In the irascible director Ken Russell’s extremely psychedelic, often absurd 1980 film Altered States, William Hurt plays a psychologist who experiments with ayahuasca and sensory deprivation to enter different states of consciousness. Eventually he begins to “devolve” first into a caveman, then into a gorilla, and eventually into pure primordial energy. The more the state was altered the more elemental and unbounded it became.
I doubt that Hills Snyder named his exhibition and travelogue series after this film, but I am also positive without having to ask that he has seen it. His works, music, curation, teaching, and writings are often about that frisson of elemental expansion—the low shadows on the green desert floor, the darkness of a cave, the frequencies of music drifting through a house. Snyder’s pursuits are generally concerned with moments that spark and flare like flint struck on a canyon and then extinguish leaving a smoke trail of memory.
In Altered States, Snyder traveled to a litany of places that, in Snyder’s words: “goes through towns selected by the virtue of their names—not because they are odd or funny, but because they are evocative—emotional states, hoped for ideals, downers, and reckonings." --- Nowhere, Happy, Bonanza, Lost Springs, Recluse, Keystone, Opportunity, Diamondville, Eden, Eureka, Bummerville, Nothing, Truth or Consequences, Eldorado, Waterloo, etc. Snyder would then take a picture of something, usually otherwise un-extraordinary—a pile of scrap, a stretch of road, some decaying bones of a small town, and draw an impressionistic, receding memory of the picture using white space and colored pencils.
In Funes the Memorius by the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, the fictionalized character of Borges meets a rural 19 year old named Funes who, since a horse-riding head injury, can remember everything absolutely precisely, be it the shape of clouds, the temperature, the crevices of a room. He can remember a day exactly over the course of a day. Snyder’s drawings throughout Altered States can be seen then as a frame or hinge between memory and loss—one can fill in the details or let them fade away like steam off the stacks of a riverboat.
There is also a “third door” with these works, which is outside of the sliding, fluid metronome of memory and forgetting, and into the realm of fantasia. The names of the towns Snyder visits are either ludicrously overwrought or a bit too on the nose. There are no diamonds in Diamondville or gold in El Dorado, or revelations in Eureka. Conversely, Bummerville, a place that stretches the definition of a “town” is most likely a true bummer, and Waterloo is probably tinged with failure and loss. Snyder’s works release these towns from their archetypes into a gauzy dream of meaning.
In conversations with Snyder, we have discussed how a dystopic future has arrived— it no longer remains in the distance like a refinery flame. The litany of symptoms is exhausting. Environmental catastrophe; growing, brutal wage inequality; 72,000 deaths in 2017 from opioid overdoses; 40% of gofundme campaigns go towards medical care—a kind of especially humiliatingly socialized medicine where one is forced to beg their friends for help; the rise of the crushing gig economy; the increasing amount of empty retail space in paper thin husks stretching across the country. The totality of such misery often synthesizes in small towns, the places Snyder visited, where the history—old buildings with some bones behind them are beginning to cave and bleach in the merciless sun and any new development is of the “desperation popup” of late capitalism, Dollar General and payday lenders. The bleakness of these tableaus that dot the country and any drive of any distance leads one to eschatological conclusions, but ones charged with catharsis. The works in Altered States are not merely records of hopelessness. To quote J.G. Ballard from Adam Parfrey’s seminal and contentious Apocalypse Culture: “I believe that the catastrophe story, whoever may tell it, represents a constructive and positive act by the imagination rather than a negative one, an attempt to confront the terrifying void of a patently meaningless universe challenging it at its own game, to remake zero by provoking it in every conceivable way.”
In his travelogue series Altered States for Glasstire, Snyder chronicles his drives through the various towns he photographed for the drawing series. At one point he writes: “One thing I can say about where these new drawings are taking me—they are getting darker. The first 50 drawings, all from May 2016, have a lightness to them, at least most of them do, but there are hints here and there of something else, as if something, Lynch-ian this way comes. Whatever it is, it comes from an attempt—at first unconscious—to draw down a groove driven by the mood of the country, as if my pencil was a needle going round and round a record made of the road I’ve driven, not into the heart, but into some back country sub zone of the national consciousness.”
There is a concentric, cycling quality to this series, both taken in sequence and each individually. Many of them feel in some way on a loop, the pure graphite lines loping back on themselves in perpetuity. This recalls the scene in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet when Kyle Mclaughlin finds a severed ear in the woods and the camera zooms through its crevices to a rising drone. Into the void, sort of like when you magnify the grooves a vinyl record they appear as canyons.
The Southwestern location of most of the drawings (almost all the towns would be considered in the 19th century American demarcation of the “West”) contributes to this needle drop into the sub zone. Snyder recently began relocating to the small mountain town of Magdalena, New Mexico, which is about an hour and a half from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and just a few miles from the site of the first nuclear explosion in human history on July 5th 1945. Robert Oppenheimer, a literary man whose mind whirred like an intricate clock, named the bomb Trinity after a poem by John Donne he was found of, “Holy Sonnet XIV: Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God” which is essentially a paean to apocalyptic creation in repetition:
“Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but O, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
but is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor even chaste, except you ravish me.”
Break that knot again and again, such was that first atomic blast, just the knot being cut again. The west with its white light, white sands, white booms personifies that sub zone of national consciousness. History is marked by annihilation of one form or another, the frame goes white, the record pops and a new song begins.
In an interview for his show from 2003, Son of Samson, Snyder includes a segment on Gregory Bateson’s theory of the Double Bind and Paradoxical Communication—“Consider a sign which reads “do not read this sign.” Paradox—you cannot do what it asks and implies simultaneously. With paradox there is essentially no choice, but there is the illusion of choice…. In response to Bateson’s work, Gina Abeles stated that ‘some double binds are therapeutic and some are malevolent…Paradox and double binds abound in life; what is pathological is staying trapped and entangled in futile attempts to unravel them from within.’”
Altered States is a series of flickering double binds. They are drawings of towns with no resemblance to their emotive names or far too much and somehow they are the same. They are simultaneously in the process of being remembered and forgotten, dissolving and filling out, becoming figurative and abstract, destroyed and reborn.
The title of this essay comes from the slogan of the town of Magdalena: “Trail’s end and gateway to the stars.” This was an ending point for cattle runs back when Magdalena was a boom town with a thriving mine that dug for Smithsonite, a mineral ore of zinc the color of sea foam. One of those Southwestern towns (like many of the others Snyder visited for this series) that used to be more populated and then seemingly in one night emptied out, the mine tapped and filled with red dust. Many of these towns serve as a memento mori for America—the slave that rode next to a Roman general receiving a triumph and whispered “someday you will die.”
The stars in Magdalena, and in much of this territory, and over the towns Snyder visited, have a luminescent immediacy and presence to their clarity. One thinks of the apocryphal Louis Pasteur and Madam Curie plan of painting a room with the focused, pure glow of radium so it would be like being inside the moon. The stars take on an unreality of a matte backdrop as if one, at trail’s end, could walk right into them.
Snyder articulates such unreality and places it within the frame of the 2016 election in the Altered States travelogue series: “This has partially revealed what my route through Altered States has been—cinematic, with a growing sense of unreality in retrospect, as if the whole time I’d been after-hours on a film set, but only realizing later that the abstract truth of ‘driving through America’ had fundamentally shifted in the 14 months since I was on the road gathering photographic material for the project.”
This unreality has two frames, like a vintage stereotype, its own hinged double bind. There is the myth of America that the election of Donald Trump was feverishly based on like a huddled mass on the tip of a sinking boat. An America of the natural rightness of Manifest Destiny, racial order and the wistful dream of serenity and respect. And then there is “the back country sub zone of national consciousness,” the true myth, a myth because it’s violent apocalyptic history, the eternal return of seething chaos, the whistling sunbaked towns decomposing in the desert and high plains are larger than life when one drives alone through them and lets it steep.
In Peter Weir’s The Last Wave, Richard Chamberlain is an Australian lawyer serving an aboriginal defendant accused of murder. Chamberlain is plagued by apocalyptic dreams of a cataclysmic wave and becomes convinced his dreaming state is actually a premonition of reality. Bruce Chatwin’s great The Songlines posits that aboriginal Australian culture cognized language as song and mapped the world through songs.
These drawings are the sub zone dream songs. They map the true myth of America, and because they are emotive the form of the song and the dream changes. Thus some depict the scenes mid drift like reeds in a stream, some appear as ancient symbols, and some are almost wholly figurative—those are the most inscrutable ones. Snyder is using a different key and compass, an ancient method beyond logic, because such is the truth of the world. The double bind of the illusion of choice—that all seems to move cosmically, on its own axis, out of reach—and that you can choose to point your car to Bummerville, Happy or even Nothing, and go there or some other place that approximates its meaning.
Neil Fauerso is a writer, concert organizer and co-founder of the record label Unseen Worlds. He lives in San Antonio. He is a 2020 recipient of the Rabkin Foundation Art Writing Prize.
