Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 20

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents

Day 20 - Visual Inventions in the Heat

Sometimes my urges for life are so huge. I want to see and do it all; want to learn all, be all. Sometimes my “all” seems a little crazy. There I was, in the searing heat in the middle of nowhere, hunting for rock images carved a thousand years ago.

I had driven off the paved Highway 117 in west-central New Mexico and guessed that the unmarked rough dirt road heading east toward the hills was correct. An hour earlier, the pretty woman in the ranger station had said I might have a tough time with my tiny car. Finally, after three miles driving on rutted dirt, I saw an encouraging official sign pointing to Sand Canyon on the right (no) and Cebolla Canyon to the left (yes). I needed to go further, to the intersection of Cebolla and Lobo Canyons. Eventually ever-deepening sand patches in the road raised my anxiety to a threshold in which inner imagery of being stuck triggered me to park and hike. I did turn the car around so it at least faced back for the return drive.

There was nobody out there on the National Forest land and wilderness. Why was I going out of my way to see the petroglyphs? I could have been at the casino at Acoma Pueblo. I could have been hanging out at a swimming pool in some high-falutin digs. Instead I was, well . . . wanting to see it all, do it all—my personal version of craving all.

The ranger had thoughtfully shown me a photo of what to look for to reach the petroglyphs, along a low, nondescript section of cliff face in the uplands to the north, somewhere between substantial canyons to east and west. I wished I had engraved the image a bit firmer into memory, so that I could recall it in a guided stream of consciousness and juxtapose it with what my actual eyes were seeing. But eventually it worked out. After a mile walk that included downs and ups across several deep arroyos, plus some poking around, I did find the panel with the menagerie of ancient carvings. I surveyed the expansive all around me landscape and took a long drink of water before turning to study them.

A four-legged animal with antlers. A big square anthropomorphic shape with long tail and arms. A left-hand handprint. A pyramid. A flying shape with two concentric circles for a head and a long tail streaming down. Another hand. Complex symmetric shapes with staircases, spirals, antennas. Creature with an X across its square torso and a circle for its head. Something clearly a bird, with legs and tail feathers. Humanoid creature. Another little thingee. Dumbbell shape—ah, they saw that the universe has duals. An alien-looking thing—oh, space creatures had landed here to help them with their civilization. A crawling something with a heavy load on its back—life then would have been full of backbreaking labors.

This was all such pure visual invention. In his book, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, Pascal Boyer points out that gods all over the world, in various cultures, are almost invariably formed by a mental blend of ordinary biology and the fantastical. My petroglyphs had a lot of biology that was highly geometricized. A synthesis of realistic and abstract invention. The outer world and inner imagination conjoined. Creations that had never existed before, from the mind, yes, but recognizable, and not just because the culture would have had traditions of how to represent the imagined. They did not have anything like our form of writing. They displayed thinking in images. They were mentally blending.

Later in the day, at sunset, after more driving, I made camp at another site in the wilderness a few miles at the end of yet another dirt road off a clay farm road that had branched off the paved road further to the south. Beautiful desolation. I had searched unsuccessfully for pueblo ruins called Dittert site. Frustrated. Sweaty. I dined on peanut butter, crackers, and dried apricots as violent thunder and lightning cracked in the distance.

An enormous cumulus cloud illuminated by sunset had been swept into a long horizontal form by the wind. It reminded me of a guitar. With the large body and a neck . . . hey, it was a sleek Fender guitar, like one I own. Instantly my mind was off and running into a sequential dreamlike reverie: Sitting here in the middle of the wilderness, I could never construct an electric guitar. And then I’m teleported across space and time from my desert to southern California, to Los Angeles in the 1950s. I’m thinking about getting into the nascent rock and roll music business, networking with people, people who will want to groove and swing and dance. Some folks help me build a prototype of a guitar and suddenly success takes wing, and a whole subsequent fantasy life—my life with a vast business and lots of women, fast cars, and all-night parties—spins forth and then here rises the surf music movement and before I know it, “I’m out there a havin’ fun in the warm California sun,” which became lyrics to a hit song. The song played in my head. Fast-paced guitar riffs.

I do need the human anthill, oh god, with tearful gratitude I thought-felt at the fantasy’s wind-down back to my sitting at camp in the sunset. Is this how people sometimes choose lifestyles, occupations, or life partners? They try on fantasies until they say, “That’s a good one”? I have had my share of this process. It’s too late for the fantasy of an electric guitar business

Finally I noticed that the guitar-shaped cloud had dissipated. My private fantasy had definitely not enhanced my here-and-now experience of the cloud. Basically, although I was looking right at it, once my imagination had launched up and away through the doorway of the great cloud I stopped seeing it, unlike the experience with the humble cottonwood tree. Still, the fantasy was fun. Sequences of exciting years passed in seconds. The power of visual invention. And the automatic brain.

Notes

[1] The lyrics about “a having fun . . .” are from the song “California Sun.” According to Wikipedia (November, 2024), “The most successful version of the song was released by the Rivieras in 1963 and became the group's biggest hit in their short career.” I was a young, eastern teen far from the California scene. Cool drums and guitar parts.

[2] For more on the “humble cottonwood tree,” see "Day 17 A Tree at Lyman Lake."

Reference

Boyer, Pascal. (2004). Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books. Excellent as well is 2018 book: Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create (Yale University Press).

© 2024 by Tyler Volk

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