From a Journal of a Past Year

( The author is an Eliot House senior concentrating in Visual and Environmental Studies. )

It must begin at dawn before the eyes can know it, there is color-there is such slight quiet color that it comes all from one-the differences all our own, before morning before the sun can face everything directly, washing its color to origin-they are strong weighted colors-each passes through the center so that always the trees, the adobe, mountains beyond the dunes-all are penetrated by color from within, the mountains break the land up into different and early-colored mornings, themselves, they serve infinite silhouettes, their trees lighted against the snow by light that has passed over and returned from reflection off grasses and clouds and earth again rising the eye insufficient, the land was not sculpted within limits beyond a line of trees that in summer would have stopped the eye completely far beyond, the land in flatness compressed to a blue line that seems to just separate-but a separation in insufficient dimension, from above, the narrow hand would stretch in a plane beyond the limits of either eye, and from the blue would emerge the invisible colors changing so patiently that one could as well walk from sun to shadow in the same ignorance of perfect vision to descend, however, from wings to the land beyond the blue plain begin, continuing to the great mountains in measureless distance, great dunes of sand, they are vulnerable, massive changing with the clouds, their gravity, constant in change, they are not gold, nor golden color borne of texture below the surface, the refraction of a beauty need never be know, precious elements of transcendent spectra blinding, forever blind, locked within other earths, hues humble to familiarity to walk on the earth the clouds, the lower contoured in shades of sand and earth grasses and greens-that at any moment they will be released in a dry quiet rain falling to the appropriate surface-the color lost in the blue sky, lost onto the vision we see them, the clouds now whiter and still moving the sun now higher the light, now above the mountains, has moved from eclipse to sharper distinction, less peaceful stasis pinon-you smell it as everything around you clouds and light moving across the mesa the highway lost as a thirsting arroyo, brief and fearful potential, one can run across any land easiest in the arroyos-the length greater, but the water does it because it is the only way-if not meander, then a tacking against and with gravity, for the integrity of the land, journey to an ocean, the long way home, surprising, brief use of the arroyos, except for slight rains and sudden floods, they exist for the time when the snow has melted in the mountains, then they fill and rush by coolness in the heat of summer in their dry redness-sudden arteries waiting empty until needed, then fill and more grows green between the mountains a receptive valley, grateful supplication I don't have time for a watch the obelisk U. S. Courthouse Santa Fe

Pioneer Erected by Pathfinder He led the way Kit Carson comrades of Soldier Died May 23, 1868 the GAB

Age 59 years in Las Trampas two logs from hill to hollowed to carry water one inside other half with icicles-very small as compliment to overlap and gravity-hanging below complete skull of a stag on a pole small birds flying so vilently they change direction with each flap of the wing eagles yes eagles, details digression

It was quite plain that as we followed the highways through the land, the great birds followed the rivers, the edges of forests, and the contours of mountains with great shadowing rocks. That much was clear and appropriate and irony avoided until once, coming down a mountain on a dirt road, saw a raven flying its own distance down with a small stream. When the water passed under the road, however, the bird faltered the air, and for that fraction of time made a tragic decision-one flap of the wings that shadowed across the car, a short glide to curve with the road down the mountain soon beyond us. Somehow, the bird following our road showed a sense of freedom from it. But what have our roads done to these creatures with their won, magical, geometrics? What are our headlights broad across the land in darkness, what are our vehicle crossings to the deer and rabbits and the mice and insects lost forever to blinded owls, all of it lifeless beneath our wheels and exploded in passing on our glass less tangible adversary in the summer-you feel it moving invisible around you, winter a fair opponent, cold all behind the ears and in moon shadow more than afternoon suns naked in the midnight standing in the moonlight, with everything visible in precise shadow is quite silence, the reflected sun, fluid in its coolness is substantial as its warmth in day, contouring in degree around arms and neck and chest, a diminishing sensation into mystery of deeper shadow than sun an adobe ruin cut into and through a hill so that the builders had only to brick two end walls, cover the roof and put in small windows at either end-the integrity of the double-thickness of adobe walls that they had built, there are now trees growing within the earthwalls and the top branches have broken the crest of the hill adobe is one of the few moral ways man can build on the land, the adobe comes from the land where the home is to be, it raised from the earth and still a part of it, the color is the land beneath the juniper and pinon which surround it, low to the ground and quiet, when abandoned, returns to the earth and origin. Ceilings are long log rafters covered with planks of wood, and earth above, they are low, are warm and welcome to the hand; the walls are earth and carry her warmth and rhythm fireplaces, for efficiency, curve the corners of the room, their openings are the most wonderful of parabolas, three pinon logs leaning in on each other, the tops burn, and they lean farther and farther until they touch, and are, ashes, they give warmth for the soul and body, and the smell of the land that rose through hands into the house around, it is a land of the mind and all of the infinites of wonder it invites, there is no question of a god, the answer in the subtleties of colors that are distinct in their closeness, there is so much color of the land that its varieties come together in the lights of dawn and sunset stars tonight past Los Alamos to heaven, and except for the moon which competed closer, their light was all, walking in the night, over the hills, the shadows of the rocks are precise and have their own place, everything is doubled, all of it together, half the sky of clouds came from the north until a great curve of cirrus broke off and wheeled an are beyond the moon and Orion through the whole east and far to open south the mountains of Sangre de Christo, in less than pain after sunset, are pearl and shadow pinon burned sage crushed and spread over skin under nose finally both pinon scruffy pine trees smelling like St. Peter's had a chance to visit Bishop Lamy's Romanesque cathedral and his private chapel, the quiet peace of the chapel was more an expression of personal faith, small moments of calm perception, at least in Santa Fe, today, the cathedrals are losing people, that day the bishop was in the middle of a sermon, through the door- in ?iam pacts above a straight line barreling protest or denial, when we are of the same humanity it is hard to deny each other "I make mistakes everyone does" wide stance sitting knees up and down back and forth rocking "your presence is your faith" and of course I was standing in a cathedral, had genuflected, adjusted to the light of candles in small chapels, but would leave before the creed the Bishop's chapel the gold and white sun from water color window alms, old boards and a bishop so simple, such quiet and wonder a very small room, whitewashed with sun-gold on the altar, plain glass windows, the sun shining through painted patterns for speckled rainbows on the walls and floor the original five stations by faded paintings on weathered boards, it was all more than a cathedral ceiling vanishing from the eyes quite short of heaven a small chapel in a home a fragment of fourteenth-century Scottish stained glass leaning against a window-beyond, a dry river, trees and rising hills, crucifix a carved root still part of the dry earth, a candle always on a large smooth stone, flat as a simple altar blind Homer, poet liking water and consequent seas.

Greek maps, over their years, never had to be revised larger to be more universally inclusive. In their ships, men would not travel cut of sight of land. They had their universe, were perhaps not anxious to introduce foreign terms. Their cosmic resonances were in terms of the concrete, for their vision, though mechanically false, was truer to understanding and made sense in the shape of their minds.

They understood (conceived) vision as a process involving a ray originating in the eye, travelling out and striking an object-sight complete. Without psychology and philosophical hashings, from the very beginning, man's understanding of all things was subjective-the man himself is the source of his perceptions. There is a humility in that concept hard to understand. All you perceive has your nobility in perception, its importance determined by your awareness. What you don't see, cannot know, is shadow, darkness around and in corners, beyond horizons. We deal with unknowns in and with the terms of what we understand. Beyond his genius in removing man from sight of known shores, Homer's odyssey still had to present mysteries with realities people could understand. Whirlpools were given names to relate in sea-tales-lightning didn't just strike, he named the hand of its origin. Nothing can remain unknown entirely, magical creatures are composites of the world we know, and we turn men into pigs, always the unknown. Milton made it concrete and germinal and capitalized it with Heaven and Hell. Chaos is when things are skew at their origins, can never come together, cannot be parallel for sense or reason.

Chaos is a map-maker's concept. After you have drawn in the part of the world you know, you must fill in to the edge of the parchment. Always a little beyond known seas begin the chimeras and monsters which obviously exist. They occupy the page to the edge where the border says we can stop, breathless. But we never know what is beyond the limits of our map and mind. On clear days we venture into that darkness, we take all that we know from our world and because we cannot know better, define our new visions with old eyes.

There is a fine photograph taken in the last half of the nineteenth century. Eighteen hundreds-for those of us without good historical understanding they can at least be approached in crude chronology. Between the war for independence (revolutionary) and the freeing of the slaves, there was another large war, of opposing directions and, at an off-Broadway production of Our American Cousin, the sudden death of our president, a good man. References to this century have priorities in the immediate moment, and beyond the eighteenth century the understanding are truly historical-the chosen preservations that have influenced us in our reference to them. The 1800's, however, are historical enough for us to believe that they are real and not a warp of the present vortex, but they are also close enough in time for us to feel some comfort with them. The energies they generated are still around, still possible resolution to fine focus. The war for independence (Revolutionary) began a certain growth of sensibilities as, our backs turned safely to England, we merely walked a few short steps to the assumption that we had set our back-yard fences much too close to the east coast and, being a symmetrically oriented people, made plans to also take in the one in the West.

That little trip, the one across a geographical America, claimed everything behind the footprints, and we thought we had it. But we had just reached a limit-a dangerous accomplishment at any time-and had no idea of the responsibility. We had a country with lines simply drawn in on the map-the Pacific, an ocean not a state, asked slightly difficult questions to a people not yet breathless from the sprint over hills and valleys between plains. They stopped, but couldn't accept the absence of a finish line. America began to exist when she realized she had changed after the Revolutionary War for Independence and began to understand the nature of her energies, only a few steps behind the British proudly watching that sun rise all over the world. And there was no doubt dialogue with the America most concrete-those mountains valleys deserts oceans plains and all the combinations the sun sets on.

The photograph is a large wet-plate which required twenty minutes of exposure even in the intense sun of the southwest. It was one of a series taken by the photographer for the new railroad company. With an original photographic image of such size, great detail is possible, and the photograph is quite impressive. It presents a landscape absolutely unknown to eyes in the East. Of such grand scale and majesty, it had to be a photograph to be believed-a painting would have been accepted as grand imagination. But it is there and it is real. But its sense of practical reality is the genius of the photograph. It would have been insufficient except that the viewer is not given an isolated image of an unknown landscape-context always gives the greater meaning, and the most powerful context is provided. Prominent in the photograph, in as great detail as the rocks and sky and shadows, is the railroad curving through, the locomotive portrait-frozen in the foreground. It made everything all right. Made it possible to call all that land Colorado Arizona Nevada instead of a hard-consonant two-headed monster. Made it all as conceivable as the land beneath the tracks in Pennsylvania Massachusetts New York. New Mexico has nothing to do with an old namesake in Europe. Rivers are water not bridges. But because we did not believe it we ignored it. What is frightening is that we ignore small natural circumstances without understanding the consequences. We can ignore gravity-but Kitty Hawk complete in a C-5A? There was still something not too bad when the trains had cow-catchers. Today it is inconceivable that they would slow down for anything. They run sterile on their tracks, with no response and no meaning to the landscape. We move our minds and hands in infinite silence and think we understand. The train is no longer foreign in the land, the land now gets in the way of our movements to places which do not exist.

Now, having written about the sunrise of New Mexico, it becomes impossible to elaborate. It is not real-days and nights on a mesa-the warmth and meaning of the sun when clouds brought the chill of the altitude. Some have wondered why Indians with histories of peace lived on mesas when water had to be carried from the valleys around.

Standing on top, when the sun rises above the mountains at eye level and the whole day casts its shadow below you-always in sun, always grateful for the light and warmth and presence. When that dawn joins the silence of birds calling for miles clear through the valleys, deer in the shadow of mountain eclipse, before the sun is over; and then a band of light the length of the mesa, a light which descends to the simple base of earth as sun moves into higher brightness.

People out there have a simple system to learn from. The sun comes up, travels across the sky, gives life to all things, goes down behind mountains and lights the moon-its magic even in darkness. It is easy to understand and creates men of great humility, men who are not completely confused about what is going on around, who can look directly at themselves and their families, who can try to work with the land and not against it. Our technologies can deny nature successfully for considerable times, but our apocalypse will be because we have perverted something basic. Fire water earth and air will end us.

they destroyed the rivers and lakes and cool mountain streams, took them apart and numbered them, forgotten catalogue the day the commercials stopped, and we killed ourselves ignorantly in other ways for years of more minutes on television, until another law-by definition days late and embarrassing-states the obvious and stays the razor from our wrists. And we would never imagined. But they can do it with bagels and others too, and easy. Some things they don't tell us.

there were times that led us to a possible war today when America is so ill that she must kill anonymous in basic prejudice. We all remember when "we freed the slaves"-it is that we cannot admit the condition that made the act possible because necessary that we are still as blind today. We wore two uniforms then and still the killing was hard to understand. And the deaths-that is killing, simply. We can now commit our suicide anywhere in the world.

Our great faults make possible revelations that should as easily be genetic. We have done ill things with our quantity of history. We had a lot to learn about our humanity when we moved West; the land spoke loud enough that the lesson should have made others possible. I don't think we learned. We shall perish if it is now too late and it is a sin that I don't have time for a watch.

Understanding what it meant to be a country was possible only after those rocks called Big Sur were seen by people who should have understood what it meant to have worn cloth woven from Southern cotton. But didn't understand what it meant when they got wet and it all became California.

Our understandings are based on relative measurement pounds pennies miles heights-absolutes are given to comparisons and our merit is not intrinsic-it is one of those promotions they have to give if you stick around long enough. We are the products of these movements, but because we are flesh and blood and know pain in our heads, it will be sad as they kill us.

No man is happy, few can be proud-by our rules though, there must be some more unhappy, and some, honest, who have no hope.