parody: "Parody is both textual doubling (which unifies and reconciles) and differentiation (which foregrounds irreconcilable opposition between texts and between text and 'world')...It's appropriating of the past, of history, its questioning of the contemporary by 'referencing' it to a different set of codes, is a way of establishing continuity that may, itself, have ideological implications." (Hutcheon,1985)

clocks: A landscape "represents man taking upon himself the role of time." (Jackson,1984)

radioactive ordure: "Particular attention has been focused on the twenty-thousand-person community of Shiprock, New Mexico, where an abandoned 1.7-million-ton tailings pile covers seventy-two acres in the heart of town." (Wasserman & Solomon,1982)

white bird: In Arabian folklore, the Roc is "a fabulous white bird of gigantic proportions that could lift elephants and carry them to its nest, where they would be eaten for dinner." (Mercatante,1974). As Sinbad's bird, the Roc "was like a cloud that spread darkness over the earth." (Armstrong,1970)

children: "In 1980, the March of Dimes funded an investigation into possible links between radiation given off by uranium mining and milling and the high rates of birth defects, stillbirths and miscarriages that plague the Navajos of northwest New Mexico...With the birth defect study more than halfway complete, (Dr. Lora Shields, in a report to the American Academy of the Advancement of Science's annual meeting, 1982) identified a total of 325 severe birth defects which occurred during (1964-74)...an alarmingly high number for a population the size of Shiprock's (Six thousand Navajo families live in the Shiprock area.)" (McLeod,1983)

heart: Dr. John Ogle, of Shiprock, "said in six months he had seen three infants born with heart diseases, two with cleft lips and palates, two with skull defects, two with Down's syndrome, one with a section of backbone missing, and several with thyroid conditions." (Reichard,1970)

bones: "Os.te.o.pho.to.car.di.ol.o.gy: Bones, lights and hearts. Bones to begin with. Light in the form of scintillation, illuminating, lighting up. One of the most brilliant words, because of 'photo.' Like superillumination." (Anonymous. From, "Schizophrenic Definitions.")

spire: "This spectacular rock, which resembles a winged creature poised, is called Shiprock by the whites. (bida hi, "rocks with wings," Navajo.) The long lava dike at the southwest is said to be the blood of Cliff Monster." (Reichard,1970)

inverted: "As a result of the dynamic tendencies of all contradictions, the world of phenomena becomes a system of perpetual inversions, illustrated, for example, in the hour-glass which turns upon its own axis in order to maintain its inner movement: that of sand passing through the central aperture--the 'focal point' of its inversion." (Cirlot,1983)