Page 30 of The Anthropocene Reviewed

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down -

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing - then -

Several years ago, a plank in reason broke within me, and I dropped down and down, and hit a world at every plunge. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but precedent is cold comfort when you feel the funeral in your brain. As I struggled to recover, or at least slow the plunge, my thoughts drifted back to the road trips I’d taken, and I decided to try a geographical cure. I drove to see the world’s largest ball of paint, which ended up kind of saving my life, at least for the time being.

I’m fascinated by roadside attractions because they are one place where we see the work of huge systems intersect with the work of tiny individuals. We have so many roadside attractions because we have so many roads—our interstate highway system is built to move lots of people across vast areas of land.* Once you’re on an Interstate, it’s easy to stay on it until you need gas or food. To tempt you away from the cruise-controlled straightforwardness of the American highway requires something extraordinary. Something unprecedented. The world’s largest ______.

It’s the system that makes the roadside attraction necessary, but individuals choose what to make and why. Consider, for example, Joel Waul, creator of Megaton, the world’s largest ball of rubber bands. When first constructing the ball, Waul wrote on his Myspace page, “First, have a definite, clear practical idea, a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends. Third, adjust all means to that end. —Aristotle.”* For Waul, the definite and clear and practical idea was to make the world’s largest ball of rubber bands, which would eventually come to weigh over nine thousand pounds. I’m not sure why I find it beautiful to devote oneself obsessively to the creation of something that doesn’t matter, but I do.

The world’s largest ball of paint is located in the tiny town of Alexandria, Indiana. Back in 1977, Mike Carmichael painted a baseball with his three-year-old son. And then they kept painting it. Carmichael told Roadside America, “My intention was to paint maybe a thousand coats on it and then maybe cut it in half and see what it looked like. But then it got to the size where it looked kinda neat, and all my family said keep painting it.” Carmichael also invited friends and family over to paint the ball, and eventually strangers started showing up, and Mike would have them paint it, too.

Now, over forty years later, there are more than twenty-six thousand layers of paint on that baseball. It weighs two and a half tons. It has its own little house, and every year more than a thousand strangers show up to add layers of paint to it. The whole thing is free to visit; Mike even provides the paint. He and his son both still add layers, but most of the painting is done by visitors.

As a child, just as I imagined technological advances were driven primarily by the brilliant insights of heroic individuals laboring in isolation, I saw art as a story of individual geniuses.

Shakespeare or Leonardo da Vinci or whoever used their innate brilliance to expand the human landscape, and by studying the lives and work of these individuals, I could know all there is to know about how great art gets made. In school, whether I was studying history or math or literature, I was almost always taught that great and terrible individuals were at the center of the story. Michelangelo and his ceiling. Newton and the falling apple. Caesar crossing the Rubicon.

To be fair, I was sometimes taught that circumstance played a role in the emergence of greatness. When discussing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high school, one of my teachers pointed out that in order for Mark Twain to become Mark Twain, he had to grow up along the river that separated twentieth-century America during the war that separated nineteenth-century America. But mostly I was taught, and believed, that important work was done not by the times or via massive collaboration, but by heroic and brilliant individuals.

I still believe in genius. From John Milton to Jane Austen to Toni Morrison, some artists are just . . . better. But these days, I see genius as a continuum rather than a simple trait. More to the point, I think the worship of individual genius in art and elsewhere is ultimately misguided. Isaac Newton did not discover gravity; he expanded our awareness of it in concert with many others at a time and in a place where knowledge was being built and shared more efficiently. Julius Caesar didn’t become a dictator because he chose to cross the Rubicon River with his army; he became a dictator because over centuries, the Roman Republic became more reliant upon the success of its generals to fund the state, and because over time the empire’s soldiers felt more loyalty to their military leaders than to their civilian ones. Michelangelo benefited not just from improved understandings of human anatomy, and not just from being Florentine at a time when Florence was rich, but also from the work of several assistants who helped paint parts of the Sistine Chapel.

The individuals we celebrate at the center of more recent revolutions were similarly positioned in times and places where they could contribute to faster microchips or better operating systems or more efficient keyboard layouts. Even the most extraordinary genius can accomplish very little alone.

I’ve often wished—especially when I was younger—that my work was better, that it rose to the level of genius, that I could write well enough to make something worth remembering. But I think that way of imagining art might make individuals too important. Maybe in the end art and life are more like the world’s largest ball of paint. You carefully choose your colors, and then you add your layer as best you can. In time, it gets painted over. The ball gets painted again and again until there is no visible remnant of your paint. And eventually, maybe nobody knows about it except for you.

But that doesn’t mean your layer of paint is irrelevant or a failure. You have permanently, if slightly, changed the larger sphere. You’ve made it more beautiful, and more interesting. The world’s largest ball of paint looks nothing like the baseball it used to be, and you’re part of the reason.

In the end, that’s what art is for me. You paint the ball, which changes the way someone else thinks about painting the ball, and so on, until some guy overwhelmed with grief and dread drives out to Alexandria, Indiana, to see what beautiful foolishness thousands of people have made together, and feels a hope that cannot be explained or shared except by painting. That guy adds a layer of his own to the ball, one that won’t last but still matters. Art is not only a genius going forth, as James Joyce put it, “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Art is also picking a light blue for your layer of the world’s largest ball of paint, knowing that it will soon be painted over, and painting anyway.

I give the world’s largest ball of paint four stars.

SYCAMORE TREES

MY CHILDREN LIKE TO PLAY an age-old game with me called Why? I’ll tell them, for instance, that I need them to finish breakfast, and they’ll say, “Why?” And I’ll say so that you receive adequate nutrition and hydration, and they’ll say, “Why?” And I’ll say because as your parent I feel obligated to protect your health, and they’ll say, “Why?” And I’ll say partly because I love you and partly because of evolutionary imperatives baked into my biology, and they’ll say, “Why?” And I’ll say because the species wants to go on, and they’ll say, “Why?”

And I’ll pause for a long time before saying, “I don’t know. I guess I believe, in spite of it all, that the human enterprise has value.”

And then there will be a silence. A blessed and beautiful silence will spread across the breakfast table. I might even see a kid pick up a fork. And then, just as the silence seems ready to take off its coat and stay awhile, one of my kids will say, “Why?”

When I was a teenager, I used the why game as a way of establishing that if you dig deep enough, there is no why. I reveled in nihilism. More than that, I liked being certain about it. Certain that everyone who believed life had inherent meaning was an idiot. Certain that meaning is just a lie we tell ourselves to survive the pain of meaninglessness.

A while back, my brain started playing a game similar to the why game. This one is called What’s Even the Point.

There’s an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem I’ve quoted in two of my novels and will now quote again, because I’ve never come across anything that describes my depressive blizzards so perfectly. “That chill is in the air,” the poem begins, “Which the wise know well, and have even learned to bear. / This joy, I know, / Will soon be under snow.”

I’m in an airport in late 2018 when suddenly I feel that chill in the air. What’s even the point? I’m about to fly to Milwaukee on a Tuesday afternoon, about to herd with other moderately intelligent apes into a tube that will spew a truly astonishing amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in order to transport us from one population center to a different one. Nothing that anyone has to do in Milwaukee really matters, because nothing really matters.

When my mind starts playing What’s Even the Point, I can’t find a point to making art, which is just using the finite resources of our planet to decorate. I can’t find a point to planting gardens, which is just inefficiently creating food that will sustain our useless vessels for a little while longer. And I can’t find a point to falling in love, which is just a desperate attempt to stave off the loneliness that you can never truly solve for, because you are always alone “way down in the dark which is you,” as Robert Penn Warren put it.

Except it’s not a darkness. It’s much worse than that. When my brain plays What’s Even the Point, what actually descends upon me is a blizzard of blinding, frozen white light. Being in the dark doesn’t hurt, but this does, like staring at the sun. That Millay poem refers to “the eye’s bright trouble.” It seems to me that the bright trouble is the light you see the first time you open your eyes after birth, the light that makes you cry your first tears, the light that is your first fear.

What’s even the point? All this trial and travail for what will become nothing, and soon. Sitting in the airport, I’m disgusted by my excesses, my failures, my pathetic attempts to forge some meaning or hope from the materials of this meaningless world. I’ve been tricking myself, thinking there was some reason for all of it, thinking that consciousness was a miracle when it’s really a burden, thinking that to be alive was wondrous when it’s really a terror. The plain fact, my brain tells me when it plays this game, is that the universe doesn’t care if I’m here.

“Night falls fast,” Millay wrote. “Today is in the past.”