Ron Broglio
Georgia Tech

In 1807 and 1808 in the southern extremity of Cumberland, Captain William Mudge and his team of surveyors hauled hundreds of pounds of books, theodolite, scopes, and supplies atop Black Comb Mountain. With its extensive view, the summit served as a primary station for one of the great triangles in the national ordnance survey of Britain, the first of its kind executed with such precision and scale by any nation. After visiting Black Comb in the summer of 1811, William Wordsworth became interested in local stories of Mudge's survey and wrote two poems in honor of the triangulation atop the mountain, "Written with a Slate Pencil on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Comb" and its companion piece "View from the Top of Black Comb." The poems move somewhere between the technical sight of the surveyor and the artistic sight of the poet. From the summit, land and sea lie "At the spectator's feet" and "Display august of man's inheritance/ Of Britain's calm felicity and power!" ("View from the Top of Black Comb" 23, 33-34). The reader gains a sense of Great Britain's might as enhanced by the survey as well as by the poet's picturesque account of the venture.

Wordsworth's poems illustrate an intersection among diverse fields: technology, geometry, the picturesque, and British nationalism. These fields intersect in their assumptions about space, sight, and objects seen. This essay looks at how science served political ends in the British Ordnance Survey and how the same space grounding technology at the service of British government informs landscape aesthetic of the Romantic period. Additionally, the essay explores how the classification of clouds in meteorology effected Constable's paintings. The survey, meteorology, and landscape aesthetic yield rich avenues of inquiry into the problems of space and sight since both aesthetic and technical observation directly develop from the same epistemological assumptions about how to figure nature. And yet, even as these diverse fields overlap and artists make use of the dominant means of constructing space and sight, both Wordsworth and Constable develop ways of undermining the dominant spatial field. As will be explored at the close of this essay, particularly problematic is Wordsworth's use of mathematical calculation and scientific categorization to read a picturesque landscape while at the same time finding means to subvert such objectification.

Scientific, artistic, and political fields converge in using technology not simply as a means of human productivity, but as a way of constructing knowledge. While the modern industrial era has its beginnings in the late eighteenth century in Britain with the mining of coal for steam powered machines, the number of factors that play a part in the industrial revolution--including early physics, mining techniques, land property rights, transportation, and labor--are so complex it becomes difficult to discern how technology functions. Martin Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology" is important here since he addresses the value of technology from outside the technological point of view. He takes a different approach by asking how humans relate to nature in such a way as to make industrialization possible. Technology becomes a way of relating to beings--a way in which humans do not simply let the truth of beings reveal itself but rather a means by which we "challenge forth" or provoke entities in nature into a particular way of being.

For Heidegger, technology places unreasonable demands upon the environment, relating to beings for their use value rather than for their value in relation to being: "The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such" ("Concerning Technology" 320). Technology no longer figures the human subject as caretaker of Nature but rather scans Nature for its use to fit human needs. Consequently, we obscure part of Nature's way of being and our way of shepherding the world around us. Heidegger's essay "The Age of the World Picture" further develops how science creates a "picture" of Nature by arresting objects through its means of knowing:

Human wonder at the beauty of our environment is lost as nature becomes "set in place" by science. The value of beings in the world becomes narrowed according to our means of calculating and representing these beings. Nature becomes an objectifiable sum, a standing reserve to service human needs and interests. Any qualities in nature that may fall outside of such objectification remain hidden and of residual importance to us.

As technology makes nature into a set of calculable sums, the objectification of nature becomes the ready tool exercised by those in power. Returning to the national ordinance survey of Great Britain, mapping transforms the overabundant information found "in the field" into abstract geometric patterns on paper. Nature becomes a calculable sum as those who issue and control maps create an ordering of affairs out of the sprawling terrain. To plot a course between cities, to measure the amount of land held, to mark private property lines, to provide guidelines for tithing, and taxes, in brief, to mark lived transactions of a people, a country provides national, standardized maps. National maps constructed by a government serve the stability and longevity of a nation.

Consequently, cartography provides a visible cipher for nationalism. As long as the map is taken as a transparent representation of reality, the lines mark objects as geographic realities. But once we see the social and technological constructedness of the map, the relationship between lines of cartography and the existence of objects comes under question. As Denis Wood in The Power of Maps explains, "Once it is acknowledged that the map creates these boundaries, it can no longer be accepted as representing these 'realities' which alone the map is capable of embodying" (19). Cartography constructs the space it reads and in doing so projects the mapmaker's desires onto the mapped space. By studying the creation of a national map of Great Britain in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, we reveal political desires that inform the cartographic ordering of land.

Consider, for example, the case of General Roy who initiated designs for the first ordnance survey of Great Britain. Roy's ambition to map the whole of the nation began with his appointment as Assistant Quartermaster under General David Watson in 1747. Their task was to produce maps of the rebellious Scottish Highlands that would aid civil and military control of the area (Roy 385-87). The Jacobite uprising of 1745 had brought Prince Charles and Highland chiefs under his command as far south as Derby in their march toward London. The invading armies were beaten back to Scotland, but without adequate maps of the territory, the English troops were at a disadvantage. The Duke of Cumberland halted his counter-attack for six weeks in order to prepare military maps for an advance on the rebels. It was at the bloody massacre of Culloden that the Jacobites were finally defeated (Speck 147-62). General Waston and William Roy's mapping project was a direct result of the rebellion and the British need to establish dominion in the area. The Duke of Cumberland had made known to his father, King George II, the necessity of good maps in controlling local uprisings, aiding in taxation, and completing the system of roads that would connect Scotland to the rest of the kingdom.

William Roy's subsequent career was shaped by the Scotland project. After his experience in Scotland, Roy foresaw the need to map the whole of Britain along the lines of the French project of a national map. However, the Seven Years War and then the war with the States delayed Roy's plans such that it was not until three decades after his initial proposal that the opportunity arose for a national map.

In 1783, partly to flaunt the French accomplishment of their national map project and partly as a good will gesture, the French Academy proposed to the Royal Society of London a joint mapping venture. The English and French had disagreed in the latitude and longitude of their two most famous observatories. A survey from Greenwich Observatory to Dover then across the channel to Calais would solve the problem. The Royal Society took on the project and General Roy was appointed its leader. As Roy explains, the Society considered the honor of the nation at stake "in having at least a good a map of this as there is of any other country," and if the East India Company would participate in Coromandel and Bengal, then "everything would then be done that Britain could do within her own dominions, in regard to the determination of the figure and dimensions of the earth" (Brown 261-62).

The survey from London to Dover was delayed for over three years as Roy commissioned fine precision instruments and spent a good deal of time making adjustments in their calibration. The two hundred pound theodolite fashioned by Jesse Ramsden eventually became the pride of English technology and grew in fame well into the 1800s. Interesting in terms of nationalism, colonization and mapping, Roy planned to use materials from Britain's former American colony as well as from Scotland. He had New England white pine and Riga or Scotch pine honed for his deal rods. But despite careful honing of wood rods, variance in length due to humidity prevented their use in accurate surveying, and glass rods were used instead. Roy continued to adjust his instruments, but because the French had waited far too long, the initial transnational, cross-channel measurements were taken in 1787. As a result of the survey, many errors were found on the very best maps of Britain. And because of problems in reading the arc of the earth’s surface, as foreseen long ago by the renowned English scientist Isaac Newton, the longitude of French maps were affected too. Roy died shortly after the survey, and a map of Britain remained a long way off.

A new interest in the mapping of the country began again in 1791 as British relations with France increasingly soured. The mapping of Britain became a military project with its headquarters located in the Tower of London and with its cadre of officers trained at the Royal Military Academy. Lieutenant Colonel Edward Williams directed the survey assisted by Captain William Mudge and Mr. Isaac Dalby. Essex and Kent were the first areas surveyed since government maps of the area would come in handy should a rumored French landing take place along the English Channel.

The survey continued over the next half century conducted by a special Corps of Royal Military Surveyors and Draughtsmen created in 1805. Early on during the course of the mapping, tensions between surveyors and citizens developed. Government encroachment on private lands was seen as interference with the rights of citizens to privacy and independence. Suspicion that the survey would be used for tax purposes further riled the public. Surveyors were harassed and run off the land, and landowners denied access to their private estates. Furthermore, surveyors avoided enclosed estates and went around troublesome terrain such as bodies of water and thickets. But when the first maps from the survey were engraved and printed in 1801, general clamor ensued for more and better maps of the entire nation. Landed gentlemen of Lincolnshire and Rulandshire even agreed to pay for a fixed number of finished maps if the government would expedite survey of their territory (Pierce 249).

Large land owners immediately recognized the importance of accurate and authoritative maps. Firstly, reliable maps advanced the policies of land enclosure which severed the rural poor from land traditionally held as common property. The enclosures, of course, favored land owners who subsumed the commons and put them to agrarian and recreational uses. Secondly, ancient and revered common footpaths that cut across property did not always show up on maps. When such paths did appear on maps, the byways were allowed to stand, but when footpaths disappeared on maps, much to the lament of travelers on foot, official maps allowed landholders to close off these now "unofficial" pathways (Wallace 111-18). The maps had a value as objects much like that of portraits used to display the wealth of landholders. Portraits such as Gainsbough's Mr. and Mrs. Robert Andrews connect the opulence of the property with the leisure and wealth of the landed class (Bermingham 28-33). Maps also allowed landholders to show off their land at one glance. Gentlemen could survey and discover favorable private hunting and fishing areas on their property. Finally, land could be set aside for the newly popular English landscape gardens (Williams 120-26).

In 1825 the survey of Britain broke off abruptly as military surveyors under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Colby left for Ireland where several administrative problems as well as the levying of taxes called for accurate maps. Since the Union between Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, a variety of rebellious societies arose in rural parishes stemming from political, religious, and land feuds. As with Scotland, good maps of Ireland on a large scale would aid in policing the rural areas. Given the experience in the British countryside and knowing the political tensions in Ireland, problems with the survey were foreseen. The House of Commons passed an act empowering the surveyors to enter any lands as needed and prohibiting the obstruction of the survey and the destruction or removal of the surveying equipment. The mapping of Ireland was completed in 1840 and the later half of the 1800s was spent in a detailed mapping of Northern England and Scotland with the completion of the survey in 1888. General Roy's dream of a mapped nation was realized some hundred years after his initial efforts in laying the baseline for the survey.

While the politics of the national survey brings land under the eye of the nation and makes those who occupy land subject to the authority of government maps, the very means surveyors and the tourists use to engaging landscape transform land into an object for use value. Both in tourism and surveys movement across terrain, expansive views from choice prospects, and the drawing or mapping of the land become ways of staking a claim to the area. As one takes in a view of the landscape, in the very act of sight the scene becomes like the private property of the individual travelers who "catch the diversity of views"(Gray 1079). The physical land is subjected to a particular means of representation. Mediated through a theodolite, a Claude glass, or a mental construct of a picturesque "framed" scene, the land becomes ordered according to the mode of seeing. In the national survey, the theodolite and measuring chain "have been dragged through every county, parish, township, hamlet, and demesne throughout the land" and hoisted upon "church steeples, on towers, domes and monuments" in order to represent the space of the nation (White 322). The sense of a land captured, ordered, and conveniently drawn across a Cartesian plane is what makes the maps of the Ordnance Survey seductively controlling. Likewise, the tourist covers terrain and marks on a map the ground covered. The sense of ownership developed in a survey is matched by the tourists' need to go further in order to see more and to catch new prospects so as to lay claim to having mastered a given terrain. Both surveyor and tourist map the land with a sense of possessing it. The eye takes a military assault on the land transforming it into an observed landscape. The eye of the surveyor and the eye of the Romantic tourist are the same eye.

This sameness of eye is evident in the way subject and object are formed in vision. The way seeing used in the survey and in the tour makes assumptions about the seeing subject; in fact, as we participate in these ways of seeing, we become subjects constructed under the survey or tour's regime of sight. The viewer is not distinct from the apparatus of sight and the way the apparatus is constructed both materially and ideologically. In this sense, Jonathan Crary's analysis of the metaphysical suppositions in the optics of the camera obscura intersects with an analysis of the surveyor's theodolite (Crary 25-66). Both camera obscura and theodolite work as stationary machines with a monocular point from which to see the surrounding landscape.

In deploying these technologies of vision and observation, sight becomes individuated and decorporealized (Crary 38-39). This is evident in the abstraction or removal of the viewer from the scene viewed. In making sense of a terrain, both surveyor and tourist stand at a distance and apart from the viewed landscape. The distance between the viewer and objects viewed contributes to the sense of being apart, a sense of individuation. The surveyor or tourist then frames the land into a landscape by centering on a particular object seen in the distance and using this center to organize the surrounding terrain. Gilpin, for example, in his guide to the Lake District, spends several chapters explaining how to compose a scene with a lake as the central object around which the rest of nature is organized: "We have now made a considerable advance towards a landscape. The sky is laid in; a mountain fills the offskip; and a lake, with it's accompaniments, takes possession of a nearer distance. Nothing but a fore-ground is wanting; and for this we have great choice of objects--broken ground--trees--rocks--cascades--and vallies" (Gilpin 103). By considering the landscape as constituted and ordered at a distance and apart from the viewer, the scene appears to exist in isolation, without the necessity of a perceiving subject. Likewise, the viewer as subject maintains an identity apart from the land in its facticity and apart from the landscape as a scene. The surveyor or tourist seems to gain an objective representation of space without the interference of engagement with the terrain.

Additionally, the viewer is decorporealized by the stationary nature of the viewing. While touring would appear to be about movement from place to place in an interaction of the tourist with the land, it is the stationary point and place of the beautiful prospect that takes precedence in the tour much as the points of triangulation have predominance in surveying. Eighteenth and nineteenth century tour guides are filled with advice or commands on where to stand, where to approach, where to stop the touring of the tour to admire a view, and what object to observe as a center of one's view. So, for example, in Thomas West's guide "The design of the following sheets, is to encourage the taste of visiting the lakes, by furnishing the traveler with a Guide; and for that purpose, the writer has here collected and laid before him, all the select stations and points of view, noticed by those authors who have last made the tour of the lakes, verified by his own repeated observations"(West 6). The disembodied tourist who follows these maps and stands at prospect points leaves behind his/her situatedness in the world to survey the atemporal beauty of nature. The viewer stands at a specific observation point while using his/her imagination to form nature into a picture "calculated for the pencil," thus meeting the terms of the picturesque aesthetic (West x).

As the land becomes represented by a pencil drawing--be it the cartographer's map or the artist's sketch--nature falls under the rule of geometry which is at the heart of the artist's linear perspective and the surveyor's triangulations. In his essay "Perspective as Symbolic Form," Erwin Panofsky highlights the break made through linear perspective by contrasting Renaissance painting with that of Greek and Medieval works. Prior to the Renaissance, painting concern itself with individual objects, but the space which they inhabit fails to embrace or dissolve the opposition between bodies. Space acts as a simple superposition, a still unsystematic overlapping of objects (Panofsky 41-43). With linear perspective comes an abstract spatial system capable of ordering objects:

The interest in a coordinate system and in bodies in a "general sense" developed through linear perspective corresponds to Descartes's founding of a coordinate system for mathematics used in cartography as well as his translation of corporeal bodies into geometric figures in his Optics (Garber 294). Panofsky develops the correlation of Renaissance linear perspective and Cartesian philosophy by explaining that each constructs the same space from different modes of thought: "'aesthetic space' and 'theoretical space' recast perceptual space in the guise of one and the same sensation: in one case that sensation is visually symbolized, in the other it appears in logical form" (Panofsky 45). According to Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, this perceptual space is meant to provide an immediacy, a sense of presence with the objects represented while erasing the viewer's attention to the technique of representation (Bolter 24-25). There is a danger in what is erased by naturalizing linear perspective and Cartesian optics. Brining to bear Heidegger's understanding of how technology reveals being, the way of seeing employed by tourism and surveying creates from the land an abstracted landscape--a representational structure Martin Jay calls "Cartesian perspectivalism" ("Scopic Regime" 4-11). While nature offers an overabundance of stimuli for the viewer, the land becomes framed and reduced to a calculable sum, a particular objectification of nature that makes the land useful to the viewer and his or her interests.

There are many instances in which the surveyor's map and tour guide overlap in their transformation of land to landscape. Take, as an example, Penrith Beacon. The hill at Penrith was surveyed for the construction of a warning beacon and then later mapped in the National Survey. On the hill of Penrith, a 727 foot beacon was erected in 1719 as one of a series of beacons extending from Carlyle southward. The beacons served as a relay of warning signals to citizens of northern England in the event of an invasion from Scotland. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, as the danger of invasion subsided, the former military site became a tourist site based upon political surveillance. Looking to the north from this singular vantage point, the tourist could consider the rising power of the British nation. James Clark in his 1789 tour guide, aptly titled A Survey of the Lakes, diagrams the views from atop Penrith and includes a picture of a singular viewing eye positioned atop the beacon (Liu 101). This disembodied, immobile eye with its authoritative overview acts as a transcendent overseer of the scene. Extending from the eye are lines or rays that indicate lines of sight for particular objects. In representing a place and a view in what looks much like a surveyor's map, Clarke's diagram joins the art of viewing landscapes with the technique of surveying. By employing the guide's instructions for observation, the tourist becomes the monocular, disembodied eye. To properly read Clarke's diagram one must be able to filter the stimuli presented in nature and reduce the view to abstract figures found on his diagram. Such participation trains and constructs the viewing subject according to a particular technology of representation, i.e. the geometric optics that informs linear perspective in art and surveying in cartography.

Not only are elements of the survey to be found in the tour, but also the picturesque beautifies the mapping of empire. Writing on the eve of the completion of the National Survey, Pilkington White adds a picturesque and romantic mood to the expedition:

For White, the military surveyors are also tourists who order nature not simply with theodolite but also with the eye that frames the picturesque scene. These small narrative moments invest the "cut-and-dried" operations of the survey with a higher aesthetic and moral value. Their "romantic" experiences rebound upon their scientific operation as their souls raised to a higher truth return to the task at hand with a new sense of purpose and destiny in constructing a national map. The disembodied optics of the survey gets doubled by the disembodied ascent of the soul. It is not that the beauty of nature inspires the surveyors; rather as they live in "utter isolation for months from the lower world," the very struggle to tame nature and make it bend to human wishes produces the effect upon their souls. Both in cartography and landscape aesthetics, the body is left behind and, as Wordsworth might say, one "becomes a living soul."

As in viewing landscapes, a similar abstraction of nature into classifiable, calculable objects takes place in rendering sky-scapes. How can one represent the formless, shapeless billowing mass of a cloud? Constable considered the problem of clouds to be foremost in the painting of landscapes. His Twenty Studies of Skies, Copied from "A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape" by Alexander Cozen (1823.55-74) show his concern in the early 1820s for how to better capture the way clouds look. With what Cozen calls "Circumstances," Constable develops clouds that are more than a formal element of the painting. These clouds arise from and take part in the circumstances or conditions of the surrounding scene.

In 1820-21, Constable made well over 50 studies and oil works of clouds. In the flat white planes found in his Weymouth Bay paintings (1816.78, 1816.81) and Flatford Mill (1817.1) one can see Constable struggling to render their light, billowy mass (Thrones 490-98). To arrive at an adequate representation of clouds, Constable looked toward the growing science of meteorology and became an avid student of Luke Howard’s classifications. Luke Howard’s Modification of Clouds, published in 1802 and made famous in his multi-volume Climate of London (1818-20) introduced the classification of clouds that we use today (Badtz 65). In may ways Howard's system did for the sky-scape what the surveying of the picturesque did for the wilds of nature in the landscape. Just as cartography allows for an objective observation of space and in fact creates the objective space it measured, so too Howard’s system provides an ordered means of reading the masses of billowing white puffs. As survey and tour guides define, quantify, and qualify objects, the meteorological tagging of clouds orders the billowing forms. Constable's choice to incorporate Howard's classifications into his paintings marks a shift in landscapes. As Karl Kroeber has noted in Romantic Landscape Vision, the balance between imaginative scenes of nature and actual locations tips in favor of representing "the real" as clouds move from formal artistic elements to actual sky-scapes (19). "The real" that Constable gestures toward is nature filtered through the lens of meteorology. Just as with landscape aesthetics' use of cartography, with Constable's clouds the overabundance of stimuli nature offers the viewer gets reduced to the parameters given in technological enframing of nature which classifies particular elements into discrete and calculable objects.

What Constable achieves with the scientifically correct clouds is a means of rendering meteorological shifts. We recognize these clouds not simply as formal artistic units but as signs of passing weather patterns. With the passing of a cloud, Constable captures in the still-life a duration in time. This is a complex and possibly liberating move between the fields of art and science toward a human being and dwelling with nature (Kroeber 19). Yet, such freedom gets enclosed by the larger issues of how clouds figure within the nationalized landscape of the picturesque. The picturesque is notably an English aesthetic. Gilpin notes, "we find a species of landscape, which no country, but England, can display in such perfection: not only because this just species of taste prevails no where else; but also, because no where else are found such proper materials" (Gilpin 10). Cloud are part of this Englishness. Since it rains frequently in England, clouds are one of the "proper materials" important for a picturesque landscape.

Wordsworth takes some time explaining how a country that "indeed, [is] subject to much bad weather" can produce beautiful scenes (Guide 191). He goes so far as to extol the inclement weather of England over the clearer skies of other nations:

Clouds become part of a national identity. Later in Wordsworth’s Guide, he compares the mountains of the Lake District to those of Switzerland. Clouds again play an important nationalistic role. In order to make up for the lower elevation of summits in the Lake District, Wordsworth explains that "the resemblance [between the Alps and Lake District mountains] would be still more perfect on those days when vapours, resting upon, and floating around the summits, leave the elevation of the mountains less dependent upon the eye than on the imagination" (Guide 232). Karl Badt makes a similar claim for Constable’s clouds: "There is no doubt that in so doing he gave expression to the character of his own native countryside. A painter who had not lived in the constant change of weather in southern England or in Holland would hardly have come to find this historical aspect of nature in the changes in the weather and to have understood it with enjoyment" (65).

From Constable’s paintings emphasizing the aesthetics of the picturesque to the scientific classification by English meteorologists such as Luke Howard and Thomas Forster over French cloud typologies of Jean Baptiste Lemarck, clouds become increasingly English. As such, they are not simply the element that reveals the spacing of space on a canvas and marks a duration in time. Clouds reveal English space and mark the changes in English weather. It has been said that the cumulus cloud became Constable's favorite cloud, the cloud he loved to paint. With its occasional shower, this cloud common to the English landscape would pass by in under an hour and thus mark a particularly English meteorological unit of time. Likewise, as Wordsworth’s clouds rest upon the summits of the Lake District mountains and not the Alps and as the clouds are part of the "unsettled weather, with partial showers" of England, the space marked by the clouds and the time of their passing weather patterns become English space and English time.

Recalling the example which opens this essay, a reader can compare and contrast Captain Mudge's maps and Wordsworth's poems about Black Comb Mountain because the cartographer and artist share a common way of thinking space. The grids and lines of the survey are translatable to picturesque aesthetics because of the logical, consistent, and homogeneous quality of the constructed space. Cartesian perspectivalism maintains "logical recognition of internal invariances through all the transformations produced by changes in spatial locations" (Ivins 9). It provides an optical consistency, a regular avenue through space, by which objects can be seen from varying points of view, in different lighting, and by different viewers yet remain the same objects (Latour 27). Yet there are many Romantic landscapes that remain alien to the techniques of the surveyor. Such works seek to de-center the subject in his/her relation to the landscape and construct other scopic regimes with their accompanying reconfiguration of subject-object relations.

Wordsworth's work illustrates the complexity of constructing space since he clearly relies on Cartesian perspectivalism for figuring landscapes while in other instances dramatically breaks away from the constraints of such a spatialization. Despite many beautiful, sublime, and picturesque scenes in The Prelude, in Book Eleven, Wordsworth calls for a usurpation of the tyranny of the eye:

He plans to thwart this despotic sense by following Nature which

The way Wordsworth elides the dominate scopic regime fits well with a phenomenological critique of Descartes's optics since both work to make the subject more than a spectator of the scene and to represent a sense of space prior to mental abstraction and categorization of sensations. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's restoration of a felt relatedness to experience works as a helpful theoretical complement to Wordsworth's interest in engaging his surroundings.

Merleau-Ponty rejects both the Cartesian empiricist position and the Berkleyean idealist construction of vision: "We have to reject the age-old assumptions that put the body in the world and the seer in the body, or, conversely, the world and the body in the seer as in a box" (Merleau-Ponty, Visible 138). The empiricists make the subject an object abstracted from the world and treat each sense as utterly distinct. The idealist position of Berkley makes the thinking subject all powerful, submitting perception to thought and judgement. For idealists, a transcendental knowledge of space exists prior to any sense experience. For Ponty, both positions omit the primary layer of intersensory experience of the body prior to cognitive construction and synthesis of perceptual data; both make the world a spectacle to be observed by a disembodied mind (Jay, Downcast Eyes 308). Ponty develops a sense of being in the world which reconfigures one's identity and relation to one's surroundings.

Rather than seeing space as something to be made transparent by techniques that are erased, Ponty figures the spacing of space as a dense flesh that constructs subject-object relations:

Ponty's sense of space has a thickness about it as opposed to linear perspective's transparency. The flesh of the world acts as a "connective tissue" by which we come to know objects in the world around us. Each investigation of the world calls for a bringing together of subject and surroundings through an intimate corporeal relation Merleau-Ponty describes as a "tactile palpation" and even "the palpation of the eye" (Visible 133). Yet, just as the flesh is a connective tissue constituting subject-object relations, it also acts as a veil to conceal aspects of beings. By any means of inquiry we expose only some of the visible layers of beings. So while we can never know the fullness of objects in the world, Merleau-Ponty gives us a means of knowing that works beyond technologies revealing objects as standing reserve and other than Cartesian bodies as a geometry made real.

Consider again the Penrith beacon that was described earlier as the site of Clarke's transcendent overseer. In one of his "spots of time" in The Prelude, Wordsworth transforms this site of military surveillance and touristic observation by providing another way of interacting with the land. Penrith beacon is the scene of a riding lesson and a greater revelation in "seeing." While "the ancient servant of my father's house" means to take the young William on a ride to the scenic beacon, the child gets lost and Wordsworth depicts his younger self as the errant traveler who gets caught within a whole new series of relations to the landscape. While driven off of the public road, rather than ascending to a position where he would gain an advantageous view of the surrounding landscape and thus a simple mapping of space, he descends to engage the territory of the valley and moor. His encounter with a moldering gibbet, a naked pool, and a woman struggling against strong winds make the touristic seeing secondary to his experience of a "visionary dreariness" with which he reinvests the location (Prelude 11.287-315).

In his visionary encounter, Wordworth avoids a picturesque definition and categorization of entities. Instead, the space of representation works as a connective tissue that half reveals and half conceals the land. In the Penrith Beacon passage, Wordsworth pits the disorientation of the senses against the sensible optics of seeing according to a Cartesian point, line, and grid system and so thwarts the tyranny of sight by using "the senses each / To counteract the other and themselves" (Prelude 11.179-80). Wordsworth represents what Merleau-Ponty characterizes as the richness of "experiences that have not yet been 'worked over,' that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both 'subject' and object,' both existence and essence." (Visible 130). For Wordsworth, the eye does not operate alone but in conjunction with the rest of the body that stumbles along the valley and moor. The intense vividness with which the narrator encounters each object and the cumulative impressions left by his encounters as he moves through the landscape creates for the reader both a sense of pleasure from the engaging interaction and consternation due to the difference from the expected touristic observation. In this new found relation to the land, it is no longer the boy who is lost but the authority figure leading the tour, as the boy explains, "I looked all round for my lost guide." Wordsworth's spots of time, as evident in the Penrith Beacon passage, provide a denaturalization of the dominant way of seeing and in its place represent a felt relatedness to the land.

Footnotes omitted in this online version.

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