I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the speed of life these days—my own life specifically, and all of our modern lives in general.  Everything is immediate, change is lightning-fast and I wonder how much of the world and our own lives we actually see in its detail.  Anyway.  All this got me thinking about a piece I wrote about “Field of Corn” an art installation in Dublin, OH.  It is one of my very favorite pieces of public art, and long ago I wrote about it for a long deceased web publication. 

Sam Frantz was an agricultural engineer who invented the first hybrid corn. This art installation is on the site of his former farm on...Frantz Road, of course. An interesting way to honor both his memory, and Dublin's (recent) history as an farming community.

I've looked around the internet for a little more information about this, and have discovered that there are apparently quite a few people who Hate The Corn. They truly hate it. A just a few samples of the corn hate (unattributed, of course)

"that atrocity is only a coupla miles from my house i specifically don't go that way as often as i can just to avoid it."

"I'm embarassed to say I live very near this monstrosity. It's like a big crop of man parts attacking!!! Quite scary up close!"

"The corn is a huge embarassment and a complete pisser of wasted tax dolllars."

Now. Please. As the photo attests, we've been rather close up to the corn, and I wasn't scared. And honey, if you are mistaking corn for a field of giant "man parts" I don't want to know about your dating life. In fact, if you refer to them as "man parts" I think you might need to take remedial Sex Ed. But... if the good folks of Dublin are running around thinking that this is a giant field of penii, that explains why they are so "embarassed." And while we're talking about wastes of the taxpayer's money...I could think of a quite few that cost considerably more than the Giant Corn. But we won't get started on that. (note: the Corn was not funded by tax revenue per se, partially from a grant from the city--taken from the hotel bed tax revenue--and partially from private sources. There was no Corn Tax, in case you were wondering)

Far from being scared by my close-up view of the corn, I was intrigued. Each ear is, like real corn, subtly different, but taken in the wide view seem identical. It takes enlarging something as simple and common as corn for us to see it as something more than a collective noun: corn. Perhaps that is the point here. What else are we missing, in our blurry sped-up world of driving past and skimming over? What else are we reducing to a collective noun--lives, joys, people?

To quote William Blake:

"To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour." (from Auguries of Innocence)

Sadly, for those who are Corn Haters, not even 109, eight foot tall ears of corn can show them the infinities in their hands.