November 23, 2023 : Wondercab Mini (55A)

Two Gobsmackers: A Dream and an Ant

To begin with, an actual dream:

Wilde & Shortz

Notwithstanding Oscar Wilde’s sage observation to the effect that the eight most frightening words in the English language may be “I had a very interesting dream last night,” the thing is, I did, and god help me, god help us all, I feel the need to share it.

In my dream I was listening to the radio and Will Shortz, the NPR Sunday Morning Edition’s age-old puzzle-master offered up his latest challenge: “Take a three-letter word,” he said, “reverse the order of the letters and add two more to the front, and you will come up with two words describing things that old men do all the time.” I figured out the answer and immediately stopped doing the one to go do the other!

This actually happened.

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And speaking of things that actually happened

Those of you who took the trouble to read the entirety of the transcript of the conversation I included in our last issue, the one I had with Robert Irwin at Chinati in Marfa on the occasion of the publication of the second edition of our Seeing is Forgetting book, will already know where this one is going, because on that occasion I told Bob about something that had happened to me just the day before right there at Chinati. I subsequently wrote the experience up in somewhat more detail for the Chinati Newsletter, and I take the liberty of including the entire saga right here right now:

The Judd Ant

So the other afternoon I happened to find myself walking the length of the late Donald Judd’s enigmatically posed (if strangely imposing) processional of giant concrete die spread out across an otherwise empty wildgrass expanse along the periphery of his marvelous Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

I say “die,” though of course the (precisely) 64 boxy concrete structures are not exactly mammoth dice; rather, at least dimensionally, think of a pair of dice cubes glued cheek-by-jowl one beside the next and then hollowed out, either lengthwise (precisely 5 meters long by 2 1/2 high and 2 1/2 meters deep) or through the narrow core (2 1/2 meters by 2 1/2 and 5 meters deep);

some of them completely hollow so you can see clean through, others stoppered either at the front or the back (like packing crates, alternately wide or deep, lying on their sides); the whole lot of them gathered into (at first) seemingly random clusters, three long see-through boxes in a starlike splay here, and then three wide stoppered boxes one behind the next there, and then…groups of three or five or six spread one beyond the next, until tramping the full length of the wide wildgrass field (exactly one kilometer), you have traversed precisely 15 such groupings.

Open, closed; wide, narrow; three, six, five; radial, side-by-side, one behind the other: The didactic character of the experience (“Hmm, that’s true, you can try it that way, and then this other, and if you add one more you can do it this way, and now hollow them out the other way, and now stopper the hollows”) gradually giving way to an experience more lyrical, or perhaps poetical (certain effects seeming to repeat themselves like deep tidal refrains, just beyond the reach of conscious apperception) before the whole mad enterprise begins to throb as profoundly existential (the sheer absurdity of the effort involved in lugging these huge concrete slabs out onto this godforsaken field, the Stonehenge defiant assertion of value implied, the primordial insistence on a brute human trace across this otherwise barren high desert expanse).

The Judd concrete boxes at Marfa (almost all images drawn from an exceptionally vivid portfolio at Latitude 65.ca, here)

Not bad, not bad, I found myself thrumming as now, doubling back, I returned the length of the rutted path, reprising the 15 clusters in reverse, ambling toward the Foundation’s headquarters compound way up ahead, humming along (didactical/poetical/existential), my gaze presently drifting absentmindedly to the ground before me (churned tire-ruts and dried mud puddles and tufts of upthrust grass), when—I swear to God—I happened to notice a little ant dragging an improbably long stalk of dried blond wildgrass.

And I mean a stalk a good five or six times its own body length. Pulling and pulling on the damn thing, and now laying it down and traipsing back along its length so as to be able instead to push it forward, much of the time (swear to God) tilting the stalk a good 45 degrees into the air, laying it down again, nudging it leftward, going around to the other side, nudging it right, returning to the back to lift it skyward and shovingly forward once again. And so on. And on. Relentlessly.

By this time I was completely absorbed. Minutes passed—the ant, the straw, their dogged course—till finally the ant dragged the thing under and presently around a tuft of wild grass, lay the straw down, pulled back momentarily, seeming to appraise the situation, and now began nudging it ever so slightly this way and that, lining it up perfectly (as I now suddenly perceived, dumbfounded) with another length of dry straw already there, which in turn perfectly abutted another length still, the three lengths of identical blond straw now perfectly aligning—nudge, push, nudge, nudge, pull—into one long length. Whereupon, its mission apparently accomplished, the seemingly satisfied little creature simply wandered off into the gathering evening light.

As at length did I, wondering, had Judd first got the idea from the ant, or the ant from the Judds, or was it that Judd conditioned me even to be able to notice the ant, or was that ant simply God (or, at very least, God’s high priest), or (I mean, seriously) what? Just what the hell was that?

See you next week!

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