Wanderings: Still in Santa Fe

Meem Library - St. John's College - Santa Fe, NM

Still in Santa Fe. Anticipate being here until the end of October. I may spend the winter here. Writing a lot. Been spending my days at the downtown public library and the Museum of New Mexico, researching, as always, the sonnets and the history of the Piedra Lumbre Land Grant - which encompasses the Chama River Canyon.

About 50 years after the Salem Witch Trials, there was an outbreak of "witchcraft" in Abiquiu (1756-1766) and a subsequent series of Witchcraft Trials. In truth, the native peoples, the Genizaro Indians, were merely practicing the ceremonies and rituals of their native religion. Of course, to the zealous catholics, this was witchcraft. It was also a convenient excuse to disrupt the native peoples' settlements and lay claim to the land they occupied. Nevertheless, its a fascinating history of oppression, religious sublimation, syncretism and supernatural belief.

I recently have moved from the downtown area out here to the Meem Library at St. John's College just east of Santa Fe, not far from the SF Institute. I've always thought I should've gone to St. John's. With their rigorous focus on the Liberal Arts, deep engagement to the primary and foundational texts of Western culture, I think I would've been a fish in happy waters. Considering it's size, around 65,000 volumes, it's an excellent resource; an elegant selection, balancing the beauty of curated secondary material and depth of primary text, in original language and translation. It's also much more conducive to long term study and meditation.

The downtown public library is a welcome refuge for the homeless and stereotypical Santa Fe characters: that guy with the silver pony tail wearing an Indiana Jones hat purchased at Urban Outfitters, a tie-die t-shirt, Bermuda shorts and huarache sandals, talking at full volume about his "vision quest" in the "sweat" where he attained a "oneness" with the "First Peoples" and now believes himself to be more of "pure-blood Navajo" than "colonially tainted unwoke White Man."

At the end of the month, I'll be in Northern Arizona, Four Corners area, then will head south to Tucson. Jennifer is there for a month or so. She's heading back to Austin / Dallas to live and work. I may head down there. Trying to get a sense of which way the wind will be blowing.

Wanderings: Durango to Santa Fe

Red Rocks - Hwy 84 - Near Abiquiu

Headed out of Durango early, expecting heavy weather and traffic. Sparse traffic on 160 into Pagosa Springs, "the place of bad smelling waters". Didn't bother with any waters. The further along I drove, the more I welcomed the landscape. As soon as I turned south onto 84, I had the road to myself. Dense grey thunderheads gathered in the east, but no rain. Listening, as always, to Frank Muller perform Moby Dick. Several hours of sweet driving ahead of me.

There is always a distinct change in tone of the landscape whenever I have crossed over into New Mexico. The last time when I was traveling out of Amarillo as I passed over the line, there was a subtle alteration in luminosity, as if the world had become slightly brighter. That this arbitrary line demarks not only a geographical but a psychological change of state is a mystery to me. This time it felt like a warmth of recognition, reverse nostalgia, the cessation of a chronic sorrow or ache for a home. By the time I got to Chama I was unaccountably happy. This sense of well-being only grew the further along the road I traveled. 

Highway 84, from Chama to Santa Fe, is one of the finest drives in the country. Just after Tierra Amarilla, when it enters into the Piedra Lumbre, "Vally of the Shining Stone," the land becomes sublime and deeply resonant, winding deep into my own personal mythology, intersecting with the ancient Pueblo Peoples, Anasazi, Conquistadors, Cabeza de Vaca, Seven Cities of Gold, Coronado, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, The Witch Trials of Abiquiu, Spanish Colonialism, D. H. Lawrence, the Ghost Ranch, Georgia O'Keefe, The Monastery of Christ in the Desert, the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Bomb, Trinity, Oppenheimer, Roswell, Thomas Merton, Solitude in the Desert, the Desert Fathers, Hermits, the Devil and daemons, the Traces of the Fugitive Gods, God's Bones and the Cathedral of God's Skull. 

I pulled into the small rest stop just below the Red Rocks, got out and hiked up the highway to take a few photos of the vermillion finlike formation. Got there just before the approaching storm clouds shadowed the sun. Climbing high up on a cliff to the south of the formation, I had a panoramic view of the Valley, the Perdernal sitting dark in the distance to the West, a portion of the Abiquiu Reservoir below, its pacific waters covering ancient massacre, ruin and grave, the Chama winding towards it from the north, carving out the canyon residence of the Monastery, the Ghost Ranch and the surrounding colored cinematic cliffs, the highway snaking through the center into a hazy vanishing point. I've stopped here often enough that the view is iconic, an archetype of The Road. It is a perspective I never tire of, that I never "get used" to. 

As always in Espanola I search for the phantom bus station where I was given shelter in the Drunkard's Room. As always, it seems a phantom of memory, shifted from a physical locale into a spiritual one. 

On down past the Native American Casinos - surreal abominations / retributions of a Native American Dream. They all are cliche. To think about them is cliche, resistant as they are to any new poetry. 

Driving into Santa Fe is, again, a homecoming. Feeling grounded, centered, these familiar roots. I wonder if I can finally finish what I started here so long ago. 

St. Francis Cathedral - Santa Fe

At night, I walk through the empty streets of downtown, conversing with ghosts, updating the sentimental maps of memory. A few pints of Dos XX at Del Charro, a couple of shots of tequila. Later in front of the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi. The keystone arch burning with the Tetragrammaton. A refulgent moon over the right tower. I breath in the sweet air, searching for pinon and juniper, not finding them, instead scenting an indescribable essence of being, as if smelling my own skin. 

Skulls for Sale - Santa Fe

Wandering: Grand Junction to Durango - Red Mountain Pass

Red Mountain Pass, Colorado

What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.

- Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue

Headed out of Grand Junction to Durango on US 550, the Million Dollar Highway, through the Uncompahgre Gorge to Red Mountain Pass, 11,018 feet above all human concern except one: to not veer one foot to the right and fall 1000 feet.

Considering Lao-Tzu (Laozi) and Yinxi:

The third story in Sima Qian states that Laozi grew weary of the moral decay of life in Chengzhou and noted the kingdom's decline. He ventured west to live as a hermit in the unsettled frontier at the age of 80. At the western gate of the city (or kingdom) [Hankao Pass], he was recognized by the guard Yinxi. The sentry asked the old master to record his wisdom for the good of the country before he would be permitted to pass. The text Laozi wrote was said to be the Tao Te Ching, although the present version of the text includes additions from later periods. In some versions of the tale, the sentry was so touched by the work that he became a disciple and left with Laozi, never to be seen again. In others, the "Old Master" journeyed all the way to India and was the teacher of Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha. Others say he was the Buddha himself. - Wikipedia: Laotzi

Booming thunderstorms as Van Winkle's men of the mountains play at nine-pins. At least, I have the hairpin highway to myself. There are no guardrails. Just a painted line to the right, a few feet and a the precipitous drop into the Abyss. I creep upwards, surprised at the magnetic pull of the steering wheel to the left. There is the overbearing presence of the hovering cliff wall on the other side. The narrow ribbon of the highway seems an optical illusion, hanging insubstantially in the sky.

Finally up on the roof beam if the world, driving through thick cloud, listening (again) to Frank Muller reading Moby Dick. The sublime beauty  and terror of the Chapter 36: The Quarter-Deck:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event-in the living act, the undoubted deed-there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare! - Melville, Moby-Dick

Ahead, the highway turns towards Molas Pass, blasts of wind buffet the jeep. A rushing white Cloud River rushes beside the banks of the cliff's edge. The clouds break apart and, for a moment in that brief opening, an enormous mountain stands before me. Then it is gone. I get out of the jeep into a howling wind and wait for another break. Searching for the eye of the White Whale as it passes beneath the ship of the world.