1. Kokopelli on the Road

The approach to this small corner of western Colorado from the south, once you've accomplished the steep escarpment called Book Cliffs, is through Canyon Pintado, a long winding flat bottomed valley full of cows, ranchers and Indian petroglyphs. I need to reach town by dark and don't really have time to stop, between dodging wandering herds of cattle and following the dust of pickup trucks. But something catches me as I pass a series of national park pull-offs; a sign reading "Kokopelli," pointing up toward some rock paintings beneath a steep cliff face overlooking the road. At first I resist, driving on about a quarter mile. Then I stop and turn around, realizing that Kokopelli is too close to the theme of this journey for me not to stop and pay homage. Pulling off to the side and letting a pickup truck pass, I drive back to the pull-off and get out to climb the stone pathway up to the overhang.

I can actually see him from the road, a figure in red beneath the leaning stone. Bent beneath the hump he carries on his back, gazing back along the valley, his flute or didgeridoo points along his gaze. I've never seen his figure drawn so large or colored such a deep red ochre. At his feet is the inevitable spiral, tracing a path from origin through migration, and back to the center.

This day I traveled more than 400 miles. I came out of a country of burning forests around Los Alamos, then up Route 84 through the Chama Valley, one of the most beautiful roads in North America. I stood the night before with my son at a place across from a gambling casino called Camel Rock, where we could see the long dragon snake of the Cerro Grande fire winding it's way along the canyons and slopes above White Rock. Today I left the vanilla smell of burning yellow pine behind me, and whatever dangerous ghosts might be leaking out of the ground at the home of the bomb. I drove through Ghost Ranch country alongside Abiquiu Reservoir, past the red cliffs and standing rocks and natural amphitheaters by Canjilon Creek. Turning west at Chama, I entered fully into the heart of Indian country, winding through the woods and canyons of the Jicarilla Apache, past the town of Dulce and into the vast reaches of Navajo land. I crossed the Navajo Dam, it's reservoir stretching off between the mesas, and passed into Colorado, up through Durango and Creede, along the falling white waters pouring through gorges, past old mining towns turned into tourist destinations. I climbed out of the Navajo desert and onto the Colorado plateau and through the high northern country.

This Kokopelli, here when the first Spaniard came looking for gold, now gazes back along the old trails of Indians and explorers, miners and gamblers, fluting his remembrance that once we emerged from a world destroyed by darkness, and we could easily lose our world to deadly darkness once again.

2. Kiva

The town is at the end of a long canyon in a narrow valley where the road from the south joins the northern route winding along the White River. I was told to look for a water tank, and this whole dry valley is full of water tanks. In a parched corner of Colorado I find myself in another high desert, more desolate and paradoxically more civilized than the desert I come from. The valley is an oasis among gray mesas; the town is filled with trees and trailer courts built along the river and the bluffs. On the other side of town an expanse of desolate hills begins and marches away to the horizons north and west.

I look in earnest for the tank just beyond town. I've been told it can't be missed. Route 64, after being the town's main street turns to the north and there it is, perched like an enormous silver art deco spaceship, overlooking the bottom land alongside a creek and a winding dirt road that slithers back between the hills. The rakish Rio Grande Railroad logo is painted in black up near the top and winding around the bottom is a multi-colored ring of graffiti.

At the base of the bluff, across the dirt road that goes back into mesa and oil rig country, sit a couple of homes built around a converted house trailer. I recognize Michael's station wagon parked out front. A sign at the driveway marks this place as the home of the Wade family: "Wadeland: Population 6." I pull up and park, and walk up to the porch door of the main house. Knocking stirs the interest of a couple of enthusiastic dogs, more interested in wrestling with each other than with bothering a stranger. An energetic woman in her 60's appears at the screen door, grabbing the dogs firmly by their collars and speaking loudly over their yipping, "You must be Ralph from Santa Fe. I'm Barbara...your friends are already here. Come on in and have some food...you wanna beer?"

The enormous front room is filled with knickknacks, a bar, a full size store dummy dressed like a gay cowboy, and the biggest television screen I've ever seen. A game show is on and the image is so impressively huge that it temporarily transfixes me in the gaze of the faces, larger than life, diving for dollars across a virtual wall of phosphors. Rescue comes with the sound of familiar voices and the smell of a feast coming out of the kitchen. Spread before me are at least four main dishes, three salads, and at least three or four desserts, ranging from pie and cinnamon rolls, to marshmallows in Jell-O.

Over the next hour or so I hear a ton of country gossip. Chevron, the town's biggest employer, is moving on and a good chunk of the male population will be out of work. The vacation business is building. The blacks up at the Community College have started to come down into town. There is an extended commentary on the vices and virtues of the nearest big towns of Craig and Vernal, where there are Walmarts and shopping centers. There's plenty of good-natured ribbing from Barbara and her husband about our presence up here, but it's all apiece with their amazing generosity. Soon it's time for the four of us who've arrived from out of town to climb up to the tank and embark on the ceremony for which we've come.

Denver musicians have been coming up here for 14 years, ever since one of them on a Chataqua tour was turned on to the place by a local teenager. The visits became regular over the years, expanding to include a growing circle of sound explorers. In the early nineties a CD was produced and recorded inside the Tank, featuring a host of instruments and voices, including hand drums, whirl tubes, autoharps, a viola, a Synclavier, and a child's chorus.

For a time in the mid eighties the graffiti on the Tank took a turn toward the rage and racism felt by displaced teenaged youth in the small town fringes of Reagan's America. Eventually a heavy-duty lock was affixed to the outside hatch and most of the verbal ugliness was painted over. The Mormon capitalist who'd inherited the Tank as part of a failed business venture handed it legally over to a musician willing to take on the property taxes. Finally this vessel, moved here in the fifties from another state, brought to hold water but never put to its intended use, became a full fledged temple to sound.

I walk my route week in and out in the place I live. Friend to friend, I draw the circumference of community. Connections and boundaries; those I work with, those I know, those with whom I share some small vision or emotional bond. Sometimes I can see this community going out in a huge circle stretching across the electronic miles between Vancouver and Boston, Cleveland and Raleigh. Even in these virtual spaces every contact is somehow precious.

As dusk approaches Michael removes the padlock and one by one we crawl in through the round bolted hatch where once a large pipe, at least two and a half feet across, conducted the flow of water in and out of the Tank. Grasping the bolted edge we slide in feet first, finding ourselves in darkness. As our eyes gradually adjust a dim blue-green glow is seen emanating from what appears to be a mixing board set in a square metal case occupying the middle of the floor. Inside the Tank is about 45 feet across and 75 feet high. A faint circle of daylight leaks in around the circumference of the conical roof high above. A ladder goes up one side to a hatchway opening to the outside. A slim pipe near the ground bridges the middle of the floor from wall to wall, providing a place for sitting down. Several fat candles rest on either end and in the center. A couple of wide PVC tubes are propped against the pipes with bundles of cloth stuffing one end and an extra large kitchen sponge resting near the other. I later learn that these are parts of an instrument of deep ethereal rhythm called a "whirl tube". A harmonic booming is made when one claps the sponge against an open end. The walls of the Tank are painted all black, except for about 10 feet of white around the bottom and up along the sides of the ladder, added to cover up the aforementioned graffiti. A row of didgeridoo are propped next to the entry hatch. Almost the entire floor is covered with blankets and the blankets are covered with musical instruments and noisemakers of every kind. Turning back toward the entrance, one looks out at the outside world through a circle of bolts around the open hatchway. This other world, seen through the port, has been utterly left behind.

Immediately upon entering I realize that this place is in love with sound. The smallest scuffle of footsteps or the sound of a whisper are taken up and whirled around the inside of the container and transformed into an awesome and numinous voice. A single note launched by the human voice is sustained, I'm told by Michael, for up to 35 seconds. This is a place of perfectly circular echoes, each sound becoming pure ambient presence, unveiling all of it's inner dynamics like the unfolding of a flower. This is a soundspace that can't really be duplicated by electronic means. Like the world's great cathedrals it attracts musicians who hunger to be in the middle of that sound, exploring it like the landscapes of another planet. Entering the space one steps immediately into a state of trance. For an interval the four of us drift around the circle, making sounds, stopping to listen, adding overtones, shaping new notes, replying to our own voices vibrating in the air.

One reason I came on this journey is to get away from the words and images that define me. I don't trust in either. Some have made the case that written language has driven us essentially mad, driving us into wars of interpretation, fragmentation, dogma. They claim that the rise of the image will save us from ourselves. But we've become as lost and confused by images as ever we were by words. Words give meaning and images deliver emotion and both are running tides from an anonymous world outside. In a world mediated by images we've all but lost the boundary between what is manipulated and what is real. Although we believe that science has triumphed over prejudice, perhaps we've left an empty basket of words only to embrace delusion.

At the start of the evening a neighbor brings up her teenage daughter, prodding her to crawl inside and have a look. She's very young and timid, fascinated and curious all at once, feeling a bit out of place among these four strange older men. The array of instrumentation spread over the blanketed floor is like nothing she's ever seen. Jeremiah shows her how to get a sound from blowing into a conch shell and this inspires her to ask her mother to pass to her from the van outside a French horn that she plays in her high school band. Tentatively she puts it to her lips, blowing a couple of clear brass notes that fill the space like the sound of trumpets in an archangelic choir. We are all a bit overwhelmed, and the girl, finally overcome by shyness and the weirdness of all this, retreats back outside to her mother. The memory of that excellent sound, however, stays behind and is somehow resurrected with the sound of Michael blowing into conch and pipes, calling the proceeding into formal being. As the full moon rises above the tank no one doubts that spirits will come out of the air and down into this place, to play and echo and improvise through the persons of all of us.

Each of us joins the collective voice, made of all our sound but seamlessly woven as one in this chamber of air. As the sound weaves and blends and rises I find myself joining the chorus with a loud clear voice, a vocalization that's pulled out of me in some made up language of pure sound, responding to every nuance in the rising and falling breath of the evening. I find my whole body moving with the changing character of sound, becoming part of a whirling dance that gracefully moves around the circumference; Jeremiah and Mark and I circling Michael with shakers and strings, pipes and drums.

Occasionally Jeremiah crouches over the digital console, face dimly lit by the green LEDs, concentrating on capturing whatever sonic messages are furiously circling in the air. In the Tank both images and abstractions are consigned to the nether darkness. Like denizens of the Lescaux caves we find refuge from the preeminence of vision and enter a world beyond dream. There are no words or images in this dark place. The sound in the Tank is before language. All sounds blend and swirl and transform like the waves and ripples that wash over sand patterns at the bottom of an ocean tide pool. Beneath the far off canopy of moonlight the candle flames flicker. There are few discernable shadows thrown against the black walls. Sounds of voice, rhythm and breath beckon our spirits into ecstasy. Four clear male voices rise and whirl in chant and song. The deep booming of the Whirl Tubes echo an unearthly rhythm as Michael strums the silver strings of an autoharp. Mark plays runs on a guitar while chanting in tongues and Jeremiah marches around the circle to the beat of the djambala. The dancing and singing and playing weave and pulse in and out of the hours. Occasionally there is silence for a few moments as a cycle is brought to a naturally felt conclusion. After a few moments another song begins, and another ceremony with a new theme, a new rhythm and a new harmonic.

As we sing and dance and play the sound of a great booming, like the ghost of a passing train, or maybe an earthquake, echoes in the background of one of our songs. We realize that this is the sound of the great evening desert wind, striking the tank and rising against its sides like the herald of some angel of the air. Playing on the sides of the tall metal ark as if in response to the exuberant voices rising from within it.

Finally, after several hours we stop. The sounds of wind and voices decline with the descent of the moon. We crawl outside under an incredible star canopy and stand together wrapped in a blanket of silence. The musicians scatter to their bunks and trailers. Jeremiah keeps vigil in the tank until morning.

"There is sanity and madness, but the key to creativity and life lies precisely on the boundary between." - R.D. Laing

...and Orpheus falls...and the children dance...and no one can doubt that there are angels in the symmetry of these sounds...the grail that we seek is direct, unmediated experience.

In the beginning we hear voices. After a time the voices shape themselves into words. The words then shape themselves into stories and the stories become our reality. The stories help us form the web of wonders we call human society. By the tone and the colors of the words we find an identity in the undifferentiated weave of what we see and hear and perceive.

We learn to make symbols for these sounds. We learn to scratch letters in the sand and find ourselves cast out of the garden and into our own heads. Comprehension becomes a matter of interpretation and we are well on our way to the burning times; a long adolescence that stretches from the 13th through the 19th centuries. From the invention of the printing press to the total segmentation of mind and god, logic and morals, science and religion, through seven centuries of war and struggle, suppression, revolution and atrocity, the adolescent makes war upon the world in order to differentiate from it. Culture tears itself from culture while philosophy battles with desire.

Then comes the photograph and humanity is transfixed in its own shadow like a beast on the highway frozen in the headlights. Blink...Blink...Click ...the Civil War...Blink...Click...World War One...Blink...Click...the Second...Click...Flash...the photographic age transfigured into the nuclear age...the colonial age replaced by the digital age...the age of pirates is swept aside by the age of programmers...

We are lost in images...hopelessly confused by them. We live in urban containers where all reference to anything other than ourselves has been excised. We can no longer tell what is spirit and what is mirrored shadow. We no longer particularly care. Unlike previous empires that have fallen to conquest, American culture will dissolve into the sea of its own chaotic artifice.

3. Hearing Voices

The next day I stand and look over the gray hills that sweep north under the hot dusty breezes of the desert. The rising and plunging of oilrigs dot the landscape like huge insects drawing sustenance out of the rocky soil.

Up north are dinosaur bones and the winding sources of the Green River that merges with the Colorado in the middle of an impossible landscape just south of the Four Corners. Here are the Canyonlands of migrants, Mormons and Navajos. Golden trumpeting angels on the top of white church steeples and ancient carvings in the rock. Farther south is Monument Valley and the land turns brick red with shapes of enormous gods parading over the desert. Finally, at the end of a long spiral around Indian Country there are the Hopi villages. All the dramas and contradictions of human life on earth are there played out on the edges of something timeless. In square stone structures built into the earth the ceremonies of the year unfold, passed on from year to year through many hundreds of generations, going all the way back to the emergence of the people from the destruction of the fourth world.

As the morning grows late we begin packing up the instruments and moving them outside. In one last sing before we empty the place, Michael vibrates a long droning sound out of the didgeridoo. The sound once again builds and climbs and is sustained, leading to an irresistible urge to respond. I'm inspired enough to climb the 75-foot steel ladder that hugs the side of this miraculous cylinder. The air up there heats up in the presence of the climbing sun of another day. Hugging the rungs with one arm I turn to gaze straight down on the magic circle. Michael sets down his instrument and now his strong clear voice pours out over the rhythm of someone's drum. On the other side of the circle Jeremiah once again attends the green glowing meters of the mixing board.

There is a moment in the religion of Santeria when the presence of the god comes down to "ride" the worshipper like a horse, displacing personality and taking over form, moving voice and body like divine puppeteer. Santeria is a religion of sound and rhythm and dancing. That is what I've come here to find. I want more than anything to dig down below the geologic layers of representation and meaning, to find the body of the earth and the rhythm and notes of all things. Michael's voice calls and calls in the intense vibrating tones of air while Mark is caught and taken into the rhythm of the tribal drum and I find myself calling out into the air suspended above. The powers we have summoned have been waiting through the night for our spirits to surrender and now, miraculously, they've caught us by surprise in the dark of the day.

Finally all of these voices let themselves fade into silence. In the middle of the silence Michael softly weeps, overcome by whatever feeling this clear passionate singing has called upon. Each of us, in turn, lays a hand upon him, letting him know that we've ridden the sound along with him, and although we will never know, we somehow understand.

The experience of travelling through these lands can give one a profound sense of the eternal order of all things. Worlds begin and worlds end. Ceremonies send the voices of the Hopi, the Navajo, the Mormons and four musicians up in prayer to the spirit worlds. The spirits leave their places to join us on the earth. The garden grows, life is renewed, and all things take their places in a universe of time and space. The long spiral of this journey takes me along the ancient pilgrimage trails of Indian Country and brings me back to my home in Santa Fe. The fires of Los Alamos are put out. The dry season continues for weeks or months before they end. The journey teaches me that it's impossible to leave the smoking mirrors behind. Even in the remote wilderness the signals and texts are with me. With every word and image I bring with me the collective being of my culture.

I seek a language that is pure, but only a language without words or pictures can meet that demand. Language itself is a stubborn stone forever growing, and the act of writing is most like sculpture, knocking away that which is superfluous, digging to find the words to express what is always beyond words, logic, reason and self-absorption. For now I deliver to you this journey, this essay, this travelogue, this spiral, this ritual, this prayer.

When we're ready to leave this fourth world what will have changed will be our language. When we've abandoned the dark possession of a totally mediated world, and discovered a life beyond thought and symbol, we can leave the centuries of war and reason to follow the flute player to a place we can't at present comprehend.

Relevant texts:

Cronenberg, David. Existenz. Alliance Atlantis Films, 1999.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Odland, Bruce. Leaving Eden. Arcadian Recordings, 1991.

Schlain, Leonard. The Alphabet Versus The Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. Penguin Arkana, 1998.

Stanwood, Michael. Arc of a Buzz. Babyjane Records, 1999.

Stephens, Mitchell. The Rise of the Image the Fall of the Word. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Waters, Frank, The Book of the Hopi. Viking Penguin, 1977.

*this review appears in FISH DRUM #16

words by Ralph Melcher

art by Peter Taylor

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