Page 83 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

four corners of the continent to grub around in the earth, foul up the cracks in

its surface, start banks, show off their legs and come up against their desires
like stone hurdles, Wilson remains quietly in Vermont, on his parents’ farm.
Looking. This is all he does. And he takes hundreds of photographs of pine-
cone scales, moss filaments, flower petals, snail shells, lichen; he’s interested
in dwarf forms, in things that are diminutive, or stunted. But what amazes him
the most, dumbfounds and mesmerizes him, are things that melt, or flow, or
stream, or burn, or thaw, or fade, or hide, or disappear. The things he finds the

most beautiful, the most enthralling, are things that you can’t look at for long,
which don’t recur, which only happen once, just once—there, right in front of
you—and which last no longer than an instant. And then vanish. This is what
intrigues him. He wishes he didn’t have to miss any of them. He’d like to
capture them all, to preserve something from them, an imprint, a trace, a

memento.
Oh, Wilson Bentley must be a bit cracked. Yes, he’s quite possibly a bit
cracked. He spends hours alone, lying on a trellis, between the imperceptible
tinkle of snowflakes on a glass plate and some unheard cry deep inside him.
And if he loves photographing scales, feathers and seeds, he has a real
weakness for snow. For snow is both soft and cold, beautiful and terrifyingly
imperious towards humans. It blankets everything. Snow lies there,

motionless, tenacious, enveloping the world, dazzling and monotonous.
And what Wilson fears the most would be to miss a snowflake, a single
snowflake, to fail to capture each of its dancing, airborne, celestial and almost
immaterial particles. He has the impression, as he lies on his trellis in the yard
behind the farm, that, with his tweezers, he can physically touch the
suprasensible. No sooner has he bent over the tiny crystal, the one just fallen

from the sky, the tiny fragment of meteor, than it vanishes. You have to act
quickly. Very quickly. If you want to etch this unique existence onto your
photographic plate, the imprint which will be its grave, or, in a sense, its tome,
like a fleeting sensation that you want to fix, you have to be lying in wait, at
the ready, alert, responsive. In the few photographs that I’ve seen of him,
Wilson is in the snow, outside his farm, photographing a snowflake, and
smiling.

Without his having intended it, his pictures became famous, and were known

throughout the world. He published some magnificent photographs in the
National Geographic under the heading: “The Magic Beauty of Snow and