Times Magazine 2005

SANTA FE AND TAOS, NEW MEXICO

Among the scribbles in my travel notebook I find, for the first time ever, an attempt  at a Zen poem. It says:       

Steep silence outside Taos:

Snow on the wind;

Clouds oppress coyotes.

And the violet, awe-inspiring hush of that chill dusk is brought back to me so vividly I know why generations of artists and writers have been drawn to northern New Mexico. For Taos feeds your fantasies, Santa Fe seduces you into thinking that all is possible, that you could lead another life trying to encapsulate light within words, or taking a pencil to delineate the chunky adobe haunches of San Francisco de Asis church at Ranchos de Taos, just like Georgia O’Keefe. You want to stay there, or at least have your ashes transported back, to rest in the mountains near those of D.H.Lawrence.

Santa Fe, the jewel in the crown of America’s 47th State, lies in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains an hour’s drive north of Albuquerque. Taos is 72 miles higher, in another world of its own. In 2001 I passed through for three days, fell in love, and promised myself that one day I’d return to see if it was just a passing infatuation with mountains and the high, glittering light which renders all colour luminous. I’d also wanted to travel north of Taos to visit the D.H.Lawrence memorial, but had no time. It was unfinished business.

Though I dreamed of sagebrush aromatic in dry desert heat, my chance to return came when the cities sparkled with a million snow stars, chilli ristras  hung in porches, seasonal farolitas  (candles in paper bags) edged the buildings, and pinyon wood and Thanksgiving turkeys scented the air. Give thanks indeed, I said to myself, for in the winter a place is stripped back to its true soul.

‘Soul’ is the right word here, although the  almost untranslatable Spanish duende  is perhaps better, with its connotations of power and enchantment. Although you can’t go to New Mexico without buying some Native American turquoise jewellery, the real aficionados  know that the spirit of place goes beyond fashion statements and cool interior design. It may sound impossibly counter-culture but there is an atmospheric ‘vibe’ which some think emanates from deep within red earth and rock: the dramatic Rio Grande rift and countless dormant volcanoes which may - who knows? - produce an energy more significant than could be marked on any Richter Scale. 

The area has always changed people. Reflecting on his first visit to New Mexico in 1922 the author of ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’ wrote ‘The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning sun shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul and I started to attend.....In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul awoke, and the old world gave way to a new.’  Lawrence arrived with Frieda at the invitation of Mabel Dodge Luhan, a rich New York heiress who had settled in Taos, caused a scandal by marrying a full-blooded Indian from Taos Pueblo, and collected artists and intellectuals around her in a salon  of fervid sexuality, creativity and inevitable conflict.  Guests at the house you can now stay at in Taos ( since owned by Dennis Hopper too) included Anselm Adams, Alfred Steiglitz, Georgia O’Keefe, Willa Cather and Carl Jung.

Now Santa Fe, a town of 62,000 is the second largest art centre in the United States, after New York. On Canyon Road the galleries jostle, some very up-market, some selling ‘alternative’ decorative arts. There’s a centre for Free Tibet (complete with Buddhas in the snow)  near Geronimo, the most expensive restaurant in town. In one gallery a dealer, Michelle Gaugy, told me her theory that the magic of Santa Fe and Taos derives from the light, the energy, the  spirit of place which attracts those creative human beings who are capable of responding to it. They in their turn are drawn by each other’s energy, encouraged by each other’s gifts...and so the place and the people become one.

True or not, you do encounter artists. Everyone, it seems, is happy to talk to you, whether or not you buy. Each day the Native American sellers line up outside the Palace of the Governors to sell the famous jewellery and objects of  wholly covetable beauty. I bought a seed pot from Robert Naranjo, a Tewa from Santa Clara Pueblo who makes the famous black-on-black pottery. He showed photographs of his pots fired in horse dung and told me his life story. His wife Linna had died recently, he explained but he knew she was with ‘Josida’: ‘Your God and mine have different names but they are the same - the Almighty Father, the Maker’. Robert moved away, drove lorries and did a whole range of jobs, but finally came back to the Pueblo to learn the old craft. Unavoidable.

Likewise, Authur Lopez is a Santero or maker of holy images - the term for the Hispanic art of carving religious figures which are gessoed and painted in jewel-bright colours. His bold new work is highly collectible because it uses the traditional style to address sharp., contemporary themes. So Jesus cruises in a ‘low-rider’ car, and the Pope stands on his balcony turning his back on those of his flock (the homosexual couple, the nun who wishes to be a priest, the harried young mother and so on) who yearn for his help. Arthur told me that all through his childhood in Santa Fe he saw people drawing, painting, making  - against the backdrop of landscape and vivid sunsets. How could he avoid inspiration?

There are those who dismiss Santa Fe as a sort of Disney construct, where even the new car park has to be built in traditional adobe style. Taken in by the sophistication of shops, opera, museums and highly-developed tourist trade, they miss the truth enshrined in the town’s name - the ‘Holy Faith’ symbolised by an anonymous mural of the ubiquitous Virgin in the funky Guadalupe district. If you don’t ‘get’ her, in her blue-starred robe, you’ll never understand this town.To me, the  essence of Santa Fe is  religious, its history a Holy Trinity of stories.

The cultural fusion is beyond riches. Dressing in cowboy boots,  a Mexican waistcoat and Navaho squash blossom necklace (like the great collector Millicent Rogers whose Taos house is now a fine museum) can be powerfully symbolic for those who know. First you have to tune into  the native American faith in creation as inseparable from human life, the great cycles of living and dying celebrated in rituals of song and dance. Visiting the Bandolier National Monument outside Santa Fe I climbed the traditional ladders to peer into ancient Anasanzi caves thousands of years old, where the ancestral Pueblo dwellers built homes and carved petroglyphs - spirals, birds - in the red rock. The snow outlined the ruins of the stacked structures which people would enter through holes in the roofs. In such  beauty you  feel the presence of ancient spirits.

Imposing itself on the ancient native American culture came the ‘family and faith’ of the Hispanic (Catholic) oppressors/settlers whose art was an expression of worship, sustaining in a harsh land. The third layer comes with the endurance of the Anglo-American pioneers, who were makers too, because necessary household crafts evolved into artistic expression which embodied whole lives within the symbolic patterns of a quilt. And over them all, through the centuries, the vastness of sky and mountain - the physical manifestations of the unseen truth they all believed in. 

On a Sunday morning we take the high road north to Taos. Always, along the route, there are the accidental Still Lives: a purple fence with a steer’s skull behind, iconic junkyards littered with classic Americana, elaborate iron ranch signs.  Massively-buttressed adobe churches spill huge congregations: all ages, all types. Climbing up to little Chimayo, wind tears through the sage bushes, and light boils on the horizon, then disappears.  In El Santuario  (the Lourdes of the American west) an entire Hispanic family poses for a family snap by the altar and the back room is decorated with pieces of medical apparatus, rosaries and crosses left behind by those ‘cured’ by the holy dirt you can dig up from a hole in the floor. There’s a simple, home-made spirituality about the place which drives you to light a candle. Just in case. 

Santa Fe is a sharp, sprawling metropolis compared to little Taos. The town has been an art colony since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and  Lawrence wrote, ‘You cannot come to Taos without feeling that here is one of the chosen spots on earth.’  To spend an evening in the Adobe Bar at the Taos Inn is to feel yourself in a ‘sixties time warp, for the artistic counter culture is alive and well and drinking margaritas to an accompaniment of weird Lebanese-Baltic (yes!) jazz. A guy wanders in wearing a cowboy hat, and this is normal: cultural fusion means he’s at home next to denim dirndls and trailing velvet. There’s an abundance of steely pony tails, which greet each other with long, long hugs. The flower children are in their prime (rather like me), still hangin’ out, with their kids and grandchildren too. Next to me I hear, ‘Right on! You tell her I said Hi, man!’ - this from one grey-haired woman to another.

Next day, in Taos Pueblo I find myself plugging into the vibe once again, this time from a different source. The Spanish called the villages of the non-nomadic Indians ‘pueblos’ (towns) and imposed their religion on them, until the Native Americans could take no more and rebelled in 1680. Carl Jung agreed with Lawrence’s view that in  Taos Pueblo  ‘you will feel the old, old root of human consciousness still reaching down to depths we know nothing of’.

On a grey winter day the adobe dwellings, stacked like one of Braque’s muddier cubist works, are almost forbidding. You pay to enter the village but many areas are out of bounds; this is not a museum or a heritage set, but a living place. Some of the houses are open for trade, and so I meet Mrs Cosita Romero, selling fry bread by her fire. She asks me if  I ‘ve visited the church and says, ‘it’s spirit comes from ‘the native tradition,  even though it is Catholic and I was christened there’. As if all this happened yesterday, she explains that Catholicism was ‘forced on us’ by the Spanish, but that it doesn’t matter ‘since we all believe in one God’.  Sure enough, in San Geronimo church  there are dolls in Native American costume next to the saints.

It was time for the pilgrimage - in an absence of the New Mexican light, when the surrounding  mountains brooded unseen. The ranch Mabel Dodge Luhan gave the Lawrences in  1924  lies about 15 miles north of his beloved Taos. They tried to live 

according to ideas of freedom,  but there was to be no escape for Lawrence: his  short life and  tormented marriage was  ended by lifelong illness in the south of France in 1930. Frieda went back to live in Taos with her Italian lover Angelo Ravagli, and it was he who finally (with almost comic difficulty in 1935) brought back the ashes and built the ‘shrine’. It’s five miles down a dirt road,  but with the aid of a four wheel drive Chevrolet, in a foot of snow, I was able to pay homage, 

The little  building in the trees has yellow walls, a blue wooden roof and a round window painted crudely with a sunflower. A phoenix - Lawrence’s symbol - forms the altar, cast crudely from concrete. In the absolute silence I laid my ‘wreath’ - a tiny chilli ristra  to symbolise the passion of  his creativity. In 1956 Angelo buried Frieda outside the shrine’s door; today the grave of the woman the Indians called ‘Angry Winter’ lay under a a snowy quilt. Looking through the visitors’ book I saw that an anonymous sceptic  (dragged there by whom?) had scrawled, ‘This is the height of silliness’.

Ah, I thought - how sad and boring that somebody would travel to New Mexico and remain immune to its imaginative, burning heart.

Bel Mooney travelled  London-Chicago-Albuquerque with American Airlines, and  stayed at the Inn of the Five Graces in Santa Fe and the Fechin Inn in Taos. For information on holidays in New Mexico ring 01489 or visit www.newmexico.org