Flaking Out
Wilson Alwyn Bentley's Snowflake 892.
A couple of years ago, you could hardly get through a winter week without someone telling a version of the Eskimos-words-for-snow story. We've only got one word for snow, the story went, but those Eskimos have 20, or a hundred, or a thousand, depending on the yarn-spinning skills of the teller. Hm, we'd say, ain’t it interesting how much language determines experience and vice versa. It turns out, unfortunately, that this story isn't true. As Steven Pinker pointed out in The Language Instinct, Inuit languages have about a dozen words for snow, roughly the same as English: snow, sleet, slush, and so forth.
But it makes sense that stories about snow have come to stand as metaphors for the variety of experience in general. Snow changes everything. It is a world-cloaker and a land-blanketer. When the snow comes, everything gets slower and more deliberate. Just look at how it falls, meandering without a care in the world. Contrast this with the rain, which quickens things most of the time. Snow living is dominated by preparing to go outside and then de-preparing when you come back inside. It is marked by the blindness of limited vision during a blizzard and the blindness of too much light in the bright sunshine bouncing off the layers of white.
And yet, for as much as snow is a muffler and a homogenizer, for as much as it coats the world in a uniform sameness, it is composed of tantalizing bits of absolute singularity. We've all heard about the individuality of the snowflake, the way that no two are exactly the same, structurally. Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley figured out a way to photograph this singularity. He did it by putting the snowflakes on black velvet.
Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.
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Oh, by the way, Snowflake Bentley was wrong. In 1988, in Wisconsin, two identical snowflakes were discovered and photographed. Every time we think the universe is one way, it turns out to be another, a fact that would probably have pleased Mr. Bentley even in his disappointment. • 13 January 2010
Morgan Meis is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for The Believer, Harper’s, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. He can be reached at morganmeis@gmail.com.
Plate XIX of "Studies among the Snow Crystals ... " by Wilson Bentley, "The Snowflake Man." From Annual Summary of the "Monthly Weather Review" for 1902.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce.
