Jnana Hodson

 

Where Space Upends

In his first day of solitude since moving to a new job and a new dwelling, the man will suffer. Driving out beyond the irrigated orchards and fields of the valley, he’ll follow a coworker’s scribbled directions higher into the foothills and eventually park beside the weathered-gray walls of what was once a one-gas-pump country store. He’ll hoist a daypack and stumble out along a rutted trace in a search, he believes, for the backbone and spirit of his new surroundings. By itself, the peculiar sunlight of this place will trigger a blinding headache. So will the abrupt release from the crushing and inflexible deadlines of his office. There are many reasons for entering arid expanses, as well as many reasons to avoid them. In antiquity, he could have asked Desert Fathers for details. This time, the human is no trader following a caravan route or a shepherd following goats, nor is he prospecting or dodging cattle. He isn’t running contraband nor is he an illegal immigrant. In fact, he’s running from no one, unless maybe himself. In short, he’s a pilgrim, one who’s been suffering long before this particular headache strikes. He has no idea his journey solicits, above all, a healing - his own, as well as the planet’s. Outdoors, away from town, away from the familiar countryside of his past, he’ll resist an intense thirst preceding the throbbing. The only shade he’ll find is in the shell of a rusted Depression-era Plymouth, where he’ll collapse in what had been the passenger’s seat.

Once the relentless glare has drilled another hole in his skull, a spider will enter. Every seeker who relocates to desert requires new circuitry. The arachnid will rewire the man’s brain and lungs. Maybe Murshid has sent her. Until now, the man had no inkling of Trickster, whatever its particular form.

It’s hard to say, precisely, how long the man remains out. It must seem like days, and perhaps is. Even so, in any wilderness, there’s additional jeopardy in roaming after nightfall - especially without a flashlight or torch. In the cooling air of late afternoon, he walks back to his car and steers homeward.

If he could sustain his solitude in this terrain, the man would mutate into a desert rat, perhaps crossing over into madness. Instead, this man will choose to live at its periphery, entering when his calendar allows. Such a pathway, he’ll find, is also maddening.

Desert turns everything to bone. That, or to stone. Even the scattered tufts of bunchgrass and the isolated clusters of flowers turn into straw skeletons. Social conventions, too, dry away. In pursuing clarity, which parched spreads possess abundantly, the man also enters an order of madness. Paradoxically, to preserve his sanity in dealing with people, it becomes periodically necessary for him to revisit this incomprehensible delirium. Settle back on his own bedrock, readjust to his own frame. Here, then, he returns afresh to spaces within and without. Waits. Listens. In this place, wind is a clearing, spiraling on itself. Then, when this twisting reverses, screwing into bony alkaline soil, he gives praise. At times, the man may even see his own heart clearly. As he comes to know his way around more securely, he lifts a cup of clear spring water and pours it on bleached parchment at his feet. Selah. The next day a bouquet of tiny flowers rises like fingers bent by wind. Always somewhere, wind.

Listen.

He’ll look closer and see in that runt garden herds of patient insects. Then he’ll look across the wind to read what its elbows have written in large letters.

At last he’ll sleep soundly, for she’s returned. Selah.

* * *

Perhaps you think it harsh, this description of the spider’s work. “Rewire?” you say. “A human’s not an electronic device!” But some ways, he is - a tangle of neurological pathways that remain mysterious. Here, threads harden into wispy bone. Snare dreams in flight and hold them for inspection, for wrapping, for ingestion. Filter and stabilize the air he breathes. In desert, an outcome seldom materializes immediately. A procedure goes dormant - sometimes for years. What appears dead often is merely waiting.

The man will learn to pace himself more steadily. To watch for the rattlesnake, especially at river’s edge. To recalibrate his vision to the American Far West, where natural beauty assumes such spectacular proportions few notice the thinness at hand. The spider will teach all this. Clarity, like the desert itself, strips away to essentials. Sweeps away clutter. In what appears sparse, the man will gaze for episodes of miniature grace. Even elegance.

After a rare downpour, wrinkled hills sprout terraced dwarf gardens. The man recalls glossy photographs of tenacious farmers working green steps above Mediterranean and Chinese shorelines. He thinks, too, of terraced heights in the Andes and Himalayas. Applications of timeless, universal wisdom.

Around the man’s home, blades of extended orchards flutter in the bowl of the valley. From the tawny ridges he sees this as green sandals on wrinkled feet. Science that makes this dusty soil incredibly fruitful also leaves the place comparatively lifeless; the variety of life forms diminishes, even in seemingly arid desert. It’s simply a matter of maximizing profits.

His wife leaves on yet another trip, then phones to say she’s depressed. She refuses to give a reason.

Why put up with it? He’s no patriarch, and no one would allow him such influence. They’ve promised to be equals. He has enough struggles without carrying hers. She should be helping him now, building a home and a family of their own rather than running after her parents or friends. This, however, is one point where spider - and for that matter, desert rats - cannot advise him. What he does know is that when she’s happiest, she’s also faithfully practicing their religious disciplines. Too often, though, she prefers to hitchhike on his devotions.

In the midst of the next drizzle, when the clock demands his return to the office, he’ll prefer to stay put, admiring beadwork on telephone line. Especially in desert, he’ll examine points of rain. Zero in on one gleaming star, a coil of light as pure and functionless as mathematics. Center down wordlessly in this flyspeck and let whatever’s binding him unravel slowly. In reality, he owns more time than he realizes, if he acts in the holy now. That, the spider whispers, is the kernel of celebration. Give praise. Selah.

In other climates, you commonly overlook the element of space, unless looking into the heavens on a starry night. You observe objects, and space becomes the measure of distance between an object and you, or else some arrangement of objects. In contrast, desert appears more as a vacuum - a juxtaposition of surfaces, of sky and earth extending outward not to some imaged convergence (such as the perspective point where the twin rails of a train track become one) but rather away from any focus, and thus outward around both of the observer’s ears. Here, space itself becomes obvious, as if turned upright, like a wall in your face. So often in life, what should be most obvious is the hardest to see. The spider is on the window; the spider is on the page.

Despite his mission to discover the spirit of this landscape, the man worships a portable deity. That is, he’s a follower of the Book. Or, according to his practice, the Spirit That Informed the Book. In a way, the Book follows him, even into the desert, not all that different from the desert where it was written.

The freedom to move about is essential to any mental discipline; he dare not get stuck in a single position. Three points are required for triangulation. How else can he determine where he is or where he’s going?

When he scans the desolation of geologic uplift and volcanic flow, the man appreciates the prophetic Hebrew charge, “The gods of the nations are idols.” Nothing humanity creates can equal such an outpouring. Get free of all bondage, indeed. He’ll identify idols crowding into his life, and what they demand. An old white-bearded man carried about in a box as hazardous as radioactive material? A television can be far more fatal. He’ll consider the god Brahma, to some “the most stupendous idea the human mind has ever wrestled with.” And then YHWH, the spinning Word of God, and whatever wrestled with Jacob. Some encounters go beyond human imagining. Try naming the greatest power that has wounded you. Do you rise in confrontation? Do you yield? Every road to liberation proves painful.

The man returns to dance. He moves with intellect, emotion, and muscle through the music. He charges from night into dawn; from rain into full glare. Despite bruises and even bleeding from his latest encounters, he leaps within his Dedicated Laborious Quest. Even so, his heart silently rages. Sometimes he’s at peace; sometimes, worldly affairs beset him. He’s concentrating on some rhythmic cuckoo elisions. His wrath may yet generate voltage, if he owns up to his personal forms of power, however frightening they appear. At his horizon, migrating birds coil like an aerial rattlesnake. If he could circle with them, he would face the new sun. Or he could walk in the expanse until his tracks freeze in a chattering alarm as he admits genuine terror, then raise the pistol and fire. Carefully, sever the tail’s rattle for his dance shaker. Skin and tan a length of skin for his hat band. Thus prepared, stare through ghostly prairie grasses and through hardwood stretches beyond. He’s known cornfields and soybeans, and much that has vanished. He could be the settler who leveled those forests and turned under the endless prairie; he may also be the holy visionary who will yet restore them.

Someday he will drop into a rattlesnake hole, his kiva, his own covered self. Find his private circle, his spirit hoop, and spiral more into the sunrise. Behind him and before him are suburbs to unsettle. Wilderness, he’ll perceive, is an illusion until mankind’s true settling. In the meantime, whatever is conquered remains despised, like a common-knowledge harlot.

There are problems in every marriage. He’ll delineate many distinctions. Selah!

MARKER
Because this is desert, appreciate shadows. Fear what might be lurking, too.
Enter cautiously. “Hello?”