Desert Notebooks. Ben Ehrenreich
the black hole, and you stayed outside and watched me do it, you would not see me disappear. You would see me moving more and more slowly, stretching horrifically but perhaps quite comically as I went until I came to a complete stop just outside the event horizon. If I was wearing a watch and your eyes were good enough, you would see its hands spin more and more slowly until they stopped. Then you would likely see me be incinerated, watch and all, by the heat of the so-called Hawking radiation emitted by the black hole. But whatever you saw would be very different from what I experienced as I continued to float along past that horizon, stretching as I went, yawning perhaps, until I arrived at the singularity and, in this universe at least, ceased to be.
Pedro de Alvarado makes a brief appearance in a Borges story, “The Writing of the God.” The plot is so simple that it hardly counts as plot: a character has a question; it is answered; the tale ends. A Maya priest called Tzinacán narrates the story from a vaulted cell deep in a stone-walled prison. The temple over which he once presided, dedicated to the K’iche’ god Qaholom, was burned by Pedro de Alvarado. His cell is divided by a wall. On the other side of it is another prisoner, a jaguar that “with secret steps measures equally the time and space of its captivity.” Once a day, at noon, a trapdoor opens above the cell so that the prisoners can be fed and, for a moment, enough light enters that the priest can see the jaguar.
The priest—Borges uses the word mago, closer to “sorcerer” or “wizard,” and hence to the tradition of the Renaissance magus than to anything recognizably Mesoamerican—does not expect to be released from his prison. He passes the time trying to remember everything that he knew of the world. One night he recalls that on the first day of creation his god foresaw “that at the end of time there would be great misfortune and destruction,” and wrote a single magic sentence capable of preventing that disaster. But “no one knows where he wrote it, nor with what characters.” The priest judges that “we were, as always, at the end of time,” and that it is his destiny to find the hidden script.
It could take almost any form, he knows, “a river, the empire, the configuration of the stars.” It could be his own face. It occurs to him that the jaguar was among the attributes of his god and he becomes convinced that the sacred text is inscribed on the body of the jaguar with which he shares his prison. He spends years memorizing every mark on the animal’s coat, but he does not know how to interpret their patterns. He begins to lose hope: what words comprehensible to the impoverished cognition of humans could begin to approximate the speech of a god?
Only after he utterly despairs does the vision come to him. In an ecstasy of mystic union, he sees an enormous spinning wheel, composed at once of water and fire. In it, interwoven like threads in a fabric of infinite complexity, he can see everything that is and was and ever will be. He sees himself, one of countless strands. He sees Pedro de Alvarado, his tormentor, another. He sees the entirety of the universe and its “intimate designs . . . infinite processes that together formed a single happiness.” He understands it all, even the writing inscribed on the jaguar’s flesh.
The text is composed, he says, of fourteen otherwise unremarkable words. To pronounce them aloud would be enough to give him the powers of a god, the ability to feed Alvarado to the jaguar, “to plunge the sacred knife into the hearts of the Spanish, to rebuild the pyramid, to rebuild the empire.” But he doesn’t do it. His vision has dissolved his belief in the centrality of his own existence. The man he had been, who craved vengeance, and meaning, doesn’t matter anymore. His petty misfortunes, his people, what did any of it add up to, “if he, now, is no one”?
Not everyone likes the desert. I’ve loved it since the first time I came out here alone—not to Joshua Tree that time, but farther north and east, to Death Valley. This was eighteen years ago. I had messed my life up in a number of ways that at the time felt irreparable. Being young and overly literal, I decided to head for the lowest spot in the hemisphere. I drove out from L.A., wrapped a scarf around my head, and walked out beneath the brutal sun over the salt flats in Badwater Basin. The earth was cracked and crusted white, the heat quivering above it. I doubt I brought much water. I didn’t make it to the very lowest point. It was too hot, and walking out there, the salt crackling beneath my boots, I started laughing and couldn’t stop. Mainly at myself, but at everything else too. The misery, the sense of failure that had sat on my shoulders for months just lifted off, pulverized by pure absurdity. I remember finding insects that had died there and been encrusted with white crystals of salt. Little jeweled crickets. I put a couple in my pocket and didn’t feel bad about turning around. I stayed in Death Valley for a day or two longer and can’t remember ever feeling so free.
Later my ex and I would rent a cabin in Joshua Tree for a month or two each year and come out to write. She had lived there before and she teased me at first: “City boy, you’ll be running back before a week is up.” It turned out that the solitude and silence suited me. And the clarity of the light. Sometimes I came alone for weeks at a time. I didn’t even want to drive into town to buy groceries. When work forced me home to Los Angeles—and really, I loved L.A.—I raced back to the desert as soon as I was done. The moment I got off the interstate and headed up the grade and over the mountains I would roll down the windows, sniff the air like a dog, and feel the tension sliding from my spine. I grew up in the New York suburbs and my people are originally from cloudy, low-skied lands—Scotland, Ireland, Poland, Ukraine—but I had never been anywhere where I felt so immediately at home.
Some people have the opposite response. My godmother and her partner came down to visit once from San Francisco. Her partner, who was probably sixty at the time, was overcome with joy the first time we took him into the park. He turned into a little boy, scrambling over boulders, his eyes enormous, his face transformed. But my godmother felt uneasy and exposed. Everything was sharp. There was too much death around. She missed the nurturing embrace of leafy green plants, moisture, and abundance. Other friends have had the same reaction. It’s not an aesthetic aversion so much as an existential allergy. They feel dread, something approaching panic. They see only emptiness and the bare cruelty of nature, though the forest and the coast are no less cruel.
I tried to explain that what I saw around me was not just death but, right next to it, sharing the same space, the urgency, brilliance, and stubbornness of life. You couldn’t always see it, and never would if you didn’t look, but everything was alive. Even the rocks and the dirt are alive. I don’t mean that in some mystical sense. Or not only in that sense. A “cryptobiotic crust” of microorganisms—bacteria, lichens, mosses, algae, fungi—covers the desert floor, an invisible web of fibrous tentacles that allows the soil to absorb the rain and resist the wind, sheltering the roots of plants and the animals that tunnel and burrow down there, protecting everything that skitters beneath the surface of the seen. Lichens splash the rocks with brilliant greens, yellows, reds. Life thrums through this place like a current coursing through matter that is anything but inert. A barrel cactus, a brilliant, neon pink, growing alone in a crevice, anchoring itself in a few inches of sand between the rocks. Rodents that will never in their lives drink a sip of liquid water survive solely on the sparse moisture in the seeds they so nervously eat. The spring of a jackrabbit startled in a wash. The speech of ravens. And, at night, of coyotes. And of owls. In the spring, after a New York weekend’s worth of rain stretched out over the entire winter, it all bursts forth in wild celebration—shrubs that seemed leafless, dry, dead for months reveal themselves in sudden and outrageous color, like drag queens at a ball. Some of them bide their time, waiting for the late-summer downpours and only then, in August or September, showing themselves in brilliant yellows, purples, blues.
Yes, death was everywhere too and more obvious here than in the fir and redwood forests of the north or the oak and chaparral that roll over the hills along the coast. There are rattlesnakes and mountain lions and the heat is surely lethal. There are creatures out of nightmares. There’s a giant wasp bigger than a hummingbird that lays its eggs in the flesh of living tarantulas so that its offspring will have something to eat the moment that they hatch. There’s a lizard that shoots blood from its eyes to scare off predators, a shrike that impales lizards on yucca spikes so