campbell

The Cormac McCarthy Journal 40

Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field andMcCarthy’s Enigmatic Epilogue: “Y quéclase de lugar es éste?”

Christopher D. Campbell

In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain bymeans of holes which he is making in the ground. He usesan implement with two handles and he chucks it into thehole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steelhole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God hasput there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers insearch of bones and those who do not search and they movehaltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements aremonitored with escapement and pallet so that they appearrestrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has noinner reality and they cross in their progress one by onethat track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible groundand which seems less the pursuit of some continuance thanthe verification of a principle, a validation of sequence andcausality as if each round and perfect hole owed its exist-ence to the one before it there on that prairie upon whichare the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who donot gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out hissteel. 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 thesecond sentence seems a straightforward enough representation of a manusing a post-hole digger. Anyone who has ever labored with just such an“implement” in moderately rocky soil will recognize the sparks which flywith each plunge of the tool. On this point, there has been little disagree-ment. Rather, it is the imagery of the first and third sentences which hasproven so challenging.

The most common interpretation of the man “progressing over theplain” has been simply that of a man erecting a fence, leading to readings ofthe epilogue as a whole as McCarthy’s lamentation on the “fencing in of theopen West.”2 As early as 1993, Peter Josyph was reading it this way at thefirst McCarthy conference. Such a reading led Josyph to see the epilogue as“the novel’s one false note” (175). Eight years later, Douglas Canfield


expands on this interpretation in his book Mavericks on the Border. Asimilar interpretation is implicit in Steven Shaviro’s quotation of the epi-logue in 1992. More recently, Harold Bloom has suggested, “Perhaps all thatthe reader can surmise with some certainty is that the man striking fire in therock at dawn is an opposing figure in regard to the evening redness in theWest. The Judge never sleeps, and perhaps will never die, but a newPrometheus may be rising to go up against him” (xiii). One limitation allthese interpretations share is that they focus almost exclusively on “theman” digging the holes; they do little to explain any more, and there is muchmore.

Equally as challenging as the epilogue’s first sentence is its third.Who are these wanderers? Why are they here? For what creature’s orperson’s bones do they search? Is this another of McCarthy’s commentarieson the Catholic passion for relics? Or does this imagery hearken back to themounds of bones and carcasses that were a byproduct of the near extinctionof the American bison? What of those who neither search for nor gatherbones? Why are they here? Why do they wander? What form of “prudenceor reflectiveness” is it which restrains them and “which has no inner real-ity”? Why is it necessary to validate “sequence and causality”? What is itabout the digger and his digging that captivates them or empowers them?Which is it? Do they not move on, beyond and without the digger, becausethey cannot tear themselves away from the very process described, orbecause something in this digging makes their progress possible? A possiblysignificant ambiguity exists in the phrase “and they cross in their progressone 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 them-selves, or to those who are crossing? If the phrase describes the crossers,then why do they cross “one by one”? Why not “altogether?” (The signifi-cance 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 theepilogue’s imagery. Part of the beauty of that imagery is its invitation tointerpretation. Definitive answers elude us, and in that eluding lies the veryrichness of McCarthy’s prose. Interpretation of these images is their future.What I propose, rather, is one possible explanation of their origins: theirpast. 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 therepresentation (that is, the text of the epilogue itself—the 207 words ar-ranged into five sentences which compose it), and the represented (which Iwill characterize for the moment as an artist, his audience, and both theiractions). I choose this term in particular because among all the possible


origins of the epilogue’s imagery, there is one artifact whose constructionand existence I believe capture more of the elements of this passage thanany other. Described by Kenneth Baker in 1988 as “the closest thing to amasterpiece to come out of Minimalism” (125), that artifact is Walter DeMaria’s Lightning Field near Quemado, New Mexico. Having taken placefrom June through October of 1977, the construction of The Lightning Fieldis close enough in geography to the setting of Blood Meridian, close enoughin chronology to the composition of the epilogue, and close enough in actionand physical description to the events therein to at least merit considerationby overwhelming parallels of circumstance alone, but there is much morewhich 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 highlypolished stainless steel poles with precisely milled solid pointed tips. Thepoles are erected in an equally precisely aligned grid running one mile (25poles) 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 couldtheoretically “support an imaginary sheet of glass” (De Maria 58).

Equally as important as the physical structure of The LightningField is the manner in which it may be viewed. De Maria had very clearideas on this point, and an important element of his conception involvedisolation. “Isolation is the essence of Land Art,” he said in 1980. “It isintended that the work be viewed alone, or in the company of a very smallnumber of people, over at least a 24-hour period” (58). To this end, duringthe 1 May to 31 October “visiting season” viewers with reservations—nomore than six in any 24-hour period—present themselves at the Quemadooffice of Dia Center for the Arts, leave their vehicles, and are transported tothe site, more than thirty miles from the nearest population center, by a Diaofficial. They are dropped off there in the early afternoon and retrieved thenext 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 rowsfrom the east, provides accommodation. Originally, Dia allowed a daybetween visits to refurbish the cabin, halving today’s possible 1100 viewerseach season to a mere 550, but more recently they’ve begun accommodatinga new group each day.3 Clearly, in the same way that McCarthy has neverbeen a “commercial” author, De Maria was more concerned with the natureof 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 onlyapproved method of viewing it—does not begin to cover the cost of main-taining it (Dia).

The same rationale that limits the number of visitors also drives themethod of transportation to and from the field, specified by De Maria from


the outset (Weathers). The roads, though dirt, are excellent and easilytraversable by car, but De Maria’s stated goal of isolation as a feature of thework would be reduced by the presence of even one vehicle near the field,authorized or not. Within the field, nothing man-made exists beyond thepoles themselves, extending in perfect alignment, seemingly “to the rim ofthe visible ground.” Equally important, to that very horizon, only a halfdozen manmade objects are visible—the cabin, three distant windmills, asection of barbed wire fence, the faint scar of a distant dirt road—and onlyto the keenest eye. Both time and space seem to have been arrested by thefield, space even more so within an hour of the rising or setting of the sun ormoon, when even the most distant of four hundred gleaming poles isbrightly visible. In contrast, from about two hours after sunrise until abouttwo before sunset, the field is virtually invisible, with only the nearest fewof the poles silhouetted against the horizon.

Although I recognize the challenges of the enterprise I am undertak-ing 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 fielditself immediately calls the epilogue to mind. One can easily imagine eachapparently infinite progression of two-inch diameter poles being erected bya single man with a post-hole digger. The concrete foundations, themselvesonly three feet deep and one foot in diameter, are a foot below the surfaceand invisible, so that each pole seems to spring unsupported from the soil ofthe plain itself. To stand at the end of any row and imagine its constructionis virtually to imagine McCarthy’s epilogue. Add a minimalist artist and hispatrons and the picture is complete. But these are primarily physical simi-larities. In what follows, I’ll illustrate the striking thematic elements sharedby the two works, and, finally, demonstrate how familiarity with TheLightning Field supports and amplifies Leo Daugherty’s 1993 interpretationof the epilogue’s meaning.

The first circumstantial connections are geographical and temporal.Establishing a definitive connection between this incredible work of art andthe epilogue of Blood Meridian might be as simple as establishing thatMcCarthy is among the rather small number who have seen it. Unfortu-nately, however, Dia’s record of visitors to the site before 1986 is bothincomplete and inaccessible. Ultimately, establishing whether McCarthy hasseen the installation may depend on asking the author himself.

On the other hand, it is entirely possible that McCarthy, driving thebackroads of New Mexico during his many research travels throughout theSouthwest, 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 theisolation of the site, they are unmarked in any way, either inviting or prohib-


iting. More than once, McCarthy has asserted that he “doesn’t write aboutplaces he hasn’t visited” (Woodward). In Blood Meridian itself, the closestaction to this particular area of New Mexico may be that within sight of theAnimas peaks. Then again, there is a vast geographic blank between thekid’s last known position after his departure from Los Angeles and his entryinto Texas some seventeen years later. In the end, though, it is not BloodMeridian so much as The Crossing which invites us to believe thatMcCarthy has traveled the roads which lead to The Lightning Field—that hehas been at least as close as thirty-five miles to the field itself.

Having moved to El Paso in 1977, most of McCarthy’s researchwanderings through the desert Southwest must have commenced around thesame time as construction of De Maria’s sculpture and continued after theartwork’s completion. And there is no necessity in believing that his travelsthrough the area were confined to the region about which he was writing atany given time. We are asked to believe only that by the time he did writeabout a place, he had been there. Thus, when McCarthy tells us in TheCrossing that after departing Winslow, Arizona, Billy Parham “rode southacross the high plains west of Socorro and he rode through Magdalena andacross the plains of Saint Augustine” (349), then we must assume thatMcCarthy has traveled this route, a route which, on today’s roads, passesdirectly through none other than Quemado itself, directly in front of the DiaCenter office on Route 60. Quemado, though, even today, is little more thana church, post office, school, and fewer than a dozen buildings other thanhomes. Magdalena (also the name of John Grady’s love in Cities of thePlain) is the nearest town of truly appreciable size to The Lightning Fielditself and has existed throughout this century. Even more importantly, astraight line drawn from Winslow to Magdalena, the route a horseman mighttravel, passes more closely to the field itself than to the town of Quemado.Lastly, traveling “through Magdalena and across the plains of Saint August-ine” is, in fact, the route a person would take driving from El Paso toQuemado to visit The Lightning Field.4

Beyond geography, thematic connections also invite us to believeMcCarthy would be attracted to this site. To begin with, there is the elementof lightning itself. De Maria rightly emphasized that “[t]he light is asimportant as the lightning,” for the work certainly does not depend on thisphenomenon for its impact. Still there is the name of the work, and thesignificant fact that much attention was given to the likelihood of a lightningstrike occurring, in everything from the location of the field to the physicalconstruction of the poles themselves. If De Maria has something of afascination with this particular element of nature, he is far from alone. Ifthere is any single weather phenomenon which flashes across the pages ofall of McCarthy’s fiction from The Orchard Keeper through Cities of the


Plain, it is lightning. Some of the most arrestingly beautiful passages in allof McCarthy’s prose are dedicated to its description.

In The Orchard Keeper, in a storm of biblical proportions, the titlecharacter, Arthur Ownby, is knocked unconscious by a bolt. The alliterative description of this event has a lyrical quality that rivals thepoetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

The old man kept to his course, over last year’s leaves slickwith water, hopping and dancing wildly among the mael-strom of riotous greenery like some rain sprite, burned outof the near-darkness in antic configuration against the quickbloom of the lightning. As he passed it thus a barren chest-nut silver under the sluice of rain erupted to the heart andspewed out sawdust and scorched mice upon him. A slabfell away with a long hiss like a burning mast tilting sea-ward. He is down. A clash of shields rings and Valkyriedescend with cat’s cries to bear him away. Already a rivuletis packing clay in one ragged cuff and a quiff of white hairdepending from his forelock reddens in the seeping mud.(172)

The same lyrical quality extends to the single description of lightning inOuter Dark. Occurring early in the novel, its flashes surreally illuminate thechild which Culla has just abandoned in the swamp and to which his lostand circuitous wanderings have returned him:

When he crashed into the glade among the cotton-woods he fell headlong and lay there with his cheek to theearth. And as he lay there a far crack of lightning wentbluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonicbird’s first fissured vision of the world and transpiringinstant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of thegrotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon therich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare. Hewould have taken it for some boneless cognate of his heart’sdread 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 elementand as subject of McCarthy’s most eloquent prose. As early as theprologue’s closing paragraph, which reads like a set description, we find


among the short descriptive fragments “Faint summer lightning fardownriver” (5). Thus McCarthy makes lightning a feature of the backdropupon which the ensuing drama is to play.

Indeed, there are features of the phenomenon in Suttree which bothhearken back to Outer Dark and look forward to McCarthy’s Southwesternfiction. In the same way that lightning provides the illumination for Culla’sabandonment of the infant in Outer Dark, it lights the tragic death whichshatters Suttree’s idyllic interlude with Wanda and the family of mussellersupriver. “In a raw pool of lightning an image of a baroque pieta, the womangibbering and kneeling in the rain clutching at sheared limbs and rags ofmeat among the slabs of rock. [ . . .] The cryptic lightning developed arainveiled face stark and blue upon the ground” (362). Suttree abandons thisscene of grief, and a short time later we find him again in Knoxville, atperhaps his spiritually lowest state, passively suicidal, calling the lightningdown:

It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the dark-ened heart within him and cried for light. If there be any artin the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. Ifyou can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain.

He sat with his back to a tree and watched the stormmove on over the city. Am I a monster, are there monsters inme? (366)5

Beyond his dreams and visions, there are no monsters in Suttree, but theremay be elsewhere, and yet another poetic description of lightning, the firstto occur in the novel proper, associates the two: “High over the downriverland lightning quaked soundlessly and ceased. Far clouds rimlit. A brim-stone light. Are there dragons in the wings of the world?” (29).

Silent, distant, on the “rim” of the world—it is especially this modeof describing lightning which, beginning with Suttree and continuingthrough all of the Southwestern novels, may accurately be called aMcCarthy trademark. There are at least nine such occurrences in BloodMeridian alone. Just one of several examples in All the Pretty Horses comesin a richly comic moment preserved even in the film adaptation, whereJimmy Blevins recounts a family history in which McCarthy seems to havecollected all the most interesting accounts he has heard of death by light-ning. Blevins’ recounting itself takes place while a storm looms on thehorizon. “Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowedmutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were underway at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world” (67).

This trademark continues in The Crossing, where, amongst the


many descriptions of lightning we find a passage of dialogue between Billyand Mr. Sanders as sensually and beautifully precise as it is irrelevant to anyof the novel’s action, unless it’s to reinforce the idea of there being such athing as a distinctly Mexican thunderstorm:

I seen it thunder in a snowstorm one time, Billysaid. Thunder and lightnin. You couldnt see the lightnin.Just everthing would light up all around you, white ascotton.

I had a Mexican one time to tell me that, the oldman 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 centralthemes of which is the vast differences between our two countries, there issignificance in the implication that even the weather recognizes that border.This theme is particularly emphasized by representatives from both sides inCities of the Plain, where McCarthy’s trademark distant and silent lightningis present yet again: “The dark clouds stood banked in a high wall to thenorth and a thin and soundless wire of lightning appeared there and quiveredand vanished again” (231).

All of these examples together, however, still will not balance theprevalence of electrical weather phenomena in Blood Meridian. This singlenovel contains nearly as many such references as all the rest of theMcCarthy canon combined. At least one instance of lightning-illuminatednarrative seems to hark back to Suttree’s earlier question as to whether therewere monsters in him and to answer it for mankind as a race. There aredragons in the wings of the world, and in Blood Meridian they ride uponhorses:

They cut the throats of the pack animals and jerkedand divided the meat and they traveled under the cape of thewild mountains upon a broad soda plain with dry thunder tothe south and rumors of light. Under a gibbous moon horseand rider spanceled to their shadows on the snowblueground and in each flare of lightning as the storm advancedthose selfsame forms rearing with a terrible redundancybehind them like some third aspect of their presence ham-mered out black and wild upon the naked grounds. Theyrode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose


origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of anorder both imperative and remote. For although each manamong them was discrete unto himself, conjoined theymade a thing that had not been before and in that communalsoul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whitedregions on old maps where monsters do live and wherethere is nothing other of the known world save conjecturalwinds. (151-52)

Throughout Blood Meridian distant and silent lightning lends aninescapably primordial quality to the landscape, as if one has traveled backin time to the days when lightning played a role in the original formation ofcomplex organic molecules. It may well be that this narrative techniquecontributed to Peter Josyph’s sense that “Blood Meridian is not [. . .] a novelabout nineteenth-century America, nor is it a novel about nineteenth-centuryMexico, because it is not about the nineteenth century. [. . .] [T]he world ofthe Glanton gang in this book is not a world in the likes of which theGlantons of record, or anyone else of record excepting McCarthy, has everwalked” (175). Josyph’s friend and fellow author Richard Selzer seems tohave 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 thelandscape, this distant lightning is ubiquitous:

Far to the south lightning flared soundlessly. (16). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Distant thunderheads reared quivering against theelectric sky and were sucked away in the blackness again.(19). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to thewest beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluishday of the distant desert, the mountains on the suddenskyline stark and black and livid like a land of some otherorder out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning litthe desert all about them, blue and barren, great clangingreaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demonkingdom summoned up or changeling land that come theday would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin morethan any troubling dream. (47). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The sourceless summer lightning marked out of the


night dark mountain ranges at the rim of the world and thehalfwild horses on the plain before them trotted in thosebluish strobes like horses called forth quivering out of theabyss. (163). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

They rode through the long twilight and the sun setand no moon rose and to the west the mountains shudderedagain and again in clattering frames and burned to finaldarkness and the rain hissed in the blind night land. (187). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

They ascended through a rocky pass and lightningshaped out the distant shivering mountains and lightningrang the stones about and tufts of blue fire clung to thehorses like incandescent elementals that would not bedriven off. Soft smelterlights advanced upon the metal ofthe harness, lights ran blue and liquid on the barrels of theguns. (186). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

They traveled through the high country deeper intothe mountains where the storms had their lairs, a fieryclangorous region where white flames ran on the peaks andthe ground bore the burnt smell of broken flint. (188). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

He moved on and soon he was in darkness himselfand the wind came up off the desert and frayed wires oflightning stood again and again along the western terminalsof the world. (213). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

He cited the terrain before him in the periodic flareof the lightning . . . . (214). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

All across those reaches the yammer and yap of thestarving wolves relayed and to the north the silent lightningrigged 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 outof the void. Day broke upon a smoking reach of desertdarkly clouded where the riders could count five separatestorms spaced upon the shores of the round earth. (175)

The passages above invite at least two observations. First, lightning


is clearly a meteorological phenomenon to which McCarthy has devotedconsiderable detailed attention. Second, there is no electrical weatherphenomenon actually observed6 in the course of Blood Meridian which DeMaria does not claim can also be observed at The Lightning Field, for in his1980 statement, De Maria points out that “[s]everal distinct thunderstormscan be observed at one time from The Lightning Field,” and, “On very rareoccasions when there is a strong electrical current in the air, a glow knownas ‘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 andto a host of ways in which an awareness of The Lightning Field reinforces atleast one extant reading of it, namely Leo Daugherty’s. While the onlycertainty that Harold Bloom would allow us with regard to the epilogue isthat “the man striking fire in the rock at dawn is an opposing figure [. . .] anew Prometheus [. . .] rising to go up against [the judge]” (xiii), Daughertygoes a step further and names that new Prometheus, that wiser Ahab, as theauthor himself, and reads the epilogue as a virtual McCarthian self-portraitof “a solitary obsessive who, in his alienation from this Anareta7 world, thiskilling 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 workand De Maria’s. It’s hardly a stretch to apply Daugherty’s characterizationof the “solitary, ascetic and superior nature and work” (169) of McCarthy tosuch a highly conceptual artist as De Maria.

If one accepts that the man in the epilogue is a representation ofMcCarthy as author, revelator, and artist, it is only a small step from there toalso seeing the epilogue as a description of De Maria’s sculpture, completewith artist, viewers, and commentary on their relationship. The physicalsimilarities are inescapable. Lest one object that The Lightning Field itself isfinite in nature and thus at odds with the seeming infinite progression of theepilogue, I offer both my own experience of the place and John Beardsley’sdescription of it in Earthworks and Beyond. Beardsley believes that arthistorian Christopher Hussey’s “seven attributes of the sublime provide avirtual prescription for [The] Lightning Field” (62)8. Of particular note isBeardsley’s explanation that “infinity [. . .] could either be literal or inducedby two final characteristics of the sublime: succession and uniformity, bothof which suggest limitless progression” (62). Applying these attributes toThe Lightning Field, Beardsley says, “[E]verywhere is the inference ofinfinity. The poles stand in stately succession, uniform in height and in thedistance between them. As they diminish in the distance, they create theillusion—like telephone poles or railroad tracks—of endless progression”(63). Thus, however one interprets the meaning of McCarthy’s epilogue, onecannot escape the physical similarities of the scene it describes to De


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 Beardsleynotes, “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 inwhich much of the earth has been divided and brought under human sover-eignty” (62). This same sensation is noted—in terms strongly reminiscent ofthe 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 perspectiveconventions and the modern Western mania for appropriating and subduingthe earth” (127). Nor is Daugherty’s assertion that one of McCarthy’sthemes is the unchangingly brutal nature of the world unaccommodated byDe Maria’s polished poles, of which Baker notes, “Their elegant, potentiallylethal forms stir associations to high-tech weaponry and its ancestry ofspear, dart, and arrow. [. . .] [and] conflate symbolism of weapons and thehuman figure to evoke a vision of society as a war of each against all” (127).

Finally, there is the plethora of questions springing from theepilogue’s third sentence and the wanderers we find there:

On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search ofbones and those who do not search and they move haltinglyin the light like mechanisms whose movements are moni-tored with escapement and pallet so that they appearrestrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has noinner reality and they cross in their progress one by onethat track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible groundand which seems less the pursuit of some continuance thanthe verification of a principle, a validation of sequence andcausality as if each round and perfect hole owed its exist-ence to the one before it there on that prairie upon whichare the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who donot gather.

Again, there would seem to be an analogue in The Lightning Field and itsviewers. 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 toenter it outright. A number of the statements he made in 1980 seem relevanthere. “The light is as important as the lightning.” “A simple walk around theperimeter of the poles takes approximately two hours.” “The primaryexperience takes place within The Lightning Field.” It is accepting these lastinvitations which makes one most keenly aware of how closely the


epilogue’s description applies to a visitor to De Maria’s sculpture. Viewingthe field from within, or from without, is an exercise in movement andcessation. One moves to a vantage point and admires the perfect symmetryof the view down a single row, where as many as twenty-five poles stretch-ing a mile into the distance are so perfectly aligned that twenty-four disap-pear behind the nearest one. One moves again to a midpoint between tworows to admire the diminishing perspective of the poles’ recession to thedistance. Again one moves to a point where diagonals intersect and bothforegoing views are afforded with no more movement than a turn of thehead. One moves, in a word, “haltingly.” And in the entire experience, thereis nothing so uncanny as the sense of the space defined by these poles.Stepping from “inside” the field to “outside,” one makes a movement ofinches, 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 skyitself are no different on either side of that plane—and yet that movement ofinches creates an immediate discomfort, a yearning to return to the fold, tothe “civilized” space of the field itself. Perhaps this is what De Maria meantwhen he said, “The invisible is real.”9

This simple observation may be the very “verification of a prin-ciple” that both McCarthy and De Maria had in mind. In Earthworks andBeyond, Beardsley comments on the transmission of meaning in abstractworks. “The abstract image,” he says, “whether in primitive or modern art—was felt to present reality as known in the mind rather than merely perceivedby the senses. It became a visible icon for the metaphysical. [. . .] In theiruse of reductive forms to convey metaphysical content, several of the landartists—Heizer and De Maria chief among them—share this intellectualprimitivism” (59).

There is no more strongly metaphysical work in the McCarthycanon than Blood Meridian. If Daugherty is right that the epilogue isMcCarthy’s effort to “make of himself a ‘presence’ at the end” (170), thenwhat better way to do so than to cast himself as artist through a minimalistdescription of another seeker’s work which could not help but move him?

NOTES

1. A slightly expanded version of a presentation given to The CormacMcCarthy 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 barbedwire” (7), but there is some question here as to whether this means on theranch itself or across the whole of the Southwest. Barbed wire was invented


in 1868 by Michael Kelly and patented in the form we know today byJoseph Glidden in 1884 (National Archives).

3. For information on the history of The Lightning Field since its construc-tion and the record keeping practices of Dia, I’m indebted to Robert Weath-ers, who assisted with the construction in 1977 and has served as caretakersince, and to Kathleen Shields of Dia’s Corrales, New Mexico, office, whomanages reservations for visits. Readers interested in experiencing theartifact firsthand should refer to <http://www.diacenter.org/ltproj/lf/>.

4. Still, with only this circumstantial evidence and without access to Dia’srecords or a statement from McCarthy himself, we may never know if heactually visited the site. However, when one considers the milieu to whichthe author was exposed, particularly at the MacArthur reunions after beingawarded the “genius grant” in 1981, it’s difficult to imagine his beingunaware of the most important piece of land art in his newly adopted hometerritory—and an awareness of the site, and a glimpse at the photographspublished in the 1980 Artforum article, may have been sufficient in them-selves to inspire the 1985 epilogue.

5. As Richard Woodward pointed out in 1992, Suttree seems “stronglyautobiographical.” Thus it may not be a great stretch to imagine McCarthyhimself addressing a storm in just such a manner, a manner which one mightconstrue as a less self-assured echo of Ahab’s address to the storm in chapter119 of Moby-Dick.

6. Although the kid sees the effects of ball lightning on page 215 following anight 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 hisreading of Edmund Burke’s 1757 Philosophical Enquiry (59-62).

9. De Maria also said, “The sum of the facts does not constitute the work ordetermine its esthetics”—a statement which pairs nicely with Josyph’sobservation that the “poetic whole [of Blood Meridian] has little or nothingto do with the sum of its traceable parts” (181-82).

WORKS CITED

Arnold, Edwin T., and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Perspectives on Cormac


McCarthy. 1993. Rev. ed. Southern Quarterly Ser. Jackson: UP ofMississippi, 1999. [Note: Page citations for essays in this work areto this revised edition, and may be one to two pages higher or lowerthan citations to the 1993 edition, even for essays whose actual textdid not change.]

Baker, Kenneth. Minimalism: Art of Circumstance. New York: Abbeville,1988.

Beardsley, John. Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Land-scape. New York: Abbeville, 1984.

Bloom, Harold. Introduction. Blood Meridian. Modern Library ed. NewYork: Modern Library, 2001. vi-xiii.

Canfield, J. Douglas. “The Border of Becoming: Theodicy in Blood Merid-ian.” Mavericks on the Border: The Early Southwest in HistoricalFiction and Film. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2001. 37-48.

Daugherty, Leo. “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as GnosticTragedy.” Southern Quarterly 30.4 (1992): 122-33. Rpt. in Arnoldand Luce 159-74.

De Maria, Walter. “The Lightning Field.” Artforum 18.8 (1980): 52-59.Dia Center for the Arts. “Walter De Maria: The Lightning Field, 1977.”

Pamphlet. New York: Dia, n.d.Josyph, Peter. “Blood Music: Reading Blood Meridian.” Sacred Violence: A

Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Wade Hall and RickWallach. El Paso: Texas Western, 1995. 169-88.

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Knopf, 1992.—. Blood Meridian, or Evening Redness in the West. 1985. New York:

Vintage, 1992.—. Child of God. 1973. New York: Vintage, 1993.—. Cities of the Plain. New York: Knopf, 1998.—. The Crossing. New York: Knopf, 1994.—. The Orchard Keeper. 1965. New York: Vintage, 1993.—. Outer Dark. 1968. New York: Vintage, 1993.—. Suttree. 1979. New York: Vintage, 1992.Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick: or, the Whale. 1851. Indianapolis: Bobbs-

Merrill, 1964.Myers, B. R. “A Reader’s Manifesto.” Atlantic Monthly 288.1 Jul.-Aug.

2001: 104-22.National Archives and Records Administration. “Glidden’s Patent Applica-

tion for Barbed Wire.” 17 Nov. 1999. Teaching with Documents. 25Jun. 2001 <http://www.nara.gov/education/teaching/glidden/wire.html>.

Shaviro, Steven. “‘The Very Life of the Darkness’: A Reading of BloodMeridian.” Southern Quarterly 30.4 (Summer 1992): 111-21. Rpt.


in Arnold and Luce 145-58.Weathers, Robert. Personal Interview. 19-20 Jun. 2001.Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” New York

Times Magazine 19 Apr. 1992: 28-31+. Online. New York Times onthe Web. 24 Jan. 1999 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-venom.html>.

campbell

Documents

steel hole

perfect hole

search of bones

mccarthys enigmatic

posthole digger

mounds of bones

persons bones

gatherers of bones