This picture reminds me of a brilliant use of Monument Valley by a scholar of religion - which also resonates with the humbling lessons of the Burgess/Borges Shale. Bruce Zuckerman, who teaches at USC, was discussing the challenges of working with ancient texts - texts from traditions most of which is lost. That which survives, through accident as much as anything else, strikes us as representative, indeed as the most important work of its time. But who knows? The texts we now have, he said, are like the buttes and pinnacles of Monument Valley. Impossible now not to see them as if they'd always been there, and always been that shape. And yet their shape owes only to the fact that the whole rest of the mesa of which they were a part has eroded away.Look again at Shelton's picture. The Yei Bi Chei, the buttes, the mesas - all used to be part of a larger geological layer, almost all of which has vanished. Perhaps the Navajo gods, like Michelangelo facing the fabled block of Carrera marble, carved the rest away to reveal them. Or it's Gouldian contingency - which isn't to say it couldn't still be divine.
And here, for good measure, is a picture I took, from a cross-country flight two years ago. Burgess Shale sublimity all over again.
