We can think about things that are hidden after we have viewed the maps. Myriad conventions are assumed in the physical reality of maps in the old sense. And this is just for earth. These too can be examined. The maps here are of things we cannot see, so if invisible, what are they maps of? Whatever it is, the raw form is clearer than the finished. George Bruce Moses, who executed the cover of Calendar, at the end of his short life began to paint heads in translucent white.
Suppose in all of this the air we think clear is clogged
with spiritual beings, everywhere swirling, which we can't see? Oecumene means the known world
bound together in a Mercator Projection. In older forms it excluded
great parts unknown.
Coyote and bear were among the first effigies that emerged when I began to roll out sheets of clay and drape them over bricks or blocks until they molded themselves into something. This method produced FEMA railway cars, eagles, seal, badger, fox, large dogs,, the zodiac...Some of these are now extant. Maps generally signify greater and lesser detail, stylized and objective measures, but always with the notion that more may be hidden that is known, like the Google Maps of various regions and of the planets and moons.
First the sky, then the air, then the dry earth ironwood down to the aquifers. Life among the doves became part of me and I of it. I lived in the southwest so long it entered my thought. All this in a physical sense the way appetite attracts. I wake each day after a few hours sleep to contemplate this likeness of myself before the sun intrudes. Here I explore the thought that comes with memory of life I experienced in the Germantown rows, Chartiers Valley, from which I canoed the upper reaches of the Allegheny, Clarion and Susquehanna rivers multiple times, explored Delaney's Cave the largest in Pa. so often before it was commercial that I could give tours, Schoolhouse cave, the grounds of Hellhole Cave, audited the American Viscose plants of Lewistown, Parkersburg, Meadville before they were shuttered, floods inundated with devastation, traveled and spoke in rural churches from Virginia to Toronto, lived and worked in Costa Rica with the Latin America Mission before its fall, visited all the reaches of Limon, Puntaranes, Roblealto, Turrialba, Cartago and the exploded Irazu, knew the Jersey Pine barrens, the lakes of Iowa, the beaches of North Carolina, and the highways of Texas leading to the Edwards plateau and its rivers and creeks and limestone hills, lived on the Balcones Fault above Bull Creek before the change, and tasted those secrets all the way from the madrones of the Guadalupes and the reglas of the Chisos of Big Bend down to the muddy Rio Grande, all as a prelude to Arizona which I reckoned I could not live without, would always regret not knowing and so the orange groves were a pretext for that venture. I arrived and became acquainted with Bonita Porter and her love for literature and the southwest, scouted for her all the while. I took endless trips sketching on early summer mornings out McDowell before the freeways to the Four Peaks to sketch rocks and cactus on dirt roads all the up to the manzanita, with stops along the Verde and into the reservations, always with two children along, five and two, and dug out my car stuck in loose sand along the river with my bare hands with found chicken wire, saw car crashes and transported the bulbous squashed nose of a Papago out to the highway. We were at Chinle when the trail was still open to Canyon de Chelly and in the White Mts before the fires, and in Grand Canyon for weeks on the rim and down every trail the legs of those children could stand, and in Lake Powell, the Chiricahuas, countless times to El Paso, Albuquerque, Tucson, Flagstaff, and so it happened, so that explains the series of effigies after the Pueblo style that came through my hands: horse effigies, tortoise effigies, coyote, bear, human effigies as nonfunctional embellishments of artifacts that don't exist visually but do every other way. They fill the yard. Some of the red ribbons are out there. How in all this I was gifted with a wife after my own heart who gave me a family too, for He loves to put the solitary into families, and withal came to research and document that family into which I was born, Mennonite peasants back to the beginnings of Philadelphia in Montgomery County, then Philadelphia County, from which I was removed to experience the Chartiers and to which I was returned at 16 to the very locale of my ancestors' living is past explanation to contain. For I knew none of it in the making, but was redeemed from captivity and the unspeakable at 17, changed completely, memory included with knowledge, education added with ultimate understanding so that the account above could be plumbed.
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