The opened portmanteau

Back to the desert. Silence, darkness, the earth immobilized beneath a gentle wheel of stars. Existence’s sensory deprivation chamber, the radical nudity of the geography like some cosmic conspiracy for solitude. You stood there and breathed uneasily and wondered if you would ever feel this significant again.

If only we could stop thinking, being. We could live forever.

Depressives. They have a knack for teasing out reality at its most undressed: their spouses are unlovable; their childhood dreams unattainable; death inevitable. This is seen unflinchingly, and known flinchingly. Happiness requires a kind of existential blindfold—normally (and thankfully) provided by biology—without which we’d be incapable of enjoying a sandwich or a concert without simultaneously cowering in anticipation of the very worst of life’s most staggering inevitabilities. Lovers lost, children lost, a death in assisted living—god forbid the fabric slip.

The alternative view, of course—staggering inevitabilities lend joy its immediacy. That without the torque of failure, existence itself would have no potency, no grip. This is a game called See Your Life, See every passing moment slipping quietly into the vast dross of its undifferentiated antecedents, nothing measured and nothing lost.

Gravity versus weightlessness.

It’s easy to take a trip to the desert and be astounded and assign it grave cosmic importance, and just as easy to smile and sigh and enjoy a much-needed escape into wilderness. Questions abound on which the proper attitude “should” be—as if anyone but ourselves could ever determine where to place value in our lives—as if “should” were a real word that actually had any power to imply that gravity or weightlessness could ever win the argument over the other. We’re always the ones that finally decide what’s important to us, and how. “Should” is inert.

Take that to the desert or the street or city hall or your girlfriend’s house, take to the pastrami shop or the roller rink or the fields of corn around your family’s home, Soldier Field, Salt Lake, Mt. McKinley. Go to the place that makes you quiet inside, go with all the fire of god smoldering passion salvation in that tight hard knot of your heart. Go like you might not come back so when you go again you can stay forever. Walk like one of the crazies of lore chanting mad poems of glory or just slip by in a thin grinning shimmer of zen. This is where you go. This is what you do.

And yet the question still remains, always remains: Now what?

Now you go to the next desert, is what. Or maybe you don't.

It's all so very important.

Labor for glory

On a recent trip out to Nevada I was standing on the shoulder of a remote desert highway at two o’clock in the morning, quiet along the rutted edge of sun-crozzled pavement thrust amongst a black silence of sagebrush and Joshua trees. Nothing moving and nothing lit, not even a rind of the moon.

A collection of nothings, in fact: no cars; no planes; no radios. No phone service. No insects or birds or rustling fauna. Not even a gentle breath of wind.

Imagine being deaf, or dumb, or blind; or no longer being able to taste, or to have memories, or to love. Imagine the death of a close friend, or imagine there no longer being stars in the sky or galaxies beyond our own, seas beyond the horizon, ships to traverse them. Imagine the inexistence of music and then the inexistence of film. Whither a light switch? Conceive of waking up one day and finding out no one had given you a name, or an arm, or a family.

Votaries of emptiness all, and to our minds, each a kind of dark matter, a negative presence; the sudden cessation of a motion, the final and comprehensive absence of a sustaining otherness.

John Updike said being human cannot be borne alone; we need other presences. This is why we blare TVs and go to the symphony and sit on our porches staring out at the road at the traffic trudging by. Hence Facebook and real books and Wal-Mart and the discarded stubs for Amtrak tickets. The twelve-pack, the four-door, the queen-sized bed. The rituals of Christmas and the birthday alike. Fortune cookies and this blog and t-shirts with words on them; Walt Whitman and Paris Hilton and the Rolling Stones. The Hague, the Statue of Liberty, and the street where I live—all these things are bound to us.

So do yourself a favor and go set yourself down in the middle of a desert in the predawn dark, all the vibrations of culture and knowing fucking motionless on this bald causeway of the earth as the deathbed of philosophy and ideology and politics lay sprawling cold beneath you.

Someday we die. That’s it. Beyond that, nothing.

But knowing that and feeling that and then waking up the next morning is still, now as it ever was, some good hell of a thing.