discarded–piece of Einstein’s life.  It belongs to his first wife, Mileva Maric.  She was by most accounts an accomplished mathematician, exceptionally intelligent, and a person of her own.  She nearly succeeded in the males’ world of mathematics, but didn’t .Few women did at that time in history–or at least few succeeded under their own name.  There’s a lively debate among some that Mileva was instrumental in the development of the special theory of relativity (among other things) developed by Albert in 1904/5 and published in the Annalen der Physik in the annus mirabilis of 1905.  Personally I doubt that she contributed significantly to the theoretical composition of the theory; I haven’t much of a doubt that she contributed materially to its development, being an intelligent and capable foil/sounding board/conversant with her husband.  As anyone who is a partner in a relationship of two intelligent people realizes, there is a lot of back and forth going on in the development and creation of ideas.  I don’t have any doubt that something like that went on here.

But Albert was done with her by 1914 or so, living basically apart until their official divorce in 1919..  He had minimal relations with Hans Albert.  Eduard developed schizophrenia in his 20’s and that was about it so far as his father was concerned–he was cared for by Mileva until her death in 1948 and then died in an institution in 1965.) And he was particularly done with his daughter Liserl, a baby that he made with Mileva. a girl who simply disappears.  She was born in 1901, and born in “secret”–though it was not a secret to her, or her mother.  She’s gone by 1902.  Then her parents manage to marry in 1903.  The next year Albert tries again at fatherhood witrh Hans Albert, but I think his attention span for children has a relatively short event horizon.  Eduard is born in 1910, but the development of his mental disorder divorces him from hi sfather for good.  It is simply not a pretty story. 

Einstein went on his personal life full of what I see as complications, abandonments, deceptions; living with all sorts of shadows, with a hollowness, there, somewhere. 

I don’t really care to think about Albert’s personal story, and I don’t read his flea-combed biographies I’m perfectly happy to just deal with the intellectual history of his life and be satisfied with that.  But there are days like today, when I think about people celebrating his personal life–as in his birthday–that I sense the emptiness, and wonder about Hans Albert, and Mileva, and Eduard, and the Lost Girl, Liserl.  I think that rather than celebrating Einstein’s personal milestones that we take a moment to remember the countable but countless lives like Mileva who are simply discarded, and that their lives meant as much to them as Einstein’s life meant to him. 

At least Mileva derves a gravestone.

Michele Zackheim wrote an interesting book on Lieserl, Einstein’s Daughter, if you’re interested. 

Albrecht Durer’s (1471-1528) drawing of a geometrical man was an amazing–startling, even–object to the early 16th century consciousness. His …Symmetria partium…humanorum corporum (1537) was a masterpiece, and a key piece of visionary thinking.

His Underwysung der Messung (“Treatise on Measuring”) written nearly 500 years ago (in 1525) set the stage for this next work–it is here that we find some of the most recognizable of
Durer’s illustrations of the instruments that he employed to do his perspective work.  Durer–so far as I can tell–created an orthographically rotating human figures in three-dimensional trapezoids, creating incredibly human-like non-human forms.  To the modern eye they look  like supra- or proto- or post-human, perhaps; mechanized, calculated, structural. His use of stereometry, the science of measuring volume, was adapted to this study of human form and the relationship between that and movement. 

They were in a sense a CAT scan.  And in this way the person in 1525, seeing this for the first time, could have been  experiencing something like the sensation of seeing an X-Ray for the first time in 1895 or a magnified flea in 1626, only the image wasn’t magnified nor was it an internal view–it did help in understanding perspective and motion. 

This was a new way of thinking about the body, challenging the god-grace and ubiquitous church-inspired revelation of how it worked.  This was not a necessarily easy time in which to picture humans in such a scientific way.  (In 1553 the physician and theological scholar Michael Severtus would be burned at the stake for his views on the Trinity, Nicean Creed and other related things, though his undeniably revolutionary idea of cardiopulmonary circulation was in itself a direct challenge to church teachings).

Durer’s innovation accommodated empirical observation and allowed for proportional change.  Its importance in relational drawing, anatomical and  technical, cannot be understated, which I think trumped it as a subversive agent to orthodoxy.

Erhard Schoen  (1491-1542)  who was one of the most prolific woodcut illustrators in Europe during this period with more than 116 books to his credit, produced Unnderweissung der proportzion unnd stellung der possen, liegent und stehent…, Norenberg 1542 followed Durer showing that the human form was reducible to connected but discrete Euclidean solids, and thereby was a knowable entity. (It is interesting to footnote here that this work came after a period of a dozen or so years in which Schoen produced many heavily anti-Catholic cartoons, broadsides and illustrations.) 

Close on the heels of Durer was the work of Georg Bauer  (also known as Agricola, 1494-1555) whose De re metallica Liber XII (“12 Books on the Subject of Metals”) in 1556.  This work by Agricola (recognized as one of the founding fathers of a number of disciplines–mining geology and metallurgy, mineralogy, structural geology, and paleontology) was actually more concerned with mining and minerals than the title implies.  It was here, again, that the illustrations were crucial and revolutionary—his book was a chief resource in mining for hundreds of years, due chiefly for its clear and precise how-to illustrations. 

Was it really Jan van Eyck and not J.C. Maxwell who produced the first color photograph?  Van Eyck’s after all is hanging up in Bruges in the Groeninge Museum, and Maxwell’s, well, Maxwell’s dissipated in about half an hour, leaving only an historical trace.  The problem of course is that Van Eyck’s oil (Virgin of the Canon  van der Paele) was done 403 years before the Daguerre invention (building of course on the work of others, notably Niepce), so it really doesn’t count because it really doesn’t exist.  His work though *does* exist, but not as a photo—it was, is, a painting, finished in 1436, and it stands in my mind as looking so much like a perfect capturing of a moment that it seems a (luscious) snapshot. 

In her book Color and Meaning, Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (1992), Marcia Hall makes the point (on page 69) that it is the lighting in this painting that makes it so extraordinary—and differentiates it entirely from the predictable light or “stage illumination of the Italians”.  Its an excellent point.  The light source in the painting is emanates as though it were a half-hour before sunset in Santa Fe; or here, in Asheville, when there is a very low and nearly complete cloud ceiling and the sun just manages just before sunset to peek through between the mountains and the cloud layers to blaze its extraordinary, horizontal-like brilliance making everything and anything that reflects that light into a work of private art. The figures in this painting by Van Eyck reflect a softer version of that light in such a manner—they are sharply illuminated, luminous, in all of their very human glory and frailty.  We have sharp relief, great detail, deep shadow—and much of that is missing in Italy at this time.

The photo parts come in here:  the characters are caught in the middle of some very small, obscure action, and the smallness of their movements are captured perfectly

Even though they are emotive of course the faces of the great Masaccio are relatively plain; Gozzoli, Fra Lippi, the
magnificent Fra Angelico, Pisanello, Ghirlandaio, della Francesca, Veneziano, di Credi,. Perugino, and even the emotive and colorful Rafael, all working in about the same decades as van Eyck, simply do not give this anatomical expressiveness to the faces of their subjects.

So the extreme light and the detail in the faces gives the van Eyck this fantastical quality—on the other hand the perspective and the proportions of the characters in relation to the objects in the room and the room itself are off, secondary, not important—this too in sharp contrast to the great inventors, re0-discovers, innovators of the scientific perspective.  (This homage belongs to a slightly earlier time, to Giotto and Uccello, but their work is just a bit to early for discussion with van Eyck.)  Marcia Hall goes on in her appraisal about the way in which van Eyck applied his color (“binding his pigments in a drying oil”) to give his subjects their incredible color depth, and this of course is a major element in understanding the picture (coming as it does from a stone-cold expert). 

What I’m thinking now, the aspect that is giving this painting its “photographic” quality, its supra-realistic event, is this new use o flight, new angle, with the immersion of anatomical detail and the “different”, Northern, perspective. 

This is a very, overly, simple observation and simplification, but I think in general that it is true.

It is odd to think among the great classifiers of nature, including even the lofty-namer Aristotle, that clouds were not scientifically classified until the early 19th century.   Here they are, just about the biggest thing we have as earthlings that are gigantic and close to us, and nobody offered a good classifications scheme until 200-odd years ago—a pretty slim margin of time  in the terms of recorded human history. 

Clouds are of course problematic, what with floating around and all—but if you didn’t already know the relative newness of their recognizable names isn’t it shocking to learn this bit of history? For the most part I think clouds must have been thought as being too transient, changeable, whimsical, wispy, to be given proper names.   The great scientist and classifier Lamarck tried to do so in his  Annuaire Méteorologique of 1802, and really is the first to try this, but his ideas weren’t terribly good (especially compared to the rest of his work), and it seems as though he left his best thinking effort on clouds at home.  For example, he gave us Hazy, dappled, massed, broom-like and grouped clouds as classifications (in French, respectively, en forme de voile, pommelés, attroupés,  en balayeurs and groupés).  They seem quite “French” to me, but largely outside the scope of being useful. 

It was the English pharmacist and chemist Luke Howard who in 1803 gave a greater bit of thought to structuring cloud names, classifying them according to size and shape and giving them Latin names—and this forms the basis of our naming clouds to this day.  Howard was perhaps the first, greatest, meteorologist, producing On the Modification of Clouds, (in which he describes his naming system, the “modification” part actually meaning classifying rather than changing),  The Climate of London, and the first textbook on weather,  Seven Lectures on Meteorology.  Howard’s system was expanded in 1887 by Abercromby and Hildebrandsson, who further classified clouds by height above ground as well as by appearance (and utilizing Howard’s naming system). 

Howard began his system by identifying three basic shapes to clouds: heaps, layers, and curls.  Heaps of separated cloud  masses with flat bottoms and bulbous, splayed, tops, which he called cumulus, which is Latin for heap; the Latin stratus was applied to clouds in layers which were much wider than they were thick; and again to Latin for cirrus, which called out the wispy curls of clouds.  (Rain clouds were given the Latin nimbus, for rain, and so on.) 

It is interesting and romantic to think of Howard being moved in his love of clouds as many Brits and Europeans were in the Volcanic Year of 1783 by the enormous eruptions of the Eldeyjar (Iceland) and Asama Yama (Japan) volcanoes—the force of their eruptions caused enormous changes in the skies (especially in Europe), creating vast sky-borne tapestries (the “Great Fogg” in England) and for such extended periods of time that it would have been impossible for the scientifically-minded Howard not to see them. 

Similar, in a way, to clouds is the snow crystal (snowflake)—they change forms in their lives from sky to ground, and may well disappear on contact with a warm surface.  Of course unlike clouds they may fall and be captured, kept even, though the ability to actually perform some sort of scientific something with them didn’t occur until 400 years ago, which means that snowflakes passed in and out of human existence being very simply named (in most languages) as a mass group, and not classified at all.

Johannes Kepler thought very deeply in In 1611 publishing a short treatise called On the Six-Cornered Snowflake, thinking that perhaps their (mistaken) six-cornered symmetry revealed something much deeper about the basis of nature and the universe. The 26-year-old  Robert Hooke seems to be recognized as the first to throw the snowflake under a microscope, publishing drawings of them and just about everything else that he saw in his monumental (and tall, being 13-inches tall) Micrographia (1665)–the first truly scientific book of modern times.  The largest of the large images was saved for the flea, showing the unsuspecting public the great and beautiful nature of what seemed like a fantastical beast (under magnification).  Snowflakes appeared in the book, revealed in their intricate and seemingly-symmetrical nature.  Fantastic, unimagined images. This aside, he seems to have, um, borrowed these images from an earlier work, Thomas Bartholin’s  De Nivus usu Medico Observationes Varieae, 1661.  But so it goes. 
 

The Galileo of the snowflake was Wilson Bentley (1865-1931), an autodidact Vermont farmer, seen by fellow hamlet-dwellers as odd and off, who figured out how to photographically and beautifully record the intricacies of the snow crystal world—no one had ever done this so dramatically, with such gorgeous results.  It really was as though he was able to record the heights of the mountains of the moon with a slender telescope in Pisa, 350 years earlier. The results of his decades of experience were published  in 1931 his book Snow Crystals, containing more than 2400 snow crystal images.  On the heals of Bentley’s accomplishments came the classically trained nuclear physicist Ukichiro Nakaya, who was truly the first person to apply a scientific classification to snowflakes, and who published his intrepidly-beautiful work in a 1954 book entitled Snow Crystals: Natural and Artificial.  His classification system of the various types of snowflakes would prove vastly more useful, interesting and appealing than that published by the 1951 the International Commission on Snow and Ice, and forms the basis of the discussion of snow crystals today—a classification system of a massively-occurring phenomenon that is younger than me. 

In 1982 Werner Herzog, in what may have been the culmination of a weirdly fashioned and irresistible death-wish effort, released a film that he wrote and directed:  Fitzcarraldo.  It is a spill-over big, magnificent film about a would-be ice-making rubber baron bringing an opera house into the trans-Andes, trying to make his way into the dense forest in a huge (320 tons) steamboat on the Amazon to stake a claim in exploiting previously un-leased lands filled with rubber trees  The problem faced by Fitzcarraldo (played by the probably-slightly-insane Klaus Kinski¹–just see Herzog’s 1972 Aguirre, Wrath of God and you’ll know what I mean) is that his path is blocked by unnavigable rapids–he can however reach his destination by hauling his very large ship up and over a mountain to get to a more pliant river and then to his goal.  Herzog actually does this for the film–no digital anything here^2,3–in what is one of the most glorious things I’ve ever seen in the movies.  He really does have native people clear a path up the side of a mountain, and they DO haul this ship up and over.  It is truly magnificent, especially seeing the boat moving slowly up a mountain as background to a sweating Fitz.  

The story is partially based upon the adventure of Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, who in 1890 attempted a similar feat, though with a much smaller vessel, and who also dismantled the craft to haul it overland. (Its not a bad idea, necessarily, to do this dismantling thing, especially if it has to be done and there’s no other way to do it. The North Vietnamese famously did the impossible by hauling artillery up through the jungle and up mountains to shockingly surround the French at Dien Bien Phu.) 

   The bigger and deeper back-story though is the effort–mainly by Elmer Corthell and James Eads–to build a combination railroad ship canal across the Tehuantepec isthmus in Nicaragua.  The idea of moving across Central America rather than taking the enormously long route around the tip of South America and up again is hundreds of years old.  The Corthell/Eads plan, begun in 1870’s and alive in the early ’80’s, was really the first feasible (and workable) initiative.

It would have been a gigantic undertaking, and even though it was much longer (130 miles or so)  than the more-favored Panama location for the canal, it seemed more workable as there would be less digging and no need for a lock/canal system as required at Panama. 

The French began a doomed attempt at conquering Panama shortly before this.  Ferdinand de Lesseps tried to build a canal in 1880, but the organization and general construction plan was truly inferior; also, the sanitary and medical conditions were terrible, with the French losing perhaps 22 thousand men in the failed process to disease (mainly malaria).  (The United States would lose 5,609 workers while building the Panama canal, on land granted as a payback for “helping” Panama release themselves from Columbia.)

The Corthell/Eads (who by the way was a master builder perhaps best known for his inspired masterpiece of a bridge at St. Louis) plan called for hauling the ships up and out of the water in a short canal and placing them on an enormous floating roundabout; the roundabout would then be raised, and the ship place on huge cradles borne upon vastly augmented railway lines.  Once on the cradle, the ship would be pulled and pushed by a team of four large locomotive teams which were in turn composed of two large engines.  Happily aboard, the ship would then be taken on the extended, expanded wide and augmented rail 130 miles overland and dumped into the Pacific.

It was evidently not a workable deal all the way around, though, as the U.S. decided on the new Panama to works its engineering miracle.

There is something pleasing though about the Ship Railway, though, something that appeals to the little bit of Mr. Herzog in me.  Perhaps it was the appraisal of the very stiff-lipped Sir Edward Reed–who was the former master engineer for the British navy and consultant to Eads—that makes it all so irresistible.  “It would be best to avoid a very high rate of speed” when hauling the massive ocean-going and heavily laden cargo ships.  Indeed.

Notes

1. The original actor in the Fitzcarraldo role was Jason Robards, who had to give the film up after about a third or so the way through as he came down with dysentery. Kinski came into the role after that, and the film was re-shot. 

2. There is a scene showing the steamboat being unmoored and sent down the rapids on its own–that is done with a model. So far as I know, that is the only bit of post production trickery for the film. 

3. There’s an interesting documentary of the film also released in 1982, Burden of Dreams.