The Cormac McCarthy Journal 40
Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field and
McCarthy’s Enigmatic Epilogue: “Y qué
clase de lugar es éste?”
Christopher D. Campbell
In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by
means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses
an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the
hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel
hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has
put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in
search of bones and those who do not search and they move
haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are
monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear
restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no
inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one
that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground
and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than
the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and
causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence
to the one before it there on that prairie upon which
are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do
not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his
steel. Then they all move on again.
Since the original publication of Blood Meridian in 1985,
its epilogue has intrigued and challenged readers and
critics alike. On its surface, the imagery of at least the
second sentence seems a straightforward enough representation of a man
using a post-hole digger. Anyone who has ever labored with just such an
“implement” in moderately rocky soil will recognize the sparks which fly
with each plunge of the tool. On this point, there has been little disagreement.
Rather, it is the imagery of the first and third sentences which has
proven so challenging.
The most common interpretation of the man “progressing over the
plain” has been simply that of a man erecting a fence, leading to readings of
the epilogue as a whole as McCarthy’s lamentation on the “fencing in of the
open West.”2 As early as 1993, Peter Josyph was reading it this way at the
first McCarthy conference. Such a reading led Josyph to see the epilogue as
“the novel’s one false note” (175). Eight years later, Douglas Canfield
The Cormac McCarthy Journal 41
expands on this interpretation in his book Mavericks on the Border. A
similar interpretation is implicit in Steven Shaviro’s quotation of the epilogue
in 1992. More recently, Harold Bloom has suggested, “Perhaps all that
the reader can surmise with some certainty is that the man striking fire in the
rock at dawn is an opposing figure in regard to the evening redness in the
West. The Judge never sleeps, and perhaps will never die, but a new
Prometheus may be rising to go up against him” (xiii). One limitation all
these interpretations share is that they focus almost exclusively on “the
man” digging the holes; they do little to explain any more, and there is much
more.
Equally as challenging as the epilogue’s first sentence is its third.
Who are these wanderers? Why are they here? For what creature’s or
person’s bones do they search? Is this another of McCarthy’s commentaries
on the Catholic passion for relics? Or does this imagery hearken back to the
mounds of bones and carcasses that were a byproduct of the near extinction
of the American bison? What of those who neither search for nor gather
bones? Why are they here? Why do they wander? What form of “prudence
or reflectiveness” is it which restrains them and “which has no inner reality”?
Why is it necessary to validate “sequence and causality”? What is it
about the digger and his digging that captivates them or empowers them?
Which is it? Do they not move on, beyond and without the digger, because
they cannot tear themselves away from the very process described, or
because something in this digging makes their progress possible? A possibly
significant ambiguity exists in the phrase “and they cross in their progress
one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground [. .
.].” To what does the modifier “one by one” append? To the holes themselves,
or to those who are crossing? If the phrase describes the crossers,
then why do they cross “one by one”? Why not “altogether?” (The significance
of this last question will become clear shortly.)
I raise the foregoing questions not to echo the befuddlement of B.R.
Myers but because I believe their answers point to the origins of the
epilogue’s imagery. Part of the beauty of that imagery is its invitation to
interpretation. Definitive answers elude us, and in that eluding lies the very
richness of McCarthy’s prose. Interpretation of these images is their future.
What I propose, rather, is one possible explanation of their origins: their
past. If there exists a specific event or project which inspired this vision,
that in no way reduces the richness of possible interpretations.
I believe the term minimalist describes in different ways both the
representation (that is, the text of the epilogue itself—the 207 words arranged
into five sentences which compose it), and the represented (which I
will characterize for the moment as an artist, his audience, and both their
actions). I choose this term in particular because among all the possible
The Cormac McCarthy Journal 42
origins of the epilogue’s imagery, there is one artifact whose construction
and existence I believe capture more of the elements of this passage than
any other. Described by Kenneth Baker in 1988 as “the closest thing to a
masterpiece to come out of Minimalism” (125), that artifact is Walter De
Maria’s Lightning Field near Quemado, New Mexico. Having taken place
from June through October of 1977, the construction of The Lightning Field
is close enough in geography to the setting of Blood Meridian, close enough
in chronology to the composition of the epilogue, and close enough in action
and physical description to the events therein to at least merit consideration
by overwhelming parallels of circumstance alone, but there is much more
which compels us to at least consider it.
Before proceeding, some explanation of the artifact itself is in order.
The Lightning Field is a work of land art which consists of 400 highly
polished stainless steel poles with precisely milled solid pointed tips. The
poles are erected in an equally precisely aligned grid running one mile (25
poles) east-west by one kilometer and six meters (16 poles) north-south.
Averaging 20 feet 7½ inches in height, the tops form a plane which could
theoretically “support an imaginary sheet of glass” (De Maria 58).
Equally as important as the physical structure of The Lightning
Field is the manner in which it may be viewed. De Maria had very clear
ideas on this point, and an important element of his conception involved
isolation. “Isolation is the essence of Land Art,” he said in 1980. “It is
intended that the work be viewed alone, or in the company of a very small
number of people, over at least a 24-hour period” (58). To this end, during
the 1 May to 31 October “visiting season” viewers with reservations—no
more than six in any 24-hour period—present themselves at the Quemado
office of Dia Center for the Arts, leave their vehicles, and are transported to
the site, more than thirty miles from the nearest population center, by a Dia
official. They are dropped off there in the early afternoon and retrieved the
next day just before lunch. A 1930’s log cabin, located 200 yards “outside”
the northern edge of the field and centered between the 10th and 11th rows
from the east, provides accommodation. Originally, Dia allowed a day
between visits to refurbish the cabin, halving today’s possible 1100 viewers
each season to a mere 550, but more recently they’ve begun accommodating
a new group each day.3 Clearly, in the same way that McCarthy has never
been a “commercial” author, De Maria was more concerned with the nature
of the experience of his creation than with reaching vast numbers of people.
Likewise, the charge for an overnight stay at the field—and this is the only
approved method of viewing it—does not begin to cover the cost of maintaining
it (Dia).
The same rationale that limits the number of visitors also drives the
method of transportation to and from the field, specified by De Maria from
The Cormac McCarthy Journal 43
the outset (Weathers). The roads, though dirt, are excellent and easily
traversable by car, but De Maria’s stated goal of isolation as a feature of the
work would be reduced by the presence of even one vehicle near the field,
authorized or not. Within the field, nothing man-made exists beyond the
poles themselves, extending in perfect alignment, seemingly “to the rim of
the visible ground.” Equally important, to that very horizon, only a half
dozen manmade objects are visible—the cabin, three distant windmills, a
section of barbed wire fence, the faint scar of a distant dirt road—and only
to the keenest eye. Both time and space seem to have been arrested by the
field, space even more so within an hour of the rising or setting of the sun or
moon, when even the most distant of four hundred gleaming poles is
brightly visible. In contrast, from about two hours after sunrise until about
two before sunset, the field is virtually invisible, with only the nearest few
of the poles silhouetted against the horizon.
Although I recognize the challenges of the enterprise I am undertaking
here, for the student of McCarthy, and especially of Blood Meridian,
making a connection between The Lightning Field and the
epilogue is not even a voluntary act. The physical structure of the field
itself immediately calls the epilogue to mind. One can easily imagine each
apparently infinite progression of two-inch diameter poles being erected by
a single man with a post-hole digger. The concrete foundations, themselves
only three feet deep and one foot in diameter, are a foot below the surface
and invisible, so that each pole seems to spring unsupported from the soil of
the plain itself. To stand at the end of any row and imagine its construction
is virtually to imagine McCarthy’s epilogue. Add a minimalist artist and his
patrons and the picture is complete. But these are primarily physical similarities.
In what follows, I’ll illustrate the striking thematic elements shared
by the two works, and, finally, demonstrate how familiarity with The
Lightning Field supports and amplifies Leo Daugherty’s 1993 interpretation
of the epilogue’s meaning.
The first circumstantial connections are geographical and temporal.
Establishing a definitive connection between this incredible work of art and
the epilogue of Blood Meridian might be as simple as establishing that
McCarthy is among the rather small number who have seen it. Unfortunately,
however, Dia’s record of visitors to the site before 1986 is both
incomplete and inaccessible. Ultimately, establishing whether McCarthy has
seen the installation may depend on asking the author himself.
On the other hand, it is entirely possible that McCarthy, driving the
backroads of New Mexico during his many research travels throughout the
Southwest, came upon the site on his own, either by accident or on purpose.
The roads, though dirt, are quite good, and in the interest of protecting the
isolation of the site, they are unmarked in any way, either inviting or prohibThe
Cormac McCarthy Journal 44
iting. More than once, McCarthy has asserted that he “doesn’t write about
places he hasn’t visited” (Woodward). In Blood Meridian itself, the closest
action to this particular area of New Mexico may be that within sight of the
Animas peaks. Then again, there is a vast geographic blank between the
kid’s last known position after his departure from Los Angeles and his entry
into Texas some seventeen years later. In the end, though, it is not Blood
Meridian so much as The Crossing which invites us to believe that
McCarthy has traveled the roads which lead to The Lightning Field—that he
has been at least as close as thirty-five miles to the field itself.
Having moved to El Paso in 1977, most of McCarthy’s research
wanderings through the desert Southwest must have commenced around the
same time as construction of De Maria’s sculpture and continued after the
artwork’s completion. And there is no necessity in believing that his travels
through the area were confined to the region about which he was writing at
any given time. We are asked to believe only that by the time he did write
about a place, he had been there. Thus, when McCarthy tells us in The
Crossing that after departing Winslow, Arizona, Billy Parham “rode south
across the high plains west of Socorro and he rode through Magdalena and
across the plains of Saint Augustine” (349), then we must assume that
McCarthy has traveled this route, a route which, on today’s roads, passes
directly through none other than Quemado itself, directly in front of the Dia
Center office on Route 60. Quemado, though, even today, is little more than
a church, post office, school, and fewer than a dozen buildings other than
homes. Magdalena (also the name of John Grady’s love in Cities of the
Plain) is the nearest town of truly appreciable size to The Lightning Field
itself and has existed throughout this century. Even more importantly, a
straight line drawn from Winslow to Magdalena, the route a horseman might
travel, passes more closely to the field itself than to the town of Quemado.
Lastly, traveling “through Magdalena and across the plains of Saint Augustine”
is, in fact, the route a person would take driving from El Paso to
Quemado to visit The Lightning Field.4
Beyond geography, thematic connections also invite us to believe
McCarthy would be attracted to this site. To begin with, there is the element
of lightning itself. De Maria rightly emphasized that “[t]he light is as
important as the lightning,” for the work certainly does not depend on this
phenomenon for its impact. Still there is the name of the work, and the
significant fact that much attention was given to the likelihood of a lightning
strike occurring, in everything from the location of the field to the physical
construction of the poles themselves. If De Maria has something of a
fascination with this particular element of nature, he is far from alone. If
there is any single weather phenomenon which flashes across the pages of
all of McCarthy’s fiction from The Orchard Keeper through Cities of the
The Cormac McCarthy Journal 45
Plain, it is lightning. Some of the most arrestingly beautiful passages in all
of McCarthy’s prose are dedicated to its description.
In The Orchard Keeper, in a storm of biblical proportions, the title
character, Arthur Ownby, is knocked unconscious by a bolt. The
alliterative description of this event has a lyrical quality that rivals the
poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins:
The old man kept to his course, over last year’s leaves slick
with water, hopping and dancing wildly among the maelstrom
of riotous greenery like some rain sprite, burned out
of the near-darkness in antic configuration against the quick
bloom of the lightning. As he passed it thus a barren chestnut
silver under the sluice of rain erupted to the heart and
spewed out sawdust and scorched mice upon him. A slab
fell away with a long hiss like a burning mast tilting seaward.
He is down. A clash of shields rings and Valkyrie
descend with cat’s cries to bear him away. Already a rivulet
is packing clay in one ragged cuff and a quiff of white hair
depending from his forelock reddens in the seeping mud.
(172)
The same lyrical quality extends to the single description of lightning in
Outer Dark. Occurring early in the novel, its flashes surreally illuminate the
child which Culla has just abandoned in the swamp and to which his lost
and circuitous wanderings have returned him:
When he crashed into the glade among the cottonwoods
he fell headlong and lay there with his cheek to the
earth. And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went
bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic
bird’s first fissured vision of the world and transpiring
instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the
grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the
rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare. He
would have taken it for some boneless cognate of his heart’s
dread had the child not cried. (17-18)
Because the majority of the action in Child of God takes place in the winter,
there is little opportunity for lightning, but with the writing of
Suttree and all that follows, lightning is back as both a recurring element
and as subject of McCarthy’s most eloquent prose. As early as the
prologue’s closing paragraph, which reads like a set description, we find
The Cormac McCarthy Journal 46
among the short descriptive fragments “Faint summer lightning far
downriver” (5). Thus McCarthy makes lightning a feature of the backdrop
upon which the ensuing drama is to play.
Indeed, there are features of the phenomenon in Suttree which both
hearken back to Outer Dark and look forward to McCarthy’s Southwestern
fiction. In the same way that lightning provides the illumination for Culla’s
abandonment of the infant in Outer Dark, it lights the tragic death which
shatters Suttree’s idyllic interlude with Wanda and the family of mussellers
upriver. “In a raw pool of lightning an image of a baroque pieta, the woman
gibbering and kneeling in the rain clutching at sheared limbs and rags of
meat among the slabs of rock. [ . . .] The cryptic lightning developed a
rainveiled face stark and blue upon the ground” (362). Suttree abandons this
scene of grief, and a short time later we find him again in Knoxville, at
perhaps his spiritually lowest state, passively suicidal, calling the lightning
down:
It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the darkened
heart within him and cried for light. If there be any art
in the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. If
you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain.
He sat with his back to a tree and watched the storm
move on over the city. Am I a monster, are there monsters in
me? (366)5
Beyond his dreams and visions, there are no monsters in Suttree, but there
may be elsewhere, and yet another poetic description of lightning, the first
to occur in the novel proper, associates the two: “High over the downriver
land lightning quaked soundlessly and ceased. Far clouds rimlit. A brimstone
light. Are there dragons in the wings of the world?” (29).
Silent, distant, on the “rim” of the world—it is especially this mode
of describing lightning which, beginning with Suttree and continuing
through all of the Southwestern novels, may accurately be called a
McCarthy trademark. There are at least nine such occurrences in Blood
Meridian alone. Just one of several examples in All the Pretty Horses comes
in a richly comic moment preserved even in the film adaptation, where
Jimmy Blevins recounts a family history in which McCarthy seems to have
collected all the most interesting accounts he has heard of death by lightning.
Blevins’ recounting itself takes place while a storm looms on the
horizon. “Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed
mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under
way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world” (67).
This trademark continues in The Crossing, where, amongst the
The Cormac McCarthy Journal 47
many descriptions of lightning we find a passage of dialogue between Billy
and Mr. Sanders as sensually and beautifully precise as it is irrelevant to any
of the novel’s action, unless it’s to reinforce the idea of there being such a
thing as a distinctly Mexican thunderstorm:
I seen it thunder in a snowstorm one time, Billy
said. Thunder and lightnin. You couldnt see the lightnin.
Just everthing would light up all around you, white as
cotton.
I had a Mexican one time to tell me that, the old
man said. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.
It was in Mexico was where I seen it.
Maybe they dont have it in this country.
Billy smiled. (351-52)
In a book that is part of a “Border Trilogy,” one of the central
themes of which is the vast differences between our two countries, there is
significance in the implication that even the weather recognizes that border.
This theme is particularly emphasized by representatives from both sides in
Cities of the Plain, where McCarthy’s trademark distant and silent lightning
is present yet again: “The dark clouds stood banked in a high wall to the
north and a thin and soundless wire of lightning appeared there and quivered
and vanished again” (231).
All of these examples together, however, still will not balance the
prevalence of electrical weather phenomena in Blood Meridian. This single
novel contains nearly as many such references as all the rest of the
McCarthy canon combined. At least one instance of lightning-illuminated
narrative seems to hark back to Suttree’s earlier question as to whether there
were monsters in him and to answer it for mankind as a race. There are
dragons in the wings of the world, and in Blood Meridian they ride upon
horses:
They cut the throats of the pack animals and jerked
and divided the meat and they traveled under the cape of the
wild mountains upon a broad soda plain with dry thunder to
the south and rumors of light. Under a gibbous moon horse
and rider spanceled to their shadows on the snowblue
ground and in each flare of lightning as the storm advanced
those selfsame forms rearing with a terrible redundancy
behind them like some third aspect of their presence hammered
out black and wild upon the naked grounds. They
rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose
The Cormac McCarthy Journal 48
origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an
order both imperative and remote. For although each man
among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they
made a thing that had not been before and in that communal
soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited
regions on old maps where monsters do live and where
there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural
winds. (151-52)
Throughout Blood Meridian distant and silent lightning lends an
inescapably primordial quality to the landscape, as if one has traveled back
in time to the days when lightning played a role in the original formation of
complex organic molecules. It may well be that this narrative technique
contributed to Peter Josyph’s sense that “Blood Meridian is not [. . .] a novel
about nineteenth-century America, nor is it a novel about nineteenth-century
Mexico, because it is not about the nineteenth century. [. . .] [T]he world of
the Glanton gang in this book is not a world in the likes of which the
Glantons of record, or anyone else of record excepting McCarthy, has ever
walked” (175). Josyph’s friend and fellow author Richard Selzer seems to
have a similar sense of the novel’s setting when he refers to the gang as
“members of a primal horde” (qtd. in Josyph 176). As a feature of the
landscape, this distant lightning is ubiquitous:
Far to the south lightning flared soundlessly. (16)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Distant thunderheads reared quivering against the
electric sky and were sucked away in the blackness again.
(19)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the
west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish
day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden
skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other
order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.
The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit
the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging
reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon
kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the
day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more
than any troubling dream. (47)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The sourceless summer lightning marked out of the
The Cormac McCarthy Journal 49
night dark mountain ranges at the rim of the world and the
halfwild horses on the plain before them trotted in those
bluish strobes like horses called forth quivering out of the
abyss. (163)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
They rode through the long twilight and the sun set
and no moon rose and to the west the mountains shuddered
again and again in clattering frames and burned to final
darkness and the rain hissed in the blind night land. (187)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
They ascended through a rocky pass and lightning
shaped out the distant shivering mountains and lightning
rang the stones about and tufts of blue fire clung to the
horses like incandescent elementals that would not be
driven off. Soft smelterlights advanced upon the metal of
the harness, lights ran blue and liquid on the barrels of the
guns. (186)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
They traveled through the high country deeper into
the mountains where the storms had their lairs, a fiery
clangorous region where white flames ran on the peaks and
the ground bore the burnt smell of broken flint. (188)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He moved on and soon he was in darkness himself
and the wind came up off the desert and frayed wires of
lightning stood again and again along the western terminals
of the world. (213)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He cited the terrain before him in the periodic flare
of the lightning . . . . (214)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All across those reaches the yammer and yap of the
starving wolves relayed and to the north the silent lightning
rigged a broken lyre upon the world’s dark rim. (318)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Lightning stood in ragged chains far to the south,
silent, the staccato mountains bespoken blue and barren out
of the void. Day broke upon a smoking reach of desert
darkly clouded where the riders could count five separate
storms spaced upon the shores of the round earth. (175)
The passages above invite at least two observations. First, lightning
The Cormac McCarthy Journal 50
is clearly a meteorological phenomenon to which McCarthy has devoted
considerable detailed attention. Second, there is no electrical weather
phenomenon actually observed6 in the course of Blood Meridian which De
Maria does not claim can also be observed at The Lightning Field, for in his
1980 statement, De Maria points out that “[s]everal distinct thunderstorms
can be observed at one time from The Lightning Field,” and, “On very rare
occasions when there is a strong electrical current in the air, a glow known
as ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ may be emitted from the tips of the poles” (58).
And this returns us, finally, to the epilogue of Blood Meridian and
to a host of ways in which an awareness of The Lightning Field reinforces at
least one extant reading of it, namely Leo Daugherty’s. While the only
certainty that Harold Bloom would allow us with regard to the epilogue is
that “the man striking fire in the rock at dawn is an opposing figure [. . .] a
new Prometheus [. . .] rising to go up against [the judge]” (xiii), Daugherty
goes a step further and names that new Prometheus, that wiser Ahab, as the
author himself, and reads the epilogue as a virtual McCarthian self-portrait
of “a solitary obsessive who, in his alienation from this Anareta7 world, this
killing planet, and in his fidelity to the real god, has a ‘can do no other’
(because Called) purpose, and who cares not a whit for the ‘market’” (170).
Recall the similarly “uncommercial” aspects of both McCarthy’s early work
and De Maria’s. It’s hardly a stretch to apply Daugherty’s characterization
of the “solitary, ascetic and superior nature and work” (169) of McCarthy to
such a highly conceptual artist as De Maria.
If one accepts that the man in the epilogue is a representation of
McCarthy as author, revelator, and artist, it is only a small step from there to
also seeing the epilogue as a description of De Maria’s sculpture, complete
with artist, viewers, and commentary on their relationship. The physical
similarities are inescapable. Lest one object that The Lightning Field itself is
finite in nature and thus at odds with the seeming infinite progression of the
epilogue, I offer both my own experience of the place and John Beardsley’s
description of it in Earthworks and Beyond. Beardsley believes that art
historian Christopher Hussey’s “seven attributes of the sublime provide a
virtual prescription for [The] Lightning Field” (62)8. Of particular note is
Beardsley’s explanation that “infinity [. . .] could either be literal or induced
by two final characteristics of the sublime: succession and uniformity, both
of which suggest limitless progression” (62). Applying these attributes to
The Lightning Field, Beardsley says, “[E]verywhere is the inference of
infinity. The poles stand in stately succession, uniform in height and in the
distance between them. As they diminish in the distance, they create the
illusion—like telephone poles or railroad tracks—of endless progression”
(63). Thus, however one interprets the meaning of McCarthy’s epilogue, one
cannot escape the physical similarities of the scene it describes to De
The Cormac McCarthy Journal 51
Maria’s Lightning Field.
But what of that meaning? Even for those who believe that
McCarthy’s epilogue is simply a lament upon the fencing in of the West,
again there is a thematic parallel in The Lightning Field, for Beardsley
notes, “At all times the piece is an experience in the demarcation of space,
referring through the use of the mile and the kilometer to the manner in
which much of the earth has been divided and brought under human sovereignty”
(62). This same sensation is noted—in terms strongly reminiscent of
the judge’s quest to be suzerain—by Kenneth Baker, who says the poles
“calibrate the space of the plain in a manner that links pictorial perspective
conventions and the modern Western mania for appropriating and subduing
the earth” (127). Nor is Daugherty’s assertion that one of McCarthy’s
themes is the unchangingly brutal nature of the world unaccommodated by
De Maria’s polished poles, of which Baker notes, “Their elegant, potentially
lethal forms stir associations to high-tech weaponry and its ancestry of
spear, dart, and arrow. [. . .] [and] conflate symbolism of weapons and the
human figure to evoke a vision of society as a war of each against all” (127).
Finally, there is the plethora of questions springing from the
epilogue’s third sentence and the wanderers we find there:
On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of
bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly
in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored
with escapement and pallet so that they appear
restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no
inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one
that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground
and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than
the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and
causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence
to the one before it there on that prairie upon which
are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do
not gather.
Again, there would seem to be an analogue in The Lightning Field and its
viewers. Recall De Maria’s intention that the work be viewed alone. Further,
De Maria encourages visitors to the site both to survey its perimeter and to
enter it outright. A number of the statements he made in 1980 seem relevant
here. “The light is as important as the lightning.” “A simple walk around the
perimeter of the poles takes approximately two hours.” “The primary
experience takes place within The Lightning Field.” It is accepting these last
invitations which makes one most keenly aware of how closely the
The Cormac McCarthy Journal 52
epilogue’s description applies to a visitor to De Maria’s sculpture. Viewing
the field from within, or from without, is an exercise in movement and
cessation. One moves to a vantage point and admires the perfect symmetry
of the view down a single row, where as many as twenty-five poles stretching
a mile into the distance are so perfectly aligned that twenty-four disappear
behind the nearest one. One moves again to a midpoint between two
rows to admire the diminishing perspective of the poles’ recession to the
distance. Again one moves to a point where diagonals intersect and both
foregoing views are afforded with no more movement than a turn of the
head. One moves, in a word, “haltingly.” And in the entire experience, there
is nothing so uncanny as the sense of the space defined by these poles.
Stepping from “inside” the field to “outside,” one makes a movement of
inches, through a plane defined by any of the four outermost rows. There is,
in fact, no “inner reality” to this space—the terrain, the vegetation, the sky
itself are no different on either side of that plane—and yet that movement of
inches creates an immediate discomfort, a yearning to return to the fold, to
the “civilized” space of the field itself. Perhaps this is what De Maria meant
when he said, “The invisible is real.”9
This simple observation may be the very “verification of a principle”
that both McCarthy and De Maria had in mind. In Earthworks and
Beyond, Beardsley comments on the transmission of meaning in abstract
works. “The abstract image,” he says, “whether in primitive or modern art—
was felt to present reality as known in the mind rather than merely perceived
by the senses. It became a visible icon for the metaphysical. [. . .] In their
use of reductive forms to convey metaphysical content, several of the land
artists—Heizer and De Maria chief among them—share this intellectual
primitivism” (59).
There is no more strongly metaphysical work in the McCarthy
canon than Blood Meridian. If Daugherty is right that the epilogue is
McCarthy’s effort to “make of himself a ‘presence’ at the end” (170), then
what better way to do so than to cast himself as artist through a minimalist
description of another seeker’s work which could not help but move him?
NOTES
1. A slightly expanded version of a presentation given to The Cormac
McCarthy Conference, El Paso, Texas, October 27, 2001.
2. Indeed, at the very outset of McCarthy’s next novel, All the Pretty Horses,
the narrator tells us that, “In eighteen eighty-three they ran the first barbed
wire” (7), but there is some question here as to whether this means on the
ranch itself or across the whole of the Southwest. Barbed wire was invented
The Cormac McCarthy Journal 53
in 1868 by Michael Kelly and patented in the form we know today by
Joseph Glidden in 1884 (National Archives).
3. For information on the history of The Lightning Field since its construction
and the record keeping practices of Dia, I’m indebted to Robert Weathers,
who assisted with the construction in 1977 and has served as caretaker
since, and to Kathleen Shields of Dia’s Corrales, New Mexico, office, who
manages reservations for visits. Readers interested in experiencing the
artifact firsthand should refer to
4. Still, with only this circumstantial evidence and without access to Dia’s
records or a statement from McCarthy himself, we may never know if he
actually visited the site. However, when one considers the milieu to which
the author was exposed, particularly at the MacArthur reunions after being
awarded the “genius grant” in 1981, it’s difficult to imagine his being
unaware of the most important piece of land art in his newly adopted home
territory—and an awareness of the site, and a glimpse at the photographs
published in the 1980 Artforum article, may have been sufficient in themselves
to inspire the 1985 epilogue.
5. As Richard Woodward pointed out in 1992, Suttree seems “strongly
autobiographical.” Thus it may not be a great stretch to imagine McCarthy
himself addressing a storm in just such a manner, a manner which one might
construe as a less self-assured echo of Ahab’s address to the storm in chapter
119 of Moby-Dick.
6. Although the kid sees the effects of ball lightning on page 215 following a
night storm, he does not observe the phenomenon itself.
7. See Daugherty, page 163 for an explanation of this term.
8. Beardsley points out that Hussey’s “seven attributes” are drawn from his
reading of Edmund Burke’s 1757 Philosophical Enquiry (59-62).
9. De Maria also said, “The sum of the facts does not constitute the work or
determine its esthetics”—a statement which pairs nicely with Josyph’s
observation that the “poetic whole [of Blood Meridian] has little or nothing
to do with the sum of its traceable parts” (181-82).
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