Plato’s Alcove

It is for me to give them something in return.  I trade into the small, sharp fingers of one woman a perfect loaf of bread that all five accept graciously.  Suddenly I see the loaf’s size—that it is not enough.  I retrieve a single-thread harness of diamonds and pearls that fastens at the nape and small of the back.  I put it on the first Japanese woman, who wears her black hair up.  Her neck and face shine.  The fire of the desert travels around and through the jewels.

The other four gather around her in a surge of simple excitement.  The voice of their delight is as the murmuring of pinyon jays.  They bow and go in a group away.

A voice remarks upon the sentimentality of my action involving the harness.

I say, “Yes, but you must give them their due.”

Five oriental women, like five muses.

I go out into the desert and forget them for the stone, dirt, and jade sky.

II. Journey

 A friend is taking me to the desert.  It’s my first trip.

As we set out, I think I know him.  In the city he is tall with a stiff, proud walk; he wears the habit of doubt.

When we strike the San Rafael Desert and drive east along sand-dune-ruffled roads, his face acquires a shadowy smile.  Layers slough off.  He leaves discarded skins along the dirt track.

As darkness lowers we come upon a canyon lying below road level, sinking into its own landscape.   While my friend beds down I walk between yuccas to introduce myself to this strange land.

Raised beneath the East Coast’s sweet gum and white oak canopy I feel exposed on the rimrock, lost in a glittering wilderness of stars.  All those sharp lights prompt pinpricks of doubt: what if I’m not wanted?  Sitting on slickrock, I follow moonlight down stone walls as far as I can see.  To the north, the canyon’s trough empties its darkness into an equally dark delta between the lowest stars.

No way to orient myself.  I stand up to leave.  Suddenly a cry rises from the canyon, several fluted notes scaling down.  It repeats twice then dies.  I toy with the idea it’s a sign but can’t think what it means.  An invitation I can’t accept?  An out-and-out taunt?  Laughter? 

Returning to camp, I find my friend asleep.  He jumps when I walk up.  Seeing it’s only me he falls straight back into dream.  Where moonlight falls across his sleeping face it shines naked as a child’s and—there’s that smile.

Later I wake to wild talk.  I roll over and look at my friend.  He’s sitting up in his sleeping bag, hands stretched to the front.  He waves them and with a soft chuckle says, “No, no, no, no, no!”  The nos scale down like the fluting I heard earlier.

He appears to be rejecting some idea.  What is it?

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer but lays back down and snores lightly.

* * * * *

            I don’t sleep well—too excited—and wake early to watch stars melt into pink-blue sky.  The sun is coming up fast: I feel the earth moving beneath me.  I look at my friend.  He shows no sign of rousing.  Slipping from my bag, I walk barefoot to the rim to listen to birds’ calls chime in the rocks and wait for the god of this place to make an appearance.

It comes, following its own trail of lights.  Below me, the canyon unfolds, stretches, embraces the glory.  Hidden places in the rocks turn out to it.

Verse. On the east rim the fire rose blossoms,
Its pink-gold tongues
Blushing rock and sand,
Licking up night’s tinajas.

Chorus. In sand grains beneath me,
The coolness of stars—
Those winking violets
That glamour the shadow.

Verse. My face
Inclines to the light.
Hands soften, spread—
Blood blooms.

At the truck, my friend is up.  He’s still smiling as if he hasn’t really wakened, as if he never really went to sleep.  I think, in the desert, waking and sleeping are the same for him.  His voice has changed and, again, his walk.  All stiffness has melted into an antelope’s lightly taken step.  I wonder if there’s been a change in me but realize my wondering is probably the answer.

After breakfast he strings my gear together, helps me on with my pack, and adjusts it.  Around a fire pit lie several coppery willow trunks.  He stands one against me then sets it down and whacks off its end with a machete.

“This should do,” he says, handing it over.

Down we go.  The sand pulls back on my step so I rely on my walking willow.  At a bend, I look down to see a rattlesnake curled on the path, not in strike coils but in the heavy knot of sleep.  Its head flinches as my friend’s ankle swings by.

“Ah!”

My friend turns to look.  “Hm, glad you saw that,” he says.  Taking my willow, he prods the snake.  It shifts like an ancient thing waking then shakes out music from its rattle. My friend picks it up with the end of my stick and swings it around towards me.   “Do you want to hold it?” he asks.

Smiling, I shake my head.  “No,” I say.  “I’m the new kid on the block.”  He moves the rattlesnake off the trail.  It carves a trough in the sand as it crawls into rocks.

Reaching the canyon’s bottom, we hike along a wash bed.  Ahead rises a stone wall.  I see something.  I say, “There’s a sign.”

My friend says, “Look above the sign.”  I see swallows swirling against cliff face.  I see burning rock.

“Where?”

“Keep looking.  It takes time.”

I see dark streaks.  They look like rust stains.  Not stains.  Paintings.

The streaks have distinguishable heads atop angular shoulders.  A few have arms but most have no legs—the lower body of each disappears as if all earthen connections were dissolving, but heads and shoulders prowl upward at delicate angles toward spirit worlds.

I see figures shaped like urns.  Two men hold long snakes by their tails.  A birdman soars, wings spread, set free, apparently, by the figure below leaning back as if to better view the birdman’s flight.  Desert sheep with exaggerated horns walk in a red row.  Deer, buffalo, crops.  Figures with arms raised as if in supplication or joy.  I see zigzags—lightning?  I see spirals.  Rain from painted clouds falls into a dark stream that runs below the figures—flash flood?

“Whadya think?” he asks.

“Interesting.”

My friend strips down to a black Speedo and tucks desert flowers beneath the rim of his blue bandanna.  Fragrant yellow, white, and red blooms wreathe his blond head. The blue in his eyes has sharpened.  His stride is firm and long.  Following a few yards behind I find his walk hypnotic but keep to myself in layers of clothing.

On another panel, children’s palm prints underscore painted and chiseled images.  My friend points out storage cists in the sand.  Stones bear scoring he says may be from tool sharpening.  Beneath a scene of two men pursuing a buck stretches a mound that has somehow gathered a crown of dried leaves.  My friend tells me that beneath the mound might lie a burial.

The entirety of this place unnerves me.  All my life I’ve experienced society isolated from garden and grave.  To have it all in one small breathing space seems . . . well … primitive.  Walking up canyon we find more panels.  Then we arrive at an alcove whose massive, inward curve is peopled by a crowd, the likes of which I have never dreamed.

Floating on stone are elaborately painted ghosts, wide at the shoulders, narrowing toward their bottom ends to round off or wisp away.  Disproportionately small heads crown many of these massive torsos.  Around primary figures, spirit-bodies of brown pigment undulate like smoke in a breeze.  Flocks of bighorn sheep stand broadside, further texturing the panel’s high design.   More strokes and zigzags, more snakes.  Men aiming spears at animals or other men.

Sure of myself I scramble over the rocks below, but the figures subdue me. Gradually, I am brought to stillness.  Earlier, my friend speculated that a panel we viewed contained fertility symbols.  Here is everything else, life as transitory as desert flowers’ thin blossoms, as desert raindrops, yet as enduring as the deepest faith residing in imagination.  A great rising-to-meet-life, rising-to-meet-death. And who’s to say that images of death are not also images of fertility?

With the wild relations of color and design, with all the activities of men and nature, stillness lives in the whole.  Stillness?  I mean very old, very centered potency.  And the whole, alien as it is, distant as it is, thunders.  The belief these figures embody clings to them yet, distilling, incomprehensible.

I’m accustomed to naming things but the meaning of what I see here eludes me. Lack of understanding shames me.  I thought these people primitive but I’m the ignorant one.  What did these people know?

I demand of the images, What do you know? I get back only thundering silence.  If my legs and neck were shackled so that I was unable to move, I couldn’t feel more helpless.  I think, There’s something behind me.  But I can’t turn to look for the source of the images on the wall.  To my soul, they exist only as shadows of otherworldly reality.  Or is it, otherworldly imagination?

Is there a difference?

Suddenly I realize that there isn’t anything behind me—there’s something beyond me.  The fire of this realization burns in my brain.  Reduced to ashes, I weep.

“These were good people,” my friend says.

I want to ask, when will I recover from their goodness?

III. Scholium

Because all language acts in relation with something, including itself, all language carries within degrees of alienation—art, music, written and spoken words, the maths.  Alienation is bittersweet: the awe we feel at how the garden lowers into our hands poisonous as well as ineffable fruits, fruits of knowledge.  This awe is our self-consciousness in the face of all-being, inertia when everything around dances, inability to answer as thoroughly as we have been asked.  The degree of alienation implied might be great or it might be so small that rather than thinking it alienation we call it hope.  But whether it’s verse, advertisement, a painting, a fugue, or a scientific text; whether it conveys by texture, color, number, syntax, or tone; language holds like the body holds blood tension between boundaries and what lies beyond.

Consider the language of praise.  Not the kind that says, “I admire you because you agree with me,” or “I praise you because you have a weakness for flattery.”  I mean the kind that says, “Have mercy, Life of my life!”  Such language addresses a great Something Beyond, admitting distance between the worshipper and object of praise.  Such language might even savor the distance because that very distance attracts one into unforeseen ways—into the gorgeous unknown.

Sacred writings, like those on canyon walls, exist by virtue of these distances—they are language looking across plains of being.  They struggle to express, or more heroically, to transcend alienation, or at least to reduce it.  Romanticism, whatever else it is, reaches through the imagination to try to reconcile the perceiver with what, but mostly how, he perceives, or what he aspires to.  Classicism, realism, naturalism—all these bring participants face to face with Other—that which one does not yet know.  Irony is one name we’ve assigned this condition of alienation.  Irony—what some worship as the constant of the universe.

Irony.

It can creep up on you at any time.

IV. Memory

Williamsburg, Virginia—the maze behind the Governor’s Mansion.  I’m in Mrs. Carter’s fourth grade class.  Paths run left and right through manicured hedgerows.  A guide gathers us at the maze’s entrance and says, “Start by going to your right.”

Too young to worry about Minotaurs, off we scamper through green corridors to find the maze’s secret center.

Competition to arrive first is fierce.  I don’t want to be last but looking around see that I nearly am.  I back out of dead ends, stumble into others at intersections.  Then, I find it—the maze’s heart.  It’s a small, grassy opening with a white bench—rather disappointing.  Shouldn’t there be some mysterious object here—a statue of a unicorn or some strange but wonderful machine?

Oh well! 

Tagging the bench, I whirl and rush out.  Now I’m anticipating the unwinding.  I’m concentrating on the way out, but after running only a few steps I find myself back at the entrance.

I stop.  It can’t be!  Confused, I fight back tears.  I realize the truth: if I had turned left at the entrance, instead of right as directed, I would have reached the maze’s “center” in seconds.  I feel someone enjoying a good joke at my expense.  I look for the laughing eyes I know must be there, but there’s no one.  Bitter!  And who is that I feel looking?  I have no word for it.

The word is irony.

Irony is what lay at the maze’s secret center.

 V. Journey

  “Come on,” my friend says.  Feeling raw and half-blind, I climb out from beneath the figures with nowhere near the confidence I brandished climbing up.  Putting our backs to this gods’ gallery, we return to our packs, moving them to a side canyon.  My friend takes off to explore this tributary.  Afraid to be left alone with the canyon’s awful ghosts, I follow.

We have not gone far when we reach a steep dryfall and trail’s end.  To my astonishment my friend lays down in the shade and without saying a word goes to sleep.

Now I know it’s true.  In this place sleeping and waking are the same to him.  I sit nearby and wait.

When he wakes we return to camp.  He begins cooking dinner.  Tipping his head, he looks at me, sitting idle in the sand.  “Take these water bottles and fill them,” he says.

Pouting at being sent off like a kitchen maid I walk a long ways, but all waterholes are too shallow or have crunchy-looking creatures bumping through.  I return to camp.

“I can’t find a hole deep enough to dip the bottles without picking up an inch of silt.  I’m going the other way.”

“That’s okay, but first eat dinner.”  He’s made shrimp “creole” from spices, vegetables, and shrimp-flavored Ramen.  It tastes good.  Partway through the meal, he stops chewing and listens.  “I hear an engine,” he says.

When he mentions it, I hear it—just barely.  He finishes eating before I do and picks up water bottles and water purifying kit.  “Stay here,” he says.

Surprised, I stare.  I think, Why should I?  And what’s with the water bottles?  That’s my job.

After a while, he returns, water bottles full, and I realize he left me behind to protect me, hidden in the brush like a fawn.  He says,  “It’s a Mormon ward clerk type with six kids in a Suburban.  He came down the switchback and was giving himself gray hairs negotiating the hairpins getting back up.  He made everyone get out and walk.”

The clerk and his kids gone, the canyon is ours again.  We wander then lounge in our sleeping bags till we drift off to sleep.  During the night a rock crashes down the cliffs, startling me awake.  I stare wide-eyed into a star-flashing sky.  Between canyon walls moonlight presses, intensifies—whitewater through narrows.  Echoes fly away into silence.  I reason out the noise and settle back into my bag, imagining moonbeams moving rocks in their currents.  I look at my friend.  Drenched in moonlight, he has slept through this drama of erosion.

The moon’s silent currents flow all around.  Coldness creeps out of the rocks.  Closing my eyes, I see canyon walls and feel the tension of stones as they endure gravity.

My friend’s relaxed breathing lulls me back into sweet-air sleep.

VI. Scholium

 Irony may be defined simply as the discrepancy between appearance (what we believe is happening) and reality (what is really happening).  Along with initiation rites, jokes, twists in everyday speech, and facial expressions, there exists art whose very core of energy is the ironic destruction.  All these suggest that while irony might be a simple and common thing, like nakedness, our fascination with it isn’t so simple.

Perhaps irony’s biggest trick is the false sense of superiority it gives the person who imagines himself to stand outside it—the person who really knows what’s going on.  The ironist adopts a superior stance and plays jokes to entrap others.  But such a position is itself steeped in irony because our limited perspectives make us all shortsighted.

Where perspectives end, we accept boundaries.  Irony, or the ironic destruction, occurs when we are forced to reach out and touch those boundaries, only to find—heh heh—walls we supposed were real aren’t really there at all.  As a dissolvent of imagined boundaries, irony may be the molten center of every act of relation, be it to humans, to animals, or to a landscape of ideas.

 VII.  Journey

 Next morning I rise before my friend and walk to the main canyon to watch the sun rise. All around, doves murmur.  The tributary remains steeped in chilly shadow, but in the main canyon, light like warm honey drops onto my skin.  I go back to wake my guide and friend.  I can’t stand his sleeping through sun-up.  Or maybe I just don’t want to see it unless he sees it too.

“Get up!” I say.

He takes my demand well and rises.

Barefoot, disheveled, and all of a color, he treads to the main canyon.  Again I’m reminded of a pronghorn buck.

He says, “Let’s go worship the sun.”  Looking up, he names it.  “Father Sun.”

“Mother Moon,” I answer.

“Mother Moon,” he assents.

“And the stars?”

“Brothers and sisters.”

VIII. Scholium

 In any confrontation where irony is present (perhaps it’s present in all confrontations), destruction is imminent.  But this destruction destroys and renews with one fire; it kills and makes alive.  We reach out and touch something uncanny, something that threatens because in our present state it’s unknowable, but it demands to be known because it’s at hand, now.  Either we accept the truth about our favorite boundaries—like the Emperor’s New Clothes, they’re not really there—or else we remain set against life, believing it will continue as it is and never be anything more.  We refuse to admit to daily apocalypses erupting before our eyes.  But refusing to laugh doesn’t kill the joke.  Refusing to laugh might just make the joke even funnier.

When we find ourselves to be irony’s laughingstock, we experience the sudden revelation the joke thrusts upon us.  We’re caught in the act, the rug is yanked from under our feet, or there’s a box in a box in a box, all neatly wrapped but containing at the center nothing. Or the center isn’t in the middle.  It doesn’t matter how it happens.  Somehow, we believed the wrong thing, made the wrong choice; somehow, we are undone.

However, if we’re supple, we may receive more than mere comeuppance.  We may get over ourselves.  We may get through.  This might happen at any time or place, with some animals or any person.

IX. Dream

 Christ walks across an open land.  His robe is the color of Navajo sandstone.  Occasionally he stops and talks with our group or turns and skips with a light step backward so that he can face us as he speaks.

I walk along behind but feel my contact with Earth dissolve.  I fly, only straight up.  This doesn’t seem unusual; nobody takes the least notice.

I rise, passing through layers of blue strata: turquoise gliding to slate blue, to midnight blue, and finally to black expanse.  I sail past familiar constellations—Scorpio, Cassiopeia, Ursa Major—to constellations I’ve never seen.  I remain in this stellar plain for some time, gorging on its newness.  My mind works out shining triangulations and dot-to-dot variants—the schemata of suns.

Finally, I’m done in by satiety.

I say, “I am satisfied—for now.”

Immediately I sink down from this new galaxy or new part of the familiar one, gliding like cottonwood fluff, passing once more through common constellations bearing the taxonomy of mythology, through layers of light, a glissade of soft colors—down, down, down to terra firma.

X. Journey

 It’s Sunday and time to leave.  I feel as if I’ve become insubstantial—one thing after another moves me.  My friend moves me.  Had it been anyone else, I could have protected myself.  He pushes me out there.

By now, there are wild lights in his eyes.  As with the desert, I’m not capable of joining him completely.  Yet I ‘ve had my rites of passage.

He leaves me again.  While he’s gone, I stretch myself into the air.  I remove my flannel shirt and sit in tee shirt and jeans and rub on sunscreen.  Sitting cross-legged, I brush out my hair, savoring the touch of sun and shadow on bare neck, the movement of breezes across my scalp.  I let out my breath and realize I’ve been holding it knotted in my chest.  Imagining that my belly contains a spiral, I breathe.  The spiral expands, contracts.  Three deep breaths: in . . . out, in . . . out, in . . . out.  Breaths of air filtered through stone, through thickets of wild coyote willows.  Yes.

He finds me thus, looking different.  I see something in his eyes.  In a gesture to it, I hold out my last granola bar.

Taking it, he says, “You saw the look in my eye.”

I dread the hike to the rim but know I’ll do it.  My friend climbs the sandy trail with steadiness.  I use his deep footprints as stair steps.  His footprints and the walking willow prevent my sliding backward with each step.  He finds dove feathers.  I meet him puffing and tired.  He tucks the feathers in my hair beneath the hat brim and walks ahead, and as I follow I feel life change. Body rhythms align, muscle strikes earth in easy relation.  Breathing becomes measured and pleasurable.  Oxygen hits my blood in a clean rush.  I begin moving steadily, freely, with joy.  When I reach the canyon rim ablaze with zenith light, I am exultant.

XI.  Scholium

Perhaps there are more kinds of destruction than we realize.  We don’t recognize them because they’re routine; if someone pointed out their destructive quality, we would protest.  There is the functional destruction in language: the flicker, the trade, of metaphor—as Aristotle said, “the best thing by far for poets.”  There is the long corridor of the symbol, whose entrance contains its exit.  These are two figures that in the mind burst into flames from which phoenix of new meaning arise.

With language, the struggle to get across begins in infancy and becomes mundane so that we don’t think of language acquisition as the boundary crossing it is. Or because we don’t think of the boundary crossing of language acquisition as destructive, we don’t give it the reverence due.  Often then language is not fluently acquired—even native tongues.

But since when crossed, boundaries disappear, as in metaphor, symbol, and paradox, might not irony as well disappear once the boundaries providing for the ironic destruction are transcended?  When the discrepancy between appearance and reality dwindles, or, if such a thing is possible, finally disappears, what remains?  Surely, since we’re imperfect beings, irony is inescapable.

Or is it?

XII.  Journey Dream Memory Scholium

 In the desert one day I met Coyote, the Trickster-God.  We greeted each other and sat in the shade.  I opened my canteen and drank then offered Coyote a drink.  When he thought I wasn’t looking he wiped the canteen’s mouth.  Then he drank.

“Thank you,” he said, handing it back.

I asked Coyote, “Why is this place so beautiful?”

He laughed and said, “I’ll tell you a story that explains everything.”

Used to be (said Coyote) the world wasn’t like this.  Earth wasn’t even earth.  A great, watery business, it flowed together and apart, rising and falling.  There were no plants, no coyotes, and no people—only the world, and it couldn’t speak.  Each day Sun called out to it, but the world stood silent. Moon signaled across the darkness but the world made no sign.

Now a great Maker, Ma’i, Coyote, who goes from place to place and star to star, passing by Earth stopped to consider it.  Seeing this sphere formed at the very limits of the laws he shook his head.

“What god did this?” he asked.  “It’s the work of an imbecile!”  To show his contempt he relieved himself on it.  A seed passed through him and fell into the water.  Then Ma’i went away.

Waves tossed the seed then struck a drift of land.  The seed was cast ashore.  Instantly the ground doubled over it and sank.

Moon and Sun continued to call to this world but nothing happened.  Then one day, something did happen.  A green tendril rose up through the water.  With this tendril, the world found its tongue.

(At this point, Coyote ceased speaking and began singing this shapely song.)

This
pale tendril
turned to face Moon
and Sun who looked on it with
deepening interest. It grew and became a tree
rooted like a tongue in the mouth of World’s becoming.
Moon and Sun sang to the tree words like water to thirst,
words like love to longing: Here we are and here you are
at the spring at the root of dawn. Branches erupted from the trunk,
each a forest unto itself. These branches overhung quivering formative elements:
earth, air, water, fire. Tight buds pushed from the ends of bare branches like words
forming on the tip of a tongue. They gasped in petalled utterances—
Parti-colored flowers, alike and unalike. Fragrance from this Tree of Heaven
ripened the awaiting hour. The flowers fell like stars
into elemental morasses. Some plunging into water became fishes.
Some falling in fire became dragons and the phoenix they say
makes its pyres of red cinnamon bark. Some striking earth landed on four feet.
Some falling through air turned to birds who speak the feathery idioms of flight.
Two fell—plop, plop—into warm brown mud. These became man and woman.
Everything began talking at once. Moon and Sun laughed, saying,
There is nothing anywhere, ever,
like the shining moment of conception.
Thus the world went from a sullen place
to one of many utterances.
Earth and Sun spoke in terms of life
and to Moon the world
responded with silver tides.
The tree faded but the life
that came of it multiplied
like saplings in a thicket
of wild coyote willows.

 (Here Coyote stopped singing and spoke once more in normal voice.)

 But of all creatures living, First Man and First Woman (I’m skipping a bit here, said Coyote) were peculiar, because while there was no doubt they had been born of the tree they behaved as if they hadn’t.  Earth felt the relation and spoke to them in the sweetness of her fruits and the coolness of her waters.  It caressed them with breezes and visited them in quiet places.  But still First Man and First Woman acted like they were they only thing happening, which caused problems for everyone.

So Earth sent something more obvious by way of speaking to them, namely Strong Spirits.  Like the blossoms that fell from the tree, each formed according to its element.  There’s Desert Strong Spirit, Strong Spirit in the Sea, Star Strong Spirit, and so on.  They tease Woman and Man, coaxing them beyond themselves, calling to them to join the rest.

Coyote finished his story and said, “Well, what do you think?”

“It’s just as you said.  It’s a beautiful story and explains a lot.”

He nodded.  Waving a paw at land and sky, he said, “This whole business is very ecological, economical, and remarkable, don’t you think?”

“Very,” I said.

“The Strong Spirit of this place has shown you this.”

Then he said something that sticks in my head to this day.

“What do you suppose . . ..” he said, then stopped.  He coughed, “Ahem, ahem.”

“What?  What is it?” I asked.

“What do you think we’d do with our big brains if we weren’t all the time using them to get ourselves out of trouble we’ve gotten ourselves into?”

I stared at the stones as if they had asked the question and not Coyote.

I said, “Huh, I haven’t the slightest idea.”

Coyote slapped his thigh.

“Exactly!” he said.