Desert erotica

Before you go on, I have to say that this may not exactly be the "erotica" you are probably thinking. It all began when people reacted this way when they heard where I was headed: "Death Valley? There is nothing there!" But after my trip, I wondered how they could have missed it because I think if you want a deep experiential lesson on time and space, a strange sensual passion for "infinity," and you have not received a letter from NASA to train as an astronaut, the desert is the next best candidate.

Amazing space. Death Valley National Park in California occupies a space the size of Switzerland and bears a geology that yields deep time. Geologists divide the Earth’s geologic history into four major periods: Precambrian, 4.6 billion to 540 million years ago; Paleozoic, 540 million to 245 million years ago; Mesozoic, 245 million to 65 million years ago; and Cenozoic, 65 million years ago. A council of gray eminence, the rock version, sits on Death Valley. The oldest rock deposits in Death Valley are over a billion years old, placing their formation during the late Precambrian Era. These deep-time rocks yield more about their nature than some fully animated fellows I know. Nature writer Terry Tempest Williams writes in Red, Passion and Patience in the Desert (Vintage Books, NY 2002), that desert rocks are "sculptured time to be touched, even tasted" and that it is "our mineral content preserved in the desert." She is right; we all eventually yield in unison to mineral. But why did I feel a need to achieve such closeness with minerals that will unsentimentally have me in the end?

I think about Williams’ notion of the "erotic" for the desert. It is a strange feeling for space because it is directed toward such immensity and none in particular. The erotic she speaks of "calls the inner life into play" where "we feel the magnetic pull in our bodies toward something stronger, more vital than simply ourselves" and where "arousal becomes a dance with longing." Sand dunes appeal to a weakness to be held without being captured. (By the way, quicksand tales of murder are just that – tales. Quicksand is just sand saturated with water so the more you struggle, the more you will sink but so far, no one has been verified yet to have died in it or been buried more than waist-deep.) When the late afternoon winds started to gust, I recognized I was within the whorl of a usual afternoon sandstorm. It was so amazing to also see nearby funnel-shaped twisters spin like dervishes! I just sat there like a bead of sand being sifted inside an hourglass, plumbing the sandy embrace, surrendering to trickling time. These dunes are made up of eroded quartz particles from the Cottonwood Mountains that I could see from the dunes. Quartz – the mineral that makes most of clocks in the world tick. It made me think of quartz in that form pulsating in multitudes of people’s wrists and something a friend read recently which she shared with me: They may have the watches but we have the time.

If the winds or your feet do not get to them first, you will see transient marks of life creeping, crawling, slithering across sand dunes like ephemeral artworks. Just "marks" because most desert fauna are nocturnal given desert temperatures that swear to slay them by day. Aside from a lone coyote, I also saw lots of birds like roadrunners that I laughed out loud when I caught myself half-expecting them to be followed by a truck with an ACME sign on it like in the cartoon series.

I have since left the desert but I still keep finding beads of sand in my stuff that I treat as dusty promises of an elegant death in good time, bones ground to perfection, toward our own common mineral destiny. For space that is popularly perceived as yielding "nothing," I came out of my desert trip in Death Valley with a searing notion of "erotic infinity," understanding better the poet William Blake’s rendering of the world through a grain of sand that now also help me think through the "wildness" I seek in space and in me. Wild spaces, in the desert, forest or waters or even in your gardens, are places where we hold off planting our personal daily emergencies and national wannabes to assert that restraint is as much a part of human nature as is "action," what Williams called "places of restraint" where the most civilized act is to let the space just be.

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