The Anthropocene Reviewed(65)

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing - then -



Several years ago, a plank in reason broke within me, and I dropped down and down, and hit a world at every plunge. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but precedent is cold comfort when you feel the funeral in your brain. As I struggled to recover, or at least slow the plunge, my thoughts drifted back to the road trips I’d taken, and I decided to try a geographical cure. I drove to see the world’s largest ball of paint, which ended up kind of saving my life, at least for the time being.



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I’m fascinated by roadside attractions because they are one place where we see the work of huge systems intersect with the work of tiny individuals. We have so many roadside attractions because we have so many roads—our interstate highway system is built to move lots of people across vast areas of land.* Once you’re on an Interstate, it’s easy to stay on it until you need gas or food. To tempt you away from the cruise-controlled straightforwardness of the American highway requires something extraordinary. Something unprecedented. The world’s largest ______.

It’s the system that makes the roadside attraction necessary, but individuals choose what to make and why. Consider, for example, Joel Waul, creator of Megaton, the world’s largest ball of rubber bands. When first constructing the ball, Waul wrote on his Myspace page, “First, have a definite, clear practical idea, a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends. Third, adjust all means to that end. —Aristotle.”* For Waul, the definite and clear and practical idea was to make the world’s largest ball of rubber bands, which would eventually come to weigh over nine thousand pounds. I’m not sure why I find it beautiful to devote oneself obsessively to the creation of something that doesn’t matter, but I do.

The world’s largest ball of paint is located in the tiny town of Alexandria, Indiana. Back in 1977, Mike Carmichael painted a baseball with his three-year-old son. And then they kept painting it. Carmichael told Roadside America, “My intention was to paint maybe a thousand coats on it and then maybe cut it in half and see what it looked like. But then it got to the size where it looked kinda neat, and all my family said keep painting it.” Carmichael also invited friends and family over to paint the ball, and eventually strangers started showing up, and Mike would have them paint it, too.

Now, over forty years later, there are more than twenty-six thousand layers of paint on that baseball. It weighs two and a half tons. It has its own little house, and every year more than a thousand strangers show up to add layers of paint to it. The whole thing is free to visit; Mike even provides the paint. He and his son both still add layers, but most of the painting is done by visitors.



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As a child, just as I imagined technological advances were driven primarily by the brilliant insights of heroic individuals laboring in isolation, I saw art as a story of individual geniuses.

Shakespeare or Leonardo da Vinci or whoever used their innate brilliance to expand the human landscape, and by studying the lives and work of these individuals, I could know all there is to know about how great art gets made. In school, whether I was studying history or math or literature, I was almost always taught that great and terrible individuals were at the center of the story. Michelangelo and his ceiling. Newton and the falling apple. Caesar crossing the Rubicon.

To be fair, I was sometimes taught that circumstance played a role in the emergence of greatness. When discussing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high school, one of my teachers pointed out that in order for Mark Twain to become Mark Twain, he had to grow up along the river that separated twentieth-century America during the war that separated nineteenth-century America. But mostly I was taught, and believed, that important work was done not by the times or via massive collaboration, but by heroic and brilliant individuals.

I still believe in genius. From John Milton to Jane Austen to Toni Morrison, some artists are just . . . better. But these days, I see genius as a continuum rather than a simple trait. More to the point, I think the worship of individual genius in art and elsewhere is ultimately misguided. Isaac Newton did not discover gravity; he expanded our awareness of it in concert with many others at a time and in a place where knowledge was being built and shared more efficiently. Julius Caesar didn’t become a dictator because he chose to cross the Rubicon River with his army; he became a dictator because over centuries, the Roman Republic became more reliant upon the success of its generals to fund the state, and because over time the empire’s soldiers felt more loyalty to their military leaders than to their civilian ones. Michelangelo benefited not just from improved understandings of human anatomy, and not just from being Florentine at a time when Florence was rich, but also from the work of several assistants who helped paint parts of the Sistine Chapel.

The individuals we celebrate at the center of more recent revolutions were similarly positioned in times and places where they could contribute to faster microchips or better operating systems or more efficient keyboard layouts. Even the most extraordinary genius can accomplish very little alone.



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I’ve often wished—especially when I was younger—that my work was better, that it rose to the level of genius, that I could write well enough to make something worth remembering. But I think that way of imagining art might make individuals too important. Maybe in the end art and life are more like the world’s largest ball of paint. You carefully choose your colors, and then you add your layer as best you can. In time, it gets painted over. The ball gets painted again and again until there is no visible remnant of your paint. And eventually, maybe nobody knows about it except for you.