Description: The warehousing of Anasazi culture

From Craig Childs, House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization across the American Southwest

1.

"When archaeological crews began digging in the ruins of Chaco Canyon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they dumped unsalvageable rubble into the wash for flash floods to carry off. From one excavation alone, led by the National Geographic Society in the 1920s, more than 100,000 tons of archaeological debris -- splintered ceiling timbers and unseated wall stones -- were hauled out in ore carts and fed to the wash, as if the workers thermselves were agents of erosion. Everything else was packed into crates and shipped in boxcars to distant museums and private collections. A startling wealth of objects left Chaco Canyon during those excavations: colorful flutes and planks of richly painted wood that once hung in rooms like banners; beautifully decorated bowls and jars found stacked neatly to the ceilings of these rooms; masses of bear paws and mountain lion claws and bird wings uncovered in ceremonial contexts." (page 19)

2.

"Looking for the artifacts removed from Pueblo Bonito, I had wandered the long halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, its treasures sealed in seemingly never-ending rows of gray metal cabinets. In the Peabody Museum at Harvard, I found three stories of ceramics. In a small Federal repository in Albuquerque, I went through thousands of beads in plastic cases, and painted seed jars crowded on metal shelves. In these modern storehouses I packed my journals with annotations, telling which of Pueblo Bonito's rooms contained which artifacts. This morning I put the pieces back, restocking these rooms from my imagination. I filled spaces with thousands of nested bowls, their severe geometric designs flowing from one to the next. Exotic birds went back into their burials under the floors, along with a necklace made of two thousand flawlessly graduated turquoise discs, with jet black finger rings and painted flutes. I fit ceiling beams back into position, first setting turquoise into their sockets, the hanging feathered sashes from their heights." (page 47)

"One soul in two tormented halves": "In a Shallow Grave" closes

James Purdy, In a Shallow Grave: Reading Notes, Second Part

Garnet's ideal applicant, Daventry, appears suddenly -- "I thought he was a will-o'-the-wisp" -- and has a warm, soft hand "like that of a goat." Indeed, he'd grown up in Utah as a shepard. Garnet has taken to dismantling clocks for a hobby, and notes that Daventry "shakes his head like the old half-broken pendulum of the clock when I am dickering with it."

Up until now, Purdy has successfully evaded any indication of the time frame of "In a Shallow Grave" -- including what war Garnet was injured in -- but now divulges as Vietnam with one word at the end of a long paragraph in which the veteran defends his flowery way of speaking: "I don't take any pleasure anymore in reading the newspapers, and anyhow they are about the living, Daventry, and writ in living language, no, I have got firmly habituated to these old books . . . and so gradually you are these old books have seeped or trickled into my speech and have took over from the way people talk today. But until you spoke just now I didn't know I had this peculiarity even. So that explains how I call you a courtly young man, dig?"

He dispatches Daventry with a letter to the Widow Rance. Predictably, she finds the youthful applicant, Garnet's physcal surrogate, to be sexually irresistible -- making him strip off his clothes so she can see every inch of his flesh. Garnet is horribly jealous, but it also brings the two of them closer together.

In the meantime, Quintus continues his reading of the old books -- "which I don't think either of us enjoyed" -- snatches of which stick in Garnet's memory. "It is a remarkable fact," Quintus reads, seemingly at random, "that the three chief natural elements, water, air, and fire, have neither taste, smell, nor any flavor whatsoever."

Later, browsing through a "Guide to Phrenology," Garnet reads the following under a heading "MAN IS A GLYPH": "Man is little more than a glyph which punctuates space, but once gone is as unrecollectable as smoke or clouds."

Daventry begs not to be sent any further to the Widow Rance, but Garnet is insistent, even as he knows what the result will be.

The widow becomes sexually obsessed with Daventry -- he is tortured with her voraciousness -- and he spends less and less time with Garnet and Quintus in the old house.

While Daventry is away, Garnet is served with eviction papers for non-payment of back taxes. In a pseudo-Christian ceremony -- fueled, perhaps, by the powerful pills and dope they have been ingesting -- Daventry makes a communion from his own fresh-spilled blood. A hurricane arises and prevents the eviction and, as part of his further sacrifice, Daventry agrees to wed the Widow Rance. With this, Garnet's physical self begins to regenerate.

Garnet, fearful he will lose Daventry forever is told by the former teen runaway, now-Christlike savior: "'Hear me Garnet,' he was going on, looking at me like he was in search of my soul, 'I will never leave you even though the firmament part, because we are one, one soul in two tormented halves.'"

Daventry is killed, crucified on a tree in a freak wind storm -- "his arms stretched out as if he would enfold me" -- with his scalp circled by a ring of blood. Sacrifice complete, Garnet is united for a brief moment with the Widow Rance. But he walks away; "the droll thing about getting what you long for is the longing was better, longing pains more, but it's more what you want."

The Widow Rance, her new love for Garnet now unrequited, begins recruiting her own applicants -- sending handsome young men to Garnet with love letters based on those Daventry brought to her.

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The Applicants: Purdy's "In a Shallow Grave" opens

James Purdy, In a Shallow Grave: Reading Notes, First Part

Purdy's "In a Shallow Grave": a half-dead and physically shattered, monstrous veteran, released from the hospital and returned to his family's mansion in Virginia, seeks hired men, "applicants," boys really, to act as his intermediaries -- his prostheses to the living world.

Characters in "In a Shallow Grave" variously divided, contradictory: simultaneously healthy/sick, beautiful/defiled, male/female, young/old, ignorant/refined.

The veteran, Garnet Melrose, is basically inside-out. His doctor tells him: "Well, Garnet, you look like an open anatomy chart, one can see all your veins and arteries moving with the blood." As a kind of living corpse, the healthiest part of him is his bones; again the doctor speaks:
"although your skin bears a total disfigurement, you ought to bear in mind, despite your outward appearance you have a wonderful fine and strong bone structure, and it is the bones that are the real measure of a man's bearing and good looks."

The doctor advises: "it is your memory which keeps you in pain, learn to forget and you will be well again."

At first, Garnet has difficulty finding "applicants" to be his servant: "all the young men acted the same way, that is they took one look, and their gorge started to rise, and they would strain and cough, wanting to vomit."

The primary duty of the applicants is to take messages to Garnet's childhood sweetheart, the "Widow Rance" who is herself an odd mixture of death and life -- only 28, she has lost two husbands (brothers) to the same war in which Garnet was disfigured. She also lost to early death the infants she bore to each.

"The Widow Rance is twenty-eight but sometimes acts like some old rich woman of sixty." It also becomes clear that while she has forbidden Garnet to approach her, that he spies on her at night.

Garnet's questions for each of the applicants: "Can you prepare simple food? Like say heat already prepared soup, boil coffee, rub my feet when my attack comes on and the flesh above my heart, and can you take letters to the Widow Rance?"

Few white boys are willing to perform such service -- particularly, it seems, the foot rubbing: "the human foot is the real nigger of the human body" -- and it is clear that the black boys he hires are not satisfactory in the primary duty of communicating with the Widow Rance -- for the applicants are clearly physical proxies for the once handsome Garnet who, despite his doctor's advice, refuses to forget his past, his youth (he went to war when he was 17).

Garnet, who was a devoted dancer before going into the war, relives his youth by sneaking into an abandoned dancehall at night and recreating in his mind the time when he was sought after by all the young women of the town.

Garnet's divisions suggested by his name: "people stumble on hearing my name, the first name doesn't fit with the second, the first name, they feel, sounds like a girl's, and the second to them sounds too historical." His nicknames in the Army are indicative of his mood swings: Garnet Melrose = "Granite" and "Morose." The girlish side of his nature embodied in his still flowing hair: "I remember my first-grade teacher had said, "You have hair a girl would die for," and whilst everything else turned the color of mulberries, my hair was untouched by when I was blown up in the war, and so it made me look even more outlandish."

One of the black applicants, Quintus, becomes Garnet's reader. Reading to Garnet seemingly at random -- but maybe not so randomly -- from the old, dusty volumes, he appears to combine learning and ignorance. He fails as the physical applicant Garnet desires; becoming instead a kind of intellectual prosthesis.

Then the ideal physical applicant arrives: Daventry. He is a mixture of beauty and defilement: handsome but with his front teeth missing. And a mixture of innocence and brutality: he suffers from guilt at having, in self-defence, murdered two Mexican men. His beauty being on the outside, he is the perfect emissary for the inside-out Garnet.

Garnet says of his arrival: "I do not believe he was from this world. I believe he was sent by the Maker of All Things perhaps if such exists. I do not say that he brougt me total joy, but he was the ideal applicant."

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Pitch, the boy-hating Missourian

Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: Reading Notes, Part the Third

The confidence man continues his tour of the steamship. He taunts a miser traveling in Emigrant class with a get-rich-quick scheme, teasing him as insufficiently "confident" until finally the greedy of man relents ("I confide. I confide") and invests $100 in gold coins.

Changing guise to that of a herbalist (purveying the "Omni-Balsamic Rejuvenator"), he inveigles a sick man into purchasing his cures. "Then you give me hope?" the "juiceless, joyless" man asks. "Hope is proportionate to confidence," he responds, "how much confidence you give me, so much hope do I give you."

The sick man's plea: "only make me so I can walk about in the sun and not draw flies to me, as lured by the coming of decay."

The herbalist encounters a fellow deceiver: a man whose health has been destroyed by the New York legal system but -- as the real cause of his infirmity would earn no charity -- begs as a casuality of the Mexican war.

Introduction of the gun-toting, animal-skin clad Missourian Pitch, a "hard case" who will dispute with three avatars of the confidence man in a row

Pitch suspicious of nature and a hater of humanity -- and boys in particular. He is seeking a machine that can replace the boys (thirty to date) he has been hiring to do his farm work.

"I'm now on the road to get me made some sort of machine to do my work. Machines for me. My cider mill -- does that ever steal my cider? My mowing machine -- does that ever lay a-bed mornings? My corn husker -- does that ever give my insolence? No: cider-mill, mowing-machine, corn-husker -- all faithfully attend to their business. Disinterested too; no board, no wages; yet doing good all their lives long; shining examples that virtue is its own reward -- the only practical Christians I know."

"What a difference in a moral point of view between a corn-husker and a boy. . . . A corn- husker, for its patient continuance in well doing, might not unfairly go to heaven. Do you suppose a boy will?"

Seeking to counter this anti-boy argument, the confidence man posits that a boy always has the potential to be good ("boys outgrow what is amiss in them") and that one must wait for the good to emerge. To which Pitch responds: "The butterfly is the caterpillar in a gaudy cloak; stripped of which, there lies the impostor's long spindle of a body, pretty much worm-shaped as before."

When the confidence man seeks to argue the benefits of natural cures, Pitch counters by saying that his cough was "natural" in the first place, as is cholera, deadly-nightshade, and killing winters. To which the herbalist replies: "you would seem to have little confidence in nature; which really, in my way of thinking, looks like carrying the spirit of distrust pretty far."

Pitch: "Look you nature! I don't deny but your clover is sweet, and your dandelions don't roar; but whose hailstones smashed my window?"

Further: "I have confidence in nature? I? I say again there is nothing I am more suspicious of. I once lost ten thousand dollars by nature. Nature embezzled that amount from me; absconded with ten thousand dollars' worth of my property; a plantation on this stream, swept clean away by one of those sudden shiftings of the banks in a freshet; ten thousand dollars' of alluvion thrown broad off upon the waters."

The confidence man, as the herbalist, asks what Pitch has confidence in if he has "no confidence in boys, no confidence in men, no confidence in Nature." Pitch replies: "I have confidence in distrust."

Pitch sees in the confidence man's studied neutrality on the question of abolition an offensive moderation: "Pickled and prudent sentiments. You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right."

Pitch: "Boy or man, the human animal is, for most work purposes, a losing animal. Can't be trusted; less trustworthy than oxen. . . . Hence these thousand new inventions -- carding machines, horse-shoe machines, tunnel-boring machines, reaping machines, apple-paring machines, boot-blacking machines, sewing machines, shaving machines, run-of-errand machines, dumb-waiter machines, and the Lord-only-knows-what machines; all of which announce the era when that refractory animal, the working or serving man, shall be a buried bygone, a superseded fossil. Shortly prior to which glorious time, I doubt not that a price will be out upon their peltries as upon the knavish 'possums, especially the boys. Yes, sir (ringing his rifle down on the deck), I rejoice to think that the day is at hand, when, prompted to it by law, I shall shoulder this gun and go out a boy-shooting."

Observes the confidence man (now in the guise of the man with the brass plate, an officer of the Philosophical Intellgence Office, which seems to also conduct a kind of orphan-placement service): "Shocking, shocking. . . . You seem to have very little confidence in boys."

Pitch, objecting to the confidence man's politeness: "Don't try to oil me."

Again, Pitch who finds machines more worthy of entry into heaven than humans: "Truth is like a thrashing-machine; tender sensibilities must keep out of the way."

Upon completion of the deal with Pitch to send him a thirty-first boy: "Thank you. Confidence is the indispensable basis of all sorts of business transactions. Without it, commerce between man and man, as between country and country, would, like a watch, run down and stop."

When the confidence man in his latest guise purportedly disembarks at Cairo, his influence on Pitch is dispelled as well "like one beginning to rouse himself from a dose of chloroform treacherously given."

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Spreading the ideology of "Confidence"

Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: Reading Notes, Part the Second

The confidence man advises an effete young scholar to abandon reading the Greek and Roman Classics as heretical and injurious in their lack of "confidence" and thus undermining of God and Christendom.

The scholar overhears the confidence man in one of his incarnations promoting investment in the Black Rapids Coal Company and greedily seeks to buy shares when he appears in different disguise.

The confidence man denounces the Wall Street "bears": "The depression of our stock was solely owing to the growling, the hypocritical growling, of the bears. . . . The most monstrous of all hypocrites are these bears: hypocrites by inversion; hypocrites in the simulation of things dark instead of bright; souls that thrive, less upon depression, than the fiction of depression; professors of the wicked set of manufacturing depressions. . . . Fellows who, whether in stocks, politics, bread-stuffs, morals, metaphysics, religion -- be it what it may -- trump up their black panics in the naturally-quiet brightness."

The confidence man suggests that the bears get their "sulk" not from life but from plays and books. "Ten to one, he has lugged home from auction a musty old Seneca, and sets about stuffing himself with that stale old hay; and thereupon, thinks it looks wise and antique to be a croaker, thinks it's taking a stand 'way above his kind."

The scholar having gullibly invested in the mining concern, the confidence man seeks to lure him to a further speculation in New Jerusalem, "a new and thriving city, so called, in northern Minnesota."

Next, disguised as a Quaker, the confidence man scatters handbills about the Fidele's saloon containing an "Ode of the Intimations of Distrust in Man, Unwillingly Inferred from Repeated Repulses in Disinterested Endeavors to Procure his Confidence."

Observing a card game in the company of a new target, the confidence man poo-poos the idea that card sharpers may be at work, suggesting that "a fresh and liberal construction would teach us to regard those four players -- indeed this whole cabin of players -- as playing at games in which every player plays fair, and not a player but shall win."

Discussion of humanity from story of "anomalously vicious woman," that calls into question whether the "human form be, in all cases, conclusive evidence of humanity." Suggestion that perhaps "only the good are human" in refutation of Roman Senator Thrasea who, as related by Pliny, posited 'he who hates vice, hates humanity.'"
Woman in story is unpromisingly named Goneril; described as having a hardened and baked complexion "like that of the glazed colors on stoneware" and as "rather beautiful, though of a style of beauty rather peculiar and cactus-like."

Considering the dismal fate of the unfortunate husband (supposedly one of the confidence man's earlier avatars) of this inhuman Goneril, the current edition of the confidence man proposes that the real question is whether the spouse bore his misfortune despondently or "with confidence."



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"Where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase": Melville's "The Confidence Man" commences

Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: Reading Notes, Part the First

As pasengers embark on the steamship Fidele at the wharf in St Louis, a placard offers a reward for the capture of "a mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently come from the East."

Crowds gather about the sign, vendors sell money-belts and hawk handbills describing the exploits of captured violent thugs, "creatures, with others of the sort, one and all exterminated at the time, and for the most part, like the hunted generations of wolves in the same region, leaving comparatively few successors; which would seem cause for unalloyed gratulation, and is such to all except those who think that in new countries, where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase."

Into this scene a stranger "in the extremest sense of the word" arrives and, working his way to the place where the placard is posted, mutely holds up a slate on which he writes a series of messages about "charity." Those in the crowd variously ignore and ridicule him.

By way of contrast to the mute stranger, the ship's barber, opening his shop, hangs a sign reading "No Trust" (that is: No Credit), thus establishing the polarity of "The Confidence Man" between faith and skepticism, gullibility and suspicion.

That polarity further explored with appearance of legless negro beggar who is denounced as fake by an embittered peg-legged man, "a limping, gimlet-eyed, sour faced person -- it may be some discharged custom house officer, who suddenly stripped of convenient means of support, had concluded to be avenged on government and humanity. . . . hating or suspecting everything and everybody."

The crippled Negro begs by creepily imitating a dog and catching pennies in his mouth. When the peg-legged man continues to denounce him, the beggar is asked by the crowd for people who can attest to his honesty. He describes several, all of whom, it becomes clear, are disguises of the "confidence" man at loose among the ship's population.

Later, the peg-legged man, challenged as to why anyone would perform such a massive deception for mere pennies, jeers "you greenhorns! Money, you think, is the sole motive to pains and hazard, deception and deviltry in this world. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve?"

The Fidele's passengers representative of all America, indeed all humanity: "As among Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims . . . there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; man of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers and mocassined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fe traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man."

Episodes that follow describe various disguises of the Confidence Man, extracting charity (the Seminole Widow and Orphans Asylum) or investment (the Black Rapids Coal Company) from the ship's passengers -- pleading, sometimes querilously for their "confidence," soliciting their "trust." As each new incarnation of the confidence man emerges, queries regarding the prior ones are answered by saying he has just disembarked.

Among the confidence man's targets is a "good" man whose suit is lined in white and who wears a white glove (though his ungloved hand is just as white); the bills in his wallet are "crisp with newness, fresh from the bank, no muckworm's grime upon them" and all manual activity needed of him is performed by a black servant who "did most of the handling for him; having to do with dirt on his account."

To this visibly "good" man, the confidence man proposes a "World's Charity" that by taxing all the globe's population at a rate of a dollar a year would efficiently eliminate all poverty and heathenism by letting out charitable projects for bidding "in the Wall Street spirit."

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