Outside El Paso

When I say that being here (see photo) was one of the highlights of the trip, that probably says a lot about what kind of trip it was. 

The place depicted is a salt flat by the highway near the south end of the Guadalupe Mountains, in far west Texas. On my first drive around the country, my first Itinerant Artist Project tour back in the spring of 2000, an 11-week journey that changed the course of my life...this same salt flat was only a ghostly, moonlit presence, glimpsed now and then in the blackness outside the beam of my headlights, as I raced along toward El Paso. I was on a 14-hour drive from Austin to the Arizona border. It was the longest drive I'd ever done, most of it at night. A few weeks into a rather intimidating journey, I felt desperate to reach some place I'd seen before and knew. So I just drove until I got to Portal, Arizona.

I'd done a fair amount of traveling before, some overseas, but geographically and spiritually that particular drive took me to probably the most extreme state of dislocation I've experienced. My consciousness seemed to be slipping beyond the pull of everyday reality. I never fell asleep but was held on the edge of dreams or nightmares or some dim oblivion, for several hours. Things I saw along the way haunted me - not necessarily unpleasantly - for years and maybe still do.

At the disturbing end of the spectrum were the glowing eyes of jackrabbits that lined the road – every few hundred yards it seemed – through the Chihuahuan Desert. An eye would glint in the headlights, glowing orange as the car got closer, the left eye of a creature crouched, poised by the side of the road waiting to throw itself toward the headlights when they passed. Anticipating and dodging the jackrabbits wore on me. I grazed one, the first one, which luckily bounded out of the shadows when I was taking a fast curve away from it. I somehow missed all the rest. But it took a toll on my psyche.

More deeply disturbing had been my first vision of Ciudad Juarez: across a shadowy chasm separating the neon signs and harsh extravagance of El Paso from what looked like and endless grid of faint, bare light bulbs – something like a starry sky but monotonously ordered, stretching across a vast hillside and into dim nothingness. That was several years before the changes that made Juarez known as the murder capital of the world.

Toward the more pleasant end of the spectrum was the mysterious glow of the salt flats. I tend to like elemental phenomena, bare geology. In the moonlight I could only guess what I was seeing, but it had a beauty and it had been calling me back ever since. Eleven years later, the alien place had become an long lost friend that I wanted to visit again.

…

And what is beauty but the beginning of terror? - Rilke

This seems a suitable place for one of my favorite quotes, from Rilke. One of the best things about it is it's over the top strangeness. I also like that the two translations I've seen are so different. Above is the more standard version. But the first version I saw, attributed to the painter Wolf Kahn, seems to say a lot more:

“What is beauty but the bearable edge of a knowing we could not endure?”

At my MFA exhibit in Ann Arbor many years ago, I was approached by a young German couple. I was surprised and delighted to hear that they had been following my progress and wanted to buy something – not just something but my best painting, a large night landscape with a looming, glowing cloud, which I called “the Cloud of Unknowing.” As we talked, the woman looked at me with great sympathy and said “It must be so painful working with such beauty.” Most people I knew would never guess or even begin to articulate such a thought. It's a very Romantic thought and in my case on the mark; I felt understood in a way I rarely have. I wouldn't be surprised if they were familiar with Rilke's writing.

The knowing “we could not endure” can perhaps be understood in brief flashes or sensed as we work along its edges. At any rate, I believe it's something to which we vitally need to be in relation if we are to now and then glimpse the full dimension of our humanity.

The pain of the poet cannot be compared with the sort of suffering and anxiousness one hears about in a place like Ciudad Juarez, or the sort of existential strain and ache I sensed to be part of life in El Paso. But it can be intense and threatening. It's also something I've protected myself from, to some degree, with my switch from the larger, more daring paintings like the Cloud of Unknowing and the isolation of the studio to the smaller work and social support of the Itinerant Artist Project.

This latest trip was partly about remembering things like that, and gauging whether or not I want to return to the studio, and how I might go about it.