Sittin' Pretty in Schaefer City

Karen, a Detroit artist friend who loves ceramics, photography and the blues, said recently, "The desert and native places are very sacred, once you've been there, it never leaves your system . . ." She's right. I've been thinking about various pueblos I've checked out -- as a sort of alien visitor -- the strange skies, mesas and buttes surrounding them and the colors that out-dazzle individual books and poems and TV and movies and songs and the many other prisms and touchstones of reality through which we mediate our lives.

While atop Sky City, the ancient Acoma pueblo sitting on top of a mesa in the American Southwest, I couldn't help but also remember the old advertising jingle for Schaefer beer, "Sitting pretty in Schaefer City," which made no sense, but then did. "First there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is, " Donovan sang in 1967. He was as right as my friend Karen.

Often it seems to me that William S. Burroughs (with Brion Gysin) was also right: human perceptions of the world are like some vast cutup of random images and sequences that we creatively (or crazily) make narrative sense of.

Then again, everything is so interconnected -- even seemingly random bits connect if one pays enough attention -- that what seems seamless is seamless.

While in Sky City, I noted ladders that went up to adobe rooftops and other ladders that went down into kivas where men from the pueblo performed some kinds of mysterious ceremonies, perhaps involving peyote -- a natural psychotropic or hallucinogen derived from cactus. Rather than asking directly about those kiva ceremonies then, though, I settled for a piece of delicious frybread and some fresh water offered by a pueblo couple from their home. For all I know, those pueblo men were merely watching imaginary football from an imagined Schaefer City of the mind.

Today's Rune: Partnership.