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antoinette
nora
claypoole
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Old
Times. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Tony Luhan, Frank Waters and others
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But besides who is IN the project, it
might help to understand the raison d'etre. So. I'll share with you
some history of the project and also the impulse behind it.
How we live our lives in these tsunamied times will determine our
realities.
If we do our vision work we'll make a leap all together keep life
resonating peace. We will survive.
Creating kisses of bliss, One way or the other.
Kinda like a hippie revival down at the Hondo hot springs .....
Lately people seem to have a perpetual wondering
about how to take the best of where we came from and get to where
we need to be.That is, with
pressing end times rhetoric creating
erratic frequencies within our psyche a random reader or veteran of
any war might ask.....
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why create
a collection of art, stories, interviews and poems about a small
town of Taosenos in Northern New Mexico??
About People living around Taos Pueblo, talking about "the mountain"
and reminiscing about the plaza and paseo when they were still
unpaved??"
And I reply.....
Because
the winded wings of butterflies and hummingbirds
in Arroyo Seco, New Mexico
can create reunions of lost relatives in Salandra, Italia. I mean
it.
But, okay,
still....what does a Gail Russell photo of an old blue pick up
truck on a dusty road have to offer the high tech world reeling from
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© Lisa Law "Janis Joplin and Tommy"
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© Gail Russell "It was just
one of those days" |
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the devastation of
tsunamis, real and prophetic?? What does the rant of John Nichols
regarding Guatemala in the 1960's have to bear on a new generation
of digital debutantes?? When does Sam Hamill's poetic "curse on
Carson" undo corporate contracts defying South American
rainforests? How does the HorseFly newspaper hat photographed by
Jaap Vanderplas impact an oil spill near Monterey Bay??
How does Robert Mirabal's 1960's Grandpa story etch a portal which
reflects entrance into the butterfly effect?? When do the
lighthearted memories of Alex Blackburn and Nita Murphy, the
artwork of Anita Rodriguez tame the wrath of imprisoned Iraqi
children?? How does Frank Water's "lost work" revive the senses f a
toxic wasteland?
Will Barbara Waters
love and philosophy of living on El Salto Road & John Nizalowski's
journaling cure any nations' bankrupt conscience??
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- These are easier
questions to answer than imagined. In a time when we are being
called to remain awake. In a world of increasing closed eyes.
These are easier questions to answer than imagined. How?
Here. Art.
la Puerta, Taos the Art of Fetching Sky
defies the drought of any nation. Truly.
As art transforms what the soul cannot recycle.
Art a paranormal experience, of sorts.
HM: Is
this Taos project mostly poetry and photography. Or does it also
include paintings and sculpture?
- antoinette nora
claypoole: La Puerta, Taos the art of fetching sky is a fusion
of varied artforms. It includes images from various Taos
artists who were part of a collection of work compiled by the
Harwood Museum in Taos, an anniversary event, CA/T back in 2003.
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© Artwork by
Anita Rodriguez "Lowrider Heaven" |
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©
Megan Bowers "Stations of the Cross" |
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There
are various other local artists, past and contemporary fused with
interviews, poems, short stories and previously unpublished
non-fiction by Alex Blackburn and Frank Waters (1902-1995). So, yes
paintings, sculpture images, photo/art stories all of it.
la Puerta,
Taos intends to call upon the art of place to do the sorcery
from which it arrives. Take human existence and heal the dark
holes of fear. Which plague our gourds of ashes sight.
Divining antidotes essential. Lessons in the art of
fetching sky beckon. Wandering through la Puerta, Taos the
dream is that you weave a place to live where life is.
Marriage. Of Earth and Sky, Taos. One of those rare places
where people are unafraid to see themselves. Inside the land
that holds them.
Asking about the Taos project, what it
entails, brings to my mind a quote from Daniel Pinchbeck,
one which I read stumbled into soon after I met him a few
years back. He explains "If
art provides a 'saving power, it is not in the atomized
artworks produced by individual subjects, but in a deeper
collective vision that sees the world as a work of art."
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In my heart this sentiment is truly one which is reflected
in this Taos artists and writers project. We come together
as people and in the collecting of our visions an emergent
reality reifies art.
As some of us tally
time, we know it is now scant few years before 2012, a date
the Mayan calendar ends. To some this suggests humans may
disappear. Others of us believe we will make a collective
leap into love and peace realities. Something like a non
stop Woodstock replay.
Taos and
the varied artists and writers are collected. Not through
one singular genre, art form or media. Rather, the
book/project is like intergalactic offerings of a random,
collective wilderness. For this is all.
About Love. Of land. Of stories. Of magic and
legends, cowboys and yes Indians. Conquistadores and
trappers, women and hippies. Macramé dreams and men
slipping from "reality". From myth into what feels
like an endless arroyo of Spring high mountain snow packed
melt transposed from the Northwest to Northern New Mexico.
Art via Taos is mythical and seductive. Doctoring, divine
and a dust-devilled legacy.
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©
Gail Russell "Gorman and Warhol" |
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HM : What else are you
working on?
antoinette nora claypoole: Most exciting for me now is a recent
fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts that I received. It is for my
work in non-fiction and supports research I am doing at the Yale
Library Archives. There lives the "lost works" of Louise Bryant
(1885-1936), writings she did that until 2 years ago were stowed
away like a starving mother in the berth of a leaking ship. Much
like the one she road overseas to find her husband and love, John
Reed (1887-1920) with whom she witnessed the Russian Revolution of
1917. Together they both wrote books of that pivotal moment for
workers worldwide. An impulse, quite honestly, which is carried
forward today, revived via Chavez.
Though Ms. Bryant's two books
survived her life, various plays, poems and
correspondences had been lost to her previous biographers and my
intention is to create
a trilogy of her work, Watersongs. There will be a "collected
works" volume of
previously unseen writings by Ms. Bryant. A play (my virgin
sojourn in that genre and
an experimental photo/art cha cha. ) All the pieces of Watersongs
will be holding as
focal point her nearly buried --entombed (by the wrath of an
estranged, 3rd husband,
William Bullitt-- journalistic legacy.
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The hope is that a new
generation of activists
becomes inspired by the risks Louise Bryant took, the world leaders
she interviewed
(including Mussolini and Lenin) and the fearless way she presented
Socialism as a
necessary mainfest of existence. That is, The Watersongs Project
is something which
will bring to page/theater the myriad ways another person's life
can inspire our
current perplexing world stage nearly 100 years later. That is, a
tribute to the
reality that time is an illusion which keeps us from the propensity
of the human psyche
to traverse and reshape landscapes of freedom.
Louise Bryant's description of Jack Reed as he was dying in Moscow,
Oct. 19, 1920---he
is the only American buried at the Kremlin--is a resonate image of
poetic potentiality...."He would tell me the water he drank was full
of songs". This image informs my sojourn through Ms. Bryant's
work, becoming an elixir to the collective mist within which we,
so many, are enveloped.
- HM: Can you tell me about
your book rivers in her eyes and where the inspiration came from
to write this?
- antoinette nora
claypoole:
Rivers in her Eyes is an historical fiction I
wrote, based on the struggles at Big Mountain, Az. It contains
many things for many people, a post-colonial story which intends
to inform, enliven and revive a collective Earth based
existence.
If one searches a memory back far enough there is the truth
that all
people were once tribal--honoring woman, mother, goddess as the
source of all life. All of us, regardless of skin color, can
find our roots in tribal cultures. That is, we all have an
essential connection to Earth-based life, be it Celtic, Gypsy,
African, the People of First Nations (named "American Indian" by
the colonizers). In this way we are all related and in this way
many people were like Indians and Celts who once freely held
ceremony, sang with a drum, honored the kiss and hum of winged
ones, four-leggeds becoming totems, Sun and Moon honored as
magical deities.
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However, nowadays, few of any nation remember with clarity these
old
ways-- the conquerors have been busy trying to make us forget
what we
already remember. For a very long time. Threatened by tribal
people
and our inherent resistance to become slaves, property owned, or
power-over oppressors, colonizers throughout the centuries have
attempted destruction of woman/Earth centered life. Colonizers
destroyed libraries of woman's literature and art in ancient
Egypt's Alexandria, burned over one million women at the stake
for things like making a man sexually attracted to her, hunted
and tortured European men who practiced prayer at a forest altar
outside the confines of the "Holy Mother Church", massacred
Indians on the "Great Plains" under the guise of manifest
destiny. All of this in an attempt to deny the religion, life
and culture of land-based people.
- The Dine' struggle to keep their homeland, their
way of life, their religion, because they believe what happens
at Big Mountain happens to the entire human race.
Despite these desperate death walks, there is that rare
exception of tribal ways surviving, as can be seen through the
knowing of people like the Traditional Dine' (Navajo) who live
near Big Mountain, Arizona. They remember what many have
forgotten. Just as in old European tribal cultures, sacredness
of the land lies at the heart of Dine' life. The Dine' pray and
make offerings everyday to one of the four sacred mountains,
and this is what keeps the People,
Dine', alive. This land
is their Altar and it is said no one will survive, destruction
of life as we know it will occur, if this Altar is disturbed.
That is what the prophecies say. No one will survive. Not the
Red people, the White, Yellow or Black.
Dine' are part of a tribal people who continue to carry the
prayer and life-style of Earth based realities and are
threatened with destruction of their way of life. For those age
old ATTEMPTS to colonize and conquer "heathens" continues on
into the 21st century--in the form of corporate exploitation of
and desire to own natural resources which often lie under
Indian reservations in the United
States. For even today there are federal jurisdictions which are
interfering with Traditional Dine' way of life. Over the years
several laws have been passed which demand Traditional Dine'
move from Big Mountain and many Dine' have resisted this attempt
at forced relocation. Several years back the U.S. Supreme
Court refused to hear a lawsuit fourteen years in the making, a
Freedom of Religion petition (Manybeads vs. U.S. April 2001)
which would have allowed Traditional Dine' to stay on their
homeland and pray. This most recent decision has paved the way
for Hopi Tribal Council urged by energy
corporations to make plans for the mining of uranium and coal
from the Altar, Big Mountain, Black Mesa, a desire which has
been in the making and the courts since the mid 1950's.
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Here is a warning I
write in the author's notes:
" Yet a warning. Reader of any nation. Go gently and without icon
mentality into the spheres of Indian reality. Seek out an inner
sensitivity and connection to your own genetic ancestry ... while
listening with and knowing of People of First Nations. For while I
have spent nearly twenty years living, praying and working with
Indian people, I have wondered at how there is medicine in our
togetherness. And though I have been doctored by ceremony and
honored to pray with strong Elders, I have been likewise proud to
share with my Indian friends the pieces of my Irish/Italian ancestry
which are mutually useful for our survival. Saying it straight, I
am proud to represent ALL the nations which reside inside of me. And
in this way I believe
we all come to break the pattern of missionary mentality. There is
no one to save. No one to rescue. No one riding a white steed a
holy cross around his neck. Simply families remembering a patch of
moss. A way of life. A mountain altar. A desert wind. Bringing each
the other breath. Of life. As owl and her sight. As mourning dove
in pinon. There is a song. Of night sky. Of morning dawn. Of
fires burning and star passages. Of children born and old ones
gone. "
The dream is that RIVERS IN HER EYES helps something shift in the
way a reader, a nation, a world, creates our relationship to
Earth-- and to each other. A redefining of sacredness of life for
ALL nations. In the dream our stories and lives can survive the
ravages of time. In
that place there is no more slaying wo/man, mother, goddess, Earth.
In the dream we breath together like lovers in the dawn. We are the
heartbeat and the fusion. The milk of Life. Again. And again. And
again.
The dreams are where we really live.
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