Yesterday’s Cornfields

Have you ever decided that cornfields were fascinating and suddenly found it to be so?  In the three hundred mile stretch between Chicago and St. Louis they are certainly hard to miss, but I am no longer with the camp of those who groan and say, “not another cornfield.”  Cornfields, after all, I’ve just decided, are fascinating.  It is true that topographically they offer little diversion, flat and homogeneous they certainly are.  But immaculately planted, they are oddly reminiscent of groves of Italian Pines lined up with tremendous precision and offering an ever-shifting view with the progression of the slowly moving bus.  And there is such surprising beauty in the flatness. Green expanses running next to reds and browns, dotted by the lone tree, the scattered houses, the ever-stretching power lines.  And human beings, everywhere unseen in the art of feeding millions, leaving their mark in perfectly straight rows of corn.

Children, who are now the age that I was then, continue faithfully to answer worksheet questions about the advent of agriculture, flagging the word surplus in their textbooks and explaining the advances made possible through the specialization which came about in Mesopotamia—the land between the rivers, cradle of civilization.  I wonder if the fifth grade child, to say nothing of the adult, can possibly reconcile the connection between Gilgamesh, the Babylonian Empire, the cities of Ur and Uruk and the Iraq and Iran of his media consciousness; watching ground troops plow over what might once have been the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, while looters shatter the Warka Vase leaving it broken in a ditch because it is too well-known to sell without suspicion. 

Maybe it’s the corn going to my head, but if it holds such beauty for me in the sprawling green leaves of every individuated stalk, how do people so readily destroy things infinitely more beautiful?  The ancient Mesopotamian rulers deified themselves, waging war for power and glory in a cycle of upheaval that is too familiar.  Today’s religions take up arms with an undying certainty that G-d is with them and then like Aztecs make human sacrifices to their G-d.  As if the promise of eternal damnation for the non-believers were not enough punishment so that the lives of the “infidels” deserved to be made living hells.

            Howard Nemerov advised us wisely as adults to, “keep gravely the grand confusion of the world under [our] hats, which is where it belongs,” but this seems more difficult to do day by day. Again, I do admit, it could just be the cornfields, for since I first decided they were fascinating a hundred miles ago they have become more beautiful with every stalk.