We drove west from Albuquerque and took the quiet road to the Acoma Pueblo, also called Sky City Mesa. It’s been occupied since the 2nd century. We saw the mesa from a distance:
We stopped at the marvelous cultural centre and arranged for a tour. Up onto the mesa, past little corrals and stone buildings collapsing into the landscape. And on the mesa itself, the beautiful pueblo, where about 15 families still live and where ceremonies still occur, the ladders to the kivas ready.
There are places on earth that speak so clearly and plainly of their history and you understand the long attachment of people to place. It’s them, or maybe I mean they’re natural extensions of everything I understand a place to be. We bought a little piece of Acoma pottery, crosshatched with lines of rain, the ears of corn there too.
2. Postcard from Boca Negro Canyon
We stopped at a canyon near Albuquerque to see the petrogylphs made by the ancestors of the native pueblo people. Some of these were created perhaps 400-700 years ago and some as long ago as 2000-3000 years. They were made by chipping away the surface desert varnish or patina from basalt rocks. No one knows exactly what they mean but they are deeply beautiful and evocative after all these years. I passed one young woman texting on the trail and I thought that in some ways these were a form of terse communication. A turtle:
Some squiggles which I think are snakes — while a sign on the trail warned to watch out for rattlesnakes. And of course spirals (this seemed inevitable to me, who spent the winter quilting them), an acknowledgement that we live in the cycles of life and death, summer and winter:
How quickly we leave one landscape, one country, and enter another. I woke in a hotel near the Vancouver airport this morning and by early afternoon I was walking Albuquerque’s Old Town. And how lovely it is, this city of old adobe buildings, gardens of yucca and cacti, warm air. . . Flying from Denver, I looked out to see a vast area composed as beautifully as a quilt — circles in squares, some of them bisected by thin lines, and nearby, the scribble of oxbows. What crops are planted in circles, I wondered, and later found out that it’s the result of center-pivot irrigation. That’s all I know and I’ll try to find out more but seen from a plane, it’s like looking at the work of a really skillful quilter, working with rich brown velvet, tawny corduroy, deep silvery blue thread, olive green felt.
We ate dinner in Mas, a restaurant in what was the first hotel Conrad Hilton built in his native New Mexico and which is now Hotel Andaluz, walking distance from our B&B. We had the most delicious tapas — grilled eggplant with Manchego and saffron honey, a hummus made with roasted carrots and chickpeas, beet and walnut puree, sesame lavash, slices of Mancheo with membrillo, olives — and a bottle of Spanish wine. This is what we saw when we began the walk back to the Mauger B&B:
my novella, Inishbream, in Helene Francoeur’s beautiful turbot-skin bound edition
It occurred to me, talking to John as we walked over for the mail today (ask me about community mail boxes! I honestly can’t take the fuss about them, the suggestion that it’s the end of civilization as we know it, the end of safety for seniors – there are seniors in our neighbhourhood, John included, and like us, they’ve never had home mail delivery; if they can’t collect their own mail, a neighbour will do it for them…), that my reading lately has been largely novellas. I’ve written two posts about them – Hetty Dorval and Deep Hollow Creek are, to my mind, both novellas – and I’ve spent quite a bit of time (for desperate reasons) perusing publishing websites to see who on earth might consider a manuscript comprised of two novellas. (Yes, mine!)
And once I realized that I was reading novellas, and thinking about novellas, I began to see them everywhere. Last night I read David Gilmour’s new book, Extraordinary. I hadn’t meant to. I liked his book about watching films with his teen-aged son but I haven’t much liked his fiction. I did read his interview in Hazlitt last September (http://www.randomhouse.ca/hazlitt/blog/gilmour-transcript) and found it utterly distasteful. He’s entitled to his opinion(s) of course but nothing he said about writing and reading made me think I’d enjoy his latest book. But when I saw it at the library yesterday, I picked it up, read the jacket copy, and checked it out. It took me an hour and a half to read it last night and I don’t regret the time spent at all. It’s good. It moves along so well and the writing is crisp and clean. And you know what? I think it’s a novella. It’s brief – perhaps 50,000 words – and is essentially a conversation between a brother and a sister. Each character is vividly drawn and the dialogue is convincing. It has a novella’s sense of time and place, that contained and concise elegance.
One of my favourite novellas is Joyce’s The Dead. It’s perfect. I read it once a year and each time I’m both moved and inspired. And more. Surprised to find a sentence I hadn’t remembered and how its perfect fit within the narrative made it so organic to the piece as a whole that it took a fifth or tenth reading to actually see it. I love what Ian McEwan said about The Dead in his wonderful piece on the novella in the New Yorker magazine (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/some-notes-on-the-novella.html):
I’d swap “The Dead”’s concluding pages for any fifteen from “Ulysses.” The young Joyce surpassed himself. I sometimes fantasize that on my deathbed, celebrated phrases from this novella will see me out: “I think he died for me”; “one by one they were all becoming shades”; “the time had come for him to set out on his journey westward”; snow “softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves”; “snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.’ There could be worse final moments.
I’m looking forward to reading the Canadian poet Gillian Wigmore’s recently-published novella, Grayling. I think highly of her poetry.She writes deeply and beautifully from her northern landscape –
4. fraser (fort george)
meet the clang and stink of the black train bridge
dripping the rain into the broad brown river
can trees be proud?
the cottonwood aren’t quitters
they draw the river up their roots
reach high towards sky
travellers in metal cars untouched
by river life, rife and humming
down below (from “Five Rivers: Under Bridges” in Soft Geography, Caitlin Press, 2007)
– and I anticipate that she will bring that attentive eye and ear to prose as well. And I am full of admiration for Gillian’s publisher, Mona Fertig at Mother Tongue Publishing, who unapologetically advertises this new book as a novella. (From the catalogue copy: “A lean and intense tale that takes the reader to haunting depths. A seminal and brilliant addition to a neglected genre.”)
We stopped at the marvelous cultural centre and arranged for a tour. Up onto the mesa, past little corrals and stone buildings collapsing into the landscape. And on the mesa itself, the beautiful pueblo, where about 15 families still live and where ceremonies still occur, the ladders to the kivas ready.
