Against Bliss
where did all the people go?
Bliss is a wallpaper. That may sound pseudo-profound, but it’s actually just a fact: it’s the title of the most famous wallpaper in history, and arguably the most viewed photo ever taken. Microsoft has that sort of power — as the default wallpaper for Windows XP, Bliss has undoubtedly been seen by billions of people across the world. The photographer, Chuck O’Rear, claims to have seen it in news broadcasts from the White House Situation Room, in shots of the Venezuelan President, and through the window of a restaurant in a small Thai village.
For a time, even many Microsoft employees thought it was fake. O’Rear recalls being contacted by the engineering staff: “we want to know where that photo originated. Most of us think it was photoshopped. There’s also a group of us who think that it was made not far from our headquarters, here in Seattle.”
They were all wrong.
Not only was it not photoshopped, it wasn’t even planned: “I didn’t ‘create’ this. I just happened to be there at the right moment and documented it.” O’Rear was on the way from his Napa Valley home to visit Daphne Irwin, the woman he would eventually marry. As he made his way down Sonoma Highway, he saw the hill. “There it was! My God, the grass is perfect! It’s green! The sun is out! There’s some clouds!”
He doesn’t know why Microsoft chose his photo — “Were they looking for an image that was peaceful? Were they looking for an image that had no tension?” — but they certainly wanted it badly. They wanted to own the photo outright, so they needed the original. When O’Rear tried to send the photo to Microsoft by courier, not even FedEx were willing to transport something with such a high price tag. The exact figure is protected by a non-disclosure agreement, but supposedly the price paid for Bliss is second only to that paid for the photo of then-President Bill Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky.
What’s striking about the photo is just how empty it is. There are a few clouds, a smattering of dandelions and a distant, evocative peak; but if anything these features only amplify the emptiness. Microsoft’s Bliss is void: offering the sort of peace you might find in a padded cell, rather than a child’s play-park. It’s free from tension because it’s free from just about anything: especially the human touch. Microsoft’s default is not to have any people on the other side of its windows. Ignorance is bliss, and vice versa.
That ‘empty’ and ‘natural’ peace is a feature common to many of the world’s most beautiful places. Whether it’s the Peak District, Yellowstone, or Chobe National Park; the human is often held or pushed back to make room for the natural — but some people wonder whether it’s the best way to deal with that tension.
In a piece sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, John Vidal tells one story of this approach being taken:
“The Botswana police helicopter spotted Tshodanyestso Sesana and his friends in the afternoon. The nine young Bushmen, or San, had been hunting antelope to feed their families, when the chopper flew towards them.
There was a burst of gunfire from the air and the young men dropped their meat and skins and fled. Largely through luck, no one was hit, but within minutes armed troops arrived in a jeep and the nine were arrested, stripped naked, beaten and then detained for several days for poaching in a nature reserve.
Welcome to 21st-century life in the vast Central Kalahari game park, an ancient hunting ground for the San, but now off-limits to the people who forged their history there.”
The problem isn’t unique to Botswana and its people, but it is a problem that’s almost universally ignored. In her essay on the establishment of US National Parks, Emily A. Vernizzi notes that “Native Americans have continually been exploited in one way or another in America’s pursuit of idealism”, observing that “the establishment of Yosemite created the “Yosemite model” for nature reserves around the world to follow as a basis for removing their indigenous peoples.” She concludes: “National Parks may be bliss, but the truths deserve to be known.”
When you push out the human for the sake of the natural, you’re not pushing out an idea — you’re pushing out real people. Often, it’s the most underprivileged people that bear the brunt of it. Is that right? The question cuts to the heart of much human guilt. Do we really belong in this world? Is this world really our home?
A storm had just passed through when O’Rear took his photo, leaving the grass especially vivid — but that there was grass at all was unusual. With prices in Sonoma reaching $75,000 per acre of bare land, much of the area had succumbed to either property or vineyard developments; but in 1992, Napa Valley was rendered bleak by the insect Phylloxera — pest of commercial grapevines worldwide. About half the vines across Northern California were pulled up from the soil and burned, leaving the hillsides carpeted with grass by the time O’Rear photographed them in 1996.
Today, the vines are back. The vineyards suck up water from the earth, and grape-human collaboration turns that water into Chardonnay and Pinot noir that’s famous right round the globe. If Bliss is one way to resolve the tension between nature and humanity, wine is another. Where Bliss exhibits emptiness, wine exhibits collaboration. Today’s photos of Sonoma Highway may not make the best wallpapers, but the fruit is far easier to stomach.
Do people belong in this world? Maybe that, too, seems pseudo profound. But things which seem trivial to those of us on this side of the window are vital to indigenous people everywhere. And of course that’s the real question – is there even any other type of person? We were all indigenous until we started putting up windows.
After all – if we don’t belong here, who’s going to make the wine?
