Paradigm shifts

I arrived in New Mexico ten days ago, and I have not yet succumbed to the temptation to wear leather tassels, own a lowrider truck or purchase firearms. It feels great to be out of Baltimore, to be recovered from surgery, to take a break from teaching, writing, being hunched over my computer for too many hours at a time.

From Melissa's window I can see the Sandia Mountains rising above the desert. Agave and prickly pear are in bloom, and humming birds thrum furiously among the cacti. The brown Rio Grande meanders through Albuquerque, along with stands of diminishing cottonwood forests-- the bosque. The days are dry and hot, the nights sublimely cool. The cucharacha does its little roundabout dance in the midnight hours. There are flowering trees everywhere.

Last week we roadtripped to Sedona, Arizona, past black mesas, Indian outposts, rock shops. At a gas station an Indian man adjusted the lapels on his gray suit, which was much too small for him. There were flavored condoms for sale from vending machines in the men's bathroom. There were huge storm clouds rolling in.

On the periphery of Petrified Forest National Park, shops offered Baja blankets, meteorites, turquoise necklaces. A strip of black tarmac led endlessly away from the interstate, leading to what is supposedly one of the most preserved meteoric impact sites in the world. The veins of man on the desert are all right angles. Here in the flat almost wastelands there is nothing to stop a highway.

We drove on, we drove on. Sage and juniper and pinon. The black mesas giving away to red rock in Arizona, the mountains rising beyond Flagstaff, the ponderosa pine forest stretched over the highway as we descended into the canyon north of Sedona.

And then we were whirled into the vortex. Sedona is a postcard type of place. Take a picture at sunset and, provided that your finger isn't on the lens, you can tell your friends and family that you were in one of the sublimely beautiful places on earth, and then drive away in your RV.

The town is a strange mix of hippies, nature lovers, tourists. Pillars and domes of red rock rise around the city like ancient temples or decrepit gods. This is a holy place for the Anasazi, the Apache, and now the retiree. You don't have to go far to get beyond the two million dollar adobe homes. To see the bees drunk on agave nectar and smell the hot sage wind.

My favorite hike was deep into a box canyon where the red cliffs towered around us on all sides. It's one of Sedona's so-called vortex sites, where-- magnetism? energy fields? aliens? -- supposedly supercharge the earth and the hairless monkeys that tread it.

I felt super-charged.

Is there something to it?

If a computer chip can be inserted in my head, giving me a simulacra of hearing, if we can put men on the moon, if bees can communicate telepathically, if a bristlecone pine can live for 5000 years, well then, why not?

But the reason doesn't matter. It feels good to be away from Baltimore. This past year I've missed being out in nature. I've been hunched over a computer churning out pages, teaching freshmen, soaking in the Hopkins vibe... which in its own way seems almost monastic. After a year in the ivory tower it feels good to be back in the real world again. And I mean real the way it's been for millions of years, not real the way it's been this past century.

I didn't even realize how out of touch I was, how out of balance. How much of this past year I spent in my head living in fantasy fiction worlds, or worrying about my hearing, or agonizing about my ethical and spiritual issues regarding an implant. Obsessing over drafts, marking up workshop pieces, soaking up Welty and Nabokov, putting my faith into marks on paper.

Marks on paper that represent objects and thoughts and feelings and everything we value in this world. As writers we spend the years writing our own illuminated texts, bibles, korans, gitas... we put all our faith in what we're writing. Sometimes it seems as if the end-all is getting the story right or finishing the novel that threatens to consume us. Each paragraph is a psalm, each well-turned metaphor a reason to believe what we're doing really matters.

I've spent the last year taking what was already an obsession and becoming fanatical about it. I've always thought it's a beautiful thing to give up oneself for art. But there's danger in it, too. I'm a demagogue, a quack, or as John Gardner might put it, a monkey pounding away on a keyboard.

It's good to laugh at myself again. It's good to realize that none of it matters, in the best possible way. To be humbled. To look up at the red rocks towering above me and realize I'm just one tiny cog in the gears. The fears and doubts loomed too large last year. They were out of proportion of this container I inhabit... a six foot cylinder of flesh. As if I were trying to fit ten years of Thanksgiving dinners into a little Martha Stewart tupperware container.

Did I really think the world would seethe and bubble and the oceans would dissolve if I didn't complete the great American deaf novel by May? Or that the invisible gods would turn their backs on me and waterfalls change their course if I had a computer chip put in my head? Well, no, I didn't think any of that. But it was as if I did. Everything was out of proportion. I was just another guy stuck in my head.