Woke up this morning well before 5 a.m., not particularly rested, all freaked out about mortality again.... I haven't written much about, because I lately haven't much inhabited, the spells of profound despair I'm sometimes subject to.... Sometimes I just worry. I bolt awake in the middle of the night, heart heavy and fast, tears already in my eyes, because the ice caps are melting and all the polar bears are going to die. Read a couple of days ago that all these new species, including the hippopotamus, have been added to the list of endangered species, and it pretty much bummed me out. "Entropy," I thought. "This is fuckin' entropy: everything reduced to the lowest common denominator, as boring and uniform as human beings can make it before they die out too."
And I also think about the fact that I'm 42 and probably about half way through my life. I sorta believe in reincarnation, and I wonder what I'll come back as.... I'm not announcing suicidal tendencies or anything--no need to worry about me--but there are times when I think, "Yeah, it wouldn't be so very bad to start all over again...."
And then I read something like this or this from Chris Clarke, which tears my heart in ways I can't fathom or describe. I realize that those of us who love the desert romanticize it terribly, and it's not because we don't know there are other places that are really beautiful. It's because, hell, I don't know.... In some ways the best thing I ever heard anyone say about the desert was T. E. Lawrence's response (at least, Peter O'Toole said it, in the movie version of T. E. Lawrence's life) when asked why he likes its so: "It's clean."
It's clean. You get dirty there, but the desert itself is somehow clean.
I spent most of my Christmas break in east Tucson at the home my parents recently purchased two doors down from my brother and his family, and one of the things I did while I was there was go for walks and look at the Catalinas, the strange mountain range to the North. The Catalinas are amazing: they're so weirdly bumpy and irregular, and they are perfectly situated to capture shadows created by the sun as it travels across the sky: the Catalinas change more than any other mountain range I've ever seen.
Like I said, there's something about all this I can't fathom or describe. The air seems clean (not that it really is these days) and clear and I just have this sense of... the sublime? Intimations of mortality? I'm just so aware of how the landscape I grew up in shaped my sense of... life as something bright and harsh. Of the world as something that doesn't much give a shit whether we manage to live in it or not, but is incredibly beautiful--and somehow knows that--whether we notice it or not. I've never not felt this sort of awe and despair and gratitude and certainty inspired by this deep visceral language-less knowledge the desert communicated to me the first time I look around and said, "Huh. So this is home."
I doubt this is making sense. Plenty of things I feel I can describe adequately. My love for my home and the reasons why the desert moves me--that I can't describe.
A lot of people say the desert is mystical. For me, though, it's massive humidity that really jolts my senses. I grew up in a place that was really dry - not desert, just plains. I'm back there now, unfortunately. But now and then you'll step outside and it'll be inexplicably humid and, honestly, for about 30 seconds, I don't know where I am, I don't know who I am, I start having these crazy Proust-like memories, only it's not my life I'm remembering, and I'm certain there's some weird, spontaneous, past life regression stuff going on that I barely understand.
ha ha, I think I must belong in California.
I'm not Boethius. Because I believe that we have to live in this world, I believe that there is no consolation for the despair that sometimes grips you when people's relentless self-destruction and drive to take the rest of the biosphere down with us springs to light. For me, the feeling is anger, rage, which I have to contain if I'm going to be civil. And I think civility is important because in fact we do understand the damage we are doing and can stop it; it's a matter of getting the powerful (in various guises: sex, nation, class) to give up some of their privileges. The political paralysis is an absurd game of chicken between the planet and the powerful.
I don't have the same feeling of home that you describe. I do love the desert -- even the Atacama desert, a nearly lunar landscape -- and I love the mountains in Colorado where I grew up. It's hard to imagine a landscape more different to those than England, but this is a persistently beautiful place, too, and some people here do try to protect that beauty. The desert shows its scars as clearly as Nebraska does but the desert can wear its scars with a bit more assertiveness: "do your worst, I can still kill you." The ocean has that same power: a bit noisier and a bit faster than the desert, but it can still remind you that you're just part of a bigger thing.
I grew up in Nevada and Oregon. I love the desert for its seeming directness, but I miss the ocean most.
My love for my home and the reasons why the desert moves me--that I can't describe.
I'm thinking you just did.
Reese wrote:
But now and then you'll step outside and it'll be inexplicably humid and, honestly, for about 30 seconds, I don't know where I am, I don't know who I am, I start having these crazy Proust-like memories, only it's not my life I'm remembering, and I'm certain there's some weird, spontaneous, past life regression stuff going on that I barely understand.
There are other places that I feel really, um, moved by, I guess--cold, oceany places. Maybe I was a Viking once? There are also places I recognize as lovely in their own way but they don't do anything special for me: tropical islands, for instance. I recognize that places like Taiwan and Hawaii (which are on the same latitude, but Taiwan is made of marble and Hawaii of volcanic rock) are breathtakingly gorgeous, but they don't speak to me in this strange direct way the desert does.
Then there's the culture issue: China, both the Mainland form and Taiwan, always felt SO UTTERLY FOREIGN to me. I decided at one point to believe that I was there to work out past life karma, that I'd been a Mongol invader who died of homesickness and longing and that's why my life in China sucked so bad.
Spike wrote:
The political paralysis is an absurd game of chicken between the planet and the powerful.
Good way of putting it.... And the thing is, the planet will still be here--we'll be the losers.
The ocean has that same power: a bit noisier and a bit faster than the desert, but it can still remind you that you're just part of a bigger thing.
I think about that, and about your corner of the world, every time I read about rising sea levels.... Your home could be under water in the next 100 years. That would suck.
R Hayes wrote,
I love the desert for its seeming directness, but I miss the ocean most.
Hi! Thanks for stopping by. I think perhaps it's healthier to miss the ocean more than the desert--after all, the ocean is the source of so much life and the desert is, well, the desert is the place where certain tenacious things manage to hang on. Like I said, the desert has always aroused a mixture of awe and despair--you have to be an idiot not to realize how threatening it is.
Of course, there's this whole new dimension to the despair when I spend much time in Phoenix and see all those huge homes with huge air-conditioning units, and huge lawns with huge sprinkler systems, and huge garages with huge cars in them. The desert is large, but the way you live in it should be small.
And thanks, Chris, for sending me the links that prompted the post, and for understanding what I wanted to say.
This is very moving, Holly, and I agree with Chris Clarke - you've described so well - the sudden and inexplicable strike of homesickness - for a favorite home and our larger home (the world).
So many landscapes of the soul. What romantics we are, really.