{"id":2513,"date":"2021-07-11T19:27:10","date_gmt":"2021-07-11T19:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=2513"},"modified":"2021-07-11T19:27:10","modified_gmt":"2021-07-11T19:27:10","slug":"santa-fe-on-thinner-oxygen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=2513","title":{"rendered":"Santa Fe on Thinner Oxygen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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How rare to travel as an amateur or emigrant, so ignorant of a well-trod place that you let the place\u2019s magic play with your \u201cfree gaze.\u201d   I, Rhode Islander, arrive with little knowledge of New Mexico.  D.H. Lawrence, Georgia O\u2019Keeffe, retirees and moneyed Texans stay way in my back pocket.  I take in a sightline that\u2019s not East Coast congested, but vast and open. The roads are straight \u2014 endless \u2014 cutting through an artist\u2019s range of pinks, ochres, yellows.  The desert unfolds like an ocean of silver-sagebrush meets horizion.  Everything breathes on thinner oxygen.  The light makes rocks and cactus levitate.  Cactus are wan and colorless until they burst into hot colors like cartoons.  Veils of rain trail from navy-dark clouds you can see in some distance town.  Sunset over a layered plane that looks like the bottom of the sky.  In sum, an otherworldliness.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As poet Adam Zagajewski writes, to the emigrant, a rush of rain on a Paris boulevard can be Notre Dame\u2019s equal.  He also talks of how a workaday place falls prey to the \u201cinnocent sabotage of the free gaze, thus splitting it into disconnected atoms.\u201d   So the morning sunbeam opens the doors of vision.  It doesn\u2019t negate the tragedy of the native tribes but observing legacy of history in situ, witnessing the past in landscape, the native absence and presence becomes more felt.  Paul Celan\u2019s term \u201cwhat happened,\u2019 expresses the horror of what can\u2019t be named here too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is Tsankawi, white pumice bone stone volcanic lava carved like ancient condos into 354 dwellings by the Pueblos.  We meet an artist carving sacred wood with a power tool from the ledge of his truck in a town with a sacred mud well.   And throughout the state is woven an impulse to let phenomena saturate \u2014 to hear the Earth breathe, speak, be.  To listen to silence that is full of shimmering leaves or trickling sand as waves carry it  through unfolding moments. To hear seeds in the paper-thin casement of dried nora peppers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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How rare to travel as an amateur or emigrant, so ignorant of a well-trod place that you let the place\u2019s magic play with your \u201cfree gaze.\u201d   I, Rhode Islander, arrive with little knowledge of New Mexico.  D.H. Lawrence, Georgia … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1133,944,1132,942,15,277,1131,1134],"class_list":["post-2513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-celan","tag-new-mexico","tag-pueblo","tag-santa-fe","tag-travel","tag-travel-writing","tag-tsankawi","tag-zagajewski"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4D5qU-Ex","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2513"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2522,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2513\/revisions\/2522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}