Fragments from the Desert Books

Revived notes on faith, fire, holy love, and poetic strife.

Somewhere near Area 51 Circa 2013.

I’m revising two linked essay collections; one is more done than the other. My friend Brad was asking me the other day about the influential years I had in Las Vegas. 5 years I lived in that complicated city, learning (and teaching myself) how to teach; reading, studying, and writing poetry; rebuilding a spiritual identity; and grappling with the many temptations and darknesses woven into the neon desert of Las Vegas. All the contrasts all went together, and I’m grateful I had my apprenticeships there, and then, at the right time, I’m glad that I departed. The years also left hundreds of pages of desert writing, some of which I’m working through and cleaning up.

As I’ve been spending a month now teaching poetry to two English Honors classes, I’m reminded of these precious Vegas years when I rediscovered poetry, poetics, and their relationships to philosophy and mysticism. Assigned to write an ars poetica by my teacher, Don, I drew intense inspiration from the Metaphysical Poets, like Donne and Herbert. Then I tried to connect them with modern poets, like Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robin Blaser, among others, to come up with a vision that strikes me now as a little baffling: a fable of cosmic fire underlying all things. And yet in a sense this all anticipated the Islamic turn in my life that would come only when I returned to the coastal border city of my childhood. Now my elemental model is less fire and more the “ocean without a shore” of the Sufis. Or the Quranic ocean of inexhaustible ink.

All these desert notes relate to my lived experience of apprehending energies, many unseen and speculative, that ask us to reimagine our humanness. And especially when the most inhuman/inhumane wield all the power. These notes are prefaces, possibly, to my belief that the mysterious and unbounded ecological citizenship that we all possesses is our primary weapon against the collective dehumanization our leaders are forcing us to consent to. They want us to believe that the world no longer exists for most of us. But the world, ecologically speaking, including us at our most interconnected and entangled, is the only thing that does.

These rather dramatic reflections still testify to the mosaic-self I, sometimes neurotically, embody. They also anticipate, I hope, the community-self I always am striving to become. Now, as I’ve tried to introduce poetry to students who have barely encountered a poem, (and which has led to some incredibly moving experiences and days, with more to be said later), I am reanimating a lived intimacy with poetry’s energies. Here are some fragments then from an old ars poetica that I am modifying to honor later journeys of soul and striving. Prose poem-ish things. Lyrical essay things. Experiments in prayer-thought. They suggest a life spent teaching college English, trail running, reading, writing, trying to pray, cultivating strange solitudes, and exploring a uniquely weird city in the desert.

The Fire

While I teach writing and rhetoric in the day, I spend other moments reading and studying poetry. Which is to say I’m finally learning how to read poetry in Las Vegas. Lately I’ve come back to Dame Helen Gardner’s anthology, “The Metaphysical Poets.” Because it fits in my back jeans pocket, it’s a reliable book to bring to restaurants, bars, and parking lots. My favorite place to read is Fat Choy, a tucked-away Asian-American diner inside an old, rather decrepit casino on a tumbledown road full of potholes and pay phones with missing phones. I camp out in their red vinyl booths and read the compact poems while eating duck and rice and sipping a Little Buddha beer. These old poems are difficult and sinewy, sometimes unpleasant, but they revive and reframe a sense of devotion. To God? Possibly. Those three letters remain a rumor, a trace of meaning, a horizon of retreating flame.

When I landed here, in this high, desolate place, I was alone but with ears bent towards a populous roar. My consciousness was nothing I had done or could glorify in; what filled the hollows were actions rooted in wavering signs: teaching, guiding, writing, reading, praying – all these desperate attempts at listening. To what?

A fire, I believe or want to believe. A fire, I sense, without knowing how.

So it is to a radiance or a fire which is all I might apprehend of God, or Wisdom, which might be how God shows herself to mortals. There is a Fire that sustains me and underlies my apprehensions and tasks; a fire that reveals itself in dream, in distances, in words, in colors, in suffering, in attempts at love, through bouts of surrender, in encounters with others-who-have-turned-toward-me.

My life is only a garbled expression of Fire but at least know I feel this is true. All I can grow into is fire’s flawed, stammering messenger even if there is no message, at least in the conventional sense. Fire is the synthesis of all the messages I expect and may never receive. The one Image that is all Images, the sum of all Messages: the flickering blaze enlivening and buoying all things.

Metaphysical poets speak, often, of “turning.” Turning is a gesture that fire compels, the choreography of humility. When the fire starts, your head pivots; when what you look at no longer yields wise love, you turn to the unknown face, even if no face is present. The cosmological field is rife with unrevealed faces. Believing in faces means yearning for recognition. Is there something metaphysical about turning? Out in the desert I am turning upon tides of dust, rust, silences, and heat-blown stones, breathing in broken wings, feeling beneath me the thirsting contortions of mesquite.

When I’m running in the desert, thinking, like breathing, changes: feelings that seem ancestral and primal, memories of the simple drip of sand through hands and the deep inhalation of pink wind born cities away. Intimations of stone intestines. Compression of granite strata and river-light.

Movement leads to sharing thoughts, or spilling them. A tree as a child is there to share with. Our faces are unguent vulnerabilities.

And in the morning classroom, after a long run, and with new commitments to thinking, feeling, and communicating. While I will not truly awake anytime soon, I’m reminded that awakening is the horizon, the threshold. What is the body but a system of dunes interacting with the outer dunes, appealing to the fieriest horizon? The quietude of the sands encased in asphalt. An expectant silence. This silence suggests a deep luminosity that will come to reinvent the mind and rebuild the personality.

I must become silent to hear the blaze. Yet silence seems to be a question, too, of signs. Subside into the all-Quiet fluid of space-time. And one must dream – and listen to the dreams that spring from silence.

In unbounded listening we become as expansive as the sky and, potentially, as fearless and unassuming. The desert sky sublimity is a lifelong motif.

The pink day crumbles to dusk and I run along the purpling sands, an image of Fire behind my eyes. My dunes are un-walled gardens; their curvatures are concealments; a snake-like radiance writhes and seethes throughout the taupe, ochre, and indigo textures. All things are built to subside into these heaped, undulant grains; so much must hide here because of the all-encompassing fires of sun and heat. Car parts, broken glass, strollers, memos, charred dolls, fish skeletons: all half-submerged and still-scintillating. Running in the desert is my new devotion to the visions concealed in my body as it overlaps with the earth’s bodies. My body is a system of dunes interacting with the outer dunes. Running on dirt and sand links with devotions of writing and teaching and praying and reading.

Here a meadow is oceanic sand and gravel, and pavement, and groomed and manicured and smashed rock and boulder; here, my body paces and talks all day about how to use language, how words can work in the service of Wisdom and Harmony and the cohesive Body, and then I make my own flesh move differently and more silently in the evening. The next day I step into the concrete-walled classroom again and try, with my students, to bring the words to flame, and to make the dream-like magic of language an actual, waking reality. A reality that pays homage to the dreams, the ones we have and the ones we’d like to have.

All of this indicates a need for lantern-bearing and the gardening of wild flame.

Fire helps us cajole companions. I want to share a fire with friends. Bread and nourishment will taste better in the flame’s half-light. Fire and companion: two key words for poet Robin Blaser. And mirrors, which bring more companions into vision.

A companion, etymologically, is a “bread-sharer” and spiritually, a hearth protector. Any force that “paraphrases” the soul can become a companion. One challenge in Las Vegas has been how to make companions: of people, of events, of crossroads, of opacities, of fears, and failures. Companions are paraphrases; or in Robin Blaser’s vision: “Companions are horizons.” Blaser in his ars poetica, “The Fire” also states: “The heat I’m after is not simply the personal heat of the meeting, the recognition, but a heat and a passion which are of the nature of existence itself. The personal, yes, but then the translation of the personal to correspond with larger and larger elements…” Later, in Syntax he again comes back to companions: “I read, walk, listen, dream and write among companions. These pieces do not belong to me.” Again the soul is put in paraphrase by the forces that enter and alter it.

While running, other voices flood my face, other faces flutter in and out of my own face. The very idea of a face, of physiognomy. How we must feel forever assessed by being beheld by other eyes. What if the face was featureless, a desert.

I watch embryonic faces move through me and out into the desert, their slow reverberations alter my thoughts as I grasp that I am always the sum of my unfinished accompaniments. Yet such facial thinking cannot happen without using my body like a tree unanchored in a scrolling landscape. Here in the desert, the lack of bulk and the accumulation of distances make you feel more accompanied than a big dense noisy city would. The subtle accompaniments of all the invisibility between the clouds and the earth.

This time of teaching in the desert has comprised activities whose links to one another I want to honor and understand. Running in the desert is one ritual. And in those runs the mind changes and reaches out to other minds, most not human. And by running, I refine teaching, and through teaching, my reading changes, and then my praying and my desiring.

Love And Fire

Devotion through love puts a frame around your life that illumines secret reserves, hidden riches. Love is a navigational turning in one’s life, which opens the self onto more luminous horizons. In turning, and always remembering to turn, we forever proffer our life as a fire for another to acknowledge.

John Donne speaks of this navigation by sacrifice in the final lines of the poem, “Good Friday, 1613 Riding Westward”:

“O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree;

I turne my back to thee but to receive

Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.

O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee

Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,

Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,

That thou may’st know mee, and I’ll turne my face”

In love, there is only a sense of solidity because of constant and dizzying oscillations.

Vibrations maybe. One or more beloveds are compelled to consistently turn to face and implore the other. But the imploring insists on no explicit answer, only more implicit gestures.

Any love possesses a spiraling, shell-like quality.

This turning becomes a kindling that creates a blaze that refines love’s energies.

The devotional poem is an enactment of these sacrificial turnings, so there is always vivid and sudden motion concentrated in its lines. In her introduction to The Metaphysical Poets, Helen Gardner describes “the concentration and sinewy strength of style” that characterizes poets like John Donne and Ben Johnson. The poem’s lines become the turns and loops of an ecstatic entanglement. Enacting these movements in language is a way to live them again, both physically and spiritually.

Soul’s labor is listening, which encompasses and refines all other senses.

The tyranny of the visible is defied by our unfinished ears.

I went out and ran the six miles and this time a snake in my path, and a scorpion too, like a tiny blond lobster. We crave this primordial interlocutor, a creature who recalls us to the buoyancy of our dreams. Running the fringes of the desert, feeling the tones and colors of abandonment, I summon other faces that guide me. Then there is the night of the small bats flapping about my head, like nocturnal toontown creatures. My body moving like an animal’s, it’s as if I’m recalling courage that isn’t yet mine. Courage that is of the world’s beastly heart,. The courage to run isn’t really courage, though. To run from something known into something unknown might be. To run deeper into the world not certain if it’s still the world might be.

The Invisible

All of us are doubting the semiotic possibilities of the unseen, the un-sensed. If we are to speak or take notes, how can we revive the words in advance so that they do justice to our hearts? Some students even question whether the invisible has any right to speak at all. It’s all around us, we think, but what if it's just too much to mean anything?

As a class we create a list of words that we think we understand, or that we have ceased thinking about due to their overuse. Love, of course, is one of them. So is beauty. Strength. Happiness. Fear. Here, through interrogation and reimagining, the alphabet itself undergoes a recuperative transformation but too much interrogating leads to depletion. A delicate middle way of questioning and reappraisal is taken.

Again, a poem beings to be a kind of reconciliation: another long poem of spiritual pilgrimage, “Relearning The Alphabet” by the poet Denise Levertov. Written around the same year as Blaser’s The Moth Poem, this is a passionate devotional poem sequenced by the letters of the alphabet. In “A” we already reach the organizational crux of things: “Joy – a beginning. Anguish, ardor.”

Levertov explicitly links the processes of re-education and re-learning to a fire-driven regeneration. She doesn’t let us forget that “ardor” comes from the word, “to burn.” In “C” she advocates: “The seeing/that burns through, comes through to/the fire’s core.” The fire persists throughout this alphabet that is being regenerated through pilgrimage and sacrifice. The poem’s vibrant oscillation between absence and presence creates the twists and turns of a devotional quest: “Lost in the alphabet/I was looking for/the world I can’t now say/(Love).” Love is this ineffable fire: what all language tries to circumscribe.

Then, under the letters “I, J” we enter again into uncanny territory: “At the edge, I stand yet. No, I am moving away,/walking away from the unbridged rush of waters towards/’Imagination’s holy forest,’ meaning to thread its ways,/that are dark/and come to my own clearing.” Here Levertov may be consciously alluding to Blaser, and, as well, to Duncan’s “field of permission.”

My first month in Vegas, 2013, a friend and I went hiking and discovered this friend.

I find it comforting that a companionable spiritual geography is once again being mapped in poetry: of forests, fields, clearings, and deserts, places that offer vital opportunities and transformative encounters for one’s language and one’s faith. As we navigate these overlapping, intricate terrains of the soul and the earth, we begin to hear, with the poet, the fire that sources them: “the blaze addresses/a different darkness:/absence has not become/the transformed presence the will/looked for/but other: the present,/that which was poised already in the ah! of praise.” Levertov’s alphabetic pilgrimage ends where intentions and desires reclaim their own infancies: in joy, praise, affirmation of the present moment, the dissolution of separation. The poem ends, then, with what fire is concealing all along: sweetness.

The very sweetness of fire and heat is hidden in celestial signs.

Hearts of Space

A warm and bone-dry Sunday and its enticing air-conditioned emptiness. By twilight we’re driving with hot air blowing on our faces, the radio loud to stir up the blood and coax the outer currents in. A searching feeling that consumes you is heightened by the stars framed by these high stony fortifications. Our eyes hold microscopic hints of those fires and our nose drinks pulverized minerals from Needles and Searchlight, the Eastern mining towns.

Outside, beyond the hills, the distances are crystalline and galactic; starlight flashes dark amethyst and blood orange and algae green. When it got dark, that radio show came on, the one with two hour "space music" radio show that made these four-wheeled wanderings more cinematic than any movie could ever possibly be. The DJ’s voice is deep, moody, performative and we feel cellar-damp and mossy with its chthonic reverberations.

The car grows lynx-ish through the night’s metamorphic auditory hollows: “From abstract electronic soundworlds to orchestral soundtracks, classical adagios to delicate jazz improvisations, traditional ethnic and religious music to ambient atmospherics — Hearts of Space ranges across the music of thousands of artists and albums to create spatial/ambient experiences of quality and depth: contemplative music, broadly defined.”

Deep in fog country now and the tonalities and celestial rhythms grace our softened forms. The artists create an atmospheric coastline in the mind, dotted with tiny towns and quaint villages: Jacaszek, Deaf Center, Bersarin Quartet, Stars of the Lid, Hammock, How To Disappear Completely, Eluvium, William Basinksi, Brian Eno, Fripp, ambient oblivion flesh, my kindred space apes.

In the desert, Outer Space comes at you bigger, louder, wilder -- while inner space feels more star-studded and hushed. But both are mental playgrounds. Space begins to become a great, jewel-bedecked mother, Sophia-Isis, the rumor of blue-black spaciousness that holds us all in eternal, motherly nonchalance.

“Rhythmic or tonal movements animate the experience of flying, floating, cruising, gliding, or hovering within the auditory space. Terrestrial space music employs natural outdoor ambiences — sounds of water, birds, insects, thunder, etc. In either case, the major effect of this music is to take the listener out of their body or at least out of their normal sound environment.”

Turning Again

Coming here, my own self turned in a strange and exhilarating direction. On my patio at twilight, summer’s sting lessening, late autumn bronze chewing the leaves, orange and purple gashes opening in the sky. The thin, yellow trees are aglow, bark scintillating with the salt-musk close of day. I inhale the pulverized distances coming closer, as iridescent purples, parched pinks, and magnetic oranges. My neon desert is a prism of kaleidoscopic fire. Yet there is sweetness, which is hard to retain if you are over-accustomed to certain tastes.

A faith in language has sustained me this far, and, incrementally the dry white, yellow and red earth is contaminating my syllables; dusting, varnishing, serrating and salting them. I lose the ability to say God so I say: space, cosmos, vastness, multiplicity, spaciousness. Then I choose other, more (hopefully) precise words. But then forget them. At long last, the crumbling words yield a new kind of invisible presence.

I become humbled by the elemental clangor of life, uncertain of what kind of vocabulary to meet it with. When I speak and write am I just only always hallucinating? But in words, whether poems, prayers, nonsense, the unarticulated God seethes, goading me to hearken to vibrations I can’t truly verbalize even though I must. Asymmetry, harmony of juxtaposed fragments.

Beauty is the gift of navigating these imperishable life ruins & impenetrable heart-darknesses. Love is developing a prowess of vision through sacrifices and devotions.

Questions and Animals

So what can I say to match the parceling out of fire that is the desert? How can I contort my own life to partake of the sweet phosphorescence indwelling all things?

Questions as strange as these arrive in my cool, dim apartment by the burning carports. When I saw the tortoise and the fox glancing at me under stormy skies, I had to animalize. They were messengers not in their own eyes but in mine, locked in sympathy by sudden strangeness. Sacrifice induces a wilding of the self, or how to become an infant in the eyes of a Creator, unspeakable.

The animal is initiator of the numinous. Beasts, original infants. I look to the black “silky flycatchers “of the desert: those shining red-eyed phainopepla birds whose song is one of the most surprising I’ve heard. Theirs is a song that catches itself in the mesquite limbs like the unspooled reels of a cassette tape.

Matter unceasingly presents itself in all its resplendent and untamed singularities. Matter also emits fire that is both sanctuary and wilderness, and into which we, as artists and seekers and healers, must plunge.

Things, both there and not there, beseeching us to turn and turn again.

“God's breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage”