I am spending the next couple of months in a small town near the Mexican border called Marfa, Texas. Population: 2 000. The foundation that is hosting me has provided a small house, a car (which I can’t drive) and a bicycle.
Marfa is dry and full of cacti and other succulents, and alpine plants. The weather this time of year is neither hot nor cold. And the light is exquisite, soft and clear; things seem to have a resonance and gentleness.
In 1972 a brash artist by the name of Donald Judd started buying up land and old buildings here. He was gripped by the idea that art was in the idea. In his paintings he tried to remove imagery and composition. He focused on presenting colour and depth. In his sculptures he sought to remove all direct references to the human body. For him, how objects occupied space and how they were perceived within that space, was more important than the object itself. Some objects were placed at eye level, others ran up a wall. His work is powerful — you start to feel your own presence in space quite strongly. Silence has its own textures and order is as much about the emptiness around an object as it is about the object itself.
in the past week or so I have encountered what people here fondly call ”cridders”. And it has quickly become clear to me why cowboy boots are long and thick.
Day 1: In the kitchen, a long brown thing that looks like a cross between a giant centipede and a scorpion. I stomp on it with some hysteria, then lift the mushy remains and throw them into that disposal mechanism in the sink of every American household, called an InSinkerator. The machine whirrs and grinds and, for a moment, I spare a thought for Iraq — the whole Blackwater horror — and pray that I never provoke the American desire to InSinkarate the IslamoFascists.
Day 2. Evening: I am cycling around and meet an old man near the town cemetery. He waves me down and points to the ground. A furry fist on eight legs is moving. The man looks very happy. It is a tarantula. A male, he thinks. Later, as my bike turns into the driveway, I see another one. Somebody mentions that they are migrating.
Day 2. Night: I am sitting outside smoking and a small herd of hairy blue pigs walk by, not 3m away from me. I am later told they go by the name javelinas, which annoys me. In our guidebook we were warned to watch out for javelinas at night. I thought they were poisonous plants or violent butterflies. Not feral pigs.
Day 3. Morning: Over frappuccinnos, I sit watching a man riding a bicycle past me. The handlebars have been replaced by polished bullhorns. I am sitting outside, listening to people laugh at the latest revelations about Dubya. Apparently former Mexican president Vicente Fox says in his biography that George W Bush is afraid of horses, so much so that there are none on his ranch. Then, a few minutes later, somebody is chatting to somebody about the rattlesnake found on somebody’s front porch.
There are other kinds of cridders here, with blue hair, wild eyes, paint streaks and the like. For this is a town of art and artists and exiles — people who are looking to live uncomplicated lives where they can measure themselves with integrity.
The house I am living in is decorated in a minimalist style and this idea derives partly from the things Judd was working on in the Seventies and Eighties. Without the clutter, cloth and colour I usually have around me, the sound and feel of space outside is quite strong. So strong that I, a man never seen exercising — I’ve not ridden a bicycle since I was 10 — have found myself cruising the streets and evading the cridders of Marfa on this bicycle.
It is all a bit unnerving to discover that I have been moving from capsule to capsule and have lost the sense of being part of a texture of life and space.
Last night I woke up and could hear javelinas breathing and snorting outside my window. It felt sort of good.