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to the lungs, and the lungs affect the heart, and the blood and
the nerves are affected, too fast a beat, rasping nerves, petty
concerns, small things important. The life, I say, is pre-
cultural, and will remain so. Adobe is peasant. At best it is
and will be a cult of the body, bodies going from place to
place, from party to party - no being in the spirit of man,
despite or just because the being of the place is so great; no
contemplation, despite or just because vast Nature's contempla-
tion overshadows all else; no aloneness in this region of unchange-
able solitude and isolation. And I want to return to the middle-
west where the earth is less, or to New York where the earth
is not at all. I want to be in the company of low-land people
again, even this means that I must discuss "vital questions"
until I am sick of them.

I have, as you can see, an earth-restlessness. I am looking
for my place. I have gone on and on, looking for my place. My
present condition is not new. In every place I have lived
I have accepted and protested. The difference is one of degree.
Here in New Mexico both sides are pushed to extremes. All of
myself is involved, and constantly involved in affirming and
denying - and this is drama, the essence of it, and this is my
drama, and this, I have come to understand, is the drama of
thousands of others, those who are not locked in one place,
a drama heightened by world-conditions and by the restlessness
of the very earth itself.

I do not expect to find the conditions I want, already made.
I must, I know, help remake and make them. I must help tear down.
I must help build. I have and I will continue to do this, to the

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ranch and having this ranch be the permanent physical base of
our world.

One cannot live on the ocean bed.

It is strange. Often I have the impression that all of this
country is under water. Shadows and sea-green cover the mountains
with a wavy floating effect. The mountains seem like huge mounds
submerged. Except when dust is in the air, no air is more clear.
Dust puts a haze, a yellowish mist over the hills. But dust or
no dust, air clear or hazed, I feel water, I see water everywhere
over this dry earth. Not a wash. Not a river. A huge sea, a
vast transparent ocean whose surface is the sky with the clouds
as ships, I, unreal, passing through.

But how can this be? This high earth, submarine? It does
not always give this impression. I say, sometimes. At other times
I see it realistically as it is, one of the highest and grandest
crusts of the earth inhabited by man. But how account for the
submarine sense?

Perhaps I am re-seeing something that I saw ages ago. It
feels like that. Perhaps ages ago, before the continent lifted,
it was submarine. Perhaps I lived here just after the sea
drained. Perhaps I lived here when a new sea came as a deluge.
Perhaps that ancient x dwelling accounts for my urge to live
here again, loving New Mexico magnificent, gravitating to it
stronger than to any other part of the known earth, yet feeling
always a menace as if I were being drawn to my doom.

One thing is sure. There is no menace in the days. The
southwestern days are big, brilliant, and assuring. No where
else are days so large. A great day - here day is great.

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Speaking for myself - I seem to have a mirror in me. It must be there all the time, but only out here is it put to use. It reflects the day and all therein, regardless of what I am doing or the immediate focus of my attention. This vast blue sky, this intense great sun, the spread of plain, the slopes of the hills, the lines of the far-encircling mountain ranges, the sense and the rhythm of them, the feeling itself of day in this country - they are in me, I cannot close them out, I cannot forget them, no matter how absorbed I may be in the small thing immediately before my eyes or mind.

In consequence, there is a certain loss of sense of self, a certain displacement of my content as the southwest comes into me. My thoughts become still, my feelings disappear, my sense of entity vanishes - and I, I am unreal. Identification takes place. I am the day and the day is me. I am these hills, and I feel, if at all, only as they feel. I am the river <u>FM</u> flowing. I am the storm coming over Taos mountain. I am silent, because this country does not speak in words.

It is an experience. It is the experience of the south-west. I like it. Not many regions can pull me out of myself. No other place can enter me with such complete vividity. I wish I could convey the sensation of it. The sensation, the sense of being - not my being, but some being - as I sit on the roof of our adobe house and gaze at an expanse of earth as far-spreading as a stretch of ocean. Sometimes I feel that I could and would gladly sit on this roof and gaze - and be - forever.

And so I like to drive. I like to be out in the car and move around. In the East, it is difficult to get me outdoors.

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Day after day, night after night, I want to stay in. To me,
a crowded
outdoors in New York is disagreeable space between one house
or building and another. In New Mexico it is difficult to hold me
in. A special decision, a strong determination is required. Out
here the car is my moving roof. It is, indeed, my magic carpet.
Whether I sit back or front, drive it or rest idle, I take
in the scene and the earth of this region takes me, and I am
it.

To move, to drive a car out here, is different. All previous
notions of moving and car-driving must be revised. To begin
with, the space is so vast that you may be going fifty miles an
hour yet seem to be stationary. No matter how fast you go, the
mountain is always there. Then, too, there is a huge form
for this entire region, say the region of Taos. Within this
huge form there are innumerable smaller ones. Pass by all the
small forms you will, from hill to valley, from loma to arroya,
from dry sagebrush country to plowed fields, from town to
town, Talpa, Taos, Arroya Hondo - and you are still within the
large form and feeling of this region. Thus it so happens
that for me, *moving* and *being* are blended. Here in the southwest
I can move and be, be and move. Moving in the car I can be as
on the roof.

I must confess, however, that there are times when I
strongly protest against what I then call my vassalage to this
country. I want to be its master, not its slave. I want to be
myself, not it. I want it to come into me, not I lose myself
in it. I want my world, my atmosphere, my shapes and forms
and thoughts and feelings. I am not a mirror, I am a maker.

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I am not a photographic plate. I am active, a creator. I want to take what I need of this country, and leave the ample rest.

A marriage is taking place. Myself and the Southwest. In marriage the man takes the woman, possesses, aborbs, and obliterates her - then both are re-created, the man the woman the woman, both as individuals of a union. Now I grant that the Southwest is great enough to make me the woman of this marriage. In time, when the fusion is completed, it will, I am sure, release me to myself, happier and more whole because of the relationship. But now, with the process incomplete, I protest. I am not woman, I say. I am man. I would possess, absorb, and obliterate the Southwest.

Moreover, I am an egoist. I do not want myself lost or even diminished in the slightest sensible degree. I am the product of an egotistical civilization whose people pride themselves on their conquest over Nature. Is it any wonder that I, self-conscious I, squirm and growl when, coming from a city like New York when man does actually dominate, I suddenly find myself overmastered by a country that turned the trick without lifting a finger, simply by being?

Furthermore I am writer. In any case, that is what I am supposed to be. I, descendent of magicians, am supposed to use words with magical effects. But what words can I use to affect these mountains? Besides, as I have said, this country takes words away from me. Not only do the important words of my vocabulary go, but also the little words of everyday use. Sometimes I can't call to mind the word for some simple thing. Silence is grand, but writers are voluble folk. Whoever heard

9

of a silent writer?

All of this, of course, is personal to me. On the face
of it it is, as the phycohomologists would say, subjective. For
all I know it may even be neurotic. In any case it is personal.
I know it is personal, having to do with me and not intrinscially
with the Southwest, because there live in this region a
number of writers who fulfill the tradition of writers. If
not voluble, they are at least talkative. They chat away,
gossip sometimes, and have all necessary words at their finger
tips. Each year they write at least one book. In the Southwest
they pursue their craft as well as they could anywhere else.
Nor - to judge by their books - are they thrown into violent
vital struggles by such senseless issues as being and not-being.
Happy, harmonious people!x writers!