He was now Edward Muybridge and his focus was sharp. He had caught landscapes and tribes in the darkness of his exposure. He had a reputation and his new name stuck to it like shit to a blanket.
He spent more and more time back in the cities, especially after he captured the great wastes of Alaska. Their cold loneliness prompted unwise warmth in his humanity and he decided to “settle down.”
Flora walked into his life like another dimension; it was the only time he lowered his defences and overpowering love had trampled all his apertures, calculations, and timings. It had shaken his terse tree of knowledge to its roots. His young wife, like new blood, warming and radiating every part of his ordered existence, bringing a joy that he could not own and for the first time had not wished to. The birth of his son had overwhelmed him with more feelings than he had been able to understand; a ball of life burnt and writhed inside him whenever he held the child in his bony hands. Then he found the letter proclaiming her love for another man and the whisper that the child might be his. Then Muybridge knew that they had only ever been deceitful diversions—things that were never meant to last, moments of deception to rob him of purpose. He should have stayed with the wilderness, instead of being tempted by the vain hopes of family and wealth: He knew that was what the London doctor would have advised. His love and his money had been squandered; he would never make that mistake again. He justified his weakness with the ill health and puerile wishes that all men have injected into them by their mothers; the belief that finding a good woman and making a home is a solid and resolute accomplishment of maturity. He had never truly felt the draw of that ambition, only its slender side effect of respectability. He had always been aware of his difference, and so had his mother, who doted on his younger brother.
But at least he had tried giving his thin, forlorn heart in trust to a wife, albeit a fat woman who had trampled it in the smeared bedsheets of her adultery. He had survived far worse than heartbreak in the wilderness, going beyond his guide’s wisdom, cutting trees away from untouched landscapes to construct the composition he desired. Compiling fierce light in the inverted world that was totally his. In the same cold passion he climbed the hill to the silver mine, calling his adversary out from a card game and into the fragrant landscape, cooling under the setting new moon.
“Good evening, Major Larkyns,” he had said to the man squinting in the doorway, trying to see who was speaking against the bright light. “My name is Edward Muybridge, and here is the answer to the letter you sent my wife.”
He had levelled the pistol at the philanderer’s chest and fired. Quick blood coughed into the bright, moving leaves of that October dusk; the victim staggered through the house and died in the back garden, hugging a tree. Muybridge walked behind him, apologising to the players, whose hands were frozen in disbelief.
He knew now what the good London surgeon already understood; he had warned that his injury would become inflamed by people, and it had. This would even be mentioned in court: how the lesions in his brain had opened, becoming red raw with her deception; her lies and faithlessness running like lava, hot salt, ammonia, tears; her fecund fluids pissing in his wound. He must close it forever and never let another finger his interior or violate the pristine bone closure of his vision. He was finished with proximity and all the cankers that grew in it.
He had resolved to never again be the person described in that courtroom: a “lost animal, vacant and mad.” People he knew—friends, neighbours, even servants—had told of his seizures; of incoherent jabbering, his eyes starting from his head, jaw hanging open; his dreadful appearance, haggard and shivering all over, a terrible paleness swallowing his humanity, while his breathing shrank to gasps and smelt rank and toothy. At one point in the trial, he was said to have sunk into such a fit, his countenance becoming so horrifying, that the clerk of the court had been obliged to restrain his furiously working hands and hide his hideous, contorting features beneath a handkerchief, while the jury left the room, some in tears, and the judge retired for thirty minutes, needing the consolation of a sturdy bourbon. Why they had told these lies he never knew, but it had somehow helped all to see his righteousness.
When he stepped free from the courthouse and into the cheering crowd, it had been a sanctified rebirth. Friends and strangers held him up, helped him walk limply home; after only a few steps, he had heard the white, death-faced voices of the singing circle and begun to understand the significance of the Ghost Dance. He slowed and twisted around, weak in the arms of his helpers, to look back at the crowd at the foot of the courthouse steps—they milled and revelled, picking their hats up from the dusty street where they had landed only moments before, a jubilant and temporary resting place after being cast into the air of his triumph.
Now that his wife was dead, the bastard child given to a home, he was free once more. Free to continue, and to never again allow such treacherous emotions to poison his will. When friends tried to update him on the growing child or on the striking resemblance to him that it had apparently begun to bear, he had cut them dead, severed them from his righteous mind. He moved again and again, photographing all he could, wandering into the deserts and high mountains without a whiff of Christ or Satan as companions.
Muybridge was becoming famous for his encyclopedic studies of animal movement, but also for his most popular invention, the zoopraxiscope—a mechanical tabletop precursor of cinematic motion. But it and its family of more and more sophisticated devices were mere toys in comparison to the new machine, a brass hydra of lenses, cogs, and light that no one had ever seen. This was not a passive projector of illusion or entertainment, but something far more disturbing and revolutionary, with an engaged conversation with light itself.
He had recognised, many years ago, what had been screaming at him from his archives of movement: His misdirection, up to that point, had been complete. The measured delineation that filled his life was a lie. Observation was not the primary function of photography, but a side effect of its true purpose. The constant gathering of pictures of life was only a harvesting of basic material. Deeper meaning lay within the next part of the process, a kernel waiting to give up its flavour after being savagely reworked: The camera was a collector not of light, but of time, and the time it cherished most was in the anticipation of death.
It could look between the seams of existence and sniff out an essence that was missed in the daily continuum. It fed on a spillage between worlds that was denied to common sight and ordinary men. He had first noticed it when making portraits of the defeated Modoc chieftains, all those years ago, though he saw it also in Guatemala and in some of the invalids who graced his movement portfolios. They had stared into life, and his camera, differently from other men. Their portraits sang against the world, their eyes threading through the viewer’s gaze.
There was an aura of nonvisible vibration in his glass slides, an effect that shimmered in the emotional eye but not in reality. It somehow transferred to his prints, so that while they depicted the noble or twisted sitter, framed in space, they also hummed a lucid resonance that slivered alongside the viewer’s subjective intelligence. Astoundingly, the effect was increased when the image was projected, rather than stained, onto paper.
The twelfth-generation zoopraxiscope was not like the rest. It was certainly not like the first four. He needed another name for it. Gull’s peripherscope kept floating to the surface, but he always banished it, not wanting a minor medical instrument to be seen as any kind of influence on his totally original concept.
No one would ever believe what it did, looking at its complex entanglement of lenses and shutters. They would expect more pretty pictures to dance on the wall yet would meet instead a rippled light that sliced the optic nerve into a whip of driving visions…
Muybridge was keen in his arrogance, sharp enough to know that such a statement, made publicly, would unbind his esteem and threaten his well-forged place in history. Those little minds that scratched at his achievements would make light work of his undoing, were they privy to such a discovery—but they would never be allowed to snatch away his triumph or his secret. He would let it seep out, after they were all rotted bones. Let others announce his genius, as Huxley had for Darwin, or as Ruskin had for Turner, men not yet born, men of the growing age who would recognise his enlightenment. He would save his strength and maybe live long enough to witness it. He had made the device, found the conclusion. But he had seen others of his age brought to the pillory in the last years of their lives, shredded and broken by their generosity, choked on the crumbs of wisdom they gave, too freely, to the mob. He had better things to roll into the future than explanation. He was too old to debate and be questioned. He was justified and right, so he concealed his knowledge of the brass creature that engineered the invisible.
A long time ago, what now seemed like hundreds of years, he had visited the Isle of Man, a derelict rock in the Irish Sea between England and Ireland, ignored by both antagonistic islands. His parents had taken him there to see the peasants working the thick, dense earth and the violent, ragged sea and to avoid the questions of a smouldering family horror at home. On a rare, blistering afternoon, without shadows or any other form of shade, he had been trusted to explore alone as they wandered the beach and not to move from the place in which he winched and roamed without finding interest.
In a shelter of cupped rock, nailed with white painted cottages to the cliff, he had met a fisherman. His boredom had been like bait to the old seaman, who was hiding his own endless tedium in the morbid actions of work. They had talked intermittently, dribbling sentences into the sand for each to watch without comment. The tide had receded and given a bellowing space to their breath, letting speech occur in salty bubbles. The highlight of the interaction had been in the contents of a battered pail of slopping brine, fetched by the fisherman and dramatically screwed into the sand for his young mind’s attention. A clunking, pissing sound had come scratching from the bucket. He was instantly hooked. Walking over to look inside, he saw five crabs of various sizes, struggling against the limited water and the steep tin sides of their containment.
“Are they trying to escape?” he stuttered. “Trying to get out?”
“Aye.” The fisherman nodded after a tobacco pause.
“But why can’t they do it?” he asked. “There are more of them than the water.”
“They be Manx crabs,” said the man. “See—every time one crawls up an’ nearly escapes, the others drag it back down.”
Even as a boy, he had recognised this, known it to be as true as the ocean, and he had been instantly grateful for an adult fact. He had known, even then, that he would use it all his life.
He had never looked back.