Incidents of Moving House in Pandemic Times
SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT ARMCHAIRS IN THE DESERT, DWELLING & GARDENING, MIRROR DISPLACEMENTS AND PETROGLYPHS, LURKING NEAR A TRAIN DEPOT, AND DESIRE-BASED RESEARCH; OR, AN ESSAY ABOUT MOVEMENT AND STILLNESS AND FINDING PLACE, DEDICATED TO LUCY AND ROBERT, WITH LOVE FROM RINCÓN
Place for me is the locus of desire. –Lucy Lippard
The map is a series of “upheavals” and “collapses”—a strata of unstable fragments
is arrested by the friction of stability. –Robert Smithson
A double rainbow sits over the original Rincón, NM train depot. Summer 2021.
This essay was published in the inaugural edition of Agency, a magazine created by Vienna-based artists Andrés Ramírez Gaviria, Elisabeth Kihlström, and Yuki Higashino. The first edition was dedicated to the theme of Travel.
To travel to a place is not the same as moving there, but this year I moved to a place where many people used to travel.
Now a farm town mostly in ruins, the village where I live was established at the cross of a railroad intersection on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Line in southern New Mexico. Rows of houses for railroad employees lined the street where the train depot was built, and at a two-story Harvey House hotel, “Harvey girls” in starched white linen dresses served famously generous portions of excellent food. This was sometime around the late 1880s, and the town’s population peaked then, at 500 persons. Named Rincón because it sits nestled inside the corner made by three mountains, the town’s relationship to train travel—people always passing through—and its nocturnal loading and unloading of train cars, earned it a reputation as “a favorite resort for rustlers and desperadoes of the most notorious stripe.” A friend tells me that "rincón" in Spanish could also be: "lurking place." This is the first year in two decades that I have not been in constant travel, and instead, I lurk my way through pandemic times, spending ten months in West Texas near family, before packing up again and moving to the desert. From Rincón, I drive forty miles for groceries once a week, and I see no one I know.
From the original "travail," the word travel indicates "painful or laborious effort"—even the laboring pain of childbirth. And "travail" comes to us from "trepalium," an instrument of torture. Travel, then, has long been synonymous with doing unpleasant and physically painful work, of being abused and hurt. Among other discoveries in this year of solitude, I realize I don’t miss the constant travel of before, with its attendant discomforts. Of course, moving comes with its own extraordinary pain and disorientation; in twenty years, this will be my eighteenth or nineteenth move; I’ve lost count.
On Highway 62, Brownfield is thirty-nine miles from the sad and violent town where your family has settled. You promise yourself never to go back there. In Brownfield, you turn right at the gas station, bobbling over the brick road of a faltering business district, and then the road opens up into the High Plains that lead you into New Mexico, one hundred and thirty-nine miles to the alien knick-knacks of Roswell.
You ascend the Sierra Blanca mountain range. As you drive higher, the mountains are covered in pine trees. There are casino resorts further up, a fire station, mobile homes perched on the side of the mountain, patches of snow in the shade. A church dominates a hill in the Mescalero Apache reservation.
In Ruidoso, you stop at Disco Taco for a burrito. You order at the walk-up window and eat in your car, parked beside a picnic table, the grease staining your clothes as it slips through the foil.
In 1967, Richard Long walked back and forth in a single line through a grassy field, his trampled path a kind of drawing in the landscape, which he titled A Line Made by Walking. It’s a simple conceit, but our paths change the places where we make them.
Landscape architecture names the paths we make when we go off-path (or when there is no path) "desire lines." I often use this term to describe my life, my obstinate insistence upon going off-path, marking a geography of essays and exhibitions across the U.S. and Central America, often directed more by relationships than strategy. It is what scholar Eve Tuck describes as “desire-based research.”
This kind of research, in my case, has always also included constant movement: to be in dialogue with communities means to go to them, and to return. To do the work of listening and, then, translation traveled—made visible—elsewhere, a kind of creative diplomacy in a personal struggle for a more empathetic world.
The World’s Largest Pistachio sculpture sits alongside the highway, beckoning you to buy pistachio wine and bags of sweet and savory nuts but you do not stop because now you are deep in this journey and if you stop you might lose your nerve.
In 1965, a group of Latin American poets, architects, sculptors, philosophers, and one painter, traveled across South America from Tierra del Fuego to Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia, in a pickup truck. As they drove, they followed the Southern Cross meridian, giving lectures, creating art interventions and sculptural installations in remote places, and making a series of improvisational poetic gestures along the route. They called the journey "Amereida," a neologism from the mingling of "Aeneid" with "América." They were in search of “a poetic voice that sings the emergence and destiny of the continent,” write Javier Correa and Victoria Jolly, “The Amereida is set out as an experience, one that, led by word and action, wonders about the meaning and destiny of America, in order to open up the possibility of a poetic mode of dwelling in the continent… This kind of iteration, in our view, also inevitably entails the formation of a sediment, a cluttering that paradoxically ends up becoming a methodology for Amereida: an oxymoron between history and poiesis, between icon and abyss.”
I am struck that the journey of these artists might be a kind of poetic dwelling, that in movement they also found a kind of staying with that Correa and Jolly liken to sediment. In “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Heidegger connects being with dwelling, finding linguistic roots in the Old German between the two verbs. “Ich bin – du bist; bin belongs to bauen; man is insofar as he dwells.” "Bauen" has its roots in "care," the tending to growth that happens when one cultivates a place for living. Dwelling, he writes, is a staying with things. I think about this as I unpack boxes of books and ceramics, my grandmother’s table, dishes from my great-grandmother.
Just past the White Sands, you roll into Alamogordo, a military town that sits in the Tularosa Basin of the Chihuahua Desert, just under the Sacramento Mountains. You wait in the McDonald’s drive-through for a morning sandwich and a Diet Coke and you eat in the parking lot before moving on, deeper into the desert.
The Tate has a Tracey Emin photograph in its collection from a road trip/book tour she made in 1995. Monument Valley (Grand Scale) captures Emin in the foreground, sitting on a velvety green sitting-room chair and holding open her book, Exploration of the Soul. Behind her, sandstone buttes rise up out of the desert and lines of white clouds form rows along a blue sky. The book, published in an edition of 200, describes Emin’s childhood, from how she imagines her conception, to birth (with her twin brother, Paul), and through her thirteenth year, in which a violent episode marks her transition to adulthood. Above all, it records the dissolution of her close relationship with her brother. The desert site of the photograph, a sacred tribal land for the Navajo people, is at once austere and dramatic—a counterpoint to the suggestion of a living room and, therefore, family. The openness of the desert, its longevity, the way the monumental landscape forms are made from the erosion of millennia: there are metaphors for self-discovery and expansion here, or for ways the self is wildly irrelevant here, in stark contrast to the ways it is circumscribed by the home, or ideas of family.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic Spaceport has recently launched another test flight of its SpaceShipTwo Unity out of the desert, and you see the strange double-bodied plane take off over you. It returns to earth, a failing computer system canceling the mission. National optimism about space exploration has been privatized and yet you still feel the tinge of disappointment, haunted by the Challenger explosion that you watched in first grade. Krista MacAuliffe, your dad’s hero, exploded into space dust and American sadness.
On the other side of Alamogordo, the White Sands are gleaming, a desert beach of blinding whiteness. Sometimes you pull over and sled down their slopes, surprised at how hard they hit when you thump off the sled at the bottom and your head pops along the compacted sand. From a distance, they look softer.
In 1971-72, Richard Long makes a 100-mile circular walk on Dartmoor, recording a single observation from each day of walking, “Day 1 Winter skyline, a north wind,” he writes. The collected observations become a kind of poem of the quotidian extreme: “Day 2 The Earth turns effortlessly under my feet,” but by “Day 3 Suck icicles from the grass stems,” and on “Day 7 Flop down on my back with tiredness / Stare up at the sky and watch it recede.” He describes his walks as a point of contact, “a meeting place of who I am and the topography, characteristics, and beauty of the place.” And yet, I imagine A Hundred Mile Walk is less about self-discovery than about observation, about the archetype of a circle and its suggestions of infinity paired with the constant aliveness of an endlessly changing landscape.
Near White Sands National Park, the U.S. government still tests nuclear missiles, often closing the highway that runs south of the park for hours at a time. In the U.S., it is the only airspace—other than the air above the White House—that can be entirely shut down at a moment’s notice. Someone tells you this and you believe it, and think about the UFOs finding this open air in which to crash and race their saucers.
On a walk to the perimeter of Rincón, I come across petroglyphs carved into boulders, their enigmatic geometries collapsing the time of this place: people have been traveling through here for centuries, but the stones remain. On the path, there are piles of garbage, some of it burned. Pieces of a mirror are scattered under a small tree, their surfaces reflecting sky and branch and I think of Robert Smithson’s 1969 essay “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatán,” describing a series of mirror interventions he made into various landscapes during a trip to the Yucatán Peninsula. Placing groups of square mirrors at various sites and photographing them, Smithson called the pieces Mirror Displacements and they reflect and refract the environments they enter, “displacing the solidity of the landscape and shattering its forms,” writes Nancy Spector, “Part Earthwork and part image, the displacements contemplate temporality; while the mirror records the passage of time, its photograph suspends time.” The displacements also suggest a radical unsettling, in my mind, of the authority of the artist, the way that authority is grounded in place (read: city) (actually, read: New York).
You follow Highway 70 to the east and as it cuts through the Organ Mountains you feel the lift of elevation, the winding mountain pass a permeable boundary guarding you from the past. The mountains are sloping dirt and gravel until they are vertical sheers of stone, their presence above Las Cruces solidly establishing direction from any point. Crossing the mountains, you escape family history, you are alone in the desert, you are hearing the whispers of other travelers, outcasts of the generations that precede you.
The on-ramp for I-25 sits three-quarters of a mile from the front door and you are thirty-one miles above Las Cruces, through desert hills that are always changing in the light. Canyons cut into the rocky slopes and as the days turn to summer, the valleys are filled with green orchards of pecans and fields of onion.
“The search for homeplace is the mythical search for the axis mundi, for a center, for some place to stand, for something to hang on to,” writes Lucy Lippard, who once wrote a short story about a woman’s erotic love for a place, a farm, that eventually absorbs her into itself. Lippard moved to a New Mexico village too, and it’s one of the reasons you feel sure of this particular line of desire. Memoirist Jami Attenberg describes twenty years of constant travel as her own attempt to avoid herself. When she eventually buys a house in New Orleans, she writes of a new feeling of rootedness: “I had situated myself in the world.”
The drive from here to there is 381 miles. Six hours if you don’t stop, but more like seven hours and four decades of figuring out where you want to be (and therefore who). The train doesn’t stop here anymore and the Harvey House is long gone. The adobe walls of your home are thick and keep the air inside warm or cool throughout the night and day. Roses and mature trees grow in the yard, apricot fuzz beginning to green on the baby fruits, and you admit to your friends that you didn’t know fruits and flowers could grow in the desert.
Maybe this writing is only about a very simple idea: that movement and stillness are two ways of being, enantiomorphic halves of each other, each answering specific questions about the self as it reflects and refracts alongside a place. Or, that travel and its corollary—returning to or finding a home—are discomforts by which we make relationship to ourselves. We connect or disconnect from a place in specific categories of time: a two-week trip, a six-hour drive, a thirty-year mortgage, a ten-month quarantine, a twenty-year exile, a two-hour flight. Travel is one marker of that time, often the measure of memory, a recalling of how experience informs us of who we are. And yet, I want to also say that it’s not only a journey about self, but about the diffusion of the singular human, the squaring of mortality with geologic time and constantly changing colors of the desert, the tropics, the land.
“One must remember that writing on art replaces presence by absence by substituting the abstraction of language for the real thing,” warns Smithson, who might also be talking about place. He dismantles the mirror displacements right after he photographs them, returning the mirrors to New York. “If you visit the sites (a doubtful probability) you find nothing but memory-traces,” he writes. “Remembrances are but numbers on a map, vacant memories constellating the intangible terrains in deleted vicinities. It is, the dimension of absence that remains to be found. The expunged color that remains to be seen.”
When the sun sets in the valley, the surrounding mountains become shades of blue, then gray, their distance flattened into the cut-out layers and lines of their boundaries. Paths through the hills turn to white lines, and the enormous sky takes up all the air in the room. Sometimes the clouds hang low and broad, the gauzy haze of distant rain connecting earth with heaven. The train sounds are the rhythmic hum behind thick and constant birdsong. And, then, just like that, for a split second, you are just there.
Laura August
Rincón, NM
Summer 2021