With nothing but the deepest respect and compassion for the family involved, something happened here in Taos that I have to briefly write about. (You can no doubt find the whole story at the Taos New Web site.)
The story involves a 54-year-old artist from Pittsburgh who moved out here with his wife about three months ago, fulfilling a life-long dream. From what was published in the paper, he was happy (“no sign of sadness,” said a friend). About a week ago, the painter and a group of friends were relaxing one evening eating fried chicken and listening to the Beach Boys. Suddenly someone noticed his absence, though no one had seen him leave.
The next day they found his vehicle at the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. Assuming he had jumped, the state police sent a helicopter to search the cliffs and riverbank below the bridge but didn’t find a thing and gave up trying. It’s a big country out here. Almost a week later, his wife and a group of river runners took a raft trip down the gorge to locate what everyone assumed would be his body, and a mile and a half downstream, they found it. His wife pulled his body onto a rock to secure it until a second helicopter team could fly out to recover it…
Most of you and the family too no doubt regard this as a horrifying tale. To me it’s partly that, but something else as well. Without personal knowledge of the man or any of the others involved, it’s risky to say even another single word. However, these thoughts occur to me.
The spiritual energy of this place is huge and monstrous. “Spirit” has nothing to do with peace and love and little tinkle bells, either. Nothing to do with dreamcatchers, crystals, incense, gurus, or the like. Spirit is the Truth, and everyone reacts in different ways, often unexpectedly. DO NOT COME HERE TO “RETIRE” OR TO GROOVE OUT ON THE SCENERY. THE ENERGY CAN BURN THE FLESH RIGHT OFF YOUR BONES, AND YOU MAY NEVER BE THE SAME.
Sometimes even artists just can’t handle it. Then again, perhaps the man in question did… That’s all I’m saying.
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The way you describe the spirit of this place reminds me of the writings of Lawrence, who himself once lived there. I don’t know what you think of his stuff. It’s awfully dated and phallo-centric (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but it seems to evoke the same place you describe, the same cruel kind of spiritualness. For example (from “St. Mawr”): “the men at the ranch, and the animals with them, had bursts of queer, violent, half-frenzied energy, in which, however, they were wont to lose their wariness. And then, damage of some sort. The horses ripped and cut themselves, or they were struck by lightning, the men had great bursts or sickness. A curious disintegration working all the time, a sort of malevolent breath, like a stupefying, irritant gas coming out of the unfathomed mountains.”
Or this: “And her love for the ranch turned sometimes into a certain repulsion. The underlying rat-dirt, the everlasting bristling tussle of the the wildlife, with the tangle and the bones strewing. Bones of horses struck by lightning, bones of dead cattle, skulls of goats with little horns: bleached, unburied bones. Then the cruel electricity of the mountains. And then, most mysterious but worst of all, the animosity of the spirit of place: the crude, half-created spirit of place, like some serpent-bird for ever attacking man, in a hatred of man’s onward struggle towards further creation.”
This kind of stuff is interspersed with more purely beautiful invocations of the place. Still, the kind of underlying harshness or cruelty is what I remember. In this story, if memory serves, somebody gets killed. Lawrence celebrates and loves this harshness and contrasts it constantly with the soft, insipid, denatured, hypocritical ways of eastern people. However, he was a bit of a strange bird, even if a genius, and he pretty well described the same “dark gods” wherever he lived, whether in the English midlands, Mexico, Australia, New Mexico, or Tusany.
All this makes me speculate that the poor fellow you describe might be another of these obsessive folks drawn like moths to the fire to a place like New Mexico, partly because it has been written about for so long by people like Lawrence and J.H. Farr. Lacking their ability to imagine and formulate with words their intense experiences, he performed the sort of ultimate act that inarticulate people always have at their disposal – self-destruction. Or maybe the poor guy just got intolerably depressed, something that can happen any place, any time, and all our attempts to figure it out literarily are beside the point.
Anyhow, old compadre, keep the black dogs away from your own doorstep.
My husband & I wrote a short screenplay which involves addressing the dark energies of the bridge and doing ceremony to honour the dead as well as make that site more inspiriting and protective of those in despair. If anyone is able to supply production funds for this please contact us at soulsoundings@hotmail.com
Ahhhh…
Yes.
Silence, from Taos…
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