LAND OF ENCHANTMENT

Four years have now passed—incidentally, the same amount of time it takes for light from Alpha Centauri, the nearest known star to the sun, to reach Earth—since I visited a New Mexican shaman. I chose New Mexico because I wanted to journey to someplace far away and magical and because New Mexico, which lives nearly two thousand miles from me, on the other side of the country, is known as the Land of Enchantment. I chose the shaman because she had a decent website and I liked the way she used her “About Me” page to tell the story of how, decades earlier, she had journeyed to Morocco to study with Paul Bowles and to Spain to receive the blessing of an older shaman, an old woman who recognized the younger as someone whom she could pass on the lineage of her teachings. I also liked the fact that she didn’t look like a shaman—assuming it’s safe to say that American shamans can be said to have a “look”—but instead appeared simply to be the kind of vibrant, radiantly happy middle-aged woman who could rock braids without it seeming like a superficial way to appear girlish. I rented a car from Virginia Tech’s Fleet Services—a Prius whose license plate frame announced that the vehicle was “FOR OFFICAL USE ONLY”—and drove the 1600-plus miles to Santa Fe. In a room decorated with intricately woven rugs and Buddha statues and an ottoman where a plate of sage was smoldering, the shaman took a drum the size of a manhole and beat it while singing what sounded to me like an ancient, droning hymn. And when she entered the spirit realm or whatever—I know I’m messing this part up—she said she found my wisdom soul, an entity in the shape of a boy who, according to the shaman, had abandoned me when I was six years old; he now lived on a dude ranch in Wyoming, because the sky was so big out there and he loved the stars. Even so, this wisdom soul told the shaman that he wanted to “come home” and would I let him and if so would it be okay if he brought the stars too. I said yes and the shaman blew on the top of my head and then against my chest, as if she were blowing right into my heart; her breath smelled faintly—though not unpleasantly—of garlic. My job then, the shaman said, was to welcome the wisdom soul, to speak to it, to get to know it, and also to take a packet of tobacco she’d given me and sprinkle it around the base of a so-called “grandfather tree,” as a thank you to ancestral spirits, or something, the latter of which I eventually did, but I have to admit that I never talked to the wisdom soul, didn’t know how, really, or what I would say, never really believed that there ever even was an actual wisdom soul, though I wonder now if that was even the point—that instead I was supposed to learn to talk to a metaphorical part of myself I’d failed to nurture or even know. The day before I visited the shaman, I’d left the town of Marfa, Texas—where I’d spent the night in a vintage Airstream, and eaten chili poured into a bag of Fritos, and drank a margarita with jalapeños floating around inside—and driven north, to visit Prada Marfa. You may have heard of this place—a building that looks like a Prada store, in the middle of the desert. Even though the signs on the store say “Prada,” and the letters exhibit the company’s familiar font, and even though there are windows through which you can view various bags and shoes that appear to have been arranged on shelves in a manner that suggests that they might be for sale, they are not, because this store is not, as it turns out, an actual store. The door, for instance, is not a door that can be opened. The point of this thing, according to Elmgreen and Dragset, the pair of artists who designed it, was to build a monument to capitalism and then let nature take its ruinous course—and if somebody shot out a window or desert animals began to use it as a home, so be it—but days after it was finished, a thief broke in and stole everything inside. So the designers replaced the broken windows with fortified glass, cut the bottoms out of the bags, displayed only right-footed shoes, and tagged everything with GPS trackers. As much as I like to think about this fake little Prada store in the middle of the desert—the closest town, Valentine, has a population of 230—I think I would’ve liked it better if the creators had stayed true to their word. I like to imagine the building gradually falling apart, and that if somebody time-lapsed this decay, it might resemble something eaten by quicksand. As terrifying as the idea of falling into quicksand is, there is something pleasurable—to me, anyway—about watching something get sucked into the ground and out of sight. I hadn’t ever given this phenomenon much thought, and I certainly wasn’t aware that anyone would consider the sight of another person struggling and crying as they sank slowly into a bog or any kind of mushy earth to be arousing, but apparently this is a legit fetish and there are filmmakers whose entire oeuvre consists of other humans—usually women, in various stages of undress, but not, necessarily, naked—sinking slowly out of sight. I know, from reading several books on the subject, that if a person—a shaman, say, or someone under a shaman’s direction—wants to travel from ordinary reality—that is, our everyday reality, with its limitations—to non-ordinary reality—that is, a spirit realm where anything is possible, where animals talk and people fly and our dead ancestors roam freely—that the traveler lies down on the floor, eyes closed, listens to the beat of a drum, and imagines climbing into a hole in the earth, and tunnels through the dark until light appears, and that this is one way to gain entrance to this so-called spirit realm, where, with one’s power animal, one might seek the kind of wisdom that can make life in ordinary reality more bearable. I wonder, now, if quicksand could be seen as a kind of hole—a hole in disguise, like the booby traps I used to make by scooping out hollows at the edge of our yard and then laying twigs and leaves over the top—and that maybe a person could use quicksand as another way to journey to non-ordinary reality. I suppose it could be argued that quicksand isn’t a hole, per se, but I seem to remember that the important thing was that one should imagine an entrance into the earth, and that this was an important part of exiting everyday reality. So who’s to say in the end that I can’t lie down, eyes closed, with the others who are listening to the beat of an ancient drum, to visit the jungle of my mind, where I’ll shimmy myself into a patch of quicksand, and wait for the sopping muck to swallow me whole, so that I can finally leave this world—and its rules—behind.