Mind Map #1: Flatland
A collage of thoughts on Terry Allen, Joseph Cornell, and Polynesian wayfinding
Currently reading Truckload Of Art: The Life And Work Of Terry Allen, by Brendan Greaves. One of my favorite artists gets the hefty biography treatment. Terry is a conceptual artist, playwright, radio broadcaster, sculptor, poet. He’s also one hell of a country singer and songwriter. “People tell me it’s country music, and I ask, ‘Which country?’”
And his Lubbock, Texas upbringing—full of boredom, colorful family lore, surreal entertainment courtesy of his wrestler promoter father, and that endless, mind-numbing flatland—turned Terry into a quotable guy.
“Art is the shortest distance between two question marks.”
“The moment the present ends, and memory begins, it becomes fiction.”
“Talking about art is like trying to French kiss over the telephone.”
Greaves: “[Allen] has proposed a trinity of identities and voices he perceives within every great artist: the criminal (the artist must break rules), the child (the artist must exercise their innocence), and the lunatic (the artist must function on another plane of experience and consciousness).” To which I wonder: aren’t they all the same?
Terry grew up in Lubbock. It’s the largest city on the Llano Estacado, one of the largest mesas in North America. Everything’s big out there: big distances, big ranches, big sky looming overhead. I’ve driven through Lubbock a handful of times, and I struggled to keep the car on the highway as the winds blew with gale force on sunny, cloudless days. Out there, you don’t need a storm to get blown away.
Greaves: “In 1541, when the Spanish conquistador Francisco Coronado encountered the Llano Estacado, he described the ‘sea of grass’ as limitless, ‘with no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea…not a stone, nor bit of rising ground, not a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.’” It disoriented the Spanish. Their native guides would shoot an arrow straight ahead of them, walk, retrieve the arrow, and then repeat, to make sure they weren’t walking in a circle.
Family friends went to Lubbock’s Texas Tech University in the ‘70s and told me about the dust storms. They’d wet towels and push them into every possible opening around doors and windows. Still, the dust would pile into the center of the room in ruddy mounds. I remember being terrified. Wind, to me, was in the violence of spring tornadoes that hit North Texas, almost always around my birthday, turning the skies a sickly green. I couldn’t imagine violent wind just dropping out of a sunny day. In the book, Terry remembers coughing for days after dust storms. He’d drag his finger across his classroom desk and it’d come up with earth.
Lubbock, the Hub City, “spoked with highways to take you away, to anywhere else, to anyone else.” Looking at a map, it’s hard not to see it as a wind-swept island. If you folded a globe in half, diagonally, would Lubbock be the obverse of some barren land holding on for dear life in the Roaring Forties?
A childhood in a sea of grass. Nothing to make an echo. The Llano Estacado, created when a vast interior ocean dried up. Terry’s childhood home in Lubbock contained “exactly one piece of art…a generic etching of a sailing ship.”
His uncles, cousins, grandfathers were sailors: “All of them grew up on a farm out on the desolate flats of the Texas Panhandle. That’s probably why they went off to fight wars on the ocean…flat just seemed to naturally go off to fight on flat. Maybe it’s more comfortable to kill somebody or get killed with a familiar horizon in the distance.”
Place creates the artist. Joseph Cornell bisects my current deep dive into all things Terry. Cornell’s sea was New York City, early 20th century. Curio shops and antiquities dealers peppered Fourth Avenue, huddling along Madison Square Park and into Greenwich Village. Picture windows displayed their cabinets of curiosity: Victorian dolls, sheet music, rare books, vintage hand-painted postcards, astronomical charts, penny arcades. The beautiful, human-scaled flotsam of the 19th century washing ashore an industrialized beach.
Cornell’s ship of necessity was the elevated train. The Third and Sixth Avenue lines sailed a sea of windows, from the Flatiron Building to the apartments crowding the tracks. Eye-level glimpses of people and scenes as the train clattered past: a woman knitting, a man pressing hats, faces, curtains, advertisements, fire escapes, iron and steel and wood, geometries of sunlight and shadow.
This is where Cornell’s shadow boxes and assemblages came from. Windows into mysterious worlds.
Charles Simic: “Somewhere in the city of New York there are four or five still-unknown objects that belong together. Once together they'll make a work of art. That's Cornell's premise, his metaphysics, and his religion.”
Cornell: “thru the cellar window the squirrel and catbird, robin at the bird table under the quince tree with its petals falling - the rose pink of azalea bush in full bloom strong sense of significant form, drama and poetry accentuated by the ‘spectacle.’”
Hanging in the kitchen, Allen’s mother had a set of china plates with painted birds on them. Her chain smoking accidentally set the house on fire in 1967, burning up the plates. “Just after the fire,” Allen says, “when they were oddly still perfectly intact, you reached up from a ladder to take them down off the charred walls and the lightest touch to them collapsed into a fine painted ash across your fingers and face and drifted out across the air, released now, birds of their own, flying into each breath going into your body.”
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Thousands of years ago, if you were to sail the South Pacific, there were millions more seabirds than today. But who would sail an ocean that was a third of the earth? At a time when the Europeans hadn’t even left the Mediterranean bathtub—the scene for the epic poetry of The Odyssey, The Iliad, and The Aeneid—the Polynesians were venturing to Madagascar in the west and South America in the east. They navigated by star, by current, by cloud, by seabird. Birds on the horizon will tell you where feeding grounds are, which mean shallower water and land. Island lagoons colored the underside of distant clouds green. New Zealand historian Michael King writes, “the Pacific Ocean with its widely spaced islands dotted across a vast surface was a kind of terrestrial mirror for the galaxy, the Milky Way, which provided Polynesian sailors with stellar markers for celestial navigation.”
Coconut strips and palm strips detailed ocean currents, wind patterns, and swells. Cowrie shells connected the strips and represented islands and atolls. Pilots memorized them and left the fragile stick charts on land, feeling the ocean to navigate.
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A sea of stars, a sea of birds, a sea of grass, a sea of steel.
Seas to learn, to understand, to sail into deeper, dreamier, mysterious waters.