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Memory, place, being.

Article Excerpt
I live in a city that is forgetting itself, forgetting itself even as it constantly remakes itself into new impermanent shapes. A city driven by change, but not renewal, which might suggest an idea, a civic principle seeking expression. A city ordered, if at all, only by its changing, by its ever-expanding rivers of traffic coursing ever-widening channels. As it forgets itself, I lose myself.

We are relational beings, our ontology predicated on our ties to each other and to the places we inhabit.

BEHOLD

I recall as a boy accompanying my mother as we went to Old Pascua, Tucson's original Yaqui Village, at Easter-time. Across the great dirt plaza, late at night, out of the darkness, I could see the yellow-white light from a bare bulb hanging in a ramada, as we made our way quietly toward the small bunch of people gathered, the silence only interrupted by the irregular drum beat coming out of the darkness like an echo, the beat hanging in the air. And then the flute. Working our way to the front, I would behold the pascolas and musicians and the central figure, motionless, ready, standing in the center. My mother bends down and whispers in my ear: "Look, Joe, the deer dancer."

A Yaqui pahko is a ceremonial event celebrating and expressing religious meaning. It is especially associated with deer songs and the deer dancer. To me attending, observing, or just being in the vicinity and hearing a pahko underway captures the quintessential feeling of our desert Southwest. For me it is one of those apertures through which I am tied to place and tied to the layers of my own being experienced over time. A seeming lifetime after my childhood, I remember a night in Potam when I was the guest of Felipe Molina and his Sonoran compadre. I was sleeping in a daub-and-wattle structure in the family compound. I had gone to sleep hearing, in the distance, a pahko underway, the sound of flute and drum. In the middle of the night I awoke and heard that solitary drum beat--a resonating "bong" that carried through the black Potam night--followed by an interval of silence before a brief trill of flute. Lying...

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