5/23/12
The air is dry here, it smells like smoke. A mountain is burning 30 miles away and the sky last night was orange-red, like the earth had been sucked up there somehow. It feels like ages. Nothing could be so distinct as the Texas sun except, perhaps, the profundity of the New Mexico landscape. It seems to boggle the mind with intensity and far-reaching power. I’ve been in Marfa and now find myself in Silver City, New Mexico. I’m sunburned. In a way I hadn’t ever experienced before. Like I’m soaking up Iron ore, directly into my skin. Yesterday at daybreak i drove up to the Gila Cliff Dwellings of the Mogollon and 10,000 years of travelers before them. It’s a place that I feel a great awe and reverence for. It exists between architecture and landscape. The village inhabits an active geological formation, made initially by volcanic eruption and then chiseled away by water to form undulating, concave eddy pools of “Gila Conglomerate” rock. The Mogollon created enclosed dwellings inside these formations, and their village in the rock is one of the great works of architecture I have yet seen.
