Went out to Terlingua last week for the annual national or international chili cookoff. There's pictures arond here somewhere, but not really of the cookoff. I think that was the least impressive thing out there. I've been before but it remains my mecca in texas. It's one of the multitude spots parked on this earth that offer too much vision so that one feels small, unimportant and able to cross valleys with a single stride. Like the parts of Greece that inspired the Titans, a view so vast that we had to invest gargantuan heroes and demons to tower over it, to keep the land from being able entirely to swallow us up. It's a place I could never stay all my life but would happily die there.
Coming back to the city from this simple desert, this immense gaping wound of rock, dirt and emptiness makes me feel like I can't really see anything around me, I go on moving in my day but the whole expance of city moving around me is as blind as I, moving like the ant heap and asleep to the world which at certain moments, perhaps in the Chihuahua or somewhere else, you get an impression of life from the standpoint of geographic time, of planets, weather, people coming and going and making no impression upon anything so far as the earth is concerned. And if the earth rots and belly aches and swallows us to our doom, it won't notice and from some point of view up high on jacob's ladder this says everything about the importance of human life here on earth. There are bigger things going on. For me, I quit watching the news, forsaking it to rely upon my intuition that whatever struggle and strife going on here is immutable, impassable, and fleeting just as death itself is imminent. If there is a god in heaven, it is minding the passage of stars, not waiting to help people out of traffic, or out of a bad relationship, or out of Baghdad. The Titans are in the cliff face and not in our churches and offices, not even in us. We're far too asleep to have anything immense as divinity within us.
In closing, I didn't eat much chili, but the weekend had it's own immense pleasures outside of dining...that's all.