The year I was born, Peter Gabriel released a song titled San Jacinto, which documents the spiritual experience of a southwestern Native American man, whose culture is inundated and crushed by the influence of the white man.
He prepares himself for a great trial. He walks through his modern city, observing its travesties and saccharine, witty artificiality, and yet continues to the top of the mountain at dawn. He breathes in the sacred drug and he has a great revelation. All becomes clear for a brief moment, he exults, he is overwhelmed. He is but one node in the line, he holds it, he steadies it.
And, upon waking up, he is groggy, confused. He can't order his thoughts and is left with a vague remembrance of his epiphany, which he struggles to communicate. But he knows he is part of the last vestige of his culture.
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