Twenty years ago, when
I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in
the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.
(P. 13)
And so it begins…this novel made me think a great deal about
our own country—even tho’ I finished reading it well before the 2016 election
results were decided, I was already well aware of the division between the
coastal, urban areas and the rural areas, especially the open plains. You know,
those “fly over” states in the middle—the Great Plains, the “Bread Basket” of
the nation, amber waves of grain and all that salt of the earth stuff. I know
there are some who look at that part of the USA map and think, “those red state
people who love Jesus, take the Bible literally, and don’t believe in
evolution.” Whatever. To each his own, they’re not hurting me none, and I mean
them no harm. You’d be surprised, we are more than what we seem, more than
anyone can imagine. Being from Upstate New York, I’ve seen a similar difference
between town and country—Upstate vs. New York City. There are Upstate people
who would love to cut off from NYC, many of the “us” up here resent the
audacity of those city slickers trying to impose their highfalutin ideas on us
simple folk in the great, lake effect, cold, white north—take that as you think
best, it can go either way. The people of the Midwest and the people I bump
elbows with outside of the realm of the academia bubble in the Upstate regions
are pretty much from the same cloth. And they feel left behind, the forgotten
America. Even though, I’ll never fit in with them, I do admire them for their honest, hardworking
ethics. Even the ones who are a hard scrabble lot who don’t know better, they
chronically do dumb things, and wind up doing time in jail for petty nonsense
they shouldn’t have done. I always sympathized with the ones on the outside,
even if they didn’t understand me at all, the ones who I befriended, tipped
their heads with curiosity and gave up on figuring me out. I wasn’t a threat,
just different. They’d talk, I’d listen to their stories. For as long as
there’s civilization, there will always be differences, factions, groups, and
each has their own ideas of how things are, and what is right—or wrong.
See…this is what I love about books, they get you thinkin’ about stuff…even if
the stuff has little to do with the book, there’s something about reading that
turns on the brain to travel in and around…
The plainsman’s
heroes, in life and in art, were such as the man who went home every afternoon
for thirty years to an unexceptional house with neat lawns and listless shrubs
and sat late into the night deciding on the route of a journey that he might
have followed for thirty years only to arrive at the place where he sat—or the
man who would never take even the one road that led away from his isolated
farmhouse for fear that he would not recognize the place if he saw it from the
distant vantage points that others used.
There were historians
who suggested that the phenomenon of the plains themselves was responsible for
the cultural differences between the plainsmen and Australians generally. The
exploration of the plains had been the major event in their history. What had
at first seemed utterly flat and featureless eventually disclosed a countless
subtle variations of landscape and an abundance of furtive wildlife. Trying to
appreciate and describe their discoveries, the plainsmen had become unusually
observant, discriminating, and receptive to gradual revelations of meaning.
Later generations responded to life and art as their forbears had confronted
the miles of grassland receding into haze. They saw the world itself as one
more in an endless series of plains. (p. 18)
Wow—think about it. Ain’t it beautiful—universal truths and
all that—can you dig it? I thought you could.
The same landowner
began to describe other influences that he felt late at night in the more
remote wings of his house. He sensed sometimes the lingering persistence of
forces that had failed—of a history that had almost come into being. He found
himself looking into corners for the favourite pieces of the unborn children of
marriages that were never made. (P. 23)
I spent some time west of the Mississippi—a friend and I drove
13 ½ hours on Route 10 from Houston to El Paso once, (that was enough.) I saw a
changing landscape along the way, from humidity drenched heat to baked desert
dry—a big sky, a broad expanse all around with the ribbon of highway cutting
through, and then the shimmering haze of distant horizon—the horizon, the
future, the place you’re trying to get to—or get away from—depends on how you
want to look at it, I guess. I was far from home, and passing through, looking
for something outside of myself. I hadn’t written a book yet, but wanted to, I
just had to find what I was looking for out there in that horizon—that
periwinkle blue future distance.
…the famous ‘tint of
the horizon’… what moved them more than wide grasslands and huge skies was the
scant layer of haze where land and sky merged in the farthest distance…talking
of the blue-green haze as though it was itself a land—a plain of the future,
perhaps, where one might live a life that existed only in potentiality on the
plains where poets and painters could do no more than write or paint….a
landscape that was wholly illusory…the zone of haze was as much a part of the
plains as any configuration of soil or clouds…they esteemed the land of their
birth for the very reason that it seemed bounded continually by the blue-green
veil that urged them to dream of a different plain.(bits n’ pieces stitched
together from P.27)
…an “art of the
horizon.” (P.29)
Anyone surrounded from
childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two
landscapes—one continually visible but never accessible and the other always
invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily.(P. 36)
This obsession with
explorers. Please don’t misunderstand me; it’s a worthy task we’ve undertaken.
But that vision of the plains we’re all looking for—let’s remember that the
first explorers may not have been expecting plains. And many of them went back
to their seaports afterwards. Certainly they boasted of what they had
discovered. But the man I want to study is the one who came inland to verify
that the plains were just as he’d hoped for. That vision we’re all looking for…
(p. 46)
It depends on what you’re looking for—the filmmaker who
proposed to make a film about the plains—The
Interior—it never happened, at least, not realized in a tangible way that
was initially proposed—he was really a writer not a filmmaker, and got caught
in the trap of expectation.
…I learned in time
that I was considered by a small group to be a film-maker of exceptional promise.
When I first heard this, I had been about to reply that my cabinets full of
notes and preliminary drafts would probably never give rise to any image of any
sort of plain. I had almost decided to call myself poet or novelist …or some
other of the many sorts of literary practitioner flourishing on the plains. Yet
if I had announced such a change in my profession I might have lost the support
of those few people who persisted in esteeming me…A few of these men argued
even that the further my researches took me away from my announced aim and the
less my notes seemed likely to result in any visible film, the more credit I
deserved as the explorer of a distinctive landscape…It suited the purposes of
these men that I should continue to call myself a film-maker; that I should
sometimes appear at my annual revelation with a blank screen behind me and
should talk of the images I might yet display…No one afterwards could point to
a single feature of whatever place I stared at. It was still a place out of
sight in a scene arranged by someone who was himself out of sight. (bits
and pieces stitched together from pages 109-110.)
He came, he saw—he stayed. If he left, something would’ve
come of it.
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