october desert journals

I.

seen the sun rise a few too many times.
when the anticipation, the apprehension, of a new day becomes so great that you feel you must beat its arrival by getting up well before it comes around, to triumph in a human yet inhumane fashion over the forces of the cosmos to prove some kind of superiority through an exercise in absolute inferiority, standing directly beneath the middle stud of Orion's belt and attempting to feel as if with eyes that you can take it all in and own it with a name. the sunrise is owned by the canyons and mountains and the turning globe, not a singular human psyche scratching away for posterity and love, 'cause the sun's risen somewhere else just the same as the sun has set for millions and at the exact same time, somewhere a single tear is shed into the sea by someone staring westward to watch the sun disappear. up before the sun like one person could possess the totality of the cause of life as we know it.

II.

a whisper became a scream; the buzzing sawing sounds of crickets are many in number in the scrubby dry brush, and commingle to sing a deafening roar, one unbreakable hum across the night that is synonymous with sleep, that is harmonious with dreams. a single tear fell in the sea, a signal for the deluge that is always to come; one concentric ring rang out and then retreated inward like a frightened child, before the ocean became a canvas so abstract. one man was born of a single cell, metastasized into a conglomerate, became one million times the size and grew appendages of bone, flesh, cartilage, and blood, spread the seed out among the grasses, forests, swamps, and mountains, and created something unstoppable, a whisper turned into a deafening roar. a pebble dropped from a mountain top dislodged a rock of comparable size and set into motion the drifting of the continents, the collision of borderlines, abolishing the idea of separate, disparate, of differing entities we so often ascribe.

III.

forces combine and conspire to create, to destroy; a world created is another destroyed, and destruction is an ultimate agent of rebirth. in the heart of a dying animal there no longer flows the cascading fluid of the lifeforce, but the decomposition and feeding power of the freshly lain skin is a creation in itself.

IV.

an awe-inspiring mountain was not created in a roar and set in place, more like in a series of infinite whispers undetectable to all but the most minute seers. and what is a roar but 10,000,000 whispers combined and conspiring?

V.

distant voices, heard from afar, may well be the whispers of conscience, consciousness, demons or angels of the mind. you don't know what they are saying, whether they are speaking to one another or to you or to themselves, your inner ear tuned to a far-flung frequency to try to sense the voices that come from afar or within. just as to hear an owl singing at dawn and attempt to get a sense of what the world is trying to convey, something about darkness, somberness, stillness, inhumanity, the absolute reality that goes on without us. a distant voice from across a sandy plain diffused in dry wind and as spread apart and scattered as the grains of sand that carry on the wind, shattered like windswept rock, and just the same the meaning has been slightly skewed to our minds, we don't know what to call it once it has been one thing and disassembled into another form, hence the uselessness of distinctions. a voice may just be the soft music of the wind bent to a familiar tone or tune, but we can call it a voice, perhaps because we've sought the song the wind seemed to be singing to us. a voice in the wind or hidden in a rocky stream: to hear you must not listen to but through the surface facade and find the words hidden not beneath or above but within.