‘In the arid landscape the sky is the final arbiter.’
Paul Bowles, Africa Minor (1957)
When I was living and working in New York City, the writer Paul Bowles swivelled my consciousness off course and led me to seek out his harsh environments, that cause violent extremes of longing and horror. Hot, dry, dusty, relentless wind. The deafening roar of endless silence.
I went to the desert, where daytime sizzles, nights blaze, and interminable sands swirl. It is nearly impossible to hold together a landscape that is devoid yet interdimensional. Nothing is solid. Your body comes apart in the desert and you think of sucking on stones to sense what they have to say – a lot, as it turns out.
In the Sahara, Sinai, Syrian, Negev, Chihuahuan, high and low deserts, I searched for his fat, elongated stillness and acute, piercing silence that would reach the subterranean in me. The desert became an obsession; like Tangiers and djinn were for Bowles, locked in the mind. His was aided by kif and glasses of mint tea, mine was merely literature (as if reading could ever be mere). In his 1953 essay about the Sahara, ‘Baptism of Solitude’, Bowles asks:
Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can’t help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surrounds can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in comfort or money, for the absolute has no price.
There is no ambiguity in the desert. Its beingness rests indubitable in my lungs, each breath standing alone. I am utterly alone without agency in the desert, as if my will is stripped, exposed. Raw solitude as the final arbiter.
In the desert and in Bowles’s writing, if something appears on the horizon or on the page that you enjoy, even relish, you soon discover it might merely be a mirage, beckoning and hypnotic. A mirage can be life-sustaining or anti-climactic. But you have no choice. You are compelled to keep going. The desert is pulling you into yourself where you can see yourself without delusion. Bowles sends you down angled corridors in dark alleyways, laid out carefully and then you’re caught breathless in a new reality, unable to stop reading. His short stories’ realities puncture the social world. I need that ‒ to escape the world of organized, compartmentalized, acceptable thinking. I seek out the chaos of being unglued even though it’s severe and often frightening. In the desert, the eyes lose the trust of the mind.
But the body has its appetites, so here are some facts. Humans can survive three minutes without air; three days without water; three weeks without food. With one gallon of water, you’ve got four days to live. Two and a half gallons, five days. Not a lot of room for error. Bowles lays out the consequences of our actions and often they aren’t pretty, but they stick in your brain. Details are recalled so many times, “that they have taken on the color of legend.”
You make up stories to calm the unknown in the desert. Maybe an Ahmed arriving to rescue you, slinging your body over his shoulder and carrying you off to an oasis with palm trees, a gurgling fountain and shade. Cool running water. Days so painfully hot and nights bitter cold. The world turned upside down. Terror and Beauty. Dreaded yet magnetic. It all comes down to conservation. Don’t sweat. Don’t urinate. And don’t die with water in your canteen. A cold wind can empty an empty stomach. Bowles leads me there to the abyss and lets go.
The desert and Bowles’s short stories shimmer, caught in a vortex of pressurized silence, burying identity, form, emitting illusion. A mirage perhaps but acutely, cuttingly real. Forces bigger than your personality. Surrender or resist, if you have any will left. I’ve run out of will in the desert. Carrying a heavy backpack, the sun grilling my neck, no shade for stopping, I was kept going by something other. There always seemed to be a lot of otherness in the desert so I needed to surrender rather than exercise sheer grit. How could I possibly pit myself against the unseen and become a worthy opponent? If I stopped, the other would down me. It’s an empty stage where to act is futile. The last can of beans, spilled in the sand, eaten anyway. There’s grit for you.
Hot yet icy cold, Bowles knows how to write about this otherness, so he carries me, for thirty years he’s been carrying me and then he has to go and die before I make it to Tangiers. I wanted to drink glasses of mint tea with him, sitting on the floor, and tell him how I’ve been led by animal pleasures that controlled my body and mind just as his stories do. His characters think they have it all under control when, really, they are unravelling, facing that final disaster. I too thought I knew what I was doing when all along I was led by men and appetite. Bowles somehow knows what will happen if you pursue obsession. Especially with the desert.
His last novel, Up Above the World (1966) was rejected by Random House as being too “nihilistic.” Even Bowles, when in the process of writing the book, found it depressing. And yet that is what keeps you reading. There’s a sense of abandon, like negative space. Moments are left hanging and you find yourself suspended. Like walking the desert, reading Up Above the World can be menacing, or you can surrender and be liberated, unable to stop reading, stop moving. I’m at once thrilled and captivated, all the while dreading what is coming next, searching for meaning. He gives you none. It’s not a hopeless feeling but more a promise of something behind what we perceive, a literary mirage, a shimmer in the text.
Insects eat sage and rabbit bush. Snakes and lizards eat insects and other snakes and lizards. Bobcats eat rats and mice. Rats and mice eat snake and lizard eggs. Wolves and coyotes eat jackrabbits, rats and mice. Hawks and owls eat any small animals they can catch; vultures eat the dead. And the desert eats away rock into stones into sand. Just like me, everything has its appetite. My appetite to escape the confines of social consciousness led me into the arms of foreign lovers whom I thought were more exciting. In the end, my need for freedom drove me on, resulting in abandonment ‒ they leaving me, me leaving myself. To desert is to abandon but the desert remains. In the end, I sought out the desert to be alone when all along I’ve been alone inside the mirage of companionship and support. The desert offers no such promise.
When I finally made it to Morocco after thirty years of reading everything Bowles had written, I didn’t go alone. If you’re not alone in the desert then there is the illusion that you are safe. But there is nothing safe about the desert, or your body in the desert, because there’s no reference point if no one is there with you. Your body certainly can’t be trusted to help you. It craves liquid and a break from the relentless emptiness. Any kind of break, like the slithering of a midget-faded rattlesnake or a horned viper. I saw the skittering of a scorpion and thought I heard its curled tail crackling. You’re unable to think or feel the way you think and feel when you’re in a body talking, eating, conversing, having sex, writing. You think strange thoughts. You feel strange. You become strange. There’s no sane reason to long for the desert but I do. The desert has cast a perplexing spell on me ever since the first time I stepped into that vast silence, that undifferentiated space.
In between going, I read Bowles, who lines my bookshelf and my brain. Letters, interviews, travel pieces, novels, and especially his short stories; I can’t seem to get enough. “Destiny, when one perceives it clearly from very near, has no qualities at all. The recognition of it and the consciousness of the vision’s clarity leaves no room on the mind’s horizon… The night was absolutely black.” But before the black, there’s the sky of spilled stains: Dragon’s Blood Red, Caravaggio Red, Venetian Red, Cinnabar, Orange of Mars, Bishop’s Purple. Before night falls, the sky and I dance. The Tarantella, a tango, the Dervish spin. What else can I do? There is no Ahmed to carry me off to the liquid gold of clear water.
I was mesmerized by the Whirling Dervishes in Konya, Turkey, the home of Rumi: “Paths go from here to there, / but don’t arrive from somewhere! / it’s time now to live naked.” The Dervishes spin, one hand raised to heaven, the other down to earth, for one hour without cease. They looked naked in their simple, unconscious rapture. I found that in the desert, with Rumi and Bowles. Transported out of myself, like following my dance partner in the tango, limbs pressed so tightly together we are one body in heat.
When Bowles first moved to Tangiers in 1931, he wrote to a friend: “It is unbelievably lovely here and the sea is peacock feather blue. The rest is whiter than Jesus’s soul, so white the eye’s pupils are pained to grow tiny enough. Little lizards, and spiders three inches.” Oh so lovely. Lurking in his “tattered gossamer world” are spells cast on unsuspecting tourists who think they’re simply lounging in an exotic world with a different view from back home.
Gore Vidal, who wrote the introduction to Bowles’s Collected Stories (1979), said of the extraordinary short story, ‘A Distant Episode’:
Something harsh is glimpsed in the lines of a story that is now plainer in its reverberations than it was when written. But then it is no longer news to anyone that the floor to this ramshackle civilization that we have built cannot bear much longer our weight. It was Bowles’s genius to suggest the horrors which lie beneath that floor, as fragile, in its way, as the sky that shelters us from a devouring vastness.
Once you’ve lived in the desert and hitchhiked through the Middle East for two years like I did; once you’ve read Bowles; once you’ve committed yourself to keep returning, no matter the reason; you are compelled, just like the djinn that cast spells on tourists who think they can travel in the Sahara and emerge unscathed. I have my reminders of my deserts. My body has scars like henna tattoos, my endless journals written in tiny script. But it’s not horror, or myth, or memories that burn, merely literature, the hot, icy memories, and my dreams, burning my lethargy, relentless as the desert wind. In the Sahara, a Sirocco is called the “hot, evil wind,”
Bowles’s short story, ‘Pages from Cold Point’, begins:
Our civilization is doomed to a short life: its component parts are too heterogeneous. I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done. Life is visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go. Perhaps someday another form of life will come along. Either way, it is of no consequence. At the same time I am a part of life, and I am bound by this to protect myself to whatever extent I am able. And so I am here.
And so is the desert. And so are we all.
I once took a bicycle into the Negev Desert with the intention of finding an oasis a Bedouin had once taken me to. The memory is legend now, but back then I was driven by appetite. I had an insatiable appetite for risk and mystery, and got both. After the heat of day the evening is, as usual, filled with thick, dense silence and an icy cold. The silence broken by the yelps of hyena and the clack of the metal spokes of the bicycle wheels spewing sand. Such a foolish notion to bicycle in the desert, especially at nightfall. But the effort is draining away my insatiable longing. Some of it anyway.
As I ride, or try to, night slips in.
The flat horizon sucks down the blood-red sunset, swiftly, along with parched heat cooling, turning cold. The white sun is replaced by a white moon and the once-dazzling cobalt sky reduced to black. Day drops into night. Conscious into subconscious. The desert devouring both.
To desert is to abandon. Forsake. This Negev Desert is splattered with artifacts − abandoned tanks and torn parachutes ‒ Israel perpetually at war. The parched land. My parched desire to do something about it. The desert is our future.
A musty, bitter smell of dust mixed with grease, wheels caked in red sand. The bicycle wheels cease to turn. Trying to still my rapid breathing, I pretend I am alone.
Waiting for my eyes to adjust, my ears ring from the pulsing pressure of anticipation that holds hostage the ever-present hyena. I see his eyes neon in the distance and force myself to be still. As still as the black surround until it grows impossible to wait any longer for come-what-may-stalking.
There is no cactus in this desert, no irregularity in the landscape to break up vision, to navigate, to contrast flat sand and a black sky. I know that everything is waking up after the sleep of day, underground, hidden from the heat, all rested up for dinner, for the elongated night of crossing and preying and consuming.
Out spill a family of hyraxes from crested rock (these woodchuck-like-adorables are the closest living relative to elephants). If I could only calm my fear long enough, be still enough, I might turn back. But I’m hellbent on finding that oasis and undoing its place as legend in my mind. I don’t want it to become another Paul Bowles story in my head. This is real, not myth. I am living it. I’m also haunted that our whole planet might become a desert. Arid and devoid. Our once fecund planet, my beloved home. What have we done? The heat index today is 110 degrees.
I get on the bike and pump, trying to ride away from my thoughts, my grief. Ride away from so many eyes watching, in wait, cooling. Cooling and ready. Prehistoric creatures wake at night’s beginning and buff thorns with their tails, slithering between rock encased for centuries in dust. Just like me, everything has its appetite.
I ride as best I can. There is an oasis of trees over a hill, hopefully nearby, at least I think so − if I can keep on thinking. Pump the pedals through stones and sand. Through crushed eons. On that hill in that grove is rest. Hopefully that buried pot for making chai, a glass, sugar. Mohammed took me once, made me tea. We drank to Allah and the stars. The stars will come but for now it is only the blackened shards of rock that sting my bare ankles. And the wind.
There might not be stars tonight. No Bedouin’s tea. But in the distance. There! That might be a tree. Or maybe another rusted tank. Out here in the debris of war; frayed rope, strewn metal, the body parts of machine guns. The desert for refuse, an easy, silent dump.
This place, so alien from the long blue shadows on white snow from the sugar maples of my youth. How can two places at the same time of year be so contrary?
In the distance. There. I want it to be a tree, one of many. A tiny oasis? Hill of soft sand? Covered in a canopy of green? Pump the bike. Never mind the eyes. They have not come closer.
A cold wind works its emetic. Now bile and longing mix. I swoon but do not fall. The burnt crust under me trembles. Alive. We are alive together. A mirage is the settling heat at dusk and the suffocating heat at noon. I must keep that in mind. No reason to fear. It is only my breathing that I hear, none other. Only a thrumming of a beating heart in my throat. Get off and push.
Finally I find the trees, the hill of sand, and the buried chai service. Under the branches there are no stars, if there ever were any. I’d forgotten to look up.
The wind has stopped. My breathing slows. Morning will come soon enough. Or not.
I had so wanted to be fearless.
With Bowles, I read past my dread.
*
Dian Parker’s nonfiction and fiction has been published in numerous literary journals, magazines, newspapers, and nominated for a number of Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. She also writes about art and artists, including color essays, for arts publications. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and currently lives in the hills of Vermont.
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