In Periscope (Hart Crane), the straightedge "device" has sprouted a hand, and it looks as though the periscope is opening onto the blue sea, helpfully labeled "BLUE" in the lower panel. A black arrow on the right points downward. In Pictures of Nothing, his posthumously published lectures on abstract painting at the National Gallery, Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, mentions Johns' "title mania." Doesn't the title encourage us to think of Hart Crane's suicidal dive into the Gulf of Mexico in 1932, after he was beaten up for coming on to a crew member? Doesn't that extended hand suggest a crucifix, an image, presumably, of gay martyrdom? But Weiss—and probably Johns, too—will have none of this. The periscope is a mechanical device, like the compass and quadrant that Crane mentions in his poem At Melville's Tomb. The painting, Weiss argues, is really about "the compound relationship between instrument and body," which in turn "recalls the Target paintings with plaster casts."