'Upon This Rock'

After Willa Cather published The Professor’s House in 1925 which contains her “Tom Outland’s Story” about the cultural grounding treasure (and not its surface monetary value) to be known of the realization of the feet upon the immense cliff rock at Mesa Verde—its ancientness, strength, and formidability undaunted by human thought, and wrote a letter back to F. Scott Fitzgerald about writing the ineffable cause internally of the feminine that had to be expressed, she knew she would take this to its realization, the embodiment—in herself and in creation to give solidity to Presence of what was not yet understood or even thought about the truer possibilities of American culture rooted in and from that feminine. In an interview that year she is quoted as saying,

“If one is going to do new business the patterns cannot help."

Of that she meant to free herself of the very limiting and “pernicious” American frame-up that traps one into the “prizes” of American culture: “how the [girl] got the [boy], and how [she] succeeded in business”—a very low horizon of the limitations of life as merely form beneath the dehumanizing structure of capitalism. She meant to go far beyond those cultural boundaries and live what had not been lived before, express what had not been expressed before. This transition of articulation in her writing she fully saw when she first visited the American Southwest—Arizona, propitiously on the exact days that the ostentatious show of culture in the Titanic sunk beneath the Atlantic, money over lives. What she viscerally experienced at Walnut Canyon she knew within her own Body.

I was already aware that her work had taken on the air of the eternal and was working that way because of miracles unfolding. My first glimpses of what she was doing with the Arizona rock came from my own experience in the Southwest and writing about the terrain and cave art in the South of France with my little Yorkie, Vanilla Custard Pudding. Our miracle wonder Bichon Frise Moonbeam was a part of it too, even as he passed. On our hikes in the woods and cliffs they became the same space in New Mexico, just as I would later see it had with her, with new possibilities.

Our footsteps matched the 36,000 year old footsteps of a little [girl] and a wolf’s footprints beside her in the deepest part of Chauvet. I had also written of the artwork that would come out of that realization flowing forth to Homer to Leonardo da Vinci in his Virgin of the Rocks—which clearly demonstrates the realization of the red rock cliffs and the feminine. And so when I reread Willa’s The Song of the Lark I understood what artistic insight she had into those rock formations and cliff dwellings she saw in Arizona. I understood that they were feminine—the strength and aliveness of the earth, and thus the “Upon this rock I will build my church.” I also knew she was aware that Michelangelo himself had done the same—she showed it in her 1925 photograph in Santa Fe by placing a bow on her heart while taking a picture of herself as the doors to the cathedral—aloft on a balcony, in line with the ceiling. That’s the photograph I propitiously walked into at the beginning of 2008 on Michelangelo’s exact 500 year anniversary of beginning to paint the Sistine—about my name. It took a number of road trips this year to finally put it within the veins of what she felt here that was the shock of embodiment. In May driving back from Tucson as I entered the terrain of Las Cruces, “the Crosses,” I could finally experience what she had. It was a shock of the beautiful. Without a doubt it struck me as feminine—something America had not experienced in its mythology—gorgeously coming up in those triangles of red rocks building to a pinnacle almost as if pointing to the heart within, the body there itself, rising to it, giving her, me, embodiment in the strongest, most formidable way I’ve ever felt. It turns out where I turned at Las Cruces is the beginning of the Jornada del Muerto, which goes by my home. This summer became one of road tripping through Arizona to Nevada—to see the Dead (& Company), and at Walnut Canyon I felt how Willa knew that the vitality comes up from those canyon cliff dwellings, knows her new power and grows from there, knows she must grow on her own from this ground—and not from society’s visions of her. Those boundaries have no voice here.

From Willa Cather’s writing in 1925—now 99 years ago—without the withholding patterns of culture she became free of in the American Southwest—came Death Comes for the Archbishop in 1927, a very on-the-road discovery in the stillness and formidability in the terrain that demonstrates this stunning different foundational rootedness of the feminine she first articulated in her 1915 The Song of the Lark. But its beginnings of spirit were coming: In 1912 “The Bohemian Girl,” which she sold in Greenwich Village at the Brevoort Hotel right before coming, had first brought in that freeness of spirit and a different rootedness—a foreign heritage which honored her Bohemian spirit—and what had for Willa been her expressed “original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord”: French literature and legend. As the characters swirl in a waltz in a barn Nils tells Clara:

“Besides, we'll give them something to talk about when we hit the trail. Lord, it will be a godsend to them! They haven't had anything so interesting to chatter about since the grasshopper year. It'll give them a new lease of life. And Olaf won't lose the Bohemian vote, either. They'll have the laugh on him so that they'll vote two apiece. They'll send him to Congress. They'll never forget his barn party, or us. They'll always remember us as we're dancing together now. We're making a legend. Where's my waltz, boys?" he called as they whirled past the fiddlers.”

Willa’s certainty of these answers was real. She placed herself and her writing literally upon that firm earth solidity against the waves arriving at the energy of the Atlantic and the formidability of that rock pouring forth its eternal in her very Body and hand at Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She had a cabin built there in 1928, the year following Death Comes for the Archbishop. In 1931 she published Shadows on the Rock—another reference to what comes of that realization first at the red rocks of Arizona to the North Eastern shore of early Quebec and the beginnings of culture in the flow of French heritage giving seed to the newly grounded feminine. From that we can see it all differently.