Japan and Christchurch earthquakes

Arturo and the Tortoise Shell (or Slipping Through the Cracks)

Arturo’s brother found a turtle shell in the desert and gave it to Arturo, and I met Arturo at the foundry in Vegas, Nuevo Mexico,and I helped him because he had hurt his back, so he went “back” to school to retrain; to be an artist. So I helped him scrape the plaster on the mold of the turtle and turn it around and fight the time, cause plaster of paris can set up on you real quick, so the knife must move fast and his back was not fully up to the task and mine was, at the time. The next time I saw my slight friend, he was painting something special: the patron saint of his village had been stolen recently, the male doll all dressed in fine old handmade lace and the frame would incorporate a litter, so we were talking about how to make it, cause, on Easter Sunday or thereabouts, it was carried he said, “by the majordomos”. I thought there was only one on the acequia system, so I asked why he used the plural and he said, “because the two majordomos and their wives carry it.” I was amazed at that imagery and that archetypal beauty...and that cultural reality. He gave me the mold one day as a gift; the one of the turtle and it is many moons since I have seen my talented friend; as the oil painting was stunning, in my opinion, what with all that lace. I cast the turtle in bronze and clay and glass; thinking it was beautiful and, also, stunning, what with all that perfect back detail- as beautiful in its own way as the lace...my son even wants one - the glass one - and it has been in shows around these parts, touting tortoises.
I know you find them around here, cause one year someone found a turtle on the railroad tracks and we kept it for a while and then decided to let it go.....and Tom found a dried shell up on the top of his mountain. Perhaps our old friend was dropped up there by a hawk ...or an eagle. And I thought of the ancient Greek story that points to the fact that we do not really know when we will die; like the guy in Athens who walked outside onto the streets, and was killed by a turtle dropped by an eagle.
So I was in Christchurch, New Zealand, a few days ago; down by the river to fish. I fished for a few minutes and was leaning as close to the river as I could lean without falling in when, to my horror, I felt the world shake and I spun, somehow, and dived under the electric fence line and crouched on the farmer’s pasture on all fours in horror and I was swearing and one can imagine what I was saying, can’t one? I was all alone, except for the cows, unphased, across the river; chewing the grass and not stampeding!
And now, oddly, I was at the end of the world, and was a survivor myself.. of the staggering devastating forces of nature.......swearing.
So I had a bronze turtle shell that I had never chased totally and was lying around, and I thought of what to do to process that scenario by the river, somehow and I looked at the turtle with its bizarre “head” like the epitome of shock, so I made a sculpture about the earthquake and the water and seeing the broken churches; the bronze turtle with the horrified one eyed head diving out of the grasp of the waters
Then today I woke up early this morning ( 3/11/2011)and saw the news: an earthquake 1000 times the strength of Christchurch (2/22/2011) 200 miles from Tokyo and I saw the devastation one more time; even worse
This time I could relate to it....... and I thought about all those people crouched on the ground or wherever they were - swearing exactly the way I did, probably. And thought about how the spires fell from the cathedral and how ours, in Santa Fe, was, perhaps thankfully, never finished. And I thought about when I was in China many years ago, as a young man, when our interpreter told me the worst swear words in Chinese, one being t.. ma… and the other was the Chinese word for turtle he said, Wang … or wang ba …, which made him and everyone else around blush, back in that halcyon moment. So when I started to think about all this, this morning, while watching a tsunami carry away everything in its path, and a whilrpool vortex larger than a rugby stadium in Christchurch and all the devastation like I had just walked through myself; fires, sirens, collapsed buildings, people placing one foot in fron of the other and in shock and I remembered the rest of the story: the turtle part. You see, the turtle was the one that held up the four elephants that held up the flat earth, and, when tipped, the earth and the waters were fragilly susceptible to breakage and spilage, and so I saw some connections in my new weltanschauung that ties together Arturos back and my Chinese comrades and my sussurous creeks and the tsunamis …….and the questioning eyes of the child I passed by in Christchurch and, intuitively, winked at, as we passed each other ….into the uncertain future........swearing each in our own way, knowing more than we did the day before...each in our own way.....atlas shrugging...turtles diving and swearing.
So the Iriquois, the New Zealanders, the Japanese, the Chinese and the New Mexican sons all have had the turtle standing and diving, and discovered what holds up those turtles......many more turtles, and what holds up the world....those four majordomos just like my friend said...and we all were in shock , even the earth, and we all carried the litter as we could.