
Lightly my toes touch
the ground,
pushing me off again,
like Nijinsky defying gravity as
he floated across the stage;
or the anonymous shamans who painted visions
of flight
on the walls of paleolithic caves; or Carlos Castaneda
asking his teacher, "Did I really fly?" Or a lung-gom-pa.
At the Pueblo Indian Cultural
Center, two masked dancers tread into
a room bells on ankles tinkling to drumbeats, feathered arms wheeling, dipping....my
feet, too, begin to stamp,
raising the sparks from embers thought long dowsed out.
Yesterday, a man was escorted
from the lobby of a Ramada Inn, into the cold street. Sitting
in a cafe we miss the monumentality of the carved
friezes, the mobility of Lascaux, the animal portraiture
of Altamira, and in their view,
the basal ganglia mediate rule-guided behavior, whereas the
frontal cortex provides alternatives that incorporate context-dependent
processing. This can also be seen as an example of the integration
of implicit encoding in the basal ganglia and explicit processing
in the frontal cortex. This frontal cortex-basal ganglia
system
serves the elusive, delicate movement of La Pasiega.
It is as though here alone, this
morning, I saw the same man pushed out another door.
"How can
an Indian be homeless in New Mexico?"
"When words lose their soul, we are
all homeless," he
slurred,
staggering
out,
counting coup.
As I walked
home, a loud voice came from a park, "Do you have a
cigarette? Do you know what time it is? What's the name of
this park?" A young man wanting to talk. |
He told
me he was from Orlando, and was here to buy horses. He liked
Florida, but wanted to live in Albuquerque and become a chef.
Horse meat? |

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