Atlantic, Iowa
Bird Syntax
Bric-a-Brac
Dear Thano
New Hopes†
Doorbell Press
Contact
1
At the hospital this morning, sitting in the waiting room, I read about optical surgeries in the cheap xeroxed pamphlets on the counter. They are what, what what. One pamphlet offered to lower intraocular pressure, another to reverse retinal detachment. A third brochure explained the extracapsular extraction of cataracts. “What Is More Precious Than Your Eyesight?” the brochure inquires over the image of a seagull against a sunburst.
“A splinter in the eye is the best magnifying glass,” Adorno advises, and that evening, home from the hospital, it is the feeling of the same crumpled pamphlet in my pocket that leads me to investigate whatever obscure relations might exist between the multiple definitions of the word cataract--meaning, 1), a “clouded visual occlusion,” and, 2), a “large waterfall.”
2
As it goes, the relationship is not so obscure. An optical cataract occurs when proteins in the lens denature and “cloud” white, just as rushing water, someone once thought, also “clouds” white. Etymology suggests a more ontological connection. The word cataract comes from the Greek term katarrhaktēs or “down-rushing.” Commenting on a passage in Chrysippus, Simplicius used the term ὑποχυθέντας, meaning “to spill” or “to pour under.” In the Middle Ages, Guy de Chauliac wrote that cataract was caused by “an extensive moisture which gradually penetrates into the eye and, in consequence of cold, coagulates” (System of Op XI, 65), similar to Ibn Sina, in 1025, who called it nozul-al-maa—“water-falling disease.” It is not difficult to read this logic in the brochure’s grainy diagrams, which show light cascading through the narrow opening of the iris and pouring into the optical cavern like water.
In other accounts, such as X, it was sucked out through a large straw. When John Berger had his cataracts removed in X. “The passage through this small pain was inseparable from my journey towards a newly visible world,” Berger wrote, “as if the sky remembers its rendezvous with the other colours of the earth.”
3
Although the words waterfall, cascade, and cataract are now interchangeable, in 1828 Noah Webster’s Dictionary drew a taxonomic distinction between them. According to Webster, the term “waterfall” is “generally used of the fall of a small river or rivulet” (as in a garden or brook), while “cascade” denotes features of a scale “less than a cataract.” This leaves to the cataract a tautology: it is a “cascade upon a great scale.” As a practical example, Webster points to the cataracts “of Niagara, of the Rhine, Danube and Nile”; as a usage example, to Washington Irving: “The tremendous cataracts of America thundering in their solitudes.”
In being the largest among the features, the cataract is also the most beautiful. In the Third Critique, Kant employs “the lofty waterfall of a mighty river” to evoke those natural phenomena so overwhelming that recourse to reason as a mediator. Consider the testimony of Charles Dickens, who visited Niagara Falls in 1842. “In an instant, I was blinded by the spray, and wet to the skin,” he wrote, “I saw the water tearing madly down from some immense height, but could get no idea of shape, or situation, or anything but vague immensity.” Then, he writes, “I began to feel what it was.” Standing in the basin, looking up at the ocean pouring down on him, 5,000,000 lbs. per second, it is not intuition but the pleasure of reason which overcomes him, putting him in contact with an idea of the infinite which he calls “God.” “It would be hard for a man to stand nearer God than he does there,” he writes. The “effect of this tremendous spectacle on me, was peace of mind—tranquility—great thoughts of eternal rest and happiness…”
4
The first European to place a number on the “incredible Cataract” at Niagara firsthand was Father Louis Hennepin, a recollect missionary with Robert Cavelier de La Salle. In 1683 Hennepin reported that Niagara plunged “down a height of more than five hundred feet,” an eighth of a league wide, and culminated in a hell of waters that “foam and boil in a fearful manner.” By the time he published a second description fifteen years later, the “Horrible precipice” had only grown: now, he wrote, it was “above six hundred foot”—“so prodigious high, that it would make one tremble to gaze steadily upon the water”—and churned in “the most hideous manner imaginable.” The “outrageous Noise,” he claimed, was “more terrible than that of Thunder”; the magnificent spray “so great that it forms a kind of cloud above this abyss.”
Father Hennepin’s report stood as fact until 1722, when the barrister Paul Dudley relayed to the Royal Society an opinion differing “very much from the Account Father Hennepin has given the World of that Cataract.” In , in Albany, Mr. Dudley met a “French Native of Canada” named Monsieur Borassaw. “When I objected Hennepin’s Account of those Falls to Monsieur Borassaw,” Dudley wrote, Borassaw admitted the cataract was in truth “no more than twenty six Fathom, or an hundred and fifty six Foot,” and the “outrageous Noise” which Hennepin had described quiet enough to “converse together close by it.” Yet there was one detail that M. Borassaw did corroborate. “The Mist or Shower (his Word was La Brume), which the Falls make, is so extraordinary, as to be seen at five Leagues distance, and rises as high as the common Clouds,” Dudley wrote. “In this Brume or Cloud, when the Sun shines, you have always a glorious rainbow.”
This rainbowed plumage, rising up in great, soft-bellied drifts, billows over the waterfall at all hours, as Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, in all conditions, “without a cloud, save those of the cataracts.” In winter it put Hennepin in mind of summer, the great plumes rising “no matter how hot it is,” and in December it met Andrew Ellicott as a “beautiful crystalline appearance” frozen in the trees. François-René de Chateaubriand likened it to the “thick smoke of a vast forest fire”; Harriet Beecher Stowe to moonlight, “falling as the soul sinks when it dies, to rise refined, spiritualized, and pure.” Dickens too found it thanatic, writing that “the broad, deep, mighty stream seems to die in the act of falling.” “From its unfathomable grave,” he continued, “arises that tremendous ghost of spray and mist which is never laid, and has been haunting this place with the same dread solemnity—perhaps from the creation of the world.”
The most unusual description, however, came from Robert McCausland’s “An account of an earthy substance, found near the Falls of Niagara, and vulgarly called the Spray of the Falls,” communicated by Benjamin Smith Barton in 1789. The subject of McCausland’s experiments—the strange “earthy substance” at the base—was an unusual rock-like material thought to be petrified waterfall-mist. “This substance is found, in great plenty, every where about the bottom of the falls,” McCausland wrote, “sometimes lying loose amongst the stones on the beach, and sometimes adhering to the rocks, or appearing between the layers upon breaking them.” Under what the mist had become some what rock, coveted by visitors such as Capt. Enys, who scoured the Falls to collect it in 1787. The indigenous Neuter tribe once settled in the basin had controlled a special trade in this hardened “Spray of the Fall,” believed to harbor certain medicinal healing properties. In one of the earliest mentions of Niagara Falls, sometime in the 1640’s, the French Jesuit surgeon Francois Gendron wrote that “the spray forms a stone, or rather a petrified salt, yellowish in colour, which is very effective in the cures of sores, fistulas, and malignant ulcers.”
6
Around the same time, in the late 1700s, cataract surgery reached North America. It arrived with Dr. William Stork, an oculist learned in London, who travelled up and down the eastern seaboard “couching” patients in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. His customers issued their satisfied testimonials in the papers: “I John Conrad, of Upper Dublin, Philadelphia County, do certify, that having lost my Sight seven Years ago, was restored to it again by Dr. Stork, although I am in my 81st Year…” Two years later, when Dr. Stork retired to Florida and became a plantation agent, where he “died with the fright” during a servant uprising, the market he had created took permanent root. A Dr. John Bartlett established in Newport, Rhode Island, and Dr. De Lacoudre in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1770 the Pennsylvania Gazette announced the practice of Dr. Anthony Yeldall, who “couches cataracts in the eyes, and cures all distempers incident thereto.”
Then Frederick W. Jericho arrived in Philadelphia in 1783. At Utrecht, Jericho had written his thesis on a new technique called extracapsular extraction. “The lower part of the semi-circular cornea is cut obliquely by the very edge of the knife,” he wrote, “after which all the aqueous humor at once flows forth from the eye” as the cloud “is pushed forward through the pupil, and it falls at once from the eye.” On March 30, 1784, Mr. Christopher Rex—the recipient of perhaps the first extracted cataract in the United States—published his endorsement in the Pennsylvania Packet: “I take this method of testifying my experience of his superior abilities, from which I have derived the happy restoration of sight, after for years of blindness by a cataract on both eyes.”
Prior to the advent of extracapsular extraction, the solution to cataract consisted of “couching,” in which the occlusion was scraped away with a curved needle. In most cases the couched material was pushed from the visual axis but remained in the eye, though in X Sushruta reported the couched “phlegmatic matter” was then blown out through the nose.
7
“Today, wide highways lead to the cataract; there are inns on the American side, and the British, and mills and factories below the chasm,” Rene De-Comte de Chateaubriand wrote in 1700, and with them came a welter of new demands. At 10PM on September 14, 1860, the Falls were illuminated for the first time when Mr. Blackwell of Robert W. Blackwell & Company placed 200 blue Bengal lights around the cataract to honor the visiting Prince of Wales. 80 alone were placed behind the sheet of water at Horseshoe Falls in a what until an engineer at General Electric named Walter D’Arcy Ryan kept them illuminated for an entire month in 1907 using 44 mounted searchlights. He paid men 50¢ to stand beside the lights and change the colored gels. “It was a riot of glorious beauty, so new, so strange, so marvelous – so like some unearthly and unexplained magic that it held the spectator startled, then spellbound, speechless and delighted,” one spectator wrote.
When H.G. Wells arrived in 1906, he discovered the “spectacular effect, its magnificent and humbling size and splendour, were long since destroyed beyond recovery by the hotels, the factories, the power houses, the bridges and tramways and hoardings that arose about it.” As an image had been fixed. “The huge social and industrial process of America will win this conflict,” he wrote, “and at last capture Niagara altogether.”
8
Just three years later, the United States and Canadian governments signed the International Boundary Waters Treaty and established the International Joint Commission. Then came the International Niagara Board of Control, then the Special International Niagara Board. Under their alphabet aegis aggressive water diversions were approved, withholding a “pleasing impression upon the spectator.” Their first step was to define the terms. The Special International Niagara Board’s 1930 report on the matter, The Preservation of Niagara Falls, reads like a bureaucratic parody on Kant’s critique of the sublime, dissecting the cataract in duteous sections and subsections such as “Scenic Beauty as Dependent on Volume,” the “Impression of Contrast,” and the “Relation of Depth to Color.”
The last item, located in Appendix D - “The Colour of Niagara Falls,” elaborates an element that “had never been attempted.” It was an extensive “color survey” intended to determine the ideal “greenish-blue.” Over several months, physicist A.B. Clark isolated the water color of Horseshoe Falls at twenty-six different points using his own “Clark Telecolourimeter” to establish color ranges from bluest to greenest, 1 to 11, 0.08 to 1.65. He weighed the “contrasting” gestalt of brick and ironwork, considered the crest-height, depth, speed, light, season, and weather, until, at last, in §III - “Psychological and Aesthetic Considerations,” he turns to the “aesthetic value of the spray.” Its effect, he concludes, is to “reduce the apparent intensity of the color,” and suggests that a “reduction of the spray cloud might materially improve the breadth of the view without affecting its variety and interest.”
9
The “heavy mist column” that rises up around Horseshoe Falls was among the Special International Niagara Board’s principal considerations. Once upon a time, Monsieur Borassaw had proclaimed the cloud to Paul Dudley as an “extraordinary” natural effect; now the Special International Niagara Board wondered whether it did not obstruct the glorious “impression of horizontal extent.” In order to settle the case, The Preservation of Niagara Falls 1930 report audits the aesthetic verdicts from past “investigators.” Among them are the opinions of Col. J.G. Warren and the USACE, who lamented that the mist “hides a large portion of the Falls almost perpetually,” and Col. A.B. Jones, who concurs that the cloud “obscures the spectacle”; as well as the appraisals of S.S. Wyer and the Smithsonian, who declared the American Falls superior “because of absence of spray,” and the Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors, who reported that the mist and spray “obscure the Horseshoe and render it inferior as a spectacle to the American Fall,” going so far as to recommend interventions “that will reduce the obstructive mist to a minimum.”
The SINB report addresses these concerns in paragraphs 21-23 under the sub-heading “Scenic Beauty Dependent Upon Visibility” in Appendix C. “No one will claim that the spray rising from the Falls does not add immensely to their beauty,” the report reads, but “the question does arise, however, as to whether there is not a point at which increasing the volumes of spray no longer add to, but possibly detract from, the spectacle as a whole.” From the “Viewpoints of Past Investigators,” the answer appears almost unanimous. When Charles Dickens described Niagara’s “vague immensity” in 1842, he was not exalting the experience but complaining. “I was not disappointed—but I could make out nothing. In an instant,” he wrote, “I was blinded by the spray…”
10
The solution to these concerns was cataract surgery. In 1950, The International Joint Commission established the International Niagara Falls Engineering Board and enlisted teams of engineers to practice remedial interventions on large-scale warehouse models in Ontario and Mississippi. In order to ensure a “satisfactory scenic spectacle as defined in paragraph 64,” the engineers settled on three interventive measures. The first was an upriver International Control Dam, costing $14,594,000. The second was the removal of 64,000 and 24,000 cubic yards of rock from the flanks of Horseshoe falls ($1,582,000, $1,360,000). The third was the addition of 100- and 300-foot crest-fills, creating Terrapin Point and Tabletop Rock.
In June 1954 ground was broken on construction and the engineering teams collaborated to shrink the natural crestline of Horseshoe Falls more than three-hundred feet, excavating, something, and filling for the next three years. On September 28, 1957, Alvin Hamilton, Minister of Natural Resources, dedicated the completed works: “The American side has been enhanced with a greater flow of water, the flanks of the Horseshoe Falls have been re-clothed and the ugly scars removed, an unbroken crestline has been achieved, and the mist cloud, which so often hid much of the beauty of the Horseshoe Falls, has been lessened…”
11
Over ten years, the International Niagara Commission discovered that “misty days” at Niagara Falls doubled. In 2006, the New York Times reported on “Two Studies of Increasing Mist at Niagara Falls.” One indicated the cause to be relative temperature; the other, high-rise developments. In 2023, The Oakes Hotel, owned by Hennepin Realty Holdings and Hennepin’s View Inc., conducted a “mist study” on a proposed redevelopment which predicted an “increase in misting conditions over the shelf adjacent to the Horseshoe Falls, inclusive of the Table Rock Centre, the Niagara River Parkway, and the adjacent pedestrian walkways and areas on the Canadian side of the Falls.” The findings were assimilated as an asset: “At the Oakes Hotel, you can almost feel the mist from the falls when standing in your room or from our observation floor.”
“Upon check out,” one guest wrote, “we complained that the air conditioner was not working the room was very hot and we woke in the middle of the night to water coming out of the ceiling in the washroom over the tub.” Another complained that “water started leaking from the ceiling in our bathroom in the middle of the night. The floor was soaked and slippery. I called the front desk at 4:30am to report it.”
Attached to the reviews are photographs showing the “tourist water” from the window, the great mist-plume rising “high as the common clouds” in winter, summer, and spring, lit up, at night, in bright neon colors, and rushing toward the lip “an eight of league wide.” Then it “seems to die in the act of falling,” as Dickens wrote, and in its place raise a “tremendous ghost of spray and mist” to haunt the images.
There is no worse what.
There it is on the lens like a drop of water: “cataract.”