The Turquoise Ledge (13 page)

M
y idea was I would paint, not write, in 2006. But as I painted the portraits of the Star Beings I began to receive thought communications from them, often while I was sketching or painting one of them. I found myself jotting down short notes and messages that I later incorporated into this account.

The second Star Being portrait I painted was the figure of the Star Being rattlesnake on a lavender background. The old ancestors used a blue violet clay to make lovely lavenders and purples in sand paintings and frescoes.

I was painting the third Star Being portrait in March when the heat in my studio became unbearable. I covered the windows in layers of emergency blankets and old bed sheets and I cranked up two humidifiers in front of a big desk fan on high speed.

With the windows covered I couldn't see to paint anymore but I realized the Star Beings prefer the dim light. I bought an easel light. At night they want the windows uncovered to let in the moonlight and starlight so the titanium white in the portraits will glow.

The portraits of the Star Beings are a great success for me. I feel a close relationship with them because of the process of painting—each stroke of the paintbrush brought the form of the being a bit closer to its emergence in the world. Sometimes I felt the canvas on the frame shiver as I painted.

I began to record conversations I had with them as I painted.

One morning while I was completing a portrait of a Star Being as the Sun, I took a break outside on the front porch. After a while I noticed a large brown masked rattlesnake loosely coiled and relaxed in the shade under the mesquite tree. The delicate patterns on the scales of his face were shades of burnt umber and dark sienna brown. How perfectly the lines of the patterns followed the edges of the scales—I thought about the tiny smears my brush stroke left, requiring touch-ups.

The patterns of stripes and the dark brown mask around his eyes were powerful visual elements that caught my imagination at once. I sat on the porch and admired him, then suddenly I wanted to draw the pattern the mask and lines made on his face. I looked at the pencil lines as I copied the design on the snake's face. When my sketch was finished I realized I'd drawn the mask of another of the Star Beings, the Venus-eyed Rattlesnake. There is a cliff-painting of this incarnation of Tlaloc painted thousands of years ago by the paleo-Indians at the Hueco Tanks in Texas.

My portrait of the brown masked Tlaloc includes a headdress of dove feathers to acknowledge how much the snakes around here depend on the mourning dove and occasional white wing.

The Star Beings first contacted me years ago. I saw a Navajo war shield at a small museum, and I was strangely affected by it because there was a star map painted on the war shield—white stars painted on black—Venus was a cross near the top, the arc of the Milky Way and then the Pleiades, and Orion, and below them a crescent Moon cradled in darkness. I drew the star map from memory as best I could; I made a number of drawings in crayon, and in ink on black paper. The memory of the star map never left me, and I incorporated the map into the first novel I wrote.

Later on I bought two or three dump truck loads of washed sand to cover a large circular area on the hilltop next to my house. The big circle of white sand would stand out against the darker basalts and lavas that formed the hill. The Star Beings liked to use white sand against dark volcanic rock to mark their landing places. That's why they chose the great Pinacate mountain range near Puerto Penasco on the Gulf of California where dozens of prominent volcanic cinder cones rise above white sand washed inland by the sea.

Not long ago, late at night I heard loud thuds and bumps on the roof of my house right over my bedroom. A great horned owl? A bobcat that somehow leaped up?

It was something heavy, heavier than an owl, maybe heavier than a bobcat. I sat still in my bed and held my breath as the bumps and thuds continued. All I could think about was what happened one time before I was old enough to go to school.

I was playing outdoors when some older children stopped outside my house and pointed up at the roof very excitedly and shouted to me there was a Guumeyosh on the roof. I ran indoors to hide, terrified because I knew it was one of those ka'tsina beings that grabbed children and ate them alive.

The struggle on the roof above my bed continued and then suddenly whatever it was, stopped. I've seen great horned owls two feet tall, big around as the tops of the saguaros they perched on. The old-time people saw a resemblance between the face of the great horned owl, round and fuzzy, and the face of Venus, the warrior star being in a halo of bright fuzzy light. Great Horned Owl took scalps with his six inch talons, and so did Venus.

From the evidence in ancient Pueblo kiva frescoes and in the petroglyphs and pictographs of the Southwest and Mexico, before they return to this planet, the Star Beings customarily make contact with the dreams and imaginations of selected artists whose consciousness is open to them.

They chose me to make their portraits because they want images that are accessible to ordinary people, to the masses, not to some rarefied audience. Other artists are similarly taken over by the beings. In Santa Fe, my old friend Roberto found their images on his wall panels of copper and bronze.

The Star Beings don't care if I suffer ridicule because I'm not a professional painter.

Watching night after night I saw the size and brightness of Venus fluctuate dramatically, as if the planet changed according to whom it watched. When it watched us here, it got bigger and brighter to let us know it was watching.

Later Venus disappeared from the evening sky for months, so I almost forgot about it. Then one night in the living room just after sundown, I felt someone was nearby listening and watching my friend and me talk. At that moment, out the window above the western horizon, I saw Venus but so bright and large that at first I mistook it for a jet airplane.

While I'm sketching or working on the canvas, the Star Beings communicate with me, to let me know how they want to be portrayed.

The previous year, when my laptop's hard drive failed, I had wondered if the Star Beings had intervened electromagnetically to stop me from working on the book so I'd have to go back to painting their portraits.

I had run into financial difficulties at that time, and I thought I could sell four or five of the portraits just to get me through. Of course I would have immediately painted replacement portraits, even better than the ones I sold, but the Star Beings refused to allow this.

You want us to go out into the world to make money?

You go out into the world and make the money to keep us, and to paint more of our portraits.

I realized then the Star Beings didn't care about my financial situation, or that I was anxious and worried about money. This was after I sacrificed a year of my book project to serve these Star Beings.

Inexplicably, the Star Beings understand the meaning of capital letters in English and German, so I've been careful to capitalize. They appear to value the first or the oldest in a series above the most recent or the newest; this at a time when new software succeeds the old in a matter of weeks or even days.

The Star Beings find the human appetite for novelty stupid and pathetic and a threat to human survival because the flow of the new and the newer is not infinite and can easily be interrupted or stopped by natural causes, never mind terrorism or war. The first things, the earliest of things, Old Things, are in good supply all over the world, and there exists little chance of disruption, especially now that all attention is fixed on the newest things.

The Star Beings aren't vulnerable like humans. They don't lose anything.

The Star Beings have little knowledge of the human predicament, and no compassion.

The Star Beings return from time to time though it is not clear why. They appear to dislike humans so much; yet there are anthropomorphic features in their appearance—do they really look like this or are they merely simulating an appearance?

We are limited by our experiences here on Earth. Our imaginations fail us.

Do the Star Beings experience emotions? They seem angry at humans but this could be my own human misinterpretation. Maybe what they term “ordinary consciousness” we humans would term “angry.” What then?

They are always returning to Earth. The upheavals here don't seem to matter to them. Do they care that humans slaughter one another? Maybe the slaughter is part of some dark purpose of the Star Beings.

The Star Beings don't care about understanding humans—much as humans are not interested in them and ascribe the worst characteristics to extraterrestrials.

Are all Star Beings alike in their disdain for humans?

I stopped painting their portraits for a while because I had to try to make some money. It was about this time that I understood why I'd recently bought not one but two Nahuatl-English dictionaries. Apparently, now the Star Beings expected me to write poetry in Nahuatl although I have no knowledge at all of the language.

I started with the a's—ayahuitl, ayahuitlin which means mist and descending ghost warriors, a shower of revenants. These are the same ghost warriors the Paiute prophet Wovoka summoned with the circle dances in the 1890s across Indian country.

I thought I'd accidentally skipped to the c's—no, I didn't skip anything—there are no b's in Nahuatl.

As the portraits of the Star Beings neared completion, I realized the images themselves were alive. Sometimes when I was painting one of them, the canvas frame would make peculiar noises when I wasn't touching it. The titanium white on their portraits glowed after dark. They watched me. I moved my laptop and my notes and copies of drafts of the book to their room because they promised to help me write this book.

In the beginning the converted two-car garage was more than large enough for my writing area and a painting area with an easel near the front windows. Now the Star Beings stood shoulder to shoulder and looked down on me. I painted their portraits as they directed me. They'd cause my hand to drop the paintbrush so paint splattered on the area I was working on. Whatever action I took—to use a rag to try to clean up the splatters of paint or to apply the new color I chose to repaint the area—the Star Beings controlled these actions and that was how they controlled my portrayal of them.

I kept making mistakes and had to keep reworking and repainting the image in the portrait. The Star Beings want definite lines with clean edges as on the Pueblo pottery, but not “realism.” They want the style the fresco painters used on the walls of the kivas seven hundred years ago. None of that Impressionism for them!

I think the Star Beings chose me because as a child I'd seen the old petroglyphs and pictographs on sandstone cliffs near Laguna, and later on in canyons near Chinle. I'd seen star map petroglyphs without realizing what they were.

Now the Star Beings had a vantage point to see and hear what human beings were doing. Maybe they listened to the radio in my studio when it was on.

I sit in front of the portrait I'm painting, and only then am I able to write. Whatever I write is connected somehow to the Star Beings or to the particular Star Being I am working on at the time.

Not long ago, I realized the Star Beings wanted me to draw a star map of the Pleiades on black paper with metallic color crayons. I'm expected to draw other star maps of Orion and Scorpio while I finish the portraits.

The other day, I became weak and shaky although I'd had a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast. Was it the weeks of e-mails that went unread while I worked feverishly on the portraits or was it not working on the Star Beings' portrait for even a day?

A happy anticipation of working on the paintings each day reminded me of the happiness I felt writing novels. The joy I feel when I paint the beings is their gift to me.

I was painting one of them an ochre color, a light brown suited to a human skin tone although I knew the intent was not to present them as humans in masks and paint. My sense was that the Star Beings wanted handsome if fearsome portraits, painted in pleasing colors.

Later I was wondering which background color to use for the portrait of a terrible figure, dangling a human head from a string. Then as I stood at the bathroom sink flossing my teeth, out of the corner of my right eye, I caught a glimpse of a tall dark shadow figure. The message was to use paint as dark as the night. I finished him with a star map in white paint over his horns, face and chest. The lovely patterns of the constellations make the severed head appear even more forlorn.

In another of the portraits you can see right away the figure depicted is a troublemaker. When I first found the figure in a petroglyph it was clear he was dancing around, posturing and bragging. So of course he'd want to be portrayed just like that—with that ugly blue dick and big blue balls—to upset humans, to incite human envy and fear. As it turns out, a number of ancient petroglyphs portray beings with balls and dicks, sometimes erect, and they hold severed human heads. The calculation to cause human discomfort with the display of genitals in the state of arousal may be a rare instance of a joke or an insult from the Star Beings to humans. In general, however, the Star Beings seem oblivious to human discomfort, and most human concepts mean nothing to them.