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Daydreams of a Martian landscape. Time out of time. Sky, and rocks, and silence.
Is the desert made beautiful by the well it hides, as Saint-Exupéry wrote? Is the desert made terrible by the well which forever remains hidden?
The truth is, the hidden well represents only our longing for the desert—our desire to know it, and to have it know us in turn. The desert, however, thinks of neither freedom nor bondage, it neither seeks to please nor to harm. Nor is it indifferent, exactly. Its vast self-contained silence is a mystery, a place to dream in. Like the ultimate other, the face it shows us is often our own; though, perhaps, not as we expect to see it.
The desert holds many secrets, and it keeps them well. As soon as we stepped off the road, we left the rest of the world behind. Sure, we still had our phones, our tech, our cameras; but we found ourselves essentially in a place apart. The veneer of everyday human life is thin here, hazy, like a mirage.
The desert is changeable, it has many forms. We saw it at dusk and at dawn, felt the penetrating chill of its windy nights and the glaring heat of its noontime sun—even in winter. We marveled at the view from the top of the rim, and we explored the floor of the valley. We wandered amid the strange rectangular rocks of the Carpentry and its mounds of colourful sand, arranged by some unknown hand into neat piles, and we saw the shadows of water in dried up wadis, and we hardly spoke to one another.
Blood, like water, is scarce in the desert. Maybe this is what Michael Ondaatje meant, writing, “there is propinquity in the desert...” One feels a kinship with the rocks, with the glare of the sun, with the frigid merciless cold of the night. An uneasy kinship, but a precious one. That one can dream in a place that seems empty means only that its emptiness is a trick of the mind. In truth, the desert is not empty at all.
And so, that day we wandered in its silence, feeling out a connection. Mine is always through stories, images, symbols. That special cypher which can be read by mind and body each in its own language, and which eventually collapses the false dichotomy between them—the Real is as immanent as it is transcendent.
The realization comes easily, somehow, perhaps because there, in that vast, open, stern landscape one achieves enough silence for the augury to proceed; at any rate, to dream the rest of it into being.
Makhtesh Ramon, Negev desert, Israel. December 2018.
