In my "American Indian Literature" course at Seijo University we are reading this semester Leslie Marmon Silko's immortal masterpiece Ceremony. A work of such profundity, still it is a passage like this that grasps my mind beyond any narrative importance.
They rode south with the sun climbing up in the east, making the sky bright, almost blinding. There were no clouds and the air still smelled cool. He wanted to remember the morning, bright and clear as the leaves on the little green plants which grew low and close to the sandy ground. It had the clarity of the sky after a summer rainstorm, when the dust was washed away, and the colors of the hills and the shadows of the mesas had an intensity which made everything he saw accessible, as if he could touch all of it, even the little green rabbit weed growing close to the sand, its tiny leaves clustered like stars. (78-79)
In my twenties I paid no attention to description of the landscape when reading a book. I didn't even know what a mesa was! But now, this paragraph dazzles me, makes me want to howl for the tierra encantada del Nuevo Mexico, each word shines with an almost unbearable intensity. I am already standing at my favourite point just outside of the Albuquerque of 1989.
And what makes it all the more strange is that I read this paragraph along with the quote below by Daniel Maximin, within 6 hours' time and 12 km's distance. Imagine how one's mind can be affected by such a juxtaposition! Literature, more precisely, DESCRIPTION, never ceases to surprise me. And this would have sounded thoroughly nonsensical to me if someone told me the same when I was 26.
