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33 5. Glyph Time god’s today The oldest history of the Jornada is written everywhere in messages carved on rocks: glyphs that tell the story of a great hunt, etchings of myths and mystical beasts, expressions of the ordinary, the sacred, and the profound. On the bony spine of ridges, on the fiery fringe of brilliant rimrock canyons, on mesa top and butte, on isolated stone and fragment of pottery, the ancient people of the Jornada left their stories for the future. No Rosetta stone, no translator exists for these glyphs, yet they vibrate with the holiness of human spirit and of time’s immeasurable breadth. ‘‘I don’t know what it means,’’ a modern Zuni religious leader said after silently studying an elaborate rock art site for three hours, ‘‘but I know it is important.’’ We are no di√erent from the ancient ones of the Jornada: we speak, we write, we draw, we send missiles into space all in order to leave our messages for the future, in order to show that we once lived. From the gates of heaven to the science of Darwin, we try to record some proof that our life is real. We give it a name, or draw it, or trace its genetic code. In the petroglyphs of the Jornada are preserved what theologian John S. Dunne calls the life of the human spirit. Our very selfconsciousness is not an awareness of our history, or of the path we have taken in our lives, Dunne writes, but rather ‘‘merely and always the point one has reached so far in the voyage of discovery.’’ Every epic from the literature of the ages tells the single tale of this voyage of the human spirit. Read it here in the scattered etchings that shine like 34 Glyph Time bleached bones on the walls and rocks of the Jornada. It is not history captured in these glyphs, but time. Augustine believed that the mere actuality of time accounted for the existence of God. Time gave sequence, pattern, and meaning to reality itself. He called the eternity of time God’s ‘‘Today.’’ ‘‘And how many of our years and of our fathers’ years,’’ he wrote, ‘‘have passed through this Today of yours? . . . For Thou are most high and are not changed, and this Today does not come to an end in you; and yet it does come to an end in you, since all times are in you.’’ Once, while on a rocky cli√ high above the desert floor, I came upon a profound record of that still point in time. On a black slab, amid a scattering of symbols carved on stone a thousand years ago, someone had chiseled a circle the size of a human face. Two round holes represented eyes, and another, a mouth. It was a simple representation of a human skull. To the Hopis, who have a similar symbol, such glyphs represent the God of Death, a macabre stranger who wanders the desert. He leaves his footprints everywhere he travels, and he travels everywhere. I stood in the silence at this human expression of the journey we all face in death. Here some mother wept at the passing of a warrior son, here some father sat grief-stricken at the loss of a child. We recoil at the starkness of mortality, and yet that sudden emptiness , that glimpse of eternity, fascinates us, and entices us to continue on our voyage of discovery: we explore new lands, we reach to the stars, we look deep into our own natures, we split atoms, and we chant mantras, while the God of Death continues to stare out across the empty, sun-cut flats of the Jornada beyond the incomprehensible eternity of God’s Today. Another day while hiking along a remote and isolated gravel bench on the Jornada, I came upon a panel of glyphs etched on the vertical face of a stone slab. Two masklike faces stared from the silence of the dark rock. Below them the artist had drawn a box about the size of a hand. A staircase-like line bisected the box. The zigzag line cut the space in two like the teeth of a saw. All of the area on one side of the diagonal line had been carefully chipped away to form a beautiful white design against the black rock. The other half had been left dark. [18.117.196.217] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 05:24 GMT...

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