In Which the Magpie Takes to the Field

De Maria’s field of lightning . . . Thoreau’s “botany boxes” . . . James Schuyler’s salute to the past

“My sense of time in the city meant nothing in this place,” writes Laura Raicovich in her book-length essay At the Lightning Field. “It was replaced by a feeling of forever that was closer to geologic time than my own notions of a day or week passing. I thought I could understand big things better if I stayed.” Raicovich is writing about her first visit to Walter De Maria’s art installation The Lightning Field, which is composed of four hundred stainless steel poles scattered across a grid one mile by one kilometer and six meters in the desert in New Mexico.

More than a century before, Henry David Thoreau began bringing home plants in his hat, which he called his “botany box.” He had become aware of plants; he wanted to know their names. He wrote, “I soon found myself observing when plants first blossomed and leafed.” He went farther afield, “running to different sides of the town and into the neighboring towns often between twenty and thirty miles in a day. I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.”

Here are two of the pages from Thoreau’s herbarium, which you can see—along with his pen, his desk, and his treasured copy of the Bhagavad Gita, among other intimate traces of his vast consciousness—at the current Morgan Library exhibit “This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal.”

You can see his journals, too, although the handwriting is so fine that one might need a magnifying glass to read any of the pages. Here is a typical spread.

Odd, isn’t it, that the plants are so much easier to read? Or perhaps not.

In his astonishingly graceful book-length essay Afternoon of a Writer, Peter Handke writes of a man, a writer, whose sense of himself as a writer is fragile. “Ever since the time when he lived for almost a year with the thought that he had lost contact with language, every sentence he managed to write, and which in addition left him feeling that it might be possible to go on, had been an event.” After managing to write a few lines, the man takes a walk. It is winter. He sees: “The snow settled first on the middle strip of grass; it looked as though birch branches had been laid on the road, one after another, and so on to the horizon. In a bramblebush, single crystals would balance on thorns and then encircle them like ruffs.” He sees roads. He sees the edge of town. He sees a playground. He sees an old woman lying on the ground, for whom he calls an ambulance. He writes of what he sees, of what, in a sense, sees him. By the time his walk is done, he feels that “to himself he was a puzzle, a long-forgotten wonderment.”

Do you hear what I am telling you? It is time to take to the field. The Magpie is taking to the field now and won’t be back for a while; it is summer. For you, the field may be a street, a march, a body, a body of water, the lines of your hand. “Looking deeply,” writes Raicovich, “is a question of scale. How close? How far? It may not matter, you might see the same thing.” She visited The Lightning Field many times, going back and back, the experience of the field inexhaustible, constantly changing, like a beloved face.

“I wanted to know,” said a friend of her time in EST in the seventies, “how not to be destroyed by things happening. I mean, the bad things are going to happen. I wanted to survive them.” Isn’t that why we walk, and why we write? To survive? To recover our sense of ourselves, and others, and the world around us, as a puzzle, a long-forgotten wonderment, a way of understanding big things better?

One summer, the Magpie was in a place near fields of flowers with phenomenally saturated red petals. The red was like a chord. Or maybe it was a chord. Sweatily, carefully, I gathered heaps of the small, densely red flowers, but when I got them back—well, you know the end of this story. Looking at the broken stems and wilted petals on my desk, I thought, Now that’s just a ridiculous metaphor, the impossibility of, Eurydice, blah blah. But I may have gotten the lesson wrong, because I didn’t notice until much later that my failure to gather those particular flowers meant that I had to go to them, in the field, every day. I had to go to the field. And when I went to the field, I saw not only the flowers with a red like a chord, but flowers with tiny yellow petals, long spindly green stalks with white flowers, a house in the distance, snail shells with snails in them, grasses. I saw, in other words, the field. How close? How far?

In the poem “Salute,” James Schuyler writes,

Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

I salute the faces I miss, the things that happen, the lightning strikes. My darlings, I salute you, close and far. I’m like that, charging into the field with my sweaty plan, my little basket, my certainty of what I’m after. Was the point really, for Thoreau, that exact moment of the plant’s blooming? Or was it the continual iterations of the transformation?

I am always forgetting, and the field is always reminding me, of what it is to see, and see again, and see again, and see again.

Past is past. I salute that various field.