Stone Church in Sunlight—Santa Fe, New Mexico. Photo by Tisha Dee, Pexels.
Often when I’m asked, with less and less surprise, why I moved to Santa Fe in 1991, I repeat the familiar explanations: the sky, the light—all true, but as with many humans, after twenty-three years here, I often take these miracles for granted.
The real reason is that I need to live in the City of Holy Faith, although I didn’t know that for a while.
Nearly every day, I hear church bells, most often the bells from the Cathedral near the center of town, although often bells from the smaller churches scattered through the neighborhoods. Now, visiting Los Angeles, bells are replaced by the roar of airplanes and helicopters disturbing the heavens on their restless way to and from Los Angeles International Airport. Of course there are churches here but I’ve yet to see one.
Here all lines are straight—eves, walls, window and door frames never depart from the perpendicular. At home there are many soft curves, rounded outcroppings, drooping doorways and the sprawl of Hollyhocks at the end of their season. The images of the Madonna above the entrances of small houses in Santa Fe or painted on stones at subdivision entries don’t exist here. Perhaps the angels left with the orange groves.
Yet it is only in monster cities—Los Angeles, New York—that I see the progress we’ve made since and because of the 1960’s, less apparent in smaller towns. The Civil Rights Movement, the Feminist Movement, the Black Lives Matter and LBGTQ movements are slowly moving us forward. The Voting Rights Act, under fire now from the Republicans, opened not only the way to exercising our legitimate politial power but to a greater recognition of our other basic rights, especially our rights to an equal education. Even with the limits imposed by failing public schools—and we who send our children and grandchildren to private schools and colleges bear some of the responsibility for that failure—we now have four generations who, somewhere along the line, learned that music and art and architecture matter.
I saw this dramatically illustrated in the astonishing crowds pushing through the Getty Museum here, astonishing first for its size and next for its patience, waiting in long lines for everything, but most striking in its racial and ethnic mixture; we nice white people might almost have been a minority, which we will surely become in time, and good riddance!
It was a young crowd, too, with many strollers, whereas the old museums in the North East and all classical music events depend on greyheads.
How extraordinary that J. Paul Getty, this hard-faced billionaire who built his massive fortune on one of the most destructive industries in our history, oil, starting out in the early years of the century in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with help from his millionaire father (another fortune made in oil) should at the end of his life create a foundation with his billions for “the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge.”
There’s no way to balance this gift against the 60-year oil concession he bought decades ago from Saudi Arabia; the destruction of the natural world is not remedied by art. That is not art’s function, nor is cleansing the reputation of an oligarch.
Yet one visitor yesterday to the Getty Museum may have glimpsed in the collection of golden astrolabes something outside and beyond the daily grind, and that is worth a great deal.
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