Near this centre earlier visitors had arranged rocks and stones so that they spelled out names in the white salt of the enclosed lake bed: missy (with a heart underneath), ida marie and estelle.
The sky continued to open up. With the sound of birds and lapping water, it was lovely in a subdued and desolate way. It felt abandoned but it was not a place of abandoned meaning. It had retained — or generated — its own dismal nodality. The answer to the obvious question — was it worth coming all this way? — might have been no, but it didn’t occur to us to ask. The Spiral Jetty was here. We were here. That was the simple truth. Could the more complex truth be that if it wasn’t so difficult to get to no one would bother coming to see it?
André Malraux famously cherished the idea of a museum without walls. In a way, places like the Spiral Jetty are jails without walls. They are always about time, about how long they can detain or hold you. I remember the governor of a U.S. prison saying, of a particularly violent inmate, that he already had way more time than he’d ever be able to do. That’s exactly how the Jetty looked — like it already had more time than it could ever do — even though, relatively speaking, it had hardly begun to put in any serious time.
In uncertain tribute, we stayed longer than we needed to, waiting for any potential increments of the experience to make themselves felt. One or the other of us kept saying, ‘Shall we go?’ and, in this way, our visit was gradually extended. Nothing happened except the slow erosion of urgency and purpose. We were often ready to leave, but every time we thought about leaving we remembered the previous time we had thought about leaving and were glad the urge had not been acted on.
And then, eventually, without a word, when the desire to leave was all but extinguished, we began walking back to the car. The air was irritable with sandflies. I almost trod on a long, grey, indifferent snake. The lone and level lake stretched far away.
5
Sites such as those painted by Vedder are not always mired in the sands of the past: they are still coming into existence, are continually being created, even if they cannot always be seen — as when a construction worker mixed a Boston Red Sox T-shirt into concrete that was being poured into part of the new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, aiming to curse it.
In a photograph taken by Chaiwat Subprasom in 2014, we can see the very beginning of the processes at work in the formation of one such potential site. At first glance it seems a nice if rather pointless holiday snap. More accurately, a photograph of people taking a rather pointless holiday snap. In this respect it — the snap — is exemplary, since 90 percent of the pictures now being taken are pointless. The weather is fine, the beach is nice, the water is a gentle, unthreatening turquoise, but it’s not as if the rock in the middle is covered in ancient petroglyphs or even graffiti. That leaves the dog. A nice enough doggy, to be sure, and there’s always something fun about a dog at the seaside — until it comes trotting back and leaves sand and saltwater all over your sofa. .
Except this is the beach on Koh Tao in Thailand where the bodies of two murdered British tourists had been discovered two weeks earlier. This knowledge changes everything — including our perception of the dog, who now seems to have sensed or scented something untoward. In its modest way the picture being taken by the woman in the bikini recalls Joel Sternfeld’s photographs of parking lots or street corners in On This Site: unremarkable spots transformed into photographic memorials by captions explaining that these are places where a rape, murder or abduction took place. The couple in the photograph probably offered a similar explanatory caption when they showed the picture to friends or posted it on Tumblr. Still, their picture was not anything like as interesting as this one: a photograph showing the transformation being made. It is the act — her act — of taking the picture that invests the site with meaning. Her picture might be pointless; the act of taking it is not. Quite possibly she is taking it not to make a visual record but to offer some kind of tribute, to pay her respects in the way that, had any been available, she might have left a bunch of flowers. This is often the case: people don’t take pictures in order to have a picture; they take pictures because that is what you do. Perhaps it’s better put interrogatively: what else can you do? The man provides the answer: you just stand there.
People will continue to come to this beach. More photographs will be taken. A memorial to the dead couple will possibly be built or their names carved on the rock. Even if neither happens, some visitors to this spot will be conscious that something has happened here, will be familiar with the story of the murder. And even if that knowledge fades, this spot will still exude a faint charge of uncomprehended — possibly unnoticed — meaning. How long will that charge hold? What will remain of it two hundred years hence?
Northern Dark
Shortly after getting back from Utah, Jessica became obsessed with seeing the Northern Lights. She had been mentioning the Northern Lights for several years but now she began mentioning them all the time, telling me about friends for whom seeing the Northern Lights had been ‘the experience of a lifetime.’ Other topics were just preludes to the topic of the Northern Lights and how badly she wanted to see them. At one point she claimed that we were probably the only people in the world who had not seen the Northern Lights, that she didn’t know why I wouldn’t take her to see the Northern Lights. I wanted to see them too, I said. I just didn’t see when we would have a chance to go.
‘We could go in August,’ she said.
‘That has got to be among the most stupid things ever said by anyone,’ I said. I say stupid things too. We actually spur each other on to see who can come out with the most stupid things, so this was sort of a compliment. ‘You have to go in the winter,’ I said. ‘When it’s dark. In the summer it’s the land of the midnight sun. It’s the old Kierkegaardian either/or. Either the Northern Lights or the midnight sun. You can’t have both.’
‘Oh, I see. We can’t have both, so we’ve got to have neither. That’s what I call stupid.’
‘That’s what I call the remark of someone who has no understanding of logic whatsoever,’ I said.
This was in May. We weren’t really interested in experiencing the midnight sun, though we did enjoy hearing about it from our friend Sjon, who lives in Reykjavik.
‘When I was a kid I had trouble sleeping in the summer,’ he told us over dinner at an Indian restaurant in London. ‘In my twenties, I stayed up partying all night. Now I have very thick curtains.’
The months slipped by, the days grew longer and then, as soon as they had become as long as possible, they started to get shorter, until a day lasted only half a day, and this year became last year and next year became this year and we were suddenly in the fifth year of what Jessica had told Sjon was ‘a basically sunless marriage.’ Weather-wise, it had been the most severe December in London for over a hundred years. Snow came early, bringing ‘travel chaos’ to the road and rail networks. Heathrow could not cope. Flights were cancelled, but we were cozy at home, eating biscuits and watching the snow drift past our uncurtained windows or watching the news on TV, glad that we weren’t camped out like refugees at Heathrow, waiting out the backlog of cancelled flights, pestering airline staff for the food and drink vouchers to which we were surely entitled. Then, in January, after the snow had cleared and the country was back on its feet again, we were there, at Heathrow, waiting for a plane that would take us north, north to Oslo, then further north to Tromsø and deep into the Arctic Circle, to the Svalbard archipelago.