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The result of such an encounter (one cannot be quite sure that it was the same one) was Object (Roses des Vents), which Cornell began in 1942, tinkered with for years—as was his habit, there being few precise dates or prompt solutions in his work—and finished in 1953. Emblems of travel, dwarfed mementos, a little box of mummified waves and shrunken coasts, peninsulas, planets, things set in compartments with an air of rigorous sentiment, each of the 21 compass needles insouciantly pointing in a different direction: it is the log of no ordinary voyage. (Even the map on the inside of the lid depicts an excessively remote coastline, that of the Great Australian Bight.) The earth is presented not as our daily habitat but as one strange planet among others, which to Cornell it was.
He had an extraordinarily allusive imagination: forever unpicking its objects, forever recombining them. As the poet-critic Carter Ratcliff remarks at the opening of his brilliant catalogue essay on Cornell as a puritan, he was "a virtuoso of fragments, a maestro of absences. Each of his objects ... is the emblem of a presence too elusive or too vast to be enclosed in a box." The extreme examples of this were, perhaps, Cornell's cosmogonies—the "Soap Bubble Sets," made in the '40s and early '50s. The metaphor on which they rely is simple, even banal: a likeness between soap bubbles—quavering, iridescent, ephemeral—and the immutable orbits of the solar system, all things linked together by their ideal roundness. You cannot keep a soap bubble in a box, or fit the planets into one; but starting with two of the Dutch clay bubble pipes he acquired at the New York World's Fair in 1939, Cornell was able to construct an entire tone poem about effigies and similarities: an 18th century French planetary map, two wineglasses (distantly recalling Dante's crystal heaven), a cork ball, a fossil ammonite unwinding its eternal spiral, and so on.
There are many aspects of Cornell's imagery which seem fey, precious or backward-looking: the Christmas frosting, bats and moss and dingly dells. There is a treacherous line between sentiment and sentimentality, particularly in his evocations of his own childhood. Yet time and again, even his most gothic fantasies and his most fussily reverential evocations of dead ballerinas are plucked back from the edge by Cornell's rigor as a formal artist. The essence of the box is to contain, and within a rectangular grid, at that. Cornell enhanced this with a spare, strict sense of proportion in his divisions and compartments; not without reason did he call himself a "constructivist." What one sees in the boxes is not just memory, but the exact disposition of memory, an entrancingly just division of one's gaze between thought and material.