‘Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.’

• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Well. In pigment just perhaps. Ignore the bombast foregrounded and the yawing smokestacked tug heading away may have some wishes on board. 

Every man’s wish (women’s, Hurston exempts) might plausibly be bobbing westward here, too.

But something changes when the photograph is born.

Throw the gendered exemption overboard of course, but that’s not the key issue.

What ships at a distance carry are not wishes but fears.

That the ships look like visual artefacts, schmutz on a lens, digital craquelure, pixel tumours, is both a source of anxiety and an assertion made to minimise it. (It does not work.) There are other efforts to contain the terror aroused by these incomprehensible vessels on opaque errands along the horizon line

i) Syncretic rationalisation. 

We assert that the fear we cannot plausibly deny and the yearning we, with Hurston, strenuously claim, are in fact one - logical - phenomenon.

ii) Diligent Linnaeanism. 

Complex taxonomic schemes are thrown up to parse the threatening maritime geometries, silhouettes and quasi-symmetries. 

Rearguard at best, these attempts do not convince. Ships at a distance are terrible. The cargo they carry is our fear, but it is not our cargo. It has been ordered and it is en route. It is being transported from where it was mined to where it will be rendered.