Other Country : Barry Lopez and the Community of Artists [1 ed.] 9780816532322, 9780816500550

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Other Country

Other Country Barry Lopez and the Community of Artists James Perrin Warren

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The University of Arizona Press www.uapress.arizona.edu © 2015 The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published 2015 Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15   6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-0055-0 (cloth) Jacket designed by Leigh McDonald Jacket art: Pink Clouds by Rick Bartow, 2013. Artwork courtesy of the artist and Froelick Gallery, Portland, OR. Support for the publication of this book was provided by the Class of 1956 Provost’s Faculty Development Endowment at Washington and Lee University, and by a grant from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). The author is also grateful to the H. F. Lenfest Endowment for Faculty Summer Support. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Warren, James Perrin, author. Other country : Barry Lopez and the community of artists / James Perrin Warren. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8165-0055-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Lopez, Barry Holstun, 1945—Themes, motives. 2. Lopez, Barry Holstun, 1945— Relations with artists. 3. Artists and community. I. Title. PS3562.O67Z86 2015 813’.54—dc23 2015005530 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Acknowledgments.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Abbreviations for Books by Barry Lopez. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Prologue: Other Country. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Part I.  Captured Light 1. Learning to See: Barry Lopez and Robert Adams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2. Forms of Geography: Robert Adams’s Faith in the Light.. . . . . . . . . . . . 35 3. Leaning into the Light: Aesthetic Communities in Arctic Dreams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Part II.  Fields of Correspondence 4. Going Over: Alan Magee and Desert Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 5. Imaginary Countries: Magee, River Notes, and Winter Count. . . . . . . 80 6. The Ongoing Collaboration: Magee, Field Notes, and Resistance.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Part III.  Opening Fields 7. Long Lines and Earth Art. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 8. Mapping Home Ground.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 9. Soundscapes and the Resonance of Place. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Epilogue: Another Geography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Bibliography.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

Illustrations

Figures 1. Basement for a Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1969 © Robert Adams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 2. Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, Colorado © Robert Adams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 3. Fire Hydrant for a New Development, as Yet Unbuilt, Adams County, Colorado © Robert Adams.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 4. North of Broomfield, Colorado © Robert Adams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 5. Cottonwood Series, #11 © Robert Adams.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 6. Interstate 25, Denver, Colorado © Robert Adams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 7. Untitled, from What We Bought © Robert Adams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 8. Untitled (View of Residential Street Obscured by Pole) © Robert Adams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 9. Untitled (Park Lot of Sears as Seen from Distance) © Robert Adams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 10. Longmont, Colorado © Robert Adams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 11. From the Monastery Roof (Spiti, Ladakh, India, 1994) © Linda Connor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 12. Ceremony (Sri Lanka, 1979) © Linda Connor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 13. Writer’s Mask (Communiqué) © Alan Magee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 14. Silence © Alan Magee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 15. Wound © Alan Magee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 16. Dulce et decorum est © Alan Magee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 17. The Animals © Alan Magee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 18. Spirit © Alan Magee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 vii

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19. The Lamb © Alan Magee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 20. Wind © Alan Magee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 21. Dialogue of Comfort © Alan Magee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 22. Line Made by Walking, 1967 © Richard Long. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 23. A Somerset Beach, 1968 © Richard Long. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

Color Plates 1.1. Casting of Runes © Alan Magee 1.2. Going Over © Alan Magee 1.3. Inlet II © Alan Magee 1.4. Noir © Alan Magee 1.5. The Land of Ancestors © Alan Magee 1.6. The Orrery © Alan Magee 2.1. Waterlines, 1989 © Richard Long 2.2. Comanche Reconciliation Ceremony Pot © Richard Rowland 2.3. Milepost 175, Old Man Camp © Ben Huff 2.4. Milepost 315, Chandalar Shelf © Ben Huff

Acknowledgments

A book about community necessarily depends upon the generosity and cooperation of many people. I am grateful most of all to Barry Lopez, whose constant support for my research has been matched by his scrupulous decision not to read any part of this work before publication. Starting in spring 2007, when we taught together at my home university, his careful, ethical presence has deepened my debt to him beyond telling. He put me in contact with many of the artists who figure in this book, and many of them were instrumental, directly or indirectly, in clarifying the connections between their works and Lopez’s writings. In that regard, I am especially grateful to Alan Magee and John Luther Adams, who participated in a series of interviews and read draft chapters for me, offering their insights and factual corrections where needed. Friends have often asked me what it is like to write about a living author and living artists, and I have always answered, “It has enriched my life tremendously.” The artists whose works I include here were generous in granting permission to reproduce their works without fee, and for that practical sense of community I am profoundly grateful. Alan Magee, Robert Adams, Linda Connor, and Richard Rowland deserve special mention for their personal interest. In helping me secure a representative sample of Richard Long’s works, the staffs at Artists Rights Society, Art Resource, and Bridgeman Images were consummate professionals. At the very end of the project, Alaska photographer Ben Huff gave me a final place in the other country, while Rick Bartow and Charles Froelick helped me find the right image to cover the entire project. Diane Warner, curator of the James E. Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community, and the Natural World at Texas Tech University, was invaluable during fall 2008, when I conducted three months of research in the Barry Lopez Papers. Diane was also a continuing source of helpful information during the writing phase of the project, providing documents, sources, and advice. Her bibliography of Barry Lopez’s works has been an indispensable ix

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aid in the making of this book. In addition, the financial support of the Sowell Collection, both in the Formby Fellowship for fall 2008 and in two invitations to speak at the Sowell Collection Conference in 2012 and 2014, was all I could possibly ask for. I acknowledge all of that support with gratitude. A generous grant from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) came as a welcome sign of our scholarly community. I thank all of my ASLE colleagues for their support. Colleagues gave me much help along the way. My long friendship with Michael Branch and John Tallmadge has led me from one project to another over the years, many of them quite wholesome. Bill Tydeman at Texas Tech University was an open source of knowledge and support, and his recent publication of Conversations with Barry Lopez has brought a wealth of material together in one volume. Dan Payne at the State University of New York at Oneonta gave me my first opportunity to present work on Robert Adams and Barry Lopez. Len Kamerling and Julie Kaufman adopted us totally for fifteen months in Fairbanks, teaching us what Alaska is all about. Home ground colleagues at Washington and Lee University have supported the project from early on. The Gerry Lenfest Summer Research Grant program gave me summer funding from 2009 through 2013, helped with sabbatical leave funding between 2013 and 2014, and financed a necessary subvention for the production costs of the book. The offices of the Provost and Dean of the College have given steady encouragement, and I especially thank my colleagues Marc Conner and Suzanne Keen, now senior administrators in the university. Colleagues in the English Department have supported me daily, just by being who they are. Most especially I should mention Lesley Wheeler, chair of the department for much of the time, and Sandy O’Connell, my coadjutor at every step. My dear friends John Knox and Kirk Follo were fellow travelers all along the way, over hill and down dale, and for a two-week period in the company of Barry Lopez himself. Deborah Miranda and Margo Solod expressed their love of Lopez’s work in numerous encouragements. The professional staff at the University of Arizona Press took on this project with enthusiasm and much good will. I especially thank Kristen Buckles for her great work as an acquisitions editor and supporter. I also thank Leigh McDonald for her careful design, and Amanda Krause and Kerry Smith for their sharp editorial work. Amy Murphy did an expert job of indexing the volume. Last in the list and first in the event: Julianne Lutz Warren. Not only because she had extra copies of The Rediscovery of North America and Winter Count when I couldn’t find mine, but because she fiercely believes in what we are trying to do. May 2015 .

Abbreviations for Books by Barry Lopez

ATL AD COG DN FN HG LAC RN RNA WC

About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape Crossing Open Ground Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven Field Notes: The Grace Note of the Canyon Wren Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape Light Action in the Caribbean River Notes: The Dance of Herons The Rediscovery of North America Winter Count

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Other Country

Prologue Other Country

Mapping the Other Country Writing in a recent issue of Orion, Barry Lopez reveals some of the underlying premises of Other Country. In his essay “Landscapes of the Shamans,” Lopez explores the culturally significant ways in which many contemporary artists are reconceiving our relations with animals. It is characteristic of Lopez to begin the essay in the concrete experiences of place and storytelling, in this case a writer’s residency at the Penland School of Crafts in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.1 In four brief paragraphs, Lopez introduces the resident artists and artisans of Penland as “visionary people, producing museum-quality work in glass, steel, clay, wood, and other materials,” then focuses on a startling wooden rabbit created by Sylvie Rosenthal. The exacting details describing Rosenthal’s Warren (2010) ground the implications that her sculpture combines “realism and invention to suggest both the animal’s underlying nature and its possibilities in a world where, for many, wild animals are little more than opaque objects.” Rosenthal’s animal sculptures lead Lopez to speculate that a large cultural shift in “the conceptions we have about creatures different from ourselves” seems to be taking place (32). Thus begins a superb short essay on the contemporary art of animals. With honesty and humility, Lopez interprets the work of eight specific artists, referring to several illustrations accompanying the essay and mentioning another dozen artists to indicate the important possibilities of the subject. As the essay makes plain, it would be well worth pursuing the topic of animals in order to show how Lopez has been “thinking seriously about new ways of looking at animals” since the late 1960s and to show further that his thinking has been most influenced by artists such as the 3

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photographers John Dominis and Ilya and the writer John Berger (34). It would be instructive, too, to compare Lopez’s independent thinking with the emerging academic discipline of animal studies, an area that scholars often relate to such philosophers and theorists as Peter Singer, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Cary Wolfe. My hunch is that such a comparison would show that, as in the case of much literary theory, the academic discipline forms in the aftermath of creative thinking by nonacademic writers and artists. I do not mean to disparage philosophy or literary theory, areas I have devoted over thirty years to studying and teaching. But I do mean to suggest that creative writers and artists lead the culture in new directions.2 Even though the topic of animals and animal studies would be an interesting direction to take, I want to argue here that “Landscapes of the Shamans” is even more profound in showing the way Lopez develops his thinking about animals. He does so, first of all, by putting himself in the field and by seeking out teachers. This method stems from early books like Of Wolves and Men (1978) and the masterpiece Arctic Dreams (1986), especially in his observation of Dave Mech’s fieldwork on wolves and his long friendship with Alaska biologist Robert Stephenson. In a March 2004 interview with William E. Tydeman, for example, Lopez notes that “it’s rare that I go out entirely on my own, with no agreement to tie up with other people. . . . I end up going with people who will be my guides and tutors.” He repeats his key field methods of “immersion, momentum, and dedication” and then concludes, “An important thing to take away from all this is that I am a student of the knowledge the people I’m traveling with possess. Some of these people might have written some of it down and I can go find that. Other people don’t write. They never wrote anything down. They just know, and from the beginning with them you try to listen closely. This nonfiction methodology, for me, is a process of apprenticeship, of being tutored.”3 We see a version of this apprentice methodology in “Landscapes of the Shamans” as Lopez immerses himself in the field of contemporary visual art. Lopez’s method of apprenticeship suggests one of the meanings of my title, Other Country. By placing himself as an apprentice in the field, Lopez repeatedly explores other country, which could be, at times, an unknown territory or landscape, but which also could be a familiar landscape that becomes suddenly numinous or “other.” Through this field engagement with other country, his projects redefine boundaries, rediscovering a place or redefining the ways landscapes can be perceived. The title of the Orion essay, “Landscapes of the Shamans,” implies that the relationship between

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animals and humans constitutes such an “other country,” a country of shifting borders and new perceptions. A second important aspect of Lopez’s way of knowing is his tendency to participate in communities, often communities that he creates. Community is implicit in the method of apprenticeship, of traveling with knowledgeable companions. More immediately, the role of community is central to the argument of “Landscapes of the Shamans.” The initial setting of the essay at Penland establishes the vital role of the artistic community. As Lopez develops his ideas of the other country, he collects a community of artists by telling stories of exemplary figures. The exemplars come from a variety of times and places, and Lopez arranges them in a pattern that goes deeper than chronology or autobiography. Some of the artists are friends or acquaintances; some he has followed for years; others have only recently come to his attention. Taken together, they confirm his sense that the group is large, diverse, and international, and that their art nonetheless displays a certain coherence of purpose and meaning: “Their collective work—again, in my view—urges us to expand even further the boundaries of troubling questions about social justice struggling for political traction today in America. And by engaging with this work freely, it’s conceivable to me that our imaginations might be freshened” (34). A community of artists is not the same as an artistic movement. In fact, part of what distinguishes the artists Lopez admires is the range and variety of their artworks, and part of what he admires is that the artists may not even know one another personally at all. Another distinguishing characteristic is the consistently high level of ethical engagement in the artists’ work, an ethical questioning as rigorous and probing as any philosopher’s. A third distinctive element seems to be the artists’ courageous effort to “expand . . . the boundaries” of the ethical questions they explore. Last of all, Lopez can imagine how their work could “freshen” our collective imaginations. In these four aspects, we see what the landscape photographer Robert Adams, in a letter to Lopez, calls the “community of artists,” a community that works most effectively by engaging the imaginations of the audience. As an apprentice, and as an accomplished artist, Lopez shows repeatedly that his imagination is fiercely engaged by the other country of art. He is drawn to history and literature, especially to narratives of exploration, and he responds respectfully and ably to the biological sciences. But “Landscapes of the Shamans” shows how deeply he is affected by paintings, sculptures, photographs, by dance, music, film, and performance art. This powerful aesthetic sensibility is the third aspect of Lopez’s way of knowing. Lopez is a writer who travels, and often he travels into the other country of the visual arts

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and music. In Of Wolves and Men, for example, the four-part structure reveals four distinct ways humans have viewed wolves. In the first nine chapters, we see wolves as the object of scientific inquiry, as a kind of spiritual partner and social model for traditional Native Americans, and as a hated destroyer of property for livestock ranchers and farmers. Scientific, mythic, economic. Then the book turns to a fourth viewpoint—the wolf as an object of imagination. In the movement from section to section in Of Wolves and Men, Lopez resists reductive and integrative ways of perceiving wolves in order to reveal the ways in which human beings are always imaginatively re-creating wolves, often as versions of humanity or as versions of an unknowable “other.” The wolf, in part 4, inhabits the other country of the aesthetic imagination. The title “Landscapes of the Shamans” suggests two more aspects of Lopez’s way of knowing. The role of landscape as a constant theme in his work is undeniable, as is the imaginative engagement with the landscape as exemplified by traditional indigenous cultures. These two aspects combine in what I call, especially in part 3 of Other Country, Lopez’s geographical or archaeological imagination. While the two terms are not exact equivalents, they suggest the ways in which Lopez perceives the long line of human beings inhabiting, mapping, and moving across landscapes, engaging with and using plants and animals, the surfaces and depths of the earth, and leaving behind the signs of their passing “from at least the time of the cave paintings at Chauvet” (35). This geographical or archaeological viewpoint is framed by an appreciation for the geologic time scale, what we often refer to as “deep time,” a view that sees human cultures, especially modern industrial societies, as comparatively recent phenomena. The role of the shaman in traditional indigenous cultures has largely disappeared under the influences of modern industrial societies, but Lopez still sees it in the contemporary community of artists: “To my mind, contemporary Native American art calls out to artists to explore the nonhuman further, to work the boundary between animals and humans, and to promote discussion of which ethics now apply here, in this liminal landscape of the shaman. Among the many inspiring contemporary Native American artists conceptualizing in this area, I think right away of the Wiyot painter and carver Rick Bartow, whose massive sculpture poles were recently installed at the entrance to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, in Washington D.C.” (40). To this reference we can add Bartow’s painting Pink Clouds, which adorns the front cover of Other Country. An image of a liminal landscape, a working of the boundary between human and nonhuman, and a mythic evocation of Raven as spirit of place—such are the dimensions mapped by the shaman-artist.

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The geographical imagination works the boundary between aesthetics and ethics, and the two combine to form the other country. As Lopez’s praise for Rick Bartow suggests, moreover, the arts construct a map of this other country, and that map allows artists to explore the nonhuman, cross the boundary between the human and the nonhuman, and create a landscape of expanding ethical questions. The “liminal landscape of the shaman” figures the other country as spiritual, too, although in praising Bartow’s work Lopez locates it within aesthetic and ethical coordinates. Furthermore, he is careful to emphasize “that works of art are not generally intended to function as political or social statements.” Despite the cautionary note, art sheds a necessary light on political and social questions. We should call it a failure of imagination, then, that our leaders who “devise the social and economic policies we’re all asked to support and abide by as citizens encounter little or no art in their deliberations” (40). Whose map are we to follow? Finally, Lopez’s way of knowing calls for imaginative transformation. He ends “Landscapes of the Shamans” with a rhetorical question: “If we are able to listen to the artist today as attentively as we listen to the spellbinding orator, how can we not help but become a wiser country?” (40). The “wiser country” is yet another name for the other country of the imagination, a country in which wisdom manifests itself and enables the people of the country to transform both themselves and the places they inhabit. Lopez’s rhetorical question calls for our attentive listening, first of all, that we give our utmost attention to the community of artists. The transformation of the country follows, through collective wisdom. Ultimately, too, wisdom transforms the way of knowing into more than knowledge. Wisdom includes intimacy, restraint, judgment, insight, and foresight. These qualities are grounded, for Lopez, in the aesthetics and ethics of the other country, but at last they are spiritual attributes. A good illustration of this emotional and spiritual dimension comes in Bill Moyers’s PBS interview, in which Lopez addresses the question of how a community makes the other country: I have to think that there’ve been times in your own life, as a journalist, when you’ve lost faith or you’ve looked into a situation that made you feel you were never going to recover from what it is that you saw. But you do. And you do because somebody sent you a letter. Or somebody phoned you on the phone. And that circle of people who just stay in loose touch with each other, renews a sense that it doesn’t take a very large group of people to bring everyone to a kind of awareness that we must have now

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about what we call the fate of the earth. You know? We’re not—somebody said to me the other day, “People talk about saving the earth, but what they want to do is save the Holocene.” You know, the last ten thousand years, that’s what they’re interested in. They don’t care about. So, you know, the world’ll be fine if we’re not here. But, you know, we all like to root for the home team. I like to root for humanity. And I want to see a place where this great dream in whatever epistemology you find it in, whatever religion that you find this idea, it’s all over the world, that we can come to a state of grace. We can come to a state in which we do better than we’re doing now. I believe fiercely in that. And I meet people in every corner of the world who affirm it.4

The responsibility of humanity for the fate of the earth—and of itself—is a fundamental idea for Barry Lopez. That double responsibility underlies any community, but especially the community of artists. As Lopez articulates the reciprocal relationship in the preface to Arctic Dreams, the “great dream” is that “it is possible to live wisely on the land, and to live well. And in behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us” (xxviii). Such is a great dream of the other country, a place we have faith in but have not yet found.

Rediscovering the Other Country While by no means complete, the map sketching Barry Lopez’s way of knowing points toward another country. Essays and stories, written and published for over forty years, are also maps to the other country he imagines, for the storyteller brings communities into healthy relations with the land by creating the atmosphere in which wisdom shows itself. In Arctic Dreams, the storyteller is aligned with the Inuit figure of the isumataq, “a person who can create the atmosphere in which wisdom shows itself” (298). The wisdom of the storyteller, like the authority of the wise leader, is not a personal, private talent; it is instead an elevated, authentic way of binding human communities together with the land, a way to map our place in the universe (297–99). For Lopez, the artistic goal of the writer is to reach such authenticity, such elevation, and by reaching toward it to map the place of the community. A good way to understand this mapping through storytelling is to consider a work like The Rediscovery of North America.5 The lecture is framed, from the very outset, as a retrospective assessment of the Spanish “discovery”

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of the continent in 1492. But even though his assessment of Columbus’s legacy is devastating, Lopez does not use the distance of five hundred years to deny the legacy. Instead, he sees the Spanish incursion, with its programmatic and well-documented use of “murder, rape, theft, kidnapping, vandalism, child molestation, acts of cruelty, torture, and humiliation” (5–6), as continuing in our present day: “We see in the present a continuance of this brutal, avaricious behavior, a profound abuse of the place during the course of centuries of demand for material wealth” (10–11). The initial incursion defined the basic imperial assumption, ignorant and arrogant, “that one is due wealth in North America” (10). But the definition of wealth imposed by the Spanish, and continued to our day, in fact represents a failure of imagination. The Rediscovery of North America is an American jeremiad, a political sermon that students of American literature have learned to recognize over the past fifty years or more.6 Most important, in reading Lopez’s jeremiad we open ourselves to the possibility of a different future. Lopez constantly proposes to the reader of The Rediscovery of North America that we together imagine a different relationship with the land and a new direction for the country. We can recognize the evil that has been perpetrated, but “five hundred years later, we intend to mean something else in the world” (11). The question becomes, “How can we claim not that we are different but that we wish, seeing what has come in the wake of our acts, to set off now in a different direction?” (16). In substance and in rhetorical form, Lopez’s answer to the question is an antiphony. This call-and-response of voices, a common form of choral music, is also associated with the penitential supplications of litany, in which the clergy lead and the people respond, often with a repeated sentence or phrase (OED). Lopez employs both of these techniques in order to transform the jeremiad into a prayer. In style, the lecture works the boundary between written and spoken language, giving a strong sense of oral delivery to the text. The key to the transformation of the jeremiad into a prayer, of written into spoken, is that we listen: “[I]n the beginning it was an antiphony we wanted no part of. We’re anxious now to know what the land has to say to us, how it responds to our use of it. And we are curious, too, about indigenous systems of natural philosophy, how our own Western proposals might be answered by some bit of this local wisdom, an insight into how to conduct our life here so that it might be richer. And so that what is left of what we have subjugated might determine its own life” (19–20). What follows is a litany of names—first a list of indigenous peoples, beginning with the

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• Prologue

Arawak people, the Lucayo, of the Bahamas, and continuing long enough to evoke “a thousand distinct cultures, a thousand mutually unintelligible languages, a thousand ways of knowing” (26). Then a litany of place-names, from the Florida Keys across the continent and back again, with just as many names left out. Third, a brief evocation of the plants and animals in all those places, and what it would take to list “the most rudimentary things about their relationships, how they know and reflect each other” (29). The antiphonal litany calls out, even if we have imposed many of the names ourselves, and speaks to us of the richness of what remains “in some real sense the New World” (29). In the new antiphony, Lopez replaces the clergy not with the authority of the single writer or spellbinding orator but with the abiding authority of the land. In this relationship, land becomes a companion, and “to achieve this, one must I think cultivate intimacy, as one would with a human being” (32). Intimacy requires time, both as long-term residence in a place and as deep knowledge of the memory of a place, recorded in journals and historical records and in archaeological literature, and it requires that we measure the country by longer spans than our own individual lives. This is the long-term project Lopez envisions as a rediscovery: “To enquire after this knowledge is to make our proposals, to answer the antiphony. To be intimate with the land like this is to enclose it in the same moral universe we occupy, to include it in the meaning of the word community” (34). Lopez names four indigenous teachers from whom he has learned methods of becoming intimate with the land, and in effect he makes them speak: “Listen. . . . Every animal knows way more than you do. . . . It can’t be learned. . . . You know how to see, learn how to mark the country” (35–36). These words bespeak attention, patience, and humility, the necessity of long observation in one place, and the ability to imagine the country as “more complex even than language” (37). As in “Landscapes of the Shamans,” the first seven sections of The Rediscovery of North America emphasize the ethical dimension of geography in order to map a new way of knowing our place. There are clear echoes of liturgy and literature in both texts; the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of the map underlie the ethical. But in the last three sections, Lopez moves more directly toward establishing the combination of aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual dimensions in the geography of the other country. He devotes the longest section to the idea of the querencia, a term he takes from Spanish bullfighting, where it means a “spot in a bullring where a wounded bull goes to gather himself,” and redefines it as “a place in which we know exactly who we are. The place from which we speak our deepest beliefs”

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(39). The word means more than hearth or home, more than the anodyne “safe place.” It is “a response to threat and a desire to find out who we are,” and it depends on our developing a philosophy of place, “a recognition of the spiritual and psychological dimensions of geography” (40–41). Speaking in 1990, Lopez sees the threat in the environmental crisis, and he once again provides a litany of ecological violence, death, and rape that strongly recalls the witness of Bartolomé de las Casas from the first section of The Rediscovery of North America. He does not name global problems like climate change or deforestation or loss of biodiversity simply because we had not named them yet in 1990, but they all fit within his sense of threat. For Lopez, however, the environmental crisis is sympto­ matic of an even deeper and larger threat, one that goes back directly to the Spanish incursion: “What we face is a crisis of culture, a crisis of character. Five hundred years after the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria sailed into the Bahamas, we are asking ourselves what has been the price of the assumptions those ships carried, particularly about the primacy of material wealth” (44). The rhetoric of litany and antiphony functions effectively in the closing movements of the lecture. In a series of six parallel sentences, for example, Lopez ends the long section on the querencia with a litany of “We need” statements. “What we need is to discover the continent again,” he says/writes, and the next five sentences expand on how we need to make the rediscovery of the other country. The paragraph summarizes the argument of the lecture, pointing to the need for “a less acquisitive frame of mind,” the need to “discover the lineaments of cooperation” with the land, the need to find a sense of independence that does not refuse responsibility, the need to discern the sources of true wealth, and the need to “find within ourselves, and nurture, a profound courtesy, an unalloyed honesty” (49). In each and every one of these six sentences, the need for a reciprocal, intimate relationship with the landscape of North America grounds the statement and maps the direction we must take toward the other country. And what hope is there of finding such a place, such a querencia? The penultimate section once again provides an antiphonal litany, in the form of examples that we can follow as sources of hope. Here the parallelism appears in a series of brief “If . . . then” paragraphs, touching on models of farming, of courage, of heroic conscience, of ethical and spiritual writers, of wisdom literature, of effective practical action, of a community of neighbors (51–54). But the sources of hope are only as powerful as our imaginations. In the final section, Lopez returns to the decks of the three Spanish caravels off the coast of the island Guanahaní, imagining “men of conscience lying

12 

• Prologue

there awaiting the dawn” and that “we lie there with them” (55). Lying on the deck, we recognize the majesty of the continent as yet undiscovered by Columbus, but we also feel the weight of his authority and vision, his ability to have “got us across the literally uncharted ocean” (56). Who are we to question or deny his mapping of the future? Who are we to question or deny what the country has become? Here Lopez re-creates the crisis of character, bringing it home to us as an audience of listeners or readers. The answer to our questioning will not come from political institutions or environmental groups. It will only come from us: If we rise in the night, sleepless, to stand at the ship’s rail and gaze at the New World under the setting moon, we know we are thousands of miles from home, and that if we mean to make this a true home, we have a monumental adjustment to make, and only our companions on the ship to look to. We must turn to each other, and sense that this is possible. (57–58)

A Map to the Other Country We must turn to each other and sense that we can make this country a true home. My fundamental argument in Other Country is that Barry Lopez’s writing charts the kind of monumental adjustment he calls for at the end of The Rediscovery of North America. Furthermore, I argue that Lopez’s abiding connection to a wide-ranging community of artists is his principal means for making the adjustment and rediscovering our home. Time and again, Lopez turns to fellow artists to discover the other country. That country is first of all an artistic discipline other than his writing. In his work as an engaged professional writer, Lopez discovers and rediscovers the community of artists who point toward aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual dimensions of contemporary culture. That is, the community points toward the other country as the “true home” we all seek. Finally, the community shares the assumption that the relationship between landscape and the imagination grounds human culture, and the right relationship between landscape and the imagination can lead to a profound healing of our world. These large claims develop through an admittedly focused discussion. The nine chapters of Other Country are arranged in three roughly equal parts. Part 1, “Captured Light,” focuses on landscape photography, especially the works of Robert Adams. Lopez’s essay “Learning to See” gives titles and organizing images for the three chapters. I discuss the writer’s

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early ambitions to be a professional photographer and his admiration for the landscape photography of early artists like Timothy O’Sullivan and Paul Strand and contemporary photographers such as Adams, Frans Lanting, Emmet Gowin, and Linda Connor. Interdisciplinary discussions in the first two chapters lead, in chapter 3, to a detailed reading of light imagery in Arctic Dreams (1986). Part 2, “Fields of Correspondence,” explores several significant collaborations between Lopez and visual artist Alan Magee. The title comes from a statement by Magee during a 2002 conversation with Lopez, and it suggests a multiplicity of connections between the two artists. In chapters 4 and 5, I discuss the early work of Magee and Lopez, showing how the two develop corresponding patterns of experimentation, telling increasingly complex stories about the relationship between landscape and the imagination. These two chapters lead, in chapter 6, to a sense of mutual inspiration and ongoing collaboration between the two artists, resulting most significantly in the joining of contemplation and engagement, visual and verbal art, in the linked stories of Resistance (2004). Part 3, “Opening Fields,” widens the tight focus of the first two parts by examining the phenomenology of earth-mapping as developed in a series of books by Edward S. Casey. The three chapters treat, respectively, the earth art of Richard Long, the ceramics of Richard Rowland, and the music of Paul Winter, David Darling, and John Luther Adams. The discussions include such community projects as Lopez’s edited anthology Home Ground (2006) and his role in organizing a ceremony of reconciliation to bring Texas Tech University and the Comanche Nation into a closer, more significant relationship. The final chapter, focusing especially on the soundscapes of John Luther Adams and his collaborations with Lopez over the past thirty years, leads to a new sense of earth-mapping as a collaborative, communal effort at discovering the other country. As “Landscapes of the Shamans” clearly indicates, Lopez has a thorough, wide-ranging knowledge of contemporary landscape art, but more important than his broad knowledge is his sensibility, his remarkable ability to appreciate the work of other artists. His acute sensibility creates larger, deeper patterns in both the short stories and the essays. In researching this book, I have learned a great deal about landscape photography, visual and graphic arts, earth art, ceramics, and music. But I have learned most about Barry Lopez’s writing. In Other Country, I bring the essays and stories into an intimate relationship with the work of artists like Robert Adams, Alan Magee, and John Luther Adams because I have found that Lopez’s work resonates most

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• Prologue

deeply with the community of artists as I have discovered, studied, and mapped it. But there are always other possible maps, even if those other maps lead us in similar directions or allow us to arrive in an uncannily familiar country. In choosing to adopt a narrow, deep approach rather than a broad and potentially superficial one, I have borne in mind Henry James’s comment on the suspended ending to The Portrait of a Lady, “The whole of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together.”7 As I noted at the beginning, for example, over the course of his career Lopez has apprenticed himself to many scientists, most recently in a series of working visits to Antarctica. His relations with scientists are respectful and cordial, but in only one or two cases have they extended into the kind of ongoing collaboration that marks the community I describe here. For a similar reason, I have written very little about Lopez’s private life, even though the tone of many essays is personal and intimate. The autobio­ graphical pieces in About This Life do play a significant role in some of my readings, but I have not explored the relationship between Lopez’s writing and his traumatic childhood, marked by four years of sexual abuse by a man pretending to be a family friend.8 That is a new direction that some of Lopez’s recent essays open to readers, and I recognize its potential value in a discussion of trauma, healing, and reconciliation in Lopez’s work. Still, at this point I have not been able to see how this terrible story would group together with the subject of Other Country. If some readers may complain about the lack of scientific, biographical, or psychological detail in Other Country, I anticipate a louder complaint from the literary community. Some literary critics could well ask why I have not delved more deeply into Lopez’s relationship with elders like Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, Peter Matthiessen, and Wendell Berry. It is true, moreover, that the literary connections multiply over the span of Lopez’s career. In a recent development, for example, Lopez’s friendship with his contemporaries has led to the founding of the James E. Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community, and the Natural World at Texas Tech University. In 2001, along with Lopez’s papers, the university acquired the papers of William Kittredge, David Quammen, Pattiann Rogers, and Annick Smith, and more recently the Sowell Collection has purchased the papers and correspondence of Bill McKibben, Gretel Ehrlich, Edward Hoagland, Gary Nabhan, Rick Bass, David James Duncan, John Lane, and others.9 The literary community, implicit in these generational topics, is explicitly at work in another recent literary project with a global, geographical theme. From 2007 to 2008, Lopez served as guest editor for two issues of the

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literary magazine Ma-noa, which feature portfolios of significant landscape photography by Franco Salmoiraghi and Linda Connor. The issues also feature important works by Lopez. For the 2007 issue, Maps of Reconciliation: Literature and the Ethical Imagination, Lopez wrote an introduction and conducted an interview with Oren Lyons called “The Leadership Imperative.” For the 2008 issue, Gates of Reconciliation: Literature and the Ethical Imagination, Lopez published the essay “¡Nunca Más!” as a prologue, adapted a translated essay by Santiago Roncagliolo, “The Dogs of Deng Xiao Ping,” and wrote an untitled seven-paragraph essay as an epilogue. The two issues are anthologies of contemporary essays, poetry, fiction, and photography from all over the world, joined together by the need to locate new paths toward reconciliation, a new sense of dignity and respect.10 The role of landscape photography, especially the work of Linda Connor in Gates of Reconciliation, looks forward to the themes—even to some of the photographs—I discuss in part 1, “Captured Light,” and Connor’s photographs clearly evoke the combination of aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual concerns that animates Lopez’s work. In addition to this special project, over his forty-year career Lopez has worked as a contributing editor for several national magazines, including Outside, Harper’s, and Orion. Clearly, one could well imagine a book that explored fully the community of writers, editors, and publishers. But once again, the purely literary community is more Lopez’s home ground than the other country. The sharp focus of Other Country has led me to mention artists I would like to discuss in more depth, but in writing the book I found the deep connection with a small group of artists to be more important than breadth of coverage. To a degree, I regret the necessity of focus and coherence. Indeed, in one case I have felt it necessary to neglect an entire area of the arts by failing to discuss a series of fine press editions of works by Lopez. The artists and artisans involved in producing these editions include the visual artists Tom Pohrt and Robin Eschner, book designer Charles Hobson, book artist Sandy Tilcock, and engraver Barry Moser, among others. Lopez’s participation in producing some editions went beyond simply writing the stories that were printed. In the case of Apologia, he helped create the artworks and make the edition into a unique example of the book arts.11 The book arts are particularly interesting because they explore the borderland joining literature, the visual arts, and the material arts, and in that regard they evoke the work of Alan Magee, especially the monotypes that accompany Lopez’s Resistance. A final short version of a story I wanted to tell more fully: In June 1999, the Orion Society held a conference, Fire & Grit: Working for Nature in

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• Prologue

Community, the largest gathering ever to take place at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Conservation Training Center in Shepherds­ town, West Virginia. According to writer Pat Musick, the Orion Society dedicated the conference to “small, place-based initiatives with missions that vary as widely as the communities they spring from.”12 For the closing ceremony at nearby Antietam Battlefield, Lopez and his stepdaughter Stephanie Woodruff, a landscape designer, created a River of Light, an earth art installation like the earth-mapping projects I describe in part 3, Opening Fields. Lopez and Woodruff walked from the mouth of Antietam Creek to the battlefield, imagining the creek flowing red with the blood of twenty-three thousand casualties. They decided to make a mirror image of the river of blood, a contrast between human slaughter and the desire to reconcile and heal. Woodruff laid out two thousand paper-bag luminarias, symbolizing the new millennium, down a slope from the horizon to the stage below. For the closing ceremony, Lopez spoke of the sacrifice of the soldiers on both sides of the Civil War and then asked the gathered participants to help “turn a river of blood to a river of light.” Within moments, two thousand luminarias were shining in the night. The conference closed with the sounds of “Amazing Grace” being played on a violin.13 In the flickering of those two thousand lights, we see another geographical image. We see another map to the other country.

Part I

Captured Light

Chapter one

Learning to See Barry Lopez and Robert Adams

“Photography is the art of captured light.” —Barry Lopez

Gifts of Light and Land In the 1998 essay “Learning to See,” Barry Lopez describes how he came to give up his ambition as a professional photographer in order to become a full-time writer. Lopez “began photographing in a conscientious way in the summer of 1965” (ATL 227), and through the 1970s he used a professional letterhead that read “Barry Lopez: Photographer/Writer.” He maintained that dual identity until September 13, 1981. One of the two narratives in “Learning to See” recounts the day he decided to put down the camera for good, after a specific encounter with a young male polar bear on the Chukchi Sea. Even more important than the encounter itself is the realization it leads the young writer to make afterward: “Remembering what happened in an encounter was crucial to my work as a writer, and attending to my cameras during our time with the bear had altered and shrunk my memory of it” (231). The cameras are not a mere distraction or clumsy obstacle; they become a positive hindrance to the writer’s disciplined memory. By deliberately exercising his memory, Lopez proves to himself that the cameras are unnecessary and that he can recover the experience of encountering the bear: “When he hissed, what color was the inside of his mouth?” (231).

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Captured Light

As Lopez reflects on the encounter and his memory of it, the polar bear appears for a third and even more telling time: It was not solely contact with this lone bear a hundred miles off the northwest coast of Alaska, of course, that ended my active involvement with photography. The change had been coming for a while. The power of the polar bear’s presence, his emergence from the snow squall and his subsequent disappearance, had created an atmosphere in which I could grasp more easily a complex misgiving that had been building in me. I view any encounter with a wild animal in its own territory as a gift, an opportunity to sense the real animal, not the zoo creature, the TV creature, the advertising creature. But this gift had been more overwhelming. In some way the bear had grabbed me by the shirtfront and said, Think about this. Think about what these cameras in your hands are doing. (232)

The bear teaches Lopez that he must learn to see with a writer’s eyes and with a writer’s memory for details, but the passage also suggests that the bear teaches the writer on yet a deeper level. The cameras involve the photographer in ways that prevent him from sensing the “real creature” and implicate him in an artificial, technological world of zoos, TVs, and advertisements. That is what the cameras are actively “doing” in the photographer’s hands. For Lopez, encountering the young polar bear delivers a gift, and recalling the encounter yields a second gift, but the deepest gift leads to his ethical and aesthetic decision. The second narrative in “Learning to See” involves yet another gift. Lopez begins the essay by telling how he was asked, in 1989, to speak at the opening of an exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The exhibition, called To Make It Home: Photographs of the American West, presented a twenty-year retrospective (1965–86) of the landscape photographs of Robert Adams. Lopez had never met Adams, but he knew his photographs and admired them. He admired Adams, too: “If there is such a thing as an ideal of stance, technique, vision, and social contribution toward which young photographers might aspire, it’s embodied in this man” (ATL 224). As Lopez develops the essay, he uses Adams as a figure for the community of artists that give all of us a measure of hope. He says of the photographers he admires that “without the infusion of their images hope would wither within me” (238). And he suggests that the audience of such artists—those who visit exhibits and read books—is equally vital for the community of artists to maintain their sense of hope. After Adams read the

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transcript of Lopez’s lecture, he wrote a letter that began with this sentence: “Your willingness to speak in my behalf,” he wrote, “confirms my belief in the community of artists” (225). On May 17, 1990, Lopez delivered his lecture “The Gift of Light” at the Amon Carter Museum.1 He also condensed that seventeen-page lecture to a seven-page essay called “Faith in the Light: The Photography of Robert Adams,” which was published in the Northwest Review in 1991 along with seven photographs by Adams. In both “The Gift of Light” and “Faith in the Light,” Lopez apologizes for his own lack of expertise concerning the techniques of printmaking and the history of photography, and he even asserts, in the opening of “Faith in the Light,” that the writer is “on shaky ground, because writing is the most literal of the arts and therefore somewhat suspect among artists. We’re seated at the table, you know, but at the far end” (33). Despite the humility of the opening, however, Lopez holds firmly to his “affinity for Robert Adams’s work” and frames the affinity in terms of the community of artists: The idea of an artist as a lone genius is one that I am deeply suspicious of. When I think of my colleagues, I think of composers and dancers, of sculptors and musicians and photographers as well as writers, all offering each other enlightenment and encouragement in their work. Robert Adams speaks to me as a human being, to my dreams for grace and dignity, and I would say holiness in the world. The light in his prints is rich, sensuous, the detail in them exquisite. You can feel the temperature of the summer air, the heat of the soil. I want to underscore this—the stunning clarity of detail and the luminosity of his prints. Photography is the art of captured light. The light in these prints is fresh, it is quivering, like a horse that has just been ridden for the first time. (“Faith in the Light” 34)

In this passage, Lopez shows that he deserves a place at Robert Adams’s table. The commentary balances the ethical and spiritual dimensions of Adams’s work with the aesthetic accomplishment of landscape photography. The final simile bespeaks Lopez’s own experiences wrangling horses in Wyoming, and it responds to Adams’s art by animating the light in the photographs. In both the lecture and the essay, Lopez delineates a complex emotional relationship between light and land. Adams displays “an obvious passion for light in his prints, the light streaming down at times like a shower, an effulgence in the air. He is actually photographing the air” (34). It is as if the photographs “don’t seem to be about an object” because Adams is

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“photographing light.” Here Lopez touches on a fundamental paradox of photography, that, as John Szarkowski says, “The subject and the picture were not the same thing, although they would afterwards seem so. It was the photographer’s problem to see not simply the reality before him but the still invisible picture, and to make his choices in terms of the latter” (6). Commenting on the early print Basement for a Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1969, Lopez notes the particular objects in the photograph, but he moves toward a more abstract sense of light: “There is an aluminum ladder braced against the outer wall of a trench being excavated for a house. You can see a blinding explosion of light on the aluminum steps of that ladder. There is not a detail, not a dot in these photographs that is not intentional—or intentional in the sense that it might not have been consciously intended but once recorded it’s part of a perfect, a seamless set of relationships” (“Faith in the Light” 34). Lopez comments acutely on the sense of light in Adams’s photographs, but he necessarily leaves out a great deal, too. That effulgent ladder rising out of the tract house basement (figure 1), for example, points toward both the lines of houses in the middle distance and Pike’s Peak in the far distance. The composition presents a topographic contrast between the land and modern human efforts to live on the land. The scale of the Front Range seems to dwarf the man digging in the earth, but the tract houses suggest that human beings are more powerful than they appear. The composition also seems relatively “empty” in the left half of the frame, emphasizing the unchanged vastness of the prairie and mountains; the relatively “full” right half of the frame, by contrast, evokes the works of human dwellings. Adams’s own comments on another photograph in the exhibition (figure 2) resonate strongly: “The first uplift of the Rocky Mountains, the Front Range, revealed to nineteenth-century pioneers the grandeur of the American West, and established the problem of how to respond to it. Nearly everyone thought the geography amazing; Pike described it in 1806 as ‘sublime,’ and Kathryn Lee Bates eventually wrote ‘America the Beautiful’ from the top of the peak he discovered. Nonetheless, as a practical matter most people hoped to alter and exploit the region” (To Make It Home 28).2 These early photographs, first published in the 1974 book The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range, often emphasize ironic contrasts between nature and culture, between the land and how we make it home. But Lopez clearly sees a more layered and complex relationship at work in Adams’s prints: “Where we see ruination, a ruined landscape, or even a ruined imagination, he sees the possibility of redemption. . . . This is the hope of a mature man” (“Faith in the Light” 34). Adams’s vision of

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Figure 1.  Basement for a Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1969 © Robert Adams, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

hope, in Lopez’s view, motivates the rest of his imaginative and emotional world, including his affection for the land and his anger at what we have done to the land. And this “mature engagement with place,” he argues, teaches us more about our relationship to the land than “photographs in our Sierra Club calendars, which, in the end, are mostly pin-ups” (35). Lopez relates Adams’s vision to Wendell Berry’s metaphor of “a kindness toward the land,” and in the original lecture he elaborates on their similarity: “I think if Robert Adams had not become a photographer he would have been a very good farmer. Not, perhaps, in the technical sense, but a virtuous farmer. He would have been a man of virtue in his relationship to soil, to whatever he chose to grow” (“Gift of Light” 9).

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Figure 2.  Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, Colorado © Robert Adams, courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund, and the Janet Simeon Braguin Fund.

In a number of specific ways, Lopez develops the sense of place and space in Adams’s photographs. In addition to placing us geographically and historically through the caption-like titles of the photographs, Adams delivers “a sense of a more distant past, a geographical heritage against which the human changes are cast.” Moreover, he creates “a sense of the future,” as if he were asking us, “‘Is this what we’re going to settle for? Is this it?’” (“Faith in the Light” 35). In Lopez’s view, the scale of space in the American West both terrifies us and fills us with hope: “That same space that terrifies us because we don’t know what to do in it, and because we’re

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so small in it, also elevates us, also gives us a sense of hope that we might fill it with something other than what we have filled it with up to now” (36). Lopez closes “Faith in the Light” by claiming that Adams’s photographs urge us to act, not to be aloof, unseeing, and uncaring. He sees this urgency as essential to great art: “I do not know what more you can ask of art: to clarify, to elevate the level of consideration, to impel.” Finally, however, he considers Adams’s work as a gift, not unlike the complex gift of the young male polar bear in the Chukchi Sea: To speak of Adams’s work is to speak of faith, of hope, of compassion, of that which is sacred. He has fused art and religion not by creating icons but by inquiring after the fate of what is holy. The process that Robert Adams employs, photography, uses light to create images. The light is a gift from the sun, the images are a gift from the land, and these prints are a gift to us. If we think on these gifts, we come back again and again to the light. The light fills the photographer, and it fills us, with wonder. (36)

In the original lecture, Lopez ends with a final sentence: “And what Robert Adams has done with it rekindles the wonder that makes us commit ourselves again, as individuals and as a society, to our ideals” (“Gift of Light” 17). The revised version in the essay is more restrained and graceful, but the lecture version delivers the clear message that we must commit ourselves to our ideals, that we share those ideals with great artists, and that we must act upon those ideals to elevate our relationship to the land. Only then will the gift of light and our faith in the light be justified.

A Larger Frame Though Lopez does not directly consider the techniques of printmaking or the history of photography in his lecture and essay on Robert Adams, he actually shows a considerable knowledge of both in “Learning to See.” He names over twenty-five photographers with whose work he is familiar, many of whom are contemporaries of Adams and himself. In accepting the invitation to speak at the Amon Carter Museum, for instance, Lopez tells the program coordinator that he intends “to go back and study the work of Paul Strand, Wynn Bullock, Minor White, Harry Callahan, and others who’d been an influence on my own work and thought, in order to prepare my lecture” (ATL 224). The four photographers named here evoke the early history of American black-and-white photography, from 1915 to 1960. As the

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essay continues, Lopez adds more names, including, among others, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, Emmet Gowin, John Dominis, Frans Lanting, Tui De Roy, Sam Abell, Linda Connor, and Mary Peck. As the list suggests, Lopez is especially knowledgeable about landscape photography and wildlife photography, and his names bring us from the early period of photographers like Weston and Strand to the contemporary work of Connor and Peck. Lopez’s commitment to technique in his photography is clear from the very beginning. He says that he was “most attracted to color and form, to the emotional consequence of line” (226). That leads him to reflect on the importance of Edward Weston to his work, to his admiration for the color photography of Ernst Haas and Eliot Porter, and to his rejection of Ansel Adams as a model (“he seemed to my eye inclined to overstate”). In recounting his journey away from photography, Lopez elaborates in detail on his experiments with photographing the flow of water in creeks and rivers near his home in Oregon, especially focusing on the transition from laminar flow to turbulence and discovering, to his surprise, the “deep pattern in turbulence” (229). The technique involves shooting the water under different light conditions and at different shutter speeds. As he develops the photographs and examines his work, Lopez realizes that he has two subjects as a photographer: “First, these still images of a moving thing, a living thing—as close as I would probably ever come to fully photographing an animal. Second, natural light falling on orchards, images of a subject routinely understood as a still life” (229–30). In those two subjects, Lopez delineates the wildlife and landscape photography that he most admires and seeks to emulate. Perhaps even more important than Barry Lopez’s own photographic work is his deep affinity with the photographs and essays of Robert Adams, for Adams creates a larger frame for understanding the connections between visual and verbal artistry. Adams’s essays in particular suggest a community of landscape photographers that influences Lopez’s writing. The larger frame includes a number of photographers who are contemporaries of Adams and Lopez, but it also stretches back to the nineteenth-century survey photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan and forward to younger landscape photographers like Mary Peck and Ben Huff. The community thus arises out of a specific generation of artists, but it transcends the bounds of generations. Two of Adams’s most important essays demand special notice in this context: “In the Nineteenth-Century West” and “In the Twentieth-Century West.”3 The first essay begins by evoking a sense of shock at the state of the

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current West: “When else has a region of more than a million square miles been so damaged in so short a time?” (133). The vast scale of the West has not protected the landscape from being brutalized; indeed, the scale and rapidity of change seem to dwarf the possibilities of geography. The work of nineteenth-century photographers like O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, and Carleton Watkins reminds Adams of the complexities of western space, implying silence, a resistance to speed, and the animating power of light (134–38). Nineteenth-century photography also equates the openness of space with a profound distance from other people, and it further equates that distance with freedom. Adams criticizes our brutal treatment of both the landscape and ourselves as a “morally indefensible equation of space, understood as distance from others, and freedom, understood as license to pursue one’s own interests without regard for those of others (no one else being in view)” (142). If we consider that many of the best landscape photographers after the Civil War were employed by the United States government surveys and therefore aided “opening” the land to development by railroads, mines, and ranches, we might find that the connections between the nineteenth century and our own present can become painful. Although Adams moves easily from the photographs to our treatment of the landscapes that the photographs record, he does not criticize the moral position of the survey photographers. Rather, he praises their authenticity and veracity, especially in comparison to landscape painters like Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt, and he focuses on the “new way to see” afforded by photographic equipment. The camera did not create unlimited possibilities of representation: “The limits of the machine saved them. If there was ‘nothing’ there, they had in some way to settle for that, and find a method to convince us to do the same” (145). Even though the nineteenth-century photographers made remarkable pictures of “eccentricities” like El Capitan in Yosemite or Shoshone Falls in Idaho, they concentrated much more often on ordinary, spare landscapes: At their best the photographers accepted the limitations and faced space as the anti-theatrical puzzle it is—a stage without a center. The resulting pictures have an element almost of banality about them, but it is exactly this acknowledgment of the plain surface to things that helps legitimize the photographer’s difficult claim that the landscape is coherent. We know, as we recognize the commonness of places, that this is our world and that the photographer has not cheated on his way to his affirmation of meaning. (146)

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Adams finds in nineteenth-century photographs, especially those of Timothy O’Sullivan, the very qualities that he strives to create in his own work. The best pictures focus on “minimal landscapes” because “they are one of the extreme places where we live out with greater than usual awareness our search for an exception, for what is not taken away” (148–49). Adams’s deepest sense of place involves “the compromise offered by classical tragedy” (140), a compromise that recognizes and accepts limits. Thus the hero in the tragic plays of Sophocles and Shakespeare “is shown to believe, in ignorant pride, that he is godlike, which is to say free, and to learn through suffering that his freedom is paradoxical—to accept limits” (140). In Why People Photograph, the title of the second essay, “In the TwentiethCentury West,” artfully pairs it with the first essay, but in some ways the original title is preferable, since the essay seeks to answer the fundamental question, “In the American West Is Hope Possible?” (155). Because the essay appears in To Make It Home, moreover, it directly addresses the profound moral and aesthetic concerns Barry Lopez delineates in “The Gift of Light” and “Faith in the Light.” For both artists, hope is necessary: “Without hope we lapse into ruthlessness or torpor; the exercise of nearly every virtue we treasure in people—love, reason, imagination—depends ultimately for its motivation on hope. We know that our actions come to little, but our identity as we want it defined is contingent on the survival of hope” (160). Here Adams expresses what Lopez calls “the hope of a mature man” (“Faith in the Light” 34). Like the nineteenth-century survey photographers and the paradoxical heroes of tragic drama, Adams and Lopez accept limits. That does not mean they are resigned to the loss of open space, the overpopulation of arid landscapes, the pollution of air and light, or the degraded architecture of urban sprawl. It does not mean they are satisfied with small signs of progress such as noise reduction, restriction of water use, or improvements in air quality. Adams acknowledges that an acceptance of limits could lead to resignation, but he moves instead toward “a respectful relation to the land,” especially “a recognition and enrichment and preservation over the centuries of specifically sacred places. The final goal will remain that all places be recognized as holy, but, as a step on the way, locations of particular intensity will more and more be held dear” (167). When Adams illustrates what he means by such sacred places, he mentions graveyards and churches, places venerated by Native Americans, and creative earth-art installations such as Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels and James Turrell’s Roden Crater project (167–70). But, he adds, even more vital than the preservation of such places is the “community of observers” to make the sacred real.

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Thus Adams recalls how he visited a half dozen German churches designed by the architect Rudolph Schwarz and then asserts, “It was, in a way, why I started photographing, to see if I could find, by pictures, an emotional equivalent to the churches” (171). Adams does not insist that we all become artists in order to preserve the sacred quality of places dear to us. In the beginning of “In the TwentiethCentury West,” he imagines the sacred as part of ordinary experience: One summer afternoon, in the stillness that seems a part of the cloud shadows that move over the land, I stopped photographing and gave myself to thinking about a dream: What if there were a specific site here where those concerned with threats to the future could come, and in the silence of the prairie, strengthened by the knowledge that others had come here in concern before, focus their thoughts on changes needed to safeguard life? Perhaps the spot could be marked by a stone with a few words, perhaps a stone in dry ground above an arroyo with a little water, or on a hill in a stand of poplars planted for the wind, for birds, for the gold of fall—a place to which we could bring the harmony of our prayers. It even occurred to me, in the expansive way of hope, that such a place would be better if it were approached the ninety miles from Denver on foot, by a path. I knew that between Denver and the grasslands there were now corporate farms, patrolled and fenced, but the dream was so sustaining that I tried to hold to it. (155–56)

Even though the body of the essay develops Adams’s sense of loss—and the accompanying anger and grief—the dream of sacred places underlies his hope for changes, large and small, in the ways we inhabit the land. Adams’s imagination combines art and the ordinary in ways that bring beauty out of the badly used landscape. This dream of a specific sacred place, a place of prayer and hope, returns in the closing pages of the essay. The “community of observers” could be a community of artists, but it could also include those who appreciate art. The place could be a church, or it could be a photograph. For Adams, the act of appreciation is a way of reshaping ourselves, and he especially recommends “some personal contact with the land” (175). That might take the form of backyard gardening, but he also recommends “the common satisfaction of walking, which can sometimes be as unalloyed as that of working in the backyard, but more often leads into the diversity of modern life.” In walking, moreover, we can enjoy “a kind of friendship with things, made possible by a pace that allows regard for the least conspicuous

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miracles” (176). The personal contact with the land can lead us to creating art, or to appreciating the creations of artists, or simply to sharing a place with family and friends. That, says Adams near the end of the essay, is “as much as I expect to know of the world for which I dream. To hear one’s name, and the invitation, spoken with the assurance you will together see the same gift—‘Look’” (177).

The Slaughter Grounds In the early 1970s, Barry Lopez began visiting the western battle and massacre sites of the American Indian wars, a practice that continues into the present. He recounts some of those visits in the 2006 essay “Out West,” which accompanies Emily Ballew Neff’s book for the exhibition The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890–1950. The most fundamental purpose of visiting such places is to bring the “real ground, the actual location,” into what one knows about history (“Out West” 1). Beyond that, Lopez describes his motives as a compelling interest in “the role the land itself played in these histories. I don’t mean solely issues of tactics, weather conditions, or the position and angle of the sun on a particular day, but what might be learned from a people forced to unravel from their homeland, to abandon an integration with place that would strike many of us in the United States in the twenty-first century as bizarre, were we not so concerned with being respectful” (1). Finally, he describes a further reason for the visits as “the intractable problem of what one remembers,” where memory touches upon “vanished” or “assimilated” people and then speaks instead of “American genocide” (2). A second strand in the essay concerns Lopez’s misgivings about the loss of place and the diminished importance of empirical reality in modern art. He asks two related questions in that regard: “What kind of governance is apt to arise among us as a people if specificity of place is unimportant, and if empirical witness is no more to be trusted than a flight of imagination?” (2). Given the vagaries of cultural memory and the willingness of modern Americans to forget a genocidal past, the relationship between art and landscape takes on deeply moral colors: Standing or walking the slaughter grounds I traveled to—astonishing, really, how infrequently I encountered another human being at these places—I could not quite make the leap to a resolution from the horror of what had happened. All my life, to be free of dejection and pessimism

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about the imperfections of my own culture, I’ve read poets of the past and of my own generation, listened to Bach’s B Minor Mass and his cello suites, and recalled Vermeers in the Frick Collection, but the distance from Tule Canyon and Bear River to Bach’s Leipzig or Zagajewski’s Paris is very great. (3)

In the visits to the Indian slaughter grounds, Lopez takes up Adams’s call for “personal contact with the land,” and he does so by walking or standing—the pace, according to Adams, that allows a kind of friendship with things and a regard for the least conspicuous miracles. Lopez’s regard for the specific massacre sites becomes a form of pilgrimage, very much in line with Adams’s hopeful dream of “a place to which we could bring the harmony of our prayers” (156). The story of Lopez’s visits to the slaughter grounds is complicated by Emily Ballew Neff’s invitation for him to visit The Modern West at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and write an introduction for the exhibition book. In “The Country in Winter,” the second section of the introductory essay, Lopez reflects on his own intellectual and artistic journey across the West in the 1960s and 1970s. But rather than evoking a sense of nostalgia for his personal past, Lopez’s response to the artworks takes the form of a new perception: “In order to serve Progress, it has been necessary for us actively to refute the assertion of indigenous North American cultures that the land is sentient. The artists’ recognition in The Modern West, then, of a spiritual dimension to western space leads us to consider that this refutation might be perilous. If place is stripped of geography, and if geography is stripped of spirit, any destructive scheme for profit will fly. The ghost towns, tailings piles, clear-cuts, emptied lakes, bomb craters, and devastated working lives of the West tell us this is so” (5). That new perception requires that he research places, both through reading and through more visits. Thus in addition to his self-tutoring, Lopez drives for several weeks in the winter from 2004 to 2005, searching for the relationship between art and “an empirical authority—the actual thing” (6). The search ultimately reveals a particular form of attention to place, a form that Lopez calls “concentration.” He first discovers it by hiking away from his truck, sheltering out of the winter wind, and glassing the land carefully with his binoculars: “The creation of a painting or museum-quality photographic print requires an analogous kind of concentration, unusual in our lives now. To consider this is to see how subsumed the longer rhythms of human life have become in the cultural West, and to renew a perception of how art, itself a record of human concentration, can restore an awareness

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of those rhythms” (7). If the land revealed movement, writes Lopez, “I responded with a quickening of the blood, like any animal.” And on further reflection, it may well be that “concentration eventually reveals what at first was not apparent. It is as though the act of concentration itself draws out something latent, or, if time becomes a dimension like width, something that was there all along” (7). The line between landscape and observer, the “actual thing” and the imaginative evocation of the thing, barely exists in such sentences. Turning to the aesthetics of sacred landscapes, Lopez evokes that thin distinction in the final sentences describing the winter pilgrimage: The country in winter, like a painting hung on a wall in a museum’s quietest room, invites participation in the artist’s concentration, which can take you as deep as you feel safe to go into a “frame of meaning” in which another person moves, someone with whom you share a heritage and the pursuit of a cultural identity. On leaving some of the isolated landscapes I tried so hard to observe, I often sharply sensed that I remained a stranger there, and that I would always. Still, I’d leave with the stranger’s ardent wish after experiencing such numinous events, the traveler’s insistent plea: Don’t forget me. (7)

The first, one-sentence paragraph could describe the experience of a fellow artist, finding a shared heritage and cultural identity in a painting. It could more specifically point toward the affinity between two artists such as Lopez and Adams, an affinity that establishes the very “frame of meaning” within which both artists move and work. And, perhaps most important, it could turn that frame of meaning back upon the country in winter, the landscape itself, as inviting the artistic concentration of an observer. Despite those parallels of participation and communion, the second paragraph edges away from the aesthetic moment, delivering the elegiac tone of a perpetual stranger. The combination of authoritative landscapes and an artist’s concentration marks “The Museum Room, Houston, Texas,” the final section of “Out West.” Rather than take the reader directly to the museum room, Lopez opens the section by describing a scene near Burns, Oregon, at the Bureau of Land Management’s wild-horse corrals: The storm was distant in the south by then; the snowless skies here were decked gray and grayer with cumulo-nimbus, like sheets of construction paper torn across the grain. It was mid-morning, a January Sunday. Two

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cowboys were haying and graining horses from the back of a pickup moving through a warren of abutted corrals, the horses separated according to sex. They were feral and never-ridden beings of every color and genetic background, the majority of them sorrels, browns, grays, roans, and claybanks. A few showed the characteristics of Spanish mustangs; other bloodlines included saddle horses, thoroughbreds, and draft horses. Two feet of snow on the ground, the ground hard, the snow packed hard in the corrals. They had recently been brought in off open ranges in eastern Oregon, from some of the BLM’s federal Horse Management Areas: Paisley Desert, Stinkingwater, Palomino Buttes, Murders Creek. When I climbed the fence boards to get a better look across the checkerboard of corrals and let my head clear the last of the close-set rails, the horses, their nostrils flaring, spooked, bolted, and halted. We were a long ways here from haute école. (7)

The scene is intensely visual, and it recalls Lopez’s description of light in Robert Adams’s prints as “fresh . . . quivering, like a horse that has just been ridden for the first time” (“Faith in the Light” 34). But here the horses have never been ridden, and the light may escape capture as the horses flare and bolt away. Instead of a photographic image, Lopez creates a scene marked by texture and motion, and the most abrupt movement occurs as his head clears the rails and he tries to get a “better look” at the horses. The landscape, even under federal management, refuses to be completely framed or domesticated. Despite the evident concentration, the writer remains in some ways a stranger. Thus he ends the scene with this one-sentence paragraph: “I watched the bewildered hundred and fifty of them, mestizo creatures, their lower lips newly tattooed with purple numbers, their future no longer their own, their meaning no longer theirs to define, until I was too cold to sit the fences and the cowboys were ready to be gone” (7). That same sense of dangerous possibility reappears in the museum room. Before the exhibit opens, Lopez views a set of color reproductions of the artworks in order to write the essay “Out West” for the book The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890–1950. What strikes him most forcefully in the museum room is “how pervasive, deep, and unconscious . . . is a cultural understanding of place, of geography. And how strikingly, how almost necessarily, is western space broken by a vertical line—the strange pole in Paul Strand’s The Dark Mountain, New Mexico, the poles in Henry F. Farny’s The Song of the Talking Wire, the woman in Laura Gilpin’s The Prairie” (8). In Lopez’s view of the three artworks, the artistic understanding seems fearful of vast spaces, even while it celebrates them. The exhibit

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essays by Emily Ballew Neff certainly corroborate that view. For instance, Neff describes the 1904 Farny painting as “haunting” and “muted,” with “three bands of color intersected by telegraph poles that recede into the distance, so that the spatial implications are both lateral and longitudinal” (Modern West 65–66). Equally haunted, perhaps, Lopez meditates on the fear of western geography for weeks, concluding that the art of the West constitutes “a long-running experiment in how to depict exterior space, to render a vast geography that, since the survey photographers first went west in the 1860s, had not been so much plumbed as skirted” (8–9). Lopez’s meditation ends with the kind of hope that Robert Adams finds in the modern West. At first he thinks in future tense and conditional mood: “A new geography, made apparent in modern landscape art by incorporating duration of time, would mean a new American politics, at the least” (9). The sense of time suggests Lopez’s allegiance to narrative, and it clearly evokes the central role of cultural memory in his meditations on the slaughter grounds of the West. It may also return us to the image of the wild horses in the Bureau of Land Management’s corrals: each of the mestizo creatures embodies the crosscurrents of landscape and history, and if their future is no longer their own, we must at least ask ourselves whether their future rightly belongs to us. The second movement of the meditation asks that very type of question: “What might we gain as a people if we were to reimagine what was, at one point, too vast either to imagine or render?” (9). Lopez’s question is in some ways too vast to answer, but it implies that we would gain a sense of how much we have wasted and lost. Perhaps, however, we might also gain a sense of how much we could save. The last sentence of the essay shuts the door on the museum room, but it keeps open the questions of new geography, new politics, and new imagination: “It was with that thought that I turned out the lights in the windowless room and pulled the door shut behind me.”

Chapter t wo

Forms of Geography Robert Adams’s Faith in the Light

“Nothing permanently diminishes the affirmation of the sun.” —Robert Adams

Frames of Meaning In “The Mappist,” the final story in Barry Lopez’s Light Action in the Caribbean (2000), the narrator, Philip Trevino, searches for a reclusive mapmaker named Corlis Benefideo. A restoration geographer, Trevino focused for his doctoral research on seven books about exotic cities around the globe, all of which were apparently written by the same man, Onesimo Peña. Years later, Trevino stumbles upon a set of maps made by Benefideo and realizes that Peña and Benefideo are one and the same person, and that Benefideo is in fact a solitary genius, the eccentric “mappist” of the title. Trevino succeeds in retracing Benefideo’s career, and eventually he tracks the old man down to a remote house outside Garrison, North Dakota. Benefideo shows Trevino his latest project, the “North Dakota series”—1,651 maps that detail such transitory facts as ephemeral streams, barbed wire fence lines along the Missouri River, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century foot trails in the western part of the state, the bedrock geology of McIntosh County, and the summer distribution of Swainson’s hawks and the Richardson ground squirrel. Trevino is understandably overwhelmed: “‘I’ve never seen anything that even approaches this, this’—my gesture across the surface of the table included everything. ‘It’s not just the information, or the execution—I mean, the technique is flawless, the water-coloring, 35

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your choice of scale—but it’s like the books, there’s so much more’” (LAC 159). Benefideo’s sense of his own work is more matter-of-fact: “‘This shows history and how people fit the places they occupy. It’s about what gets erased and what comes to replace it. These maps reveal the foundations beneath the ephemera’” (159). Despite a number of important differences, Corlis Benefideo strongly resembles Robert Adams as an artist dedicated to place. Benefideo’s description of the North Dakota series, for example, recalls a series of important books by Adams, all of which focus on Colorado in the 1970s. The first, The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range, was published in 1974 with a foreword by John Szarkowski.1 The second, denver: A Photographic Survey of the Metropolitan Area, 1970–1974, and the related 1995 book, What We Bought: The New World: Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area, 1970–1974, were reissued together by Yale University Press in 2009.2 Adams consistently writes in the three books in terms that echo Benefideo’s concern for “what gets erased and what comes to replace it.” In the preface to denver, for instance, Adams recounts the changes in the new city of 1970s Denver, marked by its inclusion of “shopping centers, junky arroyos, and commercial streets” seen “amidst the dull, hard gray of pollution” (7). Declaring a “radical faith in inclusion,” Adams defines the subject of the pictures as “a troubling mixture: buildings and roads that are often, but not always, unworthy of us; people who are, though they participate in urban chaos, admirable and deserving of our thought and care; light that sometimes still works an alchemy; a western scale that, despite our crowding, persists in long views” (8). In What We Bought, Adams goes a step further, placing his project in a frame of literary history and cultural geography: Back in 1882 Walt Whitman had written in Specimen Days of his affection for Denver and of his hope to grow old there. As late as 1957 Jack Kerouac could write in On the Road of seeing Denver “like the Promised Land.” In a few years, however, the area’s ruin would be testament to a bargain we had tried to strike. The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid, and what we could not buy. They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love. (5)

The documentation of separation and loss balances uneasily against the record of “foundations beneath the ephemera.” Adams evokes that balance in a 1995 interview by Thomas Weski about What We Bought. He remarks

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that the pictures were “facilitated by my belief that we could avert disaster, that a significant part of the landscape could be saved. And the pictures were made possible by beliefs that I still hold—that it is nearly always useful, for example, to tell the truth, if not because it changes society, then because it allows us to change ourselves as individuals, to accept what we must. And the pictures reflect my continuing conviction that, no matter how hard life is, the landscape is beautiful. The light. Even over a shopping center.”3 For Adams, the light is the most fundamental of the foundations beneath (or over) the ephemera, and it reveals a resolute beauty that also appears in the maps of Corlis Benefideo. As Lopez’s mappist says, “It’s a hard thing, really, to erase a trail. A lot of information can be recovered if you stay at it” (LAC 159). The photographs in denver and What We Bought sometimes use signs for a distancing, ironic effect, as in the earlier picture of the “Frontier” gas station and Pikes Peak from The New West. Often, too, there is a kind of truth-telling, documentary eye at work, establishing a frame of meaning that invites the viewer to participate in the artist’s concentration. In that way, the photographs accord with the country in winter as Lopez describes it in “Out West,” and they also suggest the role of a stranger or traveler who pleads, “Don’t forget me.” Perhaps, moreover, they create the sense of landscape experienced with others, family or friends, the experience that Adams describes at the end of “In the Twentieth-Century West,” where we hear our name called along with an invitation to see the same gift: “Look” (Why People Photograph 177). The seven sections of denver emphasize documentary concentration, even in their titles. Four titles use the word land and function as a kind of caption for the entire category of photographs: “Land Surrounded; To Be Developed,” “Factories; Industrial Land,” “Shopping Centers; Commercial Land,” and “Agricultural Land in the Path of Development.” The first and last sections are similar to one another, both in title and in category, but the photographs of agricultural land are more bucolic and melancholy than the images of land in the early stages of development. The third plate in the book, for example, uses a fire hydrant to anchor the point of view in the foreground, and the land stretches out toward a horizon defined by power lines and a cloud of dark smoke. The land in Adams County, Colorado, has not yet been developed, but the human signs of development frame the open grasslands (figure 3). By ending with the photographs of agricultural land threatened by development, Adams clearly criticizes the destructive aspects of development in 1970s Denver, but the final image is one of the most beautiful in the entire book (figure 4). In fact, sections such as the brief “Trees” or the lengthy “Our Homes” give much evidence both of

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Figure 3.  Fire Hydrant for a New Development, as Yet Unbuilt, Adams County, Colorado © Robert Adams, courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.

the photographer’s faith in inclusion and of the alchemy of light. In the image of an ancient, abused cottonwood tree, for instance, the artist’s concentration moves beyond the demands of documentary inclusiveness (figure 5). As Adams writes in the preface to denver, “Perhaps most reassuring of all, there remain cottonwoods, those commercially useless trees that are habitat for birds and children” (7). Even the frontispiece photograph (figure 6), showing a scrubby cottonwood along the trashy shoulder of Interstate 25, near the airport in Adams County, creates a tension between elements of the composition that approaches what Adams calls “a visual stability in which all components are equally important. The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace” (denver 8). Perhaps the best commentary on this paradoxical tension comes from Adams himself, writing

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Figure 4.  North of Broomfield, Colorado © Robert Adams, courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.

in the preface to The New West: “We also need to see the whole geography, natural and man-made, to experience a peace; all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty” (xii). In one of the first images in What We Bought, Adams frames the prairie in early spring, snow still clinging to vehicle tracks in the long grass, and the picture balances vast, full spaces of earth and sky (figure 7). A ghost of that vast landscape haunts other plates, such as the grubby parking lot and industrial porch that lead the eye toward the Rockies (figure 8) or the expanse of asphalt broken only by a few brave automobiles and a lone splotch of newspaper (figure 9). For Adams, the quality of light in those two photographs transforms the familiar ugliness of suburban Denver into beautiful landscapes. The transformation can also move in another

Figure 5.  Cottonwood Series, #11 © Robert Adams, courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.

Figure 6.  Interstate 25, Denver, Colorado © Robert Adams, courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.

Figure 7.  Untitled, from What We Bought © Robert Adams, courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.

Figure 8.  Untitled (View of Residential Street Obscured by Pole) © Robert Adams, courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. The Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.

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Figure 9.  Untitled (Park Lot of Sears as Seen from Distance) © Robert Adams, courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. The Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.

direction, as in a more conventionally beautiful scene (figure 10), where the heavenly light of a winter sunset descends toward the viewer, revealing mingled, snowy tracks and trails, human and other. This suite of four plates suggests the kind of geographical narrative we find in Robert Adams’s books. Beginning as an open prairie, barely marked by human traffic, the land becomes covered with asphalt and cement, but it retains the beauty of the original landscape, and there are still moments in which the photographer captures the light of possibility. Most important to the narrative, the plot resists obvious arcs of decline, waste, and loss, even though the photographs “document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love” (What We Bought 5). Adams creates narratives without obvious resolutions because his photographs pose difficult and meaningful questions.

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Figure 10.  Longmont, Colorado © Robert Adams, courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. The Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.

Mapping Aesthetic and Literary Geographies In a brief essay called “Writing,” Robert Adams asserts that “probably the best way to know what photographers think about their work, beyond consulting the internal evidence in that work, is to read or listen to what they say about pictures made by colleagues or precursors whom they admire.”4 Even though Adams portrays himself in the essay as a reluctant writer, he has in fact produced three fine books of critical writing about photography. The first, Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values, was published in 1981 and reissued with a new preface in 1996; the second, Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews, was published in 1994 and dedicated to Barry Lopez; the third, Along Some Rivers: Photographs and Conversations, was published in 2006.5 In all three books, Adams devotes considerable attention to pictures made by colleagues and

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precursors whom he admires. The essays tell a great deal about Adams’s own work, and they map an aesthetic geography that leads toward the literary geography of Barry Lopez’s work. Adams names his precursors forthrightly. As seen in the essay “In the Nineteenth-Century West,” in Why People Photograph, he harks back to the western survey photographers, especially Timothy O’Sullivan. Adams calls O’Sullivan “the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture. He was our Cézanne, repeatedly creating pictures that were, while they acknowledged the vacancy at the center (a paradoxical symbol for the opacity of life), nonetheless compositions of perfect order and balance. Like Cézanne, O’Sullivan’s goal seems to have been, as Cézanne phrased it, ‘exciting serenity.’ Each was an artist/geologist, in love with light and rock” (WPP 149). In another memorable sentence, Adams concludes that “O’Sullivan’s western pictures are, to borrow a phrase from Roethke, the achievement of ‘a man struggling to find his proper silence’” (154). By praising O’Sullivan, Adams connects his own aesthetic vision to the understated, documentary style of the survey photographers, a style that emphasizes panoramic shots of large western landscapes. Adams defines O’Sullivan’s special vision as associated with his earlier work during the Civil War: “More than any of the other photographers, O’Sullivan was interested in emptiness, in apparently negative landscapes, in the barest, least hospitable ground” (150). In the long section of Why People Photograph called “Examples of Success,” Adams treats early twentieth-century figures such as Eugène Atget, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Laura Gilpin, Dorothea Lange, and Ansel Adams. Not surprisingly, his discussions show that he values “straight,” sharp-focus photography rather than the soft-focus pictorialism of Alfred Stieglitz. Adams does not oppose pictorialism in photographers like Edward S. Curtis, but he does fault an artist like Laura Gilpin for falling into “this mire of the generic, especially in her early work around the pueblos,” and he praises her for “experimenting until she found a way out” (99–100). More tellingly, Adams repeatedly praises his precursors for the complexity and inclusiveness of long shots, which in Weston’s Point Lobos pictures suggests “the inevitable lessening of control over the subject that this involved” and results in “freer, subtler composition as the years passed” (71). Second, Adams seeks out a sense of urgency or personal need, as in Paul Strand’s Time in New England (1943–47), and he connects that urgency with social context as much as with personal psychology. So, for instance, he concludes about Strand that “like many of the best photographers who came of age professionally in the 1920s and 1930s—Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans—he seems prophetically to have sensed that America

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was in danger of dying from within, of giving up” (77). Third, Adams tends to seek evidence in the photographs themselves, not in biographical information, and especially not material from photographers’ private lives. Thus he discusses Strand’s urgency in terms of light: “Strand was one to whom an unusual sensitivity was given, and there is a striking luminosity in all but his earliest pictures. He seems to have observed a charge running through the world, a current that suggests, without the theology, passages from Gerard Manley Hopkins” (77–78). Adams adds a second piece of formal evidence in Strand’s persistent use of “off axis” or “off-centered” compositions, in which the subject is not distributed equally within the frame or the frame includes apparently irrelevant material (81–82). The prophetic sense of urgency concerning the state of America recalls Corlis Benefideo, Lopez’s visionary mappist. While tracking down Benefideo, the narrator telephones Maxwell Abert, a former colleague of Benefideo’s at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington. Abert calls Benefideo a “patriot” with “this very strong commitment to his country, and to a certain kind of mapmaking, and he and the Survey just ended up on a collision course” (LAC 151). The characterization sounds oddly like Adams’s description of Paul Strand, who “seems prophetically to have sensed that America was in danger of dying from within.” Abert goes on to describe Benefideo’s visionary project: “Well, Corlis, you know, he was like something out of a WPA project, like Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and James Agee and them, people that had this sense of America as a country under siege, undergoing a trial during the Depression, a society that needed its dignity back. Corlis believed that in order to effect any political or social change, you had to know exactly what you were talking about. You had to know what the country itself—the ground, the real thing, not some political abstraction—was all about. So he proposed this series of forty-eight sets of maps—this was just before Alaska and Hawaii came in—a series for each state that would show the geology and hydrology, where the water was, you know, and the botany and biology, and the history of the place from Native American times.” (151–52)

The “America series” is clearly an impractical dream, and Benefideo’s North Dakota series is a representative synecdoche for the utopian whole. Most striking, however, is the artistic motive behind Benefideo’s topographic dream. Benefideo is like Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans or James Agee, and he is also, of course, like Paul Strand or Robert Adams or Barry Lopez. All of these artists are committed to “the country itself” and the authority

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of “the ground, the real thing.” Lopez treats this political dimension in the essay “Out West,” moreover, since his search for “an empirical authority— the actual thing” (6) among the slaughter grounds of the modern West leads him to an urgent artistic concentration on the redemptive, spiritual dimensions of western space.

Spiritual Geographies One of the gifts that Lopez identifies in Robert Adams’s photographs is the dream of “holiness in the world” (“Faith in the Light” 34). It is not the most obvious quality to discern in photographs of tract houses or shopping centers or endangered prairies, but Lopez’s insight is nonetheless profound and true. Adams addresses this issue obliquely in the essay “Beauty in Photography,” the title essay for his 1981 collection. As a student, Adams found the term “beauty” an obsolete embarrassment, but he returns to it with a deep belief in the essay. Beauty, he argues, is the “proper goal” of art, and by “Beauty” he means “Form” or “the coherence and structure underlying life” (BP 24). Beauty is synonymous with Form because “it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning” (25). The ideals of Beauty and Form sound Platonic, and they might suggest a specifically Christian form of Platonism. But Adams avoids the philosophical and theological implications of his terms: Art’s beauty does not lead, of course, to narrow doctrine. The Form it affirms is not neatly finished, at least to our eyes. It does not lead directly to a theology or a system of ethics (though it reminds me of the wisdom of humility and generosity). William Carlos Williams said that poets write for a single reason—to give witness to splendor (a word also used by Thomas Aquinas in defining the beautiful). It is a useful word, especially for a photographer, because it implies light—light of overwhelming intensity. The Form toward which art points is of an incontrovertible brilliance, but it is also far too intense to examine directly. We are compelled to understand Form by its fragmentary reflection in the daily objects around us; art will never fully define light. (25)

Adams comes very close to the theological and philosophical aspects of Form and Beauty, but he prefers wisdom and poetry to rigorous argument or narrow doctrine. He remains grounded in the world of daily objects and in the fragmentary reflections of splendorous light. The fragments signify wholeness, nevertheless, and they suggest at least a dream of holiness.

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In the closing paragraphs of “Learning to See,” Lopez evokes both the fragments and the wholeness in ways that relate directly to the idea of a community of artists. He reflects on the potential jadedness of a serious photographer who suddenly encounters “ideas unanticipated and dumbfounding” (ATL 237). Such a shock, he writes, “causes you to reexamine all you’ve assumed about your own work and the work of others, especially the work of people you’ve never particularly understood. This happened most recently for me in seeing the photography of Linda Connor” (237). As part of a magazine assignment, Lopez flew around the world on freight airplanes, jet-lagging his sense of time into confusion. He found himself one day in Cape Town, South Africa, driving up the west side of Table Mountain: In Cape Town that day I saw what I came to call indigenous time. It clung to the flanks of Table Mountain. It resisted being absorbed into my helterskelter time. It seemed not yet to have been subjugated by Dutch and British colonial expansion, as the physical landscape so clearly had been. It was time apparent to the senses, palpable. What made me believe I was correct in this perception was that, only a month before, I’d examined a collection of Linda Connor’s work, a book called Luminance. I realized there at Table Mountain that she’d photographed what I was looking at. She’d photographed indigenous time. (238)

The passage describes an experience of the numinous in a landscape, but the experience is complicated by the writer’s secondary realization that the numinous “indigenous time” is already represented in Linda Connor’s photographs. Perhaps unconsciously feeding Lopez’s perception of “indigenous time” on Table Mountain is Rebecca Solnit’s description of Linda Connor’s photographs in “Composure,” the introductory essay to Luminance: Connor’s prints are made on printing-out paper, a medium that necessitates exposure in sunlight for upward of half an hour. Her negatives and paper clamped together in printing frames and put out in her garden to develop bring to mind trays of fruit or clothes put out to dry, reminding us that the sun is as much a source of warmth, a garden a place where things grow. Photography is not a very technological medium in her hands. A different sense of time is at play in these works than in the mass-manufactured and machined products that dominate contemporary life, and it could be proposed that in photographing at ancient sites and among traditional peoples, she is not shutting out the present but finding

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parallels to her own processes, places with an affinity to this unrushed, contemplative sensibility and to this slower means of making the world.6

Solnit develops the nearly preindustrial sense of photographic technique in the description, and Connor’s “different sense of time” accords well with Lopez’s “indigenous time.” Moreover, Connor’s subjects are themselves analogous to “indigenous time.” First, they are the very sites and peoples that constitute the long-term inhabitation of a place. Second, such longterm inhabitation is necessary for developing the sense of a cultural and spiritual geography that leads toward the dream of holiness. The type of artistic confluence suggested here goes yet deeper, for Linda Connor’s work is deeply linked to the photography of Robert Adams. The connection is clear in Connor’s new book, Odyssey, which collects 142 plates from 1978 to 2007, including several that appear in Luminance. In place of a retrospective essay on her work, Connor presents two conversations with photographers Emmet Gowin and Robert Adams. The conversations reveal three colleagues who form the kind of community of artists that Adams evokes in his letter to Barry Lopez. The first conversation, which took place on January 15, 2008, opens with a set of telling observations by Adams: This book seems to me to be a prayer book. A repeated giving of thanks for a constellation of mysteries. But it is a visual prayer book, and both its method and its subjects seem to me to be silence. When I study the book, I’m reminded of what Mark Rothko said when he argued against explaining pictures: “Silence is so accurate.” Your pictures also remind me of Wendell Berry’s definition of a successful poem, that it “does not disturb the silence from which it came.” With these things in mind, I guess what I would like to do is urge anyone who may be reading the transcript of our conversation to turn guiltlessly away from these words at any time in order to find what matters, which is the pictures. Your book seems to me to be totally lucid without any words at all.7

Adams’s view of explanatory analysis recalls the essay “Writing” in Why People Photograph. He ends that essay by pointing out photographers’ particularly acute sense of the frailty of language: “To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters. Their gift is to see what will be affecting as a print. Mute” (WPP 35). It is similar to his view of teaching, especially teaching photography. While he respects those with a gift for teaching, he distrusts the role of analytical thinking in art:

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“Academics enjoy disassembling things in order to understand how they work, whereas artists enjoy taking scattered pieces and assembling from them things that do work” (WPP 41). Silence has a positive quality for Adams, one that is more meaningful than simply keeping words out of the way of pictures. In the essay “In the Nineteenth-Century West,” for instance, he asserts that “one of the most compelling truths in some of the early photographs is their implication of silence. Western space was mostly quiet, a fact suggested metaphorically by the pictures’ visual stillness (a matter both of their subject and composition)” (WPP 135). The silence extends, as we saw earlier, to Adams’s appreciation for the survey photographs of Timothy O’Sullivan, which he compares to Cézanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire. For both artists, the geography is “a pitching mountain,” but both manage to find the “proper silence” described by Theodore Roethke: “The wonder of the paintings and photographs is, though, that in them the violent forms are brought still, held credibly in the perfect order of the picture’s composition. Nothing is proven, but as statements of faith they strengthen our resolve to try to discover in our own lives a cognate for the artist’s vision” (WPP 154). If Linda Connor’s photographs create a kind of “visual prayer book,” then, they do so by evoking a positive spiritual quality in silence. And the photographs as “statements of faith” give the viewer an ethical courage, what Lopez calls “hope.” Adams sees an analogous spiritual quality in the way Connor uses light. He tells Connor that “over and over again you use light as evidence of the mystery that sustains your subjects, and your record of the light, especially in pictures toward the end of the book, is too impassioned and intuitive to be understood as ordinary sunlight.” In relation to Connor’s idea of light as “one of the most ancient and universal elements in designating the sacred,” Adams asks her about “a light spot in the upper center in that landscape toward the end of the book. It has small buildings down below and then, far off, a mountain ridge back toward the valley” (figure 11). The conversation never defines the “light spot” or exactly how Connor created it, but she does offer the beginning of a formal explanation: “The print of the prayer flags was able to hold the bright sunlight on the mountains while giving you the shadow detail of the foreground as well.” The sense of community created by the conversations becomes yet stronger when we recall that one of Adams’s first exhibitions took place in 1971 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City: Photographs by Robert Adams and Emmet Gowin. In effect, the conversations in Odyssey give us three major contemporary landscape photographers who clearly admire and respect one another. They share some fundamental techniques that hark

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Figure 11.  From the Monastery Roof (Spiti, Ladakh, India, 1994) © Linda Connor, courtesy of the artist.

back to the survey photographers and to the “straight” photography and documentary style of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, much of which entails the use of the view camera. They also learn from one another. Adams asks Connor about photographing “the mystery,” and he cites a specific image of “many little lighted lamps on the ground in front of the three figures that are backlit against the sun. Did you realize, as you made the exposure, that all the lamps were going to seem to be sending their light back toward the sun?” Connor recalls the scene as “a rather magical event. This family was doing their best to light hundreds of small oil lamps that were arranged to spell out a Buddhist prayer but the wind kept blowing them out. Everyone was moving around; I was very pleased when the young man just stood still for a moment. He brought the grace to the scene” (figure 12). Once again, Connor does not answer Adams’s question, but she doesn’t need to. The sense of community has as much to do with artistic vision as

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Figure 12.  Ceremony (Sri Lanka, 1979) © Linda Connor, courtesy of the artist.

with photographic technique. So, for example, Adams praises Connor’s use of the sharp-focus lens, to which she turned in 1979, and he believes that the change paradoxically suggests “the immanent and the transcendent at once” (Odyssey). Gowin agrees with Adams’s spiritual interpretation of the photographs, and at one point he says, “Making a picture is in some way trying to connect yourself to an eternal presence, or an eternal aspect of your experience that escapes ordinary life, [that] is hard to hold on to in ordinary life.” Adams then directly answers Gowin, “I think the reason I so much appreciate what you just said is that it’s also a way of responding to those who are concerned about what art should be doing in this violent, burning world of ours.”

Chapter three

Leaning into the Light Aesthetic Communities in Arctic Dreams

Barry Lopez recapitulates the major themes of Arctic Dreams in “Epilogue: Saint Lawrence Island, Bering Sea.” As in the prologue and nine chapters of the book, he begins the epilogue with a concrete event in a specific place. He is returning to the Yupik village of Gambell on the northwest cape of Saint Lawrence Island, having accompanied local men on a walrus hunt in the spring ice. While butchering walrus on the sea ice, Lopez formulates the intertwined questions he raises again and again in Arctic Dreams: “What is an animal? What is death?” (AD 408). In the cultures of arctic natives, Lopez finds hunting “the most spectacular and succinct expression of the Eskimo’s relationship with the land, yet one of the most perplexing and disturbing for the outsider to consider” (409). The economic and social changes of the modern era have led inevitably to changes in hunting practices, but Lopez refuses the easy answer, that modern hunting renders the killing of animals “inauthentic” or even unethical. Instead, his questions lead to a deeper sense of value in the long relationship of Eskimo cultures to the arctic landscape. The walrus hunt, like much else in the real landscape of the Arctic, teaches “lessons in paradox” because “the land, an animal that contains all other animals, is vigorous and alive” (411). Contemplating the paradoxes, Lopez casts his imagination toward a five-hundred-year-old monument on the Chukchi coast, “a series of bowhead whale skulls and jawbones set up in a line on the beach that is about 2500 feet long” (412), which Russian anthropologists have named Punuk culture: 52

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Perhaps the Punuk hunters at Whalebone Alley, as it is known, lived, some of them, exemplary lives. Perhaps they knew exactly what words to say to the whale so they would not go off in dismay or feel the weight of its death. I remember the faces of the walrus we killed, and do not know what words to say to them. No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself. If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light. (413)

The tone of the first paragraph is respectful but questioning, framed by the speculative word “Perhaps.” Rather than judge the Punuk hunters and their relationship to the great animals they killed, Lopez remembers the “faces of the walrus we killed.” Rather than give words to the Punuk hunters, he admits that he himself has no words to say to the walrus. The questions of death and animals lead the writer to silence. In the second paragraph, Lopez takes a step back from the immediacy of the killing, but the spectacular hunt raises other fundamental questions: How can we resolve the contradiction between our desire to lead a life marked by morality and compassion and our knowledge of blood and horror inherent in all life? And what do we make of this darkness at the very center of our culture and of ourselves? As in the reflection on the Punuk hunters, Lopez does not provide a facile answer, for the questions suggest that such fundamental paradoxes form an authentic reality, beyond any answer. Because the questions remain, “you continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light.” In that last image, the light accords with a clear answer to the contradictions of life, but we can at most lean into the light. We remain rooted in the darkness and live out the questions, but the light shows a way toward worthy expression and moral life. Within the passage and the landscape, moreover, the act of “leaning into the light” is itself a worthy expression of an exemplary life. Although Lopez never mentions Robert Adams or landscape photography in Arctic Dreams, the ethical and spiritual dimensions of light in the

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arctic landscape recall the themes of the “Gift of Light” lecture and the “Faith in the Light” essay. In Adams’s photographs, Lopez concludes, the light “rekindles the wonder that makes us commit ourselves again, as individuals and as a society, to our ideals” (“Gift of Light” 17). For Lopez, as for Adams, the “worthy expression” leads to the reader’s or viewer’s wonder. But it begins in the artist’s own ability to capture the wonder in the light. In the epilogue to Arctic Dreams, Lopez expresses his sense of wonder by bowing deeply “toward the north, that great strait filled with life, the ice and the water.” He bows “to the pale sulphur sky at the northern rim of the earth,” holding the bow until his back aches and his mind empties (414). Then, after this expression of a “leaning into the light,” he has a moment of vision: When I stood I thought I glimpsed my own desire. The landscape and the animals were like something found at the end of a dream. The edges of the real landscape became one with the edges of something I had dreamed. But what I had dreamed was only a pattern, some beautiful pattern of light. The continuous work of the imagination, I thought, to bring what is actual together with what is dreamed is an expression of human evolution. The conscious desire is to achieve a state, even momentarily, that like light is unbounded, nurturing, suffused with wisdom and creation, a state in which one has absorbed that very darkness which before was the perpetual sign of defeat. (414)

In this passage, Lopez in effect enacts the “leaning into the light.” His deep bow expresses “allegiance with the mystery of life,” and the resulting “glimpse” brings the real landscape and the dream landscape together. For only a moment, reality and dream overlap, or the real landscape catches the edge of “some beautiful pattern of light.” As in the reflection on the walrus hunt, Lopez once again takes a step back from experience, reflecting on the momentary state, which he directly compares to light—“unbounded, nurturing, suffused with wisdom and creation, a state in which one has absorbed that very darkness which before was the perpetual sign of defeat.” Thus he creates a sense of wonder in expressing his allegiance to the northern landscape, and he leans into the light of his ideals. This kind of transformative experience is deeply felt and deeply questioned. So Lopez ends the book with two brief paragraphs of contemplation and action. In the first, an ironic perspective evokes the life lived “in the midst of paradox,” but the irony clarifies the narrator’s ideals: “Whatever world that is, it lies far ahead. But its outline, its adumbration, is clear in the landscape, and upon this one can actually hope we will find our way” (415).

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A particularly salient word, adumbration, suggests in its etymology the combination of dark shadow and sunlight that marks the entire epilogue and Lopez’s meditation on the hunt. In the final paragraph, the contemplative gives way once again to a telling gesture of respect and reverence: “I bowed again, deeply, toward the north, and turned south to retrace my steps over the dark cobbles to the home where I was staying. I was full of appreciation for all that I had seen” (415). The second bow is comforting, despite the “dark cobbles” and their uncertain footing. In retracing his steps, Lopez retraces the entirety of Arctic Dreams, and he does not retreat from the hope that “we will find our way” to a better world. The last sentence evokes the plenitude of memory and vision: even though the book concludes in darkness, it leans toward the light. In significant ways, Arctic Dreams ends where it begins, with gestures made in the sunlight. In the preface to the book, Lopez traces its origin to two moments, the first of which occurs on a summer evening in the western Brooks Range of Alaska. On a walk on the tundra, he encounters nesting golden plovers and Lapland longspurs, and even the nest of two snowy owls: “I took to bowing on these evening walks. I would bow slightly with my hands in my pockets, toward the birds and the evidence of life in their nests—because of their fecundity, unexpected in this remote region, and because of the serene arctic light that came down over the land like breath, like breathing” (xx). The passage starts with a singular event but in fact narrates repeated walks, repeated gestures of reverence and respect. Memory functions to create a kind of composite experience of uncommon grace: I remember the press of light against my face. The explosive skitter of calves among grazing caribou. And the warm intensity of the eggs beneath these resolute birds. Until then, perhaps because the sun was shining in the very middle of the night, so out of tune with my own customary perception, I had never known how benign sunlight could be. How forgiving. How run through with compassion in a land that bore so eloquently the evidence of centuries of winter. During those summer days on Ilingnorak Ridge there was no dark night. Darkness never came. The birds were born. They flourished, and then flew south in the wake of the caribou. (xx)

The tone of this passage differs quite remarkably from that of the epilogue and the narrator’s bow to the north. In both passages, to be sure, the bow is a gesture of humility and respect, an acknowledgment of a mysterious force in the landscape that, in the preface, takes the form of nesting birds

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and their resolute fecundity. In both passages, moreover, the light is a vital aspect of the landscape—“like breath, like breathing”—causing the land to seem “vigorous and alive” (411). But in the preface, the light is figured as “serene,” “benign,” “forgiving,” and “run through with compassion.” It is as if the light already evoked the union of real and dream landscapes that “lies far ahead” at the conclusion of the book (415). Darkness does not need to be absorbed here, and it is not a perpetual sign of defeat, for there is no darkness—“Darkness never came.” The difference between the preface and the epilogue is one of adumbration. The beginning pages of Arctic Dreams present the midnight sunlight as an ideal landscape of peace and plenty, but even that landscape is subject to change. Hence, the tundra birds are born, flourish, and fly south for another winter. Darkness never came, but darkness will certainly come. The closing pages of the book, by contrast, evoke the “pale sulphur sky” of sunset and falling darkness. The landscape of the Bering Strait is filled with life, but it is also marked by blood and horror. And yet each of the landscapes acts as an adumbration of the other. The seemingly perfect tundra nesting place foreshadows the teeming, blood-torn strait, just as the ironic, paradoxical tone of the epilogue leans back into the light of the preface. Perhaps the relationship between the two episodes is best captured in this photographic image from Saint Lawrence Island: “At the foot of Sevuokuk, Lapland longspurs build their nests in the walrus’s abandoned crania” (414). As Lopez states at the close of the preface, the Arctic is “a region, like the desert, rich with metaphor, with adumbration” (xxix).

Empirical Authority Sunlight exercises a fundamental authority in Arctic Dreams, and it does so most fundamentally in its empirical forms. In the prologue, for example, Lopez describes the effect of arctic sunlight on the sailors aboard the British whaler Cumbrian in the summer of 1823: “The distant landscapes of Bylot and Baffin islands at Pond’s Bay were etched brilliantly before them by a high-tempered light in air clear as gin—an unearthly sight that filled them with a mixture of disbelief and pleasure. They felt exhilaration in the constant light; and a sense of satisfaction and worth, which came partly from their arduous work” (3). The descriptive language rings true, the simile of “air clear as gin” evoking an “unearthly sight” that is so richly mixed as to become intoxicating. As the example of the Cumbrian suggests, the empirical authority of arctic light derives in part from its effects on temperate-zone visitors. Because our

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culture is so distant from the landscape of the Arctic, we find it difficult to understand and evaluate the place, and we tend to undervalue it as a result of the difficulties. Lopez writes, “It is precisely because the regimes of light and time in the Arctic are so different that this landscape is able to expose in startling ways the complacency of our thoughts about land in general. Its unfamiliar rhythms point up the narrow impetuosity of Western schedules, by simply changing the basis of the length of the day” (12). As a necessary counterweight to our tendency toward impetuosity, Lopez seeks to convey “a more particularized understanding of the land itself—not a more refined mathematical knowledge but a deeper understanding of its nature, as if it were, itself, another sort of civilization we had to reach some agreement with” (12). This kind of understanding, based on the length of the day, tends toward a form of intersubjective or intercultural communication. Lopez develops a particularized understanding of the Arctic on every page of Arctic Dreams, but the peculiarities of arctic light appear most prominently in the first chapter, “Arktikós,” and in the sixth chapter, “Ice and Light.” “Arktikós” delivers, in at least two ways, an “image of the annual movement of the sun across the arctic sky” (20). Lopez narrates his own realization regarding the winter light at Barrow, Alaska: “As I walked through the village, I realized I had never understood this before: in a far northern winter, the sun surfaces slowly in the south and then disappears at nearly the same spot, like a whale rolling over” (20). More extensively, he narrates a thought experiment, an imaginary walk from the North Pole to Mexico City on the 100th meridian, which takes place in a suspended time of day and year, June 21, the summer solstice (21–34). The imaginary walk reveals the different ways in which the sun appears to move in the sky and at what angle of incidence the light strikes the surface of the earth. These facts, in turn, combine to create the effects we think of as sunrise, high noon, twilight, and sunset, but our terms for the parts of a day are a function of temperate-zone perceptions and conventions of language. Lopez makes the point in one paradoxical sentence: “In the Far North the day does not start over again every day” (23). As he develops the imaginary journey, Lopez shows how sunlight exerts empirical authority through the simplified extremities of a two-season year. Because the long twilight and darkness of winter alternate so starkly with the intense, short-lived light of summer, arctic ecosystems tend to be biologically less diverse and more vulnerable than temperate or tropical ecosystems. If we were to reverse our imaginary walk, returning north from Mexico City, we would find fewer and fewer species of plants and animals, though each species can contain many individuals. And despite those great numbers of individuals, arctic populations are subject to booms and busts.

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A good way to appreciate these conditions is to think of the tundra birds to which Lopez bows. The tundra nesters make use of a relatively short period of solar energy and productivity; the arctic sunlight provides light and warmth, melts water, and fuels the growth of plants and insects as food for the nesters and their offspring. Vulnerable to sudden catastrophes such as a June sleet storm, the tundra birds elicit Lopez’s admiration because of their resilience and endurance (32–33). As he brings the thought experiment to a close, Lopez returns to the origin of everything he sees and appreciates: “If we finally stood, then, at the end of our journey, looking over the tundra with that short list of arctic creatures to hand, wondering why it had dwindled so, we would need to look no further than that yellow star burning so benignly in the blue summer sky. It is the sunlight, always the streaming sunlight, that matters most. It is more critical even than temperature as a limiting factor on life. The salient reason there are so few species here is that so few have metabolic processes or patterns of growth that can adapt to so little light” (33–34). Streaming but limiting, arctic light exercises its fundamental power throughout the northern landscape. In “Ice and Light,” empirical phenomena take on a preternatural power, especially when they involve human perceptions and emotions. Lopez describes the many arresting colors of arctic twilights and of the aurora borealis (228–29), and he delves into the physics of refraction and reflection in describing the sun’s arcs, halos, and perihelia (229–32). In a long section about the northern lights, Lopez combines objective description with what he calls “a pervasive and stilling spiritual presence” in the auroras (232). He offers both general and specific accounts of the emotional effects the lights can have. So, for instance, he asserts that “they easily evoke feelings of awe and tenderness; the most remarkable effect they seem to have, however, is to draw a viewer emotionally up and out of himself, because they throw the sky into a third dimension, on such a vast scale, in such a beautiful way, that they make the emotion of self-pity impossible” (235). In two specific instances of his own, viewed from airplanes, he describes the motions of the auroras over the Wrangell Mountains as “like a t’ai chi exercise: graceful, inward-turning, and protracted” (233) and the overpowering effect of the auroras on his sense of the Brooks Range: “I recalled days of camping in the mountains, of traveling on the tundra, and the times I’d camped on the arctic coast west of Prudhoe. I could see these places clearly, but it was the aurora, towering over the earth, that resolved what could have been only a map into a real landscape, making the memories seem immediate and tangible” (236). If the auroras create a heightened sense of the real landscape, drawing the viewer out of the individual self, the many forms of arctic mirages create utterly false visions that “seem utterly real to the soberest viewer”

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(237). Along with the fata morgana, Lopez describes problems with scale and depth perception leading to mistaken reports and even comic errors. Whiteouts are less humorous but equally common, while the stark contrast between rock and ice on coastlines leads many an arctic explorer to error (239–40). In the details of physics and metaphysics, Lopez treats the visual effects of arctic light in order to create a particularized understanding of the land itself, and that deeper understanding treats the land as much more than a collection of objects or phenomena. In effect, Lopez sees the land as a kind of civilization or culture.

Aesthetic Dimensions The language of Lopez’s descriptions already suggests an aesthetic dimension to the empirical reality of the Arctic and of arctic light. The language straddles the boundary between external landscape and internal landscape in phrases such as “air clear as gin” or “throw the sky into a third dimension,” which suggest deep metaphorical adumbrations abiding in the landscape itself. Even in straightforwardly literal descriptions, Lopez enriches the effects of light on the viewer’s perception, and in doing so he delivers parallel effects on the reader. In “Tôrnârssuk,” for instance, he describes the colors of the polar bear’s fur in phrases that evoke the subtle hues of paintings: The ivory and pearl shading we see in a polar bear’s fur is caused by the refraction of sunlight (the same phenomenon that makes clouds appear white) in its guard hairs. The hair itself is optically transparent, or colorless. The brightest whites show up at the spring molt, the purest of these being those of young cubs. With exposure to sunlight, the hairs take on a subtle coloring; soft yellowish tones appear on the hips, along the flanks, and down the legs—a pale lemon wash, apricot yellows, cream buffs, straw whites. The tones deepen each year as the animal ages. In the low sunlight of a fall afternoon an older male’s fur might suggest the yellow golds of ripe wheat. (84)

The discrimination of shades and age is acute, but the paragraph is framed by the communal “we see,” so that Lopez seems to be describing a plural, composite knowledge of the polar bear’s colorings. Yet he adds to our understanding within the description by embedding a telling fact, the colorless hair of the bear. The rich variety of tones then becomes all the more remarkable, since the yellows abide not in the hair itself but in the refraction of sunlight in the fur. Reading the paragraph, we ask ourselves questions like

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“Are clouds white?” and, more subtly, “Is the old male’s fur a yellow gold, or is that the effect of low sunlight on a fall afternoon?” This sense of communal perception is a subtle and important effect of Lopez’s descriptive language. A brief section in “Ice and Light” (224–29) illustrates the point particularly well. Lopez narrates a series of meetings with Maurice Haycock, a retired geologist and amateur painter, at the Canadian government’s Polar Continental Shelf camp at Resolute, Cornwallis Island. Haycock’s intelligent regard for the subtle light on Cornwallis Island touches Lopez’s visual imagination. As Haycock describes “the difficulty of painting air” (225), we may well recall Lopez’s statement about Robert Adams’s photographs in “Faith in the Light”: “He is photographing the air” (“Faith in the Light” 34). As the two are conversing inside the field station, Lopez sees the room as “airy with sunlight, flushed, like an empty summer bedroom in one of Edward Hopper’s paintings,” and his perception of Haycock is heightened. The conversation between the two men leads Haycock to describe the reason for spending days in painting on the open tundra: “It was a conversation with the land, he said” (225–26). The “conversation with the land” becomes a strong motif in the second half of Arctic Dreams. In the episode on Cornwallis Island, Lopez connects it directly with the luminist tradition in nineteenth-century American landscape painting and with a sense of blessing in the light: “You cannot look at Western painting, let alone the work of the luminists, without sensing that hunger [for the light]. Western civilization, I think, longs for light as it longs for blessing, or for peace or God” (227–28). He links the conversation, moreover, to the need for an aesthetic understanding of the land. At the time, the government field station included no artists, musicians, or writers, and Lopez remarks on the situation as both peculiar and familiar: “Whenever we seek to take swift and efficient possession of places completely new to us, places we neither own nor understand, our first and often only assessment is a scientific one. And so our evaluations remain unfinished.” His alternative to the strictly scientific evaluation is to admit that the land retains “an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know”: Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard. To try to sense the range and variety of its expression—its weather and colors and animals. To intend from the beginning to preserve some of the mystery within it as a kind of wisdom to be experienced, not questioned. And to be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there. (228)

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Here Lopez elaborates dramatically on the idea of a conversation with the land. Because the land has an identity of its own, beyond our evaluative knowledge, we acknowledge it as worth our respectful regard. We also consider it as containing mystery and as affording openings of the sacred. Only then does our knowing match the land’s knowing. Only when we do not forget the land can we be sure that the land will not forget us. Lopez defines an aesthetic understanding of our relationship to the land, but the passage also gestures toward the animistic religions of indigenous cultures in the Arctic, toward the vitalism of American transcendentalists from Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Muir, and toward a mysticism grounded in the land ethic of Aldo Leopold. These are only the most obvious facets of the communal perception created by the conversation with the land. Lopez returns to the luminist tradition in American landscape painting later in “Ice and Light,” and he defines the aim of the painters as “to locate an actual spiritual presence in the North American landscape,” to see “the face of God” in the particulars of the land. That vision leads to a “loss of ego” in the paintings: “The artist disappears. The authority of the work lies, instead, with the land. And the light in them is like a creature, a living, integral part of the scene. The landscape is numinous, imposing, real. It ceases to be, as it was in Europe, merely symbolic” (245). The example of Frederic Church, perhaps the most famous of the American luminist painters, takes Lopez to paintings of icebergs and to the common comparison of icebergs to cathedrals. But Lopez sees more than the obvious connections of line and scale in the comparison; he sees “our passion for light” (248). Recurring to medieval cultural history, Lopez connects the northern landscape to the Western religious imagination: Intellectually, the eleventh and twelfth centuries were an age of careful dialectics, a working out of relationships that eventually became so refined they could be expressed in the mathematics of cathedrals. Not only was God light but the relationship between God and man was light. The cathedrals, by the very way they snared the sun’s energy, were an expression of God and of the human connection with God as well. (248)

Empirical, aesthetic dimensions and expressions lead to spiritual expressions and dimensions. The cathedrals, like the landscape paintings of Church and other luminists, express the “face of God,” and they bring human beings into relationship with God. Such aesthetic and spiritual creations spring from the land and the artists’ relationship to the land. Describing the luminists in the next chapter, “The Country of the Mind,” Lopez repeats the telling phrase

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from “Ice and Light”: “They came to conceive of the land as intrinsically powerful: beguiling and frightening, endlessly arresting and incomprehensibly rich, unknowable and wild. ‘The face of God,’ they said” (257).

Shaman Light The doublets in the luminist description of land recall the fundamental adumbration of light and darkness marking the first and last pages of Arctic Dreams. They also give a suggestive summary of how the empirical authority of the landscape migrates into the aesthetic expression of that authority, extending beyond the merely aesthetic to lean into the light of the spiritual. Yet the land remains the authoritative “face of God.” One of the profound aspects of Arctic Dreams is the courage with which Lopez faces the darkness. The courage is clear in an extended meditation on metaphysical and moral darkness that Lopez develops in “Ice and Light” (240–44). The meditation is inspired by the physical darkness of winter, but it is clearly more profound than the mere absence of sunlight. In a passage that echoes the preface, Lopez describes the benign summer sunlight on the tundra, but his imagination extends to winter, “because the summer by itself was so peaceful and I was trying to understand how the whole landscape fit together. Winter, with its iron indifference, its terrible weight, explained the ecstasy of summer. The effects of winter were disquieting to contemplate. Not the cold, though that could make you whimper with pain; it could, they would say, make rocks give up and shatter. Not the cold but the oppression. The darkness that came down. . . . In the feeble light between the drawn-in houses of a winter village, you can hear the breathing of something with ice for a heart” (241). In such darkness, the landscape breathes and has a deep identity of its own, but it does not invite the kind of conversation or opening found in luminist paintings. The experience of winter causes Lopez to remember the brilliant light of spring, but he also finds that he must dwell on darkness: “A kind of darkness, for example, that afflicts the Kaminuriak caribou: excess killing at the hands of Eskimos, in modern times. Everyone is afraid to say something about it, for fear of being called a racist. It is easier to let the animals go than to confront that tenebrous region in ourselves. The darkness of politics, in the long hours, runs into the darkness of the land. Into anger” (242). The specific example leads to a general sense of “the darker side of the human spirit,” both in Eskimo people and in modern Westerners. In another particular form, winter darkness can lead to perlerorneq, an extreme form of depression that Lopez’s source, the French anthropologist Jean Malaurie, calls “hysteria,” but which

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an Eskimo named Imina calls “the weight of life” (243).1 As in the meditation on hunting that closes Arctic Dreams, Lopez searches for a way to balance the darkness and the light, the strengths and weaknesses of the human spirit. The figure that Lopez finds in his search is the indigenous shaman, a figure that by the 1980s had effectively vanished into the cultural history of the northern peoples. Still, the figure of the angakoq, the shaman, exercises a clear power in Lopez’s imagination: In the modern ironies of a remote village—satellite televising of game shows, a small boy wearing a Harvard sweatshirt, pasta for dinner with cloth napkins, after a sermon in the Baptist church about the scourge of Communism—even here, especially here, it is possible to catch a glimpse, usually in the preparation for a hunt, of the former power, the superhuman strength and unflinching intensity, of the angakoq. He is an intermediary with darkness. He has qaumaneq, the shaman light, the luminous fire, the inexplicable searchlight that enables him to see in the dark, literally and metaphorically. He reaches for the throat of darkness; that is the primitive, as primitive as an explosion of blood. Out hunting, in the welter of gore, of impetuous shooting, that heady mixture of joy and violence, sometimes it is possible for an outsider to feel the edge of the primitive. Unbridled, it is frightening. It also defeats starvation. And in its enthusiasm for the concrete events of life, it can defeat what weighs against the heart and soul. (243)

Lopez manages to strike a number of tones in this remarkable passage. The ironies that open the paragraph sympathetically evoke a nomadic hunting culture in the grip of modernity but still finding ways to maintain community. The image of the hunt leads to the figure of the angakoq, who is “an intermediary with darkness” and yet shines his “qaumaneq, the shaman light” into the darkness and even “reaches for the throat of the darkness.” The shaman light is neither benign nor peaceful, but it gives the angakoq the necessary, powerful vision to act as an intermediary. In the final lines of the passage, the figure of the shaman circles back to the image of the hunt, for the shaman acts as a kind of hunter, embodying the primitive defined as an ambiguous mixture of joy and violence. For all the darkness of the hunt, moreover, the shaman light combats the darkness. Or perhaps it allows one to feel the edge of a state somehow like the one Lopez describes at the very end of Arctic Dreams, “a state in which one has absorbed that very darkness which before was the perpetual sign of defeat” (414). The shaman light shines on a spiritual landscape, and that spiritual landscape exists within, or overlaps with, the physical landscape. Lopez

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connects the two through the cultural role of stories and storytelling. An essential text for this connection is Lopez’s essay “Landscape and Narrative,” originally published as “Landscape and Literature” in Harper’s (1984) and later collected in Crossing Open Ground (1988). Written in the same period as the research and writing of Arctic Dreams, “Landscape and Narrative” resonates deeply with the aims and methods of the book. Thus the essay opens with a gathering of hunters in the village of Anaktuvuk Pass, in the Brooks Range of Alaska. The story of an astonishing encounter between a hunter on a snow machine and an intelligent wolverine dominates the opening, but the effect of the wolverine stories on the community of listeners is even more astonishing: “The landscape seemed alive because of the stories. It was precisely these ocherous tones, this kind of willow, exactly this austerity that had informed the wolverine narratives” (COG 63). The stories make the landscape seem alive because they have truthfully evoked the landscape in its particulars. That is the physical landscape, which Lopez calls the “external landscape” and “exterior landscape” in the essay. Another landscape, the “internal” or “interior” one, might be called a spiritual or mental landscape. For Lopez, as for traditional indigenous storytellers in many cultures, both the truth of the story and the value of the storyteller rest in the unimpeachable authority and integrity of the external landscape, which the Navajo say exhibits a “sacred order” (67). If the story is successful, it will bring the external landscape and the internal landscape into harmony, creating a sense of well-being in the listener and healing any disharmonies in the internal landscape (66–68). Thus Lopez connects storytelling to spiritual rituals and ceremonies of traditional indigenous people, and the qualities of storytelling he values most fundamentally focus on the role of the storyteller, who is vital to forging a healthy community living in a healthy landscape. Similar ideas appear in “The Country of the Mind,” the seventh chapter of Arctic Dreams. The intimacy of indigenous arctic peoples with their local landscapes is prominent, and it is supported by anthropologists from Franz Boas in the nineteenth century to Richard Nelson in the twentieth (265). Moreover, the incorporation of the land into traditional stories remains strong in modern arctic cultures, as does the sense of the land as “like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life” (274). Lopez applies the chapter title to the ideas surrounding external and internal landscapes: “If one can take the phrase ‘a country of the mind’ to mean the landscape evident to the senses, as it is retained in human memory and arises in the oral tradition of a people, as a repository of both mythological and ‘real-time’ history, then perhaps this phrase will suffice” (295–96). Lopez associates this complex geography or “country of the mind” with the

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shamanistic traditions of the indigenous arctic peoples: “The evidence for a landscape in the Arctic larger than the one science reports, more extensive than that recorded on the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey quadrangle maps, is undeniable. It is the country the shamans shined their qaumaneq, their shaman light, into” (296–97). Implicit in this visionary image of qaumaneq is the role of stories, which must be conserved—better, transmitted—in order to “bind the people into the land” (297). Moreover, the stories are themselves bound into the land, creating a mythological or historical relationship between landscape and narrative: The place-fixing stories that grew out of the land were of two kinds. The first kind, which was from the myth time and which occurred against the backdrop of a mythological landscape, was usually meticulously conserved. (It was always possible that the storyteller would not himself or herself grasp completely the wisdom inherent in a story that had endured, which had proved its value repeatedly.) (297–98)

The second kind of story relates to “real” events that have occurred within memory, including seasonal stories about traveling, hunting, or fishing. Lopez asserts that “the undisturbed landscape verifies both sorts of story, and it is the constant recapitulation in sacred and profane contexts of all of these stories that keeps the people alive and the land alive in the people. Language, the stories, holds the vision together” (298). The kinds of stories Lopez is describing appear in Tom Lowenstein’s excellent compilation, The Things That Were Said of Them: Shaman Stories and Oral Histories of the Tikigaq People. Lowenstein provides translations (by Carol Omnik, also called Tukummiq) and commentaries on a variety of tales told by Asatchaq (1891–1980), one of the last shamans of the community of Tikigaq (Point Hope) on the northwest coast of Alaska. The village of Tikigaq juts out into the Chukchi Sea, and the culture revolves around whale hunting. Lowenstein divides the stories into two categories, corresponding precisely to Lopez’s description: “First were unipkaaqs: myths, legends, and folktales which took place ‘back then’ in the indefinite past (taimmani). Then there were ancestor stories, uqaluktuaqs, which recorded family histories of feuds, journeys, hunting accidents, and shamanic events as far back as five generations.”2 The compilation consists of twenty-four stories, divided into four parts: “Shaman Trickster Stories,” “The Great Tikigaq Shamans,” “Ancestor Histories,” and “The Last Tikigaq Shamans” (including the younger Asatchaq’s namesake, active in the 1870s). The stories are rooted in the specific landscapes surrounding Tikigaq, but they include mythic, magical, and legendary events. The simple and most salient

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point, however, is that Asatchaq is one of the last shamans of Tikigaq and the principal storyteller who recounts the stories compiled by Lowenstein. Thus the roles of shaman and storyteller overlap. Lopez provides another name for this overlapping figure of shaman-storyteller: “isumataq . . . a person who can create the atmosphere in which wisdom shows itself” (298). The wisdom that can sometimes show itself is a kind of timeless and nameless understanding. Lopez calls it “understanding how to live a decent life, how to behave properly toward other people and toward the land” (298). This wisdom is not owned by any person or culture or language. In defining its outlines, Lopez imagines a scene in which such wisdom might show itself: “I could easily imagine some Thomas Merton-like person, the estimable rather than the famous people of our age, sitting with one or two Eskimo men and women in a coastal village, corroborating the existence of this human wisdom in yet another region of the world, and looking around to the mountains, the ice, the birds to see what makes it possible to put it into words” (298–99). This scene—wisdom showing itself in order to be put into words— strongly recalls the earlier scene on Cornwallis Island, in which Lopez discusses luminist painting and “a conversation with the land” (226). Even more strongly, it echoes the language that Lopez uses to attribute qualities of identity to the land, qualities that are “deeper and more subtle than we can know.” Our obligation to the land, he claims there, is simple, but it entails an appreciation both for a complex external landscape and for its relationship to our internal landscape. It is certainly worth recalling the words Lopez uses to describe our obligation: “To intend from the beginning to preserve some of the mystery within it as a kind of wisdom to be experienced, not questioned. And to be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there” (228). The kind of wisdom Lopez seeks, the kind of wisdom he allows to show itself, is the ability to hold a conversation with the land. The storyteller holds a conversation with the land, moreover, by preserving the mystery and by being alert for the sacred within the mundane. Thus the figures in Lopez’s imagined scene—some Thomas Merton–like person and one or two Eskimo men or women—form in effect a group of storytellers. Their goal is first to bind their human wisdom into the land with words and, second, to bind their human communities together with the land through their words. And whatever story such a group might tell, it would provide a glimpse of the shaman light, the luminous fire, shining into a larger country.

Part II

Fields of Correspondence

Plate 1.1.  Casting of Runes © 1984 Alan Magee, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 in.

Plate 1.2.  Going Over © 1988 Alan Magee, monotype and collage, 8 x 10 in.

Plate 1.3.  Inlet II © 1988 Alan Magee, monotype, 8 x 10 in.

Plate 1.4.  Noir © 1988 Alan Magee, monotype and collage, 8 x 10 in.

Plate 1.5.  The Land of Ancestors © 1988 Alan Magee, monotype and collage, 8 x 10 in.

Plate 1.6.  The Orrery © 1984 Alan Magee, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 108 in.

Chapter four

Going Over Alan Magee and Desert Notes

Alan Magee’s friendship with Barry Lopez began in a bookstore in Santa Barbara, California. Magee tells of finding a copy of Winter Count (1981), taking it to the hotel, reading a few stories, and “immediately [feeling] that I had discovered someone whose work, though in a different field, was very close to mine.”1 Magee was—still is—especially taken with the story “The Orrery” from Winter Count, as he makes clear in an extended conversation with Lopez: The story is based so firmly in reality, the description of landscape, stones, the barren, lonely topography, everything in it is clear and attentively observed. Then, at a certain point, the story passes over into a kind of magic. This is what I felt was so wonderful—that your story wasn’t steeped in magic, but that the magic sprang naturally out of reality, sprang, in this case, from a person who was intimately observing, paying a kind of fierce attention to the landscape. (“Conversation” 23)

In explanation of the “pass[ing] over into a kind of magic,” Magee continues with the following comparison: “Kafka used the term ‘going over.’ Many of Kafka’s stories are in the vein of what we are talking about. They are not saturated in unreality. They are stories with real buildings, chairs, and doors. ‘Going over’ describes the delicate transition into a dream-like state within a narrative” (23). Like Robert Adams, Alan Magee is a literary visual artist. And Kafka’s idea of “going over” is important to Magee’s vision of art and its function. 69

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In a 2002 interview with Helen Ferulli, Magee elaborates on the phrase in another way: “I love things that are beautiful, clearly seen and highly realized, but I value the realm of mystery even more than the beauty of appearances. Art, it seems to me, has to invite participants into another realm if it is going to be of real value to them. Kafka used this wonderful term ‘going over,’ where the world [in his stories] is depicted in its recognizable aspect—except that in one single and fundamental way the logic of reality is overthrown—is shown to be drastically altered. Going over. If you’re attempting to transport someone through the experience of art to somewhere new, the tactile affirmation of the real can make that experience more convincing.” 2

The function of art is to enable the participant (a reader or viewer) to “go over” into a new realm, most notably into a realm of dream or of the fantastic, which casts a penetrating light on recognizable reality or the “logic of reality.” The phrase “going over” appears in Kafka’s late story “On Parables.” While the story itself is paradoxical and despairing, the idea of “going over” is very much in line with Magee’s interpretations. The story begins with characteristic abruptness: Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something that he cannot designate more precisely either, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.3

We can read the “sage” as the artist and the command “Go over” as itself a parable for the journey proposed by a story or artwork. Kafka, or his narrator, resists the idea of transcendence: the artwork “cannot help us here in the very least,” and we ordinary people remain caught in the bare knowledge that “the incomprehensible is incomprehensible.” “On Parables” is itself a parable concerning both the limitations of language and knowledge and the gap between the realms of art and daily life, conveying its dark meanings in just four sentences. The story does not lead us to “some fabulous yonder,”

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but it does point out our situation by telling us, “Go over.” Nor does this mean that our ordinary world is without fabulous elements: readers of Kafka have long remarked on the prominent role of the fantastic in his stories. In the breakthrough story “The Judgment,” for example, or in the familiar novella The Metamorphosis, the fabulous and the ordinary coexist uneasily.4 Magee’s hope-filled version of “going over” sets a helpful frame for reading the early fiction of Barry Lopez, especially the stories of Winter Count. It also suggests ways in which the artist enters into a conversation with the landscape, moving from the realm of the empirical to that of the aesthetic and spiritual. Further, Magee’s artworks from the 1980s to the present reflect what he calls “a much larger field of correspondences” joining artist and writer (“Conversation” 23).

Inlets The earliest collaboration between Lopez and Magee takes place in Crossing Open Ground (1988). Lopez uses Magee’s stone painting, Casting of Runes (1984), as the jacket illustration for his collection of essays (plate 1.1). To cast runes is to practice divination by throwing small stones or bones, marked with runes, to the ground and thereby to predict the future (OED). The title effectively evokes the magical aspects of art, especially the realist paintings of stones that Magee first created in the 1980s. Casting of Runes gestures toward the correspondence between words and images, literature and painting, and as a jacket illustration for Crossing Open Ground it suggests the further correspondence between landscapes and artworks, both verbal and visual. A number of the essays in the volume develop these relationships in compelling ways. Most immediately, “The Stone Horse” (1986), “Gone Back into the Earth” (1981), “Trying the Land” (1979), “Landscape and Narrative” (1984), and “Searching for Ancestors” (1983) create narrative frames in order to show the millennia-long relationships between human beings and landscapes. While Magee’s painting does not inspire the essays, it provides a powerful adumbration of Lopez’s themes, setting a large “field of correspondences.” A second important artistic collaboration occurred in Magee’s 1990 exhibition, Inlets, for which Lopez wrote the catalogue essay.5 In twelve paragraphs, Lopez gives both a telling account of the exhibition and an insightful response to Magee’s work. In several regards, moreover, the essay recalls Lopez’s responses to the photographs of Robert Adams, especially in “Learning to See.” For example, Lopez remarks on his and Magee’s

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curious, independent discovery of one another’s work: “Alan’s drawings of common, found objects accentuated for me their innate dignity; in his well known stone paintings he was able, in my view, to present nature rather than compete with it. I felt refreshed and clarified by his vision. For his part, certain images in short stories of mine affected his sense of composition.” Magee’s paintings appeal to Lopez for the same reasons that Adams’s photographs do—the innate dignity of the everyday. In addition, the artist’s vision refreshes and clarifies in much the same way that the wolverine stories of “Landscape and Narrative” renew in the narrator “a sense of the purpose of my life” (COG 63). Finally, like the photographs of Adams and others, Magee’s work gives Lopez hope in a community of artists. In “Learning to See,” Lopez puts it this way: “Without the infusion of their images hope would wither in me. I feel an allegiance to their work more as a writer than as someone who once tried to see in this way, perhaps because I presume we share certain principles related to the effort to imagine or explain” (ATL 238). The catalogue essay sets a narrative framework for the symbolic interior journey of the artist. Lopez finds the narrative presentation unusual for Magee but quite clear: “The sequence of images tells a story, a fable about moving from a state of dark impasse to one of serene concordance with the world, by way of a looming door that opens on a difficult, troubling confrontation.” The narrative immediately recalls the parable of Kafka’s “Going Over,” and that is the title of the pivotal monotype collage in the exhibition (plate 1.2). Lopez explains that the initial monotype, “Gate,” presents “a brutal wall, foreboding and austere.” In “recurrent and insistent” images such as the monotype Inlet II (plate 1.3), he sees a “Mesoamerican wall with windowpanes of stone, a door without a handle and with no entrance step.” In “Going Over,” however, “A flying doll becomes a device by which the wall is finally surmounted.” The doll, dressed in a sailor suit or soldier’s uniform, appears in several monotype collages, combining the idea of innocence with the idea of military power. In one collage, “The Little Brother,” the doll seems to emerge from the surface of the monolithic door. In another, Noir (plate 1.4), the sailor doll lies, asleep and smiling, as an ominous mushroom cloud or face takes shape in the darkness behind. In The Land of Ancestors (plate 1.5), a bareheaded soldier doll floats above a dark blue field of monolithic gravestones, shaped like the gates and walls in earlier monotypes.6 The flight over the wall signifies transcendence, but in Magee’s narrative it leads to a dark interior landscape. The gate is not an outlet but an “inlet,” leading to an ambiguous interior place of memories, dreams, and symbols, one that combines personal and cultural histories. In Lopez’s interpretive

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narrative, the flight is also an act of courage and imagination, leading to the discovery of an aesthetic and moral landscape: When the grim stone door finally opens, when we take the courageous but also inventive first step and enter the storehouse of dream and symbol, we discover in the pool of darkness within an incipient joy. The sudden reassurance that joy induces surges and then fades as we proceed down the corridor of images, until finally it rises up, resplendent, and its source becomes apparent: the joy that impels us stems from a recognition of beauty. The stone that first opened upon a circumscribed universe of personal memories ultimately gives us access to something transcendent: a continuous but timeless creation of correspondences, within which wisdom and profound accord are apparent. In deciding to address the darkness within, in taking that step, we embark on the discovery of beauty.

This story is deeply reminiscent of the epilogue to Arctic Dreams, most especially in bringing together the actual and the dreamed: “The conscious desire is to achieve a state, even momentarily, that like light is unbounded, nurturing, suffused with wisdom and creation, a state in which one has absorbed that very darkness which before was the perpetual sign of defeat” (414). Monotypes such as “Land of Ancestors,” “Façade,” “History,” and “Gate II” reflect the absorption of darkness by figuring the gate or wall in new shapes and functions. “History,” for instance, joins blank windows and door to suggest a face. In “Stennis,” the wall becomes an aesthetic and spiritual monolith, evoking the Standing Stones of Stenness, Neolithic monuments on the Orkney Islands of Scotland. Finally, in “Cosmos,” the double monoliths suggest harmony and beauty, but the double monument leaves us with an undercurrent of ambiguity. The monotype collages of Inlets correspond well with Lopez’s interpretive narrative, and they represent a marked shift in Magee’s style from the realist paintings of the early 1980s. In addition, they clearly develop a theme of the artist’s social responsibility. In the Inlets catalogue essay, Lopez suggests as much with the comment that Magee “offers memory as a foundation of hope. Its exercise becomes a refutation of totalitarianism, in several of its guises.” In Inlets, Magee’s artistic memory reaches back to the Neolithic monuments of Stenness and forward to the world wars of the twentieth century. The narrative range of Inlets recalls Lopez’s ability, in Arctic Dreams, to move from the present to the dawn of the Holocene, exercising the writer’s imaginative memory in order to discover how human beings find a habitable, flourishing place within the arctic landscape.

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Magee’s new style also exercises a specific cultural memory, recalling the surrealistic collages of Berlin Dadaists John Heartfield and Hannah Höch.7 For Magee, the graphic art of Weimar-era Germany becomes a particularly rich source of inspiration. In the 2002 “Conversation” with Lopez, Magee notes that Heartfield’s photomontages are starkly political, explicitly “shouting to Germans about the dangerous rise of the Nazis” (3). He then contrasts that explicit critique with the quieter approach of Hannah Höch: Hannah Höch was making collages that were disturbingly beautiful, many of them not at all politically discernible. Viewed from where we sit today, the clarity with which she seemed to see what was going on, and in fact, to predict the coming tragedy in Europe, is uncannily prescient. When you remember what was happening in the years that followed the making of those little collages (they date from 1922–1926) you see that what she made was about as clear a prophecy as you could imagine. This example may be an indication that we have to allow ourselves to do what we do. Allow the sense of political dread and anxiety caused by events in the world—let them exist in the body, and then work. (3)

Magee’s comment emphasizes the ways in which artists absorb the darkness, allowing it to “exist in the body” and then find its way into the work. That process produces art that is socially responsive and responsible, even if the art may not be “politically discernible” at the time it is produced. Magee suggests that there is an art of its time, though not only for its time.

Starting Out and Going Over Alan Magee’s stone paintings of the 1980s mark a break from his earlier work as a book illustrator, and the monotypes of Inlets signal a new phase in his development as a visual artist. In a similar manner, Barry Lopez’s first four books of fiction reveal a clear pattern of constant experimentation, and they show the growth of a young writer, finding the subjects that sustain him and developing the voice that can express his way of seeing them. The first published book of fiction, Desert Notes (1976), treats the relationship between landscape and imagination in an introduction and eleven titled short stories. The form is so experimental that “short story” hardly seems the proper term. Even the introduction is a fiction, but it does not employ any conventional characterization, action, plot, conflict, or resolution. Two early typescripts of the book, copyrighted 1974 and 1975, are

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titled “Desert Notes: Eleven Essays in Space,” and Lopez’s own written account of the “Evolution of Desert Notes” notes that the origin of the book was “an essay I wrote on speculation for the Oregon Research Institute, called ‘Toward a Time of Waiting.’” Moreover, Lopez’s early supporter and editor Jim Andrews, who published the book, misread the stories as personal essays, an idea that Lopez has characterized as “repugnant” and “the worst sort of self-indulgent celebration of self.”8 The point is not that the boundary between fiction and nonfiction is somehow being ignored or neglected. Rather, the experimental forms of the twelve pieces move across the conventional boundary of genre. Most perceptive readers would see that the twelve pieces are fictional and imaginative, not personal essays. It is nonetheless useful to think of the fictions as essays, for the word essay signifies primarily a trial or experiment, only becoming fixed to the form of nonfiction composition in the works of Montaigne and Francis Bacon (OED). In addition, the subtitle of Desert Notes evokes both a meditative subjectivity and the impersonal sense of experimentation: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven. Even the word notes in the title conveys, among many salient meanings, the sense of brief, provisional writing that could lead to more complete work in the future (OED). The landscapes of Desert Notes are grounded in the real landscape of the Alvord Desert in southeastern Oregon. The high desert is an ancient playa, dry for much of the year, and is surrounded by the Steens Mountains, Pueblo Mountain, and, farther to the west, the Cascades. Numerous hot springs, named and unnamed, appear at the edges of the desert. Some of these basic facts give rise to the stories “Introduction,” “The Hot Spring,” “Perimeter,” and “The Wind,” but it is well to bear in mind the warnings of the final story, “Directions.” Even the most seemingly accurate and detailed map will inspire a reader’s misplaced confidence: “Throw them out. They are the wrong sort of map. They are too thin. They are not the sort of map that can be followed by a man who knows what he is doing. The coyote, even the crow, would regard them with suspicion” (DN 75). Though grounded in empirical landscape, the stories of Desert Notes repeatedly move toward the fabulous terrain of Magee’s “Going Over.” They are the right maps for such movements. Like Magee’s monotype collages, the stories juxtapose discordant tones. They veer suddenly from the ominous to the humorous, just as they move without warning from a recognizable reality to a magical landscape. In “Directions,” for example, the narrator warns his readers against reliable maps but also against his own directions. He names several towns, directing readers to the bus station in Tate and to a late-night passenger, Leon. “Take

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him aside,” the narrator orders, “and ask him if he came in from Molnar. Let there be a serious tone to your words, as if you sensed disaster down the road in Molnar. He will regard you without saying a word for a long time. Then he will laugh a little and tell you that he boarded the bus at Galen, two towns above Molnar” (76). None of these towns exist in Oregon, and the name of the state is never mentioned in the book. Desert Notes begins with a similar mixture of tones. The introduction seems quite serious at first, with an epigraph from Thomas Merton that warns us about the “apparently irrational void” that awaits us in the desert (xi). The first few paragraphs bristle with admonitions, delivered in direct address: “You must come with no intentions of discovery. . . . You have to proceed almost by accident.” As the narrator tells the story of his own discovery of how to drive motor vehicles across the desert, however, the tone veers into the absurdly comic. The narrator allows his van to drive itself across the playa, while he moves to the back, opens all the windows and doors, takes out his bicycle, rides alongside, or jogs back and forth from vehicle to horizon. “Until then,” the narrator concludes, “I did not understand how easily the vehicle’s tendencies of direction and movement could be abandoned, together with its systems of roads, road signs, and stop lights. By a series of strippings such as this, one enters the desert” (xii). Even if we admit the literal possibility of such comic abandon on the playa, the narrator insists on the figurative dimension of the desert at the end of the introduction: “One morning as I stood watching the sun rise, washing out the blue black, watching the white crystalline stars fade, my bare legs quivering in the cool air, I noticed my hands had begun to crack and turn to dust” (xiii). The image figures the union of the landscape and the imagination as a result of patient waiting and chance discovery. It also insists on the merging of the imagination with the hands and with tactile contact. Even though the introduction seems to warn against the use of metaphors in the pursuit of knowledge, it ends with a metaphor for discovery and self-knowledge. Other stories resemble “Directions” in using direct address as a means of developing the theme of knowledge. In “Desert Notes,” for instance, the narrator addresses a “you” and describes both of them as “tired” and walking “along the edge of the desert” (3). The narrator repeatedly admonishes the reader to beware of simple explanations, impatience, or laughter. The story ends with the narrator’s farewell: “But wait until you see for yourself, until you are sure” (5). In “The Raven,” patience is again the key virtue the narrator enjoins upon the reader, for only through an extraordinary period of waiting can we know anything about the raven and its powers. “The School” presents a similarly spare relationship between narrator and addressee. Here the narrator acts as a familiar guide, showing us parts of

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an abandoned schoolhouse. Finally, “Conversation” presents a dialogue between two characters, a visionary and a skeptic. The visionary proposes to wait patiently, like a spider, in order to understand the connections that bind a person to a place. The skeptic rejects the idea as “bullshit” and “metaphors,” but the visionary insists, “I am not talking metaphors. I am telling you the truth” (48). These pared-down fictions portray the narrators’ monologues very clearly, but they are as likely to undercut the narrators’ authority as to support it. They lead to reflections, but the reflections do not lead to clear conclusions. Thus metaphor as a way of knowing remains a possibility rather than a certainty. Native American mythology contributes a significant experimental element to Desert Notes. At the same time that Lopez was drafting some of the stories in Desert Notes, he was collecting and writing the Coyote stories that made up his second published book of fiction, Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter (1977).9 In fact, Lopez proposed the Coyote book to Jim Andrews first, and Andrews asked to publish Desert Notes as Lopez’s debut collection of fiction.10 Five stories—“The Raven,” “Twilight,” “Perimeter,” “The Blue Mound People,” and “Coyote and Rattlesnake”— develop aspects of the desert landscape through Native mythology. The Raven is a trickster figure in Pacific Northwest mythologies, akin to the Plains Indian trickster Coyote. “The Raven” tells, in a barely noticeable first-person narrative, how the raven became attached most closely to the desert, driving out the crows, who can live even “in street trees in the residential areas of great cities” (15). The raven thrives in the desert because he is patient, and the narrator advises us to wait patiently if we wish to know more about the raven. Even then, the raven will be wary of us: “The raven is cautious, but he is thorough. He will sense your peaceful intentions. Let him have the first word. Be careful: he will tell you he knows nothing” (18). The actual bird and the mythic trickster are interchangeable, so that “The Raven” embodies the aesthetic and spiritual act of “going over.” In “Perimeter” and “The Blue Mound People,” the sense of “going over” arises from a nameless, quasi-objective narrator. Though the first-person “I” appears a few times in “Perimeter,” the narrative consists of describing the four cardinal directions and the mountains that surround the desert. The mythic language of colors and directions, derived from Navajo and Pueblo religions, confers an animistic presence upon the landscape. In “The Blue Mound People,” the first-person narrator appears in a rush toward the end of the story. Otherwise, the narrator adopts the anonymous, authoritative tone of an anthropological essay. But the Blue Mound People are ultimately an imaginary ideal, an ancient (22,000 BP) community of two hundred people who somehow managed to live in the desert without hunting, gathering,

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or raising crops. The key to the mystery appears to lie in the blue mounds and the fossil white stone in each of them, but the narrator offers no explanations. Instead, the mounds and the people remain a mystery, bespeaking an intimate relationship between human beings and the desert: “I think it will be found too that the blue mounds with their white stone hearts have more to do with the desert than they have to do with the people alone. I think they might even be evidence of a bond between the people and the desert. I assume that the desert was the primary force in this relationship, but I could be wrong” (44). The tenth story in the collection, “Coyote and Rattlesnake,” is Lopez’s original telling of a Coyote story, in which Coyote sets out to ask the creator god Akasitah why he and Rattlesnake must be destroyed by the Shisa. In the terms of the story, the Shisa are modern, industrialized, urban people who have lost their connection to the land: “In the old days the Shisa had planted, they had put things back. Now they planted nothing, they returned nothing” (68). Unlike the Blue Mound People or the animals of the high desert, the Shisa no longer experience a bond with the landscape, so they no longer return anything to it. The implication is that they can only take from the landscape, extracting what they want or need, and that this will lead inevitably to the death of Coyote and Rattlesnake. Both Akasitah and Rattlesnake counsel patience, telling Coyote to watch and wait. But Coyote does not know if he can believe that the Shisa will eventually turn on themselves and end their destructive ways. In all of these stories, the voice of the narrator is subdued, as if Lopez were giving the desert landscape the opportunity to speak for itself. The first-person narrator who appears in most stories does not play a prominent role. In “Twilight,” however, the first-person narrator is integral to the structure of the story, which begins and ends with the narrator seated upon a “storm pattern rug woven out of the mind of a Navajo woman, Ahlnsaha” (21). The first half of the story details the numerous owners of the rug from 1934 to 1966, each of whom becomes progressively less certain—or truthful—about the tribal origin of the art or what its proper function should be. Finally, the narrator buys the rug, takes it home, undresses, and lies down under it all night. The second half of the story evokes, in present tense, the narrator’s visions as he sits on the rug at twilight, “the best time to see what is happening” (24). In contrast to the lies told by salespeople in the first part of the story, the narrator’s fleeting visions deliver momentary truths. The visions mix images of nature and culture as the narrator works through the senses of sight, hearing, and smell. Lopez leads four consecutive paragraphs with the clause “This

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(time) is the only time,” suggesting that twilight provides the threshold for “going over” in a number of ways. The four paragraphs give an ambiguous, somewhat comic sense of truth—sometimes promising much, sometimes little. In the first paragraph, for example, the narrator promises that “you will see the turtles massed at the eastern border for the march to the western edge where there is water” (25–26), but the narrator has already spoken with the turtles, and “they are reticent about their commitments” (26). In the last paragraph, on the other hand, the style and tone become elevated, and we seem to attain a kind of provisional wisdom from the landscape: This is the only time you can hear the flight of the grey eagle over the desert. You cannot see him because he fades with the sun and is born out of it in the morning but it is possible to hear his wings pumping against the columns of warm air rising and hear the slip of the wind in his feathers as he tilts his gyre out over the desert floor. There is nothing out there for him, no rabbits to hunt, no cliff faces to fall from, no rock on which to roost, but he is always out there at this time fading to grey and then to nothing, turning on the wind with his eyes closed. It doesn’t matter how high he goes or how far away he drifts, you will be able to hear him. It is only necessary to lie out flat somewhere and listen for the sound, like the wrinkling of the ocean. (26–27)

The “grey eagle” is modeled on the golden eagle, a common species in the arid West whose hunting and nesting behaviors resemble those described here. But the description turns sharply away from such mimetic identification, echoing William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and figuring the connection between the listener and the eagle as exquisitely close. As the paragraph concludes, Lopez figures the act of “going over”: the patient listener can hear the soaring, drifting eagle and discern “the sound, like the wrinkling of the ocean.”11 Alan Magee might read “Twilight” with same eye he brought to “The Orrery” in 1981. The magic of “going over” springs from the listener’s patience, from his “fierce attention to the landscape.” The story is not steeped in magic, not saturated in unreality. Like the stories of Franz Kafka, it is attached to reality, but instead of buildings and doors it trades in turtles and eagles. It could find a suitable correspondence in many of Magee’s stone paintings, such as Casting of Runes. Like the visual art of Alan Magee in the 1980s, Lopez’s early fiction creates correspondences within which wisdom, and a profound accord between the imagination and landscape, can appear, at least momentarily, before they fade from view.

Chapter five

Imaginary Countries Magee, River Notes, and Winter Count

Notes for New Directions Originally conceived as the second part of a trilogy, River Notes: The Dance of Herons (1979) displays a number of continuities with Desert Notes. In both books, the subtitles feature a bird as a totemic figure for the entire volume. The structure of twelve pieces, leading with an introduction and then giving eleven stories, is the same in both books. Like the first volume, River Notes includes one story, “The Rapids,” completely in dialogue. Both books feature multiple narrators, especially first-person narrators. Indeed, eight of the twelve stories in River Notes are told by a first-person narrator. The theme of landscape and imagination is once again the coherent center of the many experimental stories. Finally, the experimental energy of the first book is strongly in evidence in River Notes; if anything, it may be even stronger in the later volume. Lopez’s reflections on the relationship between the two books appear in notes that clearly date from an early stage of planning River Notes: The river, like the desert, serves as a focal point for the imagination. But it differs from the desert in always being in motion. It has no desire, like the desert, to be at rest, returning a stare, almost inscrutable. The essays in River will deal more directly with the river than did the essays in Desert deal with the actual desert.

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I will try to maintain the same conciseness of image and the overriding emphasis on metaphor as both a tool of knowledge and a weapon turned unknowingly against the self. (BLP Box 28, Folder 6)

As he plans the work, Lopez sees the theme of landscape and imagination joining the two books, but he also sees how the river landscape imposes its own authority on the imagination, insisting on motion rather than rest and requiring more direct attention than does the desert landscape. Style also functions significantly in both books: the conciseness of image leads directly to the emphasis on metaphor, and figurative language becomes the ambiguous vehicle of both knowledge and uncertainty. That double-edged quality appears in Lopez’s word essays, a figure for experimental fictions but easily mistaken for personal, nonfiction compositions. In the same folder of notes on the new project, Lopez gives a working table of contents that is revealing in its differences from the published version: The eleven essays will be as follows: The Bend (change of direction) Heron (the mystical patron of the river) The Fish (an underwater encounter) Rapids (holding fast but giving into the current) Winter (everything frozen but the water’s flow) The Falls (a man commits suicide, stepping off into the torrent) The Log Jam (challenging the river; the illusion of change in direction; the dam as pause) Backwater (what is caught, going nowhere) Ducks (coming in, feeding, exploding away) Bottom (silence in the pebbles) Morning (the unfolding of light, the revelation of the water; what has happened in the night) (BLP Box 28, Folder 6)

In the published table of contents, the first six stories bear a strong resemblance to the draft order and description of essays: “The Search for the Heron,” “The Log Jam,” “The Bend,” “The Falls,” “The Shallows,” and “The Rapids” either directly repeat or echo the draft. “The Shallows” is the one exception, and it seems related to Backwater and perhaps Bottom. The last five stories in River Notes, however, are less closely related to the

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draft essays. “The Salmon” may be a version of The Fish, just as “Dawn” could be a version of Morning, but in both cases the published version is developed in significantly new directions. Finally, three stories—“Hanner’s Story,” “Upriver,” and “Drought”—do not appear in the draft, while two projected essays—Winter and Ducks—do not appear in the published book. Changes in conception and elaboration are common in drafting and revising a set of essays or stories, and in this case they are significant. In the drafting, Lopez comes to a much more developed sense of purpose and a new narrative ambition. He tries telling more complex stories, and the descriptions of the “essays” in the draft table of contents bear little resemblance to the stories that emerge from the writing process. The larger patterns that Lopez creates become more complex, too, perhaps in answer to the demands of a more complex landscape. While River Notes reveals important continuities with Desert Notes and Giving Birth to Thunder, it looks forward in even more significant ways to the fictions of Winter Count (1981). The continuity with Desert Notes is most apparent in the fundamental relationship of landscape and imagination, a relationship that Lopez once again figures as leading to the experience of “going over.” In “Introduction,” for example, the narrator stands on a beach, watching the ocean for an undetermined time, but he tells us that he has spent most of his time walking. The movement leads him to imagine himself “in between these steps as silent as stone stairs, but poised, like the heron hunting” (x). An imaginative shapeshifter, the narrator dreams that he is a salmon, that the beach becomes “a wide floor of gray-streaked Carrara marble,” or that he can become “an empty abalone shell.” Beyond these surreal, transformative perceptions, the narrator tells a two-part story about birds, giving two different versions of “going over”: One rainy winter dawn I stood beneath gray clouds with my arms upstretched, dripping in my light cotton clothes in the familiar ritual, staring at the sand at my feet, about to form a prayer, when I felt birds alight. I felt first the flutter of golden plovers against my head, then black turnstones landing soft as butterflies on my arms, and red phalarope with their wild arctic visions, fighting the wind to land, prickling my shoulders with their needling grip. Their sudden windiness, the stiff brushing of wings, the foreign voices—murrelets alighting on my arms, blinking, blinking yellow eyes, sanderlings, whimbrels, and avocets jumping at my sides. Under them slowly, under heavy eider ducks, beneath the weight of their flapping pleading, I began to go down. As I came to my knees I

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could feel such anguish as must lie unuttered in the hearts of far-ranging birds, the weight of visions draped over their delicate bones. Beneath the frantic, smothering wingbeats I recalled the birds of my childhood. I had stoned a robin. I thought the name given the kittiwake very funny. The afternoon of the day my mother died I lay on my bed wondering if I would get her small teakwood trunk with the beautiful brass fittings and its silver padlock. I coveted it in cold contradiction to my show of grief. Feeling someone watching I rolled over and through the window saw sparrows staring at me all explode like buckshot after our eyes met and were gone. (xi)

The first paragraph presents the union of landscape and imagination in the concrete, humorous form of birds descending and alighting on the narrator’s body. The religious imagery could evoke a Christian interpretation, but it most clearly develops a vision delivered by the actual birds. At the same time, the precision of species names and actions lends a realistic tone to the passage, a tone that persists in the narrator’s empathic feeling of the birds’ unuttered anguish. In the second paragraph, memory supersedes empathic vision. The moment of “going over” occurs when the narrator feels someone watching him, rolls over, and sees “sparrows staring at me all explode like buckshot after our eyes met.” Like the story in the first paragraph, this is utterly realistic yet intensely imaginative, even fantastic. In both paragraphs, “going over” functions as a movement toward spiritual or ethical knowledge, and in both instances that knowledge is delivered by an intimate connection to birds. As Lopez’s early plans suggest, the landscape of River Notes is dynamic, active, and communicative. In “The Search for the Heron,” the narrator directly addresses the heron, as individual or as species, but he is only able to come close to the heron through an indirect report: The cottonwoods also told me of a dance, that you dreamed of a dance: more than a hundred great blue herons riveted by the light of dawn, standing with wind-riffled feathers on broad slabs of speckled gray granite, river-washed bedrock, in that sharp, etching backlight, their sleek bills glinting, beginning to lift their feet from the thin sheet of water and to put them back down. The sound of the rhythmic splash, the delicate kersplash of hundreds of feet, came up in the sound of the river and so at first was lost; but the shards of water, caught blinding in the cutting light (now the voices, rising, a keening) began to form a mist in which appeared rainbows against the white soft breasts; and where drops of water dolloped like beads

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of mercury on the blue-gray feathers, small rainbows of light here, and in the eyes (as the voices, louder, gathering on one, high, trembling note) rainbows—the birds cradled in light shattered in rainbows everywhere, and with your great blue wings fanning that brilliant mist, open, utterly vulnerable and stunning, you urged them to begin to revolve in the light, stretching their wings, and you lay back your head and closed the steely eyes and from deep within your belly came the roar of a cataract, like the howling of wolves—that long moment of your mournful voice. The birds quieted, their voices quieted. The water quieted, it quieted, until there was only your quivering voice, the sound of the birth of rivers, tapering finally to silence, to the sound of dawn, the birds standing there full of grace. One or two feathers floating on the water. (5)

Where does this scene take place? The report comes from the cottonwoods, and they tell of the heron’s dream. So the description, as concrete, dynamic, and specific as its many details may be, remains oneiric and magical. An active repetition drives the description, as the repeated images of light and voice lead to repeated images of rainbows and a quieting to silence. To fragments: “The birds standing there full of grace. One or two feathers floating on the water.” “The Search for the Heron” occupies the same place as “Desert Notes,” acting as a kind of synecdoche for the entire book. That function is clear, too, from The Dance of the Herons, the subtitle to River Notes. Moreover, the image of the dance plays an integrative role in the large narrative patterns of River Notes. That role begins to appear already in “Introduction” and in the dream vision of “The Search for the Heron.” The dance image recurs in the last two stories of the volume, “Upriver” and “Drought.” In “Upriver,” the dance occurs in the narrator’s imagination as he sits in an empty house along an unknown section of the river. In his imagined scene, the narrator dances with a woman, the imagined owner of the house: “We would dance. We would remove our shoes and with only that slight chirp of skin against the oak floor we would dance to an imagined music until we were brought around by a movement of wind through the house and in our ecstasy another rhythm: songs remembered from springs of celebration in country close by, where the oaks grew once, implacable, hosting sparrows, rising now out of the floor as though released again” (73). The oaks and sparrows replace the cottonwoods and herons, but the dance still resembles the dream-like motions of “The Search for the Heron.” In the final story of River Notes, “Drought,” the narrator listens so closely to the river that he can tell when the depth of the water changes, bringing

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with it a host of other changes in sound. As the drought takes hold, the narrator regularly sleeps on the riverbank, praying as “an expression of camaraderie” and “toward the inchoate source of the river’s strangulation” (78). In the extremes of depression and “an unfathomable compassion,” the narrator makes “the agonized and tentative movements of a dance, like a long-legged bird” (78). In the second movement of the story, the narrator dreams of “the largest fish I had ever imagined in the river” and sets out to rescue him. After he releases the fish into the river, he dances for a second time: By now the river was only a whisper. I stood at the indistinct edge and exhorted what lay beyond the river, which now seemed more real than the river itself. With no more strength than there is in a bundle of sticks I tried to dance, to dance the dance of the long-legged birds who lived in the shallows. I danced it because I could not think of anything more beautiful. (80)

Echoing the dance of the herons in “The Search for the Heron,” the narrator celebrates the power and beauty of the great fish, the river, and the herons. The dance is an artistic gesture, but in this passage it is not really a human one. Instead, it seems to gesture “beyond the river,” toward something “more real than the river itself.” The narrator’s actions are weak and humble, but they earn him a reward. The third instance of the dance occurs as a “turning . . . during the first days of winter.” In a matter-of-fact tone, the narrator tells how Lynx, Deer, and other animals gather around him, standing in “staring silence” and rendering him motionless. Then Blue Heron speaks: “We were the first people here. We gave away all the ways of living. Now no one remembers how to live anymore, so the river is drying up. Before we could ask for rain there had to be someone to do something completely selfless, with no hope of success. You went after that fish, and then at the end you were trying to dance. A person cannot be afraid of being foolish. For everything, every gesture, is sacred. “Now, stand up and learn this dance. It is going to rain.” We danced together on the bank. And the songs we danced to were the river songs I remembered from long ago. We danced until I could not understand the words but only the sounds, and the sounds were unmistakably the sound rain makes when it is getting ready to come into a country. (80–81)

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The dance of the animals with the narrator is yet another figure for “going over.” It combines the empirical authority of the landscape with the aesthetic and spiritual authority of patterned movements. The speaking animals are characters out of Native American stories, out of “river songs . . . from long ago.” They emerge in “Drought” as the third movement in the pattern that takes us from the narrator’s compassion for the river’s dying to the foolish rescue of the big fish and halting dance afterward. Blue Heron’s speech and the final dance, while they reward the narrator’s selfless gestures, do not resolve the problems of suffering and death. The narrator concludes instead, “Everyone has to learn how to die, that song, that dance, alone and in time” (81). Death, then, clearly adds still another meaning to “going over.” The Native American element in River Notes is part of the new complexity of pattern in individual stories and in the movement from one story to another. Native mythology does not function as obviously as it does in Desert Notes; there are no stories like “Coyote and Rattlesnake,” no mythic landscapes like those in “Perimeter.” But Native American perceptions of landscape are integral to Lopez’s imaginative perception of the landscape. Moreover, Native American storytelling functions significantly in characterization and plot. In a story like “The Falls,” which Lopez summarizes in the draft table of contents as “a man commits suicide, stepping off into the torrent,” the relationship of the narrator to the man who jumps off the falls is mediated by the narrator’s appreciation of the man’s shamanistic powers of shape-shifting. The story, insists the narrator, is not that “this man just threw his life away” (29). Rather, the narrator accepts as fact that the man could “change places with his dog” or “become the wind or a bird flying overhead.” He tells of the man’s vision quest in the Crazy Mountains as if he were himself part of the man’s journey. The man visits the narrator periodically, at ten-year intervals, but even when the narrator misses a visit he can sense the man’s presence: “Once he came down to see me but I was gone. I knew it when I got home. I went down to the river and saw the place where he went into the water. The ground was soft around the rocks. I knew his feet. I am not a man of great power, but I took what I had and gave it to him that time, everything I had. ‘You keep going,’ I said. I raised my hands over my head and stepped into the water and shouted it again, ‘You keep going!’ My heart was pounding like a waterfall” (32). At the climax of these repeated visits, the narrator witnesses the man’s leap from the falls, and he strongly implies that the man became a salmon as he dove into the water: “He was shaking up there at the top of the falls, silver like a salmon shaking, and that cry louder than the falls for a moment, and then swallowed and he was in the air, turning over and over, moonlight

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finding the silver-white of his sides and dark green back before he cut into the water, the sound lost in the roar” (33). The Native American element resonates strongly, too, in a pair of stories that develop the idea of “going over” in different narrative arcs. In “The Salmon,” the resonance arises from the animal itself as well as from the echo of “The Falls” and its shaman character. The third-person narration is focalized through a solitary male character who has lost his wife and is separated from his father and siblings. Over a period of four years, this man constructs a stone monument in the middle of a river, making it into the perfect representation of a giant sockeye salmon. The work of planning, engineering, and building the salmon is admirably painstaking, but despite the beauty of the monument the man remains obsessively out of balance and near despair. The salmon becomes central to the man’s idea of “the sacred order” of the earth (52), but when he completes the sculpture, the spawning salmon, rushing up the river in early October, turn around and leave, as if they disapprove of the giant stone fish. The man suddenly realizes “the depth of his desperation,” and he walks among the spawning salmon, “trying to form a statement of apology” (54). The animistic landscape appears in the image of the salmon communicating the proper order to the man: He brought his hands to his face and for a while, in the passing mist of the rainstorm, he imagined what they would say. That it was the presence of the stone fish that had offended them (he tried to grasp the irreverence of it, how hopelessly presumptuous it must have seemed), that it was an order born out of fear, understood even by salmon, to be discarded as quickly as nightmares so that life could go on. When he stood beside the fish he realized for the first time how flawless it was, that the ravages of the upstream journey were nowhere revealed. He thought of dismantling it, but instead removed only the obsidian pupils from the lapis eyes, which he dropped without looking into the rushing water as he crossed to the opposite bank. (54)

At first, the story seems to approve the man’s artistic quest, but then it turns like the thousands of salmon in the stream. The man realizes his own blindness, and by dropping the obsidian pupils into the water, he frees himself from his desperation and fears. Creative work still remains for him to do, but now he will balance “the stonework of Machu Picchu against the directionless flight of butterflies.” In the end, the ravages of the journey are as beautiful as a flawless, motionless sculpture.

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In “Hanner’s Story,” the Native American element plays an explicit role in plot and characterization. Here a first-person narrator is investigating stories about a local utopian community, Sheffield, and the relation of the Sheffield community to the native people of the region, the Quotaka. According to the local river guide Hanner, the idyllic “Sheffield stories” are rubbish, lying about the actual relationship between the utopians and the place. Hanner tells the narrator a story that he was told by a Quotaka river guide, Elishtanak. In this tertiary story, the order of the natural world results from agreements made by the local inhabitants—by the bear people and the salmon people, and by the river. But, Hanner says, “The salmon people and the bear people had made no agreement with the river. It had been overlooked. No one thought it was even necessary” (61). The river rebels, running “in two directions at once, north on one side, south on the other, roaring, heaving, white water, and rolling big boulders up on the banks.” Ultimately all of the parties come to an agreement based on the river’s honest statement that it loves the salmon. Hanner speculates that the Quotaka, ravaged by smallpox, felt betrayed by the Sheffield utopians and never told them about the necessary agreement with the river. Therefore, according to Hanner, the river flooded and wiped out the Sheffield community. “Hanner’s Story” concludes with this paragraph: I sensed, off to my left, the moonlit running of the river, heard its muffled voice. We continued down the road, abandoned at this late hour by cars. Hanner looked off into the darkness and I felt an insect land suddenly in my ear. (62)

Seemingly incongruous, the last image suggests that the narrator listens to the river’s “muffled voice” and understands the truth of Hanner’s story. It thus represents the narrator’s act of “going over” to a new understanding of the river landscape and its animistic powers. And yet it is also simply an insect landing suddenly in his ear. This brief account of three stories—“The Falls,” “The Salmon,” and “Hanner’s Story”—suggests some of the ways in which Lopez creates narrative patterns that tie the parts of River Notes together. In each story, Lopez develops the central theme of landscape and imagination in a different way. Still, the landscape persistently exercises an empirical authority over events and characters, and the empirical landscape repeatedly “goes over” to exercise a deeper authority, one that joins aesthetics, ethics, and spirituality. In this specific case, the dynamic, transformative power of the landscape runs through the trio of stories like a strong animistic current.

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Country of the Imagination The stories in the second half of River Notes, especially the three I have just discussed, look forward to the techniques and themes of Winter Count (1981). The conflict between ways of knowing and recording the truth, powerfully represented in “Hanner’s Story,” becomes a central motif in Winter Count. The title of the collection refers to a method of chronicling significant events among northern Plains Indians, as clarified in an explanatory note to the text: Among several tribes on the northern plains, the passage of time from one summer to the next was marked by noting a single memorable event. The sequence of such memories, recorded pictographically on a buffalo robe or spoken aloud, was called a winter count. Several winter counts might be in progress at any one time in the same tribe, each differing according to the personality of its keeper.

The forms and methods of keeping a winter count differ from Enlightenment chronicles in several specific ways. The multiplicity of winter counts within one tribe and the acceptance of the keeper’s personality as influencing the winter count result in a rich possibility for the chronicles. The memories are given two main forms, pictographic and verbal, and neither is given precedence. The winter counts mark a seasonal year, but they give only one memorable event. Instead of an authoritative, unified narrative history, then, the winter count provides multiple creative possibilities for stories or pictographs to evoke tribal memories. The archival material for Winter Count is especially rich, showing that Lopez worked hard on the selection of stories to be included in the book, the arrangement of the stories, and the sense of unfolding meaning in the sequence of stories. In addition, the archives show that each story underwent multiple revisions, especially on the level of style and diction. As in the case of River Notes, moreover, the archives for Winter Count reveal Lopez’s reflections on the structure and purpose of the book. In one folder, he writes that the book “is a collection of stories about the ephemeral nature of documents. We tend to believe that if something is written down by

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reputable people in a reputable context it represents the truth. I don’t think this is so; and the fact that it isn’t gives rise to a feeling of poignancy about the human condition and illuminates the rashness of human belief” (BLP Box 30, Folder 12). A bit later, remarking that not all stories feature the loss of documents, Lopez adds, “I want to suggest, as a counterpoint, how the human longing for an uninterrupted retreat from intrusions and the deep desire to love are what carry us through, quite aside from a proliferation of documents.” After giving full summaries of eleven stories, Lopez concludes, “The book encourages, I think, the value of retreat for discovering the country of one’s own imagination, and discourages unquestioning trust in the documents of others by illuminating pitfalls. Truth can no more be captured and glued to a piece of paper than can a final interpretation of history. The book says, I hope, that each of us is valuable, that not all important things are written down.”1 This tentative reflection on a collection of short stories balances delicately between a distrust in the written text, particularly what we might consider a quasi-official history, and a hopeful belief in the ineffable potency of love. The “value of retreat” and “country of one’s own imagination” recall the experimental fictions of Desert Notes, but now the country of the imagination has shifted to the northern plains. The two epigraphs to the published collection emphasize the philosophical dimensions of the retreat to the imaginary. The first is William Pitt Root’s poem “Song of Recognition,” from the collection Striking the Dark Air for Music: After the long letters have been written, read, abandoned, after distances grow absolute and speech, too, is distance, only listening is left. I have heard the dark hearts of the stones that beat once in a lifetime.

Like Lopez’s reflections on the stories, Root’s lines paradoxically point toward a loss of written language; indeed, they go yet further, taking us to the distant end of speech. At that distance, there is still the act of listening, and in the second stanza the speaker has already heard a sound: “the dark hearts / of the stones / that beat once in a lifetime.” The last words recall

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the “single memorable event” that characterizes an entry of the winter count, and the speaker of the poem affirms the belief that we need not fear the loss of “the long letters.” Root’s lines affirm, finally, the “deep desire to love” that drives the retreat into silence. The second epigraph, from the 1957 preface to Jorge Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, affirms both the limits of human knowledge and the necessity of the human imagination: “We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods” (16–17). The “dragon” is the necessary monster that fits the imagination; even though it differs according to “different places and periods,” it is always a necessary image. The necessity seems to result from our ignorance, but the dragon is as large and full of possibilities of meaning as the universe. The second epigraph works in concert with the first, emphasizing the winter count as recording a “single memorable event” that is also connected to “the personality of its keeper.” If the epigraphs signal a retreat, it is a retreat into imaginative storytelling. Given the framework of interpretation set by the epigraphs and explanatory note, as well as Lopez’s own reflections on the stories of Winter Count, we can see how certain stories figure the dragon, the loss of documents, the retreat to love, or the country of the imagination. Most of the stories feature one or more of these figurative elements. Both the figure of the dragon and the country of the imagination, moreover, recall the movement from empirical reality to the imaginary or fantastic realm, a transition that Alan Magee calls “going over.” Several of these elements appear in “Buffalo,” in which a first-person narrator tells three separate stories about extraordinary events worthy of a winter count. First, in January 1845, freak weather changes in the Medicine Bow Mountains of Wyoming cause the mass death of buffalo, “their legs slashed by the razor ice, glistening red in the bright sunlight” (30); only a small herd of white buffalo escape by climbing into the mountains, and the whole event is depicted on a buffalo robe by a Cheyenne named Raven on His Back (30). Second, near the end of the nineteenth century, Arapaho and Shoshone warriors see and hear a herd of gigantic white buffalo, singing a death song, in the Medicine Bow Mountains. Third, in 1911 Arapaho Indians tell the Colorado Mountain Club that buffalo wintering in Colorado in 1845 were heard singing a loud death song for four days as they climbed into the mountains, turning red all over and terrifying people all around.

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The narrator, a university teacher, relates the three stories to fragmentary, indirect documentary evidence from two scientific journals (articles that are actually quite authentic), but ultimately he offers two oddly paired conclusions. He first takes the rational view that the events in the winter of 1845 suggest that the inhabitants of the northern plains—buffalo as well as Indian tribes—were “trying to get away from what was coming” (35). Then he offers this second brief story: “I recently slept among weathered cottonwoods on the Laramie Plains in the vicinity of the Medicine Bow Mountains. I awoke in the morning to find my legs broken.” The second story gives us the fourth appearance of the dragon—the fourth example of “going over.” Indeed, the last line of “Buffalo” delivers an eerie echo of the famous opening sentence of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It does not directly contradict the first, apocalyptic conclusion, but it retreats from the rational, scientific explanation of historical events to the narrator’s direct encounter with the fantastic, an encounter that brings him dangerously close to the violent experiences of the buffalo and the Plains Indians of the nineteenth century. A similar retreat from academic, historical narratives occurs in “Winter Count 1973: Geese, They Flew Over in a Storm.” The story uses the focal character Roger Callahan in a center-of-consciousness narrative technique, but Callahan’s perspective is broadened by twenty-three winter count entries woven into the text. The entries are not presented in chronological order; instead, they develop Callahan’s imaginative landscape as parallel with the winter counts of Plains Indians. Many of the entries evoke suffering, loss, and death, but they are often juxtaposed with entries that evoke mysterious occurrences in nature or in human actions. Two of the entries clearly evoke Callahan’s own personal winter count: an April 1916 hunting trip on the Platte River with his father, “the cranes, just their legs visible”; and the 1918 entry, “Father, shot dead. Argonne forest” (60). Callahan, a university professor, delivers a talk at an academic conference in New Orleans, but instead of giving an interpretive argument or presenting documents he “unfold[s] the winter counts of the Sioux warrior Blue Thunder, of the Blackfeet Bad Head, and of the Crow Extends His Paw.” He offers an explanation of winter counts, expanding on Lopez’s explanatory note for the collection: “He stated that these were personal views of history, sometimes metaphorical, bearing on a larger, tribal history. He spoke of the confusion caused by translators who had tried to force agreement among several winter counts or who mistook mythic time for some other kind of real time. He concluded by urging less contention. ‘As professional historians, we have too often subordinated one system to

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another and forgotten all together the individual view, the poetic view, which is as close to the truth as the consensus. Or it can be as distant’” (61). Callahan offers finally, in silence, a single sentence: “That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion” (62). The story ends with a memorable event in Callahan’s personal winter count as he opens the windows in his hotel room: The storm howled through his room and roared through his head. He breathed the wet air deep into his lungs. In the deepest distance, once, he heard the barking-dog sounds of geese, running like horses before a prairie thunderstorm. (63)

The title of the story becomes the final entry in Callahan’s winter count. The closing descriptive language echoes William Pitt Root’s epigraph with salient words like “deep,” “deepest,” “distance,” “once,” and “heard.” There is an effect of “going over,” too, but here metaphor transforms the geese and their “barking-dog sounds” into horses “running . . . before a prairie thunderstorm.” The animal transformations are more horizontal than vertical, without an effect of transcendence, and they are more the imaginative perception of Callahan than an objective, fantastic event. Yet, as Callahan points out, each winter count bears on a larger tribal history. Thus Callahan’s winter count opens up an imaginative landscape of stories and compassion because no other form will hold us together. Winter Count is not always so critical of documents and the trails they leave behind. In “Restoration,” for example, the narrator discovers a valuable insight into Native American epistemologies by reading antiquarian books of natural history in an isolated North Dakota mansion. The books are being restored by Edward Seraut, a professional bookwright in his sixties, who suggests that the narrator could reconstruct the intellectual life of the former owner of the collection, René de Crenir. It becomes clear that de Crenir was obsessed with animals endemic to North America, desiring to develop a new understanding of them that would also be “rooted in North America and representing a radically different view of the place of animals in human ideas” (9). With Seraut’s help, the narrator determines that “de Crenir believed a cultural and philosophic bias had prevented nineteenth-century European naturalists from comprehending much of the plant and animal life they saw in North America. The resulting confusion, he believed, had kept them in ignorance of something even more profound: de Crenir had written in the margin of Maximilian’s Reise in das innere Nord-Amerika, ‘Ici les bêtes sont les propriétaires’—in North America the

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indigenous philosophy grew out of the lives of animals” (11–12). The translation opens the meaning of de Crenir’s statement, which literally means “here the animals are the owners.” Working through the translations of texts in German, French, and English, the narrator arrives at a single piece of wisdom, grounding the authority of Native American stories in the “lives of animals” and the “place of animals in human ideas.” The tone of “Restoration” is quiet and reflective, with very little dramatic action. That movement shifts suddenly in the final paragraph of the story, as the narrator and Seraut take a late lunch by one of the large windows: Out the window we could see several miles across the rolling brown hills. In a draw below the house there suddenly appeared six antelope, frozen so still they seemed to shimmer in the dry grass. I saw sunlight glinting on the surface of their huge eyes, their hearts beating against soft, cream-white throats, the slender legs. Surprised by the house, or by us in the window, they were as suddenly gone. At the end of the room, beyond a blue velvet rope strung between polished brass stanchions, a line of tourists passed. They stared at us and then looked away nervously into the shelves of books. A girl in yellow shorts was eating ice cream. In a shaft of window light I could see the wheat paste dried to granules under Seraut’s fingernails and the excessive neatness of my own notes, the black ink like a skittering of shore birds over the white sheets. (13)

The appearance of the pronghorn antelope presents that “single memorable event” of a winter count, the moment of “going over.” Here it is also the sudden, necessary appearance of the dragon, calling the narrator’s attention to the landscape outside the mansion windows. The narrator responds in kind. His perceptions are miraculously acute, taking in details that would be invisible to the human eye. He attains an intimacy with the antelope through his vision of them, and his ability to see their hearts beating against their throats recalls the speaker in Root’s “Song of Recognition”: “I have heard the dark hearts / of the stones / that beat once in a lifetime.” When the physical viewpoint swings around to take in the interior of the room and the line of tourists visiting the mansion, it implicitly marks the contrast between the empirical authority of the antelope and the bovine visitors behind “polished brass stanchions.” But Lopez does not rest with that critical view of the tourists. The narrator’s final sentence, describing Seraut’s paste-caked fingernails and the “excessive neatness” of his own writing, evokes the necessarily excessive care of restoration, but the very last image returns us to the authority of animals and their flight from the

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human world of books: “the black ink like a skittering of shore birds over the white sheets.” A brilliant exception to the main figurative currents of Winter Count, “The Orrery” is set in the upper Sonoran desert, northeast of Tucson, Arizona. The story features no documents, no winter counts, no Plains Indians, no appearances of the dragon in the shape of bison or geese or pronghorn antelope. Still, the story resembles other fictions we have seen in Lopez’s collections, especially in the lone narrator, whose intelligence and learning are evident though not ostentatious and whose imagination is drawn—he says “driven”—to the desert and to a solitary hermit living in an adobe house on the edge of the desert. The hermit is an accomplished figure of science and music; he plays a clavichord and shows the narrator an orrery: “It looked at first like a standing globe but was a compact set of inset spheres and geared wheels that drove planets and their moons around a central sun. Another clockwork mechanism linked the planets with their satellites, so that they moved relative to each other in imitation of the movements of the solar system. The machine was made of iron, bright brass, and a dark oiled wood like mahogany. There was about it something powerful and immediate” (46). We might take the hermit as a figure of Enlightenment rationality and scientific instrumentation, and he does display some of these qualities. But he is also close to the desert landscape, and he proceeds to show the narrator a natural orrery, made out of stones and hurricane winds: He moved several stones, seemed to orient himself, and amid spurts of dust I saw the stones lift off the ground. As they rose from the earth, they began to move in an arc across the sky, turning finally overhead in a dark shape like a pinwheel, some four or five hundred yards across. Now there was a waterfall sound, but only the lightest feeling of a breeze against my cheeks. The man came toward me, acknowledging my dumbstruck stare with a conspiratorial nod that indicated he thought it was impressive too. Perhaps because of friction, each of the thousands of stones now glowed, and they assumed the shape of a galaxy against the dark blue sky, like a bloom of phosphor rolling over in the night ocean. (48)

This is precisely the remarkable scene that first struck Alan Magee in the bookstore in Santa Barbara. Or as Magee puts it in conversation with Lopez, “The story is based so firmly in reality, the description of landscape, stones, the barren, lonely topography, everything in it is clear and attentively observed. Then, at a certain point, the story passes over into a kind of

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magic. This is what I felt was so wonderful—that your story wasn’t steeped in magic, but that the magic sprang naturally out of reality, sprang, in this case, from a person who was intimately observing, paying a kind of fierce attention to the landscape” (“Conversation” 23). Magee’s reading of “The Orrery” and its moment of “going over” is especially acute in recognizing that the magical moment springs from “paying a kind of fierce attention to the landscape.” It is as if the winds and stones themselves are magical dragons, except that they are firmly based in empirical reality. As the hermit tells the narrator at the close of the story, “If one is patient, if you are careful, I think there is probably nothing that cannot be retrieved” (49). “The Orrery” enacts another form of restoration, a more authoritative form than can be held between the covers of a book. For that reason, perhaps the best comment on the story and on the whole of Winter Count occurs in Magee’s stone painting from 1984 (plate 1.6). Though specific to the image from Lopez’s story, the painting also suggests a complex system of stones surrounding the central “sun,” and it reaches in its representation beyond the frame of the painting, constituting its own fierce attention to the landscape of coastal Maine. By connecting the painting to the story, moreover, the landscapes multiply, forming yet another telling version of the imaginative other country.

Chapter six

The Ongoing Collaboration Magee, Field Notes, and Resistance

The 1998 essay “The Whaleboat” takes place in Barry Lopez’s writing room at his home in Finn Rock, Oregon. Researching a book, he is reading assiduously in a four-pound government tome, General Adolphus Greely’s Report on the Proceedings of the United States Expedition to Lady Franklin Bay, Grinnell Land (1888). His imagination brings Greely’s disastrous expedition to life, but then “my gaze has left the sentence and holds now on the wooden model of a whaleboat across the room, a dry fly landing on a trout pool” (ATL 177). The basswood whaleboat excites Lopez’s imagination because it embodies beauty, intelligence, utility, and memory. Those four qualities take him ten years back, to 1988 and a store in Camden, Maine, where he and artist Alan Magee first saw the model whaleboat. The mention of Magee and the details of discovering the whaleboat become the means by which Lopez develops the relationship between contemplation and action in the essay. In the first instance, the whaleboat takes his eyes away from the book, and the metaphor implies that the whaleboat is associated with the landscape of the trout pool. The essay returns from the memory of discovery to the present, but Greely’s report no longer holds Lopez’s attention. Instead, his gaze travels outside the windows of the study into the landscape of the McKenzie River; the relationship between the interior world of the study and the exterior world of the woods and river dominates the descriptions. In addition, Lopez’s literary imagination tracks

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the landscape. In describing his study, he moves from concrete physical details to the suggestions of reading Melville: “I imagine these the quarters of one Ishmael; here, the mind of a person who, looking out upon nature, wishes to understand the inscrutable visage of that force against which Ahab wants to act. In Ishmael, the rumination, in Ahab the doing” (180). Even as he recalls walking in the river at all times, in all seasons, he holds the “practice of rivers” in relation to “a theory of rivers,” just as the essay holds literary allusions to Melville and Jim Harrison in relation to “navigating by the glow of the Milky Way, the practice of light,” and “steadying up with a staff, the practice of wood” (182). Despite these swift and subtle movements of memory and imagination, “my eyes hold on the boat. Its lines are as pleasing to me as the proportions of a salmon” (183). The effects of sunlight form the common thread running between inside and outside, contemplation and action, culture and nature, presence and memory. Lopez opens a “string of memories about light” by noting that he “entreat[s] friends like Alan Magee to speak about light even as we walk the very cobbled Maine beaches he paints, even while we stand stunned by McCreery’s boat in a Camden shop” (185). In Lopez’s sentence style, the memories of light form a string of “or consider” descriptions, focusing particularly on the play of light in the leaves of trees and understory plants. As the descriptions become more and more rapid—five “consider” commands in three short paragraphs (186)—the reader may well recall similar commands in Matthew or Luke (“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin,” “Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap”). Nor is it farfetched to hear an echo of Milton’s great sonnet on blindness, “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” with its famous concluding line, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” The string of aesthetic and spiritual memories becomes so dynamic, so action-filled, that it leads to a combination of humble awe and extraordinary perception: Often I’ve looked through the trees to the river from this room and, despite reason and familiarity, not known what I was looking at. The angle and intensity of light, in concert with chaotic movements of the air, make another landscape of the same scene, day after day. The glint on a hummingbird’s eye at the open window, rain-sheen on a sprig of red cedar, light roiled in the branches of an ash tree, and the “shook foil” of the river carry the eye from the near reach of the fingertips to the far reaches of what is readable. In a split second what is perceived as real

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snaps. It becomes the illumination of another wood, revealed within the wood previously known. (186–87)

Even though the paragraph keeps us firmly in a world of reason and familiarity, it also makes “another landscape.” The eye can catch the “glint on a hummingbird’s eye,” among other near-microscopic events, but the paragraph celebrates the beauty of light much more than the power of the eye to behold the light. That is the sense of the allusion to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnet “God’s Grandeur”: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” The poem laments humanity’s searing, blearing, and smearing of natural beauty, even as it looks for hope in the Holy Ghost’s “bright wings.” Lopez is not as forthrightly devout as Hopkins, but the words “illumination” and “revealed” suggest the kind of sudden epiphany we have seen as “going over” in the monotype-collages of Magee’s Inlets and the stories of Desert Notes, River Notes, and Winter Count. The heightened perception recalls the appearance of the pronghorn antelope in “Restoration,” the oneiric herons in “The Search for the Heron,” and the desert eagle in “Twilight.” Here it is simply “another wood, revealed within the wood previously known,” but it is also, of course, another version of the other country.

The Uncertified Route Contemplation is, paradoxically, the action most thoroughly dramatized in “The Whaleboat,” though Lopez’s memory reaches back to render scenes of walking in the river in Oregon or on the cobbled beach in Maine, and his imagination paints a vivid closing scene of six men in the whaleboat, “in pursuit of something huge, confounding, haunting” (187). He honors the dignified labors of the whalemen, even while he recognizes the decimation of whale life in the nineteenth-century fishery. That is to learn, in a Melvillean phrase, some of “the infernal paradoxes of life,” even while one also knows “that life is wild, dangerous, beautiful” (187). Neither Lopez nor Magee accepts the conventional distinction between contemplation and action. For both artists, contemplation is a form of engagement with the world. The idea of contemplation recalls the figure of Thomas Merton, whose writings focused resolutely on the role of contemplation in a spiritual and artistic life. Merton appears, we can recall, as the “Thomas Merton-like person” in Arctic Dreams, sitting in

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a circle of estimable storytellers and engaging in a conversation with the land (298–99). In the 2002 “Conversation between Barry Lopez and Alan Magee,” moreover, Lopez notes that he and Magee have been carrying on a fifteen-year discussion “of what should probably be called politics: how we feel about our work, our reflections on the political realities we confront. Both of us have been profoundly anguished and disturbed by U.S. embroilment in the Middle East, and we’ve wondered what we could do in response as writers and artists, not by writing pamphlets as it were, but by making our work a reflection of this concern” (1). That discussion has now continued for at least another decade and deeper embroilments, as Magee and Lopez seek to consider carefully how a contemplative, artistic life can confront the larger social and political realities of our present. Magee insists on the political dimension of all artwork, even if that dimension operates invisibly, but for both artists the dimension lies very deep within the work. For Magee, the particular events in recent American history do not necessarily lead to particular works. “Yet,” he argues, “the kind of regret that wells up out of witnessing events like these finds its way into work that is, I hope, more generally useful to people. . . . This requires us to restate our belief, not widely held, that attentiveness and the recognition of beauty does have an ethical component to it. I think that this is what James Hillman, in his essay ‘The Practice of Beauty,’ was getting at” (2). Hillman’s essay appears in Uncontrollable Beauty, a wide-ranging collection of contemporary aesthetic statements. Hillman argues that beauty is the most significant and unrecognized factor in modern culture (263). He traces a pervasive repression of beauty through the fields of ecology, economics, psychology, and philosophy, and he contrasts that repression with the “inherent radiance” of every part of the world (267). Finally, he proposes a series of “indirect roads” to lift the repression of beauty and invite its return. These roads lead to artworks that include bodily pleasure, time-halting attention to details, and “the mind in the work . . . anchored beyond itself.” Hillman argues, moreover, that “finished work reflects the sacred and the doing of the work, ritual” (273). Magee’s interpretation of Hillman’s argument emphasizes the ethical dimension of creating beauty and the discipline of perceiving beauty. Lopez strongly agrees that beauty is a fundamental necessity: “Life cannot exist without beauty, and to the extent that we destroy beauty we are destroying something that makes life possible. So, my small pinpoint of work in the world is to try to keep alive a sense of beauty and of engagement” (2). Through their conversations and works, Magee and Lopez amplify this sense of beauty as a form of engagement in which the mind is “anchored

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beyond itself.” In Magee’s view, the road between beauty and engagement is indirect, the politics perhaps not “discernible,” as in the collages of Hannah Höch. He interprets Höch’s collages from 1922 to 1926 as “uncannily prescient,” and her example leads him to another way in which Hillman’s indirect road might function: “Allow the sense of political dread and anxiety caused by events in the world—let them exist in the body, and then work” (3). Magee’s consistent stance as an outsider contributes yet another dimension to his idea of beauty. Thus he asserts, in an interview with Chris Hedges, that since the 1970s “‘significant’ art has become ever more remote and inscrutable” and “in a political sense, conservative. . . . I had naively believed that the modern art enterprise remained in some way linked to a gradual pull toward decency, a counterpart to various struggles for equality and fairness that were going on outside the world of art. The opposite was true.”1 Magee employs yet another powerful name for these amplifications of beauty—the “uncertified route” (“Conversation” 8). Cultivated in literature and art, Magee and Lopez recognize a value in moving outside the certified institutional avenues. As Magee puts it, “Though we value opportunities to go to Europe and to be close enough to touch a magnificent and esteemed work of art, we recognize also that the ingredients that go into meaningful work, for us, have to be a mixture of the high and the low—the masterpiece and the found object with no pretense to art. So what we end up with is a synthesis of both, and as you say, a healthy mistrust for either one in its ‘pure’ form. What we’re talking about is the insistence of walking about on level, open ground and a refusal to acknowledge the maze of fences that specialists like to construct for us” (“Conversation” 8). The “uncertified route” creates a synthesis of different cultural levels and of mixed, potentially ironic forms. It resists the academic and institutional values of the modern art enterprise, especially the specialized language of expertise. Finally, Lopez and Magee agree on the spiritual dimension of beauty, an aspect that marks them once again as contemplatives and outsiders. Lopez introduces the topic in the 2002 “Conversation”: “We’ve said James Hillman has articulated some issues for us that are very important. For example, if you want to talk about suppressed topics, anathema topics today, beauty is certainly a concept people are very uncomfortable discussing in public. Spirituality is as well. When you bring spirituality in, the discussion often turns to pop culture, or it gets thoroughly confused with religion. But I’m curious what you might speculate about the spiritual nature of your work. Are you comfortable at all with the phrase?” (11). Although he is more

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tentative than Lopez, Magee is more than willing to argue that beauty shows a “spiritual/ethical dimension,” and the perception of the spiritual/ ethical dimension depends upon “how the beauty of a thing reveals itself with attention. Attention and beauty are so closely linked.” For Magee, “beauty may be the energy source for the spirit, the place within the mind where sympathy, concordance, kindness are born and regenerated” (11). In the artists’ conversation, Emmet Gowin’s aerial photographs exemplify Magee’s sense of the numinous and the ethical. As the dialogue with Magee continues, Lopez develops his ideas of painting as “the conversation between the object and the painter,” attributing the thought to John Berger. The image of conversation also strongly recalls the painter Maurice Haycock’s statement in Arctic Dreams, that painting on the open tundra is “a conversation with the land” (225–26). For Lopez, the conversation with the land expresses “that part of the world you are recording that most accentuates, makes most plain, its spirituality.” And Lopez’s view of Magee’s paintings, whether of stones, tools, or pears, is that “you make the numinous more apparent in your representation of ordinary things” (11). Lopez sums up the discussion of beauty and the spiritual with an eloquent statement: For me, with my upbringing, the way I imagine the Great Spirit, the Overriding Spirit, is absolute seamlessness. It is so coherent there is no place where a seam can develop, and incoherence thereby become apparent. What beauty is finally to me is an unimaginable coherence. A thing so fully integrated that you merge with it and lose the terrible sense of loneliness and identity that separates you from the world. The numinous feels like an invitation and you long for it. I think people long all the time, all their lives in their dreams and in their waking hours, to be included. Part of the power of art to me is that in a particular painting with a particular artist you feel that sense of inclusion in the world. You feel the ignition of your imagination where before it had just been smoldering. So you look at a painting of stones and you walk out the door of the gallery and you’re thinking how much you love your wife. Somebody might ask, “Well, how are these connected?” They’re connected because you came to life again in the presence of the painting, forms that spoke directly to you of the numinous as a result of this miracle of painting. (“Conversation” 12)

The scenario at the end of the passage recalls the response of the narrator to the stories of the wolverine in “Landscape and Narrative,” which “renewed

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in me a sense of the purpose of my life” (COG 63). It also recalls Lopez’s lecture and essay on Robert Adams’s photographs and the “gift of light.” In his account of Adams’s work, Lopez always returns to the light as filling both the photographer and us with wonder. He ends the original lecture on Adams with this sentence: “And what Robert Adams has done with it rekindles the wonder that makes us commit ourselves again, as individuals and as a society, to our ideals” (“Gift of Light” 17). Photographs, paintings, and stories are equally powerful in bringing the viewer or listener into an intimate relationship with the world, igniting the imagination with emotional force and rekindling the sense of wonder. The merging that Lopez describes at first suggests spiritual transcendence, but the “sense of inclusion in the world” is a form of merging that figures both a kind of spiritual immanence and a vital aesthetic community.

The Ongoing Collaboration Magee and Lopez recognize in their friendship an aspect of mutual inspiration, similar to the inspiration Lopez draws from the work of Robert Adams, Linda Connor, and other artists. Magee calls this aspect “collaboration,” but he does not necessarily mean the strict definition of the word as a “united labor, especially in a scientific, artistic, or literary work” (OED). Magee’s sense is broader and deeper: “I feel that I’ve been collaborating with you since I picked up that first book of yours. There’s no doubt in my mind that this kind of unacknowledged collaboration sends out infinite roots from artist to artist” (“Conversation” 8). Magee’s roots reach across to surrealist filmmakers like the Quay Brothers, with whom he was a student at the Philadelphia College of Art, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Jan Švankmajer; to writers like Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, and Wilfred Owen; to photographers and visual artists like Frederick Sommer, Emmet Gowin, Käthe Kollwitz, and Hannah Höch. These are all part of what Magee calls “the ongoing collaboration” (9), or, as he puts it in the interview with Chris Hedges, “artists in all fields who give me something authentic and who occasionally change my life” (119). Three stories from Field Notes: The Grace Note of the Canyon Wren (1994) suggest the subtle ways in which the ongoing collaboration takes place. Each story features a first-person narrator who finds an unexpected connection to another person. The relationship is not necessarily direct or conventional; it has a certain “unacknowledged” quality, as Magee calls it. In “Teal Creek,” for example, the narrator tells the story of “an anchorite,”

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James Teal, who lives alone in the Bennett River country of the Magdalena Mountains in New Mexico. The connection between the narrator and Teal is unacknowledged but authentic, providing the narrative spine for the story. Three times the narrator attempts to visit Teal’s remote cabin, and each time he questions his own “trespass” and “unseemly curiosity.” The two characters never speak to each other, but the narrator remembers a false story told about Teal when he was a fourteen-year-old boy, and he tells his wife Julie, “‘Ever since then, I’ve known I wanted to protect Teal. And that I should—that I’m meant to—receive something from him. I don’t know what it is’” (FN 20). On the third visit, in the spring of 1969, the narrator comes close to understanding his fascination with Teal: I saw Teal standing out there in the downpour, beyond the green rows of a new garden. He was bent far over before the flat gray sky in what appeared to be an attitude of prayer or adoration, his arms at his sides. The rain had plastered his shirt to his back and his short black hair glistened. He did not move at all while I stood there, fifteen or twenty minutes. And in that time I saw what it was I had wanted to see all those years in James Teal. The complete stillness, a silence such as I had never heard out of another living thing, an unbroken grace. He was wound up in the world, neat and firm as a camas bulb in the ground, and spread out over it like three days of weather. The wind beat down on James Teal. Beyond him clouds snagged in the fir trees. The short growth in his garden between us was fresh and bright. When I turned to leave, the cabin looked lean, compact as a hunting heron. (22)

Here the narrator receives a vision from Teal, a vision of unbroken grace, positive silence, and perfect stillness. The vision is not beyond this world, but “wound up in [it], neat and firm as a camas bulb in the ground.” Teal is perfectly in place, bowing in his garden to the rain and wind, and his spirit spreads out over the ground “like three days of weather.” Although the nearby creek bears two other names, the narrator thinks of it only as Teal Creek, giving the story its title. The narrator’s relationship to Teal is reciprocal, as his final visit reveals. In May 1971, the narrator feels “compelled to visit him, as though he had called to me from a dream” (22), and he finds Teal dead, the remains of his lunch still on the table before him. The narrator cares for Teal by moving the body to the porch and covering it with a blanket. As he hesitates in his truck before bringing officials to Teal Creek, the narrator imagines reading a bedtime story to his daughter Blair, “about animals filling up the world. I

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imagined it would make us feel fine and grateful. Reading it aloud would make us feel as if nothing would go wrong” (23). By weaving the story of James Teal together with the narrator’s reading of Native American stories to his daughter, Lopez suggests that the unacknowledged collaboration between the two main characters consists in telling true, authentic stories. “Teal Creek” therefore becomes an example of how “infinite roots” connect individuals and generations to create a sense of community. Lopez’s narrators bear witness to extraordinary patterns and purposes. They must listen attentively to what their story must become. Those are the elevated demands placed on Marlis Damien, the narrator of “Empira’s Tapestry.” Empira is a young fourth-grade teacher boarding with Marlis, an older widow. Like the narrator of “Teal Creek,” Marlis is a gifted storyteller, and when Empira gives Marlis a storyteller’s stick from Ghana, she appoints her the witness of Empira’s life and art. By describing Empira’s tapestry, “a wilderness scene of bright sunlight over a canyon” (31), Marlis comes to understand that she loves Empira. And by telling the story of Empira’s illness and suicide, Marlis gathers the threads of Empira’s tapestry, showing that she understands Empira’s admirable strength and integrity. By such threads and such gatherings, communities can flourish, even if the connections remain invisible to many members of the community. The third story strongly echoes Lopez’s essay “Landscape and Narrative,” both in setting and in theme. The unnamed first-person narrator of “Lessons from the Wolverine” is one of the most fully developed characters in Field Notes. A native of Antigua and an airplane mechanic, the narrator is attached to the arctic region of Alaska and especially to animals. Like other narrators in Field Notes, he is a gifted storyteller. As the story unfolds, the narrator gradually learns that a large family of wolverines living up on the Sanumavik River doesn’t want people trapping up there. During the winter of 1990, when he is twenty-six years old, the narrator dreams of wolverines four times. The dreams lead him to a conversation with the land: I decided I was going to go up there when spring came, regardless. I’ve never been able to learn what I want to know about animals from books or looking at television. I have to walk around near them, be in places where they are. This was the heart of the trouble that I had in school. Many of the stories that should have been told about animals, about how they live, their different ways, were never told. I don’t know what the stories were, but when I walked in the woods or out on the prairie or in the mountains, I could feel the boundaries of those stories. I knew they were there, the way you know fish are in a river. This knowledge was

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what I wanted, and the only way I had gotten it was to go out and look for it. To be near animals until they showed you something that you didn’t imagine or you hadn’t seen or heard. (137)

The narrator follows the “uncertified route” over a physical and metaphysical landscape to the wolverines, but first he must hear a story. In June 1991 a native guide, Elisha Atnah, walks with the narrator for three days from the remote village of Eedaqna to the Sanumavik headwaters on the North Slope. Elisha acts as a spiritual guide, telling the narrator that wolverines “have culture, same as people do, but they all look the same to some people because they carry it in their heads. . . . Everything they need—stories, which way to travel, a way to understand the world—that’s all in their heads” (138–39). The word “stories” seems to lead directly to Elisha’s remarkable story of a female wolverine, trapped by front foot and back foot, standing on top of a wolf she has killed. She has been waiting five days like this, and she tells the young, inexperienced trapper who finally returns to find her that “it was over, wolverines were not going to do this anymore. The boy said he was sorry, but the wolverine said no, there won’t be any more trapping for a while. Too many days waiting for him” (140). The story delivers the first lesson from the wolverine, a lesson of the ethical treatment of prey or, better, a lesson of the reciprocity between human beings and the wolverine. On the fourth day of the journey, Elisha guides the narrator to his place of vision. Two wolverines appear near the solitary narrator, and they all go to sleep in the sunshine. The narrator dreams of the two wolverines, and in his dream he lies down next to them. The wolverines instruct him to “pay attention,” and the ensuing vision of patterns in sky and stars leads to the narrator’s transformation into a bird “like an osprey.” The dream becomes a memory-vision, for as he flies above the land the narrator can remember every face of every animal he has ever seen or been near. He can see himself below as the falconer he once was. When he awakes, he finds a willow stick in the shape of a running wolverine, with a string of ten wolverine claws tied around the neck. “It looked too strong to pick up” (143), he thinks, but eventually he carries it with him. When Elisha arrives, he tells the narrator that the claws are from a female wolverine, from the left front foot and right rear foot: I told him about seeing the animals from my past. I felt them all around. I felt I was carrying something in my head that hadn’t been there before. He said he was glad.

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Elisha said he didn’t know what the stick animal meant. He told me to carry it, not to put it inside my pack. He said we could ask someone when we got back to Eedaqna. (143–44)

Elisha’s reticence preserves the mystery of the stick, but it seems right to connect the wolverine stick to the storyteller’s stick from Ghana, Empira’s gift to Marlis Damien in “Empira’s Tapestry.” The wolverine stick is a talisman, conferring on the narrator the power of storytelling. Like the wolverine in Elisha’s stories, the narrator now carries the culture of the wolverines in his head. And his narration of “Lessons from the Wolverine” shows that he knows what the wolverine stick means. These three stories from Field Notes teach additional lessons about storytelling and the ongoing collaboration that forms communities. Read together, they suggest that culture is not opposed to nature but connected to it, and that culture is not solely human. In terms of “Landscape and Narrative,” they suggest that the storyteller must pay attention and listen for the stories to reveal themselves, whether in an external landscape or in an internal landscape of dream or memory. They suggest, too, that the story­ teller is in fundamental ways a source of cultural memory, remembering the dead and telling the truth of the lives led by them. Finally, they suggest that communities, like stories, must always be renewed through the ongoing collaboration of artists and audiences.

Communities of Resistance The ongoing collaboration between Magee and Lopez becomes most important in Resistance (2004). Nine of Lopez’s stories are punctuated by nine monotypes from a larger body of Magee’s work called by the alternative titles Archive and Trauerarbeit. The nine monotypes are not illustrations for the stories, nor are the stories commentaries on the monotypes. Together, the stories and monotypes present an image of a community of intellectuals and artists who collectively resist threats of social and political conformity.2 The threats take concrete form in the first story, “Apocalypse,” which sets the narrative framework for the whole collection. The narrator, Owen Daniels, receives a letter from the Office of Inland Security, and he rapidly confirms that the same letter has been sent to the “loose network of people I’d been in regular touch with since the change of administration took place in our country” (Resistance 7). The authors of the letter “informed us of the nation’s persisting need for democratic reform. Each of us was

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told of widespread irritation with our work, and the government’s desire to speak with us” (8). The official language and understated menace establish the censorious authority behind the letter, and the danger becomes more evident in further excerpts and summaries (12–15). Owen Daniels’s story defines the broad principles of the community he represents, and in a number of ways he speaks for both Lopez and Magee. First, the artists share a belief in the ability of art to reach a wide audience by bearing witness: “We believe if we can say what many already know in such a way as to incite courage, if the image or the word or the act breaches the indifference by which people survive, day to day, enough will protest that by their physical voices alone they will stir the hurricane” (10). Second, the artists share a belief in beauty. Despite the ubiquitous promoters of economic success, Daniels asserts his faith in human beings as more than “goal-seeking animals”: “We believe they are creatures in search of proportion in life, a pattern of grace. It is balance and beauty we believe people want, not triumph” (11). Third, they believe that the patterns of grace and beauty do not require updating; instead, “they require only repetition. Repetition, because just as murder and infidelity are within us, so, too, is forgetfulness. We forget what we want to mean. To achieve progress, we’ve all but cut our heads off” (12). As Daniels defines the community’s role toward the end of “Apocalypse,” “We regard ourselves as servants of memory. We will not be the servants of your progress” (17).3 Fourth, they share a belief in the liberating role of the imagination: “We believe in the imagination and in the variety of its architectures, not in one plan for all, even if it is God’s plan” (18). The ultimate response of the community is to escape from the authorities, leaving behind “these stories of where we have been and what we have seen” (16). Daniels acts as an instigator, asking the other recipients of the official letter “to recall the moment in which they recognized the transformation that led to the work that so infuriated [the authorities]” (17). Each of the stories that follows, then, will be a personal narrative of transformation, an act of memory that is both personal and public, a story of the awakening and dissenting imagination. Alan Magee began creating the Archive monotypes in the summer of 1990, and he calls the “impending first Gulf War” the “direct impetus” for the faces: I can’t say that I was making or illustrating a political point with those monotype faces, but all that anxiety about what was coming played into

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them. I also realized that in this country it had then become off limits, in news reporting, to actually show images of people being killed or hurt, which is really what war is about. . . . I think that was part of the dread I felt, and there was also the uneasy question of just why we were putting ourselves in jeopardy with a hostile act that would not be forgotten. I felt that invasion would lead to worse things, and indeed it has. But that’s getting into political motivations [for the monotypes], and mine were, as I said, more personal.4

This statement strongly echoes the 2002 “Conversation” between Magee and Lopez, in which Lopez remarks, “Both of us have been profoundly anguished and disturbed by U.S. embroilment in the Middle East, and we’ve wondered what we could do in response as writers and artists, not by writing pamphlets as it were, but by making our work a reflection of this concern” (1). In the interview with Bernier, Magee makes that same point, calling the nine monotypes in Resistance “a stimulus for the book’s nine fictional narratives. . . . Barry found something in the faces that sparked the narratives for him, and he wanted the images to remain part of the book” (11). Magee’s explanation of the monotype process is especially helpful here, for it points out the improvisational and provisional quality of the faces he creates. It also suggests the surprising, hybrid black-and-white images that appear: Monotypes, single impression prints, borrow techniques from both painting and printmaking. The image to be printed is first painted onto a smooth metal printmaking plate, then transferred to dampened paper using an etching press. In making the monotypes in this exhibition I began by rolling up a smooth zinc etching plate with ink to produce a solid black tone. I use a mixture of inks which, in combination, provide a delicate range of grays and an intense black where needed. The “painting” was done almost entirely with a process of erasure— selectively rubbing away the layer of black ink with a printer’s tarlatan or a paper towel to create the patterns of light and shadow that define a human face, or any other desired form. I do not use photographs, sketches or models in making the monotypes since it is the directness of the monotype process that I most value. The hand wiping away ink in search of a face is akin to improvisational music. The result is always a surprise.5

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Magee’s description of the “delicate range of grays” in contrast with “an intense black” applies particularly well to the nine monotypes in Resistance, which date from 1990 to 1995. The faces seem to emerge from a black background, and the direct techniques of erasure produce portraits that can be either textured and nuanced or flattened and simplified. In an author’s note that prefaces the book, Lopez writes that “the monotypes in Resistance are from a larger body of work created by Alan Magee between 1990 and 2000. A few of the earliest images were included in a show of the artist’s work at Staempfli Gallery in New York in late fall of 1990. The full collection was presented for the first time at the Berliner Philharmonie in Berlin in November 2000” (Resistance ix). Magee’s first monotype in Resistance, Writer’s Mask (Communiqué) (1990), delivers a telling image for “Apocalypse” (figure 13). Like most of the Archive monotypes, it presents a portrait of a face, but in this case the face is hidden by a bird-like, beaked mask, strongly recalling the beaked masks used by plague doctors in seventeenth-century Europe. It may suggest that the writer needs the kind of protection that doctors sought from bubonic plague. The image may also evoke the narrator, Owen Daniels, as a representative for the writer Barry Lopez. In Christian Martin’s interview, Lopez notes that “the community of people and narrators in Resistance actually resembles the community I live in—a group of artists and writers who stay in touch but who are not really activists. It’s a community where you continue to champion and to bear witness to acts of integrity, you oppose the way pop culture buries the history of humanity, and you rebel against the movement to commodify everything” (22). “Apocalypse” differs from all the other stories in Resistance in not delivering Daniels’s personal narrative of transformation, and in that communal role it echoes Lopez’s remark, “It’s important, I think, to notice that none of these people who develop lives of resistance in this book is a Lone Ranger. They come into their own through community” (Martin 19). The writer wears a communal mask, and community helps writers and artists achieve authentic identity, to “come into their own.” In all eight stories that follow “Apocalypse,” the Magee monotype stands as a fitting image of the narrator and the moment of transformation. (At the end of each narrative, including “Apocalypse,” Lopez appends the identity of the narrator and a thumbnail sketch of accomplishments made before the narrator leaves his or her present location.) The first three stories form a suite, focusing on scarred survivors. In “Río de la Plata,” the monotype Silence (1995) figures the narrator Lisa Meyer’s stitched blockage after twenty-two years of intense creativity recorded in her journal (figure 14).

Figure 13.  Writer’s Mask (Communiqué) © Alan Magee 1990, monotype, 18 x 12 in.

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Figure 14.  Silence © Alan Magee 1995, monotype, 14 x 11 in.

While maintaining outer success, Meyer loses her connections to any community and family: “What had begun to weigh on me more than anything was the silence of everyone in the city, myself included” (30). Meyer’s active reading of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning leads her to take up her journal again and renew her sense of purpose (33–34). Similarly, the narrator of “Mortise and Tenon,” Gary Sinclair, bears the haunted, sutured portrait Wound (1995) because his emotional pain from years of childhood sexual abuse seals his spirit against love (figure 15). At the moment of crisis,

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Figure 15.  Wound © Alan Magee 1995, monotype, 14 x 11 in.

Sinclair recalls a story from Ainu culture about a brown bear’s ability to heal itself: “I had long held on to this image, a bear choosing among many small roots the one that would promote the healing of a wound” (51). The echo of Magee’s title resonates through the story and the entire book. The narrator of “Traveling with Bo Ling,” the Vietnam veteran Harvey Fleming, is blinded and neutered in war. Magee’s Dulce et decorum est (1992) shows the bandaged, blank face and flat black eyes of a gas victim (figure 16), an echo of Wilfred Owen’s ironic World War I poem:

Figure 16.  Dulce et decorum est © Alan Magee 1992, monotype, 18 x 12 in.

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If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. (17–28)

As searingly despairing as the poem and monotype may be, the narrator of “Traveling with Bo Ling” rediscovers some innocence and love through his relationship with Bo Ling, a blind North Vietnamese woman. Thus an emerging pattern of redemption joins the three stories to form an elegiac movement from despair toward hope. The thumbnail biographies at the end of the stories suggest that the narrators successfully move beyond their wounds to “reach the shores of Uruguay together,” as Lisa Meyer puts it (36). The first four stories of Resistance echo the gashed, sutured, monstrous faces in Magee’s monotypes, and though the stories turn toward the healing effects of beauty and love, they create a darkly apocalyptic tone, even without the anonymous threats of faceless government bureaucrats. The last five stories and the accompanying Magee monotypes, however, clearly turn toward more hopeful narrators and more spiritual themes. Once again, stories join to form larger patterns. Thus the monotypes The Animals (1994) and Spirit (1990) resemble each other, as do the stories “The Bear in the Road” and “The Walls at Yogpar.” Both monotypes feature a pale face with pointed ears, and The Animals (figure 17) also resembles The Writer’s Mask with its black eyes and pinpoint pupils. Spirit (figure 18) is a more peaceful human face, eyes closed in apparently serene sleep. Only the four windows across the forehead, echoing the forbidding architectural imagery of the Inlets monotypes, disturb the image of rest. The narrators of “The Bear in the Road” and “The Walls at Yogpar” embark on vision quests that eventually lead to a sense of coherence and meaning in their lives. In the quest structure and in the central role of a

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Figure 17.  The Animals © Alan Magee 1994, monotype, 14 x 11 in.

spiritual guide, the narratives resemble “Lessons from the Wolverine.” Not surprisingly, moreover, storytelling functions significantly in both stories. “The Bear in the Road” features a mixed-race narrator, Edward Larmirande, a member of the Métis Nation Council and a lawyer, who is guided on his vision quest by an Assiniboine elder, Virgil Night Crow. The story of Edward’s transformation is subtle, for it recounts two failed attempts to surrender to the land and its animals in the way the narrator of “Lessons

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Figure 18.  Spirit © Alan Magee 1990, monotype, 18 x 12 in.

from the Wolverine” is able to do so successfully. Lost in the dark wood of his rational, legal mind, Edward cannot answer the grizzly bear’s question, “Why? Why are you trying to kill me?” Virgil speaks on the animals’ behalf when he tells Edward that the place “seems empty of spirit to you, but it isn’t. . . . The bear’s holding the door open, Edward. A very patient animal” (87). The story seems to end in Edward’s failure, but in the last sentences he recounts a third quest to the same area six years later: “I stayed in my same

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camp above the dry creek bed, until the voices that had so long debated the future within me grew silent, and I stepped through the door” (88). For readers familiar with Winter Count and Field Notes, “The Bear in the Road” will seem a quintessential Lopez narrative, employing indigenous patterns of storytelling and the encounter with the necessary dragon. At the same time, echoes of Dante are unmistakable. At first “The Walls at Yogpar” may seem utterly different from the essential Lopez, but the story also features a vision quest for a highly educated and rational person, led by a spirit guide from another culture and time. The narrator, Elizabeth Wangfu, an Asian American translator, is fluent in eight Chinese languages and studies several other nonstandard languages and dialects. She lives in Urumchi, the largest city in western China and a cultural/linguistic crossroads. Her ultimate quest is to travel by camel into the deserts of Xinjiang province, led by a Muslim Kirghiz neighbor, Korbel Uklel, with whom she speaks Uygur. The arrival at an old oasis, Yogpar, is the climax of Elizabeth’s journey to find “contact with the residue, the local spirits, of ancestral humanity” (101). Korbel instructs Elizabeth as they camp within the ancient walls of Yogpar, telling her that his own ancestors “are waiting” and that one day “they will speak—and then everything will change. No matter what language you speak, you will understand their meaning. You won’t find water so easily after that, nor someone for your heart to fasten itself to” (107). As the two companions prepare for sleep, Elizabeth casts her agile mind to another ancestral place: I thought to tell Korbel, maybe in the morning, about a shallow cave called Teshik-Tash in the gorge of the Zautolosh River. In Uzbekistan, far to the west of our camp. Sixty-five thousand years ago, Neandertal hunters buried one of their children there, laying the body out carefully and encircling it with five or six pairs of ibex horns, which suggested to many, when the site was discovered, that the animals were its guardians. Scientists later sent the Mousterian child’s bones to a museum in England. The ibex horns were put in a box and shipped somewhere else. Who can know, now, what these people wished the ibexes to protect the child from? Was it the scavenging of a cave hyena or something less imaginable and more dire? Before I slept I stood atop the stone arch of the west gate and watched the wind flickering on the star-bitten edges of the dunes. But for the cold stone beneath my feet, all I could name were the constellations, my ancestors’ arrangement of the stars. (109–10)

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First discovered in the 1930s, the buried child at Teshik-Tash is described by some scientists much as Elizabeth Wangfu recalls it here.6 This is certainly one of the most beautiful passages in Resistance, evoking a mysterious ancestral ritual, a kinship with other species, and a cosmic silence that Elizabeth seems to embrace completely. Like the narrators of “Lessons from the Wolverine” and “The Bear in the Road,” she becomes a storyteller in the most elevated sense. The next two stories, “Laguna de Bay in A-Sharp” and “Níłch’i,” form another diptych, turning to a more theological consideration of spiritual journeys. The monotypes The Lamb and Wind, both from 1992, are plain, ghost-like, two-dimensional portraits. Wind is somewhat smeared, as if the figure were putting his face into a forceful metaphysical wind. The wideset eyes of The Lamb (figure 19) accord with the devotion and goodwill of Jefferson deShay, the religious, mixed-race narrator of “Laguna de Bay in A-Sharp.” Like the title of Magee’s monotype, Jefferson deShay’s journey is clearly framed by Christian sacrifice, but the journey does not lead away from the world. An international medical aid worker, deShay learns that even a life of devotion must make room for laughter, that he can be “no longer afraid of immersion in the unvarnished world” (123). Music becomes a part of deShay’s ministry in Calcutta and the Philippines, giving him a powerful insight: “It was the way music broke you up and held you, how it tripped up fear’s great authority over life, how it put you back in the world you were sometimes so desperate to leave” (124). Níłch’i is a Navajo word meaning “Holy Wind” (figure 20). As the narrator Marion Taylor puts it, “the Navajo believe that through níłch’i individuals participate in graces or powers that surpass those of the individual, and that those graces or powers keep one secure in the world and confirm one’s indispensability, one’s necessity in the world” (138–39). At first it seems that Taylor’s beliefs are in marked contrast to Jefferson deShay’s gentle theology of redemption, for Taylor chooses “theologies of creation. The world is beautiful and we are a part of it. That’s all. Our work is not to improve, it is to participate” (128). But in fact both narrators participate fully in the world, and both resist conventional norms of progress and success. For deShay, the resistance comes slowly, along with the realization that indifference to suffering grows out of “the need to separate oneself from the brutality one witnessed” (115). On the other end of the spectrum, however, lies a complex form of egotism, in which the missionary becomes the “aggressive missionary of his own truth” (120). When deShay finds the balance between these two extremes, he realizes that he has “nothing, anymore, to sell” (123).

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Figure 19.  The Lamb © Alan Magee 1992, monotype, 18 x 12 in.

Similarly, Marion Taylor resists conventional ideas of success, especially those propounded by his father. But his own efforts at leading a meaningful life in radical politics lead him to lose his parents, his wife, and his children. Taylor’s story ends with several pages devoted to the Navajo philosophy of winds, and he embarks on his own spiritual journey to “search out the longest-known and most dependable of the earth’s winds” (140). Taylor

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Figure 20.  Wind © Alan Magee 1992, monotype, 18 x 12 in.

understands that níłch’i is a metaphor, “to provide a name and imagery for some force invisible but essential to life,” but he also understands that for the Navajo “this metaphor is not a metaphor, as we have it. It is the truth” (139). Taylor’s ultimate insight concerning balance is cultural and linguistic. As difficult as his journey into the Navajo cosmology may be, the return to his own culture is the most harrowing and important: “I have to

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find a language they can accept, an experience they will trust. But I believe this too will be there when I put my face into these winds. I believe there is more here than the Navajo idea with which I begin” (141). The thumbnail sketch at the end of the story, outlining Taylor’s work in alternative energy consulting and in producing international films, suggests that his search for a language and experience has been successful. Dialogue of Comfort (1992), the monotype accompanying the final story, “Flight from Berlin,” alludes to Thomas More’s posthumous Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, written while More was awaiting execution in the Tower of London. The portrait presents perhaps the most recognizably human face in the nine monotypes (figure 21). The figure is dressed in a dark cloak and dark beret; his face is symmetrical, with a kind, open-eyed expression, and his lips are parted as if in speech. The narrator, Eric Rutterman, opens the story with the idea of leaving the Utala River country of Brazil because of the warnings from his country, but also because he has been restored by his stay and is ready to move on (143). Because Rutterman is drawing and describing the natural history of the Utala River, he recalls both Magee and Lopez in vocation. He also echoes the two in their discussions of art as a conversation: “The ‘object’ to be drawn is not an object, in the sense that an artist is able to impose his scrutiny on it. The only way this will work—the quick study that seems so exactly right, a rendering inexplicably beyond the artist’s technical skill—is if the artist is in conversation with the ‘object.’ Drawing by dialogue, you might call it. The artist engages the subject of the drawing as his equal and, through some shared faculty, it contributes” (147). Once again, the single word “dialogue” offers resonant meanings within the context of the story, and those meanings resonate through all the work shared by Lopez and Magee. The Tukano people among whom Rutterman lives teach him to seek “quiet” conversations, and he actively resists any loss of the imagination in the “loud” or obvious conversation with things in the world (148–49). The title of the story, “Flight from Berlin,” refers to the last international meeting of the community of friends and acquaintances that includes the narrators of Resistance. From that meeting in Berlin, Rutterman and his family fly to Brazil, and there Rutterman comes to “see what they called ‘the quiet,’ the realm of life that could not be sensed until one overcame the damage done to perception by a long exposure to inescapable noise” (154). Like Marion Taylor in relation to the Navajo, Rutterman appreciates the Tukano “landscape of myth” (158), and he asks humbly what the Tukano ways of knowing “the quiet” could teach his own culture. He recognizes, moreover, the peace and creative redemption that come from holding a

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Figure 21.  Dialogue of Comfort © Alan Magee 1992, monotype, 18 x 12 in.

conversation with the world. But he also recognizes the importance of his own cultural history. The conversations with the world include, for him, conversations with the community of like-minded friends. For Rutterman, a specific, telling image from those conversations comes in a letter he receives from Elizabeth Wangfu, in which she recounts the journey she makes with her friend Korbel to the cave of Teshik-Tash, to

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honor the Neandertal nomads and their desire to provide comfort to their child on its journey—the child buried sixty-five thousand years ago, protected by pairs of ibex horns standing in defense. These journeys through deep time and across continents, into a spirit world it may be, become the image for constant migrations across the land. So Rutterman offers the buried child as a bridge between different cultures, and Elizabeth’s letter provides an ultimate dialogue of comfort against tribulation: Is it so different for us now? A hopeful people, attending to family tasks in a landscape of mysterious forces, a landscape where hyenas roam. We finish the day’s work and move on, overland or into dreams, ever vigilant over the children. When I read her letter about this burial, I had the breadth of time across which to consider our present tribulations, which she meant me to do. They did not seem so tyrannical then. (161)

Elizabeth’s letter to Rutterman gives a fictional version of the community of artists, the imaginative other country that Barry Lopez creates and re-creates throughout his career. One new formulation of that other country appears in the final pages of “Flight from Berlin.” In preparing to leave the Tukano, Rutterman knows that he leaves “with many of their legends, stories about the origin of the world, and the relationships between things in the world as they know it. Whether I understand the stories in every particular or not, I regard them as a kind of protection against what menaces every person—despair, conceit, failure of imagination. It is this feeling I want to give back: not thank you or every blessing on you but I wish for my life to protect your life” (162). It is a fitting response to the generosity of the Tukano, just as it is a fitting answer to Elizabeth’s letter and the community of artists: I wish for my life to protect your life.

Part III

Opening Fields

Chapter seven

Long Lines and Earth Art

Archaeologies of Spirit The Neandertal child at Teshik-Tash first appears in Resistance, in the story “The Walls at Yogpar.” As she goes to sleep by the ruins at Yogpar, the narrator Elizabeth Wangfu thinks she must tell her friend Korbel about the cave, “a shallow cave called Teshik-Tash in the gorge of the Zautolosh River, in Uzbekistan, far to the west of our camp. Sixty-five thousand years ago, Neandertal hunters buried one of their children there, laying the body out carefully and encircling it with five or six pairs of ibex horns, which suggested to many, when the site was discovered, that the animals were its guardians” (Resistance 109). In the last story of the book, “Flight from Berlin,” the narrator Eric Rutterman reports that he received a letter from an “old friend,” surely Elizabeth Wangfu, who has in the meantime visited the cave with Korbel (Resistance 160). For both narrators, the burial site of the child signifies the human need to provide protection and comfort, both for the dead and for the living. This twice-reconstructed image of the buried child reaches across deep time, joining us to the Neandertal hunters in the cave of Teshik-Tash and encircling us within the long, backward-curved horns of Eurasian mountain goats. Images of archaeology and community resonate across Barry Lopez’s work. In Arctic Dreams, for example, Lopez sets forth the basic phases of arctic cultures, based primarily on the archaeological study of migrant campsites. The migrations reach back to the Arctic small tool tradition of five thousand years ago and forward, through the Dorset, to the more recent Thule culture, the direct ancestors of modern Eskimos, especially the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic (AD 178–88). Lopez quotes the distinguished Canadian 127

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archaeologist Peter Schledermann: “Everything we are is in our spirit. In archaeology, you are examining the long line of what we are” (188).1 The long line of what we are reaches across landscapes in the form of campsites, burial sites, winter homes, and walled oases such as the fictional Yogpar: “the low wall of a four-square structure with two gateless portals, east and west. The courtyard and its well were under eight feet of sand” (Resistance 106). The long line reaches across time, connecting our present spirit to prehistoric human cultures and to the idea of community. Perhaps most beautifully, it reaches across to the image of the three-hundred-yearold landscape intaglio in “The Stone Horse” (1986), the lead essay in Crossing Open Ground. “The Stone Horse” begins with an archaeological viewpoint. The first section of the essay recounts the human occupations of the Southern California desert from as early as thirty thousand years ago, with some scholars arguing for human beings’ presence more than two hundred thousand years ago (COG 1–2). Lopez brings the record rapidly to the present day, detailing the migrations and accompanying disturbance of the landscape after World War II. Vandalism of archaeological sites has been rampant, with the Bureau of Land Management estimating that “annually, about one percent of the archaeological record in the desert continues to be destroyed or stolen” (5). In the second section of the essay, Lopez adopts a personal, groundlevel point of view, one that details the steps of mapping the location of the ground glyph and crossing the desert to find it. The narrator makes his way across a stone plain in the predawn dark, suddenly coming upon the intaglio of the horse, “laid out on the ground with its head to the east, three times life size.” At first he thinks he sees the horse “without feeling,” but he recalls later “being startled, and that I held my breath” (6). This moment of recognition, as he reconstructs it, is analogous to coming upon a wild animal suddenly, even in a situation of aftermath: “I have felt the inexplicable but sharply boosted intensity of a wild moment in the bush, where it is not until some minutes later that you discover the source of electricity—the warm remains of a grizzly bear kill, or the still moist tracks of a wolverine” (7). By describing the process of discovery, Lopez intensifies the experience of the moment. The narrative pauses—stops—and perception takes over. The only evidence of passing time is the sunlight, “running like a thin sheet of water over the stony ground,” but the dawning light reveals the horse: The horse had been brought to life on ground called desert pavement, a tight, flat matrix of small cobbles blasted smooth by sand-laden winds.

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The uniform, monochromatic blackness of the stones, a patina of iron and magnesium oxides called desert varnish, is caused by long-term exposure to the sun. To make this type of low-relief ground glyph, or intaglio, the artist either selectively turns individual stones over to their lighter side or removes areas of stone to expose the lighter soil underneath, creating a negative image. This horse, about eighteen feet from brow to rump and eight feet from withers to hoof, had been made in the latter way, and its outline was bermed at certain points with low ridges of stone a few inches high to enhance its three-dimensional qualities. (The left side of the horse was in full profile; each leg was extended at 90 degrees to the body and fully visible, as though seen in three-quarter profile.) (COG 8–9)

The paragraph combines acute perception and analytical exposition, even though in the very next paragraph the narrator resists being “drawn off into deliberation and analysis.” Any analytical language in the description does not detract from the physical, material sense of the horse. Instead, the exposition of intaglio techniques gives the artwork a powerful “negative image.” When the narrator does finally move, it is in order to catch the light from different angles, to take different viewpoints. The movements track with the narrator’s combination of thought and feeling: “The more I thought about it, the more I felt I was looking at an individual horse, a unique combination of generic and specific detail” (10). The question of viewpoint becomes even more concrete at the end of the second section. Lopez reflects on an aerial photograph of the horse, given to him by the Bureau of Land Management archaeologist who helped him find the artwork, only to realize that the aerial viewpoint is inaccurate, making the intaglio seem crude, the horse “vaguely impotent.” From the ground, as the sunlight of dawn pools in the sculpture, the horse is animate, living, immediate, qualities brought out by what Lopez calls “light-in-time”: Intaglios, I thought, were never meant to be seen by gods in the sky above. They were meant to be seen by people on the ground, over a long period of shifting light. This could even be true of the huge figures on the Plain of Nazca in Peru, where people could walk for the length of a day beside them. It is our own impatience that leads us to think otherwise. This process of abstraction, almost unintentional, drew me gradually away from the horse. I came to a position of attention at the edge of the sphere of its influence. With a slight bow I paid my respects to the horse, its maker, and the history of us all, and departed. (14)

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For readers of Arctic Dreams, the bow is a familiar gesture of respect, and its significance is by no means slight. It encompasses artwork and artist, and the human community draws a third circle that includes “the history of us all.” That complex sense of respect can only come from patience, from a ground-level viewpoint, and from a “long period of shifting light.” Thus the second section illustrates, in its archaeological imagery, the long line of the spirit. The short third section of the essay deepens the meditation on the archaeology of spirit. As the narrator drives back to the present world, a “desert impoverished by agricultural poisons and varmint hunters, by offroad vehicles and military operations,” he finds even more disturbing the idea of “vandals, the few who crowbar rock art off the desert’s walls, who dig up graves, who punish the ground that holds intaglios,” people who “devour history” (16). Lopez’s reflective viewpoint reaches toward an acute sense of the intaglio’s vulnerability, but then the stone horse becomes an “anchor for something else. I remembered that history, a history like this one, which ran deeper than Mexico, deeper than the Spanish, was a kind of medicine. It permitted the great breadth of human expression to reverberate, and it did not urge you to locate its apotheosis in the present” (16–17). History, in this final meditation, becomes “this great, imperfect stretch of human expression,” and it functions as “the clarification and encouragement, the urging and the reminder.” Moreover, such vital history “is inscribed everywhere in the face of the land, from the mountain passes of the Himalayas to a nameless bajada in the California desert” (17). The inscriptions of history on the land can be defaced, even erased, but the long line of human expression stretches deeper and broader than the erasures of the present.

The Ethics of Deep Time At a critical moment in the “The Stone Horse,” the narrator moves to different positions around the intaglio, with each move attaining a new viewpoint and new perceptions of the horse. The third time he moves, to a place near the rear hooves, he spots a stone tool at his feet: “I stared at it a long while, more in awe than disbelief, before reaching out to pick it up. I turned it over in my left palm and took it between my fingers to feel its cutting edge. It is always difficult, especially with something so portable, to rechannel the desire to steal” (9–10). This is a weighty moment in the narrative, strengthening the ethical dimension of the visit to the stone horse and the respect due both to it and to its deep significance.

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The ethical moment connects to several other archaeological narratives. The first is the essay “Searching for Ancestors” (1983), the twelfth in Crossing Open Ground. Set on the west rim of Marble Canyon on the Kaibab Plateau, the essay presents four scenes: camping with archaeologists Robert Euler and Trinkle Jones (COG 165–69); in Euler’s office on the south rim of the Grand Canyon (169–72); with the two archaeologists, finding eight-hundred-year-old Anasazi granaries in Marble Canyon (172–78); and narrative return to the first scene and the nighttime camp on the west rim of Marble Canyon (178–80). “Searching for Ancestors” has a meditative quality in keeping with the first and last scenes. The second and third scenes focus on the Anasazi as a people: “They had an obvious and pervasive spiritual and aesthetic life, as well as clothing made of feathers and teeth worn down by the grit in their cornmeal. Their abandoned dwellings and ceremonial kivas would seem to make this clear. This belief by itself—that they were a people of great spiritual strength—makes us want to know them, to understand what they understood” (172). Like the stone horse or the burial site at Teshik-Tash, the Anasazi granaries evoke the vulnerability of archaeological sites. Balancing the threats faced by the long line of human heritage is Lopez’s admiration for the work of Euler and Jones: I roll over again and look at the brightening stars. How fortunate we all are, I think, to have people like Euler among us, with their long-lived inquiries; to have these bits of the Anasazi Way to provoke our speculation, to humble us in this long and endless struggle to find ourselves in the world. The slow inhalation of light that is the fall of dusk is now complete. The stars are very bright. I lie there recalling the land as if the Anasazi were something that had once bloomed in it. (179–80)

Here the long line appears in both the “long-lived inquiries” of the archaeologists and the “long and endless struggle to find ourselves in the world.” Despite our struggle and the limits of our understanding, there are moments of completion and fulfillment like the “slow inhalation of light” in the last paragraph. At such moments, the land and the people belong together, for the people grow out of the land. While these reflections are cosmic, they are also concrete. In the essay “Theft,” first published in About This Life (1998), Lopez develops an ethical, communal connection between two personal memories. The first memory reaches back to the summer of 1957, when Lopez was twelve years old. He accompanies his uncle Gordon Holstun to visit a wealthy

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landowner, Mr. Drewpierce. Holstun is contemplating a run for Congress, and Mr. Drewpierce can advise and assist him. As uncle and nephew drive to the farm in Macon County, Georgia, Holstun tells the young boy about archaeological sites on the Drewpierce farm, sites that could be of Aztec origin. Later, the two men send the boy to visit one of the sites while they conduct their political meeting. Squatting on his haunches by a river bend, the boy finds “gray and reddish shards, some incised with stylized patterns resembling the impression of leaf fronds, some looking blackened by fire” (ATL 266). Despite his good intentions, the boy feels “a need beyond all restraint and thought. I could not understand how taking a single arrowhead might matter at all” (267). But he finds no arrowheads, and finally he pulls two potsherds from the bank and washes the sandy red soil off them: They glistened like fish in my hands, and now seemed very valuable. I pushed them deliberately into the pockets of my shorts. What Aztecs had once held, I now held. The thought worked on me that the confluence here was preordained, a cabalistic power was inherent in this simple act. In taking possession of these two pieces of pottery, I had transcended the intrusive nuisance of insects and heat, the threat of snakes and poisonous plants. I felt ownership. (267)

This retelling of primal temptation—I am tempted to call it biblical— clearly betrays the false premises and self-deluding logic of illicit possession. But of course the boy is the one who is actually possessed. Only later, after the drive home and after his uncle’s speeches about history and theoretical speculations empty the potsherds of their power, does the boy succumb “to shame and stupidity,” but even that does not erase the theft: “The act was ineradicable and I lived with it” (268–69). The second memory in “Theft” begins abruptly by returning to the archaeological work on the west rim of Marble Canyon recounted in “Searching for Ancestors.” In this retelling, Lopez comes upon hundreds of Anasazi potsherds, “some beautifully decorated with red-on-black designs, others finely incised with a fingernail to accentuate a corrugated pattern in the clay” (269). With the permission of Euler and Jones, Lopez moves several shards to photograph them, and then he returns each piece “to its cradle of dust.” The action leads, naturally, to this reflection: It occurred to me, of course, to take a potsherd as a memento, but I had no such desire. I agreed with my companions that the shards formed

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part of a historical record, that they should be left for some other mind to come upon and to interpret after we are gone. I had no desire to take anything, either, because of the esteem I had for my companions, my regard for their profession and for our friendship. I couldn’t shake a feeling, though, which had clung to me since I’d moved the potsherds, that something was wrong. Something was unfinished. (269)

The paragraph reaches back both to the memory of the twelve-year-old boy’s theft and to the ending of “Searching for Ancestors.” In that double movement, moreover, it presents a complex weave of community and the long line of what we are as human beings. Still, these big ideas in fact crystallize in the small potsherds themselves and in small acts of respect and trust like the one that ends “Theft”: That evening I sat on my sleeping bag working up the day’s notes by the light of a fire. Across from me one of my companions, Bob Euler, was cleaning our dinner dishes. He was older than me by about twenty years, a professor of archaeology, a former university president. “Bob?” I said. He looked up. “I want you to know that even though I picked up those potsherds back there to photograph, I didn’t pocket them. I haven’t picked up anything on these sites. I just want to tell you that plainly. I don’t do that.” “Yes,” he said, “I noticed.” (269)

Lopez’s avowal and Euler’s response are simple, plain, understated. At the same time, the communication between two people grounds the entire question of ethics, as it does in the story of Lopez and his uncle. In both memories, moreover, the ethical question finds a deeper answer in the archaeological perspective and in the ancient artifacts. A similar grounding in communication underlies “The Runner,” the last story in the collection Field Notes (1994). The narrator, a thirty-sevenyear-old Phoenix lawyer named Steve Graham, is estranged from his older sister Mirara, a runner and climber who is expert at finding trails in Grand Canyon National Park. Graham learns from a real estate client that an unnamed woman has found three large Anasazi storage jars while climbing below the north rim; the client hatches a scheme for employing young climbers to find artifacts for them. Graham instantly knows that the unnamed woman is his sister. He visits the park to see the storage jars and speak to the park archaeologist, who tells him that his sister is expert at finding Anasazi artifacts. Indeed, Mirara is the kind of local expert that

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Lopez describes in the essay “The American Geographies.” She is one of the “local geniuses of American landscape,” as Lopez calls them in the essay, “people in whom geography thrives” (ATL 132). Her job is not her vocation, and the place of her real work is the intimacy she builds with the Grand Canyon and the long line of its inhabitants. Mirara never speaks directly in “The Runner.” Instead, even after visiting her, Graham learns about her from her admirers and companions. As one young character, Ned, tells him, she is demanding, as are her expeditions into the canyons. Ned describes the demands as “psychological and spiritual. . . . You have to take hold of yourself. That’s the psychological part. The spiritual part—she makes you think about what you believe in when you’re with her, because what she believes in you can see. It’s in the way she moves. She runs all those long trails, you know, on the rim, the Widforss and the rest. You watch her, you’ll see her stride, her hand balance, is perfectly matched to the ground. I mean perfect. It’s beautiful” (FN 156). Graham wonders, at the end of the story, “if it would ever be possible to reach my sister, if I could ever make up the ground” (159). By reaching his sister, Graham would reach a deeper intimacy with the landscape and with all of the physical, psychological, and spiritual demands it makes. Those are worthy goals, even though the final sentence leaves in doubt Graham’s ability to make up the ground.

Walking the Line Reaching back to prehistoric cultures and to the works they have left on the earth, the “long line of what we are” also reaches to the innovations of contemporary earth artists like Richard Long. The most well-known example of earth art, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), is characterized by the large scale and industrial labor necessary for its construction.2 Richard Long is quite different from monumental, eloquent artists like Smithson, but he is no less visionary. The art critic Lucy Lippard provides a sharp view of his achievement, even though she does not develop a lengthy discussion of his work: “Long’s outdoor work is moving precisely because of its evocation of the past within a highly specific present. He has managed to make a ‘dematerialized’ and occasionally democratized form of sculpture that remains highly pictorial (or picturesque), an art that is both physical and poetic. Its apparent innocence and lack of arrogance may be deceptive; this is the ‘outgoing’ art of a loner: ‘My work is about my senses, my instinct, my own scale and my own physical commitment.’”3

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Richard Long’s innovations began during his days as an art student, and they continue to the present. The common thread through nearly all of his work is the process of walking. Although his statements are sparing and spare, Long summarized over thirty years of work for an exhibition at his alma mater, Royal West of England Academy, in 2000: My first work made by walking, in 1967, was a straight line in a grass field, which was also my own path, going “nowhere.” In the subsequent early map works, recording very simple but precise walks on Exmoor and Dartmoor, my intention was to make a new art which was also a new way of walking: walking as art. Each walk followed my own unique, formal route, for an original reason, which was different from other categories of walking, like travelling. Each walk, though not by definition conceptual, realised a particular idea. Thus walking—as art—provided an ideal means for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded or described in my work in three ways: in maps, photographs, or text works, using whichever form is the most appropriate for each different idea. All these forms feed the imagination, they are the distillation of experience. (Heaven and Earth 146)

During many of the walks, Long pauses to create simple forms such as a line, circle, cross, or spiral out of the natural materials he finds along the way—stones, dead wood, bones, even herd droppings. To create the first work, Line Made by Walking, 1967 (figure 22), Long walked back and forth in a field until the flattened grass became visible as a line; he then took a photograph and returned home (Heaven and Earth 45–46). Because of the ephemeral impact on the landscape, the artwork is an event as much as an object, a process as much as a product. The documentation through photograph, map, or text is necessary because otherwise there would be no record of the walk as an artwork or of the sculptures Long makes during the walk. The landscapes can be remote and difficult to visit; as Long described it for a 1983 exhibition in Bristol, “A walk is also the means of discovering places in which to make sculpture in ‘remote’ areas, places of nature, places of great power and contemplation. These works are made of the place, they are a re-arrangement of it and in time will be re-absorbed by it. I hope to make work for the land, not against it” (Heaven and Earth 145). Long suggests, further, that the sculptures can be ephemeral, formed out of materials like snow, water, or ashes. They may be nearly invisible in the landscape they define as a place, blending in with the other features of the landscape. The pebbles of A Somerset Beach,

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Figure 22.  Line Made by Walking, 1967 © Richard Long; Tate, London / Art Resource, NY.

1968, for example, barely coalesce to form a distinct square, and yet they resonate strongly with the surrounding beach and seascape (figure 23). In the accompanying screen print version of Waterlines, 1989, the text evokes Long’s specific 1989 walk across Portugal and Spain and the numerous but now invisible “waterlines” created by pouring water along the artist’s “walking line.” But in addition, the print includes over twenty lines created by drips of liquid mud, inverted to resemble plant-like lines ascending

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Figure 23.  A Somerset Beach, 1968 © Richard Long / © CNAC/NMAN/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

toward the sky (plate 2.1). The screen print is especially interesting because it makes the invisible waterlines visible on the surface of the print. It thus illustrates the way in which Long’s earth art blurs the lines between landscape and artwork, between process and product, and between the remote and the near. Long describes the effect clearly in a note he wrote for the 1983 Bristol show: “My photographs and captions are facts which bring the appropriate accessibility to the spirit of these remote or otherwise unrecognisable works” (Heaven and Earth 145). As Lucy Lippard remarks, many of Long’s walks create a relationship between past and present. In a recent work, for example, MEGALITHIC TO SUBATOMIC: FROM CARNAC TO CERN (2008), Long walked 603 miles in nineteen days from the Neolithic menhirs in Carnac, France, to the world’s largest particle physics laboratory in Meyrin, Switzerland. The only record of the walk, as is also the case for Waterlines, 1989, is what Long calls a “text work,” which looks at first like a simple poster, with title and explanatory caption. In fact, however, the three different lines of text, in three different typefaces and colors, register a narrative of increasing specificity. The first line is in large black capitals. The second, floating beneath, appears

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in smaller brown capitals. Then the last line, in small red capital letters: “A WALK OF 603 MILES IN NINETEEN DAYS ACROSS FRANCE TO SWITZERLAND AUTUMN 2008” (Heaven and Earth 138). In this case, Long’s “particular idea” would seem to be a silent commentary on the five-thousand-year line connecting the rows of upended megaliths to the laboratory in which the Higgs boson particle is being isolated. Similar connections arise in earlier works, such as Windmill Hill to Coalbrookdale (1979), a 113-mile walk in three days from a prehistoric barrow in Wiltshire to an iron bridge on the River Severn Gorge. Long’s documentation—a combination of two photographs and text—asserts that “the Windmill Hill folk were the first inhabitants of England to make permanent changes in the landscape” and that the bridge at Coalbrookdale “was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution” (Heaven and Earth 122–23). The insistence on measurement, evident in the duration and length of the walk, emphasizes the distance we have traveled along a long line between two points. But the measurements may also suggest how little we have changed in the interim between a prehistoric past and an uncertain future. While one would not call Richard Long a primitivist or Romantic, his earth art calls, nevertheless, for a deep historical perspective that questions our ideas of progress and rational order. Barry Lopez’s comments on Richard Long’s career show that he finds a deep affinity with the themes engaged by the walks and landscape sculptures. He remarks that “the vastness of some of his outdoor work—I am thinking mostly of the walks—is so great you’re not able to enter the work, really, without entering the time it’s embedded in. In this way the walk is like a novel but fundamentally different. What you witness has not been collapsed into sentences. An awareness of what he is ‘saying’ is not constrained by language. What he offers is a sensation—about volumetric space, about both the arrow and the sphere of time, and about activity of one sort or another—changes in weather, for example. Point of view plays no prominent role in most of his work. The works do not have a left or a right, a front or back. You can move forward or backward in them without violating them. . . . All of his walks seem to provide a spine to which are attached various kinds of contrasting order, like the order of dreams. Long opens up space, frames it in time, and crowns it with the kind of silence that states of awe generate.”4 The temporal dimension of walking the landscape seems to appeal to Lopez most especially, and it is joined to an openness of perspective that allows for alternative or “various kinds of contrasting order, like the order of dreams.”

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The narrative that may best evoke Lopez’s appreciation for Richard Long’s work is the short story “The Orrery,” from the 1981 collection Winter Count. As I noted at the end of chapter 5, “The Orrery” stands apart from many of the other stories in the collection because of the setting in the upper Sonoran desert of Arizona, the absence of any documents, and the lack of any direct reference to Plains Indians or to charismatic animals. But the story is characteristic of Lopez’s patterns in featuring a learned narrator who encounters a hermit-like intellectual or artist. In “The Orrery,” the narrator makes several trips to an area called The Fields, a flat, dry valley of reddish-brown soils, sparsely vegetated by creosote bush and ocotillo cactus. The remarkable natural aspect of the place is the wind, which the narrator describes as “intoxicating,” with “a quality of wild refinement about it, like horses turning around suddenly in the air by your ear” (WC 40). The anonymous narrator meets a solitary hermit, living in an adobe house at the edge of The Fields, and the hermit turns out to be one of the “local geniuses of American landscape” that Lopez describes in “The American Geographies.” The hermit does not know everything about the place and at first does not show any particular local expertise; the first time the narrator sees him, he is sweeping small bits of rock and soil from the desert floor. Years later, when the two finally sit down together in the adobe house, the narrator learns that the hermit is in fact a local genius, but also a throwback to the Age of Reason: he works at mathematical puzzles, plays a clavichord with accomplishment and beauty, and is restoring an orrery—a mechanical model of the solar system before the official discovery of Uranus by Sir William Herschel in 1781. The instruments date from the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they mix strangely with the hermit’s deep knowledge of local flora and fauna. Perhaps it would be better to think of the hermit as someone like Richard Long. Lopez sees Long’s interests as encompassing “historical perspective, the problematic nature of progress, and the way imposed order, the ordering of matter according to our templates, defines living and imagining for us.”5 The hermit engages in two or three distinct ways of knowing, and these epistemologies blend together to form the experience of the story. Likewise, the walks Long has been undertaking for the past forty-five years create an aura of exploration and exotic travel, even though they are also extremely humble in the actual mechanics of walking, camping, and creating sculptures out of the natural materials at hand. According to Long, moreover, the walks “explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement.” They require no instruments more sophisticated than a

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compass and a map, but they do engage in some of the same intentional, intellectual work that marks the hermit’s interests in mathematics, music, and astronomy. Finally, the hermit is an earth artist, one whose work with stones and wind Richard Long would surely appreciate: After a few minutes we came to the open area I recognized as the place where I had first seen him. The wind was just noticeable to me then, but it was evidently blowing hard enough at a distance to disturb some of the stones set down on the cleared plain. He motioned for me to keep my place and went on. I could see by his clothing as he moved away that he was walking into hurricane winds, that they snapped all around him, though I could still feel only a slight breeze and hear no sounds. He moved several stones, seemed to orient himself, and amid spurts of dust I saw the stones lift off the ground. As they rose from the earth, they began to move in an arc across the sky, turning finally overhead in a dark shape like a pinwheel, some four or five hundred yards across. Now there was a waterfall sound, but only the lightest feeling of a breeze against my cheeks. The man came toward me, acknowledging my dumbstruck stare with a conspiratorial nod that indicated he thought it was impressive too. Perhaps because of friction, each of the thousands of stones now glowed, and they assumed the shape of a galaxy against the dark blue sky, like a bloom of phosphor rolling over in the night ocean. (47–48)

This remarkable description of creative power bristles with salient details. Like Long, the artist works as an arranger of natural materials, not as one who imposes order on the place. The creative force is the naturally occurring wind, though it is figured as utterly extraordinary. The earthwork arises out of the artist’s ability to “orient himself” and situate the stones in the proper arrangement. But the earthwork is not a static creation—it is a process or event, a moving “dark shape like a pinwheel.” Scale is complex: though large, the work is limited in its expanse, yet the scale of representation is even more expansive, assuming “the shape of a galaxy.” Like many of Long’s sculptures, the earthwork in “The Orrery” occupies a remote place, and it functions to reveal what Long calls a place “of great power and contemplation.” Indeed, the ephemeral quality of the creation, combined with its grandeur, makes it a work “for the land, not against it.” The affinity between Lopez and Long is not a matter of influence but a measure of two imaginations working in similar ways, though their fields are utterly different from one another. The early story “The Salmon,” from

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River Notes (1979), shows Lopez’s interest in earth sculptures and his deep sense of the stakes involved in making earth art. The opening sentence announces the theme: “There is never, he reflected, a moment of certainty, only the illusion” (49). The certainty within the short story involves the yearly return of the salmon to spawn upstream in the river. Among the solitary character’s uncertainties are thwarted relationships with his father and with his ex-wife, his regrets, and his search for a new balance. The expression of these losses and longings takes the form of a giant sockeye salmon, a sculpture that the character makes out of river stones carefully placed on a gravel bar in the river: He had built a bulwark of timbers on the upstream end of the bar to divert the force of high water until he was finished, the one practical concession he had made, anchored it in the river bed, into bedrock. And there were the steel rods welded into a lattice against which he worked. The stones he fitted as haphazardly as rip-rap except on the surface, where they were fitted to bind against each other, to hold a curve in two planes without mortar. From upriver and downriver (this, in itself, two years of work) he had gathered the stones and (another year) sorted them: green shales and yellow sandstones, red slates and shaded gray gneiss, blue azurite, purple quartzes and cloudy white calcites. For iridescence, for translucence, he had to rely on individual stones and pebbles, agates, jaspers, and opals, some of which he had carried from as far away as the river’s mouth. (50)

The salmon is clearly an example of earth art, and it is beautiful. It is a monumental sculpture, “sixteen paces in length, nine feet high at the dorsal fin,” and it creates a larger-than-life reality: “The unsettling reality, the feeling of life in it, was heightened by the perfect shading of color, the smooth, rainslick flanks, and the fish’s eyes of hand-polished lapis, the barely visible teeth of white quartz and the narrow view down a cavernous, dark throat” (52). The giant stone salmon differs significantly from the sculptures and walks of Richard Long. The labor to build it is arduous, long lasting, pain­staking; the steel rods and timbers bespeak an effort to control the flow of the river in the service of art. The artwork itself is a representation, not a simple geometric form or upended stone. It also pretends to permanence, as if it is directly opposed to the motion and flux of the river. Rather than blending in with the place as a kind of rearrangement of stones, it overpowers the place. Does the salmon reveal a place of great power and contemplation? Despite the beauty of the stone fish, the artist’s efforts seem misplaced, even monstrous. In October of the fourth year, when the stone fish is finally

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complete, the salmon return upstream to spawn, but the solitary artist sees that thousands of spawning salmon are turning around in the river, turning away from his monumental sculpture and the blocked section of the river. In an instant, he realizes that the entire project has been an act of desperation, that “the presence of the stone fish . . . had offended” the migrating salmon, that it is a monument to his own “irreverence,” and that the sculpture must seem “hopelessly presumptuous.” Rather than being an order born out of the place, it is “an order born out of fear, understood even by salmon, to be discarded as quickly as nightmares so that life could go on” (54). The artist makes one significant gesture of obedience to the “ravages of the upstream journey,” removing the obsidian pupils from the giant salmon’s lapis eyes and dropping them into the rushing river. Slowly, the narrator tells us, the artist reclaims his life by balancing “the stonework of Machu Picchu against the directionless flight of butterflies” (54). “The Salmon” suggests that Lopez fully appreciates the vision of Richard Long because the writer and artist share a humility and a seriousness in their pursuit of order. Lopez calls that “the order of dreams” rather than “an order born out of fear.” It is an order that opens the artist to experience, to process, to the shifting dimensions of perspective. An order that rearranges space, sees time as arrow or as sphere, line or circle. An order that helps us to form the long line of what we are.

Chapter eight

Mapping Home Ground

Landscape and Memory In the essay “The American Geographies,” Barry Lopez explores the paradox between Americans’ “faulty grasp of geographical knowledge” and “the intimate, apparently contradictory familiarity of a group of largely anonymous people.” The paradox is not simply a confusion of scale or an ironic disjunction between national and local knowledge. It is darker. The large-scale sense of national landscape, “a patriotic, national vision of unspoiled, untroubled land,” in effect silences the “rigor of their local geographies” and makes our collective ignorance excusable, even normative (ATL 133). Lopez sees this kind of ignorance as a crucial failure, part of a sinister marketing of the land as a generic form of consumer entertainment. The fault does not lie solely with the modern world, either; from the very beginning of European settlement, the false, imposed, nostalgic vision of America has denied “hundreds of separate, independent native traditions” in favor of “dictates of Progress like Manifest Destiny, and laws like the Homestead Act which reflected a poor understanding of the physical lay of the land” (137). Thus the intimacy of local knowledge includes local history, the history of how real people have lived in the real landscape. Like the paradox of American geographies themselves, the tone of Lopez’s meditation oscillates between hope and despair, seeking a balancing point between the poles. So, for instance, the writer recognizes the dark threats in American ignorance, but he also finds “a great sense of hope” in traveling over the country, and that hope springs from the integrity of “a single person’s local knowledge.” In fact, Lopez even sees a “growing countercurrent” to the mainstream of false, simulated geographies (138). 143

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But he returns to the real threats to the land and to the challenges of those bearing witness: “A testament of minor voices can clear away an ignorance of any place, can inform us of its special qualities; but no voice, by merely telling a story, can cause the poisonous wastes that saturate some parts of the land to decompose, to evaporate. This responsibility falls ultimately to the national community, a vague and fragile entity to be sure, but one that, in America, can be ferocious in exerting its will” (142). The deep knowledge of geography that underlies authentic storytelling creates “a sense of place and a sense of community. Both are indispensable to a state of well-being, an individual’s and a country’s” (142). The stakes of Lopez’s ethical geography could not be higher. Ethical responsibility, so often considered only in individual terms, extends to the landscape and to the entire country. Moreover, the word “country” extends in meaning to include every aspect of the national community, human and other than human. The country includes national and local histories, cultural and natural histories, and innumerable ways of knowing. These are some of the principal senses of the word in the final paragraph of “The American Geographies”: If I were to now visit another country, I would ask my local companion, before I saw any museum or library, any factory or fabled town, to walk me in the country of his or her youth, to tell me the names of things and how, traditionally, they have been fitted together in a community. I would ask for the stories, the voice of memory over the land. I would ask to taste the wild nuts and fruits, to see their fishing lures, their bouquets, their fences. I would ask about the history of storms there, the age of the trees, the winter color of the hills. Only then would I ask to see the museums. I would want first the sense of a real place, to know the land first, the real geography, and take some measure of the love of it in my companion before I stood before the paintings or read works of scholarship. I would want to have something real and remembered against which I might hope to measure their truth. (143)

Here Lopez imagines the role of a geographic novice, asking questions and voicing the deep desire for knowledge. The novice focuses on the “real and remembered” place, the “real geography,” as the standard against which to measure cultural accomplishments. The figure of the novice combines a lyric style, marked by syntactic repetition and vivid imagery, with a hardheaded demand for the real country. In addition, the local companion in this paragraph strongly recalls Corlis Benefideo in “The Mappist” and the

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enlightened hermit in “The Orrery.” In all three texts, a local genius of American landscape shows a novice the shape and sense of the country. In “The Mappist,” the sense of place depends on Benefideo’s maps, which “reveal the foundations beneath the ephemera” (LAC 159). As we saw earlier, in “The Orrery” the hermit creates an earth map, a cosmic orrery formed out of the stones and wind of the Sonoran desert. In both stories, the map makers are local geniuses of the landscape, able to form maps out of their experiences of the land. This is precisely the kind of “mapping with/in” described by the phenomenologist Edward S. Casey: “A map with/in proceeds by adumbration rather than by indication: by indefinite indirection rather than by definite direction. Instead of the land (or sea or city) as a discrete entity or the relationships among the locales themselves, what is mapped here is one’s experience of such locales. . . . To map with/in is to furnish an earth-map of a given place or region: a re-presentation in some specific medium of what it is like to be there in a bodily concrete way” (Earth-Mapping xxi). The earth-mappings of Lopez’s short stories accord with Casey’s phenomenological description, in each case evoking the aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual dimensions of place. In both “The Mappist” and “The Orrery,” the novice/narrator learns “what it is like to be there” and, “in a bodily concrete way,” encounters an extraordinary act of mapping. In both, moreover, the act of mapping is also an important act of retrieval or recovery, restoring a sense of balance to the novice’s life. The missing component in “The Mappist” and “The Orrery” seems at first to be community. True, “The Mappist” ends with Benefideo’s accurate analysis of narrator Philip Trevino’s “lost generation” and his challenge to Trevino to find his own “way of seeing the world” (LAC 161). In a subtle way, the combined sense of potential redemption and new community comes in the last paragraph of the story, as Trevino leaves the mappist behind: I inverted the image of the map from his letter in my mind and began driving south to the highway. After a few moments I turned off the headlights and rolled down the window. I listened to the tires crushing gravel in the roadbed. The sound of it helped me hold the road, together with instinct and the memory of earlier having driven it. I felt the volume of space beneath the clear, star-ridden sky, and moved over the dark prairie like a barn-bound horse. (162)

In part 1, we saw how this passage can be linked to the luminous landscape photographs of Robert Adams, Emmet Gowin, and Linda Connor. Now it becomes clear that Trevino is transformed by his encounter with Corlis

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Benefideo and his maps. He no longer needs the visual, drawn map of his location; now he is experiencing the map itself by turning off the headlights and listening to the tires on gravel. Sound combines with instinct and memory, and these three phenomenological components of the experience create an expansive sense of place. The place becomes a map of the narrator’s position “beneath the clear, star-ridden sky,” and Trevino’s transformation from lost to found is figured by his moving “over the dark prairie like a barnbound horse,” the image evoking the sure-footed return across home ground. Trevino’s transforming experience within the dark prairie recalls the ways in which Richard Long’s walks become complex artistic mappings of place. Lopez interprets Long’s walks as offering “a sensation—about volumetric space, about both the arrow and the sphere of time, and about activity of one sort or another—changes in weather, for example.”1 The analysis could easily describe Trevino’s aural, mental mapping of the way home and his discovery of a new sense of community. In Lopez’s stories and Long’s walks, the concept of mapping expands to include a number of creative processes. Thus Long’s walks are earth artworks, and they are also examples of Casey’s “mapping with/in,” a point that connects them directly to the end of “The Mappist” and, of course, to the earth-mapping of “The Orrery.” The stories and walks map the experience of place in bodily, concrete terms. An important example of earth-mapping in Lopez’s work, the collaborative project Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (2006), involves some forty-five writers in addition to the editors, Lopez and Debra Gwartney. In alphabetical order, the book presents hundreds of terms for landscape features, many of them specific to particular places. Thus the first entry, ‘a‘a-, describes a “rubblelike” lava that “moves with a sound like crockery breaking” and is known by Hawaiians for its unforgiving nature. Still, “‘a‘a- fields have traditionally been used to grow sweet potato: Hawaiian farmers constructed trails across them made of smooth stepping stones, piled compost in the rubble, and planted seeds” (HG 2–3). The author of the entry, Pamela Frierson, was raised in Hawai‘i and has written extensively on the volcanoes in the Hawaiian archipelago (HG 440). The last entry in the book, zigzag rocks, describes the series of low, chevron-shaped dams built by Native Americans to funnel fish into weirs placed at the apexes. The author, Susan Brind Morrow, notes that “a staggered sequence of such separate weirs might extend a half mile or more downriver, as was once the case on a stretch of the Susquehanna near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.” The landscape features may be, as Morrow remarks in this case, a mark of “human interaction with the Earth” (398). Many of the entries use specific landscapes to develop the definition of a particular term, and many use the author’s own experience as

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an element of the definition. Thus the authors of Home Ground function in the same way as the “local geniuses of the landscape” that Lopez evokes in “The American Geographies.” The authors do not pretend to be all-knowing in their definitions, even though a bibliographic note at the end of the volume shows that they researched their terms in standard geographical dictionaries, as well as specific literary and technical sources (401–05). The vocabulary of Home Ground could be interpreted as a kind of earth-mapping, and the project as a whole could be described as a form of “memorial mapping” of the American landscape.2 Rather than mapping a relationship between an original place and a finished artwork that memorializes the place, however, in this instance the entries of Home Ground commit to memory the landscape terms and their meanings. Moreover, the entries entrust the terms and meanings to a community of interested readers. By creating a community of local geniuses who map the landscape for a parallel community of readers, the project creates an even larger sense of community and intimacy than existed before. These expansive concerns crystallize in Lopez’s introduction to Home Ground (xv–xxiv). Not surprisingly, the imagery of maps runs through the essay, from a contrasting pair of maps at the Native Language Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks to Lopez’s abiding interest in Erwin Raisz’s hand-drawn landform maps. These landform maps, drawn during the twenty years Raisz was teaching cartography at Harvard University, are best known for their artistic qualities, variety of typefaces, and level of fine detail. Lopez remarks that a Raisz map from 1941, Landforms of the Northwestern States, depicts “a fabled land, a place that, like a palimpsest, lies invisible beneath all the commercial roadmaps I’ve used over the years” (xix). But for Lopez the graphics are only part of the map’s appeal. Raisz’s language mixes colloquial and formal terms for the landscape features he labels on the map, and place-names contribute to the curious “sense of belonging” that radiates from the map (xx). As Lopez meditates on Raisz’s maps, the language of landscape features, whether of rock or of water, becomes another kind of earth-mapping. The retrieval of specific terms also retrieves a deep sense of intimacy and belonging from which the terms spring. And that is to create a verbal version of the “mapping with/in” that Edward Casey praises as a hallmark of contemporary earth art. Thus a triple danger lies in losing the specific vocabulary, since to do so would mean the loss of intimacy and belonging, and that loss would suggest the loss of a sense of community joining human beings to the places they inhabit. Language becomes the medium for mapping the landscape as well as the means for preserving the land.

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As in “The American Geographies,” Lopez closes the introduction to Home Ground by moving between warning and hope. The warning concerns the language “collapsing toward an attenuated list of almost nondescript words—valley, lake, mountain. Used along with ‘like a,’ these words now stand in for glade, tank, and escarpment” (xxiii). But the loss is more than linguistic. It leads to the loss of the landforms themselves: “At a time when the country’s landscapes are increasingly treated as commodities, subjected to a debate over their relative and intrinsic worth, and when city planners, land conservators, real estate developers, and indigenous title holders square off every day over the fate of one place or another, this can’t be good” (xxiii). Lopez finds hope in the “community of writers,” not because of the definitive expertise they bring to the landscape terms, but because “in concert with each other, they wanted to suggest the breadth and depth of a language many of us still seek to use purposefully every day. Their intent was to celebrate and inform, and to point us toward the great body of work which they perused in their research and which, along with a life experience of their own, they brought into play to craft what they had to say” (xxiv). In Lopez’s view, then, Home Ground is an exercise in community mapping. The local landscapes are the material and the shape of the country, but equally important are the voices and perspectives gathered in the book. The project itself—concrete, specific, as detailed as a Raisz landform map—delivers a communal sense of belonging to the American landscape. Thus Home Ground adumbrates the other country underlying the country’s generalized landscapes.

Memorial Mappings Earth-mapping can take the shape of a walk, a circle or spiral of stones, or a collection of essays. As a form of memorial mapping, the earth-map takes on an even larger dimension by becoming a ceremony of reconciliation. Such a dimensional expansion is specific to the landscape and history that are being mapped and memorialized, and it is necessarily complex. Lopez’s recent work provides a series of maps to this new dimension of earthmapping in three ways. First, the essay “Effleurage: The Stroke of Fire” (1998) traces Lopez’s introduction to the work of the ceramic artist Richard Rowland, bringing together ideas of place, a community of artists, and art as a mapping process. Second, Lopez’s essay “Out West” (2006) directly relates the landscapes of the American West to the necessity of remembering massacres of Native Americans, so that the geography of the West merges with a renewed, “outside” sense of history. Finally, from 2006 to 2007 Rowland

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and Lopez collaborated to create ceremonial pots and pitchers from the north Texas slaughter ground of Tule Canyon, which ultimately served as gifts of reconciliation to the Comanche Nation. Thus the combination of ceramics and words creates a map of remembrance and reconciliation. First published in Harper’s (January 1998) and collected alongside “The American Geographies” in About This Life, “Effleurage” takes us through Richard Rowland’s artistic process of collecting wood and burning it in a huge anagama Dragon Kiln, stoking the fire and firing ceramic sculptures and pottery for seventy-two hours or longer, and then opening the kiln to unload or “draw” the works, which “come forth sintered, flashed, scorched, ash-decorated, swollen, fatigued, and composed” (ATL 168). The essay delivers the shape of the process as if it were one firing, but in fact Lopez’s account summarizes more than two years of his participation in the work. His specific function is to collect and deliver firewood, and he is clearly practiced and skilled with the hand tools and power equipment necessary for working up firewood. His other, implicit task is to observe and record the ways in which the Dragon Kiln creates a community: “The idea that the individual ceramic artist possesses genius and that the kiln is a servant technology, long the prevailing European view, is replaced at the Dragon Kiln by the idea of a community of artists working alongside a powerful and enigmatic partner” (152). No mere thing or instrument, the Dragon Kiln recalls the necessary dragon of Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, the epigraph to Winter Count. Like a monster of imagination, the Dragon Kiln becomes the equal partner of the community of artists working alongside it. All the elements that make up the story—the Dragon Kiln, the wood, the ceramic artworks fired within, the stackers and stokers—reveal the specific dimensions of coastal Oregon, and several times in the essay they coalesce to form a yet larger pattern: One evening, stoking at a sideport and taking a few extra moments— with the head stoker’s permission—to stare into the fire with a pair of welder’s glasses, I actually saw the current of white heat moving slowly through the kiln. It flowed visibly around sculpture, vases, and kimchi jars, stroking the larger pieces, as Jack [Lopez’s pseudonym for Rowland] had described. It moved through like a storm front unfolding over low hills and a wooded plain, a silent susurration. The head stoker signaled me to close the port. He didn’t want to lose temperature. (162)

Lopez’s perception of the kiln balances figuratively between living being and landscape, in both instances an entity containing a living current of white heat. The “stroking” of white heat echoes the personification of the

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Dragon Kiln and parallels the title, “Effleurage,” giving a healing bodily presence to the artistic process. In another significant passage, Lopez figures the kiln and the creative fire within it as “the map that eludes an observer, and to a lesser degree the participants” (163). The concrete elements of Oregon, as well as the resolutely private identities of the participants, direct us to processes that are powerfully elemental, a combination of forces that are “pervasive, unruly, and beautiful,” perhaps even “salvific” (155). Rowland phrases these ideas in a written statement: “The wood-fire kiln is the window that opens into this beautiful dynamic place. Through this window I’m allowed to participate and engage in this fundamental process. Between the living layers of expression, the kiln holds me, somewhat like a rock might be held in the middle of the river’s flow” (171). In addition to place, a second crucial element in the essay is the shifting role of Lopez himself as observer, participant, reporter, and novice. That last role is especially important for the essay. As in short stories like “The Mappist” and “The Orrery,” the narrator functions as an initiate, learning the rituals and values of a particular art. Narrating his first encounter with Jack, for example, Lopez writes that “I knew I was at the edge of something right away, a kind of knowledge I didn’t have but which I might intuit” (158). He is also able to assess his own learning process: In the beginning, probably like any outsider, I perceived a relatively seamless group of fifteen or so people ebbing and flowing in their emotions through a firing, all of them clearly at ease with one another and enjoying one another’s company. (Very few human events anymore, of course, bring people together this intensely for this long on a regular basis.) But over the two years I attended firings, I saw people who didn’t have much to offer except their pots eased gently out of the group; and I watched others struggle with new responsibilities as a fire boss. . . . What always seemed praiseworthy about this polyglot group, what overrode any individual failing, was their willingness to work, to cooperate, to give in to one another. And Jack was the exemplar. (166)

In this reading, Jack becomes the figure of a local genius, a reading that Lopez encourages by portraying him as a communal, local artist. If Rowland is akin to a character like Corlis Benefideo, then Lopez resembles the questing Philip Trevino. Unlike the figures in “The Mappist” and “The Orrery,” however, the communal artist does not necessarily recede into anonymity or the life of a hermit

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sage. Describing Jack’s slide presentation at a local gallery, for instance, Lopez praises Richard Rowland in terms that recall his descriptions of artists like Robert Adams, Linda Connor, Alan Magee, and Richard Long: By the end of the show, Jack’s allegiance to his community, his regard for physical labor, and his preoccupation with the processes rather than the objects of life have been reiterated on several levels. It’s apparent he works every idea he has through the filter of local materials, local geography, local people. No artist I’ve ever met flies so completely in the face of a tradition of the elite, or so completely ignores elitism as a worthy or desirable goal. What he is looking for, he makes clear, is a reintegration of “man” and “nature,” something like the conformity between a river and its bed. And in this he is as unconscious and striking a protégé of Thoreau as possibly exists in the world of American art. (173)

The passage brings Rowland and Lopez into close accord in their appreciation for the beauty of the commonplace, and in that way both artists are protégés of Thoreau. Their accord is evident in Lopez’s admiration both for Rowland and for the community of artists he creates through the Dragon Kiln. In the figure of Thoreau, moreover, Lopez refuses to see a lone genius or solitary artist. Instead, the specific artistic legacy bespeaks a transgenerational community of integrative artists. Finally, the river image directly echoes Lopez’s description of the white heat in the Dragon Kiln and Rowland’s own statement about his artistic process: “Between the living layers of expression, the kiln holds me, somewhat like a rock might be held in the middle of the river’s flow” (171). For Lopez, as for Rowland, the community of artists extends, with intense and steady force, across temporal and formal boundaries. This expansive flow of creative power is most evident in the imagery of the river and its bed. Thus Rowland feels a strong attachment to his local river and seeks to “take the physical sensation and translate it” into art (170). In a pattern of reintegration and transformation, Lopez employs the key image of the river to close the essay. Returning home late at night from Jack’s house, Lopez walks down to the bank of the McKenzie River to sit in the dawn silence: “In that morning stillness, the hesitation of breath that bridges night and day, I heard a characteristic river sound, a sound that can be unsettling at night and which in daylight is often dismissed as something else. It is a shifting on the cobble bottom of the river, a muffled thud coming from a place where the current has prized a rock loose and wedged it differently

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in the bed” (174). Like the Dragon Kiln, the river acts as a sentient partner in an inclusive, integrating process of creation. The integrative power of landscape as a sentient process plays a vital role in Lopez’s memorial mappings. In “Out West,” the catalogue essay in Emily Ballew Neff’s book for the exhibition The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890–1950, Lopez engages in a thorough remapping of the American West, especially focusing on the “slaughter grounds” of the 1860s and 1870s. By visiting massacre sites over a period of several years, Lopez gains a troubling, disjunctive perspective on contemporary art. The essay charts Lopez’s journey toward reintegration, toward a recognition of the “violent ghost history of Manifest Destiny” (“Out West” 3) and the necessity of combining geography with history. In this reading, “Out West” becomes an exemplar of memorial mapping, supported in part by Lopez’s acute knowledge of revisionist histories created by writers, historians, and photographers of the 1970s and 1980s. Lopez names Robert Adams’s exhibition To Make It Home as one exemplary instance of the sensibility to the “actual place” (“Out West” 4). The list expands to include works by Wallace Stegner and his many famous students, by contemporary literary critics such as Annette Kolodny, and by earlier writers like Willa Cather. It includes historians like Stephen Pyne and cultural geographers like Keith Basso. In “Out West,” Lopez figures himself as a young writer driving across the western United States, carrying this alternative list of works “like another set of road maps” (4). The maps lead him to fresh understandings of landscape, history, and place. The geographical revisions are as disconcerting as they are heartening. Lopez recognizes the pervasive misgivings about the long struggle “to impose lines on volumes of space unfamiliar to the European imagination, the conceptual and technical effort it took to bring together the very far away and the intimate nearby when they were not connected by conventional human culture, by farming and roads” (5). But the artworks in The Modern West lead Lopez to a new perception, one of “lament, the kind of lament that lies within the foundation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, that we are still so far from where we wish to be as a people”: The approach taken to our dilemma in this show, it seemed to me, made the following assumption. In order to serve Progress, it has been necessary for us actively to refute the assertion of indigenous North American cultures that the land is sentient. The artists’ recognition in The Modern West, then, of a spiritual dimension to western space leads us to consider that this refutation might be perilous. If place is stripped of geography,

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and if geography is stripped of spirit, any destructive scheme for profit will fly. The ghost towns, tailings piles, clear-cuts, emptied lakes, bomb craters, and devastated working lives of the West tell us this is so. (5)

Lopez maps the exhibition with the perspective gained from his reading of revisionist intellectuals and from his direct experience of places themselves. Thus he undertakes an “orientation trip” during the winter from 2004 to 2005, before the exhibition opens. The experience gives him a sense of remaining a stranger to many of the places and their accumulated, hidden meanings, but it confirms his other sense, that the country in winter is sentient and spirited: “On leaving some of the isolated landscapes I tried so hard to observe, I often sharply sensed that I remained a stranger there, and that I would always. Still, I’d leave with the stranger’s ardent wish after experiencing such numinous events, the traveler’s insistent plea: Don’t forget me” (7). The implied reciprocity in that plea suggests the reintegrating power of place, but it remains a plea. Distance works alongside intimacy, and their relationship cannot be mapped by a spatial grid. The massacre at Tule Canyon in September 1874 becomes one of Lopez’s most long-lived memorial mappings, one that is in fact still continuing. In “Out West,” he gives a thumbnail account of the slaughter: “At Tule Canyon, Texas, having burned the homes, winter food stores, and clothing of hundreds of Southern Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche people wintering at nearby Palo Duro Canyon, Col. Randal Mackenzie ordered his troopers to shoot eleven hundred Indian horses and mules he had captured and cordoned off in a box canyon. Some of the tightly bunched animals took days to die” (2). Lopez recalls the slaughter of horses and mules twice more in the essay. First, he recounts his visit to the Cheyenne massacre site on the Washita River in Oklahoma. On November 27, 1868, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led a raid on a Cheyenne village, killing some 875 horses and mules (3–4). The striking resemblance to Mackenzie’s slaughter at Tule Canyon suggests a consistent military strategy and government policy. Second, he visits Bureau of Land Management wild-horse corrals near Burns, Oregon, at the end of his orientation trip. This second echo, more personal and lyrical than the first, is telling in its detailed descriptions of the horses and the site, and it subtly evokes the internment of Native Americans by the United States Cavalry: “I watched the bewildered hundred and fifty of them, mestizo creatures, their lower lips newly tattooed with purple numbers, their future no longer their own, their meaning no longer theirs to define, until I was too cold to sit the fences and the cowboys were ready to be gone” (7). Though the description

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strikes a haunting tone of regret, it does not actually close the essay, and the mapping project continues in ways that redefine place and its meanings.

Maps of Reconciliation In the case of Palo Duro and Tule Canyons, Lopez’s memorial mapping takes on a new form and a deeper significance in a ceremony of reconciliation. The process itself involves several parts, each of which plays an important ceremonial role in mapping and redefining home ground. The mapping includes practical, ethical, and even bureaucratic matters, and it includes the kind of aesthetic and spiritual gestures that contribute fundamentally to forming communities. While they are not the kind of details we might usually associate with aesthetic communities, the practical aspects of the Palo Duro and Tule mapping are fundamental to the success of the ceremony of reconciliation, which ultimately took place on September 9, 2007. Beginning in 2003, Lopez used his new appointment as Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Texas Tech to ask the university to consider what kind of relationship it was maintaining with the Comanche people. That question led faculty, administrators, and students associated with the Honors College and the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech Library to negotiate a new relationship with the Comanche Nation, formalized in a memorandum of agreement in 2006. The memorandum of agreement details a set of specific reciprocal relationships between Comanche Nation College and Texas Tech University. These include the importance of the Comanche way of knowing for Texas Tech students; the ability of Comanche Nation College students to transfer to Texas Tech; the role of Comanche elders in teaching ethno­ botany and ethnomusicology to students and scholars at both institutions; the consultation with Comanche elders by curators at the Texas Tech Ranching Heritage Center and Southwest Collection; and the participation of Comanche elders and scholars in Texas Tech University planning on the use of natural and cultural resources, especially the future of water on the Llano Estacado.3 The memorandum of agreement maps several practical means for developing the educational and cultural relationships between the Comanche Nation and Texas Tech University. A second fundamental aspect of the mapping project is the role of communities. The three-year process leading to the memorandum of agreement builds upon the personal relationships of Lopez with, among others, Texas Tech artist Andy Wilkinson, Comanche Nation College artist and professor Juanita Padhopony, Comanche elder Harry Mithlo, and Richard Rowland.

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The process leading to the ceremony of reconciliation involves all these figures and many more besides. All the members of the communities are necessary to the success of the ceremony and to the continuing process of reconciliation between the Comanche Nation and Texas Tech University. Anonymous Texas Tech students gathering mesquite wood from the Llano Estacado are as fundamental to the process as nominal leaders. Third, place exerts a profound influence on the participants and on the shape the ceremony eventually takes. Early in the process, Lopez fastened upon Palo Duro and Tule Canyons as the twin locus for a mapping of recon­ ciliation. After visiting the sites alone, he invited Richard Rowland to walk with him in Tule Canyon. Lopez describes the visit in a letter to a reporter for the Comanche Nation News: “I hoped the canyon might teach us the right way to think about the killing of the horses. I couldn’t really understand what I was looking for, but I knew that in the company of my friend and in a humble frame of mind, we might see something that neither man could see alone. When we visited the canyon in February 2006, Richard and I scattered tobacco in the four directions and asked the spirits there to take pity on us and guide us to an understanding of what would be pleasing as a gift to the Comanche people.”4 In this description, the ceremonial scattering of tobacco in the four directions is an act of humility and prayer for guidance. In a similar way, novelist Henry Chappell describes the ceremonial scattering as a silent prayer: “The personal nature of the moment seemed fitting, for the Comanche recognized no overarching cosmology. Rather, they simply acknowledged the mystery of life, offered their hopes and fears to individual protective spirits, and allowed others the same privilege.”5 Rowland is the focus in Lopez’s telling of the visit because the two friends walked the canyon in search of clay for firing ceremonial pottery. They also hunted for and found bones of animals—coyote, deer, bobcat, and horses. Lopez describes the bones as “emerging from the earth,” and when he and Rowland gathered the bones and clay, they put tobacco in the “places where they emerged.”6 In the metaphorical pattern of emergence, the sense of human purpose blends with the guiding spirit of the place: I was conscious, all the time I was trying to understand the nature of this ceremony, that I had no right to disturb the spirits in the canyon. Still, I asked the spirits to guide us. I believed that if Richard and I acted in a humble manner and acknowledged our ignorance, the spirits would guide us in the right direction, they would show us a path that was respectful both of the canyon and of the Comanche people. That day we were in the canyon, I felt the horses were coming up out of the ground and saying, “Take us home, now. We want to go home.”7

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In Lopez’s verbal mapping, the horses’ desire to return home emerges as the most profound spiritual aspect of the February visit, and Tule Canyon emerges as a powerful version of home ground. The role of place both expands and concentrates in the communal process of creating the ceremonial pots and pitchers. For nearly two years, Rowland worked on designing the ceramics and firing different types of pottery from the clay gathered at Tule Canyon.8 Then, for the final firing at the anagama Dragon Kiln in Astoria, Oregon, Lopez and Rowland collected beaver sticks near their homes, and Comanche elder Harry Mithlo collected beaver sticks from Cache Creek on the Comanche reservation in Lawton, Oklahoma. In addition, on an earlier occasion Lopez gathered mesquite sticks on the Llano Estacado with students from Texas Tech’s Honors College and shipped them to Rowland. During the final seven-day firing, Harry Mithlo and Andy Wilkinson traveled to Oregon and fed the kiln fire with the beaver sticks from Cache Creek. Perhaps most crucially, according to Henry Chappell, in preparing the final firing Rowland “lined the floor of his kiln with caliche, the caprock of the High Plains. He placed inside the vessels bits of antler and bone from Tule Canyon, and scattered other pieces of bone, antler, and beaver wood about the floor of the kiln. As the clay heated, the bone and antler were absorbed into the bottoms of the vessels and the walls were bathed in particles of burning bone, so that Tule Canyon was drawn ‘way up inside.’ The coastal wind went into the vessels as well, a gift from the artist’s homeland, for wind—not bellows—nourishes the kiln fire”9 (plate 2.2). In Kurt Caswell’s account, Harry Mithlo recognizes the home ground of Tule Canyon immediately: When Mithlo arrived in Oregon, he walked into Rowland’s studio to have a look at some of the work from previous firings. There he found some fifty or more pots made by various potters in the community who fired their work in Rowland’s kiln. Only a few of the pots in the studio were made from the clay dug in Tule Canyon. According to Lopez, Mithlo walked right up them. He didn’t know what he was looking at. He said: “Hey, this pot looks just like a place down there in Texas, Tule Canyon.” That’s when Lopez and Rowland knew they had finished their work. “The quality of Richard’s work was remarkable,” Lopez said. “He got that canyon exactly.” (Caswell 869)

These several layers of home ground are gathered up and reenacted at the Medicine Park Ceremonial Grounds near Lawton, Oklahoma, on September 9, 2007. As the principal organizer of the ceremony of

Plate 2.1.  Waterlines, 1989 © Richard Long / Imperial College Healthcare Charity Art Collection, London / Bridgeman Images.

Plate 2.2.  Comanche Reconciliation Ceremony Pot © Richard Rowland, photo courtesy of Southwest Collection / Special Collections Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, Comanche Reconciliation Ceremony Collection, Box 1.

Plate 2.3.  Milepost 175, Old Man Camp © Ben Huff, courtesy of the artist.

Plate 2.4.  Milepost 315, Chandalar Shelf © Ben Huff, courtesy of the artist.

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reconciliation, Lopez wrote a script that carefully combines improvisation and cooperation, featuring speeches, songs, dances, and a procession. As a text, the script is remarkable for its tone of respect for the Comanche Nation, its acknowledgment of the important roles played by members of the two communities, and the writer’s wish to speak as a respectful outsider. In one of his first statements, for example, Lopez acknowledges his struggle and asks for help from the two cultures: “We are trying to be here in a sacred manner today. We have come to honor the Comanche people and to ask if you will hear our words. We are calling on the traditions of integrity in our culture, and we are asking you to call on your ancestors, that we may live up to their expectations today.”10 As in the other accounts of Palo Duro and Tule Canyons, Lopez uses storytelling as a form of memorial mapping to establish the ground on which he stands: “We are mindful as visitors of what happened at Palo Duro Canyon and at Tule Canyon in September 1874. It is only one small part, we understand, of the story of the Comanche Nation, but it is an important part, and the story of what happened to Comanche horses, on September 30th of that year, has been teaching us. It has been on our minds.”11 The memorial mapping within the ceremony combines the story of the 1874 massacre and the story of seeking reconciliation through the community of artists. In the script, Lopez asks Chairman Wallace Coffey of the Comanche Nation for “permission as an outsider to tell the story of what happened at Tule Canyon,” and he joins that telling with the story of creating the ceremonial pitchers and pots. In the letter to the Comanche Nation News reporter, Lopez describes the ceramic vessels as symbolizing “a connection between two cultures.”12 Rowland’s communal process of integration and reconciliation is embodied in the clay, bones, ash, and wind of the ceramic pitchers and pots. In Henry Chappell’s view, moreover, water from the Ogallala Aquifer, shared by the Comanche and the Texas Tech community, creates a second symbolic connection: “At each of the cardinal points around the ceremonial ground, a Comanche veteran holding one of the clay pots stood with a Texas Tech representative holding a clay pitcher full of water.”13 In the script of the ceremony, Lopez prepares for these communal meanings by recounting the making of the ceramics and bringing that process to the present moment: “Now we are here. We would like to present these clay pots to the Comanche Nation as symbols of our respect and symbols of our effort to understand and to cooperate, as the president said, for the sake of our children. We want to pour water from the Llano’s aquifer into the pots while you hold them, as a way of saying we are all part of the Earth. Now we are asking to stand together with you.”14

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Finally, through the presentation of the clay pots and the pouring of the water from pitchers to pots, the Comanche and Texas Tech representatives do indeed “stand together.” In addition, Lopez’s script makes clear that the authority for conducting the ceremonial acts of reconciliation resides in the Comanche hosts: “Chairman Coffey calls upon four members of the Comanche Indian Veterans Association and asks each one to take a pot and then to walk out to one of the four cardinal points on the perimeter of the ceremonial ground and stand.” When the Texas Tech representatives join the veterans, Coffey directs drummers and singers to perform a “song that dates from the Comanches’ encounter with buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls, Texas, in 1864.” Then Coffey “directs the water to be poured, and asks that the pitchers be completely drained into the pots. At the conclusion of the song he asks the Comanche veterans to pour the water onto the ground.”15 Even though the ceremony still featured several more parts, such as the presentation of four Pendleton blankets to Comanche elders, Lopez fastens upon the pouring of the water as the critical moment and adumbrates the authority of the Comanche hosts as the essential element. Thus in his description of the ceremony for the Comanche Nation News reporter, Lopez concludes by noting “it was Chairman Coffey who saw the right way for the ceremony to conclude. He told the Comanche men who were holding the pots full of water to pour the water onto the ground.”16 Through the entire process of memorial mapping, Lopez is both guide and guided, observer and participant, and the idea of place functions as his major partner in the mapping. The ceremony of reconciliation between the Comanche Nation and Texas Tech University is significant in itself, but equally important is Lopez’s carefully respectful process of remapping the home ground of the Comanche. Without ever losing sight of his own place as a visitor, both to Texas Tech and to the Comanche Nation, he manages to bring together two cultures, two histories, and two ways of perceiving and knowing the landscape. This is to see the artist and storyteller as a peacemaker, as a builder of new communities. But perhaps most telling, it is to appreciate how close Lopez comes to the complex role he sees in Richard Rowland, an artist who displays his “allegiance to his community, his regard for physical labor, and his preoccupation with the processes rather than the objects of life. . . . It’s apparent he works every idea he has through the filter of local materials, local geography, local people” (“Effleurage” 173). This is to suggest, finally, that Lopez and Rowland create maps of reconciliation in their collaborative work, maps that point us in new directions, toward new places.

Chapter nine

Soundscapes and the Resonance of Place “Just as music can be language, language can be music.” —John Luther Adams

Acts of Integration In an unpublished piece titled “Biographical Information,” meant to accompany the submission of Crossing Open Ground (1988), Barry Lopez discusses the origins and writing of the fourteen magazine stories chosen for the book. The third essay, “Gone Back into the Earth,” originated in a rafting trip into the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon, but Lopez’s description moves beyond the trip and the essay: “Gone Back into the Earth” grew out of a friendship with the jazz musician Paul Winter. Paul wanted to travel down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in preparation for a recording project and urged me to join him, which I did. Paul subsequently made three more trips through the Canyon and produced an album from the project. I wrote this piece for the first issue of a new travel magazine, but ended up selling it to Notre Dame Magazine. On this trip with Paul I met a man named Mickey Houlihan, a sound engineer, and David Darling, a cellist. David and Mickey and I collaborated a year later on an album called River Notes, a reading of three stories from River Notes, with original music by David. (BLP Box 41, Folder 36) 159

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As other manuscript materials show, the raft trip took place from June 23 to July 2, 1980, and Lopez became very close to some of his companions and to the landscape of the canyon (Box 41, Folders 2–4). The essay “Gone Back into the Earth” is a relatively straightforward narrative that loops back to the beginning of the trip from the midpoint, then runs to the end of the journey on Lake Mead. Like the manuscript description of the essay’s origins, however, the narrative moves beyond the temporal dimension of ten days on the river to meditate on deep time, on the integrative connections of music to landscape, and on landscape as a source of unexpected healing. Early on, Lopez explains the setting of the essay by reflecting on the diverse group of forty-one travelers, “all but unknown to each other the first day,” rafting on the Colorado River: “We are together for two reasons: to run the Colorado River, and to participate with jazz musician Paul Winter, who initiated the trip, in a music workshop” (COG 43–44). He then integrates the two reasons with each other in three paragraphs: Winter is an innovator and a listener. He had thought for years about coming to the Grand Canyon, about creating music here in response to this particular landscape—collared lizards and prickly pear cactus, Anasazi Indian ruins and stifling heat. But most especially he wanted music evoked by the river and the walls that flew up from its banks—Coconino sandstone on top of Hermit shale on top of the Supai formations, stone exposed to sunlight, a bloom of photons that lifted colors—saffron and ochre, apricot, madder orange, pearl and gray green, copper reds, umber and terra-cotta browns—and left them floating in the air. Winter was searching for a reintegration of music, landscape and people. For resonance. Three or four times during the trip he would find it for sustained periods: drifting on a quiet stretch of water below Bass Rapids with oboist Nancy Rumbel and cellist David Darling; in a natural amphitheater high in the Muav limestone of Matkatameba Canyon; on the night of a full June moon with euphonium player Larry Roark in Blacktail Canyon. Winter’s energy and passion, and the strains of solo and ensemble music, were sewn into the trip like prevailing winds, like the canyon wren’s clear, whistled, descending notes, his glissando—seemingly present, close by or at a distance, whenever someone stopped to listen. (COG 44–45)

In this passage, descriptive and figurative language performs the act of integration. In the first paragraph, for example, the naming of fauna and flora, geological formations, and ancient inhabitants suddenly blooms and

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lifts into an array of floating colors. In the brief second and third paragraphs, Paul Winter’s search for musical reintegration resonates with the narrator’s verbal sewing together of music, landscape, and people through the image of the canyon wren’s song. Two specific descriptions in “Gone Back into the Earth” blend landscape, music, and people by expanding upon the moments of resonance listed in the second paragraph. In the first description, Lopez recounts Larry Roark’s solo in the dark, with David Darling, Nancy Rumbel, and Paul Winter coming up around him: For a while he is alone. God knows what visions of waterfalls or wrens, of boats in the rapids, of Bach or Mozart, are in his head, in his fingers, to send forth notes. The whine of the soprano sax finds him. And the flutter of the oboe. And the rumbling of the choral cello. The exchange lasts perhaps twenty minutes. Furious and sweet, anxious, rolling, delicate and raw. The last six or eight hanging notes are Larry’s. Then there is a long silence. Winter finally says, “My God.” (50)

This evocative description plays a number of integrative sounds and images, and it ultimately finds a kind of resting place both in Winter’s words and in the narrator’s immediate, silent response to the improvisation: “I feel, sitting in the wet dark in bathing suit and sneakers and T-shirt, that my fingers have brushed one of life’s deep, coursing threads. Like so much else in the canyon, it is left alone. Speak, even notice it, and it would disappear” (50). The ten tracks on the 1985 album Canyon suggest the imaginative integration made possible by the Paul Winter Consort and Paul Winter’s Living Music projects. After the initial rafting trip described in “Gone Back into the Earth,” Winter made three more trips through the Grand Canyon, recording much of the Grammy-nominated album in the landscape itself. Two tracks especially recall Lopez’s description of the scene in Blacktail Canyon. On “Bedrock Cathedral,” John Clark’s French horn runs for a two-minute solo of mellow-toned echoes that could have been recorded in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine or could be resounding against the walls of the Grand Canyon. On the following track, “River Run,” Clark’s French horn blends with the sounds of river water and the canyon wren before the entire Consort joins in a mellifluous, rhythmic chorus.1 In the final scene of the narrative, Lopez describes an impromptu concert on Scorpion Island in Lake Mead. As a thunderstorm approaches, Nancy Rumbel, Sterling Smyth, and David Darling play three solos, creating a final integration of music, landscape, and people:

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It rained the last evening. But before it did, Nancy Rumbel moved to the highest point on Scorpion Island in Lake Mead and played her oboe before a storm we could see hanging over Nevada. Sterling Smyth, who would return to programming computers in twenty-four hours, created a twelve-string imitation of the canyon wren, a long guitar solo. David Darling, revealed suddenly stark, again and then again, against a white-lightning sky, bowed furious homage to the now overhanging cumulonimbus. (52)

The scene leads to Lopez’s last reflections on the journey back into the earth. Waiting for a flight home to Oregon, he recalls Anasazi granaries at the mouth of Nankoweap Canyon and recognizes them as provision against famine. Then his sense of the Anasazi deepens and returns to the present, to what we need to survive. “I do not know,” he writes, “how we will survive without places like the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon to visit.” The experience of removing ourselves from our ordinary circumstances yields vital new perceptions: “To feel the stripping down, an ebb of the press of conventional time, a radical change of proportion, an unspoken respect for others that elicits keen emotional pleasure, a quick, intimate pounding of the heart” (52–53). Ultimately, the integration of music, landscape, and people leads to an ethical stance, but as the essay closes Lopez suggests that we first must hear a fundamental rhythm: “The living of life, any life, involves great and private pain, much of which we share with no one. In such places as the Inner Gorge the pain trails away from us. It is not so quiet there or so removed that you can hear yourself think, that you would even wish to; that comes later. You can hear your heart beat. That comes first” (53). One of the pleasures of reading “Gone Back into the Earth” is the way in which Lopez describes the sudden intimacy and community one can find by traveling with strangers in a strange landscape. As the “Biographical Information” note to Crossing Open Ground suggests, moreover, the journey of reading can lead to unexpected landscapes and people. The simple sentence “On this trip with Paul I met a man named Mickey Houlihan, a sound engineer, and David Darling, a cellist” does not mention the fact that David Darling, cellist for the Paul Winter Consort from 1970 to 1987, has collaborated with a host of musicians, writers, choreographers, and dancers. It leads, nevertheless, to the fact that Darling’s professional work with Mickey Houlihan continues to the present, and that recently the two won a Grammy Award for their 2009 album Prayer for Compassion.2 It leads to other important facts. Lopez collaborated with David Darling on two recording projects in the 1980s and 1990s. Mickey Houlihan

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brought the two artists together to record River Notes in 1981, soon after the rafting trip in the Grand Canyon. More recently, Lopez has recorded three other books with Highbridge Audiobooks, but the collaboration with Darling on River Notes is of a different order.3 This album features Lopez reading three stories from the 1979 collection: “Dawn,” “Drought,” and “The Log Jam.” Darling plays cello as a kind of choral accompaniment to the stories, weaving the music into Lopez’s reading and matching the changing tone of the stories. In “Drought,” for example, as the narrative reaches a climax, Darling’s playing becomes louder and more forceful. In the more meditative narrative of “Dawn,” on the other hand, the cello creates a continuous, subdued accompaniment. The collaborative nature of the recording appears in Lopez’s notes on his performance copy of the three stories, which mark pauses between paragraphs in the two shorter stories. In “The Log Jam,” each dated section carries a marker for tone, such as “poignant” for 1957 or “sinister” for 1964, and Lopez also marks the time for reading each section. In the final recorded version of “The Log Jam,” Darling plays an instrumental introduction and conclusion, each track less than ninety seconds long. The six sections of the story match Lopez’s performance notes closely in length, as does the overall length of the performance (BLP Box 28, Folder 18). The three stories from River Notes work especially well in the recording because all of them feature sound imagery. In “Dawn,” the senses of sight, touch, and smell are more powerfully represented than hearing, but sound plays an important role in “Drought” and “The Log Jam.” This paragraph from the performance copy of “Drought,” for example, is marked by two significant pauses and cello accompaniment: