Some Myths of the Desert in Ten Words, a Name, and Four Dissolves Holly Willis

SOME MYTHS OF THE DESERT IN TEN WORDS, A NAME, AND FOUR DISSOLVES

HOLLY WILLIS

Let us begin with turmoil, confusion, storm, and rage. Let us begin with the color red. With a monster: part man, part animal. Let us begin to ruminate on myths of the desert.

Set :: god of the desert

First there is the Egyptian myth of Set, whose name is translated as “instigator of confusion” and “destroyer.” He is an ancient god, born to Geb (earth) and Nut (sky) after the creation of the world. He boasts many guises. He is the black boar who swallows the moon month by month. He is the inhabitant of the Great Bear, the constellation in the northern sky. He is the resistance to the compelling gaze of the snake Apophis, who hypnotizes the sun god, Ra; Set’s intervention ensures the rise of the sun each day. So goes one version of the myth. Set appears in many stories, the hero of some, the demon in others. His character shifts and slides, aligning to suit those who tell his story. Blacking the sun with eclipses and shaking the world with earthquakes, Set kills and is described as a friend to the dead. For our purposes, however, this is Set’s most significant role: he represents the desert. While his brother Osiris (afterlife) more companionably champions fertility and growth, Set personifies drought and sterility. The dry. The parched. The desolate. The impoverished. He is the ever elusive. Should we be surprised that all of these qualities find their expression in the desert? No myth of the desert stands still for long.

grainy dissolve :: Zabriskie Point

A man and a woman roll, wrestling, kissing, tousling hair, touching, their tawny

bodies the same color as the sand. Other bodies appear, and as the camera

lifts up and away from the land to view the scene like God, we see that the broad landscape is dotted with twisting bodies, an entire desert of writhing, dusty sexual energy. 1 So the myth of a generation is given form, the desert

tabula rasa :: blank slate

When Moroccan actors know a Hollywood production is coming, they grow their beards long, knowing they will be more easily cast as the terrorists and assassins that populate American films. And whether the film is set in Syria, Iraq, Iran, or Saudi Arabia, no problem. To Americans, foreign actors look the same, and foreign deserts blur in a haze: a collection of picturesque if desolate dunes, a desert emptied of history, void of specificity, a blank slate ready for the prosaic imagination of Hollywood. This myth of the desert is both moribund and mendacious. The deserts of Earth are specific! Some are seas of sand, and others are covered by boulders and gravel. The Kalahari Desert boasts gentle dunes; the Gobi Desert is, some say, more pebbly, with shrubs and thorn bushes; the Namib Desert is very dry but features coastal fog; and the deserts that cover parts of the United States—the Great Basin Desert, the Mojave, the Sonoran, the Chihuahuan—together defy easy categorization, so varied are they in their characteristics. So we ask, What is a desert?

heterotopia :: place of otherness

Is not the desert a heterotopia? Is it not a space that disrupts conventional

ideas about what a space can be, that defies easy designation, that counters

our notion of utopia? 2 The desert offers the possibility of reimagining order. It is home to outlaws and exiles, those who opt out of traditional culture. The desert is hybrid and mixed, refusing clarity and calculation. The desert

is ghost towns and abandoned mines, dry wells, empty streambeds, ancient valleys, vast plains, deep ravines, tight spaces between giant rocks. The desert is a place of otherness.

heat :: a flailing heat

The desert challenges, questions, alienates. Well into The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family—worn, dirty, exhausted—has left the dustbowls of Oklahoma, and each of them longs for California, heartily anticipating the lush land of orange orchards and peach blossoms. They are not prepared for California’s desert, however. First they climb through the mountains, “through the broken, rotten rock,” moving through what the narrator describes as “dead country, burned white and gray and no hint of life on it.” They reach a summit and then descend to the desert floor in their rickety truck, driving through the desert at night. “The dusk passed into dark and the desert stars came out in

and the heat was thick and muffling.” 3 This is the myth of the desert as death

and desolation, its omnipotent heat flaunting its power through both nuance and intensity. The desert—dead, arid, hot—is so demanding and terrible that death will claim one member of the Joad family before they reach Barstow.

anchorite :: one who retreats from society for religious reasons

Paul of Thebes and Saint Anthony. Anna and Theodora; Melania, both the Elder and the Younger: these are among the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the

Christian ascetics of the third century AD who traveled into the deserts of

Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Paul is commonly named the first of these hermits,

and he reputedly lived for nearly one hundred years in a cave in the desert. His days were devout and simple, his diet plain, and the desert offered him a sense of order and clarity not possible amid the corruption of the city.

Saint Anthony, hearing stories of Paul, followed him, foregoing the quotidian

pleasures around him in order to find succor for the soul. Anchorites, these

self-made hermits gave away their homes and their money, and they entered the desert seeking its purity and to reckon with themselves through God. 4

ascetic :: practicing rigorous self-denial

The ascetics use the desert to test their faith. The desert’s harshness requires a kind of temerity and commitment not so easily roused in the city. But in addition to afflicting the body physically, the desert works metaphor

ically, fostering an attention to the Word or logos of Christianity. Indeed,

there are many ways to characterize the Word. Visionaries and mystics

employed rich and beautiful imagery. The desert, however, points in a different direction. The desert comes to represent not simply the physical isolation of the monk but also the inner retreat necessary for a full encoun

ter with the divine. “To listen to the Word one had to be prepared to enter

into an inner landscape of such stillness, such encompassing silence that

it was like a kind of desert.” 5 While the stories of the ascetics Saint Paul and Saint Antony tell of a literal retreat to the desert, spiritual egress is also metaphorical, an internal retreat to a quietude that engages with the Divine.

For the ascetic, with his rigorous self-denial, the desert opens a way to feel and sense at once the simplicity and the enormity of the Word.

3

4 John Steinbeck, The Portable Steinbeck (New York: Penguin Classics), 369.

“The theme of utopian paradise is a frequent one in early monastic texts and in all desert literature, and the order sought in the desert is a reconfiguration of the disorder of the fallen world of the cities,” writes David Jasper in Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 28.

through the desert, they fight in the desert, they have sex in the desert. He is

beaten and raped in the desert. She is murdered in the desert. Life is utterly reduced to bare existence in the desert. All around them, the desert landscape seems to breathe, rumble, and pulse. This myth? The desert is alive. It

is not the inert and hostile backdrop to our stories but an active player in a

punishing world. 6

outside :: the desert is outside

Another hiker went missing this weekend in the boulder-filled desert of

Joshua Tree National Park, one of among fifty or so that disappear each

year into the park’s twelve hundred square miles of hills, caves, and ravines. “Every landscape reveals more of itself as you search it,” explains writer Geoff Manaugh, who says that desert searchers now deploy lost-person behavior

algorithms. These computational tools track the actions of previous hikers

and use that information to predict where visitors might go next in the desert.

The algorithms do not always work. And so, long after the official searches end, teams of amateur sleuths continue to hunt for the lost. “The intensity that many of these investigators bring to their work suggests a fundamental

discomfort with the very idea of disappearance in the twenty-first century,”

Manaugh explains. “People should not be able to disappear, not in this day

and age.” 7 What does it mean to vanish outside? What myth is that? What philosophy accounts for such absence, such loss, such mystery?

Philosopher Maurice Blanchot writes of the mysterious unknowability of the

desert and its hold on our imagination related to loss. “The desert is still not

time, or space, but a space without place and a time without production. There one can only wander, and the time that passes leaves nothing behind; it is a time without past, without present, time of a promise that is real only in

the emptiness of the sky and the sterility of a bare land where man is never

there but always outside.” 8

grainy dissolve :: Teorema

A man stands in a crowded station, bereft. He undresses. He is naked. He walks, stepping from the tiled floor to the sands of a desert. The wind blows,

6

7 Twentynine Palms, dir. by Bruno Dumont (Paris, France: 3B Productions, 2003).

Geoff Manaugh, “Dark Zones,” New York Times, March 22, 2018. 8 Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003), 80.

careening on his knees nearly out of the frame, gone, and reappearing in

a cloud of dust, a negligible force. He approaches slowly, still staggering. Close-up: the man wails horrifically, not at us, but turned away, howling into the implacable desert. 9

ecomysticism :: five senses + the world

To be sure, the desert is a screen for all kinds of mythical projections, good and bad. But it is also tourmaline and malachite, creosote bushes and Joshua

trees, wolf spiders and red racer snakes. How do we reconcile the aching

divide between the idealized desert and its flabbergasting material reality?

“I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.” 10 So writes Edward Abbey, working to bring

the two concepts together, the mystic’s desire for something beyond and

the materialist’s appreciation for the enchantment of mere matter. This is an

endeavor taken up under the mantle of “ecomysticism,” defined as “a state of consciousness brought about via the five senses interacting with the rest of the material world.” 11 Can we allow this interaction? Can we set aside the

myth of the human as a separate being comprehending an external world

and instead begin to imagine consciousness as coextensive with the world?

“Mind arises, and dwells, between the body and the earth,” says David Abrams. 12 Let us dwell with the desert. Is not the desert perhaps the best place for this challenging rendezvous?

grainy dissolve :: Beau Travail

The camera circles the men at shoulder height. They raise their arms. They hold their hands to form circles. Their skin is smooth. Their profiles are

sharp. The landscape is soft behind them, holding them, carrying them,

merging with them. Body, gesture, land, and space come together as the

men move in syncopation and discipline on the edge of the desert, twentieth-century anchorites. “You don’t forget a landscape like that,” the director will later say. 13

9 Teorema, dir. by Pier Paolo Pasolini (Rome, Italy: Aetos Produzioni Cinematografiche, 1968).

10 Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (originally published by McGraw-Hill, 1968; citation taken from New York: Touchstone, 1990), 6.

11 David Tagnani, “New Materialism, Ecomysticism, and the Resolution of Paradox in Edward Abbey,” Western American Literature, vol. 50 no. 4, 2016, pp. 317-346: 319. 12 David Abrams, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 111.

13 Beau Travail, Claire Denis, 1999. The quotation is Claire Denis, from Jonathan Romney, “Who Wants to Be a Legionnaire?” The Guardian, June 27, 2000.

The Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years. Jesus fasted in the desert for forty days and forty nights. The Bible’s desert is paradoxical, shifting in status as the account moves from Genesis to Exodus, from Numbers to the Book of Matthew and beyond. The desert is a place of exile; it is a place of danger; it is also a place of revelation and renewal, of contact with God. Could it be a liminal place, a threshold? Is this liminality not also a step along the Hero’s journey, a passage from the familiar into the unfamiliar?

arid :: dry, parched

Standing in the bustling city or the lush forest, we tend to characterize the

desert by what it lacks, primarily moisture. The desert’s aridity is one of its

defining features, one that you feel as you breathe, as you move. Rebecca Solnit knows it well, this aridity. “On a hot day, water is sucked straight out of your skin, and you can feel how fast dying of thirst could be, but the aridity is

what makes the air so clear, what opens up those fifty-mile views.” She goes

on to echo the third-century ascetics, noting that this austerity is a welcome

respite from the business of the rest of the world. 14 The desert again as a paradox, giving yet taking.

landscape :: myths that shape the land

Is the desert a landscape? Which is to say, is the desert a myth, devised to explain the inexplicable? But how so? Landscape is managed nature, the wild places organized, domesticated, tidied up. And myth? A story told to explain, to assuage, to channel. Our landscapes tell us about our relationship to the world. Landscapes suggest the myths we tell ourselves about nature and culture. We call the desert a landscape as a form of control. But what do we control of the desert? And what do we control of its many myths?

Let us end with a caveat, a warning.

Twilight and then silence. Heed it well. “I know what they tell you about the desert, but you mustn’t believe them.” 15

14 Rebecca Solnit, “Diary,” London Review of Books, October 9, 2003, no page.

15 Barry Holstun Lopez, “Desert Notes,” in Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of the Raven (Kansas City: Andrew McMeel Publishing, LLC). He will go on to describe the richness of the desert, but I like this idea: myths of the desert dissolve like sand.