I've been waiting for that rapt attention to steal me back and bring clarity to this existence. Like a sail awaiting wind, or artist biding time for inspiration, or lonesome old fool praying for a good piece of mail in the post. It has been some time and i believe i'll wait longer...
This city lulls me in a comforting din, sooths my assent to being without escort. Days have tripped by in a growing haze, content yet aloof to something greater than myself. I had a few days to spare and so drove southward into the Mojave Desert, hoping to cozen an epiphany or perhaps elude my growing reticence for a spell.
The skies were limitless and draped a shimmering web of stars overhead. I skipped my poor sedan through empty washes, planing on washboard, dipping into sandy culverts. And with the coming night joshua trees turned to silhouette astride spiny saltbush, creosote, and brittle bush. I drove into the empty desert dusk. It was reckless and i knew it, but it felt like life and so i welcomed it.
The first night i laid aside a tuft of desert aster and felt the days heat radiate from the coarse ground. The wind sailed above me but settled with the final waning light to the west. I only awoke once to the assault of nearby coyotes giving unified cry a few tens of yards away. I talked myself back into my bag and fell asleep until morning.
The following day found me hiking into the canyon and up unnamed slopes and peaks. The silence deafening, welcome sounds of a train in the distance or falling rocks as i scrambled a loose ravine. I don't know where i lost it, but somewhere it caught up to me. I don't want this; this is too much, too big, too open... i need a translator! So midday i drove into town over the dusty washboard again. Thought about my day with a goblet of margarita in my hand at a dusty mexican joint on the roadside. I felt sense coming back, no matter my failure or the absurdity...
Bought a six-pack on the way out of town and returned to the Mojave. Watched the sun set over the Clark Mountains, leading toward the logistical hell of Los Angeles. I started humming a song that seemed appropriate to the occasion. Leonard Cohen said it, "I fought against the bottle... but i had to do it drunk. Took my diamond to the pawnshop... but that don't make it junk." I sat back against the hollow refuse of a downed joshua tree with a bottle of red ale in my hand. And only then could i let everything in... the immensity of space.
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“I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. 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.”
-Edward Abbey, "Desert Solitaire"
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