Basking in Gravity Summer Tour 2023: Photo Digest I
Abandoned mining camps, decrepit rest stops, and smoke signals
Ernest L. Blumeschein’s Deserted Mining Camp – a 1940 oil painting now on view at the Harwood in Taos – is one of the legit spookiest paintings I’ve seen in a long time. It’s in a class with Henry Fuseli’s legendary 1791 creepfest The Nightmare, but it’s scarier for the same reason that Midsommar is so terrifying: It’s happening in the full light of day. And like Ari Aster’s 2019 masterpiece of psychedelic terror, it’s no ordinary daylight. The grotesque figure riding an emaciated donkey through the forsaken mineral extraction settlement is traveling in the brilliant New Mexico sunshine, its creeping shadow clarifying the physical reality of this creature, their face locked in a silent scream as they wander through the ruins.
It also captures a sense of deep time that feels so unavoidable to me in the West. This mining camp was already a ruin a century ago, the crumbling adobe walls not that different from “the crickets’ soft autumn hum” that inspired Gary Snyder’s poem “They Are Listening,” a deeply melancholic ode to insect, human, arboreal, and geologic time inspired by his friend’s likely suicide, and featured in the annual Inter-Dimensional Music “Autumnal Melancholy” series of downpressing drone and goth dub burners. “As the cricket’s soft autumn hum is to us,” Snyder wrote, “so are we to the trees, as are they to the rocks and hills.”
This 2023 Basking in Gravity summer tour is about time, but you can also say that anything is about time, because like space, time is everywhere. I’ve been listening to more audiobooks from the “theoretical physics explained in a way that may appeal to stoned people and/or people who are not physicists” shelf and it’s hard to absorb such heady concepts while motoring across Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico two-lane blacktop. But at the very least I can rephrase Einstein’s theory that time is a relative thing, and sort of understand that I aged a little bit faster while I was up in the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez Mountains than I would’ve if I’d stayed put at Cosmic Chambo Studio HQ on the low-rolling prairie of East Central Indiana.
“made it to the part of TX where there's nothing but resource extraction sites, cattle concentration camps, large white trucks driven by men for whom 75mph is an inadequate speed limit, and wind” (2023) | diegetic soundtrack:
“taking an alt route diagonal from Jemez Springs through El Malpais to Tucson so as to avoid that desolate stretch of 80mph big rig traffic on the 10” (2023)
I didn’t bring my good camera on this trip: the Nubaru1 is already overloaded with yoga supplies, audiovisual equipment, clothing for at least three different climates, and camping gear suitable for rough-sleeping in high and low deserts, montane forests, and coastal woodlands. Plus the literal crate of refrigerated supplies that I require to manage T1D while on the road for a month. Being IRL with so many people that I love and that I haven’t seen since the beginning of the pandemic is overwhelming in the moment, so I didn’t take too many telephone pictures either. But I did document a few stops in order to keep in touch with Wife Rachel and Cat Hazel, and to give updates and previews to my former and future hosts. These are a few highlights that I’ve collected over the 2700 miles from Muncie to Memphis to Pampa to Taos to Jemez Springs to Tucson2 to Los Angeles.
Also if you’re here in Los Angeles and you want to contemplate mortality while listening to Mesoamerican death metal this Sunday at Coaxial Arts (or next weekend in Berkeley) save your spot before it’s too late:
Gratitude to Chris for introducing us to the warm springs of the Jemez Mountains, and to Mirabel Wildflower’s mama Molly3 for reminding us to pause at the crater itself.
As always, I am deeply stoked that you choose to be here online and sometimes now IRL again; and extremely thankful for all of the people who gave me a reason to get out of the house and get on the road. And extraordinarily grateful to Hazel and Rachel for helping coordinate from home base, at least until Rachel joins4 the trip in Berkeley. Likewise, if this newsletter is no longer of interest, thank you for having been here: make like Dead & Co. and fare thee well!
blessing up and blessing down,
Daniel
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The 2006 Oldbaru is back at home base, relegated to the status of “around town” motor vehicle since the front driver side window won’t roll down and the front passenger side door won’t open and the windshield washer fluid reservoir has a hole in it.
Where we were too busy catching up with our dear old friend and comrade Xoyote to take any photos of the ohm-azing Merguez pizza, refreshing hibiscus spritzer, or the large large large insect that was waiting outside the front door the next morning as we prepared to drive for eight hours through temperatures that never dropped below 103ºF even though we left at like 8am.
Throwback to our summer 2022 Santa Fe stop where Rachel took this photo of me and Molly where I’m wearing the same “don’t talk to me” Incantation shirt I wore on the 2023 New Mexico road trip, clutching the lush bouquet that she pulled together in just a few minutes from her garden, and sent with us to deliver to Whitney and Drew’s Abiquiú nuptials.
Sorry Hazel but you will have more fun chilling at home with all the prisms and we will totally miss you and will definitely come back but please be chill with our cool and nice cat sitter friend?
