The Time Portal Built Into a Mountain | West to East

The desert of the American Southwest, a landscape that has drawn artists for ages. One of those artists is Charles Ross, who, after more than 50 years, is on the verge of completing the most ambitious project of his life, Star Axis, a work designed to travel through time. He's watching attentively there, right? This is a very crude working model of the granite pyramid that'll be built at the top of Star Axis. The star tunnel comes up along this base with an opening at the top to view Polaris. Well, Star Axis deals with different layers of time, and experiencing those layers in relationship to each other and yourself. All the form of Star Axis has been generated around the motions of Polaris, our present North Star. In 1971, I made the first drawing. Then I started looking for land in 72. I started driving around the Southwest every summer for four years, and I kept coming back to these mesas in New Mexico. The land and the sky are sort of equal weight here. One doesn't overpower the other. They're kind of on an equal balance. And it's one of the reasons I chose the mesa. You feel like you're standing at the place where the Earth meets the sky. Throughout the Northern Hemisphere, one bright, solitary star appears to hold a fixed place in the night sky, as all the other bodies of our solar system rotate around it. This fixed point is the Pole Star, also known as the North Star, a star aligned with the Earth's axis, which, for centuries of human navigation, has marked our true north. For Charles, the North Star is also a guide to the world within us. It seems to me the alignment to the Pole Star and the celestial axis is probably in our DNA. So there's something about confronting it that kind of wakes up an aspect of you inside yourself. The original idea was just to have a staircase on the edge of the mountain and a steel ring at the top to frame the Pole Star. And we were starting to make the foundations for that. When for 30 consecutive nights, I woke in the morning with a mantra that said, you have to enter the Earth to reach the stars. You have to enter the Earth to reach the stars. So I realized it meant we had to pull the star stairs and star tunnel inside the mountain. And that added about 15 years to the construction, maybe a little more. That made the building of Star Axis a huge endeavor. He didn't know it was gonna take this long. It was gonna be a five-year project paid for by the sales of his other artwork, which would have been possible if it had been a five-year project. I think he's profoundly connected to other consciousnesses and intuitions, and it allows him to listen to his dreams. For him, it's really a calling. Studying the Pole Star's geometry, Charles became more intimately aware of its relationship with our planet. I ran into precession, which is this slow wobble of the Earth and its axis. It's slowly moving through the stars, sort of point to different regions of the sky over time. This gradual shift in the Earth's axial orientation takes approximately 26,000 years for a full cycle to complete, during which time the position of our North Star, which appears to be fixed, is actually tracing wider and wider circles around Earth's North Pole, drifting slowly but steadily away from our true North. For about the past 1,000 years, the star named Polaris has been our North Star. But over the coming millennia, the position of Polaris will continue to spiral outward until 13,000 years from now, the star Vega will take the place of Polaris as the North Star. Maybe the best example is in the star tunnel, where light and time are interchangeable. Light becomes time and time becomes light inside. You're walking through a time tunnel toward the North Star and the celestial pole. At the very beginning of the entrance, because the opening is so far from you, you'll see a one degree circle of sky. As you walk up, you'll see larger and larger circles of sky and each circle represents an orbit of Polaris for some period of history. Charles precisely worked out the geometry of star axis so that the star tunnel runs exactly parallel to Earth's axis. From that core celestial alignment, all the elements of star axis, which Charles would add over the years, would become material manifestations of our planet's relationship with the stars. They manifest different geometries, but they also manifest different layers of time. First, the equatorial chamber pointing to the celestial equator. And then the hour chamber, which frames one hour rotation of the Earth with the pole star sitting in the top of the triangular opening. Out in front is the shadow field, actually drawn by the tip of the shadow of the solar pyramid throughout the course of the year. I'm simply manifesting forms. I'm making the invisible visible in form, which seems to me is the role of art in a way. Almost half a century since beginning work on star axis, Charles relentlessly continues carving his singular vision into the desert. Fortunately, we aren't the first to attempt to understand his unique obsession. This footage was captured over the course of several years by Wendy Apple. Well, you are the easiest person I've ever interviewed. A documentary filmmaker and Charles's friend. We were very close friends. So when I got into star axis, she said she'd be interested in documenting the process. All right, well, why don't I help you do it? Wendy wanted to understand her friend's total devotion to this project. Why do you need to build that? See, this is a mystery question. Your question is a mystery question. I have no idea where this energy comes from. But the more time she spent with him, the more apparent it became to her that what Charles needed to express was far beyond words. The process of working on star axis is becoming very internal for me and becoming increasingly difficult to talk about. Why do you think that is? It's gone on so long. Don't know. Even if simple explanations felt out of reach, Wendy resisted the notion that any physical work of art was beyond the capacity of film to embrace. And so in search of answers, she took her camera and ventured into the desert. Wendy. She traveled to the ruins of Pueblo Bonito and Chaco Canyon built by the Anasazi people over a thousand years ago. The Anasazi, also known as the historic Pueblo people, were desert farmers who became expert students of the skies and trackers of time. Wendy interviewed astronomer Michael Zalick on the remains of one of the many observatories they built. There are only a few ways from an astronomical standpoint that you can set up calendars that would help you with survival. And the historic Pueblo people did them all. She also interviewed the Acoma Pueblo poet, Simon Ortiz. This place, which is called the Kiva, is a sacred ceremonial place. From here is the north, where we know that the North Star, or Polaris, is located. It's a star map, so that you will always know where you are going, so that you always will know from where you have started. In contemporary Western culture, people have lost their connection to the sky. It takes an artist to get the sensibility back of forming a new relationship to the sky, which is actually an old relationship to the sky. It's a relationship that we once had that we lost. When we recognize those relationships, that it is part of my life, my blood, my bones, my eyes, my vision, my imagination, my soul, there's a responsibility in it. There's a responsibility in what I do, you know, to be able to live between the sky and the earth. We seem to hear in her subsequent conversations with Charles how through these interviews, Wendy was beginning to develop a new perspective on our connection to the cosmos. Simon and Michael both believe that by people having lost the orientation that they have to the cosmos, people have lost responsibility to the planet and to each other. I completely agree. I mean, the theme of my work has always been to relate to the larger natural order, and that always makes your behavior more responsible. That is the entire basis of the film. And that's the key in my work, too, to kind of make windows through which one can view the larger natural order. Every once in a while, I get a major dream that seems to shift my focus and consciences. Things happen to me that way, where they just take over, you know, where there are major shifts. In 1965, I just woke up in the morning and I kind of had this vision of how to build a large prism. I went and got the materials for the first one, and at the end of the week, I swept my studio clean and sent everything to the dump and started over in prisms. I think it was about 1969, 1970, I thought I need to do something else. And the obvious thing was to do the opposite of the spectrum. So instead of spreading light out to make the colors of the spectrum, I decided I would focus it into a single point and use it to burn the sun's path across the plank. See, these are some of the earliest solar burns. They were burned for a season. The wooden plank was left under a lens on my roof in New York. They were left under the lens for three months. These solar burns were made here, out in the front. The larger of these burns is burned for eight minutes and 19 seconds, which is the average time it takes sunlight to reach the earth. All of my work comes from light. You know, it's from examining the energies and forms and structures that are contained in light. Light represents the universe, so it's a pretty rich subject. It's much more interesting than me. Sunlight takes eight minutes to reach the earth from our sun, but more than three billion years passed between the first photosynthesis and when the first Homo sapiens appeared on earth. For a species which has existed for such a tiny fraction of our planet's history, the vastness of time continues to baffle our logic. But Charles is working on helping us to feel it. This is quite different from five years ago, nicely. Oh yeah. Nicely cleared out here. There it is, the excavation that added 15 years to the construction. There are the 147 steps. 147, yeah. Star axis has a design that allows you to travel through time by going up and down 147 stairs. Polaris does a tiny little circle every day. So the fundamental question in star axis is what step do you have to be on in order to see Polaris go around in a circle that is the same size as the aperture at the top? And it turns out that it depends on what year it is. Yeah, these dates, down at the bottom, it's like one year, maybe two years. These are different by 263 B.C. versus 96 A.D. So that's four centuries apart from each other. Just one step. And at the top, they're really young. Right. So today, you have to be on step 35. But 100 years from now, you need to be on step 45. 1,000 years from now, you need to be on another step. It's kind of magical. You have this 26,000 year star cycle. So it's possible to date the stairs into the future 13,000 years and into the past 13,000 years. And that's what we've done. What is the importance of such large cycles of time as are expressed in precession? Why is that important for us to experience? The experience is the important part. You can walk through the piece and experience these alignments as a whole body experience and not just have them in your head. I'm not trying to measure anything. I'm simply collecting forms. When science does that, they measure things. When I do that, I simply do it to collect the form. The job of art is to make connections between us and what's out there, to make those connections more conscious. It's all here. We have it all here. Those connections are already there. When you step into a large spectrum where you can actually walk through the colors, you're greeted as an old friend. And it's almost as if every cell in your body has a recognition of this light. It knows this light. It's familiar with this light. And that's quite an extraordinary experience, particularly if you're not expecting it. It's a sense of connection. It's a sense of being made of light. Wendy passed away before she could experience the completed Star Axis. She was hoping we'd finish, so she could finish the film. But there was no way to finish the film until Star Axis was finished itself. But she had invested so much of herself into grasping what Charles was attempting that maybe, like him, she could already envision the finished work. And maybe that vision was already beginning to communicate with her about a different understanding of time, one in which time doesn't begin or end, but extends out infinitely from any deceptively fixed point. As you walk up the stairway, you go both forward and backwards at the same time. You see the sky as it was in the past, as it will be in the future, as you're seeing it now. And it has to do with consciousness, consciousness. It's almost as if it's better not to understand some things, but to accept them as sacred mysteries. I love the mysteries. Our lives are all filled with unfinished projects. But maybe finishing isn't ever really the goal. In this universe, where even our most reliably fixed points turn out to be constantly shifting, dreaming up our own questions to answer, following our fascination with this world wherever it leads us, is a project that never ends. What do you feel about nearing the completion of Star Axis? You're not too far away. Just a couple of years. Maybe less, maybe a year and a half. Away from finishing, yeah. I have no idea. Like, I mean, you keep trying to get me to give a specific answer about the experience, but I'll never do that because I don't want to prejudice anyone else's. That's up to each individual person. This quartzite granite has been so good to us. We're making a pile of it here to equal the number of stars in the sky. So this is the star field. How much do you know? 83. 83, oh good. That's a good start. Well, we're heading to get a few thousand, so we're on our way. Do you think that you will continue adding works and tributes to the star? No, I think this is it. Although you never know. I mean, Star Axis has a mind of its own and it will tell me what to do, as it has all along.