by Paul Bogard
Unfortunately, the canyon closes at sunset, and visitors need to be on the other side of the locked gate soon after. It’s reasonable—rangers don’t have to worry about visitors becoming lost or hurt in what is even by day an unsupervised canyon, the ruins are protected from damage, and no one has to pay for lights. But for a park that celebrates a culture that kept close watch on the night sky, the fact that the canyon is off-limits at night feels awkward, regrettable, a missed opportunity. At least, that’s my initial impression.
I first came to Chaco fifteen years ago, just after I had moved to New Mexico from Minnesota, and I was still making sense of the desert—the mesas and mountains, the canyons river-washed and rusty-hued, bluebird blue sky mornings and, of course, green chile. I came to love all those things, and I still do. But while I certainly remember the bumpy last few miles to Chaco, I realize I have forgotten the unique quality desert ruins hold, the sense that with the rock, air, and light so much as it must have been, it’s as though the former residents only recently left. I’m happy to feel that again, because I’ve come this time wanting to place myself where a culture knew darkness more intimately than we do today.
One of the biggest draws for visitors to Chaco is that most of the structures seem to have been built with astronomical and lunar alignment in mind. Many of the pictographs found on canyon and building walls seem to represent astronomical events, including one known as the “supernova pictograph” thought to depict an event from 1054. But in fact, no one really knows. And so, while the structures and alignments draw visitors, the real attraction here is mystery.
“It probably would be better labeled the ‘maybe supernova pictograph,’ because there’s no way to be certain,” says Angie Richman. An archaeoastronomer with the National Park Service—which means she is particularly interested in the cultural role the sky played in ancient cultures like Chaco’s—Richman says that, nonetheless, “there’s enough around Chaco that shows that they were watching the sky enough to notice changes. There’s rock art that’s potentially comets and eclipses, and the sky clearly had significance for them in their day-to-day life, for keeping track of time and knowing when to plant and harvest crops. And it was also spiritual—looking at the night sky and seeing the sun and the moon as gods and the stars as something to help guide them was infused into every aspect of who they were.”
The ruins of Casa Rinconada stand across the canyon from Pueblo Bonito and just a little farther east, one of the largest kivas in the Southwest, and a prime example of the kind of solar alignment that so interests visitors. Twenty-eight small square niches line the inside walls of the circular building, and two large T-shaped openings for doors lie opposite each other on an exact north-south line. Each summer solstice, if the sun is shining it sends a beam of light through an opening in the eastern wall directly into one of the twenty-eight niches. This apparent solstice alignment draws visitors from all over the world. No one really knows whether this occurrence is actually intentional or just a coincidence; the kiva walls were heavily reconstructed in the 1930s (and by Indiana Jones lookalikes in baggy pants and pith helmets, no less). Still, while some of the architectural feats seem remarkable for a culture that flourished so long ago, if your whole existence rested on your ability to understand the movement of the stars and moon, the sun and the seasons, you would probably figure out a lot of things that would seem mysterious to modern observers for whom those movements have become almost irrelevant.
While Chaco doesn’t compare in terms of height or curves to many other canyons in the Southwest, for a place to watch the sky, it’s hard to imagine a better setting. The canyon runs east to west, narrowing at either end, widening in the middle, flanked by flat-faced sandstone cliffs of matching height. And so, for much of the year, the sun and the moon both rise at one end of the canyon and set at the other. The canyon itself is wide enough that, while the walls create the horizon, you have a broader view of the sky than you would in a narrower, deeper canyon. The effect: In Chaco Canyon you stand as though in a stadium built to watch the sky, or an enormous ancient planetarium. It’s easy to imagine Chacoans lying on their backs watching the three-dimensional universe above, with stars coming down to Earth, or shooting from one end of the canyon to the other.
A slow shutter captures Chaco Canyon’s Casa Rinconada at night. (Tyler Nordgren)
The Historical Park has long focused on protecting the building ruins, but an increasingly important mission is to protect the Chaco culture’s connection to the sky. Along with G. B. Cornucopia, a ranger at Chaco for more than twenty-five years, Richman has been instrumental in making this piece of Chaco’s ancient heritage part of its present-day appeal. Beginning in 1998, she and Cornucopia began to offer nightly astronomy programs near the park’s visitors center—just outside the locked gate to the road into the ruins. Thanks to contributed telescopes and the volunteer efforts of amateur astronomers, the park now offers several different nighttime programs each week.
The night of my visit, Cornucopia entertains a crowd of several dozen visitors with time-lapse images of the moon’s cycle like a film of a beating heart, and a view through the park’s largest telescope of the M13 globular cluster—a tight grouping of several hundred thousand stars—that looks like a sparkling snowball, light as air. The starry sky rises right from the black silhouette of the canyon wall behind us. It’s a sky Cornucopia calls “our most direct link” with Chaco’s ancient culture, “the same sky it was a thousand years ago.” And despite increasing light pollution from surrounding communities, Chaco is, he says, “still a very dark place,” a place that, out among the ruins at night, can be eerie, and can make you feel like “you don’t know what century you’re in.”
I am certain I’m not alone among the visitors wishing I could venture out to see it. But the longer I’m here, the more it feels right to leave the ruins alone. Especially if Cornucopia is right, that it’s at night that Chaco is closest to what it was, it actually feels better to stay behind the gate—out of respect for those who once lived here, yes, but also because leaving what it feels like in Pueblo Bonito or Casa Rinconada under a big moon or star-plush sky a mystery actually adds to Chaco’s appeal. At Walden, it felt right and respectful to visit Thoreau’s cabin site at night, as though in doing so I connected with some part of myself. Here, while I’m pleased to visit, there’s a sense this place isn’t mine, and so to leave it unknown and unvisited feels anything but awkward, regrettable, or a missed opportunity. As the crowd begins to thin and the telescopes are put away, I look west into the canyon and imagine again the ancient Chacoans gazing at the unfathomable sky. The missed opportunity would be if we were to always get what we wanted, if we weren’t to leave some of the night alone.
In his elegiac In Praise of Shadows, the Japanese novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki wrote of the Westerner, “from candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.” Written in 1933, as the electric light washing over Japan threatened what Tanizaki saw as the vital role of darkness in Japanese culture, In Praise of Shadows reads as though it could have been written yesterday. While he does not object to the modern conveniences of electric lights or heating or toilets (“truly a place of spiritual repose”), Tanizaki does want us to recognize the “senseless and extravagant use of lights” that has “destroyed the beauty” and “this world of shadows we are losing.” I’m struck by Tanizaki’s critique of the Western mind-set, and by his wondering whether, if the Orient had developed its own science, “the facts we are now taught concerning the nature and function of light… might well have presented themselves in different form.”
That a culture might think of darkness differently than we in the West do today stays with me. But we don’t have to look far—either back in time or across the ocean—to find different cultural attitudes toward darkness and night.
While it’s impossible not to generalize wh
en speaking about the philosophy of more than five hundred different nations, broadly speaking, the way night is represented in Western culture is very different from the way it’s represented in the varied cultures of Native North America. While in the West we’ve been locking our doors and shutting our windows against the terrors of the night, both natural and supernatural (think werewolves and vampires), for centuries, Native American cultures, says Joseph Bruchac, have been seeing great spirituality in the darkness. “When we go into the sweat lodges, for example, we go into darkness. We go back into the womb of our mother—that sense of darkness being embracing and protecting. And when we look at the night sky, the Milky Way, the road of stars is the passage of souls. It is the way from life to afterlife.” An Abenaki storyteller and author of more than seventy books, Bruchac says that in traditional Native culture night is often seen as a time of healing, that many ceremonies and rituals take place at night, and that there is a sense of possibility in the night sky. “So when we look at the night sky we see many, many things,” he says, laughing. “We’re not looking for some shape darkening the moon and coming to suck our blood.”
While Western culture heavily emphasizes good versus evil, “American Indian cultures tend to be much more ambiguous,” says Bruchac, “or at least more broad in their view of the role of different creatures and different things. There are gradations of gray, and you wouldn’t really hardly ever say anything was just plain evil. It might not be good, but not evil in that European sense of irrevocably beyond the pale.” Even the concept of darkness and light as separate is often quite different, too. Black is not always bad, white not always good. “The two balance each other. It’s almost a yin-yang kind of thing,” Bruchac explains. “Certainly in Abenaki traditions, the hero Gluskabe is often represented as having a white wolf by one side, a black wolf by the other. One is day, one is night, and they’re equally important guardians or companions, for him and for all people.”
Of course, Bruchac knows that a strong traditional relationship with night doesn’t automatically translate to the modern world. In fact, in many cases, he says, that connection to night is being lost. “It’s less common,” he tells me. “You’ve got reservations out West where gang activity is more common than going out at night with your family.” Visit eastern Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly, a national monument famous for ancient cliff dwellings built into the long sway of a canyon wall, where a modern Navajo community lives “connected to a landscape of great historical and spiritual significance” (as the monument brochure says), and you may be stunned to see the same unshielded security lights that blare from barnyards and driveways across America. The fact that the Navajo here are “connected” to this landscape of “spiritual significance” apparently does not make them any more sensitive to light pollution than the rest of us.
And yet for many in the Native community, the tradition remains quite alive. As the Iroquois writer Doug George told me, “We have the night so the earth can rest. We have night so we can see the star path called the Milky Way and trace our beginnings to the Seven Dancers, the Pleiades. We have the night so some spirits may wander about and sense the physical life from which they came. We have the night so we can release our spirits to travel across space and time, to visit with other spirits and gain their advice. It is by night that we cross into other worlds, other times past and future. Our physical bodies need to dream, as this reality is only one of an infinity of realities, and only through dreaming are we able to make peace with this fact. We are never alone; nor are we restricted by the body as long as we use the night to see our place in the right perspective.”
Part of that perspective, says Bruchac, is a spiritual understanding of darkness completing the light within Native cultural traditions. “You need to be able to fall into darkness,” he explains, “but you need to be able to climb out of it at the other end, to recognize that it is a cycle. Just like day becomes night, and night becomes day. The cycle continues. We need to go through that as people, too. If we try to make things too easy for ourselves, for our children, and for our culture, we are making a great mistake, because as a Cheyenne elder once said to me, ‘Life is supposed to be hard. Otherwise, we wouldn’t appreciate it at all.’ ”
Eric G. Wilson is about as successful as an American college professor can be. Only in his midforties, he is already a tenured faculty member with an endowed chair and several books to his credit. He is also, without hesitation, against happiness. At least, that is what the title of his book would have you believe. In Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Wilson makes a stand against the kind of addiction to happiness so prevalent in American society. He wonders if “the wide array of antidepressants will one day make sweet sorrow a thing of the past… if we will become a society of self-satisfied smiles. Treacly expressions will be painted on our faces as we parade through the pastel aisles. Bedazzling neon will spotlight our way.” With artificial light, Wilson writes, “We are right at this moment annihilating melancholia.”
What do we mean by the word “melancholy”? (“Melancholia” is its more traditional version.) A modern dictionary offers synonyms such as “sad,” “gloomy,” and even “depressed,” all states that, these days, doctors commonly treat with pills—Prozac nation and all that. But it wasn’t always so. Look at versions, from the 1950s and 1960s, of the DSM, the manual psychologists and psychiatrists use to diagnose mental health, and you will see a place for the natural human emotions of mourning, sorrow, grieving—all states of a natural melancholy. Too often now, critics like Wilson claim, we treat these natural states as clinical depression, something to be medicated away. “Either you’re happy or you’re clinically depressed,” Wilson tells me. “There’s no place for that middle ground which is obviously highly significant. For me melancholy is inevitable. I wanted to reclaim that ground against happiness.”
A professor of Romantic literature, Wilson weaves his thoughts with references to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets he’s studied for years—Blake, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Keats. When I contacted him for this book, I thought what better place to meet than in his office, surrounded by the works he loves. After all, you might think the setting would be appropriate for a scholar of melancholy—that I’d knock and push open the door to a dark chamber lit only with candles, incense in the air, an organ fugue from dusty speakers, a battered desk awash with loose papers and ancient verse, the gloomy professor hunched over tortured words. But Wilson suggested we meet at a trendy bar in the city’s art district, out in the open, surrounded by young professionals enjoying the evening. It turns out the man who wrote “to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations,” also enjoys good local beer.
In fact, to meet in public surrounded by people having a good time fits perfectly with the argument that melancholy is, as Wilson says, “an essential part of a full life”; that, rather than see melancholy as some sort of failure or unfortunate disease, we can see this dark quality as being as natural to a human life as the dusk sifting down outside the bar windows. Similarly, one way to see the Romantic emphasis on the value of melancholy is as a response to the excesses of the Enlightenment. “In terms of literary history, the late eighteenth century is the time when poets started saying, look, to emphasize only reason is to miss deeply rich experiences that connect us to the meaning of life,” Wilson explains. “Blake was horrified by Newton, because Newton thought that you could reduce the world to atoms moving through the void with mathematical predictability. Basically, the world was a machine. Obviously Romanticism is a very diverse literary concept, and I’m not trying to say it’s only one thing. But I would say most of the major figures were keen on feeling, emotion, melancholy, darkness, chaos, possibility, freedom—all ideas connected to twilight or night.”
Wilson describes melancholy as “an active longing for a richer relationship to the world than we have enjoyed before.” He draws
on the English poet John Keats’s 1819 “Ode on Melancholy” as an example. “Keats says the only way you can really appreciate the world in all of its complexity and beauty is to feel sorrow at the fact that everything is passing. So if I hold up a porcelain rose it’s not as beautiful as a real rose. Why is a real rose beautiful? Because it’s transient, it’s fragile, it’s tender, it’s decaying right before our eyes.” For Keats, the aesthetic appreciation of the world comes out of a deep sense that everything is, as Wilson says, “passing into darkness,” and therefore we long for things to stay, not to die. But in that very longing for things to stay comes a desire to embrace them more intensely. For the Romantic poet, Wilson argues, “melancholia over time’s passing is the proper stance for beholding beauty.”
When Wilson calls melancholy “a twilight state” between the artificial light of our obsession with happiness and the “deep, obliterating” darkness of depression, he knows of what he speaks. To go with his tremendous professional success and his roles as husband and father, Wilson has battled depression most of his life. In his memoir The Mercy of Eternity he describes a “despair so deep” that he “was worse than dead. I was neither dead nor alive, neither restful nor energetic. I hovered somewhere in between, a ghost.” For me, knowing this about him makes his reflections on melancholy all the more meaningful. For, while it’s easy to repeat clichés such as “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” the truth behind these phrases has been with us forever: Our most difficult experiences carve in us our deepest understandings of life. “I feel as though I were authentic, true, alive,” Wilson writes of melancholy. “All fakeness falls away, and I am at the core of life.”
