A passage I love from Sarah Gridley’s Loom:

“…..black plumes, anonymous,

not flying but gently bouncing, not human, but drawing

across the imaginal some flapping, some softly

figuring line, some extended sense of touch,

or tact…”

This book, The Life of Plants by Emanuele Coccia, sounds like a welcome expansion. An excerpt from Ania Soliman’s intriguing review:

“Long before the Anthropocene period, it was plants that radically altered the Earth—the oxygen they emitted was a catastrophe of “pollution,” followed by a mass extinction of organisms unable to breathe the new air. We are part of the biomass that thrived in this changed environment, a biomass that plants constantly remake from the energy of the sun….

“Coccia views vegetative life not as an inert chemical dream from which we humans have woken up, but as the continuing basis of our ability to reason. The seed is a form of reason because, like the DNA it contains, it carries with it the potential for analysis and a plan of action. The root is a form of reason because it is analogous to the brain.”

Last month, the first transcontinental railroad that spanned North America turned 150. It’s a landmark in time that was also a literal landmark. Along with the anniversaries this year of Stonewall, Woodstock, the moon landing, and many other pivotal events (where I live, Hurricane Camille is getting some well-deserved attention), that other ’69 reaches across time with its tidings of a mighty imperial project, fulfilled.

I’ve been fascinated for a long time by the optics of the two steam engines head-to-head on the freshly laid tracks at Promontory, Utah. I love the story of the golden spike connected to a telegraph line that translated the motion of a hammer directly into a message of completion, listened for in faraway cities. (Although check out this complication–it didn’t really work as intended.) I love that the transcontinental railroad did not end at the Pacific coast, but was a project defined by two opposing lines of motion, one originating in the west, the other in the east.

The history of western expansion is tangled up with the history of photography in all kinds of interesting ways (see here for some more on that). Photography glorified and invited, and in some cases recorded what was being replaced and erased in the West, but it was primarily an agent of imperial expansion. Lines of sight, lines of force: the power of the gaze. A machine that sees for you can break open a continent.