December 1998 Issue

The passage is made up of three interlocking symbols. The desert shall become an oasis; then, the blind, the deaf and the lame shall be healed; and there, a safe highway to redemption shall be built. All the symbols are created by means of contrasts: The dry death of the desert gives way to blooming life; illness becomes wholeness; danger gives way to safety (and going astray to redemption).

It is at this point that the arts can illuminate the passage, by giving us some sense of the depth and breadth of its contrasts. In visual terms, the contrast between barren desert and lush blossom may be seen in the works of Georgia O'Keeffe. Compare, for example, the stark loneliness of From the Faraway Nearby (1937) with the rich, fertility of Poppy (1927).

The former is one of the later of O'Keeffe's skull-and-landscape paintings. The landscape is typically vast. The sky, which is delft blue at its height, fades to white and then deepens to cream at the distant horizon. The pale ground rises in conical white hills against a layer of sandy clay; the land then flattens in a deep red-brown mesa where earth meets sky. The landscape is vast and empty—and at the same time dominated by the skull of an elk floating in the foreground. The bleached antlers fill the 36" x 40" canvas, right to left and top to bottom; but the skull itself, brown and broken, colored by death and decay forms the center of all.

The latter is a suitable cover illustration for a book entitled New Creation. The original "Poppy" is very large, almost filling its 30" by 36" canvas and deepening from a rusty orange at its edges to richer and darker reds as the eye is drawn inward to the luxuriant purple-black center. There the seed pod swells, ripe to bursting with new life.¹

Or consider the contrasts within T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The "waste land" is a winter land, a "brown land" under a "brown fog" at a "violet hour," full of "the rattle of bones." Or it is a desert land, where there "is no water, but only rock", "rock and no water," "mountains of rock without water," a "dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit." Where there is only "dry sterile thunder without rain." Still, there is thunder ("Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata."), clouds (if no bigger than a man's hand) become black, and perhaps the rain will come. The poem ends with the rainy sound of "Shantih shantih shantih": Peace peace peace.²

The ending leads full circle to the beginning of the poem, where April is described as "cruellest month." But April is cruel precisely, because it breeds "lilacs out of the dead land," and stirs "dull roots with spring rain." The lines recall the prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales:

[When April's sweet showers have pierced March to the root, and flowers begin to push forth in "tendre croppes" (shoots), when the sun becomes young again, and the birds sing and wood and heath come alive...]

From The Canterbury Tales to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, highways (35:8) have suggested that there is a better place to go, even if it's only to Kansas City. In Langston Hughes' marvelous short story, On the Road, Sargent is a man without a home, a black man looking for a night's shelter in a white town. When the Reverend Mr. Dorset shuts his door on Sargent, he goes to the adjoining church. There the doors are locked, but in the course of trying to break through them (and the fracas) that follows, Sargent pulls the church down. He throws one of the pillars six blocks down the street, and looks up to find Christ walking beside him, "the same Christ that had been on the cross on the church—still stone with a rough stone surface, walking along beside him...."

As they approach the railroad yard and the nearby hobo jungle, Sargent wants to know where Christ is going. "God knows," Christ says at first, but later decides he's "gonna make it on to Kansas City."

Sargent wakes from his dream to find himself in jail. But he isn't really confined. Outside is the highway. And inside there is a new, indestructible imagination. With it he is on the road again, wondering, as the story ends, if Christ has really gone to Kansas City.

It is not only true that highways suggest that there are better places to go, it is also true that for the most part even in fiction they lead to real places—like Canterbury or San Francisco or Kansas City. It is important, finally, not to make the "literary" mistake of compounding the pictures of Isaiah 35:1-10 into a "utopia." Strictly speaking, "utopia" describes both a literary form and the vision that literary form seeks to render. The vision is of an ideal but imaginary society. The pictures Isaiah paints of oasis and highway and healing are not imaginary in the same sense. The healings (as an example) are a statement of what will be—and in Jesus Christ (Mt 11) already are!⁴

We are to be warned against this mistake, because it is very near the mistake John the Baptist makes. Even in Kahlil Gibran's idealized portrait of him, John (speaking from prison to one of his disciples) looks in Jesus for a Messiah who "shall lead my [John's] armies, horse and foot," a Messiah who will triumph: "His chariot shall pass over [all enemies], and the hoofs of His horses shall trample them and He shall be triumphant." Imprisoned as much by his vision as by Herod, John cannot see what is already real, that: "The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them" (Mt 11:4-5).⁵

Richard Dietrich

1. "From the Faraway Nearby" is reproduced in Georgia O'Keeffe by Lisa Mintz Messinger, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988, plate 57. "Poppy" is the cover illustration for Catharina J.M. Halkes' New Creation: Christian Feminism and the Renewal of the Earth, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991). It may also be found (with ninety-nine other lush and many even more obviously symbolic blossoms) in Georgia O'Keeffe: One Hundred Flowers, ed. by Nicholas Calloway (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), plate 46.
2. T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is much anthologized and also readily available in The Complete Poems and Plays, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1971), pp. 37-55.
3. The Canterbury Tales (prologue and all) may be found in Chaucer's Major Poetry, ed. by Albert C. Baugh, (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963). The tales are rendered into modern English by J.U. Nicolson and with illustrations by Rockwell Kent, (Garden City, NY: Garden City Books, 1934).
4. Langston Hughes' "On the Road" may be found (among other places) in Fictions, ed. by Joseph F. Trimmer and C. Wade Jennings, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), pp. 526-530.
5. Kahlil Gibran's Jesus the Son of Man is subtitled "his words and his deeds as told and recorded by those who knew him," (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). John speaks on pp. 51-52.