 |
The waning winter landscape of central Illinois is fascinating
for all its scarred flatness. Last season's crops have long been harvested,
their decayed residue pummeled by winter, and the tentative promise
of another season of industrially grown corn and soy is still some months
away. The abstract grid—the Grid which divvied up most
of middle America—seems less abstract in this landscape of pervasive
visibility. The right angles are apparent to the senses as much as they
are to the mind: pick-up trucks move swiftly in predictable vectors
from intersection to intersection; the elaborate system of utility poles
and wires reflects the grid some 50 feet in the air. I remember the
fierce hum emanating from the power lines, a screaming which seemed
to audibly render the bitter cold. And across this barren, grey terrain,
the periodic assertions of verticality—the barns and silos and
farmhouses, the occasional cove of denuded trees, the lone walking figure. |