Image Credit: Will Bruno, Fishmouth Cave Up Comb Ridge (2018)
What can words say about an experience of seeming total communion with the land? A perception is conscious, not intelligent.
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I often didn’t know my comings and goings until I went and returned.
— Lynne Tillman
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Winter 2017. I take a trip to my hometown in Nevada. Desert. The Desert. All traces of human interest, production, determination, consumption, and then — nothing. Less than nothing, and more. Keen absences full of what it’s all made of. What, rocks? They hum, rumble silently, stay and shimmer, sing. Following a recent romance-split, hung out to dry I’m freshly raw and open. Big deep feeling heavy feather-light occasioned by monumental change, displacement, loss. Is that the arid full desert of mind?
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It dropped so low — in my Regard —
I heard it hit the Ground —
And go to pieces on the Stones
At the bottom of my mind —
— Emily Dickinson
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Sunrise Mountain, a hulk of land always there, a looming colossal unseen, appears out of a kind of desert winter mist of memory and I perceive it as, unaccountably, the same as my form — a kind of once-estranged appendage bearing contours familiar as parts of hands, hips, knees, and I understand why painters paint the landscape, and how. Relation and situation, expression.
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Bitter melodies
Put the world back together
Working storm and stress
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The most material something juxtaposed by the most nothing, both, in one place. My distaste for it, not the desert but the vapid city on it, all but forgotten. Wayward but open to all available light, I see the mountain I’ve known, thought I knew for half my life, standing along the horizon to provoke, cajole me into seeing it and my life again as new. I presently didn’t know it or anything. All these masses of molecules. We could push that mountain over to another better plot of land. Well, we couldn’t, not now, it would take, maybe multiple millions of years. A minimum working dream.
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The sand, the stars are solid
in this sleeping oasis,
alone with the desert and
the metaphysical cigarette.
— Joseph Ceravolo
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With lightened rational control, I see and then feel that mountain in me. What in those rocks and gems is not.
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Like they do in the western — let the daylight in.
— Ronald Shannon Jackson
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Our bodies give an ongoing account, a computation back to us about our states. They tell our own story back to us, even when, especially when, our intellect bears no process via word-story. A different kind of logic/narrative is entertained, engaged, out of total necessity.
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To return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way.
— Lauren Berlant
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When in pain, the mind is open, not at ease in any sense. Parts of a world otherwise once estranged begin to bear peculiar and astonishing qualities of being new. The deepest you is the universe. The body is space, matter. Desert gems are in our bloodstream.
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No doubt my old habits are dreams
— Carol Szamatowicz
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Hints of judgement, rejection, hinder consciousness and clear perception. What you don’t see is what you don’t see. But just as often, the case is that what you see isn’t what you see. Maybe because of our complex brains, we’re always seeing and not seeing at the same time. Or we miss by a long shot, and then hit the mark of perception and realization, but only later. It’s never too late, until it is. No matter what, we miss some parts of what’s in front of us, and new perspective is always in order. Some of our reasons, by looking into what we’re composed of, are made clear. Short of a trip to the moon or Mars, the desert might be one good way of looking into it.
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Then when did thinking start? Did it have something to do with the sea’s unfathomable centrality?
— Etel Adnan
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What the hell is land? Are we part of it anymore in the Anthropocene, and if so, what is life-of-the-mind apart from it. In and out of it — consciousness — horizon is in transition as ever, an illusion as we change in keeping with it, cell by cell, thought by thought, moment to moment, in our states of grief or fear, occasional ignorance, reveries.
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The inner world can only be experienced, not described.
— Kafka
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Doing it over
To arrive at the unknown
Just get out and walk
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Its presence, immovable solidity, rises from the underground to consciousness.
— Jessica Cerrato
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I think and then, like anyone, I don’t. I’m no stranger to myself when I’m not full of thought, standing as, in the middle of a desert, relative to not much else in line of sight. There is no use in being full of alarm in such a place. I go on knowing and not knowing, as all people have, and take in the rest of life. Imagination is a verb.
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Do I know nature yet? Do I know myself?
No more words.
— Rimbaud
Previously published by Alison Jean Cole in the inaugural issue of THUNDEREGG.
