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.
