You go out into the world and make the money to keep us, and to paint more of our portraits.
I realized then the Star Beings didn’t care about my financial situation, or that I was anxious and worried about money. This was after I sacrificed a year of my book project to serve these Star Beings.
Inexplicably, the Star Beings understand the meaning of capital letters in English and German, so I’ve been careful to capitalize. They appear to value the first or the oldest in a series above the most recent or the newest; this at a time when new software succeeds the old in a matter of weeks or even days.
The Star Beings find the human appetite for novelty stupid and pathetic and a threat to human survival because the flow of the new and the newer is not infinite and can easily be interrupted or stopped by natural causes, never mind terrorism or war. The first things, the earliest of things, Old Things, are in good supply all over the world, and there exists little chance of disruption, especially now that all attention is fixed on the newest things.
The Star Beings aren’t vulnerable like humans. They don’t lose anything.
The Star Beings have little knowledge of the human predicament, and no compassion.
The Star Beings return from time to time though it is not clear why. They appear to dislike humans so much; yet there are anthropomorphic features in their appearance — do they really look like this or are they merely simulating an appearance?
We are limited by our experiences here on Earth. Our imaginations fail us.
Do the Star Beings experience emotions? They seem angry at humans but this could be my own human misinterpretation. Maybe what they term “ordinary consciousness” we humans would term “angry.” What then?
They are always returning to Earth. The upheavals here don’t seem to matter to them. Do they care that humans slaughter one another? Maybe the slaughter is part of some dark purpose of the Star Beings.
The Star Beings don’t care about understanding humans — much as humans are not interested in them and ascribe the worst characteristics to extraterrestrials.
Are all Star Beings alike in their disdain for humans?
I stopped painting their portraits for a while because I had to try to make some money. It was about this time that I understood why I’d recently bought not one but two Nahuatl-English dictionaries. Apparently, now the Star Beings expected me to write poetry in Nahuatl although I have no knowledge at all of the language.
I started with the a’s — ayahuitl, ayahuitlin which means mist and descending ghost warriors, a shower of revenants. These are the same ghost warriors the Paiute prophet Wovoka summoned with the circle dances in the 1890s across Indian country.
ayahuitl ehau-ya means mist is rising
ayauhcozamalatl means mist bow or rainbow
ayauhcozmalotonameyoa means to shine like a rainbow
I thought I’d accidentally skipped to the c’s — no, I didn’t skip anything — there are no b’s in Nahuatl.
citlalin means star
cicitlalmatiliztli means astronomy — along with the Maya and the Inca, the Nahua were great astronomers, and over the millennia they’d given other galaxies some thought
citlalloh means full of stars
cicitlalpuzacalili means space ship. It makes me happy to know that Nahuatl has a word for space ship
coacuechtli means snake rattle
coaizlactli means snake egg
coatl means snake or twin coatlantli means incisor fang
cochini means sleeper
cochitta means dream
cochtemictli also means dream
cochtlatoa means walk in your sleep
cochtapiazohua means wet the bed
cochtotolca means snore
As the portraits of the Star Beings neared completion, I realized the images themselves were alive. Sometimes when I was painting one of them, the canvas frame would make peculiar noises when I wasn’t touching it. The titanium white on their portraits glowed after dark. They watched me. I moved my laptop and my notes and copies of drafts of the book to their room because they promised to help me write this book.
In the beginning the converted two-car garage was more than large enough for my writing area and a painting area with an easel near the front windows. Now the Star Beings stood shoulder to shoulder and looked down on me. I painted their portraits as they directed me. They’d cause my hand to drop the paintbrush so paint splattered on the area I was working on. Whatever action I took — to use a rag to try to clean up the splatters of paint or to apply the new color I chose to repaint the area — the Star Beings controlled these actions and that was how they controlled my portrayal of them.
I kept making mistakes and had to keep reworking and repainting the image in the portrait. The Star Beings want definite lines with clean edges as on the Pueblo pottery, but not “realism.” They want the style the fresco painters used on the walls of the kivas seven hundred years ago. None of that Impressionism for them!
I think the Star Beings chose me because as a child I’d seen the old petroglyphs and pictographs on sandstone cliffs near Laguna, and later on in canyons near Chinle. I’d seen star map petroglyphs without realizing what they were.
Now the Star Beings had a vantage point to see and hear what human beings were doing. Maybe they listened to the radio in my studio when it was on.
I sit in front of the portrait I’m painting, and only then am I able to write. Whatever I write is connected somehow to the Star Beings or to the particular Star Being I am working on at the time.
Not long ago, I realized the Star Beings wanted me to draw a star map of the Pleiades on black paper with metallic color crayons. I’m expected to draw other star maps of Orion and Scorpio while I finish the portraits.
The other day, I became weak and shaky although I’d had a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast. Was it the weeks of e-mails that went unread while I worked feverishly on the portraits or was it not working on the Star Beings’ portrait for even a day?
A happy anticipation of working on the paintings each day reminded me of the happiness I felt writing novels. The joy I feel when I paint the beings is their gift to me.
I was painting one of them an ochre color, a light brown suited to a human skin tone although I knew the intent was not to present them as humans in masks and paint. My sense was that the Star Beings wanted handsome if fearsome portraits, painted in pleasing colors.
Later I was wondering which background color to use for the portrait of a terrible figure, dangling a human head from a string. Then as I stood at the bathroom sink flossing my teeth, out of the corner of my right eye, I caught a glimpse of a tall dark shadow figure. The message was to use paint as dark as the night. I finished him with a star map in white paint over his horns, face and chest. The lovely patterns of the constellations make the severed head appear even more forlorn.
In another of the portraits you can see right away the figure depicted is a troublemaker. When I first found the figure in a petroglyph it was clear he was dancing around, posturing and bragging. So of course he’d want to be portrayed just like that — with that ugly blue dick and big blue balls — to upset humans, to incite human envy and fear. As it turns out, a number of ancient petroglyphs portray beings with balls and dicks, sometimes erect, and they hold severed human heads. The calculation to cause human discomfort with the display of genitals in the state of arousal may be a rare instance of a joke or an insult from the Star Beings to humans. In general, however, the Star Beings seem oblivious to human discomfort, and most human concepts mean nothing to them.
One Star Being insisted on a necklace of the whitest shells with delicate cobalt blue figures of stars linked by bars of light. Another Star Being was not satisfied with the bloody skull he held, so I changed it to a freshly killed head with a clean face. A gentle cool rain from the Gulf said thanks to the painter for making the head of the enemy look presentable. Certain beings instructed humans on what must be done to call down the rain; apparently this involved an enemy’s head.