Dead West

Author’s Note:

These writings are compiled from philosophical field journals. The journals date from the decade 1995—2005, and originated while traveling the American West. The passages are not chronological, but are arranged according to evolving themes.

I. The Absent Father

prelude: lacunae

     In winter in the American desert, among snow-pelted junipers and pinyons, the borderline father appears. First he tops the horizon like a wary stag. Next he dips into a thicket of streamside osiers, among red vascular twigs. The osiers thrive in a dip in the land, and the father has sunk, innocuous now, in a place where liquid gathers. That father, the no-longer elevated man, is the one I wish to evoke. He does not enact his own desire; rather he is ours. Being unattainable and absent: that’s his very being.

This once objective father is receding into subjectivity. “The world,” says Merleau-Ponty, “in the full sense of the word, is not an object, for though it has an envelope of objective and determinative attributes, it has also fissures and gaps into which subjectivities slip and lodge themselves, or rather which are those subjectivities themselves.” So we can only glimpse this father through the agency of myriad lacunae. His individualism is multiple, and moot compared to his singularity, his submission to forces he does not apprehend. We are the forces he fails to apprehend. That failure, the fatal omission, is the father’s tragic flaw.

So my account of the father involves a series of lacunae: natural arches, canyons, washes, and even one’s own footprints on the land. The no-longer-elevated man is encountered at every turn. But even so, he is mostly departed, the confirmation of his presence--like a footprint or a track--embedded in his very absence. Pablo Neruda, perhaps mourning Whitman, says this:

Some protocol must be found

for establishing absence

with nothing really established

--some allowance for the curious among

us who feel the great gust in their faces

when the oratorical sound is uncovered,

and find, just under their boot-soles,

the absent one blazing back at them.

These writings go in search of that protocol.

Sipapu Bridge, Natural Bridges National Monument, Utah

This bridge, whose opening would almost house the dome of the United States Capitol, has taken thousands of years to form but will someday collapse and erode as part of the endless cycles of time and change.

                                    -- government informational pamphlet

The overlook at Sipapu Bridge tops a spur that protrudes into White Canyon. Today the weather is windswept, rainy.  Below, in the pale and tawny canyon, a sandstone arch defines, as its name would suggest, a sacred space.

In Hopi mythology, the sipapu is the gate where the people entered this world from a previous, corrupted world. The sipapu is a point of entry. It is not so much a genesis as a transition; and among origin myths, this difference is crucial. The sipapu is sometimes conceived of as a hole in the ground, a spring, or, as a similar Navajo myth would have it, as the bottom of a lake. It is, as I understand it, a literal place in the landscape.

When I asked a Park Ranger if this particular Sipapu marks an entry place for Pueblo peoples--as there is much evidence of Pueblo inhabitation in the immediate area, including the well-preserved Horsecollar ruins--I received a vague answer along with a quick, rehearsed lecture on cultural relativism, as if I were insulting the integrity of the native worldview by inquiring as to its literalness. I can’t blame her for being defensive; twenty minutes earlier I’d seen her on trash detail on the roadside, stabbing at Jumbo cups in the rain. Besides, inquiries of the same sort about Judeo-Christian sacred events often engender a similar, confused dynamic. It’s the nature of the sacred, as some conceive it, to constantly clash with the secular, as if they were actually opposed. Such is the essence of profanity.

But a Pueblo person might smile--or maybe grimace--at such simplistic divisions. And a visitor in the American Southwest, agog with scenery, fearful of expanse, might readily agree that each particular culture has its own point of entry into a landscape that excludes all but its own. That same sentimental visitor is likely to construe fantasies and strategies that alleviate the discomfort of knowing he doesn’t belong.

It turns out, of course, that Sipapu Bridge was not so named by Pueblo peoples at all. It was naive of me to assume otherwise. The bridge has gone under many names: the Paiute people, for example, referred to all natural bridges as mah-vah-talk-tump: under the horse’s belly. One lonely explorer named the bridge Augusta, for his wife. The name “Sipapu” was given by William Douglas, who led a government survey party to the area in 1908.

According to some, the literal sipapu, for the Hopi people, is a spring in the Grand Canyon that releases over 100,000 gallons of water per minute. The Zuni people claim their emergence point at another Grand Canyon spring, which originates from an entirely different aquifer than does the Hopi’s watery passage. Singular peoples: singular springs. Theirs are singular emergences along lines that are similar only from a distance. But sometimes the most ordinary pore--a pit in a stone, a gully, a smoke-hole, a cave, is also referred to as sipapu. And many kivas in the long Pueblo tradition also contain sipapus--small holes in the interior earth--located near the fire pit. So perhaps the emergence is everywhere even as it is localized. Maybe the two worlds are more than just adjacent. Maybe they’re already and always joined by every common absence.

                              /

Natural Bridges: don’t we have it backwards, after all? Is a natural feature to be admired in that it imitates a human artifact? Aren’t our constructed bridges actually imitations of natural forms such as stone arches or fallen logs?

So I ask the question another way: what, exactly, does the natural bridge? The lowly human with an omnipotent God? Certain sublime--translate scenic--aspects of the landscape might provide a link with the divine, or so a certain faction of my Christian tradition would have it. The tradition of the sipapu would have the natural landscape connecting two worlds as well, though the differences between these worlds does not necessarily echo the Christian dichotomy between heaven and earth.

Both traditions, though, whatever their differences, might agree on the notion of nature as providing what Martin Buber called “ a terrestrial link,” in that this “link with divine being” is forged of human acts in concert with a given environment. A natural feature such as an arch or a canyon or a lake bottom can easily be seen as a bridge, a doorway, or a gate, in that we are merely expressing metaphorical equivalents in our fervent wish for agency. And yet when Buber asserted that “the two worlds are essentially one and shall in fact become one,” he was, I suspect, being quite literal.

Because so they shall: in fact. In the geological fact of the natural bridge, for example, or in the cultural fact of our response to it. When our cultural response, refined from a destructive fantasy to a more potent narrative, approaches the fact of the arch with respect, then a new kind of literalism--utilizing, but not limited by, science--takes precedence in our lives. This literalism would constitute a de facto acknowledgement of the presence of forces much larger than either our feeble selves or our technological culture.

Because every actual feature in nature conveys the identical message: submit. And submission, to the forces that form and collapse all bridges, is not mere passivity. Submission demands that we align ourselves with those forces in order to become singular. Singularity is the highest form of individualism, in that the singular form attains its being in concert with an encompassing environment. Thus the “I” is enlarged, mingled, and made more complex.

We are attracted to these Natural Bridges precisely because of their singularity. But how many of us, I wonder, have recognized that we might aspire to that same singularity? The Natural Bridges exemplify, on a grand scale, a submission to forces that is simultaneously an emergence from those very forces. They also model our own emergence as singular human beings. Of course, the physical and temporal scales between geology and humanity differ, and it’s wise--and awe-inspiring--to keep those differences in mind. And there’s another obvious distinction to be made: we don’t have the luxury of nonsentience. We are conscious, human, attached. Our own emergence, via our personal sipapus, thus becomes a struggle. But grasping, for us, denotes both struggle and understanding: it is our mode of being in the world.

Coal Pit Wash, Zion National Park, Utah

     Hiking in the tawny sand, among the yucca and the rabbit brush, it’s easy to forget the killer that resides here in the desert. We forget, especially in October, when the sun has eased its summer vigil and is attended by clouds. The stranger underneath the bridge, sketching and reading at Coal Pit Wash: surely he’s harmless. He doesn’t want us at all. And the rattlesnakes, if they haven’t yet burrowed, are sluggish in the morning chill. The killer: well, that’s a presence. Think of reactions; the sun is nothing but. Each effect--warming blood, cracking clay, and every precious inch of shade--is aligned under the sun. Effect expands upon previous effect until the desert swells. The red giant that our sun will become is prefigured here, in miniature, every summer day.

     But in waning autumn, the killer relaxes and sighs. Pink lightning flashes behind the Zion cliffs. The cottonwoods are turning in mottled clumps this year, so that a single green tree might contain several yellow hearts. When I turn to notice a wren alighting in a crevice, I feel something graze my arm. It’s as if I’m being warned, or quieted, coaxed from my inattention. Yucca pods, open, rattle in the breeze, their tripartite chambers striated inside, and each chamber conveying its black, white-striped seeds. Down in the wash, clay curls up in the bed, slabs of earth upturning, and some forming scrolls. Fallen juniper berries--metallic blue, silver, and bronze--washed into eddies, have shriveled in the sun.

                              /

Cooled earth performs its ablutions, cleansing itself via oceans and gullies, and sending itself aloft in the clouds, dispersing itself most constantly. Meanwhile we humans insist on our selves like the wren who sounds its single note from the canyon just ahead. Our voices echo and fall. We call where we’ll never arrive. That place is a Zion, marked by mineral stigmata. It’s a separated place, a bed scrubbed clean of appearances, a gully hollowed by a watery God. It’s a naked space, I guess, and then: a gash where the self is exposed.

Elk Lake, Cascade Mountains, Oregon

It’s the first week of June in a year of high water. The tables and fire rings are submerged, the shoreline trees stranded, and the campground abandoned. Just past ice-out, the lake is quiet, the lodge not yet open.

The first indication I had of the lion was at 2:00 AM, when I awoke in the tent to a distant scream and then a hard thud on the volcanic shelf to the north. I sort of dozed then, assured somewhat by the distance the scream evoked, thinking the lion would probably steer clear of my human camp. But then I was startled out of my half-sleep by another, most immediate scream: now the lion was at my tent door. Adrenaline rose. My shout came out about an octave lower than I thought possible: I said “Hey! You,” elongating the “you” in my best mammalian manner.

As frightening as the lion’s scream was, it was nothing compared to what followed. The next sound I heard was the cat lapping at the lake water: it had not spooked. As a matter of fact, it seemed to be claiming its ground. Forced out of the higher country by snow, it must have hunted the lakeshore these spring nights. I heard it cross a small feeder-stream, once, and then twice, coming back. Though I could not hear its every footfall, it took no special care to be quiet, as it splashed in a creek it could have easily stepped over.

So the rest of the night was a vigil. The camping knife at my side was very little comfort. My watch would help me count towards the dawn, when I assumed the situation would improve.

I thought of how I might best loom up as an overbearing form to intimidate a lion. I thought of my tent walls as mostly psychological, and I hoped the lion respected such psychology. I remembered the recent rash of lion attacks in the West, and how I’d guessed that the lions had simply been too deprived of their habitat, much as had a generation of man-killer grizzlies in the late 1800’s.

The whole episode had the character of displacement: all the old feelings of helplessness, of irony, were absent. There was fear--definitely--but it was dominated by both attention and a willed inaction. My vigil, strange as it sounds, was a kind of meditation. I was aware of every detectable sound: a soft exhaling, pine needles raining on the tent, the irregularities of the feeder-stream, faint airplane engines. A raven. A robin. A screech owl. A distant bittern. A jay.

And then it was dawn. The light was rising, the lion-noises absent. When the morning was quite nigh, I left the tent and scouted the campsite. No lion that I could see. So I went about my business, noisily. As I struck the tent, I noticed a weasel ease by--its round ears and elongated body--with a fresh sense of gratitude and delight.

                         /

Nature’s potential violence: the lion at the tent. Lions driven to limits. Starvation pushing those limits to a necessary conclusion. But necessary for whom? Or for what? Limits, for us in the West, are often regarded as curses. But they are also necessary blessings, demanding inaction at crucial moments. Compelling absence at strategic times, an absence trimmed with the subtle noises that small, individual lives might make. The tree will never fall in the forest unheard: if there were no ears to receive the news of its demise, there would indeed be no forest at all. No trees to fall, and no thud in the middle of a late-spring night in the mountains. Nature’s violence is no more or no less significant than its bounty; it is, in fact, so involved with that bounty that no one can say for sure which dominates: entropy or profusion. Only we humans, worshiping entropy, demand a single, controlling mode.

The Grand Wash, Capitol Reef, Utah

Nor does the term being-in designate a spatial “in-one-another” of two things objectively present, any more than the word “in” primordially means a special relation of this kind. “In” stems from innan-, to live, habitare, to dwell. “An” means I am used to, familiar with, I take care of something. . . “Ich bin” (I am) means I dwell, I stay near. . . Being as the infinitive of “I am”: that is, understood as an existential, means to dwell near, to be familiar with.

--Heidegger, Being and Time

If we can accept Heidegger’s etymology for the moment, then walking here in the wash entails significantly more than one entity--a dazed hiker--contained inside another--a dazzling canyon. That particular old dualism will have to go. But what are my alternatives? What cultural assumptions might I carry through the wash, for the sake of sustenance, in my tattered, flimsy daypack?

What Heidegger describes here is, of course, an intimacy. A relationship. So my own emphasis, on relations between, is derived from experience, and from ever-various cultural sources. Using the dual as an origin, I want to travel--via a Buddhist conception of paradox (vs. Western contradiction), via the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity (itself a bold paradox), via the Native American spatio-spiritual emphasis on the four (or is it six) cardinal directions, via reversals and repetitions of all sorts--outward to multiplicity. Most importantly, I want to realize what Martin Buber calls “the path”: [It] is not a circle. It is the way. Doom becomes more oppressive in every new eon, and the return [to God] more explosive. And the theophany comes ever closer, it comes ever closer to the sphere between beings--comes closer to the realm that hides in our midst, in the between.”

Today I’ve arrived at a fluid place--a canyon--that is to all appearances dry. The canyon asserts an existential quality even as it diminishes my Romantic heroism. In my passage through this physical chasm, I’m finally the singular individual, and the no-longer-elevated man. My version of agnosticism, which denies any particular form of God, nonetheless revels in acts of God as a matter of course. It views God, indeed, as activity, as did Thomas Aquinas in that moment he considered being, including God's being, as a verb.

So rather than positing God as an absolute, I’m content to experience God’s activity--which is to say, activity requiring no particular form or consequence. I adhere to what a Taoist might call the Way. I’m free to ponder imponderable geological time and scale, for example, as a purposeless function of the infinite. This is my mode of keeping faith.

Hiking a canyon, for me, is an active resignation to forces and energies both quite beyond me and contained within. Kierkegaard describes his existential hero, “the Knight of Faith,” as follows: “With infinite resignation he has drained the cup of life’s profound sadness, he knows the bliss of the infinite, he senses the pain of renouncing everything, the dearest things he possesses in the world, and yet finiteness tastes to him just as good as to one who never knew anything higher.”

Walking among the sandstone walls, I realize that what we perceive in ourselves as existential resignation, we perceive in nature as indifference. The existential hero, in these terms, is the human analogue to nature’s supreme indifference. A resignation to determining forces, accompanied as it is by an immersion in and yielding to the finite detail, is akin to negotiating the geology of the West. I begin to see the infinite, then, as in-finite: located within the very earthly processes that my Judeo-Christian tradition has instructed me to distrust. I realign my faith, following contours and canyon meanders, as opposed to religious doctrine. And this realignment is neither pantheistic nor Romantic: it is rather existential, a way of being in, rather than one with, the world.

     The existential model is preferable to the Romantic model in that it privileges this being-in-the world as an active force, rather than regarding the world as merely an essential emblem to be penetrated for the purpose of transcendence. Against the ultimate Romantic abandonment of the finite, one might say this: only a noun can be abandoned, as the noun is definite and finite both. Whereas the earth as verb--progressive tense--may not be abandoned: it is ongoing action, with or without a fixed actor. (Earth’s indifference, of course, neither requires nor demands a feeling subject.)

Worse, the earth as adjective, as simply descriptive of infinity, may be even more easily abandoned, as secondary, as superfluous, as auxiliary to the infinite. But what Kierkegaard's hero embraces is simultaneously infinite and finite; he performs, according to Robert Bretall, “the ‘double-movement’ of renouncing the finite yet continuing to live in it.” Here, “renouncing the finite” is not the same as abandoning it; it is more a refutation of exclusive categories. The existential hero lives in the finite most fully, reveling in the common, as Kierkegaard makes clear in “Fear and Trembling.” In contrast, the Romantic hero, having embraced the finite as merely emblematic, is often at odds with this everyday world. He may emulate the Emersonian “transparent eyeball,” but sweat and grit will commonly get in his actual eyes, causing him to curse the earth.

                              /

Entering the wash, not a half-hour into my hike, I glimpse, on the opposite wall, two, then one more, bighorn sheep descending. Though the field guides all say that bighorns are shy, inhabiting “areas rarely disturbed by man,” here they are, presenting themselves without reservation, protected only by the small expanse of the canyon and their ability to flee.

The sheep are close enough that we actually make eye contact, and though alert, they seem unfazed by me. Have they become habituated to humans, I wonder? Or are they simply intent on some destination, unwilling to detour from their accustomed route? These three are rams, less than seven years old by the look of their curls. I can hear their hooves clicking on the rocks--the sound amplified by the canyon walls--and even the drizzle of pebbles tumbling in their wake. Occasionally one will raise his head, sniffing the air, but mostly they are intent on their journey, towards feed, towards water, or perhaps towards their customary beds.

Have you ever noticed how herd animals follow one another along invisible strands, even in difficult terrain, each imitating the other's caution or the other's ease? The spaces between them are majestic, charged with the beauty of the whole, yet holding nothing, really, but the vagaries of sight and scent, the waves and ions on the edge of form. The same canyon that channels scent, that allows for sight-lines, that provides stark choices as to where a foot might safely fall, that determines, most literally, my physical attitude at this moment, also determines the activity of these wild mountain sheep. I know, and they must sense, that the distance between us is superable. But because of that knowledge, that fixed distance shall not be violated.

And why is the distance fixed? Where’s the intimacy in that? Our momentary kinship is only allowed by a definite, shared terrain. The canyon is laced with hints, with awareness, with sure decisions and fragile acts. The mountain sheep are eventually gone, through a side canyon I can just discern. But no matter. I’ll soon forget the animals, anyway, in favor of their pattern in the world, the sensual and absent figure they define.

                         /

     Circumstance: “something surrounding.” The Grand Wash is a meandering vault crammed with ordinary stones. This is country where black basalt eggs sit impervious atop the sandstone, utterly self-contained. Where the textures of the canyon indicate the yielding that produces singularity. Where the canyon walls narrow and enclose, emitting and channeling a damp mineral smell, a trace of water mingling with the sandstone grains. Where grain as particle submits to grain as pattern, and singularity emerges.

     I pause in a gentle alcove, where the sand is intricate with stones. I comb the pale drifts and crannies, seeking the singular stone among the graceful debris. Of course, every stone is singular, so am I really pursuing some old aesthetic pleasure? What is this idle instinct? It feels celebratory to me.

This, I guess, is ritual, stripped of its pomp and dependent entirely on circumstance.

And the wash is perforated with little caves, most no bigger than a negative human form. They occupy the walls of the wash where water has recently carved most fiercely, which happens to be at eye-level: momentarily plain and approachable. What are these intimate absences, and why do they attract me? Why do I run my hands along their interiors, and peer into their recesses? And why does any content here--there is so little--attract my curiosity? The most ordinary objects, usually, reside in these spaces: pebbles, maybe, vegetable detritus, or the droppings of small animals. Here the Buddhist insight of no contents in the universe is framed geologically so that I may see, in my limited way. But also: that I may hear.

     Once, according to the New Jerusalem Bible (1 Kings 19: 9-13), Elijah stole into Mt. Sinai: “There he went into a cave and spent the night there. Then the word of Yahweh came to him saying, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’ He replied, ‘I am full of jealous zeal for Yahweh Sabaoth’. . . Then he was told, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before Yahweh.’ For at that moment Yahweh was going by. A mighty hurricane split the mountains and shattered the rocks before Yahweh. But Yahweh was not in the hurricane. And after the hurricane, an earthquake. But Yahweh was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake, fire. But Yahweh was not in the fire. And after the fire, a light murmuring sound. And when Elijah heard this, he covered his face with his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.”

     So God, forsaking any particular form, and shunning the grandiose action, reveals Himself in an intimate whisper. The New Revised Standard version of the bible translates this voice as “a sound of sheer silence.” And so it is: the lightest trim against the void. The personalized impersonal. The exception that proves--or rather actualizes--the rule.

                              /

     Toward the northern end of The Grand Wash is a small, sandy oasis of sorts, a crescent where water hasn’t yet negated the trees. Some fine old junipers are arrayed here, and one in particular attracts my eye. A resting point. A vegetable shelter, its floor littered with beautiful shriveled berries. The juniper-tree island limns the watercourse. The tree, located on the edge of an eddy, owes its singularity to proximity. Its roots might sip of the passing torrent. The juniper is borne of a nearness, an intimacy, rather than a ploughing through.

So is it any wonder that I knead the sand absent-mindedly? The sand falling through my fingers creates exact arroyos and playas. Touch becomes my dominant sense as I close my eyes, go deadpan, and submit to the shade on my face.

  Echo Park, Colorado

          Down at the park, near where the Green and the Yampa Rivers converge, cottonwoods are green spangles against the sandstone walls, and willows lope in the diminishing wind. I'm walking the little side arroyos of vermilion and pasty whites, among plovers and salts and sands. My anger at the human world has evaporated, leaving a beautiful stain, and I'm appeased by forces that could just as easily crush me.

     The canyon houses my body impartially, as it has so many others. I've spent most of the day in my tent, confined by fierce, dry winds. Now, even as I stroll, the canyon eclipses countless bodies: dinosaurs, humans, the personal and the impersonal alike. Because what is housed in these walls is time itself--not abstract time, but physical time that erupts and erodes, that fills and empties.

     Tonight the moon will not appear in the narrow sky, but its light will nonetheless illuminate these walls. I’ll define my faith by its indirect light. I'll pale next to the elongated bodies the red niches reveal. My body, too, is a grotto, soon to be flooded with annulling light.

Sand Bench Trail, Zion National Park, Utah

Walking up the trail in January, following first the Virgin and then one of her feeder creeks, I find myself surrounded by the Patriarchs, massive crowns of rock all around. But I can't look at these fathers directly yet: in seeking their intimacy, I must first notice smaller potentials: juniper berries, swollen and navy blue in coyote scat, or the skeletal net of a decayed prickly-pear cactus, or the dipping flight and orange flash of a flicker. Only then can I raise my eyes to the walls that enclose me. Only then can I praise what overpowers me: the giant limitations of the physical, the red strictures of the body.

     In this court of rock there are vast vertical spaces where no man will stand. I am in the presence of something above, loftier than fathers, more concrete than gods. Sandstone is so irreducibly physical as to become hallowed: as each grain erodes, it is spirited away by water and wind, surrounded by light, no longer of the body, but rather a body unto itself. Not isolated, not merely disconnected, the grain is suddenly singular, and capable of nothing but accumulation somewhere downstream. Grain as particle and grain as pattern: in the physics of participation, the two are in fact the same.

                              /

This is a canyon where one might tarry even into this century. The ancestral Pueblo and the Piute inhabited the valley constantly, as mild snows allowed. Then a pioneer named the place Zion, understandably confused: “Fifteen years on the Virgin River, and all I have to show for it is the experience.”

The promise of Zion is not deliverance, except to the here and now. To any here and any now: to flood stage, the car-sized boulders flung from the waters, or to this innocent meander that carved the canyon for thirteen million years. To the walls of Navajo sandstone, to the agile cottonwoods below.

Now, in winter, the tourists are few. Deer wander freely among juniper, and graze the park-like canyon. Snow glazes the sandstone, blending with white, contrasting with red. The Virgin swells with melt. Even in the grip of indifference, every creature is housed and fed.




The Wasatch Front, Utah

    
           As the government herds the bison on the Great Salt Lake’s Antelope Island--at Halloween, near dusk, with their nimble helicopter--you can watch the lights of the Utah cities waver in the dust. Nearby, at Farmington Bay, chevrons of geese pass over continuously, against the refinery towers, the power-lines and stiles, and the ashen mountain peaks. Pentecostal flames emit from tall petroleum stacks. The affront of inhuman tongues--the obscenity of hissing geese--is quelled in autumn by a gathering of snows. The Wasatch Range, relegated to scenery, still exerts an ancient influence. Ice and snow descend like the lawgiver. Tablets are smashed on our indiscretions; our animal idols are shattered. A hush ensues, an expectant silence. We await our further instructions. Soon enough, they’re forwarded, are buried in a mountain somewhere to the south.

                              /

Alexander Basin is empty of doctrine, as the citizens of the nearby city (which many claim as holy) are occupied this fine Sunday. The hike is arduous, steep, and profound. The ground is riddled with treacherous stones, hardscrabble terraces, switchbacks of clay. Mountain ash and aspen, then fir and pale-barked spruce, mob the slopes in deepening groves, while the few and marginal meadows are dense with coppery stems. The August profusion has faded, and summery flowers droop. Elderberry and Echinacea brush my legs as I pass. Cow parsnip splays in the edges, radial flower heads laden with seed. White-crowned sparrows are darting among this, rattling the brush with autumnal unease, as if a chorus, dispersed by force, frantically seeking its speech. While all around, the forest is gleaming with innocent sun.

Above a precipice where eagles scan for marmots, clouds are rising like domes. Raindrops begin to stain the granite. Against the blue of altitude, every falling droplet, lit, is itself an opulent light.

                              /

The mountains mark time. Seasonal, or geologic: it hardly matters which scale they portray at any given moment. To walk in the mountains, to seek the steep and numerous switchbacks, is to give oneself over to a narrative line. Events here are autonomous, free of our will. Aspens thrive on north-facing slopes, in moist and rocky soils. Spruces and Douglas fir amass, and then thin to subalpine fir, spires to shed the merciless snows. I wonder about this bold neutrality, these ice and rock and conifer emblems. Representing nothing but themselves, they might make us weak and uneasy. We sense their freedom from will as a wild sort of mercy, yet we’re uneasy in their relentless presence. So do we ultimately reject that mercy, thus rejecting, ironically, Christ? The House of David has crumbled, its responsive psalms, and its profound responsibility.

Capitol Reef National Park, Utah

It’s uncanny how these Western landscapes embody movement between the opposite poles of water and aridity. Capitol Reef, once the bottom of an ancient sea, is still called by a nautical name, as it was once a barrier to pioneer travelers. The terrain here, formed as vast seabeds were uplifted by geological forces, is not only the present memory of ancient water: it is the momentary actualization of that sea, of water considered as energy.

What is a canyon, anyway? As numerous canyons traverse the American Southwest, definition takes on a cinematic vastness in the contemporary imagination. We begin to emphasize definition in the sense of “the degree of distinctness in outline of an object or image (esp. of an image produced by a lens)” rather than in its more familiar sense. To define these canyons, in other words, involves more or less than conceptualizing them: it requires an imaging quite beyond the scope of any text. Verbal conceptualization, inherently divisive, cannot, ironically, capture the influence these physical divides have on those who experience them. Thus the proliferation of images of sensual slot canyons, of the expansive Grand Canyon, of water pausing between stone walls in a momentary apothegm. Of course, photography falls short of the immediate human eye. Yet in its format of both two-dimensional and sequential frames, photography presents us with our need for visual conceptualization. In these terms, canyon walls are frames as well. Photography seems to suit them.

And what do we see when we examine these images? We see water as a force, translating itself to stone as a force. We see energy embodied. The distinction between water and stone soon becomes moot. What matters, as evidenced by the depth and the graphic striations of the canyons we traverse, is energy itself.

So I experience the canyon, not as mere documentation of moving water, nor as simply inert stone, but rather as a negative space borne of watery process and variously yielding rock. The canyon, in its absent and constant form, is a fractal reality, in that eddies and currents create their own image on a massive scale. The scale exponentially increases when one considers the whole of the canyon country.

That the arid canyon country depicts--or rather, actualizes--these liquid forces in a dry and solid medium confirms an ancient intuition: that all particular form is transitory. Only energy is constant, able to span scales and media easily as it steadfastly insists on itself. As Chuang Tzu says: “How could one thing and another thing lead you to what preceded them? They are forms, colors--nothing more. But that which creates things has no form, and it rests where there is no change.”

This ultimate nonreliance on form--it’s what Rumi called an “open secret.” It’s at the core of most artistic ambition, I’d guess, this distinction between depiction and actualization. The artist, whatever her medium, is not so concerned with simply depicting her subject (assuming she has one), as she is with actualizing patterns of energy that inform that subject and all other subjects simultaneously. That the canyons accomplish this, without intent, and so visually, helps explain their appeal to wanderers like me.

                              /

Of course, some of us favor secret knowledge, which canyons seem to conceal. We love the esoteric, whether found in a remote desert waterpocket or in a rare and musty manuscript. And these forms of knowledge are fine; occasionally, in fact, they’re invaluable. But they’re only as good as they are emblematic, I’d guess: their rarity can’t be a form of freakishness if they are to reveal anything of our common endeavor. Too often the notion of special knowledge, as advanced by priests, adventurers, and scholars, is merely a vehicle to secure their privilege. It’s also a particularly delusional exercise. It is, in other words, frequently a lie.

First, we might take care to distinguish between exceptionalism and aesthetics. The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, for example, while at first glance esoteric, recognizes the folly of the privileged object. Populists smell a rat here as well. And yet the poetry of Milton, for example, intended for the masses, is indeed highly aesthetic. Michelangelo and Shakespeare worked consciously for a well-defined general public. The examples of such art are numerous.

With such a distinction in place, then, even a wayward, consumer-driven democracy might recognize the difference between the exceptional and the truly singular. The contradictions inherent in American individualism have been illuminated by many, including Tocqueville, Mill, and Dewey, and each has identified inherent difficulties in the individual achieving exceptional status. For one thing, strict individual autonomy requires that one jettison external authority. But “As Tocqueville observed,” writes Robert Bellah, “when one can no longer rely on tradition or authority, one inevitably looks to others for confirmation of one’s judgments. Refusal to accept established opinion and anxious conformity to the opinions of one’s peers turn out to be two sides of the same coin.”

Though at first the notion may seem odd, this same dynamic is applied to nature in contemporary America: the status of “special” and “rare” still holds sway, even as the confused and stranded individual looks anxiously to others for confirmation. As these others come to include wild animals and wild nature in general, endangered species and wilderness areas become valued as both special and rare--special, in part, because they are rare--and privileged knowledge is sought in the places farthest removed from one’s own society. If it’s disconcerting that the others to be found in wild nature are not our peers, and have no concern for confirming the judgments of a privileged seeker, then there are certain mystical techniques that blur our sharp isolation. And sometimes these techniques are fine.

But why do we not love crows, gulls, or pigeons with the same intensity we accord to condors or whooping cranes? Why don’t we revere our vacant lots the way we honor wilderness? If we truly esteemed our local, ragged woodlots, would we allow the destruction of ancient forests? Could we come to trust, I wonder, the most visible, the most common, rather than exclusively valuing exceptional nature?

                         /

As Gary Snyder steadily reminds us, the entire world--natural, cultural, or otherwise--is indeed a wild system. Language is a wild system, too.

Though traces of wisdom reside in the pages of books, these books, at times, lie open to the ordinary world. Like us, their faces are grazed by light. Their decipherable markings are valid only momentarily.

Indecipherable or only partially decipherable marks, on the other hand, may have a more lasting effect. How else am I to explain my attraction to the enigmatic petroglyphs that adorn the canyons of the Southwest? Whether a language becomes archaic, or dies, or is too subtle for our comprehension, there comes a time when marks function exclusively as evidence: they exist for us as indications that require no result or verdict in order to be compelling. These traces are valuable as phenomena rather than as mere tools of inquiry.

Knowledge is itself phenomenal. That’s why a specific place is so necessary to knowing: where awareness rather than comprehension takes precedence, place might be accorded its primary, autonomous authority. A place, after all, is not primarily a destination, or an answer of any sort. It does not rely on us for its meaning. And both science and mysticism admit to no comprehension except that which depends on the autonomy of an other. Whether that other is physical or metaphysical matters less than its status as an ultimate authority. “We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature.” says Newton. “I am who am.” says the Judeo-Christian God. Here the phenomenon is not only adequate unto itself, it is, in essence, infallible.

                         /

All this leads the poet to venture out with her partially decipherable language: and to evoke, hopefully, no destination, but rather an actual place. In this sense, poetic language is not special: it, like us, simply fluctuates between the mysterious and the known. The fluctuation may be beautiful; it may constitute music, or a dance. But it is common, everyday, ever occurring. It is merely on display.

From a perch inside the Waterpocket Fold, I watch the moon among moving clouds. Comprehension brightens and fades. As the phenomenon of the moon is foregrounded, then backgrounded, the sky itself becomes moon-grounded. The moon itself is an actual place--a wilderness, in fact--that informs our sensibilities as only place can. And like all wildernesses, the moon is best left untrammeled. The moon as destination is not nearly so engaging. It is best contemplated from this distance, encountered almost every night on the terms it dictates like tides.

Capitol Reef National Park, Utah

Luckily, we have memory. We have lore that allows us to continue. Stories, passed down and place-specific, help us make sense of the world. But what happens, I wonder, to a human event once it’s forgotten? Assuming that traces of phenomena can be stored, is the human memory the only possible receptacle? Hiking the Capitol Reef country, I feel as if these wrinkles and creases in the earth do store something: primarily, of course, something other-than-human, but something that includes the human as well.

Consider our endeavors. Tribal peoples have continuously inhabited these canyons for tens of thousands of years. Ancient ruins and petroglyphs are both mysterious and apparent. On a ledge off the trail to Hickman Bridge, for example, there’s a rock ring, the remains of a pit house that dates back centuries to the Fremont people. Further on there’s a small, natural hollow closed off by a wall: a granary in the mountain. More than corn was cached in this alcove. A whole way of life, partially remembered, is evidenced in a niche.

Similarly, scientists sometimes speak of the information that is stored in, say, rock layers, tree-rings, or ice-core samples from antiquity. They assume an inherent knowledge awaiting our discovery, if only we can perceive nature’s subtleties. What they may not acknowledge, though, is the fact that the secret knowledge they seek is located in nature by human curiosity. Rock is mute, except when it succumbs. Tree-rings are narratives only to our receptive senses; ice-cores silent and most obscure, until we read them as chemical poems. We are, in effect, placing our own deficiencies into the earth we inhabit, in order to address those same deficiencies. The earth, if we are patient and methodical, will recall a small--and some would say perfect--knowledge to life.

And this knowledge does not necessarily negate the value of mystery. As Galileo said, “Extensively, that is, with regard to the multitude of intelligibles, which are infinite, the human understanding is as nothing even as it understands a thousand propositions; for a thousand in relation to infinity is zero. But taking man’s understanding intensively, in so far as this term denotes understanding some proposition perfectly, I say that human intellect does understand some of them perfectly, and thus in these it has as much absolute certainty as Nature itself has.”

Scientific knowledge is indeed phenomenal. Even as the layers of visible strata, on display in a Utah cliff, become to me a book, I stride or stumble over the pages, my route resolved by a text I’ll not master. This is why I can value evidence, even within a scientific world-view, as cardinal in its status as pure phenomena. The evidence that eventually reveals a narrative--the very rock we traverse or cleave--also determines the course of our inquiry. The questions we ask are formulated by the earth.

Memory, then, seen as it is by tribal cultures as a form of portable knowledge, is embedded in natural phenomena. Stories, always specific, help extract this knowledge for use. But it is greed or dangerous folly--a mining mentality--to assume an extensive intelligence of the earth. Galileo said as much. So have the tribal elders. Because beyond or behind our glorious stories is a vast interior of un-remembered, unrealized lore. The land itself resonates with a memory that includes our own quite easily, but which exceeds ours on a scale we can hardly comprehend. Though we may place discoveries in the earth via our own curiosity, the earth’s narrative continues almost entirely without us.

                         /

Though the canyons entice us to go constantly deeper, their character is inscribed, quite plainly, on their vertical surfaces. Though canyons enclose, they are also ornate conduits, open to the traveler’s view. Their formation involves stone and echoes water. They are the interplay between properties. Are canyons, then, “between-ness” actualized? That we are allowed to walk in “between-ness,” as a matter of course, is something of a miracle. Our charged traversal echoes the traversal of the canyons themselves. And we disappear inside them, in the sense of our familiar selves no longer being quite viable, quite apparent, within the confines of a canyon. (And should that familiar self be overly Romantic, as was the legendary Everett Ruess, the canyons may well remove the entranced self altogether.)

Yet if we are to interrogate the landscape which is itself an interrogation--or at least a probing of the earth’s surface--we might remember the secondary definition of traverse: “to consider or discuss the whole extent of a subject.” Because that is precisely the Romantic task, stemming from Enlightenment optimism and trimmed with technological advances. The canyons illustrate the impossibility of a total traversal, particularly here in the massive and convoluted Waterpocket Fold. Canyons always and everywhere conceal, not just an aspect, but the bulk of themselves from us. Withheld from us, the canyons actualize--in their absent objectivity--our subjectivity as well as their own. Their incompleteness, to us, is also their very character. We are sensing their totality, their subjective existence, as primarily hidden. In this sense, canyons exemplify not an absent authority, not an inscrutable father-God, but rather the very authority of absence.

II. Companions and Saviors

prelude: promise

On January 13th and 14th of 1972, Aretha Franklin went into the New Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles to record an album of gospel music. She was accompanied by the Rev. James Cleveland, who played and sang a memorable duet with Aretha; he also exhorted the assembled congregation towards Jesus in his charming and utterly faithful way. In the second song of that first evening, Aretha made her audience a promise: “After the storm is a golden sky, and the sweet silver sun...Though your dreams might get a little bit tossed and blown...I promise you He won’t ever let you walk alone.”

     Twenty-nine years later to the day, I’m driving north on Interstate 15, listening to Aretha sing. Snowstorms are engulfing the American West, from Utah to Colorado and New Mexico, all the way east to the Oklahoma panhandle. Just south of Cedar City, Utah, a sudden blast of ice and snow has made the highway impassable. Some fifty cars and trucks lay strewn by the wayside, some damaged, one or two rolled over. Drivers are standing around in the snow, almost casually, talking or staring off into the storm, arms folded or weakly gesturing, faces barely discernible in the snow.

As I pull off into town to find a motel room, I realize that Aretha’s promise is the exact opposite of the promise of the West, wherein each of us will walk alone--or ride alone, perhaps--as a staunch individual in an awe-inspiring and sometimes hostile land.

     Then I remember the road kill. Some miles earlier, as the snow began to gather and drift, I glimpsed a brown coat in a roadside ditch, and a black movement atop it. Three ravens were attending a carcass, tearing at the bulk obscured by snow. A morbid thought occurred to me then: if that carcass were by chance a human, who would really notice? And of those who did, how many would pause in their Western excursions to attend to it with compassion? The scavenging ravens, who never ignore the dead, seem to me at this instant to be more thoroughly compassionate than any priest or preacher. At least the ravens’ appetites are never displaced, as are ours. My own sensibilities seemed displaced just then, and a vague sense of uneasiness has accompanied me ever since.

Beware: traveling at high speeds over many hours, in a landscape that both denies and lifts you at every turn, can do this to your mind. 


 Salt Lake City, Utah

So here we are at the end of a glacier of sperm, Tomasito!

Terminal moraine, detritus, soil that brings forth trees--

Ten zillion years away from home (wherever that was)--

Way past the bog-trotting Paddies, the potato ranchers and tarriers,

Down the infinite reticulations of the landing net that god

Let down for the prophet in the days of his youth: ladder

Of egg and sperm...

                    the double helix and gyre...

                                    genetic lattice...

And our names still green on our family tree: the Quaking Aspen!

--Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend

I live, these days, in the dead center of the West, in Salt Lake City, Utah. The scenery is stunning. In the Oquirrh Mountains just west of town, the Kennecott Corporation has, over the decades, gouged out the largest open pit copper mine in the world. Kennecott and another Utah mining corporation, Magcorp, currently head the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory. They are officially the top two polluters in the nation. Kennecott releases tens of thousands of pounds of arsenic, lead, and selenium annually. Magcorp’s primary toxic release is chlorine gas.

While in the West Desert, just beyond the mine, the government has placed, according to The Salt Lake Tribune, “two chemical weapons incinerators, two hazardous waste incinerators, a massive radioactive waste landfill, a hazardous waste landfill, the largest stockpile of chemical weapons in the world, a proving ground for biological and chemical warfare (much of it contaminated with unexploded ordinance and anthrax spores), a massive bombing range, and an Army depot with an underground plume of carcinogenic water.” Then there’s the Skull Valley Indian Reservation, where the decimated Goshute tribe recently entered into a contract to store 40,000 metric tons of nuclear waste for the utility industry.

This morning the Great Salt Lake, the world’s second largest “dead sea,” emits an acrid smell on the breeze as dead brine shrimp and algae--their high mortality quite natural--decompose on its shores. At the nearby University of Utah, technicians are busy mapping the genome, and genetic engineering thrives in the shadows of the Wasatch Range. And over at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints genealogical library, near the temple, the Mormon faithful are tracing their ancestry with thoroughness and pride. Some of those ancestors actually walked to Utah from points east, pulling handcarts toward utopia, at the prophet Brigham Young’s insistence. They were, for Utah Mormons, the ultimate pioneers.

“Here we are at the end of a glacier of sperm,” says a father to his son out on the prairie. While in the mountains, less than an hour east of my house, what is according to some the largest single living organism known--a grove of genetically identical aspens called Pondo--quakes in the midsummer breeze. These “family trees,” some indeed carved with the names of pioneers, sheepherders, or urban escapees, bear each scar on their pale bark with a sinuous grace and beauty. They are utterly benign. Or rather, they’re indifferent.

And for those of us who would openly approach the other, repeatedly, this is ultimate difference: indifference, and its attendant silence.

                              /

Imagery has dominated our imaginings of the West, because images are our only avenue towards self-reflection here. And self-reflection rather than influence is what Europeans have always sought--vainly, and in vain--from the American West. But neither scenery nor the obliteration of scenery with generic development will provide a satisfactory reflection for us. Scenery provides a grandiose, overly selective image, while development depicts us as mere drones and passive recipients, an image abhorrent--if often accurate enough--in the West.

But the very metaphor of reflection is inaccurate and misapplied in the actual landscape. We assume a mirror to be not only reflective but also neutral; we assume it presents an accurate image. Those of us who view the landscape as neutral may be tempted to trust in an attendant objective imagery that might in fact instruct us. But of course images are never objective. They are perceived. And what we perceive subjectively in nature is not its neutrality--for how could that affect us subjectively?--so much as it is indifference. We may well dread this indifference, and yet we must at some level acknowledge it, particularly here in the desert. Here we are sensing a land that wants nothing, and certainly wants nothing from us. If indifference must be seen as a mirror, it is a better mirror, because its blankness renders us--as isolated egos, and as individuals--invisible. Indifference influences rather than reflects, and in this fact lies its real potential for us.

But in speaking of potential, I begin to sound a bit like a booster. I have to remember--and this is the crucial remembering that living in the West requires--that the influence of the dominant geology, the arid spaces, and the shifting skies will necessarily involve limits. To forget this is to resist the vast and inevitable indifference that is so obvious here.

When nature determines the course of culture as graphically as it does in the West, where else might one look for identity? We do look to nature, but often in a perverse way. Nature’s indifference here is so apparent that it has prompted our indifference: denial on the largest scale we can muster. Los Angeles and Las Vegas, for example, are determined by a practiced resistance to aridity: as cities, they are negatively defined. They are, in that way, our ultra-Western towns.

Conceptually, the entire West is negatively defined. The West is most obviously a direction. It depends for its identity on a relative position: ultimately, on the East. And so the West has been routinely defined by various Eastern interests: mythological, military, corporate, literary, escapist. But even while contemporary pseudo-cowboys continue to rail against the very East that begot them, whole new waves of Westerners are “appearing” on the scene--some, of course, who predate the “pioneers” by centuries. Take Mexican peoples, for example. To them the Wild West is in fact el norte. And how about the immigrant from Asia? What are we to her if not the mysterious East?

A Native American, say, a Navajo arrived in Arizona via Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, or a Pueblo person at Acoma, probably the oldest continuously inhabited village in North America, might well laugh at all this directionality. To these cultures, the cardinal directions are sacred presences, all emanating from here, which is a center. Provincialism does not stem from a feeling of centeredness; instead it occurs when one identifies oneself in relationship to a distant, dominating seat of empire.

Think of how Western negativity manifests itself: first, the West is absence (blank maps, godless lands) and then the West is lack (little water, too few trees). Something, obviously, must be done about it. Now, with massive dams, over-grazing, urbanization, unprecedented recreation, and other forms of environmental insult, we encounter the West as thorough loss. The place Europeans sought to win, through negation, is as elusive as gold in a foothill stream.

                              /

The lost West--called the Old West by some--haunts our every movement. It creates a gaping emptiness. That space is then filled, with nostalgia for something that never really occurred, or with nuclear waste and chemical weapons, the remnants of something that did.

Salt Lake City, once a Western destination, actually provides an omnidirectional view of mineral frankness and indifference, as does the intermountain West as a whole. Mountains surround us. Inescapable, and making their demands, they require that we rethink our most basic assumptions about matter. Because indifference is not the same as inactivity. Matter in fact moves us, and moves itself as well.

The philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, in her book The Primacy of Movement, states bluntly that “The idea of matter as an inert chunk of stuff is outmoded.” In considering the validity of the concept of animism, Sheets-Johnstone points out that a hard look at the physical world “requires admitting a kinetic character into the domain of... matter such that [it] is not simply matter pure and simple any longer, but matter having the potential, in and of itself...to make things happen.”

So indifference involves activity. And as activity literally moves something, it could well touch us in the process. Of course contemporary animists are not so crude as to personify matter, especially stone. Geology, because it is thoroughly impersonal, is a great equalizing force. In its autonomy it accommodates all; in its supreme indifference it embraces and releases, without discrimination.




Death Valley, California

Anything that can be will be. This is the revelation of the dunes at Mesquite Flat, as they recede toward the Panamint Range. It’s not so much the tracks of mice in the sand, through they do record a presence. Nor is it the ripples and ridges that repeat over contours of time. Though, again, these are indications. Mineral blankness reveals force quite boldly, without regard to finicky life.

Here it reveals wind. The wind, filtering or rushing in to mimic a difference. Wind is formed by differences, or gradients, in atmospheric pressure. Wind is often a displacement, as pressures yield to one another and replace one another in the process. And this is a cultural as well as a natural dynamic.

     Much of our inherited world culture has its origins in animism. We have traditionally personified nature, endowing animals, plants, and even rocks with our characteristics as we animate feelings of both kinship and submission. Even the wind has a human face in such endeavors. But a complementary displacement is also possible: giving ourselves over to the world, we might become winds, in imagination, of course, but also in actual practice. Initially we may fear losing our exclusive forms, or worse, our individuality to the wind. But we might be assuaged when we find that we are indeed acting as wind: as does wind, and thus as winds, utilizing the very methodology of wind. Leaving what wind leaves: traces, altered forms. Taking what wind takes: whatever is portable, is movable, is possible to take. This process is not merely metaphorical, nor is it simply animistic. It could be animism reversed: now we are animating ourselves as wind.

     Here “as” means not merely to resemble but to imaginatively become. Or one might say, going a bit further: to resemble, under certain circumstances, is to become. If this statement seems implausible, we might remember that it describes an ancient strategy, and that we regularly practice a version of that strategy, for example, when we aspire to imitate media imagery in the hopes of transformation. Resemblance as becoming is a very human form of mimesis, older and more potent than mere representation.

And there are precedents for such resemblance in wild nature. Wind itself is mimetic, assuming the shapes and contours of the land, and then becoming the land--most graphically, these dunes--as it shapes and creases. In practicing mimesis as becoming, we are mimicking the mimesis of wind.

     Walter Benjamin writes of two types of mimesis, sensuous imitation and “nonsensuous similarity.” This latter type, a form of inborn mimetic genius, offers us some intriguing possibilities. Citing astrological practices as a form of mimesis not based primarily on direct sensuous imitation, Benjamin says that traditionally “the newborn child was thought to be in full possession of this gift, and in particular to be perfectly adapted to the form of cosmic being." This more internal mimesis, this inherent adaptation to contextual forms, offers not only the possibility of mimesis--as becoming--inhabiting our language, art, and religions, but it also suggests the plasticity of the human form, the ability to become, not part of the earth, but the very form that the earth assumes for us.

     I’ve often puzzled over the phenomenon of convergent evolution, wherein, according to Steven Jay Gould, “distantly related groups evolve similar forms, as a result of independent adaptation to common environments.” Ichthyosaurs, dolphins, and fish. Or lipoterns, horses, and camels. Why the similarities? Now I realize that common environments require not only similar forms, but also forms that are, in a particular, nonsensuous way, similar to the environment itself. Fins and streamlined bodies are nonsensuously mimetic of water in that their forms do not resist, in their plasticity, their contexts. On a larger scale, the water itself does not resist shaping forms: water is plasticity at its liquid extreme. In the same way, hooves and vegetarian bodies do not resist the demands of the land any more than the land resists geological forces, erosion, or for that matter, the impact of hooves and vegetarian bodies.

     Anything that can be will be. Possibility is derived from yielding. Nature and culture alike assume their various forms, but each form is a yielding--thus the motifs we discern--as well as an assertion of yielding. Sometimes, in culture, one yields too willfully to an absence. Sometimes fools rush in. But even then a wind is operational, and being a wind, it is bound to agitate, harm, and eventually cease. It is bound to adapt.

                              /

     If becoming the wind stretches our adult imaginations a bit too taut, other possibilities abound. Watching children swirl and play on the dunes, I recall that empathy is the current strategy in environmental education; just the other day, while visiting a natural history display, I looked through the face of a bat, hearing echolocation beeps as a mosquito came into view. To imagine oneself as a bat--without the Gothic overtones--is actually quite an accomplishment. Children do such things all the time. Maybe we can learn from them.

     Benjamin mentions that “Children’s play is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of behavior.” Doesn’t such play require a certain empathy with the thing imitated? Whether the imitated is human, animal, vegetable, mineral, elemental, or even mechanical, empathy broadens its scope to include the formulating other. Isn’t empathy also at the core of Christian love, Buddhist compassion, Jewish law? Even the scientist, supposedly objective, requires imaginative empathy in order to formulate hypotheses. It seems that empathy spans every realm of our endeavor, and that preservation of existing forms requires an ability to move outside one’s own existing form and into the realm of the other.

     OK: all this is evident. Empathy is a basis for ethical behavior. But what happens when we actually wish to agitate, to harm, or even to destroy the other? Aren’t there also models we might emulate in order to behave unethically if we so choose? I’ve already mentioned the wind. Nature is of course morally neutral, so that we might utilize our empathy with nature in any way we please. We might even use empathy--with the animal tendency towards domination and aggression, for example--to remove nature from our midst.

     If empathy is exclusively a human capacity, then our history depicts a doomed species. But what if a kind of empathy is actually being directed at us, from the very environment we are affecting? Here I’m not suggesting a sympathetic God, nor exactly a sympathetic nature. Instead I’m questioning the status of the culturally constructed individual as the primary bearer of his or her own experience. The naturalist David Rains Wallace describes a certain forest as “full of moods--frightening, welcoming, fragrant, uncomfortable--it was just that, as a commonsense organism, I considered them my moods.” Then he asks some crucial questions: “But what if I was less integral than I thought? What if parts of my brain had their own relationships with the environment? Whose moods were they then? Whose original impression had it been?”

     Children, of course, have egos. But they also have rapidly developing minds, and brains astonishing in their ability to respond to new environmental promptings. (Thus we call our children, condescendingly, “impressionable.”) Before children are fully indoctrinated into the culture of the individual, they might more easily access their environment via empathy and imagination. And they are more likely than adults to cherish their environment for its inherent physical qualities than they are to impose a grand vision upon it. Even those little boys and girls who build castles and shove the sand around with their toys: they are experimenting with the plasticity of the world more than they are, strictly speaking, manipulating it. You know: Play is the thing.                             

/

     In Death Valley, every human act becomes poignant. The sight and sounds of children playing against such a potentially deadly background: it’s not the freak nature of this landscape that moves me, but rather how exemplary Death Valley is. Its extremes only illumine the common dilemmas and pleasures of living on the land, and the commonplace deaths, which surround us.

     Death Valley is a consummate yielding. Everywhere the valley succumbs to larger forces, prompting us to succumb to the valley. To the West lie several parallel mountain ranges, which cast their rain, shadows thoroughly: the Sierra Nevada, the White, the Argus, the Panamint. Even as the block, which forms the valley, fell some 35 million years ago, the surrounding mountains rose. The rains robbed by the higher elevations surged out of the mountains, creating huge alluvial fans. According to Jeff Nicholas, “The volume of alluvium is even greater than it appears: scientists estimate that the floor of Death Valley is actually the top of 8,000 to 10,000 feet of sediments that have been eroded from the surrounding mountains.” Seas and lakes have inundated the valley frequently. Springs have flourished and dried. The valley thus receives, unresisting. And then demands the same of its human inhabitants.

At nearly three hundred feet below sea level, the salt pan as seen from Dante’s View seems a world away. The ethereal salt forms soft edges against the valley floor, like snow, but even more crystalline in its sheen. Seen from over 5,000 feet above, the pan, though distant and seemingly dead, animates light and displays mineral infiltrations and retreats that remind me of cellular activity. The heated air itself is vital, as it rises and shifts, not merely filtering the view but actively becoming a visible element in the cloudless landscape below. The air carries the scent of salt up from the pan. The scent is strangely inviting, and empty. There is nothing organic to swell it: it is thin and also ethereal. It represents the saline workings below that portend something primeval for us: death, maybe, or maybe the first glimmerings of organic life. What a thin line separates the two!

And then it occurs: the possibility of inorganic “life”--the inexorable activity of matter in transit. Matter moving itself. Succumbing. Is the valley not--in its own autonomous version--what we commonly understand as alive? Is this what animism recognizes, fears, and celebrates? At Dante’s View, I realize that I’ve been inhibited by science and modern religion alike. In such an inhospitable valley, it’s possible to rid animism of its anthropomorphic aspects and respect it in its wider sense as a profound apperception. It’s possible here to open up one’s horizons, to be inclusive of inorganic forms as vital in one’s life.

                               

Tahkenitch Creek, Oregon

     Today I'm walking in the dunes near Tahkenitch Creek. My fantasies lead me in, and then abandon me to the land.

The dunes cradle their own stunning absence, I think, carry tombs in their aprons, and accommodate the beetles that range over the sand. I hear the dunes' granular language--it fills an inner ear, fills the pond slowly. One day a forest might form, and the dunes slip away. Today they slip away, like running animals, like the surf, and the continuous sweep of their disappearance is broad and sufficient. 

     The dune is a contour line, a whim of centuries of wind. No one walks here without conceiving, in some recess, the eddies of nothingness that allowed this. The pines and the ospreys sweep, their sap and blood warming, life's neck exposed briefly to the sun. A man on the flank of the dune might fall, the sand cascading below him, and thus begin to worship chaos.

     The dune: how can this massive form be so easily disrupted?  Where's the logic of force? Entropy reaches up from our gut, from our sloughed cells. Everything is breaking down, analyzed and reduced, first to the elegance of a thin line, and then to the potential for any line at all.

    

                              /

     These dunes are formed by onshore winds. Sand brought down by the Siuslaw and the Umpqua Rivers from the Cascades--it might take thousands of years for a grain of sand to travel a hundred miles downriver--is deposited by the ocean, and the winds shape the grains into tiny globes. Each globe is a single mineral identified by its color (feldspar is milky white, and garnet is a dark red), or in the case of quartz, the most numerous grain here, by its lack of color altogether. The sand is then pushed inland from three to five feet per year; it has advanced as far as two and a half miles inland, piling up to five hundred feet above the sea. 

     There are several kinds of dunes here, some unique to the Oregon coast. The oblique dune, for instance, is a long, serpent-like formation up to one hundred sixty-five feet high and a mile long. Oblique dunes are not, like most dunes, at right angles to the wind. They are formed by the alteration of summer northwest winds and winter southwest winds. They are products, then, of a constant shifting, and their writhing shapes embody opposites. The dunes as a whole are characterized by this shifting, both in the forces that form them and, of course, in their shapes and composition. So most of the human intervention in the area has been to contradict this character by attempting to stabilize the dune formations. In the 1930's, European beach grass and gorse were introduced to hold more sand in place. The results of this planting are called fore dunes--walls of sand 25-30 ft. tall that run parallel to the coast just above the high-water mark. We've successfully built fortresses where once there were reeling swathes and gales of sand. 

     There are arguments to be made for stability, of course, but here our cultural alteration is inappropriate to the natural plasticity of the place. So nothing is enhanced. What if, instead, we would have placed boulders at selected sites in order to create beautiful and ever-changing barchan dunes, the kind that form crescent shapes--some with elongated horns--around obstructions? What if we used the cross-bedded patterns the various winds form in the sand as models for the serious or the decorative arts? What if we constructed rituals around the sounds of which the dunes are capable--hums, buzzes, moans, and booms? Jan Bannan points out that "digging into a sand dune with a shovel can produce a sound like a short, low note on a cello" and that "grains must be highly polished, perfectly smooth round balls in order to produce sounds. They must be absolutely dry and usually especially small grains." Isn't there a more satisfying music of the spheres to be found in the sand than in an abstract outer space? 

     Dunes are formed in part by plant life, too. The pioneer plants like beach pea, sea rocket, and beach morning glory are nourished by organic litter dispersed from the surf by wind.  They feed on the sea foam, hold together little patches of sand, and then decay to form soil for the dune tansy and the seashore lupine. Soon moss may become established, then kinnikinnick, then salal, evergreen huckleberry, and Western rhododendron. The trees follow: Doug fir, hemlock, and cedar. 

     Each successional plant community is visible on a walk through the dunes, and each is relatively well defined. But again, flux is the only constant; because of mild temperatures and plentiful rain, one can witness plant succession in a single lifetime. The landscape is transformed, as are our aging bodies. Though the definite phases and their implied order are obvious, change is manifested everywhere, and change determines the very character of the dunes. And then there is change as anti-change, humanly induced, like the introduction of beach grass and gorse.

In Yeats's poetic vision, the anti-Christ slouches from its desert sands toward Bethlehem to be born. But in this local version, the sands themselves march inland and obliterate what they will. No anti-Christ here, and no anarchy: the image is more a celebration of higher laws, an acceptance. What do we install into this expanse when we attempt to halt such momentum? Isn’t the anti-Christ monumental, linear, and still? Don’t we slouch towards it as if to a fabricated wall?

Onion Valley, Nevada

     In the northwest corner of Nevada, rock-strewn roads meander up to a place called Onion Valley, a wild pasture allotted for cattle, but just now frequented by six or seven deer. The valley’s namesake plant, a small Allium (from the Greek, to avoid) is called Nevada onion.

On the trail above is a rare mountain lake, glacial and small. Occasional springs adorn the mountains, leaving green seeps against the predominant tan, and also allowing for a few moisture-loving plants. Dried iris flowers, pale green and flecked with bronze, are crimped at the edges by sun. The bulbs, a few inches below the surface, are concentrating the accumulated sugars, are hoarding the chemical treasure.

And I, too, am remote and surviving, barely out of human sight. I seek better eyes to see. Walking up to yet another mountain lake, I tend to my body carefully, weary from my travels. I require something I’ve not yet seen. I suddenly remember that domestic iris bulbs need bone meal in order to thrive, and that the dead foliage must be preserved so the sugars might accumulate in the bulb below. The sexual iris requires decay: nothing new here, I suppose, except that the memory of their papery petals, their brilliance lost to the sun, stays with me--the paradox of a somber frill.

“Your needs are all met,” writes Annie Dillard. “You see the creatures die, and you know you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life.” Is this the reason I repair to mountain lakes--especially the smallest, ephemeral ones, where winter freezes penetrate fully to the bottom? Do I need to sense this particular unneediness?

Here the glaciers have deposited boulders that cleave according their natures; their natures are a concordance of forces. The cleave-marks are graphic illustrations, are intersections of directionless lines. Though these lines delineate, they don’t suggest intent. The rounded mountains spill off into the distance, consecutively, yet they don’t imply an order. Creation is not a scheme, but rather a fulfillment, true to its own internal prophecy rather than an encompassing will. Desire is not a universal component to actualization; it’s only our human mode. The fissures of our human desire contain nothing but necessity. The thin distance between that desirous necessity and the neutral world demands an exact morality.

Why do we value the human life that will inevitably fade? Why do we resist the forces that cut our lives short? I think it’s because we’re necessary. Though we as individuals will abandon life, life requires us, if only for the moment.

                        
Mt. Charleston and Primm, Nevada

                                             (drives)

From Mt. Charleston we gaze on the Nevada Test Site, along with the starkly beautiful Spotted and Pintwater Ranges. The tilt of the playa north of the mountain is both precarious and vast: so much so that as I descend the mountain, the illusion of car-travel--that we move through the landscape--is gradually challenged. Now I experience the landscape moving into me. That the landscape entering my experience contains both nuclear weaponry and desert bighorn sheep is instructive, disturbing, and binding. It requires of me “a Yes-saying without reservation, even to suffering,” to use Nietzsche's terms, in which “nothing in existence may be subtracted, [and] nothing is dispensable.”

This Yes-saying is not the same as affirming a mere fantasy. It does not entail “learning from Las Vegas” in order to “make ourselves at home in our alienated being.” What it does require is nerve.

Driving into Primm, Nevada, at night, after hours in the dark Mojave, the lights of the casinos are like nerves firing on the desert. They may produce thoughts, or they may prove to excite only impulses. The lights are certainly spectacular, and yet they are not a Yes-saying so much as a graphic illustration that, as Nietzsche wrote, “consciousness is a surface.” The lights are, as a matter of fact, fired by human drives, and thus produce a waking dream. Though according to Nietzsche, “life does not have the same freedom of interpretation when we are awake that it enjoys in our dreams,” it’s also true that “when we are awake our drives also do nothing else than interpret nerve stimulations and posit ‘causes’ according to their own requirements.” So it is that “between waking and dreaming there is no essential difference.”

If dreams are, as Nietzsche posits, meant “to compensate to a certain degree” for a lack of drive satisfaction, then the dream-like character of the casinos is reinforced. But such a definition of dreams must be only partial. Total compensation is not required to the Yes-sayer for whom “nothing in existence may be subtracted.” The lack of certain drive satisfactions is not a subtraction to be compensated, but rather an absence to be honored. For if, to the Yes-sayer, existence is complete, then absences may no more be subtracted than presences. The complete casino fantasy relies for its potency in a belief that drives are meant to be satisfied. It downplays the possibility of a drive as complete unto itself, and insists on the drive’s (temporary) cessation. So the Yes-sayer accepts casinos with this caveat: that their fantasy-character be not mistaken for the real stuff of dreams. Fantasy, though it makes us cozy in our alienation, furthers that alienation, resisting Nietzsche’s encompassing Yes. Held before fantasy’s face is a mask, a sign of deceit so forthright that we judge it as virtually harmless. We ignore a potential danger in favor of intrigue. We fancy ourselves daring, perhaps. But mere intrigue pales next to actual mystery, in both secrecy and peril. For who can say, while Yes-saying, just what it is that one affirms?

The Las Vegas Wash, Nevada

Is there any more to be done in this world than to simply trip through it, praising what we can’t apprehend? Oh, there’s moral necessity, that most difficult practice. And there are obligations, to family, community, and the earth: but these are givens, freely accepted or renounced. What I’m inquiring after is what is not given, but must be sought. And what must be sought is a common concern: the proper relationship between the object and our subjective apprehension. Such relationships are framed by culturally prescribed circumstances, whether the inscribed cave, the cathedral, the casino, or the garden. Now, in virtual America, the cave, cathedral and casino are conflated, while the garden reverts to a baroque fantasy via the entertainment industry. Each natural image is informed by media templates, and embraced or dismissed according to its resemblance to a facsimile.

No wonder nature loses. Circumscribed and revered, the wild loses its permeability, and solidifies into an afterlife for those we can only regard as sacred, as liaisons to God: four-legged, winged, or underwater saints. Now Lamarckian classification becomes a form of hagiography, and the wild becomes increasingly unapproachable, except at certain natural shrines. At these very shrines--Yosemite, Yellowstone, Moab--the unapproachable is constantly penetrated. Literalists that we are, we elevate the wild by becoming mountaineers. We internalize the wild by inhabiting its secret interior. Things begin to get cramped. Stripped of its mystery, the wild becomes merely another form of knowledge, a reference point rather than an encompassing world.

     So it is that I hike the more obscure portions of the landscape, those with no claim to sublimity. In the wash today, casinos and subdivisions loom on the horizons, while egrets, night herons, songbirds, and hawks inhabit the bends and tamarisk thickets. Channeled here by the rare occurrence of water, the animals thrive in a world of whose making? I can’t help but smile at our cosmopolitan fantasies, as New York, Paris, and Venice are all represented on the Las Vegas Strip, even while these avian sophisticates--arriving from points far north and south--are better traveled than we. They are, in fact, connoisseurs, particular in their demands. They’re attracted, in this harsh Mojave Desert, by rarified forces: by water, vegetative cover, insects, amphibians, mice.

     The arrays of high artifice on the near horizons are of course non-sequiturs, but they are more. It takes an entire, self-contained world to house a fantasy, to sustain a frail wish. That the natural environs of Las Vegas are so exacting to life lends the casinos a new poignancy: the Strip, like the wash, is exceptional, and therein lies its appeal. Do tourists, like birds, seek relief from the deprivation dominant in their world? Half understanding that they are exiled from the wild, the tourists “flock” to Las Vegas in search of risk and adrenaline. In this sense, the Strip is parallel to the wash, providing wild sustenance, albeit in a pathetically diminished form. In another sense, though, the Strip is inverse to the wash--whereas the birds seek survival in the wild, the tourist seeks a survival of the wild within.

     Walking out of the wash, I notice a local cop inspecting my solitary car. Approaching him, I’m carrying some borrowed binoculars in a small black case. The officer checks the case, supposing it to contain a firearm. When I explain to him that I was merely out to see some birds, he seems mildly amused. He directs me away from the area with a kind, dismissive wave.

Fort Rock, Oregon

tabernacle n. ME. [(O) Fr., or L tabernaculum  tent, booth, shed, dim. of taberna TAVERN]  1 Jewish Hist.  A curtained tent used as a portable sanctuary for the Ark of the Covenant and other sacred furniture during the period of exodus when the Israelites lived in the wilderness... 2 fig. A dwelling-place, a place of abode; spec. (a) the dwelling place of God; (b) the human body regarded as the temporary abode of the soul or of life...

                             

                        --The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

     In the Old Testament, the Ark is the wooden chest, which contained the Jewish law and was kept in the holiest place of the Tabernacle. In Catholic tradition, the tabernacle may hold the Eucharist, the body of Christ itself. I first learned of this back at Our Lady of the Wayside school, and it struck me as peculiar even then. Even our God, it seemed, required shelter. As an altar boy, I would approach (but never touch) his little house. It was gold and ornate, and curtained in the front, like a miniature stage. And like a stage, the tabernacle was the setting for a transformed ordinary: in the storeroom behind the altar the unconsecrated hosts (shipped in bulk, in plastic bags) were merely wafers of brittle bread, but the hosts stored in the tabernacle were more than holy. Each was God's own body, not made physical so much as abstracted: in the stead of the unfathomable whole we received a single white disc.

     Sacred food is not exclusively a Christian concept. The Jews, of course, received manna directly from Yahweh. And many traditions, each in its crucially different way, express this same motif. 

     Joseph Epes Brown, in describing the Lakota vision of the universal bison, says, "that part which represents mankind, and especially the White Buffalo Woman, is a certain meat from the shoulder of the animal." The White Buffalo Woman, like Christ, is an emissary from the realm of the sacred. Like Christ, she bore and offered a form of salvation (in the form of the sacred pipe), and she promises to return again "at the end of this world," according to Black Elk (1862-1950), "a coming which we Indians know is now not very far off." 

     The White Buffalo Woman dwelt among mankind, in her physical manifestation as food, until a systematic, if incomplete, genocide intervened. I've read of flatboats--commonly called arks--steaming the Missouri a mere hundred years ago, loaded down with nothing but buffalo tongues. I think of how the bison tilts when shot, its shoulder hitting first, crushing the woman within. I think, also, of the different tabernacles each tradition envisions: the Judeo-Christian sacred furniture vs. the Lakota living (then hunted, killed, and ingested) animal. As always, my tradition emphasizes the crafted product as the essential metaphor for our conception of life. We tend to see the earth as a result of the creation rather than as an ongoing process. We tend to see life forms as individuals rather than as the inextricable and mysterious forces they are. Just as the product metaphor is reinforced and promoted by consumer capitalism, so the illusion of the autonomous being is fostered by Western individualism. 

     The Lakota vision, though, is integrated in a more ancient and ongoing tradition, one that easily predates the entire of "civilization" as we recognize it. Recently, a group of images was discovered in a cave (the proto-tabernacle?) in southeastern Ardeche, France. According to The New York Times, "...charcoal pigments of two rhinoceroses and a bison found in the Chauvet cave...were between 30,340 and 32,410 years old." The Times also notes, as a comparison, that "the art at Lascaux, which is similar to style to the newly found cave, is thought to be about 15,000 to 17,000 years old." So not only do the oldest known paintings depict animals in a way that suggests their sacred status--there is now evidence of a consistent expression, over huge periods of human time, of an intimate and spiritual relationship with animals. 

     Black Elk said that " it was the will of Wakan-Tanka, the Great Spirit, that an animal [the buffalo] turn itself into a two-legged person in order to bring the most holy pipe to his people." Among the images at the Chauvet cave is what the archaeologists call the Sorcerer: a drawing of a creature with the head and the hump of a bison standing upright on human legs. This remarkable figure will evoke much wonder and speculation.  At the very least, it suggests the inextricability of humans and animals, predator and prey, in the ancient mind. And it hints at something more: recognition, in its fantastic imagery, of the inadequacy of the individual consciousness to convey--or influence--nature's power. Both the figure's iconic presentation and its composite character evoke a universal principle--the inadequacy of the individual--that requires no written language or rational philosophy to justify it. What this image does require is the comprehensive religious and artistic vision, with origins in the Pleistocene, that still exerted its power in Black Elk's era, and that persists even today.

                              /

     You can see the formation, on Oregon’s central plateau, from many miles away. From a distance, it looks a lot like a sleeping body on the desert. Inside the body is a small cave, where, in 1938, we discovered the tule-reed sandals, and estimated them at 10,000 years of age. They were perfectly preserved, ready to be slipped on to travel to some gathering abroad, perhaps at Celilo Falls to the north, or the Klamath marshes to the south. How different this discovery was from our Saharan adventures, where we encountered monumental feet buried in featureless sand. Here, ordinary shoes honor the memory, not of rulers or gods, but of common excursions. The survival urge that sent these people abroad to trade obsidian for dried salmon, or to gather water-lily seeds, is the same urge we feel today. The bond between us and our ancestors is the god of survival rather than the mere survival of God.

                              /

     So every living thing receives its sacred food: carp gleam like wax and snout the shallows, and even mites seek their white cakes, our dead skin cells. I believe this. I enjoy the romantic implications of my old church's namesake, Our Lady of the Wayside; I imagine a maternal protection far from home. After years of traveling the American West, I still require her comfort, and I look for it in the roadside shrines, in the cliffs where bats turn, snatching the invisible insects from the dusk. I look for it in the riverbank, where the ouzel carries moss to her nest. Or in the decrepit trees, where swallows emerge to trace their figures in the air.

     My longings on obscure backcountry roads hark back at least to sixteenth century Germany and Austria, where, according to Simon Schama, "a [Christian] cult of rustic pilgrimage developed, often marked by wayside shrines and chapels. These shrines held images of the Madonna and child carved from lime wood and were sometimes themselves crudely fashioned out of the trunk of a tree." And of course they hark back further, to Chaucer's time, and to the very time of Christ, when his disciples quite literally followed him from settlement to settlement.

     And then there is Exodus. Or Mecca. Or the ancient Buddhist habit of journeying to hermitages, of pausing at roadside shrines.

But of course the sources of my peregrinations are more remote than even these, to be found in the dawn wanderings of hunter-gatherers, the most ancient predecessors of those who tread this Oregon plateau. Perhaps, then, my origins as a pilgrim are held in the deepest recesses of human memory. The Chauvet cave contains a stone slab with the skull of a bear placed upon it, as though it were an altar. What was that skull thought to contain? How was it approached, with what reverence or fear, and what, do you suppose, was requested of the powers that resided within? 

Willamette Valley, Oregon

     Morning light adorns the firs differently than say, pines, which splinter the light, or oaks, which spangle it. And the effect changes by the minute as the sun ascends. The light depends, too, upon the density and age of the trees, and on the weather. Sometimes the firs on the ridge opposite appear almost as a wall, presenting a single surface, the depth of field short. These are the trees facing east. The firs that face north receive the sun laterally, so they stand more as individuals, their green chiaroscuro creating not only depth, but also black-green hollows between the upper, tapering portions of the trees. 

     In these hollows, imagination lolls. There is always an adjacent world, always worlds enough. The forest here is thick, convoluted, and secret. The deer go down the ravines to drink from a thin creek. They leave their elegant hoof-prints in mud, among equisetum and ferns. Downed fir, some edged-out madrone, and the under story all glower in shadow. These are like the remnant thickets I've been wandering since I was a boy. These vine maples that form a sleeping chamber for deer are the same maples that have sheltered me, even as they obscure the canopy above, and above that, the sun.

What might await us in the forest light and shadow? It might be terror. Panic, of course, is one of the legacies of an encounter with Pan, the nature deity and god of nightmares.

We pride ourselves on being self-conscious animals, and we choose that trait as a means of distinguishing ourselves from other species. But how much of our own minds do we fathom? And how much of the minds of other animals? The skull is a tabernacle, too, accommodating mystery. We ourselves contain the active link with the universe that we sometimes seek in God.

     Could the mind--or what some call the soul--form its own intimate relationships with its environment, independent of our wills or our egos? Our oldest impulses tell us this is so. The Chauvet cave affirms it, as does the Old Testament, as does science freed of its arrogance. Animated spirit, compassion, reason--these are the interior sparks that ignite our world with a full and brilliant love. 

     Because the heart is a tabernacle as well. It could be that we recognize the character of love each time we approach an ecosystem, and then we deny that recognition. James Hillman describes our cognizance: "Your emotion is corresponding to the act, the external world. That's called the significance theory of emotion. Your emotion is telling you about the significance of something. You look at a big dark forest and you feel melancholy. It's telling you something about the gestalt there." But we are afraid of projection, and there are good reasons to be cautious, as false projections endanger both us and the world. Anthropomorphism is a curse in the scientific idiom. I wonder, though, at the fear that underlies this curse. Maybe we don't want to see and feel what's out there, especially when it evokes what Hillman calls "the horrors, peculiarities, and cruelties that exist in your nature and all nature." Or perhaps a deep sense of shame at our actions against the plants and animals prevents us from an affiliation of sense and feeling with them. If each time we enter into their feeling we also enter into the diminishment and denial of that feeling, then our relationship with life becomes masochistic and pointless. 

     An acceptance of what our senses compel us to feel leads to something far greater and more fundamental than all this human hand-wringing. When our encounters with ecosystems begin to involve recognition with all of its implications intact--knowledge, gratitude, thankfulness, appreciation, reverence, kinship, honor, and address--then an intimate exchange might occur. 

Antelope Island, Great Salt Lake, Utah

A good measure of the true wilderness lover is the number of Bobcats he has seen in the wild.

--Henry Hill Collins, Complete Field Guide to American Wildlife, 1959

The number, so far, is one. Though I have heard the kits mewing in the underbrush somewhere near Takenitch Creek. And one night, sleeping in the open in the eastern Sierra Nevada, a scratching in the soil spooked my companion, who hailed from Chicago. He built the fire up high and kept a vigil half the night. I told him relax it’s probably bobcat, but I don’t think that soothed him, and finally, just as I was about to drift off to sleep, he whispered: ever seen one?

Bobcats are common, just shy. They’re a bit like spiders that way, as there’s likely a spider, right now, within three or four feet of your body. Or perhaps you could think of it as does Gary Snyder: “The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now.”

In any event, the bobcat is near enough to wherever you are, though its presence may be metaphorical (which is not to say abstract)--involved more with desire than with pain. The pain comes later.

But an animal always at a proximate place--bobcat or not--could indeed be lethal. The professor gazed over his glasses at his innocent audience and announced: “The world as received by Yeats was unacceptable, so he simply created his own.” I smiled, thinking of how the slouching beast was forever approaching, of how it never arrived. The Second Coming is always coming. Its terrible promise is promise: the pain comes later.

And any beast will teach me something, though not what I wanted to learn, like the constant lesson that my language is shit, is exactly that significant. Bobcat scat, braided with fur, is sometimes called sign, the signifier returning to soil. This is mostly how I’ve known the bobcat, by artifacts left on a trail. The animal itself is not approaching, as in poetry, but receding, as in life.

/

Thankfully there are ways to recede. An animal puts distance between us: it will usually flee. But it just might wait, in hiding, for my slow, distracted passage. Then it sinks into its world so thoroughly as to defy any separateness at all. It eludes me by becoming me, by permeating my skin. Unlike the bobcat, my eyes are unaccustomed to gloom, to fused identities, to the lie of identity itself. So the bobcat goes its way invisibly, crouched in the grotto of my mind.

I am not the same as my presence: my presence is larger than me. My presence is an encounter; it eludes me at every turn. Because it is just those turns, my life as actual acts, and that’s all. The acts aren’t even always my own. (Who went daily to watch the carcass of the bobcat fold and decay?) The acts could be another’s, or another animal’s, and even one I’ve never seen. What I once assumed was the Muse guiding my hand is actually my expanded presence, my mysterious pact with the world.

                         /

Antelope Island elongates light. The tan mountains emerging from the silvery lake allow the light to linger. The light remarks on the various surfaces so frankly as to quell any vague dissatisfaction, any quest for hidden meaning. The light is itself an announcement as it angles and falls on the sere.

One winter day the bobcat simply revealed itself. I was sitting in an array of rocks overlooking the beach when I noticed, some thirty yards away, a subtle fluttering in the wind. Atop a boulder a large bobcat sat, fur ruffling, surveying the island. It showed no aversion to me. Forced down from the higher areas by snow, I supposed, it hunted the island plain. Maybe daylight hunting was required in these leaner times. But whatever its necessity, the cat met mine easily: I just stared and stared. Through binoculars, the animal’s image was so intimate that I felt for a moment like a voyeur to its survival. But then the ease of the cat, its sureness in the broad sun, assured me of the rightness of our common presence.

     Our common presence, the bobcat and I, is the only defense against existential isolation. Our presence together corrects the error of mistaking “existence before essence” for “pull[ing] oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness,” as Nietzsche says. The fact that the cat and I arise on this island simultaneously-- rather than sequentially, or by cause and effect--insures both our community and our autonomy. We are intended forms only in one another’s presence. Isolated, we are vagaries.

                              /

How the bobcat’s ancestors arrived on the island is no great mystery: the waters of the lake fluctuate greatly. (Freemont, the explorer, rode his horse here in the mid-1800’s.) But what is the bobcat’s connection, right now, to the mainland? Could an ancestral past somehow act as an aegis against isolation? Inherited traits express themselves in a context that is not necessarily inherited. Contexts inevitably change over time; environments evolve. So adaptation is a matter of avoiding isolation within a given set.

I’m too narrow, of course, in positing local geography as the only nexus to the larger world, but place specifics are primary. The fluctuation among these specifics--water levels, weather, rodent populations, etc.--designates a fluid passage among any form involved, whether bobcat, prey, or human visitor. In this sense, proximity as a general kind of metonymy allows for the passage of forms within, but not confined to, the specific place. We arise, not out of nothing, but from a field of proximity. There is nothing fixedly essential about it: the field, in fact, is open. And it’s especially open today, as human and cat are edged by an island into each other’s sight.

Upper Erma Bell Lake, Cascade Range, Oregon

     In late September, the trail into the Erma Bell Lakes offers a profusion of berries. Ripe thimbleberries, my favorite wild fruit, are deep red domes among their maple-like leaves. Orange bunchberries, those miniature dogwoods, cover the ground. There's poisonous baneberry, the occasional huckleberry, and then a real prize--at the Upper Lake, I come across a patch of blueberries, big, purple, and crowned. To devour blueberries in the woods is to experience our sensual moment on this earth, to know something of the myriad, in time. In another season the trove might have been strawberries. On another occasion the omnivore may have been a bear. The taste of wild blueberries is unlike anything else, unlike its cousin the huckleberry, and certainly unlike its domesticated kin. So the character of the moment is unique, and it does not refute the individualism I hold so dear. But in the privacy of my feast, I sense a continuum of moments, and participation. Among the rhododendron, the paintbrush, the aster and the bear grass, another in a series of individuals thrives.

     As I continue my hike, this notion of continuum is translated by my walking into further experience. There's a rustle of ducks--a pair on a boggy pond--taking off into the woods. Might they be wood ducks? What else would fly into the dense firs? In straining my eyes to see, I'm suddenly aware of a tree across the bog adorned in scarlet. The incongruous red bands are draped so luxuriously that I think they might be ribbons. Making my way through the dense under story, I stumble upon it: a mountain ash, its berries cascading improbably from nearly bare branches. Two gray jays happen along and casually snatch a few from the profusion. So one event leads easily to another. Ducks segue to berries and berries to jays. 

     And back on the trail, I spy another implausibility: a single blue oblong berry, held erect between two leaves. Its color is peculiarly metallic and deep. It's Queen's Cup, a lily, and the royalty of the name, though it probably applies to the white flowers, seems deserved. What I love about the berry, I think, is its distinction, as subtle as it is among other, more profuse forms on the forest floor. In my walking experience, the Queen's Cup berry presents itself as singular, and thus as precious. Knowing that the grouse sometimes nibble on them, or that the sheen of their blue pearls holds the promise of a lily, I'm allowed into the folds of light between shifting forms. My lust becomes lustrous, constant and transformed. And why not? Eros wants it all anew. Eros has never abandoned these woods, even in autumn, in the face of ice and snow. Eros wears its jewels in each season, the facets bright, or sometimes gloomy. In certain lights the odd blue berry must cast a shadow even stranger and more lovely than itself.

Washburn Beach, Oregon

     Our bodies are only erotic in very particular circumstances. We are flawed and miraculous to the point of glowing, and we give off the most ordinary light. Haloes and auras aside, our skins mostly reflect the light outside and present it again to the seeing world. We're common this way, and recognizable. Mystery and allure come later, with the introduction of shadow, with the depth chiaroscuro suggests.

     We share a common interior life, too, and here I am speaking literally. We are horrified or astounded by the body's viscera, and yet the body merely expresses nature's motifs. Walking the beach, I come across some stranded jellies: flat, round, and translucent, scalloped along their rims. They are living tissues cast from the body of the sea. Then I find a thicker jelly, like an amorphous organ, with something small and red-purple still pulsing inside. And a dead cormorant, its neck broken, its head and beak elegant, its underwing quills (so orderly, like piano keys, or corrugations) the color of mussels--blue, violet, and milky white. 

     On a flat, wet expanse, gulls and crows are gouging the sand. They're after, I discover, bloodworms, red and bluish creatures that look a lot like arteries or veins. I remember the moons rising in my fingernails, and the oaks like lungs that respirate the sky. I wonder who has laid my body all out in array, and whether I should feel repulsed. I revel in a place set between light and shadow, neither exterior nor interior: the body, as it is, sparkling in the green sea foam.

     Is this nether-place the thin house of Eros?  The beach is an elongated figure, self-sufficient, and stretching like a cat between land and sea. My own skin defines me in the world more than it divides me from it. Membranes seal, but they also exchange. Minerals and water seep in, seep out with a slow ease.  The light patterns the surf in the same way it plays on my arm-hairs. The salty sheen that glitters on my skin comes from without and within.

     I've decided to seek my peace with Eros, to receive the gift I'm given, unexpectedly carnal as it is. I gazed at my own body in a mirror today, and for the first time fully noticed the constellation of moles from neck to shoulders to belly to back. I've worn these most of my life, but I've ignored them in favor of a sculptural version of self, one more blank and ideal. How long can one live before he realizes that visual idealism has to end, that scenery is false? Plastic debris mingles with the kelp, and clearcuts mar the slopes above. The reclining nudes I've encountered don't exactly grace the landscape; this life is not an idyll at all.

Eros is everywhere, not innocent of disease. Images themselves are profoundly imperfect, no matter what perfection they portray. This is why we crave them, and why we create them as if they were flesh. Like flesh, they will fade. Yet what can we bestow on the world but innocent surfaces, hinting all the time at more? Naive and loving, we live among our images, knowing better all the while. Maybe we conjure better images as a way of keeping faith with the world. Only love accommodates this contradiction and reversal, attracting Eros to us as if we were gods.

    

Gillette, Wyoming

High Wyoming plains, scarred with erosion and snow: so few animals visible the whole three hundred miles. I’ve imagined twisted birds in the wires, poisoned lambs laid out for coyotes, even sickly, grazing cattle, but this winter is barren of disease and life, and even barren of death. The ranchers, tired of atrocities, stay home and watch TV. Now and again a blue light flickers in a trailer or a shack.

We can’t go back, to the present, to cowboys’ slickers agleam in the rain, to a time when they flock into town from the ranches, from the oilrigs, from the plank-brown prairie. They want only company and nourishment. They do not bend in their bodies: they twist and snap. Their hands brown, smelling of leather, they lean like snow fences over the bar. Our loss, and their loss, too: to become a walking archetype is hard on ordinary boots.

Meanwhile, truth is stubbornly fixed, a constellation of bright clichés. Only those who lie awake under cloudless, chilling skies might see it wheel and fail. The verities are wrestled down by the very ones who proclaimed them. The calf, ceremoniously roped, is dragged a few yards as it flails.

a kitchen table in the American West

     The kitchen is chaotic with food and gaudy packaging, table scraps and towels and discarded forks. Like a landscape, I think, strewn with human messes, and in places we call pristine, strewn with forests or glaciers or streams. Or in the desert, where blankness is a presence, ornamented here and there with boulders, scented with rain-bitten sage. This domestic life must be grinding on me: I long to be traveling by night, propelled among the folds of the earth, listening to the mysterious radio, and absorbing, in my bones, the low howl outside the windshield glass.

     A lot has been said about the American need for the road. In an interview, Gary Snyder once characterized Jack Kerouac's hero, Dean Moriarity, as "the cowboy crashing": “The source of this thing is--what do you see when you move across the Plains day after day? That's a mind-bending experience, a wild ecology and an unpopulated terrain. That becomes an archetype immediately for America, literally mythical. What was intended to be done was that you should step forth into wild space; what you end up doing a hundred years later is driving back and forth in cars as fast as you can. Space becomes translated into speed.”

     Which pretty much describes my own life in my twenties, when sleep wasn't such a necessity. But now I must reconcile that hectic legacy with the calamity at the sink: the cowboy comically wrecked in the kitchen, staring at his own face reflected in dishwater. Narcissus become homely. Entropy. All those greasy pans.

     The cowboy is perpetually crashing. Legendary writers have landed in the strip-mall America they curse. Their books and images adorn the shelves of chain bookstores; they flare up as they go down in cellophane flames. Men: hardly cowboys, some of them, but always cowboys crashing. Acquainted with the ghost of Hemmingway. Men of the land. Their expression of their masculinity was wrought as a gift. It's no use asking for something else--this is what we were given. And we might find it actually poignant and strong, if we care receive it, if we care to understand the forces that work against the giving.

And then we might set the old work aside, and examine the terrain for signs of the new. Because Hemmingway’s Idaho is now overrun with the compounds and bunkers of the Aryan nation. With luxury barns, second homes for the urban rich. While at the same time hosting the largest contiguous wilderness in the lower forty-eight states. What cowboy is suited to ride this eclectic range?

Strangely, I’m left thinking of the complement and supposed opposite of the cowboy--I think of the conformist, in the figure of the traveling salesman. I remember Arthur Miller’s play, or Eudora Welty’s masterful story. I think of my own dad, a salesman, driving through the Midwestern landscape with as much ease as he could muster, given the demands of five children and a perennially sick wife. I imagine his face, sometimes, as I wind my own late way through the Western mountains.

     In the figure of the conformist, wildness--conceived falsely as an unlimited natural impulse--clashes with the domestic demands of families and social orders, isolating the powerless man, and demanding a masculine mythology to occupy his void. This is all complementary to the cowboy, of course--it is the very ground for the cowboy mystique--and it’s also the common, and less romantic, face of the cowboy crashing.

The cowboy, even while tending dutifully to his domestic herd, is described as independent. We have adopted the figure of the cowboy--not to be confused with actual ranch workers--as the medium between the demands of the wild and of the domestic. (And so he hovers somewhere between the high mountain meadows and my dilapidated kitchen.) Such a double-bind would always make for a tragic character, but now that tragedy has been compounded: once an exile from society, now the cowboy is cast out from his natural paradise as well, alienated from his home on the range. And he cannot--will not--come to terms with this fact. His exile is his very identity. That's why he's always the puer, the boy, as reconciliation with the way things actually are is an issue of maturity.

     And this, apparently, suits us: America, bent on a culture of immaturity, continues to value youth over experience and whim over wisdom. In our grandiose adolescence, it has not yet occurred to us to really honor limits in the West.

The Grand Tetons. Wyoming

     Christ enters the West right here, where his missionaries have prepared the ground. Christian imagery--the Cathedral group of peaks, crosses of snow in the mountains, or the beams of light called Jacob’s ladders that emit from the Tetons towards evening: all are evidence of an imposition.

     The cross had entered the New World centuries earlier, of course, from Spain, and taken root in the American Southwest, in mixed-blood New Mexico, where even now pinion is burning in appeasement. And in California, Father Junipero Serra, weary from his endeavors, slept on a hard plank bed at Carmel, his quill pen the only flourish in his cell. But nowhere does the brutal Christ (for what other Christ could endure these lands?) enter the landscape so grandly, so indifferently, than in these Wyoming ranges. Here, grandeur and indifference, it turns out, cling to one other by necessity. As we can’t bear the scale and rigor of the geological earth, we aestetisize the mountains by alluding to Christ. Whereas Christ the emissary once linked us to an impersonal and metaphysical father, in the West he links us to physical mountains, to mass and latent energy, to barriers, to time. The oldest rock in North America is thrust up before our faces, and presents a face itself: exposed to our needle-like contemplation, the Tetons slowly erode.

     In the park we encounter that Christian vision in the form of a rustic chapel. The Chapel of the Transfiguration, near Menor’s Ferry crossing, is intentionally humble, in the manner of a cabin to house our Christ. The architecture of unmilled wood stresses its authenticity, by which we mean its closeness to an original state. It retains the integrity of timber, of an assembly of half-fallen trees that shelters elk and other mammals, each in its vulnerable season. By deviating little from its environment, the rustic structure qualifies our human claim to separateness. It’s open to decay, much more so than our urban cathedrals: it’s meant to return to the earth. It’s even beautiful as it fails, as the chinks and rude openings allow the elements the cabin was built to forestall. I think of the frontier cabins that housed suffering and premature death, that enclosed despair so well. That stifled the feminine. That hardened the men.

     Inside the hushed chapel, one wall bears a blessing for climbers as they ascend “the mountain which is Christ.” Another wall bears a little painting of this very scene: the chapel among the summits. Needless to say, the self-reflective image pales, is nearly invisible. Because kneeling here, we’ve framed the Tetons more effectively to our Western apprehension. A rectangular window behind the altar, beyond the simple cross, crops the magnificent Teton Range like an image by Thomas Moran. For us, the mountain must be thus defined in order to function, whether as icon or as actual Christ. Here, housing our God in an interior allows us also to frame him in the world.

                              /

     Visual idealism holds the line between detailed nature and our cultural apperception. It holds a pose, and it holds the key, supposedly, to personal revelation. And its hold on me is strong. A given idealism both directs and interprets what I tend to notice on the land. It’s no wonder: Jackson Hole has always been characterized as imagery by European/American culture; agriculture and ranching here are marginal at best. Where else but in the Tetons is a major peak named for the artist who portrayed it? Moran, via his paintings, was instrumental in bringing the Tetons to the public’s attention in the 19th century. Ultimately, his imagery contributed significantly to the effort to protect and preserve the area as a National Park. Images, however momentary, make claims to being timeless and unchanging. In this case the ideal of the imaged landscape predated, and eventually was transferred to, the actual land.

     Ever since Moran, we’ve suffered the Tetons and their wildlife represented in clichéd photographs and badly executed paintings. But now a new urgency accompanies these images. On this weekend, as a matter of fact, Jackson Lake Lodge is hosting the Wildlife Film Festival, with its emphasis on “new markets and new media.” So even while amorous moose amble through the flats just outside, the filmmakers assemble in a darkened auditorium. Behind them, in the emptied great room, there’s a photographic exhibit of endangered species, video loops of animal lives, and mention of a camera attached to a sperm whale’s back. So as all the hype is informed by extinction and digital imaging, our choices become increasingly stark. It’s all a matter of yes or no, yes or no, repeated to the point of “high definition”: a clarity of image based entirely in the binary.

     The tourists, too, are obsessed with imaging, to the point of endangering themselves and the local wildlife. A woman darts into traffic, long-lens at the ready, in pursuit of a befuddled moose. Nearby, the National Wildlife Art Museum features crowd-pleasing images by Bierstadt and Russell.

     What am I to make of this proliferation of imagery? Why do scenery and the conventions of nature photography persist? I sometimes think of such visual idealism as a kind of grieving, a reaction to a serious loss. As the Christian logos of a created nature fades, it is preserved only as a specimen. Thus logos moves towards the consumable logo. Such specimens tend to be ideal, and of course greatly simplified--removed from their complex natural environs. Even human manipulation, necessary to the specimen, is downplayed in the specimen’s “pure" isolation. So it’s not such a far reach from the religious icon to the naturalist’s cabinet to the contemporary nature calendar; nor is the gap between nature photography and advertising so wide.

Visual idealism closes these distances by broadening other, more basic differences. Surface is distanced from substance by heightening certain desirable features while eliminating all others, thus forsaking nature’s complexity in favor of the viewer’s desire. If this distancing resembles the tactics of fashion photography and advertising’s depiction of human bodies, it’s because our desire is caught up in the fantasy of eternal youth, if not, exactly, eternal innocence. This fantasy of course requires an idealized, if not an entirely revised, memory to support it--a constant, manufactured sequence of images. In this sense, what the nature photograph and the super-model shot alike actually depict is our powerlessness against entropy and death. Every photographic image indeed has its haunting negative. The proper literary gloss of such idealistic imagery is nothing but a photographic gloss, a shimmering distance between the viewer and the viewed.

                              /    

On the banks of Two Oceans Lake, moose-prints pool with water. The shells of aquatic snails gleam, pale, some artlessly broken. Two autumn gentians, yet to open, lie hidden in brittle grass. This morning I’m hiking around the lake. When I emerge momentarily from dense forest, I notice otters swimming near shore. A few stray ducks and a merganser glide in the middle distance. On the other side of the lake: willows and blonde meadows beneath a rise of timbered hills.

As scenery, the Teton distances recede. The sharp, steep profile of the mountains and the sink of Jackson Hole compose large dramatic intervals. But here at the lake, these intervals are smaller, experience more gradual and near. I submit to uneventful events--an elk bugling at hearing’s edge, the pale nakedness of a downed spruce log, a moment of cherished autumn heat. These take on the sheen of the lake, a light so frank I can hardly take it in.  

Snake River Plain, Idaho

On Idaho's Snake River plain, the Pilot Buttes--three isolated mountains--plot the Oregon Trail. Two were formed by molten rock released from crustal weaknesses, and one is simply a bulge, pushed up by heaving lava below. Those same flows produced a vast black field, as the lava cooled to basalt, all braided, scored and convoluted. It’s now a knobby reptilian skin, named Hell’s Half Acre, that heats and cools with severe conditions like any devilish snake.

Yet this God-forsaken field is perforated with caves, clefts and little alcoves, where temperatures are remarkably constant. These reprieves, to paraphrase St. Augustine, are the caverns of memory. What survives in them is not obvious, but obscured as a matter of course. Where water seeps, ferns and mosses recall, in green silence, the tropics that once succeeded here. Rodents hide and breed here, safe for the moment from roving coyotes. Coyotes in turn will den in the caves, their pups enclosed in a double womb. Rabbits may venture in. And rattlesnakes will gather here, in writhing heaps that go dormant at winter’s signal.

Even now, wind is depositing loess in cavities in the rock. Slow-growing junipers emerge from the soil, and in a mere four hundred years, their sheaves of shredded bark unraveling, tell of a twisted survival, a life once coaxed from indifference and nothingness, now proclaiming only itself.

Or is it in fact proclaimed? The sagebrush, the arrowhead, the visible buttes: what was a scattered array converges, indicating a way.

And not incidentally, this lava field is split by the Interstate highway. Travelers drift toward Yellowstone, or to their hyper-imagined homes. Always the field of endeavor is scored by the strange longevity of desire.

Yellowstone Basin, Wyoming/Montana

Prometheus. . .went up to heaven, and lighted his torch at the chariot of the sun, and brought down fire to man. With this gift man was more than a match for all other animals. It enabled him to make weapons wherewith to subdue then; tools with which to cultivate the earth; to warm his dwelling, so as to be comparatively independent of climate; and finally to introduce the arts and coin money, the means of trade and commerce.

                                                            --Bullfinch

                             

He brought us the gift. He keeps some still in his watery vaults at Yellowstone, so as to remind us of the wild origins of fire, of a time when all was Chaos, when earth and air and fire and water were confused in a shapeless mass.

It was Prometheus’s task to endow humans with something to ennoble us. In giving us fire, he also gave us story, for now we could gather on those winter nights when only speech would endure.

We spoke. Ancestors and animals, and, indeed, ancestral animals haunted our pliant stories. Plants and minerals proceeded through the lore. Prometheus liked this earthly quality of story, as the smoke of cooking-fires carried the words to his ears.

For a time, our stories were Prometheus’s only respite from the ordeal imposed upon him by Jupiter. Even while a vulture pecked at Prometheus’s liver, and even while that liver was renewed only to be preyed upon again, our words were as a salve to him. In this way we were unknowingly noble. In this way we served something greater than ourselves.

This was a Golden Age, which of course is just another story we tell. Prometheus might well ask: what’s so ideal about being chained to a rock, having one’s liver torn out and eaten time and time again? A massive legacy of suffering accompanies our stories into the present time. And that legacy is carried, in part, by our animal companions, by those who would soothe or devour us.

Take the vulture. Is it true, as the voice from the whirlwind proclaims to Job, that “there is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen”? Is there a place before or beyond suffering where we might reside? Is that place always concealed from us? Or is it perhaps a mountain in India named Vulture Peak, where the Buddha transmitted the dharma to Mahakashypapa, where, according to Dogen, “the authenticity of the transmission is unhidden through all time”?

The vulture, for the Christian adventurer, marks failure. Think of the buzzards circling the conquistadors, the prospectors, or the Western pony-soldiers. Remember the American settlers, huddled in their flimsy wagons, or prone in the shade of their oxen, with their faded bibles and family lore. They looked to the sky with anxiety. They looked to the earth with zeal.         

                    /

On Mt. Washburn, a grizzly traces a ridge, knocking rocks off the edge with precision, plotting a cool chaotic line where basalt falls into the snow.

Prometheus brought us the gift, all right, but now it’s the earth that gives and receives. We can sense, in the profile of a bison, the forward-leaning integrity of bluffs, and a blunt determination. It’s as if the bluffs are animalized--even down to the mottled fur, the gradations of tan on the shoulders, or the shadowy jet of the flanks. When a bird lights on the bison’s back, expecting insects, the exchange is complete. The animal’s a habitat, and the habitat’s alive.

When herds of these worlds dot the flats, or move laconically over humps in the land, the vertigo the hunter felt may well overwhelm us. Amidst the dizzying melding of forms, we’re flexed and then relaxed. We shift ‘til we’re all shaken out. The frost on the sagebrush is exhilarating, but soon it melts in the elevated sun.

Then the more subtle traces emerge: microbial mats in the hot springs, thriving at 160 degrees, or a locust, black and glossy as lacquer, crossing the trail. An elk is bugling on the edge of hearing’s range, and the sound is like paradise--all high promise and brevity. It’s a mockery, to us, of the longevity of our desire. The call rises up, an irregular spire, and vacillates in the wind.

Do we now begin, strangely, to long for a religion? If only the churches were this ethereal, the dogma elusive and fine. If only the faithful went over the land with this intent and lightness, gathering rather than smothering, and trailing wild harems in their wakes.

This Promethius with the torn side--part carrion, part regeneration: isn’t he a precursor to Christ?

                              /

But Utopia is not a national park. It’s a cruel and a pure white city. It dissolves like salt with each heavy rain, and then it’s covered in snow. White is redundant, and purity stained with its own peculiar effluent--strings of minerals and primitive life forms that cling to the city in chains.

Do we require an emblem of perfection? An elk skull and rack, dragged into the center of a pit, gleams in the autumn sun. Soon the snow will fill the hole, as neat and soothing and senseless as any nursery rhyme. And as innocent, of course, because it’s a matter of course: that’s all. Picture, then, what can’t be pictured--the skull buried in whiteness, marked only by a vague concavity. A place where light gently pools. Bluish snow, Yellowstone winter: not the heart of the West at all, but rather the West’s new memory.

                              /

Prometheus is watching a raven, at a distance, dip in and out of a pinion pine. He sees life begun as a fleck, an aberration, against the grain. He was the one who fashioned our human figure from wet earth, who let us dry and harden in the sun. He sees now that the sun has spawned its opposite, a tiny darkness spun out like a tale--with unpredictable twists.

The sun won’t spurn its offspring, but neither will it favor the human, or for that matter, the raven--scorched and chilled by turns, a cold intelligence will enter our bodies, warmed by muscular energy, channeled by the senses. It seems so willful to Prometheus, this eccentric raven, until he notices his own discerning, shaped by the alien speck of a bird.

All day he’s been scanning the slopes for wildlife, each rock and anomaly potentially creature. When he tries to lift the rock he’s chained to, he recalls that, during the Pleistocene, melting ice sheets set these Yellowstone boulders down. He longs, then, for a return to a cold and Golden Age. He wants to return the rock to its glacial shelf. This he conceives of as freedom.

No wonder the ravens seem amused, mocking the world with their voices. The vulture greets Prometheus again. Mouths continuously open and close, and the world is constantly moving. Mountains thrust up or mountains worn down, or seasonal fast migrations--folly after folly ensues, and still the earth comes rasping.

    

                              /

At Blacktail Ponds, two wolves are tracing the water’s edge, pausing occasionally to probe flotsam with their snouts and their paws. Further in the backcountry, a grizzly explores the perimeter of a wetland as she makes her way toward hibernation. Burnt aspens limn gullies and draws, and badger burrows dot the plains. Shed elk antlers trim the land, gleaming under lowering clouds. Everywhere surfaces are caressed or adorned, examined or shrouded with moving shadows. Where surfaces delve and interact, in those physical pockets: entropy and regeneration mix, become inseparable.

Prometheus surveys these scenes with supreme detachment. His gaze falls on the wild as sunlight, as just another material glaze. As a creator-god, he might lend life like the sun, but he does so indifferently now, without purpose or plan. Fire, that metonym of the sun used for our purposes, has a wild origin, one we were forced to recognize when Yelowstone went up in flames. Prometheus’s first gift, civilization, has somehow gone awry. His second gift, then, wildfire, sweeps in to return us to a more primal aspiration: actual survival.

Now all’s a presentation, faced and multi-faceted. On a sojourn in the wilderness, the elite destination’s abandoned in favor of being among. Right here, in a draw arrayed with timber and bones, there are no more stale exotica and no more stifling homes--there are only fixed and loosening points.

Fine. And the long exteriors, the life-cycles eons old, the persistent crickets: how do these endure? Lives cure in the sun like animal skins, frayed at the edges. Momentos. They fade in the ordinary light, like parchment, antiquated and frail. Lives are not even as durable as the skeletons that contained them, and yet life insists. It spreads out as an airy membrane, with rifts and textures of its own, enlivening the caves and the hollows, the sockets and the interstices. It conforms to those absences so precisely as to deny our logical nihilism, and displace our vast despair.

Cape Arago, Oregon

     Capes: essays that edge toward meaninglessness, tomes that nudge the sea. The moon pulls. The earth rotates and revolves. Among these motions, a gate made of degrees is perpetually opening. At high tide, twice a day, the moon creates a bulge in the water, which the land moves through. So this coast is wading in the ocean, ever on the ocean’s edge. This is our form of immersion, our answer to the rumors of the fall. If we don’t dwell fully in Eden, it’s not because we’ve been cast out. It’s because we’re always arriving, like a cape plunging into the tides.

                              /

     At Christmas time they assemble the lights on the timber baron’s old estate, and the public wanders through. There on the sea-cliffs are formal gardens, offset and surrounded by the deep thickets and cedars of that coast. The grounds are arrayed in lovely, artfully placed strands, in spindles, routes, and whorls of colored lights. Each bulb is especially poignant, given the immensity of the black ocean and woods all around, given the indifference of the surf as it hammers the rocks below. Each signals an intent against a field of demise, the same as a distant lighthouse beacon, or a flashing buoy, or a crab boat’s running lights as it negotiates the sea. Each documents a futile hope: that we may beguile the darkness into serving as a backdrop for our frail endeavors on earth.

     Each bulb, alone, is indeed frail, is beautifully forlorn in its isolation. But assembled, the lights become figures, with claims to make on their ground.

Nowhere in this pageant is Christian imagery to be seen. Instead, the lights create some strikingly accurate animal imagery: one display depicts pelicans in formation just over an actual rooftop; another shows, in sequence, an orca breaching and then turning in the air, then splashing back in the surf, its ponderous mass rejoining the water in a freefall that diagrams joy. Nearby, there’s the outline of a gray whale swimming at the surface with her calf--actual size--and periodically blowing. And jellyfish, viewed from below, dangle their tentacles like garlands and streamers of light. Knowing that actual jellies glow in the proximate sea, that they assemble in clumps and strands according to the tides, this last image, at first angelic, becomes more organically representative than angels ever could. The entire estate is an American crèche, the flora and fauna attending a Christ that takes no human form, or whose infant, soft, and developing body is easily diffused.

The placid and the miniscule lights depict an omnipresence. God become man was an achievement, a civilizing feat. But Christ become various, become wild and atmospheric, is a miracle indeed. Because here God is realized as his acts, and here Christ applies himself to a whole system of criss-crossing forces. “The only thing that is Christian,” said Nietzsche, “is the Christian mode of existence, a life such as he had who died on the Cross.” So the wintry American cross, absent from this Christmas scene, is also absent of a dying Christ. It’s blissfully barren of the human form, sufficient unto itself.  

 Cape Blanco, Oregon

     The cape’s ensconced in fog today; the lighthouse is more a presence than an actual, thick-walled tower. Viewed from behind, the beacon is vague, indifferent, warding off arrival like a ghost, remote and yet persistent. The ghosts themselves so often associated with lighthouses revel, I’d guess, in this same disembodied command.

The dead abound: on the road to the south face of the cape, I visit the graves of the Irish who settled this coast, so far from their suffering ancestors. What separation they must have experienced. But perhaps these settlers’ suffering, here among the gales, united them at last with their kin. Maybe their lives on the land, rather than their afterlives, comprised a sort of reunion. Certainly the Irish were somehow familiar with these cliffs, with these smoldering greens, with the heaths and with lichens that cling to the ground. Those who dug peat in the old country knew where energy gathered. Those who clutched rosaries must have noticed the runners and blunt leaves of the bearberry.

                              /

     The beach south of the cape is long, littered with big driftwood, and bisected by transient streams. Not far offshore is the Blanco Reef, a sequence of finned, windowed, and elegant rocks. I walk for hours in various sands: hard-packed, bronzy, and flecked with black debris, or else loose and pale, animated by gusts, and then deceptively still. On a cliff wall there are fossil snails, released from the landscape by tides. They're white and chalky, numerous, bland. They’re thin and fragile, collapsing in my hands. These bodies, once and twice removed, are mock emblems of appetite. I’m tempted to call them ghostly, but they’re too material for that. Secretions from mollusk bodies, replaced exactly by minerals, have become an accretion

--have become a wall--that crumbles at my touch.

Such transience seems at first to deny death, as a ghost might, I suppose. But in actuality, transience emphasizes the transformation that the ghost unwisely resists. The death of the individual snail is a miniscule portion of the world that I witness. Its death, not even a catalyst, is more a condition for the process to unfold: one condition among many. So the fossils indicate what I tend to forget--that the human condition is not characterized primarily by death, or even by suffering. That death and suffering are themselves conditions, expressed yet not subsumed by our humanity, and applied to a larger transmutation. We, though soon to be abandoned, convey demise to novel contexts. We are the vehicles for our portable fates.

“Oh yes,” Virginia Woolf has a dead moth express: “Death is stronger than I am.” Stronger, yes, but smaller, I would guess, than even that transient insect. For the moth conveys its cargo like pollen, a granular death. This is why we look to the landscape: to experience ourselves as nodes, and thus to know our own deaths as both tiny and necessary, as potent but ultimately small. It’s not death but death’s residue--powder from a moth’s wing, or the chalky dust of snails--that allows, in due time, for disclosure.


Highway 264, the Hopi reservation, Arizona

A powerful passage from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition offers this critique of Cartesian introspection: “The ‘seen tree’ found in consciousness through introspection is no longer the tree given in sight and touch, an entity in itself with an unalterable identical shape of its own. By being processed into an object of consciousness on the same level with a merely remembered or entirely imaginary thing, it becomes part and parcel of this process itself, of that consciousness, that is, which one knows only as an ever moving stream.”

Coming around a bend in the highway on the Hopi reservation, I find myself wedged between geological walls. The little pass funnels the huge desert light, and creates for me a high-speed intimacy, as my shadow shifts through the earth. On the side of the road is a strange glittering: a conical juniper has been trimmed for Christmas, its garland quivering in the breeze.

Ah, I think--the more-than-seen tree at last. This is the Christian version of the Hopi singularity that Leslie Marmon Silko has described: “The bare vastness of the Hopi landscape emphasizes the visual impact of every plant, every rock, every arroyo. Nothing is overlooked or taken for granted. Each ant, each lizard, each lark is imbued with great value simply because the creature is there, simply because the creature is alive in a place where any life at all is precious.”

So this is the heightened tree, its symbolic ornament obvious, its artifice like a signal fire on a mesa infused with extra-ordinary beings. And I imagine an age in which each tree and boulder is thus arrayed, in which Cartesian introspection is heightened to the point of such obviousness as to become more easily accountable to Arendt’s sharp critique.

Such an age might also highlight a positive Christian component of Western consciousness: nature celebrating the birth of Christ, and proclaiming his constant entry to earth. “Nature” is, after all, from the Latin nasci: to be born. Does the perpetual birth of nature sufficiently offset its perpetual entropy? If nature is seen as inherently sufficient, then the answer must be yes. The answer must be perpetually yes in order to address the ongoing question. And the answer must be perpetually yes to conform to the birth it describes.

Of course: my return to the tree is ever mediated, but it is mediated by various earthly forces in concert with my consciousness. Subjectivity of course seeps in, but it conforms to place-specific gaps and absences, and it also trims each tree and boulder, enhancing a given form via artifice rather than simply shrouding it.

Or so it might be, in my imagined age. If utopian visions seem misplaced at the feet of these Hopi mesas, it’s because the Hopi recognize, in their series of replaced worlds, the inevitability of corruption and arrogance among us. And yet their origins, too, and their very identity involve a recurring emergence, a promised restoration for those who keep to the Creator’s plan.

III. All That Remains

prelude: speech

     Speech has fled, and has fallen. What remains? Its wake is greater and more profound than speech itself could ever be. And this wake is not merely aesthetic, or even wise. Lyotard says this: “It is not Jesus' beauty that makes him true. He cannot even be approached through the senses; his incarnation is not his presence in the world, it is our tears sprung from joy. He is thus sublime, an insensible affection, a sensible presence in the heart only. How can the affection be present in the pulpit if the preacher only speaks of it? It is not up to him to make people cry. One cries in response to grace.”

One cries. Or cries out, in a responsitory refrain. Then one refrains again from speaking, and again inhabits the grotto from which speech has fled.

Celilo Falls, Columbia River

I’m following the Columbia River west through Oregon. It’s March: it happens to be my birthday. Rain and snow obscure the river to my right. Last night, exhausted, with the dusk deepening at my back, I pulled off the highway to sleep in a parking area overlooking the water. It happened to be the site where the Columbia, here actually a reservoir, is backed up behind the dam that--in the year of my birth--obliterated the ancient fishing ground called Celilo Falls.

“It happened.” “To be.” Again I return to my existential homeland, a place both familiar and strange in its thoroughgoing aura of loss. A place that forces numerous apologia. A wayside. A necessary aside, not to be gazed at directly, but known only by a sidelong glance.

Carl Safina writes: “The natives called the Columbia River Nch’i-Wana, Big River, and for a length of time no one can really conceive of they had caught fish at Celilo Falls, standing on makeshift platforms over the roaring white curling cataracts and whirlpools, and dipping salmon from the maelstrom with long nets or spearing the leaping ones midair . . .  The Celilo Falls area became a major communication center where diverse cultures made alliances, exchanged stories, and spoke about religion and their history, in peace. What days those must have been, trading fine crafts and feasting and sharing tales and dances.

When the Dalles Dam backed up the river in 1957 and Celilo Falls was submerged, Indians stood on the bank, watching.”

Safina also notes this: “Celilo Falls was the navel of the Columbia, a birth scar, the pull and tuck cinching water, salmon, and humans tight together, a center of spiritual and defining power for the people, and of evolutionary challenge for the fish. Its removal deforms the figure almost too hideously to look at directly. Perhaps that is why, although there is a black-and-white photo of Celilo Falls in almost every home and office I enter, I have never seen it hung as the center of attention.”

So the memory of the obliterated falls is veiled in a necessary obscurity. Obscurity descends where grief and respect mingle. Once I mentioned the falls to an artist of the Walla Walla tribe. He gently corrected my pronunciation: see-lie-low. And then he fell silent.

                         /

Martin Buber observes that “It is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every Thou must become an It in our world." This inevitable lapse can be carried to the point of genocide. Let’s not quibble: one of the implicit goals of Western expansionism and Manifest Destiny was cultural genocide. The flooding of Celilo Falls was a late byproduct of that very effort. And so every act now committed in the American West is post-genocidal. Though various Indian nations live, they also live in a post-genocidal state. Our best philosophies have no solvent to abolish this historical fact.

    

                         /

Image: the wide, glossy water over Celilo Falls. Water drowning water. What purports to obliterate the memory of the falls actually preserves it. The replacement-image, in its coy falseness, its utter difference from the original, does the opposite of depict; but in so doing it constantly summons the original image to mind. And then it summons the original presence to mind, which is a slippage away from imagery. Thus the original becomes peripheral in our vision--like all those off-placed photographs of the falls--and in losing its centrality gains an all-pervasiveness mimetic of God.

God, according to the Judaic and also the Islamic traditions, must not be imaged, less He become merely an idol, an icon rather than an all-pervading presence. And yet God, too, has become an object among objects. Religion, apparently, insists on it. Maybe this objectification of God makes the objectification of our fellow creatures relatively easy. Buber says that humanity “thirsts for something spread out in time, for duration. Thus God becomes an object of faith. Originally, faith fills the temporal gaps between the acts of relation; gradually, it becomes a substitute for these acts.” This, of course, is a false objectification, and Buber describes its counterpart: “Life before the countenance is life in the one actuality, the only true ‘objectivum’.”

So the image exposes the whole Western adventure. It's as Buber feared: “The trust-in-spite-of-all of the fighter who knows the remoteness and nearness of God is transformed ever more completely into the profiteer’s assurance that nothing can happen to him because he has the faith that there is One who would not permit anything to happen to him.”

One who would not permit our suffering? Who is this God? Where does He dwell? Ask the exiles, the victims, the survivors, and the descendants of the slain. Hear what they have to say about permission, if, indeed, they have anything to say at all.


Santa Fe, New Mexico

The Cathedral of St. Francis is unfinished. The twin steeples culminate prematurely, are dwarfed by the mountains surrounding town. A truly American cathedral: it implores (from implorae--to weep) in its very form. It signifies the certainty that there is no end to our sorrow, a fact well known in Santa Fe.

Housed inside is the oldest Madonna in the United States, Our Lady of Peace, brought to New Mexico in 1675. It is in her presence that I light a candle for my mother, and then, in an anterior hall, another for my father, who always chose the fringes. Alone in the little hall, I notice a staircase leading up, I suppose, into one of the incomplete steeples. It’s roped off, vague. My father reminds me to be critical.

So I dig further and learn that Our Lady of Peace was originally called La Conquistadora, Our Lady of the Conquest. And that the cathedral was built by Bishop Lamy in 1869 as a way to reestablish Spanish presence after both the Pueblo Indians and Mexican revolutionaries had ejected--in many instances, murdered--the New Mexico Franciscans. This Romanesque cathedral, then, is a plea and then a demand for domination.

But not domination over suffering, as suffering is an all-encompassing given. Rather, what the Church demands is domination over the mode in which the faithful receive the gift of suffering. And that, in the end, is the essence of Catholic instruction--the etiquette of consent. The Church aspires to possess its faithful as the faithful merely aspire to possess their own lives.

So the unfinished cathedral represents, in Martin Buber’s terms, “a latency” within “life’s rhythm of pure relation.” In my eyes this latency constitutes beauty: it is the very absence I’ve learned to cherish. But in the eyes of the faithful, this latency houses God the object, the Eucharistic wish. “Thus God becomes an object of faith,” writes Buber. “Originally, faith fills the temporal gaps between the acts of relation; gradually, it becomes a substitute for these acts. The ever new movement of being through concentration and going forth is supplanted by coming to rest in an It in which one has faith.”

If I flee the house of God, it is only to avoid such a “coming to rest.”

“Rest in peace,” the congregation muttered at my parents’ funerals. Their wish was for the departed. But who will speak for the living departed, those other-faithful who yet travel the roads?

Mt. Wheeler, Nevada

Open range, and wary mustangs, a road as thin as horsehair. The clouds, two hundred miles off, are suddenly charged with violence and light. Last night I slept along the highway, on a mattress thrown in the back of an open, yellow truck. The stars swarmed in my eyes.

When I arrive amid the fluttering aspen groves, it’s not so much a respite as it is an immersion in the desert’s more frail possibilities. Among the aspens, some inscribed with names, we sense our own dreamlike and delicate natures, placed now in a desert so vast as to obliterate irony. And yet there are traces, in the massiveness of the mountain, in its miniscule glaciers, in the patience of its caves, and in the meadowlark’s persistent, unanswered call, of a sly withdrawal of the world from its inhabitants, an absence limned by irony itself.

                              /

There are remarkable trees up here--bristlecone pines--some accessible, and others remote. They are “remarkable” because so many of us are compelled to remark on them.

Here our marks on the landscape are merely graffiti, desperate attempts to be noticed by the cosmos: the catalog labels affixed to the trees, the saw kerfs of entrepreneurs, the adjectives employed by weary poets. Our re-marks are even more distant: scientific (yet oddly vague) analyses that trust distancing as a kind of traversal toward the subject of inquiry. (Science has always seemed to me thus paradoxical, and thus strangely poetic.)

The arcane, hardened trees. I resist intimacy with these, calling them “arcane” and “hardened” perhaps as a way of confirming my own nature. We see these trees are survivors. The humans who habitually wander among these spacious groves, especially among the more remote trees, become themselves remote and as unforgiving as the nature they perceive. They allow only for a few extraordinary, if tortured, souls to survive their angry survey, and then they revere those souls in the forms of trees.

     The cult of the Romantic genius knows only such bounds. It ultimately stifles, and calls for certain reversals. So that in 1964, the oldest tree ever found on the planet, a 5100+ year-old bristlecone pine, was chainsawed by one Donald Currey, a graduate student determined to count its rings. (WPN-114, he called it. Others have named it “the Prometheus Tree.)

Maybe I know what Currey wanted: rings escaping endlessly from a center, something to defy our pathetic time. If only knowledge could be as simple as counting, and as removed from death. If we must evaporate from this earth, victims of abstract winds, let our pain be as elegant as epochs, yes? Let our passing be coded as a natural text. We ourselves escape endlessly from a center, abandoning our origins with uncanny ease, insisting on our uniqueness as we jettison everything that lends us meaning.

So I, too, have found a use for the tree. The WPN-114 stump is a monument to hubris, of course, but it is something else. It dwells, like the genius, in a realm just beyond what is commonly recognized as given. In other words, it is “gifted” in a way that extends the commonly given into an extra-ordinary realm.

All old bristlecones are predominantly dead wood. WPN-114 has been granted superior iconic power via its more extreme age and its more extreme death. It is, not in spite of, but rather due to its untimely, sudden, and complete demise, a specimen tree. It thrives, culturally, as a cold remnant: as remains. It can never be resurrected in the old Christian sense.

The remnant, always partial but also indicative: this is the pragmatic object of study, the best embodiment of probability, percentage, and degree. The cold remnant rather than the warm resurrection conforms to our contemporary skepticism concerning certainty. The remnant may be middling in some ways, but to us it’s at least believable. Its imminent or actual demise, in fact, makes it all the more credible to the postmodern mind. Thus WPN-114 remains for us as remains, in the way that all ancient beings do. This is one reason we create the narrow category of “ancient,” usually excluding, say, the atmosphere, fossil water, or fungal colonies in favor of more anthropomorphic forms like trees: we wish for a sympathy in nature. And yet we know, as skeptics, that any sympathy offered is bound to be also indifferent, and cold: utterly other even in its sympathetic image. If old-growth trees fulfill this other requirement, then old-growth stumps fulfill it even more decisively.

Because in a post-industrial, environmentalist era, remains are all that are left to us. From this perspective, it’s the stump, not the tree, that spans an age of pyramids and crosses. 


Los Angeles, California

I can't recall the number of the room I'm supposed to go to. Rain pelts my face and flashes on the streets. No one ever said life would be arranged in rows, like words or the irrigated orchards. Still, I scan the world for words, as if words, repeated rhythmically again and again could nurture children, dispel sickness, or shred the thatch over my eyes.

One day I may learn to forgive. For now, words are a balm. My hours of idleness are the night sky, glittering with indolence, from which ideas leap.

My urges, unfortunately, seem to have no parameters. They are formless needs, phantom conditions that can't be met--these are Transcendental legacies. So of course I’ve made numerous errors. She who might have been a lover I elevated like an urn. It seems I forgot how to receive. My teachers lectured in vain.

Now ideas reach me like pollen, carried on a booksleeve, a melody, or lodged in a stranger's hair. And I'm lucky to love the work of so many who dazzle me with sound. Miles, Mingus, Bird: America's sons. From Bechet to Coltrane to Shorter, I bear with joy the detachment of their tones.

I remember how Miles Davis described California’s influence on his music: “Out by the beach, you have silence and the sound of waves crashing against the shore. . . . California is an outside thing and the music that comes out of there reflects open space and freeways.” I remember, too, how Bird was estranged here: estranged from his familiar sources for heroin, and estranged from his music and himself. He ended up, according to Miles, “so drunk he fell asleep smoking and set fire to his bed. When he put the fire out and then wandered into the street naked, the police. . . took him to Camarillo State Hospital” where he stayed for seven months.

Meanwhile, my poets write and die with elan. Jeffers, Rexroth, etc.: they are commonly all but forgotten. Still, I sense a juxtaposition, as if my life were placed among breathing monuments. Maneuvering there, I'm sheltered, impermanent, lost. I nod in appreciation, or sleep. I walk in my narrow shoes outward, a spoke from a hub. At tables, the world seems flat. In bottles of wine, it's grandiose and dark. But beneath my feet, the world is merely hard. Birds blinking in the canopy above me know solidity better for their hollow bones. So I know the earth better for my pages, as flimsy and pale as blossoms. I make my way stubbornly, and usually sober, to find elders where I arrive. Here the company's strange and exacting. Though we live for sound, we're mostly mute, only breaching the silence to sigh.

                              /

Alienated from my species, I loiter in their midst. The silence gained traveling escapes me: a moment in the motel, at the fake wood grain desk, and it flies out among palm fronds, gone. There’s a rustling that unnerves me. Formality, the teacup's pretense of containing the all, irritates like a cough. As if this weren't bad enough, the walls in my room are, naturally, thin, and breathy sex seeps through. Who in the world would fuck, given the choice, in this palace of the ephemeral? Yet it goes on, monotonously glorious: the disembodied breath, the syncopated lovers, the tide rising a half-block away.

    

south of Crescent Beach, California

I was hiking a stretch of the coast trail, dwarfed and a little confused, like the folks in folktales, by the world all around. Cow parsnip towered in the meadow, and the redwoods graced the cliffs with their fog-gathering crowns. As the ocean pounds at the rocks a hundred feet below, the trail ascends from a creek mouth in a series of gradual switchbacks.

Rounding a bend, I saw what I took for a dog leaping from the trail into the woods. Then I saw the thick, curled tail, and I knew I was glimpsing a lion. The cat was gone in a moment, permeating a thicket like fluid through a cell wall. It was as if I haven't seen an animal at all--it was more like witnessing a process transpire, an event that separates itself from the flow of all others, for an instant, and then is reimmersed.

     And further up the trail, I found I was walking on the old road abandoned in the Thirties for the new highway inland. Buried under seasons of duff, obscured by fronds and moss, the softening asphalt seemed feral, the yellow stripes absurd. I'd heard they'd felled ancient redwoods to form this roadbed; now I saw how loss endures. In the fleeting lion and the recent obliteration, I realized the world as a palimpsest.

And our place in it: we are vague. We are here, if only as a smear among the extinctions.

Pajarito Plateau, New Mexico

Always, a new wave of human violence is coming over the West. A history of proliferating laboratories contributes--on one scale, the meth labs that have infiltrated the cities and the rural areas alike, and on another scale, the blasphemy of the Trinity Project, the labs at Hanford Reach, and that largest lab of all, the Nevada Test Site and everywhere downwind. Everywhere brute Western force shows itself unashamedly. Near Tule Lake, California, in a remote area among the prolific and dazzling birds, a man is dancing frantically, waving his long hair and playing an air-guitar, shrieking. He turns to glare at my approach. On the John Day River, in eastern Oregon, at dusk, an old pickup comes barreling down an embankment--engine killed--and stops just short of the river and my camp. The man inside, alone with his rifle, takes a slug of whiskey from a bottle and then makes no motion or sound. For an hour. Can I assume he’s now sleeping?

And then, travelling west from Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the innocuous labs hum in the summer heat, where the woods are partitioned from public entry, I come across a vast crater in the earth. It turns out to be the Valles Caldera, which, at fourteen miles in diameter, is one of the larger volcanic collapse craters on the planet. Among its kin are Krakatoa and Yellowstone.

Such resurgent calderas, as they’re called, are created when, according to Rosanna L. Hamilton, “infrequent, truly large eruptions occur,” collapsing the roofs of huge magma chambers and spewing “decompressing gasses and jets of pumice and ash. . . at high speeds into the atmosphere” and tossing “boulders as heavy as 100 metric tons more than 10 kilometers.” Here nature’s profound violence is graphic, and leaves an imprint visible from space.

It was some one million years ago that the Valles Caldera formed; the most recent volcanic activity here occurred 130,000 years ago. But the subsurface body of igneous rock is still partially molten. The volcano, as we say, is merely sleeping.

The true hubris of Los Alamos is revealed in the context of the very plateau that holds it aloft. That we aspire with our human violence to approximate nature’s speaks worlds about our potential for harm. And each of these worlds is inhabited, right now, by anxiety-ridden peoples in the presence of nuclear terror. What are we being forced to resist? Where else might we live? Are there worlds within worlds? Are there alternatives to this apocalyptic mimesis?

In nearby Frijoles Canyon are the ruins of a small ancestral Pueblo city, its kivas and rooms arranged in a shape not unlike the crater itself. And in the cliffs, there are numerous dwellings, carved right into the volcanic tuff that the cooling volcano produced. So here people literally lived within the artifacts of nature’s violence, creating artifacts--cavities in the tuff--of their own. Of course, the ancestral Pueblo did not intend artifacts as their legacy; they merely went about their symbolic and practical business.

Pits and absences, stipples and gulfs in geology and history alike: both the ancient event and the people who then inhabited it, bathing in its hot springs, have left powerful negative spaces as remains. Though scales necessarily differ, all such spaces describe an inevitable absence. To occupy these absences, even briefly, invites an existential embrace of abyss. That embrace includes the human violence visited on peoples and on lands. (The ancestral Pueblo, no doubt, also visited violence on their neighbors.)

But make no mistake: such an embrace does not condone violence, any more than Christ’s embrace of the leper condoned disease. Rather, true acceptance of destructive forces inspires a fierce compassion, a longing to sculpt inhabitable, or even beautiful, hollows from their remains.

Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

The ruins at Chaco Canyon, to me, are the remains of destructive forces. Arriving at the canyon in the summer heat, I guess at those forces with a vague intent. I know too acutely that the whole Chaco complex was suddenly abandoned some nine hundred years ago.

Yet what I really wish to know is this: is my approach to the Chaco complex in any harmony with the Pueblo peoples who conceived it? This question, for contemporary visitors, seems somehow crucial. Most people come here not just to gawk, but to participate. But in what? To what end? Chaco Canyon is no mere museum, nor is it a church. It was once what we claim to loathe--a seat of empire. It was also an astronomical observatory, but what did the ancestral Pueblo observe, exactly, in the movement of the sun and the moon?

     Flute music rises from the campground, resounding softly against low sheltering cliffs. Voices are mostly muted, fires rather small. True to the month of August, an aura of reverence pervades the gorgeous dusk. Coyotes, some becoming camp robbers, call nearby. Tents glow here and there, lit from within with dim lanterns, becoming colorful lanterns themselves. I sit in a lawn chair on the edge of camp, gazing up at the emerging stars, watching for Perseid meteors.

                              /

     Perverse as ever, I’ve been reading St. Augustine while on the road. And now, among his admonitions to break down my pride, I arrive at the vast Pueblo ruins. The canyon, distinguished by Fajada Butte in the south, frames the transient green of Chaco Wash, filled just now with runoff from the brief but intense summer storms.

Chaco Canyon lies at the center of the San Juan basin, which, at 130 miles in circumference, drains into the meandering San Juan River. Here, from roughly AD 850 to AD 1150, the ancestral Pueblo peoples built an extraordinary complex of houses, pueblos, kivas, mounds, canals, and roads. The size and complexity of the excavated ruins is remarkable, as is their exquisite masonry. The ruins include Chetro Ketl and Pueblo Bonito, which are, according to Stephen Lekson, “the two largest masonry structures of their time north of central Mexico.” Certainly the “great houses” and “great kivas” found at Chaco are of a magnitude above other ruins found in the surrounding terrain. Pueblo Bonito, for example, a rambling and elegant D-shaped ruin, is the largest the great house known, encompassing more than 800 rooms.

Chaco apparently served as a cultural center with some sort of binding relationship to smaller, outlying pueblos. Ancient roads radiate from Chaco like spokes from a wheel. Except that the ancestral Pueblo, as far as we can tell, had no use of the wheel; nor did they have beasts of burden. So perhaps runners frequented these roads, or maybe quantities of corn or trade goods were carried on human backs over the arduous distances. Chaco-centered influence seems to have extended over 50,000 square miles or more. Certainly Chaco had commerce with the Meso-American culture to the south. Macaw skeletons have been found in the canyon, as have Mexican-style copper bells.

“What then, is my God?” asks St. Augustine. “Making all things new; bringing the proud to decay and they know it not.” Christian pride is in fact fossilized at Chaco, which has become, to non-natives, a shrine to impermanence. That we miss the inherent contradiction in such a shrine suggests that, for us, pride is still ascendant.

“We have made Chaco a garden of ruins,” writes Stephen Lekson. “In the 1920’s, the National Geographic Society took a. . .tack. . . followed by all subsequent excavations: clearing the ruins as exhibits-in-place, sites that people could visit and enjoy as ruins. The rubble was cleared away, and the standing walls were treated with new mortar to protect them as elements and from further collapse. This process of stabilization seeks to maintain ruins as ruins.”

                         /

In the cool of the morning, I walk among the sage, the snakeweed and the still desert rubble. Each stone casts an individual shadow, a documentation of its dance with the sun. Entering the Pueblo Bonito ruin, wandering room to ceilingless room, I admire the naked masonry, surfaces that would not be so apparent to the ancestral Pueblo peoples, as the walls were then plastered over. Aside from an appreciation of the dignified labor here, a vague feeling of familiarity begins to come over me. No, I don’t claim any New Age connection with ancient astronomers or tribes. But something is nagging at me--these rooms seem too cramped for practical inhabitation, except, as some have suggested, perhaps as sleeping chambers. Indeed, passing through them, continuous and contained as they are, is akin to negotiating the imagery of a dream: rooms derived yet aloof from the waking world. And especially the now-open kivas--round, theatrical spaces--attest to this sense of demonstration, as if the Pueblo were designed to skirt the edge between mystery and visibility.

According to The Solstice Project, “the western segment of Pueblo Bonito’s long front wall is oriented [towards] the rising and setting sun at equinox,” while “the radial wall which is perpendicular to the Western segment. . .is oriented north-south, to the azimuth of the meridian passage of the daily sun at noon.” Everywhere in Chaco Canyon such alignments are in evidence. So yes: perhaps the alignments themselves constitute the edge between the unseen and the seen. More than simply markers of celestial events, maybe the manifested alignments themselves were understood as membranes. Mightn’t the invisible pass through such a membrane as a presence in one’s life? Mightn’t this passage be reenacted with every sojourn inside a constructed pueblo, given that the pueblo was seen as itself a manifestation--rather than merely indicative--of the grounded mystery sought?

     The placement of astronomical petrogyphs on nearby Fajada Butte encourages such thinking. These images are not powerful merely in their abstract representation of astronomical events. They are powerful in the exact placement of the petroglyphs themselves, in the ability of the images to intersect a cosmic event, thus becoming itself such an event.

Pueblo astronomical images move beyond depiction into the realm of participation. The ability of Pueblo astronomers to enact this leap must attest to their own participatory ethic. Merely observing is an amoral act, a science of the eyes. Consciously actualizing what one observes in nature is something else altogether. Just how that “something else” manifests itself in terms of behavior--both toward the landscape and towards other humans--is the moral question that presents itself when considering Chaco Canyon.

                              /

Why did the Pueblo people abandon Chaco and migrate to new locations? The theories run from drought to a debilitating diet to invasions by neighboring tribes. But Edmund Ladd, a Pueblo Indian scholar from Zuni, asserts, “They weren’t travelling because there were droughts or there was pestilence. They were travelling because they were looking, searching for the center place.” And this search was prompted, according to the Acoma writer Simon Ortiz, by an eviction from Kashkahtruutih, “a beautiful, serene place where everything was provided by the spirit-helpers as long as the people respected the sacred powers of creation.” When pridefullness caused the people to be cast from Kashkahtruutih, they were scattered among different lands and languages. They founded new pueblos and retained a link with the ideal world through the agency of stories.

But these stories are no more remains than are the Chaco ruins--not if “remains” implies lifeless bodies of knowledge or lore. I wish to use the term more literally: to describe what remains among us, and is therefore alive and vital. Here the Romantic emphasis on death fails us completely, as does mere existential toughness in the face of a banal and irrefutable demise. What remains among us is not death, but active entropy. Active entropy is the continuous arising of what we call death. It is not the isolated event of anyone’s personal death, but rather a participatory dynamic--the real reason, I suppose, that we’ve come so many miles to arrive at Chaco Canyon.

We wish to participate in the very disappearance of the Chaco ruins, in the physical erasure of an ancient center, in an ongoing, and to us, a gradual absence. The ruins and the petroglyphs are poignant for what they suggest, of course, but they hold a deeper significance as objects unto themselves. They are Edenic only in the sense that they are intrinsically powerful, regardless of any secondary inference. To insist on their perpetual preservation or their ultimate interpretation is to be cast out of the Eden of their sufficiency. That Eden, lingering in every object, can either be extracted--and thus lost--or respected as to its autonomy. Edenic objects are not to be questioned; they are to be complied with.

Our failure to inhabit these ruins on their present terms leaves us cast out and wandering. At least the Pueblo peoples might yet participate with the stone as stone, which, according to Ortiz, “would find its own place in the construction.” The stones themselves actualize what we may then choose to ponder: will as an agent of earthly others, form as outwardly determined, walls as membranes rather than barriers.

And this earthly Eden is not essential any more than the biblical Eden was: it might be suspended at any time. Such suspension as occurs in Eden--and now I speak, of course, from my own tradition--is inseparable from Eden’s destruction. Might I be granted the most literal use of “suspension” here, in keeping with my theme? A world hung by a celestial thread is released to us only to plummet and smash into myriad shards. That thread is then replaced with celestial alignments, walls and marks that retain a semblance of the thread even while re-placing it on earth.

But the shards also remain. I can only wonder as to why Chacoan peoples ritually destroyed some 30,000 ceramic vessels to form a single mound at Pueblo Alto. But I can say this: shards are decentralized energy. A world of shards is not centered in or monitored by a God. Here the center place is always dissolving. Our search for such a center is thus wonderfully in vain. Such a search erodes our pride as a matter of physical course. 


Montezuma Pass, Cochise County, Arizona

I’ve headed down the trail a bit and found a fine, lonely spot to gaze off into Mexico. I’m perched on a cliff overlooking the site of Coronado’s fifteenth century entrada. An infamous, possessed man, that Coronado—fueled by greed and wishful lies, he rode all the way to Kansas in search of gold, wreaking his bit of havoc on the way. His entrada failed, on its own terms, miserably. And yet, history occurs. The arbitrary becomes the inevitable. Aren’t I viewing a portal for the Hispanic influence in North America?

The morning light is rising on the flanks: the Patagonia Mountains, Mt. Hopkins, Lone Mountain, and off in the far distance, Baboquivari, home of the Papago gods. The various mountains take the light differently, each according to its own geology and vegetation. Each creates an effect. For instance: Lone Mountain, slightly apart from the rest, is a caterpillar of humps, partially forested. Pinkish ridges alternate with gray-green stripes. When it catches the sun, I almost expect it to inch along, to move even farther from the surrounding ranges, becoming even more distinct against the valley floor.

To the east, at over 8,000 feet, San Jose dominates the horizon—a peak and a curving arc. It was a marker Coronado knew, I would guess, as a constant. It must have loomed over his excursion for quite some time. That mountain, any mountain, might have placed Coronado’s ambitions in better proportion, might have ordered his priorities. If only mountains, to the Conquistadors, were anything more than barriers, or potential gold and silver mines.

Entradas may begin with noble gestures, as in the appointment of Coronado, by Don Antonio de Mendoza, Viceroy of New Spain, in 1540. Antonio wrote that “ [It is] conducive to the service of God, our Lord, and our own that this said expedition be carried out in our name, having confidence that you . . . will take special care in the protection and defense of the said lands and their natives . . .” And yet, upon arriving at the first of the seven fabled “cities of Cibola”—actually a Pueblo—disappointed and near starvation, the Conquistadors were not welcome. The Pueblo Indians laid a line of corn meal in the sand, and warned the Spanish not to cross.

The Spanish crossed, and with their horses and armor and steel swords, defeated the Indians, inhabited the pueblo, and exhausted the Indian stores. Later, taking what they wanted while guests at another pueblo, the Conquistdors themselves were defeated, but not by military supremacy. They were conquered by their own delusion. The Pueblo Indians had a visiting Plains Indian, called by the Spanish “the Turk”—“because he looked like one”—fabricate a story of Cibola on the plains. The Indians knew that this fantasy was more potent than weaponry, that the Conquistadors would set off in search of gold and leave the pueblos in peace. That’s pretty much what happened—the entrada wandered all the way to present-day Salinas, Kansas, before they unearthed the deception. They executed the Turk and turned back for Mexico City.

                              /

The land is profound, not for what it yields, but for what it allows. Here it allows diversity, in many senses. Many peoples have filtered in to these expanses—Clovis tribes, some nine thousand years ago, and more recently, the Hohokam. More recently, still—Mormons, miners, ranchers, military families, hippies, and retirees: why call only one such entry “Entrada”? These inhabitations are flimsy layers—are ephemeral traces, really, even as desperate Mexicans risk the crossing again and again.

The heavily patrolled political border transects a biogeographical junction, where the Rocky Mountains terminate, and the Sierra Madre run east-west—I can see their dry, sensuous folds--across northern Mexico. Where the Sonora desert segues into the Chihuahuan, and sky-island mountain ranges harbor a great diversity of animals. Cochise County, I’m told, is second only to the Costa Rican rainforest, worldwide, in diversity of mammals. Javelina and coatimundi, puma and bear.  Coyote, of course. And though rare, always the possibilitiy of a cat: jaguar, jaguarundi, ocelot, or margay.

The bird-life here is extraordinary too, as subtropical species like Elegant Trogon, Mexican Jay, Green Kingfisher, Phanopepla, and Neo-Tropical Cormorant mix with more northern species, not to mention the countless warblers, hummingbirds, sparrows, and other migrants that frequent the land in the spring and fall.

The trail where I pause illustrates diversity, as well, in terms of fauna. From where I sit I can see cholla, live oak, yucca, prickly pear, mountain mahogany, manzanita, pinion pine, beargrass, and more.

The San Rafael Valley spreads out below, just now mottled in cloud-shadow and intermittent sun. This light and shadow fall on a striated landscape, further complicating the visual patterns, and making for a graphic, swimming depth. The grasses, still pale gold in March, are dotted--and closer to the surrounding mountains, mobbed--by the green crowns of oaks, and higher up, by pines. The political line that runs at an angle through this seems, at the moment, moot, like a contrail fading in a complex sky. I know: the border is all important to real people, on either side. And yet . . .

When the Mexican wolves, when the jaguars, when the subtropical birds and amphibians move north in response to global warming, will the Border Patrol sense them with infrared devices? Will anyone demand documentation? Might they be rounded up and returned to their country of origin?

Interstate 19, southern Arizona

I could be anywhere, driving. The car’s interior is heating up in the afternoon sun. I might be getting drowsy. I roll down the window. I never really escape the drone of traffic, traffic, anyway.

Could be anywhere. But in actuality I’m just here, in the Sonora desert, among beings. Among the pleasing verticals and crooknecks of saguaro cacti. Among ocotillo, whose spindly arms are just now offering red blooms to the hummingbirds, and among those hummingbirds who vibrate their tail-feathers even when perching, while their blue necks and red-pink bills incite my desire—for what?

Just now, my desire is to see. In that degree of detail, what my momentum won’t allow. Well, I’ll be content with memory—and revel in this ironic desire, placed always in the future, dulled only by the past.

Still. What’s that fur ruffling on the highway shoulder? Road kill, but the patterns—it looks for all the world like an ocelot. Which in turn looks an awful lot like a margay. But ocelot and margay are rare in Arizona—haven’t they disappeared? Habitat gone, cats all hunted out, their coats too gorgeous, too desirable.

So much for desire. I’m moving so fast that it’s all a blur, anyway—in this case, a smeared animal all a blur, and my life a smeared animal, my own hair ruffling in the interstate wind. History itself is slurred. No possibility of pausing, you understand.

There’s no turning back.

Durango, Colorado

                                             (processional)

At the end of the American century, I arrive at Durango, Colorado, in a parade of cars sporting out-of-state plates. The mountains all around are perforated by mines, adorned with ski resorts, and bathed just now in a light reminiscent of a landscape by Moran--or is the resemblance the other way around? Meanwhile, the same sooty steam engines that once carted silver and ores from the earth now convey tourists possessing large disposable incomes. Overwhelmed by scenery, by shopworn yet strangely gleaming notions of the “Spirit of the West,” the tourists climb to their private sublimities, trailing industrial clouds behind them.

     Is this what it means to break down one’s pride? To endure a laggardly ride, whether in nineteenth-century equipage or in twenty first-century traffic? To slow one’s expectations until they occur only once a day, or a decade, or a century? On Durango’s main drag, the old West endures essentially unchallenged. Motorcycle mamas attend to their machines. Drivers in SUV’s wander in search of pasture in which to park their bulk. An Indian in a booth proclaims something about Mother Earth--the cliche uttered freely, as if irony had never visited itself on this particular town.

     And yes, there is something falsely Edenic about our post-industrial world. Though the success of industrial societies has always entailed ignorance, the blind eye was turned mostly from nature, except nature as parody of either our utilitarian or our Romantic impulses. Now, in an age of ecology, we claim an affection for actual nature. We trust science to detail the relationships there. And yet we are more oblivious than ever to our own industrial workings. The post-industrial era is a technical triumph of ritual over practice, wherein the processional has replaced the physical process as our way of shaping the world. The fact that our current cultural apprehension is totally dependent on industry is largely taken for granted. What matters to us, of course, is the moving through landscape space, rather than the actuality traversed. Only such momentum allows for the rich fantasy life we Americans entertain, and for statements as empty and accurate as this, from Richard Rodriguez: “For truly ours is a country that redefines patriotism--not as love for land but as a love of movement over the land.”

And yet doesn’t a severe lack of awareness, both of the land traversed and the awesome means of traversal, result from our infatuation with movement? And isn’t such an infatuation--one without regard to specifics and consequences--in fact rather infantile? Do we require systemic failures to detail the industrial process for us? If we do, they will occur to us, regularly, out of our own pathetic necessity.
 

 Lime, Oregon/Huntington, Idaho

Cruising the huge, postindustrial West involves a new predestination. Manifest Destiny, for me, has been transformed into Manifest Motion as a redundancy, wherein motion becomes the exclusive means of manifesting my existence. The destination, long abandoned as corrupted or quaint, is dead. Now only movement sustains me. So I’m not only reluctant to pause in my relentless thrust--I’m terrified that such a pause will expose me to the essential hollowness of the West, of the nation-state, of capitalism, of my life. No wonder, then, that I should seek respite in a false nostalgia--or maybe the only true sort of nostalgia after all: a nostalgia for what I never had.

First I focus on pristine wilderness as somehow Edenic, the mosquitoes and harsh summit winds notwithstanding. But then, as wilderness shrinks, becomes crowded, commodified, and merely politically delineated, I’m forced to scurry, on interstate highways and gravel roads, to new refuges, each of which is also emblazoned with obvious cultural markers. Soon the transit between these wild expanses is akin to the passage through those very canyons, those beaches, those strips of old-growth forest, those high and narrow crags, and those riparian halls that once sustained me. The road, in other words, is not unlike the wildlife corridors that progressive environmentalists, out of empathy and desperation, are working to establish. The road is a means to a wild survival.

This emphasis--on conduits through the developed landscape leading to wider, hidden destinations--is surgical: extractive, traumatic, and yet necessary for life. Such an emphasis requires, first, an opening emblematic of the whole operation--an extremely fine line. It requires a peculiar exactness on the part of the surgeon, a specialization of the mind. It requires an academic coldness, a narrow deftness in accordance with the incision it imposes.

But must precision constitute narrowness? What does the roadway slash really access, and what does it really evidence? In seeking answers on the open road, I’m led down into another nostalgia. This time I yearn, strangely enough, for the old industrial landscapes. I yearn to see them in ruin, to witness nature taking them back. I long for an innocent sleep, for willows striating concrete walls, for acacias shading steel. This new arcadia is as much a fantasy as any previous version, but the road has lulled me into acceptance, has exhausted my eyes with its relentless precision. I need to see the linear erode. The wild is yet at some distance; and so the feral entices.

     From I-84 in the afternoon sun, I glimpse the pale cement plant emerging from the lime-encrusted hills. I instinctively take the nearest exit and trace my way back to the ruin. Its hollows are cell-like, the mountainside remnant reminiscent somewhat of ancient pueblos. Large pits dot the site, some of them sheltered by decrepit sheds. But there are Greek elements as well: big fluted columnar stacks, some toppled, dominate the wreckage.

As I walk among the array of sluices, gears, torn-off corrugated rooftops, and broken windowpanes, a whitish soil crumbles softly underfoot. The scent of lime mingled with sagebrush is calming and dry. The stillness is embroidered with the fluttering of pigeons, the muted freeway rustle, the sporadic flapping of tin sheets in the wind. Crows are roosting in the upright stacks. From the base of the cliff below comes the low rumble of a Union Pacific freight.

     Above, the ruin is all light and decay as it ascends the mountain against a blue-gray sky. Spindly power-poles climb the hills into the distance, leading the eye once again along a fabricated line. And yet each old power-pole, cross-shaped, is falling at its own angle and degree, slowly dispersing its linear energy into the ground. I can’t help but think of return. I’m reminded of the telegraph poles I’ve noticed still standing in Utah, how they appear more every year like the tree trunks they always were. And then I remember--going back a bit further--that here I’m straddling the Oregon Trail, itself an avenue of dispersal, a line that frayed and scattered its followers to points American West.

     The fragmenting line, then, not only divides the landscape into pieces: it fragments itself, splitting into numerous trails. The historical road leading back, when closely observed, also leads us outward. It leads us outward toward the land--through ancient nomadic wanderings, through settlement patterns and strip-mall corridors, through designated wilderness trails that soon dissolve to traces in the brush. And outward is also forward, or a variety of forwards--an omnidirectional forward, if you will.

You think there are no centers remaining? That power is no longer concentrated in a West ever dissolving? Just east of Lime is the small town of Huntington, on the meandering Snake River. Huntington proudly claims the status of “catfish capital of the world.” Driving through, along the steep riverbanks, and then deeper into the hills, I’m finally overcome by darkness. Turning the car around, cautious on the narrow gravel, I’ve lost all sense of direction. If it weren’t for this simple road, I think, how would I know what “back” even means? And then, in mid-turn, I’m subtly aware of a portable center, neither personal nor entirely impersonal--of my mobile body’s ability to convey the phenomenal world.

Capitol Gorge, Utah

The Gorge is a slot on the edge of Capitol Reef, opening out into the desert east of Waterpocket Fold. It’s a natural (and narrow) entry, or exit, in the convoluted reef, and so is an ancient passage. The petrogylphs there are numerous, of an ancestral Pueblo style called “Freemont.” They are accompanied by a “pioneer register,” where Mormon settlers marked their own historical transit.

Though the Freemont graphics include abstract elements, mostly they depict figures of various sorts--including human, animal, and conglomerate beings--in various configurations. In contrast, the pioneer markings are entirely abstract: names followed by dates, letters by numerals--being and time abstracted from experience and placed in adjacent categories.

I have no way of knowing what the Freemont images portray, or if the issue of portrayal as I understand it is even proper to petroglyphs. But I do sense, in many of the glyphs I’ve encountered, a reference to endeavors or progression of some sort. Sometimes repeating figures, especially bighorn sheep, are placed in lines suggestive of momentum. I’ve been told that petroglyphs are, in part, records of clan migrations, and that the migrations themselves were purification ceremonies. Even the images of single figures, mixing human and animal attributes as they often do, suggest a fluid and progressive identity.

The pioneer register, on the other hand, is fairly familiar to me: it is a record of individuals, fixed in their identity, and passing through difficult historical circumstances.

The fixed vs. the fluid identity: this is the difference I distinguish on these walls. And a certain concrete quality in the Freemont images as well. Even though the images are by our standards “fantastic,” they are of course more “realistic”--more concrete and particular--than the generic names nearby. Though we usually conceive of the stylized type as an abstraction from the individual, here individualism itself is another level of abstraction, departing mimetic practice and sliding towards the name, that most minimal depiction.

And then there is a further sliding. The pioneer answer to the oppression of the fixed identity was to move through a preordained and rigid history, or more accurately, into that history as a promised land. It’s as if the names on the pioneer register segue into the frozen dates appended to them.

The post-Enlightenment individual may well be fixed, but he isn’t necessarily subject to the whims of an old, oppressive community--not as long as there are new utopias to light out for. As a matter of fact, the individual bound to transcend a common, grounding context must idealize himself in the world. Often, he’s obliged to locate himself elsewhere than the place of his birth or formulation. Ultimately, he’s obliged to locate himself elsewhere than even the physical earth. Though the pioneers who etched their names here might have called that elsewhere “heaven,” where they actually ended up was somewhere else in human history.

Of course, we’re all subject to that history, and to suppose otherwise is dangerous. And I do not begrudge the self-actualizing individual, especially the one who removes herself from oppressive social circumstances; on the contrary, I admire and emulate her. But what am I to make of the separation, of our common existence from time, that this escape often entails? In America, time becomes the preferred, abstract realm, reified in the vast, “empty” spaces of the West. “Making” history by abandoning the past is the contradictory praxis of the pioneer, the cowboy, and the neo-primitive alike. (Americans are often said to have no sense of history. Not quite accurate: it’s just that, to us, history is the future.)

Maybe what we’re talking about here is the difference between mythical and “pragmatic” history. Though European-derived cultures like to condescend to “primitives” by allowing them only a cyclical, mythical ethos, who actually practices mythological history on a recurring basis?

Think of the Crusades. Of the unmarked Holocaust graves. Think of Manifest Destiny, or habitat depletion. Pollution, or the nuclear state. We open ourselves out, but instead of branching--or as we like to say, “progressing”--we spiral around to novel versions of the old, familiar atrocities. Our errors drill down into the earth where they were extracted, distorted, and refined in the first place. “Pragmatic” history, then, is driven ever inward, centripetally, by an unstable and whirling mythos. In seeking the center, we encounter not nature, nor an autonomous God, but our own myopic appetites. We struggle to survive, not our world, but our ever-worldly selves.

In this light, the opposite, “primitive” strategy of directing mythology outward, of subjecting myth to the survival needs of water, food, and shelter--to the extent that this practice supports sustenance rather than brute domination--looks rather sophisticated, doesn’t it? It’s not utopian, or even noble. It’s just pragmatically wise.
 

Wendover Air Force Base, Nevada/Utah border

From the diner in Wendover, over a mediocre hamburger, I have a good view over of one of the premier graffiti rocks of the West. Topped with microwave towers and an array of receivers, the butte is a modern signal mountain. Its faces are adorned with boldly painted figures, mostly in strategic code: RIA 116, Millers 461: 264, SoAC, Lakers 199. Here meaning has leached out of the language for all but the initiated, leaving only intriguing traces.

     The obsolete military history of Wendover is apparent all over town. Secrets have either died here in concealment or else moved on to more contemporary havens. On the Utah side of town, especially, where the casinos don’t dominate, the shanties and desert-mud roads have an air of abandonment about them. At the old air base, where the crew of the Enola Gay was trained near the end of World War II, decrepit barracks and airplane hangers house the traces of grandiose cravings--and all it comes to is a nothingness, a tainted, banal debris.

     I’ve come here, oddly enough, to view an art exhibit among the ruins. A group based in Los Angeles, called The Center For Land Use Interpretation, sponsors a Wendover Exhibit Hall in a renovated barracks. Approaching and locating the hall turns out to be a interactive aspect of experiencing the exhibit, as the building is one of many nearly identical ones, and is not clearly signed. A phone call to LA provides me with a building number and a lock combination--I’m to let myself in, turn on the lights, and please make sure to shut and lock everything when I go!

The hall exhibits or documents the works of artists who have interpreted the surrounding terrain. Some have constructed wonderfully useless technologies--an automatic vehicle that moves randomly across the salt flats, for example--while others have imaged military-industrial sites nearby. My favorite work was by an artist who created a sonic fence that interacts with the land and the wind. Indeed, most of the art here seems concerned with the ephemeral aspect of the industrialized desert, where even concrete and steel succumb to the burgeoning sagebrush and the wind-shifted earth.

What I admire most about these pieces, though, whether they exhibit a playfulness or a documentary sensibility, is a notable lack of irony--which shows a certain restraint, given this particular material. An ironic impulse might easily rise in this desert as a reaction to a threatening permanence--half-lives buried beneath us, and seemingly indelible marks on the land. The salt flats here are so vast that one might observe on them, from a prominence, the very curve of the earth. Some have treated these flats as a void in which to dump wastes or to drop bombs, while others, like Robert Smithson with his big earthwork “Spiral Jetty,” have viewed them as an immense, blank canvas. Both approaches, though, have utilized irony as a makeshift refuge in this open and uninviting terrain. Both the technologist and the artist have felt the need to shelter a frightening sensibility--the urge to dominate a hostile world--that emerges too easily here. So the Enola Gay is named for somebody’s mother. A hangar bay becomes the spanable gulf between nihilism and patriotic action. And so also does irony inform Smithson’s jetty, which, according to H.W. Janson, relies “in part, on the Surrealist irony of the concept: a spiral jetty is as self-contradictory as a straight corkscrew.” That basic irony multiplies when one considers the inward-turning form in a vast outer landscape, the parody of Great Basin drainage patterns, the fanciful shape in a demanding environment, the simple urge to decorate rendered in such a complicated manner, and the postmodern dissociation of monumental scale--of the spectacle--from permanence or profundity.

Irony of course has many functions, some of them illuminating. But often enough, irony forges the arbitrary slag of our actions into a keen, double-edged sword. Often it heightens the decisive aspect of such abstract rationales and stark oppositions as are necessary to war--and to all expressions of empire. Such irony might indeed be deadly. Certainly contemporary art, and especially much “illegitimate” art, has absorbed this lethal energy only to release it before our eyes. Describing a photograph by Richard Misrach, taken inside the Enola Gay hangar in 1986 and entitled “Simulated Window,” Rebecca Solnit writes: “[it] shows a slab of drywall that closed off that bunker’s view of the outside world on which military personnel drew and labeled ‘simulated scenery,’ and ‘simulated bush,’ and ‘simulated pussy in the sun’ in a collection of images as clever and cold as anything by David Salle or Richard Prince, except that the detachment of these amateur artists is quite likely to be literally lethal. . .”

Solnit continues:[This] is not only the detachment of Derridean poststructuralism but also the detachment of video-game wars, such as the Gulf War, where people appeared as electronic target data and dead Iraqi citizens were described as ‘collateral damage.’ Or perhaps the two are the same detachment (which began militarily as aerial bombing in World War I and reached its height with the maximum destruction with minimum effort of the Enola Gay’s bombing of Hiroshima). In the spirit of that irony, one could say that to be collateral damage is to die of alienated signifiers.”

Alienated signifiers, yes. Which suggest the alienation of the signified as well. That’s why, for me, the most poignant art to be found here on the desert is also the most ordinary. Here and there, especially along the interstate highway, travelers have paused to spell out their names with rocks placed on the salt. To enact something as arbitrary as a name in such a deliberate fashion speaks worlds not only to the plight of the individual, but also to her actual absence on the land. Now she’s departed for more promising places; now only her signature stands in her place. Her name is more arbitrary than the facetious names of the nuclear bombs--Fatman, Little Boy--dropped on Japanese cities. And the location of that name is now more arbitrary, too, than strategic or symbolic targets anywhere in the world. She has placed her name, then, in compliance with her arbitrary situation--she has followed her orders to the letter. She’s abandoned her name in a specific configuration, a small but potent legacy. She’s evaded an imperial annihilation by signing on to the earth.


Hovenweep National Monument, Colorado/Utah

The Square Tower complex is a group of ancestral Pueblo buildings placed in and around a shallow canyon headed by a spring. The complex, dating to the thirteenth century, includes some extraordinary towers, as well as a “house” embedded in a huge, eroded boulder. Indeed, each structure at Hovenweep is placed at the canyon in an intimate manner, whether clinging to a outcropping or nestled in a landscape fold.

The spring that makes this particular canyon a life source repeats a dynamic that allowed Pueblo inhabitation throughout the Southwest. Rain and snowmelt permeate the porous sandstone down to a solid layer of shale, where it is forced horizontally out in the form of a seep. The seep then gathers life. Its emergence from the earth allows the emergence of peoples from former, diminished worlds. Those peoples built structures that resisted elements or enemies even as they yielded to the features of the land.

So at Hovenweep I can experience, graphically, yielding and resistance resulting in definite, if temporary, forms. Hiking the draw, I sense this everywhere: in the junipers pushing against the cobalt sky, or in large conglomerate boulders. Forms extend themselves effortlessly out into the world, yielding to certain forces. Forms are also resisted by certain forces: in some cases, by the very same forces--think of the giving and the scorching sun, or of erosion--that called them into being. In actualizing these forces, forms become entirely textural. Each protuberance or hollow, each burr or smoothness, documents the push and the pull of the world. The juniper’s scale-like leaves, its shredded bark, are more than simply attributes. They are the tree. And pebbles embedded in conglomerate rock--are they not the rock itself? So much for parts and wholes. So much for mere description.

I wonder if the ancestral Puebloans sensed this same push-and-pull as they built their checkdams up on the rim, allowing soil to back up just enough to support a transient crop. I imagine corn roots drawing at the mineral nutrients and remnant water, even as, overhead, virga grace the sky, the rain evaporating before it reaches the ground. I think back to last summer here, to a rattlesnake coiled motionless on a rock, something coaxing me towards it even as I wisely withdrew. And I remember a flash flood in the desert nearby, shoving everything ahead like any old history--all jumbled, chaotic, and thick with debris.

I used to mistake clarity for simplicity. Now I look up from the canyon floor to notice the intricate moon.
 

Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

Ice has formed on the north-facing roadbeds, forcing me to ascend Mesa Verde slowly. The flank of the mesa is marked by fire-blackened trees, stark against the snow. In the southern distance stand two edifices: Shiprock, and a huge, fuming coal plant. To the West lies the Sleeping Ute, to the east the distant San Juan Mountains. Up here, you know exactly where you are in the world. That sense of centeredness offsets the isolation that mesas also afford. It’s no wonder that mesa-tops seem to suit many Native Americans, from the Hopi to the Zuni to their not-so-distant ancestors.

Mesa Verde is a gathering place. It is gathering sun, clouds, and game, and it is gathering humans in our need for sustenance. Here, concentration and dispersal alternate to allow for inhabitation. In the case of the ancestral Pueblo, that inhabitation is evident in the ruins distributed throughout the mesa. The Pueblo people know Mesa Verde as a phase in their epic migration. Inhabitation here is always transient.

Hiking a snow-trimmed canyon-wall trail, I experience alternations as a matter of course. Fluctuations in body-heat, in food energy, in hydration and dehydration, and in terrain require numerous delicate adjustments: of clothing, of pace, of water-intake, of foot-placement, and of course of perception itself.

Walking within these fluctuations, “in beauty” as the tribes sometimes say, I pause to rest in a south-facing alcove, attracted by the peeping of chickadees under rimrock, in Douglas fir and juniper. Against the silence of the canyon, I’m pleased to hear the occasional cracking of seeds in little beaks. Sustenance, I think, was never so satisfactory.

And only then, after ten minutes or so, do I notice the assembled stone on the ledge just over my shoulder. These are modest ruins, no more than a few rooms, finer for their intimacy. That others have paused here before me, enticed perhaps by the same factors--greenery, protection from the wind, an orientation towards precious winter sun--is a testament to our common endeavors. Though our differences are also continuous, the fact of a south-facing alcove in winter embraces all who venture in this land.

Gathering requires presentation. First we present a face to what abundance there is in the desert, and then we turn inward, to the shelter of stone rooms. Thus we gather in what the mesa offers, be it foodstuffs or sandstone that breaks at near ninety-degree angles when properly struck, or be it spiritual renewal. Huddled in the kiva at Cedar House ruins, I experienced a narrowed aperture, a concentrated vast world light, as in solstice blades marking seasonal time, as in poetry, as in small fires burning in the ground. Now I see that same fleck of light, horizontal for the moment, in a non-Platonic cave, a place not pooling darkness but rather gathering sun.

Canyon de Chelly, Arizona

Hannah Arendt writes that “it is the nature of the human surveying capacity that it can function only if man disentangles himself from all involvement in and concern with the close at hand and withdraws himself to a distance from everything near him.” She goes on to say that “any decrease of terrestrial distance can be won only at the price of putting a decisive distance between man and earth, of alienating man from his immediate earthly surroundings."

In this scenario, distance is expressed as traversal time. Thus, it seems, distance must be either elapsed or potential in order to be experienced. Here “autonomous distance” is almost an oxymoron. And yet distance experienced in terms of time actually precludes any real potential. Always there is a lost, lapsed, or conquered distance; never is there a potential one, because potential distance requires its own undoing, whether in imagination or as a planned expedition. A potential distance is always mentally or actually rushed into nonexistence, perpetually placed in the past. So as a place, distance is always expired, creating for us a deadened West. Out here, what began as potential, by virtue of especially great distances, instantaneously expires in our minds.

This is why traversal is problematic in the West: while we are unable to see potential in any but the most personal, imaginative terms, the terrain is extremely impersonal as far as we can see. To make distance truly intimate, alive and vital to us, we actually do have to “survey” it from a single, detached point. In other words, we need to be internally still.

Is this stillness what the mesa offers? Is it in fact a form of meditation? The survey of which I speak entails life activities generated from a point so fixed--not in the sense of ordained or static, but rather as a stability--that we can only call it a center. What does that place entail?

The centered point is not what Arendt describes as “a condition of remoteness.” Nor is it “a point outside” of anything. It is rather the unmoved unknown--what Arendt calls “the region of faith.” It is unmoved in the sense of Buddhist nonattachment, or Pueblo placedness. It is unknown, always, because potential must remain mysterious in order just to remain.

                   

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While roaming the south rim of Canyon de Chelly, I picked up a young Navajo hitchhiker. He had thumbed his way from Farmington, New Mexico, where he had been visiting his cousin. He told me he lived at Spider Rock, which I knew as two huge monoliths rising from the canyon floor, the place where Spider Woman gave weaving to the people. “A little community,” he called it. And yet when I dropped him off along the dirt road where he lived, it was out on Defiance Plateau, some miles from the actual formation. Sometimes we name our home for its origin, for what influences us to this day. I’d guess the Navajo man lives well within the compass of Spider Rock, in his trailer in the pinyons or wherever he travels.

Now, standing at the rim of the canyon, I hear coyotes sounding--two groups addressing one another. Their howls fill the afternoon air, elongated and enhanced by the canyon walls. Their din is an omnidirectional expansiveness, departing the four linear directions and filling the very canyon. This is a trend that civilizations follow and sometimes forget: when expressiveness becomes truly expansive, a compass we humans are capable of is articulated, and sometimes attained.

Too often, though, this compass is conflated with colonial expansion, its worldly shadow. Human patterns of inhabitation are primarily horizontal, like the agricultural fields of the Navajo, like the chevrons of their sheep drifting on the canyon floor. But what of the urge, or the need, to live vertically? Civilizations delve and ascend, building kivas, bomb shelters, basements, and subways; and building skyscrapers, cathedrals, mosques, and mountain shrines.

At Canyon de Chelly, Pueblo ruins are perched improbably high on the sheer canyon walls. Why? Perhaps, as some have suggested, an aggressive contingent of cannibalistic raiders forced these remote placements. Vertical life, then, could be an expression of the fear of domination, a response to naked aggression. Urban high-rises, for example, also serve as retreats from certain ongoing threats. But might these defensive vaults into the sky also invoke our better natures? Might they temper our brutal acts by substituting a spiritual impulse for a merely domineering one? The conflation of these impulses, of course, has determined most of Western history. But only by separating these urges might we really contemplate compass.

The upward vertical expansiveness of civilizations, though rooted necessarily in survival, aspires to more than brute existence. Verticality need not always loom; it can express an alternative to dominance.

When expansiveness is conceived of in a horizontally linear fashion, it is usually a euphemism for colonialism. What appears as a pragmatic literalism is actually a mystification, as territories are “opened” in order to shroud the will to control. This horizontal covering, this physical hegemony requires a prostrate people and a prone earth. Narratively, it is often expressed as a linear travel saga, as inspired entrada or pioneer travail; or, from the conquered’s perspective, as forced exodus--think, for example, of the Long Walk of the Navajos.

But when expansiveness is seen as omnidirectional, involving a fuller potential: what then? Walking down to the White House ruins, I’m accompanied by a crew of ravens. I notice bluish forms below me, and hear wing flaps in the canyon silence. On a red wall opposite me, a shadow moves, reshaped by every gap and outcropping as it passes over the stone.

Well: vertical life requires an infalling, wherein one no longer loiters on a far scenic rim. Compass is possible only via immersion, where “between,” no longer confined to horizons, becomes “among,” an unwilled yet sure position in a multifarious world.