Anna Batchelor, Driving Bolivia’s Salt Flats, 2012.
Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.
—MICHELANGELO
Last year, I drove out to a place where our sight extends far enough to glimpse the curvature of the Earth. There the familiar relationship between earth and sky fractures. No orienting horizon, foreground, mid-ground, or background is there to guide our path. The phenomenon occurs on a short list of locales: where I went, the salt flats, the bone white, briny swath of a prehistoric lake bed in Bonneville, Utah, just shy of its border with Nevada; Lake Eyre in Australia; the Salar de Atacama in Chile; and the larger Salar de Uyuni on the Bolivian Altiplano, where those near-mythical pink flamingos come to nest. In these regions, sea evaporation has outpaced precipitation year after year, and arid winds have buffered down the miles of remaining salt to a plane so level that it is isotropic—it appears with the same flatness, the same dimension in all directions.1 Last I was there, I met a man at the edge of the salt flats who told me, perplexed, that he had driven across the entire state of Illinois on less gas than it took him to drive across the Bonneville Salt Flats. To walk it, to drive on it, feels like standing on a ball—each step forward on the blindingly white ground feels unexpectedly new. It creates an endurance walk, one that seems to extend how much we think we can traverse.
Anna Batchelor, Driving Bolivia’s Salt Flats, 2012.
Mountains are what create the illusion on the Bonneville Salt Flats—the massifs can appear as if sky-suspended mounds of earth. The eye catches what we think must be their bottom, but that pile of rock bends with the exact downslope of the planet, beyond our line of sight.
The distortion creates mountains with floating edges, sharp like an arrow’s tip. The flint blade-like ends hover, as if pinched by a giant. Set down before us as if a materialized taunt, they seem to show a future within our sights, but just out of our grasp.
Few get out on the salt flats. It is the kind of site you visit when there is nowhere left to go—you have to drive through it to get to your destination, or you venture out deliberately, as if the Earth’s other natural wonders can no longer move you and what’s left is this alien locale. When it’s dry, the land is a place of seeming freedom. After all, there’s little there. Some head there to set land racing records of up to 450 miles per hour. Others go for the annual National Archery Association Flight Championships. When I went, it was so quiet that for vast stretches I heard only the sound of my shoes on the crinkled land. Except for the occasional sound of a thunderclap shearing the air, a race car breaking the sound barrier, this is a silent ground.
It mirrors the process in ourselves, when the road before us is flat, when we’ve accomplished much of what we’ve set out to do. When any direction seems possible, we walk forward with the clarity that comes from contrast. Save one large obstacle in our sights, we could be disoriented, aimless, adrift.2
They say we never walk in truly straight lines, but on the salt flats, a ruler-lined walk is impossible. A seemingly direct forward march turns out in hindsight to be a series of curves. Without realizing it, we constantly autocorrect, covering more ground than we knew we could.
A friend, an artist who has gone to the Bonneville Salt Flats more times than I have, tells me that even with the assistance of a navigator, she has never made it fully across, never walked an arched path all the way to the edge to meet the foot of the massifs that ring the salt flats like a bowl. Last we spoke, she had attempted it three times. We agree that it is an uncanny walk, “like trying to climb up a mountain and not being sure if you’re at the top or not, so you keep trying to rise higher, and by the time you get to what you think is the highest point, you’re at the edge, can’t really see, and realize that you’ve managed to go beyond the peak.”3
Chris Taylor, Impossibility of straight lines, 2003, Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah. Photo: Bill Gilbert.
To walk on the salt flats is to live out archer’s paradox, an off-center logic that the best archers use to thrive.
How often have we designated a work of art or invention a masterpiece or a classic, an inexhaustible gift, while its creator considers it incomplete, permanently unfinished, riddled with difficulties and flaws?4 More times than we could possibly know. I considered a partial list: William Faulkner wrote sections of The Sound and the Fury five different times after it was already published, adding new writing as an appendix to the novel’s later editions.5 Paul Cézanne worried that he would “die without ever having attained this supreme goal”: to create a work of art that came directly from nature, as he put it. He found his painting oeuvre wanting.6 Cézanne identified with Frenhofer, the protagonist of Honoré de Balzac’s 1831 short story Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (“The Unknown Masterpiece”): a Pygmalion figure whose aesthetic ambition to re-create reality by painting the female form ends in inevitable failure.7 Frenhofer probed the meaning of color, of line, “but by dint of so much research, he has come to doubt the very subject of his investigations”—a dynamic that Maurice Merleau-Ponty would later call “Cézanne’s Doubt.”8 Frenhofer was a favorite literary character of Cézanne’s. Émile Bernard recounted that during a visit to Cézanne in Aix in 1914, the conversation turned to Frenhofer and “The Unknown Masterpiece” and the painter “got up from the table, stood before me, and striking his chest with his index finger, he admitted wordlessly by this repeated gesture that he was the very character in the novel. He was so moved by this feeling that tears filled his eyes.”9 When he sketched self-portraits, he labeled some FRENHOFER. Cézanne rarely thought that his works were finished, but put them aside “almost always with the intention of taking it up again,” which meant leaving most of his works unsigned.10 Less than ten percent of paintings in his catalogue raisonné bear his signature.11
Nobel Prize–winning poet Czeslaw Milosz was one of many who repeated this coda as if on a constantly extending crystalline ground. After every book of his poetry came out, he said, “There is always the feeling that you didn’t unveil yourself enough. A book is finished and appears and I feel, Well, next time I will unveil myself. And when the next book appears, I have the same feeling.”12
We thrive when we stay on our own leading edge. It is a wisdom understood by Duke Ellington, whose favorite song out of his repertoire was always the next one, always the one that he had yet to compose. Like trying to find the end of a sound wave, the endeavor is never complete.
The pursuit of mastery is an ever onward almost. “Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish,” Michelangelo implored, like a perpetual Adam with his finger outstretched but not quite touching the Old Testament God’s hand in the Sistine Chapel.13 When Michelangelo was commissioned to paint the vaulted fresco ceiling sixty-five feet above the ground, he complained of his brain nearly hitting his “back,” and that he nearly had “goiter” from “the torture” of having his “stomach squashed” beneath his chin and his face doubled as “a fine floor” for the “droppings” of paint from his brush above him, as each gesture had become “blind and aimless.” “My painting is dead. Defend it for me. I am not in the right place—I am not a painter,” he implored his friend Giovanni in a letter written as a sonnet.14 Next to it he drew what looks like a self-portrait: a figure stands, cranes his head, and paints a devil-like face on the ceiling. While laboring over his second cycle on the vault of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, The Flood, his plaster mixture sprouted mildew and a lime mold plagued the work, as if some crude joke. Michelangelo wrote to his patron, Pope Julius II, “I told Your Holiness that this [painting] is not my art; what I have done is spoiled,” and asked to be replaced.15
