In the waiting room: "Today, now, the doctor is here. What a good feeling to be in the clinic, in this place of miracles. In the hall I see the doctors and nurses working. So clean, so healthy. See what miracles have done for them." L.J. Schneiderman, "The Appointment." In R. Reynolds and J. Stone, On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays. New York, 1991.

an old woman: "She represented the kind of death that our culture wished to conceal, making it invisible as old women are made invisible: the common garden-variety kind of death; death in old age, death from wasting disease, death after slowed generation of body and mind. Our civilization tries not to acknowledge such death." B.G. Walker, The Crone: Women of Age, Wisdom, and Power. San Francisco, CA.. 1985

red spots: On March 21, 1996, I wrote to Robert S. McCully, "The modern, scientific, mind works through a process of elimination, spawning binaries, categories, and charisma. Thus several scholars of Paleolithic Art see dots as marking boundaries, and palimpsests arising from a lack of space." On March 26th, he replied, "'Scholars' must have not read Leroi-Gourhan, since dots went on like waves. No boundaries like a period."

meandering: "The meanders have their own associated signs, such as running angles and sets of very tiny marks. But what do they represent? It was essentially serpentine form and its associated angles that led me to assume the meander was related to a water mythology and ritual." A. Marshack, "Exploring the Mind of Ice Age Man." National Geographic. January, 1975

they would be encountered: J.E. Pfieffer, "Icons in the Shadows." Science 80. #1.1980

with horses, ibexes...: R.S. McCully, "Sorcerers as Masculine Protest Symbols in Upper Paleolithic Times." Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology. Fall 1984.

waiting they linger: J. Weishaus. Refigured from, S. Ortiz, "Dryroot in a Wash."

the Shiwana: "The Shiwana are sacred beings in the traditional religious cosmology of the Pueblo Indian world. They are figures that exist as conceptualized beings which contain the powers of life. That's why they are known most commonly as bringers of rain and snow since moisture is necessary to ongoing life. During certain traditional Pueblo religious ceremonies, the Shiwana are personalized, or manifested as Kachina, masked figures that represent the Shiwana." (S. Ortiz. Private Correspondence, 1997)

toilet tank's innards: "The interior mechanism is simple beyond belief, consisting of a hole and a flap or plug to seal it, shut and stop the flow of water. On the plastic type, the hole is closed by eccentric action on the back of the pivoting plastic flap .On the brass type, there is a single linkage which lifts the plug and pushes it back into its seat as the float rises. If there are obstructions in the port or between the closure and its set, simply remove them manually, reassemble the valve and open the angle valve. Quickly reattach the float rod onto the valve=s operating arm, and, as the tank fills, work the float gently up and down, which should cause the closure to reseat itself in its port properly. As you gently more the rod up and down, the valve should open and shut completely, stopping the flow of water." D. Fredricksson, Plumbing For Dummies. Indianapolis, IN., 1983.

to body decoration: M. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge, MA., 1991.

before the sight: From, "Quetzalcoatl's Hero Journey."  In, R. H. Markman and P.T. Markman, The Flayed God--The Mesoamerican Mythological Tradition. San Francisco, 1992.

the felt correspondence: D. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. New York, 1996.