Chaco Canyon yesterday, impulse after reading the Childs stuff. Many years of wanting to go. I thought it took 5 hours or more but driving a little hard it was only 3.5. Good route, down to 74 through Ohkay Owingeh, 84 to Abiqui Lake, turn west on 96, sweet road through Coyote and Gallina, sleepy towns and little traffic. Curvy and twisty at
times. Fast shot reaching 550, Jicarilla Apache and then Navajo territory. Thought I’d stay over but didn’t pack well–sleeping bag but forgot pad, no tent, didn’t stock up on drinks and food, bare bones. The last store is the place where you turn from 550, like 21 miles of mostly dirt road away from Chaco.
If it had been with L, with some partner, lover, it would have felt different. Good, but not as good. Or better, also worse. All that.
I don’t know, I wanted something to be happening. I wanted to stay overnight with the full moon and Venus and Jupiter coming off a conjunct. It clouded over pretty much all around at about 7:30. Thunder and some flashes way off. Moonrise just before sunset, the ranger woman said. Look how cute with the braids, silver hair, well-spoken at the information desk. Talk about the Childs and she shows me another book, she wants to read that one. A children’s book, she says, and it’s with owls or something, I look at it and don’t care. I think later why doesn’t she invite me over to her ranger housing for drinks. We can smoke weed and talk while we wait for the moon to come out from the clouds. She informed that moonrise is just a minute before sunset. Also the Venus Jupiter conjunction was exact last night. Climax then. I assume she’s single but it is children she’s marking the owls book about.
Also saw the man with a little girl and water bottles walking higher up into spaces I thought were forbidden so went around and also made walks in those spaces.
Of course veering course. Elaborated reflexivity, exasperated minimalism.
Don’t forget those winds that were blowing through Pueblo Bonito doorways and windows an hour before sunset. The guy surprised me sitting on the floor. Hi, say happy guys. Let’s not talk about ancients and this special air. One camera click and he’s out. Later outside looks a mellow queer couple. Short blonde, tough hair.
The ruins thing, Lovecraft and Romans. I hear here a sad default voice, tired beat. I’m fatigued and lazy. Then I project gearings and import.
I blow tobacco smoke around to hazy directions. Horizons, sightlines, facades. Lights and intimations. Gnats in here, not persistent. I’m tired. Lie down in this house. Black skinny jeans that ride low. I’m no kid. An aging man who might be on the point of exposing himself. Slide a few inches. I say hi to the blonde woman and she says back. To the black-haired slim woman with pointy sunglasses and she says nothing.
Craig Childs get out of here. You got it right with the neural synapse metaphor, solstices and equinoxes lighting up circuits. Pueblo Bonito as brain. Tell the story you like about it. It’s constructed to brain you. I like it as a house of delight. I hate where the Park Service brochure says the brickwork would have been covered with plaster because Chacoans liked that. You like it as a house of mobility, motion. Stands a great house but PB is always thinking about moving. My house of delight goes for fountain flows. It mimics butte runoff, the stained cliffs behind. I see a big guy on the rock. Turning on the water. PB runs flows. It’s like worshipping a pump, a kitchen sink. Indoor plumbing turned outdoors. People from all over the place. Objects in piles, stacks, ceiling-high reserves. Pots, bracelets, knives, live birds. Potlatch channeled, layered, intensified. When it reaches critical mass, approaches implosion, everyone moves. Like a social intuition that says: build up, break down. A fountain that erects and then disassembles. Turn off the flow and it’s gone, just ruins left. Abandoned carnivals, amusement parks. Houses of delight.
Don’t forget, don’t forget. Memory as raw material to be labored into aesthetic commodity. The cloud was coming right into the fucking window. More an aperture, something not window about it. Too high to look out from. It’s skylights, architecture of old factories, of shopping malls, of sweet apartments, of Santa Fe mountain homes, Enchantment Realty, call for details.
My ass on the ground because it was shady, my ass in the dust, I stole three stones just pebbles I scratched up random. I’ve got a black fedora, a cig going, I had weed stopped on the road halfway from the visitor center. The stronger stuff but I scarcely feel it. I don’t read any brochure text though I have one in my back pocket. BORROW AND RETURN was one Park Service box, the other PAY. I look at the brochure later checking because I took fourteen photos out of the allowed fifteen though I had been determined I wouldn’t take any at all of in there. The little windows way up, the blue and the cloud, the Magritte effect, some kind of jog.
Yes, now I remember, the keyword last night driving back three and a half hours just after dark, rain around Coyote, the DO NOT PASS signs, the PASS WITH CARE signs flashing out and my thirsty brain thinking they were brightly lit roadside stores, water, juice, maybe a Dr Pepper this once, I only ate peanuts, drank warm water, now I remember, reminding myself to consider, to feel, to retain Chaco Canyon, it took so many years, I would have been an asshole going with my girlfriend way back, pedantic and exclusive, my wife would have loved it after complaining and I would have been pissed off and humbled by her percepts, my last girlfriend would have been with me on the floors rolling in dust, why did I let her go, I’m seeing a pattern, but the keyword I’m remembering, yes, scale, scales, PB works off mismatches, huge sky, little opening, awesome temple site, middle of nowhere without a big river or mountain range, PB bold or perverse or wicked, the stuff is here, great storerooms of it, I’m a fucking bank, I’m a broker, a trader, but you get nothing back for what you bring, and I don’t get anything either, this isn’t tribute, this isn’t payment for being allowed to come and party. Got a fountain going here with flows, flows, that’s all. Enjoy the house of delight.
Childs sets off on the roads radiating, connecting, Childs with nexus, with mobility, with rhythm, he loves the idea of motion and of motion getting into patterns, his books flow from flows, and I also love an idea of motion and admire its utter uselessness, its tautology, its redundancy: so x is all about moving, and here I am writing showing it moving, and here I am tracking its motions, water caches, feet on the ground, and I am so jealous, CC, that your stories also mimic the runoff, are about flows, and with flowing prose, what’s not to love.
I liked that I did the trip very fast. With speed, with dispatch, with push and focus. If I can’t write at home, I’ll get in my car and make a line across the land with it. My engine hum noise, 1998 Toyota Corolla, 155k, AC on sometimes with the driver’s window open, solving the problem, covered by wind drag; or I just listen to the sound burden, the car’s radio doesn’t play, I have no music devices.
All that. I think about my emissions, my fuel purchase at the Bodes place in Abiqui.
Hating on all the fountain delight. Flows? More like bad song contagions.
What does a mood do, is it mojo.
Is it measure, treasure, is a mood a doom.
CC–dude, so clean, though there are the secret caves, the ones where he says he left it alone, he didn’t touch anything, he does not give directions, for all the reader knows the places may not exist.
That touching else somewhere near the Chaco mood.
Gerald Majer’s poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Yale Review, and other journals. Their book The Velvet Lounge was published by Columbia University Press. They recently completed a book on a Baltimore music collective, The Vibe Notebooks, and also last year the experimental poetry book Wey Way. They live in Baltimore and New Mexico where they pursue a range of theater and music projects, including the sound-art duo Vibranium Experiments and the spoken-word performance project One Thousand Jicaritas.