Seems like a book title waiting to happen.
Navajo Unleaded.
06-Jun-12
Driving northeast from Flagstaff I passed through the Navajo Reservation, a vast area taking up something like a quarter of all Arizona. White man’s logic would dictate that there was consequently little in this vast area of easily discernible economic value. So it seemed to my eyes. As with many places in the Southwest, the logic of the road was hard to understand: the road I was taking, US 160, seems to run through a whole lot of nothing. It follows no water, and there are very few houses or people there. That said, it seemed to be a busy enough road at the end of May. It is amazing how much driving we do, and how easily and cavalierly we pass over vast desert areas which would have terrified our ancestors and been virtually unpassable.
The things you can do with cactus juice plaster.
My last full day in Tucson was a Sunday, and the visit of a friend gave me a perfect opportunity to visit San Xavier del Bac one more time. I hope to write a bit more about this extraordinary church, which to my mind is the most extraordinary building and artwork in Arizona. After mass I lifted the head of San Xavier for luck or protection, and my friend and I took a desert stroll from Tubac to Tumacacori, where we visited a desert cantina where I had once been treated nicely. We played some pool, slaked our thirst, and walked back to Tubac along the old trail. The trail had been used by Juan Batista de Anza, the governor of the area, when he set out for the Pacific Coast to establish a new mission more than a thousand miles away – Mission Dolores, also known as San Francisco. Our four miles along the trail made us both wonder about continuing the walk to San Francisco. Obviously enough the de Anza trail must have run along the Santa Cruz River to the Gila to the Colorado, but how did he go from the Colorado to San Francisco? The thought of crossing the Mojave by foot or beast had us both measuring our own hardihoods.
The next day I packed my car and cleaned my room. My landlady insisted on fleecing me of some money before my departure, knowing with that savage human cunning that I was not going to haggle over the price of a freedom that now was very near. But in all such matters I go like a sheep to the shearer. But I said I would be on the road by noon, and at 11:50 I was heading down the driveway.
Melancholy clung to me all the way. I’m not quite sure why – I suppose something felt undone, or inconclusive. I came here alone five months ago, and five months later I was alone again. I had sixteen hundred bucks in my bank account but that felt like the only difference.
I was to see an old friend in Prescott, but being a little ahead of schedule I stopped at a place called Arcosanti. Trapped as I had been in the quotidian of middle-class salary-earning, I hadn’t seen much in Arizona of the unusual: and Arcosanti was supposedly a city in the making, a “urban laboratory” to explore “arcology,” or the meeting-place of architecture and ecology. My guide book promised good things:
This cross between a kibbutz and design school 65 miles north of Phoenix looks like a village on Luke Skywalker’s home planet. Radical when conceived in the 1960s, Soleri’s ideas now seem cutting-edge in this age of urban sprawl and global warming.
The city was being planned to support 5,000 people sustainably and ecologically. Even if this was not possible, it was “a groovy stop-off if you’re driving from Phoenix to Sedona.”
I could feel the disappointment coming as I drove down the dirt road to the place: the dirt road suggested a place that the future had already forgotten. I got off at the empty parking lot and could feel the nothing: no noise, no people, no children, no flowers, no life. There were only a few buildings, built at the edge of a dry gulch – what was the obsession in the 60s with building on slopes? The ground floor on one side was the third floor on the other side. The materials were of the cheapest and ugliest – concrete – to suggest thrift, although the shapes were weird and difficult. This was not the kind of thing you could reproduce by yourself in the desert.
I entered a hallway, and on my right was a loosely connected structure containing the staircase. A sign said there was a cafe and the “visitors’ trail” down the stairs, so I descended. The staircase looked like every other concrete staircase in every bad 60s building. Poured concrete and unadorned metal rails. Posters on the walls touted the architect – my thought was that he had four hundred years to improve on Borromini and had failed.
I entered the cafe, which was a lofty concrete rectangle with no one in it. It was a “self-service” cafe. They had some drinks there and some sandwiches. You put money into a basket. The desolation was doubly impressive because it did not make me curious to poke around: it just made me feel like an intruder, and I wanted to leave. I went out to the visitors’ trail, which crossed the gulch seemingly without purpose. An odd fireplace was there, looking like the most unsatisfactory fire pit human beings have ever made. Looking back at Arcosanti it had some silly Italian cypresses, which looked out of place in the Arizonan desert – but in fact, the whole thing looked out of place. Architecture was hardly meeting ecology at all. It was just lines on paper. Nothing looked organic at all.
And for that reason, no one wanted to live there.
I’m not giving up on the idea of sustainable architecture. But to me the ideal is a place like San Xavier del Bac, where they are literally making desert plaster for the church out of cactuses – all local and sustainable ingredients. And where there is always life and beauty, and where little children come in and say “wow.” This is organic and sustainable – where there are few straight lines because hands don’t make things straight.
I read that Arcosanti is conceding that no one wants to live there, and it will not become a city, and so is looking into other options.
The firepit of the future will not be circular, because people will not want to talk to one another, they'll be made so miserable by the architecture of the future. Nor will they ever dance at all, certainly not round a fire.
On the Road.
30-May-12
El Capitan, Arizona. The gateway to Monument Valley.
End of days in Tucson.
24-May-12One more teaching day left. Heading back east very soon. I can’t wait to get back to my cabin.
City of Santa Fe.
24-May-12
San Miguel Mission, Santa Fe.
I was surprised to see Obama come out for gay marriage – it’s a long-term winning issue, but in the short term it’s risky, and I don’t associate Obama with risk. But then a day later as if on cue out comes the dirt on Romney – that he teased gay students in his high school (“Atta girl”) and led a “posse” of boys to ambush a long-haired boy and forcibly cut off his hair. The terrible thing about the story is how much it feels right – that Romney’s nervous and unsettling need for absolute conformity to external sources of meaning and normalcy was present even in high school, and that he has apparently never had any effective source of inner integrity. And his lame apology seems perfectly scripted to showcase his human vacuity. And the story is much more effective for the contrast with Obama’s now-public support of gay marriage.
Obama never has to talk about the Romney story and I bet he never will. Romney is just going to be Facebooked to death by stories like this. Obama has apparently decided to make gay rights one of his chief motivating factors to get his electorate out. It’s a fascinating move. It’s also Rovian. Obama’s base – college-educated first-half-of-lifers like myself who volunteered for his campaign last time around – may not be too impressed by his records on civil rights, U.S. imperialism, the unabated concentration of wealth, or the protection of the middle class. So he’ll motivate us with Osama bin Laden’s head on a platter and “social issues.”
Fracking.
07-May-12
Catskill photographer Les Stone has started turning his camera on fracking in Pennsylvania so we know exactly what we’re talking about. I’m sympathetic to the argument that if we consume energy we had better share the burden of producing it. But destroying groundwater – forever – is always going to be just about the least appealing energy solution there is. Consume less, people.
Christopher Page.
07-May-12It is very easy to be impressed by Christopher Page. For those with some sense of what they’re looking at, his “Reasons Not to Read the Old Testament” are astonishing. And he’s thoughtful and Christian everywhere.
The Richness of Human Life.
15-May-12Two fifth grade students finished their tests later than the rest of the class and as a result their tests ended up in a different pile from everyone else’s, and when I got to grading them I figured I would skip the scantron – it was only two tests – and grade them by hand. On the thirteenth question of the test – “what is the Latin for ‘friendship'” – one of the students circled the correct answer (“d. amicitia”) and then drew the torso, head, and tail of a cat looking at the correct answer. It was gratuitous – she knew that we teachers did not normally look at the test booklet for scantron tests – and it took away from her time on the exam. But it was wonderfully dear. If we had found something like this in an inscription two thousand years old, it would be almost unbearably precious and human. But it is precisely the kind of thing that tends to perish – the silly work of a childish hand, which adults pass over to get to graver concerns.
Since some students were done with their test early, I told them that I wanted to write a book about a javelina who visits ancient Rome. I needed an illustrator, so if they wanted to try out for the post they could do so. Having them illustrate a story about a javelina in Rome is a pretty good way to get a partial inventory of the some of the stranger areas of their minds. I got pictures of gladiators and fishmongers and the Colosseum and reclining emperors and “poisoness water” and men chanting “Hail Neptune! Hail Mars” in the recesses of temples.
We put so much effort into showing none but the rational parts of our mind: always giving the answer to the question asked and nothing more, being relevant and coherent and organized. I wanted the kids to put answers on their tests, not drawings. But I felt that the richer and more important side was left neglected and unexplored, a casualty of efficient and well-run society, which has other things to do than look at children’s projections about time-traveling javelinas.
So it is with my time in Arizona, which is coming to a close. I was loyal to the system: I taught, I did my work, I paid my bills and I paid attention to all the things which could be construed as my professional responsibilities. I had little time for anything else. But I feel a richness in the human and animal lives around me which I do not routinely come into meaningful contact with by being professional or dutiful. I know this is what I want – life and reality as opposed to all our politeness, which is always a form of partiality and incompleteness – and yet I don’t really know how to get it. And when I get in that car and leave Tucson I will be leaving behind a white-collar job and returning to poverty and uncertainty.