Spangled and Fulfilled
I was sitting at the bar in a downtown restaurant the other day. Meghan was admiring the brick wall behind us and wondered if one of its features was the result of creative construction sometime after the wall was originally built. At points throughout the wall, some single bricks had apparently been taken out, paired up, turned 90 degrees, and put back in, mortar and all, so that now there were as many as thirty or more small brick shelves for wine bottles or plants or other decorations. “It’s nice,” she said, “but it just seems so unnecessary.”
Now, most of the time I would almost certainly agree; I think many things in life are very, very unnecessary. But, on this one, I cringed a little when she said it. Why should “necessary” have the final say? In fact, aren’t there many, many places in life where “necessary” should have no say at all?
If I didn’t have this poem from Richard Wilbur in mind at the time, I certainly could have:
AT MOORDITCH
“Now,” said the voice of lock and window-bar,
“You must confront things as they truly are.
Open your eyes at last, and see
The desolateness of reality.”“Things have,” I said, “a pallid, empty look,
Like pictures in an unused coloring book.”“Now that the scales have fallen from your eyes,”
Said the sad hallways, “you must recognize
How childishly your former sight
Salted the world with glory and delight.”“This cannot be the world,” I said. “Nor will it,
Till the heart’s crayon spangle and fulfill it.”
I did have that poem in mind while I was reading Jonathan Raban’s fantastic book, Bad Land: An American Romance. Having just moved myself to Montana for the rest of winter and into spring, it was easily picked up from the “Montana” section at a local bookstore last week. Raban traces the zealously encouraged settlement of eastern Montana in the early 20th century. Between government incentives, railroad company pamphlets, creative advertising and photography, and the enthusiastic hopes and dreams of migrants, many found the new life being offered hard to resist. But it was, on the whole, a dreadful failure.
They’d come to the land and tried to shape it according to their imported ideas of science, progress, community, landscape. Now the land began to shape them. Its message to the people was blunt: live here, and you will live barely and in isolation. It shook itself free of the litter of surplus buildings, the fence posts and barbed wire with which Lilliputian homesteaders had tried to pin it down.
The land would wear just so much architecture and society, and no more. In the Platonic republic of the United States, the land of limitless imagining, where ideas were no sooner conceived than they became concrete entities, nature was not supposed to dictate the terms on which mankind could live with it. Of course, nature often struck petulantly back at man, with earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and fires; but this inflexible drawing of lines and limits was alien to the American temper. The prairie was not amenable to problem solving; it wasn’t going to be fixed by new farming methods, or turned green by applied electromagnetism. It was what it was, which was not at all what people had conceived it to be.
Swallows nested now in the wrecked houses of the theorists and high-hopers, and in the abandoned cabins of the rolling stones. Those who were left were marked out by their willingness to submit to the land’s terms…”
If the decorated wall spoke to me of the crayon, Raban’s book speaks to the reality that resists that crayon.
All throughout Raban’s history of eastern Montana, which is almost perfectly told, he points to the “innocent optimism” of those who bought into the dream being sold and who attempted to make a home there.
The pamphlet readers, innocent of the reality of America, brought to the text both a willing credulity and a readiness to fill in the spaces between the words with their own local, European experience. They had no more real idea of Montana than they had of the dark side of the moon. But they were devout believers and imaginers. The authors of the railroad pamphlets were able to reach out to an audience of ideal readers of the kind that novelists dream about, usually in vain.
Surely there is much to be said about this, about the sham advertising combined with exaggerated scientific knowledge combined with overconfident idealism—it is, after all, “an American romance.” There is much to be pitied looking back on this chapter in American history, and Raban, I think, clearly loves the lives and the families that he traces through it. And of course, too much cannot be said about the historical (and continual) insistence of forcing our will onto the land, into the world—“…sketching a fantastic future for the land, with an Olympian disregard for what was actually here.”
I do, however, wish that Raban had more to say about that spirit of imagination, that property of vision, that tries (dares) to see more than we can see. There was recognition at times, but on the whole, the hopes and dreams of these migrants seem to be cast entirely as mistaken, as sorry and pitiful, if still lovable and relatable. And they certainly are those things—loveable, relatable, and mistaken—all of which is wonderfully told by Raban. But it seems to me that there is something missing. Perhaps the best way that I can put it is to say that I wish the book had more of a place in it for Richard Wilbur’s poem, that Raban had perhaps included a little more praise for “the heart’s crayon.”
Of course, it doesn’t mean that any desert will turn oasis with the right amount of willpower, or imagination, or prayer. Certainly our hopes have to be properly placed, directed, applied. But what if the world is not the world until the heart and mind engage it with a crayon?
And if not quite that—if not praise for the pull to transform, to bring something dull to colorful life—then at least a simpler love, a love that might accomplish something like it. Maybe something like what Christian Wiman has in mind in his poem “The Reservoir”:
There comes a time when it is time to be
alive by a lake where the sun dies and dies.
Brown, glintless, it lies in the land and in the mind.
A man might be forgiven for loving dust,
dead weeds and a cracked, receding shore,
a sky so empty that it has no end.
It may not be a desert turned into a garden, but surely that is its own kind of spangling and fulfillment.