Plebian dreams
‘This dirt knows our DNA.’
IT’S 3 A.M. The world’s craziness laps against the walls of my house like a liquid wind of death. Dis-ease rides the deep silence of that bone deep cold just before dawn, like dark cold water seeping under the covers and making my joints ache. Someone told me that all over the world this hour is the coldest. I wonder how many people are awake now – aching, worried, scared.
My mind turns over an inventory of catastrophic, apocalyptic realities and lands on the Jeep – after days without a vehicle it will be back in my driveway, by no-contact delivery, sprayed with Lysol, because maybe people hanging around the mechanic’s shop are asymptomatically positive – so I can’t drive it until it sits there with the windows open for four days. And then, where will I go?
I was only 16 when I saw the films of the concentration camps, but even then I knew the only way to survive trauma of that magnitude is with spiritual strength.
Thanksgiving dinner is in the freezer. Not the back burner, but the freezer. I thought of sitting my two plastic skeletons at the table in some of my clothes and taking a selfie entitled “My Thanksgiving” for this article.
“Dear Plebe,
“One of my favorite quotes is by Zorba the Greek who said, ‘Insanity is the salt that keeps good sense from going to rot.’ Whoever you are, no mientes, I know that this pandemic, the election, climate change, the crazymaking frustration of mask-wearing and toilet paper obsessions have left you with plenty of preservative to keep your good sense from rotting for the rest of your life. And for generations, because the global trauma of this huge event will change history and the DNA of everybody alive now. That is not hyperbole or poetic license but science. Articles about the stresses and mental health problems of the pandemic abound.
“So here’s a snack of insanity, to while away the hours of solitude while the pandemic rages outside.
“Understandably, Tempo thought that when I entitled my column ‘Mi Taosi’ it was a typo. It wasn’t. It was a code signal. ‘Taosi,’ for those of you
who don’t know, is a parallel universe existing in the same geographical location as the town of Taos, but at a vibrational frequency that makes it invisible to all eyes not in generational Taoseño heads. The landscape is totally different, hundreds of buildings are just not there and there are lots of difuntos walking around, including Mante.
“Another code word is ‘plebe.’ The linguistic root, at a glance, connects the word to the Latin ‘plebian,’ which is close, but that is not quite what ‘plebe’ means. It’s the family, the clique, the gang, the people. But it’s way, way more. I am sure Native languages all have a word for this.
“‘Plebe’ is an electromagnetic field, an invisible web of code words, body language, significant pauses, subtle accents, aromas, scents and signals, recipes, images, memories, greetings and barely perceptible twitches of the eyelid, to mention a few things that trigger mutual mirror neurons in the brains of generational Taoseños. You can see them on an MRI, in case you think I’m making this up. We light each other’s synapses up.
“This mutual exchange of information creates a field among the participants and exists externally and at the same time exists inside our bodies, intellectually, emotionally and physically, affecting our nervous systems, organs and votes. Internally, it carries an emotional tone, a cozy, comforting, exclusive sense of relatedness, of belonging, of secret togetherness. But it is also an external field, and when you step into it you can feel it.
“We are literally related to each other by blood or marriage. We share a gene pool spicily seasoned by our historical experience over 300 years, both bitter and sweet, on the same land, in the same villages and in some cases even the same houses. We are a dense network of interlocking vibrations throbbing even in our adobe walls and
the land under our feet. This dirt knows our DNA.
“And then there is personal history. After a lifetime of living in the same small town there is bound to be a huge databank in the field of interactions, from good to bad and everything in between, a circulatory system of stories. And then the power of language – a language unique to our region, a colloquial Spanish that has generated all kinds of speculation among those who don’t speak it, pungent, funny, deliberately opaque to outsiders who speak ‘regular’ Spanish, spiced with Nahuatl words, Tiwa, English words, archaic words and current slang.
“All four preceding paragraphs, all the above information, is understood instantaneously and contained in the word ‘Plebe,’ which is both the field and the people ‘in’ it.”