You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.
―Italo
Calvino, Invisible Cities
In the blackest hour, she finds herself awake, seeing nothing but feeling trapped inside the four walls. The man next to her struggles in his sleep, mumbling in the language he came to her with. So there she lies, the Great Spirit flooding into her. She imagines her body as a river fed from undiscoverable sources. All she can recall now of the dream is a white feather that flowers up from a helmet of gleaming silver. Why it terrifies her she doesn’t yet know. The task right now is to serve the Great Spirit by etching the vision into stone.
She breathes in the scent of the fire dying in the hearth, tasting ash floating in the dampness. The dog at her feet flattens his ears towards her, sensing she’s about to get up. Once on her feet, her eyes seeing through darkness, she moves silently through the room. At the back door she reaches for a shawl, then slips outside, into the vegetable garden, the dog at her heels, the dew tickling her bare feet as she walks along the stone path to the gate, escaping into thick fog that glows in light from the full moon.
The windless night is alive with the echo of low tide gurgling over the stones terraced on the shore.
She glances back at the house, snug in a clearing among the trees. It’s a place where she rarely sleeps the night through, often waking like she does tonight, struggling to breathe.
He built the house after she took him as a husband. A one-room gabled box over a cellar of granite block, surrounded by the wigwams of her people in this valley beside the sea. South-facing, the house is warmed by the sun most days. In the garden, there is respite from the prevailing winds. The fence he built has created spaces that didn’t exist before, where she spends her days harvesting, washing clothes, kept company by the dog. In the yard, she feels that time passes differently, slower at times, faster at others. There are times the experience is blissful. There are times she feels lost, cut off. She’s still not comfortable with his idea of living here all year, a source of tension between them.
5-b
The Practitioner: Frank Lloyd Wright
I’m trudging along in the arizona desert like I’ve just stepped onto a moving walkway that isn’t moving. It’s the expectation of gliding—then disappointment when you’re not. I’m battling resistance in each step, the limitations of myself in time and space. It’s furnace-hot, a world without shadow at high noon. The breeze burns into me.
The desert, when contemplated from an abstract distance, much like the ocean and the prairie, can fool you into thinking it can be experienced with ease. How easy to underestimate nature.
On this dirt road flanking the front of Taliesen West, I’m watched in silence by towering saguaro cactuses all around me. From my vantage point, the visible planes of Wright’s compound, the sloping geometries of its timbered structure and cantilevered rooflines, the layering of plinth forms, suggest a ruin from a lost civilization that knew things we still don’t.
I step over the carcass of a small rodent, headless, shredded by who knows what.
He waits at the top of the pyramidal staircase behind the triangular reflecting pool, standing next to a petroglyph-etched boulder on its plinth. He’s wearing a dark blue suit and matching cape over it. A darker blue silk scarf folds crisply inside his suit lapels, high and tight on his neck. The black broad-brimmed hat. The cane. He’s not dressed for the desert, but in spite of it, the classic operatic Wright persona, our all-seeing Zeus, the thundering sky god of the architectural profession.
I figure he’s not been exerting much psychic energy tracking my arrival. The closer I get, the more he appears to be looking past me, contemplating the brown vastness of the landscape below the thin blue of the Arizona sky. Suddenly he becomes real, a living presence: a man in his middle seventies now, fighting fragility, not a statue to my fantasies of who he might or should be.
As I climb the final step, his head dip towards me, the tiniest acknowledgement. He’s looking at me directly now. It’s not a negatively aristocratic gaze that judges everything before or below it. Although
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