We had wonderful rains in the summer of 2006. The rattlesnakes got really fat because all the rain meant many baby rodents and birds. I recognized one of the rattlesnakes because it is almost an albino. It got huge. Last summer it was long but not so big and fat, and it was never upset to meet me in the yard; but this year for the first time when we met, he let me know he was nearby when I was forty feet away. The snake seems to know it is too big to easily hide anymore, so it has to scare predators away. I appreciated the polite warning while I was far off; the next time I saw him the mastiffs were barking at him through the fence and the snake flexed out its ribs and puffed itself up so it was one third again its size.
I shook the red plastic dustpan in the face of the small light-colored rattler who thinks she owns the front patio. But rather than back out the way she’d just come in she drew herself up furiously into a z shape and advanced on the invader to her patio. The red plastic infuriated her. I backed off and let her stay in the patio as long as she pleased.
CHAPTER 25
My 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?