Unquiet Solitude
DAY OF THE DEAD, the full moon, skyrocketing COVID-19 statistics and the Mercury going retrograde will all come together in a few days, making this Halloween like none you or your children remember. So whether you are an atheist, a parent weighing the dangers of trick or treating, in law enforcement, a firefighter or in the National Guard or have lost your business or a loved one – here are all the scary things:
Election/COVID-19/climate change/racism/nuclear threat/economic collapse/armed crackpots/ news/rising seas/civil unrest/food shortages/chaos/ melting icecaps/ police brutality/ thousands homeless/hunger/stock market crash/ loose cannons/caged children/school shootings.
I know, I know – don’t “live in fear.” But fear, like death, is not a bad thing. If there was no death, then there would be no sex – reproduction without death would lead to extinction of all species from overpopulation in no time.
And without fear people could not be prepared for or even see real dangers and would also become extinct. Ignoring dangers simply allows them to proliferate, like unpaid bills, unresolved psychological issues, virus, and so on.
Personally, there is something that I have always feared more than anything. I was 16. I had just left Taos for college. It was 1967 in the world a million miles from home, and I was not prepared for Western civilization. In fact, I even wanted it – I couldn’t wait to get out of Taos. But I was just a baby.
Anyway, in those days our local isolation had just cracked, not broken, and I had been shaped in the crucible of another, older and profoundly different world. “America” was a shock to me and 75 years later I still haven’t gotten over it or gone back.
I caught a glimpse of that thing I’m scared of when I was maybe 5. The family visited Texas and I saw a house that had been burned around a Black man. I knew about the devil, but he was just words compared to that burned-down house.
But at 16 I really left home, went to college and saw a movie that showed clips from Buchenwald, Dachau and the concentration camps taken by American troops. I was the only one in the theater sobbing with terror. I knew I was seeing evil, and that it was “out there,” lurking and the world was not safe.
But the “out there” has spilled over the mountains that once enclosed our solitude, and this year there is no place without climate change, COVID-19 and the – thing I’m afraid of.
Taos was not a paradise in my childhood – there were real dangers and things to be afraid of, although nothing compared to the present. We made up stories to transform the “bad things” into “just a story” – or better still – make it go away altogether. It was a form of magic. My mother was a painter and my father was a storyteller. His father, Justino Antonio Rodriguez, migrated to Taos probably around 1905 from Parral, Chihuahua.
The Chihuahuan Desert is the largest desert in the Northern Hemisphere. It is alive with mystery. Caves deep underground full of growing crystals 30 feet long where the temperature is over 120 degrees; ancient sea beds where the turtles are descended from stranded marine ancestors, the nopales are blue and more meteors fall than any place on earth.
The ancestors of this continent’s diverse peoples have crossed this desert so many times that the ground knows our DNA. Maybe our bones vibrate in harmony with that vein of giant underground crystals, or our blood with a buried artery of throbbing water that runs deep under the primordial migration route.
The landscape converts you to mysticism; you begin to see how natural forces have drawn and driven creatures up and down this prehistoric path for centuries, like blind iron filings on a beautiful blue map. Animals know the power of these tracks that wax and wane with the breathing of the biosphere. Generations of humans have crossed here, braiding their stories into the ancient, indifferent dirt.
And off the beaten path there are haciendas abandoned since the 17th century where ghosts sweep across the empty, broken floors, their bones wrapped in rotten lace. They pass like dreams through doors with shattered eyes that nothing but wind opens, ghosts that stand for years on rusted, twisted balconies, waiting to see some sign of human life, like widows waiting for someone who will never return or the end of a drought that has lasted for centuries.
The silent mountains roll like blue thunder fading away into endless solitude. Clouds fill the sky with towering loneliness and below, just under the threshold of awareness, there is a restlessness, a pacing, a howling … an animal unquietness.
Perhaps our instincts for a more natural world are awakening – and these coyotes came into my painting by themselves.