Just read
House of Rain, an incredible and beautifully written book about Craig Child's journey across the Colorado Plateau down to northern Mexico, following Anasazi ruins, in search of answers about the mysterious culture. Really brings the southwestern landscape to life. All I need now is to make the trek myself.
Some choice quotes:
"The cosmology of this desert is constantly revealed in different forms. I looked up and saw rock art unfurling down a sunbaked cliff, and bits of fallen cliff dwellings hanging from shallow alcoves. The movement of people is one of these thin veneers across the planet's surface. Flowing over the geologic ripples of the Colorado Plateau, people once slipped into these convenient spaces, journeying between gaps and along ridges as the earth flinched and rolled around them...the hands of the world were touching them, leading them first one way and then another." 224
Here the desert is the base, the living organism, the mover and controller, the active element. People are transient, guests--an interesting perspective on the place of humanity in the world
"...landscape and climate have always ruled the comings and goings of people, controlling, it seemed, my every step. I called (the Southwest) a landscape of motion, saying that the science of archaeology has been hampered by an inability to comprehend even simple distances. It is crucial that one walk across the land to earn a true sense of how people might once have traveled." 261
He studies the people through the lens of the landscape.
Interesting to think of "earning" knowledge, as opposed to just learning--a different type of absorption
A story relating types of pottery to migration:
When tribes reached the Little Colorado River, they were given a choice of either a dull or brightly colored egg. The colorful egg contained a dark raven, signifying they were to stay on the Plateau. The dull egg contained a rainbow-colored parrot, meaning that the tribes were to migrate south. Colors of the birds match pottery types produced by the tribes. 269
Why did the colorful bird come from the dull egg and vice versa? The pairing of opposites here is interesting--such as vibrance born from plainness--and relates to concepts of yin and yang, universal balance.
Changes in pottery patterns signal shifts in ideology:
"The hard geometry of an earlier era of black-on-white styles softened into spiraling imagery, still orderly and mathematical in its approach, but given over to more playful asymmetrical scrolls and serifs. ...(it) signaled the rise of the Flower World, what the Hopi call
siitalpu, a belief in a beautiful and chromatic spiritual dimension that parallels this physical one." 308
Childs intimates that this new perspective arose as part of the shirt from "austere country of desert into the mountains, with their silver flashes of creeks and springs". Landscape again shapes the people.
"Then I thought, maybe there are not a thousand paths. Maybe there are only a few. Maybe only one. The earth contains inevitable confluences. We come back again and again no matter who we are or when we come." 325
Like a river's tributaries converging, like Hindu belief of becoming one with Atman, of narrowing the focus down to one point that contains everything, or opening the focus to make everything into one great whole. Perhaps there is no need to worry about which path to take, because the only forks in the road actually work the opposite way, and divergences only differ from confluences in perspective.
Idea of reflection:
Mountains in the Southwest are symbols for water--they are where water falls, where that life-force (qi?) of the land can be found
"There are metaphorical mountains underground that mirror the tangible ones aboveground, bodies of water within the earth fed by precipitation on peaks scattered across the southwest." 421
Contrast of over vs. under, up vs. down, open vs. hidden--paired opposites
Underground aquifers like yin
Like 7/8 of iceberg
"A religion is centered on the mechanics of water. Even modern hydrologists cannot adequately explain the direct correlation between climate shifts and water table fluctuations. ...Perhaps they cannot explain it because they have not had to live and die by it for thousands of years. They are unaware that Tlaloc (the water deity) is breathing." 421
Hard science does not allow adequate room for all the possible perspectives, logic cannot explain the eccentricities of a living landscape
"Tlaloc is hydrology...The deity is a metaphor for the full hydrological cycle of moisture, ice, rain, snow, dew, and fog; pooling, draining, and evaporating. It is the movement of water, the lifeblood of the Southwest, a meter that any civilization here must obey." 422
Rhythm, RTA here mesh with qi. Think about pictures of moving water, water dripping, sounds created by water, crescendoing and fading with floods and years of drought, following an oscillating pattern.
A timepiece
"A form of motion stirred up from the land. People merely fell into step" 423
Here a culture truly in touch with its surroundings. To be at the height of awareness is to begin not to lose self-awareness, but to gain perception of dovetailing with everything else
Looking at a body in a very old grave:
"We have hardly changed in this short time. Tools of stone have been replaced by plastic and metal, but our capacity for imagination, for sensation, has not altered." 428
Seeing potsherds:
"I reached out and touched the grainy, wind-hounded face, startled to see pieces of pottery sticking out of its surface like teeth. ...My eyes ran up the one-story wall, seeing little discs and dishes, as if the remains of this past civilization could not be kept in the ground. They swept skyward, building a new culture." 439
"The rain will depart and the people will follow, walking a spiral that has no end." 445
