Corn Dark

Jenn and I went to the Whitney the other day, for the first time in several years, and saw the Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction show.

I’m not ordinarily a big fan of abstraction, but I enjoyed the exhibit—perhaps because O’Keeffe’s abstractions are often not very abstract. Many of these begin with objects in nature—a flower, a bleached bone, a stalk of corn—and stylize or otherwise alter them. They are speculative nature paintings, in the way that Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist takes place in a speculative version of New York.

I liked in particular Pelvis I, It Was Blue and Green (which might or might not be derived from an aerial view of a water landscape), and Lake George (1924), in which the wave in the foreground is carved like a sand dune.

Corn Dark reminded me of this passage from Thoreau’s Journal (February 26, 1840), a precursor of his credo from Walden: “I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.”

The most important events make no stir on their first taking place, nor indeed in their effects directly. They seem hedged about by secrecy. It is concussion, or the rushing together of air to fill a vacuum, which makes a noise. The great events to which all things consent, and for which they have prepared the way, produce no explosion, for they are gradual, and create no vacuum which requires to be suddenly filled; as a birth takes place in silence, and is whispered about the neighborhood, but an assassination, which is at war with the constitution of things, creates a tumult immediately.

Corn grows in the night.

P.S. The color of the universe is beige.