Vishnu time

“ ... The elements of which our bodies are composed were manufactured this way, in the interiors of stars now deceased, and distributed to space where these stars exploded.” — Robert Jastrow

By Mary Sojourner

His face was solemn, his hard eyes soft with the generous magic we had been granted. He clasped the charm bracelet around my right wrist. The assuredly-not-pure-gold links were hung with a little gun, a thunderbolt, and a road runner.

“My vow,” he said and closed the clasp, “which you will remember every time you see this bracelet — my vow is chipped with a pink diamond into the Vishnu Schist at the bottom of the Canyon. The words are exactly the ones I have spoken to you tonight — to be bone-deep honest.”

I believed him. How could I not, a woman trained in love by folk stories and fairy tales, a woman raised in a home where honesty was taught while lies wove together the fragile legend of our family?

It would be two years after his vow before I would lie in my bed alone and read Mary Renault’s fine novels of early Greece and see this sentence: “Men make vows only when they doubt they can live their promise.” I closed the book and set it on my bed, a bed piled high with books and newsletters. I thought of my vow to my once-beloved; and in that instant, saw the cover story of the nearest newsletter: “What’s in a Number?: Numeric Ages for Rocks Exposed Within Grand Canyon.” I remembered a different vow, mine, made not to a human, but to that Canyon. I opened the newsletter and read: “During interpretive programs,” the authors Allyson Mathis and Carl Bowman had written in Nature Notes, “audience members often ask rangers, with wonder in their voices, ‘How do you know that?’ after the ranger has described rocks exposed within Grand Canyon as being 270 millions years (m.y.) or 1.7 billions years (b.y.) old.”

I remembered standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, aeons above the 1.7-billion-year-old Vishnu Schist at its bottom, and whispering to ravens who had swirled up from the chasm — as though they were messengers for the time-alchemised stone — “I will never forget this moment. I will fight for You.”

It was 1985 and I had lived in Northern Arizona for less than a year. A Denver uranium mining company had filed a claim in a meadow thirteen miles from the Canyon’s rim, on land the Havasupai people hold sacred as the belly of Mother Earth. I was a cynical big city chick who did no believe in spirits or religions, no matter how ancient; but when I had first stood on the rim of the Canyon two years earlier, I had felt my huge and troubled life shrink to the size and mystery of a carbon molecule.

So, I made the vow to fight — and did. I was not alone.We, Havasupai and Anglo, environmentalists, Viet Nam Vets, medicine people, lawyers, hippies, teachers and kids, fought with legal briefs, with civil disobedience, with story-telling and prayers.

We held the mining company at bay four years, just long enough for the price of uranium to drop and the mine-site to be abandoned, head-frame standing, a bored guard and two cheerful dogs watching over equipment — and the mine shaft unsunk.

We knew we had not won a permanent victory. I knew the vow a greenhorn New Yorker had taken on the South Rim of the beloved Abyss, might never be fully kept. There would not be the incomparable peace of knowing a place has been forever protected. And, in that uneasy knowledge, I understood the patience required for the work.

Patience is a human quality. Rock simply is. The Vishnu Schist, unlike the vows of lovers — whether the Beloved is human or stone — promises nothing. And while it holds garnets, can briefly hold the warmth of a brutal summer day, the rock is ruled not by imperatives toward vengeance, or even faithfulness. Only the Rule of What Is holds sway.

In 1991, on a private river trip, I pressed my hands to the Vishnu warmth. A year later, with no less warmth, a friend gave me one of Its garnets, a rough lump of cool ember the size of my thumb. I knew the rule for human guests in places of power: Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints. I imagined some day I would carry the garnet to the base of the Vishnu and give it back.

Hiking injuries now guarantee that will not happen. I can still walk desert washes, make my way up low angle stone, but a river trip would require more than my arthritic joints could bear. (I have felt, at times, since the hiking fall that marked me permanently, as though I am a woman of stone, my shoulders and hips basalt, the rasp of bone on bone as harsh as the making of a new landscape. And, I have learned I contain garnets.)

In the year I vowed to the Canyon, I travelled by truck and foot; I gathered the knowledge we needed for the battle against the mining company from books and journals, from newspapers and government documents.We mailed each other legends and geological data; we phoned and stood on street corners and red canyon earth holding hand-painted signs to tell our stories. In our world, there was no internet; there were only 80-hour pro-bono work weeks.

I wondered, as I re-read the Canyon article, who had named the Vishnu Schist and why. Next morning, I logged-on the Web in less than seconds — and found no definite answers. Major Clarence E. Dutton, explorer, geologist, mystic orientalist, had named many of the Canyon’s buttes in 1880 for Hindu deities, because he believed they looked like temples. My Havasupai friends, had they met him, might have politely pointed out that the buttes are temples. But the schist itself may have been named by Dutton, or Powell, or some other explorer, intent on making — by naming — the dark heart of the gorge less inhuman, less terrifying. Why Vishnu? I knew nothing of Vishnu. I typed his ancient name into the search engine, words of pure energy flickered, born from the dance of negative and positive, from that which forms the Schist and my own worn bones — star particles, the raw material of Time.

“Vishnu: The preserver god of the Trinity has four hands ... the fourth hand holds a mace (gada) indicating the power and the punishing capacity of the Lord if discipline in life is ignored.

“The dark color of the Lord represents the passive and formless ether, a great quality for a pervading god. He rests on the bed of the powerful, coiled serpent, Seshanag, who represents the sleeping universe.

“Lord Vishnu is also known as Hari, the remover.”

I remembered a human vow chipped into Vishnu Schist; a human vow whispered to the space in which ravens had soared. Black rock and garnets; betrayals and a promise kept. A pervading god who is known as the remover. My once-beloved, a man incapable of being alone, thereby (in the teaching of most ancient wisdoms) faithless to his deepest truth, had not been able to keep his vow. And, of the two I made him — I will not leave you and I will not destroy the bed-rock of your life — I kept only one. He shattered his own foundation.

I left and vowed to myself to stay gone, broke that vow and remade it twice, moved forward to a lonely bed piled with books, a morning entranced by a glowing screen, time for consideration of vows and naming — and the near-making of another vow. I began to send myself an e-mail: “I’ll make no more vows to humans.” I typed the words and knew they were nothing more than a promise I might never keep — unlike a vow to a canyon, or to a meadow in which the belly of What Is lies sacred, for time before mind, for time going on 1.7 billion years, and more.

I deleted my words and sent these: I am Vishnu, the pervader, Vishnu, the remover. I am an old woman, a carbon particle, a raven — alive on a bright November morning. No more, no less.



Frequent contributor Mary Sojourner is the author of “solace: rituals of loss and desire,” “bonelight: ruin and grace in the southwest” and “delicate: stories.” She lives in Flagstaff.