Sol Paz Kistler - A Story
UNTITLED, (As the Æther Flows Through Space)
I am not a fountain, but I am the continuance between all things. I have no source that I know of. I am the infusion of all knowing. My heaviness can be felt in the moments before the rush of the wind picks up between the trees at high elevations. A silence as deep and wide as a caldera. I prefer to reside close to the mountains even though I am everywhere.
The coo of a mourning dove breaks across my silence. Through the thick, hot air, I expand myself up through the hum of tires gliding over blistering asphalt. I move through compressor, condenser, evaporator; I exhale across the faces of the two figures hurling forward at high speeds. I intermix myself in the golden white threads flowing between and through them. Between them, are threads that cannot ignore one another.
Dawn’s father, David, is describing a time he found a rock in the desert with the words “Body Found” and the date painted in white letters. I play in the sounds his voice makes, reverberating around the cabin of the vehicle. Dawn is watching the place in the distance where the sun kisses the road and an arc of refracted light continuously recedes like dancing water. Quivering, I illuminate myself in her thoughts around the word mirage. A hot lavender light appears, her will drains it until it is the color of withered petals.
Dawn invents a memory of herself driving alone into the desert to set up her easel and paint. She imagines stumbling across a pair of dusty boots sticking out between a bend in the rocky cliffs. In her mind, she wanders between foothills, finding a smooth rock to carry back in her arms. She holds her brush, just above the surface, hesitating for a moment as she imagines the style of lettering she would choose.
David, sensing Dawn deep in thought, decides not to mention that that particular hike —to a desert lush with organ pipe cacti, ocotillo, creosote and saguaro —had been to practice shooting his vintage Röhm RG-14, using the landscape as target practice. He hesitates, anticipating Dawn’s disapproval at hearing him refer to this gun as a Saturday Night Special now that she's back from her liberal arts program.
Outside, the road climbs and the sand dunes lower. The horizon line lopes alongside the car as the bleaching hot sun exposes every shade and permutation of brown earth, rock, stone, stick; each gently carbonizing in the heat. David takes his foot off the gas as he looks in the rear-view mirror and sees a fleet of Border Patrol vehicles. He slows to allow the SUV's painted white and green to pass. They seem out of their jurisdiction, though David doesn't know for sure. He thinks briefly about the checkpoints leaving Mexico: agents standing outside their trucks, barely glancing into his car as they wave him past. Their expressions obscured behind polarized sunglasses.
Dawn is coiling her thoughts around her like a boa constrictor. I expand in the space between them and her. She is reeling backwards in time, in disbelief that she is back in this desolate landscape, thinking she had escaped forever and would’ve aspired to greatness. She is back in New York, at the beginning of art school again. An angel from the desert, Dawn was encountered by her peers, raised in the surrounding suburbs, with an awe that was sacredizing. The desert's lonesomeness held the metaphysical, and likewise, Dawn had been imbued with the gift of the mirage. Through her studio practice, she perfected the art of the embodiment of illusion. She painted wild desert horses, sculpted figurines of coyotes, and projected mountainous horizon lines onto installations of zephyrous sheer silk sheets. The feedback she received for her work reinforced the idea that the lived, historical reality of the southwest was not as captivating as poetic representations of the sensuous, libidinal energy of an arid and unpopulated desert expanse. By the end of her first semester, Dawn had completely dissolved her childhood ambivalence for the place.
Like a small dust devil swirling alone, I extract the memory of an early instinct Dawn had sensed: that the lure of the southwest should be regarded with suspicion. Crystallizing, I raise this specter in her mind. This region operates as a site for a recurring fever-dream for the United States. A terra incognita resulting from the occupation and installment of an illusion made permanent. Here, fools mistook Fate for Destiny. The gold had evaporated for the early settlers, but a residue of their enterprise remained impregnated in the soil, causing a feral and infectious blindness. These apparitions hypnotized, taking fleshy forms of gaudy, Hollywood grandeur, bloated amusement parks, New Age energy vortexes, and cult-like wellness retreats. The collective delusion of a kinder and more intelligent technology watching us from above brought visitations from UFO's. It is in this place that missionaries nourished their cravings to expand and replicate. Religious leaders, knowing their flocks were spellbound in the heat, proceeded to defanged each disciple one by one. Invisible laws materialized on the land, created from imaginations that believed in systematic superiority over the life that was already present.
This whirlwind is short-lived. Dawn forces this deep into the taproot of her subconscious. Back to her timeline at art school, Dawn is remembering herself as a medicine woman from a barren and spiritual place. She wanted to make art that is unburdened; a psychic relief.
The embrace of personae, so particular to her generation of Americans, has overlooked the basic and profound law of all imaginations: that all dreaming minds will eventually, and inevitably, have nightmares too.
Rooted in the past, Dawn had composed herself like an espaliered tree, trained to simplify themselves in order to bear fruit. In her studio practice, she made meek, lumpy clay objects representing memory; loops representing mythic time; painted colorful blobs, mind-numbing stains to represent rapport. Everything she created was made to soften and alleviate. In this way, Dawn constructed something like a radiance.
Her body began to collect the cosmic imagery her new incandescence demanded. Freshly inked on her shoulder blade was a Zuni bear, the Navajo hieroglyphic for the sun was between her breasts, and a phoenix filled in with a colorful, southwest-style geometric pattern spread across her back. Dawn had the words: "White Buffalo Calf Woman,” inked in a delicate script on the inside of her upper arm. She had the impression of bold strokes, like Kaniza's triangle, the contours of which are defined by illusion. Dawn felt herself emitting rays onto everything she touched in her studio; the world was opening up to her light.
Here there is pain, wincing and acute. I am not unmoved but I do not interfere. Everything must flow in all directions and without difference. I am pulled into the tears forming in her eyes; the hum of the tires in the car. Embarrassment, betrayal, humiliation. Blinded by her own brilliance. Dawn swallows and hopes her father doesn’t notice.
Dawn’s boyfriend had left her for another young artist at school, Luce.
Dawn tried, desperately, not to fixate on this other young woman. She knew better, but still she could not help herself. She fell into an obsessive contemplation, stalking her every move in an attempt to understand her allure. Whereas Dawn was noble, luminous, and fresh, Luce was a wisp, mysterious and aloof. She was barely a shade and yet, —she was captivating.
Luce had an intellect with a formidable reputation. She was known for work that was dense, composed of carefully crafted latin phrases coupled with evocative gestures. To Dawn, Luce's oeuvre looked like no more than a compost of arranged detritus, but Luce was not interested in creating beautiful things through her work. She was interested in the mechanics of signification and meaning, of articulating contrasting ideas based on nearly-impenetrable readings. Despite the fact that Luce often did not fully grasp her references herself, she was successful in her tactics of synthesizing these ideas into a clever arrangement of aesthetic prompts.
Once, Luce had been asked to sit in as a guest for the studio critique of Dawn’s Investigation into Materials class. Dawn watched Luce from across the concrete floor, bent over in her folding chair. Luce’s long, unwashed hair falling over her downturned eyes. The word "Adore" was tattooed in gothic script beneath her collar bone. Everything Luce picked out from underneath her fingernails, she ate.
Dawn listened to her speak. Her words were confused, opaque and contradictory. Dawn knew it was a mistake to believe this was genius. But here is the spark between them, when they lock eyes, mournful and pleading: each knows that the other is their primal twin.
Dawn mimics in metaphor; Luce trafficks in semiotics. Dawn ascribes spiritual qualities to locale, and Luce deals corrupted exegetics. Dawn observes how Luce seduces- it is the rapidity with which she incorporates new information. In class, when other students show their work, still in-progress, still uncertain and unknowing, Luce, more evolved, quickly ingests and exhales their ideas into her own body of research. Spotting the value of new concepts quickly, these spores enter into Luce’s practice,a rapacious harvest and aggregation of her intellectual encounters.
Dawn, showing work about the raw, sublime beauty of the distant white sand dunes, leads Luce to organize a group show using the same landscape as the off-site gallery space.
Sometimes lovers don’t recognize one another through acts of love alone.
Before her final semester, Dawn flew home, back to the desert, to create her last body of work for thesis. She wandered alone, hoping she was a mystic, but the terrain withheld from her. She painted a series of Yucca, ‘ghost in the graveyard,’ rising out of the mounds of white gypsum, but it became clear that no deep or hidden meaning was materializing from the sastrugi. Dawn collected no inspiration from the dust.
One night, while staggering through the arid landscape, the moonlight highlighting her path, Dawn felt a lunacy begin to descend upon her. On her painting days she suffered headaches, heat stroke, and nose bleeds. She drove hours in the opposite direction to visit the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness, so her bloodshot eyes could roam the panorama, searching for something to extract from the formations of the bony spires. But the hoodoos remained silent. She sat in the dirt and cried. All she could conjure was her own delirium. Her tears streaked her face in the heat.
Lashed, tethered and anchored to her own obliterating romantic humiliation, Dawn was fermenting into madness. She fantasized about her skull being dashed open against the sharp rocks, relief as the pressure oozed out from within herself. She prayed to be torn apart, ground down, and spread like granules in the wind.
In the end, Dawn's thesis work was black and white video of white sand slipping between her fingers. In her voice-over, she spoke of the oneness she felt with the desert landscape, of how she felt her body dissolve in the desert and open up into a skyward expanse, and into her place within the cosmos. She filmed this upon her return to New York, using bags of white aquarium sand dumped out in her studio.
***
In the weeks following Dawn’s return home from New York, Luce had a solo show opening up in Reno. Dawn planned on driving straight through to attend it. Dawn felt a pull like transverse orientation, spiraling her towards a white hot flame. Sensing her instability, her father, David, had offered to help drive her there.
At the opening, Dawn wandered from piece to piece, her thoughts distorted as if by a static interference. Luce was at the opening. Dawn saw her from across the room, wearing a floor-length evening gown, and shyly holding a bouquet of roses while having her portrait taken in the space. Dawn watched her pose for each photograph, knowing she was witness to Luce's particular power, and wondered what she was emulating with her own. Luce's projection of meekness disguised her slyness. Her true talent was really a refined social practice of combing others for ideas, materials, and gestures. Luce operated like a tornado, and just as soon as she took things up in her orbit, she flung them away. She kept moving and used whatever served her momentum. She sat with no subject matter for very long in her practice. Nothing was lost or gained by her work, because just like Dawn's, nothing was ever at stake. Dawn sensed in her, as she sensed in herself, the truth of this barreling force:
that they were both to be constantly adrift inside of it, leaving nothing but a splintered ruin left in their wake. The central conceit of an art practice such as theirs, is that the violence is always, always, happening to them. It made no difference if either of their work was made under the pretense of social, environmental, or even aesthetic concerns: Dawn knew that they were entwined by their artifice.
Dawn recalls that once, when she had closed her eyes in the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness, I had revealed my face to Dawn in the spectacle of the ring of rubble, formed from the discarded rocket bodies that circle the earth's atmosphere. She briefly filled with awe as the landscape dissolved her sense of self, and it was not a threat, but a privilege to experience this spiritual grace. This land is haunted by those who, entangled in these invisible boundaries, have lost their lives wandering this expanse. Cut off, without water or respite from the heat, their physical selves had dissolved without a witness to their protest of oneness. I poured into her with the thunderous gallopings of a thousand horses delirious with empire and exhaustion. Dawn allowed herself to glimpse a moment before this time. Here, all the lines and boundaries designating the borders between the states and nations unfix themselves and float away. There is the truth of all land as undivided space, rolling ceaselessly in all directions, eventually folding itself under the sea. She felt she was merely a body unmarked by time and falling endlessly forever and ever. The rotation of a wheel with no orientation upwards or downwards, surrounded by the blackness of space. Dawn was not equipped or prepared to interpret this, and just as soon as it had been revealed, the vision had faded, and she had forgotten it.
Dawn hardly spoke on the drive to Reno. David wondered if the stress of living in the city was taking its toll. The night of the opening, they checked into a mysteriously damp room with two twin beds at a budget motel. The art was by her school friend, Lucy maybe? David didn't understand the art. Small bits of paper rolled into spirals, a dried moth resting on a pile of river stones, ropes and chains hanging off paintings that looked like a child’s scribblings. The text provided vague references to desert military testing sites, to drone strikes, as well as a few misplaced scientific terms. David wasn't certain how any of the visual art reflected what the writing provided.
All of the young people at the opening were covered in tattoos just like his daughter now was. She dressed just like they all did too, though he didn't really mind any of that. He knew that when her mother died, his Natalie, Dawn had not allowed herself to be abandoned. He knew that she had moved so far away to recreate herself. David knew he was unbearable to live with as well in the months following her mother’s death. He could see that. He considered it all fair enough.
Back in the motel room, when it seemed Dawn was sleeping soundly, David snuck out and drove 40 miles west to Carson City, to a place that his friends had told him about. He drove slowly down a dirt road, peering into the opened doors of rooms strung with cheap multi-colored lights.
I am here, moving between the reflection and refraction of colors against the stucco walls. David pays for a young girl with a heart-shaped face, sitting at the end of a bed in a scratchy, white, babydoll nightie that is too large for her. I kiss the complexity whirling inside her large, brown eyes.
Upon returning, David did not go back into the room where Dawn was sleeping. Instead he sat in the truck with his head on the steering wheel watching the light slowly descend around him. He waits in the motel office for Dawn to come downstairs for the burnt coffee served in styrofoam cups.
David senses an unease around her in the car on the drive home. Dawn hardly spoke, and was more brooding and silent than usual. She must have known. David thought.
When she was away at school, David had made a habit of it, often driving across the border to Mexico instead. He went with his hunting buddies, other men with septic, inflamed eyes and liver spots. Often, they would stop in the desert to shoot various firearms, and David’s little revolver was duly made fun of. Their skin was marked by pale scars, indicating where cancerous growths had been removed.
Alone with the young girls, David was always uneasy. He made the young women face away, which, David figured, they probably preferred anyways.
No matter how many times they visited, David would always become agitated in line at the border crossing. His pulse would begin to quicken at the sight of the Border Patrol agents standing in the glaring sun, wearing dusty olive camouflage ankle to helmet and outfitted carrying M4's with optics.
I am here flowing breathlessly between this invisible mesh. This is the edge of America, where the subconscious, turned hostile, viciously fights to keep the sleeper from unraveling the frayed edges of the dream. Here is the liminal location of the internal fission required to keep illusion permanent, and yet, ever-receding. The requirement being a rabid belief in the purification and elimination of a fictitious, biologized enemy. David despises Border Patrol agents, not able to come to terms with his own fear and shame that his actions might be known to a higher authority. Though David is quickly waved through every time, because no matter the nature of his transgressions, the border permits and tolerates in order to reinforce itself as omnipotence merely at play.
David has told himself that it is the last visit now that Dawn has moved back home. For weeks now, she has been hollow and deflated and absorbed inside herself, and so David has offered to take her out to see White Sands National Park, but to his surprise, Dawn has asked to see the White Sands Missile Range instead. In the car, she tells him that she wants to touch the lava-rock obelisk erected to commemorate the “Trinity Test Site,” and to collect a piece of trinitite if she can find it. David is not so sure that is a good idea, he has heard that these stones still carry detectable levels of radiation.
David thinks about the turn coming soon, where he will have to purchase the visitor's pass, to show to the guard at the Las Cruces gate before they can enter the missile range. I am entwined in the murmur of the road passing up through the wheels: through the torque applied from the pistons moving up and down, intaking fuel and oxygen, and moving inside each cylinder from heat and combustion. There is exhaust escaping out; the drone of the air conditioner blowing in. I am a lavender flicker across them both. Among all of this potential energy, of histories, spirits, and powers, I am ready to witness and to acquiesce to the flow of their will. But Love gives a gentle nudge, an arroyo still flowing deep within the surface, connecting to more permanent flows elsewhere.
David turns to his daughter and says: "You can turn on the radio if you'd like. Anything you want to listen to. I don't mind."