I Came to the Desert to Die

Salton Sea, Desire Borne of Silence, and a Dozen Flies and Me

Dear Friends and Family,

Lots here today and a longer meditation. . .

Most of you know I went on a little journey (evoked in the new Substack Welcome page. Please have a look if you have not.).

Recently, I compiled all these letters and my handwritten notes into a Word doc. An idea (for which I cannot take credit) is that maybe there’s a story in those pages. Today’s letter is a first pass at me rummaging through them to see.

This desert meditation, some of which I shared while on the wander a year ago, seemed a good, albeit challenging perhaps, start to our series on silence, solitude, and simplicity. Don’t let it frighten you away from these ways of being. There’s beauty, kindness, and presence in even the harshest absence.

Follow-up

On Audio Recordings

In the recent survey, you were favorable and neutral about audio recordings. Neutral came as a relief, honestly. I have mixed feelings about audio and the written word. Not to mention—but I will—I’m a bit audio shy.

But there are times when audio would help with difficult passages when we venture into the esoteric. So, when it seems helpful to the letter, I will record—as a reading, not as if in conversation—as I did with the Ars Poëtica letters.

Feel free of course! to forego listening to the audio. But it will be there when helpful.

Forthcoming

Gatherings in Silence

As I shared last week, next Sunday, June 2, I will begin offering once-monthly gatherings in silence: noon–1 pm ET, first Sunday. Details are at the bottom of the letter.

To nurture the sense of connection, intimacy, and communion that emerges in shared silence, these gatherings are available by registration only. Subscription to Beyond the Comfort Zone is preferred (monthly, annual, or Contributors’ Circle). If circumstances do not permit you to contribute financially, I will kindly offer you a complimentary subscription, without hesitation.

reneeeliphd@substack.com (inactive email posted last week. oh my!)

Simplicity on the Page

I am committed to giving you an experience that evokes on the page what the words hope to convey. I run into how-to aesthetics challenges with the Substack platform that I constantly endeavor to work around. And I run into questions of how to communicate the necessary and noteworthy with the evocative and poietic.

To say, intention and actuality are ever intermingling a sea tide of change. We get close sometimes. We drift from shore others. We’ll keep at it.

Thank you for being here.

With love,

Renée

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I Came to the Desert to Die

images: Renée Eli

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In the relationship with the unthought known—the enigmatic other, the inscrutable God, the stranger within the self—a desire is born.¹

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What it must be to see a thousand of me coming toward, big as a thunder god, eyes the size of a sweltering sun, hands branching out like a falling tree. What it must be to see where you long to be but be forbidden, wandering the endless endlessness of something you cannot see but is right there, plain as day, on the soles of your feet, which make no sound when they touch down. But the wings of these flies are incessant.

The sound of wrath, they are, broken only by the silence that penetrates their every refusal and my efforts to afford them escape. They rushed in this predicament as I flung open the side door yesterday, and me with no mind what I would hazard when I opened the door to step outside. All hours since, they zigzag dust-stained windows and windshield, flanking the edges as if they might luck upon an out.

I leave them.

I walk toward water wondering if I am making my way toward aberration. It is distant. It is motionless. It is shore and shore in the middle of sand and sage. I walk through absence, a thick, pregnant empty, broken by the sound of fracture beneath my feet. Between the few dotted humans I see and me is a sunset heat haze ablaze with beseeching. Little seems to signal life but this silent empty, urging. I have no reference for this place. It is an accident.

Salton Sea came by injunction to “make the desert bloom.”² The hope was for water upstream to flow through a channel dug to water this then parched once ocean floor. This canal, it turns out, was not deep and wide enough to carry all the water in a big flood from the river that fed it.

And so it was that when the Colorado River ran way too hard for way too long into the canal, it spilled over the sides, and running still, as water does, until it comes to what can hold the formless form of it, this long flood found in time a trough, sinking into “the lowest place, the place all others avoid.”³

This trough—the Salton Sink—drops down two hundred feet along the southernmost area of the San Andreas Fault, a strike-slip fault where the earth sidesteps from time to time at the touch point of two tectonic plates—the North American and the Pacific. Now the water would sink and belly out across a narrow bowl. As it did so, it made a lake some two hours south of Death Valley and three hundred seventy-six miles oblong.⁴ The water was never meant to pool in one place.

We may say we fail—i.e., stumble, fall—to anticipate the consequences of what we do; meaning, we fall into our folly. And we do. But there’s more to it than that. A lot more.

We fail—i.e., lose the wherewithal—to perceive the deeper vein of desire to be running through all life. And why would we do that? What stumble would lead to lost wherewithal at the expense of desire?

What if we say we stumble at remembering as does a toddler eager for the day who, tumbling headlong, forgets she does not have wings to fly? Imagine discovering the weight of gravity again for the first time when you’re reaching through the wondering bliss of being.

We might just stop throwing arrows at our lifeboat. Let a little innocence seep back in. Maybe, we recall our own deep vein of desire, and more still. Maybe, we feel our bodies leap when, just for a moment, we touch the inner impulse of yearning giving birth to the universe and matter and the moment-by-moment life of you and me.⁵ Maybe, we desire desire. That would scare us to death.

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. . . not to have is the beginning of desire.⁶

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What we cannot have murmurs from the bottom of this body of water. One stumbled dream is an endless groan to go back home to a heavenly paradise we cannot imagine could not be in plastic the realities of which we cannot see. Even if no one could convince us we fell out of Eden, even if we believe none of that is true, parable, allegory, or fable, we are forever acting, across the whole, as if we do.

And so, when some fifty years or so after the flood, resort towns began popping up along the shores of this lake on the hope of recreating Eden near Death Valley, it is not only that fiat for such a wonderland in a desert had failed to plan enough to see it through. (There was never enough outflow to keep this lake clean from the unending inflow of waste from upstream enterprise and homes.) It was that planning stumbled into some inner forgotten to hear the deep murmur of being stretched across a desert floor. Only, for a while that inner forgotten, too, stayed silent, as if it knew it was too soon to whisper an unthought known, as if Humpty Dumpty would need not stumble but, in fact, fall off a great, high wall—not to break him but to wake him.

When the glut of water on the desert floor with no place to go leached minerals from the surface layers of the earth, yielding water in time as salty as a sea, we could say we humans had not thought and so did not know what would follow when an accidental lake became an accidental sea. Surely, no one had a clue that by the turn of this century, more than 7,000,000 fish would lay dead on the surrounding desert sands.

Surely, no one could have imagined the only fauna able to cope in a milieu so vacant the conditions for life would be tilapia—for a time, before they, too, died—and flies.⁷

Out there, before they inscaped the van, were their wings the sound of insistence as they are inside? Or is it that when they were free, they need not puncture this silence, as I do when my every step shatters the skeleton of a dead fish?

What is the birth of sound?

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The ‘unthought known’ in human experience evokes mental states beyond our grasp. This is the place where ‘knowledge unravels from its own self-possession’. Both self and other may be known in a way that in a sense dissolves all identity; in that place, we may communicate.⁸

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I do not move, the only motion the slight of breath. One of the flies flying about lands on the right forearm, another on the elbow nearby. There are more. I lose count.

One by one, they make their way across the landscape of skin, wandering the forest of hair, across lines, nose, bumpy folds, surely to them, ravines, Everest, canyons into the deep earth of me. 

An impulse to shoo them.

An injunction inside to let the impulse hush.

An image.

It is the man on Haywood back home who at three in the afternoon on a scathing summer day sleeps on the street as wasp-sized houseflies swarm his body and graze on what we call filth. An impulse to weep.

Flies wandering the terrain of me. They are quick. They are busy. They mean me no harm. I am the beach along which they walk. I am the desert no more. I am fish bones at Salton Sea. I am an oasis to scavenge.

I am Manna.

Am I death’s pretense? A foreshadow with these flies of what becomes of all? Am I the end? Am I detritus of the remains of me? Am I not I yet?

The impulse to shoo comes and goes until it’s gone. Each step of each fly becomes one by one a touch, each step a kiss on the flesh. They offer themselves, the touch strangely tender. So light is the sweep across the skin, so barely. A landing atop the hand, venturing now into the folds between the index and middle finger. I begin to desire the touch of these flies I discern as two. They break the silence by the sound of their wings. Or is it the thought that silence can be broken that breaks the silence? The fly on the hand flies on. The fly on the forearm lingers, this skin a wonderland.

If the fly is touching my skin, then I am touching the fly. If every life would surely die without touch then these flies and I, we fulfill each other—for, every membrane between self and world is the world’s caress, and every membrane the world touches is a membrane caressing the world, and so, the flies and I, we are the world.⁹ Between each flap of fly wing unseen by these naked eyes and the distance between each wing and the air on which it sings, and between air and breath, breath and every red blood cell . . . an endless unthought known.

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‘For certain souls, water is the matter of despair’. To contemplate water ‘is to slip away, dissolve, and die’; such a water reverie yields ‘strange and dismal murmurs’.¹⁰

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I came to this sea to escape the (sudden) desert heat. It was late autumn when I arrived the Sonoran last year, then wandered the High Plains of the Chihuahuan, in time, the Mojave, and just last week, Death Valley. Well into spring now, no longer the need to park the van on cold nights with the long side facing east and the warmth of the morning sun. The night air freezes still the tips of sage and cheyenne, but gone is the freeze of the grey-water tank; water stagnate, nowhere to go. I came to the desert to die.

Oh sure, there had been loss. Life is always teetering on the thick slice of absence. I had walked straight into that searing heat of heartache. It nearly did me in. But I made it.

And that was why I came to die—not of the flesh. I came to die of I.

You must listen harder in the desert for the strange and dismal murmurs. Water is never absent. It is rarer seen. What is whispers—a snake outstretched, the flap of a raven’s wing, wind across grasses, a sliver of the moon. I goes missing when the ears outstretch to listen to what knows no I. There, in the thick swallow of silence, I, engulfed, is tethered all the while to an unthought known within.

You never lose the unthought known.

It is the shore of your open sea, the murmuring deep groaning for being to be. It is the burning beginning desire in the silence gaping between a fly’s wings and the flesh of tomorrow’s breath. What must it be to see a thousand of me coming toward, big as a thunder god, eyes the size of a sweltering sun, hands branching out like a falling tree? What must it be to see where you long to be but be forbidden, wandering the endless endlessness of something you cannot see but is right there, plain as day, on the soles of your feet, which make no sound when they touch down?

What is it to listen to that invocation?¹¹

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1. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep (New York: Schoken Books, 2009), p. xxvvii.

2. Rebecca Onion, “Not-So-Great Salt Lake: Why Have Even the Environmentalists Given Up on the Salton Sea?” Slate, October 16, 2007. https://slate.com/culture/2007/10/plagues-and-pleasures-on-the-salton-sea-reviewed.html

3. LaoTzu, Tao Te Ching: The Book of the Way, trans. Sam Torode (Ancient Renewal, 2021), ch. 8. This is not the translation I typically call on (See James Legge translation). But I like this particular turn of phrase, “that all others avoid.” accessed from: https://vialogue.wordpress.com/2021/12/14/tao-te-ching/

4. Onion, “Not-So-Great Salt Lake.”

5. German biologist and philosopher, Andreas Weber, wrote a beautiful exploration the desire behind matter in Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2014). This idea runs through Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution as well: trans. Arthur Mitchell (Henry Holt, 1913).

6. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), p. xv, cf. Wallace Stevens, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.

7. “Accidental Bodies of Water: The Salton Sea,” Sometimes Interesting. https://sometimes-interesting.com/accidental-bodies-of-water-the-salton-sea/

8. Zornberg, Murmuring Deep, p. xvii.

9. For further exploration of perception through touch and the gaping gap between touching and being touched, see Maurice Merleau–Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Northwestern University Press, 1969); Maurice Marleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).

10. Zornberg, Murmuring Deep, p. xxviii.

11. Ibid., xxvii.