The Petroglyph and the Symphony

A bighorn sheep stares at me.  I cannot tell from its profoundly inscrutable eye if it is alive or dead.  Three arrows stick out from its body.  The one that protrudes from its chest, where the heart would be, has probably inflicted the fatal wound.  It stands on a hill surrounded by snow-capped blue mountains that encircle it like a sacred hoop.  This is the center, the place of unity and wholeness, the intersection of the six holy directions.  The bighorn sheep was pecked on a basalt boulder by a Jornada Mogollon artist between six and nine hundred years ago.  The drawing was made by scratching through the patina of desert varnish that coats the boulder to expose the lighter-colored rock below.  Desert varnish, a sooty coating that covers nearly all of the rocks on this hill, is of organic origin.  Billions of bacteria living on the surface of the rock have left behind a coating of manganese and iron oxides.

     The bighorn sheep resides at the Three Rivers petroglyph site in southern New Mexico.  He shares a hill of intrusive igneous rock and hardy chaparral with at least 21,000 other petroglyphs carved by people living in a nearby village.  The Jornada Mogollon lived in pit-houses clustered as small settlements throughout the arid landscape of southern New Mexico.  They built their homes partially underground, which made them cool in the summer and easily heated in the winter.  They were also inveterate artists.  Their petroglyphs and pictographs are found at sites throughout their homeland, often in astonishing numbers and using a wide array of colors or etching techniques.

     As I contemplate the artistic talents of the person who created the bighorn sheep, this person who, through his or her work, allowed me to see the dead or dying animal centuries after its death, the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, so familiar from the films and even commercials that have used it as background music, comes to mind.  In this carving there is so much: the eternal struggle between life and death, the complex and contradictory relationship between nature and humanity, and the mystery, captured with almost unbearable power in that enigmatic, staring eye, of the animal mind, which—most frightfully—is also our mind.  All the terror and wonder of our naked human nature is revealed, as it is in Beethoven’s music.

     Beethoven wrote music because that was his trade.  He wrote for his contemporaries, and, ultimately, for himself.  Perhaps he dreamed that his music would still be able to touch people centuries after his death, but he had no assurance of immortality.  That was humanity’s gift to him.  In his time, Beethoven had his critics, but he knew the worth of his music.  He experienced the joy of success, of adulation and love for his work.  Irascible fellow that he was, he often complained that these things mattered little to him.  And yet, he would undoubtedly have felt most gratified, in all of his solitary brilliance, had he known with certainty the extent to which his work would be treasured and revered by future generations; had he possessed the knowledge that his work would be rediscovered and re-imagined with devotion by subsequent hosts of musicians and music lovers for centuries to come.

     My thoughts return to the artist who created the bighorn sheep.  I am aware of the fact that there are people who actually know what his motivations were in carving this work.  His or her descendants have kept alive the secrets of this place, those members of certain modern Pueblo clans who can claim an unbroken lineage with the blood of the Jornada Mogollon, and with their culture.  But those secrets are not for me.  I do not seek to desecrate that which should remain hidden.  Those mysteries belong to the realm of the sacred.  But I can’t help speculating about the artist, because his work—as art—moves me so powerfully.  Priest, historian, or whatever else he was, he was also, intentionally or not, an artist.  He or she created these works for his or her own people.  I do not ask why.  I do, however, wonder if this unknown artist could ever have imagined that hundreds of years hence, a man not of his own people or time, not of own his race or worldview, would be so moved by this expression of a universal human vision, of the universe itself.  For me, his work has withstood the corrosive properties of both time and nature, to be rediscovered in an age unimaginable to him, like the mysterious and profound and purifying light from a long-departed star.