Journey to an Antique Land

Bob Nash’s art is the destination

The title can mislead readers expecting another Greek travel narrative. Bibliographic descriptions identify the essay chiefly as Miller’s commentary on Bob Nash’s work. Its journey is through the suggestive world of an artist’s images, rather than a documented itinerary through ancient Mediterranean sites.

A contemporary Big Sur account quotes Miller describing Nash’s pictures as enigmatic messages and imagining their origins far beyond ordinary surroundings. That response makes antiquity and remoteness metaphors for the encounter with unfamiliar visual signs. It does not establish that the two men undertook an archaeological expedition.

Fitzpatrick-Grimm’s profile reproduces Miller’s image of drawings arriving from the “hidden face of the moon,” followed by his reference to earthly “lunacy.” The echo turns apparent strangeness back on the observer: the pictures seem alien, but ordinary human ambitions become the questionable things. His next move dismisses measurement, calculation and effort together. Looking at Nash’s art thus becomes a temporary release from the standards by which people usually judge achievement, rather than a puzzle whose code the critic has to solve.

An essay made with its subject

Nash is both the artist Miller discusses and the illustrator associated with the original book. This gives the collaboration a different structure from an illustrator decorating an already complete travel story. Readers are offered a visual practice and a writer’s response to it in the same small publication.

Miller’s role is that of an enthusiastic interpreter. His imaginative associations need not be taken as Nash’s own explanation of every mark. Keeping artist and commentator distinct allows the pictures to remain more than examples of Miller’s prose.

The profile’s next quotation makes damage and recognition coexist: missing pieces do not prevent Miller from remembering a whole. Nash’s response shifts the emphasis. His interrupted lines belong to living nature, not chiefly to the remains of a vanished civilization. Read together, the two explanations make the same gaps do different work: Miller associates them with memory, while Nash treats discontinuity as part of how a living whole exists. Neither reading requires the drawing’s gaps to be filled in.

The small book and its later settings

Ben Ben Press published the illustrated book in Big Sur in 1962. The essay later appeared with On Turning Eighty, and Village Press issued a short edition in 1973. Those settings place the same text beside different companions: an artist’s work in one case, Miller’s late reflections in another.

It belongs most naturally with Miller’s writing about painters and making art. Varda, the Master Builder and To Paint Is to Love Again offer closer comparisons than a conventional guide to Greece. Readers seeking Miller’s actual Greek travels should begin with The Colossus of Maroussi.