The Pilgrimage of the Sublime

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Prologue

They left because silence had grown unbearable.

Not the silence of peace, nor of rest, but the silence that followed loss. Floorboards creaked under their steps with no one to answer; the refrigerator hummed too loudly, a reminder of the emptiness pressing in on every sound. In rooms once filled with laughter, only the sound of wind through a window remained. The clock ticked too loudly in the still house. Dust hung in the air like a veil, catching the late light in its shifting threads. Books and papers on the desk whispered of a life once lived, but no voice rose to meet them.

The wanderer carried no clear destination, only a hunger to stand before something greater than themselves. They had read of the Sublime in books and lectures—terror and wonder, vastness beyond comprehension—but words were brittle compared to the hollow inside their chest. They needed to feel it, to stand where human will faltered before the immensity of earth and sky.

And so they went west, into landscapes whispered about in art and myth, seeking the places where order and chaos met.

Chapter I: The Jetty

The salt air stung the wanderer’s lips as dusk fell over the Great Salt Lake. The horizon burned faintly with the last of the sun, a red wound slipping behind distant mountains. At their feet, the black basalt rocks of Spiral Jetty curved outward into the water, coiling like some primordial serpent half-buried in salt and silence. The air tasted of brine, drying their tongue, leaving a bitterness on the back of the throat. A faint, sour smell of algae clung to the shoreline, mingling with the sharp tang of salt.

Each step crunched—white crust breaking underfoot, the sound sharp as bone splintering. The sound carried strangely, bouncing across the flat expanse until it seemed like another presence was walking just behind them. The spiral led them forward, and with each turn the lake’s stillness deepened. There was no wind. No bird. Only the weight of distance pressing in from every side. A low groan of water, shifting far beneath the crust, rose and faded like the breath of some hidden leviathan.

Here, art had once imposed order upon the elements. Stones dragged, aligned, and set into place, human will inscribed against the expanse. But time had undone certainty. Salt crystals clung to the basalt like frost, glimmering faintly in the fading light. Pink and orange hues flickered across their surfaces, as if each crystal hel the memory of a vanished fire. The lake itself had risen and fallen, drowning the jetty, then retreating, leaving it bare again. Control was illusion. What remained was a conversation—between man and earth, permanence and impermanence, order and the sublime chaos of water and sky.

The wanderer paused at the spiral’s center. The light flickered. For a moment the horizon wavered, as if the entire lake had become a trembling mirror. It quaked, not in movement, but in perception—the way Robert Smithson had written of an “immobile cyclone.” The wanderer felt themselves at the eye of something vast and ungraspable.

They were small. So small. A solitary figure standing on the lip of eternity.

And yet—beneath the dread of insignificance, another feeling stirred. Awe. Wonder. The lake seemed to lean closer, as though it had been waiting all along, patient and watchful. Its silence was not absence but listening, an ancient ear bent toward a solitary human step. As though the lake, the salt, the spiral, the horizon itself were whispering: You are part of this immensity. Not apart from it.

The wanderer closed their eyes. In the silence, the Sublime revealed itself not as terror alone, but as invitation.

Interlude: The Road

The road westward stretched in silence. Nights passed in cheap motels, days beneath skies vast enough to swallow thought. The hum of neon signs leaked through the blinds, the smell of stale carpet and bleach seeping into the restless dark. In the heat of day, the steering wheel burned against their palms, the horizon rippling in waves of mirage. The hum of highway tires droned in their ears long after the car was parked; at night, pipes in the motel walls rattled and sighed, restless as their own dreams. The wanderer traced lines in a notebook—words, fragments, half-remembered passages. But no theory could hold the storm that gathered on the horizon.

Chapter II: The Field of Lightning

The road ended in emptiness. Miles of sagebrush and open desert stretched in every direction, the horizon unbroken except by the faint silhouettes of mountains. Somewhere within this expanse lay the Field. The wanderer walked until the grid revealed itself—rows upon rows of slender steel rods gleaming faintly, their points piercing the sky.

The stillness was uncanny. Each rod was identical in height and distance, as though an unseen hand had laid a net of order over the land. The desert’s hush was broken only by the faint hiss of wind over dry grass, a whisper that rose and fell like a warning. Yet beyond that net the desert roared in silence—wind over stone, ancient sun on earth, the whisper of storms gathering just beyond sight.

The wanderer entered the grid. At first, it was only geometry: precise lines, ordered space. But soon, the rods began to hum in their presence, not with sound but with a strange tension, as if the air itself tightened with expectation. They remembered the words of Walter De Maria: The rods do not create lightning. They only wait for it.

The wanderer stopped in the center. All around, the silver rods reached upward like a thousand prayers. Above them, the sky darkened, clouds forming with a slow and deliberate hand. The first flash came distant, a pale fork against the mountains. The air carried the sharp tang of ozone, a metallic edge that stung the nose. Fine hairs lifted on their arms as if the body itsel were an antenna waiting for the strike. Then another, closer, searing across the blackening heavens.

The desert air thickened with ozone. The rods became antennae of hunger, poised for fire.

Fear rose like bile. At any moment, the heavens could descend—white fire striking with no mercy, no warning. A low growl of thunder rolled closer, building like a drumbeat beneath the skin of the world. The wanderer felt the body’s fragility, the nearness of annihilation. And yet… a pulse of exhilaration throbbed beneath the dread. To witness this would be to stand at the very seam between creation and destruction.

The storm broke. Lightning tore the sky open, rending it with light. Thunder followed, rolling across the plain like avalanches echoing through an invisible canyon. Each strike etched white scars into their vision, burned into memory even after the light was gone. The rods answered, not by defiance but by channeling, carrying the celestial fire into the earth itself. The grid flared alive, a sudden cathedral of light and fury.

The wanderer fell to their knees, trembling. Terror and wonder fused, indistinguishable. It was as Emily Brady had written: displeasure and pleasure oscillating, converging, overwhelming.

The sky thundered, and in that roar the wanderer heard not death, but revelation: This is the Sublime. Terror is its doorway. Wonder, its dwelling place.

Interlude: The Ascent

They traveled on, their path narrowing. The climb was steep, the loose shale slipping beneath their boots. Muscles in their calves burned, each breath quickening in the air. The desert gave way to stone, the earth rising into ancient forms. At night, they thought of the one they had lost—how small a life seemed against such immensities, and yet how infinite a memory could be. Sometimes, in the hush between stars and coyote calls, they felt a second shadow moving with their own, a presence that did not vanish but walked beside them, quiet and steady as breath. In the dark, they could almost hear that voice again, low and steady, a tone that once steadied them through storms. It came not in words but in cadence, like the remembered rhythm of breath beside their own. Coyotes called in the distance, their cries fracturing the silence and then vanishing, leaving the night heavier in their wake.

Chapter III: The Crater of Stars

The desert gave way to silence, and silence gave way to stone. The wanderer climbed the long slope of the extinct volcano, its rim etched against a sky already deep with twilight. The path wound upward through red earth, each step releasing the faint scent of dust and time.

At the summit, the crater opened like a vast bowl carved from the body of the world. Within, chambers and tunnels had been shaped by human hands—yet their purpose was not possession, but revelation. The air smelled of cool stone and ancient ash, carrying the damp hush of a cave. Their fingertips brushed the walls, gritty with dust that clung to the skin. This was James Turrell’s sanctuary of the sky, a place where stone and starlight conspired to draw the gaze upward.

The wanderer descended into the heart of the crater. The air grew cooler, denser. At the chamber’s center, they lay upon the stone floor, eyes drawn to the circular aperture above. Through it, the sky appeared impossibly close—no longer the distant vault of heaven, but a living dome breathing with light. The silence here had weight, humming faintly in the ears until it seemed the stars themselves were singing just beyond hearing.

First came a single star, piercing the indigo veil. Then another, and another, until the aperture filled with constellations, ancient fires burning with a clarity the wanderer had never known. The earth fell away. The body dissolved. There was only the gaze and the galaxies, stretching beyond measure. The stars felt so near they pricked the eyes–ice-bright, trembling as though each one pulsed with breath. The silence around them deepened until it thrummed like a soundless vibration against their ribs.

Here, terror softened into awe. The vastness no longer threatened annihilation but offered union. The stars did not diminish the wanderer’s smallness—they magnified their belonging. And in their belonging, they carried more than themselves. The memory of the lost one shimmered among the constellations, not gone but dispersed, as if the night sky itself had taken them in. For a breathless moment, it seemed the universe was not empty but alive, whispering through silence: You are seen. You are part of this.

The wanderer wept. Not for fear. Not for sorrow. But for the revelation of beauty beyond control, beyond containment. Their sobs sounded small, swallowed by the chamber until even grief became part of the stillness.

Turrell’s words came unbidden, echoing through the chamber: It becomes your experience.

And so it was.

When dawn came, the wanderer rose, carrying within them the memory of light etched against stone. They understood now: the Sublime was not a conquest, nor a theory, nor a fleeting terror. It was a pilgrimage—one that began in awe, passed through fear, and returned to wonder.

Epilogue: The Sound of Dawn

And as the first rays of sun poured into the crater, the wanderer knew they would never be the same.

The world stirred softly: a single birdcall breaking the night’s hush, the faint crackle of stone warming in the new light. The silence did not vanish; it shifted—no longer empty, but resonant, as though the earth itself was breathing. In that breath, the wanderer heard an answer too vast for words, carried not in language but in sound: the quiet pulse of belonging. They reached for the small notebook they had carried all this way. The page lay open, waiting, but their hand stilled. No words would come. The silence itself was the writing–the answer etched deeper than ink could hold.

“Silence is not absence. It is presence.”

Rebecca Hyde Gonzales