Joan Didion & Georgia O’Keeffe: Shooting, Stars, and Sacred Place
Vol. 1, Issue 16, Nov. 1, 2022
Joan Didion writes of Georgia O’Keeffe1 and her eclipsed sister Claudia, in the Texas twilight, walking mesmerized toward the horizon of the Texas panhandle. There, they squinted into the distance, seeking the first glimmer of the evening star, the glamor of the evening star. Claudia, younger, carried a gun as they wandered across the dust. While Georgia O’Keeffe studied the star, Claudia played Annie Oakley. Didion quotes O’Keeffe:
“That evening star fascinated me,” she wrote. “It was in some way very exciting to me. My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot as many as she could before they hit the ground. I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star. Ten watercolors were made from that star.”2
The evening star paintings are from 1917. Whenever I teach writing, I require that my students read Didion’s 1976 piece on Georgia O’Keeffe, not only because her image and myth would later become synonymous with New Mexico where I live and work, but also to have them occupy the metaphor into which Didion invites us: the bottles thrown skyward and the coincidence of the bullet and the coruscating, starry glass, exploding, radiating. Great art occurs as often as Claudia’s bullets actually struck a cola bottle out of the evening sky, which is to say, not often.
Here, we might think of synchronicities, chance or practiced alignments, and the “shining record” of those events from which Claudia has vanished, even more obscurely than Georgia O’Keeffe’s older painter sister Ida, of whom almost no one has heard. In Didion’s beautiful telling, Claudia is something like a forgotten gift to the O’Keeffe myth of the West, a stylistic aspect that seems, without her, to have emanated from Georgia O’Keeffe alone. Didion asks us to consider the extent to which “Style is character” holds, prompted by her daughter Quintana’s assumption—on seeing O’Keeffe’s “Sky Above Clouds” at seven years old—that the “glory she saw in the work reflected a glory in its maker.”3 If we take ‘a’ glory to mean ‘some’ or ‘an occasional’ glory, we might return to the coincidence of bullet and bottle in an appraisal of style and character, that sometimes, style and character align, existentially, but they more frequently miss.
But I want to talk about the desert—
In his excellent book Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality4, Belden Lane writes of Georgia O’Keeffe’s home at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico:
Like many others, I have come to love Ghost Ranch, considering it a sacred place of sorts. Even Georgia O’Keeffe, not ordinarily inclined to religious language, felt the same way. Of her love for Pedernal, the mountain on the horizon south of the ranch, she used to say that if she painted it enough God might give it to her.5
Lane, a theologian who employs phenomenological, existential, and mythopoeic approaches, also recounts the vicissitudes of the place, not least as a contested territory, but also as a bioregion.
Located on the northern edge of the eighteenth-century Piedra Lumbre Land Grant region, Ghost Ranch has through the years been fought over by Spanish settlers, raiding parties of Comanches and Utes, the U.S. Forest Service, and developers of various sorts. In 1966, nearby Echo Amphitheater was seized and occupied by local Hispanos laying claim to the “commons” that were said to have been guaranteed in the original land grants. Some of them proclaimed a free republic, seeking independence from the United States.
As a bioregion, the land including Ghost Ranch has suffered severe devegetation due to overgrazing by livestock, especially sheep, since the nineteenth century. This, in turn, has brought flooding and gullying, which eventually led to the construction of the Abiquiu Dam in the 1960s, putting 14,000 acres of the beautiful Chama River Valley under water. recreation now threatens what is left. Such is the wider history of experience that shapes the reality of a “sacred place” like Ghost Ranch. To ignore this part of the story is to betray the dignity of the land itself and to silence the voices of those who have lived upon it and made it their own.6
Landscapes of the Sacred provides four phenomenological categories or axioms by which place becomes sacralized. Each is elucidated in some detail, but essentially Lane’s axioms are:
Sacred place is not chosen, it chooses. “Sacred place is therefore a construction of the imagination that affirms the independence of the holy.”
Sacred place is ordinary place, ritually made extraordinary. “The local sacra is frequently found to be surprisingly unremarkable, esteemed because of neither its sublime setting nor its functional importance in the life of the community. It becomes recognized as sacred because of certain rituals that are performed there, setting it apart as unique.”
Sacred place can be trod upon without being entered. “Its recognition is existentially, not ontologically discerned. The identification of sacred place is thus intimately related to states of consciousness.”
The impulse of sacred place is both centripetal and centrifugal, local and universal. “One is recurrently driven to a quest for centeredness—a focus on the particular place of divine encounter—and then at other times driven out from that center with an awareness that God is never confined to a single locale.”7
Here is Georgia O’Keeffe at Ghost Ranch—even the name provokes—making her gestures, performing her rituals, projecting her states of consciousness toward the flint mountain Pedernal, which sounds like without meaning paternal, that quality of, in Didion’s essay, “The city men. The men. They.” The flat mountain resounds with religion. Georgia O’Keeffe, Didion says, possessed a hardness. For God to have given her the mountain would be to give Himself to the painter. I find that, even in the 1930s, or in the 1910s, she was something like an olive tree, her arms and fingers always branching, a walking Gethsemane, and now we find her place, the genius loci attended like some haunted Marian tomb. And this is not a fault, not a criticism, if we can hold more than one thought.
Imagine, once more, the disappearing sister Claudia, casting—yes, casting in an occult sense, also—her bottles into the evening sky, and shooting at them…latitude and longitude…lassitude and longing as the darkness encroaches and reveals its broken glass stars…Sacred space mapped, measured, and predicted by theodolite…One month ago, as I write, the small asteroid-moon Dimorphos was struck by a projectile sent 6.8 million miles from Earth. Enthusiasts of sacred geometry might note that Nancy Chabot of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory compared the collision to “running a golf cart into the Great Pyramid.” Dimorphos is derived from dimorphic, that of dual forms expressed within a single species, in this case not in terms of sex, but of pre- and post-impact, and the deviation of its course.
The identification of a sacred place deviates its course. Sacred places are dimorphic: before and after ritual, before and after the point when they become sites for pilgrimage, sacrifice, litany, and reverence. And because, as Lane reminds us, sacred places are imaginative constructs and their recognition is existential, not ontological, they are inherently unstable, invisible to the uninitiated, overdetermined to the initiated, and those with other claims—sacred or not—upon the same coincidence of longitude and latitude, perhaps the aspect of a mountain, a space alone the horizon where a star appears at the right time.
Thank you for reading, and I hope this gives you some ideas.
Regards from New Mexico,
—James Reich
James Reich’s new limited edition collection of poetry The Holly King is available from Stalking Horse Press.
Didion, Joan (2009) “Georgia O’Keeffe” In The White Album. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux pp. 126-130
ibid. p. 130
ibid. pp. 126-127
Lane, Belden C. (2002) Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press
ibid. p. 3
ibid. p. 4
ibid. p. 19