Heaven's Featureless Plain

A Thesis on Liminality

I have never been much for what they call “high art.” The visual arts of the last few decades have often left me confounded, irritated, and even offended. Strolling through the sleek, fancy museums where the haut-kultur is on display, I am always niggled by a cynical voice from within that persistently asks: “Is this not all just a kind of abstruse and ridiculous money-laundering scheme?”

Yet each time I ask myself this question, I am led down two paths:

1. Maybe so; perhaps artists really are the beasts of burden used by wealthy patrons and their art dealers to move tremendous amounts of money around the world tax-free — and perhaps their whole enterprise obtains tacit permission through the petit-bourgeois desire of the art-consuming public to be “cultured” and “fancy” even if the art is inane and genuinely indecipherable in the worst way.

2. But then again, perhaps not — perhaps the efforts are genuine far more often than I imagine. And every time I meditate on this, my mind immediately goes to Andreas Gorsky’s infamously-expensive work, Rhein II.

When Rhein II sold at a Christie’s Auction for $4,300,000 in 2011, it was a major news story. “The Most Expensive Photograph Ever Sold,” read the headline — and it was shown on the evening news, too; piped directly from Manhattan to our provincial backwater in a manner that, particularly in the case of this story, seemed incongrous and indiscriminate.

I was 17 at the time, a senior in high school. On the day the story ran, I overheard a fellow exclaim aloud: “Who would pay FOUR MILLION BUCKS for a photo? That photo SUCKS!”

Andreas Gursky's infamous "Rhein II."

We were in the waiting room at an auto mechanic’s shop on the even-grubbier-than-usual side of Rome, NY; crinkled, dog-earred copies of Better Homes and Gardens magazine sprawled across the plywood-veneer coffee table — the soda machine hummed as the loud air compressor wrenches zipped in the garage’s giant bays and cigarette smoke and oil fumes wafted in through the door. As the stranger made his harsh, lightning-fast judgement of Gorsky’s now-famous Rhein II photograph on the television, I found myself disagreeing — I quietly thought to myself that I actually kind of liked the photo. I stared at it as long as they showed it on the screen; I wanted to look at it again.

Or did I actually like it? Perhaps I was simply rebelling against the yawling provincialism of that boorish man in the mechanic’s waiting room; perhaps my “liking” it was only a way of slipping away from my embarassingly churlish place of origin — a thing that I knew was embarrassing because something somewhere (the television, perhaps?) had subliminally convinced me of it. To actually somehow “enjoy” Rhein II was to sneak a little sip of the petit-bourgeois kultur that, so far as I’d ever been told, was the antidote to one’s own admittedly rednecky genesis. From this perspective, “liking” a piece of “high art” is really secondary — one only says “I like it very much” as a kind of affirmation proclaimed to others as much as to oneself; an oblique way of declaring quite firmly that “I am not a stupid, ignorant rube.”

For a teenager named “Hickman” — as in “I’m a hick, man!” — to engage with anything like this was, in hindsight, an almost comical sort of exercise. But my mother (who was the only person I knew who’d been to Paris — and not Paris, NY but the real Paris) was an NPR-listener and one who enjoyed the Museum of Modern Art; her love of the high visual arts held an almost sacramental role for her during her tenure in our hickish one-horse town. I was taught in those years that only an ignoramous would reject ‘modern art’ carte blanche — and our experience with the guffawing fellow in the mechanic’s waiting room did seem to buttress her argument.

Later that week, I went to the library to search for it on Google. I wanted to look at it again; I found myself thinking about the photograph constantly. I searched the terms: “Most expensive photograph in history” and there it was; the perplexing photo that “sucked” so far as the soda-swilling man at the mechanic’s place was concerned. A hauntingly-straight horizon of green grass and water; a terraformed landscape of sythetic order and crystalline emptiness — it looked like the high, heavenly ‘edge of the world.’ I wanted to be there; I wanted to experience the ultimate, final, complete peace of a true “nowhere,” and to bathe in whatever silence Mr. Gorsky must’ve known when he snapped the shot. If this “sucked,” I couldn’t tell. And I declared to myself that if I had had $4,300,000 to spare — I might’ve bought the photograph myself.

From then on, Gorsky’s vision was not merely an artifact of superlatively-expensive high art — it was an article of wordless poetry that wove itself into my mind’s eye effortlessly, permanently, and without so much as a word or conscious thought. At the time, I was (as teenagers often are) quite rapt with studying Buddhism and the Tao Te Ching; I was regularly trying to meditate, and quite often when aiming to entrance myself in the circular breath of the Buddha, Gorsky’s vision in Rhein II would surface in my mind’s eye. Soon, wholly self-invented variations of it would surface, too — until I found that the interior of my mind had been terraformed in a manner hardly different from the Rhine River itself in that precise spot where Gorsky had photographed it. The influence this photograph had on me cannot be understated; after encountering it, I became obsessed with themes of liminality, emptiness, silence, and the sublime feeling one gets when they find themselves perched high at the bleeding edge of the world.

Yet what Rhein II did for me then seemed only to pole along a vessel that had already been in motion for many years already. From the earliest days I can remember — perhaps around age five — I have held an intense fascination with bleak, frigid, featureless northern places. I dreamt of Canada and declared that I would emigrate to some far-flung, flat, frozen plain in that country (a dream I was still bent on pursuing until fairly recently). When I slept in my bed, I faced North every night, thinking it good luck to do so; I read about deserts and Greenland, was fascinated with giant, empty parking lots and dreary, rusty, emptied-out cities along I-90, and always aimed to put myself in places sited at the unseen door between two worlds. Just as estuaries are often some of the most dense and biodiverse environments on earth, to me, the liminality contained within isolated northern locales felt like a spiritual equivalent — and at that, a private haven where a fellow might find himself removed from the harsh sorrows of the wider world.

Perhaps this interest is what ever drove me to my obsessive interest in Massena, New York. As a boy I reveled in locating geographical extremes — particularly northernmost points. Alert, Nunavut and Barrow (now Utgiavik) Alaska — Estcourt Station, Maine and Angle Inlet, Minnesota; I wanted to see them, live in them, stitch the far-flung emptiness of such places into the weft and warp of my own life. But Massena in particular, that was my northernmost point; it was situated at the northern tip of my own state, which I have almost always loved very much. Though I would not actually visit Massena for some years, it became my “magnetic north” — from a very early age and ever since, Massena has been the zenith around which my own personal internal geography has been oriented; it is the center of my map.

When finally, I found myself actually standing at the northernmost point of the State of New York roughly six miles north of Massena’s village center, what did I find but a paradise of liminality? There was no fanfare there; no high-flying idealism nor the faintest glimpse of commercialism. Only a terraformed system of dykes and earthworks built for flood control around the Saint Lawrence Seaway; vast networks of electrical infrastructure, and the giant, faceless, Moses-Saunders International Power Dam and its massive turbines quietly humming in the distance.

At this point of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, water flowing seaward from Lake Superior has taken nearly four full centuries to reach this spot. The entire Great Lakes system in all its royal beauty finds its outlet here, in this unassuming, overcast, and largely unpeopled spot. No part of the river here is wild or natural, for its original course was altered heavily by the construction of the Seaway and its various water control systems and power dams. Most of the land in the Seaway’s immediate vicinity is owned by the New York Power Authority, too, and it is largely uninhabited save for in a few enclaves where older homes from the pre-dam era were grandfathered in.

There is none of the pomp and circumstance in this place that one might find in the ritzy, world-renowned Thousand Islands some seventy-five miles upriver. Tourism is exceptionally rare, save for during the season when there are numerous bass-fishing tournaments — when men in wraparound sunglasses pilot expensive fishing boats around the lonely waters in search of a prize-winning fish. After they leave, there are only a handful of older people who walk their dogs along the shoreline — and a few dozen “boat watchers” who track and photograph the giant freighter ships that pass through the Seaway every day or so. It is a sleepy, eerily-quiet, far-flung zone; a place to retire to in secrecy, where no neon glows and no brochures tell tales of luxury nor of fanfare.

Yet perhaps even more striking than any of this — the strange liminal zone in the area north of Massena and close to the Saint Lawrence River appears to have no cultural “center.” For while the vast majority of human-settled, developed regions have some clear sense of what is and is not normal in terms of behavior, activity, speech, and dress — this place does not have anything of the sort. Where, southward, one might be judged by what sort of “side by side” off-road vehicle they drive, and whether they have enrolled their children in the local school, or whether they order Bud Light or a White Claw at the Sportsmen’s Club — no such thing exists here. And where, in some of the villages around Potsdam and Canton, one’s standing might be measured against their proximity to Saint Lawrence or Clarkson universities, or the SUNY college — along the Seaway, there are not so many representatives of that culture.

Instead, the silent chasm of water below the pin-straight earthworks and their untouched, wild foliage is a domain in which the visitor or resident appears to be removed from the comings-and-goings of the human sphere entirely. For the maintenance of the Seaway appears nearly autonomous save for the NYPA workers on their giant lawnmowers, mowing square miles of earth berms and grass-covered dykes. We are not in farm country here, either — right against the Seaway, no cows or corn are within one’s field of vision. NYPA land is open to the public but not for hunting nor for ATVing, too, so the “outdoorsman” culture one sees in points south is largely absent except for the deer that occasionally hang bloody in the few residents’ yards. And though Canada is within one’s field of vision along the River, it is not to be accessed or interacted with in any way whatsoever — it is Another Place, Somewhere Else, a foreign entity that one can only enter conversation with by crossing the official CBSA border checkpoint at Cornwall, Ontario.

It would not be wrong to characterize this place as “lonely” and even “boring.” Yet such a characterization, in spite of being correct on at least some level — would be incomplete. For the North American apotheosis of Andreas Gorsky’s vision in Rhein II is found here; and just as there is a good bit more to that photograph than one finds at first glance, so too with the landscape along the Seaway. What we have in this empty place is a “free zone” — a reprieve from the complicated choreographies of the social domain. True clarity of mind is found here in spades; and though that clarity may present as desperate isolation, funereal remoteness, or heavy, harsh darkness at first blush — when one sits with it and lets the liminal emptiness marinate upon the heart, they “break through” to an ecstatic kind of freedom and peace. It is an experience that works so subtly it could easily be missed; and indeed, it takes a long time to cultivate such a mystical relationship to such a “pure void” as the Saint Lawrence Seaway zone around Massena.

---

Over a decade ago now, I found myself hitchhiking through Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. I had been having hard luck hitchhiking on Interstate 90 south of there, and cut north to head up to I-94, where I suspected North Dakotan kindness would get me to Minneapolis in short order. On the ‘rez,’ as some call it, a very, very old fellow picked me up and took me in. He drove me to his little shanty on the plain, where he allowed me to spend the night. Though he was over 90 years old, he insisted that I sleep in his bed, and that he sleep on the floor. I tried to convince him that I’d be happy to sleep on the floor instead, but he only replied: “this is how we do things here,” before falling fast asleep on the floor of his tiny cabin.

We spoke for many hours the next day as I helped him with various chores and we sipped instant coffee by the morning’s light. The wind sent the Tyvek on his shack flapping arhythimically as we spoke; the open sunlight of the Great Plains blinded me as I stared northward. The man was some kind of a Lakota elder; he was mild-mannered and genteel in his habits, and had a deeply spiritual disposition. He asked me to tell him all of my life story, which I did — and as I told it, he tried to get me to take my time. He wanted me to avoid skipping over any detail. We talked and talked, getting into his old pickup truck, which he used to take me to Mandan, ND. We drove for hours together; I felt for a moment as if we were like father and son.

Finally, as he deposited me in front of the Wal-Mart in Mandan, he stood in front of me and took a long last look at me in silence. He was in no rush to offer his final words to me; we were both sad to part ways. After a breath and a smile, he said: “You are, I would say, what my people would call a ‘Heyoka’. This is — and do not be offended at this — a kind of sacred clown. Our rules are such that he can say anything to anybody, of any rank or standing, and that he is to use his position to teach the people lessons that they could not otherwise learn — and to teach them through laughter and even mockery.”

I was stunned by this assessment of my character largely because it felt true; I have always been a kind of “clown,” not in the sense that I am a laughingstock but in the sense that I am a misfit whose most natural way of being appears to others to be a kind of strange spectacle — which some love and many hate. What the man said, it seemed, could have been true.

“I will tell you one more thing about the Heyoka, too: the Heyoka always lives at the edge of the village. He cannot be too close to the others, because to them, he is kind of crazy — but because he lives to serve the others, he cannot be too far away from them either. The edge is where he belongs; there is nowhere else for him.”

For some reason this comment struck me even more than the first — for at that time, I always slept literally “at the edge of the village.” Nightly, I bedded down beside the Interstate in the brush, always walking distance from the amenities of the towns but always breaking camp out of sight and away from others by nightfall.

Meditating upon Gorsky’s Rhein II and on the North American analogue I’ve found to it on the Saint Lawrence Seaway, I find myself returning to what the Lakota man said about “living at the edge of the village.” For the eccentric, the misfit, the one who is poorly adapted to “norms” — the edge is his natural environment. Unable to relax when faced with the complicated social rules and mores of regular human society for too long, the “sacred clown” finds his refuge in the unclassifiable, featureless void mere miles from the village. The silence is his safety; the softness of the long, cold, grey lines along the horizon soothe him.

What Gorsky may have done by taking Rhein II, then, could be seen as an early foretelling of a trend towards “liminality” as a high form of aesthetic beauty among internet-age youth. For the fragmentary essence of internet-era culture is one of limitless niches that cannot be shoehorned into norms; the ‘villages’ of former days have now been shattered into an infinite of atomized encampments. Of former communities and mainstreams and “mass culture,” there are now only particles and half-memories moving like flotsam amid the static. Displaced and deracinated, wandering the vagabond currents of vague intuition and walking in the fuzziness of the “post-everything” era, it seems that the comfort the eccentrics, misfits, and “heyokas” have ever derived from life at the far edges is now a general condition — a thing relevant to everybody, everywhere, perhaps for the first time.

When there is no village anymore, don’t all of us gravitate toward the edges, as if by magnetism, to bask in the dizzying silence? Like terns at the magnetic north pole, swirling above the pole in a state of confusion, searching for some homeward-facing beacon that cannot be found — the spirit rests in a place of blankness, to breathe. Not hopeless, per se, but not hopeful either; not inside, but not outside either. Staring outward over the Rhein, or the Saint Lawrence River, or out over the abandoned K-Mart parking lot, we remember some memory we have never lived; we taste what the Brazilians call “saudade”.

Gursky’s work led me to that place, and I have never really left it. Even when I am in places of great color and variegated texture, with many layers of social meaning and ample supplies of pomp and circumstance — I am still there, standing over the perfect straightness of the grey water under grey skies, empty-minded, pleasantly numb, standing bright-eyed in the windless frigid landscape of my dreams. There, the primordial simplicity of mankind’s dawn yawns under the overcast, and the heart is quietly made whole again, nourished back to peace, removed from the raucous half-truths of a technicolor world.

For this, one has no need of paying four million dollars for the view. The open chasm of endless, soundless horizontal lines along that northern river comes to the eye free of charge, without fanfare, without television tabloids and Sotheby’s auctioneers and gossiping art dealers. To call it natural would be wrong, of course, yet it is a manmade landscape possessed of a ‘hyper-naturalness’ that is exceedingly pleasing to the spirit. To stand before it is to sleep while awake; to rest there is to renew the heart entirely — to slip back into the secrecy of featureless time and silence to be healed, consoled, led to perfect recollection and breath.

Here, under the somber grey clouds of Massena’s bleeding northern edge, the ache of dislocation eases back; the muscles of the heart relax. And a future begins to feel possible again. If, in our time, “liminal spaces” are attractive to the eyes of so many, I do not find that it is so for strictly spurious reasons. Collectively, we have a profound need to recharge, to enter into silence, to retreat to the edge, far from the chaotic static of a world ransacked by blinding color and feverish ideas and constant sprints toward nowhere.

Gursky saw this coming even back in 1999. It was the era of Woodstock 99 and Limp Bizkit; a time of Ecstasy pills and techno clubs and delirious stock brokers and terrorism. Beeping fax machines and 60 Minutes segments on psychopathic killers; “stranger danger” and D.A.R.E. — Gursky intuited a degree of bedlam that was not sustainable to us even then, and seemed to understand that it would worsen and worsen without relief. So it was that his own eye led him to a place of pure and total relief. And like the void from which the ectoplasm first writhed at the dawn of creation, now, after all things have been created and have converged into a heinous cacophony — we can only return to the void-like plain, where there is nothing but line, nothing but the scrim-like light of the overcast and the naked shimmering of the water.

And it is there where we can — finally — begin again.

---