An Idiomatic Search: Why on Earth did you pick that title?

 

A Foreword

We live on the third planet from the sun, largest of four rock planets in our solar system, the blue one shimmering from light rays bouncing off oceans and rivers back into the cosmos. It looks otherworldly, we say, like a mirage, or dreamlike, a glorious home, place of ideas, curiosity, arts and sciences, creative solutions spinning, manifesting, orbiting around each other.

Following the template of our first regional anthology, WET, published by Sharehouse Press, 2021, this collection honors Earth. It is the welcomed second publication in our four-volume series of anthologies showcasing professional literary arts of regional writers.

After their submissions arrived, we selected cover art, updated bios and prepared to find a suitable title.

How hard could it be?

With this subject, it’s complicated.

Michael Thompson and I opened a month-long discourse on the challenging subject. We talked with other writers and combined their responses with personal research about scientific, cultural, emotional, and spiritual characteristics of Earth. The results provided us with a roadmap around our Mother planet; a wondrous maze, twisting and turning with suggestions, critical thinking and contemporary “reach number” assessments.

We searched the ends of the Earth aiming to find one word mirroring the cultural diversity of the writers’ expansive points of view and diverse narratives, yet still conveyed totality, the wholeness of Earth.

Dry, opposite of Wet, the title of our water anthology, did not fit because Dry is a condition, the absence of moisture in some places, not absent everywhere. We tried Mama―regretfully, too sassy. We considered Ground―too limited, only concerning the mantel. Home―Toni Morrison got there first. We researched phonetics, like, /ərTH/, but admit it’s obscurity. Latin root words: orbis, tellus mundus, orbis terrae, terra―all of them too erudite, overused. We needed a word more down to earth, instead.

Losing ground, not gaining a foothold, we doubled down by swelling our focus to include animals, sea life, avian families, crustaceans, forests, and insects, the cryptobiotic desert soil structures and the ant piles in your alley.

It was an intense, but joyful search for a singular word describing more than human production on Earth―the hard goods and economies―that accounts for innovative thought and memory, too.

All the life force on Earth

What about love? Are we nourished by our love of Earth and its reciprocity? Possibly. Love sustains us, even ties us to the cosmos, “I love you to the moon and back,” we say.

It became clear that our discourse was nourishing, thought for the sake of thinking, a state of being without manifesting goods, and that such fertile engagement invigorates the mind and heart.

“The Earth is Fertile,” offers Michael.                

Fertile.

Yes. That’s it!

We agree.

Perfect.

FERTILE, An Anthology of Earth Poems and Prose …

Imagine Place

Earth is fundamentally a genial place to think. True, and Earth does not judge thought, does not read our mind and kick us out into the solar system if we say something offensive. Instead, Earth erupts over concerns about herself, in volcanoes and earthquakes; she rises the sea levels up at resorts, creates mega hurricanes, ice storms, and atmospheric rivers; bubbles contamination to the surface, renders multitudes of dire consequences when conditions threaten her life. It is a matter of her survival first, not ours―a rejoinder to the cost of shallow ideas and mostly human misconduct.

Regardless, thought is creation on Earth.

Art is a fine example of her generosity because art practices generate from private ideas.

“Where on Earth did that come from?”

Art is also easily erased in its infancy, a simple dismissible record because it arrives from a place of personal quietude, a silent invisible creation free from public scrutiny at that stage.

We recently witnessed the entire cycle―idea, manifest, objection―in our own community. Wheatpaste artist, Chip Thomas, a.k.a. Jetsonorama, completed a photo series about the Southern Ute Bison Herd with permission from the Ute Tribe in Ignacio, Colorado. The photos are base images for his mural commission on a building in a small town beside the state highway about an hour west of the Ute herd on private property.

During the process he cropped a few bison out of the pasture in the original photographs, enlarged them on paper about three and a half times the size of a normal bison and then pasted the colossal animals on the desert-red exterior walls of the modest commercial building. They immediately garnered a slew of positive comments from travelers on the highway and social media. People talked, asked questions. What did it mean? Why bison? Wow. “That’s cool!”

Some see the trope, the ultimate visual land acknowledgement: bison reminding everyone that this was Native American land. That’s enough. No more need be said on the wheat paste mural. No additional cut lines or text explanations.

The image works. It’s an effective, strong narrative inside a rigorous installation handsomely designed to complement building and site. But apparently the bison’s normal reproductive parts were too ample at that expanded size, according to Thomas. They drew criticism. Someone in our rural community wants the offending animal, or at least the offending reproductive parts of the animal painted out.

The affronted resident of our agricultural region attracted common sense, incredulous counter-replies, “What on Earth is [the offended one] thinking? That’s a real bison up close or far away!”

Many of us respectfully acknowledge the bison wheat paste project. It is original social commentary street art, a record, “Like nothing else on Earth. Truly, it’s masterful.”

Jetsonoram’s wheat paste bison project grew from a quiet idea. It caused a lot of talk around here. Even a few national art publications question how this story evolved from a bison herd in a pasture to paint-out. A heck of a lot of extreme enthusiasm effervesced around the idea of enlarged bison on a building.

The saga bolsters fecund Life on Earth. We can entertain energy producing, contentious discussions. We can consider grand ideas and produce strong, life-affirming results from our thoughts if we want. But we can also absorb criticism and even accept that the bison parts may be painted out, someday.

Life goes on.

It’s all okay with Mother Earth. Let’s hope more art installations stimulate such discourse.  It nourishes our quite minds, and, in this case, it’s good for the bison, too.

If readers want to know more about our region, and why we began the anthology series, Water, Earth, Air and Fire, publishing professional regional writers, please pick up a copy of WET: An Anthology of Water Poems and Prose. In it you’ll learn how the Great Western Inland Sea covered everything in the Four Corners seventy million years ago. When it evaporated, it left behind a fertile land where we engage abstract activities like searching for a book title while simultaneously multi-tasking the whole of Earth, planting our farmland with organic carrots and praying for more rain and snow to keep the bison pastures lush and nutritious.

Earth is Fertile. She wants to live. Luckily, all life on our home planet does, too.  

 

Sonja Horoshko, Editor

Art Juice Studio Visual and Literary Arts

Chair Emerita: Cortez Public Arts Advisory Committee