The Desert
Boundlessness
and emptiness - these are the two most expressive symbols of that attributeless
Godhead, of whom all that can be said is St. Bernard's Nescio nescio or
the Vedantist's "not this, not this." The Godhead, says Meister
Eckhart, must be loved "as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not-image,
must be loved as He is, a sheer pure absolute One, sundered from all twoness,
and in whom we must eternally sink from nothingness to nothingness." In
the scriptures of Northern and Far Eastern Buddhism the spatial metaphors recur
again and again. At the moment of death, writes the author of Bardo Thodol, "all
things are like the cloudless sky; and the naked immaculate Intellect is like
unto a translucent void without circumference or center." "The great
Way," in Sosan's words, "is perfect, like unto vast space, with
nothing wanting, nothing superfluous." "Mind," says Hui-neng
(and he is speaking of that universal ground of consciousness, from which all
beings, the unenlightened no less than the enlightened, take their source),
"mind is like emptiness of space. . . Space contains sun, moon, stars, the
great earth, with its mountains and rivers. . . Good men and bad men, good
things and bad things, heaven and hell - they are all in empty space. The
emptiness of Self-nature is in all people just like this." The theologians
argue, the dogmatists declaim their credos; but their propositions "stand
in no intrinsic relation to my inner light. This Inner Light" (I quote
from Yoka Dashi's "Song of Enlightenment") "can be likened to space;
it knows no boundaries; yet it is always here, is always with us, always
retains its serenity and fullness. . . You cannot take hold of it, and you
cannot get rid of it; it goes on its own way. You speak and it is silent; you
remain silent, and it speaks."
Silence
is the cloudless heaven perceived by another sense. Like space and emptiness,
it is a natural symbol of the divine. In the Mithraic mysteries, the candidate
for initiation was told to lay a finger to his lips and whisper: "Silence!
Silence! Silence - symbol of the living imperishable God!" And long before
the coming of Christianity to the Thebaid, there had been Egyptian mystery
religions, for whose followers God was a well of life, "closed to him who
speaks, but open to the silent." The Hebrew scriptures are eloquent almost
to excess; but even here, among the splendid rumblings of prophetic praise and
impetration and anathema, there are occasional references to the spiritual
meaning and the therapeutic virtues of silence. "Be still, and know that I
am God." "The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the world keep
silence before him." "Keep thou silence at the presence of the Lord
God." The desert, after all, began within a few miles of the gates of
Jerusalem.
The
facts of silence and emptiness are traditionally the symbols of divine
immanence - but not, of course, for everyone, and not in all circumstances.
"Until one has crossed a barren desert, without food or water, under a
burning tropical sun, at three miles an hour, one can form no conception of
what misery is." These are the words of a gold-seeker, who took the
southern route to California in 1849. Even when one is crossing it at seventy
miles an hour on a four-lane highway, the desert can seem formidable enough. To
the forty-niners it was unmitigated hell. Men and women who are at her mercy
find it hard to see in Nature and her works any symbols but those of brute
power at the best and, at the worst, of an obscure and mindless malice. The
desert's emptiness and the desert's silence reveal what we may call their
spiritual meanings only to those who enjoy some measure of physiological
security. The security may amount to no more than St. Anthony's hut and daily
ration of bread and vegetables, no more than Milarepa's cave and barley meal and
boiled nettles - less than what any sane economist would regard as the
indispensable minimum, but still security, still a guarantee of organic life
and, along with life, of the possibility of spiritual liberty and
transcendental happiness.
But
even for those who enjoy security against the assaults of the environment, the
desert does not always or inevitably reveal its spiritual meanings. The early
Christian hermits retired to the Thebaid because its air was purer, because
there were fewer distractions, because God seemed nearer there than in the
world of men. But, alas, dry places are notoriously the abode of unclean
spirits, seeking rest and finding it not. If the immanence of God was sometimes
more easily discoverable in the desert, so also, and all too frequently, was
the immanence of the devil. St. Anthony's temptations have become a legend, and
Cassian speaks of "the tempests of imagination" through which every
newcomer to the eremitic life had to pass. Solitude, he writes, makes men feel "the
many-winged folly of their souls. . .; they find the perpetual silence
intolerable, and those whom no labor on the land could weary, are vanquished by
doing nothing and worn out by the long duration of their peace." Be
still, and know that I am God; be still, and know that you are the
delinquent imbecile who snarls and gibbers in the basement of every human mind.
The desert can drive men mad, but it can also help them to become supremely
sane.
The
enormous drafts of emptiness and silence prescribed by the eremites are safe
medicine only for a few exceptional souls. By the majority the desert should be
taken either dilute or, if at full strength, in small doses. Used in this way,
it acts as a spiritual restorative, as an anti-hallucinant, as a de-tensioner
and alterative.
In
his book, The Next Million Years, Sir Charles Darwin looks forward to
thirty thousand generations of ever more humans pressing ever more heavily on
ever dwindling resources and being killed off in ever increasing numbers by
famine, pestilence and war. He may be right. Alternatively, human ingenuity may
somehow falsify his predictions. But even human ingenuity will find it hard to
circumvent arithmetic. On a planet of limited area, the more people there are,
the less vacant space there is bound to be. Over and above the material and
sociological problems of increasing population, there is a serious
psychological problem. In a completely home-made environment, such as is
provided by any great metropolis, it is as hard to remain sane as it is in a completely
natural environment such as the desert or the forest. O Solitude, where are thy
charms? But, O Multitude, where are thine! The most wonderful thing
about America is that, even in these middle years of the twentieth century,
there are so few Americans. By taking a certain amount of trouble you might
still be able to get yourself eaten by a bear in the state of New York. And
without any trouble at all you can get bitten by a rattler in the Hollywood
hills, or die of thirst, while wandering through an uninhabited desert, within
a hundred and fifty miles of Los Angeles. A short generation ago you might have
wandered and died within only a hundred miles of Los Angeles. Today the
mounting tide of humanity has oozed through the intervening canyons and spilled
out into the wide Mojave. Solitude is receding at the rate of four and a half
kilometers per annum.
And
yet, in spite of it all, the silence persists. For this silence of the desert
is such that casual sounds, and even the systematic noise of civilization,
cannot abolish it. They coexist with it - as small irrelevances at right angles
to an enormous meaning, as veins of something analogous to darkness within an
enduring transparency. From the irrigated land come the dark gross sounds of
lowing cattle, and above them the plovers trail their vanishing threads of
shrillness. Suddenly, startlingly, out of the sleeping sagebrush there bursts
the shrieking of coyotes - Trio for Ghoul and Two Damned Souls. On the trunks
of cottonwood trees, on the wooden walls of barns and houses, the woodpeckers
rattle away like pneumatic drills. Picking one's way between the cactuses and
the creosote bushes one hears, like some tiny whirring clockwork, the
soliloquies of invisible wrens, the calling, at dusk, of the nightjays and even
occasionally the voice of Homo sapiens - six of the species in a parked
Chevrolet, listening to the broadcast of a prize fight, or else in pairs
necking to the delicious accompaniment of Crosby. But the light forgives, the
distances forget, and this great crystal of silence, whose base is as large as
Europe and whose height, for all practical purposes, is infinite, can coexist
with things of a far higher order of discrepancy than canned sentiment or
vicarious sport. Jet planes, for example - the stillness is so massive that it
can absorb even jet planes. The screaming crash mounts to its intolerable
climax and fades again, mounts as another of the monsters rips through the air,
and once more diminishes and is gone. But even at the height of the outrage the
mind can still remain aware of that which surrounds it, that which preceded and
will outlast it.
Progress,
however, is on the march. Jet planes are already as characteristic of the
desert as are Joshua trees or burrowing owls; they will soon be almost as
numerous. The wilderness has entered the armament race, and will be in it to
the end. In its multi-million-acred emptiness there is room enough to explode
atomic bombs and experiment with guided missiles. The weather, so far as flying
is concerned, is uniformly excellent, and in the plains lie the flat beds of
many lakes, dry since the last Ice Age, and manifestly intended by Providence
for hot-rod racing and jets. Huge airfields have already been constructed.
Factories are going up. Oases are turning into industrial towns. In brand-new
Reservations, surrounded by barbed wire and the FBI, not Indians but tribes of
physicists, chemists, metallurgists, communication engineers and mechanics are
working with the co-ordinated frenzy of termites. From their air-conditioned
laboratories and machine shops there flows a steady stream of marvels, each one
more expensive and each more fiendish than the last. The desert silence is
still there; but so, ever more noisily, are the scientific irrelevancies. Give the
boys in the reservations a few more years and another hundred billion dollars,
and they will succeed (for with technology all things are possible) in
abolishing the silence, in transforming what are now irrelevancies into the
desert's fundamental meaning. Meanwhile, and luckily for us, it is noise which
is exceptional; the rule is still this crystalline symbol of universal Mind.
The
bulldozers roar, the concrete is mixed and poured, the jet planes go crashing
through the air, the rockets soar aloft with their cargoes of white mice and
electronic instruments. And yet for all this, "nature is never spent;
there lives the dearest freshness deep down things."
And
not merely the dearest, but the strangest, the most wonderfully unlikely. I
remember, for example, a recent visit to one of the new Reservations. It was in
the spring of 1952 and, after seven years of drought, the rains of the
preceding winter had been copious. From end to end the Mojave was carpeted with
flowers - sunflowers, and the dwarf phlox, chicory and coreopsis, wild
hollyhock and all the tribe of garlics and lilies. And then, as we neared the
Reservation, the flower carpet began to move. We stopped the car, we walked
into the desert to take a closer look. On the bare ground, on every plant and
bush innumerable caterpillars were crawling. They were of two kinds - one
smooth, with green and white markings, and a horn, like that of a miniature
rhinoceros, growing out of its hinder end. The caterpillar, evidently, of one
of the hawk moths. Mingled with these, in millions no less uncountable, were
the brown hairy offspring of (I think) the Painted Lady butterfly. They were
everywhere - over hundreds of square miles of the desert. And yet, a year
before, when the eggs from which these larvae had emerged were laid, California
had been as dry as a bone. On what, then, had the parent insects lived? And
what had been the food of their innumerable offspring? In the days when I
collected butterflies and kept their young in glass jars on the window sill of
my cubicle at school, no self-respecting caterpillar would feed on anything but
the leaves to which its species had been predestined. Puss moths laid their
eggs on poplars, spurge hawks on spurges; mulleins were frequented by the gaily
piebald caterpillars of one rather rare and rigidly fastidious moth. Offered an
alternative diet, my caterpillars would turn away in horror. They were like
orthodox Jews confronted by pork or lobsters; they were like Brahmins at a
feast of beef prepared by Untouchables. Eat? Never. They would rather die. And
if the right food were not forthcoming, die they did. But these caterpillars of
the desert were apparently different. Crawling into irrigated regions, they had
devoured the young leaves of entire vineyards and vegetable gardens. They had
broken with tradition, they had flouted the immemorial taboos. Here, near the
Reservation, there was no cultivated land. These hawk moth and Painted Lady
caterpillars, which were all full grown, must have fed on indigenous growths -
but which, I could never discover; for when I saw them the creatures were all
crawling at random, in search either of something juicier to eat or else of
some place to spin their cocoons. Entering the Reservation, we found them all
over the parking lot and even on the steps of the enormous building which
housed the laboratories and the administrative offices. The men on guard only
laughed or swore. But could they be absolutely sure? Biology has always
been the Russians' strongest point. These innumerable crawlers - perhaps they
were Soviet agents? Parachuted from the stratosphere, impenetrably disguised,
and so thoroughly indoctrinated, so completely conditioned by means of
post-hypnotic suggestions that even under torture it would be impossible for
them to confess, even under DDT. . .
Our
party showed its pass and entered. The strangeness was no longer Nature's; it
was strictly human. Nine and a half acres of floor space, nine and a half acres
of the most extravagant improbability. Sagebrush and wild flowers beyond the
windows; but here, within, machine tools capable of turning out anything from a
tank to an electron microscope; million-volt X-ray cameras; electric furnaces;
wind tunnels; refrigerated vacuum tanks; and on either side of endless passages
closed doors bearing inscriptions which had obviously been taken from last
year's science fiction magazines. (This year's space ships, of course, have
harnessed gravitation and magnetism.) ROCKET DEPARTMENT, we read on door after door. ROCKET AND EXPLOSIVES
DEPARTMENT, ROCKET PERSONNEL DEPARTMENT. And
what lay behind the unmarked doors? Rockets and Canned Tularemia? Rockets and
Nuclear Fission? Rockets and Space Cadets? Rockets and Elementary Courses in
Martian Language and Literature?
It
was a relief to get back to the caterpillars. Ninety-nine point nine recurring
per cent of the poor things were going to die - but not for an ideology, not
while doing their best to bring death to other caterpillars, not to the
accompaniment of Te Deums, of Dulce et decorums, of "We shall
not sheathe the sword, which we have not lightly drawn, until. . ." Until
what? The only completely unconditional surrender will come when everybody -
but everybody - is a corpse.
For
modern man, the really blessed thing about Nature is its otherness. In their
anxiety to find a cosmic basis for human values, our ancestors invented an
emblematic botany, a natural history composed of allegories and fables, an
astronomy that told fortunes and illustrated the dogmas of revealed religion.
"In the Middle Ages," writes Émile Mâle,
"the idea of a thing which a man formed for himself, was always more real
than the thing itself. . . The study of things for their own sake held no
meaning for the thoughtful man. . . The task for the student of nature was to
discover the eternal truth which God would have each thing express." These
eternal truths expressed by things were not the laws of physical and organic
being - laws discoverable only by patient observation and the sacrifice of
preconceived ideas and autistic urges; they were the notions and fantasies
engendered in the minds of logicians, whose major premises, for the most part,
were other fantasies and notions bequeathed to them by earlier writers. Against
the belief that such purely verbal constructions were eternal truths, only the
mystics protested; and the mystics were concerned only with that "obscure
knowledge," as it was called, which comes when a man "sees all in
all." But between the real but obscure knowledge of the mystic and the clear
but unreal knowledge of the verbalist, lies the clearish and realish knowledge
of the naturalist and the man of science. It was knowledge of a kind which most
of our ancestors found completely uninteresting.
Reading
the older descriptions of God's creatures, the older speculations about the
ways and workings of Nature, we start by being amused. But the amusement soon
turns to the most intense boredom and a kind of mental suffocation. We find
ourselves gasping for breath in a world where all the windows are shut and
everything "wears man's smudge and shares man's smell." Words are the
greatest, the most momentous of all our inventions, and the specifically human
realm is the realm of language. In the stifling universe of medieval thought,
the given facts of Nature were treated as the symbols of familiar notions.
Words did not stand for things; things stood for pre-existent words. This is a
pitfall which, in the natural sciences, we have learned to avoid. But in other
contexts than the scientific - in the context, for example, of politics - we
continue to take our verbal symbols with the same disastrous seriousness as was
displayed by our crusading and persecuting ancestors. For both parties, the
people on the other side of the Iron Curtain are not human beings, but merely
the embodiments of the pejorative phrases coined by propagandists.
Nature
is blessedly non-human; and insofar as we belong to the natural order, we too
are blessedly non-human. The otherness of caterpillars, as of our own bodies,
is an otherness underlain by a principal identity. The non-humanity of wild
flowers, as of the deepest levels of our own minds, exists within a system
which includes and transcends the human. In the given realm of the inner and
outer not-self, we are all one. In the home-made realm of symbols we are
separate and mutually hostile partisans. Thanks to words, we have been able to
rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of
the demons. Our statesmen have tried to come to an international agreement on
the use of atomic power. They have not been successful. And even if they had,
what then? No agreement on atomic power can do any lasting good, unless it be
preceded by an agreement on language. If we make a wrong use of nuclear
fission, it will be because we have made a wrong use of the symbols, in terms
of which we think about ourselves and other people. Individually and
collectively, men have always been the victims of their own words; but, except
in the emotionally neutral field of science, they have never been willing to
admit their linguistic ineptitude, and correct their mistakes. Taken too
seriously, symbols have motivated and justified all the horrors of recorded
history. On every level from the personal to the international, the letter
kills. Theoretically we know this very well. In practice, nevertheless, we
continue to commit the suicidal blunders to which we have become accustomed.
The
caterpillars were still on the march when we left the Reservation, and it was
half an hour or more, at a mile a minute, before we were clear of them. Among
the phloxes and the sunflowers, millions in the midst of hundreds of millions,
they proclaimed (along with the dangers of over-population) the strength, the
fecundity, the endless resourcefulness of life. We were in the desert, and the
desert was blossoming, the desert was crawling. I had not seen anything like it
since that spring day, in 1948, when we had been walking at the other end of
the Mojave, near the great earthquake fault, down which the highway descends to
San Bernardino and the orange groves. The elevation here is around four
thousand feet and the desert is dotted with dark clumps of juniper. Suddenly,
as we moved through the enormous emptiness, we became aware of an entirely
unfamiliar interruption to the silence. Before, behind, to right and to left,
the sound seemed to come from all directions. It was a small sharp crackling,
like the ubiquitous frying of bacon, like the first flames in the kindling of
innumerable bonfires. There seemed to be no explanation. And then, as we looked
more closely, the riddle gave up its answer. Anchored to a stem of sagebrush,
we saw the horny pupa of cicada. It had begun to split and the full-grown
insect was in process of pushing its way out. Each time it struggled, its case
of amber-colored chitin opened a little more widely. The continuous crackling
that we heard was caused by the simultaneous emergence of thousands upon
thousands of individuals. How long they had spent underground I could never
discover. Dr. Edmund Jaeger, who knows as much about the fauna and flora of the
Western deserts as anyone now living, tells me that the habits of this
particular cicada have never been closely studied. He himself had never
witnessed the mass resurrection upon which we had had the good fortune to
stumble. All one can be sure of is that these creatures had spent anything from
two to seventeen years in the soil, and that they had all chosen this
particular May morning to climb out of the grave, burst their coffins, dry
their moist wings and embark upon their life of sex and song.
Three
weeks later we heard and saw another detachment of the buried army coming out
into the sun among the pines and the flowering fremontias of the San Gabriel
Mountains. The chill of two thousand additional feet of elevation had postponed
the resurrection; but when it came, it conformed exactly to the pattern set by
the insects of the desert: the risen pupa, the crackle of splitting horn, the
helpless imago waiting for the sun to bake it into perfection, and then the
flight, the tireless singing, so unremitting that it becomes a part of the
silence. The boys in the Reservations are doing their best; and perhaps, if
they are given the necessary time and money, they may really succeed in making
the planet uninhabitable. Applied Science is a conjuror, whose bottomless hat
yields impartially the softest of Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of
Medusas. But I am still optimist enough to credit life with invincibility, I am
still ready to bet that the non-human otherness at the root of man's being will
ultimately triumph over the all too human selves who frame the ideologies and
engineer the collective suicides. For our survival, if we do survive, we shall
be less beholden to our common sense (the name we give to what happens when we
try to think of the world in terms of the unanalyzed symbols supplied by
language and the local customs) than to our caterpillar- and cicada-sense, to
intelligence, in other words, as it operates on the organic level. That
intelligence is at once a will to persistence and an inherited knowledge of the
physiological and psychological means by which, despite all the follies of the
loquacious self, persistence can be achieved. And beyond survival is
transfiguration; beyond and including animal grace is the grace of that other
not-self, of which the desert silence and the desert emptiness are the most
expressive symbols.
(From Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow)
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