Watkins, after "Chaos"

.

Lassen Peak in California, viewed from "Chaos": from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)

...So I lay awake in the dark thinking of Carleton

Watkins, blind, agéd, his mind slowly deteriorating in the State

Hospital for the Insane at Napa -- alone,

destitute, forsaken -- his wife, younger, once his assistant, having

now taken to referring to herself as his "widow"

for convenience -- the man who had invented the mammoth camera,

who had made the world aware of Yosemite Valley,

ascended the Whitney Glacier, explored the Columbia River Gorge,

given the surging power of nature at The Geysers

image life -- imagining Watkins' broken

consciousness adrift and wandering amid an endless flow of broken

images -- Shasta floating as an aethereal cloudlike

presence in the clear thin-air distance, towering, lifting

the mind to the sky -- the shattered mirror bits

of a flood of broken glass-plate memory

negatives -- the jagged night, tectonic, slowly

passing in the lamentation-drenched

ward -- a colloidal spill of illumination pooling

beneath the threshold of the visible, spilling

in from the yellowed corridor walls -- outcries

of inmates in isolation, unanswered -- the peak of Lassen

as seen from the great crack'd nevadite sea of "Chaos" crags

upon whose pyroclastic waves the untethered

mind now moves beyond present time across the blur of a vanished

past in the fractured half-light, rocking --

Mount Shasta and Whitney Glacier in California, seen from the crater (Shastina): from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)

Mount Shasta and Shastina (crater) with the Whitney Glacier between: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)

Eastern slopes of Mount Shasta in California: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)

Mount Shasta in California: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)

Mount Shasta: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)

Mount Shasta in California, viewed from Sheep Rock, 15 miles distant: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)

Northwest slopes of Mount Shasta, viewed from Shasta Valley in California: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)

View from Shasta Valley, California: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)







Summit of the Sierras from Round Top, Sierra Nevadas. View from Round Top. Cloud scene looking east from Azimuth. Vertical wall just west of Azimuth in foreground. Blue Lakes on right: 1879 (Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University)

Indian Village at the Head of the Dalles, Columbia River, Oregon: 1884-1885 (Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University)

California geysers (alternative title: Devil's Canyon, geysers, looking down. Sonoma County, California. Seated figure in lower left of the photo may be Watkins himself: from the series Landmarks of Yosemite National Park and Pacific Coast views, California, c. 1865; image restoration by trialsanderrors, 2010 (Library of Congress)

Half Dome, Yosemite Valley, California: from the series Landmarks of Yosemite National Park and Pacific Coast views, California, c. 1865; image restoration by trialsanderrors, 2010 (Library of Congress)

Lassen Peak in California: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)

Block of nevadite on "Chaos" in California: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)

Lassen Peak and "Chaos" in California. Nevadite flow: from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)

Photos by Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916)