Old writings: Marfa, TX

This is a magical place to wake up. Windows open, birds calling from all sides. My yard backs up against the vastness of desert—when I water my plants in the morning, I get the smell of carob as the water hits the hard dry desert soil. The rosemary bushes have doubled in size since I moved in-- their tough skins and fleshy leaves have protected them through all hours of hot yellow sun.

When I water the tree with drooping leaves like a willow, the smell of wet dust rises up to my face. Here in the desert the smells are easily distinguishable, one from another—there is nothing between them in the air to confuse their origins. As I pour water into the dirt well of the tree I look down my block—one block from the edge of town—one block from an open vista of vast desert. It seems strange to go about daily business as if I did not have this piece of knowledge—a raised topographical sense that I am teetering precipitously on the edge of something wild and large.

On our block, perfectly gridded, there are houses facing a dusty street—the ocotillo cactus have orange blooms at the top, and the barn swallows swoop in elegant curlicues down from the wires, looking for nest sites. The hot smell of tomato leaves in the sun is another reason to get up early—to watch the slowest of births from green to yellow flower- to what? I haven’t seen any farther just yet—all of my exotic heirloom tomato seeds died in the withering heat of the laundry room.

There is a purity to the air here—a lack of sensory noise—a dryness and sparcity made of sagebrush, wet creosote, rosemary leaves, and wet earth. To me it feels like a place where I can be anything—a brain of clicking wires, a soft body, a capable body. I feel like the mechanizations of my thought are visible here. I can wake up in the morning, replay the nagging shard of an awkward interaction last night, but can move past it, somehow, by getting back to the soil. I turn around this morning and bury the incident in wet dirt. I can breathe it back into the wind that whips around dry bushes in the field. I can open myself to the sky like the overnight cactus bloom-- a bruised and torn blossom that appeared one morning, sprung up the sides of the fingered (widow?) cactus outside the back door.

Marfa is not a difficult place to write about, the difficulty lies in watching yourself act in such stripped and bare bones of a way-- in unshaded outlines of movement and thought.

Marfa is a beautiful filament of a place, a facetted piece of quartz or clear stone, a central point that focuses and frames light. It is a lens, like the shard of heavy glass that I found on my first week here; packed with dirt on one side, shining green in the window dusk of falling afternoon.


6/2009
Marfa, TX

Letter from Turkey

""Cagan and I stayed the night with a well-to-do farmer and his wife who lived near the field station. On learning that I was a writer, the wife gave me a volume of poetry written by her uncle during the end stages of his struggle with cancer. I opened it with some trepidation. The poems were about how interesting it is to be alive, about how you're never sure what nature is telling you, but it's definitely telling you something. There was a poem about the Aras River in spring, when the black stones tumble over like ghosts, and another about street vendors. The vendors shout, "There are tomatoes!" and "There are carrots!" They shout about the existence of many vegetables, and this annoys a woman in a late model car."

Batuman categorizes this as "eco-poetry", that represents humans and nature as "a dynamic, inter-related series of cyclic feedback systems, in contrast to traditional nature poetry , in which nature is merely a kind of backdrop to human activity. In fact, the very idea of "nature"-- implying something exterior to humanity and human culture-- may be inimical to true ecological thinking, which presupposes the interconnectedness of all things."

(by Elif Batuman, "Natural Histories: A journey in the shadow of Ararat." The New Yorker, Oct 24, 2011, 65)

Christmas Market on Les Lices

"Somehow I got across with a surge of people when a policeman held up his white mitten. It was all food, in endless stands on both sides of the packed walk. I have never seen so many kinds of sausages, meat pates and rolls, cuts of horse-cow-pig, dead rabbits dripping with blood into little paper cups tied over their noses, bunches of wild birds hanging like feathery grapes, more wild birds naked and tiny on white enameled trays.

I have never seen so many great wooden buckets of olives of every kind and size and color. There was one tub of green olives mixed with little pickled onions and slices of sickly-looking bitter orange. There were olives stuffed, smooth, wrinkled, shiny, dull. And there were spices, in packets-boxes-jars, aromatics from Provence, pepper from far places."
(from "About Looking Alone at a Place", As They Were, MFK Fisher, Marseille, FR, )

Jan Weenix, Dutch, Amsterdam, 1681-1719
Gamepiece with a Dead Heron ("Falconer's Bag")

Beautiful taskmaster.