Conquest of Arid America

I.

A wandering word is the word of God. It has for echo the word of a wandering people. No oasis
for it, no shadow, no peace. Only the immense, thirsty desert, only the book of this thirst, the
devastating fire of this fire reducing all books to ashes at the threshold of the obsessive, illegible
Book bequeathed us. -Edmond Jabes.

In Conquest of Arid America, William E. Smythe

wrote poetic propaganda for colonizing the desert,
The Nation reaches its hand into the Desert.
The barred doors of the sleeping empire are
flung wide open to the eager and the willing,
that they may enter in and claim their heritage!
The Desert Land Act sought to, as Catrin Gersdorf writes,
replace the masculine landscape with one that could be
feminized and ready to make the desert bloom.
A bourgeois form of anti-modernism,
frontier nostalgia, became, for people like
Theodore Roosevelt, a vehicle for
spitting out the faceless, feminine
life of the cosmopolitan crowd within.
The spirit drove him west on a conquest of arid America,
a godforsaken place for whom godlike whispers turn demonic
between pleasure and terror, writing himself into the landscape,
the hinter edge in the sand with a finger,
a thorn pulled, a river tamed, definitive
speech sediment erodes in uncertain waters.
A sign along the Grand Canyon tells you to
imagine you’re a pioneer on a horse
coming up to the canyon’s rim,
gaze into the vast unknown,
feel the wind in your hair.
The desert is like a mirror reflecting both
the sacred and expendable to the colonial gaze
which maps and kills, names and maims,
looking down into the canyon, like a hole in
the sky, inverted as melted but bubbles up in where
fingers and mind meet to grid the ungriddable strata.
II.

If the waves of the sea could flow in

and cover its barren nakedness,
wrote pioneer William L. Manly,
it would be indeed, a blessing.
For whom, the cheap nature of
holding your finger in the dike long enough for the
flood to recede, horse and driver, tossed, both,
into the sea, the surging waters standing like a wall.
About the dams on the Sacramento and Columbia river,
Floyd Dominy, Commissioner of Reclamation said
There isn't any way to control the river without
having any tradeoffs, and the salmon,
unfortunately, was one of the tradeoffs.
Asked if it was worth it, he smiled,
I think it's worth it, yes, there are
substitutes for eating salmon,
they can eat cake.
The face of the hydraulic aristocracy is reflected in
every drop of water that keeps miles of lawn grasses in
perpetually preadolescent botanical castrati.
Who needs fish when you can have
miles of neighbors glaring at each other while
watering a patch of grass in the desert?
Colorado Senator Thomas Patterson called
the federal development of rivers,
a great pacificator, better than a standing army,
because poor people, instead of causing
great social disturbances in great cities,
would go West to seek an irrigated farm.
III.

They had to invent the speed of prototype cars to

cope with the absolute horizontality.
A Garden of Eden on Wheels floats across
an unmade ocean bed in the open air,
aimless, shedding histories, cancelled
ground, the brain of time scooped out.
The cities grammars of restraint breaks
for whom daily re-enacted is the miracle of
easy living in an unforgiving landscape,
lawns, ice, cubed squash, mausoleum seats
designed to the anatomy of the womb.
Absorbed by an indefinable blue in
the motionless blue of the sky,
a nomadic womb is as if
pulled by the desert highway
or sucked forward by creating a
vacuum in front of it, bypassing
Gods test of faith, bypassing the
slow rhythm of the desert
beyond silence to the most
insignificant word.
God creates the world through his word, says Reb Nachman of Breslov,
but in the void that surrounds all the worlds there is no language,
the questions which arise there are silent. That is why Moses is
described in the bible as hesitant of speech. (Ex. 4:10)
The relation to God is defined by the passion of the distance from God,
the collapse of which is the death of this longing and closeness,
and so, the believer must cry for God's absence:
She seeks the nearness of God through
ever seeking to confront this distance.
In the godforsaken land of the ‘just as it is’
all objects appear as they are, truth in the arid surface,
touching from a distance, the smiles in a gas station,
the desert horizon, like the dry surface of non-stick pans
communicating heat from a distance so that
water evaporates before even touching it.
IV.

The travel guide issued in 1881 by the

Union and Central Pacific Railroads for
passengers bound to San Francisco reads
Board a train of silver palace cars in
the evening and will soon be whirling
away across the Great American Desert.
Fred Harvey, the Civilizer of the West,
built luxurious way-stations and
Indian Detours for tourists in which
actors simulate the lifestyle of
Native Americans in the desert.
The Fred Harvey Company was sold to
Amfac. Inc. originally known as
H. Hackfeld and Company which
was founded by J. C. Pflueger and his
brother-in-law, Heinrich Hackfeld, who
later became the business agent for
the Old Sugar Mill of Kōloa, part of the first
commercially successful sugarcane plantation in Hawai’i
where managers suggesting Hawaiian’s have shown
complete worthlessness as laborers and
described them as being so strongly
rooted in their cultural heritage that
centuries, at least, will intervene ere
they will understand that
it is a part of their duty to
serve their masters faithfully.
V.

There isn't a sacrifice I can make that compares

to the eternity of a slow-motion catastrophe
that are the buttes at Monument Valley:
blocks of language rising high, their
pitiless erosion, ancient sedimentations
that owe their depth to wear.
Where meaning and morals are kept alive artificially,
all I can do is laugh at the echo of my own erosion
swallowed by the remorseless horizon.
The book imperceptibly takes shape within
the book we will never finish, there is my desert.
Objects project permanence,
the body names and hoards
out of a fear of decay,
to defy decay is to evade death.
In fermented foods, rotting takes us to the border
of appetite and death, a potentially lethal preservation.
Photography is no different, maybe that's why
Americans say cheese when photographed as if
preparing an idealized image for preservation.
An aging book produces poisonous chemicals whose
sweet smells of smoke, hints of almond, pressed
flowers, the sea, masks its annihilative powers,
not unlike pasture land that masks the desert
in Frank Mackenzie’s painting,
Making the Desert Blossom.
The poem composed in the act of its own
decomposition places us precariously on the
edge of the annihilative powers of silence.
Edmond Jabes writes, the poet, or the Jew, protects the desert which
protects both her speech and writing. The desert, replied Reb Goetz,
is the souls awakening, and sky, its envy, the garden is speech,
the desert, writing. In each grain of sand, a sign surprises.
Desert faith is beyond the idolization of forms of language.
After a treacherous expedition down the Colorado River, John Wesley Powell wrote,
The canyon of Lodore was not devoid of scenic interest
even beyond the power of the pen to tell.
E.J. Book of Margins

The wandering kingdom of dust

Salvation is the water that quenches our thirst

Eternity are enemies of pulp and rind

When there is nothing left there will still be sand

Slowness has the passion of immobility with which it will someday fuse, in the heart of the
irrevocable refusal to be (because living means acknowledging ones limits) man is like a
prisoner in jail: he is finally conscious of his loss, the victory of his loss.

Dialogue of the living with the leaves, dialogue of the dead with the sand.

The soul has words as petals.

Thirst is our lot.

The breaking of the tablets is the fundamental act that allowed divine writing to pass from
silence into the ratified silence of all writing.

Riches of supreme poverty.

The desert has no book.

And passage?- perhaps what has neither end nor beginning, unfixed trace, non-trace of a
burning trace; raw sensibility of sand and skin in their extremity.

Thought must stoop to conquer new heights. Its peaks are also its limits…
The unthought is thought that cannot be made to stoop.

Thought bears the thought of a grain and the dimensions of an ocean.

“The thinker is a seasoned fisherman,” he said. “From the sea of the unthought he draws
luminous thoughts-moonfish, globefish, flatfish- which, having swallowed the bait, wriggle for a
moment between the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea before they stiffen, aliens, on the
ground.”

Thought is to life as the unthought to death: one and the same buoy.

(If God is His Word, the desert is older than God, being the place where it first appeared, hence
older than His Word. But God is without past. Do we admit, when we say God is born of god and
dies in God, that He is at the same time Word and place?
By declaring, “I am the Place,” did God want to point out that He was the Word of all places
and the Place of all words?
God’s life was disconcertingly brief; His death, that of His Word blasted.
Of this life the desert bears witness in its silence.
Every grain of sand refers us to this death.)

Andrew vogel ettin –

As soon as creation begins, the power of pent-up infinite possibility becomes vitiated.
(in the decaying word/wound) (the wounding is wounded)

Something similar happens to our idealizations: embodied, they lose substance. The moment
when the fullest experience of the divine would be possible is in that silence truly filled with
potentiality, just before the word is shaped into fact.

Within silence exists a fully developed network of subaudible communication, like the architect’s
blueprint. Andre Neher termed this “energetic silence.”

God becomes word as we become human.

(living by a train)

Arranging letters to for words before speaking them is one way imagining the divine preparing
for the process of creating. The torah,, according to rabbinic tradition, preceded creation in
exactly the way a blueprint precedes the structure that it details.

The eye lays down- and is- the law.

Adams fall is the triumph of the eye.

The eye captures what it will destroy. It cannot perceieve what escapes death, what is invisible.

Man comes to know what his eyes destroy.

“thou shalt not kill,” commands God. Did he hope that man will turn blind again?

God created the world, that is, God created Himself in order to face up to the eyes of man and to
show his power by escaping them.

The best proof of love the creature could give God was to accept his invisibility.

“…the lethal opening of the eye.” – JD

The word is a world in flames.

Sabrina Dalla Valle- 7 days and nights in the desert

Dross loosened from the mind turns to gold the moment you see your image in the void.

Essence of awareness comes down to this: we yearn for presence yet we pursue sequence.

Deserts will show you how to read the story.

Duration too, swallows sequence.

Full experiences houses perfect embrace, endings always return to the beginning like the best
friendship that happens when you have to start all over, finally free from the familiar.
You could be anyone, a joy to anticipate, a daylong meditation, portentious or at least symbolic
dream, the grammar of a new language, the surprise of mohave yucca that shoots upward over
night into a blossoming tree, the fickle curve of stars.
God burns forever in the four fires of His Name.

He also wrote: “In every word a wall of fire separates me from God, and God, together with me
is this word.”

The Book is what the black of fire carves into the white of fire.

A kind of counter writing carried, however, by writing- its irksome contrary or contrariety, with
which it collides and breaks- attempts to lord it where reflexion overflows the foaming wave. But
there is already the beach, the sand, the progressive erosion of a reproduced tracethat was but
the daring imprint of a question left open. The beach is flooded with the “white blood” of the
sea; the trace, drowned in blood. Obliteration is but the waves of blood on an abandoned wharf
all written, all covered with footprints.

Signs represent the presence in its absence.

P47