Inadequacies of feeling, and attempted correctives, are most evident in the boxes containing human images. These are the most testing for both artist and viewer as they often seem so restrictive, even hermetically sealed against normal relationship. Here Cornell’s habitual avoidance, his need to meet other human beings conditionally, comes to the fore. There is hardly any box that can be said to be internally “object relational”, that is, dealing pictorially with two or more persons in relationship. A rare exception is Paolo and Francesca (1943-8) and even its figures are static and remote. Most humanoid boxes contain single figures gazed in upon more or less voyeuristically. This lends a chilly remoteness, a sort of awe-struck worship of icons, as in the Andre Breton collage (1966). When it comes to females, the moods may be weird and disturbing as in The Gift collage (1960s) in which a young girl has a present to offer but walks away towards some impersonal geometric round and sharp forms in the landscape. It may be going too far to identify a Lolita-like theme here, but association with Bebe Marie's entrapment of the early 1940s is inevitable. Cornell was certainly conflicted over his idolatry of female icons, working intensively, for instance, on The Crystal Mask-Garbo (1939-40), only to destroy it when he thought Garbo would dislike the result. The struggle for authentic feeling is very evident in such images, and it is not certain that Cornell got much beyond the esthetic elegance into being able to identify what he could not permit himself to feel, or really wanted, from a woman. Perhaps the collage most revealing of his dilemma of desire and inhibition, of the legitimacy of feeling attaching to females at all, was titled First Collage in a Long Time of 1959. It consists of a half view from the back of a pin-up female nude juxtaposed with natural landscape, all overlaid by a harsh geometric grid. only sky and yellow spring foliage or blossoms are continuous, the problem posed being what true desire really is—the erotic woman or nature.25
Merely calling the woman the “tree of life”, as does one critic, fails to explain the dramatic bifurcation and imprisoning grid. The splitting and immobilizing of images could not be resolved, taking Cornell to the limits of his capacity to feel. But it led to some of the strangest and most moving images in American art and, from the psychobiographical point of view, it defined the problem of avoidance and compromise more eloquently than had yet been managed. A hostile critic might observe that Cornell was so frightened of ordinary human relationships that he fled into the cosmos, yet the cosmological boxes are among his finest accomplishments. Cornell was an amateur astronomer, possessing many books on the subject. Projecting consciousness into space, and using sky charts in search of distant objects, proved a useful means of mood control. Observatory (Corona Borealis Casement) of 1950 is a this-world/ other-world conjunction done with a grid alongside a star chart. Release into the great beyond is promised by this box, yet restrictive enclosure is also suggested. That there is a tantalizing “way out” in plain view is perhaps the point, but Cornell also understood that there is no way out of the human realm. Human conflict always re-enters even the most expansive cosmic visions. The Journeying Sun (For Samuel Taylor Coleridge) of 1961 is a good example of the unexpected effects of Cornell’s private associations between poet and the sun. We may struggle for some necessary logic in the sun/sheep-and-lamb conjunction and, admitting defeat, still feel that something of importance about Coleridge is being said. (Was he a lost sheep, a shorn lamb, yet a darling of the cosmos?) Mystery abounds in such images as Time Transfixed (c.1964), a vague and incomplete clock face with roman numerals. A clue may be found in Cornell’s statement that “I am always one day ahead of conventional time and this one day is an ‘eterniday’ this world that I have come to be enveloped in ...” (p. 327). The Sun Box from the 1960s attempts to put imagery to the music of the spheres, resonating with journal statements about the sun’s ultimate beauty, including one made just before Cornell’s death: Sunshine breaking through going on 12 noon (p. 472). This places Cornell near, if not alongside, Claude Lorrain and J. M. W. Turner who, regarding the sun as primal and sacred, made it central to their art. Pre-verbal archetypal images thus enter Cornell’s cosmological boxes and collages, giving them a healing influence upon the human troubles they incorporate. The advent of light signals maturation of his art.
Overcoming Distress
Cornell’s creativity gave protection against the ravages of obsessions and ever-present risk of depression. Encounters with archetypes lifted him, as if by grace, above conflicts in human relations that could not be solved by Christian Science or the formal achievements of art alone. Psychologically disadvantaged by the early loss of father, dislocation of home and the stress of living with a controlling mother, Cornell could easily have become a psychological casualty. Dysthymia, or persistent low, morose or melancholic mood, rather than depression, is probably an accurate description of his worst states. There is no record in the journal of the most incapacitating sort of depressive episode, although the risk was felt. This is noticeable in the journal entries for 1968, when there is also occasional evidence for cyclical mood swings (p. 396). That he surmounted risk factors for crippling emotional disorder is a tribute to the persistence with which he plied the religious and cultural resources available to him. With time, the early obsessive idolizing of glamorous women seems to have eased as Cornell made friendships with such females as the poet Marianne Moore and the critic Susan Sonntag. He would also hold long confessional telephone conversations with understanding female friends. He was thus able to be intimate within the framework of avoidance. The journal certainly gives evidence of disturbed states, with bizarre dissociative visions and dreams coming to the fore: for instance in March, 1962 “midnight—on 2nd shift from kitchen stove lingering in clear state bedroom jotting flavor on retaining and a visionary image in the recollection & recording—against stark aqua sky silhouetted dark green—a sprawling grotesque form flashing down hurtling streaking down-wards lightening flash of image—sharp awakening from tired sleep on downstairs couch early afternoon” (p. 292). There are no associations to help discern the meaning of this alarming mental event, which remains strange and alien. Cornell was certainly afraid of eruptions of memory, and he feared it becoming “pregnant” in “hallucinatory sleep—bad and yet thrown off time & time again” (p. 396). Diane Waldman, who knew Cornell, reports: “He often engaged in a form of self-hypnosis, allowing his mind to free associate. i thought then as i do now that this dreamlike state was more surreal than his so-called Surrealist work”.26 Free associations sometimes produced virtually incoherent scripts which are neither prose nor poetry (for example pp. 440 and 442f are perilously close to schizophrenic “word salads”). Equally worrying, in the journal for 1972 there is a report of “being taken over by spiritual mystical forces”, of a twelve hour visitation by the unconscious and by associated vertigo (pp. 468-9). In this case the “plunge” into the unconscious was “friendly”, but it had begun with a “genitals dream”, broken into by an unwelcome phone call. Cornell does not disclose the actual sexual content, or try to turn it into art as, for instance, Coleridge had done in the profoundly erotic visionary poetic fragment Kubla Khan. Cornell appears not to have transcribed from such visionary states but to have stored and edited them in readiness for box and collage-making.