Reaching Keet Seel by Reg Saner - Excerpts

Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin’s Echo and the Anasazi. Reg Saner. 1998. ISBN 0874805538

EXCERPTS

Over more than a dozen summers, with an occasional autumn thrown in, I have fed my pleasure on the ruins, the canyons and mesas of this book, as other work permitted. “Points along the way” were both places and stops toward answering two deceptively simple questions: “Why do I find these things so strangely moving?” and “What are they trying to tell us?”

If biblical minds agreed on one thing, it was that desert is demonic. To efface it utterly was to praise the Lord.

Odd that in this universe where maybe nothing is divine except what’s missing, our last few desert places seem profoundly blessed by what isn’t there. We now feel that truly to bring forth the fruit of such terrain is to agree that its silence and space are unimprovable. We say so any time we answer its hush with an attentive stillness, one wide and deep as respect.

Even assuming that religious emotions are indeed illusory, is human life possible without them? Their impulses seem so universal as to be innate, as if encoded genetically. Are they evolution’s protection against what evolution itself has created, reason’s analytical habit?

Any sacred building’s layout and symbols offer alignment, orientation. They give directions without saying a word.

Christianity, especially, identifies the sacred with “good,” whereas ancient Greeks and Pueblos – to cite parallel extremes – conceived the sacred in ways making “good” irrelevant, even absurd.

By projecting a secularized sacrality onto nature as a sort of benign whiff exuded from forests, vernal woods, or whitewater streams, we may forget that sacred power is traditionally grounded in the supernatural, whereas, and by definition, nature is natural. Yet a Hope leader could say, “The Hopi land is the Hopi religion,” because to Pueblos nature is never only natural.

All the same, though “bleak” should name my mood, it doesn’t. “Emptiness,” yes, and one I’m well content to sit quietly filled with. Its slight sadness feels like wisdom, as if that’s what I, too, had come to Chaco for.

No lands feel more desolate than those of the Hopi, no religion more beautiful or complex. That very desolation must have begotten such beauty and complexity. Encircled by utter indifference in every empty direction, you could feel yourself the least of beings, the merest speck; or you could sense yourself as the focus of spirits and sacred powers – without ceasing, however, to realize that in such vastitudes everyone’s daily affairs hither and yon around your tiny pueblo count for no more than the trickles of ant people busily seething round their anthill.

… is the sacred really self-love echoed back to sound like a call? A circular transaction? For me, its “place” exists anytime we stand at a center, the center of a moment: our own widest awareness of, and agreement to be, who and where we are.

Haven’t the gods always been made of our own limitations? No god has qualities a human wouldn’t find useful.

For most of humankind, wonders merely natural aren’t quite enough – as if our species sorely needs religious emotion to restore what analytical reason makes away with.

There are places you go, simply to be there. In the old days, such going toward was called pilgrimage.

Just as we living ones need the dead to remember us and help us with our lives, the gods rely on us mortals to sustain them.

If you believe there’s such a thing as desecration, you believe in the sacred.

Lots of rock, lots of sand, lots of wind, and very little rain can make juniper stands growing there, at the far end of possibility, an outpost of marginalized eccentrics.

There amid the deranged and violent I also discovered “good” trees battening on the same rimrock; witnessed all the living optimism, all the hurt joy that can scuffle upward out of such rock and suffer openly. In wresting a living from limestone’s long famines of rain, they must sometimes have felt that enduring there was next to impossible, but endure they had.

Mountains echo whatever you tell them, but desert space is always a listener, its only voice a quiet so unbroken it hushes you, thereby making you fit to enter.

Primitive? Yes, but wouldn’t it feel good to regress, to live among townsfolk where nobody had a job? Where instead of jobs, everybody has a life, and every life a clear purpose?

… an escape from self, the “me”. From the incessantly mumbling, grumbling, scheming, blithering first-person singular. It’s a brief but soothing release.

As for a New Mexico, Arizona, or Utah evening, your mood there can invest time’s barest necessities with an allure so narcotic you feel on the verge of understanding things no one will ever understand.

Questing toward some imagined Grand Happiness, we find it rarely if ever; meanwhile, a few blessed moments find us. They’re not anything we’d know how to look for. Besides, that’s not how it works. The blessed moments aren’t targetable. They just happen. Years later, merely recollecting them can summon us back to our best selves, but only if when they come, we’re not too busy to see them for what they are.

If you live long enough, you begin having days when it seems you may actually be getting some sense. How to act, how to see, what to care about. What truly matters.

Now comes the twist that makes endless questing for knowledge problematic. We assume that to know what, where, and why we are is a good thing. Is it? When ignorance is bliss, the proverb reminds us, “tis folly to be wise.” Despite such sayings, don’t we claim to follow “truth” wherever it leads? Or is that only a flattering mirage?

Even at a standstill you can feel it inside you: the road as verge, as threshold, making “destination” a mere pretext for the real business of going to meet it.

But for many of us four-wheeled, non-Native Americans, isn’t it true that our “center” and best mode of being is motion? Whose aim is less a place than simply the horizon.

A people who’ve survived desert conditions for ages are realists. You haven’t a choice. In desert, you become either a realist or a set of bleached bones. Paradoxically, you also come into kinship with a world of realities they eye has not seen …

Reg Saner Quotation

Strange - this nostalgia for ourselves as inanimate matter,
of which my brain consists, enlivened for a while by some solar quirk.


photo from: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/

The Four-Cornered Falcon by Reg Saner - Excerpts

The Four-Cornered Falcon: Essays on the Interior West and the Natural Scene. Reg Saner. 1994. ISBN 1-56836-049-5

EXCERPTS

The journal was private, and yet – like all journals – it secretly hoped for a reader.

Western terrain had long stirred in me a fairly passionate impulse to witness. There were also abiding curiosities that had wanted satisfying. That meant going to look. In turn, that meant taking time which – or so my conscience kept hinting – should’ve been spent on less grandiose enterprises than trying to see what I was part of. On the other hand, a lifetime has always seemed too rare, too surreal an opportunity to throw away on success.

A ravenous hawk; a slightly ludicrous bag of fat fur. Appetites that have learned how to repeat themselves. To what end? None that any living creature – now or to come – ever will know. To be. Each to do its kind.

We survive by not believing what we know. Is that because our unconscious knows something truer than fact? Maybe it knows that what we most admire can’t die, including the best of ourselves – which we don’t invent, merely inherit or borrow. And which, like the world, is nobody’s possession.

Daily dutiful habit is our way of keeping possibilities small.

When we take a person into our memory his dying doesn’t in any way evict him.

I’m here now perhaps because as a Midwestern boy I’d have loved it but couldn’t. Had no idea. By just hiking here I amaze him.

Heady pine-scent from trees leading the hardest of lives makes me wonder why so much of humanity’s smell is sorrow.

We admire wild places because their forests and mountains meet us as exactly what they meant to be; blessedly forlorn, among many strange ways in which the world keeps its promise.

Sharp as a blade, distant skyline meets the eye through miles of thin air. I listen. A soundlessness whose smallest effect is awe; hermetically pure, a speaking stillness. Like good composers, mountains never play the same silence twice.

Strange – this nostalgia for ourselves as inanimate mater, of which my brain consists, enlivened for a while by some solar quirk.

Against one’s own brain, what defense comes to more than a shrug?

Any “This, Here, Now” so entirely taken with being exactly itself can’t help arresting a lone skier, just as any mind that arrives there takes one look and stops mumbling. Stops cluttering itself with thoughts. Hasn’t a name, isn’t anyone. Becomes what it hears: mountain snowfall in which silence ripens.

Why should raw bigness summon the deepest, oldest feelings we life forms can have? Perhaps by the very size of indifference. Because mountains scorn the astonishments they give rise to, because they pretend to live entirely within the limits of the visible, because they despise our memories, we respect the hugeness of their refusal to confide. Which awes us.

Among fellow humans we’re merely superfluous at best; at worst, part of the competition. But winter mountains enlarge the needle’s eye of our tiny brains and their labyrinthine trivialities. Thanks to the rude unity of winter’s fourteen-thousand-foot peaks, we feel our insignificance expand like a strange prestige – which makes being alive a kind of magic, easy as being not quite real. Small wonder that wherever terrain permits, primitives go around filling their habits with mountain gods.

“Where are our sacred places?” None natural, I think, none untouched. Instead, all human-centered; a battle, a birthplace, a document. Well and good, as far as humankind goes. But where not one natural space is held sacred, what gods will be found?

… in humankind’s continuous heart the impulse to sow the landscape with gods may be our one oldest urge.

“Daily you have to pump gods back into the scenery; so you can breathe. You can’t breathe just scrub woodlands and yucca and cactus and rock.”

From juniper, as from many another life that water takes on in deserts, I learn the trick of surviving even technology: “Be a tree not worth cutting down.”

Meanwhile I tried very hard to learn every which way a Douglas fir might grow that a white fir couldn’t mimic. And vice versa. It was a process teaching me how much of what we call eyesight is wanting to see. Small wonder that, cytologically speaking, retinal tissue and brain tissue are cousins. Eyes seem to be the mind leaning forward.

Worldwide, in fact, various myths reflect the feeling that a thing can’t fully and properly exist without its name.

More important perhaps than a name’s cover-up of details is its blurring of the fact that each thing is really an event, thus a confluence of forces still in motion; forces traceable – if we’ve time to reflect that far – back toward the time our solar system was fog, the sun not yet resolved to a focus with hydrogen fusion at heart. To see beyond language may be to receive flashes of a luminous whole; to feel an obsidian chip, for example, change into its molten past or vaporized forever even as the sperm and egg we once were stoop to pick it up.

Fear is often the threshold of knowledge, but the rate at which our species dares to know itself seems brachiopodally slow.

The ruckus we kicked up over being blood cousins to apes and monkeys was the strident denial of a six-year-old whose playmates have just told him how babies are really made.

… the truth: nature as one self-sufficient machine where anything that can die is called “life”, and ourselves the losses we agree to live out. It’s as if the atmosphere suddenly vanished. Without a vapor of illusion to absorb its lethal radiations, the sun pours down a ruthless clarity denying everything I’d like to be true.

Desert canyons at night are anything but voiceless. Yet peaceful, supremely. In such canyons your own presence can feel like the human race down to one person – which is to exist more actually than any other way I know.

An even greater poverty than seeing “mystery” where there is none might be not seeing it where there is.

… the more carefully I look at specific conifers, the less apt to their individualities become syllables like “spruce” or “pine” or “fir”.

As children we wondered, “What am I doing? And why am I doing it here?” We couldn’t guess, then, how wide these questions were, or that merely to ask them was to be more than merely ourselves.

Thus on a peak whose shattered granite is indeed blunt as ruin, I clamber around gazing off into all points of the compass, then lunch with no other company than the stones’ rude stares – their way of asking, “Why breathe? Why bother? Why come?” … Proud of their mindless immortalities – compared with anything married to oxygen – the massive slabs seem bored with human pretensions.

Unfortunately, the very adaptability that made us human may be our most lethal gift. Our shifty species is supple enough to call anything “home sweet home”, no matter how befouled. Thus adaptability, having made Homo sapiens boss of all vertebrates, may undo us. What blight can’t we get used to, project ourselves into, and love? Our progeny will call desolation “nature” if that’s all they’ve known.

A deer god? “How could an animal the Anasazi killed and ate be a deity?” A few generations ago this seemed credulity fit only for primitives; and seemed especially so to high-toned Christian people who killed their god very year on Good Friday, then ate him.

Vaguely we sense that those ruins are related not only to us but also to what we’re doing here, and have been doing for days: trying to see the life now passing through us, as it has through those who once lived.

… that’s the High Southwest. Colored distances like nowhere else I know, unbroken by any made thing. And skies that change you to a person worth being there.

The question every victim asks of its destroyer is “Why?” The answer varies endlessly yet is always the same, “Because I can.” Pollution: a display of power. Negligence: disregard of what’s sacred; refusal to connect one thing with another.

Our grand Western spaces are, instead, an empty plentitude. On the thoughtful person they confer depths beyond any thing humans can ever put there. The middle of nowhere is a power, a moving unity of spirit in us, one that habitation can only break up, never enhance.

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The Four-Cornered Falcon: Essays on the Interior West and the Natural Scene (Kodansha Globe)

Reg Saner Quotation

Desert canyons by night are anything but voiceless.
Yet peaceful, supremely. In such canyons
your own presence can feel like the human race down to one person
– which is to exist more actually than any other way I know.

Reg Saner Quotation

We admire wild places because their forests and mountains
meet us as exactly what THEY meant to be;
blessedly forlorn, among many strange ways
in which the world keeps its promise.

Reg Saner Quotation

[Colorado] I’m here now perhaps
because as a Midwestern boy I’d have loved it
but couldn’t. Had no idea.

By just hiking here I amaze him.