This world and that of the gods are mirrors of each other and transactions between them involve reciprocal exchange—the Hopi feed the kachinas, and the kachinas feed the Hopi by bringing the rain. “Everything, in Hopi belief, is dependent on rainfall, which, when confined with Mother Earth, is the essence of all things.”
We read our books and examine old photos and walk the contemporary Hopi mesas and talk to the people, and feel for a hopeful moment that in the mirror of what it’s like to be human provided by the Hopi, we can see a chance for peace in our worldwide community. But connection is tricky, and not just because of Hopi reticence. On Second Mesa, in the village of Walpi, a man came up while I was walking the balustrade around the edge of the mesa, and offered to explain the Hopi beliefs. I imagined he was hitting on me, running some scam, and I turned away.
There are no more than seventy-five feet from the cliffs on one side of Walpi to the cliffs on the other. The accumulation of stonework and adobe buildings is stacked in that narrow space in a rough way that suggests to my metaphor-making consciousness they’re of the cliffs themselves, i.e., authentic. I counted five kivas and nine clan houses among the Walpi. These people, in villages, clans, lineages, and kivas, house groups and clan groups, I thought, isolated in my self-administered defeat, are never alone. What do they know?
Walpi, inherently elemental, so obviously made of earth, like Acoma and the White House, is a situation in which I feel, immediately upon leaving, that I missed whatever it was that I went there to encounter.
So go back, I think, talk to people, this time get it right. But I don’t get it right, any more than I can pin down my feelings as I stood viewing my mother’s powered face that last time before she was interned. I’m drawn to Walpi by old photos and the fact that Walpi looks much the same as it did a hundred years ago, by a sense of deathlessness, the primordial dream.
“Corn cobs and husks, the rinds and stalks and animal bones,” Leslie Marmon Silko writes, “were not regarded by the ancient people as filth or garbage. The remains were merely resting at midpoint in their journey back to dust. Human remains are not so different.”
Silko says, “Rocks and clay are part of the Mother. They emerge in various forms, but at some time before, they were very small particles or great boulders. At a later time they may become what they once were. Dust.” I imagine some mudhead Hopi clown-figure telling me, laughing, “Lighten up, old Sport, you are not going anywhere, your electricities will be around so long as there are electricities. Breathe and smile as the clouds drift over the desert.”
And stop ignoring the obvious. What Walpi whispers into our suspicious minds, of course, if there must be a message, is simple: Be communal, join up, share your goods, and once in a while give your sweet time away, no charge, pro bono, and you’ll be as close to home as you’re likely to be. But is that exactly what we want to hear?
Hopi and the Zuni pueblos share one obvious thing: isolation. Traveling to Zuni, going alone, I zoomed on and on across plains. But Zuni was unlike Walpi. Zuni was not the elegant, stacked, and laddered pueblo I’d seen in hundred-year-old photographs. Rather, it was a cluster of cinder block houses, grocery stores, and shops selling native pots, carved silver jewelry, and fetishes. Cell phones looked to be a big consumer item, and TV dishes.
Hoping to buy a something for Annick, I wandered into a jewelry shop with a half-dozen motorcycles, road bikes, in front. The riders, in dusty leathers, chatted in French, joking with the Zuni proprietor while a lean woman with streaked blond hair, and burly tattooed fellow, tried on earrings. I drove on to Gallup, where I drank some gin, ate a chicken-fried steak smothered in sausage gravy, and sat in a motel room watching “America’s War Against Terrorism” on the TV while a digital clock clicked off minutes.
The belief system that sustains Zuni, that I entirely missed, can be sensed in Dennis Tedlock’s essay “Zuni Religion and World View” in the Handbook of North American Indians. The Zuni, Tedlock tells us, believe that the world is inhabited by “raw people” and “cooked people” (also known as “daylight people” and dependent on cooked food). The raw people eat food that is raw or has been sacrificed to them by the cooked people, and they can also change forms; they are people in the sense that one of their possible forms is human, and because they and humans should behave as kinsmen toward one another.
“The earth itself,” Tedlock says, “is a raw person, Earth Mother; trees and bushes are her arms and hands, and she wears a robe of yellow flowers (pollen grains) in the summer and white flowers (snowflakes) in the winter.” In return for prayers and offerings the Sun Father grants blessings to daylight people, including daylight itself. The daylight people have a similar reciprocal relationship to raw people like rainstorms, bears, kachinas, and corn plants.
Eliza McFeely, in Zuni and the American Imagination, sums up reasons why outsiders, reacting to incoherence in their own cultures, have found Zuni attractive. “Interdependent secret societies, each of which was concerned with a different aspect of Zuni’s physical, economic, and spiritual health, were the cornerstones of Zuni social cohesion.
“The pueblo itself, in its courtyards, passageways, and rooftops, was stage and gallery for the kachina dances that were the most public of Zuni’s religious practices.” All the people, as participant or witness, were involved. “At times the entire village was transformed into a sort of open-air cathedral.”
Social cohesion, I think, is the operative notion. Zuni religious life, as does most native religious life over the Southwest, because life in that arid land has been so precarious, centers on systems of caretaking of people, animals, plants, all of creation—and is thus inherently conservative.
In Patterns of Culture, published in 1934, anthropologist Ruth Benedict describes the Zuni culture as “Apollonian,” restrained, more concerned with social order than individual desires, but essentially benevolent. In a radically disrupted world, such as that of recent times, as Eliza McFeely writes, the Zuni “emphasis on tradition, harmony, and the life of the social group” looked to be “a rational alternative.”
But life is ordinarily disordered. In The Beautiful and the Dangerous, Barbara Tedlock tells of the seasons she and her husband spent working as anthropologists at Zuni. Her book is organized like a novel, scenes in progression, focused on the textures of daily life, meaning revealed in events. Toward the end she juxtaposes a boozy dance-hall night in Gallup with the masked Zuni dance ceremony called Shalako, each a search, each disturbed by conflicted yearnings. The Zuni, it seems, despite their famed rationality and concern for social order, also like to kick back and party.
But their losses are never entirely forgotten. Native American poet Joy Harjo, in “Deer Dancer,” tells of barroom women in a scene like Gallup, fighting despair and finding meaning even after “the real world collapses.” The last stanzas go like this:
And then she took off her clothes. She shook loose memory, waltzed with the empty lover we’d all become.
She was the myth slipped down through dreamtime. The promise of feast we all knew was coming. The deer who crossed through knots of a curse to find us. She was no slouch, and neither were we, watching.
The music ended. And so goes the story. I wasn’t there. But I imagined her like this, not a stained red dress with tape on her heels but the deer who entered our dream in white dawn, breathed mist into pine trees, her fawn a blessing of meat, the ancestors who never left.
“How shall we enjoy ourselves,” writes Dennis Tedlock, is a primary Zuni concern. “Many kachina dances are not so much sacred as they are beautiful.” Barbara Tedlock tells of a bright and talented young Zuni potter, a single mother who is depressed and allows her infant daughter to almost suffocate while strapped to a cradleboard. The young woman says she wishes she could move to Albuquerque and “get an office job or something.” She’d like to throw away all her security inside Zuni for an escape into the chancy Anglo world where she could maybe learn to be a real artist. Is that it?
Our homes are a primary source of identity; without them to inhabit in our imaginations we often become disoriented. We wonder where are we, who are we, who should we be? But homes can also be an entrapment.
Southwestern native peoples have maintained the integrity of their communities without sacrificing individual spontaneity by insisting on belief that the world is alive if difficult, and that we have no choice but to meet life with life—working, cherishing, playing, dancing, and praying, thus keeping the world alive. At the same time, of course, some of the most imaginative are looking for a way to get themselves to Albuquerque.
Southwestern villages like Hopi and Zuni have seemed like an attractive alternative to our fractured culture for more than a century. As a consequence the life-styles and arts of these communities are being copied, essentially commodified, by communal hippies and in high-end galleries in Santa Fe and Scottsdale.
Wandering the ancient mesa-top village of Acoma, I bought Annick a necklace. But not many people live up there full-time anymore. They are more comfortable in semi-Anglo villages on the flatlands nearby. As are most citizens of Laguna, down the highway toward Albuquerque. Many of the pueblos have evolved into cultural museums, backdrops used by people with art for sale to lure tourists. But nevertheless, the necklace I bought for Annick was pure silver and beautifully crafted.
At the Hubbell Trading Post in Ganado, south of Canyon de Chelly, there are stacks of brilliantly designed and finely made Navajo rugs. The prices are high and should be. Designing and weaving those rugs is an art learned over lifetimes by women in hogans out amid the distances. Each rug, after the design is thought out, takes hundreds of hours of slow, intricate work.
But rug weaving is not an ancient Navajo art form. Rather, with the encouragement of traders like Lorenzo Hubbell at Ganado more than a hundred years ago, Navajo women developed rug weaving as a commercial enterprise. The weavers, however, have let their vision and work evolve into a source of both personal and community pride and identity, transforming what could have been the drudgery of “forced” work for hire into the high and voluntary artistic achievement their rugs so often are.
Be careful, take your time, and if you want to buy Navajo rugs or pueblo pottery or Hopi kachina dolls or Zuni jewelry and fetishes, learn to know what you like and why. There’s junk everywhere—in Gallup it’s possible to find lots of pseudo-Zuni art made in Mexico and the Philippines. But exquisite things can be found if you’re prepared to pay uptown prices for an embodied vision.
CHAPTER SIX
The Santa Fe Triangle
My first time in Santa Fe was at a convention of the people who wrote pop-Western gunfighter novels. I was staying in very posh digs, elegant rooms, a laid-back open-to-the-night bar, and hyperexpensive Western art and native craft shops along an arcade. But the convention was brain-dead. I listened to talks about morality by old fellows who wrote shoot-’em-up pornography, bare-assed splendor in the meadow about every twenty pages, and to ecstatic theorizing about aesthetics by women wearing way too much silver, clanking squash-blossom necklaces and dozens of bracelets. This all seemed fraudulent, dedicated to selling a sort of imitation West.
And I felt like as big a fraud. The Western had always been a more or less ridiculous transmogrification of actual life in the West, and it wasn’t even a vital commercial form anymore. And we all knew it. So I drank, and was happy when a wild fellow I’d known in other circumstances showed up with a crazed renegade painter who lived alone in the deep New Mexico outback, a man who was trying to get his beloved—ten thousand varieties of light playing over one particular run of infinities—onto canvas.
But before long a sourness descended over our group. We were absolutely unknown artists, and likely to stay that way. We seethed with envy, and took to stalking along the arcade, carrying drinks and making sarcastic remarks about the paintings and pottery on display there.
Then the crazed painter stuck his fist through the face of an enormous stereotypical acrylic cowboy on a buckskin horse who was eyeing the glory of a vast white to orange to deep red sunset, a work of art valued at three thousand dollars. Security appeared, in the form of a big uniformed balding man wearing a badge and a holstered weapon.
So, there in fact, before us, we had one of the essential conflicts in the West—inauthenticity, or not? But it turned out that the crazed painter, or the other fellow, I never did get it straight, was married to a woman with money. Credit cards appeared, and what had looked like serious trouble went away in moments.
The manager of the gallery smirked and winked at me as our group headed back toward the bar. “Those fellows,” he said, “aren’t they the real thing.” It didn’t seem to be a question. “What a hell of a town,” he said. We were all of us, even him, in his mind, larger than life. In hindsight it seems clear we were up to nothing but self-justifying inauthenticities. However, the mudhead says, aren’t we always, mostly?
A couple of years later Annick and I started our day in Santa Fe with room after room of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings in the museum off the square dedicated to her work—vividly feminine flowers and striped rose-and-saffron escarpments stretched out like a resting body and alive, and bone-white skulls juxtaposed against the blue purity in the sky. That vision is striking and entirely hers but in its commodified form, on framed posters all over Santa Fe, it’s clichéd decor.
So, looking for sights we hadn’t seen before, we went out for what we’ve come to think of as “the famous four-culture drive.” North of Santa Fe we visited the Santuario de Chimayó, said to be the Lourdes of America. It’s visited by thousands of mostly Hispanic and Indian pilgrims on Holy Week, some hiking or hitchhiking over hundreds of miles bearing hand-hewn crosses. Annick bought a tiny stamped tin milagro, which means “miracle” in Spanish, a head which when blessed might reinforce my resolve to stop smoking.
In the village of Chimayó I bought an elegant blanket from Trujillo’s Weaving Shop, where they were being made as we watched. A friend told me that Chimayó has since become “the black-tar heroin capital of New Mexico,” and that Espanola, down on the Rio Grande, has the highest percentage of overdose deaths of any population in the United States. What to say? Was this the right way to proceed, driving, idling, and buying?
In the highlands of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains between Santa Fe and Taos, we came to Truchas. Robert Redford tried shooting The Milagro Beanfield War around Truchas and found he wasn’t wanted—the only evidence of that disruption was a sign reading Milagro Gas.
A couple of hundred years ago, as the culture of Spanish New Mexico solidified into a class system, the poor mestizos and genizaros were encouraged to settle in outlier towns and serve as buffers against rapacious raiders like the Comanche, whose attacks had ensured the abandonment of the pueblo at Pecos. Truchas was one of those towns. Visits by priests were rare, and the isolated people evolved a sect of what I’ve heard called “morbid Christians.”
Known as Penitentes, they spend Holy Week singing sorrowful hymns and enacting a repetition of Christ’s death, a brother literally hauling a heavy cross to the hill on his back in order to suffer while others whip themselves bloody with knotted cords. Penitentes exist today much as they did, distant and proud. A writer I used to know was snooping around Truchas when he found himself faced by angry men wielding tire irons. They sent him right down the road. He said later, laughing as he spoke, “I completed my research in the New York Public Library.”
Cruising down toward the Rio Grande, we imagined seeing landform patterns from O’Keeffe paintings on actual hills, and indulged a fantasy: an angular and aging, beautiful woman at her paintings on the roadside, a black Model A parked alongside, a slope folding into a gully which was then transmutated into an image which might be suggesting the beauties of women’s so-called nether parts or simply remind us
that translucent mysteries are part of one another. The idea of her lifetime’s work was no longer boring.
Across the Rio Grande, we ascended to Los Alamos. The layout of life there looked planned, orderly, small-town streets, as the poet Richard Hugo said of another Western town, “laid out by the insane”—a community theater near a nuclear research facility; families poised beside the possibility of apocalypse. Lawns and incandescent closure.
On the morning of July 16, 1945, down on the southern New Mexico badlands called Jornada del Muerto, a device exploded that cast “the light of a thousand suns.” The fireball grew to be shaped “like a monstrous, convoluting brain.” Hard to think this is where it began.
Bandelier is an ancient native village site in a deep secluded canyon north of the plateau where those scientists live and work. Prehistoric inhabitants carved dwellings into the cliffs. Through centuries of travel they’d worn knee-deep paths into the soft stone. This, for me, spoke of human continuities and persistence as nothing I’d seen recently. This, I thought, is why I’m here, what I’m going to love about this neck of the woods. Then my automobile went to ailing—semiplugged emission-control system. We barely made it back up the hill to the plateau and Los Alamos.
Far away, as we chugged through the twilight, Santa Fe lighted the horizon and looked pretty sexy to escapees from ice-bound Montana. Annick and I ran through another late round of baked brie with lingonberries, laid up in a casita, and woke to warm springtime.
Many in the the modernist art movement before the First World War believed they might find a home in some local neighborhood. Many, not just artists, still do. Allegiance to a coherent local life-style might define us. Given a chance, in the proper setting, we might find that we were content in a classless society, a free and forbearing interwoven culture. That was and is the echoing dream.
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